Cimarron Rose

by James Lee Burke

  Why, I thought.

  There was a cut, an indentation, newly scabbed, the size of a tooth, on the ring finger of Darl Vanzandt.

  No, I told myself, you’re letting it get away from you.

  That night, as an electrical storm raged outside, L.Q. Navarro stood in the middle of my living room, his ash-colored Stetson tipped back on his head, and said, “You were as good a lawman as me, bud. When they’re poor and got no power, like Lucas and the dead girl, and other people get involved with what happens to them, you know it’s a whole sight bigger than what they want you to think.”

  “Why’d you go and die on me, L.Q.?”

  He twirled his hat on his index finger, and an instant later, through the window, I saw his silhouette illuminated by a bolt of lightning on a distant hill.

  CHAPTER

  SIX

  THE NEXT DAY, after work, I dug night crawlers and cane-fished with a little mixed-blood Mexican boy in the tank on the back of my property. His name was Pete, and he had blue eyes and pale streaks the color of weathered wood in his hair, which grew like a soft brush on his head. He grinned all the time and talked with an Anglo twang and was probably the smartest little boy I ever knew.

  “That was the Chisholm Trail out yonder?” he asked.

  “Part of it. There’re wagon tracks still baked in the hardpan.”

  He chewed his gum and studied on the implications.

  “What’s it good for?” he asked.

  “Not much of anything, I guess.”

  He grinned and chewed his gum furiously and skipped a stone across the water.

  “Black people say you spit on your hook, you always catch fish. You believe that?” he said.

  “Could be.”

  “How come you don’t marry Temple Carrol?”

  “You have too many thoughts for a boy your age.”

  “She sure spends a lot of time jogging past your house.”

  “Why do you have Temple Carrol on the brain this evening, Pete?”

  “’Cause there she comes now.”

  I looked over my shoulder and saw Temple’s car drive past my garage and barn and chicken run and windmill, then follow the dirt track out to the levee that circled the tank. Pete thought that was hilarious.

  Temple got out of her car and walked up the slope of the levee. Her face looked cool and pink in the twilight.

  “He’s out,” she said.

  “Moon?”

  “None other.”

  “Excuse us, Pete.”

  I leaned my cane pole in the fork of a redbud tree, and we walked down the levee. The late red sun looked like molten metal through the willows on the far bank.

  “He was at your office,” she said.

  “What?”

  “Sitting on your steps for maybe an hour. In a blue serge suit and a Hawaiian shirt that’s like an assault on the eyeballs. I told him your office was closed. He just sat there, cleaning his fingernails.”

  “Don’t mess with him, Temple. Next time call the cops.”

  “What do you think I did? A half hour later, this new deputy, Mary Beth Sweeney, shows up. I told her I was glad somebody from the sheriff’s department could finally make the trip from across the street. Get this, nobody sent her. She just happened to be driving by. She told him to hoof it.”

  Temple forked two fingers into the side pocket of her blue jeans.

  “He left you a note,” she said.

  It was written in pencil, on the inside of a flattened cigarette wrapper.

  Mr. Holland, I find it damn inconsiderate you dont post your office hours. Call me at the Green Parrot Motel to talk this thing out.

  Garland T. Moon

  We were back at her car now. She opened the driver’s door and reached across the seat and picked up a revolver. It was an ancient .38–40 double-action, the metal as dull as an old nickel with holster wear.

  “Keep this. You can add it to your historical collection,” she said.

  “Nope.”

  “I got a friend in Austin to run Moon on the computer. Corrections thinks he did two snitches in Sugarland.”

  “Thanks for coming by, Temple.”

  She lowered the revolver, which she held sideways in her palm.

  “Where’s it end?” she said.

  “Excuse me?”

  “You gave up your badge, then your career as a prosecutor with the Justice Department . . .” She shook her head. “Because you think an accidental death takes away your right to judge people who are evil?”

  “Pete and I are fixing to fry up some fish. You’re welcome to join us.”

  “You make me so mad I want to hit you,” she said.

  LATER THAT EVENING, I called the sheriff at his home.

  “My PI made a 911 on Garland Moon,” I said.

  “So?”

  “Nobody was dispatched.”

  “What’s the man done?” he asked.

  “He was in your custody. You let him out. I don’t want him on my doorstep.”

  “You think I want this lunatic on the street?”

  “To tell you the truth, I’m not sure, sheriff.”

  “You’re a natural-born pain in the ass, Billy Bob. Don’t be calling my house again.”

  AFTER I HUNG up, I called a friend in the sheriff’s department and got the address of Mary Beth Sweeney. She lived in a new two-story apartment complex with a swimming pool just outside of town. It was 9 P.M. when I walked up the brick pathway at the entrance, and the underwater lights in the pool were turned on and pine needles and a glaze of suntan lotion floated on the surface. The lawn was empty, the portable barbecue pits left on the flagstones feathering with smoke.

  I climbed to the second landing and rang her doorbell. My right hand opened and closed at my side and I felt warm inside my coat and wished I had left it in the Avalon.

  Her face had a meaningless expression when she opened the door.

  “Sorry to bother you at home. But I heard Garland Moon was at my office,” I said.

  “Yes, is there something I can tell you?”

  “Maybe. If I’m not bothering you.”

  I waited.

  “Come in,” she said.

  Her small living room was furnished with rattan chairs and a couch and a round glass table. A yellow counter with three stools divided the kitchen from the living room. She was barefoot and wore jeans and a white and burnt orange University of Texas Long-horn T-shirt. A copy of The New Yorker was splayed open on the glass tabletop and a pair of horn-rimmed glasses lay next to it.

  “You just happened by and saw Moon outside my office?” I said.

  “What’s this about, Mr. Holland?”

  “I think I’m developing an ongoing problem with the sheriff’s office. I think it’s because of Lucas Smothers.”

  She hadn’t asked me to sit down. She placed one hand against the counter and pushed her feet into a pair of white moccasins as though she were about to go somewhere. Her eyes were violet colored, unfocused, caught somewhere between two thoughts.

  “You shouldn’t come here,” she said.

  “I wonder how I should read that. Is there hidden meaning there? I always have trouble with encoded speech.”

  “If you don’t like rudeness, you shouldn’t keep forcing the issue, Mr. Holland.”

  “My name is Billy Bob.”

  “I know who you are.” Then I saw the color flare behind her freckles, not from anger but as if she had made an admission she shouldn’t.

  “You like Mexican food?” I asked.

  “Good night.” She put her hand on the doorknob and turned it.

  “Tomorrow night? I appreciate what you’ve done for me.”

  She opened the door and I started outside. I was only inches away from her now and I could smell
the perfume behind her ears and hear her breathing and see the rise and fall of her breasts. A tiny gold chain and cross hung around her neck.

  “Moon won’t come at you head-on. He’ll use Jimmy Cole,” she said.

  I felt my mouth part as I stared into her eyes.

  IT WAS SUNRISE the next morning when I pulled into the dirt drive of Vernon Smothers’s two-bedroom white frame house, with a mimosa in the front yard, a sprinkler spinning in a sickly fashion by the wood steps, a partially collapsed garage in back, and every available foot of surrounding property under cultivation.

  I walked along the edge of a bean field to an irrigation ditch where Lucas stood up to his knees in the water, raking dead vegetation out of the bottom and piling it on the bank.

  “What are you doing?” I said.

  “My dad uses it in the compost heap.”

  “He’s not one to waste.”

  “You don’t like him much, do you?” he said. His face and denim shirt were spotted with mud, his arms knotted with muscle as he lifted a rake-load of dripping weeds to the edge of the ditch.

  “Garland Moon’s out. I want you to be careful,” I said.

  “Last night a Mexican in the poolroom offered me five hundred dollars to drive a load of lumber down to Piedras Negras.”

  “What are you doing in the poolroom?”

  “Just messin’ around.”

  “Yeah, they only sell soda pop in there, too. Why’s this Mexican so generous to you?”

  “He’s got a furniture factory down there. He cain’t drive long distances ’cause he’s got kidney trouble or something. He said I might get on reg’lar.”

  “You leave this county, Lucas, you go back to jail and you stay there.”

  “You ain’t got to get mad about it. I was just telling you what the guy said.”

  “You thought anymore about college for next fall?”

  “I was just never any good at schoolwork, Mr. Holland.”

  “Will you call me Billy Bob?”

  “My dad don’t allow it.”

  I walked back to my car. The sun was yellow and pale with mist behind Vernon Smothers’s house. He stood on his porch in work boots and cut-off GI fatigues and a sleeveless denim shirt that was washed as thin as Kleenex.

  “You out here about Moon?” he asked.

  “He’s been known to nurse a grievance,” I answered.

  “He puts a foot on my land, I’ll blow it off.”

  “You’ll end up doing his time, then.”

  “I busted my oil pan on your back road yesterday. You’ll owe me about seventy-five dollars for the weld job,” he said, and went back inside his house and let the screen slam behind him.

  JUST BEFORE LUNCHTIME, my secretary buzzed the intercom.

  “There’s a man here who won’t give his name, Billy Bob,” she said.

  “Does he have on a blue serge suit?”

  “Yes.”

  “I’ll be right out.”

  I opened my door. Garland T. Moon sat in a chair, a hunting magazine folded back to ads that showed mail-order guns and knives for sale. He wore shiny tan boots that were made from plastic, and a canary yellow shirt printed with redbirds, with the collar flattened outside his suit coat.

  “Come in,” I said.

  My secretary looked at me, trying to read my face.

  “I’m going to take my lunch hour a little late today,” she said.

  “Why don’t you go now, Kate? Bring me an order of enchiladas and a root beer. You want something, Garland?”

  His lips were as red as a clown’s when he smiled, his head slightly tilted, as though the question were full of tangled wire.

  He walked past me without answering. I could smell an odor like lye soap and sweat on his body. I closed the door, turned the key in the lock, and put the key in my watch pocket.

  “What are you doing?” he said.

  I sat behind my desk, smiled up at him, my eyes not quite focusing on him. I scratched the back of my hand.

  “I asked you what you’re doing,” he said.

  “I think you’re a lucky man. I think you ought to get out of town.”

  “Why’d you lock the door?”

  “I don’t like to be disturbed.”

  One side of his face seemed to wrinkle, his small blue eye watering, as though irritated by smoke. He was seated now, his thighs and hard buttocks flexed against the plastic bottom of the chair.

  “I want to hire you. To file a suit. They took a cattle prod to me. They put it all over my private parts,” he said.

  “My client’s deposition has no meaning for you now. You’re home free on murder beefs in two states. I wouldn’t complicate my life at this point.”

  “That little bitch they planted in the cell, what’s his name, Lucas Smothers, he told y’all a mess of lies. I never had no such conversation with Jimmy Cole. I been jailing too long to do something like that.”

  I looked at the backs of my fingers on top of the desk blotter. I could hear the minute hand on my wall clock click into the noon position. Outside the window, the oak trees were a deep green against the yellow sandstone of the courthouse.

  “Don’t misjudge your opponent, sir,” I said.

  “I know all about you. But you don’t know the first thing about me. Me and my twin brother was in a place where they switched your legs raw just because you spilled your food on the floor. You ain’t gonna find that on a rap sheet. When he was nine years old they pushed epilepsy pills down his throat till he choked to death. You doubt my word, you go look in the Waco Baptist Cemetery.”

  “You’re a sick man.”

  “There’s some that has said that. It never put no rocks in my shoe, though.”

  I got up from my chair and walked to the door and turned the key in the lock.

  “Get out,” I said.

  He remained motionless in the chair, his face looking away from me, the back of his neck flaming with color. He mumbled something.

  “What?” I said.

  He didn’t repeat it. When he walked past me, his eyes were fixed straight ahead, a single line of sweat glistening on the side of his face like an empty blood vein.

  CHAPTER

  SEVEN

  AT SUNRISE SUNDAY morning I put on my pinstriped beige suit and a short-sleeve white shirt and a pair of oxblood Tony Lamas, walked down to the barn and lifted my saddle off a sawhorse in the tack room and threw it on the back of my Morgan. The breeze blew through the doors on each end of the barn and the air was cool and smelled of wildflowers, fish spawning, oats and molasses balls, green horse dung, hay that had turned yellow in the corners, and well water spilling over the lip of the corrugated windmill tank.

  L.Q. Navarro sat on top of a stall, the heels of his boots hooked onto a plank, his body slatted with sunlight.

  “You should have taken that .38–40 that gal tried to give you,” he said.

  “It’s Sunday, L.Q. Take a day off.”

  “It’s them kind of days the shitbags crawl out of the storm sewers. Tell me it wasn’t fun busting caps on them dope mules down in Coahuila.”

  “Adios, bud,” I said, and flicked my heels into the Morgan’s ribs and thudded across the soft carpet of desiccated horse manure in the lot.

  I crossed the creek at the back of my property and rode through a stand of pines, then up an incline that was humped with blackberry bushes into Pete’s backyard. He waited for me on the porch, dressed in a pair of pressed jeans and a starched print shirt and freshly shined brown shoes. I reached my arm down and pulled him up behind the cantle.

  The Morgan’s hooves clattered on the flattened beer cans in the yard.

  “Was you really baptized in the river?” he said.

  “Sure.”

  “I never heard of a river-baptized person converting
to a Catholic.”

  “Somebody’s got to keep y’all honest.”

  He was quiet a long time, rocking against me with the horse’s steps.

  “Does it bother you when people say you’re crazy, Billy Bob?”

  “Most of the human race is, Pete.”

  “I knew you was gonna say that.”

  We came out of the pines into the backside of a rural Mexican neighborhood with fenceless dirt yards and abandoned privies and alleys blown with litter and bloodred hibiscus growing out of rusted car shells.

  This area was part of what was known as the West End, a place where cedar cutters and field-workers and “bohunks,” people who were of mixed German and Mexican blood, had always lived. It was exactly twenty miles down the same road that led into the East End, where Deaf Smith’s country club set, and there were many of them, had bought and refurbished Victorian homes that were as big as steamboats when spot market oil was forty dollars a barrel.

  It was cool inside the small stucco church, and electric fans oscillated on the walls by the Stations of the Cross, and the votive lights in front of a statue of Christ’s mother rang with color each time the breeze from the fan passed over the burning wax. The people in the pews were almost all elderly, their hands sheathed in callus, the skin around their eyes wrinkled, as though they had been staring into the sun for a lifetime.

  After Mass, Pete and I rode my Morgan up the street, then cut through a grove of cedars and an empty filling station that had been built in 1945 and went inside a clapboard café and ate breakfasts of pork chops, biscuits, milk gravy, scrambled eggs, grits, sliced tomatoes, and coffee.

  “What’s a crystal meth lab?” Pete asked.

  “A place where people make narcotics. Why?”

  “My mother said to stay away from some men that’s in the neighborhood.”

  “Oh?”

  He looked out the window at a dog tied on a rope in the bed of a pickup. He chewed on the corner of his thumbnail. The light had gone out of his eyes.

  “You shouldn’t tie a dog in the back of a truck. If he falls out, he’ll get drug to death. He won’t have no chance at all,” he said.