Read Heartwood for Free Online Page B

the mockingbirds flying in and out of the shade. “I’m coaching American Legion this year,” he said. “For some reason I can’t teach those boys not to swing on a change-up. Meanest pitch in baseball. The pitcher holds the ball in the back of his hand and messes up your head every time.”
    For lunch I walked over to the saloon and pool room next to the barbershop and ate a sandwich and drank a cup of coffee at the bar. The saloon was dark and had wood floors and an old mirror over the bar and was cooled by electric fans mounted on the walls.
    Skyler Doolittle walked in from the glare of the street and stood at the end of the bar, twisting his torso one way, then another, his fused neck turning with his shoulders, until he saw me in back.
    “This fellow Deitrich is trying to have me sent to thesylum. I want to hire you. Ain’t nobody else around here gonna represent me. I want my watch back, too,” he said.
    “Why would Earl want to send you to an asylum, Mr. Doolittle?” I asked.
    “The fellow’s a cheat. I confronted him with it. In the Langtry Hotel dining room. In front of all them businessmen.”
    “I’m primarily a criminal defense lawyer. I don’t know if I’m the right man for you, sir.”
    His eyes looked about the saloon, wide, frenetic. The pool players were bent over the tables in cones of light.
    “I knowed your daddy years back. You was river-baptized,” he said. “Immersed both in the reflection of the sky and the silt from Noie’s flood. That means the earth and the heavens got you cupped between them, just like the hands of God. I ain’t no crazy person, Mr. Holland. On a clear day like today I see everything the way it is. I’m haunted by them children. A crazy man don’t walk around in Hell.”
    “The children in the bus accident?” I said.
    “They talk to me out of the flames, sir. I don’t never get rid of it.”
    The pool shooters nearby did not look in our direction, but their bodies seemed to hang motionlessly on the edges of the light that enveloped the tables.
    “Why don’t we walk on over to my office, Mr. Doolittle?” I said.
    He fitted his Panama hat back on his head and stepped out the front door into the heat like a man braving a furnace.
    I worked late in the office that evening. My air conditioner had broken and I opened the window and lookeddown onto the square at the cooling streets, the scrolled pink and purple and green neon on the Rialto Theater, the swallows dipping and gliding around the clock tower on the courthouse. Then I saw the sheriffs tow truck hauling Cholo Ramirez’s customized 1949 Mercury through the square toward the pound.
    The tow truck was followed by two cruisers that stopped on the side of the courthouse. Four uniformed deputies got out and escorted Esmeralda Ramirez, her wrists cuffed behind her, into the squat, one-story sandstone building that served as the office of Hugo Roberts.
    I went back to my desk and tried to resume work. But I could not get out of my mind the image of four men dressed in khaki, their campaign hats slanted forward on their heads, the lead-gray stripes on their trousers creasing at the knees, marching a manacled girl into a building that looked like a blockhouse.
    It started to sprinkle while the sun was still shining. I put on my coat and Stetson and walked across the street, then around the side of the courthouse lawn to the entrance of Hugo’s office. Two of the deputies were smoking cigarettes by the door, their faces opaque, my own reflection looking back at me in their sunglasses. Out of the corner of my eye I saw Temple Carrol carry a sack of groceries from the Mexican store on the side street to her Cherokee.
    “What’s the deal on the girl?” I said to the deputies.
    “What’s it to you?” one said.
    “The ’49 Mercury you were towing, a kid named Cholo was driving it the other night. He tried to give me some trouble,” I said.
    “We got a 911. The girl was weaving on the highway out by the