Heartwood

by James Lee Burke

  “Nobody regular?”

  “Yeah, I mean a friend or two might stay over. Come on inside. I’ll show you my new electric bass.”

  He had scrubbed out the interior of the house with lye water and set coffee cans planted with petunias in the windowsills and hung his twelve-string and slide guitars, mandolin, banjo, and fiddle from felt-covered hooks on the living room walls. His musical talent was enormous. He referred to country and blues and rock musicians, both living and dead, by their first or nicknames, as though he and his listener knew them intimately: Hank and Lefty, Melissa, Lester and Earl, Janice, Kitty, Emmylou, Stevie Ray, Woody and Cisco. The irony was that in his humble reverence he was unaware he was as good as or better than most of them.

  I heard a car turn off the county road into the yard.

  “Check out this next cut on the CD. It’s ‘Rocket ’88,’ Jackie Brenston. The first real R&B record ever made,” Lucas said.

  Through the side window I saw a yellow convertible park in front of the dented and sagging silver trailer that was set up on cinder blocks. The driver wore a hard hat and a denim shirt that was spotted with drilling mud. The Mexican girl next to him pushed her hair back on her head with one hand. Her hair was long and dark and looked as though it had been stained with iodine.

  “Jeff Deitrich and Esmeralda Ramirez are living here?” I said.

  “I got him a job on my rig. The guy’s trying to straighten out his life. It ain’t gonna be easy for them two.”

  “He’s putting you in harm’s way.”

  “What if you’d taken that attitude when I was in trouble? I’d be chopping cotton in Huntsville Pen.”

  Through the window I watched Jeff walk inside the trailer with his arm around Esmeralda’s shoulders, a lunch bucket in his left hand. I let out my breath and sought words that would seem reasonable and hide the fear that gripped my heart. The wind slapped the door of the trailer into the frame like a pistol shot.

  The man chained hand and foot next to Skyler Doolittle was named Jessie Stump, an armed robber, speed addict, and psychopath who shot a Mexican judge in a courtroom, jumped through a second-story glass window, and escaped into the heart of Mexico City. He was also one of my ex-clients. When I got him off on a forgery charge, he paid my fees with a bad check.

  There were five inmates in jailhouse orange jumpsuits sitting on the passenger seats in the rear of the bus, and two uniformed deputy sheriffs in front, their backs protected by a wire-mesh partition. Jessie was the only inmate who had been locked in both wrist and leg manacles. He leaned forward, his chains tinkling, and removed a leather-craft tool from his shoe, one with a thin, needle-sharp steel hook on the end. Then he inserted the tip into the lock on his right wrist and twisted gingerly, as though he were correcting the mechanism in the back of a clock.

  When the serrated steel tongue of the manacle popped loose, Jessie slipped a small bar of soap into his mouth and started to work on his leg chains. Skyler Doolittle’s hand closed around his like a large ball of bread dough.

  “You go, I go,” Skyler whispered.

  Jessie’s hair was coal black, his narrow face cratered with acne scars, his dark eyes wired. His lips were pinched together to hold the soap that was melting inside his mouth. A thought, a moment’s resentment, the consideration of alternatives, perhaps, seemed to hover in front of his eyes, then disappear. He inserted the tool in the manacle on Skyler’s left wrist. His fingertips were black with grime, his nails as thick as tortoiseshell, but he rotated the shaft of the leather-craft tool as delicately as a surgeon.

  A minute later Jessie rolled a topless container of Liquid-plumr down the aisle and collapsed on the floor, writhing, his feet thrashing, his mouth white with foam.

  The deputy riding shotgun stared back through the wire mesh.

  “Pull it over. Stump’s done swallowed drain cleaner,” he said to the driver.

  The bus stopped on the swale. The guard by the front door got up out of his seat, unholstered his revolver and set it on the dashboard. He unlocked the wire-mesh door that gave onto the aisle.

  The guard was near retirement, his face ruddy with emphysema, his stomach hanging over his belt like a sack of grain. His hand touched Stump’s shoulder.

  “Hold on, son. We’ll get the medics here. They’ll pump you out,” he said.

  Then Jessie was on his feet, the tape-wrapped shank pressed against the guard’s jugular.

  “You key that radio and I’ll slice his pipe,” he said to the driver, who was young, only two years on the job, and had suddenly realized the cost of underestimating the potential of the men he ferried back and forth daily from a half dozen service institutions.

  Jessie pushed the older guard down the aisle, through the wire-mesh door, and picked up the revolver off the dashboard. He pointed it at the side of the driver’s head and pulled the driver’s gun from its holster.

  “Drive the bus down that side road into them pines,” he said.

  The bus bounced down a dirt road into deep shade, past a pond that was green with lichen and dimpled with the tracings of insects and dragonflies. Jessie reached past the steering wheel and turned off the ignition.

  “Y’all get out,” he said.

  “What you gonna do, Jessie?” the driver said.

  “Some days a guy just gets up and brushes his teeth in the commode,” he replied.

  “Them state hospital people are gonna certify you. You won’t never do time,” the older guard said.

  “They give me electroshock, bossman. I bit right through that rubber hose they put in my mouth. Lordie, I cain’t go through that un again,” Jessie said.

  He herded the two guards out the door, pushing them in the back toward the pond that rang with a greenish-yellow light. The other inmates stared from the bus windows, some already starting to turn their faces away, as though they were being forced to watch the showing of a film they didn’t want to see.

  “Just look the other way and kneel down. Look at the water. It’s full of frogs. They’re jumping all over the place. See?” Jessie said to the guards.

  “My salary is all my old woman’s got. You must have gone to a church at one time, son. Ain’t none of you boys all bad,” the older guard said. Then his words broke in his throat and died and his lungs heaved in his chest for breath.

  “I didn’t just go to church. My daddy was a preacher. He burned me with cigarettes and choked to death on a woman’s glass eye in a motel room. You look at them frogs. There’s one yonder fat as a football,” Jessie said. He stepped back from the two guards, his hand tightening and untightening on the grips of the pistol, his palm making a popping sound, as though there were adhesive on his skin.

  Then Skyler Doolittle was standing behind him, a clutch of chains and manacles dripping from one hand.

  “Have they did something bad to you?” Skyler asked.

  “They ain’t. Back at the jail, a couple of them others took me down for midnight Bible study. Magpies all set on the same bush,” Jessie said.

  “You aiming to walk through a woods in these orange suits?” Skyler asked.

  “What?” Jessie said.

  “Get their uniforms off and chain them up. Don’t you hurt them, either,” Skyler said.

  “Who put you in charge? Don’t you walk off like that. You listening to me?” Then Jessie stared at Skyler’s bare skin. “Man, they done the same thing to you, ain’t they?”

  Skyler had unzipped and stepped out of his orange jumpsuit and mounted the bus’s steps. His body was striped with bruises, like the color in rotten fruit. He reached under the dashboard with both hands and tore the radio out of its fastenings and threw it out on the ground like a dead animal.

  “What’s the name of them two give you midnight Bible study?” he said.

  At false dawn the next morning I drove out to Wilbur Pickett’s place. The sun was still below the horizon, and the air was a dense blue and the shapes inside it not quite formed. When I got out of the car I could smell the
heavy, cold odor of well water and coffee boiling and pork frying in the kitchen. Then I saw Wilbur riding his Appaloosa through the grass from the west, his face covered with shadow under his hat, a lamb gathered against his stomach with one arm. He dismounted by the barn and set the lamb on a worktable inside the door and stroked its head.

  “Reach me that first-aid kit, will you?” he said.

  “What happened?” I asked.

  “Some dumb bastard left a steel trap out there in the hills. I’d like to slam his hand in a car door and see how he likes it.”

  There was a bright red bracelet incised around the lamb’s right leg. Wilbur poured disinfectant on the wound and washed and applied salve to it, then began cutting strips of gauze and tape with a pair of scissors while I held the lamb.

  “You left a message on my machine. Something about this fellow Fletcher who works for Earl Deitrich?” I said.

  Wilbur twisted his head and looked back at his house. The curtains were flapping whitely in the kitchen window.

  “I come home yesterday and this guy Fletcher was parked in the drive, leaning against his limo, watching Kippy Jo hang wash in back,” Wilbur said.

  “What’d he want?”

  “Wait a minute,” Wilbur said, and bandaged the lamb’s wound and set the lamb down on a bed of straw in a stall. He removed a sealed gallon jar from a plank shelf. It was filled to the top with loamy, reddish-brown dirt that was marbled with black streaks against the glass. He unscrewed the top of the jar and handed it to me.

  “Smell it,” he said. Then he waited, and said, “Just like salt water and humus and rotten eggs, ain’t it?”

  “Oil?”

  “Sweet crude, as black and pure as it gets. You can eat it on ice cream. Kippy Jo inherited two hundred acres in Wyoming her grandfather owned. That’s the core sample on what’s gonna be the Kippy Jo Number One. Don’t nobody know about it. At least that’s what I thought till this guy Fletcher showed up.

  “I asked him what he was doing in my damn driveway. He goes, ‘We hear you got a drill site located in Wyoming. If you want to unload it, we can introduce you to the right people.’

  “I say, ‘Even if I knew what you was talking about, why would I want to deal with anybody mixed up with Earl Deitrich?’

  “He goes, ‘To make your troubles go away, Mr. Pickett.’

  “I say, ‘My wife’s charged with murder. You gonna make that go away?’

  “He says, ‘With one phone call, my friend.’ Then he looked at Kippy Jo in the backyard, smiling, like he was thinking of a private joke.”

  Wilbur watched the lamb trying to get to its feet in the stall. The interior of the barn was dissected with beams of bluish light.

  “How would Earl Deitrich know about your land?” I asked.

  “He’s a big man in extractive industries. I had the core tested at a lab in Denver. They all know each other,” Wilbur said. “That pipeline deal in Venezuela? Every dollar we make is going into our own drilling company. Billy Bob, I’m talking about an oil and natural gas dome big as that Tuscaloosa strike back in the seventies.”

  “That’s what all this has been about, hasn’t it? He wants your oil property,” I said. “What’d you tell Fletcher?”

  “To keep his eyes off my wife. To get his damn car out of my driveway.”

  “That’s the ticket.”

  He pulled the saddle off the Appaloosa and flung it across a sawhorse.

  “It’s all bluff. If I got to give it up to get Kippy Jo off, that’s what we’ll do.” He replaced the jar of oil sand on the shelf. “It’s funny what can happen just from setting down at the wrong man’s table, ain’t it?”

  He took off his hat and wiped his forehead with his sleeve, then grinned, blade-faced, in the sun’s first pink light.

  Then something happened that I would not quite be able to get out of my memory. His innocent nature, his devotion to his wife, his concern for an injured animal, seemed exquisitely caught in the moment, until I smiled back at him and looked directly into his eyes. When I did, he dropped his head and buttoned a shirt pocket, as though he did not want me to see beyond an exterior that I obviously admired.

  13

  Temple Carrol came into my office Monday afternoon and sat down in front of an air-conditioning duct and let the wind stream blow across her body. Her blouse was peppered with perspiration.

  “Pretty hot out there?” I said.

  “I just spent two hours in the basement of the courthouse looking for the list of possessions on Bubba Grimes’s body. It was buried in a box on a shelf right next to the ceiling.”

  She handed a manila folder to me with several departmental forms and penciled sheets from a yellow legal tablet inside. When he died Bubba Grimes’s pockets had contained car keys, a roll of breath mints, a wallet with fifty-three dollars inside, a comb, fingernail clippers, a wine cork, a Mexico peso, and three dimes.

  “You checked the possessions bag?” I asked.

  “Yeah, it’s just like it says there.” She held her eyes on my face.

  The possessions sheet was marked up, words smeared or scratched out. I picked up the phone and punched in Marvin Pomroy’s number.

  “I’m looking at some of the expert paperwork done by Hugo Roberts’s deputies. For some reason it was filed in the basement with documents that are a hundred years old,” I said.

  “Talk to Hugo,” he said.

  “You know what’s not on the possessions list?”

  “No.”

  “A pocketknife. But at the bottom of the form a word is scratched out. It’s scratched out so thoroughly there’s no paper left,” I said.

  Marvin was quiet a moment. “So Hugo’s boys get an F for penmanship and neatness. The scene investigator said Grimes was carrying only what’s on that list.”

  “Grimes cut the back screen. He had to have a knife to do it. Forensics would have given us exculpatory evidence. That knife probably had strands of wire on it. I think that’s why you had a blowup with Hugo over the phone. You know he’s destroyed evidence.”

  “No, I don’t know that.”

  “This stinks, Marvin. Don’t let them drag you down with them.”

  “You quit the U.S. Justice Department and went to work for the dirtbags, Billy Bob. Maybe I don’t always like the system I serve, but this county is a better place because of the work I do. Nothing derogatory meant. Maybe you like watching sociopaths prop their feet on your desk,” he said, and hung up.

  Lucas said the fight between Jeff and Esmeralda actually started at the rig, on the night tower, when Jeff showed up late for work, then sassed the driller and later got careless and almost cost another floorman his life.

  Imagine an environment filled with the roar of a drill motor, the singing of cables, chains whipping off pipe, hoists and huge steel tongs swinging in the air, drilling mud welling out of the hole over your steel-toed boots, the heat of flood lamps burning your skin. The night sky blooms with dry lightning, and the constant, deafening noise eats at your senses. It’s a dangerous environment. But it’s also one that’s monotonous and mind-deadening. For just a moment, you daydream.

  The tongs swung into the man next to Jeff and knocked him all the way across the platform. His bright orange hard hat rolled into the darkness like a tiddlywink. The driller shut off the engine. When the injured man sat up, his arm hung loosely from his shoulder, and the back of his wrist quivered uncontrollably on the floor. He looked stupidly at the others as though he didn’t know who he was. A piece of canvas flapped in the silence.

  After the injured floorman was driven to the hospital, Jeff put his bradded gloves back on and waited for the derrick man, high up on the monkey board, to unrack a section of pipe and send it down with the hoist. Then he realized the driller and the rest of the crew were looking at him, waiting for something.

  “You made three mistakes in one night, Jeff. See the timekeeper for your drag-up check,” the driller said.

  “I apologize for messing up
. I just haven’t been feeling too good,” Jeff said.

  “Ain’t everybody cut out for it. Heck, if I had your looks, I’d go out to Hollywood. Anyway, take it easy, kid,” the driller said.

  A moment later Jeff was standing out in the darkness, beyond the circle of light and noise that oil field people called the night tower, watching what were now his ex-co-workers wrestle the drill bit, hose the drilling mud off the platform floor, and go about their routine as though he had never been there.

  At breakfast with Lucas and Esmeralda in Lucas’s kitchen, Jeff went over the incident on the platform floor again and again, analyzing what went wrong, rethinking what he should have told the driller, wondering if in fact the accident was his fault or if he had simply been made a scapegoat because he had sassed the driller earlier.

  “Roughnecks get run off all the time. That’s part of the life out there, Jeffro. It ain’t no big deal,” Lucas said.

  “That’s right, Jeff. There’s a lot of work in San Antone now,” Esmeralda said.

  “Like doing what?” he asked.

  “The restaurant where I work. They need an assistant manager,” she answered.

  His face was dull with fatigue, but a residual sense of annoyance, like a black insect feeding, seemed to glimmer in his eye.

  “We can drive down there this morning. I need to stop at the washateria and go to the Wal-Mart, anyway. Cholo needs me to buy him some underwear,” she said.

  “You think I’m going to spend my morning shopping for your brother’s underwear?” Jeff said.

  “Hon, you had a bad night. Now lighten up,” she said, and rested her palm on his arm.

  He turned his face away from both Esmeralda and Lucas and stared out the rusted screen at a piece of guttering swinging in the wind and the yard that was matted with dandelions.

  Later in the morning Lucas turned on the electric fan in the back bedroom and went to sleep. He was awakened in the thick, yellow heat of the afternoon by quarrelsome voices out in the trailer, insults hurled like a slap, a table knocked over, perhaps, dishes clattering to the floor.