The Mexican Tree Duck

by James Crumley

  It took three days’ wading through three jurisdictions before I found it. Wynona’s VW Beetle abandoned just beyond the confluence of the East Fork and the Wood River. Then another day at the Blaine County Courthouse to find out what it meant.

  Joe Don Pines didn’t actually own his vacation home; he just owned a major portion of the corporation that owned it, Overthrust Drilling and Production, Inc. Overthrust sounded more like a porno film company than an independent oil company that drilled holes and pumped oil. After a moment’s thought, though, my first notion sounded closer to the bone of truth. But a telephone call to El Paso told me that OD&P was only a wholly owned subsidiary of something called Franklin Mountain Funds, which became particularly interesting when I discovered that FMF owned a property between Ketchum and Hailey up the East Fork of the Wood River. According to a Blaine County deputy’s report, Wynona Jones’s beige Volkswagen bug had been found abandoned, still running, just south of the East Fork Road.

  Somehow I had to dump my FBI tail before I took a look at the house. They must have felt the budget crunch, too, because they only had one car to assign to my care and keeping. Anybody can dump a single car, but I felt like being fancy, plus I wanted to lose his car radio and his portable unit, too. I drove over to the Ketchum ranger station.

  Several hours and many miles later—thanks to a bit of basic woodcraft and a Forest Service map, about the only service they provide that doesn’t kiss the subsidized ass of the logging industry—the Fucking Bureaucratic Idiot was afoot, hopelessly lost, five miles up Uncle John’s Gulch with four flat tires, to hell and gone out of radio range. Nothing I had done since kissing SAC Cromwellington on the ear had made me feel that fine. I laughed all the way back to town.

  After my brief close-up view of Joe Don’s ten-thousand-square-foot vacation home, I couldn’t imagine why he had bothered with another property so close to his mansion. The tax rolls listed its value at seven hundred fifty thousand, but who knew what that much money might buy fifteen miles out of town.

  An unimproved dirt track led north off the East Fork Road up Hardy’s Gulch through stunted cottonwoods and dwarf aspen into the sagebrush desert mountains. A locked gate blocked the access to Joe Don’s place, but I worked the van back and forth across the old mining roads until I found a place to look down on the house.

  When I glassed it from the ridgeline above, I saw that it caught three acres behind an adobe fence with good old-fashioned broken glass running along the top like sharp lace. The house was adobe, too, real adobe, not cheap stucco over cinder blocks, a real adobe hacienda, complete with a foliage-clotted patio and a dusty fountain, nestled in a narrow sagebrush canyon in Idaho. Actually, it looked pretty good from where I stood, white walls shining among the dusty shades of gray. Nothing moved down at the house. It looked so perfectly deserted I went back to town to get ready to move into the neighborhood.

  When the van was filled with water, beer, bad food, and good books, including the joy of a new Stephen Greenleaf novel, I bought a roll of camouflage netting and drove back to settle in for the duration, the van backed into a dry gulch filled with bushy sage and sunshine. Unless you’ve spent a lot of time looking for people in the bush, you wouldn’t believe how easy it is to hide in plain sight.

  Although this kind of surveillance had never been my strong suit, I convinced myself that I had earned a few days out of the FBI’s mind, a respite for my nose, and a vacation for my liver.

  I lasted a full twenty-four hours before I began talking to myself, telling myself that I was operating on a hunch so slim that it verged on the edge of madness. I wondered if Hank Snow would understand or appreciate just how much trouble he had caused me. Or even care. The PI Driving Train Early Winter Blues.

  During the first forty-eight hours nothing happened. Which was pure torture. At least the feds didn’t find me. Or if they had, they were watching me from a satellite. That was okay with me. But late in the afternoon of the third day just as the sun fired the peaks of the Pioneer Mountains, I glassed the ridges around me and caught the flash of a large lens on the ridge on the south side of the East Fork. When I raised my spotting scope, I discovered that I wasn’t the only one watching the adobe house.

  Three men in desert camouflage had made camp at the head of a heavily timbered draw. It didn’t look like the sort of place the feds would make camp. They would have had better equipment, too. And food. These guys had a ratty brown tent that had so many patched holes it didn’t need to be camouflaged. And they seemed to be living on beans and tortillas. Also, I was almost certain that the FBI hadn’t started carrying AK-47s or hired Chato to work for them.

  Then I looked back at the adobe. The dusty fountain sputtered on like a hot garden hose, and a young woman had opened the French doors on the east side of the tiled patio. She sat in a leather director’s chair, her face tilted to catch the last hour of the sun before it dropped behind the ridge above me. She had opened her blouse to nurse the small child in her arms. Occasionally, she touched the unoccupied breast as if it were tender. Her hair looked like golden wire in the sunlight, her skin as smoothly and lightly tanned as thick cream.

  Wynona Jones.

  Even if I hadn’t found her with what almost seemed magic, I still would have fallen simply in love with the sight of her, sunning herself like an ancient sybarite maiden, the lovely child happily snuggled against her timeless beauty.

  When I glanced back at the Mexican camp, they were breaking it down as quickly as possible. I had to get to her before they could, to save her before moonrise. From what, I neglected to consider.

  There are rules of behavior in America, rules of conduct, rules that can change your luck in a country based on the rules of luck. For instance, after forty, never go anyplace you’ve never been before. Except on somebody else’s nickel. Never go out at night unless you’re wearing black. And never go anywhere in America without a gun and a little C-4 and det cord.

  Rules work.

  Everybody looks silly with camo paint slashed across their face. But so few people see you, it’s not a huge problem. Swaddled in black sweats, painted like a black and white Comanche, I worked my way down to the highway, wrapped a string of det cord and C-4 around the power pole and the telephone pole just past the junction, then dropped them like bad habits. Cigarettes and cocaine, perhaps. Hardy’s Gulch had no more alarm systems that night.

  Put your money in bad dogs before good alarm systems. Technology is interesting, but nowhere nearly as effective as a couple of Rottweilers.

  Somebody had already cracked the automatic gates at Joe Don’s, as they had the front double doors, so I stuck my crowbar back in my pack. Once in the foyer, I shouted:

  “Wynona! I’m a friend of Mel’s from Snowy Lake! She …”

  “Ain’t no need to shout,” she whispered from the darkness beside me. “I just got Lester to sleep, and if you wake him up, I’ll kick your butt past good daylight.”

  “Sorry,” I said quietly, flashing my light across her. The baby slept like a rock in her arms.

  “You’re Sughrue?”

  I didn’t bother to deny it. “I don’t know what sort of mess you’ve gotten yourself into, girl, but they know you’re here.”

  “The Mexicans? Shit,” she said. “Shit, where have you been? Mel said you were dogging me and were bound to find me. Eventually,” she complained in a soft semi-southern accent.

  “Mel didn’t exactly give me a map, girl.”

  “If you’d waited a day, she would have,” she said. “And besides, I turned the fountain on hoping you’d see it. If you were being cautious.”

  “Sorry” was all I could say. “They saw it, too …”

  “I knew they were watching,” she said. “The first time I opened the refrigerator before I unscrewed the light, they were here in a couple of hours. But we heard them and hid …”

  “Where?”

  “I grabbed the diaper bag, and we hid uphill until they left.”

  “Th
at was smart,” I said.

  “Mel said you were smart, too, she could tell, and that I could trust you. My bags have been packed for five days,” she whispered, then pointed to a backpack and a duffel stacked on a hallway table. “So let’s get outa here. If you’ll get those, I’ll tote the diaper bag and the car seat,” she said.

  “And Lester, of course,” I said.

  “Of course, dummy,” she said.

  So we gathered her gear and struck off up the dirt track to Norman’s van. We made it just before moonrise. Without any idea that my foray was going to work, I hadn’t made any preparations to leave. While Wynona played with the briefly fussy Lester, then filled his mouth with her left breast, I strapped everything down, washed my face, then cut a piece of netting large enough to cover the van’s windows and chrome and taped it down.

  “You ready?” I asked when I got ready to coast the van out of the arroyo and onto the uphill road.

  “There ain’t no seat belts back here,” she said from the back, “so I’m gonna have to put Lester in my seat.” She strapped Lester’s car seat down, then curled between the seats and looked up at me, her eyes shining in the muted moonlight. “No more shooting? I got to watch out for Lester, you understand.”

  “Shooting?”

  “When that second bunch of Mexicans took Mrs. Pines from that first bunch,” she said, “I never heard nothing like it.”

  “Where was this?” I asked, popping the clutch to start the engine and turning the van onto the dirt road that led over the ridge and into the next drainage.

  “Up there at Joe Don’s big place. You know, the one by the golf course,” she said.

  No wonder the FBI didn’t want me inside the house. Now that I thought about it, the housekeeper looked less like a Mexican domestic than a feminist Chicana lawyer.

  “There was so much blood and noise,” Wynona continued, “that me ‘n’ Lester didn’t have no trouble getting out. Lester was a good boy—he never even made a peep,” she said calmly, as if firefights were everyday occurrences in Lester’s brief experience. “What’s all that stuff on the windows for?”

  “Well, it ain’t bulletproof, girl, but maybe they won’t see the moonlight reflecting off the windows.”

  “Mel said you were probably as tricky as any Mexican.”

  “What else?”

  Wynona giggled.

  “What?”

  “She said she’d a probably gone to bed with you, but you seemed so ‘worldly.’ That’s a kinda nice word, don’t you think? You know, with all that gunk off your face, you kinda remind me of Magnum PI. ’Cept you’re some older.” Then she giggled again. “And shorter. She told me you looked like a cop but you didn’t act like one. Are you?”

  “Say what?”

  “You don’t have to treat me like the village idiot, Mr. Sughrue. Are you a cop?”

  “No. A private investigator.”

  “Then why’re you looking for Sarita?”

  “You wouldn’t believe me if I told you,” I admitted.

  “Try me.”

  “Not just yet,” I said, long past the moment when I knew when, why, or if I could tell the truth. Or even recognize it should I hear it again in this lifetime. “Just as soon as I know how you’re involved in this fucking mess.”

  “You don’t have no call to cuss in front of a sleeping child, Mr. Sughrue.” Wynona sounded hurt.

  “Sorry,” I said, then glanced at Lester. He slept like a saint. “But I would surely like to know what’s going on.”

  “Well, I’ll see if I can tell you,” she said, tucking the blanket around Lester’s sweet face. “Where should I start?”

  I suggested the beginning, always a mistake.

  “My daddy used to take care of bird dogs for Mr. Pines. Down in El Paso. Well, in point of actual fact, just over the line in New Mexico. ’Til he got killed. My daddy, that is. Dona Ana County sheriff said it was a suicide, said my daddy took a hatchet to his bird dogs, then to Sr. Bones, then …”

  “Sr. Bones?”

  “His pet monkey,” Wynona said as if everybody had one. “He might a killed them pointers if’n he was really drunk, but he wouldn’t have ever killed Sr. Bones. No matter what. And he never took no cocaine, either. My mama never had a good word to say ’bout him, but she always told me that he never did no drugs of no kind.

  “Sheriff said Daddy did that to the animals under the influence of cocaine, then cut his own tallywacker into four pieces before he cut his own damn throat. That sound like any suicide you ever heard of?”

  After we topped the ridge, I rolled the window down, grabbed a handful of netting, and jerked the whole piece loose from the masking tape. Once I stowed it behind my seat, I turned on the van’s lights, then watched the road for a while.

  “Where are we going?” Wynona said, finally breaking the silence.

  “Where you want to go?”

  “Aspen.”

  “Why?”

  “I got a place to hide out there,” she said, “a place where me an’ Lester can lie low ’til this shit-storm blows over …”

  “You’re not planning on hiding out with those Mexicans from the Quirky Arms, are you?”

  “Just me and Lester. No more Mexicans, even though Sarita got me a job there.” Wynona gave me a look as if she suspected I might want to share their safe place.

  “Good,” I said. “There’s some folks in Aspen I want to see.”

  “You got any music? Lester sleeps better with a little music.”

  “I’d rather hear more of this story,” I said, “more beginning, more middle, and more ending.”

  “It’s kinda like the story of my life,” Wynona said, a rueful smile flickering across her face, then she frowned. “You don’t have any idea what’s going on, do you?”

  “Just what I read in the papers,” I admitted. “And the part you told me about Sr. Bones.”

  “Shit-a-brick,” she whispered.

  “I didn’t think we were supposed to be cussing in front of a sleeping baby,” I said.

  “Shit-a-brick ain’t cussing,” she calmly maintained, “it’s a condition.” Then she paused, thinking. “I got some cross-tops, man, so we can drive straight through.”

  “You’re dodging the question, girl,” I said, “which gives me the terrible feeling that we had best keep our wits about us and take the long way to Aspen.”

  “Do I have any say?”

  “Not unless you want to walk.”

  “That’s no choice,” she said, but not talking to me. “Hellfire, I ain’t had no choice in my life, except for having Lester, and to do that I had to hang out with a bunch of pro-life dumbfucks for six months … So I guess we’ll get there when we get there.”

  “That’s right,” I said. “I don’t think those vatos from Aspen saw me but I suggest we go the long way around, take it slow and safe, and watch our back trail …”

  “Shit-a-brick,” she whispered. “You won’t sell me out, will you, Mr. Sughrue? Please say you won’t.”

  “Girl, I wasn’t even looking for you, remember? I was looking for Sarita Pines. So why would I sell you out?”

  “I don’t know. I just don’t know what’s happening,” she gushed. “But I swear on Baby Lester’s head that if you get us to Aspen safe, I’ll tell you everything I know and help you find Sarita. Please.”

  “Okay,” I said, and she held the blanket aside so I could place my hand on Lester’s soft head.

  “Swear,” she pleaded, and I did.

  I also noticed that Lester’s blanket had been hiding a port wine stain that covered the upper right side of his face. Like a seal on this mad bargain. I left my hand resting on Lester’s little head long enough to feel those shockingly resilient bones, the throb of blood, the bass line pulse of life. Over the years I had worked for blood, pain, bone-ache love, and sometimes money. This was the first time I ever went to work for a baby.

  It took us until daybreak to thread the mining trails and Forest Service r
oads back to Sun Valley, then we went to Aspen the hard way, north to Stanley, over to Boise, then down into the Nevada and Utah deserts, then into Colorado on I-70, edged around Grand Junction, then down through Delta and Gunnison, then finally ran out of energy about three in the afternoon a day later outside of Buena Vista, some sixty-five miles south and east of Aspen.

  Wynona and Lester had done some road time together before me. They were great travelers. As far as I could tell, either Lester was a fucking miracle or coming down with something. He only cried when he was hungry or sleepy, and even then he did it quietly and quickly. Sometimes he would fuss briefly until Wynona shifted his seat or changed his diaper. He always seemed grandly amused. About almost everything. I couldn’t tell how old he was, and didn’t want to admit my ignorance to his mother, but he always looked me in the eye as if he thought I actually knew what I was doing. He’d take a giant grunting dump in his diapers, looking quite serious but faintly amused, then he’d glance at me, cock his head, then smile in relief. He’d laugh when I touched his tummy and sometimes fall asleep holding on to one of my fingers.

  “He really likes you,” Wynona said once as she was changing his diaper on the floor.

  “Wait until he gets to know me,” I joked, “then he’ll really like me. We’ll be running buddies, chase women, annoy fish, and …”

  “Please,” she said.

  When I glanced down from the endless highway, she was crying without movement or sound. Just tears. That’s the hardest way, I think. Shit, here I was full of myself, acting like Uncle Dad. Lester was just a lark for me. But he was Wynona’s life.

  “I’m really sorry.”

  “You are, aren’t you?” she said, brushing at the wet tracks of her tears on Lester’s chest. “You know, Mel was wrong about you …”

  “Wrong?”

  “She said you were worldly. Bullshit.”

  “I take it we’ve taken to cussing in front of the baby even when he’s awake,” I said.

  She slapped me on the thigh, the first time we had touched, except for the accidental moments of close quarters. “You ain’t worldly at all. You just act like that. You’re just some good old boy who done forgot where he came from. A sucker for every bird dog pup and shitty-bottomed baby that come down the pike.” Then she laughed, brushing at her own tears. “Next time Baby Lester takes a dump, Mr. Sughrue, I’m gonna make you change the diaper.”