BBH01 - Cimarron Rose (15 page)

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.

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-colored 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?'

'They weren't wetbacks, Pete. They were bad guys.
They got what they asked for.'

'That don't sound like you.'

'I lost my friend down there.'

'I didn't mean nothing.'

'I know that. You're the best, Pete.'

We walked Beau down the hard-packed dirt street,
along the edge of the rain ditch, to the café and ate supper.

But I didn't tell Pete the rest of the story, nor
have I ever told anyone all of it, at least not until now—the
weeks
of treatment in Uvalde and Houston for the wound in my right arm, the
bone surgery, the morphine dreams that at first leave you with a vague
sense of unremembered sexual pleasure, followed by a quickening of the
heart, flashes of light on the edges of your vision, like gunfire in
darkness, a feeling in the middle of the night that you are about to be
violated by someone in the room whom you cannot see.