Heartwood (Billy Bob Holland 2)

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The water in the creek was shallow and tea-colored, flowing over green and brown and white pebbles that were no bigger than my thumbnail. The western wall of the drainage was in shadow now, but the east side was of the soft gold texture that light makes when it collects inside a newly coopered pine barrel. The wind blew from the bottom of the ravine and I saw the scrub brush and redbud trees riffle and change tone in the sunlight against the cliff wall, and for just a moment I saw the dark opening of the cave where I believed Skyler Doolittle and Jessie Stump had been living.

I got down from the saddle and lifted the strap of the rucksack off the pommel and looped it over my left shoulder and hung L.Q.’s gun belt from my right and began walking up the path that was barely visible in the pine needles that had been foot-pressed blackly into the soil between the trees.

Just before I reached the cave I threw a pebble at the entrance and watched it bounce off the face of the cliff and roll down the incline. Then I threw a second, this time right through the hole in the rock.

“You guys wouldn’t be upset if I visited you, would you?” I said.

But there was no response.

I closed the distance to the cave and squatted down under a redbud tree and took my flashlight out of the rucksack and shined it inside the rock, then stepped under the overhang and stood erect inside the cave itself.

The sleeping bags and canned goods were gone. The vinyl garbage bags that had been flattened on the floor were now tangled and stenciled with silt from the soles of lug boots. The plank that had contained canned goods had been pulled out of the wall and thrown into the back of the cave and the one-gallon molasses can that had held drinking water had been crushed and scoured with scratches on the stone ring around the firepit.

I stepped out of the cave’s coolness into the warmth of the afternoon and the breeze gusting up the drainage. The sunlight glimmered on the outcroppings that had been leached clean of soil by the springs flowing out of the hillside and had turned green with lichen. Were Jessie and Skyler buried somewhere along the creek? Had they been covered with rocks or perhaps rooted up and devoured by animals? I doubted it. Whoever had crushed the water can and prised the wood plank out of the wall had taken out his anger on the cave as a surrogate for his intended human victims.

I walked back down the path and mounted Beau and rode over the plates of stone that scraped like slate under his hooves.

I drove the truck, with Beau’s trailer wobbling behind it, down the dirt road onto the state highway, then followed the river to the northeast corner of the county, where an oxbow had formed in 1927, then had been dammed up and allowed to become a glistening yellowish-green sump filled with mosquitoes, dead trees webbed with river trash, and shacks knocked together from slat board, tar paper, and stovepipe.

I rode down a dirt street between empty shacks, then crossed a slough and continued up a rise through trees and a break between two low-lying hills that gave onto a glade where a group of California hippies had tried to live in the late 1960s. They had hung tepees and built a longhouse of pine logs and sweat lodges of river stones, dug a water well and root cellars, and carpentered a marvelous cistern on top of boulders they rolled from the fields with hand-hewn poles.

Twenty-five deputized vigilantes burned them out in 1968.

I got down from Beau and lifted the rucksack and L.Q.’s gun belt off the pommel and walked to the foot of the hill on the far side of the glade. Pine trees grew up the slope toward the crest and crows were cawing deep in the shadows. I kicked a bare spot in the ground and made a fire ring from field stones, then gathered an armful of twigs and rotted branches among the trees and coned them up in the fire ring and lit them with a paper match.

I squatted upwind from the smoke, removed a skillet from the rucksack and rubbed the bottom with butter and set the skillet on stones among the flames. When the butter had browned, I lay two large ham steaks inside and watched them fry, then cracked four raw eggs on the edge of the skillet and cooked them next to the ham.

The smoke flattened in the wind and drifted back into the trees on the hillside. A man with a fused neck pushed aside the slat door on a root cellar and stepped out into the shadows. A second man followed him, his face cratered with scars that looked like popped bubbles on the surface of paint.

L.Q.’s gun belt and holstered .45 still hung from my right shoulder. I ladled the eggs and meat onto two tin plates, then toasted four slices of bread in the ham fat and put them in the plates, too. I could see Jessie Stump’s tall, skinny frame out of the corner of my vision and feel his eyes watching me.

“How’d you know where we was at?” he asked.

“You grew up on the oxbow. It didn’t take a lot of figuring,” I said.

“How come you brung a pistol?” he asked.

“I’ve always taken you for a serious man,” I replied. I picked up the skillet with both hands and drained the last of the ham fat over the eggs and bread and didn’t look up.

“Didn’t nobody else reckon it,” Skyler Doolittle said.

“That’s because they searched here first. In the meantime, y’all were in a cave up above the Deitrich place,” I said.

“Maybe you’re too damn smart for your own good, boy,” Jessie said.

“Don’t be addressing Mr. Holland like that. He’s a decent man,” Skyler said.

I stood up and handed Skyler a plate.

“You want to eat, Jessie?” I said.

“I ain’t against it,” he replied. His black, unwashed hair had the same liquid brightness as his eyes.

“Somebody liked to nailed y’all in that cave,” I said.

“You goddamn right they did. They’d a done it if it hadn’t been for Ms. Deitrich,” Jessie said.