Heartwood

by James Lee Burke

  “Is digging with a shovel surface-hunting?”

  “Matter of definition,” I said.

  “How you know there wasn’t a tepee ring right here?” he asked.

  “Would you build your house where a creek could flow through it?” I said. “Say, look at that pair of hawks up in the redbuds.”

  When he turned his head and stared up the slope into the trees, I took a flat, fan-shaped piece of yellow chert with a sharply beveled edge from my pocket and tossed it onto the screen.

  “I don’t see no hawk,” he said. Then his eyes dropped to the screen. “That’s a hide scraper. It’s worked all along the edge. A book at the library shows one just like this.”

  “It looks like you got a museum piece there, bud.”

  He rubbed the chert clean with his thumbs, then dipped it in the creek and dried it on his blue jeans.

  “It’s great to have this place to ourselves again, ain’t it?” he said.

  “Yeah, it is. You think you can handle one of those buffalo steaks and a blueberry milkshake?” I said.

  We drove through the dusk toward the cafe where we ate breakfast each Sunday after Mass. Fireflies were lighting in the trees along the road, and there was a cool smell in the air, like autumnal gas, even though it was only late summer.

  A restless, undefined thought kept turning in my mind, but I did not know what it was, in the same vague way I’d been bothered by the inconsistencies in Jeff Deitrich’s threat against Esmeralda and Lucas. The road was uneven, and Pete’s head bounced up and down as he looked out over the bottom of the window at the landscape.

  “Are you gonna ask Temple to eat with us?” Pete said.

  “I don’t know if she’s back from Bonham yet, Pete.”

  “I seen her car go in her driveway this afternoon.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “I reckon I know her car. Was she supposed to call you or something?”

  “She said if she got back early enough, she might join us out at the creek. Maybe she’s a little tired.”

  “I hope I ain’t said the wrong thing again.”

  “You didn’t.”

  He was quiet a long time.

  “What was that gangbanger’s car doing in her backyard?” he asked.

  I pulled the truck onto the shoulder of the road. A semitrailer with its lights on went past me.

  “Which gangbanger’s car?” I said.

  “That purple Mercury. The one owned by that guy Cholo,” he said, his eyes threading with anxiety as he looked at the expression on my face.

  I dropped Pete off at his house and headed up the dirt street, with Beau’s trailer bouncing behind me.

  Why hadn’t I put it together? I asked myself. Ronnie Cruise’s wetbrain friend, Charley Quail, had taken Cholo’s car to Lucas’s rented house in the western part of the county. When he discovered that Lucas and Esmeralda weren’t living there, he had probably been told by someone to go to either my house or Lucas’s stepfather’s. He must have been driving down my road and seen Esmeralda leaving Temple’s house after she had gone there with Lucas to string the Gibson guitar for Temple’s father.

  Charley Quail had assumed Temple’s house was mine. He parked the Mercury there and walked down to the convenience store to catch the bus back to San Antonio, thinking he had done a fine turn for Ronnie Cruise.

  I went through the stop sign at the end of Pete’s street, crossed a wood bridge over a drainage ditch littered with trash and studded with wild pecan trees, and turned out onto the surfaced road that led by my house. The moon was rising now and the sun was only a dirty red smudge inside a bank of purple rain clouds in the west. Up ahead, I saw a plumbing truck parked on Temple’s swale. I turned into the driveway and cut the engine. The lawn sprinkler was on and strings of water twirled in the glow of the bug lamp and clicked across the front steps and the hydrangeas in the flower beds. Behind me, I heard Beau nicker and his hooves scrape on the wood floor of his trailer.

  The television was on in the living room, but the curtains were drawn. I walked up on the porch and tapped with one knuckle on the screen door. The air-conditioning unit in the window was roaring loudly, and I knocked again, this time harder.

  “Temple?” I said.

  There was no response.

  “Temple? It’s Billy Bob,” I said, then walked around the side of the house and up the drive.

  Temple’s car was parked by the shed where her heavy bag was hung, and between the shed and her neighbor’s cornfield I could see the dull maroon shape of Cholo’s Mercury. The pecan tree above the shed filled with wind, and the heavy bag twisted slightly on its chain, its leathery surfaces glistening in the moonlight.

  I leaned over and picked up one of Temple’s speedbag gloves out of the dust. A smear of blood flecked with dirt had dried on the flat area that covered the knuckles.

  I dropped the glove and walked up on the back screen porch and turned the knob on the door. The door was both key-locked and dead-bolted.

  Then I heard voices from the cellar stairway, those of two men who were coming back up to the first floor. I stepped away from the back door and pressed close in to the wall. My hand ached for L.Q. Navarro’s revolver.

  “We got the wrong place, Johnny. It happens. Write it off.”

  “I told you, the bitch knows me. So we got to wipe the whole slate. We get those kids down here, then we go home.”

  “I’m the one she busted in the nose. I say we boogie.”

  “I’m gonna do the broad. You want, you can have seconds. But this is her last night on earth. Now give it a rest and fix some sandwiches.”

  “I’m getting thin. I need something.”

  “Check in her medicine cabinet. Maybe she’s got some diet pills.”

  “You said it’d be clean, in and out. Just straightening out some punks, you said. She’s a cop. We’re gonna do her old man, too, a guy in a wheelchair? You know what’ll happen if they get their hands on us?”

  “Shut up.”

  The kitchen window was open and I could hear them pulling open drawers, rattling silverware, cracking the cap on a bottle of beer.

  Get to a phone, I thought.

  No, she could be dead before I got back.

  I stepped off the porch, easing the screen shut behind me, and went through the shadows of the pecan tree into her father’s old welding shed. On top of a workbench was a thick-handled, grease-stained ball peen hammer, with a head the size of a half-brick.

  I went back down the driveway, crouching under the windows, and pulled open the storm doors on the cellar’s entrance. The steps were cement and caked with a film of dried mud and blackened leaves. Through a broken pane in the main door I could see a lightbulb burning on the far side of a furnace and the silhouette of a figure whose mouth was taped and whose wrists were tied around a thick drainpipe that ran the length of the ceiling.

  I stared impotently through the vectored glass at Temple’s back, the exposed baby fat on her hips, the glow of her chestnut hair against the dinginess of the cellar. Only the balls of her bare feet touched the floor, so that her arms were pulled tight in the sockets and her shoulders were squeezed into her neck.

  I opened my pocketknife and wedged it into the doorjamb, under the lock’s tongue, and began to prise it back into the spring.

  A shadow fell across the cellar’s inside stairs, then Johnny Krause walked down the steps into the light, his brilliantined hair pulled behind his head in a matador’s knot, a five-day line of blond whiskers along his jawbones. He drank from a long-necked bottle of beer and pressed the coldness of the bottle against the side of his face. He wore a short-sleeve Texas A&M workout shirt that molded against the contours of his torso.

  “I’m not gonna let them two guys upstairs touch you. But you and me got a date,” he said.

  Two? Did he say two?

  Johnny Krause set the beer bottle down on a chair and grinned and slipped his comb out of his back pocket. He placed the teeth of the comb under T
emple’s throat and drew them up to her chin. Then he touched her hair with his fingers and leaned close to her and kissed the corner of one eye.

  His back was to me now, and I could see a small automatic, probably a .25, stuck down in his belt.

  “You want the tape off? Just blink your eyes,” he said. “No? I’d like to kiss you on the mouth, hon. Get you off your feet. Come on, think about it.”

  He placed his hands on his hips.

  “This is gonna be quite a rodeo,” he said.

  “Johnny! Tillman’s got the kids on the phone! Get the fuck up here!” a third man hissed down the staircase.

  Johnny Krause mounted the steps three at a time. I prised the tongue of the lock back against the spring and scraped the door back on the cement and stepped inside the cellar.

  Temple twisted her head and stared at me. Upstairs I could hear Krause talking into a phone.

  “That’s right. Captain McDonough’s the name … No, Ms. Carrol will probably be all right, but somebody has to watch her father. Bring Ms. Ramirez with you. I need to ask her about this car of hers that’s out back,” he said.

  I set down the ball peen hammer on the chair and began sawing through the electrical cord that was wrapped around Temple’s wrists. Above me the heavy shoes of the intruders creaked on the planks in the floor. Temple’s eyes were inches from mine, bulging in the sockets, charged with alarm, then I realized she was not looking at me but at something over my shoulder.

  A behemoth of a man in dark blue overalls stood at the head of the landing, his back to us, his huge buttocks stretching across the doorway. Then he turned to go down the stairs.

  I picked up the hammer from the chair and stepped behind the furnace. The insulation on the cord around Temple’s wrists was frayed, the bronze wire exposed.

  Each plank in the stairs groaned under the massive weight of the man in overalls. His head was auraed with a wild mane of black hair, his neck festooned with gold chains. He was eating a cheese sandwich and his thick fingers sank deeply into the bread and left black marks on it.

  He stood in front of Temple, chewing, his eyes roving over her face.

  “Hi, girlie,” he said.

  I swung the hammer into the back of his head and saw the skin split like gray leather inside his hair. He doubled over, his sandwich bread clotting in his throat. An unformed cry hung on his lips, as though he had stepped on a sharp stone.

  Then he straightened up and looked at me, his face creasing with both bewilderment and rage. A bright stream of blood dripped from his hair.

  I hit him again, this time above the ear. His eyes rolled up in his head, and he struck the cement with his knees, falling sideways into the shadows. My hands were shaking when I sawed through the electrical cord on Temple’s wrists.

  She pulled the tape off her mouth, her breath trembling as she drew air into her lungs. I put my arm in hers and pointed toward the cellar door.

  We walked out of the cone of electric light by the furnace, back into the shadows, the door yawning open in front of us, the freedom of the night only seconds away.

  Then I heard someone in the driveway, his feet pausing, the gravel scraping under the soles of his shoes. A flashlight beam bounced inside the storm doors I had opened, welling out in a pool on the cement steps that were stenciled with my boot prints.

  The man in the driveway eased a foot down on the first step, then removed it and tried to angle the light into the cellar without getting any closer to the door.

  I turned the unconscious man on his back and felt his pockets, then inside the bib of his overalls. My hand closed around the butt of a Ruger .22 automatic.

  I moved quickly past Temple through the side door and was suddenly standing below the man with the flashlight. Hanging from his right hand was a chrome-plated .45 automatic. His mouth dropped open.

  I aimed the Ruger at his throat and clicked off the safety, although I had no way of knowing if a round was in the chamber.

  “Throw it away, bud! Do it now!” I said.

  He froze, his hand squeezed tightly on the grips of the .45. He had a small, round, tight face and enormous blue tattoos that covered the insides of his arms.

  “You can live! Throw it away and run!” I said.

  I saw the moment gather in his eyes, the big question that he had always asked himself—Was he really a coward, as he had always secretly feared? Was he willing to risk it all and glide out over the Abyss, with nothing to sustain him except the residue of the last injection he had put in his veins?

  He swallowed, the pistol rising upward as though it were a balloon detached from his hand. Then suddenly he gagged in his throat, his face seemed to dissolve, and he flung the .45 into the flower bed and ran toward the road.

  I let out my breath and wiped the moisture from my eyes on my shirtsleeve.

  Temple came out of the cellar behind me. The inside of the house was quiet, except for the exhaust of the air conditioner and the sounds of the television set. The pecan tree in the backyard puffed with wind, its leaves rising like birds against the moon. I pressed my hand between Temple’s shoulder blades and tried to move her toward the road, then felt her stiffen.

  “No … My father,” she said silently with her lips.

  But Johnny Krause preempted any more decisions that we may have been forced to make. He came off the back porch, letting the screen slam behind him.

  “Where’s Tillman at, Skeet?” he said into the darkness.

  We stared into each other’s face.

  He fired with his .25 automatic, the sparks flying into the darkness. The rounds made a dry, popping sound, like Chinese firecrackers. At least two of them hit the windshield of the Avalon and one ricocheted off the curved front of Beau’s trailer.

  At almost the same time, I raised the Ruger with both hands, my arms stretched out in front of me, and squeezed the trigger. The first round slapped into wood somewhere inside the welding shed, but when I let off the second round I saw his left arm jump as though it had been stung by a wasp.

  Then he bolted through the backyard, over a fence and an irrigation ditch, and was running hard through a field toward the river.

  “You all right, Temple?” I said.

  “My father’s tied up in the bedroom. I have to go,” she said.

  “Are you all right?”

  The whites of her eyes were pink with broken veins. Her face contained a level of anger and injury and violation I had never seen in it before, like water-stained paper held against a hot light. She went into the house and did not answer my question.

  I cleared the jammed shell from the Ruger and backed Beau out of his trailer and lifted a coil of polyrope off a hook on the wall. I swung up on the saddle and hung the polyrope on the pommel and leaned forward in the stirrups. Beau crossed the yard and irrigation ditch in seconds, then I popped him once in the rump and felt his whole body surge under me.

  Beau was beautiful when I let him run. His muscles rippled like water, his stride never faltering. The thudding of his hooves in the field, the rhythmic exhalation of his breath, his absolute confidence in our mutual purpose, were like sympathetic creations of sound and power and movement outside of time. Lightning trembled inside storm clouds that stretched like a black lid on a kettle from one horizon to the other. But electricity or wind or mud and blowing newspaper or desiccated poppy husks rattling in a field never affected Beau, as they did most horses. Instead, he seemed to draw courage from danger, and his loyalty to me never wavered.

  Up ahead I could see Johnny Krause running, his face twisted back toward us.

  Beau and I went across a ditch and up a slope toward a bend in the river where three cottonwoods grew on the bluff. I widened the loop in the end of the polyrope, doubling back part of the rope in my right hand, and whipped it in a circle over my head.

  Johnny Krause turned and fired once with his automatic, but Beau never flinched. I flung the loop at Krause’s head and saw it take on his neck and the top of one shoulder. I
leaned back in the saddle and wound the rope around the pommel and felt the loop bind around Krause’s throat. Then I turned Beau and brought my boot heels into his ribs.

  The rope jerked Krause off his feet and dragged him tumbling and strangling across the ground, across rocks, into the side of a tree stump, through a tangle of chicken wire and cedar posts that someone had stacked and partially burned.

  I reined up Beau under a cottonwood, freed the rope from the pommel, and tossed the coil over a tree limb and caught the end with my hand. Krause was trying to get to his feet, his fingers wedging under the rope that was now pinched tightly into his throat. I rewrapped the rope on the pommel and kicked Beau in the ribs again and felt Johnny Krause rise from the earth into the air, his half-top boots kicking frantically.

  Beau’s saddle creaked against the rope’s tension as I watched Johnny Krause’s face turn gray and then purple while his tongue protruded from his mouth.

  Then I saw the lights of a car that had come to rest in a ditch, and the silhouette of a man running toward me.

  “What are you doing here, L.Q.?” I asked.

  “Somebody better talk sense to you. This might be my way, but it ain’t yours,” he said.

  “He molested Temple. Hanging’s not enough.”

  “Don’t give his kind no power. That’s the lesson me and you didn’t learn down in Coahuila.”

  Beau tossed his head against the reins and blew air, shifting his hooves and barreling up his ribs like he did when he didn’t want to take his saddle.

  I released the rope and let it spin loose from the pommel. I heard Johnny Krause thump against the earth, his breath like a stifled scream.

  Then I watched Ronnie Cross walk right through L.Q.’s shape, shattering it like splinters of charcoal-colored glass against the glare of headlights in the background.

  “I was with Essie and Lucas at your house when them guys called. We got ahold of some Texas Rangers,” he said.

  I wiped my hands on my thighs and stared at him silently from the saddle. Then, as though waking from a dream, I looked up at the wind in the cottonwoods and the heat lightning flickering on the leaves, and once again wondered who really lived inside my skin.