Perhaps noticing that I was staring a half-century dead in the eye, I wondered if I should regret my taste in music, wondered if it was infantile, as a woman once told me, but I simply could not resist all that wonderful madness, that reckless joy and pain. Truth to tell, I wondered about a lot of things these vacation afternoons. My hair had gotten skimpy, gray streaks among the blond, but God help me I still loved the blessed mota smoke, still loved the fuzzy stoned light in the middle of the afternoon. I had been living as straight as I’d ever managed, given my life, working hard and taking good care of Baby Lester. Hell, I was even putting money away for the kid’s college. But I simply couldn’t live too straight all the time. I had to bend, crooked, occasionally.
My other choices seemed limited: twelve-stepping like a ghost into a boring future; or becoming one of those old mutt-faced hippies, brained by smoke and cheap whiskey, marijuana and politics. Frankly, I still loved to giggle and dance, still hated the fools in charge. Even the ones who said they were on our side. They drove me to drink, too. I didn’t even hate the war anymore, or even all the wasted death, exactly. Loving the boy had washed the cynicism and anger right out of my blood. Hell, maybe I would become one of those ancient, almost wise old men who live for slow afternoon beers balanced against a single shot of good Scotch as the baseball game plays on a bad television in a cheap bar. That sounded better than a reptilian isolation in retirement.
Well, maybe not wise. And not so ancient, either. Occasionally, I still found a young woman touched by the company of the bad times and the old days. Maybe I wouldn’t retire from that. Not just yet. Not that I had taken advantage of some kid’s romantic attachment to sixties nostalgia. Nope. Actually, I hadn’t slept with a woman since Wynona’s death. Though taking comfort with that made me a little nervous.
But, Christ, that afternoon I had just gotten off a particularly ugly job, chasing a bail jumper for Harim through West Texas for nearly two months. When I brought the sly old man, one Jack Barstow, back to face sixteen counts of child molestation, Harim’s secretary, a fortyish harridan named Lila, had been so pleased that she stuffed three tightly rolled joints into the envelope with my cash, saying, “Somebody has to smoke all that dope I keep taking away from my goddamned kids.”
It seemed I hadn’t had a day off from work or fatherhood in years, so maybe it was time to blow the pipes. But first, Baby Lester, always first.
I went by Wynona’s mother’s house, played with Baby Lester until he was crazy, then put him down for a nap. Mrs. Townsend promised me that the boy would sleep till dark, at least, then asked me to call her “Grammy” for the twentieth time, and told me to take a couple of days. When I argued, Mrs. Townsend whispered as she snuck a cigarette on the porch, “Sonny, you look like warmed-over shit. Get drunk. Hell, get laid—even if you have to go to Juarez. Wear a rubber, though. Grammy’ll take care of everything.”
All right, blame me. I fired up Lila’s first number as I backed out of the driveway, promptly dropped it, then backed the van into the salt cedars that lined the driveway. When I looked back at the house Mrs. Townsend was laughing and waving, shouting something about the nature of fun, but sometimes the old lady didn’t make any sense. And sometimes she did: She wouldn’t smoke in front of her grandbaby; she stubbed out her cigarette before she went inside where Lester, escaped from his nap already, clung to the screen door, shaking the frame, waving and laughing, as if encouraging me to let it all hang out. Just like the old woman.
Sometimes old people were a wonder.
Take Garciela Townsend. Wynona had told me enough about her mother so I knew that she was about a thousand ants short of a picnic, and often mean as a sow with a shoat stuck under the bottom rail, but as far as Lester and I were concerned she was sweet as strawberry honey.
I admit my amazement freely. Because Mrs. Townsend insisted on taking care of Lester, I was able to work the job as usual—skips and repos and jumpers, depositions and divorces, instead of night shifts at truck stops or the cracking plant or the smelter, the taste of dust, diesel, or arsenic thick on a cigarette-seared tongue. So I fired the mota again, pulled the van out of the brush, punched Beautiful Loser into the tape deck, and drove slowly away. This nostalgia was a frenzy that needed feeding. “God love Grammy.”
And sometimes old people were a caution.
Take Jack Barstow. The old boy had spent his life as a fairly respectable and slightly boring high school history teacher, raised a small but normal family, taught thousands of students about Stephen F. Austin and old Sam Houston and others of that tribe. Then he retired.
The shit must have been stirring, but maybe Jack was too busy. Or maybe he had just never been caught. The acts Barstow had performed on his three grandsons and their playmates were so heinous that Harim made me leave my weapons in the bond office safe before I left on the chase.
When I finally caught up with Barstow in Ranger, Texas, and found the old bastard volunteering as a foster grandfather at a church child care, I admit I was glad the Browning wasn’t under my arm. As it was, when the old man didn’t resist but did simper like a clown as he claimed his innocence, I slapped him so hard they never did find his false teeth.
—
Cruising the Upper Valley that afternoon, the weight of Jack Barstow almost lifting off my shoulders, I was drawn to the desert west of the Rio Grande. The great, rough emptiness filled something in me, something I couldn’t name.
I nearly drove out there, thinking perhaps to drive the sandy tracks across to Columbus, New Mexico, then across the border to Palomas, where the whoremasters broke in the young girls bought in the high desert villages. No matter what they looked like, their beauty was in their hopelessness. Once, half-drunk in Palomas, I decided that when I wanted to commit suicide, I would cross the border, steal a vanful of young whores, and drive them home. Of course, they’d be back in the whorehouses before my body began to decay.
So this wasn’t the time, not for Palomas, or the far desert roads. This was a time to watch the sunset flame out, watch the shadows creep across the valley, watch the Thunderbird glow blood-red across the face of the Franklin Mountains.
Wynona had been dead ten days over a year. As he grew from baby to toddler, Lester was almost too alive, too wild and crazy. But I never had any resistance to loving Wynona’s child. The first time the kid heard Zevon chord into “Stand in the Fire,” Lester, who could barely stand, ripped off his diaper and danced naked like a dervish. Lester was bound to be a rambler, a gambler, and a good-time car wreck. Just like his mom. Then I remembered that Wynona had died before we ever had a chance to dance. Shit.
Like all shiftless, rootless drinkers I sometimes thought of myself as a poet of the highway or a roadside philosopher, like my mad father. But he had also taught me a few things, a few ways to protect that core of being that makes you human. Sometimes people you love fucking die. You’re supposed to feel bad. For-fucking-ever. And that is a gift. Most assholes, even if you gut shoot them, can’t even manage to feel bad about their own deaths long enough to stop being assholes: that was sad. Feeling bad about the deaths of people you loved: that was hard, but not sad.
So I decided as the sun drifted down the western sky to head the van up the prehistoric banks of the Rio Grande, have a beer, smoke the last joint, cry a few tears, laugh, and think of Wynona Jones. Then when it was dark as ink, I’d go home, back to Lester and the old stone house where we lived. Yeah. Pick up some tapes. An old movie for me. Out of the Past would be perfect. Cartoons for Lester. His favorites, Tom & Jerry and Bullwinkle. And McDonald’s. It sounded like a plan.
But the cooler was empty. I couldn’t go to the sunset without a beer. Luckily I was just passing La Esperansa del Mundo—a tiny Mexican beer joint that seemed to capture all the horrible moments between Texas and Mexico, the wars, the lies, the naked aggression of a country led by the Protestant gods of capitalism against a country confused by the old gods and the Catholic Church, a country mad with beauty and despair
…Yes. La Esperansa. “Poor Mexico,” they say. “Too far from God and too goddamned close to Texas.”
In my piss-poor border Spanish, hoping to be as polite as an aging hippie redneck can be, I ordered a can of beer to be drunk politely before I ordered a six-pack to go. La Esperansa could not be treated like a convenience store. Too much dignity. I nodded at the older Mexican farmers at the tables, men who had seen my passing act before and forgave it, who nodded like gentlemen acknowledging my effort. Since the valley still held the sun’s heat and the shadowed bar was cool and peaceful, I ordered another beer. Then a third.
At some point a group of five young urban Chicanos slouched through the door, to everybody’s displeasure, and surrounded the bumpy old pool table with its crooked sticks and chipped balls. The young men looked at me, the only gringo in the place, as if I were a sail-cat, a flat, sun-fried roadkill. A challenge issued. The tallest one, a wide-shouldered dandy with a thick moustache and snaky eyes, smiled too long. So I smiled back, hoping the smile indicated age and maturity, not lack of judgment, then turned away.
Nothing was at stake here, it seemed. But after a moment the bartender started shouting at the men, Spanish spit too quickly for my ear.
Well, fuck it, I remember thinking. God hates people who make trouble in bars. Particularly bars that mean something to me. So, half-stoned, half-drunk, and more than half-ready to kick the living shit out of some asshole, I turned back to face the young men—planning, I suppose, to walk over to the tall one, talk to him or take him out quickly, whichever the kid wanted. If that didn’t stop the others—well, hell, I’d worry about it later. They might kick my ass, but they wouldn’t be getting a cherry.
So I moved, a fast but friendly, bold stroll between the tables, and the bartender screamed. The tall cholo had drawn a cheap pistol from his back pocket. Shit, and there I was with nothing but a beer can in my hand.
I had time to recognize the piece, a South American five-shot .38 revolver made by an arms company that supposedly started up with stolen CIA funds left over from the Reagan years, and even had time to think, I guess you think odd shit just before you die.
And afterward, too.
—
Sometimes my father claimed that I had been conceived in the back of a moving pickup truck outside Socorro, New Mexico. At other times he said a motel in Deming. And other odd places at odder times, too.
But if it had been a Deming motel, I hoped it had been a little sweeter room than Milo’s. The walls had been slopped instead of painted, the carpet exhumed instead of laid, and the crooked curtains nailed to the wall for good reason. Two puke-plastic chain lights flanked the filthy bed with dim stagnant streams from forty-watt bulbs. A former tenant had tried to steal the cheap clock-radio off the murky wall, but it had resisted the theft and held on by a single bent bolt. Perhaps the same tenant who had snatched the television and plugged the toilet.
Among this chaos Milo couldn’t have looked any more dead, flat on his back, unwashed, badly stitched, laid out in the stolen clothes. He had his right hand under the dirty pillow, and the stink from his exposed armpit smelled like death. Rubber tubes dark with age ran in a frenzy of snakes up his nose, into the back of his hand, and out of his dick. The old addict and his silent Mexican nurse had enough tubes in him to open a service station. The doc maintained that Milo was a dead man if he didn’t pee soon; and nobody really wanted to deal with the paperwork and questions a hospital would require. Not even our lawyer.
“I’ve shoved that fucking tube up his dick until my arms are sore,” he said, “and I ain’t gonna do it no more.”
The doc jerked the catheter out of Milo—who rose briefly then fell back on the dirty bed, his hand anchored under the pillow—and the ancient nurse started to gather their supplies, but Teddy put the doc in an arm lock and sat him heavily down. That was the end of that argument. I knelt over Milo and tried to talk to him. Without response. For a long time.
“What the fuck is wrong?” I asked.
“Maybe shock,” the nurse suggested.
“Maybe that last jolt was a little too much,” the doc whispered. “I’ve sorta lost my touch over the years.”
I stripped the sleeve off the inside of Milo’s elbow: tracks like the Union Pacific without a gold spike.
“You old fuck,” I said, “if he’s hooked…”
“It’s all I had, son, and it ain’t nothing he can’t cold turkey,” the old man said. “Hellfire, I’ve done it a hundred times myself. Maybe a thousand.” Then he added, “But I can’t make him pee.”
“Put the goddamned catheter back in, you junkie bastard,” I said quietly, and he tried. Without any success. Milo stirred again, briefly, his hand locked under the pillow. “What the hell’s he got under there?” I said. “A piece?”
“Among other things,” the doc said. “But I wouldn’t try to take nothing away from the bastard. He’ll hurt you.” The old man lifted up his wrinkled shirt to expose three or four large bruises of various age and hue. “He’s pretty tough for a dead man,” he said quietly.
Jack held one leg, Teddy the other, as I tried as carefully as I could to pull the sodden pillow from under Milo’s head. Weak and wasted as he was, he bridged his back to hold the pillow in place and wrestled so hard that Teddy had to get a leg over Milo’s free arm so I could jerk on the other from under the pillow. Finally the struggle ceased. Milo flopped back and opened his eyes, his empty hand flexing like a dying snake, the right still buried under the pillow.
“Sughrue?” he croaked, and the nurse wiped his lips with a washrag wrapped around ice cubes. “Water,” he said, “gimme some fucking water.”
The old doc shook his head. “It’ll kill him,” he whined, “then you’ll blame me. They always blame me. Then hurt me.”
“Blame you,” I said. “I’ll peel your hide and pack you in rock salt.”
“See,” the old man said, and fell back in his chair, weeping junkie tears.
“Water,” Milo whispered, grinning with a death rictus, dots of blood forming on his cracked lips. “Gimme some water, Sonny, and I’ll give you something.” I eased up on Milo’s arm, and we watched in total silence as it slithered under the pillow. Even the doc muffled his sobs. But Milo didn’t bring out a pistol. He handed me the half-rotten right hand of Xavier Kaufmann, then begged for water until he passed out, leaving the cold soft flesh for me to hold while he retreated into his near-coma.
Two hours later, Milo came out of it screaming, sitting up and howling like a man whose raw flesh was covered with black scorpions, whose blood crawled with fire ants. We thought he was coming down off the nod. But as a blackish stain dampened the bed, we realized he was just taking a leak. And, boy, did it sound like it hurt.
When he stopped screaming, we started laughing. Milo stared at us as if we were stone crazy. “Where the hell did you get this?” I asked him, holding up the hand, which Jack had placed in an evidence baggie. “And what the fuck was it doing under your pillow?”
“It’s a long story,” he croaked, then pulled the Glock from under the pillow, “and not very pretty.” Then he grinned again and the blood ran down his chin. “Now get me a fucking drink of water.”
The old bastard wasn’t just alive, he was probably dangerous. Perhaps he’d given up his foolish dreams of living this life without occasionally shooting somebody.
—
Finally, the whales sound deep in the dark water, and Milo detaches the 25x scope from the tripod with steady fingers, then replaces everything in the foam-lined carrying case where the various weapons and surveillance gear are stored. He touches the case as if he can feel the automatic fire beneath the plastic. Milo had kicked cold turkey, but it wasn’t nearly as easy as the old doctor promised. “I wish I could see them up close,” Milo says, turning his back on the darkening swells, “maybe hear them sing.”
I tell him I’m not sure these are the singing kind, but if he wants, we can take a guided boat tour.
“Can’
t,” he growls. “I get seasick.”
How the hell do you know? I ask.
“Korea,” he whispers. “On the boat ride over, I threw up ninety-seven times. After I started counting. If I hadn’t been a growing boy, I’d’ve been dead before I got there. As it was, Sonny, I told ’em I’d rather die in combat than climb back on that fucking troop ship.”
I suggest that he was a sissy.
“No, I was a baby,” he says, his voice deep and raw after three weeks of maintenance whiskey and constant cigarettes. I have been watching him closely but haven’t seen a sign of the old style death-wish drinking. Just a guy trying to hang on to a bit of ease in a bad world. “Just a teenager,” he muses. “Hell, I would have been a virgin, too, if it wasn’t for Phyllis Fjosse. God love her. I’ve had this thing for cross-eyed girls since that afternoon.” He puts the foam-lined case into the trunk of the Caddy. “I snuck out of the hospital in Japan and got laid a couple of times. But it was either too ornate for my body cast—they wanted to stick stuff up my ass—or too commercial. So the next real piece of ass I found was when I mustered out in Frisco. A gap-toothed Catholic girl on her last free weekend before a one-way ticket to the convent…”
Milo pauses by the driver’s door, gazing over the Caddy’s roof, once more considering the cold Pacific, slate-gray now and rougher in the rising wind. The swells, so smooth in the distance, crash madly against the rocks below, spray flinging itself halfway up the cliff, fingers of icy foam clinging.
“Never felt the same afterwards,” he whispers. “Not about gap-toothed Catholic girls. Or nuns, either.” Then he smiles softly. “The way that girl loved to fuck, I suspect she didn’t make Jesus a great wife.”
I agree, and laugh politely. Once Milo was mobile, Jack moved us out of Deming to Silver City to hide out with another branch of the extensive Soames family, a retired cop who ran a bar, and we went to ground in his rambling adobe until the reports of Xavier Kaufmann’s death were confirmed. I still wanted the guy who paid him to pull the trigger, wanted him like fire, but Jack and Teddy talked me into letting la familia cool down before we thought about crossing the border to look for the Baron, particularly around Enojada. After finding Milo in the motel, it only seemed fair to let my revenge slide for a time. We could look for his banker and the money, and check out the dead lady poet now; and I could wait.
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