BBH01 - Cimarron Rose (22 page)

'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.'

I drove from Bunny's house to Jack
Vanzandt's
office. His secretary said he had already gone for the day. She went
back to her work, concentrating her gaze on a computer printout as
though I had already left.

'Where did he go?' I asked.

'To one of the lakes, I think.'

'The yacht basin?'

'I'm not sure.'

'Do you know if Darl is with him?' I asked.

She stared thoughtfully into space. 'I don't think
he mentioned it,' she said.

'I'd really like to have a talk with them. Both of
them. Would you get Jack on his cell phone?'

She removed her glasses, which were attached to a
blue velvet cord around her neck.

'Please, Mr Holland. I'm just the secretary,' she
said, her face softening to an entreaty.

'Sorry,' I said.

She smiled at me with her eyes.

The lake where Jack usually kept his sailboat was in
a cup of wooded hills that sloped down to cliffs above the water's
edge. The western cliffs were in shadow now, the stone dark with
lichen, but out in the sunlight a solitary boat with enormous red sails
was tacking in the wind, the hard-blue chop breaking like crystal
needles across its bow.

Jack Vanzandt stood barechested behind the wheel,
his skin golden with tan, his white slacks tight across his hips and
the ridges of muscle in his abdomen.

I waited for him at the boat slip, where a black man
was grilling steaks by a plank table under a shed. If Jack was
uncomfortable with my presence, he didn't show it. In fact, he seemed
to take little notice of me. He was talking to his two guests, who sat
in chairs by the cabin with tropical drinks in their
hands—the
Mexican drug agent, Felix Ringo, and a man from Houston by the name of
Sammy Mace.

Jack stepped off his boat, laced a rope around a
cleat, and walked toward me. His eyes were flat, but they took my full
measure and watched my hands and expression.

'You going to lose it here?' he asked.

'Can't ever tell,' I said.

'Don't.'

'Your kid's a coward and a sadist. But you probably
already know that. I just wanted to tell you he's hooked up with
Garland T. Moon now.'

'You want to eat, or insult me some more?'

Felix Ringo and the man named Sammy Mace were at the
end of the dock, watching a yellow pontoon plane come in low over the
hills and skim across the water.

'Sammy Mace is mobbed-up, Jack,' I said.

'Then why isn't he in Huntsville? Look, I don't feel
good about some things Darl has done. So I've tried to help out.'

'Oh?'

'Felix Ringo is an old friend I knew at Benning.
He's got a lot of ties in the Hispanic community. He found a kid who
might clear Lucas.'

I didn't reply. I looked into his eyes.

'Eat with us. Let's end all this foolishness,' he
said.

'Found which kid?' I asked.

'A biker. Belongs to a gang called the Purple
Hearts. He's had a couple of beefs with Bunny Vogel.'

Then Felix Ringo and Sammy Mace were under the shed,
smiling, nodding, while the black man ladled steaks onto metal plates.
Out on the boat, Emma Vanzandt stepped out of the cabin with sunglasses
on and shook out her hair.

Sammy Mace was in his fifties now, his hair silver
and combed straight back on his head, his face distinguished, almost
intellectual with the square, rimless glasses he wore. Except for his
eyes, which did not match his smile. They studied me, then flexed at
the corners with recognition.

'You were a uniform in Houston? A Texas Ranger got
in some trouble later?' he said.

'Good memory, Sammy,' I said.

'You remember me?'

'You bet. You killed a Houston cop.'

'Hey,' he said playfully, raising a finger on each
hand, as though he were warding off bees. 'I shot a guy coming through
my bedroom window without no shield in his hand, in the middle of the
night, in a neighborhood with cannibals mugging old people down at the
church.'

'What's with this guy?' Felix Ringo said.

'Nothing. Billy Bob's all right. He's just trying to
work some things out,' Jack said.

'You take it easy, Jack,' I said.

I walked back down the dock toward my car. The wind
was warm on my back, the water sliding through pebbles and sand onto
the grass. I heard Jack's leather sandals behind me.

'That kid's going to come to your office. His name's
Virgil Morales,' he said.

'Why are you doing this?' I asked.

'Because you keep laying off your problem on Darl.
Don't make it hard. Take the favor.'

'Does Sammy Mace come with it?'

'He's got the biggest chain of computer outlets in
south Texas. I lit up villages in Vietnam; you killed people in Mexico.
Why don't you get your nose out of the air?'

When I drove away I saw Felix Ringo screw a
cigarette into a gold holder, then stop what he was doing and rise from
his chair when Emma Vanzandt joined their table. The black cook took a
bottle of chilled wine from an ice bucket, wrapped it in a towel, and
poured into the goblets on the table. The diners cut into their steaks
and ate with the poise of people on the cover of Southern
Living.

I wanted to take Jack Vanzandt off at the neck.

After dinner I took out my mother's
old family photo
album and began leafing through the stiffened pages of forty years ago.
At the top of the page my mother, always the librarian, had written the
year each group of pictures was taken. On the pages marked 1956
were five black-and-white photos of my father at work or at a company
picnic. One shot showed him out on the pipeline, smiling, his welder's
hood pushed up on his head, a teenage boy in pinstripe overalls
standing behind him with an electrical brush in his hands to clean the
weld on the pipe joint. In another photo, my father sat at a picnic
table filled with lean-faced blue-collar men and their wives. In the
midst of the adults was the same teenage boy, burr-headed, jug-eared,
his face an incongruous tin pie plate among those grinning at the
camera.

I went to Marvin Pomroy's office in the morning and
got him to pull Garland T. Moon's jacket. The first of many mug shots
was paper-clipped to the second page. I pulled it loose and dropped it
and the two photos from my mother's album on Marvin's desk.

'This mug shot was taken when Moon was seventeen.
Look at the kid in the pictures of my father,' I said.

Marvin propped his elbows on the blotter and peered
down through his glasses at the photos, his fingers on his temples.

'You called it. He knew your old man. But I don't
know what difference it makes,' he said.

'I think he's got some kind of obsession with my
father.'

'So what? Jack the Ripper was probably a surgeon or
a Mason or the queen's grandson. The bottom line is he eviscerated
hookers.'

'You're really a breath of fresh air, Marvin. You
ought to get a Roman collar and start counseling people,' I said.

'This isn't Mexico. You stay away from Moon, Billy
Bob.'

'You want to spell that out?'

'We don't have free-fire zones in Deaf Smith. You
get into any of that Ranger-danger dogshit here, you're going to be in
front of a grand jury yourself.'

I picked up the photos of my father from his desk
blotter and put them in my shirt pocket.

'Sammy Mace is in town. Hanging with Jack Vanzandt
and this Felix Ringo character. I'd give it my attention,' I said, and
didn't bother to close the door when I left.

That afternoon I was staring down from
my office
window into the street, wondering if I would ever extricate Lucas from
the legal process that was about to eat him alive, when a Mexican kid
on a Harley pulled to the curb and walked into the archway on the first
floor. A minute later my secretary buzzed me and I opened the door of
my inner office.

'You're Virgil Morales?' I said.

He was tall, his bare arms clean of jailhouse or
biker art, his Indian-black hair curly on the back of his neck. His
face could have been that of a male model's, except for one eye that
had a lazy drift in it.

'How'd you know?' he asked.

'Oh, you hear things.' I grinned. 'Why'd you decide
to come see me?'

He looked at the glass-encased guns of my
great-grandfather on the wall.

'I want to do the right thing,' he replied.

'Good for the conscience, I guess.'

'They re-filed some old charges against me in San
Antone. Mr Ringo says he can square it.'