Cimarron Rose

chapter ten

The next morning, when Lucas Smothers came to work with his father, he told me of the late-night visit he had received from people with whom he had gone to high school.

The cars cut their lights before they got to Lucas's house, but through his open window he could hear music on a radio and the voices of girls. The cars, five of them, were stopped in the center of the road, their engines throbbing softly against the pavement, their hand-rubbed body surfaces glowing dully under the moon like freshly ported plastic.

Then the lead car turned into Lucas's drive, followed by the others, and fishtailed across the damp lawn, scouring grass and sod into the air, crunching the sprinkler, ripping troughs out of the flower beds.

One girl jumped from a car, a metallic object in her hand, and bent down below the level of the bedroom window. He heard a hissing sound, then saw her raise up and look at him. No, that wasn't accurate. She never saw him, as though his possible presence was as insignificant as the worth of his home. Her face was beautiful and empty, her mouth like a pursed button.

'What are y'all doing?' he said, his voice phlegmy in his throat.

If she heard him, she didn't show it. Her skin seemed to flush with pleasure just before she turned and pranced like a deer into the waiting arms of her friends, who giggled and pulled her back inside the car.

By the time Lucas and his father got outside, the caravan was far down the road, the headlights dipping over a hill.

Lucas could see the girl's footprints by the water faucet under his window. The ground was soft and muddy here, and the footprints were small and sharp edged and narrow at the toe, and it was obvious the girl had tried to stand on a piece of cardboard to keep the mud off her shoes. Written in red, tilted, spray-painted letters below Lucas's screen was the solitary word loser.

That same day I drove out to the Green Parrot Motel, a pink cinder-block monstrosity painted with tropical birds and palm trees and advertising water beds and triple-X movies. The desk clerk told me Garland T. Moon was next door at the welding shop.

The tin shed had only one window, which was painted over and nailed shut, and the walls pinged with the sun's heat. Garland T. Moon was stripped to the waist, black goggles on his eyes, arc-welding the iron bucket off a ditching machine. The sparks dripped to his feet like liquid fire. He pushed his goggles up on his forehead with a dirty thumb and wiped his eyes on his forearm. His smile made me think of a clay sculpture that had been pushed violently out of shape.

'Were you out at my house two nights ago?' I asked.

'I got me a parttime job. I don't run around at night.'

'I think either you or Jimmy Cole hurt my horse.'

'I was out a couple of nights. The other side of them hills. There's all kind of lights in the clouds. You ever hear of the Lubbock Lights, them UFOs that was photographed? There's something weird going on hereabouts.'

'I've rigged two shotguns on my property. I hope you don't find one of them.'

'You don't have no guns. I made a whole study of you, Mr Holland. I can touch that boy and I touch you. It's a sweet thought, but I ain't got the inclination right now.'

'Jimmy Cole's dead, isn't he?' I said.

He pulled a soot-blackened glove from his hand one finger at a time.

'Why would a person think that?' he asked.

'You don't leave loose ends.'

'If I was to come out to your place or that pup's with a serious mind, y'all wouldn't have no doubt about who visited you… You cain't do nothing about me, Mr Holland. Don't nobody care what happens to crazy people. I know. I majored in crazy. I know it inside and out.'

'Crazy people?'

'I heard the screw say it in the jail. You're queer for a dead man. You're one seriously sick motherfucker and don't know it.'

He started laughing, hard, his flat chest shaking, sweat rolling through the dirt rings on his neck, the wisps of red hair on his scalp flecked with bits of black ash.

I picked up Mary Beth Sweeney at her apartment that evening and we drove down the old two-lane toward the county line. She wore a pale organdy dress and white pumps and earrings with blue stones in them, and I could smell the baby powder she used to cover the freckles on her shoulders and neck.

Twice she glanced at the road behind us.

'You having regrets?' I asked.

Her eyes moved over my face.

'I don't think your situation is compromised. The sheriff's corrupt, but he's not Phi Beta Kappa material,' I said.

'What are you talking about?'

'I think you work for the G,' I said.

'The G? Like the government?'

'That's the way I'd read it.'

'I'm starting to feel a little uncomfortable about this, Billy Bob.'

She gazed out the side window so I couldn't see her expression. We crossed the river and the planks on the bridge rattled under my tires.

'My great-grandfather's ranch ran for six miles right along that bank,' I said. 'He used to trail two thousand head at a time to the railhead in Kansas, then he gave up guns and whiskey and became a saddle preacher. His only temptation in life after that was the Rose of Cimarron.'

'I'm sorry. I wasn't listening,' she said.

'My great-grandpa… He was a gunfighter turned preacher, but he had a love affair with an outlaw woman called the Rose of Cimarron. She was a member of the Dalton-Doolin gang. He wrote in his journal that his head got turned by the sweetest and most dangerous woman in Oklahoma Territory.'

'I'm afraid you've lost me,' she said.

I tried to laugh. 'You're a fed. This county's got a long history of political corruption, Mary Beth. There're some violent people here.'

'How about the prosecutor, Marvin Pomroy?'

'He's an honest man. As far as I know, anyway. Are you FBI?'

'Can we forget this conversation?' she said.

I didn't answer. We pulled into a Mexican restaurant built of logs and scrolled with neon. I walked around to the passenger side to open the door for her, but she was already standing outside.

The hills to the west were rimmed with a purple glow when I drove her back home. During the evening I had managed to say almost nothing that was not inept and awkward. I turned into her apartment building and parked by the brick wall that bordered the swimming pool.

'Maybe I should say good night here,' I said.

'No, come in for a drink.'

'I've made you uneasy. I don't want to compound it.'

'You're patronizing me… I don't understand you, Billy Bob. You quit a career as a law officer and then as an assistant US attorney to be a defense lawyer. You like putting dope mules back on the street?'

'I won't handle traffickers.'

'Because you're a cop. You think like one.'

I heard cars behind me on the road, the same two-lane that I could follow, if I were willing, into Val Verde County and beyond, across the river, into an arroyo where horses reared in the gunfire and a man in a pinstriped suit and ash gray Stetson and Mexican spurs grabbed at his breast and called out to the sky.

We were outside the car now. My ears were popping, as though I were on an airplane that suddenly had lost altitude.

I heard myself say something.

'I beg your pardon?' Mary Beth said, her mouth partly open.

My face felt cold, impervious to the wind, the skin pulled back against the bone. Like the penitent who refuses to accept the priest's absolution through the grilled window inside the confessional, I felt the words rise once more in my throat, as in a dream that knows no end.

'I killed my best friend. His name was L.Q. Navarro. He was a Texas Ranger,' I said.

Her lips moved soundlessly, her eyes disjointed as though she were looking at a fractured image inside a child's kaleidoscope.

At noon the next day I walked from my office to the pawnshop down the street from the health club. The three-hundred-pound black woman who owned it, whose name was Ella Mae, wore glass beads in her hair and a white T-shirt that read: I Don't Give a Fuck-Don't Leave Home Without American Express.

On the wall behind the counter were scores of guns and musical instruments. I pointed at one.

'Can you give me a good deal, Ella Mae?' I said.

'Honey, if we was back in the old days, I'd pay to pick your cotton. That's the truth. Wouldn't put you on,' she said.

But after she had rung up my purchase, her mood changed, as though she were stepping across a line she had drawn between herself and white people.

'The other day when you was here? You gone on to your car, but a man with red hair was watching you. He had a coat on without no shirt,' she said.

'What about him?'

'The look in his face, honey. He started to come in here and I locked the door.' She shook her head, as though she feared her words could make the image a reality.

That evening I drove to Lucas Smothers's house. Vernon was sitting on the steps, a bottle of strawberry soda beside him. His clothes were dirty from his work, his face lined with streaks of dried sweat. A wheelbarrow filled with compost and crisscrossed with rakes and a shovel stood in the front yard. Under Lucas's screen was a bright patch of white paint.

'Is Lucas home?' I asked.

'He took the truck to town.'

'Did the sheriff do anything about those kids who tore up your lawn?'

'That tub of guts is doing good to get himself on and off the toilet seat.'

'Is Lucas at the poolroom?'

'No, they're handing out free beer at the Baptist church tonight.'

'It's always a pleasure, Vernon.'

But Vernon had another side, one that wouldn't allow me the freedom to simply condemn and dismiss him. When I was almost out the drive, he rose from the steps and called my name and walked out to the road. He pulled a cloth cap from his back pocket and popped it open and flicked it against his thigh, as though he could not bring himself to admit the nature of his fear and love and his dependence upon others.

'What kind of chance has he got? Don't lie to me, either,' he said.

'It doesn't look real good right now.'

'It ain't right… I swear, if they send that boy to prison…' He breathed hard through his nose. 'I killed people in Vietnam didn't do nothing to me.'

'I'd get a lot of distance between me and those kinds of thoughts, Vernon.'

'Damn, if you don't always have to get up on the high ground. Excuse me for asking, but who died and made you God?' he said, and went inside the house. You didn't win with Vernon Smothers.

I drove downtown and parked in front of the poolroom, a gaunt, two-story building that was over a hundred years old. It had a wood colonnade and elevated sidewalk inset with iron hitching poles, a stamped tin ceiling, oak floors as thick as railroad ties, a railed bar with spittoons, card and domino tables, a woodburning stove, and a toilet down a back hallway with the water tank high up on the wall.

Down the row of pool tables, I saw Lucas chalking a cue, sipping off of a long-neck beer. He wore a pair of gray slacks and loafers and a starched lavender shirt and he had put gel in his hair.

'Come on outside,' I said.

'Now?' he asked.

'Half the people in here are my clients… I'd like to stay off the clock.'

His face pinched with confusion. 'What?' he asked.

It was cool outside, and down the street the live oaks on the courthouse lawn were gold and purple and freckled with birds in the sun's afterglow.

'You got a date?' I said.

'I'm supposed to talk with this guy about a job,' he said.

'Have a seat in my car. I want to show you something.'

As soon as he opened the passenger door he saw the twelve-string guitar propped up on the seat.

'Man, where'd you get that at?' he said.

'A client. I never could play one for diddly-squat, though. You want it?'

'Do I?'

'It's yours. I hate to use it for a fly swatter.'

He corded the neck and ran his thumbnail across the strings.

'Wow, what a sound. Mr Holland, I'll make this right with you.'

'Don't worry about it. Look, those kids who tore up y'all's lawn?'

'My father and me fixed it. I don't care about kids like that.'

'Listen to me. I don't know why anyone would…' I shook my head and started over. 'Maybe they have too much money, maybe they're just mean, but it's important you understand what and who you are… Sometimes we look at the reflection in other people's eyes and that's who we think we are and the truth is we're a whole lot better than that.'

'You're a good guy, Mr Holland. But I don't want to talk about this.'

'Suit yourself. But you're an artist, the honest-to-God real article, Lucas. Some people will always envy and hate you for the talent you have.'

He turned the guitar over in his hands and felt the polished mahogany and walnut belly and the spruce soundboard.

'It's funny, I seen one just like this in Ella Mae's pawnshop. She wanted three hundred dollars for it,' he said.

'No kidding?'

His gaze wandered over my face, then he looked out the window at a man in cream-colored slacks and a tropical hat walking toward the poolroom.

'There's the guy I'm meeting,' Lucas said.

'Felix Ringo? He's the guy talking to you about a job?'

'Yeah, I told you about him. He's got a furniture factory down in Piedras Negras.'

'He's a Mexican drug agent.'

'Yeah. He's got a furniture business, too.'

'Wait here.'

I got out of the Avalon and approached the man named Felix Ringo. His expression was flat, his eyes registering me with the valuative pause of a predator waking from sleep.

'I don't know why, but you're running a game on the kid in my car. It stops here,' I said.

'You got some bad manners, man.'

'I'll say it once. Stay away from him.'

'I was at Fort Benning. The School of the Americas. I'm here with the permission of your government. I don't like to provoke nobody, but I don't got to take your shit.'

'Don't bet on it.'

'Hey, man, I got a good memory. I'm gonna remember where I seen your face. When I do, maybe you ain't gonna have a very good day.'

I stepped off the sidewalk and got back in my car. He remained under the colonnade, staring at Lucas. Then he jerked his head at him, motioning him inside.

'He's dirty, Lucas. It's something you can smell on a bad cop. He'll take you down with him,' I said.

'I cain't get on at any clubs. What am I gonna do, keep working for my dad the rest of my life?'

'It might beat chopping cotton with a gunbull standing over you,' I said and started the car and drove down the street before he could get out.

'Why don't you treat me like I'm three years old?' he said, his face red with anger and embarrassment.

'I want the names of all Darl Vanzandt's friends,' I said.

That night I sat at my library desk and read from Great-grandpa Sam's faded, water-stained journal that he had carried in a saddlebag through Oklahoma Territory.

L.Q. Navarro sat in a burgundy-colored stuffed chair in the corner, fiddling with his revolver, an armadillo-shell lamp lighted behind his head. He spun the revolver on his finger and let the ivory handles snick back flatly in his palm. The blue-black of the steel was so deep in hue it looked almost liquid. He opened the loading gate with his thumb, pulled back the hammer on halfcock, and rotated the cylinder so that one loaded chamber at a time clicked past his examining eye.

'That Garland T. Moon? You can take it to him with fire tongs. That boy's not a listener,' he said.

'I'm trying to read, L.Q.,' I said.

'You going to find your answers in there? I don't hardly think so.'

I rested my brow on my fingers so I wouldn't have to look at him.

I read from Great-grandpa Sam's journal:

In the Indian Nation, July 4, 1891

I always heard women in the Cherokee Strip was precious few in number and homely as a mud fence, but it was not held against them none. The Rose of Cimarron surely gives the lie to that old cowboy wisdom. She is probably part colored and part savage and perhaps even related to the Comanche halfbreed Quanah Parker. She is also the most fetching creature I have ever set eyes on. I would marry her in a minute and take her back to Texas, but I am sure I would not only be run out of the Baptist church but the state as well, provided she did not cut my throat first.

If the Lord made me for the cloth, why has my lust and this woman come together at such an inopportune time?

L.Q. stuffed his revolver in his holster and walked to the ceiling-high window and looked out at the hills. I could see the thick, brass cartridges in the leather loops on his gunbelt, and the Ranger badge clipped just in front of his holster.

'Your great-grandpa got rid of whiskey and guns in his life, but his propensities come out in a different way,' he said.

'What's that mean?'

'Garland Moon, Jimmy Cole, that Mexican drug agent with the grease pencil mustache? You don't run them kind off with a legal writ, Billy Bob.'

He took his revolver back out of his holster and hefted it from one palm to the other, the barrel and cylinder and moon-white grips slapping against his skin.

A pair of headlights turned into my drive, and through the library window I saw Mary Beth Sweeney pull her cruiser to the back of my house.

I stepped out on the back porch and opened the screen door. Her portable radio was clipped to her belt.

'You on duty?' I said.

'For another hour. I need to talk with you,' she said. She stepped inside the porch and took off her campaign hat and shook out her hair. 'You can't just unload a bomb like that and walk off from someone.'

'Last night?'

'Yeah, last night. I don't want somebody hanging his guilt on me like I'm some kind of dartboard.'

'That wasn't my intention.'

'Oh no? Like, "Hey, I killed my best friend, and you remind me of it, so see you around and thanks for the great evening."'

'Where do you get the in-your-face attitude?' I said.

'I knew it would be a mistake coming here.'

'No, it wasn't,' I said. I held my eyes on hers and realized what it was that drew me to her. The spray of pale freckles, the dark brown curls that had a silklike sheen in them, the obvious decency and courage in her behavior, these were all the characteristics that had probably defined her as a girl and had stayed with her into her maturity. But her eyes, which were bold and unrelenting, masked a level of past injury that she didn't easily share.

Her stare broke.

'Come in. I just baked a pecan pie,' I said.

'I'd better not.'

I put my hand under her forearm.

'You have to,' I said.

She bit down on her bottom lip.

'I need help with this Mexican drug agent,' I said.

'For just a minute.' She walked ahead of me and sat at the kitchen table, with her hat crown-down in front of her.

'Felix Ringo told me he was at the School of the Americas at Fort Benning. Punch him up on the computer for me,' I said.

'The federal computer, you're saying?'

'You got it.'

'What's this School of the Americas?'

'It's supposed to be counterinsurgency training. But their graduates have a way of murdering liberation theologians and union organizers or anybody they don't approve of.'

I placed a piece of pie and cup of coffee in front of her. She turned a tiny silver spoon in her cup, then put the spoon down and gazed out the window.

'I'm not saying I have access. But I'll do what I can,' she said. Static, then a dispatcher's voice squawked on her portable. 'I'll have to take a rain check on the pie.'

She walked out onto the porch, both hands on the brim of her campaign hat.

I picked up one of her hands and traced my fingers down the inside of her arm and brushed her palm and touched her nails and the back of her wrist and folded her fingers across mine.

'You're really a nice lady,' I said.

The wind filled the trees outside and blew through the screens, and a loose strand of her hair caught wetly in the side of her mouth. I removed it with my fingertips, then looked in her eyes and saw the consent that I knew she rarely gave, and I put my hands on her arms and kissed her on the mouth, then did it again, then slipped my arms around her and touched her hair and the hard muscles in her back.

I felt a warm exhalation of her breath against my cheek, like that of a swimmer taking a self-disciplinary pause, then her palms pressing on my chest, and I was looking into her face again, the light brown freckles, the brightness of her eyes. She pursed her lips, then winked and was gone into the yard and the shadows and the moonlight and her cruiser, all that fast.

I stood in the drive and watched her back out into the road and pull away behind the row of poplar trees and myrtle bushes that bordered my front yard.

Down the road, I heard a second car engine start up, then a pair of headlights flared in the road and a sheriff's cruiser passed my driveway, with two men in it, headed in the same direction as Mary Beth. The man in the passenger's seat seemed to have his arm propped up on the sill so anyone watching from my house could not identify him.

I called 911 and told the dispatcher a drunk man with a gun was shooting at automobiles in front of my home.