field toward the river.
'You all right, Temple?' I said.
'My father's tied up in the bedroom. I have to go,' she said.
'Are you all right?'
The whites of her eyes were pink with broken veins. Her face contained a level of anger and injury and violation I had never seen in it before, like water-stained paper held against a hot light. She went into the house and did not answer my question.
I cleared the jammed shell from the Ruger and backed Beau out of his trailer and lifted a coil of polyrope off a hook on the wall. I swung up on the saddle and hung the polyrope on the pommel and leaned forward in the stirrups. Beau crossed the yard and irrigation ditch in seconds, then I popped him once in the rump and felt his whole body surge under me.
Beau was beautiful when I let him run. His muscles rippled like water, his stride never faltering. The thudding of his hooves in the field, the rhythmic exhalation of his breath, his absolute confidence in our mutual purpose, were like sympathetic creations of sound and power and movement outside of time. Lightning trembled inside storm clouds that stretched like a black lid on a kettle from one horizon to the other. But electricity or wind or mud and blowing newspaper or desiccated poppy husks rattling in a field never affected Beau, as they did most horses. Instead, he seemed to draw courage from danger, and his loyalty to me never wavered.
Up ahead I could see Johnny Krause running, his face twisted back toward us.
Beau and I went across a ditch and up a slope toward a bend in the river where three cottonwoods grew on the bluff. I widened the loop in the end of the polyrope, doubling back part of the rope in my right hand, and whipped it in a circle over my head.
Johnny Krause turned and fired once with his automatic, but Beau never flinched. I flung the loop at Krause's head and saw it take on his neck and the top of one shoulder. I leaned back in the saddle and wound the rope around the pommel and felt the loop bind around Krause's throat. Then I turned Beau and brought my boot heels into his ribs.
The rope jerked Krause off his feet and dragged him tumbling and strangling across the ground, across rocks, into the side of a tree stump, through a tangle of chicken wire and cedar posts that someone had stacked and partially burned.
I reined up Beau under a cottonwood, freed the rope from the pommel, and tossed the coil over a tree limb and caught the end with my hand. Krause was trying to get to his feet, his fingers wedging under the rope that was now pinched tightly into his throat. I rewrapped the rope on the pommel and kicked Beau in the ribs again and felt Johnny Krause rise from the earth into the air, his half-top boots kicking frantically.
Beau's saddle creaked against the rope's tension as I watched Johnny Krause's face turn gray and then purple while his tongue protruded from his mouth.
Then I saw the lights of a car that had come to rest in a ditch, and the silhouette of a man running toward me.
' What are you doing here, L.Q.?' I asked.
' Somebody better talk sense to you. This might be my way, but it ain't yours,' he said.
'He molested Temple. Hanging's not enough.'
'Don't give his kind no power. That's the lesson me and you didn't learn down in Coahuila.'
Beau tossed his head against the reins and blew air, shifting his hooves and barreling up his ribs like he did when he didn't want to take his saddle.
I released the rope and let it spin loose from the pommel. I heard Johnny Krause thump against the earth, his breath like a stifled scream.
Then I watched Ronnie Cross walk right through L.Q.'s shape, shattering it like splinters of charcoal-colored glass against the glare of headlights in the background.
'I was with Essie and Lucas at your house when them guys called. We got ahold of some Texas Rangers,' he said.
I wiped my hands on my thighs and stared at him silently from the saddle. Then, as though waking from a dream, I looked up at the wind in the cottonwoods and the heat lightning flickering on the leaves, and once again wondered who really lived inside my skin.
The next morning I had my receptionist call Earl Deitrich's house and get the ex-mercenary named Fletcher Grinnel on the phone.
'Last night I hung a piece of shit named Johnny Krause in a tree,' I said.
'You're a busy fellow,' he replied.
'He just gave you up on the murder of Cholo Ramirez. Check out the statistics on the number of people currently being executed in Texas, Grinnel. You going to ride the gurney for Earl Deitrich?'
'Say again, please?'
32
Three weeks later, on a Saturday afternoon, Peggy Jean Deitrich parked her automobile in front of my house and walked across the grass to the driveway, where I was planting climbing roses on the trellises I had nailed up on posts on each side of the drive. I had painted the posts and trellises and the crossbeam white, and the roses were as bright as drops of blood against the paint.
The balled root systems were three feet in diameter and packed in sawdust and black dirt and wrapped with wet burlap. I knelt on the grass and snipped the burlap away and washed the roots loose with a garden hose and lowered them into a freshly dug hole that I had worked with horse manure. I put the garden hose into the hole and watched the water rise in a soapy brown froth to the rim, then I began shoveling compost in on top of it.
'You're right good at that,' she said, and sat down on my folding metal chair in the shade.
'What's up, Peggy Jean?'
She wore jeans and shined boots and a plaid snap-button shirt and a thin hand-tooled brown belt with a silver buckle and a silver tip on the tongue. The wind blew the myrtle above her head and made patterns of sunlight and shadow on her skin, and for just a moment I saw us both together again among the oak trees above the riverbank when she allowed me to lose my virginity inside her.
'Jeff's out on bail and still doesn't realize he'll probably go to prison. Earl expects to be indicted for murder momentarily and is usually drunk by noon. He also goes out unwashed and unshaved in public. But maybe you know all that,' she said.
'Sorry. I don't have an interest anymore in tracking what they do.'
'We're defaulting on the Wyoming land deal. Earl's creditors are calling in all his debts. I think it's what you planned, Billy Bob.'
'Earl stepped in his own shit, Peggy Jean.'
'I want to hire you as our attorney.'
'Nope.'
'I can pay. Earl has a half-million-dollar life insurance policy I can borrow on.'
I shook my head. 'Let me give you some advice instead and it won't cost you a nickel. If you're poor and you commit a crime, the legal system works quickly and leaves you in pieces all over the highway. If you're educated and have money, the process becomes a drawn-out affair, like a terminal cancer patient who can afford various kinds of treatment all over the world. But eventually he ends up at Lourdes.
'That's what will happen to Earl. He'll become more and more desperate, and more and more people will take advantage of his situation. The ducks will nibble him to death and eventually he'll come to Lourdes. If I were his attorney, I'd tell him to negotiate a plea now and try to avoid a capital conviction.'
She got up from the chair and gazed at my house, the barn and Beau in the lot and the windmill ginning and the fields that had been harvested and were marbled with shadows and the willows by the tank that were blowing in the wind.
She looked up at the red oak plank I had hung from the crossbeam over the driveway.
'Why did you name your place Heartwood?' she asked.
