BBH01 - Cimarron Rose

  Romancing that woman is like chasing cows in dry lightning. It's a whole lot easier getting into the saddle than out of it. Such is the nature of pagan ways.

  When I walked out to my car Lucas Smothers pulled into the driveway in his skinned-up truck.

  'My father says I got to tell you something. Even though it's just stuff I heard,' he said.

  'Go ahead.'

  He got out of the truck and leaned against the fender. The shadow of a poplar tree seemed to cut his face in half. He bit a hangnail.

  'About the firemen finding Jimmy Cole's body at the old Hart Ranch? Like, maybe Garland Moon killed him and tried to burn him up with some old tires? I mean, that's what the sheriff's thinking, ain't it?' he said.

  'It's Moon's style.'

  'Darl Vanzandt and some others used to get fried on acid and angel dust out there. Roseanne went there with them once. She said Darl got crazy when he was on dust.'

  'What's Darl have to do with Jimmy Cole?'

  'Six or seven months back, a hobo died in a fire by the railway tracks. The paper said he was heating a tar paper shack with a little tin stove and a can of kerosene. I heard maybe Darl and some others done it.'

  He looked at the expression on my face, then looked away.

  'Why would he kill a hobo?' I asked.

  'There's kids that's cruel here. They don't need no reason. Roseanne said maybe Darl's a Satanist.'

  'We're talking about murdering people.'

  'I seen stuff maybe older folks don't want to know about. That's the way this town's always been.'

  'Jimmy Cole wasn't killed on the Hart Ranch. His body was moved there.'

  'It wasn't Darl?'

  'I doubt it.'

  He wiped his palms on his jeans. 'I got to get to work… Mr Holland?'

  'Yes?'

  He scraped at a piece of rust on the truck door with his thumbnail.

  'You doing all this 'cause you figure you owe me?' he said.

  'No.'

  He was silent while the question he couldn't ask burned in his face.

  'Your mother and I were real close. If it had gone different, we might have gotten married. For that reason I've always felt mighty close to you. She was a fine person,' I said.

  His throat was prickled and red, as though he had been in a cold wind. He got in the truck, looking through the back window while he started the engine so I would not see the wet glimmering in his eyes.

  But the lie that shamed, that I could not set straight, was mine, not his.

  I parked my car around the corner from the bank and walked back toward the entrance to my office. Emma Vanzandt sat in a white Porsche convertible by the curb, two of her tires in the yellow zone. She wore dark glasses and her black hair was tied up with a white silk scarf. When I said hello, she looked at the tops of her nails. I stepped off the sidewalk and approached her car anyway.

  'Is Jack inside?' I asked.

  'Why don't you go see?'

  'Your son attacked me, Emma.'

  The backs of her hands were wrinkled, like the surface of bad milk, networked with thick blue veins. She spread her fingers on the steering wheel and studied them.

  'If you think you can solve your problems at our expense, you don't know Jack or me,' she said.

  I went up the stairs and opened the frosted glass door into my outer office. My secretary was trying to busy herself with the mail, but the strain on her composure showed on her face like a fine crack across a china plate. Jack was staring at a picture on the wall, without seeing it, his hands on his hips. When he turned to face me, his vascular arms seemed pumped and swollen with energy, as though he had been curling a barbell.

  'Come inside, Jack,' I said.

  'That's very thoughtful of you,' he replied.

  He closed the inner door behind him. He bit his bottom lip; his hands closed and opened at his sides.

  'I can't describe what I'm feeling right now,' he said.

  'Your son's problem is dope and booze. Address the situation, Jack. Don't blame it on other people.'

  'I feel like taking off your head.'

  'Oh?'

  'You put me in mind of a blind leper climbing into a public swimming pool.'

  'I get it. I'm the source of everyone's discontent but don't know it.'

  'You got this guy Moon stoked up, then you broke my boy's nose.'

  'Moon?'

  'He wouldn't be around here if it wasn't for you.'

  'What do you care?'

  'He hauled a dead man out to my property, what's his name, that character Jimmy Cole.'

  'Cole was found on the old Hart place.'

  'I have an eighth interest in it…' He seemed distracted and tried to regain his train of thought. 'I want you to leave us alone. It's a simple request. You've fucked up your life and your career. But I'll be damned if you'll make my family your scapegoat.'

  I stepped closer to him. I could feel the blood rise in my head. In the corner of my eye I thought I saw L.Q. Navarro watching me, wagging a cautionary finger.

  'You want to explain that, Jack?' I asked.

  'I gave orders in Vietnam that cost other men their lives. It comes with the territory. That's what maturity is about. I'm embarrassed to be in your presence,' he replied.

  He went out the door, nodding to the secretary as he passed.

  I sat alone in the steam room at the health club, the sting of his words like needles in my face. I pushed a towel into a bucket of water and squeezed it over my head and shoulders. L.Q. Navarro leaned against the tile wall, his dark suit bathed in steam, his face as cool and dry as if he stood on an ice flow.

  'Don't let them kind get to you,' he said.

  'Which kind is that?'

  'The kind with money. I don't know what that boy did in Vietnam, but down in Coahuila we went up against automatic weapons with handguns. We shot the shit out of those guys, too.'

  'I grant, they knew we'd been in town.'

  He took off his Stetson and spun it on his finger. His teeth shone when he smiled.

  'That woman deputy, the tall one, Mary Beth's her name? She was good to the little boy. That's how you tell when it's the right woman,' he said.

  'You saved me from burning to death, L.Q. It was the bravest thing I ever saw anyone do.'

  He grinned again, then his face became somber and his eyes avoided mine.

  'I got to leave you one day, bud,' he said.

  A fat man with a towel wrapped around his loins opened the steam room door and came inside. L.Q. fitted his hat on his head and walked toward the far wall, where the tiles melted into a horizontal vortex spinning with wet sand.

  I showered and walked back to my locker in the dressing room, then caught myself glancing sideways at my reflection in the wall mirror, at the same reddish blond hair that Lucas had, the same six-foot-one frame, the puckered white scar on my upper right arm where a bullet had snapped the bone the night L.Q. died, the long stitched welt on top of my foot from the night he pulled me out of the grass fire and we thundered down the hills with tracers streaking over our heads in the darkness.

  At age forty-one I had gained only ten pounds since I was a beat cop in Houston, and I could still bench two hundred pounds and do thirty push-ups with my feet elevated on a chair.

  But I knew my self-congratulatory attitudes were all vanity. I was trying to reconstruct my pride like a schoolboy searching for a missing virtue in his reflection after he has been publicly humiliated.

  I stuffed my soiled workout clothes in my gym bag and drove out to the old Hart Ranch.

  It lay between two large hills, and the only access was down a rutted dirt road that wound through a woods with a thick canopy and layers of pine needles and dead leaves on the ground. The gate at the cattleguard was chain-locked and strung with yellow crime scene tape. I climbed through a barbed wire fence and walked a quarter of a mile into a wide glade that was green with new grass and dotted with wildflowers.

  The main house, which had been built in
the Victorian style of the 1880s, with a wide columned porch and stained glass in the windows, was now the color of cardboard, the roof destroyed by fire, the outbuildings and windmill wrapped with tumbleweeds.

  I followed a creek along the bottom of the far hill, wandered back into a piney woods, crisscrossed the glade, then walked all the way to the river bluffs that bordered the opposite end of the ranch.

  I found a small pioneer cemetery whose monuments were flat fieldstones scratched with dates from the 1850s; a steam tractor that had rusted apart in the creek bed; an impacted, overgrown trash dump probably left behind by loggers or CCC boys; a broken crosscut saw frozen in the trunk of a tree and sealed over by the bark; deer, coon, possum, and cougar tracks but not one human footprint except where the atrophied body of Jimmy Cole had been discovered among the stack of burning rubber tires.

  It was a beautiful day, the sky blue, the trees on the hills in full leaf. I picked up a stone and sailed it clattering into the ruins of the abandoned house.

  A hog burst out the back door and ran stumpily through the lot, past the windmill and the collapsed barn, into a stand of pine trees.

  I followed him for five minutes, then came out into sunlight again and saw seven others in a slough, feral, rust-colored, layered with mud, their snouts glistening with gore.

  In the center of the slough, her hind quarters pried apart, lay a disemboweled doe, a cloud of insects hanging like gauze above her head.

  The slough was churned into soup, slick with patches of stagnant water, green with excrement. On the far bank, where the silt had dried in the sun, were at least three sets of human footprints.

  The sheriff leaned over his spittoon and snipped the end off his cigar.

  'Feral hogs, that means undomesticated?' he said.

  '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.

  * * *

  chapter thirteen

  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.