Heartwood by James Lee Burke

wore a pair of faded pink shorts, and the tails of her shirt were knotted under her breasts. Her skin was glazed with sweat, her eyes blinking with the salt that ran into them. She blotted her face on her shirt.
    “What is it, Temple?” I asked.
    “If you want to be an idiot in your private life, that’s your business. But I’m part of Wilbur Pickett’s defense team. You don’t have the right to do what you’re doing.”
    “Doing what, please?”
    Her hands were in her back pockets, her face tilted up into mine now, the whites of her eyes shiny and pink. Her breasts rose and fell against her shirt.
    “It’s a small town. Peggy Jean had a fight with her husband in front of the Langtry Hotel. Then the two of you boogied on down the road,” she said.
    “She twisted her ankle. I took her home.”
    “Well, twist this. You’ve managed to publicly involve yourself with the wife of the man who’s brought charges against your client. You piss me off so bad I want to beat the shit out of you.” She shoved me in the breastbone with her hand. Then she shoved me again, her face heating, her eyes watering now.
    “Nothing happened, Temple. I promise.”
    She turned and walked away from me, then ripped the baseball cap off her head and shook out her hair. The faded rump of her shorts was flecked with dirt.
    “Come on back, Temple,” I said.
    But she didn’t.
    I went inside the house and turned on the television to fill the rooms with as much noise as I could to drown out Temple’s words.
    A Houston televangelist was sitting on a stage with his two co-hosts, a middle-aged blonde woman and a white-haired black man who looked like a minstrel performer rather than a real person of color. The three of them had joined hands and were supposedly receiving telepathic pleas for help from their electronic congregation. Their eyes were squeezed shut, their faces furrowed with strain as though they were constipated.
    I stared in disbelief as the pilot Bubba Grimes took a seat among the latticework of plastic flowers. He talked of mercy flights to Rwandan refugees, or missionaries who risked their lives in jungles that swarmed with wild animals and tropical disease. Grimes’s face broke into thousands of fine wrinkles when he grinned, like the lines in a tobacco leaf. The televangelist was bent forward in his chair, his unctuous voice modifying and directing Grimes’s peckerwood depiction of Western humanity at work in Central Africa.
    The blonde woman and the black man, whose skin looked like greasepaint and whose hair was as white as new snow, nodded their heads reverentially.
    Grimes poured into a glass from a pitcher filled with ice and Kool-Aid and drank until the glass was empty.
    “Bubba loves his Kool-Aid,” the televangelist said.
    Grimes grinned at the camera, his lips as red as a wet strawberry.
    It was sickening to watch.
    I went to my desk in the library and punched in Earl Deitrich’s number on the telephone.
    “What is it now?” he said when he recognized my voice.
    “I drove your wife home the other day because you left her on the sidewalk with a sprained ankle. That was the extent of it. I hope we’re clear on that.”
    “Oh yeah. That’s why y’all were dancing in a bar the same afternoon … You there? No smart-ass remarks to make?”
    I looked stupidly out the window at the blades of my windmill ginning beyond the barn roof.
    “Your wife didn’t do anything wrong, Earl. If there’s any blame involved, it’s mine,” I said.
    “You got that right.”
    I started to ease the receiver down, to let go of pride and anger and all the vituperative energy that had clung to me like a net since I had run into Ronnie Cruise by the church. But for some reason I kept seeing Bubba Grimes’s red smile on the television screen.
    “That sociopathic pilot, the guy you paid to lie about Wilbur Pickett? He landed his plane on my pasture. He wanted to hang you from a meat hook. I’d hire a better class of lowlife,