Cimarron Rose (Billy Bob Holland 1)

'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.'