BBH01 - Cimarron Rose (11 page)

'Now?' he asked.

'Half the people in here are my clients…
I'd like to stay off the clock.'

His face pinched with confusion. 'What?' he asked.

It was cool outside, and down the street the live
oaks on the courthouse lawn were gold and purple and freckled with
birds in the sun's afterglow.

'You got a date?' I said.

'I'm supposed to talk with this guy about a job,' he
said.

'Have a seat in my car. I want to show you
something.'

As soon as he opened the passenger door he saw the
twelve-string guitar propped up on the seat.

'Man, where'd you get that at?' he said.

'A client. I never could play one for diddly-squat,
though. You want it?'

'Do I?'

'It's yours. I hate to use it for a fly swatter.'

He corded the neck and ran his thumbnail across the
strings.

'Wow, what a sound. Mr Holland, I'll make this right
with you.'

'Don't worry about it. Look, those kids who tore up
y'all's lawn?'

'My father and me fixed it. I don't care about kids
like that.'

'Listen to me. I don't know why anyone
would…' I shook my head and started over. 'Maybe they have
too much money, maybe they're just mean, but it's important you
understand what and who you are… Sometimes we look at the
reflection in other people's eyes and that's who we think we are and
the truth is we're a whole lot better than that.'

'You're a good guy, Mr Holland. But I don't want to
talk about this.'

'Suit yourself. But you're an artist, the
honest-to-God real article, Lucas. Some people will always envy and
hate you for the talent you have.'

He turned the guitar over in his hands and felt the
polished mahogany and walnut belly and the spruce soundboard.

'It's funny, I seen one just like this in Ella Mae's
pawnshop. She wanted three hundred dollars for it,' he said.

'No kidding?'

His gaze wandered over my face, then he looked out
the window at a man in cream-colored slacks and a tropical hat walking
toward the poolroom.

'There's the guy I'm meeting,' Lucas said.

'Felix Ringo? He's the guy talking to you about a
job?'

'Yeah, I told you about him. He's got a furniture
factory down in Piedras Negras.'

'He's a Mexican drug agent.'

'Yeah. He's got a furniture business, too.'

'Wait here.'

I got out of the Avalon and approached the man named
Felix Ringo. His expression was flat, his eyes registering me with the
valuative pause of a predator waking from sleep.

'I don't know why, but you're running a game on the
kid in my car. It stops here,' I said.

'You got some bad manners, man.'

'I'll say it once. Stay away from him.'

'I was at Fort Benning. The School of the Americas.
I'm here with the permission of your government. I don't like to
provoke nobody, but I don't got to take your shit.'

'Don't bet on it.'

'Hey, man, I got a good memory. I'm gonna remember
where I seen your face. When I do, maybe you ain't gonna have a very
good day.'

I stepped off the sidewalk and got back in my car.
He remained under the colonnade, staring at Lucas. Then he jerked his
head at him, motioning him inside.

'He's dirty, Lucas. It's something you can smell on
a bad cop. He'll take you down with him,' I said.

'I cain't get on at any clubs. What am I gonna do,
keep working for my dad the rest of my life?'

'It might beat chopping cotton with a gunbull
standing over you,' I said and started the car and drove down the
street before he could get out.

'Why don't you treat me like I'm three years old?'
he said, his face red with anger and embarrassment.

'I want the names of all Darl Vanzandt's friends,' I
said.

That night I sat at my library desk
and read from
Great-grandpa Sam's faded, water-stained journal that he had carried in
a saddlebag through Oklahoma Territory.

L.Q. Navarro sat in a burgundy-colored stuffed chair
in the corner, fiddling with his revolver, an armadillo-shell lamp
lighted behind his head. He spun the revolver on his finger and let the
ivory handles snick back flatly in his palm. The blue-black of the
steel was so deep in hue it looked almost liquid. He opened the loading
gate with his thumb, pulled back the hammer on halfcock, and rotated
the cylinder so that one loaded chamber at a time clicked past his
examining eye.

'
That Garland T. Moon? You can take it to
him with fire tongs. That boy's not a listener,
' he said.

'
I'm trying to read, L.Q.
,' I
said.

'
You going to find your answers in there?
I don't hardly think so
.'

I rested my brow on my fingers so I wouldn't have to
look at him.

I read from Great-grandpa Sam's journal:

L.Q. stuffed his revolver in his
holster and walked
to the ceiling-high window and looked out at the hills. I could see the
thick, brass cartridges in the leather loops on his gunbelt, and the
Ranger badge clipped just in front of his holster.

'
Your great-grandpa got rid of whiskey and
guns in his life, but his propensities come out in a different way
,'
he said.

'
What's that mean?'

'Garland Moon, Jimmy Cole, that Mexican
drug agent with the grease pencil mustache? You don't run them kind off
with a legal writ, Billy Bob.'

He took his revolver back out of his holster and
hefted it from one palm to the other, the barrel and cylinder and
moon-white grips slapping against his skin.

A pair of headlights turned into my drive, and
through the library window I saw Mary Beth Sweeney pull her cruiser to
the back of my house.

I stepped out on the back porch and opened the
screen door. Her portable radio was clipped to her belt.

'You on duty?' I said.

'For another hour. I need to talk with you,' she
said. She stepped inside the porch and took off her campaign hat and
shook out her hair. 'You can't just unload a bomb like that and walk
off from someone.'

'Last night?'

'Yeah, last night. I don't want somebody hanging his
guilt on me like I'm some kind of dartboard.'

'That wasn't my intention.'

'Oh no? Like, "Hey, I killed my best friend, and you
remind me of it, so see you around and thanks for the great evening."'

'Where do you get the in-your-face attitude?' I said.

'I knew it would be a mistake coming here.'

'No, it wasn't,' I said. I held my eyes on hers and
realized what it was that drew me to her. The spray of pale freckles,
the dark brown curls that had a silklike sheen in them, the obvious
decency and courage in her behavior, these were all the characteristics
that had probably defined her as a girl and had stayed with her into
her maturity. But her eyes, which were bold and unrelenting, masked a
level of past injury that she didn't easily share.

Her stare broke.

'Come in. I just baked a pecan pie,' I said.

'I'd better not.'

I put my hand under her forearm.

'You have to,' I said.

She bit down on her bottom lip.

'I need help with this Mexican drug agent,' I said.

'For just a minute.' She walked ahead of me and sat
at the kitchen table, with her hat crown-down in front of her.

'Felix Ringo told me he was at the School of the
Americas at Fort Benning. Punch him up on the computer for me,' I said.

'The federal computer, you're saying?'

'You got it.'

'What's this School of the Americas?'

'It's supposed to be counterinsurgency training. But
their graduates have a way of murdering liberation theologians and
union organizers or anybody they don't approve of.'

I placed a piece of pie and cup of coffee in front
of her. She turned a tiny silver spoon in her cup, then put the spoon
down and gazed out the window.

'I'm not saying I have access. But I'll do what I
can,' she said. Static, then a dispatcher's voice squawked on her
portable. 'I'll have to take a rain check on the pie.'

She walked out onto the porch, both hands on the
brim of her campaign hat.

I picked up one of her hands and traced my fingers
down the inside of her arm and brushed her palm and touched her nails
and the back of her wrist and folded her fingers across mine.

'You're really a nice lady,' I said.

The wind filled the trees outside and blew through
the screens, and a loose strand of her hair caught wetly in the side of
her mouth. I removed it with my fingertips, then looked in her eyes and
saw the consent that I knew she rarely gave, and I put my hands on her
arms and kissed her on the mouth, then did it again, then slipped my
arms around her and touched her hair and the hard muscles in her back.

I felt a warm exhalation of her breath against my
cheek, like that of a swimmer taking a self-disciplinary pause, then
her palms pressing on my chest, and I was looking into her face again,
the light brown freckles, the brightness of her eyes. She pursed her
lips, then winked and was gone into the yard and the shadows and the
moonlight and her cruiser, all that fast.

I stood in the drive and watched her back out into
the road and pull away behind the row of poplar trees and myrtle bushes
that bordered my front yard.

Down the road, I heard a second car engine start up,
then a pair of headlights flared in the road and a sheriff's cruiser
passed my driveway, with two men in it, headed in the same direction as
Mary Beth. The man in the passenger's seat seemed to have his arm
propped up on the sill so anyone watching from my house could not
identify him.

I called 911 and told the dispatcher a drunk man
with a gun was shooting at automobiles in front of my home.

A half hour later I stood in the front
yard and
watched the last of five cruisers from the sheriff's department,
including Mary Beth Sweeney's, drive away. Temple Carrol had seen the
emergency lights from her house down the road and had arrived only a
few minutes ago. 'Somebody shooting at cars? I didn't hear any
gunfire,' she said.

'I saw two guys in a cruiser follow that new deputy
from my house, so I muddied up the water,' I replied.

'Mary Beth Sweeney? What's she doing at your house?'

'I wanted her to run this Mexican drug agent for me.'

'She had to come by your house to do it?' She looked
across the road at my neighbor's cattle bunched in the field.

'She was in the neighborhood,' I said.

'This broad always has a way of being in the
neighborhood.'

'You want a cup of coffee?'

She pulled a bandanna out of her jeans pocket and
tied up her hair. 'I can't sleep when I drink coffee. Or when I think
your house is burning down,' she said.

She walked toward her car.

'Temple?' I said.

She didn't answer.

I was rinsing the dishes after
breakfast the next
morning when Vernon Smothers tapped on my back door. He wore a broken
straw hat and had a matchstick in the corner of his mouth.

'What is it?' I said, opening the door part way,
without inviting him in.

He rolled his wedding ring on his index finger and
looked at the palm of his hand.

'I made a mistake about something. I need your
advice,' he said. He blew air out of his nose, as though he had a cold,
and looked away at the windmill behind the barn.

I widened the door for him. He sat down at the plank
table on the porch. The heels of his cowboy boots were worn almost flat.

'Yesterday I hauled my car in to have the oil pan
welded. To that shop next to the Green Parrot Motel?' he said.

He saw the recognition in my face.

'Yeah, that's right,' he said. 'The place where
Garland Moon is working. Except I didn't know that and I didn't know
what he looked like, either.'

'Oh man,' I said.

'He gets my car up on a jack and drains the oil and
takes the pan off and welds it and sticks it back on, and I ask how
much I owe him.

'"Hunnerd-twenty-five," he says.

'I go, "My ass. That job ain't worth one nickel more
than seventy-five dollars."

'He says, "Then it looks like I got me a fishing
car."

'I give him eighty dollars cash and take out my
MasterCard for the rest of it. He looks at the name and says, "Vernon
Smothers… Vernon Smothers… Is that little jailhouse
bitch your son? Why, you're bird-dogging me, ain't you?"

'I told him I'd never laid eyes on him and didn't
want to and didn't have no plan on seeing him again… He never
said a word. He just smiled and wrote out my charge slip and handed it
to me… I seen eyes like that on one other man in my life. He
was a door gunner. If he caught them in a rice field or a hooch or
coming out of a wedding party, it didn't make no difference.'

'Forget it,' I said.

'I think he's going to hurt my boy.'

'We won't let that happen, Vernon.' He cupped his
fingers over his mouth. His skin made a dry, rasping sound against his
fingers.