Heartwood

'They're gonna kill Lucas after they get finished with Essie. What world you live in, Mr. Holland? You don't think Jeff and his friends got it in them?'

I was standing up when he said this, and I could feel the blood pounding in my wrists and temples, and for some reason I wanted to attack him with my fists.

'Here's what it is, Mr. Holland,' he said. 'I ain't gonna let Jeff get away with this. You remember the two Viscounts who put their hands all over Essie in a movie theater, the ones who took a real bad bounce off a roof? I didn't throw them off, but the choices they had weren't too good. They were either gonna grow new kneecaps or learn how to fly.

'Since that day no Viscount has bothered a Purple Heart or one of our girls. I'm telling you this because I heard about some stuff you done when you were a Texas Ranger, about dope mules that got a playing card stuck down their throats in Coahuila. I don't got any playing cards with Purple Hearts on them, but maybe Jeff and his friends are gonna ask themselves how many funerals they want to go to.'

I sat down at the table. The wood felt cold and hard against my forearms.

'You're going to take somebody out?' I said, my words catching in my throat.

'You don't want it to get done, or you don't want to know about it? You rather your boy be killed? Which one you want, Mr. Holland?'

That same night Wilbur Pickett appeared in the ESPN television broadcast booth high above an indoor arena in Mesquite, where a rodeo was in progress. Wilbur wore a new gray Stetson with a blue cord tied around the crown and a snap-button silver and blue cowboy shirt that rang like ice water on his shoulders. Kippy Jo sat next to him, wearing dark glasses, her forearm touching Wilbur's.

The broadcaster was a short, wiry, lantern-jawed, ex-bull rider himself, with recessed buckshot eyes and a high-pitched East Texas accent that was like tin being stripped off a roof. His teeth were as rectangular as tombstones when he grinned and pushed the microphone in front of Wilbur.

'It's good to see you, boy. The last time you was here you was coming out of chute number 6 on a bull named Bad Whiskey. That was the only bull on the circuit besides Bodacious could run the clowns up the boards, turn around in midair, and give you a view from El Paso to Texarkana, all in one hop,' the announcer said.

'I appreciate being here, W.D. It's a real opportunity for me…'

'It's a treat having you drop by to do color for us again,' the announcer interrupted. 'We're gonna take a break in a minute, then I want your opinion on a bulldogging buddy of yours out of Quanah…'

Wilbur sat rigidly in the chair, his right hand clenched around his left wrist. He leaned toward the microphone, the brim of his hat partly shadowing his face, as though he were creating a private space in which he was about to confide a secret to a solitary individual.

'My wife says I got to do this or I ain't never gonna have no peace,' he said. 'I want to apologize to all the friends and rodeo fans I let down. I was accused of stealing from a man in Deaf Smith. I told everybody I didn't do it, but I lied. I took fifty thousand dollars from this fellow. He says it was more… It wasn't but that don't matter. I stole and I lied about it and I'm sorry. Thanks for having me on, W.D.'

Both Wilbur and Kippy Jo walked off camera. The announcer stared blankly after them, then said, 'I guess we'll go to a commercial now. I don't know about y'all, but I still figure Wilbur T. Pickett for a special kind of rodeo cowboy.'

It didn't take long. Earl and Peggy Jean Deitrich were in my office the next afternoon with their attorney, a towering, likable man named Clayton Spangler, who was rumored to own fifty thousand acres of the old XIT Ranch around Dalhart. Peggy Jean wore a white suit and sheer white hose and sat with her legs crossed, her face rouged high up on the cheekbones, so that her whole manner seemed angular and pointed, like the cutting edge of an instrument. Earl had come directly from the handball court at the country club, and his hair was still wet from his shower, his skin glowing with health and the excitement of the moment.

I felt like a mortician presiding over my best friend's wake while his enemies took the ice from his body and dropped it in their beer.

'It seems like an equitable way of resolving the whole affair,' Clayton said.

'All his and Kippy Jo's two hundred acres in Wyoming? With all mineral rights? Forget it,' I said.

'How about this scenario instead?' Earl said, leaning forward. 'We refile criminal charges against Pickett, sue him in civil court, and take both the Wyoming tract and his place out on the hardpan and get a judgment against everything he makes in the future.'

'I'll talk to him,' I said, replying to Clayton Spangler rather than to Earl.

'It's good seeing you again, Billy Bob,' Clayton said, and stood up and shook hands.

Peggy Jean stood by the window, looking down into the street. Against the shadowy, cool colors of my office her suit seemed woven from light. She brushed at the back of her neck with her fingers, bending her knees slightly to see someone through the blinds, then rubbing her fingertips idly, totally oblivious to the people around her.

She and Earl went out the door, but Clayton Spangler hung back a moment.

'This one has got a personal and ugly bent to it. That's not my way of conducting business. Come back with something reasonable and we'll lock the barn door on it,' he said.

'Sounds good, Clayton. Earl and his kind put me in mind of livestock with the red scours,' I said.

'I tried,' he said.

That evening, when I came home, Lucas's pickup truck was in the driveway and he was sitting on the tailgate, swinging his feet in the dirt. His straw hat was pushed up on his forehead and his reddish-blond hair stuck out on his brow. Through the kitchen window I saw Esmeralda washing dishes at the sink.

'I took the key from under the step. I hope you don't mind,' he said.

'What's she doing at the sink?'

'Straightening up a little bit. Washing your breakfast dishes. Essie likes everything squared away.' He twisted his head and looked out at the tank and the wind channeling the grass in the fields and a hawk drifting on extended wings across the sun. He lifted his shirt off his skin and shook it. 'It's sure been a hot son of a gun, ain't it? I liked to got fried out on the rig,' he said.

'How about telling me what's really going on here?'

'A biker was scouting out my house last night. I seen two more when I come back from work this afternoon.'

'You're telling me you want to move Essie into my house?'

'She don't have no folks. She don't want to stay with Ronnie and his mother. I'll be here, too. I mean if it's okay.'

'Why'd Ronnie and Essie break up, Lucas?'

'She told him he had to get out of the gangs.'

'You sure it's over between them?'

'It don't matter. I ain't gonna let her down now.'

'Y'all take the downstairs. Leave a light on at your house and your pickup in your front yard. You can drive my truck,' I said.

'How come you asked about why they broke up?'

'No reason,' I lied.

'She didn't want to do this, Billy Bob. She's a brave gal.'

I put my hand on his shoulder and we walked toward the back porch. His muscles felt like rocks moving inside leather. Our hatted shadows flowed up the steps as though we were joined at the hip, then broke apart when he opened the screen and waited for me to walk ahead of him.

Wilbur paced in his living room, his big hands opening and closing. The wind was blowing hard through the screens, popping the curtains back on the wallpaper.

'Give them the whole place in Wyoming?' he said. 'That'll be the second time the Deitrichs cleaned my family out. I cain't believe this is happening.'

'You confessed on TV. It's good for the soul but usually not for the wallet,' I said.

He sat down in a thread-worn stuffed chair. He re-moved a half dozen color photographs from a table drawer next to the chair and handed them to me.

'That's the kind of high desert it is. The earth don't get no prettier,' he said.

The acreage stretched from a winding river up a long hardpan slope to high bluffs that were green on the top against the sun. The slope was in shadow, the sage silvered with frost, and antelope were grazing among