BBH01 - Cimarron Rose (13 page)

On the way back to my car Darl Vanzandt got up from
the passenger seat of his cherry-red chopped-down 1932 Ford and came
toward me, the pupils of his wide-set eyes like burnt cinders. He drank
the foam out of a quart bottle of Pearl and flung it whistling into the
darkness. When I tried to walk around him, he stepped into my path, his
courage inflating now with the audience that had formed at his back.

'Whoa, there, bud,' I said.

'You bothered all my friends. Now you're bothering
my step-mother,' he said.

'Wrong.'

'You're setting me up to go to jail. All because of
that little fart Lucas Smothers,' he said.

'Good night,' I said.

But he stepped in front of me again. He pushed me in
the breastbone with his fingers, then he did it again, grinding his
teeth slightly, thumping hard against the bone.

'Don't do this, Darl,' I said.

The skin around his mouth was taut and gray, his
nose tilted slightly upward, the fear and loathing in his eyes like a
candle flame that didn't know which way to blow. I dropped my eyes, and
a smile exposed his teeth.

He slapped the carton of milk from my hand. It
exploded in a white star on the pavement.

I stepped backward, then walked in a wide circle
toward my car.

I heard his feet running behind me. By the time I
could turn he was almost upon me. I brought up my elbow and drove it
into his nose.

He doubled over, his cupped hands smeared with blood
as soon as they touched his face. Then Bunny Vogel was next to him, his
arm around Darl's shoulders, holding a wadded T-shirt against Darl's
nose.

'I'll get some ice, then we'll go home. It ain't
broken. The blood's darker when it's broken,' Bunny said.

'You tell his dad what happened, Bunny,' I said.

'It ain't my job to tell on people.'

'You're sure loyal to a kid who cost you a career in
the pros. I wonder why that is,' I said.

He led Darl back toward the parked cars of the East
Enders. Then he glanced back at me, his eyes like those of a man who
just realized his future will be no different from his past.

The next morning I ate breakfast on
the kitchen
table and read from Great-grandpa Sam's journal.

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.