Bordersnakes

by James Crumley

  “Send in the troops,” I suggested. “That worked with Noriega. Like a charm.”

  “Hey, asshole, don’t make jokes when you don’t know the whole story.”

  “Right,” I said, “since I’m a civilian, I’ll never know the whole story. So what the hell does the DEA want with Kaufmann?”

  “It’s this way, Mr. Milodragovitch,” he said pleasantly. “We have it from a very reliable source that Kaufmann is about to change businesses. From smuggling to designer drugs.”

  “So?”

  “Word is that he’s perfected a new drug that can be smoked, ingested, or injected. The high of cocaine, the peace of heroin, and the price of crack,” he said. “Think what the inner cities will look like once that hits the street.”

  “Right,” I said, “chaos, war, and the DEA budget triples. Quit blowing smoke up my ass, Mr. Jack Daniels. What does the DEA really want?”

  After a long pause, he decided to tell me another version of the truth. “Not the DEA, Mr. Milodragovitch,” he said, sighing, then sat down. “Me. I want him. Kaufmann has only made two mistakes in his life. Some years ago he killed a man on the docks in Puntarenas, Costa Rica. In broad daylight. An American tourist, a young girl on a trip with her Sunday school, took a videotape film of the murder. Her father was a police officer in Reston, Virginia, and she was a tough kid. She stayed calm, took steady pictures of the killing.” Then the agent paused, sighed again, and I didn’t have to ask who the young girl was. “Kaufmann killed her, too,” he continued quietly. “Through a long series of misadventures, the tape recently came into my hands. If I can get him to Costa Rica, I’ve got his ass forever. For-fucking-ever.”

  “What was his other mistake?” I asked.

  “What? After Harvard, he applied for American citizenship. His father kicked him out of the legitimate familia. That’s when he showed up in Enojada to take up with his mother’s family, the Hurtados, who own the Castellano Ranch.”

  “What makes you think I can do something by myself that you can’t do with the whole fucking government behind you?” I asked. Then when he didn’t answer, I said, “Let me answer that for you. Because he’s a CIA asset, right?”

  “I wouldn’t know anything about that,” he said slowly.

  “Jesus,” I said. “What the hell was he doing with the Special Forces in Central America?” He didn’t answer. “Okay, what do I get out of this?”

  “Well, let me see. First, I can keep Sughrue out of prison.”

  “What?”

  “Some of my colleagues took the mysterious death of Joe Don Pines pretty seriously,” he said. “So there’s been a lot of overtime hours put into that investigation. Unofficially, you understand.”

  “And?”

  “I lucked into the key,” he said. “The fat boy who brokered Sughrue the bamboo vipers got popped in Vegas when I happened to be there. Ten ounces of primo blow. Enough for twenty-five years without parole. So Mr. Dahlgren sang me a sad song. It wasn’t hard after that. I’ve even got the guy who made the copies of the clay ducks he used to get the snake into Joe Don Pines’s office…”

  “The Mexican Tree Ducks,” I said to nobody in particular.

  “…and I’ve even got the guy who stole the UPS truck he used to deliver the packages…”

  “Okay,” I said. “You’ve made your point. What do I get?”

  “What do you get? Well, just let me just say that Sughrue’s shooting in New Mexico and your missing money are directly connected…”

  “What the hell does that mean?”

  “That means that maybe I can show you how to get your money back.”

  “I wish I believed you.”

  “You better believe me,” he said quietly. “You don’t have any choices anymore.” Then he reached into his jacket pocket, brought out a small leather packet and an 800 number on a slip of paper, which he handed to me. “This is the works. The same drug the Kaufmanns used on you. He’ll be immobile for at least four hours. And you can reach me at this number anytime. Day or night. And I’ll meet you at the Castillo airstrip within the hour.”

  “Why don’t you just let us shoot him? Hell, given the right weapon, Sughrue can probably stick a round in his ear at eight hundred yards.”

  “Dead’s too easy. I want the bastard in a cell in Costa Rica.”

  “Let me guess,” I said. “You’re getting close to retirement, right? And maybe the Costa Rican federal police need an experienced American cop…”

  “I wouldn’t know anything about that,” he said again.

  “Perfect,” I said, glanced at the number on the slip of paper, then popped it into my mouth, chewed, and swallowed it.

  “What the hell are you doing?”

  “Eating the evidence,” I said.

  He laughed, honestly. “I guess that’s better than stuffing it up your nose…”

  We stood up. Once again he reached out his hand. And once again I ignored it.

  “Listen, buddy, I don’t know what you’re after, but you fucking people make me crazy,” I said. “You want to win the war on drugs? It’s fucking simple. Take the goddamned money out of it. Legalize the shit. No money, no crime. No harm, no foul. Declare the war won, and let’s go home. If you really want to help, take your budgets and give them to jobs programs and rehab hospitals…”

  “Simpleminded liberal bullshit!” he snarled. “You don’t know what the hell you’re talking about.”

  “Well, that makes two of us, sir,” I said. “You keep your people out of my way, and I’ll see what I can do. But you fuck with Sughrue, and I’ll spend the rest of my life and all my money making your life a living hell. Remember, I’ve got nothing to lose. Absolutely nothing.”

  “You can say that again,” he said, then led me out of the room.

  As they drove me back to the motel I wondered what had happened to that teenager who couldn’t wait to get to war, who had raised his hand to swear allegiance to country and Constitution and commander-in-chief. I also wondered what had happened to said country, Constitution, and president that had left the sullied and aged remains of that teenager feeling as if he possessed some of the last bits of moral integrity in this troubled world. Or perhaps I was just wondering, Why me?

  —

  “Looks like you’re going to have an open winter,” I said to Betty Porterfield as we sat on her gallery sipping slow morning beers and rocking. I had nearly killed myself getting there but had made it in time to meet her at the first gate for the beginning of her weekend. It had been a long time since I wanted to see a woman that badly. A very long time.

  “What’s an open winter?” she said.

  “No snow.”

  She laughed quietly, a sound that made the six-hundred-mile drive worthwhile. “Sleet or freezing rain is about as close as we usually come to snow, bud,” she said, then tucked a stray strand of fine red hair behind her ear and looked away, adding so softly I almost didn’t hear it, “But you should hear it on the tin roof.”

  “I think I’d like that.”

  She turned back to stare at me and considered that. Sheba stirred briefly on the top step, then stretched out in the weak sunshine, one eye on me, one eye on the Rock Island Red hens pecking and scratching in the pale dust of the front yard, their soft peeping voices murmuring through the cool morning air. A thin cloud of cedar smoke from the banked fire in the cookstove filtered across the small valley.

  “Maybe,” she said, then looked away again.

  “I thought you said ‘anytime,’ ” I answered lightly.

  “That was breakfast,” she said, perhaps more sharply than she meant. We were like a pair of sore-footed old geldings testing our friendship in a new corral.

  “It was good,” I said, “thanks again. But I’ve got a bunch of shit I’m supposed to be doing, and if you don’t want me here…”

  But she watched the woodsmoke drift toward clarity and didn’t respond for a long time, then she pondered the hens and said, “You know how I keep
Sheba off the chickens?”

  “Force of will,” I said, and got the beginnings of a smile.

  “I let her kill one,” she said, “then I tied the feet around her neck and let the dead chicken hang there until it rotted off. She’d starve to death before she’d eat an egg.”

  “Are you as tough as you sound?” I asked.

  “Is anybody?” she asked, then thought about it and smiled. “Maybe I am, though,” she said. “I’ve seen some shit.”

  “Is that why you dropped out of medical school?”

  “Maybe,” she answered. “Maybe. I told you I lost my faith in humanity. A long time ago. People bother me. Shit, I can’t even deal with people enough to have a normal small animal practice. But other than that bud I’m plenty tough.”

  “Hell, I’ve dug my own grave,” I said, trying to sound light again.

  “Haven’t we all,” she said calmly, then stood up and walked to the end of the gallery, slowly this time, then turned around. “Let’s lie down,” she said softly, “to sleep.”

  “I thought you didn’t sleep,” I said.

  “I think I need to,” she answered, then walked over to touch my nose with her finger. “Can you?”

  “I can try.”

  “Cocaine makes me nervous,” she said. “I don’t like it very much.”

  “Me either,” I said, “but it was the only way I could get here as quickly as I did.”

  “You could have flown.”

  I hesitated for a long time, then told her the truth. “I don’t want to be on record as having checked a handgun.” Sughrue had loaned me his Airweight, and I still had the Glock hidden in the trunk of the Beast. “It could come back on me.”

  “Are you here to kill somebody?” she asked, suddenly serious again.

  “Not unless I have to,” I said. “It’s not much fun.”

  “It’s not much fun even when it’s supposed to be,” she said without explanation. “Humanity, decency—it’s not all it’s cracked up to be.” Then Betty took me by the hand and led me into the house and across the kitchen to the corner where the futon rested. Sheba followed with soft clicking footsteps on the plank floor, then curled up on the bottom of the futon. The dog tried to stay as still as I did as we waited for Betty to lie down.

  She didn’t even take off her boots as she stretched out beside me on the futon and rested her head on my shoulder. She talked into my neck, telling me the sorry story about how she lost her faith in humanity.

  She was in her second year of medical school in Houston, a fairly normal young woman, raised by decent people, her dad a pediatric cardiologist, her mother a good country woman without pretensions, and Betty was in love with and engaged to a young black med student from Conroe, who was himself raised by decent people, his dad a high school principal and his mother a third-grade teacher.

  Then early one evening Betty answered the doorbell. The young black man she saw through the peephole wore a three-piece black suit and a rep tie and carried an expensive leather briefcase. An insurance salesman, perhaps, or a graduate student taking a survey. And to inquire might seem a betrayal of the man she loved and planned to marry. So she took the door off the chain and opened it.

  “Then once it was opened,” she said softly, “he hit it with his shoulder, hit it hard enough to knock me down in the middle of the living room.

  “He grabbed my hair and dragged me to the bedroom and threw me across the bed before I knew what was happening,” she said, “then he took out a pissant little twenty-two derringer—Christ, I had a thirty-eight Colt Detective Special in the night table drawer that my mother had given me and taught me to shoot—but he took this cheap little fucking toy pistol and stuck it in my ear and told me that if I did everything he wanted, he wouldn’t kill me, told me in a very calm, almost amused and highly cultured voice, then he asked me please not to make him kill me.

  “Hey, what the hell,” she continued, turning away from me, “I was a grown-up lady, bud, I wasn’t some prudish country girl, so I said ‘Okay, but please don’t hurt me,’ and he agreed so nice and polite.

  “Jesus fucking Christ, what a fool I was. Shit, I even apologized for pissing my pants when he started hurting me, my breasts, and he let me go to the bathroom and clean up, let me change the sheets, but then he hurt me, hurt me bad, and hurt me for what seemed hours.

  “Oh, Christ did he hurt me,” she said as calmly as she could, but even Sheba heard the tone in her voice. The dog crept up from the bottom of the futon and licked her face. Betty pushed Sheba away, then apologized to the dog, turned away from me, and gathered Sheba’s muzzle to her face, then Betty tried to go on in a normal tone as she rubbed Sheba’s face and pulled at her loose underlip.

  “You know she has a number tattooed on her lip,” she said, “but it wasn’t an American Kennel Club number. I checked.” Then she paused for a long breath and went on with the story, hugging Sheba’s body to hers.

  “Oh, shit, he was huge and iron hard,” she whispered, “and he stuck that goddamned thing in me over and over again. Any place he could find a hole. Oh, hell, bud, I was bleeding everywhere, even my throat was full of blood, and I tried and tried to get him off, anything to make him come and stop, please stop.

  “Then he stopped and told me what I had to do to make him come,” she said, then paused. “I had to believe he was going to kill me or he couldn’t come. Christ, he was crying and apologizing when he told me that, but he told me that if he didn’t believe me, he was going to kill me, and I guess I believed him. He stuck that shitty little gun in my mouth and jacked off over my face. He demanded that I watch him, told me that if I closed my eyes when he came, he’d pull the trigger.

  “I guess I didn’t care by then,” she said. “I just wanted him gone, and I was willing to do anything to have him gone. So I did what he said, did it without complaint. And then, then the worst part, the fucking worst part.

  “He got a warm washrag and cleaned my face, cleaned it as if I were a baby, kissing his come and my tears off my face,” she said as she rolled toward me again, then grabbed my beer and guzzled the rest of it, and turned away from me. I eased her back into the circle of my arm.

  “I guess I was still crying,” she continued, “as he got dressed, because the bastard stood there at the end of my bed and asked me in this perfectly normal voice why I was crying. I don’t know what I answered, but it must have been wrong, because the bastard smiled sadly, then took the fucking little twenty-two out of his coat pocket and shot me in the face. Shot me right in the face, then laughed and tucked that piece-of-shit pistol in his coat pocket.”

  Betty shrugged off both Sheba and me again, sat up against the wall, and hugged a pillow to her chest. Then she touched the faint scar across her cheekbone.

  “I don’t know what would have happened to me if he hadn’t shot me,” she said, her voice muffled by the pillow. “Just don’t know. And don’t know what would have happened if that twenty-two short hadn’t glanced off my cheekbone and skated around to my ear, if it had punched through the sinus as it should’ve and scrambled my brains. Don’t know.”

  Betty was silent, her face buried in the pillow, so long that I finally asked, “What happened?”

  She raised her head, glared at me as if I were mad, and said, “I jerked the thirty-eight out of the nightstand drawer and put two rounds into his butt before he got to the bedroom door,” she said calmly, “then I put another one between his shoulder blades as he scuttled toward the living room. Then I leaped out of bed, kicked him until he rolled over, then I called him a ‘fucking nigger’ and shot him in the face. Twice. Then put the derringer in his hand and called the police.”

  Betty threw the pillow aside, jerked the ribbon out of her hair, and tossed it as if she were trying to scalp herself.

  “I don’t know,” she said, cocking her face at me. “It was just like shooting myself…I might as well have shot myself.”

  “Well, you’re sure as hell a good enough shot,” I
said, trying for an echo of her line the first morning I’d been out at her place. But it was the wrong note.

  And oh, hell, was I sorry. Before I knew what was happening I was politely but coldly escorted out the door and into the Beast.

  The last thing she said was: “Don’t call me, you son of a bitch, and I won’t have to hang up on you.”

  Blame it on the coke, I told myself as I drove away, or blame it on an innate lack of sensitivity in my character, or blame it on the fucking bossa nova. Whatever, I was looking forward to visiting with Mr. Ed Forsyth.

  As I drove toward Kerrville, sleet began to rattle my windshield, and I almost felt sorry for Ed Forsyth. The Chicano kid had warned us that Forsyth was a sucker puncher, and I planned to be the puncher rather than the sucker. I slipped the sap into the liner pocket of my jacket. But I never got it out.

  The desk clerk at the motel remembered me, so she told me that Mr. Gish had died and then she called Connie up at the house, who said come on up, so I did.

  Ed Forsyth greeted me at the front door with his goofy smile, then escorted me into the living room to see the “grieving widow.” As we waited for Connie, he even made me a drink. But when I reached for the sap as if reaching for a cigarette, Eddie tried to kill me without another word.

  I managed to roll over the couch, land on my feet, and chunk the heavy crystal glass at him before Forsyth leaped the couch and planted the heel of his boot in the middle of my sternum, then landed lightly, bouncing on his toes. When I recoiled off the stone wall, it felt as if my heart had stopped. What the hell, surely I was dead. Forsyth was fifteen years younger, thirty pounds heavier, and had a worse attitude than Sughrue.

  “I’m gonna let you up, old man,” he said, his goofy grin sparkling, “ ’cause you’re easy.”

  “Thanks,” I whispered. I didn’t realize I’d been lying down so I levered myself off my side and wobbled to my feet in front of him. “Come on,” I said hoarsely, “you Howdy Doody motherfucker.”

  “Stop it, Eddie,” came Connie’s tired voice from the back of the room.