Bordersnakes

by James Crumley

  Sughrue

  As the movie winds its troubled and weary way toward a pre-Christmas wrap, the weather grows unseasonably warm, almost early-summer hot, and the rattlesnake patrols take more and more time. The poor spade-headed, forked-tongued devils slither in thick, dark streamers from their deep rocky sanctuaries to laze on flat rocks in the unexpected sunshine. Two or three times a day shotgun blasts split the windy silence, and the heap of bloody serpent scraps fills the narrow refuse pit the effects guys had blown in the stony ridge between the adobe ruins and the fake village, bodies that clog the stone slit and writhe to decay under each day’s ration of lime that holds down the smell of rotting snakes.

  Fucking Milo not only refuses to answer any questions about what the hell we’re doing on this job, he doesn’t even talk to me anymore. He hasn’t for days. It’s the goddamned woman. And probably her cocaine, too. Rumors among the crew say it’s primo. Which is dangerous for the old man. Each morning I wake horrified to face the day.

  Even Kate is horrified when I tell her.

  Kate’s driven over to our place to bring Whitney and Baby Lester back from an afternoon’s horseback ride on the ranch. She refuses to stay for dinner, but will share a beer with me after I change out of my uniform and work on the tiles for the rear patio as she watches quietly. I’m not exactly sure why I bother. The place doesn’t even belong to us. Harim picked up the title, along with the convenience store in Fairbairn he lets us run, when an old coke dealer jumped bail on an ancient conspiracy beef.

  Thanks to the lovely DEA. Once you come to their attention, they never forget. And with the blunt force of mandatory sentencing, they can make your mother roll over on you. Hell, I’d done a lot of drugs in my misguided life, but never sold a bit, and knew, thanks to Joe Don Pines, I was still somewhere on their list, still wearing a gold star. A list bearing Milo’s name, too, now.

  “You’ve got a great life here, Sughrue,” Kate says softly to my back. “What’s the matter?”

  “Milo and Suzanne,” I say. “I’m worried.”

  “Oh, no! He’s not sleeping with my sister?” Kate says. “Oh, my God, he is! What the hell’s he thinking?”

  “Thinking’s not exactly the first word that comes to mind,” I say. “Besotted, that’s the first word that comes to mind.”

  “Is he in love with her?” she asks. “My God, that would be awful.”

  “Well, maybe not,” I lie.

  And lie again because I don’t tell Kate that I strongly suspect her sister is also sleeping with Dunston, the DP, the preppie AD kid, and maybe even the Chicano hairdresser who’s providing her with cocaine. Hell, even the aging starlet lead spends a lot of time in Suzanne’s motor home. I don’t know where she finds the time. Like everybody else, Suzanne’s working long, hard days. Maybe even longer and harder than everybody else. The only people I’ve ever seen work this hard was a grunt patrol on a useless jungle hump in Vietnam.

  “Suzanne can be trouble,” Kate says, her voice trembling as if she’s talking about a terminal disease. “If he’s not in love with her, I don’t think he should be fucking her…”

  Everybody’s fucking her, I think as I tap a red tile into the sand, but only Milo’s blindly in love. But I don’t tell Kate. I don’t tell her lots of things. So she hugs me goodbye, and I retreat into the house, send Baby Lester from his homework to the shower, and, once alone, suggest to Whitney that perhaps we should find another way, another place to live.

  Whitney leans on the edge of the sink for a long moment, long enough to make me worry. I step forward, cradle her slim waist in my hands, bury my face in the sweet tumble of her golden hair.

  “C.W.,” she says without turning. “C.W., if I hadn’t come when you called, you would have let yourself die in that damned hospital. So you owe me, right? Big time, right?”

  The question doesn’t need an answer.

  “Finish this thing,” she whispers, “then we’ll talk about the future. And the past.” Then Whitney pauses, turns, smiling, into my arms, asking, “You mind?”

  I do, but know I can’t say so. I know what it will take to get Milo away from Suzanne and back on the job. Maybe even save his life. I just hope Whitney will forgive me later. I know the old man won’t.

  Milo

  The first thing that came to my mind when I saw him swagger out of her motor home was: so this is how it happens.

  Suzanne had sent me off that morning with the wranglers, the horses, and the stunt doubles to bodyguard and snake watch the second unit while they covered a complicated horse chase. She didn’t trust anybody else, she told me, and it was important that all these shots were covered in one day. Even after two weeks on location, because they shot out of sequence, I still didn’t have much idea of what the movie was about.

  I just did my job, did it perfectly because if things fucked up—if an actor found a stash of pills and blew a line or the hungover cameraman missed a shot on the last take before the light failed—she wouldn’t sleep with me, ignored me with a passion. Except for those wild moments when she accused me of sleeping with the assistant hairdresser. Or the makeup girl. Or the only aging starlet who didn’t treat me like passing offal. Even when she didn’t want me, Suzanne acted as if I belonged to her. She would have driven a younger man, less patiently desperate, completely insane. As it was, she made me crazier day by day. And she would have bled the heart out of a man with thinner skin.

  I did everything I could to sleep with Suzanne every chance I got. And thanks to her endless supply of cocaine—which she seemed to use as a working drug instead of a happy one—I wasn’t sleeping in my bed much, either. I spent my nights roaming the desert beyond her trailer, waiting for the sound of her voice crackling through the night, spent my days keeping my part of the job working clean and tight. But lately I felt as if I was worn down to the gut strings, as if a coil of barbed wire occupied my chest.

  It was all complicated by my refusal to talk to Sughrue. I knew he wouldn’t approve of the way I was fucking it up—my money, his revenge and salvation—but I believed I could work it out, could have it all, believed if we could just get through this goddamned movie, everything would be all right. I suppose, in that way, I wasn’t much different from the cast and crew. Surely they wouldn’t have worked this hard if they hadn’t believed that some magical thing would happen to them at the celluloid finale.

  So that last day went perfectly and quick. Even though I stayed with the wranglers to help unsaddle, cool, and load the horses, it was still midafternoon when we got back to the location. The first unit was setting a reverie of a gunfight in the adobe ruins, but Suzanne’s chair was empty. I limped quickly toward her motor home, but Dunston, sitting on the steps of his adobe, called me over and insisted he couldn’t have a beer unless I joined him. Fuck his contract, he shouted.

  What the hell, I thought, I could borrow his bathroom to fix my nose, and beer with the old boy was always a pleasure. As long as we could stay out of the tequila.

  As he lifted the third Herradura, Dunston said, “Let’s hear it for that great movie.”

  “What great movie?”

  “Tequila Mockingbird,” he said, laughing and choking down his shot.

  I slammed my half-empty shot glass on the table, stared at my trembling fingers, and interrupted the old man. I had already been in the bathroom. Twice. “What the fuck is this movie about, Mr. Dunston?”

  “You don’t know?”

  “Women on horseback without shirts, and a little gunfire?” I suggested, then laughed and stood to leave.

  “Sit down, son,” he said, pouring another shot and slicing another piece of Mexican lime, “and I’ll tell you.”

  “Okay,” I said.

  “Okay,” he said, then lifted his glass. “It’s like this. These out-of-work women gunfighters…”

  “Have hit the glass ceiling?” I joked as I finished my tequila, which Dunston refilled immediately. “You’re going to get me drunk,” I said, laughing, touchi
ng my cane, thinking I might need the support this afternoon.

  “You’re going to need it,” he said, then continued, “Okay, listen, they’re not really gunfighters, these women. They’re gamblers and camp cooks and whores and whatnot. But they have all killed their men. Well, not their actual men. Just killed a man. Or two.”

  As Sam sipped at his drink I thought of Betty Porterfield, which sobered me somewhat. Even though I told Suzanne that our brief moments together were the best part of my long, ruined life, which I even made myself believe in spite of everything, I never stopped thinking of Betty Porterfield.

  “So they get hired by this rich rancher, whose wife has been kidnapped by this Mexican revolutionary, to take the ransom money to Mexico and bring his wife back…”

  “This is beginning to sound familiar,” I said.

  “Right,” he agreed. “And when they bring her back…”

  “They learn the truth,” I interrupted, pouring my own shot this time, “and turn her loose to go off with Jack Palance?”

  “Something like that.”

  “Jesus,” I said, stunned. “She never saw The Professionals?”

  Dunston took a long time to answer, considering his darkly aged tequila in the sunlight slanting through the top of the curtained window. “Son,” he said, “to tell the truth, I don’t think Suzanne’s ever seen a western movie. Not even one of mine.”

  “You didn’t say anything?”

  “Don’t get me wrong, kid,” he said, “crazy whore that she is, the bitch wrote a great script and she’s making a fucking wonderful movie.” Then the old man paused, then continued in an aged whine. “You have any idea how long it’s been since I’ve been on a film? Ever’body in that fucking town thought I was dead. Except for those bastards who hoped I was.”

  “I guess I thought you were dead, too,” I said.

  “Well, I’m fucking not!” he shouted, standing.

  I stood up, too, but Dunston wasn’t looking at me. He was staring out the window. Then he reached over to push me back into my seat.

  “Fuck it,” he said, “let’s have a drink to commemorate my resurrection…”

  But it was too late for both of us.

  Through the narrow uncurtained space at the top of the window I watched Suzanne clatter down the steps of her motor home and stride toward the location, talking into her handheld radio, her shadow as black as her shining hair and leather pants, black against the pale desert dust. And behind her, Sughrue, standing in the doorway, wiping his nose, tucking in his shirttail, and scratching his nuts.

  “I’m sorry, son,” Dunston said softly, but I wasn’t there anymore.

  If I hadn’t paused in the doorway after I kicked the door open, paused to reach back for my cane, which had been the most expensive part of this goddamned scam, I suspect I would have hit Dunston’s steps with my pistol in my hand and emptied the clip into Sughrue’s chest without thinking about it. As it was I used several thousand dollars’ worth of cane to immobilize his right arm with a shot to the elbow before I dropped him in the dirt with a right hook that should have put both of us in the hospital. He stayed down, touching a trickle of blood from the corner of his mouth. But he wasn’t out.

  “Now she’s made us both bleed, Milo,” he said.

  “You chickenshit son of a bitch,” I hissed, “you’re fired. Don’t let me see your ass around here again.”

  “More than fine by me, man,” Sughrue said as he stood up slowly. “By the way, she wants you to drive her to Enojada after this shot.”

  “Fuck you.”

  “And also by the way, man,” Sughrue said as he turned to walk away, “before you cross the border with her, do me a favor. Just say ‘Roriann,’ man, say ‘Rita Van Tasselvitch,’ and be sure to say ‘dumb fucking old man.’ Say that loudest, Milo.”

  “You stupid son of a bitch,” I said, “you think I didn’t know?”

  For once in his life, Sughrue didn’t have anything to say. He just left. I wish I could say I had planned it that way.

  Sughrue

  Okay, so now I’m the fucking stupid one, carrying a mouthful of sore teeth as I follow Milo and Suzanne across the border into Enojada in the vain hope I could keep him out of trouble. Trouble I’d started, somehow. Once he’d started sleeping with her, I knew his eyes would be blinded by her whipcorded body and his ears filled with the angry buzz of her screaming, bloody orgasms, and that he wouldn’t listen to me when I told him who Suzanne really was. Or who she really wasn’t. But by the time I remembered where I had heard that whiplash of a voice she used on poor old Mr. Dunston at the fajita party, it was already too late.

  When I saw him the next morning coming out of her motor home, I didn’t know what to say. Then I didn’t have a chance because he wouldn’t talk to me. Right then I decided Milo wouldn’t listen to me unless he thought I’d fucked her. Which I guess I nearly did. I suppose, technically, a blow job counts, even if you don’t come. As I said, I guess I’m the fucking stupid one now.

  —

  When Milo shouted at me while I was lying in the dust that he already knew, I was nearly as shocked as I was by Suzanne’s reaction when I told her that I knew what she’d done. She didn’t turn a hair. Just lifted the corner of her mouth and said, “I should have had you killed.”

  “They took a pretty good shot at it,” I said.

  “That was just an accident,” she said. “Or maybe a problem with the language.”

  “Jesus, you’re not just a liar, you’re fucking crazy.”

  She just smiled sweetly, watching me in the mirror as she fixed her makeup, saying, “You know what they say. When you’re a schizophrenic you never have to be alone…”

  “You’re not a schizophrenic,” I said, “you’re just a bitch.”

  “…and when you’re a manic-depressive, you don’t have to be unhappy too long.”

  “Jesus wept fucking blood,” I muttered. “You are crazy.”

  “What did you say, C.W.?”

  “I said you’re a fucking bitch.”

  “Comes with the territory,” she said calmly. “But you’re a man. You wouldn’t understand.”

  “Right,” I said. “I never killed anybody for money.”

  “If you think this is about money,” she said, “you’re dumber than I thought. Besides, I never killed anybody…”

  “You didn’t have to, did you?”

  “Nope,” she said, “they all lined up. And everybody fell down on cue.”

  “Maybe I lined up,” I offered, “and maybe I fell down, but I got back up.”

  “Not exactly,” she said quietly. “You got out of the investigation business. Which was all I wanted.”

  “But Milo got me back in,” I said, but I’m remembering the sound of the firing pin shattering in my ear. “And he’s still standing up.”

  “Not exactly, honey,” she said, her pure West Texas twang returning to hum like a strand of barbed wire in the wind. “Your precious Milo fell the farthest. And landed right on top of my lovely body. You remember that, don’t you?” Then she paused, turned, and continued as if none of this had happened, “And you know, Milo’s the one I might keep around. I think he loves me.” She smiled at me in the mirror and chilled my soul.

  “Poor bastard,” I said.

  “When Milo comes back with the wranglers, please tell him that I need him to drive me across the border to my uncle’s place when I finish the gunfight reverses.”

  “How the hell does somebody end up like you?”

  “I don’t know,” she admitted. “That’s not my worry. Perhaps I just accepted my station in life. I’m a second-class citizen, dumb-ass, so I learned everything I could learn about how to live in a man’s world.” Her smile sparkled like a frozen river. “I could have made you come, you know. No matter how hard you tried to resist. I could still do it.” Her hand reached for my fly. I jumped back as if touched by a snake. Her laughter sounded like a wall of mirrors breaking. “See,” she said, laughi
ng. “I do know how to live in a man’s world.”

  “A man’s world?”

  “But then you wouldn’t know anything about that, would you?” she said. “Face it, C.W., you’re not a man. You’re just a kid. A mind full of nonsense, a head full of silly macho romantic notions. You’re a child. Wandering around with your dick in your hand. Speaking of which, if I were you, I’d button up my pants before I talked to Milo. I suspect he won’t understand.”

  “No more than I did,” I said, remembering how she seemed to enjoy my humiliations when I tried to love her.

  “Nor any less,” she said, “I pray,” then she went out the door like a woman in a movie. Leaving me to follow like the fourth stooge…

  —

  …all the way to the gate of Don Emilio Kaufmann’s estate up a small river canyon outside of Enojada. A half-mile or so below the gate, I nearly overrun them while Milo stops his rig for something. Maybe a long piss. I don’t know, can’t see anything but the right rear of the Blazer. But finally they drive on to the gate, with me following, and I drive past as they pull through the gate, then park the Blazer.

  Unfortunately, the stakes are immediately raised. The gate stays open long enough for a black Suburban with smoked glass to roar out and tail me. But not very far. Maybe two miles, then in my rearview mirror I spot a guy with a mini-Uzi rising through the sunroof. As I see the flashes of automatic fire and feel the rear tires go, I grab the emergency brake, lock up the rear wheels, whip the pickup into a bootlegger’s turn, then slam head-on into the left front fender of the Suburban.

  If our bumpers hadn’t caught and locked, the Suburban would have tumbled off the narrow track and into the canyon without me, but as it is, clinched together like love bugs, turning slowly in the afternoon air, I have plenty of time to think about stupidity.

  Milo

  After we crossed the Rio Grande and the brief inspection at Mexican customs, Suzanne glanced up from the open briefcase on her lap long enough to direct me down the rough, crooked main street of Enojada, a small ruined town where it looked as if even the halt and the lame carried automatic weapons concealed beneath their rags. The only signs of prosperity were a liquor store just across the border, a new motel built over a dance hall, and the Chevy dealership. Pale dust drifted like gunsmoke in the air. I drove very carefully and kept my eyes to myself. Suzanne had made me empty the Blazer of firearms before we left the location, and I missed the weight of my pistol belt. I also particularly missed having Sughrue to cover my back. But that was the deal I had made with myself. I’d cross the border naked, or not at all.