BBH01 - Cimarron Rose

by James Lee Burke

  'This isn't even signed,' he said. But his voice faltered.

  'Why would your boy buy twenty feet of steel cable at a building supply, Jack?' I asked.

  'Cable?' he said.

  'With U-bolts,' I said.

  He kneaded the sheet of paper with one hand into a ball and dropped it on the drink table. It bounced and rolled onto the floor.

  'I'll be back,' he said to his wife.

  'Jack…' she said. Then she said it again, to his back, as he walked around the side of his house to his four-wheel-drive Cherokee.

  I bent over and picked up Darl's note and put it in my pocket. I thought Emma would say something else. But she didn't. She simply propped her elbow on the arm of the chair and rested her forehead on her fingers, the smoke from her cigarette curling out of the ashtray into her hair.

  I walked back down the drive in the cooling shadows to Bunny's car. At the end of the block, the taillights of Jack's Cherokee turned the corner and disappeared up a winding street whose high-banked, blue-green lawns hissed with sprinkler systems.

  'Can you take me to the Rim Rocks?' I said to Bunny through his window.

  He didn't reply. Instead, he was looking at something through the front windshield. He opened the door and stepped out on the pavement.

  'I think that boy done growed up on us,' he said.

  Lucas and Vernon Smothers slowed their pickup truck to the curb. They were both eating fried chicken out of a plastic bucket. They got out and walked to the back of the truck. Lucas dropped the tailgate and slid a plank down to the pavement to offload the Indian motorcycle, which was held erect in the truck bed with four crisscrossed lengths of bungi cord. He kept looking at us, waiting for one of us to speak.

  'Hi, what cha y'all doing here?' he said.

  What follows is put together from accounts given me by Marvin Pomroy, a sheriff's deputy, and a seventeen-year-old West End girl who had not guessed that a late-spring evening high above a lazy river could prove to be the worst memory of her life.

  The wind was cool on the outcrop of rocks above the gorge, the evening star bright in the west, the air scented with pine needles, wood smoke from the campfire, the cold odor of water flowing over stone at the base of the cliffs.

  Earlier, the others had been worried about Darl. Speed took his metabolism to strange places. His face had popped a sweat for no reason, then it had run like string out of his hair while he sucked air through his mouth as though his tongue had been burned. He peeled off his shirt and sat on a rock, his hand pressed to his heart, a blue-collar girl from the West End named Sandy mopping his skin dry.

  He toked on a joint sprinkled with China white and held the hit in his lungs, one time, twice, three, four times, until his eyes blinked clear and the angle iron twisting in his rib cage seemed to dissolve like liquorice on a stove.

  He snapped the cap off a beer and drank it in front of the fire, bare-chested, the leggings of his butterfly chaps molded against his thighs like black tallow.

  His face was serene now. His mouth seemed to taste the wind, the blue-black density of the sky, the moon that rose out of the trees.

  'This is the way it's supposed to be, ain't it? We're up here and everybody else is down there. It's like a poem I read. About Greeks who lived above the clouds,' he said. 'Know what I mean?'

  The others, who sat on motorcycles or logs or on the ground, stoned-out, euphoric in the firelight, their skin singing with the heat of the day and the alcohol and dope in their veins, toked and huffed on joints and nodded and smiled and let the foam from their beer bottles slide down their throats.

  'What about you, Sandy? You read that poem?' he said to the West End girl, who sat on an inverted bucket by his foot.

  'I wasn't too good in English,' she said, and raised the corner of her lip in a way that was meant to be both self-deprecating and coy.

  He twitched his metal-sheathed boot sideways, so it tapped hard into her bare ankle.

  'Then you should read this poem. Because it's a great fucking poem,' he said.

  'Yeah, sure, Darl.'

  'What makes you think you got to agree with me? You haven't even read it. That's an insult. It's like you're saying…' He paused, as though on the edge of a profound thought. 'It's like you're saying I need you to agree with me, or otherwise I'm gonna be all broken up 'cause my ideas are a pile of shit or something.'

  'I didn't mean that, Darl.'

  Her eyes looked into the dark. He stepped closer to her so his chaps intruded on the edge of her vision. His beer bottle hung loosely from his hand. The orange hair on his wrist glowed against the fire.

  'What did you mean, Sandy?' he asked.

  'Nothing. It's just real neat out here. The wind's getting cool, though.' She hugged herself, feigning a shiver.

  'You ever pull a train, Sandy?' he asked.

  The blood went out of her face.

  'Don't worry. I was just seeing if you were paying attention,' he said, then leaned over and carefully spit on the top of her head.

  Jack Vanzandt had found the access road to the Rim Rocks at the bottom of the hill. He shifted down and ground his way up the slope, through woods that yielded no moon or starlight, bouncing through potholes that exploded with rainwater, shattering dead tree limbs against his oil pan. Gray clouds of gnats and mosquitoes hung in his headlights. In the distance he thought he heard the flat, dirty whine of a trail bike, then the roar of a Harley. But he couldn't tell. The camping equipment in his Cherokee caromed off the walls; the glove box popped open and rattled the contents out on the floor; a rotten tree stump in the middle of the road burst like cork against his grill.

  Then he reached a fork, with a sawhorse set in his path. He stopped the Cherokee and moved the sawhorse to the other side of the fork and went on. He looked in the rearview mirror at the divide in the road and at the reflection of his taillights on the barrier and was disturbed in a way he couldn't quite explain, like cobweb clinging briefly to the side of the face.

  Then the trees began to thin and the road came out on the hill's rim, and he could see the moonlight on the river below and the piled wood burning on a sandy shelf of rock, one that protruded out into nothingness, and Darl's silhouette against the flames and the gleaming chrome and waxed surfaces of his friends' motorcycles.

  Jack strained his eyes through the mud and water streaked on his windshield and the shadows his brights threw on the clearing. He did not see Lucas Smothers among the faces that looked like they had been caught in a searchlight, and he let. out his breath and felt the tension go out of his palms and he wiped them one at a time on the legs of his slacks.

  Then he realized they did not know who he was.

  'If you're dirty, kitties, now's the time to lose it,' he heard his son yell.

  Bags of reefer and pills showered out into the darkness, sprinkling the water far below.

  Darl Vanzandt swung his leg over his Harley, started the engine, his face shuttering with a familiar ecstasy as he twisted the gas feed forward and the engine's power climbed through his thighs and loins.

  He cornered his bike on the far side of the fire, his boot biting into the dirt, then righted the bike's frame and roared down the road that Jack had just emerged from, his face turned into the shadows to avoid recognition.

  His tire tracks showed he never hesitated when he hit the fork in the road, leaping potholes, occasionally touching the soft earth with his boot, his path marked by the strip of starry sky overhead, the province of gods who lived above the clouds, rather than the narrow, eroded track sweltering with heat and filmed with gnats between the trees.

  The night had gone down bad, but he didn't doubt the wisdom of the plan he had conceived that morning, when he drank wine laced with speed out of a stone beer mug, nor did he doubt his partial execution of it. It was still a good plan, one he could pull off later, when that punk Lucas Smothers mustered enough guts to run a chicken race along the unbarricaded road that led back to the cliff's edge. Just let Lucas get in
the lead and take the road that was open while he, Darl, swerved around the barricade and found his way to the bottom of the hill, safe and removed from whatever might happen when Lucas Smothers discovered the cost of jerking on the wrong guy's stick.

  Or maybe he thought none of these things. Maybe he was simply intrigued with the frenetic bouncing of his headlight on the pines, the latent sexual power girded between his chaps, the way reefer wrapped a soft gauze around the uppers surging in his veins, as though his skin was a border between his universe and the one other people lived in.

  Darl swerved around the barrier his father had moved, opened up the Harley, the back wheel ripping a trench through the earth, and plowed into the steel cable that was stretched neck-high between two pine trunks.

  His bike spun away into the trees, the engine roaring impotently against the ground.

  The cable was thinner in diameter than a pencil, and Darl had tightened each end until the steel loops had bitten so deeply into the pine bark that the cable looked like it grew horizontally out of the trunks.

  He died on his back, the headlight of his Harley shining across his face. His mouth was open, as though he wanted to speak, but the cable's incision had cut his windpipe as well as his jugular. When his father found him, three misshapen, emaciated dogs with spots like hyenas were licking Darl's chest, and Jack had to drive them from his son's body with a stick. The medical examiner later said the dogs were rabid. He refused to answer when a reporter asked if the dogs had found Darl before the time of death.

  * * *

  chapter thirty-six

  But when I drove down the rutted road to the Hart Ranch that same night I knew of none of the events I just described.

  The gate that gave onto the ranch was open, the padlocked chain snapped by bolt cutters. I turned off my headlights and drove the Avalon across the cattle guard, parked in a grove of mesquite, and slipped L.Q.' s revolver from its holster. Then I pulled six extra rounds from the leather cartridge loops on the belt and dropped them in my pocket and stepped out into the darkness. The revolver felt heavy and cold and strange in my hand.

  The moon was above the hills, and I could see deer grazing in the glade between the woods and the river, and in the distance the roofless Victorian home that had been gutted by fire and the log and slat outbuildings and rusted windmill in back, wrapped with tumbleweed.

  The edges of the house were silhouetted by a white light that glowed in the backyard. I moved along the perimeter of the woods, spooking coveys of quail into the darkness. The grass was almost waist high from the rain, and a set of car tracks stretched through the glade and ended where a 1970s gas-guzzler was parked in the shadows. A second set of car tracks, fresher ones, the grass pressed flat and pale-sided into the wet sod, led past the parked car to the back of the house.

  I walked between the woods and parked car and looked through the car window. In the moonlight I could see the ignition wires hanging below the dashboard. From behind the house I heard a metallic, screeching sound like a board with rusted nails in it being pried loose from a joist.

  I walked to the right of the house, through a side yard that was strewn with plaster and broken laths that looked like they had been ripped from the interior walls and thrown outside. A Coleman lantern as bright as a phosphorous flare hissed on the ground in the center of the backyard. Farther on, a blue van was parked by a barn with a tractor shed built onto one side, and through a dirty window in the shed a second lantern burned inside and the shadows of at least two men moved back and forth across it.

  I crossed the yard, outside the perimeter of light. My foot went out into a pool of shadow, where there should have been level ground, but instead I stepped into a hole at least a foot deep, my ankle twisting sideways inside my boot, a pain as bright as the sting of a jellyfish wrapping around the tendons in my lower back.

  The shadows beyond the window froze against the light.

  Then I thought I heard L.Q. Navarro's voice say, 'The dice are out of the cup. Make 'em religious, bud.'

  I limped forward and flung the door back on its hinges and pointed L.Q.'s revolver into the room.

  Felix Ringo and a second man stood just beyond a worktable where Garland T. Moon was wrapped fast against the wood planks with chains that were clamped and boomed down on his chest and thighs. Moon's face was turned away from me, as though he were napping. The clothes of Ringo and the second man were streaked with soot and bits of hay and dried horse manure. Behind them, the flooring in the barn had been ripped up, the plaster board gouged out of a bunk area, a rusty hot water tank split open with an ax.

  The room was hotter than it should have been, filled with a hot smell that at first I thought came from the lantern.

  'You don't look too good, man,' Ringo said.

  I could feel the muscles constrict across my back, just like someone had taken pliers to my spine. I propped one arm against the doorjamb and held the pistol level with the other.

  The second man clutched a plastic bag full of credit cards in his hand. He had the scarred eyebrows of a prizefighter and small ears and hair so blond it was almost white.

  'Both you boys put your hands behind your head and get down on your knees,' I said.

  The second man studied my face, his tongue moving across his bottom lip. 'Fuck you, buddy,' he said, and bolted into the barn, crashing out the door into the yard.

  But I didn't fire. Instead, I kept the .45 pointed at Ringo's face, my other hand holding on to the doorjamb for balance. When I took a step forward, the pain caused my jaw to drop open. I heard the van start up outside and drive out of the yard.

  'You want to go to a hospital? I can do that for you, man,' Ringo said.

  I eased my hand onto the worktable, inches from the JOX running shoe on Moon's foot, stiffening my arm for support. An odor like the smell of burned scrapings from a butchered hog rose into my face.

  'Last chance, Ringo. Get on the floor,' I said.

  'You're all mixed up. This is DEA. You don't got no business here.'

  I pulled back the hammer on the revolver.

  'Okay, man. My friend gonna come back with some local law. They gonna jam you up, man,' Ringo said, and knelt on the floor and laced his fingers behind his neck. He crinkled his nose, his mustache wiggling on his lip, as though he were about to sneeze.

  I worked my way around the other side of the table. Moon's eyes were staring at nothing. The skin of his face looked shrunken on the bone, puckered and red like a rubber Halloween mask. The cloth of his flowered shirt was crisscrossed with scorch marks, and inside the scorch marks were lesions that looked like they had been cut into the skin with a laser.

  The blowtorch was turned on its side by the far wall.

  'I'll take a guess. Crystal coming in, counterfeit credit cards going out,' I said.

  'Hey, the guapa you was in the sack with? Ask her. This is a federal operation, man. She gonna fuck you again, except this time you ain't gonna enjoy it.'

  'If y'all were looking for some of your stash, you tortured the wrong guy. It was probably Darl Vanzandt and his friends who ripped you off.'

  'You want to take me in? That's good, man. 'Cause I'm gonna be on a plane back to Mexico City tomorrow morning. So let's go do that, man.'

  'I don't think so.'

  His eyes studied my shirt front.

  'What's that you got in your pocket?' he asked.

  'This? It's funny you ask. A friend of mine dropped it down in Coahuila.'

  A dark and fearful recognition grew in his face, like smoke rising in a glass jar.

  I moved toward him, my hand sliding along the table for support. Inches away from my forearm, a viscous tear was glued in the corner of Moon's receded blue eye.

  'I bet ole Moon spit in your face,' I said.

  Felix Ringo rose to his feet and began running toward the back of the barn, his head twisted back toward me. He grabbed onto a stall door and pulled an automatic from an ankle holster and fired three times, the rounds slappi
ng into the front wall, then he began running again. He passed a tack room and flung the plywood door open in his wake, his arms waving almost simultaneously, as though hornets were about to torment his flesh.

  I held on to a wood post by a stall and fired one round after another, the powder flashes splintering from the cylinder and the barrel. The explosions were deafening, the recoil knocking my wrist high in the air. Each round blew divots out of the tack room door that yawned open in the passageway, tore even larger holes in the outside door, whined away into the woods with a sound like piano wire snapping.

  Dust and lint and smoke drifted in the light from the Coleman lantern. My right ear was numb, as though frigid water had been poured inside it. I put the hammer on half-cock and shucked out the empty shell casings on the floor and rotated the cylinder and inserted six fresh rounds in the loading gate, then lowered the hammer again and locked the cylinder into place.

  I limped slowly past the stalls and closed the splintered door of the tack room. Felix Ringo lay on the floor, the slide on his automatic jammed open by a partially ejected shell casing. Blood welled from a wound that looked like a crushed purple rose inserted inside the torn cloth on his hip.

  'My friend L.Q. Navarro used to say ankle hideaways are mighty cool, but the problem is they only work for midgets,' I said, and sat down heavily on a hay bale that puffed dust and lint into the air.

  'I got to have a doctor,' Ringo said.

  I felt weak all over. Gray threadworms floated in front of my eyes. I touched my upper chest and my hand came away coated with something that was warm and damp and sticky.

  'Looks like we both got a problem here, Felix.' I breathed slowly and wiped the sweat out of my eyes. From my shirt pocket I pulled the playing card emblazoned with the badge of the Texas Rangers and marked with the date of L.Q.'s death. 'You remember the rules down in Coahuila. When you lose, you get one of these stuck in your mouth.'

  'I'm hurt bad. Look, man, I die here, I gotta have a priest.'

  'You killed Roseanne Hazlitt, didn't you?'