The Final Country

THREE

Everything stayed calm, even the beautiful weather – it might have been called Indian summer, but Texas had destroyed, displaced, or deported almost all of its native tribes – so it was calm and busy until Sunday night. I had a bar to run, woman troubles I didn't understand, and boredom to battle. I just didn't have the time or the energy to track down Enos Walker or brace Sissy Duval. But it wasn't all bad.

Since I wasn't exactly in the bar business to be in business, and it was my money, sort of, I had done it my way when I built the place. The gently arching bar had been constructed from pegged oak planks and faced with a black leather pad that matched the ten high-backed stools. Plenty of room to stand at the bar, and a real brass rail whereupon the drinkers could rest their feet. Comfortable black leather chairs circled the nine round tables set on three levels so everybody could have a view of the Hill Country sunsets above the rim of Blue Hollow. Even the three tables in the nonsmoking area, which was shielded by half-wood half-glass walls and provided with a separate ventilation system, had a view. Everything behind the bar was within two easy steps on the hard rubber duckboards.

Just as important were the things the bar didn't have: no beer signs and no sports paraphernalia – they attracted the wrong sort of drinker – no jukebox or canned music but a CD system with a collection of classical music and jazz; and no television, except for the small color set above the closed end of the bar where only the bartender and the bar drinkers had a view. For the occasional day drinker and my lonely nights. A small grill in a room behind the bar served only nachos, taquitos, tacos, red and green chili, and cold sandwiches. It was as close to a bartender's heaven as stolen money could buy. In addition, Petey had inserted a program in the computer system that showed random drink and food orders paid for with cash. All I had to do was match the overage with cash from the floor safe in the kitchen, and suddenly clean money appeared. When I first met Petey, he was a skateboard punk with spiked hair and lots of metal in his face. Now he was my silent yuppie partner. He was worth it. I could even turn the program off if one of us wasn't going to be there to close out the register.

Most of the people who worked the bar and grill were members of the Herrera family, and Sunday was their day to howl with the familia, so I worked most Sunday nights, but no two were ever the same. Some Sunday nights the bar resembled a fraternity party gone bad. The technocrats and software salesmen visiting the nearby computer companies sometimes drank like spoiled, nervous children, slobbering from rubbery lips onto their pocket computers or loosened silk ties. Then sometimes they didn't drink at all. The crowd was occasionally leavened by a clot of Japanese, who after their first burst of fun would droop politely like fragile flowers over their martini glasses, or demand karaoke until they passed out. Occasionally the evening would be punctuated by smart professional women hiding their disgust behind brittle smiles. On other Sunday nights, though, the bar resembled an elegant morgue.

Like that Sunday night. Three nicely buffed executive wives without husbands, down from the large stone houses in the hills to the west, idled over glasses of chardonnay in the nonsmoking section. A large, burly, but aging fellow with a gray crew cut – known as Paper Jack – in a wrinkled suit and a stained tie steadily downed Wild Turkeys on the rocks in the middle of the bar. At the far end a remote and beautiful young woman with a deep tan sipped a Macallan Scotch neat with an Evian back. Everybody left everybody else peacefully alone. The wind softly buffeted the glass walls as dusk rode gently into star-spangled darkness over the Hill Country.

Two of the grass widows drifted out, seeking either more excitement or the pharmaceutical solace in the medicine cabinets of their large, empty houses. The third one, a tall blond named Sherry, stopped at the bar, as she often did, for an Absolut on the rocks, three of my Dunhill cigarettes, and a gently bored pass at me. I ignored her offer as politely as possible, knowing, of course, that some cold Sunday night I might need the warmth of her bed.

Once Sherry ambled out, her slim hips as elegant as a glass harp, I watched, smiling sadly, then bought Paper Jack and the lovely young woman a drink, told the cocktail waitress to call it a night, went into the grill to send the cook home early, poured myself a large glass of red wine – Betty had been fairly successful weaning me from double handfuls of single malt Scotch whisky to red wine – and settled in to wait out the evening, leaning against the back bar as I polished glasses and watched Jimmy Stewart tremble and stutter through Bend of the River. So I didn't exactly notice when Paper Jack started forcing his mumbled attentions on the young lady at the end of the bar.

Paper Jack, with his seemingly unending supply of hundred-dollar bills, had always been long on cash and short on charm, but he was an old drinking buddy of Travis Lee Wallingford's and one of Jack's nephews managed the Blue Hollow Lodge, so I had always cut Jack a large length of slack when he stayed at the Lodge on one of his business trips-cum-binges. But his first clear words got my attention.

"Hey pretty lady," Jack said loudly, "where the hell I know you from? I know you from some place?"

"I beg your pardon," the young woman said quietly, the arch of a perfect eyebrow raised. "I don't think so," she added. She had elegant cheekbones and a generous mouth, and her makeup seemed professionally blended across the smooth planes of her face.

"I fuckin' know you, lady," Jack continued, a crooked smile elastic on his face. "I'll remember evenschually -"

"Believe me, sir," the young woman interrupted calmly, "I've never seen you before in my life." She took a long drink of her whisky and turned as if to leave.

Then Jack's drunken face suddenly brightened. "Does this fuckin' help?" he said, then cast a sheaf of Franklins in front of him and hammered his huge fist on the bar. "That's what it cost me last time, honey."

"Okay, Jack," I said as I stepped in front of him, "that's it." I dumped his drink in the sink, stuffed the bills in his shirt pocket, and told him to get the hell out of my place.

"She's a fuckin' whore, Milo," he said, "you dumb shit. And gimme my drink back, you cheap bastard." Then he stood up and reached across the bar to grab my shirt.

I had seen this act once before and knew that even in his late sixties Jack still had hands like ham hocks, hardened by years in the oil patch, and he was too big, too drunk, and too stubborn for me to handle without hurting him. So it had to be quick and quiet. I waved my hands in front of Jack's bleary eyes, grabbed his tie with my left hand, then popped him smartly on the forehead with the heel of my right palm. Not hard enough to knock him out. Just hard enough to slosh his whiskey-soaked brain back and forth against his skull bones. Stunned, Jack's eyes rolled up in his head. I caught him before his nose smashed on the bar, then laid his pudgy cheek gently on the padded front.

"Excuse me," I said to the young woman as I went around. "Would you watch the bar for a second, please? I'll be right back."

I hooked the half-conscious bulk of the old man under the arm, grabbed his room key out of his pocket, then steered him out the door and down the hall to his usual room, where I dumped him on the bed. Jack was snoring before I could prop him on his side with pillows so he wouldn't drown in his own vomit. I loosened his tie and shoelaces, then hurried back to the bar. The young woman was still there.

"Sorry for the trouble," I said as I went back behind the bar. "And thanks for watching the bar."

"Not the first one I've ever watched," she said. "Thanks, but I wouldn't come into strange bars if I couldn't handle drunks," she added.

"I didn't want you to hurt ol' Jack," I said, "and it's my job to keep the peace."

"And a thankless job, I'm sure," she said, smiling. "May I buy you a drink?"

What the hell, I could catch Jimmy Stewart in The Naked Spur tomorrow night, and this was a truly beautiful woman. Thick dark hair cascaded in soft waves off a warm, dusky face dominated by eyes as darkly blue as a false dawn. A small crescent-shaped scar at the corner of her broad mouth and a slight knot at the bridge of her arched nose kept her face from being perfect. But perfect would have been wrong. Beneath her dark blue pin-striped suit and light blue mock turtleneck blouse, her body looked long and lean, softly dangerous. Except for tiny gold hoops in her ears and a large pendant, a round black stone set in an irregularly shaped gold band, she wore no jewelry. The stone rested heavily between her full, fine breasts.

"What the hell," I said. "It's my place – why not?"

"And I'll have another, please," she said. "I'm not going anywhere." Then she smiled as if she had enjoyed the pleasure I was taking in the presence of such loveliness.

I hadn't spoken to Betty since the night she left the bar – that wasn't unusual these days – but we sort of had a standing date for breakfast at the ranch on Monday mornings, the beginning of her nights off, but damned if I was going to be the first to break the silence, so I poured the lady and myself large Macallans over ice.

"Absent friends," I said as I raised my glass.

"New friends," she said, smiling. "Molly McBride," she added, handing me her card, "lawyer."

"Milo Milodragovitch," I said as I glanced at the Houston address and slipped the card into my shirt pocket, and handed her one of my own. "Bartender," it said.

Then we shook hands like civilized people, her hand softly moist in mine, her blue eyes shining.

"Nice move you put on that old man, Mr. Milodragovitch," she said, not stumbling over the name. "But you didn't learn that move in a bar."

"I'm sorry?"

"Listen, my father, after he got hurt, ran a place over in Lake Charles, so I grew up in a bar," she said, a Cajun lilt coming into her voice, "and I tended bar all the way through my undergraduate degree and then law school, so I know something about violence in bars. You popped that old man as if you were cutting a diamond. Any harder, you might have killed him. Any easier, he would have been fighting mad." She raised her glass again. We drank deeply. I loved the warm burn of the whisky. Molly McBride reached across the bar to take the cigarettes and matches out of my shirt pocket. Her blood-red fingernails seemed to sparkle against my chest. "You're a pro," she added, lighting our cigarettes.

"Thanks," I said, my burning cheeks bunched around a kid's grin. "I spent some time in law enforcement," I explained, "and I've been a private investigator for years, but the real truth is that most of what I know about violence I learned in bars."

"Me, too," she said, laughing through a cloud of smoke, then filling her mouth with Scotch, smiling with pleasure.

"Not too many young women drink single malt whisky," I mentioned.

"Learned it from my Daddy, God rest his soul," she said. "He always said that the only people who drank white whiskey were sissies or drunks, and the only people who drank bourbon were white trash chicken fuckers, con men, and counterfeit Confederate gentlemen, and -"

But before we could continue the conversation, a string of rental cars and the motel van deposited a gaggle of traveling men who had come in on the last flight and who always needed a drink or two after the inevitable rough landing at the Austin airport. I found myself wishing that they would go away, hoping that they would not drive Molly McBride back to her room, but she stayed at the bar, smoking my cigarettes and sipping Scotch until the nervous fliers cleared out, and I offered her a last drink since I usually closed at ten on Sunday nights.

"I've got a bottle of single cask Lagavulin in my room," she said as she signed her check. "Two-fifteen," she added, "if you're interested."

"I've got to check out, make the drop, and stock," I apologized, "and I'm kind of involved."

"Who isn't?" she said, then smiled. "Let the day man stock. I don't have to be in court until one o'clock, so let's have a drink or two. And by the way, the ice machine on the second floor is on the blink." Then she walked toward the door, her long legs elegant above high heels. At the doorway she paused to smile over her shoulder, saying, "Give me ten minutes…" Then disappeared down the hallway.

I quickly totaled the register, then covered the phony overage with unwashed cash from the safe in the kitchen, wrote Mike Herrera a note of apology for neither cleaning nor stocking, locked up the liquor, washed my hands, did two quick lines of the dead man's coke, then went out the door with a bucket of ice under my arm, following Molly McBride quickly enough to catch the faint trace of lilac she trailed behind her.

Over the five marriages I'd never been particularly faithful. Or unfaithful, either. The whole question seemed theoretical and had nothing to do with the actual moment. Or the fact that marriage and the notion of fidelity had been invented when women could be bought for horses, cows, or in certain places sheep. The lies and the betrayal – that was the important part, the part that hurt forever.

Besides, maybe this woman just wanted a drink, some legal conversation, maybe even a soft and sad good night kiss to relieve the loneliness, but as I raised my fist to knock on her door, my guts shivered as if I were fourteen again, drinking whiskey downstairs at Sally's in Livingston while the dark, nameless beast of love waited between the stubby legs of a half-breed Canadian whore up those long carpeted stairs, a night already paid for by my dead father, the girl not much older than me just waiting to sing "Happy Birthday." Of course, by the time I got up the stairs, I was whiskey-drunk and scared stupid. But she fixed all that.

On my fourteenth birthday, the family lawyer gave me an envelope my Dad had left with him. Inside, the title and keys to the Dodge Power Wagon moldering in the three-car garage, a savings account passbook, and a note. "Hey, sprout," it read, "if I'm not around to watch you turn fourteen, Happy Birthday. There's a prepaid night at Sally's. It's hard enough being a teenager without confusing sex with love. They are both fine, son, but they're different." Then a P.S.: "Don't tell your mother about the savings account. She knows about the pickup. I'm sorry about the will." My mother had forced my old man to bind his estate in a trust that I couldn't touch until I was fifty-three.

That next morning, draped over the toilet as the girl giggled from the bed, "I hope this isn't your first time, kid," I first began to have a notion that my father's death had not exactly been an accident, but it took me another twenty years to figure out his suicide.

"Jesus," I whispered, waiting in front of Molly McBride's door, "get a fucking grip, old man." But still my knock was as hesitant as a teenager's.

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.

"I never lived any place where you could work up a sweat in November," I said. "Just standing still."

"I've never lived any place where piss froze before it hit the ground," she said.

"Maybe I made that part up," I admitted.

"I thought so," she said.

"But no matter how cold it is," I said, "you can always put more clothes on." Then I paused. "But I've never figured out how to take enough clothes off when it's hot down here." Then I paused again, turned to face her, touched the dark stone on her chest. "What's this?"

"The only thing my mother left me," she said quietly. "It's called the Shark of the Moon."

I looked more closely. The golden band no longer looked irregular now that I could see the snouts, dorsal fins, and tails of the golden sharks circling the dark pool of the stone. And etched faintly in the center I could feel another.

"So what the hell do you want from me?"

"Believe me. I've tried everything. I can't get anybody to help. Not the cops. Not the most desperate and sleaziest PIs. Hell, I even tried to put an ad in Soldier of Fortune, but they wouldn't take it. So it's up to you, Milo. And as Mattie Ross said, 'I hear you have true grit.' "

Jesus, I thought as I tried to remember if John Wayne got laid in that movie, she's pulling out all the stops. "I'm guessing here, but I'll bet you want to put an ad in the paper about a lost dog in Blue Hole Park, right? And you hope the same bastard will answer it?"

"I'm meeting him at ten o'clock this morning," she said, "on the same overlook where he took my sister…"

"What makes you think it's the same guy?"

"I knew it in my bones," she said, "when I heard his voice over the telephone. I fucking knew it."

"You cut it pretty close."

She reached into the chest of drawers and pulled out a Glock 20.

"You know, I've yet to meet a woman in Texas who doesn't carry a piece," I said. "It doesn't have a safety, it doesn't have a blow back lock, and the FBI thinks it's perfect."

"They gave me a permit."

"Everybody's got a permit as far as I can tell," I said, wondering why all the major decisions of my life had to be made while I was slightly tipsy, mildly high, and stinking of bodily fluids. Or maybe it wasn't just the bad decisions, maybe it included the good ones, too. Whichever, I had no way to resist. "Okay. I've got a black cherry El Dorado. Meet me in the parking lot at nine. I've got to look over the ground."

She put her arms around my neck, saying, "How can I ever thank you?"

"Consider me thanked, and I'll give you the family rate for a bodyguard day."

"Family rate?"

"Three hundred instead of five," I said, smiling, "in cash, in advance."

"The fuck doesn't count?" she asked.

"Nothing solidifies a deal like folding money. It doesn't change its mind and doesn't whine about respect the next morning."

"That's for sure," she said as she dug into her purse and handed me the money with a quick burst of nervous laughter. "That's what I always tell my clients," she added. "The ones who are guilty, that is." Then we laughed, shook hands, and I left her standing in the hard moonlight, listening to the faint murmur of the creek.

The upper reaches of Blue Creek wandered weakly through Betty's ranch, then crossed another ranch, before it wound onto her other uncle's place – Tom Ben Wallingford owned several sections – before it dropped in a small stream off the Balcones Escarpment to join the gush of the huge artesian spring at the base of the hollow, where Blue Creek became a wide, beautiful stream, pellucid water slipping over limestone ledges, pausing occasionally to form perfect swimming holes. Travis Lee, who had his job at the law school and later his private practice, donated most of his part of the old family ranch to the county for a park, taking a huge tax write-off and keeping a narrow strip of land on the north side of the creek. Leaving his older brother with his sections of mostly worthless scrub, particularly after the government dropped the mohair subsidy, land good only for deer leases, which the old man wouldn't allow. And, as Austin expanded northwesterly, development, which the old man hated. Tom Ben's sections nearly were surrounded by upscale developments, but the stubborn and childless old cowboy was dickering with the Blue Creek Preservation Society, of which Betty Porterfield was president and probably the major financial angel, to put the land into a conservancy, but only if they could come up with a deal to keep it a working ranch. But nobody could come up with the deal he wanted, and it seemed that Tom Ben Wallingford was going to dicker until he died, and he seemed to think he was going to live forever.

The Overlord Land and Cattle Company, a wholly owned subsidiary of Overlord Minerals, Inc., owned most of the land around the ranch – hell, most of Gatlin County – and the CEO, Hayden Lomax, insisted the old man had signed an option to sell the ranch, which Tom Ben Wallingford had denied completely. The whole thing had been simmering toward court for a couple of years before I came to stay in the Hill Country.

When Betty Porterfield asked me to move into her ranch house, I told myself that I had buried my Montana past and intended to finish out my life in the Hill Country. Betty and I had met over a gunshot dog and fallen in love over stories of loss and gunfire. And I loved Betty's ranch, a section of Hill Country heartland, and the crippled animals Betty brought home from the emergency veterinarian clinic where she worked nights, loved the bright glow of the plank floor and the homemade cedar furniture, the wood cookstove and the hissing Coleman lanterns, the reassuring scratch and peep of the chickens in the yard dust, the yawns of sleeping cats, throwing the tennis ball for the three-legged Lab, Sheba, until my arm hurt, watching the sweep of weather across the wide Texas sky as I sat on the front porch pointlessly whittling, turning cedar posts into cookstove shavings.

Until it went bad, I'd never been closer to a woman than Betty. She had healing hands; I'd seen her work, seen the undeniable hope in an animal's eyes when she put those hands on them. A look, I suspected, I had when she first put her hands on me. So I tried really hard. For the first time in my life I studied how to be home, studied every angle and plane of Betty's face, every freckle, every stray wisp of red hair, the faint trace of the bullet scar across her right cheek, the dark leaden dimple on her left jawline where she'd fallen on a pencil in the third grade, which only showed when she occasionally laughed, wild and free.

And I studied Texas, too, because it seemed important to Betty, important in some way I didn't understand, but extremely important nonetheless. "Texans are proud people," her Travis Lee explained to me, "and Betty is a Texan." As if that explained everything. So during the mornings while she slept, I wandered the ranch with books. Hell, I knew more about flora and fauna on her ranch than I knew about my grandfather's land, which I had finally managed to give back to the Benewah tribe, one of the few places in Montana I had ever called home. Not the moldering mansion where I was raised, not the log cabin the garbage company goons had burned down. Those places weren't home. Except sometimes in the log cabin back home when I'd be sitting on the porch watching the first snow, and my big black tomcat, Eldridge Carver, would curl in my lap. That was home, sometimes. But that was easy. Making myself at home on Betty's ranch was work.

Month after month I wandered the ranch on foot in all kinds of weather. I sometimes thought I knew it better than Betty did. She'd torn out all the pasture and cross fences except for a small plot down the hill from the house where she kept a couple of saddle horses and occasionally ran a calf or two. On the back side of the ranch, I discovered a tiny outcropping of flint, no bigger than a freight car, and at the base of it, covered with limestone dust, a midden of arrowhead flakes, probably Comanche, since it seemed they had owned everything from there to southern Colorado for two hundred years. And I studied the Indians, too, nothing but ghosts now.

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."

"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.