Head Games (The Hector Lassiter Series)

by Craig McDonald

  “It would be wonderful,” I said, “But we really must go,” I lied.

  She looked around, wringing her hands. Then she went to a display case.

  She pulled out a set of spurs.

  “My husband’s favorites.” She handed one to me and the other spur to Bud.

  “Don’t say no,” she said. “It’s the least we can give you for bringing Pancho home.”

  42

  It seemed wrong to be dissolute — to wander through cantinas and to drink and carouse after that exchange with Pancho Villa’s one, true widow. We certainly couldn’t do any of that in his own town.

  So we crossed the border bridge again.

  We pulled up in front of my house.

  It was not good to be home.

  Bud retrieved his long-languishing, rented Buick from my garage. He had been given another assignment for True. The editors wanted him to profile Mickey Spillane. In a rare fit of self-restraint, I kept my opinion to myself.

  Bud said, “I’ll try to get down here again, come the fall, if you’ll have me, Hector. Maybe we could drive down to Galveston Bay ... do some deep-sea fishing. You, me and a boat.”

  “Sounds good,” I said. “I’d really like that.”

  “Hell, it sounds wonderful,” he said.

  We both knew it would never happen.

  The young poet left and I stood there alone in my driveway, watching the dust kicked up by his tires slowly sift back down.

  Hemingway’s phone number weighed heavily in my wallet.

  Perhaps I’d finally make that call ... inveigle an invitation to Cuba. So many years had passed, maybe we could recapture that old vibe. I took a breath, pulled out the slip of paper with his number, and dialed the operator.

  43

  Excerpt from True Magazine, October 1957:

  Lassiter:

  A Portrait Of The Artist

  As “Crime Writer”

  By Eskin “B.” Fiske

  Self-described “crime writer” Hector Lassiter lives in the last house in New Mexico, so close to the Rio Grande he could toss his empties in the river from the window above his Smith and Corona typewriter.

  The trap for all writers who enter the public consciousness as Lassiter has — as, say, a Hemingway has — is the tendency on the part of passionate fans to confuse their favorite writers with the characters that they have created.

  That tendency is particularly tough if you are Hector Mason Lassiter, now 57, who came up through the old pulp magazines and occasional scripts for radio crime dramas. His characters include boxers, hard-drinking private detectives and cops, hired killers and desperate men whose lives fall apart in squalid hotels awash in flickering neon that strobes through slitted shades. Often, these men smoke and drink too much. Lassiter’s men routinely take and hand out savage beatings most mere mortals wouldn’t survive.

  Lassiter, the man and the writer, stands in stark contrast to the rogue males about whom he has written in a string of classic crime novels that have shaped and defined the genre.

  Each morning at five, Hector Lassiter rises and brews a pot of strong black Cuban coffee — a brand he developed a taste for while living many years ago in Key West. As his pungent coffee brews, Hector Lassiter shadow boxes and punishes himself with a frenetic series of sit-ups, push-ups and leg lifts.

  Then he writes.

  “Three hours a day, minimum,” Lassiter told me, sitting in his big study filled with his own books and the books of a few others whom he respects. “Rain or shine, holidays or funerals, there are no exceptions or excuses. On a good day — a really good day — I may do five hours.”

  Midday in extreme southern New Mexico is like Hell in the off-season — “sweltering” doesn’t cover it, and talk of a “dry heat” will get your ass kicked. So Hector Lassiter usually naps, then showers and eats a light lunch. Afternoons are spent reading and revising his morning’s output. That takes perhaps another two hours.

  Then it’s time for relaxation: the bull- or cockfights in Juárez, drinks with matador friends and fellow aficionados, or entertaining the more comely Hollywood stars he now moves among as one of Tinsel Town’s most sought after screenwriters. Ava Gardner, Carol Baker, Marilyn, he’s been spotted with all of them on his arm.

  One of his longtime friends is Marlene Dietrich; both deny persistent rumors of an affair. But Lassiter admits the German-born actress/singer probably knows him better than any other woman — certainly better, he says, a little ruefully, than his first three wives.

  “Hector is too easily misunderstood,” Dietrich argues. “He is like Papa (Hemingway) in that way. He writes so cleanly and with such masculine voice and absolute authority that the subtle art of his writing is often missed. Hector is so much more than a crime writer, but reviewers haven’t learned that yet. Since his first novel appeared in 1925, he has been giving us pictures of life as it truly is in our cities, in our outposts and in the American West. And it is interesting to me, interesting and funny and even a little bit sad, that his very best short stories have no crime in them at all.

  “Like Hemingway,” Marlene Dietrich continued, “he has this other terrible talent — you find yourself warped or transformed by his writing. You find yourself speaking in the cadence and language of his characters. In his presence, you sometimes feel like a character in one of his books.”

  Actor and director Orson Welles agrees. On the set of Touch of Evil, where Lassiter was visiting as a consultant, Welles said, “Hector, really, is the last of that great breed of martial men steeped in the Western Canon and wholly committed to the craft of writing. I put him in that same vanishing class as a Kipling. A Bierce. Oh, and Hemingway, of course.”

  Lassiter’s military record is at once transparent and mysterious. At age 15, he lied about his age and enlisted. Soon he was chasing the Mexican general Pancho Villa, riding behind Black Jack Pershing.

  Following an injury in a skirmish in the high country when a part of the Punitive Expedition, Lassiter shipped out to Europe, eventually to serve as an ambulance driver along the Italian front. It was there that he met his longtime friend Ernest Hemingway. Ernest was slightly older and treated Lassiter as a kid brother.

  After the war, when many writers of his generation were still finding their way to Paris, Lassiter instead located to Key West, where Hemingway would later join him. Like his present house — his sprawling hacienda in La Mesillia — Lassiter’s Key West house was barely in the United States. “I like living on the edge, I suppose,” he said. “Key West was practically like living in the tropics. Prohibition wasn’t, down there. It was bohemian. It rained every day. I love the rain. But then Flagler and that ****sucker FDR ruined Key West ... turned it into a tourist trap ... tried to build that damned highway and rail-line. It was time to get out.”

  But there were also dark rumors of gun-running and rum-running, the smuggling of refugees from Cuba into the United States.

  Next came Seattle, another last American outpost. There, Lassiter lived on an island in Puget Sound. But he sold that cabin in 1941 when he left for Europe to cover the Second World War for a score of major magazines, news agencies and overseas newspapers. There, Lassiter was dogged by rumors of engaging in more than journalism. Some embittered correspondents whom he scooped claimed that Lassiter endangered their protected status by carrying firearms and secretly spying on behalf of Allied Intelligence Agencies. There have even been rumors of his having organized his own band of guerilla fighters during the final fight to liberate Paris. Confronted with these rumors, Lassiter said, with typical laconic good cheer, “Bull****.”

  In 1946, Hector Lassiter finally made his way back home. He moved as close to the Mexican border as he could and maintain American residency. There he built his present home.

  His newest novel is titled The Land of Dread and Fear — a wrenching study of Texas-Mexico tensions and lonely men confronting mortality along that border.

  “These days, all days, I seem to be drawn to the
borderlands,” Lassiter said. We were sitting in a backroom of a cantina on the outskirts of Ciudad Juárez at the time. “The Land of Dread and Fear exemplifies that inchoate obsession of mine,” he said.

  Lassiter will be staying in La Frontera for his next project: He’s agreed to supply the script for a film by legendary director Sam Ford. The cyclopean auteur is working on a movie he’s dubbed Rooster of Heaven, a hard-bitten tale of cockfighting and other “bloodsports” to be filmed on location in Ciudad Juárez and Tijuana. The promise of location shooting is what sold Lassiter on the project.

  “It’s important to me, and to the audience, to see Mexico how she is, not as we would wish her to be. We need to see the squalor ... the deprivation that drives her people — people like Marita, the young unwed mother in my new novel — to risk everything crossing the Sonoran Desert, or trying to swim the Rio Grande. We need to see those real Mexican faces ... to hear authentic voices. It turns my stomach every time I see Wallace Beery playing Pancho Villa as a drunken lout in a ridiculous suit of lights. The real Villa, love him or detest him, was a nuanced and complex creature and a military genius. He was a man who never drank and in fact banned alcohol in his native province. He was a passionate land reformer and a man committed to literacy and the education of children.

  “We don’t want to see the real Mexico, or its people,” Lassiter continued. “How many of the sad people who read those damned movie magazines remember that Rita Hayworth ain’t really Rita Hayworth? Her real name is Margarita Cansino. She was born south of the border. The Hollywood types plucked her hairline to give her a more ‘American’ forehead. They dyed her hair red and they put her on impossible diets. You think Lupe Velez is really the typical Mexican woman? I can tell you she isn’t.”

  A young Mexican actress on the set of Touch of Evil has read many of Hector Lassiter’s books. She read them before she met the man on the set of the film in which she makes her debut. She told your correspondent, “There is an old saying, ‘Trust the art not the artist.’ Mr. Hemingway, he has his own version: ‘It is a dangerous thing to know a writer.’ Mr. Lassiter exudes charisma. He robs rooms of their oxygen. He listens to what people say. So few people really listen to one another now — not just the words, you understand, but the spaces and messages between the words, underlying them. I think it is a little dangerous to read Hector Lassiter and then to come to know him, even a little. When you do that, and then you go back and read his books again, well, it makes one more than a little sad. But he loves my country — particularly its women. I suspect if he can be said to have one great regret, it might be that he was not born Mexican. I suspect he would have preferred to have ridden with Pancho Villa instead of after him.”

  44

  Bud Fiske’s profile of me made me laugh — for about a minute.

  At first flush, I wished every word was ... well, True.

  Then it made me sad. Maybe even a bit angry.

  Like all profiles, it didn’t really catch me: my truculence; my selfishness; my tendency to try too hard to please. Well, to please pretty women, anyway.

  So I read the piece two more times and realized that Fiske’s profile of me was, at base, a minefield — a series of carefully couched signals. Signals sent by Fiske, of course, but also perhaps by Marlene and by Orson Welles if their quotes were at all accurate. Perhaps they were not. Mine certainly weren’t. But then I’d encouraged Fiske to make it all up anyway.

  But it was more than that. It was Bud Fiske trying to assign me some social relevance regarding issues and topics I assumed to be of importance to Bud. For surely they weren’t my causes. Some of it portrayed me as the crusader I could only guess Fiske wished or was trying to will me to be.

  And Marlene and Orson claimed a gravitas for my “oeuvre” it didn’t deserve and I didn’t intend for it.

  I suspected that the editors of True must have been disappointed with the piece. It ran shorter than most they published and ended abruptly. It was as though someone setting type said, “Enough of this somber, self-important bullshit.”

  In the previous February’s issue, True did a major “book-length” profile of Hemingway as seen by his “friends and enemies.” I’d gotten a call or two for quotes, but resisted. Probably just as well — the article was edgy and bitchy. I’m sure that Hemingway must have hated the thing.

  But the editors, and most of their readers, I suspect, must have loved that sucker.

  With me they’d gotten this hagiography — worse, a sanctimonious distortion ... there among the adverts for Carling Black Label Beer, Weaver Scopes, Starcraft boats and Norm Thompson’s “Adventure” boots. There among breathless articles on the Cleveland Headhunter and the semi-nude photos of Anita Ekberg. I threw the magazine down in disgust.

  I couldn’t bear my lonely house. I put on a stack of Marelene’s records, but every song ripped through me — “Illusions,” “Let’s Call It A Day” and “Something I Dreamed Last Night.”

  Every day brought stinging rain — the remnants of Hurricane Audrey.

  Things weren’t good down south, either — a massive earthquake had struck Mexico City and killed scores.

  So I climbed into my dusty Chevy and drove until I hit El Paso.

  I ambled around town for a while; stood and looked at the place where Bud and me had “found” his cowboy hat. It made me feel even lonelier. I missed the scrawny cocksucker so much it surprised me.

  After a time, I asked directions to the nearest whorehouse.

  I paid forty dollars for a pretty young Mexican thing who was just “finding her feet,” so to speak, in the life. Maybe it was the diabetes. Maybe it was my age (or hers). Hell, maybe it was some flavor of new-found scruples.

  Whatever it was, I just couldn’t.

  Her mouth and her youth, her black eyes and hair, her small, pert breasts and lush hips, everything she had — well, it wasn’t enough for me.

  So I sat there in her sad, dirty bed for an hour, talking to her, listening to her story. I tried in my best storyteller’s fashion to talk her out of that dead-end life she’d chosen for herself and into mine.

  She wasn’t going for my pitch.

  I didn’t know which one of us that said less for.

  My time up, I dressed and stumbled across the street to the VFW Hall.

  I flashed my card at the door at the wounded, drunken gatekeeper and he waved me in with his remaining arm.

  It was dark and cool inside — a wanton womb for old and broken men. The air was laced with blue-gray streams of cigarette smoke and reeked of beer. Buddy Loy Burke was playing on the jukebox: “Soldier’s Lament.” Felt like home. Then someone dropped coins for Marlene Dietrich: “I May Never Go Home Anymore.” Now it was just like home.

  Now it was just me and all the other old campaigners — sitting there with their eye-patches, missing legs and their hooks-for-hands.

  There were veterans from all the brand-name wars: World War I, World War II, Korea ... Maybe even a few from the Pershing Expedition. There were a few others who must have been roped into other, perhaps clandestine conflicts that never achieved marquee status.

  Sitting in the corner was one ancient man whom I guessed for a bonafide Civil War vet — probably the last of the bugle boys. He was in a wheel chair. I took the table next to his. The bartender called to me across the room, “What’ll it be, Ace?”

  I fished out my Zippo and a pack of Pall Malls. I said, “Scotch, neat. And make the first one a double.”

  The Civil War vet sipped his beer and said, “Hard liquor — that’ll kill you faster than anything, sonny.”

  I smiled and blew some smoke. “Promise?”

  There was an old piano in the corner. When the jukebox played out, I moved over there and sat down. I play a little. I began banging out “Canción Mixteca.” I began to sing the Spanish lyrics by José López Alavés. He was a Mixtec Indian who hailed from Oaxaca:

  How far I am from the land where I was born

  Immense sadness fi
lls my thoughts

  I see myself so alone and so sad

  Like a leaf in the wind

  I would like to cry I would like to die

  From the feeling

  Land of the sun

  I long to see you

  Now that I live so far from your light, without love

  I see myself so alone and so sad

  Like a leaf in the wind.

  An old Mexican who had volunteered to fight with us in World War II picked up his flamenco guitar and accompanied me. He was missing an important finger on his right hand, yet played beautifully. Another old Mexican vet who crossed the border to fight Hitler picked up his accordion.

  Soon, every veteran in the joint was singing with me. I’d almost reached the end of the song when I realized that I was crying.

  BOOK TWO

  —

  1967,

  THE

  LAND OF DREAD

  AND FEAR

  1

  Adios

  Ten years ... gone.

  I’m old and tired and used up.

  I’ve lived too long. Gone and outlived my sorry-ass world.

  It’s been two years since I’ve written anything worth a damn.

  This morning I read a list of the best-selling books of the year. I wasn’t on it. The stuff that was? Books by these characters named Styron, Potok, Uris and Kazan. Poetry, according to the list, seems to be crap written by this dude, Rod McKuen. The really big-sellers this year? Rosemary’s Baby by Ira Levin and Phyllis Diller’s Marriage Manual.

  Like I said, ain’t much of real worth around anymore.

  My daughter is still dead.

  My country has gone to hell.

  Our last two Democrat presidents have led us into another war — but not the kind of conflict that a scheming mercenary like Emil Holmdahl would ever find a way to turn a buck on. In this dark year of our gone-missing Lord, only the industrial military complex gets rich on warfare. It’s what the country gets for electing some dumbass, jug-eared, appendectomy-scar flaunting Texas politician to be president — “Great frontiers” and a shadow government. Black budgets and bigger bombs. Or maybe JFK and LBJ just figured time had come to salt the street corners with a fresh crop of begging, one-legged and one-armed men — boys with burned faces and missing eyes and noses.