Heartwood (Billy Bob Holland 2)

He cupped his hands around a match and fired one up. He held the smoke down and took the hit deep in his lungs, heard the paper drying and burning crisply toward his lips with each toke, his face warming and growing tight like tallow molding against the bone.

The waitress hooked an aluminum tray on his window. She was cute, in her purple and white rayon uniform, her mouth like a cherry, her bleached hair curled on her shoulders.

“You want to do some Mexican gage?” he asked.

“What’s that?” she replied.

“I’ll pick you up later. I’m Jeff Deitrich.”

“My father takes me home … You want to order? I got a pickup getting cold at the window.”

She brought him a fish sandwich and an iced mug of beer. Music was pumping out of the speakers on the stanchions that supported the canvas tarps the owner pulled out on guy wires when it rained or during the heat of the day. He walked to the men’s room, nodding at kids who should have recognized him but didn’t. When he came back out, some kids in a group looked at him quickly, then their eyes slid off his face.

“You got some problem with me?” he said to a thin, crew-cut boy in a red windbreaker and T-shirt who was leaning against a customized van.

“Not me,” the boy replied, then grimaced at his girl.

“Sorry, man. I thought you were somebody else,” Jeff said, and walked away wondering why he had just lied.

Was he losing it?

He couldn’t finish his sandwich. The breeze dropped and a sweet, rotting odor wafted off the Dumpster and invaded the inside of his head. He put the canvas top up on his convertible and rolled up the windows, then stared through the windshield at a black man in a security guard’s uniform locking a grilled door behind the kitchen. The guard twisted a key in the lock mechanism, then rattled the door in the jamb to make sure it was secure.

Jeff swallowed and sweat broke on his forehead and a spasm constricted his stomach, as though someone had raked a nail across the lining.

I’m not going to jail. That’s not going to happen. Don’t have those kinds of thoughts, he told himself.

He took the roach out of the ashtray and the remaining joint from the cigarette case and rolled down the passenger window and flung them into the darkness.

When he looked back through the windshield he was staring at the side of Ronnie Cross’s 1961 T-Bird. Ronnie made the turn at the end of the lot, then pulled into a slot that had just emptied. For no reason that he could explain, Jeff felt a sense of familiarity and friendship with Ronnie he’d never experienced before.

He got out of the convertible and walked to Ronnie’s window and leaned his hands on the roof. Ronnie glanced up at him only a second, then rested his palms on the bottom of the steering wheel and looked straight ahead.

“Ronnie, I got no hard feelings. This guy Johnny Krause is full of shit. I wouldn’t hurt Essie for the world,” Jeff said.

Ronnie picked up a toothpick off the dashboard and slipped it into his mouth.

“Yeah, uh, look, Jeff, me and Essie and Lucas are gonna meet for some dinner. Maybe you ought to rejoin your party,” Ronnie said.

“Y’all are tight, huh?”

“You know how it is.” Ronnie played with the toothpick and didn’t look up at Jeff’s face.

Jeff felt a moist click in his throat, then he heard a voice coming out of his mouth that didn’t sound like his own, a voice veined with weakness and fear.

“What’s it like inside? I mean, how bad does it get?” he said.

“Inside what?”

“Prison. You hear a lot of stories.”

“About guys getting their cherry busted in the shower?” Ronnie said.

“Yeah, I guess.”

“I don’t know. I was in Juvie once. I never did time. I ain’t a criminal.”

Ronnie lifted his eyes up into Jeff’s face.