Heartwood bbh-2

by James Lee Burke

  "I'll take a shower. Wait out here," she said.

  We drove through the field behind my house to the grove of cottonwoods that overlooked the river. The sky was gray with rain clouds, and leaves were blowing out of the grove onto the river's surface. The grass was tall and green in the shade, and I spread a tablecloth on the ground and lay out the containers of cold chicken and pinto beans and fruit salad.

  "I saw you go past the house early this morning," she said.

  "Wesley Rhodes implicated Jeff Deitrich in a drug deal on tape. The jailer put him in an isolation cell with his belt and a dog collar."

  She rubbed at the back of her neck while I spoke, her hair blowing in the wind.

  "You think they might try to hang him from a pipe?" she said.

  "Could be."

  "I'm supposed to check on him?"

  "Nope. I'm going back up there this afternoon. I'll have him out on bond in the morning."

  She nodded, her eyes moving curiously over my face. Then she squatted by the tablecloth and filled a paper plate with food and ate it standing up, looking out over the river.

  I cupped her elbow in one palm.

  "Sit down with me, Temple," I said.

  "All right," she said.

  I sat next to her and we ate in silence. Her hair kept getting in her eyes and I lifted one strand off her eyebrow and smoothed it back on her head. Her eyes settled on mine, then her face colored and she set her plate down and walked to the car and leaned against it, her expression hidden.

  When I placed my fingers on her arm she moved away from me as though she had been touched with ice. "I have to go back now. Thank you for the lunch. No, don't say anything else, Billy Bob. You think I'm tough. You're wrong. I can't cut this shit," she said.

  It stormed that night. I developed a fever and a lightheadedness that seemed to have no origin, and I fixed hot tea and lemon and drank it at my desk in the library while the rain swirled in the glow of the upstairs windows.

  The rain slackened and my eyes burned with fatigue and I felt myself slipping off to sleep. I woke at midnight to mariachi music that made no sense, the voice of my son, Lucas, singing, L.Q. Navarro speaking in words that I could see move like moths on his lips but could not hear, the sound of water dipping into a vortex that was about to close on a little boy's head.

  Lightning flared in the clouds beyond the barn and I saw a figure run from the fields, through the horse lot, into the barn, and I was sure L.Q. Navarro had taken up residence in my dreams for the night.

  Then I saw the electric light go on by Beau's stall.

  I took a flashlight out of a kitchen drawer and walked through the pools of rainwater in the backyard and pulled open the barn door. Suddenly I was staring into the face of Skyler Doolittle, his bald head crisscrossed with rivulets of sweat. He was dressed in a cheap, pale blue suit that was far too small for him, a candy-striped shirt with popped buttons, a twisted necktie, white athletic socks, and jail-issue shoes. His body exuded a raw odor like night damp and moist clay and ozone.

  "I got blood on my hands, Mr. Holland," he said.

  "You killed Kyle Rose?" I said.

  "That deputy with the stinger? Somebody kilt him?"

  "With Rose's bow and arrow."

  Skyler's face went out of shape, like white rubber, his eyes hot with thought.

  "You didn't do it?" I said.

  "No, sir."

  "Then it was Jessie Stump," I said.

  "I been working with him. The boy can be saved. He's had a terrible life."

  "Why'd you come here, Mr. Doolittle?"

  "I've got to have hep. I just don't know what kind. Now I got blood on my hands."

  "Sir, you're not making sense."

  He wiped his palms on the front of his suit and I saw the dark streaks on the cloth.

  "A deputy sheriff tried to stop me at a crossroads. He was taking his gun out. I hit him till he didn't get up no more."

  I sat down on a spool table and felt my eyes go out of focus and my energies drain. My field of vision swam with weevil worms.

  "I can get you into federal custody," I said.

  "Earl Deitrich come out of the Pit. I can smell Satan on a man the way you smell sulfur in a storm. You was made different the day the preacher laid you back in the river and let the water fill your eyes with sky and trees. I ain't gonna be here to stop Deitrich. You got to do it."

  "Mr. Doolittle, I'm not a theologian. I'm probably not even a very good attorney. But baptism was a simple ritual of the Essenes. It was just a way of welcoming a new person into the Christian community."

  He rubbed the blood from his hands on his coat sleeves, his eyes as round as coins pushed into his face. Then, from a long way off, I could hear dogs barking, in a pack, the sound rising louder and louder on the wind.

  "Come back in the house with me. I won't let them hurt you," I said.

  "They'll kill Jessie Stump for sure. You ain't seen them at work."

  I removed all the bills from my wallet, two hundred dollars, and put them in his hand.

  "Goodbye, Mr. Doolittle," I said.

  "Goodbye, sir," he replied.

  17

  The next day I rose early and showered and went out into the cool of the morning and put oats in Beau's trough and picked up litter from the storm in the yard. The fever of the previous night seemed to have flowed out of my body like water. I started to call Marvin Pomroy and tell him about the visit of Skyler Doolittle and to ask about the fate of the deputy sheriff whom Skyler had beaten; but the day was just too nice to contend with the irrationalities of a legal system that was never intended to be anything other than a cosmetic one.

  Instead I drove to Lucas's rented house forty miles west of town and got to watch another form of irrationality at work-my son's.

  He and I were talking in the front yard when Ronnie Cruise's 1961 sunburst T-Bird, with Ronnie behind the wheel and Cholo in the passenger seat, turned into the drive.

  "My sister back there?" Cholo said from the window.

  "What do y'all want?" Lucas said.

  "Figure it out. To see my sister, man," Cholo said.

  The car drove past the side of the house and stopped in front of the trailer.

  I looked into Lucas's face.

  "You keep your hand out of it," I said.

  "It's my damn house. What's Ronnie Cross doing here? She eighty-sixed him a long time ago," he replied.

  "Lucas-"

  He walked to the side of the house and stared at the trailer, his hands on both hips, his coned straw hat pulled down on his face. Esmeralda and Cholo and Ronnie were now out in the dirt yard.

  "I got a job in a restaurant here. I'm not going back to San Antone, Cholo," Esmeralda said.

  "I'm your brother. You're gonna do what I say," Cholo said.

  "These ain't our people up here. My mother says you can stay at her house. I ain't gonna bother you, Essie," Ronnie said. He wore a red bandanna on his hair and the points lifted in the wind.

  "Then respect what I tell you, Ronnie," she said.

  "You got something going with Smothers over there?" he asked.

  "He was good to me. Leave him alone," she said.

  "What we got here is all kinds of people dumping on us," Cholo said. "Jeff's old man just got your marriage annulled. It don't exist. That means Jeff used you to glom his big-boy and threw you away like toilet paper," Cholo said.

  Lucas stepped farther out into the drive and said, "You guys got the message. She don't want y'all here." His hands were inserted flatly in his back pockets and the skin of his face was tight against the bone.

  "I'll say this once. This is a private conversation," Ronnie said.

  "Fuck you, Ronnie. You're on my property," Lucas said.

  Ronnie breathed slowly through his nose and picked at his nails. He cut his head at Lucas, then at me.

  "We came here to work something out that don't got nothing to do with you two. But you treat us like we're spit on the bottom of you
r shoe. No different than Mr. Deitrich. You think you can bing with us, man? You really think that?" he said.

  "We're not part of your problem. You need to understand that," I said.

  Ronnie wiped at his nose, looking at nothing.

  "Call me, Essie," he said to Esmeralda.

  "It's over, Ronnie," she said.

  He rubbed his thumb back and forth across his forehead and walked toward his car, his face lost in thought, suddenly oblivious to our presence.

  Lucas and I watched the T-Bird disappear down the road.

  "How do you read that?" Lucas asked.

  "Don't ever humiliate a guy like Ronnie Cruise in front of his peers," I said.

  "Well, he ain't coming on my property and wiping his feet on people," he said.

  I looked at his profile against the early sun, the heat in his cheeks, the manly energy in his eyes, and felt my heart sink like a stone in a well.

  It's strange how people bloom, even in poisonous soil, once they allow themselves to become what they've always been. Jeff Deitrich had rebelled against his father and married a Mexican girl and had tried to cut it on the floor of a drilling rig. But he quickly learned that yielding to the seduction of his father's world brought no penalty, instead only celebration of the returned prodigal, and that he had been foolish to compete with people who secretly coveted the opulence that was his by right.

  At the end of the week I had to go out to Post Oaks Country Club and meet a client, an obese, self-deluded, thoroughly corrupt oilman who was about to enter Huntsville Penitentiary.

  We sat in the cooling shadows on the terrace while, not far away, golfers on the driving range were hitting into an enormous white net. My client's face went soft and then nakedly lustful as he gazed over my shoulder.

  "I'm born again, but an elegant woman like that can sure give a man thoughts," he said.

  I turned in my chair and saw Peggy Jean and Jeff Deitrich, side by side, dressed in tennis whites, hitting off the rubber tee into the net. Jeff's form was perfect, his skin tanned as dark as the polished wood in his club. Peggy Jean rested one hand on his shoulder, her head bending down with laughter as both of them shared a joke, more like confidants or even sweethearts than child and stepmother.

  "It's too bad Earl don't spend more time at the fireside and not at the poker table. For a while I thought he was going to be selling his furniture out on the lawn. He must have hit a gusher," my client said.

  "Excuse me?" I said.

  "Don't pay me no mind. If I was single, I'd probably drool a bucket full."

  "I was thinking about Jeff," I said.

  "Jeff? His mother should have thrown him back and raised the afterbirth. You mixed up with that little piss-pot? I thought you had some smarts. No wonder I'm headed for the pen."

  I said goodbye to my client and walked past Jeff and Peggy Jean toward my car. Then I stopped and looked at their backs until they both felt my eyes on them.

  "Why, Billy Bob. Come have a drink with us," Peggy Jean said. And she seemed to say it with genuine warmth.

  "I'd like a word with Jeff," I said.

  The smile went out of her face. "I beg your pardon?" she said.

  "Would you step over here, please, Jeff?" I said.

  He grinned good-naturedly, as though tolerating a harmless aberration, then came toward me, resting his club on his shoulder.

  "What's up, Billy Bob?" he said.

  "You exploited my son's friendship. You used his home, then dumped your wife there. Now Lucas is taking your weight with Ronnie Cruise," I said.

  "I can't control what others do. You sure you don't want to hit some balls or have a drink?"

  "You're quite a guy," I said.

  He winked at me, his eyes full of ridicule, and went back to the tee. Peggy Jean had never moved, her face stamped with the insult of being rebuffed publicly in her own club.

  She waited for me to speak or say goodbye. But I didn't. Behind me, I heard a suck of air as Jeff cut his club viciously into a golf ball.

  On the way home I felt my stomach suddenly seize and constrict, as though the lining were being stapled by a machine. My breath went out of my mouth, and my chest hit the steering wheel. Up ahead, I saw Temple Carrol working in her yard, pulling weeds on her hands and knees out of a hydrangea bed and throwing them behind her on the grass. I turned into her drive and sat very still behind the wheel, my face sweating.

  She glanced over her shoulder, then continued her work. I wiped my face on my sleeve and opened the door and got out. Then I had to sit down again.

  Temple walked toward me, wiping her hands on her shorts, blowing her breath up into her face to remove a strand of hair from her eyes.

  "You all right?" she said.

  "I must have eaten the wrong tiling."

  She cupped her hand on my forehead.

  "You're burning up. I'll drive you home," she said.

  "I'm fine." I tried to smile. "Saw Jeff Deitrich at the country club. He was born to it."

  "Earthshaking news."

  "You hear anything about Earl Deitrich having a big infusion of cash in his business?"

  "Move over and quit worrying about the Deitrichs," she said, and nudged me sideways into the passenger seat.

  A few minutes later she walked me to my front door, one hand under my arm.

  "Get in bed and I'll check on you in a couple of hours," she said.

  "What about my car?"

  "I'll bring it back. Do what I say."

  I went up to my bedroom on the third floor and switched on the floor and ceiling fans and opened the windows wide and lay down on top of the sheets in my underwear. In minutes my pillow was soaked. Outside the window, in the setting of the sun, I could see the vast green rolling landscape to the west, as though I were looking into the vastness of the world itself, with all its shadows and mysteries and its alluring red-tinged precipices that fell away into darkness.

  I went into the bath and showered and lay down again but found no relief. It was dark now, and in my mind I saw the flashes of gunfire in the arroyo where L.Q. Navarro died, relived the moments when bullets pierced my own body like hot pokers, floated once again in the warm water that Morpheus prepared for his friends.

  Kippy Jo Pickett had called me a giver of death. Her words were like spittle in the face, and I could not dismiss or forget them. L.Q. and I killed Mexican drug mules on the pretext they would otherwise never be made accountable for their crimes; but the truth was we killed them because we personally loathed what they were and what they did and we took enormous satisfaction in leaving them where they fell, a card twisted in the mouth, for their friends to find.

  Then I saw L.Q. standing at the foot of my tester bed, his hat and pinstripe suit streaked with dust, his white shirt glowing radiantly in the dark. He inserted a gold toothpick in the corner of his mouth.

  " Get rid of them thoughts. It was me got us down there, bud," he said.

  " I got something bad in me, L.Q. It's just like the time I caught one in the chest."

  "The trip across ain't bad. It's just like you and me splashing hell for breakfast through the Rio Grande. You blink and there's ole red-eye coming up in the east."

  "I'm afraid."

  " You ain't got to be. It'll happen for you. It's the one moment you ain't got to plan," he said, then turned, as though distracted by something behind him, a gleam of light reflecting on his gold toothpick.

  Temple Carrol came through the door and walked right through him and out the other side, so that his presence was now a black-purple silhouette around her body.

  She sat on the edge of the bed and took both my hands in hers and looked into my face.

  "I shouldn't have left you," she said.

  I wanted to answer but I couldn't. I could hear my teeth rattling in my jaws. She wiped my brow with her hand and touched my cheek with the back of her wrist.

  "I'm going to get some water and some damp towels," she said, and started to rise from the bed.

&nb
sp; But I held both of her hands tightly in mine, and like a child I pulled her toward me, put my face in her breasts, slipped my arms around her sides, felt her hesitate momentarily, then lie down against me and place her hands on the back of my head and neck, one knee pointed across my thigh.

  I could hear a cacophony of huge, thick-bodied birds outside the window and the flapping of wings that spread as wide as a man's arms.

  The whirring sounds in Temple's chest were like those inside a seashell, like wind and salt tide blowing onto a beach. I held her against me while carrion birds drifted in a red sky behind my eyelids.

  18

  I awoke in the hospital the next afternoon. A hard yellow light filled the room and seemed to enamel the walls and furniture with a severity and coldness that was unrelated to the season. The inside of my throat was raw, as though it had been scraped by a metal tool, and my head reeled when I went into the bathroom.

  I got back into bed and held a pillow across my eyes and tried to sleep but couldn't. A half hour later a tall physician in greens by the name of Tobin Voss came in and sat on the foot of my bed. His jaws were unshaved, his thick graying hair uncombed. He had been a helicopter pilot in Vietnam but never spoke except in an oblique way of his experience there.

  "You feel like somebody hit all over you with an ice mallet?" he asked.

  "What's wrong with me?"

  "Tainted food maybe. We pumped your stomach out. You don't remember it?"

  "No."

  "We were a little worried about you for a while. Your girlfriend, the one who brought you in? She's quite a gal."

  "She's a private investigator who works for me."

  "I've got it. At two in the morning your P.I. is at your house. Sorry I had things confused," he said. "Is anybody mad at you?"

  "What are you telling me. Doc?"

  "I've seen Third World peasants eat rice from storage dumps we poisoned. You brought back some memories."

  He stood up from the bed and looked out the window at the trees below. The backs of his arms were covered with salt-and-pepper hair. When he turned back from the window he was smiling.