Cimarron Rose

by James Lee Burke

  Outside, Bunny looked at his watch. “I guess we ought to haul ass,” he said.

  Lucas picked up the fresh collins in front of him and drank half of it. It was as sweet as lemonade, the vodka subtle and cold and unthreatening. The girls watched him while he drank.

  “What’s going on?” he asked.

  They smiled at one another.

  “We were saying you’re cute,” the third girl said.

  “I’m fixing to boogie. Y’all coming or not?” Bunny said.

  “Darl can throw a shitfit if you keep him waiting,” the blonde girl said.

  “Darl?” Lucas said.

  “We’re gonna meet him at the drive-in. If he’s not too wiped out,” she replied.

  “Y’all didn’t say nothing about Darl,” Lucas said.

  “He wants to come. What’s the law against that?” the blonde girl said. She stood up. Her face seemed angry now, vexed. “People can go where they want. He can’t help it if he’s rich.”

  “I didn’t say that he . . . ,” Lucas began. He rose from his chair and felt a rush, like a hit of high-grade speed, a white needle that probed places in his mind he had never seen before. “I just meant . . .”

  But he didn’t know what he meant, and he followed Bunny through the bar and out into the parking lot, the gravel crunching under his boots now, the wind hot for some unexplainable reason, tinged with the smell of alkali.

  Later, they backed into an empty slot at the drive-in restaurant, next to Darl’s softly buffed ’32 Ford, and ordered a round of long-neck Lone Stars. Lucas could see the back of Darl’s neck, thick and oily, pocked with acne scars. Three other boys were in the car with him, their caps on backward, their upper bodies swollen from steroid injections and pumping iron. One of them flipped a cigarette at the waitress’s butt when she walked by.

  Lucas drank down the beer. It felt cold and bright in his throat. But he was sweating now, his heart beating faster than it should.

  “I got to get out,” he said from the backseat.

  “What’s wrong?” Bunny said.

  “I don’t know. I got to get out. I cain’t breathe good. It’s hot in here.”

  He opened the back door and stood in the breeze. The hills were flushed with a dark purple haze now, the strings of lights over the parking lot humming with a hot buzz like nests of electrified insects.

  He walked to the men’s room, but the door, which was metal and fire engine-red, was bolted from the inside. He stared at the rows of parked cars, at the Mexican and black cooks through the kitchen window, the waitresses who carried metal trays loaded with food and frosted mugs of root beer. They all seemed to function with an orderly purpose from which he was excluded, that he witnessed as a clown staring through a glass wall. His face tingled and simultaneously felt dead to the touch. He hadn’t felt this drunk, no, train-wrecked, since the night Roseanne Hazlitt was attacked. That thought made him break into a fresh sweat.

  He gave up waiting for the person to come out of the locked rest room and walked back to Bunny’s car, his eyes avoiding Darl and his friends. The engines in both the Chevy and Ford were idling, the Hollywood mufflers throbbing above the asphalt like a dull headache.

  “Hey, what’s happenin’, man?” Darl said.

  “Hi, Darl,” Lucas said.

  “You want to ride out with us?”

  “Bunny’s taking me. Thanks, anyway.”

  “Good-looking threads, man. They’re gonna dig it,” Darl said. Somebody in the backseat laughed, then dropped his unfinished fish sandwich out the chopped-down slit of a window.

  Darl grinned at Lucas as he drove the Ford out of the parking lot onto the highway, his boxed haircut and one-dimensional profile rippled with the glow of the overhead beer sign. When he gave the Ford the gas the rear end rocked back on the springs and wisps of smoke spun off the back tires.

  Lucas started to open the back door of the Chevy. Bunny’s head was twisted around in the window, looking at him, the corner of his lip pinched down between his teeth.

  “Kid, you ain’t got to do this. Most of those country club people are dickheads. Maybe we ought to say fuck it,” Bunny said.

  The girls sat expressionless, their gaze fastened on their cigarettes, waiting, as though caught between Bunny and a predesigned plan that was about to go astray.

  “I’m all right. I’m gonna get some coffee out there. It’s not a late gig, it’s just one or two sets, anyway,” he said. He sat down on the rolled white leather and tried to wash a taste like pennies out of his mouth with the last swallows in a bottle of Lone Star that one of the girls handed him.

  Bunny didn’t seem to move for a long time, biting a piece of skin off the ball of his thumb. Then he shifted the Chevy into gear and turned out of the lighted parking lot into the darkness of the highway.

  BY THE TIME they reached the country club, Lucas’s hair was mushy with his own sweat; his tongue felt too large for his mouth; his hands had the coordination of skillets.

  He saw the columned front porch of the country club go by the back window of Bunny’s Chevy, then the swimming pool that was built in the shape of a shamrock. The voices around him were like cacophony in a cave. Up ahead, Darl Vanzandt’s Ford and two other cars with kids inside them were parked in the shadows, under live-oak trees, just outside the flood lamps that lighted the terrace where people in formal dress were dancing to orchestra music. Bunny slowed the Chevy and turned in the seat and looked at Lucas.

  “You gonna be sick?” he said.

  But Lucas couldn’t answer.

  Bunny hit the steering wheel with the flat of his fist. “Oh man, how’d I get in this?” he said.

  Then Darl was at the window, his friends behind him. Their cigarettes sparked like fireflies in the darkness. One of them carried a lidded bucket by the bail.

  “How much acid you give him?” the boy with the bucket said.

  “I didn’t give him nothing,” Bunny said.

  “Pull him out,” Darl said.

  “Let it slide, Darl. He’s really fried,” Bunny said.

  “Smothers is a geek. So he gets what geeks got coming,” Darl said.

  “Come on, think about it. Your old man’s gonna shit a bowling ball,” Bunny said.

  “Here’s twenty dollars. Go down to San Antone and get a blow job. You’ll feel better,” Darl said. He was leaning on the window jamb now. He touched the stiffened edges of two ten-dollar bills against Bunny’s jawbone.

  Bunny pushed his hand away.

  “I ain’t gonna do this,” he said.

  “Pretty fucking late, Bunny,” the boy with the bucket said. Then he dropped his voice into a deep range and said, “I ain’t gonna do this. I got my fucking standards.”

  “You know what it’s like to pull a two-by-four out of your ass?” Bunny said.

  “So you don’t have to help. Pop the trunk,” Darl said.

  Two of Darl’s friends lifted Lucas by his arms out of the backseat and held him between them like a crucified man. Bunny breathed loudly through his nose, then pulled a latch under the dash. Darl reached into the trunk, took out Lucas’s twelve-string guitar and case by the handle, and slammed the lid.

  “Thanks for hauling the freight. No hard feelings. You got no beef with him. I do,” Darl said.

  Bunny started his car and began backing off the grass toward the drive. He had cut his headlights, but in silhouette he could see Darl and his friends pulling off Lucas’s clothes, like medieval grave robbers stripping a corpse. The girl in the front seat with Bunny clicked on the radio, increased the volume, and began putting on fresh makeup.

  “He buys you blow jobs? That’s disgusting,” she said.

  “Act like your brain stem ain’t a stump,” he said, then in his frustration clenched the steering wheel so tightly his palms burned.

  “Let’s go b
ack to the drive-in. I got to pee,” a girl in the backseat said.

  Bunny wanted to floor the Chevy across the grass and hedges and flower beds onto the drive, but he stared dumbly at the scene taking place in front of him, wondering even then how he would deal with this later, wondering, perhaps, even who or what he was.

  Lucas was shirtless, sitting on his buttocks now, his trousers pulled down around his feet, encircled by Darl and the three boys from the drive-in and the others who had gotten out of their cars. But Bunny’s attention was diverted by another figure, an older man, one whose pale skin seemed to glisten with a dull sheen like glycerin. On the edge of the circle, his face softly shadowed by the branches of a long-leaf pine, was Garland T. Moon, a cigarette cupped in his hand, like a soldier smoking furtively on guard duty. The corner of his mouth was wrinkled in a smile.

  Two boys with their caps on backward hiked Lucas up from the ground. Darl draped the guitar from its cloth strap around Lucas’s neck while another boy tightened Lucas’s belt around his ankles. Then they stretched wide the elastic on his Jockey undershorts and poured mud and straw and liquid excrement from a feeder lot down his buttocks and genitals and dragged him to the edge of the terrace.

  Then the two boys holding Lucas stopped, unsure, wavering in the roar of brass and saxophones.

  “No, no, it’s show time, babies,” Darl said.

  His words, his cynicism, his vague and encompassing contempt, seemed to animate the two boys, who for just a moment had probably themselves felt like moths hovering outside the radius of a flame. They carried Lucas into the space between the orchestra and dance area, his feet dragging on the flagstones, his head lolling on his shoulder, a befouled, bone-white man who looked as though his neurological system had melted.

  When they dropped him and ran, he tried to push himself to his feet. But he tripped and fell, his guitar clattering on the stone. His skin was beaded with sweat and dirt and auraed with humidity in the glare of the flood lamps; his mouth was a stupefied slit across a roll of bread dough. He propped himself on his elbows and stared out at the dancers.

  But the membership and management at Post Oaks Country Club were not made up of people who let the world intrude easily upon them. The band never faltered; the eyes of the dancers registered Lucas’s presence for no more than a few seconds; and a security guard and waiter wrapped a tablecloth around him and removed him as they would a sack of garbage a prankster had thrown over the wall.

  But later, inside the aluminum shed where Lucas sat on a bench among the club’s garden tools, throwing up in a sack that had once contained weed killer, he got to see the less public side of the club’s management. The manager was a thick-bodied bald man who wore dark trousers and a wine-colored sports jacket, and he was flanked on each side by a security guard.

  “You’re telling me Jack Vanzandt’s son did this?” he said.

  “Yes, sir, that’s right. It was Darl set it up.”

  The manager pointed his finger into Lucas’s face. “You listen to me, you nasty thing, you tell these lies to anybody else, I’ll have you put in jail,” he said. “Now, when the sheriff’s car gets here, you go home, you never mention this to anyone, and don’t you ever come near here again.”

  “It was Darl. I’ll say it to anybody I want. It was Darl, Darl, Darl. How you like that, sir?” Lucas’s eyes went in and out of focus, and a vile-tasting fluid welled up in his throat.

  “Get him out of here. And wash off that bench, too,” the manager said.

  IT WAS NOON the next day, and I stood in Bunny’s backyard and listened to the last of his account. He buffed the hood of his car while he talked, his triceps flexing, his voice flat and distant, as though somehow he were only a witness to events rather than a participant.

  He finished talking. He rubbed the rag back and forth in the thin horsetails of dried wax on the hood. Finally he looked at me over his shoulder, his hair bunched in a thick S on his cheek.

  “You ain’t gonna say nothing?” he asked.

  “He told me you were stand-up. I thought you might want to know that.”

  “Who said that?”

  “The kid you delivered up like a trussed hog.”

  The color flared in his cheeks. I turned to walk away.

  “Maybe I’m a Judas goat, but there’s a question you didn’t ask,” he said at my back.

  “What might that be, sir?”

  “How come he went out there to begin with. It’s ’cause Darl got the girls to tell him you were gonna be there. So maybe I ain’t the only one hepped pour cow shit on that boy.”

  CHAPTER

  TWENTY-ONE

  I DROVE FROM Bunny’s house to Jack Vanzandt’s office. His secretary said he had already gone for the day. She went back to her work, concentrating her gaze on a computer printout as though I had already left.

  “Where did he go?” I asked.

  “To one of the lakes, I think.”

  “The yacht basin?”

  “I’m not sure.”

  “Do you know if Darl is with him?” I asked.

  She stared thoughtfully into space. “I don’t think he mentioned it,” she said.

  “I’d really like to have a talk with them. Both of them. Would you get Jack on his cell phone?”

  She removed her glasses, which were attached to a blue velvet cord around her neck.

  “Please, Mr. Holland. I’m just the secretary,” she said, her face softening to an entreaty.

  “Sorry,” I said.

  She smiled at me with her eyes.

  The lake where Jack usually kept his sailboat was in a cup of wooded hills that sloped down to cliffs above the water’s edge. The western cliffs were in shadow now, the stone dark with lichen, but out in the sunlight a solitary boat with enormous red sails was tacking in the wind, the hard-blue chop breaking like crystal needles across its bow.

  Jack Vanzandt stood bare chested behind the wheel, his skin golden with tan, his white slacks tight across his hips and the ridges of muscle in his abdomen.

  I waited for him at the boat slip, where a black man was grilling steaks by a plank table under a shed. If Jack was uncomfortable with my presence, he didn’t show it. In fact, he seemed to take little notice of me. He was talking to his two guests, who sat in chairs by the cabin with tropical drinks in their hands—the Mexican drug agent, Felix Ringo, and a man from Houston by the name of Sammy Mace.

  Jack stepped off his boat, laced a rope around a cleat, and walked toward me. His eyes were flat, but they took my full measure and watched my hands and expression.

  “You going to lose it here?” he asked.

  “Can’t ever tell,” I said.

  “Don’t.”

  “Your kid’s a coward and a sadist. But you probably already know that. I just wanted to tell you he’s hooked up with Garland T. Moon now.”

  “You want to eat, or insult me some more?”

  Felix Ringo and the man named Sammy Mace were at the end of the dock, watching a yellow pontoon plane come in low over the hills and skim across the water.

  “Sammy Mace is mobbed-up, Jack,” I said.

  “Then why isn’t he in Huntsville? Look, I don’t feel good about some things Darl has done. So I’ve tried to help out.”

  “Oh?”

  “Felix Ringo is an old friend I knew at Benning. He’s got a lot of ties in the Hispanic community. He found a kid who might clear Lucas.”

  I didn’t reply. I looked into his eyes.

  “Eat with us. Let’s end all this foolishness,” he said.

  “Found which kid?” I asked.

  “A biker. Belongs to a gang called the Purple Hearts. He’s had a couple of beefs with Bunny Vogel.”

  Then Felix Ringo and Sammy Mace were under the shed, smiling, nodding, while the black man ladled steaks onto metal plates. Out on the boat, Emma
Vanzandt stepped out of the cabin with sunglasses on and shook out her hair.

  Sammy Mace was in his fifties now, his hair silver and combed straight back on his head, his face distinguished, almost intellectual with the square, rimless glasses he wore. Except for his eyes, which did not match his smile. They studied me, then flexed at the corners with recognition.

  “You were a uniform in Houston? A Texas Ranger got in some trouble later?” he said.

  “Good memory, Sammy,” I said.

  “You remember me?”

  “You bet. You killed a Houston cop.”

  “Hey,” he said playfully, raising a finger on each hand, as though he were warding off bees. “I shot a guy coming through my bedroom window without no shield in his hand, in the middle of the night, in a neighborhood with cannibals mugging old people down at the church.”

  “What’s with this guy?” Felix Ringo said.

  “Nothing. Billy Bob’s all right. He’s just trying to work some things out,” Jack said.

  “You take it easy, Jack,” I said.

  I walked back down the dock toward my car. The wind was warm on my back, the water sliding through pebbles and sand onto the grass. I heard Jack’s leather sandals behind me.

  “That kid’s going to come to your office. His name’s Virgil Morales,” he said.

  “Why are you doing this?” I asked.

  “Because you keep laying off your problem on Darl. Don’t make it hard. Take the favor.”

  “Does Sammy Mace come with it?”

  “He’s got the biggest chain of computer outlets in south Texas. I lit up villages in Vietnam; you killed people in Mexico. Why don’t you get your nose out of the air?”

  When I drove away I saw Felix Ringo screw a cigarette into a gold holder, then stop what he was doing and rise from his chair when Emma Vanzandt joined their table. The black cook took a bottle of chilled wine from an ice bucket, wrapped it in a towel, and poured into the goblets on the table. The diners cut into their steaks and ate with the poise of people on the cover of Southern Living.