My father had burned the word “Heartwood” into the oak plank with a running iron. He had intended to build a white gate with rose trellises and a crossbeam at the entrance to the drive and hang his sign from the beam, but he was killed that same spring in a pipeline blowout at Matagorda Bay.
I sat in the grass on the slope and wiped the grain clean with an oily rag and scoured the dust out of the branded letters until they were dark and granulated and rippling under my index finger. My mother said she thought it was a bit vain and presumptuous to hang a sign on a farm as modest as ours, and my father’s response was, “The only reason it’s modest is because the Hollands was honest and didn’t steal other people’s land during the Depression for four bits an acre.”
But I knew my father, the quiet whirrings in his chest, the grace and dignity with which he conducted himself, and the deeply held sentiments he didn’t share openly because he lacked the vocabulary to express feeling without sounding saccharine. He loved our home because in his mind it had no equal anywhere on the earth. How many men lived in a three-story purple-brick house, surrounded by poplars and roses and blooming myrtle, with a breezy top-floor view of a barn, horse lot, windmill, chicken run, cattle pasture, plowed acreage with rows of vegetables that ran all the way to the bluffs, a willow-lined tank stocked with striped bass and crappie and bream and catfish, the scars of the Chisholm Trail baked like white ceramic into the hardpan, and a meandering, green river and rolling hills in the distance? We woke to it every day, knowing that everything God and the earth could give to a family had been presented to us with no other obligation on our part than to be its stewards.
I don’t think my father was vain at all, and in reality I don’t think my mother did, either.
I heard footsteps behind me and turned around and saw Pete coming down the slope through the pine trees. He was barefoot and carried a fishing rod with the Mepps spinner pulled up tight against the eyelet so that it rattled when he walked.
He looked around, his face puzzled.
“Was you talking to someone?” he asked.
“Probably not,” I replied.
“Billy Bob, if you was in a conversation and other people was saying a friend of yours was crazy, would you get in them people’s face about it?”
“Nothing wrong with being crazy. It gives you a more interesting view. If it was me, I wouldn’t debate it with people who don’t understand those kinds of things,” I said.
“I was thinking along the same lines,” he said. “But in my opinion the friend I’m talking about is the best guy I ever knowed.” He grinned and nodded to himself, as though taking great pleasure in his own wit and the world around him.
“Why don’t we go down to the tank and entertain the bass?” I said.
I got up on Beau, then Pete handed up my father’s red oak gate sign and I propped it across the pommel and waited for Pete to climb on Beau’s rump. He held me tightly across the waist, his bass lure rattling on his fishing rod, while we rode through a field of wildflowers toward the tank.
Sunday morning Chug Rollins was still swacked on tequila and downers from the previous night and drove all the way across the border to visit a Mexican brothel. Upon his return to Deaf Smith he cruised Val’s and got into it with a carhop who refused to move from in front of his automobile and gave him the finger when he blew his horn at her. The manager, who was six and a half feet tall, walked the waitress inside, then broke Chug’s windshield with an ice mallet. By sunset Chug was at Shorty’s, out on the screen porch, drunk on beer, wired to the eyes, filling the air with a sweet-sour animal odor that coated his body like a gray fog.
When his friends moved their drinks and food to tables that were at a safe distance, Chug cornered kids who were younger than he, forcing them to drink with him and listen to his rage at the sheriff’s department, at Jessie Stump, at Mexican gangbangers, then at what he called “hip-hop cannibals that crossed the wrong lines.”
“You in the Klan or something?” one kid said, a wry grin on his mouth as he tried to preserve his dignity and justify his shame for not fleeing Chug’s presence.
“It’s like a war. There’re casualties in a war. It wasn’t my beef, anyway. Hey, I didn’t say anything about black people, you got me? I got nothing against them,” Chug said.
“That’s righteous, man. No problem. I got to use the rest room.”
“Bring back a pitcher from the bar,” Chug said.
An hour later Chug was picked up for DWI. When the deputy shook him down against the side of the car, a throat-lozenges container fell from his pocket and broke open in the gutter. A handful of reds glimmered in the mud like beads from a broken necklace.
The next morning I took a chance. No one boiled on alcohol and downers would later remember everything he said and did.
Chug lived in a three-bedroom, one-story brick house, with a wide, cement porch and white pillars that affected the appearance of East End homes which cost much more. His father was a deacon in the Baptist Church, an auxiliary member of the sheriffs department, and a booster of almost every civic group in town, but he wore pale blue suits with a white stitch in them, hillbilly sideburns, and grease in his hair. The lawn was burned along the edges of the walks, and the small concrete pool in back always had leaves and pine needles floating in the corners.
It was there that I found Chug, resting in a deck chair, his eyes shaded with dark glasses, his elephantine, hair-streaked body oiled with suntan lotion.
He raised his head just far enough to see who I was.
“You’re getting a burn,” I said.
“I’ll live with it.”
“I thought you might need an attorney,” I said.
“My father already got the ticket reduced to reckless driving. The dope I was supposed to be holding was Red Hots. So thanks but no thanks. Who let you in here, anyway?”
“You don’t remember what you were telling people at Shorty’s?” I asked.
“Yeah, ‘Pass the hot sauce.’ ”