Bordersnakes

by James Crumley

  At a Y intersection with an even smaller highway, I had to stop to let a funeral cortege pass, though I couldn’t imagine a graveyard in the middle of this nowhere. The next vehicle I met was a pickup that contained three teenage boys with faces painted like clowns under their broad cowboy hats. I don’t know what I’d expected in West Texas, but I began to suspect that I had wandered into a fucking Fellini film.

  Then came the tourists as I climbed past slopes of juniper and scrub oak, and higher still into the improbable gray rock peaks: a busload of ancients turning into a picnic ground already occupied by several families in vans; a couple of drugstore cowboys drinking beer at a turnout; and a group of hikers who looked like retired college professors. Then I saw the MacDonald Observatory rising from the mountain ridge like an escaping moon.

  Too weird, I thought, too fucking weird. So I stopped at the next wide spot in the road to collect myself, wondering what I’d done, wondering what the hell I was doing in West Texas.

  —

  I had been born and raised in the small western Montana city of Meriwether and, except for my time in the Army, had always lived there. It had taken only a month, but now I owned nothing, just a rented mailbox and a telephone number that rang at an answering service. I had destroyed my past, abandoned my parents’ graves, said goodbye to the few friends still alive, then flew to Seattle to buy a new car. I had visions of exotic convertibles, crouched low to the road, faster than death, more surefooted than a Revenue Agent. But now that I could actually afford one, I didn’t fit in the little bastards anymore. A Porsche salesman pointed me toward a Cadillac Eldorado Touring Coupe, nearly two tons of Detroit iron driven by three hundred horses out of a thirty-two-valve V-8, a car big enough for my butt and my head, a trunk the size of a small country, and a Northstar engine that nailed my ass into the driver’s seat when I stuffed the accelerator into the fire wall. And the Beast held the road in a screaming corner. At least as fast as I cared to push her. But I had to wait a week to get the color I wanted with a sunroof. The salesman tried to sell me a Dark Montana Blue, but I assumed I’d given up sentiment in my middle age, so I waited for Dark Cherry.

  That’s where the trouble started. In Seattle. Still not drinking, just waiting for the sunroof, I decided that the new ride deserved a new wardrobe. A couple of tweedy blazers, maybe, a pair of cords, maybe new boots. So I dropped into a store a couple of blocks from the Four Seasons, found a tall, elegant lady with a British accent, who sold me five thousand dollars’ worth of Italian foofaraw, including a two-hundred-fifty-dollar felt hat that she claimed could be pulled through a napkin ring, then nearly fucked me to death. I was so sore driving from Seattle to El Paso not even the eight-way power seat took the strain out of my groin. But it was fun. In my drinking days, I might have married her, lived with her, or tried to love her. But I already had enough ex-wives, ex-roommates, and ex-lovers to last me a lifetime. Oddly enough, I’d taken a vacation from love about the same time I began my long rest from drinking.

  —

  But down in this moonscape I decided I’d rested long enough. So I pulled into the next unpaved turnout and dug into my elegant road provisions: I fired up a fancy English cigarette, a Dunhill Red, and cracked a bottle of Mexican ale, Negra Modelo, then stood in that relentless fall wind smoking and drinking like a civilized man, suspecting that soon enough I’d be back to Camel straights and cheap shots of schnapps anchored by cans of Pabst, living like the drunk I’d always been. Or maybe not. Ten years dry and sober without the crutches of cigarettes and meetings—it hadn’t been a waste of time, but it hadn’t been constant entertainment, either.

  All the high-class fixings burned my tongue like fried shit and made me dizzy and reckless. I loved it. But I didn’t have another beer. I guess it was a test. I guess I sort of passed.

  —

  All I had was an address on the single main street of Fairbairn, a dying town about halfway between Marfa and the Mexican border at Castillo, a town killed by cattle prices and the closure of a military firing range. I drove past the address twice, not believing my own eyes or notes. Once the Dew Drop Inn must have been the best motor court in town. Eight native rock cabins with Spanish tile roofs and tiny garages stood in a shabby half circle around a patio filled with Russian thistle tumbleweeds and ancient dust, and the cabins looked as if they hadn’t been occupied since WWII. A small cafe and beer joint perhaps once had adjoined the office. But now a shabby convenience store filled that space. It advertised ICE COLD BEER and HOMEMADE TAMALES, two major West Texas staples, it seemed.

  As I parked in front of the store, a darkly brown man stepped out. He looked rope-wiry and rank in a flat-brimmed hat, jeans, and only a vest in spite of the sharp wind. A knife the size of a small sword dangled from his belt. I couldn’t see his shadowed eyes, but his mouth pursed as if to spit when he passed my Caddy with the temporary tags. Fucking tourist. Then he climbed into an ancient GMC pickup and rattled away.

  Inside the store, blinking against the sudden shade, I paused as the tall blonde behind the counter rang up a candy sale and made change for a couple of young Mexican-American kids. She looked up, her mouth moved as if to ask if she could help, then tears filled her eyes and she rushed around the counter to hug me long and hard, as if I were her long-lost father. She even whispered “Milo” against my shoulder.

  Shit, I had driven two thousand miles to be attacked by a woman I had never seen before. But I didn’t say anything. My life had always been like that.

  After a long moment, the woman realized that I wasn’t responding in kind, so she stepped back, wiping her eyes. “Milo,” she said, “it’s me. Whitney. C.W.’s wife.”

  “Wife?”

  “Whitney. From Meriwether. I used to work for…for C.W.’s lawyer friend,” she said, then paused. “You know. Solly…I guess they aren’t exactly friends anymore.”

  Then I realized who she was. One of Lawyer Rainbolt’s endless stream of tall, blond, perfectly lovely, and damn smart legal secretaries. After Wynona died in a bout of gunfire, for which Sughrue blamed himself, he had split for Texas with her baby boy, Lester. This woman had started dropping into my bar, the Slumgullion, shyly asking about Sughrue, but not often enough to make me remember her name. That woman was just barely visible beneath the face of this one. Her darkly burned face with a fan of hard-sun wrinkles winking white at the corners of her blue eyes looked nothing like the one I remembered. What time couldn’t do, Sughrue and the West Texas climate had. Still lovely and surely still smart, even though she had married the crazy bastard, her face no longer even vaguely resembled the distant, professional mask I remembered. This was the face of a woman who would kick your ass and give you an hour to draw a crowd.

  “Whitney…” I said. “I’m sorry, but is that your first or last name?”

  In answer, she laughed, bright silver peals that chased the shadows from among the half-empty shelves. “I could tell that you never remembered my name,” she said, smiling, then added proudly, “Whitney Peterson…well, Sughrue, now,” and shook my hand. “I’m so glad you’re here. C.W. will be so happy to see you. You just missed him, you know.”

  I should have recognized the knife, I thought. “I didn’t know…” I said.

  “Oh, we didn’t tell anybody,” she continued. “We didn’t want anybody to know. We did it in the hospital…” Then she paused; a shade fell across her face. “I better let him tell you about that,” she said quietly. Then she grabbed a tablet off the counter and began to draw. “Let me show you how to find the place. I’d call, but he won’t have a telephone in the house.” She tore a sheet off the tablet, handed it to me as if it were the winning ticket for a lottery I hadn’t entered, then dropped her eyes and added, “When you get out to the trailer, tell him I’m right behind you. Just as soon as I can get Dulcy to relieve me. I’ll bring dinner. And tequila. And some more beer. And we’ll have an evening of it…”

  Her wrinkles deepened with sadness, as if she meant to weep again
.

  “Is there any place to stay in this town?” I asked, to bring her back to this moment.

  “Oh, you have to stay with us. You must. The trailer is a double-wide. With an extender. We’ve got tons of room…”

  Eventually, I convinced her that unannounced guests deserved to pay for their own space. So I left, loaded down with tamales, ice, and beer, and took a room at the only open motel, the Cuero, named I assumed for the dry creek that skirted the tiny town, and followed her map south and east of town.

  —

  The rough mountains had ended north and west of Fairbairn, but they had left a score of rocky echoes trailing into the desert. Scuts of wispy clouds troubled the afternoon sky, flirting with a half-moon rising. On the parched flats between the outcroppings, the desert wind picked up strength, moaned and rattled, shifting even the weight of my new Detroit Iron as I rode south and east, following Whitney’s directions, trying not to think about what she had said, the H-word.

  Hospitals had already taken enough of my friends. My people had a history of living until somebody killed them. Usually themselves. But Sughrue’s mother had died of lung cancer years ago. And his crazy father of a benign brain tumor. So without thinking it, the worst came to mind. If the bastard was dying, I told myself, I wouldn’t tell him why I’d come hunting him. No matter what. And I wouldn’t cry, either. At least not sober.

  I turned onto a dirt track a couple of miles past a pretty little roadside park, stopped to open a wire gap, then eased the Beast down a one-lane track, rutted and rocky, that led between two rusty barbed-wire fences across a flat pasture where a dozen antelope grazed on invisible grass, then through another gap, across another pasture. This one rolling toward the blue mountains beyond. And filled with tiny horses grazing. Those little horses were my last straw. All over again. I grabbed another beer. My second of the day, of the decade. It worked just fine, just wonderful. And I ignored the fucking little horses flittering like gnats at the corner of my eye.

  Once through the last gap, I glanced back at the trail of dust I’d left, in spite of driving slowly, as it fled before the ever-rising wind. Then at the road ahead. More of the same. Winding over a couple of small ridges and around another heap of rocks, I found Sughrue’s double-wide permanently installed and sided with rough boards nestled in a small depression, as if seeking lee shelter from all the winds that might blow. Some sort of unfinished frame structure stood in front of the trailer and a metal shed behind, with a windmill and horse trough beyond that.

  I parked in front, honked the horn into the wind without response, then walked up to the trailer’s steps. The frame structure turned out to be a grape arbor of some kind, standing over a patio in progress, Mexican tile set directly on the hard-packed ground. The marker strings hummed in the wind, and the dead vines rattled, almost blotting out the pumping grind of the windmill. I turned back, surveyed the thorny brush—greasewood I guessed from reading western novels—scattered with dwarf mesquite.

  A child’s voice shouted “Yo!” from the corner of the house, and I turned quickly enough to catch a glimpse of a small figure darting around the corner. Before I could take a step in that direction, though, a brown blur swept from under the steps, a forearm as hard and unforgiving as sun-dried leather locked around my throat, and I could feel the point of a knife blade under my ear. Actually, the point was too sharp to feel. What I felt was the slow trickle of blood down my neck. Another goddamned suit for the cleaners.

  A voice hissed, the breath beside my face smelling of dried beef and chilies, tequila and lime and fear, a whisper as roughly soft as a wood rasp in white pine.

  “Who the fuck are you, buddy?” it said, then the forearm eased slightly off my throat.

  “It’s me, you fucking idiot,” I gasped. “I gave you that knife.”

  Everything stopped for a moment. Then released.

  “Milo?” Sughrue said as I turned. He slid the twelve-inch blade of the full-sized Ruana Bowie back into its sheath. “What the hell are you doing in those clothes?”

  I might have asked the same thing.

  It was the guy from the parking lot in front of the Dew Drop Inn. Except he had exchanged his jeans for a loincloth and his hat for a leather string around his forehead holding back the long sun-bleached hair. Up close I could see a puckered scar that divided his ridged abdomen. And Sughrue’s blue eyes in this rawhide stranger’s face.

  The beef had been whittled away, the stocky body now fence-rail thin instead of cornerpost solid, the eyes as wild and shifty as those of the longhorns, the old laugh lines of his face washed out, blown away. When he finally smiled, I thought his face would crack.

  “Goddammit,” he said, “you got your fucking money.” My insane mother had convinced my father to keep my inheritance in trust until I was fifty-three so I wouldn’t squander it on wild women, whiskey, and trout streams. As my father had. “You finally got the money.” Sughrue hugged me so hard he nearly knocked the breath out of me. “So how is it? Being rich?”

  I didn’t bother to answer but nodded at the scar. “Your wife said you’d been in the hospital,” I said when he turned me loose. I pointed at his scar. I swear he flinched.

  “It’s nothing,” he said quickly.

  “Nothing?”

  “Had a little trouble up in New Mexico,” he said, trying to smile. “Nothing serious. I’m fine. Never been better,” he went on as Baby Lester crept quietly around the near corner of the trailer to wrap his brown arms around the corded leg of his adopted father. Baby Lester wasn’t a baby anymore. Just a smaller version of Sughrue, silent and wary, and dressed like his foster dad. He would have looked at home on one of the dwarf horses. “This is your Uncle Milo,” Sughrue said to Lester, and the small boy shook my hand solemnly. “Why don’t you grab us a couple of beers, son?” Sughrue said. “Unless your Uncle Milo is still on the wagon…”

  “I just fell off today,” I admitted as Lester went up the steps to the front door.

  As soon as it closed behind the boy, Sughrue turned to me, asking with a wolfish grin that only hardened his icy blue eyes, “How the hell did you find me, old man?”

  “I hired a private eye,” I said, laughing. The bark that escaped his thin smile didn’t exactly resemble laughter. “Just a joke,” I explained.

  —

  My eye had taken several days to open, but it had healed long before the sick headaches expired. Just using the telephone brought the dizziness back. Driving and talking became drug experiences. Just as I was about to give up on Sughrue, quit and drift with my tail between my legs, I found a mailman to buy and he came up with an address for Baby Lester from a rocking horse his grandmother mailed to him.

  Earlier, the grandmother wouldn’t give me the time of day. She claimed not to have the slightest idea where Sughrue had taken her grandbaby. In fact, she offered to hire me to find him. Both her children were dead, she said, and it was that son of a bitch Sughrue’s fault. And now her only grandbaby was gone. She had blood in her eye and vengeance wearing down her teeth, she said. But I didn’t believe a word of it.

  —

  “You taught me,” I said. “I found the post office bar.” Something about working for the Postal Service drove me to drink. And other acts of madness.

  “Shit,” Sughrue said dryly. “I kept telling Grammy not to mail that fucking rocking horse. But I guess it was too late by then, wasn’t it? Pretty slick, Milo.”

  “I learned it from you,” I said, but he didn’t seem amused.

  Baby Lester arrived with two bottles of Dos X’s, which Sughrue promptly opened with his teeth.

  “Some shit don’t change,” I said as he handed me the icy bottle. But he didn’t even smile. “Whitney said she’d bring out dinner and some more beer just as soon as somebody named Dulcy came to work.”

  “Fucking Dulcy is hanging at a jackpot rodeo up by Alpine,” Sughrue said, which probably explained the little cowboy clowns. Then he spit on the ground, adding, “She’ll be pi
g-drunk and crotch-sore for the next couple of days. Whitney’ll have to close early. But she won’t. Stubborn woman. Dammit.”

  “Well, you married her,” I said. “Congratulations.”

  “Fuck you,” he said, then almost smiled. “Let’s get out of the wind. Love this country, man, but hate the fucking wind.”

  “Ambiguity,” I ventured. “Always your strong suit. Love a stubborn woman, but hate being married to her…” But the joke died before we took a step.

  —

  Sughrue and I had been buddies from the moment we met in the early seventies. He showed up in Meriwether chasing a pharmacist from Redwood City, just weeks after I had opened a PI office because the sheriff’s department had terminated my deputy’s job for lack of morals. I didn’t believe punchboard and poker games were mortal sins or that a couple of sad half-breed whores threatened the moral fiber of Meriwether County. When Sughrue checked in with the police department, an old pal of mine sent him to me, since Sughrue’s California license didn’t buy doodley-squat in Montana.

  So I completed his search for the pharmacist, and Sughrue confronted him. The guy had a fugitive warrant on him, so we could have taken him anytime and any way we wanted. But Sughrue wanted to be kind, let the old boy have one last drink and one last piss. Rather than go home, the pharmacist hanged himself on his knees in front of the urinal, and the resultant lawsuits drove Sughrue out of California. So instead of returning to Moody County in South Texas, where he’d been raised, he came to Montana. Other people had come for worse reasons.

  We’d partnered for a time, long enough for him to qualify for his Montana ticket, then we got into a moral argument about one of our clients—something about fucking runaway wives—and that turned into a drunken fistfight, which I lost. Only Tommy Ray ever hit me harder.