The Right Madness

by James Crumley

  I knew what was coming next, so I slipped back down the ridge and walked back to my ride. Whatever plan I might have had to confront the Foleys became as vague as a distant dust devil.

  “What happened?” Claudia asked as she slipped onto the barstool beside me.

  I was two drinks ahead, and after I told her, she asked, “What are you going to do now?”

  “Actually, I think I’ll pick up the cats,” I said, “and see if I can find a job as a security guard in Minneapolis.”

  “That would last about ten minutes,” she said. “And what about Mac?”

  “Are these legal or personal questions?”

  “Yes.”

  “Fuck,” I said. “I’ll fake some INS documents tomorrow, leave the shotgun here, and see what they say.”

  “I’ve got a legal Smith & Wesson LadySmith .38 in my bag,” she said. “But it’s in your safe.”

  “Thanks,” I said, “but if I pointed it at Edgar, he’d probably eat it, then I’d be beat to death by a crippled woman. Bitch is probably Ukranian.”

  “Are you ever going to get over that?

  “I’m not sure,” I admitted.

  “Listen, you asshole,” she hissed. “When I was the lead cheerleader at Butte High, we’d just won the state championship against Hellgate High, and I was kissing the fullback. When they turned out the lights, the son of a bitch dragged me under the stands and raped me. I wasn’t exactly a virgin, but I’d never been raped. It’s a somewhat different experience, asshole.”

  “Shit, what’d you do?”

  “I lived with it,” she said softly. “My father could have had him killed—just because he’s a tailor, don’t think he’s not connected—I could have killed him myself. But I just lived with it. Forgave myself and lived with it. So give it a rest. What happened to you was entirely different from what happens to a woman being raped. The next time you mention it or feel sorry for yourself, I’m going to coldcock you.”

  As Claudia lectured me, her coal black hair and white wings tumbled around her striking face, her cheeks inflamed with anger. I kissed her because I couldn’t help myself. She kissed me back; sitting there at the motel bar, we nearly came to it. But we stopped, sighed, then laughed mightily.

  “We’ve got a lot of shit to work out,” she said. “Let’s not do that again.”

  “Okay,” I said. “But I ain’t gonna apologize.”

  “And I ain’t gonna ask you to,” she said, then took off, boots thumping, Wranglers swinging, fringed jacket stirring like the wind before a warm, soft rain.

  I kept my place, assuming a hangover might make tomorrow’s chore easier.

  I was amazed how tiny and fierce the cholitos were when they met me at the gate the next morning. I didn’t show them the shotgun or any faked INS papers, I just said, “La Migra,” and they looked at the plain-brown-wrapper Chevy and scuttled away to the big house. After a few minutes, the giant stalked down the front steps and walked toward me, blood in his eye and the club swinging from his thick wrist. I was just as happy that he hadn’t bothered to open the gate between us.

  “You’re not Pacheco,” he rumbled. “And it’s the wrong day.”

  “Pacheco’s gone,” I said. “He gave me the key. I want twice what he was getting and twice as often.”

  If his wild laughter hadn’t made me step back, his breath would have. It smelled like a wild boar’s fart, fetid with corruption, rotten as an ancient swamp. His cigar stank like smoked guts.

  “Fool!” he shouted, and raised the club to the empty sky. “You from those foul imps, the twins? Tell those … those godless abominations that they’ve stolen the last of my money. The very last. And the next time they come sneaking around,” he added, “I’ll call heaven’s fire down on them, just as I did on their slut of a mother. And you …” he paused, then smiled, “you, my friend, I’ll fry and feed to the pigs. One lousy, ungodly piece at a time, you devil’s scum.” As if to make his point, he slammed the club down on a large switch on a gray box attached to one of the inner gate posts. The fence began to hum a deadly song of electricity.

  I wouldn’t have been surprised if a bolt of lightning had come out of the bare sky, even less surprised if I’d swung up the 12-gauge and put five rounds of buckshot into the evil old bastard.

  “You haven’t seen the last of me,” I said, probably because this whole case had either made me crazy or stupid. “Not by a little bit, you bastard!”

  He raised his club again, turned his face to the clear blue heavens, and bellowed, “I pray to God to make it so! I pray!”

  I climbed back in the stolen car, “the twins?” ringing in my ears. It was all there in my investigative notes that I had worked out before the injunction. It had to be them: the softball player who had given me the box of matches with the bug in the Depot; the painting crew who had killed Charity Ritter; the tall Girl Scouts who were in the Northwest Hotel just before Carrie Fraizer fell from the balcony; the metal-studded punk rockers who left the bar moments after Ellen, just before she cut off her hands. They were good; they could be boys or girls, shadows, whatever they wanted. I knew all those things even before the restraining order. But I couldn’t do anything, even now, not without the fucking twins. Wherever they might be. I drove back to Denver to see what Mr. Pacheco had to say for himself.

  We found an interesting and quiet place to have lunch. After we ordered, Claudia looked at me and said, “You can’t tell me that you’re going to kill somebody, CW. That’s going too far. I’m still an officer of the court, and I may be half in love with you, but I’ll call the police in a heartbeat.”

  “Okay,” I said. “I’m not going to kill the old bastard. But I’m going to bring him down. Legally. He’s got some INS guy named Pacheco on the payroll. I’ve got him for illegal garbage collection, and nobody knows how many health violations, not to mention the greenhouses. Besides, he probably set fire to his wife.” Then I paused for effect, to make the lie more convincing, “Trust me, I’ll be as legal as the law allows.”

  She looked dubious, but stuck out her hand. “Shake on it?”

  Ah, you got to love those Butte girls. I put as much honesty as I could into the handshake.

  “Where did you get the other car?”

  “Rented it.”

  “I hope so,” she said, but I don’t think she believed me.

  I spent the rest of the afternoon tracking down Pacheco and working my way past various INS functionaries. He turned out to be a midlevel pencil-necked bureaucrat, but he must have had enough clout to keep field agents from checking out the Foley place. He had a long, pale brown Spanish face with oddly dark eyes, soft long fingers bound with several rings, and the paunch of a deskbound man. His expensively cut hair was as black as his eyes. He couldn’t have looked more corrupt if he’d tried. I suspected the Foleys weren’t his only clients. There was so much money in illegal aliens that sometimes even the best men in the Border Patrol went bad. Most agents were noted for their honesty, and few gave in to temptation. But so many hungry eyes stared across the desert toward the USA, and so many came, trudging in plastic sandals and cheap cowboy boots, carrying their plastic jugs of water that always ran out, robbed and killed by the coyotes who had promised freedom. They would not and could not be stopped, and the sorry truth was that the American economy would founder like a horse bloated with green grain without the mojado population to do our shitwork.

  And there had to be some DEA connection, too. But I hoped to avoid that. Any number of them would be pleased to put a round up my ass for all the times I’d stepped on their polished loafers.

  “Mr. Grubenko,” Pacheco said without a trace of an accent, “what can I do for you?”

  “Tell me how to get into the Foley place.”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” he murmured, unmoved.

  “You want to play it that way, fine,” I said, standing. “I’ve got a friend on the Post who would just love this story, and you know that Foley is so
damned crazy, he’ll give you up in a second.”

  “Who the hell are you?”

  “Just somebody who needs inside the Foley place,” I said. “It shouldn’t interfere with your business arrangements.”

  “If he catches you, he’ll kill you,” he said.

  “And feed me to the hogs.”

  “You can count on that,” he said.

  “Thanks,” I said.

  “Por nada,” he answered. “Crazy as she is, I’d rather do business with the old woman.”

  “I don’t reckon cell phones work out there in the high lonesome,” I said, and he shook his head sadly. “I’d hate to find a reception committee waiting.”

  “No problem,” he said. “No problem at all.”

  As I drove back to the motel, a slow-moving cold front slipped south over the Cheyenne Ridge, and the light rain and cool breeze made Denver’s air almost invisible, moving out the smog that usually filled the depression of the Mile High City. I stopped at the bar and called Claudia in the room. The phone was busy, but finally I got through and told her to come down. We had to talk. She wasn’t going to like it, but we had to talk.

  I was right; she didn’t like it that I refused to tell her what was going to happen.

  The glow from the compound bounced off the low, flat clouds as I parked the government ride. The rain had turned to desert mist, as much damp air as water, and it felt great on my face as I slipped down the ridge. My nose filled with the childhood smell of a screen door just before thunder storms—a faint, dusty, almost electric odor. I was as invisible and as clean as I could get: black new running shoes and coveralls I could burn later, latex gloves on my hands, and the shotgun covered with ArmorAll to fox the fingerprints. America is a beautiful place, right? Dynamite is as easy to buy as bad drugs. And you can prime the sticks with firecrackers and kitchen timers. I buried two sticks on either side of the catch pond spillway, then slipped down by the fence with my bolt cutters.

  The small explosions emptied the pond, and the small flood shorted out the generator as I slid through the mud to the compound. The hogs didn’t seem too disturbed by the small explosions or the sudden rush of muddy water. So I snipped through the chain link, then climbed over the side of the stout wooden pen to steal among the stirring animals.

  Only the glint of light off the wire that bound the head of the club and the stench of his cigar saved my life. I should have known Pacheco had been too easy. Foley’s club grazed my left arm hard enough to almost break it. The arm felt dead as I rolled among the squirming, roiling animals, the pig shit, and the sheet of muddy water as Foley followed me, kicking the pigs aside as easily as if they were small dogs, slamming the club into their stolid backs, sending them squealing into the night or dropping them as dead as rotten logs. I couldn’t let him get close, but he finally cornered me, trapped on my knees. He raised the club to heaven, his eyes full of fire and blood in the iron gray shadows. I had no choice. I lifted the shotgun from under my windbreaker. I just had time not to kill him. But at that range the double-ought round took his arm off at the elbow, the club spinning away with his forearm.

  He still came, though, kicking madly and screaming like one of the pigs until I butt-stroked him in the nuts. When he went down, finally, I kicked him behind the ear to keep him down.

  In the misty gloom, I spotted Pacheco directing the cholitos gathering around the pen. I could almost hear their blades—linoleum knives, cheap switchblades searching the dark air for my blood. I fired two rounds over their heads, and they scattered like chickens through the gate. I heard it open, and the sound of running feet. The boys faded into the night. But Pacheco didn’t make it. He reached for his Glock, but without a safety, he shot himself in the groin. I put a round of buckshot that raised a small cloud of muddy water at his “feet, and he fell screaming. I struggled to reload the shotgun, then grabbed Foley by the collar to drag him out of the pen so the hogs wouldn’t eat him, then I tied off his bloody stump with the rawhide thong off his club. I splashed over to a whining Pacheco, stomped his Glock into the muddy sand, kicked him under the chin to shut him up, then knelt to pull his face out of the water. A couple of disturbed rattlesnakes slivered by his body. I let them go.

  As I stood up and tried to shake the paralysis off my left arm, I heard the soft trot of the little donkey. The old woman, her hair wild in the mist, her hand on the whip, firm on the cane handle, came toward me out of the odd gloom.

  “Hold it,” I said. “And put that whip down or I’ll kill your fucking donkey.”

  “Is the old bastard dead?” she asked in an oddly calm voice.

  “He’s bad hurt but he ain’t dead.”

  “We can’t leave him,” she said. “The children will come back to kill him. He was so mean to the children.”

  “Lady, I watched you with the whip,” I said.

  “True,” she said quietly, talking to herself more than me. “Mean is contagious. And I caught it from him, I guess.”

  “Has the old man ever been to Montana?”

  “What?”

  “Montana? The old man ever been there?”

  “No. We’ve never been anywhere but here since we left Georgia in sixty-six,” she snorted.

  “What about the twins?”

  “We don’t see the twins,” she said. “Not since they got smart, stole one of his precious suitcases, and ran away.”

  “Where did they go?”

  “I don’t reckon that’s any of your business, mister,” she said. “I don’t know anyway, and I wouldn’t tell you no how, not even if you was to shoot me in the foot.” Then she waved a stump of a leg at me and cackled insanely at her joke.

  “Ronnie was such a brave boy,” she continued when she’d caught her breath. “He kept the old bastard off Sarrie May. He took her beatings. They’re good people, now, and they’re doing good things with our bloody money.”

  “Good things, right,” I grunted, “like killing half a dozen people this summer.”

  “I wouldn’t know nothin’ about that,” she said calmly. “That doesn’t sound like my children,” she said, then paused and asked, “I don’t suppose you’d carry the old bastard to the hospital?”

  “No, but I’ll carry you into the house,” I said as the generator overrode its short, then chugged back to life. The lights came on. Wet chickens scattered everywhere, fighting over the dead ones. The hogs had less trouble dividing their spoils—first come, first served, and the dead quickly dispatched in a frenzy of grunts and squeals.

  Della was the oddest burden I’d ever carried, heavy but light, without resistance, alive but also dead. Her wild hair seemed heavier than her mangled body. I kicked in a door, found the lights, kicked my way through tangled furniture, then dumped her on a bed. The floodlights outside had washed the color from her skin, but under the inside lights, the deep dusky color of her skin glowed. That mixture of Native American—Cherokee, perhaps—black, Spanish, and English sometimes found in the Deep South.

  The room was full of computer equipment—screens and towers and keyboards. It looked like an office in Silicon Valley. I was still covered with pig shit and wanted to kill somebody, anybody. If you’ve never felt that fire, you don’t know what it’s like: like an orgasm that never stops, like a moment when everything is right.

  “You know,” she said as if nothing had happened, as she picked up the family Bible on the night table and clutched it to her chest, “I had Dougie after the old bastard figured out that Dougie didn’t belong to him. He burned my legs off, did it on purpose, you know.”

  I scanned the pictures on the bookshelf across from her bed. The first was a shot of a convoy: two remodeled school buses, two dump trucks, and a three-quarter-ton army surplus vehicle. Group shots of men in religiously enormous beards, women in bonnets and long dresses, children as slight as sprites, fewer people in each picture. Among the photos, as an afterthought, rested a plaque: Della Mae Starrett Foley, Ph.D. in agriculture from Mississippi State. With honor
s.

  “Who the hell are you?” she finally asked.

  “You’ve heard of the crack of dawn, ma’am,” I said. “Well, I’m the crack of vengeance.”

  “You’ve come to take us down? You’ll never find the money,” she blustered.

  “So what the hell are you white trash doing all the way out here?”

  She ignored the insult with a slight sneer, then started to tell me the story.

  “When Edgar was stationed at Fort Carson—”

  “Edgar is too big and too dumb to have been in the army.”

  “He joined at seventeen,” she said, “before he got his growth …” Then she paused. “I don’t know if you’ve ever spent any time in South Georgia, buddy? It’s wet. He came up here with a buddy whose daddy worked for one of these big outfits, and he loved it,” she said. “It’s the most beautiful place in the world, the high plains. You can’t believe the dawn light, or sunset, or what it might have been like filled with buffalo.” She stopped, pointed to her degree. “I majored in dry-ground farming, drip irrigation, all the things we should have learned from the Jews. And we came out for a new Eden in a place where nobody would ever look.”

  This time she paused a long time, rubbed one of her stumps, then reached into the nightstand drawer for papers and a squib of smoke.

  When she fired it up, the raucous stink of great smoke filled the room.

  “It’s an old story, Mr. Crack of Justice,” she said, then paused as if she’d suddenly remembered something. “You’ve got to get the old man out of the yard. Please. The cholitos will carve him up. He treated them so badly.”

  “Will you stay put, ma’am?” I said. “And tell me what’s going on?”

  “I promise,” she said, but I didn’t exactly know what else to do.