James Burke: Heartwood

Wilbur Pickett didn't have trouble finding oil up in Wyoming; he just found it too soon. There was no blowout preventer on the wellhead when the drill bit punched into an early pay sand; the premature eruption of gas and oil and salt water ignited at the wellhead, and the pressurized torrent of flame incinerated the derrick like a tower of matchsticks.

Wilbur and his crew barely escaped with their lives.

After the well was capped, Wilbur squatted on his haunches amid the ruins of his derrick and surveyed the cliffs that rose above his and Kippy Jo's land, the green river that meandered through it, the groves of cotton-woods on the banks, the wet sage on the hardpan, the antelope and white-tailed deer down in the arroyos.

That afternoon he and Kippy Jo drove to a bank in Sheridan and took out a building loan and started construction two weeks later on the dude ranch that he would name the Kippy Jo Double Bar.

For electric power he erected two wind turbines where his drilling rig had been. One morning he hooked his thumbs in his back pockets and gazed at the enormous metal blades turning soundlessly in the sunrise.

"This is a fine spot, Kippy Jo, but it ain't diddly-squat on a rock when it comes to serious wind. Where's the one place on earth it blows from four directions at once? I mean wind that'll pick your cotton, sand the paint off your silo, and move your house to the next county, all free of charge," he said.

Wilbur went in the house and called the Deitrichs' lawyer, Clayton Spangler, who was rumored to own fifty thousand acres of the old XIT Ranch in the Texas Panhandle.

"Mr. Spangler, Kippy Jo and me would like to invite you trout fishing up at our ranch. I'm talking about rainbows fat as a fence post, sir. I flat got to knock 'em back in the water with a boat oar," he said.

The Wilbur T. Pickett Natural Energy Company was on its way.

The next spring, during Easter break, Lucas and Temple and I drove to San Antonio and had supper at an outdoor cafe on the river, not far from the Alamo. The evening sky was turquoise, the air warm and fragrant with the smell of flowers. Lucas didn't talk anymore about Esmeralda. If I mentioned her name, he always smiled and deliberately created a beam in his eyes that was not meant for anyone to read, lest the dues he had paid be taken from him.

The scene along the river was almost an idyllic one. The gondolas were filled with tourists; mariachi musicians in sombreros and dark suits scrolled with white piping played guitars in the cafes; the fronds of banana trees along the water's edge raided in the breeze. But I couldn't concentrate on the conversation around me. I kept smelling a heavy fragrance of roses. When Temple and Lucas went into a shop to buy cactus candy for her father, I walked over to the Alamo. The facade was lighted with flood lamps and was pink and gray against the darkening sky, and I sat down on a stone bench and twirled my hat on my finger.

I could never look at the chapel and the adjacent barracks without chills going through me. One hundred and eighty-eight souls had held out for thirteen days against as many as six thousand of Santa Anna's troops. They went down to the last man, except for five who were captured and tortured before they were executed. Their bodies were burned by Santa Anna like sacks of garbage.

But even as I dwelled on the deaths of those 188 men and boys, the smell of roses seemed to be all around me. Was I still enamored with the girl who used to be Peggy Jean Murphy?

Maybe. But that wasn't bad. The girl I knew was worth remembering.

Behind me, I heard the throaty rumble of twin Hollywood mufflers off the pavement. I thought I saw a sunburst T-Bird turn up a darkened street toward the freeway, then I heard the driver double-clutching, shifting down, catching a lower gear, one shoulder bent low as he gripped the floor stick and listened for the exact second to pour on the gas and tack it up.

In my mind's eye I saw Ronnie Cross and Esmeralda Ramirez flying down an empty six-lane highway through the countryside, the chromed engine roaring, the green dials on the walnut dashboard indicating levels of control and power that seemed to transcend the laws of mortality itself.

I thought of horsemen fleeing a grass fire in Old Mexico and civilian soldiers who waited with musket and powder horn at an adobe wall and a preacher who baptized by immersion and created a cathedral out of trees and water and sky. I smelled banks of roses and saw Ronnie Cross speed-shift his transmission and floor the accelerator, tacking up now, the rear end low on the road, the twin exhaust pipes thundering off the asphalt. Esmeralda twisted sideways in the oxblood leather seat and grinned at him, pumping her arms to the beat from the stereo speakers, she and Ronnie disappearing down the highway, into the American mythos of gangbangers and youthful lovers and cars that pulsed with music, between hills that had been green and covered with sunlight only an hour ago.