Heartwood (Billy Bob Holland 2)

She leaned close to the glass so she could see up the road. There he was, walking in the dusk toward a filling station and convenience store, the wind, now peppered with rain, blowing up clouds of dust around his legs.

The bus went past Ronnie. She went back to the rear window again, ignoring the irritation of the people around her, and saw the three cars from the country club turning around on a side road and heading back toward Ronnie, the drivers at first circumspect, looking in both directions, then leaning forward eagerly, as though t

hey had just discovered a feared and wounded enemy caught in a steel trap and could not believe their luck.

Esmeralda walked hurriedly up the aisle and held onto the vertical pole behind the driver’s chair.

“Let me out,” she said.

“I cain’t stop along here, lady. A truck will take the side of my bus off,” the driver said.

“I have to get off.”

“That’s your stop up yonder, ain’t it? Sit down before you fall and hurt yourself.”

The bus pulled to the shoulder of the road a hundred yards from Lucas’s house. She stepped down from the vestibule and began running along the gravel toward Lucas’s house and the pickup truck that was parked in the front yard. The rocks were like flint through the bottoms of her slip-on shoes. The wind was full of grit that invaded her eyes and drops of rain as hard as marbles struck her face. A semitrailer roared past her, the backdraft blowing her sideways, filling her head with sound as though someone had clapped his hands on both her ears.

Lucas had just showered and changed into a clean pair of Levi’s and a soft shirt and was picking out “The Wild Side of Life” on his Dobro, dragging the slide up and down the neck, listening to the notes rise from the resonator and hover in the air like metallic butterflies. He saw the bus go by the front of the house, its windows lighted, and he wondered if Esmeralda had been on it. But he had decided not to bother her anymore, not to intrude upon either her grief or the strange relationships she had with both Ronnie Cross and Jeff Deitrich.

His skin still felt sunbaked from the hours on the drilling rig, the fat long since gone from his muscles, his big western belt bucket flat against the leanness of his stomach. By and large, roughnecks were a pretty interesting bunch, he thought. They rarely complained about the hard lives they’d led and were grateful to have whatever jobs came their way. Even though they worked together for years they usually didn’t know one another’s last names and didn’t consider it an important element in a friendship. They talked constantly of their sexual conquests but in reality considered women a biological mystery and openly admitted they were physically dependent upon them. They were irresponsible, out of sync with the world, and often grinned snaggletoothed at the calamities they visited upon themselves. A guy could do worse than hang with a bunch like that, Lucas thought. It was probably like being in the Foreign Legion. Not a bad way to think of yourself.

He drew his steel picks across the Dobro’s strings and slid the bar down the neck and started singing a song he had learned from a one-eyed ex-roustabout who used to pick beans for his stepfather:

“Ten days on, five days off,

I guess my blood is crude oil now.

Reckon I’m never gonna lose

Them mean ole roughneckin’ blues.”

Then Esmeralda burst through the front door, her pink uniform spotted with rain, her cheeks flushed as bright as apples.

“Ronnie had a flat. Some guys are about to jump him. You got to help,” she said.

“Which guys?” Lucas said, rising slowly from the couch.

“Chug Rollins and two carloads of his friends.”

“Chug?” he said, and closed and opened his eyes and blew out his breath. He felt a sickness in his stomach and a dampness on his palms that he didn’t want to recognize.

“What’s the matter?” she said.

“Nothing. I mean, what’s between Chug and Ronnie? They got a history?”

“Are you serious? They hate Ronnie. They’ll kill him.”

He rubbed at his forehead and stared emptily into space. Only moments earlier he had felt surrounded by the imaginary company of his oil field friends. Now the room had become deserted. Even Esmeralda’s presence hardly registered on the corner of his vision. The air was suddenly stale and bitter with a knowledge about himself that was as palpable as the odor that rose from his armpits.

“Yeah, Chug and them others ain’t people to fool with. They ain’t got no limits, Essie,” he said, aware for the first time that he had used the pet name Ronnie had given her.

“Where are you going?” she said incredulously.

He went into the bedroom and returned with his boots and sat on the couch and slipped them on one at a time. His skin felt dead to the touch and he could not remember the question she had just asked him.

“I ain’t never been seasick before. What’s it supposed to feel like?” he said.

He and Esmeralda drove back up the road and passed the filling station and convenience store, the neon tubing around the windows and the lights in the pump bays rain-streaked and glowing inside the dusk. In a wide turnout area on the left-hand side of the road they saw the three cars from the country club parked at odd angles, the silhouettes of ten or twelve people gathered in a circle on the far side, and birds rising noisily from the trees in a field.