Bordersnakes

  Connie’s office looked as if it belonged in a southwestern art gallery. So did she. In her expensive working clothes, manicure, and perfect hair she looked like a woman in charge of a Fortune 500 company, her inner beast sheathed in Irish linen.

  “So who the fuck are you, and what do you want from me?” she asked once she was seated behind the redwood slab of her desk, fingering an obsidian knife with a clay handle. It looked as if it were meant to cut out men’s hearts. For fun, not in religious sacrifice. She didn’t offer me a chair, but I took one anyway.

  “Look,” I said, “I’m not the enemy. I’m no threat to your life…”

  “You goddamned well better not be,” she said passionately. “I’ll cut your fucking head off.”

  “I hope it won’t be necessary,” I said, “because I have some sad news. Your sister and her husband are dead. Murdered.” At least she caught her breath for a second, rose and stepped over to the glass wall to stare at the shaded river. “I’m sorry,” I added.

  “Don’t be, Montana,” she said without turning. “Ana’s been dead for a long time. Maybe since the day she changed her name. Certainly since she hooked up with the cocaíneros, the day she met Ray.” Then she turned to face me. “Does my father already know?” I nodded. “At least there’s that.” Then she sat down, leaned on the desk, and looked at me sadly. I thought she was going to talk about her sister, but like many people dealing with grief, Connie decided to talk about herself.

  “I did everything right, you know,” she said, running her thumb across the glass blade. “Finished high school. Worked my way through college making tacos in San Marcos. For six years. Got my degree in accounting. Straight A’s all the way through. Didn’t get married to some cholo, didn’t get pregnant.

  “The first job I got—a good job with a national accounting firm—some needle-dick white-bread fraternity boy told me to work on my accent and to buy some new clothes. Something a little less flashy. Then he showed me his little white chipmunk of a dick, and told me to get on my knees. I was still a fucking Meskin chick from Del Rio whose father couldn’t even speak English.

  “I grabbed his pecker, all right,” she said calmly, “nearly jerked it out by the root. But goddammit, I almost got on my knees.”

  “But you didn’t,” I said. “It doesn’t do much good for me to apologize for either my gender or my race,” I added, “or the world. But I’m sorry.”

  Connie looked at me for a long second, then almost smiled. “Then I went to San Antonio and had some fun,” she said. “Caught the clap, had my uterus yanked out my vagina. Some other shit. Tried to go home, but papá threw me out of the house.

  “The next real job I had that didn’t take place after dark or in a bar was here, in the laundry, shaking farts out of sheets. Now I’m vice president of the company, and when L.G. dies in bed some night,” she said softly, “I’ll have it all. So don’t fuck with me. I’ll have Eddie turn you into fertilizer.”

  “I suspect Eddie’s got his own problems right now,” I said. She looked puzzled, then smiled.

  “I’m sorry to miss that one,” she said.

  “Right,” I agreed, “but this has nothing to do with you.” She raised an eyebrow. “Aside from the fact that Ray was a sleazeball and ran a money laundry, what do you know about him?”

  “Not much,” she said. “Ray was a bordersnake. He belonged to one of the familias, big families that control the drug trade on the border. He was too nice a kid, I bet, so they changed his name and sent him to college.”

  “What was his name?” I asked.

  “I’ve only heard it once,” she said. “But it was German, not Spanish. Bachmann, Hoffmann—something like that. A lot of those old northern Mexican ranch families have English or German names.”

  “He have any brothers named Roger?” I asked, but she shrugged. “What about your sister?” I asked. “What sort of woman was she?”

  “A girl,” she answered sharply. “A girl who liked to have fun. A little girl always afraid of the dark. And she hated to be afraid. So of course everyone loved her, loved to take care of her, help her make decisions. Shit, she couldn’t finish her degree because she couldn’t decide on a major. When she met Ray, she was working as a hostess in a place in north Austin, one of those theme places. She was too dumb and lazy to cocktail. She got the job because she was fucking the bar manager, sharing him with Kate…”

  “Kate knew her?”

  “I think she and Kate were in love,” she said flatly, daring me to make something of the dancing scene. “Or maybe Kate was in love and Ana was having fun. Who knows? Who cares?” Perhaps I had the wrong expression on my face because she quickly added, “Whatever L.G. wants, L.G. gets. Till the day he dies.”

  I stood up, asked one last question. “So where’s this familia that Ray belongs to?”

  “A little town across the border from Castillo,” she said. “Enojada. But I wouldn’t cross the border there and go around asking a bunch of questions. By the time those bordersnakes get through with you, you’ll be begging them to cut off your head. Try El Paso. Hell, at least it’s sort of Texas.”

  “Thanks for the advice,” I said.

  “I’d ask you to drop in after L.G.’s dead, Montana,” she said, “but somehow I suspect you’re going to beat him to hell.”

  “And thanks for the offer,” I said, ignoring her prediction. “But when I go to bed, I like to make love, not war.”

  “Trust me, amigo,” she said, almost smiling, as she grabbed my bill and signed it. “It’s all the same.”

  “I hope not,” I said, not exactly sure, though.

  —

  The desk clerk gave me an odd look when I handed her the bill that Connie had signed. I reached for my billfold.

  “It’s on the house, sir,” she said. “Come back an’ see us, you heah.”

  “At these prices,” I said, “I can’t afford not to.”

  Her look got even odder. Texas seemed to be full of pretty women. And tough women. But cheap irony seemed to be wasted on some of them. Maybe life down here was too hard on women for them to appreciate irony of any sort.

  —

  When I got to the Lincoln, Kate sat in the front seat, painting her toenails. A variety of backpacks and duffels were piled in the backseat. She wore a white nameless ball cap, baggy pants, and a shapeless purple cotton sweater that had slipped off her shoulder. I leaned in the open window and kissed the cool, clear skin in the hollow of her collarbone.

  “What the hell are you doing here, girl?” I said.

  “I’ve worn out this town,” she said, concentrating on her tiny little toenail, “and I’ve never been to Montana.”

  “I’m not going to Montana,” I said.

  “You will eventually,” she said calmly. “Where are we going first?”

  “Good question,” I said, then threw my bag on top of hers and climbed into the driver’s seat. “I thought I locked the car.”

  “Not very well,” she said, reaching into the large purse at her feet to pull out a professional-quality slim jim. She smiled shyly, then said, “I had a misspent youth.”

  “As far as I can tell,” I said, “you’re still having it.”

  When I drove out of the parking lot, Kate put her feet out the window for her toes to dry and her head in my lap.

  “I’m a lesbian, you know,” she said.

  “I’m not sure you know what you are,” I said, “and even if you are, honey, I sort of like the idea of being in love with a woman I can’t fuck. Seems pure and simple, somehow.”

  “Believe me, it’s not,” she said, then she tilted her cap over her eyes and fell promptly to sleep like a tired kitten.

  Sughrue looked a little tired himself. But not sleepy. He leaned against a wall outside the rental office, his bag at his feet. A scrape high on his right forehead had already stopped bleeding. But his T-shirt, jeans, and windbreaker were unsoiled. And his big smile unbroken.

  We transferred a dazed Ka
te and her bags to the backseat of the Beast, settled our bill, then drove out to Interstate 10 and headed west.

  “How’d it go?” I asked.

  “A draw.”

  “A draw?”

  “Yeah,” Sughrue said. “I promised I wouldn’t kill the son of a bitch and L.G. put the over-under quail gun back in the trunk of his Mercedes and promised to tell the hospital that Eddie fell off a cliff.” Then Sughrue laughed so loudly that Kate stirred on the backseat. “Where’d you get her?”

  “I’m not exactly sure.”

  “Where’s she going?”

  “With us,” I said. “Guess she’s been living too hard.”

  “Tell me about it,” Sughrue said, then groaned softly. “How’d it go with Connie?”

  “She suggested we not go down to Enojada…”

  “From what I hear, that’s good advice,” Sughrue said, “and it’s a little too goddamned close to the house for my comfort.”

  “…and that perhaps Raymundo Lara was born under another name,” I said. “Maybe Carver D will turn another favor for us.”

  “Maybe,” Sughrue said. “Or maybe the El Paso narco guy can help.”

  “I don’t think so,” I said. “He checked up on me in Meriwether and didn’t like what he heard.”

  “Nobody likes a crooked cop, Milo,” Sughrue said. “Particularly when they don’t even get paid for it.”

  “I always did get it wrong, didn’t I?”

  Sughrue smiled again, touched his scrape, and said, “Let’s stop first chance. Stretch our legs, maybe have a beer.”

  “Shit, Sughrue, we’ve been in the car ten minutes.”

  “Yeah,” he said, “but Eddie got in a couple of body shots before he went down. I could use a beer, maybe see if I’m pissing blood yet.”

  —

  Damaged kidneys or not, I could tell Sughrue was hurting, and Kate was sleeping like the dead, so we stopped in Junction. One drink turned into four or five, which, when mixed with a couple of Florinal 3’s out of Kate’s grab bag of drugs, turned into darkness. My road pals were nodding out over their drinks before sundown, so I bought us a bag of tacos and found a motel, where we crashed like a small litter of sick puppies.

  Everybody seemed fine the next morning after the miracle of twelve hours of sleep, so we were full of coffee, biscuits, and country gravy and rolling west again with the rising sun at our backs, the Beast purring beautifully, eating that long gray ribbon of highway. The norther had petered out, the blue sky bloomed, and the landscape lapped clean again outside the windshield.

  Sughrue resisted it until nearly nine o’clock, but he tilted his seat back. Kate, who hadn’t said ten words since the afternoon before, except to complain when the bartender carded her in Junction, disappeared into her portable CD player and earphones, and also disappeared beneath the contents of her bags. They seemed to have exploded. The backseat looked like the bottom of a teenage girl’s closet. Her sleepy eyes drooped slowly and soon she joined Sughrue in his major nap.

  About noon, I fed my charges in Fort Stockton, when they finally awoke. As we pulled back on the seemingly endless interstate across West Texas, Kate leaned forward between Sughrue and me.

  “I hate to be a pest,” she said brightly, “since I’m riding free and all that. Hell, you guys haven’t even tried to get a blow job, or make me jack you off, or anything. That usually comes in the first thirty minutes. But do you mind if I ask where we’re going?”

  “No,” I said, then looked at Sughrue. “I don’t mind, do you?”

  “Not at all,” he said, “but I’d like to hear some more about these blow jobs we didn’t get.”

  “Ha, ha, ha,” Kate said, then ran down her window and spit. “Sometimes bad sex is better than bad jokes.”

  “When?” Sughrue asked, then turned around in his seat.

  “All right,” Kate shouted, smiling. “Where the fuck are you guys going?”

  “El Paso City,” Sughrue said.

  “Oh, shit,” she moaned. “I fucking hate El Paso. After Mom died, every time the General got stationed in Central America, he sent me and my big sister to boarding school there.”

  “The General?”

  “My father,” she explained. “He was really just a bird colonel, but they gave him a star and made him a brigadier before he retired. Just to be nice, maybe. But maybe because he held the line on Iran-Contra. My mother always called him ‘El General.’ Even when they were kids. Her family owned the ranch next to his family’s. It was a joke. Kind of. Maybe he was kind of bossy even then, but I don’t think my father was ever particularly militarily minded. He just wanted to get off the ranch. It can be boring if you’re not born for it.” Then Kate paused. “Maybe you guys can drop me at the ranch,” she said quickly, then slapped me on the shoulder. “But you have to promise, promise, promise you’ll pick me up before you head back to Montana. I’ll love you forever if you promise, Grandpa.”

  “You’ll love him forever, whatever,” Sughrue said. “All the girls do.”

  “Especially the ones who call me Grandpa.”

  “I don’t know your name, man,” she said. “Or yours, either, tough guy.”

  It seemed a little odd to introduce ourselves at this point, but we did it with a certain amount of grace. Her name was Katherine Marie Kehoe.

  “So where’s this ranch?” I asked.

  “The Castellano Ranch. Just down the road,” she said, “between Fairbairn and the border. The General loves having me around. But I make him nervous. And he’s too sweet to complain. So we spend all our time drinking our way through his wine cellar. It’s a blast. One of these days I’m going to get him stoned, too. You goddamned betcha…I’ll bet he’s really sweet and funny when he’s stoned.”

  Sughrue and I glanced at each other, but we couldn’t tell what question we wanted to ask.

  “A sweet and funny general?” was what we finally decided upon. In unison.

  “Maybe charming’s a better term. That’s it,” she said, “charming. And maybe a little shy.” Then, as if she’d never thought of it before in the clutter of her mind, she said, “I guess shy can be mean, you know, like if you’re a kid, or something. You’re sweet, Grandpa, and shy, too.” Then she chuckled and kissed me wetly on the neck. “It’s not much out of the way. Really. Take the next exit and head south.” Then she added with that West Texas dismissal of distance, “It’s only about seventy miles.” Kate began madly repacking as Sughrue and I looked at each other again.

  Sughrue’s face was suddenly quiet, unmoving. I couldn’t read it. Had no idea what he was thinking. I wasn’t sure what I was thinking, either. But we’d find out.

  Finally he said, “Funny place to grow up.”

  Kate paused in her scramble to say, “Well, I didn’t exactly grow up there. But it is a funny place to call home.”

  I couldn’t tell what Sughrue thought of that, either.

  North of Fairbairn, after a long silent ride south from the interstate, I suggested a farewell road beer. Sughrue cracked them for us, and we toasted our brief friendship, and Kate gave me the ranch’s telephone numbers. It seemed there were several spreads that ran from south of Fairbairn to the Mexican border. I gave her the answering service number in Meriwether. And promised not to go to Montana without her.

  Then I asked her about Analise Navarro.

  “What?” she said, her mood suddenly dark, then desperately chatty again. “Sure, I knew her in Austin. She was an okay chick; a little confused about her sexuality. I think her mother’s brother used to dandle her on his knee. That happens a lot more than people think, you know. Connie doesn’t know what the hell she’s doing, either. Something happened there, too. But Ana was okay. I liked her. Till she married Ray.”

  “Ray?” I said, fishing.

  “Ray Lara,” she said, glancing around like a trapped animal. “After that she had too much cocaine and too little sense. She never thought Ray gave her enough money. So she started dealing when they go
t back from the honeymoon. She bought a little hair salon and dealt out of there. Dumb.” Then Kate paused, pointed up ahead. “There it is, boys. My hometown.”

  As I had noticed before, there wasn’t much in Fairbairn, fair or otherwise, just five hundred people sprinkled across a dusty plain with hazy mountains in the distance and deeply cut arroyos that only ran in the occasional rain. They weren’t running that day. Sughrue didn’t even glance at the Dew Drop Inn when we passed.

  So we rode in silence south toward Mexico past the ornate locked gate that opened to the Castellano Ranch, until Kate screamed to stop at an unmarked cattle guard secured by a barbed-wire gap. Kate insisted on opening it, and we drove through on the rutted track. Where it dipped into a dry wallow about one hundred yards inside the fenceline, the track suddenly became a nicely graveled road. Two young vaqueros in a pickup with one M-16 and one heavy scoped deer rifle racked behind their heads came across the plain to intersect our path, until Kate leaned out the car window and waved at them.

  It must have been five miles to the house, a huge rambling adobe that had faded to its natural desert color. A line of foreign poplars bordered the road, their needs fed by an irrigation ditch. And a large greensward watered by an underground sprinkler system surrounded the house in that rocky scrub-brush desert. The main house was large enough to be the clubhouse of a small country club. We parked in the circular drive beside a brand-new Dodge pickup and a Toyota 4Runner with a logo painted on the side: RATTLESNAKE PRODUCTIONS.

  “Oh, God. That’s probably Suzanne’s car. She’s making a movie, you know,” Kate prattled nervously, “but what an odd name for her production company. My God, she hates rattlesnakes. And the General…Oh, shit, I’ll be in the middle again…sometimes they just hate each other…”

  A long porch stretched across the front of the house. Two tall, lean men stood up from a small table to examine the approach of our Beast. One of the men was dressed in starched khaki, a leather bomber jacket, and a blue gimme cap with gold braid on the bill. The General, I assumed. The other, a dark-faced vaquero, looked as if he could be the younger brother of Señor Navarro of Del Rio. His faded jeans and blanket-lined jacket hung on his lanky frame with a working cowboy’s grace.