Heartwood (Billy Bob Holland 2)

“Esmeralda looks back at her real serious and says, ‘I know. That’s why I don’t eat here.’ ”

“Pretty funny story,” I said.

He sat forward in his chair and folded his hands between his knees, his eyes staring at a place on the rug.

“Jeff can be a rough guy. But getting it on with Ronnie Cross’s girl? Three white guys jumped Ronnie after a football game. He beat them up so bad one of them got down on his knees and begged,” he said.

“You worried about me?”

“Ronnie’s girl was in your office. You had a run-in with Cholo. Something real bad’s gonna come out of this. It’s like the feeling I had when I was a kid. I’d wake up in the morning and there was a sick feeling around my heart, like a hand was squeezing it.”

“These kids don’t have anything to do with my life, Lucas,” I said.

He looked out the window at the trees blowing in the wind, his skin puckered under one eye.

“Wilbur Pickett started all this. Now he’s dragging you into his bullshit,” he said. “You older people don’t have no idea what goes on in this town. Y’all ain’t never known.”

He stared down at the frayed bottoms of his jeans to hide the anger in his face.

That night it stormed and the house was cool and filled with wind and the smell of ozone. On nights like this I used to hear the tinkle of L.Q. Navarro’s spurs, then he would be standing next to me in the library, the lightning flickering through the window on his grained skin and his lustrous black eyes.

L.Q. lived in my memory—in fact, was always present in some way in my life—but I didn’t feel guilt about his death any longer and I seldom saw him during my waking hours. I kept his custom-made, blue-black .45 revolver and his holster and cartridge belt in the top drawer of my desk, and sometimes I removed it from the leather and opened the loading gate and turned the cylinder one click at a time, peering through the whorls of light in each empty chamber, my palm wrapped around the yellowed ivory handles that seemed warm and sentient from his callused grip.

But L.Q. knew me better than I knew myself. On his visitations he would chide, “Tell me it wasn’t fun busting caps on them Mexican dope mules.”

And when I thought too long about our nocturnal raids into Old Mexico, I became like the untreated drunkard who has renounced whiskey, until in his denunciation he unconsciously begins to rub his lips with the flats of his fingers.

And just as I always did when these moments occurred, I drove to the small stucco church in a rural working-class neighborhood where I went to Mass and lighted a candle for L.Q. Navarro, for whom I converted to Catholicism after his death, as though somehow I could extend his life by taking on his faith.

Then I went next door to a clapboard cafe that served buffalo burgers and blueberry milk shakes and sat by the screen window and watched the lightning flicker on the pines in front of the church and listened to the thunder roll harmlessly away into the hills.

Lucas Smothers had tried to warn me about the youth culture, if one could call it that, of south-central Texas.

Why should he even have felt the need?

The answer was that Lucas, like L.Q. Navarro, knew me better than I knew myself.

I should have been able to walk away from the complexities surrounding the defense of Wilbur Pickett.

But the problem was a fragrance of roses. Bubba Grimes, the pilot with the drooping left eye, had said it. When Peggy Jean perspired she smelled like warm roses. She smelled like roses and bruised grass in an oak grove and skin that’s sun-browned and cool and warm at the same time. All I had to do was close my eyes and I was back there in that heart-twisting moment with my face buried in her hair, unaware that she and I were creating a memory for which I would never find an adequate surrogate.

The next morning Hugo Roberts left a message on my office answering machine.

“We just made a second trip out to Wilbur Pickett’s place. Guess what? That poor li’l peckerwood had a couple of them bonds hid in the panel of his wife’s dresser. Thought I’d just keep you up to date. Have a good day.”

7

My son, Lucas, had told me that the older people of Deaf Smith had never known what really went on in our town. He was right. We talked about younger people as though they were no different from the generations of years past. Somehow the eye did not register the kids who were stoned by second period at the high school, the girls who had abortions, the kids infected with hepatitis and herpes and gonorrhea, or the ones who passed their backpacks through a window so they could get their guns past the school’s metal detectors.

A kid upon his knees in front of a toilet bowl, strings of blood hanging from his broken lips, the jean-clad legs of his tormentors surrounding him like bars, is a sad sight to witness. The fact that the teachers know better than to intervene is even sadder.

But if we saw younger people as they were, we’d have to examine ourselves as well. We’d have to ask ourselves why we allowed people like Hugo Roberts to dwell in our midst.

By the time I had listened to his voice on the message machine and walked over to his office, he had another revelation to make. The only light in his blockhouse of an office came from the desk lamp; the upward glow from the shaded bulb made his face look like a wrinkled tan balloon floating in the gloom.

“We picked up that ole boy Skyler Doolittle. He says he’s your client,” he said.

“Not exactly. What’d he do?”