The Final Country (8 page)

He drove silently down the pasture to the tiny creek and the spring box where I kept a case of Coors cans cooling among the crawdads and mint leaves, and silently drank a beer before Travis Lee spoke.

“Mind if I piss in your creek?” he said as he unbuttoned his jeans. Except in the courtroom, Travis Lee wore Levi’s, cowboy boots, western shirts, and expensive leather vests, a wide-brimmed Stetson, plus a huge gold belt buckle decorated with what looked like a snake’s head with ruby eyes.

“Ain’t my creek,” I said.

“Ain’t mine either, anymore,” Travis Lee said. I raised an eyebrow. “Blue Creek doesn’t look like much here,” the old man said, his large hands lifting his hat and rumpling his thick thatch of white hair, as if it could be any more rumpled, “and over there where it joins the branch that crosses my brother’s ranch, it doesn’t look like too much either, but by the time it drops off the escarpment into Blue Hole, it’s the perfect Hill Country creek.” I didn’t think I was supposed to say anything, yet, so I didn’t, just pulled two more beers out of the cold spring water. “But I guess you knew that. Betty says you’ve become something of a Texas expert.”

“Self-defense,” I admitted.

“Hey, I’ve been to Montana,” Travis Lee said. “You people up there can go round and round about being land-proud, too.”

“Right, but there ain’t so many of us on the dance floor.”

“I always suspected that too much solitude might make a man a bit cranky,” Travis Lee said.

“I like to see the sunset without too many people in the way,” I said. “This is nice out here, but Austin is just another city — same faces, different scenery — except for the food and the music, it could be anywhere. Besides, I was born cranky.”

“I just bet you were, boy,” the huge old man said, his laughter filling the small valley.

“An old friend of mine who grew up down here tells me Montana would be perfect if it had less February, more barbecue, and some decent Mexican food.”

“Hell, boy,” the old man said, “it’s too nice a day to sit around just looking at your fuzzy navel. You’re lookin’ as stale as yesterday’s beer fart. Let’s go to town, celebrate, maybe choke down a whiskey or two.”

“Celebrate?”

“One less day to live with that slick socialist son of a bitch in the White House,” he said. “That always makes me happy.”

“I thought you used to be a Democrat?”

”
Used to be
being the operative phrase. Where do you stand in this political morass?” he asked.

“I guess I’m against everything.”

“A cynic, then.”

“I prefer to think of myself as a realist,” I said.

“Whatever, let’s go have a drink.”

For reasons I didn’t quite understand — he was a lawyer who specialized in putting land deals together, which meant developer, which rhymed with dog turd, as far as I was concerned — I said yes, left Betty a note, then climbed into Travis Lee’s silly four-wheel-drive Ford crew cab pickup, the ideal rig for every lawyer seeking muddy fields and hay bales to buck.

We started with a whiskey visit to Travis Lee’s law office where we drank expensive Scotch sitting among the old man’s collection of the War of Northern Aggression artifacts — sabers and muskets and company rosters among dozens of original photographs.

“Sorry for the museum clutter,” Travis Lee said.

“Pretty impressive,” I said.

Travis Lee propped his hand-tailored boots on the desk, leaned back in his chair, and said, “I pretty much missed my war, I guess — broke my ankle on the last jump before we were supposed to ship out for Korea — so I guess I adopted this one. But you made the Korean thing, right?”

Somehow Wallingford’s question bothered me. As if Korea had been like a visit to a theme park. But he was Betty’s uncle, so I answered politely and honestly, “I was sixteen and stupid and my mother wanted me out of the house after my Dad died.”

“Sounds like she wanted you dead,” Wallingford said with the oddly blunt honesty that Texans sometimes had, and which I sometimes enjoyed.

“Who knows?” I said. “According to my Dad, my great-grandfather was at the Battle of the Wilderness when he was younger than that. Fourteen. Survived into his nineties, but he was still sharp. Hell, he was the sheriff of Meriwether County into his seventies. Tended bar into his late eighties.”

“What did he have to say about the Wilderness?”

“According to my Dad, he said it wasn’t much worse than being down in the Pennsylvania mines as a child,” I said. “But bad enough so that after he got wounded, he hid in a pile of brush and bones, playing dead until he could whittle a crutch and hobble back to his lines.”

I didn’t add that the wound was caused by a rebel younger than himself who had found my great-grandfather when he stumbled over the pile of bones he was hiding beneath. Almost by accident the kid stuck a bayonet through his calf as my great-grandfather ran his bayonet through the kid’s throat. My great-grandfather cauterized the wound with a red-hot ramrod, then whittled a crutch, and hobbled west instead of back to his unit. What the hell, it wasn’t his war — his father had sent him in place of an older, more favored brother — so he headed into the setting sun, away from the war. He didn’t have much English or any skills except the ability to shatter a coal face with a pick and a certain native willingness to use a firearm without hesitation, and his only ambition was for more sunlight and fewer bosses shouting at him. So he hobbled across the Great Plains swabbing bar floors, slopping pigs, and shoveling horseshit and hay while he worked on his English. By the time he got to Montana, the Gold Rush was almost over, the war was long over, so the first Milodragovitch in Montana became a peace officer, and, as was the custom in those days, a saloon owner and a whoremaster.

“Whores aren’t bad people,” Travis Lee said when I finished the story. “Let’s go have a drink with several, professional and political.”

Then we proceeded to a round of visiting drinks with his old political cronies, cranky to a man, and ex-colleagues at the law school, plus cops, bartenders, and ex-hookers. Then a late lunch at a tiny barbecue shack above Blue Creek, the only commercial establishment on the strip of the old family ranch that Travis Lee still owned north of the creek, where we played dominoes, drank Shiner beer, and ate smoked brisket as tender as a fresh biscuit.

“Milo,” he said in his best voice, his great shaggy head hanging over the table, “you’re too young to be retired. You’re chewin’ on your ass like a mangy hound, sittin’ out there at the ranch, doin’ nothin’. You need somethin’ to do.” Then he leaned his huge face across the table and whispered, “I understand you know something about the bar business…”

“I certainly do,” I said.

“… and that you’ve got a bundle of cash sittin’ fallow in the Caymans,” he said. “I can raise some money from friends, add yours to mine, funnel it in through an offshore loan, and boy we got a gold mine right here, clean and legal.”

Which is how we became partners in the Blue Hollow Lodge. Once I was convinced of the “clean and legal” part. But I insisted on owning the bar outright, to which Travis Lee agreed without much fuss. Betty was against it at first, especially the part where I lent her uncle some of the start-up money, saying that I was just using it as an excuse to get out of the house. Then without explanation she changed her mind. I had more money than I could spend in two lifetimes, even if I lived as long as my great-grandfather, and it did sound like a good way to get out of the house occasionally. Or maybe I was just tired, as I once said during an argument with Betty, of being her fancy man.

Of course, later, quickly bored with the bar business, I got my Texas PI ticket and six weeks after that moved out of Betty’s ranch house…

…and into a large, anonymous motel suite on the ground floor, a place that, except for the heavy bag and free-weight set, could have been anywhere, belonged to anyone. Perhaps it should have seemed a sad place, but coming from Molly McBride’s bed and facing a day when something might actually happen to break the routine of my days, it didn’t seem so bad.

I called Betty at the clinic to let her know that I wasn’t driving out to the ranch for breakfast. When she asked why, I answered, almost truthfully, “I’ve got a client.”

“Christ on a crutch, Milo,” she said, “are you on drugs? Or just fucking drunk?”

“Neither, particularly. Why?”

“Oh, hell, I don’t know,” she sighed, and I could see her forearm brush the hair off her face, “between the bar and your fucking
clients,
we never seem to see each other anymore anyway —”

“Lady,” I interrupted, “between your job and trying to save Blue Creek, we don’t see each other at all.”

So she hung up on me. Not for the first time, either. I’d seen Montana, even with its terrible winters, destroyed by greed, miners and developers and logging companies — Christ, Hayden Lomax’s corporation even owned a leaking cyanide leach gold mine in eastern Montana that the state had been trying to shut down for years. Also an undeveloped shallow gas field on the edge of the Crazies — so I didn’t share Betty’s hope to save Blue Creek.

Early on she asked me one morning on her front porch why I wouldn’t investigate Hayden Lomax and his development corporation that wanted to steal her uncle’s ranch and surround the South Fork of Blue Creek with country club developments and fill it with phosphates, drain-field sewage, and golf balls.

“Nobody pays enough money for me to go up against really big money,” I admitted. “You might as well ask me to investigate the mob.”

“I don’t know if it’s the bar, or your so-called job,” she said, “but I hate it when you’re a cynical son of a bitch,” she said. “Get off my property.”

“It’s nice to know that at least you, among all people, actually have property rights.”

“You haven’t paid your rent this month,” she pointed out.

I wrote her a check for the usual amount, a thousand dollars, packed my war bag quickly, and left that day. We didn’t speak for a month, and I didn’t move back in for six weeks.

And God knows how long the silence would last this time if I told her about Molly McBride, I thought as the telephone rang. I almost let it ring but finally answered.

“Milo,” Betty said softly, “we’ve got to sit down and talk before we lose this thing. Can’t you make breakfast in the morning? Can’t you put whatever you’re doing off for at least that long? Please.”

“Goddammit,” I growled, breaking into her plea, “if you had a gutshot dog on the table, and I needed my aching heart stitched back on my sleeve, I wouldn’t ask you to drop your work. So don’t fucking ask me.”

Then I hung up, took a long hot shower, and slept like a baby through what remained of the mad night.

When Molly McBride pulled her Ford Probe rental into the parking lot above the overlook, I climbed out of the Caddy, dressed for my part as the innocent jogger. Except for the floppy camouflage jersey that covered the S&W Centennial Airweight .38 strapped to the small of my back. Molly still wore the Tulane jersey, which nearly covered the bulky Glock stuffed into a fanny pack at the base of her back, and baggy sweats, her hair tucked under a New Orleans Saints hat that almost hid her scrubbed face. Neither of us acted as if we expected to greet each other as lovers or friends, so we just walked down the trail to the overlook. To the left, the creek bounced down the limestone shelves to join the deep well of the artesian spring. From above, the Blue Hole looked like an eye into a better world, clear and cold, yet somehow warm with the shafts of mid-morning sunlight filling the water. The shifting wind had died, and the cloudless sky seemed endless.

“Don’t you have any questions?” she asked, a bit nervously.

“What’s to know? The guy makes a move on you, I stop him, then let the cops deal with him. He doesn’t, I follow him back to his car and check him out. It should be simple.”

“I wish you’d just kill the bastard,” she said, then patted her fanny pack.

“You didn’t hire me for that,” I said. “And if you start letting off rounds from that cannon, you’ll probably shoot me or some poor software engineer across the hollow. Why don’t you put it back in the car?”

“Why don’t you put yours back?”

I shook my head, patted her shoulder, she smiled nervously again, then I searched the broken rocks of the slope above the overlook until I found a shadowed nook between two scrub cedars ten feet above the overlook as Molly stretched her legs against the low stone wall below. And we waited.

The guy had picked a good time. Mid-morning the park was usually empty, the dawn joggers off their offices, the lunchtime joggers still tied to their desks. Not much foot traffic at all: an older couple walking their ragged mop dog; a college couple more interested in grabbing each other than running; and three singleton joggers in expensive Lycra suits.

Then a fourth, a tall, gawky bald-headed man, shuffled up the switchback from the creek bottom. He ran like a duck, feet splayed, elbows flapping like his oversize shorts and belly pack. A classic nerd, even to the thick horn-rims he wore. But he paused as if to catch his breath as the trail opened into the overlook, so I rose on my haunches. Molly hadn’t even turned. With a quickness I couldn’t believe, the jogger was behind her, his bony forearm around her neck in a choke hold, hissing something I couldn’t hear in her ear.

I didn’t even consider the .38, just rushed down the rocky slope and slammed a right hook into the nerd’s kidney. The duck-footed guy grunted like a man hit with an axe handle and dropped to one knee as Molly spun away. I caught a glimpse of her red, frightened face as she dumped her fanny pack and fled. But even as he dropped to his knee, the guy caught me in the right thigh with a hard back-thrust blow from his bony elbow. For a moment I thought I’d been shot but managed to roll away and scramble to my feet, my right leg no more use than a boneless tube of flesh. I reached for the Airweight now, but the skinny guy front-kicked me in the chest so hard I left my feet and landed on my butt against a clutter of limestone shards on the side of the trail. Once again I felt as if I’d been shot, in the heart this time, mortally wounded, nailed to the ground, my hands dangling uselessly in my lap. The skinny guy moved toward me in some sort of martial arts shuffle and he had death in his angry eyes. Mine. I had no doubt that the kick aimed at my chin meant to snap my neck like a match stick.