BBH01 - Cimarron Rose (33 page)

'I might have blown the trial today, L.Q.'

'You know what you got on your side? It's
that boy's character. He's got sand. You know why?'

'Tell me.'

'He's your son.'

'You always looked after me, L.Q.'

'Know how I'd run it? Put that boy on the
stand and let the jury see what he's made of.'

I still had my hat on. I sat in the stuffed leather
chair in the corner and pulled my hat brim down over my eyes. I could
hear L.Q.' s spurs tinkling on the rug.

'That DEA woman got you down?'
he asked.

'Remember the time we went to that beer
garden in Monterrey? The mariachi bands were playing, and you flamenco
danced with that lady who played the castanets. It was cool every night
and we could see fires out in the hills when the sun went down. Life
was real good to us then, wasn't it?'
I said.

'What's her name, Mary Beth, I still think
she's a right good gal. Sometimes you got to let a mare have her head.'

'Hope you won't take offense, L.Q., but
how about shutting up?'
I said.

'Read your great-grandpa's journal. All
good things come to the righteous and the just.'

I fell asleep amid the sounds of distant thunder.
When I woke up a half hour later, L.Q. was gone and Bunny Vogel was
banging on my door.

He sat at my kitchen table with a cup
of coffee in
his hand, his bronze hair splayed damply on his neck.

'Start over again,' I said.

'The old man was in the sack with this woman works
at the mill. He said he'd latched the screen. He figures Moon slipped a
match cover in it and popped the hook up. It was the gal, Geraldine's
her name, who saw him first. She goes, "Herbert, there's a man in the
doorway. He's watching us," and she rolls the old man off her and tries
to pull the sheet over herself.

'Moon was leaning against the doorway, smoking a
cigarette, tipping his ashes in his hand. The old man says, "You get
the fuck out of here."

'Moon says, "I wouldn't let that in my bed unless I
painted it with turpentine and run castor oil through it first."

'The old man says, "I got a gun in my drawer." Moon
laughs and goes, "A fat old fart like you would have to Vaseline his
finger to get it through the trigger guard."

'Then he picks up Geraldine's dress and tosses it at
her and says, "Go 'head on, woman. I ain't interested in what you got."

'The old man tried to get up, and Moon pushed him
back down with three fingers; A big fat naked guy, wheezing on
cigarettes, trying to get off the mattress while another guy kept
shoving him down.'

'What did Moon tell him?'

'He says, "Sorry I missed Bunny. I hear he ripped
some Longhorn ass up at A&M. I like that."'

'Nothing else?'

Bunny stared at the door of the icebox, widening his
eyes, flexing his jawbone, as though he were watching a moving picture
on the unblemished whiteness of the door. Then his throat made a muted
sound and he started over and said, 'He put my old man's nose between
his fingers and squeezed and twisted it. He kept smiling down at him
while he done it.'

The whites of Bunny's eyes had turned pink and
glistened with an unnatural shine, like the surface of a peeled
hard-boiled egg that's been tainted with dye. He stared down into his
coffee cup.

'There's something else, isn't there?' I said.

He shook his head.

'What is it, Bunny?

'The old man had me drop him at the bus depot. He
said he was gonna visit my grandma in Corpus. He said I ought to do the
same.'

'Don't be too hard on him,' I said.

Then Bunny began to weep.

'What are you hiding, kid? What makes you so
ashamed?' I asked.

But he didn't reply.

I couldn't sleep. I went to the
café by the church
to eat a late dinner, but it was closed. So I drove to the drive-in
restaurant north of town, that neon-lighted square of neutral territory
that was dominated by East Enders during the week because of the amount
of money they had to spend and their freedom from jobs and
responsibility. Or maybe it was the only place where they could take
their secret need and see it in the faces of others and for a short
time not be bothered by its presence in themselves.

I sat in a red vinyl booth by the window and looked
through the rain at the line of parked cars under the canvas awning
that had been pulled out on guy wires. The windows of the cars were
steamed from the inside, some of the engines running, the tailpipes
wisping tongues of smoke in the rain. Occasionally, a cigarette would
drop sparking from a wind vane, or a shoulder, a clutch of hair, would
press against the glass. But no one, at least not I, knew what went on
inside each of those hand-buffed, lacquered, chopped and channeled cars
whose surfaces seemed to ignite like colored flame when touched by neon.

It was a week night, so the kids inside those cars
were not the kind to worry about school. Did they neck with the
innocent, dry lust of a previous generation? Or drink beer with a sense
of discovery and wonder, as though the spring season and their own
physical yearning and the brassy cold glow in the backs of their
throats held a portent for them that was like an endless song? Was the
greenness of their lives like a bursting flower scattering pollen from
their open palms?

Or were they already bitten with ennui and hatred of
one another, joyless in their couplings, insatiable in their disdain
for difference without knowing why? Darl Vanzandt's '32 Ford was backed
into the middle of the row under the canvas awning. Its cherry-red
finish gleamed with the wet, hard luster of a tunnel wound. The
passenger's window was rolled down, and Darl's bare arm was curled on
the sill, the bicep pumped like a small, white grapefruit. A girl sat
on his lap, combing his hair, shaping and reshaping it as though she
were creating a sculpture. He turned his face toward the restaurant
window and his expression was as morally empty, his eyes as sightless,
as a perforated sack of skin stuffed with chemical jelly.

The waitress brought me a steak, with two fried eggs
on top of it, and an order of refried beans and tortillas. I broke the
egg yokes on the steak, sliced the meat in strips and rolled the strips
with beans inside a tortilla. When I looked up, the girl from Darl's
car was running through the rain for the restaurant. She came through
the door, shaking water out of her hair, and dropped a quarter into the
payphone by my booth, glancing back through the window, her slippered
foot tapping on the floor.

'Mr Vanzandt?… Yeah, it's Holly. Look,
Darl's not exactly in good driving shape,' she said. 'Yeah, well, I'd
drive him home and all that, but he just told me to take my diaphragm
and get the fuck out of his life, so I think I'm just gonna say
nighty-nighty and let somebody else clean up his shit. Bye, now.'

After she hung up she looked at the phone and said,
'Fuckhead,' and went out the door.

While I was paying my check at the cash register, I
saw Jack Vanzandt's Cadillac drive into the parking area with a black
man behind the wheel and Jack get out in a pair of jeans and tennis
shoes and a polo shirt and walk to his son's car. Darl still sat in the
passenger's seat, but now with his head on his chest. Jack tipped
Darl's head back and tried to wake him, but Darl's face was bloodless,
his eyes closed, his skin glowing with the tallowy shine of melted wax.

By the time I started my Avalon, Jack had gotten
behind the wheel of Darl's car and had driven the two of them to the
highway's entrance. Jack was waiting for a line of traffic to pass so
he could turn left, while I was about to turn right and go back to the
West End. Then I had one of those moments that nullify all easy
definitions about human behavior and the nature of love.

A pair of truck high beams flooded the interior of
the chopped-down Ford with a naked white brilliance, and I saw Darl's
head on his father's shoulder, his eyes still closed. Then Jack brushed
something away from his boy's eye, a food crumb, perhaps, and kissed
him on the forehead, his face filled with an undisguised grief.

It was still raining and dark at
sunrise the next
morning. I read from Great-grandpa Sam's journal at the breakfast table.

The next day Marvin Pomroy recalled
Virgil Morales
to the stand and tore him up. After Marvin sat back down, I looked over
at his table. His coat hung on the back of his chair, and his white
shirt looked as bright as new snow against his fire-engine-red
suspenders. He saw me looking at him and raised his eyebrows and
shrugged. Marvin didn't take prisoners.

During a midmorning recess Emma Vanzandt rose from a
bench in the corridor outside the courtroom and stopped me and Temple
Carroll. Darl remained seated behind her, dressed like a fraternity
boy, in grey slacks and a blue sports coat, a gold chain and tiny gold
football strung outside the collar of his shirt.

'Got a minute?' she said. Her face was heavily made
up, and threadlike lines spread from her eyes and the sides of her
mouth when she feigned a smile for passersby.

'Sorry,' I said. Down the corridor I saw Jack
Vanzandt buying a cigar at the concession counter.

Emma's thumb and index finger circled my wrist.

'Don't do this,' she said.

'What?'

'Blame the girl's death on Darl.'

'He's not a defendant.'

'Don't insult me, Billy Bob.'

'Your boy's never been made accountable. Why don't
y'all let him stand on his own for once?'

'Jack's made arrangements to send him to a treatment
center in California. It's a one-year in-patient program. For God's
sakes, give us a chance to correct our problem.'

'Darl came out to my house. He offered to give up
his father,' I said.

'He offered to—' Her face had the startled, still
quality of someone caught in a photographer's strobe.

'You've got a monster in your house, Emma. Whatever
happens in this courthouse won't change that,' I said.

Temple and I left her standing in the middle of the
corridor, her mouth moving soundlessly while her stepson snipped his
fingernails on the bench behind her.

Temple and I went up to the second
floor of the
courthouse and bought cold drinks from the machine and drank them by a
tall, arched window at the end of the hall. It had stopped raining
temporarily, but the streets were flooded and the wake from passing
automobiles slid up onto the courthouse lawn.

'You bothered about what you said to Emma?' Temple
asked.

'Not really.'

'If you're worried about hanging it on Darl
Vanzandt—'

'The jury won't see motive in Darl. We can make him
an adverb but not a noun.'

She was silent. I heard her set her aluminum soda
can on top of the radiator.

'You want to spell it out?' she asked.

'Bunny Vogel's going to have a bad day,' I said.

'Wrong kid for it.'

'Damn, I wish I could adjust like that. "Wrong kid
for it." That's great.'

I walked back down the hall to the stairs, my boots
echoing off the wood floor.