Cimarron Rose

'Forget it,' I said.

'I think he's going to hurt my boy.'

'We won't let that happen, Vernon.' He cupped his fingers over his mouth. His skin made a dry, rasping sound against his fingers.

The social circle of Darl Vanzandt wasn't a difficult one to track. They were rich and lived in the East End; they had flunked out of the University of Texas or they commuted to a community college or they held token jobs in the businesses they would inherit. But it was a strange solipsistic attitude toward others that truly defined them. They were animated and loud and unseeing in public, indifferent to the injury their words might cause anyone outside their perimeter. They drove too fast, running stop signs and caution lights, never making a connection between their recklessness and the jeopardy they arbitrarily brought into the lives of others.

Their accents were regional, but they had skied in Colorado and surfed in California, and they played golf and tennis at a country club where blacks and Mexicans picked up their litter from the greens and their sweaty towels from the court, as though that was the natural function of the poor. Their insensitivity was almost a form of innocence. Had they ever been brought to task for their behavior, they probably would not have understood the complaint against them.

But one member of this group was an exception. Bunny Vogel came from a family of shiftless mill workers whose front yard was always decorated with rusted washing machines and automobile parts. But Bunny'd had a talent. As a high school running back he had crashed holes through the enemy line like a tank through a hedge row. Then he had played two years on a no-cut athletic scholarship at Texas A amp;M, with every expectation of graduating and going to the pros. That was before he got caught paying off a grader and fellow athlete to change an exam score for a freshman named Darl Vanzandt.

After he was expelled, he turned his motorcycle on its side and ground a strip of metal, leather, and bone a hundred feet long on the highway to Austin.

I found him at his job out at the skeet club. He could have been a Visigoth, with his grained, ruddy face, his long bronze-colored hair tangled on his shoulders, a deep pink scar, with stitch holes, along one jaw. Bunny was deferential and soft-spoken, even likable, but I always felt that behind his smile a clock was ticking as he waited for that moment when he would be free of older people and the sanction and approval they could arbitrarily withdraw if he displeased them.

Shotguns popped in the warm breeze behind him, and beyond the row of oblong green traps, clay pigeons exploded in puffs of colored smoke against the sky.

'I'd like to hep you, Mr Holland, but far as I know the only guy mixed up with Roseanne Hazlitt was ole Lucas. Sorry,' he said.

'Were you out at Shorty's the night she was attacked?' I asked.

'I might have been. But I didn't see her… Seen Lucas… That ain't no hep, though, is it?' He smiled boyishly and brushed at the grass with one shoe.

'You think Lucas could rape and kill a girl?'

'Lucas?' He thought about it. 'It's not like him. But a guy gets a snootful, who knows?'

'How you know he had a snootful, Bunny?'

He smiled with his eyes. 'I never saw him out there when he didn't.'

'See you around.'

'Yeah, anytime, Mr Holland. I hope it works out for Lucas.' He bit the corner of his lip philosophically.

On the way to my car I saw Emma Vanzandt walking toward me from a pavilion. She wore a pair of tailored brown riding jeans and lizard boots and a maroon silk shirt that filled with the wind.

'You're not going to say hello?' she asked.

'How you doin', Emma?'

'You've been busy. All Darl's friends wonder what you might be up to.'

'They haven't figured it out, huh?'

'Billy Bob,' she said, her voice climbing. 'Be a little kind. Darl's not a bad boy.'

'I didn't say he was.'

She looked back at the pavilion. 'Let's get in your car and I'll explain something… Darl suffers from-'

'Fetal alcohol syndrome. Jack told me about it.'

'I'd never heard of it before. But our last psychiatrist took one look at him and seemed to know everything about him… They've all got the same face. The eyes are set far apart, the upper lip is too close to the nose.' Then she looked at nothing and said, 'What a club to belong to,' and laughed, almost lewdly, as though giving vent to another person who lived inside her.

'His friends vandalized Lucas Smothers's house.'

'Oh, I don't believe that.'

'It's good to see you, Emma.'

'He wet his bed until he was fifteen. He's not capable of raping anybody. I don't think he's learned how to masturbate yet,' she said.

'Maybe he should start. He beat up a prostitute with his fists.'

'You should have gotten married, Billy Bob. Then you wouldn't be such a stick in the mud.'

'Really?'

She reached across the car seat and patted me on the wrist. 'Jack's sorry for speaking harshly to you. Come by and see us. We'll work all this out.'

'No, we won't,' I said.

'Well, you're just a big pill. But one day you'll see we mean you well. Until then, you have a good life, sir,' she said, and squeezed my hand.

She got out of my car, her long, Indian-black hair tucked behind her head with a silver comb. Then I saw Darl come to meet her, looking past her shoulder at me, his face oily and insentient with booze and tranquilizers, the glare in his eyes like yellow heat trapped under murky water.

The next day, in my office, Marvin Pomroy, the prosecutor, told me about the call that had come in to the rural fire station, his eyes moving across the rug as though he were clarifying the details to himself rather than to me.

No one would have seen the flames, but a shower broke in the predawn hours and a column of wet smoke rose from between two hills and hung in the sky like a long gray rope. At first the firemen thought they were simply putting out a pile of discarded automobile tires that had been heaped into a deep pit. Then they began to poke through the foam and pull apart the tires with their axes. The blackened figure at the bottom of the pyre looked atrophied, cemented at the joints, like an anatomically deformed manikin encased in a thick crust. Except for the white teeth, exposed by the skin that had stretched back on the skull in a death grin.

'You're sure it's Jimmy Cole?' I asked.

'Cole was missing two toes on his left foot. He cut them off with a hatchet to get out of the field in Sugarland,' Marvin said. His eyes were bright, his gum snapping in his jaw. 'The crime scene's clean, though. We can't tie it to Moon.'

'You look like your circuits are burning,' I said.

'The ME says Cole died somewhere else. His nose and mouth and ears were full of sediment and pig shit. The ME says he was probably buried in a hog lot, then dug up after rigor mortis set in.' He glanced at my face. 'What?' he said.

'I told Garland Moon I thought he'd killed Cole. He probably decided to move the body.'

'What were you doing with Moon?'

'Either he or Cole was in my barn. I tried to warn him off.'

'Don't try to 'front this guy on your own,' he said. But I knew I was not the source of his agitation. He leaned forward in the chair, a heated sheen on his face. 'Look, I've got a problem here that's eating my lunch. The fire was on the old Hart property. Nobody's lived there for thirty years. But I got the feeling most of those deputies had been there before. I also got the feeling the sheriff didn't want anybody hanging around there.'

'Who owns the place now?'

'A California company that sells western real estate to people tired of shopping in malls where the Crips and the Bloods have firefights. But I don't see anything there worth hiding, a strip of ground between the hills, the kind of place where the hoot owls screw the jackrabbits.'

'Why you telling me this?'

'That's the irony. I work in a county that's so corrupt I have to confide in a defense lawyer who rides his horse into barrooms. I grant you, it's a pitiful situation,' he said.