BBH01 - Cimarron Rose

by James Lee Burke

  * * *

  chapter nineteen

  Pete's mother waited tables in a diner out by the slaughterhouse. Sometimes the men she met in bars beat her up, stole her money, and got her fired from her jobs. Last year she was found wandering behind a motel in her slip and was put in a detox center for three days. After she got out, a choleric judge who reeked of cigars and self-righteousness lectured her in front of morning court and sentenced her to pick up trash on the highways for six weekends with a group of high school delinquents.

  I sat in her living room and explained why Pete needed to stay at Temple Carrol's house for a while. She listened without expression, in her waitress uniform, her knees close together, her hands folded in her lap, as though I held some legitimate legal power over her life. There were circles under her eyes, and her hair was lank and colorless on each side of her narrow face.

  'Cain't y'all just go arrest the guy wrote you that letter?' she asked.

  'There weren't any fingerprints on it. We don't know who sent it.'

  'The social worker wants him here when she makes her home call. Y'all ain't gonna keep him real long, are you? I cain't get in no more trouble with Social Services.'

  Late Friday afternoon I looked down from my office window and saw Darl Vanzandt's cherry-red '32 Ford turn into the square. The roof was 'chopped'—vertical sections had been cut out of the body so that the top was lowered several inches and the windows looked like slits in a machine-gun bunker—and I had a hard time telling who sat in the passenger's seat, one gnarled arm hooked on the outside panel. Then the car turned out of the evening glare into the shade and I saw the profile of Garland T. Moon.

  They parked off the square in front of the Mexican grocery and went inside. Then Moon came out alone, leaned against the car, and began eating ice cream with a plastic spoon from a paper cup.

  I walked across the square through the shadows and stopped in front of him. He wore pleated, beltless khakis high up on his hips and a ribbed sleeveless undershirt that looked stitched to his skin.

  'What are you doing with the kid?' I said.

  He licked the ice cream off his spoon. A shaft of sunlight fell like a dagger across his face, and his receded eye watered in the glare.

  'He likes Mexican girls. I introduced him to a lady friend of mine got a house across the border,' he said.

  'You ought to stick to your own kind. The Vanzandts are out of your league.'

  'Y'all all in my league, boy. Me and him got us an arrangement.' He winked at me.

  Inside the grocery, by the small soda fountain in back, I could see Darl talking to a group of kids three or fours years younger than he. The girls had earrings through their noses, even their eyebrows.

  'You dealing, Moon?' I said.

  'Me? I don't have nothing to do with drugs. I won't even go into a drugstore. That's a fact,' he replied. He spooned the ice cream into his mouth. His lips dripped with whiteness when he smiled.

  I drove over to Lucas Smothers's house and found him in the backyard, working on the Indian motorcycle. He had rolled the dents out of the fenders and repainted them and mounted a new sheepskin seat on the frame. The wind was still warm and I could smell the water that had just been released from the irrigation ditch into the vegetable rows beyond the barn.

  'You know Darl's hanging with Garland Moon now?' I asked.

  He set down a wrench on a rag that he had spread on the ground.

  'With Moon?' he said.

  'That's right.'

  He looked into space, then picked up the wrench and went back to work.

  'Where can I find the Mexican biker Bunny Vogel got into it with?' I asked.

  'Guy picked up Roseanne at work sometimes?'

  'That's the one.'

  'He's supposed to be a Purple Heart. They used to be a Los Angeles gang. Some Mexicans in San Antone use their name now.'

  'Can you put me with this guy?'

  'I never had nothing to do with gangs, Mr Holland. I always went my own way. It didn't do no good, though.'

  'Why would he call Bunny a pimp?'

  'That don't make sense to me. Bunny's stand-up.'

  'Stand-up? He does grunt work for the Vanzandts because he's afraid to start over again. What do you call that?'

  'Everybody don't get to choose what they want to be,' he said. Then he paused in his work and looked me directly in the face. 'Or what last name they got, either.'

  That night Mary Beth and I went to a movie at the Rialto theater on the square. When we came back outside the air was warm and smelled of the few raindrops that tumbled out of an almost clear sky. The sidewalk was marbled with the green and pink neon on the marquee, and the tops of the live oaks on the courthouse lawn rustled in the wind and shaped and reshaped their silhouettes against the lighted clock tower. The street was filled with the same long line of cars and motorcycles that filled it every Friday and Saturday night, radios blaring with rap music, an occasional beer bottle or can arching onto the courthouse lawn.

  They weren't all bad kids, not even the East Enders, who were incapable of understanding a world where people lived from paycheck to paycheck and, in the last heat wave, even died because they couldn't adequately cool their houses.

  Maybe what bothered me most about them was the way they feigned profligacy as almost a deliberate insult to the very fates that had blessed them.

  For some reason I remembered a scene years ago with L.Q. Navarro. We had picked up a prisoner in Denver, leg-chained him through a D-ring on the back floor, and were headed back to Texas when L.Q. saw a faded wood sign by the roadside north of Trinidad.

  'I want to stop here,' he said.

  'What is it?' I asked.

  'I'll show you what guts was like back in 1914,' he said.

  We drove west down a dirt road flanked with pinion trees and hardpan, the mountains purple and edged with fire in the sunset, and stopped at a wire-enclosed monument erected by the United Mine Workers in memory of the striking miners and their families who were shot or asphyxiated to death by state militia and Rockefeller gun thugs during the Ludlow Massacre. There was no US government or state memorial. The monument itself was a fairly simple one, a large block of inscribed stone adorned with statues next to a heavy trap door that opened on a flight of stairs and a basement with decayed plaster walls.

  Inside that same enclosure eleven children and two women died when the tents above them were set on fire. The names on the monument were almost all those of Italian and Mexican immigrants.

  'People who didn't have a sackful of beans took on John D. himself,' L.Q. said. 'Their strike got broke and Rockefeller come out here and danced with a miner's wife and made headlines.'

  'How you know so much about it?' I asked.

  'That's my great-grandmother's name up there, bud.'

  Darl Vanzandt's '32 Ford passed us, its dual pipes throbbing against the asphalt. If he noticed Mary Beth and me, he didn't show it. Across the street, a girl in shorts sat astride the barrel of the Spanish-American War artillery piece, her hands clenched around the metal.

  'What are you thinking about?' Mary Beth said.

  'Nothing. It's a great country,' I said.

  'You worrying about Lucas?'

  'On his worse day, I'll take that kid over this whole street.'

  She slipped her arm inside mine and squeezed it against her.

  On Saturday afternoon Mary Beth and I took Pete to the rodeo at the county fair grounds. The parking lot was filled with pickup trucks and horse trailers, the viewing stands and midway packed, and a gentle brown haze lifted off the arena while a parade of mounted cowboys rode by the stands, American and state of Texas flags flying over their heads, and carnival rides reared and dipped in the sky.

  We bought cotton candy and hot dogs and strolled past the chutes, where boys barely out of high school stood in clusters or perched up on the slats in skin-tight jeans, butterfly chaps, wide-brimmed black Stetsons, rayon shirts with outrageous mixes of the rainbow, and belt b
uckles polished like Cadillac bumpers.

  They were West Enders and blue-collar kids from adjoining counties, their hair mowed into their scalps, their necks cuffed with sunburn. They postured and chewed Red Man and stuck wads of snuff between their lips and gums and tried to talk older than they were, but no one could deny the level of their courage.

  The horses they rode sunfished out of the chutes while the rider tried to bring his spurs above the withers, one hand flung into the sky, his spine twisting like it was about to break loose from the tailbone.

  Or they tied down their inverted palms on bulls that exploded between the legs when the chute opened, entering that breathless moment inside a vacuum before the bull's hooves touched the sod again, the cowbell clanged from its cinch, and the muscles in the bull's back seemed to wrench the rider's entrails out of his rectum.

  They got pitched headlong into the dirt, trampled, stove in, flung against the boards, and sometimes hooked, the bull's horn piercing lung and kidney, tossing the rider in the air, trundling him across the arena like a cloth doll while clowns who wore football shoes tried to save the rider's life with a rubber barrel.

  As L.Q. might say, you could find a worse bunch.

  We were out on the midway when we saw a country band assembled on a stage by a grassy area flanked with booths that sold Indian jewelry. In the back of the band was Lucas Smothers, his sunburst twelve-string guitar slung around his neck on a cloth strap beaded with flowers.

  It was the first time, to my knowledge, he had played anywhere since his arrest. The band kicked it off with 'The Orange Blossom Special' and 'Bringing in the Georgia Mail,' then bled right into Hank Snow's 'Golden Rocket.' Lucas stepped to the front of the group and held the sound hole of his guitar to a microphone on an abbreviated stand and went into an instrumental ride that was beautiful to hear and watch. His left hand corded up and down the frets, never pausing, never making a mistake, while the plectrum flashed across the strings over the sound hole, the double-strung octave notes resonating like both a bass guitar and a mandolin.

  No one on the stage could approach his performance. But when he finished his solo, which also ended the song, the applause was broken, muted, like cellophane burning and then dying. I could see the emptiness in Lucas's face, his eyes blinking, one hand fiddling with his back pocket, as though he could hide his embarrassment there.

  But the leader of the band, a decent man from Austin who well knew his audience, was not one to let a wrong go unchecked. He picked up the microphone and said, 'That boy can do it, cain't he? That was gooder than my mama's grits…' He extended his arm back toward the band. 'Lucas Smothers, ladies and gentlemen, Deaf Smith's own! How about giving him and the whole band a big hand?'

  One of those loudest in his applause was Darl Vanzandt, who stood at the back of the crowd, a smear of cotton candy on his mouth. Three girls, slightly younger than he, were with him. When the band took a break, he touched one of the girls on the shoulder, and she and her two friends went to the stage and began talking excitedly to Lucas.

  'What cha studying on?' Pete said.

  'Oh, not much,' I said, and ran my palm over the soft top of his crewcut.

  'Turn loose of it, Billy Bob. He'll be all right,' Mary Beth said.

  'No, he won't,' I said.

  She looked at my face, then followed my eyes to Garland T. Moon, who sat on top of a loading chute to the left of the stage, eating a snow cone, crunching the ice to the top by squeezing his fist tighter and tighter along the cone. Darl Vanzandt gave him the thumbs-up sign.

  Later, I looked down from the stands and saw Moon wandering along the main aisle, smiling, staring up at the crowd with friendly approval, as though he were one of us, a member of the community enjoying a fine day. He bought a fresh strawberry snow cone from a vendor and bit into it like he was a starving man and it was wet fruit. He touched the pigtails on a little girl's head and brushed his loins against a woman, then stepped back with an elaborate apology on his face.

  'I'll be back,' I said.

  'Billy Bob?' Mary Beth said.

  Moon went out the side exit of the stands to a long, flat cement building that served as a public shower and men's room during Indian powwows and rodeos and county fairs. A few kids stood at the urinals but no Garland T. Moon.

  I walked along the duckboards, past the row of toilet stalls, until I saw a pair of plastic cowboy boots under a door and heard a man coughing deep in his throat. Next to the boots was a strawberry snow cone that had splattered on the duckboards.

  I already saw the next moments in my mind's eye—the door of the stall flying back in his face, my fist nailing him across the bridge of the nose, my boots coming down on his head when he hit the floor.

  But that wasn't the way it played out.

  When I shoved the door open, I watched a man imploding inside, his head and chest bent over the toilet bowl, his hands wedged against the walls, while he tried to expel a stream of dark blood from his mouth and keep from strangling on it at the same time.

  'Hold on, Moon. I'll get here with the medics,' I said.

  I found the ambulance by the entrance to the arena and walked along beside it to the cement building and watched two paramedics load Moon on a gurney and wheel him back outside. A white towel was wrapped around his throat and chin. Each time he coughed the towel speckled with blood.

  'You know this man?' one of the medics asked me.

  'Not really,' I said.

  'Yeah, he does. You might say I'm an old friend of the family,' Moon said.

  'You're not a clever man, Moon,' I said.

  The muscles in his face contorted; his hand came off the gurney and locked around my wrist like links in an iron chain.

  'This don't change nothing. One day I'm gonna tell you something that'll turn you into a dog trying to pass broken glass,' he said.

  * * *

  chapter twenty

  I talked to Marvin Pomroy on the telephone Monday morning. Across the street, the trees on the courthouse lawn were a hard green in the sunlight, and I could see an inmate in jailhouse whites smoking a cigarette behind a barred window on the top floor of the building.

  'The doctor says Moon's insides looked like they'd been chewed by rats. Did you know somebody poured a can of Drano down his mouth when he was a kid in Sugarland?' Marvin said.

  'Moon was a snitch?'

  'I doubt it. It was probably because he wouldn't come across. That's not what's causing his problems today, though. He's got cancer of the stomach.'

  'That's why he's back, isn't it? This is his last show,' I said. 'I should have put it together.'

  'I'm not with you.'

  'He told me he didn't drink. Then he told me he had some old DWIs hanging over his head.'

  'Next time leave him in the toilet stall.'

  I don't know to what degree Garland T. Moon helped coordinate the events of the next night. The pettiness of mind, the vindictiveness, the level of cruelty involved were all part of his mark. But so were they characteristic of Darl Vanzandt. They had found each other, and I suspected neither of them doubted for a moment the intentions and designs of the other, in the same way the psychologically malformed in a prison population stare into hundreds of other faces and immediately recognize those whose eyes are like their own, window holes that give onto the Abyss.

  I heard the story from the outside and the inside, from Mary Beth, whose cruiser was the first to arrive on the 911 at the country club, from Vernon Smothers, and from Bunny Vogel. It was the kind of account, as Great-grandpa Sam had said, that made you ashamed to be a member of the white race. Darl Vanzandt and Moon were aberrations. But how about the others who, with foreknowledge and joy of heart, went along with their scheme?

  Lucas had worked with his father in the fields that day and had told him he was going to play with the band that evening before a baseball game out at the old Cardinals training camp. Vernon Smothers did not believe him, but he had long ago come to believe his son would never tel
l him the truth about anything, that lack of trust was the only permanent reality in their relationship, and so he said nothing at four o'clock when Lucas walked hot and dusty from the field, stripped to his shorts by the barn, and picked the wood ticks off his body in a sluice of water from the windmill.

  Lucas went inside and showered and dressed in a new pair of slacks and shined yellow boots and a form-fitting western-cut sports coat. When he came out on the porch the wind was fresh and cool in his face, the late afternoon filled with promise. He sat on the steps with his twelve-string guitar and waited for Bunny Vogel to pick him up. Lucas's father was still hoeing in the field, his body like a piece of scorched tin silhouetted against the sun, his back knotted with anger, perhaps, or just the demands of his work.

  There were girls in Bunny's car, girls Vernon Smothers hadn't seen before. They wore tiny gold rings threaded through their eyebrows and the rims of their nostrils; they were thin and immature and not sexually appealing but dressed and behaved as though they were, wearing no bras, their shirts partially unbuttoned, their voices urgent and wired, as though they were in the midst of a party that had no walls.

  Vernon didn't understand them. But how could he, he thought, when he couldn't even define what was wrong in his own life. Maybe it was the whole country, he told himself. Everything had gone to hell back in the 1960s. It was that damn war and the people who didn't have to fight it.

  For a few minutes, that thought seemed to bring him solace. He watched from the window as Bunny's car drove away with his son.

  Bunny, Lucas, and the girls went first to a bar and restaurant owned by Bunny's cousin on top of a hill that overlooked a long green valley. They ate barbecue sandwiches on a roofed porch in back and drank vodka collins that were filled with shaved ice and cherries and orange slices. The day had cooled, and the meadows on the hillside were bright with flowers and spring grass. The cousin gave them double shots for the price of one, and Lucas began to feel a closeness to Bunny and the girls that made him see them all in a new light, as though they had always been fast friends, more alike than he had ever thought, and the perfection of the evening were an affirmation that the world was indeed a fine place.