Heartwood bbh-2

by James Lee Burke

  "Ronnie Cruise says he's going to take down a couple of Jeff's buds. Maybe cancel their whole ticket."

  Marvin brushed at his nose and fiddled with his shirt cuffs.

  "That's still not why you came here, though, is it?" he said.

  "I've thought about remodeling a couple of those kids myself. Maybe going all the way with it."

  "The last portion of this conversation didn't occur. On that note, I'd better get to work," Marvin said, and picked up a sheet of typed paper from his blotter and studied it intently until I was out the door.

  That afternoon I came home from work and rode Beau along the irrigation ditch at the bottom of the pine-wooded slope that gave onto the backyards of the rundown neighborhood where Pete lived. To my left was the acreage that Lucas's stepfather, who worked for me on shares, had planted with okra, squash, corn, cantaloupe, strawberries, melons, and beans. I passed the water-stained plank that Pete used to walk down from his house to mine, then rode up on the bench into shadow to a weathered wood shed where my father once kept the tools that his Mexican field hands used.

  I let Beau graze along the banks of the ditch and twisted the key in the big Yale lock on the shed door and went inside. The air was warm and smelled of metal and grease. Dust and particles of hay glowed in the cracks of light through the walls, and a deer mouse skittered inside the well of an automobile tire. The door was caught on a wood sled, one with boards for runners that at one time we drew with a mule down the rows when we picked beans and tomatoes into baskets. I propped the sled against the wall, touching the dirt-smoothed and rounded edges of the runners and for just a moment seeing my father framed against the late sun, drinking water from a ladle, then replacing it on the bucket that sat between the baskets. Then I felt someone's eyes on my back.

  In the far corner L.Q. Navarro sat on top of a saw-horse, his arms propped beside him for support, his long legs crossed at the ankles.

  " Your friend Pomroy is gonna fret his mind till he takes the easy way home. Which means he's gonna lock up that Mexican gangbanger, what's his name, Ronnie Cruise," L.Q. said.

  " Marvin's a good man," I replied.

  "He wants to sleep at night, bud. His kind don't win wars. Them kids are scum. You cap 'em and bag 'em and don't study on it."

  I began pulling a pile of junk apart in one corner until I found what I had come for. It was made of red oak, and was heavy and splinter-edged, three inches thick, two feet high, and the width of a door. Two screw bolts, with eyelets as big as half dollars, were twisted vertically into the top of the wood. I hoisted it up on my shoulder.

  " I'm gonna lock up. You coming?" I said to L.Q.

  "You know I'm right."

  " I sure don't," I said, and closed the door on L.Q. and snapped the lock into place.

  My father had burned the word "Heartwood" into the oak plank with a running iron. He had intended to build a white gate with rose trellises and a crossbeam at the entrance to the drive and hang his sign from the beam, but he was killed that same spring in a pipeline blowout at Matagorda Bay.

  I sat in the grass on the slope and wiped the grain clean with an oily rag and scoured the dust out of the branded letters until they were dark and granulated and rippling under my index finger. My mother said she thought it was a bit vain and presumptuous to hang a sign on a farm as modest as ours, and my father's response was, "The only reason it's modest is because the Hollands was honest and didn't steal other people's land during the Depression for four bits an acre."

  But I knew my father, the quiet whirrings in his chest, the grace and dignity with which he conducted himself, and the deeply held sentiments he didn't share openly because he lacked the vocabulary to express feeling without sounding saccharine. He loved our home because in his mind it had no equal anywhere on the earth. How many men lived in a three-story purple-brick house, surrounded by poplars and roses and blooming myrtle, with a breezy top-floor view of a barn, horse lot, windmill, chicken run, cattle pasture, plowed acreage with rows of vegetables that ran all the way to the bluffs, a willow-lined tank stocked with striped bass and crappie and bream and catfish, the scars of the Chisholm Trail baked like white ceramic into the hardpan, and a meandering, green river and rolling hills in the distance? We woke to it every day, knowing that everything God and the earth could give to a family had been presented to us with no other obligation on our part than to be its stewards.

  I don't think my father was vain at all, and in reality I don't think my mother did, either.

  I heard footsteps behind me and turned around and saw Pete coming down the slope through the pine trees. He was barefoot and carried a fishing rod with the Mepps spinner pulled up tight against the eyelet so that it rattled when he walked.

  He looked around, his face puzzled.

  "Was you talking to someone?" he asked.

  "Probably not," I replied.

  "Billy Bob, if you was in a conversation and other people was saying a friend of yours was crazy, would you get in them people's face about it?"

  "Nothing wrong with being crazy. It gives you a more interesting view. If it was me, I wouldn't debate it with people who don't understand those kinds of things," I said.

  "I was thinking along the same lines," he said. "But in my opinion the friend I'm talking about is the best guy I ever knowed." He grinned and nodded to himself, as though taking great pleasure in his own wit and the world around him.

  "Why don't we go down to the tank and entertain the bass?" I said.

  I got up on Beau, then Pete handed up my father's red oak gate sign and I propped it across the pommel and waited for Pete to climb on Beau's rump. He held me tightly across the waist, his bass lure rattling on his fishing rod, while we rode through a field of wildflowers toward the tank.

  Sunday morning Chug Rollins was still swacked on tequila and downers from the previous night and drove all the way across the border to visit a Mexican brothel. Upon his return to Deaf Smith he cruised Val's and got into it with a carhop who refused to move from in front of his automobile and gave him the finger when he blew his horn at her. The manager, who was six and a half feet tall, walked the waitress inside, then broke Chug's windshield with an ice mallet. By sunset Chug was at Shorty's, out on the screen porch, drunk on beer, wired to the eyes, filling the air with a sweet-sour animal odor that coated his body like a gray fog.

  When his friends moved their drinks and food to tables that were at a safe distance, Chug cornered kids who were younger than he, forcing them to drink with him and listen to his rage at the sheriff's department, at Jessie Stump, at Mexican gangbangers, then at what he called "hip-hop cannibals that crossed the wrong lines."

  "You in the Klan or something?" one kid said, a wry grin on his mouth as he tried to preserve his dignity and justify his shame for not fleeing Chug's presence.

  "It's like a war. There're casualties in a war. It wasn't my beef, anyway. Hey, I didn't say anything about black people, you got me? I got nothing against them," Chug said.

  "That's righteous, man. No problem. I got to use the rest room."

  "Bring back a pitcher from the bar," Chug said.

  An hour later Chug was picked up for DWI. When the deputy shook him down against the side of the car, a throat-lozenges container fell from his pocket and broke open in the gutter. A handful of reds glimmered in the mud like beads from a broken necklace.

  The next morning I took a chance. No one boiled on alcohol and downers would later remember everything he said and did.

  Chug lived in a three-bedroom, one-story brick house, with a wide, cement porch and white pillars that affected the appearance of East End homes which cost much more. His father was a deacon in the Baptist Church, an auxiliary member of the sheriffs department, and a booster of almost every civic group in town, but he wore pale blue suits with a white stitch in them, hillbilly sideburns, and grease in his hair. The lawn was burned along the edges of the walks, and the small concrete pool in back always had leaves and pine needles floating i
n the corners.

  It was there that I found Chug, resting in a deck chair, his eyes shaded with dark glasses, his elephantine, hair-streaked body oiled with suntan lotion.

  He raised his head just far enough to see who I was.

  "You're getting a burn," I said.

  "I'll live with it."

  "I thought you might need an attorney," I said.

  "My father already got the ticket reduced to reckless driving. The dope I was supposed to be holding was Red Hots. So thanks but no thanks. Who let you in here, anyway?"

  "You don't remember what you were telling people at Shorty's?" I asked.

  "Yeah, 'Pass the hot sauce.'"

  "Two drowned Jamaican drug dealers floated up in a rock quarry. Not too smart to blab it around a beer joint. You talk this over with Jeff yet?"

  Chug's glasses were jet black and filled with the sun's hot reflection. His mouth formed a shape like an elongated zero, then he licked the corners of his lips and picked up a glass of iced tea from the concrete and shook the ice in it.

  "Maybe you should shag it on out of here," he said.

  "No need to be impolite."

  Even though I couldn't see his eyes, I recognized the measured change taking place in him. It was characteristic of East End kids, or at least those Chug hung with. They could become whatever you wanted them to be. They just had to discover the role you required of them, the way a water dowser psychically probes the environment around him.

  He sat up on the deck chair and wiped the sweat out of his hair with a towel so I could not read his expression when he spoke.

  "I'm not feeling too good today, Mr. Holland. We have a family lawyer. I don't know anything about drug dealers or drowned people or why I should be talking to Jeff Deitrich about anything except football," he said.

  "You think you can get rid of that kind of guilt by going to a cathouse?" I said.

  He saw a man's silhouette go across the sliding glass doors at the back of the house. He got up heavily from the deck chair and walked to the glass and tapped on it with his high school ring.

  Chug's father slid open the door, wearing a tan western suit, smiling brightly, his dentures stiff in his mouth.

  "Daddy, this guy's being a pain in the ass," Chug said.

  "You're Mr. Holland, aren't you?" Chug's father said, still beaming, patting his son on the shoulder as Chug walked past him into the living room. "What can I do for you, sir?"

  The skin around his mouth looked like rilled paper against the stiffness of his teeth. He waited for my response, as though I were a customer on the showroom floor at his dealership.

  Temple Carrol, Wilbur and Kippy Jo Pickett, the Deitrichs and their attorney, Clayton Spangler, and I met that afternoon in a private dining room at the Langtry Hotel.

  As though some cosmic irony were at work, the hotel's owner had set a silver bowl of floating red roses in the middle of the dining table.

  "To settle all claims and grievances, the Picketts are willing to offer Mr. and Mrs. Deitrich forty percent of the Pickett Oil Company. That includes forty percent ownership of all the equipment in place on the Wyoming tract and forty percent of all oil and gas revenues," I said to Clayton.

  "Pickett Oil Company? This guy digs postholes and sells watermelons for a living," Earl said.

  Clayton rubbed two fingers on his temple. "It's not what we had in mind," he said to me. He looked immense seated next to his client, his flat-brim hat crown-down by his wrist.

  "Talk to the geologists who analyzed the core sample. There's a black lake under those two hundred acres. It might extend into two other counties," I said.

  Clayton smiled. His eyes were blue, his graying blond hair trimmed close to the scalp. "My favorite line from Golda Meir was her statement about the Hebrews wandering for two thousand years, then settling in the only place in the Middle East that had no oil," he said. "No offense meant, but Mr. Pickett seems to have the same kind of luck. As compensation for real loss, you're offering my clients a chance to gamble. By the way, Mr. Deitrich's employees looked at the equipment on the Wyoming property. It's junk."

  "What did you come here expecting?" I said.

  "All of it," Peggy Jean interjected.

  "You're not going to get it," I said.

  Our eyes met across the table, as adversaries, all memories of our youth nullified by financial interests.

  "This guy makes good on what he stole, on our terms, or he goes to prison," Earl said, leaning forward, lifting his finger up at Wilbur.

  "My wife can go back to the res, so I ain't afraid of jail no more, Mr. Deitrich," Wilbur said.

  "There's a complication here you don't understand, Earl," I said. "Wilbur gave me ten percent of his situation in Wyoming. I'm not about to let you rip off both me and the Picketts because you're on the edge of bankruptcy. Here's our best offer. You can buy the property at twenty-five hundred an acre and we retain half the mineral rights. But the drilling equipment and the producer's end of the oil royalties remain ours. You had an opportunity to be a producer rather than simply a property owner. But that offer is off the table. Y'all can't have it both ways."

  "You're asking for a half million dollars," Earl said.

  "It's a bargain," I said to Clayton. "We'll hold the mortgage for fifteen years at seven percent. The escrow account will be set up right here in town. If this isn't satisfactory to the Deitrichs, they can refile criminal charges against my client and he'll take his chances at trial."

  Peggy Jean straightened her back, her chest rising and falling. Earl pulled at his collar; a tic jumped at the corner of his eye.

  "We want half the drilling operation," Peggy Jean said.

  "Not an option," I said.

  "That land's worth a minimum of thirty-five hundred an acre, Mr. Deitrich. For a signature you make an immediate two-hundred-thousand-dollar profit, plus you get half of what may be a huge oil sand. I wouldn't take too long making up my mind," Temple said.

  Earl Deitrich looked at his wife, then at Clayton Spangler.

  "Why don't y'all have a drink at the bar?" Clayton said to our side of the table.

  Late that afternoon I took a half gallon of French vanilla ice cream out of the freezer and put it, a serving spoon, and two bowls and teaspoons in a paper bag and drove down to Temple Carrol's house.

  She was wearing moccasins and lavender shorts and a beige T-shirt when she answered the door.

  "Sit in the swing with me," I said.

  "Where'd you go after the Deitrichs took the deal?" she asked.

  "I wanted to get ahold of a Houston homicide detective named Janet Valenzuela. She's working the arson of the savings and loan and the deaths of the four firemen. I told her Cholo Ramirez admitted to being at the fire and was working for Ronnie Cruise's uncle and Earl Deitrich in a take-down scam. I called the FBI, too. Maybe they can squeeze the uncle."

  "You left Ronnie's name out of it?"

  "He's not a player. You want some ice cream?"

  She slipped her palms in her back pockets. They were tight against the cloth and curved against the firmness of her rump. I could feel her eyes studying the side of my face.

  The half gallon of ice cream had begun to soften in the warm air, but it was still round and cold in my hands when I set it on the railing of the gallery and filled two bowls. I handed one to her and sat down in the swing. She sat on the railing and ate without speaking. The cannas in her flower bed were stiff and hard-looking in the shade, the bloom at the head of the stalk sparkling with drops of water from the sprinkler.

  "Why so quiet?" I asked.

  "That deal today? You had everybody in the room absolutely convinced Wilbur was about to punch into a big dome. I don't think he could find oil in a filling station," she said.

  "Avaricious people make good listeners," I said.

  "What are you up to?"

  "I'm just not that complex, Temple."

  She raised her eyebrows. I got up from the swing and sat next to her on the railing. Her
shoulder and hip touched mine. Her spoon scraped quietly in her ice cream bowl while she continued to eat.

  "You want to go to a show?" I asked.

  She didn't answer.

  "Is your father home?" I asked.

  "Why?"

  "I thought you might want to go to a show. I mean, if he'd be all right by himself."

  "He's at his sister's. They have dinner and watch late-night TV one night a week." Her face turned up into mine.

  "I see," I said. I circled my fingers lightly around her wrist and touched her upper arm with my other hand. In the shadows her mouth looked red and vulnerable when it parted, like a four o'clock opening to the evening's coolness.

  Then she dropped her eyes and tilted her head down.

  "A movie sounds fine. I have to change, though. Can you wait for me out here a few minutes?" she said.

  Rita Summers sat at a table by the window in the restaurant her father owned above the river. This was one of four that he owned in Texas and New Mexico, and she liked to come here sometimes by herself and have a drink in the lounge and watch the boats on the river and think about her day and the men, boys, really, who moved in and out of it without consequence and the protean nature of her relationships that in her mind's eye always ended in a blank place in her future.

  There had been a time when she had believed the future was built incrementally, with absolute guarantees of success provided to those who did what was expected of them. You graduated from high school, with all the attendant ceremony, as though it actually marked an achievement, then enrolled at the university in Austin and lived in a sorority house and dated the right boys and kept the right attitudes and learned whom to avoid and whom to cultivate, and one day your father gave you away at your wedding and the pride and love you saw in his eyes confirmed that all the goodness the world could offer had indeed become yours.

  But she didn't finish her second year at the university. Her professors were boring, the subject matter stupid, the fraternity boys she dated inane and immature. She began seeing an air force officer who came from old Boston money, even though she knew he had a wife, a Berkeley graduate, in Vermont. They began meeting weekends at the Ritz Carlton in Houston and the Four Seasons in Dallas. The hardness of his body inside her, the tendons in his back tightening under her fingers, filled her with a sense of excitement and power she had never experienced before. Her skin seemed to glow with it when she showered afterwards, and the glow and erotic confidence only intensified when she refused to answer her sorority sisters' questions about the affair she was obviously having.