“Enough to last me a lifetime,” I said.
“Eight!” Gail shouted, storming around the room, pounding floorboards with her boots. “Eight? What’s eight against eight hundred thousand? Eight million? The whole goddamned planet earth, huh?”
“You sound like an officer I knew in Korea,” I said.
“Well, by God, it is a war.”
“Right now,” I said, “I’m having trouble choosing sides.”
“We chose you, darling,” Cassie said, “because it’s your war too, because—”
“Bullshit,” I said, “you chose me because I was convenient, because you knew I could be manipulated. With your kind of money, you could have hired a battalion of lawyers and private detectives.”
“They did try,” Carolyn said from the far side of the room, “but nobody was very interested in taking on a multinational corporation.”
“And how did you do, darling?” Cassie asked.
“Not very well,” I said. “I got out alive. You people are still alive. Call it a draw.”
“A draw?” she said. “Didn’t you find out anything?”
I lied to keep from laughing. “Hell, lady, I’m still not real sure what this was all about.”
“You want to know what it was all about?” she said. “Well, let me get my coat and I’ll show you what it was all about.”
“In a minute,” I said. “I’ve got two other things to settle first.” I took out an envelope and tossed it into Sarah’s lap. “There’s your credit cards, ma’am, my expense sheet, and your bill.”
“Her bill?” Cassie protested as she stood up. “For what?”
“I did what I was hired to do,” I said. “You’re the bitch in the rented car, which is all she needs to know, and the guy in the yellow Toyota, his name is, or was, John Rausche. A long-haul trucker. An ex-con. He got blown to pieces over in Elk City, Idaho, then fried.” I turned to Cassandra Bogardus. “And, sweetheart, you killed him with your little dumb-ass number in Seattle, you killed him the first time you let him touch that great body of yours…”
“Oh, for Christ’s sake,” she murmured, “that little worm.”
“You should be more careful where you put your mouth, lady,” I said, and Cassie shuddered. “By the way, Mrs. Weddington, you’ll also be getting a rather large bill from Haliburton Security. They spent some time looking for you after you and Gail pulled your cute little disappearing act.”
“I’ll take care of it, Bud,” she said, her face so gray I hoped she’d live long enough to get it done. “I’ll take care of everything.”
“Well, are you quite through?” Cassie asked.
“One more thing,” I said. “I want my bearskin back.”
“It’s still in my trunk,” Carolyn said.
She came across the room, still not looking at me, and Cassie and I followed her to the door. Behind me I heard Sarah moan my name, the clatter of Gail’s boots as she went to comfort the old lady. This foolishness had claimed enough victims, so I went back.
“It’s okay, Sarah,” I said as I touched her wet cheek. Gail tried to shoulder me out of the way, but I didn’t move. “It’s okay,” I repeated. “What’s done is done. In a couple of weeks, I’ll call. We’ll have tea and crumpets. Okay?”
“Please try to forgive me, Bud.”
“Ah, there’s nothing to forgive,” I said. “Your heart was in the right place. I just wish you hadn’t chosen me.”
“Me too,” Gail complained. “Nothing got done.”
“Hush,” Sarah said, her finger lifted, “hush, child.”
When I got ouside, Carolyn and Cassie were struggling angrily with the grizzly hide. I gave them a hand. We got it out and into the bed of my pickup.
“Well, are you ready now?” Cassie said sharply. “To see what this is all about.” I nodded sadly. “We’ll need snowshoes,” she said.
“Nope.”
“Nope?” she said, her hand to her cheek.
“The illegal dump in the old mine above Camas Meadows,” I said, “has been cleaned out.”
“Cleaned out? How do you know?”
“I went up yesterday,” I said.
“But why, what…”
“I had a list of their illegal dumps in seven Western states,” I said, “and I made a deal.”
“A deal?”
“Right,” I said. “I traded that list for cleaning up that one dump…”
“It wasn’t yours to trade,” she said, her face pinched with anger.
“Sure as hell was,” I said, “and I traded it for my life, Sarah’s life, Gail’s, even your piss-ant, rich-girl ass.”
“But why—”
“I had some notion I might like to see your goddamned face, lady, when you saw the empty mine galleries, but the truth is, it’s not worth it.”
“What’s not worth it?”
“Spending two hours in the same pickup with a piece of trash like you.”
“You son of a bitch!” She drew back and slapped me as hard as she could. I let her. It felt all right, washed the last bit of her out of me, the memory of her touch.
Carolyn turned around, pivoted neatly from the hips, and dropped Cassandra Bogardus in the snow with a perfect right cross. We laughed as we watched her scramble to her feet, moving backward, frightened by the small violence and the tiny trickle of blood out of the corner of her mouth, her green eyes gone gray, no glitter left.
“And you know, Cassie,” Carolyn huffed, “if you don’t do what Milo said about the children, I’m going to follow your ass around and knock you down every day for the rest of your stinking life.” Cassie nodded dumbly, then fled into the safety of the mansion. “God, that felt good,” Carolyn said, her flat cheeks flushed. “If only I had done that when I first found out what sort of crazy crap she had in mind.”
“I knew I was being taken for a ride,” I said, “but I hoped she would be at the end of it.”
“Men,” she snorted. “Ah, but what the hell, I was a fool too. Once you wouldn’t turn loose of your—that is, your grandfather’s—timberland, she convinced me that whatever happened to you was your fault. I’m sorry.”
“Not as sorry as I am, love.”
“What about it?” she said suddenly.
“What about what?”
“The deal I offered you the last time I saw you.”
“I’ve made my last deal,” I said, “but I appreciate your persistence.”
“We’ll get it eventually, you know,” she said. “You can’t get a draw with the government.”
“Over my dead body,” I said.
“God, I should have broken the rules,” she said, “stayed at your house all night that night, fucked you to a frazzle, then gotten you to give your word at a weak moment. Isn’t that the way it works out West? You can take a man’s word to the bank?”
“Trigger’s stuffed, love, and Gene Autry owns a baseball team,” I said. “Now that the dump is gone, you people shouldn’t have any trouble making a trade for the C, C&K sections, but you have my word on this—you’ll never get my grandfather’s land.”
“You’re going to be bitter about all this, aren’t you?” she said, reaching for my cheek with her cold hand. “I like the beard.”
“You bet your sweet ass, lady, I’m going to be bitter.”
“How long?”
“As long as it takes.”
“So what now?”
“Chores,” I said, brushing her hand away, “then I’m heading south, down to Mexico, try to grow old peacefully in the sunshine.”
“So it’s all been for nothing?”
“Almost nothing,” I said. “An EPA official down in Denver recently died, a fellow named Sikes. Get some of your hot-shot environmental lawyer buddies to check into his estate and his recent decisions. That should keep them busy for a few years, maybe even clean up some garbage in the process.”
“Sikes,” she said. “Thanks.”
“For nothing, babe.”
“Howe
ver you want it, Milo.”
“And, babe…”
“Yes?” she said, pulling the hood of her jacket up against the cold.
“Nothing,” I said, and we left it like that, went our separate ways, either because of or against our better judgment. You always hate to lose a good woman, one you might love for a long time, but she wanted to save the wilderness to look at it, and I wanted…well, I wasn’t sure anymore what I wanted, maybe just an end to confusion.
—
When I knocked on Tante Marie’s door in the fading, ashen dusk, she answered it wearing a long woolen robe with curlers in her hair. Over her shoulder, I could see the television set. A Hawaii Five-O rerun. She recognized me, saw me glance at the program, then said, “One must study corruption to defeat it.”
“And take the occasional rest from the crusade,” I said.
She nodded without smiling. “Can I help you?”
“You already have,” I said, handing her the deed to my grandfather’s three thousand acres, “and this is my end of the bargain.”
“What is it?”
“Camas Meadows,” I said, “where the bears used to dance.”
“What?”
“That was the deal,” I said, “Camas Meadows for Charlie Two Moons’ name.”
“I’ll be damned,” she said, digging her glasses out of her pocket.
“Sometimes even coyote tongue speaks without joking,” I said, “and there’s no need to thank me.”
“I hadn’t planned on it,” she said, her eyes like wet black stones.
“Goddamn,” I said, “you knew about the mine, didn’t you?”
“The mine?” she said blandly.
“Jesus Christ, lady,” I said, amazed, “when the gunfire starts, I want to be on your side.” But her small smile told me I hadn’t bought a thing.
“Let me tell you a story,” she said. “Once upon—”
“Lady,” I interrupted, “I’ve heard enough stories lately to last me a lifetime.”
She was too busy rechecking the deed to pay much attention to my departure, but as I turned the pickup up the South Fork Road to spend one last night among my grandfather’s ashes, I saw Tante Marie in my rear-view mirror. She still stood on the front porch, and at a distance it seemed as if she was dancing.
—
The road had been plowed over the divide and down to the old mine, but it was still hairy. I liked the idea of the crooked bastards out in the snow, putting tire chains on garbage trucks, but I suddenly realized that it was just some working stiffs out wrestling in the cold while the real bastards sat in warm offices on leather chairs. They hadn’t done a great job at the mine, but at least the leaking drums had been removed and some of the toxic puddles shoveled up. Not a victory, not even a draw. God knows how much poison had already seeped into the ground water.
I parked at the mine and got out my snowshoes and pack. I set the grizzly hide on a pair of plastic saucers, then hiked like a coolie down the unplowed road to the edge of the meadow. There, I dug a great circular pit in the blue, glowing snow, then built as big a fire as I could find deadfall wood. I sat for several hours as the fire burned down, listening to the wilderness. The nearest wolf was probably in Canada, and the coyotes snuggled warm in their dens, so that night was silent except for the crackle of the fire. When it had burned down to embers, I shoveled them aside, then dug a shallow hole in the thawed earth and rolled the bearskin into it, then built another fire on top. When I had coals again, I baked a couple of potatoes in aluminum foil and grilled a large T-bone steak I had picked up in town. I didn’t have much appetite, though, and threw most of the meal back into the fire, an American offering, a backyard barbecue.
I don’t know what I planned to dream wrapped in my sleeping bag—sweet dancing, perhaps—but if I dreamed, I didn’t remember the visions. When I woke, I felt as purified as I was ever going to feel, so I loaded up and hiked back to the truck.
—
The next week I finished my chores, sold my lot to the first cash buyer, and used some of Tewels’ money to hire the best criminal lawyer in the Northwest for Billy Buffaloshoe and to take Abner goddamned Social Security regulation kept them from the altar, so they took up living in sin. I had a dull, sleepy tea with Sarah and a sullen Gail. Sarah showed me the trust-fund papers. They seemed fine. And she said Cassie was coming around, but as far as I knew she never did. Gail told me that next year there would be a government regulation to prevent the dumping of liquid toxic waste in landfills, but I just laughed at her, tried to explain that they would fight it in the courts until the government backed off. Then it was her turn to laugh, an unpleasant, naive sound that brought tears to Sarah’s eyes.
After that I put Meriwether in my rear-view mirror, heading south with something over forty thousand dollars in my kitty, planning to measure it out slowly in Mexico until I came into my father’s estate.
I detoured through Seattle, though, with five thousand in an envelope for the former Mrs. Rausche. When I parked in front of her house on a dingy Sunday afternoon, John Paul, Jr., in a bright red parka that looked new, and Sally, with a white patch over her eye, were playing some game with rules only they knew, running from one edge of the sagging porch to the other, then freezing in place.
When he saw my pickup, the boy ran out to the driveway and gave me a crisp salute. Then he recognized me, even behind the beard. “You’re a private,” he said shyly, “you’re supposed to salute me.”
“Sorry,” I said and complied. “Is your mother home?”
“She’s gone to the store with Baby Luke,” he said as Sally crashed into his back.
“Will you give this to her?” I asked, and Sally peeked under his arm. “It’s from Captain Rausche’s friends.”
He took the heavy envelope out of my hand, weighed it in his. “Will you tell them ‘Thank you’?” he asked.
“I will,” I said, and we exchanged salutes again.
I went south like a gut-shot deer, breathing hard.
—
My intentions were the best, my reasons endless. My hometown had died inside me, and I craved sunshine and simplicity. I made it as far as Red Bluff, California, where I gave up, turned around, headed home, back into the heart of one of the worst Montana winters in years. Some things you can change, some you can’t. A few months after the government put the regulation against liquid toxic waste in landfill into effect, they suspended it. For further study, or something.
I still have my beard, though, and haven’t had a drink since the night Simmons died. When I see myself in a barroom mirror, I look like a ghost of my former self, and I see myself a lot as I tend bar at Arnie’s across the street from the Deuce, work the day shift and swamp out the bar at night. Sometimes old Abner comes in for a short beer, but not too often because Yvonne gives him hell about it. Sometimes Raoul comes in for a laugh, sometimes the colonel to offer work, which I refuse. Carolyn even dropped by once. Her offer was harder to refuse, but I managed it. The poor postman, who somehow started all this, comes in occasionally, but he has lost his job and his wife, and doesn’t have much to say after the third or fourth drink I turn down. I am not tempted. I live close to the grain, avoid even the appearance of evil, forgive all things, live alone in the tiny swamper’s cubicle beside the alley, keep my nose clean.
I have learned some things. Modern life is warfare without end: take no prisoners, leave no wounded, eat the dead—that’s environmentally sound.
Fifty-two draws closer every day, and with it, my father’s ton of money. So I wait, survive the winters, and when the money comes, let the final dance begin.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
James Crumley was born in Three Rivers, Texas, and spent most of his childhood in South Texas. He currently teaches creative writing at the University of Texas at El Paso and summers in Missoula, Montana. His earlier works include a novel of Vietnam, One to Count Cadence, and three detective novels: The Wrong Case, The Last Good Kiss, and Dancing Bear. Mr. Crum
ley is at work on a novel about Texas.
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