BBH01 - Cimarron Rose (34 page)

She caught me halfway down, stepped in front of me
on the landing, her arms pumped. A strand of her chestnut hair was
curved on her chin. 'There's one person only, one,
who has always been on your side. Sorry I never let you fuck me a few
times so I could leave town without even a phone call. You only get
that kind of loyalty with federal
grade,' she said.

She walked down the rest of the stairs alone, the
anger in her eyes her only defense against tears. I stood in the
silence, wondering what the final cost of Lucas's trial would be.

After Darl Vanzandt took the oath he
sat at an angle
in the witness chair, lowered his eyes coyly, as though the world's
attention were upon him, played with his class ring, suppressed a smile
when he looked at his friends.

'Bunny Vogel used to go out with Roseanne Hazlitt,
didn't he?' I asked.

'Everybody knows that.'

'Is Bunny your friend?'

'He used to be.'

'He looked out for you at Texas A&M,
didn't he?'

'We were from the same town, so we hung out.'

'He paid off a grader to change an exam score for
you, didn't he?'

Darl's green eyes looked at nothing, then clouded
and focused on me for the first time, as though the words he heard had
to translate into a different language before they became thoughts in
his mind. He rubbed the peach fuzz on his jawline. 'Yeah, we both got
expelled,' he said.

'Did your stepmother get him a job at the skeet
club?'

'Yeah.'

'You double-dated and you hung out at the drive-in
restaurant together?'

'Sometimes.'

'I'd say y'all were pretty tight, right?'

'That was then, not now.'

'You let people get in your face, Darl?'

'What d'you mean?'

'Dis you, push you around, act like you're a woosh?'

'No, I don't take that stuff.'

'What happened to the Mexican kid who scratched up
your car with a nail?'

'I kicked his ass, that's what.'

'Because people don't get in your face and abuse
your property, right? You stomp their ass?'

'Yeah, that's right.'

'You ever beat up a woman, a prostitute in San
Antonio by the name of Florence LaVey?'

'No, I didn't. I protected myself from people who
were rolling me.'

'What happens when people hit your friends, Darl?
You kick their ass, too.'

'You goddamn right.' He looked at his friends and
grinned.

'Did you see Roseanne Hazlitt slap Bunny Vogel the
night she was attacked?'

He pushed at his nose with the flats of his fingers.
His eyes were threaded with veins, fixed on mine.

'Yeah. At Shorty's. It wasn't a big deal. She always
had her head up her hole about something,' he said.

'It made you mad to see your friend get hit, didn't
it?'

'No. I bought her and Lucas a drink. I wasn't mad at
anybody.'

'Is that when you put roofies—downers—in
Lucas's
drink?' I asked.

'Objection, your honor. He's badgering and leading
his own witness,' Marvin said.

'Withdrawn,' I said. 'Darl, why'd Roseanne slap
Bunny Vogel?'

'She said she was getting baptized. She wanted him
to take her to this holy-roller church that's on TV.'

'Baptized?'

'I told you, she had boards in her head. She goes,
"Do something decent for a change. Take me to my baptism. Maybe it'll
wash off on you." So Bunny says, "Let's take a drive. I'll roll down
the windows so you can air the reefer out of your head."

'She goes, "I'm going down to the Lakewood Church in
Houston. I done talked to the preacher already."

'Bunny says, "Shorty's is a funny kind of church
house to show folks you been saved." She goes, "I'm here to meet Lucas
Smothers. At least he don't treat his old friends like yesterday's
fuck." Another guy goes, "That's 'cause you're Lucas's reg'lar fuck
now."

'Bunny put his hand on her arm and said he'd take
her home. That's when she slapped him. She walked on inside and shot
him the bone.'

Darl's eyes smiled at his friends.

'Did Roseanne once work in the same church store you
do, Darl?'

I saw a thought, like a yellow-green insect, catch
in his eye. Then I realized his distraction had nothing to do with my
question. He was staring at a spectator in the back of the courtroom.
The spectator, Felix Ringo, sat by the aisle with his tropical hat on
his knee, one elbow propped on the chair arm, three fingers resting
across his mouth.

'What's that got to do with anything?' Darl asked.

'Answer the question,' the judge said.

'Yeah, she worked there,' Darl said.

'Who got her the job?' I asked.

'My parents did. They felt sorry for her 'cause she
had a crummy life.'

'How'd your parents know Roseanne Hazlitt, Darl?'

'Bunny brought her over. You saying I was mixed up
with her? I wouldn't touch her. It was probably like the Houston Ship
Channel down there.'

He leaned forward mischievously, his eyes bright
under his blond brows, as though in leaning closer to his friends,
whose faces were lit with the same mocking grin as his, he shut out the
rest of the courtroom.

'Did you and your friends dope Lucas Smothers and
strip off his clothes and pour a bucket of feces on him at the country
club? Did you vandalize his house? Did you try to threaten me at my
home? Did you murder an indigent man, Darl?'

'Mr Holland, you're way beyond anything I'll allow,'
the judge said.

'Withdrawn,' I said.

Darl got down from the stand, his face stupefied,
his mouth round and wordless, his teeth exposed like those of a hungry
fish.

At noon Marvin Pomroy caught me in the
corridor and
asked me into his office. He sat down behind his desk, took his glasses
off, and rubbed one eyebrow with the back of his wrist.

'I'm not comfortable with some stuff that's going on
here,' he said.

'Gee, Marvin, sorry to hear that,' I said.

'I checked into this threat Moon supposedly made
against Bunny Vogel and his father. But there's no handle on
it… He walked into their house without knocking.'

'So why tell me about it?'

He picked up a sheet of pink carbon paper from his
desk blotter.

'That gal down the road from you, Wilma Flores, the
mother of the little boy who's always fishing in your tank?' he said.

'Pete's mother.'

'Yeah, that his name, Pete. She made a 911 at five
this morning. She was showering to go to work. She went to wipe off the
bathroom window to see if it was still raining outside. Six inches from
her face is a guy with tufts of red hair slicked down on his head and
blue eyes like she's never seen in a human being before.'

I felt a tingling, a deadness, in my hands that made
me open and close my palms.

'The deputy put it down as a Peeping Tom incident.
Nothing would have come of it, except I heard him talking about it when
I was in the bullpen this morning. I made him go back out to the house
with mug shots of Garland Moon and five other of our graduates. The
deputy said she took one look at Moon's photo and wouldn't even touch
it with her finger when she identified him,' Marvin said.

'Where's Pete now?'

'At school. I'll put a deputy at their house this
afternoon.'

'Your deputies are worthless. Did you pick up Moon?'

'He has two witnesses who say he was eating
breakfast in a diner at five A.M.'

'You believe them?'

'It's a Peeping Tom complaint. Even if we could
charge him, he'd be out on bond in an hour.'

Then his defensiveness, his frustration with me and
his job went out of his face.

'I called the lady and offered to keep Pete at our
house for a while. She said I was helping Social Services take her
little boy from her… Where you going?' he said.

Stonewall Judy granted a recess until
the following
morning.

I drove home and went into the barn, unlocked the
tack room and sorted through the garden hoes and rakes and mauls and
picks and axes that were stacked inside an old Mayflower moving drum.
The edges of the tools were flecked with bits of dried mud and tangles
of dead weeds from cleaning the vegetable garden and flower beds in the
early spring, or strung with resinous wisps of pine from the cords of
wood I had split last fall. But I knew the tool I was looking for.

It was a mattock whose heavy, oblong iron head had
already worn loose from the helve. I clamped a pair of vise grips on
the wedge that held the handle fast inside the mattock head, twisted it
out of the wood, and slipped the handle free. It was made from ash,
thick across the top to support the weight of the iron head, the grain
worn smooth at the grip. I propped it on the passenger seat in the
Avalon and headed down the road to town just as a curtain of rain moved
in a steady line across the clumped-up herd of red Angus in my
neighbor's draw.

I parked behind the tin shed where Moon worked. The
rain pattered on my slicker and the brim of my Stetson as I pulled open
the back door of the shed. A black man in a bikini swimsuit with a
yellow rag tied around his head was grinding a metal bracket on an
emery wheel.

'Hep you?' he asked.

'Is this your shop?'

'What you want?'

'Garland Moon.'

His eyes went over my person. 'That a chunk of wood
under your raincoat?'

'It's been that kind of day.'

He nodded. 'He gone down to Snooker's Big Eight.'

'You going to use the telephone on me?'

'Rather y'all do it there than here… Tell
you something, a man like that is looking for somebody to click off his
switch. You don't do it, he'll find the right man sooner or later.'

I drove a half mile down the road to a bluff above
the river and a long wood building that was ventilated with window fans
and set in a grove of oak trees that had been the site of a beer garden
during the 1940s. The parking lot was full of pickup trucks and
motorcycles, and rain was blowing through the trees and streaking on
the front windows, which glowed with purple and red neon.

I walked the length of the building, stepping across
puddles, looking through the spinning blades of fans at the felt
tables, pinball machines that swam with light, bikers drinking beer at
the bar, an enormous Confederate flag ruffling against the far wall.
Then I looked through a screen door and saw him bent over a cue,
sighting on the diamond-shaped nine-ball rack, the triceps of his
poised right arm knotted with green veins. He drove the cue ball into
the rack like a spear.

He raised up, his mouth smiling at the perfection of
the break, his fingers reaching for the chalk. Then he heard the screen
open and close behind him and he turned toward me just as I whipped the
mattock handle, edge outward, across his jaw.

His knees buckled slightly, and a choked sound, a
grunt, came out of his throat. He pressed his hand against his cheek as
though he had a toothache, his eyes glazing with shock and surprise,
and I hit him again, this time whipping the helve across his mouth.

His pool cue had clattered to the floor. He looked
at it rolling away from him, his mouth draining blood on the apron of
the table, and I hit him again, in the ribs, and again in the head, the
neck, across the ear; then Moon was stumbling out the back screen door,
through the trees, along the edge of the bluff. Down below, the river
was covered with rain rings.

I swung the mattock handle with both hands across
his spine. I seemed to slip out of time and place, as though I had been
absorbed into a red-black square of film that was like the color of
fire inside oil smoke. Then, like a man awakening from a dream, I
realized the mattock handle was no longer in my grasp, that I was on
one knee beside him, his head lolling against a tree trunk, my fist
driving into his face.

'That's enough, motherfucker,' a voice said behind
me.

I turned and looked up into the disjointed, heated
eyes of a booted man in a leather vest whose body glowed with odor.

'Private conversation,' I said. But my words sounded
outside my skin, as though they had been spoken by someone else and I
heard them through the rain. The back of my right fist was flecked with
Moon's blood.

A biker next to him studied my face and extended his
arm across his friend's chest.

'His name's Holland. Sonofabitch is crazy. Leave him
alone. Snooker done already called the Man,' he said.

They and those who had followed them walked away,
their boots splashing in puddles, as though water had no effect on
their clothes and bodies, their hair blowing in the wind like dirty
string.

I looked again at Moon, his face, the tree he lay
against, the grass stains on his elbows, the skinned lesions around his
eyes, the rain dripping out of the overhead branches, all of it coming
into focus now, my breath quieting in my throat, as though a bird with
blood in its beak had flown out of my chest.

'You think you're conwise, but somebody's laughing
at you, Moon, just like those gunbulls did when they draped you over a
barrel and made a girl out of you,' I said.

He pushed his back up against the tree, wincing
slightly, grinning at me. He started to speak, then cleared his mouth
and spit in the grass and started over.

'This don't mean nothing. I done something to you
won't ever change,' he said.

'The people who hired you are the same people who
tried to run you out of town earlier.'

He grinned again and wiped his nose on his sleeve,
but I saw my words catch in the corner of his eye.

'You and Jimmy Cole wandered into something you
shouldn't out at the Hart Ranch. Then some guys tried to take you down
with a baseball bat at your motel. The same guys jumped me behind my
barn. One of them was a dude named Felix Ringo.'