Cimarron Rose

chapter twenty

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 amp;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.

'Thanks for hauling the freight. No hard feelings. You got no beef with him. I do,' Darl said.

Bunny started his car and began backing off the grass toward the drive. He had cut his headlights, but in silhouette he could see Darl and his friends pulling off Lucas's clothes, like medieval grave robbers stripping a corpse. The girl in the front seat with Bunny clicked on the radio, increased the volume, and began putting on fresh makeup.

'He buys you blow jobs? That's disgusting,' she said.

'Act like your brain stem ain't a stump,' he said, then in his frustration clenched the steering wheel so tightly his palms burned.

'Let's go back to the drive-in. I got to pee,' a girl in the backseat said.

Bunny wanted to floor the Chevy across the grass and hedges and flower beds onto the drive, but he stared dumbly at the scene taking place in front of him, wondering even then how he would deal with this later, wondering, perhaps, even who or what he was.

Lucas was shirtless, sitting on his buttocks now, his trousers pulled down around his feet, encircled by Darl and the three boys from the drive-in and the others who had gotten out of their cars. But Bunny's attention was diverted by another figure, an older man, one whose pale skin seemed to glisten with a dull sheen like glycerin. On the edge of the circle, his face softly shadowed by the branches of a long-leaf pine, was Garland T. Moon, a cigarette cupped in his hand, like a soldier smoking furtively on guard duty. The corner of his mouth was wrinkled in a smile.

Two boys with their caps on backward hiked Lucas up from the ground. Darl draped the guitar from its cloth strap around Lucas's neck while another boy tightened Lucas's belt around his ankles. Then they stretched wide the elastic on his Jockey undershorts and poured mud and straw and liquid excrement from a feeder lot down his buttocks and genitals and dragged him to the edge of the terrace.

Then the two boys holding Lucas stopped, unsure, wavering in the roar of brass and saxophones.

'No, no, it's show time, babies,' Darl said.

His words, his cynicism, his vague and encompassing contempt, seemed to animate the two boys, who for just a moment had probably themselves felt like moths hovering outside the radius of a flame. They carried Lucas into the space between the orchestra and dance area, his feet dragging on the flagstones, his head lolling on his shoulder, a befouled, bone-white man who looked as though his neurological system had melted.

When they dropped him and ran, he tried to push himself to his feet. But he tripped and fell, his guitar clattering on the stone. His skin was beaded with sweat and dirt and aura-ed with humidity in the glare of the flood lamps; his mouth was a stupefied slit across a roll of bread dough. He propped himself on his elbows and stared out at the dancers.

But the membership and management at Post Oaks Country Club were not made up of people who let the world intrude easily upon them. The band never faltered; the eyes of the dancers registered Lucas's presence for no more than a few seconds; and a security guard and waiter wrapped a tablecloth around him and removed him as they would a sack of garbage a prankster had thrown over the wall.

But later, inside the aluminum shed where Lucas sat on a bench among the club's garden tools, throwing up in a sack that had once contained weed killer, he got to see the less public side of the club's management. The manager was a thick-bodied bald man who wore dark trousers and a wine-colored sports jacket, and he was flanked on each side by a security guard.

'You're telling me Jack Vanzandt's son did this?' he said.

'Yes, sir, that's right. It was Darl set it up.'

The manager pointed his finger into Lucas's face. 'You listen to me, you nasty thing, you tell these lies to anybody else, I'll have you put in jail,' he said. 'Now, when the sheriff's car gets here, you go home, you never mention this to anyone, and don't you ever come near here again.'

'It was Darl. I'll say it to anybody I want. It was Darl, Darl, Darl. How you like that, sir?' Lucas's eyes went in and out of focus, and a vile-tasting fluid welled up in his throat.

'Get him out of here. And wash off that bench, too,' the manager said.

It was noon the next day, and I stood in Bunny's backyard and listened to the last of his account. He buffed the hood of his car while he talked, his triceps flexing, his voice flat and distant, as though somehow he were only a witness to events rather than a participant.

He finished talking. He rubbed the rag back and forth in the thin horsetails of dried wax on the hood. Finally he looked at me over his shoulder, his hair bunched in a thick S on his cheek.

'You ain't gonna say nothing?' he asked.

'He told me you were stand-up. I thought you might want to know that.'

'Who said that?'

'The kid you delivered up like a trussed hog.'

The color flared in his cheeks. I turned to walk away.

'Maybe I'm a Judas goat, but there's a question you didn't ask,' he said at my back.

'What might that be, sir?'

'How come he went out there to begin with. It's 'cause Darl got the girls to tell him you were gonna be there. So maybe I ain't the only one hepped pour cow shit on that boy.'