Heartwood (Billy Bob Holland 2)

“You calling me a bullshit guy, right?” he said.

“No, I’m saying it’s Sunday morning and I’m not in the mood for somebody’s grift. If that offends you, go fuck yourself.”

I walked out of the sunlight onto the church lawn, into the pine trees where Pete waited for me. I heard Ronnie start his car and back out onto the dirt street and head toward the state road. Then he slowed and made a U-turn through the portico of a deserted Pure station, the Hollywood mufflers reverberating off the cement. He stopped in front of the church and left the car running in the street. He jumped across the rain ditch onto the grass and caught my shirtsleeve with two fingers, oblivious to the stares of people going inside the church.

“I ain’t burned no firemen, man. And nobody don’t talk to me like that. That means nobody.”

When I got back to the house I walked Beau into the barn and unsaddled him and turned him out. As I walked toward the house I saw Temple Carrol jog past the front of the driveway, then pause in midstride and stare back at me, as though unsure of what she was going to do next.

She walked up the drive toward me, her hair tucked inside a baseball cap.

“You look like you’ve been pouring it on,” I said.

“I’ve got a problem. This friend of mine has his head up his butt. But I really don’t know how to tell him that,” she replied. She wore a pair of faded pink shorts, and the tails of her shirt were knotted under her breasts. Her skin was glazed with sweat, her eyes blinking with the salt that ran into them. She blotted her face on her shirt.

“What is it, Temple?” I asked.

“If you want to be an idiot in your private life, that’s your business. But I’m part of Wilbur Pickett’s defense team. You don’t have the right to do what you’re doing.”

“Doing what, please?”

Her hands were in her back pockets, her face tilted up into mine now, the whites of her eyes shiny and pink. Her breasts rose and fell against her shirt.

“It’s a small town. Peggy Jean had a fight with her husband in front of the Langtry Hotel. Then the two of you boogied on down the road,” she said.

“She twisted her ankle. I took her home.”

“Well, twist this. You’ve managed to publicly involve yourself with the wife of the man who’s brought charges against your client. You piss me off so bad I want to beat the shit out of you.” She shoved me in the breastbone with her hand. Then she shoved me again, her face heating, her eyes watering now.

“Nothing happened, Temple. I promise.”

She turned and walked away from me, then ripped the baseball cap off her head and shook out her hair. The faded rump of her shorts was flecked with dirt.

“Come on back, Temple,” I said.

But she didn’t.

I went inside the house and turned on the television to fill the rooms with as much noise as I could to drown out Temple’s words.

A Houston televangelist was sitting on a stage with his two co-hosts, a middle-aged blonde woman and a white-haired black man who looked like a minstrel performer rather than a real person of color. The three of them had joined hands and were supposedly receiving telepathic pleas for help from their electronic congregation. Their eyes were squeezed shut, their faces furrowed with strain as though they were constipated.

I stared in disbelief as the pilot Bubba Grimes took a seat among the latticework of plastic flowers. He talked of mercy flights to Rwandan refugees, or missionaries who risked their lives in jungles that swarmed with wild animals and tropical disease. Grimes’s face broke into thousands of fine wrinkles when he grinned, like the lines in a tobacco leaf. The televangelist was bent forward in his chair, his unctuous voice modifying and directing Grimes’s peckerwood depiction of Western humanity at work in Central Africa.

The blonde woman and the black man, whose skin looked like greasepaint and whose hair was as white as new snow, nodded their heads reverentially.

Grimes poured into a glass from a pitcher filled with ice and Kool-Aid and drank until the glass was empty.

“Bubba loves his Kool-Aid,” the televangelist said.

Grimes grinned at the camera, his lips as red as a wet strawberry.

It was sickening to watch.

I went to my desk in the library and punched in Earl Deitrich’s number on the telephone.

“What is it now?” he said when he recognized my voice.

“I drove your wife home the other day because you left her on the sidewalk with a sprained ankle. That was the extent of it. I hope we’re clear on that.”