Heartwood

'It comes from a story my father told me when I was baptized. It has to do with the way certain kinds of trees grow outward from the center.'

I sat down in the folding chair and filled a jelly glass with Kool-Aid from a plastic pitcher. My hair was damp with perspiration and in the shade the wind felt cool against my skin.

She stood behind me and her shadow intersected mine on the grass. Then the sun went behind a cloud and our shadows grayed and disappeared. She stroked the hair on the back of my head, upward, as she might a child's.

'Heartwood is a good name. Goodbye, Billy Bob,' she said.

Then she was gone. I never saw her again.

After Labor Day the weather turned dry and hot, and there were fires in the hills west of the hardpan, flecks of light you could see at night from the highway, like an indistinct red glimmering inside black glass. I tried not to think about the Deitrichs anymore, and instead to concentrate on my own life and the expectation and promise that each sunrise held for those who accepted the day for the gift it was.

Fletcher Grinnel had given up Earl Deitrich in front of a grand jury and Kippy Jo was off the hook for the shooting of the intruder, Bubba Grimes. She and Wilbur had gone to Wyoming to begin drilling on their property, even though she still maintained that Wilbur would bring in a duster.

Lucas was preparing to return to school at Texas A amp;M and was talking about Esmeralda joining him there. But Ronnie Cross found excuses to visit my house with regularity and to ask about Esmeralda, and she in turn had a way of dropping by when he was there. In those moments I looked at Lucas with the pang that a parent feels when he knows his child will be hurt and that it's no one's fault and that to try to preempt the rites of passage is an act of contempt for the child's courage.

Temple Carrol and me?

She still said I lived with ghosts.

But even though I told myself each day I was through with the Deitrichs and the avarice and meretriciousness of the world they represented, I knew better. They were too much a part of us, the town, our history, the innocence and goodness we had perhaps created as a wishful reflection of ourselves in the form of Peggy Jean Murphy.

The Deitrichs came back into my life again with a phone call. In a way that would never allow me to extricate myself from them.

A call at midnight from Jessie Stump.

'I thought you'd left the area,' I said. 'I been sick,' he said.

'Go to a hospital.'

'Don't need none. My daddy could heal bleeding and blow the fire out of a burn. He cured warts with molasses and a hairball from a cow's stomach… I'm gonna send money to get Skyler's casket moved to a church cemetery.'

'I have his personal effects from his rooming house. I'll mail them to any address you want. Why don't you honor his memory and start over again somewhere else?'

'I don't need no personal effects. He give me his watch. The one his ancestor carried at the Alamo. I'm looking at it in the palm of my hand right now.'

'It was returned to the Deitrichs.'

'Yeah…' he began, but did not finish his sentence.

'The Deitrichs gave it to you?' I said.

'I'm fixing to be a rich man, boy. That's all you need to know. Now, you do what I say about moving that casket.'

'You listen to me, Stump. A New Zealander, a man named Fletcher Grinnel, admitted killing Mr. Doolittle. He'll go down for it. So will Earl Deitrich. You stay away from their house.'

'You worried about the woman? How long does it take you to figure it out, boy?'

I couldn't sleep the rest of the night.

But in the morning I knew what I had to do. I called Earl Deitrich at his home.

'Jessie Stump's back in the area. I think he aims to splatter your grits,' I said.

'What else is new?' Earl said.

'I think someone inside your house is helping him.'

'Judas Iscariot is in my midst? You're telling me this because you're a great guy? Okay, great guy, you've done your duty.'

'He has possession of Skyler Doolittle's watch. How'd he come by it?'

I could hear him breathing in the silence.

'You're telling me my wife is trying to have me killed? You're a vicious, sick man,' he said.

I replaced the receiver gently in the telephone cradle. I couldn't blame him for his feelings.

I ate lunch with Marvin Pomroy that day at the Mexican grocery across from the courthouse. Marvin listened while I talked, then was quiet a long time. He cleared his throat slightly and drank from his glass of lemonade. His face looked cool and serene and pink in the breeze from the wood-bladed fan overhead.

'Why did you call Deitrich first instead of me?' he asked.

'I gave Peggy Jean a preview of what their lives would be like for the next year. I believe I started her thinking about other options.'

He wiped his mouth with his napkin and picked up the check and added up the figures on it.

'You don't have anything to say?' I asked.

'Yeah, maybe Earl Deitrich will finally do something good for a change. Like rid us of Jessie Stump,' Marvin replied.

But two hours later Marvin called me at the office, as I knew he would.

'Hugo's going to send a couple of deputies back out to the Deitrich place. The next time you orchestrate a train wreck, don't tell me about it,' he said, and hung up.

Jeff Deitrich cruised Val's that night in his yellow convertible, alone, the top down. It was a beautiful fall night; the moon was big and yellow over the hills, the air cool, smelling of pine wood smoke and late-blooming flowers. The parking lot was filled, the hand-waxed surfaces of his friends' sports cars and roll-bar Jeeps glowing under the electric lights. He drove up one aisle and down the other, scanning faces and groups of kids who talked with great animation between their parked cars. But no one seemed to look in Jeffs direction, as though he were only a passerby, somehow not a player anymore.

He made a U-turn in the street and came through the main entrance again. Why was it that everyone looked younger? Most of these guys were high schoolers or people whom he had always regarded as barely worth noticing. Where were Chug and Warren and Hammie?

The only empty slot was at the far end of the lot, by a Dumpster that was overflowing in the weeds. He backed his convertible in so he could see everyone who drove by. It was just a matter of time before his old friends would be cruising by, gathering around his car, laughing at all this legal bullshit that a four-eyed fuck named Marvin Pomroy was trying to drop on his head.

Under his seat was a silver cigarette case that contained two tightly twisted joints of Jalisco gage, sprinkled with China White to give it legs.

He cupped his hands around a match and fired one up. He held the smoke down and took the hit deep in his lungs, heard the paper drying and burning crisply toward his Ups with each toke, his face warming and growing tight like tallow molding against the bone.

The waitress hooked an aluminum tray on his window. She was cute, in her purple and white rayon uniform, her mouth like a cherry, her bleached hair curled on her shoulders.

'You want to do some Mexican gage?' he asked.

'What's that?' she replied.

'I'll pick you up later. I'm Jeff Deitrich.'

'My father takes me home… You want to order? I got a pickup getting cold at the window.'

She brought him a fish sandwich and an iced mug of beer. Music was pumping out of the speakers on the stanchions that supported the canvas tarps the owner pulled out on guy wires when it rained or during the heat of the day. He walked to the men's room, nodding at kids who should have recognized him but didn't. When he came back out, some kids in a group looked at him quickly, then their eyes slid off his face.