James Burke - Heartwood

I dropped two shaved fifteen-foot posts into the holes I had dug, then shoveled a wheelbarrow-load of gravel around the bottoms for support, tamped down the gravel with a heavy iron bar, and added more. I was sweating and breathing hard, my face perspiring in the wind. When I turned around and looked into the shade of the myrtle hedge, L.Q. was gone.

The phone rang in my library late that night.

"You mind if we fish on the back of your property in the morning?" Wilbur said.

"Help yourself," I said.

"Tomorrow, if you got a minute, Kippy Jo wants to tell you something. I do, too."

After I ate breakfast the next morning I drove the Avalon through the field behind the barn, the grass whispering under the bumper, around the far corner of the tank, and down to the bluffs. The sun was just above the horizon, and the wind was still cool, and leaves from the grove of trees up on the knoll were blowing out on the water. Wilbur and Kippy Jo were down on the bank, fishing in the eddies behind a bleached, worm-carved cottonwood whose root system was impacted with rocks and clay. A knife-shaved willow branch humped with bream and catfish lay in the shallows.

"Tell him what you seen, Kippy Jo," Wilbur said.

She sat in a folding canvas chair and rested her rod across a bait bucket. She wore a pair of blue jeans and a white T-shirt with blue trim on the neck and sleeves. In the softness of the sunrise her hair had a blue-black shine in it and was curved around her throat.

"There won't be an oil well where Wilbur wants to drill. Just a windmill," she said.

"She says I ain't gonna find no oil. Ain't that a pistol? Course, that means Earl Deitrich ain't gonna get none, either," Wilbur said.

"This is what you wanted to tell me?" I said.

Kippy Jo wet her lips. Her eyes followed my voice and fixed on my face. "I've had a horrible vision in my sleep. Several people stand at the entrance to Hell. Or at least one man in the group thinks he sees them there. It's like I'm inside this man's thoughts and I see the entrance to Hell through his eyes. Then there's a gunshot," she said.

"I don't take your gift lightly. But if I was y'all, I wouldn't think a whole lot on what tomorrow holds. The sun is going to come up whether we're here for it or not," I said.

"Yeah, that kind of talk gives me the cold sweats, Kippy Jo," Wilbur said. He cast his bobber out into the current again and picked up a lunch bucket and offered it to me. "Fried cottontail and Kippy Jo's buttermilk biscuits, son. There ain't no better eating."

"I believe it," I said, and then said goodbye to his wife and walked back up to my automobile.

Wilbur caught up with me just as I opened the car door. He wore khakis smeared with fish blood and a black T-shirt with the sleeves rolled up over the tops of his arms. A self-deprecating smile hung on the edge of his mouth.

"I been studying all this time about making money, but the truth is Kippy Jo don't care if I got it or not," he said. "It takes some kind of fool to be so long in figuring out what counts, don't it?"

"I think you're ahead of the game, Wilbur," I replied.

I drove back up to the house, brushed out Beau in the lot, watered the flowers in the beds, and went inside to shower and change before going to the office.

Lucas and Esmeralda were eating at the kitchen table. Esmeralda wore a Mexican peasant blouse and a red hibiscus in her hair, almost as though she were deliberately dressing like a Hispanic.

"Running late, aren't you, bud?" I said.

"Our well's a duster. The bossman shut it down yesterday," Lucas said.

"Y'all doin' all right?" I said.

"Fine. I love your place. It's real nice of you to let us stay here," Esmeralda said.

"It's my pleasure," I said.

"We're going down to Temple Carrol's. Her daddy's got an old Gibson she wants me to string. Oh, I forgot to tell you. She called and said she's got to go to Bonham till tomorrow night. Something about taking a deposition for another lawyer," Lucas said.

I nodded, then felt a strange and unfamiliar sense of loneliness at the thought of Temple's being gone.

"Y'all have a good one," I said. When I left the house for the office Esmeralda seemed lost in thought, like a person who has arrived at a destination she never planned.

Later, on the way home for lunch, I stopped at the convenience store down the road for gas. While I was paying inside, I noticed a man with a florid, narrow face at the cafe counter. His eyes were a washed-out blue, his hair like a well-trimmed piece of orange rug glued to his scalp. A puckered burn scar was webbed across the right side of his neck. He drank coffee and smoked a cigarette and glanced at his watch.

I stared at him, remembering my last conversation with Ronnie Cruise.

I took my change from the cashier and walked to the counter and sat down next to the man with orange hair.

"You're Charley Quail," I said.

He took his cigarette from his mouth and looked through the smoke at me. "You know me?" he said.

"You used to drive stock cars at the old track out by the drive-in movie. You raced at Daytona," I replied.

"That's me."

"It's an honor to meet you," I said.

His hand was weightless in my grip. I remembered an article from the Austin newspaper, two or three years back, about Charley Quail's long travail with alcoholism, the jails and detox centers, a greasepit fire that turned his body into a candle. He looked at his watch, then compared the time with the clock on the wall and looked over his shoulder at the road.

"You waiting on the bus?" I asked.

"It's supposed to be here at 12:14. I don't know if my watch is wrong, or the one up on the wall, or if both of them is."

"Where you headed?"

"San Antone."

"You know a Mexican kid named Ronnie Cruise? Some people call him Ronnie Cross," I said.

"I just delivered a car for him. I had to look all over the cottonpickin' county for the right house, too."

"Where did you leave it, Charley?"

"None of your goddamn business." He tilted his chin up to show his defiance.

"Sorry. I didn't mean to offend you," I said, getting up from the counter stool. "Is Ronnie a pretty good friend of yours?"

"He was my mechanic. He pulled me out of a fire. You one of them people been giving that boy trouble?" he said.

When I got to my house ten minutes later, expecting to see Cholo's car, the driveway was empty. I looked inside the barn, then behind it, chickens scurrying and cackling in front of me. But there was no sign of the '49 Mercury. The windmill swung suddenly in the breeze, the blades clattering to life, and a gush of water spurted out of the well pipe into Beau's tank.

The next afternoon Pete and I loaded Beau in his trailer and hooked the trailer onto my truck, and went to look for arrowheads in the ravine where Skyler Doolittle and Jessie Stump had once hidden in a cave.

The sun was still high in the sky and the cliffs were yellow with sunshine, the air heavy with the smell of the pines that dotted the slopes. I shoveled silt from the edge of the creekbed onto a portable seine with an army-surplus E-tool while Pete picked flint chippings and small pieces of pottery off the screen.

"I heard a schoolteacher in the barbershop say we ain't supposed to do this," Pete said.

"This stuff is washed down from a workmound or a tepee ring. It doesn't hurt anything to surface-hunt," I replied.

"Is digging with a shovel surface-hunting?"

"Matter of definition," I said.

"How you know there wasn't a tepee ring right here?" he asked.

"Would you build your house where a creek could flow through it?" I said. "Say, look at that pair of hawks up in the redbuds."

When he turned his head and stared up the slope into the trees, I took a flat, fan-shaped piece of yellow chert with a sharply beveled edge from my pocket and tossed it onto the screen.