BBH01 - Cimarron Rose (21 page)

I talked to Marvin Pomroy on the
telephone Monday
morning. Across the street, the trees on the courthouse lawn were a
hard green in the sunlight, and I could see an inmate in jailhouse
whites smoking a cigarette behind a barred window on the top floor of
the building.

'The doctor says Moon's insides looked like they'd
been chewed by rats. Did you know somebody poured a can of Drano down
his mouth when he was a kid in Sugarland?' Marvin said.

'Moon was a snitch?'

'I doubt it. It was probably because he wouldn't
come across. That's not what's causing his problems today, though. He's
got cancer of the stomach.'

'That's why he's back, isn't it? This is his last
show,' I said. 'I should have put it together.'

'I'm not with you.'

'He told me he didn't drink. Then he told me he had
some old DWIs hanging over his head.'

'Next time leave him in the toilet stall.'

I don't know to what degree Garland T.
Moon helped
coordinate the events of the next night. The pettiness of mind, the
vindictiveness, the level of cruelty involved were all part of his
mark. But so were they characteristic of Darl Vanzandt. They had found
each other, and I suspected neither of them doubted for a moment the
intentions and designs of the other, in the same way the
psychologically malformed in a prison population stare into hundreds of
other faces and immediately recognize those whose eyes are like their
own, window holes that give onto the Abyss.

I heard the story from the outside and the inside,
from Mary Beth, whose cruiser was the first to arrive on the 911 at the
country club, from Vernon Smothers, and from Bunny Vogel. It was the
kind of account, as Great-grandpa Sam had said, that made you ashamed
to be a member of the white race. Darl Vanzandt and Moon were
aberrations. But how about the others who, with foreknowledge and joy
of heart, went along with their scheme?

Lucas had worked with his father in the fields that
day and had told him he was going to play with the band that evening
before a baseball game out at the old Cardinals training camp. Vernon
Smothers did not believe him, but he had long ago come to believe his
son would never tell him the truth about anything, that lack of trust
was the only permanent reality in their relationship, and so he said
nothing at four o'clock when Lucas walked hot and dusty from the field,
stripped to his shorts by the barn, and picked the wood ticks off his
body in a sluice of water from the windmill.

Lucas went inside and showered and dressed in a new
pair of slacks and shined yellow boots and a form-fitting western-cut
sports coat. When he came out on the porch the wind was fresh and cool
in his face, the late afternoon filled with promise. He sat on the
steps with his twelve-string guitar and waited for Bunny Vogel to pick
him up. Lucas's father was still hoeing in the field, his body like a
piece of scorched tin silhouetted against the sun, his back knotted
with anger, perhaps, or just the demands of his work.

There were girls in Bunny's car, girls Vernon
Smothers hadn't seen before. They wore tiny gold rings threaded through
their eyebrows and the rims of their nostrils; they were thin and
immature and not sexually appealing but dressed and behaved as though
they were, wearing no bras, their shirts partially unbuttoned, their
voices urgent and wired, as though they were in the midst of a party
that had no walls.

Vernon didn't understand them. But how could he, he
thought, when he couldn't even define what was wrong in his own life.
Maybe it was the whole country, he told himself. Everything had gone to
hell back in the 1960s. It was that damn war and the people who didn't
have to fight it.

For a few minutes, that thought seemed to bring him
solace. He watched from the window as Bunny's car drove away with his
son.

Bunny, Lucas, and the girls went first
to a bar and
restaurant owned by Bunny's cousin on top of a hill that overlooked a
long green valley. They ate barbecue sandwiches on a roofed porch in
back and drank vodka collins that were filled with shaved ice and
cherries and orange slices. The day had cooled, and the meadows on the
hillside were bright with flowers and spring grass. The cousin gave
them double shots for the price of one, and Lucas began to feel a
closeness to Bunny and the girls that made him see them all in a new
light, as though they had always been fast friends, more alike than he
had ever thought, and the perfection of the evening were an affirmation
that the world was indeed a fine place.

'You were great at A&M, Bunny,' Lucas said.
'I mean, you could still make it in the pros, I bet.'

'Yesterday's ink, kid,' Bunny said.

'He's not a kid. He's a… He's a…
I don't know what he is,' one of the girls said, and giggled. She took
a drink from her collins glass, and her mouth looked red and cold, like
a dark cherry that waits to burst on the teeth. 'You're the best
musician in the county, Lucas. You should have gone to East High. My
father knows Clint Black and George Strait.' Her eyes blinked, as
though the effort of organizing her thoughts had left her breathless.

'He owns the studio where Clint Black started out,'
another girl said.

'No kidding?' Lucas said.

'He did 'til a bunch of Jews took it over,' the
first girl said. Her eyes were blue, her head covered with blonde
curls, and the alcoholic flush on her face made her look vulnerable and
beautiful in spite of the harshness of her words.

'Clint Black is good as they get. So is George
Strait,' Lucas said.

Bunny looked off at the hills, his coppery hair
glinting against the late red sun. He seemed lost in his own thoughts
now. The girls were silent, as though waiting for something, and for
just a moment Lucas knew they didn't care about the names of country
musicians and that he bored the girls by wanting to talk about them.
But then why did they bring up the subject?

'Ain't we supposed to go to the country club now?'
he asked.

'We've got time,' the girl whose father had owned a
recording studio said. She held up her glass to a Mexican waiter and
handed it and a credit card pressed under her thumb to him. She didn't
speak, and upon his return with the drinks, she signed the charge slip
and let him pick it and the pen off the table without ever speaking to
him.

Lucas kept staring at the clock on the wall, one
with green neon tubing around the outside of the face. The hands said a
quarter to seven; then, when he looked again, he was sure only moments
later, the hands said 7:25. He went to the men's room and washed and
dried his face and looked in the mirror. His eyes were clear, his skin
slightly red from the day in the fields. He wet his comb and ran it
through his hair and walked back through the bar area, his boots solid
on the stone floor.

Outside, Bunny looked at his watch. 'I guess we
ought to haul ass,' he said.

Lucas picked up the fresh collins in front of him
and drank half of it. It was as sweet as lemonade, the vodka subtle and
cold and unthreatening. The girls watched him while he drank.

'What's going on?' he asked.

They smiled at one another.

'We were saying you're cute,' the third girl said.

'I'm fixing to boogie. Y'all coming or not?' Bunny
said.

'Darl can throw a shitfit if
you keep him waiting,' the blonde girl said.

'Darl?' Lucas said.

'We're gonna meet him at the drive-in. If he's not
too wiped out,' she replied.

'Y'all didn't say nothing about Darl,' Lucas said.

'He wants to come. What's the law against that?' the
blonde girl said. She stood up. Her face seemed angry now, vexed.
'People can go where they want. He can't help it if he's rich.'

'I didn't say that he…' Lucas began. He
rose from his chair and felt a rush, like a hit of high-grade speed, a
white needle that probed places in his mind he had never seen before.
'I just meant…'

But he didn't know what he meant, and he followed
Bunny through the bar and out into the parking lot, the gravel
crunching under his boots now, the wind hot for some unexplainable
reason, tinged with the smell of alkali.

Later, they backed into an empty slot at the
drive-in restaurant, next to Darl's softly buffed '32 Ford, and ordered
a round of long-neck Lone Stars. Lucas could see the back of Darl's
neck, thick and oily, pocked with acne scars. Three other boys were in
the car with him, their caps on backward, their upper bodies swollen
from steroid injections and pumping iron. One of them flipped a
cigarette at the waitress's butt when she walked by.

Lucas drank down the beer. It felt cold and bright
in his throat.

But he was sweating now, his heart beating faster
than it should.

'I got to get out,' he said from the backseat.

'What's wrong?' Bunny said.

'I don't know. I got to get out. I cain't breathe
good. It's hot in here.'

He opened the back door and stood in the breeze. The
hills were flushed with a dark purple haze now, the strings of lights
over the parking lot humming with a hot buzz like nests of electrified
insects.

He walked to the men's room, but the door, which was
metal and fire-engine-red, was bolted from the inside. He stared at the
rows of parked cars, at the Mexican and black cooks through the kitchen
window, the waitresses who carried metal trays loaded with food and
frosted mugs of root beer. They all seemed to function with an orderly
purpose from which he was excluded, that he witnessed as a clown
staring through a glass wall. His face tingled and simultaneously felt
dead to the touch. He hadn't felt this drunk, no, train-wrecked, since
the night Roseanne Hazlitt was attacked. That thought made him break
into a fresh sweat.

He gave up waiting for the person to come out of the
locked rest room and walked back to Bunny's car, his eyes avoiding Darl
and his friends. The engines in both the Chevy and Ford were idling,
the Hollywood mufflers throbbing above the asphalt like a dull headache.

'Hey, what's happenin', man?' Darl said.

'Hi, Darl,' Lucas said.

'You want to ride out with us?'

'Bunny's taking me. Thanks, anyway.'

'Good-looking threads, man. They're gonna dig it,'
Darl said. Somebody in the backseat laughed, then dropped his
unfinished fish sandwich out the chopped-down slit of a window.

Darl grinned at Lucas as he drove the Ford out of
the parking lot onto the highway, his boxed haircut and one-dimensional
profile rippled with the glow of the overhead beer sign. When he gave
the Ford the gas the rear end rocked back on the springs and wisps of
smoke spun off the back tires.

Lucas started to open the back door of the Chevy.
Bunny's head was-twisted around in the window, looking at him, the
corner of his lip pinched down between his teeth.

'Kid, you ain't got to do this. Most of those
country club people are dickheads. Maybe we ought to say fuck it,'
Bunny said.

The girls sat expressionless, their gaze fastened on
their cigarettes, waiting, as though caught between Bunny and a
predesigned plan that was about to go astray.

'I'm all right. I'm gonna get some coffee out there.
It's not a late gig, it's just one or two sets, anyway,' he said. He
sat down on the rolled white leather and tried to wash a taste like
pennies out of his mouth with the last swallows in a bottle of Lone
Star that one of the girls handed him.

Bunny didn't seem to move for a long time, biting a
piece of skin off the ball of his thumb. Then he shifted the Chevy into
gear and turned out of the lighted parking lot into the darkness of the
highway.

By the time they reached the country
club, Lucas's
hair was mushy with his own sweat; his tongue felt too large for his
mouth; his hands had the coordination of skillets.

He saw the columned front porch of the country club
go by the back window of Bunny's Chevy, then the swimming pool that was
built in the shape of a shamrock. The voices around him were like
cacophony in a cave. Up ahead, Darl Vanzandt's Ford and two other cars
with kids inside them were parked in the shadows, under live-oak trees,
just outside the flood lamps that lighted the terrace where people in
formal dress were dancing to orchestra music. Bunny slowed the Chevy
and turned in the seat and looked at Lucas.

'You gonna be sick?' he said.

But Lucas couldn't answer.

Bunny hit the steering wheel with the flat of his
fist. 'Oh man, how'd I get in this?' he said.

Then Darl was at the window, his friends behind him.
Their cigarettes sparked like fireflies in the darkness. One of them
carried a lidded bucket by the bail.

'How much acid you give him?' the boy with the
bucket said.

'I didn't give him nothing,' Bunny said.

'Pull him out,' Darl said.

'Let it slide, Darl. He's really fried,' Bunny said.

'Smothers is a geek. So he gets what geeks got
coming,' Darl said.

'Come on, think about it. Your old man's gonna shit
a bowling ball,' Bunny said.

'Here's twenty dollars. Go down to San Antone and
get a blow job. You'll feel better,' Darl said. He was leaning on the
window jamb now. He touched the stiffened edges of two ten-dollar bills
against Bunny's jawbone.

Bunny pushed his hand away.

'I ain't gonna do this,' he said.

'Pretty fucking late, Bunny,' the boy with the
bucket said. Then he dropped his voice into a deep range and said, 'I
ain't gonna do this. I got my fucking standards.'

'You know what it's like to pull a two-by-four out
of your ass?' Bunny said.

'So you don't have to help. Pop the trunk,' Darl
said.

Two of Darl's friends lifted Lucas by his arms out
of the back seat and held him between them like a crucified man. Bunny
breathed loudly through his nose, then pulled a latch under the dash.
Darl reached into the trunk, took out Lucas's twelve-string guitar and
case by the handle, and slammed the lid.