"Cimarron Rose" - читать интересную книгу автора (Burke James Lee)chapter seven At sunrise Sunday morning I put on my pinstriped beige suit and a short-sleeve white shirt and a pair of oxblood Tony Lamas, walked down to the barn and lifted my saddle off a sawhorse in the tack room and threw it on the back of my Morgan. The breeze blew through the doors on each end of the barn and the air was cool and smelled of wildflowers, fish spawning, oats and molasses balls, green horse dung, hay that had turned yellow in the corners, and well water spilling over the lip of the corrugated windmill tank. L.Q. Navarro sat on top of a stall, the heels of his boots hooked onto a plank, his body slatted with sunlight. ' I crossed the creek at the back of my property and rode through a stand of pines, then up an incline that was humped with blackberry bushes into Pete's backyard. He waited for me on the porch, dressed in a pair of pressed jeans and a starched print shirt and freshly shined brown shoes. I reached my arm down and pulled him up behind the cantle. The Morgan's hooves clattered on the flattened beer cans in the yard. 'Was you really baptized in the river?' he said. 'Sure.' 'I never heard of a river-baptized person converting to a Catholic' 'Somebody's got to keep y'all honest.' He was quiet a long time, rocking against me with the horse's steps. 'Does it bother you when people say you're crazy, Billy Bob?' 'Most of the human race is, Pete.' 'I knew you was gonna say that.' We came out of the pines into the backside of a rural Mexican neighborhood with fenceless dirt yards and abandoned privies and alleys blown with litter and bloodred hibiscus growing out of rusted car shells. This area was part of what was known as the West End, a place where cedar cutters and field-workers and 'bohunks', people who were of mixed German and Mexican blood, had always lived. It was exactly twenty miles down the same road that led into the East End, where Deaf Smith's country club set, and there were many of them, had bought and refurbished Victorian homes that were as big as steamboats when spot market oil was forty dollars a barrel. It was cool inside the small stucco church, and electric fans oscillated on the walls by the Stations of the Cross, and the votive lights in front of a statue of Christ's mother rang with color each time the breeze from the fan passed over the burning wax. The people in the pews were almost all elderly, their hands sheathed in callus, the skin around their eyes wrinkled, as though they had been staring into the sun for a lifetime. After Mass Pete and I rode my Morgan up the street, then cut through a grove of cedars and an empty filling station that had been built in 1945 and went inside a clapboard chafé and ate breakfasts of pork chops, biscuits, milk gravy, scrambled eggs, grits, sliced tomatoes, and coffee. 'What's a crystal meth lab?' Pete asked. 'A place where people make narcotics. Why?' 'My mother said to stay away from some men that's in the neighborhood.' 'Oh?' He looked out the window at a dog tied on a rope in the bed of a pickup. He chewed on the corner of his thumbnail. The light had gone out of his eyes. 'You shouldn't tie a dog in the back of a truck. If he falls out, he'll get drug to death. He won't have no chance at all,' he said. 'Who are these men, Pete?' 'People my daddy knew once.' His face was empty, his gaze still focused outside the window. 'My mother made up that story about him getting killed in the army. He just gone off one day and never come home.' 'Maybe you shouldn't study on it.' 'It don't bother me. If people don't want you, they ain't worth fretting on. That's the way I see it.' Then he grinned again, as though the world's capacity to injure had no power over him. Jack Vanzandt lived in a large white-columned home built of old brick and Spanish ironwork salvaged from a plantation in Louisiana. The lawn comprised eight acres and sloped upward from the street through shade trees to the wide, breezy front porch of the house, the four-car garage with servants quarters on top, two clay tennis courts, a screened-in pool stippled with sunlight, a stucco guest cottage, a satellite television dish that was the size of a barn door. His first wife had died in a traffic accident on a bridge over the Pecos River gorge. The second wife, Emma, came from Shreveport, where her mother and father had run a fundamentalist church, then had become moderately wealthy by starting up a mail-order wedding cake business. Emma's approach to civic and charitable work seemed to be governed by the same entrepreneurial spirit. She ran on high-octane energies that made her eyes flash and her hands move abruptly when she became impatient with the way someone else did his work, until she simply took over it. Like her husband, Jack, she was always polite, and her high cheekbones and long Indian-black hair were lovely to look at. But you always felt you wanted her as a friend, never as an adversary. 'How are you, Billy Bob?' she said, rising from her work in a rose bed, pulling off a cotton glove and extending her hand. 'Sorry to bother y'all on a Sunday, Emma,' I said. 'We always love to see you. Did you bring your tennis racquet?' 'No, I'm afraid I have to chop cotton today. Is Jack around?' 'You're going to take his picture?' she said, her eyes dropping to the Polaroid camera in my hand. 'Not really,' I said, and smiled. Jack came out on the front porch, a frosted highball glass wrapped with a napkin and a rubber band in his hand. 'Can you handle a gin and tonic?' he said. 'I just need a minute or two, then I'll be gone,' I said. He watched my face, then said, 'Walk out here with me and I'll show you part of an Indian work mound Emma dug up.' We strolled through the trees toward a white gazebo. Pine needles and rose petals had been scattered on the grass by a windstorm during the night. 'My PI had to do some checking on Darl's record,' I said. I kept my eyes straight ahead on the piled dirt and sacks of pasteurized fertilizer and potted hydrangeas by the edge of a freshly spaded flower bed. Jack cleared his throat slightly. 'Why's that?' he said. 'You don't want to find out later the other side is waiting for you with a baseball bat. Darl has four arrests involving violence of some kind… Am I correct, he beat up a waitress in a bar?' Jack squatted by the mound of black dirt and picked up some pottery shards and rubbed them clean between his fingers. There was a thin, round place in the center of his gold hair. 'He shouldn't have been there. But she wasn't a waitress. She was a prostitute, and she and her pimp tried to roll him when they thought he was passed out,' he said. 'I'd like to take a Polaroid of Darl.' 'I'm a little unclear as to where this is going.' 'The kid who might take you for seven figures should at least be able to identify your son in a photo lineup.' 'Wait here. I'll get him.' Five minutes later the two of them came out of the back of the house together. Even though it was almost noon, Darl's face looked thick with sleep. He raked his hair downward with a comb, then gazed at the lint that floated out in the sunlight. 'What's that spick say?' he asked. 'Darl…' his father began. 'That you blindsided him and kicked him on the ground,' I said. 'How about my car? I was supposed to enter it in the fifties show in Dallas. What right's he got to ruin my paint job?' 'That's a mean cut on your ring finger,' I said. 'It collided with a flying object. That guy's mouth.' 'Two weeks ago?' 'Yeah, his tooth broke off in my hand. I'm lucky I didn't have to get rabies shots.' 'Look up a little bit,' I said, and popped the flash on the Polaroid. Darl's eyes stared back at me with the angry vacuity of an animal who believes it has been trapped in a box. 'I'm going back to the house,' he said. 'Thank Mr Holland for the help he's giving us, son,' Jack said. 'He's doing this for free? Get a life,' Darl said. Thick-bodied, sullen, his face unwashed, he walked through the shade, his hand caressing the peach fuzz along his jawbone. Jack turned away, his fists knotted on his hips, his forearms corded with veins. That afternoon Temple Carrol found me back by the windmill, hoeing out my vegetable garden. The sky behind her was purple and yellow with rain clouds, the air already heavy with the smell of ozone. 'My sister-in-law works at the video store. This tape was in the night drop box this morning,' she said. I stopped work and leaned on my hoe. The blades of the windmill were ginning rapidly overhead. 'Somebody must have dropped it in by mistake. You'd better take a look,' she said. We went through the back of the house to the library and plugged the cassette into the VCR. At first the handheld camera swung wildly through trees illuminated by headlights, rock music blaring on the audio, then the camera steadied, as though it were aimed across a car hood, and we saw kids climbing out of convertibles, throwing ropes of beer on each other, passing joints, kissing each other hard on the mouth for the camera's benefit, their features as white as milk. Then we saw her in an alcove of trees, in Clorox-faded jeans and a maroon T-shirt with a luminous horse head on it, a longneck beer in one hand, a joint in the other, dancing to the music as though there were no one else present on earth. 'Roseanne Hazlitt,' I said. 'Wait till you see what a small-town girl can do with the right audience,' Temple said. Her auburn hair was partially pinned up in swirls on her head, but one long strand curled around her neck like a snake. She let the beer bottle, then the joint, drop from her fingers into the weeds, and began to sway her hips, her eyes closed, her profile turned to the camera. She pulled her T-shirt over her head, her hair collapsing on her shoulders, arched her shoulders back so that the tops of her breasts almost burst out of her bra, unsnapped her jeans and stepped out of them, then twined her hands in the air and rotated her hips, ran her fingers over her panties and thighs, grasped the back of her neck and widened her legs and opened her mouth in feigned orgasm and pushed her hair over her head so that it cascaded down her face while her tongue made a red circle inside her lips. The screen turned to snow. 'How about the look on those boys watching her?' Temple said. 'You recognize any of them?' I asked. 'Three or four. Jocks with yesterday's ice cream for brains. How do kids get that screwed up?' I looked at my watch. It had started to rain outside and the hills were aura-ed with a cold green light like the tarnish on brass. 'I'll buy you a barbecue dinner at Shorty's,' I said, and dropped the Polaroid photo of Darl Vanzandt in front of her. We sat on the screen porch and ate plates of cole slaw and refried beans and chicken that had been cooked on a mesquite fire. The river that flowed under the pilings of the club was dented with raindrops, the trees along the bank smoky with mist. Downstream, some boys were swinging out over the water on a rubber tire tied to a rope, cannonballing into the current. I heard beer cans clattering outside the screen. 'He's an old-timer, Temple. Let's try to keep him in a better mood this time,' I said. 'I'll just watch. Maybe I can learn how it's done,' she said. We went out the side door to a woodshed with a tarp that was extended out from the roof on slanted poles. The elderly black man we had interviewed earlier in the week was heaving two vinyl sacks of cans into the shed. When he saw us, he took his stub of a pipe out of his shirt pocket and pared the charcoal out of the bowl with a penknife. 'My memory ain't no better than it was the other day. Must be age. Or maybe I don't take to rudeness,' he said. He pointed the stem of his pipe at Temple. 'I get the notion you don't like working here,' I said. 'The job's fine. What a lot of people do here ain't.' I held the Polaroid of Darl Vanzandt in front of him. He dipped his pipe in a leather tobacco pouch and pressed the tobacco down into the bowl with the ball of his thumb. 'Is that the boy Roseanne Hazlitt slapped?' I said. He struck a wood match and cupped it over his pipe, puffing smoke out into the rain. He tossed the match into a puddle and watched it go out. 'You a church man?' I said. 'My wife and me belong to a church in town. If that's what you're axing.' 'That girl didn't deserve to die the way she did,' I said. He tapped his fingernail on the Polaroid. 'That ain't the one she slapped,' he said. His eyes lingered for a moment on mine, then looked out into the rain. 'But he was in the crowd?' I asked. 'A boy like that don't have no use for anybody else 'cause he don't have no use for himself. What other kind of place he gonna go to? Come back tonight, he'll be here, insulting people, yelling on the dance flo', getting sick out in the weeds. He ain't hard to find.' 'Was he here the night she was attacked?' I said. 'Why you giving me this truck? You know the one question y'all ain't axed me? Who'd that po' girl leave with? It was Lucas Smothers. That's what I seen.' He pointed to the corner of his eye. 'Y'all always think you find the right nigger, you gonna get the answer you want.' In the car, I felt Temple's eyes on the side of my face. She rubbed me on the arm with the back of her finger. 'Lucas didn't do it, Billy Bob,' she said. On the way home, by chance and accident, Temple and I witnessed a peculiar event, one that would only add to the questions for which I had no answer. It had stopped raining, but the sky was sealed with clouds that were as black as gun cotton and mist floated off the river and clung to the sides of the low hills along the two-lane road. A quarter mile ahead of us, a flatbed truck with a welding machine mounted behind the cab veered back and forth across the yellow stripe. A sheriff's cruiser that had been parked under an overpass, the trunk up to hide the emergency flasher on the roof, pulled the truck to the side of the road and two uniformed deputies got out, slipping their batons into the rings on their belts. It should have been an easy roadside DWI arrest. It wasn't. The driver of the truck, his khakis and white T-shirt streaked with grease, his face dilated and red with alcohol, fell from the cab into the road, his hard hat rolling away like a tiddledywink. He got to his feet, his ankles spread wide for balance, and started swinging, his first blow snapping a deputy's jaw back against his shoulder. The other deputy whipped his baton across the tendon behind the truck driver's knee and crumpled him to the asphalt. It should have been over. It wasn't. We had passed the truck now, and the two deputies were into their own program. 'Uh-oh,' Temple said. They lifted the drunk man by each arm and dragged him on his knees to the far side of the truck. Then we saw the humped silhouettes by the back tire and the balled fists and the batons rising and falling, like men trading off hammer strokes on a tent post. I touched the brake, pulled to the shoulder, and began backing up in the weeds. From under the overpass a second cruiser came hard down the road, its blue, white, and red emergency flasher on, water blowing in a vortex behind it. The driver cut to the shoulder, hit the high beams, and the airplane lights burned into the faces of the two deputies and the bloodied man huddled at their knees. The driver of the second cruiser got out and stood just behind the glare that blinded the two deputies, a portable radio in her left hand, the other on the butt of her holstered nine-millimeter. 'Y'all got a problem here?' Mary Beth Sweeney said. That night I fell asleep as an electrical storm moved across the drenched hills and disappeared in the west, filling the clouds with flickers of light like burning candles in a Mexican church that smelled of incense and stone and water. Or like cartridges exploding in the chambers of L.Q. Navarro's blue-black, ivory-handled, custom-made.45 revolver. |
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