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 again. 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?'
'Jack's made arrangements to send him to a treatment center in California. It's a one-year in-patient program. For God's sakes, give us a chance to correct our problem.'
'Darl came out to my house. He offered to give up his father,' I said.
'He offered to-' Her face had the startled, still quality of someone caught in a photographer's strobe.
'You've got a monster in your house, Emma. Whatever happens in this courthouse won't change that,' I said.
Temple and I left her standing in the middle of the corridor, her mouth moving soundlessly while her stepson snipped his fingernails on the bench behind her.
Temple and I went up to the second floor of the courthouse and bought cold drinks from the machine and drank them by a tall, arched window at the end of the hall. It had stopped raining temporarily, but the streets were flooded and the wake from passing automobiles slid up onto the courthouse lawn.
'You bothered about what you said to Emma?' Temple asked.
'Not really.'
'If you're worried about hanging it on Darl Vanzandt-'
'The jury won't see motive in Darl. We can make him an adverb but not a noun.'
She was silent. I heard her set her aluminum soda can on top of the radiator.
'You want to spell it out?' she asked.
'Bunny Vogel's going to have a bad day,' I said.
'Wrong kid for it.'
'Damn, I wish I could adjust like that. 'Wrong kid for it.' That's great.'
I walked back down the hall to the stairs, my boots echoing off the wood floor.
She caught me halfway down, stepped in front of me on the landing, her arms pumped. A strand of her chestnut hair was curved on her chin. 'There's one person only, one, who has always been on your side. Sorry I never let you fuck me a few times so I could leave town without even a phone call. You only get that kind of loyalty with federal grade,' she said.
She walked down the rest of the stairs alone, the anger in her eyes her only defense against tears. I stood in the silence, wondering what the final cost of Lucas's trial would be.
After Darl Vanzandt took the oath he sat at an angle in the witness chair, lowered his eyes coyly, as though the world's attention were upon him, played with his class ring, suppressed a smile when he looked at his friends.
'Bunny Vogel used to go out with Roseanne Hazlitt, didn't he?' I asked.
'Everybody knows that.'
'Is Bunny your friend?'
'He used to be.'
'He looked out for you at Texas A amp;M, didn't he?'
'We were from the same town, so we hung out.'
'He paid off a grader to change an exam score for you, didn't he?'
Darl's green eyes looked at nothing, then clouded and focused on me for the first time, as though the words he heard had to translate into a different language before they became thoughts in his mind. He rubbed the peach fuzz on his jawline. 'Yeah, we both got expelled,' he said.
'Did your stepmother get him a job at the skeet club?'
'Yeah.'
'You double-dated and you hung out at the drive-in restaurant together?'
'Sometimes.'
'I'd say y'all were pretty tight, right?'
'That was then, not now.'
'You let people get in your face, Darl?'
'What d'you mean?'
'Dis you, push you around, act like you're a woosh?'
'No, I don't take that stuff.'
'What happened to the Mexican kid who scratched up your car with a nail?'
'I kicked his ass, that's what.'
'Because people don't get in your face and abuse your property, right? You stomp their ass?'
'Yeah, that's right.'
'You ever beat up a woman, a prostitute in San Antonio by the name of Florence LaVey?'
'No, I didn't. I protected myself from people who were rolling me.'
'What happens when people hit your friends, Darl? You kick their ass, too.'
'You goddamn right.' He looked at his friends and grinned.
