BBH01 - Cimarron Rose (29 page)

At Huntsville Moon had been written up repeatedly
for 'shirking work quota' and 'weighing in with dirt clods.'

In the old days a convict at Huntsville had to pick
a certain quota of cotton each day. If he didn't, or if he was caught
weighting his bag with dirt from the field, he was separated out from
the other inmates, taken hot and dirty to a lockdown unit, not allowed
to shower or eat, and forced to stand with two others on top of an oil
drum until the next morning. If he fell off the drum, he had to deal
with the gunbull in the cage.

Moon had been hospitalized twice for head
lacerations and broken foot bones. No cause for the injury was given.
Each hospitalization took place after an escape attempt. His stomach
had been seared by liquid Drano, his back held against a hot radiator,
his calves branded with heated coat hangers. Everything in his record
indicated he was as friendless and hated among the prison population as
he was among the personnel.

But what good did it do to dwell upon the cruelty
that had been inculcated in Garland T. Moon or that he had cultivated
and nourished in himself and injected systematically into the lives of
others? The day you understood a man like Moon was the day you crossed
a line and became like him.

I needed to know what had happened between him and
my father around the year 1956. Moon had said my father had put him in
his truck and dropped him on the highway without food or money or
destination. My father was a good-hearted and decent man, slow to anger
and generous to a fault. If Moon's account was true, Moon had either
committed a crime so heinous or represented a threat so grave to others
my father had felt no reservation in abandoning an ignorant, sexually
abused boy to his fate.

I went back to the first entries in Moon's file. He
had been released from the county prison, at age sixteen, in February
of 1956. His record remained clean until August 17 of that same year.
The words 'suspicion of abduction' were typed out neatly by the date
without explanation.

I walked across the square to the newspaper and
asked permission to use the paper's morgue. The issues from 1956 -had
never been put on microfilm and were still bound in a heavy green
cardboard cover that had turned grey with age around the borders. I
turned to the August issues and found a four-inch backpage story about
a missing ten-year-old Negro girl who was later discovered hiding in a
cave. She told officers a white man had come into her yard and had led
her into the woods behind her home. She refused to tell anyone what had
happened to her between the time she left home and the time she had
been found by sheriff's deputies.

Four days later there was a follow-up story about a
juvenile who had been brought in for questioning about the girl's
abduction. The story did not give his name but stated he had been
working on a pipeline nearby the girl's home.

The juvenile was released from custody when the
parents refused to bring charges.

The date on the newspaper follow-up story was August
18, the day after the date on Garland T. Moon's rap sheet.

I walked back across the street and threw Moon's
file on the sheriff's desk.

'Sorry, I couldn't find Cleo,' I said. 'By the way,
some exculpatory evidence disappeared from the Roseanne Hazlitt
homicide investigation. I'm talking about some bottles and beer cans
taken from the murder scene by your deputies. You mind going on the
stand about that, Hugo?'

Pete's mother was waiting for me when
I got back to
the office. She wore a pink waitress uniform, her lank, colorless hair
tied behind her head. She kept twisting the black plastic watchband on
her wrist.

'The social worker says she's got to certify. If
Pete ain't living at home no more, she cain't certify.' She sat bent
forward, her eyes fastened on the tops of her hands.

'I'll talk to her,' I said.

'It won't do no good.'

'It's dangerous for him, Wilma.'

'They ain't done nothing but write that note. They
sent it to you. They didn't send it to us.' The resentment in her voice
was like a child's, muted, turned inward, resonant with fear.

'I'll ask Temple to bring his stuff home after
school,' I said.

'You been good to Pete and all but…' She
didn't finish. Her eyes looked receded, empty. 'I'm gonna move away.
This town ain't ever been any good for us.'

'I don't think that's the answer.'

Then I saw the anger bloom in her face, past the
fearful restraint that normally governed her life.

'Yeah? Well, why don't you just raise your own son
and leave mine alone for a while?' she said.

At six that evening Mary Beth called
from Denver.

'Am I going to see you again?' I asked. My throat
was dry, my tone vainly ironic and preemptive, the receiver held too
tightly against my ear.

'I can't come back there for a while.'

'I can get a flight to Denver… Mary Beth?
Are you there?'

'Yes… I mean, yes, I'm here.'

'Did you hear what I said?' But I already knew the
answer, and I could feel a weakness, a failing in my heart as though
weevil worms had passed through it.

'Some people here are still upset about the way
things went in Deaf Smith,' she said.

'With you and me?'

'That's part of it.'

'I think the problem is Brian Wilcox. Not you, not
me, not the shooting of Sammy Mace and his bodyguard. I think Wilcox is
poisoning the well everywhere he goes and your people are overlooking
it to save the investigation.'

'Maybe that's true. But I can't do anything about
it.'

I could hear her breathing in the silence.

'Can you give me a telephone number?' I said.

'We're leaving tonight for a meeting in Virginia.'

'Well, I hope it works out for you,' I said.

'What? What did you say?'

'Nothing. I never did well inside organizations. I
hope you do. That's all I meant.'

In the silence I could hear her breath against the
receiver.

'Mary Beth?'

'Yes?'

'I'll need you to testify at Lucas's trial. About
the cans and bottles those other deputies lost or destroyed.'

'It's a bad time to bring that up.'

'Bad time? That's what's on your mind? It's a bad
time?'

'Good-bye, Billy Bob.'

After I hung up the receiver, I stared
at the
telephone in the fading light through the window, as though I could
will it to ring again. Then I walked outside, under an empty dome of
yellow sky, into a sand-bitten wind that shredded leaves from the
chinaberry tree. I got into my Avalon, the wind buffering the windows,
and drove
to Pete's house.

'You're by yourself?' I asked.

He stood on the porch in a pair of pin-striped
overalls and a Clorox-stained purple T-shirt.

'My mother don't get off from work till nine,' he
replied.

'Did you eat yet?'

'Some.'

'Like what?'

'Viennas and saltines.'

'I think we'd better get us a couple of those
chicken-fried steaks at the café.'

'I knew you was gonna say that.'

It was dusk when we got to the café. We sat under a
big electric fan by the window and ordered. Down the street, the sun
was red behind the pines in the church yard. Pete had wet his hair and
brushed it up on the sides so that it was as flat as a landing field.

'You have to be careful, bud. Don't talk to
strangers, don't let some no-count fellow tell you he's a friend of
your mom,' I said.

'Temple done told me all that.'

'Then you won't mind hearing it again.'

'That ain't all she told me.'

'Oh?'

'She said for a river-baptized person you been doing
something you ain't supposed to. What'd she mean by that?'

'Search me.'

'It's got to do with that lady from the sheriff's
department. That's my take on it, anyway.' He bit off a bread stick and
crunched it in his jaw.

'Really?'

'Temple talks about you all the time. She said she
feels like going upside your head with a two-by-four.'

'How about clicking it off, bud?'

'You gonna come to my ball game this weekend?'

'What do you think?'

He chewed the bread stick and grinned at the same
time.

In a candid moment most longtime cops
and prison
personnel will tell you there are some criminals whom they secretly
respect. Charles Arthur Floyd was known for his scrupulousness in
paying for the food he was given by Oklahoma farmers when he hid out on
the Canadian River. Clyde Barrow finished a jolt on a Texas prison
farm, then went back and broke his friends out. Men who have invested
their entire lives in dishonesty do max time rather than lie about or
snitch-off another con. Murderers go to their deaths without complaint,
their shoulders erect, their fears sealed behind their eyes. The
appellation 'stand-up' in a prison population is never used lightly.

But the above instances are the exceptions. The
average sociopath is driven by one engine, namely, the self. He has no
bottom, and his crimes, large or small, are as morally interchangeable
to him as watching TV with his family or walking back to a witness at a
convenience store robbery and popping a .22 round through the center of
her forehead.

Darl Vanzandt pulled his '32 Ford into my drive the
next evening, then saw me currying Beau in the lot and drove his car to
the edge of the barn and got out and stood in the wind, his face
twitching from the dust that swirled out of the fields or the chemicals
that swam in his brain.

He approached the fence and lay his forearm on the
top rail, studying me, his unbuttoned shirt flapping on his chest. I
hadn't noticed before how truncated his body was. The legs were too
short for his torso, the shoulders too wide for the hips, the hands as
round and thick as clubs.

'Say it and leave,' I said.

'Bunny Vogel quit his job at the skeet club. My
mother got him that job. He walks in yesterday and tells the manager
he's finished bagging trash and cleaning toilets. Big fucking
superstar. He's gonna dime me, that's what he's doing.'

'Who cares?'

'It's Bunny who started it all. I'm talking about
Roseanne. You listening? Bunny pretends he's a victim or something.
Believe me, 'cause he's got a messed-up face doesn't
mean he's a victim.'

'Not interested.'

He made an unintelligible sound and his face seemed
to wrinkle with disbelief.

'I can give you Bunny, man,' he said.

'I'm not interested, because you're a liar, Darl.
Your information is worthless,' I said.

He inched farther down the fence rail, as though
somehow he were getting closer to me.

'You want Garland Moon? I can do that too. I got
stuff on that geek can make you throw up,' he said.

'Nope.'

'What's with you?'

I pulled Beau's left front hoof up between my legs
and pried a rock out of his shoe with my pocketknife. I could hear
Darl's shirt puffing and flapping in the wind.

'You and Marvin Pomroy got to work some kind of
deal,' he said. 'The judge said I fart in the street, I'm going to the
Walls. I'm still a kid.'

I put down Beau's left hoof and stooped under his
neck and picked up his other front hoof. The wind blew my hat across
the lot into the barn.

'My old man,' Darl said.

'What?'

'That's who you're really after. You want him, I can
give him to you.'

I stood erect and stared at him. No shame, no
expression except one of expectancy showed in his face. I folded my
pocketknife blade in my palm and walked toward him and placed my hand
on the smoothness of the fence rail next to his. His skin was sunburned
inside the peach fuzz on his cheeks; there was a small clot of mucus in
the corner of his mouth.

'I don't want anything you can give,' I said.

'Wha—'

'I'm going to take it from you on the stand,' I said.

I turned away from him and stroked Beau's face and
took a sugar cube from my shirt pocket and let him gum it out of the
flat of my hand. A moment later I heard Darl's car engine roar, then
the dual exhausts echo off the side of the house and fade away in the
wind.

The evening before opening statements
I drove to
Lucas Smothers's house and took a new brown suit, white shirt, and tie
off the clothes hook in the back of the Avalon and knocked on the door.
Lucas appeared at the screen with a wooden spoon in one hand and a shot
glass in the other.

'You got your hair cut,' I said.

'Yeah, just like you told me.'

'What are you doing with a whiskey glass?'

'Oh, that,' he said, and smiled. 'I'm baking a cake
for my father's birthday. I use it for measuring. Come on in.'

I followed him into the kitchen, the plastic suit
bag rattling over my shoulder.

'What's that?' he asked.

'It's your new suit. Wear it tomorrow.'

'I got a suit.'

'Yeah, you've got this one. Tomorrow, you sit erect
in the chair. You don't chew gum, you don't grin at anything the
prosecutor or a witness says. If you want to tell me something, you
write it on a pad, you never whisper. You do nothing that makes the
jury think you're a wiseass. There's nothing a jury hates worse than a
wiseass. Are we connecting here?'

'Why don't you carve it on my chest?'

'You know how many defendants flush themselves down
the commode because they think the court is an amusement park?'

'You're more strung out about this than I am.'

Because I know what you'll face if we lose, I
thought. But I didn't say it.

He stood tall and barefoot at the drainboard,
measuring vanilla extract into the shot glass. Outside the screen
window, the windmill was silhouetted against a bank of yellow and
purple clouds.