Cimarron Rose

'Anybody question Moon about the sheriff's murder?' I asked.

'I don't see him as a strong suspect.'

'Moon was in the old county prison when the sheriff was a roadbull,' I said. Marvin was tilted back in his swivel chair.

The connections didn't come together in his face. 'Moon said a couple of guards sodomized him on an oil barrel. He said they did it to him every Sunday morning.'

'You're saying the sheriff was a pervert?'

'I don't know anything he wasn't.'

'If Moon's got a hard-on for the whole county, why does he wait forty years to come back and do a number on us? I think the sheriff was killed for other reasons,' Marvin said.

'Some people might call an ax across the face an indicator of revenge.'

But I could tell he was thinking of something else. He took off his glasses and polished the lenses with a piece of Kleenex. He fitted them back on his nose, his face blank, as though debating whether to expose the feelings he usually kept stored in a private box. His hair was so neat it looked like fine strands of metal on his head.

'I couldn't sleep last night,' he said. 'What those guys tried to do to you… I'd like to catch up with them on a personal basis.'

'It's not your style, Marvin.'

'You don't get it. I'm a law officer in a county that's probably run by the Dixie Mafia. I just can't prove it.'

I walked back across the street to the office and took the mail out of the box in the first-floor foyer. The foyer was cool and made of stucco and tile and decorated with earthen jars planted with hibiscus. Mixed in with the letters and circulars was a brown envelope with no postage, addressed to me in pencil.

For some reason-its soiled surfaces, the broken lettering, a smear of dried food where the seal had been licked-it felt almost obscene in my hand. I didn't open it until I was inside my office, as though my ignoring it would transform it into simply another piece of crank mail written by a dissatisfied client or a convict who thought his personal story was worth millions in movie rights. Then I cracked it across the top with my finger, the way you peel back a rotted bandage.

Inside was a Polaroid picture of Pete on the playground at the Catholic elementary school. The penciled page ripped out of a cheap notebook read: 'This was took this morning. When we get finished carving on him, his parts will fit in your mailbox.'

I called the principal at the school. She was a classic administrator; she did not want to hear about problems and viewed those who brought them to her as conspirators who manufactured situations to ruin her day.

'I just saw Pete. He's in the lunchroom,' she said.

'I'll pick him up at three. Don't let him walk home,' I said.

'What's wrong?'

'Some people might try to hurt him.'

'What's going on here, Mr Holland?'

'I'm not sure.'

'I'm aware you pay his tuition and you're concerned for his welfare, but we have other children here as well. This sounds like a personal matter of some kind.'

'I'll call you back,' I said. I hung up and punched in Temple Carrol's number.

'We need to throw a net over Roy Devins,' I said.

'What happened?'

I told her about the visit of the three men to my house the previous night.

'They knew about my rope-dragging Devins out of the bar. Devins was in the sack with Pete's mother. She's a drunk and gets mixed up with bikers and dopers sometimes.'

'You told this to Marvin?'

'What's he going to do? Half the cops in the county are on a pad. He's lucky he hasn't been assassinated.'

'Look, don't handle that letter. If we can lift some prints, Marvin can run them through AFIS. I'll get back to you.'

I closed the blinds and sat in the gloom and tried to think. These were the same men who thought they could terrorize Moon and run him out of town, except he turned the situation around on them and mutilated Roy Devins. But why put heat on Moon? Because he'd been out at the Hart Ranch? Who were they?

L.Q. Navarro sat in a swayback deerhide chair in the corner, one foot propped up on the wastebasket. He kept throwing his hat through the air onto the point of his boot, gathering it up, and throwing it again.

'Time to go to the bank,' he said.

'I figured that's what you'd say.'

'You just gonna study on it?'

'I gave it up, L.Q. It got you dead.'

'Them that won't protect their home and family don't deserve neither one. That's what you used to tell me.'

'Maybe I aim to cool them out. Maybe that's what's really on my mind.'

'Come on, bud, that little boy cain't be hanging out in the breeze, not with some rat-bait writing letters about killing him. If it was me, I'd blow that fellow's liver out and drink an ice-cold Carta Blanca while I was at it… Sorry, my way of putting things probably ain't always well thought out.'

I went downstairs to the bank, then into the vault where the safety deposit boxes were kept. I carried my rental box into a private enclosure and set it on a table and opened the hinged lid. Lying amidst my childhood coin collection and my father's Illinois pocket watch was L.Q.'s holstered double-action revolver. The steel had the soft sheen of liquorice; the ivory handles seemed molded into the steel, rather than attached with screws, and age had given them a faint yellow cast, as though the layer of calluses on L.Q.'s palm had rubbed its color into them.

I pulled back the hammer to half-cock and opened the loading gate and rotated the cylinder so I could see the whorls of light in each empty chamber. Then I holstered the pistol again and wrapped the belt and buckle around the holster and stuck it in a paper bag and walked back up to my office.

Temple Carrol had called back and left a message with my secretary-Roy Devins, whom Garland T. Moon had mutilated, had checked out of the hospital, all bills unpaid, and was thought to have taken a Greyhound bus out of town.

I took L.Q.' s revolver home that afternoon and placed it in my desk drawer in the library and read from Great-grandpa Sam's journal.

August 14, 1891

The Rose of Cimarron and me went to Denver last week on the Santa Fe Railroad and took a room as man and wife in the Brown Palace Hotel, a building which is a marvel even for these modern times. Jennie could not get over riding up ten floors on an elevator, and the truth is neither could I. The lobby was filled with potted ferns and red- velvet chairs and settees that was brought from England and which Queen Victoria was said to have sat in. The dinner was prairie chicken stuffed with rice. They give us little bowls to wash our fingers in that Jennie thought was for soup. Later, we drank lemonade with mint leaves in it and ate oysters out of silver ice buckets and listened to the singer Lillie Langtry perform. Most of the guests seemed to be Republican business men. But they was a pretty good sort just the same.

Wyatt and Morgan Earp, Dallas Stoudenmire, Johnny Ringo, Joe Lefores, and the tubercular drunkard Doc Holliday have been here and have died or gone on to whatever places are left for their kind. The streets of Denver are lit with gas lamps, and gunmen and Indians and rowdy miners are not welcome. I don't think Jennie can see it though. Denver is not the future. It's the Cherokee Strip and her people and maybe even the likes of me that's the past.

I had a terrible lesson on the way back. A grass fire burned down the trestle over a gorge and we was stuck on the prairie for two days. We walked to a camp of Tonkawa Indians that stayed half-starved during the winter because the agents stole the money that was for their food. Jennie got a box of canning jars from the train and showed the squaws how to put up preserves. She looked right elegant in her long dress, boiling tomatoes on a stone oven and pouring the stew in glass jars with a spoon set inside so the glass didn't break from the heat. I thought maybe we might have an ordinary life after all, maybe up in Wyoming or Montana where nobody ever heard of the Doolin and Dalton gangs.