The Right Madness

by James Crumley

  When I finished my chore, stashing the old man on the front porch—I couldn’t drag him any farther—I came back inside, and she sighed, then said, “When we came here we believed in the glory of the Goddess of the Herb. Some of our parents had been snake handlers and lye drinkers. But we smoked herb. Then Edgar started drinking, which was against the rules. Then he bought himself an air conditioner and his own computer. He’d spend forever in that room,” she said, nodding toward a locked door beyond the bed, “drinking and fiddling with himself after he lost the … ability to make love.”

  I blew the door off with the 12-gauge. Without asking.

  “The money’s not there,” she whined.

  Nothing but high-end computers and sexual video tapes.

  “He should have bought another windmill,” she said. “Saved us thousands in batteries and fuel.”

  “Lady,” I said. “I have nothing but sympathy for your life. You people are fucking idiots. Hell, I’m a white-trash hippie myself. I’m here for one thing. I want to know where the fucking twins are.”

  “The twins?” she said.

  I jerked the Bible out of her grasp. A single blue sheet drifted out.

  I read it with my heart cracking.

  Mommy, Dougy, We’re safe in a small town in Montana, Meriwether. We’re going to school, and remembering everything that Mommy told us.

  Love,

  Ronnie and Sarrie May.

  No date, no address, no worthwhile information.

  “What does that mean, ‘We’re remembering everything Mommy taught us’?”

  “I homeschooled them. We learned to hack together. Just for fun, at first. Then we got mean. They use computers like swords,” she said. “And they can kill you with a sharp fingernail. I taught them that, too. Before I lost my legs, I was a ninth degree tae kwon do,” she said proudly. “And I’ve never lost a handicapped match since then,”

  “I’m into gun do,” I said as I popped her in the forehead with the butt of the shotgun. I made sure her hard, rough hands were tied together before she got her senses back.

  When her eyes cleared, she said, “Cut me loose, you asshole, and I’ll take you on straight.” Then she got hold of herself and whined, “What kinda asshole would hit a crippled woman?”

  “I thought about shooting you,” I said. “Until I found this.” It had been heat sealed into the cover of her Bible.

  If you can ever run away from the old bastard, Mom, we’re just south of Chama, New Mexico, an unmarked cattle guard just to the east of the Rio Arriba estates turnoff. There’s a cut in the mountains that you can see from the road. Head there. The school, Los Almas Perdida, is at the base of the break. You’ll be safe with us.

  At least I knew where to look now; maybe even find out what had sent them on their rampage in Meriwether.

  “What happened to all the other people?” I asked.

  “Their children disappeared,” she said. “Wandered off into the desert, died of snakebite, heatstroke …”

  “Or fed to the hogs?”

  She had no answer for that.

  “Is there something I can do for you?” I asked.

  “Haven’t you done enough?” she said without irony. “Put me back in the buggy, you bastard, and leave me the shotgun. Maybe I can keep the cholitos off him. Until help arrives,” she added, then became coquettish. “I could tell you where the suitcases are hidden. If I wanted.”

  I didn’t say anything, just picked her up, carried her out to the buggy, and left the unloaded sawed-off and five rounds in her lap.

  “Good luck,” seemed to be all I could say.

  But she didn’t say thanks.

  I had a good idea what was going to happen after I left, but I didn’t think about it.

  I was over the ridge before I heard the first shot, the second quickly behind it. Pacheco, then the old man. She took a little longer to make up her mind about the third round—I suspected that the old donkey had been just about her only friend—but the fourth came without hesitation a moment later. I was as clean as I was going to get in Colorado.

  FOURTEEN

  AFTER I TOSSED my outer clothes in various dumpsters on the edge of town, I put the stolen car back into the airport parking space where I had left the pickup; went back to the hotel and patched my arm as best I could; loaded a sleepy, disgruntled, and angry Claudia with her goods into the truck; then checked out in the middle of the night. I had seen and done things that were never going to go away, but I pushed on. Even leaving just past midnight, it still took two hard days—the last climbing out of the valley of the Rio Conejos and over two ten-thousand-foot passes down into Chama. I knew Chama from the old days. High-mountain fall nights colder than reindeer assholes and great Mexican food that could melt the fillings in your teeth. But like so many small, isolated towns, it had been infected with minimansions around the edges, whereas almost everything downtown sported a for sale sign in front.

  In spite of the lovely scenery, it hadn’t been what you might call an easy trip. When Claudia stopped bitching, she slept a long while as I gobbled enough speed to keep moving, but when she woke up she went after me again.

  “What happened out at the Foley place?” she demanded.

  “Nothing you want to know about, lady,” I said. “Absolutely nothing.”

  “You son of a bitch!” she shouted.

  “Someday you’ll forgive me,” I said. “You might be one of my lawyers, but you’ll never hear what happened. Never. And don’t ask again, please. If that’s not good enough, I’ll drop you at the next goddamned town.”

  She thought about it for what seemed a long time, then said, “Don’t ever leave me behind again. No matter what, okay?”

  “That’s too tough,” I said. “I’m on my way to talk to two killers, both of them probably massively insane. I don’t think you should go along.”

  “Sughrue, I don’t give a rat’s ass what you think,” she said. “From now on, buddy, where you go, I go.”

  “No,” I said. “That’s final. Alamosa is just down the road. I’ll drop you there.”

  “You do that,” she said, “and I’ll call Johnny Raymond, and he’ll get the FBI to issue a fugitive warrant.”

  I thought that was an odd thing for her to say, but I didn’t know how to stop her. “Okay, lady, but you do what I say, and nothing else,” I said. “That’s the only way it might work.”

  She nodded, but I wasn’t sure that it was in agreement. I had to hope that I could find an ad in the local paper and pick up a piece. Almost anything would do, I thought; then the memory of the old woman with my shotgun blotted everything else out. I could only hope that the cholitos would feed the bodies to the pigs and then go back to business as usual, instead of fleeing across that empty, scrub plain into the arms of men who didn’t have their best interests at heart.

  “Where the hell have you gone?” Claudia asked in her best lawyer voice, that hard voice that made witnesses squirt in their shorts. “You look like a man who has seen a ghost.”

  “Leave it alone,” I said. “Leave it the fuck alone.”

  For once, she did; then we pushed on toward Chama, topping the Cumbres Pass in the late afternoon sun. The grassy alpine meadows spread out before us, cut by a winding creek and the old narrow-gauge railroad. It looked like a place where a good man could settle with his woman, sledding hay to his cattle through the hard winters, pulling calves in the brief spring, his best friends a gentle mare and an old vaquero, his face a map of the brutal winters and the high-altitude sun of midsummer. But it was just a dream, and I was a fool for even dreaming it.

  “You’ve gone away again,” Claudia said, gently this time, her soft fingers briefly crossing my cheek.

  We found a decent motel with an empty room with two double beds. But no bar. The nearest bar, something called the High Country, was down the street, a sort of fake western place but with a real western ambience. A few drinks, a bait of enchiladas, and some easy conversation with the bart
ender, talking about changes. Minimansions and horse pastures among pockets of real dirt-poor people. We borrowed the telephone book to look for Realtors, and as we went down the list, I wrote down the number of the one whose name brought an unbidden frown to the bartender’s face.

  Back at the motel, I tried to keep Claudia from seeing my left arm as we undressed for bed, but it didn’t work. A long ragged gouge ran along a streak of blue-black bruise from my shoulder to my elbow. Badly cut butterfly bandages tried to hold it together.

  “Jesus fucking Christ, Sughrue,” she said as she cleaned the wound and cut more and neater butterflies to pull the edges tighter.

  “How the hell do you know it’s not broken?” she asked when she finished.

  “Because I can still scratch my ass with it,” I said.

  “Asshole” passed for good night between us.

  The next morning we found a plump, happy woman in a rundown café called Big G’s, a place that looked as if it hadn’t changed in the thirty years since I’d been in Chama, a place that made green chile huevos rancheros to die for. Then we went back to the room to call the real estate agent, one Earl Dolson, who arrived at our room in fifteen minutes in a crew-cab four-wheel-drive diesel pickup, his version of a cowboy Cadillac. His banker’s Stetson had never seen sweat, his beady eyes hadn’t seen his oversized belt buckle beneath his gut in years, and his exotic boots squeaked like endangered species on his dainty feet.

  We endured the morning, then a lunch at a downtown hotel, where I popped the question.

  “Earl,” I said, “we’ve got a couple of teenagers, and I understand that there’s a private school around here.”

  “That’s sure enough true,” he chuckled, “but it ain’t for folks like us. It’s called the School of Lost Souls, or something like that, run by a couple of half-breeds, brother and sister, and they bring in a busload of Meskin preteen troublemakers from Espanola on Monday morning and keep them until Friday night. It’s ain’t no place for decent people.”

  After lunch, we looked at a couple of places south of town. The turnoff and the break in the mountains to the east came into view as clear as the mountain air. We suffered through a couple more houses, then several drinks before we finally excused ourselves.

  Later we went back to the High Country for drinks and some take-out chicken. The bartender had a completely different version of the school. I knew that Espanola had gone from being one of the last great Mexican outposts left in New Mexico and a great town for vatos, low riders, but then had degenerated into the capital of Mexican brown tar heroin, a place where even some of the drug counselors were discovered to be addicts. Now it was clear: there was one boy and one girl. The lady bartender, a displaced Texan, thought the De la Hoz’s school, run by Elena and Rico De la Hoz, did great work with kids. They had tried to restore both their cultures—Mexican and Indian—made them handle the chores of managing small herds of sheep and goats and a handful of riding stock, and had kept them clean, polite, and hopeful. Having seen the twins’ father, though, I had to wonder.

  Of course, Claudia wanted to know what was going on. All I said was that we were going calling on Sunday. She went into a deep sulk, pounded a couple of tequilas, then stormed down to the room to call her mother, no matter how much I objected. I had a handful of drinks, then climbed into the pickup to drift slowly through clear high-altitude night sky, berserk with stars.

  Claudia faked sleep nearly as well as I did, but her first stuttering snores finally put me past all that.

  The next morning we checked out of the motel, breakfasted on huevos rancheros again, then headed toward Santa Fe. We were halfway there before Claudia said a word. “Giving it up, cowboy?”

  “No,” I said, “but now that we’ve got their new names, I thought we’d best see what we’re getting into.”

  “Start with death records, right?” she said. “Then pick up the paper trail.”

  “Something like that,” I said. “When I can pick up something again.”

  The unusual name, De la Hoz, made it almost too easy. Two days in a Holiday Inn on the computer and the telephones. The twins could have taken different names, surely, and made themselves almost impossible to trace, but they had to find a set of boy and girl twins who had died on the same day. In this case, in a truck wreck south of Socorro. Elena and Enrico, as they now called themselves, had faked high school transcripts—probably with a computer and a printer—and enrolled as seniors at Academy del Sol in Alamogordo to finish high school, then attended Mountain States University and graduated with degrees in education. He majored in phys ed and computer science, and she majored in English and theater arts.

  They must have had the school in mind all the time, and somehow they had picked up the art of washing cash, an art they probably learned at their father’s knee. Lots of phony real estate transactions between various corporations they owned behind various shells. They might be psychopaths, but they had the clever, sharp minds of the truly insane. Their last deal had been to buy the old lodge that had become the school. By the time they opened, all their paperwork was in order, fake foundations in place to pay the bills. A retired principal from Espanola was in charge until he died a few years later, by which time the twins had gotten their master’s degrees in administration by going to summer school.

  In fact, until Dougie’s death, they had spent their summers in various colleges and universities, picking up courses and extra degrees. Afterward, though, perhaps they had spent their days just brooding among their goat herd and contemplating the lovely countryside, until the desire for revenge overcame any good intentions they might have held at the beginning.

  “What now?” Claudia wanted to know.

  “We wait until Sunday,” I said. “Then we’re going to school. And I’d really appreciate it if you stayed at the motel.”

  “Not a chance,” she said. “Perhaps if I’d gone with you out to the Foley place, you’d be able to lift a fork with your left hand.”

  The bruise had spread down to the wrinkles on my wrist and around the nails of my left hand, and my shoulder made funny sounds when I lifted it over my head.

  “Still …”

  “You don’t plan on committing any crimes, do you?”

  “I don’t plan on anything,” I said. “But shit happens.”

  “Around you, CW, it storms.”

  “Well, I’m going to the bar to get out of it,” I said.

  “Have fun,” she said, but I don’t think she meant it.

  As much as I hated to go visiting without a piece, coming up with one turned out to be too much of a chore. I settled for dark glasses, a John Deere cap, a roll of quarters, and a slather of mud on the Montana plates. Late Sunday afternoon we went calling.

  The school seemed built of peeled native logs: a small dormitory, a cluster of what looked like classrooms, a small place in the center that looked like the headquarters, and a large barn next to pole corrals. The place was clean and well maintained with neatly raked gravel walks, freshly painted door and window frames, and a sense of extreme order. Very extreme. Maybe even hysterical.

  We parked in front of the center building between a battered school bus and an old Blazer, not in much better shape. Nobody showed up, nothing happened, and the last thing I told Claudia was to get in the driver’s seat, keep the engine running in case she needed to run, and, goddamn it, stay in the truck.

  When I sauntered around the main building, the twins were in the goat pen. Rico was finishing milking an old Nubian. They looked so much alike they might have come from the same egg instead of the same womb. Classic features produced by Mexican, Indian, and redneck genes; clear, lovely skin with a slightly dusky cast beneath. Strong and lean, long-legged, high-waisted dancers’ bodies visible even in overalls and Tshirts. For a moment, as I leaned on the fence rail of the goat pen, I doubted that everything I had discovered led to these two lovely people.

  The doubt disappeared when Elena turned, her eyes sparkling with recogn
ition as she unrolled a blacksnake whip off her shoulder—unlike her mother, she had gone for the real thing—and from fifteen feet away hit me on the bridge of the nose between my eyes with the leaded popper. The sunglasses and cap flew off, and I could see my nose as it bloomed bloody and painful out of my face. Elena didn’t give me much time to register the pain before she crossed the pen, hurdled the fence, and clubbed me behind the ear with the handle of the whip.

  I remember thinking for an instant that I was going to spend my declining years, should I have any, getting the shit knocked out of me by various women, then it all went away in a black, bloody mess as I reconsidered my cheap disguise.

  When I came back, everything was different. I seemed to be hanging high on a wall of the small gym inside the barn, half naked, my hands cuffed above my head and hooked to a peg, my bare toes barely touching the oak floor. Down at the bottom of my vision, two tiny figures in black karate gear were running and tumbling on a long pad, striking at each other, but stopping an instant before the blow landed. A thousand miles down the building beneath a basketball goal, Claudia was naked, tied over a vaulting horse. Even from this distance, the bruises and cuts from the whip covered her buttocks and back. A trickle of blood crept down the inside of her right leg. Goddamned woman. She hadn’t run like I’d told her.

  Then I looked back at the tiny figures, dancing in and out of throws and blows, something sexual in the dance, but I didn’t know what. I closed my eyes, sucked in a silent breath, and realized that I had enough LSD in my system to drive a normal man insane. Something in me still remembered the San Francisco years, dropping acid and misbehaving between jobs chasing down runaway kids. I could deal with this, I told myself, goddamnit; I could find that spark of sanity below the surges of the drug if I could just get my fillings to stop singing, make the walls stop stretching in and out, and keep my aching face from slipping off my skull bones. I focused on the pain, on the blood trickling down my chest from my nose and random whip cuts.

  The wrestling dolls became people, the twins, working out as if this were an ordinary day. Beside the flickering hair of sanity, a burning glow of hatred simmered. Somehow I croaked Rico’s name, and they both came to stand in front of me, smiling.