BBH01 - Cimarron Rose

by James Lee Burke

  'Yeah, well, here's the surprise. Felix Ringo's getting a Mexican warrant on Moon for scoring some dope across the border. Moon might do time in a Mexican slam. The centipedes come free with the rice and beans.'

  'For some reason, you don't look all broken up.'

  'You're still not hearing me. When Moon gets word of this, and he will, who's he going to come after?'

  'Well, you never know what's down at the bottom of the Cracker Jack box, Marvin.'

  He shook his head and walked away, trying to smooth the wrinkles out of the seersucker coat he held in his right hand, a good man who would forever serve causes that were not his own.

  Lucas took the oath just after one o'clock. He sat very still in the witness chair, his hands splayed on his thighs, his face damp in the humidity. His throat was already streaked with color, as though it had been rouged.

  'When you were first arrested, you said you hardly knew Roseanne Hazlitt. You said you didn't even know her last name. That was a lie, wasn't it?' I said.

  'Yes, sir.'

  'Why would you lie like that?'

  'Cause she told me she was pregnant. 'Cause y'all would think it was me hurt her if y'all knew it was my baby…' He took a breath. 'I lied 'cause I didn't have no guts.'

  'How'd you feel about Roseanne?'

  'She was a good person. She couldn't hep the things she done, I mean, with drinking and that kind of stuff.'

  'Did she tell you who might have made her pregnant?'

  'Objection, hearsay,' Marvin said.

  'I'll allow it,' the judge said.

  'Some older guy she was seeing in town. I didn't ask. It didn't make me feel too good.'

  'You thought the baby could be yours, didn't you?'

  'Yes, sir.'

  'Why?'

  'Sir?'

  'Why did you think it could be yours?'

  'Cause we was making love.'

  'That's not what I'm asking you, Lucas. Did you use a condom?'

  He rubbed his palms on his trousers and looked at the judge.

  'Answer the question, please,' she said.

  'No, sir, we didn't use none,' Lucas said.

  'That sounds dumb to me. Why not?'

  'Objection, your honor. He's badgering and cross-examining his own client,' Marvin Pomroy said.

  'Approach,' the judge said. She took off her black-framed glasses and pushed aside the microphone. 'What are you doing, Mr Holland?' she said.

  'I'm going to prove my client is psychologically incapable of having committed the crime,' I replied.

  'Psychologically incapable? Wonderful. Your honor, he's not only appointed himself the repository of Freudian thought, he's psychoanalyzing someone who was drunk,' Marvin said.

  'Mr Holland?' the judge said.

  'My client has taken the stand of his own volition, your honor. The rest of his life is at stake here. How can justice possibly be harmed by the questions I've asked?'

  'Mr Pomroy?' she said.

  'I think he's turning this trial into a snake-oil show.'

  'I caution you, sir,' she said.

  'Mr Holland says he means no harm. Neither does a skunk wandering into a church house,' Marvin said.

  'Your objection is noted and overruled. Mr Holland, I'm giving you some unusual latitude here, but don't abuse it. Step back.'

  'Your honor—' Marvin said.

  'Take a seat, Mr Pomroy, and stay in it for a while, please,' she said.

  I walked to the right of the witness stand, so the jury would look into Lucas's face when he spoke.

  'Let's forget that stuff about condoms, Lucas. What would you have done if Roseanne had been carrying your child?' I said.

  'I wouldn't have done nothing.'

  'Would you have asked her to get an abortion?'

  'No, sir.'

  'Why not?'

  'Cause it would have been our baby.'

  'A baby with no father? You'd just let her rear it on her own?'

  'That's not what I meant.'

  'What did you mean?'

  'I figured we'd get married,' he said.

  'You have a flop in the hay, then suddenly you want to be a father and a married man? Who you kidding, Lucas?'

  'I told you the truth,' Lucas said.

  'I don't believe you.'

  'I wouldn't let no kid of mine grow up without a last name. I don't care what you believe.'

  'Why all this moral righteousness about fatherhood? It's a little hard for me to swallow.'

  'Your honor—' Marvin said.

  But the judge made a placating gesture with her hand and didn't take her eyes off my face.

  'Cause I know what it's like,' Lucas said.

  'To be like what? You're not making sense.'

  'Not to have a father.' His breath was coming hard in his throat now, his cheeks blooming with color.

  'Vernon Smothers is not your father?'

  Lucas's shoulders were bent, his head tilted sideways, his eyes pink with broken veins, glimmering with water, riveted on mine.

  'My real father never give me his damn name. You know what I'm talking about, too,' he said.

  'Your honor, I object,' Marvin said.

  'Mr Holland—' the judge said.

  'Who is your father?'

  'I ain't got one.'

  'Say his name.'

  'You are! Except you'd never admit it! 'Cause you slept with my mother and let somebody pick up after you. That's what you done. You think I'd do that to my own kid?'

  Then he started to cry, his face in his hands, his back shaking.

  Judge Judy Bonham leaned her chin on her hand and let out her breath.

  'Take your client down from the stand, Mr Holland, then report to my chambers,' she said.

  Marvin leaned back in his chair, flipped a pencil in the air, and watched it roll off the table onto the floor.

  * * *

  chapter thirty-three

  It went to the jury late that afternoon. I stood at my office window and looked out at the square, at the trusties from the jail scraping mud out of the gutters, the scrolled neon on the Rialto theater, the trees puffing with wind on the courthouse lawn, all in their proper place, the presummer golden light of the late sun on the clock's face, as though the events of the last few days had no significance and had ended with a whisper.

  Then Darl Vanzandt came out of a side street on a chopped-down chromed Harley motorcycle, wearing shades and bat-wing chaps, his truncated body stretching back on his arms each time he gunned a dirty blast of air through his exhaust pipe.

  He drove around and around the square, mindlessly, with no apparent purpose, causing pedestrians to step back on the curb, his metal-sheathed heel scotching the pavement when he cornered his bike, his straight exhaust echoing off the buildings like an insult.

  Then he turned into the shade of a narrow street and opened up the throttle, his tan shoulders swelling with blood and power, blowing newspapers and a cluster of Mexican children out of his path.

  The phone rang on my desk.

  'We'll probably fly in there this weekend. You going to be around?' the voice said.

  'Mary Beth?'

  'I'm in Houston with a task force. Brian is out of the picture. We're about to pull the string on some individuals in your area.'

  'Let me know what I can do.'

  'I don't think you quite understand, Billy Bob. The greaseball drug agent, Felix Ringo? He's gone apeshit. We get the impression you put some glass in Garland Moon's breakfast food.'

  'So what?'

  'So Ringo is part of a bigger story than the town of Deaf Smith.'

  'Bad guy to break bread with.'

  'Yeah? Well, as FDR once said of Somoza, "He might be a sonofabitch, but he's our sonofabitch."'

  'I never found a lot of humor in that story.'

  'No, you wouldn't.'

  I waited for her to say something else but she didn't. 'Why'd you call?' I asked.

  'I don't know, Billy Bob. I really don't.'


  I heard her lower the receiver into the cradle. I took the phone away from my ear and then put it to my ear again, the dial tone buzzing against my skin, as though somehow that would restore the connection. I stared at the shadows on the courthouse tower; they had the deep purple hue of a stone bruise, the kind that goes through the muscle into the bone.

  I went home and cooked a steak in the backyard. I ate on the back porch, then sat at my desk in the library with Great-grandpa Sam's journal opened under the desk lamp and tried to read. L.Q. Navarro sat in the burgundy chair in the corner, twirling his gold pocket watch on its chain.

  'Don't think too harsh of her. Working for the G and falling in love with a guy like you probably ain't a good combo,' he said.

  'Not tonight, L.Q.'

  'Stonewall Judy might have give you the riot act, but you could tell she admired what you done. I like when she said, "Get your star back, Billy Bob, or stay out of my court." That's the kind of female I can relate to.'

  'I'm trying to concentrate.'

  'You got to turn loose of what's fretting you. You and I both know what that is, too.'

  'I mean it, L.Q. Stop it.'

  'You cain't be sure that Mexican is the right fellow.'

  'I see his face in the gun flashes. You broke your knife blade off in his kidney.'

  'So you gonna bust a cap on him and always wonder if you killed the right man? Ain't you had enough grief over that stuff down in Coahuila?'

  I picked up Sam's journal and turned on the light in the kitchen and read at the breakfast table. I heard L.Q.' s spurs tinkling behind me, then it was quiet a moment and their sound disappeared down the front hall into a gust of wind that pushed open the screen door and let it fall back against the jamb.

  September 3, 1891

  I washed my jeans, my blue cotton shirt, my socks and underwear in a big cook pot and dried them on a warm rock the evening before I was to ride out. Then I packed my saddle bags with my Bible, spectacles, word dictionary, almanac, razor, soap, and a box of Winchester rounds, and rolled a blanket inside my slicker. The Rose of Cimarron seen all this but said nary a word. I don't know as she was hurt or if she did not give a damn. Tell me if there's a louder silence than that of a woman. I lay down in the dark and thought she would come to my side. But she walked down the hillock with a pout on her face to the mud caves, to join in the drunken frolic of her relatives I reckoned, and I knew I had commenced the most lonely night of my life. Outside the window I could see trees of lightning busting all over the sky. In my sleep I thought I heard thousands of cows lowing at the smell of rain, then going from hell to breakfast over a bluff that didn't have no bottom.

  The morning broke cold and mean out of the north. You could see hail bouncing on the hardpan and big clouds swirling and getting darker all the time, like a twister was kicking up dust and fanning it out across a black sky. Jennie had not come back from the mud caves. I cooked my breakfast on the woodstove and fried some salted pork and put it and three smoked prairie chickens in my saddle bags. I put on my slouch hat, my vest and cotton shirt, my chaps that has turned black from animal grease and wood smoke, and hung my Navy revolvers from my pommel and pulled my Winchester '73 from its scabbard and rode down the hillock through the dead campfires and litter and venison racks of the subhumans that calls themselves the Dalton-Doolin gang.

  The burlap sacks that was hung across the cave entrances was weighted down with rocks to keep the wind out. My horse clattered across some tin plates and tipped over a cook's tripod and iron kettle and pushed over a table loaded with preserve jars. But not a soul stirred up in the caves where my Jennie slept. I looped my lariat and tossed it over a venison rack and drug it through the firepit and kicked down a lean-to with a drunk man in it and dropped the gate on the hog pen and stove out the bottom of a boat that was tied in the bulrushes.

  But it was for naught. Jennie did not come out of the caves. Instead, one of the Doolin party did, this fellow with a beard like black grease paint and a head the shape of a watermelon. He was barefoot and in long red underdrawers with a bottle of whiskey in one hand and a pepperbox pistol in the other. I laid one across his cheek with my Winchester barrel and left him sitting in the mud like a man just discovered he had mumps. But my behavior was that of a child. My Jennie was gone, just like my reckless youth.

  I forded the Cimarron and rode north in the storm. I was a drover and meat hunter on the high plains after the War, but I never saw the like of this storm. The tumble brush was like the Lord's crown of thorns dashed in the face. I could actually hear the dust clouds grinding across the hardpan, the way a locomotive sounds when the wheels screech on the grade. Up ahead the sleet was white all the way across the crest of the hills, and I knew me and my poor horse was in for a mighty hard day. I didn't turn in the saddle when I heard hooves coming behind me, supposing it was just hail beating on my hat. Then I seen her pouring it on her buckskin, bent low over the withers the way a savage rides so he can shoot under the horse's neck, her dress hitched plumb over her thighs.

  I don't know how to explain it, but whenever I saw that woman ride a horse a banjo seemed to start ringing in my lower parts.

  Hailstones and wind and flying brush could not diminish the beauty of the Cimarron Rose. Her smile was as beautiful as a flower opening in the morning and my heart fairly soared in my breast. Tied to her pommel was the fattest carpet bag you ever seen.

  Are you looking for company? she asked.

  I surely am, I said.

  Then I would dearly like to ride along with you.

  You was all packed and never told me? That's a mean trick to play on me, Jennie.

  This bag here? No, this here is money that's twice stole. They ain't coming for it, though. I turned their horses out.

  I beg your pardon? I said.

  My relatives has robbed Pearl Younger's whorehouse and the Chinaman's opium den in Fort Smith. You reckon this is enough to build a church?

  Good Lord, woman, you don't build church houses with money from a robbery.

  I could see I had hurt her feelings again.

  I can't preach nowhere cause I got a warrant on me, anyway, I said.

  They say there ain't no God or law west of the Pecos.

  We rode on like that, the wind plumb near blowing us out of the saddle. We stopped in a brush arbor, just like the one I got ordained in, and I put my slicker on Jennie and tied my hat down on my head with a scarf and built us a fire.

  I bet there ain't no preacher like you on the Pecos, she said.

  Just gunmen and drunkards, Jennie.

  My mother says under the skin of every drunkard there's a good Baptist hiding somewhere.

  Now, what do you answer to a statement like that?

  Then she says, I bet the devil don't hate nothing worse than seeing his own money used against him.

  I unrolled my blanket and covered our heads with it and put my arms inside her slicker, her face rubbing like a child's on my chest. I could feel her joined to me the way married folks is supposed to be and I knowed I didn't have to fight no more with all the voices and angry men that has lived inside me, and I saw the hailstones dancing in the fire and they was whiter than any snow, more pure than any words, and I heard the voice say Forgiven and I did not have to ask Who had spoken it.

  The bailiff called from the courthouse. The jury was back in.

  * * *

  chapter thirty-four

  It wasn't a dramatic moment. It was a Friday night and the jury had asked the judge they be allowed to deliberate that evening, which meant they had no plans to return Saturday or Monday morning. The courtroom was almost deserted, the shadows of the oscillating fans shifting back and forth across the empty seats, the sounds of the late spring filtering through the high windows, as though the theater in our lives had already moved on and made spectators of us again.

  Except for Lucas when the jury foreman read the verdict of not guilty. He shook hands with the jurors, the judge, with me and Vernon and Temple,
with the bailiff, with the custodian mopping the hallway, with a soldier smoking a cigarette on the courthouse steps.

  'That's it? There ain't no way it can be refiled, huh?' he said.

  'That's it, bud,' I said.

  His face was pink in the waving shadows of the trees. I could see words in his eyes, almost hear them in his throat. But Vernon stood next to him and whatever he wanted to say stayed caught in his face, like thoughts that wanted to eat their way out of his skin.

  'Good night,' I said, and walked with Temple toward my car.

  'Hold on. How much is the bill on all this?' Vernon said.

  'There isn't one.'

  'I ain't gonna take charity.'

  'Well, I won't have you unhappy, Vernon. I'll send you the biggest bill I can.'

  'Somebody's making obscene phone calls in the middle of the night. I think it's that little shit Darl Vanzandt.'

  'Don't you or Lucas go near that kid.'

  'What's Lucas supposed to do, live in a plastic bubble?… Hold on. I ain't finished. What you said when Lucas was on the stand, I mean, what you done to yourself to get him off, well… I guess it speaks for itself.'

  His face looked flat, his hands awkward at his sides.

  'Good night, Vernon.'

  'Good night,' he said.

  Pete came by early the next morning to go fishing in the tank. He was barefoot and wore a straw hat with a big St Louis Cardinals pin on it and a pair of faded jeans with dark blue iron-on patches on the knees.

  'The water's pretty high after all that rain,' I said.

  'What's a fish care long as you drop the worm in front of him?'

  'You surely are smart.'

  'I always know when you're gonna say something like that, Billy Bob. It don't do you no good.' He grinned at me, then looked out confidently at the world.

  We picked up our cane poles in the barn and walked past the windmill down to the tank. The sun was soft and yellow on the horizon and patches of fog still hung on the water's surface. A bass flopped inside the flooded willows on the far bank, and a solitary moccasin swam across the center of the tank, its body coiling and uncoiling behind its triangular head. Pete trapped a grasshopper under his hat and threaded it on his hook, then swung his line and bobber out past the lily pads.