James Crumley - The Final Country

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.

"She stapled flyers to damn near every tree, took out a half-page ad in the paper, even tried to borrow money from me to rent a billboard…" Molly paused as if exhausted, her sigh full of some grief I didn't want to understand, then she turned to face me.

"Eventually," she continued, briskly now, "the man who had Ellie called, and offered to sell her back for a hundred dollars… They were to meet at the overlook above the spring, down there in the park. The cops know that much from Annette's answering machine tape…"

"The cops?"

"Two days later they found her body stuffed under a ledge above the spring," Molly said, nodding toward the sleeping dog, "and Ellie was sitting beside her. Maybe she'd never been lost at all.

"The son of a bitch had… he had raped and killed Annette… he had tortured her, raped her, killed her, then, my God, the son of a bitch cut her head off… they never found her head… we had to bury her without a goddamned head…" Then Molly paused again, heaved a great breath, then let the rest gush out. "My mother couldn't take it. Six weeks later, she hanged herself."

"Jesus," I said. "What can I say?" Both my parents had been suicides, so I had some idea of the confusion and guilt it caused.

But Molly was already moving away, back to the bathroom, leaving the dog and me in the pitiless moonlight.

And when she came back, she came back into my arms. Naked. Just as she was supposed to. Whispering against my neck, "Don't say anything."

Nobody ever knows how much is only real for the moment. Or how much is real forever. Maybe the momentary is all we'll ever know, the woman open beneath you, her lips wild with laughter, or riding high over you, her tears like hot wax on your chest. Molly was muscular and willing and lovely, and there were moments when I felt as if I might die, and moments when I knew I'd live forever. And even worse, a moment when I convinced myself that I was doing the right thing, somehow giving support and comfort to this woman.

Afterward, we leaned again on the rail over the dark wrinkles of the hollow, ice ringing like tiny bells in our glasses, the moon still molten, but the wind had shifted to the southeast, suddenly warm in our faces, our sweat unslaked.