Heartwood (Billy Bob Holland 2)

Chug made a grinding noise deep in his throat and charged toward the door as though he were back on the high school football field, tearing holes in the enemy line like a tank through a hedgerow, his fists balled into hams, his furrowed brow tilted down like a battering ram.

A waitress came through the revolving door just before Chug reached it, spinning the thick, rounded edge of the glass directly in front of Chug’s head.

He crashed into it with a sound like someone thumping a wood mallet on a watermelon, then rolled moaning between the partitions, his hands clasped to his forehead.

The waitress tried to free herself from being trapped by shoving against the push bar, slamming the door back into his face, mashing his nose against the glass like a pig’s snout pressed against a window.

Finally Chug tumbled out on the sidewalk, his clothes spotted with expectorated Red Man and Copenhagen.

“Better put some ice on that bump. It looks like a couple of golf balls,” Lucas said.

Jeff helped Chug to his feet while he glared at both Esmeralda and Lucas.

“This is all your fault, Jeff. Don’t blame it on anybody else,” she said.

“Your mouth’s always running. You never shut up. Somebody’s going to put something in it,” Jeff said.

“You couldn’t cut it on the rig and you cain’t cut it nowhere else, either. Stop taking out all your grief on other people,” Lucas said.

Lucas and Esmeralda walked across the parking lot toward Lucas’s pickup truck. The clouds overhead were silver and black in the moonlight, like smoked pewter, the wind rattling the palm trees by the entrance to the drive-in. Jeff’s fists curled and uncurled at his sides.

“Don’t worry, Jeff. He’s gonna be a stump when we get finished with him,” the ex-football player with his cap on backwards said.

“Smothers can wait. Esmeralda’s asking for a train,” Jeff said, his eyes burning into her back.

“You got a sign-up sheet?” the ex-football player said.

Two days later Lucas sat on the top rail of Beau’s lot, the heels of his boots hooked on the second rail for support, and tossed chinaberries at a bucket. The morning was still cool, the shadows long on the ground, and Beau was drinking out of the tank by the windmill, switching his tail hard in the shade. I stopped shoveling manure into a wheelbarrow and leaned the shovel against the fence.

“Who heard him say this?” I asked.

“The waitress.”

“Maybe Esmeralda should go back to San Antone for a while.”

“She don’t listen. What do you reckon I ought to do?”

If they try to rape that girl, you blow their damn heads off, I thought.

“Pardon?” Lucas said.

“Nothing. I didn’t say anything.” I widened my eyes and looked at the clarity of the horizon against the sunrise. A flock of crows was descending into my neighbor’s corn, like black ash drifting out of the sky.

I pulled the morning edition of the local newspaper out of my back pocket and flopped it open on the fence rail. At the bottom of the front page was a story about the bodies of two Jamaicans that had been found floating in a flooded quarry outside Waxahachie. “Maybe it’s time Jeff Deitrich had some of his own chickens come home to roost,” I said.

“He’s mixed up with these dead guys?”

“Get her out of town. Let me work on a couple of things.”

He dropped down from the fence and scraped a pattern in the dust with his boot.

“The reason I come over is, I was wondering if you might loan me L.Q. Navarro’s revolver,” he said.

I walked away from him toward the house, not answering him, shaking my head, wanting to flee his words as I would a dark and obscene thought.

27

That same morning I met Temple Carroll at the office. I hadn’t spoken to her since my failed overture in her backyard when she had dropped her speedbag gloves in the dust and gone into the house and locked the door behind her like a slap in the face.