Heartwood (37 page)

“Your great-grandpa Sam could hang from the pommel at a full gallop and shoot from under the horse’s neck like an Indian,”
L.Q. said.
“You’re as good a shot as he was. Why waste talent?”

I dropped two shaved fifteen-foot posts into the holes I had dug, then shoveled a wheelbarrow-load of gravel around the bottoms for support, tamped down the gravel with a heavy iron bar, and added more. I was sweating and breathing hard, my face perspiring in the wind. When I turned around and looked into the shade of the myrtle hedge, L.Q. was gone.

The phone rang in my library late that night.

“You mind if we fish on the back of your property in the morning?” Wilbur said.

“Help yourself,” I said.

“Tomorrow, if you got a minute, Kippy Jo wants to tell you something. I do, too.”

After I ate breakfast the next morning I drove the Avalon through the field behind the barn, the grass whispering under the bumper, around the far corner of the tank, and down to the bluffs. The sun was just above the
horizon, and the wind was still cool, and leaves from the grove of trees up on the knoll were blowing out on the water. Wilbur and Kippy Jo were down on the bank, fishing in the eddies behind a bleached, worm-carved cottonwood whose root system was impacted with rocks and clay. A knife-shaved willow branch humped with bream and catfish lay in the shallows.

“Tell him what you seen, Kippy Jo,” Wilbur said.

She sat in a folding canvas chair and rested her rod across a bait bucket. She wore a pair of blue jeans and a white T-shirt with blue trim on the neck and sleeves. In the softness of the sunrise her hair had a blue-black shine in it and was curved around her throat.

“There won’t be an oil well where Wilbur wants to drill. Just a windmill,” she said.

“She says I ain’t gonna find no oil. Ain’t that a pistol? Course, that means Earl Deitrich ain’t gonna get none, either,” Wilbur said.

“This is what you wanted to tell me?” I said.

Kippy Jo wet her lips. Her eyes followed my voice and fixed on my face. “I’ve had a horrible vision in my sleep. Several people stand at the entrance to Hell. Or at least one man in the group thinks he sees them there. It’s like I’m inside this man’s thoughts and I see the entrance to Hell through his eyes. Then there’s a gunshot,” she said.

“I don’t take your gift lightly. But if I was y’all, I wouldn’t think a whole lot on what tomorrow holds. The sun is going to come up whether we’re here for it or not,” I said.

“Yeah, that kind of talk gives me the cold sweats, Kippy Jo,” Wilbur said. He cast his bobber out into the current again and picked up a lunch bucket and offered it to me. “Fried cottontail and Kippy Jo’s buttermilk biscuits, son. There ain’t no better eating.”

“I believe it,” I said, and then said goodbye to his wife and walked back up to my automobile.

Wilbur caught up with me just as I opened the car door. He wore khakis smeared with fish blood and a black T-shirt with the sleeves rolled up over the tops of his arms. A self-deprecating smile hung on the edge of his mouth.

“I been studying all this time about making money, but the truth is Kippy Jo don’t care if I got it or not,” he said. “It takes some kind of fool to be so long in figuring out what counts, don’t it?”

“I think you’re ahead of the game, Wilbur,” I replied.

I drove back up to the house, brushed out Beau in the lot, watered the flowers in the beds, and went inside to shower and change before going to the office.

Lucas and Esmeralda were eating at the kitchen table. Esmeralda wore a Mexican peasant blouse and a red hibiscus in her hair, almost as though she were deliberately dressing like a Hispanic.

“Running late, aren’t you, bud?” I said.

“Our well’s a duster. The bossman shut it down yesterday,” Lucas said.

“Y’all doin’ all right?” I said.

“Fine. I love your place. It’s real nice of you to let us stay here,” Esmeralda said.

“It’s my pleasure,” I said.

“We’re going down to Temple Carrol’s. Her daddy’s got an old Gibson she wants me to string. Oh, I forgot to tell you. She called and said she’s got to go to Bonham till tomorrow night. Something about taking a deposition for another lawyer,” Lucas said.

I nodded, then felt a strange and unfamiliar sense of loneliness at the thought of Temple’s being gone.

“Y’all have a good one,” I said. When I left the house for the office Esmeralda seemed lost in thought, like a person who has arrived at a destination she never planned.

Later, on the way home for lunch, I stopped at the convenience store down the road for gas. While I was paying inside, I noticed a man with a florid, narrow face at the cafe counter. His eyes were a washed-out blue, his hair like a well-trimmed piece of orange rug glued to his scalp. A puckered burn scar was webbed across the right side of his neck. He drank coffee and smoked a cigarette and glanced at his watch.

I stared at him, remembering my last conversation with Ronnie Cruise.

I took my change from the cashier and walked to the counter and sat down next to the man with orange hair.

“You’re Charley Quail,” I said.

He took his cigarette from his mouth and looked through the smoke at me. “You know me?” he said.

“You used to drive stock cars at the old track out by the drive-in movie. You raced at Daytona,” I replied.

“That’s me.”

“It’s an honor to meet you,” I said.

His hand was weightless in my grip. I remembered an article from the Austin newspaper, two or three years back, about Charley Quail’s long travail with alcoholism, the jails and detox centers, a greasepit fire that turned his body into a candle. He looked at his watch, then compared the time with the clock on the wall and looked over his shoulder at the road.

“You waiting on the bus?” I asked.

“It’s supposed to be here at 12:14. I don’t know if my
watch is wrong, or the one up on the wall, or if both of them is.”

“Where you headed?”

“San Antone.”

“You know a Mexican kid named Ronnie Cruise? Some people call him Ronnie Cross,” I said.

“I just delivered a car for him. I had to look all over the cottonpickin’ county for the right house, too.”

“Where did you leave it, Charley?”

“None of your goddamn business.” He tilted his chin up to show his defiance.

“Sorry. I didn’t mean to offend you,” I said, getting up from the counter stool. “Is Ronnie a pretty good friend of yours?”

“He was my mechanic. He pulled me out of a fire. You one of them people been giving that boy trouble?” he said.

When I got to my house ten minutes later, expecting to see Cholo’s car, the driveway was empty. I looked inside the barn, then behind it, chickens scurrying and cackling in front of me. But there was no sign of the ’49 Mercury. The windmill swung suddenly in the breeze, the blades clattering to life, and a gush of water spurted out of the well pipe into Beau’s tank.

The next afternoon Pete and I loaded Beau in his trailer and hooked the trailer onto my truck, and went to look for arrowheads in the ravine where Skyler Doolittle and Jessie Stump had once hidden in a cave.

The sun was still high in the sky and the cliffs were yellow with sunshine, the air heavy with the smell of the pines that dotted the slopes. I shoveled silt from the edge of the creekbed onto a portable seine with an army-surplus E-tool while Pete picked flint chippings and small pieces of pottery off the screen.

“I heard a schoolteacher in the barbershop say we ain’t supposed to do this,” Pete said.

“This stuff is washed down from a workmound or a tepee ring. It doesn’t hurt anything to surface-hunt,” I replied.

“Is digging with a shovel surface-hunting?”

“Matter of definition,” I said.

“How you know there wasn’t a tepee ring right here?” he asked.

“Would you build your house where a creek could flow through it?” I said. “Say, look at that pair of hawks up in the redbuds.”

When he turned his head and stared up the slope into the trees, I took a flat, fan-shaped piece of yellow chert with a sharply beveled edge from my pocket and tossed it onto the screen.

“I don’t see no hawk,” he said. Then his eyes dropped to the screen. “That’s a hide scraper. It’s worked all along the edge. A book at the library shows one just like this.”

“It looks like you got a museum piece there, bud.”

He rubbed the chert clean with his thumbs, then dipped it in the creek and dried it on his blue jeans.

“It’s great to have this place to ourselves again, ain’t it?” he said.

“Yeah, it is. You think you can handle one of those buffalo steaks and a blueberry milkshake?” I said.

We drove through the dusk toward the cafe where we ate breakfast each Sunday after Mass. Fireflies were lighting in the trees along the road, and there was a cool smell in the air, like autumnal gas, even though it was only late summer.

A restless, undefined thought kept turning in my mind, but I did not know what it was, in the same vague way I’d been bothered by the inconsistencies in Jeff Deitrich’s threat against Esmeralda and Lucas. The road was uneven, and Pete’s head bounced up and down as he looked out over the bottom of the window at the landscape.

“Are you gonna ask Temple to eat with us?” Pete said.

“I don’t know if she’s back from Bonham yet, Pete.”

“I seen her car go in her driveway this afternoon.”

“Are you sure?”

“I reckon I know her car. Was she supposed to call you or something?”

“She said if she got back early enough, she might join us out at the creek. Maybe she’s a little tired.”

“I hope I ain’t said the wrong thing again.”

“You didn’t.”

He was quiet a long time.

“What was that gangbanger’s car doing in her backyard?” he asked.

I pulled the truck onto the shoulder of the road. A semitrailer with its lights on went past me.

“Which gangbanger’s car?” I said.

“That purple Mercury. The one owned by that guy Cholo,” he said, his eyes threading with anxiety as he looked at the expression on my face.

I dropped Pete off at his house and headed up the dirt street, with Beau’s trailer bouncing behind me.

Why hadn’t I put it together? I asked myself. Ronnie Cruise’s wetbrain friend, Charley Quail, had taken Cholo’s car to Lucas’s rented house in the western part of the county. When he discovered that Lucas and Esmeralda weren’t living there, he had probably been told by someone to go to either my house or Lucas’s stepfather’s. He must have been driving down my road and seen Esmeralda leaving Temple’s house after she had gone there with Lucas to string the Gibson guitar for Temple’s father.

Charley Quail had assumed Temple’s house was mine. He parked the Mercury there and walked down to the convenience store to catch the bus back to San Antonio, thinking he had done a fine turn for Ronnie Cruise.

I went through the stop sign at the end of Pete’s street, crossed a wood bridge over a drainage ditch littered with trash and studded with wild pecan trees, and turned out onto the surfaced road that led by my house. The moon was rising now and the sun was only a dirty red smudge inside a bank of purple rain clouds in the west. Up ahead, I saw a plumbing truck parked on Temple’s swale. I turned into the driveway and cut the engine. The lawn sprinkler was on and strings of water twirled in the glow of the bug lamp and clicked across the front steps and the hydrangeas in the flower beds. Behind me, I heard Beau nicker and his hooves scrape on the wood floor of his trailer.

The television was on in the living room, but the curtains were drawn. I walked up on the porch and tapped with one knuckle on the screen door. The air-conditioning unit in the window was roaring loudly, and I knocked again, this time harder.

“Temple?” I said.

There was no response.

“Temple? It’s Billy Bob,” I said, then walked around the side of the house and up the drive.

Temple’s car was parked by the shed where her heavy bag was hung, and between the shed and her neighbor’s cornfield I could see the dull maroon shape of Cholo’s Mercury. The pecan tree above the shed filled with wind, and the heavy bag twisted slightly on its chain, its leathery surfaces glistening in the moonlight.

I leaned over and picked up one of Temple’s speedbag gloves out of the dust. A smear of blood flecked with dirt had dried on the flat area that covered the knuckles.

I dropped the glove and walked up on the back screen porch and turned the knob on the door. The door was both key-locked and dead-bolted.

Then I heard voices from the cellar stairway, those of two men who were coming back up to the first floor. I stepped away from the back door and pressed close in to the wall. My hand ached for L.Q. Navarro’s revolver.

“We got the wrong place, Johnny. It happens. Write it off.”

“I told you, the bitch knows me. So we got to wipe the whole slate. We get those kids down here, then we go home.”

“I’m the one she busted in the nose. I say we boogie.”

“I’m gonna do the broad. You want, you can have seconds. But this is her last night on earth. Now give it a rest and fix some sandwiches.”

“I’m getting thin. I need something.”

“Check in her medicine cabinet. Maybe she’s got some diet pills.”

“You said it’d be clean, in and out. Just straightening out some punks, you said. She’s a cop. We’re gonna do her old man, too, a guy in a wheelchair? You know what’ll happen if they get their hands on us?”

“Shut up.”

The kitchen window was open and I could hear them pulling open drawers, rattling silverware, cracking the cap on a bottle of beer.

Get to a phone, I thought.

No, she could be dead before I got back.

I stepped off the porch, easing the screen shut behind me, and went through the shadows of the pecan tree into her father’s old welding shed. On top of a workbench was a thick-handled, grease-stained ball peen hammer, with a head the size of a half-brick.

I went back down the driveway, crouching under the windows, and pulled open the storm doors on the cellar’s entrance. The steps were cement and caked with a
film of dried mud and blackened leaves. Through a broken pane in the main door I could see a lightbulb burning on the far side of a furnace and the silhouette of a figure whose mouth was taped and whose wrists were tied around a thick drainpipe that ran the length of the ceiling.