Heartwood (Billy Bob Holland 2)

Then my feet touched the soap-rock bottom and I gathered Pete in my arms and lifted him against my chest and waded onto gravel and sand and the tall clumps of grass growing along the bank.

I lay him down and stroked his head and rubbed his back and felt the warmth of his breath against my skin.

His face was white from exhaustion, beaded with water, when he looked up at me.

“I knew you was coming,” he said.

“Almost didn’t make it, bud,” I replied.

“Cain’t fool me, Billy Bob. I wasn’t never afraid,” he said.

I gathered him up on my shoulder and climbed up the path to the top of the promontory. Peggy Jean stood openmouthed in the front yard of the cottage, her skin prickled in the wind.

“The lifeguards were supposed to be watching. I gave them the exact number of children who’d be here. They could have no doubt about that,” she said.

“I’ll get my things out of the cottage,” I said.

“I paid them to watch every one of those children, Billy Bob.”

“I know. The problem’s not yours.”

“Then get that expression off your face.”

I went inside with Pete still on my shoulder, then came back out with my clothes and boots bunched under my left arm.

“Ernest Hemingway is my favorite writer. I admired his great courage. But in the end he blew his head off with a shotgun. Goodbye, Peggy Jean,” I said.

Kyle Rose had a problem. All his life he had loved uniforms—the National Guard fatigues he wore to monthly meetings, the pressed, deputy sheriffs greenish-brown short-sleeve shirts and lead-striped trousers that looked like Marine Corps tropicals, even the bleached-white straw hat and shades and starched khaki pants he wore when he had been a migrant crew leader supervising stoop labor in bean fields.

The buzzed haircut, the flex of cartilage in the jaw, the eyes that could make county inmates and street people look at their shoes, this was only part of the appearance he cultivated, that told people who and what he was. You also had to be squared away, booted and hatted, the tendons in your body forming a geometrically perfect network of power inside a tight-fitting uniform. The opaqueness of your face and the tight seam of your mouth had to make them swallow.

But all of it had failed him, and he didn’t know why or how to explain his feelings to anyone else.

Jessie Stump and Skyler Doolittle were out on the ground, somewhere in the hills across the river from where they had broken out of the jail bus. But why should that bother him? Stump was white trash and a crankhead; electroshock had turned his brains into scorched grits. Doolittle was a killer of children, a deformed pervert who looked like a dildo and belonged inside a circus wagon. Kyle Rose had pulled blacks by their hair out of Nigger Town clubs while their friends did nothing. Once he climbed a water tower and clubbed a sniper unconscious with the butt of his shotgun. A mainline recidivist who had been brought in from Huntsville as a witness in a trial threw his food tray against the drunk tank wall and sent the trusties scurrying down the corridor. Kyle Rose made him clean it up with his shirt, then crawl under the deadline that was painted on the cement floor.

Why did the thought of Skyler Doolittle and Jessie Stump out on the ground make words stick in his throat and cause him to unconsciously wipe his palms on his trousers?

Because they were not afraid of him. Stump was too crazy and Doolittle … Kyle Rose couldn’t describe what it was that made Doolittle different. It wasn’t just the fused neck. Doolittle’s eyes seemed to accept pain as though that were the only condition he had ever known, like a naked man who has spent a lifetime on a trail that wanders endlessly through thornbushes. There was no handle on a man like that.

Kyle Rose bought a second handgun, a .25-caliber hideaway that strapped comfortably on the ankle. But a wire was trembling inside him, and neither the hideaway nor the shots of tequila he drank at lunch nor his belligerent rhetoric in the deputies’ bullpen gave him relief.

“I think we ought to scour them cliffs above the river,” he said to Hugo Roberts.

“What for? They ain’t hurt the guards on the bus. I don’t see no great danger out there,” Hugo said. He sat in the gloom behind his desk, the smoke from his cupped cigarette climbing into his face.

“They’re escaped prisoners. That’s what for. One ought to be gelded, the other un stuffed back in his mother’s womb,” Kyle said.

Hugo propped his elbows on the desk blotter and puffed on his cigarette and breathed the smoke out on his hands. He looked disinterestedly out the window.

“Provided they ain’t already in Mexico, they’ll come out when they’re hungry. In the meantime, find yourself a woman, Kyle. Or take up paddleball. Why’d you stoke up them boys with a stun gun, anyway? All we need is the Justice Department sending undercover agents in here again,” Hugo said.

Kyle Rose walked out of the sandstone blockhouse and slammed the door behind him with his foot. Hugo’s other deputies kept their eyes fixed in a neutral space, the refrigerated odor of smoke and testosterone and expectorated Red Man wrapped on their bodies like cellophane on produce.

“We got to start using civil service exams, establish better screening. I think the boy’s got a serious nervous disorder. I do,” Hugo said. He puffed on his cigarette, breathing the smoke philosophically over his hands.

Kyle Rose took three days off without pay and went to the trailer he owned on the river. The lawn was neat, nubbed down by goats, the pine trees widely spaced so Kyle had full view of all his surroundings. But he took no chances. The first night there he ran trip wire strung with tin cans around the tree trunks in the yard and loaded his scoped deer rifle and leaned it inside the front door. Then he sat in a deck chair on the screen porch with a cold bottle of Carta Blanca and watched the boat lights on the river, the fire in his neighbor’s barbecue pit flaring under a piece of meat, the evening star rising above the hills into a mauve-colored sky.

He slept late and rose refreshed and had coffee with his neighbor, a retired enlisted man, then split firewood on a stump by the river’s edge even though he would not need it until the fall.