Heartwood (Billy Bob Holland 2)

“That’s me.”

“It’s an honor to meet you,” I said.

His hand was weightless in my grip. I remembered an article from the Austin newspaper, two or three years back, about Charley Quail’s long travail with alcoholism, the jails and detox centers, a greasepit fire that turned his body into a candle. He looked at his watch, then compared the time with the clock on the wall and looked over his shoulder at the road.

“You waiting on the bus?” I asked.

“It’s supposed to be here at 12:14. I don’t know if my watch is wrong, or the one up on the wall, or if both of them is.”

“Whe

re you headed?”

“San Antone.”

“You know a Mexican kid named Ronnie Cruise? Some people call him Ronnie Cross,” I said.

“I just delivered a car for him. I had to look all over the cottonpickin’ county for the right house, too.”

“Where did you leave it, Charley?”

“None of your goddamn business.” He tilted his chin up to show his defiance.

“Sorry. I didn’t mean to offend you,” I said, getting up from the counter stool. “Is Ronnie a pretty good friend of yours?”

“He was my mechanic. He pulled me out of a fire. You one of them people been giving that boy trouble?” he said.

When I got to my house ten minutes later, expecting to see Cholo’s car, the driveway was empty. I looked inside the barn, then behind it, chickens scurrying and cackling in front of me. But there was no sign of the ’49 Mercury. The windmill swung suddenly in the breeze, the blades clattering to life, and a gush of water spurted out of the well pipe into Beau’s tank.

31

The next afternoon Pete and I loaded Beau in his trailer and hooked the trailer onto my truck, and went to look for arrowheads in the ravine where Skyler Doolittle and Jessie Stump had once hidden in a cave.

The sun was still high in the sky and the cliffs were yellow with sunshine, the air heavy with the smell of the pines that dotted the slopes. I shoveled silt from the edge of the creekbed onto a portable seine with an army-surplus E-tool while Pete picked flint chippings and small pieces of pottery off the screen.

“I heard a schoolteacher in the barbershop say we ain’t supposed to do this,” Pete said.

“This stuff is washed down from a workmound or a tepee ring. It doesn’t hurt anything to surface-hunt,” I replied.

“Is digging with a shovel surface-hunting?”

“Matter of definition,” I said.

“How you know there wasn’t a tepee ring right here?” he asked.

“Would you build your house where a creek could flow through it?” I said. “Say, look at that pair of hawks up in the redbuds.”

When he turned his head and stared up the slope into the trees, I took a flat, fan-shaped piece of yellow chert with a sharply beveled edge from my pocket and tossed it onto the screen.

“I don’t see no hawk,” he said. Then his eyes dropped to the screen. “That’s a hide scraper. It’s worked all along the edge. A book at the library shows one just like this.”

“It looks like you got a museum piece there, bud.”

He rubbed the chert clean with his thumbs, then dipped it in the creek and dried it on his blue jeans.

“It’s great to have this place to ourselves again, ain’t it?” he said.

“Yeah, it is. You think you can handle one of those buffalo steaks and a blueberry milkshake?” I said.