Heartwood (Billy Bob Holland 2)

“Oh, hello, Billy Bob,” she said when I walked up behind her. She wore tight riding pants and a checkered shirt and sunglasses, and she pushed her glasses more tightly against her face when she smiled.

“Beautiful saddle,” I said.

“It’s for Jeff’s birthday.” She kept one side of her face turned from me, as though she were waiting for someone else to emerge from inside the store.

“You already paid, Ms. Deitrich?” the clerk said, looking at the credit card in her hand.

“No, I’m sorry. I’ll go inside and take care of it,” she replied.

“Let me have your card and I’ll bring the charge slip out here for you to sign. It ain’t no trouble at all,” the clerk said, and took the card from between her fingers before she could reply.

Peggy Jean looked away awkwardly at the loading platform. Her skin high up on one cheekbone was heavily made up with rouge and powder.

“Everything okay, Peggy Jean?” I said.

“Oh yes, just one of those days,” she said, then smiled, like an afterthought. “It’s so windy out here today.” She took a bandanna from her back pocket and tied it around her hair, knotting it under her chin.

“It’s too bad about the accountant, that fellow named Greenbaum. He seemed like a nice man,” I said.

“What are you talking about?”

“He’s dead. He was jumped by some gangbangers at Herman Park in Houston.”

“Max? When?”

“I’m sorry. I thought y’all knew.”

“No … I heard nothing … You’re talking about Max Greenbaum?”

She seemed to look about her, as though the answer to her confusion were inside the wind.

I stepped closer to her, my fingers touching her elbows.

“I’ll drive you home,” I said.

“No … Absolutely not … Billy Bob, please, just …”

She walked away from me and stood in the shade by the driver’s door of her pickup, her arms folded in front of her, as though she were creating a sanctuary that I couldn’t enter. The clerk came out of the store with her credit card and charge slip attached to a clipboard. Then he saw her expression and his face turned inward and he lowered his eyes.

“If you’ll just sign this, ma’am, I’ll take care of everything and you can be on your way,” he said.

“Peggy Jean—” I began.

“I’m sorry for my lack of composure. Max? No, there’s a mistake about this,” she said, and got in her truck and scoured a cloud of pink dust out of the parking lot.

I sat in the half-light of my office and drank a cup of coffee. On the wall, encased in glass on a field of blue felt, were the .36-caliber Navy Colt revolvers and octagon-barrel lever-action ’73 Winchester rifle that had been carried by my great-grandpa Sam Morgan Holland when he was a drover on the Chisholm Trail. In his life he had also been in the Fourth Texas at Little Round Top, a violent drunkard who shot five or six men in gun duels, and finally a saddle preacher who took his ministry into the godless moonscape west of the Pecos.

The bluing on Sam’s weapons had long ago been rubbed off by holster wear, and the steel now had the dull hue of an old nickel. In Sam’s diary he described his encounters with John Wesley Hardin, Wild Bill Longley, and the Dalton-Doolin gang, all of whom he loathed as either psychopaths or white trash. But in his account of their depredations there is never an indication that the worst of them ever struck a woman.

In the historical South the physical abuse of a woman by a man was on a level with sodomy of animals. Such a man was considered a moral and physical coward and was merely horsewhipped if he was lucky.

But today a woman who did not flee the batterer or seek legal redress was usually consigned to her fate, even considered deserving of it.

I wondered what Great-Grandpa Sam would do in my situation.

I set my empty coffee cup in my saucer, opened my Rolodex to the “D” section, and punched a number into my telephone.

“Earl?” I said.