BBH01 - Cimarron Rose

  It is thoughts like these that has been building in me like steam in a tea kettle with a cork in the snout.

  The stink on this bunch has run off all the game, and in the meantime they won't keep their hogs penned and have let them turn feral. So now when they can't rustle cows they have taken to shooting wild horses for meat. In the late evening they lay up on the bluff with an old Sharp's buffalo rifle that has an elevator sight on it and kill them as they come down to drink from the Cimarron. It a heart-wrenching and sickening spectacle for anyone who loves horses to witness. What finally tore it was I looked out the back window of our cabin and there was the biggest shithog I ever seen, an ax-handle thick across the shoulders, rooting out every one of our potatoes and trampling our tomato vines into green string. I put a rope on him and walked him behind my horse down to Blackface Charley's cave and told him and three others they owed me a season's worth of canned produce and they'd better pick it out of their own gardens and not steal it, either.

  Charley said since I fed the hog, it was now mine and we was square. The skin where he was burned by his own revolver blowing up in his face crinkles like dried snake skin when he smiles.

  Last evening about eight of them headed for Pearl Younger's cathouse in Fort Smith. I kept looking at them caves and the garbage on the banks and the squaws peeling strips of jerky off a skinned horse, and finally I holstered on my Navy .36's and walked on down to the bluffs with a five-gallon can of coal oil. One of the Doolin boys thought he had a case to make, so I did have to gun-whip him a mite and haul him by the seat of his britches down the slope and fling him in the river, although that had not been my intention. In the meantime the squaws sat down and watched and thought it was all big fun. In ten minutes I had four of them caves blooming with black smoke, long columns of it that fed way up into the sky. The burlap and blankets and straw give it heat, and you could hear ammunition popping like firecrackers and whiskey jugs and preserve jars blowing apart inside. Jennie stood up on the hillock in a deerskin dress and watched me like I had lost my mind.

  When I come back up the slope she was nowhere in sight. I figured it was not easy for her to see me burn out her kinfolk. I was fixing to tell her I didn't bust nary a cap from my Navy .36's, which was not the way it would have gone before my ordination. Then I seen her bareback on her horse out in a field of sunflowers, wearing that old deerskin dress without no underclothes. In the twilight her skin had the glow of a new rose, and she was smiling at me, and I knew she was truly the most beautiful woman a man was ever graced with.

  Maybe I got rid of the worst part of my violent nature. But damn if I've banked the fires of my love and desire for the Rose of Cimarron.

  Oh well. I reckon the story of us all is an on-going one.

  While I was reading from my great-grandfather's journal, a retired school janitor and his wife were parking their car in front of their home in Deaf Smith's black district. It was a Honda, one they had bought used three years ago through a finance company and had just made the final payment on the previous week.

  The thieves who boosted it that night slim-jimmed the door, broke the steering wheel lock, and wired the ignition in less than three minutes. By the time the retired janitor, who heard the snapping sound of the wheel lock through the window of his second-story bathroom, could get down the stairs to the front door, his Honda was speeding through the intersection at the end of the block, followed by what he described as a 'hot rod car got a shine like a red candy apple.'

  The thieves parked the stolen car in the grass by the four-lane divided highway outside of town, then squirted a can of lighter fluid over the upholstery and tossed a burning truck flare through the open window. The flames rippled along the fabric like strips of warm color from a chemical rainbow, then the wind swirled the fire in a vortex that flattened against the headliner and curled out over the roof, consuming the seats, popping the front windows into Coke bottle glass on the hood.

  The thieves waited on the pedestrian overpass, drinking from quart bottles of beer, passing a joint back and forth while the Honda burned a hundred yards north of them. One of them took time to urinate against the abutment that supported the chainlink archway overhead, one that the thieves sliced open with bolt cutters by the north rail so the peeled-back wire could not be seen by a car approaching from the south.

  Mary Beth patrolled this same section of highway around 11 p.m. every night she was on duty. She usually cruised through the drive-in restaurant just outside the city limits, the parking lot at Shorty's, the picnic area by the river where Roseanne Hazlitt was attacked, then made a U-turn through the center ground at the county line, just north of the overpass.

  The retired janitor called in the report on his Honda at 10:26. The report of a burning automobile by the side of the highway was called in anonymously at 10:49. Two minutes later Mary Beth had hit her siren and emergency flasher and was headed full-bore for the overpass.

  As she approached from the south, she saw three males in silhouette inside the chain-link archway, possibly kids who had climbed the overpass to better see the fire that had spread from the stolen car into an adjacent field.

  She saw the three figures turn and run to the far side of the overpass, her blue, white, and red flasher whip off the support walls on each side of her, then an object that came from above, out of the darkness, that seemed to have no source or context.

  The thieves had probably taken the seventy-pound block of concrete from the site of a demolished building. It was rectangular in shape, jagged on each end, spiked with twisted steel rods that protruded from the concrete like handles.

  It exploded through the center of the front window, gutting the dashboard, raking the twelve-gauge pump shotgun out of its locked holder, blowing glass and electrical dials and radio parts into the backseat, embedding in the wire-mesh screen behind the front seat like a cannonball.

  The cruiser spun sideways, its tires scorching black lines across the asphalt, an ambulance behind it swerving out of control into the center ground to avoid a collision.

  A paramedic was the first person to the cruiser. When he opened the door, Mary Beth's campaign hat rolled out on the grass, the crown marbled with blood.

  * * *

  chapter twenty-three

  The next morning I got off the hospital elevator on the fifth floor and started through the waiting area toward the nurses' station. Brian Wilcox and two other federal agents came around the corner at the same time.

  'I don't believe it. Like a fly climbing out of shit every place I go,' he said.

  'I don't want to 'front you today, Brian.'

  'What makes you think you can call me by my first name?'

  He wore a blue suit and tie and white shirt. His hair had the dull sheen of gunmetal, with silver threads in the part. He stood flat-footed in front of me, heavy, solid, his shoulders too large for his suit. The cleft chin, the cologned, cleanly shaved jaws, the neatness that he wore like a uniform, did not go with the expression in his eyes.

  'Let me by, please,' I said.

  'She's in that room because those kids went through her to get to you.'

  'If they did, Garland T. Moon put them up to it.'

  'Same problem. You can't stay out of his face. But other people end up in the barrel.'

  'Moon wandered into something out at the old Hart Ranch. He's just not sure what it is. But you probably know all this. Run your game on somebody else.'

  I started past him, but he grabbed my arm. I flung it away and felt my fingers accidently hit his chest. His face flared and he grabbed at me again, with both hands, his chin raised, his teeth bared. I shoved him away and stepped back, raising my arm in front of my face, then the other two agents were on him, splaying their hands against his chest.

  'Get going,' one of them said over his shoulder.

  'The problem's not mine.'

  'Don't fool yourself, ace,' he replied.

  Mary Beth was sitting up, with a pillow behind her back, when I entered
her room. Her right arm was bandaged, the skin purple and red between the strips of tape, swollen tight and hard against the dressing like a wasp sting. Her hair was tied on top of her head with a bandanna to keep it off the dressing where a steel rod had incised the scalp almost to the bone.

  'You look good,' I said.

  'Sure I do.'

  'When can you go home?'

  'Today. There's no big damage done.'

  She wore no makeup, and in the slatted sunlight through the window her face looked opaque, as though it hid thoughts she herself had not dealt with.

  'Did you sleep last night?' I asked.

  'Yeah, some.'

  'When I was shot, I couldn't close my eyes without seeing gun flashes again. That's the way it is for a while.'

  Her gaze roved over my face and seemed to go inside my eyes.

  'What is it?' I asked.

  'The other day you said you didn't know who I was,' she said. 'My father was a motorcycle cop in Oklahoma and a high sheriff in Kentucky. He was a good man, but he had a special hatred for sex predators. He killed two of them after they were in custody.'

  'They weren't trying to escape?'

  'What are the odds of a cop having to shoot an escapee on two occasions?'

  'Seems like old history, Mary Beth.'

  'He hated those men because a degenerate got in our back window when I was three years old.'

  My eyes shifted off her face.

  'He died going in a house after a serial rapist. At night, without backup, with a "throw-down" taped to his ankle. You figure out what the plan was,' she said.

  'You blame yourself?'

  She thought about it. 'No,' she said. 'But you're not going to use me to take down Garland Moon or Darl Vanzandt or whoever it is you're thinking about.'

  'I just ran into Brian Wilcox. If that guy's the cavalry, I think we're all going to be wearing Arrow shirts.'

  She smiled in spite of herself. I sat on the edge of her bed and picked up her hand. I touched the freckles on her face. 'Pete and I'll take you home today, then bring supper over,' I said.

  She rested her head on the pillow and squeezed the top of my arm.

  The man who had replaced the murdered sheriff was named Hugo Roberts. If you asked him how he had made his living the last thirty years, he would answer, 'I ain't spent a whole lot of time in the private sector.' He'd been a county road hack, a deputy sheriff, a city patrolman, a bailiff, a jailer, and some said a volunteer on a firing squad in Utah. He was shaped like a lean pear and smoked constantly, even though he had already lost one lung and wheezed like a leaking inner tube when he talked.

  He sat at the corner of the old sheriff's desk, flipping ashes into the spittoon, his narrow shoulders hunched into the cigarette smoke that swirled about his head.

  'Did I lock up Darl Vanzandt? Do bears shit in the woods? Does my wife read the Bible all night and tell me I'm the reason our kids are ugly?' he said. 'Hell, yes. What else you want to know, Billy Bob?'

  'Where's Darl now?'

  'I had the little fucker shot.'

  'Give it a break, Hugo.'

  'All we got on him is some roofies. Far as I know, they're not even illegal.'

  'Roofies?'

  'Rohypnol. Ten times stronger than Valium. It's made overseas for insomnia. It tends to show up in date rape cases. How long you been gone from law enforcement?'

  'Is he upstairs?'

  'Get real, Billy Bob. His old man was down here with his lawyer at six this morning. I cain't charge him. The black man owned the stolen vehicle didn't get a license number and never saw a face… Look, I ain't sure myself it was Darl. There's a mess of customized cars hereabouts that same shade of red.'

  'How many of them are owned by people like Darl Vanzandt?'

  He spit, then wiped his mouth on his palm.

  'Know and prove ain't a difference I should have to explain to a lawyer,' he said.

  'I think the county found the right man for the job, Hugo.'

  'The air-conditioning unit in here does about as much good as an ice cube on a woodstove. Make sure you close the door snug on your way out,' he said.

  It was noon and the sun was white and straight up in the sky when I got home. I went into the library and took L.Q.' s revolver out of the desk drawer. I opened the loading gate, clicked back the hammer to half-cock, and rotated the cylinder until the empty sixth chamber came back under the hammer again.

  Great-grandpa Sam carried his Navy .36s down to the bluffs on the Cimarron when he burned out the Dalton-Doolin gang and never had to pop a cap, I told myself.

  'Wrong way to think, bud,' L.Q. Navarro said behind me.

  'All right, I'll bite,' I answered.

  'You don't tote it as a fashion statement. The other guy's got to know you cain't wait to use it. Elsewise, it's got the value of tits on a boar hog'

  I eased the hammer down, locking the cylinder, and slipped the barrel back into the holster.

  'You know what's really fretting you?' he said.

  'Why don't you tell me, L.Q.?'

  'It ain't that I got shot accidentally. It's because you believe it wouldn't have happened if we hadn't been down in Coahuila vigilanting them dope mules.'

  I kept my back to him. The sky outside was hot and bright, and dust was blowing in gray clouds out of the fields.

  'Hey, the blood lust wasn't yours, bud; it was mine. I loved flushing them out of the poppies and blowing feathers when they ran. It could have been you instead of me,' he said.

  'The new sheriff's corrupt.'

  'That's like going to the whorehouse and saying the place is full of whores.'

  'Everything was straight lines in Coahuila. It was us against them, and at sunrise we added up the score,' I said.

  L.Q. didn't answer. I turned and looked at him. He stood with one arm propped against the bookshelves, staring at his foot, the brim of his Stetson shielding his face.

  'You don't usually lack for words,' I said, my throat burning at what I knew was coming next.

  'We mortgaged tomorrow for today, bud. Even for me, that thought is about like swallowing a piece of barbed wire,' he replied.

  He walked toward the doorway, his back to me, his hands on his hips, splaying his coat out. I raised my hand to speak, then he was gone into the hallway and I heard the wind fling open the front door and fill the house with a creaking of boards and wallpaper.

  I parked my Avalon behind the tin shed where Garland T. Moon worked as a welder and entered through the back door. The heat inside was numbing. A propane-fed foundry roared in one corner, a cauldron of melted aluminum wedged in the flames. Moon wore sandals without socks and a pair of flesh-colored gym shorts that were molded against his loins. He was bent over a machinist's vise, cutting a chunk of angle iron in half with an acetylene torch, his back spiderwebbed with rivulets pf sweat.

  He heard me behind him, screwed down the feed on the torch, and pulled off his black goggles with his thumb. Dirty strings of soot floated down on his head and shoulders. His eyes dropped to my belt. He pulled at his nose.

  'You come here to gun me?' he said.

  'What's your hold on these kids?'

  'It ain't no mystery. Cooze and dope. The high school clinic already gives them the rubbers. I just introduce them to what you might call more mature Mexican women.'

  'You're a genuinely evil man, sir.'

  'You got to stick a gun down in your britches to tell me that?' He laughed to himself and wiped his hands with an oil rag. The muscles in his stomach looked as hard as corrugated metal. 'You got your ovaries stoked up 'cause them boys poured cow shit on your son?'

  'They almost killed a deputy sheriff last night.'

  He picked up a can of warm soda from the workbench and drank, his throat working smoothly, his gaze focused indifferently out the door on the river.

  'The doctors said I was supposed to be dead eight years ago. Said I was plumb eat up with cancer. I smell death in my sleep. It comes to somebody else first, bet
ter them than me,' he said. He wiped his armpits with the rag and threw it on the floor.

  I looked at his softly muted profile, his recessed, liquid blue eye, the ridged brow that was like a vestige of an earlier ancestor. My forearm rested on the butt of L.Q. Navarro's revolver. I lifted the revolver from my belt, my palm folded across the cylinder, and laid it on the workbench.

  'Pick it up,' I said.

  He lit a cigarette, picked a particle of tobacco off his lip and dropped it from between his fingers.

  'I cain't be hurt, boy. I live in here,' he said, and pointed to the side of his head. 'I learned it when a three-hundred-pound nigger stuffed a sock in my mouth and taught me about love.'

  I pulled a photograph from my shirt pocket and held it up in front of him.

  'Is the boy in overalls you?' I asked.

  He lifted it out of my hand and smiled while he studied it. He tossed it on top of the revolver and smoked his cigarette, a merry light in one eye.

  'My father taught you how to weld, didn't he?' I said.

  'He wasn't bad at it. I'm better, though.'

  'I think a man like you must come out of a furnace.'

  'That's the first thing you said today made any sense.'

  I took a six-inch bone-handled game knife out of my pocket and pried open the single blade. Two days ago I had ground it on an emery wheel in the barn and stropped it on an old saddle flap, and the buffed ripples along the edge looked like the undulations in a stiletto.

  I lay the photograph down on his workbench and sliced it in half.

  'My father was a fine man. You're a piece of shit, Moon. You don't belong in his past anymore than you do in our present,' I said.

  I pulled loose the severed image of the child who had become the man standing before me and dropped it into the foundry. It curled immediately into a film of ash and rose into the air like a black butterfly.