Bordersnakes

by James Crumley

  “You want to quit again? What the hell are you thinking about?” he asked me quietly. “You can’t afford to let this go.”

  “Maybe I can,” I said, wondering how to leave Sughrue permanently behind, then glanced at Whitney and Baby Lester, but they were lost in a Little Golden Book. “The guy who did you is dead…”

  “That’s what they say.”

  “…and my father’s money is gone with the goddamned wind, so maybe we should just relax.”

  “Right,” he said bitterly. “Listen, man, if you’re afraid to brace Forsyth, I’ll do it.”

  “I don’t think you have the right to say that to me, kid.”

  “Hell,” he continued, his voice a bitter snarl now, “maybe even take real jobs. You and me, man, we could chase bail jumpers for Harim. Or maybe even go to work as security guards.” Then he rattled through the newspapers again and held up the classified ads. “Those Hollywood jerks,” he said, “that Rattlesnake Productions, they’re taking bids for a qualified security outfit. We qualify, right?” Then he crumpled up the paper. “Fuck you, man. Maybe you started this shit, but by God I’m not afraid to finish it.”

  “If you boys have to have another fistfight to make friends,” Whitney said, “get yourselves a new audience and leave me the hell out of it.” Then she and Baby Lester hit the door like people running from a fire.

  “I get the point,” I said, tossing my napkin on the table. “I’ll be back in a couple of days and we’ll finish this shit.”

  “But your heart’s not in it anymore, man.”

  “I left my heart in San Francisco, dipshit.”

  “Or outside Columbus, New Mexico,” he said suddenly, not smiling, “along with your nuts.”

  I took a deep breath, and we stared at each other over the dead silence. “Your call,” I said, “in the parking lot, in the desert where you hide, or on the fucking moon.”

  Sughrue sighed, rubbed his face as if he could wipe the stubble off his face. “Hey man, I’m sorry,” he said. “I don’t know what the fuck I’m thinking about.”

  “That’s fairly clear.”

  “Look, I’m going to loan you the Airweight, man,” he said, “and I want you to promise me that if that Howdy Doody motherfucker comes at you, you put him down. Put five rounds in him without a single fucking word.”

  I didn’t say yes. But I didn’t say no, either. I guess we’d been spending too much time together. But whatever had almost happened was over.

  “By the way,” he added softly, “Whitney says Kate’s been calling. Every day. Why don’t you stop by?”

  “Maybe,” I said, then paid the check and climbed into the Beast. In my rearview mirror, it looked as if Sughrue and Whitney were shouting at each other in the fading light. It was probably my fault, but I didn’t have either the time or the energy to try to fix it.

  Since I had all night on the interstate no matter what, I decided to drop in on Kate. Once again the ranch house looked deserted. The General seemed to be asleep at the wheel of his large pickup parked at the far corner of the house. The Rattlesnake Productions 4Runner was parked at the front door, and the old vaquero squatted on his heels, leaning against the wall. The cowboy gave me a brief smile as I climbed out of the Beast, took the thin, hand-rolled cigarette out of his drooping moustache, spit off the porch, then spit a mouthful of Spanish at me, “Que quiere tu, gringo?”

  “Kate,” I said. I had been listening to Sughrue’s border tongue and reviving my teenage dreams of Robert Jordan’s Spanish Civil War. “Es aqui?”

  “Peladita,” he said, laughing, “the little bald one.” Then he banged on the door once with his fist.

  As if she had been waiting behind the door, Suzanne opened it quickly. She’d dressed in black again, cowboy boots this time, crinkly new black Levi’s, jeans and jacket, an expensively aged work shirt, and a silvery silk scarf knotted at her long smooth column of neck. She touched the scarf with professionally red nails and asked in a hard flat voice, “Can I help you?”

  “Is Katie around?”

  The woman narrowed her eyes, then turned without answering me. “Katherine!” she shouted. She walked back into the dark empty hollow of the house without inviting me through the wide-open doorway. She settled herself in a director’s chair before a laptop computer at the large table in the dining room. Sam Dunston and the preppie kid sat on the other side. The click of her nails on the laptop keys filled the silence of the house for several minutes. Then the woman glanced up, her eyes as hard as malachite chips, staring at me as if she had never seen me before.

  “Katherine!” she shouted again. Her partners flinched. “Gentleman caller!” She made the phrase sound like “white trash.”

  Kate danced out of the kitchen doorway, music clamped on her ears, a can of Tecate beer in one hand, a bomber joint in the other, wearing a long, yellow T-shirt that said FUCK KARMA…on the front, and on the back…BEFORE IT FUCKS YOU.

  “Uncle Grandpa,” she squealed when she saw me, then boogied over and threw her arms around my neck. “Where the fuck you been, man?” she whispered, then added loud enough for her sister to hear, “You got any blow, Daddy-O?”

  I didn’t even bother to answer.

  Kate introduced me to the vaquero, Juan-Jose, who drifted silently away, oddly shy and polite now, then Kate waved at her sister. “Say hello,” Kate said. Suzanne gave us a sixteenth of an inch of a cold smile.

  “She’s been working in Hollywood too long,” Kate said by way of explanation. “She doesn’t have time to be polite. So fuck her. Listen, we’re having a big fajita cookout for my birthday Sunday week, so you gather up that worthless Sughrue and his wife and kid and make them come…”

  “Katherine,” Suzanne said quietly. “It’s a private party.”

  Kate ignored her. “She’s bringing her stars and her famous ass wipes,” she burbled, “and she’s afraid the great unwashed will ask them for autographs and all that gooey, goony shit…” Kate paused for breath, then addressed her sister out of the corner of her mouth. “Mr. Milodragovitch is too rich to be an asshole…”

  “I’m sure, sister dear…” Suzanne said without looking up from the screen.

  “I promise I won’t ask for any autographs,” I said, catching Kate’s high, “unless I can have nekkid pitchurs, too.”

  “…and it is my birthday.”

  Without looking up from her laptop computer, Suzanne smirked, “Only by accident.”

  I led Katherine out to the car and we climbed into the front seat so I could make a small bindle of Tipton’s blow for her.

  “How’s it going, kid?” I asked.

  “Same as always,” she said. “Shooting and screaming; barking and backbiting…”

  “Your dad and Suzanne?”

  “And me in the middle,” she said softly. “It’s always been bad but it’s the worst it’s ever been.” Then she paused. “I think my father’s got money in this movie deal…”

  “How’s that change things?” I asked.

  “You don’t know the General and money,” she said. “The ranches sometimes cost more to run than they make, and his retirement doesn’t go as far as it’s supposed to…Hell, I don’t know. He’s always been funny about money.”

  “Katie, honey,” I said, folding the bindle into her hand, “you hang on, and if I’m back from Austin in time, we’ll be here for fajitas. And maybe even a couple of laughs.”

  Then the kid almost smiled as she hugged me goodbye, scattering tears on my neck, whispered “Come back,” and fled back into the house. It made me wonder why some families didn’t just get out of each other’s hair. Even those who didn’t have any.

  I had my hand on the ignition key of the Beast when the General wandered toward me from the far side of his pickup with a bottle in his hand. I climbed out to at least say hello.

  “Mr. Milodragovitch,” he said politely, “I’ve never probably thanked you for bringing Kate home. Thank you. You have any children?”

  �
��No,” I lied. I saw no reason to discuss my life with the General.

  “They’ll break your heart,” he said, then raised a dusty bottle to his lips. He must have gone deep into his cellar for it. Then he offered it to me. “I’m sure Kate told you that I have a wonderful cellar. This is a Napoleon, an 1846, I think, out of Somasa’s basement. As an officer and a gentleman, can I offer you a knock…”

  “No, thanks,” I said, “I wasn’t an officer.”

  “I must apologize for the lack of a snifter,” the General drifted on, “but somehow it seemed superfluous on a day like this…”

  “A day like this?” I said.

  “One of my daughters is as mean as a rabid fox,” he muttered, “and the other a stone dyke…I wonder what I did to deserve this…” He didn’t want an answer. He sat down on the raised sill of the porch. “I know you weren’t an officer,” the General said out of nowhere, turning his lean, weathered face to look up at me. “You were a child, a goddamned child…”

  “True enough,” I said. I had turned sixteen in basic and seventeen huddled in a cold, muddy trench. “But how did you know that, sir?”

  The General grinned slyly. “I’ve still got friends at the Pentagon, you know.”

  “I’m sure you do,” I said. Like most investigators I didn’t like people digging into my past. “But what’s the point?”

  “You mind if I ask you a personal question?” the General asked, suddenly almost sober as he raised the bottle. Before I could answer, he asked, “You’ve been in combat, right? It changes a man, doesn’t it? I missed Korea and Vietnam, but I saw a bit of trouble during my years in Central America. Enough to know that it changes a man, makes him a better man…” The old man stood up and wandered over to lean on the fender of the Beast.

  “That wasn’t my experience, sir,” I said, which was true. “I knew a bunch of World War II combat vets in my outfit. Some of them were great guys. Some of them were pieces of shit wearing stars and bars and stripes. But what’s the point? It was a long time ago.”

  “No point,” he said calmly, then drinking, “but what the hell, let’s have a drink. We’ll never have another chance…well, you’ll never have another chance because I’m going to drink the whole son of a bitch.” Then he raised the bottle to his lips and had a decent taste. “Goddamn,” he said, trying without much success to be one of the guys, “if pussy were honey and it was on fire, it’d taste like this.”

  The General offered me the dusty bottle again, and this time like a fool I took it. His estimation of the brandy wasn’t too far off. Nor my estimation of the foolishness of having a drink with him.

  “Have another,” he said. “You’ve brought Katie home, and I owe you…more than you know.”

  So I had another knock. Perhaps the brandy should have been served in a candle-warmed snifter—I don’t know—but even out of the bottle it made me feel as if I should be wearing a morning coat, a top hat, and an ascot, a woman on my arm as lean and troublesome as an Afghan hound.

  “Nice,” I said.

  “Have another,” the General said, and I did. But when I handed the bottle back to him, he asked, “I’m sure Katie told you that the bastards tried to indict me over that Iran-Contra mess?”

  “She mentioned something about it,” I said carefully.

  “A lot of great soldiers—combat soldiers, great Americans—were tarred with that ugly brush, you know,” the General said, handing me the brandy again. “Tarred by bastards who never heard the sound of gunfire,” he added. “I’ll never feel the same about this country again…Those soldiers did their duty.”

  “I’m not sure I believe duty included lying to Congress…”

  Before I could finish, the General grabbed the bottle out of my hand. “What the hell do you know about it?” he asked.

  I hesitated with my answer. He was Katie’s dad.

  “What?” he asked. “What the hell you know about duty?”

  “Not much,” I said, taking the bottle back without his offering it, “But I did what I thought was my duty…”

  “But you never led men, never faced the insidious political problems…”

  “That’s true, sir,” I answered, then had another hit of the brandy. “General,” I said, “forgive me for being blunt. But I spent ten months in Korea serving in a line infantry outfit and goddammit I did my duty…” I had to stop to get a breath and hold back the unbidden anger. “But it didn’t make me a fucking liar.”

  “But it was a different time,” the General said, almost begging, “the rules were different.”

  As always the West Texas sky was moving. Clouds and light and hope for rain. I wrapped the cognac in his hand. He didn’t resist.

  “The rule is,” I said, “you eat their salt and do their bidding but you don’t fucking lie for them when they fuck up.” There seemed to be a dark moment when the General had a light in his eye as he told me, “You’ve never been in charge. You don’t know what the hell you’re talking about.”

  People in charge have been telling me this shit all my life.

  Think of it this way: you’re in the third wave at Tarawa, and some dolt misread the tide, so your landing craft lodges on the reef; every second Marine in your LST dies during the thousand-yard struggle through the surf; or you’re trapped on that black slithering sand at Iwo Jima and some fucking nut in a tank runs over your buddy; or it’s Korea when the powers that be decide that jets can do close infantry work; you put out the purple panels and the smoke of the day, and still the F-86s come slithering through your positions, hammering you with rockets and .50-caliber rounds as big and ugly as your thumb; or your squad had laagered on a ridge in Indochina, eating some shit out of a can left over from a war nobody remembers, and some kid who flunked out of East Jesus State misreads the elevation on the 81mm and everybody you knew on this tour has turned to bloody puddles without ironic final lines.

  “I don’t mean to be impolite, sir,” I said politely, “but I saw more atheists in foxholes than I did Republicans.”

  “I’m not sure what that means,” he said, then smiled like a man for whom foxholes were an abstract notion.

  “I’m not sure, either,” I said. “You take care, sir.”

  So I nodded goodbye and climbed into the Beast leaving him with his bloody bottle, thinking perhaps I needed a long rest and a detour to Blanco.

  I had to wonder, though, if perhaps Sughrue wasn’t right: I was afraid to face Howdy Doody. I was supposed to have come home from the war years ago. But sometimes it follows you home like a bad dog.

  —

  During the long drive to Betty’s house I took the time to reconsider the DEA encounter in El Paso one more time. I hadn’t exactly told Sughrue the whole story. If I had, there would be no way to leave him behind when I had to cross the border. And I had resolved, during the interview with the DEA agent, to do just that.

  The agent—a tall, lanky bald man in his fifties, a knobby piece of work, more gristle than muscle—who finally let himself into the small interrogation room, introduced himself as “Chuck Johnson.”

  “This is going to be your copy,” he said in a soft southern voice as he pulled a microcassette recorder from his pocket and placed it on the table between us and switched it on. Then he held out his broad hand, which I ignored. He actually looked hurt. “It’s going to be that way, huh?”

  “You’re fucking right,” I said, “Mr….What was your name? Hiram Walker? Or was that Fred Flintstone? And please. Tell me that’s the only recording device in this room. Jesus, give me a break.”

  “Mr. Milodragovitch,” he said quietly, propping a hip on the table, “of course this isn’t the only recording device in the room. But everything else is turned off. That’s why I want you to have your own copy.”

  I was interested by this ploy. So I played along, checked the tape and the sound level, then replaced it between us.

  “Now what?” I said.

  “First, don’t fuck with me. A couple of dance
s with me, and you’ll be begging for the Kaufmann brothers.”

  “Who’s that?”

  The agent stood up, turned in a quick, frustrated circle, then slammed his palms on the table and leaned into my face. “Listen, you dumb son of a bitch,” he hissed, “I’m not some fucking bureaucrat with a gun. I got more time on the street than you got in the crapper, and I know everything there is to know about you and your jerk-off buddy, Sughrue. Everything. You fuck with me and you two will never see daylight again…”

  “Why don’t you just cut the pissant melodrama and tell me what you want?”

  After a long pause and the deep, hard-bitten sigh of a man too long in a shitty, losing war, “I want Emilio Kaufmann alone on this side of the border,” he said calmly.

  I let that one lay there. But something sick and greasy slipped among my viscera as I waited for his explanation.

  “Listen,” he said, “this isn’t your usual border trash snake-shit. I can’t touch him in Mexico. He’s one slick son of a bitch. Our own Special Forces trained him when he got out of high school and he served a couple of training tours in Central America before he came back to the States to do a Ph.D. in pharmacology from the University of Washington, a Harvard MBA—his family owed the Cruz Azul chain of drug stores—so he’s damned smart, dirt mean, and without conscience.”

  “Sounds like Superman’s evil twin, Skippy,” I suggested.

  “Smarter and tougher than that,” he said. “Most of the cocaine that arrives in America is transhipped through northern Mexico. Emilio Kaufmann controls most of the cocaine that crosses the border in this sector. He’s done it for years, survived all the changes in the Colombian drug lords because he’s the best at what he does. And he’s especially hard-nosed. He loses a shipment, everybody connected with it dies. Everybody. And all their families. And he’s heavily connected politically, virtually unindictable on either side of the border.”