Heartwood (Billy Bob Holland 2)

He herded the two guards out the door, pushing them in the back toward the pond that rang with a greenish-yellow light. The other inmates stared from the bus windows, some already starting to turn their faces away, as though they were being forced to watch the showing of a film they didn’t want to see.

“Just look the other way and kneel down. Look at the water. It’s full of frogs. They’re jumping all over the place. See?” Jessie said to the guards.

“My salary is all my old woman’s got. You must have gone to a church at one time, son. Ain’t none of you boys all bad,” the older guard said. Then his words broke in his throat and died and his lungs heaved in his chest for breath.

“I didn’t just go to church. My daddy was a preacher. He burned me with cigarettes and choked to death on a woman’s glass eye in a motel room. You look at them frogs. There’s one yonder fat as a football,” Jessie said. He stepped back from the two guards, his hand tightening and untightening on the grips of the pistol, his palm making a popping sound, as though there were adhesive on his skin.

Then Skyler Doolittle was standing behind him, a clutch of chains and manacles dripping from one hand.

“Have they did something bad to you?” Skyler asked.

“They ain’t. Back at the jail, a couple of them others took me down for midnight Bible study. Magpies all set on the same bush,” Jessie said.

“You aiming to walk through a woods in these orange suits?” Skyler asked.

“What?” Jessie said.

“Get their uniforms off and chain them up. Don’t you hurt them, either,” Skyler said.

“Who put you in charge? Don’t you walk off like that. You listening to me?” Then Jessie stared at Skyler’s bare skin. “Man, they done the same thing to you, ain’t they?”

Skyler had unzipped and stepped out of his orange jumpsuit and mounted the bus’s steps. His body was striped with bruises, like the color in rotten fruit. He reached under the dashboard with both hands and tore the radio out of its fastenings and threw it out on the ground like a dead animal.

“What’s the name of them two give you midnight Bible study?” he said.

At false dawn the next morning I drove out to Wilbur Pickett’s place. The sun was still below the horizon, and the air was a dense blue and the shapes inside it not quite formed. When I got out of the car I could smell the

heavy, cold odor of well water and coffee boiling and pork frying in the kitchen. Then I saw Wilbur riding his Appaloosa through the grass from the west, his face covered with shadow under his hat, a lamb gathered against his stomach with one arm. He dismounted by the barn and set the lamb on a worktable inside the door and stroked its head.

“Reach me that first-aid kit, will you?” he said.

“What happened?” I asked.

“Some dumb bastard left a steel trap out there in the hills. I’d like to slam his hand in a car door and see how he likes it.”

There was a bright red bracelet incised around the lamb’s right leg. Wilbur poured disinfectant on the wound and washed and applied salve to it, then began cutting strips of gauze and tape with a pair of scissors while I held the lamb.

“You left a message on my machine. Something about this fellow Fletcher who works for Earl Deitrich?” I said.

Wilbur twisted his head and looked back at his house. The curtains were flapping whitely in the kitchen window.

“I come home yesterday and this guy Fletcher was parked in the drive, leaning against his limo, watching Kippy Jo hang wash in back,” Wilbur said.

“What’d he want?”

“Wait a minute,” Wilbur said, and bandaged the lamb’s wound and set the lamb down on a bed of straw in a stall. He removed a sealed gallon jar from a plank shelf. It was filled to the top with loamy, reddish-brown dirt that was marbled with black streaks against the glass. He unscrewed the top of the jar and handed it to me.

“Smell it,” he said. Then he waited, and said, “Just like salt water and humus and rotten eggs, ain’t it?”

“Oil?”

“Sweet crude, as black and pure as it gets. You can eat it on ice cream. Kippy Jo inherited two hundred acres in Wyoming her grandfather owned. That’s the core sample on what’s gonna be the Kippy Jo Number One. Don’t nobody know about it. At least that’s what I thought till this guy Fletcher showed up.

“I asked him what he was doing in my damn driveway. He goes, ‘We hear you got a drill site located in Wyoming. If you want to unload it, we can introduce you to the right people.’

“I say, ‘Even if I knew what you was talking about, why would I want to deal with anybody mixed up with Earl Deitrich?’

“He goes, ‘To make your troubles go away, Mr. Pickett.’