Bordersnakes

  —

  At ten the next morning, when we gathered around a table at the local cafe, El Corazón del Leon—The Lionheart, I think—everybody looked tired. Even in fresh clothes. Whitney, beautifully haggard in jeans and a worn cotton work shirt. And Baby Lester, now dressed like a normal child on his way to preschool. Even Sughrue had changed out of his Apache drag. I had tried to tidy up but not too hard. I managed a white suit and an Italian silk shirt in a pattern that resembled dog viscera, but shaving had been beyond me.

  “I don’t know if I can eat with that thing hanging on your chest,” Sughrue offered as the waitress walked toward our table. “Who’re you supposed to be this morning? Don Johnson?”

  “My hangovers don’t have names,” I said, woolly worms under my skin. At least that hadn’t changed. The waitress was very polite to me. As if I might be a television star.

  After a breakfast of eggs and chorizo, fresh tortillas and peppers, aided by streams of strong coffee, at least the Sughrue family looked like human beings. Or some West Texas version of them. And I felt less like an animal.

  Nobody had much to say. Sughrue’s duffel was waiting in the back of the truck. Whitney didn’t say a word through breakfast, not even as Sughrue tossed his gear in the trunk of my Beast, then played goodbye grab-ass with Lester. But after the boy climbed into the truck and Sughrue into my ride, she hugged me dry-eyed, then held my shoulders.

  “I know you don’t know anything about me, Milo, but I grew up too pretty for my own good,” she said, surprising me with a story instead of a plea to bring him back alive. “My mother always envied me,” she continued, “and my father was afraid to touch me after I started my periods. And the men I’ve tried to love have always been afraid of me. Or even worse, prettier than me. It hasn’t been fun. Except for Sonny. And that’s probably because he’s always been too crazy to be afraid.”

  I didn’t know what to say, so I kept my mouth shut.

  “But now he’s afraid, too,” she added. “Last night, after you left, he went out into the desert to sleep with the snakes and the thorns, instead of spending his last few hours with me. Then Lester went. Then me. Too fucking crazy.” Then her voice hardened. “If you bring the son of a bitch back, Milo, bring him back whole.”

  Hey, lady, I wanted to say, I’m not some fucking spirit doctor. Sometimes love made me angry. Even when I wasn’t involved in it. “I can’t promise anything,” I said sharply, then quickly apologized. “I’m sorry. I’ll do my best.”

  “Just be his friend,” she said. “He needs a friend. I’m tired of being his only friend.” Then she put a hand on my shoulder. “And one more thing.”

  “What’s that?”

  “When you find the son of a bitch who shot him. Cut his fucking nuts off, okay. Then kill him.” She kissed me sweetly on the cheek and climbed into the pickup.

  As Sughrue and I drove north toward the interstate, he asked me what Whitney had said.

  “She said we were assholes, buddy,” I answered. “But you were the worst.”

  “Boy,” he said mildly, “she’s sure got you pegged.” Then he actually smiled. “Let’s see what this fucking Beast can do.”

  And he smiled as I showed him.

  —

  We had lunch at a place called Chope’s in the Upper Valley, across the New Mexican border north of El Paso, then eased up to La Esperansa del Mundo. On the way, I made him loan me the S&W .38 Airweight out of his duffel. He wanted to know why. “I’ve heard what you think you remember,” I said. “Now let’s see what you really remember.” Two pickups were parked outside the small adobe building.

  “Let me handle this,” Sughrue said as he held the bar door open for me. “These people have different ways…”

  The two beers I’d had with lunch hadn’t killed the worms yet. “Fuck you,” I said. “You’ve handled it enough.”

  Inside the pleasant cozy place, two old Mexican-American farmers sat at a table covered with Schlitz cans and tobacco flakes. The bartender gave us a narrow look, then turned back to his Spanish soap opera on the television. He didn’t need or want our business. I ordered four cans of Schlitz, which he reluctantly brought.

  “What are you doing, man?” Sughrue asked as I carried the cans to the farmers’ table.

  I sat the beers and myself down. “Excuse me,” I said. “You gentlemen look like regulars. Maybe you were here the day some asshole put a round in Señor Sughrue over there?” The old boys looked at me as if I were crazy, then hustled out the door without speaking as I carried their beers back to the bar.

  “See what I said,” Sughrue whispered.

  “Just exactly what I wanted,” I said in a loud voice. Then I stepped around the bar and switched off the television. “Hey, bartender,” I said, “maybe you remember that day?”

  Sughrue started to say, “He’s not the guy who was…”

  “No habla English, señor,” the bartender said.

  “Good,” I said, flashing an old badge at him. “You habla F-B-fucking-I?”

  “Hey, man, I wasn’t even here,” the bartender said with a Texas accent. “Didn’t you hear what…”

  “I don’t care what he says,” I said. “He was fucked up that afternoon. It’s you I care about. We’re going out back to look around for a minute. When we get back, you best have your shit stacked in an orderly pile, señor, or you’re looking at a bus trip south of the border.”

  “Jesus,” he squealed, “I’m a fucking citizen. I was born in Dallas.”

  “That’s never stopped us before, amigo,” I said, “so get your story ready. We’ll be right back.”

  Then I led Sughrue out the back door of the bar to the junky verge of the irrigation ditch that branched through the cotton and chili fields. He didn’t much want to go, but he went anyway, caught up in the act.

  “You got another one of those needle-dick joints, Sughrue?” I asked as we stopped beside an abandoned cultivator.

  “What?” he said. “Sure. Why?”

  “I’m asking the questions,” I said. “Smoke the son of a bitch before that guy calls the cops. Then sit down.”

  Sughrue smoked like a stove for a few minutes. I watched the pale blue sky rent with contrails, watched small groups of cotton pickers glean the machine-swept fields, watched the slight breeze unburden the cottonwoods along the ditch of their last leaves.

  “Hey,” he said shortly. “It’s hard to get stoned while you’re watching, Milo.”

  “I don’t have time for this sensitive shit,” I said. “Sit the fuck down. Close your eyes. And breathe deep.”

  Sughrue did, as docile as an old dog.

  As soon as he calmed down, but before he calmed down too much, I shoved him on his side with my foot. He protested, but neither too loudly nor too long. When I stuck the Airweight into his ear, he nearly jumped out of his skin, but he kept his eyes tightly closed.

  “Oh, fuck, man,” he muttered. “It’s loaded.”

  “Damn right,” I said, though I’d unloaded it. “It’s supposed to be. Keep your fucking eyes shut, gringo. The next sound you hear is the next to last one you’ll ever hear…” I cocked the .38. Sughrue curled into a ball, holding his gut. “What’s next?”

  “What?”

  “The sound. What is it? Ice breaking on Flathead Lake? The Meriwether during spring thaw? A martini glass…”

  “That’s it. That’s the one.”

  “Goddamn son of a motherfucking bitch. Piece of shit,” I growled. “What’s next? What? Goddammit, what?”

  “I don’t know,” he said, then opened his eyes.

  “Look around,” I suggested, “then come inside. Let’s have another beer.”

  Before Sughrue came in, I had time to apologize profusely to the bartender, whose name was Teo, buy him two beers, and discover that he had a brother-in-law who had worked sugar beets in Wyoming and apples in eastern Washington, which nearly made us neighbors. In the western scheme of things.

  “Pretty sneaky,” Sug
hrue said, smiling, “but it didn’t work, asshole. The only thing I remember is that I shit my pants when the firing pin shattered. Isn’t that lovely.”

  “That’s something,” I said, laughing so the suddenly terrified bartender could laugh. “Let’s look at some highway,” I said. I overtipped the bartender, then we left.

  “What’s next?” Sughrue asked as we pulled back on the road.

  “Your New Mexico license is still good, I hope?”

  “For another six months,” he said.

  “Good,” I said. “I’ll hire a lawyer in Las Cruces, who then will hire you, then maybe the fucking sheriff’s department won’t shoot us on sight.”

  Sughrue thought about that. I slid a tape of Gregorian chants into the tape deck and let it carry us softly away toward the seat of Luna County.

  We were winding under Interstate 10, looking for the markers to downtown, when Sughrue sat up abruptly.

  “The tree,” he said. “When he threw the piece away, it hit a fucking tree.” Then he turned to me. “You son of a bitch.”

  “Don’t flatter me,” I said, turning the car around. We could always hire a lawyer.

  “I wasn’t,” he said. “I nearly shit my pants again.”

  With Teo’s rickety ladder and his approval, Sughrue found the cheap revolver in surprisingly good shape lodged in the rotten crotch of the second cottonwood in the line along a shallow subsidiary ditch.

  “All right,” Sughrue shouted to me where I sat in a webbed folding chair. He tipped the piece off a pencil and into a baggie. “Now you can get off your ass, Milo, and do something.”

  “Like what?” I said, happily buzzed. But then I knew. I didn’t like it, but I knew.

  —

  By noon the next day, and thanks to the house dick at the Paso del Norte, we had our Las Cruces lawyer, Teddy Tamayo, a retired district court judge, a short, stout old man who had worked his way through college at New Mexico State and law school in Albuquerque as a professional wrestler known as the Masked Avenger across the border in Juarez. Teddy thought we were a couple of pretty funny gringos, and he offered to take my retainer just as soon as he managed to stop his mad chortling. And checked my Montana references. For once, my old buddy, Jamison—the decent man who had mostly raised my son and who was now chief of the Meriwether Police—came through with the right words.

  As he handed me a receipt for the cash, Teddy looked up at my partner and said, “Mr. Sughrue. I have heard it said that you were the man responsible for the death of one Joe Don Pines.”

  That would be Wynona’s former stepfather, and Baby Lester’s father, and a capital slimeball, by all accounts.

  “I heard he killed himself,” Sughrue answered.

  “Unfortunately, men like that never do,” Teddy said, laughing, then added, “Many people owe you thanks.”

  “Nobody owes me anything,” Sughrue said, then stepped out of the office.

  “Did I hurt his feelings?” Teddy asked.

  “He ain’t got none,” I said, then left, too.

  —

  The next part seemed harder.

  When Sughrue and I walked into the dingy air of Duster’s at four-thirty, I made sure we covered the dress code: windbreakers, jeans, and T-shirts; steel-toed work boots for balance; and a criminal air about our eyes. Sughrue didn’t have any tattoos, but I had a blurry patch of gunpowder burn on my right forearm that might have been a tattoo once. Or at least a grease spot. I was glad because, in spite of Rocky’s prediction that the law might keep his brother this time, Tommy Ray leaned on the bar. At least he only had one usable arm. They had bound the other to his chest with a scraggly body cast. From the looks of it, T.R. had already seen action.

  “Hey, Tommy Ray,” I said as we pulled up beside him. “Buy you a tequila?”

  His head turned like a giant boulder toward my voice, then he stared at me for a long time. Behind me Sughrue whispered, “You didn’t tell me how fucking big he was, Milo.” But I had.

  Then suddenly T.R. grinned, his giant teeth exposed like a bad dog’s, a broken one gleaming in front. “Hey, dude, how’s it hanging?” he said. “You’re the old fart who hit me with his hat.” T.R. reached up to scratch the scab on his eyebrow where I had cut it with the jab. Nobody had taken out the stitches yet. One came away with T.R.’s dirty fingernail. “Let me buy the drinks,” he offered.

  “You’re too big to argue with,” I said. T.R. laughed wildly, but Sughrue didn’t crack a smile. Not even when I introduced him, as usual: Sugh, as in sugar; and rue, as in rue the fucking day.

  The greasy bartender came over to tell us that if we were going to fight he wouldn’t serve us, but when T.R. grinned at him as if he were a bar snack, the bartender bought the first two rounds. So we drank a bit, chatted about bar fights we’d won and lost. Except Tommy Ray couldn’t remember losing any.

  “How’s the tit?” I finally asked. T.R. explained that the stitches kept tearing out, which is why the doctor put him in the body cast. Then he added with a grin that it was one bad scar but he was having trouble deciding what kind of tattoo to have around it.

  “Dripping blood,” Sughrue said under his breath. But T.R. heard him and said he’d already rejected that one. “Teeth, I think,” he said, then wondered where my hat was, how it had weathered the tussle. Soon it became clear that he admired my Borsalino. I went to the car and made him a gift of it. Even though it perched on his huge close-cropped head like a beanie, he kept it. I could always get another hat, like a lawyer or a gun.

  “Hey, you seen Rocky around?” I asked.

  T.R. gunned his tequila, then sloshed a large measure of beer into his mouth. “Shit, dude,” he said slowly, “Rocky’s really mad at me. For hittin’ you. You bein’ a retired officer of the law and all. He said if you wanted to push it, I’d be doin’ hard time right now. So these days, when Rocky comes around, I got to take off, go someplace else.” Then Tommy Ray shook his head sadly. “But he don’t come around much anymore.”

  “Why’s that?”

  “He’s inna hospital,” Tommy Ray said seriously, poking his finger into his mouth to touch the broken tooth. “Might lose his hand…”

  “Jesus Christ,” was all I could say.

  —

  “Worse than a snakebite,” Rocky said, nodding toward his right hand propped up on thin hospital pillows. “And my own little brother, too. Ain’t that the shits. God knows where he had that mouth.” Then he paused. “Doc says he might have to take the finger. Maybe the hand.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “You didn’t have to step in.”

  “Yeah, I did,” he said. “Family. And what the hell. I knew better.”

  The little television on the wall murmured as Jeopardy came back after the commercial break. Rocky turned the sound up with his left hand. His right was wrapped in a gauze ball the size of a melon with a drain hanging out and an antibiotic drip plugged into the inside of his elbow. As we watched, he muttered the questions under his breath. He knew most of them, too. Like Sughrue usually did. It made me wish Sonny had come inside, but he said he’d had enough of that particular hospital, even if it had been the scene of his marriage.

  During the commercial break before Final Jeopardy, I told Rocky that I’d paid his hospital bill.

  “What the fuck did you do that for?” he asked.

  “I don’t know,” I admitted. “An old friend of mine says I have a too finely developed sense of responsibility. Whatever, it’s done.”

  Rocky thought about it, then shook his head. “Shit, it’s not even T.R.’s fault. I knew the fucker was infected. But I was down in Culiacán setting up a run.” Then he stopped. “Into California, man. I don’t shit where I live. Besides, it’d be embarrassing for one of my brothers to have to pop me…

  “After it was set, I got to drinking tequila and sampling the product, ignoring my fucking hand. Doc says that might’ve done it. So it’s nobody’s fault but my own. No reason for you to pick it up.”

  ?
??Like I said, Rocky, it’s done,” I said. “And I never heard of a dope dealer or a hospital giving the money back.” Rocky laughed shortly. “Besides, I’ve got a favor to ask.”

  “What kind?” he wanted to know. Really wanted to know.

  So I laid it out for him.

  “Shit, man,” he said, “it ain’t like the old days. All these fucking computers, you know. Cops gotta log on and log off and leave an electronic trail all the way. I just don’t know. But I’ll call Jack—he’s pretty tight with the DEA—maybe he can figure a way to do it.”

  “You still at the same place?” he asked. When I nodded, he said, “Must be nice.”

  “It ain’t home.”

  As I opened the door, he said quietly, “Hey, man. Paying that bill, that’ll draw some water with Jack. And thanks.”

  —

  Jack was a skinny wire-cable of a guy wearing a bushy moustache and a ponytail, red-eyed and unshaven. But he looked like his brothers around the eyes, and I assumed he had been working undercover, so I was going to open the door. Then Sughrue demanded some ID, and we nearly lost our help right there. I cooled them off, and we handed over the cheap .38 and told him what we needed. He didn’t like it, but he said he’d try. Then he took five hundred for expenses.

  Jack didn’t get back to us for four days. But we didn’t mind. Sughrue and I spent them quietly, driving up to the Upper Valley in the mornings to jog for an hour along the levee roads along the Rio Grande. Sughrue was in great shape. He could nearly double my distance in the hour, and come back to the Caddy barely sweating. He’d been running in the desert, he said.

  “Getting ready to vamoose?” I said, joking.