BBH01 - Cimarron Rose

by James Lee Burke

  'You going to move your car now?'

  'No.' His finger was stiff, the nail thin and sharp and trembling below my eye. 'Stay away from crime scenes that don't concern you, stay away from the lady… You got anything clever to say?'

  'Not really. Except if you put your finger in my face again, I'm going to break your jaw. Now, get your fucking car out of my way.'

  I went back home and weeded the vegetable garden. I curried out Beau and cleaned his stall and set out catfish lines in the tank and shoveled out the chicken run and worked buckets of manure into my compost pile with a pitchfork, my calluses squeezing tighter and tighter on the smooth wood of the handle, until I finally gave it all up and flung the pitchfork into a hay bale and went inside.

  The palms of my hands rang as though they had been stung by bees, as though they ached to close on an object that was hard and round and cool against the skin and flanged with a knurled hammer that cocked back with a loud snap under the thumb.

  Moon had said some people are made different in the womb. Was he just describing himself, or did the group extend to people like me and Great-grandpa Sam?

  Or Darl Vanzandt?

  Through my open front windows I heard the deep, throaty rumble of the Hollywood mufflers on his '32 Ford, then a cacophony of straight pipes and overpowered engines and chopped-down Harleys behind him.

  He turned into the drive, alone, the exposed chrome engine so fine-tuned a silver dollar would balance on the air cleaners. His friends pulled onto the shoulder of the road, on my grass, their tires crumpling the border of my flower beds. They cut their engines and lit cigarettes and lounged against their cars and trucks and vans and motorcycles, as though their physical connection to a public road gave them moral license to behave in any fashion they wished.

  Darl swung a dead cat by its tail, whipping it faster and faster through the air, and thudded it against the screen door.

  I went out on the porch with my cordless phone in my hand.

  'I already put in a 911 on you, Darl. Time to head for the barn,' I said.

  'I'm gonna kick your ass. Don't believe me, you chicken-shit lying motherfucker? Come out here and see what happens next,' he said.

  I walked toward him. His wide-set green eyes seemed to shift in and out of focus, as though different objects were approaching him at the same time. His upper lip was beaded with perspiration, his nostrils dilated and pale. The skin of his face drew back against the bone. I could smell beer and fried meat and onions on his breath.

  'I mean you no harm. I never have. Neither does Lucas. Go on home,' I said.

  'You're in my face every day. You're spreading lies all over town.'

  'You and your friends killed somebody's cat? That's what y'all do to show everybody you're big shit?'

  'I ain't afraid of you.'

  I stepped between him and the road, with my back to his friends, cutting off his view of them.

  'Bunny Vogel's not here to bail you out. You're stoned and you're frightened. If you force me to, I'll show everyone here how frightened you are,' I said.

  'If I was scared, I wouldn't be here.'

  'You're afraid of what you are, Darl. Your folks know it. In their guts, those guys out there do, too. You elicit pity.'

  He opened his mouth to speak. It made a phlegmy, clicking sound but no words came out. His resolve, all the martial energy he had been able to muster while driving down the road with his Greek chorus surrounding him, seemed to fade in his eyes like snowflakes drifting onto a woodstove.

  'Talk to your dad. Get some help. Don't do something like this again,' I said.

  'I been sick. I had flu all week. I don't have to listen to anything you—' he said.

  I cupped my hand around his upper arm. It felt flaccid, without tone or texture, as though the downers in his system had melted the muscle into warm tallow. I opened his car door for him, put him inside, and closed the door. His eyes were filled with water, his cheeks flushed with pale red arrowpoints.

  'You want a cop to drive you home?' I asked.

  He didn't answer. When I went back inside it was quiet for a long time, then I heard his engine start up and his tires crunch on the gravel and back out on the road. Some of the others followed, looking at one another, unsure, and some turned back toward town, all of them like people trying to create their own reality, from moment to moment, inside a vacuum.

  The country club had been all-white since its inception in the early 1940s, first by the legal exclusivity the law allowed at the time, then by custom and defiance and contempt. It had remained an island of wealth and serenity in an era that had produced cities scrawled with graffiti and streets populated by the homeless and deranged.

  The groundskeepers adjusted the amounts of water and liquid nitrogen fed into the grass to ensure the fairways were emerald green year-round, no matter how dry or cold the season. The swimming pool was constructed in the shape of a shamrock, and those who stepped down into its turquoise sun-bladed surface seem to glow with a health and radiance that perhaps validated the old literary saw that the very rich are very different from you and me.

  The main building was an immaculate, blinding white, with a circular drive and a columned porch and a glassed-in restaurant with a terrace shaded by potted palm and banana trees that were moved into a solarium during the cold months. A hedge as impenetrable as a limestone wall protected the club on one side, the bluffs and the lazy green expanse of the river on the other. Recessions and wars might come and go, but Deaf Smith's country club would always be here, a refuge, its standards as unchanging as the European menu in its restaurant.

  I had dressed for it, in my striped beige suit, polished cordovan boots, a soft blue shirt and candy-striped necktie. But dress alone did not always afford you a welcome at Post Oaks Country Club.

  I stood by Jack and Emma Vanzandt's table, the maître d' standing nervously behind me, a menu in his hand. Jack and Emma were eating from big shrimp cocktail glasses that were deep-set in silver bowls of crushed ice.

  'You want to go outside and talk?' I said to Jack.

  He wiped his mouth with a napkin and looked through the French doors at several men putting on a practice green. 'It's all right, Andre,' he said to the maître d'.

  Then he glanced at an empty chair across from him, which was the only invitation I received to sit down.

  'Thanks, Jack,' I said.

  In the gold and silver light that seemed to anoint the room, Emma's Indian-black hair looked lustrous and thick on her bare shoulders, her ruby necklace like drops of blood on the delicate bones of her throat.

  'Your boy was out at my place today. He's a sick kid. Do something about him,' I said.

  'You come to our dinner table to tell me something like this?' Jack said.

  'Here's the street menu in Deaf Smith, Jack: purple hearts, black beauties, rainbows, screamers, yellow jackets, and China white if you want to get off crack. I hear Darl does it all. If you don't want to take a wake-up call, at least keep him away from my house.'

  He set his cocktail fork on the side of his plate and started to speak. But Emma placed her hand on his forearm.

  'We're sorry he bothered you. Call either Jack or me if it happens again. Would you like to order something?' she said.

  'Blow it off. I can't blame you. The sheriff did too. But now he's dead,' I said.

  They stared at each other.

  'You didn't know?' I said.

  'We just got back from Acapulco,' Jack said.

  'Somebody came up behind him with an ax,' I said.

  'That's terrible,' Emma said.

  'He had a lot of enemies. A lot,' Jack said. But his eyes were fastened on thoughts that only he saw.

  'I told the sheriff I think Darl killed Jimmy Cole. I don't know if there's a connection or not,' I said.

  Emma's eyes were shut. Her lashes were black and the lids were like paper, traced with tiny green veins, and they seemed to be shuddering, as though a harsh light were burning inside her.


  'Leave our table, Billy Bob. Please, please, please leave our table,' she said.

  But later I was bothered by my own remarks to the Vanzandts. Darl connected with the sheriff's murder? It was unlikely. Darl and his friends didn't prey on people who had power. They sought out the halt and lame and socially ostracized, ultimately the people who were most like themselves.

  The sheriff's widow was the daughter of a blacksmith, a square, muscular woman with recessed brooding eyes who wore her dark hair wrapped around her head like a turban. Whether she bore her husband's infidelities and vulgarity out of religious resignation or desire for his money was a mystery to the community, since she had virtually no friends or life of her own except for her weekly attendance at the Pentecostal church downtown, and the community had stopped thinking of her other than as a silent backdrop to her husband's career.

  'The person done this was probably a lunatic got loose from some mental hospital,' she said in her kitchen.

  'Why's that?'

  'Cause it's what Davis Love always told me it'd be if it happened,' she said. (Davis Love was her husband's first and last name and the only one she ever called him by.) 'He said the man who killed him would probably be some crazy person, 'cause nobody he sent up to prison would ever want to see him again.'

  She let the undisguised heat in her eyes linger on my face so I would make no mistake about her meaning.

  'He left his mark on them?' I said.

  'They tended to move to other places.'

  I looked out the kitchen window at the rolling pasture behind her house, the neat red and white barn, an eight-acre tank stocked with big-mouth bass, the sheriff's prize Arabians that had the smooth gray contours of carved soap rock.

  'I'm sorry for your loss,' I said.

  'They might bad-mouth him, but he worked hisself up from road guard to high sheriff, without no hep from nobody.'

  I nodded as her words turned over a vague recollection in my mind about the sheriff's background.

  'He was an extraordinary person,' I said.

  Her smile was attenuated, wan, a victorious recognition of the assent she had extracted from me. Then I saw it in her eyes. She had already revised him and placed him in the past, assigning him qualities he never had, as the roles of widow and proprietress melded together in her new life.

  I had forgotten that the sheriff had started out his law enforcement career not as a cop but as a gunbull on a road gang, back in the days when the inmates from the old county prison were used to trench water and sewer lines and to spread tar on county roads. I remember seeing them as a boy, their backs arched with vertebrae, their skin sun-browned the color of chewing tobacco, thudding their picks into a ditch while the road hacks stood over them with walking canes that were sheathed on the tips with cast-iron tubes.

  Moon had been one of those inmates.

  At age fifteen raped on a regular basis by two gunbulls in the county prison.

  What were his words? Tore my insides out and laughed while they done it… Y'all gonna get rid of me the day you learn how to scrub the stink out of your own shit.

  Was the splattered, red trail from the kitchen to the gun case in the sheriff's log house just the beginning of our odyssey with Garland T. Moon?

  That night I called Mary Beth Sweeney and got her answering machine.

  'It's Billy Bob. I'll buy you a late dinner—' I said, before she picked up the receiver.

  'Hi,' she said.

  'Are you Secret Service?'

  'No!'

  'I had a run-in with this character Brian Wilcox this morning. Why are Treasury people interested in the sheriff's murder?'

  'Ask Brian Wilcox.'

  'Come on, Mary Beth.'

  'I don't want to talk about him.'

  Through my library window I could see the moon rising over the hills.

  'How about dinner?' I said.

  'It's a possibility.'

  'I'll be by in a few minutes.'

  'No, I'll come there.'

  'What's wrong?'

  'Brian watches my place sometimes. He's weird…' Then, before I could speak again, she said, 'I'll take care of it. Don't get involved with this man… See you soon.'

  The breeze was cool that night, the clouds hammered with silver. It had been an unseasonably wet spring, and small raindrops had started to click on the roof and the elephant ears under my library windows. I walked out into the barn and the railed lot behind it and fed Beau molasses balls out of my hand. When he had finished one, he would bob his head and nose me in the shirt pocket and face until I gave him another, crunching it like a dry carrot between his teeth. I stroked his ears and mane and touched the dried edges of the wound someone had inflicted on his withers, and tried to think through all the complexities that had attached themselves to the defense of Lucas Smothers and had brought someone onto my property who would take his rage out on a horse.

  I could hear the windmill's blades ginning in the dark and the bullfrogs starting up in the tank. My back was to the open barn doors and the wind blew across me and Beau as though we were standing in a tunnel. For no apparent reason his head pitched away from the molasses ball in my palm, one walleye staring at me, and then he backed toward the far side of the lot, his nostrils flaring.

  I turned and just had time to raise one arm before a booted man in shapeless clothes swung a sawed-off pool cue at the side of my head. I heard the wood knock into bone, then the earth came up in my face, the breath burst from my chest, and I heard a snapping, disconnected sound in the inner ear, like things coming apart, like the sound of seawater at an intolerable depth.

  I was on my elbows and knees when he kicked me, hard, the round steel-toe of the boot biting upward into the stomach.

  'You like roping people in bars? How's it feel, motherfucker?' he said.

  Then a second man kicked me from the other side, stomped me once in the neck, lost his balance, and kicked me again.

  My Stetson lay in the dirt by my head, the crown pushed sideways like a broken nose. I could hear Beau spooking against the rails, his hooves thudding on the mat of desiccated manure.

  But a third man was in the lot too. He wore khakis and snakeskin boots, and hanging loosely from the fingers of his right hand was a curved knife, hooked at the end, the kind used to slice banana stalks. He dropped it in the dirt by the booted man's foot.

  The booted man gathered it into his right hand and laced the fingers of his left into my hair and jerked my head erect.

  'Just so you'll know what's going on, we're cutting off your ears,' he said.

  For just a second, through the water and blood and dirt in my eyes, I saw a flash of gold in the mouth of the man who had dropped the knife to the ground.

  I brought my fist straight up between the thighs of the man who held me by the hair, sinking it into his scrotum. I saw his body buckle, the knees come together, the shoulders pitch forward as though his lower bowels had been touched with a hot iron.

  Then headlights shone in my driveway, bounced across the chicken run, and filled the barn and horse lot with shadows.

  The three men were motionless, like stick figures caught under a pistol flare. I rolled sideways, stumbled and ran into the barn, my arms cupped over my head as one of them aimed and fired a pistol, a .22 perhaps, pop, pop, pop, in the darkness and I heard the rounds snap into wood like fat nails.

  I thought I saw L.Q. Navarro, his tall silhouette and cocked ash-gray Stetson and gunbelt and holstered .45 double-action revolver superimposed against an eye-watering white brilliance.

  Moments later Mary Beth Sweeney squatted next to me in Beau's stall, her nine-millimeter pushed down in the back of her blue jeans. My nose was filled with blood and I had to breathe through my mouth. She ran her hand through my hair and wiped the straw and dirt out of my eyes. My face jerked when she touched me.

  'Oh Billy Bob,' she said.

  'Where are they?'

  'They took off in a four-wheel-drive through the back of your
property… Let's go inside. I'll call the dispatcher.'

  'No, call Marvin Pomroy.'

  I got to my feet, my hands inserted between the slats of the stall. The high beams of her car were still on, and the inside of the barn was sliced with electric light. She put her arm around my waist, and we walked together toward my back door as the wind twisted and bent the branches of the chinaberry tree over our heads.

  * * *

  chapter seventeen

  I stood shirtless in my bedroom on the third floor, the cordless phone held to one side of my head, a towel filled with ice held against the other. My shirt was on the floor, the collar flecked with blood. I could feel a burning in my lower back that I couldn't relieve, no matter which way I moved.

  'You never saw them before?' Marvin said through the phone.

  'No… I don't think.'

  'You're unsure?'

  'The guy who watched, the one who dropped the knife on the ground… Maybe I'm imagining things.'

  'Where'd you see him?'

  'It's like you remember people from dreams. I'm not feeling too well now, Marvin. Let me get back to you.'

  'I'll put a deputy on your house.'

  'No, you won't.'

  'No faith,' he said.

  'You're a good guy, Marvin. I don't care what people say.'

  I heard him laugh before he hung up.

  I clicked off the phone and set it down on the table by the window where Mary Beth sat, her violet eyes close set with thought.

  'You think you saw one of those guys before?' she said.

  'L.Q. Navarro and I went up against this same mule down in Coahuila three or four times. I always saw him in the dark. Sometimes I see people at night who remind me of him, like you see people inside dreams. A therapist told me—'

  'What?'

  'That it was unexpiated guilt. It's the kind of thing therapists like to talk about.'

  'I worry about you.'

  'I'd better take a shower,' I said.

  'You should go to the hospital.'