Bordersnakes

by James Crumley

  “That sounds like a bribe to me,” the sheriff grunts.

  “Of course,” Milo answers, “but a perfectly legal one.” The sheriff sputters, examines the gravel with his tiny pointed toes, then asks, “How much?”

  “Legal limit,” Milo answers, then switches on the recorder again. “And while you’re thinking about it, Henriksen, let me add a couple of other things to think about: you’ve been to the FBI Academy at Quantico, and you don’t like those tight-assed jerks any more than I do; they just want to close the case file to look good at budget time, and if the woman who helped steal my money isn’t your Rita—and I’m convinced she isn’t—it’s their fucking ass hanging out, so you got the nuts on the resident agent the next time he tries to muscle you. As for me, you can’t muscle a guy who’s already dug his own grave. And believe me, Sheriff, I’m that fucking guy.”

  The sheriff takes a long look at Milo, then nods as if he believes the old fart.

  —

  Cousin Oscar Henriksen, captain of an electric flat-bottomed skiff with which he guides birdwatchers, doesn’t have a drinking problem because Sheriff Henriksen pats him not-so-gently on his red cheek and takes the pint of Four Roses away from him on the dock. “Oscar,” the sheriff tells him, “Mr. Milodragovitch here says he gets seasick real easy. So let’s take it flat and slow…”

  Flatt and Scruggs, I say, and realize it’s my first words of the morning. Since I ordered breakfast. The sheriff, who’s now our buddy, rode up front with Milo on the way down to the Copia River, and he looks at me as if I’ve lost my mind. As does Milo. So I shut up. And enjoy the boat ride.

  Although I had spent several years snaring runaway kids in San Francisco during the late sixties and early seventies, about the only time I’d spent this far up the coast was the time I tracked a kid to a goat commune up in Mendocino County above Gualala.

  The kid was from a family farm outside Slippery Rock, Pennsylvania, and he wasn’t so much hiding from his folks as he was looking for fun. Up at the commune they milked their own goats, made their own cheese, and grew their own great marijuana, the first sinsemilla I’d ever smoked. I bought a pound for what an ounce goes for now, and got the kid to ride down to San Francisco with me ostensibly to peddle the smoke. But I really got him to come along because I told him that everybody else at the goat farm was fucking their livestock. The kid looked so sick at heart that I realized I’d made a lucky, or unlucky, guess.

  The kid climbed on the airplane home by himself, which wasn’t usually the case, and last I heard he was happily working the farm and growing a little noncommercial crop for his own consumption. Farming high, he said, was about the only way to go.

  I had done a little time on a tractor as a kid, pulling a stalk cutter and a disc over rows of picked cotton, turning the plants under to keep the pink bollworm at bay. That was in the old days, before chemical assistance became popular. Both among tractor drivers and cotton. I thought maybe the kid was right.

  But nothing during that visit up the coast had prepared me for this foggy boat ride up the brusque reach of the Rio Copia. Once the flat-bottom boat drifts silently around the first curve of the estuary, we are someplace else. Because it’s been a bird sanctuary for a long time, the redwoods still stand like old people on the steep slopes, their ancient thickbark faces draped in the gray fluff of sailing fog in the stupendous silence, a quiet so perfect the tick of blood rumbles in my ears and my breath breaks like storm surf. I hear a blue heron lift its wings, feather by feather; the sputtering gasp of a sea lion resounds like thunder across the tree-clotted banks. And the water below does not stir before our passage.

  Something happens to me: my heart aches, I think, with the tranquil beauty, and I long for the slim, tanned arms of my woman, the laughter of my child. They should see this. Hell, they will see this, someday, I promise. Christ, maybe I’m just homesick. And the lump in my throat is strapped to my body. Like the pistol under my arm. Shit. I grab a sob with a cough. It echoes like a gunshot.

  “You okay?” Milo asks, and I nod. Truthfully. Milo smiles at me as if he understands.

  “The Tiptons ain’t exactly morning people,” the sheriff says quietly as the boat drifts into thickening fog, and I realize that he’s not the politically ambitious clown I thought. He grew up here. This is his place. “So let’s try not to scare ’em into gunfire,” he adds as a house beside the still water heaves into view like a floating shipwreck.

  Oscar cuts the electric outboard and fires up a gasoline one. Christ, it sputters like an automatic weapon. Or a terrible alarm clock. A thousand unseen birds fling themselves into the air with an immense flapping din. But when it’s over and Oscar cuts the outboard to drift to the waterlogged dock where he casually tosses a loop over a piling, no life betrays itself at the house. Opaque windows reflect the dull water and sky. The gray redwood shakes of the roof are green-grizzled with moss like the faded board-and-batten walls. This is a place nailed together for silence, a keep built for secrets. Even the front door, open to the cold morning, seems shut.

  So when a giant naked woman with a mane of gray hair bursts from the black hole of the open door, clatters in a fierce run down the dock to cannonball a great sweep of cold water over the boat, I scream. Like everybody else. And whip the Airweight off my ankle.

  “I’ll pretend I didn’t see that, son,” the sheriff says to me quietly when the boat stops rocking enough for us to drag our sodden selves onto the dock.

  I apologize to the sheriff, then explain that I didn’t realize what I’d done.

  He almost smiles, then shouts at the woman quickly disappearing into the remaining wisps of fog over the rolling water, “Goddammit, Nancy Tipton, I’m gonna fucking blow your ass off one of these days.”

  “Promises, promises, Leo!” the hard-stroking woman shouts back, then swims away.

  “Shit,” the sheriff says. “We might as well go in and make coffee. If Nancy’s up this early, she’s been up all night, and God knows when she’ll be back.”

  “The goddess knows what evil lurks in the heart of men,” comes a faint echo from the fog bank.

  “You know,” Milo says, “this is the only time I’ve been in Northern California, Sheriff. Unless you count the repo-depot in Oakland. And right now I’m just as glad I went on to Korea that time…”

  Laughing, we tumble into the house like wet puppies. Although the outside doesn’t look like much, the inside seems as neat and tight as I’d imagine a clipper ship’s galley. The sheriff stokes the woodstove like a man familiar with it, and within minutes has cowboy coffee boiling over it. He douses it with cold water to drop the grounds, then quickly fills tin cups and hands them to us. He pulls Oscar’s pint from his coat pocket, explaining, “There ain’t never been no sugar in the Tiptons’ house, but I might be able to dig up some honey.”

  Oscar says the whiskey will be fine, but he doesn’t get any. Milo doesn’t want any, so the sheriff and I have a tot.

  You’re not the sort of man I ever thought I’d be having a drink with, I tell him.

  He nods as if the feeling is mutual, but smiles and takes the sting off it. “This ain’t a drink, son,” he says. “Just coffee.”

  Milo tells a story about drinking rye and coffee with his dead father while his mother broke every dish in the kitchen, and I remember, but don’t say, how old man Moody had the old Indian retainer, Bald Coon, drive him from the Big House across the Muddy Fork to show up almost every morning of my childhood at my mother’s shotgun-shack kitchen table for bourbon and coffee. I realize the conversation has split around the cleft of my memory, and I say What? as if I’m already drunk in the morning.

  The sheriff looks embarrassed. Milo coughs politely. “Leo was just saying, C.W., that he and Rita—his Rita—were old, old friends.” The sheriff blushes so deeply he finally looks kin to Cousin Oscar. “It must have been a terrible chore to identify the body,” Milo says kindly.

  “A fucking nightmare,” the sheriff whispers.

>   We stand awkwardly around the neat kitchen in this timeless place until our memories drive us out to the dock as the sun clears the high ridges behind the house and fires a sheet of quicksilver across the still waters of the false river, almost sizzling the fog. Moments later, Nancy backstrokes through that siren fire, her mantle of gray hair like a silver cape over her broad shoulders, then bounds onto the dock like the world’s largest, oldest gymnast.

  As she stands on the end of the dock, flinging water from her hard body and wringing her hair like a mop, she and Milo stare at each other like two old grizzlies preparing for their last encounter. Love, maybe, or hate. Whatever, bloody fun. Then Milo blushes and looks away. He lost the moment, somehow, down in La Jolla with Maribeth, maybe. Shit, I want to shout at him. It’s okay. A guy gets a burning needle stuck up his dick, digs his own grave, and nearly dies because he can’t piss, it’s no wonder he doesn’t get a hard-on the first time he tries. Try again. Fuck it, try again. With this one. I love it when I’m philosophical.

  But before I finish the thought, she’s lost interest and is looking at me as if I were breakfast. Or lunch. No, not a meal. A snack. I blush, too, and look away, feeling an odd desire to apologize. This is old hat for the smiling sheriff, and Oscar has curled into himself like a salt-sprinkled banana slug.

  “This an official call, Leo?” Nancy says in a melodious voice full of laughter.

  The sheriff shakes his head sadly, then explains that Milo and I want to talk to her about Rita. Nancy looks at us in a different light now. Distinctly, I hear the words “old fart” and “pipsqueak” but brush them from my mind. Just as she brushes the water from her legs with the side of her heavy, work-hardened hand. I steal another look at her naked body.

  She’s not fat. Not at all. Just huge. Everywhere. Her breasts only sag with age, and her rosy, erect nipples are as big as cherries. The blond thatch at her crotch is as white as straw, and her labia peeks pinkly through. I suspect her clit is the size of my little finger, but since I’m already as horny as a two-peckered goat, I’m afraid of looking too closely. For fear she’ll show it to me.

  The sheriff almost laughs as he introduces Milo and me to Nancy. As we shake hands with a large naked woman, we try to act as if it’s all in a day’s work. Nancy barks and leads us into the house, where she slips into sweat pants and a XXL Forty-Niners jersey that’s a little too tight across the chest.

  “Thanks,” Milo says, smiling. “I appreciate that.” The old fart hasn’t given up yet, I think. They sit at the table alone, Nancy across from him. I lean against an inlaid redwood wall corner so snug it must be water-tight. The sheriff leans beside me. “Do you mind talking about Rita?” Milo asks politely.

  “Why should I?” Nancy asks softly, then looks at me, and turns back to Milo. “How long have you and this cracker been buddies?”

  Cracker? I say.

  “I was born at night,” she says without looking at me, “but not last night.”

  “We’ve been partners twenty-some-odd years,” Milo answers.

  “Well, Rita and I were friends,” she says in that quietly musical voice. “Friends. Not buddies, not pals, not partners. But friends for almost forty years. We were born in Glory the same week. Our mothers were friends. We grew up together, we grew middle-aged together, pal. When she married my big brother, I told her not to; when she divorced him I told her to pluck him like a fryer. And if anything I can tell you will convince this bumbling fuck of a sheriff that she did not die in a drug deal, I’ll talk to you till your dick falls off.” Milo starts to say something, but she breaks in. “Get this straight first, man, Rita was batshit crazy all her life. But she did not lie, cheat, steal, or deal drugs…”

  “Except to her friends,” Leo interrupted.

  “You never had a friend, Leo,” Nancy says, “so what do you know about it?”

  “Except Rita,” he answers softly.

  “Except Rita,” Nancy agrees. “But she was crazy. See! Everybody loved her. Even the fucking law.”

  “So who killed her?” Milo asks.

  “I don’t fucking know,” Nancy says, her voice breaking. “But when I find them, I’m going to twist their fucking little heads clean off.”

  The sheriff pours all of us some coffee. Milo takes a little sweetener this time. I don’t. Oscar whines at the front door like a runt puppy, but it does him no good.

  “What was she doing in Mexico?” Milo asks.

  “Dealing drugs, according to the Federales,” the sheriff says softly.

  “Writing her autobiography,” Nancy says. “Supposedly.”

  “Supposedly?” Milo says.

  “It was supposed to be some big secret,” Nancy says, “and for once in her life, she managed to keep it.”

  “Any idea why?”

  “Had to be love. Rita didn’t give a shit about money,” Nancy says, “and she wasn’t afraid of anything.”

  “Maybe she should have been,” the sheriff says.

  Nobody has a question for that answer, and in the silence we hear the creak of a bedspring, the thump of a heel, and a metallic clack that sounds very much like a pump shotgun jacking a round into the chamber. The sheriff grabs my right arm and shakes his bald head slowly. And then a voice drifts down the stairwell: “Who the fuck’s down there, Nancy?”

  “It’s me, Aaron,” the sheriff says, then turns to Nancy. “You didn’t tell me he was back.”

  But Nancy just shakes her head. “I thought he was too stoned to wake up, Leo. The fucking shotgun is loaded with double-ought buckshot.”

  “Oh, shit,” the sheriff whispers, then releases my arm.

  “You got a warrant?” the voice floats down again.

  “Just a friendly visit,” the sheriff starts to say, but footsteps hurry across the ceiling and a tall, iron-pumped blond guy in swim trunks fills the stairwell, a pistol-butted sawed-off 12-gauge pump shotgun propped across his forearm and his finger curled white on the trigger.

  “I don’t take your visits friendly, Leo,” Aaron says, the shotgun leveled at the sheriff.

  “Son,” the sheriff says quietly. “Get your finger off the trigger, open the breech, and set it on the stairs…”

  Aaron laughs, his teeth white against his tan face, but his blue eyes not smiling. “Or what, you pus-bucket?”

  “Do it, bro’,” Nancy whispers, but it sounds more like a plea than a command.

  “Who are these guys, sis? I don’t even know these guys,” he says, then swings the shotgun to cover Milo, “and I don’t like them. What the fuck are they doing here? They feds?”

  “They’re helping the sheriff with Rita’s murder,” Nancy says calmly, then steps toward her brother, who’s crying now, huge tears silently flowing out of his blue eyes, and reaches for the shotgun.

  “Goddamn Rita!” Aaron screams, then slams the barrel of the shotgun against his sister’s jaw and jerks the trigger.

  —

  Big as she is, Nancy drops like an empty sack, all slack muscles and loose skin, and the double-ought buckshot knocks huge hardwood splinters from the inlaid kitchen ceiling. One of them spears the sheriff between the neck and shoulder. I shove him aside, draw the Airweight, and fire two quick shots over Aaron’s head, but he ignores them as if wadcutters are gnats.

  Before he can reload, Milo is on him, struggling for the shotgun. It’s not immediately clear who’s going to win, and I don’t want Aaron to have the sawed-off, so I look for a clear shot, but Milo holds hard to the shotgun, locks his feet into Aaron’s midsection, and rolls backward, throwing him out the front door, where he rolls across the dock, smashing Oscar to the boards with his shoulder.

  Aaron scrambles quickly to his feet, then dives into the water and swims away so swiftly that he leaves a wake as Milo watches from the door, the sawed-off hanging from his hand.

  “Shit,” he says, then unloads the remaining rounds and sidearms them out the door, where they splash into the Copia. Then we check out the mess.

  Nancy is
deeply unconscious, and, as far as I can tell, her jaw is badly broken. And she’s in the best shape. Sheriff Henriksen has a six-inch varnished redwood splinter buried deeply in behind his collarbone, and massive amounts of shiny blood froth around the wood.

  Outside, Oscar lies on the dock in the sunshine, holding his stomach and chest and rocking as if a piece of his viscera has been broken off. I remember the feeling, remember thinking that I could feel the bullet, feel every movement of it through my body. And hear in my bones the firing pin breaking.

  Then Milo grabs my shoulders, shakes me once, and we go to work.

  But not quickly enough to keep the cursing sheriff from jerking the polished redwood splinter out of his shoulder. A breathlessly red jet of arterial blood splatters the ceiling, and the sheriff hits the floor like a sack of seed corn. Subclavian artery, I guess, and Milo nods. “House like this must have an old hemostat roach clip,” he says, and digs his fingers into the bloody wound. “Find it. And some tape.”

  I dump all the drawers in the house before I find one inside a cigar box on a night table upstairs. When I get back to the kitchen, Nancy has come around, but passes out again when she opens her mouth to say something to me and her jaw collapses like an old rotten bridge. Oscar still moans like death on the sunlit dock. And Milo looks as if he’s been butchering hogs. I open the woodstove, jam the hemostat into the red-hot coals until it burns my fingers, then hand it to Milo, along with a clean dish towel and a roll of duct tape, the closest I could come to a field dressing.

  While Milo tries to catch the bleeder, I slip the radio off the sheriff’s belt, but can’t raise anybody because of the deep valley. “See if you can get something between her teeth,” Milo grunts, reaching deep into the wound. “Something wood. Then immobilize her jaw with the duct tape, man.”

  It ain’t pretty, but it seems to work. As does Milo’s jury-rigged bandage over the hemostat. I can only hope Nancy’s jawbone doesn’t splinter any worse as we load her beside the white-faced sheriff in the skiff. When we pick up Oscar, though, he wails like a fresh-cut shoat, hopelessly. Something inside is broken, and he screams louder than the fleeing flocks of birds as we ease the overloaded boat down the estuary.