The Mexican Tree Duck

  “What the fuck does that mean?” I said, not exactly sure where this attack was leading. “Shit, we smoked dope together every off-duty moment we could manage it. Why does that make me a hippie and not you?”

  “Because you’re a white guy,” he said calmly, “and I’m a Mexican. It’s okay for us to smoke mota, but you white guys take it too seriously. You smoke dope, it makes you a hippie.”

  “You’re not a fucking Mexican,” I said, “you’re a New World, Old World, third world mongrel. And I’ve never been a very fucking good white guy, anyway.”

  “That’s no excuse,” he said, “for being a hippie.”

  “You asshole, I’m a fucking licensed and bonded private investigator working for a world-famous drug lawyer. That captain we plucked out of the bush, Rainbolt, you probably knew him when he practiced down here …”

  “I knew him, Sarge, and only a fucking hippie would work for a beefstick like that,” he said, smug with cocaine happiness. “He was our most wanted. That’s how real cops felt about him.”

  “Frank, I may not be a cop but at least I don’t have to go around to grade schools to tell little kids that the policeman is your friend.” I think I was shouting by now.

  “That’s police officer, you sexist pig,” he said with a straight face.

  When we stopped laughing, Frank asked me what I was working on. I guess I told him a good version of the story, because as soon as we were able, we were on our way to Aspen, a dying cop, an alcoholic mailman, and a licensed and bonded private dick working for a world-famous drug lawyer. I knew if I told him about Norman, Frank would call me a hippie again.

  I probably shouldn’t have, but before we cleared the suite, I peeked into the bedroom. Women look a lot like men after thrashing drunkenly around the bed, except they always seem to be prettier. They looked kind of sweet. But when I pointed that out to Frank as we drove out of the motel lot, Jimmy sleeping curled in the back of the van, Frank, of course, just smiled as if that was exactly what a hippie scumwad would think.

  Before we left, we finished our chores. Frank cashed in some comp-time, Jimmy took a suspension without pay until his termination hearing, and I loaded the van with camping gear. Nobody ever expects the bad guys to show up in a tent, and I suspected that whatever happened in Aspen, we were going to be the bad guys.

  When I explained that wrinkle to Jimmy the second time between hangover naps, he said, “No problem, Sarge. I’ve already been the bad guy once.”

  “When?”

  “When I came back to the world, this fat broad in San Francisco—I went over to the Haight in uniform on purpose to give them a chance to pick on me—called me a baby killer to my face. You know what I did?” I shook my head unable to imagine it. “I pulled a string of Chinese mushrooms out of my pocket, told her they were baby slope ears, then I started to eat them.” Then Jimmy laughed as he drifted back to sleep. “Fucking bitch fainted so hard she bounced, then rolled down one of them slick, steep streets like she was gonna roll ’til she lost some weight … And fuck if some hippie chick didn’t step outa the crowd, put her arms around my neck, and start to cry … My first wife, man, and the best … so let’s go grab this broad and her kid back, and fuck bein’ bad guys …”

  As he fell asleep, I thought about revising my opinion. Perhaps only people who followed the letter of the law, instead of the spirit, would think of us as bad guys. Recently, it came to me that the letter of the law was a dollar sign, and the spirit a ghost of her former self.

  Since Dagoberto and his minions knew me, I stayed out at camp while Jimmy and Frank spent a day in town in a rent-car chasing paper and casing the Quirky Arms. I communed with nature in the quiet empty campground and listened to the last game of the Series over ten cups of cowboy coffee. Then I remembered Lester’s diaper bag.

  I set it on the picnic table, went through it again with the same results. I leaned my head back in the thin fall sunshine, watched the smoke from our fire, a straight column baffled by the skinny arms of the pines. Wynona wanted me to have the bag for some reason, maybe trying to help me chase down Norman’s supposed mom.

  I hadn’t forgotten my job, but I wasn’t about to hurry, either. My mad father taught me from the beginning that you kill more deer with patience than energy. Also, you usually didn’t have to drag the carcass quite so far to the pickup. Maybe my best hope would be to stand still and let the FBI flush her into my arms.

  So I turned to the bubble-wrapped package with the sharpest and thinnest blade of my Case pocketknife, the one that said “meat only,” whatever that might mean. Slow and easy, cutting just the strapping tape, I removed the first layer. Then the second, then the third. Then I set it on the table and stared at it for a long time, as if watching it closely might make it talk.

  After a while, I realized that if it did talk, it would speak in an ancient tongue I wouldn’t understand. It was a bird, a pottery bird of some sort in a colorful fired glaze. Pinkish-orange legs, which seemed impossibly thin for pottery this old, held up a rusty body with a black belly and a white stripe along the edge of the wings. It looked something like a duck, or a goose, and somehow Mexican, something I had never seen before, but something I knew, if I could just think of what it might be. The bill looked as brightly coral as a teenage girl’s lipstick. A thumb-sized hole, encrusted with a black substance like hardened tar, pierced the middle of the duck’s back, and another hole, straw-sized, also tarred shut, stuck in the center of the duck’s pink puckered bill, puckered as if to whistle …

  Fuck, I thought, a Mexican Tree Duck. A flock used to summer in the mesquite scrub along the resaca behind my mother’s house, the remains of a slough off the Muddy Fork of the Nueces. When I was a kid, I thought them the dumbest ducks in the world—all they did was stand around in trees and look silly. I seemed to remember that they had teeth, too, and sure enough when I looked at the pottery duck I saw tiny rows of teeth scratched in the glaze.

  I felt like a real detective instead of a maniac, for a change, so I picked up the duck and held it softly. When I shook the duck, something inside rattled with dull, padded thumps like a large marble or a lump of clay. I set it back down on the table, cracked a beer, and proceeded to watch my duck.

  That’s how Frank and Jimmy found me a couple of hours later.

  By then I had a stack of beer cans and roaches beside my duck and I knew every crack in the old glaze, every minor imperfection in the clay below it. I had begun to talk to it and cuddle it like a baby or a very old dying man. It had an air about it, a cruel ancient dignity, a stern implacability, a pitiless gaze that had survived the centuries.

  I was reminded of a trip to D.C. years ago, during my first hitch in the Army, from Fort Bragg to play a football game in the Capital, Fort Belvoir or Fort Meade or some other fucking fort, and they gave us an afternoon off the day before the game. Our only requirement was to show up at the mess hall that night sober. We were all sweat hogs and flakes, so that was a major chore, but playing football was such a lazy, crazy way to serve the Army time, we took the coach’s order seriously. Somebody, the quarterback probably, suggested we tour the Smithsonian, so we trekked over that way and herded into the first giant building we saw.

  But it was the National Gallery. Everybody wanted to leave except me, and I couldn’t leave. Not yet. It was the first time I’d ever seen a painting that hadn’t been executed on black velvet. Rembrandt, Van Gogh, Moran—I don’t remember all the names, but they couldn’t get me out of there. First, they tried pleading. Then threats. Then they meant to carry me away bodily, but in my younger days I had a reputation for being both mean and crazy, and they let me be.

  It would be a perfect story if I had dropped the first guard who told me that the gallery was closing, but I went along as docile as a pet lamb. That was one of the most important days in my life. I didn’t become a painter or anything like that, but I stopped being whatever it was I had been before. I had found some other way besides violence to be calm. That da
y led me out of the Army the first time, back to college, thinking I could play football just for the money, and then into some other nonsense, in and out of the Army twice more, to Vietnam, eventually to jail, then to graduate school and somehow to whatever life I was living thirty-some-odd years later. Whatever trouble that day in the National Gallery caused, I never forgot the way I felt, nothing ever sullied that day. Or matched it.

  Until this silly goddamned duck.

  “So what the hell is that?” Frank asked as he carried another six-pack out to the table.

  “A Mexican Tree Duck,” I said. “It was in the package in the diaper bag.”

  “Now that I ain’t gonna be hounded by piss-tests,” Jimmy said, “I was kinda hoping it would be a pound of Peruvian flake or some of that Humboldt sinsemilla. I’ve been looking to expand my drug experiences.”

  “We’ve got plenty of drugs, kid,” I said.

  “I can’t tell you how glad I am to hear that,” Frank said.

  “Take it easy, you big bastard,” Jimmy said to Frank, “it’s time to have some fun and stop being the most serious Mexican I ever met.”

  “I’m more than a Mexican,” Frank said.

  “And you, Sarge, quit fucking calling me ‘kid.’ I’ll never see forty again.”

  “Then you stop calling me ‘Sarge,’ “I said. “I made PFC again three days before my discharge. I think they were trying to get me to re-up.”

  We all laughed at the notion, though at other times the idea hadn’t seemed so strange.

  “So tell me, boys,” I said.

  Frank straddled the bench across from me as Jimmy cracked three cans of beer, then Frank took his little notebook out of his back pocket and began ruffling the pages.

  “The gate code you gave us for the house didn’t work today,” Frank said, “but I boosted Jimmy over the fence …”

  “They had changed the code on the front door, too,” he said, circling the table like a midget Hollywood Indian, “but they forgot to lock the garage doors. House looks exactly like you said. ’Cept the phones are dead.”

  “No way to come up with the owner, C.W.,” Frank said. “Paper trail ends at a holding company whose only address is a lawyer at an offshore bank. We’ll never break that one.”

  “These are some rich, smart dudes, man,” Jimmy said. “Why the hell are you holding that fucking duck like a baby?”

  I put the duck back into his plastic nest and began carefully replacing the wrapping.

  “After a pretty good look at your pal Dagoberto,” Frank said, “as far as the Denver police computer can tell, he is the sole owner of the Quirky Arms. There’s no note, his bills are paid promptly by a national independent accounting firm, as are his taxes, local, state, and federal. I didn’t see the books, but if he’s washing money through there, none of the obvious signs are around.” He paused, then shook his head. “On the other hand, when we had a couple of drinks there, I noticed some interesting things. I couldn’t place the accent but I’d swear some of the other guys are not any kind of Mexican that I know. We don’t see enough Colombians in Denver for me to be absolutely sure, but I thought I recognized several Colombian accents, at least something Central or South American. The cook, maybe the bartender, one waiter. But the oddest thing, Sughrue: I can smell criminal activity. And right now I’m smelling trouble, not cocaine.”

  “Wish to hell I was smelling some right now,” Jimmy said, “up close and personal.”

  “Just wait,” I said.

  “But even stranger,” Frank said with a cop’s sense of the dramatic, “when my buddy ran Sr. Reyna’s name through the system, he came up completely clean. Not just in our computer files, but also in the NCIC.”

  “I can’t believe that,” I said as I finished taping my duck safely into his nest. “What the hell does that mean?”

  “One of three things, I suspect,” Frank said, closing his notebook. “Either he’s clean, which I truly doubt. Or he’s got friends in high places. Or …”

  “Or?” Jimmy and I said together.

  “Or he’s a DEA asset. Stranger things have happened with our brother officers in the drug war.”

  “Fuck that version,” I said. “What sort of friends could he have in high places? Maybe Joe Don Pines? He ran for governor in Texas, didn’t he?”

  “And got beaten so badly he moved to New Mexico,” Frank said.

  “But he works for the President, right?” I said.

  “That’s oil and energy shit, C. W.,” Frank said, “wrong area code. Plus, he just doesn’t feel right in my gut …”

  On that we all fell silent together, then all tried to talk at once. Jimmy won through sheer energy.

  “That Joe Donny Pines, he was a fucking officer in Vietnam, wasn’t he? Some kinda head-hog in Saigon?”

  “Sounds right,” Frank said, “but I gotta drain my lizard.”

  Jimmy and I watched the big man shuffle toward the latrine again. I opened a couple of beers for us. “Isn’t there anything he can do?” I asked as I handed him the can.

  Jimmy turned on me, his eyes so angry I thought he was either going to shout or hit me, then they just got sad. We sat for a moment listening as the valley lost the sun, cooling, drawing the wind down. The trees rattled, rubbed, and squealed, needle against needle, bark against bark.

  “The biggest target in the fucking bush, man. He shoulda died a thousand times over there,” Jimmy said softly, “a thousand times.”

  Thirty minutes later the sun had disappeared and we all sat around in down vests staring into cups of murky coffee, something besides beer to drink after a couple of hits of Norman’s biker speed.

  “Neither hide nor hair,” I said, “of Wynona or the Cisneros woman?”

  Frank shook his head. “We followed him home, glassed his house good, then followed him back, followed the flat-nosed guy around, and the fat one some, too. But nothing. If they’ve got the women, we didn’t see them.”

  “So what now?” Jimmy asked.

  “You guys have to go in and take Sr. Reyna out,” Frank said, “see if he might join you in an intimate conversation.”

  “You guys?”

  “Sarge, if I’d put in my papers before I left town,” Frank said, “I’d go with you. But if we get caught, my kids lose the retirement.”

  “Makes sense,” I said. “What about you, kid?”

  Jimmy stared up at the blue sky fading to black, then said, “Wish we had a helicopter …”

  “What the fuck you want a chopper for?” Frank said.

  “Carry that little bastard up about ten thousand feet and hold him in the door,” Jimmy said, still looking up. “Usually they can’t talk fast enough at that altitude.”

  Frank looked at me and said, “Jimmy did a few weeks with the ARVN Rangers after you left the outfit. The uniforms fit, and he liked being the tallest piece of shit in the company.”

  “They had the best whores, too,” Jimmy said, smiling into the heavens.

  “But let me point out something, you little fuck,” Frank said, then reached over the table and picked up Jimmy by the back of his vest, “we’re already at ten thousand feet.”

  Without a pause, Jimmy said, “Then we’ll throw him off your shoulders, you big fuck.”

  “I can’t be involved,” Frank said, taking charge anyway, “but I’ll cover the front. You guys park on the street. I’ll go for a drink, see if the slimebag is there, then come back and give you the setup, then go back in and order another. You guys go in through the alley.”

  “What if the door’s locked?” Jimmy asked, shuffling from foot to foot.

  “Wait until somebody brings out the garbage, you worthless little Harp,” Frank said. “But don’t bring him back here. Please. And don’t tell me where you take him. Okay?” Jimmy and I nodded. “I’m treading the line as it is …”

  “Don’t fuck the job,” Jimmy said, heading for the pisser, “and the job won’t fuck you.”

  “Right,” Frank said, watching the
little man hump through the darkness as if he could see.

  “He can still see in the dark,” I said.

  “You know what the little jerk did after you left the outfit?” Frank asked me. “He went a little batshit, you remember, after Willie got wasted, so the green machine wouldn’t let him extend for another tour. So they sent him home. When he cleared division, he went AWOL and hitched back to the company, said they’d changed their mind at the last minute. Usual Army fuckup. Dumb-ass. It took ’em six months to find him, then they didn’t know quite what to do …”

  “They couldn’t get rid of me quick enough,” Jimmy said from the shadows, still as quiet on his feet as the old days. “An MP rode me all the way to Travis. I was a civilian two hours after my feet hit the runway. But I fooled ’em.”

  “Jerkoff used his cousin’s birth certificate to enlist again,” Frank said. “You ever hear anything like that?”

  “No,” I had to admit.

  “My own mother turned me in,” Jimmy squealed, “just after I finished basic—you’d be amazed how easy basic is after a few months in the bush.” Then he laughed. Jimmy had enlisted the first time after his older brother came home in a box, so I couldn’t blame his mother. “So I said fuck it, went back to San Francisco …”

  “Where you fucked up again,” Frank said, then paused. “Let’s do it before the place closes and one of you hippies loses his nerve.”

  So we did.

  After Frank came back out front and laid the details on us, we walked around to the alley, two guys in gray overalls and watch caps that pulled down to become ski masks. Jimmy carried a clipboard in one hand, my spring-loaded sap in his other; I toted a new toolbox full of rocks and the silenced .22 Woodsman loaded with hollow points in my long pocket. Just a couple of working stiffs on a late night call.

  I don’t know about the old cliché of soldiers following a good officer into the gates of hell; but my experience had taught me that you could follow a good point man and trust him to keep you out of the shit. And Jimmy had been good. Maybe walking point was like riding a bicycle: you never forgot. The jittery, jumpy Jimmy disappeared as he led me down the alley; he was in charge now.