Heartwood by James Lee Burke
The next morning I had my receptionist call Earl Deitrich’s house and get the ex-mercenary named Fletcher Grinnel on the phone.
“Last night I hung a piece of shit named Johnny Krause in a tree,” I said.
“You’re a busy fellow,” he replied.
“He just gave you up on the murder of Cholo Ramirez. Check out the statistics on the number of people currently being executed in Texas, Grinnel. You going to ride the gurney for Earl Deitrich?”
“Say again, please?”
32
Three weeks later, on a Saturday afternoon, Peggy Jean Deitrich parked her automobile in front of my house and walked across the grass to the driveway, where I was planting climbing roses on the trellises I had nailed up on posts on each side of the drive. I had painted the posts and trellises and the crossbeam white, and the roses were as bright as drops of blood against the paint.
The balled root systems were three feet in diameter and packed in sawdust and black dirt and wrapped with wet burlap. I knelt on the grass and snipped the burlap away and washed the roots loose with a garden hose and lowered them into a freshly dug hole that I had worked with horse manure. I put the garden hose into the hole and watched the water rise in a soapy brown froth to the rim, then I began shoveling compost in on top of it.
“You’re right good at that,” she said, and sat down on my folding metal chair in the shade.
“What’s up, Peggy Jean?”
She wore jeans and shined boots and a plaid snap-button shirt and a thin hand-tooled brown belt with a silver buckle and a silver tip on the tongue. The wind blew the myrtle above her head and made patterns of sunlight and shadow on her skin, and for just a moment I saw us both together again among the oak trees above the riverbank when she allowed me to lose my virginity inside her.
“Jeff’s out on bail and still doesn’t realize he’ll probably go to prison. Earl expects to be indicted for murder momentarily and is usually drunk by noon. He also goes out unwashed and unshaved in public. But maybe you know all that,” she said.
“Sorry. I don’t have an interest anymore in tracking what they do.”
“We’re defaulting on the Wyoming land deal. Earl’s creditors are calling in all his debts. I think it’s what you planned, Billy Bob.”
“Earl stepped in his own shit, Peggy Jean.”
“I want to hire you as our attorney.”
“Nope.”
“I can pay. Earl has a half-million-dollar life insurance policy I can borrow on.”
I shook my head. “Let me give you some advice instead and it won’t cost you a nickel. If you’re poor and you commit a crime, the legal system works quickly and leaves you in pieces all over the highway. If you’re educated and have money, the process becomes a drawn-out affair, like a terminal cancer patient who can afford various kinds of treatment all over the world. But eventually he ends up at Lourdes.
“That’s what will happen to Earl. He’ll become more and more desperate, and more and more people will take advantage of his situation. The ducks will nibble him to death and eventually he’ll come to Lourdes. If I were his attorney, I’d tell him to negotiate a plea now and try to avoid a capital conviction.”
She got up from the chair and gazed at my house, the barn and Beau in the lot and the windmill ginning and the fields that had been harvested and were marbled with shadows and the willows by the tank that were blowing in the wind.
She looked up at the red oak plank I had hung from the crossbeam over the driveway.
“Why did you name your place Heartwood?” she asked.
“It comes from a story my father told me when I was baptized. It has to do with the way certain kinds of trees grow outward from the center.”
I sat down in the folding chair and filled a jelly glass with Kool-Aid from a plastic pitcher. My hair was damp with perspiration and in the shade the wind felt cool against my skin.
She stood behind me and her shadow intersected mine on the grass. Then the sun went behind a cloud and our shadows grayed and disappeared. She stroked the hair on the back of my head, upward, as she might a child’s.
“Heartwood is a good name. Goodbye, Billy Bob,” she said.
Then she was gone. I never saw her again.
After Labor Day the weather turned dry and hot, and there were fires in the hills west of the hardpan, flecks of light you could see at night from the highway, like an indistinct red glimmering inside black glass. I tried not to think about the Deitrichs anymore, and instead to concentrate on my own life and the expectation and promise that each sunrise held for those who accepted the day for the gift it was.
Fletcher Grinnel had given up Earl Deitrich in front of a grand jury and Kippy Jo was off the hook for the shooting of the intruder, Bubba Grimes. She and Wilbur had gone to Wyoming to begin drilling on their property, even though she still maintained that Wilbur would bring in a duster.
Lucas was preparing to return to school at Texas A&M and was talking about Esmeralda joining him there. But Ronnie Cross found excuses to visit my house with regularity and to ask about Esmeralda, and she in turn had a way of dropping by when he was there. In those moments I looked at Lucas with the pang that a parent feels when he knows his child will be hurt and that it’s no one’s fault and that to try to preempt the rites of passage is an act of contempt for the child’s courage.
Temple Carrol and me?
She still said I lived with ghosts.
But even though I told myself each day I was through with the Deitrichs and the avarice and meretriciousness of the world they represented, I knew better. They were too much a part of us, the town, our history, the innocence and goodness we had perhaps created as a wishful reflection of ourselves in the form of Peggy Jean Murphy.
The Deitrichs came back into my life again with a phone call. In a way that would never allow me to extricate myself from them.
A call at midnight from Jessie Stump.
“I thought you’d left the area,” I said.
“I been sick,” he said.
“Go to a hospital.”
“Don’t need none. My daddy could heal bleeding and blow the fire out of a burn. He cured warts with molasses and a hairball from a cow’s stomach … I’m gonna send money to get Skyler’s casket moved to a church cemetery.”
“I have his personal effects from his rooming house. I’ll mail them to any address you want. Why don’t you honor his memory and start over again somewhere else?”
“I don’t need no personal effects. He give me his watch. The one his ancestor carried at the Alamo. I’m looking at it in the palm of my hand right now.”
“It was returned to the Deitrichs.”
“Yeah …” he began, but did not finish his sentence.
“The Deitrichs gave it to you?” I said.
“I’m fixing to be a rich man, boy. That’s all you need to know. Now, you do what I say about moving that casket.”
“You listen to me, Stump. A New Zealander, a man named Fletcher Grinnel, admitted killing Mr. Doolittle. He’ll go down for it. So will Earl Deitrich. You stay away from their house.”
“You worried about the woman? How long does it take you to figure it out, boy?”
I couldn’t sleep the rest of the night.
But in the morning I knew what I had to do. I called Earl Deitrich at his home.
“Jessie Stump’s back in the area. I think he aims to splatter your grits,” I said.
“What else is new?” Earl said.
“I think someone inside your house is helping him.”
“Judas Iscariot is in my midst? You’re telling me this because you’re a great guy? Okay, great guy, you’ve done your duty.”
“He has possession of Skyler Doolittle’s watch. How’d he come by it?”
I could hear him breathing in the silence.
“You’re telling me my wife is trying to have me killed? You’re a vicious, sick man,” he said.
I replaced the receiver gently in the telephon
I ate lunch with Marvin Pomroy that day at the Mexican grocery across from the courthouse. Marvin listened while I talked, then was quiet a long time. He cleared his throat slightly and drank from his glass of lemonade. His face looked cool and serene and pink in the breeze from the wood-bladed fan overhead.
“Why did you call Deitrich first instead of me?” he asked.
“I gave Peggy Jean a preview of what their lives would be like for the next year. I believe I started her thinking about other options.”
He wiped his mouth with his napkin and picked up the check and added up the figures on it.
“You don’t have anything to say?” I asked.
“Yeah, maybe Earl Deitrich will finally do something good for a change. Like rid us of Jessie Stump,” Marvin replied.
But two hours later Marvin called me at the office, as I knew he would.
“Hugo’s going to send a couple of deputies back out to the Deitrich place. The next time you orchestrate a train wreck, don’t tell me about it,” he said, and hung up.
• • •
Jeff Deitrich cruised Val’s that night in his yellow convertible, alone, the top down. It was a beautiful fall night; the moon was big and yellow over the hills, the air cool, smelling of pine wood smoke and late-blooming flowers. The parking lot was filled, the hand-waxed surfaces of his friends’ sports cars and roll-bar Jeeps glowing under the electric lights. He drove up one aisle and down the other, scanning faces and groups of kids who talked with great animation between their parked cars. But no one seemed to look in Jeff’s direction, as though he were only a passerby, somehow not a player anymore.
He made a U-turn in the street and came through the main entrance again. Why was it that everyone looked younger? Most of these guys were high schoolers or people whom he had always regarded as barely worth noticing. Where were Chug and Warren and Hammie?
The only empty slot was at the far end of the lot, by a Dumpster that was overflowing in the weeds. He backed his convertible in so he could see everyone who drove by. It was just a matter of time before his old friends would be cruising by, gathering around his car, laughing at all this legal bullshit that a four-eyed fuck named Marvin Pomroy was trying to drop on his head.
Under his seat was a silver cigarette case that contained two tightly twisted joints of Jalisco gage, sprinkled with China White to give it legs.
He cupped his hands around a match and fired one up. He held the smoke down and took the hit deep in his lungs, heard the paper drying and burning crisply toward his lips with each toke, his face warming and growing tight like tallow molding against the bone.
The waitress hooked an aluminum tray on his window. She was cute, in her purple and white rayon uniform, her mouth like a cherry, her bleached hair curled on her shoulders.
“You want to do some Mexican gage?” he asked.
“What’s that?” she replied.
“I’ll pick you up later. I’m Jeff Deitrich.”
“My father takes me home … You want to order? I got a pickup getting cold at the window.”
She brought him a fish sandwich and an iced mug of beer. Music was pumping out of the speakers on the stanchions that supported the canvas tarps the owner pulled out on guy wires when it rained or during the heat of the day. He walked to the men’s room, nodding at kids who should have recognized him but didn’t. When he came back out, some kids in a group looked at him quickly, then their eyes slid off his face.
“You got some problem with me?” he said to a thin, crew-cut boy in a red windbreaker and T-shirt who was leaning against a customized van.
“Not me,” the boy replied, then grimaced at his girl.
“Sorry, man. I thought you were somebody else,” Jeff said, and walked away wondering why he had just lied.
Was he losing it?
He couldn’t finish his sandwich. The breeze dropped and a sweet, rotting odor wafted off the Dumpster and invaded the inside of his head. He put the canvas top up on his convertible and rolled up the windows, then stared through the windshield at a black man in a security guard’s uniform locking a grilled door behind the kitchen. The guard twisted a key in the lock mechanism, then rattled the door in the jamb to make sure it was secure.
Jeff swallowed and sweat broke on his forehead and a spasm constricted his stomach, as though someone had raked a nail across the lining.
I’m not going to jail. That’s not going to happen. Don’t have those kinds of thoughts, he told himself.
He took the roach out of the ashtray and the remaining joint from the cigarette case and rolled down the passenger window and flung them into the darkness.
When he looked back through the windshield he was staring at the side of Ronnie Cross’s 1961 T-Bird. Ronnie made the turn at the end of the lot, then pulled into a slot that had just emptied. For no reason that he could explain, Jeff felt a sense of familiarity and friendship with Ronnie he’d never experienced before.
He got out of the convertible and walked to Ronnie’s window and leaned his hands on the roof. Ronnie glanced up at him only a second, then rested his palms on the bottom of the steering wheel and looked straight ahead.
“Ronnie, I got no hard feelings. This guy Johnny Krause is full of shit. I wouldn’t hurt Essie for the world,” Jeff said.
Ronnie picked up a toothpick off the dashboard and slipped it into his mouth.
“Yeah, uh, look, Jeff, me and Essie and Lucas are gonna meet for some dinner. Maybe you ought to rejoin your party,” Ronnie said.
“Y’all are tight, huh?”
“You know how it is.” Ronnie played with the toothpick and didn’t look up at Jeff’s face.
Jeff felt a moist click in his throat, then he heard a voice coming out of his mouth that didn’t sound like his own, a voice veined with weakness and fear.
“What’s it like inside? I mean, how bad does it get?” he said.
“Inside what?”
“Prison. You hear a lot of stories.”
“About guys getting their cherry busted in the shower?” Ronnie said.
“Yeah, I guess.”
“I don’t know. I was in Juvie once. I never did time. I ain’t a criminal.”
Ronnie lifted his eyes up into Jeff’s face.
When Jeff walked back to his car, he felt belittled, his face tingling. But he couldn’t say why.
An hour later he drove across the cattleguard and up the road to his house. The air was dry and cool and he could smell smoke from a fire in the woods somewhere beyond the house. Yes, he could even see a red glow in the sky and ashes rising against the moon, perhaps from the ravine that angled its way down to the river. But surely firefighters were on it and it offered no threat to his home.
He parked the car by the side of his house and decided to stay the night in Fletcher’s empty cottage. His stepmother would be asleep by now, in her own bedroom, with the door locked, while Jeff’s father walked aimlessly around the darkened first floor, his teeth unbrushed, trailing an odor like a gymnasium, or made long-distance calls to people who hung up on him.
Jeff picked up a half-filled bottle of Cold Duck off a table by the swimming pool and drank from it as he walked to the cottage. Tiny pieces of ash drifted onto the pool’s surface and floated like scorched moths above the underwater lights.
From the edge of the woods far above the house, Jessie Stump watched him through a pair of binoculars.
Earl did push-ups in the dark on the floor of his library. One, two, one, two, one two, his arms pumping with blood and testosterone, the tendons in his neck and back and buttocks netting together with a power that he’d never thought he possessed. The moon was full, a marbled yellow above the tree line on the ridge, and it shone through the French doors and lighted the library walls and rows of books with a dull glow like the color of old elephant ivory.
He stripped naked in the bathroom and shaved in front of the full-length mirror, showered and washed his ha
She locked bedroom doors, did she? The king of the manor in medieval times would have just walled her up. But he was determined not to be vindictive. Why blame her for her feelings? No matter what they claimed, women were sexually aroused by rich men, and he was no longer rich. But he hadn’t believed she would set him up to be killed by Jessie Stump.
Earlier this evening he had found the security system on the back doors shut down. It wasn’t accidental. Someone had punched in the coded numbers with forethought and deliberation.
Actually, her level of iniquity intrigued him, caused a vague arousal in his loins in a way that he did not quite understand. No, it was not her wickedness itself, but instead his ability to perceive it, see through and transcend it, to match and overwhelm it in response and deed, that titillated him.
So a pathetic piece of human flotsam like Jessie Stump was the best assassin she could hire? What a joke. But in reality it made sense. She had no money. A fool like Stump could be micromanaged with the gift of an antique watch, then disposed of later.
Maybe he should give Peggy Jean a little more credit.
He walked out the front door and gazed at the constellations in the sky, the glow of a fire beyond the ridge, the long, green roll of the valley in front of his house. He could probably remain in default on his mortgages for another seven or eight months, then this would all belong to someone else. That thought made the veins tighten like a metal band along the side of his head.
He wagged a flashlight back and forth in the darkness and waited for the two deputies to walk from their posts out on the grounds onto the layers of black flagstone that formed the entrance to his house.
“Y’all come in and have some ice cream and strawberries with me. I won’t be needing y’all anymore tonight,” he said.
“I shined a spotlight up in them trees, high up on the ridge. I swear I seen some field glasses glint up there,” one deputy said.