back of his neck, pushing the hair up as though he were going to shave it.
Then the deputy traced the point of the knife down Chug's vertebrae and paused with the tip inside the back of Chug's belt.
'You didn't shoot Skyler but you was part of it,' the deputy said, and sliced the knife down through Chug's belt and underwear and the seam of his khaki pants, exposing his enormous pink posterior. 'Stop blubbering, boy. A shithog like you wouldn't make good Vienna sausage. Tell the one who done it Skyler ain't here no more to plead for him. Tell him I killed three people no one knows about, people who hurt me real bad. Tell him I done it in ways that made a drunkard out of the detective who worked the case.'
Then Jessie Stump scrubbed the top of Chug's head with his knuckles and drove off in Chug's automobile.
29
'What did you do to the deputy you took the uniform off of?' I said into the phone.
'Knocked him in the head,' Jessie said.
'You called me in the middle of the night to tell me all this bullshit?'
'I want you to lay some flowers on Skyler's grave. Put it on my tab.'
'You don't have a tab. You're not my client… Hello?'
At 8 a.m. I walked down the first-floor hallway of the courthouse and entered Marvin Pomroy's office right behind him.
'You're going to tell me Jessie Stump got in touch with you after terrifying the Rollins kid?' he said.
'Stump isn't my client. I have nothing to do with him. That's an absolute,' I said.
'Three years ago we had him deadbang on a check-writing charge. With his sheet we could have put him away for five years. You discredited an honest witness and got Stump off. How's it feel?'
'I need your help.'
'You're outrageous.'
'Jeff Deitrich has targeted the Ramirez girl and my boy Lucas.'
Marvin hadn't sat down at his desk yet. The heat went out of his face and he moved some papers around on his ink blotter, his eyes lowered.
'You talk to Hugo Roberts?' he asked.
'Waste of time.'
'What do you want from me?'
'You have influence with the Deitrichs. They want to stay in your favor. Get them to pull Jeffs plug.'
'That's not too complimentary.'
'Ronnie Cruise says he's going to take down a couple of Jeff's buds. Maybe cancel their whole ticket.'
Marvin brushed at his nose and fiddled with his shirt cuffs.
'That's still not why you came here, though, is it?' he said.
'I've thought about remodeling a couple of those kids myself. Maybe going all the way with it.'
'The last portion of this conversation didn't occur. On that note, I'd better get to work,' Marvin said, and picked up a sheet of typed paper from his blotter and studied it intently until I was out the door.
That afternoon I came home from work and rode Beau along the irrigation ditch at the bottom of the pine- wooded slope that gave onto the backyards of the rundown neighborhood where Pete lived. To my left was the acreage that Lucas's stepfather, who worked for me on shares, had planted with okra, squash, corn, cantaloupe, strawberries, melons, and beans. I passed the water-stained plank that Pete used to walk down from his house to mine, then rode up on the bench into shadow to a weathered wood shed where my father once kept the tools that his Mexican field hands used.
I let Beau graze along the banks of the ditch and twisted the key in the big Yale lock on the shed door and went inside. The air was warm and smelled of metal and grease. Dust and particles of hay glowed in the cracks of light through the walls, and a deer mouse skittered inside the well of an automobile tire. The door was caught on a wood sled, one with boards for runners that at one time we drew with a mule down the rows when we picked beans and tomatoes into baskets. I propped the sled against the wall, touching the dirt-smoothed and rounded edges of the runners and for just a moment seeing my father framed against the late sun, drinking water from a ladle, then replacing it on the bucket that sat between the baskets. Then I felt someone's eyes on my back.
In the far corner L.Q. Navarro sat on top of a saw-horse, his arms propped beside him for support, his long legs crossed at the ankles.
' Your friend Pomroy is gonna fret his mind till he takes the easy way home. Which means he's gonna lock up that Mexican gangbanger, what's his name, Ronnie Cruise,' L.Q. said.
' Marvin's a good man,' I replied.
'He wants to sleep at night, bud. His kind don't win wars. Them kids are scum. You cap 'em and bag 'em and don't study on it.'
I began pulling a pile of junk apart in one corner until I found what I had come for. It was made of red oak, and was heavy and splinter-edged, three inches thick, two feet high, and the width of a door. Two screw bolts, with eyelets as big as half dollars, were twisted vertically into the top of the wood. I hoisted it up on my shoulder.
' I'm gonna lock up. You coming?' I said to L.Q.
'You know I'm right.'
' I sure don't,' I said, and closed the door on L.Q. and snapped the lock into place.
My father had burned the word 'Heartwood' into the oak plank with a running iron. He had intended to build a white gate with rose trellises and a crossbeam at the entrance to the drive and hang his sign from the beam, but he was killed that same spring in a pipeline blowout at Matagorda Bay.
I sat in the grass on the slope and wiped the grain clean with an oily rag and scoured the dust out of the branded letters until they were dark and granulated and rippling under my index finger. My mother said she thought it was a bit vain and presumptuous to hang a sign on a farm as modest as ours, and my father's response was, 'The only reason it's modest is because the Hollands was honest and didn't steal other people's land during the Depression for four bits an acre.'
But I knew my father, the quiet whirrings in his chest, the grace and dignity with which he conducted himself, and the deeply held sentiments he didn't share openly because he lacked the vocabulary to express feeling without sounding saccharine. He loved our home because in his mind it had no equal anywhere on the earth. How many men lived in a three-story purple-brick house, surrounded by poplars and roses and blooming myrtle, with a breezy top-floor view of a barn, horse lot, windmill, chicken run, cattle pasture, plowed acreage with rows of vegetables that ran all the way to the bluffs, a willow-lined tank stocked with striped bass and crappie and bream and catfish, the scars of the Chisholm Trail baked like white ceramic into the hardpan, and a meandering, green river and rolling hills in the distance? We woke to it every day, knowing that everything God and the earth could give to a family had been presented to us with no other obligation on our part than to be its stewards.
I don't think my father was vain at all, and in reality I don't think my mother did, either.
I heard footsteps behind me and turned around and saw Pete coming down the slope through the pine trees. He was barefoot and carried a fishing rod with the Mepps spinner pulled up tight against the eyelet so that it rattled when he walked.
He looked around, his face puzzled.
'Was you talking to someone?' he asked.
'Probably not,' I replied.
'Billy Bob, if you was in a conversation and other people was saying a friend of yours was crazy, would you get in them people's face about it?'
'Nothing wrong with being crazy. It gives you a more interesting view. If it was me, I wouldn't debate it with people who don't understand those kinds of things,' I said.
'I was thinking along the same lines,' he said. 'But in my opinion the friend I'm talking about is the best guy I ever knowed.' He grinned and nodded to himself, as though taking great pleasure in his own wit and the world around him.
