The Final Country

that six margaritas and a line of bullshit had bought me from Carol Jean's hairdresser mom.

As I pulled the El Dorado into the parking lot beside three pickups and a battered Suburban, I tossed my sunglasses into the glove box with my S &W Airweight.38, then locked it. I had taken a spent.25 round in the guts some years before, lost eighteen inches of intestine and much of my fondness for sidearms. I hadn't carried a piece very often since then. If Carol Jean was here today, I could only hope she wouldn't shoot me. Or bite me. Or hit me with her new tits.

But before I could ease out of the sour mood and the El Dorado, a black Lincoln Town Car with Oklahoma dealer tags slid into the lot with locked brakes, raising a veil of dust that almost obscured the fine afternoon. The black guy who stepped out of the Town Car wasn't any larger than a church or any more incongruous than a nun with a beard. Six nine or ten and an iron-hard two-ninety. Above his dark shades, his shaved head gleamed coppery and metallic like the jacket on a high-powered rifle round. His black leather pants rippled like a second skin and his bloused red shirt announced itself like a matador's cape. And the way he walked across the lot shouted 'yard boss,' as if he had survived a ton of hard time somewhere and was damn sure ready to do it all over again.

When the big guy slammed through the swinging doors of the beer joint, the hinges squealed and the doors flapped like sheets in a rising wind. I thought about postponing my quest for Carol Jean. But, as usual, once I had started looking for somebody, I made the mistake of feeling vaguely responsible for them. So I climbed out and headed for the joint. Before I got there, though, I heard a nasal drawl, shouting, 'Watch out, you fuckin' nigger!' And moments later a large Chicano kid streaming blood from a pancaked nose tumbled out of the joint, staggered to his feet, then ran for the safety of his pickup truck. When I reached for the doors, Carol Jean crashed into my arms, her salty new tits as hard as the custom cue clutched in her hands. Dressed in skintight jeans and a tank top that could have been painted on her torso, I assumed her opponents spent more time watching Carol Jean than the table. She was taller than she looked in her photograph, and without braces, prettier, too, but I had been right on about the attitude. She turned, raised the cue like an axe, and headed back into the beer joint.

'I wouldn't do that if I were you,' I said.

'And why the hell not?'

'There won't be enough of you left to fuck, sugar,' I suggested. 'Besides, you're holding it all wrong.'

But Carol Jean wasn't having any of it. Where reason fails, try money. I slipped a twenty off my money clip, handed it to her.

'Just wait over there by that Cadillac, and I'll give you another one when I come out.'

Still Carol Jean hesitated, her head cocked like a fairly bright chicken, until a redneck kid flew out of the front window and landed like a sack of shit in a pile of broken glass.

'Hi, Vernon,' she said calmly, but the kid wasn't up to answering. 'Okay, man,' she added to me, 'I don't know what you're doing, but if you don't come back, I'll take the other one off your dead body.' Then she laughed, a sound as shrill as worn brake pads.

'Thanks for the vote of confidence,' I said, hitched up my jeans, arranged my mouth into my most beguiling smile, and sauntered into the shadows like a dumb tourist.

The bar had been built into the slope, giving it two levels: pool tables and booths on the lower level in front, a short bar and half a dozen tables about four feet higher in the back. The large black gentleman hadn't quite made it to the upper level yet. Another sizable black guy in a Dallas Cowboys jersey leaned over a pool table, leaking blood and broken teeth onto the felt – the big guy seemed to be an equal opportunity disaster area – and a rat- faced beer-joint cowboy had a cue raised over his head, his narrow mouth curled in contempt, but when he brought the cue down, the big guy casually blocked it with a muscular forearm. The cue snapped briskly, and the handle weight spun out to slam the already damaged Cowboys fan in the forehead with a sound like an egg dropped on a sidewalk. He disappeared behind the pool table as if shot. The cowboy grinned apologetically, then dashed past me as fast as his tight jeans and high-heeled boots would let him.

'Next time use it like a bayonet,' I suggested as the cowboy stumbled past, 'not a club.'

'You must not be from around here,' the big guy said softly. 'Most of these Texas assholes are dumber than hammered dogshit.'

'Nobody ever accused me of being from around here,' I said as I stepped up to stand beside the big guy, who loomed over me like an unstable rock outcropping.

'Whatever,' he said, slapping me on the shoulder hard enough to make my knees flex. But the huge hand on my shoulder was polite instead of insistent. 'Let's you and me have a drink, old man.'

It's the hair, I thought. Several white streaks had appeared after a bad session with a bunch of contrabandistas a few years before. I'm not as old as I look, I started to say. But I could tell that the big guy wasn't interested. So I followed him up the short stairway, where we leaned against the bar.

'I don't mind a little whip-ass, when it's deserved,' the chubby bartender said as he leaned on the bar, 'and that Meskin kid was way outa line.' He was a soft, round-faced man with a fat, bald head. 'I don't want to have to call the law,' he maintained stoutly. But I suspected he had delivered this line a few times before without success.

'Just shut the fuck up,' the big guy said as he set his shades on the bar, 'and pour us a drink. I ain't had time for a peaceful drink since I left Tulsa this morning. How about a couple of handfuls of that Crown Royal over a little ice.'

The bartender found two water glasses and filled them with ice and whiskey. The big guy nuzzled his drink for a second, then poured it down his throat. I nibbled around the edges of mine.

'Goddamn that was good, man,' the big guy said, then he noticed my drink. 'Come on,' he said, laughing and dropping his hand like a grubbing-hoe handle on my shoulder. If he wasn't careful, the big son of a bitch was going to kill me with affection. With his shades off, his eyes were an oddly gray shade of light blue, shining like tiny bulbs on either side of his hooked nose. 'When you drink with Enos Walker, man, we don't allow no sipping.'

You might as well argue with an avalanche, so I dumped mine down my throat, too, though I didn't enjoy it nearly as much as Enos Walker had.

'Set us up again, bartender,' he said, 'then I want to have a word with somebody who knew that fuckin' Duval.'

The bartender's hand shook a little this time as he poured, then he rubbed his sweaty head as if it had suddenly sprouted hair. 'Ah, Mr. Duval ain't been here for some time…'

'I just been in jail, motherfucker,' the big guy said as he held up his second bundle of whiskey, 'not on the moon. Who the hell's in charge these days? Either Duval's buddies or that fuckin' silver-haired bitch -'

'Mandy Rae?' the bartender interrupted, then snapped his mouth shut as if the name hurt his teeth.

'- one of 'em owes me big-time, chubby.'

'I don't rightly know nothin' 'bout that,' the bartender said.

'Well, who the hell you reckon might know,' Walker said, leaning easily over the bar and burying his index finger to the first joint in the bartender's pudgy chest, 'Mr. Fucking Pillsbury Doughboy?'

'Ah, maybe Mr. Long knows,' he answered with a tortured sigh.

'Billy Long? I remember that redneck piece of shit. Where is he?'

'He's in the office,' the bartender said, thumbing over his shoulder, 'but I don't think he wants to be bothered right now.'

'No bother,' Enos Walker said, then gunned his drink and headed around the bar.

The bartender mopped his head with a bar towel, chugged a bubbling drink straight from the bottle, then sighed deeply as his right hand drifted under the counter. I reached over to pinch his snotty upper lip. Hard.

'What have you got under there?'

'Sawed-off double twelve,' the bartender whimpered as the whiskey courage squirted out of him like puppy piss.

'Better let me have it,' I said, 'before somebody gets hurt. Stock first, if you don't mind.'

The bartender handed me the shotgun, and got his upper lip back in return. I broke the piece open, ejected both shells, and handed it back to him just as we heard loud voices from the office. The shouting ended with an even louder gunshot.

'Oh my God,' the bartender moaned and shoved the sawed-off deeply into the ice.

Enos Walker came back to the bar, not hurrying, a huge semi-automatic pistol dangling from his hand.