BBH01 - Cimarron Rose (18 page)

Her smile was attenuated, wan, a victorious
recognition of the assent she had extracted from me. Then I saw it in
her eyes. She had already revised him and placed him in the past,
assigning him qualities he never had, as the roles of widow and
proprietress melded together in her new life.

I had forgotten that the sheriff had
started out his
law enforcement career not as a cop but as a gunbull on a road gang,
back in the days when the inmates from the old county prison were used
to trench water and sewer lines and to spread tar on county roads. I
remember seeing them as a boy, their backs arched with vertebrae, their
skin sun-browned the color of chewing tobacco, thudding their picks
into a ditch while the road hacks stood over them with walking canes
that were sheathed on the tips with cast-iron tubes.

Moon had been one of those inmates.

At age fifteen raped on a regular basis by two
gunbulls in the county prison.

What were his words? Tore my insides out
and laughed while they done it… Y'all gonna get rid of me the
day you learn how to scrub the stink out of your own shit.

Was the splattered, red trail from the kitchen to
the gun case in the sheriff's log house just the beginning of our
odyssey with Garland T. Moon?

That night I called Mary Beth Sweeney
and got her
answering machine.

'It's Billy Bob. I'll buy you a late dinner—' I
said, before she picked up the receiver.

'Hi,' she said.

'Are you Secret Service?'

'No!'

'I had a run-in with this character Brian Wilcox
this morning. Why are Treasury people interested in the sheriff's
murder?'

'Ask Brian Wilcox.'

'Come on, Mary Beth.'

'I don't want to talk about him.'

Through my library window I could see the moon
rising over the hills.

'How about dinner?' I said.

'It's a possibility.'

'I'll be by in a few minutes.'

'No, I'll come there.'

'What's wrong?'

'Brian watches my place sometimes. He's
weird…' Then, before I could speak again, she said, 'I'll
take care of it. Don't get involved with this man… See you
soon.'

The breeze was cool that night, the
clouds hammered
with silver. It had been an unseasonably wet spring, and small
raindrops had started to click on the roof and the elephant ears under
my library windows. I walked out into the barn and the railed lot
behind it and fed Beau molasses balls out of my hand. When he had
finished one, he would bob his head and nose me in the shirt pocket and
face until I gave him another, crunching it like a dry carrot between
his teeth. I stroked his ears and mane and touched the dried edges of
the wound someone had inflicted on his withers, and tried to think
through all the complexities that had attached themselves to the
defense of Lucas Smothers and had brought someone onto my property who
would take his rage out on a horse.

I could hear the windmill's blades ginning in the
dark and the bullfrogs starting up in the tank. My back was to the open
barn doors and the wind blew across me and Beau as though we were
standing in a tunnel. For no apparent reason his head pitched away from
the molasses ball in my palm, one walleye staring at me, and then he
backed toward the far side of the lot, his nostrils flaring.

I turned and just had time to raise one arm before a
booted man in shapeless clothes swung a sawed-off pool cue at the side
of my head. I heard the wood knock into bone, then the earth came up in
my face, the breath burst from my chest, and I heard a snapping,
disconnected sound in the inner ear, like things coming apart, like the
sound of seawater at an intolerable depth.

I was on my elbows and knees when he kicked me,
hard, the round steel-toe of the boot biting upward into the stomach.

'You like roping people in bars? How's it feel,
motherfucker?' he said.

Then a second man kicked me from the other side,
stomped me once in the neck, lost his balance, and kicked me again.

My Stetson lay in the dirt by my head, the crown
pushed sideways like a broken nose. I could hear Beau spooking against
the rails, his hooves thudding on the mat of desiccated manure.

But a third man was in the lot too. He wore khakis
and snakeskin boots, and hanging loosely from the fingers of his right
hand was a curved knife, hooked at the end, the kind used to slice
banana stalks. He dropped it in the dirt by the booted man's foot.

The booted man gathered it into his right hand and
laced the fingers of his left into my hair and jerked my head erect.

'Just so you'll know what's going on, we're cutting
off your ears,' he said.

For just a second, through the water and blood and
dirt in my eyes, I saw a flash of gold in the mouth of the man who had
dropped the knife to the ground.

I brought my fist straight up between the thighs of
the man who held me by the hair, sinking it into his scrotum. I saw his
body buckle, the knees come together, the shoulders pitch forward as
though his lower bowels had been touched with a hot iron.

Then headlights shone in my driveway, bounced across
the chicken run, and filled the barn and horse lot with shadows.

The three men were motionless, like stick figures
caught under a pistol flare. I rolled sideways, stumbled and ran into
the barn, my arms cupped over my head as one of them aimed and fired a
pistol, a .22 perhaps, pop, pop, pop, in the
darkness and I heard the rounds snap into wood like fat nails.

I thought I saw L.Q. Navarro, his tall silhouette
and cocked ash-gray Stetson and gunbelt and holstered .45 double-action
revolver superimposed against an eye-watering white brilliance.

Moments later Mary Beth Sweeney squatted next to me
in Beau's stall, her nine-millimeter pushed down in the back of her
blue jeans. My nose was filled with blood and I had to breathe through
my mouth. She ran her hand through my hair and wiped the straw and dirt
out of my eyes. My face jerked when she touched me.

'Oh Billy Bob,' she said.

'Where are they?'

'They took off in a four-wheel-drive through the
back of your property… Let's go inside. I'll call the
dispatcher.'

'No, call Marvin Pomroy.'

I got to my feet, my hands inserted between the
slats of the stall. The high beams of her car were still on, and the
inside of the barn was sliced with electric light. She put her arm
around my waist, and we walked together toward my back door as the wind
twisted and bent the branches of the chinaberry tree over our heads.

I stood shirtless in my bedroom on the
third floor,
the cordless phone held to one side of my head, a towel filled with ice
held against the other. My shirt was on the floor, the collar flecked
with blood. I could feel a burning in my lower back that I couldn't
relieve, no matter which way I moved.

'You never saw them before?' Marvin said through the
phone.

'No… I don't think.'

'You're unsure?'

'The guy who watched, the one who dropped the knife
on the ground… Maybe I'm imagining things.'

'Where'd you see him?'

'It's like you remember people from dreams. I'm not
feeling too well now, Marvin. Let me get back to you.'

'I'll put a deputy on your house.'

'No, you won't.'

'No faith,' he said.

'You're a good guy, Marvin. I don't care what people
say.'

I heard him laugh before he hung up.

I clicked off the phone and set it down on the table
by the window where Mary Beth sat, her violet eyes close set with
thought.

'You think you saw one of those guys before?' she
said.

'L.Q. Navarro and I went up against this same mule
down in Coahuila three or four times. I always saw him in the dark.
Sometimes I see people at night who remind me of him, like you see
people inside dreams. A therapist told me—'

'What?'

'That it was unexpiated guilt. It's the kind of
thing therapists like to talk about.'

'I worry about you.'

'I'd better take a shower,' I said.

'You should go to the hospital.'

'I've wasted enough of the night on these guys. Why
don't you get yourself something to eat in the kitchen?'

'Eat?'

'Yeah.'

'Too much,' she said.

After she went downstairs, I got into the shower
stall and turned the hot water into my face and hair and propped my
palms against the tile and let the blood and dirt and dried sweat boil
out of my skin and sluice into the drain.

But when I closed my eyes I felt the bottom of the
stall tilt under my feet and I saw streamers of colored light, like
tracers in a night sky, behind my eyelids. I dried off and dressed in
my underwear, one hand gripped on the bathroom door for balance. I saw
the horizon dip outside the window and I heard a voice say
Just
so you'll know what's going on, we're cutting of your ears
,
and I toppled sideways across a chair onto the floor.

Then Mary Beth was beside me, her hands gripped
under my arms, pulling me erect, helping me to the bed. I fell back on
the pillow and dragged the sheet across my loins. She sat on the edge
of the mattress, her eyes staring down into mine. Outside the window
the sky was sealed with a flat layer of black clouds that pulsed with
lightning.

'I'm all right,' I said.

'You want me to go?'

I started to speak, but she saw the answer in my
eyes and she leaned over me and brushed my forehead with her fingers
and kissed me lightly on the mouth. The tips of her curls touched my
cheeks, and I could smell her shampoo and the heat in her skin. I held
her and kissed her again. She slipped off her shoes and lay beside me,
her face inches from mine.

'I've seen your jacket. Your kind always gets hurt,
Billy Bob,' she said.

'You are a fed.'

She didn't reply. Instead, she gathered her arms
around me and pulled me against her, releasing her breath against my
cheek, molding me against her, her ankle tucked inside mine.

I waited to sit up, to change my position, but I
felt two bright tentacles of pain slip along my spine and wrap around
the front of my thighs.

'Wait,' she said. She stood up, unbuttoned her shirt
and let it drop to the floor, then unsnapped her blue jeans and worked
them off her hips and stepped out of them. Behind her, I could see
clouds racing across the land, blooming with quicksilver, splintering
the hills with electricity.

She turned away from me briefly, unhooked her bra
and slipped off her panties, then sat on the edge of the mattress,
pulled the sheet away from my body, and lay against me. I tried to turn
on my shoulder so that I faced her, but again I felt a muscular spasm
seize my lower back and send a pain through my thighs that made my
mouth drop open.

'Don't move,' she said, and spread her thighs and
sat on top of me, her arms propped on each side of me. She smiled down
into my face. The freckles on her shoulders and the tops of her breasts
looked like tiny brown flowers. I traced my fingers around her nipples
and took them in my mouth, then felt an unrelieved hardness and desire
in my loins that I couldn't contain, that was like an envelope of heat
glowing off of iron, that ached to enter her softness and the beauty
and charity of her body, which gave satisfaction and sanctuary long
before orgasm.

'I'll be here for you,' she whispered, her lips
against my cheek, her passion so genuine and pure that I knew secretly,
as all men do, I was undeserving of it.

Early the next morning, I put ice on
the tubular
swelling along the side of my head and went to a doctor for the muscle
spasms in my lower back. He showed me a set of exercises that involved
lying on the floor and raising the knees to the chest and sitting in a
chair and touching the floor while I sucked in my stomach. I was amazed
to find that a level of pain that had been so intense could drain out
of my body like water, at least temporarily.

'Whenever you feel the pain, do the exercise. You'll
be fine. Just avoid any sudden movement in your back,' the doctor said.
He took a ballpoint pen out of his shirt pocket. 'You want a
prescription?'

'No, thanks.'

'It's light stuff.'

'It always is.'

'Tell me you're not still six-parts Baptist, Billy
Bob.'

Later, I went to the health club and sat in the
steam room, then showered and walked to Marvin Pomroy's office in the
courthouse.

'We put out a bulletin on the three guys but we
didn't have much to go on,' he said.

'Anybody question Moon about the sheriff's murder?'
I asked.

'I don't see him as a strong suspect.'

'Moon was in the old county prison when the sheriff
was a roadbull,' I said. Marvin was tilted back in his swivel chair.

The connections didn't come together in his face.
'Moon said a couple of guards sodomized him on an oil barrel. He said
they did it to him every Sunday morning.'

'You're saying the sheriff was a pervert?'

'I don't know anything he wasn't.'

'If Moon's got a hard-on for the whole county, why
does he wait forty years to come back and do a number on us? I think
the sheriff was killed for other reasons,' Marvin said.

'Some people might call an ax across the face an
indicator of revenge.'

But I could tell he was thinking of something else.
He took off his glasses and polished the lenses with a piece of
Kleenex. He fitted them back on his nose, his face blank, as though
debating whether to expose the feelings he usually kept stored in a
private box. His hair was so neat it looked like fine strands of metal
on his head.

'I couldn't sleep last night,' he said. 'What those
guys tried to do to you… I'd like to catch up with them on a
personal basis.'