BBH01 - Cimarron Rose (17 page)

The ax was one he recognized. It had rested on a
nail in the shed above his woodpile. He had honed it on a grinding
stone until its edge looked like a sliver of ice.

The first blow was a diagonal one, delivered at a
downward angle. The blade bit into the sheriff's face from below the
left eye to the right corner of the mouth.

That was the first blow. The others were struck
along a red trail from the kitchen to the gun case in the living room,
where the sheriff gave it up forever and lay down among the stuffed
heads that had always assured him he was intended to be the giver of
death and never its recipient.

Sunday morning, before the sun was
above the hills,
I watched from behind the crime scene tape while the paramedics rolled
the sheriff's body on a gurney to the back of an ambulance. Marvin
Pomroy nudged me on the arm, then walked with me toward my Avalon.

'You got any thoughts?' he asked.

'No.'

'He was dead at least two hours before the hooker
got there. The intruder could have cleaned the place out. But he
didn't. So it's a revenge killing, right?'

'A lot of TDC graduates hated his guts,' I said.

Marvin looked back at the log house. His face was
dry and cool in the wind, but the skin jumped in one cheek, as though a
string were pulling on it.

'Two Secret Service agents were in here earlier.
What's their stake in a guy who spit Red Man on restaurant floors?' he
said.

'Not DEA?'

'No.'

'One of them was named Brian?'

'That's right, Brian Wilcox. A real charmer. You
know him?'

'Maybe. You want to go to breakfast?'

'After looking at what's inside that house?'

'The sheriff was a violent man. He dealt the play a
long time ago.'

'Where the fuck do you get your ideas? Pardon my
language. Violent man? That's your contribution? Thanks for coming out,
Billy Bob. I don't think my morning would have been complete without
it.'

I drove up a sandy, red road that
twisted and dipped
through hardwoods and old log skids and pipeline right-of-ways that
were now choked with second growth.

Up ahead, a dark, polished car with tinted windows
and a radio antenna came out of an intersecting road and stopped in
front of me.

The man whom Mary Beth called Brian got out first,
followed by two others who also wore aviator's sunglasses and the same
opaque expression. But one man, who had rolled down a back window part
way, did not get out. Instead, Felix Ringo, the Mexican drug agent, lit
a cigarette in a gold holder and let the smoke curl above the window's
edge.

'Step out of your car,' Brian said.

'I don't think so,' I said.

The man next to him opened my door.

'Don't be shy,' he said.

I turned off the ignition and stepped out among
them. The air was motionless between the trees and smelled of pines and
the rainwater in the road's depressions. Brian raised his finger in my
face. It stayed there, uncertainly, as though he were on the brink of
doing something much more serious and precipitous.

'I don't have the right words. Maybe it's enough to
simply say I don't like you,' he said.

'You're over the line, bud,' I said.

'You're not a police officer anymore, you're not an
assistant US attorney, you're a meddlesome civilian. That fact seems to
elude you.'

'You going to move your car now?'

'No.' His finger was stiff, the nail thin and sharp
and trembling below my eye. 'Stay away from crime scenes that don't
concern you, stay away from the lady… You got anything clever
to say?'

'Not really. Except if you put your finger in my
face again, I'm going to break your jaw. Now, get your fucking car out
of my way.'

I went back home and weeded the
vegetable garden. I
curried out Beau and cleaned his stall and set out catfish lines in the
tank and shoveled out the chicken run and worked buckets of manure into
my compost pile with a pitchfork, my calluses squeezing tighter and
tighter on the smooth wood of the handle, until I finally gave it all
up and flung the pitchfork into a hay bale and went inside.

The palms of my hands rang as though they had been
stung by bees, as though they ached to close on an object that was hard
and round and cool against the skin and flanged with a knurled hammer
that cocked back with a loud snap under the thumb.

Moon had said some people are made different in the
womb. Was he just describing himself, or did the group extend to people
like me and Great-grandpa Sam?

Or Darl Vanzandt?

Through my open front windows I heard the deep,
throaty rumble of the Hollywood mufflers on his '32 Ford, then a
cacophony of straight pipes and overpowered engines and chopped-down
Harleys behind him.

He turned into the drive, alone, the exposed chrome
engine so fine-tuned a silver dollar would balance on the air cleaners.
His friends pulled onto the shoulder of the road, on my grass, their
tires crumpling the border of my flower beds. They cut their engines
and lit cigarettes and lounged against their cars and trucks and vans
and motorcycles, as though their physical connection to a public road
gave them moral license to behave in any fashion they wished.

Darl swung a dead cat by its tail, whipping it
faster and faster through the air, and thudded it against the screen
door.

I went out on the porch with my cordless phone in my
hand.

'I already put in a 911 on you, Darl. Time to head
for the barn,' I said.

'I'm gonna kick your ass. Don't believe me, you
chicken-shit lying motherfucker? Come out here and see what happens
next,' he said.

I walked toward him. His wide-set green eyes seemed
to shift in and out of focus, as though different objects were
approaching him at the same time. His upper lip was beaded with
perspiration, his nostrils dilated and pale. The skin of his face drew
back against the bone. I could smell beer and fried meat and onions on
his breath.

'I mean you no harm. I never have. Neither does
Lucas. Go on home,' I said.

'You're in my face every day. You're spreading lies
all over town.'

'You and your friends killed somebody's cat? That's
what y'all do to show everybody you're big shit?'

'I ain't afraid of you.'

I stepped between him and the road, with my back to
his friends, cutting off his view of them.

'Bunny Vogel's not here to bail you out. You're
stoned and you're frightened. If you force me to, I'll show everyone
here how frightened you are,' I said.

'If I was scared, I wouldn't be here.'

'You're afraid of what you are, Darl. Your folks
know it. In their guts, those guys out there do, too. You elicit pity.'

He opened his mouth to speak. It made a phlegmy,
clicking sound but no words came out. His resolve, all the martial
energy he had been able to muster while driving down the road with his
Greek chorus surrounding him, seemed to fade in his eyes like
snowflakes drifting onto a woodstove.

'Talk to your dad. Get some help. Don't do something
like this again,' I said.

'I been sick. I had flu all week. I don't have to
listen to anything you—' he said.

I cupped my hand around his upper arm. It felt
flaccid, without tone or texture, as though the downers in his system
had melted the muscle into warm tallow. I opened his car door for him,
put him inside, and closed the door. His eyes were filled with water,
his cheeks flushed with pale red arrowpoints.

'You want a cop to drive you home?' I asked.

He didn't answer. When I went back inside it was
quiet for a long time, then I heard his engine start up and his tires
crunch on the gravel and back out on the road. Some of the others
followed, looking at one another, unsure, and some turned back toward
town, all of them like people trying to create their own reality, from
moment to moment, inside a vacuum.

The country club had been all-white
since its
inception in the early 1940s, first by the legal exclusivity the law
allowed at the time, then by custom and defiance and contempt. It had
remained an island of wealth and serenity in an era that had produced
cities scrawled with graffiti and streets populated by the homeless and
deranged.

The groundskeepers adjusted the amounts of water and
liquid nitrogen fed into the grass to ensure the fairways were emerald
green year-round, no matter how dry or cold the season. The swimming
pool was constructed in the shape of a shamrock, and those who stepped
down into its turquoise sun-bladed surface seem to glow with a health
and radiance that perhaps validated the old literary saw that the very
rich are very different from you and me.

The main building was an immaculate, blinding white,
with a circular drive and a columned porch and a glassed-in restaurant
with a terrace shaded by potted palm and banana trees that were moved
into a solarium during the cold months. A hedge as impenetrable as a
limestone wall protected the club on one side, the bluffs and the lazy
green expanse of the river on the other. Recessions and wars might come
and go, but Deaf Smith's country club would always be here, a refuge,
its standards as unchanging as the European menu in its restaurant.

I had dressed for it, in my striped beige suit,
polished cordovan boots, a soft blue shirt and candy-striped necktie.
But dress alone did not always afford you a welcome at Post Oaks
Country Club.

I stood by Jack and Emma Vanzandt's table, the
maître d' standing nervously behind me, a menu in his hand.
Jack and
Emma were eating from big shrimp cocktail glasses that were deep-set in
silver bowls of crushed ice.

'You want to go outside and talk?' I said to Jack.

He wiped his mouth with a napkin and looked through
the French doors at several men putting on a practice green. 'It's all
right, Andre,' he said to the maître d'.

Then he glanced at an empty chair across from him,
which was the only invitation I received to sit down.

'Thanks, Jack,' I said.

In the gold and silver light that seemed to anoint
the room, Emma's Indian-black hair looked lustrous and thick on her
bare shoulders, her ruby necklace like drops of blood on the delicate
bones of her throat.

'Your boy was out at my place today. He's a sick
kid. Do something about him,' I said.

'You come to our dinner table to tell me something
like this?' Jack said.

'Here's the street menu in Deaf Smith, Jack: purple
hearts, black beauties, rainbows, screamers, yellow jackets, and China
white if you want to get off crack. I hear Darl does it all. If you
don't want to take a wake-up call, at least keep him away from my
house.'

He set his cocktail fork on the side of his plate
and started to speak. But Emma placed her hand on his forearm.

'We're sorry he bothered you. Call either Jack or me
if it happens again. Would you like to order something?' she said.

'Blow it off. I can't blame you. The sheriff did
too. But now he's dead,' I said.

They stared at each other.

'You didn't know?' I said.

'We just got back from Acapulco,' Jack said.

'Somebody came up behind him with an ax,' I said.

'That's terrible,' Emma said.

'He had a lot of enemies. A lot,' Jack said. But his
eyes were fastened on thoughts that only he saw.

'I told the sheriff I think Darl killed Jimmy Cole.
I don't know if there's a connection or not,' I said.

Emma's eyes were shut. Her lashes were black and the
lids were like paper, traced with tiny green veins, and they seemed to
be shuddering, as though a harsh light were burning inside her.

'Leave our table, Billy Bob. Please, please, please
leave our table,' she said.

But later I was bothered by my own
remarks to the
Vanzandts. Darl connected with the sheriff's murder? It was unlikely.
Darl and his friends didn't prey on people who had power. They sought
out the halt and lame and socially ostracized, ultimately the people
who were most like themselves.

The sheriff's widow was the daughter of a
blacksmith, a square, muscular woman with recessed brooding eyes who
wore her dark hair wrapped around her head like a turban. Whether she
bore her husband's infidelities and vulgarity out of religious
resignation or desire for his money was a mystery to the community,
since she had virtually no friends or life of her own except for her
weekly attendance at the Pentecostal church downtown, and the community
had stopped thinking of her other than as a silent backdrop to her
husband's career.

'The person done this was probably a lunatic got
loose from some mental hospital,' she said in her kitchen.

'Why's that?'

'Cause it's what Davis Love always told me it'd be
if it happened,' she said. (Davis Love was her husband's first and last
name and the only one she ever called him by.) 'He said the man who
killed him would probably be some crazy person, 'cause nobody he sent
up to prison would ever want to see him again.'

She let the undisguised heat in her eyes linger on
my face so I would make no mistake about her meaning.

'He left his mark on them?' I said.

'They tended to move to other places.'

I looked out the kitchen window at the rolling
pasture behind her house, the neat red and white barn, an eight-acre
tank stocked with big-mouth bass, the sheriff's prize Arabians that had
the smooth gray contours of carved soap rock.

'I'm sorry for your loss,' I said.

'They might bad-mouth him, but he worked hisself up
from road guard to high sheriff, without no hep from nobody.'

I nodded as her words turned over a vague
recollection in my mind about the sheriff's background.

'He was an extraordinary person,' I said.