Heartwood by James Lee Burke Page B

always governed my life were about to be irrevocably set aside.

8
    At sunset that evening I drove to Wilbur Pickett’s place on the hardpan. The sun had dropped behind the hills in the west and the afterglow looked like fires were burning inside the trees on the hills’ rim.
    Wilbur and his wife, Kippy Jo, had moved their kitchen table out into the middle of the backyard and were eating ears of corn they had roasted on a barbecue pit. His pasture was dimpled with water and had turned emerald green from yesterday’s storm, and his Appaloosa and two palominos were drinking out of the tank by his windmill, their tails switching across their hindquarters. Parked by the barn was an ancient snub-nosed flatbed truck loaded to the top of the slats with rattlesnake watermelons.
    “I’m trying to put your trial off as long as I can. A guy like Earl Deitrich eventually sticks his hand in a porcupine hole,” I said.
    “Don’t matter to me. I got these ole boys down inVenezuela just about sold on this pipeline job. You still got time to get in on it.”
    It was like talking to a child.
    “Good-looking melons,” I said.
    “I went on down through Rio Grande City and got me a mess of them. I’m gonna flat clean up on that li’l deal,” he replied.
    “You went to Mexico?”
    “Yeah, what’s wrong with that?” he said.
    “You’re on bail. You don’t go to other countries when you’re on bail,” I said.
    “You want some corn?” he asked.
    “Wilbur, I think Earl Deitrich is into some very bad stuff. I’m not sure what it is, but you’re his scapegoat. Stop playing his game,” I said.
    He looked at me from under his shapeless cowboy hat with a private, ironic expression, then flung the coffee from his metal cup and wiped it clean with a napkin.
    “You were going to say something?” I asked.
    “Not me, son,” he replied. After a moment, he said, “Kippy Jo, tell him what you been seeing in your dreams.”
    She turned her blue, sightless white-flecked eyes on me. The wind was blowing at her back and it feathered her hair around her throat.
    “A winged man is coming. His teeth are red. He’s killed Indian people in another place. I don’t understand the dream. He’s very evil,” she said.
    I didn’t respond. She turned her head slightly, as though the creak of the windmill or the horses snuffing and blowing at the water tank meant something. Then her eyes came back on me and her head tilted, her mouth parting silently, her cheeks slack with a thought that confused her.
    “But you already know him. How can you be around a man this evil without knowing it?” she said.
    “Don’t that blow your head?” Wilbur said.
    When I walked out to my car with Wilbur I wished I hadn’t come. I had wanted to caution him, but it did no good. Wilbur had been born in the wrong century. His kind became the tools of empires with glad hearts and an indefatigable optimism. When their usefulness ended, they were discarded.
    But he was not the only one who was naive.
    “You were fixing to tell me something back there,” I said.
    He took off his hat and pressed the dents out of the crown. Against the fire in the western sky his chiseled, surgically rebuilt profile looked like a Roman soldier’s.
    “Me and Kippy Jo was selling our melons out on the state road today,” he said. “I seen your Avalon coming hell for breakfast around a truck. I thought, Now, there’s a man badly in need of melons.”
    His eyes held mine. I could feel my face burning.
    “I ain’t gonna tell a man of your background about milking through the fence, but if that wasn’t Peggy Jean Deitrich in your car, then ole Bodacious head-butted me a lot worse than I thought,” he said.
    That Saturday afternoon Lucas and his band played at Shorty’s out on the river. Shorty’s, with its screened porches and lack of air-conditioning, might have been a ramshackle nightclub and barbecue joint left over from another era, but either out of curiosity or need