Heartwood Read Online Free PDF Page B

in the gloom, his eyes full of gloat.
    I pulled open the door and stepped back out into the afternoon breeze and dappled shade and closed the door behind me and heard the metal tongue on the latch fallinto place. The breeze felt wonderful in my face. Then I remembered the name. I pushed the door open again. The glare fell like a dagger across Grimes’s face.
    “You were mixed up with a televangelist preacher and the Contras down in Nicaragua. You were shot down dropping supplies to them,” I said to Grimes.
    “I told you, boy’s an encyclopedia of worthless information,” Hugo said.
    “Then you made the news again. Flying for the same preacher in Zaire. Except you were diverting mercy flights to his diamond mines,” I said.
    “I bet a local jury will get on this like stink on shit,”Hugo said.
    “They sure will. That’s where all Earl Deitrich’s money comes from,” I said.
    Hugo’s cigarette paused halfway to his mouth, the smoke curling upward like a white snake.
    Early the next morning the air was unseasonably cold and a milk-white fog blew off the river and hung as thick as wet cotton on the two-acre tank behind my barn. As I walked along the levee I could hear bass flopping out in the fog. I stood in the weeds and cast a Rapala between two flooded willow trees, heard it hit the water, then began retrieving it toward me. The sun looked like a glowing red spark behind the gray silhouette of the barn.
    I felt a hard, throbbing hit on the lure. I jerked the rod up to set the treble hook, but the lure rattled loose from the bass’s mouth, sailed through the air, and clinked on the water’s surface. Behind me I heard someone tapping loudly on my back door, then a truck engine grinding past the barn and through the field toward me.
    Wilbur Pickett got out and walked up the levee in apair of khakis and cowboy boots and a denim jacket cut off at the armpits.
    “They’re flopping out there, ain’t they?” he said.
    “There’s a pole and a coffee can of worms by that willow,” I said.
    “Lordy, this is a nice place. I aim to have one like it someday,” he said, squatting down to thread a night crawler on his hook.
    “You doing all right?” I said.
    He swung the cork and weighted line out into the fog.
    “My wife sees pictures in her head. It scares me sometimes. She says you got dead people following you around,” he said.
    “I don’t see any.”
    “She said these are people you killed down in Old Mexico. I told her I never heard no such thing.” He looked straight ahead, a nervous flicker in the corner of his eye.
    I reeled in my line and rested my rod against the trunk of a redbud tree. I watched a cottonmouth moccasin swimming through the shallows, its body forming and re-forming itself like an S-shaped spring.
    “Billy Bob?” Wilbur said.
    “They were heroin mules. They got what they deserved,” I said.
    “That don’t sound like you.”
    “I’ve got to get to work,” I said.
    He rubbed his palm on his forehead, and his eyes searched in the fog, as though looking for words that weren’t part of his vocabulary. I saw his throat swallow. “She says you’re a giver of death. She says it’s gonna happen again.”
    “What will happen again?”
    “She says there’s spirits that want revenge. It’s got to do with human heads in a garden in Africa. It don’t make no sense. I ain’t up to this. I ain’t never hurt nobody. I don’t want to have nothing to do with this kind of stuff,” he said.
    He dropped the cane pole across a willow branch and got into his paint-skinned truck and began grinding the starter.
    “Wilbur, get down here and talk,” I said.
    His engine caught and he twisted his head back toward me as he turned the wheel with both hands.
    “You killed people and you ain’t sorry? That ain’t the Billy Bob Holland I always knowed. Why’d you tell me that?” he said, his eyes wet.
    He roared through the field, the tall grass whipping under his front bumper, trash