The Final Country (35 page)

“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.

“Hell, man, I can shut it down from here.”

Since both Molly and Enos Walker were dead and no longer threats to the Lomaxes or anybody else, I had made no secret of my location during the weeks in the hospital. As a result, I received odd lots of information from down in Texas. I had returned my Gatlin County badge and credentials, with a polite letter of resignation, a gesture received without comment. Carver D called daily until he decided to take a month off himself to spend it in a spin dry in Tucson, and to let me know that the GMC pickup had been a dead end, stolen in Lubbock, the plates stolen in Tyler. But he called a second time that day to let me know that Tom Ben hadn’t made it. The stroke and the pneumonia had been too much for the old boy. I bribed a nurse to bring me a pint of Jack Daniel’s, a taste I’d never much liked, but I drank it anyway, my hangover as grim as my grief the next morning.

I got on the phone that afternoon. Lalo told me that there didn’t seem to be any cops hanging around the bar, but for some reason we were making money hand over fist. Hangas kept looking for Eldora Grace, but she hadn’t surfaced for so long that her daughter up in Fort Worth reported her as a missing person. He also added that Travis Lee seemed to have Sissy Duval’s power of attorney and was taking care of her investments and condo. Joe Warren had left several messages to ask me to find his wife again, but I didn’t return any of them. Sylvie Lomax hadn’t called, which was news with its own value.

But the strangest message came just about the time I had decided that I was not only going to survive, I was going to enjoy getting even. It came in a registered letter from a lawyer whose name I didn’t recognize.

It was a scribbled note from Tom Ben:
Well, kid, if you’re reading this, I’m dead meat. Hell, I’ve been half dead since Mary killed herself before I could get back from Korea and beat the shit out of my worthless little brother. But it’s too late for regrets. And I don’t have the energy for them today. I did as well as I could, given my failures. I’m sure you won’t understand what this is about or what’s going to happen next, but trust me, I did it in all good faith. For reasons you don’t need to know anything about, the girl can’t protect my place against the fucking greed-mongering whores. So I’m leaving you my shares in the ranch corporation. And a note with my lawyer. I pray you’ll figure out what to do with the land, and maybe with a little luck you can keep them from completely fucking over that small part of the world it has been my pride and joy to inhabit. Good luck, my friend.

The note was signed:
Thomas Benjamin Wallingford, Capt. USMC.

I had no idea what it meant then, but when I got hold of his lawyer, I found out. Tom Ben had incorporated the ranch some years before, dividing the shares equally between himself and Betty. He left me his shares, which wouldn’t have been a controlling interest, except that, for reasons I didn’t understand, and perhaps never would, Betty had outsmarted herself. Every time she cashed one of my rent checks, she transferred ten shares of her stock into my name, so I owned the controlling interest of the corporation. Perhaps trying to protect Tom Ben’s ranch from Lomax and Overlord Land and Cattle, thinking I might go up against big money if I had something personal at stake. Just another touch of her desire for a secret life, I assumed. And I was sure that Betty didn’t know just how fucking personally I was taking it now. Whatever her reasons, I now owned a controlling interest in Tom Ben’s ranch.

Travis Lee showed up unexpectedly a few days later, bearing gifts, a crooked grin, and a complaint. “Hellfire, son, you should have let me know,” he said as he stepped into the door. “You look like a man who’s been rode hard, put up wet, then run over by a shit-storm.”

“I don’t have much hospital experience,” I admitted. “And I don’t want much more.” Recovering in an El Paso hospital from a gunshot wound had been enough for me.

“Can’t blame you for that,” he said. “It’s sure as hell hard to get up here in the wintertime. I sure didn’t plan on spending a major part of my remaining years in the Salt Lake airport.” He nodded toward the snow squall outside my room’s windows.

“The price you pay for splendid isolation,” I said. “What the hell are you doing up here?”

“Thought you might need something to read,” he said, then handed me a sackful of paperback books, canned treats, and two half-pints of vodka.