The Mexican Tree Duck

by James Crumley

  Carney filled two tortillas with beans and headed back to the garden, disappearing into a tiny bamboo hut that blended so well with the foliage we hadn’t seen it before.

  We watched with amazement. Jimmy sat down at the table, saying, “That fucking guy makes me nervous.”

  “Me, too,” Barnstone said.

  “What was he?” Frank asked. “A fucking lurp?”

  “We’ve never discussed it,” Barnstone said, leaving it at that.

  When we had eaten everything but the plates, Jimmy said it for us. “It wasn’t pretty, Barney, and I wouldn’t feed it to my cousin in Boston, but that’s the best breakfast I’ve ever had.”

  “I suspect you’re going to need it,” Barnstone said, pouring more coffee. Then he turned to me, his voice flat and hard like a place Buddha might sit, but not for long. “So what the fuck are you guys really doing in my town?”

  Frank and Jimmy stood up to get between us before it got western and ugly.

  “First, Mr. Barnstone,” I said, “maybe you’ll tell me why you sicced that little DEA bitch on me.”

  “She’s an old friend, Mr. Sughrue, and she asked me. That’s why.”

  “What the fuck …” Frank started to say.

  But Barnstone stood up, stepped over to the tack room door, and said, “Let me show you something,” then he swung open the door. The bloody body of his white duck dangled from a nail. “That duck was a great companion,” Barnstone said. “She came with a touch. Anybody’s touch. A truly happy soul. And this piece of shit …” Barnstone whipped a scrap of canvas off a dead body, the throat cut to the neck bone, then he covered it up. “I haven’t seen a dead body in ten years. You guys are here one fucking day, and I … Well, you can dig it, right?”

  “You do that?” I asked.

  “Carney,” Barnstone said. “He was sort of fond of Annie, too.”

  “Who was the guy?” Jimmy asked.

  “Just some mojado fresh off the farm,” Barnstone said. “I know the asshole in Delicias who probably hired him. But I’ve been clean so long I fucking know this is not directed at me, so it would be nice if I had the whole story, and how some fucking heavyweight Mexican scammer knew you were here. Is that a problem?” Barnstone closed the door on the dead as if they had already taken their places on the great wheel of life.

  “Probably found it out from the DEA,” I said. “Dottie said my name was all over their computer, but I don’t know how the hell they could make this connection.”

  Jimmy and Frank didn’t know if they should run or fight, so they babbled questions until I told them I didn’t have a clue. Except for the one Dottie had given me.

  “And the kicker is, boys, they think I’m in town,” I said, “to shepherd several tons of cocaine across the border.”

  “Competition. That explains a lot,” Barnstone said.

  “Yeah, but what the fuck does it mean?” Jimmy said.

  That, of course, as always, is the question.

  For another bundle of bills, Barnstone’s neighbor rented Frank and Jimmy an old Corvette that sounded like an airplane but, as Frank said happily later, “When the light changes, everybody else becomes a flyspeck in your rearview mirror.” They went into El Paso proper, should such a place actually exist, to see if the childhood part of Norman’s story checked out.

  Then Barnstone took me into his house, which was filled with the most wonderful collection of junk on the North American continent. A child’s barber chair, a stuffed javelina, a life-sized color cutout portrait of Pancho Villa in a pith helmet that made him look a lot like Teddy Roosevelt. A horseshoe collection mounted on varnished plywood. A chopped Harley hog in front of a projection television screen. And that was only in the living room.

  “Where’d you get all this crap?” I asked.

  “I don’t know,” he said, “shit just sticks to me like fuzz bunnies to a cat.” Then he straddled the Harley, reached into the off-side saddlebag, and came out with an old broom-handled Mauser automatic pistol. “Shit like this,” he said, a soft threat like a small flame in his voice.

  “I thought you didn’t allow guns on the place,” I said, sinking into a tooled-leather couch underneath a longhorn steer’s mounted rack, crossing my hands behind my neck. “Or questions.”

  “Just mine,” he said. “In emergencies. The duck and the dead body make it an emergency.”

  “The gun won’t buy you shit,” I said, “and you know it. How long has it been since you dropped the hammer on a guy in your living room?”

  Barnstone looked at me for a long time, the Mauser unwavering in his hand. Then he laughed calmly and slipped the pistol back into the saddlebag. “Well, either you’re the real goods, Sughrue, or you’re too tough for me.”

  “Tough never counts,” I said. “But Dottie said I could trust you. Let’s have a beer and I’ll fill you in on the various felonies I’ve committed on the way to El Paso. That’s if you’re still interested.”

  “I’m interested,” he said, “now.”

  So we settled at the kitchen table with a couple of Tecates, and I told him most of the story. While he shook his head, I added that I also wanted a close look at Joe Don Pines; he nodded sagely, and asked, “You always live like this?”

  “Whenever I can,” I admitted. He smiled serenely, then I said, “You know anything about Joe Don and drugs?”

  He gave me a look that questioned my sanity. “As far as I know, he’s just a rich asshole,” he said, “but there has been some talk. He does have a three-thousand-yard paved strip over at the ranch headquarters in Edwards Hole, and her family has a ranch in the Encantadas south and east of Big Bend with a two-thousand-yard hardened runway on it. That’s all I know.” He looked at me again. “Think about it, Sughrue. I have a lot of money, but Joe Don and his wife have a hundred times as much as I do. Why would they fuck with nickel-and-dime shit like drugs when they’ve got enough money to do big-time white-collar crime?”

  “Two tons of cocaine ain’t exactly nickel-and-dime, is it?”

  “For them, sure.”

  “Barnstone, remember,” I said. “Money’s the ultimate drug. And desire the snake swallowing its tail.”

  “Hey, now,” he said, smiling, “don’t get oriental on me. Just be cool and we’ll take a look. With open minds, empty of desire.”

  “I can’t promise that,” I admitted.

  “Well, we’ll just leave the guns at home,” he said, then laughed as he dug up a small tripod, two sets of desert fatigues, and a pair of WWII German naval binoculars. “Grab your walking shoes, man,” he said, tossing me a set of fatigues. “We’re going to cover some ground.”

  An hour later we were easing down an arroyo just southwest of the Upper Valley not too far from the track Jimmy had followed. Barnstone had insisted on leaving the ambulance a couple of miles west of the fat farm, hidden in a small brushy gully an hour downhill and a canteen of water behind us. It was cloudy and late fall, but the desert still sucked the moisture right out of us. We rounded a bend in the dry wash and overlooked the Upper Valley lying peacefully between the prehistoric banks of the Río Bravo del Norte. Barnstone motioned to belly down, then we slithered up to the edge.

  “Probably a lot of trouble for nothing,” he whispered, handing me the glasses, “but better safe than sorry. Anyway, there it is. One of Joe Don’s lairs.”

  The three drilling rigs I had seen the night we crossed the desert sat along the banks of the valley about five hundred yards apart just above a new road that seemed to lead to a brand-new border crossing. A telephone crew with ditching equipment approached the checkpoint from both sides of the border.

  Just before the crossing, a road branched off, and a sign announced: El Rancho Encantada. The fat farm lay in front of us, glistening white stucco walls and red tile roofs among a plague of golf courses and swimming pools, green and blue rampant in the middle of the desert. A Gulfstream jet touched down at the private strip just beyond the eighteenth hole, then parked among sev
eral of its ilk.

  A platoon of men and women dressed in shining gray Lycra tights and either halters or singlets danced to music we couldn’t hear, training for the war against excess. Some of the figures looked as if they could use the work, but several of them looked as carefully honed to tendon and bone as lifelong speed freaks. Three young women in red Lycra led the dance, their hard, square jawlines commanding the air.

  The rest of the help—gardeners, serving folk, and random gofers—wore red jumpsuits and looked Mexican, but none looked familiar. I swept the spa several times with the wide-angle glasses, then went back over it again closely with my spotting scope.

  I didn’t see a sign of Wynona or Lester, though, not an armed guard or even a simple cell, nothing.

  “I don’t see her,” I told Barnstone, “and I don’t see anyplace they might be holding somebody against their will. Except the dance floor and she’s not there,” I said. “What are the telephone companies doing down there?”

  “Joe Don is building a new border crossing,” he answered. “Another of his shithouse mouse dreams.”

  “Has he got an office in El Paso?”

  “Yeah, but I don’t think we can work that one. Maybe we can try the main ranch tonight,” he said, “but that’s a fucking different deal, man. We’ll have to low-crawl about five hundred yards.”

  “I can see why you were able to stay in business so long,” I said.

  “Betrayed by my basest desires, though,” Barnstone sighed, then chuckled. “But she was almost worth it.”

  “I wouldn’t know,” I said. “My desires have always been simply way off base.” I paused while he considered that. “And I think I’ll visit Joe Don at the office this afternoon.”

  “He ain’t gonna like that,” he said.

  “I hope to fuck not.”

  Overthrust Drilling and Production had offices on the top floor of the tallest building in downtown El Paso, an edifice of black glass striped with white concrete columns. It had taken me a couple of hours on the telephone and the persistence of a junkie or a lawyer to get through to Joe Don’s personal assistant. Once I had her on the telephone I mentioned that I had some questions about his missing wife that I was sure he wouldn’t want to share with the FBI.

  Then I got some action. They kept me on the line long enough to trace the call, then gave me an appointment at 6:00 P. M.

  By the time I hung up the telephone in my room at the Paso del Norte Hotel, where I had taken a room in the name of Eduardo Nueces, and walked down to the lobby they had three guys with earplug speakers and lapel mikes on my tail. Two were dark and swarthy and dressed like traveling salesmen, but they both looked like refrigerators in bad sport coats and their little piggy eyes glittered with the hope of violence; the other looked like an unemployed pimp. The fourth and fifth, a tourist couple, picked me up as I strolled up to the little square where they used to keep the alligators.

  As I walked through the throng of bums, a slim character in pimp clothes from the thirties stopped me with a long, thin finger.

  “Hey, man, you looking for some action?” he said.

  Slightly taken aback since several thousand prostitutes worked just across the border, all I could do was look toward Juárez.

  “Don’t even think about going to Mexico,” he said. “The girls there are all ugly, greedy, and diseased. But if you’re interested in some big-titted white pussy—cheerleaders and pom-pom girls—I’m your man, soldier.”

  “I just want to know what happened to the alligators, man.”

  “Just walked away, soldier,” he said, then broke into a bit of soft-shoe hustle in his pointed alligator shoes, “just walked away.” Then he smiled and followed them. One of the refrigerators grabbed his arm, and the skinny guy broke into his smiling spiel. I hoped they didn’t hurt him too much. But I didn’t hope too much.

  But the brief weirdness made me think I needed a drink. In Mexico. Which somehow manages, in spite of its madness, to be saner than America. So I hoofed down Stanton Street to the bridge, then crossed the border to Juárez. None of my tails looked anything like government agents and none of them bothered to call home before we crossed the border, didn’t even hesitate, which probably meant that Joe Don was holding out on the Fibbies, just like I thought.

  Walking felt right, down the crowded dingy Texas side, through the lovely tamale stench. Besides, I had stashed my rent-car in a high-rise garage, and once across the thick, muddy waters flowing between concrete walls, chain link, and razor wire, Mexico afoot seemed even better. I played it out for a while, pissed in a urinal filled with ice, then another filled with seaweed. Nervous pees, so I took a cab a block and a half to a place I’d heard about, the Kentucky Club, for margaritas and nostalgia. The bartender claimed to have played in the Mexican League back in the days when American baseball players were giants, before the Dominicans took over the league. After I stopped peeing, I wandered back to America with my little band tagging behind me. At least they had the decency to hide their earplugs and mikes before they crossed over through American immigration and customs. Then I took the fucks into the parking garage and lost them until I was ready to be found.

  They took me down half an hour later when I stepped out of the elevator on Joe Don’s floor a few minutes before six. I resisted just enough to get their blood in an uproar, hoping they might give something away. They were tough but professional, like excops rather than hired thugs. Except for the woman, whom I had managed to kick in the shin. Although she was a redhead complete with a scattering of freckles, she launched a string of curses in slurred Spanish that I couldn’t follow with my smattering of Tex-Mex. She was about to kick me in the nuts when one of the dark guys spoke sharply to her. In what sounded like Mexican Spanish. But so quickly that the only word I caught was gusana. Then they hustled me down the hall to see the wizard.

  Although I had been searched carefully twice, led through a metal detector, then manacled into cuffs, a waist chain, and leg irons, when I was ushered into the presence of Joe Don himself and shoved into a chair, a tall, well-dressed young man went over me again. He did everything but shine a flashlight up my rectum. And I told him so.

  “Don’t tempt me,” he said.

  I looked at Joe Don and said, “That’s the way it is with the help today. When they don’t have their heads up their own asses, they’re looking for some other shitty place to put their face.”

  The tall young man blushed under his rich tan all the way up to his blond hair combed sleekly back from his high forehead. He ran a soft hand over his hair as if I’d mussed it, a gesture that reminded me of somebody. He looked sort of willowy under his expensively loose suit and he wore thin Italian loafers without socks, thin enough to show the callused toes. And when he slapped me, it nearly took my head off.

  “Thanks,” I said. “That clears up everything except my head.” Then I shook my head, and he laughed. “I may be dizzy, motherfucker, but I promise payback’s going to be a bitch.”

  “What the fuck do you want?” he said, then slapped me again. A little harder.

  “An office like this, man,” I said, looking around Joe Don’s corner lair. It was all soft leather, dark wood, and views. Mostly east El Paso and Juárez, not views much praised for their aesthetic values. Other than this, the only displays of money were a couple of original Spanish oils on the walls and a glass case of pre-Columbian artifacts. Most of the wall space was occupied by artifacts from the Vietnam War. Weapons and official photos, citations and medals, the phony debris of a foolish cause. This fucker had believed. So I added, “And other people’s money to fuck around with.”

  The blond boy struck me again before Joe Don could stop him.

  “Touchy,” I said when the stars got out of my eyes.

  “That’s enough, Len,” Joe Don said. He had a deep, theatrical voice that went well with his large, rugged face. Then to me: “You’ve gone to a great deal of trouble to get into my office, you want to tell me what this is about,
Mr. Eddie Nuts? Blackmail? Ransom?”

  “Hey, Mr. Pines,” I said, “when you check your telephone tapes, you’ll see that I just wanted to ask you some questions without the FBI in my hair. That’s all.” I rattled my chains. “My real name is C. W. Sughrue and I’m a private investigator from Meriwether, Montana, and I spent some of my life as a buck sergeant in the First Air Cav, so let’s cut the shit, okay? Get them to take the gift wrapping off me, offer me a drink like a white man, and get rid of these overpaid jerks, then I’ll ask my questions, and we can be pals, a couple of vets talking over old times, good Saigon pussy and bad times in the bush.”

  Joe Don stared at me for a moment, then smiled his open, handsome smile. Even chuckled warmly. We chatted while his goons unlocked my chains and the blond guy, whom Joe Don introduced as Leonard Townsend, his adopted son and his chief of security, poured a large measure of Herradura Gold tequila into heavy crystal tumblers. Joe Don was heavy himself, on the charm, but I managed to keep myself from kissing him on the lips. Maybe it was the empty slot in the display case where my Mexican Tree Duck had once rested between his pals. It was clear to me that the other two ceramic ducks lacked the distinguished character of mine.

  Maybe Lenny had slapped me harder than I realized. But I didn’t care. I knew Barnstone was watching from the roof of a nearby bank building. Surely he wouldn’t let the bastards kill me without at least calling the cops.

  “So why don’t you fill me in, Mr. Sughrue?” Joe Don said quietly.

  So I did my best.

  When I finished Norman’s version of the story, Joe Don walked over to the glass wall and stared deeply into Mexico as the shadows of sunset lengthened over the desert, then he sighed and began to speak without turning.

  “I suppose you’ve gotten deeply enough into my background, Mr. Sughrue, to understand that my marriage to Sarita was simply a matter of financial convenience, arranged between her grandfather and me. And believe me, sir, it has worked on those terms. Worked so well that we’ve become quite close. Sarita is a lovely, cultured woman, my friend, and what began as a marriage of convenience has become a real marriage, and I would do anything to get her back. Pay any amount of money …” Then he paused, turned to look at me. “But there has been no ransom demand,” Joe Don said, and let it lie there.