Heartwood (Billy Bob Holland 2)

“Sir, you’re not making sense.”

He wiped his palms on the front of his suit and I saw the dark streaks on the cloth.

“A deputy sheriff tried to stop me at a crossroads. He was taking his gun out. I hit him till he didn’t get up no more.”

I sat down on a spool table and felt my eyes go out of focus and my energies drain. My field of vision swam with weevil worms.

“I can get you into federal custody,” I said.

“Earl Deitrich come out of the Pit. I can smell Satan on a man the way you smell sulfur in a storm. You was made different the day the preacher laid you back in the river and let the water fill your eyes with sky and trees. I ain’t gonna be here to stop Deitrich. You got to do it.”

“Mr. Doolittle, I’m not a theologian. I’m probably not even a very good attorney. But baptism was a simple ritual of the Essenes. It was just a way of welcoming a new person into the Christian community.”

He rubbed the blood from his hands on his coat sleeves, his eyes as round as coins pushed into his face. Then, from a long way off, I could hear dogs barking, in a pack, the sound rising louder and louder on the wind.

“Come back in the house with me. I won’t let them hurt you,” I said.

“They’ll kill Jessie Stump for sure. You ain’t seen them at work.”

I removed all the bills from my wallet, two hundred dollars, and put them in his hand.

“Goodbye, Mr. Doolittle,” I said.

“Goodbye, sir,” he replied.

17

The next day I rose early and showered and went out into the cool of the morning and put oats in Beau’s trough and picked up litter from the stor

m in the yard. The fever of the previous night seemed to have flowed out of my body like water. I started to call Marvin Pomroy and tell him about the visit of Skyler Doolittle and to ask about the fate of the deputy sheriff whom Skyler had beaten; but the day was just too nice to contend with the irrationalities of a legal system that was never intended to be anything other than a cosmetic one.

Instead I drove to Lucas’s rented house forty miles west of town and got to watch another form of irrationality at work—my son’s.

He and I were talking in the front yard when Ronnie Cruise’s 1961 sunburst T-Bird, with Ronnie behind the wheel and Cholo in the passenger seat, turned into the drive.

“My sister back there?” Cholo said from the window.

“What do y’all want?” Lucas said.

“Figure it out. To see my sister, man,” Cholo said.

The car drove past the side of the house and stopped in front of the trailer.

I looked into Lucas’s face.

“You keep your hand out of it,” I said.

“It’s my damn house. What’s Ronnie Cross doing here? She eighty-sixed him a long time ago,” he replied.

“Lucas—”

He walked to the side of the house and stared at the trailer, his hands on both hips, his coned straw hat pulled down on his face. Esmeralda and Cholo and Ronnie were now out in the dirt yard.

“I got a job in a restaurant here. I’m not going back to San Antone, Cholo,” Esmeralda said.

“I’m your brother. You’re gonna do what I say,” Cholo said.

“These ain’t our people up here. My mother says you can stay at her house. I ain’t gonna bother you, Essie,” Ronnie said. He wore a red bandanna on his hair and the points lifted in the wind.