We parted ways. Badly. The next time we crossed paths, in a bar in Paradise, Montana, I broke his right collarbone with a pool cue and, with him one-armed and hurting, managed to fight him to a draw. When we got out of the Saunders County jail the next morning, we decided that not being friends was too much trouble. So we were buddies again.
—
Out of the wind, for Sughrue, meant another flat tile patio under another grape arbor behind the trailer, where we sat, mostly silent, drinking beer and smoking my cigarettes—he decided to quit quitting, too—until the sun hit the horizon and the wind fell. Then in the sweet dusky light he built a tiny smokeless fire and squatted, sipping slow beers until deep-dark-thirty, when Whitney’s lights came bouncing up the trail.
After dinner, Sughrue put the boy to bed, leaving Whitney and me on the patio. I stirred the Indian fire as we listened to Sughrue’s voice reading to the boy. It sounded like Dickens.
“Doesn’t sound like Dr. Seuss,” I said, quietly, as I cracked two more beers. “More like Hard Times.”
“C.W. thinks that children’s books don’t prepare children for the real world,” she said, not a hint of judgment in her voice, no more than when she added, “He’s crazy, you know.”
“He’s always been crazy,” I joked.
Whitney’s pale eyes darkened as tendrils of flame ate the small dry wood, then she stood abruptly. “I’m going to bed, Milo,” she said. “Maybe he’ll talk to you.”
“Don’t mean to interfere, ma’am, but you ought not to marry a man who won’t talk to you,” I said, stupid now I suppose with drink. “Sorry. None of my business…”
“I married him so he wouldn’t die,” she answered like a woman who knew, “but I can’t make him live.” Then she said good night and trudged into the trailer as if climbing the steps of a gallows.
I wanted to put my hand under her slim elbow and help, but knew better. I’d done enough marital work in the old days, to smell the rift between them even before I heard it, and during my marrying years, when I had been known as the Dick Butkus of domestic relations, even I could recognize sadness in a good woman.
Looking back over my five marriages and four divorces—one of my wives died in a car wreck with three sailors before we could get divorced—sometimes I wanted to track those women down to ask what we had done wrong. But I knew better than that. What we’d done wrong was to marry. The marriages are just flings and larks and hangover refuges. At least my only son was lucky. His mother, Ellen, had married a decent man who raised him well, and when I stopped in San Francisco on the way to El Paso from Seattle to see the boy and his wife, they treated me like an aging uncle, some distant and dimly remembered relation, whose company they enjoyed but didn’t quite understand, but for whom they honestly cared. It was a lovely gift, and I thanked them for it, an act I perhaps had too often neglected during my earlier years.
—
Sughrue broke the thought when he stepped outside, unscrewing the cap on a bottle of tequila. He took a pull, then handed it to me. I took a sip, prepared for liquid fire, but touched a soft smoky taste almost like a good single-malt whiskey. Not bad. I had another, then stared at the blue horseshoe on the label. Sughrue slipped a skinny joint and a kitchen match from his vest pocket, then fired them both.
“Not bad,” I said, passing him the tequila. “And I wouldn’t mind a hit off that doobie, either, but I want you to know that if you’re going to continue to jerk me around and avoid talking about this shit…”
“What shit?” he asked blandly enough to piss me off.
“This,” I hissed, suddenly angry, slamming my hands against the rocks of his shoulders, “this hiding out shit…”
“You too drunk to drive that hog, Milo?” he said. I shook my head, still angry. “Let me put my pants on,” he said mildly, “then let’s take a ride, old man.”
—
His story about getting shot drifted like the trip he’d made that day through the Rio Grande Valley north of El Paso, back in town after a long, ugly chase to catch a bail jumper, a child molester who had once been a citizen. There was that. And the fear that the bastard would slither through the system, more trouble than he was worth.
But mostly the wandering, afternoon road trip was about Wynona, Baby Lester’s mom. Sughrue still blamed himself, though nobody else did. And on his way to see the sunset over the desert, Sughrue stopped for a six-pack in a New Mexican beer joint and somehow got involved in a hassle between the bartender and a group of El Paso Chicanos, led by a tall, loud kid.
Words were exchanged. Then the big kid whipped a cheap, snub-nosed .38 out of his back pocket and snapped a round at the bartender, a loud, stinky pop that smashed an old Coors sign. The second round clipped right between Sughrue’s fingers, between the little finger and the ring finger on his right hand, right through the beer can, and into his gut.
In that moment the motes dancing on the shafts of sun shivered with the cloud of gun cotton, wadding, and unexploded powder grains, not to mention the fucking lead, plus the vaporized beer from the murdered can. But by the time Sughrue let this random madness roar through his mind, before he could step forward, the flattened .38 lead had tumbled through the edge of his liver, several loops of gut, and his left kidney, where the spent round died like a lost marble.
—
Between midnight and sunrise Sughrue stopped talking; we sat on a picnic table at the little rest area just up the road. Stone Corrals, it was called, I learned from the sign as I pissed on it. A short ride from the trailer. Sughrue loved the Beast but couldn’t stand to be inside too long. When I walked back to the table, he took up the tale again.
“So they took the kidney and a couple of feet of intestine,” he said jauntily, then gunned a beer. “The only telephone number in my wallet was Whitney’s.” He sounded embarrassed. “The hospital called her. I didn’t want to call anybody. I don’t know. Maybe I was ashamed. They say it happens that way sometimes. Maybe I wasn’t too lucid. I don’t fucking know. Anyway, she came down, hung around, and finally said it might cheer both of us up to get married. So we did.”
“So what the hell are you doing out here in the middle of nowhere? Playing cowboys and Apaches?”
“I came down this way once,” he said softly, “on a job, and I liked the country. It suits my personality.” Then he stopped and pointed his finger at me. “You ever realize that you and me, we’ve always lived close enough to the border to run if we have to?”
“Sounds right,” I agreed, and he just let it hang there. “So what’s the problem?”
“What the hell are we running from, man? What are we afraid of?” Sughrue paused, then walked away for a moment, hitting on the tequila bottle, then back to the cooler for a beer. He offered me a drink, which I declined. Another test maybe, but maybe I just needed to be a little sober, now. Then Sughrue turned away from me. At first I couldn’t hear him, so I moved closer.
“…all the customers ran, everybody ran, but the cholos, the kids, those fuckers dragged me out back to the edge of the irrigation ditch, then the big one stuck the pistol in my ear and pulled the fucking trigger, pulled the fucking trigger with the barrel in my ear…”
“I don’t understand,” I said, quietly.
An easy breeze rattled the stunted trees among the rocks. Stars and a half-moon filled the night sky with enough light to see a small herd of desert white-tailed deer grazing in the shadows across the highway. They raised their soft noses and flickering ears at a rattle of gunfire from the south.
“What the hell is that?” I asked.
“Hollywood blanks,” he answered. “Some asshole is rehearsing a western movie around here. On the old pieces of the gunnery range. Down by Castillo. Fuck ’em.”
“Fuck ’em?”
“They don’t know a thing about gunfire,” he said softly.
“Or having a thirty-eight stuck in your ear?”
“You’re dead right there, bro’.”
“What happene
d?”
“The goddamned firing pin shattered,” Sughrue said. “I heard it. Broke like an ice crystal. I still hear it. Then the big guy threw the pistol away.”
He was talking but wasn’t getting to it. I knew that much. Pushing wouldn’t help. It had taken two years and ten thousand drinks to get the story of his Vietnam troubles, particularly the one that nearly got him sent to Leavenworth. I didn’t have either the time or the liver for this one.
“Yeah,” I said into the silence.
“So I rolled into the irrigation ditch,” he said. “The guy who shot me wanted to come after me, but the other guys, they were dressed out and didn’t want to fuck up their good clothes. What the hell, they said, I was one dead fucking gringo already.
“I didn’t disagree with them, either,” he continued. “I floated along, drifting and dreaming. I might still be there, but I bumped into a head gate. Climbed out, walked back to the van, and drove myself to the hospital down in El Paso.”
“Nobody picked you up?”
“Drunk, wet, bloody in the middle of the afternoon,” he said, “who would pick me up?” Then he looked at me and laughed. “You would, you dumb son of a bitch. Even if you didn’t know it was me. Asshole.”
“Thanks.”
“You’re welcome.”
It passed for a joke between us.
Until he told me what he had been working toward.
“I heard them talking, Milo. I’ve got just enough border Spanish to understand a little. Somebody hired these fucking guys to kill me,” he said flatly. “Some son of a bitch.”
“Who?”
“They didn’t say and I couldn’t think of a soul who’d want to. Still can’t.”
“What’d the cops say?” I asked.
“Fucking cops,” he answered. “Not much. Couldn’t find the piece. Told me I was crazy. According to the bartender, the cholo was just some drug dealer passing through town. Nobody would dare testify, even if they could find him. And according to the Luna County Sheriff’s Department, if I wasn’t crazy or drunk or stoned, or all three at once, it was just some hangover from my troubles down here a few years ago.”
Sughrue stopped. I knew that sorry story. It had ended where this one began. With the death of Wynona Jones.
“The fucking DEA ran Dottie and Barnstone all the way to Coasta Rica, so I didn’t have any friends. And all kinds of law, they’re still mad at me. If the licensing rules weren’t so fucked down here, man, I’d never have gotten a ticket to work.
“So the official stance is that since I’m not dead,” Sughrue growled, “it’s not their problem. So fuck it.”
“And if you’re dead? Fuck that, too?”
“Right on, brother,” he muttered. “But I ain’t dead. And I know the bastards are still looking for me.”
“So let’s find the bastards,” I said. “They’ll tell us who hired them.” In the old days, Sughrue could make a rock talk. “Then we’ll know who.”
“You’re big on finding people, Milo,” he said softly. “Hell, you couldn’t even find me.”
“Not quite true, Sonny.”
Sughrue bowed his head, then turned away from me, whispering, “I think Whitney’d leave me, man. She for damn sure would. I owe her big-time. And Lester loves her like fire.”
Not just Lester. I had to think about that. This was Sughrue’s first marriage, maybe his first longtime live-in love. The child seemed deeply attached to Whitney. If Sughrue was going with me, I needed him whole. Not looking back all the time. And I owed him, too, so it was an easy decision to make.
“Okay,” I said, “I’ll do it without you. I’ll find them. Then you can stop hiding.”
“No,” he pleaded, then grabbed a sob before it escaped into the dark air. “Fuck that. I can’t afford any more debts.”
I wouldn’t even guess what had happened in the hospital to make Whitney think she had to marry Sughrue, but that was the debt Sughrue had trouble carrying. Maybe a little anger would help.
“Your sorry ass ain’t the boss of me,” I said.
Sughrue turned, tears glistening in his eyes, his fists knotted. He remembered the line. He’d said it to me just before our first fight. “Goddamn you, Milo.”
“Goddamn you,” I said. “Fucking coward. Tell the woman the truth. Maybe she won’t leave.”
“What fucking truth?” he shouted. The whitetails scrambled toward safety, bounding rocks with flags waving, as the echoes of his scream rattled the stillness.
“That somebody shot you in the guts, and you got scared. For the first time in your life,” I said, calmly. “So welcome to the human race.”
“I’m not scared of you, asshole.”
“I didn’t put a round in you,” I said. “Plus I’m your friend. And except for the war, your oldest friend.”
The breath Sughrue took seemed to suck all the fresh air out of the night. He took a step toward me, nearly cocked a fist.
“I’ve got a pool cue in my pocket,” I said.
“No, you don’t. It’d make that silly-ass suit hang wrong,” he said. Then Sughrue smiled.
“It’s an Italian cue,” I said, “light, troublesome, fashionable, and ineffective.” Sughrue finally laughed.
“I’ll talk to her,” he said. “I can’t promise anything, except that I’ll talk to her.”
“She loves you, Sughrue,” I said, “and she’s a damn smart woman. She’ll do the right thing. Trust her. And if she won’t let you go,” I added, “I’ll still go alone.”
“Why are you doing this, old man?” he asked.
“I want something from you.”
“What?”
“I want you to help me find a banker.”
“What for?”
“Well, you know. A long time ago I tried to throw all my guns away…”
“At least you got rid of the ammo,” he said.
“And out of the business. Something I had to do, I guess, a promise I needed to keep,” I said. “Too many people got hurt…”
“Tell me about it,” he said.
“But when I find this son of a bitch,” I said, “I want you to hold him while I take a double-bitted axe to him. Chop off his hands at the wrist and feet at the ankles. Maybe some other parts, too.”
“Jesus, man. What’d he do?”
“He stole my father’s money,” I admitted, “stole it with a computer.”
“But the car, the clothes…”
“I sold everything he didn’t steal. The office building, the bar, the rent property. Everything. I’ve got enough money to chase him for a couple of years,” I said, “living good. Maybe even three. Then after that…who knows? Maybe I can sell the Caddy…”
“Sell your wardrobe first,” he suggested.
“But I’m going to catch the son of a bitch, even if I have to do it on Social Security.”
“You never paid much Social Security,” he said. “Shit, man, you’re crazier than I am.”
“Just older,” I said, “and slower. It took me almost two years to get mad.”
—
My father, trapped in a bad marriage, in love with another bad woman, had shotgunned himself before I was a teenager. My mother hanged herself with her queen-sized panty hose at a fat farm in Arizona while I was a teenager in the Korean War. As they say, shit happens. I learned to live with it. But she had hated my father so much, she took it out on me for being his only son. She and her lawyer managed to convince him to tie the family money, principal and interest, in trust until I was fifty-three.
During my years as a deputy sheriff, a private investigator, and a bartender, I could forget about the money. Mostly. The drink helped, I think, a little bit. Then the chore of sobriety helped, too. It was just a thing in my future, assuming I had one in those days, something like a lottery ticket. Hell, when I got to the bank on my fifty-third birthday only to find the trust department in a furor over the disappearance of Andy Jacobson with the money wire transferred into the Bermuda Triangle
of Caribbean banks, three million plus dollars of my father’s money, I just accepted it, like some Zen warrior, took the punch, and walked back to the bar, went behind the stick still wearing my three-piece courtroom suit, and worked my shift. Without a word.
The FBI did their job, sort of, found out that Jacobson—a paunchy, balding little banker guy with bad skin and worse breath who got his job because he was married to one of his bosses’ ugly daughters and who used to lean on my bar and sip cheap draft beers and treat me to his coltish giggle as he reported the ups and downs of my unavailable trust fund—had slipped out on his fish-eyed Christian wife and was hosing some beefy lady poet out at Mountain States College. But that was a dead end. The lady poet turned out to be operating on a pretty good set of fake identification, which they found in her apartment, and a pretty good life story. According to her, she had been a stripper, bartender, lady wrestler, and bouncer in the Bay Area. She had even managed to publish a chapbook of poetry and work a couple of temporary replacement teaching jobs on the fake paper. But academics are easy to fool. As far as anybody could tell, she’d never been photographed or fingerprinted, and her alias, Rita Van Tasselvitch, didn’t show up on anybody’s computer AKA lists. Whoever she was, she and Jacobson had simply disappeared. As soon as the feds started babbling about a vague mob connection, I knew my money was long gone. In their minds. But not in mine, not yet.
After poking around her colleagues in the English Department at Mountain States, most of whom were on her side and blamed Jacobson for corrupting her talent and intelligence with money, I gave up that trail and sued the bank, but it looked like a long haul to nowhere. A year drifted past, another six months, then one afternoon it hit me so hard I nearly took a drink. I poured a dozen shots, then dumped them down the drain. Then decided to hunt up Sughrue. He used to say, “Anybody who speaks badly of revenge ain’t never lost nothing important.” If anybody could find Jacobson, the large lady poet, and the money, he could. But faced with his story, I didn’t mind standing in line behind Sughrue for my shot at revenge. Hell, I had nothing but lots of time and a little money.
—
Back at the trailer Sughrue offered the extra bedroom again, but I knew what was coming when he went to bed—angry words, tears, the slap of bare flesh—so after we promised to meet for breakfast in Fairbairn, I left Sonny to the rest of his night. But in the rearview mirror as I drove away I saw him heading for the desert horizon, a rough blanket over his shoulder. Followed moments later by Baby Lester’s tiny figure. Then Whitney’s larger one. It was a family, I suppose, three people wrapped in raw wool, huddled on the desert floor, praying for sleep without dreams.
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