Cimarron Rose

chapter thirteen

The next afternoon Mary Beth answered her phone.

'Is anything wrong?' I asked.

'No. Why should there be?'

'Your machine's been off. I haven't seen you around.'

'Can I call you back later?'

But she didn't. That evening I drove to her apartment. As I walked up the stairs, people were swimming laps in the pool, stroking through the electric columns of light that glowed smokily under the turquoise surface, and the air was tinged with the gaslike smell of chlorine, burning charcoal starter, and flowers heated by the colored flood lamps planted in their midst.

A heavyset man in a tie and business suit came out of Mary Beth's apartment and almost knocked me down. I stepped back from him and felt the place on my chest where he had hit me.

'Excuse me,' I said.

He pushed his glasses straight on his nose and looked into my face, as though he recognized me. His hair was dark and neatly clipped, his part a pale, straight line in his scalp. His chin had a cleft in it and his cheeks were freshly shaved and his skin taut and scented with cologne.

'No problem,' he said.

'No problem?'

'I said I was sorry, pal. I didn't see you.'

'That's funny. I didn't hear you,' I said.

He started to turn away, then his chest expanded and his stomach flattened, as though he were abandoning a useless protocol, and he faced me squarely with his left foot slightly forward, the right foot at an angle behind it.

'You have a reason for staring at me?' he asked quietly.

'Not in the least.'

He glanced back at Mary Beth's closed door. 'Have a good evening. Best way to do that, don't let it get complicated,' he said. He raised his finger and eyebrows at the same time, then walked down the stairs.

She was in her uniform when she let me in. There were pools of color in her cheeks and her voice had a click in it when she spoke. She began straightening couch pillows and magazines that didn't need straightening, her back turned to me.

'I'm sorry to be in a rush. I have to be on duty in twenty minutes,' she said.

'That guy's a fed.'

'What, he threw a badge on you?'

'No, he's a self-important clerk who thinks arrogance and being a cop are the same thing.'

'You don't like them much, do you?'

'He shouldn't be here. If I can make him, other people will, too.'

'I have to go, Billy Bob.' She removed her gunbelt from the closet shelf and began strapping it on her waist. She tucked her shirt inside the belt and kept her eyes on her fingers and the cloth as it tightened under the edge of the leather.

I waited until she raised her eyes again. 'You have a personal relationship going with this guy?' I asked.

'I don't have to tell you these things.' Then I saw her cheeks sink, as though she were disturbed by the severity of her own words.

'He's putting you in jeopardy. I don't like him. That offends you?' I said.

She picked up her purse from the counter that separated the kitchen from the living room. Her face was turned away from me. She pressed her fingers against her temple.

'I'm leaving and I don't have any more to say. Do you want to walk to the parking lot with me or stay here?'

'Somebody's trying to run Garland Moon out of town. Because of something he knows. But he doesn't know what it is.'

She stared at me blankly, her freckled face like a young girl's, suddenly empty of all other concern.

Temple Carrol was sitting in a deerhide chair in my office when I arrived the next morning.

'I found our man,' she said.

'How?'

'He told the guys in the emergency room he fell from a paint ladder through a glass window. They reported it as a knife wound.'

'Why didn't they believe him?'

'Somebody had done a number on him earlier. A paramedic said he looked like he'd been drug by a rope.' She propped her chin on her fingers and waited for the recognition to show in my eyes.

His name was Roy Devins, and he had been two times down in Huntsville and maybe once in Mexico under another name, and whatever had happened to him-an accident on a ladder, a knife beef in a bar-he had driven seventy miles down the highway without seeking help, or even accepting it when people at stoplights glanced into the cab of his pickup, then realized what they were looking at and remained sickened and numb and stationary at the light while he sped away from them.

He looked out of the bandages on his face with the attentiveness of a man who gives importance only to those who can harm him. Then the eyes registered and dismissed us and receded back into the ennui of looking at objects and listening to sounds that might satisfy a need or fulfill a desire-the possibility of cigarettes in my shirt pocket, the noise of a food cart in the hall, a film featuring Japanese gladiators in samurai combat on the television set.

'You remember me?' I said.

'Where's your horse?' he replied.

'You don't mind our being here, do you?'

'I don't give a shit what y'all do,' he said.

'You can put Garland Moon down for the Bitch, Roy. Three-strikes-and-you're-out was made for this guy,' I said.

There were thin white lines around his eyes, as if all sunlight and health had been siphoned out of his skin. The bandages on one side of his head were flat against the scalp and bone. When he turned his head on the pillow, a tic jumped in his throat, as though a fine fishbone were caught in his windpipe. I thought it was the pain.

'I'm going out to the Coast, get a new start. I'm through with all this running around. I fell off a ladder,' he said. His eyes shifted off mine and looked at nothing.

'Listen up, Roy,' Temple said. 'They don't graft ears back on here. Medicaid doesn't pay for plastic surgery on slashed cheeks. How'd we know about you, anyway? He came out to Billy Bob's house and laughed about doing you.'

His eyes filmed over and he turned his head on the pillow so that he faced the open door of his room and the sound of other people walking in the hall, rattling food trays, delivering flowers and fruit baskets, carrying with them all the beautiful portent that an ordinary day could offer.

'Think about it another way. The guys who got you to bust him up, have they been here to look in on you, pay your bills, tell you they're sorry it went south on you?' I said.

But our reasoning could not compete with the memory of Garland T. Moon and that moment when Roy Devins, dope mule and abuser of children, mainline con and fulltime loser, thought he could burst into a motel room with a baseball bat and inspire terror in a man he presumed was one of his own kind, no stronger or weaker or better or worse, unaware that all his experience with evil in county jails and state prisons was as worthless as every other precept that had betrayed him when he had believed himself on the edge of unlocking the magic doors to which everyone but he had always been granted access.

I sat on a bench in the side yard of the stucco church that Pete and I attended, and watched Pete and a group of boys his age play work-up softball out on the school diamond. The shade under the mimosa tree was flecked with tiny blades of sunlight, and Beau, my Morgan, was eating grass along the rain ditch that bordered the church yard. I opened the thick cover of Great-grandpa Sam's journal and turned the pages to my bookmark.

July 21, 1891

I think they aim to rob a train.

July 27, 1891

They rode out of here three days ago, headed due east into a red dawn that was hot enough to have come off the devil's forge. They was drunk when they come back in last night, stinking of rut and beer and tripe they was eating with their hands out of a leather poke. Whatever money they stole, they did not spend it on a bath house in Fort Smith. If you dipped them for ticks and lice, the water would be instantly black and probably have to be shoveled out of the vat and burned with kerosene.

I had thought I had put my violent ways behind me. But just as my loins yearn for the nocturnal caress of the Rose of Cimarron, my palm wishes to curve around the hardness of my Navy.36. I purely hate these men, God forgive me for my words, but they make me ashamed to be a member of the white race and give me dreams about the old life and the men whose faces I lighted with gunfire while people watched from the balconies of saloons and brothels.

Jennie and I have moved into a cabin up on the hillock overlooking the river. We have peach and apple trees in the yard and curtains in the windows she sewn from her old dresses. But I cannot pretend those outlaws are not down below in their mud caves, their squaws rolling opium in little balls for their pipes, the stolen dollars they almost lost in a river drying on clotheslines.

Maybe I hate them because the nature of their abode and of their fornication is the only difference between us. This question has troubled me sorely and I raised it to Jennie. She did not reply and went out to the woodstove in back and began frying meat for our breakfast. She was not hardly dressed and in the early light her young body looked like that of a savage. The sight of her filled me with a passion that I could not contain, that even in the cool air of our bedroom made her palms damp with my sweat.

I am fifty-six years old and fear I do not know who I am.

Pete walked hot and dusty and happy into the shade, his fielder's glove hooked on its strap through his belt.

'We still gonna get peach ice cream?' he said.

'I wouldn't go a day without it,' I replied.

'You know them men out yonder, Billy Bob? They been around the block twice, like they was lost or something.'

I looked over my shoulder, out on the hard-packed dirt street. Both the cars were dark and waxed, with tinted windows and radio antennas. I stood up and put on my Stetson and walked over to Beau and stroked his head and fed him a sugar cube with the flat of my hand. The cars pulled up along the edge of the rain ditch, and the passenger window in the front of the lead car rolled down on its electric motor.

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.