Heartwood (38 page)

I stared impotently through the vectored glass at Temple’s back, the exposed baby fat on her hips, the glow of her chestnut hair against the dinginess of the cellar. Only the balls of her bare feet touched the floor, so that her arms were pulled tight in the sockets and her shoulders were squeezed into her neck.

I opened my pocketknife and wedged it into the doorjamb, under the lock’s tongue, and began to prise it back into the spring.

A shadow fell across the cellar’s inside stairs, then Johnny Krause walked down the steps into the light, his brilliantined hair pulled behind his head in a matador’s knot, a five-day line of blond whiskers along his jawbones. He drank from a long-necked bottle of beer and pressed the coldness of the bottle against the side of his face. He wore a short-sleeve Texas A&M workout shirt that molded against the contours of his torso.

“I’m not gonna let them two guys upstairs touch you. But you and me got a date,” he said.

Two? Did he say two?

Johnny Krause set the beer bottle down on a chair and grinned and slipped his comb out of his back pocket. He placed the teeth of the comb under Temple’s throat and drew them up to her chin. Then he touched her hair with his fingers and leaned close to her and kissed the corner of one eye.

His back was to me now, and I could see a small automatic, probably a .25, stuck down in his belt.

“You want the tape off? Just blink your eyes,” he said. “No? I’d like to kiss you on the mouth, hon. Get you off your feet. Come on, think about it.”

He placed his hands on his hips.

“This is gonna be quite a rodeo,” he said.

“Johnny! Tillman’s got the kids on the phone! Get the fuck up here!” a third man hissed down the staircase.

Johnny Krause mounted the steps three at a time. I prised the tongue of the lock back against the spring and scraped the door back on the cement and stepped inside the cellar.

Temple twisted her head and stared at me. Upstairs I could hear Krause talking into a phone.

“That’s right. Captain McDonough’s the name … No, Ms. Carrol will probably be all right, but somebody has to watch her father. Bring Ms. Ramirez with you. I need to ask her about this car of hers that’s out back,” he said.

I set down the ball peen hammer on the chair and began sawing through the electrical cord that was wrapped around Temple’s wrists. Above me the heavy shoes of the intruders creaked on the planks in the floor. Temple’s eyes were inches from mine, bulging in the sockets, charged with alarm, then I realized she was not looking at me but at something over my shoulder.

A behemoth of a man in dark blue overalls stood at the head of the landing, his back to us, his huge buttocks stretching across the doorway. Then he turned to go down the stairs.

I picked up the hammer from the chair and stepped behind the furnace. The insulation on the cord around Temple’s wrists was frayed, the bronze wire exposed.

Each plank in the stairs groaned under the massive weight of the man in overalls. His head was auraed with a
wild mane of black hair, his neck festooned with gold chains. He was eating a cheese sandwich and his thick fingers sank deeply into the bread and left black marks on it.

He stood in front of Temple, chewing, his eyes roving over her face.

“Hi, girlie,” he said.

I swung the hammer into the back of his head and saw the skin split like gray leather inside his hair. He doubled over, his sandwich bread clotting in his throat. An unformed cry hung on his lips, as though he had stepped on a sharp stone.

Then he straightened up and looked at me, his face creasing with both bewilderment and rage. A bright stream of blood dripped from his hair.

I hit him again, this time above the ear. His eyes rolled up in his head, and he struck the cement with his knees, falling sideways into the shadows. My hands were shaking when I sawed through the electrical cord on Temple’s wrists.

She pulled the tape off her mouth, her breath trembling as she drew air into her lungs. I put my arm in hers and pointed toward the cellar door.

We walked out of the cone of electric light by the furnace, back into the shadows, the door yawning open in front of us, the freedom of the night only seconds away.

Then I heard someone in the driveway, his feet pausing, the gravel scraping under the soles of his shoes. A flashlight beam bounced inside the storm doors I had opened, welling out in a pool on the cement steps that were stenciled with my boot prints.

The man in the driveway eased a foot down on the
first step, then removed it and tried to angle the light into the cellar without getting any closer to the door.

I turned the unconscious man on his back and felt his pockets, then inside the bib of his overalls. My hand closed around the butt of a Ruger .22 automatic.

I moved quickly past Temple through the side door and was suddenly standing below the man with the flashlight. Hanging from his right hand was a chrome-plated .45 automatic. His mouth dropped open.

I aimed the Ruger at his throat and clicked off the safety, although I had no way of knowing if a round was in the chamber.

“Throw it away, bud! Do it now!” I said.

He froze, his hand squeezed tightly on the grips of the .45. He had a small, round, tight face and enormous blue tattoos that covered the insides of his arms.

“You can live! Throw it away and run!” I said.

I saw the moment gather in his eyes, the big question that he had always asked himself—Was he really a coward, as he had always secretly feared? Was he willing to risk it all and glide out over the Abyss, with nothing to sustain him except the residue of the last injection he had put in his veins?

He swallowed, the pistol rising upward as though it were a balloon detached from his hand. Then suddenly he gagged in his throat, his face seemed to dissolve, and he flung the .45 into the flower bed and ran toward the road.

I let out my breath and wiped the moisture from my eyes on my shirtsleeve.

Temple came out of the cellar behind me. The inside of the house was quiet, except for the exhaust of the air conditioner and the sounds of the television set. The pecan tree in the backyard puffed with wind, its leaves
rising like birds against the moon. I pressed my hand between Temple’s shoulder blades and tried to move her toward the road, then felt her stiffen.

“No
 … 
My father,”
she said silently with her lips.

But Johnny Krause preempted any more decisions that we may have been forced to make. He came off the back porch, letting the screen slam behind him.

“Where’s Tillman at, Skeet?” he said into the darkness.

We stared into each other’s face.

He fired with his .25 automatic, the sparks flying into the darkness. The rounds made a dry, popping sound, like Chinese firecrackers. At least two of them hit the windshield of the Avalon and one ricocheted off the curved front of Beau’s trailer.

At almost the same time, I raised the Ruger with both hands, my arms stretched out in front of me, and squeezed the trigger. The first round slapped into wood somewhere inside the welding shed, but when I let off the second round I saw his left arm jump as though it had been stung by a wasp.

Then he bolted through the backyard, over a fence and an irrigation ditch, and was running hard through a field toward the river.

“You all right, Temple?” I said.

“My father’s tied up in the bedroom. I have to go,” she said.

“Are you all right?”

The whites of her eyes were pink with broken veins. Her face contained a level of anger and injury and violation I had never seen in it before, like water-stained paper held against a hot light. She went into the house and did not answer my question.

I cleared the jammed shell from the Ruger and backed
Beau out of his trailer and lifted a coil of polyrope off a hook on the wall. I swung up on the saddle and hung the polyrope on the pommel and leaned forward in the stirrups. Beau crossed the yard and irrigation ditch in seconds, then I popped him once in the rump and felt his whole body surge under me.

Beau was beautiful when I let him run. His muscles rippled like water, his stride never faltering. The thudding of his hooves in the field, the rhythmic exhalation of his breath, his absolute confidence in our mutual purpose, were like sympathetic creations of sound and power and movement outside of time. Lightning trembled inside storm clouds that stretched like a black lid on a kettle from one horizon to the other. But electricity or wind or mud and blowing newspaper or desiccated poppy husks rattling in a field never affected Beau, as they did most horses. Instead, he seemed to draw courage from danger, and his loyalty to me never wavered.

Up ahead I could see Johnny Krause running, his face twisted back toward us.

Beau and I went across a ditch and up a slope toward a bend in the river where three cottonwoods grew on the bluff. I widened the loop in the end of the polyrope, doubling back part of the rope in my right hand, and whipped it in a circle over my head.

Johnny Krause turned and fired once with his automatic, but Beau never flinched. I flung the loop at Krause’s head and saw it take on his neck and the top of one shoulder. I leaned back in the saddle and wound the rope around the pommel and felt the loop bind around Krause’s throat. Then I turned Beau and brought my boot heels into his ribs.

The rope jerked Krause off his feet and dragged him tumbling and strangling across the ground, across rocks,
into the side of a tree stump, through a tangle of chicken wire and cedar posts that someone had stacked and partially burned.

I reined up Beau under a cottonwood, freed the rope from the pommel, and tossed the coil over a tree limb and caught the end with my hand. Krause was trying to get to his feet, his fingers wedging under the rope that was now pinched tightly into his throat. I rewrapped the rope on the pommel and kicked Beau in the ribs again and felt Johnny Krause rise from the earth into the air, his half-top boots kicking frantically.

Beau’s saddle creaked against the rope’s tension as I watched Johnny Krause’s face turn gray and then purple while his tongue protruded from his mouth.

Then I saw the lights of a car that had come to rest in a ditch, and the silhouette of a man running toward me.

“What are you doing here, L.Q.?”
I asked.

“Somebody better talk sense to you. This might be my way, but it ain’t yours,”
he said.

“He molested Temple. Hanging’s not enough.”

“Don’t give his kind no power. That’s the lesson me and you didn’t learn down in Coahuila.”

Beau tossed his head against the reins and blew air, shifting his hooves and barreling up his ribs like he did when he didn’t want to take his saddle.

I released the rope and let it spin loose from the pommel. I heard Johnny Krause thump against the earth, his breath like a stifled scream.

Then I watched Ronnie Cross walk right through L.Q.’s shape, shattering it like splinters of charcoal-colored glass against the glare of headlights in the background.

“I was with Essie and Lucas at your house when them
guys called. We got ahold of some Texas Rangers,” he said.

I wiped my hands on my thighs and stared at him silently from the saddle. Then, as though waking from a dream, I looked up at the wind in the cottonwoods and the heat lightning flickering on the leaves, and once again wondered who really lived inside my skin.

The next morning I had my receptionist call Earl Deitrich’s house and get the ex-mercenary named Fletcher Grinnel on the phone.

“Last night I hung a piece of shit named Johnny Krause in a tree,” I said.

“You’re a busy fellow,” he replied.

“He just gave you up on the murder of Cholo Ramirez. Check out the statistics on the number of people currently being executed in Texas, Grinnel. You going to ride the gurney for Earl Deitrich?”

“Say again, please?”

Three weeks later, on a Saturday afternoon, Peggy Jean Deitrich parked her automobile in front of my house and walked across the grass to the driveway, where I was planting climbing roses on the trellises I had nailed up on posts on each side of the drive. I had painted the posts and trellises and the crossbeam white, and the roses were as bright as drops of blood against the paint.

The balled root systems were three feet in diameter and packed in sawdust and black dirt and wrapped with wet burlap. I knelt on the grass and snipped the burlap away and washed the roots loose with a garden hose and lowered them into a freshly dug hole that I had worked with horse manure. I put the garden hose into the hole and watched the water rise in a soapy brown froth to the rim, then I began shoveling compost in on top of it.

“You’re right good at that,” she said, and sat down on my folding metal chair in the shade.

“What’s up, Peggy Jean?”

She wore jeans and shined boots and a plaid snap-button shirt and a thin hand-tooled brown belt with a silver buckle and a silver tip on the tongue. The wind blew the myrtle above her head and made patterns of sunlight and shadow on her skin, and for just a moment I saw us both together again among the oak trees above the riverbank when she allowed me to lose my virginity inside her.

“Jeff’s out on bail and still doesn’t realize he’ll probably go to prison. Earl expects to be indicted for murder momentarily and is usually drunk by noon. He also goes out unwashed and unshaved in public. But maybe you know all that,” she said.

“Sorry. I don’t have an interest anymore in tracking what they do.”

“We’re defaulting on the Wyoming land deal. Earl’s creditors are calling in all his debts. I think it’s what you planned, Billy Bob.”

“Earl stepped in his own shit, Peggy Jean.”

“I want to hire you as our attorney.”

“Nope.”

“I can pay. Earl has a half-million-dollar life insurance policy I can borrow on.”

I shook my head. “Let me give you some advice instead and it won’t cost you a nickel. If you’re poor and you commit a crime, the legal system works quickly and leaves you in pieces all over the highway. If you’re educated and have money, the process becomes a drawn-out affair, like a terminal cancer patient who can afford various kinds of treatment all over the world. But eventually he ends up at Lourdes.