Heartwood (Billy Bob Holland 2)

He wanted an excuse to touch her. She tied her hair up on her head while she worked, and when she stood on a chair and lifted a curtain into place, her back looked strong and muscular, her exposed hips tapering outward just below her belt line, the backs of her thighs hard, as though she were wearing heels. When the chair legs wobbled, he started to grip her waist, but she steadied herself against the wall with one hand and said, “Don’t worry. I’m not going to fall.”

When Cholo died, Lucas thought Esmeralda would turn to him. But she didn’t. She returned from the funeral dry-eyed and withdrawn, like a person who has been in a subfreezing wind and sits alone by a stove with the memory of cold burned deep into the face. That evening he tapped on her screen, and when she appeared in the doorway, the overhead light breaking over her shoulders and reddish-brown hair like gold needles, he said, “If you ain’t eat yet, I’m fixing to put some food out on the table. Or I can bring some over. I mean, if you’re hungry. Or maybe you just want to take a walk or something.” Then he took a breath and said, “I ain’t good at words. I’m sorry about your brother.”

“That’s nice of you, Lucas. But I have to go to work,” she replied.

“Work? That tub of guts at the Dog ’n’ Shake is making you come in the same day your brother was buried?”

“I’ll see you later, Lucas,” she said, and eased the inside door closed in his face.

She didn’t even ask him for a ride. Instead, she put on her pink uniform and waited out on the road for the county bus to pick her up and carry her out to the small drive-in not far from the Post Oaks Country Club.

Now he sat on his back steps in the early morning coolness, looking at her undergarments on the clothesline, wondering if he was prurient or simply a fool. No sound at all came from inside the trailer. The sun rose above the house in a red ball and he flung the coffee from his cup into the dust and laced on his steel-toed boots and drove his pickup truck out to the drilling rig where he had an eight-hour one-hundred-degree shift waiting for him on the derrick floor.

That evening, when she got off from work at the Dog ’n’ Shake, Ronnie Cruise was waiting for her in the parking lot. He was dressed in slacks, polished loafers, and a new sports shirt, clothes he normally didn’t wear, and his hair had been freshly barbered and his jaws glowed with aftershave lotion.

He leaned down in the T-Bird’s passenger window so she could see his face.

“I’ll take you home, Essie,” he said.

“I have a bus pass,” she replied.

His car was parked in the shadow of an oak tree, and the engine ticked with road heat.

“Come on, you been on your feet all day,” he said.

“Thanks, anyway, Ronnie. Really.”

She walked out to the edge of the road and stood where the bus would stop. She twisted her mouth into a button and stared at the entrance to the country club and the fairways along the river and the sun that had descended into a red cloud of dust and rain blowing on the horizon.

Ronnie sat behind the steering wheel of his car, his head on his hands. He started the engine and drove in circles around the Dog ’n’ Shake, his tires squealing softly on the pavement, while children eating at the outdoor tables watched him with wide grins on their faces.

The bus stopped for Esmeralda, then the doors closed with a rush of air and the bus heaved out into the road again with Ronnie’s T-Bird behind it. Esmeralda sat behind the driver’s seat and tried to ignore Ronnie’s behavior, but when she glanced into the wide-angle mirror on the driver’s window she saw three cars come out of the country club driveway and fall into line behind Ronnie’s.

She walked to the back of the bus and looked out the rear window. Ronnie grinned up at her through his windshield, giving her the thumbs-up sign, like an idiot, oblivious to the automobiles behind him.

Who was driving the car immediately behind Ronnie’s? she asked herself. It was one of Jeff’s friends, what’s his name, the one she disliked even more so than the others. He was big all over, layered with beer fat, his neck as thick as a pig’s. He was like most fat men she had known—he affected humor and detachment from the world, but he used his irreverence to hide his cruelty, his vulgarity to disguise his fear and hatred of women.

Esmeralda waved her hand back and forth at Ronnie and pointed at the cars behind him. But he continued to grin mindlessly at her, pushing in his clutch and gunning his engine so his Hollywood mufflers rumbled off the asphalt.

She would have gotten off the bus and ridden with him, but he swung over the center line and roared past the bus and two other cars in front before he crossed back over the line and reentered his lane.

She returned to the front of the bus, swaying with her hand in a strap, and tried to see him through the front windshield. But instead of Ronnie’s T-Bird, she saw Jeff’s friend Chug Rollins, that was the name, pass the bus and cut back quickly into the flow of traffic, followed by the two other cars from the country club.

The bus headed into the dying sun, dipped down through road depressions filled with shadow, took on more passengers, mostly Hispanics and black people who worked as maids and janitorial help. Their muscles were flaccid with fatigue, their faces tired, lined, indifferent to what others might think of their slack jaws and the emptiness in their eyes.

She kept standing up in the aisle, searching the road for sign of Ronnie’s T-Bird. But the sky was turning purple above the hills now and most drivers had switched on their headlights and she couldn’t distinguish one car from the next. Maybe Ronnie had started back toward San Antone, she thought. Why was he so stubborn? Her brother was dead and one day Ronnie’s luck would run out the same way. For what? So they could wear gang colors and have the respect of sociopaths in the prison yard at Huntsville or Sugarland? She had told him it was over. She had deserted him, slept with another man and done things with the other man she didn’t even want to remember. Certain kinds of injuries don’t heal, she thought, not when you do them with forethought to yourself and those closest to you. Why couldn’t Ronnie understand that? He was as unteachable as Cholo.

He had come to the trailer behind Lucas’s house, in khakis and a purple shirt open on his chest, the dry hint of reefer on his breath.

“I love you, Essie. I want you back. I don’t care what you done,” he had told her.

“Don’t degrade yourself. It’s embarrassing. When did you start smoking dope? God, I’m sick of this craziness,” she replied.

Then she had seen something flicker and die in his face, and she bit down on her lip and watched him walk out of the trailer door and take his car keys from his pocket and look at them and put one wrong key after another into the ignition.

Now, on the bus, she felt tears welling up in her eyes and she looked down in her lap so no one would see her face.

Then she glanced out the window and saw Ronnie’s car by the side of the road, empty, the left rear tire off, the bare wheel pressed into the dirt next to a crumpled jack.