Heartwood

19

"What did you do next?" I asked Wesley.

"I run all the way back to the highway. Jeff Deitrich picked me up hitchhiking," he answered. His face was gray, his hair soaked, like a man in mortal terror.

"We can do the right thing, Wes."

"Like go across the street and tell your buddy Marvin Pomroy what I just told you?"

"We get the jump on it. Let the others fall in their own shit."

"You're old. You ain't got to worry about guys like Jeff Deitrich and Chug Rollins. I hate this town. I hate being dumb and not having no money and not knowing when other people are making fun of me. I'm Jonesing real bad. I got to cop," he said.

"No dope. Just for today. We'll get you into detox."

But he went out the door. The back of his shirt looked like someone had pressed a rolled, wet towel from his shoulder blades down to his wide leather belt.

That afternoon I sat in Marvin Pomroy's office and gazed out the window at the courthouse lawn.

"You want to tell me why you're here?" he asked.

"It's been a slow day."

"With your clients? I take that back. You don't have clients. You supervise a crime wave."

But it was obvious I saw no humor in his remark. He took off his rimless glasses and sighted through the lenses as though he were looking for blemishes.

"Earlier I saw you go into the drugstore and buy four different newspapers," he said. "I wonder why a defense attorney would do that."

"Beats me," I said.

"One of your clients has confessed a particularly atrocious crime or told you something else that really bothers you. Since most of your clients are mentally impaired, you want to believe he's just hallucinating. Tell me I'm wrong," he said.

I cut my head noncommittally.

"Jerk yourself around all you want. You hate these sleazebags worse than I do," he said.

"You have a Little League schedule handy?" I asked.

"Clever," he said.

But my day with Marvin Pomroy wasn't over. Just before 5 p.m. I looked down from my office window into the burned-out end of another ninety-nine-degree afternoon and saw two sheriffs department cruisers and a van loaded with rifle-armed deputies park in the shade on the north side of the courthouse. The deputies got out on the sidewalk, looking hot and weary, their uniforms and campaign hats powdered with dust.

I called Marvin.

"What's going on with Hugo's goon squad?"

"Glad you asked. Your clients, Skyler Doolittle and Jessie Stump? They're up in the hills above Earl Deitrich's place. How do we know that? Because Jessie Stump put a steel-barbed arrow two inches from Earl's head this afternoon."

"Why would Jessie want to hurt Earl?"

"Could it have something to do with the fact Doolittle thinks Earl is the Antichrist? Could Doolittle possibly be behind it? Search me."

"Maybe Earl and Jessie have found each other."

"Which church do you attend, Billy Bob? The only reason I ask is that I'd like to avoid it."

Tuesday evening Wilbur Pickett made a mistake. He stopped at Shorty's for barbecue, then left Kippy Jo there while he went down the road to sell a man a welding machine.

She sat at a plank table on the screen porch and felt the breeze come up and the shadows lengthen on the river and the sun cut the tops of the cliffs with a yellow glare before it settled into an indistinct purple haze beyond the pasturage to the west.

The sounds around her were those of young people who spoke too loudly, who gave the waitress their orders as they would to a post, who were casually profane, as though the validation of their own power could be achieved only by their assault on the sensibilities of others.

But inside her mind she saw Wilbur's pickup truck turning into the welding shop down the road and she knew he would be back in fifteen minutes, just as he said he would, and she ate her food and listened to the sounds of the wind and the river threading around the boulders in the current and paid no attention to the voices from the next table.

Then she heard a car engine that was too powerful for the frame it was mounted on, the driver double-clutching as he shifted down and turned into the parking lot, the throaty rumble of his dual Hollywood mufflers bouncing off the front of the building like a glove in the face.

The voices at the next table died when the driver came through the screen door.

He saw her but he didn't speak. He seemed to study the people at the next table, his body swaying, the boards bending under his hobnailed boots, an odor like smoke, alcohol, and body grease emanating from his clothes.

He walked to the bar and came back out with an iced mug of draft beer in his fist. His shoulder struck the doorjamb and the beer splashed over the mug's rim onto the floor.

He was standing behind her chair now, the wall fan wafting across his body, blowing the rawness of his odor on her skin. He steadied himself with one hand on the back of her chair, the muscles of his upper arm swelling with blood, his knuckles touching her shoulder blade.

"Where's your husband at?" he asked.

"This is a bad place for you. You shouldn't come here," she replied.

"Anybody hurt me. Purple Hearts will take people out of here one by one. They'll cut phone lines. Won't nobody be able to help them."

"You're empowering your enemies."

"I'm gonna bring Deitrich down. I'm gonna hurt him for what he done to you."

"Sit down with me. Put your hands in mine."

But he wasn't listening to her now. He turned at a snigger, a remark about Mexicans, his elbow striking the back of someone's head. Then he shoved a tray stacked with barbecue ribs onto the floor and flung his beer into a man's face and spit in a woman's hair.

He had no chance. The men from the table he had violated were joined by others, men with redneck accents and drilling mud on their clothes, and they swarmed over him and pushed him outside, trundling him in their midst down a leaf-strewn embankment to the riverside.

In her mind the trees along the bank and the cliffs above the water were no longer a repository of shadow but were now lighted with a kinetic yellow and black brilliance, as though the sun were shining at midnight.

Kippy Jo stood at the porch screen, listening to the sounds that rose from the riverbank. The crowd had formed a circle, but all their physiological differences had disappeared. They had only one face, and it and their bodies looked made of baked clay, and they used the sharp points of sticks to prod the man in the center back and forth, as they would a bear in a pit.

Angular tubes of red light burst from the wounds in his skin. His throat roared, his hands thrashed at the air like paws. Then his face lifted toward her, one eye squeezed shut like a lump of cauliflower. She could feel the pointed sticks cut into her own ribs and chest, just as they did his. She felt her way between the tables and out the door and down the path to the riverbank, touching the bushes on each side of her, cobweb clinging to her hair.

She smelled the hot stench of the crowd and stopped. She sensed the presence of a shape in front of her and reached out and touched the hardened muscles in a man's back and felt him jump as though the tips of her fingers had burned his skin.

The faces of everyone in the circle turned slowly upon her.

"Lady, you don't have any business down here," a man said. But the confidence in his voice drained before he had finished the sentence.

She stepped inside the circle and touched the face of the man in the center, the wetness running out of his hair, the eye that trembled under her fingertips. She ran her hand down his shoulder and fitted it inside his upper arm.

"You have to take me out to the road and stay with me until Wilbur comes back," she said.

She thought he would argue but he didn't. They walked together toward the path, the crowd parting in front of her, looking into her sightless eyes as though the power they had feared all their lives lay hidden there. The wind gusted off the river, scattering pine needles across the clearing, then the sun that had blazed at the top of the sky died and the riverside went dark again and the only heat she felt was the brilliance of high-beam headlights that someone had shined across the water onto the cliffs.

Kippy Jo and Cholo Ramirez stood by the front of the parking lot like two bronze statues welded at the seam until Wilbur's pickup truck came skidding to a stop in a rooster tail of dust behind them. His eyes went past them to the crowd that was still standing in front of the screen porch.

"What in the hell you doin' with my wife, boy?" he said.

"She says I ain't fair to him. I say he could have gotten her killed," Wilbur said to me the next day in my office.

"You don't like him?"

"I don't like him coming around Kippy Jo. That boy's a criminal, pure and simple. Besides, he looks like a toad frog somebody kept mashed down inside a Vaseline jar."

"Why are you telling me all this?" I asked.

"Earl Deitrich ain't the only one on his shit list. Is your son getting it on with a Mexican gal named Esmeralda?"

That evening I sat on a wooden stool behind Lucas's rented house and watched him can-water the tomato plants in the rocky plot of ground he called a vegetable garden. The air was hot and still and thick with birds, and out on the state road I heard a semitrailer roar by and saw a turkey buzzard rise from a piece of roadkill on the edge of the asphalt. While he sprinkled and dusted his plants, Lucas kept glancing up at the trailer where Esmeralda was living, as though she could hear his words.

"I ain't afraid of Cholo. I ain't afraid of Ronnie Cross, either," he said.

"Foolish words, in my view," I said.

"Well, you ain't me."

"L.Q. Navarro used to tell me there're two kinds of friends you can have by the tote sack-the kind that find you when you're in tall cotton and the kind that find you when they're in trouble."

"Boy, I wish I was smart and had all them things figured out."

"You know what heartwood is?"

"Sure… What is it?"

"Some trees add a layer of new wood under their bark each year. The core of the tree grows stronger and stronger, until it's almost like iron. Old-timers say they used to bust their axes on it."

"Yeah?" Lucas said, his eyes wandering away from me now. Esmeralda was hanging her wash on the clothesline, her hair wrapped in a towel. "What's that have to do with what we're talking about?"

"I'm not sure. I'll study on it and let you know," I said.

"You're a mysterious man, Billy Bob."

I walked back to my car and did not reply.

My father was a tack and hot-pass welder on pipelines all over Texas, and when I was nine years old he took my mother and me with him on the line into the Winding Stair Mountains of eastern Oklahoma. It was early fall and the canopy of the hardwood trees had already started to ruffle with red and gold all the way to the massive outlines of the Ozarks. My father wasn't an overly religious man, but he made an effort to tithe and he wouldn't normally drink except on Christmas and July 4. By chance the pipeline was shut down our last Sunday in the Winding Stairs and he took me with him to a camp meeting on the banks of a pebble-bottomed stream whose water was the color of light green Jell-O.

The choir was a string band, the preacher a rail of a man who opened his Bible as though to read, then looked heavenward with his eyes squeezed tightly shut yet never misspoke a line. The congregation shook and trembled and spoke in tongues and in the next breath ate dinner on the ground and off the tailgates of farm trucks. But those were not the images that defined for me that seminal afternoon of my childhood.

The banks of the stream had eroded sharply during a spring torrent, and the root systems of the overhanging trees trailed in the current like brown spiderweb. The trunk of each tree looked swollen and hard, the bark glistening and serrated, as though the root system had drawn the coldness of the water into the wood and filled it with a hardness that would blunt nails.

The preacher stood waist-deep in the current and dipped a fat woman backwards, the current sliding across her closed eyes, her white dress tied around the knees with a blue slash so it wouldn't float up from her thighs.

"You up to it?" my father asked.

"I ain't afraid," I said.

"Don't let your mother hear you using 'ain't.' That water's like ice, bud."

"I been in a lot worse."

I felt his large hand cup on the top of my head.

A few minutes later I stood barefoot on the pebbles, the coldness of the water sucking around my thighs and genitals, my palm clutched in the preacher's. He leaned me back in the water and a vast green light seemed to cover my face and steal the breath from my lungs and invade my clothes and burn my skin.

Then, just as the preacher raised my face from the water, I opened my eyes and saw the trees arching overhead and the leafy green and yellow design they formed against the sky, and without knowing the words to circumscribe the idea, I knew I had entered a special and inviolate place, a private cathedral suffused with stained light that I would always return to in memory when I felt I was unworthy of the world.

While my father dried me off by a fire and put his old army shirt on me, the one with the Indianhead Division patch and sergeant's stripes on the sleeve, I glanced back at the stream and it looked ordinary now, apart from me, dotted with half-immersed people whom I did not know.

"What kind of trees are those?" I asked.

"Heartwood," my father said. "They grow in layers, like the spirit does. That's what Grandpa Sam used to say, anyway. You just got to keep the roots in a clear stream and not let nobody taint the water for you."

His jaw was filled with a ham sandwich, and it seemed to swell into the size of a softball when he grinned.