James Burke: Heartwood

He dropped the cane pole across a willow branch and got into his paint-skinned truck and began grinding the starter.

"Wilbur, get down here and talk," I said.

His engine caught and he twisted his head back toward me as he turned the wheel with both hands.

"You killed people and you ain't sorry? That ain't the Billy Bob Holland I always knowed. Why'd you tell me that?" he said, his eyes wet.

He roared through the field, the tall grass whipping under his front bumper, trash blowing from the bed of his truck.

Late the next afternoon I received a phone call from Kippy Jo Pickett, Wilbur's wife.

"They tore up our house. They ripped the floor out of the barn," she said.

"Who did?" I said.

"The sheriff and his men."

"Did he have a search warrant?"

"He said he did. He kept rattling a paper in front of me. He smelled like liquor," she said.

"Where's Wilbur?" I asked.

"They drove him out to the hills. When they brought him back, he wouldn't come in the house," she replied.

A half hour later I parked in Wilbur's dirt drive and walked around the side of the house to the back, where he was burning trash in an oil barrel. His shirt hung on a fence post and his skin looked like warm tallow in the yellow and red light of the fire. The kitchen window was at my back. I turned and looked through the screen into the sightless eyes of Kippy Jo.

"I'm sorry. I didn't see you there," I said, regaining my breath.

She walked away from the sink without answering.

Wilbur glanced up from his work, then went on shoving a stack of splintered boards into the flames.

"Hugo Roberts drove you out in the hills?" I said.

Wilbur sucked in one side of his mouth. "He showed me what was left of a cougar that got caught in a hoop wire. He said the more it fought, the more it cut itself up."

"He threatened you?" I asked.

"He said we live way out here on the hardpan. He said Mexican dopers go through here at night sometimes. He wouldn't want none of them to catch Kippy Jo home alone, 'cause some of them ain't half human."

I waited for him to go on, but he didn't. His face looked flushed in the heat of the fire.

"You're not telling me something, Wilbur," I said.

"Hugo said he'd like to have a good boy like me as one of his deputies. He took his nine-millimeter out and stuck it down in my pants. Like this." Wilbur shoved the flattened ends of his fingers down under his belt buckle. "He pushed it on down till it was pressing against my privates. He told me, 'You're a natural-born lawman, Pickett.' His deputies was grinning from behind their sunglasses, like I was some kind of geek in a carnival."

"Hugo fears and hates people who have courage, Wilbur. That's why he's cruel," I said.

He speared a board into the flames, his eyes avoiding mine.

"He offered you a deal, didn't he?" I said.

"He said it don't matter if Deitrich gets the bonds back or not. I can say a fence burned me and took off without giving me no money. The insurance is gonna take care of it, anyway."

"Listen to Hugo Roberts and you'll be chopping cotton on Huntsville Farm."

"He's the man with the power."

"Goodbye, Wilbur."

I walked back out to my car. The scrub oak on the rim of the hills looked like stenciled black scars against the molten sun. I started the car engine, then turned it off and got back out and slammed the door. I stepped up on the gallery and opened the screen door without knocking. Kippy Jo was tucking in a fringed bedspread on the couch. She turned and stared in my direction.

"Did you tell your husband I was a giver of death?" I asked.

She folded her fingers in front of her, her eyes like white-flecked blue marbles, her very skin seeming to absorb the sounds around her. But she didn't speak.

"I not only killed drug transporters, I accidentally killed my best friend. If people want to talk about it, that's fine. I just don't want to listen to it," I said.

I let the screen swing back on the spring behind me. But my angry words brought me no comfort.

That night I drove down the road to the convenience store for a loaf of bread. I heard the car behind me before I saw it, its twin Hollywood mufflers rumbling off the asphalt. It was a customized 1949 Mercury convertible, with a grille like chromed teeth, the deep maroon finish overpainted with a tangle of blue and red flames blowing out of the hood. I turned into the convenience store and went inside, and the customized Mercury turned in after me and parked in the shadows by the side of the building.

When I came back out, two kids with baseball caps inverted on their heads were sitting in the convertible's front seat. A third kid stood on the pavement, throwing a tennis ball against the store wall.

He was bull-necked and thick-chested, his brown hair cut short, his T-shirt and beltless slacks as limp as rags against the hardness of his body. When I got into my Avalon, he threw the tennis ball against the front windshield. I opened the door and stood up, one foot still inside the car.

"Is there something I can help you with?" I asked.

"Yeah, Earl Deitrich's doing good for a lot of kids in San Antone. Why you bringing a crazy guy out of the woodwork to hurt him?" he said.

"Crazy guy?"

"Yeah, this guy burned kids up in a school bus, looks like a penis stuffed inside a suit, what's his name…" He snapped his fingers at the air. "Skyler Doolittle, he's telling lies about Earl Deitrich. We don't like that, man."

He leaned over and picked up his tennis ball, then stepped closer to me, kneading the ball like a sponge in his palm. There was a tattoo of a death's head on one side of his throat and on the other side a knife that was made to look like it had cut into the flesh and was dripping blood. The wind had dropped, and the heat rising from the pavement carried his odor into my face, a smell like reefer and unwashed hair and motor oil.

"Put it in a letter, bud, and I'll get back to you on that," I said.

"Bud? Who you think you're fucking with, man?" he said.

"You got me."

"My name's Cholo Ramirez. You heard of the Purple Hearts?"

"Cholo the warlord, right? There was a gal around here last Saturday by the name of Ramirez. She was with Earl Deitrich's son and a kid named Ronnie Cruise. You related?"

"Esmeralda? What you mean she was around here? She's going to the Juco. She don't have nothing to do with-hey, man, don't try to sling and bing with me. I can break your sticks."

I sat back down behind the wheel. But he grabbed the window jamb before I could pull the door shut.

"You telling me my sister was with Jeff Deitrich?" he said.

"Stand away from the car. I don't want to hit you backing out," I said.

"You pick the shit out of your teeth and answer me."

I dropped the Avalon into reverse, cut the wheels in a circle, and backed out into the light by the gas pumps, leaving Cholo Ramirez staring at me with his fists clenched by his sides, the veins in his arms pumped with blood.

Early the following Monday I tapped on the frosted glass of Marvin Pomroy's office on the first floor of the courthouse. He sat behind his desk in his rimless glasses and blue suspenders and immaculate white, starched shirt, his hair neatly combed, his jaws ruddy and closely shaved, his eyes as placid and secure as a Puritan theologian's.

"Hugo Roberts redecorated Wilbur Pickett's house late Friday afternoon. He also stuck a nine-millimeter down Wilbur's fly," I said.

"I see Hugo Roberts five times a day. You don't have to tell me about his potential."

"I think he's more interested in a confession than in recovering stolen bonds."

"You're saying Hugo is on a pad for Earl Deitrich and Earl Deitrich is running a scam on the insurance company?"