CIMARRON ROSE
James Lee Burke
Hyperion Press
Fiction
ISBN: 0786889306

Chapter One

My great-grandfather was Sam Morgan Holland, a drover who trailed cows up the Chisholm from San Antonio to Kansas. Most of his life Great-grandpa Sam fought whiskey and Indians and cow thieves and with some regularity watched gully washers or dry lightning spook his herds over half of Oklahoma Territory.

Whether it was because of busthead whiskey or just the bad luck to have lost everything he ever worked for, he railed at God and the human race for years and shot five or six men in gun duels. Then one morning, cold sober, he hung his chaps and clothes and Navy Colt revolvers on a tree and was baptized by immersion in the Guadalupe River. But Great-grandpa Sam found no peace. He sat each Sunday on the mourners' bench at the front of the congregation in a mud-chinked Baptist church, filled with an unrelieved misery he couldn't explain. One month later he decided to ride to San Antonio and kill his desire for whiskey in the only way he knew, and that was to drink until he murdered all the warring voices inside his head.

On the trail he met a hollow-eyed preacher whose face had been branded with red-hot horseshoes by Comanches north of the Cimarron. The preacher made Sam kneel with him in a brush arbor, then unexpectedly grasped Sam's head in his hands and ordained him. Without speaking again he propped his Bible against Sam's rolled slicker and disappeared over a hill into a dust cloud and left no tracks on the other side.

For the rest of his life, Great-grandpa Sam preached out of the saddle in the same cow camps his herds had trampled into shredded canvas and splintered wagon boards when he was a drover.

His son, Hackberry, who was also known in our family as Grandpa Big Bud, was a Texas Ranger who chased Pancho Villa into Old Mexico. As a young lawman he locked John Wesley Hardin in the county jail and was still wearing a badge decades later when he stuffed Clyde Barrow headfirst down a trash can in a part of Dallas once known as "The Bog."

But Grandpa Big Bud always made sure you knew he was not at Arcadia, Louisiana, when Bonnie Parker and Clyde were trapped inside their car by Texas Rangers and sawed apart with Browning automatic rifles and Thompson .45 submachine guns.

"You don't figure they had it coming?" I once asked him.

"People forget they wasn't much more than kids. You cain't take a kid down without shooting him a hundred times, you're a pisspoor Ranger in my view," he said.

My grandfather and his father were both violent men. Their eyes were possessed of a peculiar unfocused light that soldiers call the thousand-yard stare, and the ghosts of the men they had killed visited them in their sleep and stood in attendance by their deathbeds. When I was a young police officer in Houston, I swore their legacy would never be mine.

But if there are drunkards in your family, the chances are you will drink from the same cup as they. The war that can flare in your breast with each dawn doesn't always have to come from a charcoal-lined barrel.

I lived alone in a three-story late-Victorian house built of purple brick, twenty miles from the little town of Deaf Smith, the county seat. The house had a second-story veranda and a wide, screened-in gallery, the woodwork painted a gleaming white. The front and back yards were enclosed by poplar trees and myrtle bushes and the flower beds planted with red and yellow roses.

I made sun tea in big jars on the gallery, grilled steaks for friends under the chinaberry tree in the backyard, and sometimes cane-fished with a bunch of Mexican children in the two-acre tank, or lake, at the back of my farm.  But at night my footsteps rang off the oak and mahogany woodwork inside my house like stones dropped down an empty well.

The ghosts of my ancestors did not visit me. The ghost of another man did. His name was L.Q. Navarro. In life he was the most handsome man I ever knew, with jet black hair and wide shoulders and skin as brown and smooth as newly dyed leather. When he appeared to me he wore the clothes he had died in, a dark pinstriped suit and dusty boots, a floppy gray Stetson, a white shirt that glowed like electrified snow. His hand-tooled gunbelt and holstered revolver hung on his thigh like a silly afterthought.  Through the top buttonhole of his shirt he had inserted the stem of a scarlet rose.

Sometimes he disappeared into sunlight, his form breaking into millions of golden particles. At other times I did pro bono work on hopeless defenses, and my spectral visitor declared a temporary amnesty and waited patiently each night by himself among the mesquite trees and blackjack oaks on a distant hillside.

The phone rang at 10 A.M. on a Sunday morning in April.

"They got my boy in the jailhouse. I want him out," the voice said.

"Is that you, Vernon?"

"No, it's the nigger in the woodpile."

Vernon Smothers, the worst business mistake in my life. He farmed seventy acres of my land on shares, and I had reached a point where I was almost willing to pay him not to come to work.

"What's he charged with?" I asked.

I could hear Vernon chewing on something --- a piece of hard candy, perhaps. I could almost see the knotted thoughts in his eyes as he looked for the trap he always found in other people's words.

"Vernon?"

"He was drunk again. Down by the river."

"Call a bondsman."

"They made up some lies . . . They're saying he raped a girl down there."

"Where's the girl?"

"At the hospital. She ain't conscious so she cain't say who done it.  That means they ain't got no case.  Ain't that right?"

"I want a promise from you . . . If I get him out, don't you dare put your hand on him."

"How about you just mind your own goddamn business, then?" he said, and hung up.

*   *   *   *   *

The county courthouse was built of sandstone, surrounded by a high-banked green lawn and live-oak trees whose tops touched the third story. The jailer was named Harley Sweet and his mouth always hung partly open while you spoke, as though he were patiently trying to understand your train of thought. But he was not an understanding man. When he was a deputy sheriff, many black and Mexican men in his custody never reached the jail. Nor thereafter did they stay on the same sidewalk as he when they saw him coming in their direction.

"You want to see Lucas Smothers, do you? We feed at twelve-thirty. Better come back after then," he said. He slapped a fly on his desk with a horse quirt. He looked at me, slack-jawed, his eyes indolent, waiting God knows for what.

"If that's the way you want it, Harley. But from this moment on, he'd better not be questioned unless I'm present."

"You're representing him?"

"That's correct."

He got up from his desk, opened a door with a frosted glass window in it, and went inside an adjoining office. He came back with a handful of Polaroid pictures and dropped them on his desk.

"Check out the artwork. That's what she looked like when he got finished with her. She had semen in her vagina and he had it inside his britches. She had skin under her fingernails and he has scratches on his body. I cain't imagine what the lab will say. You can really pick your cases, Billy Bob," he said.

"Where was she?"

"Thirty yards from where he was passed out." He started to drink out of his coffee cup, then set it back down. His silver snap-button cowboy shirt shimmered with light. "Oh hell, you want to spend your Sunday morning with a kid cain't tell the difference between shit and bean dip, I'll call upstairs. You know where the elevator's at."

When other boys in high school played baseball or ran track Lucas Smothers played the guitar. Then the mandolin, banjo, and Dobro. He hung in black nightclubs, went to camp meetings just for the music, and ran away from home to hear Bill Monroe in Wichita, Kansas. He could tell you almost any detail about the careers of country musicians whose names belonged to a working-class era in America's musical history that had disappeared with five-cent Wurlitzer jukeboxes --- Hank and Lefty, Kitty Wells, Bob Wills, the Light Crust Dough Boys, Rose Maddox, Patsy Montana, Moon Mullican, Texas Ruby.

His hands were a miracle to watch on a stringed instrument. But in his father's eyes, they, like Lucas himself, were not good for anything of value.

When he was sixteen Vernon caught him playing triple-neck steel in a beer joint in Lampasas and beat him so unmercifully with a razor strop in the front yard that a passing truck driver climbed out of his cab and pinned Vernon's arms to his sides until the boy could run next door.

Lucas sat shirtless in blue jeans and a pair of scuffed cowboy boots on the edge of a bunk in a narrow cell layered with jailhouse graffiti. His face was gray with hangover and fear, his reddish blond hair spongy with sweat. His snap-button western shirt lay at his feet. It had blue-and-white checks in it, and white cloth in the shoulders with tiny gold trumpets stitched in it. He had paid forty dollars for the shirt when he had first joined the band at Shorty's.

"How you feel?" I asked, after the turnkey locked the solid iron door behind me.

"Not too good." His wrists were thick, his wide hands cupped on top of his knees. "They tell you about the girl . . . I mean, like how's she doing?"

"She's in bad shape, Lucas. What happened?"

"I don't know. We left Shorty's, you know, that joint on the river. We was kind of making out in my truck . . . I remember taking off my britches, then I don't remember nothing else."

I sat down next to him on the bunk. It was made of cast iron and suspended from the wall by chains. A thin mattress covered with brown and yellow stains fit inside the rectangular rim. I picked up his hands in mine and turned them over, then pressed my thumb along his finger joints, all the time watching for a flinch in his face.

"A lady's going to come here this afternoon to photograph your hands. In the meantime don't you do anything to bruise them," I said. "Who's the girl?"

"Her name's Roseanne. That's all she told me. She come in with a mess of other people. They run off and left her and then her and me got to knocking back shots. I wouldn't rape nobody, Mr. Holland. I wouldn't beat up a girl, either," he said.

"How do you know?"

"Sir?"

"You don't remember what you did, Lucas . . . Look at me. Don't sign anything, don't answer any of their questions, don't make a statement, no matter what they promise you. You with me?"

"My father got you to come down here?"

"Not exactly."

His blue eyes lingered on mine. They were bloodshot and full of pain, but I could see them trying to reach inside my mind.

"You need a friend. We all do at one time or another," I said.

"I ain't smart but I ain't stupid, either, Mr. Holland. I know about you and my mother. I don't study on it. It ain't no big deal to me."

I stood up from the bunk and looked out the window. Down the street people were coming out of a brick church with a white steeple, and seeds from cottonwood trees were blowing in the wind and I could smell chicken frying in the back of a restaurant.  

"You want me to represent you?" I said.

"Yes, sir, I'd sure appreciate it."

He stared emptily at the floor and didn't look up again.

I stopped at Harley's office downstairs.

"I'll be back for his arraignment," I said.

"Why'd he have to beat the shit out of her?"

"He didn't."

"I guess he didn't top her, either. She probably artificially inseminated herself."

"Why don't you shut up, Harley?"

He rubbed his chin with the ball of his thumb, a smile at the corner of his mouth, his eyes wandering indolently over my face.

Outside, as I got into my Avalon, I saw him crossing the courthouse lawn toward me, the sunlight through the trees freckling on his face. I closed my car door and waited. He leaned one arm on the roof, a dark loop of sweat under his armpit, and smiled down at me, his words gathering in his mouth.

"You sure know how to stick it up a fellow's snout, Billy Bob. I'll surely give you that, yessir. But at least I ain't killed my best friend and I don't know anybody else who has. Have a good day," he said.

Chapter Two

Lucas's arraignment was at eleven Monday morning. At 8 A.M. I met a sheriff's deputy at the courthouse and rode with her in her cruiser to the spot on the river where Lucas and the girl from Shorty's had been found.

The deputy's name was Mary Beth Sweeney. She wore a tan uniform, with a lead-colored stripe down the side of each trouser leg, and a campaign hat that slanted over her brow. Her face was powdered with pale brown freckles and her dark brown hair hung in curls to her shoulders. She was new to the department and seemed to have little interest in either me or her assignment.

"Were you a law officer somewhere else?" I asked.

"CID in the army."

"You didn't want to work for the feds after you got out?" I said.

She raised her eyebrows and didn't answer. We passed Shorty's, a ramshackle club built on pilings over the water, then pulled into an old picnic area that had gone to seed among a grove of pine trees. Yellow crime scene tape was stretched in the shape of a broken octagon around the tree trunks.

"You responded to the 911?" I said.

"I was the second unit to arrive."

"I see."

I got out of the cruiser and stepped under the yellow tape. But she didn't follow me.

"Where was the girl?" I said.

"Down there in those bushes by the water."

"Undressed?"

"Her clothes were strewn around the ground."

"On the ground by her?" I said.

"That's right."

The soil in the clearing was damp and shady, and tire tracks were stenciled across the pine needles that had fallen from the trees.

"And Lucas was in his truck, passed out? About here?" I said.

"Yes, sir."

"You don't have to call me 'sir.' "

I walked down to the riverbank. The water was green and deep, and cottonwood seeds swirled in eddies on top of the current.

"You know, I never heard of a rapist being arrested because he was too drunk to flee the crime scene," I said.

But the deputy didn't answer me. The ground among the bushes was crisscrossed with dozens of footprints. I walked back to where Lucas's truck had been parked. Mary Beth Sweeney still stood outside the crime scene tape, her hands in her back pockets. Her arms looked strong, her stomach flat under her breasts. Her black gunbelt was polished and glinted with tiny lights.

"This is quite a puzzle," I said.

"The sheriff just told me to give you the tour, Mr. Holland."

She put on a pair of dark green aviator's sunglasses and looked at the river.

"Did Lucas attack her in his truck, then pass out? Or did he attack her in the brush and walk back to his truck, have a few more drinks and then pass out?" I said. "You don't have an opinion?"

"I'll drive you back to your car if you're ready," she said

"Why not?" I said.

We drove through rolling fields that were thick with bluebonnets and buttercups, then crossed a rusted iron bridge over the river. The river's bottom was soap rock, and deep in the current you could see the gray, moss-covered tops of boulders and the shadows they made in the current.

"You're pleading your man innocent?" she said.

"You bet . . . You think I'm firing in the well?"

"I just wondered," she said, and didn't speak again until we pulled into the shade of the live oaks that surrounded the courthouse.

I walked to my car, then turned unexpectedly and caught her watching me, her sunglasses hanging from her fingers.

I stopped the prosecutor outside his office just before Lucas's arraignment. The corridor was empty, and our voices echoed off the old marble floor and high wood ceiling.

"You're not going to jam us up on the bail, are you, Marvin?" I said.

"Don't expect any slack on this one, Billy Bob," he replied.

He wore a bowtie and seersucker suit, and his face looked at me with the quiet moral certitude of an ax blade.

"You don't have a rape case. You're not going to make assault and battery without a weapon, either," I said.

"Oh?"

"Lucas doesn't have a bruise on him."

"You see the medical report on her genitalia? Or maybe that's just Lucas's idea of rough sex . . . You want to talk about weapons? How about if he beat her face on the side of the truck?"

"You have evidence of that?"

"It poured down Saturday night. The whole crime scene was washed clean."

"Pretty convenient, Marvin."

"No, pretty sickening. And the charge isn't assault and battery. Where have you been this morning?"

I stared into the righteous light in his eyes and knew, with a sinking of the heart, what was coming next.

"She died an hour ago. The doc says it was probably a brain hemorrhage. You want to plea out, give me a call. He's not going to do the big sleep, but I guarantee you he'll get to be an expert at picking state cotton," he said.

Because Lucas was being arraigned on a Monday morning, he was brought to court on the same wrist chain as the collection of DWIs, wife beaters, and barroom brawlers who had been in the drunk tank over the weekend. Each Monday morning they would ride down to the first floor in an elevator that resembled a packed zoo cage and, in stumbling peckerwood or black or Mexican accents, offer their explanations for the mercurial behavior that seemed to affect their lives like a windstorm blowing arbitrarily through a deserted house.

Normally the weekend miscreants waved at their friends in the courtroom or punched one another in the ribs and snickered while one of their members tried to talk his bail down. But not today. When they sat in the row of chairs at the front of the court and the bailiff unlocked their wrists and dropped the chain to the wood floor, they rounded their shoulders and looked at their shoes or moved a chair space away from Lucas, as though eye contact or proximity to him would stain them with a level of guilt that was not theirs.

I stood next to him when it was his turn to rise and face the court. His father had brought him a clean white shirt and flowered tie and pair of starched khakis, but he was unshaved and his wavy hair was uncut and wet and combed straight back on his collar, so that he looked like a 1950s hood rather an uneducated rural kid whose father had belittled him since he was a child.

Marvin, the prosecutor, asked that Lucas's bail be set at $200,000.

I heard Lucas's breath catch in his throat. I touched the back of his wrist with mine.

"Your Honor, my client is just nineteen and has very little in the way of resources. He has no felony arrests of any kind. He's lived his whole life in this county. The bail request is not only unreasonable, it's deliberately punitive. The real problem is, Marvin doesn't have a case and he knows it."

The judge's glasses were orbs of light and the lines in his face seemed gathered around his mouth like crinkles in papier-mache. " 'Punitive' is it? Tell that to the family of the dead girl. I also love your first-name familiarity. There is nothing I find more heartwarming than to feel I'm involved in a court proceeding that might be conducted by Lum and Abner. Bail is set at one hundred-fifty-thousand dollars. Count yourself fortunate, counselor," he said, and clicked his gavel on a small wood block.

On the way out of the courtroom Vernon Smothers's gnarled hand clenched on my forearm. His gray eyes were jittering with anger.

"Everything you touch turns to shit, Billy Bob," he said

"Go home, Vernon," I replied.

"I don't want my boy locked up with low-rent nigras. Get him in a special cell or something."

"Don't go home. Find a wastebasket and stand in it, Vernon," I said.

I rode up in the elevator with Lucas and a deputy. Lucas's lower body was draped in a clinking net of waist and leg chains. The deputy slid back the wire-mesh door on the elevator, then used a key to unlock a second, barred door that swung out onto the third floor. We walked under a row of electric lights with wire baskets over the bulbs, our footsteps echoing off the sandstone walls, past a series of cells with solid iron doors and food slits, past the tank where the drunks were kept, toward three barred cells that faced back into the corridor. Lucas's cheeks and throat were pooled with color, as though they had been burned with dry ice.

"This is where we keep the superstars," the deputy said. He started to unlock Lucas's wrists in front of the middle cell. A hand and arm came out of the bars to the right and undulated in the air like a serpent.

"You got fresh meat for us, boss man?" the half-naked man in the cell said. His eyes looked maniacal, the structure of his head as though it had been broken in a machinist's vise. His arms were too short for his thick torso, and his chest and pot stomach were white from lack of sunlight and covered with green and red tattoos.

The deputy slipped his baton from the ring on his belt and whanged it off the bars an inch from the tattooed man's hand.

"You stick it out there again, I'll break it," he said.

"Come on, keep my Jell-O tonight and put that sweet thing in here with me," the man said, his palms wrapped around the bars now, his eyes dancing with malevolence six inches from mine. His body exuded a raw, damp odor like sewer gas.

After the deputy had unlocked Lucas's wrists from the manacles, I saw the fingers on both his hands start to tremble.

"Give me a minute," I said to the deputy.

"No problem. But I'm going to lock you inside so nobody don't grab one of your parts. You think the smart-ass here on the right's bad? They ain't thought up a name for that 'un on the other side."

I went into the cell with Lucas and watched the deputy turn the key on us and walk back down the corridor and sit at a small table and take his lunch out of a paper bag.

"I don't care if I cain't remember anything or not, I didn't hurt that girl. I liked her. She always come in there with college kids, but she didn't put on like she was special," he said.

"Which college kids?" I said.

He sat down on the bunk. A blowfly buzzed over the seatless toilet behind him. Lucas's eyes started to film.

"People she went to school with, I guess. Are they gonna electrocute me, Mr. Holland?" he said.

"Texas doesn't have the electric chair anymore. But, no, you won't be tried for capital murder. Just give me some time. We'll get you out of this."

"How?"

I didn't have an answer for him.

On the way out, I heard the man with the misshaped head and white pot stomach laughing in a high, whinnying voice, mimicking the conversation he'd heard in Lucas's cell: "They gonna 'lectrocute me? They gonna 'lectrocute me? . . . Hey, you punk, the black boys gonna take you into the bridal suite and teach you how to pull a train."

He held his chin and loins close against the bars and made a wet, chugging sound like a locomotive.

I went home and fixed lunch in the kitchen. The silence of the house seemed to ring and pop in my ears. I opened all the downstairs windows and pulled back the curtains and felt the wind flow through the hallway and puff open the back screen. The morning paper lay folded on an oak table in front of the hallway mirror. A full-length photo of Lucas in handcuffs stared up at me. He didn't have my eyes, I thought. They were obviously his mother's. But the hair, the cut of the jaw, the six-foot-one frame . . . None of those belonged to Vernon Smothers.

I went back into the kitchen and tried to finish the fried pork chop sandwich I'd fixed.

His mother and I had gone to high school together. Both her parents had been road musicians who worked oil field honkytonks from Texas City to Casper, Wyoming. When she was sixteen she met and married Vernon Smothers, who was ten years older than she. When she was nineteen she found me in Houston and asked for money so she could leave him.

I offered her half of my ancient rented house in the Heights.

Two weeks later a fellow Houston police officer called Vernon and told him I was living with his wife. He came for her at night when I was not home, in the middle of a hurricane that tore the pecan tree out of my front yard. I never saw her again.

A month after Lucas was born she was electrocuted trying to fix the well pump that Vernon had repaired with adhesive tape from the medicine cabinet.

I wrapped my unfinished sandwich in wax paper and put it in the icebox. When I turned around, L.Q. Navarro was leaning against the back doorjamb, his arms folded across his chest. His Stetson was the color of ash, his eyes as lustrous as obsidian.

"How's it Hangin', L.Q. ?"I said.  

"This weather's a pistol. It don't get any better."

"You're not going to try to mess me up today, are you?"

"I wouldn't dream of it, Billy Bob."

He slipped the scarlet rose from the top buttonhole of his shirt and rolled it by the stem between his fingers. Where the rose had been was a hole that glowed with a bloodred light, like a votive candle burning inside red glass.

"It was an accident,"I said.

"That's what I keep telling you. Get rid of this for me, will you?"He drew the rose across my palm. My fingers constricted as though the tendons had been severed by a barber's razor.

Ten minutes later I heard an automobile in front. I opened the door and looked down the flagstone walk that dissected the wall of poplars at the foot of the lawn, and saw the sheriff's deputy named Mary Beth Sweeney getting out of her cruiser. She fixed her campaign hat so that the leather cord drew tight against the back of her head, pushed her shirt down inside her gunbelt with her fingers, and walked toward me. She had a walk that my father would have referred to as a "fine carriage," her shoulders erect, her chin lifted, her long legs slightly accentuating the movement of her hips.

"How you doin'?" I said.

"You going to use a PI in discovery?"

"Probably . . . You want to come inside?"

"Out here is good. At the river, night before last? The scene investigator picked up a vinyl bag-load of beer cans. They're not in the evidence locker."

"Why are you telling me this?"

"That kid's going down on a bad bounce. I'm not buying into it."

"You can lose your job for this."

"Look, you know all these things. The victim's teeth were broken. Your man didn't have any cuts on his hands. There was no weapon. When we cuffed him, he was too drunk to stand up."

"Criminal Investigation Division, huh?" I said.

"What about it?"

"Doing grunt work in a place like this . . . You must like the mild summers. In July we fry eggs on the sidewalks."

"Use what I've told you, Mr. Holland, or wear it in your hat," she said.

She walked back to her cruiser, her attention already focused on a cardinal perched atop a rose trellis, her hat tipped forward on her curly head like a Marine Corps DI's.

Excerpted from CIMARRON ROSE © Copyright 2001 by James Lee Burke. Reprinted with permission by Hyperion Press. All rights reserved.

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