Bordersnakes

by James Crumley

  I heard the back door open. Two ordinary-looking guys came in, one about my size, the other bigger. They waved at the bartender and chatted familiarly. While I headed for the ladies’ room.

  I should have realized that I’d fucked up when the blow job was too good, too professional. But just as soon as the thought came, so did I. And a thin, sharp needle plunged into my thigh, so sharp and thin I didn’t really notice it until I realized I was completely paralyzed, conscious but without muscular control.

  I had to watch without resistance as the blonde quickly stripped me out of my clothes. All of them. One of the ordinary-looking guys put them on, and the larger, walleyed guy lifted my body like a baby’s and dumped me into a rolling hamper. Then somebody else loaded the hamper into the back of a delivery van within ten feet of the cop covering the back door, a van that deposited me at my own back door.

  The Kaufmann brothers had swept all the bugs out of my house and dumped them into a glass of vinegar on my rented table, where they released the occasional bubble like insects losing air out of their thorax. Then they taped my lax body, naked, to a rented wooden captain’s chair in the dining room, and gave me another shot. Whatever it was, it was wonderful. I went from paralyzed to bright-eyed and bushy-tailed in a few seconds.

  Rogelio, the younger brother, smiled at me as he pulled on surgical gloves. The walleyed thug didn’t smile. Xavier didn’t need gloves. He didn’t have any fingerprints. But he hung back in the shadows anyway, a soft-spoken shade. Then Rogelio frowned. “Hey, this is the guy told Leon he was Rocky Soames.”

  The thug—I never did get his name—said something in Spanish.

  “Maybe you killed him too soon,” Xavier answered him in almost accentless English. “Like Raymundo.” Then he turned to me. “I hear you been looking for me, man,” he said.

  “And trying to do business in my town,” Rogelio added. “So who the fuck are you, man?”

  Okay, I was dead whatever I did, and I’d probably earned it. It was almost a relief after the last three weeks. I had spent enough time in police interrogations to know that you don’t tell the cops anything. Period. Ever. Not one word. So I decided not to talk to the crooks, either.

  That lasted about twenty seconds. Or just as long as it took Rogelio to plug in his toy, an electric stencil cutter with a long needle soldered to the end, and watch the current heat the needle red-hot. Suddenly I realized what had happened to the Laras. And knew why Ray Lorenza had died before he could tell them about the floppy disk in the PC. When Rogelio brushed it across the head of my penis, I nearly fainted.

  But when he stuck it up my dick, I convulsed so wildly that the rented chair exploded into pieces around me. I nearly got away in their surprise. At least I got in one good lick on Rogelio’s upper arm with a chair leg before the thug wrapped me in his huge arms. So Rogelio could pound on me at will. Or till his arms got tired.

  Within minutes, I was back in the same condition. Except that now I had some new scars and sore teeth. And somebody had thought to bring a metal chair from the kitchen.

  “Jesus,” Rogelio said, wiping sweat off his face and smiling. “That must’ve hurt, man.” Then he looked at Xavier, who nodded, and his little brother didn’t have any trouble doing it again. This time I had neither a swoon nor a convulsion to blanket the pain. Not the next time, either. At least I didn’t have a heart attack.

  Nobody likes to show their ass. But the truth is, I soiled myself. Twice. Then told them a story. Then another story. And another. But I don’t think I told them everything. And didn’t tell them my name. Somehow it seemed terribly important to hold on to my name. But the fucking bastards didn’t believe me. No matter how many stories I told, they would not believe me.

  But I guess at some awful moment I gave up Sughrue’s story.

  “Hey, look man,” Xavier said softly from the edge of the room as the thug cleaned me up with a dish towel, his giant fingers so oddly gentle I could have kissed his face, tongued a fly speck off his walleye, anything. “This isn’t about some dude I shot, up in New Mexico, this Sughrue guy. It can’t be. Nobody would go to all this trouble.” Then he turned to his brother, who was sweating nearly as badly as I was as he burned hairs off his arm with the needle. I could smell the burning hair even through the stench of my own voided bladder and bowels. “You wouldn’t do that for me, would you, hermano?”

  Rogelio smiled, then said, “Of course not, brother mine.”

  “Good,” Xavier said, but his eyes narrowed slightly as if this wasn’t the right answer. Then to me he said, “If I had wanted to kill this Sughrue person, he would be dead. As you are dead, my friend. As a favor to a friend, you understand, I just shot him a little bit. So he was supposed to live.”

  Somewhere I registered the lie, not that it would be of any use. Like the distrust and lack of love between the brothers. They were too smart to let me use that.

  “Do him again?” Rogelio asked, almost whining, pulling a cocaine inhaler from his pocket and sniffing deeply.

  “No. I don’t think so, little brother,” Xavier said. “You like it too much. It’s not good for your mental health. And it gives me bad dreams.”

  “Fuck it,” Rogelio said, grinning, “let’s take him to the desert. Let him dig his own grave.”

  So they did.

  —

  “See,” Rogelio said as he tossed me a long-handled spade and pointed to the center of a bare, sandy spot. “We aren’t uncivilized. We’ve picked some easy digging for your last chore.”

  “No such thing as easy digging,” I said, “or bad pussy.” Nobody laughed. None of them had ever done any serious digging. I didn’t know much about their sex lives. Except that something was terribly wrong with Rogelio.

  The long ride to the desert had restored me slightly. At least I was getting used to being naked. I’d never got used to the pain that burned to the center of my groin. And I had a weapon in my hands. I would die, sure, but I’d take at least one of these fuckers to hell with me.

  Xavier, with arrogantly empty hands, was a black shadow in front of the van’s headlights. Rogelio, holding a silenced MAC-10 submachine gun, which probably meant it was a .380, and the thug, with a Glock automatic pistol, stood on opposite sides of the grave site. I plotted out the grave and began digging slowly but steadily, pitching the sand close to the thug’s feet. He stepped back, moved slightly to the left.

  “Hey, Rogelio,” Xavier said, “stand back. Don’t let him throw sand in your face.” His face was shadowed by the lights, but I could hear the taunt in his voice. So could his brother. Who just grunted, and clicked off the safety of the MAC-10.

  “This maricón, he’s the one gonna have sand in his face,” he added, then stuffed his nose again with the inhaler.

  I worked steadily, long enough for them to get bored, long enough for my muscles to loosen and the sweat to turn from clammy to clean and hot and angry, and to get down far enough past my knees to have a little leverage, then tossed the shovel handle-forward on the ground in front of Rogelio.

  “What the fuck you doing?” Rogelio said suddenly, as if just waking up.

  “I got to pee,” I groaned, lying—I didn’t think I’d ever pee again—leaning my hands on the side of the grave, as if standing up hurt. Which it did. But I’d sweated out most of the gin and the drugs. But not the shame. “I really got to pee.”

  “Piss in your own grave!” he shouted.

  “Suck my dick, maricón!” I shouted back.

  “Suck on this!” Then Rogelio stepped toward me with the submachine gun. Xavier started to say something, but he was too late.

  Using my hands I levered myself straight up as if about to jump Rogelio as he advanced, but I came down with both hands on the shovel blade, and the handle leaped into Rogelio’s crotch so hard it lifted him off the ground. As I twisted to land flat on my back in the shallow grave, Rogelio fell to his knees and pulled the trigger of the MAC-10.

  A couple of rounds just missed my head, th
udding into the side of the grave, but as the clip emptied, the MAC-10 lifted up and to the side, stitching the large, kindly thug from his knee to his walleye. He dropped the Glock at his feet and toppled sideways.

  Xavier recovered quickly and dove for the pistol. He and I reached the Glock at about the same time—because I had paused to grab the shovel. He had just locked his fingers around the Glock when I cut his hand off like a snake’s head with the shovel blade, clean off at the wrist. Xavier rolled away screaming. For most men that would have been it; I would have taken his head, too. But he scrambled to his feet and fled for the van.

  The Glock was slippery with blood when I shot at his fleeing shadow. I missed him, but I got the headlights with the next two rounds. Then jerked two clips off of the thug’s shoulder holster. And made it back to the grave as the sound of a heavy assault rifle started chugging from the darkness beside the van.

  I stayed down.

  “Give it up!” I shouted from the bottom of my grave. “I’m going to put a round into your little brother!”

  In the starlight I could see Rogelio still kneeling above me, trying to hold his nuts with one hand, trying to eject the empty clip with the other.

  “Give it up now!” I screamed, and reached to pull the skinny fucker into the grave with me.

  The kid was dead before I touched him; his brother sprayed the grave site with a full clip. I heard the sound of a fumbled reload. Then the firing of the engine. I scrambled out from under Rogelio’s body in time to throw the rest of the clip at the van. I heard the steel prang of my rounds against the van’s body but must not have hit anything important because it kept going.

  Maybe the fucker would bleed to death before he got to El Paso. But I couldn’t count on it. I stripped the thug of his bloody clothes, jacket, and his oversized shoes, threw them on, then took the MAC-10, the fresh clip, an ugly switchblade, and the cocaine inhaler from the kid’s body, shouldered the shovel, and, at the last moment, gathered some other things I didn’t want anybody else to have. Not Xavier, because he’d be back. Not even Sughrue. This was mine.

  Then I found the dirt track and jogged away from the lights of El Paso, the warm glow over the moonless eastern sky. Jog a hundred steps of pure fire, then walk two hundred, sobbing. When I had to lie down I stepped off the sandy road, then backtracked through the brush and buried myself in a thornbush beside the track.

  Nobody showed up but a roving Border Patrol Suburban, and I would have died before I talked to them.

  Just before daylight, I had to go to the ground hard before hypothermia put me down for good. I slipped as far as I could into the brush, which frankly wasn’t too far. When I looked for a place to dig my hole, I spotted the corner of something projecting just above the blow-sand. I dug around it with my hands just long enough to find out that somebody had buried a fucking bale of cotton. And a six-pack of Bud cans. What kind of people steal a bale of cotton? Or abandon beer in the desert? I didn’t want to think about it, I just guzzled a warm beer. Dug another shallow grave and lined it with wads of cotton pried from the bale with the switchblade. Drank another beer and lay down to die. Or dream. Or just sleep till dark. In spite of the cocaine. If I dreamed, I didn’t want to remember it.

  —

  That night outside Columbus, New Mexico, I found a farmhouse circled by a field of stalks, guarded by two mange-ridden dogs they must have kept to fox mojados, wetbacks crossing the desert toward the false promise of America. I couldn’t kill the fucking dogs, even though I wanted to and tried, but I did manage to trap them in an empty ramshackle garage long enough to gobble a pound of raw hamburger and an onion, to steal clothes without bullet holes or blood, and to find a pair of shoes that moved when my bloody feet did. Almost sixteen dollars in piggy-bank change and three cans of peach halves. I had simply become a smarter, more feral animal than the dogs. I buried the bloody clothes and the MAC-10, which was too bulky to carry under the too-tight clothes, but there were other things I still didn’t want to give up.

  When, surviving on freestone Melbas, I got into Columbus later that night, the only pay telephone I could find was under a bright streetlight hanging off the post office. That wouldn’t do. I hiked back to dig up the MAC-10 and the silencer, hiked back to town, shot out the streetlight, then went back to bury it again. Perhaps that was when I lost my mind. Finally. Perhaps because I hadn’t peed in over twenty-four hours, I was dying of uremia. Or at least I assumed something like that.

  When I called collect the only safe person I could think of south of the Montana line, Teddy Tamayo, I woke him up. He complained, mightily, but he came, drove me to Deming, bought me a truck stop breakfast, then another, and checked me into a motel. He even found me a junkie doctor who would make a house call that time of night, an elderly blue-faced white guy who hadn’t had a medical license since the fifties and who had to dig a vein out of his white, wormy old toes so he could fix in front of me because his old hands shook so badly he couldn’t stick a catheter up my dick. So the old boy fixed me, too, then rammed the rubber tube home. As I nodded off behind the Mexican brown heroin, I dreamed the bloody urine ran out of me into a plastic bag as if I were bleeding to death.

  PART TWO

  Sughrue

  Fucking Milo. The old fart stands over there next to the cliff watching a pod of gray whales about half a mile out through the spotting scope, leaning to stare into the cold, blunt face of the Pacific. The sundown sea is calm today, with a thrilling blush of fire that glistens like molten blood on the flat, sullen slopes of the easy swells, then fades to black with the passing tilt of a wave. One of the whales spouts, a trail of breathy waters like a sigh hanging in the stolid air. Milo grunts. I can tell by the hunch of his shoulders that he feels as if he’s been hunted nearly to extinction, too.

  He’s not been himself since that night. Maybe it was soiling himself in fear before other men. That must have robbed him of something terribly important to his idea of being a man. Or maybe it was the simple insult of the pain. But I think I can guess what he’s really mad about: when he spilled his guts, the assholes didn’t believe him. Milo always really hated to be called a liar. Once the Kaufmanns did that, they were dead men. Or so we hear. Rogelio’s body disappeared, as did the large nameless Mexican. So nobody slept in Milo’s shallow grave. Jack heard from his DEA buddies that Xavier Kaufmann died of blood poisoning somewhere deep in the interior of Mexico.

  At least the old fucker is alive. That counts. Milo didn’t notice it for a couple of days—guess they hurt him so badly he couldn’t look himself in the eye; I was like that in the hospital, Whitney said, the day she told me to marry her or die, and he still hasn’t said zip-minus-shit about it—but the curly tar-black pelt that used to cover his head like a dead animal is now clipped to the bone and streaked with long shafts of pure angel white. And something small and dangerous lurks behind his eyes, hides in his rare smiles. As far as I can tell, Milo’s handling his violation at least as badly as I did mine.

  —

  Okay, so we fucked up. But the Kaufmanns ran a pretty slick scam, and Milo chose that night to get hammered on gin martinis, tough drinks in the best of times. Once a shrink friend of mine, who specialized in drunks, told me that he could spot a gin drunk across a crowded room. Of course, the shrink was wasted on Absolut vodka at the time. Maybe if Milo had been drinking anything but Bombay martinis, he wouldn’t have fallen for the hooker’s birthday-blow-job routine.

  Perhaps I shouldn’t joke about it, but sometimes shit is too heavy if you don’t make light of it.

  Jack and I sure didn’t have any jokes that night. By the time we figured out that something was wrong, the bar had filled with a batch of early evening hard-drinking big guys with guns. It wasn’t the sort of place you wanted to pull a piece, unless you could find perfect cover from the cross fire when the good guys, and the bad, saw a pistol waving in the air. Jack said it had only happened once before, when a demented DEA agent and former Dallas Cowboy fan had tried to p
lug Tom Landry on the big screen television. The final toll was sixteen wounded, not one of them an innocent bystander. So we did the only thing we could think of: we set fire to the Golden Horn.

  In the resultant confusion, we took out the guy wearing Milo’s clothes, and the hooker, too, when she objected, stuffed both of them in the trunk of Milo’s rented Mercedes, and drove them back to the house off Scenic Drive.

  My viscera flinched when I saw the long needle soldered to the sharp point of the stencil cutter lying on the table. Jack and I ignored the blood and the splintered chair as we stared at the needle and knew the old fart was dead. Maybe we even prayed he had died easy.

  Within five minutes we knew everything the guy in Milo’s suit and the hooker knew, which was jack shit. Fucking hired help from California. I wanted to cut their fucking heads off anyway, but Jack talked me out of it. So we locked them in the garage, then sat around for three days with our thumbs up our asses, working the telephones and planning an assault on Mexico we knew we’d never make. Jack had five kids from two marriages and another in the oven with his girlfriend; I had Baby Lester, and Whitney now. Only men who are done with their family lives can do The Wild Bunch number, can walk into a hail of gunfire, grinning like Warren Oates or marching with the peace and dignity of Bill Holden.

  Just about the time Jack and I had gotten sick of blaming ourselves, and each other, Teddy Tamayo left a message for Jack at the police station.

  —

  On the afternoon I got shot, a Saturday, I spent the heat of the day cruising the Upper Valley of the Rio Grande in Norman’s classy VW van, easing back and forth between El Paso and Old Mesilla, New Mexico, foxing the sun in cool Mexican beer joints with slow, sweaty beers, and smoking Detroit needles, skinny doobies, on the comfortable curves of the back roads, the tape deck cranked all the way to the sky as Zevon, Seger, Ely, and Waits wailed rock and roll into the blind maw of the ancient sun.