The Mexican Tree Duck

by James Crumley

  The wedding, that could have bothered me, too, but I’d seen too many biker betrothals lately to think much about it anymore. It’s always frightening when the worst sort of people decide to join the best.

  Norman’s having a rich and lovely mother, that bothered me, as did the disappearance of said Mrs. Pines from a fancy lodge over in Snowy Lake, Montana, where her husband was addressing a convention of natural gas producers. That was a problem, too. According to the papers, her husband, Joe Don Pines, had returned from an afternoon speech to find their room empty, her purse and room key on the coffee table.

  Mrs. Pines sometimes jogged in the afternoon, so the alarm wasn’t raised until dark-thirty when she still hadn’t appeared. For ordinary people, the hue and cry would have waited the usual twenty-four hours, and the FBI not called in for weeks, but Joe Don was a personal friend of the President and his special envoy to the Mexican government for oil and gas imports, a position he had obtained by running unsuccessfully for a dozen state offices, on his own nickel, and by large and frequent donations to the Republican cause. Perhaps that was the same way he had risen from Army Reserve captain to bird colonel during the Vietnam War Games. Whatever, Joe Don waited at one of his ventures, a resort cum fat farm cum golf course—El Rancho Encantada—just over the New Mexican border west of El Paso, Texas, while the feds left no stone unturned.

  I also wasn’t crazy about stumbling over feds at every step along the way. Some of them were just plain semi-ordinary assholes who believed in getting the job done the best and easiest ways, while perhaps even having an occasional bit of fun along the way. Some of them were simply bureaucratic assholes with guns. Others were driven, dedicated assholes who would pop their grannies for a single lungful of pot when they were trying to hold down their last meal against the nausea of chemotherapy. But whatever they were personally or professionally, they were the fucking feds. And I wasn’t. But if I played it right, I could at least make more money in a couple of weeks than they did in a month. Money counts with bureaucrats. When Dan Rather makes more money than the President, who the fuck’s really in charge?

  About twenty miles south of Meriwether, I turned left across the Hardrock River to pick up the Eastside Highway, then followed it on south to the Burnt Fork Road, which led a twisted trail to Solly’s cattle guard.

  Solly didn’t keep any cattle, just two crazy goats, a string of riding and pack mules, and one old gander named Millard Fillmore. When the goats weren’t trying to play king of the mountain on his guests’ automobiles or chew up their seat covers, they kept the scrub brush and short grass down inside the house fence. The mules allowed Solly to tackle the wilderness behind his house in some ease and luxury. I wasn’t sure what Millard Fillmore, the goose, did. As far as I could tell he thought he was an Alsatian watchdog with an attitude.

  Solly’s driveway was only a couple of miles long and lined with about five hundred poplars, which weren’t breaking any wind, but their long, thin shadows held strips of the most recent snow across the hard-surfaced driveway. His house sat on the lip of a bench that commanded a view of the Burnt Fork, the Hardrock Valley, and the rocky peaks of the mountain range that gave the river its name. It had been constructed of huge red cedar logs stacked on a granite rock foundation, and enough glass walls to make Montana Power simper with joy. It shimmered like a diamond in the lowering sun, the A-frame front flanked by two sweeping glass-walled wings.

  As I parked by the steps up to the deck and the front door, Millard Fillmore came rushing out of his goose door in the garage, his wings spread wide, his neck arched like a snake about to strike, screaming as loudly as his huge lungs and pissant-sized brain would let him. You couldn’t scare Millard, you had to confuse him, so I let his beak nearly touch my pants leg before I leaned over, grabbed his neck, and threw him into a snowbank in the shade of the front steps, which exploded like a down pillow. Millard came out, as always, a changed goose. Ignoring me, he waddled over to inspect my new ride as the two goats, Frick and Frack, loped around the corner of the house and came to a sudden halt when they found a vehicle they couldn’t leap on or in.

  I laughed all the way to the front door, which opened as always without a key, then stepped into the huge, silent emptiness. Solly lay on one of the leather couches, his prosthesis loose on the floor, lying, dead or wounded, a man of scattered parts. I had a flash from the old days in the bush. Then he lifted his arm from his face, stared at me as if I were a stranger, and he a stranger to himself. Then he slowly sat up.

  “Six thousand square feet of living space,” I said, once again marveling at the spotless house filled with modern art and expensive furniture, “all dressed up and nowhere to go. Hell, this place needs a woman’s touch—cocktail franks and clam dip, martinis, green onions wrapped in cream cheese and thin pastrami slices—yeah, you need a serious woman and a really serious party before the snow sticks.”

  “All the serious women are working too hard,” Solly said, “and all the parties are the same, so fuck it.” Then he hopped over to the raked glass walls that flanked the front door, waving out at the fine afternoon in our view. “Someday, my son, this will all be yours.” Then he paused, staring at the van. “What the fuck is that?”

  “Norman’s idea of a joke,” I said.

  “Jesus, C.W., I ran away from San Francisco in one of those in seventy-eight, took off with a bunch of freaks, traveling light. Sixty thousand dollars, twenty pounds of meth crystal, and a Colt Commander in a backpack. Those kids would have shit if they knew … I finally bought the van from them down in Taos. By god those were the days …” Solly drove nothing these days but 7 series BMWs sporting handicapped stickers. “What the hell is it like?”

  “Interesting,” I said, walking over to join him. “As far as I can tell, the fucker will do a wheel-stand in first, second, and third gear.”

  “What about fourth?”

  “I haven’t been in fourth yet.”

  “That fucking Norman,” he said. “How the hell did you ever get mixed up with him? You’ve got some strange friends, Sonny.”

  “Thanks, counselor,” I said. “And I got involved with him some years ago in a drug deal, then some time later in some hassle about fish.”

  “Oh,” Solly said as if this were news to him. He was watching Millard stroke his beak on the chrome bumper of the van.

  “What the hell’s he doing?” I asked. “Sharpening his beak?”

  “Falling in love with his own reflection,” Solly said quietly, touching his aging image on the glass wall. “What’s that writing across the front?”

  “La Gloria Azul,” I said, and Solly nodded.

  “The Blue Glory. Shit.” Then he turned to me suddenly as if he had something really important to say. “Geese don’t sharpen their beaks, you turkey,” he said solemnly. “Let’s have a drink.” Then hopped over to his lower leg and strapped it back on and led me into the kitchen wing, which covered the whole first floor above the three-car garage.

  “How’d you beat me out here?” I asked.

  “Fucker canceled lunch on me,” he answered, “and this weather is playing hell with my stump. Phantom aches and pains.”

  “Too bad.”

  “For him. I charge double for missed appointments,” he said, reaching for the really good Scotch. He poured two neat tots into crystal shot glasses.

  “Your clients put up with that sort of shit?”

  “They beg for it,” Solly said, grinning. “Makes them think I can move mountains.”

  “Or juries,” I said, sipping the Scotch, which tasted like pure gold.

  “That, too, and makes federal prosecutors eat out of my shorts.”

  “Can’t you?”

  “Given the proper motivation … You like the Scotch?” I nodded as coolly as I could. “They only make a hundred cases a year,” he said. “One hundred sixty-five dollars a bottle.”

  “Not even an hour’s work for a big-shot lawyer like you.”

  Solly laughed like a
man whose whole life had been one big joke on the world as he picked up the bottle and a. 300 Weatherby custom-built rifle leaning against the sink and carried them toward the front door and the deck, where he did his serious business, as serious as he could stand behind the laughter.

  “So what the hell am I doing here, Solly?” I asked as he poured the second Scotch.

  “Just wanted to see you before you took off, man. We don’t see each other enough these days.”

  “Hell, I’m just another one of the trolls down in your fucking legal morgue,” I said. “Move me into your house and I’ll really keep you company. Me and a couple of those lovelies from the office. You could wax nostalgic while I wax their thighs so their cunt hair doesn’t show in a string bikini …”

  But Solly was someplace else, couldn’t even come back long enough to complain about my sexist crudity, something he was usually careful to do. He picked up the Weatherby, adjusted the variable scope, then jacked a round into the chamber. Quick as a flash, Solly fired an offhand round at his favorite target: a five-gallon can of water at five hundred yards. He was a marvel. I never saw him miss; I never saw him hunt; just shoot like an angel with god’s eye.

  “Remember when we were coming out of the bush that time?” Solly asked suddenly.

  “There was only one time, man.”

  “Remember that kid in your squad, skinny black kid with glasses, the one that got caught on the trip wire?”

  “Willie Williams,” I said.

  “Never saw anything like that. He nearly turned white when he felt it catch, but he stood still while you dug out the mine. Never will forget that, Sonny, never saw that kind of trust …”

  “He was just stoned,” I said, “smoking hash right through the number.”

  Solly reached down to scratch his calf, where I knew he had a piece of jungle rot that wouldn’t go away. “What ever happened to him?”

  “Did his time and went home,” I lied. “Why?”

  “No reason. Just thinking about it the other day.” Then Solly paused. “You know, I knew this Pines asshole in Vietnam …”

  “What?”

  “Oh, nothing, I just ran across him once in the bush. Some sort of REMF brass … He’s probably still got connections in D.C., but you know I’ve still got some favors owed back there, too. If you need any help, give me a call. The FBI is not going to like you nibbling around the fringe of their case.”

  “They never liked me in the first place,” I said.

  “They must know what they’re doing.” Solly grinned suddenly, his teeth flashing in the sunlight, then slapped me on the shoulder. “You watch your ass out there, old buddy. I’m not crazy about this case. Are you?”

  “Luckily, I’m just crazy.”

  “And getting worse every year,” Solly said, not laughing. “So you stay in touch, okay? Try to check in every other day.”

  “Yes, Captain Rainbolt, sir,” I said, but didn’t bother to salute.

  “What’s first?”

  “Snowy Lake,” I said.

  Snowy Lake lay north of Meriwether toward the Canadian border, one of those small Montana towns that seem to live on snow four months of the year and cocaine the rest. Meriwether wasn’t exactly a Methodist summer camp, but Snowy Lake played in the big leagues. I didn’t know a soul in town these days and given the preponderance of DEA agents and informants, I didn’t want to.

  So I stopped at the local K mart, bought a cheap suit and some short-sleeve white shirts and thin ties, then dropped the van at the Snowy Lake airport, rented an anonymous gray sedan with Solly’s corporate gold card, and drove to Snowy Lake to check into the Powderhorn Lodge, looking as bureaucratic and mysterious as I could.

  Except for brief forays into the bar, where I drank cheap vodka like a cop but overtipped wildly, I stayed in my room for the first couple of days, neither shaving nor using deodorant after my frequent showers. Then I cleaned up my act, put a smile on my face, and went to work late one evening just as the bartender, a pleasant youngish woman named Mel, a professional ski bum, was about to close the bar. Given the way I had tipped, her bartender’s conscience wouldn’t let her close me out.

  I had two quick ones while she cleaned up as I watched her until she became convinced that my next move was to either hit on her or ask where to buy cocaine.

  Just as she walked over to lay down last call, I said, “You know, it’s a real pleasure to watch a pro break down a bar and get everything ready for the day shift. That used to be one of my favorite things.”

  “Thanks,” she said, then asked, “You a bartender?”

  “Wish to hell I’d never stopped.”

  “You got time for one more …”

  “How’s your martini?” I asked.

  “World-class,” she said proudly. Then added, “When I want it to be.”

  “Have one with me?” I asked, and she looked at me for a long time. “Mel, you know what I do for a living, right?” I said, tearing off the cheap tie. “But I haven’t always been a cop. I used to be a fair-to-middling bartender and I’m off the clock tonight then outa here tomorrow. This undercover junk is the shits.”

  “Okay,” she said, trusting her bartender’s instinct, long honed in ski lodges around the West. Or so I learned after the second martini. Copper Mountain, Vail, Angelfire, Red River, and half a dozen others. She’d come north from Telluride in her late thirties, looking for easier slopes and more polite customers. But the Canadians were about to drive her insane, and she was considering marriage, again, perhaps children, maybe college down in Missoula, looking like a woman facing forty with no place to go, a woman who had chosen the fantasy of powdered fun over the middle-class fantasy of security. It’s all an illusion, though. The bear of real life is waiting for everybody. She’d had her time in the sun, on the slopes, around the bars, and now she’d probably make some decent man a terrific partner, a man who could see past the frivolity to the hard, lovely core of her character.

  I wasn’t that man, though.

  At some point later she closed the lounge door, placated the bar manager, then pried my recipe for the Dead Solid Perfect Martini, which I had perfected years ago with friends down in Austin, from my reluctant fingers. A frozen glass, a swish of vermouth, a smidgen of olive juice, a smudge of jalapeno, a cocktail onion, and good gin washed over ice until it smokes in the humid air.

  Well, we weren’t in Texas, so the humidity wasn’t right and we couldn’t make smoke, but we had a couple anyway. Then made a pitcherful and retired to my room.

  If you’ve never done this, you don’t know what it’s like. It’s not about sex, it’s about stories. She tells you the one about the drunk who wandered into her bar with the end of a ski pole stuck in his thigh and demanded a dozen schnapps before he’d go to the hospital to have it cut out. Then you tell the one about skiing through the lift line at Eldora, over the snowbanks around the parking lot, and into the side of a pickup truck. Moving. Hit it so hard I knocked the driver out. And so it goes on. Making friends.

  Then about three o’clock, slightly drunk with a wonderfully surprising clarity, Mel looked up and asked the right question.

  “So what do you want?” she said, her round face glowing with intelligence around her smile. “Obviously not my no longer nubile body, though you might be welcome to it another time, more than welcome in fact, but for tonight, Mr. Sughrue, what do you really want?”

  “You remember the woman who disappeared from here last month?”

  “Sarita, little Sarah,” she mused. “Sure. She was a beauty. Not just for her age. She said she was fifty-one, and I believed her. I’m sure you know how unusual it is for women of different social and economic classes to tell the truth about their ages …” She paused. “Okay, man, I went to college, too. Lots … Lots of times.” Then she laughed and poured us another martini. “She wasn’t beautiful for fifty-one. She was just flat fucking beautiful. Great cheekbones. Terrific skin. And wrinkles in all the right places …” I must have r
aised an eyebrow because Mel shook her head at me as if I were a stupid child. “Laugh lines, asshole. Smile crinkles. A sad, thoughtful little crease between her eyes. And unlike her rat turd of a husband and all the other rich turds around him, she was unfailingly polite to the help. Even when she wasn’t in public. She was a true aristocrat. Wynona told me …”

  “Wynona?”

  “Wynona Jones. With a ‘y.’ She was the maid for their condo. Secretly,” Mel said, leaning over the coffee table, “I think maybe she knew something about the … you know, Sarita taking off …”

  “Why do you say ‘taking off’?”

  “Anybody with a lick of sense would know that her husband wouldn’t pay a dime to get her back, and nobody that stupid could get next to her.”

  “Did this Wynona Jones say anything?”

  “No, but she took off the same day, you know, and I knew she and Sarita had gotten to be pals or something, you know, but it wasn’t like she disappeared or anything. She gave notice a month or so before, said she had a gig down in Aspen, hopping tables at a fake British pub called the Quirky Arms, said her baby would be closer to his dad down there,” she said, then paused again and reached to touch my cheek, her breasts swinging heavily under the thin fabric of her uniform shirt. “Why the fuck am I telling you this?”

  “An honest face?” I suggested.

  “Not that honest,” she whispered, then leaned over to kiss me. Her lips moved against my mouth. “I’ll bet you were trouble when you were young,” she whispered, then moved away. “Oh, stop that,” she said to herself.

  “Well, not that much trouble,” I said, and Mel laughed without rancor. “What did the FBI have to say about this?”