Heartwood (Billy Bob Holland 2)

She went back to work on the bag. The moon was big and yellow behind the pecan tree in her backyard. Out in the darkness I could hear the wind rattling in her neighbor’s cornfield. Her invalid father was inside the house, and I could see his silhouette, in his wheelchair, against the lighted television screen in the front room.

“You mad at me?” I said.

“No, not really. You’re what you are. I can’t change it,” she answered.

I hooked my arm around the top of the bag.

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“You’ve never let me down. They don’t make them any better than you, Temple,” I said.

“You live with ghosts. I can’t compete with them.”

“Don’t talk like that.”

“You don’t understand women, Billy Bob. At least you don’t understand me.”

I put my hands on the tips of her shoulders, even while she was shaking her head.

“I’m hot and dirty,” she said.

I touched the pool of moisture in the hollow of her neck and slid my hands down her back and smelled the heat in her hair and felt the tone of her muscles and the taper of her hips against my palms. I let my lips brush against her cheek, and for the first time in our many years as intimate friends I consciously stepped over a line into Temple’s life.

She raised on the balls of her feet, her stomach against my loins, as though she were going to kiss me, then her face broke and she walked hurriedly into the house, dropping her gloves randomly into the dust, and closed the door and locked it behind her.

26

Wesley Rhodes was standing on the corner of the square, across from the courthouse, in the cool of the evening, watching the junior high school girls go in and out of the Mexican grocery store that had a small soda fountain in back. They giggled and had braces on their teeth and attracted him in ways he didn’t understand. Not in a bad way. It was like they were his age, or he was their age, except he knew a lot more about the world than they did and he could take care of and protect them.

He just never could get up the nerve to talk to them. Maybe tonight would be different. He sat up on top of the backrest of a wood bench under a live oak, his hair slicked back, his comb clipped inside his shirt pocket, drinking from a Dixie cup filled with Coca-Cola and crushed ice. The trees were dark green overhead and the face of the clock on the courthouse tower glowed in the sunset, and the streets were striped with shadows now and the girls in front of the grocery marbled with light from the owner’s neon signs. Man, summertime was great. If he just had enough nerve to stroll across the street …

That’s when Jeff Deitrich’s yellow convertible, with the top up, pulled to the curb and Jeff said, “Get in back, snarf.”

They chased him for two blocks before they blocked him in an alley and Chug and Hammie and Warren pulled him off a fire escape and threw him in the car.

Crushed between Hammie and Chug in the backseat, he saw the city limits sign speed past the window.

“What’s going on?” he said.

“You’re gonna become a deep-sea diver tonight, little buddy. You ever watch those Jacques Costeau shows on TV? A frog can do it, you can do it,” Hammie said. He took the comb out of Wesley’s shirt pocket and scratched the purple and burnt-orange tattoo of a butterfly on the side of his throat with it.

“Frog? What’s a frog got to do with anything?” Wesley asked.

Just after midnight the convertible turned on a dirt road and a few minutes later Wesley was able to see clearly out the window and recognize the rock quarry, just like someone had taken a bad dream from his life and forced him back inside it.

Wesley climbed out of the car with the others, his heart thundering, his armpits running with sweat. The wind had died and a layer of dust hung in the air and drifted over the mounds of yellow dirt that surrounded the crater.

“Tell them, Warren. I ain’t never snitched nobody off. Even when the gunbulls put me in the hole,” Wesley said.

“That’s what I’ve been telling them. You’re a righteous, sharp little dude. That’s why they’re letting you prove yourself,” Warren said. He smiled good-naturedly, like the old Warren used to do, square-jawed, his eyes clear, handsome as a movie star.

“Why I got to prove anything? I ain’t done nothing wrong,” Wesley said.

“Not a good attitude, Wes,” Warren said, his face taking on philosophic concern. “You a good swimmer?”

Jeff popped the trunk.

“This is scuba gear, queeb. That’s an underwater camera and strobe. You’re going to dive that Mercedes and take pictures. The mop-heads had better be inside,” Jeff said.