Bordersnakes

  “What was that all about?” Whitney asks as we drive away.

  “I don’t know,” I answer. “Nobody ever tells me anything.”

  “I’ll tell you this,” she says. “It’s certainly nice to have you at home again. All of you.”

  “It’s nice to be home,” I say then wonder what the hell Milo’s got up his sleeve.

  Milo

  From the sag of his shoulders beneath the lash of Suzanne’s voice, I could tell that Sam Dunston did belong to the whiskey. I should know; I once belonged to it myself. Suzanne’s eyes flared in the smoky light, and the reflected flames flickered up the shiny black leather of her tight pants. Her gaze swept the table so hard that her drunk father slipped away like an egg-sucking dog.

  But Dunston seemed made of stronger stuff. At least at this whiskey moment. He ignored her stare, turned and held out his glass toward the actor, whose name I couldn’t remember, who filled it with four fingers of Wild Turkey. Suzanne nearly stomped her silver-toed boot like an angry drugstore cowboy. But she restrained herself to a single angry sigh. An angry blush rushed like fire up her slender neck, then she tossed her sin-dark hair and stormed toward the house. The back door slammed, then the front, then a car door, and we listened to the gravel-spitting roar of her 4Runner as Suzanne fled south toward the location.

  When she was safely away, I rested my cane on the table and sat down across from Dunston, who glanced at me with bright, angry eyes, asking, “So, Mr. Rent-a-Cop, have you come to monitor the old buzzard’s intake?”

  “Actually, Mr. Dunston,” I said, “I sat down to see if I might share a glass of that unblended whiskey with a man whose movies I’ve always admired.”

  “Flattery might get you a small measure, Mr….” he said, and I introduced myself. “Jesus, partner,” Dunston said to the actor beside him, “fella with a name like that surely deserves a full measure.” And he complied. Then we raised our glasses. “Absent friends,” Dunston said, “magic time, and that fucking Kehoe bitch.” I guess I hesitated because the old man explained. “Hey, son, I ain’t got nothin’ against her. Except she should’ve let me direct this damn movie. And she should’ve starred in it instead of that jiggle-butt bimbo.”

  “I didn’t know she was an actress,” I said.

  “A fuckin’ natural,” Dunston said. “Best untrained talent I’ve ever seen. We could’ve made a fortune. She’s a real fuckin’ beauty…”

  “But she wanted to direct?” I said.

  “Even the fuckin’ road signs in LA want to direct, son,” he said, then sipped his whiskey and went back to bemoaning his fate in the hands of Suzanne Kehoe. “And I’d bet horse turds against hand grenades that the camera just loves her. But no pictures. Of any kind. That’s one of her many rules. Never knew a director, not even me, who had so many fuckin’ rules on the set.”

  “She’s got a lot of rules for a beginner?” I said.

  Dunston suddenly stared at me. The old man had survived for a long time in a business not known for suffering the foolish. He might be half-drunk but he was more than half-smart. And he knew he was being pumped. Suddenly, for no good reason, other than meanness, perhaps, he decided to let me prime the pump. But his bodyguard gave me a look meant to freeze the silver off my belt buckle.

  “She’s no beginner,” Dunston said slowly. “I don’t know dogshit about her but I know she’s not a beginner. Hell, all I know is that she showed up at my trailer on the beach up in Cocachino County with a damned good script and almost enough money to make this fuckin’ movie…”

  “Almost enough?” I said.

  “Damn near,” he said. “So you don’t have to worry about your paycheck, son. In a couple of weeks we’ll have enough film in the can for a European presell. If I can keep that idiot DP from shooting old jiggle-butt from the rear…”

  “Especially in the saddle,” the other guy suggested quietly. “From that angle you can’t tell which is the horse’s ass.”

  He and Dunston laughed as quietly as they could, then Dunston slapped his companion on the back, saying to me, “Hey, you remember this old boy?”

  “The face is familiar,” I admitted, “but the name escapes me.”

  “Roy Jordan,” Dunston said. “Starred in my first movie.”

  “Demon Ride?” I said. “Sure. I see it now. Nineteen fifty-four. Great movie.”

  “Downhill since then,” Roy said, but he didn’t sound too sad about it.

  “Speaking of downhill,” Dunston said, “you boys drink on without me for a bit. I’m going over there and lean on that wall until my fuckin’ prostate surrenders and lets me piss and hope it runs downhill into the fuckin’ Rio Bravo del Norte.” Then Dunston pushed up from the table, Roy watching him like a night nurse, and staggered to the side of the General’s house, where he leaned like a permanent addition to the adobe.

  “What the hell happened?” I asked Roy. “I thought he was dead.”

  “Damn near is,” he answered quietly. “Three bypasses, a minor stroke, and a long, continuing bout with pancreatic cancer.”

  “Damn,” I said, “that’s rawhide tough. Is that why he quit working?”

  Roy thought for a long time before he decided to answer that one. “I guess it doesn’t matter anymore. After he shot his wife and the hyphenate, everybody—studios, independents, even foreigners—was afraid to hire a director who was willing to shoot the fuck-ups instead of just firing them.” Roy smiled like a man who wished he had discharged a few rounds himself.

  “I guess I missed that,” I said. “Dunston shot his wife in the hyphen?”

  Roy laughed as if I were an idiot child. “We were making a movie down in Durango when Sam caught the star-producer-pissant, the hyphenate, parking his wife. Hell, it had been going on for weeks, and Sam didn’t much care. The shoot was going well, and Sam always cared more about the movie than he did about pussy. And what the hell, we were running whores in tandem all over Durango every night our own damn selves.

  “But one afternoon Sam was setting a shot. One of those complicated moments when twenty-five people, ten horses, the clouds, and the sun have to hit the mark the first time. Mr. Asshole Star chose that particularly ill-chosen moment to run his link sausage up Mindy’s ass.

  “Well, you can imagine. She screamed like a stuck shoat. The trailer rattled like a six on the Richter. It fucked everybody’s concentration. Even the fuckin’ horses were glancing over their withers. So Sam gets in his limo, rams the trailer, turns it over, then grabs his sweet-sixteen double-barrel, loads it with nine-and-a-half bird shot, and when the star and Mindy hightail it into the desert, Sam peppers their butts until they were out of sight.

  “Then Sam came back to the set, did the shot, the sweet-sixteen-gauge loaded and propped on his shoulder, then we wrapped,” Roy concluded. “The son of a bitch could always get the shot.”

  “I don’t think I know this movie,” I said.

  “Sure you do,” he said. “The studio fired him, and the fucking hyphen finally directed it, recut the shit out of Sam’s stuff. I can’t remember the title—The Hard Rock, or something like that—one of those psychologically sensitive bullshit westerns.” Then Roy paused, smiling, poured a small measure of whiskey in our glasses, and said, “But at least he had sense enough to keep Sam’s shot. Best fucking shot in the film.”

  Before he lost the mood and Dunston staggered all the way back to the table, I asked, “Why did you guys finally decide you needed security?”

  “Wetbacks and rattlesnakes,” Roy said simply. “The wetbacks were stealing us blind. Hell, they even stole the front tires off Sam’s Winnebago while he was sleeping in it. Sober. Then Ms. Kehoe found a rattler in her 4Runner. Sam convinced her to give up on the people she had hired—moonlighting law dogs—and hire some real help.”

  From the wall, we heard Dunston yelp like a coyote, then laugh happily.

  “Success,” Roy said.

  Dunston rejoined us, and we drank and talked about the joys of old age, o
ld movies, and old whiskey, until Kate came to get me.

  “Milo,” she said, calling me by name for the first time I could remember. “The General is down. Will you help me get him to bed?”

  The General was down in one of his fake bunkers, quietly curled in the sand, his skinny shanks jerking in the firelight. If the old fart had been grinning, I might have thought he was dog-dreaming of conejos, chasing bunny rabbits through the brush. I gathered the old gentleman’s shoulders and a guy stepped over from Kate’s fire to get his ankles. As we stood up, I got a clear look at the guy’s face in the firelight. “I thought you were in Hawaii,” I said.

  “It’s a long story,” he answered, a sick grin on his face.

  “Maybe you can tell me about it over a beer,” I suggested. He nodded grimly, and Kate urged us toward the house with her father.

  A few minutes later, the old man safely abed, still sleeping drunkenly, Tom-John Donne and I faced each other across a tiled breakfast bar in the large Mexican kitchen while Kate grabbed a couple of beers out of the built-in refrigerator.

  “You guys know each other?” she asked. When both of us nodded, she added, “Is it cool?”

  Donne took a long pull at his beer, then grunted, “I’m chill, kid, as long as it’s cool with Mr. Milo-whatever-his-name-is…”

  “Milodragovitch,” I said, hoping it sounded like a threat rather than a spelling mistake. Then I turned to Kate, thanked her, and excused her. “You said it was a long story,” I said to Donne as soon as Kate left, and he raised his beer to his mouth.

  “Yeah, right…” he started to say.

  “By the way, Donne,” I interrupted, “somebody chopped off Aaron Tipton’s head.”

  “That’s not what I heard, man,” he said as soon as he had another swallow of his beer.

  “What did you hear?”

  “Actually, I read it in the LA Times…”

  “When you got back from Hawaii?”

  “You got it, man…”

  “Are you doing stunts on this fucking movie?”

  “Hey, I’m the stunt coordinator, man,” he said quickly, “the second AD, and the third male lead.” Then he paused to suck on his beer. “This film is my big break, my SAG card and the whole bit. Makes all that fucking cheap prison dental work worthwhile.” Donne sounded too happy and proud to be lying.

  If he wasn’t, I didn’t know enough about the business to brace him with it. I wanted to go into his history with Tipton, but suddenly I was tired of questions and answers and lies. Perhaps even tired of people telling the truth. Betty Porterfield came to mind.

  “Fuck it,” I said, “just forget it.” The son of a bitch looked hurt. So I grabbed my beer and headed back to Dunston’s table.

  But when I got back, Roy and Dunston were gone, so I took my leave, too, walked over to the Blazer with the Sawyer Security Systems logo on the door, and headed south toward the location.

  —

  Most of the crew had been lodged at distant motels from Castillo to Marfa, but all the head hogs were in fancy motor homes parked near the adobe ruins of an old ranch headquarters three miles off the highway. Most of the movie was being shot there, at nearby exteriors, and at a mock Mexican village that had been jury-rigged just over the next rise. So I had three guards roaming the perimeter, and a relief manning a small frame guard shack on the road into the location.

  When I got to the shack Suzanne Kehoe’s 4Runner sat beside it, engine off, headlights glowing faintly as if the battery had worn down. In the flash of my headlights I could see her head rise from where it had been slumped over the steering wheel, and in the harsh light of the shack’s single bulb I could see the relief man tilted back in his chair, his head hanging at an impossible angle.

  Oddly enough, setting up the security company, with Maribeth Williamson’s friendly assistance, had been the easiest and perhaps the cheapest part of putting this scam together. A friend of her dead husband’s already owned a security company that specialized in the oil field, so for a nominal price, a stiff bond, and an insurance rider, he loaned me the logo and some of the equipment necessary to bid for the job. As far as I could tell, nobody else wanted it. Not after the initial interview with Suzanne Kehoe, when they found out that a major duty was rattlesnake patrol. Ms. Kehoe didn’t want to see any snakes. Ever. Of any kind. But I had good reason to kiss deep ass, though I never understood why she let me. Pure arrogance, maybe.

  But Suzanne Kehoe’s face was twisted by pure fright as I leapt out of my rig and rushed to her window.

  “The flies,” she gasped, quickly rolling it down, then nodded toward the shack, “…the flies…”

  I glanced over at the shack. A dozen large and black flies crawled slowly across the guard’s face. I darted to the shack, but as soon as I opened the door the smell of cheap bourbon, instead of fresh death, rolled out on a wave of heat. The worthless bastard, a local redneck deputy sheriff, had passed out with the small space heater turned on high enough to hatch the flies out of the wood. They hung tightly to his face even when I propped his limp body in the rear corner of the shack. Then I checked on my other three guards. At least they were sober enough to answer their radios, and sensible enough not to complain when I cursed them and told them that they had to finish the night shift without a relief.

  Then I heard Suzanne Kehoe grind her weak battery. When I got back to her her face was composed, her voice trembling but calm as she explained that she was fine. Except she kept a constant pressure on the ignition key, held it there until the dim headlights died and the battery clicked against the starter like a dying cricket. I reached in through the window and took the keys as gently as I could.

  “I’m sorry,” she said softly, her cold fingers on my wrist, her breath hot against my cheek. “I’m sorry, I didn’t know I was doing that….Is he dead?”

  “Drunk,” I said.

  “Would you be so kind as to accompany me to my quarters?” she asked with hysterical calm.

  “Bette Davis?” I guessed, as I opened the door of the 4Runner. But the blank look she gave me told me that she didn’t have the vaguest idea what I might be saying. So I helped her out of her 4Runner and into my Blazer, then drove around the other dark and silent motor homes, which were huddled around a single mercury vapor lamp, to her quarters, which sat apart on the edge of the stark shadows.

  After I’d unlocked and opened the door, I handed Suzanne her keys. She took them, smiling as if she had just recognized me, saying softly, “You said something about a drink…” Then she took my hand and led me into the darkness.

  —

  In my late middle age it comes to me that women often take advantage of my good nature. But it’s nobody’s fault but mine. So blame it on me. Or the sudden release of tension when I discovered that the guard wasn’t dead. I’m weak. Always have been about women. And my life hadn’t exactly been a Doris Day movie lately. But that’s no excuse for what happened. Given what I knew about this woman, I might as well have agreed to crawl into a sleeping bag full of diamondbacks. But what the hell, I told myself, even a rattlesnake deserves the benefit of the doubt.

  By the time Suzanne and I finally got around to the drinking part, my moustache still smelled of her crotch and my knee was bleeding. When she’d come—sitting backward on top of me, holding on to my half-raised knee with one hand as she fingered her clit with the other hand and I pounded inside her until I thought I might die—she’d screamed and buried her expensively capped teeth into my knee. The release, to say the least, was terrifically intense. At least for me.

  Suzanne flopped on the bed beside me, pressed her lean body against me just long enough for her spasms to cease, then rolled away to scoop up a tiny hit from the pile of pink Peruvian flake sitting on a small mirror on the nightstand in a long, red fingernail. She hit it twice, then did my nose, but only once, before she picked up the Stoli and shaved ice with a lemon twist I’d made her when we’d first come in the motor home.

  I rolled off the bed,
grabbed my beer, stepped to the back door of the motor home, the one on the dark side. The black desert sky glittered with stars as distant and cold as my head. The cool night air moved lightly against my wet, naked skin as it seemed to dry individual hairs on my chest. I felt fucking great for the first time in a long time. So I roared into the night, roared from someplace deeper than my diaphragm. A horse whinnied and a pack mule brayed from the corrals. Then I stalled on the hard ground, the warm piss foaming and splashing in the dust. I roared again, deep and longer this time. The hardpan of the corral clattered with nervous hooves as the remuda snorted and whoofed.

  “That’s certainly lovely,” she said as I turned back into the small space. “If you’re one of those assholes who smoke after sex…”

  “Some parts of me are smoking, lady,” I interrupted, smiling so hard my cheeks hurt. “That’s for damn certain sure.”

  “…then please do it outside,” she continued flatly, not even a hint of a smile cracking the smooth planes of her face.

  What the hell. She’d given as good as she’d gotten. I’d done my job, and now I was no more part of her life than the tissue she used to wipe my jism out of her crotch. “Excuse me,” I said and reached for my pants.

  “Forgive me,” she said quietly, “I can be a bitch…afterwards.”

  I didn’t need to ask what she meant by that.

  “Loss of control and all that,” she added.

  So I put my britches back on the chair and sat on the bed beside her. Even in the dim light, I could see that Suzanne was closer to forty than thirty, could see the almost invisible scars in front of her ears and along her hairline.

  “A woman has to work with what she has,” she said softly, watching me look at her, “and my body is a weapon.” Then she cupped her small perfect breasts. “State of the art, though,” she said.

  “And a fine and lovely work of art it is,” I said, then took the soft pebble of her nipple between my lips.

  “Thank you,” she whispered against my hair, and once again I was fucking lost. And soon bleeding from another slice of Suzanne’s ecstasy.