Cimarron Rose bbh-1

by James Lee Burke

  The sun broke above the horizon and was warm on my back as I walked toward the house. Then my gaze steadied on the barn, the backyard, the drive, the porte cochere, and two black sedans that shouldn't have been there.

  I walked through the back porch and kitchen into the main part of the house, which Brian Wilcox and five other Treasury people were tearing apart.

  'What the hell do you think you're doing?' I asked.

  Wilcox stood in the middle of my library. Splayed books were scattered across the floor.

  'Give him the warrant,' he said to a second man, who threw the document at me, bouncing it off my chest.

  'I don't care if you have a warrant or not. You have no legitimate cause to be here,' I said.

  'Shut up and stay out of the way,' the second man said. He wore shades and a military haircut, and his work had formed a thin sheen of perspiration on his face.

  'Come on, Wilcox. You're a pro. You guys pride yourselves on blending into the wallpaper,' I said.

  'You're interfering with a federal investigation,' Wilcox said.

  'I'm what?'

  'I think you've been running a parallel investigation to our own. That means there's probable cause for us to believe you possess evidence of a crime. Hence, the warrant. You don't like it, fuck you,' he said.

  I used the Rolodex on my desk and punched a number into the telephone.

  'I hope you're calling the judge. He's part Indian. His nickname is Big Whiskey John. He's in a great mood this time of day,' Wilcox said.

  'This is Billy Bob Holland. I've got six Treasury agents ransacking my home,' I said into the receiver. 'The agent in charge is Brian Wilcox. He just told me to fuck myself. Excuse me, I have to go. I just heard glass breaking upstairs.'

  The agent in shades picked up my great-grandfather's journal from a chair, flipped through it, and tossed it to me. 'Looks like a historical document there. Hang on to it,' he said, and raked a shelf of books onto the floor.

  'That was the newspaper,' I said to Wilcox. 'It's owned by an eighty-year-old hornet who thinks fluoridation is a violation of the Constitution. Does the G still have its own clipping service?'

  'You think you're getting a bad deal, huh? You cost us eight months' work. That's right, we were about to flip Sammy Mace, then you showed up. Plus your gal just got pulled out by her people.'

  He looked at the reaction in my face, and a smile broke at the corner of his mouth.

  'Her people?' I said numbly.

  'Call her apartment. She's gone, bro. She got picked up in a plane at four this morning. She wouldn't survive an IA investigation,' he said.

  I started to pick books off the floor and stack them on my desk, as though I were in a trance.

  'You were a cop,' Wilcox said. 'You don't use a baton to bring a suspect into submission. You never deliver a blow with it above the shoulders. They'd crucify her and drag her people into it with her.'

  'I can't stop what you're doing here. But somewhere I'm going to square this down the line,' I said.

  'Yeah, that's going to be a big worry of ours,' Wilcox said.

  The man in shades began rifling my desk. He removed L.Q. Navarro's holstered. 45 revolver and flipped open the loading gate on the brass bottom of a cartridge.

  I fitted my hand around his wrist.

  'That belonged to a friend of mine. He's dead now. You don't mind not handling it, do you?' I said, and squeezed his wrist until I saw his lips part on his teeth and a look come into his eyes that his shades couldn't hide.

  'We're done here,' Wilcox said, raising his palm pacifically. 'Don't misunderstand the gesture, Holland. Touch a federal agent again and I'll put a freight train up your ass.'

  I waited for her call, but it didn't come.

  I worked late at the office that day. Through the blinds I could see the sun, like a burning flare, behind the courthouse and the tops of the oak trees. At just after seven Temple Carrol came by.

  'I'll buy you a beer,' she said.

  'I still have some work to do.'

  'I bet.' She sat with one leg on the corner of my desk. She lifted her chestnut hair off her neck. 'It's been a hot one.'

  'Yeah, it's warming up.'

  'She blew Dodge, huh?'

  'I don't know, Temple. Not everybody reports in to me.'

  'You want to talk business, or should I get lost?'

  I pushed aside a deposition I was reading and waited.

  'I took Jamie Lake shopping for some clothes that make her look half human,' she said. 'At first she's looking at these see-through things and I tell her, "Jamie, it might be the nature of prejudice and all that jazz, but tattoos just don't float well with juries."

  "Oh I get it," she says. "Upscale people tell the truth. Trailer court people lie. Wow! Tell me, which kind was that needle-dick polygraph nerd who was trying to scope my jugs?".

  'I say, "We do what works, kiddo."

  'She goes, "There's nothing like being sweet, is there? I once told a narc, 'Gee, officer, I wouldn't have smoked it if I had known it was harmful to my health.' He was such a gentleman after that. He took it out of his pants all by himself."

  'Billy Bob, this gal is major off the wall.'

  'Most of our clientele is. That's why they're in trouble all the time,' I said.

  'Here's the rest of it. She had her nose really bent out of joint by this time. So she takes out her MasterCard and buys four hundred dollars' worth of clothes I couldn't afford.'

  'It doesn't mean she's dirty.'

  'Yeah, and Jack Vanzandt and this greaseball Felix Ringo brought her to us out of goodwill.'

  I rubbed my forehead and looked at the soft orange glow of the sunset over the trees. Mockingbirds glided by the clock tower on the courthouse.

  'Yeah, this guy Ringo doesn't fit. He's a friend of Jack, he was hanging around Sammy Mace, and he's hooked up with the G at the same time,' I said.

  I felt the fatigue of the day catch up with me. I tried to think straight but I couldn't. I felt her eyes on my face.

  'Go to supper with me,' she said.

  'I'm going to put Darl Vanzandt on the stand,' I said.

  That night there was still no call from Mary Beth. In the morning I drove to the office, then walked to the thrift store operated by the Baptist church, where Emma Vanzandt was a volunteer worker.

  She was in back, sorting donated clothes on a long wood table. She wore tailored jeans and red pumps and a white silk blouse with red beads. She didn't bother to look up when I approached her.

  'Jack and Felix Ringo gave me some witnesses that are almost too good to be true,' I said.

  'Oh, how grand,' she said.

  'I think Jack may have done it to get me off your son's back.'

  She looked me in the face and silently formed the word stepson with her mouth.

  'Excuse me, your stepson, Darl.'

  'Why tell me, good sir?'

  'Because Darl's going on the stand just the same.'

  'Would you kindly take the okra out of your mouth and explain what you're talking about.'

  'Darl was at Shorty's the night Roseanne Hazlitt was attacked. He's mentally defective and has a violent history. He's beaten women with his fists. He goes into rages with little provocation. You figure it out, Emma.'

  'Ah, our conscience feels better now, doesn't it? You take Jack's favor, but to prove your integrity, you subpoena a walking basket case and fuck him cross-eyed in front of a jury of nigras and Mexicans.'

  A woman paying for her purchase at the counter turned around with her mouth open.

  'Tell Jack what I said.'

  I walked back out the front door. Then I heard her behind me. In the sunlight her makeup looked like a white and pink mask stretched on her face, her black hair pulled tightly back on her forehead, her eyes aglitter with anger or uppers or whatever energy it was that drove her.

  'You're a fool,' she said.

  'Why?'

  Her mouth was thick with lipstick, slightly opened, her eyes fastened on
mine, as though she were on the edge of saying something that would forever make me party to a secret that she imparted to no one.

  'Bunny Vogel,' she said.

  'What?'

  Then the moment went out of her eyes.

  'I wish I were a man. I'd beat the shit out of you. I truly hate you, Billy Bob Holland,' she said.

  My father was both a tack and hot-pass welder on pipelines for thirty years, but all his jobs came from the same company, one that contracted statewide out of Houston. I called their office and asked the lady in charge of payroll if their records would indicate whether my father ever worked around Waco in the late 1930s or early 1940s.

  'My heavens, that's a long time ago,' she said.

  'It's really important,' I said.

  'A lot of our old records are on the computer now, but employees' names of fifty years ago, that's another matter-'

  'I don't understand.'

  'The company has to know where all its pipe is. But back during the Depression a lot of men were hired by the day and paid in cash. WPA boys, drifters off the highway, they came and they went.'

  And the company didn't have to pay union wages or into the Social Security fund, either, I thought.

  'Can you just determine if y'all lay any lines around Waco about 1940 or so?' I asked.

  'That's a whole lot easier. Can I call you back when I have more time?' she said.

  I gave her my office number and went home for lunch. The light on my telephone answering machine was flashing in the library. I pushed the 'play' button, trying not to be controlled by the expectation in my chest.

  'It's me, Billy Bob. I'm sorry I left the way I did. I'm not even supposed to call you. I'll try to get back to you later,' Mary Beth's voice said.

  The tape announced the time. I had missed her call by fifteen minutes.

  I fixed a sandwich and some potato salad and a glass of iced tea and sat down to eat on the back porch. The fields were marbled with shadow and the breeze was warm and flecked with rain and I could smell cows watering at my neighbor's windmill. On the other side of the tank, beyond the line of willows that puffed with wind, was the network of baked wagon ruts and hoofprints where the Chisholm Trail had traversed my family's property. Sometimes I believed Great-grandpa Sam was still out there, in chaps and floppy hat, a bandanna tied across his face against the dust, trying to turn his cows away from the bluffs when dry lightning caused them to rumble across the prairie louder than the thunder itself.

  I wished I had lived back in his time, when men like Garland T. Moon were bounced off cottonwood trees and federal agents didn't make you fall in love with them and then leave on airplanes at four in the morning with no explanation.

  It was a self-pitying way to think, but I didn't care. I went into the library and got out Sam's journal and read it while I finished lunch.

  August 28, 1891

  Maybe burning out them four caves wasn't such a good idea. The gang has come back from Pearl Younger's whorehouse and now the Dalton brothers seem to think their leadership is on the line. To make matters worse, Emmett Dalton, the only one of them who probably has half a brain, told me my name has been put on a warrant by the U.S. court up in Wichita, because I am now considered a known associate of train robbers and murderers.

  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 amp;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.'