BBH01 - Cimarron Rose

by James Lee Burke

  'Oh man,' I said.

  'He gets my car up on a jack and drains the oil and takes the pan off and welds it and sticks it back on, and I ask how much I owe him.

  '"Hunnerd-twenty-five," he says.

  'I go, "My ass. That job ain't worth one nickel more than seventy-five dollars."

  'He says, "Then it looks like I got me a fishing car."

  'I give him eighty dollars cash and take out my MasterCard for the rest of it. He looks at the name and says, "Vernon Smothers… Vernon Smothers… Is that little jailhouse bitch your son? Why, you're bird-dogging me, ain't you?"

  'I told him I'd never laid eyes on him and didn't want to and didn't have no plan on seeing him again… He never said a word. He just smiled and wrote out my charge slip and handed it to me… I seen eyes like that on one other man in my life. He was a door gunner. If he caught them in a rice field or a hooch or coming out of a wedding party, it didn't make no difference.'

  'Forget it,' I said.

  'I think he's going to hurt my boy.'

  'We won't let that happen, Vernon.' He cupped his fingers over his mouth. His skin made a dry, rasping sound against his fingers.

  The social circle of Darl Vanzandt wasn't a difficult one to track. They were rich and lived in the East End; they had flunked out of the University of Texas or they commuted to a community college or they held token jobs in the businesses they would inherit. But it was a strange solipsistic attitude toward others that truly defined them. They were animated and loud and unseeing in public, indifferent to the injury their words might cause anyone outside their perimeter. They drove too fast, running stop signs and caution lights, never making a connection between their recklessness and the jeopardy they arbitrarily brought into the lives of others.

  Their accents were regional, but they had skied in Colorado and surfed in California, and they played golf and tennis at a country club where blacks and Mexicans picked up their litter from the greens and their sweaty towels from the court, as though that was the natural function of the poor. Their insensitivity was almost a form of innocence. Had they ever been brought to task for their behavior, they probably would not have understood the complaint against them.

  But one member of this group was an exception. Bunny Vogel came from a family of shiftless mill workers whose front yard was always decorated with rusted washing machines and automobile parts. But Bunny'd had a talent. As a high school running back he had crashed holes through the enemy line like a tank through a hedge row. Then he had played two years on a no-cut athletic scholarship at Texas A&M, with every expectation of graduating and going to the pros. That was before he got caught paying off a grader and fellow athlete to change an exam score for a freshman named Darl Vanzandt.

  After he was expelled, he turned his motorcycle on its side and ground a strip of metal, leather, and bone a hundred feet long on the highway to Austin.

  I found him at his job out at the skeet club. He could have been a Visigoth, with his grained, ruddy face, his long bronze-colored hair tangled on his shoulders, a deep pink scar, with stitch holes, along one jaw. Bunny was deferential and soft-spoken, even likable, but I always felt that behind his smile a clock was ticking as he waited for that moment when he would be free of older people and the sanction and approval they could arbitrarily withdraw if he displeased them.

  Shotguns popped in the warm breeze behind him, and beyond the row of oblong green traps, clay pigeons exploded in puffs of colored smoke against the sky.

  'I'd like to hep you, Mr Holland, but far as I know the only guy mixed up with Roseanne Hazlitt was ole Lucas. Sorry,' he said.

  'Were you out at Shorty's the night she was attacked?' I asked.

  'I might have been. But I didn't see her… Seen Lucas… That ain't no hep, though, is it?' He smiled boyishly and brushed at the grass with one shoe.

  'You think Lucas could rape and kill a girl?'

  'Lucas?' He thought about it. 'It's not like him. But a guy gets a snootful, who knows?'

  'How you know he had a snootful, Bunny?'

  He smiled with his eyes. 'I never saw him out there when he didn't.'

  'See you around.'

  'Yeah, anytime, Mr Holland. I hope it works out for Lucas.' He bit the corner of his lip philosophically.

  On the way to my car I saw Emma Vanzandt walking toward me from a pavilion. She wore a pair of tailored brown riding jeans and lizard boots and a maroon silk shirt that filled with the wind.

  'You're not going to say hello?' she asked.

  'How you doin', Emma?'

  'You've been busy. All Darl's friends wonder what you might be up to.'

  'They haven't figured it out, huh?'

  'Billy Bob,' she said, her voice climbing. 'Be a little kind. Darl's not a bad boy.'

  'I didn't say he was.'

  She looked back at the pavilion. 'Let's get in your car and I'll explain something… Darl suffers from—'

  'Fetal alcohol syndrome. Jack told me about it.'

  'I'd never heard of it before. But our last psychiatrist took one look at him and seemed to know everything about him… They've all got the same face. The eyes are set far apart, the upper lip is too close to the nose.' Then she looked at nothing and said, 'What a club to belong to,' and laughed, almost lewdly, as though giving vent to another person who lived inside her.

  'His friends vandalized Lucas Smothers's house.'

  'Oh, I don't believe that.'

  'It's good to see you, Emma.'

  'He wet his bed until he was fifteen. He's not capable of raping anybody. I don't think he's learned how to masturbate yet,' she said.

  'Maybe he should start. He beat up a prostitute with his fists.'

  'You should have gotten married, Billy Bob. Then you wouldn't be such a stick in the mud.'

  'Really?'

  She reached across the car seat and patted me on the wrist. 'Jack's sorry for speaking harshly to you. Come by and see us. We'll work all this out.'

  'No, we won't,' I said.

  'Well, you're just a big pill. But one day you'll see we mean you well. Until then, you have a good life, sir,' she said, and squeezed my hand.

  She got out of my car, her long, Indian-black hair tucked behind her head with a silver comb. Then I saw Darl come to meet her, looking past her shoulder at me, his face oily and insentient with booze and tranquilizers, the glare in his eyes like yellow heat trapped under murky water.

  The next day, in my office, Marvin Pomroy, the prosecutor, told me about the call that had come in to the rural fire station, his eyes moving across the rug as though he were clarifying the details to himself rather than to me.

  No one would have seen the flames, but a shower broke in the predawn hours and a column of wet smoke rose from between two hills and hung in the sky like a long gray rope. At first the firemen thought they were simply putting out a pile of discarded automobile tires that had been heaped into a deep pit. Then they began to poke through the foam and pull apart the tires with their axes. The blackened figure at the bottom of the pyre looked atrophied, cemented at the joints, like an anatomically deformed manikin encased in a thick crust. Except for the white teeth, exposed by the skin that had stretched back on the skull in a death grin.

  'You're sure it's Jimmy Cole?' I asked.

  'Cole was missing two toes on his left foot. He cut them off with a hatchet to get out of the field in Sugarland,' Marvin said. His eyes were bright, his gum snapping in his jaw. 'The crime scene's clean, though. We can't tie it to Moon.'

  'You look like your circuits are burning,' I said.

  'The ME says Cole died somewhere else. His nose and mouth and ears were full of sediment and pig shit. The ME says he was probably buried in a hog lot, then dug up after rigor mortis set in.' He glanced at my face. 'What?' he said.

  'I told Garland Moon I thought he'd killed Cole. He probably decided to move the body.'

  'What were you doing with Moon?'

  'Either he or Cole was in my barn. I tried to war
n him off.'

  'Don't try to 'front this guy on your own,' he said. But I knew I was not the source of his agitation. He leaned forward in the chair, a heated sheen on his face. 'Look, I've got a problem here that's eating my lunch. The fire was on the old Hart property. Nobody's lived there for thirty years. But I got the feeling most of those deputies had been there before. I also got the feeling the sheriff didn't want anybody hanging around there.'

  'Who owns the place now?'

  'A California company that sells western real estate to people tired of shopping in malls where the Crips and the Bloods have firefights. But I don't see anything there worth hiding, a strip of ground between the hills, the kind of place where the hoot owls screw the jackrabbits.'

  'Why you telling me this?'

  'That's the irony. I work in a county that's so corrupt I have to confide in a defense lawyer who rides his horse into barrooms. I grant you, it's a pitiful situation,' he said.

  'Thanks, Marvin. The ME thinks Jimmy Cole was suffocated in a hog lot?'

  'Moon wouldn't do that to an old friend. He put an ice pick inside his head.'

  After work that day I took the rake and garden shears and a gunny sack out of the barn and walked to our family cemetery on the far side of the tank. It was bordered by sandstone fence posts drilled through the center to hold the cedar rails that my father had shaved and beveled and notched thirty-two years ago, the year before he had climbed down into a hellhole on a natural gas pipeline to mend a leak in a faulty weld.

  Each year he faked his physicals or got someone else to take them for him, because, like many pipeline arc welders, his eyes were filled with tiny pinholes from weaving a circle of fire that was as white as the sun around a pipe joint. My mother said his vision had become so bad that clarity of sight came to him only when he struck the stringer-bead rod against the pipe's metal and saw again the flame that was as pure to him as the cathedral's bells were to the deaf bellringer Quasimodo.

  My father never saw the apprentice with him pull a Zippo from his khakis and light a cigarette. The explosion blew the glass out of the welding truck like brittle candy.

  My mother, who had been a librarian and an elementary school teacher, was buried next to him. After my father's death, she had purchased a common headstone for them both, inscribed with her name as well as his, with her birth date and a chiseled dash that left the date of death to another hand.

  I raked their graves and Great-grandpa Sam's clean, and those of all the other Hollands buried there, trimmed the grass around the headstones, and weeded out the rose beds I had dug under the cedar fence rails. Then I picked wild-flowers from the field and set them on my parents' graves, and cut a solitary yellow rose and laid it against Great-grandpa Sam's headstone.

  The wind was warm blowing across the field, rippling the grass like new wheat, and I could smell the river and the water in the irrigation ditches and the day's heat baked into the scarred hardpan that had once been part of the Chisholm Trail. I didn't hear the footsteps behind me.

  'I saw you from the back of the house,' Mary Beth said. She wore tan slacks, with high pockets, and sandals and a magenta shirt, and she carried a picnic basket by the straw bail in her right hand.

  'How you doin', slim?' I said.

  'Slim? If you aren't a peach.'

  'You figure out who those guys in the cruiser were?'

  'Take your choice.'

  'Maybe it's time your people pulled you out.'

  'Subject closed. You like fried chicken?'

  'You bet.'

  We walked across the field to a grove of oaks on the bluff above the river. She spread a checkered cloth on the grass and set it with silverware, tiny salt and pepper shakers, turkey-and-cheese sandwiches, guacamole, taco chips, potato salad, and a thermos of lemonade. Her hair hung over her cheeks while she placed each item carefully on the paper plates.

  'You're making me self-conscious,' she said.

  'You're a great-looking lady, Mary Beth.'

  Her eyes crinkled in the corners. I was standing by the edge of the checkered cloth now. When she rose to her feet her face was only inches away from mine. I touched her hair, then I put my mouth on hers. Her eyes were open, then they closed and she put her arms around my back and I felt her breasts against my chest and a moment later the heat of her cheek press against mine.

  I was suddenly involved with the old male impossibility of making love with any degree of dignity while standing up. We sat on the grass, then I lay her back with her head on the edge of the checkered cloth and kissed her again. The wind was blowing from across the river, eddying through the grass above the bluff, and the clouds piled on the western horizon were purple and edged with fire. I looked down into her eyes.

  Behind me I heard a horse's hooves moving through the dead oak leaves. I turned and saw Beau, my Morgan, coming through the shade, and a little boy with a haircut like a soft brush riding bareback atop him.

  'Hi! What ch'all doin'?' he said, pushing a branch out of his face with his arm.

  'Hey, Pete, what's goin' on?' I said, my voice coming back to me like a man bursting to the surface of a deep pool.

  'We still going fishing?'

  'Wouldn't miss it, bud. You want some chicken? This is Mary Beth.'

  He grinned at her. He was barefoot and in overalls and looked like a small clothespin on Beau's spine.

  'I already eat,' he said.

  'We have some lemonade,' she said. She was sitting up now, one arm propped behind her.

  'That's all right. I'm butting in.'

  'I'd tell you, wouldn't I?' I said.

  He grinned at nothing, flicking the reins across the back of his hand.

  'I'm gonna take Beau back,' he said.

  'Billy Bob told me a lot about you, Pete. I'd like it if you'd join us,' Mary Beth said.

  His eyes shifted off her, his grin never fading, then he slipped off Beau's back onto the ground.

  'This is the smartest little guy in Deaf Smith,' I said.

  'I knew you was gonna say that,' he said.

  That night I drove down the road to the convenience store to buy a carton of milk. The store was on the top of a rise, next to a cornfield, its bright white-and-red exterior and neon-scrolled windows and lighted gas pumps and wide cement parking area surrounded by rural darkness. It was also a hangout for East Enders dragging the main road through town.

  Their cars were parked by the phone booth, their doors open to catch the breeze, the cement pad around their feet already littered with beer cans, dirty napkins, and the cigarette butts they had emptied from their ashtrays.

  On the way back to my car Darl Vanzandt got up from the passenger seat of his cherry-red chopped-down 1932 Ford and came toward me, the pupils of his wide-set eyes like burnt cinders. He drank the foam out of a quart bottle of Pearl and flung it whistling into the darkness. When I tried to walk around him, he stepped into my path, his courage inflating now with the audience that had formed at his back.

  'Whoa, there, bud,' I said.

  'You bothered all my friends. Now you're bothering my step-mother,' he said.

  'Wrong.'

  'You're setting me up to go to jail. All because of that little fart Lucas Smothers,' he said.

  'Good night,' I said.

  But he stepped in front of me again. He pushed me in the breastbone with his fingers, then he did it again, grinding his teeth slightly, thumping hard against the bone.

  'Don't do this, Darl,' I said.

  The skin around his mouth was taut and gray, his nose tilted slightly upward, the fear and loathing in his eyes like a candle flame that didn't know which way to blow. I dropped my eyes, and a smile exposed his teeth.

  He slapped the carton of milk from my hand. It exploded in a white star on the pavement.

  I stepped backward, then walked in a wide circle toward my car.

  I heard his feet running behind me. By the time I could turn he was almost upon me. I brought up my elbow and drove it into his nose. />
  He doubled over, his cupped hands smeared with blood as soon as they touched his face. Then Bunny Vogel was next to him, his arm around Darl's shoulders, holding a wadded T-shirt against Darl's nose.

  'I'll get some ice, then we'll go home. It ain't broken. The blood's darker when it's broken,' Bunny said.

  'You tell his dad what happened, Bunny,' I said.

  'It ain't my job to tell on people.'

  'You're sure loyal to a kid who cost you a career in the pros. I wonder why that is,' I said.

  He led Darl back toward the parked cars of the East Enders. Then he glanced back at me, his eyes like those of a man who just realized his future will be no different from his past.

  * * *

  chapter twelve

  The next morning I ate breakfast on the kitchen table and read from Great-grandpa Sam's journal.

  July 7, 1891

  Today I cane-fished in the river for perch and shovel-mouth with Jennie, which is the Christian name of the Rose of Cimarron. The hills was covered with Indian paintbrush and sunflowers and we cooked our fish in a brush arbor with a spring that stays wet through the summer months.

  It is country that begs for a church house, but it is infested with a collection of halfwits and white trash that calls themselves the Dalton-Doolin gang. They live in mud caves along the river and consider it the high life. A Chinaman brings them opium and squaws give them the clap. They rob trains because the smell on them is such they would get run out of a town before they could ever make it to the bank.

  A little twerp named Blackface Charley Bryant threw a temper tantrum and commenced firing a rifle into the sky and using profane language in Jennie's and my presence. He come by his nickname when his own revolver blew up in his hand and turned half his face into an eggplant. I informed him I did not want to forget my ordination and cause him injury, but I would probably do so should I put a third eye in the middle of his forehead.

  I am tempted to wrap Jennie in fence wire and carry her out of here across my pommel. But Judge Isaac Parker has had over fifty federal lawmen shot to death in these parts, and I think he would as lief hang a woman outlaw as a man, since people tell me he has already hung a highwayman's horse.