BBH01 - Cimarron Rose Read Free Page A

iron doors and food slits, past the tank where the drunks
were kept, toward three barred cells that faced back into the corridor.
Lucas's cheeks and throat were pooled with color, as though they had
been burned with dry ice.
    'This is where we keep the superstars,' the deputy said. He
started to unlock Lucas's wrists in front of the middle cell. A hand
and arm came out of the bars to the right and undulated in the air like
a serpent.
    'You got fresh meat for us, boss man?' the half-naked man in
the cell said. His eyes looked maniacal, the structure of his head as
though it had been broken in a machinist's vise. His arms were too
short for his thick torso, and his chest and pot stomach were white
from lack of sunlight and covered with green and red tattoos.
    The deputy slipped his baton from the ring on his belt and
whanged it off the bars an inch from the tattooed man's hand.
    'You stick it out there again, I'll break it,' he said.
    'Come on, keep my Jell-O tonight and put that sweet thing in
here with me,' the man said, his palms wrapped around the bars now, his
eyes dancing with malevolence six inches from mine. His body exuded a
raw, damp odor like sewer gas.
    After the deputy had unlocked Lucas's wrists from the
manacles, I saw the fingers on both his hands start to tremble.
    'Give me a minute,' I said to the deputy.
    'No problem. But I'm going to lock you inside so nobody don't
grab one of your parts. You think the smart-ass here on the right's
bad? They ain't thought up a name for that 'un on the other side.'
    I went into the cell with Lucas and watched the deputy turn
the key on us and walk back down the corridor and sit at a small table
and take his lunch out of a paper bag.
    'I don't care if I cain't remember anything or not, I didn't
hurt that girl. I liked her. She always come in there with college
kids, but she didn't put on like she was special,' he said.
    'Which college kids?' I said.
    He sat down on the bunk. A blowfly buzzed over the seatless
toilet behind him. Lucas's eyes started to film.
    'People she went to school with, I guess. Are they gonna
electrocute me, Mr Holland?' he said.
    'Texas doesn't have the electric chair anymore. But, no, you
won't be tried for capital murder. Just give me some time. We'll get
you out of this.'
    'How?'
    I didn't have an answer for him.
    On the way out, I heard the man with the misshaped head and
white pot stomach laughing in a high, whinnying voice, mimicking the
conversation he'd heard in Lucas's cell: 'They gonna 'lectrocute me?
They gonna 'lectrocute me?… Hey, you punk, the black boys
gonna take you into the bridal suite and teach you how to pull a train.'
    He held his chin and loins close against the bars and made a
wet, chugging sound like a locomotive.
     
    I went home and fixed lunch in the
kitchen. The silence of the
house seemed to ring and pop in my ears. I opened all the downstairs
windows and pulled back the curtains and felt the wind flow through the
hallway and puff open the back screen. The morning paper lay folded on
an oak table in front of the hallway mirror. A full-length photo of
Lucas in handcuffs stared up at me. He didn't have my eyes, I thought.
They were obviously his mother's. But the hair, the cut of the jaw, the
six-foot-one frame… None of those belonged to Vernon Smothers.
    I went back into the kitchen and tried to finish the fried
pork chop sandwich I'd fixed.
    His mother and I had gone to high school together. Both her
parents had been road musicians who worked oil field honkytonks from
Texas City to Casper, Wyoming. When she was sixteen she met and married
Vernon Smothers, who was ten years older than she. When she was
nineteen she found me in Houston and asked for money so she could leave
him.
    I offered her half of my ancient rented house in the Heights.
    Two weeks later a fellow Houston police officer called Vernon
and told him I was living with his wife. He came for her at night when
I was not home, in the middle of a hurricane that