Cimarron Rose (Billy Bob Holland 1)

'Can you just determine if y'all lay any lines around Waco about 1940 or so?' I asked.

'That's a whole lot easier. Can I call you back when I have more time?' she said.

I gave her my office number and went home for lunch. The light on my telephone answering machine was flashing in the library. I pushed the 'play' button, trying not to be controlled by the expectation in my chest.

'It's me, Billy Bob. I'm sorry I left the way I did. I'm not even supposed to call you. I'll try to get back to you later,' Mary Beth's voice said.

The tape announced the time. I had missed her call by fifteen minutes.

I fixed a sandwich and some potato salad and a glass of iced tea and sat down to eat on the back porch. The fields were marbled with shadow and the breeze was warm and flecked with rain and I could smell cows watering at my neighbor's windmill. On the other side of the tank, beyond the line of willows that puffed with wind, was the network of baked wagon ruts and hoofprints where the Chisholm Trail had traversed my family's property. Sometimes I believed Great-grandpa Sam was still out there, in chaps and floppy hat, a bandanna tied across his face against the dust, trying to turn his cows away from the bluffs when dry lightning caused them to rumble across the prairie louder than the thunder itself.

I wished I had lived back in his time, when men like Garland T. Moon were bounced off cottonwood trees and federal agents didn't make you fall in love with them and then leave on airplanes at four in the morning with no explanation.

It was a self-pitying way to think, but I didn't care. I went into the library and got out Sam's journal and read it while I finished lunch.

August 28, 1891

Maybe burning out them four caves wasn't such a good idea. The

gang has come back from Pearl Younger's whorehouse and now the Dalton brothers seem to think their leadership is on the line. To make matters worse, Emmett Dalton, the only one of them who probably has half a brain, told me my name has been put on a warrant by the U.S. court up in Wichita, because I am now considered a known associate of train robbers and murderers.

I understand the judge who done this is the same one who told the Colorado cannibal Albert Packer there was only seven good Democrats in the mountains where Packer got froze in for the winter and Packer had went and ate five of them. I now wish Packer had carried his knife and fork into the court and made it six.

The Cimarron is naught but ribbons of muddy water now and carrion birds perch on the ribs of the wild horses the Dalton-Doolins have shot and butchered down on the banks. The hills are orange and sear with drought all the way to Kansas, and dust and chickweed blows up in flumes that will sand the skin off your bones.

The poppy husks in the fields have hardened and dried and they rattle and hiss like snakes when I ride down to the river to draw water for our garden. When I see the fireflies in the trees and hear the cicadas in the evening, I wonder how I have strayed so far from the smell of rain and flowers on the Texas Gulf. It is the feeling I always had as a child, that everything was ending, that the world's sins was fixing to turn the sky to flames. I never could account for the notions I had as a child. But it is feelings like this that always made the word whiskey want to break like a bubble on the back of my tongue.

I know if I stay on the Cimarron, I will be gunned down for sure or forced once again to kill other men. Jennie woke me last night when she heard sounds by the outhouse. It was only hogs, but she commenced crying and said she has heard her relatives talking and she fears for my life. I have not knowed her to cry before.

It is cowardly to run, though, particularly from the likes of them down in the mud caves. We never done it when we marched alongside Granny Lee and I'll be damned if I'll do it now.

These are prideful thoughts, all. God forgive me for them. I feel desolate and lost and would ride into the worst storm on earth for just a drop of rain.

I didn't hear from Mary Beth again that day. That night I dreamed of a picnic ground filled with children. A green river curled through cottonwoods behind them, and a rainbow arched through the sky over their heads. In their midst was a goat-footed satyr, his vascular arms as white as milk, a clutch of balloons strung from one fist. At first I couldn't see his face, then he rotated his head toward me, his mouth grinning, the scab on his lip as shiny as plastic. The children ran toward the balloons and swirled about his thighs like disembodied figures in a maelstrom.

* * *

chapter twenty-six

In the morning I drove to Bunny Vogel's house. His father came out on the porch, barefoot and without a shirt. He was an inept tank of a man, whose doughlike hand dwarfed his cigarette.

'You the lawyer been coming around?' he said.

'That's right.'

'He went swimming. At the beach, up the river,' he said. 'You going up there?'

'I expect.'

'Tell him he went off without cleaning the grease trap. Now there's some black gunk overflowing out of the sink. Whole house smells like an elephant backed up and farted in it.'

I drove to the small stretch of sandy beach built by the county at the curve of the river. Bunny's maroon '55 Chevy was parked back in the trees, the waxed finish and green-tinted windows sprinkled with pine needles. A heavyset Mexican girl in a black bathing suit sat at a picnic table, watching Bunny do push-ups, his toes on the table, his arms propped on a bench. He wore only a pair of lavender running shorts, and his triceps and back muscles ridged like rolls of metal washers.

When he saw me, his face reddened, and he sat on the bench and dusted the sand off his feet and began fitting on his flip-flops. His long, bronze-colored hair hung down over his disfigured jawline.

'Your name keeps coming up in my trial preparation,' I said.

'I ain't interested,' he said.