Cimarron Rose

by James Lee Burke

  The car rolled like a self-contained mobile inferno across the yellow grass in the fields, the two robbers like blackened pieces of stone inside. The ammunition in their stolen Browning Automatic Rifles was still exploding when the car dipped over the bluffs and slid into the river. It continued to burn, like a fallen star, under the water, boiling carp that were as thick as logs to the surface.

  Today the car was a home to shovel-mouth catfish that could straighten a steel hook like a paper clip.

  Mary Beth got out of the Avalon and stretched and hung her gunbelt over the corner of the open door. She watched Pete baiting his hook down on the bank, as though she were forming words in her mind.

  “The man at my apartment, his name’s Brian. I was involved with him. But not anymore. I mean, not personally,” she said.

  “Take this for what it’s worth, Mary Beth. Most feds are good guys. That guy’s not. He put you at risk, then he tried to lean on me.”

  “You?”

  “I suspect y’all are DEA. The FBI doesn’t send its people in by themselves.”

  “Brian leaned on you?”

  “Tried. This guy’s not first-team material.”

  Her eyes were hot, her back stiff with anger.

  “I have to make a phone call,” she said.

  “Stay here, Mary Beth.”

  “I’ll walk back.”

  I took her gunbelt off the corner of the door.

  “Nine-Mike Beretta,” I said.

  “You want to shoot it?”

  “No.” I folded the belt across the holster and handed it to her. The nine-millimeter rounds inserted in the leather loops felt thick and smooth under my fingers. “I don’t mess with guns anymore. Take my car back. Pete and I will walk.”

  Then she did something that neither Pete nor I expected. In fact, his face was beaming with surprise and glee as he looked up from the bank and she hooked one arm around my neck and kissed me hard on the mouth.

  THAT AFTERNOON THE district attorney, Marvin Pomroy, rang me at home.

  “We’ve got Garland Moon in the cage. He wants to see you,” he said.

  “What’s he in for?”

  “Trespassing, scaring the shit out of people. You coming down?”

  “No.”

  “He’s into something, it’s got to do with the Vanzandt family. Anyway, we’ve got to kick him loose in another hour. So suit yourself.”

  THE PREVIOUS NIGHT, Garland T. Moon had showed up first at Shorty’s, then at the drive-in restaurant north of town, dressed in plastic cowboy boots, white pleated slacks, a form-fitting sleeveless undershirt, costume jewelry on his hands and wrists and neck. He wandered among the cars in the parking lot, gregarious, avuncular, a paper shell of french fries in one hand, a frosted Coke in the other. He worked his way into groups of teenagers, as though he were an old friend, and told obscene jokes that made their faces go slack with disgust.

  Then Bunny Vogel’s ’55 Chevy, with a girl in the front passenger seat, and Darl Vanzandt and another girl in back, cruised the lines of parked cars and backed into an empty space twenty feet from Moon.

  He walked to their car, bent down grinning into the windows, his face lighted with familiarity.

  “Who’s that in there?” he said.

  Inside the car, they looked at one another.

  “How about we go for some beers? Maybe I score a little muta?” he said.

  “We don’t know you, man,” Darl said.

  “You kids got a look in your eyes tells me y’all don’t care y’all end up in the gutter or not . . . I’m a student of people. I want to know where that look comes from. Let’s make it scrambled eggs at my place.”

  “I just washed my car. Get your fucking armpits off the window,” Bunny said.

  A few minutes later every car in the drive-in had burned rubber out onto the highway and left Garland T. Moon standing alone, with his french fries and frosted Coke, amid the litter in the parking lot.

  The next day Jack Vanzandt was among a foursome on the ninth green at the country club when a man in a cream-colored suit, a Hawaiian shirt printed with flowers that could have been shotgun wounds, and brand-new white Kmart tennis shoes with the word JOX emblazoned across the tops strolled up from the edge of the water trap, his wisps of red hair oiled on his scalp, and said, “Excuse me, sir, I’d like to talk with you over at the Shake ’n’ Dog about a mutual interest we got . . . Say, this is a right nice golf range, ain’t it? I been thinking about getting a membership myself.”

  GARLAND T. MOON was in the holding cage on the first floor, by the elevator shaft that led up to the jail. He had stripped off his coat and shirt, and was standing bare chested in his slacks and JOX running shoes, his hands hooked like claws in the wire mesh.

  “What kind of bullshit are you up to, Moon?” I said.

  “I got ’em by the short hairs.”

  “Oh?”

  “That little puke Darl Vanzandt done Jimmy Cole, thinks he’s some kind of Satanist. I got news for y’all, there’s people that’s the real thing, that’s made different in the womb, it’s in the Bible and you can check it out. You getting my drift, boy?”

  “Why’d you want to see me?”

  “Tell his father I want a hunnerd-thousand dollars.”

  “Tell him yourself.”

  “Don’t walk away from me . . . You gonna do what I tell you whether you like it or not. I can give testimony I heard Lucas Smothers confess to raping and killing that girl in the picnic ground.”

  “Have you been in a mental asylum?”

  “Where I been is in this tub of nigger bathwater when I was fifteen years old.” His mouth puckered into a peculiar grin, red and glistening, flanged with small teeth.

  “It’s the town, isn’t it, not me or Lucas or some peckerwoods who worked you over with a cattle prod,” I said.

  “You know the old county prison north of the drive-in restaurant? Forty-one years ago two gunbulls put me over an oil drum every Sunday morning and took turns. Tore my insides out and laughed while they done it . . . Y’all gonna get rid of me the day you learn how to scrub the stink out of your own shit.”

  I turned and walked back toward the entrance.

  “You won’t pick up a gun ’cause you killed your best friend! I got the Indian sign on you, boy!” he called at my back.

  MARVIN POMROY WAITED for me outside. He was a Little League coach, and because it was Saturday he wore a pair of seersucker slacks and a washed-out golf shirt without a coat. But, as always, not a hair was out of place on his head, and his face had the serenity of a thoughtful Puritan who viewed the failure of the world through Plexiglas.

  I told him what Moon had said.

  “Why does he seem to have this ongoing obsession with you?” he asked.

  “You got me.”

  “You never ran across him when you were a Ranger or prosecutor?”

  “Not to my knowledge.”

  Down the street a construction crew was fitting a steel crossbeam into the shell of a building and a man in black goggles was tack-welding a joint in a fountain of liquid sparks.

  “What kind of vocational training did Moon get inside?” I asked.

  “He picked cotton. That’s when he wasn’t in lockdown . . . Why?”

  “Moon’s an arc welder. So was my father.”

  “Big reach.”

  “You got a better one?” I asked.

  LATE THAT EVENING the sheriff parked his new Ford pickup at his hunting camp above the river. He was proud of his camp. The log house on it was spacious and breezy, with cathedral ceilings, lacquered yellow pine woodwork, a fireplace built from river stones and inset with Indian tomahawks and spear points recovered from a burial mound, stuffed tarpon and the heads of deer and bobcats mounted on the walls and support beams, a green felt poker table cupped with
plastic trays for the chips, a freezer stocked with venison and duck, ice-cold vodka and imported beer in the refrigerator, glass gun cases lined with scoped rifles.

  He showered and dried off in the bathroom, then walked naked into the kitchen and opened a bottle of German beer, turned on the television set atop the bar, and punched in the number of an escort service in San Antonio on his cordless phone.

  From the kitchen window he could see the sun’s last fiery spark through the trees that rimmed the hills above the river, the gray boulders that protruded from the current, his dock and yellow-and-red speedboat snugged down with a tarp, the flagstone terrace where he barbecued a whole pig on a spit for state politicians who introduced him with pride to their northern friends as though he were a charismatic frontier reflection of themselves.

  Not bad for a boy with a fourth-grade education who could have ended up road-ganging himself.

  The sheriff had always said, “We all work for the white man. You can do it up in the saddle with a shotgun, or down in the row with the niggers. But there’s no way you ain’t gonna do it.”

  The woman who answered the number in San Antonio said his visitor would be there in two hours.

  The sheriff drank the last of his beer and let the foam slide down his throat. His massive torso was ridged with hair, his back and buttocks pocked with scars from the naked screws on football shoes that had thundered over his body when he had played defensive lineman in a semipro league at age nineteen. He peeled the cellophane off a cigar, lit it, wet the match under the faucet, and dropped it into a plastic-lined wastebasket under the counter. Then he seemed to have turned from the sink, perhaps when a shadow fell across his neck and shoulders.

  The ax was one he recognized. It had rested on a nail in the shed above his woodpile. He had honed it on a grinding stone until its edge looked like a sliver of ice.

  The first blow was a diagonal one, delivered at a downward angle. The blade bit into the sheriff’s face from below the left eye to the right corner of the mouth.

  That was the first blow. The others were struck along a red trail from the kitchen to the gun case in the living room, where the sheriff gave it up forever and lay down among the stuffed heads that had always assured him he was intended to be the giver of death and never its recipient.

  CHAPTER

  SIXTEEN

  SUNDAY MORNING, BEFORE the sun was above the hills, I watched from behind the crime scene tape while the paramedics rolled the sheriff’s body on a gurney to the back of an ambulance. Marvin Pomroy nudged me on the arm, then walked with me toward my Avalon.

  “You got any thoughts?” he asked.

  “No.”

  “He was dead at least two hours before the hooker got there. The intruder could have cleaned the place out. But he didn’t. So it’s a revenge killing, right?”

  “A lot of TDC graduates hated his guts,” I said.

  Marvin looked back at the log house. His face was dry and cool in the wind, but the skin jumped in one cheek, as though a string were pulling on it.

  “Two Secret Service agents were in here earlier. What’s their stake in a guy who spit Red Man on restaurant floors?” he said.

  “Not DEA?”

  “No.”

  “One of them was named Brian?”

  “That’s right, Brian Wilcox. A real charmer. You know him?”

  “Maybe. You want to go to breakfast?”

  “After looking at what’s inside that house?”

  “The sheriff was a violent man. He dealt the play a long time ago.”

  “Where the fuck do you get your ideas? Pardon my language. Violent man? That’s your contribution? Thanks for coming out, Billy Bob. I don’t think my morning would have been complete without it.”

  I DROVE UP a sandy, red road that twisted and dipped through hardwoods and old log skids and pipeline right-of-ways that were now choked with second growth.

  Up ahead, a dark, polished car with tinted windows and a radio antenna came out of an intersecting road and stopped in front of me.

  The man whom Mary Beth called Brian got out first, followed by two others who also wore aviator’s sunglasses and the same opaque expression. But one man, who had rolled down a back window part way, did not get out. Instead, Felix Ringo, the Mexican drug agent, lit a cigarette in a gold holder and let the smoke curl above the window’s edge.

  “Step out of your car,” Brian said.

  “I don’t think so,” I said.

  The man next to him opened my door.

  “Don’t be shy,” he said.

  I turned off the ignition and stepped out among them. The air was motionless between the trees and smelled of pine and the rainwater in the road’s depressions. Brian raised his finger in my face. It stayed there, uncertainly, as though he were on the brink of doing something much more serious and precipitous.

  “I don’t have the right words. Maybe it’s enough to simply say I don’t like you,” he said.

  “You’re over the line, bud,” I said.

  “You’re not a police officer anymore, you’re not an assistant U.S. attorney, you’re a meddlesome civilian. That fact seems to elude you.”

  “You going to move your car now?”

  “No.” His finger was stiff, the nail thin and sharp and trembling below my eye. “Stay away from crime scenes that don’t concern you, stay away from the lady . . . You got anything clever to say?”

  “Not really. Except if you put your finger in my face again, I’m going to break your jaw. Now, get your fucking car out of my way.”

  I WENT BACK home and weeded the vegetable garden. I curried out Beau and cleaned his stall and set out catfish lines in the tank and shoveled out the chicken run and worked buckets of manure into my compost pile with a pitchfork, my calluses squeezing tighter and tighter on the smooth wood of the handle, until I finally gave it all up and flung the pitchfork into a hay bale and went inside.

  The palms of my hands rang as though they had been stung by bees, as though they ached to close on an object that was hard and round and cool against the skin and flanged with a knurled hammer that cocked back with a loud snap under the thumb.

  Moon had said some people are made different in the womb. Was he just describing himself, or did the group extend to people like me and Great-grandpa Sam?

  Or Darl Vanzandt?

  Through my open front windows I heard the deep, throaty rumble of the Hollywood mufflers on his ’32 Ford, then a cacophony of straight pipes and overpowered engines and chopped-down Harleys behind him.

  He turned into the drive, alone, the exposed chrome engine so fine-tuned a silver dollar would balance on the air cleaners. His friends pulled onto the shoulder of the road, on my grass, their tires crumpling the border of my flower beds. They cut their engines and lit cigarettes and lounged against their cars and trucks and vans and motorcycles, as though their physical connection to a public road gave them moral license to behave in any fashion they wished.

  Darl swung a dead cat by its tail, whipping it faster and faster through the air, and thudded it against the screen door.

  I went out on the porch with my cordless phone in my hand.

  “I already put in a 911 on you, Darl. Time to head for the barn,” I said.

  “I’m gonna kick your ass. Don’t believe me, you chickenshit lying motherfucker? Come out here and see what happens next,” he said.

  I walked toward him. His wide-set green eyes seemed to shift in and out of focus, as though different objects were approaching him at the same time. His upper lip was beaded with perspiration, his nostrils dilated and pale. The skin of his face drew back against the bone. I could smell beer and fried meat and onions on his breath.

  “I mean you no harm. I never have. Neither does Lucas. Go on home,” I said.

  “You’re in my face every day. You’re spreading lies
all over town.”

  “You and your friends killed somebody’s cat? That’s what y’all do to show everybody you’re big shit?”

  “I ain’t afraid of you.”

  I stepped between him and the road, with my back to his friends, cutting off his view of them.

  “Bunny Vogel’s not here to bail you out. You’re stoned and you’re frightened. If you force me to, I’ll show everyone here how frightened you are,” I said.

  “If I was scared, I wouldn’t be here.”

  “You’re afraid of what you are, Darl. Your folks know it. In their guts, those guys out there do, too. You elicit pity.”

  He opened his mouth to speak. It made a phlegmy, clicking sound but no words came out. His resolve, all the martial energy he had been able to muster while driving down the road with his Greek chorus surrounding him, seemed to fade in his eyes like snowflakes drifting onto a woodstove.

  “Talk to your dad. Get some help. Don’t do something like this again,” I said.

  “I been sick. I had flu all week. I don’t have to listen to anything you—” he said.

  I cupped my hand around his upper arm. It felt flaccid, without tone or texture, as though the downers in his system had melted the muscle into warm tallow. I opened his car door for him, put him inside, and closed the door. His eyes were filled with water, his cheeks flushed with pale red arrowpoints.

  “You want a cop to drive you home?” I asked.

  He didn’t answer. When I went back inside it was quiet for a long time, then I heard his engine start up and his tires crunch on the gravel and back out on the road. Some of the others followed, looking at one another, unsure, and some turned back toward town, all of them like people trying to create their own reality, from moment to moment, inside a vacuum.

  THE COUNTRY CLUB had been all-white since its inception in the early 1940s, first by the legal exclusivity the law allowed at the time, then by custom and defiance and contempt. It had remained an island of wealth and serenity in an era that had produced cities scrawled with graffiti and streets populated by the homeless and deranged.