BBH01 - Cimarron Rose

by James Lee Burke

  'I've wasted enough of the night on these guys. Why don't you get yourself something to eat in the kitchen?'

  'Eat?'

  'Yeah.'

  'Too much,' she said.

  After she went downstairs, I got into the shower stall and turned the hot water into my face and hair and propped my palms against the tile and let the blood and dirt and dried sweat boil out of my skin and sluice into the drain.

  But when I closed my eyes I felt the bottom of the stall tilt under my feet and I saw streamers of colored light, like tracers in a night sky, behind my eyelids. I dried off and dressed in my underwear, one hand gripped on the bathroom door for balance. I saw the horizon dip outside the window and I heard a voice say Just so you'll know what's going on, we're cutting of your ears, and I toppled sideways across a chair onto the floor.

  Then Mary Beth was beside me, her hands gripped under my arms, pulling me erect, helping me to the bed. I fell back on the pillow and dragged the sheet across my loins. She sat on the edge of the mattress, her eyes staring down into mine. Outside the window the sky was sealed with a flat layer of black clouds that pulsed with lightning.

  'I'm all right,' I said.

  'You want me to go?'

  I started to speak, but she saw the answer in my eyes and she leaned over me and brushed my forehead with her fingers and kissed me lightly on the mouth. The tips of her curls touched my cheeks, and I could smell her shampoo and the heat in her skin. I held her and kissed her again. She slipped off her shoes and lay beside me, her face inches from mine.

  'I've seen your jacket. Your kind always gets hurt, Billy Bob,' she said.

  'You are a fed.'

  She didn't reply. Instead, she gathered her arms around me and pulled me against her, releasing her breath against my cheek, molding me against her, her ankle tucked inside mine.

  I waited to sit up, to change my position, but I felt two bright tentacles of pain slip along my spine and wrap around the front of my thighs.

  'Wait,' she said. She stood up, unbuttoned her shirt and let it drop to the floor, then unsnapped her blue jeans and worked them off her hips and stepped out of them. Behind her, I could see clouds racing across the land, blooming with quicksilver, splintering the hills with electricity.

  She turned away from me briefly, unhooked her bra and slipped off her panties, then sat on the edge of the mattress, pulled the sheet away from my body, and lay against me. I tried to turn on my shoulder so that I faced her, but again I felt a muscular spasm seize my lower back and send a pain through my thighs that made my mouth drop open.

  'Don't move,' she said, and spread her thighs and sat on top of me, her arms propped on each side of me. She smiled down into my face. The freckles on her shoulders and the tops of her breasts looked like tiny brown flowers. I traced my fingers around her nipples and took them in my mouth, then felt an unrelieved hardness and desire in my loins that I couldn't contain, that was like an envelope of heat glowing off of iron, that ached to enter her softness and the beauty and charity of her body, which gave satisfaction and sanctuary long before orgasm.

  'I'll be here for you,' she whispered, her lips against my cheek, her passion so genuine and pure that I knew secretly, as all men do, I was undeserving of it.

  * * *

  chapter eighteen

  Early the next morning, I put ice on the tubular swelling along the side of my head and went to a doctor for the muscle spasms in my lower back. He showed me a set of exercises that involved lying on the floor and raising the knees to the chest and sitting in a chair and touching the floor while I sucked in my stomach. I was amazed to find that a level of pain that had been so intense could drain out of my body like water, at least temporarily.

  'Whenever you feel the pain, do the exercise. You'll be fine. Just avoid any sudden movement in your back,' the doctor said. He took a ballpoint pen out of his shirt pocket. 'You want a prescription?'

  'No, thanks.'

  'It's light stuff.'

  'It always is.'

  'Tell me you're not still six-parts Baptist, Billy Bob.'

  Later, I went to the health club and sat in the steam room, then showered and walked to Marvin Pomroy's office in the courthouse.

  'We put out a bulletin on the three guys but we didn't have much to go on,' he said.

  'Anybody question Moon about the sheriff's murder?' I asked.

  'I don't see him as a strong suspect.'

  'Moon was in the old county prison when the sheriff was a roadbull,' I said. Marvin was tilted back in his swivel chair.

  The connections didn't come together in his face. 'Moon said a couple of guards sodomized him on an oil barrel. He said they did it to him every Sunday morning.'

  'You're saying the sheriff was a pervert?'

  'I don't know anything he wasn't.'

  'If Moon's got a hard-on for the whole county, why does he wait forty years to come back and do a number on us? I think the sheriff was killed for other reasons,' Marvin said.

  'Some people might call an ax across the face an indicator of revenge.'

  But I could tell he was thinking of something else. He took off his glasses and polished the lenses with a piece of Kleenex. He fitted them back on his nose, his face blank, as though debating whether to expose the feelings he usually kept stored in a private box. His hair was so neat it looked like fine strands of metal on his head.

  'I couldn't sleep last night,' he said. 'What those guys tried to do to you… I'd like to catch up with them on a personal basis.'

  'It's not your style, Marvin.'

  'You don't get it. I'm a law officer in a county that's probably run by the Dixie Mafia. I just can't prove it.'

  I walked back across the street to the office and took the mail out of the box in the first-floor foyer. The foyer was cool and made of stucco and tile and decorated with earthen jars planted with hibiscus. Mixed in with the letters and circulars was a brown envelope with no postage, addressed to me in pencil.

  For some reason—its soiled surfaces, the broken lettering, a smear of dried food where the seal had been licked—it felt almost obscene in my hand. I didn't open it until I was inside my office, as though my ignoring it would transform it into simply another piece of crank mail written by a dissatisfied client or a convict who thought his personal story was worth millions in movie rights. Then I cracked it across the top with my finger, the way you peel back a rotted bandage.

  Inside was a Polaroid picture of Pete on the playground at the Catholic elementary school. The penciled page ripped out of a cheap notebook read: 'This was took this morning. When we get finished carving on him, his parts will fit in your mailbox.'

  I called the principal at the school. She was a classic administrator; she did not want to hear about problems and viewed those who brought them to her as conspirators who manufactured situations to ruin her day.

  'I just saw Pete. He's in the lunchroom,' she said.

  'I'll pick him up at three. Don't let him walk home,' I said.

  'What's wrong?'

  'Some people might try to hurt him.'

  'What's going on here, Mr Holland?'

  'I'm not sure.'

  'I'm aware you pay his tuition and you're concerned for his welfare, but we have other children here as well. This sounds like a personal matter of some kind.'

  'I'll call you back,' I said. I hung up and punched in Temple Carrol's number.

  'We need to throw a net over Roy Devins,' I said.

  'What happened?'

  I told her about the visit of the three men to my house the previous night.

  'They knew about my rope-dragging Devins out of the bar. Devins was in the sack with Pete's mother. She's a drunk and gets mixed up with bikers and dopers sometimes.'

  'You told this to Marvin?'

  'What's he going to do? Half the cops in the county are on a pad. He's lucky he hasn't been assassinated.'

  'Look, don't handle that letter. If we can lift some prints, Marvin can run them thr
ough AFIS. I'll get back to you.'

  I closed the blinds and sat in the gloom and tried to think. These were the same men who thought they could terrorize Moon and run him out of town, except he turned the situation around on them and mutilated Roy Devins. But why put heat on Moon? Because he'd been out at the Hart Ranch? Who were they?

  L.Q. Navarro sat in a swayback deerhide chair in the corner, one foot propped up on the wastebasket. He kept throwing his hat through the air onto the point of his boot, gathering it up, and throwing it again.

  'Time to go to the bank,' he said.

  'I figured that's what you'd say.'

  'You just gonna study on it?'

  'I gave it up, L.Q. It got you dead.'

  'Them that won't protect their home and family don't deserve neither one. That's what you used to tell me.'

  'Maybe I aim to cool them out. Maybe that's what's really on my mind.'

  'Come on, bud, that little boy cain't be hanging out in the breeze, not with some rat-bait writing letters about killing him. If it was me, I'd blow that fellow's liver out and drink an ice-cold Carta Blanca while I was at it… Sorry, my way of putting things probably ain't always well thought out.'

  I went downstairs to the bank, then into the vault where the safety deposit boxes were kept. I carried my rental box into a private enclosure and set it on a table and opened the hinged lid. Lying amidst my childhood coin collection and my father's Illinois pocket watch was L.Q.'s holstered double-action revolver. The steel had the soft sheen of liquorice; the ivory handles seemed molded into the steel, rather than attached with screws, and age had given them a faint yellow cast, as though the layer of calluses on L.Q.'s palm had rubbed its color into them.

  I pulled back the hammer to half-cock and opened the loading gate and rotated the cylinder so I could see the whorls of light in each empty chamber. Then I holstered the pistol again and wrapped the belt and buckle around the holster and stuck it in a paper bag and walked back up to my office.

  Temple Carrol had called back and left a message with my secretary—Roy Devins, whom Garland T. Moon had mutilated, had checked out of the hospital, all bills unpaid, and was thought to have taken a Greyhound bus out of town.

  I took L.Q.' s revolver home that afternoon and placed it in my desk drawer in the library and read from Great-grandpa Sam's journal.

  August 14, 1891

  The Rose of Cimarron and me went to Denver last week on the Santa Fe Railroad and took a room as man and wife in the Brown Palace Hotel, a building which is a marvel even for these modern times. Jennie could not get over riding up ten floors on an elevator, and the truth is neither could I. The lobby was filled with potted ferns and red- velvet chairs and settees that was brought from England and which Queen Victoria was said to have sat in. The dinner was prairie chicken stuffed with rice. They give us little bowls to wash our fingers in that Jennie thought was for soup. Later, we drank lemonade with mint leaves in it and ate oysters out of silver ice buckets and listened to the singer Lillie Langtry perform. Most of the guests seemed to be Republican business men. But they was a pretty good sort just the same.

  Wyatt and Morgan Earp, Dallas Stoudenmire, Johnny Ringo, Joe Lefores, and the tubercular drunkard Doc Holliday have been here and have died or gone on to whatever places are left for their kind. The streets of Denver are lit with gas lamps, and gunmen and Indians and rowdy miners are not welcome. I don't think Jennie can see it though. Denver is not the future. It's the Cherokee Strip and her people and maybe even the likes of me that's the past.

  I had a terrible lesson on the way back. A grass fire burned down the trestle over a gorge and we was stuck on the prairie for two days. We walked to a camp of Tonkawa Indians that stayed half-starved during the winter because the agents stole the money that was for their food. Jennie got a box of canning jars from the train and showed the squaws how to put up preserves. She looked right elegant in her long dress, boiling tomatoes on a stone oven and pouring the stew in glass jars with a spoon set inside so the glass didn't break from the heat. I thought maybe we might have an ordinary life after all, maybe up in Wyoming or Montana where nobody ever heard of the Doolin and Dalton gangs.

  When we got back on the train I seen a dark smear on the floor by the woodstove, one that somebody had tried to scrub out of the grain with sand. I asked the conductor who had bled there. He said it was the wife of a railroad board member, and she had been shot to death when train robbers fired through the glass in the window three weeks ago.

  Later Jennie asked me what I was studying on. I said, That collection of trash and lamebrains down the hillock from us has gone and killed an innocent woman.

  She looked out the window, pouting, then said to me, The railroad stole the land from the Indians and I ain't a bit sorry for her. If this was the Lord pulling the veil from my eyes, the light has fairly withered an old man's heart.

  A motorcycle turned into my drive, the engine popping and misfiring. I turned on the porch light and stepped outside. Lucas Smothers sat astride an old, low-slung Indian motorcycle with dented, purple fenders, his T-shirt and jeans streaked with grease. He cut the engine and grinned.

  'You ever see one like this?' he asked.

  'Sure, they're collector's items.'

  'I'm gonna restore it. It's got a crack in the frame but I can braze it. The teacher at the high school body shop said I could use the equipment in the afternoon while they're still cleaning up.'

  'Where'd you get it?'

  'Darl Vanzandt.'

  'Darl?'

  Lucas's eyes went away from my face.

  'He said he'd been going to church and trying to get right for the bad things he's done. What was I supposed to say, "I don't want to have nothing to do with you"?'

  'I think he'll hurt you.'

  'By giving me an old bike?'

  'Jimmy Cole was murdered on the Hart Ranch. You were probably right the first time. Darl and his friends found him hiding out there and killed him.'

  He pressed his palm on his forehead, smearing grease in his hair.

  'Everything I do is fucked up. I feel worse every time I come over here,' he said, his eyes glistening.

  'Leave the bike here. I'll call his father and have it picked up.'

  'Yeah, 'cause the product of your broken rubber cain't take care of hisself. Thanks, anyway,' he said.

  He started the motorcycle, fed it the gas until the misfires became a dirty roar, then fishtailed off the gravel onto the county road, his hair whipping in the wind, his T-shirt pooling with air.

  Way to go, Holland, I thought.

  Mary Beth Sweeney called the next morning, just as I was about to leave for the office.

  'Bunny Vogel got into it last night with a Mexican biker at Shorty's,' she said.

  'Which biker?'

  'No name. He took off before I got there. But it looks like the fight had something to do with Roseanne Hazlitt.'

  'How do you know?'

  'A couple of witnesses said the Mexican kid called Bunny "spermbrain", then "Roseanne's pimp." That's when they went at it. They tore up most of the side porch.'

  'Where's Bunny now?'

  'I kept him downtown two hours, then kicked him loose. He's supposed to pay the owner half the damages.'

  'You're a good cop, Mary Beth.'

  'A good cop would take him to the Marine Corps recruiting station before he ends up in Huntsville. Have you ever been to California?'

  'No, why?'

  'These kids must go out there and take courses in how to screw up their lives.'

  Bunny lived on the west end of the county, not far from a train siding, a shut-down cannery, and a string of abandoned and overgrown wood cottages that had been used by migrant workers during the 1940s. His house was sheathed in ancient grey Montgomery Ward brick and elevated on cinder blocks, but the floor had settled through the center, so that the outside covering had cracked like a dried husk, exposing the tar paper underneath. Bunny's '55 maroon Chevy, with the rolled white le
ather interior, was parked in the dirt yard, as incongruous as a color cutout pasted on a gray stage set, its green-tinted windows filled with reflections of clouds.

  Bunny stood in the backyard, in a sleeveless red sweatshirt and running shorts and half-top cleats, flinging footballs through a rubber tire that hung on a rope from the limb of a hackberry tree.

  'I heard you got put in the bag last night,' I said.

  'Word gets around.' He picked up another football from an orange crate and fired a bullet pass through the tire. It landed on a grassy knoll and rolled toward the train tracks.

  'Who was the biker?'

  'Just a greaseball who wants to take down a swinging dick in Shorty's. I ain't a swinging dick. But that's what the greaseball wants to think.'

  'He called you a spermbrain?'

  'Yeah, I think that's what he said.' He shook his hair back on his shoulders and flung another football at the tire. This time it caromed off the rim.

  'He's the same guy who picked up Roseanne at the Dairy Queen, isn't he? The one you took her away from?'

  'Maybe.'

  'Something bothers me, Bunny. Roseanne slapped you the night she was attacked. I think it was for something you're really ashamed of, maybe something related to her death.'

  'I guess I just ain't smart enough to figure all them things out, Mr Holland.'

  'The Mexican kid called you a pimp?'

  'If that's what somebody told you.'

  'That's when you swung on him?'

  'Wouldn't you?' He cocked his arm to throw another football, then dropped it back into the orange crate. 'I got to go to work. Anything else on your mind?'

  'Yeah, what kind of game is Darl Vanzandt trying to run on Lucas Smothers?'

  'What them two do ain't my business.'

  'What is?'

  'Sir?'

  'Cleaning up after a moral retard for the Vanzandt family?'

  'People don't talk to me like that.'

  'I just did. Watch your back, Bunny. Before it's over, I think Darl will kick a two-by-four up your ass,' I said, and walked back to my car.

  I looked through the windshield at him before I backed out. His hands were propped on his hips, his mouth a tight seam, his disfigured profile pointed at the ground. Then he drove his cleated shoe into the slats of the orange crate and showered footballs over the yard.