BBH01 - Cimarron Rose

  He looked out of the bandages on his face with the attentiveness of a man who gives importance only to those who can harm him. Then the eyes registered and dismissed us and receded back into the ennui of looking at objects and listening to sounds that might satisfy a need or fulfill a desire—the possibility of cigarettes in my shirt pocket, the noise of a food cart in the hall, a film featuring Japanese gladiators in samurai combat on the television set.

  'You remember me?' I said.

  'Where's your horse?' he replied.

  'You don't mind our being here, do you?'

  'I don't give a shit what y'all do,' he said.

  'You can put Garland Moon down for the Bitch, Roy. Three-strikes-and-you're-out was made for this guy,' I said.

  There were thin white lines around his eyes, as if all sunlight and health had been siphoned out of his skin. The bandages on one side of his head were flat against the scalp and bone. When he turned his head on the pillow, a tic jumped in his throat, as though a fine fishbone were caught in his windpipe. I thought it was the pain.

  'I'm going out to the Coast, get a new start. I'm through with all this running around. I fell off a ladder,' he said. His eyes shifted off mine and looked at nothing.

  'Listen up, Roy,' Temple said. 'They don't graft ears back on here. Medicaid doesn't pay for plastic surgery on slashed cheeks. How'd we know about you, anyway? He came out to Billy Bob's house and laughed about doing you.'

  His eyes filmed over and he turned his head on the pillow so that he faced the open door of his room and the sound of other people walking in the hall, rattling food trays, delivering flowers and fruit baskets, carrying with them all the beautiful portent that an ordinary day could offer.

  'Think about it another way. The guys who got you to bust him up, have they been here to look in on you, pay your bills, tell you they're sorry it went south on you?' I said.

  But our reasoning could not compete with the memory of Garland T. Moon and that moment when Roy Devins, dope mule and abuser of children, mainline con and fulltime loser, thought he could burst into a motel room with a baseball bat and inspire terror in a man he presumed was one of his own kind, no stronger or weaker or better or worse, unaware that all his experience with evil in county jails and state prisons was as worthless as every other precept that had betrayed him when he had believed himself on the edge of unlocking the magic doors to which everyone but he had always been granted access.

  I sat on a bench in the side yard of the stucco church that Pete and I attended, and watched Pete and a group of boys his age play work-up softball out on the school diamond. The shade under the mimosa tree was flecked with tiny blades of sunlight, and Beau, my Morgan, was eating grass along the rain ditch that bordered the church yard. I opened the thick cover of Great-grandpa Sam's journal and turned the pages to my bookmark.

  July 21, 1891

  I think they aim to rob a train.

  July 27, 1891

  They rode out of here three days ago, headed due east into a red dawn that was hot enough to have come off the devil's forge. They was drunk when they come back in last night, stinking of rut and beer and tripe they was eating with their hands out of a leather poke. Whatever money they stole, they did not spend it on a bath house in Fort Smith. If you dipped them for ticks and lice, the water would be instantly black and probably have to be shoveled out of the vat and burned with kerosene.

  I had thought I had put my violent ways behind me. But just as my loins yearn for the nocturnal caress of the Rose of Cimarron, my palm wishes to curve around the hardness of my Navy .36. I purely hate these men, God forgive me for my words, but they make me ashamed to be a member of the white race and give me dreams about the old life and the men whose faces I lighted with gunfire while people watched from the balconies of saloons and brothels.

  Jennie and I have moved into a cabin up on the hillock overlooking the river. We have peach and apple trees in the yard and curtains in the windows she sewn from her old dresses. But I cannot pretend those outlaws are not down below in their mud caves, their squaws rolling opium in little balls for their pipes, the stolen dollars they almost lost in a river drying on clotheslines.

  Maybe I hate them because the nature of their abode and of their fornication is the only difference between us. This question has troubled me sorely and I raised it to Jennie. She did not reply and went out to the woodstove in back and began frying meat for our breakfast. She was not hardly dressed and in the early light her young body looked like that of a savage. The sight of her filled me with a passion that I could not contain, that even in the cool air of our bedroom made her palms damp with my sweat.

  I am fifty-six years old and fear I do not know who I am.

  Pete walked hot and dusty and happy into the shade, his fielder's glove hooked on its strap through his belt.

  'We still gonna get peach ice cream?' he said.

  'I wouldn't go a day without it,' I replied.

  'You know them men out yonder, Billy Bob? They been around the block twice, like they was lost or something.'

  I looked over my shoulder, out on the hard-packed dirt street. Both the cars were dark and waxed, with tinted windows and radio antennas. I stood up and put on my Stetson and walked over to Beau and stroked his head and fed him a sugar cube with the flat of my hand. The cars pulled up along the edge of the rain ditch, and the passenger window in the front of the lead car rolled down on its electric motor.

  The man from Mary Beth's apartment looked at me from behind aviator's sunglasses.

  'You already stomped the shit out of Roy Devins. Maybe it's time to leave his welfare to others,' he said.

  'You know how it is, a guy gets bored and starts to wonder why feds are running around in his county, making veiled threats, acting like heavy-handed pricks, that sort of thing,' I said.

  He laughed to himself.

  'How about staying out of Dodge?' he said.

  'I expect we're on the same side, aren't we?'

  'You're a defense lawyer, pal. You get paid to keep the asswipes out of the gray-bar hotel chain.' His gaze drifted to Pete, then back on me. 'You really stick playing cards in the mouths of dead wets down in Coahuila?'

  I stroked Beau once along his mane, then stepped across the rain ditch and leaned down into the open window of the lead car.

  'I worked with a Ranger named L.Q. Navarro. We took down the mules and burned out the stash houses y'all didn't know how to find. You couldn't shine his boots, bud.'

  He took off his sunglasses and looked indolently into my face.

  'You like the lady, don't make trouble for her. You're an intelligent man. You can work with this, I'm convinced of it,' he said, and motioned to his driver.

  Pete and I watched the two cars move slowly away, the windows sealed against the dust, the whitewall tires crunching delicately on the gravel as though the two drivers did not want to chip the gleaming finish on the cars' exteriors.

  'You pretty mad, Billy Bob?' Pete said.

  'No, not really.'

  'For a person that's been river baptized and converted to Catholic, too, you sure know how to tell a fib.'

  I rubbed the top of his soft, brushlike hair as the two cars turned down a dirt alley and their dust rolled across the wash hanging behind a row of clapboard shacks.

  * * *

  chapter fourteen

  The typical isolation unit in a prison is a surreal place of silence, bare stone, solid iron doors, and loss of all distinction between night and day. Its intention is to lock up the prisoner with the worst company possible, namely, his own thoughts.

  But fear and guilt have corrosive effects in the free people's world as well.

  Bunny Vogel passed my house twice, driving a customized maroon '55 Chevy, before he mustered the courage to turn in the driveway and walk out to the chicken run in back, where I was picking up eggs in an apple basket.

  He wore an unbuttoned silk shirt and jeans and Roman sandals without socks, and his tangled bronze-color
ed hair seemed to glow on the tips against the late sun. With his classical profile and his abdominal muscles that were like oiled leather, he could have been a male model for the covers of romance novels, except for the sunken scar that curled like an inset pink worm along his jawbone.

  'Pretty nice automobile,' I said.

  'What you said the night you busted Darl in the nose? About me being loyal to a guy who cost me a pro career?'

  'I didn't mean to offend you, Bunny.'

  He let out a breath. 'I think you're gonna pin the tail on any donkey you can. I ain't gonna be it, Mr Holland,' he said.

  'You want to come inside?'

  'No… The old black guy out at Shorty's told you Roseanne Hazlitt slapped somebody in the parking lot the night she was killed.'

  'How do you know that?'

  'Darl heard the old guy'd been talking to you. So he kind of got in his face about it.'

  'He's quite a kid. I don't think I've ever known one exactly like him.'

  'It was me she slapped. I ain't gonna hide it no more.'

  I picked up a brown egg from behind a tractor tire and dropped it in the basket. I didn't look at him. I could hear him breathing in the silence.

  'But that's when I left. I didn't see Roseanne or Darl or none of the others after that. I ain't part of nothing that happened later that night,' he said.

  'Who was?'

  'God's truth, Mr Holland, I don't know.'

  'You told me you weren't mixed up with Roseanne, Bunny.'

  He kneaded his fists at his sides and the veins in his forearms swelled with blood. Then his face colored and his eyes glazed with shame.

  'Damn, I knew this was gonna be a sonofabitch,' he said.

  This is the story he told me.

  He was a high school senior, on the varsity, with the kind of bone-breaking running power that left tacklers dazed and sometimes bloody in his wake, when he first noticed her watching him at practice from the empty stands.

  He remembered the balmy gold afternoon that he walked over to her, his cleats crunching on the cinder-and-pea-gravel track, and tossed the football into her hands. He thought it was a clever thing to do, the kind of gesture that disarmed most girls, that made them feel vulnerable and a little foolish and gave them a chance to be coy and defenseless in his presence.

  She flipped it back at him with both hands, so fast he had to duck to avoid being hit in the face. Then she opened her compact and put on lipstick as though he were not there.

  'How old are you, anyway?' he asked.

  'Fifteen. You got something against being fifteen?' She squeezed her knees together and wagged them back and forth.

  He looked back over his shoulder at the practice field, at the second-string, whose attention was absorbed with thudding their pads against one another and running plays they would never be allowed to run in a game that counted.

  'You want to go to a movie tonight?' he asked.

  'The drive-in?'

  'It don't have to be the drive-in.'

  'I'll think about it.'

  'You'll think about it?'

  'I work at the Dairy Queen. I get off at six. I'll let you know then.'

  He watched her walk down the empty concrete aisle, then across the worn grass to the bus stop in front of the school, her hips swaying under her plaid skirt. He kept glancing back at the practice field, as though someone were watching him, and his own thoughts confused and angered him.

  He was at the Dairy Queen at five-thirty.

  They did it a week later, amid a drone of cicadas, in the back of his uncle's old Plymouth, on cushions that smelled of dust and nicotine, and he realized immediately she had lied and that she was a virgin and he was hurting her even more deeply than the gasp, the clutch of pain in her throat, indicated. But he couldn't stop, nor did he know how to be gentle, nor could he admit that most of his sexual experience had been with Mexican prostitutes in San Antonio and the mill women his father brought home when he was drunk.

  He was frightened when he saw how much she bled and he offered to drive her to a hospital in another county.

  'You afraid to take me to one here?' she said.

  'I don't want you in trouble with your folks, that's all,' he lied.

  'I don't need a doctor, anyhow. Did you like me?' she said.

  'Yeah, sure.'

  'No, you didn't. But you will next time,' she said, and kissed him on the cheek.

  Her hand found his. The trees that had gone dark outside the car made him think of stone pillars wrapped with the tracings of fireflies, but he did not know why.

  He saw her two days later in front of the shoe store downtown and bought her a lemon Coke at the small soda fountain in back of the Mexican grocery. He told her he would call her that evening but he didn't.

  Two weeks passed before he realized it was not he who had avoided her; she had made no phone call to him, had not come out to the practice field as he had expected, had not told anything of their first date to anyone he knew.

  He found himself watching her at her job at the Dairy Queen from his parked car across the street. Then one night at closing time he saw her go in back, in her uniform, and emerge moments later from a side door in suede boots and tight jeans and hoop earrings and vinyl black jacket, her mouth bright with fresh lipstick, and mount the back of a motorcycle a Mexican kid who looked carved out of an oak stump sat splayed upon, his genitalia sculpted against his jeans.

  A half hour later he found them both at the drive-in restaurant north of town.

  'Get in my car, Roseanne,' he said. Then to the Mexican boy, 'Here the drift, greaseball. You can ride your hog home and fuck your fist tonight. Or walk out of here on broken sticks.'

  'Oh yeah, she told me about you… Vogel, the running bo-hunk, right?' the Mexican replied. 'I got news for you, sperm-brain. She's jailbait. I hope you end up in the Walls and somebody jams a chainsaw up your cheeks.'

  An hour later Bunny and Roseanne made love on a bare mattress in the darkened back of the filling station where he worked on weekends.

  Through the rest of his senior year she was available whenever he wanted her. She rarely made demands or threw temper tantrums, and the fact that he didn't take her to the parties or places where his friends went seemed of no concern to her. But he would realize, again, belatedly, as had always been the case, he did not really understand the nature of the game. Just as he had worried that her age would diminish him in the eyes of his classmates (until he discovered that, as a West Ender, he was not expected to date anyone of significance, anyway), he also learned that Roseanne didn't care about his world or friends because she had brought him into hers.

  Sophomore girls giggled when he walked by, and one time three of them hung a condom filled with milk on a string inside his hall locker. When they had slumber parties his father would be wakened by phone calls that made him wonder if his son had become a child molester.

  Then Bunny began to wonder if there were not other men involved with Roseanne besides himself. She knew too much, controlled him too easily, discerned his moods and sexual weaknesses too easily, sitting on top of his thighs, pressing his face into her breasts, kissing his damp hair while he came inside her.

  One night he forced the subject. 'You making it with somebody else, Roseanne?' he said.

  'You're such a silly fucko sometimes… Oh, I'm sorry, baby. Come here.'

  That same night they went to San Antonio and had small red hearts tattooed above their left nipples.

  After graduation Bunny worked as a floorman on a drilling rig in Odessa. Then he reported for summer football camp at A&M and a strange phenomenon occurred in his life: he was no longer a West Ender.

  He was invited to sorority mixers, into the homes of the wealthy, taken to dinner at the country club by businessmen, treated as though a collective family of magically anointed people had decided to adopt him as their son.

  He didn't return to Deaf Smith until Thanksgiving. He didn't call Roseanne Hazlitt, either.

/>   He expected anger, recrimination, maybe even a trip on her part to College Station and a public scene that would be ruinous for him. But she surprised him again.

  It was the last game of the season, a blue-gold late fall afternoon like the one the previous year when he had crunched across the track on his cleats and flipped the football into her palms. He got up from the bench and walked back to the Gatorade cooler and saw her standing by the rail in the box seats, next to a marine in his dress uniform. Bunny stared at her stupidly. She took a mum from the corsage on her coat, blew him a kiss, and bounced the mum off his face.

  'Hey, you too stuck-up to say hello, you ole fucko?' she said.

  His bare head felt cold and small in the wind, somehow shrunken inside the weight of his shoulder pads.

  'Why'd she slap you in front of Shorty's, Bunny?' I asked.

  He stuck the flats of his hands in his back pockets. He kicked at the dirt and didn't reply.

  I looked beyond his shoulder at his customized maroon Chevy, with oversize whitewalls and white leather interior.

  'That's a great-looking car,' I said.

  The next day, after work, I lit a candle in front of the statue of Christ's mother at the stucco church. The church was empty, except for Pete, who waited for me in a pew at the back. I walked back down the aisle, dipped my fingers in the holy water font and made the sign of the cross, then winked at Pete and waited for him to join me out on the steps.

  The western sky was ribbed with scarlet clouds, and the air smelled of pines and irrigation water in a field.

  'You come here just to light a candle?' Pete asked.

  'A friend of mine died on this date eleven years ago. Down in Mexico,' I said.

  'How old was he?'

  'Just a mite older than me.'

  'That's young to die, ain't it?'

  'I guess it is.'

  He nodded. Then his expression grew thoughtful, as though he were remembering a moment, a question, he had refused to face earlier. 'Them men who was in the cars out there, the ones made you mad, that one man said something about you sticking a playing card in the mouth of a dead wetback? You ain't done anything like that, huh?'