Heartwood by James Lee Burke Page A

he replied.
    I turned and walked stiffly past my table, left a dollar for having used the place setting, and went up the stairs through the old darkened lobby, past the empty registration desk and pigeonholes for guest mail and room keysand the dust-covered telephone switchboard, into the shade under the colonnade and the wind that blew like a blowtorch across the asphalt.
    I was a half block down the street when I heard Peggy Jean’s voice behind me. “Billy Bob, wait. I need to talk with you. Don’t go away like this.”
    She was on high heels, and when she started toward me she twisted one ankle and had to grab on to a wood post. Then Earl was on the sidewalk beside her, and the two of them began to argue with the attempted restraint of people whose lives are coming apart on a stage. I stood in the middle of the sidewalk, under a candy-striped barbershop awning, like a foolish and impotent spectator who cannot bring himself to either flee or participate in the fray.
    “You’re tight. Go sit in the lobby. I’ll have some coffee sent out,” Earl said.
    “You had that handicapped man arrested? Over a card game?” she asked incredulously.
    “I didn’t. He’s demented. He’s been in prison for killing schoolchildren, for God’s sake.” Then Earl waved his hands in the air and slapped them against his hips in exasperation. “I give up,” he said, and went back into the hotel.
    But he didn’t stay. He was right back out on the sidewalk. “To hell with it. Just to hell with it. Go back inside and eat something. I’ll send Fletcher with the limo,” he said, and got into his Lincoln and backed out into the street while Peggy Jean propped herself against the colonnade’s post and pulled off her broken high-heel shoe.
    “You want a glass of iced tea?” I said to her.
    “Tea. Aspirin. Heroin. Anything. I feel like a train wreck,” she said.
    “Why don’t you sit down on the bench? I’ll get my car.”
    I told myself my gesture was an innocent one. Perhaps it was. You didn’t abandon an impaired friend in a public place and leave her to swelter in the heat and her own embarrassment while she waited on the mercies of an irresponsible husband.
    Yes, I’m absolutely sure I thought those thoughts.
    We drove north of town toward her home, then she asked to stop at a steak house that was built on an escarpment overlooking a long valley. When she got out of the car she deliberately knocked the heel off her other shoe on an ornamental boulder by the restaurant door, then put her shoes back on as flats and went in the ladies’ room and washed her face and put on fresh makeup and came back out and sat at a table with me by the back window.
    The restaurant was cool and softly lit and deserted except for a bartender and a waiter. Clouds covered the sun now, and the valley below us was blanketed with shadow and the wind blew the grass and wildflowers in channels like the fingers of a river.
    The jukebox was playing an old Floyd Tillman song. Her face seemed to go out of focus with a private thought or maybe with an after-rush from the Old-Fashioneds. Then she fixed her eyes on me as though I were walking toward her out of a dream.
    “Dance with me,” she said.
    “I’m not very good at it,” I said.
    “Please, Billy Bob. Just one time.”
    And that’s what we did, on a small square of polished yellow hardwood floor, balloons of color rippling through the plastic casing of the jukebox. She placed her cheek against mine, and I could smell bourbon and candiedcherries and bitters and sweet syrup and sliced oranges on her breath, as though all the blended, chilled odors of what she had consumed had been refermented and heated inside her heart’s blood and breathed out again against my skin.
    Then her head brushed against my face and I smelled a fragrance of roses in her hair. Her loins, when they touched mine, were like points of fire against my body, and I knew I was entering a country where the rules that had