“You think I’m afraid.”
“No, I don’t think you’re afraid,” she said, serious again.
“You sound as if I should be.”
“You look tired, man,” she said. Somewhere along the way I had made the change from “Mr. Sughrue” to “man.” “How much farther now?”
“Girl, I think we should crash up here in Buena Vista. Catch up on the z’s, then hit Aspen just about daylight. The bad guys live such bad lives that they’re never worth a shit in the morning,” I said. Of course, neither was I. “How does that sound?”
“Can we have a cheeseburger, extra fries, and a strawberry malt?”
“Sure,” I said. “What about Baby Lester? Can he tell what you’ve been eating?”
“That’s an awfully personal question to ask a mother.”
“Well, excuse me,” I said, “I’ll see if I can’t find two restaurants and two motels …”
She grabbed my arm. “No. No. Just get two beds. Lester and me, we won’t be any trouble. I promise. But please don’t make us stay in a room all by ourselves. Please.”
Who could argue with that? I found a motel that looked as if it had once been a motor court just across a gravel lot from a cafe. Above the small town, way the hell up among the rocky heights of the Collegiate Peaks, winter raised tufts of its cold, gray head. But down where we stopped to rest, the sun still worked. Even the broken glass scattered through the gravel sparkled like jewels, and the cafe smelled like the place they invented cheeseburgers.
I don’t know how long Wynona had been snuggled against my back when she shook me out of the sweaty depths of another nightmare. Or dusk-mare. The gray light slithered around the thin curtains. The small room could have been underwater or lost in an evergreen jungle. Even after she woke me, I couldn’t move, any more than I could remember what had frightened me. Wynona got a towel, sopped up the greasy sweat, then opened me a beer from the cooler. I guzzled the beer, as cold as ice cream, then grumbled about the ache in the top of my palate.
“You always act like that when a woman climbs into your bed?” she asked as she popped another beer.
“I don’t know,” I confessed. “Not too many women climb into my bed …”
“Well, I suspect that’s ’cause you don’t want them.”
“… and none like you, girl.”
She kissed me for a long easy time, lifted my hands from my sides, made me touch that creamy skin, so soft and thin that I could feel the hard muscles working beneath, the milk-hardened breasts. When she let me up for air, I managed to struggle out of her arms long enough to sit up and pull on the beer again.
“You don’t owe me anything,” I said, “for the ride, and I’ve survived bad dreams before, but I haven’t made love to a woman in a long time …”
Wynona pulled me back down with a hard no-nonsense jerk, her mouth working softly against mine. Something important inside me leaped into her arms. “What have you been doing up there in Montana? Helping sheep through fences?” she whispered, laying out the old joke. I started to answer, but she hissed, “Just shut the fuck up.” And I did.
Later, she told me secrets devoid of narrative.
“Oh, goddammit,” she moaned when I laid my tongue in the fold of her thigh, then she giggled, “Watch out, man, I come too easy and too hard.” A threat, or a promise. Whichever, she kept coming until she stuffed a pillow in her mouth to keep from waking Baby Lester.
“You know,” she said in the darkness above me, later, her breath harsh and gasping, “you’re … the first man I’ve … made love with … since Lester was born.” Then she moved against me again, leaned into my face, french fries and strawberry malteds redolent on her night breath.
When she kissed me, she came again, sucking my lower lip into her mouth, her throat, her heart. Just as I considered dying a wonderful relief, she stopped again, then sat up.
“Hey, man, don’t fall in love with me, okay?” She had the same tone in her voice that she used when she talked about Lester. “Guys do that shit to me all the time. Fall in love with me. They think that because I come all the time that I love them or something. It’s just something my body does, okay? Love’s a hell of a lot more complex than that. Right now it’s me and Lester against the fucking world. I mean it’s not like we don’t trust you, you know, but …” She paused, stared at me as if I wasn’t nodding my head quickly enough. Then she lifted her hips, eased down, once slowly, twice, then so slowly I knew I was going to die. At least somebody in the room moaned like the living dead.
“Stop that,” she said. “What the hell’s your first name?”
“I don’t know anymore.”
“You tell me your name, or I’ll quit,” she said, then did it again. “I mean it.”
“C.W.” was about all I could strangle out.
“All of it,” she said, riding me again and again until the pleasure became pain.
“Chauncey Wayne,” I stuttered, and she laughed. “But you can call me ‘Sonny.’”
“I’ll bet your mama called you ‘Sonny,’” she said, then went after me with sweet vengeance. “But I ain’t your mama, sweetie pie,” she added, unnecessarily, then proved it.
Just before dawn, Wynona, Lester, and I were cuddled against the head of the bed watching cartoons.
“My Dad loved Tom and Jerry,” I said.
“Who were they?”
“Before your time.”
“Oh, back in the old fart days,” she giggled, then snuggled against me. “Is your daddy dead?”
“Both my folks.”
“Mine, too. Maybe that’s why we get on so well,” Wynona said. “We’re both orphans.” Then she fell sad. “I hope Lester never has to be an orphan.”
“No you don’t,” I said.
“What’s that mean? Goddammit, you’ve got no call to say that,” she said, then flopped away from me.
Lester was propped between a pair of pillows, watching us as if we were aliens. I patted his mother on the hip. Sometimes she seemed ancient and wise; sometimes, like now, a child with a child; sometimes her small hard body seemed so easy and soft that it didn’t have enough skin to contain all that passion; sometimes she retreated in pain and fear until she seemed just skin and hard-rock bone-hurt.
“Girl, the only way he can keep from being an orphan is if he dies before you do,” I said softly, then tried to kiss the cusp of her neck.
Wynona rolled over and talked into my chest. “I ain’t stupid, Mr. Worldly. I knew what you meant. But I don’t care. I don’t want Lester to ever have to be an orphan,” she said, but we both knew she was talking about herself.
The cartoons played out in front of us. Lester, his purple scar shining like ancient wisdom in the flickering light of the cathoderay tube, would gurgle a small laugh, then stare over my chest toward his mom. Then he pulled himself across me, clump of hair by clump, to his mom, then he whacked her on the smooth, lovely forehead.
“Jesus, baby, what do you want?”
Lester laughed as loud as he could, then cut loose a wet, stinky, endless fart, and whacked his mom again.
“This is your chance, cowboy,” Wynona murmured just before she sighed and rolled away from us. “Don’t blame me if he pees in your face” were her last words of advice before sleep overwhelmed her.
I didn’t blame her. And I didn’t blame Baby Lester, either. I hoped they wouldn’t blame me for going through their gear.
PART THREE
WE WEREN’T GOING to make Aspen by dawn, not the way Wynona was sleeping, but I figured I’d let her sleep while I changed Lester. So I propped the baby on my hip, and he slipped right off, reminding me that sometimes women’s parts had multiple uses. Trying again, I draped the little sucker over my shoulder, picked up the diaper bag, and eased into the bathroom.
The diaper bag seemed a bit heavy and when I set it down, it made that dreadfully dramatic thump against the tile floor. I’d known women—several, in fact—who carried guns in their purses, but
usually something cheap, light, and easy to handle: a .25 automatic or a .32 five-shot revolver. But Wynona was the first woman I’d known to fill her diaper bag with a silenced Colt Woodsman .22, weapon of choice among some professional killers, and a Glock 10mm semiautomatic, handgun of choice among some of our esteemed FBI agents, and six loaded clips for each. At least the .22 was empty and the Glock had a trigger lock so Lester couldn’t blow us away.
I left the pistols in the side pocket. In the middle of the bag, the package of disposable diapers seemed a bit heavy, so after I changed Lester and washed my face, I dug deeper and found a package the size of a large cantaloupe swaddled in bubble wrap and mummified with strapping tape. It rattled dully when I shook it. I didn’t think it was a baby’s toy. I shook it again, and Wynona murmured in her sleep.
It only took a moment to slip Lester beside her; he gave me a wonderfully happy grin, then suckled merrily away. I sure as hell didn’t remember having that much fun when I was a baby. While they slept, I went through the rest of Wynona’s things, and found nothing to show that she wasn’t exactly who she said she was: a single mom on the run from god knows what. Except for the key to the Glock’s trigger lock.
She had promised to tell me where to find Sarita Pines once I had them safely to Aspen, and I thought perhaps she might be more help if I held up my end of the bargain, but she and Lester made such a picture together, I fell asleep watching them.
Three hours later I woke from a seamless nap, cool and ready to kick ass, but Lester’s diaper had come unfastened, and the little dickens had peed all over my side.
After I showered again, we packed, then trekked on toward Aspen like a small happy family. Wynona searched the radio dial for a station that penetrated the mountains, then rattled through Norman’s tapes looking for anybody she had ever heard of before. Lester endured his mom’s restlessness with minimal fussing, but as we climbed higher and higher up Independence Pass he became more and more agitated, then when we topped the pass, he went insane. At first, he screamed, clawed at his ear, and tried to break out of his car seat. Then he got serious.
“Jesus,” I said, startled, “I think Baby Lester’s had enough of this driving around …”
But Wynona was too busy digging into the diaper bag to answer. “Oh, Christ,” she finally muttered, “it’s his ear … the altitude … I should have been nursing him … but I hate to take him out of the seat … Goddammit, where’s his medicine …” Then she stared at me, all the tough calm lashed away by the whipping frenzy of her baby’s pain. “I can’t find it.”
Once in the bush our company hit a cold LZ on a ridgeline somewhere close to Cambodia. After we set up a perimeter, we were joined by a batch of battalion S-2 brass and some of those sun-glassed guys whose fatigues lacked insignia. They seemed like a bunch of Rear Echelon Motherfuckers out for a lark or another cluster on their Vietnam service medals, standing around catching an overview of the war.
One of the majors, a tubby little guy, sat down on the grass while the hard-assed head-hogs conferred. Then he made a pillow of his helmet and leaned back to catch some rays. Instead of a tan, though, he caught the green-slivered strike of a bamboo viper just under his right eye. One of the snake’s tiny fangs must have penetrated into the major’s sinus cavity because the snake was stuck there, hanging like a decoration from his cheek.
Operating bolts slammed shut all over the LZ when the major screamed, slapping and jerking at the small green ribbon dangling from his face. Then for some reason, panic perhaps, surprise, terror, the major darted into a tight tangle of brush at the edge of the clearing, where he managed to grovel and growl and scream for at least five minutes as he wrapped himself in the endless clutches of wait-a-minute vines. The new company CO looked at me, and I looked at my oldest hand, Willie Williams. He shook his head, a gesture I didn’t have to convey to the captain.
When it was finally quiet, Willie turned to the captain, spit on the dusty grass, and said, “The major must’ve been some kinda tough, sir.” The captain raised an eyebrow. “Most guys, sir, get one a them little green fuckers on ’em, they sometimes get one step, maybe half another, then hit the mud dead. If the major could’ve straightened out his trail, hell, he’d a made it a couple a klicks. Course somebody should’ve told him this ain’t no place for a picnic.”
The captain agreed without comment. He wasn’t a great officer, but he did know enough to listen to the old guys. Even that, though, didn’t keep him alive long enough for us to learn his first name. Or even remember exactly how he died.
But nobody ever forgot the major. Nobody felt sorry for him, though. The fucker didn’t have to be there, and nobody cared if his wife got his Purple Heart. But pain and plain fear like that is hard to forget. It took a squad of engineers thirty minutes with wire cutters to get the asshole out of the vines. The hard guys never even took off their sunglasses when they watched the body bagged. But for those of us who lived in the bush, it was the sort of moment that made a lively addition to our nightly entertainment of bad dreams and shitty sleep. Now we had something else to worry about.
But Baby Lester was a different deal.
“What can I do?” I pleaded with Wynona, her face already dull from Lester’s pain. Sympathetic milk poured from her breasts, seeping through her sweatshirt.
“One more favor,” she wailed, jerking at the straps of the car seat. “One more.”
Well, more than one actually, but I did them all as best I could. First, I had to hurry, but be careful, she explained as she jerked up the car seat and hurled it into the back of the van. Second, I had to follow her complex directions to the safe house and I had to remember the way back. Because she would try to ease the pain in Lester’s ear and she would call a doctor Sarita had recommended and he would call the pharmacy and I could pick up Lester’s medicine. She jerked up her sweatshirt and tried to get Lester to at least nurse, but he fought like a tiny madman.
When we finally dropped into Aspen, both exhausted by the baby’s screams, Wynona shouted the directions at me in a voice as desperate as her child’s.
The directions were complicated, but eventually we turned off a paved street onto a dirt trail. Fifteen or twenty yards up the trail, the road switched back, became paved, and led to a serious locked gate. Wynona shouted the code at me, “Eighteen-forty-seven-eleven,” prayed I could remember it, then urged me forward. “The front door code is the same but backward!”
We followed the paved road to an oversized A-frame set on a daylight basement next to a three-car garage at the top of a heavily timbered knoll. Wynona leaned over to give me a quick hug and kiss that got more nose than mouth, then smeared my face with Lester’s milk-soaked chin in lieu of a kiss, then grabbed her purse and leaped out of the van and ran for the house. Lester’s screams echoed back down the driveway.
It didn’t take forever, but it did take some time. Aspen has more pharmacies than a small town deserves, but fortunately the first one I tried called the others until they located Lester’s prescription. Then more directions. Then a try at backtracking myself. It almost worked. I ended up at a cul-de-sac on the next knoll over, just a small creek away.
Your heart doesn’t sink or leap into your throat, but something happens inside when you know it’s gone bad, something scientists can probably explain with chemical and neurological changes in the body, but that’s just some scrawls on paper. When I stared across the small distance to the A-frame, I knew it had gone bad. I got the field glasses out of the glove box in time to catch the rear end of a Chevy pickup truck as it dropped down the driveway. And two numbers off the New Mexico license plate. I took a moment to dig out my Browning and strap it on under my vest, then fasten the Airweight to my ankle.
Of course, by the time I backtracked to the right knoll, there was nobody to shoot. That’s how it usually happens.
The house was more than empty. Not a sign of Wynona and Lester, of course, not even the echo of a scream. And not much of anything else, either. Not
a bill, no mail at all, not even a piece of paper except in the bathroom on a roll. Nothing on the walls, not even a number on the telephones, not even Wynona’s fingerprints there, I would bet.
She had been there long enough to make the telephone call to the doctor, whose name I had on the prescription bottles, and then disappeared. Hell, I didn’t even know whose house I was prowling. I could find out, sure, but that would take time, which I didn’t think I had.
I left it like I found it, climbed back into the van, then drove into Aspen. I kept the pistols strapped to my body, the drugs in the false bottom of the propane tank, and the diaper bag on the seat next to me. I unlocked the trigger of the Glock, slammed in a clip, and jacked a round into the chamber. If I couldn’t find Wynona and Lester, at least I could kill somebody with their pistol.
At the last moment, I stuffed Lester’s medicine into my vest pocket.
They hadn’t even bothered to hide the black Chevy pickup. It was parked right in front of the open doors of the Quirky Arms. Dagoberto even sat at the bar, alone, as if he were waiting for me. David and Chato sat at a table in the rear, flanked by two other vaqueros de farmacia. Nobody bothered to hide their feelings about my presence, but at least I didn’t see any pistols around. Maybe because several tables of rich tourists picked at an early lunch.
“I thought you must be around somewhere, man,” he said as I hitched up on the stool next to him. “Let me buy you a drink. Hola, Roberto. A Dead Solid Perfect Martini for my friend here.” Then he leaned his elbows on the bar, smiling at himself in the mirror as he lifted his drink.
“No, thanks,” I said, then dug my thumb deep into his exposed armpit and held on for dear life. Give him this: that hold hurts way down in the viscera; but he only spilled a few drops of his drink. “People who fuck with my friends usually end up sorry.”