James Burke - Heartwood

"What are you staring at? Sonofabitch drank out of a fire extinguisher," one deputy said.

The second deputy looked at me with recognition, his arm locking simultaneously around the black man's struggling head.

"Hey, your client, the freak in the cage? We pick him up again on the same beef, he's going out of here a steer," he said.

That evening a tornado destroyed an entire community south of us and killed over thirty people. I rode Beau, my Morgan, out into the fields and watched the dust blowing on the southern horizon and the rain clouds moving like oil smoke across the sun. I turned Beau back toward the house just as the rain began to march across the fields and dimple the river.

The sky turned black and the temperature must have dropped twenty degrees. I turned on the lights in the barn and tied on a leather apron and pried a loose shoe off Beau's back left hoof. A car turned off the highway into my drive, paused for a moment by the side of the porch, then rolled slowly to the front of the barn.

Its headlights were on high beam and shone directly into my eyes.

I picked up a hammer off the anvil and stood just inside the opened doors of the barn. The headlights went off and I saw a chopped, sunburst 1961 T-Bird, with chrome wire wheels and an oxblood leather interior, full of Mexican kids. Ronnie Cruise cut the engine and walked through the rain into the barn.

He wore baggy black trousers and a form-fitting ribbed undershirt and a rosary with purple glass beads around his neck; his shoulders looked tan and hard and were beaded with water.

"That's quite a car," I said.

"Me and Cholo built it. I done a lot of custom work for people around here," he said. His eyes dropped momentarily to the hammer in my hand. "You think we're here to 'jack your Avalon, man?"

"You tell me."

"I didn't mean to dis you at the garage. But see-" He held his fingers up in the air and looked at them as he spoke, as though they held the words he needed. "See, I heard what the lady said when my back was turned, about two guys going off a roof. Like, that's the story somebody told you. But you didn't have the respect to ask me about it. I don't think that's too cool, man."

"So maybe it's none of our business."

"Yeah, well, I'll clear it up for you. A couple of Viscounts put their hands all over a girl in a theater. Then when they had to explain theirselves they got scared and like the punks they were they pulled a nine. Maybe the guy they pulled it on got it away from them and chased them across a couple of roofs. So the two Counts decided they were gonna jump to a fire escape. They almost made it. But the guy didn't throw nobody off a roof…" His eyes searched my face. "Why you keep looking at me like that?"

"Because I don't have any idea why you're here."

He cut his eyes sideways and exhaled through his nose.

"There's a tornado out there and I couldn't get back home," he said.

"Y'all want some coffee?"

He pawed at his cheek with three fingers. "Yeah, I think that'd be nice," he said.

I went into the house and brought back a pot of coffee and a paper sack full of tin cups. His friends, two girls and two boys, all of them wearing caps backwards on their heads, sat on hay bales or walked idly through the stalls, touching saddles, coils of polyrope, rakes, hoes, mattocks, bridles, a pair of chaps, axes, and fire tongs as though they were historical artifacts.

I rasped Beau's hoof smooth and reshoed it, then led him toward his stall. Ronnie Cruise stepped behind him to get to the coffeepot, and Beau's back hooves slashed into the air like jackhammers. Ronnie grabbed his shinbone, his face white with pain, his shirtfront drenched with coffee. I grabbed him by one arm and eased him down on a hay bale.

"You all right?" I said.

"Oh yeah. I always like getting my spokes broken." He rocked forward, squeezing his shin with both hands.

"Let me show you something. You can work behind a horse all you want as long as you let him know what you're doing," I said.

I ran my hand and arm along Beau's spine and rump and let my body brush close into his when I moved across his hindquarters. "An animal is just like a human being. He fears what he doesn't understand. Here, step up beside me," I said.

Ronnie Cruise rose to his feet, then hesitated, his tongue wetting his bottom lip. I picked up his hand by the wrist and set it on Beau's rump, then pulled Ronnie toward me. Beau twisted his head once so he could see us, then blew out his breath and shifted his weight on the plank floor.

"See?" I said.

"Yeah."

"Your leg okay?"

"Yeah, no problem." His face was inches from mine now.

"Do me a favor, will you?" I said.

"What?"

"Don't wear a rosary as a piece of jewelry."

Raindrops as big as marbles clattered on the tin roof. He stared back at me, his mouth cone-shaped with incomprehension.

In the morning the San Antonio and Austin and local newspapers were filled with news about the tornado that had scoured an entire town out of the earth. But they also carried a wire story about a fire that had burned down half a city block in Houston later the same day.

Before I could finish reading the newspaper's account of the fire, the phone next to my kitchen table rang. It was the Houston homicide detective whose name was Janet Valenzuela.

"Why is it people from Deaf Smith keep showing up in my caseload?" she said.

"You've lost me," I said.

"It's not a good story," she said.

The fire had started in the bottom of an empty office building that had once housed a savings and loan company. The rooms had been filled with stacked office furniture, rolled carpets stripped from the floors, jars of paint thinner, and paper packing cases left behind by the movers. The fire rippled across the exposed dry wood in the floors, snaked up the walls, flattening temporarily against the ceiling, then blew glass onto the sidewalks and curled outside onto the brick facade.

Five minutes later the ceiling collapsed and the second- and third-story windows were filled with a yellow-red brilliance like the marbled colors inside a foundry.

A fireman inside the fourth-floor stairwell used his radio to report what he swore was the voice of a child. Three other firemen went into the building, and together they worked their way from room to room on the fourth floor, ripping open doors with their axes, their heavy coats and the inside of their face shields starting to superheat from the flames crawling up the walls.

Then a fireman yelled into his radio: "It's a doll. A talking doll. Oh God, the tiger's got us… Tell my wife I…"

The fire, fed by a sudden rush of cold air, turned the brick shell of the building into a chimney swirling with flame. The roof exploded into the night sky like a Roman candle.

"The doll was one of these battery-operated jobs. We think a homeless woman left it in there and the heat set it off," Janet Valenzuela said.

"How'd the fire start?"

"Winos and street people live in there. Somebody saw some Hispanic kids hanging around earlier. The place was filled with accelerants. Take your choice."

"Why are you calling me?"

"The building belonged to a savings and loan company before it went bankrupt and was seized by the government. But the land it stood on is owned by a man named Earl Deitrich. That's the guy Max Greenbaum was an accountant for. Funny coincidence, huh?"

"Come up and see us sometime. Widen your horizons," I said.

"If it's arson and homicide on federal property, you'll get to meet us as well as the FBI. Say, does this guy Deitrich know any Houston gang members?"

"You ever hear of a bunch called the Purple Hearts in San Antone?" I asked.

"Say again?"

At lunchtime I walked from my office to our town's one health club and sat in the steam room with my back against the tiles. The bruises from the baton blows I had taken in Hugo Roberts's office looked like purple and yellow carrots under my skin. I dipped a sponge in a bucket of water and squeezed it over my head, then lay on my back and stretched my muscles by pulling my knees toward my chest.