BBH01 - Cimarron Rose (9 page)

I whipped the loop three times over my head and
flung it at the man with the blond beard. It slapped down on him hard
and caught him under one arm and across the top of the torso. He tried
to rise from the chair and free himself, but I wound the rope tightly
around the pommel, brought my left spur into the Morgan's side, and
catapulted the blond man off his feet and dragged him caroming through
tables and bar stools and splintering chairs, into an oak post and the
legs of a pinball machine and the side of the jukebox, tearing a huge
plastic divot out of the casing. Then I ducked my head under the
doorjamb, and the Morgan clopped across the porch and into the road,
and I gave him the spurs again.

I dragged the blond man skittering through the
parking lot, across layers of flattened beer cans and bottle caps
embedded in the dirt. His clothes were gray with dust now, his face
barked and bleeding, both of his hands gripped on the rope as he tried
to pull himself free of the pressure that bound his chest.

I reined in the Morgan and turned him in a slow
circle while the blond man rose to his feet.

'Tell me why this is happening to you,' I said.

'Wha—' he began.

'You turn around and you tell all these people how
you hurt a child,' I said.

He wiped the blood off his nose with the flat of his
hand.

'His mama told me there was a fellow liked to put
his head up her dress,' he said.

I got down from the saddle and hooked him in the
nose, then grabbed his neck and the back of his shirt and drove his
head into the corner of the porch post.

The skin split in a scarlet star at the crown of his
skull. When he went down, I couldn't stop. I saw my boot and spur rake
across his face, then I tried to kick him again and felt myself topple
backward off balance.

Pete was hanging on my arm, the five-dollar bill
crushed in his palm, his eyes hollow with fear as though he were
looking at a stranger.

'Stop, Billy Bob! Please don't do it no more!' he
said, his voice sobbing in the peel of sirens that came from two
directions.

I sat in the enclosed gloom of the
sheriff's office,
across from his desk and the leviathan silhouette of his body against
the back window. The deputy who had arrested me leaned against the log
wall, his face covered in shadow. The sheriff took his cigar out of his
mouth and leaned over the spittoon by the corner of his desk and spit.

'You turned that fellow into a human pinball. What's
the matter with you?' he said.

'It's time to charge me or cut me loose, sheriff,' I
said.

'Just keep your britches on. You don't think I got
enough drunk nigras and white trash in my jail without having to worry
about the goddamn lawyers?… Ah, there's the man right now.
Cain't you beat up somebody without starting an international
incident?' he said.

The door opened, and a dark-skinned man in a
tropical hat with a green plastic window built into the brim and a tan
suit that had no creases entered the room. He removed his hat and shook
the sheriff's hand, then the uniformed deputy's and mine. He was a
little older than I, in his midforties, perhaps, his jawline fleshy,
his thin mustache like the romantic affectation of a 1930s leading man.

'Felix Ringo, a Mexican drug agent?' I repeated.

'Yeah, you know that name, man? Is gringo. My
ancestor, he was a famous American outlaw,' he said.

'Johnny Ringo?' I said.

'Yeah, that was his name. He got into it with guys
like, the guy there in Arizona, was always wearing a black suit in the
movies, yeah, that guy Wyatt Earp.'

'Felix is jalapeño and shit on toast south of the
Rio Grande. You fucked up his bust, Billy Bob,' the sheriff said.

'Oh?' I said.

'The guy you drug up and down, man, I been following
him six months. He's gonna be gone now,' the Mexican said.

'Maybe you should have taken him down six months
ago. He hurt a little boy this morning.'

'Yeah, man, but maybe you don't see the big picture.
We take one guy down, we roll him over, then we take another guy down.
See, patience is, how you call it, the virtue here.'

'The guy I pulled out of that bar isn't the Medellin
Cartel North. What is this stuff, sheriff?' I said.

The sheriff rolled his cigar in the center of his
mouth and looked at the Mexican drug agent.

'Billy Bob used to be a Texas Ranger, so he looks
down on the ordinary pissant work most of us have to do,' he said.

'That's a bad fucking attitude, man,' Felix Ringo
said.

'Get out your fingerprint pad or I'm gone, sheriff,'
I said.

He dropped his cigar hissing into the spittoon.

'There's the door. Don't mistake my gesture. Stay
the hell out of what don't concern you,' he said.

Felix Ringo followed me outside. The light was hard
and bright on the stone buildings in the square, the trees a violent
green against the sky. I could see Mary Beth Sweeney outside her
cruiser, writing on a clipboard in the shade. She stopped and stared
across the lawn at me and the man named Felix Ringo.

'You want something?' I asked him.

'I seen you somewhere before. You was a Ranger?' he
said.

'What about it?'

'You guys did stuff at night, maybe killed some
people that was fruit pickers crossing the river, that didn't have
nothing to do with dope.'

'You're full of shit, too, bud,' I said, and walked
toward the cab stand across the street.

I stepped off the curb and waited for a car to pass.

Then I heard her voice behind me.

'Hey, Billy Bob,' she said.

'Yeah?'

She gave me the thumbs-up sign and smiled.

The next morning I drove along the
fence line of my
property to a section by the river where Lucas and Vernon Smothers were
hoeing out the rows in a melon patch. I walked out into the field, into
the heat bouncing off the ground, into Vernon's beaded stare under the
brim of his straw hat.

'I want to borrow Lucas for a couple of hours,' I
said.

'What for?' he asked.

'Take a guess,' I said.

He propped his forearm on his hoe handle and smelled
himself. He looked out over the bluff and the milky green flatness of
the river and the willows on the far side.

'I don't want to lose my melons to coons this year.
I aim to put steel traps along that ditch yonder. That's where they're
coming out of,' he said.

'I need Lucas to help me with the case, Vernon.
You're not putting any steel traps on my property, and you can forget
about poisons, too.'

'You ever see how a coon eats a melon? He punches a
little hole, no bigger than a quarter. Then he sticks his paw in and
cleans the whole insides out. All he needs to do is get his paw in the
hole and he don't leave nothing but an empty shell for anybody else.'

His mouth was small and angry, down-turned on the
corners, his stare jaundiced with second meaning.

'Let's go to the movies, Lucas,' I said.

Lucas sat on the back steps and pulled
off his boots.

'You don't have to do that,' I said.

'I'll track your house.'

We went into the library and I switched on the VCR
that contained the videotape of Roseanne Hazlitt dancing. Lucas's face
went gray when he realized what he was being shown.

'Mr Holland, I ain't up to this,' he said.

'Who are the other kids in that woods?'

'East End kids messin' around. I don't know them too
good.'

'I don't believe you.'

'Why you talk to me like that?'

'Because none of this will go away of its accord.
You played in the band at Shorty's. You knew the same people Roseanne
knew. But you don't give me any help.'

He swallowed. His palms were cupped on his knees.

'I grew up in the West End. I don't like those kind
of guys.'

'Good. So give me the names of the other boys she
went out with.'

He fingered the denim on top of his thigh, his knees
jiggling up and down, his eyes fixed on the floor.

'Anybody. When she was loaded. It didn't matter to
her. Three or four guys at once. Same guys who'd write her name on the
washroom wall,' he said. He blinked and rubbed his forehead with the
heel of his hand.

We drove into Deaf Smith and parked on
the square
and walked down a side street toward a brick church with a white
steeple and a green lawn and a glassed-in sign announcing Sunday and
Wednesday night services.

'Why we going to the Baptist church?' Lucas asked.

'We're not,' I replied.

Next door to the church was the church's secondhand
store. An alley ran along one wall of the store, and at the end of the
alley was an overflowing donation bin. The pavement around it was
littered with pieces of mattresses and mildewed clothing that had been
run over by automobile tires. As soon as the store closed at night,
street people sorted through the bin and the overflow like a collection
of rag pickers.

Lucas's eyes fixed on a waxed, cherry-red
chopped-down 1932 Ford with a white rolled leather interior and an
exposed chromed engine parked in front of the store.

'You know the owner of that car?' I asked.

'It's Darl Vanzandt's.'

'That's right,' I said, and pointed through the glass.

Darl was sorting a box of donated books by pitching
them one at a time onto a display table. When the box was empty, he
opened the back door and flung it end over end into the alley.

'We need to have a talk with him,' I said.

'What for? I ain't got no interest in Darl.' The
rims of his nostrils whitened as though the temperature had dropped
seventy degrees.

'It'll just take a minute.'

'Not me. No, sir.'

He backed away from me, then turned and walked back
to the car.

I got in beside him.

'What's the problem?' I asked.

'I don't fool with East Enders, that's all.'

He twisted at a callus on his palm.

'All of them, or just Darl?'

'You don't know how it is.'

'I grew up here.'

'They look down on you. Darl knows how to make
people feel bad about themselves.'

'Like how?'

'In metal shop, senior year, he was making Chinese
stars in the foundry, these martial arts things you can sail at people
and put out an eye with. Darl was hogging the sand molds, and this kid
says, "I got to pour my mailbox hangers or I won't get my grade," and
Darl goes, "You got an S for snarf. Get out of the way."

'The kid says, "What's a snarf?"

'Darl says, "You don't got a mirror at home?"

'After school Darl catches the kid out in front of
everybody and says, "Hey, a snarf is a guy who gets off sniffing girls'
bicycle seats. But I had you made wrong. You don't get an S. You get an
F for frump. That's a guy cuts farts in the bathtub and bites the
bubbles."'

Lucas's cheeks were blotched with color.

'Would Darl beat a girl with his fists, Lucas?'

'My father needs me back in the field,' he answered.

That evening I opened up all the
windows in the
third floor of my house and let the breeze fill the rooms with the
smells of alfalfa and distant rain and ozone and dust blowing out of
the fields.

The house seemed to resonate with its own emptiness.
I stood by the side of the hand-carved tester bed that had been my
parents', my fingers resting on the phone, and looked out over the barn
roof and windmill and the fields that led down to the clay bluffs over
the river. Lightning with no sound quivered on a green hill in the west.

I punched in Mary Beth Sweeney's number.

'You mind my calling you?' I asked.

'I'm happy you did.'

The line hummed in the silence.

'I know a Mexican restaurant that serves food you
only expect in the Elysian Fields,' I said.

'Let's talk about it tomorrow.'

'Sure,' I said.

'I'm sorry, I don't mean to be like this…
That Mexican narc you were talking with? He's a bucket of shit. You
watch your butt, cowboy.'

Watch your own. You're working for the G, Mary Beth,
I said to myself as I put down the receiver.

That night I heard the doors on the
near end of the
barn slamming in the wind. I rolled over and went back to sleep, then
remembered I had closed the doors on the near end and had slipped the
cross planks into place to hold them secure. I put on a pair of khakis
and took a flashlight from the back porch and walked through the yard,
the electric beam angling ahead of me.

One door fluttered and squealed on its hinges, then
sucked loudly against the jamb. I started to push the other door into
place, then I looked down the length of stalls, out in the railed lot
on the far side, and saw my Morgan trotting in a circle, wall-eyed with
fear, spooking at bits of paper blowing in the moonlight.

'What's wrong, Beau? Weather usually doesn't bother
you,' I said.

I got him into the barn and stroked his face, closed
the door behind him, and unscrewed the cap on a jar of
oats-and-molasses balls and poured a dozen into the trough at the head
of his stall.

Then I saw the red, diagonal slash on his withers,
as though he had been struck a downward blow by a metal-edged
instrument.

His skin wrinkled and quivered under my hand when I
placed it close to the wound.

'Who did this to you, Beau?' I said.

The electric lights in the barn were haloed with
humidity, glowing with motes of dust in the silence.

At eight the next morning I drove to
the edge of
town, where Jack Vanzandt ran his business in a five-story building
sheathed in black glass. His office was huge, the beige carpet as soft
as a bear's fur, the furniture white and onyx black, the glass wall
hung with air plants.