Heartwood (Billy Bob Holland 2)

“You want some corn?” he asked.

“Wilbur, I think Earl Deitrich is into some very bad stuff. I’m not sure what it is, but you’re his scapegoat. Stop playing his game,” I said.

He looked at me from under his shapeless cowboy hat with a private, ironic expression, then flung the coffee from his metal cup and wiped it clean with a napkin.

“You were going to say something?” I asked.

“Not me, son,” he replied. After a moment, he said, “Kippy Jo, tell him what you been seeing in your dreams.”

She turned her blue, sightless white-flecked eyes on me. The wind was blowing at her back and it feathered her hair around her throat.

“A winged man is coming. His teeth are red. He’s killed Indian people in another place. I don’t understand the dream. He’s very evil,” she said.

I didn’t respond. She turned her head slightly, as though the creak of the windmill or the horses snuffing and blowing at the water tank meant something. Then her eyes came back on me and her head tilted, her mouth parting silently, her cheeks slack with a thought that confused her.

“But you already know him. How can you be around a man this evil without knowing it?” she said.

“Don’t that blow your head?” Wilbur said.

When I walked out to my car with Wilbur I wished I hadn’t come. I had wanted to caution him, but it did no good. Wilbur had been born in the wrong century. His kind became the tools of empires with glad hearts and an indefatigable optimism. When their usefulness ended, they were discarded.

But he was not the only one who was naive.

“You were fixing to tell me something back there,” I said.

He took off his hat and pressed the dents out of the crown. Against the fire in the western sky his chiseled, surgically rebuilt profile looked like a Roman soldier’s.

“Me and Kippy Jo was selling our melons out on the state road today,” he said. “I seen your Avalon coming hell for breakfast around a truck. I thought, Now, there’s a man badly in need of melons.”

His eyes held mine. I could feel my face burning.

“I ain’t gonna tell a man of your background about milking through the fence, but if that wasn’t Peggy Jean Deitrich in your car, then ole Bodacious head-butted me a lot worse than I thought,” he said.

That Saturday afternoon Lucas and his band played at Shorty’s out on the river. Shorty’s, with its screened porches and lack of air-conditioning, might have been a ramshackle nightclub and barbecue joint left over from another era, but either out of curiosity or need every class of person in our area came through its doors.

They scored dope and on one another. Bikers got swacked on crystal; forlorn oil field wives went up the road to the Super 8 Motel with college boys; rednecks broke their knuckles on one another’s faces out in the trees; and Hollywood film people from Fredericksburg took it all in like happy visitors at a zoo.

Jeff Deitrich’s birthday party had started at his house, then had moved in a caravan of Cherokees and roll-bar Jeeps and sports cars to Shorty’s. Jeff and his

friends occupied both the side and back screen porches. They drank daiquiris, Coronas with lime, and B-52s. As the evening wore on, the joints they toked on along the riverbank glowed like fireflies among the darkening trees.

A yellow Porsche convertible pulled into the lot and two men, one young, the other middle-aged, went inside and sat at the bar. The younger man was too thin to be called handsome, but his delicate facial bones, bright eyes, and guileless manner gave him a boyish charm and vulnerability that drew older men to him.

The middle-aged man with him wore cream-colored pleated slacks and white shoes and a navy-blue shirt. He had a dissolute face and thick, salt-and-pepper hair. His hips and lower stomach swelled over his belt slightly, and his soft buttocks splayed on the barstool when he sat down. He crossed his legs and smoked a gold-tipped cigarette with his wrist held in the air, surveying the dance floor, letting his smoke leak upward whimsically from his open mouth.

When the band took a break Lucas went to the end of the bar for a cold drink. The younger man, whose name was Leland, kept twisting his head so he could see through the side door onto the screen porch where Jeff Deitrich, his shirt unbuttoned on his brown chest, was standing at his table, entertaining his guests, and downing a B-52, a jigger of whiskey dropped into a schooner of draft beer.

Then Jeff caught Leland’s stare. His dark eyes blazed and his throat and the gold chain and St. Christopher’s metal that hung from it were ropy with sweat. He set the schooner down on the plank table and walked to the bar, standing three feet from Leland. He waved the bartender away, scooped a handful of peanuts out of a dish, and ate them with his fingers, one at a time, looking at the bottles on the bar. He breathed audibly through his nose.

“I told you not to come around here again,” he said.

“We were just passing by, Jeff. I guess birthday congratulations are in order,” Leland said.

“In three minutes you and the queen better be the fuck out the door,” Jeff said.

The middle-aged man pursed his lips and said, “Aren’t we the excitable one?”

Leland’s hand immediately touched his friend’s wrist.