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 je
ans 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.
“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, handcarved 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 bungee cord. A wood tray divided into compartments was inset in the top of th
e 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 posting 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 emblazoned 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?”
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