Cimarron Rose

by James Lee Burke

  I stroked Beau once along his mane, then stepped across the rain ditch and leaned down into the open window of the lead car.

  “I worked with a Ranger named L.Q. Navarro. We took down the mules and burned out the stash houses y’all didn’t know how to find. You couldn’t shine his boots, bud.”

  He took off his sunglasses and looked indolently into my face.

  “You like the lady, don’t make trouble for her. You’re an intelligent man. You can work with this, I’m convinced of it,” he said, and motioned to his driver.

  Pete and I watched the two cars move slowly away, the windows sealed against the dust, the whitewall tires crunching delicately on the gravel as though the two drivers did not want to chip the gleaming finish on the cars’ exteriors.

  “You pretty mad, Billy Bob?” Pete said.

  “No, not really.”

  “For a person that’s been river baptized and converted to Catholic, too, you sure know how to tell a fib.”

  I rubbed the top of his soft, brushlike hair as the two cars turned down a dirt alley and their dust rolled across the wash hanging behind a row of clapboard shacks.

  CHAPTER

  FOURTEEN

  THE TYPICAL ISOLATION unit in a prison is a surreal place of silence, bare stone, solid iron doors, and loss of all distinction between night and day. Its intention is to lock up the prisoner with the worst company possible, namely, his own thoughts.

  But fear and guilt have corrosive effects in the free people’s world as well.

  Bunny Vogel passed my house twice, driving a customized maroon ’55 Chevy, before he mustered the courage to turn in the driveway and walk out to the chicken run in back, where I was picking up eggs in an apple basket.

  He wore an unbuttoned silk shirt and jeans and Roman sandals without socks, and his tangled bronze-colored hair seemed to glow on the tips against the late sun. With his classical profile and his abdominal muscles that were like oiled leather, he could have been a male model for the covers of romance novels, except for the sunken scar that curled like an inset pink worm along his jawbone.

  “Pretty nice automobile,” I said.

  “What you said the night you busted Darl in the nose? About me being loyal to a guy who cost me a pro career?”

  “I didn’t mean to offend you, Bunny.”

  He let out a breath. “I think you’re gonna pin the tail on any donkey you can. I ain’t gonna be it, Mr. Holland,” he said.

  “You want to come inside?”

  “No . . . The old black guy out at Shorty’s told you Roseanne Hazlitt slapped somebody in the parking lot the night she was killed.”

  “How do you know that?”

  “Darl heard the old guy’d been talking to you. So he kind of got in his face about it.”

  “He’s quite a kid. I don’t think I’ve ever known one exactly like him.”

  “It was me she slapped. I ain’t gonna hide it no more.”

  I picked up a brown egg from behind a tractor tire and dropped it in the basket. I didn’t look at him. I could hear him breathing in the silence.

  “But that’s when I left. I didn’t see Roseanne or Darl or none of the others after that. I ain’t part of nothing that happened later that night,” he said.

  “Who was?”

  “God’s truth, Mr. Holland, I don’t know.”

  “You told me you weren’t mixed up with Roseanne, Bunny.”

  He kneaded his fists at his sides and the veins in his forearms swelled with blood. Then his face colored and his eyes glazed with shame.

  “Damn, I knew this was gonna be a sonofabitch,” he said.

  This is the story he told me.

  HE WAS A high school senior, on the varsity, with the kind of bone-breaking running power that left tacklers dazed and sometimes bloody in his wake, when he first noticed her watching him at practice from the empty stands.

  He remembered the balmy gold afternoon that he walked over to her, his cleats crunching on the cinder-and-pea-gravel track, and tossed the football into her hands. He thought it was a clever thing to do, the kind of gesture that disarmed most girls, that made them feel vulnerable and a little foolish and gave them a chance to be coy and defenseless in his presence.

  She flipped it back at him with both hands, so fast he had to duck to avoid being hit in the face. Then she opened her compact and put on lipstick as though he were not there.

  “How old are you, anyway?” he asked.

  “Fifteen. You got something against being fifteen?” She squeezed her knees together and wagged them back and forth.

  He looked back over his shoulder at the practice field, at the second-string, whose attention was absorbed with thudding their pads against one another and running plays they would never be allowed to run in a game that counted.

  “You want to go to a movie tonight?” he asked.

  “The drive-in?”

  “It don’t have to be the drive-in.”

  “I’ll think about it.”

  “You’ll think about it?”

  “I work at the Dairy Queen. I get off at six. I’ll let you know then.”

  He watched her walk down the empty concrete aisle, then across the worn grass to the bus stop in front of the school, her hips swaying under her plaid skirt. He kept glancing back at the practice field, as though someone were watching him, and his own thoughts confused and angered him.

  He was at the Dairy Queen at five-thirty.

  THEY DID IT a week later, amid a drone of cicadas, in the back of his uncle’s old Plymouth, on cushions that smelled of dust and nicotine, and he realized immediately she had lied and that she was a virgin and he was hurting her even more deeply than the gasp, the clutch of pain in her throat, indicated. But he couldn’t stop, nor did he know how to be gentle, nor could he admit that most of his sexual experience had been with Mexican prostitutes in San Antonio and the mill women his father brought home when he was drunk.

  He was frightened when he saw how much she bled and he offered to drive her to a hospital in another county.

  “You afraid to take me to one here?” she said.

  “I don’t want you in trouble with your folks, that’s all,” he lied.

  “I don’t need a doctor, anyhow. Did you like me?” she said.

  “Yeah, sure.”

  “No, you didn’t. But you will next time,” she said, and kissed him on the cheek.

  Her hand found his. The trees that had gone dark outside the car made him think of stone pillars wrapped with the tracings of fireflies, but he did not know why.

  HE SAW HER two days later in front of the shoe store downtown and bought her a lemon Coke at the small soda fountain in back of the Mexican grocery. He told her he would call her that evening but he didn’t.

  Two weeks passed before he realized it was not he who had avoided her; she had made no phone call to him, had not come out to the practice field as he had expected, had not told anything of their first date to anyone he knew.

  He found himself watching her at her job at the Dairy Queen from his parked car across the street. Then one night at closing time he saw her go in back, in her uniform, and emerge moments later from a side door in suede boots and tight jeans and hoop earrings and vinyl black jacket, her mouth bright with fresh lipstick, and mount the back of a motorcycle a Mexican kid who looked carved out of an oak stump sat splayed upon, his genitalia sculpted against his jeans.

  A half hour later he found them both at the drive-in restaurant north of town.

  “Get in my car, Roseanne,” he said. Then to the Mexican boy, “Here’s the drift, greaseball. You can ride your hog home and fuck your fist tonight. Or walk out of here on broken sticks.”

  “Oh yeah, she told me about you . . . Vogel, the running bohunk, right?” the Mexican replied. “I got news for you, spermbrain. She’
s jailbait. I hope you end up in the Walls and somebody jams a chain saw up your cheeks.”

  An hour later Bunny and Roseanne made love on a bare mattress in the darkened back of the filling station where he worked on weekends.

  THROUGH THE REST of his senior year she was available whenever he wanted her. She rarely made demands or threw temper tantrums, and the fact that he didn’t take her to the parties or places where his friends went seemed of no concern to her. But he would realize, again, belatedly, as had always been the case, he did not really understand the nature of the game. Just as he had worried that her age would diminish him in the eyes of his classmates (until he discovered that, as a West Ender, he was not expected to date anyone of significance, anyway), he also learned that Roseanne didn’t care about his world or friends because she had brought him into hers.

  Sophomore girls giggled when he walked by, and one time three of them hung a condom filled with milk on a string inside his hall locker. When they had slumber parties his father would be wakened by phone calls that made him wonder if his son had become a child molester.

  Then Bunny began to wonder if there were not other men involved with Roseanne besides himself. She knew too much, controlled him too easily, discerned his moods and sexual weaknesses too easily, sitting on top of his thighs, pressing his face into her breasts, kissing his damp hair while he came inside her.

  One night he forced the subject. “You making it with somebody else, Roseanne?” he said.

  “You’re such a silly fucko sometimes . . . Oh, I’m sorry, baby. Come here.”

  That same night they went to San Antonio and had small red hearts tattooed above their left nipples.

  After graduation Bunny worked as a floorman on a drilling rig in Odessa. Then he reported for summer football camp at A&M and a strange phenomenon occurred in his life: he was no longer a West Ender.

  He was invited to sorority mixers, into the homes of the wealthy, taken to dinner at the country club by businessmen, treated as though a collective family of magically anointed people had decided to adopt him as their son.

  He didn’t return to Deaf Smith until Thanksgiving. He didn’t call Roseanne Hazlitt, either.

  He expected anger, recrimination, maybe even a trip on her part to College Station and a public scene that would be ruinous for him. But she surprised him again.

  It was the last game of the season, a blue-gold late fall afternoon like the one the previous year when he had crunched across the track on his cleats and flipped the football into her palms. He got up from the bench and walked back to the Gatorade cooler and saw her standing by the rail in the box seats, next to a marine in his dress uniform. Bunny stared at her stupidly. She took a mum from the corsage on her coat, blew him a kiss, and bounced the mum off his face.

  “Hey, you too stuck-up to say hello, you ole fucko?” she said.

  His bare head felt cold and small in the wind, somehow shrunken inside the weight of his shoulder pads.

  “WHY’D SHE SLAP you in front of Shorty’s, Bunny?” I asked.

  He stuck the flats of his hands in his back pockets. He kicked at the dirt and didn’t reply.

  I looked beyond his shoulder at his customized maroon Chevy, with oversize whitewalls and white leather interior.

  “That’s a great-looking car,” I said.

  THE NEXT DAY, after work, I lit a candle in front of the statue of Christ’s mother at the stucco church. The church was empty, except for Pete, who waited for me in a pew at the back. I walked back down the aisle, dipped my fingers in the holy water font and made the sign of the cross, then winked at Pete and waited for him to join me out on the steps.

  The western sky was ribbed with scarlet clouds, and the air smelled of pines and irrigation water in a field.

  “You come here just to light a candle?” Pete asked.

  “A friend of mine died on this date eleven years ago. Down in Mexico,” I said.

  “How old was he?”

  “Just a mite older than me.”

  “That’s young to die, ain’t it?”

  “I guess it is.”

  He nodded. Then his expression grew thoughtful, as though he were remembering a moment, a question, he had refused to face earlier. “Them men who was in the cars out there, the ones made you mad, that one man said something about you sticking a playing card in the mouth of a dead wetback? You ain’t done anything like that, huh?”

  “They weren’t wetbacks, Pete. They were bad guys. They got what they asked for.”

  “That don’t sound like you.”

  “I lost my friend down there.”

  “I didn’t mean nothing.”

  “I know that. You’re the best, Pete.”

  We walked Beau down the hard-packed dirt street, along the edge of the rain ditch, to the café and ate supper.

  But I didn’t tell Pete the rest of the story, nor have I ever told anyone all of it, at least not until now—the weeks of treatment in Uvalde and Houston for the wound in my right arm, the bone surgery, the morphine dreams that at first leave you with a vague sense of unremembered sexual pleasure, followed by a quickening of the heart, flashes of light on the edges of your vision, like gunfire in darkness, a feeling in the middle of the night that you are about to be violated by someone in the room whom you cannot see.

  After the hospitals, I went back across the river, without a badge, into the arroyo where we were ambushed and the town south of it where three of our adversaries—psychotic meth addicts who would later be killed by federales—had celebrated L.Q.’s death in a whorehouse, then down into the interior, across dry lake beds and miles of twisted moonscape that looked like heaps of cinders and slag raked out of an ironworks, into mountains strung with clouds and finally a green valley that was glazed with rain and whose reddish brown soil was lined with rows of avocado trees.

  I thought I had found the leader, the man L.Q. had taken the rifle from.

  The owner of the only bar in the village thought for a moment about my offer, then picked up the fifty-dollar bill from the counter and folded it into his shirt pocket. He was a big man with a black beard, and part of his face was covered with leathery serrations like dried alligator hide.

  “See, I was a migrant labor contractor in Arizona. That’s where I first seen this guy. I think he was moving brown heroin on the bracero buses. Pretty slick, huh? Yeah, I don’t owe that guy nothing. Come on back here, I’ll show you something,” he said.

  The bar was a cool, dark building that smelled of beer and stone, and through the front door you could see horses tied to a tethering rail and the late sun through the long-leaf Australian pines that were planted along the road.

  We went out the back door to a small cottage that was built of stacked fieldstones and covered with a roof of cedar logs and a blackened canvas tarp. The bartender pushed open the door, scraping it back on the stone floor.

  “That was his bunk. Them stains on the floor, that’s his blood. The guy don’t got no name, but he got plenty of money. Puta too. A couple of them,” the bartender said. “They told me they didn’t like him, he talked about cruel things, made them do weird stuff, know what I mean?”

  “No.”

  “He must have been in the army, maybe down in Guatemala, he done some things to the Indians . . . Here.”

  The bar owner picked up a bucket by the bail, walked outside with it, and shook it upside down. A broken knife blade and a spiral of bloody bandages tumbled out. He flipped the knife blade over with the point of his boot.

  “That’s what the doctor took out of him. Got to be a macho motherfucker to carry that and still have puta on the brain,” he said.

  “Where’d he go?” I could feel my heart beating with the question.

  “A plane picked him up. Right out there in them fields . . . This guy killed somebody who was your friend?”

  “
Not exactly.”

  “Then I’d let it go, man. He told them two girls, his puta, he wired up people to electrical machines . . . You want your money back?”

  “No.”

  “You don’t look too good. I’ll fix you a rum and something to eat.”

  “Why not?” I said, looking at the mist on the avocado orchards and a torn purple and yellow hole in the clouds through which the man without a face or name had perhaps disappeared forever.

  CHAPTER

  FIFTEEN

  THE NEXT MORNING was Saturday, a blue-gray, misty, cool dawn that brought Mary Beth Sweeney to my back door at 6 A.M., still in uniform from the night shift, her thumbs hooked into the sides of her gunbelt.

  I held open the screen. “Come in and join Pete and me for breakfast. We’re fixing to go down to the river in a few minutes,” I said.

  She removed her hat, her eyes smiling into mine.

  “I’m sorry for the other night,” she said.

  “You got to try some of Pete’s fried eggs and pork chops. They run freight trains on this stuff, isn’t that right, Pete?”

  He grinned from behind his plate. “I always know when he’s gonna say something like that,” he said.

  We rode down the dirt track in my car to the bluffs. The water in the river was high and slate green, tangled with mist, the current eddying around the dead cottonwood trees that had snagged in the clay.

  Five feet under the surface was the top of an ancient car, now softly molded with silt and moss. In the winter of 1933 two members of the Karpis-Barker gang robbed the bank in Deaf Smith and tried to outrun a collection of Texas Rangers and sheriffs’ deputies from three counties. Their car was raked with Thompson machine-gun bullets, the glass blown out, the fuel tank scissored almost in half. My father watched the car careen off the road, plow through the corn crib and hog lot, then ignite with a whoosh of heat and energy that set chickens on fire behind the barn.