Heartwood (Billy Bob Holland 2)

Then I saw L.Q. standing at the foot of my tester bed, his hat and pinstripe suit streaked with dust, his white shirt glowing radiantly in the dark. He inserted a gold toothpick in the corner of his mouth.

“Get rid of them thoughts. It was me got us down there, bud,” he said.

“I got something bad in me, L.Q. It’s just like the time I caught one in the chest.”

“The trip across ain’t bad. It’s just like you and me splashing hell for breakfast through the Rio Grande. You blink and there’s ole red-eye coming up in the east.”

“I’m afraid.”

“You ain’t got to be. It’ll happen for you. It’s the one moment you ain’t got to plan,” he said, then turned, as though distracted by something behind him, a gleam of light r

eflecting on his gold toothpick.

Temple Carrol came through the door and walked right through him and out the other side, so that his presence was now a black-purple silhouette around her body.

She sat on the edge of the bed and took both my hands in hers and looked into my face.

“I shouldn’t have left you,” she said.

I wanted to answer but I couldn’t. I could hear my teeth rattling in my jaws. She wiped my brow with her hand and touched my cheek with the back of her wrist.

“I’m going to get some water and some damp towels,” she said, and started to rise from the bed.

But I held both of her hands tightly in mine, and like a child I pulled her toward me, put my face in her breasts, slipped my arms around her sides, felt her hesitate momentarily, then lie down against me and place her hands on the back of my head and neck, one knee pointed across my thigh.

I could hear a cacophony of huge, thick-bodied birds outside the window and the flapping of wings that spread as wide as a man’s arms.

The whirring sounds in Temple’s chest were like those inside a seashell, like wind and salt tide blowing onto a beach. I held her against me while carrion birds drifted in a red sky behind my eyelids.

18

I awoke in the hospital the next afternoon. A hard yellow light filled the room and seemed to enamel the walls and furniture with a severity and coldness that was unrelated to the season. The inside of my throat was raw, as though it had been scraped by a metal tool, and my head reeled when I went into the bathroom.

I got back into bed and held a pillow across my eyes and tried to sleep but couldn’t. A half hour later a tall physician in greens by the name of Tobin Voss came in and sat on the foot of my bed. His jaws were unshaved, his thick graying hair uncombed. He had been a helicopter pilot in Vietnam but never spoke except in an oblique way of his experience there.

“You feel like somebody hit all over you with an ice mallet?” he asked.

“What’s wrong with me?”

“Tainted food maybe. We pumped your stomach out. You don’t remember it?”

“No.”

“We were a little worried about you for a while. Your girlfriend, the one who brought you in? She’s quite a gal.”

“She’s a private investigator who works for me.”

“I’ve got it. At two in the morning your P.I. is at your house. Sorry I had things confused,” he said. “Is anybody mad at you?”

“What are you telling me, Doc?”

“I’ve seen Third World peasants eat rice from storage dumps we poisoned. You brought back some memories.”

He stood up from the bed and looked out the window at the trees below. The backs of his arms were covered with salt-and-pepper hair. When he turned back from the window he was smiling.

“Your private investigator? She pushed your gurney into the E.R. and put the fear of God in a couple of people. She’s not looking for a job in midlevel management, is she?” he said.

I got home late that evening, light-headed and dehydrated, the inside of my eyelids like sandpaper. I went out to the barn and removed two vinyl sacks of garbage from the garbage cans and emptied them on a large piece of plywood and used a garden rake to separate out packaged and canned food from any that might have been tampered with.