“That’s for sure,” she said as she dug into her purse and handed me the money with a quick burst of nervous laughter. “That’s what I always tell my clients,” she added. “The ones who are guilty, that is.” Then we laughed, shook hands, and I left her standing in the hard moonlight, listening to the faint murmur of the creek.
* * *
The upper reaches of Blue Creek wandered weakly through Betty’s ranch, then crossed another ranch, before it wound onto her other uncle’s place — Tom Ben Wallingford owned several sections — before it dropped in a small stream off the Balcones Escarpment to join the gush of the huge artesian spring at the base of the hollow, where Blue Creek became a wide, beautiful stream, pellucid water slipping over limestone ledges, pausing occasionally to form perfect swimming holes. Travis Lee, who had his job at the law school and later his private practice, donated most of his part of the old family ranch to the county for a park, taking a huge tax write-off and keeping a narrow strip of land on the north side of the creek. Leaving his older brother with his sections of mostly worthless scrub, particularly after the government dropped the mohair subsidy, land good only for deer leases, which the old man wouldn’t allow. And, as Austin expanded northwesterly, development, which the old man hated. Tom Ben’s sections nearly were surrounded by upscale developments, but the stubborn and childless old cowboy was dickering with the Blue Creek Preservation Society, of which Betty Porterfield was president and probably the major financial angel, to put the land into a conservancy, but only if they could come up with a deal to keep it a working ranch. But nobody could come up with the deal he wanted, and it seemed that Tom Ben Wallingford was going to dicker until he died, and he seemed to think he was going to live forever.
The Overlord Land and Cattle Company, a wholly owned subsidiary of Overlord Minerals, Inc., owned most of the land around the ranch — hell, most of Gatlin County — and the CEO, Hayden Lomax, insisted the old man had signed an option to sell the ranch, which Tom Ben Wallingford had denied completely. The whole thing had been simmering toward court for a couple of years before I came to stay in the Hill Country.
When Betty Porterfield asked me to move into her ranch house, I told myself that I had buried my Montana past and intended to finish out my life in the Hill Country. Betty and I had met over a gunshot dog and fallen in love over stories of loss and gunfire. And I loved Betty’s ranch, a section of Hill Country heartland, and the crippled animals Betty brought home from the emergency veterinarian clinic where she worked nights, loved the bright glow of the plank floor and the homemade cedar furniture, the wood cookstove and the hissing Coleman lanterns, the reassuring scratch and peep of the chickens in the yard dust, the yawns of sleeping cats, throwing the tennis ball for the three-legged Lab, Sheba, until my arm hurt, watching the sweep of weather across the wide Texas sky as I sat on the front porch pointlessly whittling, turning cedar posts into cookstove shavings.
Until it went bad, I’d never been closer to a woman than Betty. She had healing hands; I’d seen her work, seen the undeniable hope in an animal’s eyes when she put those hands on them. A look, I suspected, I had when she first put her hands on me. So I tried really hard. For the first time in my life I studied how to be home, studied every angle and plane of Betty’s face, every freckle, every stray wisp of red hair, the faint trace of the bullet scar across her right cheek, the dark leaden dimple on her left jawline where she’d fallen on a pencil in the third grade, which only showed when she occasionally laughed, wild and free.
And I studied Texas, too, because it seemed important to Betty, important in some way I didn’t understand, but extremely important nonetheless. “Texans are proud people,” her Travis Lee explained to me, “and Betty is a Texan.” As if that explained everything. So during the mornings while she slept, I wandered the ranch with books. Hell, I knew more about flora and fauna on her ranch than I knew about my grandfather’s land, which I had finally managed to give back to the Benewah tribe, one of the few places in Montana I had ever called home. Not the moldering mansion where I was raised, not the log cabin the garbage company goons had burned down. Those places weren’t home. Except sometimes in the log cabin back home when I’d be sitting on the porch watching the first snow, and my big black tomcat, Eldridge Carver, would curl in my lap. That was home, sometimes. But that was easy. Making myself at home on Betty’s ranch was work.
Month after month I wandered the ranch on foot in all kinds of weather. I sometimes thought I knew it better than Betty did. She’d torn out all the pasture and cross fences except for a small plot down the hill from the house where she kept a couple of saddle horses and occasionally ran a calf or two. On the back side of the ranch, I discovered a tiny outcropping of flint, no bigger than a freight car, and at the base of it, covered with limestone dust, a midden of arrowhead flakes, probably Comanche, since it seemed they had owned everything from there to southern Colorado for two hundred years. And I studied the Indians, too, nothing but ghosts now.
On other afternoons I’d gather up one of Betty’s saddle horses, then drift easily for a couple of hours over to Tom Ben’s place, where we’d sit on the veranda sipping iced tea and watching the sun soften the cedar breaks as it settled over the Hill Country while he shucked dried corn and doled it out cob by cob to the small herd of Spanish goats he kept for the occasional barbecue. During the Korean War Tom Ben had been a twenty-eight-year-old captain in the Marine reserves who had been called to active duty when I was a sixteen-year-old Army private on falsified enlistment papers, and on those occasional afternoons we sometimes touched on those times, talking without talking too much. But he never talked about WW II, except to wonder about what might have happened if we had to invade Japan. And about Korea, Tom Ben mostly complained about the cold and bitched about his feet. Never married, he was as fond of his niece as if she were his child, and he extended that fondness to me. His place was a home place in a way Betty’s never quite managed, but I didn’t go over there often enough.
At Betty’s place I read all the books I’d always meant to read, watched endless hours of movies on the battery-run portable television with a built-in VCR, which Betty allowed me to keep in the old smokehouse. She wouldn’t watch them with me but sometimes she’d come in to lean on my back, briefly, her nose snuffling out the old smoke and salt smells. Then she’d leave me to the present and drift back to the nineteenth-century British novels she was addicted to.
Also, for the first time in my life, I had long stretches of solitude with which to consider my life, trying to connect everything from my father’s lovesick suicide to my mother’s aggressive lie that somehow forced me to endure three months of muddy Korean hell before a broken collarbone got me back to the States in time to hear about her drunken suicide drying out at a fat farm down in Arizona. I considered it all: the failed marriages, the drunk years, the boring dry years — and it only added up to anything when I was in the arms of this sad, redheaded woman.
But I couldn’t make her happy. No matter how hard I studied. Hell, I knew better. A man can make a happy woman sad but he can’t finally make a sad woman happy. Then I studied her sadness until the burden of that became too much for either of us to carry.
And the sorry truth was that I couldn’t study Texas hard enough to make it home. It remained a foreign country, an undiscovered dimension, too large a place to be one place, a country held together by a semi-mystical history and a semi-hysterical pride. The more it became urbanized, the more it insisted on being country. The politics seemed like a cruel trick played by the rich on the poor. When I read copies of letters sent back home from the first settlers, the lies leapt off the page like billboards advertising hell: no hot weather, no mosquitoes, free land. Like every other place I had been, it was all about money. No more, no less. And even with money, I was still an outsider, more at home with whores, small-time drug dealers, musicians, and winos. And too old to change. It was as if I was spending a thousand dollars a month for a combination of gradua
te school, therapy, and serious frustration. But I tried and tried until I wore out my try, until it ached like a bad tooth.
Oddly enough, it was her other uncle who brought my unease to my attention first. Travis Lee drove up to the ranch house one silken fall morning as I sat in a rocking chair on the front porch, an unread novel in my lap, an unwhittled stick at my feet, the sun warm on my face, and Betty asleep in the house.
“What’s happening, cowboy?” Travis Lee wanted to know as he rolled down the passenger’s window of the huge pickup. “What the hell aren’t you reading?”
“Something I always meant to read. Anna Karenina,” I said.
“Ends badly, I hear,” Travis Lee said as he kicked open the passenger door. “Let’s go down to the creek and have a beer.”
He drove silently down the pasture to the tiny creek and the spring box where I kept a case of Coors cans cooling among the crawdads and mint leaves, and silently drank a beer before Travis Lee spoke.
“Mind if I piss in your creek?” he said as he unbuttoned his jeans. Except in the courtroom, Travis Lee wore Levi’s, cowboy boots, western shirts, and expensive leather vests, a wide-brimmed Stetson, plus a huge gold belt buckle decorated with what looked like a snake’s head with ruby eyes.
“Ain’t my creek,” I said.
“Ain’t mine either, anymore,” Travis Lee said. I raised an eyebrow. “Blue Creek doesn’t look like much here,” the old man said, his large hands lifting his hat and rumpling his thick thatch of white hair, as if it could be any more rumpled, “and over there where it joins the branch that crosses my brother’s ranch, it doesn’t look like too much either, but by the time it drops off the escarpment into Blue Hole, it’s the perfect Hill Country creek.” I didn’t think I was supposed to say anything, yet, so I didn’t, just pulled two more beers out of the cold spring water. “But I guess you knew that. Betty says you’ve become something of a Texas expert.”
“Self-defense,” I admitted.
“Hey, I’ve been to Montana,” Travis Lee said. “You people up there can go round and round about being land-proud, too.”
“Right, but there ain’t so many of us on the dance floor.”
“I always suspected that too much solitude might make a man a bit cranky,” Travis Lee said.
“I like to see the sunset without too many people in the way,” I said. “This is nice out here, but Austin is just another city — same faces, different scenery — except for the food and the music, it could be anywhere. Besides, I was born cranky.”
“I just bet you were, boy,” the huge old man said, his laughter filling the small valley.
“An old friend of mine who grew up down here tells me Montana would be perfect if it had less February, more barbecue, and some decent Mexican food.”
“Hell, boy,” the old man said, “it’s too nice a day to sit around just looking at your fuzzy navel. You’re lookin’ as stale as yesterday’s beer fart. Let’s go to town, celebrate, maybe choke down a whiskey or two.”
“Celebrate?”
“One less day to live with that slick socialist son of a bitch in the White House,” he said. “That always makes me happy.”
“I thought you used to be a Democrat?”
” Used to be being the operative phrase. Where do you stand in this political morass?” he asked.
“I guess I’m against everything.”
“A cynic, then.”
“I prefer to think of myself as a realist,” I said.
“Whatever, let’s go have a drink.”
For reasons I didn’t quite understand — he was a lawyer who specialized in putting land deals together, which meant developer, which rhymed with dog turd, as far as I was concerned — I said yes, left Betty a note, then climbed into Travis Lee’s silly four-wheel-drive Ford crew cab pickup, the ideal rig for every lawyer seeking muddy fields and hay bales to buck.
We started with a whiskey visit to Travis Lee’s law office where we drank expensive Scotch sitting among the old man’s collection of the War of Northern Aggression artifacts — sabers and muskets and company rosters among dozens of original photographs.
“Sorry for the museum clutter,” Travis Lee said.
“Pretty impressive,” I said.
Travis Lee propped his hand-tailored boots on the desk, leaned back in his chair, and said, “I pretty much missed my war, I guess — broke my ankle on the last jump before we were supposed to ship out for Korea — so I guess I adopted this one. But you made the Korean thing, right?”
Somehow Wallingford’s question bothered me. As if Korea had been like a visit to a theme park. But he was Betty’s uncle, so I answered politely and honestly, “I was sixteen and stupid and my mother wanted me out of the house after my Dad died.”
“Sounds like she wanted you dead,” Wallingford said with the oddly blunt honesty that Texans sometimes had, and which I sometimes enjoyed.
“Who knows?” I said. “According to my Dad, my great-grandfather was at the Battle of the Wilderness when he was younger than that. Fourteen. Survived into his nineties, but he was still sharp. Hell, he was the sheriff of Meriwether County into his seventies. Tended bar into his late eighties.”
“What did he have to say about the Wilderness?”
“According to my Dad, he said it wasn’t much worse than being down in the Pennsylvania mines as a child,” I said. “But bad enough so that after he got wounded, he hid in a pile of brush and bones, playing dead until he could whittle a crutch and hobble back to his lines.”
I didn’t add that the wound was caused by a rebel younger than himself who had found my great-grandfather when he stumbled over the pile of bones he was hiding beneath. Almost by accident the kid stuck a bayonet through his calf as my great-grandfather ran his bayonet through the kid’s throat. My great-grandfather cauterized the wound with a red-hot ramrod, then whittled a crutch, and hobbled west instead of back to his unit. What the hell, it wasn’t his war — his father had sent him in place of an older, more favored brother — so he headed into the setting sun, away from the war. He didn’t have much English or any skills except the ability to shatter a coal face with a pick and a certain native willingness to use a firearm without hesitation, and his only ambition was for more sunlight and fewer bosses shouting at him. So he hobbled across the Great Plains swabbing bar floors, slopping pigs, and shoveling horseshit and hay while he worked on his English. By the time he got to Montana, the Gold Rush was almost over, the war was long over, so the first Milodragovitch in Montana became a peace officer, and, as was the custom in those days, a saloon owner and a whoremaster.
“Whores aren’t bad people,” Travis Lee said when I finished the story. “Let’s go have a drink with several, professional and political.”
Then we proceeded to a round of visiting drinks with his old political cronies, cranky to a man, and ex-colleagues at the law school, plus cops, bartenders, and ex-hookers. Then a late lunch at a tiny barbecue shack above Blue Creek, the only commercial establishment on the strip of the old family ranch that Travis Lee still owned north of the creek, where we played dominoes, drank Shiner beer, and ate smoked brisket as tender as a fresh biscuit.
“Milo,” he said in his best voice, his great shaggy head hanging over the table, “you’re too young to be retired. You’re chewin’ on your ass like a mangy hound, sittin’ out there at the ranch, doin’ nothin’. You need somethin’ to do.” Then he leaned his huge face across the table and whispered, “I understand you know something about the bar business…”
“I certainly do,” I said.
“… and that you’ve got a bundle of cash sittin’ fallow in the Caymans,” he said. “I can raise some money from friends, add yours to mine, funnel it in through an offshore loan, and boy we got a gold mine right here, clean and legal.”
Which is how we became partners in the Blue Hollow Lodge. Once I was convinced of the “clean and legal” part. But I insisted on owning the bar outright, to which Travis Lee agreed witho
ut much fuss. Betty was against it at first, especially the part where I lent her uncle some of the start-up money, saying that I was just using it as an excuse to get out of the house. Then without explanation she changed her mind. I had more money than I could spend in two lifetimes, even if I lived as long as my great-grandfather, and it did sound like a good way to get out of the house occasionally. Or maybe I was just tired, as I once said during an argument with Betty, of being her fancy man.
Of course, later, quickly bored with the bar business, I got my Texas PI ticket and six weeks after that moved out of Betty’s ranch house…
…and into a large, anonymous motel suite on the ground floor, a place that, except for the heavy bag and free-weight set, could have been anywhere, belonged to anyone. Perhaps it should have seemed a sad place, but coming from Molly McBride’s bed and facing a day when something might actually happen to break the routine of my days, it didn’t seem so bad.
I called Betty at the clinic to let her know that I wasn’t driving out to the ranch for breakfast. When she asked why, I answered, almost truthfully, “I’ve got a client.”
“Christ on a crutch, Milo,” she said, “are you on drugs? Or just fucking drunk?”
“Neither, particularly. Why?”
“Oh, hell, I don’t know,” she sighed, and I could see her forearm brush the hair off her face, “between the bar and your fucking clients, we never seem to see each other anymore anyway —”
“Lady,” I interrupted, “between your job and trying to save Blue Creek, we don’t see each other at all.”
So she hung up on me. Not for the first time, either. I’d seen Montana, even with its terrible winters, destroyed by greed, miners and developers and logging companies — Christ, Hayden Lomax’s corporation even owned a leaking cyanide leach gold mine in eastern Montana that the state had been trying to shut down for years. Also an undeveloped shallow gas field on the edge of the Crazies — so I didn’t share Betty’s hope to save Blue Creek.
The Final Country Page 6