BBH01 - Cimarron Rose (16 page)

After the hospitals, I went back across the river,
without a badge, into the arroyo where we were ambushed and the town
south of it where three of our adversaries—psychotic meth
addicts who
would later be killed by federates—had
celebrated L.Q.' s death in a whorehouse, then down into the interior,
across dry lake beds and miles of twisted moonscape that looked like
heaps of cinders and slag raked out of an ironworks, into mountains
strung with clouds and finally a green valley that was glazed with rain
and whose reddish brown soil was lined with rows of avocado trees.

I thought I had found the leader, the man L.Q. had
taken the rifle from.

The owner of the only bar in the village thought for
a moment about my offer, then picked up the fifty-dollar bill from the
counter and folded it into his shirt pocket. He was a big man with a
black beard, and part of his face was covered with leathery serrations
like dried alligator hide.

'See, I was a migrant labor contractor in Arizona.
That's where I first seen this guy. I think he was moving brown heroin
on the
bracero
buses. Pretty slick, huh? Yeah, I
don't owe that guy nothing. Come on back here, I'll show you
something,' he said.

The bar was a cool, dark building that smelled of
beer and stone, and through the front door you could see horses tied to
a tethering rail and the late sun through the long-leaf Australian
pines that were planted along the road.

We went out the back door to a small cottage that
was built of stacked fieldstones and covered with a roof of cedar logs
and a blackened canvas tarp. The bartender pushed open the door,
scraping it back on the stone floor.

'That was his bunk. Them stains on the floor, that's
his blood. The guy don't got no name, but he got plenty of money.
Puta
too. A couple of them,' the bartender said. 'They told me
they didn't
like him, he talked about cruel things, made them do weird stuff, know
what I mean?'

'No.'

'He must have been in the army, maybe down in
Guatemala, he done some things to the Indians… Here.'

The bar owner picked up a bucket by the bail, walked
outside with it, and shook it upside down. A broken knife blade and a
spiral of bloody bandages tumbled out. He flipped the knife blade over
with the point of his boot.

'That's what the doctor took out of him. Got to be a
macho
motherfucker to carry that and still have
puta
on the brain,' he said.

'Where'd he go?' I could feel my heart beating with
the question.

'A plane picked him up. Right out there in them
fields… This guy killed somebody who was your friend?'

'Not exactly.'

'Then I'd let it go, man. He told them two girls,
his
puta,
he wired up people to electrical
machines… You want your money back?'

'No.'

'You don't look too good. I'll fix you a rum and
something to eat.'

'Why not?' I said, looking at the mist on the
avocado orchards and a torn purple and yellow hole in the clouds
through which the man without a face or name had perhaps disappeared
forever.

The next morning was Saturday, a
blue-gray, misty,
cool dawn that brought Mary Beth Sweeney to my back door at 6 a.m.,
still in uniform from the night shift, her thumbs hooked into the sides
of her gunbelt.

I held open the screen. 'Come in and join Pete and
me for breakfast. We're fixing to go down to the river in a few
minutes,' I said.

She removed her hat, her eyes smiling into mine.

'I'm sorry for the other night,' she said.

'You got to try some of Pete's fried eggs and pork
chops. They run freight trains on this stuff, isn't that right, Pete?'

He grinned from behind his plate. 'I always know
when he's gonna say something like that,' he said.

We rode down the dirt track in my car to the bluffs.
The water in the river was high and slate green, tangled with mist, the
current eddying around the dead cottonwood trees that had snagged in
the clay.

Five feet under the surface was the top of an
ancient car, now softly molded with silt and moss. In the winter of
1933 two members of the Karpis-Barker gang robbed the bank in Deaf
Smith and tried to outrun a collection of Texas Rangers and sheriffs'
deputies from three counties. Their car was raked with Thompson
machine-gun bullets, the glass blown out, the fuel tank scissored
almost in half. My father watched the car careen off the road, plow
through the corn crib and hog lot, then ignite with a whoosh
of heat and energy that set chickens on fire behind the barn.

The car rolled like a self-contained mobile inferno
across the yellow grass in the fields, the two robbers like blackened
pieces of stone inside. The ammunition in their stolen Browning
Automatic Rifles was still exploding when the car dipped over the
bluffs and slid into the river. It continued to burn, like a fallen
star, under the water, boiling carp that were as thick as logs to the
surface.

Today the car was a home to shovel-mouth catfish
that could straighten a steel hook like a paper clip.

Mary Beth got out of the Avalon and stretched and
hung her gunbelt over the corner of the open door. She watched Pete
baiting his hook down on the bank, as though she were forming words in
her mind.

'The man at my apartment, his name's Brian. I was
involved with him. But not anymore. I mean, not personally,' she said.

'Take this for what it's worth, Mary Beth. Most feds
are good guys. That guy's not. He put you at risk, then he tried to
lean on me.'

'You?'

'I suspect y'all are DEA. The FBI doesn't send its
people in by themselves.'

'Brian leaned on you?'

'Tried. This guy's not first
team material.'

Her eyes were hot, her back stiff with anger.

'I have to make a phone call,' she said.

'Stay here, Mary Beth.'

'I'll walk back.'

I took her gunbelt off the corner of the door.

'Nine-Mike Beretta,' I said.

'You want to shoot it?'

'No.' I folded the belt across the holster and
handed it to her. The nine-millimeter rounds inserted in the leather
loops felt thick and smooth under my fingers. 'I don't mess with guns
anymore. Take my car back. Pete and I will walk.'

Then she did something that neither Pete nor I
expected. In fact, his face was beaming with surprise and glee as he
looked up from the bank and she hooked one arm around my neck and
kissed me hard on the mouth.

That afternoon the district attorney,
Marvin Pomroy,
rang me at home.

'We've got Garland Moon in the cage. He wants to see
you,' he said.

'What's he in for?'

'Trespassing, scaring the shit out of people. You
coming down?'

'No.'

'He's into something, it's got to do with the
Vanzandt family. Anyway, we've got to kick him loose in another hour.
So suit yourself.'

The previous night, Garland T. Moon
had showed up
first at Shorty's, then at the drive-in restaurant north of town,
dressed in plastic cowboy boots, white pleated slacks, a form-fitting
sleeveless undershirt, costume jewelry on his hands and wrists and
neck. He wandered among the cars in the parking lot, gregarious,
avuncular, a paper shell of french fries in one hand, a frosted Coke in
the other. He worked his way into groups of teenagers, as though he
were an old friend, and told obscene jokes that made their faces go
slack with disgust.

Then Bunny Vogel's '55 Chevy, with a girl in the
front passenger seat, and Darl Vanzandt and another girl in back,
cruised the lines of parked cars and backed into an empty space twenty
feet from Moon.

He walked to their car, bent down grinning into the
windows, his face lighted with familiarity.

'Who's that in there?' he said.

Inside the car, they looked at one another.

'How about we go for some beers? Maybe I score a
little
muta
?' he said.

'We don't know you, man,' Darl said.

'You kids got a look in your eyes tells me y'all
don't care y'all end up in the gutter or not… I'm a student
of people. I want to know where that look comes from. Let's make it
scrambled eggs at my place.'

'I just washed my car. Get your fucking armpits off
the window,' Bunny said.

A few minutes later every car in the drive-in had
burned rubber out onto the highway and left Garland T. Moon standing
alone, with his french fries and frosted Coke, amid the litter in the
parking lot.

The next day Jack Vanzandt was among a foursome on
the ninth green at the country club when a man in a cream-colored suit,
a Hawaiian shirt printed with flowers that could have been shotgun
wounds, and brand-new white K-Mart tennis shoes with the word JOX
emblazoned across the tops, strolled up from the edge of the water
trap, his wisps of red hair oiled on his scalp, and said, 'Excuse me,
sir, I'd like to talk with you over at the Shake 'n' Dog about a mutual
interest we got… Say, this is a right nice golf range, ain't
it? I been thinking about getting a membership myself.'

Garland T. Moon was in the holding
cage on the first
floor, by the elevator shaft that led up to the jail. He had stripped
off his coat and shirt, and was standing barechested in his slacks and
JOX running shoes, his hands hooked like claws in the wire mesh.

'What kind of bullshit are you up to, Moon?' I said.

'I got 'em by the short hairs.'

'Oh?'

'That little puke Darl Vanzandt done Jimmy Cole,
thinks he's some kind of Satanist? I got news for y'all, there's people
that's the real thing, that's made different in the womb, it's in the
Bible and you can check it out. You getting my drift, boy?'

'Why'd you want to see me?'

'Tell his father I want a hunnerd-thousand dollars.'

'Tell him yourself.'

'Don't walk away from me… You gonna do
what I tell you whether you like it or not. I can give testimony I
heard Lucas Smothers confess to raping and killing that girl in the
picnic ground.'

'Have you been in a mental asylum?'

'Where I been is in this tub of nigger bathwater
when I was fifteen years old.' His mouth puckered into a peculiar grin,
red and glistening, flanged with small teeth.

'It's the town, isn't it, not me or Lucas or some
peckerwoods who worked you over with a cattle prod,' I said.

'You know the old county prison north of the
drive-in restaurant? Forty-one years ago two gunbulls put me over an
oil drum every Sunday morning and took turns. Tore my insides out and
laughed while they done it… Y'all gonna get rid of me the day
you learn how to scrub the stink out of your own shit.'

I turned and walked back toward the entrance.

'You won't pick up a gun 'cause you killed your best
friend! I got the Indian sign on you, boy!' he called at my back.

Marvin Pomroy waited for me outside.
He was a Little
League coach, and because it was Saturday he wore a pair of seersucker
slacks and a washed-out golf shirt without a coat. But, as always, not
a hair was out of place on his head, and his face had the serenity of a
thoughtful Puritan who viewed the failure of the world through
Plexiglas.

I told him what Moon had said.

'Why does he seem to have this ongoing obsession
with you?' he asked.

'You got me.'

'You never ran across him when you were a Ranger or
prosecutor?'

'Not to my knowledge.'

Down the street a construction crew was fitting a
steel crossbeam into the shell of a building and a man in black goggles
was tack-welding a joint in a fountain of liquid sparks.

'What kind of vocational training did Moon get
inside?' I asked.

'He picked cotton. That's when he wasn't in
lockdown… Why?'

'Moon's an arc welder. So was my father.'

'Big reach.'

'You got a better one?' I asked.

Late that evening the sheriff parked
his new Ford
pickup at his hunting camp above the river. He was proud of his camp.
The log house on it was spacious and breezy, with cathedral ceilings,
lacquered yellow pine woodwork, a fireplace built from river stones and
inset with Indian tomahawks and spear points recovered from a burial
mound, stuffed tarpon and the heads of deer and bobcats mounted on the
walls and support beams, a green felt poker table cupped with plastic
trays for the chips, a freezer stocked with venison and duck, ice-cold
vodka and imported beer in the refrigerator, glass gun cases lined with
scoped rifles.

He showered and dried off in the bathroom, then
walked naked into the kitchen and opened a bottle of German beer,
turned on the television set atop the bar, and punched in the number of
an escort service in San Antonio on his cordless phone.

From the kitchen window he could see the sun's last
fiery spark through the trees that rimmed the hills above the river,
the gray boulders that protruded from the current, his dock and
yellow-and-red speedboat snugged down with a tarp, the flagstone
terrace where he barbecued a whole pig on a spit for state politicians
who introduced him with pride to their northern friends as though he
were a charismatic frontier reflection of themselves.

Not bad for a boy with a fourth-grade education who
could have ended up road-ganging himself.

The sheriff had always said, 'We all work for the
white man. You can do it up in the saddle with a shotgun, or down in
the row with the niggers. But there's no way you ain't gonna do it.'

The woman who answered the number in San Antonio
said his visitor would be there in two hours.

The sheriff drank the last of his beer and let the
foam slide down his throat. His massive torso was ridged with hair, his
back and buttocks pocked with scars from the naked screws on football
shoes that had thundered over his body when he had played defensive
lineman in a semipro league at age nineteen. He peeled the cellophane
off a cigar, lit it, wet the match under the faucet, and dropped it
into a plastic-lined wastebasket under the counter. Then he seemed to
have turned from the sink, perhaps when a shadow fell across his neck
and shoulders.