Heartwood

I looked at Lucas with the pang that a parent feels when he knows his child will be hurt and that it's no one's fault and that to try to preempt the rites of passage is an act of contempt for the child's courage.

...young people...who were casually profane, as though the validation of their own power could be achieved only by their assault on the sensibilities of others.

It’s strange how people bloom, even in poisonous soil, once they allow themselves to become what they’ve always been.

But if Cholo Ramirez was indeed intended to embark on the Ghost Trail of his Indian ancestors, its entrance was not marked by cottonwood trees along a riverbank on a windswept green plain. The Ghost Trail for Cholo lay inside the incessant scream of a shorted-out car horn and the heated smell of car metal and exhaust fumes and asphalt only a block from the Alamo. That’s where the paramedics pried his hands off the steering wheel of his ’49 Merc and tried to abate the convulsions in his body and the hemorrhage that was taking place in his brain. While they strapped him down to a gurney, a frustrated policeman popped the Merc’s hood and tore the wiring from the horn like a severed snake.

I think perhaps a degree of wrong is being done here.” “A degree of wrong?” I said. “Yes.” Then the voice came together with an image, that of a small, nervous, dark-haired man, with a hawk’s nose and thick glasses, in a blue suit with dandruff on the shoulders. What was the name? Green? Greenberg? “You’re Mr. Greenbaum. The accountant. You were at the Deitrichs’ luncheon yesterday,” I said. The line went dead.

Nothing wrong with being crazy. It gives you a more interesting view.

...to try and preempt the rites of passage is an act of contempt for the child's courage.

If you’re poor and you commit a crime, the legal system works quickly and leaves you in pieces all over the highway. If you’re educated and have money, the process becomes a drawn-out affair, like a terminal cancer patient who can afford various kinds of treatment all over the world. But eventually he ends up at Lourdes.

What kind of trees are those?" I asked. "Heartwood," my father said. "They grow in layers, like the spirit does. That's what Grandpa Sam used to say, anyway. You just got to keep the roots in a clear stream and not let nobody taint the water for you.