Heartwood bbh-2

by James Lee Burke

  Sometimes she wondered about the wife, the Berkeley graduate in Vermont. Then she would toss her head, as though dealing with a problem of conscience, but in reality she was secretly happy, in a way that almost disturbed her, at the sexual power she could exert over other people's lives.

  But one month she missed her period. She told him this over Sunday breakfast in the hotel. He stopped returning her calls.

  The following month, when her menstrual cycle resumed, she sat down at her desk in the sorority house and, using stationery from the Ritz Carlton Hotel, wrote a letter to her lover's commanding officer, detailing the affair, and making particular mention of the lover's statements about his contempt for his wife in Vermont, to whom he referred as "Ho Chi Minh's answer to Minnie Mouse." She mailed the letter to the air base and copies to the wife and to the wife's father, who was the mayor of the village in which they lived.

  Rita drank from her gin fizz and was amused at the way her fingerprints stenciled themselves in the moisture on the glass. The gin was cold and warm inside her at the same time, just as the immediate environment around her was. The air-conditioning was set so low her breath fogged against the window, but, outside, the twilight was green, streaked with rain, a palm tree rattling in a balmy breeze. She drank again from the gin and bit down on the candied cherry in the ice, and thought how she was both inside a hermetically sealed air-conditioned world owned by her father and yet part of the greater world, although safe from its elements. In moments like these, in a setting like this, she felt the same sense of control she had enjoyed when she lay down on the bed in the Ritz Carlton and looked at the undisguised hunger in the air force officer's face.

  But it was not his rejection of her that bothered her now. It was Jeff Deitrich. And Jeff Deitrich and Jeff Deitrich and Jeff Deitrich, and the fact that two men in a row had used and discarded her and the second one had rubbed food in her nose and hair and eyes while other people watched.

  She drank the rest of her gin fizz and ordered another, her jawbone flexing like a tiny spur under the skin.

  She heard the car before she saw it, the twin exhausts roaring off the asphalt, the transmission winding into a scream. Then it burst around a line of cars, across the center stripe, a customized Mercury she had seen before, coming hard out of the north, its maroon hood overpainted with a net of blue and red flame, a sheriffs cruiser right on its rear bumper.

  A second cruiser came out of the south and slid sideways to a stop on the asphalt, sealing off the two-lane and blocking the Mercury's escape.

  The driver of the Mercury shifted down, double-clutching, and turned abruptly into the restaurant's parking lot, flooring the accelerator again. But he spun out of control into a muddy field that sloped down toward the bluffs over the river, showering brown water across his windows, the wheels whining in gumbo up to the axle, mud and grass geysering off the back tires.

  Then the engine killed and steam rose off the hood in the rain. The driver, who was shirtless, leaned his head on his folded arms and waited for the two deputies to pull him from his car.

  Rita stood on the flagstone back porch of the restaurant, with her drink in her hand, and watched the deputies handcuff the driver of the Mercury and walk him up the slope to the open-air shed where her father's cooks stacked cords of hickory and mesquite wood for the stone barbecue pit inside. The deputies' hair and uniforms were soaked. The deputies tried to dry themselves under the shed, then gave it up and cuffed their prisoner to an iron U-bolt embedded in the side of a chopping block that was chained to the cement pad.

  The deputies took off their hats when they addressed her.

  "You mind if we clean up inside, Ms. Summers?" one said.

  But she knew that was a secondary reason for going inside. They ate free whenever they stopped at the restaurant.

  "What did he do?" she asked.

  "Oh, he's just a bad Mexican kid wants to give the Deitrich boy some trouble. Plus he's got a half dozen moving violations against him in San Antone," the deputy said.

  Inside, the deputies gave their food order to a waiter and went into the men's room. Rita covered her head with a newspaper and walked down to the shed. Someone turned on the flood lamps in the oak trees, and the mist looked like iridescent smoke blowing out of the leaves.

  She leaned against the cedar post at the corner of the shed and drank from her gin glass.

  "What's your name?" she said.

  "Ronnie," the man cuffed by one wrist said. "You work here?"

  "If I want to. My father owns it."

  "Impressive," he replied.

  So this was the famous Ronnie Cross, she thought. He sat on the cement pad, barefoot, one knee drawn up before him. He had wide shoulders and big arms, Indian-black hair cut short, lips a little like a classical Greek's, and muscle tone and skin that made her think of smooth, tea-stained stone.

  "What will they do to you?" she asked.

  "Take me back to San Antone on a couple of bench warrants."

  His dark eyes never blinked. They were lidless and devoid of any emotion that she could see. But it was his mouth that bothered her. It stayed slightly parted, as though he looked upon the world as a giant, self-serving deception that only a fool would respect.

  "You think you're big stuff, don't you?" she said.

  "I'm chained up here. I might get county time. These guys will burn me with the bondsman so I got to wait in the bag for my court date. You're drinking gin or vodka with cherries in it. Maybe your shit don't flush, but I ain't big stuff."

  "You want a cigarette?"

  "I don't smoke no more."

  "Anymore."

  "What?"

  "'Anymore' is the correct usage. You're a lot smarter than you pretend. You're just up here to say nighty-night to Jeff Deitrich?"

  He stuck his little finger in his ear and let water drain from it.

  "You want to do me a favor?" he said. "I put my car keys under the dash. Keep them for a guy I'm gonna send. Otherwise, some local white bread will chop up my car or these two county fucks will have it towed in."

  "I heard you were a piece of work," she said.

  "My friend's a wetbrain. But if you'll keep the keys, he'll find you."

  "Why trust your car to a wetbrain?"

  "In case nobody told you, it's open season around here on Purple Hearts."

  "I'll think about holding your keys," she said.

  She balanced her glass on a pile of sawed mesquite wood and walked into the shadows, out of the light that shone from the oak trees. She found the ax leaning handle-up against the corner post. The flat sides of the blade were streaked with wisps of wood and dried sap, but the edge had been filed and honed the color of buffed pewter.

  She lifted it with both hands and walked back into the electric light. Her shadow fell across Ronnie Cross's upturned face.

  "What's the worst thing that ever happened to you?" she asked.

  "Dealing with people who are full of shit."

  She smiled at the corner of her mouth.

  "You ever have a fling with white bread?" she said.

  "I'm a one-woman man. Her name's Esmeralda."

  "Put out your right hand and close your eyes."

  He studied her face, his joyless, dark eyes seeming to reach inside her thoughts. Then his gaze dropped to her mouth, his lips parting indolently. She felt a flush of color spread in her throat, a tingle in her thighs. Her eyes brightened with anger and her palms closed on the ax handle.

  "Put your wrist on the stump," she said.

  He paused momentarily, then lifted his cuffed right hand so that the left manacle came tight and clinked inside the U-bolt embedded in the chopping block. He spread his fingers flatly on the wood, his eyes never leaving hers. The veins in his wrist looked like purple soda straws.

  She raised the ax above her right shoulder, her hands gripped uncertainly midway up the handle, and swung the blade down toward his face.

  She felt the filed edge bite into metal and sink into
wood.

  In seconds he was on his feet, the severed manacle glinting like a bracelet on his right wrist. He paused just beyond the roof of the shed, his face half covered with shadow.

  "For white bread, you're a class act," he said.

  Then he was running barefoot down the slope in the rain. The iridescent light radiating from the trees glistened on his body. She watched him sprint down the riverbank, gaining speed, and dive like a giant steel-skinned fish into the middle of a rain ring.

  30

  Ronnie Cruise called me at my office the day after Rita Summers cut his handcuffs.

  "I want you to know what can happen when you dime a guy, Mr. Holland," he said. "The two county fucks that nailed me? One of them popped a black guy on a back road and told people he tried to escape."

  "I told Marvin Pomroy you might try to take down a couple of Jeff's friends. I'm sorry he sicced those guys on you," I replied.

  "What'd you think was gonna happen?… Where's Lucas and Essie?"

  "Why do you want to know?"

  "A friend picked up Cholo's Mercury to give it to Essie. But I drove by their place and they ain't there and neither is the Merc."

  "You're in town?" I said.

  "Don't worry about where I am." He paused, the surfaces of the receiver squeaking in his grip. "They're at your house, ain't they?"

  "Don't bring Cholo's car here."

  "That's what you're not hearing. The guy driving Cholo's car is a friend, but he's got yesterday's ice cream for brains. You hearing me on this, Mr. Holland? You fucked it up."

  "Meet me at my house," I said.

  But he had already hung up the phone.

  Why had I asked him to meet me at my house? To tell him what? I wasn't sure myself.

  That afternoon I began building the trellised, crossbeam entrance to the driveway that my father had wanted to build before he died at Matagorda Bay. The western sky was purple and red, the hills a deeper green from last night's rains, and pools of gray water stood in the driveway gravel. I twisted the posthole digger into the lawn and piled the dirt on the grass, all the time trying to focus on a troublesome thought that hung on the edge of my mind, one that had to do with human predictability.

  That's why I had wanted to talk with Ronnie Cruise. He didn't buy easily into illusion and certainly not the subterfuge of his enemies.

  L.Q. Navarro stood in shadows, his ash-gray hat low on his forehead, a gold toothpick in his mouth.

  " It's that spoiled puke Jeff Deitrich that's bothering you. His threats don't add up. He don't know no bikers. Not real ones," L.Q. said.

  " He's got the stash they took off the Jamaicans. He'll use it to hire pros. The Deitrichs cover their ass. They don't leave vendettas to amateurs, L.Q.," I replied.

  "I think you got it ciphered, bud. The question is who's the shitbag he's hiring."

  "The mercenary, Fletcher Grinnel?"

  "Grinnel works for the old man. Wire up a shotgun out at your boy's place. See whose parts you pick up out of the yard."

  L.Q. was grinning when he said it and expected no response.

  But neither did he hide what he really wanted from me. He removed his custom-made, double-action revolver from his holster and spun it in his hand, toward him, then in the opposite direction, the yellow ivory handles slapping into the heel of his palm.

  " Your great-grandpa Sam could hang from the pommel at a full gallop and shoot from under the horse's neck like an Indian," L.Q. said. " You're as good a shot as he was. Why waste talent?"

  I dropped two shaved fifteen-foot posts into the holes I had dug, then shoveled a wheelbarrow-load of gravel around the bottoms for support, tamped down the gravel with a heavy iron bar, and added more. I was sweating and breathing hard, my face perspiring in the wind. When I turned around and looked into the shade of the myrtle hedge, L.Q. was gone.

  The phone rang in my library late that night.

  "You mind if we fish on the back of your property in the morning?" Wilbur said.

  "Help yourself," I said.

  "Tomorrow, if you got a minute, Kippy Jo wants to tell you something. I do, too."

  After I ate breakfast the next morning I drove the Avalon through the field behind the barn, the grass whispering under the bumper, around the far corner of the tank, and down to the bluffs. The sun was just above the horizon, and the wind was still cool, and leaves from the grove of trees up on the knoll were blowing out on the water. Wilbur and Kippy Jo were down on the bank, fishing in the eddies behind a bleached, worm-carved cottonwood whose root system was impacted with rocks and clay. A knife-shaved willow branch humped with bream and catfish lay in the shallows.

  "Tell him what you seen, Kippy Jo," Wilbur said.

  She sat in a folding canvas chair and rested her rod across a bait bucket. She wore a pair of blue jeans and a white T-shirt with blue trim on the neck and sleeves. In the softness of the sunrise her hair had a blue-black shine in it and was curved around her throat.

  "There won't be an oil well where Wilbur wants to drill. Just a windmill," she said.

  "She says I ain't gonna find no oil. Ain't that a pistol? Course, that means Earl Deitrich ain't gonna get none, either," Wilbur said.

  "This is what you wanted to tell me?" I said.

  Kippy Jo wet her lips. Her eyes followed my voice and fixed on my face. "I've had a horrible vision in my sleep. Several people stand at the entrance to Hell. Or at least one man in the group thinks he sees them there. It's like I'm inside this man's thoughts and I see the entrance to Hell through his eyes. Then there's a gunshot," she said.

  "I don't take your gift lightly. But if I was y'all, I wouldn't think a whole lot on what tomorrow holds. The sun is going to come up whether we're here for it or not," I said.

  "Yeah, that kind of talk gives me the cold sweats, Kippy Jo," Wilbur said. He cast his bobber out into the current again and picked up a lunch bucket and offered it to me. "Fried cottontail and Kippy Jo's buttermilk biscuits, son. There ain't no better eating."

  "I believe it," I said, and then said goodbye to his wife and walked back up to my automobile.

  Wilbur caught up with me just as I opened the car door. He wore khakis smeared with fish blood and a black T-shirt with the sleeves rolled up over the tops of his arms. A self-deprecating smile hung on the edge of his mouth.

  "I been studying all this time about making money, but the truth is Kippy Jo don't care if I got it or not," he said. "It takes some kind of fool to be so long in figuring out what counts, don't it?"

  "I think you're ahead of the game, Wilbur," I replied.

  I drove back up to the house, brushed out Beau in the lot, watered the flowers in the beds, and went inside to shower and change before going to the office.

  Lucas and Esmeralda were eating at the kitchen table. Esmeralda wore a Mexican peasant blouse and a red hibiscus in her hair, almost as though she were deliberately dressing like a Hispanic.

  "Running late, aren't you, bud?" I said.

  "Our well's a duster. The bossman shut it down yesterday," Lucas said.

  "Y'all doin' all right?" I said.

  "Fine. I love your place. It's real nice of you to let us stay here," Esmeralda said.

  "It's my pleasure," I said.

  "We're going down to Temple Carrol's. Her daddy's got an old Gibson she wants me to string. Oh, I forgot to tell you. She called and said she's got to go to Bonham till tomorrow night. Something about taking a deposition for another lawyer," Lucas said.

  I nodded, then felt a strange and unfamiliar sense of loneliness at the thought of Temple's being gone.

  "Y'all have a good one," I said. When I left the house for the office Esmeralda seemed lost in thought, like a person who has arrived at a destination she never planned.

  Later, on the way home for lunch, I stopped at the convenience store down the road for gas. While I was paying inside, I noticed a man with a florid, narrow face at the cafe counter. His eyes were a washed-out blue, his hair like a well-trimmed piece
of orange rug glued to his scalp. A puckered burn scar was webbed across the right side of his neck. He drank coffee and smoked a cigarette and glanced at his watch.

  I stared at him, remembering my last conversation with Ronnie Cruise.

  I took my change from the cashier and walked to the counter and sat down next to the man with orange hair.

  "You're Charley Quail," I said.

  He took his cigarette from his mouth and looked through the smoke at me. "You know me?" he said.

  "You used to drive stock cars at the old track out by the drive-in movie. You raced at Daytona," I replied.

  "That's me."

  "It's an honor to meet you," I said.

  His hand was weightless in my grip. I remembered an article from the Austin newspaper, two or three years back, about Charley Quail's long travail with alcoholism, the jails and detox centers, a greasepit fire that turned his body into a candle. He looked at his watch, then compared the time with the clock on the wall and looked over his shoulder at the road.

  "You waiting on the bus?" I asked.

  "It's supposed to be here at 12:14. I don't know if my watch is wrong, or the one up on the wall, or if both of them is."

  "Where you headed?"

  "San Antone."

  "You know a Mexican kid named Ronnie Cruise? Some people call him Ronnie Cross," I said.

  "I just delivered a car for him. I had to look all over the cottonpickin' county for the right house, too."

  "Where did you leave it, Charley?"

  "None of your goddamn business." He tilted his chin up to show his defiance.

  "Sorry. I didn't mean to offend you," I said, getting up from the counter stool. "Is Ronnie a pretty good friend of yours?"

  "He was my mechanic. He pulled me out of a fire. You one of them people been giving that boy trouble?" he said.