James Burke - Heartwood

"No, I'm sorry. I'll go inside and take care of it," she replied.

"Let me have your card and I'll bring the charge slip out here for you to sign. It ain't no trouble at all," the clerk said, and took the card from between her fingers before she could reply.

Peggy Jean looked away awkwardly at the loading platform. Her skin high up on one cheekbone was heavily made up with rouge and powder.

"Everything okay, Peggy Jean?" I said.

"Oh yes, just one of those days," she said, then smiled, like an afterthought. "It's so windy out here today." She took a bandanna from her back pocket and tied it around her hair, knotting it under her chin.

"It's too bad about the accountant, that fellow named Greenbaum. He seemed like a nice man," I said.

"What are you talking about?"

"He's dead. He was jumped by some gangbangers at Herman Park in Houston."

" Max? When?"

"I'm sorry. I thought y'all knew."

"No… I heard nothing… You're talking about Max Greenbaum?"

She seemed to look about her, as though the answer to her confusion were inside the wind.

I stepped closer to her, my fingers touching her elbows.

"I'll drive you home," I said.

"No… Absolutely not… Billy Bob, please, just…"

She walked away from me and stood in the shade by the driver's door of her pickup, her arms folded in front of her, as though she were creating a sanctuary that I couldn't enter. The clerk came out of the store with her credit card and charge slip attached to a clipboard. Then he saw her expression and his face turned inward and he lowered his eyes.

"If you'll just sign this, ma'am, I'll take care of everything and you can be on your way," he said.

"Peggy Jean-" I began.

"I'm sorry for my lack of composure. Max? No, there's a mistake about this," she said, and got in her truck and scoured a cloud of pink dust out of the parking lot.

I sat in the half-light of my office and drank a cup of coffee. On the wall, encased in glass on a field of blue felt, were the. 36-caliber Navy Colt revolvers and octagon-barrel lever-action '73 Winchester rifle that had been carried by my great-grandpa Sam Morgan Holland when he was a drover on the Chisholm Trail. In his life he had also been in the Fourth Texas at Little Round Top, a violent drunkard who shot five or six men in gun duels, and finally a saddle preacher who took his ministry into the godless moonscape west of the Pecos.

The bluing on Sam's weapons had long ago been rubbed off by holster wear, and the steel now had the dull hue of an old nickel. In Sam's diary he described his encounters with John Wesley Hardin, Wild Bill Longley, and the Dalton-Doolin gang, all of whom he loathed as either psychopaths or white trash. But in his account of their depredations there is never an indication that the worst of them ever struck a woman.

In the historical South the physical abuse of a woman by a man was on a level with sodomy of animals. Such a man was considered a moral and physical coward and was merely horsewhipped if he was lucky.

But today a woman who did not flee the batterer or seek legal redress was usually consigned to her fate, even considered deserving of it.

I wondered what Great-Grandpa Sam would do in my situation.

I set my empty coffee cup in my saucer, opened my Rolodex to the "D" section, and punched a number into my telephone.

"Earl?" I said.

"Yes?"

"Who hit your wife?"

"What?"

"You heard me. On the right side of her face."

"You've got some damn nerve."

"So it was you?"

"You keep your carping, self-righteous mouth off my family."

"Touch her again and I'll catch you out in public. Everything you own or you can buy won't help you."

He slammed down the phone. I sat for a long time in the pale light glowing through the blinds, the fingers of my right hand curling into the oil and moisture on my palm.

That evening a lacquered red biplane dropped out of an absolutely blue sky, circled once over the river, and landed in the pasture beyond the tank. I got into the Avalon and drove past the chicken run and barn and windmill and out through the tall grass that grew at the foot of the levee. When I came around the willows at the far end of the tank I saw the man named Bubba Grimes, who had claimed that Wilbur Pickett had tried to sell him bearer bonds; he was leaning against the fuselage of his plane, pouring from a dark bottle of Cold Duck into a paper cup.

"You tend to show up in a peculiar fashion, Mr. Grimes," I said, getting out of the Avalon.

He set down the bottle on the bottom wing of his plane and grinned at the corner of his mouth. His drooping left eye looked like gray rubber that had melted and cooled again.

"Got an offer for you. Wilbur Pickett is about to have some bad luck. Price is right, I can change all that," he said.

"Wilbur's a poor man, Mr. Grimes. That means I'd have to give you money out of my own pocket. Now, why would I want to do that?"

"To bring down Earl Deitrich. The word is you topped his wife."

"I think it's time for you to get back in your plane."

He drank his paper cup empty and tossed it in the weeds. "The man's weakness is gambling. You want my hep, here's my number. The two of us can mess him up proper," he said, and shoved a penciled piece of notepad paper in my shirt pocket with two fingers.

"Get off my property," I said.

He cut his head. "I cain't blame you for not wanting to know your own mind. That woman's special. She's got a fragrance like roses. In Africa once, she'd been out working in the heat and she come in the tent, and the smell was like warm roses. It's too bad rich men always get the pick of the brooder house."

In the red light his face was filled with a glow that was both saccharine and lustful. When he took off, he raised his bottle in salute; his plane clipped the top of a willow tree and scattered leaves behind him like green bird feathers.

Five days later Lucas Smothers came to my office and sat in the swayback deerhide chair in the corner and took off his hat and gazed out the window. He had been working in the fields with his stepfather, and I could smell an odor like grass and milk in his clothes. He had his mother's blue eyes, and the light seemed to enter and hold inside them as it would inside tinted crystal. His expression was deliberately innocuous, as it always was when he felt caught between his need to instruct and caution me and at the same time protect me from the knowledge of what his generation, with its rapacious addictions, was really like.

"A guy who runs around with Jeff? He told me this crazy story about him, about how Jeff ain't always in control like he pretends. It's a little off the wall, though," he said.

"I'll try to handle it," I said.

"That Mexican girl who got busted out on the highway, Esmeralda? It was Jeff called the cops on her. His friend says Jeff did a one-nighter with her. Except she won't go away and the truth is Jeff don't want her to, no matter what he tells himself and everybody else."

I had to be in court in twenty minutes and I tried not to let my attention wander or my eyes drop to my wrist-watch.

"So a couple of nights ago Jeff drives his girlfriend, Rita Summers, down to this Mexican restaurant north of San Antone where Esmeralda works. Jeff's gonna show Esmeralda there's nothing between them and Rita is his reg'lar and he ain't afraid to get it all out in the open, if that's what it takes.

"All his buds are there, cranking down tequila sunrises and Carta Blanca, after they been smoking dope all the way from Deaf Smith. When Esmeralda walks by with a tray, some guy goes, 'I never thought I'd like to have sloppy seconds on a pepperbelly.'

"Jeff's face looked like he'd eaten a tack. Rita Summers don't say anything for a long time, then she calls Esmeralda over and goes, 'Excuse me, but this food tastes like dog turds.'