Cimarron Rose

by James Lee Burke

  She walked down the rest of the stairs alone, the anger in her eyes her only defense against tears. I stood in the silence, wondering what the final cost of Lucas’s trial would be.

  AFTER DARL VANZANDT took the oath he sat at an angle in the witness chair, lowered his eyes coyly, as though the world’s attention were upon him, played with his class ring, suppressed a smile when he looked at his friends.

  “Bunny Vogel used to go out with Roseanne Hazlitt, didn’t he?” I asked.

  “Everybody knows that.”

  “Is Bunny your friend?”

  “He used to be.”

  “He looked out for you at Texas A&M, didn’t he?”

  “We were from the same town, so we hung out.”

  “He paid off a grader to change an exam score for you, didn’t he?”

  Darl’s green eyes looked at nothing, then clouded and focused on me for the first time, as though the words he heard had to translate into a different language before they became thoughts in his mind. He rubbed the peach fuzz on his jawline. “Yeah, we both got expelled,” he said.

  “Did your stepmother get him a job at the skeet club?”

  “Yeah.”

  “You double-dated and you hung out at the drive-in restaurant together?”

  “Sometimes.”

  “I’d say y’all were pretty tight, right?”

  “That was then, not now.”

  “You let people get in your face, Darl?”

  “What d’ you mean?”

  “Dis you, push you around, act like you’re a woosh?”

  “No, I don’t take that stuff.”

  “What happened to the Mexican kid who scratched up your car with a nail?”

  “I kicked his ass, that’s what.”

  “Because people don’t get in your face and abuse your property, right? You stomp their ass?”

  “Yeah, that’s right.”

  “You ever beat up a woman, a prostitute in San Antonio by the name of Florence LaVey?”

  “No, I didn’t. I protected myself from people who were rolling me.”

  “What happens when people hit your friends, Darl? You kick their ass, too.”

  “You goddamn right.” He looked at his friends and grinned.

  “Did you see Roseanne Hazlitt slap Bunny Vogel the night she was attacked?”

  He pushed at his nose with the flats of his fingers. His eyes were threaded with veins, fixed on mine.

  “Yeah. At Shorty’s. It wasn’t a big deal. She always had her head up her hole about something,” he said.

  “It made you mad to see your friend get hit, didn’t it?”

  “No. I bought her and Lucas a drink. I wasn’t mad at anybody.”

  “Is that when you put roofies—downers—in Lucas’s drink?” I asked.

  “Objection, your honor. He’s badgering and leading his own witness,” Marvin said.

  “Withdrawn,” I said. “Darl, why’d Roseanne slap Bunny Vogel?”

  “She said she was getting baptized. She wanted him to take her to this holy-roller church that’s on TV.”

  “Baptized?”

  “I told you, she had boards in her head. She goes, ‘Do something decent for a change. Take me to my baptism. Maybe it’ll wash off on you.’ So Bunny says, ‘Let’s take a drive. I’ll roll down the windows so you can air the reefer out of your head.’

  “She goes, ‘I’m going down to the Lakewood Church in Houston. I done talked to the preacher already.’

  “Bunny says, ‘Shorty’s is a funny kind of church house to show folks you been saved.’ She goes, ‘I’m here to meet Lucas Smothers. At least he don’t treat his old friends like yesterday’s fuck.’ Another guy goes, ‘That’s ’cause you’re Lucas’s reg’lar fuck now.’

  “Bunny put his hand on her arm and said he’d take her home. That’s when she slapped him. She walked on inside and shot him the bone.”

  Darl’s eyes smiled at his friends.

  “Did Roseanne once work in the same church store you do, Darl?”

  I saw a thought, like a yellow-green insect, catch in his eye. Then I realized his distraction had nothing to do with my question. He was staring at a spectator in the back of the courtroom. The spectator, Felix Ringo, sat by the aisle with his tropical hat on his knee, one elbow propped on the chair arm, three fingers resting across his mouth.

  “What’s that got to do with anything?” Darl asked.

  “Answer the question,” the judge said.

  “Yeah, she worked there,” Darl said.

  “Who got her the job?” I asked.

  “My parents did. They felt sorry for her ’cause she had a crummy life.”

  “How’d your parents know Roseanne Hazlitt, Darl?”

  “Bunny brought her over. You saying I was mixed up with her? I wouldn’t touch her. It was probably like the Houston Ship Channel down there.”

  He leaned forward mischievously, his eyes bright under his blond brows, as though in leaning closer to his friends, whose faces were lit with the same mocking grin as his, he shut out the rest of the courtroom.

  “Did you and your friends dope Lucas Smothers and strip off his clothes and pour a bucket of feces on him at the country club? Did you vandalize his house? Did you try to threaten me at my home? Did you murder an indigent man, Darl?”

  “Mr. Holland, you’re way beyond anything I’ll allow,” the judge said.

  “Withdrawn,” I said.

  Darl got down from the stand, his face stupefied, his mouth round and wordless, his teeth exposed like those of a hungry fish.

  AT NOON MARVIN Pomroy caught me in the corridor and asked me into his office. He sat down behind his desk, took his glasses off, and rubbed one eyebrow with the back of his wrist.

  “I’m not comfortable with some stuff that’s going on here,” he said.

  “Gee, Marvin, sorry to hear that,” I said.

  “I checked into this threat Moon supposedly made against Bunny Vogel and his father. But there’s no handle on it . . . He walked into their house without knocking.”

  “So why tell me about it?”

  He picked up a sheet of pink carbon paper from his desk blotter.

  “That gal down the road from you, Wilma Flores, the mother of the little boy who’s always fishing in your tank?” he said.

  “Pete’s mother.”

  “Yeah, that his name, Pete. She made a 911 at five this morning. She was showering to go to work. She went to wipe off the bathroom window to see if it was still raining outside. Six inches from her face is a guy with tufts of red hair slicked down on his head and blue eyes like she’s never seen in a human being before.”

  I felt a tingling, a deadness, in my hands that made me open and close my palms.

  “The deputy put it down as a Peeping Tom incident. Nothing would have come of it, except I heard him talking about it when I was in the bullpen this morning. I made him go back out to the house with mug shots of Garland Moon and five other of our graduates. The deputy said she took one look at Moon’s photo and wouldn’t even touch it with her finger when she identified him,” Marvin said.

  “Where’s Pete now?”

  “At school. I’ll put a deputy at their house this afternoon.”

  “Your deputies are worthless. Did you pick up Moon?”

  “He has two witnesses who say he was eating breakfast in a diner at five A.M.”

  “You believe them?”

  “It’s a Peeping Tom complaint. Even if we could charge him, he’d be out on bond in an hour.”

  Then his defensiveness, his frustration with me and his job went out of his face.

  “I called the lady and offered to keep Pete at our house for a while. She said I was helping Social Services take her little boy from her . . . Where you going?” he said.


  STONEWALL JUDY GRANTED a recess until the following morning.

  I drove home and went into the barn, unlocked the tack room and sorted through the garden hoes and rakes and mauls and picks and axes that were stacked inside an old Mayflower moving drum. The edges of the tools were flecked with bits of dried mud and tangles of dead weeds from cleaning the vegetable garden and flower beds in the early spring, or strung with resinous wisps of pine from the cords of wood I had split last fall. But I knew the tool I was looking for.

  It was a mattock whose heavy, oblong iron head had already worn loose from the helve. I clamped a pair of vise grips on the wedge that held the handle fast inside the mattock head, twisted it out of the wood, and slipped the handle free. It was made from ash, thick across the top to support the weight of the iron head, the grain worn smooth at the grip. I propped it on the passenger seat in the Avalon and headed down the road to town just as a curtain of rain moved in a steady line across the clumped-up herd of red Angus in my neighbor’s draw.

  I parked behind the tin shed where Moon worked. The rain pattered on my slicker and the brim of my Stetson as I pulled open the back door of the shed. A black man in a bikini swimsuit with a yellow rag tied around his head was grinding a metal bracket on an emery wheel.

  “Hep you?” he asked.

  “Is this your shop?”

  “What you want?”

  “Garland Moon.”

  His eyes went over my person. “That a chunk of wood under your raincoat?”

  “It’s been that kind of day.”

  He nodded. “He gone down to Snooker’s Big Eight.”

  “You going to use the telephone on me?”

  “Rather y’all do it there than here . . . Tell you something, a man like that is looking for somebody to click off his switch. You don’t do it, he’ll find the right man sooner or later.”

  I drove a half mile down the road to a bluff above the river and a long wood building that was ventilated with window fans and set in a grove of oak trees that had been the site of a beer garden during the 1940s. The parking lot was full of pickup trucks and motorcycles, and rain was blowing through the trees and streaking on the front windows, which glowed with purple and red neon.

  I walked the length of the building, stepping across puddles, looking through the spinning blades of fans at the felt tables, pinball machines that swam with light, bikers drinking beer at the bar, an enormous Confederate flag ruffling against the far wall. Then I looked through a screen door and saw him bent over a cue, sighting on the diamond-shaped nine-ball rack, the triceps of his poised right arm knotted with green veins. He drove the cue ball into the rack like a spear.

  He raised up, his mouth smiling at the perfection of the break, his fingers reaching for the chalk. Then he heard the screen open and close behind him and he turned toward me just as I whipped the mattock handle, edge outward, across his jaw.

  His knees buckled slightly, and a choked sound, a grunt, came out of his throat. He pressed his hand against his cheek as though he had a toothache, his eyes glazing with shock and surprise, and I hit him again, this time whipping the helve across his mouth.

  His pool cue had clattered to the floor. He looked at it rolling away from him, his mouth draining blood on the apron of the table, and I hit him again, in the ribs, and again in the head, the neck, across the ear; then Moon was stumbling out the back screen door, through the trees, along the edge of the bluff. Down below, the river was covered with rain rings.

  I swung the mattock handle with both hands across his spine. I seemed to slip out of time and place, as though I had been absorbed into a red-black square of film that was like the color of fire inside oil smoke. Then, like a man awakening from a dream, I realized the mattock handle was no longer in my grasp, that I was on one knee beside him, his head lolling against a tree trunk, my fist driving into his face.

  “That’s enough, motherfucker,” a voice said behind me.

  I turned and looked up into the disjointed, heated eyes of a booted man in a leather vest whose body glowed with odor.

  “Private conversation,” I said. But my words sounded outside my skin, as though they had been spoken by someone else and I heard them through the rain. The back of my right fist was flecked with Moon’s blood.

  A biker next to him studied my face and extended his arm across his friend’s chest.

  “His name’s Holland. Sonofabitch is crazy. Leave him alone. Snooker done already called the Man,” he said.

  They and those who had followed them walked away, their boots splashing in puddles, as though water had no effect on their clothes and bodies, their hair blowing in the wind like dirty string.

  I looked again at Moon, his face, the tree he lay against, the grass stains on his elbows, the skinned lesions around his eyes, the rain dripping out of the overhead branches, all of it coming into focus now, my breath quieting in my throat, as though a bird with blood in its beak had flown out of my chest.

  “You think you’re conwise, but somebody’s laughing at you, Moon, just like those gunbulls did when they draped you over a barrel and made a girl out of you,” I said.

  He pushed his back up against the tree, wincing slightly, grinning at me. He started to speak, then cleared his mouth and spit in the grass and started over.

  “This don’t mean nothing. I done something to you won’t ever change,” he said.

  “The people who hired you are the same people who tried to run you out of town earlier.”

  He grinned again and wiped his nose on his sleeve, but I saw my words catch in the corner of his eye.

  “You and Jimmy Cole wandered into something you shouldn’t out at the Hart Ranch. Then some guys tried to take you down with a baseball bat at your motel. The same guys jumped me behind my barn. One of them was a dude named Felix Ringo.”

  He looked out into the rain, his brow knurled, his recessed eye bright, brimming with water.

  “A Mexican narc works out of San Antone?” he asked.

  “Guy’s got a nasty record, Moon. He likes to hurt people. But unlike you, he’s got juice with the government.”

  “That don’t change nothing between me and you.”

  “The Big C has its own clock.”

  “You still ain’t caught on, have you? How come that pipe joint blowed out on your old man? ’Cause some kid lit a cigarette down in the bellhole?”

  I stood up and straightened my back. I felt two long ribbons of pain slip down my spine and wrap around my thighs.

  “Come on, boy. Ask me,” he said. His legs forked out straight in front of him, like sticks inserted inside his trousers. His flat-soled prison work shoes glistened with mud.

  I picked up my hat and slapped the dirt off it on my coat. “You come near Pete or his mother again, I’ll shoot you through the lungs. It’s a promise, Moon,” I said, and started to walk away.

  “I went back into the pump station and turned on the gas. That pipe was loaded when his arc bit into it. You ever watch a cat chewing on an electric cord? You ought to seen his face when it went,” Moon said.

  He began to laugh, holding his ribs because they hurt him, his face convulsing like a pixie’s. He pushed the mattock handle at me with one shoe, trying to say something, shaking his head impotently at the level of mirth bursting from his chest.

  MOON HAD TO reach into the past to injure me, but across town, at that moment, Darl Vanzandt was buying a length of steel cable and a set of U-bolts, perhaps to prove that no matter what happened to Garland T. Moon, his legacy would be passed on to another generation in Deaf Smith.

  CHAPTER

  THIRTY-TWO

  YOU FOLLOWED DARL from the courthouse?” I said to Temple.

  We sat on my back screen porch. Pete was in the house, watching television, and the yard was full of pools with islands of leaves floating in them.

&nbs
p; “You rubbed his face in it, in front of his friends. A kid like that doesn’t pray for his enemies,” she said.

  “I’m sorry for the stupid remark I made to you yesterday.”

  “I already forgot about it.” She picked up her coffee spoon from her napkin and set it in her saucer.

  I waited, but her eyes were deliberately empty, the balls of her fingers motionless on the table, and I said, “What’s he want with a pair of U-bolts and twenty feet of steel cable?”

  She shook her head, then said, “For some reason, those words and the name of Darl Vanzandt make my stomach crawl . . . You really gonna strike a match on Bunny’s soul?”

  “It’s going to get even worse later.”

  She looked at me and then looked through the screen. Her face was quiet, full of the thoughts and connections that she seldom shared. Her shirt had pulled out of her jeans and her baby fat creased on her hips. “You want to have dinner with me and Pete?” she asked.

  PETE’S MOTHER HAD consented to let him return to Temple’s house for the next few days. That night we ate at a cafeteria, then I dropped them off and parked my car in back, turned on the flood lamps in the yard, poured some oats in Beau’s stall, and walked all the way around the outside of the house with L.Q.’s .45 revolver under my raincoat.

  Then I fell asleep on the third floor, with Great-grandpa Sam’s journal open in my lap, an illogical image of torn steel cable and roaring car engines threading in and out of my dreams.

  BUNNY VOGEL WAS dressed in a brown suit and sandals and a wash-faded pink golf shirt when he took the stand. He kept scratching his face with four fingers, as though an insect had burrowed into his cheek, and staring out into the courtroom, as though looking for someone who should have been there but wasn’t.