Heartwood by James Lee Burke
I skidded barefoot down the slope over rocks and exposed tree roots and crashed through a nest of blackberry bushes onto the beach. On the far side of the stream I could see his face just under the surface, his eyes squinted shut, his hair floating from his scalp, his mouth pinched tight against the breath he wanted to draw from the water. I ran across a flat rock and dove headlong into the current, felt the cold strike like an anvil against the bone, then took two hard strokes and went under and grabbed him around the waist and brought him to the surface with me, throwing him as far as I could toward the bank.
Then my feet touched the soap-rock bottom and I gathered Pete in my arms and lifted him against my chest and waded onto gravel and sand and the tall clumps of grass growing along the bank.
I lay him down and stroked his head and rubbed his back and felt the warmth of his breath against my skin.
His face was white from exhaustion, beaded with water, when he looked up at me.
“I knew you was coming,” he said.
“Almost didn’t make it, bud,” I replied.
“Cain’t fool me, Billy Bob. I wasn’t never afraid,” he said.
I gathered him up on my shoulder and climbed up the path to the top of the promontory. Peggy Jean stood openmouthed in the front yard of the cottage, her skin prickled in the wind.
“The lifeguards were supposed to be watching. I gave them the exact number of children who’d be here. They could have no doubt about that,” she said.
“I’ll get my things out of the cottage,” I said.
“I paid them to watch every one of those children, Billy Bob.”
“I know. The problem’s not yours.”
“Then get that expression off your face.”
I went inside with Pete still on my shoulder, then came back out with my clothes and boots bunched under my left arm.
“Ernest Hemingway is my favorite writer. I admired his great courage. But in the end he blew his head off with a shotgun. Goodbye, Peggy Jean,” I said.
Kyle Rose had a problem. All his life he had loved uniforms—the National Guard fatigues he wore to monthly meetings, the pressed, deputy sheriffs greenish-brown short-sleeve shirts and lead-striped trousers that looked like Marine Corps tropicals, even the bleached-white straw hat and shades and starched khaki pants he wore when he had been a migrant crew leader supervising stoop labor in bean fields.
The buzzed haircut, the flex of cartilage in the jaw, the eyes that could make county inmates and street people look at their shoes, this was only part of the appearance he cultivated, that told people who and what he was. You also had to be squared away, booted and hatted, the tendons in your body forming a geometrically perfect network of power inside a tight-fitting uniform. The opaqueness of your face and the tight seam of your mouth had to make them swallow.
But all of it had failed him, and he didn’t know why or how to explain his feelings to anyone else.
Jessie Stump and Skyler Doolittle were out on the ground, somewhere in the hills across the river from where they had broken out of the jail bus. But why should that bother him? Stump was white trash and a crankhead; electroshock had turned his brains into scorched grits. Doolittle was a killer of children, a deformed pervert who looked like a dildo and belonged inside a circus wagon. Kyle Rose had pulled blacks by their hair out of Nigger Town clubs while their friends did nothing. Once he climbed a water tower and clubbed a sniper unconscious with the butt of his shotgun. A mainline recidivist who had been brought in from Huntsville as a witness in a trial threw his food tray against the drunk tank wall and sent the trusties scurrying down the corridor. Kyle Rose made him clean it up with his shirt, then crawl under the deadline that was painted on the cement floor.
Why did the thought of Skyler Doolittle and Jessie Stump out on the ground make words stick in his throat and cause him to unconsciously wipe his palms on his trousers?
Because they were not afraid of him. Stump was too crazy and Doolittle … Kyle Rose couldn’t describe what it was that made Doolittle different. It wasn’t just the fused neck. Doolittle’s eyes seemed to accept pain as though that were the only condition he had ever known, like a naked man who has spent a lifetime on a trail that wanders endlessly through thornbushes. There was no handle on a man like that.
Kyle Rose bought a second handgun, a .25-caliber hideaway that strapped comfortably on the ankle. But a wire was trembling inside him, and neither the hideaway nor the shots of tequila he drank at lunch nor his belligerent rhetoric in the deputies’ bullpen gave him relief.
“I think we ought to scour them cliffs above the river,” he said to Hugo Roberts.
“What for? They ain’t hurt the guards on the bus. I don’t see no great danger out there,” Hugo said. He sat in the gloom behind his desk, the smoke from his cupped cigarette climbing into his face.
“They’re escaped prisoners. That’s what for. One ought to be gelded, the other un stuffed back in his mother’s womb,” Kyle said.
Hugo propped his elbows on the desk blotter and puffed on his cigarette and breathed the smoke out on his hands. He looked disinterestedly out the window.
“Provided they ain’t already in Mexico, they’ll come out when they’re hungry. In the meantime, find yourself a woman, Kyle. Or take up paddleball. Why’d you stoke up them boys with a stun gun, anyway? All we need is the Justice Department sending undercover agents in here again,” Hugo said.
Kyle Rose walked out of the sandstone blockhouse and slammed the door behind him with his foot. Hugo’s other deputies kept their eyes fixed in a neutral space, the refrigerated odor of smoke and testosterone and expectorated Red Man wrapped on their bodies like cellophane on produce.
“We got to start using civil service exams, establish better screening. I think the boy’s got a serious nervous disorder. I do,” Hugo said. He puffed on his cigarette, breathing the smoke philosophically over his hands.
Kyle Rose took three days off without pay and went to the trailer he owned on the river. The lawn was neat, nubbed down by goats, the pine trees widely spaced so Kyle had full view of all his surroundings. But he took no chances. The first night there he ran trip wire strung with tin cans around the tree trunks in the yard and loaded his scoped deer rifle and leaned it inside the front door. Then he sat in a deck chair on the screen porch with a cold bottle of Carta Blanca and watched the boat lights on the river, the fire in his neighbor’s barbecue pit flaring under a piece of meat, the evening star rising above the hills into a mauve-colored sky.
He slept late and rose refreshed and had coffee with his neighbor, a retired enlisted man, then split firewood on a stump by the river’s edge even though he would not need it until the fall.
It was amazing what a good night’s sleep could do. His worries about Skyler Doolittle and Jessie Stump now seemed childish and inconsequential. Besides, they had invited whatever troubles befell them. Sometimes you had to shave the dice a little bit or nobody went down. That’s what Hugo said. Skyler Doolittle had killed children while DWI, then had been picked up next to a school yard. How many free passes does a guy like that get? So they put some child porn in his room. Big deal. Rather that than this guy wipe out another busload of kids. Bight?
Stump was another one who should have been fed into a tree shredder. The whole family had lived on a muddy, brush–tangled oxbow of the river for generations, inbreeding, shining deer, tapping into the county power line, stringing forest fires when the lumber mill wouldn’t hire them, shooting holes in a Job Corps water tower.
No, a tree shredder wouldn’t do it, Kyle thought. It would take napalm. Bring in fighter jets and nape the entire sinkhole, sterilize the earth they had walked on so the virus couldn’t infect the gene pool worse than it already had.
In fact, as the day wore on, Kyle wished Doolittle or Stump would have a go at him. They all made noise about getting even once they were on the street. How they’d like to eat a toppling soft-nosed round from his scoped deer rifle? Whap. Just like blowing the ba
That evening he went outside with his bow and quiver of arrows and pinned a fresh paper target on the hay bales he had stacked against his toolshed. The paper was shiny and soft, like oilcloth, when Kyle rolled it out and flattened it against the bale, and the image of the white-tailed deer seemed to shimmer with life in the fading light. From thirty-five yards Kyle drove a half dozen arrows into the deer’s neck and sides, the fletched shafts quivering solidly upon impact.
It was a beautiful evening. The sky was purple above the hills, and the shadows seemed to drape the trees with a mosslike softness, like fir trees in a rain forest. He took a bottle of tequila out of an ice bucket on his shooting table and drank two fingers neat from a shot glass and chased it with Carta Blanca. This was the good life. It might even get a lot better after Hugo Roberts destroyed his remaining lung with cigarettes. Who was a better candidate for Hugo’s replacement than Kyle Rose?
He lay his bow on the shooting table and walked to the perforated paper target and began pulling the arrow shafts from the bales of hay. Rain was moving out of the south, dimming the fields in the distance, clicking now on the asphalt county road at the foot of his property. The air was dense and cool, like air from a cave, and the pine trees shook in the wind and scattered pine needles across the top of Kyle’s trailer. For just a moment he thought he heard a tin can tinkle on a wire.
A bolt of lightning crashed in a field across the road and illuminated the trees, burning all the shadows from the clearing, and Kyle saw the tinkling sound was only the wind playing tricks on him. A solitary drop of water struck his head, hard, like a marble, and he finished gathering the arrow shafts from the hay bale.
When he turned around he saw a man in a yellow raincoat and shapeless fedora by the shooting table. The man’s face was dark with shadow, but there was no doubt about what he was doing. He had notched an arrow, one with a filed and barbed point, on the bowstring and was pulling back the bow with the power of a man whose strength seemed more than human.
He heard the arrow whiz toward him, a sound like the air being scissored apart. He threw his hands in front of his face and tried to whirl away from the arrow’s impact but instead took the point high up under his armpit. He felt the shaft traverse his lungs, felt the gift of breath and oxygen taken from him as quickly as the ruptured bladder of a football collapsing against the toe of a cleated shoe.
He felt blood rising into his throat now, his chest breaking into flame, the arrow’s shaft catching under his right arm each time he tried to reach for the .25-caliber hideaway that was strapped to his ankle.
The man in the yellow raincoat and fedora walked toward him in the rain, notching another arrow on the bowstring. Kyle’s fingers fluttered on the grips of the .25 automatic, then he freed it from its holster and tried to raise it in front of him. The hatted man kicked it from his hand as though it were a toadstool.
The second arrow pierced Kyle’s jaws and embedded in the soft earth under the side of his face. In his mind’s eye he saw himself as a fish cast upon land, red flowers issuing from his mouth, the pollen blowing across a pair of prison work boots.
He breathed hard through his pinioned cheeks, his eyes trying to absorb a last glimmer of gold light on the river’s surface.
15
The following Monday I stood at my office window and watched Marvin Pomroy cross the street, his starched white shirt crinkling in the sunlight. He disappeared into the alcove on the first floor of my building, and although I couldn’t see him now, I knew he was mounting the stairs three at a time, as he always did. Moments later he sat down in front of my desk and wiped his glasses with a Kleenex. His face was egg-shaped, pink with heat, but not a hair was out of place.
“Boiling out there, huh?” I said.
He touched at his forehead with his shirtsleeve and ignored the question.
“The casts from the crime scene are of prison work shoes, the same kind we issue at the jail. Doolittle and Stump were both wearing them when they broke loose from the bus. They both wear size eleven, same size as the casts,” he said.
“Doolittle’s not a killer, Marvin,” I said.
“That was an eighty-pound bow. Doolittle has the strength to pull it. Stump doesn’t.”
“Stump’s a meth-brain. He destroyed his brother-in-law’s house by running back and forth through the walls. He stuffed a Mexican’s head in a drainpipe at Snooker’s Big Eight.”
But I could see Marvin’s attention already starting to wander.
“A paramedic over at County says you brought a little half-breed boy into emergency receiving. You wanted his lungs checked out so he didn’t develop pneumonia from a near drowning,” Marvin said.
“That’s right.”
He got up from his chair and stood at the window and looked down at the street. “It happened around New Braunfels? At a swimming party for an orphans group or something?” he asked.
“This is why you came over here?”
“Peggy Jean and Earl Deitrich have a cottage down there. They sponsor a swim party for orphans once or twice a year.”
“What’s your point, Marvin?”
“You have three clients—Wilbur and Kippy Jo Pickett and Skyler Doolittle—involved in an adversarial relationship with Earl Deitrich. You’re getting in his wife’s bread and you ask me what’s the point?”
“I don’t care for your language,” I said.
Marvin turned from the window and bunched my sleeve in his fist, his eyes full of pity and disappointment.
“You could be disbarred for stuff like this. You’re a pain in the ass, but you’re an honest man. If you let me down, Billy Bob, I’m going to bust your jaw,” he said.
• • •
That evening Kippy Jo Pickett hauled five buckets of water from the horse tank and started a fire of slat wood under an iron pot set on stones in the lee of the barn. She sat in the shade, upwind of the fire, and felt the heat begin to crawl through the iron and rise from the water’s surface. The ground was littered with the chickens Wilbur had butchered on the stump before driving off to a temporary job at a rig out in the hills, their headless bodies flopping in the dirt, their feathers powdering with dust. When the first steam bubbles chained to the pot’s surface, she lifted two chickens by the feet and dipped them into the water, then sat back down in her chair and began ripping sheaths of wet feathers from their skins and dropping them into a paper bag. That’s when she heard the car turn into the drive and stop, the twin exhausts echoing off the side of the house.
She wiped her hands on a cloth and wrapped her fingers around the handle of the hatchet Wilbur had used to butcher the chickens and listened to a man’s footsteps come up the drive and into the backyard.
She looked into the purple haze and the dust blowing from the hoof-smoothed area around the horse tank, and inside her mind saw a squat, brow-furrowed man with the thick neck of a hog watching her. The wind blew out of the north and swept her hair back over her shoulders and lifted her dress around her knees. The man approached her, guardedly, his feet splayed, his gaze sweeping the yard, the pasture where the horses nickered, the sun’s fire on the western hills, his nostrils dilating like an animal emerging from a cave.
He paused when he saw the hatchet behind the calf of her leg. Her sightless eyes seemed to burrow into his face and probe thoughts and feelings that he himself did not understand. He swallowed and felt foolish and cowardly and wiped his mouth with his hand. Then she did something he didn’t expect. She rested the head of the hatchet by her foot and released the handle and let it fall sideways into the dust.
“I’m looking for Wilbur Pickett,” he said.
“He’s at work. On the oil rig. He won’t be home till morning,” she answered.
He waved one hand back and forth in front of her eyes, his soiled palm only ten inches from her face.
“Don’t do that,” she said.
He stepped back, frightened again. He tried to think clearly before he spoke a
“You might be a violent man. But it’s because others have hurt you,” she said.
His face flinched as though flies were buzzing in it. He opened and closed his palms at his sides and could hear himself breathing. He studied the flecks of whiteness in her blue eyes, the redness of her mouth, the way her black hair whipped around her cheeks in the wind. She pressed her dress down over her knees and waited for him to speak.
“I know stuff about Earl Deitrich don’t nobody else know. I can bring him down,” he said.
“We don’t care what you can do,” she replied.
“Don’t talk to me like that. I’m here to help. We got a, what do you call it, we got a mutual interest.”
“No,” she said.
“Listen, lady, y’all got something he wants or he wouldn’t be trying to send your old man to the pen. Your husband wildcatted in Mexico. It’s got something to do with oil, ain’t it?”
“It’s not your business. There’s fried rabbit and potato salad on the kitchen table. Bring it out,” she said.
“Bring food out? I didn’t come out here to eat. Look, lady—”
“You hate Earl Deitrich because he treats you and someone close to you with disrespect. He’s obligated to you but makes you feel worthless. You fight with him in your mind and he always wins.”
He stepped back from her, his mouth opening to speak. Her words were like cobweb that he wanted to wipe out of his face. She rose from her chair and spread newspaper on the stump that was grained with dried blood and bits of chicken feathers. She set a stone on each side of the newspaper so the wind wouldn’t blow it away.
“What’s your name?” she asked.
“Cholo Ramirez.”
“You’re part Indian, Cholo. The spirits of all your people watch over you. Don’t be frightened. Go get the food,” she said.