Authors: Craig McDonald
El Gavilan (44 page)
A voice behind them: “Sadly, she probably would at that.” Able Hawk patted Patricia’s arm. She offered a cheek and the old lawman kissed it.
Patricia said, “How’s your great-granddaughter?”
“Already husky, healthy,” Able said. “Built like a Hawk. She’s doing just fine.”
Tell said, “And Amos?”
“They’re ‘guardedly optimistic,’ whatever the fuck that means. Amos lost a kidney, but I hear that’s no obstacle to a life. He’s going to be a long while getting his stomach back in order. And he lost muscle in one leg. May have a limp. But they tell me Amos should be able to have a career in law enforcement. If he still wants one when he gets back in the pink.”
Tell said, evenly, “That’s good—good he can hold on to that dream if he still wants it after all this.”
Able said, “Puts him one up on his old grandpa.”
Tell said, “Yeah, about that …” He pulled an envelope from his pocket and held it up for Able to see.
Hawk looked at the envelope, narrowing his light gray eyes. “What’s that?”
“My letter of resignation,” Tell said. “I’ve accepted a post as chief of police of Cedartown, Ohio. In about a minute, I’m going to walk over to the mayor there and quit my job. You should follow me over, Able. I’ll recommend you to Rice as my replacement as chief of police.”
Able grinned. “You serious?”
Patricia took Tell’s arm and inclined her head against his shoulder. “Damn right he is. Lickety-split, you aren’t gonna see the two of us for our dust.”
Able bit his lip. “Cedartown, that’s where your cousin lives, isn’t it?”
“That’s right,” Tell said.
“Then I may just have found my retirement community,” Able said. “Two of you living there, place should be like a blissful garrison.” Able took Tell’s arm and steered him a little ways away from Patricia. He said softly, “You really want me to put in for that job? After Pierce and all?”
“I told you what I did for my family,” Tell said. “So I’m in no position to judge you, Able. But I’ve seen you at work. I’ve seen the way you do the job when it’s not too personal. When you’re playing it straight, you’re a natural. Nobody better.” Tell smiled and nodded as he saw Sofia Gómez approaching, holding Evelia’s hand. “And I think you’re the right man at the right time for this town. So yeah, Able,
you
should take up my badge.”
Able smiled at Sofia and took her arm.
Tell and Able shook hands a last time and Tell held his hand out to Patricia.
Holding hands, they walked toward Mayor Ernest Rice. Patricia said, “Did you see that look between Hawk and Mrs. Gómez? You think they … ?”
“I truly couldn’t care less,” Tell said.
Tell handed the mayor his letter of resignation. The mayor immediately tried to talk Tell out of quitting.
Shaking his head, resisting all the mayor’s arguments against leaving, Tell looked over his shoulder and saw Able Hawk approaching.
SIXTY
The Ryder truck filled with their combined possessions pulled out first. Tell backed up his SUV and followed.
Freddy Fender on the radio, singing “Across the Borderline.” Patricia sang softly along.
As they pulled out of the apartment complex’s parking lot, Patricia turned down the radio. She reached across the seat and took Tell’s hand and held it between hers, resting them on her lap.
“Two weeks, and you haven’t confided in me yet,” Patricia said.
Tell scowled. “Confided what?”
“Confided what really happened that night that Pierce and Strider died.”
Tell shot her a glance.
“What?”
Patricia said, “It was that e-mail that Able sent you asking for a meeting. Able wanted to meet you in the ball diamonds the same night that Pierce and Strider died there. That’s a pretty big coincidence, Tell, even to someone like me. There was an electrical storm that kept me from getting that e-mail in time—I mean, in time to alert you to Able’s request. But I got access to it the next morning, after news came of Strider’s and Pierce’s deaths. It ate at me, Tell. So I made a phone call … Tell, please don’t blame Chris, because I pressed him. I … well, I begged Chris to tell me what
he
thought had happened based on what was in the papers. After a lot of pushing on my part, he grudgingly said he was convinced the crime scenes were staged. Chris said that Hawk likely killed Strider, and then killed Pierce too. Chris said that Pierce’s death struck him as a badly staged suicide.”
Fucking Chris. What tipped that spooky bastard? And had he sensed Tell’s hand in events? Probably.
Tell gave her a longer look. He withdrew his hand. “Why? What made Chris think that?”
Patricia stared at her engagement ring. “Kind of gory, but when Chris explained it, it made sense to me. Chris said that cops see enough suicides with handguns—failed and successful—that they all know to do it what Chris called ‘the right way.’ He said that cops always do what Shawn did—put the gun in their mouth and shoot through the roof of the mouth. Chris said no cop would ever shoot himself in the temple. He said there was too much danger of brain damage or self-mutilation, but not death.”
“It was a big gun, Patricia,” Tell said, looking straight ahead. “Enough to get the job done so long as Pierce hit his own head.”
“Okay.” Patricia hesitated, then said, “But if Able
did
do it, it wouldn’t bother me. It’s like what you did for Marita … for Claudia.”
“Playing God, you mean?”
“Getting justice where and when the law can’t.”
Tell had nothing useful to say back to that. Technically, the law
could
have done the job for Thalia—but the price for achieving it was one Able Hawk wasn’t willing to personally pay … a cost too high for Able and his grandson. Tell couldn’t quibble with that.
They drove in silence for a while, nearing the eastern Horton County line.
Patricia pointed to a billboard that read: “
El Gavilan
is watching.”
Able Hawk’s icy gray eyes looked down on them.
Patricia said, “He’ll update those to reflect his new position, don’t you think?”
Tell shrugged and half smiled. He reached back across the seat and took Patricia’s hand as they crossed the border.
THEN
It was midnight. Thalia lay in bed, listening, trying to figure out what had awakened her.
After a time, the traffic noise and the creaking of the old walls fell away.
Thalia realized it was the sound of crying that woke her up. She cast off the covers and crept on tiptoe down the hall. She listened outside her daughter’s door: Evelia was snoring softly.
She moved a bit farther down the darkened hallway. Standing by her mother’s room, Thalia heard her mother sobbing. Thalia raised her hand to knock … hesitated. She remembered then it was the anniversary of her father’s death.
Thalia started to knock again; hesitated again. She heard her mother say, “Never should have come here …
never
. We never should have made that crossing. We were
such
fools.”
A sigh. Thalia took another deep breath, centering herself.
She walked down the long, dark hallway and closed the door behind her.
NOW
A young man and his pregnant wife, sitting in the lowest-rung cantina in Tubutama.
The Coyote looks them both over. The young man can’t be much more than twenty. He earlier said that he was originally from Sonora. He wears raggedy Levi’s, worn boots and a too-small T-shirt promoting the film
Once Upon a Time in Mexico
.
The Coyote figures if these two ever reach the other side, the kid will spend at least the next five years of his life working for chump change hanging drywall for new, shittily constructed gringo houses.
And the young woman—hardly more than a girl, really? The Coyote figures her for eighteen, or less. She is already running to pudgy, the unwanted pregnancy like some spur to her waiting fat cells.
Mexican women rarely lose their baby weight. Well, hardly any of them living in Mexico ever do.
The girl has dyed her hair some J-Lo bogus shade of honey brown—some hue no Latina was ever born with. But the girl is smart enough to know she shouldn’t color her hair while carrying a kid: her roots are growing in black. There is a black stripe about three inches wide at her part. The Coyote guesses her for five, maybe six months pregnant.
She stands and excuses herself. Her man—husband? boyfriend?—waits until she is gone and says, “With the baby, she drinks anything, well, you know, her kidneys …”
“I have many sisters,” the Coyote says. He smiles, revealing gold front teeth. “They get big with child, it’s constant pissing, I know, brother.”
“I’m not sure we should even be thinking about this,” the young man says. “I mean, with her like this now. Maybe it is better if we wait.”
The Coyote waves a hand. “Be
harder
then. Then you have
three
bellies to carry water for.” The Coyote is overdue on a payment for his new Hummer. He needs the money, so he says, “No, you go
now
. Now, every drink she takes, it’s a drink the
niño
gets,
sí?
And you’re young, strong. You’ll carry your woman, it comes to that, yes?”
“Well, sure, but—”
“A baby, out there, crossing in August? Early September? Even October? You’d lose the child. Better to go now, while she still is a few months out and when you both have two arms to carry the water. When you’re not weighed down with a baby. You go
now
. Before the Minute Men increase their numbers. Before fucking Bush puts more National Guard on the border. Before they build more of that goddamn wall.”
“You take many across,” the young man says, almost decided. “Where do they all go?”
The Coyote smiles again, flashing his gold teeth. He says, “I hear very good things about a place called O-hi-o.”
The End
If you liked El Gavilan check out:
Rogue Males
AMES
C
RUMLEY
The Right Madness
(May 3, 2005)
“You might come here Sunday on a whim.
Say your life broke down. The last good kiss
you had was years ago.”
—R
ICHARD
H
UGO,
“Degrees of Gray in Philipsburg”
J
ames Crumley’s opening lines of 1978’s
The Last Good Kiss
are now arguably the most famous and fondly held in hardboiled crime fiction:
“When I finally caught up with Abraham Trahearne, he was drinking beer with an alcoholic bulldog named Fireball Roberts in a ramshackle joint just outside of Sonora, California, drinking the heart right out of a fine spring afternoon.”
The worthy crime fiction cognoscenti have committed that paragraph to memory.
In Crumley’s watershed book, private investigator/professional pourer C.W. Sughrue is recruited to find “missing” writer and drunk Abraham Trahearne. Abe is a synthesis of Ernest Hemingway and poet/Crumley friend Richard Hugo. Sughrue’s investigation becomes an accidental road trip and pursuit race through the bars and taverns of the American West.
As Dennis Lehane confided to me in April 2003, speaking for himself and fellow crime authors George Pelecanos and Michael Connelly, “I think it’s funny we all hold the same book in a certain high regard, which is James Crumley’s
Last Good Kiss.
I think that’s the thing we’re swinging for—’there’s the benchmark, let’s go after that.’ That’s a book that stands head and shoulders above any concept of genre fiction.”
Indeed, Crumley started out down a different apparent writing path: he came out of the hyper-literary Iowa Writers’ Workshop. His first book was the Vietnam novel
One to Count Cadence.
The Texas-born author struggled for a follow-up to that book but couldn’t find anything that felt right. About that same time, Richard Hugo introduced Crumley to the crime novels of Raymond Chandler shortly after Crumley moved to Missoula, Montana, where he made his home.
Crumley’s second novel was the Chandler-inspired
The Wrong Case,
a crime novel that introduced readers to the character of Milo Milodragovitch.
He followed that book with
The Last Good Kiss.
With those two novels, Crumley, butressed by fellow writers George V. Higgins and Elmore Leonard, changed the terrain of contemporary crime fiction. Plot was subordinated to character and language came front and center. For the first time, a poet’s sensibility and style were brought to bear on the mystery novel.
In 1996, Crumley wrote
Bordersnakes,
a novel set along the West Texas and Mexico border. That novel unites C.W. Sughrue and Milo Milodragovitch, who switch off narrative duties.
C.W. Sughrue returned in 2005 in
The Right Madness,
investigating a series of deaths tied to the practice of a psychiatrist friend. The novel takes its title from another Richard Hugo poem.
The Right Madness
is also striking for its unusual dedication note to “the people who stepped up to the mark when things went badly for me,” who “organized a benefit for me that kept us up and running during the time I couldn’t even write my name.”
James Crumley died on September 17, 2008 at the age of sixty-eight.
• • • • •
The Right Madness
opens with a pretty attention-getting author’s note. What happened to you?
They never found out. I just suddenly filled up with fluid—my lungs and the heart-sack, or muscle, or whatever it is. My wife was out of town and I was actually sort of staying home behaving myself very well. When she got back I went out to the airport to get her and realized that something was wrong. I was in the ICU for eleven days and I was on a ventilator, which was not pleasant. The nurse in charge at the ER said she had to put me on a ventilator. By that time, my carbon dioxide level was so high that I was fairly incoherent, but I said, “What if I don’t want to be on a ventilator?” She looked at her watch and said, “Well, two or three hours, you’ll get into a coma … two or three days, you’ll be dead.”
[Laughing]
She was straight and matter-of-fact. So I said, “Okay. Let’s get one. Let’s do it.”
How are you doing now?
I seem to be doing fine. I got out in October, when I was sixty-three. I’m sixty-five now, so it’s been almost two years. No recurrence. This is actually the third time that something strange like this has happened to me. And they never found out what happened then, either. You know how doctors are: patients don’t know anything. I told the doctor on the case about the others, but it took him a while. They took the last of the fluid out of my left lung and it came back absolutely clear. No TB … no cancer, no viruses, no bacteria. He said, “Well, I guess you knew what you were talking about.”
It was quite an exciting time. I think the hardest part was recovering from the paralytics that they give you to keep you still there on the litter. I had an enormous number of hallucinations while I was away, but they all seemed to be connected to what was going on around me. My internist is an old friend of mine. He said, “I thought your ancient, ‘lizard-tail brain,’“ as he says, “was still flickering away.” It took a while to adjust and I was right in the middle of the book when it happened.
It’s been four years since
The Final Country.
Tell me a little about the catalyst for
The Right Madness.
Something you’ve been thinking about for a while?
Yeah, thirty-some-odd years. I didn’t know what to do after the opening. I mean, it was so long ago that I was still playing flag-football … that was what the game was at one time.
So this was something you started and went back to?
I often do that. With
The Last Good Kiss,
that’s the eighteenth draft of the first chapter. I never knew exactly what happened next until I got it right and then I
knew.
That tends to be the way I work. I run around in circles until I know what happens next.
I read a piece John Harvey did about you a while back that indicated there are a number of books started, stopped … sometimes picked back up again. So that is your process?
Yeah. And some of the stuff never gets picked up again.
Are there whole books of yours we haven’t seen yet?
There’s an eight-hundred-page manuscript that went into a fireplace at one time.
You actually burned it?
I thought that maybe it would put the burden away.
Did it?
[Laughing]
No. No. I’ve been working on it off and on since, jeez, since I finished my first novel … ‘69? 1968? Somewhere in there. It’s a Texas novel. It’s very difficult for me to write about Texas. I have had numerous attempts. That was the second time I’d burned all the pages … not
all
the pages … not eight hundred pages in a line, but it was a lot of work. The unfortunate thing is I remember every
goddamn
word. I
hate
that.
I’ve heard of that book. I’ve read allusions made to it over the years. It’s not in any danger of turning up anytime soon, then?
I don’t think so. God, I hope not
[laughing].
Do you get back to Texas often?
Not too often. My mother is still alive down there. I’ve got old friends in Austin I sometimes go see. But I go long periods of time without going back.
How about El Paso? Get back there much?
Not as often as I’d like. I sort of like that part of Texas more than the part where I grew up, which was outside of Corpus Christi.
There’s a songwriter who lives in El Paso who I like a lot, guy named Tom Russell, and he has written about how the sprawl is starting to affect even El Paso.
That’s funny—he just sent me a CD the other day. I just remembered that. I get things in the mail and they get on my desk and my desk looks like my garage and my garage looks like the dump. I’d completely forgot about it.
Tell me a little bit about your writing process. How many times do you go over a draft, typically?
It doesn’t seem to take me as long as it used to. I used to say I get one page out of ten. I think now I get one page out of three or four. Something like that. You know, I’ve been doing it for forty years, so I should learn something. But every time you start another book, it’s like, “I don’t know how I did the last one.” That sort of thing. I’ve always had trouble with openings.
The opening of
The Last Good Kiss
has become an icon within the crime world. You have people who have actually committed those opening lines to memory. They are revered by so many writers: Dennis Lehane and George Pelecanos cite that book as the novel that really kick-started them. Do you have a sense of what that book means to other writers within the genre?
I have some idea. But I don’t take myself too seriously. It’s really nice when writers like Connelly and George Pelecanos—who is a friend of mine—meet you and like what you’ve done. Writers who like writers are good. But sort of the strangest person that ever mentioned it was a woman who was a librarian on NPR. It was a piece about best first lines. I’m not up in the mornings much, so I didn’t hear it myself, but somebody sent it to me on the e-mail. It was very nice. Pete Dexter, in Seattle, recently said something at a reading about that line. So that part’s good. It’s just a lot of pressure: they want you to do the same thing over and over again. It would be like keeping my characters the same age over and over again. Those guys have gotten old and it shows on them.
Yes, their bodies are starting to betray them and they can’t bounce back from those beatings like they once did. Is there an upward limit on how far you would go in portraying them? Is there an age you draw the line at in terms of trying to depict them?
No, not really. I’ve never written anything set since 9/11. I’m trying to do that now, but it’s really hard to do something without acknowledging the effect that 9/11 had. Some things are just simply too traumatic to write about. So, we’ll see. I haven’t killed ‘em off yet. At one time—maybe
Final Country
or somewhere—I was trying to move to a third-person voice and kill Milo, but my wife talked me out of it.
That’s what they’re there for—to save us from ourselves.
Right. She was right. Plus, I’ve never written a third-person novel and I’ve never written a first-person short story, as far as I know. If I knew how this stuff worked, I wouldn’t be doing it, I guess.
Do you have a preference between your two guys—Milo and C.W.?
Not really. They’re older than some of my children—I’ve got two sons in their twenties—but they’ve been in my head for years. One of the reasons I wrote
Bordersnakes
was because of those people who were always telling me all the books were in the same voice. I didn’t get here by being smart, I got here by being crazy: there’s nothing that works better than telling me not to do something.
Have any of your children shown an interest in following you into writing?
I’ve got daughters who are artists and readers. My one son is a twenty-three-year-old who just finished art school and he’s fiddling around with film. My younger son, if he could be whatever he wanted to be, he’d be a basketball player
[laughing].
He’d need to be about six-seven or six-eight …
Yeah, it really broke his heart when he didn’t get tall. But then, I know how that feels. I was telling somebody the other day that I knew I had to get old, but I didn’t know I’d have to get shorter—that seems really unfair.
I think Elmore Leonard has said the same thing—the fact that he was afraid he was just going to vanish.
He’s a great guy. I sure like him. A lot of the guys of that generation are really great gentlemen. Wonderful writers.
I’ve been reading a lot of your short fiction recently and really enjoying it. You had a remarkable football story in the Otto Penzler collection,
The Mighty Johns.
I enjoyed another one in a recent Penzler Best-of-Year anthology. Were these stories you wrote on request, or do you write short fiction and then try to place it?
There’s no way to tell. Sometimes I just sit down and a story starts. It’s pretty much impossible to make myself do something like that, but every now and then, it works.
A number of crime writers I’ve interviewed have said they would happily make their living as short story writers if they could make a living doing it. They much prefer writing those stories to writing a novel. Are you of that school of thought?
I’m not a natural short story writer. I have lots of friends who are. It’s just never sort of been my format. I wrote ‘em when I first started because it seemed easier to throw something away that was short. I think for short stories you really have to think that way. You’ve got to arc very quickly. My short stories tend to be truncated novels or the sort of things where I haven’t got any idea what’s going on. Sometimes I will write one on purpose. There’s a story called “Hostages” that was in Dennis McMillan’s collection
Measures of Poison
which has suddenly been anthologized several places. It’s a ten-page short story set in the Depression. I don’t know where that one came from, but my wife made me do it again because it was so short: “It’s nice, but it’s just too short.”
I was in Arizona a few weeks ago and I briefly met Dennis McMillan. He was frustrated that your publisher had not allowed him to go ahead with a limited edition of
The Right Madness.
Yeah, I could not seem to be able to get anybody to do that. For one thing, we went after it a little late. And nobody could seem to understand what he was trying to do. Writers don’t have any influence over that kind of thing. I was disappointed, too. Dennis and I are old friends. He does
good
books. The books are artifacts. It doesn’t do anything to the sales of the trade copy, so I just never understood what happened. They even made him pay for the disc they sent him.