The Final Country

by James Crumley

  The burst of his laughter banged the sides of the building like a twelve-pound sledge. “Mandy Rae. Shit, man, she’s been dead for years. After Duval got shot that night, there was too much heat to work, so she split for France to move into the heroin trade. Perfect business for a bitch like that. When I was in the slam, I heard that the Corsicans blew up her car. She was a real pain in the ass, man, she always had to be running things, to be in charge of everything. Hell, if she wasn’t dead, I’d kill her myself. I know damn well she dropped the dime on me when me and my brother went into business on our own.”

  “I think it’s a quarter now,” I said. “Where’d she get the cocaine?”

  Walker laughed and reached for the bottle, saying maybe we should have a drink. “You think she’d give up her source to a Mandingo nigger like me? Hell, no. Not a chance.” He hit the bottle hard, then looked at me and said, “But you still be wanting something else, don’t you? You one of them unsatisfied white motherfuckers. You think if you know some shit, it’ll make everything better? You don’t know shit.”

  “You might be right. But I think if you’ll come back to Texas with me, Walker,” I said. “And roll over on Mandy Rae, Sissy Duval, and Hayden Lomax, I can help you beat the Billy Long murder charges.”

  “Billy Long’s murder charges,” he said, then laughed for a long time before he did another line, then hit the bottle again. “Fuck the small stuff. Mandy Rae, man, she’s long dead. Hayden Lomax, hell, he owns the world down there, and you couldn’t touch him in a hundred years. And Sissy Duval, she’s just a silly piece of ass. She liked it up the old dirt track even better than her husband did. Fuck her. And all them other cunts.” Then he paused to hit the bottle again. “Billy Long, that racist fucker, he don’t count for nothin’. Nobody gives a shit that he’s dead. I’m clean on that one. I’m clean here. Come spring, I’ll sell all this shit to some Mexicans over in Yakima, then I’ve got some South American plans.” He hit the bottle again. “Look at it from my point of view,” he said, then stood up.

  “That’s what got me in trouble, Walker,” I said. “Looking at it from your point of view. Now I’m thinking I should have just walked away.”

  “Maybe you should have walked away, man. What’s to keep me from poppin’ your ass, then runnin’ it through the rock crusher?”

  “Just me,” I said.

  “Milo,” Molly whispered.

  “By the way, who is that fine lady?” Enos asked. I didn’t tell him.

  “Maybe we ought to forget all this and go,” she whispered, staring at the pistol swinging casually in his hand.

  “Go!” Enos shouted before I could agree with her. “Shit, the party’s just gettin’ off the ground, girl. Hey, girl, let’s see what you got under that other shit.”

  “Don’t fuck with me, man,” I said. “I’ll sic Lomax on your ass.”

  Walker was suddenly no longer interested in Molly. “What’s that you say?”

  “Lomax sent me to look for you,” I said, lying as fast as I could.

  “That’s your bad luck, old man,” Walker muttered. “I ain’t ever doin’ no more time.” Then without another word, Walker backhanded me on the side of the head so hard that I lifted out of the chair and fairly flew across the room, smacked into the side of one of the roaring gas heaters with the side of my neck and shoulder, then bounced hard to the concrete floor. I didn’t have a second to appreciate my scrapes and burns before Walker kicked me in the side with his work boots. I had a moment to feel the left arm and several ribs crack before he stuffed the pistol in his waistband and jerked me upright to smash me full in the face with his giant fist. I felt my nose flatten and several teeth splinter. I guess I should have been surprised that he hadn’t knocked my eyes right out of their sockets. When he picked me up again, at least I got the remains of my nose out of the way of his fist, but he caught me high on the forehead. I rolled over the heater again, then landed on a pile of rock-crusher bits. Then Walker picked me up again. I was done, all my strings were broken, my limbs dangling like broken wings. Piss ran down my leg, shit dribbled whenever it wanted, blood filled my eyes.

  Before he could hit me again, through the billowing fog of shock, I heard Molly scream “No!” Then a sharp pop. I grabbed weakly at Walker’s pistol, but he swatted me away like a gnat, then I heard another crack, followed by an explosion, then he released me. I tumbled to the cold floor as softly as a black feather, glancing off the bulk of the gas heater again, the smell of burning skin rank in the bloody, crooked remains of my nose.

  * * *

  Sometimes you don’t get a chance to say goodbye. Sounds maudlin, but it’s true. I don’t know how long it took Molly to die. The .50 Magnum round had taken her just two fingers to the left of her right hipbone, right in the center of that lovely dimple which I would never taste again, then essentially blown her right buttock off. Even if I’d been conscious, I probably couldn’t have saved her. Enos Walker was beyond saving, too. One of the .22 rounds from the derringer she had stolen out of my war bag and secreted in her purse had glanced off his teeth and harmlessly out of his cheek. The other, though, had gone up his left nostril, and, I suspected, kicked around his brain pan like a marble in a urinal. He probably was dead when he pulled the trigger. No one will ever know. Once I was vaguely mobile, I crawled to Molly but there was nothing beyond her eyes, just that other country where the dead go, and when I held my face to hers, I just stained her beauty with my bloody snot. Then I crawled to the door and into the blizzard, burying myself into a small snowbank beside the shed, just long enough to stop the burning on my neck and back, then staggered to the pickup, and gobbled a handful of codeine. When I stumbled back inside, I struggled into my insulated Carhart’s and pacs, listening to the tiny rat’s teeth of bone grinding every time I moved my left elbow. Next came the first of many hard parts. To make my nose resemble one. It took three tries, even packed with wads of Walker’s cocaine. The result wasn’t anything that my friends would recognize, but it stopped flopping around my face. It didn’t work as well as it once did, either, but I had enough coke left to pack the nostrils, plus some left over to pack into the bloody slots where teeth used to hang out. Then the necessary shit. Somehow I had to get out of there.

  By the time I had taken care of everything, the snowstorm had blown itself out, and the sun sat low in the southwestern sky, hanging just over the snow-packed peaks of the Bridgers, the bare golden ridges of short grass banked by blue clots of snow glittering like frozen rivers. The wind had turned. Icy torrents roared off the Crazies behind me, blasted the afternoon, blowing the tears off my cheeks before they could freeze. South, the Absarokas gleamed with frozen snow and even harder rock, shining distant and dangerous like polar mirages against the clotted sky.

  Welcome home, I thought, welcome fucking home.

  FOURTEEN

  Although it was not yet April, it could have passed for a summer dusk in the real world, except for a small, aimless wind and the lingering chill of the last in a series of wet northers that had plagued the Hill Country winter. The pungent, musky cedar fragrance mingled lightly with the damp but dry limestone wafting on the cool air. The cloudless horizon burned like a distant grass fire. CJ, as Carol Jean Warren said we should call her, stepped out of the front door of Tom Ben’s house as former deputy sheriff Bob Culbertson drove up. She patted my shoulder and tucked my windbreaker closer around my shoulders as if I was some ancient grandfather, and the movement set the rocking chair in motion for a long second. I waited for the black discs and the waves of nausea, echoes of the concussion, that sometimes still came with the rocking, but they didn’t come, so I continued whittling at the scrap of cedar in my hands. I wished her good luck. CJ told me good night, kissed the top of my head, then headed down the walk to Bob’s pickup, her pool cue case cocky over her shoulder. Bob climbed out of his pickup to meet her at the bottom of the walk. They chatted a few minutes standing beside the pickup. With skinny butts tightly packed into jeans, cowboy shir
ts topped by down vests, they could have been siblings. Or lovers. Which I suspected they had become in the weeks they had been working for me. But they showed no sign as they parted. She climbed into his pickup and drove away. Bob ambled up to the veranda, scattering the small goats, then stopped in front of me, smiling.

  “You ready to beat the shit out of somebody, old man?” Out of uniform, Bob had the face of a boy scout.

  I stood up and stretched. The dead man’s ligament in my right knee felt a little stiff in spite of, or because of, the long workout I had endured that morning; I would have sworn that the pins in my elbow ached in the unseasonable evening chill. The skin grafts on my neck and shoulder felt like sun-dried leather. But when I stiff-armed Bob’s shoulder with my right palm, he stepped back, grinning.

  “Who are you calling an old man, kid?” I said. “Besides, we’re just looking for some polite conversation.”

  * * *

  Well, I was old, true enough. A man can’t turn sixty in a hospital bed without feeling old. I was old even before I made it to the hospital in Billings. It took hours and almost all the rest of Enos Walker’s cocaine to organize the scene at the Punky Creek Mine building. At least Carver D said it was nine o’clock his time when I called him on the scrambled cell phone as soon as I reached the back door of the Owl, called to ask him to call my ex-partner to ask him to drive over from Meriwether to help me. Then I pulled up my jacket hood, and hobbled into the bar, almost invisible among the other late night drinkers. The bartender handed me the worthless manila envelope full of worthless truths. I tore it into small pieces and fed it into the toilet. Then I settled into a long wait of nips of cocaine and slow sips of Absolut.

  I’d wanted to carry Molly’s torn body away with me but I couldn’t think what to do with it. Wear it around my neck like the fatal, final albatross of my life, a sign of all my mistakes and foolishness. I didn’t think I was going to need a visible sign of all that. But I did take the Shark of the Moon and hang it around my neck.

  I had used up most of my energy to pile up the meth lab and drag the bodies into the stacks. My attitude toward Enos Walker was oddly benign. Whatever mistakes he had made in his life, I had to admit that my half-assed quest was at least as much for my own benefit as his. I didn’t even complain too much that the son of a bitch weighed nearly three hundred pounds. Getting him under the meth lab was like dragging a live bull calf to a denutting. And when I got him under the end table, I hooked his thumb around the trigger of the Desert Eagle pistol and blew most of his fucking head off. The pathologist, should one ever turn up, would have a hell of a time tracing the path of the .22 round that had bounded around inside his skull like a crazed mouse and scrambled his brains like an omelet.

  I was afraid to drag Molly into the pile, afraid her destroyed leg would rip off her body. I didn’t think I could stand that. So I picked her up, even with my broken arm, then carried her to the table and placed her among the meth chemicals. As the winter dusk settled like an ashen cloud, I closed her eyes and stroked her face until I knew I had to go.

  First, I turned off the gas to the heaters until the flames died, then turned it back on again, and set the crude cigarette and matchbox fuse, and finally staggered out to drive shakily away. I was halfway to Wilsall when the gas-filled building went off. It lit up the sky like a bomb, like the end of the world, and with any luck the natural gas and the ether would burn hot enough and long enough to destroy any fingerprints I might have missed inside the building. Whatever tire prints I might have left on the frozen road would be wiped out by the first rural fire truck up the track.

  During the endless, wandering drive to Livingston, I discovered a long sharp pain in my right knee that somehow I hadn’t noticed yet, plus the disturbing fact that the little finger on my right hand was half its normal size. But it didn’t hurt. I stopped in Wilsall, did another bump of cocaine, and pulled my little finger out of my hand. That got me to the Owl.

  Where I huddled on a stool near the front door, sick with the waste of Enos Walker’s life. I could have saved him — saved all of us — if he’d just given me a chance. Molly’s death had left me as empty as a whiskey bottle in a Hangtown gutter. Whatever she might have been in her earlier life, in my part of it she had been a beauty, a tough, stand-up, fearless partner, and I knew that I would never be able to replace her. Those light blue eyes fading to gray, then into impenetrable, dark distance — that would never go away. No matter how many times I lifted the water glass of vodka, no matter how much shit I stuffed into my broken nose, the black stone was going to hang cold over my heart until the end.

  By driving like a madman, my ex-partner managed to show up from Meriwether just before closing time. He didn’t ask any questions he didn’t want to know the answers to, and dealt with the shit. On the way to Billings, he dumped the weapons, the cocaine, the codeine, and the fake identification into the depths of a deserted construction site in Columbus, followed by a sack of traction sand, a hole where once spring arrived and the cement was poured and the asphalt laid, except for memories, that part of my life would disappear. Then he took most of my extra cash and promised to mail it to Petey, then dropped me down the street from the emergency room entrance of Deaconess in Billings before he drove up to the airport to leave the Cherokee in the rental car lot. He would take the bus to Livingston the next morning, and we would leave no tracks. I wandered over to sit on the curb, stoned and drunk, waiting to die.

  “Tell me about it some time, old man,” was the last thing he said before he drove away.

  I couldn’t tell if it was the cold wind, pain, or just my life that filled my swelling eyes with salty tears.

  * * *

  My insurance was current, plus my checks cleared, and I even had a stash of cash in a hidden compartment in my war bag, and it was Montana so the hospital treated me like a human being, once I was willing to pay for a private room, and the police finally got bored and bought my story that I’d picked up a couple of hitchhikers who’d beaten me senseless and stolen my Caddy at a rest area outside Columbus. Of course, I didn’t have any idea how I’d gotten burned or have the slightest memories who had dropped me at the ER.

  I was a bit more damaged than I had any idea at first. They had to break my nose to reset it, so I could keep breathing through it. That was a pleasant experience. Even deep under the anesthesia I could swear I felt it. Some of the burns were deep enough to require skin grafts, which was about as painful as anything I had ever endured. My left arm had been smashed badly enough above the elbow to require pins to hold the bones together. There was some uncomfortable dental surgery and some new partial plates. And the mystery pain in my right knee turned out to be a torn ACL. They said the easiest and quickest recovery would require the ligament from a dead person.

  “Shit, I’m half dead,” I told them, “and your drugs are shitty, so do it before I change my mind and sue you.”

  They weren’t amused. They hadn’t seen as many dead people as I had recently. Nor did they find it as amusing as I did that the surgery was scheduled for the day I turned sixty. But by the end of February, though, my ribs had knit, and I was deeply and successfully into physical therapy, the grafts had taken, and they had given me a light plastic cast for the arm. Finally, I’d had enough bad food and sterility, and checked myself out against doctor’s advice before the bastards committed me, for drug abuse and a generally bad attitude, to the state hospital over in Warm Springs.

  As I combed my hair that day — completely white now — as I considered my new white beard and my ravaged face — I’d lost twenty pounds during the six weeks in the hospital — I thought perhaps they were right — it occurred to me that I resembled my greatgrandfather a great deal — but my grin was still my grin, and I still had some shit to deal with back down in Texas before I moved on. There is nothing like weeks of drugged fog equally mixed with severe pain and damned expensive bureaucratic torture plus a complete dearth of recreational drugs to make an old boy cranky.
And in spite of Johnson’s quip about the prospect of being hanged in a fortnight wonderfully concentrating the mind, when a man doesn’t care if he lives or dies, the concentration upon revenge acquires a fearful clarity. It shines like the point of a poisoned dagger, shadows as dark and deep as the barrel of a sawed-off ten gauge double-barrel, and echoes like a tornado’s thunder. Just in case my anger wasn’t enough to carry me sensibly through the rest of my time, as soon as I was semi-mobile I had Petey fly up and check me out on a new laptop that connected me to a world of information, that even in spite of all the facts Carver D had dug out for me, I’d never realized existed.

  “You’ve become a fair to middling one-handed keyboard man,” Petey said.

  “Thanks,” I said. “Are you still planning to go to Harvard Business?”

  Petey looked uncomfortable for a second, fiddling with the single piece of ornamental metal left on his head, a small earring. He had taken up normal clothes, too. Today he sported a dark tweed jacket, khakis, and loafers.

  “If I can get Carver to stop drinking,” he said softly. “He’s the only family I’ve ever had.” One winter day, Carver D and Hangas had found the fifteen-year-old Petey passed out in an alley off Sixth Street with only a skateboard for warmth. “I’d hate to leave him, man, but he’s the one who encouraged me to go to school. And thanks to you, I don’t need his money for this.”

  “I’ve been meaning to talk to you about that,” I said. “It’s time to shut our little laundry down.” Then told him about my plans for the bar. “If you and your buddies would make one more haul to the Caymans for me, I’d appreciate the chore. Double your cut.” Petey and his buddies usually went to the bank for me, then came back with legal amounts of cash to wash. “Can you shut down the program from Carver D’s house?” I asked.