The Mexican Tree Duck

by James Crumley

  At about 135 mph, the Cadillac had become a red dot, the gray sedan disappeared, and dozens of reconstructed hippies on the freeway had Owsley acid flashbacks as the van bombed past twice as fast as memory allowed.

  We made the turn onto State Highway 6, and never saw the sedan again, but the driver of the Cadillac, who was pretty good, managed to follow us. Jimmy had grabbed a handful of maps, which served us well as we blasted down the dirt tracks toward the Alamo Reservation and Magdalena on the other side. But we couldn’t escape our dust trail, or the red Caddy tied to it.

  Heading up Mesa del Oro, we stopped around a long curve at the top of a switchback. Jimmy stayed with the van, Frank grabbed the glasses and a sleeping bag for a rest, and I loaded the three 10mm clips with full metal jackets.

  As the Caddy swept around the lower switchback curve, I leaned on the rolled sleeping bag and fired half a clip while Frank spotted my shots. We were so far away, the guys in the Caddy had to put the top down to be sure they were really hearing gunfire. Frank finished the clip while I spotted, but I didn’t recognize a soul in the convertible, and Frank didn’t shoot any better than I did. But face it, a hundred yards downhill with a pistol is mostly luck.

  “Remember those fat boys I told you about?” I said to Frank as I reloaded. He nodded. “They’re shipping us a couple of BARs. I could make them boys down there do the Bunny Hop. Two switchbacks ago. I used to hit shit with the BAR at a thousand yards. Regularly.”

  “A BAR. Hell, man, I used to see those ARVN cruds lugging them across paddies, but I never fired one.”

  “Hey, you fucking new guy, I enlisted back in the brown-boot Army, when the M-60 was just some bureaucrat’s dream.”

  “I could never shoot that son of a bitch worth a damn,” Frank said, “but boy could I make a lot of noise.”

  “You could carry the pig,” I said, “and that was the hard part.” Then I fired another few rounds.

  This time I got close enough to scatter rock dust on their windshield. Everybody but the driver unlimbered some sort of stamped tin assault rifle burdened with a suppressor. They sprayed the hillside at random, but didn’t have much more range than I did. Then the driver made the mistake of stopping to look around. My first two shots were high, but the next three went dead center into the hood. The Caddy stopped for good, and the men scrambled out of the car. Then I put the rest of the clip into the trunk lid, hoping to hit the fuel tank.

  Whatever I hit wasn’t the gas but it went off like a bomb. The blast knocked the four guys off their feet and set fire to one guy’s hat, but they didn’t pause to look back, they just came up the hill like four heavy-duty professional grunts assaulting a bunker, covering each other, and moving pretty good for guys in cowboy boots.

  I threw the sleeping bag down the slope. It took two bounces before they shredded it with automatic fire, covering the slope with petrochemical fibers.

  “Don’t look like feathers to me,” Frank said.

  “Trying to save money for my client,” I said.

  “False economy,” he said, “goose down’s the best.”

  “Glad to know that,” I said. “Now what should we do about these assholes down there?”

  “I’d suggest we get the fuck out of their way,” Frank said.

  We slithered back through the scrub brush, careful not to raise a bit of dust, then both leaped into the van as Jimmy hit it.

  We eased the long, slow way down to Santa Rita, skirting the Gila, nobody talking much about the young professional soldiers on our asses. We waited outside Santa Rita past midnight, then worked our way south toward Deming, where I really had been born in a motel, then down to Columbus, where Pancho Villa’s dream really ended with the massive mistake of the night attack on the American troops. Jimmy claimed to know a back way into El Paso, a notion that neither Frank nor I bothered to dispute.

  We were content to chug slowly through the desert, driving by moonlight, trusting our point man to find the pale tracks through the spiked cactus and the night. Jimmy found the remains of the Jamaican roach and managed to roll a fairly substantial joint out of it, which we smoked through the night. Frank and I opened the sliding door and sat on the floor of the van watching the moonlight spill across the sand.

  “This is really stupid,” Jimmy said dreamily from the driver’s seat. “We’ve got no edge at all. Maybe we should do some coke, Sarge.”

  “Now, that’s a really stupid idea,” I said, giggling, then arranged it.

  “Not a great edge,” Frank said later, “but an edge, nonetheless.”

  Because of the flight, Frank hadn’t brought a piece, but he carefully loaded my entire arsenal and spread it out on the carpet around him. He looked like a heathen god who had just discovered gunfire. He tossed the Airweight to Jimmy, who stuck it between his legs. “This is about your size, pissant.” Then he stared into the night for a moment before he turned to me. “We did the right thing to boogie,” he said. “Those guys were going to kick our ass.”

  “I had the twelve-gauge, man,” Jimmy said, “and they would’ve paid fucking dearly.”

  “You know,” I said to Frank, “he’s right. Maybe they would’ve kicked our butts, but maybe they wouldn’t have paid the price.”

  “I don’t know who the fuck trained those guys,” Frank said, “but they were fucking pros. They would’ve gone through us like thin shit through a tall Swede.”

  Jimmy got the giggles and wanted to know how fast that was, and we riffed that number for a while, until Frank got serious.

  “Face it, guys, we’re old.”

  “Fuck you,” Jimmy suggested.

  “Then why the fuck didn’t we stick?” Frank wanted to know.

  “Because it’s not the fucking same!” I shouted.

  Jimmy stopped the van, and I stepped outside into that layer of desert night where the ground still seeps heat like a dying sun and the air is as cold as moonlight. I think maybe I was crying again. But they listened.

  “It’s not the same, not now,” I whispered. “We fucking ran from those guys because we didn’t want to kill anybody anymore. Four pistols, one pump shotgun, plenty of ammo, great cover, and the high ground. Fuck it, we could’ve kicked their butts in a Waxahachie minute. And you assholes know it.” Then I paused, and Frank said it for me.

  “But we didn’t want to,” he said, then handed me a beer, and we climbed back into the van to crawl across the desert track, without speaking until Jimmy wanted to know just how long a Waxahachie minute was, you know, compared to the thin-Swede real-shit thing. Then we laughed and crossed the night.

  Occasionally, the shadows of mountains mounted the horizon, suggesting mazes of rock and thorn. Or the muffled engine would fall quiet and the squeak of a windmill or a bat could ring through the moon-spill. I wanted to stop, build a tiny, smokeless fire, and chant the words my crazy father had taught me so long ago, chant until his grandfather shades rose from the sand to dance before me. I remembered the words but could not say them even under my breath. I tried to fill that failure with more smoke, jokes, and laughter, trying to stifle that sad moment of seriousness when we had to admit that we were no longer what we had once been. We could still sleep in muddy holes, still stand back-to-back, as Solly and I had that ambush afternoon, and fight without fear, but we could no longer kill without … without … without rancor, or reason, just for the simple yet complex act of possible survival.

  Just about the time I nearly had it worked out, just as we could see the city lights of El Paso polluting the night and three drilling rigs to the southeast horizon, a phantom, wrapped in camouflage and sporting an M-16 at port arms, stepped out of the creosote brush with his hand raised. Jimmy stopped the van as if this were an everyday occurrence. The sentry stepped over, swept the interior of the van with a red-lensed flashlight, and said, “Shit, that mota smells good. Jamaican, huh? You guys got a roach, maybe, and a cold beer? Hey, and by the way, you mind waiting here for a little while?”

  After a l
ong silence, Jimmy said, “Well, fuck, if this is an ambush, boys, it’s too good for us.” Jimmy tapped the Airweight barrel on the door frame. “You put your gun down, son, and I’ll put mine down, and we’ll party quietly through the night.”

  The kid didn’t even hesitate, but leaned the M-16 against the van. “You guys seem cool, so it’s okay with me,” he said, “but there’s twenty of us, so let’s be friends.”

  “Sounds good to me,” Frank said, then clicked the shotgun’s safety back on.

  So we sat there in the middle of nowhere watching the track in front of us while a reinforced squad dressed in combat fatigues and carrying state-of-the-art automatic weapons rigged with night scopes crossed the desert with two low-boy semi-tractors and trailers loaded with a wrecked C-47 and hundreds of bales of marijuana, as silent as ghosts and as serious as rattlesnakes. The crossing completed, the phantom kid ate the roach, handed his empty beer can to Jimmy, then picked up his weapon.

  “Pack it in, pack it out,” he said. “You dudes take care,” he added politely, then jogged after the low-boys and the troops.

  None of us moved for a long time, then Jimmy found his voice. “What the fuck was that?”

  “What?” Frank said.

  “That!” Jimmy shouted, then threw the empty beer can out the window.

  “Yuppie drug dealers,” Frank said, “and if you don’t pick up your litter, pissant, they’ll kill you, your family, and all your friends, supposing you have any.”

  Jimmy got the beer can while we laughed, and as he drove away, I said, “I don’t know why I didn’t shit my pants. I haven’t seen anything like that in a long time.”

  “I know why I didn’t,” Jimmy said.

  “Why?” Frank wanted to know.

  “Because I had about three pounds of seat cover up my asshole,” Jimmy shouted, then laughed finally himself.

  “Nice of you to pick a road not taken,” Frank said.

  “How the hell did I know the fucking Free Texican Air Force was flying tonight?” Jimmy said. “Peter Rowen fucking forgot to tell me, man.”

  “Too true,” Frank shouted, and we butchered the song until dawn.

  Dawn found us wallowing in a windmill-fed steel tank on the edge of the desert above the Upper Valley. The salt cedars growing along the seep killed the morning breeze as the sun’s fireball rose over the Franklin Mountains. We were dark and red and glistening in the morning light, sun-struck and stupid, maybe, but dying full of life as the sun reared its head and filtered through the dew-damp spiderwebs threading the thorny brush.

  One of the too few times my father garnered me for a summer, we went back to Deming to see an old war buddy of his. After all these years it seems his name was Lawson, or Layton, and he had been wounded several times wading to the beach on the third wave at Tarawa. The .25-caliber Nambu rounds had stitched his stomach, and the puckered scars grown large and frightening as his beer belly grew. He’d married a Mexican woman whose family owned a piece of ground with a spring out toward the Florida Mountains south and east of Deming where they raised melons and peppers and truck-garden vegetables. And he had a daughter named Marta.

  While our fathers were drinking, she took me into her bedroom to play Kitty Wells on her 45 rpm changer, which played through a ten-dollar plastic radio, the only thing her mother left when she fled back to Crystal City, Texas. After she played “An Answer to the Wild Side of Life” about ten times, Marta spent about an hour teaching me how to French-kiss.

  I might have been eleven, maybe twelve, just old enough to have an erection but too young for ejaculation, and she was perhaps thirteen, but we were hotter than two-dollar pistols.

  The next sunrise morning she rapped on the side of the pickup bed where I slept wrapped in canvas and one of my grandmother’s quilts. When I looked up, she had her finger to her lips. Not that our fathers would have heard us from the small fire they tended in the backyard, the fire they had tended through all the night of serious drinking.

  I followed Marta out to their bulldozed dirt tank, where we took off our clothes, slipped into the muddy, shallow water, and without swimming a stroke began touching each other. She didn’t exactly have breasts, just nipples and bumps, as she said, and she didn’t have much more pubic hair than I did, but we did what we could to make the world safe for sexual freedom.

  In the dawn light the desert mountains reared wild and rough against the sky, ancient yet young, an endless reminder of our transient youth and promised demise. But it seemed so far away at that moment.

  Though coming fast. Shortly afterward I had my first real wet dream, and it was of Marta, standing in the reflected dawn fire of that scummy pond.

  Of course, nothing is ever that simple.

  We made love the night after she buried her father in Las Cruces twenty-some years later, then again when I buried mine after a motorcycle wreck outside Falfurrias, Texas, the very next year.

  But it never went anywhere. She blamed that first morning, the water shining with tiny rainbows as it dripped from her hair, her hand soft on my prick as hard as a mesquite root. I blamed the deaths. Whatever, it never went anywhere. She married a melon farmer outside La Junta, and they had a dozen kids. I didn’t.

  Later, dripping and semi-sane, Frank, Jimmy, and I climbed out of the tank and stood drying in the sun. Jimmy wanted to talk about the day we stood in the rain, but nobody would listen to him. I insisted on finishing the drive out of the desert—driving sometimes settles me down—so Jimmy guided me straight to Barnstone’s place, just over the Rio Grande River levee, nearly in New Mexico, and beautifully situated on a knoll in the middle of a pecan grove. Barnstone’s place looked like home. His main house, two stories and a dozen rooms, was stone instead of adobe, as was the wall around his two acres of yard. Inside the wall he had half a dozen small stone apartments, a small stable and barn, and a three-car garage, each of the stalls filled with Morgan convertibles in various stages of restoration.

  When we pulled up to the back gate, a tall red-bearded bald man was standing in the compound with a bowling ball in one hand and a beer can in the other. About thirty feet away, a torn turkey, wings spread, eyes glistening, faced him.

  “Be quiet,” Jimmy recommended, “this is serious.”

  “What the fuck is this?” Frank asked, kneeling between the seats. “An attack turkey?”

  “Bowling for Turkeys,” Jimmy said, and about that time the tall man launched his ball.

  The turkey waited until the last moment, then hopped casually into the air and shit on the ball as it trundled below him. The bowling ball rolled to the edge of a raised bed garden where another tall man in a conical straw hat and black pajamas toiled at the weeds with a short hoe. The turkey stalked over to a bathtub full of beer cans, where it perched like the national bird Benjamin Franklin meant it to be.

  “Goddammit, Carney,” the red-bearded man shouted, his deep voice rich in the damp river morning, “it’s your turn.”

  The man in the garden glanced from under his Vietnamese hat and said quietly, “He shit on the ball again, Barnstone. It’s not my turn.”

  We climbed out, beers in hand ourselves, and leaned on the white gate. Barnstone walked over to the soiled bowling ball, then noticed us when he leaned over. Two bantam roosters crowed from the corral, and a white duck scuttled to Barnstone’s knees. He watched us carefully as he stroked the duck’s back. The duck quivered as if about to lay an egg, then squatted in the grass and shuddered as if overwhelmed by an orgasm, then staggered away.

  “It’s not polite to watch sex with animals,” he said.

  Hacienda Barnstone had some rules we couldn’t exactly live with—like no guns on the place and no hard drugs, unless they were the “people’s drugs,” which meant stingy didn’t cut it—but his neighbor down the road had no such qualms. He rented us his empty garage to stash the van. Then Barnstone loaded us into his desert camouflage WWII Power Wagon ambulance and drove us over to a place called Victor’s, where we were ass
aulted by a squad of huevos rancheros. Mostly we just ate and sweated, guzzled Tecate beer, then repeated the process. But Jimmy stopped long enough to ask:

  “What’s with that Carney dude? He having delusions of Cong grandeur?”

  “No,” Barnstone answered seriously, “he’s paying a great karma debt.”

  Frank nearly spit eggs and peppers across the table, and I had to grin.

  “You a Buddhist?” I asked.

  “A label implies a path; a path, a desire. Whatever I may be, my friend, I am without desire,” he said, his huge freckled face as peaceful as stone.

  “What the fuck did what’s-his-name do,” Frank asked, “that we didn’t all do?”

  “Carney’s his name, and his debt is not incurred by the act but by the refusal to acknowledge the debt,” Barnstone said. “Arthur was a balls-to-the-wall stockbroker in Dallas, a man with all the toys—boats, cars, north Dallas women—then he found the ultimate toy. Cocaine. Some can, some can’t. He couldn’t. I couldn’t. We found each other bleeding in the same cathouse piss trough over in Las Palomas, and put our feet to the ground.” Barnstone picked up the breakfast check in one hand, his beer in the other. “My debt seemed lighter. At least I can still smoke a little dope and drink the occasional beer. The last time Carney had a beer, he ended up in Ohio.” The way he said it, Ohio sounded like the seventh circle of hell. “Breakfast is on me, gentlemen. After this you’re on your own. Times are gentle right now, so I can give you three small apartments or the big place which sleeps four. Pay what you can as long as you can. No questions asked.”

  “The big place,” Jimmy said quickly as if afraid to split the fire team, “and thanks, Barney. This time I can pay.”

  “And you remember the rules.”

  “You dirty it, you wash it. You break it, you fix it. You fuck up, you walk,” Jimmy said, then Barnstone nodded and headed for the cash register and the merry, rotund presence of Victor himself.

  “You didn’t tell us this was some kinda religious fruitcake of a place,” Frank growled as he finished his beer.