The Final Country (6 page)

“She’s a fuckin’ whore, Milo,” he said, “you dumb shit. And gimme my drink back, you cheap bastard.” Then he stood up and reached across the bar to grab my shirt.

I had seen this act once before and knew that even in his late sixties Jack still had hands like ham hocks, hardened by years in the oil patch, and he was too big, too drunk, and too stubborn for me to handle without hurting him. So it had to be quick and quiet. I waved my hands in front of Jack’s bleary eyes, grabbed his tie with my left hand, then popped him smartly on the forehead with the heel of my right palm. Not hard enough to knock him out. Just hard enough to slosh his whiskey-soaked brain back and forth against his skull bones. Stunned, Jack’s eyes rolled up in his head. I caught him before his nose smashed on the bar, then laid his pudgy cheek gently on the padded front.

“Excuse me,” I said to the young woman as I went around. “Would you watch the bar for a second, please? I’ll be right back.”

I hooked the half-conscious bulk of the old man under the arm, grabbed his room key out of his pocket, then steered him out the door and down the hall to his usual room, where I dumped him on the bed. Jack was snoring before I could prop him on his side with pillows so he wouldn’t drown in his own vomit. I loosened his tie and shoelaces, then hurried back to the bar. The young woman was still there.

“Sorry for the trouble,” I said as I went back behind the bar. “And thanks for watching the bar.”

“Not the first one I’ve ever watched,” she said. “Thanks, but I wouldn’t come into strange bars if I couldn’t handle drunks,” she added.

“I didn’t want you to hurt ol’ Jack,” I said, “and it’s my job to keep the peace.”

“And a thankless job, I’m sure,” she said, smiling. “May I buy you a drink?”

What the hell, I could catch Jimmy Stewart in
The Naked Spur
tomorrow night, and this was a truly beautiful woman. Thick dark hair cascaded in soft waves off a warm, dusky face dominated by eyes as darkly blue as a false dawn. A small crescent-shaped scar at the corner of her broad mouth and a slight knot at the bridge of her arched nose kept her face from being perfect. But perfect would have been wrong. Beneath her dark blue pin-striped suit and light blue mock turtleneck blouse, her body looked long and lean, softly dangerous. Except for tiny gold hoops in her ears and a large pendant, a round black stone set in an irregularly shaped gold band, she wore no jewelry. The stone rested heavily between her full, fine breasts.

“What the hell,” I said. “It’s my place — why not?”

“And I’ll have another, please,” she said. “I’m not going anywhere.” Then she smiled as if she had enjoyed the pleasure I was taking in the presence of such loveliness.

I hadn’t spoken to Betty since the night she left the bar — that wasn’t unusual these days — but we sort of had a standing date for breakfast at the ranch on Monday mornings, the beginning of her nights off, but damned if I was going to be the first to break the silence, so I poured the lady and myself large Macallans over ice.

“Absent friends,” I said as I raised my glass.

“New friends,” she said, smiling. “Molly McBride,” she added, handing me her card, “lawyer.”

“Milo Milodragovitch,” I said as I glanced at the Houston address and slipped the card into my shirt pocket, and handed her one of my own. “Bartender,” it said.

Then we shook hands like civilized people, her hand softly moist in mine, her blue eyes shining.

“Nice move you put on that old man, Mr. Milodragovitch,” she said, not stumbling over the name. “But you didn’t learn that move in a bar.”

“I’m sorry?”

“Listen, my father, after he got hurt, ran a place over in Lake Charles, so I grew up in a bar,” she said, a Cajun lilt coming into her voice, “and I tended bar all the way through my undergraduate degree and then law school, so I know something about violence in bars. You popped that old man as if you were cutting a diamond. Any harder, you might have killed him. Any easier, he would have been fighting mad.” She raised her glass again. We drank deeply. I loved the warm burn of the whisky. Molly McBride reached across the bar to take the cigarettes and matches out of my shirt pocket. Her blood-red fingernails seemed to sparkle against my chest. “You’re a pro,” she added, lighting our cigarettes.

“Thanks,” I said, my burning cheeks bunched around a kid’s grin. “I spent some time in law enforcement,” I explained, “and I’ve been a private investigator for years, but the real truth is that most of what I know about violence I learned in bars.”

“Me, too,” she said, laughing through a cloud of smoke, then filling her mouth with Scotch, smiling with pleasure.

“Not too many young women drink single malt whisky,” I mentioned.

“Learned it from my Daddy, God rest his soul,” she said. “He always said that the only people who drank white whiskey were sissies or drunks, and the only people who drank bourbon were white trash chicken fuckers, con men, and counterfeit Confederate gentlemen, and —”

But before we could continue the conversation, a string of rental cars and the motel van deposited a gaggle of traveling men who had come in on the last flight and who always needed a drink or two after the inevitable rough landing at the Austin airport. I found myself wishing that they would go away, hoping that they would not drive Molly McBride back to her room, but she stayed at the bar, smoking my cigarettes and sipping Scotch until the nervous fliers cleared out, and I offered her a last drink since I usually closed at ten on Sunday nights.

“I’ve got a bottle of single cask Lagavulin in my room,” she said as she signed her check. “Two-fifteen,” she added, “if you’re interested.”

“I’ve got to check out, make the drop, and stock,” I apologized, “and I’m kind of involved.”

“Who isn’t?” she said, then smiled. “Let the day man stock. I don’t have to be in court until one o’clock, so let’s have a drink or two. And by the way, the ice machine on the second floor is on the blink.” Then she walked toward the door, her long legs elegant above high heels. At the doorway she paused to smile over her shoulder, saying, “Give me ten minutes…” Then disappeared down the hallway.

I quickly totaled the register, then covered the phony overage with unwashed cash from the safe in the kitchen, wrote Mike Herrera a note of apology for neither cleaning nor stocking, locked up the liquor, washed my hands, did two quick lines of the dead man’s coke, then went out the door with a bucket of ice under my arm, following Molly McBride quickly enough to catch the faint trace of lilac she trailed behind her.

Over the five marriages I’d never been particularly faithful. Or unfaithful, either. The whole question seemed theoretical and had nothing to do with the actual moment. Or the fact that marriage and the notion of fidelity had been invented when women could be bought for horses, cows, or in certain places sheep. The lies and the betrayal — that was the important part, the part that hurt forever.

Besides, maybe this woman just wanted a drink, some legal conversation, maybe even a soft and sad good night kiss to relieve the loneliness, but as I raised my fist to knock on her door, my guts shivered as if I were fourteen again, drinking whiskey downstairs at Sally’s in Livingston while the dark, nameless beast of love waited between the stubby legs of a half-breed Canadian whore up those long carpeted stairs, a night already paid for by my dead father, the girl not much older than me just waiting to sing “Happy Birthday.” Of course, by the time I got up the stairs, I was whiskey-drunk and scared stupid. But she fixed all that.

On my fourteenth birthday, the family lawyer gave me an envelope my Dad had left with him. Inside, the title and keys to the Dodge Power Wagon moldering in the three-car garage, a savings account passbook, and a note. “Hey, sprout,” it read, “if I’m not around to watch you turn fourteen, Happy Birthday. There’s a prepaid night at Sally’s. It’s hard enough being a teenager without confusing sex with love. They are both fine, son, but they’re different.” Then a P.S.: “Don’t tell your mother about the savings account. She knows about the pickup. I’m sorry about the will.” My mother had forced my old man to bind his estate in a trust that I couldn’t touch until I was fifty-three.

That next morning, draped over the toilet as the girl giggled from the bed, “I hope this isn’t your first time, kid,” I first began to have a notion that my father’s death had not exactly been an accident, but it took me another twenty years to figure out his suicide.

“Jesus,” I whispered, waiting in front of Molly McBride’s door, “get a fucking grip, old man.” But still my knock was as hesitant as a teenager’s.

Molly McBride had opened the sliding glass door to her balcony, and the room was full of moonlight. She still wore her prim suit, as if we were to have a legal conversation over drinks, but she had removed her blouse and bra, I realized as I held out the bucket of bar ice like a cheap gift. I noticed because her suit coat swung open as she plunged her hands into the ice, then rubbed her neck and without a word reached inside her coat to hold her cold hands under the weight of her dark-tipped breasts. In her heels she looked me straight in the eye, and in the hard moonlight her eyes glittered madly, her smile seemed grim rather than seductive, and the black stone hanging over her heart glistened like an obsidian blade.

“I’m glad you came,” she purred. “I was afraid you wouldn’t.” Then she touched my neck with her cold fingers. Which was too much for me. I must have stiffened and turned.

“I’m sorry,” I said, shoving the ice bucket against her naked chest. “Maybe this wasn’t such a good idea. Maybe I should go.”

And I might have. But she shoved the bucket back to me, burst into tears, then ran to the closed bathroom door, where she paused to glance over her shoulder, her face twisted with pain and grief, before she quickly slammed it. Leaving me holding the damn ice bucket, half in the room, half in the hallway.

* * *

After the first drink, I calmed down. And after the second, I was ready for anything. It was one of those crazy nights when anything seemed possible. The west wind had scoured the star-studded sky, and the slice of moon seemed white-hot and as sharp as a skinning knife against the night as I waited, leaning into the soft breeze on the balcony rail of Molly’s room. I had found glasses and the Scotch on the small table outside, and convinced myself that a little Scotch couldn’t make things any crazier. In spite of the traffic murmurs from all sides of the hollow, I imagined I could hear Blue Creek rushing over the low water crossing below, could even hear the artesian gush of the huge spring that joined the creek at the dark base of the hollow cupped in the limestone bluff that glistened, unfortunately, like the bits of Billy Long’s skull bones on the flocked wallpaper. Surely it was the drugs and some sort of delayed midlife madness, I hoped, not something permanently engraved on my nights.

The bathroom door creaked quietly behind me, followed by a snuffle and the rattle of toenails as an awkward white dog drifted out of the bathroom and across the moon-bright carpet. Molly came out a moment afterward, barefoot, her hair pulled back and her face scrubbed, wearing an oversized Tulane football jersey, number
69,
and sweat pants. The dog curled in the near corner of the room, snoring almost immediately. Molly fixed a drink, then leaned on the rail beside him.

“Pretty stupid, huh?” she said.

“Pretty effective. I nearly fainted.”

“Please forgive me,” Molly giggled, then apologized again. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I’m supposed to be a tough, grown-up lady lawyer, and I should have simply approached you directly, instead of coming to your bar to check you out, then making that stupid pass. I feel like such an idiot.”

“Please don’t,” I said. “Try to remember that I’m the fool it nearly worked on. And I’m beginning to feel like an idiot because I don’t know what the hell this is about.”

She paused long enough to freshen our drinks, then proceeded calmly. “The last time I was in town I was running with a lawyer friend of mine on the trail along the creek in the park,” she said, “and we passed you, and he said he had heard some ugly rumors about you… and the trouble a few years ago, when you and your partner went up against the
contrabandistas
in West Texas.”

“I’m not too crazy about hearing that. Who the hell told you that?” I asked, serious now. A banker and a woman as lovely as she was greedy had stolen my father’s trust before I could even spend a penny of it, mixed it with drug money in a botched attempt to make a movie. Then my ex-partner and I, with Petey’s help, had stolen it back. But not without considerable bloodshed and bruised law enforcement egos. “What did he say? And who the fuck was he?”

“I won’t tell you his name,” Molly McBride said, calm against my sudden seriousness, “but he told me enough about you to start me digging.”

“And?”

“Mr. Milodragovitch,” she said, turning to face me, “I mostly do criminal work. I know cops. I know crooks. And stories get around.”

“What the hell do you want?” I asked, tired and angry now. What I really wanted even more than an answer to my question was another blast of that pure cocaine.

“I want you to sit down and listen to me for a moment,” she said, her head bowed, then raised into the moonlight. “That’s all. Please just listen to me.”

“So let me get this straight. Let me get this perfectly straight, okay? I don’t get laid, right? I get a bedtime story instead? Wonderful.” But I sat down anyway.

“I don’t blame you for being bitter,” she said, sitting across from me and grabbing my hands. “Just listen, please.”

“What have I got to lose? Except pride, dignity, and my bad reputation?”

“Four years ago,” she said, clutching my hands harder, “my little sister was running down by the creek when she lost her dog —”

“I don’t fucking do lost dogs these days,” I said, perhaps a bit more angrily than I meant. She released my hands, then stood up to lean against the rail, her back to me.

“Ellie is a mutt,” she said into the night, “a nothing dog, but Annette loved her. It had been a bad year. Our Daddy died early that year, and Annette’s boyfriend had — well, white boys shouldn’t smoke crack and hang around topless bars — and her favorite prof in the English Department killed himself. So when she lost Ellie, Annette went crazy.