BBH01 - Cimarron Rose (8 page)

'I'll just watch. Maybe I can learn how it's done,'
she said.

We went out the side door to a woodshed with a tarp
that was extended out from the roof on slanted poles. The elderly black
man we had interviewed earlier in the week was heaving two vinyl sacks
of cans into the shed. When he saw us, he took his stub of a pipe out
of his shirt pocket and pared the charcoal out of the bowl with a
penknife.

'My memory ain't no better than it was the other
day. Must be age. Or maybe I don't take to rudeness,' he said. He
pointed the stem of his pipe at Temple.

'I get the notion you don't like working here,' I
said.

'The job's fine. What a lot of people do here ain't.'

I held the Polaroid of Darl Vanzandt in front of
him. He dipped his pipe in a leather tobacco pouch and pressed the
tobacco down into the bowl with the ball of his thumb.

'Is that the boy Roseanne Hazlitt slapped?' I said.

He struck a wood match and cupped it over his pipe,
puffing smoke out into the rain. He tossed the match into a puddle and
watched it go out.

'You a church man?' I said.

'My wife and me belong to a church in town. If
that's what you're axing.'

'That girl didn't deserve to die the way she did,' I
said.

He tapped his fingernail on the Polaroid.

'That ain't the one she slapped,' he said. His eyes
lingered for a moment on mine, then looked out into the rain.

'But he was in the crowd?' I asked.

'A boy like that don't have no use for anybody else
'cause he don't have no use for himself. What other kind of place he
gonna go to? Come back tonight, he'll be here, insulting people,
yelling on the dance flo', getting sick out in the weeds. He ain't hard
to find.'

'Was he here the night she was attacked?' I said.

'Why you giving me this truck? You know the one
question y'all ain't axed me? Who'd that po' girl leave with? It was
Lucas Smothers. That's what I seen.' He pointed
to the corner of his eye. 'Y'all always think you find the right
nigger, you gonna get the answer you want.'

In the car, I felt Temple's eyes on the side of my
face. She rubbed me on the arm with the back of her finger.

'Lucas didn't do it, Billy Bob,' she said.

On the way home, by chance and
accident, Temple and
I witnessed a peculiar event, one that would only add to the questions
for which I had no answer.

It had stopped raining, but the sky was sealed with
clouds that were as black as gun cotton and mist floated off the river
and clung to the sides of the low hills along the two-lane road. A
quarter mile ahead of us, a flatbed truck with a welding machine
mounted behind the cab veered back and forth across the yellow stripe.
A sheriff's cruiser that had been parked under an overpass, the trunk
up to hide the emergency flasher on the roof, pulled the truck to the
side of the road and two uniformed deputies got out, slipping their
batons into the rings on their belts.

It should have been an easy roadside DWI arrest. It
wasn't. The driver of the truck, his khakis and white T-shirt streaked
with grease, his face dilated and red with alcohol, fell from the cab
into the road, his hard hat rolling away like a tiddledywink. He got to
his feet, his ankles spread wide for balance, and started swinging, his
first blow snapping a deputy's jaw back against his shoulder.

The other deputy whipped his baton across the tendon
behind the truck driver's knee and crumpled him to the asphalt.

It should have been over. It wasn't. We had passed
the truck now, and the two deputies were into their own program.

'Uh-oh,' Temple said.

They lifted the drunk man by each arm and dragged
him on his knees to the far side of the truck. Then we saw the humped
silhouettes by the back tire and the balled fists and the batons rising
and falling, like men trading off hammer strokes on a tent post.

I touched the brake, pulled to the shoulder, and
began backing up in the weeds.

From under the overpass a second cruiser came hard
down the road, its blue, white, and red emergency flasher on, water
blowing in a vortex behind it. The driver cut to the shoulder, hit the
high beams, and the airplane lights burned into the faces of the two
deputies and the bloodied man huddled at their knees.

The driver of the second cruiser got out and stood
just behind the glare that blinded the two deputies, a portable radio
in her left hand, the other on the butt of her holstered
nine-millimeter.

'Y'all got a problem here?' Mary Beth Sweeney said.

That night I fell asleep as an
electrical storm
moved across the drenched hills and disappeared in the west, filling
the clouds with flickers of light like burning candles in a Mexican
church that smelled of incense and stone and water.

Or like cartridges exploding in the chambers of L.Q.
Navarro's blue-black, ivory-handled, custom-made .45 revolver.

It's night in the dream, and L.Q and I are
across the river in Mexico, where we have no authority and quarter
comes only with dawn. We're dismounted, and our horses keep spooking
away from the two dead drug transporters who lie in a muddy slough,
their mouths and eyes frozen open with disbelief.

L.Q. pulls a pack of playing cards
emblazoned with the badge of the Texas Rangers from the side pocket of
his suit coat, unsnaps two cards from under the rubber band, and flicks
them at the corpses.

I pull their guns apart and fling the
pieces in different directions.

'The tar is still up in one of them
houses. You take the left side and don't silhouette on the hill,' L.Q.
says.

'Burn the field and the tar will go with
it, L.Q.,' I say:

'Wind's out of the south. I'd sure hate to
lose a race with a grass fire,' be says.

The houses are spread out along a low
ridge, roofless, made of dried mud, their windows like empty eye
sockets. My horse is belly deep in a field of yellow grass, and he
skitters each time the withered husk of a poppy jitters on the stem.

The rifle fire erupts from the windows
simultaneously all across the ridge. My horse rears under my thighs,
and I feel myself plummeting backward into darkness, into a crush of
yellow grass while tracer rounds float into the sky.

But it's they who set fire to the field,
who watch it spread behind a thirty-knot wind that feeds cold air like
pure oxygen into the flames. I feel my left foot squish inside my boot,
feel my knee collapsing as I try to run uphill and realize that this is
the place where all my roads come together, now, in this moment, that
the end I never foresaw will be inside an envelope of flame, just as if
I had been tied to a medieval stake.

Then I see L.Q. bent low on his mare,
pouring it on through the grass, his Stetson low over
his eyes, his coat flapping back from his gunbelt, his right hand
extended like a rodeo pickup rider's.

I lock my forearm in his, palm against
tendon, and swing up on his horse's rump, then feel the surge of muscle
and power between my legs as we thunder over the top of a ridge, my
arms around L.Q's waist, my boot splaying blood into the darkness, my
face buried in his manly smell.

Then, as in a dream, I hear the horse's
hooves splash through water and clop on stone and L.Q. holler out,
'Why, goodness gracious, it's Texas already, bud!'

At five-thirty Monday morning I went
to Deaf Smith's
sole health club, located a block off the town square in what used to
be a five-and-dime store, where I worked out three times a week. I
lifted in the weight room, then exercised on the benches and Nautilus
machines and was headed for the steam room when I saw Mary Beth Sweeney
on a StairMaster machine, by herself, at the end of a blind hallway.
Her cotton sports bra was peppered with sweat, her face flushed and
heated with her movement on the machine. Her curly hair stuck in
strands to her cheeks.

'Good morning,' I said.

'How do you do, Mr Holland?' she said.

'Nobody calls me "Mr Holland"… Never
mind… That was impressive last night. That guy in the welding
truck owes you one.'

'You stopped, didn't you?'

'Can you go to a picture show tonight?' I asked.

'Why do you keep bothering me?'

'You're a handsome woman.'

'You've got some damn nerve.'

I bounced the tip of my towel on the base of the
StairMaster.

'Adios,' I said.

A half hour later I walked outside into the blue
coolness of the morning, the mimosa trees planted in the sidewalks
ruffling in the shadow of the buildings. Mary Beth Sweeney, dressed in
her uniform, was about to get into her
car. She heard me behind her, threw her canvas gym bag on the
passenger's seat, and turned to face me.

'You strike me as an admirable person. I apologize
for my overture, however. I won't bother you again,' I said, and left
her standing there.

I walked down the street toward my
car. I paused in
front of the pawnshop window and looked at the display spread out on a
piece of green velvet: brass knuckles, stiletto gut-rippers, barber's
razors, slapjacks, handcuffs, derringers, a .38 Special with notches
filed in the grips, a 1911 model US Army .45, and a blue-black ivory
handled revolver that could have been a replica of L.Q. Navarro's.

I felt a presence on my back, like someone brushing
a piece of ice between my shoulder blades. I turned around and saw
Garland T. Moon watching me from the door of a bar, licking down the
seam of a hand-rolled cigarette. He wore a cream-colored suit with no
shirt and black prison-issue work shoes, the archless, flat-soled kind
with leather thongs and hook eyelets.

I walked back to the door of the bar.

'Early for the slop chute, isn't it?' I said.

'I don't drink. Never have.'

'You following me?'

He lit the cigarette, propped one foot against the
wall, inhaled the smoke and burning glue into his lungs. He cast away
the paper match in the wind.

'Not even in my darkest thoughts, sir,' he said.

I headed back up the street. The three-hundred-pound
black woman who owned the pawnshop was just opening up. She saw my eyes
glance at her window display.

'Time to put some boom-boom in yo' bam-bam, baby,'
she said. She winked and tapped her ring on the glass. 'I ain't talking
about me, honey. But I 'predate the thought anyway.'

At noon I carried a ham sandwich and a
glass of milk
out on my back porch. Beyond the barn I saw Pete sitting on the levee
that surrounded the tank.

He heard me walking toward him, but he never turned
around.

'Why aren't you in school, bud?' I asked.

'Stayed home, that's why,' he said, looking out at
the water.

Then I saw the discolored lump and skinned place by
his eye.

'Who did that to you?' I asked.

'Man my mother brung home last night.' He picked at
his fingers and flung a rock into the tank. Then he flung another one.

I sat down next to him.

'Is your mom okay?' I asked.

'She ain't got up yet. She won't be right the rest
of the day.'

'Where could I find this fellow?' I said.

We went into the barn and I strapped
on L.Q.' s
roweled spurs and saddled my Morgan. I pulled a heavy coil of rodeo
polyrope off a wood peg and hung it on the pommel. It was five-eights
of an inch in diameter and had an elongated eye cinched at the tip with
fine wire.

'What are we doing, Billy Bob?' Pete said.

'The man who owned these Mexican spurs, he used to
tell me, "Sometimes you've got to set people's perspective straight".'

I put my arm down and pulled him up on the Morgan's
rump.

'What's "perspective" mean?' Pete said.

We rode through the back of my farm, crossed the
creek and went up the slope through the pines. The ground was moist and
netted with sunlight under the Morgan's shoes, and ahead I could see
the stucco church where Pete and I went to Mass and the deserted
filling station on the corner and up the dirt street an unpainted
plank-walled tavern with a shingle-roof porch and boxes of petunias in
the windows.

I stopped the Morgan by the side window.

'You see him?' I asked.

That's him yonder, by the pool table. The one eating
chili beans out of a paper plate.'

'I want you to go on back to the
café and wait for me.'

'Maybe you oughtn't to do this, Billy Bob. My eye
don't hurt now.'

'Did you eat lunch yet?'

'He's got a frog sticker in his right-hand
pocket. I seen it when he…'

'When he what?'

'Hung up his britches on my mother's bedpost.'

I put five dollars in Pete's hand, 'Better get you a
hamburger steak and one of those peach ice cream sundaes. I'll be along
in a minute.'

Pete slid off the Morgan's rump and walked down the
street toward the café, looking back over his shoulder at me,
the lump
by his eye as red as a boil.

I took the polyrope off the pommel, unfastened the
pig string that held the coil in place, worked the length of the rope
through my palms and ran the bottom end through the eye at the tip.
Then I double-folded the rope along half the loop, picked up the slack
off the ground, and rode my Morgan up on the porch and through the
doorway, ducking down on his withers to get under the jamb.

The inside of the tavern was well lighted and
paneled with lacquered yellow pine, and neon Lone Star and Pearl beer
signs and an enormous Texas flag were hung over the bar.

'I hope you brung your own dustpan and whisk broom,'
the bartender said.

I rode the Morgan between a cluster of tables and
chairs and across a small dance floor toward the pool table. The man
eating from a paper plate looked at me, smiling, a spoonful of chili
halfway to his mouth. He wore a neatly barbered blond beard and a shark
tooth necklace and a blue leather vest and black jeans and silver boots
sheathed with metal plates.