BBH01 - Cimarron Rose (12 page)

The social circle of Darl Vanzandt
wasn't a
difficult one to track. They were rich and lived in the East End; they
had flunked out of the University of Texas or they commuted to a
community college or they held token jobs in the businesses they would
inherit. But it was a strange solipsistic attitude toward others that
truly defined them. They were animated and loud and unseeing in public,
indifferent to the injury their words might cause anyone outside their
perimeter. They drove too fast, running stop signs and caution lights,
never making a connection between their recklessness and the jeopardy
they arbitrarily brought into the lives of others.

Their accents were regional, but they had skied in
Colorado and surfed in California, and they played golf and tennis at a
country club where blacks and Mexicans picked up their litter from the
greens and their sweaty towels from the court, as though that was the
natural function of the poor. Their insensitivity was almost a form of
innocence. Had they ever been brought to task for their behavior, they
probably would not have understood the complaint against them.

But one member of this group was an exception. Bunny
Vogel came from a family of shiftless mill workers whose front yard was
always decorated with rusted washing machines and automobile parts. But
Bunny'd had a talent. As a high school running back he had crashed
holes through the enemy line like a tank through a hedge row. Then he
had played two years on a no-cut athletic scholarship at Texas
A&M, with every expectation of graduating and going to the
pros. That was before he got caught paying off a grader and fellow
athlete to change an exam score for a freshman named Darl Vanzandt.

After he was expelled, he turned his motorcycle on
its side and ground a strip of metal, leather, and bone a hundred feet
long on the highway to Austin.

I found him at his job out at the skeet club. He
could have been a Visigoth, with his grained, ruddy face, his long
bronze-colored hair tangled on his shoulders, a deep pink scar, with
stitch holes, along one jaw. Bunny was deferential and soft-spoken,
even likable, but I always felt that behind his smile a clock was
ticking as he waited for that moment when he would be free of older
people and the sanction and approval they could arbitrarily withdraw if
he displeased them.

Shotguns popped in the warm breeze behind him, and
beyond the row of oblong green traps, clay pigeons exploded in puffs of
colored smoke against the sky.

'I'd like to hep you, Mr Holland, but far as I know
the only guy mixed up with Roseanne Hazlitt was ole Lucas. Sorry,' he
said.

'Were you out at Shorty's the night she was
attacked?' I asked.

'I might have been. But I didn't see her…
Seen Lucas… That ain't no hep, though, is it?' He smiled
boyishly and brushed at the grass with one shoe.

'You think Lucas could rape and kill a girl?'

'Lucas?' He thought about it. 'It's not like him.
But a guy gets a snootful, who knows?'

'How you know he had a snootful, Bunny?'

He smiled with his eyes. 'I never saw him out there
when he didn't.'

'See you around.'

'Yeah, anytime, Mr Holland. I hope it works out for
Lucas.' He bit the corner of his lip philosophically.

On the way to my car I saw Emma Vanzandt walking
toward me from a pavilion. She wore a pair of tailored brown riding
jeans and lizard boots and a maroon silk shirt that filled with the
wind.

'You're not going to say hello?' she asked.

'How you doin', Emma?'

'You've been busy. All Darl's friends wonder what
you might be up to.'

'They haven't figured it out, huh?'

'Billy Bob,' she said, her
voice climbing. 'Be a little kind. Darl's not a bad boy.'

'I didn't say he was.'

She looked back at the pavilion. 'Let's get in your
car and I'll explain something… Darl suffers from—'

'Fetal alcohol syndrome. Jack told me about it.'

'I'd never heard of it before. But our last
psychiatrist took one look at him and seemed to know everything about
him… They've all got the same face. The eyes are set far
apart, the upper lip is too close to the nose.' Then she looked at
nothing and said, 'What a club to belong to,' and laughed, almost
lewdly, as though giving vent to another person who lived inside her.

'His friends vandalized Lucas Smothers's house.'

'Oh, I don't believe that.'

'It's good to see you, Emma.'

'He wet his bed until he was fifteen. He's not
capable of raping anybody. I don't think he's learned how to masturbate
yet,' she said.

'Maybe he should start. He beat up a prostitute with
his fists.'

'You should have gotten married, Billy Bob. Then you
wouldn't be such a stick in the mud.'

'Really?'

She reached across the car seat and patted me on the
wrist. 'Jack's sorry for speaking harshly to you. Come by and see us.
We'll work all this out.'

'No, we won't,' I said.

'Well, you're just a big pill. But one day you'll
see we mean you well. Until then, you have a good life, sir,' she said,
and squeezed my hand.

She got out of my car, her long, Indian-black hair
tucked behind her head with a silver comb. Then I saw Darl come to meet
her, looking past her shoulder at me, his face oily and insentient with
booze and tranquilizers, the glare in his eyes like yellow heat trapped
under murky water.

The next day, in my office, Marvin
Pomroy, the
prosecutor, told me about the call that had come in to the rural fire
station, his eyes moving across the rug as though he were clarifying
the details to himself rather than to me.

No one would have seen the flames, but a shower
broke in the predawn hours and a column of wet smoke rose from between
two hills and hung in the sky like a long gray rope. At first the
firemen thought they were simply putting out a pile of discarded
automobile tires that had been heaped into a deep pit. Then they began
to poke through the foam and pull apart the tires with their axes. The
blackened figure at the bottom of the pyre looked atrophied, cemented
at the joints, like an anatomically deformed manikin encased in a thick
crust. Except for the white teeth, exposed by the skin that had
stretched back on the skull in a death grin.

'You're sure it's Jimmy Cole?' I asked.

'Cole was missing two toes on his left foot. He cut
them off with a hatchet to get out of the field in Sugarland,' Marvin
said. His eyes were bright, his gum snapping in his jaw. 'The crime
scene's clean, though. We can't tie it to Moon.'

'You look like your circuits are burning,' I said.

'The ME says Cole died somewhere else. His nose and
mouth and ears were full of sediment and pig shit. The ME says he was
probably buried in a hog lot, then dug up after rigor mortis set in.'
He glanced at my face. 'What?' he said.

'I told Garland Moon I thought he'd killed Cole. He
probably decided to move the body.'

'What were you doing with Moon?'

'Either he or Cole was in my barn. I tried to warn
him off.'

'Don't try to 'front this guy on your own,' he said.
But I knew I was not the source of his agitation. He leaned forward in
the chair, a heated sheen on his face. 'Look, I've got a problem here
that's eating my lunch. The fire was on the old Hart property. Nobody's
lived there for thirty years. But I got the feeling most of those
deputies had been there before. I also got the feeling the sheriff
didn't want anybody hanging around there.'

'Who owns the place now?'

'A California company that sells western real estate
to people tired of shopping in malls where the Crips and the Bloods
have firefights. But I don't see anything there worth hiding, a strip
of ground between the hills, the kind of place where the hoot owls
screw the jackrabbits.'

'Why you telling me this?'

'That's the irony. I work in a county that's so
corrupt I have to confide in a defense lawyer who rides his horse into
barrooms. I grant you, it's a pitiful situation,' he said.

'Thanks, Marvin. The ME thinks Jimmy Cole was
suffocated in a hog lot?'

'Moon wouldn't do that to an old friend. He put an
ice pick inside his head.'

After work that day I took the rake
and garden
shears and a gunny sack out of the barn and walked to our family
cemetery on the far side of the tank. It was bordered by sandstone
fence posts drilled through the center to hold the cedar rails that my
father had shaved and beveled and notched thirty-two years ago, the
year before he had climbed down into a hellhole on a natural gas
pipeline to mend a leak in a faulty weld.

Each year he faked his physicals or got someone else
to take them for him, because, like many pipeline arc welders, his eyes
were filled with tiny pinholes from weaving a circle of fire that was
as white as the sun around a pipe joint. My mother said his vision had
become so bad that clarity of sight came to him only when he struck the
stringer-bead rod against the pipe's metal and saw again the flame that
was as pure to him as the cathedral's bells were to the deaf bellringer
Quasimodo.

My father never saw the apprentice with him pull a
Zippo from his khakis and light a cigarette. The explosion blew the
glass out of the welding truck like brittle candy.

My mother, who had been a librarian and an
elementary school teacher, was buried next to him. After my father's
death, she had purchased a common headstone for them both, inscribed
with her name as well as his, with her birth date and a chiseled dash
that left the date of death to another hand.

I raked their graves and Great-grandpa Sam's clean,
and those of all the other Hollands buried there, trimmed the grass
around the headstones, and weeded out the rose beds I had dug under the
cedar fence rails. Then I picked wild-flowers from the field and set
them on my parents' graves, and cut a solitary yellow rose and laid it
against Great-grandpa Sam's headstone.

The wind was warm blowing across the field, rippling
the grass like new wheat, and I could smell the river and the water in
the irrigation ditches and the day's heat baked into the scarred
hardpan that had once been part of the Chisholm Trail. I didn't hear
the footsteps behind me.

'I saw you from the back of the house,' Mary Beth
said. She wore tan slacks, with high pockets, and sandals and a magenta
shirt, and she carried a picnic basket by the straw bail in her right
hand.

'How you doin', slim?' I said.

'Slim? If you aren't a peach.'

'You figure out who those guys in the cruiser were?'

'Take your choice.'

'Maybe it's time your people pulled you out.'

'Subject closed. You like fried chicken?'

'You bet.'

We walked across the field to a grove of oaks on the
bluff above the river. She spread a checkered cloth on the grass and
set it with silverware, tiny salt and pepper shakers, turkey-and-cheese
sandwiches, guacamole, taco chips, potato salad, and a thermos of
lemonade. Her hair hung over her cheeks while she placed each item
carefully on the paper plates.

'You're making me self-conscious,' she said.

'You're a great-looking lady, Mary Beth.'

Her eyes crinkled in the corners. I was standing by
the edge of the checkered cloth now. When she rose to her feet her face
was only inches away from mine. I touched her hair, then I put my mouth
on hers. Her eyes were open, then they closed and she put her arms
around my back and I felt her breasts against my chest and a moment
later the heat of her cheek press against mine.

I was suddenly involved with the old male
impossibility of making love with any degree of dignity while standing
up. We sat on the grass, then I lay her back with her head on the edge
of the checkered cloth and kissed her again. The wind was blowing from
across the river, eddying through the grass above the bluff, and the
clouds piled on the western horizon were purple and edged with fire. I
looked down into her eyes.

Behind me I heard a horse's hooves moving through
the dead oak leaves. I turned and saw Beau, my Morgan, coming through
the shade, and a little boy with a haircut like a soft brush riding
bareback atop him.

'Hi! What ch'all doin'?' he said, pushing a branch
out of his face with his arm.

'Hey, Pete, what's goin' on?' I said, my voice
coming back to me like a man bursting to the surface of a deep pool.

'We still going fishing?'

'Wouldn't miss it, bud. You want some chicken? This
is Mary Beth.'

He grinned at her. He was barefoot and in overalls
and looked like a small clothespin on Beau's spine.

'I already eat,' he said.

'We have some lemonade,' she said. She was sitting
up now, one arm propped behind her.

'That's all right. I'm butting in.'

'I'd tell you, wouldn't I?' I said.

He grinned at nothing, flicking the reins across the
back of his hand.

'I'm gonna take Beau back,' he said.

'Billy Bob told me a lot about you, Pete. I'd like
it if you'd join us,' Mary Beth said.

His eyes shifted off her, his grin never fading,
then he slipped off Beau's back onto the ground.

'This is the smartest little guy in Deaf Smith,' I
said.

'I knew you was gonna say that,' he said.

That night I drove down the road to
the convenience
store to buy a carton of milk. The store was on the top of a
rise,
next to a cornfield, its bright white-and-red exterior and
neon-scrolled windows and lighted gas pumps and wide cement parking
area surrounded by rural darkness. It was also a hangout for East
Enders dragging the main road through town.

Their cars were parked by the phone booth, their
doors open to catch the breeze, the cement pad around their feet
already littered with beer cans, dirty napkins, and the cigarette butts
they had emptied from their ashtrays.