The Final Country

by James Crumley

  “Leave my poor old dead Granny out of this,” he said, his smile unbroken. “An old buddy of mine in D.C. whistled a little bird song in my ear last week. You’re about to have tax people all over you like stink on a dead hog’s ass.”

  “That’s not a problem,” I said, hoping I wasn’t lying. At least not to myself.

  “Not a problem? Tax people are always a problem,” he said. “They can bury you, and nobody can do a thing about it. And there’s some suggestion that the little whoredogs are sittin’ in your bar as we speak.”

  I didn’t say anything. I guess I didn’t have anything to say. I just stared north like some dumb beast, not really looking at the dark bank of clouds moving down the long, empty plains toward me. Another goddamned norther.

  “And speaking of whores? Any luck finding that woman for Sylvie Lomax?” he said. “If I were in your boots, son, I’d look for a double dose of clean money, and all the influential friends I could find. Hayden Lomax draws a lot of water around here. And I can guarantee that she draws a lot of water with him.”

  “I’ve been back and forth across five states and came up empty.” I wasn’t sure why I lied to him, but I had promised myself that once Molly told me what the hell this was all about, I’d see her home safely.

  “Well, if you find her, don’t tell my big brother. I understand that he’s still got the bejesus hots for her,” he said, and jerked his dimpled chin at Tom Ben’s pickup sitting in front of his house, then he laughed long and loud, the laughter guttering on the rising north wind like a dying candle.

  “I’ll keep that in mind,” I said, thinking that, given his history, it was a strange thing to say. And I wondered how Travis Lee knew about the incident. Unless Betty had told him.

  “Well, you call me now,” Travis Lee said, “sooner rather than later.” He stood up abruptly, slapped me on the shoulder again, then headed for the back door of his house. “You want a real drink?” he said.

  “No thanks,” I said. “Not right now. And thanks for the warning.”

  “My pleasure, son. You’re a stranger down here,” he said, “and Texas hospitality is the rule, not the exception.”

  * * *

  When I climbed out of the pickup in front of Tom Ben’s dairy barn, I could hear the laughter cracking against the metal walls. The light, fading behind the rolling storm, had drawn the shine from the steel, leeching it to an ashen gray. Inside, in the corn crib, Tom Ben sat on a milking stool and Molly on her cot, her long hair combed out and her face made up. They huddled over a bottle of Jack Daniel’s, laughing and slapping their knees. Tom Ben’s glass was as dark as raw molasses, but Molly’s was very light.

  “Wow,” she said as I came in. “My master returns.”

  The old man stood up quickly, stumbling a bit, a guilty boy’s grin lopsided on his unshaven face. “Hell, Milo,” he said, “I just thought I’d check on the girl.”

  “Thanks,” I said. “I appreciate it.”

  “Well, I best be headin’ out to the house,” the old man said as he picked up the half-empty bottle of bourbon.

  “I’ll give you a hand,” I said, but the old man turned on me.

  “I got every place I ever started to go, boy,” he said quickly. “One of them was back from the Yalu River. Ever hear of that fucking place, boy?”

  “Yes, sir,” I said. “I spent part of a spring staring in that direction once.” Then watched the old man wobble out the door and into the dim evening. I guess I could see my legs wobbling in my future. He was only twelve years older than me. Then I looked at Molly.

  “Don’t look at me,” she said. “I didn’t invite him in.”

  “I’m sure you didn’t,” I said. “But one more of those drinks, honey, you would have had to help me carry him out.”

  Molly held up her foot with the shackle on it, smiling like a child. “We could work something out.”

  “Don’t tempt me.”

  “So what did you find out, Mr. PI? When can I go home?”

  “Where the hell do you call home?” I said.

  She looked briefly puzzled. “Vegas, I guess,” she said. “I’ve got some business there.”

  “I’m sure you do,” I said. “You want some Mexican food?”

  “What?”

  “You want some Mexican food for dinner?” I said. “I’ve got one more chore to do before dark, then I’ll bring you some dinner.”

  “And some cold beer?” she said. “Can’t eat Mexican food without cold beer.”

  “Sure,” I said, then checked the locks on her shackle.

  “You’ve changed my diaper and you still don’t trust me?” She sounded almost hurt.

  “Not much,” I said, then locked the door to the corn crib, and then the barn door.

  * * *

  As I leaned on Betty’s gate in the rising north wind, it seemed like a hundred years instead of five since the first time I stood there. But it’s always that way when things go bad between two people. The first time I had leaned on her gate, she held a pistol on me. But she let me inside that time. This time she just looked at me with dead eyes, holding back the three-legged lab, Sheba, who had the slobbery tennis ball in her mouth.

  “What the hell do you want?” she said flatly.

  “Thought I’d see how you’re doing.”

  “As you can see, I’m fine,” she said. “You brought that fucking woman back down here, didn’t you,” she said. “I told you not to do that, I told you to let the law handle it. You didn’t do that, did you? No? So what do you want?”

  “I guess I came to see if I could heal the breach.”

  “It’s long past that time,” she snorted. “You chose your life, Milo, now you can sleep in it,” she added, then turned away, pulling the whining dog behind her as she walked back to the house.

  It would be pretty to say that the cold rain and the biting wind started as I climbed back into the Beast, but the norther held back its sharp teeth and hard rain until I got back to the barn.

  * * *

  The wind and rain rattled the barn and the small milk-house heater roared as Molly and I shared the food from Taco Cabana and a six-pack of cold Negra Modelo.

  “You know what that old man told me?” she said.

  “Hard to imagine.”

  “He said that he had hated the cold ever since he had carried one of his dead buddies until his body froze solid as a cedar post,” she said. “Why would he tell me something like that? And what was he talking about?”

  “Tom Ben was a Marine company commander in the Korean War. He was proud of it. And maybe he was trying to impress you.”

  “Oh,” she said as if she wasn’t quite sure where Korea was. Hell, I wasn’t quite sure either and I’d been there for almost three months before the broken collarbone got me out of combat and into a hospital, and some doctor suggested that I wasn’t really eighteen. “Why would he want to impress me?”

  “Who knows,” I said. “Tom Ben’s a tough old bird, but maybe he was trying to get in your pants.”

  Molly giggled for a second, then suddenly became serious. “Can I tell you something?”

  “Sure.”

  “It’s a lot different meeting him like this, instead of on the job.”

  “Maybe it’s you that’s different,” I said.

  Molly paused for a moment, tore off a piece of brisket, and held it in front of the heater. “You’re always trying to look inside my head,” she said. “I’m not sure I like it.”

  “That’s my job,” I said, remembering what Betty had said at the gate.

  “Do you like it?”

  “Not always,” I admitted. “How about you? You like your job?” Then I paused. “I’m sorry. I’ve no right to say something like that.”

  But she didn’t answer. We finished our meal in silence, then a couple of beers and cigarettes. When she finally spoke, it was to ask if the shower in the corner of the barn had any hot water. I told her it did.

  “Do you trust me enough t
o let me take a shower?”

  “That’s the wrong question to ask, lady,” I said as I unlocked the shackle from her ankle. “There’s soap and stuff on the shelf,” I added as she picked up a clean pair of sweats and a T-shirt, then walked over to the dark corner where the shower stood. I tried not to watch as she slipped out of the sweats and under the rushing water, her long silken body shining darkly in the shadows. In spite of everything, she was still the most beautiful woman I had ever seen, and I could not stop looking at her, not while she showered, not while she came back to the crib to brush out the long, black ribbons of her hair, the soft weight of her breasts bobbing beneath the T-shirt. Finally, I busied myself unrolling two down sleeping bags, one on her cot, the other on my pad.

  “It’s going to be chilly tonight,” I said. “This wet Texas cold seeps into your bones.”

  “You know,” she said softly, paused with her face turned to me, the brush still in her thick hair. “You know, of all the men I’ve conned in my life, you were the hardest.” Then she touched me on the forehead softly with the brush handle. “Of all the men I conned, you believed me the most.”

  “I guess I’ve always been a fool,” I said. “How hard did you sting Paper Jack?”

  “Thirty or forty grand,” she said, yawning. “I don’t remember the actual figure.”

  “How?” Reminded that yet another Texan had lied to me.

  “Probably promised to make a single copy video just for him,” she said. “Sometimes I block the details of a job.”

  “Why?”

  “Why what?” she said. “I did it for the money. You think I want to be a whore all my life?”

  “No,” I said. “Why Paper Jack?”

  “He slugged some old guy at a poker table in Vegas,” she said calmly. “They were going to kill him, but somebody talked them into just spanking his billfold.”

  “I guess they thought he got what he deserved.”

  “Given the guy he hit,” she said, “he’s damn lucky to be alive.” Then she paused. “You’re sleeping here again tonight?”

  “You’re my only lead.”

  “Then you’re shit out of luck, man,” she said, but she was smiling.

  When she finished with her toilet, I locked the shackle around her ankle, snapped off the lights, and we shared a few drinks of Scotch in the light of the milk-house heater almost without conversation, then slipped into our beds.

  Later that night I had a version of the dream, the one where I stood beside her cot. This time, though, she reached her hands down from the cot, took my hands, and pulled me into the cot with her, saying, “Get in here, you old fart. It’s cold down there.” But this time it was no dream. I just had to act as if it was one to live with myself. Then I blamed the Scotch for making me open the cocaine and the shackle, then the cocaine for Molly, then I blamed myself for everything. But for a few hours the dead kept their eyes closed and the living shut their flapping mouths. And the dream lived. For the moment.

  * * *

  Although the storm still loomed cold and ashen outside, it was nearly bright noon when the nightmare began. When the scrambled cell phone began to ring, I untangled myself from Molly, then stumbled around the corn crib until I found the phone in my war bag.

  “What the hell,” I muttered.

  “Milodragovitch,” an oddly familiar voice shouted, “I’ve got your fuckin’ nigger, I want my whore back.”

  “Shit,” I said. Molly looked up at me from the cot. “What? Who is this? What are you talking about?”

  “Listen to this, you asshole,” the voice said, then I heard a grunt of pain, as if somebody had been hit with a truck. “We’re standing here in North Las Vegas, asshole,” the voice came again, “and your nigger’s head is in a vise. If she ain’t back here in forty-eight hours, I’m going to take a hammer to his face until he looks like crawdad shit. Not even his Momma will recognize his body. Of course it won’t matter because she’ll be fishbait floating in Lake Mead. Forty-eight hours, dickwad.” Then the connection was broken.

  “What’s up?” Molly asked.

  “Your buddy, Jimmy Fish, has got a friend of mine and his mother,” I said, “and he’s going to butcher them if I don’t bring you back. He claims you’re his whore.”

  “Oh God,” she said, “that little fuck will kill them,” then buried her face in her hands. “What are you going to do?”

  “Put your clothes on,” I said, then found my pants, dug out Fresno’s card, and dialed the number. It took a few minutes to argue my way past secretaries and into the august presence of himself.

  “Mr. Milodragovitch,” he crooned, “what can I do for you now?”

  “You can earn your money for a change,” I said, then explained before he could interrupt.

  * * *

  The next four hours clicked by like the passage of death beetles. Molly and I drank coffee, chewed on oranges, and smoked like wood stoves. But neither of us said an extraneous word, just waited quietly. When the cell phone rang, it sounded as if we were trapped in a bell tower, as the ringing crashed off the metal walls.

  “Milodragovitch,” Fresno said.

  “I’m here.”

  “Well, I don’t know exactly what happened, but it went okay.”

  “What the hell’s that mean?”

  “The McCraveys are okay. Not fine, but okay. Red has a bunch of scrapes and bruises. And his mother had some kind of heart spell, but the paramedics said it’s nothing serious. But Mr. Jimmy Fish, he’d been watching too many of his own movies.”

  “Yeah.”

  “I don’t know why, but he decided to shoot it out with me and my boys. Tossed his crutch aside and grabbed for his piece,” Fresno said. “I took a chance and put one in his shoulder. Little fucker dropped the piece, but before he hit the floor, one of the goons with him — some slick Frenchman, Red says — put one in Jimmy’s head, then threw his piece down and slipped out the back door. I don’t fucking know how he got away, but he did.”

  “Are we covered?” I asked.

  “As far as I can tell, the two other guys don’t speak English. So we’re covered. I stuck one of our alarm shields on the outside of the building,” he said. “Jimmy Fish had a gunshot crease in his thigh, but everybody around here knows that he did that himself. So as long as your friends keep their mouths shut, you’re covered.”

  “Can you get the cell phone to Red?”

  “I’ll run it by the hospital. He rode along with his Mom.”

  “Thanks,” I said, then asked him how much I owed him. He said he’d send a bill. I said I’d send a check.

  “I guess I should thank you for more than the money,” he said.

  “Why?”

  “I don’t know. After the way we met, I guess I should thank you for even thinking that I might help.”

  “You didn’t seem all that happy about your situation,” I said. “I had to hope I read you right.” Once again, asking for help seemed to have worked out.

  “Maybe someday you’ll tell me what’s going on,” he said, “but thanks anyway.” And we left it like that.

  “Jimmy Fish is dead,” I said as I turned to Molly.

  “I guess I can go home then,” she said.

  “What?”

  “I don’t know anything, man. Jimmy Fish set up the job on you,” she said. “Hell, he’s been getting me jobs since he turned me out running cons. One of his so-called buddies — Vegas, Hollywood, or Richboy Land — would want to fuck a guy up, and I’d be the instrument of revenge.”

  “Isn’t that just fucking lovely.”

  Then Molly explained just how lovely it had been.

  Jimmy Fish and Rollie Molineaux had been childhood buddies, had grown up together, and gone to work roughnecking offshore out of Morgan City to support their garage band habit. They had been working on the rig floor together the day the backup cable on the cathead tongs broke and snapped Rollie’s arm off clean as a police whistle. They had gone into the bar business with the
insurance settlement. Rollie became the world’s best one-armed bartender. Jimmy discovered that nobody wanted to listen to him sing, but he had a real talent for handling hecklers, running whores, and setting up cons. Even during his run as a semi-famous comic and character actor, Jimmy Fish couldn’t stop the gangster life.

  “He never recovered from the fact that he wasn’t going to be the Cajun Frank Sinatra,” Molly said. “He always thought the audiences hated his act and him, that they were just laughing at him, so the gangster life gave him a way to be in charge. Running drugs and whores and cons.”

  “Sounds like a sweetheart.”

  “Except for the fact that he sort of raped me when I was thirteen, he had his moments,” she said softly. “Sort of.”

  “Sort of?”

  “Oh, hell,” she sighed. “I was a goofy, gawky teenager, and he was Rollie’s best friend, almost a member of the family, and sort of a celebrity, and we’d been drinking wine, so maybe I flirted with him a little bit. He’d bought Rollie a fishing boat, and I think maybe they were running a little coke or something for somebody, so one night when Rollie hadn’t made it back yet… I don’t know. You know what they say, shit’s what happens while you’re waitin’ for life to start.”

  “That’s what they say, I guess.”

  “But I don’t think they really know,” she said, then released a bark of laughter, short and sharp as if she was biting off a sob. “But what the hell, man, he paid for college all the way through my first year of law school, and he didn’t bother me too much, then…”

  “Then?”

  “Oh, hell, the usual story. Some rich guy I was datin’, he OD’d one night and suddenly I was in the middle of a cocaine bust I couldn’t skate,” she said slowly, “without help from Jimmy and his connections, then suddenly there didn’t seem any sense in finishing law school, right, and I wasn’t skinny anymore, so I started taking my clothes off for a living, and believe me I made a good living … until Jimmy showed me how to make a better one.”

  “When did you start running cons?” I asked.

  “It seems like a long time ago,” she said. “A hundred years. Jimmy turned me out on the cons, but I had already turned myself out as a whore. It started out as a way to get even with a john, a rich bastard who had fucked me over badly, then the next thing I knew, I discovered a talent for it…”