Heartwood (13 page)

That evening Pete and I bought a bucket of fried chicken and cane-fished for shovelmouth under a weeping willow on the bank of the river. The sun was a dull red on the western horizon, as though it were surrendering its heat to the darkness that lay beyond the earth’s rim, and when the wind blew from the river, the grass in the fields turned pale in the light slanting out of the clouds and the wildflowers seemed to take on a new color.

“Are Wilbur Pickett and his wife going to the pen?” Pete asked.

“Not if I can help it.”

Pete’s face was pensive, the way it became when he put the adult world under scrutiny.

“People are saying Wilbur’s wife shot that fellow ’cause they were all stealing from Mr. Deitrich,” he said.

“They’re wrong.”

His brow furrowed as another question swam in front of his eyes, like a butterfly that wouldn’t come into focus.

“If Mr. Deitrich is trying to put your clients in jail, how come you and Ms. Deitrich are such good friends?” he asked.

“Something just pulled your cork under.”

He jerked on his pole. The cork and weight and hook came flying out of the water into the grass.

“He must have taken off,” I said.

“Durn, I knew you was gonna say that.”

Then Pete looked past my shoulder at a low-slung, chopped-down Mercury coming through the field. In the muted light its tangled colors took on the deep reddish-purple hue of a stone bruise.

“I’m heading back home,” Pete said.

“No, you stay here. This is your place. You never have to leave it, not for any reason.”

“Them gangbangers are no good, Billy Bob. You don’t see what they do when people like you ain’t around.”

I set down my cane pole and walked toward the Mercury before it reached the riverbank. Cholo Ramirez pulled to a stop and got out, his baggy khaki trousers hanging loosely from his hips, his ribbed, white undershirt molded to his physique. His tan shoulders seemed to glow with the sun’s fire.

“How much can I tell you and be protected?” he said.

“You mean by client-lawyer privilege?”

“Whatever.”

“You’re not my client. I’m not taking on any new clients”

He gazed at the river, his hands opening and closing at his sides.

“Esmeralda married a
maricón
, man. He beats up queers ’cause that’s what he is. She told me how they made love on an air mattress on the Comal River. I was getting sick,” he said.

“I don’t know if you’ve come to the right place, Cholo,” I said.

“Me and Earl Deitrich got a history. I can jam him up real bad, man. But I got to have guarantees.”

“What’s he done to you?”

“It’s what he’s doing to Esmeralda. She ain’t no gangbanger, man. She makes As in college. He sent a lawyer to the house. Five thousand dollars for her to get lost.”

“You want more?” I said.

Cholo stepped closer to me. I could smell the heat in his skin. For the first time in months I saw the silhouette of L.Q. Navarro on the edge of my vision, his ash-gray hat shadowing his face, his white shirt glowing against his dark suit, his index finger wagging cautiously.

“Esmeralda ain’t somebody’s pork chops you pay for by the pound. She thinks Jeff loves her. If he loves her, how come he lets his old man treat her like she’s the town pump?” Cholo said.

“How did you know I was back here?” I asked.

“I walked around back. I looked in your barn. I seen you and the little boy riding your horse out here.”

“You walked around back?”

“You got a hearing problem? I’m talking about my sister.
What
, I didn’t have permission to walk behind your fucking house?”

“Come to the office, Cholo. We’ll talk this stuff over. Maybe I can help,” I said.

His brow was creased into rolls of grizzle, his eyes pulled close together like BBs.

“I’m all mixed up. I can’t think. It makes my head hurt,” he said.

I walked away from him and picked up my cane pole and swung the bobber out into the current. I kept my back turned until I heard the Mercury engine roar to life and the weeds in the field clatter under the front bumper.

L.Q. Navarro leaned with one shoulder against the willow tree, rolling a cigarette. He popped a lucifer match on his thumbnail and cupped it to the cigarette, and I saw the flame flare on his mustache and dark eyes and grained skin.

“That boy will cook your liver on a stick,”
he said.

Once in a while you hear about truly wicked abuses inside the system: In California, rival Hispanic and black gang members forced into a concrete-enclosed recreation area while a gunbull waits to blow away a particularly troublesome inmate as soon as the fighting starts; over in Louisiana, an inmate kept for years in solitary confinement, until he permanently damages his brain by beating his head against an iron wall; a Haitian immigrant sexually tortured with a plumber’s helper in the rest room of a New York City police station.

You hope it’s only a story. Or that, if true, the culpable parties have been fired or jailed themselves.

That’s what you hope.

Sunday morning Skyler Doolittle went to a fundamentalist, Holy Roller church in the West End, one that had trailed its legends of snake handling, drinking poisons, and talking in tongues all the way across the chain of southern mountains into the hill country of rural

When he left the church he ate lunch at a truck stop and returned to his room in a backstreet sandstone hotel that had no air-conditioning and where the dust from a feeder lot blew through the windows above the old wood colonnade.

He turned the key in the lock and stepped inside the door. On his bed and floor and nightstand were photographs of children. The draft through the door blew the photographs into a vortex, one filled with images that made his eyes water.

Two uniformed deputies in shades stepped through the door behind him. The taller of the two was named Kyle Rose; a pale, shaved area still showed in the back of his scalp where I had driven his head into the log wall of Hugo Roberts’s office. He removed the sunglasses from his face and pinched the red marks on the bridge of his nose. His mouth was a stitched line, hooked downward on the corners. He pulled the shades on the windows.

“Ain’t nobody here but us chickens now,” he said.

The call came to my house Sunday night, not from Skyler Doolittle but from a janitor in the jail section of the county hospital.

“It happened out in the parking lot. I seen it from the upstairs window. They had him between two cars. This cop had some kind of electric gun in his hand,” he said.

“Skyler told you to call me?”

“Yes, sir.”

“What’s your name?” I asked.

He started to speak, then hung up.

A half hour later an orderly at the hospital unlocked a plain metal door on an isolation room whose floor and walls were overlaid with mattresses. Skyler Doolittle stood in a corner, wearing nothing but boxer undershorts
that were printed with smiling blue moons. His body was streaked with red abrasions, like rope burns.

“They beat you?” I said.

“At my hotel, ’fore they took me out to the car. In the parking lot a man put a stinger on me. His name’s Kyle Rose. He done it all over my back.”

“I’m going to get you transferred to a bed, Mr. Doolittle. My investigator will check on you later tonight, and I’ll be back to visit you in the morning.”

Then I noticed a change in his eyes; they had taken on a color they hadn’t possessed before, like lead that’s been scorched in a fire. His posture, even his muscular tone, seemed different, the tendons in his fused neck like braided rope, his chest flat-plated, the upper arms swollen with glandular fluids.

“This fellow Deitrich and the man with that stinger?” he said.

“Yes?”

“My thoughts don’t seem like my own no more. I ain’t never hurt nobody on purpose. I’m a river-baptized man. I fear a great evil is fixing to draw me inside it. I got no place to turn with it.”

I was to be of little help to Skyler Doolittle. Five days later, I watched him leave Deaf Smith in a blue state bus with grilles on the windows for a state mental hospital in Austin. At the time I even thought he would be better off, safe from the torment visited upon him by Hugo Roberts’s deputies.

I paid little attention to the man with fan-shaped sideburns chained hand and foot next to him.

That evening Lucas asked me to come out and see the farmhouse he had rented forty miles west of town. He said he had rented it in order to be closer to his job on an oil rig. But his pride in living on his own and paying his own way was obvious.

We stood in the front yard, surveying the bullet-pocked window glass, the scaled white paint, the gutters clogged with pine needles, the collapsed privy and the windmill wrapped with tumble brush in back. In the side
yard the branches of a dead pecan tree were silhouetted like gnarled fingers against the sun.

“I got an option to buy. With a little fixing up, it’d be a right nice place,” he said.

“Yeah, it looks like it’s got a lot of promise,” I said, trying to keep my face empty. From inside I could hear Elmore James singing “My Time Ain’t Long” on a CD. “Who lives in the trailer out back?”

“Nobody reg’lar.” He looked about the yard, his expression blank.

“Nobody regular?”

“Yeah, I mean a friend or two might stay over. Come on inside. I’ll show you my new electric bass.”

He had scrubbed out the interior of the house with lye water and set coffee cans planted with petunias in the windowsills and hung his twelve-string and slide guitars, mandolin, banjo, and fiddle from felt-covered hooks on the living room walls. His musical talent was enormous. He referred to country and blues and rock musicians, both living and dead, by their first or nicknames, as though he and his listener knew them intimately: Hank and Lefty, Melissa, Lester and Earl, Janice, Kitty, Emmylou, Stevie Ray, Woody and Cisco. The irony was that in his humble reverence he was unaware he was as good as or better than most of them.

I heard a car turn off the county road into the yard.

“Check out this next cut on the CD. It’s ‘Rocket ’88,’ Jackie Brenston. The first real R&B record ever made,” Lucas said.

Through the side window I saw a yellow convertible park in front of the dented and sagging silver trailer that was set up on cinder blocks. The driver wore a hard hat and a denim shirt that was spotted with drilling mud. The Mexican girl next to him pushed her hair back on
her head with one hand. Her hair was long and dark and looked as though it had been stained with iodine.

“Jeff Deitrich and Esmeralda Ramirez are living here?” I said.

“I got him a job on my rig. The guy’s trying to straighten out his life. It ain’t gonna be easy for them two.”

“He’s putting you in harm’s way.”

“What if you’d taken that attitude when I was in trouble? I’d be chopping cotton in Huntsville Pen.”

Through the window I watched Jeff walk inside the trailer with his arm around Esmeralda’s shoulders, a lunch bucket in his left hand. I let out my breath and sought words that would seem reasonable and hide the fear that gripped my heart. The wind slapped the door of the trailer into the frame like a pistol shot.

The man chained hand and foot next to Skyler Doolittle was named Jessie Stump, an armed robber, speed addict, and psychopath who shot a Mexican judge in a courtroom, jumped through a second-story glass window, and escaped into the heart of Mexico City. He was also one of my ex-clients. When I got him off on a forgery charge, he paid my fees with a bad check.

There were five inmates in jailhouse orange jumpsuits sitting on the passenger seats in the rear of the bus, and two uniformed deputy sheriffs in front, their backs protected by a wire-mesh partition. Jessie was the only inmate who had been locked in both wrist and leg manacles. He leaned forward, his chains tinkling, and removed a leather-craft tool from his shoe, one with a thin, needle-sharp steel hook on the end. Then he inserted the tip into the lock on his right wrist and twisted
gingerly, as though he were correcting the mechanism in the back of a clock.

When the serrated steel tongue of the manacle popped loose, Jessie slipped a small bar of soap into his mouth and started to work on his leg chains. Skyler Doolittle’s hand closed around his like a large ball of bread dough.

“You go, I go,” Skyler whispered.

Jessie’s hair was coal black, his narrow face cratered with acne scars, his dark eyes wired. His lips were pinched together to hold the soap that was melting inside his mouth. A thought, a moment’s resentment, the consideration of alternatives, perhaps, seemed to hover in front of his eyes, then disappear. He inserted the tool in the manacle on Skyler’s left wrist. His fingertips were black with grime, his nails as thick as tortoiseshell, but he rotated the shaft of the leather-craft tool as delicately as a surgeon.

A minute later Jessie rolled a topless container of Liquid-plumr down the aisle and collapsed on the floor, writhing, his feet thrashing, his mouth white with foam.

The deputy riding shotgun stared back through the wire mesh.

“Pull it over. Stump’s done swallowed drain cleaner,” he said to the driver.

The bus stopped on the swale. The guard by the front door got up out of his seat, unholstered his revolver and set it on the dashboard. He unlocked the wire-mesh door that gave onto the aisle.

The guard was near retirement, his face ruddy with emphysema, his stomach hanging over his belt like a sack of grain. His hand touched Stump’s shoulder.

“Hold on, son. We’ll get the medics here. They’ll pump you out,” he said.

Then Jessie was on his feet, the tape-wrapped shank pressed against the guard’s jugular.

“You key that radio and I’ll slice his pipe,” he said to the driver, who was young, only two years on the job, and had suddenly realized the cost of underestimating the potential of the men he ferried back and forth daily from a half dozen service institutions.

Jessie pushed the older guard down the aisle, through the wire-mesh door, and picked up the revolver off the dashboard. He pointed it at the side of the driver’s head and pulled the driver’s gun from its holster.