Read BBH01 - Cimarron Rose Online
Authors: James Lee Burke
'Mr Holland?' the judge said.
'My client has taken the stand of his own volition,
your honor. The rest of his life is at stake here. How can justice
possibly be harmed by the questions I've asked?'
'Mr Pomroy?' she said.
'I think he's turning this trial into a snake-oil
show.'
'I caution you, sir,' she said.
'Mr Holland says he means no harm. Neither does a
skunk wandering into a church house,' Marvin said.
'Your objection is noted and overruled. Mr Holland,
I'm giving you some unusual latitude here, but don't abuse it. Step
back.'
'Your honor—' Marvin said.
'Take a seat, Mr Pomroy, and stay in it for a while,
please,' she said.
I walked to the right of the witness stand, so the
jury would look into Lucas's face when he spoke.
'Let's forget that stuff about condoms, Lucas. What
would you have done if Roseanne had been carrying your child?' I said.
'I wouldn't have done nothing.'
'Would you have asked her to get an abortion?'
'No, sir.'
'Why not?'
'Cause it would have been our baby.'
'A baby with no father? You'd just let her rear it
on her own?'
'That's not what I meant.'
'What did you mean?'
'I figured we'd get married,' he said.
'You have a flop in the hay, then suddenly you want
to be a father and a married man? Who you kidding, Lucas?'
'I told you the truth,' Lucas said.
'I don't believe you.'
'I wouldn't let no kid of mine grow up without a
last name. I don't care what you believe.'
'Why all this moral righteousness about fatherhood?
It's a little hard for me to swallow.'
'Your honor—' Marvin said.
But the judge made a placating gesture with her hand
and didn't take her eyes off my face.
'Cause I know what it's like,' Lucas said.
'To be like what? You're not making sense.'
'Not to have a father.' His breath was coming hard
in his throat now, his cheeks blooming with color.
'Vernon Smothers is not your father?'
Lucas's shoulders were bent, his head tilted
sideways, his eyes pink with broken veins, glimmering with water,
riveted on mine.
'My real father never give me his damn name. You
know what I'm talking about, too,' he said.
'Your honor, I object,' Marvin said.
'Mr Holland—' the judge said.
'Who is your father?'
'I ain't got one.'
'Say his name.'
'You are! Except you'd never admit it! 'Cause you
slept with my mother and let somebody pick up after you. That's what
you done. You think I'd do that to my own kid?'
Then he started to cry, his face in his hands, his
back shaking.
Judge Judy Bonham leaned her chin on her hand and
let out her breath.
'Take your client down from the stand, Mr Holland,
then report to my chambers,' she said.
Marvin leaned back in his chair, flipped a pencil in
the air, and watched it roll off the table onto the floor.
It went to the jury late that
afternoon. I stood at
my office window and looked out at the square, at the trusties from the
jail scraping mud out of the gutters, the scrolled neon on the Rialto
theater, the trees puffing with wind on the courthouse lawn, all in
their proper place, the presummer golden light of the late sun on the
clock's face, as though the events of the last few days had no
significance and had ended with a whisper.
Then Darl Vanzandt came out of a side street on a
chopped-down chromed Harley motorcycle, wearing shades and bat-wing
chaps, his truncated body stretching back on his arms each time he
gunned a dirty blast of air through his exhaust pipe.
He drove around and around the square, mindlessly,
with no apparent purpose, causing pedestrians to step back on the curb,
his metal-sheathed heel scotching the pavement when he cornered his
bike, his straight exhaust echoing off the buildings like an insult.
Then he turned into the shade of a narrow street and
opened up the throttle, his tan shoulders swelling with blood and
power, blowing newspapers and a cluster of Mexican children out of his
path.
The phone rang on my desk.
'We'll probably fly in there this weekend. You going
to be around?' the voice said.
'Mary Beth?'
'I'm in Houston with a task force. Brian is out of
the picture. We're about to pull the string on some individuals in your
area.'
'Let me know what I can do.'
'I don't think you quite understand, Billy Bob. The
greaseball drug agent, Felix Ringo? He's gone apeshit. We get the
impression you put some glass in Garland Moon's breakfast food.'
'So what?'
'So Ringo is part of a bigger story than the town of
Deaf Smith.'
'Bad guy to break bread with.'
'Yeah? Well, as FDR once said of Somoza, "He might
be a sonofabitch, but he's
our
sonofabitch."'
'I never found a lot of humor in that story.'
'No, you wouldn't.'
I waited for her to say something else but she
didn't. 'Why'd you call?' I asked.
'I don't know, Billy Bob. I really don't.'
I heard her lower the receiver into the cradle. I
took the phone away from my ear and then put it to my ear again, the
dial tone buzzing against my skin, as though somehow that would restore
the connection. I stared at the shadows on the courthouse tower; they
had the deep purple hue of a stone bruise, the kind that goes through
the muscle into the bone.
I went home and cooked a steak in the
backyard. I
ate on the back porch, then sat at my desk in the library with
Great-grandpa Sam's journal opened under the desk lamp and tried to
read. L.Q. Navarro sat in the burgundy chair in the corner, twirling
his gold pocket watch on its chain.
'Don't think too harsh of her. Working for
the G and falling in love with a guy like you probably ain't a good
combo,'
he said.
'Not tonight, L.Q.'
'Stonewall Judy might have give you the
riot act, but you could tell she admired what you done. I like when she
said, "Get your star back, Billy Bob, or stay out of my court." That's
the kind of female I can relate to.'
'I'm trying to concentrate.'
'
You got to turn
loose of what's fretting you. You and I both know what that is, too.'
'I mean it, L.Q. Stop it.'
'You cain't be sure that Mexican is the
right fellow.'
'I see his face in the gun flashes. You
broke your knife blade off in his kidney.'
'So you gonna bust a cap on him and always
wonder if you killed the right man? Ain't you had enough grief over
that stuff down in Coahuila?'
I picked up Sam's journal and turned on the light in
the kitchen and read at the breakfast table. I heard L.Q.' s spurs
tinkling behind me, then it was quiet a moment and their sound
disappeared down the front hall into a gust of wind that pushed open
the screen door and let it fall back against the jamb.
September 3, 1891
I washed my jeans, my blue cotton shirt, my socks and
underwear in a big cook pot and dried them on a warm rock the evening
before I was to ride out. Then I packed my saddle bags with my Bible,
spectacles, word dictionary, almanac, razor, soap, and a box of
Winchester rounds, and rolled a blanket inside my slicker. The Rose of
Cimarron seen all this but said nary a word. I don't know as she was
hurt or if she did not give a damn. Tell me if there's a louder silence
than that of a woman. I lay down in the dark and thought she would come
to my side. But she walked down the hillock with a pout on her face to
the mud caves, to join in the drunken frolic of her relatives I
reckoned, and I knew I had commenced the most lonely night of my life.
Outside the window I could see trees of lightning busting all over the
sky. In my sleep I thought I heard thousands of cows lowing at the
smell of rain, then going from hell to breakfast over a bluff that
didn't have no bottom.
The morning broke cold and mean out of the north. You could
see hail bouncing on the hardpan and big clouds swirling and getting
darker all the time, like a twister was kicking up dust and fanning it
out across a black sky. Jennie had not come back from the mud caves. I
cooked my breakfast on the woodstove and fried some salted pork and put
it and three smoked prairie chickens in my saddle bags. I put on my
slouch hat, my vest and cotton shirt, my chaps that has turned black
from animal grease and wood smoke, and hung my Navy revolvers from my
pommel and pulled my Winchester '73 from its scabbard and rode down the
hillock through the dead campfires and litter and venison racks of the
subhumans that calls themselves the Dalton-Doolin gang.
The burlap sacks that was hung across the cave entrances was
weighted down with rocks to keep the wind out. My horse clattered
across some tin plates and tipped over a cook's tripod and iron kettle
and pushed over a table loaded with preserve jars. But not a soul
stirred up in the caves where my Jennie slept. I looped my lariat and
tossed it over a venison rack and drug it through the firepit and
kicked down a lean-to with a drunk man in it and dropped the gate on
the hog pen and stove out the bottom of a boat that was tied in the
bulrushes.
But it was for naught. Jennie did not come out of the caves.
Instead, one of the Doolin party did, this fellow with a beard like
black grease paint and a head the shape of a watermelon. He was
barefoot and in long red underdrawers with a bottle of whiskey in one
hand and a pepperbox pistol in the other. I laid one across his cheek
with my Winchester barrel and left him sitting in the mud like a man
just discovered he had mumps.
But my behavior was that of a child. My Jennie was gone, just like my
reckless youth.
I forded the Cimarron and rode north in the storm. I was a
drover and meat hunter on the high plains after the War, but I never
saw the like of this storm. The tumble brush was like the Lord's crown
of thorns dashed in the face. I could actually hear the dust clouds
grinding across the hardpan, the way a locomotive sounds when the
wheels screech on the grade. Up ahead the sleet was white all the way
across the crest of the hills, and I knew me and my poor horse was in
for a mighty hard day.
I didn't turn in the saddle when I heard hooves coming behind me,
supposing it was just hail beating on my hat. Then I seen her pouring
it on her buckskin, bent low over the withers the way a savage rides so
he can shoot under the horse's neck, her dress hitched plumb over her
thighs.
I don't know how to explain it, but whenever I saw that woman
ride a horse a banjo seemed to start ringing in my lower parts.
Hailstones and wind and flying brush could not diminish the
beauty of the Cimarron Rose. Her smile was as beautiful as a flower
opening in the morning and my heart fairly soared in my breast. Tied to
her pommel was the fattest carpet bag you ever seen.
Are you looking for company? she asked.
I surely am, I said.
Then I would dearly like to ride along with you.
You was all packed and never told me? That's a mean trick to
play on me, Jennie.
This bag here? No, this here is money that's twice stole. They
ain't coming for it, though. I turned their horses out.
I beg your pardon? I said.
My relatives has robbed Pearl Younger's whorehouse and the
Chinaman's opium den in Fort Smith. You reckon this is enough to build
a church?
Good Lord, woman, you don't build church houses with money
from a robbery.
I could see I had hurt her feelings again.
I can't preach nowhere cause I got a warrant on me, anyway, I
said.
They say there ain't no God or law west of the Pecos.
We rode on like that, the wind plumb near blowing us out of
the saddle. We stopped in a brush arbor, just like the one I got
ordained in, and I put my slicker on Jennie and tied my hat down on my
head with a scarf and built us a fire.
I bet there ain't no preacher like you on the Pecos, she said.
Just gunmen and drunkards, Jennie.
My mother says under the skin of every drunkard there's a good
Baptist hiding somewhere.
Now, what do you answer to a statement like that?
Then she says, I bet the devil don't hate nothing worse than
seeing his own money used against him.
I unrolled my blanket and covered our heads with it and put my
arms inside her slicker, her face rubbing like a child's on my chest. I
could feel her joined to me the way married folks is supposed to be and
I knowed I didn't have to fight no more with all the voices and angry
men that has lived inside me, and I saw the hailstones dancing in the
fire and they was whiter than any snow, more pure than any words, and I
heard the voice say Forgiven and I did not have to ask Who had spoken
it.
The bailiff called from the
courthouse. The jury was
back in.
It wasn't a dramatic moment. It was a
Friday night
and the jury had asked the judge they be allowed to deliberate that
evening, which meant they had no plans to return Saturday or Monday
morning. The courtroom was almost deserted, the shadows of the
oscillating fans shifting back and forth across the empty seats, the
sounds of the late spring filtering through the high windows, as though
the theater in our lives had already moved on and made spectators of us
again.
Except for Lucas when the jury foreman read the
verdict of not guilty. He shook hands with the jurors, the judge, with
me and Vernon and Temple, with the bailiff, with the custodian mopping
the hallway, with a soldier smoking a cigarette on the courthouse steps.
'That's it? There ain't no way it can be refiled,
huh?' he said.