Heartwood (41 page)

The Wilbur T. Pickett Natural Energy Company was on its way.

The next spring, during Easter break, Lucas and Temple and I drove to San Antonio and had supper at an outdoor cafe on the river, not far from the Alamo. The evening sky was turquoise, the air warm and fragrant with the smell of flowers. Lucas didn’t talk anymore about Esmeralda. If I mentioned her name, he always smiled and deliberately created a beam in his eyes that was not meant for anyone to read, lest the dues he had paid be taken from him.

The scene along the river was almost an idyllic one. The gondolas were filled with tourists; mariachi musicians in sombreros and dark suits scrolled with white piping played guitars in the cafes; the fronds of banana trees
along the water’s edge rattled in the breeze. But I couldn’t concentrate on the conversation around me. I kept smelling a heavy fragrance of roses. When Temple and Lucas went into a shop to buy cactus candy for her father, I walked over to the Alamo. The facade was lighted with flood lamps and was pink and gray against the darkening sky, and I sat down on a stone bench and twirled my hat on my finger.

I could never look at the chapel and the adjacent barracks without chills going through me. One hundred and eighty-eight souls had held out for thirteen days against as many as six thousand of Santa Anna’s troops. They went down to the last man, except for five who were captured and tortured before they were executed. Their bodies were burned by Santa Anna like sacks of garbage.

But even as I dwelled on the deaths of those 188 men and boys, the smell of roses seemed to be all around me. Was I still enamored with the girl who used to be Peggy Jean Murphy?

Maybe. But that wasn’t bad. The girl I knew was worth remembering.

Behind me, I heard the throaty rumble of twin Hollywood mufflers off the pavement. I thought I saw a sunburst T-Bird turn up a darkened street toward the freeway, then I heard the driver double-clutching, shifting down, catching a lower gear, one shoulder bent low as he gripped the floor stick and listened for the exact second to pour on the gas and tack it up.

In my mind’s eye I saw Ronnie Cross and Esmeralda Ramirez flying down an empty six-lane highway through the countryside, the chromed engine roaring, the green dials on the walnut dashboard indicating levels of control and power that seemed to transcend the laws of mortality itself.

I thought of horsemen fleeing a grass fire in Old Mexico and civilian soldiers who waited with musket and powder horn at an adobe wall and a preacher who baptized by immersion and created a cathedral out of trees and water and sky. I smelled banks of roses and saw Ronnie Cross speed-shift his transmission and floor the accelerator, tacking up now, the rear end low on the road, the twin exhaust pipes thundering off the asphalt. Esmeralda twisted sideways in the oxblood leather seat and grinned at him, pumping her arms to the beat from the stereo speakers, she and Ronnie disappearing down the highway, into the American mythos of gangbangers and youthful lovers and cars that pulsed with music, between hills that had been green and covered with sunlight only an hour ago.

HALF OF PARADISE

TO THE BRIGHT AND SHINING SUN

LAY DOWN MY SWORD AND SHIELD

TWO FOR TEXAS

THE CONVICT

THE LOST GET-BACK BOOGIE

THE NEON RAIN

HEAVEN’S PRISONERS

BLACK CHERRY BLUES

A MORNING FOR FLAMINGOS

A STAINED WHITE RADIANCE

IN THE ELECTRIC MIST WITH CONFEDERATE DEAD

DIXIE CITY JAM

BURNING ANGEL

CADILLAC JUKEBOX

CIMARRON ROSE

SUNSET LIMITED