Cimarron Rose

by James Lee Burke

  I understand the judge who done this is the same one who told the Colorado cannibal Albert Packer there was only seven good Democrats in the mountains where Packer got froze in for the winter and Packer had went and ate five of them. I now wish Packer had carried his knife and fork into the court and made it six.

  The Cimarron is naught but ribbons of muddy water now and carrion birds perch on the ribs of the wild horses the Dalton-Doolins have shot and butchered down on the banks. The hills are orange and sear with drought all the way to Kansas, and dust and chickweed blows up in flumes that will sand the skin off your bones.

  The poppy husks in the fields have hardened and dried and they rattle and hiss like snakes when I ride down to the river to draw water for our garden. When I see the fireflies in the trees and hear the cicadas in the evening, I wonder how I have strayed so far from the smell of rain and flowers on the Texas Gulf. It is the feeling I always had as a child, that everything was ending, that the world’s sins was fixing to turn the sky to flames. I never could account for the notions I had as a child. But it is feelings like this that always made the word whiskey want to break like a bubble on the back of my tongue.

  I know if I stay on the Cimarron, I will be gunned down for sure or forced once again to kill other men. Jennie woke me last night when she heard sounds by the outhouse. It was only hogs, but she commenced crying and said she has heard her relatives talking and she fears for my life. I have not knowed her to cry before.

  It is cowardly to run, though, particularly from the likes of them down in the mud caves. We never done it when we marched alongside Granny Lee and I’ll be damned if I’ll do it now.

  These are prideful thoughts, all. God forgive me for them. I feel desolate and lost and would ride into the worst storm on earth for just a drop of rain.

  I didn’t hear from Mary Beth again that day. That night I dreamed of a picnic ground filled with children. A green river curled through cottonwoods behind them, and a rainbow arched through the sky over their heads. In their midst was a goat-footed satyr, his vascular arms as white as milk, a clutch of balloons strung from one fist. At first I couldn’t see his face, then he rotated his head toward me, his mouth grinning, the scab on his lip as shiny as plastic. The children ran toward the balloons and swirled about his thighs like disembodied figures in a maelstrom.

  CHAPTER

  TWENTY-SIX

  IN THE MORNING I drove to Bunny Vogel’s house. His father came out on the porch, barefoot and without a shirt. He was an inept tank of a man, whose doughlike hand dwarfed his cigarette.

  “You the lawyer been coming around?” he said.

  “That’s right.”

  “He went swimming. At the beach, up the river,” he said. “You going up there?”

  “I expect.”

  “Tell him he went off without cleaning the grease trap. Now there’s some black gunk overflowing out of the sink. Whole house smells like an elephant backed up and farted in it.”

  I drove to the small stretch of sandy beach built by the county at the curve of the river. Bunny’s maroon ’55 Chevy was parked back in the trees, the waxed finish and green-tinted windows sprinkled with pine needles. A heavyset Mexican girl in a black bathing suit sat at a picnic table, watching Bunny do push-ups, his toes on the table, his arms propped on a bench. He wore only a pair of lavender running shorts, and his triceps and back muscles ridged like rolls of metal washers.

  When he saw me, his face reddened, and he sat on the bench and dusted the sand off his feet and began fitting on his flip-flops. His long, bronze-colored hair hung down over his disfigured jawline.

  “Your name keeps coming up in my trial preparation,” I said.

  “I ain’t interested,” he said.

  I looked at the girl and waited for him to introduce me. When he didn’t, I realized the redness in his face was not because I had caught him impressing a girl with his strength.

  “I’m Billy Bob Holland. How do you do?” I said to her.

  “It’s nice to meet you,” she said. A gold tooth shone in the back of her mouth.

  “Yeah, excuse me, this is Naomi. We was taking a swim,” he said, and his hand gestured at nothing, as though he needed to offer an explanation.

  “So that’s what I’m gonna do,” she said, and picked up her towel.

  “You ain’t got to go, Naomi,” Bunny said.

  She smiled and walked into the water, the backs of her thighs wrinkling below the rim of her bathing suit. She leaned over and cupped water on her shoulders and spread it on her arms. Bunny watched her, his jaws slack, his eyes trying to take him out into the sunlight, away from the conversation he was about to have.

  “I’m calling you as a witness at Lucas’s trial,” I said.

  “Oh man, don’t tell me that.”

  “You’ll have a lot of company—Darl Vanzandt, Virgil Morales, a biker girl named Jamie Lake, an elderly black man who saw Roseanne Hazlitt slap you.”

  “Morales? That pepper bel . . . that kid from the Purple Hearts? What’s he got to do with this?”

  “Why’d Roseanne hit you? Why’d Morales call you a pimp, Bunny?”

  Bunny put the tips of his fingers on his temples.

  “You don’t know what you’re doing. You’re setting my life on fire, Mr. Holland.”

  “Your life? How about the girl who’s in the cemetery? How about Lucas Smothers’s life?”

  Above his left nipple was the tattoo of a small heart.

  “I didn’t want none of this to happen. People don’t plan for stuff like this to happen,” he said.

  “Emma Vanzandt called me a fool yesterday. When I asked her why, she used your name. Like you were a key I didn’t know how to fit on the ring.”

  “Emma done that?” He twisted around on the bench and stared at me, his eyes burning. “That bitch done that?”

  “That doesn’t sound like you, Bunny.”

  “Yeah, what does? Human dildo?”

  He waited for me to comprehend his meaning. I kept my expression flat.

  “Rich woman catches her husband milking through the fence, how does she stick it to him? She gets a young guy to put the wood to her.”

  “You and Emma?”

  “It was a one-time deal. She drove a hundred miles to a motel that was between two oil rigs. The walls was vibrating off the foundation. I think she was whacked out on speed. She wanted to call him up on the phone during a certain moment. I had to talk her out of it.”

  He stared out at the river and at the Mexican girl whose body was bladed with the sun’s reflection off the water. After a while he said, “She’s a nice girl. Naomi, I mean. She don’t know about none of this. She thinks I’m hot shit ’cause I played football at A&M.”

  “Maybe you’re a better guy than you think,” I said.

  “No, I know what I am. I blame my trouble on the Vanzandts, but they knew the kind of person they was looking for.”

  “You’re still a young man. You haven’t done anything that can’t be undone.” When he didn’t answer, I said, “Have you?”

  He looked down at the tops of his feet. His fingers were pressed into his bronze hair like white snakes. When I walked to the car I realized I had forgotten to deliver his father’s message, but I felt Bunny didn’t need another reminder that day of who or what he was.

  I ALMOST DIDN’T recognize her when she got out of a taxicab in my drive at noon the same day. She wore a powder-blue suit, heels, a white blouse, and a beige shoulder bag. But for some reason, in my mind’s eye, I still saw the tall, naturally elegant woman in tan uniform and campaign hat. I opened the side door and stepped out under the porte cochere.

  “Wow,” I said.

  “Wow, yourself.”

  “You sure look different.”

  “That’s the welcome?”

  “Come in.” I opened t
he screen.

  She hesitated. “I don’t want to interrupt your day.”

  We seemed to be looking at each other like people who might have just met at a bus stop.

  “I don’t know what to say, Mary Beth. I got one phone message. My only source of information about you has been Brian Wilcox.”

  “Brian?”

  “He got a warrant and tossed my house.”

  She looked away, her face full of thought.

  “I’m not supposed to be here. My people are cutting a deal with the new sheriff,” she said.

  “Your people?”

  “Yes.”

  The wind blew the curls on the back of her neck. I could hear the tin roof on the barn pinging with heat, like wires breaking.

  “The locals are trying to jam you up on the shooting?” I said.

  “It’s their out. I handed it to them on a shovel.”

  “Sammy Mace was a cop killer. He got what he had coming,” I said.

  “Can we go inside, Billy Bob? We were in Denver this morning. I overdressed.”

  She sat down at the kitchen table. I poured her a glass of iced tea. I ran cold water over my hands and dried them, not knowing why I did. Outside, the barn roof shimmered like a heliograph under the sun.

  “My office is taking the weight for me. I screwed up, but they’re taking the weight, anyway,” she said.

  “A stand-up bunch. We’re talking about the DEA?” I said.

  Her back straightened under her coat. Her hand was crimped on a paper napkin, her gaze pointed out the window.

  “I thought coming here was the right thing to do. But I’m all out of words, Billy Bob.”

  “Can’t we have dinner? Can’t we spend some time together without talking about obligations to a government agency? You think you owe guys like Brian Wilcox?”

  “This is pointless. Because you hung up your own career doesn’t mean other—” She didn’t finish. She put both her hands in her lap, then a moment later placed one hand on top of her shoulder bag.

  I opened the refrigerator door to take out the iced tea pitcher again. Then closed it and stood stupidly in the center of the room, all of the wrong words already forming in my throat.

  “An English writer, what’s his name, E. M. Forster, once said if he had to choose between his country and his friend, he hoped he’d have the courage to choose his friend,” I said.

  “I guess I missed that in my English lit survey course,” she said, rising from her chair. “Can I use your phone to call a cab? I should have asked him to wait.”

  “I apologize. Don’t leave like this.”

  She shook her head, then walked into the library and used the telephone. I stood in her way when she tried to walk down the hall to the front door.

  “You see yourself as a failure. You put yourself through law school. You were a Texas Ranger and an AUSA. You can be a lawman again, anytime you want,” she said.

  “Then stay. I’ll cancel the cab.”

  I put my hand on her arm. I saw the pause in her eyes, the antithetical thoughts she couldn’t resolve, the pulse in her neck.

  “I’d better go. I’ll call later,” she said.

  “Mary Beth—”

  Then she was out the door, her cheeks glazed with color, her hand feeling behind her for the door handle so she would not have to look back at my face.

  BUT BY MONDAY morning there was no call. Instead, a dinged gas-guzzler stopped out front of my office and a woman in a platinum wig and shades and a flowered sundress got out and looked in both directions, as though by habit, then entered the downstairs foyer.

  A minute later my secretary buzzed me.

  “A Ms. Florence LaVey. No appointment,” she said.

  “Who is she?”

  “She said you’d know who she was.”

  “Nope. But send her in.”

  The inner door opened and the woman in the platinum wig stood framed in the doorway, her shades dripping from her fingers, her face expectant, as though at any moment I would recognize her relationship to my life.

  “Can I help you?” I asked. Then I noticed that one of her eyes was brown, the other blue.

  “The name doesn’t turn on your burner, huh? San Antonio? The White Camellia Bar?”

  “Maybe I’m a little slow this morning.”

  “I know what you mean. I always get boiled on Sunday nights myself. I think it has something to do with being raised Pentecostal . . . Let me try again . . . A nasty little fuck by the name of Darl Vanzandt?”

  “You’re the lady he beat up. You’re a waitress?”

  “A hostess, honey.” She winked and sat down and crossed her legs. She opened a compact and looked at herself. “I’d like to slip some pieces of bamboo deep under his fingernails.”

  “His father says you and a pimp tried to roll him.”

  She wet the ball of one finger and wiped at something on her chin and clicked the compact shut.

  “His old man paid me ten thousand dollars so he and his son could tell whatever lies they wanted to. You interested in what really happened?”

  “It’s not of much value if you took money to drop the charges.”

  “I’m not talking about what that little shit did to me. I read about that girl in the paper when she got beaten to death. But I didn’t make any connections. Then last night him and this ex-convict named Moon come to this new bar I’m working in. Fart Breath starts talking about a trial, about this girl got gang-raped and her head bashed in, about how some lawyer is trying to make him take somebody else’s fall. I’m standing behind the bar. I keep waiting for him to catch on who I am. Forget it.”

  “Yes?”

  “Get the girl dug up. See if she wasn’t stoned-out on roofies.”

  “We’re talking about Ro—”

  “You got it. Rohypnol. That’s what the Vanzandt kid uses. He picks up a girl and dumps it in her drink so he can do anything he wants with her.” She fitted her glasses on, then removed them again. “I wish I’d sent him to the Ellis Unit at Huntsville. The colored boys always appreciate new Ivory soap when they come out of the field.”

  “I’ve seen the autopsy. She was full of booze but no dope.”

  She brushed a long red thumbnail back and forth across a callus. “He sat on my chest and spit in my face. He broke both my lips. I told this to his old man. He goes, ‘Ten thousand is my limit.’”

  “The Vanzandts have their own way of doing things,” I said, my attention starting to wander.

  She got up to leave.

  “Forget about the dope. Either that kid did her, or y’all got real bad luck.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Two like him in one town? This might be a shithole, honey, but it doesn’t deserve that,” she said.

  JUST BEFORE LUNCH, the lady in charge of payroll at my father’s old pipeline company called from Houston.

  “We didn’t contract any jobs around Waco during the late Depression or the war years. But of course that doesn’t mean in itself your father wasn’t there,” she said.

  “Well, what you’ve found is still helpful,” I said.

  “Wait a minute. I did some other checking. I don’t know if it will be useful to you or not.”

  “Yeah, please, go ahead.”

  “Your father worked steadily for us in east Texas from 1939 to 1942. Then evidently he was drafted into the army. I don’t know how it would have been possible for him to have worked for another company around Waco at the same time. Does this help you out?”

  “I can’t tell you how much.” I thanked her again and was just about to hang up. Then I said, “Just out of curiosity, would the ‘search’ key on your computer kick up the name of a man named Garland T. Moon?”

  “Hold on. I’ll see. When did he work for us?”

 
“During the mid-1950s.”

  I heard her fingers clicking on the keyboard of a computer, then she scraped the phone up off the table.

  “Yes, we have a record of a G. T. Moon. But not during the 1950s. He was a hot-pass welder on a natural gas line down at Matagorda Bay in 1965. Is that the same man? . . . Hello?”

  I don’t remember if I answered her or not. I recall replacing the receiver in the cradle, the residue of moisture and oil that my palm print left on the plastic, the skin tightening in my face.

  My father had been blown out of a bellhole while mending a leak on a pipe joint at Matagorda Bay in 1965.

  CHAPTER

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  I WALKED ACROSS the street to the one-story sandstone building, which was now the office of the new sheriff, Hugo Roberts. He sat with one half-topped boot propped on his desk, the air around him layered with cigarette smoke.

  “You want Garland T. Moon’s file? Marvin Pomroy don’t have it?” he asked.

  “It’s gone back into Records.”

  “What d’ you want it for?”

  “Idle curiosity. Since he probably killed your predecessor with an ax, I thought you might be interested in it, too.”

  He dropped his foot to the floor.

  “Damn, Billy Bob, every time I talk with you I feel like a bird dog sticking his nose down a porcupine hole.” He picked up his phone and punched an extension. “Tell Cleo to stop playing with hisself and to bring Garland Moon’s sheet to my office,” he said. He put the phone back down and smiled. “Hang on, I got to take a whiz.”

  He went into a small restroom and urinated into the bowl with the door open.

  “You got Moon made for the sheriff’s murder, huh?” he said.

  “That’d be my bet.”

  He washed his hands, combed his hair in the mirror, and came back out. “Since nobody else has figured that out, what gives you this special insight?” he said.

  “Because you’re not worried about who did it.”