Bordersnakes

by James Crumley

  “We don’t have a single police connection here,” he said, “and this is going to be a large homicide investigation. They’ll put your ass inside the walls at Huntsville. Haven’t you had your felony fix tonight?” he asked.

  “Not hardly,” I said. “It’s my first in ten or fifteen years.” Sughrue poured me another splash of whiskey. “You can go home anytime you want.”

  “Maybe they’ll let us be cellmates,” he said. “I wouldn’t miss that for the world. Maybe we can even learn to like mascara and tattooed Nazis.” Then he leaned forward. “So I’m in for the duration, Milo.”

  “Thanks,” I said, “but I still feel like shit. A fucking ghoul…wandering around the house with a hat full of puke in my pocket.”

  Sughrue took care of it for me, stuffed it in a plastic bag with my jumpsuit, gloves, underwear, and shoes and socks. He promised to get rid of it on his predawn run.

  —

  I knew better than to try to sleep until all the drink was drunk. And me, too, I hoped. I also knew that sometime after the trembling in my hands stopped, the pictures behind my eyes would start. Sughrue meant to stay up with me, but at sunrise I sent him out to run, then took another shower. It didn’t help. So I opened the drapes to watch dawn break over downtown Austin and the pink capitol.

  —

  The force of the .44-Magnum round had blown the woman—I couldn’t say her name, even in my head—half off the bed, leaving her ruined head clotted to the bedroom carpet and her hips propped on the bed, her naked vulva exposed to the stinking air. The shock of death had been so sudden that her body hadn’t had time to void itself. The large drop of blood on her right nipple could have come from the blow-back, but with the barrel of the large revolver in her mouth, maybe not. Careful not to step in the dried puddle of brain matter, bone splinters, and blood, I had taken the red lens off the flashlight and examined her breast as closely as I could stand. The blood had come from a single crusted hole in her nipple no larger than a pinprick.

  I couldn’t imagine her pain. Once as a teenager, a kitten had hooked my nipple with a sharp claw. I had gone to my knees as if struck by lightning. Just thinking about her as the sun flashed brightly off the narrow lake brought the acid remains of my stomach back into my throat. I barely made it to the toilet before I gushed good whiskey into the porcelain throne.

  From the look of Lara’s white face and blue penis, a drop of blood congealed at the crusted slit, resting flaccidly on the fuzzy toilet seat, I guessed that he had died before the .44 round. Maybe of a heart attack, facing the sort of torture his wife had suffered. Then, I suspected, they had wrapped his hand around the Magnum and pulled the trigger with his dead finger. Whoever these guys were, they didn’t mind getting their hands dirty.

  But I thought I’d worry about that tomorrow, so I took to my bed with the rest of the whiskey. When it was empty, I thought about hitting myself in the head with the bottle. But I didn’t have to bother.

  —

  When I emerged from my cocoon at ten I forced myself into swim trunks, my old running shoes, and a U of Montana Grizzlies sweatshirt. I waved silently at Sughrue in the sitting room, then stumbled outside to jog at a slow amble down the gravel footpath alongside the lake. I used any excuse to walk, or sit down to watch the children in their light winter clothes feeding the ducks. The perfect weather had held, blue cloudless skies, cool dry air. But still the hangover and nightmare sweats poured off me in torrents.

  So many runners and families clotted the path, I supposed I had slept into the weekend. A fact I confirmed in the Jacuzzi back at the Hyatt as the Austin American-Statesman Sunday comics floated past me. Some people’s children, I thought, as Sughrue always said. Several young mothers basked in the warming sun as their kids paddled about the pool. I wadded up the comics so I could drop them into the trash on my way into the hotel.

  “Sir,” came a nasal voice beside me. I turned.

  “You talking to me, lady?”

  “My boys weren’t through with those,” she said.

  “Then why the hell did they throw them in the Jacuzzi?”

  The woman was slim and tall, mid-thirties, pretty in a brittle, bleached-blond, expensively buffed way, but for reasons I didn’t really examine I decided her jutting breasts had experienced the miracle of silicone. Either that, or a true miracle.

  “They didn’t,” she claimed in her abrasive Texas accent. “Maybe the wind blew them in.”

  I started to say something ugly—I didn’t need this shit—but paused when she batted her eyelashes at me and smiled. She didn’t want to fight; it was just the accent. A couple of small boys, maybe six or seven, true cottonheads, stepped up behind her, dripping water. As if on cue, the boys shook their heads like white dogs, and cold drops of water flew. I flinched and the woman squealed, fussed her boys back into the pool, then grabbed a hotel towel off her chaise longue and started drying my chest and shoulders.

  “Thanks,” I said, taking the towel away from her. I noticed that she hadn’t bothered to dry herself, but let the drops stand on her remarkably tight, tanned skin. I felt as if I had wandered into a commercial. “Let me buy you another paper,” I said as I daubed at her wet hide like a fool.

  “Let me buy you a drink,” she said, then extended her hand, the one without the giant rock and the wedding band of diamonds. “Maribeth Williamson,” she added.

  “Milodragovitch,” I answered, shaking her firm little hand.

  Without turning loose, she told her boys to wait at the pool for her, and led me toward the patio tables above the pool, saying, “Is that Russian?”

  “My great-grandfather claimed to be a Cossack,” I answered lamely as we had a couple of Bloody Marys, which she charged to her suite, then we discussed our personal histories.

  Or, more accurately, mine. During the next half hour, I decided that her habit of squealing whenever I said “Montana” or “private investigator” and her chainsaw Texas accent might be considered attractive, maybe even terminally cute, in some circles. Such as the ones her forefinger made on my palm. And the circles I was thinking about: my tongue around the nipples of those amazing breasts, around the furred freckles above her pubis.

  I don’t remember exactly how it happened, her call or mine, but before we split we agreed to have a couple of “sundowners,” as she called them, in the bar at the top of the hotel. So I raced to my room and stepped into the glass-sided shower, maybe having one of those acid flashbacks Sughrue talked about, or neatly hooked through the foreskin. An evening with a woman like Maribeth could wipe some of the dreams clean. Who was I to look a gift woman in the mouth. Or anyplace else. I tried to push the Laras to the dead rock bottom of my mind.

  —

  After the shower, I was all for room service and a nap till sundown. “I’ve got a date,” I told Sughrue, but he wasn’t impressed and insisted we had to get out of the suite so the maids could clean. I dressed in real clothes, jeans, a Deerskin flannel, and cowboy boots, then let him lead me to a place called Cisco’s, where after two plates of migas, even Sughrue was ready for a nap.

  But the maids were chattering in our suite, so we took the Saturday and Sunday Austin American-Statesman and an alternative weekly called the Dark Coast down to the patio.

  After the waitress—another one of the good-looking long-legged coeds of which the hotel seemed to have an inordinate supply—took our orders, I glanced through the meaningless newspaper lies of the Lara killings. They were still withholding the names until the next of kin were notified. Then I broached the subject of my date.

  “Don’t complain,” he said when I finished my story. “Maybe you got lucky.”

  “You don’t understand,” I told him. “I felt like I was dealing with a woman from another country. Maybe even another planet.”

  “Texas women only come in two types,” he said, then went back to the paper.

  “What types?” I finally had to ask.

  “What?” Sughrue said, bored already with
my love life. “Oh, that, man. Some of them are terrific, the kind of women who can match you drink for drink, smoke for smoke, fuck you stupid, and piss standing up.”

  “How the hell they do that?”

  “I didn’t say they’d let you watch,” he said.

  “Wonderful. What about the other ones?”

  “They’ll chew you up like an old hunk of side pork and not even bother to spit out the rind,” he said. Then held up the Dark Coast. “I think I was in the Army with the guy that runs this paper.”

  “In Vietnam?”

  “Nope,” he said, “just before that. My third hitch. I was playing ball and covering sports for the base paper at Fort Lewis…”

  “Your third hitch?” This was new information to me.

  “Yeah,” he mumbled, blushing. “I did two before Vietnam. Between football vacations at various junior colleges under various names.”

  He didn’t seem to want to talk about it, so I asked about the guy he thought he knew.

  “Carver de Longchampe. Can’t be two guys with that name,” he said. “And I think he went to school at UT. Econ, maybe. He wanted to be a draft dodger, but he couldn’t find a dodge before Vietnam. Shit, the Army wouldn’t even let him out when he confessed to being both a Communist and a homosexual. Even though it was true. One hell of a good guy, though. The only other admitted dope smoker on base.” Then Sughrue smiled. “When I told him that my single chance at the straight life had been torpedoed by nigger music and Meskin smoke, he knew what I meant.” Then he laughed. “One hell of a guy. I kept the rednecks off his ass.”

  “Sonny Sughrue,” I said, “cracker by day, protector of the deviant by night.”

  “Something like that,” he said with a fond smile. “I heard that when the Army decided they needed another faggot pinko in Vietnam,” he continued, “he finally split for Canada. Took some balls. Guess he came back when Carter let them off the hook.”

  “Doesn’t sound like the sort of guy who would have any police contacts.”

  “I don’t know,” Sughrue said. “His editorial this week is about the Austin Police Department. Seems they actually investigate hate crimes against gay people.”

  “Maybe he’s got a computer, too,” I said, tapping the floppy disk copy in my shirt pocket.

  “What the hell made you look in the computer?” he asked.

  “Slumgullion’s may be an ancient shot and beer-back shithole dive—fried mush and fresh side pork, too, if you please—but it was a gold mine for years,” I said. “Hell, even back when Gene Currier was keeping both sets of books, he worked on the first IBM PC.”

  “Fucking perfect,” Sughrue said, raising his Bloody Mary. “Sometimes I really miss Montana. You know, I was working the salmon fly hatch once up by Fish Creek. Couldn’t catch a cold, even though I could see the damned trout rising right at my knees. But then I looked over on a gravel bar, and there was that giant cop—you remember him?”

  “Smolinski,” I said, “the one they once called ‘Animal’?”

  “Yeah, but he looked peaceful that day. He had some chick sitting on a driftwood log while she gave him a blow job standing there in his waders. It was that lovely cross-eyed girl who used to cocktail at the Riverside…what was her name?”

  “Arlene,” I said.

  Thus the afternoon passed, trailing shining memories of our misspent youths and middle years through the drinks, as we talked of old pals and home, good times and bad, and blessed survival of witless, benighted fools. Maybe the worst part about being sober was not having any new drunk stories to tell.

  —

  Maribeth beat me to the top-floor bar, which for some reason was called the Foothills, but I wasn’t late. Sundown waited and the end of the fine afternoon. It was early November somewhere else, but in Austin that day it might have been spring. Maribeth wore a red sundress, busy with exotic blossoms and vines, that made her skin glow, so I kissed her on her glossy lips, then refused to apologize.

  “You’re properly tuned, cowboy,” she said.

  “Thanks,” I said, meaning it. “Forgive me, but I’ve been standing in a dark wind too long, sitting on my own lap too fucking hard…”

  “And?”

  “Tomorrow morning I go back to the job, love.”

  “Which means?”

  “Sometimes my work is like war, so this might be the last fun I ever have,” I said.

  “Which means?” she said again.

  “My turn for questions,” I said. “Were you trying to pick me up at the pool?”

  “I hear old guys are sometimes grateful.”

  “I wouldn’t know,” I said. “You know Austin?”

  “I grew up here.”

  “If you’re not doing anything else, Maribeth Williamson,” I said, then tossed my car keys on the table, “I’d love it if you’d take the keys to my brand-new Cadillac and drive me deep into the sunset.”

  She considered it for a moment, then smiled. “My boys are already at their grandmother’s. Tomorrow morning at ten I’m due in divorce court to fight over custody and a lot of money. I’m supposed to have dinner with my lawyer, but I think he’s trying to fuck me…So I’m sort of going to war, too.” Then she grinned and picked up the keys.

  “You’re a gift, darling.”

  “And don’t I love it,” she said, laughing and laughing as she took me away.

  —

  Like most middle-aged white American males I grew up during the years when nobody except fundamental Christians and other bigots knew exactly what to think about “the love that dare not speak its name.” Working my side of the street, though, I didn’t exactly see the best side of any segment of the population. Mostly, they were just there. Faggots, butt-fuckers, cocksuckers, nances, flits—they’re just names. Beyond the insults, you find people. Real people. Maybe a little sadder than everybody else. But on the whole, as we’ve come to find out recently, not nearly as dangerous to small boys as some Catholic priests.

  So I was prepared to meet Carver D, as he called himself in his gay persuasion, but I’d never met a Texas Communist before. Nothing prepared me for that.

  In spite of their past history and friendship, Carver D was a little wary of Sughrue. Maybe the world had taught him to be wary of everybody. Instead of meeting at the newspaper office, Carver D insisted on meeting at a small beer joint east of the interstate in what looked like the deep dark heart of a bad neighborhood. Gang turf, I suspected, although I had only seen “gang turf” on television. Whatever its denizens called their neighborhood, it was surely enemy territory for a couple of white boys in a Cadillac.

  “Maybe they’ll think we’re pimps,” Sughrue said as we parked next to a lime-green ’62 Lincoln limo with suicide doors and a personalized plate—CARVER D—on the caliche lot in front of the board-and-batten shack called Flo’s Blue Heaven.

  “You talking about my new clothes or my new car?”

  “Right,” he said, then climbed out. “Sorry you gave up weapons, old man?”

  “I didn’t give up weapons, asshole,” I said, following the mad fucker into the blackness of the beer joint. “Just bullets.” Then I checked the sap in my sock. It felt just fine.

  A single white face glowed at the rear of the tiny bar. We walked toward it. Closer, we could see that a large black gentleman with close-cropped gray hair and a military bearing shared his table. Even in the dim light, Carver de Longchampe looked dead. Or dying. His bloated face floated over a body that seemed to be a large pile of mashed potatoes covered by a once-expensive and once-elegant white suit that could have covered a small truck and might have been retrieved from a vegetable dump. His deep, rumbling voice had been hoarsened by the cheap bourbon from the brown paper sack at his knee and by years of the same Gitane smoke that turned his fat fingers into small yellow tubers harvested from a graveyard. His large brown eyes, as melancholy as prunes in Cream of Wheat, shone with secret knowledge and sparkling wit, and when he smiled, you wanted to laugh.

 
; “Sergeant Sughrue. What a pleasant surprise,” he said, waving his thick fingers at him, then turned to me. “This man,” he said to me, “may have saved my life. But that’s a trifle in the larger economic scheme. He saved my pride, which is a much more precious gift, as I’m sure you understand.” Then he paused, adding, “Great suit, Mr….”

  I introduced myself and held out my hand. It disappeared into his soft soiled paw.

  “I want one just like it,” he said. “Sit down and tell me what you want, Mr. Milodragovitch.”

  “What makes you think we want something, Carver D?” Sughrue said.

  “And what makes you think you’ve got it?” I added.

  Carver D just laughed, sloshed whiskey in his glass, lit one Gitane from another, then said quietly, “Everybody wants something, gentlemen, and I’ve got it all.”

  The black gentleman chuckled, his first sound of the afternoon. It wasn’t pretty.

  Carver D certainly had some contacts. In that single morning, somehow he had learned that Sughrue had worked for the Department of Defense Intelligence Agency after the Vietnam War. In lieu of a stretch in Leavenworth. “Faggot underground,” he said. “That should scare the shit out of the straight world,” he said, with laughter. So I had no way of knowing if he was telling the truth.

  It didn’t matter, though. After Carver D decided that we were what we seemed and wanted what we wanted, he said he’d get right on it. He stood, leaning heavily on a blackthorn stick, and promised to meet us later that night. His driver helped him out the front door of Flo’s and behind the suicide door of the Lincoln.

  —

  We gathered at a beer garden near the capitol. A hangout for country-lawyers-cum-politicos, shirttail lobbyists, and what was left of Austin’s left, Carver D said. But it seemed to me to be filled with collegiate riffraff, spiced with skateboard punk trash.

  “Times change,” Carver D mused. “Do you realize that teenagers control a full one-quarter of the GNP? If they just had politics again…”