James Burke - Cimarron Rose

Men like Felix Ringo did the jobs for the forces of Empire that no government ever acknowledged. They went to special schools and carried badges and were endowed with marginal respectability, but their real credentials lay in their bottomless cruelty. And no matter what explanations they offered others for their behavior, each of them daily fed his perversity like a gardener tending a hothouse filled with poisonous flowers.

Political assassins always kept journals; sadists kept trophies, and they never strayed far from them.

I found the box at the bottom of a desk drawer. It was made of sandalwood, fitted with gold hinges and hasps, fastened with a soft bungi cord. A wood tray divided into compartments was inset in the top of the box. It contained military decorations, a sergeant's chevrons, gold teeth, polished finger bones, empty shell casings, a switchblade knife with a green serpent inlaid in the handle, a long strip of black hair wrapped inside a plastic bag.

Under the wood tray was a thick pack of pornographic photos held together with a rubber band. They were yellow with age, mounted on cardboard, and featured Orientals involved in every possible sexual act and position. But it was not these that shocked or sickened the sensibilities. The bottom of the box was layered with Polaroid color photos that made the eye film, the hand vaguely soiled at the touch: a freshly dug pit in front of which four peasant men and a woman stood bound and blindfolded; a man on his knees with his thumbs tied behind him, a disembodied arm pointing a pistol behind his ear; a man with a pesticide sack over his head, hung by his arms between two stone walls; grinning enlisted men posing at the end of a dirt street littered with bodies that had started to bloat; a woman strapped in a chair, her face and shirtless upper torso streaked with blood.

At the bottom of all these photos was a playing card emblazoned with the badge of the Texas Rangers. Written in felt pen across the badge was the word Muerto and the date I accidentally killed L.Q. Navarro.

When I got back home Lucas Smothers was sitting on the steps of my front porch, twisting the tuning pegs on a mandolin, tinking each string with a plectrum. He wore a pair of starched khakis and cowboy boots and a short-sleeve denim shirt rolled above his triceps. His reddish blond hair was combed into faint ducktails on the back of his head. It was cool where he sat in the shade, and he drank out of a soda can and smiled at me.

'I got a bluegrass gig at a club over in Llano County. My dad didn't say nothing about it, either,' he said.

'Go to college,' I said.

'So I can be like them rich pukes out in East End?'

'Come in the house. I have to use the phone.'

Inside the library, he looked at the titles of books on my shelves while I punched in Marvin Pomroy's home number on the phone.

'Marvin?' I said.

'Oh gee,' he said when he recognized my voice.

'Felix Ringo isn't taking Moon down on a Mexican warrant. He's taking him off the board,' I said.

'What gives you this special insight?'

'Does it figure Ringo's going to bust a guy who can testify against him?'

'Ringo's a cop. Moon's a nut case.'

'I just creeped Ringo's place at the Conquistador. He was a dope mule down in Coahuila.'

'Say again? You did what?'

'My partner and I capped some of those guys, Marvin. His name was L.Q. Navarro. He put a playing card in the mouth of every dead mule we left down there. Ringo has one of those cards in a sandalwood box filled with his trophies. He wrote the date of my friend's death on it.'

'You're telling me, the district attorney, you broke into a policeman's apartment?'

'Ask Ringo to show you his Polaroid collection of life down in the tropics.'

'Let this go, Billy Bob.'

'Moon killed my father.'

He repeated my statement back to me incredulously. When I didn't reply, he said, 'Do you realize what you just told me? If this guy shows up dead…'

'Get a life, Marvin,' I said, and eased the phone receiver down in the cradle.

Lucas stood at the bookshelves, Great-grandpa Sam's journal spread in his hands, his mouth open.

'What's up, bud?' I said.

He blinked, then closed the journal.

'Moon killed your dad?' he asked.

'Yeah, I guess he did.'

'What are you gonna do about it?'

'That journal was kept by my great-grandfather. He was a drunkard and a gunfighter who became a saddle preacher on the Chisholm Trail. It took him a long time, but he learned how to put aside his violent ways.'

'What happens when the other guy don't put aside his?'

'You talking about Moon or Darl Vanzandt?'

'I seen Darl out at the drive-in this morning. He was melting screamers in dago red. He said I was yellow. He said he's gonna pop me in the face every time he sees me.'

'He'll crash and burn, Lucas. He's a pitiful person.'

'You told Marvin Pomroy you capped some dope mules.'

'So I'm a bad example.'

'No, you ain't. You're a good man. And that's why I come here, just to tell you that. I'm proud we're… Well, I'm proud, that's all. I'll see you, Billy Bob.'

He went down the front hall and out the door to his pickup. Through the screen I could see shadows on the hillside and wildflowers rippling and bending and straightening in the wind, like colored confetti flickering in a world that had almost gone gray. chapter thirty-five

That afternoon I drove to the welding shop where Moon worked. It was padlocked, and the owner of the motel next door, where Moon kept a room, said he had not seen him in two days.

I went home and worked in the yard and tried to think my way out of an impossible situation. Great-grandpa Sam, at age fifty-six, had prevailed against the Dalton-Doolin gang but had kept faith with his ordination and had not taken human life. I had manipulated a psychopath, perhaps putting the Vanzandts at risk as well as Felix Ringo. Intellectually I regretted what I had done, but secretly I still lusted for revenge and my wrists swelled with blood and my calluses rasped against the grain of the mattock when I thudded it into the roots of a willow that had threaded themselves into my water well.

I sat in the grass on the riverbank and watched the current riffle across the top of a submerged cottonwood. Directly below me, lost in the murk and high water, was the sunken automobile where two members of the Karpis-Barker gang had died. Garland T. Moon had waded through this water and fished here, wearing a suit, flinging a hook full of bloody melt into the current that flowed through the car's empty windows.

Why this particular spot, I wondered. Did he know the sunken car was there, that it was a nest for shovel-mouth catfish, that bass hung under the bluffs and fed on the insects that fell from the grove of trees upstream?

My father probably took him fishing here, walked these same banks with him as he did with me in later years, a sack of bread-and-butter sandwiches swinging from his big hand.

Moon had tried to extort ten acres from me on the back of my property. What were his words? I want the place should have been mine. At least part of it. Was that it, I thought. Maybe I had been wrong, he hadn't returned to Deaf Smith simply for revenge. Somehow he had convinced himself he was owed part of my father's estate. He had also gone to Jack Vanzandt, perhaps a surrogate for my father, walking into the middle of his golf game, as though somehow the door to wealth and acceptance in Deaf Smith society would open for him if he could only turn the right handle.

Now he had disappeared. Where would a man dying of cancer, beaten with a maul handle, and hunted by a sadist go in a county that had been the origin of his travail and the denier of what he believed was his inheritance?

What places was he even familiar with? Perhaps just the motel room with water bed and X-rated cable he lived in, the old county prison where he had been sodomized by two roadbulls, the tin welding shed that was like stepping into the devil's forge, the wide, green sweep of the river below the bluffs at the back of my property.