BBH01 - Cimarron Rose (10 page)

I sat in a stuffed leather chair, my legs crossed,
the purpose of my visit like a piece of sharp tin in my throat.

'You want to buy some computer stock?' Jack asked,
and grinned.

A door opened off to the side and Jack's wife walked
out of a rest room. I rose from my chair.

'Hello, Emma, I didn't know you were here,' I said.

'Good morning, sir. Where's your camera?' she said.

'Maybe I should come back later. I didn't mean to
intrude upon y'all,' I said.

'No, no, I'm delighted you came by. What's up?' Jack
said.

'It's Darl.'

'Unhuh?' Jack said.

'I can't represent him.'

They looked at me quizzically.

'Can you tell me why?' Jack asked.

'I have a conflict of interest. I was retained
earlier by Lucas Smothers. I think your son was at Shorty's the night
Roseanne Hazlitt was attacked.'

'Probably half the kids in Deaf Smith were,' Jack
said.

'Darl could end up as a witness at Lucas's trial,' I
said.

I could see the connections coming together in
Jack's eyes, his good looks clouding.

'No, this goes beyond that, doesn't it?' He pointed
one finger, bouncing it in the air. 'You're making Darl a suspect to
get Lucas off the hook.'

'Nope.'

'Well, I personally think you should be ashamed of
yourself, Billy Bob,' Emma said.

'I'm sorry,' I said, rising from my chair. The room
felt warm, the air astringent with the smell of chemical pellets in the
hanging baskets.

Jack rose from his chair behind his desk. The balls
of his fingers rested on the glass top. His lavender shirt with a white
collar and rolled French cuffs and loose tie looked like a cosmetic
joke on his powerful body.

'Do you want me to write a check right now, or does
the bill come later for photographing my son so you can implicate him
in a murder?' he asked.

'I didn't invent your son's history or his
problems…' I shook my head. 'I apologize for my remark. I'd
better go now,' I said.

'Jack, don't let this happen. We need to sit down
and talk this out,' Emma said.

'I might have some difficulty doing that. Get out of
my office, Billy Bob,' he said.

Outside, I could feel the blood stinging in my neck,
my hands useless and thick at my sides.

The next morning, when Lucas Smothers
came to work
with his father, he told me of the late-night visit he had received
from people with whom he had gone to high school.

The cars cut their lights before they got to Lucas's
house, but through his open window he could hear music on a radio and
the voices of girls. The cars, five of them, were stopped in the center
of the road, their engines throbbing softly against the pavement, their
hand-rubbed body surfaces glowing dully under the moon like freshly
ported plastic.

Then the lead car turned into Lucas's drive,
followed by the others, and fishtailed across the damp lawn, scouring
grass and sod into the air, crunching the sprinkler, ripping troughs
out of the flower beds.

One girl jumped from a car, a metallic object in her
hand, and bent down below the level of the bedroom window. He heard a
hissing sound, then saw her raise up and look at him. No, that wasn't
accurate. She never saw him, as though his possible presence was as
insignificant as the worth of his home. Her face was beautiful and
empty, her mouth like a pursed button.

'What are y'all doing?' he said, his voice phlegmy
in his throat.

If she heard him, she didn't show it. Her skin
seemed to flush with pleasure just before she turned and pranced like a
deer into the waiting arms of her friends, who giggled and pulled her
back inside the car.

By the time Lucas and his father got outside, the
caravan was far down the road, the headlights dipping over a hill.

Lucas could see the girl's footprints by the water
faucet under his window. The ground was soft and muddy here, and the
footprints were small and sharp edged and narrow at the toe, and it was
obvious the girl had tried to stand on a piece of cardboard to keep the
mud off her shoes. Written in red, tilted, spray-painted letters below
Lucas's screen was the solitary word
loser
.

That same day I drove out to the Green
Parrot Motel,
a pink cinder-block monstrosity painted with tropical birds and palm
trees and advertising water beds and triple-X movies. The desk clerk
told me Garland T. Moon was next door at the welding shop.

The tin shed had only one window, which was painted
over and nailed shut, and the walls pinged with the sun's heat. Garland
T. Moon was stripped to the waist, black goggles on his eyes,
arc-welding the iron bucket off a ditching machine. The sparks dripped
to his feet like liquid fire. He pushed his goggles up on his forehead
with a dirty thumb and wiped his eyes on his forearm. His smile made me
think of a clay sculpture that had been pushed violently out of shape.

'Were you out at my house two nights ago?' I asked.

'I got me a parttime job. I don't run around at
night.'

'I think either you or Jimmy Cole hurt my horse.'

'I was out a couple of nights. The other side of
them hills. There's all kind of lights in the clouds. You ever hear of
the Lubbock Lights, them UFOs that was photographed? There's something
weird going on hereabouts.'

'I've rigged two shotguns on my property. I hope you
don't find one of them.'

'You don't have no guns. I made a whole study of
you, Mr Holland. I can touch that boy and I touch you. It's a sweet
thought, but I ain't got the inclination right now.'

'Jimmy Cole's dead, isn't he?' I said.

He pulled a soot-blackened glove from his hand one
finger at a time.

'Why would a person think that?' he asked.

'You don't leave loose ends.'

'If I was to come out to your place or that pup's
with a serious mind, y'all wouldn't have no doubt about who visited
you… You cain't do nothing about me, Mr Holland. Don't nobody
care what happens to crazy people. I know. I majored in crazy. I know
it inside and out.'

'Crazy people?'

'I heard the screw say it in the jail. You're queer
for a dead man. You're one seriously sick motherfucker and don't know
it.'

He started laughing, hard, his flat chest shaking,
sweat rolling through the dirt rings on his neck, the wisps of red hair
on his scalp flecked with bits of black ash.

I picked up Mary Beth Sweeney at her
apartment that
evening and we drove down the old two-lane toward the county line. She
wore a pale organdy dress and white pumps and earrings with blue stones
in them, and I could smell the baby powder she used to cover the
freckles on her shoulders and neck.

Twice she glanced at the road behind us.

'You having regrets?' I asked.

Her eyes moved over my face.

'I don't think your situation is compromised. The
sheriff's corrupt, but he's not Phi Beta Kappa material,' I said.

'What are you talking about?'

'I think you work for the G,' I said.

'The G? Like the government?'

'That's the way I'd read it.'

'I'm starting to feel a little uncomfortable about
this, Billy Bob.'

She gazed out the side window so I couldn't see her
expression. We crossed the river and the planks on the bridge rattled
under my tires.

'My great-grandfather's ranch ran for six miles
right along that bank,' I said. 'He used to trail two thousand head at
a time to the railhead in Kansas, then he gave up guns and whiskey and
became a saddle preacher. His only temptation in life after that was
the Rose of Cimarron.'

'I'm sorry. I wasn't listening,' she said.

'My great-grandpa… He was a gunfighter
turned preacher, but he had a love affair with an outlaw woman called
the Rose of Cimarron. She was a member of the Dalton-Doolin gang. He
wrote in his journal that his head got turned by the sweetest and most
dangerous woman in Oklahoma Territory.'

'I'm afraid you've lost me,' she said.

I tried to laugh. 'You're a fed. This county's got a
long history of political corruption, Mary Beth. There're some violent
people here.'

'How about the prosecutor, Marvin Pomroy?'

'He's an honest man. As far as I know, anyway. Are
you FBI?'

'Can we forget this conversation?' she said.

I didn't answer. We pulled into a Mexican restaurant
built of logs and scrolled with neon. I walked around to the passenger
side to open the door for her, but she was already standing outside.

The hills to the west were rimmed with
a purple glow
when I drove her back home. During the evening I had managed to say
almost nothing that was not inept and awkward. I turned into her
apartment building and parked by the brick wall that bordered the
swimming pool.

'Maybe I should say good night here,' I said.

'No, come in for a drink.'

'I've made you uneasy. I don't want to compound it.'

'You're patronizing me… I don't understand
you, Billy Bob. You quit a career as a law officer and then as an
assistant US attorney to be a defense lawyer. You like putting dope
mules back on the street?'

'I won't handle traffickers.'

'Because you're a cop. You think like one.'

I heard cars behind me on the road, the same
two-lane that I could follow, if I were willing, into Val Verde County
and beyond, across the river, into an arroyo where horses reared in the
gunfire and a man in a pinstriped suit and ash gray Stetson and Mexican
spurs grabbed at his breast and called out to the sky.

We were outside the car now. My ears were popping,
as though I were on an airplane that suddenly had lost altitude.

I heard myself say something.

'I beg your pardon?' Mary Beth said, her mouth
partly open.

My face felt cold, impervious to the wind, the skin
pulled back against the bone. Like the penitent who refuses to accept
the priest's absolution through the grilled window inside the
confessional, I felt the words rise once more in my throat, as in a
dream that knows no end.

'I killed my best friend. His name was L.Q. Navarro.
He was a Texas Ranger,' I said.

Her lips moved soundlessly, her eyes disjointed as
though she were looking at a fractured image inside a child's
kaleidoscope.

At noon the next day I walked from my
office to the
pawnshop down the street from the health club. The three-hundred-pound
black woman who owned it, whose name was Ella Mae, wore glass beads in
her hair and a white T-shirt that read:
I Don't Give a
Fuck—Don't
Leave Home Without American Express.

On the wall behind the counter were scores of guns
and musical instruments. I pointed at one.

'Can you give me a good deal, Ella Mae?' I said.

'Honey, if we was back in the old days, I'd pay to
pick your cotton. That's the truth. Wouldn't put you on,' she said.

But after she had rung up my purchase, her mood
changed, as though she were stepping across a line she had drawn
between herself and white people.

'The other day when you was here? You gone on to
your car, but a man with red hair was watching you. He had a coat on
without no shirt,' she said.

'What about him?'

'The look in his face, honey. He started to come in
here and I locked the door.' She shook her head, as though she feared
her words could make the image a reality.

That evening I drove to Lucas
Smothers's house.
Vernon was sitting on the steps, a bottle of strawberry soda beside
him. His clothes were dirty from his work, his face lined with streaks
of dried sweat. A wheelbarrow filled with compost and crisscrossed with
rakes and a shovel stood in the front yard. Under Lucas's screen was a
bright patch of white paint.

'Is Lucas home?' I asked.

'He took the truck to town.'

'Did the sheriff do anything about those kids who
tore up your lawn?'

'That tub of guts is doing good to get himself on
and off the toilet seat.'

'Is Lucas at the poolroom?'

'No, they're handing out free beer at the Baptist
church tonight.'

'It's always a pleasure, Vernon.'

But Vernon had another side, one that wouldn't allow
me the freedom to simply condemn and dismiss him. When I was almost out
the drive, he rose from the steps and called my name and walked out to
the road. He pulled a cloth cap from his back pocket and popped it open
and flicked it against his thigh, as though he could not bring himself
to admit the nature of his fear and love and his dependence upon others.

'What kind of chance has he got? Don't lie to me,
either,' he said.

'It doesn't look real good right now.'

'It ain't right… I swear, if they send
that boy to prison…' He breathed hard through his nose. 'I
killed people in Vietnam didn't do nothing to me.'

'I'd get a lot of distance between me and those
kinds of thoughts, Vernon.'

'Damn, if you don't always have to get up on the
high ground. Excuse me for asking, but who died and made you God?' he
said, and went inside the house. You didn't win with Vernon Smothers.

I drove downtown and parked in front
of the
poolroom, a gaunt, two-story building that was over a hundred years
old. It had a wood colonnade and elevated sidewalk inset with iron
hitching poles, a stamped tin ceiling, oak floors as thick as railroad
ties, a railed bar with spittoons, card and domino tables, a
woodburning stove, and a toilet down a back hallway with the water tank
high up on the wall.

Down the row of pool tables, I saw Lucas chalking a
cue, sipping off of a long-neck beer. He wore a pair of gray slacks and
loafers and a starched lavender shirt and he had put gel in his hair.

'Come on outside,' I said.