Heartwood

by James Lee Burke

  When I walked into the shower two of the men who had beaten me were lathering themselves with the showerheads turned off. Their bodies were tanned and hard and streaked with soapy hair, their eyes malevolent and invasive. I put my head under the shower and turned on both faucets and let the water boil over my face.

  Temple Carrol met me in the courtroom, where a client of mine, a twenty-year-old four-time loser with alcohol fetal syndrome, was being arraigned for holding up the convenience store where he used to work. He had used no mask or disguise and his weapon had been a BB pistol.

  The judge’s name was Kirby Jim Baxter. His face was furrowed and white, like a bleached prune, and it stayed twisted in an expression of chronic impatience and irritability.

  “You back again? What the hell’s the matter with you? You want to spend the rest of your life getting pissed on by a prison guard’s horse?” he said.

  My client, Wesley Rhodes, had a harelip, a flat nose, an I.Q. of eighty, and wide-set reptilian-green eyes that seemed to contain separate thoughts at the same time. He stuffed socks inside his fly and wore motorcycle boots with elevated soles and two heavy, long-sleeve shirts that made his upper torso splay from his Levi’s like a cloth-wrapped stump.

  I began to run through the same old shuck that every judge hears when people like Wesley have their bail set. “Your Honor, my client has entered an alcoholic treatment program and is attending A.A. meetings daily. We’d like to request—”

  “Did I address you, counselor?” Kirby Jim said.

  “No, Your Honor.”

  “Then shut up. Now, you listen, young man—”

  It should have been a cakewalk. Kirby Jim was annoyed with the planet in general, but he wasn’t a bad man. He was sympathetic to the fact that people like Wesley Rhodes had no chance from the day they were born. He also knew that inside the system Wesley was anybody’s bar of soap.

  “It wasn’t armed robbery ’cause there wasn’t no BBs in the gun. I was in there to buy a magazine. My daddy said to tell y’all that and to kiss my ass. I ain’t afraid to go back. Horses don’t piss on people unless you get under them, anyway. So that shows how damn much you know,” he said, and turned his grinning, pitiful face on me, as though his wit had forever destroyed the Texas legal system.

  “Bail is set at ten thousand dollars. Bailiff, take him away,” Kirby Jim said.

  That’s what most of it is like.

  Outside, Temple and I sat under the trees on a steel-ribbed bench by the Spanish-American War artillery piece. It was warm in the shade and the trees were full of jays and mockingbirds.

  “It’s not your fault. That kid had a millstone around his neck when he was born,” she said.

  “I was thinking of something else.” I told her of the visit to my house by Ronnie Cruise the previous night and the fire that had burned down the empty savings and loan building on Earl Deitrich’s property in Houston.

  “You think these Mexican kids did it and Ronnie Cruise was setting up an alibi?” she asked.

  “Maybe.”

  “Who cares? They’re street rats. It’s not related to defending Wilbur Pickett, anyway.”

  “I don’t like getting used.”

  She straightened herself on the bench, pressing the heels of her hands against the metal. I felt the edge of her hand wedge against mine.

  “You want to feel these kids aren’t all greaseballs. The truth is they are,” she said.

  “You’re too hard, Temple.”

  “It’s a habit I got into down in Fort Bend County after I let a gangbanger ride in the back of my cruiser without cuffs. He paid back the favor by wrapping his belt around my throat,” she said.

  I looked at her profile. She lifted a wisp of her chestnut hair off her forehead and fanned her face with a magazine. Her mouth was red and small, her skin moist and pink with the heat. Her eyes had the same milky green color as the river that ran through our county, and they often had shadows in them, just the way the river did when the current flowed under a tree. Her uplifted chin and the parting of her lips made me think of a flower opening in the shade.

  “You staring at me for a reason?” she said.

  “Sorry. You’re a real pal, Temple.”

  “A pal? Oh yes,” she said, standing up. “Always glad to be a pal. See you later, cowboy. Don’t let your worries over the Purple Hearts screw up your day.”

  I still hadn’t eaten lunch and I walked over to the Langtry Hotel. It had been built of sandstone in the nineteenth century, with a wood colonnade over the elevated sidewalk that was still inset with tethering rings. Supposedly the Sundance Kid and his schoolteacher mistress, Etta Place, had stayed there, as well as the vaudevillians Eddie Foy and Will Rogers. The upstairs rooms were boarded up now, but the old bar, with its white, octagon-tile floor and stamped tin ceiling, was still open, as well as the dining room, which was paneled with carved mahogany and oak and hung with chandeliers that when lighted looked like yellow ice.

  Diagonally parked in front of the entrance was Earl Deitrich’s maroon Lincoln, its chrome wire wheels and immaculate white sidewalls blazing in the sunlight. The velvet curtains were open in the dining room and I could see Earl and Peggy Jean at a long, linen-covered table with some of the town’s leading businesspeople. Peggy Jean, whom I had never seen drink, had an Old-Fashioned glass in her hand.

  Don’t go in. Leave them alone, I thought.

  Then, with all the caution of a drunk careening down a sidewalk, I thought, Like hell I will.

  I sat at a small table by the window, across the room from them, and ordered. Earl and his friends were in high spirits, garrulous and loud, Earl’s laughter even more cacophonous than the others, as though it welled up from some irreverent and arrogant knowledge about the world that only he possessed.

  I listened to it for five minutes, then could take it no longer. On the table next to me was an abandoned copy of the morning paper. I folded it in half and walked to Earl’s table and set it by his elbow, so the headline about the fire in Houston could not escape his vision.

  “Too bad about those four firemen who got burned to death on your property last night,” I said.

  The mirth in his face died like air leaking from a balloon.

  “Yes. It’s a terrible thing. I’ve been keeping in touch by telephone,” he said.

  “Hugo Roberts’s trained cretins picked up Skyler Doolittle on a bogus beef. I think you know what I’m talking about,” I said.

  “No, I don’t,” he said.

  “You cheated him at cards. He got in your face about it. So you had Hugo’s Brownshirts roust him.”

  Earl smiled tolerantly and shook his head. The other men at the table looked like they had been frame-frozen in a film, their hands poised on a napkin, a water glass, their eyes neutral.

  “Go back to your table, sir,” the owner, a California entrepreneur, said behind me.

  “No, no, he’s invited here. You sit down with us, Billy Bob,” Peggy Jean said, her throat flushed, her mouth stiff and unnatural and cold-looking from the whiskey and iced cherries in her Old-Fashioned glass.

  I put one hand on the table and leaned down toward Earl’s face. His fine brown hair hung on his brow.

  “You paid Hugo Roberts to plant evidence on Wilbur Pickett. Then you shamed and humiliated a handicapped man. I’m going to take what you’ve done and shove it up your sorry ass,” I said.

  “You went to night school and earned a law degree and are to be admired for that. But you’re still white trash at heart, Billy Bob. And that’s the only reason I don’t get up and knock you down,” he replied.

  I turned and walked stiffly past my table, left a dollar for having used the place setting, and went up the stairs through the old darkened lobby, past the empty registration desk and pigeonholes for guest mail and room keys and the dust-covered telephone switchboard, into the shade under the colonnade and the wind that blew like a blowtorch across the asphalt.

  I was a half block down the street
when I heard Peggy Jean’s voice behind me. “Billy Bob, wait. I need to talk with you. Don’t go away like this.”

  She was on high heels, and when she started toward me she twisted one ankle and had to grab on to a wood post. Then Earl was on the sidewalk beside her, and the two of them began to argue with the attempted restraint of people whose lives are coming apart on a stage. I stood in the middle of the sidewalk, under a candy-striped barbershop awning, like a foolish and impotent spectator who cannot bring himself to either flee or participate in the fray.

  “You’re tight. Go sit in the lobby. I’ll have some coffee sent out,” Earl said.

  “You had that handicapped man arrested? Over a card game?” she asked incredulously.

  “I didn’t. He’s demented. He’s been in prison for killing schoolchildren, for God’s sake.” Then Earl waved his hands in the air and slapped them against his hips in exasperation. “I give up,” he said, and went back into the hotel.

  But he didn’t stay. He was right back out on the sidewalk. “To hell with it. Just to hell with it. Go back inside and eat something. I’ll send Fletcher with the limo,” he said, and got into his Lincoln and backed out into the street while Peggy Jean propped herself against the colonnade’s post and pulled off her broken high-heel shoe.

  “You want a glass of iced tea?” I said to her.

  “Tea. Aspirin. Heroin. Anything. I feel like a train wreck,” she said.

  “Why don’t you sit down on the bench? I’ll get my car.”

  I told myself my gesture was an innocent one. Perhaps it was. You didn’t abandon an impaired friend in a public place and leave her to swelter in the heat and her own embarrassment while she waited on the mercies of an irresponsible husband.

  Yes, I’m absolutely sure I thought those thoughts.

  We drove north of town toward her home, then she asked to stop at a steak house that was built on an escarpment overlooking a long valley. When she got out of the car she deliberately knocked the heel off her other shoe on an ornamental boulder by the restaurant door, then put her shoes back on as flats and went in the ladies’ room and washed her face and put on fresh makeup and came back out and sat at a table with me by the back window.

  The restaurant was cool and softly lit and deserted except for a bartender and a waiter. Clouds covered the sun now, and the valley below us was blanketed with shadow and the wind blew the grass and wildflowers in channels like the fingers of a river.

  The jukebox was playing an old Floyd Tillman song. Her face seemed to go out of focus with a private thought or maybe with an after-rush from the Old-Fashioneds. Then she fixed her eyes on me as though I were walking toward her out of a dream.

  “Dance with me,” she said.

  “I’m not very good at it,” I said.

  “Please, Billy Bob. Just one time.”

  And that’s what we did, on a small square of polished yellow hardwood floor, balloons of color rippling through the plastic casing of the jukebox. She placed her cheek against mine, and I could smell bourbon and candied cherries and bitters and sweet syrup and sliced oranges on her breath, as though all the blended, chilled odors of what she had consumed had been refermented and heated inside her heart’s blood and breathed out again against my skin.

  Then her head brushed against my face and I smelled a fragrance of roses in her hair. Her loins, when they touched mine, were like points of fire against my body, and I knew I was entering a country where the rules that had always governed my life were about to be irrevocably set aside.

  8

  At sunset that evening I drove to Wilbur Pickett’s place on the hardpan. The sun had dropped behind the hills in the west and the afterglow looked like fires were burning inside the trees on the hills’ rim.

  Wilbur and his wife, Kippy Jo, had moved their kitchen table out into the middle of the backyard and were eating ears of corn they had roasted on a barbecue pit. His pasture was dimpled with water and had turned emerald green from yesterday’s storm, and his Appaloosa and two palominos were drinking out of the tank by his windmill, their tails switching across their hindquarters. Parked by the barn was an ancient snub-nosed flatbed truck loaded to the top of the slats with rattlesnake watermelons.

  “I’m trying to put your trial off as long as I can. A guy like Earl Deitrich eventually sticks his hand in a porcupine hole,” I said.

  “Don’t matter to me. I got these ole boys down in Venezuela just about sold on this pipeline job. You still got time to get in on it.”

  It was like talking to a child.

  “Good-looking melons,” I said.

  “I went on down through Rio Grande City and got me a mess of them. I’m gonna flat clean up on that li’l deal,” he replied.

  “You went to Mexico?”

  “Yeah, what’s wrong with that?” he said.

  “You’re on bail. You don’t go to other countries when you’re on bail,” I said.

  “You want some corn?” he asked.

  “Wilbur, I think Earl Deitrich is into some very bad stuff. I’m not sure what it is, but you’re his scapegoat. Stop playing his game,” I said.

  He looked at me from under his shapeless cowboy hat with a private, ironic expression, then flung the coffee from his metal cup and wiped it clean with a napkin.

  “You were going to say something?” I asked.

  “Not me, son,” he replied. After a moment, he said, “Kippy Jo, tell him what you been seeing in your dreams.”

  She turned her blue, sightless white-flecked eyes on me. The wind was blowing at her back and it feathered her hair around her throat.

  “A winged man is coming. His teeth are red. He’s killed Indian people in another place. I don’t understand the dream. He’s very evil,” she said.

  I didn’t respond. She turned her head slightly, as though the creak of the windmill or the horses snuffing and blowing at the water tank meant something. Then her eyes came back on me and her head tilted, her mouth parting silently, her cheeks slack with a thought that confused her.

  “But you already know him. How can you be around a man this evil without knowing it?” she said.

  “Don’t that blow your head?” Wilbur said.

  When I walked out to my car with Wilbur I wished I hadn’t come. I had wanted to caution him, but it did no good. Wilbur had been born in the wrong century. His kind became the tools of empires with glad hearts and an indefatigable optimism. When their usefulness ended, they were discarded.

  But he was not the only one who was naive.

  “You were fixing to tell me something back there,” I said.

  He took off his hat and pressed the dents out of the crown. Against the fire in the western sky his chiseled, surgically rebuilt profile looked like a Roman soldier’s.

  “Me and Kippy Jo was selling our melons out on the state road today,” he said. “I seen your Avalon coming hell for breakfast around a truck. I thought, Now, there’s a man badly in need of melons.”

  His eyes held mine. I could feel my face burning.

  “I ain’t gonna tell a man of your background about milking through the fence, but if that wasn’t Peggy Jean Deitrich in your car, then ole Bodacious head-butted me a lot worse than I thought,” he said.

  That Saturday afternoon Lucas and his band played at Shorty’s out on the river. Shorty’s, with its screened porches and lack of air-conditioning, might have been a ramshackle nightclub and barbecue joint left over from another era, but either out of curiosity or need every class of person in our area came through its doors.

  They scored dope and on one another. Bikers got swacked on crystal; forlorn oil field wives went up the road to the Super 8 Motel with college boys; rednecks broke their knuckles on one another’s faces out in the trees; and Hollywood film people from Fredericksburg took it all in like happy visitors at a zoo.

  Jeff Deitrich’s birthday party had started at his house, then had moved in a caravan of Cherokees and roll-bar Jeeps and sports cars to Shorty’s. Jeff and his
friends occupied both the side and back screen porches. They drank daiquiris, Coronas with lime, and B-52s. As the evening wore on, the joints they toked on along the riverbank glowed like fireflies among the darkening trees.

  A yellow Porsche convertible pulled into the lot and two men, one young, the other middle-aged, went inside and sat at the bar. The younger man was too thin to be called handsome, but his delicate facial bones, bright eyes, and guileless manner gave him a boyish charm and vulnerability that drew older men to him.

  The middle-aged man with him wore cream-colored pleated slacks and white shoes and a navy-blue shirt. He had a dissolute face and thick, salt-and-pepper hair. His hips and lower stomach swelled over his belt slightly, and his soft buttocks splayed on the barstool when he sat down. He crossed his legs and smoked a gold-tipped cigarette with his wrist held in the air, surveying the dance floor, letting his smoke leak upward whimsically from his open mouth.

  When the band took a break Lucas went to the end of the bar for a cold drink. The younger man, whose name was Leland, kept twisting his head so he could see through the side door onto the screen porch where Jeff Deitrich, his shirt unbuttoned on his brown chest, was standing at his table, entertaining his guests, and downing a B-52, a jigger of whiskey dropped into a schooner of draft beer.

  Then Jeff caught Leland’s stare. His dark eyes blazed and his throat and the gold chain and St. Christopher’s metal that hung from it were ropy with sweat. He set the schooner down on the plank table and walked to the bar, standing three feet from Leland. He waved the bartender away, scooped a handful of peanuts out of a dish, and ate them with his fingers, one at a time, looking at the bottles on the bar. He breathed audibly through his nose.

  “I told you not to come around here again,” he said.