Heartwood

25

Late that night we stopped in a rest area south of Uvalde and lowered the leather seats back and slept until dawn. In my dream I saw L.Q. and me riding hard down a hill of yellow grass that was lined with flame across the crest. The sky was the texture and color of old bone, and smoke and dust were blowing out of the hills across a sun that gave no heat. Our horses came out of the grass just ahead of the fire, ash and cinders raining upon our heads, then we were on a baked, white flood-plain in which our horses' hooves sculpted holes as big as buckets.

But up ahead were a green river, shadowed with willow trees that had turned gold with the season, and in the distance rain falling on hills where red Angus grazed. L.Q.'s pinstripe suit was strung with horse saliva and sweat, his coat blowing back from the Ranger badge on his belt and the tied-down revolver on his thigh.

"Use your spur, bud. They'll cuff us to mesquite trees and cut off our toes and dance in the smoke while we burn," he said.

"He's fixing to go lame, L.Q."

Then I felt my gelding heave sideways under me, slamming me into the soft, baked soil that cracked under my weight like cake icing and powdered my suit with alkali. L.Q. reined his mare and I hit her rump running, vaulting on two hands behind the cantle. I felt her power surge up like a barrel between my thighs, and I locked both arms around L.Q.'s waist and we plunged into the river and down the shelf into deep water.

I saw the alkali and ash and the blackened grass from the fields wash away in the current and felt the water's warmth swell inside my clothes. But something was wrong. The hills on the far side of the river had caught fire, the autumnal gold of the willows now crinkling with flame. Inside the smoke, I could hear cattle stampeding, a roar so loud the surface of the river trembled.

L.Q. had floated out of the saddle and was holding onto the pommel, water rilling off the brim of his hat.

" I think this is the big one, L.Q.," I said.

" It'll take better than them scumbags to do the likes of us," he replied.

"We put ourselves in it."

" In what?" he asked.

"Hell. That's what this is. We've been locating ourselves next to every evil sonofabitch in north Mexico."

"That's the job description, bud. They commit the crime and we splatter their grits. It beats selling shoes, don't it? Stop tasking your innards. The day you lose your humanity is the day you let Johnny Krause's kind have their way."

When Temple shook me awake it was raining only two hundred yards away, like a wet curtain of spangled light that partitioned the land, and the live oaks overhead were green and softly focused against the primrose tint of the sunrise in the east. I could smell cattle in a livestock truck that was parked by the rest station, and the sand flats and the rain dimpling on the Nueces River down below.

"You okay, Billy Bob?" she asked.

"Sure."

"You always have dreams like that?"

A trucker and his wife were eating their breakfast at a stone table under a shed, their faces serene and rested in the cool of the morning, and two little girls were playing on the grass with a big rubber ball. I widened my eyes and opened the car door and felt the flat, dry hardness of the cement under my boot, as though I were touching ground again after having been disconnected from the earth.

"It looks like it's going to be a right nice day," I said.

Temple hooked her elbow over the back of the passenger seat. Her eyes moved over my face with an undisguised affection in them, then she reached out with her fingertips and brushed a strand of hair out of my eye.

That afternoon Wilbur Pickett put his hands on his hips and stared at Kippy Jo's dresser and decided he had fixed the uneven drawers for the last time. They hung on the runners and jammed sideways and the threading on the knobs had stripped on the screws. Besides, the paneling on the left side that Hugo Roberts and his deputies had ripped loose searching for the stolen bearer bonds was split diagonally along the face like a long white crack in a mahogany tooth.

So he asked permission first, then removed all the clothes from the drawers and folded them on the bed and hauled the dresser to the barn, where he dropped it up-right and began chopping it apart for kindling. On the third blow of the ax the frame cleaved in half and sank in upon itself, and he hooked the ax on the left panel and prised the nails from the warped seam at the top. When he did, the panel cracked apart like a walnut shell, and between the lower portion of the splintered wood and a piece of scrap board that a previous owner had inserted next to the drawer space was the green-and-white-printed edge of a bearer bond.

"They must have planted three of them instead of two," Wilbur said over the phone.

"Did you touch it?" I asked.

"Not with a manure fork, son," he replied.

An hour later he was waiting for me on a wood chair in front of the barn when Marvin Pomroy and I and a fingerprint man from San Antonio and Hugo Roberts pulled into his drive in three different cars. Wilbur's hair was wet and combed, and he had put on fresh blue jeans and a beige sports shirt and a pair of dress boots. He stood up from his chair and extended his hand to Marvin.

"How you do, Mr. Pomroy?" he said.

Marvin hesitated just a second, then reached out and took Wilbur's hand. No one spoke and a bucket hanging on a nail inside the barn door tinked against the wood in the wind.

"I don't hold no personal grudge," Wilbur said.

"I understand you have a piece of evidence that bears looking at," Marvin said.

"It's what them worthless deputies stuck in there and didn't take back out," Wilbur said.

Hugo Roberts screwed a cigarette into his mouth and lit it with his lighter, blowing the smoke out in the sunset.

"If this ain't the silliest waste of time I can think of, I don't know what is," he said.

"If you're going to smoke, do it downwind from me, Hugo," Marvin said.

The independent fingerprint man from San Antonio picked up the bearer bond gingerly with a pair of tweezers and dropped it into a plastic bag.

"Y'all put me in mind of somebody tweezering corn out of pig shit. What in the hell is this supposed to prove?" Hugo said.

"I imagine all your deputies' fingerprints are on file, as well as your own, Hugo. You'll make those immediately available to us, won't you?" I said.

"I don't have nothing else to do. Did your boy smash up a bunch of cars with his stepdaddy's pickup truck?" he replied. He looked out at a freight train crossing a trestle in the hills and held his cigarette close to his lips with two fingers and puffed it uninterruptedly, the skin of his face the same nicotine shade as his fingers in the late sunlight.

I had just hung up the phone after talking to Marvin Pomroy when Wilbur came through my office door at noon the next day. He continued to stand rather than take a chair, his teeth clamped down on the corner of his lip, his hat held with both hands in front of his belt buckle.

"Hugo Roberts's prints and Kyle Rose's are on the bond. Yours aren't," I said.

"Kyle Rose, the deputy somebody strung a deer arrow through?" Wilbur said.

"That's the guy. You didn't steal those bonds. They were planted, Wilbur. Marvin Pomroy just said as much."

"What's it mean?"

"I have some paperwork to do, then you're going to be out of it."

He sat down in a chair and rubbed the back of his neck, his eyes burrowing into the carpet.

"What about Kippy Jo?" he asked.

"She's still on the hook."

"One deal's part of the other, ain't it? If I hadn't been set up, Bubba Grimes wouldn't have been sent out there to kill me and Kippy Jo."

"I thought you'd be happy."

He got up from the chair, my words never registering in his face.

"I can leave the state now, cain't I?" he said.

"Excuse me?"

"Them boys investing in my pipeline deal down in Venezuela? I showed them that core sample from up in Wyoming. They're ready to rock."

I propped my elbow on the arm of my swivel chair and rubbed the corner of my chin.

"To drill a damn oil well you'd leave your wife by herself?" I said.

"It's money all this is about. She ain't standing trial for killing Bubba Grimes. She's standing trial 'cause her husband's got something Earl Deitrich wants."

"You want to buy and sell him, don't you?" I said.

His skin was still slick with the heat and moisture from outside, and he wiped his throat and looked at the shine his sweat made on his calluses. He wiped his hand dry on his shirtfront and said, "I was one second from being a world champion. Lacking that one second makes me a guy who digs postholes for rich people. You think Ms. Deitrich's a high-class woman. Maybe she is. But when I worked out at their place, she never give me a drink of water that wasn't in a jelly glass. Kippy Jo Pickett is gonna have rubies on her fingers big as bird's eggs, and there ain't nobody in this county, particularly not no dadburn Deitrichs, gonna look down on us."

The next afternoon I loaded Beau in his trailer and we drove north of the river to the base of the ravine where Pete and I often hunted arrowheads and the flint chip-pings washed down from Tonkawa workmounds. I hung L.Q. Navarro's holstered. 45 and gun belt from one side of the pommel and my rucksack from the other and rode up the incline along the creekbed, Beau's shoes raking dully on the stones along the bank.

The water in the creek was shallow and tea-colored, flowing over green and brown and white pebbles that were no bigger than my thumbnail. The western wall of the drainage was in shadow now, but the east side was of the soft gold texture that light makes when it collects inside a newly coopered pine barrel. The wind blew from the bottom of the ravine and I saw the scrub brush and redbud trees riffle and change tone in the sunlight against the cliff wall, and for just a moment I saw the dark opening of the cave where I believed Skyler Doolittle and Jessie Stump had been living.

I got down from the saddle and lifted the strap of the rucksack off the pommel and looped it over my left shoulder and hung L.Q.'s gun belt from my right and began walking up the path that was barely visible in the pine needles that had been foot-pressed blackly into the soil between the trees.

Just before I reached the cave I threw a pebble at the entrance and watched it bounce off the face of the cliff and roll down the incline. Then I threw a second, this time right through the hole in the rock.

"You guys wouldn't be upset if I visited you, would you?" I said.

But there was no response.

I closed the distance to the cave and squatted down under a redbud tree and took my flashlight out of the rucksack and shined it inside the rock, then stepped under the overhang and stood erect inside the cave itself.

The sleeping bags and canned goods were gone. The vinyl garbage bags that had been flattened on the floor were now tangled and stenciled with silt from the soles of lug boots. The plank that had contained canned goods had been pulled out of the wall and thrown into the back of the cave and the one-gallon molasses can that had held drinking water had been crushed and scoured with scratches on the stone ring around the firepit.

I stepped out of the cave's coolness into the warmth of the afternoon and the breeze gusting up the drainage. The sunlight glimmered on the outcroppings that had been leached clean of soil by the springs flowing out of the hillside and had turned green with lichen. Were Jessie and Skyler buried somewhere along the creek? Had they been covered with rocks or perhaps rooted up and devoured by animals? I doubted it. Whoever had crushed the water can and prised the wood plank out of the wall had taken out his anger on the cave as a surrogate for his intended human victims.

I walked back down the path and mounted Beau and rode over the plates of stone that scraped like slate under his hooves.

I drove the truck, with Beau's trailer wobbling behind it, down the dirt road onto the state highway, then followed the river to the northeast corner of the county, where an oxbow had formed in 1927, then had been dammed up and allowed to become a glistening yellowish-green sump filled with mosquitoes, dead trees webbed with river trash, and shacks knocked together from slat board, tar paper, and stovepipe.

I rode down a dirt street between empty shacks, then crossed a slough and continued up a rise through trees and a break between two low-lying hills that gave onto a glade where a group of California hippies had tried to live in the late 1960s. They had hung tepees and built a longhouse of pine logs and sweat lodges of river stones, dug a water well and root cellars, and carpentered a marvelous cistern on top of boulders they rolled from the fields with hand-hewn poles.

Twenty-five deputized vigilantes burned them out in 1968.

I got down from Beau and lifted the rucksack and L.Q.'s gun belt off the pommel and walked to the foot of the hill on the far side of the glade. Pine trees grew up the slope toward the crest and crows were cawing deep in the shadows. I kicked a bare spot in the ground and made a fire ring from field stones, then gathered an armful of twigs and rotted branches among the trees and coned them up in the fire ring and lit them with a paper match.

I squatted upwind from the smoke, removed a skillet from the rucksack and rubbed the bottom with butter and set the skillet on stones among the flames. When the butter had browned, I lay two large ham steaks inside and watched them fry, then cracked four raw eggs on the edge of the skillet and cooked them next to the ham.

The smoke flattened in the wind and drifted back into the trees on the hillside. A man with a fused neck pushed aside the slat door on a root cellar and stepped out into the shadows. A second man followed him, his face cratered with scars that looked like popped bubbles on the surface of paint.

L.Q.'s gun belt and holstered. 45 still hung from my right shoulder. I ladled the eggs and meat onto two tin plates, then toasted four slices of bread in the ham fat and put them in the plates, too. I could see Jessie Stump's tall, skinny frame out of the corner of my vision and feel his eyes watching me.

"How'd you know where we was at?" he asked.

"You grew up on the oxbow. It didn't take a lot of figuring," I said.

"How come you brung a pistol?" he asked.

"I've always taken you for a serious man," I replied. I picked up the skillet with both hands and drained the last of the ham fat over the eggs and bread and didn't look up.

"Didn't nobody else reckon it," Skyler Doolittle said.

"That's because they searched here first. In the meantime, y'all were in a cave up above the Deitrich place," I said.

"Maybe you're too damn smart for your own good, boy," Jessie said.

"Don't be addressing Mr. Holland like that. He's a decent man," Skyler said.

I stood up and handed Skyler a plate.

"You want to eat, Jessie?" I said.

"I ain't against it," he replied. His black, unwashed hair had the same liquid brightness as his eyes.

"Somebody liked to nailed y'all in that cave," I said.

"You goddamn right they did. They'd a done it if it hadn't been for Ms. Deitrich," Jessie said.

"Come again?" I said.

"She was blackberrying up there. Had three or four quart jars full," Skyler said. "I think she seen the smoke from our fire. Next day this note was stuck on a pine branch partway up the path."

He unfolded a sheet of blue stationery from bis pocket and handed it to me. It read, "This isn't a safe place for you. Leave before your hiding place is discovered. Those who will find you mean you great injury."

"It's not signed," I said.

"Ain't nobody else been up there. To my mind, she's a great lady," Skyler said.

"Mr. Doolittle, I want y'all to surrender," I said.

"That ain't gonna happen, boy," Jessie said.

"He's right," Skyler said.

"They'll kill both of y'all," I said.

Jessie wiped his plate clean with a piece of bread and ate it, then set the plate down on the grass and pulled his shirt out of his trousers. A bloody white sock was tied with a strip of cloth across his top rib.

"That's where some boys in a Jeep notched me with a deer rifle. Next time I'll catch them in their sleeping bags," he said.

"Is this what you want?" I said to Skyler.

"No, sir. I'd like to be let alone," he replied.

I inverted the skillet and knocked it clean on the fire ring, then slipped a paper sack over it and dropped it in the rucksack and hung the rucksack on the pommel of Beau's saddle.

"You gonna turn us in?" Jessie said.

I put my left boot in the stirrup and swung up on the saddle. I felt Beau try to jerk his head up.

"I'm going to ask you just once, Jessie. Take your hand off his bridle," I said.

"Then you answer me. You gonna turn us in or not?" Jessie said.

"He's a river-baptized man, Jessie. He's got the thumbprint of God on his soul. Let him pass, son," Skyler said.

The sun had dropped behind the hills now and the air was moist and heavy and dense with mosquitoes and the bats that fed off them. I crossed the slough and rode back down the dirt street through the row of empty shacks that were encircled by the ugly scar of the oxbow off the river. I felt the thick weight of a bat thud against the crown of my hat, and I kept my face pointed down at Beau's withers until we were up on high ground again.

Peggy Jean knew Jessie Stump had tried to drive a barbed arrow through her husband's head, yet had warned him and Skyler Doolittle so they could avoid capture.

Why?

That's what I asked Temple Carrol two hours later while she smacked her gloves into the heavy bag behind her house. She wore a pair of khaki shorts and a gray workout halter and alpine lug boots with thick socks folded down on her ankles, and her thighs were tan and muscular and tight against her rolled shorts.

"Maybe Peggy Jean wants it all. Maybe that's always been her way," she said.

"Pardon?" I said.

She hit the bag again, left, right, left, right, left, and hard right hook, twisting the bag on the chain, ignoring me.

"Will you give it a break?" I said.

"Her first soldier boy got killed in Vietnam. Then she tried a blue-collar kid like you. Then she found another soldier boy with money. Maybe she'd like to keep the money and that monstrosity of a house they live in and have another roll in the hay with you. Feel flattered?" she said.

"Pretty rough assessment."

"Sorry. I'll go scrub out my mouth with Ajax," she said.

She went back to work on the bag. The moon was big and yellow behind the pecan tree in her backyard. Out in the darkness I could hear the wind rattling in her neighbor's cornfield. Her invalid father was inside the house, and I could see his silhouette, in his wheelchair, against the lighted television screen in the front room.

"You mad at me?" I said.

"No, not really. You're what you are. I can't change it," she answered.

I hooked my arm around the top of the bag.

"You've never let me down. They don't make them any better than you, Temple," I said.

"You live with ghosts. I can't compete with them."

"Don't talk like that."

"You don't understand women, Billy Bob. At least you don't understand me."

I put my hands on the tips of her shoulders, even while she was shaking her head.

"I'm hot and dirty," she said.

I touched the pool of moisture in the hollow of her neck and slid my hands down her back and smelled the heat in her hair and felt the tone of her muscles and the taper of her hips against my palms. I let my lips brush against her cheek, and for the first time in our many years as intimate friends I consciously stepped over a line into Temple's life.

She raised on the balls of her feet, her stomach against my loins, as though she were going to kiss me, then her face broke and she walked hurriedly into the house, dropping her gloves randomly into the dust, and closed the door and locked it behind her.