BBH01 - Cimarron Rose (6 page)

'Darl had a fistfight with a Mexican kid. We'd like to just
shake hands and forget it. But it looks like the family found out we
have a little money,' Jack said.

'What about it, Darl?' I asked.

'At the American Legion game. Kid scratched all over my hood
with a nail. I asked him why he did it. He said because of the cheer we
were yelling in the stands. So I told him it was a free country, people
can say anything they want 'cause that's why we got a First Amendment.
Wets don't like it, they can swim back home.'

'What cheer?' I asked.

'"Two-bits, four-bits, six-bits a peso, all good pepper
bellies stand up and say so."' His eyes smiled at nothing. He rubbed
the thick ball of muscle along his forearm.

I looked at his father.

'The Mexican boy had to have his jaws wired together,' Jack
said.

I took a yellow legal pad and a ballpoint pen out of my drawer
and pushed them across my desk toward Darl.

'I'd like you to write down what happened for me. Just like
you're writing a school essay,' I said.

'I just told you what happened,' he said.

'Darl has dyslexia,' Jack said.

'I see,' I said. 'I tell you what, I'll get back with y'all
this afternoon. I'm sorry I'm a little distant this morning.'

Darl Vanzandt played with the high school ring on his finger,
his cheeks glowing with peach fuzz. His eyes seemed amused at a private
thought. Then he looked me straight in the face and said, 'My father
says Lucas Smothers is your woods colt.'

'Go to the car, son,' Jack said.

After Darl was gone, his father extended his hand.

'I apologize. Darl has serious emotional problems. His
mother… It's called fetal alcohol syndrome. He's not always
accountable for the things he says and does,' Jack said.

'Don't worry about it,' I said.

'I really appreciate your helping us, Billy Bob.'

He squeezed my hand a second time. His grip was encompassing,
long lasting, the skin moist and warm. After he was gone and I was
seated again behind my desk, I found myself unconsciously rubbing my
hand on the knee of my trousers.

Why, I thought.

There was a cut, an indentation, newly scabbed, the size of a
tooth, on the ring finger of Darl Vanzandt.

No, I told myself, you're letting it get away from you.

That night, as an electrical storm raged outside, L.Q. Navarro
stood in the middle of my living room, his ash-colored Stetson tipped
back on his head, and said, '
You were as good a lawman as me,
bud. When they're poor and got no power, like Lucas and the dead girl,
and other people get involved with what happens to them, you know it's
a whole sight bigger than what they want you to think
.'

'
Why'd you go and die on me, L.Q.?'

He twirled his hat on his index finger, and an
instant later, through the window, I saw his silhouette illuminated by
a bolt of lightning on a distant hill.

The next day, after work, I dug night
crawlers and
cane-fished with a little mixed-blood Mexican boy in the tank on the
back of my property. His name was Pete, and he had blue eyes and pale
streaks the color of weathered wood in his hair, which grew like a soft
brush on his head. He grinned all the time and talked with an Anglo
twang and was probably the smartest little boy I ever knew.

'That was the Chisholm Trail out yonder?' he asked.

'Part of it. There're wagon tracks still baked in
the hardpan.'

He chewed his gum and studied on the implications.

'What's it good for?' he asked.

'Not much of anything, I guess.'

He grinned and chewed his gum furiously and skipped
a stone across the water.

'Black people say you spit on your hook, you always
catch fish. You believe that?' he said.

'Could be.'

'How come you don't marry Temple Carrol?'

'You have too many thoughts for a boy your age.'

'She sure spends a lot of time jogging past your
house.'

'Why do you have Temple Carrol on the brain this
evening, Pete?'

'Cause there she comes now.'

I looked over my shoulder and saw Temple's car drive
past my garage and barn and chicken run and windmill, then follow the
dirt track out to the levee that circled the tank. Pete thought that
was hilarious.

Temple got out of her car and walked up the slope of
the levee. Her face looked cool and pink in the twilight.

'He's out,' she said.

'Moon?'

'None other.'

'Excuse us, Pete.'

I leaned my cane pole in the fork of a redbud tree,
and we walked down the levee. The late red sun looked like molten metal
through the willows on the far bank.

'He was at your office,' she said.

'What?

'Sitting on your steps for maybe an hour. In a blue
serge suit and a Hawaiian shirt that's like an assault on the eyeballs.
I told him your office was closed. He just sat there, cleaning his
fingernails.'

'Don't mess with him, Temple. Next time call the
cops.'

'What do you think I did? A half hour later, this
new deputy, Mary Beth Sweeney, shows up. I told her I was glad somebody
from the sheriff's department could finally make the trip from across
the street. Get this, nobody sent her. She just happened to be driving
by. She told him to hoof it.'

Temple forked two fingers into the side pocket of
her blue jeans.

'He left you a note,' she said.

It was written in pencil, on the inside of a
flattened cigarette wrapper.

We were back at her car now. She
opened the driver's
door and reached across the seat and picked up a revolver. It was an
ancient .38-40 double-action, the metal as dull as an old nickel with
holster wear.

'Keep this. You can add it to your historical
collection,' she said.

'Nope.'

'I got a friend in Austin to run Moon on the
computer. Corrections thinks he did two snitches in Sugarland.'

'Thanks for coming by, Temple.'

She lowered the revolver, which she held sideways in
her palm.

'Where's it end?' she said.

'Excuse me?'

'You gave up your badge, then your career as a
prosecutor with the Justice Department…' She shook her head.
'Because you think an accidental death takes away your right to judge
people who are evil?'

'Pete and I are fixing to fry up some fish. You're
welcome to join us.'

'You make me so mad I want to hit you,' she said.

Later that evening, I called the
sheriff at his home.

'My PI made a 911 on Garland Moon,' I said.

'So?'

'Nobody was dispatched.'

'What's the man done?' he asked.

'He was in your custody. You let him out. I don't
want him on my doorstep.'

'You think I want this lunatic on the street?'

'To tell you the truth, I'm not sure, sheriff.'

'You're a natural-born pain in the ass, Billy Bob.
Don't be calling my house again.'

After I hung up, I called a friend in
the sheriff's
department and got the address of Mary Beth Sweeney. She lived in a new
two-story apartment complex with a swimming pool just outside of town.
It was 9 p.m. when I walked up the brick pathway at the entrance, and
the underwater lights in the pool were turned on and pine needles and a
glaze of suntan lotion floated on the surface. The lawn was empty, the
portable barbecue pits left on the flagstones feathering with smoke.

I climbed to the second landing and rang her
doorbell. My right hand opened and closed at my side and I felt warm
inside my coat and wished I had left it in the Avalon.

Her face had a meaningless expression when
she opened the door.

'Sorry to bother you at home. But I heard Garland
Moon was at my office,' I said.

'Yes, is there something I can tell you?'

'Maybe. If I'm not bothering you.'

I waited.

'Come in,' she said.

Her small living room was furnished with rattan
chairs and a couch and a round glass table. A yellow counter with three
stools divided the kitchen from the living room. She was barefoot and
wore jeans and a white and burnt orange University of Texas Longhorn
T-shirt. A copy of The New Yorker was splayed
open on the glass tabletop and a pair of horn-rimmed glasses lay next
to it.

'You just happened by and saw Moon outside my
office?' I said.

'What's this about, Mr Holland?'

'I think I'm developing an ongoing problem with the
sheriff's office. I think it's because of Lucas Smothers.'

She hadn't asked me to sit down. She placed one hand
against the counter and pushed her feet into a pair of white moccasins
as though she were about to go somewhere. Her eyes were violet colored,
unfocused, caught somewhere between two thoughts.

'You shouldn't come here,' she said.

'I wonder how I should read that. Is there hidden
meaning there? I always have trouble with encoded speech.'

'If you don't like rudeness, you shouldn't keep
forcing the issue, Mr Holland.'

'My name is Billy Bob.'

'I know who you are.' Then I saw the color flare
behind her freckles, not from anger but as if she had made an admission
she shouldn't.

'You like Mexican food?' I asked.

'Good night.' She put her hand on the doorknob and
turned it.

'Tomorrow night? I appreciate what you've done for
me.'

She opened the door and I started outside. I was
only inches away from her now and I could smell the perfume behind her
ears and hear her breathing and see the rise and fall of her breasts. A
tiny gold chain and cross hung around her neck.

'Moon won't come at you head-on. He'll use Jimmy
Cole,' she said.

I felt my mouth part as I stared into her eyes.

It was sunrise the next morning when I
pulled into
the dirt drive of Vernon Smothers's two-bedroom white frame house, with
a mimosa in the front yard, a sprinkler spinning in a sickly fashion by
the wood steps, a partially collapsed garage in back, and every
available foot of surrounding property under cultivation.

I walked along the edge of a bean field to an
irrigation ditch where Lucas stood up to his knees in the water, raking
dead vegetation out of the bottom and piling it on the bank.

'What are you doing?' I said.

'My dad uses it in the compost heap.'

'He's not one to waste.'

'You don't like him much, do you?' he said. His face
and denim shirt were spotted with mud, his arms knotted with muscle as
he lifted a rake-load of dripping weeds to the edge of the ditch.

'Garland Moon's out. I want you to be careful,' I
said.

'Last night a Mexican in the poolroom offered me
five-hundred dollars to drive a load of lumber down to Piedras Negras.'

'What are you doing in the poolroom?'

'Just messin' around.'

'Yeah, they only sell soda pop in there, too. Why's
this Mexican so generous to you?'

'He's got a furniture factory down there. He cain't
drive long distances 'cause he's got kidney trouble or something. He
said I might get on reg'lar.'

'You leave this county, Lucas, you go back to jail
and you stay there.'

'You ain't got to get mad about it. I was just
telling you what the guy said.'

'You thought anymore about college for next fall?'

'I was just never any good at schoolwork, Mr
Holland.'

'Will you call me Billy Bob?'

'My dad don't allow it.'

I walked back to my car. The sun was yellow and pale
with mist behind Vernon Smothers's house. He stood on his porch in work
boots and cut-off GI fatigues and a sleeveless denim shirt that was
washed as thin as Kleenex.

'You out here about Moon?' he asked.

'He's been known to nurse a grievance,' I answered.

'He puts a foot on my land, I'll blow it off.'

'You'll end up doing his time, then.'

'I busted my oil pan on your back road yesterday.
You'll owe me about seventy-five dollars for the weld job,' he said,
and went back inside his house and let the screen slam behind him.

Just before lunchtime, my secretary
buzzed the
intercom.

'There's a man here who won't give his name, Billy
Bob,' she said.

'Does he have on a blue serge suit?'

'Yes.'

'I'll be right out.'

I opened my door. Garland T. Moon sat in a chair, a
hunting magazine folded back to ads that showed mail-order guns and
knives for sale. He wore shiny tan boots that were made from plastic,
and a canary yellow shirt printed with redbirds, with the collar
flattened outside his suit coat.

'Come in,' I said.

My secretary looked at me, trying to read my face.

'I'm going to take my lunch hour a little late
today,' she said.

'Why don't you go now, Kate? Bring me an order of
enchiladas and a root beer. You want something, Garland?'

His lips were as red as a clown's when he smiled,
his head slightly tilted, as though the question were full of tangled
wire.

He walked past me without answering. I could smell
an odor like lye soap and sweat on his body. I closed the door, turned
the key in the lock, and put the key in my watch pocket.

'What are you doin?' he said.

I sat behind my desk, smiled up at him, my eyes not
quite focusing on him. I scratched the back of my hand.

'I asked you what you're doing,' he said.

'I think you're a lucky man. I think you ought to
get out of town.'

'Why'd you lock the door?'

'I don't like to be disturbed.'

One side of his face seemed to wrinkle, his small
blue eye watering, as though irritated by smoke. He was seated now, his
thighs and hard buttocks flexed against the plastic bottom of the chair.