Heartwood (Billy Bob Holland 2)

“It’s good seeing you again, Billy Bob,” Clayton said, and stood up and shook hands.

Peggy Jean stood by the window, looking down into the street. Against the shadowy, cool colors of my office her suit seemed woven from light. She brushed at the back of her neck with her fingers, bending her knees slightly to see someone through the blinds, then rubbing her fingertips idly, totally oblivious to the people around her.

She and Earl went out the door, but Clayton Spangler hung back a moment.

“This one has got a personal and ugly bent to it. That’s not my way of conducting business. Come back with something reasonable and we’ll lock the barn door on it,” he said.

“Sounds good, Clayton. Earl and his kind put me in mind of livestock with the red scours,” I said.

“I tried,” he said.

That evening, when I came home, Lucas’s pickup truck was in the driveway and he was sitting on the tailgate, swinging his feet in the dirt. His straw hat was pushed up on his forehead and his reddish-blond hair stuck out on his brow. Through the kitchen window I saw Esmeralda washing dishes at the sink.

“I took the key from under the step. I hope you don’t mind,” he said.

“What’s she doing at the sink?”

“Straightening up a little bit. Washing your breakfast dishes. Essie likes everything squared away.” He twisted his head and looked out at the tank and the wind channeling the grass in the fields and a hawk drifting on extended wings across the sun. He lifted his shirt off his skin and shook it. “It’s sure been a hot son of a gun, ain’t it? I liked to got fried out on the rig,” he said.

“How about telling me what’s really going on here?”

“A biker was scouting out my house last night. I seen two more when I come back from work this afternoon.”

“You’re telling me you want to move Essie into my house?”

“She don’t have no folks. She don’t want to stay with Ronnie and his mother. I’ll be here, too. I mean if it’s okay.”

“Why’d Ronnie and Essie break up, Lucas?”

“She told him he had to get out of the gangs.”

“You sure it’s over between them?”

“It don’t matter. I ain’t gonna let her down now.”

“Y’all take the downstairs. Leave a light on at your house and your pickup in your front yard. You can drive my truck,” I said.

“How come you asked about why they broke up?”

“No reason,” I lied.

“She didn’t want to do this, Billy Bob. She’s a brave gal.”

I put my hand on his shoulder and we walked toward the back porch. His muscles felt like rocks moving inside leather. Our hatted shadows flowed up the steps as though we were joined at the hip, then broke apart when he opened the screen and waited for me to walk ahead of him.

Wilbur paced in his living room, his big hands opening and closing. The wind was blowing hard through the screens, popping the curtains back on the wallpaper.

“Give them the whole place in Wyoming?” he said. “That’ll be the second time the Deitrichs cleaned my family out. I cain’t believe this is happening.”

“You confessed on TV. It’s good for the soul but usually not for the wallet,” I said.

He sat down in a thread-worn stuffed chair. He removed a half dozen color photographs from a table drawer next to the chair and handed them to me.

“That’s the kind of high desert it is. The earth don’t get no prettier,” he said.

The acreage stretched from a winding river up a long hardpan slope to high bluffs that were green on the top against the sun. The slope was in shadow, the sage silvered with frost, and antelope were grazing among cottonwoods by the riverbank.

In the corner of one photograph were two huge pipe trucks, a dismantled derrick streaked with rust, and part of an oil platform.