The Mexican Tree Duck

by James Crumley

  When the cowcatcher on the engine pulling the 3:12 fast freight to Spokane hit the jukebox, the high thin voice sang one last empty screaming wail that died quickly beneath the thundering steel wheels. The collision filled the snowy night with an explosive rainbow shower of plastic and pot-metal, worthless quarters and inflated dollar bills that covered the pale parking lot like a hard post-apocalyptic rain falling.

  “Absolutely fucking perfect,” I said to Solly. “Hank Snow would be ecstatic.”

  “What the hell, man, I suspect Michael Jackson might have liked it, too.”

  “I don’t care,” I said.

  “I can tell you’re happy, Sughrue,” Solly said, “and I’m happy, too.”

  “Yeah?”

  “You’re happy playing the music critic from hell, Sonny, but I’m glad I don’t have to play your lawyer.”

  “What are you gonna do, counselor? Sneeze my retainer all over the parking lot?”

  Solly grabbed his nose as if he might consider just that, but he laughed as we climbed into my pickup, headed for the happy confusion of darkness and laughter.

  We spent several days arranging various alibis, all of which involved acting as if nothing had happened. We spent some time in Butte, a perfect Montana place to hide—nobody would ever look for you in Butte—then even more time at Chico Hot Springs, where Solly bathed his old wounds while I sought liver damage in the bar. Eventually, though, Thanksgiving was upon us, and we, or Solly to be more exact, decided that we, meaning me, had to return to Meriwether to face, as it were, the music.

  They were playing our song, and this was my dance: civil suits had surrounded me like a tribe of Hollywood Indians. They had all filed: Leonard the Sly’s slick business lawyer, Betty Books from Hong Kong, the railroad, and Mountain States Vending wanted damages for their property. Even the engineer driving the train asked for psychic damages, claiming the collision with the jukebox had caused him to hear strange voices and to see lights in the darkness.

  Criminal charges were forthcoming, the Meriwether County attorney said, just as soon as he stopped laughing.

  That was too much for Solly. He deigned to accept all my cases; on his advice, I became as liquid as dirty dishwater. And about as useful. All my portable goods except my weapons were converted to cash, which somehow all landed in Solly’s pocket. I gave up the apartment where I had lived forever and moved into the basement of Solly’s law firm offices, a building that had served until recently as a mortuary. It wasn’t too bad. I had an embalming table covered with a foam pad for a bed, a tiny hot plate on a baby refrigerator on a coffin stand, and a chance to spend the next ten or fifteen years listening to Solly’s chuckles as I chipped away at my legal fees interviewing witnesses, transcribing depositions, and sweeping up, while we waited, as he said, for some real work, a job worthy of my talents, whatever odd sort they might be.

  Survival came to mind first. Laughter, too, an ability to laugh through whatever vicissitudes life rolled my way, and certainly a willingness to be amazed. For instance, the wonders of Montana weather never cease to amaze me. The winter broke again, and Indian summer visited the scene into deep October. Another long-predicted snowstorm finally arrived two days late and seemed more like the fulfillment of a weather forecast than a prophecy of icy doom. I even learned to sleep among the ghosts of the lately dead, knowing they rested warmly under a cold white mantle. But most amazing of all, Solly actually found me a real job.

  I was doing something disgusting involving scrambled eggs and canned chili—I don’t seem to be especially sensitive to women’s domestic needs out of the bedroom nor do I cook worth a damn, which may explain why I’ve never married—over my hot plate that morning when Solly creaked down the concrete stairs, his step light and jolly for a crippled man, his chuckle absolutely amused.

  “Sughrue, my old friend, you’re going to just love this one,” he said, handing me a business card, “just absolutely love it.” He laughed all the way back up the stairs.

  I glanced at the card. Dablgren’s Tropical Fish and Pet Paradise, it said. I liked it already.

  Dahlgren’s version of Paradise sat on the edge of a section of Meriwether that in other towns would be called “across the tracks.” But since Meriwether, like most western towns, had been developed with an eye to utility rather than aesthetics, everything was just across the tracks or beyond some mystic river or over some other arbitrary line just around the corner from space and time. So we just called it Felony Flats, as a friend of mine had named it back in his days as a deputy sheriff. Cheap rents mean cheap locks, and felons don’t make the best of neighbors. Often it seemed that the entire neighborhood traded material goods and/or spouses every six or eight months, whether they wanted or needed to or not.

  From the look of Dahlgren’s parking lot, littered with new foreign cars, though, I suspected he did most of his business in richer climes. I pulled the Japanese pickup Solly had loaned me in beside the store’s van, a three-quarter-ton Ford decked out in tropical seascapes. It looked a bit odd covered with six inches of fresh snow.

  When I opened the front door and stepped into the soft, bubbling light of the tropical fish section, a slight young woman with a large mouth and a small moustache darted swiftly through the sparklingly clean tanks. She stopped in front of me, her slim body still trembling, and whispered, “Yes-s-s-s,” breathlessly, her pale eyes bulging with the effort. I handed her my last card, a tattered bit, and asked to see Mr. Dahlgren.

  “Which one?” she murmured wetly. I lifted a shoulder as if I might break out in an Australian crawl or a butterfly. She understood, nodding. “I’ll get them,” she said, glancing at my card. “Mr. Soo-goo?” she ventured.

  “‘Shoog’ as in sugar, honey,” I said, slipping my card out of her slick fingers and resisting a sudden urge to chuckle her behind the gills, “and ‘rue’ as in rue the goddamned day.”

  She smiled coldly, exposing an enormous number of very large white teeth, then turned, smoothing her shimmery blue skirt over her tiny hips, and wriggled toward the dark, watery recesses at the rear of the store.

  As I waited, I watched some brightly designed fish wander from one end of a tank to another, a miniature school mindlessly following the lead of the alpha fish. They were nice to watch, but I couldn’t pronounce their name or afford their price. One of the last times my mad father came back to South Texas to visit, he showed up in front of my mother’s shotgun house in a rattletrap pickup. A dark woman with sharp features and quick hands sat in front, a bundle of snot-nosed kids beside her. Occasionally her hands darted at the kids, sometimes cleaning their noses with a dirty thumb, sometimes delivering a sharp crack on the noggin. My father looked slightly embarrassed as he came around the truck, a plastic bag of goldfish in one hand, a bowl in the other.

  “Better than a bunny rabbit,” he explained after he hugged me, “and more likely to survive than colored chicks.” He handed me the gifts. I gathered he thought it was somewhere near Easter-time, which it wasn’t, and I began to understand why my mother called him “a cheap-trick, white-trash mystic.”

  After he left in a cloud of slow dust, heading west one more time, seeking visions again, my mother came out of the house and collected my father’s gifts. The fishbowl became her favorite ashtray, the grave of millions of Viceroy butts, and she dumped the goldfish into the algae-clotted horse trough behind the salt cedar windbreak where they grew large and ugly on a diet of mosquito larvae and dragonflies, where they might still be living now for all I knew, though my mother had long been buried by the Viceroy butts.

  As I peered at the sweeping motions of the tiny fish, I suspected they survived on a more expensive, less useful diet. Before I had time to consider it, the sounds of soft confusion and muttered “excuse me’s” came from the back of the store. I peeked around the corner. Two very large, fat men were stuck in the office doorway with the tiny woman lodged between them. Her eyes seemed ready to pop out of her head, but she slipped one slim hand out, t
hen slithered from between them with an audible plop and rushed toward a nearby tank the size of a deep-freeze. I expected her to dive in, safe at last, but at the last moment she veered into an empty aisle.

  The two men lumbered toward me, their steps raising tiny waves in the tanks, dressed in matching polyester sport tents. They were a pair of giant twins, at least six-six and three hundred pounds apiece, hugely fat but somehow willowy, too, as if their massive flesh rode on green sticks instead of bones.

  “I’m Joe,” one said. “Frank,” the other chimed. “Dahlgren,” they sang, then giggled and offered me oddly delicate hands. Although the boys looked a great deal alike—so much alike, in fact, I could never tell them apart—they had difficulty doing things together. Like shaking hands. I think I shook Joe’s hand twice and Frank’s not at all, but I was never sure.

  “I understand you gentlemen have a problem,” I said, and restrained myself from shouting weight at the top of my lungs, “but Lawyer Rainbolt didn’t fill me in on the particulars.”

  “Particulars,” they said in a jumble, then glanced at each other. After several moments of hesitation on both their parts, both reached into their plaid sport coats and withdrew folded sheets of paper. I took both just to be fair. They were copies of invoices, a long list of names I assumed to be various fish, tanks, and other equipment. The total price came to $5,354.76.

  “Somebody’s mighty serious about their fish,” I said, trying to smile. The Dahlgrens didn’t return it. In fact, they frowned so deeply I thought fat, greasy tears might slide down their downy cheeks. Then one of them handed me a yellow personal check covered with NSF and DO NOT REDEPOSIT stamps. “So what am I supposed to do,” I asked, “repossess a bunch of fish?”

  “Please,” Joe said. “Without violence,” Frank added.

  Rue the day, I thought, giant pacifist twins. Then I looked at the check, as if I knew what I was doing. It had been drawn on a small state-chartered bank one county west of Meriwether. The bank had been fleeced by a California resort developer, forced into receivership, absorbed by a midwestern holding company, then closed. The account in the dead bank was in the name of one Norman Hazelbrook, a vaguely familiar name. Then the comment about no violence made sense.

  “You guys took a check from Abnormal Norman? Are you batshit crazy?” I asked. The boys attempted to look at their feet as they blushed.

  Abnormal Norman Hazelbrook was president and chief executive officer of a biker gang known as the Snowdrifters, a gang made up of misfits and rejects from gangs all over the country. If you couldn’t cut it with the Angels, or were just too disgusting for the Banditos, Norman would take you into his gang. Their headquarters sat at the head of Clatterbuck Creek on the old Moondog mining claim. Norman had purchased the property after he got out of the Oregon state pen, where he was doing time for aggravated assault. The story was that Norman got in a scuffle with an Oregon state patrolman and somehow managed to bite his nose off. Then the fool added grievous insult to massive injury when he chewed it up and swallowed it in front of the horrified officer.

  “Didn’t his rather odd attire give you some idea that Norman might not be exactly an outstanding citizen?” I asked.

  “You know Mr. Hazelbrook, I take it?”

  “I hate to admit it but I know Norman,” I said. Fun is where you find it, right, even if you have to follow your nose. “But I wouldn’t take a check from him.”

  “He was very persuasive,” one offered shyly. “Very,” the other added, glancing over his shoulder as if Norman might be lurking behind the gerbils. “Ah, he ate our entire supply of African leaf fish,” the one I decided to call Joe said. “Then he ate Li Po,” Frank whispered, “swallowed the old gentleman without a gulp. I hesitate to think about his last moments, the horror of drowning in that, that monster’s stomach acids.”

  “I can understand,” I said, “even sympathize. But who’s this Lee Poe guy? Edgar’s little brother?” I know I shouldn’t have laughed, but I thought I hid it quite nicely behind a coughing fit. The fat boys frowned anyway.

  “One of our rarest and finest Siamese fighting fish,” Joe said. “We took the check before his, ah, friends joined in.”

  “Norman never goes anywhere without his friends,” I said, “not even to sushi bars.” The boys frowned again. “But seriously, now, boys. Stop me if I’m wrong, okay? You want the fish back, is my guess, not the money.” They nodded ponderously, jowls trembling. “I might be able to get the money—with a Sherman tank—but I can’t repossess five thousand dollars’ worth of tropical fish from one of the worst motorcycle gangs in America.”

  “Actually, we have a tank,” Frank said softly.

  “Right,” I said, smiling at his little joke, “lots of them. But we need more than that. I take it you took this to the sheriff over there?”

  “He suggested that it was our fault for doing business with people of that ilk.”

  “I wouldn’t know where to begin with these guys,” I admitted.

  “You know him,” Joe said, “you could at least talk to him. We would pay you five hundred dollars just to talk to him.”

  “Cash?”

  “Of course,” Frank said. “Just give us a moment, please, to get the money.” With that, they heaved about, ships spinning in the night, under way for their office, their large buttocks rocking slowly like a gelatinous surf.

  I strolled over to a turtle tank to wait. For the sake of old times, Norman might talk to me, and if I came out of it alive, the five hundred would make walking around Meriwether a lot more fun. Solly had deep pockets but he was reluctant to put his hands into them for my good times. I stared down at the little captive turtles, took a deep breath, thinking perhaps to sigh over my weary plight. Forget it. Never take a deep breath over a turtle tank. Live on fish heads and rice, suck on a wino’s sock, make pancakes with rotten eggs, but never take a deep breath over a turtle tank. By the time I had stopped gagging, the Dahlgren boys had returned with the cash.

  “I want to borrow your van this afternoon,” I said as I counted the bills, “and I want you to write a letter to Solly explaining that all I have to do is talk to Norman and that you promise to cover all my medical expenses as a result of this interview. Fair?”

  “Fair,” they agreed as we shook hands, tiny tears of hope glimmering in their eyes.

  The living quarters of the Snowdrifters had grown organically, in the same way fungus grows in a bachelor’s refrigerator. They had started with a couple of converted school bus campers backed up to the old mine shacks. Then Norman got middle-class pretensions. He had a log house built into the hillside in front of the old Moondog shaft. Then bit by furry bit everything became connected, and whatever members of the gang were in residence at any one time seemed to live wherever it suited them. One big happy family. Some of them, more than you would think, had jobs. Some even had families and had built houses away from the main complex for their old ladies and children. The sixties seemed alive and well up Clatterbuck Creek, if a little gray and dull and semi-communal, but I knew that however much fun and polite these guys could play, they could also play rough given the slightest reason.

  I wouldn’t want to burn them on a drug deal, or try to enforce the county zoning laws, that’s for sure. The county sheriff, who had been repeatedly reelected since the early sixties, occasionally made noises about cleaning up the mess up there, if only the county attorney would give him the papers, but it was just noise. I knew some DEA types and some state narco boys who were convinced that the Snowdrifters ran an amphetamine factory in the old mine shaft, but they were part of the same group of law enforcement turkeys who promised to rid the county of drugs by … well, by sometime … and who lied to the press about the value of the few drug busts they made. Besides, Norman might look funny, but he could count on his fingers and toes, and he hadn’t taken anything but misdemeanor busts for fights and traffic violations since his release from Salem. And if the truth be known, I had worked for Norman a few times ridin
g shotgun on deals and runs. I remembered him as half-good company, the times almost fun. Except perhaps for the last time, when we went off the top of Rogers Pass in a stolen green Saab with a trunkload of AK-47s. That’s another story, though.

  Norman also had the best illegal satellite video system in western Montana, which I had occasion to watch, but Norman’s main fault seemed to be the ease with which he got bored. After the satellite dish came video games, which irritated me a little, and after the video games came the white rats. They didn’t bother me—they were oddly affectionate—but Norman took to getting stoned and taking potshots at them with a Ruger Blackhawk .44 magnum, and rumor had it that he occasionally bit their heads off for effect. I didn’t believe that. If I had, I might have been nervous.

  When I telephoned, Norman’s longtime old lady, Midget, shouted for him. I heard him shout back, “Tell the old fart to come on out. We’ll twist one, have some fun like the old days.” Then I heard wild laughter, the ringing crash of gunfire, nameless squeals.

  By the time I wrestled the Paradise van up to Norman’s gate, I thought about being nervous, even thought about giving the money back. Some clients think private eyes have a code, something like never quit or seek justice whatever the cost or punish the guilty whoever they might be, but the code is probably more like never give the money back. So I leaned on the horn, the chain-link gate rolled back, and I drove toward the end of the canyon over the rough, snowy track. As I came around the last corner. I could see Norman sitting in the school bus that served as one of his front entrances. He had started without me. A cloud of smoke shrouded his head, he cradled an AK-47 in his arms, and his smile glowed in the snowy light.

  When I trudged up to the bus door, Norman levered it open. “You got them fat boys stashed in that fish van, Sughrue?”