Cimarron Rose

by James Lee Burke

  “I told Garland Moon I thought he’d killed Cole. He probably decided to move the body.”

  “What were you doing with Moon?”

  “Either he or Cole was in my barn. I tried to warn him off.”

  “Don’t try to ’front this guy on your own,” he said. But I knew I was not the source of his agitation. He leaned forward in the chair, a heated sheen on his face. “Look, I’ve got a problem here that’s eating my lunch. The fire was on the old Hart property. Nobody’s lived there for thirty years. But I got the feeling most of those deputies had been there before. I also got the feeling the sheriff didn’t want anybody hanging around there.”

  “Who owns the place now?”

  “A California company that sells western real estate to people tired of shopping in malls where the Crips and the Bloods have firefights. But I don’t see anything there worth hiding, a strip of ground between the hills, the kind of place where the hoot owls screw the jackrabbits.”

  “Why you telling me this?”

  “That’s the irony. I work in a county that’s so corrupt I have to confide in a defense lawyer who rides his horse into barrooms. I grant you, it’s a pitiful situation,” he said.

  “Thanks, Marvin. The ME thinks Jimmy Cole was suffocated in a hog lot?”

  “Moon wouldn’t do that to an old friend. He put an ice pick inside his head.”

  AFTER WORK THAT day I took the rake and garden shears and a gunny sack out of the barn and walked to our family cemetery on the far side of the tank. It was bordered by sandstone fence posts drilled through the center to hold the cedar rails that my father had shaved and beveled and notched thirty-two years ago, the year before he had climbed down into a bellhole on a natural gas pipeline to mend a leak in a faulty weld.

  Each year he faked his physicals or got someone else to take them for him, because, like many pipeline arc welders, his eyes were filled with tiny pinholes from weaving a circle of fire that was as white as the sun around a pipe joint. My mother said his vision had become so bad that clarity of sight came to him only when he struck the stringer-bead rod against the pipe’s metal and saw again the flame that was as pure to him as the cathedral’s bells were to the deaf bellringer Quasimodo.

  My father never saw the apprentice with him pull a Zippo from his khakis and light a cigarette. The explosion blew the glass out of the welding truck like brittle candy.

  My mother, who had been a librarian and an elementary school teacher, was buried next to him. After my father’s death, she had purchased a common headstone for them both, inscribed with her name as well as his, with her birth date and a chiseled dash that left the date of death to another hand.

  I raked their graves and Great-grandpa Sam’s clean, and those of all the other Hollands buried there, trimmed the grass around the headstones, and weeded out the rose beds I had dug under the cedar fence rails. Then I picked wildflowers from the field and set them on my parents’ graves, and cut a solitary yellow rose and laid it against Great-grandpa Sam’s headstone.

  The wind was warm blowing across the field, rippling the grass like new wheat, and I could smell the river and the water in the irrigation ditches and the day’s heat baked into the scarred hardpan that had once been part of the Chisholm Trail. I didn’t hear the footsteps behind me.

  “I saw you from the back of the house,” Mary Beth said. She wore tan slacks, with high pockets, and sandals and a magenta shirt, and she carried a picnic basket by the straw bail in her right hand.

  “How you doin’, slim?” I said.

  “Slim? If you aren’t a peach.”

  “You figure out who those guys in the cruiser were?”

  “Take your choice.”

  “Maybe it’s time your people pulled you out.”

  “Subject closed. You like fried chicken?”

  “You bet.”

  We walked across the field to a grove of oaks on the bluff above the river. She spread a checkered cloth on the grass and set it with silverware, tiny salt and pepper shakers, turkey-and-cheese sandwiches, guacamole, taco chips, potato salad, and a thermos of lemonade. Her hair hung over her cheeks while she placed each item carefully on the paper plates.

  “You’re making me self-conscious,” she said.

  “You’re a great-looking lady, Mary Beth.”

  Her eyes crinkled in the corners. I was standing by the edge of the checkered cloth now. When she rose to her feet her face was only inches away from mine. I touched her hair, then I put my mouth on hers. Her eyes were open, then they closed and she put her arms around my back and I felt her breasts against my chest and a moment later the heat of her cheek press against mine.

  I was suddenly involved with the old male impossibility of making love with any degree of dignity while standing up. We sat on the grass, then I laid her back with her head on the edge of the checkered cloth and kissed her again. The wind was blowing from across the river, eddying through the grass above the bluff, and the clouds piled on the western horizon were purple and edged with fire. I looked down into her eyes.

  Behind me I heard a horse’s hooves moving through the dead oak leaves. I turned and saw Beau, my Morgan, coming through the shade, and a little boy with a haircut like a soft brush riding bareback atop him.

  “Hi! What ch’all doin’?” he said, pushing a branch out of his face with his arm.

  “Hey, Pete, what’s goin’ on?” I said, my voice coming back to me like a man bursting to the surface of a deep pool.

  “We still going fishing?”

  “Wouldn’t miss it, bud. You want some chicken? This is Mary Beth.”

  He grinned at her. He was barefoot and in overalls and looked like a small clothespin on Beau’s spine.

  “I already eat,” he said.

  “We have some lemonade,” she said. She was sitting up now, one arm propped behind her.

  “That’s all right. I’m butting in.”

  “I’d tell you, wouldn’t I?” I said.

  He grinned at nothing, flicking the reins across the back of his hand.

  “I’m gonna take Beau back,” he said.

  “Billy Bob told me a lot about you, Pete. I’d like it if you’d join us,” Mary Beth said.

  His eyes shifted off her, his grin never fading, then he slipped off Beau’s back onto the ground.

  “This is the smartest little guy in Deaf Smith,” I said.

  “I knew you was gonna say that,” he said.

  THAT NIGHT I drove down the road to the convenience store to buy a carton of milk. The store was on the top of a rise, next to a cornfield, its bright white-and-red exterior and neon-scrolled windows and lighted gas pumps and wide cement parking area surrounded by rural darkness. It was also a hangout for East Enders dragging the main road through town.

  Their cars were parked by the phone booth, their doors open to catch the breeze, the cement pad around their feet already littered with beer cans, dirty napkins, and the cigarette butts they had emptied from their ashtrays.

  On the way back to my car Darl Vanzandt got up from the passenger seat of his cherry-red chopped-down 1932 Ford and came toward me, the pupils of his wide-set eyes like burnt cinders. He drank the foam out of a quart bottle of Pearl and flung it whistling into the darkness. When I tried to walk around him, he stepped into my path, his courage inflating now with the audience that had formed at his back.

  “Whoa, there, bud,” I said.

  “You bothered all my friends. Now you’re bothering my stepmother,” he said.

  “Wrong.”

  “You’re setting me up to go to jail. All because of that little fart Lucas Smothers,” he said.

  “Good night,” I said.

  But he stepped in front of me again. He pushed me in the breastbone with his fingers, then he did it again, grinding his teeth slightly, thumping hard against the bone.
/>   “Don’t do this, Darl,” I said.

  The skin around his mouth was taut and gray, his nose tilted slightly upward, the fear and loathing in his eyes like a candle flame that didn’t know which way to blow. I dropped my eyes, and a smile exposed his teeth.

  He slapped the carton of milk from my hand. It exploded in a white star on the pavement.

  I stepped backward, then walked in a wide circle toward my car.

  I heard his feet running behind me. By the time I could turn he was almost upon me. I brought up my elbow and drove it into his nose.

  He doubled over, his cupped hands smeared with blood as soon as they touched his face. Then Bunny Vogel was next to him, his arm around Darl’s shoulders, holding a wadded T-shirt against Darl’s nose.

  “I’ll get some ice, then we’ll go home. It ain’t broken. The blood’s darker when it’s broken,” Bunny said.

  “You tell his dad what happened, Bunny,” I said.

  “It ain’t my job to tell on people.”

  “You’re sure loyal to a kid who cost you a career in the pros. I wonder why that is,” I said.

  He led Darl back toward the parked cars of the East Enders. Then he glanced back at me, his eyes like those of a man who just realized his future will be no different from his past.

  CHAPTER

  TWELVE

  THE NEXT MORNING I ate breakfast on the kitchen table and read from Great-grandpa Sam’s journal.

  JULY 7, 1891

  Today I cane-fished in the river for perch and shovel-mouth with Jennie, which is the Christian name of the Rose of Cimarron. The hills was covered with Indian paintbrush and sunflowers and we cooked our fish in a brush arbor with a spring that stays wet through the summer months.

  It is country that begs for a church house, but it is infested with a collection of halfwits and white trash that calls themselves the Dalton-Doolin gang. They live in mud caves along the river and consider it the high life. A Chinaman brings them opium and squaws give them the clap. They rob trains because the smell on them is such they would get run out of a town before they could ever make it to the bank.

  A little twerp named Blackface Charley Bryant threw a temper tantrum and commenced firing a rifle into the sky and using profane language in Jennie’s and my presence. He come by his nickname when his own revolver blew up in his hand and turned half his face into an eggplant. I informed him I did not want to forget my ordination and cause him injury, but I would probably do so should I put a third eye in the middle of his forehead.

  I am tempted to wrap Jennie in fence wire and carry her out of here across my pommel. But Judge Isaac Parker has had over fifty federal lawmen shot to death in these parts, and I think he would as lief hang a woman outlaw as a man, since people tell me he has already hung a highwayman’s horse.

  Romancing that woman is like chasing cows in dry lightning. It’s a whole lot easier getting into the saddle than out of it. Such is the nature of pagan ways.

  When I walked out to my car Lucas Smothers pulled into the driveway in his skinned-up truck.

  “My father says I got to tell you something. Even though it’s just stuff I heard,” he said.

  “Go ahead.”

  He got out of the truck and leaned against the fender. The shadow of a poplar tree seemed to cut his face in half. He bit a hangnail.

  “About the firemen finding Jimmy Cole’s body at the old Hart Ranch? Like, maybe Garland Moon killed him and tried to burn him up with some old tires? I mean, that’s what the sheriff’s thinking, ain’t it?” he said.

  “It’s Moon’s style.”

  “Darl Vanzandt and some others used to get fried on acid and angel dust out there. Roseanne went there with them once. She said Darl got crazy when he was on dust.”

  “What’s Darl have to do with Jimmy Cole?”

  “Six or seven months back, a hobo died in a fire by the railway tracks. The paper said he was heating a tar paper shack with a little tin stove and a can of kerosene. I heard maybe Darl and some others done it.”

  He looked at the expression on my face, then looked away.

  “Why would he kill a hobo?” I asked.

  “There’s kids that’s cruel here. They don’t need no reason. Roseanne said maybe Darl’s a Satanist.”

  “We’re talking about murdering people.”

  “I seen stuff maybe older folks don’t want to know about. That’s the way this town’s always been.”

  “Jimmy Cole wasn’t killed on the Hart Ranch. His body was moved there.”

  “It wasn’t Darl?”

  “I doubt it.”

  He wiped his palms on his jeans. “I got to get to work . . . Mr. Holland?”

  “Yes?”

  He scraped at a piece of rust on the truck door with his thumbnail.

  “You doing all this ’cause you figure you owe me?” he said.

  “No.”

  He was silent while the question he couldn’t ask burned in his face.

  “Your mother and I were real close. If it had gone different, we might have gotten married. For that reason I’ve always felt mighty close to you. She was a fine person,” I said.

  His throat was prickled and red, as though he had been in a cold wind. He got in the truck, looking through the back window while he started the engine so I would not see the wet glimmering in his eyes.

  But the lie that shamed, that I could not set straight, was mine, not his.

  I PARKED MY car around the corner from the bank and walked back toward the entrance to my office. Emma Vanzandt sat in a white Porsche convertible by the curb, two of her tires in the yellow zone. She wore dark glasses and her black hair was tied up with a white silk scarf. When I said hello, she looked at the tops of her nails. I stepped off the sidewalk and approached her car anyway.

  “Is Jack inside?” I asked.

  “Why don’t you go see?”

  “Your son attacked me, Emma.”

  The backs of her hands were wrinkled, like the surface of bad milk, networked with thick blue veins. She spread her fingers on the steering wheel and studied them.

  “If you think you can solve your problems at our expense, you don’t know Jack or me,” she said.

  I went up the stairs and opened the frosted glass door into my outer office. My secretary was trying to busy herself with the mail, but the strain on her composure showed on her face like a fine crack across a china plate. Jack was staring at a picture on the wall, without seeing it, his hands on his hips. When he turned to face me, his vascular arms seemed pumped and swollen with energy, as though he had been curling a barbell.

  “Come inside, Jack,” I said.

  “That’s very thoughtful of you,” he replied.

  He closed the inner door behind him. He bit his bottom lip; his hands closed and opened at his sides.

  “I can’t describe what I’m feeling right now,” he said.

  “Your son’s problem is dope and booze. Address the situation, Jack. Don’t blame it on other people.”

  “I feel like taking off your head.”

  “Oh?”

  “You put me in mind of a blind leper climbing into a public swimming pool.”

  “I get it. I’m the source of everyone’s discontent but don’t know it.”

  “You got this guy Moon stoked up, then you broke my boy’s nose.”

  “Moon?”

  “He wouldn’t be around here if it wasn’t for you.”

  “What do you care?”

  “He hauled a dead man out to my property, what’s his name, that character Jimmy Cole.”

  “Cole was found on the old Hart place.”

  “I have an eighth interest in it . . .” He seemed distracted and tried to regain his train of thought. “I want you to leave us alone. It’s a simple request. You’ve fucked up your life
and your career. But I’ll be damned if you’ll make my family your scapegoat.”

  I stepped closer to him. I could feel the blood rise in my head. In the corner of my eye I thought I saw L.Q. Navarro watching me, wagging a cautionary finger.

  “You want to explain that, Jack?” I asked.

  “I gave orders in Vietnam that cost other men their lives. It comes with the territory. That’s what maturity is about. I’m embarrassed to be in your presence,” he replied.

  He went out the door, nodding to the secretary as he passed.

  I SAT ALONE in the steam room at the health club, the sting of his words like needles in my face. I pushed a towel into a bucket of water and squeezed it over my head and shoulders. L.Q. Navarro leaned against the tile wall, his dark suit bathed in steam, his face as cool and dry as if he stood on an ice floe.

  “Don’t let them kind get to you,” he said.

  “Which kind is that?”

  “The kind with money. I don’t know what that boy did in Vietnam, but down in Coahuila we went up against automatic weapons with handguns. We shot the shit out of those guys, too.”

  “I grant, they knew we’d been in town.”

  He took off his Stetson and spun it on his finger. His teeth shone when he smiled.

  “That woman deputy, the tall one, Mary Beth’s her name? She was good to the little boy. That’s how you tell when it’s the right woman,” he said.

  “You saved me from burning to death, L.Q. It was the bravest thing I ever saw anyone do.”

  He grinned again, then his face became somber and his eyes avoided mine.

  “I got to leave you one day, bud,” he said.

  A fat man with a towel wrapped around his loins opened the steam room door and came inside. L.Q. fitted his hat on his head and walked toward the far wall, where the tiles melted into a horizontal vortex spinning with wet sand.

  I SHOWERED AND walked back to my locker in the dressing room, then caught myself glancing sideways at my reflection in the wall mirror, at the same reddish blond hair that Lucas had, the same six-foot-one frame, the puckered white scar on my upper right arm where a bullet had snapped the bone the night L.Q. died, the long stitched welt on top of my foot from the night he pulled me out of the grass fire and we thundered down the hills with tracers streaking over our heads in the darkness.