Heartwood by James Lee Burke
“What was that blowup with Hugo Roberts about?” I said.
“None of your business. But I’ll tell you this much. Kippy Jo had traces of Grimes’s blood on the tips of her left hand. I think she felt his face before she parked the second round in his other eye. Forget the blind-girl defense, Billy Bob.”
“You’re hiding something,” I said.
That evening my little friend Pete walked from his house through the back of my property to my back screen porch. He carried a huge straw basket that was loaded with fruit, chocolate wrapped in gold foil, and cellophane bags of cactus candy and Mexican pralines. The strap of a brand-new black fielder’s glove, with white leather thongs through the webbing, was buttoned around the basket’s handle.
“What you got there, bud?” I said, opening the screen door for him.
“Ms. Deitrich brung it by the house this afternoon. My mother told me to bring it over here and leave it. She says she ain’t letting no rich people look down on us.”
“I’m not following you.”
“She says Ms. Deitrich don’t care two cents about me. This has got something to do with y’all.” He hefted the basket onto the plank table and sat down on a bench and looked at his tennis shoes. The yellow cellophane and red ribbon that enclosed the basket were undisturbed. A greeting card hung halfway out of an envelope taped to the basket’s handle. It read:
Dear Pete, I don’t know if you remember me from church or not. But I know you’re a friend of Billy Bob’s and that he is very proud of you. Please accept this gift as a congratulations for your hard work at school and your fine performance with your baseball team.
Your friend,
Peggy Jean Deitrich
“I believe Ms. Deitrich has high regard for you, Pete,” I said.
“It don’t matter. I cain’t take none of this back home. My mother’ll throw it in the garbage.” His eyes lingered on the fielder’s glove, then he twisted his mouth into a button and looked into space, as though the glove meant nothing to him.
“You want to saddle up Beau?” I asked.
“No. I got to weed the garden. Things ain’t too good at the house right now.”
I nodded, then watched him walk past the chicken run and along the edge of the irrigation ditch, stopping to throw dirt clods at the water. Then he crossed the small wood bridge that spanned the ditch and climbed up the hill into the pine trees that concealed the dirt yard and clapboard house where he lived.
Peggy Jean sometimes did volunteer work in the evenings at the library. The sky was piled with rain clouds and the sun was a dying orange fire between two hills when I drove into town. The library was a one-story, peaked-roof building with the tall, domed windows that were characteristic of public buildings at the turn of the century. The lights were on inside the windows and the oak trees on the lawn were black-green with shadow.
Peggy Jean was behind the circulation desk, wearing a flower-print dress and horn-rimmed glasses. I set the candy and fruit basket on top of the desk. The library was almost deserted.
“Pete’s mom won’t accept this. He can’t keep the glove, either,” I said.
“Is she angry at the boy?”
“She’s a drunk. She’s angry all the time.”
“I’m sorry. After that situation at the courthouse, I mean, the way the Mexican girl was treated, I wanted to apologize in some way.”
“You don’t owe me one.”
“I didn’t say I did. How do you think I felt, watching that girl patronized and dismissed like that? But I couldn’t do anything about it, not without starting a fight right there on the street,” she replied. She took off her glasses and let them hang from a velvet cord around her neck. “I’m thinking of leaving Earl.”
I felt my hand close and open at my side and a tingling sensation in my throat that I didn’t understand.
“You’ll do the right thing,” I said.
“I haven’t done the right thing in twenty years, Billy Bob.”
Then I realized who was sitting at one of the reading tables against the far wall, his hands clasped like paws on edges of a huge Life pictorial history, the top of the book obscuring the lower half of his face, so that he resembled the World War II cartoon drawing of Kilroy.
“That’s Skyler Doolittle,” I said.
“The man who claims Earl cheated him out of his watch?”
“Does Skyler know who you are?” I asked.
“No, he comes in here all the time. Poor soul, I feel sorry for him.”
The overhead lights blinked to indicate the library would close in five minutes.
“I guess you have a ride home,” I said.
“Earl’s picking me up,” she said.
“I see. Well, good night, Peggy Jean,” I said.
“Good night,” she said.
Outside, a moment later, as the rain clouds pulsed with veins of lightning, I witnessed one of those improbable incidents that you know will result in grave harm to an innocent party, one whose life seems destined to be governed by the laws of misfortune. Skyler Doolittle, in his wilted seersucker, walked down the library steps behind Peggy Jean just as Earl Deitrich’s maroon Lincoln pulled to the curb and Earl popped open the passenger door for his wife.
Earl’s face was rainbowed with color in the glow of his dash.
“I don’t believe it. You’re stalking my wife,” he said.
“I haven’t did no such thing,” Skyler said.
Peggy Jean got in the car and closed the door. But Earl did not drive away. He made a U-turn and slowed by the curb, rolling his window down on its electric motor so he could look directly into Skyler’s face.
“You malignant deformity, you just made the worst mistake of your life,” he said.
I was standing in the shadows on the corner and Earl did not see me. For some reason I could not explain, I felt obscene.
Early the next morning, before I went to the office, I drove to a sporting goods store in the strip mall on the four-lane, then returned to the west end of the county and headed down the dirt street that fronted Pete’s house. When no one answered the door, I walked around back. He stood barefoot in the tomato plants, hoeing weeds out of the row, the straps of his striped overalls notched into his Astros T-shirt.
“Give it a break, bud,” I said, and sat down on a folding metal chair. I put my Stetson on his head and popped loose the staples on the shopping bag in my hand, then reached inside it.
“Where’d you get the glove?” he asked.
“A client gave me this two or three years back. I put it up in the closet and forgot all about it.”
His gaze shifted to the back door and windows of his house.
“That’s why it’s still in the shopping bag?” he said.
“Right, because I don’t have occasion to use it. But you’re missing the point. Anybody can own a fielder’s glove. The art comes in molding the pocket.” I opened a cardboard box and rolled an immaculate white, red-stitched baseball out of it. “See, you rub oil into the pocket, then mold the ball into it and tie the fingers down on top of it with leather cord. Watch.”
I heard his mother open the screen behind us and smelled the cigarette smoke that curled away from her hand into the clean vibrancy of the morning air.
“What ch’all doin’?” she said.
“I had this old glove lying around. I thought Pete might get some use out of it,” I said.
“He ain’t eat his breakfast yet,” she said.
“He’ll be right in. How you been doing, Wilma?”
But she closed the door without answering. I winked at Pete and handed him the glove and removed my Stetson from his head.
“Are lawyers supposed to lie, Billy Bob?” Pete asked.
“Not a chance.”
“You’re mighty good at it.”
“Yeah, but don’t tell anyone,” I said.
“I ain’t.” His eyes squinted shut with his grin.
Two days later Kippy Jo Pickett’s bail was set a
“They’re mortgaging their place to make the bail,” I said.
His eyes clicked sideways behind his glasses and looked somewhere else. “I’m sorry,” he said.
“This is all over one man’s pride and avarice,” I said.
“Sure it is,”he said. He set his briefcase on the arm of a wood bench and unsnapped the locks on it. He removed an eight-by-ten crime scene photo and put it into my hands without bothering to look at me. Bubba Grimes’s mutilated eyes were sealed with the coagulated blood that had welled out of the entry wounds. “Keep it. I have a dozen color slides or so for the jury,” he said.
That evening Pete and I bought a bucket of fried chicken and cane-fished for shovelmouth under a weeping willow on the bank of the river. The sun was a dull red on the western horizon, as though it were surrendering its heat to the darkness that lay beyond the earth’s rim, and when the wind blew from the river, the grass in the fields turned pale in the light slanting out of the clouds and the wildflowers seemed to take on a new color.
“Are Wilbur Pickett and his wife going to the pen?” Pete asked.
“Not if I can help it.”
Pete’s face was pensive, the way it became when he put the adult world under scrutiny.
“People are saying Wilbur’s wife shot that fellow ’cause they were all stealing from Mr. Deitrich,” he said.
“They’re wrong.”
His brow furrowed as another question swam in front of his eyes, like a butterfly that wouldn’t come into focus.
“If Mr. Deitrich is trying to put your clients in jail, how come you and Ms. Deitrich are such good friends?” he asked.
“Something just pulled your cork under.”
He jerked on his pole. The cork and weight and hook came flying out of the water into the grass.
“He must have taken off,” I said.
“Durn, I knew you was gonna say that.”
Then Pete looked past my shoulder at a low-slung, chopped-down Mercury coming through the field. In the muted light its tangled colors took on the deep reddish-purple hue of a stone bruise.
“I’m heading back home,” Pete said.
“No, you stay here. This is your place. You never have to leave it, not for any reason.”
“Them gangbangers are no good, Billy Bob. You don’t see what they do when people like you ain’t around.”
I set down my cane pole and walked toward the Mercury before it reached the riverbank. Cholo Ramirez pulled to a stop and got out, his baggy khaki trousers hanging loosely from his hips, his ribbed, white undershirt molded to his physique. His tan shoulders seemed to glow with the sun’s fire.
“How much can I tell you and be protected?” he said.
“You mean by client-lawyer privilege?”
“Whatever.”
“You’re not my client. I’m not taking on any new clients”
He gazed at the river, his hands opening and closing at his sides.
“Esmeralda married a maricón, man. He beats up queers ’cause that’s what he is. She told me how they made love on an air mattress on the Comal River. I was getting sick,” he said.
“I don’t know if you’ve come to the right place, Cholo,” I said.
“Me and Earl Deitrich got a history. I can jam him up real bad, man. But I got to have guarantees.”
“What’s he done to you?”
“It’s what he’s doing to Esmeralda. She ain’t no gangbanger, man. She makes As in college. He sent a lawyer to the house. Five thousand dollars for her to get lost.”
“You want more?” I said.
Cholo stepped closer to me. I could smell the heat in his skin. For the first time in months I saw the silhouette of L.Q. Navarro on the edge of my vision, his ash-gray hat shadowing his face, his white shirt glowing against his dark suit, his index finger wagging cautiously.
“Esmeralda ain’t somebody’s pork chops you pay for by the pound. She thinks Jeff loves her. If he loves her, how come he lets his old man treat her like she’s the town pump?” Cholo said.
“How did you know I was back here?” I asked.
“I walked around back. I looked in your barn. I seen you and the little boy riding your horse out here.”
“You walked around back?”
“You got a hearing problem? I’m talking about my sister. What, I didn’t have permission to walk behind your fucking house?”
“Come to the office, Cholo. We’ll talk this stuff over. Maybe I can help,” I said.
His brow was creased into rolls of grizzle, his eyes pulled close together like BBs.
“I’m all mixed up. I can’t think. It makes my head hurt,” he said.
I walked away from him and picked up my cane pole and swung the bobber out into the current. I kept my back turned until I heard the Mercury engine roar to life and the weeds in the field clatter under the front bumper.
L.Q. Navarro leaned with one shoulder against the willow tree, rolling a cigarette. He popped a lucifer match on his thumbnail and cupped it to the cigarette, and I saw the flame flare on his mustache and dark eyes and grained skin.
“That boy will cook your liver on a stick,” he said.
Once in a while you hear about truly wicked abuses inside the system: In California, rival Hispanic and black gang members forced into a concrete-enclosed recreation area while a gunbull waits to blow away a particularly troublesome inmate as soon as the fighting starts; over in Louisiana, an inmate kept for years in solitary confinement, until he permanently damages his brain by beating his head against an iron wall; a Haitian immigrant sexually tortured with a plumber’s helper in the rest room of a New York City police station.
You hope it’s only a story. Or that, if true, the culpable parties have been fired or jailed themselves.
That’s what you hope.
Sunday morning Skyler Doolittle went to a fundamentalist, Holy Roller church in the West End, one that had trailed its legends of snake handling, drinking poisons, and talking in tongues all the way across the chain of southern mountains into the hill country of rural
When he left the church he ate lunch at a truck stop and returned to his room in a backstreet sandstone hotel that had no air-conditioning and where the dust from a feeder lot blew through the windows above the old wood colonnade.
He turned the key in the lock and stepped inside the door. On his bed and floor and nightstand were photographs of children. The draft through the door blew the photographs into a vortex, one filled with images that made his eyes water.
Two uniformed deputies in shades stepped through the door behind him. The taller of the two was named Kyle Rose; a pale, shaved area still showed in the back of his scalp where I had driven his head into the log wall of Hugo Roberts’s office. He removed the sunglasses from his face and pinched the red marks on the bridge of his nose. His mouth was a stitched line, hooked downward on the corners. He pulled the shades on the windows.
“Ain’t nobody here but us chickens now,” he said.
The call came to my house Sunday night, not from Skyler Doolittle but from a janitor in the jail section of the county hospital.
“It happened out in the parking lot. I seen it from the upstairs window. They had him between two cars. This cop had some kind of electric gun in his hand,” he said.
“Skyler told you to call me?”
“Yes, sir.”
“What’s your name?” I asked.
He started to speak, then hung up.
A half hour later an orderly at the hospital unlocked a plain metal door on an isolation room whose floor and walls were overlaid with mattresses. Skyler Doolittle stood in a corner, wearing nothing but boxer undershorts that were printed with smiling blue moons. His body was streaked with red abrasions, like rope burns.
“They beat you?” I said.
“At my hotel, ’fore
“I’m going to get you transferred to a bed, Mr. Doolittle. My investigator will check on you later tonight, and I’ll be back to visit you in the morning.”
Then I noticed a change in his eyes; they had taken on a color they hadn’t possessed before, like lead that’s been scorched in a fire. His posture, even his muscular tone, seemed different, the tendons in his fused neck like braided rope, his chest flat-plated, the upper arms swollen with glandular fluids.
“This fellow Deitrich and the man with that stinger?” he said.
“Yes?”
“My thoughts don’t seem like my own no more. I ain’t never hurt nobody on purpose. I’m a river-baptized man. I fear a great evil is fixing to draw me inside it. I got no place to turn with it.”
12
I was to be of little help to Skyler Doolittle. Five days later, I watched him leave Deaf Smith in a blue state bus with grilles on the windows for a state mental hospital in Austin. At the time I even thought he would be better off, safe from the torment visited upon him by Hugo Roberts’s deputies.
I paid little attention to the man with fan-shaped sideburns chained hand and foot next to him.
That evening Lucas asked me to come out and see the farmhouse he had rented forty miles west of town. He said he had rented it in order to be closer to his job on an oil rig. But his pride in living on his own and paying his own way was obvious.
We stood in the front yard, surveying the bullet-pocked window glass, the scaled white paint, the gutters clogged with pine needles, the collapsed privy and the windmill wrapped with tumble brush in back. In the side yard the branches of a dead pecan tree were silhouetted like gnarled fingers against the sun.
“I got an option to buy. With a little fixing up, it’d be a right nice place,” he said.
“Yeah, it looks like it’s got a lot of promise,” I said, trying to keep my face empty. From inside I could hear Elmore James singing “My Time Ain’t Long” on a CD. “Who lives in the trailer out back?”
“Nobody reg’lar.” He looked about the yard, his expression blank.