BBH01 - Cimarron Rose (38 page)

He went down the front hall and out the door to his
pickup. Through the screen I could see shadows on the hillside and
wildflowers rippling and bending and straightening in the wind, like
colored confetti flickering in a world that had almost gone gray.

That afternoon I drove to the welding
shop where
Moon worked. It was padlocked, and the owner of the motel next door,
where Moon kept a room, said he had not seen him in two days.

I went home and worked in the yard and tried to
think my way out of an impossible situation. Great-grandpa Sam, at age
fifty-six, had prevailed against the Dalton-Doolin gang but had kept
faith with his ordination and had not taken human life. I
had manipulated a psychopath, perhaps putting the Vanzandts at risk as
well as Felix Ringo. Intellectually I regretted what I had done, but
secretly I still lusted for revenge and my wrists swelled with blood
and my calluses rasped against the grain of the mattock when I thudded
it into the roots of a willow that had threaded themselves into my
water well.

I sat in the grass on the riverbank and watched the
current riffle across the top of a submerged cottonwood. Directly below
me, lost in the murk and high water, was the sunken automobile where
two members of the Karpis-Barker gang had died. Garland T. Moon had
waded through this water and fished here, wearing a suit, flinging a
hook full of bloody melt into the current that flowed through the car's
empty windows.

Why this particular spot, I wondered. Did he know
the sunken car was there, that it was a nest for shovel-mouth catfish,
that bass hung under the bluffs and fed on the insects that fell from
the grove of trees upstream?

My father probably took him fishing here, walked
these same banks with him as he did with me in later years, a sack of
bread-and-butter sandwiches swinging from his big hand.

Moon had tried to extort ten acres from me on the
back of my property. What were his words?
I want the place
should have been mine. At least part of it.
Was that it, I
thought. Maybe I had been wrong, he hadn't returned to Deaf Smith
simply for revenge. Somehow he had convinced himself he was owed part
of my father's estate. He had also gone to Jack Vanzandt, perhaps a
surrogate for my father, walking into the middle of his golf game, as
though somehow the door to wealth and acceptance in Deaf Smith society
would open for him if he could only turn the right handle.

Now he had disappeared. Where would a man dying of
cancer, beaten with a maul handle, and hunted by a sadist go in a
county that had been the origin of his travail and the denier of what
he believed was his inheritance?

What places was he even familiar with? Perhaps just
the motel room with water bed and X-rated cable he lived in, the old
county prison where he had been sodomized by two roadbulls, the tin
welding shed that was like stepping into the devil's forge, the wide,
green sweep of the river below the bluffs at the back of my property.

And the Hart Ranch, where he had seen lights in the
clouds he associated with UFOs.

I went back to the house, wrapped the belt around
L.Q.'s holstered .45 revolver, and set it on the seat next to me in
the Avalon.

But I didn't get far. Bunny Vogel pulled his '55
Chevy into my drive and got out with a sheet of lined notebook paper
gripped in his hand. His Mexican girlfriend sat in the passenger's seat.

'What's wrong, Bunny?' I said.

'I went to Lucas's house. To tell him I'm sorry for
my part in that cow-flop stuff out at the country club. There wasn't
nobody home. That Indian motorcycle was gone, too. I found this note
wadded up on the porch.'

I smoothed it out on Bunny's hood. The handwriting,
in pencil, was like a child's.

It was unsigned.

'The Rim Rocks?' I said.

'There's a dirt road in the woods at the top of the
cliffs, about two miles upriver from the Hart Ranch,' Bunny said.

'The steel cable,' I said.

'The what?' he asked, his head tilted peculiarly in
the wind, as though the air held a secret that had eluded him.

I pulled into the drive of the
Vanzandts' home.
Bunny and his girlfriend parked by the curb and did not get out of
their car. The sun had dipped behind the house, and the pine trees in
the front yard were edged with fire, the trunks deep in shadow. Far up
the slope, sitting in deck chairs on their wide, breezy front porch,
were Jack and Emma, a drink tray set between them.

So that's how they would handle it, I thought. With
booze and pills and assignment of blame to others. Why not? They lived
in a world where use was a way of life and money and morality were
synonymous. Perhaps they believed the burden of their son's errant ways
absolved them of their own sins, or that indeed they had been made the
scapegoats of the slothful and inept whose plight it was to loathe and
envy the rich.

Jack rose from his chair as I approached the porch.
He wore a canary-yellow sports shirt and white slacks and a western
belt and polished cowboy boots, and his face looked as composed as that
of a defeated warrior to whom victory was denied by only chance and
accident.

'I'd invite you for a drink, Billy Bob, but I
suspect you're here for other reasons,' he said.

Emma lit a cigarette with a gold lighter and smoked
it as though I were not there, her red nails clicking slowly on the arm
of the chair.

'Is Darl around?' I asked.

'No, he went to a show with friends,' Jack said.

'This morning he was melting screamers in red wine.
But tonight he's eating popcorn at the theater?' I said.

'What in God's name are you talking about now?' Emma
said.

'Screamers, leapers, uppers, black beauties,
whatever you want to call them. They tie serious knots in people's
brains,' I said.

'Maybe you'd better leave,' Jack said.

I handed him the note Darl had left on Lucas's
porch. He straightened it between his hands and read, his feet spread
slightly, pointed outward, like a man on a ship.

'This isn't even signed,' he said. But his voice
faltered.

'Why would your boy buy twenty feet of steel cable
at a building supply, Jack?' I asked.

'Cable?' he said.

'With U-bolts,' I said.

He kneaded the sheet of paper with one hand into a
ball and dropped it on the drink table. It bounced and rolled onto the
floor.

'I'll be back,' he said to his wife.

'Jack…' she said. Then she said it again,
to his back, as he walked around the side of his house to his
four-wheel-drive Cherokee.

I bent over and picked up Darl's note and put it in
my pocket. I thought Emma would say something else. But she didn't. She
simply propped her elbow on the arm of the chair and rested her
forehead on her fingers, the smoke from her cigarette curling out of
the ashtray into her hair.

I walked back down the drive in the cooling shadows
to Bunny's car. At the end of the block, the taillights of Jack's
Cherokee turned the corner and disappeared up a winding street whose
high-banked, blue-green lawns hissed with sprinkler systems.

'Can you take me to the Rim Rocks?' I said to Bunny
through his window.

He didn't reply. Instead, he was looking at
something through the front windshield. He opened the door and stepped
out on the pavement.

'I think that boy done growed up on us,' he said.

Lucas and Vernon Smothers slowed their pickup truck
to the curb. They were both eating fried chicken out of a plastic
bucket. They got out and walked to the back of the truck. Lucas dropped
the tailgate and slid a plank down to the pavement to offload the
Indian motorcycle, which was held erect in the truck bed with four
crisscrossed lengths of bungi cord. He kept looking at us, waiting for
one of us to speak.

'Hi, what cha y'all doing here?'
he said.

What follows is put together from accounts given me
by Marvin Pomroy, a sheriff's deputy, and a seventeen-year-old West End
girl who had not guessed that a late-spring evening high above a lazy
river could prove to be the worst memory of her life.

The wind was cool on the outcrop of
rocks above the
gorge, the evening star bright in the west, the air scented with pine
needles, wood smoke from the campfire, the cold odor of water flowing
over stone at the base of the cliffs.

Earlier, the others had been worried about Darl.
Speed took his metabolism to strange places. His face had popped a
sweat for no reason, then it had run like string out of his hair while
he sucked air through his mouth as though his tongue had been burned.
He peeled off his shirt and sat on a rock, his hand pressed to his
heart, a blue-collar girl from the West End named Sandy mopping his
skin dry.

He toked on a joint sprinkled with China white and
held the hit in his lungs, one time, twice, three, four times, until
his eyes blinked clear and the angle iron twisting in his rib cage
seemed to dissolve like liquorice on a stove.

He snapped the cap off a beer and drank it in front
of the fire, bare-chested, the leggings of his butterfly chaps molded
against his thighs like black tallow.

His face was serene now. His mouth seemed to taste
the wind, the blue-black density of the sky, the moon that rose out of
the trees.

'This is the way it's supposed to be, ain't it?
We're up here and everybody else is down there. It's like a poem I
read. About Greeks who lived above the clouds,' he said. 'Know what I
mean?'

The others, who sat on motorcycles or logs or on the
ground, stoned-out, euphoric in the firelight, their skin singing with
the heat of the day and the alcohol and dope in their veins, toked and
huffed on joints and nodded and smiled and let the foam from their beer
bottles slide down their throats.

'What about you, Sandy? You read that poem?' he said
to the West End girl, who sat on an inverted bucket by his foot.

'I wasn't too good in English,' she said, and raised
the corner of her lip in a way that was meant to be both
self-deprecating and coy.

He twitched his metal-sheathed boot sideways, so it
tapped hard into her bare ankle.

'Then you should read this poem. Because it's a great
fucking poem,' he said.

'Yeah, sure, Darl.'

'What makes you think you got to agree with me? You
haven't even read it. That's an insult. It's like you're
saying…' He paused, as though on the edge of a profound
thought. 'It's like you're saying I need you to agree with me, or
otherwise I'm gonna be all broken up 'cause my ideas are a pile of shit
or something.'

'I didn't mean that, Darl.'

Her eyes looked into the dark. He stepped closer to
her so his chaps intruded on the edge of her vision. His beer bottle
hung loosely from his hand. The orange hair on his wrist glowed against
the fire.

'What did you mean, Sandy?' he
asked.

'Nothing. It's just real neat out here. The wind's
getting cool, though.' She hugged herself, feigning a shiver.

'You ever pull a train, Sandy?' he asked.

The blood went out of her face.

'Don't worry. I was just seeing if you were paying
attention,' he said, then leaned over and carefully spit on the top of
her head.

Jack Vanzandt had found the access
road to the Rim
Rocks at the bottom of the hill. He shifted down and ground his way up
the slope, through woods that yielded no moon or starlight, bouncing
through potholes that exploded with rainwater, shattering dead tree
limbs against his oil pan. Gray clouds of gnats and mosquitoes hung in
his headlights. In the distance he thought he heard the flat, dirty
whine of a trail bike, then the roar of a Harley. But he couldn't tell.
The camping equipment in his Cherokee caromed off the walls; the glove
box popped open and rattled the contents out on the floor; a rotten
tree stump in the middle of the road burst like cork against his grill.

Then he reached a fork, with a sawhorse set in his
path. He stopped the Cherokee and moved the sawhorse to the other side
of the fork and went on. He looked in the rearview mirror at the divide
in the road and at the reflection of his taillights on the barrier and
was disturbed in a way he couldn't quite explain, like cobweb clinging
briefly to the side of the face.

Then the trees began to thin and the road came out
on the hill's rim, and he could see the moonlight on the river below
and the piled wood burning on a sandy shelf of rock, one that protruded
out into nothingness, and Darl's silhouette against the flames and the
gleaming chrome and waxed surfaces of his friends' motorcycles.

Jack strained his eyes through the mud and water
streaked on his windshield and the shadows his brights threw on the
clearing. He did not see Lucas Smothers among the faces that looked
like they had been caught in a searchlight, and he let. out his breath
and felt the tension go out of his palms and he wiped them one at a
time on the legs of his slacks.