BBH01 - Cimarron Rose (14 page)

'That's right,' I said.

'Which kind is it that don't like rolling in slop?'

'I think Jimmy Cole was killed right there on the
ranch,' I said.

'Because you found pig shit in a slough and Jimmy
Cole had it in his ears?'

'There was a dead campfire inside the house. I think
he was hiding out there.'

'And Darl Vanzandt and his pissant friends done it?'

'You tell me.'

He leaned back in his chair and pulled on his nose.

'If you told me Darl Vanzandt was messing with
sheep, I might believe it,' he said. Then he stared at me for a long
time, his face starting to crease, a private joke building like a
windstorm inside his huge girth. 'Is this how y'all done it in the
Rangers, searching out pig shit in the woods? Damn, son, if you ain't a
riot. Hold on, let me get my deputies in here. They got to hear this.'

He laughed so hard tears coursed down his cheeks.

After supper that night, I stood at my
library
window and watched the sky turn black and lightning fork into the crest
of the hills. I turned on my desk lamp and started a handwritten letter
to Jack Vanzandt. Why? Maybe because I had always liked him. Also, it
was hard to criticize a man because his love blinded him to the
implications of his son's behavior.

But my words would not change the chemical or
genetic aberration that was Darl Vanzandt, and after two paragraphs I
tore my piece of stationery in half and dropped it in the wastebasket.

It rained hard, blowing in sheets across the fields
and against the side of the house. I called Mary Beth's apartment and
let the phone ring a dozen times. I had tried to reach her all day, but
her answering machine was still off.

I replaced the receiver in the cradle, then glanced
out the window into the driveway just as a tree of lightning split the
sky and illuminated the face of Garland T. Moon.

He stood motionless in the driving rain, a thick
hemp doormat held over his head, his blue serge suit and tropical shirt
soaked through.

I turned on the porch light and stepped out the
front door. He walked out of the shadows, his flat-soled prison shoes
crunching on the gravel. Without invitation, he mounted the porch, his
mouth grinning inanely, the raindrops on his face as viscous as
glycerin.

'How did you get here?' I asked.

'Walked.'

'From town?'

'They're holding old DWIs over my head so I cain't
get a driver's license.'

'You kill your buddy Jimmy Cole?'

The skin of his face seemed to flex, caught between
mirth and caution, as though he were breathing with a sliver of ice on
his tongue.

'I ain't had to. Somebody else done it,' he said.
'You sent them people after me?'

'Which people?'

'Ones come in my room with a baseball bat.'

'Get off my property, Garland.'

His eyes held on my face, unblinking, his mouth a
dry slit.

'Then it's somebody figures I know something. But I
ain't got no idea what it is,' he said.

'I read the case file from LAPD. They say you were
in that house for three hours. They say you killed them all one by one
and made the survivors watch.'

'Then why ain't I in jail?'

I walked close to him. I could smell the deodorant
that had melted on his skin, his breath that was like chewing gum and
snuff.

'You've got a free pass tonight. You won't get
another one,' I said.

His eyes, as blue and merry as a butane flame,
danced on my face.

'The one with the bat? I caught him before he could
get back to his truck. Check around the clinics. See if they ain't got
a man won't be going out in public a lot,' he said.

He stepped back into the rain and darkness and
walked out to the road, the doormat above his head, his suit molded
like a blowing cape against his body.

The next afternoon Mary Beth answered
her phone.

'Is anything wrong?' I asked.

'No. Why should there be?'

'Your machine's been off. I haven't seen you around.'

'Can I call you back later?'

But she didn't. That evening I drove to her
apartment. As I walked up the stairs, people were swimming laps in the
pool, stroking through the electric columns of light that glowed
smokily under the turquoise surface, and the air was tinged with the
gaslike smell of chlorine, burning charcoal starter, and flowers heated
by the colored flood lamps planted in their midst.

A heavyset man in a tie and business suit came out
of Mary Beth's apartment and almost knocked me down. I stepped back
from him and felt the place on my chest where he had hit me.

'Excuse me,' I said.

He pushed his glasses straight on his nose and
looked into my face, as though he recognized me. His hair was dark and
neatly clipped, his part a pale, straight line in his scalp. His chin
had a cleft in it and his cheeks were freshly shaved and his skin taut
and scented with cologne.

'No problem,' he said.

'No problem?'

'I said I was sorry, pal. I didn't see you.'

'That's funny. I didn't hear you,' I said.

He started to turn away, then his chest expanded and
his stomach flattened, as though he were abandoning a useless protocol,
and he faced me squarely with his left foot slightly forward, the right
foot at an angle behind it.

'You have a reason for staring at me?' he asked
quietly.

'Not in the least.'

He glanced back at Mary Beth's closed door. 'Have a
good evening. Best way to do that, don't let it get complicated,' he
said. He raised his finger and eyebrows at the same time, then walked
down the stairs.

She was in her uniform when she let me in. There
were pools of color in her cheeks and her voice had a click in it when
she spoke. She began straightening couch pillows and magazines that
didn't need straightening, her back turned to me.

'I'm sorry to be in a rush. I have to be on duty in
twenty minutes,' she said.

'That guy's a fed.'

'What, he threw a badge on you?'

'No, he's a self-important clerk who thinks
arrogance and being a cop are the same thing.'

'You don't like them much, do you?'

'He shouldn't be here. If I can make him, other
people will, too.'

'I have to go, Billy Bob.' She removed her gunbelt
from the closet shelf and began strapping it on her waist. She tucked
her shirt inside the belt and kept her eyes on her fingers and the
cloth as it tightened under the edge of the leather.

I waited until she raised her eyes again. 'You have
a personal relationship going with this guy?' I asked.

'I don't have to tell you these things.' Then I saw
her cheeks sink, as though she were disturbed by the severity of her
own words.

'He's putting you in jeopardy. I don't like him.
That offends you?' I said.

She picked up her purse from the counter that
separated the kitchen from the living room. Her face was turned away
from me. She pressed her fingers against her temple.

'I'm leaving and I don't have any more to say. Do
you want to walk to the parking lot with me or stay here?'

'Somebody's trying to run Garland Moon out of town.
Because of something he knows. But he doesn't know what it is.'

She stared at me blankly, her freckled face like a
young girl's, suddenly empty of all other concern.

Temple Carrol was sitting in a
deerhide chair in my
office when I arrived the next morning.

'I found our man,' she said.

'How?'

'He told the guys in the emergency room he fell from
a paint ladder through a glass window. They reported it as a knife
wound.'

'Why didn't they believe him?'

'Somebody had done a number on him earlier. A
paramedic said he looked like he'd been drug by a rope.' She propped
her chin on her fingers and waited for the recognition to show in my
eyes.

His name was Roy Devins, and he had
been two times
down in Huntsville and maybe once in Mexico under another name, and
whatever had happened to him—an accident on a ladder, a knife
beef in
a bar—he had driven seventy miles down the highway without
seeking
help, or even accepting it when people at stoplights glanced into the
cab of his pickup, then realized what they were looking at and remained
sickened and numb and stationary at the light while he sped away from
them.

He looked out of the bandages on his face with the
attentiveness of a man who gives importance only to those who can harm
him. Then the eyes registered and dismissed us and receded back into
the ennui of looking at objects and listening to sounds that might
satisfy a need or fulfill a desire—the possibility of
cigarettes in
my shirt pocket, the noise of a food cart in the hall, a film featuring
Japanese gladiators in samurai combat on the television set.

'You remember me?' I said.

'Where's your horse?' he replied.

'You don't mind our being here, do you?'

'I don't give a shit what y'all do,' he said.

'You can put Garland Moon down for the Bitch, Roy.
Three-strikes-and-you're-out was made for this guy,' I said.

There were thin white lines around his eyes, as if
all sunlight and health had been siphoned out of his skin. The bandages
on one side of his head were flat against the scalp and bone. When he
turned his head on the pillow, a tic jumped in his throat, as though a
fine fishbone were caught in his windpipe. I thought it was the pain.

'I'm going out to the Coast, get a new start. I'm
through with all this running around. I fell off a ladder,' he said.
His eyes shifted off mine and looked at nothing.

'Listen up, Roy,' Temple said. 'They don't graft
ears back on here. Medicaid doesn't pay for plastic surgery on slashed
cheeks. How'd we know about you, anyway? He came out to Billy Bob's
house and laughed about doing you.'

His eyes filmed over and he turned his head on the
pillow so that he faced the open door of his room and the sound of
other people walking in the hall, rattling food trays, delivering
flowers and fruit baskets, carrying with them all the beautiful portent
that an ordinary day could offer.

'Think about it another way. The guys who got you to
bust him up, have they been here to look in on you, pay your bills,
tell you they're sorry it went south on you?' I said.

But our reasoning could not compete with the memory
of Garland T. Moon and that moment when Roy Devins, dope mule and
abuser of children, mainline con and fulltime loser, thought he could
burst into a motel room with a baseball bat and inspire terror in a man
he presumed was one of his own kind, no stronger or weaker or better or
worse, unaware that all his experience with evil in county jails and
state prisons was as worthless as every other precept that had betrayed
him when he had believed himself on the edge of unlocking the magic
doors to which everyone but he had always been granted access.

I sat on a bench in the side yard of
the stucco
church that Pete and I attended, and watched Pete and a group of boys
his age play work-up softball out on the school diamond. The shade
under the mimosa tree was flecked with tiny blades of sunlight, and
Beau, my Morgan, was eating grass along the rain ditch that bordered
the church yard. I opened the thick cover of Great-grandpa Sam's
journal and turned the pages to my bookmark.

Pete walked hot and dusty and happy
into the shade,
his fielder's glove hooked on its strap through his belt.

'We still gonna get peach ice cream?' he said.

'I wouldn't go a day without it,' I replied.

'You know them men out yonder, Billy Bob? They been
around the block twice, like they was lost or something.'

I looked over my shoulder, out on the hard-packed
dirt street. Both the cars were dark and waxed, with tinted windows and
radio antennas. I stood up and put on my Stetson and walked over to
Beau and stroked his head and fed him a sugar cube with the flat of my
hand. The cars pulled up along the edge of the rain ditch, and the
passenger window in the front of the lead car rolled down on its
electric motor.