Heartwood (27 page)

How about Esmeralda? She hadn’t even bothered to say thank you. In fact, after they dropped Ronnie off at his car, she had hardly spoken on the way back to the house. Go figure, he thought.

He went back into the bedroom and turned on the electric fan and lay on top of the bedspread with his jeans still on and rested his arm across his forehead. The rain had stopped entirely now and the moon had risen over the hills in the distance. Through the screen he could see the glow of Esmeralda’s reading lamp against the orange curtain that hung in the trailer’s bedroom window. She read books by Ernest Hemingway and Joyce Carol Oates. He’d seen the As she had made on her English papers. She was one smart woman but he’d be switched if he knew what went on in her head.

Then her shadow moved across the curtain and she opened the front door and walked out in the yard in a robe and disappeared behind his house. A moment later he heard her knock lightly on the back screen.

He turned on the kitchen light and looked at her through the screen. Her robe was tied tightly around the waist so that her hips were accentuated against the cloth and on her feet she wore fluffy slippers that looked like rabbits.

“Anything wrong?” he said.

“I keep hearing noises. I know it’s just the wind, but I couldn’t sleep,” she replied.

“You want to come in?”

She made a face, as though she were arguing with herself. “If you’re still up,” she said.

“Sure. It’s hot, ain’t it? The rain don’t cool things off that much this time of year,” he said, holding the screen open for her, wondering if the banality of his remarks
hid the desire that reared inside him when her body passed close to his.

“Ronnie wanted to come pick me up tomorrow. I told him not to,” she said.

“It’s better he don’t have no more run-ins with Chug Rollins.”

“You’re in trouble because of Ronnie and me. I’m sorry for what I said earlier.”

“I don’t pay them East Enders no mind.”

She seemed smaller now, somehow vulnerable, the light shining on the red streaks in her hair, hollowing one cheek with shadow.

“When it rains I see Cholo in the ground. His casket was made of plywood and cheesecloth. I keep seeing it over and over in my mind,” she said.

“You all right, Essie?”

“No. I don’t think I’ll ever be all right. You didn’t like Cholo. Not many people did. But he was brave in ways other people don’t understand.”

Lucas started to speak, then paused and unconsciously wet his lips, realizing, for the first time, that no words he spoke to her would have any application in her life. The light from the overhead bulb seemed to reveal every imperfection and blemish in her person and his own and make no difference. He couldn’t translate the thought into words, but for just a moment he knew that intimacy and acceptance had nothing to do with language. The linoleum felt cool under his bare feet, the warm, green smell of summer puffing on the wind through the screens. He put his arms around her and felt her press against him as though she were stepping inside an envelope. He rubbed his face in her hair and kissed the corner of her eye and moved his hand down her back. Her
breasts and abdomen touched against him and he swallowed and closed his eyes.

“Maybe you ain’t seeing things real good right now. Maybe it ain’t a time to make no decisions,” he said.

Her hand left him for only a moment, brushing the wall switch downward, darkening the kitchen. Then she rose on the balls of her feet and kissed him hard on the mouth, squeezing herself tightly against him, her eyes wet on his chest for no reason that he understood.

Go figure, he thought.

Lucas told me all this the following morning, which was Sunday, while he swept the gallery and carried sacks of grass seed from the pickup bed into the shade. I sat on the railing with a glass of iced tea in my hand and watched him rake the dirt in the yard in preparation for seeding it.

“She told you Cholo was brave?” I said.

“He was her brother. What do you expect her to say?”

“His conscience was his bladder. He burned four firemen to death. The firemen were brave, not the guy who killed them.”

Lucas worked the rake hard into the soil, the muscles in his arms knotting like rocks. He breathed through his nose.

“Why’d you come out here, anyway? To stick needles in me?” he said.

“Chug and those others will come after you.”

“They ain’t good at one-on-one.”

“They don’t have to be,” I said.

He threw the rake down and split open a bag of seed with a banana knife and began scattering seed around the yard.

“You’re down on Esmeralda ’cause of her race. It’s bothered you from the get-go,” he said.

“Criminality is a mind-set. It doesn’t have anything to do with race. She’s been around criminals most of her life and she instinctively defends them. Don’t buy into it.”

“I’m telling you to lay off her, Billy Bob.”

“L.Q. Navarro was a Mexican. He was the best friend I ever had, bud.”

He slung the rest of the seed around the yard, whipping the burlap empty, then stooped over to rip open another sack. When he did, he said something I couldn’t hear, words that were lost in the shade and the muted echo off the house, words that I didn’t want to ever recognize as having come from his throat.

“What did you say?” I asked.

He unhooked the knife from the split in the burlap and stood erect, his cheeks burning.

“I didn’t mean it,” he replied.

“Don’t hide from it. Just say it so I can hear it.”

“I said, ‘Yeah, you killed him, too.’ ”

I emptied my iced tea into the flower bed, watching the frosted white round cubes of ice bounce on the black soil he had turned and worked with a pitchfork. I set the glass on the railing and walked to my Avalon, my eyes fixed on the long green level of the horizon.

I started my car engine and put the transmission in reverse, then saw his face at the window. His eyes were shining.

“You don’t ease up on me sometimes. You push me in a corner so’s I cain’t find the right words. I ain’t got your brains,” he said.

“Don’t ever say that about yourself. You have ten times any gift I do,” I said, and drove down the state road toward town.

I went five miles like that, past church buses loaded with kids and highway cafes that served Sunday dinners to farm families, all of it sweeping past me like one-dimensional images painted on cardboard that had no relation to my life. Then I turned around and floored the Avalon back to Lucas’s. He had pulled a hose from behind the house and was watering down the seed in the front yard, spraying into the wind so that the drift blew back into his face.

“You going to the rodeo this afternoon?” I asked.

“I’m in the band. We open the show,” he replied, gathering his T-shirt in his hand and wiping his face with it, unsure as to whether he should smile or not.

The rodeo and livestock show didn’t begin that afternoon until the sun had crossed the sky and settled in an orange ball behind the shed over the grandstand at the old county fairgrounds, then Lucas’s bluegrass band walked into the center of the arena, squinting up at the thousands who filled the seats, and launched into “Blue Moon of Kentucky.”

Temple Carrol and Pete and I walked down the midway through the carnival and food concession stands that had been set up behind the bucking chutes, eating snow cones, watching the buckets on the Ferris wheel dip out of a sky that had turned to brass layered with strips of crimson and purple cloud.

The air smelled of hot dogs broiling in grease, candied
apples, deep-fried Indian bread, the dust that lifted in a purple haze off the arena, popcorn cascading out of an electric pot, splayed saddles that reeked of horse sweat, cowboys with pomade in their hair and talcum coated on their palms, and watermelons that a black man hefted dripping and cold from a corrugated water tank and split open on a butcher block with a knife as big as a scimitar.

Then a bunch of 4-H kids on top of a bucking chute hollered down at a cowboy-hatted man in the crowd, their faces lit with smiles and admiration.

“Hey, Wilbur, we got one here can turn on a nickel and give you the change,” a kid said.

“You ain’t got to tell me. One bounce out of the chute and that one don’t live on the ground no more,” Wilbur Pickett replied, and all the boys grinned and spit Copenhagen and looked at each other pridefully in the knowledge that the bucking horse they might draw was esteemed by the man who had ridden Bodacious one second shy of the buzzer.

Wilbur and Kippy Jo walked past the plank tables pooled with watermelon juice and seeds in the eating area that had been set up under a striped awning that ruffled and popped in the breeze. They stopped by the corrugated water tank, and while Wilbur worked three dollars out of his blue jeans to pay the black man for two slices of melon, Kippy Jo cupped her hands lightly on the edge of the tank and tilted her head, her eyes hidden by sunglasses, staring at the crowd on the midway as though faces were detaching themselves from an indistinct black-and-white photograph and floating toward her out of the gloom and the electronic noise of the midway.

I followed her gaze into the crowd and saw Jeff and Earl and Peggy Jean Deitrich by the merry-go-round, the carved and painted horses mounted with children
undulating behind them. Chug Rollins came back from the concession stand and joined them, handing each of them a hot dog wrapped in a greasy paper towel.

That’s what I saw. Wilbur told me later what his wife saw.

The sky was white, the sun ringed with fire above an infinite, buff-colored plain, upon which columns of barefoot Negroes in loincloths were yoked by the neck on long poles. They trudged in the heat with no expectation of water or shade, their eyes like glass, their skins painted with dust and sweat, the inside of their mouths as red as paint. Then she realized that they were dead and their journey was not to a place but toward a man in safari dress, his face concealed from her, his head and body bathed in black light. Wherever he went, the Negroes followed, as though his back were the portal to his soul.

“Earl Deitrich,” she said to Wilbur.

“Yeah. I seen him. He’s early for the shithog contest,” Wilbur said.

“No. The spirits of the Africans his ancestor killed are standing behind him. Their skulls were buried in anthills and eaten clean and used to line a flower bed.”

“Let’s go on up in the stands. I don’t need that stuff in my afternoon. Cain’t that fellow just find a grave to fall into?” Wilbur said.

She lowered her hand into the water tank, felt the melted ice slip over her wrist and the coldness climb into her elbow. The water seemed to stir, the corrugated sides ping with metallic stress or a change in temperature. Two muskmelons which had floated and bobbed on the bottom drifted like yellow air bubbles to the surface.

But the water she now looked down upon was green and viscous, and when the melons broke through the
surface they were black and rough-edged, abrasive as coconuts, braided with hair that looked like dusty snakes.

“How’d you make them melons come up, lady?” the black vendor said, grinning, looking at his own reflection in her sunglasses.

She walked out on the midway toward Jeff Deitrich.

Jeff lowered his hot dog from his mouth as she approached, then Earl and Peggy Jean and Chug Rollins stopped talking, glancing peculiarly at Jeff, then turning as a group toward Kippy Jo.

“The black men you drowned … They’ll float up from the car. They’ll follow you just like the Africans do your father,” she said.

“I think you got me mixed up with somebody else,” Jeff said, his eyes shifting sideways.

“They were alive a long time after the car sank. They breathed the air that was trapped against the roof. Touch my hands and you’ll see them. They’re unfastening the safety belts that hold them in the seats of the car.”

Jeff grinned stupidly, his mouth opening and closing without sound. He stepped back from her, as though he could pull an envelope of invisibility around himself, his face unable to find an acceptable expression, like a naked man on a public sidewalk.

It made good theater. But I suspected somebody would pay a price for it. I drove out to Wilbur’s that night and tried to convince him of that in his front yard.

“Jeff Deitrich doesn’t believe in your wife’s psychic powers. He probably believes somebody informed on him,” I said.

“You’re telling me he done it, he drowned a couple of black guys?”

“I’m telling you he’s a dangerous kid. He takes out his grief on others. Usually innocent people.”

The windows in Wilbur’s house were lighted behind him, his horses blowing and nickering out beyond the windmill.

“I ain’t got no doubts about Earl Deitrich’s family. You want to come in for a piece of pie?” he asked.

“I must speak a different language. You just don’t hear me, do you?”

“I’m cutting you in for ten percent of my oil company.”

“No, you’re not.”

“Son, anybody can be a lawyer or a rodeo bum. You ever see well pipe sweat moisture big as silver dollars? That’s what happens when you punch into an oil sand. The air turns sour with gas and everything you put your hand on is dripping with money.”

“Leave me out of your oil dealings, Wilbur.”

“What you got is ten percent of nothing. That’s probably the only fee you’re ever gonna get.” He grinned broadly, his bladed face silhouetted in the light from his house, and sailed a rock out into the darkness. “Don’t worry about that Deitrich kid coming around here, either. His kind was put outside before the glue was dry.”

Hopeless.

I stopped at the IGA the other side of the intersection and called Wesley Rhodes at his house.

“Get out of town. Visit your relatives in Texline,” I said.

“They’re in prison. Why you want me out of town?”

“Jeff Deitrich thinks somebody dimed him on the deal with the Jamaicans at the rock quarry.”

“Oh
man,”
he said, like someone who had not believed his luck could get any worse.

On the way back home I tried to sort out my thoughts and the reasons I felt anger at Wilbur and his wife, and even at my son, Lucas.