Cimarron Rose

'You're really a breath of fresh air, Marvin. You ought to get a Roman collar and start counseling people,' I said.

'This isn't Mexico. You stay away from Moon, Billy Bob.'

'You want to spell that out?'

'We don't have free-fire zones in Deaf Smith. You get into any of that Ranger-danger dogshit here, you're going to be in front of a grand jury yourself.'

I picked up the photos of my father from his desk blotter and put them in my shirt pocket.

'Sammy Mace is in town. Hanging with Jack Vanzandt and this Felix Ringo character. I'd give it my attention,' I said, and didn't bother to close the door when I left.

That afternoon I was staring down from my office window into the street, wondering if I would ever extricate Lucas from the legal process that was about to eat him alive, when a Mexican kid on a Harley pulled to the curb and walked into the archway on the first floor. A minute later my secretary buzzed me and I opened the door of my inner office.

'You're Virgil Morales?' I said.

He was tall, his bare arms clean of jailhouse or biker art, his Indian-black hair curly on the back of his neck. His face could have been that of a male model's, except for one eye that had a lazy drift in it.

'How'd you know?' he asked.

'Oh, you hear things.' I grinned. 'Why'd you decide to come see me?'

He looked at the glass-encased guns of my great-grandfather on the wall.

'I want to do the right thing,' he replied.

'Good for the conscience, I guess.'

'They re-filed some old charges against me in San Antone. Mr Ringo says he can square it.'

'What charges?'

'Holding some reefer and a few whites. I'm on probation, see, and my PO can stick me back in county. I might get consecutive time, too.'

'It all makes sense,' I said.

'They get you in the system, they jam you up. It's like they only got so many names in the computer and these are the guys they keep jamming up.'

'What have you got for me, Virgil?'

He wore a sleeveless purple T-shirt and jeans and shined, half-topped leather boots. He sat down and rubbed his hands up and down his forearms.

'The night Roseanne got killed? I stopped in that picnic ground,' he said. 'Lucas was passed out drunk in his truck. Roseanne wanted me to drive her home. I wish I had. But there ain't no way Lucas killed her.'

'Anybody else see this?'

'Yeah, some college girl from Austin. She was on my bike. That's why I couldn't give Roseanne a ride. Maybe you can find her.'

I nodded while he talked. His eyes wandered around the office; occasionally he squeezed the inside of his thigh, high up by his scrotum. I had the feeling he could eat a hot cigarette and not miss a beat.

'Why didn't you tell someone this earlier?' I asked.

'I was in county.'

'You got into Bunny Vogel's face the other night. You weren't in county then.'

'I just got out. You don't want the information, I'll boogie. Where'd those old guns come from?'

'Out at Shorty's you called Bunny a pimp. Why would you do that?'

'I don't remember saying that.'

'Other people do.'

He shook his head profoundly. 'It don't come to mind. Maybe I was just hot. Bunny and me had some trouble over Roseanne once.'

'He took her away from you?'

Virgil shrugged. 'Yeah, that about says it. I still liked her, though. She was a good girl. Too good for all them rich kids.'

I tried to read his face, his voice, the apparent genuine sentiment in his last statement.

'How old are you, Virgil?'

'Twenty-one.'

'I think you got a lot of mileage.'

'You gonna tell Mr Ringo I hepped out?'

I pushed a yellow legal pad and a pencil across the desk to him.

'Write this stuff down for me, will you?' I said.

After he was gone, I walked to the window and watched him start his Harley. and roar off the square, his exhaust echoing between the buildings. When I turned around, L.Q. Navarro was sitting in the deerhide chair, throwing cards from his Ranger deck into the crown of his hat.

'You believe him?' he asked.

'He can bust Marvin's case.'

'That boy's jailwise, bud.'

'Right. So why would he trade off a chickenshit possession charge against perjury in a homicide trial?'

'Picking up the soap in a county bag ain't no more fun than it is in Huntsville.'

'L.Q., you could have out-debated Daniel Webster.'

He cut his head and grinned, as he always did when he had decided to desist, and with two fingers flipped the joker into the hat.

Through my library window the sun was red and molten over the hills, the willows on the edge of the tank puffing in the wind. Mary Beth and Pete had been making dinner sandwiches in the kitchen. I didn't hear her behind me.

She saw L.Q.' s revolver, the belt wrapped around the holster, on top of my desk, next to Great-grandpa Sam's open journal. I had removed the old cartridges from the leather loops and inserted fresh ones from a box of Remingtons. Then I had taken apart the revolver and cleaned and oiled the springs and mechanisms in it and run a bore brush through the barrel until a silver luster had returned to the rifling.

'I didn't think you kept any guns in your house,' she said.

'It belonged to L.Q. Navarro,' I said.

'I see.'

'I had it in a safe deposit box. I was afraid it might rust.' I put it and the box of Remingtons and the bore brush and the can of oil inside the desk drawer and closed the drawer.

She went to the window and looked at the sunset.

'Is it for Moon?' she said.

'Sometimes a guy keeps a blank space in his mind.'

'Not a good answer.'

She walked back into the kitchen.

We went down to the tank and spread a checkered cloth on the grass and set out our sandwiches and deviled eggs on paper plates. Pete scooped night crawlers out of a coffee can and baited the hooks on three cane poles and swung the bobbers out on the flooded reeds. The sun dipped over the hills, and the dusk felt moist and heated from the water and dense with insects.

'You need to back off,' she said.

'From a guy like Moon?' I asked.

'From all of it. You're straying too deep into federal territory.'

She kept her gaze on the tank and never looked at me. She hooked her thumbs in the pockets of her riding pants.

I put my hand on her back. I could feel the heat in her skin through her shirt.

'These guys threatened Pete; they were going to take me down in pieces,' I said.

'You think that's lost on me?'

'We're seeing each other and I don't even know who you are,' I said.

She didn't reply.

'Mary Beth?' I said.

'Maybe you don't know who you are yourself, Billy Bob,' she said. She turned and looked me full in the face. Her throat was bladed with color. 'I know what y'all did in Mexico. The man you idolize was a self-appointed executioner. Is that what you want to be?'

'He was a brave man, Mary Beth. You shouldn't speak of him like that.'

She opened the top of the wicker basket and took out the tin cups for lemonade and started to fill them. Then she stopped and brushed a long curl out of her eye.

'I apologize for remarking on your friend. Say good night to Pete for me,' she said, and walked toward the house and her car.

I went to the health club at six-thirty the next morning and lay on the tile stoop at the rear of the steam room and began the series of exercises the doctor had recommended for my back. The room was empty, billowing with vapor, the temperature set at 130 degrees.