Heartwood (Billy Bob Holland 2)

“Were you drunk?”

“No. But I’m working on it.”

“Why’d they run you off?”

He tipped the half-pint bottle to his lips and drank gingerly, perhaps no more than a capful, the whiskey lighting in the glass against the sun.

“Somebody got to them. Somebody with the name Earl Deitrich, I expect,” he said.

“We can do something about that,” I said.

“No, you cain’t. He’s the man with the money and the power. I thought folks here’bouts would stand behind one of their own. That’s the thinking of a fool, son.”

“Come inside.”

“Nope. I’m throwing it in. Cut a deal with that fellow Pomroy.”

“What?”

“I’m letting Earl Deitrich in on our drill site up in Wyoming. Neither me or Kippy Jo is going to jail.”

He tried to hold his eyes on mine, then his stare broke and he drank from the bottle again.

“I don’t care what Deitrich or his people have told you. Marvin Pomroy won’t have anything to do with something like this. Frankly I won’t, either,” I said.

“Then I’ll get me another lawyer.”

“That’s your choice, sir.”

“I ain’t no ‘sir.’ I ain’t nothing. But at least I ain’t been sleeping with the wife of the man trying to put my friends in jail.”

His face was sullen, embarrassed, and accusatory, like a child’s, all at the same time. I turned and walked back inside the house. I heard him fling his uncapped whiskey bottle whistling into the twilight, then start his truck and back out into the street, tearing a swatch out of a poplar tree.

What could I do about Wilbur? The answer was nothing. I drove out to his house on the hardpan in the morning. As I approached the house a ’49 Mercury roared past me in the opposite direction.

Kippy Jo Pickett was on the front steps, in the shade, snapping beans in a pan, when I walked into the yard.

“That was Cholo Ramirez’s car,” I said.

“Yes, he just left.”

“What’s he doing here?”

“Visiting. Telling me about his life, his cars, things he worries about.”

“That kid has brain damage. If I were you, I’d leave him alone.”

“His mother’s boyfriend broke his skull when he was a baby. Do we also throw away the part of him that wasn’t damaged? Is that what you mean?”

I looked off in the distance, across the hot shimmer of the fields, and watched Cholo run a stop sign, then swerve full-bore around an oil truck.

“Where’s Wilbur?” I asked.

“He went down to the state employment office.”

“Earl Deitrich’s trying to jerk y’all around. If you’re jammed up for money, I can lend you some. Don’t give in to this man.”

Her eyes fixed on my face and stayed there. A brown and white beagle lay in a shallow depression by the side of the gallery, its tail flopping in the silence.