BBH01 - Cimarron Rose

by James Lee Burke

  'There's a lady knocking on your back door, Billy Bob,' he said.

  I turned and looked toward the house. She wore a white skirt and blouse and a wide hat with flowers on it, and even at a distance I could almost feel the electricity ,in her movements, the anger in her balled fist as she continued, unrelentingly, to knock on the screen door.

  'Is it that government lady who used to come out?' Pete asked.

  'No, I'm afraid it's a walking neurosis by the name of Emma Vanzandt.'

  He mouthed the words walking neurosis to himself.

  Then Emma saw me and got in her car and drove around the barn and out to the tank. She stepped out of the car and stood at the bottom of the levee, her ankles and knees close together, her face strangely composed, like that of a person who lives with ferocious energies that she can call upon whenever necessary.

  'I wanted to say something to you at your home, so you'd know my words weren't spoken to you as a result of a chance encounter,' she said.

  'I've never underestimated your sense of purpose, Emma.'

  'You've ruined my marriage and destroyed our family. I don't blame you for wanting to get your son off, but at heart you're a voyeur with the instincts of a garbage rat. The fact that we've had you in our home fills me with a level of disgust that's hard to express.'

  'How about the dues other people have paid for you, Emma? Lucas and Roseanne Hazlitt and Bunny Vogel? Don't their lives mean anything?'

  'Bunny Vogel is an overall-and-denim gigolo. I never met your son. And I gave Roseanne Hazlitt a job in our church's store. Does that answer your question?'

  'Jack was in business with Sammy Mace. Y'all are friends of Felix Ringo. Why don't you check out this guy's record? I heard him tell a story about wiring up somebody to a telephone crank.'

  'I have nothing else to say to you, sir. You're an ill-bred, disingenuous, violent man. You live in the West End where you can pretend you're otherwise. I just feel sorry for those who are taken in by you.'

  Her eyes lingered on Pete with a look of both pity and disdain.

  Then she got in her car and realized she had removed the keys from the ignition and had placed them either on the seat or the dashboard. She stuck her fingers down the cracks in the seat, searched along the back floor, felt over the top of the dashboard, stirred through the coins and litter inside the pocket of the console. Her fingers started to tremble and lines appeared in the caked makeup on her brow like string in wet clay and her breath speckled her lips with saliva.

  I picked up the keys off the ground and handed them to her through the window.

  'Garland Moon's off his chain. If y'all sicked him on Bunny or me through Felix Ringo, you'd better hire some private security,' I said.

  She was hunched over the wheel, twisting the key in the ignition, her eyes manic with rage and humiliation.

  'I'm going to have the skin peeled off your body in strips,' she said.

  She dropped the car in reverse, knocked me aside with the open door, and gouged a huge divot out of the levee with the back bumper. Then she corrected the front wheels and pressed the accelerator to the floor and scoured mud and shredded grass into a green balloon behind her car.

  I walked down the levee with my pole and stood above a cluster of lily pads and bounced a worm up and down on the bottom, my scalp tightening with the tangle of thoughts in my head.

  'That lady didn't have the right to say them kind of things to you,' Pete said.

  'When you're a cop, or sometimes a lawyer, you serve up people's lives on a dung fork, Pete. They usually deserve it, but it's never a good moment.'

  'I wouldn't pay that lady no mind. You're the best friend I ever had, Billy Bob.'

  'That man who came by y'all's house and looked in your mom's window?'

  The expression went out of his face, as though he had remembered a bad dream that should not have been part of the waking day.

  'I gave him a beating, then turned him loose on somebody else. Maybe on that woman who just left,' I said.

  Pete looked at me, then averted his eyes. His mouth was parted, his cheeks gray.

  'You done that?' he said.

  The Conquistador Apartments were built of white stucco and blue tile on the highway that led to San Antonio. The gardens around the pool and the outside wall were overlaid with gravel and planted with Spanish daggers, cactus, crown of thorn bushes, and mimosa trees, which gave it a hot, arid appearance out of context with the surroundings. It was built during the oil boom of the 1970s, and the people who stayed there seemed to have no geographical origins. They wore lizard-skin boots, vinyl vests, turquoise jewelry, hand-tooled belts, and cowboy hats with a feather in the band, as though they had stopped at a roadside souvenir shop outside Phoenix and taken on a new identity. They could have been drug traffickers or owners of fast-food chains. The swimming pool was always iridescent with a residue of suntan lotion and hair gel.

  I used the building directory to find Felix Ringo's apartment, which was located off an arched flagstone walkway. No one answered the bell and I could hear no movement inside. I slipped a screwdriver in the jamb, pried the bolt out of the wood, pushing it back into the lock's mechanism, then threw my shoulder into the door and snapped it free.

  The apartment was furnished with heavy, hand-carved oak chairs and tables and cabinets, the windows covered with blue velvet drapes, the thermostat set below sixty degrees. Even when I turned on the lights the rooms seemed dark, the cracks around the curtains as bright as tin. An acrylic painting of a picador with his lance embedded in the pack of muscle behind a bull's neck hung over the water bed. In the drawer of the nightstand were a .25-caliber automatic, four boxes of condoms, a velvet rope, a jar of Vaseline, and a spring-loaded, leather-encased blackjack that was shaped like a darning sock.

  I told myself I had broken into a man's apartment to see justice done, perhaps even to see Felix Ringo in custody so he would not become the victim of Garland T. Moon. But that was not the reason. Even inside the refrigerated gloom of the apartment, I could still see the muzzle flashes of guns blooming in the darkness down in Coahuila, hear the labored breathing of L.Q. Navarro's wounded horse, see L.Q. stirrup-dragged across the rocks and cactus.

  Men like Felix Ringo did the jobs for the forces of Empire that no government ever acknowledged. They went to special schools and carried badges and were endowed with marginal respectability, but their real credentials lay in their bottomless cruelty. And no matter what explanations they offered others for their behavior, each of them daily fed his perversity like a gardener tending a hothouse filled with poisonous flowers.

  Political assassins always kept journals; sadists kept trophies, and they never strayed far from them.

  I found the box at the bottom of a desk drawer. It was made of sandalwood, fitted with gold hinges and hasps, fastened with a soft bungi cord. A wood tray divided into compartments was inset in the top of the box. It contained military decorations, a sergeant's chevrons, gold teeth, polished finger bones, empty shell casings, a switchblade knife with a green serpent inlaid in the handle, a long strip of black hair wrapped inside a plastic bag.

  Under the wood tray was a thick pack of pornographic photos held together with a rubber band. They were yellow with age, mounted on cardboard, and featured Orientals involved in every possible sexual act and position. But it was not these that shocked or sickened the sensibilities. The bottom of the box was layered with Polaroid color photos that made the eye film, the hand vaguely soiled at the touch: a freshly dug pit in front of which four peasant men and a woman stood bound and blindfolded; a man on his knees with his thumbs tied behind him, a disembodied arm pointing a pistol behind his ear; a man with a pesticide sack over his head, hung by his arms between two stone walls; grinning enlisted men posing at the end of a dirt street littered with bodies that had started to bloat; a woman strapped in a chair, her face and shirtless upper torso streaked with blood.

  At the bottom of all these photos was a playing card emblazone
d with the badge of the Texas Rangers. Written in felt pen across the badge was the word Muerto and the date I accidentally killed L.Q. Navarro.

  When I got back home Lucas Smothers was sitting on the steps of my front porch, twisting the tuning pegs on a mandolin, tinking each string with a plectrum. He wore a pair of starched khakis and cowboy boots and a short-sleeve denim shirt rolled above his triceps. His reddish blond hair was combed into faint ducktails on the back of his head. It was cool where he sat in the shade, and he drank out of a soda can and smiled at me.

  'I got a bluegrass gig at a club over in Llano County. My dad didn't say nothing about it, either,' he said.

  'Go to college,' I said.

  'So I can be like them rich pukes out in East End?'

  'Come in the house. I have to use the phone.'

  Inside the library, he looked at the titles of books on my shelves while I punched in Marvin Pomroy's home number on the phone.

  'Marvin?' I said.

  'Oh gee,' he said when he recognized my voice.

  'Felix Ringo isn't taking Moon down on a Mexican warrant. He's taking him off the board,' I said.

  'What gives you this special insight?'

  'Does it figure Ringo's going to bust a guy who can testify against him?'

  'Ringo's a cop. Moon's a nut case.'

  'I just creeped Ringo's place at the Conquistador. He was a dope mule down in Coahuila.'

  'Say again? You did what?'

  'My partner and I capped some of those guys, Marvin. His name was L.Q. Navarro. He put a playing card in the mouth of every dead mule we left down there. Ringo has one of those cards in a sandalwood box filled with his trophies. He wrote the date of my friend's death on it.'

  'You're telling me, the district attorney, you broke into a policeman's apartment?'

  'Ask Ringo to show you his Polaroid collection of life down in the tropics.'

  'Let this go, Billy Bob.'

  'Moon killed my father.'

  He repeated my statement back to me incredulously. When I didn't reply, he said, 'Do you realize what you just told me? If this guy shows up dead…'

  'Get a life, Marvin,' I said, and eased the phone receiver down in the cradle.

  Lucas stood at the bookshelves, Great-grandpa Sam's journal spread in his hands, his mouth open.

  'What's up, bud?' I said.

  He blinked, then closed the journal.

  'Moon killed your dad?' he asked.

  'Yeah, I guess he did.'

  'What are you gonna do about it?'

  'That journal was kept by my great-grandfather. He was a drunkard and a gunfighter who became a saddle preacher on the Chisholm Trail. It took him a long time, but he learned how to put aside his violent ways.'

  'What happens when the other guy don't put aside his?'

  'You talking about Moon or Darl Vanzandt?'

  'I seen Darl out at the drive-in this morning. He was melting screamers in dago red. He said I was yellow. He said he's gonna pop me in the face every time he sees me.'

  'He'll crash and burn, Lucas. He's a pitiful person.'

  'You told Marvin Pomroy you capped some dope mules.'

  'So I'm a bad example.'

  'No, you ain't. You're a good man. And that's why I come here, just to tell you that. I'm proud we're… Well, I'm proud, that's all. I'll see you, Billy Bob.'

  He went down the front hall and out the door to his pickup. Through the screen I could see shadows on the hillside and wildflowers rippling and bending and straightening in the wind, like colored confetti flickering in a world that had almost gone gray.

  * * *

  chapter thirty-five

  That afternoon I drove to the welding shop where Moon worked. It was padlocked, and the owner of the motel next door, where Moon kept a room, said he had not seen him in two days.

  I went home and worked in the yard and tried to think my way out of an impossible situation. Great-grandpa Sam, at age fifty-six, had prevailed against the Dalton-Doolin gang but had kept faith with his ordination and had not taken human life. I had manipulated a psychopath, perhaps putting the Vanzandts at risk as well as Felix Ringo. Intellectually I regretted what I had done, but secretly I still lusted for revenge and my wrists swelled with blood and my calluses rasped against the grain of the mattock when I thudded it into the roots of a willow that had threaded themselves into my water well.

  I sat in the grass on the riverbank and watched the current riffle across the top of a submerged cottonwood. Directly below me, lost in the murk and high water, was the sunken automobile where two members of the Karpis-Barker gang had died. Garland T. Moon had waded through this water and fished here, wearing a suit, flinging a hook full of bloody melt into the current that flowed through the car's empty windows.

  Why this particular spot, I wondered. Did he know the sunken car was there, that it was a nest for shovel-mouth catfish, that bass hung under the bluffs and fed on the insects that fell from the grove of trees upstream?

  My father probably took him fishing here, walked these same banks with him as he did with me in later years, a sack of bread-and-butter sandwiches swinging from his big hand.

  Moon had tried to extort ten acres from me on the back of my property. What were his words? I want the place should have been mine. At least part of it. Was that it, I thought. Maybe I had been wrong, he hadn't returned to Deaf Smith simply for revenge. Somehow he had convinced himself he was owed part of my father's estate. He had also gone to Jack Vanzandt, perhaps a surrogate for my father, walking into the middle of his golf game, as though somehow the door to wealth and acceptance in Deaf Smith society would open for him if he could only turn the right handle.

  Now he had disappeared. Where would a man dying of cancer, beaten with a maul handle, and hunted by a sadist go in a county that had been the origin of his travail and the denier of what he believed was his inheritance?

  What places was he even familiar with? Perhaps just the motel room with water bed and X-rated cable he lived in, the old county prison where he had been sodomized by two roadbulls, the tin welding shed that was like stepping into the devil's forge, the wide, green sweep of the river below the bluffs at the back of my property.

  And the Hart Ranch, where he had seen lights in the clouds he associated with UFOs.

  I went back to the house, wrapped the belt around L.Q.'s holstered .45 revolver, and set it on the seat next to me in the Avalon.

  But I didn't get far. Bunny Vogel pulled his '55 Chevy into my drive and got out with a sheet of lined notebook paper gripped in his hand. His Mexican girlfriend sat in the passenger's seat.

  'What's wrong, Bunny?' I said.

  'I went to Lucas's house. To tell him I'm sorry for my part in that cow-flop stuff out at the country club. There wasn't nobody home. That Indian motorcycle was gone, too. I found this note wadded up on the porch.'

  I smoothed it out on Bunny's hood. The handwriting, in pencil, was like a child's.

  Lucas,

  We got a new name for you. Its Baby Shit. In case you dont know, baby shit is yellow. You got everybody to feel sorry for you at the trial because you dont have parents. You know what the truth is? You dont have parents because nobody ever wanted you. Baby shit gets wiped off. It doesnt get raised.

  I gave you my collectors bike and you snitched me off. I thought you could hang out with us but you couldn't cut the initiation at the country club. You got one way out of your problem, Baby Shit. Maybe you can prove your not a spineless cunt. Bring my bike out to the Rim Rocks at 6. I'll be there by myself because I dont have to run to my old man to square a beef.

  You thought Roseanne was a good girl? She was good, all right. Down past the part you couldnt get to.

  It was unsigned.

  'The Rim Rocks?' I said.

  'There's a dirt road in the woods at the top of the cliffs, about two miles upriver from the Hart Ranch,' Bunny said.

  'The steel cable,' I said.

  'The what?' he asked, his head tilted pec
uliarly in the wind, as though the air held a secret that had eluded him.

  I pulled into the drive of the Vanzandts' home. Bunny and his girlfriend parked by the curb and did not get out of their car. The sun had dipped behind the house, and the pine trees in the front yard were edged with fire, the trunks deep in shadow. Far up the slope, sitting in deck chairs on their wide, breezy front porch, were Jack and Emma, a drink tray set between them.

  So that's how they would handle it, I thought. With booze and pills and assignment of blame to others. Why not? They lived in a world where use was a way of life and money and morality were synonymous. Perhaps they believed the burden of their son's errant ways absolved them of their own sins, or that indeed they had been made the scapegoats of the slothful and inept whose plight it was to loathe and envy the rich.

  Jack rose from his chair as I approached the porch. He wore a canary-yellow sports shirt and white slacks and a western belt and polished cowboy boots, and his face looked as composed as that of a defeated warrior to whom victory was denied by only chance and accident.

  'I'd invite you for a drink, Billy Bob, but I suspect you're here for other reasons,' he said.

  Emma lit a cigarette with a gold lighter and smoked it as though I were not there, her red nails clicking slowly on the arm of the chair.

  'Is Darl around?' I asked.

  'No, he went to a show with friends,' Jack said.

  'This morning he was melting screamers in red wine. But tonight he's eating popcorn at the theater?' I said.

  'What in God's name are you talking about now?' Emma said.

  'Screamers, leapers, uppers, black beauties, whatever you want to call them. They tie serious knots in people's brains,' I said.

  'Maybe you'd better leave,' Jack said.

  I handed him the note Darl had left on Lucas's porch. He straightened it between his hands and read, his feet spread slightly, pointed outward, like a man on a ship.