Cimarron Rose (Billy Bob Holland 1)

'Man my mother brung home last night.' He picked at his fingers and flung a rock into the tank. Then he flung another one.

I sat down next to him.

'Is your mom okay?' I asked.

'She ain't got up yet. She won't be right the rest of the day.'

'Where could I find this fellow?' I said.

We went into the barn and I strapped on L.Q.' s roweled spurs and saddled my Morgan. I pulled a heavy coil of rodeo polyrope off a wood peg and hung it on the pommel. It was five-eights of an inch in diameter and had an elongated eye cinched at the tip with fine wire.

'What are we doing, Billy Bob?' Pete said.

'The man who owned these Mexican spurs, he used to tell me, "Sometimes you've got to set people's perspective straight".'

I put my arm down and pulled him up on the Morgan's rump.

'What's "perspective" mean?' Pete said.

We rode through the back of my farm, crossed the creek and went up the slope through the pines. The ground was moist and netted with sunlight under the Morgan's shoes, and ahead I could see the stucco church where Pete and I went to Mass and the deserted filling station on the corner and up the dirt street an unpainted plank-walled tavern with a shingle-roof porch and boxes of petunias in the windows.

I stopped the Morgan by the side window.

'You see him?' I asked.

That's him yonder, by the pool table. The one eating chili beans out of a paper plate.'

'I want you to go on back to the café and wait for me.'

'Maybe you oughtn't to do this, Billy Bob. My eye don't hurt now.'

'Did you eat lunch yet?'

'He's got a frog sticker in his right-hand pocket. I seen it when he…'

'When he what?'

'Hung up his britches on my mother's bedpost.'

I put five dollars in Pete's hand, 'Better get you a hamburger steak and one of those peach ice cream sundaes. I'll be along in a minute.'

Pete slid off the Morgan's rump and walked down the street toward the café, looking back over his shoulder at me, the lump by his eye as red as a boil.

I took the polyrope off the pommel, unfastened the pig string that held the coil in place, worked the length of the rope through my palms and ran the bottom end through the eye at the tip. Then I double-folded the rope along half the loop, picked up the slack off the ground, and rode my Morgan up on the porch and through the doorway, ducking down on his withers to get under the jamb.

The inside of the tavern was well lighted and paneled with lacquered yellow pine, and neon Lone Star and Pearl beer signs and an enormous Texas flag were hung over the bar.

'I hope you brung your own dustpan and whisk broom,' the bartender said.

I rode the Morgan between a cluster of tables and chairs and across a small dance floor toward the pool table. The man eating from a paper plate looked at me, smiling, a spoonful of chili halfway to his mouth. He wore a neatly barbered blond beard and a shark tooth necklace and a blue leather vest and black jeans and silver boots sheathed with metal plates.

I whipped the loop three times over my head and flung it at the man with the blond beard. It slapped down on him hard and caught him under one arm and across the top of the torso. He tried to rise from the chair and free himself, but I wound the rope tightly around the pommel, brought my left spur into the Morgan's side, and catapulted the blond man off his feet and dragged him caroming through tables and bar stools and splintering chairs, into an oak post and the legs of a pinball machine and the side of the jukebox, tearing a huge plastic divot out of the casing. Then I ducked my head under the doorjamb, and the Morgan clopped across the porch and into the road, and I gave him the spurs again.

I dragged the blond man skittering through the parking lot, across layers of flattened beer cans and bottle caps embedded in the dirt. His clothes were gray with dust now, his face barked and bleeding, both of his hands gripped on the rope as he tried to pull himself free of the pressure that bound his chest.

I reined in the Morgan and turned him in a slow circle while the blond man rose to his feet.

'Tell me why this is happening to you,' I said.