Heartwood (Billy Bob Holland 2)

“Jessie is another matter, though. He’s half white trash and half Comanche Indian. He’ll tie you down in your bed and put a sock in your mouth and skin you like a deer. Ask the sheriff, Chug,” I said.

The three passengers in the Jeep looked at one another. The one named Warren stuck an unlit cigarette in his mouth, then pulled it out and rolled the barrel of the cigarette back and forth between his fingers.

“The people at the state mental hospital thought they’d blow out his aggressions with electroshock. He bit through the rubber gag, then got a hand free and chewed a technician’s finger off,” I said.

“My uncle used to hire Jessie Stump to clean gum off the seats at the Rialto. He got stuck in the chimney when he tried to rob the hardware store. The county jail in Llano wouldn’t take him because he’s not toilet trained. Good try, counselor,” Jeff said, and laughed, then drove back on the two-track road. But his passengers were silent, their expressions dull with either fatigue or reconsideration about the wisdom of hunting Jessie Stump.

The wind dented the grass and flowers in the glade and a drop of rain stung me in the eye like a BB.

“The guys they’re looking for are living in our cave, ain’t they?” Pete said.

“That’d be my guess.”

“Are those stories true about Jessie Stump?”

I wet my lips. “I kind of made those up,” I said.

“I don’t like to hear about stuff like that, Billy Bob. I don’t want to come up here for a while. Don’t lie to me about Jessie Stump, neither. It means you don’t respect me.”

I turned around in the saddle and looked at him. But his eyes stared at the ground as it moved past us, as though our shadows knew each other in ways we did not. He removed his hands from my waist and rested them on the cantle.

22

I went to Marvin Pomroy’s house early the next morning, before he left for work, and found him out on the patio behind his white gingerbread house, his newspaper propped against a glass of orange juice, a piece of toast held in his fingers while he read the box scores on the sports page.

His backyard was spacious and filled with trees and flowering bushes, and blue jays and mockingbirds flew in and out of the sunlight. His wife waved at me from the French doors that gave onto the dining room and held up a cup of coffee with a question in her face.

“No thanks, Gretchen,” I said, and sat down at Marvin’s table without being asked.

“Can’t it wait till I get to the office?” he said.

“Did you talk to the pathologist in San Antone?”

“Yeah, I did. He said Cholo Ramirez was sniffing model airplane glue before he died. There was a sock loaded with it on the seat beside him.”

“That’s not what killed him.”

“Maybe not. But the pathologist isn’t sure what did. Boxing gloves with poison on them? Sounds like Elizabethan theater.”

“Wake up, Marvin Earl Deitrich is treating you like a bought-and-paid-for stooge.”

He folded up his newspaper and set it to the side of his plate. His shirt looked as smooth and white as new porcelain.

“As a public official I have to accept all kinds of abuse at the courthouse. That doesn’t apply in my home,” he said.

“That Mexican kid had a chemical time bomb put in his head.”

“Not in this county he didn’t.”

“There’s nothing like seeing cartography used to compartmentalize evil,” I said.

Marvin rose from his chair and picked up his newspaper and glass of orange juice and went inside the house and closed the French doors gingerly with one foot.

The next day was Saturday. Lucas Smothers woke before dawn and drank coffee on the back steps of his rented house and watched the sun break across the fields and light on the trailer where Esmeralda Ramirez was still living. She had hand-washed her undergarments the night before and hung them on the clothesline in back, and now they moved in the breeze and he felt v

aguely ashamed when he realized he was looking at them.

He had convinced himself he had no romantic interest in her, that he could no more ask her to leave than he could refuse to help an injured person on the highway. But when she had cleaned his house for him and hung curtains in his windows, he’d found himself following her from room to room, telling her about the bands he had played in, listening to her talk about her classes at the Juco, all the time watching her eyes and her mouth, embarrassed at the level of arousal they caused in him.