Heartwood (34 page)

“I took the key from under the step. I hope you don’t mind,” he said.

“What’s she doing at the sink?”

“Straightening up a little bit. Washing your breakfast dishes. Essie likes everything squared away.” He twisted his head and looked out at the tank and the wind channeling the grass in the fields and a hawk drifting on extended wings across the sun. He lifted his shirt off his skin and shook it. “It’s sure been a hot son of a gun, ain’t it? I liked to got fried out on the rig,” he said.

“How about telling me what’s really going on here?”

“A biker was scouting out my house last night. I seen two more when I come back from work this afternoon.”

“You’re telling me you want to move Essie into my house?”

“She don’t have no folks. She don’t want to stay with Ronnie and his mother. I’ll be here, too. I mean if it’s okay.”

“Why’d Ronnie and Essie break up, Lucas?”

“She told him he had to get out of the gangs.”

“You sure it’s over between them?”

“It don’t matter. I ain’t gonna let her down now.”

“Y’all take the downstairs. Leave a light on at your house and your pickup in your front yard. You can drive my truck,” I said.

“How come you asked about why they broke up?”

“No reason,” I lied.

“She didn’t want to do this, Billy Bob. She’s a brave gal.”

I put my hand on his shoulder and we walked toward the back porch. His muscles felt like rocks moving inside leather. Our hatted shadows flowed up the steps as though we were joined at the hip, then broke apart when he opened the screen and waited for me to walk ahead of him.

Wilbur paced in his living room, his big hands opening and closing. The wind was blowing hard through the screens, popping the curtains back on the wallpaper.

“Give them the whole place in Wyoming?” he said. “That’ll be the second time the Deitrichs cleaned my family out. I cain’t believe this is happening.”

“You confessed on TV. It’s good for the soul but usually not for the wallet,” I said.

He sat down in a thread-worn stuffed chair. He removed
a half dozen color photographs from a table drawer next to the chair and handed them to me.

“That’s the kind of high desert it is. The earth don’t get no prettier,” he said.

The acreage stretched from a winding river up a long hardpan slope to high bluffs that were green on the top against the sun. The slope was in shadow, the sage silvered with frost, and antelope were grazing among cottonwoods by the riverbank.

In the corner of one photograph were two huge pipe trucks, a dismantled derrick streaked with rust, and part of an oil platform.

“What’s the matter?” Wilbur said.

“I don’t know if I’d want to punch a hole in a place that beautiful.”

“Well, you ain’t me.”

“I’ll get everything I can for you. But you have to trust me. That means at a certain point we indicate to the Deitrichs you’re willing to go to jail. You have to mean it, too,” I said.

“Scared money don’t win?”

“Not in my experience.”

“I don’t think I ever felt so miserable in my life. My mama always said it. Us Picketts has got two claims on fame: My daddy was the dumbest white man in this county and I worked a lifetime to come in a close second.”

He took the photographs of his two hundred acres in Wyoming from my hand and pitched them into the drawer and looked into space.

It was raining the next evening, the air dense with ozone, when Chug Rollins left the Deitrich home and drove down the long valley across the cattleguard onto a
two-lane blacktop road fringed on both sides with hardwood trees. The landscape was sodden, the corridor of trees dripping, and a green radiance seemed to lift off the crest of the hills into the dome of sky overhead, then disappear into the swirls of blue-black clouds that groaned and crackled with thunder but contained no lightning that struck the earth.

Chug ripped the tab on a Pearl and drank the can half empty in three swallows, then set it in the holder on the dashboard. In his rearview mirror he could still see the sheriff’s cruisers that were parked by the Deitrichs’ cattleguard. It was all going to turn out all right, he thought. Nobody had tied the drowned mop-heads to him or Jeff, and besides, it was Jeff’s grief, anyway. What they needed to do now was straighten out a few people who thought the East Enders didn’t have a firm grip on events in Deaf Smith, starting with Jeff’s ex and that punk Lucas Smothers and working on down through Ronnie Cruise and any other Purple Hearts who wanted to be deep-fried in their own grease and then finally, as an afterthought, that pimple on everybody’s ass, Wesley Rhodes, yes indeedy.

Who paid the taxes here, anyway? Pepperbellies and bohunks?

Up ahead a sheriff’s deputy by the side of the road waved a flashlight at him. Chug lifted the can of Pearl from the dash holder and set it on the floor, then pulled to a stop and rolled down the passenger window with the electric motor.

“Give me a ride up to my cruiser?” the deputy asked, bending down to the window. His uniform was soaked through and molded to his thin frame, and water sluiced off the brim of his campaign hat.

“Sure, get in,” Chug answered.

The deputy seemed relieved to be in the dryness and warmth of the automobile. He removed his hat and shook the water off gingerly on the carpeting and wiped his face with a red handkerchief.

“That open container you got on the floor don’t bother me,” the deputy said.

Chug grinned and replaced the can of Pearl in the dash holder. But the deputy continued to study the floor for some reason.

“Where’s your cruiser?” Chug asked.

“On up a piece. This rain’s a frog-stringer, ain’t it?”

“How come you to get separated from your car in weather like this?”

“Another deputy dropped me off to check something out, then he went on up to the house,” the deputy replied.

“Check out what?”

“A colored man standing by the road. I run him off.”

“Is there a reason you keep looking at my feet?” Chug asked.

“Didn’t know I was.”

“You damn sure were. What’s your name?”

“It’s right there on my name tag.” The deputy hooked his thumb inside his shirt pocket and poked out the cloth and the brass nameplate pinned to it. The plate read
B. Stokes
.

“But what’s your name?” Chug asked again.

The deputy was silent. The car hit a depression and splashed water across the windshield, and Chug increased the speed of the wipers, glad to have something to do, to show control of his machine and the environment around him. But why was he thinking like that? he asked himself. The rain spun in a vortex between the line of trees on each side of the blacktop, and the fading, peculiar
nature of the light seemed to form a green arch, like a canopy, over the roadway. Chug realized he was sweating and that his breath was coming hard in his chest. He rolled down his window and let the wind and rain blow in his face.

“I’m going to stop at that filling station at the crossroads. You can see the lights from here. Place is full of customers. You can call somebody if you need a ride,” Chug said.

He heard the deputy’s gun belt creak, then the hollow sound a leather pocket makes when a heavy object is removed from it.

The deputy twisted the muzzle of his nine-millimeter into Chug’s neck.

“Turn right at that cut in the trees, then keep going till you see a railroad car,” he said.

Chug clicked on his turn indicator, but the deputy slapped it off. After Chug had turned off the road, he looked at the pocked, shiny white face of the deputy, the wired, black eyes, and said, “You got the wrong guy.”

“Maybe … What size shoe you wear?”

“A twelve,” Chug said, his brow furrowing.

“It don’t look like it to me … Stop yonder.”

The sandy road dipped and rose through hardwoods, then ended at an overgrown stretch of railway track on which sat a faded red Southern Pacific boxcar that had rotted into the soft, moldy texture of old cork.

The deputy walked Chug to the lee side of the boxcar and picked up a pinecone and threw it at him, hard. Chug raised his arm and ducked and heard the pinecone bounce off the slats of the boxcar.

“This time you catch it. You drop it and I’ll shoot you in the elbow,” the deputy said, and tossed the pinecone at Chug underhanded.

“What the hell you doin’?” Chug said.

The deputy worked his handcuffs out of the case on the back of his belt and threw them to Chug.

“Hook yourself up to that iron rung on the corner,” he said. “Now kick your loafer off.”

After Chug did it, the deputy picked the loafer out of the leaves and pine needles and spread a piece of tissue paper with the penciled outline of a shoe or boot sole on it across the floor of the boxcar and smoothed it with his palm. He held Chug’s loafer with the fingers of both hands above the outline, moving it back and forth in space, without touching the paper.

“You’re left-handed and got too big a foot. It’s your day and not mine,” the deputy said.

Chug looked steadily at the side of the boxcar, the blistered strips of red paint, the gray weathering in the wood, the way the rain leaked down off the roof and threaded in the cracks. He gathered the moisture in his mouth so he could speak, but when he did the words that rose from his throat seemed like someone else’s.

“I won’t tell anybody about this,” he said.

“Yeah, you will. You’ll tell every little pissant who’ll listen. You’ll tell your mommy and your daddy and them people at the country club and the preacher at your church and all them little pukes at Val’s you hang around with and whatever piece of tail you pay to climb up on top of. You’ll be oinking your story like a little pig till people want to stop up their ears. I didn’t say look at me, boy.”

The deputy brought the barrel of the automatic up between Chug’s thighs, flicking off the butterfly safety and cocking back the hammer.

“Don’t mess your britches on me. I’ll blow your sack off right now,” the deputy said.

But the rings of fat on Chug’s hips were shaking, the rain streaming off his hair and face, his eyes wide and his breath sputtering the rainwater off his lips into a spray, so that his head looked like that of a man who had just burst to the surface of a lake after almost drowning.

Chug heard the deputy work open a pocketknife and felt the deputy press the honed edge lightly against the back of his neck, pushing the hair up as though he were going to shave it.

Then the deputy traced the point of the knife down Chug’s vertebrae and paused with the tip inside the back of Chug’s belt.

“You didn’t shoot Skyler but you was part of it,” the deputy said, and sliced the knife down through Chug’s belt and underwear and the seam of his khaki pants, exposing his enormous pink posterior. “Stop blubbering, boy. A shithog like you wouldn’t make good Vienna sausage. Tell the one who done it Skyler ain’t here no more to plead for him. Tell him I killed three people no one knows about, people who hurt me real bad. Tell him I done it in ways that made a drunkard out of the detective who worked the case.”

Then Jessie Stump scrubbed the top of Chug’s head with his knuckles and drove off in Chug’s automobile.

“What did you do to the deputy you took the uniform off of?” I said into the phone.

“Knocked him in the head,” Jessie said.

“You called me in the middle of the night to tell me all this bullshit?”

“I want you to lay some flowers on Skyler’s grave. Put it on my tab.”

“You don’t have a tab. You’re not my client … Hello?”

At 8 A.M. I walked down the first-floor hallway of the courthouse and entered Marvin Pomroy’s office right behind him.

“You’re going to tell me Jessie Stump got in touch with you after terrifying the Rollins kid?” he said.

“Stump isn’t my client. I have nothing to do with him. That’s an absolute,” I said.

“Three years ago we had him deadbang on a check-writing
charge. With his sheet we could have put him away for five years. You discredited an honest witness and got Stump off. How’s it feel?”

“I need your help.”

“You’re outrageous.”

“Jeff Deitrich has targeted the Ramirez girl and my boy Lucas.”

Marvin hadn’t sat down at his desk yet. The heat went out of his face and he moved some papers around on his ink blotter, his eyes lowered.

“You talk to Hugo Roberts?” he asked.

“Waste of time.”

“What do you want from me?”

“You have influence with the Deitrichs. They want to stay in your favor. Get them to pull Jeff’s plug.”

“That’s not too complimentary.”

“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.