BBH01 - Cimarron Rose (7 page)

'I want to hire you. To file a suit. They took a
cattle prod to me. They put it all over my private parts,' he said.

'My client's deposition has no meaning for you now.
You're home free on murder beefs in two states. I wouldn't complicate
my life at this point.'

'That little bitch they planted in the cell, what's
his name, Lucas Smothers, he told y'all a mess of lies. I never had no
such conversation with Jimmy Cole. I been jailing too long to do
something like that.'

I looked at the backs of my fingers on top of the
desk blotter. I could hear the minute hand on my wall clock click into
the noon position. Outside the window, the oak trees were a deep green
against the yellow sandstone of the courthouse.

'Don't misjudge your opponent, sir,'

'I said.

'I know all about you. But you don't know the first
thing about me. Me and my twin brother was in a place where they
switched your legs raw just because you spilled your food on the floor.
You ain't gonna find that on a rap sheet. When he was nine years old
they pushed epilepsy pills down his throat till he choked to death. You
doubt my word, you go look in the Waco Baptist Cemetery.'

'You're a sick man.'

'There's some that has said that. It never put no
rocks in my shoe, though.'

I got up from my chair and walked to the door and
turned the key in the lock.

'Get out,' I said.

He remained motionless in the chair, his face
looking away from me, the back of his neck flaming with color. He
mumbled something.

'What?' I said.

He didn't repeat it. When he walked past me, his
eyes were fixed straight ahead, a single line of sweat glistening on
the side of his face like an empty blood vein.

At sunrise Sunday morning I put on my
pinstriped
beige suit and a short-sleeve white shirt and a pair of oxblood Tony
Lamas, walked down to the barn and lifted my saddle off a sawhorse in
the tack room and threw it on the back of my Morgan. The breeze blew
through the doors on each end of the barn and the air was cool and
smelled of wildflowers, fish spawning, oats and molasses balls, green
horse dung, hay that had turned yellow in the corners, and well water
spilling over the lip of the corrugated windmill tank.

L.Q. Navarro sat on top of a stall, the heels of his
boots hooked onto a plank, his body slatted with sunlight.

'You should have taken that .38-40 that
gal tried to give you,' he said.

'It's Sunday, L.Q. Take a day off.'

'It's them kind of days the shitbags crawl
out of the storm sewers. Tell me it wasn't fun busting caps on them
dope mules down in Coahuila.'

'
Adios, bud
,' I said, and
flicked my heels into the Morgan's ribs and thudded across the soft
carpet of desiccated horse manure in the lot.

I crossed the creek at the back of my property and
rode through a stand of pines, then up an incline that was humped with
blackberry bushes into Pete's backyard. He waited for me on the porch,
dressed in a pair of pressed jeans and a starched print shirt and
freshly shined brown shoes. I reached my arm down and pulled him up
behind the cantle.

The Morgan's hooves clattered on the flattened beer
cans in the yard.

'Was you really baptized in the river?' he said.

'Sure.'

'I never heard of a river-baptized person converting
to a Catholic'

'Somebody's got to keep y'all honest.'

He was quiet a long time, rocking against me with
the horse's steps.

'Does it bother you when people say you're crazy,
Billy Bob?'

'Most of the human race is, Pete.'

'I knew you was gonna say that.'

We came out of the pines into the backside of a
rural Mexican neighborhood with fenceless dirt yards and abandoned
privies and alleys blown with litter and bloodred hibiscus growing out
of rusted car shells.

This area was part of what was known as the West
End, a place where cedar cutters and field-workers and 'bohunks',
people who were of mixed German and Mexican blood, had always lived. It
was exactly twenty miles down the same road that led into the East End,
where Deaf Smith's country club set, and there were many of them, had
bought and refurbished Victorian homes that were as big as steamboats
when spot market oil was forty dollars a barrel.

It was cool inside the small stucco church, and
electric fans oscillated on the walls by the Stations of the Cross, and
the votive lights in front of a statue of Christ's mother rang with
color each time the breeze from the fan passed over the burning wax.
The people in the pews were almost all elderly, their hands sheathed in
callus, the skin around their eyes wrinkled, as though they had been
staring into the sun for a lifetime.

After Mass Pete and I rode my Morgan up the street,
then cut through a grove of cedars and an empty filling station that
had been built in 1945 and went inside a clapboard chafé and
ate
breakfasts of pork chops, biscuits, milk gravy, scrambled eggs, grits,
sliced tomatoes, and coffee.

'What's a crystal meth lab?' Pete asked.

'A place where people make narcotics. Why?'

'My mother said to stay away from some men that's in
the neighborhood.'

'Oh?'

He looked out the window at a dog tied on a rope in
the bed of a pickup. He chewed on the corner of his thumbnail. The
light had gone out of his eyes.

'You shouldn't tie a dog in the back of a truck. If
he falls out, he'll get drug to death. He won't have no chance at all,'
he said.

'Who are these men, Pete?'

'People my daddy knew once.' His face was empty, his
gaze still focused outside the window. 'My mother made up that story
about him getting killed in the army. He just gone off one day and
never come home.'

'Maybe you shouldn't study on it.'

'It don't bother me. If people don't want you, they
ain't worth fretting on. That's the way I see it.'

Then he grinned again, as though the world's
capacity to injure had no power over him.

Jack Vanzandt lived in a large
white-columned home
built of old brick and Spanish ironwork salvaged from a plantation in
Louisiana. The lawn comprised eight acres and sloped upward from the
street through shade trees to the wide, breezy front porch of the
house, the four-car garage with servants quarters on top, two clay
tennis courts, a screened-in pool stippled with sunlight, a stucco
guest cottage, a satellite television dish that was the size of a barn
door.

His first wife had died in a traffic accident on a
bridge over the Pecos River gorge. The second wife, Emma, came from
Shreveport, where her mother and father had run a fundamentalist
church, then had become moderately wealthy by starting up a mail-order
wedding cake business. Emma's approach to civic and charitable work
seemed to be governed by the same entrepreneurial spirit. She ran on
high-octane energies that made her eyes flash and her hands move
abruptly when she became impatient with the way someone else did his
work, until she simply took over it. Like her husband, Jack, she was
always polite, and her high cheekbones and long Indian-black hair were
lovely to look at. But you always felt you wanted her as a friend,
never as an adversary.

'How are you, Billy Bob?' she said, rising from her
work in a rose bed, pulling off a cotton glove and extending her hand.

'Sorry to bother y'all on a Sunday, Emma,' I said.

'We always love to see you. Did you bring your
tennis racquet?'

'No, I'm afraid I have to chop cotton today. Is Jack
around?'

'You're going to take his picture?' she said, her
eyes dropping to the Polaroid camera in my hand.

'Not really,' I said, and smiled.

Jack came out on the front porch, a frosted highball
glass wrapped with a napkin and a rubber band in his hand.

'Can you handle a gin and tonic?' he said.

'I just need a minute or two, then I'll be gone,' I
said.

He watched my face, then said, 'Walk out here with
me and I'll show you part of an Indian work mound Emma dug up.'

We strolled through the trees toward a white gazebo.
Pine needles and rose petals had been scattered on the grass by a
windstorm during the night.

'My PI had to do some checking on Darl's record,' I
said. I kept my eyes straight ahead on the piled dirt and sacks of
pasteurized fertilizer and potted hydrangeas by the edge of a freshly
spaded flower bed.

Jack cleared his throat slightly. 'Why's that?' he
said.

'You don't want to find out later the other side is
waiting for you with a baseball bat. Darl has four arrests involving
violence of some kind… Am I correct, he beat up a waitress in
a bar?'

Jack squatted by the mound of black dirt and picked
up some pottery shards and rubbed them clean between his fingers. There
was a thin, round place in the center of his gold hair.

'He shouldn't have been there. But she wasn't a
waitress. She was a prostitute, and she and her pimp tried to roll him
when they thought he was passed out,' he said.

'I'd like to take a Polaroid of Darl.'

'I'm a little unclear as to where this is going.'

'The kid who might take you for seven figures should
at least be able to identify your son in a photo lineup.'

'Wait here. I'll get him.'

Five minutes later the two of them came out of the
back of the house together. Even though it was almost noon, Darl's face
looked thick with sleep. He raked his hair downward with a comb, then
gazed at the lint that floated out in the sunlight.

'What's that spick say?' he asked.

'Darl…' his father began.

'That you blindsided him and kicked him on the
ground,' I said.

'How about my car? I was supposed to enter it in the
fifties show in Dallas. What right's he got to ruin my paint job?'

'That's a mean cut on your ring finger,' I said.

'It collided with a flying object. That guy's mouth.'

'Two weeks ago?'

'Yeah, his tooth broke off in my hand. I'm lucky I
didn't have to get rabies shots.'

'Look up a little bit,' I said, and popped the flash
on the Polaroid.

Darl's eyes stared back at me with the angry vacuity
of an animal who believes it has been trapped in a box.

'I'm going back to the house,' he said.

'Thank Mr Holland for the help he's giving us, son,'
Jack said.

'He's doing this for free? Get a life,' Darl said.
Thick-bodied, sullen, his face unwashed, he walked through the shade,
his hand caressing the peach fuzz along his jawbone.

Jack turned away, his fists knotted on his hips, his
forearms corded with veins.

That afternoon Temple Carrol found me
back by the
windmill, hoeing out my vegetable garden. The sky behind her was purple
and yellow with rain clouds, the air already heavy with the smell of
ozone.

'My sister-in-law works at the video store. This
tape was in the night drop box this morning,' she said.

I stopped work and leaned on my hoe. The blades of
the windmill were ginning rapidly overhead.

'Somebody must have dropped it in by mistake. You'd
better take a look,' she said.

We went through the back of the house to the library
and plugged the cassette into the VCR.

At first the handheld camera swung wildly through
trees illuminated by headlights, rock music blaring on the audio, then
the camera steadied, as though it were aimed across a car hood, and we
saw kids climbing out of convertibles, throwing ropes of beer on each
other, passing joints, kissing each other hard on the mouth for the
camera's benefit, their features as white as milk.

Then we saw her in an alcove of trees, in
Clorox-faded jeans and a maroon T-shirt with a luminous horse head on
it, a longneck beer in one hand, a joint in the other, dancing to the
music as though there were no one else present on earth.

'Roseanne Hazlitt,' I said.

'Wait till you see what a small-town girl can do
with the right audience,' Temple said.

Her auburn hair was partially pinned up in swirls on
her head, but one long strand curled around her neck like a snake. She
let the beer bottle, then the joint, drop from her fingers into the
weeds, and began to sway her hips, her eyes closed, her profile turned
to the camera. She pulled her T-shirt over her head, her hair
collapsing on her shoulders, arched her shoulders back so that the tops
of her breasts almost burst out of her bra, unsnapped her jeans and
stepped out of them, then twined her hands in the air and rotated her
hips, ran her fingers over her panties and thighs, grasped the back of
her neck and widened her legs and opened her mouth in feigned orgasm
and pushed her hair over her head so that it cascaded down her face
while her tongue made a red circle inside her lips.

The screen turned to snow.

'How about the look on those boys watching her?'
Temple said.

'You recognize any of them?' I asked.

'Three or four. Jocks with yesterday's ice cream for
brains. How do kids get that screwed up?'

I looked at my watch. It had started to rain outside
and the hills were aura-ed with a cold green light like the tarnish on
brass.

'I'll buy you a barbecue dinner at Shorty's,' I
said, and dropped the Polaroid photo of Darl Vanzandt in front of her.

We sat on the screen porch and ate
plates of cole
slaw and refried beans and chicken that had been cooked on a mesquite
fire. The river that flowed under the pilings of the club was dented
with raindrops, the trees along the bank smoky with mist. Downstream,
some boys were swinging out over the water on a rubber tire tied to a
rope, cannonballing into the current.

I heard beer cans clattering outside the screen.

'He's an old-timer, Temple. Let's try to keep him in
a better mood this time,' I said.