James Burke - Heartwood

"Some gangbangers caused the death of an accountant down in Houston. You and Cholo hear anything about that?" Temple said.

"I don't get to Houston much. Anyway, I'm signing off on this stuff. So excuse me and maybe I'll see you some other time," he said.

"Cholo got Esmeralda out of jail. You didn't want to be there for her yourself?" I said.

"We're not getting along real good right now," he replied.

Then I took a chance.

"Is Jeff getting next to your girl? She got busted out by his house," I said.

He looked at the tops of his hands, his face impenetrable.

"I heard you took some whacks for her. That's the only reason we're talking now. But anything between me and Jeff is private business. I don't mean nothing personal by that," he said.

He untied the bandanna from his head and shook it out and walked back into the garage.

Temple watched him go back to work on the shell of a 1941 Ford, the flats of her hands inserted in her back pockets.

"That kid's a piece of work. You see him throwing two guys off a roof?" she said.

"With about as much emotion as spitting out his gum," I said.

That afternoon I walked over to Marvin Pomroy's office in the courthouse. His secretary told me he was at the Mexican grocery store that was located just off the square. When I cut across the lawn toward the store, I thought I saw Skyler Doolittle walking on a side street, in his Panama hat and wilted seersucker, his upper torso bent forward, as though he wanted to arrive at his destination sooner than his body could take him.

I found Marvin Pomroy at a table under a wood-bladed fan in the back of the store, eating a taco while he read a book.

"I hope this is about baseball," he said.

"Was that Skyler Doolittle out there?" I asked.

"He came by and gave me a book. About Earl Deitrich's great-grandfather. Evidently the great-grandfather was an Alsatian diamond miner and slaver for the Belgians."

A uniformed deputy sheriff came in and bought a package of Red Man at the counter. He gave both of us a hard look before he went out.

"Esmeralda Ramirez isn't bringing sexual battery charges against Hugo's office, provided they don't charge you for punching out the deputy. Did you know that?" Marvin said.

"No, I didn't," I said. Marvin lifted his eyes into my face when I pulled out a chair and sat down without being invited. "Cut Wilbur Pickett loose."

"The state attorney's office seems to think he's a guilty man. I've gotten calls from a few other people, too." His eyes left mine and looked at nothing.

"Tell both them and Earl Deitrich to get lost," I said.

"Oh, yeah, that kind of statement makes people with money and power go away every time," he said.

We stared at each other in the silence. The breeze from the overhead fan ruffled the pages of the book he was reading. Marvin Pomroy was a good man who believed the system represented a level of integrity that somehow transcended the people who constantly manipulated it for their own ends. No amount of arguing or the personal battering of his soul had ever affected that faith. I knew nothing I said now would change that fact.

"Why'd Skyler Doolittle give you the book?" I asked.

"Hell if I know. I guess the great-grandfather was a genuine sonofabitch. He even wrote a handbook for the Belgian government on how to capture starved natives at night when they snuck into their gardens for food. Take a look at this picture. He used human skulls to border his flower beds… You all right?"

"Wilbur Pickett's wife talked about the same thing. She saw the picture inside her head. It has something to do with spirits that want revenge."

He pinched his temples gingerly, then signaled the waitress for his check.

"I think I'll stroll on back to the office. Don't get up. Stay and have some iced tea. It's on me. Really," he said.

That evening I had an unexpected visitor, my son, Lucas Smothers, who was finishing his first year at A amp;M. He parked his stepfather's pickup in the driveway and walked into the barn, where I was raking out the stalls and loading a wheelbarrow for the compost heap. His snap-button cowboy shirt was open on his chest and his straw hat was slanted down on his head. He squatted on his long legs, pushed the brim of his hat up with his thumb, and squinted with one eye at the sun setting over the tank, as though a great philosophic consideration was at hand.

"I can think about a whole lot more fun things to do this evening," he said.

"Aren't you supposed to be up at school?" I asked.

"I got exams next week. You want to wet a line?" he said.

"How about I buy you a barbecue dinner out at Shorty's instead?"

"I ain't got no objection to that." He stood up and removed a Mexican spur from a peg on the wall and spun the rowel with one finger. It was one of the spurs my friend L.Q. Navarro had worn the night he died down in Coahuila. "I hear you been messing with the Purple Hearts," he said.

"Who told you this?"

"I saw Jeff Deitrich at Val's Drive-in."

"You know why his father would want to get mixed up with Mexican gangbangers?"

"I don't know about his old man. I know about Jeff, though."

"Oh?"

"His reg'lar is a gal named Rita Summers. I said to him once, 'She's sure a nice girl. In fact, she's got it all, don't she?' He goes, 'So does vanilla ice cream, Lucas. That don't mean you cain't try chocolate.'"

He spun the rowel on the spur, then hung the spur back on the peg.

We drove through the hills in the cooling shadows to Shorty's and ate dinner on a screen porch that rested on pilings above the river. The water was high and milky green, and it flowed around the edge of a hill and dropped over boulders into pools that were white with cottonwood seeds. The air was cool now and smelled of fern and wet stone, and when the sun set, Shorty, the owner, turned on the electric lights in the oak trees that shaded his picnic tables.

The country band on the dance floor was just warming up.

"Got me a job roughnecking this summer. Got a bluegrass gig in Fredericksburg, too," Lucas said.

"You've done great, bud," I said.

He smiled but his eyes were looking beyond me, through the screen, at the shadows of the trees on the cliff wall across the river.

"Be careful with Deitrich," he said.

"I don't think Earl's a real big challenge."

His fork paused in front of his mouth. Then he set it in his plate. "I ain't talking about Earl," he said. "Jeff used to go down to Austin to roll homosexuals. Not for the money. Just to stomp the shit out of them. I always been too ashamed to tell anybody I seen it."

His eyes were downcast when he picked up his fork again. His face looked curiously like a girl's.

Peggy Jean didn't have to flirt to attract men to her. Oddly, a show of fatigue in her face, a buried injury, an unshared problem, made you want to step into her life and walk with her into the private places of the heart. Her vulnerability wove webs that allowed you to enter them without shame or caution.

On Thursday morning I saw her by her pickup truck at a farm supply and tack store on the edge of town. A clerk was carrying a western saddle from inside the store to the back of the truck while she waited by the open tailgate, a platinum American Express card held loosely between two fingers.

"Oh, hello, Billy Bob," she said when I walked up behind her. She wore tight riding pants and a checkered shirt and sunglasses, and she pushed her glasses more tightly against her face when she smiled.

"Beautiful saddle," I said.

"It's for Jeff's birthday." She kept one side of her face turned from me, as though she were waiting for someone else to emerge from inside the store.

"You already paid, Ms. Deitrich?" the clerk said, looking at the credit card in her hand.