The Wrong Case

by James Crumley

  “Yeah, I found him,” I lied. “But he was dead.”

  “That’s too bad, man, dead people—”

  “Are a hassle,” I finished for her.

  She sighed deeply, as if her wind was spent. She curled up on the seat, her legs drawn under her, her narrow head resting on the seat back, her face hidden in lank hair.

  “Must be sad dying,” she whispered as I headed up Willomot Hill.

  “Some people say that living is the sad part.”

  “Well, that’s silly,” she said, sitting up and brushing the hair out of her face. “What the fuck is that?”

  “Tourists,” I said.

  A caravan of identical aluminum travel trailers occupied the right-hand lane, strung out up the hill like metallic sausages. I down-shifted the rig and roared around the laboring automobiles and their gleaming burdens in the passing lane.

  “Goddamned tourists.”

  “Be nice,” she said, shifting roles, flitting from stoned child to bemused adult as easily as I changed gears. “I’m a goddamned tourist, man, into sightseeing and all that crap, I’m a tourist everywhere I go.” But the role slipped and the giggles came back. “Let’s give the bastards a sight,” she said, slipping out of her cut-offs. She hopped up on the seat and propped her naked butt out the window. But the slow trek of the trailers proceeded smoothly, the eyes in the cars fixed on some more distant and photogenic vista. Mindy was happy, though, grinning wildly, her eyes bright beneath spare brows.

  “Put your clothes on,” I said at the top of the hill as I slowed to turn into the parking lot of the Willomot Hill Bar. “I’m gonna get some beer. You want something?”

  “Sure, man, a Coke and all the goddamned candy bars in the world,” she said, tugging up her cut-offs. A flash of white around the sparse pubic hair made me weak. But then I could always be tempted.

  “Right,” I said, parking the car.

  The bar was in a low building, windowless on both long sides, and it seemed to have been hacked out of the side hill behind it, then skidded down to rest slightly askew beside the highway. Blunt and unfriendly outside, it was like a cave inside, the lair of feral humans, dark and dank, the low walls lined with the mounted heads of deer and elk and mountain sheep and goats and bears, more like totems than trophies. At the very back of the long, low room stood an erect grizzly bear, dim and shaggy, frighteningly shapeless in the deep shadows, its glass eyes glowing like two embers. At night, filled with smoky yellow light and sullen drunks off the reservation, the bar seemed like some primeval ruin, a temple where human sacrifices had just been offered to the hirsute demon-god lurking at the back, an offering refused by the beast. I knew what it looked like at night because I had gone in too many times officially as peacemaker or arrester of vicious movements—roles the owner, Jonas, objected to. At night it looked like the sort of place Raymond Duffy might choose to die in, and in the day, empty except for the silent Indian woman behind the bar, it was no better.

  “Jonas around?” I asked the woman bartender, whose face was so impassive and eyes so glassy that she might have been another trophy hanging behind the bar. I thought Jonas might remember the Duffy kid, but the Indian woman shook her head slowly, silently.

  “Is he coming back today?” My voice sounded oddly reverent in the hushed bar. The woman shrugged, then nodded, then shrugged again. I didn’t know what she meant, but it didn’t matter. Jonas was easy to find: just look for the meanest, loudest, toughest runt in the county, and it had to be Jonas. I ordered a six-pack of beer, two Cokes, but she didn’t have any candy bars. I took a package of potato chips instead, hoping they would suffice.

  On the way to the door, I thought of bringing Helen Duffy up to see the place where her little brother had died. Perhaps it might explain something to her, then she could explain it to me. But there was no need to kid myself. If Helen walked into the Willomot Bar, she would only see a dingy, depressing bar, sadly degenerate, and even worse, she would be able to tell that I was right at home in the bar. I made foolish noises to myself about being disgusted by the Willomot and I didn’t hang out there too often, but I seldom drove past without stopping in, and in an odd way I was fond of the bar. It was a Kamikaze bar, pledged to a divine destruction.

  Outside, back under the rational glare of sunlight, the vault of blue sky resisted the advance of another front, Simon’s rain, a reef of bruised clouds stealing in from the west. Over a ridge directly north, the stone peaks of the Cathedral Mountains spired, as clear as chimes in the summer air. The column of trailers still trundled slowly past, metallic worms on a fatal migration. And sweet Mindy sat cross-legged and naked as a jay bird on the roof of my rig, waving gaily at the tourists.

  “What’s happening?” I asked, trying not to let her know how delighted I was with her.

  “Nothing, man, absolutely nothing,” she answered over her shoulder. As she twisted, the muscles of her narrow waist shimmered in the sunlight. “I haven’t caused a single wreck.”

  “Too bad,” I said. “Come on down. I’ve got work to do.”

  “It’s too nice a day to work,” she said, waving at a logging truck driver as he pulled his truck back across the road, just missing the last of the shining trailers.

  “It’s gonna rain,” I said, pointing behind us at the relentless gray front, from which thunder showers were breaking off like reckless children, slipping ahead of the clouds, splashing rain and cool wind down the mountain valleys. “Soon.”

  “You can work after it starts to rain,” she said.

  “It’s supposed to be the other way around.”

  “That’s silly,” she grumbled, but she climbed down as I watched. She was so casually naked that there didn’t seem to be any point in looking the other way. Her legs were long and slim, her perky rump firm, and her breasts were small but looked as hard as green apples.

  Once in the rig, she tossed her clothes on the floor and sat with her head hanging out the window, her hair fluttering in the wind. Then she faced me again, shaking out the wind tangles, and popped the top of a Coke can.

  “Thanks,” she said. “They didn’t have any candy bars?”

  “Nope.”

  “Good. They still make my face break out, man, and that’s my last shred of middle-class vanity.”

  “Got some potato chips, though.”

  “Yuk,” she grunted. “Fried in animal fats, man. Yuk.”

  She was so smug that I had a handful even though I didn’t want them. She was wrong. They had been fried in used crankcase oil.

  “Hey,” she said, poking me in the ribs. “You wanna ball?” she asked, not faking the casual nature of the question. “I could use a little bread for the road, man. A little bread lets you choose who you have to ball for meals,” she added, grinning broadly as if she hoped to shock me. When I didn’t answer, she said, “Well, if you’re in such a hurry to see old Kick-in-the-ass, I could give you some head while we’re driving. I’m kinda skinny and don’t have any tits to speak of, but I move around a lot to compensate, man, and I could use the bread.”

  I wanted to ask her who she had been traveling with and how she had come up with the routine, but I asked her how much instead.

  “I don’t care, man, spare change or twenty bucks, it don’t matter.”

  “What if I just give you twenty bucks?”

  “Outa sight. What if I ball you for nothing?” she answered quickly.

  “I don’t know,” I said, laughing. “How old are you?”

  “Who cares,” she said, reaching for my fly.

  “I do,” I said, stopping her busy little fingers. “I never ball a chick without a personal history.”

  “That’s weird, man. I ain’t got the clap, so whatcha afraid of?”

  “Balling strangers, I guess.”

  “Everybody’s a stranger, dummy, and you’re puttin’ me on,” she said, her fingers working again. “So find a flat spot.”

  “How old are you?”

  “Nineteen going on fo
rty, man, just like the rest of the world.”

  She took my silence as criticism, which it wasn’t. I had a momentary rush of sadness, but I didn’t know if it was for me or her.

  “Don’t worry about me, man, I’ve been on the road since I was thirteen. My old man wouldn’t let me go to Woodstock, so I split and I ain’t been back. You grow up quick on the road, man, and I’m about as old as I’ll ever be,” she said, defending herself against the years between us.

  “How old will you be at forty?”

  “Who cares. To get old, man, you have to remember things, and I don’t even remember this morning. My old man told me all the time that I’d have to grow up someday when I got out in the real world,” she said, moving closer as she talked. Her fingers had opened my shirt, and her hands were stroking my chest. Her breath was hot against my face. “Well, I’m all grown up and this is the real world, man.”

  “Right,” I said. “Let’s find a sylvan glade.” Helen Duffy wouldn’t understand, but my father would have.

  “What’s that?”

  “A nice flat spot.”

  —

  Afterwards, we exchanged the polite and breathless compliments by which casual lovers maintain their dignity. Consideration touches more deeply and longer than passion. We began with spontaneous passion but finished with consideration, which surprised both of us pleasantly. And after the surprise came the sadness. She rose after a few still moments of holding each other and wandered aimlessly over to the small creek that stuttered past our flat spot. She eased her slim foot into the cold water, muttered a complaint, then rambled on to a large, smooth rock which lay partially in the water, where she lay down to sun. I walked over and sat beside her.

  “A while ago I asked you if Reese was dealing smack, but you never got around to answering me,” I said softly, rubbing her firm thigh with the back of my hand.

  “Working, huh?”

  “Yes.”

  “You make a lot of money?” she asked.

  “I used to. But I spent a lot too, so it evened out.”

  “I never balled a private eye, man.”

  “Neither have I.”

  She grinned and held my hand tightly for a second, then said, “Lawrence used to deal, man, but I don’t think he ever dealt smack. That’s what he took his fall for, so he was kinda afraid of it.”

  “Dealing smack?”

  “No, man, smuggling it across the Mexican border. I think that he asked El Creepo to move out when he got hooked. I heard that. But I didn’t hear it from Lawrence, so who knows if it’s true.”

  “How long ago was that?”

  “I don’t know, man. I didn’t spend much time keeping up with that crap.”

  “How well did you know the Duffy kid?”

  “As well as I wanted to, man. He was a prime creep. I knew that the first time I saw him strutting around with his goddamned guns, quick-drawing and snapping the trigger in people’s faces. Man, after that I wouldn’t even stay in the same room with him, and I told him that if he ever did that to me, he damn well better have a bullet in his goddamned gun because I was gonna knock his fucking head off. And I’d have done it too, man, I ain’t no goddamned pacifistic flower child or nothing like that.”

  “Was he around a lot?”

  “El Creepo? Naw, he paid the rent, man, but he wasn’t around all that much. But he was around enough so that some people wouldn’t even crash there for free.”

  “It wasn’t Lawrence’s house?”

  “Naw, man. He never has any bread. El Creepo paid all the bills.”

  “Was he dealing?”

  “I don’t know, man. He always had dope and money.”

  Dope and money, the trappings of new wealth, I thought as I gathered my clothes and dressed, cursing myself for quitting cigarettes, needing that blue swirl of thoughtful smoke. Dressed, I walked back to the rock and held her tightly for another moment, not thinking at all.

  “Hey, man,” she breathed against my neck.

  “Yeah.”

  “Hey, man,” she repeated, leaning back to stare at me with her soft brown eyes, light brown like her hair, dry and shaken clean in the wind.

  “Yes,” I said into her silence, the silence of the young, which ran like an underground river beneath the dope babbles and inarticulate riffs of their private language, the silence of frustration and anxious grief for nameless losses.

  “Hey, man, don’t be sad, okay? Sometimes older guys, you know, they get down afterwards. I don’t like to make guys sad when I ball them,” she said, sounding as lonesome as easy rain among stolid pines. “Okay?”

  “You don’t make me sad,” I said, not telling her that youth was sometimes sadder than middle age, not telling her that she made me feel old, older than the mountains, more ruined than the gulleys jagged on sunburnt slopes. “It’s been too nice a day to be sad.”

  “Great,” she said sadly.

  And I lifted her in my arms, as light as a bundle of dry wood. She smelled of sunlight and stone, her limbs as smooth and limber as green sticks, and her mouth on mine, sun-warm and gentle, as soft as down, drove a stake into my tired heart. I wanted to break the spell, to heave her into the creek, to shout and splash water happily, to find some quick irony with which to resist, but the spell held.

  “You’re crying, you old fart,” she whispered sweetly, forgiving me, almost happy.

  “I must be drunk.”

  “You’re crying.”

  “Yeah, but I’m not sad.”

  Ten

  The Holy Light Hog Farm was one of those visions of paradise nurtured by dirt farmers going bust on the Great Plains—their faces implacable, sunburnt, wind-furrowed—a vision for which they would have gladly sold their souls. Lacking a market for souls, they did the next hardest thing: rose up from behind their plows and dragged their suffering families west out of that great bitter sea of harsh land that stretched to the bleak horizon in all directions, heading west to the promised land, rich wet valleys where the mountains broke the sharp thrust of the winter winds, land so fertile that fence posts took root overnight and cattle fattened like hogs. Not very many found their Edens, but the man who first owned the land and built the house now occupied by the Hog Farm did.

  The house was yellow and square, three stories high, softened by a gabled roof and a broad veranda on three sides, and set on a shallow hillside at the foot of the Cathedral Mountains, which rise as grandly as the Tetons, overlooking the wide, fecund valley of the Stone River. Large and stately trees grew around the house, providing shade and dignity, and a deep lawn, broken randomly by flowering shrubs, flowed down the hillside from the house to the edge of the fields and meadows. It was a lovely place, a proper seat for a baron, an old man, tall and weather-honed lean, wrapped in faded, starched khaki, his collar buttoned loosely around his thin, stiff neck. So it was a shock to drive up and see a naked, pregnant woman stretched on the thick grass to catch the last of the sun and a bearded freak sitting on the veranda steps rolling a joint, to hear the dull thud of hard rock music rippling like thunder from the broad windows.

  The young man who owned the place didn’t have any illusions about the community of man. His land was posted, and nobody stayed at the farm unless he worked. He grew his own hog feed organically, so the fifteen or twenty young people living there had plenty of work. Since I have the average older American’s theoretical attachment to work, I approved of his concept, but I had been up to the farm on business—once to bring back a runaway teenage girl and twice to verify that runaway wives were living in sin—and I didn’t completely approve of the people. Not that they were bad people. They were suspicious of strangers and too damned self-righteously superior about their modern morality to suit me. But they didn’t bother anybody and they worked. Probably harder than I did. And because of my previous visits, they didn’t like me at all.

  —

  “You wait in the car,” Mindy said, patting me on the thigh. She had made me promise once more not to gi
ve Reese any grief, and she reminded me of the promise as she climbed out of the rig and trotted across the lawn toward the front door, pausing to say hello to the pregnant lady.

  The kid on the veranda obviously didn’t know me because he waved and smiled and shouted, “What’s happening, man?” but the pregnant lady recognized me. She rose, eased into a loose shift and walked over to my rig. A tall blond lady, as beautifully healthy as some expectant mothers are, she was the ex-wife of a real estate salesman in Meriwether. In my own small way, I’d been responsible for the paucity of her divorce settlement.

  “My ex-husband send you up here to spy on me?” she asked in a hard, flat voice.

  “Don’t be paranoid, lady,” I said. “You’ll hurt the baby.”

  “Fuck off. Did he?”

  “No, ma’am.”

  “Then get your ass off the property.”

  “Oh, go to hell,” I said, not knowing if my irritation was from my memory or the two whites I’d taken when Mindy and I left the creek. The tall woman left, striding across the lawn so strongly that she could have pulled a plow. It had been a lovely divorce. The dude she was shacked up with had taken a swing at me when I came up to verify her living arrangement, and then I had to sue her ex-husband for my fee. But the woman looked so good walking away from me that I was sorry she didn’t like me.

  “Occupational hazard,” I said to myself, sipping beer and wondering what I was going to do if Reese didn’t show up. Or if he did. I reached under the seat for the Browning automatic, looked at it, checked the clip and made sure there was a round in the chamber, then put it back under the seat. I wasn’t going to shoot anybody. The whole idea was silly. I had learned the hard way that if you pull a gun on a man, you damn well better be ready to shoot him. Otherwise he might get mad. I had pulled my service revolver on a huge gypo logger once, and he broke my wrist taking it away from me. Then he knocked me cold, stuffed me in the back of my unit, and drove himself to the county jail. It felt nice to have the 9-mm pistol under the seat, but that’s where it should remain.