She shook her head. 'You're personally involved with this one, Billy Bob. You're not seeing things like you should… How do I say it?'
'Come on, Temple. Don't be that way.'
'How about that Sweeney broad? You know she's an undercover operative of some kind. When the feds or whoever they are get finished with whatever they're doing around here, she'll take off and you and me and Pete and Lucas will still be chopping in the same cotton patch. Except one of us never knew who his real friends were.'
'That's not true. You know the respect I have for you.'
'The word the girl in Austin uses all the time? It's fuck. Yeah, that's it, fuck. As in fuck it.'
I picked up the bill and paid it at the register in front. When I came back to the table, Temple had gone.
I couldn't sleep that night. I went downstairs in my robe and turned on the desk lamp in the library and, with heat lightning veining the sky outside, read from Great-grandpa Sam's journal.
August 26, 1891
I convinced myself the Rose of Cimarron should not be blamed for the crimes committed by her kinfolks. She was reared among people that's hardly human and it is only through God's grace she has survived as unsoiled as she is. But that don't mean I have to abide the likes of Blackface Charley Bryant and them others who think holding unarmed people at gunpoint somehow adds several inches to what I suspect is their pitiful excuse for a pecker.
This collection of homicidal pissants not only steals from each other, they pass their diseases back and forth through their squaws. Their defenders might say they was victims of the railroads or carpetbag government. But I was with boys of the Fourth Texas at Gettysburg who went up those hills into federal cannon with their uniforms in rags and without no shoes on their feet. In camp you could hang your gold watch on a tree branch overnight and come morning it'd be glinting in the sunlight when you opened your eyes.
It is thoughts like these that has been building in me like steam in a tea kettle with a cork in the snout.
The stink on this bunch has run off all the game, and in the meantime they won't keep their hogs penned and have let them turn feral. So now when they can't rustle cows they have taken to shooting wild horses for meat. In the late evening they lay up on the bluff with an old Sharp's buffalo rifle that has an elevator sight on it and kill them as they come down to drink from the Cimarron. It a heart-wrenching and sickening spectacle for anyone who loves horses to witness. What finally tore it was I looked out the back window of our cabin and there was the biggest shithog I ever seen, an ax-handle thick across the shoulders, rooting out every one of our potatoes and trampling our tomato vines into green string. I put a rope on him and walked him behind my horse down to Blackface Charley's cave and told him and three others they owed me a season's worth of canned produce and they'd better pick it out of their own gardens and not steal it, either.
Charley said since I fed the hog, it was now mine and we was square. The skin where he was burned by his own revolver blowing up in his face crinkles like dried snake skin when he smiles.
Last evening about eight of them headed for Pearl Younger's cathouse in Fort Smith. I kept looking at them caves and the garbage on the banks and the squaws peeling strips of jerky off a skinned horse, and finally I holstered on my Navy. 36's and walked on down to the bluffs with a five-gallon can of coal oil. One of the Doolin boys thought he had a case to make, so I did have to gun-whip him a mite and haul him by the seat of his britches down the slope and fling him in the river, although that had not been my intention. In the meantime the squaws sat down and watched and thought it was all big fun. In ten minutes I had four of them caves blooming with black smoke, long columns of it that fed way up into the sky. The burlap and blankets and straw give it heat, and you could hear ammunition popping like firecrackers and whiskey jugs and preserve jars blowing apart inside. Jennie stood up on the hillock in a deerskin dress and watched me like I had lost my mind.
When I come back up the slope she was nowhere in sight. I figured it was not easy for her to see me burn out her kinfolk. I was fixing to tell her I didn't bust nary a cap from my Navy. 36's, which was not the way it would have gone before my ordination. Then I seen her bareback on her horse out in a field of sunflowers, wearing that old deerskin dress without no underclothes. In the twilight her skin had the glow of a new rose, and she was smiling at me, and I knew she was truly the most beautiful woman a man was ever graced with.
Maybe I got rid of the worst part of my violent nature. But damn if I've banked the fires of my love and desire for the Rose of Cimarron.
Oh well. I reckon the story of us all is an on-going one.
While I was reading from my great-grandfather's journal, a retired school janitor and his wife were parking their car in front of their home in Deaf Smith's black district. It was a Honda, one they had bought used three years ago through a finance company and had just made the final payment on the previous week.
The thieves who boosted it that night slim-jimmed the door, broke the steering wheel lock, and wired the ignition in less than three minutes. By the time the retired janitor, who heard the snapping sound of the wheel lock through the window of his second-story bathroom, could get down the stairs to the front door, his Honda was speeding through the intersection at the end of the block, followed by what he described as a 'hot rod car got a shine like a red candy apple.'
The thieves parked the stolen car in the grass by the four-lane divided highway outside of town, then squirted a can of lighter fluid over the upholstery and tossed a burning truck flare through the open window. The flames rippled along the fabric like strips of warm color from a chemical rainbow, then the wind swirled the fire in a vortex that flattened against the headliner and curled out over the roof, consuming the seats, popping the front windows into Coke bottle glass on the hood.
The thieves waited on the pedestrian overpass, drinking from quart bottles of beer, passing a joint back and forth while the Honda burned a hundred yards north of them. One of them took time to urinate against the abutment that supported the chainlink archway overhead, one that the thieves sliced open with bolt cutters by the north rail so the peeled-back wire could not be seen by a car approaching from the south.
Mary Beth patrolled this same section of highway around 11 p.m. every night she was on duty. She usually cruised through the drive-in restaurant just outside the city limits, the parking lot at Shorty's, the picnic area by the river where Roseanne Hazlitt was attacked, then made a U-turn through the center ground at the county line, just north of the overpass.
The retired janitor called in the report on his Honda at 10:26. The report of a burning automobile by the side of the highway was called in anonymously at 10:49. Two minutes later Mary Beth had hit her siren and emergency flasher and was headed full-bore for the overpass.
As she approached from the south, she saw three males in silhouette inside the chain-link archway, possibly kids who had climbed the overpass to better see the fire that had spread from the stolen car into an adjacent field.
She saw the three figures turn and run to the far side of the overpass, her blue, white, and red flasher whip off the support walls on each side of her, then an object that came from above, out of the darkness, that seemed to have no source or context.
The thieves had probably taken the seventy-pound block of concrete from the site of a demolished building. It was rectangular in shape, jagged on each end, spiked with twisted steel rods that protruded from the concrete like handles.
It exploded through the center of the front window, gutting the dashboard, raking the twelve-gauge pump shotgun out of its locked holder, blowing glass and electrical dials and radio parts into the backseat, embedding in the wire-mesh screen behind the front seat like a cannonball.
The cruiser spun sideways, its tires scorching black lines across the asphalt, an ambulance behind it swerving out of control into the center ground to avoid a collision.
A paramedic was the first person to the cruiser. When he opened the door, Mary Beth's campaign hat rolled out on the grass, the crown marbled with blood. chapter twenty-three
The next morning I got off the hospital elevator on the fifth floor and started through the waiting area toward the nurses' station. Brian Wilcox and two other federal agents came around the corner at the same time.
'I don't believe it. Like a fly climbing out of shit every place I go,' he said.
'I don't want to 'front you today, Brian.'
'What makes you think you can call me by my first name?'
He wore a blue suit and tie and white shirt. His hair had the dull sheen of gunmetal, with silver threads in the part. He stood flat-footed in front of me, heavy, solid, his shoulders too large for his suit. The cleft chin, the cologned, cleanly shaved jaws, the neatness that he wore like a uniform, did not go with the expression in his
