James Crumley - The Final Country

On other afternoons I'd gather up one of Betty's saddle horses, then drift easily for a couple of hours over to Tom Ben's place, where we'd sit on the veranda sipping iced tea and watching the sun soften the cedar breaks as it settled over the Hill Country while he shucked dried corn and doled it out cob by cob to the small herd of Spanish goats he kept for the occasional barbecue. During the Korean War Tom Ben had been a twenty-eight-year-old captain in the Marine reserves who had been called to active duty when I was a sixteen-year-old Army private on falsified enlistment papers, and on those occasional afternoons we sometimes touched on those times, talking without talking too much. But he never talked about WW II, except to wonder about what might have happened if we had to invade Japan. And about Korea, Tom Ben mostly complained about the cold and bitched about his feet. Never married, he was as fond of his niece as if she were his child, and he extended that fondness to me. His place was a home place in a way Betty's never quite managed, but I didn't go over there often enough.

At Betty's place I read all the books I'd always meant to read, watched endless hours of movies on the battery-run portable television with a built-in VCR, which Betty allowed me to keep in the old smokehouse. She wouldn't watch them with me but sometimes she'd come in to lean on my back, briefly, her nose snuffling out the old smoke and salt smells. Then she'd leave me to the present and drift back to the nineteenth-century British novels she was addicted to.

Also, for the first time in my life, I had long stretches of solitude with which to consider my life, trying to connect everything from my father's lovesick suicide to my mother's aggressive lie that somehow forced me to endure three months of muddy Korean hell before a broken collarbone got me back to the States in time to hear about her drunken suicide drying out at a fat farm down in Arizona. I considered it all: the failed marriages, the drunk years, the boring dry years – and it only added up to anything when I was in the arms of this sad, redheaded woman.

But I couldn't make her happy. No matter how hard I studied. Hell, I knew better. A man can make a happy woman sad but he can't finally make a sad woman happy. Then I studied her sadness until the burden of that became too much for either of us to carry.

And the sorry truth was that I couldn't study Texas hard enough to make it home. It remained a foreign country, an undiscovered dimension, too large a place to be one place, a country held together by a semi-mystical history and a semi-hysterical pride. The more it became urbanized, the more it insisted on being country. The politics seemed like a cruel trick played by the rich on the poor. When I read copies of letters sent back home from the first settlers, the lies leapt off the page like billboards advertising hell: no hot weather, no mosquitoes, free land. Like every other place I had been, it was all about money. No more, no less. And even with money, I was still an outsider, more at home with whores, small-time drug dealers, musicians, and winos. And too old to change. It was as if I was spending a thousand dollars a month for a combination of graduate school, therapy, and serious frustration. But I tried and tried until I wore out my try, until it ached like a bad tooth.

Oddly enough, it was her other uncle who brought my unease to my attention first. Travis Lee drove up to the ranch house one silken fall morning as I sat in a rocking chair on the front porch, an unread novel in my lap, an unwhittled stick at my feet, the sun warm on my face, and Betty asleep in the house.

"What's happening, cowboy?" Travis Lee wanted to know as he rolled down the passenger's window of the huge pickup. "What the hell aren't you reading?"

"Something I always meant to read. Anna Karenina," I said.

"Ends badly, I hear," Travis Lee said as he kicked open the passenger door. "Let's go down to the creek and have a beer."

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."