BBH01 - Cimarron Rose (40 page)

Jack Vanzandt plea-bargained down to three years in
a federal facility. It seemed like a light sentence, at least for a man
who had trafficked in crystal meth and counterfeit credit cards and
indirectly caused the death of a young woman, until the morning I read
in the paper that Jack had taken poison in the psychiatric unit of a
federal hospital and had suffered a brain seizure that cost him his
eyesight.

Emma divorced him after their home and their assets
were confiscated by the government. I heard her stepson's ashes were
left behind in an urn on the mantelpiece and she never tried to recover
them. Today she runs her parents' mail-order wedding cake business in
Shreveport and sometimes appears on a televangelical cable program and
denounces drug use among teenagers.

I never saw Mary Beth again, at least not when I was
fully conscious. After the surgery that removed the .25-caliber round
from my chest, I floated for days through a warm pool of morphine and
was sure I saw her in the room with L.Q. Navarro. But one morning I
woke to sunlight and the realities of physical recovery and spoke both
their names repeatedly, my hands as useless as blocks of wood, my face
tingling with thousands of needles, until a black male nurse pushed me
back on the bed and held me there, his eyes lighted with pity.

On a Friday evening in late summer Temple Carrol and
I went to watch Pete play in a ball game at the Catholic elementary
school. I had let him ride Beau to the game by himself, and later we
walked from the diamond to the café down the street and ate
buffalo
burgers and blackberry milkshakes. Outside the window, Beau pulled his
tether loose and walked into the grove of pines by the stucco church
and began grazing in the grass. The attic fan in the café drew
the air
through the open door and windows, and I could smell the evening coming
to its own completion, the dusk gathering in the streets, the water
that ebbed out of the irrigation ditch into the grass, the pine boughs
etched against the late sun, the hot sap cooling on the bark of the
trees.

'That's good about Lucas going to A&M this
fall, ain't it?' Pete said.

'It's a fine school,' I said.

'Can I ride Beau back by myself tonight?'

'You're the best, Pete,' I said.

'He's a mighty good little boy, that's what he is,'
Temple said, and hugged him against her.

'I'm gonna ride Beau out on the hardpan, where that
Chisholm Trail is at,' Pete said, and grinned as though he had already
begun an extravagant adventure.

Temple's eyes settled on mine, and I looked at the
redness of her mouth and wanted to touch her hands.

Outside, I heard Beau's hooves thumping on the earth
and I dipped a strip of buffalo steak in catsup that was as thick as
blood and for just a moment, in my mind's eye, I saw dust clouds filled
with hail swirling across the high plains, and I thought of Comanche
Indians and saddle preachers and trail drovers and outlaws and was sure
that somewhere beyond the rim of the world Great-grandpa Sam and the
Rose of Cimarron turned briefly in their saddles and held up their
hands in farewell.

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