Cimarron Rose bbh-1

by James Lee Burke

  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 doin?' 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 o
n 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 chafe 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.

  'Who are these men, Pete?'

  'People my daddy knew once.' His face was empty, his gaze still focused outside the window. 'My mother made up that story about him getting killed in the army. He just gone off one day and never come home.'

  'Maybe you shouldn't study on it.'

  'It don't bother me. If people don't want you, they ain't worth fretting on. That's the way I see it.'

  Then he grinned again, as though the world's capacity to injure had no power over him.

  Jack Vanzandt lived in a large white-columned home built of old brick and Spanish ironwork salvaged from a plantation in Louisiana. The lawn comprised eight acres and sloped upward from the street through shade trees to the wide, breezy front porch of the house, the four-car garage with servants quarters on top, two clay tennis courts, a screened-in pool stippled with sunlight, a stucco guest cottage, a satellite television dish that was the size of a barn door.

  His first wife had died in a traffic accident on a bridge over the Pecos River gorge. The second wife, Emma, came from Shreveport, where her mother and father had run a fundamentalist church, then had become moderately wealthy by starting up a mail-order wedding cake business. Emma's approach to civic and charitable work seemed to be governed by the same entrepreneurial spirit. She ran on high-octane energies that made her eyes flash and her hands move abruptly when she became impatient with the way someone else did his work, until she simply took over it. Like her husband, Jack, she was always polite, and her high cheekbones and long Indian-black hair were lovely to look at. But you always felt you wanted her as a friend, never as an adversary.

  'How are you, Billy Bob?' she said, rising from her work in a rose bed, pulling off a cotton glove and extending her hand.

  'Sorry to bother y'all on a Sunday, Emma,' I said.

  'We always love to see you. Did you bring your tennis racquet?'

  'No, I'm afraid I have to chop cotton today. Is Jack around?'

  'You're going to take his picture?' she said, her eyes dropping to the Polaroid camera in my hand.

  'Not really,' I said, and smiled.

  Jack came out on the front porch, a frosted highball glass wrapped with a napkin and a rubber band in his hand.

  'Can you handle a gin and tonic?' he said.

  'I just need a minute or two, then I'll be gone,' I said.

  He watched my face, then said, 'Walk out here with me and I'll show you part of an Indian work mound Emma dug up.'

  We strolled through the trees toward a white gazebo. Pine needles and rose petals had been scattered on the grass by a windstorm during the night.

  'My PI had to do some checking on Darl's record,' I said. I kept my eyes straight ahead on the piled dirt and sacks of pasteurized fertilizer and potted hydrangeas by the edge of a freshly spaded flower bed.

  Jack cleared his throat slightly. 'Why's that?' he said.

  'You don't want to find out later the other side is waiting for you with a baseball bat. Darl has four arrests involving violence of some kind… Am I correct, he beat up a waitress in a bar?'

  Jack squatted by the mound of black dirt and picked up some pottery shards and rubbed them clean between his fingers. There was a thin, round place in the center of his gold hair.

  'He shouldn't have been there. But she wasn't a waitress. She was a prostitute, and she and her pimp tried to roll him when they thought he was passed out,' he said.

  'I'd like to take a Polaroid of Darl.'

  'I'm a little unclear as to where this is going.'

  'The kid who might take you for seven figures should at least be able to identify your son in a photo lineup.'

  'Wait here. I'll get him.'

  Five minutes later the two of them came out of the back of the house together. Even though it was almost noon, Darl's face looked thick with sleep. He raked his hair downward with a comb, then gazed at the lint that floated out in the sunlight.

  'What's that spick say?' he asked.

  'Darl…' his father began.

  'That you blindsided him and kicked him on the ground,' I said.

  'How about my car? I was supposed to enter it in the fifties show in Dallas. What right's he got to ruin my paint job?'

  'That's a mean cut on your ring finger,' I said.

  'It collided with a flying object. That guy's mouth.'

  'Two weeks ago?'

  'Yeah, his tooth broke off in my hand. I'm lucky I didn't have to get rabies shots.'

  'Look up a little bit,' I said, and popped the flash on the Polaroid.

  Darl's eyes stared back at me with the angry vacuity of an animal who believes it has been trapped in a box.

  'I'm going back to the house,' he said.

  'Thank Mr Holland for the help he's giving us, son,' Jack said.

  'He's doing this for free? Get a life,' Darl said. Thick-bodied, sullen, his face unwashed, he walked through the shade, his hand caressing the peach fuzz along his jawbone.

  Jack turned away, his fists knotted on his hips, his forearms corded with veins.

  That afternoon Temple Carrol found me back by the windmill, hoeing out my vegetable garden. The sky behind her was purple and yellow with rain clouds, the air already heavy with the smell of ozone.

  'My sister-in-law works at the video store. This tape was in the night drop box this morning,' she said.

  I stopped work and leaned on my hoe. The blades of the windmill were ginning rapidly overhead.

  'Somebody must have dropped it in by mistake. You'd better take a look,' she said.

  We went through the back of the house to the library and plugged the cassette into the VCR.

  At first the handheld camera swung wildly through trees illuminated by headlights, rock music blaring on the audio, then the camera steadied, as though it were aimed across a car hood, and we saw kids climbing out of convertibles, throwing ropes of beer on each other, passing joints, kissing each other hard on the mouth for the camera's benefit, their features as white as milk.

  Then we saw her in an alcove of trees, in Clorox-faded jeans and a maroon T-shirt with a luminous horse head on it, a longneck beer in one hand, a joint in the other, dancing to the music as though there were no one else present on earth.

  'Roseanne Hazlitt,' I said.

  'Wait till you see what a small-town girl can do with the right audience,' Temple said.

  Her auburn hair was partially pinned up in swirls on her head, but one long strand curled around her neck like a snake. She let the beer bottle, then the joint, drop from her fingers into the weeds, and began to sway her hips, her eyes closed, her profile turned to the camera. She pulled her T-shirt over her head, her hair collapsing on her shoulders, arched her shoulders back so that the tops of her breasts almost burst out of her bra, unsnapped her jeans and stepped out of them, then twined her hands in the air and rotated her hips, ran her fingers over her panties and thighs, grasped the back of her neck and w
idened her legs and opened her mouth in feigned orgasm and pushed her hair over her head so that it cascaded down her face while her tongue made a red circle inside her lips.

  The screen turned to snow.

  'How about the look on those boys watching her?' Temple said.

  'You recognize any of them?' I asked.

  'Three or four. Jocks with yesterday's ice cream for brains. How do kids get that screwed up?'

  I looked at my watch. It had started to rain outside and the hills were aura-ed with a cold green light like the tarnish on brass.

  'I'll buy you a barbecue dinner at Shorty's,' I said, and dropped the Polaroid photo of Darl Vanzandt in front of her.

  We sat on the screen porch and ate plates of cole slaw and refried beans and chicken that had been cooked on a mesquite fire. The river that flowed under the pilings of the club was dented with raindrops, the trees along the bank smoky with mist. Downstream, some boys were swinging out over the water on a rubber tire tied to a rope, cannonballing into the current.

  I heard beer cans clattering outside the screen.

  'He's an old-timer, Temple. Let's try to keep him in a better mood this time,' I said.

  'I'll just watch. Maybe I can learn how it's done,' she said.

  We went out the side door to a woodshed with a tarp that was extended out from the roof on slanted poles. The elderly black man we had interviewed earlier in the week was heaving two vinyl sacks of cans into the shed. When he saw us, he took his stub of a pipe out of his shirt pocket and pared the charcoal out of the bowl with a penknife.

  'My memory ain't no better than it was the other day. Must be age. Or maybe I don't take to rudeness,' he said. He pointed the stem of his pipe at Temple.

  'I get the notion you don't like working here,' I said.

  'The job's fine. What a lot of people do here ain't.'

  I held the Polaroid of Darl Vanzandt in front of him. He dipped his pipe in a leather tobacco pouch and pressed the tobacco down into the bowl with the ball of his thumb.

  'Is that the boy Roseanne Hazlitt slapped?' I said.

  He struck a wood match and cupped it over his pipe, puffing smoke out into the rain. He tossed the match into a puddle and watched it go out.