Heartwood (Billy Bob Holland 2)

“Hell if I know. I guess the great-grandfather was a genuine sonofabitch. He even wrote a handbook for the Belgian government on how to capture starved natives at night when they snuck into their gardens for food. Take a look at this picture. He used human skulls to border his flower beds … You all right?”

“Wilbur Pickett’s wife talked about the same thing.She saw the picture inside her head. It has something to do with spirits that want revenge.”

He pinched his temples gingerly, then signaled the waitress for his check.

“I think I’ll stroll on back to the office. Don’t get up. Stay and have some iced tea. It’s on me. Really,” he said.

6

That evening I had an unexpected visitor, my son, Lucas Smothers, who was finishing his first year at A&M. He parked his stepfather’s pickup in the driveway and walked into the barn, where I was raking out the stalls and loading a wheelbarrow for the compost heap. His snap-button cowboy shirt was open on his chest and his straw hat was slanted down on his head. He squatted on his long legs, pushed the brim of his hat up with his thumb, and squinted with one eye at the sun setting over the tank, as though a great philosophic consideration was at hand.

“I can think about a whole lot more fun things to do this evening,” he said.

“Aren’t you supposed to be up at school?” I asked.

“I got exams next week. You want to wet a line?” he said.

“How about I buy you a barbecue dinner out at Shorty’s instead?”

“I ain’t got no objection to that.” He stood up and removed a Mexican spur from a peg on the wall and spun the rowel with one finger. It was one of the spurs my friend L.Q. Navarro had worn the night he died down in Coahuila. “I hear you been messing with the Purple Hearts,” he said.

“Who told you this?”

“I saw Jeff Deitrich at Val’s Drive-In.”

“You know why his father would want to get mixed up with Mexican gangbangers?”

“I don’t know about his old man. I know about Jeff, though.”

“Oh?”

“His reg’lar is a gal named Rita Summers. I said to him once, ‘She’s sure a nice girl. In fact, she’s got it all, don’t she?’ He goes, ‘So does vanilla ice cream, Lucas. That don’t mean you cain’t try chocolate.’ ”

He spun the rowel on the spur, then hung the spur back on the peg.

We drove through the hills in the cooling shadows to Shorty’s and ate dinner on a screen porch that rested on pilings above the river. The water was high and milky green, and it flowed around the edge of a hill and dropped over boulders into pools that were white with cottonwood seeds. The air was cool now and smelled of fern and wet stone, and when the sun set, Shorty, the owner, turned on the electric lights in the oak trees that shaded his picnic tables.

The country band on the dance floor was just warming up.

“Got me a job roughnecking this summer. Got a bluegrass gig in Fredericksburg, too,” Lucas said.

“You’ve done great, bud,” I said.

He smiled but his eyes were looking beyond me,through the screen, at the shadows of the trees on the cliff wall across the river.

“Be careful with Deitrich,” he said.

“I don’t think Earl’s a real big challenge.”

His fork paused in front of his mouth. Then he set it in his plate. “I ain’t talking about Earl,” he said. “Jeff used to go down to Austin to roll homosexuals. Not for the money. Just to stomp the shit out of them. I always been too ashamed to tell anybody I seen it.”

His eyes were downcast when he picked up his fork again. His face looked curiously like a girl’s.

Peggy Jean didn’t have to flirt to attract men to her. Oddly, a show of fatigue in her face, a buried injury, an unshared problem, made you want to step into her life and walk with her into the private places of the heart. Her vulnerability wove webs that allowed you to enter them without shame or caution.

On Thursday morning I saw her by her pickup truck at a farm supply and tack store on the edge of town. A clerk was carrying a western saddle from inside the store to the back of the truck while she waited by the open tailgate, a platinum American Express card held loosely between two fingers.