'He received a section of land, just like all the other Texas soldiers?'
'You got it, kemo sabe.'
'What happened to it?' I felt my hand tighten unconsciously on the receiver.
'Most of it was sold off. Except for one hundred acres Wilbur's great-grandfather owned outside Beaumont. I'm in the Beaumont public library right now. That one hundred acres was right by the Spindletop oil strike. Wilbur's great-grandfather lost it in a civil suit filed by a Houston oil speculator named Deitrich. Wilbur's greatgrandfather hanged himself. This all happened about 1901. Guess which Deitrich family we're talking about?'
I had been standing up in my office, gazing out the window while I talked. Suddenly I felt light-headed, my face cold and filmed with perspiration at the same time. I sat down in my swivel chair.
'You still there?' Temple said.
Wilbur Pickett was inside his barn, grinding the center-cutter for a ditching machine on an emery wheel, the sparks gushing onto his boot tops, when I pulled up on the grass in the Avalon and got out and headed for him without even bothering to turn off my car engine.
I threw my hat at his head. His mouth opened, then he saw my expression and the skin of his face grew so tight against the bone there were white lines, like tiny pieces of string, around his eyes.
'You did it, you lying bastard,' I said.
'You stand back from me, Billy Bob.'
I started to speak, but I couldn't get the words out. I shoved him in the breastbone.
'Don't do that,' he said.
I shoved him again, with both hands, my teeth clenched together, then I pushed him out the back door into the horse lot. He became foot-tangled, off balance, flinching when I came at him again.
'Go ahead, take a shot, Wilbur. See what happens,' I said.
His face was the bright red of a trainman's lantern.
'I ain't gonna fight you,' he said. He lowered his hands and turned his back to me and hung his arms over the top rail of the fence. His pulse jumped in his neck and he looked at me out of the corner of his eye like a frightened animal.
'Why'd you steal? Why'd you lie all this time?' I said.
'Deitrich rubbed my face in it in front of all them people. I went into his office to bust that watch on the fireplace. Then I seen them bonds in the safe. I started thinking about the oil land his family stole from mine and I looked at them bonds and before I knowed it I had the watch in my pocket and them bonds stuck down in my britches. It was like I was watching somebody else do it instead of me.'
He glanced at me to see if his explanation had taken. He swallowed and looked away quickly. 'I got greedy. Is that what you're waiting on?' he said.
'You sorry sonofabitch,' I said.
'It wasn't no three hundred thousand. It was fifty. Giving them back wasn't gonna do no good. Earl Deitrich was gonna make money on the insurance claim and come after Kippy Jo's and my oil sand at the same time.'
'Does your wife know about this?'
'No, sir, she don't.'
'What about the bonds that were in the side of the dresser?'
'They were planted. That's what I been trying to tell you. It didn't matter what I done or didn't do. Deitrich and Hugo Roberts was gonna put me in the pen.'
He stared morosely at the windmill blades straining against the lock chain and at his horses out in the alfalfa and the dust and rain blowing out of the hills in the west.
'What'd you do with the bonds you stole?' I asked.
'I sold them down in Mexico. The money's in the oil deal up in Wyoming now.'
'You used us.'
He pressed the heel of his hand against his forehead.
'I guess this world can be a mess of grief, cain't it?' he said.
'Just stay the hell away from me,' I said, and walked back to my Avalon.
I saw Kippy Jo hanging wash on the clothesline. She stopped her work and lifted her head, her eyes focusing on the sky, as though the barometer had dropped dramatically and the environment around her was about to experience a change she had not foreseen.
Late that night the phone in my library rang.
'Jessie and me has got to get out of here, Mr. Holland,' the voice said.
'Mr. Doolittle?'
'I owe you mightily for what you've done. But I need money to get us down to the coast.'
'I can't do that. You're an innocent man, but Jessie Stump belongs in a cage.'
'Somebody up on the ridge seen us yesterday. He had field glasses.'
'Let me surrender you, sir. I'll see that you're protected. You have my word.'
'You don't know what it's like for a deformed man in the hands of hateful men. They ain't gonna get me again. You cain't hep me?'
'Not the way you want.'
I heard him take a breath through the receiver, as though resigning himself.
'Jessie ain't all bad. I made him give up revenge against Earl Deitrich. That's a start, ain't it?' Skyler said.
'I don't know what to tell you, sir,' I replied.
'Goodbye, Mr. Holland. I reckon this is the last time I'll be telling you that, too.'
'Good luck, Mr. Doolittle,' I said. He hung up.
The following afternoon, Saturday, Temple threw a pebble against my library window. I went to the back porch and opened the screen. But she didn't come in.
'This is good right here,' she said, and sat down on the scrolled iron bench under the chinaberry tree.
'I've got some lemonade made.'
'Another time. I talked with Wilbur Pickett. You're too hard on him,' she said.
'Oh?'
'It was there all the time, Billy Bob. You've said it yourself. People will do lots of things for money. Did it make sense that a man who would steal an antique watch would take nothing else with it?'
'He lied.'
'He was scared.'
'Of what?'
'You, his wife, the kids that look up to him. Come on, stop stoking your own furnace.'
'Just dropping by to ladle out some moral insight?' I said.
'No. I did some checking into Earl Deitrich's finances. His place in Montana is up for sale and he's been borrowing on his house here. That's why he grabbed on to this insurance scam after Wilbur stole his bonds. He stands to gain a quarter of a million and he might still end up a partner in Wilbur's oil deal. He probably sent Bubba Grimes to kill Wilbur and Kippy Jo so he could file civil suit against the estate and seize their property up in Wyoming.'
'I'm still Kippy Jo's defense attorney, and now I have to put Wilbur on the stand so he can tell the jury how he stole fifty thousand dollars in bonds and lied about it. Does that sound like a credible defense witness to you? You think that will make the jury a lot more sympathetic toward the Picketts? Or maybe I can suborn perjury.'
'I can see this might piss you off.'
'Thank you,' I said.
She walked down the driveway toward her car. Then turned around and came back.
'You got some mint leaves to go with that lemonade?' she said.
Ten miles from town was a drive-in theater left over from the 1950s that opened only on Friday and Saturday nights. High school and college kids got crashed on warm beer and reefer and crystal and purple passion, rat-raced up and down the aisles, accidentally tore the speakers from the stanchions or the windows out of their cars when they burned rubber off the embankments, threw water bombs made from condoms into convertibles, fist-fought behind the cinder-block bathrooms, and stuck firecrackers up the tailpipes of cars in which great love affairs were blooming.
