Heartwood (18 page)

That evening Wilbur Pickett drove a flatbed pipe truck into my backyard and stepped down from the cab with a half pint of whiskey in his hand. His skin was filmed with dust, his washed-out denim shirt unbuttoned on his chest, his battered hat streaked with grease.

“You’re listing hard to port, bud,” I said.

“I got run off two jobs in one day. The driller cut me loose at the rig and the water well boss said he felt ashamed at hiring a rodeo man to do nigra work. Told me he was firing me out of respect. How about them pineapples?” he said.

“Were you drunk?”

“No. But I’m working on it.”

“Why’d they run you off?”

He tipped the half-pint bottle to his lips and drank gingerly, perhaps no more than a capful, the whiskey lighting in the glass against the sun.

“Somebody got to them. Somebody with the name Earl Deitrich, I expect,” he said.

“We can do something about that,” I said.

“No, you cain’t. He’s the man with the money and the power. I thought folks here’bouts would stand behind one of their own. That’s the thinking of a fool, son.”

“Come inside.”

“Nope. I’m throwing it in. Cut a deal with that fellow Pomroy.”

“What?”

“I’m letting Earl Deitrich in on our drill site up in Wyoming. Neither me or Kippy Jo is going to jail.”

He tried to hold his eyes on mine, then his stare broke and he drank from the bottle again.

“I don’t care what Deitrich or his people have told you. Marvin Pomroy won’t have anything to do with something like this. Frankly I won’t, either,” I said.

“Then I’ll get me another lawyer.”

“That’s your choice, sir.”

“I ain’t no ‘sir.’ I ain’t nothing. But at least I ain’t been sleeping with the wife of the man trying to put my friends in jail.”

His face was sullen, embarrassed, and accusatory, like a child’s, all at the same time. I turned and walked back inside the house. I heard him fling his uncapped whiskey bottle whistling into the twilight, then start his truck and back out into the street, tearing a swatch out of a poplar tree.

What could I do about Wilbur? The answer was nothing. I drove out to his house on the hardpan in the morning. As I approached the house a ’49 Mercury roared past me in the opposite direction.

Kippy Jo Pickett was on the front steps, in the shade, snapping beans in a pan, when I walked into the yard.

“That was Cholo Ramirez’s car,” I said.

“Yes, he just left.”

“What’s he doing here?”

“Visiting. Telling me about his life, his cars, things he worries about.”

“That kid has brain damage. If I were you, I’d leave him alone.”

“His mother’s boyfriend broke his skull when he was a baby. Do we also throw away the part of him that wasn’t damaged? Is that what you mean?”

I looked off in the distance, across the hot shimmer of the fields, and watched Cholo run a stop sign, then swerve full-bore around an oil truck.

“Where’s Wilbur?” I asked.

“He went down to the state employment office.”

“Earl Deitrich’s trying to jerk y’all around. If you’re jammed up for money, I can lend you some. Don’t give in to this man.”

Her eyes fixed on my face and stayed there. A brown and white beagle lay in a shallow depression by the side of the gallery, its tail flopping in the silence.

“You’d do that?” she asked.

“Pay me back when y’all punch into your first oil sand.”

“Wilbur’s scared. He sits by himself in the kitchen in the middle of the night. He thinks I’m going to prison.”

“Listen, Kippy Jo, men like Earl Deitrich steal people’s dreams. They have no creative vision of their own, no love, and no courage. They envy people like you and Wilbur. That’s why they have to destroy you.”

She was quiet a long time. The sun was hot and bright in the sky, and the pools of rainwater in the alfalfa glimmered like quicksilver. Kippy Jo set down the tin pan of snapbeans and kneaded the thick folds of skin on top of the beagle’s neck. The wind blew her hair in a black skein across her eyes.

“He won’t listen,” she said.

Earl Deitrich was one of those who believed that when force, control, and arrogance did not get you your way, you simply applied more of the same.

That night the moon was down, and rain clouds sealed the sky and heat lightning flickered over the hills in the west. Wilbur and Kippy Jo slept under an electric fan, the drone of the motor and the tinny vibration of the wire basket over the blades threading in and out of their sleep as the fan head oscillated on its axis. At 2
A.M
. Wilbur heard a crunching sound, like car tires rolling slowly across pea gravel. He rose from the bed in his underwear and lifted the .308 Savage lever-action from the rack and walked barefoot into the living room. He looked out into the drive and at the road in front and saw nothing. He leaned down on the windowsill, the curtains blowing against his skin. He stared into the darkness until
his eyes burned and he imagined shapes that he knew were not there.

He walked into the kitchen and took a quart of milk from the icebox and drank from it. Then he heard car tires crunching on the gravel again, rolling faster this time, and he realized the sounds had come from the back of the house, not the front.

He opened the screen door and stepped into the yard just as three men pushed his pickup truck out onto the road, turned over the engine, and jumped inside. He ran to the side of the house, threw his rifle to his shoulder, and levered a round into the chamber.

He moved the iron sights just ahead of the driver’s window, saw the man silhouetted against a light on a neighbor’s barn, and felt his finger tighten on the trigger. Then he blew out his breath and lifted the barrel into the air, resting the stock in the cradle of his left arm. He watched the truck disappear down the road toward the hills in the west.

He heard Kippy Jo behind him.

“I’ll call 911,” she said.

“It won’t do no good. It’ll just bring Hugo Roberts and them thugs of his back out here.”

“Come back in the house,” she said, tugging at his arm.

“No. They turned off the road into the hills. They’re stopping for something. I’m going after them sons of bucks.”

“That’s what they want you to do.”

“Then they should have thought twicet about what they prayed for. That’s a Wilbur T. Pickett guarantee.”

Wilbur put on a cotton shirt and jeans and a pair of boots and hung a flashlight on a lanyard around his neck and bridled one of his palominos and rode it bareback
out to the hills, the lever-action Savage propped across the horse’s withers. He rode through arroyos and a sandy wash dimpled with pools of red water. He rode up a steep incline into mesquite and blackjack that had been scorched black from brushfires, into stands of green trees, across rocky ground, and onto a plateau that looked out on the railroad trestle.

Heat lightning leaped between the clouds and he saw his truck parked down below, under the stanchions of the trestle.

He brought his boot heels into the ribs of the palomino, leaning his weight back toward the rump, his rifle held vertically in his right arm, and rode down the slope into the ravine.

The wind shifted and an odor struck his face that was like a green chemical, like the smell of a river that has receded from flood stage and exposed the remains of drowned livestock.

Both of the truck doors were open and Wilbur could hear blowflies droning in the darkness. He unhooped the flashlight from his neck and slipped from the horse’s back and walked around to the front of the truck.

A figure sat stiffly behind the steering wheel, the hands resting motionlessly on each side of the horn button. Strands of gray hair lifted in the hot wind around a face that seemed to have no features, that was as black as leather that had molded in the ground.

When he flicked on the flashlight he saw his mother in her burial clothes, now stained by groundwater, her chin and the corners of her mouth puckered tightly against the bone in an eternal scold, her slitted eyes staring at him as brightly as fish scale.

•   •   •

The following morning Wilbur recounted all the above in my office, spinning his hat on his index fìnger.

“They dug up your mother’s grave?” I said incredulously.

“They sure did. My bet would be on that Fletcher fellow. Anyway, I already called Earl Deitrich,” he replied.

“You going to let him get away with—”

He flipped his hat by the brim up on his head. “My mother was a long-suffering, Christian woman. I know that ’cause not a day passed without her telling me. She told my daddy that so often he used to walk around the house with wads of newspaper screwed in his ears. He even said she’d get up out of the grave to tell the rest of us how worthless we was.

“So that’s what I told Earl Deitrich. That woman has been a lifetime motivator. The best part of Earl Deitrich run down his daddy’s leg and there won’t be a beer joint left in Texas the day Kippy Jo and me cut him in on our oil site. Durn, if that boy didn’t slam down the phone, then pick it up and slam it down again.”

It seemed like nothing went easy for Jeff Deitrich. Or at least that’s what he told Lucas Smothers after he came back from seeing his father and being told he had one of two choices: lose Esmeralda Ramirez and her beaner relatives or get used to the lifestyle of oil field trash.

“He had my name taken off the membership list at the club. He canceled all my credit cards,” Jeff said.

“So flush the club,” Lucas said.

“Luke, my boy, black basketball players with orange hair and collard greens for brains make twenty million dollars in a season. Think about where you’re going to be on your current salary in ten years.”

Jeff had sailed yachts and deep-sea-fished since he was a child. He drove to Aransas Pass and tried to get on as a boat pilot ferrying supplies to offshore oil rigs. The owner of the boatyard listened attentively, chewing on a matchstick, and told Jeff to come back in the morning,
that maybe they could work something out. Jeff and Esmeralda took a twenty-dollar room at a motel behind a truck stop, then Jeff went down to the boatyard at 5
A.M
. The owner had left word with the foreman that Jeff could start his trial period right away, cleaning the grease trap behind the office and shoveling out the hold of a shrimper.

The foreman had to lock himself in a bathroom.

On the way back home Jeff stopped in San Antonio and scored four fat bags of rainbows and blues and a bag of Afghan skunk.

“Why you need all that dope?” Esmeralda said.

“Try to concentrate on what I’m saying. We don’t have any money,” he said, enunciating each of his words. “The way to get money is to buy something cheap, then sell it to dumb people for a lot more than it’s worth. It’s why Mexicans never get out of the barrio.”

But that night two Jamaican dealers from Dallas met Jeff in an abandoned picnic ground down the road from Shorty’s and, instead of handing him an envelope full of cash, pointed a .357 Magnum in his face and picked up the four Ziplocs of rainbows and blues from the car hood and dropped them in a shopping bag.

“I know where you guys live. Y’all are going to have some visitors,” Jeff said.

“Say, mon, why don’t we do it dis way? We just take your thumbs wit’ us and save you de gas money,” the man with the gun said.

Jeff watched the taillights of their car move away into the darkness, the dust from the tires drifting as palpably as grit into his hair.

The tin trailer was boiling with heat when Jeff woke in the morning, his face netted with hangover and inchoate
rage at being ripped off by two calypso mop-heads his father wouldn’t allow to drink out of the garden hose. He came through the back door of Lucas’s house and made toll calls without permission, pacing up and down, barefoot, his breath bouncing sourly off the receiver.

“I’m going to stick their flippers in a vise,” he said. “Just pick up Hammie and two or three other guys and cover my back … No, I’m serious. I’m going to break their fingers, then their wrists. You want the word on the street we’re anybody’s fuck? They’re going to eat their next meal out of a dog bowl … We having a memory lapse, Warren? You remember that hit-and-run in Austin?”

Ten minutes later Lucas heard Jeff and Esmeralda fighting inside the trailer.

“Because I need it. Because I couldn’t sleep all night. Because you snore. Because I got barbed wire in my head. You tell me where it is!” Jeff said.

“You know how much you smoked already? Look at your eyes. They’re full of blood clots. You stink like a street person.”

“I’ll say it one more time, Esmeralda. Where’s my stash?”

“I burned it.”

“Sure you did. That’s why birds are dropping out of the sky.”

He began tearing her clothes off the hangers in a closet and throwing them through the front door. Then he walked out onto the steps with her storage trunk over his head and heaved it end over end into the yard. The top burst open, and he rooted in it like a badger digging in a hole, flinging her jewelry and shoes and scrapbooks and red and purple rayon undergarments into the air. His
face was white and sweating, his jaws flecked with stubble.

“You need to go to detox, Jeff. You’re sick,” she said.

“What I’m sick of is salsa and onion breath and your brother Cholo’s stupid face and the thought I’ve been coming in the same box as Ronnie Cruise. I want to scrub you off me with peroxide.”

“Maricón,”
she said.

He straightened up slowly. “You called me a queer? That’s what you just said? A queer? Say it again and see what happens.”

“Maricón!”
she said.
“Cabrón! Cobarde! Maricón! Maricón! Maricón!”

“Your face looks funny like that. All out of shape. Funny and stupid,” he said, smiling strangely. “I know a truck stop where I can get you on, doing hand jobs. I’ll take a shower and drive you there. You can tell them about your credits at the Juco. They’ll be impressed. For some reason, Esmeralda, I feel just great.”

Lucas told me this story early Saturday morning while I curried out Beau in the lot. We were in the shade of the barn and the morning was still cool and the wind off the river smelled of wet trees and wildflowers and the livestock in my neighbor’s pasture.