James Burke - Cimarron Rose

Set up and sandbagged, and I had walked right into it.

An hour later I drove Mary Beth to our small airport. The windows of my car were beaded with water, and lightning forked without sound into the hills.

'Don't feel bad,' she said.

'It was a slick ruse. Those two kids were telling the truth, but somebody gave them money and turned them into witnesses for the prosecution.'

'Felix Ringo and Jack Vanzandt sent them to you?'

'Let's talk about something else.'

'Sorry.'

There was nothing for it. Everything I said to her was wrong. We stood under a dripping shed and watched a two-engine plane taxi toward us, its propellers blowing water off the airstrip. I felt a sense of ending that I couldn't give words to.

'I didn't do you much good, did I?' she said.

'Sure you did.'

'I have to think over some things. I'll be better about calling this time,' she said.

Then a strange thing happened, as though I were an adolescent boy caught up in his sexual fantasies. I hugged her lightly around the shoulders, my cheek barely touching hers, but in my mind's eye I saw her undressed, smelled the heat in her skin, the perfume that rose from her breasts, felt her bare stomach press against my loins. It wasn't lust. It was an unrequited desire, like a flame sealed inside my skin, one that would not be relieved and that told me I was completely alone. For just a moment I understood why people drank and did violent things.

'So long,' she said.

'Good-bye, Mary Beth.'

'Watch your butt.'

'You bet.'

I watched her plane take off in the rain, its wings lifting steadily toward a patch of blue in the west. I got in my car and drove back to town. The hills were sodden and green under clouds that churned like curds from burning oil tanks.

L.Q. Navarro was waiting for me when I got home. He leaned his hands on the windowsill in the library and looked out at a cold band of light on the western horizon.

'It's been a mighty wet spring,' he said.

'I might have blown the trial today, L.Q.'

'You know what you got on your side? It's that boy's character. He's got sand. You know why?'

'Tell me.'

'He's your son.'

'You always looked after me, L.Q.'

'Know how I'd run it? Put that boy on the stand and let the jury see what he's made of.'

I still had my hat on. I sat in the stuffed leather chair in the corner and pulled my hat brim down over my eyes. I could hear L.Q.' s spurs tinkling on the rug.

'That DEA woman got you down?' he asked.

'Remember the time we went to that beer garden in Monterrey? The mariachi bands were playing, and you flamenco danced with that lady who played the castanets. It was cool every night and we could see fires out in the hills when the sun went down. Life was real good to us then, wasn't it?' I said.

'What's her name, Mary Beth, I still think she's a right good gal. Sometimes you got to let a mare have her head.'

'Hope you won't take offense, L.Q., but how about shutting up?' I said.

'Read your great-grandpa's journal. All good things come to the righteous and the just.'

I fell asleep amid the sounds of distant thunder. When I woke up a half hour later, L.Q. was gone and Bunny Vogel was banging on my door.

He sat at my kitchen table with a cup of coffee in his hand, his bronze hair splayed damply on his neck.

'Start over again,' I said.

'The old man was in the sack with this woman works at the mill. He said he'd latched the screen. He figures Moon slipped a match cover in it and popped the hook up. It was the gal, Geraldine's her name, who saw him first. She goes, "Herbert, there's a man in the doorway. He's watching us," and she rolls the old man off her and tries to pull the sheet over herself.

'Moon was leaning against the doorway, smoking a cigarette, tipping his ashes in his hand. The old man says, "You get the fuck out of here."

'Moon says, "I wouldn't let that in my bed unless I painted it with turpentine and run castor oil through it first."

'The old man says, "I got a gun in my drawer." Moon laughs and goes, "A fat old fart like you would have to Vaseline his finger to get it through the trigger guard."

'Then he picks up Geraldine's dress and tosses it at her and says, "Go 'head on, woman. I ain't interested in what you got."

'The old man tried to get up, and Moon pushed him back down with three fingers; A big fat naked guy, wheezing on cigarettes, trying to get off the mattress while another guy kept shoving him down.'

'What did Moon tell him?'

'He says, "Sorry I missed Bunny. I hear he ripped some Longhorn ass up at A amp;M. I like that."'

'Nothing else?'

Bunny stared at the door of the icebox, widening his eyes, flexing his jawbone, as though he were watching a moving picture on the unblemished whiteness of the door. Then his throat made a muted sound and he started over and said, 'He put my old man's nose between his fingers and squeezed and twisted it. He kept smiling down at him while he done it.'

The whites of Bunny's eyes had turned pink and glistened with an unnatural shine, like the surface of a peeled hard-boiled egg that's been tainted with dye. He stared down into his coffee cup.

'There's something else, isn't there?' I said.

He shook his head.

'What is it, Bunny?

'The old man had me drop him at the bus depot. He said he was gonna visit my grandma in Corpus. He said I ought to do the same.'

'Don't be too hard on him,' I said.

Then Bunny began to weep.

'What are you hiding, kid? What makes you so ashamed?' I asked.

But he didn't reply.

I couldn't sleep. I went to the cafe by the church to eat a late dinner, but it was closed. So I drove to the drive-in restaurant north of town, that neon-lighted square of neutral territory that was dominated by East Enders during the week because of the amount of money they had to spend and their freedom from jobs and responsibility. Or maybe it was the only place where they could take their secret need and see it in the faces of others and for a short time not be bothered by its presence in themselves.

I sat in a red vinyl booth by the window and looked through the rain at the line of parked cars under the canvas awning that had been pulled out on guy wires. The windows of the cars were steamed from the inside, some of the engines running, the tailpipes wisping tongues of smoke in the rain. Occasionally, a cigarette would drop sparking from a wind vane, or a shoulder, a clutch of hair, would press against the glass. But no one, at least not I, knew what went on inside each of those hand-buffed, lacquered, chopped and channeled cars whose surfaces seemed to ignite like colored flame when touched by neon.

It was a week night, so the kids inside those cars were not the kind to worry about school. Did they neck with the innocent, dry lust of a previous generation? Or drink beer with a sense of discovery and wonder, as though the spring season and their own physical yearning and the brassy cold glow in the backs of their throats held a portent for them that was like an endless song? Was the greenness of their lives like a bursting flower scattering pollen from their open palms?

Or were they already bitten with ennui and hatred of one another, joyless in their couplings, insatiable in their disdain for difference without knowing why? Darl Vanzandt's '32 Ford was backed into the middle of the row under the canvas awning. Its cherry-red finish gleamed with the wet, hard luster of a tunnel wound. The passenger's window was rolled down, and Darl's bare arm was curled on the sill, the bicep pumped like a small, white grapefruit. A girl sat on his lap, combing his hair, shaping and reshaping it as though she were creating a sculpture. He turned his face toward the restaurant window and his expression was as morally empty, his eyes as sightless, as a perforated sack of skin stuffed with chemical jelly.