The Mexican Tree Duck

by James Crumley

  “They wouldn’t fit,” I said, stepping into the moldering funk of the bus.

  Norman leaned the rifle against the far window and asked, “So what the fuck you doin’ here?”

  “Just trying to make a living, Norman.”

  “Bullshit, man,” he growled, then stretched and yawned, his wild eye roving in its socket. He took a hit off the remains of the doobie, then ate it, fire and all. His grimy hand rubbed at his bearded chin. The hand came back dirtier, if that was possible, without dislodging the pieces of what looked like last week’s anchovy and jalapeño pizza. “You can’t hardly make enough livin’ to pay for your fun.” He laughed. “What was playing?”

  “Some nutless cretin.”

  “Figures,” he said, hugely amused with himself, “homophobic bastard.” Norman watched too many television talk shows on his dish, which might prove that the method of the education is more important than the actual information. “Goddammit, Sughrue, not even in my wildest days, not even in my worst moments, did I ever consider somethin’ like that, somethin’ that—what can I say?—that fuckin’ abnormal,” he said with what seemed to be great admiration. “Wish to fuck I’d thought of it,” he added, then laughed so hard he seemed about to come apart.

  Aside from looking even crazier than he was, Norman seemed to be the only survivor of a genetic disaster, a man of parts, and all the parts from totally unrelated people. His lank greasy hair draped thick and black around a long pale face with light gray eyes and a wispy, almost oriental moustache. His long skinny arms ended in tiny hands; his short legs tried to carry the torso of a large man on feet so tiny a Chinese prince might love them. Then of course there was the eye, always staring with deep interest just over your shoulder into some demented fourth dimension. And the smell, a mixture of stale urine, bad teeth, marijuana, and probably acid rain and crotch rot, that followed him like bad karma.

  Norman’s laughter ended in a terrific fit of dope coughing. He dragged something living from the gravel pit of his throat, then hawked it onto a side window where it quickly froze among others of its kind, then thumbed toward the back of the bus where it connected through a cabin to his log house. “Let’s go twist one, man.”

  I had an attack of fastidious hesitation, but moved quickly along when he raised his arm to throw it affectionately around my shoulders. “Goddammit, Sughrue, it’s a fuckin’ kick in the ass to see you again, my man, remember that fuckin’ time I stuffed that fuckin’ Saab through that snowbank and we flew off Rogers Pass …”

  As he told the story that I remembered all too well, I worked my way through the debris of a particularly untidy life, managed to dodge the double sleeping bag on the bus floor where Norman’s second-in-command, Beater Bob, reclined calm and supine. Bob was as large as both the Dahlgren twins, so heavy he hadn’t straddled a hog in years but rode with the gang on a specially sprung trike with a bench seat and powered by a Volkswagen engine. Bob didn’t seem to be in the bag alone. Someone or something bobbed at his crotch, low grunts slipping forth from the center of the bag.

  “C.W.,” Bob said pleasantly.

  “Bob,” I answered as I stepped aside and tried to hold my breath. Bob had his arms propped behind his head, and I could tell he hadn’t been to the car wash since the cows came home at the beginning of winter.

  The clutter faltered in the cabin behind the bus and died completely, thanks to Midget, in the large living room of Norman’s house. Except for the rats. And the rat turds. The former either coursing about the room in great cinematic stampedes rife with the pitter-patter of tiny feet on the oak flooring, or just hanging out in quivering bunches. The latter crunching under my boots. A large naked woman I didn’t recognize snored in a hammock stretched in front of the stone fireplace across the room. At the far end, Norman’s video equipment sat about like a showroom display, silent and gray. But the near wall, covered with the fish tanks in question, shimmered with movement and light. Midget, a small, hard woman dressed in a baby-doll nightie, sat on a ladder, a fish book in one hand and a box of something dried and disgusting in the other. She seemed to know what she was doing, though. The water in the tanks was as limpid and lively as that in Dahlgren’s Paradise.

  “Hey, C.W.,” she said without looking up, then shook her head and glanced at Norman. “This fish shit is complex, man.”

  “Ain’t that something,” Norman said proudly. “Mary’s my full-time fishbitch.”

  “Norman,” Midget scolded.

  “Sorry,” Norman said. Their relationship must have taken a turn. I’d never known Midget’s given name and never known Norman to apologize for anything. “The royal keeper of the fish,” he amended as he swept a cluster of sleeping rats off a tattered recliner. I perched on the front of an old couch, trying to take a seat that wasn’t moving. Norman drew a packet of smoke out of his overalls pocket and quickly twisted a number the size of a mouse. “So what’s up, Sughrue?” he asked after he lit it. “You come for the money?”

  “The fish,” I said as he handed me the joint. Norman looked as if I had hurt his feelings. “Hey, man, it’s just a day’s work for me, and I’ve already earned it. After me, though, comes the county sheriff and his minions.”

  “Fuck the sheriff and his fuckin’ onions,” Norman said calmly as he took the number from me. “That pustle-gutted pissant bastard shows up on my property, I’ll have Bob squeeze shit-for-brains ’til his head pops like a pimple, then Mary can feed him to the fish.”

  “Now, Norman, you know that’s not right,” Mary said, shaking her head fondly.

  “You get the picture,” he said. Norman offered me the smoke, but I waved it away. “I’m keepin’ the fuckin’ fish, man. I like ’em. A lot. I picked ’em up on orders …”

  “Orders?”

  “From my doc, man,” he explained. “He told me to get them, but I’m attached to the little fuckers now, Sughrue, you wouldn’t believe it …”

  “Don’t believe it,” Mary interrupted. “Norman don’t even know their names, man, I’m the one’s attached. He’s just barely involved.”

  I felt as if I had missed something very important, so I took the number back from Norman and had a healthy hit. I wanted to fit in with the weird. “Your doctor told you to get the fish?” Norman nodded. “What the fuck for?”

  “Ah, shit, man,” he sighed. “I got this ah, you know, this fuckin’ blood pressure problem. Hypertension, you know. Stress-related, they think.”

  “Certainly lots of stress in your business, Norman.”

  “Damn straight. You oughta try runnin’ a business, not a big business but a business, with the kinda creeps I got hangin’ around me. It ain’t easy, man. Somebody’s gotta be responsible, right? So I guess it’s gotta be me. I can’t depend on these other fuckin’ jerks …”

  “Thanks, Norman,” Mary said.

  “Except for Mary, of course,” he continued, “and I’m sorry, man, we been friends a long time, but I’m keepin’ the fish. I guess that’s the bottom line, dude.”

  I kept thinking that there must be some easy way out of this, but since I didn’t know what it might be I said, “I know I shouldn’t ask, man, but what the hell do the fish have to do with your blood pressure?”

  “I always liked that about you, Sughrue. Even when you’re stoned senseless, man, you always ask the right question. You can go back to work for me anytime. Just ask … Where was I?”

  “Fish tanks and blood pressure,” I said.

  “Thanks, man. See, I had these headaches, and the doc said it was my blood pressure so he gave me these tiny little pills but they made my pretty little pecker absolutely fuckin’ useless …”

  “Never was all that useful, anyway,” Mary giggled from the ladder, then she took a hit off a roach, blew smoke across the water, and laughed again.

  Instead of dragging one of the pistols off the end table and killing her, Norman joined her laughter fondly. I took another hit. Quickly. Norman took the number from me, then picked up a rat off t
he arm of the couch and set it on his chest, where he stroked it gently and blew dope smoke softly into its tiny gaping nostrils.

  “So he told me to try fish. I watch ’em two hours ever’ day. Works like a voodoo charm,” he said, then patted his crotch. “Watchin’ them little fucks eats up that stress, man, makes me mellow.”

  As if the idea of mellow worked on him, Norman wriggled his ass, settled his bulk into the recliner, and tilted it back. A loud, painful squeal ripped from the recess of the Lazy Boy. “Oh, shit, man,” Norman groaned. He handed me the roach and the rat, which I took as calmly as if I had been just waiting for the chance to hold them, then he stood up, carefully turned over the chair, and gently dug a damaged rodent from the springs. “Poor baby,” he crooned as he held it in his hand. The rat thrashed around on its broken back, then sunk its teeth into Norman’s thumb. Norman let it. After a moment, he quickly snapped its neck, stroked it with his thumb once more, then tossed it toward the fireplace. It bounced off the fat lady’s hip and into the fire. She neither woke nor sang, but then it wasn’t time yet. “I fuckin’ hate that, man,” Norman said as he righted the recliner.

  “You don’t use them for target practice anymore?” I asked as I handed him his pretties. The rat had been sweetly affectionate as I held it, and I swear it gazed at me with longing as I gave it back.

  “No way, man,” he said. “I’m a changed man, Sughrue, massively mellow.”

  “I’m glad to hear that,” I said.

  Norman stopped petting the rat on his chest and gave me a hard look. Not that mellow, I guess.

  “So maybe we can work something out.”

  “Don’t fuck with me, man.”

  “Maybe if you’d just pay the Dahlgrens, Norman, and maybe let them see what a good job Mary is doing with the fish, maybe visitation rights,” I suggested, “maybe they could help Mary.”

  “Mary don’t need any help, and I don’t want those fat fucks in my house. Can you dig it?” Norman said, his good eye hard and his bad one nearly focused, his voice bottomed out on the line. Then his mood shifted again, quickly, and he mused, “You know what, man? If those fat fucks hadn’t been so scared of me, I might have given them a good check.”

  “Norman, you ate their entire supply of African leap fish,” I said.

  “Leaf fish,” he corrected.

  “And somebody who sounded like their grandfather.”

  “Li Po,” he said. “A Siamese fighting fish. Shit, it was strange having those fish swimming around in my tummy, man.”

  “Norman!” Mary screeched from the tanks, but we ignored her.

  “So the boys were a little scared,” I suggested.

  “They shit their baggy pants.”

  “Well, what would you do if I came in here and bit the heads off your favorite rats?”

  “I wouldn’t be surprised. You always were crazier than me, Sughrue. And never scared of me or treated me like I was a freak,” he said. “That’s why I always liked you … And goddammit I hate it when some fuck treats me like I’m a freak. Hey, man, I’m a human being, you know, and I got fuckin’ feelings like anybody else, so when people are afraid of me, unless I mean for them to be, it makes me weird. Okay?”

  “Well, it’s okay with me, but I think the boys will go to the law.”

  “What do you think I got lawyers for, man? Traffic tickets? It’ll take ’em a year just to get through the gate. Maybe by then my blood pressure will be down …”

  “Fuck your blood pressure, Norman,” I said. We were both sort of stunned, but I carried on in my foolishness. “You fucking criminals are the most self-centered assholes in the world. All you think about is yourself. Think about somebody else for a change. Just give the Dahlgrens their money and let them see that the fish are all right, and all this will go away.”

  “Maybe you should go away, asshole.” Norman had feelings, and I had damaged them. “Out of my house.” He stood up slowly.

  “Norman,” Mary said softly from the fish tanks.

  “I’ll be back,” I said, standing too.

  “Like I said, asshole, you always were crazy.”

  “Keep that in mind.”

  “Don’t get crossways with me and the brothers,” Norman said.

  “Fuck you and the brothers,” I said as I walked toward the door, the skin crawling like rats across my exposed back. But Norman snorted, bitter and tough, and I knew I had walked out this time. Next time, well, who knows about next time.

  As I drove away in the van, I found my hands trembling on the steering wheel. It didn’t feel like fear, though, but some sort of anger, maybe even rage. Norman was just Norman, and I didn’t think I was mad at him. I was just me, on the back side of forty, bedded down on a slab. Not even my own slab.

  The snow-slick roads back to Meriwether gave me plenty of time to consider my life, but sometimes I simply wasn’t interested in my life. So I’d never married, hadn’t had a date in a year, hadn’t slept with a woman in so long I couldn’t remember it, I mean really slept with a woman, but I didn’t seem to care. I might think that the Dahlgrens were ridiculous, but they really cared about their fish. I couldn’t fix my life, maybe I could get their fish back. Maybe that was my life, helping those who could still care, even if I couldn’t. At the moment it didn’t sound like such a bad life.

  When I got back to the store, I found Frank and Joe at a workbench beside the office door, leaning over a panting fish spread-eagled on a scrap of white cotton gauze. Frank held the clown-colored fish as Joe trimmed its dorsal fin with a single-edged razor blade, their gloved hands as carefully delicate as brain surgeons’. I told them what had happened up Clatterbuck Creek. Joe paused to look up at me.

  “Since he seems to care for the fish,” he said, “perhaps we could appeal to his kinder, gentler instincts.” I snorted. “Doesn’t have any, eh?” Frank said.

  “I don’t want to say anything bad about Norman,” I said, “but he is determined to keep the fish, and equally determined not to pay you.”

  “I don’t understand. Why?”

  “Norman’s not to understand, okay? He likes being an outlaw. Hell, so do I, for that matter,” I said. “But he’s not without feelings. I take it that he felt as if you, or somebody here, had treated him as if he were a freak. As Norman said, that makes him weird.”

  The boys exchanged a knowing glance, then Frank said, “Mona,” and Joe blushed. I didn’t want to know. Joe gave his attention back to the fish, sliced cleanly through the fin, then Frank picked up the fish in a gauze net and placed him in a small tank at the back of the bench. Joe held up the bluesteel blade, which glistened greasy as blood in the soft light. “Sometimes I wish we were more like the General,” he said sadly.

  “The General?”

  “Our father,” Frank said. “A man possessed of a violent nature,” Joe added.

  “I believe that’s what people pay me for,” I said.

  “Can you get our fish back?” they asked.

  “I can’t guarantee their safety,” I admitted, “but with enough money and firepower, I can get them back.”

  The twins stood together. Today they wore matching psychedelic sweaters the size of my last bad trip. “We have plenty of both,” Frank said. “If you get our fish back,” Joe said, “we’ll give you five thousand dollars.”

  I nodded. We remembered how badly we shook hands, so we didn’t bother. Frank and Joe grinned at each other.

  “God love the General,” Joe said. “Walk this way, Mr. Sughrue,” Frank said.

  I followed them instead, through the office, where they stripped off their gloves and grabbed violently orange down parkas, and out the back door, where they stared at their matching white Cadillacs for a moment before Joe said, “You can ride over with Frank, then back with me. All right?” The inmates had been in charge all day, so I quickly agreed. Frank and I climbed aboard his ride and we followed Joe down the alley and across Felony Flats.

  As we headed toward the southern fringe of Mer
iwether, Frank sang along with a Beach Boys tape. He had a high, sweet voice, but when he noticed me listening, he turned down the volume.

  “I suppose you think it’s odd that Joe and I don’t ride in the same car?”

  “Oh, no,” I lied.

  “Twins are supposed to be psychically connected,” Frank said, “but Joe and I were never like that. Even at birth, you know, we both tried to come out at the same time. Killed our poor mother. I don’t think the General ever forgave us.”

  “Your father was in the Army?”

  “And grandfather, and great-grandfather, ad nauseam. When it became clear during our freshman year at VMI that we were not, so to speak, military material, it nearly killed the old gentleman,” he said. “Wouldn’t that be irony of ironies? Killing our poor mother with our confusion and size, then doing the same to the General.” Frank giggled as if this were an old joke well considered.

  After he finished laughing, we rode in silence out the highway to a storage rental place. It had their name on it, too.

  “We have several business interests here,” Frank explained as we pulled through the yard to a large building set some distance beyond the rest of the storage units.

  “The fish business must be okay.”

  “The fish, they’re merely one of our hobbies,” he said as we parked beside Joe’s Caddy, “our favorite, of course, but only one of many financial interests.”

  We dismounted, the auto sighed with relief, then we waited at the door. Frank held the doorknob as Joe punched a code into the alarm system. The door unlocked with a loud, metallic click. Frank pushed the door open slightly, then paused.

  “You may remember, Mr. Sughrue,” he said, “that we told you we actually had a tank.”

  “No,” I said, “no-no.”

  “Yes-yes,” the boys sang, and opened the door, flicked on the lights, and waved me inside.

  As the ranks of fluorescent tubes in the ceiling twinkled into light they revealed my father’s war, good old WWII, racks of M-1s, walls of grease guns, Thompsons, and M-1A carbines, several water-jacketed Browning .30-caliber machine guns, a bevy of BARs, a trio of air-cooled .50s, a half-track shining with fresh OD paint, and by god a fucking Sherman tank.