skeletons (12 page)

I blew. “Are you seriously asking me to go back there and lay my ass on the line again for the goddamned government? Just because a few million tortillas are up here looking for a better life?” I bounced off the bed, shook my shaving kit at him. “No way! Not by the hair on my chinny-chin-chin. Which reminds me—I have to shave. So long, Mr. Snackenberg. Give my love to Annie and Ace.”

I flounced into the John and opened my kit and lathered up and assumed he had slunk back to the bureaucracy. But no. In a minute he was at the John door, about six feet four inches of him, looking for a place for his head. I hummed a tune and readied a razor.

“If you had any idea how much those eight million illegals cost us,” he said. “Thirteen billion dollars every year, in welfare and Social Security and food stamps and houses and evaded taxes and schools and health care—thirteen billion. In addition to the dollars they send home, which is hard on our balance of payments.”

“What’s a billion to Washington? We’re bankrupt anyway.”

“If you could see what happens to many of them, as I have,” he persisted. “They’re exploited, ripped off, slave labor. They exist under the threat of being turned in to us and deported unless they keep their mouths shut. If they don’t pay the people who brought them in, and keep on paying, they’re beaten, and in some instances killed. As examples to the others. It’s hell for them here.”

“A pity you don’t play the violin.”

“I hate to use the word ‘patriotism,’ Mr. Butters, but if-”

“Then don’t.”

He actually blushed. “I know, being from New York, you think we’re pretty hick out here. Possibly we are. But I’ll tell you something. If Uncle Sam asks us to help, we help first and fuss about it later. Whether it’s fighting a war or chipping in for a cause or flying the flag. And we’re not ashamed of it.”

“Please don’t sermon me while I’m shaving. I absolutely, unequivocally refuse to go back to Harding and be murdered.”

“I can give you protection.”

It was a kind of showdown. I resolved to let him look down the barrel of a little oratory. “Sorry,” said I. “I must live for the sake of American kidlit. From where the sun now stands,” quoth I, “I will sleuth no more forever. I am getting the hell out of the Wild West and going gaily back to the dear dogshit sidewalks of New York City with Tyler Vaught. I will never even take in a Western movie again.”

“I’m sorry, too. My job, and the job of the INS, is to enforce the law. And when the citizens of the United States will no longer volunteer to assist—”

“I pay my taxes.”

“Then this country hasn’t much future.”

“But I have,” I declared, razor suspended over my Adam’s apple. “And I’m hanging on to it. So you saddle up Old Paint and ride out and patrol your border, Snackenberg. And happy trails to you.”

He unbuttoned his jacket. And in the mirror I glimpsed something I wasn’t supposed to. In a holster at his belt line. A real GUN. I got the shivers.

“All right,” he said. “Go home, marry Vaught. See if you can sleep nights.”

“I can.” But my hand trembled. My razor hand.

“I doubt it. Crossworth, Sansom, Butters. Won’t you lie awake wondering who she’ll leave you for next? Who number four will be?”

To be a bastard, if you’re basically a good guy, you have to work at it.

I was dressed and the orderlies had bellhopped my luggage down to the car and the RN had warned me to fly low for a few days and we were alone. Tyler looked terrific. A St. Laurent suit of faded blue denim, the jacket studded with brass nailheads, the skirt gaucho, and a red-and-white-checked gingham blouse. She came to kiss me. I turned my face from her. I said, “Heard from Philip Crossworth lately?”

It was as though I had slapped her.

Then, on our way to a hotel, Tyler at the wheel to spare me, I said, “Guess what. The law has dug up old Max’s coffin. It was full of sand.”

She pulled the Rolls over to the curb, incapable. I had to drive. She had come by cab directly from the airport to the hospital, so we took a room on the top floor of the Paso del Norte. To show how anguished and contrite she was she tried again to kiss me, and again I turned my face away. We ordered up some margaritas. She wanted to see the dressing under my shirt and gave me tequila and sympathy, but I said no thanks, my war wounds were my own.

Then I said, “The trial transcripts are missing.”

Her glass was halfway. She put it down, salt on the rim unsullied.

She ordered dinner—gargantuan Guaymas shrimp and
bollos
and Bohemia beer and
sopapilla
and coffee. Waiting for it she said the Paso del Norte was a very historic hotel: From its roof El Pasoans had watched the battle for Juarez during the revolution, and while General Pershing was chasing Pancho Villa around Chihuahua, the officers of National Guard regiments stationed along the border held their fancy-dress balls here. I said how interesting.

Dinner arrived. I dug in, then said, “Villa. Remember the Villistas who were let go and tracked down and killed? The Texas horse race you told me about? Well, the word in Harding is that the four of them were found and buried a few years back near the border by their own people. A flame burning and all that—sort of a memorial to gringo justice. So I drove out there last night, to the graves. I dug one up.”

She waited.

“Empty.”

Her fork was in her first shrimp.

“Those graves are fake.”

That finished dinner for her.

But not for me. I pigged everything. She did have coffee, and afterward we sipped in silence and watched out the windows as the sky flared and darkened and lights blinked on in Mexico, across the river.

“I lived with Phil Crossworth for two years,” she said. “A long time ago. Toward the end, I happened to mention—”

“Harding,” I interjected. “And the trials and your grandfathers and the Villistas—I know, I know. And it sounded like great material for a thriller.

So he whipped right out here and did the Hindu rope trick.”

“The police worked long and hard. I think his case is still open—he could even be alive. He rented a car in El Paso and drove over, but they never found that either.”

My curiosity got the better of me. “What about his things—bags, clothes, so on?”

“Nothing. He’d checked into a room at the Ramada Inn and-”

“I bet he did. Good old 112.”

“How do you know?”

“I told you when I phoned. That’s where they put Max and yours truly. So it had to be 112. I think they keep that one on reserve for your literary playmates from New York. Did you love him?”

“Who?”

“It’s no wonder you have to ask. With a love-life as complex as yours. Crossworth.”

“I thought I did. At the time.”

“You always do. At the time.”

“But I married you.”

“But not for long.”

Silence.

“You must hate me,” she said. “If you do, I can’t blame you. But the truth is, I’m so sorry I have no way to express it.”

“Where did you get that old Colt revolver? Your grandfather’s.”

“Pingo Chavez gave it to me.”

“Where did he get it?”

“I don’t know.”

“There were two, you said. A matched pair. Where’s the other one?”

“I don’t know.”

Silence.

“This is probably the end of us,” she said.

“Probably. Why didn’t you tell me about Crossworth?”

“I was afraid to. Afraid you might not come out here.”

“Because I’d be afraid to.”

“Yes.”

“Because I’m a born coward.”

“I didn’t say that.”

“Why writers, Tyler? Why not private detectives, people like that? You’ve got the money.”

“Like a Grade B movie? No, I told you. Writers do research. And they’re intelligent, imaginative. They can put things together in plots.”

“Well, just because the three of us struck out, don’t be discouraged. There must be at least a couple hundred more in New York you haven’t slept with yet. And when you’ve run through them, how about the Writers Guild of America West? Move to LA. They have thousands of members.”

“Please don’t.”

She rose, took off her jacket, tossed it on the king-sized bed, stood looking at it. The bed. So did I. With a certain ululation in my loins.

“If this is the end of us,” she said, “I’d be grateful if you’d tell me anything else you think important.”

“Why not?” I said. “A heart of eighteen-carat gold. Nice to old ladies, give anybody the shirt off my back. And my coat. And my pants. Which I just did, last night. Well, let’s see.” I had to watch it. I’d decided to cooperate with Snackenberg to the extent of not mentioning him or his Border Patrol or the bit about illegal aliens to her. I’d do that much for Uncle Samuel, but no more. And patriotism had nothing to do with it—things between us were sufficiently screwed up without throwing that in the hopper. “Speaking of shirts, I can tell you what happened to Sansom. You were right—it wasn’t hit-and-run. He was dragged to death under a car. And you were right about Chavez—he did it. Last night he and his deputies were the ones who tied me under a car and told me to get out of Harding and dragged me long enough to give my chest a close shave. Practically to the bone.”

Tyler sat down beside her jacket, and in the last of the light began to paint nickels, dimes, and quarters with red nail enamel.

“So Sansom was murdered,” I said. “Just like Crossworth. The guys who ball you really lead exciting lives, don’t they, Tyler?”

She shook her head.
“
We don’t know Max is dead, or Phil either.”

“No, not for sure. But I read the report of the county medical examiner on Sansom, and if he isn’t dead I’d hate to meet him on Halloween. What a face. In fact, no face.”

Silence.

“You hate me, don’t you, Jimmie?”

I took a long time answering that one. I drank cold coffee and looked out the window at the lights in Mexico. “Tyler, at this point I’m too totaled to hate anyone. Seven days ago I kissed you goodbye in New York—it seems like a year—and this has been the worst week of my life. I’m an urban, apartment-type person. I eat my porridge and dream and listen to records and weave my little webs for the kiddies and type and a barber appointment makes a big day for me. When I think what I’ve been through— what you’ve put me through—Jesús H. Christ. And the frustrating thing—I simply can’t figure it. Can’t figure you, to begin with. I think I love you, but I’m also mad as hell at you. It’s a really vicious thing for a woman to bribe a man with love and marriage if he’ll just go out after some Unholy Grail of hers and put his life in jeopardy. And that was our deal, remember? Find out if Sansom was murdered and who did it and you’d be mine forever and ever and I did it and now I’m not sure I care to collect. Looking at you now, sitting on that bed, I still lust for you—it must be my glands, it’s certainly not my brains. You’re sorry for me? I’m sorry for me. And for Crossworth, too, and even old Max. Where was I? My God, I’m almost incoherent—oh yes, so I can’t figure you. And sure as hell any of the rest of it. Oh, I get stuck on a storyline often, like all writers, but this takes the moldy cake. If you really are remorseful, as you say, then lay it on the line with me, Tyler. What for God’s sake is going on in that home town of yours?”

“Jimmie, I honestly don’t know.”

“Why did your mother go off her rocker?”

“I don’t know.”

“What’s the problem between you and your father?”

“I don’t know, really. We were never close.”

“You don’t know, you don’t know. Okay, let’s take another tack. You sent three men out to Harding—why? I mean really why. Do you know that?”

She hesitated. “Yes. Partly to find out what became of my grandfather.”

“Buell Wood.”

“Yes. I heard his story a hundred times when I was a little girl. The old people remembered him personally. They made certain we young people would never forget him. Somehow he’s always been more real to me than my own father.”

“The great gunfighter. Your mother told me there were rumors for years—that he was south of the border, that he was a sheriff in Utah, so on. But she never saw him again after the 1916 trial. What do you think became of him?”

“I think he was murdered, too.”

“By who?”

“I don’t know.”

“I repeat. Where did Pingo Chavez get your grandfather’s gun—the one he gave you?”

“I asked him but he wouldn’t say. So I don’t know.”

“You don’t know, you don’t know.”

Silence.

The pressure dressings on my chest began to draw. I got up, stepped to the bed, sat down beside her. She would not look at me. I took her face in my two hands, turned it to me. She resisted. I had to use force. Much as I despise violence in any form or degree, I used it. I scowled into those gray orbs. I resisted her beauty as she resisted my strength.

“Tyler, I don’t believe you.”

“About what?”

“About your grandfather. All right, I’ll accept hero worship, girlish fantasies, but that’s not enough to risk the lives of three men. One loves you and pays the price, so you send another. And he pays, so you send another. And that’s me. And I almost paid. I’m lucky to be here. No, there’s something rancid in Harding—I can smell it fifty miles away. What is it?”

“I don’t know.”

I tightened my grip. “Then goddammit, tell me. Why did you send us? Why? What did you really want us to find out for you—really?”

She closed her eyes.

“Damn you, Tyler-”

She said: “Who I am.”

I said: “Who you are?”

She said: “I’ve never known.”

“Who you are!” I believed my ears. I let her go. I shot to my feet, ready to eat the carpeting. “Who you are? You mean—you mean all you wanted was an identity trip? And you talked us three sad bastards into taking it for you? My God Almighty!”

WHO TYLER VAUGHT WAS.

A timing device had been ticking in me for twenty-four hours, ever since I’d come to under a car staring down at sandy swatches of my own blood. And now like ten pounds of plastic explosive I went off, sky high and wall to wall.

“Who you are! My God, if it wasn’t so tragic it’d be hilarious! Two men dead and one injured for something you could have had on the couch of any shrink in New York for a hundred bucks an hour! I’ve finally heard everything! Who are you? No, what are you? As bananas as your mother? Or some kind of a goddamned monster?”