Heartwood bbh-2

by James Lee Burke

  "Then I'll get me another lawyer."

  "That's your choice, sir."

  "I ain't no 'sir.' I ain't nothing. But at least I ain't been sleeping with the wife of the man trying to put my friends in jail."

  His face was sullen, embarrassed, and accusatory, like a child's, all at the same time. I turned and walked back inside the house. I heard him fling his uncapped whiskey bottle whistling into the twilight, then start his truck and back out into the street, tearing a swatch out of a poplar tree.

  What could I do about Wilbur? The answer was nothing. I drove out to his house on the hardpan in the morning. As I approached the house a '49 Mercury roared past me in the opposite direction.

  Kippy Jo Pickett was on the front steps, in the shade, snapping beans in a pan, when I walked into the yard.

  "That was Cholo Ramirez's car," I said.

  "Yes, he just left."

  "What's he doing here?"

  "Visiting. Telling me about his life, his cars, things he worries about."

  "That kid has brain damage. If I were you, I'd leave him alone."

  "His mother's boyfriend broke his skull when he was a baby. Do we also throw away the part of him that wasn't damaged? Is that what you mean?"

  I looked off in the distance, across the hot shimmer of the fields, and watched Cholo run a stop sign, then swerve full-bore around an oil truck.

  "Where's Wilbur?" I asked.

  "He went down to the state employment office."

  "Earl Deitrich's trying to jerk y'all around. If you're jammed up for money, I can lend you some. Don't give in to this man."

  Her eyes fixed on my face and stayed there. A brown and white beagle lay in a shallow depression by the side of the gallery, its tail flopping in the silence.

  "You'd do that?" she asked.

  "Pay me back when y'all punch into your first oil sand."

  "Wilbur's scared. He sits by himself in the kitchen in the middle of the night. He thinks I'm going to prison."

  "Listen, Kippy Jo, men like Earl Deitrich steal people's dreams. They have no creative vision of their own, no love, and no courage. They envy people like you and Wilbur. That's why they have to destroy you."

  She was quiet a long time. The sun was hot and bright in the sky, and the pools of rainwater in the alfalfa glimmered like quicksilver. Kippy Jo set down the tin pan of snapbeans and kneaded the thick folds of skin on top of the beagle's neck. The wind blew her hair in a black skein across her eyes.

  "He won't listen," she said.

  Earl Deitrich was one of those who believed that when force, control, and arrogance did not get you your way, you simply applied more of the same.

  That night the moon was down, and rain clouds sealed the sky and heat lightning nickered over the hills in the west. Wilbur and Kippy Jo slept under an electric fan, the drone of the motor and the tinny vibration of the wire basket over the blades threading in and out of their sleep as the fan head oscillated on its axis. At 2 a.m. Wilbur heard a crunching sound, like car tires rolling slowly across pea gravel. He rose from the bed in his underwear and lifted the. 308 Savage lever-action from the rack and walked barefoot into the living room. He looked out into the drive and at the road in front and saw nothing. He leaned down on the windowsill, the curtains blowing against his skin. He stared into the darkness until his eyes burned and he imagined shapes that he knew were not there.

  He walked into the kitchen and took a quart of milk from the icebox and drank from it. Then he heard car tires crunching on the gravel again, rolling faster this time, and he realized the sounds had come from the back of the house, not the front.

  He opened the screen door and stepped into the yard just as three men pushed his pickup truck out onto the road, turned over the engine, and jumped inside. He ran to the side of the house, threw his rifle to his shoulder, and levered a round into the chamber.

  He moved the iron sights just ahead of the driver's window, saw the man silhouetted against a light on a neighbor's barn, and felt his finger tighten on the trigger. Then he blew out bis breath and lifted the barrel into the air, resting the stock in the cradle of his left arm. He watched the truck disappear down the road toward the hills in the west.

  He heard Kippy Jo behind him.

  "I'll call 911," she said.

  "It won't do no good. It'll just bring Hugo Roberts and them thugs of his back out here."

  "Come back in the house," she said, tugging at his arm.

  "No. They turned off the road into the hills. They're stopping for something. I'm going after them sons of bucks."

  "That's what they want you to do."

  "Then they should have thought twicet about what they prayed for. That's a Wilbur T. Pickett guarantee."

  Wilbur put on a cotton shirt and jeans and a pair of boots and hung a flashlight on a lanyard around his neck and bridled one of his palominos and rode it bareback out to the hills, the lever-action Savage propped across the horse's withers. He rode through arroyos and a sandy wash dimpled with pools of red water. He rode up a steep incline into mesquite and blackjack that had been scorched black from brushfires, into stands of green trees, across rocky ground, and onto a plateau that looked out on the railroad trestle.

  Heat lightning leaped between the clouds and he saw his truck parked down below, under the stanchions of the trestle.

  He brought his boot heels into the ribs of the palomino, leaning his weight back toward the rump, his rifle held vertically in his right arm, and rode down the slope into the ravine.

  The wind shifted and an odor struck his face that was like a green chemical, like the smell of a river that has receded from flood stage and exposed the remains of drowned livestock.

  Both of the truck doors were open and Wilbur could hear blowflies droning in the darkness. He unhooped the flashlight from his neck and slipped from the horse's back and walked around to the front of the truck.

  A figure sat stiffly behind the steering wheel, the hands resting motionlessly on each side of the horn button. Strands of gray hair lifted in the hot wind around a face that seemed to have no features, that was as black as leather that had molded in the ground.

  When he flicked on the flashlight he saw his mother in her burial clothes, now stained by groundwater, her chin and the corners of her mouth puckered tightly against the bone in an eternal scold, her slitted eyes staring at him as brightly as fish scale.

  The following morning Wilbur recounted all the above in my office, spinning his hat on his index finger.

  "They dug up your mother's grave?" I said incredulously.

  "They sure did. My bet would be on that Fletcher fellow. Anyway, I already called Earl Deitrich," he replied.

  "You going to let him get away with-"

  He flipped his hat by the brim up on his head. "My mother was a long-suffering, Christian woman. I know that 'cause not a day passed without her telling me. She told my daddy that so often he used to walk around the house with wads of newspaper screwed in his ears. He even said she'd get up out of the grave to tell the rest of us how worthless we was.

  "So that's what I told Earl Deitrich. That woman has been a lifetime motivator. The best part of Earl Deitrich run down his daddy's leg and there won't be a beer joint left in Texas the day Kippy Jo and me cut him in on our oil site. Durn, if that boy didn't slam down the phone, then pick it up and slam it down again."

  16

  It seemed like nothing went easy for Jeff Deitrich. Or at least that's what he told Lucas Smothers after he came back from seeing his father and being told he had one of two choices: lose Esmeralda Ramirez and her beaner relatives or get used to the lifestyle of oil field trash.

  "He had my name taken off the membership list at the club. He canceled all my credit cards," Jeff said.

  "So flush the club," Lucas said.

  "Luke, my boy, black basketball players with orange hair and collard greens for brains make twenty million dollars in a season. Think about where you're going to be on your current salary i
n ten years."

  Jeff had sailed yachts and deep-sea-fished since he was a child. He drove to Aransas Pass and tried to get on as a boat pilot ferrying supplies to offshore oil rigs. The owner of the boatyard listened attentively, chewing on a matchstick, and told Jeff to come back in the morning, that maybe they could work something out. Jeff and Esmeralda took a twenty-dollar room at a motel behind a truck stop, then Jeff went down to the boatyard at 5 a.m. The owner had left word with the foreman that Jeff could start his trial period right away, cleaning the grease trap behind the office and shoveling out the hold of a shrimper.

  The foreman had to lock himself in a bathroom.

  On the way back home Jeff stopped in San Antonio and scored four fat bags of rainbows and blues and a bag of Afghan skunk.

  "Why you need all that dope?" Esmeralda said.

  "Try to concentrate on what I'm saying. We don't have any money," he said, enunciating each of his words. "The way to get money is to buy something cheap, then sell it to dumb people for a lot more than it's worth. It's why Mexicans never get out of the barrio."

  But that night two Jamaican dealers from Dallas met Jeff in an abandoned picnic ground down the road from Shorty's and, instead of handing him an envelope full of cash, pointed a. 357 Magnum in his face and picked up the four Ziplocs of rainbows and blues from the car hood and dropped them in a shopping bag.

  "I know where you guys live. Y'all are going to have some visitors," Jeff said.

  "Say, mon, why don't we do it dis way? We just take your thumbs wit' us and save you de gas money," the man with the gun said.

  Jeff watched the taillights of their car move away into the darkness, the dust from the tires drifting as palpably as grit into his hair.

  The tin trailer was boiling with heat when Jeff woke in the morning, his face netted with hangover and inchoate rage at being ripped off by two calypso mop-heads his father wouldn't allow to drink out of the garden hose. He came through the back door of Lucas's house and made toll calls without permission, pacing up and down, barefoot, his breath bouncing sourly off the receiver.

  "I'm going to stick their flippers in a vise," he said. "Just pick up Hammie and two or three other guys and cover my back… No, I'm serious. I'm going to break their fingers, then their wrists. You want the word on the street we're anybody's fuck? They're going to eat their next meal out of a dog bowl… We having a memory lapse, Warren? You remember that hit-and-run in Austin?"

  Ten minutes later Lucas heard Jeff and Esmeralda fighting inside the trailer.

  "Because I need it. Because I couldn't sleep all night. Because you snore. Because I got barbed wire in my head. You tell me where it is!" Jeff said.

  "You know how much you smoked already? Look at your eyes. They're full of blood clots. You stink like a street person."

  "I'll say it one more time, Esmeralda. Where's my stash?"

  "I burned it."

  "Sure you did. That's why birds are dropping out of the sky."

  He began tearing her clothes off the hangers in a closet and throwing them through the front door. Then he walked out onto the steps with her storage trunk over his head and heaved it end over end into the yard. The top burst open, and he rooted in it like a badger digging in a hole, flinging her jewelry and shoes and scrapbooks and red and purple rayon undergarments into the air. His face was white and sweating, his jaws necked with stubble.

  "You need to go to detox, Jeff. You're sick," she said.

  "What I'm sick of is salsa and onion breath and your brother Cholo's stupid face and the thought I've been coming in the same box as Ronnie Cruise. I want to scrub you off me with peroxide."

  " Maricon," she said.

  He straightened up slowly. "You called me a queer? That's what you just said? A queer? Say it again and see what happens."

  " Maricon!" she said. " Cabron! Cobarde! Maricon! Maricon! Maricon!"

  "Your face looks funny like that. All out of shape. Funny and stupid," he said, smiling strangely. "I know a truck stop where I can get you on, doing hand jobs. I'll take a shower and drive you there. You can tell them about your credits at the Juco. They'll be impressed. For some reason, Esmeralda, I feel just great."

  Lucas told me this story early Saturday morning while I curried out Beau in the lot. We were in the shade of the barn and the morning was still cool and the wind off the river smelled of wet trees and wildflowers and the livestock in my neighbor's pasture.

  "Jeff's gone?" I said.

  "He burned rubber for thirty feet. He shot me the bone when he went by. What a guy," he said.

  "Where's Esmeralda?"

  "Staying at the trailer," he said.

  I straightened up and paused in my work, my arms resting on the warm indentation of Beau's back. Lucas looked down at his foot and kicked at the dust. The brim of his straw hat was curled into a point on the front.

  "She lost her restaurant job. She don't have no place to go," he said.

  "She has a family."

  "Just Cholo. He's crazy."

  "That's the point. Stay away from those people."

  "Which people is that?"

  "Don't make a racial deal out of this. You know what I'm talking about," I said.

  "You want me to run her off? Treat her like Jeff done?"

  I opened the gate in the lot and turned Beau out into the pasture.

  "I guess life was a lot simpler when I was y'all's age," I said.

  "Yeah, I reckon that's how I got here," he replied.

  Sunday morning I got a call from the county jail. My harelip, flat-nosed, meltdown client, Wesley Rhodes, had been out of the bag three days, then had gotten busted at four o'clock that morning for possession, driving without a license, and indecent exposure.

  I waited for the jailer, a sweating fat man whose khaki trousers hung below his crack, to open up Wesley's isolation cell in the top of the courthouse.

  "Why isn't he in the tank, L.J.?" I asked.

  "It's full up on Saturday nights. Federal judge is always on our ass about it," he replied.

  I sat down on a chain-hung iron bunk opposite Wesley. The sun had risen into the trees outside, and the light through the bars made lacy shadows on Wesley's face. He wore a dark blue see-through shirt and a studded dog collar around his neck and Cloroxed jeans belted tightly below his belly button. His wide-set green eyes stared at me with the angular concentration of a lizard's.

  "What were you holding, Wesley?" I said.

  "Blues. They been on the street a couple of days."

  "Dilaudid?"

  "They wasn't for me. There's a man I get together with sometimes. He cooks them. They're safer than the tar that's coming up from the Valley."

  "What's the indecent-exposure charge?"

  "I was taking a leak in the park."

  "You selling yourself, Wes?"

  He dropped his eyes and gripped his bunk and rocked on his arms.

  "He takes me out to dinner and buys me clothes sometimes, that's all. I got to get out of jail. They're scaring me."

  "In what way?"

  "A couple of mop-heads, you know, dreadlocks, Jamaican guys, been unloading a lot of blues and rainbows. The word is they ripped them off Jeff Deitrich."

  "So?"

  "I was cuffed in the cruiser with a friend while the deputy was tearing up my daddy's car. I was telling my friend about Jeff getting stiffed by these two guys. Then the deputy comes back to the cruiser and picks up a tape recorder off the front seat. He plays it back, listening to everything I said, all the time staring at me like I done something really bad.

  "I go, 'That's an illegal wiretap.'

  "He goes, 'You better stick to being some rich junky's hump, sperm-breath.' Then he wouldn't put me in the tank. Why they pissed off, Mr. Holland? Is it 'cause I told them they cain't use that tape?"

  "You don't have expectation of privacy in the back of a police cruiser, Wesley. But that's not the problem. While you're in here, you don't talk about Jamaicans taking off Jeff Deitrich. You hearing
me on this?"

  Wesley stood up from his bunk and looked at the barred window above his head. An uneaten breakfast of powdered eggs and white bread and packaged jam lay on top of the toilet tank.

  "My stomach's been sick. I ain't ever pissed them off before. Nothing don't feel right," he said.

  "Give me your belt and that dog collar," I said.

  "What?" he said.

  Downstairs I dropped the collar and Wesley's wide leather belt and heavy metal buckle on the jailer's desk.

  "Don't ever try to get away with something like this, L.J.," I said.

  He dipped his fingers in a leather pouch and loaded his jaw with chewing tobacco, his lidless eyes never leaving mine.

  Later, after church, I stopped by a supermarket in town, then drove to Temple Carrol's house, which was just down the road from mine. I could hear her working out on the heavy bag in the backyard, thudding her gloves into it, spinning it on the chain that was hooked into a beam on her father's open-air welding shed.

  She didn't see me behind her. She wore gray sweatpants and a workout halter and red tennis shoes, and she was leading into the bag with her left, hooking with her right, and following with a karate kick. Her skin was flushed, her shoulders and the baby fat on her sides slick with perspiration.

  "Have a picnic with me," I said.

  She turned and lowered her gloves, chewing gum, her face without expression, the bag creaking on the chain behind her.

  "You need a favor?" she asked.

  "It's a nice day. I didn't want to spend it alone."

  She pulled off her gloves one at a time. They were dull red, thin-padded, with metal dowels inside that fitted across the palms.

  "I don't like being somebody's safety pin, Billy Bob," she said.

  "I had to try. No hard feelings. I'll probably see you tomorrow."

  "Were you in the sack with Peggy Jean?" she asked.

  "No." I picked up a bottle cap off a spool table and flipped it with my thumbnail against the trunk of a pecan tree. "That doesn't mean my behavior was acceptable."

  She looked at me for a long moment, her chestnut hair damp on her cheeks. Then she tossed one of her gloves at my face.