Bordersnakes

by James Crumley

  Finally I raise the substation dispatcher when we are about five hundred yards from the dock, and she locates a passing Coast Guard chopper that meets us at the landing, where we transfer our load, then climb aboard behind them. I spent my Vietnam tour in the 1st Air Cav, so helicopters were nothing new, but Milo had never been up in one. As we fly to Glory, we discover that Milo doesn’t just get seasick. He starts throwing up when the pilot throws the chopper into a banking turn, and doesn’t stop until we land in the parking lot of the hospital. The paramedics carry the wounded to the ER, and the deputies escort Milo and me to jail.

  Which makes me sick.

  Thanks to Don Henriksen’s clout with the chief deputy, we are only there a few hours. Which is a few hours too many.

  —

  The next afternoon, most of the blood and fear washed off and out of us, Milo and I drive to the hospital, where we discover that the sheriff is still unconscious in the ICU because of the blood loss and shock. But Oscar has died in the night, Don Henriksen tells us, his ribs crushed into his lungs and his damaged liver and spleen destroyed by Aaron Tipton’s shoulder, for whom there’s a manslaughter APB being broadcast at that moment.

  Milo invites the haggard deputy for cafeteria coffee, but not me. I know Milo’s coming back to the waiting room. It only takes him five minutes. “Go see the woman,” he says. “Don’t tell her about Oscar’s death. Or the APB. We have to find her brother before the law, Sughrue.”

  Why me, man?

  “She liked you, boy,” he says. “I could tell.”

  Fuck you, old man, I think. But take on the chore.

  —

  A nurse sits beside Nancy’s sleeping bulk in the bed. At least I think it’s a nurse. She looks like a nurse, even in a crew cut, nine earrings, and a pastel, flowered jumpsuit. She stares coldly up at me.

  “Can I help you?” she whispers.

  I need to talk to the lady, I suggest. She awake?

  “You with the sheriff’s department?”

  Before I can nod, Nancy’s hand slips out of the covers to grab the control and raises the bed. Her hair is matted in dirty clots, her teeth are wired together, and the bruise has seeped across her face and neck, but a sleepy smile flirts with her eyes as she nods at the nurse.

  “He’s come to wash my hair,” Nancy says to her, teeth gritted, talking with just her lips.

  “Well, isn’t that sweet,” the nurse says to me, as if I’m not just a child, but a dull child, “but I have to stay in the room. Nancy just had a shot of Demerol, and I have to watch her, you know.” The nurse slaps a pair of wirecutters on the bedside table. “In case she regurgitates.”

  “He can handle it,” Nancy grunts. “Now get the fuck out of here. Please.”

  The nurse looks only slightly ruffled, then asks, “You the guy with the duct tape?”

  I shrug.

  “I guess you’ll do,” she says, then smiles and steps softly to the sink and fills a washbasin with warm water, which she hands to me, along with a sample of shampoo and a small pitcher. “Don’t be afraid,” she adds, smirking, then slips quietly out the door on her rubber soles, while Nancy raises the back of the bed as far as it will go.

  I’ll bet you think I don’t know how to do this, I say to her in the silence as I place the water between her legs.

  But she answers with a wooden smile. “I fucking love Demerol.” Then bows her head over the basin as if praying.

  As I pour the warm water over her bowed head and work the shampoo into her matted gray mane, I tell her: My mother was an Avon Lady, a terrific gossip, and a secret cheap wine drinker. When I was a little boy, after my father left, she drank more, and some summer mornings when she had an earthquake of a head, the look of a woman with continental plates shifting in her skull, I would wash her long blond hair, then comb it dry…

  “Until it started giving you a hard-on,” Nancy says, in a tight-lipped yet soft voice. “I’ll bet she loved Demerol, too.”

  When she was dying of lung cancer, I whisper, she loved it all. But she didn’t have much hair to wash by then…

  “I’m sorry.”

  It was a long time ago, I say.

  “Nothing’s a long time ago,” Nancy whispers as a single tear splashes into the soapy water. “Nothing. My mother only knows it’s Wednesday because I do her hair on Wednesday.”

  I’m sorry.

  “Fuck it,” she says, then tells me about her brother until I’m finished. Then she tells me how much she loves dreamy Demerol again and asks for another favor of a more personal nature. I can’t refuse, not now. Wrapped in the painkiller, it takes a long time. Long enough for me to become involved. But when she’s finished, I raise my head, wash my face, and kiss her slack, sleeping mouth, and promise to be back.

  But the next day, after having heard about the sheriff’s slim hold on life and Oscar’s death, Nancy refuses to see me.

  —

  “It’s pretty thin shit,” Milo says a day later as we top the Grapevine and stare down at the rain-washed LA Basin. The air is cool, clean, the sun perfectly warm, all the way to the heart of the Valley, the sort of day that once made LA seem like paradise, but which you don’t see much anymore. “Pretty thin shit in a fucking huge town,” Milo adds.

  “But a beautiful day,” I say.

  At least we have three possible connections to Aaron Tipton: the name of a retired stunt man, Tim O’Bannion, that I weaseled out of Nancy; a known criminal associate, one Tom-John Donne, given us by Deputy Don from Aaron’s rap sheet; and a biker’s nickname, Greasy Leg, that the bartender Tarzan had let slip after a day of drink and drugs with Milo. But no addresses, and not much of a lead on the cops.

  By the time we get to the Sportsman’s Lodge on the border between Studio City and Sherman Oaks, the day has gone to hell—the sun unpleasantly hot through a hazy film of smog—as has the Valley. Back in the old days when I occasionally chased runaways to LA, I stayed in the Valley because the place and the people had seemed a little bit country and you could still find an occasional orange tree. But looking at it now, it is LA to the core. Strip malls stuffed with bad yogurt shops, silly fingernail places, and other useless businesses; cheap apartment complexes waiting for the big one to turn them to plaster dust; and traffic hell, streets filled with drivers who couldn’t read signs or spell fuck.

  At least the Sportsman’s still seems a calm island in the madness. Since Republic Pictures used to be down Ventura Boulevard, John Wayne had had a drink or two and the odd nap there in the old days, and occasionally you could still see Gene Autry teetering in his tiny boots across the coffee shop. We take a suite in the front building above the pool, then have a drink or two and curl up for naps.

  —

  After I wake from a drowning sleep for a shower and clean clothes, I find another new Milo in the Lobby Bar, chatting up the black bartender and guzzling blended margaritas. “Just about to call you,” Milo says expansively. Still surly from my nap, I order a beer. Any fucking kind. “Make him one of those margaritas, please, Joe,” Milo says, already on a first-name basis with the bartender. “We’ll see if we can’t cheer him up.”

  “What if I don’t want to be cheered up?” I say.

  “Then you’re an asshole,” Milo says. “And you better be polite, Sughrue. Joe here’s one bad rooster and he’s already solved about half our problems.”

  As Joe puts together the first blender drink I’ve had in my life, Milo tells me all about it. Joe has an old friend who has just come back to town from Kentucky, somebody named Boots who has a current PI license, a chauffeur’s license, and expired SAG and WGA cards, but a current AA membership.

  “You’ll like Boots,” Joe says as he places the drink in front of me, “and, Texas, if you’re just half as crazy as your buddy, you’re gonna need Boots.” Then he laughs in soft, southern tones as I sip the margarita. Pretty smooth, I think, and not too sweet, either.

  “Not bad,” I say, then turn to Milo, asking: “How the hell lo
ng have you been here?”

  “Well, I couldn’t sleep…”

  “Don’t blame him on me,” Joe says, smiling fondly. “I found him like this when I came on shift.”

  “Strictly my fault,” Milo adds, sniffling.

  “You got into the fucking cocaine,” I whisper.

  “Boots can’t show up until nine tomorrow, Sughrue, and it’s Friday night, man, time for a night off,” Milo says seriously. “It’s fucking time.”

  What could I do but raise my glass, drain it, and order two more. “Whatever comes,” I toast, but I’ve already ruined the mood. At eleven when Joe gives last call, Milo orders a double tequila and a beer, then goes to piss.

  “Room service is over?” I ask Joe.

  “But Jerry’s Deli delivers,” he answers.

  So at least Milo has a half-pound of pastrami on rye in his gut when he rolls into bed. Which gives him something to throw up in the morning.

  Over breakfast the next morning, Boots, a small, efficient black woman in working cowboy duds, lays it out for us. “This is Hollywood, boys; first we eat, then we talk.”

  “Is this a power breakfast?”

  “Not hardly,” she answers. “Too late.”

  Actually, she forks through a huge breakfast as she tells stories, all of which have the same point: because she’s black and a woman, she’s had to do it all, work all these jobs to stay around the business and raise her three fatherless boys in some decent fashion. And maintain her expensive hobby: horses.

  “Are you telling us that you’re going to be expensive?” Milo asks.

  “That’s right, cowboy,” she says, then reaches for a piece of sourdough toast on Milo’s plate, “if I work for you. And right now that’s a big if.” Then she gobbles Milo’s toast with brightly capped teeth and, finished, snatches a piece of bacon off my plate.

  “You must be southern,” I say.

  “I thought I’d lost the accent.”

  “Southern women always have to eat off somebody else’s plate,” I say.

  She stares at me a long time, then laughs softly. “I don’t think I’ve ever been called a southern woman before,” she says, taking a shorthand notebook out of her purse. “Okay, boys, lay it out for me.”

  After Milo finishes, she reaches for his last piece of cold toast, asking, “You got two grand in cash?”

  “I can get it in five minutes,” Milo says.

  “Go to the front desk, get an envelope to put it in, and rent me a room for tonight,” Boots says quietly, “and I’ll see what I can do for you boys.”

  “A room?”

  “I want to go swimming when I get back,” she answers, then stares at me as if I am going to deny her.

  Milo shrugs as if to say It’s just money, then takes off. While he’s gone, Boots fills the void with aimless Hollywood chatter and gossip as the waitress quietly cleans the table. When Milo returns and hands her the envelope with the money and the key, Boots stands quickly, saying, “It’s going to be a nice afternoon, boys, our last one for a while, so why don’t you hang out around the pool and work on your tans—they could use some work, right?—and I’ll be back before you burn.”

  Then Boots was gone, skipping away like a dreadful sprite, leaving us mostly speechless.

  “Guess we should buy some new swimming trunks,” I suggest, and Milo looks at me as if I’m crazy. “It’s SoCal, man,” I explain.

  —

  So once the idea is in place, we both buy some new trunks that make us look like refugee tourists. And suntan lotion, too. As if Milo could burn through the dark curly pelt across his chest and shoulders. Or me through my West Texas tan. But I’ve never exposed the scar to people I didn’t know, so I lather myself with it, too, as if the greasy sheen will hide the wound.

  It’s not like we think it’s going to be, lazing around the pool in Hollywood—although Hollywood is more a notion than a place—taking the smog-filtered sun with Jewish families and car salesmen, unemployed aerospace executives and cocktail waitresses. California dreaming ain’t what it used to be. No muscle boys with greased loins hang out, and not a single starlet lounges around us, although a fairly pretty Frenchwoman seems to be working on songs at the table next to ours.

  After another pot of coffee and the LA Times, Milo finally turns to me and says, “This is fucking boring.”

  “It’s Hollywood, Jake,” I say. “You get the drinks, and I’ll cut the lines.”

  —

  Six hours later, we are chatting up the two cocktail waitresses from Phoenix when Boots steps out poolside, shining in a bikini, as slender and strong as an ebony bow, and slips into the pool without a splash, and does about thirty brisk laps before the gals from Arizona realize that we are watching her instead of talking to them. Milo and I feel like two little boys who have been caught farting in the bathtub and thinking about biting the bubbles. Boots climbs out of the pool and shakes her head at us, then grabs her towel and walks toward us, lovely and compact, not so much erotic as simply impressive.

  Sometimes Whitney does that to me. She’s lovely, that’s for sure, so lovely that in the old days it never occurred to me that I could even talk to her. But that’s not all she is. She’s a lovely person. Sometimes Whitney does something so wonderful and generous of heart—jollies Lester, another woman’s child, out of an angry funk, or hugs me just because she wants to—that I feel like a heartless worm, even if she loves me. Women, man, women.

  Boots doesn’t waste a moment on formalities, or even a smile, doesn’t even dry the sparkling water out of her short, curly hair. Tim O’Bannion, the retired stunt man, owns a motel in the desert on the edge of the Joshua Tree National Monument. Greasy Leg’s real name is Bill McGeorge and he has done time with Aaron Tipton at Chino; he probably could be found working the Boardwalk in Venice Beach or hustling drinks and running a jewelry scam in Santa Monica at either Chez Jay’s or the Circle Bar. And Tom-John Donne has cleaned up his act, opened a dojo in Panorama City, and works now and again as a heavy in low-budget kick-boxing movies.

  “So if you were us,” Milo asks, “how would you start?”

  “Frankly, boys,” Boots answers quickly, “I’d start home. And just as fast as I could.” Then she pauses and stands. “But I know you’re not going to, so good luck.”

  “That’s it,” I say, “for two grand?”

  “You want more,” she says, turning on me. “Such as the fact that you assholes are both drunks and drug addicts? Driving around in a Caddy with New Mexican plates full of state and federal felonies? Working an open attempted murder case, no less?”

  “Attempted?” Milo interrupts.

  “It sounds like the sheriff’s going to make it,” she said. “Thanks to you. And if my friend Joe didn’t like you two idiots, for inexplicable reasons as far as I can tell, I’d throw your money in your face and let you kill yourselves without my help. ’Cause I got too much to lose.” Then she gathers a deep breath. “As it is, I just hope you’re not too fucked up to remember what I told you, because I ain’t about to write it down,” Boots finishes, and almost spits at our feet.

  “Fucking LA,” I say, standing now, too. “Land of the expensively cheap thrill.”

  But Milo pulls me down sharply, saying softly to Boots before she can turn away, “Thanks for your help, ma’am. Maybe I understand how you feel about us. I sometimes feel the same way myself…”

  “Speak for your own damn self,” I whisper hoarsely.

  “…but we’re just playing the cards we’re dealt…”

  “Fucking denial!” Boots shouts over the random echoes of the pool.

  “Judgmental bitch,” I mutter.

  “Shut up, Sughrue,” Milo says. “You weren’t raised like that…”

  “I can take you, cowboy,” Boots says, her tone flat and mean and ready, “any fucking time.”

  “Maybe not, honey,” I say, shaking off Milo’s hand. “It might be fun trying.”

  “Sit down, children,” Milo whispers, �
��you’re scaring the tourists.”

  Boots and I glance suddenly around the shimmering pool, look at each other, and realize how silly we must seem. At least we laugh. Boots waves at us forgivingly, then walks away, shouting “Good luck, boys!” over her lovely shoulder.

  I quickly find the chair with my butt and take a long pull on the margarita, still trembling with the adrenaline burst.

  “What the fuck was that about?” I ask breathlessly.

  “I don’t exactly know,” Milo says, “but I expect she’s had some bad times with the cocaine and the drink. And maybe she’s still having them. Maybe worried about her boys. I don’t know.”

  “No, I mean, what’s it really about?”

  “Sexual tension, kid,” he answers, “but don’t worry. You could have taken her. Just like you took that asshole back in Kerrville. So come on. Let’s get out of this piss-thin sunshine, go see Joe and have a last drink, a nap, then go to work.”

  “Be along in a minute,” I say.

  —

  Jesus, I couldn’t even remember that Howdy Doody motherfucker’s name in Kerrville. But I remember that he gave me all I could handle. And more. His right foot at the end of a leg sweep that seemed to tear something in my thigh. A couple of body shots that hit like large-caliber rounds. If he hadn’t missed with the big right hand, it would have been me stretched out to thump at will on the rich guy’s lawn. But when he missed, I slipped behind the big bastard, locked my right arm around his throat, and choked him down. With my teeth locked into the back of his neck. Like some asshole bad-dog jail-cop. Shit, I was so scared of losing the fight that I nearly choked him all the way down to dead. And probably would have if the old rich guy hadn’t grabbed an over-under shotgun out of the trunk of his Mercedes and aimed it at us, his hands trembling so badly I was sure we were bird-shot dead. It took a half-pint of vodka and two long lines for me to stop shaking enough to face Milo. Hell, I would have shot the coke into my arm if I’d had the works.