Heartwood (Billy Bob Holland 2)

“You got it, kemo sabe.”

“What happened to it?” I felt my hand tighten unconsciously on the receiver.

“Most of it was sold off. Except for one hundred acres Wilbur’s great-grandfather owned outside Beaumont. I’m in the Beaumont public library right now. That one hundred acres was right by the Spindletop oil strike. Wilbur’s great-grandfather lost it in a civil suit filed by a Houston oil speculator named Deitrich. Wilbur’s great-grandfather hanged himself. This all happened about 1901. Guess which Deitrich family we’re talking about?”

I had been standing up in my office, gazing out the window while I talked. Suddenly I felt light-headed, my face cold and filmed with perspiration at the same time. I sat down in my swivel chair.

“You still there?” Temple said.

Wilbur Pickett was inside his barn, grinding the center-cutter for a ditching machine on an emery wheel, the sparks gushing onto his boot tops, when I pulled up on the grass in the Avalon and got out and headed for him without even bothering to turn off my car engine.

I threw my hat at his head. His mouth opened, then he saw my expression and the skin of his face grew so tight against the bone there were white lines, like tiny pieces of string, around his eyes.

“You did it, you lying bastard,” I said.

“You stand back from me, Billy Bob.”

I started to speak, but I couldn’t get the words out. I shoved him in the breastbone.

“Don’t do that,” he said.

I shoved him again, with both hands, my teeth clenched together, then I pushed him out the back door into the horse lot. He became foot-tangled, off balance, flinching when I came at him again.

“Go ahead, take a shot, Wilbur. See what happens,” I said.

His face was the bright red of a trainman’s lantern.

“I ain’t gonna fight you,” he said. He lowered his hands and turned his back to me and hung his arms over the top rail of the fence. His pulse jumped in his neck and he looked at me out of the corner of his eye like a frightened animal.

“Why’d you steal? Why’d you lie all this time?” I said.

“Deitrich rubbed my face in it in front of all them people. I went into his office to bust that watch on the fireplace. Then I seen them bonds in the safe. I started thinking about the oil land his family stole from mine and I looked at them bonds and before I knowed it I had the watch in my pocket and them bonds stuck down in my britches. It was like I was watching somebody else do it instead of me.”

He glanced at me to see if his explanation had taken. He swallowed and looked away quickly. “I got greedy. Is that what you’re waiting on?” he said.

“You sorry sonofabitch,” I said.

“It wasn’t no three hundred thousand. It was fifty. Giving them back wasn’t gonna do no good. Earl Deitrich was gonna make money on the insurance claim and come after Kippy Jo’s and my oil sand at the same time.”

“Does your wife know about this?”

“No, sir, she don’t.”

“What about the bonds that were in the side of the dresser?”

“They were planted. That’s what I been trying to tell you. It didn’t matter what I done or didn’t do. Deitrich and Hugo Roberts was gonna put me in the pen.”

He stared morosely at the windmill blades straining against the lock chain and at his horses out in the alfalfa and the dust and rain blowing out of the hills in the west.

“What’d you do with the bonds you stole?” I asked.

“I sold them down in Mexico. The money’s in the oil deal up in Wyoming now.”

“You used us.”

He pressed the heel of his hand against his forehead.

“I guess this world can be a mess of grief, cain’t it?” he said.