Cimarron Rose bbh-1

by James Lee Burke

  Men like Felix Ringo did the jobs for the forces of Empire that no government ever acknowledged. They went to special schools and carried badges and were endowed with marginal respectability, but their real credentials lay in their bottomless cruelty. And no matter what explanations they offered others for their behavior, each of them daily fed his perversity like a gardener tending a hothouse filled with poisonous flowers.

  Political assassins always kept journals; sadists kept trophies, and they never strayed far from them.

  I found the box at the bottom of a desk drawer. It was made of sandalwood, fitted with gold hinges and hasps, fastened with a soft bungi cord. A wood tray divided into compartments was inset in the top of the box. It contained military decorations, a sergeant's chevrons, gold teeth, polished finger bones, empty shell casings, a switchblade knife with a green serpent inlaid in the handle, a long strip of black hair wrapped inside a plastic bag.

  Under the wood tray was a thick pack of pornographic photos held together with a rubber band. They were yellow with age, mounted on cardboard, and featured Orientals involved in every possible sexual act and position. But it was not these that shocked or sickened the sensibilities. The bottom of the box was layered with Polaroid color photos that made the eye film, the hand vaguely soiled at the touch: a freshly dug pit in front of which four peasant men and a woman stood bound and blindfolded; a man on his knees with his thumbs tied behind him, a disembodied arm pointing a pistol behind his ear; a man with a pesticide sack over his head, hung by his arms between two stone walls; grinning enlisted men posing at the end of a dirt street littered with bodies that had started to bloat; a woman strapped in a chair, her face and shirtless upper torso streaked with blood.

  At the bottom of all these photos was a playing card emblazoned with the badge of the Texas Rangers. Written in felt pen across the badge was the word Muerto and the date I accidentally killed L.Q. Navarro.

  When I got back home Lucas Smothers was sitting on the steps of my front porch, twisting the tuning pegs on a mandolin, tinking each string with a plectrum. He wore a pair of starched khakis and cowboy boots and a short-sleeve denim shirt rolled above his triceps. His reddish blond hair was combed into faint ducktails on the back of his head. It was cool where he sat in the shade, and he drank out of a soda can and smiled at me.

  'I got a bluegrass gig at a club over in Llano County. My dad didn't say nothing about it, either,' he said.

  'Go to college,' I said.

  'So I can be like them rich pukes out in East End?'

  'Come in the house. I have to use the phone.'

  Inside the library, he looked at the titles of books on my shelves while I punched in Marvin Pomroy's home number on the phone.

  'Marvin?' I said.

  'Oh gee,' he said when he recognized my voice.

  'Felix Ringo isn't taking Moon down on a Mexican warrant. He's taking him off the board,' I said.

  'What gives you this special insight?'

  'Does it figure Ringo's going to bust a guy who can testify against him?'

  'Ringo's a cop. Moon's a nut case.'

  'I just creeped Ringo's place at the Conquistador. He was a dope mule down in Coahuila.'

  'Say again? You did what?'

  'My partner and I capped some of those guys, Marvin. His name was L.Q. Navarro. He put a playing card in the mouth of every dead mule we left down there. Ringo has one of those cards in a sandalwood box filled with his trophies. He wrote the date of my friend's death on it.'

  'You're telling me, the district attorney, you broke into a policeman's apartment?'

  'Ask Ringo to show you his Polaroid collection of life down in the tropics.'

  'Let this go, Billy Bob.'

  'Moon killed my father.'

  He repeated my statement back to me incredulously. When I didn't reply, he said, 'Do you realize what you just told me? If this guy shows up dead…'

  'Get a life, Marvin,' I said, and eased the phone receiver down in the cradle.

  Lucas stood at the bookshelves, Great-grandpa Sam's journal spread in his hands, his mouth open.

  'What's up, bud?' I said.

  He blinked, then closed the journal.

  'Moon killed your dad?' he asked.

  'Yeah, I guess he did.'

  'What are you gonna do about it?'

  'That journal was kept by my great-grandfather. He was a drunkard and a gunfighter who became a saddle preacher on the Chisholm Trail. It took him a long time, but he learned how to put aside his violent ways.'

  'What happens when the other guy don't put aside his?'

  'You talking about Moon or Darl Vanzandt?'

  'I seen Darl out at the drive-in this morning. He was melting screamers in dago red. He said I was yellow. He said he's gonna pop me in the face every time he sees me.'

  'He'll crash and burn, Lucas. He's a pitiful person.'

  'You told Marvin Pomroy you capped some dope mules.'

  'So I'm a bad example.'

  'No, you ain't. You're a good man. And that's why I come here, just to tell you that. I'm proud we're… Well, I'm proud, that's all. I'll see you, Billy Bob.'

  He went down the front hall and out the door to his pickup. Through the screen I could see shadows on the hillside and wildflowers rippling and bending and straightening in the wind, like colored confetti flickering in a world that had almost gone gray. chapter thirty-five

  That afternoon I drove to the welding shop where Moon worked. It was padlocked, and the owner of the motel next door, where Moon kept a room, said he had not seen him in two days.

  I went home and worked in the yard and tried to think my way out of an impossible situation. Great-grandpa Sam, at age fifty-six, had prevailed against the Dalton-Doolin gang but had kept faith with his ordination and had not taken human life. I had manipulated a psychopath, perhaps putting the Vanzandts at risk as well as Felix Ringo. Intellectually I regretted what I had done, but secretly I still lusted for revenge and my wrists swelled with blood and my calluses rasped against the grain of the mattock when I thudded it into the roots of a willow that had threaded themselves into my water well.

  I sat in the grass on the riverbank and watched the current riffle across the top of a submerged cottonwood. Directly below me, lost in the murk and high water, was the sunken automobile where two members of the Karpis-Barker gang had died. Garland T. Moon had waded through this water and fished here, wearing a suit, flinging a hook full of bloody melt into the current that flowed through the car's empty windows.

  Why this particular spot, I wondered. Did he know the sunken car was there, that it was a nest for shovel-mouth catfish, that bass hung under the bluffs and fed on the insects that fell from the grove of trees upstream?

  My father probably took him fishing here, walked these same banks with him as he did with me in later years, a sack of bread-and-butter sandwiches swinging from his big hand.

  Moon had tried to extort ten acres from me on the back of my property. What were his words? I want the place should have been mine. At least part of it. Was that it, I thought. Maybe I had been wrong, he hadn't returned to Deaf Smith simply for revenge. Somehow he had convinced himself he was owed part of my father's estate. He had also gone to Jack Vanzandt, perhaps a surrogate for my father, walking into the middle of his golf game, as though somehow the door to wealth and acceptance in Deaf Smith society would open for him if he could only turn the right handle.

  Now he had disappeared. Where would a man dying of cancer, beaten with a maul handle, and hunted by a sadist go in a county that had been the origin of his travail and the denier of what he believed was his inheritance?

  What places was he even familiar with? Perhaps just the motel room with water bed and X-rated cable he lived in, the old county prison where he had been sodomized by two roadbulls, the tin welding shed that was like stepping into the devil's forge, the wide, green sweep of the river below the bluffs at the back of my property.

  And the Hart Ranch, where he had
seen lights in the clouds he associated with UFOs.

  I went back to the house, wrapped the belt around L.Q.'s holstered . 45 revolver, and set it on the seat next to me in the Avalon.

  But I didn't get far. Bunny Vogel pulled his '55 Chevy into my drive and got out with a sheet of lined notebook paper gripped in his hand. His Mexican girlfriend sat in the passenger's seat.

  'What's wrong, Bunny?' I said.

  'I went to Lucas's house. To tell him I'm sorry for my part in that cow-flop stuff out at the country club. There wasn't nobody home. That Indian motorcycle was gone, too. I found this note wadded up on the porch.'

  I smoothed it out on Bunny's hood. The handwriting, in pencil, was like a child's.

  Lucas,

  We got a new name for you. Its Baby Shit. In case you dont know, baby shit is yellow. You got everybody to feel sorry for you at the trial because you dont have parents. You know what the truth is? You dont have parents because nobody ever wanted you. Baby shit gets wiped off. It doesnt get raised.

  I gave you my collectors bike and you snitched me off. I thought you could hang out with us but you couldn't cut the initiation at the country club. You got one way out of your problem, Baby Shit. Maybe you can prove your not a spineless cunt. Bring my bike out to the Rim Rocks at 6. I'll be there by myself because I dont have to run to my old man to square a beef.

  You thought Roseanne was a good girl? She was good, all right. Down past the part you couldnt get to.

  It was unsigned.

  'The Rim Rocks?' I said.

  'There's a dirt road in the woods at the top of the cliffs, about two miles upriver from the Hart Ranch,' Bunny said.

  'The steel cable,' I said.

  'The what?' he asked, his head tilted peculiarly in the wind, as though the air held a secret that had eluded him.

  I pulled into the drive of the Vanzandts' home. Bunny and his girlfriend parked by the curb and did not get out of their car. The sun had dipped behind the house, and the pine trees in the front yard were edged with fire, the trunks deep in shadow. Far up the slope, sitting in deck chairs on their wide, breezy front porch, were Jack and Emma, a drink tray set between them.

  So that's how they would handle it, I thought. With booze and pills and assignment of blame to others. Why not? They lived in a world where use was a way of life and money and morality were synonymous. Perhaps they believed the burden of their son's errant ways absolved them of their own sins, or that indeed they had been made the scapegoats of the slothful and inept whose plight it was to loathe and envy the rich.

  Jack rose from his chair as I approached the porch. He wore a canary-yellow sports shirt and white slacks and a western belt and polished cowboy boots, and his face looked as composed as that of a defeated warrior to whom victory was denied by only chance and accident.

  'I'd invite you for a drink, Billy Bob, but I suspect you're here for other reasons,' he said.

  Emma lit a cigarette with a gold lighter and smoked it as though I were not there, her red nails clicking slowly on the arm of the chair.

  'Is Darl around?' I asked.

  'No, he went to a show with friends,' Jack said.

  'This morning he was melting screamers in red wine. But tonight he's eating popcorn at the theater?' I said.

  'What in God's name are you talking about now?' Emma said.

  'Screamers, leapers, uppers, black beauties, whatever you want to call them. They tie serious knots in people's brains,' I said.

  'Maybe you'd better leave,' Jack said.

  I handed him the note Darl had left on Lucas's porch. He straightened it between his hands and read, his feet spread slightly, pointed outward, like a man on a ship.

  'This isn't even signed,' he said. But his voice faltered.

  'Why would your boy buy twenty feet of steel cable at a building supply, Jack?' I asked.

  'Cable?' he said.

  'With U-bolts,' I said.

  He kneaded the sheet of paper with one hand into a ball and dropped it on the drink table. It bounced and rolled onto the floor.

  'I'll be back,' he said to his wife.

  'Jack…' she said. Then she said it again, to his back, as he walked around the side of his house to his four-wheel-drive Cherokee.

  I bent over and picked up Darl's note and put it in my pocket. I thought Emma would say something else. But she didn't. She simply propped her elbow on the arm of the chair and rested her forehead on her fingers, the smoke from her cigarette curling out of the ashtray into her hair.

  I walked back down the drive in the cooling shadows to Bunny's car. At the end of the block, the taillights of Jack's Cherokee turned the corner and disappeared up a winding street whose high-banked, blue-green lawns hissed with sprinkler systems.

  'Can you take me to the Rim Rocks?' I said to Bunny through his window.

  He didn't reply. Instead, he was looking at something through the front windshield. He opened the door and stepped out on the pavement.

  'I think that boy done growed up on us,' he said.

  Lucas and Vernon Smothers slowed their pickup truck to the curb. They were both eating fried chicken out of a plastic bucket. They got out and walked to the back of the truck. Lucas dropped the tailgate and slid a plank down to the pavement to offload the Indian motorcycle, which was held erect in the truck bed with four crisscrossed lengths of bungi cord. He kept looking at us, waiting for one of us to speak.

  'Hi, what cha y'all doing here?' he said.

  What follows is put together from accounts given me by Marvin Pomroy, a sheriff's deputy, and a seventeen-year-old West End girl who had not guessed that a late-spring evening high above a lazy river could prove to be the worst memory of her life.

  The wind was cool on the outcrop of rocks above the gorge, the evening star bright in the west, the air scented with pine needles, wood smoke from the campfire, the cold odor of water flowing over stone at the base of the cliffs.

  Earlier, the others had been worried about Darl. Speed took his metabolism to strange places. His face had popped a sweat for no reason, then it had run like string out of his hair while he sucked air through his mouth as though his tongue had been burned. He peeled off his shirt and sat on a rock, his hand pressed to his heart, a blue-collar girl from the West End named Sandy mopping his skin dry.

  He toked on a joint sprinkled with China white and held the hit in his lungs, one time, twice, three, four times, until his eyes blinked clear and the angle iron twisting in his rib cage seemed to dissolve like liquorice on a stove.

  He snapped the cap off a beer and drank it in front of the fire, bare-chested, the leggings of his butterfly chaps molded against his thighs like black tallow.

  His face was serene now. His mouth seemed to taste the wind, the blue-black density of the sky, the moon that rose out of the trees.

  'This is the way it's supposed to be, ain't it? We're up here and everybody else is down there. It's like a poem I read. About Greeks who lived above the clouds,' he said. 'Know what I mean?'

  The others, who sat on motorcycles or logs or on the ground, stoned-out, euphoric in the firelight, their skin singing with the heat of the day and the alcohol and dope in their veins, toked and huffed on joints and nodded and smiled and let the foam from their beer bottles slide down their throats.

  'What about you, Sandy? You read that poem?' he said to the West End girl, who sat on an inverted bucket by his foot.

  'I wasn't too good in English,' she said, and raised the corner of her lip in a way that was meant to be both self-deprecating and coy.

  He twitched his metal-sheathed boot sideways, so it tapped hard into her bare ankle.

  'Then you should read this poem. Because it's a great fucking poem,' he said.

  'Yeah, sure, Darl.'

  'What makes you think you got to agree with me? You haven't even read it. That's an insult. It's like you're saying…' He paused, as though on the edge of a profound thought. 'It's like you're saying I need you to agree with me, or otherwise I'm
gonna be all broken up 'cause my ideas are a pile of shit or something.'

  'I didn't mean that, Darl.'

  Her eyes looked into the dark. He stepped closer to her so his chaps intruded on the edge of her vision. His beer bottle hung loosely from his hand. The orange hair on his wrist glowed against the fire.

  'What did you mean, Sandy?' he asked.

  'Nothing. It's just real neat out here. The wind's getting cool, though.' She hugged herself, feigning a shiver.

  'You ever pull a train, Sandy?' he asked.

  The blood went out of her face.

  'Don't worry. I was just seeing if you were paying attention,' he said, then leaned over and carefully spit on the top of her head.

  Jack Vanzandt had found the access road to the Rim Rocks at the bottom of the hill. He shifted down and ground his way up the slope, through woods that yielded no moon or starlight, bouncing through potholes that exploded with rainwater, shattering dead tree limbs against his oil pan. Gray clouds of gnats and mosquitoes hung in his headlights. In the distance he thought he heard the flat, dirty whine of a trail bike, then the roar of a Harley. But he couldn't tell. The camping equipment in his Cherokee caromed off the walls; the glove box popped open and rattled the contents out on the floor; a rotten tree stump in the middle of the road burst like cork against his grill.

  Then he reached a fork, with a sawhorse set in his path. He stopped the Cherokee and moved the sawhorse to the other side of the fork and went on. He looked in the rearview mirror at the divide in the road and at the reflection of his taillights on the barrier and was disturbed in a way he couldn't quite explain, like cobweb clinging briefly to the side of the face.

  Then the trees began to thin and the road came out on the hill's rim, and he could see the moonlight on the river below and the piled wood burning on a sandy shelf of rock, one that protruded out into nothingness, and Darl's silhouette against the flames and the gleaming chrome and waxed surfaces of his friends' motorcycles.

  Jack strained his eyes through the mud and water streaked on his windshield and the shadows his brights threw on the clearing. He did not see Lucas Smothers among the faces that looked like they had been caught in a searchlight, and he let. out his breath and felt the tension go out of his palms and he wiped them one at a time on the legs of his slacks.