Heartwood (Billy Bob Holland 2)

“I’m going to stop at that filling station at the crossroads. You can see the lights from here. Place is full of customers. You can call somebody if you need a ride,” Chug said.

He heard the deputy’s gun belt creak, then the hollow sound a leather pocket makes when a heavy object is removed from it.

The deputy twisted the muzzle of his nine-millimeter into Chug’s neck.

“Turn right at that cut in the trees, then keep going till you see a railroad car,” he said.

Chug clicked on his turn indicator, but the deputy slapped it off. After Chug had turned off the road, he looked at the pocked, shiny white face of the deputy, the wired, black eyes, and said, “You got the wrong guy.”

“Maybe … What size shoe you wear?”

“A twelve,” Chug said, his brow furrowing.

“It don’t look like it to me … Stop yonder.”

The sandy road dipped and rose through hardwoods, then ended at an overgrown stretch of railway track on which sat a faded red Southern Pacific boxcar that had rotted into the soft, moldy texture of old cork.

The deputy walked Chug to the lee side of the boxcar and picked up a pinecone and threw it at him, hard. Chug raised his arm and ducked and heard the pinecone bounce off the slats of the boxcar.

“This time you catch it. You drop it and I’ll shoot you in the elbow,” the deputy said, and tossed the pinecone at Chug underhanded.

“What the hell you doin’?” Chug said.

The deputy worked his handcuffs out of the case on the back of his belt and threw them to Chug.

“Hook yourself up to that iron rung on the corner,” he said. “Now kick your loafer off.”

After Chug did it, the deputy picked the loafer out of the leaves and pine needles and spread a piece of tissue paper with the penciled outline of a shoe or boot sole on it across the floor of the boxcar and smoothed it with his palm. He held Chug’s loafer with the fingers of both hands above the outline, moving it back and forth in space, without touching the paper.

“You’re left-handed and got too big a foot. It’s your day and not mine,” the deputy said.

Chug looked steadily at the side of the boxcar, the blistered strips of red paint, the gray weathering in the wood, the way the rain leaked down off the roof and threaded in the cracks. He gathered the moisture in his mouth so he could speak, but when he did the words that rose from his throat seemed like someone else’s.

“I won’t tell anybody about this,” he said.

“Yeah, you will. You’ll tell every little pissant who’ll listen. You’ll tell your mommy and your daddy and them people at the country club and the preacher at your church and all them little pukes at Val’s you hang around with and whatever piece of tail you pay to climb up on top of. You’ll be oinking your story like a little pig till people want to stop up their ears. I didn’t say look at me, boy.”

The deputy brought the barrel of the automatic up between Chug’s thighs, flicking off the butterfly safety and cocking back the hammer.

“Don’t mess your britches on me. I’ll blow your sack off right now,” the deputy said.

But the rings of fat on Chug’s hips were shaking, the rain streaming off his hair and face, his eyes wide and his breath sputtering the rainwater off his lips into a spray, so that his head looked like that of a man who had just burst to the surface of a lake after almost drowning.

Chug heard the deputy work open a pocketknife and felt the deputy press the honed edge lightly against the back of his neck, pushing the hair up as though he were going to shave it.

Then the deputy traced the point of the knife down Chug’s vertebrae and paused with the tip inside the back of Chug’s belt.

“You didn’t shoot Skyler but you was part of it,” the deputy said, and sliced the knife down through Chug’s belt and underwear and the seam of his khaki pants, exposing his enormous pink posterior. “Stop blubbering, boy. A shithog like you wouldn’t make good Vienna sausage. Tell the one who done it Skyler ain’t here no more to plead for him. Tell him I killed three people no one knows about, people who hurt me real bad. Tell him I done it in ways that made a drunkard out of the detective who worked the case.”

Then Jessie Stump scrubbed the top of Chug’s head with his knuckles and drove off in Chug’s automobile.

29

“What did you do to the deputy you took the uniform off of?” I said into the phone.

“Knocked him in the head,” Jessie said.

“You called me in the middle of the night to tell me all this bullshit?”