I felt a tingling, a deadness, in my hands that made me open and close my palms.
'The deputy put it down as a Peeping Tom incident. Nothing would have come of it, except I heard him talking about it when I was in the bullpen this morning. I made him go back out to the house with mug shots of Garland Moon and five other of our graduates. The deputy said she took one look at Moon's photo and wouldn't even touch it with her finger when she identified him,' Marvin said.
'Where's Pete now?'
'At school. I'll put a deputy at their house this afternoon.'
'Your deputies are worthless. Did you pick up Moon?'
'He has two witnesses who say he was eating breakfast in a diner at five A.M.'
'You believe them?'
'It's a Peeping Tom complaint. Even if we could charge him, he'd be out on bond in an hour.'
Then his defensiveness, his frustration with me and his job went out of his face.
'I called the lady and offered to keep Pete at our house for a while. She said I was helping Social Services take her little boy from her… Where you going?' he said.
Stonewall Judy granted a recess until the following morning.
I drove home and went into the barn, unlocked the tack room and sorted through the garden hoes and rakes and mauls and picks and axes that were stacked inside an old Mayflower moving drum. The edges of the tools were flecked with bits of dried mud and tangles of dead weeds from cleaning the vegetable garden and flower beds in the early spring, or strung with resinous wisps of pine from the cords of wood I had split last fall. But I knew the tool I was looking for.
It was a mattock whose heavy, oblong iron head had already worn loose from the helve. I clamped a pair of vise grips on the wedge that held the handle fast inside the mattock head, twisted it out of the wood, and slipped the handle free. It was made from ash, thick across the top to support the weight of the iron head, the grain worn smooth at the grip. I propped it on the passenger seat in the Avalon and headed down the road to town just as a curtain of rain moved in a steady line across the clumped-up herd of red Angus in my neighbor's draw.
I parked behind the tin shed where Moon worked. The rain pattered on my slicker and the brim of my Stetson as I pulled open the back door of the shed. A black man in a bikini swimsuit with a yellow rag tied around his head was grinding a metal bracket on an emery wheel.
'Hep you?' he asked.
'Is this your shop?'
'What you want?'
'Garland Moon.'
His eyes went over my person. 'That a chunk of wood under your raincoat?'
'It's been that kind of day.'
He nodded. 'He gone down to Snooker's Big Eight.'
'You going to use the telephone on me?'
'Rather y'all do it there than here… Tell you something, a man like that is looking for somebody to click off his switch. You don't do it, he'll find the right man sooner or later.'
I drove a half mile down the road to a bluff above the river and a long wood building that was ventilated with window fans and set in a grove of oak trees that had been the site of a beer garden during the 1940s. The parking lot was full of pickup trucks and motorcycles, and rain was blowing through the trees and streaking on the front windows, which glowed with purple and red neon.
I walked the length of the building, stepping across puddles, looking through the spinning blades of fans at the felt tables, pinball machines that swam with light, bikers drinking beer at the bar, an enormous Confederate flag ruffling against the far wall. Then I looked through a screen door and saw him bent over a cue, sighting on the diamond-shaped nine-ball rack, the triceps of his poised right arm knotted with green veins. He drove the cue ball into the rack like a spear.
He raised up, his mouth smiling at the perfection of the break, his fingers reaching for the chalk. Then he heard the screen open and close behind him and he turned toward me just as I whipped the mattock handle, edge outward, across his jaw.
His knees buckled slightly, and a choked sound, a grunt, came out of his throat. He pressed his hand against his cheek as though he had a toothache, his eyes glazing with shock and surprise, and I hit him again, this time whipping the helve across his mouth.
His pool cue had clattered to the floor. He looked at it rolling away from him, his mouth draining blood on the apron of the table, and I hit him again, in the ribs, and again in the head, the neck, across the ear; then Moon was stumbling out the back screen door, through the trees, along the edge of the bluff. Down below, the river was covered with rain rings.
I swung the mattock handle with both hands across his spine. I seemed to slip out of time and place, as though I had been absorbed into a red-black square of film that was like the color of fire inside oil smoke. Then, like a man awakening from a dream, I realized the mattock handle was no longer in my grasp, that I was on one knee beside him, his head lolling against a tree trunk, my fist driving into his face.
'That's enough, motherfucker,' a voice said behind me.
I turned and looked up into the disjointed, heated eyes of a booted man in a leather vest whose body glowed with odor.
'Private conversation,' I said. But my words sounded outside my skin, as though they had been spoken by someone else and I heard them through the rain. The back of my right fist was flecked with Moon's blood.
A biker next to him studied my face and extended his arm across his friend's chest.
'His name's Holland. Sonofabitch is crazy. Leave him alone. Snooker done already called the Man,' he said.
They and those who had followed them walked away, their boots splashing in puddles, as though water had no effect on their clothes and bodies, their hair blowing in the wind like dirty string.
I looked again at Moon, his face, the tree he lay against, the grass stains on his elbows, the skinned lesions around his eyes, the rain dripping out of the overhead branches, all of it coming into focus now, my breath quieting in my throat, as though a bird with blood in its beak had flown out of my chest.
'You think you're conwise, but somebody's laughing at you, Moon, just like those gunbulls did when they draped you over a barrel and made a girl out of you,' I said.
He pushed his back up against the tree, wincing slightly, grinning at me. He started to speak, then cleared his mouth and spit in the grass and started over.
'This don't mean nothing. I done something to you won't ever change,' he said.
'The people who hired you are the same people who tried to run you out of town earlier.'
He grinned again and wiped his nose on his sleeve, but I saw my words catch in the corner of his eye.
'You and Jimmy Cole wandered into something you shouldn't out at the Hart Ranch. Then some guys tried to take you down with a baseball bat at your motel. The same guys jumped me behind my barn. One of them was a dude named Felix Ringo.'
He looked out into the rain, his brow knurled, his recessed eye bright, brimming with water.
'A Mexican narc works out of San Antone?' he asked.
'Guy's got a nasty record, Moon. He likes to hurt people. But unlike you, he's got juice with the government.'
'That don't change nothing between me and you.'
'The Big C has its own clock.'
'You still ain't caught on, have you? How come that pipe joint blowed out on your old man? 'Cause some kid lit a cigarette down in the hellhole?'
I stood up and straightened my back. I felt two long ribbons of pain slip down my spine and wrap around my thighs.
'Come on, boy. Ask me,' he said. His legs forked out straight in front of him, like sticks inserted inside his trousers. His flat-soled prison work shoes glistened with mud.
I picked up my hat and slapped the dirt off it on my coat. 'You come near Pete or his mother again, I'll shoot you through the lungs. It's a promise, Moon,' I said, and started to walk away.
'I went back into the pump station and turned on the gas. That pipe was loaded when his arc bit into it. You ever watch a cat chewing on an e
lectric cord? You ought to seen his face when it went,' Moon said.
He began to laugh, holding his ribs because they hurt him, his face convulsing like a pixie's. He pushed the mattock handle at me with one shoe, trying to say something, shaking his head impotently at the level of mirth bursting from his chest.
Moon had to reach into the past to injure me, but across town, at that moment, Darl Vanzandt was buying a length of steel cable and a set of U-bolts, perhaps to prove that no matter what happened to Garland T. Moon, his legacy would be passed on to another generation in Deaf Smith.
* * *
chapter thirty-two
'You followed Darl from the courthouse?' I said to Temple.
We sat on my back screen porch. Pete was in the house, watching television, and the yard was full of pools with islands of leaves floating in them.
'You rubbed his face in it, in front of his friends. A kid like that doesn't pray for his enemies,' she said.
'I'm sorry for the stupid remark I made to you yesterday.'
'I already forgot about it.' She picked up her coffee spoon from her napkin and set it in her saucer.
I waited, but her eyes were deliberately empty, the balls of her fingers motionless on the table, and I said, 'What's he want with a pair of U-bolts and twenty feet of steel cable?'
She shook her head, then said, 'For some reason, those words and the name of Darl Vanzandt make my stomach crawl… You really gonna strike a match on Bunny's soul?'
'It's going to get even worse later.'
She looked at me and then looked through the screen. Her face was quiet, full of the thoughts and connections that she seldom shared. Her shirt had pulled out of her jeans and her baby fat creased on her hips. 'You want to have dinner with me and Pete?' she asked.
Pete's mother had consented to let him return to Temple's house for the next few days. That night we ate at a cafeteria, then I dropped them off and parked my car in back, turned on the flood lamps in the yard, poured some oats in Beau's stall, and walked all the way around the outside of the house with L.Q.' s .45 revolver under my raincoat.
Then I fell asleep on the third floor, with Great-grandpa Sam's journal open in my lap, an illogical image of torn steel cable and roaring car engines threading in and out of my dreams.
Bunny Vogel was dressed in a brown suit and sandals and a wash-faded pink golf shirt when he took the stand. He kept scratching his face with four fingers, as though an insect had burrowed into his cheek, and staring out into the courtroom, as though looking for someone who should have been there but wasn't.
I walked toward the jury box so Bunny would either have to face them when he answered my questions, or avert his eyes or drop his head. It wasn't a kind thing to do.
'Did you sleep with Roseanne Hazlitt, Bunny?' I asked.
'We went out in high school.'
'Did you sleep with her?'
'Yes, sir.'
'Would you say you loved her?'
'Yeah, I reckon. I mean, the way kids do.'
'You were a senior and she was only fifteen when y'all met, is that right?'
'Yes, sir.'
'Was she a virgin?'
'She told me she wasn't.'
'You found out different, though, didn't you?'
He knitted his fingers together, glanced out at the courtroom, at the Vanzandts, the boys he had played football with, the Mexican girl he dated now, at the few empty seats in back where maybe his father would come in late and sit down.
'Bunny?'
'Yes, sir, I found out I was the first,' he said.
'You hurt her, didn't you? You thought you should take her to a hospital?'
'Yes, sir.'
'But not in the county where people might know you?'
He turned his head away from the jury and cleared his throat. 'That's right,' he said.
'The witness will speak up,' the judge said.
'I was afraid. She was underage,' Bunny said. He pushed himself up in the chair and rubbed his hand on the back of his neck.
'Then you went to A&M and dumped her?' I said.
'She didn't lack for boyfriends. She found some a whole lot better than me.'
'Did you punch out Virgil Morales at Shorty's?'
'Yeah, we got a bad history.'
'He called you a pimp?'
Bunny's right hand squeezed on his thigh. He ran his tongue over his lips. 'Yeah, that's what he did,' he said.
'How did Roseanne Hazlitt come to know Mr and Mrs Jack Vanzandt, Bunny?'
'I took her out to their house once. I intro—'
'Introduced her to whom?'
'Just what I said. I took her to their house.'
His words were binding in his throat now, the scar along his jaw turning as dark as blood against his tan.
'Did you have sexual intercourse with Mrs Vanzandt?' I asked.
'Relevance, your honor,' Marvin said.
'I'll allow it,' the judge said. 'The witness will answer the question.'
'I did it once. It was 'cause she was mad over something, I mean with her husband. She was like that,' Bunny said.
'Did Roseanne ever slap you before that night at Shorty's?'
'No, sir.'
'Roseanne said her baptism might wash off on you. Why was she so angry at you, Bunny? Why did she feel so betrayed?'
'Cause she didn't have no friends left. Except Lucas. He's the only one done right by her.'
'But she wanted you to take her to her baptism? Because you owed her in a big way, didn't you?'
'I guess that's what she thought.'
'Why did you owe her, Bunny? Why did she say her baptism might wash off on you?'
He kneaded his hands between his thighs, the balls of his feet tapping neurotically on the stand, his head pulled down on his chest. His long hair fell down around his throat like a girl's.
'Answer the question, please,' I said, but I had lowered my voice now, the way you do when you hope your own capacity for cruelty will be forgiven.
'I drove her to Dallas to meet Mr Vanzandt. He rented three rooms at the Four Seasons, like there wasn't nothing unusual about him being with a couple of young people. But we all knew why we was there. I took her down to his room the first night, for drinks out on the balcony and all, but I left by myself,' he said.
He rested his forehead on his fingers, staring numbly at the floor. Then he added, as though his own behavior had been explained to him by someone else, 'That's what I done, all right.'
Emma Vanzandt rose from her chair and walked down the aisle and out of the courtroom, her face like parchment about to wrinkle in a flame.
'How many times did you do this?' I asked.
'Whenever he wanted her. At least up until she thought she was pregnant and he told her to get it cut out of her, 'cause he wasn't gonna have no woods colt with his name on it…'
The only sound in the courtroom was the hum of the fans and the rain clicking on the windowsills. No one looked at Jack Vanzandt, except his son, who studied his father as though a strange and new creature whom he didn't recognize had just swum into his ken.
Fifteen minutes later a power failure darkened the building for three hours, and Temple and Lucas and I drove to a barbecue restaurant on a hill that overlooked the river outside of town. It had stopped raining, and the sky in the west was blue and you could see the shadows of clouds on the hillsides.
Lucas couldn't eat. I reached over and picked a piece of blooddried tissue paper off his cheek where he had cut himself shaving.
'There's nothing to it. Just be who you are,' I said.
'Be who I am?' he said.
Temple was watching my face.
'You heard me. Tell the truth, no matter what it is. When you go on that stand, you just be Lucas. Don't try to hide anything, don't try to manipulate the jury, don't back away from a question,' I said.
'What are you gonna ask me?'
'I don't know.'
He looked seasick.
'Do what Billy Bob te
lls you,' Temple said.
He pressed his napkin to his mouth, then got up from the table and walked quickly to the men's room.
'You're gonna take him apart, huh?' Temple said.
We waited in my office until the power went back on in the courthouse, then a bailiff phoned me and we went downstairs and across the street and met Marvin Pomroy coming down the courthouse walk.
'I need to talk to you,' he said to me.
'What's up?'
He looked at Temple and Lucas.
'I bet it's earth-shaking stuff, like prosecuting parking offenders in the most corrupt shithole in Texas,' Temple said, and went up the walk with Lucas.
Marvin looked at her back, his eyes involuntarily dropping to her hips.
'You think she'd work for me?' he asked.
'How about getting to it, Marvin?'
'Getting to it? You stoked up Garland Moon and aimed him at this Mexican drug agent, didn't you?'
The air smelled of wet leaves and sewer mains swollen with rainwater and pavement drying in the sunlight. A sheriff's deputy led five black inmates in jailhouse whites past us on a wrist chain.
'Look at me!' Marvin said.
'Take it easy, Marvin.'
'Felix Ringo's got a fuck pad at the Conquistador. He says a guy he swears is Garland Moon tried to get through the bathroom window. He says the guy was carrying one of these small chainsaws, the kind you cut up cordwood with.'
'That's bad news, isn't it?'
'Are you out of your mind? You bust up a psychopath with an ax handle, then screw down his dials and turn him loose on a policeman. You're supposed to be an officer of the court.'
'How do you know I sent him after Ringo?'
'Because you're still a vigilante. Because you still think this is the O.K. Corral.'
'Thanks for sharing, Marvin. I really appreciate it.'
'Sharing? Moon trashed Ringo's place down in San Antone. Get this. He defecated on the upholstery. What's all this tell you?'
'He's terminal and knows it.'
BBH01 - Cimarron Rose Page 26
