Heartwood

by James Lee Burke

  He drew his steel picks across the Dobro’s strings and slid the bar down the neck and started singing a song he had learned from a one-eyed ex-roustabout who used to pick beans for his stepfather:

  “Ten days on, five days off,

  I guess my blood is crude oil now.

  Reckon I’m never gonna lose

  Them mean ole roughneckin’ blues.”

  Then Esmeralda burst through the front door, her pink uniform spotted with rain, her cheeks flushed as bright as apples.

  “Ronnie had a flat. Some guys are about to jump him. You got to help,” she said.

  “Which guys?” Lucas said, rising slowly from the couch.

  “Chug Rollins and two carloads of his friends.”

  “Chug?” he said, and closed and opened his eyes and blew out his breath. He felt a sickness in his stomach and a dampness on his palms that he didn’t want to recognize.

  “What’s the matter?” she said.

  “Nothing. I mean, what’s between Chug and Ronnie? They got a history?”

  “Are you serious? They hate Ronnie. They’ll kill him.”

  He rubbed at his forehead and stared emptily into space. Only moments earlier he had felt surrounded by the imaginary company of his oil field friends. Now the room had become deserted. Even Esmeralda’s presence hardly registered on the corner of his vision. The air was suddenly stale and bitter with a knowledge about himself that was as palpable as the odor that rose from his armpits.

  “Yeah, Chug and them others ain’t people to fool with. They ain’t got no limits, Essie,” he said, aware for the first time that he had used the pet name Ronnie had given her.

  “Where are you going?” she said incredulously.

  He went into the bedroom and returned with his boots and sat on the couch and slipped them on one at a time. His skin felt dead to the touch and he could not remember the question she had just asked him.

  “I ain’t never been seasick before. What’s it supposed to feel like?” he said.

  He and Esmeralda drove back up the road and passed the filling station and convenience store, the neon tubing around the windows and the lights in the pump bays rain-streaked and glowing inside the dusk. In a wide turnout area on the left-hand side of the road they saw the three cars from the country club parked at odd angles, the silhouettes of ten or twelve people gathered in a circle on the far side, and birds rising noisily from the trees in a field.

  Lucas shifted the truck down and flicked on the turn indicator and cut across the center stripe into the parking area. Lightning jumped between the clouds overhead and flickered whitely on the grass in the field. For just a moment an image caught in Lucas’s eye that he would later associate with the event more than the event itself. A thin, blond kid with pipestem arms was drunk and had wandered out into the field by himself and had pried a loose board from a collapsed shed. The board was flanged with rusty nails on one end, and the boy was whipping it at the air, his face oily and heated with booze, his eyes dull with a resentment that had no source.

  Lucas pulled past Chug’s new lavender Cadillac, the one his father allowed him to borrow from the father’s dealership, and cut the headlights and the engine.

  “Stay here, Essie,” he said.

  “I’m going with you.”

  “If this deal goes south, I want you to get to the filling station and call Billy Bob Holland.”

  “What are you going to do?”

  He listened to the engine cooling and looked in the rearview mirror at the chrome grille and lavender surfaces of Chug’s Cadillac and the circle around Ronnie Cruise and shook his head. “You got me,” he said, and got out and slammed the door behind him, as though he could lock his fear inside the truck cab.

  As he walked toward the group he heard Esmeralda open her door and step down on the gravel and follow him.

  That woman is definitely not a listener, he thought.

  Chug Rollins was in the center of the circle with Ronnie now, a white golf cap on his head, a blue silk shirt with red flowers on it plastered wetly against his skin. His white pants were hitched up like a sack with a black leather belt below his belly button. His back was an ax handle across, his upper arms swollen with the thick mass of pressurized fire hoses.

  Lucas had seen Chug and his friends at work before. They targeted someone they didn’t like and systematically quizzed and taunted him and made him admit behavior that was odious, that demonized him and made him unlike themselves. When it was established that he was deserving of no mercy, they tore him apart.

  Homosexuals, Mexican and black gangbangers, an outside street dealer who tried to take over the local action, winos who wandered into the East End from the train tracks, they all got the same treatment. They didn’t come back for seconds.

  But Ronnie Cross was a different cut. He combed his hair while they insulted him, using both hands, his face composed, his cheeks sucked in. When he had finished and put his comb away, he leaned over and spit six inches from Chug’s shoe.

  “That’s how greaseballs impress people? You show them you can spit?” Chug said.

  “I don’t see no greaseballs here,” Ronnie said, lifting his eyes patiently toward the sky. “See, a greaseball is a guy who’s mobbed-up. Now, if you’re calling me a ‘greaser,’ like in ‘spic,’ I got to consider the source, which means it ain’t worth worrying about. See, I don’t think you got your shit together, or you wouldn’t need a bunch of little fucks to follow you around and tell you, you don’t got no weight problem. What I’m saying is, no offense meant, is a big guy like you shouldn’t need to perform in front of windups, right?”

  “That’s cute,” Chug said.

  “No, man, ‘cute’ is when you put on golf drag and drive around in your old man’s Caddy trying to score black cooze that wouldn’t sleep with you if they was blind.”

  “Hey, Chug, how long you gonna take this?” somebody in the crowd said.

  “You carry a shank, greaseball?” Chug said.

  “You call it, man. Shanks, fist, feet, elbows, bottles, you want to go nines, that can happen, too.”

  “Chug, the guy just came up to give a girl a ride home from work,” Lucas said from the rear of the circle. Suddenly he had become visible, and his voice stuck in his throat and his face felt tight and small and cold in the wind.

  “What’s with you, Smothers, you go off to A&M to major in dick-brain?” someone said.

  But Chug raised his hand for the others to be silent.

  “What are you doing with Jeff’s ex, Lucas?” he asked.

  “I just think it ain’t right this many guys out here against one,” Lucas said.

  “You’re not a bad kid. But that’s still Jeff’s punch. You want sloppy seconds, you check it out with Jeff first. Now, you take yourself and the jumping bean out of here. This doesn’t concern you,” Chug said.

  Lucas scratched his eyebrow and looked at nothing. The headlights of a passing car swept over the group, seeming to light Ronnie’s face as brightly as a candle. The afterglow of the sun had died on the horizon and the rain was falling softly out of a black sky. Lucas wiped his mouth with his hand and took Esmeralda by the arm and turned her toward his pickup truck with him.

  “I thought Aggies only did it with sheep,” someone said.

  Esmeralda tried to pull away from Lucas, but his hand bit into her arm.

  “You’re going to leave Ronnie on his own? I can’t believe you,” she said.

  “Get in the truck,” he said.

  “You turn my stomach,” she said.

  He didn’t reply. He opened the passenger door and pushed her inside, then closed the door behind her and walked around the back toward the driver’s side.

  Lucas’s stepfather had removed the factory bumper from the rear end of the truck and replaced it with two sections of six-inch steel pipe mounted and welded in a V-shape on a thick, cast-iron bib.

  Esmeralda’s face looked numb, beyond tears, freeze-dried with shame.

 
; “Hitch up your seat belt,” Lucas said.

  “You worry about seat belts? You take me to the filling station. I’m going to call the police,” she said.

  “Same guys who molested you? Hang on!” he said.

  He worked the transmission into reverse and floored the accelerator. The truck’s tires spun gravel under the fenders and the rear end swayed back and forth as it raced toward the three parked cars. The V-shaped welded pipe, ragged on all the edges from the acetylene cut, tore first into the side of an Oldsmobile compact, peeling two long strips out of the paint and metal, then crashed into the rear fender of a Ford, blowing out the taillight and knocking the car’s frame sideways. Then the pipe apex tore into the grille of Chug’s Cadillac, gashing the radiator into a wet grin, crumpling the fenders up on the tires like broken ears.

  Lucas dropped the transmission into low and spun away from the Cadillac, twisting the steering wheel to the right, heading straight for the circle of Ronnie’s tormentors. At first they looked at him in disbelief, then scattered in front of his headlights, white-faced, running for either the road or the safety of the field and the trees. He hit the brakes long enough for Ronnie to jump into the cab besides Esmeralda, a cloud of tire dust and raindrops blowing across the dashboard. Then he floored the accelerator again and burned two long divots out of the dirt onto the asphalt, the rear end of the truck fishtailing on the wetness of the road.

  Ronnie grabbed the windowsill of the passenger door with both hands and slammed it shut. His eyes were manic with energy, his skin shining with water. He leaned past Esmeralda so he could see Lucas’s face.

  “We don’t got no white bread in the Purple Hearts, but sometimes we make an exception,” he said.

  “Not in your dreams, Ronnie,” Esmeralda said.

  A highway patrol car passed them in the opposite direction, its siren screaming, the rain whipping in a red and blue and silver vortex off its light bar.

  Lucas waited for two hours at the house for the Texas Department of Public Safety or a group of Hugo Roberts’s deputies to knock on his door. But no one did. He and Esmeralda drove Ronnie back to his T-Bird and helped him change his tire, passing the parking area that was now empty and pooled with rainwater and streaked with car tracks. Then he returned home and watched Esmeralda go inside the trailer and close the door and click on the lamp in her bedroom. He went into the house and tried to sleep, then gave it up and drank a cup of coffee in the kitchen by himself, the shadows and yellow light from the overhead bulb bladed on his bare shoulders, sure that he would be on his way to jail by midnight.

  But no police came.

  Were Chug and the others actually stand-up? he wondered.

  No, they didn’t want to admit they were taken down by a Mexican girl and a West Ender. They’d find a way to square it down the road. He had no doubt about that.

  Why wasn’t life simple? Why couldn’t you simply go to work or attend college or play music in a band and be let alone? Why didn’t time or age or the dues you paid buy you any wisdom?

  How about Esmeralda? She hadn’t even bothered to say thank you. In fact, after they dropped Ronnie off at his car, she had hardly spoken on the way back to the house. Go figure, he thought.

  He went back into the bedroom and turned on the electric fan and lay on top of the bedspread with his jeans still on and rested his arm across his forehead. The rain had stopped entirely now and the moon had risen over the hills in the distance. Through the screen he could see the glow of Esmeralda’s reading lamp against the orange curtain that hung in the trailer’s bedroom window. She read books by Ernest Hemingway and Joyce Carol Oates. He’d seen the As she had made on her English papers. She was one smart woman but he’d be switched if he knew what went on in her head.

  Then her shadow moved across the curtain and she opened the front door and walked out in the yard in a robe and disappeared behind his house. A moment later he heard her knock lightly on the back screen.

  He turned on the kitchen light and looked at her through the screen. Her robe was tied tightly around the waist so that her hips were accentuated against the cloth and on her feet she wore fluffy slippers that looked like rabbits.

  “Anything wrong?” he said.

  “I keep hearing noises. I know it’s just the wind, but I couldn’t sleep,” she replied.

  “You want to come in?”

  She made a face, as though she were arguing with herself. “If you’re still up,” she said.

  “Sure. It’s hot, ain’t it? The rain don’t cool things off that much this time of year,” he said, holding the screen open for her, wondering if the banality of his remarks hid the desire that reared inside him when her body passed close to his.

  “Ronnie wanted to come pick me up tomorrow. I told him not to,” she said.

  “It’s better he don’t have no more run-ins with Chug Rollins.”

  “You’re in trouble because of Ronnie and me. I’m sorry for what I said earlier.”

  “I don’t pay them East Enders no mind.”

  She seemed smaller now, somehow vulnerable, the light shining on the red streaks in her hair, hollowing one cheek with shadow.

  “When it rains I see Cholo in the ground. His casket was made of plywood and cheesecloth. I keep seeing it over and over in my mind,” she said.

  “You all right, Essie?”

  “No. I don’t think I’ll ever be all right. You didn’t like Cholo. Not many people did. But he was brave in ways other people don’t understand.”

  Lucas started to speak, then paused and unconsciously wet his lips, realizing, for the first time, that no words he spoke to her would have any application in her life. The light from the overhead bulb seemed to reveal every imperfection and blemish in her person and his own and make no difference. He couldn’t translate the thought into words, but for just a moment he knew that intimacy and acceptance had nothing to do with language. The linoleum felt cool under his bare feet, the warm, green smell of summer puffing on the wind through the screens. He put his arms around her and felt her press against him as though she were stepping inside an envelope. He rubbed his face in her hair and kissed the corner of her eye and moved his hand down her back. Her breasts and abdomen touched against him and he swallowed and closed his eyes.

  “Maybe you ain’t seeing things real good right now. Maybe it ain’t a time to make no decisions,” he said.

  Her hand left him for only a moment, brushing the wall switch downward, darkening the kitchen. Then she rose on the balls of her feet and kissed him hard on the mouth, squeezing herself tightly against him, her eyes wet on his chest for no reason that he understood.

  Go figure, he thought.

  23

  Lucas told me all this the following morning, which was Sunday, while he swept the gallery and carried sacks of grass seed from the pickup bed into the shade. I sat on the railing with a glass of iced tea in my hand and watched him rake the dirt in the yard in preparation for seeding it.

  “She told you Cholo was brave?” I said.

  “He was her brother. What do you expect her to say?”

  “His conscience was his bladder. He burned four firemen to death. The firemen were brave, not the guy who killed them.”

  Lucas worked the rake hard into the soil, the muscles in his arms knotting like rocks. He breathed through his nose.

  “Why’d you come out here, anyway? To stick needles in me?” he said.

  “Chug and those others will come after you.”

  “They ain’t good at one-on-one.”

  “They don’t have to be,” I said.

  He threw the rake down and split open a bag of seed with a banana knife and began scattering seed around the yard.

  “You’re down on Esmeralda ’cause of her race. It’s bothered you from the get-go,” he said.

  “Criminality is a mind-set. It doesn’t have anything to do with race. She’s been around criminals most of her life and she instinctively defends them. Don’t buy into it.”


  “I’m telling you to lay off her, Billy Bob.”

  “L.Q. Navarro was a Mexican. He was the best friend I ever had, bud.”

  He slung the rest of the seed around the yard, whipping the burlap empty, then stooped over to rip open another sack. When he did, he said something I couldn’t hear, words that were lost in the shade and the muted echo off the house, words that I didn’t want to ever recognize as having come from his throat.

  “What did you say?” I asked.

  He unhooked the knife from the split in the burlap and stood erect, his cheeks burning.

  “I didn’t mean it,” he replied.

  “Don’t hide from it. Just say it so I can hear it.”

  “I said, ‘Yeah, you killed him, too.’ ”

  I emptied my iced tea into the flower bed, watching the frosted white round cubes of ice bounce on the black soil he had turned and worked with a pitchfork. I set the glass on the railing and walked to my Avalon, my eyes fixed on the long green level of the horizon.

  I started my car engine and put the transmission in reverse, then saw his face at the window. His eyes were shining.

  “You don’t ease up on me sometimes. You push me in a corner so’s I cain’t find the right words. I ain’t got your brains,” he said.

  “Don’t ever say that about yourself. You have ten times any gift I do,” I said, and drove down the state road toward town.

  I went five miles like that, past church buses loaded with kids and highway cafes that served Sunday dinners to farm families, all of it sweeping past me like one-dimensional images painted on cardboard that had no relation to my life. Then I turned around and floored the Avalon back to Lucas’s. He had pulled a hose from behind the house and was watering down the seed in the front yard, spraying into the wind so that the drift blew back into his face.