The Mexican Tree Duck

  Then it was business.

  Although Barnstone, Norman, and I tried to talk them out of it, Dottie and Mary arrived with Lester and the extra gunhands from Stone Wash Springs. Lately, it seemed I had had a remarkable string of bad luck trying to get women to do anything I ordered, asked, or begged. We nearly lost Mrs. Pines the elder as we swept the ranch house for the dozen bugs we eventually found.

  At first, Mrs. Pines had a screaming fit about the DEA interfering in the private life of her son. When we pointed out that all the electronics were German or Polish, which probably meant that her son had bugged her, she had another more inchoate episode, during which she claimed that Joe Don wouldn’t make a pimple on his father’s ass. Sarita gave her another dose of Valium, minus the excitement of bourbon this time. So, except for Sarita and Mrs. Pines, we were finally able to settle around the kitchen table for several cups of cowboy coffee while we watched the sunrise shatter the dark rim of the Hole.

  First we did information. Barnstone suggested that between his own contacts and Dottie’s they could spin the buzz on the firefight to make it sound like a rip-off or an internecine war between partners, and he believed that since he owed them a load of VCRs the Mexican Army might hold up their end.

  Then we did blame.

  After finding the directional bug in the briefcase, I should have realized that Joe Don was committed to the modern world of electronic marvels. It was all my fault. But Solly came to my defense. I didn’t think of it, he suggested, because I didn’t quite recognize the modern world. Which wasn’t the same thing as being my fault.

  I agreed for the sake of brevity, always a blessing during conversations with lawyers.

  Then Solly wanted to blame himself for not being able to talk Wynona out of her modesty, but Norman verified his efforts and all of us could vouch for Wynona’s stubbornness.

  Then Mary started her blame rap about Norman’s mom and all that, but Jimmy shut up everybody, saying, “Yeah, well, I started the fucking Vietnam War! So don’t fucking argue with me!”

  So we gave up blame. Even me, who could feel the loss of Wynona again like the terrible jungle cramps that came in huge empty waves when you had to hold the watery shit inside your guts on a night ambush.

  But nothing got me off the hook. I was still in charge. So, at last, we did plan. I’ve always done better at do than plan, but what the hell, we all have to suffer sometime.

  So that’s how I found myself sitting on the sunny patio above the first tee at the Santa Teresa golf course having a drink with Joe Don.

  “How many guns do you have on me?” he wanted to know.

  “Nice body armor,” I said, “but no good against a high-powered rifle round, say a .300 Weatherby.”

  “Yeah,” he said. “I got tired of those bulky Kevlar things. As you know, they’re just too fucking hot.”

  “So, let’s deal,” I said, trying to ignore the sweat pouring off me.

  “What have you got that I could possibly want?”

  “Your mother, your son, your wife,” I suggested, “your money, and your fucking duck. The mortal nuts on your drug deal.”

  “And what have I got that you could possibly want?”

  “Wynona Jones.”

  “I know a great deal more about you now than I did last time we talked,” he said calmly. “You’re not as dangerous as you seem. Except to yourself. What if I simply said ‘Fuck you’? You’re not going to harm any of those people. I can always get more money. The Peruvian deal may have already gone south. And I’ve got two ducks. Wouldn’t it make sense for me to say ‘Fuck you’?”

  “Well, jerkoff,” I said, “I know a great deal more about you, too. You’re a shit-sucking dung beetle of a man, and a dead yellow coward.”

  Joe Don tried to act as if that didn’t bother him. He stared down the sloping ridge past the overdressed golfers toward the highway east of the country club as he unwrapped a cigar. Two telephone cable diggers, one from each side of the international border, approached the newly built border crossing. Joe Don’s drilling rigs labored away at the earth, seeking pockets in the Overthrust Belt.

  “Drill stem doesn’t seem to be spinning too fast,” I suggested. “How deep are the holes?”

  “Deep enough,” Joe Don answered, “to have found a hard rock strata that’s chewing up drill bits like peanuts … You familiar with drilling rigs?”

  “Third-generation oil field trash on both sides,” I said.

  “Oh,” Joe Don said with that sort of turned lip and cocked eyebrow I had seen too much of as the child of a wandering derrick-hand and the local Avon lady.

  “And I spent my time in the weevil corner,” I added, but Joe Don had already stopped listening. I felt my hands torque into fists.

  When Joe Don had his cigar firmly emplaced in his teeth and smoking in the pale, cool air, I reached over and broke it in half, stubbing the lighted half against the back of his hand.

  “Hey, man,” I said to his green face, “I’m trying to quit.” Then I pressed the cigar harder into his hand. “Think about this. You won’t be saying ‘Fuck you’ to some tired middle-aged drunk, Joey, you’ll be saying ‘Fuck you’ to two Colombians, who will, in order to collect their—or should I say, your?—hundred grand, be more than happy to kill everybody you’ve ever known. At least, that’s the way I put it to them.” Then I tossed the cigar into the ashtray. “Understand, Joey?”

  “You son of a bitch,” he hissed, holding his hand like a broken animal to his chest. “You just bought a one-way ticket to hell.”

  “Remember, you weekend warrior piece of officer shit,” I whispered, “I’ve done been there and back. I might have shit my pants, but I didn’t run away. I was in the war, asshole, and you were on television.”

  “Call my office,” he said, trying for military crispness, but failing. “Work out the details with Lenny.”

  “Not Lenny,” I said, “you. And on my terms.”

  Joe Don hesitated, then nodded and fled to the men’s room. From the front he might have looked like a hero, but from behind he looked like a pear-assed wimp waddling toward the toilet before he wet his pants. Again.

  Back in the rented car, Frank and Jimmy wanted to know what was wrong. But I drove all the way to the Upper Valley Bar and had two drinks before I could talk.

  “Frank?” I said. “Can you stretch two more favors out of your computer buddy in Denver?”

  Frank sipped his beer, then looked at me, grinning like a Chinaman. “Sure,” he said, “Joe Don Pines and … Lawyer Rainbolt.”

  “Good guess,” I said, waving for another drink.

  “Wasn’t a guess,” Jimmy growled from the pool table. “What are you going to do?”

  “See what the weather is doing this time of year,” I said, “up in Montana.”

  “Never been to Montana,” Jimmy said, “but I remember red skies over Montana.”

  “Bloodthirsty little bastard,” Frank said.

  “Just thirsty,” Jimmy said, “and it’s a movie. With Richard Widmark and the guy with the nose bigger than his hat.”

  “Richard Boone?” Frank asked.

  “Karl Malden,” Jimmy said. “Spigger hick.”

  When we stopped laughing, I called Barnstone at the ranch house in the Hole, suggested a brief rest for us. He encouraged it. With that blessing, Jimmy, Frank, and I sat down to slake our thirst.

  Thanks to the vested unfairness of the Selective Service Act, a lot of guys who shouldn’t have been there ended up in Vietnam. But not all of them in the bush. It usually takes six to ten troopers in support to keep one on the front lines. Of course, in a war where the enemy gerrymanders the front line every night, the combat zone can be anywhere.

  And because the American military and political establishments used the war for their own benefit, then manifestly displayed all the meretricious mendacity of a Mafia don or a Hollywood whore, a huge number of kids ended up in the bush who should never have been allowed to leave their hometowns.
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  Some couldn’t learn and didn’t make it; some could and did. But even in a slightly better world, none of them would have been there.

  William Curtiss Williams, Jr., was one of those.

  Willie had the lanky frame, hip-hop walk, and narrow feral head of a bad-ass street nigger, plus a pair of the meanest light green eyes anybody in the company had ever encountered. But Willie was of such a fine disposition and had one of those high soft sweet voices that made you realize that his eyes were shining with intelligence rather than malice and that his walk was simply an expression of his basically good-natured resilience—he seemed to have come from another world. Of course, he had.

  His parents were both doctors who practiced in the middle-class black environs of Minneapolis. Willie was an only child, asthmatic and sickly for most of his childhood, then suddenly blessed with health for the first time in his youth just in time to run into a white radical antiwar activist psychology professor at Carlton College, who convinced him that the war was being directed by the white devils to exterminate the brown and black races.

  Well, like a lot of radicals, the professor was half-right: there were a bunch of white devils in charge, evil because they were too often blessed with equal parts of greed for “career advancement” and simple stupidity. They were all right until they came in country, where they quickly learned that a field command could be worth their lives. If Charlie didn’t kill them, their own grunts would.

  Half-wrong, the professor didn’t understand that in the bush we were all the same, the mud people, much hated in recent days by the idiots of the Aryan Nation. And completely lacking in any basic knowledge of individual personality, a terrible but all too frequent failing in his profession, the son of a bitch killed William Curtiss Williams, Jr., and broke his folks’ hearts.

  Willie volunteered. And volunteered again. In spite of the fact that the first real physical activity of Willie’s short life came in basic training at Fort Leonard Wood, he signed up for jump school. Then for the 1st Air Cav. Then for Vietnam. Then for a second tour.

  Willie, who flinched obviously when his black brothers called him “nigger” in high laughing tones, refused to go home as long as he could help one brother adjust to the war. Because Willie, who wouldn’t have the vaguest idea how to survive on the mean streets of Hough or Bed-Sty or Cabrini Green, who showed up in country carrying a fucking briefcase full of books and wearing gold wire-rim reading glasses, was a pro in the bush.

  Willie lost the briefcase, the glasses, and all the reading material the first day when a mortar barrage racked Headquarters Company. After being blown ass over earlobes, maybe Willie understood that he was lucky to be alive and intended to stay that way. Nobody ever took luck out of the equation, but smart and careful was always luckier than stupid and lazy.

  So when I met him, eight months into his second tour, Willie was about the best jungle fighter around. But the most tired, too. He lived on amphetamines, slept on black hash and heroin-soaked Kools, and snacked on his liver and lights.

  Then he died.

  We were humping out of the bush from picking up Solly. We were wet and wrinkled like the big toes of the dead, so tired we slept walking, hungry because we hadn’t been resupplied for six days, and after a night ambush and another at the river crossing our nerves itched like pumpkin vines.

  Then Willie hooked a boot lace on a trip wire. And froze. Thank Buddha.

  I didn’t care anymore. I ran everybody out of range of the little bouncing beauty, ran them off at gunpoint, then got on my belly to dig out the mine.

  Bellied in the muck, listening to the cool chatter of Willie, smelling the rank bite of hash, watching Willie’s knee tremble ever so slightly, I fell in love with life, fell at least as much as it was possible for me. And I got him fucking out. About the sweetest moment of my life.

  Then the next night in his tent, I pulled an overloaded spike out of his arm, an American-made disposable syringe filled with our heroin. The CIA had bought the opium, flown it to labs on Taiwan, then flown it back to Vietnam just to kill William Curtiss Williams, Jr.

  My brief love affair with life ended.

  At the end of the afternoon in the Upper Valley Bar, without telling a single war story, Frank and Jimmy and I lifted our glasses to Willie. As we always would.

  Barnstone had asked me to stop by to check on Carney because he wouldn’t answer the telephone. We found him sitting at the backyard table, his meager goods in a feed sack. He was in the van before we could stop him, saying simply, “No sense in you guys having all the fun,” then he fell into the black hole of silence wherein he dwelt.

  PART SIX

  IT TOOK SOME money, which we took out of the funds Joe Don put up to keep me from finding his wife, and ten days to set up the exchange, but finally we were ready, standing on a deeply snowdrifted ridge above the abandoned mining town of Pride & Joy a full two days before Joe Don and his boys were due to arrive. Frank, Jimmy, and I had helped Solly snowshoe into his firing position, built a BB bag rest—sand would have frozen—for his .300 Weatherby, and set up his expedition gear. Then Frank wrapped a chain around the nearest ponderosa pine, locked it to a set of leg restraints, then slapped one on Solly’s good ankle.

  Solly just stared at me without complaint, then asked, “So what now?”

  Jimmy answered. “You fuck up, Captain, you’ll have to shoot off your good foot and crawl home. In fact, I’ll be more than happy to help you.”

  “What did I ever do to you, kid?”

  “If you don’t know, asshole, I can’t tell you,” Jimmy said, then trudged away as if he couldn’t stand our presence another second. Frank shrugged and followed him through the light, drifting flakes.

  “So it comes to this, Sughrue?”

  “I didn’t start this shit,” I said, “but I intend to finish it.”

  “You want to hear my side?”

  “Not particularly,” I said, “and particularly not now.”

  “What gave me away?” he asked, then answered himself when I wouldn’t. “I told those idiot fucks at the DEA to at least fake a file, that somebody would check someday. I’m just sorry it had to be you, man.”

  “Look,” I said, unable to restrain my anger any longer, “just shut the fuck up. Shut up now. Put your fucking headset on and do what I say, when I say it, and we’ll all walk away from this. Sort of.”

  “You’re in charge …” he started to say, but I had already headed my snowshoes down the long slope toward the empty shacks of Pride & Joy, ghostly in the fading light.

  On the long drive back to Montana, all of the guys jammed in the van, Frank had forced a detour on our caravan, out of Taos and over to Eagle Nest, where a father had built a memorial to his son dead in Vietnam, a shell-like building surmounted by a split column. Simple but effective. We all left in tears, except for Carney. Only Solly bothered to speak. Once again he asked about Willie Williams. Once again we lied.

  Once in the van, though, just about the time we cracked beers and bad jokes, Carney started. When we stopped for the night in Pueblo, Colorado, Carney didn’t. We had to do something. Like a bunch of Sunday School liberals we sat around in one room trying to talk Carney out of his fucking tears.

  Finally, he whispered, “I don’t deserve to be with you guys. I was a fucking coward over there.”

  The ever-sensitive Jimmy told him to tell somebody who gave a shit, then opened a round of beers. But Carney maintained his guilt. Then he burst into story as well as new tears.

  “I did dogs,” Carney said, then fell silent.

  After a moment Jimmy pointed out that he hadn’t exactly fucked beauty queens. Until he went over to advise the ARVN Rangers.

  “Scout dogs,” Carney explained. “I lost so many dogs, man, I just couldn’t do it anymore. Had three or four blown to fucking pieces. Then I got scared.”

  Frank leaned forward so that his deep sorrowful tones might penetrate this foolishness and said, “Hey, man. You ain’t talking to a
soul who gives a shit about that.”

  “Fuck, man, I’d go on patrol with these beautiful Dobermans and watch them sniff out a mine, then fuck up,” he said.

  “We all fucked up, kid,” Solly said. Frank and I looked at each other, nodded without smiling.

  “No. The dogs would fuck up. Dust and blood, man. I couldn’t do it anymore,” Carney said. “So I started stepping on their feet, breaking their toes so they could go home and I didn’t have to be scared any fucking more.”

  “Makes sense to me,” Norman said. “I got so tired of looking at guys all fucked up, I still … Well, fuck it, you know the rest.”

  “Then he found out the fucking Army was killing the dogs,” Barnstone said.

  “The green shitty machine,” somebody said.

  “So what the fuck did you do after that?” Jimmy wanted to know.

  Carney mumbled something. Frank asked him what he had said. Then Carney whispered louder: “I did another tour. As a LRRP.”

  “Well, no fucking wonder you were scared,” Jimmy said, relieved. “You guys were crazy.”

  We’ll never know who laughed first. But we were all guilty. Before the laughter was over, Carney was laughing, too, and crying, and it was over.

  We still had some problems, but this part was over.

  During the ten days and nights of hiding and planning the slippery preparations, we had crashed out at Solly’s ranch, except for Mary and Norman, who felt safe enough in the confines of their biker bastion up Clatterbuck Creek. Dottie still had her bundle of comp-time so she could take care of Baby Lester. And now that they had made friends with Millard Fillmore, Carney and Barnstone refused to even talk about going back to El Paso. Although it seemed clear by this time that Sarita had no notion of escape, we kept her locked up down in the mother-in-law apartment in the daylight basement of Solly’s place.

  Frank and Jimmy didn’t have much trouble talking me into staying out of sight, hanging out at the house with Dottie and Sarita. Barnstone, Frank, and Jimmy took care of most of the preparations, buying weapons and electronic gear from the Dahlgren boys and expedition winter clothes and camping equipment all over town. Leaving me in the devil’s most dangerous position: with nothing to do.