Cimarron Rose

by James Lee Burke

  At age forty-one I had gained only ten pounds since I was a beat cop in Houston, and I could still bench two hundred pounds and do thirty push-ups with my feet elevated on a chair.

  But I knew my self-congratulatory attitudes were all vanity. I was trying to reconstruct my pride like a schoolboy searching for a missing virtue in his reflection after he has been publicly humiliated.

  I stuffed my soiled workout clothes in my gym bag and drove out to the old Hart Ranch.

  IT LAY BETWEEN two large hills, and the only access was down a rutted dirt road that wound through a woods with a thick canopy and layers of pine needles and dead leaves on the ground. The gate at the cattleguard was chain-locked and strung with yellow crime scene tape. I climbed through a barbed wire fence and walked a quarter of a mile into a wide glade that was green with new grass and dotted with wildflowers.

  The main house, which had been built in the Victorian style of the 1880s, with a wide columned porch and stained glass in the windows, was now the color of cardboard, the roof destroyed by fire, the outbuildings and windmill wrapped with tumbleweeds.

  I followed a creek along the bottom of the far hill, wandered back into a piney woods, crisscrossed the glade, then walked all the way to the river bluffs that bordered the opposite end of the ranch.

  I found a small pioneer cemetery whose monuments were flat fieldstones scratched with dates from the 1850s; a steam tractor that had rusted apart in the creek bed; an impacted, overgrown trash dump probably left behind by loggers or CCC boys; a broken crosscut saw frozen in the trunk of a tree and sealed over by the bark; deer, coon, possum, and cougar tracks but not one human footprint except where the atrophied body of Jimmy Cole had been discovered among the stack of burning rubber tires.

  It was a beautiful day, the sky blue, the trees on the hills in full leaf. I picked up a stone and sailed it clattering into the ruins of the abandoned house.

  A hog burst out the back door and ran stumpily through the lot, past the windmill and the collapsed barn, into a stand of pine trees.

  I followed him for five minutes, then came out into sunlight again and saw seven others in a slough, feral, rust-colored, layered with mud, their snouts glistening with gore.

  In the center of the slough, her hind quarters pried apart, lay a disemboweled doe, a cloud of insects hanging like gauze above her head.

  The slough was churned into soup, slick with patches of stagnant water, green with excrement. On the far bank, where the silt had dried in the sun, were at least three sets of human footprints.

  THE SHERIFF LEANED over his spittoon and snipped the end off his cigar.

  “Feral hogs, that means undomesticated?” he said.

  “That’s right,” I said.

  “Which kind is it that don’t like rolling in slop?”

  “I think Jimmy Cole was killed right there on the ranch,” I said.

  “Because you found pig shit in a slough and Jimmy Cole had it in his ears?”

  “There was a dead campfire inside the house. I think he was hiding out there.”

  “And Darl Vanzandt and his pissant friends done it?”

  “You tell me.”

  He leaned back in his chair and pulled on his nose.

  “If you told me Darl Vanzandt was messing with sheep, I might believe it,” he said. Then he stared at me for a long time, his face starting to crease, a private joke building like a windstorm inside his huge girth. “Is this how y’all done it in the Rangers, searching out pig shit in the woods? Damn, son, if you ain’t a riot. Hold on, let me get my deputies in here. They got to hear this.”

  He laughed so hard tears coursed down his cheeks.

  AFTER SUPPER THAT night, I stood at my library window and watched the sky turn black and lightning fork into the crest of the hills. I turned on my desk lamp and started a handwritten letter to Jack Vanzandt. Why? Maybe because I had always liked him. Also, it was hard to criticize a man because his love blinded him to the implications of his son’s behavior.

  But my words would not change the chemical or genetic aberration that was Darl Vanzandt, and after two paragraphs I tore my piece of stationery in half and dropped it in the wastebasket.

  It rained hard, blowing in sheets across the fields and against the side of the house. I called Mary Beth’s apartment and let the phone ring a dozen times. I had tried to reach her all day, but her answering machine was still off.

  I replaced the receiver in the cradle, then glanced out the window into the driveway just as a tree of lightning split the sky and illuminated the face of Garland T. Moon.

  He stood motionless in the driving rain, a thick hemp doormat held over his head, his blue serge suit and tropical shirt soaked through.

  I turned on the porch light and stepped out the front door. He walked out of the shadows, his flatsoled prison shoes crunching on the gravel. Without invitation, he mounted the porch, his mouth grinning inanely, the raindrops on his face as viscous as glycerin.

  “How did you get here?” I asked.

  “Walked.”

  “From town?”

  “They’re holding old DWIs over my head so I cain’t get a driver’s license.”

  “You kill your buddy Jimmy Cole?”

  The skin of his face seemed to flex, caught between mirth and caution, as though he were breathing with a sliver of ice on his tongue.

  “I ain’t had to. Somebody else done it,” he said. “You sent them people after me?”

  “Which people?”

  “Ones come in my room with a baseball bat.”

  “Get off my property, Garland.”

  His eyes held on my face, unblinking, his mouth a dry slit.

  “Then it’s somebody figures I know something. But I ain’t got no idea what it is,” he said.

  “I read the case file from LAPD. They say you were in that house for three hours. They say you killed them all one by one and made the survivors watch.”

  “Then why ain’t I in jail?”

  I walked close to him. I could smell the deodorant that had melted on his skin, his breath that was like chewing gum and snuff.

  “You’ve got a free pass tonight. You won’t get another one,” I said.

  His eyes, as blue and merry as a butane flame, danced on my face.

  “The one with the bat? I caught him before he could get back to his truck. Check around the clinics. See if they ain’t got a man won’t be going out in public a lot,” he said.

  He stepped back into the rain and darkness and walked out to the road, the doormat above his head, his suit molded like a blowing cape against his body.

  CHAPTER

  THIRTEEN

  THE NEXT AFTERNOON Mary Beth answered her phone.

  “Is anything wrong?” I asked.

  “No. Why should there be?”

  “Your machine’s been off. I haven’t seen you around.”

  “Can I call you back later?”

  But she didn’t. That evening I drove to her apartment. As I walked up the stairs, people were swimming laps in the pool, stroking through the electric columns of light that glowed smokily under the turquoise surface, and the air was tinged with the gaslike smell of chlorine, burning charcoal starter, and flowers heated by the colored flood lamps planted in their midst.

  A heavyset man in a tie and business suit came out of Mary Beth’s apartment and almost knocked me down. I stepped back from him and felt the place on my chest where he had hit me.

  “Excuse me,” I said.

  He pushed his glasses straight on his nose and looked into my face, as though he recognized me. His hair was dark and neatly clipped, his part a pale, straight line in his scalp. His chin had a cleft in it and his cheeks were freshly shaved and his skin taut and scented with cologne.

  “No problem,” he said.

  “No problem?”<
br />
  “I said I was sorry, pal. I didn’t see you.”

  “That’s funny. I didn’t hear you,” I said.

  He started to turn away, then his chest expanded and his stomach flattened, as though he were abandoning a useless protocol, and he faced me squarely with his left foot slightly forward, the right foot at an angle behind it.

  “You have a reason for staring at me?” he asked quietly.

  “Not in the least.”

  He glanced back at Mary Beth’s closed door. “Have a good evening. Best way to do that, don’t let it get complicated,” he said. He raised his finger and eyebrows at the same time, then walked down the stairs.

  She was in her uniform when she let me in. There were pools of color in her cheeks and her voice had a click in it when she spoke. She began straightening couch pillows and magazines that didn’t need straightening, her back turned to me.

  “I’m sorry to be in a rush. I have to be on duty in twenty minutes,” she said.

  “That guy’s a fed.”

  “What, he threw a badge on you?”

  “No, he’s a self-important clerk who thinks arrogance and being a cop are the same thing.”

  “You don’t like them much, do you?”

  “He shouldn’t be here. If I can make him, other people will, too.”

  “I have to go, Billy Bob.” She removed her gunbelt from the closet shelf and began strapping it on her waist. She tucked her shirt inside the belt and kept her eyes on her fingers and the cloth as it tightened under the edge of the leather.

  I waited until she raised her eyes again. “You have a personal relationship going with this guy?” I asked.

  “I don’t have to tell you these things.” Then I saw her cheeks sink, as though she were disturbed by the severity of her own words.

  “He’s putting you in jeopardy. I don’t like him. That offends you?” I said.

  She picked up her purse from the counter that separated the kitchen from the living room. Her face was turned away from me. She pressed her fingers against her temple.

  “I’m leaving and I don’t have any more to say. Do you want to walk to the parking lot with me or stay here?”

  “Somebody’s trying to run Garland Moon out of town. Because of something he knows. But he doesn’t know what it is.”

  She stared at me blankly, her freckled face like a young girl’s, suddenly empty of all other concern.

  TEMPLE CARROL WAS sitting in a deerhide chair in my office when I arrived the next morning.

  “I found our man,” she said.

  “How?”

  “He told the guys in the emergency room he fell from a paint ladder through a glass window. They reported it as a knife wound.”

  “Why didn’t they believe him?”

  “Somebody had done a number on him earlier. A paramedic said he looked like he’d been drug by a rope.” She propped her chin on her fingers and waited for the recognition to show in my eyes.

  HIS NAME WAS Roy Devins, and he had been two times down in Huntsville and maybe once in Mexico under another name, and whatever had happened to him—an accident on a ladder, a knife beef in a bar—he had driven seventy miles down the highway without seeking help, or even accepting it when people at stoplights glanced into the cab of his pickup, then realized what they were looking at and remained sickened and numb and stationary at the light while he sped away from them.

  He looked out of the bandages on his face with the attentiveness of a man who gives importance only to those who can harm him. Then the eyes registered and dismissed us and receded back into the ennui of looking at objects and listening to sounds that might satisfy a need or fulfill a desire—the possibility of cigarettes in my shirt pocket, the noise of a food cart in the hall, a film featuring Japanese gladiators in samurai combat on the television set.

  “You remember me?” I said.

  “Where’s your horse?” he replied.

  “You don’t mind our being here, do you?”

  “I don’t give a shit what y’all do,” he said.

  “You can put Garland Moon down for the Bitch, Roy. Three-strikes-and-you’re-out was made for this guy,” I said.

  There were thin white lines around his eyes, as if all sunlight and health had been siphoned out of his skin. The bandages on one side of his head were flat against the scalp and bone. When he turned his head on the pillow, a tic jumped in his throat, as though a fine fishbone were caught in his windpipe. I thought it was the pain.

  “I’m going out to the Coast, get a new start. I’m through with all this running around. I fell off a ladder,” he said. His eyes shifted off mine and looked at nothing.

  “Listen up, Roy,” Temple said. “They don’t graft ears back on here. Medicaid doesn’t pay for plastic surgery on slashed cheeks. How’d we know about you, anyway? He came out to Billy Bob’s house and laughed about doing you.”

  His eyes filmed over and he turned his head on the pillow so that he faced the open door of his room and the sound of other people walking in the hall, rattling food trays, delivering flowers and fruit baskets, carrying with them all the beautiful portent that an ordinary day could offer.

  “Think about it another way. The guys who got you to bust him up, have they been here to look in on you, pay your bills, tell you they’re sorry it went south on you?” I said.

  But our reasoning could not compete with the memory of Garland T. Moon and that moment when Roy Devins, dope mule and abuser of children, mainline con and fulltime loser, thought he could burst into a motel room with a baseball bat and inspire terror in a man he presumed was one of his own kind, no stronger or weaker or better or worse, unaware that all his experience with evil in county jails and state prisons was as worthless as every other precept that had betrayed him when he had believed himself on the edge of unlocking the magic doors to which everyone but he had always been granted access.

  I SAT ON a bench in the side yard of the stucco church that Pete and I attended, and watched Pete and a group of boys his age play work-up softball out on the school diamond. The shade under the mimosa tree was flecked with tiny blades of sunlight, and Beau, my Morgan, was eating grass along the rain ditch that bordered the church yard. I opened the thick cover of Great-grandpa Sam’s journal and turned the pages to my bookmark.

  JULY 21, 1891

  I think they aim to rob a train.

  JULY 27, 1891

  They rode out of here three days ago, headed due east into a red dawn that was hot enough to have come off the devil’s forge. They was drunk when they come back in last night, stinking of rut and beer and tripe they was eating with their hands out of a leather poke. Whatever money they stole, they did not spend it on a bath house in Fort Smith. If you dipped them for ticks and lice, the water would be instantly black and probably have to be shoveled out of the vat and burned with kerosene.

  I had thought I had put my violent ways behind me. But just as my loins yearn for the nocturnal caress of the Rose of Cimarron, my palm wishes to curve around the hardness of my Navy .36. I purely hate these men, God forgive me for my words, but they make me ashamed to be a member of the white race and give me dreams about the old life and the men whose faces I lighted with gunfire while people watched from the balconies of saloons and brothels.

  Jennie and I have moved into a cabin up on the hillock overlooking the river. We have peach and apple trees in the yard and curtains in the windows she sewn from her old dresses. But I cannot pretend those outlaws are not down below in their mud caves, their squaws rolling opium in little balls for their pipes, the stolen dollars they almost lost in a river drying on clotheslines.

  Maybe I hate them because the nature of their abode and of their fornication is the only difference between us. This question has troubled me sorely and I raised it to Jennie. She did not reply and went out to the woodstove in back and began fr
ying meat for our breakfast. She was not hardly dressed and in the early light her young body looked like that of a savage. The sight of her filled me with a passion that I could not contain, that even in the cool air of our bedroom made my palms damp with my sweat.

  I am fifty-six years old and fear I do not know who I am.

  Pete walked hot and dusty and happy into the shade, his fielder’s glove hooked on its strap through his belt.

  “We still gonna get peach ice cream?” he said.

  “I wouldn’t go a day without it,” I replied.

  “You know them men out yonder, Billy Bob? They been around the block twice, like they was lost or something.”

  I looked over my shoulder, out on the hard-packed dirt street. Both the cars were dark and waxed, with tinted windows and radio antennas. I stood up and put on my Stetson and walked over to Beau and stroked his head and fed him a sugar cube with the flat of my hand. The cars pulled up along the edge of the rain ditch, and the passenger window in the front of the lead car rolled down on its electric motor.

  The man from Mary Beth’s apartment looked at me from behind aviator’s sunglasses.

  “You already stomped the shit out of Roy Devins. Maybe it’s time to leave his welfare to others,” he said.

  “You know how it is, a guy gets bored and starts to wonder why feds are running around in his county, making veiled threats, acting like heavy-handed pricks, that sort of thing,” I said.

  He laughed to himself.

  “How about staying out of Dodge?” he said.

  “I expect we’re on the same side, aren’t we?”

  “You’re a defense lawyer, pal. You get paid to keep the asswipes out of the gray-bar hotel chain.” His gaze drifted to Pete, then back on me. “You really stick playing cards in the mouths of dead wets down in Coahuila?”