Heartwood

by James Lee Burke

Wesley took two hits of speed and washed them down with his beer.

  He used the pay phone on the side of a shut-down filling station while the others watched him from the heated darkness. Insects thudded against the interior light overhead. His skin felt as though it were wrapped with damp wool.

  The mop-head answered the beeper page but acted like somebody threw easy money in his face every day.

  “Where you get four grand, mon?”

  “It belongs to a fudge packer, the guy I been buying blues for.”

  “We give it some thought. We meet you on the highway. You better change your life, mon. Stop hanging with dem AIDS people.”

  The mop-head gave Wesley directions to a Dairy Queen and hung up before Wesley could argue. Wesley was terrified when he stared out of the lighted phone booth into Jeff’s face.

  “I told y’all they wouldn’t go to the quarry. It ain’t my fault,” he said.

  “You did great. They’re gonna take you down, little buddy,” Hammie said.

  It didn’t make sense. What were they talking about? Wesley’s head throbbed.

  All of them were grinning at him now, but in a tolerant, avuncular way, as though they had accepted him as one of their own.

  “You got another beer?” he said.

  A half hour later Wesley sat behind the wheel of Chug’s car, with Chug eating a banana split in the passenger seat, ice cream and strawberry juice and chocolate smeared on his mouth. Wesley started to ask him why he was dressed up like a fruit, but he remembered the damage Chug used to do to his opponents when he was a high school varsity lineman.

  So instead he said, “Jeff just wants his stash back? Ain’t nothing real bad going down, huh, Chug?”

  Chug adjusted the tweed hat on his head and winked. “You know Jerry Lee Lewis got kicked out of divinity school here?” he said.

  The two mop-heads pulled into the Dairy Queen in a black Mercedes and got out and leaned down on the windowsills on both sides of Chug’s car. They smelled of funk and onions and fish and unwashed hair that had been plaited with aloe.

  “We don’t go nowhere till we see some money, mon,” the one at Chug’s window said.

  Chug lifted up a napkin from his lap and exposed a roll of one-hundred-dollar bills crimped together with a rubber band. He smiled, his tongue lolling on his teeth. A tiny green stone gleamed in his earlobe.

  “There it is, hard as a cucumber. You want to touch it?” he said.

  “You can follow us. We got a place to do business. But don’t be talking that way to me, mon. We don’t got dose kinds of problems in the Islands,” the man at Chug’s window said, his dreadlocks swinging like dusty snakes on his cheeks.

  “How we know y’all won’t beat us up?” Chug said, his face suddenly soft and vulnerable.

  “You too sweet and de little man there too rough,” the man at the window said.

  So the mop-heads were smart-asses as well as take-down artists, Wesley thought as he followed the Mercedes down the highway. Just like everybody else, making fun of him because he was short and didn’t think fast and his meal ticket was with a fudge packer or two. Well, maybe they needed to get their paint scratched up a little bit. Like Hammie said, point of honor. It made Wesley feel good to know he was on the same wavelength as guys like Hammie and Warren.

  The Mercedes turned off on a dead-end gravel road and drove between rolling pasture, then stopped by the desiccated and paintless shell of a farmhouse that was squeezed to breaking inside a stand of blackjack.

  The mop-heads cut their lights and walked back toward Chug’s car. One of them opened Chug’s door.

  “Step out here in de road, mon. We need to count your money,” he said.

  “Really?” Chug said, standing erect now, the mop-head finally realizing how big Chug actually was.

  “Yeah, ’cause dat’s too much money for you. We think maybe you just give it to us,” the mop-head said, his hand reaching for the .25-caliber automatic pushed down in the back of his beltless slacks.

  That’s when Chug hit him in the stomach, harder than Wesley had ever seen anyone hit. That was also when Wesley pulled the remote latch on the trunk and heard Hammie climb out on the gravel and saw Warren and Jeff each coming fast down the road in separate vehicles, their headlights so bright they made his eyes water.

  He turned away from what happened next. The blows from fists and knees and feet finally stopped and the dust drifted into the trees and broke apart in the wind, and he thought it was over, that they would be on their way back to Deaf Smith in a few minutes and he would be in his father’s house by dawn.

  But Hammie looked down at the mop-heads and said,

  “Hey, you guys got to check out that rock quarry. It’s a pretty spot. You’ll dig it.”

  The quarry looked like a large meteor hole filled with green water, the shale sides tapering down to the surface under a sky that was bursting with stars. The mop-heads were belted into the backseat of their Mercedes, both doors open, their wrists fastened behind them with plastic flex-cuffs. In the darkness their faces were the color of eggplant, welted and glistening with blood.

  But they weren’t afraid, Wesley thought. They had proved that when they took their beating without asking for mercy. One of them had even told Chug he’d give him a discount on diet pills.

  But now Jeff was taking a gas can and an emergency flare out of his car. Oh man, this wasn’t happening, Wesley thought.

  Hammie, Warren, Chug, and the other guy were sitting on a grass-tufted mound of dirt, eating fried chicken from a plastic bucket and drinking more beer. How could you eat after you pounded the shit out of two guys? Wesley thought. These East End guys were meaner, more unpredictable and dangerous than anyone he’d known inside. Jeff had a crazy light in his eyes, like he’d loaded up on screamers or whites on the half shell melted down in booze. He was squatted down on his haunches now, eating a drumstick not five feet from the Mercedes, with the gas can resting by his foot. He finished chewing and threw the chicken bone at the mop-head who was closer to him.

  “What do you think is about to happen in that insignificant life of yours?” Jeff said.

  “My mother give me over to de spirits when I was born, mon. I don’t argue wit’ what they do,” the mop-head answered.

  Jeff stood up and unscrewed the plastic cap on the flexible hose that was screwed into the top of the gas can. He held the emergency flare under the mop-head’s nose like a police baton and pushed his head back on his neck.

  “You ever read about Nero? He used Christians for candles. You guys Christians?” Jeff said.

  When the mop-head didn’t reply, Jeff popped him across the nose with the flare, then swung the can idly back and forth, letting the gas slosh against the tin sides.

  Warren and the others had stopped talking now, their faces suddenly tuned in to what Jeff was saying. Warren rose casually to his feet, wiping the grease off his hands on the back of his jeans. He picked up a jack handle that was stuck sharp-end-down in the sand.

  “We already got their stash, Jeff. Maybe we should just remodel their car a little bit. Let them take a visual lesson back home,” he said.

  Warren walked in a circle around the Mercedes, breaking head- and taillights as though he were cracking hard-boiled eggs with a spoon.

  “What’d you think I was going to do?” Jeff asked him.

  “What do I know?” Warren said.

  “You guys are too much,” Jeff said, and walked to his yellow convertible and unscrewed the cap on his fuel tank and inserted the gas can hose inside.

  A wind smelling of distant rain and watermelon fields seemed to blow out of nowhere. Hammie, Warren, Chug, and the other guy started talking and laughing at once, dipping their hands down into the cooler’s melted ice for another Budweiser.

  The mop-head behind the wheel of the Mercedes said something to his friend, then both of them grinned, their teeth pink with blood in the starlight.

  “Say again?” Jeff asked. He tilted the can up
ward, draining it, and set it on the ground.

  “Hey, mon, you had a nice Mexican wife. Cholo’s sister, right? She just don’t like white bread.”

  “So repeat what you said.”

  “You got a thing for wearing her underwear. Dat’s what Cholo say. Not me, mon.”

  Jeff stuck his hands in his back pockets and studied the ground for a long moment, brushing pebbles and dirt under the sole of one loafer. He combed his hair. He huffed an obstruction out of his nose. He sucked the saliva out of his cheeks and spit it into the darkness.

  The mop-heads stared indifferently into space, occasionally shaking a mosquito out of their faces.

  Jeff walked around the far side of the Mercedes and closed the back door, then returned to the driver’s side and closed that door, too.

  “Jeff?” Hammie said.

  But Jeff didn’t answer. The Mercedes was pointed downward on a slope that twisted between huge, grass-grown mounds of dirt and stone. Jeff used a beach towel to wipe down the Mercedes’s door handles, the steering wheel, and dashboard, then the ignition keys when he started the engine.

  “Hey, we got a pair of big eyes here,” Warren said, nodding at Wesley. “Listen to me, man. I got a future. I don’t want to leave it here tonight.”

  “Don’t put your hand on me again, Warren,” Jeff said, and dropped the Mercedes into gear.

  The mop-heads craned their necks frantically, their bodies straining against the seat belts, like people involuntarily riding in the back of a taxi that had no destination. The Mercedes rolled down the slope toward the water, gathering speed, the front end suspension adjusting for the undulations in the slope. For a moment Wesley thought the car was about to high-center on a pile of rock and swerve into a small hill and stall out but it didn’t.

  The mop-heads twisted their heads and looked at him through the back window just as the car bounced hard over a rise in the slope, springing the trunk in the air, and disappeared between two mounds of dirt and sand.

  Then Wesley heard the engine hiss like a molten horseshoe dipped in a trough when the car’s front end dropped over the embankment into the water.

  Jeff popped the emergency flare alight and walked up on a rise and held the flare aloft, bathing the crater and its yellow banks and the reeds in the shallows with a red glow. Thirty feet out, water was flowing and channeling like the currents in a river through the opened windows of the car, sliding over the roof now, the green silt obscuring the shapes that fought desperately inside the rear glass.

  Then the car was gone from view and Wesley was running in the darkness, alone, away from the crater and the air ballooning to the water’s surface, filled, he was absolutely sure, with the voices of men who called out his name.

  19

  “What did you do next?” I asked Wesley.

  “I run all the way back to the highway. Jeff Deitrich picked me up hitchhiking,” he answered. His face was gray, his hair soaked, like a man in mortal terror.

  “We can do the right thing, Wes.”

  “Like go across the street and tell your buddy Marvin Pomroy what I just told you?”

  “We get the jump on it. Let the others fall in their own shit.”

  “You’re old. You ain’t got to worry about guys like Jeff Deitrich and Chug Rollins. I hate this town. I hate being dumb and not having no money and not knowing when other people are making fun of me. I’m Jonesing real bad. I got to cop,” he said.

  “No dope. Just for today. We’ll get you into detox.”

  But he went out the door. The back of his shirt looked like someone had pressed a rolled, wet towel from his shoulder blades down to his wide leather belt.

  • • •

  That afternoon I sat in Marvin Pomroy’s office and gazed out the window at the courthouse lawn.

  “You want to tell me why you’re here?” he asked.

  “It’s been a slow day.”

  “With your clients? I take that back. You don’t have clients. You supervise a crime wave.”

  But it was obvious I saw no humor in his remark. He took off his rimless glasses and sighted through the lenses as though he were looking for blemishes.

  “Earlier I saw you go into the drugstore and buy four different newspapers,” he said. “I wonder why a defense attorney would do that.”

  “Beats me,” I said.

  “One of your clients has confessed a particularly atrocious crime or told you something else that really bothers you. Since most of your clients are mentally impaired, you want to believe he’s just hallucinating. Tell me I’m wrong,” he said.

  I cut my head noncommittally.

  “Jerk yourself around all you want. You hate these sleazebags worse than I do,” he said.

  “You have a Little League schedule handy?” I asked.

  “Clever,” he said.

  But my day with Marvin Pomroy wasn’t over. Just before 5 P.M. I looked down from my office window into the burned-out end of another ninety-nine-degree afternoon and saw two sheriff’s department cruisers and a van loaded with rifle-armed deputies park in the shade on the north side of the courthouse. The deputies got out on the sidewalk, looking hot and weary, their uniforms and campaign hats powdered with dust.

  I called Marvin.

  “What’s going on with Hugo’s goon squad?”

  “Glad you asked. Your clients, Skyler Doolittle and Jessie Stump? They’re up in the hills above Earl Deitrich’s place. How do we know that? Because Jessie Stump put a steel-barbed arrow two inches from Earl’s head this afternoon.”

  “Why would Jessie want to hurt Earl?”

  “Could it have something to do with the fact Doolittle thinks Earl is the Antichrist? Could Doolittle possibly be behind it? Search me.”

  “Maybe Earl and Jessie have found each other.”

  “Which church do you attend, Billy Bob? The only reason I ask is that I’d like to avoid it.”

  Tuesday evening Wilbur Pickett made a mistake. He stopped at Shorty’s for barbecue, then left Kippy Jo there while he went down the road to sell a man a welding machine.

  She sat at a plank table on the screen porch and felt the breeze come up and the shadows lengthen on the river and the sun cut the tops of the cliffs with a yellow glare before it settled into an indistinct purple haze beyond the pasturage to the west.

  The sounds around her were those of young people who spoke too loudly, who gave the waitress their orders as they would to a post, who were casually profane, as though the validation of their own power could be achieved only by their assault on the sensibilities of others.

  But inside her mind she saw Wilbur’s pickup truck turning into the welding shop down the road and she knew he would be back in fifteen minutes, just as he said he would, and she ate her food and listened to the sounds of the wind and the river threading around the boulders in the current and paid no attention to the voices from the next table.

  Then she heard a car engine that was too powerful for the frame it was mounted on, the driver double-clutching as he shifted down and turned into the parking lot, the throaty rumble of his dual Hollywood mufflers bouncing off the front of the building like a glove in the face.

  The voices at the next table died when the driver came through the screen door.

  He saw her but he didn’t speak. He seemed to study the people at the next table, his body swaying, the boards bending under his hobnailed boots, an odor like smoke, alcohol, and body grease emanating from his clothes.

  He walked to the bar and came back out with an iced mug of draft beer in his fist. His shoulder struck the doorjamb and the beer splashed over the mug’s rim onto the floor.

  He was standing behind her chair now, the wall fan wafting across his body, blowing the rawness of his odor on her skin. He steadied himself with one hand on the back of her chair, the muscles of his upper arm swelling with blood, his knuckles touching her shoulder blade.

  “Where’s your husband at?” he asked.

  “This is a bad place for y
ou. You shouldn’t come here,” she replied.

  “Anybody hurt me, Purple Hearts will take people out of here one by one. They’ll cut phone lines. Won’t nobody be able to help them.”

  “You’re empowering your enemies.”

  “I’m gonna bring Deitrich down. I’m gonna hurt him for what he done to you.”

  “Sit down with me. Put your hands in mine.”

  But he wasn’t listening to her now. He turned at a snigger, a remark about Mexicans, his elbow striking the back of someone’s head. Then he shoved a tray stacked with barbecue ribs onto the floor and flung his beer into a man’s face and spit in a woman’s hair.

  He had no chance. The men from the table he had violated were joined by others, men with redneck accents and drilling mud on their clothes, and they swarmed over him and pushed him outside, trundling him in their midst down a leaf-strewn embankment to the riverside.

  In her mind the trees along the bank and the cliffs above the water were no longer a repository of shadow but were now lighted with a kinetic yellow and black brilliance, as though the sun were shining at midnight.

  Kippy Jo stood at the porch screen, listening to the sounds that rose from the riverbank. The crowd had formed a circle, but all their physiological differences had disappeared. They had only one face, and it and their bodies looked made of baked clay, and they used the sharp points of sticks to prod the man in the center back and forth, as they would a bear in a pit.

  Angular tubes of red light burst from the wounds in his skin. His throat roared, his hands thrashed at the air like paws. Then his face lifted toward her, one eye squeezed shut like a lump of cauliflower. She could feel the pointed sticks cut into her own ribs and chest, just as they did his. She felt her way between the tables and out the door and down the path to the riverbank, touching the bushes on each side of her, cobweb clinging to her hair.

  She smelled the hot stench of the crowd and stopped. She sensed the presence of a shape in front of her and reached out and touched the hardened muscles in a man’s back and felt him jump as though the tips of her fingers had burned his skin.

  The faces of everyone in the circle turned slowly upon her.