Heartwood (Billy Bob Holland 2)

“What happened?” I asked.

“I found this ex-con boxer, Johnny Krause, at a pool hall in San Antone yesterday,” she replied. “He stuck a pool cue in my eye.”

“You went there by yourself?”

“He said he was sorry. He was just nervous around class broads in pool rooms. You want to hear what I have or not?” she said.

She ran through the material in her notebook. Krause had been picked up and questioned in the death of Cholo Ramirez and let go. He drove a cement mixer on and off for a construction company, rented a farmhouse behind a water-bed motel on the outskirts of San Antonio, and spent most of his downtime in Mexico.

“Dope?” I said.

“He draws compo and drives a new Lincoln,” Temple said.

“Where’s our pool shooter now?” I asked.

We crossed the border at Piedras Negras and drove down into the state of Coahuila. The sun was hazy and red on the horizon now, and the poplar trees planted along the road were dark green, almost blue, in the dusk. We continued south of Zaragoza and crossed a river dotted with islands that had willow trees on them, then we saw a long baked plain and hills in the distance and a whitewashed village that spilled down an incline to a brown lake. The water in the lake had receded from the banks and left the hollow-socketed skeletons of carp in the skin of dried mud that covered the flats.

A Mexican cop nicknamed Redfish by the Bexar County sheriff’s department, for whom he was a drug informant, waited for us in the backseat of a taxi parked in the small plaza in the center of the village. He had jowls like a pig, narrow shoulders, wide hips, and sideburns that fanned out like greasepaint on his cheeks. He wore yellow shades and a mauve-colored flop-brim bush hat, probably to detract from his complexion, which was deeply pocked, as though insects had burrowed into the flesh and eaten holes in it.

“I had to hire my cousin to drive me ’cause we didn’t have no official cars free today. He’s gonna need twenty-five dollars for his time,” Redfish said.

“Yeah, I can see he probably gave up a lot of fares this afternoon. Tourists flying in for the water sports and that sort of thing,” Temple said.

“Your friend at the Bexar sheriff’s office? He said you got a hard nose. We don’t got no tourists now. But in winter we got gringos from Louisiana kill ducks all over that lake. They shoot three or four hundred in a morning. What you think of that?” Redfish said.

“We think we need to talk to Johnny Krause,” I said.

“You was a Texas Ranger?”

“That’s right,” I said.

“One thing to remember here. He ain’t been in no trouble in Mexico. He leaves a lot of money in the village. ’cause he’s a countryman don’t mean he gets treated without respect.”

/> The wind shifted and Temple’s face jerked as though it had been struck. “What’s in that lake?” she said.

“Everything from the houses runs downhill here. It don’t stink after the rains. The gringos come here for the ducks after the rains. They’re real proud, drinking wine in the cafe and eating all their ducks,” Redfish said.

Redfish got in the front seat of the Avalon with me, and Temple sat in back. The sun was an ember on the horizon when we drove deeper into the village and out onto a chiseled rock road above the lake. Caves or old mine shafts were cut back into the hill, and people were living in them. They washed their clothes in the lake and dried them on the rocks around the caves, and cooked their food in pots that gave off an odor like burning garbage. I saw no men, only women and children, their faces smeared with soot, the color of their hair impossible to define.

“They’re gitanos. They fix dishes with chicken guts. They steal them out of hog pens. You can’t do nothing for them,” Redfish said.

“Where are the men?” Temple asked.

“A bunch of them got in a fight with knives. The jefe got them out at his ranch for a while. Look, señorita, this is a house of puta. Maybe it ain’t good you go in there,” he said.

“I’ll try not to have impure thoughts,” Temple said.

“Johnny Krause ain’t grown up inside, know what I mean?” Redfish said to me.

“No,” I said.

“Neither do I,” Temple said, leaning forward on the seat.

“All the gitanos ain’t just up in them caves or out at the jefes ranch,” he said, and looked out the window at the dusty surface of the lake.

At the end of the road beveled out of the hill was a whitewashed building that had probably been a powder house for a mining company and possibly later a jail. The walls were stone, the windows inset with bars, the roof covered with wood poles and tin and mounds of dirt that had sprouted grass. The casement of the front door was steel, bolted into the stone, and the door itself, which hung partially open, was cast iron and painted red. The paint was incised with every possible lewd depiction of human genitalia.

The bar and floor were made of rough-planed raw pine scorched by cigarette and cigar butts. The interior was bright with a greasy light from oil lamps, and the smoke on the ceiling was so thick it churned in gobs when someone walked under it. The faces of the customers were besotted and inflamed, their teeth rotted, their skin unnaturally lucent, like lemon rind. A child went in and out of the back door, emptying cuspidors and returning them to the bar and tables. Through the back windows and the open door I could see three pole sheds with burlap curtains hung from the roofs. Under the bottom of the curtains were slop jars and wash pans and the legs of either beds or cots.