Heartwood (32 page)

I had been standing up in my office, gazing out the window while I talked. Suddenly I felt light-headed, my face cold and filmed with perspiration at the same time. I sat down in my swivel chair.

“You still there?” Temple said.

Wilbur Pickett was inside his barn, grinding the center-cutter for a ditching machine on an emery wheel, the sparks gushing onto his boot tops, when I pulled up on the grass in the Avalon and got out and headed for him without even bothering to turn off my car engine.

I threw my hat at his head. His mouth opened, then he saw my expression and the skin of his face grew so tight against the bone there were white lines, like tiny pieces of string, around his eyes.

“You did it, you lying bastard,” I said.

“You stand back from me, Billy Bob.”

I started to speak, but I couldn’t get the words out. I shoved him in the breastbone.

“Don’t do that,” he said.

I shoved him again, with both hands, my teeth clenched together, then I pushed him out the back door into the horse lot. He became foot-tangled, off balance, flinching when I came at him again.

“Go ahead, take a shot, Wilbur. See what happens,” I said.

His face was the bright red of a trainman’s lantern.

“I ain’t gonna fight you,” he said. He lowered his hands and turned his back to me and hung his arms over the top rail of the fence. His pulse jumped in his neck
and he looked at me out of the corner of his eye like a frightened animal.

“Why’d you steal? Why’d you lie all this time?” I said.

“Deitrich rubbed my face in it in front of all them people. I went into his office to bust that watch on the fireplace. Then I seen them bonds in the safe. I started thinking about the oil land his family stole from mine and I looked at them bonds and before I knowed it I had the watch in my pocket and them bonds stuck down in my britches. It was like I was watching somebody else do it instead of me.”

He glanced at me to see if his explanation had taken. He swallowed and looked away quickly. “I got greedy. Is that what you’re waiting on?” he said.

“You sorry sonofabitch,” I said.

“It wasn’t no three hundred thousand. It was fifty. Giving them back wasn’t gonna do no good. Earl Deitrich was gonna make money on the insurance claim and come after Kippy Jo’s and my oil sand at the same time.”

“Does your wife know about this?”

“No, sir, she don’t.”

“What about the bonds that were in the side of the dresser?”

“They were planted. That’s what I been trying to tell you. It didn’t matter what I done or didn’t do. Deitrich and Hugo Roberts was gonna put me in the pen.”

He stared morosely at the windmill blades straining against the lock chain and at his horses out in the alfalfa and the dust and rain blowing out of the hills in the west.

“What’d you do with the bonds you stole?” I asked.

“I sold them down in Mexico. The money’s in the oil deal up in Wyoming now.”

“You used us.”

He pressed the heel of his hand against his forehead.

“I guess this world can be a mess of grief, cain’t it?” he said.

“Just stay the hell away from me,” I said, and walked back to my Avalon.

I saw Kippy Jo hanging wash on the clothesline. She stopped her work and lifted her head, her eyes focusing on the sky, as though the barometer had dropped dramatically and the environment around her was about to experience a change she had not foreseen.

Late that night the phone in my library rang.

“Jessie and me has got to get out of here, Mr. Holland,” the voice said.

“Mr. Doolittle?”

“I owe you mightily for what you’ve done. But I need money to get us down to the coast.”

“I can’t do that. You’re an innocent man, but Jessie Stump belongs in a cage.”

“Somebody up on the ridge seen us yesterday. He had field glasses.”

“Let me surrender you, sir. I’ll see that you’re protected. You have my word.”

“You don’t know what it’s like for a deformed man in the hands of hateful men. They ain’t gonna get me again.
You
cain’t hep me?”

“Not the way you want.”

I heard him take a breath through the receiver, as though resigning himself.

“Jessie ain’t all bad. I made him give up revenge against Earl Deitrich. That’s a start, ain’t it?” Skyler said.

“I don’t know what to tell you, sir,” I replied.

“Goodbye, Mr. Holland. I reckon this is the last time I’ll be telling you that, too.”

“Good luck, Mr. Doolittle,” I said.

He hung up.

The following afternoon, Saturday, Temple threw a pebble against my library window. I went to the back porch and opened the screen. But she didn’t come in.

“This is good right here,” she said, and sat down on the scrolled iron bench under the chinaberry tree.

“I’ve got some lemonade made.”

“Another time. I talked with Wilbur Pickett. You’re too hard on him,” she said.

“Oh?”

“It was there all the time, Billy Bob. You’ve said it yourself. People will do lots of things for money. Did it make sense that a man who would steal an antique watch would take nothing else with it?”

“He lied.”

“He was scared.”

“Of what?”

“You, his wife, the kids that look up to him. Come on, stop stoking your own furnace.”

“Just dropping by to ladle out some moral insight?” I said.

“No. I did some checking into Earl Deitrich’s finances. His place in Montana is up for sale and he’s been borrowing on his house here. That’s why he grabbed on to this insurance scam after Wilbur stole his bonds. He stands to gain a quarter of a million and he might still end up a partner in Wilbur’s oil deal. He probably sent Bubba Grimes to kill Wilbur and Kippy Jo so he could file civil suit against the estate and seize their property up in Wyoming.”

“I’m still Kippy Jo’s defense attorney, and now I have to put Wilbur on the stand so he can tell the jury how he
stole fifty thousand dollars in bonds and lied about it. Does that sound like a credible defense witness to you? You think that will make the jury a lot more sympathetic toward the Picketts? Or maybe I can suborn perjury.”

“I can see this might piss you off.”

“Thank you,” I said.

She walked down the driveway toward her car. Then turned around and came back.

“You got some mint leaves to go with that lemonade?” she said.

Ten miles from town was a drive-in theater left over from the 1950s that opened only on Friday and Saturday nights. High school and college kids got crashed on warm beer and reefer and crystal and purple passion, rat-raced up and down the aisles, accidentally tore the speakers from the stanchions or the windows out of their cars when they burned rubber off the embankments, threw water bombs made from condoms into convertibles, fist-fought behind the cinder-block bathrooms, and stuck firecrackers up the tailpipes of cars in which great love affairs were blooming.

Without the dope the drive-in theater would have been little different in ambiance from its predecessors of four decades ago. In fact, it still had its moments: the smell of foot-long hot dogs and mustard and chopped onions, the palm trees framed against sunsets that were probably the most glorious in the Western Hemisphere, the scrolled purple and pink neon on the concession stand, the strolling groups of short-hair, fundamentalist kids whose piney-woods innocence seemed to insulate them from all the societal changes taking place around them.

Esmeralda and Lucas parked their pickup truck on the
second row, and Lucas went to the concession stand and brought back a large popcorn, two hot dogs, and two Pepsis. Lucas was adjusting the sound on the speaker when a skinny kid in horn-rimmed glasses and cowboy boots and a denim shirt with the tails pulled out of his belt and a wallet chain hanging out of his back pocket stopped five feet from the pickup’s window and started making frantic gestures at him.

“What do you want, J.P.?” Lucas asked.

“Come over here, man,” J.P. said in a whisper, as though Esmeralda couldn’t hear or see him.

“Stop acting like a moron. What is it?” Lucas said.

“Jeff’s back there with Rita Summers. He was melting coke in a glass of Jack. The guy’s out there on the edge, man. When you walked by he give you a look, like … Man, I don’t want to even remember it. That dude’s cruel, Lucas.”

“Yeah, thanks, J.P. Don’t worry about it, okay?” Lucas said.

A few minutes later Esmeralda said she was going to the rest room.

“I’ll come with you,” Lucas said.

“No,” she replied.

“You don’t owe Jeff anything. Don’t talk to him,” Lucas said.

She tilted her head and feigned a pout.

“He’s scum, Essie,” Lucas said.

“I’ll be right back. Now stop it,” she said.

She walked toward the concession, right past Jeff’s yellow convertible. She wore a tight white dress with frill around the hem and neckline and scarlet ribbon threaded in and out of the frill. Rita Summers was behind the steering wheel, eating from a paper shell of french fries. Jeff held a tumbler full of bourbon and ice in his hand.
His eyes followed Esmeralda, the sway of her hips, the way her hair bounced on her shoulder blades.

He set the tumbler on the dashboard and got out of the car and followed her.

She heard the soles of his loafers crunch on the shale behind her. His face was dilated with booze, his pores grainy with perspiration and heat.

“Go home, Jeff. Get some rest,” she said.

“Dump Smothers. We can get it back together,” he said.

“You need help. Give therapy a try. What have you got to lose, hon? You’d learn a lot about yourself and see things different.”

“Better hear me, Essie. You and Smothers and Ronnie Cross have been sticking it in my face. In front of lots of people. A guy runs out of selections. That’s the way it is. Even Ronnie knows that.”

“I think you’re going to die if you don’t get help.”

“We had a lot going at first. We can have it back. You want me to say it? I never had a girl like you.”

“That’s the problem, Jeff. You collect girls. You don’t love them. You can’t, because you don’t love yourself.”

His eyes were out of focus. He wiped his nose with his wrist. He seemed to lose balance momentarily, then right himself. “I gave you a chance. But you’re just not a listener. It’s the beaner gene. Y’all are uneducable,” he said.

She turned and went into the women’s room. A few minutes later she walked past the convertible again, her eyes focused on the movie screen, her white dress bathed in light. Jeff watched her while he drank from the bourbon tumbler with both hands.

“You’re slurping like a pig. Maybe you and the south-of-the-border cutie should still be an item,” Rita said.

Jeff took the paper shell of french fries from her hands and ground it into her face, smearing her eyes and hair and blouse with catsup and salt and potato pulp while she struck blindly at him with her fists, her elbows blowing the horn in staccato.

Sunday morning Skyler Doolittle walked up a wooded slope and sat on a boulder that was webbed with lichen and read from a Gideon Bible. The pages of the Bible were water-stained, the thick cardboard cover bleached like ink diluted with milk. The sun was not over the hill yet, and the woods were smoky and wet, the air suffused with a cool green light that seemed to have its origins in the river down below rather than in the sky.

Jessie Stump, shirtless, his belt notched into his bony ribs, was shaving without soap, over a bowl outside a shack that had once been a deer stand. Jessie had packed a duffel bag with their pots, pans, blankets, road maps, clothes, and food. On his belt was a heavy, saw-toothed hunting knife, the edge honed so sharp it cut fine lines in the opening of the scabbard when he slipped it in and out of the leather.

Jessie wiped his face dry with his arm and squatted by a map and counted out their money on top of it. Thirty-two dollars and eleven cents were left over from the money Billy Bob Holland had given to Skyler. Jessie looked down at the map and the lines he had drawn in pencil along all the roadways that led to Matagorda Bay, over which he had written the words “Cousin Tyson’s shrimper,” as though somehow his hand could create the journey and escape by salt water before they actually took place.

He looked up the slope at Skyler, who seemed consumed by the Gideon he had found in a shack down by
the oxbow. So what if Skyler spent his time with that stuff, Jessie thought. It didn’t do no harm. Besides, Skyler’d sure been shortchanged in this world and maybe had something good coming in the next. In fact, Skyler was the only decent man he ever recalled meeting, except for maybe Cousin Tyson, who’d been in the pen four times and probably did a good turn for Jessie only because he hated cops on general principles.

Skyler wore a clean plaid shirt and suspenders and gray work pants they had gotten a black man to buy for them at the Wal-Mart. Skyler wet his thumb and forefinger each time he turned a page in his Bible, then he studied one passage for a long time and smiled down at Jessie.

The passage was about John the Baptizer, and John’s words seemed to rise off the page for Skyler and re-create the forest around him. The smoky green canopy overhead became the roof of a granary, and wind was blowing through the slats and separating out the chaff and lifting the grain into the sunlight, so that it became as golden as bees’ pollen.

Skyler lifted the Bible in front of him to reread the passage, sitting up higher on the boulder. In his mind’s eye he was already inside a gilded dome, one in which all the imperfections of the world disappeared, and he did not see the circular glint of glass on top of the ridge.

The soft-nosed .30-06 round tore through the book’s cover and half the pages and pierced Skyler through the lungs before the report ever rolled down the hillside.

Jessie Stump ran toward Skyler, his face lunatical, his knife drawn like a foolish wand.

Skyler had slipped to the ground and was on his hands and knees, coughing red flowers on the stones that protruded from the soil. The torn pulp from his Bible floated down on his head like feathers from a white bird.

The shooting was reported over the phone an hour later by a weeping man who refused to give his name to the dispatcher.