Free The Final Country by James Crumley Page A

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