The Final Country (21 page)

“Or when you had it off,” Betty said. I tried to keep my face grim. “You did take your shirt off, didn’t you?” she asked, grinning as she poked me in the ribs.

“But I remember the address,” I continued. “Navigation Boulevard. Sometimes people make mistakes when they make fake business cards.” Then I paused. “I took my shirt off but not my socks,” I said, grinning, too.

“That’s disgusting,” Betty said. “Like one of those old black-and-white porno films.” I glanced at her. “I’m not as stuffy as some people seem to think.”

I shook my head, chuckling, then wound south toward the ship channel and Navigation Boulevard. The address turned out to be a rundown joint with black-painted windows called the Longhorn Tavern, the sort of place where, when I parked the Caddy in front, I imagined I could hear the hacking coughs of day-drinkers, the snicker of switchblades swinging open, the metallic click as the hammers of cheap revolvers were drawn back.

“It’d be easier if you stayed in the car,” I said, “and without argument.” Betty glanced at the place, then nodded solemnly. I took a picture of Molly McBride from the glove box, then climbed slowly out of the car, and trudged up the sagging steps of the tavern. I wondered if my pace looked as ancient as it felt.

Inside, every bar stool was filled, every bleary eye aimed at the morning game shows murmuring on the two televisions at either end of the bar. The clientele seemed to be an interracial cross-gender mob of the unemployed mixed with the unemployable: construction workers, semi-retired whores, shore-bound sailors, longshoremen, and street-level drug dealers. Even in scuffed boots and faded jeans, I felt overdressed because I wore a clean shirt. I found a small space at the front of the bar next to a fairly clean fellow about my own age with one arm of his khaki shirt pinned to his shoulder. It seemed the safest place.

When the bartender, an enormous black woman with scarred, ham-sized fists and the wary eyes of a street fighter, lumbered down to my end of the bar, I ordered a bottle of Lone Star, trying to fit in.

“No bottles,” she rumbled. “Nothin’ but cans,” she added as she cracked one for me.

Looking around, I agreed with the bartender. I wouldn’t put anything resembling a weapon into the hands of this crowd, either. Not that the bartender would need one. “Thanks,” I said, shoving a ten at her. “Keep the change,” I said, then pulled the picture out of my jacket pocket. “You haven’t seen this woman around here, have you?”

“Annie,” the one-armed guy on the stool murmured as he spun to face me.

“You ain’t a fuckin’ cop, are you?” the bartender asked, tugging on her ear with the thick fingers of her right hand.

“I’m a private in —” was all I got out of my mouth before the large woman threw the straight right at me. I tried to shove my stool backward to slip the punch, but the one-armed guy stuck his boot against my stool, and the large fist slammed against my forehead, hard enough to knock me off the stool. I hit the floor, rolled, then stumbled backward all the way across the room. The bartender shouted, “We don’t allow out-of-town pigs in here, do we boys?” Then half her customers swarmed me. My last clear thought was that I was going to die, with perfect irony, at the hands and feet of a crowd of winos.

Then it was all bar-fight confusion and chaos. Tables and chairs, teeth and hair, blood and primal grunts. It seemed I remembered the one-armed guy kicking viciously at my crotch. And that I’d never been quite so happy to hear the sounds of sirens and hoping they were coming for me.

* * *

I came back to the world sitting on a rickety chair at one of the dirty tables. Two young cops — one black, one Chicano — wearing surgical gloves swabbed delicately at my bleeding face, Betty and the bartender hovering in the background. The rest of the bar had cleared as if by magic.

“How are you doing, buddy?” the black cop asked.

“I’ve been worse,” I said after I had checked my teeth and nose, then the rest of my face. A fairly deep gash in my left eyebrow. Another long shallow one under my chin. A dozen fingernail gouges. “Nothing a couple of butterfly bandages can’t handle,” I told the cops. “Sore ribs. Both pupils the same size, I hope.” Betty nodded. “And it feels like they missed my nose and nuts.” My right fist echoed with the memory of at least a single solid blow.

“You got any ID, buddy?” the Chicano kid asked, seemingly uninterested in my injuries.

I dug out my real driver’s and PI license. Luckily, I’d left the badge case and the fake ID in the trunk of the Caddy. This was no time to have a badge. The photo of Molly McBride had disappeared.

“So what happened in here?” the black kid asked.

“Ah, hell,” I said quietly, “we’re on our way to New Orleans, and I’d heard that an old skip I’ve been chasing for a couple of years had been seen in here. Guy named Bill Ripley. Thought I’d stop in and ask. Guess I asked the wrong guy. My fault entirely.”

“You see any of your attackers?”

“It all happened too quick,” I said. “The bartender tried to stop them, but there were too many, too fast.”

“Recognize anybody, Annie?” the black officer asked the bartender.

“Place was plum-full of strangers this morning, Officer.”

“Guess the fleet’s in,” the Chicano officer snorted. Then he handed me a stack of sterile pads and a roll of gauze tape. “It would be a good idea to get out of this part of town, sir. Why don’t you let your wife drive? They have a lot of good doctors on your way. Over in Beaumont, maybe.”

“Sounds good to me,” I said, then I stood up, forcing myself not to wobble. “Thanks,” I said to the bartender, who gave me a hairy eyeball and a sneer. “Let’s go, honey,” I said to Betty, as blandly as a tourist, then put my hand on her shoulder and let her lead me to the safety of the Beast.

“What the hell happened in there?” Betty asked as she eased out from the curb.

“I got knocked down by a fat woman,” I answered, “and damn near kicked to death by an alcoholic mob.”

“But why?”

“They don’t like strangers, I guess,” I said. “You call the cops?”

“They were roaring by when this guy tumbled out the front door.”

“Great. At least I got in one shot,” I said, checking my face in the visor mirror. “Let’s get the fuck out of this town,” I said. I gobbled a couple of codeines, then used Betty’s Swiss Army knife scissors to trim some butterfly bandages to try to seal the cuts on my face.

“It’s about ninety miles to Beaumont,” Betty said. “You going to bleed to death?”

“Why do you ask?”

“Because you’re going to have some stitches when I get there.”

“No fucking way am I going to sit around some goddamned emergency room.”

“You may not have to,” Betty said, then reached for the cell phone in her purse as I reached for the codeine bottle again.

* * *

Stunned by the codeine, I didn’t exactly pay much attention to where Betty led me in the medical office complex next to the Beaumont Hospital, but when she hugged the tall, black doctor with a short gray beard before she introduced us, I knew exactly where I was.

“Warren Reeves,” the doctor said as he shook my hand.

“Good to meet you,” I said. And I meant it. Reeves and Betty had been engaged when she had killed the black kid who had raped her. Reeves had stuck by Betty all through the troubles afterward, but her guilt had driven a wedge between them that no amount of love could extract.

Reeves led me into the examining room filled with children’s toys, cleaned me up quickly, and deadened the cuts. Then hit me with tetanus and antibiotic shots. “I hope I remember how to do this,” he said, “but from the look of your face it doesn’t need to be plastic surgery. This isn’t your first rodeo.”

“I only agreed to the needle work because she made me,” I said. “She’s a hard woman.”

“Don’t I know,” Reeves responded, grinning.

“You boys want me to leave the room while you talk about me?” Betty asked.

“I love it when she’s shy,” I said.

“Me, too,” Reeves said, then began stitching.

Afterward, Reeves refused payment, but I stuck five hundred dollars in his pocket. “Donate it to your favorite charity.”

“You sure y’all won’t stick around for dinner?” Reeves said to Betty. “I know Anna and the kids would love to see you. It’s been too long.”

“Milo’s hot on the trail of something or other,” Betty said. “Maybe on the way back. I’ll call.”

“Do that,” Reeves said. Then to me, “Any doctor can take those stitches out for you.”

“I can do it myself.”

“Of course you can,” Reeves said. “Just sterilize the fingernail clippers before you do it.”

We laughed, shook hands again, then I left Betty and Reeves to make their goodbyes alone. But Reeves shouted at me before I got out the office door. “You sure you won’t spend the night? The guest house is always ready, and there’s forty pounds of blue cat in the freezer.”

I was suddenly very old and tired, the pain of the beating seeping through the drugs, and the invitation so warm and generous. “Why the hell not? Lake Charles ain’t going anywhere.”

* * *

Later that night, Reeves and I, stuffed with catfish and hush puppies, loafed on the patio listening to the frogs and insects sing along the brackish slough that stretched just behind the dark screen of thick brush at the edge of the yard. Domestic sounds came from the kitchen — the rattle of pots going into the dishwasher, the soft murmurs of the children, and Anna’s lilting voice, her accent a charming mixture of French, Vietnamese, and Southern — Reeves and I sipped Cognac and smoked good Havanas.

“Keeps the mosquitoes off,” Reeves said quietly as if apologizing for the cigar.

“Maybe for you,” I said as I slapped one on my wrist, leaving a large freckle of blood on my skin and an odd pain in my hand. “I think they’re using me as a drug smorgasbord. At least they’re easy to kill. Too fat and stoned to fly.” I slapped another one on my forehead.

“You been rustling cattle?” he asked.

“No. Why?”

“Looks like you’ve been butchering a calf with a chain saw.”

“Don’t believe I’ve ever had that pleasure.”

We chuckled softly, then sat quietly for several minutes, listening again to the buzz saw of the night. Then Reeves said, “Betty’s as happy as she’s been in a while. You should be proud.”

“If I thought I had anything to do with it, man, I might be proud,” I admitted, “but sometimes I think she’s just a slave to her moods.”

“I blame her folks for that,” Reeves said. “Distant father. And a mother who should have been on lithium.”

“She never talks about them.”

“Her old man wasn’t my favorite person, but he was interesting,” Reeves said. “Really the last of the great country doctors. House calls and the whole number. Also, a great mechanic. He could stitch up your ranch hand, tune your pickup truck, pull a calf, then take a flat of free-range brown eggs in payment. But the money changed all that.”

“Money?”

“He patented an improvement to a surgical staple gun or something that made him a considerable fortune. Then the gravel company that owned the dump truck that hit her folks head-on settled a heavy piece of change on Betty,” he said. “Lord knows her mother’s ranch never made a dime after they gave up deer leases.”

“Her father wasn’t your favorite person, “though?”

“He was a hard son of a bitch,” Reeves said. “Betty told me that after her first menses, he never touched her again. Never a hug, never a held hand, never even a hand ruffling her hair, or an encouraging word. She was a mess when I met her. Nobody could live up to Dr. Porterfield. Same kind of charmingly arrogant Southern jerk as her lawyer uncle.”

“Travis Lee?”

“You know the old boy?”

“We’re sort of partners,” I said.

“Well, I’d surely watch him,” Reeves said. “He started off as the sort of lawyer who’d start a fist-fight just to drum up clients, then graduated down to politics, and further down to shady land deals.”

“I thought he was too rich for that kind of sleazy,” I said.

“Last time I was over in Austin, an old friend of mine suggested that Wallingford had taken a bath in the last oil glut, mis-read the computer boom, and was badly overextended. Very badly.”

“When was that?”

“I don’t know. Five or six years ago.”

“Hell, I’m supposed to be suspicious by nature. And profession,” I said, “so I had my lawyer go through the contracts. Travis Lee’s always come up with his share of the payments. And he is Betty’s uncle.”

“I’ve been wrong before.”

“And I’ve misjudged a few women.”

“And Betty a few men…”

“The rape?”

“Not just that,” Reeves sighed. “After her mother and father were killed in the wreck, she took off two years before she started medical school, and I suspect she ran a little wild, cocaine cowboys and that ilk. In fact she just eased back to a semi-normal life when…” Reeves paused, puffed on the cigar, then blew a perfect smoke ring into the humid air. “Ah, hell, the rape and the killing and all the troubles afterward.”

“Troubles?”

“She put five rounds in the guy’s back. If he’d been white, and if she couldn’t have afforded Phil Thursby,” Reeves said, “she would have done hard time. And she knew that. She was guilty, and nothing I could do or say seemed to ease that guilt. She quit medical school, ran wild again until she went to vet school somewhere in California, then left the twentieth century and moved out to the ranch.

“I didn’t see her again until Anna and I got married. And as far as I know, you’re the first man she’s been involved with for any length of time for a long time,” Reeves added, then paused again. “I suspect it hasn’t been easy.”

“Since people started trying to kill me, she’s been a lot easier to be around,” I said.

Reeves gave me an odd look.

“I haven’t exactly lived a citizen’s life. Now my chickens are coming home to roost. Turns out they’re turkey buzzards.”

Betty and Anna stepped out of the kitchen, arm in arm, smiling.

“If you ol’ boys done gossipin’ ‘bout us girls,” Anna said to her husband, “the children are in bed and waitin’ for their Daddy to read to them.”

Betty said, “And I should get my patient into bed.”