It was a week night, so the kids inside those cars were not the kind to worry about school. Did they neck with the innocent, dry lust of a previous generation? Or drink beer with a sense of discovery and wonder, as though the spring season and their own physical yearning and the brassy cold glow in the backs of their throats held a portent for them that was like an endless song? Was the greenness of their lives like a bursting flower scattering pollen from their open palms?
Or were they already bitten with ennui and hatred of one another, joyless in their couplings, insatiable in their disdain for difference without knowing why? Darl Vanzandt's '32 Ford was backed into the middle of the row under the canvas awning. Its cherry-red finish gleamed with the wet, hard luster of a tunnel wound. The passenger's window was rolled down, and Darl's bare arm was curled on the sill, the bicep pumped like a small, white grapefruit. A girl sat on his lap, combing his hair, shaping and reshaping it as though she were creating a sculpture. He turned his face toward the restaurant window and his expression was as morally empty, his eyes as sightless, as a perforated sack of skin stuffed with chemical jelly.
The waitress brought me a steak, with two fried eggs on top of it, and an order of refried beans and tortillas. I broke the egg yokes on the steak, sliced the meat in strips and rolled the strips with beans inside a tortilla. When I looked up, the girl from Darl's car was running through the rain for the restaurant. She came through the door, shaking water out of her hair, and dropped a quarter into the payphone by my booth, glancing back through the window, her slippered foot tapping on the floor.
'Mr Vanzandt?… Yeah, it's Holly. Look, Darl's not exactly in good driving shape,' she said. 'Yeah, well, I'd drive him home and all that, but he just told me to take my diaphragm and get the fuck out of his life, so I think I'm just gonna say nighty-nighty and let somebody else clean up his shit. Bye, now.'
After she hung up she looked at the phone and said, 'Fuckhead,' and went out the door.
While I was paying my check at the cash register, I saw Jack Vanzandt's Cadillac drive into the parking area with a black man behind the wheel and Jack get out in a pair of jeans and tennis shoes and a polo shirt and walk to his son's car. Darl still sat in the passenger's seat, but now with his head on his chest. Jack tipped Darl's head back and tried to wake him, but Darl's face was bloodless, his eyes closed, his skin glowing with the tallowy shine of melted wax.
By the time I started my Avalon, Jack had gotten behind the wheel of Darl's car and had driven the two of them to the highway's entrance. Jack was waiting for a line of traffic to pass so he could turn left, while I was about to turn right and go back to the West End. Then I had one of those moments that nullify all easy definitions about human behavior and the nature of love.
A pair of truck high beams flooded the interior of the chopped-down Ford with a naked white brilliance, and I saw Darl's head on his father's shoulder, his eyes still closed. Then Jack brushed something away from his boy's eye, a food crumb, perhaps, and kissed him on the forehead, his face filled with an undisguised grief.
It was still raining and dark at sunrise the next morning. I read from Great-grandpa Sam's journal at the breakfast table.
August 30, 1891
The preacher who ordained me had been branded in the face with burning horse shoes. He said all good things come to the righteous and the just. His words rose like snow flakes from the heat that had been seared into his skin. But today those words ring hollow on my ears. I have proved unworthy of my ordination. It is a folly for me to pretend otherwise.
Them in the mud caves are drunk tonight. They brought in two white prostitutes and killed a wild pig and cooked it in a brush fire on the river bank and danced around the flames to fiddle music. I have thought of heading south for the Red River and Texas, but federal marshals have been stationed along the tick-fever line to keep sick herds from trailing up to the railheads in Kansas and I will be served with a federal warrant and locked in manacles for sure.
My oil lamp has burned low and our little house is filled with shadows as I write these lines. The dirt in our garden is dry and cracked and swarming with insects, and Jennie is trying to swat the deer mice out of the melons and pumpkins with a burlap bag. It won't do no good, but I will not try to tell her that.
It is hard for me to think of myself as a fugitive from the law. The idea of it makes the insides of my hands sting as though bitten by sweatbees. Them from the mud caves are dipping whiskey out of the busted head of a barrel now, framed in the firelight like painted Indians. At Little Round Top I watched soldiers, boys, really, die in the V of my musket sight. Those memories cause me grave regret, even though it was war. But now I see rocks high on the hill above the Cimarron, a sharpshooter's den made for a Henry repeater or Winchester rifle. Down below, the Doolins and Daltons tip their cups in the firelight. I have to wipe the sweat off my palms onto my britches and not think the thoughts I am thinking.
I tell myself, Better to slake thirst with whiskey than blood. But if I have come to this, I know my life as a drunkard is about to begin a
gain. Tomorrow I'm going to ride north to the court in Wichita and leave the Rose of Cimarron behind. I have great trepidation about my treatment in a Yankee court and do not know if I will ever see her or Texas again. I hear tell a Scottish slaver wrote the beautiful hymn 'Amazing Grace'. I never thought much on the words 'a wretch like me' until this moment.
I'll ride through the camp below the mud caves in the morning, just so the Daltons and Doolins can never say they didn't have a chance at my back. Emmett can usually control the others, but if he ain't around, maybe my stay on the Cimarron won't end so bad after all.
* * *
chapter thirty-one
The next day Marvin Pomroy recalled Virgil Morales to the stand and tore him up. After Marvin sat back down, I looked over at his table. His coat hung on the back of his chair, and his white shirt looked as bright as new snow against his fire-engine-red suspenders. He saw me looking at him and raised his eyebrows and shrugged. Marvin didn't take prisoners.
During a midmorning recess Emma Vanzandt rose from a bench in the corridor outside the courtroom and stopped me and Temple Carroll. Darl remained seated behind her, dressed like a fraternity boy, in grey slacks and a blue sports coat, a gold chain and tiny gold football strung outside the collar of his shirt.
'Got a minute?' she said. Her face was heavily made up, and threadlike lines spread from her eyes and the sides of her mouth when she feigned a smile for passersby.
'Sorry,' I said. Down the corridor I saw Jack Vanzandt buying a cigar at the concession counter.
Emma's thumb and index finger circled my wrist.
'Don't do this,' she said.
'What?'
'Blame the girl's death on Darl.'
'He's not a defendant.'
'Don't insult me, Billy Bob.'
'Your boy's never been made accountable. Why don't y'all let him stand on his own for once?'