Heartwood (31 page)

Wes aimed through the camera’s lens and clicked the shutter five times. Then, with his heart tripping against his ribs, he let the camera float loose on its wrist cord and did something he never thought he would have the courage to.

He prised the back door loose from where it had lodged in the silt, then he was inside the car with the two dead men, his air tank clanging against the roof, their bloated skin brushing against his. A dreadlock wrapped across his mask like a leech, a forehead tipped against his jaw. His hands trembled while he worked, his fingernails and knuckles dipping into what felt like wet cornmeal, then a bilious fluid surged out of his stomach into his throat and he gagged violently and lost his mouthpiece and swallowed water that locked inside his windpipe like cement.

His lungs were bursting, his eyes bulging out of his head when he broke the surface into moonlight and air.

He fell on the sand, gasping, his body shaking, his Jockey undershorts strung with dead weeds.

“You get the pictures?” Jeff said.

“Hang them over your fucking mantel,” Wesley said.

Jeff uncapped a bottle of sparkling water and drank it while Wesley stumbled toward the convertible.

It was Monday afternoon that Wesley told me all this in my office.

“Who’s developing the pictures?” I asked.

“Warren’s old man owns some porno places in Houston. Warren uses their darkroom.”

“The Costens are in pornography?”

His ruined face, with its harelip and wide-set, reptilian-green eyes, looked into space, as though the question had nothing to do with his life and hence was not one that anyone would expect him to answer.

“What did you do inside the Mercedes?” I said.

“The black guys was mushy and swole up like garbage bags. Like they was full of gas and wanted to float. I unsnapped their seat belts and left both doors open.”

A grin scissored across his face, his eyes seeming to separate on the dough pan of his face and dance with light.

Score one for the little guys, I thought.

What happened that night out at Val’s Drive-In started over either Chug Rollins’s sister or Jerry Lee Lewis’s music, depending on whom you heard it from.

Background: Chug’s sister had the same weight problem as her brother, compounded by a notorious reputation for profligate sexual behavior. Two months ago she had made national news when she was prosecuted for the statutory rape of one of her male students at a Fort Worth high school.

It was a fine evening when Lucas Smothers and Esmeralda Ramirez pulled into Val’s. The sun had just set
below the rim of the hills and the light was draining from the sky as the day cooled. The breeze came up and the neon signs overhead and in the restaurant’s windows went on and rippled the cars and pavement in the parking area. Lucas and Esmeralda went inside and sat by the jukebox and ordered, then Lucas dropped four quarters in the slot and began punching in every Jerry Lee Lewis number he could find.

That’s when Chug Rollins and Jeff Deitrich and his old girlfriend, Rita Summers, came in and sat down together two booths away. A moment later they were joined by three of Jeff’s and Chug’s friends, ex–football players from the University of Texas, two of whom had been expelled after a gang rape of a co-ed in a fraternity house. They ordered mugs of draft beer and Rita Summers lit a cigarette under the No Smoking sign. She balanced her cigarette on an ashtray and fixed a clasp on the back of her gold hair, her blue eyes filled with ridicule.

“Look when you have a chance. Lavender spiked heels with embroidered jeans. I think she uses chlorine gas for perfume,” she said.

“That’s Smothers’s hair tonic,” one of the ex-football players said. He wore a cap backwards on his head and a white T-shirt that was bursting on his torso.

In the background Jerry Lee sang “I Could Never Be Ashamed of You.”

At first Jeff didn’t look in Lucas’s and Esmeralda’s direction, then he seemed to become more and more agitated, his eyes flicking away from the conversation around him, pinning Lucas, then Esmeralda.

“Hey, Smothers, is that your stuff on there?” he asked.

“Yeah, why?” Lucas said.

“It’s giving me a headache,” Jeff said.

“Jerry Lee Lewis is the greatest white blues singer of our time,” Lucas said.

“It’s forty years old. It’s also garbage. Unplug it,” Jeff said.

“Anything else you want? Shoes shined? Car washed?” Lucas said.

Chug Rollins turned his massive weight around in the booth.

“I’ve still got a major beef to settle with you, fuckhead. Don’t give me an excuse,” he said.

Lucas dipped a french fry in catsup and ate it and raised his eyebrows innocuously.

“You want to make faces, don’t let me see it,” Chug said.

Lucas unfolded a paper napkin and draped it with one hand from his forehead and ate a french fry behind it.

“You are seriously pissing me off,” Chug said. He got up from the booth and hit the side and top of the jukebox and shook it with both hands until he knocked all of Lucas’s selections out of play. Then he dropped a quarter in the slot and punched in a white rap song and reached behind the box to turn up the volume.

“You got a problem with that?” he said.

“It don’t bother me if people like to pour shit in their ears,” Lucas said.

Chug leaned down on the table. His arms were enormous, his chest and massive stomach as wide as a wood-stove. Lucas could smell the talcum and aftershave lotion and deodorant on his skin, the onions and fried meat on his breath. Chug wadded up a napkin and bounced it off Lucas’s chest.

“I see you in here again, you’re gonna be taking your meals through a glass straw for six months,” he said, then went to his booth.

“Don’t say anything else, Lucas,” Esmeralda whispered.

Lucas flipped the wadded-up napkin out on the floor by Chug’s booth. “All right, let’s get out of here,” he said.

Lucas went to pay the check while Esmeralda waited, her back turned to Jeff, who sat with one leg out in the aisle, his face disjointed, his eyes on her figure, the rise of her breasts against her form-fitting V-necked shirt. Lucas came back from the cash register and saw Jeff’s expression and put his arm around Esmeralda, as though he could shield her from the violation and lust and black radiance in Jeff’s eyes.

“Don’t be looking at us like that, Jeff,” he said.

“What’d you say?” Jeff said.

Lucas and Esmeralda headed toward the revolving side door. Chug got up from the booth and hitched up his scrotum with one hand.

“My ten-inch in your pepperbelly’s mouth, Smothers,” he said.

“Give it to your sister. She needs it a lot worse than we do,” Lucas said, and went through the revolving door.

Chug made a grinding noise deep in his throat and charged toward the door as though he were back on the high school football field, tearing holes in the enemy line like a tank through a hedgerow, his fists balled into hams, his furrowed brow tilted down like a battering ram.

A waitress came through the revolving door just before Chug reached it, spinning the thick, rounded edge of the glass directly in front of Chug’s head.

He crashed into it with a sound like someone thumping a wood mallet on a watermelon, then rolled moaning between the partitions, his hands clasped to his forehead.

The waitress tried to free herself from being trapped by shoving against the push bar, slamming the door back into his face, mashing his nose against the glass like a pig’s snout pressed against a window.

Finally Chug tumbled out on the sidewalk, his clothes spotted with expectorated Red Man and Copenhagen.

“Better put some ice on that bump. It looks like a couple of golf balls,” Lucas said.

Jeff helped Chug to his feet while he glared at both Esmeralda and Lucas.

“This is all your fault, Jeff. Don’t blame it on anybody else,” she said.

“Your mouth’s always running. You never shut up. Somebody’s going to put something in it,” Jeff said.

“You couldn’t cut it on the rig and you cain’t cut it nowhere else, either. Stop taking out all your grief on other people,” Lucas said.

Lucas and Esmeralda walked across the parking lot toward Lucas’s pickup truck. The clouds overhead were silver and black in the moonlight, like smoked pewter, the wind rattling the palm trees by the entrance to the drive-in. Jeff’s fists curled and uncurled at his sides.

“Don’t worry, Jeff. He’s gonna be a stump when we get finished with him,” the ex-football player with his cap on backwards said.

“Smothers can wait. Esmeralda’s asking for a train,” Jeff said, his eyes burning into her back.

“You got a sign-up sheet?” the ex-football player said.

Two days later Lucas sat on the top rail of Beau’s lot, the heels of his boots hooked on the second rail for support, and tossed chinaberries at a bucket. The morning was still cool, the shadows long on the ground, and Beau was drinking out of the tank by the windmill, switching
his tail hard in the shade. I stopped shoveling manure into a wheelbarrow and leaned the shovel against the fence.

“Who heard him say this?” I asked.

“The waitress.”

“Maybe Esmeralda should go back to San Antone for a while.”

“She don’t listen. What do you reckon I ought to do?”

If they try to rape that girl, you blow their damn heads off, I thought.

“Pardon?” Lucas said.

“Nothing. I didn’t say anything.” I widened my eyes and looked at the clarity of the horizon against the sunrise. A flock of crows was descending into my neighbor’s corn, like black ash drifting out of the sky.

I pulled the morning edition of the local newspaper out of my back pocket and flopped it open on the fence rail. At the bottom of the front page was a story about the bodies of two Jamaicans that had been found floating in a flooded quarry outside Waxahachie. “Maybe it’s time Jeff Deitrich had some of his own chickens come home to roost,” I said.

“He’s mixed up with these dead guys?”

“Get her out of town. Let me work on a couple of things.”

He dropped down from the fence and scraped a pattern in the dust with his boot.

“The reason I come over is, I was wondering if you might loan me L.Q. Navarro’s revolver,” he said.

I walked away from him toward the house, not answering him, shaking my head, wanting to flee his words as I would a dark and obscene thought.

That same morning I met Temple Carroll at the office. I hadn’t spoken to her since my failed overture in her backyard when she had dropped her speedbag gloves in the dust and gone into the house and locked the door behind her like a slap in the face.

“What’s shakin’, Slim?” she said.

“You want a taco?”

“Why not?” she said.

We walked across the square to the Mexican grocery and sat at a table in back under a wood-bladed fan.

“Wesley Rhodes told me Warren Costen’s father is involved in pornography in Houston. I’d like you to check it out,” I said.

“What for?”

“Skyler Doolittle had child porn pictures planted on him when he was arrested. I wonder if Hugo’s deputies got the pictures from Warren Costen or Jeff Deitrich.”

“Where am I supposed to start?”

“Search me. The Costens are supposed to be an upstanding, pioneer family.”

“Yeah, they always let everybody know their shit didn’t flush,” she said, and bit into her taco. She saw me watching her. She looked down at her clothes to see if something had fallen on them.
“What?”
she said.

“Nothing.”

“Why are you staring at me?”

“I’m not. You look great, Temple.”

Her eyes fixed on mine, blinking uncertainly.

She called me long-distance two days later.

“I got a tip from a reporter at the
Houston Chronicle
who covers real estate and the zoning board. Costen and several partners run a couple of companies that manage slum rentals in the Third Ward. But during the oil recession in the eighties a lot of property on the west side was sold off to HUD. Costen and his friends bought low and expanded their slum rentals and put in video porn stores in what used to be middle-class and upscale neighborhoods.”

“What’d you find out about Costen and child pornography?”

“Nothing. But if video porn is there, so is the clientele for the rest of it. You want me to keep looking?”

“No, come on back up to God’s country,” I said.

“Just out of curiosity, I went out to Rice University and talked to a history professor about Costen’s ancestors. This professor belongs to a historical society that keeps track of all the documents from the Texas Revolution and the descendants of everybody who fought in it. Costen’s family was the real thing, friends of Sam Houston and Jim Bowie and Stephen F. Austin.”

I felt myself yawning. “You did a good job. Come on back home,” I said.

“Hear me out. I asked the professor to check out Skyler Doolittle. Doolittle was telling the truth. His ancestor died in the Alamo with Travis and Crockett and the others. His survivors were given a section of land after the war, which was the promise Sam Houston made to everyone who served with him to the end.”

“I’m not with you, Temple.”

“You remember describing to me the lunch out at the Deitrichs’ place, when Earl Deitrich humiliated Wilbur Pickett at the table by taking that antique watch out of his hand, like Wilbur didn’t have the right to be looking at it?”

“Yes.”

“You said Wilbur told a joke about his ancestor fighting in the Battle of San Jacinto, except the ancestor was a horse thief and sold horses to both sides.”

“Yeah, that’s what he said.”

“It wasn’t just a joke.” I could hear her turning pages on a notepad. “Wilbur’s ancestor was named Jefferson Pickett. I don’t know if he was a horse thief or not, but he survived the Goliad Massacre and was with Houston when Santa Anna was captured on the San Jacinto.”

“He received a section of land, just like all the other Texas soldiers?”

“You got it, kemo sabe.”

“What happened to it?” I felt my hand tighten unconsciously on the receiver.

“Most of it was sold off. Except for one hundred acres Wilbur’s great-grandfather owned outside Beaumont. I’m in the Beaumont public library right now. That one hundred acres was right by the Spindletop oil strike. Wilbur’s great-grandfather lost it in a civil suit filed by a
Houston oil speculator named Deitrich. Wilbur’s great-grandfather hanged himself. This all happened about 1901. Guess which Deitrich family we’re talking about?”