BBH01 - Cimarron Rose (37 page)

'That's it, bud,' I said.

His face was pink in the waving shadows of the
trees. I could see words in his eyes, almost hear them in his throat.
But Vernon stood next to him and whatever he wanted to say stayed
caught in his face, like thoughts that wanted to eat their way out of
his skin.

'Good night,' I said, and walked with Temple toward
my car.

'Hold on. How much is the bill on all this?' Vernon
said.

'There isn't one.'

'I ain't gonna take charity.'

'Well, I won't have you unhappy, Vernon. I'll send
you the biggest bill I can.'

'Somebody's making obscene phone calls in the middle
of the night. I think it's that little shit Darl Vanzandt.'

'Don't you or Lucas go near that kid.'

'What's Lucas supposed to do, live in a plastic
bubble?… Hold on. I ain't finished. What you said when Lucas
was on the stand, I mean, what you done to yourself to get him off,
well… I guess it speaks for itself.'

His face looked flat, his hands awkward at his sides.

'Good night, Vernon.'

'Good night,' he said.

Pete came by early the next morning to
go fishing in
the tank. He was barefoot and wore a straw hat with a big St Louis
Cardinals pin on it and a pair of faded jeans with dark blue iron-on
patches on the knees.

'The water's pretty high after all that rain,' I
said.

'What's a fish care long as you drop the worm in
front of him?'

'You surely are smart.'

'I always know when you're gonna say something like
that, Billy Bob. It don't do you no good.' He grinned at me, then
looked out confidently at the world.

We picked up our cane poles in the barn and walked
past the windmill down to the tank. The sun was soft and yellow on the
horizon and patches of fog still hung on the water's surface. A bass
flopped inside the flooded willows on the far bank, and a solitary
moccasin swam across the center of the tank, its body coiling and
uncoiling behind its triangular head. Pete trapped a grasshopper under
his hat and threaded it on his hook, then swung his line and bobber out
past the lily pads.

'There's a lady knocking on your back door, Billy
Bob,' he said.

I turned and looked toward the house. She wore a
white skirt and blouse and a wide hat with flowers on it, and even at a
distance I could almost feel the electricity ,in her movements, the
anger in her balled fist as she continued, unrelentingly, to knock on
the screen door.

'Is it that government lady who used to come out?'
Pete asked.

'No, I'm afraid it's a walking neurosis by the name
of Emma Vanzandt.'

He mouthed the words walking neurosis
to himself.

Then Emma saw me and got in her car and drove around
the barn and out to the tank. She stepped out of the car and stood at
the bottom of the levee, her ankles and knees close together, her face
strangely composed, like that of a person who lives with ferocious
energies that she can call upon whenever necessary.

'I wanted to say something to you at your home, so
you'd know my words weren't spoken to you as a result of a chance
encounter,' she said.

'I've never underestimated your sense of purpose,
Emma.'

'You've ruined my marriage and destroyed our family.
I don't blame you for wanting to get your son off, but at heart you're
a voyeur with the instincts of a garbage rat. The fact that we've had
you in our home fills me with a level of disgust that's hard to
express.'

'How about the dues other people have paid for you,
Emma? Lucas and Roseanne Hazlitt and Bunny Vogel? Don't their lives
mean anything?'

'Bunny Vogel is an overall-and-denim gigolo. I never
met your son. And I gave Roseanne Hazlitt a job in our church's store.
Does that answer your question?'

'Jack was in business with Sammy Mace. Y'all are
friends of Felix Ringo. Why don't you check out this guy's record? I
heard him tell a story about wiring up somebody to a telephone crank.'

'I have nothing else to say to you, sir. You're an
ill-bred, disingenuous, violent man. You live in the West End where you
can pretend you're otherwise. I just feel sorry for those who are taken
in by you.'

Her eyes lingered on Pete with a look of both pity
and disdain.

Then she got in her car and realized she had removed
the keys from the ignition and had placed them either on the seat or
the dashboard. She stuck her fingers down the cracks in the seat,
searched along the back floor, felt over the top of the dashboard,
stirred through the coins and litter inside the pocket of the console.
Her fingers started to tremble and lines appeared in the caked makeup
on her brow like string in wet clay and her breath speckled her lips
with saliva.

I picked up the keys off the ground and handed them
to her through the window.

'Garland Moon's off his chain. If y'all sicked him
on Bunny or me through Felix Ringo, you'd better hire some private
security,' I said.

She was hunched over the wheel, twisting the key in
the ignition, her eyes manic with rage and humiliation.

'I'm going to have the skin peeled off your body in
strips,' she said.

She dropped the car in reverse, knocked me aside
with the open door, and gouged a huge divot out of the levee with the
back bumper. Then she corrected the front wheels and pressed the
accelerator to the floor and scoured mud and shredded grass into a
green balloon behind her car.

I walked down the levee with my pole
and stood above
a cluster of lily pads and bounced a worm up and down on the bottom, my
scalp tightening with the tangle of thoughts in my head.

'That lady didn't have the right to say them kind of
things to you,' Pete said.

'When you're a cop, or sometimes a lawyer, you serve
up people's lives on a dung fork, Pete. They usually deserve it, but
it's never a good moment.'

'I wouldn't pay that lady no mind. You're the best
friend I ever had, Billy Bob.'

'That man who came by y'all's house and looked in
your mom's window?'

The expression went out of his face, as though he
had remembered a bad dream that should not have been part of the waking
day.

'I gave him a beating, then turned him loose on
somebody else. Maybe on that woman who just left,' I said.

Pete looked at me, then averted his eyes. His mouth
was parted, his cheeks gray.

'You done that?' he said.

The Conquistador Apartments were built
of white
stucco and blue tile on the highway that led to San Antonio. The
gardens around the pool and the outside wall were overlaid with gravel
and planted with Spanish daggers, cactus, crown of thorn bushes, and
mimosa trees, which gave it a hot, arid appearance out of
context with
the surroundings. It was built during the oil boom of the 1970s, and
the people who stayed there seemed to have no geographical origins.
They wore lizard-skin boots, vinyl vests, turquoise jewelry,
hand-tooled belts, and cowboy hats with a feather in the band, as
though they had stopped at a roadside souvenir shop outside Phoenix and
taken on a new identity. They could have been drug traffickers or
owners of fast-food chains. The swimming pool was always iridescent
with a residue of suntan lotion and hair gel.

I used the building directory to find Felix Ringo's
apartment, which was located off an arched flagstone walkway. No one
answered the bell and I could hear no movement inside. I slipped a
screwdriver in the jamb, pried the bolt out of the wood, pushing it
back into the lock's mechanism, then threw my shoulder into the door
and snapped it free.

The apartment was furnished with heavy, hand-carved
oak chairs and tables and cabinets, the windows covered with blue
velvet drapes, the thermostat set below sixty degrees. Even when I
turned on the lights the rooms seemed dark, the cracks around the
curtains as bright as tin. An acrylic painting of a picador with his
lance embedded in the pack of muscle behind a bull's neck hung over the
water bed. In the drawer of the nightstand were a .25-caliber
automatic, four boxes of condoms, a velvet rope, a jar of Vaseline, and
a spring-loaded, leather-encased blackjack that was shaped like a
darning sock.

I told myself I had broken into a man's apartment to
see justice done, perhaps even to see Felix Ringo in custody so he
would not become the victim of Garland T. Moon. But that was not the
reason. Even inside the refrigerated gloom of the apartment, I could
still see the muzzle flashes of guns blooming in the darkness down in
Coahuila, hear the labored breathing of L.Q. Navarro's wounded horse,
see L.Q. stirrup-dragged across the rocks and cactus.

Men like Felix Ringo did the jobs for the forces of
Empire that no government ever acknowledged. They went to special
schools and carried badges and were endowed with marginal
respectability, but their real credentials lay in their bottomless
cruelty. And no matter what explanations they offered others for their
behavior, each of them daily fed his perversity like a gardener tending
a hothouse filled with poisonous flowers.

Political assassins always kept journals; sadists
kept trophies, and they never strayed far from them.

I found the box at the bottom of a desk drawer. It
was made of sandalwood, fitted with gold hinges and hasps, fastened
with a soft bungi cord. A wood tray divided into compartments was inset
in the top of the box. It contained military decorations, a sergeant's
chevrons, gold teeth, polished finger bones, empty shell casings, a
switchblade knife with a green serpent inlaid in the handle, a long
strip of black hair wrapped inside a plastic bag.

Under the wood tray was a thick pack of pornographic
photos held together with a rubber band. They were yellow with age,
mounted on cardboard, and featured Orientals involved in every possible
sexual act and position. But it was not these that shocked or sickened
the sensibilities. The bottom of the box was layered with Polaroid
color photos that made the eye film, the hand vaguely soiled at the
touch: a freshly dug pit in front of which four peasant men and a woman
stood bound and blindfolded; a man on his knees with his thumbs tied
behind him, a disembodied arm pointing a pistol behind his ear; a man
with a pesticide sack over his head, hung by his arms between two stone
walls; grinning enlisted men posing at the end of a dirt street
littered with bodies that had started to bloat; a woman strapped in a
chair, her face and shirtless upper torso streaked with blood.

At the bottom of all these photos was a playing card
emblazoned with the badge of the Texas Rangers. Written in felt pen
across the badge was the word Muerto and the date
I accidentally killed L.Q. Navarro.

When I got back home Lucas Smothers
was sitting on
the steps of my front porch, twisting the tuning pegs on a mandolin,
tinking
each string with a plectrum. He wore a pair of starched khakis and
cowboy boots and a short-sleeve denim shirt rolled above his triceps.
His reddish blond hair was combed into faint ducktails on the back of
his head. It was cool where he sat in the shade, and he drank out of a
soda can and smiled at me.

'I got a bluegrass gig at a club over in Llano
County. My dad didn't say nothing about it, either,' he said.

'Go to college,' I said.

'So I can be like them rich pukes out in East End?'

'Come in the house. I have to use the phone.'

Inside the library, he looked at the titles of books
on my shelves while I punched in Marvin Pomroy's home number on the
phone.

'Marvin?' I said.

'Oh gee,' he said when he recognized my voice.

'Felix Ringo isn't taking Moon down on a Mexican
warrant. He's taking him off the board,' I said.

'What gives you this special insight?'

'Does it figure Ringo's going to bust a guy who can
testify against him?'

'Ringo's a cop. Moon's a nut case.'

'I just creeped Ringo's place at the Conquistador.
He was a dope mule down in Coahuila.'

'Say again? You did what?'

'My partner and I capped some of those guys, Marvin.
His name was L.Q. Navarro. He put a playing card in the mouth of every
dead mule we left down there. Ringo has one of those cards in a
sandalwood box filled with his trophies. He wrote the date of my
friend's death on it.'

'You're telling me, the
district attorney, you broke into a policeman's apartment?'

'Ask Ringo to show you his Polaroid collection of
life down in the tropics.'

'Let this go, Billy Bob.'

'Moon killed my father.'

He repeated my statement back to me incredulously.
When I didn't reply, he said, 'Do you realize what you just told me? If
this guy shows up dead…'

'Get a life, Marvin,' I said, and eased the phone
receiver down in the cradle.

Lucas stood at the bookshelves, Great-grandpa Sam's
journal spread in his hands, his mouth open.

'What's up, bud?' I said.

He blinked, then closed the journal.

'Moon killed your dad?' he asked.

'Yeah, I guess he did.'

'What are you gonna do about it?'

'That journal was kept by my great-grandfather. He
was a drunkard and a gunfighter who became a saddle preacher on the
Chisholm Trail. It took him a long time, but he learned how to put
aside his violent ways.'

'What happens when the other guy don't put aside
his?'

'You talking about Moon or Darl Vanzandt?'

'I seen Darl out at the drive-in this morning. He
was melting screamers in dago red. He said I was yellow. He said he's
gonna pop me in the face every time he sees me.'

'He'll crash and burn, Lucas. He's a pitiful person.'

'You told Marvin Pomroy you capped some dope mules.'

'So I'm a bad example.'

'No, you ain't. You're a good man. And that's why I
come here, just to tell you that. I'm proud we're… Well, I'm
proud, that's all. I'll see you, Billy Bob.'