Heartwood (Billy Bob Holland 2)

“Where’s your husband at?” he asked.

“This is a bad place for y

ou. You shouldn’t come here,” she replied.

“Anybody hurt me, Purple Hearts will take people out of here one by one. They’ll cut phone lines. Won’t nobody be able to help them.”

“You’re empowering your enemies.”

“I’m gonna bring Deitrich down. I’m gonna hurt him for what he done to you.”

“Sit down with me. Put your hands in mine.”

But he wasn’t listening to her now. He turned at a snigger, a remark about Mexicans, his elbow striking the back of someone’s head. Then he shoved a tray stacked with barbecue ribs onto the floor and flung his beer into a man’s face and spit in a woman’s hair.

He had no chance. The men from the table he had violated were joined by others, men with redneck accents and drilling mud on their clothes, and they swarmed over him and pushed him outside, trundling him in their midst down a leaf-strewn embankment to the riverside.

In her mind the trees along the bank and the cliffs above the water were no longer a repository of shadow but were now lighted with a kinetic yellow and black brilliance, as though the sun were shining at midnight.

Kippy Jo stood at the porch screen, listening to the sounds that rose from the riverbank. The crowd had formed a circle, but all their physiological differences had disappeared. They had only one face, and it and their bodies looked made of baked clay, and they used the sharp points of sticks to prod the man in the center back and forth, as they would a bear in a pit.

Angular tubes of red light burst from the wounds in his skin. His throat roared, his hands thrashed at the air like paws. Then his face lifted toward her, one eye squeezed shut like a lump of cauliflower. She could feel the pointed sticks cut into her own ribs and chest, just as they did his. She felt her way between the tables and out the door and down the path to the riverbank, touching the bushes on each side of her, cobweb clinging to her hair.

She smelled the hot stench of the crowd and stopped. She sensed the presence of a shape in front of her and reached out and touched the hardened muscles in a man’s back and felt him jump as though the tips of her fingers had burned his skin.

The faces of everyone in the circle turned slowly upon her.

“Lady, you don’t have any business down here,” a man said. But the confidence in his voice drained before he had finished the sentence.

She stepped inside the circle and touched the face of the man in the center, the wetness running out of his hair, the eye that trembled under her fingertips. She ran her hand down his shoulder and fitted it inside his upper arm.

“You have to take me out to the road and stay with me until Wilbur comes back,” she said.

She thought he would argue but he didn’t. They walked together toward the path, the crowd parting in front of her, looking into her sightless eyes as though the power they had feared all their lives lay hidden there. The wind gusted off the river, scattering pine needles across the clearing, then the sun that had blazed at the top of the sky died and the riverside went dark again and the only heat she felt was the brilliance of high-beam headlights that someone had shined across the water onto the cliffs.

Kippy Jo and Cholo Ramirez stood by the front of the parking lot like two bronze statues welded at the seam until Wilbur’s pickup truck came skidding to a stop in a rooster tail of dust behind them. His eyes went past them to the crowd that was still standing in front of the screen porch.

“What in the hell you doin’ with my wife, boy?” he said.

• • •

“She says I ain’t fair to him. I say he could have gotten her killed,” Wilbur said to me the next day in my office.

“You don’t like him?”

“I don’t like him coming around Kippy Jo. That boy’s a criminal, pure and simple. Besides, he looks like a toad frog somebody kept mashed down inside a Vaseline jar.”

“Why are you telling me all this?” I asked.

“Earl Deitrich ain’t the only one on his shit list. Is your son getting it on with a Mexican gal named Esmeralda?”

That evening I sat on a wooden stool behind Lucas’s rented house and watched him can-water the tomato plants in the rocky plot of ground he called a vegetable garden. The air was hot and still and thick with birds, and out on the state road I heard a semitrailer roar by and saw a turkey buzzard rise from a piece of roadkill on the edge of the asphalt. While he sprinkled and dusted his plants, Lucas kept glancing up at the trailer where Esmeralda was living, as though she could hear his words.

“I ain’t afraid of Cholo. I ain’t afraid of Ronnie Cross, either,” he said.

“Foolish words, in my view,” I said.

“Well, you ain’t me.”