Heartwood bbh-2 Read online

  7

  My son, Lucas, had told me that the older people of Deaf Smith had never known what really went on in our town. He was right. We talked about younger people as though they were no different from the generations of years past. Somehow the eye did not register the kids who were stoned by second period at the high school, the girls who had abortions, the kids infected with hepatitis and herpes and gonorrhea, or the ones who passed their backpacks through a window so they could get their guns past the school's metal detectors.

  A kid upon his knees in front of a toilet bowl, strings of blood hanging from his broken lips, the jean-clad legs of his tormentors surrounding him like bars, is a sad sight to witness. The fact that the teachers know better than to intervene is even sadder.

  But if we saw younger people as they were, we'd have to examine ourselves as well. We'd have to ask ourselves why we allowed people like Hugo Roberts to dwell in our midst.

  By the time I had listened to his voice on the message machine and walked over to his office, he had another revelation to make. The only light in his blockhouse of an office came from the desk lamp; the upward glow from the shaded bulb made his face look like a wrinkled tan balloon floating in the gloom.

  "We picked up that ole boy Skyler Doolittle. He says he's your client," he said.

  "Not exactly. What'd he do?"

  "Hanging around the playground at the elementary, trying to give them kids candy bars."

  "We have an ordinance about giving away candy bars?"

  "You can be cute, Billy Bob. But I've dug children out of leaf piles and garbage dumps. Y'all do that in the Rangers?"

  "I came over here for only one reason, Hugo. You planted those bonds in Wilbur Pickett's house. You'll wish you didn't."

  He grinned and picked up a pen from his blotter and popped off the cap. He worked the head of the pen in and out of the cap.

  "You seen that Mexican girl lately, what's her name, Esmeralda something?" he said.

  I walked across the lawn to the main courthouse, where Skyler Doolittle was sitting on a wood bench inside a holding cage between the jailer's office and the back elevator. In his long-sleeve white shirt and wide red tie, his bald head and fused neck looked exactly like the domed top of a partially repainted fire hydrant.

  "I'll have you out of here in about a half hour. But I think it's a good idea you not go around the school yard again," I said.

  "I wouldn't harm them kids," he said.

  "I know you wouldn't," I said. His eyes that were between gray and colorless seemed to take on a measure of reassurance. "By the way, my investigator checked around and didn't find any indication Earl Deitrich is trying to put you in an asylum. So maybe you were worried unduly on that score, Mr. Doolittle."

  "Those sheriffs deputies called me a sex pervert. They said they'd had their eye on me. They said the state's got a special place for my kind."

  I laced my fingers in the wire mesh of the cage. He looked like the most isolated and socially and physically rejected human being I had ever seen.

  "Some Mexican gangbangers made mention of you to me, Mr. Doolittle. Maybe they're the same kids who caused the death of a Jewish man in Houston. I think you're a decent and good man, sir. I suspect your word is your bond. In that spirit I ask you to leave Earl Deitrich alone," I said.

  He seemed to study my words inside his head, his mouth flexing at the corners.

  "If you ask it of me. Yes, sir, I won't give him no more trouble," he said.

  When I walked past the elevator, one that looked like a jail cell on cables, two uniformed deputies were struggling with a waist-chained black inmate in county whites. The inmate's left eye was cut and white foam issued from his mouth.

  "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 h
and 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.

  When I walked into the shower two of the men who had beaten me were lathering themselves with the showerheads turned off. Their bodies were tanned and hard and streaked with soapy hair, their eyes malevolent and invasive. I put my head under the shower and turned on both faucets and let the water boil over my face.

  Temple Carrol met me in the courtroom, where a client of mine, a twenty-year-old four-time loser with alcohol fetal syndrome, was being arraigned for holding up the convenience store where he used to work. He had used no mask or disguise and his weapon had been a BB pistol.

  The judge's name was Kirby Jim Baxter. His face was furrowed and white, like a bleached prune, and it stayed twisted in an expression of chronic impatience and irritability.

  "You back again? What the hell's the matter with you? You want to spend the rest of your life getting pissed on by a prison guard's horse?" he said.

  My client, Wesley Rhodes, had a harelip, a flat nose, an I.Q. of eighty, and wide-set reptilian-green eyes that seemed to contain separate thoughts at the same time. He stuffed socks inside his fly and wore motorcycle boots with elevated soles and two heavy, long-sleeve shirts that made his upper torso splay from his Levi's like a cloth-wrapped stump.

  I began to run through the same old shuck that every judge hears when people like Wesley have their bail set.

  "Your Honor, my client has entered an alcoholic treatment program and is attending A.A. meetings daily. We'd like to request-"

  "Did I address you, counselor?" Kirby Jim said.

  "No, Your Honor."

  "Then shut up. Now, you listen, young man-"

  It should have been a cakewalk. Kirby Jim was annoyed with the planet in general, but he wasn't a bad man. He was sympathetic to the fact that people like Wesley Rhodes had no chance from the day they were born. He also knew that inside the system Wesley was anybody's bar of soap.

  "It wasn't armed robbery 'cause there wasn't no BBs in the gun. I was in there to buy a magazine. My daddy said to tell y'all that and to kiss my ass. I ain't afraid to go back. Horses don't piss on people unless you get under them, anyway. So that shows how damn much you know," he said, and turned his grinning, pitiful face on me, as though his wit had forever destroyed the Texas legal system.

  "Bail is set at ten thousand dollars. Bailiff, take him away," Kirby Jim said.

  That's what most of it is like.

  Outside, Temple and I sat under the trees on a steel-ribbed bench by the Spanish-American War artillery piece. It was warm in the shade and the trees were full of jays and mockingbirds.

  "It's not your fault. That kid had a millstone around his neck when he was born," she said.

  "I was thinking of something else." I told her of the visit to my house by Ronnie Cruise the previous night and the fire that had burned down the empty savings and loan building on Earl Deitrich's property in Houston.

  "You think these Mexican kids did it and Ronnie Cruise was setting up an alibi?" she asked.

  "Maybe."

  "Who cares? They're street rats. It's not related to defending Wilbur Pickett, anyway."

  "I don't like getting used."

  She straightened herself on the bench, pressing the heels of her hands against the metal. I felt the edge of her hand wedge against mine.

  "You want to feel these kids aren't all greaseballs. The truth is they are," she said.

  "You're too hard, Temple."

  "It's a habit I got into down in Fort Bend County after I let a gangbanger ride in the back of my cruiser without cuffs. He paid back the favor by wrapping his belt around my throat," she said.

  I looked at her profile. She lifted a wisp of her chestnut hair off her forehead and fanned her face with a magazine. Her mouth was red and small, her skin moist and pink with the heat. Her eyes had the same milky green color as the river that ran through our county, and they often had shadows in them, just the way the river did when the current flowed under a tree. Her uplifted chin and the parting of her lips made me think of a flower opening in the shade.

  "You staring at me for a reason?" she said.

  "Sorry. You're a real pal, Temple."

  "A pal? Oh yes," she said, standing up. "Always glad to be a pal. See you later, cowboy. Don't let your wo
rries over the Purple Hearts screw up your day."

  I still hadn't eaten lunch and I walked over to the Langtry Hotel. It had been built of sandstone in the nineteenth century, with a wood colonnade over the elevated sidewalk that was still inset with tethering rings. Supposedly the Sundance Kid and his schoolteacher mistress, Etta Place, had stayed there, as well as the vaudevillians Eddie Foy and Will Rogers. The upstairs rooms were boarded up now, but the old bar, with its white, octagon-tile floor and stamped tin ceiling, was still open, as well as the dining room, which was paneled with carved mahogany and oak and hung with chandeliers that when lighted looked like yellow ice.

  Diagonally parked in front of the entrance was Earl Deitrich's maroon Lincoln, its chrome wire wheels and immaculate white sidewalls blazing in the sunlight. The velvet curtains were open in the dining room and I could see Earl and Peggy Jean at a long, linen-covered table with some of the town's leading businesspeople. Peggy Jean, whom I had never seen drink, had an Old-Fashioned glass in her hand.

  Don't go in. Leave them alone, I thought.

  Then, with all the caution of a drunk careening down a sidewalk, I thought, Like hell I will.

  I sat at a small table by the window, across the room from them, and ordered. Earl and his friends were in high spirits, garrulous and loud, Earl's laughter even more cacophonous than the others, as though it welled up from some irreverent and arrogant knowledge about the world that only he possessed.

  I listened to it for five minutes, then could take it no longer. On the table next to me was an abandoned copy of the morning paper. I folded it in half and walked to Earl's table and set it by his elbow, so the headline about the fire in Houston could not escape his vision.

  "Too bad about those four firemen who got burned to death on your property last night," I said.

  The mirth in his face died like air leaking from a balloon.

  "Yes. It's a terrible thing. I've been keeping in touch by telephone," he said.

  "Hugo Roberts's trained cretins picked up Skyler Doolittle on a bogus beef. I think you know what I'm talking about," I said.

  "No, I don't," he said.