Heartwood (Billy Bob Holland 2)

“Ronnie’s waiting in the car. He wasn’t sure you wanted him inside,” Cholo said.

“Why’d you bring him? It’s not his business. Stay out of my life, Cholo,” she said.

“Don’t treat us like that, Esmeralda. We’re your people. It’s you who don’t have no business up here,” Cholo said. Then his face clouded and his metabolism seemed to kick into a higher register. “I don’t understand nothing that’s going on here.”

But she wasn’t listening to him. Her eyes swept the street once more. She pirouetted on the sidewalk and stared into my face.

“Is Jeff in jail? Because of the gay guy at Shorty’s?” she said.

“The guy Jeff beat up had a change of heart. He dropped the charges and decided to vacation in Cancún,” I said.

But the inference about the way Jeff’s father handled business did not show in her face. “Then where’s Jeff?” she said.

A steel-gray limo with tinted windows pulled into a yellow zone next to Cholo’s car and Earl Deitrich got out of the back door, dressed in dark blue jeans and soft boots and a snap-button shirt. Peggy Jean stayed far back in the interior of the limo, her face veiled with shadow, her white dress glowing in a ray of sunlight. The chauffeur, a peculiar man named Fletcher, who seemed to have no past or origins, stood on the opposite side of the limo, his arms propped on the roof, a fixed smile on his mouth.

Earl’s face was warm with sympathy, his hands open, as though he were about to console a survivor at a funeral.

“Thank the Lord I caught you,” he said to Esmeralda.

“My attorney is going to contact you tomorrow. We’ll get everything worked out. Believe me, Jeff wants to do the right thing. In the meantime, you call me with any problem you have.”

“What are you talking about?” she said.

“Young people act hastily sometimes. That doesn’t mean they have to ruin their lives over it. We’re here to help. We’re in this thing together,” he said.

“Where’s Jeff?” she asked.

“He’s got some things to work out. But he’s going to have to do it by himself. It’s important for us to understand that, Esmeralda,” Earl said.

“He marries my sister but he’s got things to do by himself? She don’t have no more to say. You send the lawyer around, he talks to me first,” Cholo said.

Earl’s chauffeur walked around the grille of the limo and stood inches from Cholo’s back, smiling at nothing, the black hair that was combed on the sides of his bald pate ruffling slightly in the breeze. He wore black slacks and shined shoes and an open-necked long-sleeve white shirt with cuff links that had red stones in them.

Earl’s eyes looked directly into the chauffeur’s. The chauffeur’s gaze shifted to a spot across the street and he stepped backwards as though an invisible hand had touched his chest.

“You’re right, Cholo,” Earl said. “Everybody needs to be included in on this, informed about everything that’s happening. Absolutely.”

“You think I married your son so I can take your money? You’re pitiful, Mr. Deitrich,” Esmeralda said.

“I don’t blame you for having bad feelings. I just want to—” Earl began.

Ronnie Cruise, who sat behind the Mercury’s steering wheel, lifted his eyes into Earl’s face. Ronnie’s eyes were absolutely black, without luster, dead, devoid of all moral sense.

“Like Cholo says, we got nothing else to talk about here. No disrespect, but tell your man there, what’s his face, Fletcher, to get his fucking hand off Cholo’s paint job,” Ronnie said.

A few minutes later Temple Carrol and I watched the limo and the customized Mercury drive in different directions through the cooling streets of Deaf Smith. Peggy Jean had never spoken. Not to me, not on behalf of decency or fairness or in some token way to show a bit of kindness toward a Mexican girl who was about to discover you didn’t leave the rural slums of San Antonio because a drunk white boy married you in Piedras Negras.

“How do you read all that?” Temple asked, lifting her shirt off her moist skin and shaking the cloth.

I couldn’t answer. I kept thinking about Peggy Jean and the net of shadow and light on her skin and white dress and her silent participation in her husband’s evil.

“You still on the planet?” Temple said.

“What do I think?” I said. “I think Jeff Deitrich is a sexual nightmare. I think he’s violent and dangerous and has racist instincts. I hope Esmeralda gets as far from the Deitrich family as possible.”

“Who lit your fuse?” Temple said.

That night the sky was blue-black, veined with dry lightning, and brushfires burned in the hills west of Wilbur Pickett’s place out on the hardpan. Deer broke down the wire fence on the back of Wilbur’s pasture, and his Appaloosa and two palominos wandered out into the darkness.