Heartwood (Billy Bob Holland 2)

Lucas shifted the truck down and flicked on the turn indicator and cut across the center stripe into the parking area. Lightning jumped between the clouds overhead and flickered whitely on the grass in the field. For just a moment an image caught in Lucas’s eye that he would later associate with the event more than the event itself. A thin, blond kid with pipestem arms was drunk and had wandered out into the field by himself and had pried a loose board from a collapsed shed. The board was flanged with rusty nails on one end, and the boy was whipping it at the air, his face oily and heated with booze, his eyes dull with a resentment that had no source.

Lucas pulled past Chug’s new lavender Cadillac, the one his father allowed him to borrow from the father’s dealership, and cut the headlights and the engine.

“Stay here, Essie,” he said.

“I’m going with you.”

“If this deal goes south, I want you to get to the filling station and call Billy Bob Holland.”

“What are you going to do?”

He listened to the engine cooling and looked in the rearview mirror at the chrome grille and lavender surfaces of Chug’s Cadillac and the circle around Ronnie Cruise and shook his head. “You got me,” he said, and got out and slammed the door behind him, as though he could lock his fear inside the truck cab.

As he walked toward the group he heard Esmeralda open her door and step down on the gravel and follow him.

That woman is definitely not a listener, he thought.

Chug Rollins was in the center of the circle with Ronnie now, a white golf cap on his head, a blue silk shirt with red flowers on it plastered wetly against his skin. His white pants were hitched up like a sack with a black leather belt below his belly button. His back was an ax handle across, his upper arms swollen with the thick mass of pressurized fire hoses.

Lucas had seen Chug and his friends at work before. They targeted someone they didn’t like and systematically quizzed and taunted him and made him admit behavior that was odious, that demonized him and made him unlike themselves. When it was established that he was deserving of no mercy, they tore him apart.

Homosexuals, Mexican and black gangbangers, an outside street dealer who tried to take over the local action, winos who wandered into the East End from the train tracks, they all got the same treatment. They didn’t come back for seconds.

But Ronnie Cross was a different cut. He combed his hair while they insulted him, using both hands, his face composed, his cheeks sucked in. When he had finished and put his comb away, he leaned over and spit six inches from Chug’s shoe.

“That’s how greaseballs impress people? You show them you can spit?” Chug said.

“I don’t see no greaseballs here,” Ronnie said, lifting his eyes patiently toward the sky. “See, a greaseball is a guy who’s mobbed-up. Now, if you’re calling me a ‘greaser,’ like in ‘spic,’ I got to consider the source, which means it ain’t worth worrying about. See, I don’t think you got your shit together, or you wouldn’t need a bunch of little fucks to follow you around and tell you, you don’t got no weight problem. What I’m saying is, no offense meant, is a big guy like you shouldn’t need to perform in front of windups, right?”

“That’s cute,” Chug said.

“No, man, ‘cute’ is when you put on golf drag and drive around in your old man’s Caddy trying to score black cooze that wouldn’t sleep with you if they was blind.”

“Hey, Chug, how long you gonna take this?” somebody in the crowd said.

“You carry a shank, greaseball?” Chug said.

“You call it, man. Shanks, fist, feet, elbows, bottles, you want to go nines, that can happen, too.”

“Chug, the guy just came up to give a girl a ride home from work,” Lucas said from the rear of the circle. Suddenly he had become visible, and his voice stuck in his throat and his face felt tight and small and cold in the wind.

“What’s with you, Smothers, you go off to A&M to major in dick-brain?” someone said.

But Chug raised his hand for the others to be silent.

“What are you doing with Jeff’s ex, Lucas?” he asked.

“I just think it ain’t right this many guys out here against one,” Lucas said.

“You’re not a bad kid. But that’s still Jeff’s punch. You want sloppy seconds, you check it out with Jeff first. Now, you take yourself and the jumping bean out of here. This doesn’t concern you,” Chug said.

Lucas scratched his eyebrow and looked at nothing. The headlights of a passing car swept over the group, seeming to light Ronnie’s face as brightly as a candle. The afterglow of the sun had died on the horizon and the rain was falling softly out of a black sky. Lucas wiped his mouth with his hand and took Esmeralda by the arm and turned her toward his pickup truck with him.

“I thought Aggies only did it with sheep,” someone said.

Esmeralda tried to pull away from Lucas, but his hand bit into her arm.

“You’re going to leave Ronnie on his own? I can’t believe you,” she said.