by Dan Flanigan
“Well, I think he knows somehow.”
“There’s no way for him to know.”
“If you think you can control him, you’re wrong. He’s out of control.”
“What do you want me to do? Shoot him?”
He looked at the shotgun in her hand. It would be so simple. Lenny was more than a nuisance; he was a threat. To everything. To her, to him, to the possibility of escape, to what they might create for each other if only given a chance, if they could only overcome this last redoubt, swim this last moat, slay these last dragons. Suddenly psychic, O’Keefe saw in his mind a scene like the recollection of a nightmare, muddy and deliriously blurred, a scene in which Lenny would be the cause of some fatal undoing, some hideous demise. He recalled watching Lenny on television, bilking the suckers. Lenny had added nothing to life. He was corrupt but not even really a corrupter, only a vessel of corruption, like a prostitute who carries but herself does not suffer from a venereal disease. He remembered what Tag had said that day at her house: “I woke up one morning and realized I was living with a ferret.” Tiny, bright, beady eyes. Greedy, twitching nostrils sniffing the ground. Sharp, little, needle-like teeth ripping at the throat of a baby rabbit.
O’Keefe’s life had never before had in it a moment like this. There were few such moments in the world, moments that give sudden and monstrous birth, and he understood then that it was only the language of tragedy and not tragedy itself that has disappeared from our lives. Maybe if you took a man’s wife, you thought you could take his life too. Maybe you thought you had to somehow.
He is at Lenny’s side, the pistol leaps up in his hand, the muscles of Lenny’s face distend horribly and then collapse in the ultimate stress of violent death. The bullet rips off the top of the head, and the corpse pitches sideways onto the hard-packed, unyielding ground.
O’Keefe stands there. Alone. Despite her standing there. Even she has no meaning now though he had thought he was acting for her. His life has been a search for something to fill up the emptiness in him, but now he is as empty and soulless as the creature shriveled there on the unpropitious earth. His quest is fulfilled, his life’s task complete; he does not have to strain against the rein of reality anymore. To murder and create, the poet said. He has created a new self, an abstraction, utterly bereft of context, of syntax, of any language to connect him to the vibrant, suffering, striving, foolishly hopeful world.
She looked at him strangely, her brow furrowing in a dismay that would soon give birth to scorn. She had not meant to be taken seriously; she had just been making a sarcastic point. If she had fully understood what had just passed through his mind, she would have recoiled in revulsion, the same nauseated revulsion he felt now for himself. And if she kept standing there looking at him like that, she was bound to come to perceive what he had become in that moment.
“Just watch him,” he said and walked away.
HE HIKED IN the foothills for hours, hoping the sweat of the climb would flush the murderer out of him. Finally, exhausted, he crawled into the shade beneath a mesquite tree, and, as if he were a boy and a believer again and kneeling in the cathedral, the light from the stained glass windows ebbing in the Saturday twilight, waiting for the priest to hear his confession, he examined his conscience. Thought before deed. The Church had taught him that the very thought itself was a mortal sin. And the Church had been right about that. Whatever else the Church might not be right about, it was right about that. He probed within himself for the source of his sin. His whole life had been a wanting, a search for something transcendent, as if he were entitled to a special providence, and maybe this is what came of too much wanting. Lacking a priest or even the belief in priestly powers, he would have to prescribe his own penance and seek his own absolution. He recalled how yesterday, as he watched through the window, she had lunged at Lenny to save him though he was so little worth saving, how she had locked onto his leg and held him fast to the world though he wanted only to forsake it. He had read somewhere that there were more galaxies in the universe than there were grains of sand on the earth. That made him a mere speck in the cosmos, an almost nothing of a thing that did not matter at all. Then why did he seem to matter so much? Surely it was just a trick the mind played, the ego’s delusion and denial of death, but he still seemed to matter and perhaps now more than ever. He did not fully understand it until much later, but, at that moment, his view of the world shattered and then shifted, and, for the first time in his life, he and his self were not at the center of things. There were other things on the planet now to consider and care for. One of them was Tag Parker, and, O’Keefe supposed, even Lenny Parker, miserable, ragamuffin, snot-nosed child of God that he was, might deserve some caring for too.
WHEN HE RETURNED to the house, Tag was cooking dinner. Lenny had shaved and showered and changed his clothes. He looked almost like the old Lenny again, which was not an improvement. He smiled his cherubic smile, the give-me-your-money smile. O’Keefe swallowed his disgust and tried to replace it with at least a modicum of lenity, however grudging and charged through with contempt.
“Do you want to clean up before you eat?” Tag said to O’Keefe, more a command than a question. He had to go through her bedroom to the bathroom. The room was dark and cool and awash in her scent, and he felt like a hunter who had stumbled into the secret lair of the wondrous animal he had long fruitlessly pursued. The bedcovers were turned down as if in invitation. The sheets would be cool and the mattress soft enough. He imagined lying there with her in the late-afternoon shadows, watching the twilight fade into night. He had made love to her on the floor in the cabin and on the blanket in the grass by the spring-fed pool, but he wondered if he would ever be able just to lay peacefully abed with her, merely sleep with her, her back to him, her rump tucked into his groin, the flesh of her breast cupped in his hand as she slept. Her smooth nakedness next to him would be all the comfort he needed.
Dinner was waiting when he came out of the shower. She had fried cube steaks and potatoes, made salad, sliced tomatoes. A homely little meal in the country. She said nothing more than she had to, maybe embarrassed having two lovers at her table. Lenny maintained a morose silence. As if he knew. How could he not know? O’Keefe felt like taking his food out in the yard and eating it there.
They talked about the only thing the three of them had in common, the day after tomorrow.
“We only have two horses,” O’Keefe said.
“One of you can ride with me,” she said.
“What time are you supposed to meet them?” O’Keefe said.
“Ten a.m.” she said. “It’s three hours’ ride from here.”
“What’s the place like where you’re meeting them?”
She looked sheepish. She had no idea.
“Out in the desert somewhere,” she said. “That’s all I know. I have it marked on a map.”
“And what happens when you get there?”
“We make the trade, the cocaine for the money, and they take us on over,” Lenny said.
“And from there?”
“They’ll have a car for us. It’s from there to the ocean and the island.”
“I hope it’s that simple,” O’Keefe said, trying to keep the sarcasm out of his voice. “But somehow I don’t think it will be. We should get there early, as soon after dawn as we can. Lenny and I will ride in together on one of the horses. You stay behind us with the cocaine, so you can see us but we can’t see you. If things seem okay, Lenny will come riding back to you for the cocaine. Give him the cocaine, and stay where you are. Don’t come to us until I signal you again. We make them give us the money, but we keep the cocaine. And then I’ll show them the grenade.”
“The what?” Lenny said.
“The grenade. With the pin pulled.”
“You have a grenade?”
“Yes, and it’s going to stay in my hand with that pin pulled until you’re in the car and gone. If they try something funny, everything blows. The cocaine, the money
, everything. Tag, if the shit hits the fan when we first get there, before I signal you to come down, you ride hard out of there. When you get back here, get in that truck and get to where people are. And then you’d better go to the cops. You won’t have any other choice then.”
“And what happens to you and me?” said Lenny.
“We do whatever we have to do.”
“I’m no hero.”
“Neither am I. We try to get out ourselves and ride after her. But don’t wait for us, Tag. You understand that? Don’t wait for us. Assume we’re dead.”
“Jesus,” Lenny said in a throaty whisper. He stood up, walked over to the television set, turned it on, and resumed his well-worn place on the couch.
O’Keefe drank coffee and smoked at the table while Tag washed the dishes. When she finished the dishes, she sat down on the couch next to Lenny. The characters on a television sitcom chattered punch lines at them, but they did not laugh. Time moved unbearably slowly, and their lack of anything to say to each other oppressed them. This isn’t escape, O’Keefe thought, it’s exile.
Lenny laid out four meandering lines of cocaine on the coffee table and took one in each nostril with the little straw.
“You want some?” Lenny said.
O’Keefe shook his head “No.”
“Tag?” Lenny said, offering her the straw.
She looked at O’Keefe. Was she pleading to him with her eyes? He hoped not.
“No thanks,” she said.
A few minutes later, she said, “I’m going to bed” and left the room without looking at either of them, and neither of them felt like saying “Good night.”
Later O’Keefe stood up and said, “I’m gonna go try to sleep myself.”
“Where?” Lenny said, his ferret eyes darting back toward Tag’s bedroom.
“I’m taking my sleeping bag out to the barn.”
Lenny looked relieved. O’Keefe felt like a villain. But when he walked out of the house into the moon-bright night, the cold, clear air seemed cleansing. His step felt firm on the hard ground. One of the horses snorted in the corral. Coyotes howled in the hills, then stopped abruptly. He could see the mountains on the moon. Everywhere a stillness. Utter quiet. The earth and its creatures, all but the human ones, seemed to be at peace. He stopped and looked back at the house, at the window of the room where she lay, and it seemed like he was telling her goodbye.
CHAPTER 26
O’KEEFE WOKE UP the next morning not long after dawn, cold and stiff and weary from another night on the ground. She had perched herself on a hay bale across from him, leaning back against the wall of the barn, sipping coffee and making fun of him with her smile.
“You were snoring,” she said.
“Doesn’t go very well with my hero image, does it?”
“You are, you know.”
“What?”
“A hero.”
He shook his head. A clown. At best a Don Quixote. A hero, not even a little. All of the heroes had departed from the earth long ago.
He struggled out of his sleeping bag and put on his pants and boots and a jacket. She had the horses saddled and waiting.
“Come on,” she said.
“Where?”
“You sure can’t be a hero if you don’t know how to ride a horse. I’m gonna teach you what you’ll need to know tomorrow.”
LENNY STOOD ON the back porch and watched Tag and O’Keefe ride out of the barn. At first he thought they might be abandoning him there, but then he remembered that it was tomorrow morning that they were supposed to meet the buyer. Then where might they be getting to? Probably out into the foothills to . . . Time to have another snort. He hadn’t slept all night though he had pretended to be sleeping when Tag had come into the living room that morning. He needed the cocaine every every hour or so now. Who does she think she is, just riding off with that guy? They’re probably planning something. Probably planning to dump me out in the desert. Maybe kill me first. I saw the look in that guy’s eyes yesterday. The look of a killer.
He watched them ride out of sight. He noticed that she had left the shotgun leaning up against an old wooden chair on the porch. Good. He would have something to protect himself with when the time came.
The mouth of the small canyon behind the corral was narrow and framed by boulders on either side. They had to ride single file to pass through it. The canyon was no more than fifty yards long. At the end of the canyon a trail switchbacked up into the foothills. The rifle bounced against his back. He had decided to bring the rifle and the pistol and the pack with the grenades in it. No use leaving anything behind to tempt Lenny. Only then did he remember the shotgun.
“Have you done much riding?” she asked.
“Quite a bit when I was a kid. Hardly any since then.”
“Up the hill you lean forward. Down the hill you lean back.”
“I remember that.”
His horse stopped to munch on the vegetation at the side of the trail.
“Don’t let him do that,” she said. “Let him know who’s the boss.”
At the top of the canyon she showed him how to tighten the cinch of the saddle. “It loosens up after you ride for a while, and you’ll need to tighten it back up.”
They remounted the horses and paused to contemplate the scene—the panorama of the desert floor spread out for miles below them, the distant mountains bestowing a welcome finitude, a contented confinement, a wise limitation. They had found themselves at the center of a circle of wonder, as if the sacred-seeming vistas all around them had been created solely for them to behold. But he knew otherwise now. Their sentience so often tricked them, gave them an illusion of mastery over the vast, indifferent land. They were but specks in the cosmos. But such marvelous specks they were, charged with the magic, whirling stuff of life, comets fading toward death but shining brightly still, orbiting through the mystery.
“Ready?” she said.
He had a hard time pulling himself away from the scene. Another moment of peace, seldom come, dearly bought. Too quickly they had to ride on. He seemed comfortable on a horse and kept a good seat in his saddle, so she dispensed with the basics and taught him the few things he would need to know tomorrow. He rolled well with the horse in the gallop though once she had to stifle laughter when he pitched to the side and struggled madly to right himself, nearly falling off. Like most beginners, he experienced the most trouble in the trot. A horse could not gallop very far, but it could trot all day, and if you could not master the trot, could not keep from jerking and bouncing in the saddle, before very long your body would think it had been pureed in a blender. He could not quite get the hang of it, tried too hard, cursed himself frequently.
“It’s like riding a bicycle,” she said. “Once you get it, you’ve got it forever. But until you do, you think you’re the most uncoordinated person on Earth.”
Like riding a bicycle. Kelly. Did she live in fear every night, given what had happened to her on Halloween night when the real goblins had paid them a visit?
THEY RODE TO the oasis and let the horses graze while they loitered by the pool. He tossed small rocks into the water. A hawk soared far above them. She had brought the blanket, expecting they would make love again, wore moccasins that she could quickly slip off her feet, loose fitting pants, no bra, no panties. She thought she would be eager to have him lick and fondle and fuck her again in his gentle, awed, reverent way, as if he were performing some kind of worship, but he gave no sign of wanting to, and she shared his mood. When their eyes met, he only smiled his strange, sad smile that seemed to be mocking something—him, her, the world, she didn’t know what. After a while he walked to her horse and untied the blanket, placed it unrolled on the ground, and laid his head back on it, using it for a pillow. Then he pulled her down and gathered her to him, her head resting on his shoulder, moving up and down with his chest in the slow rhythm of his breathing. They lay that way for a long time.
“Last night,” she said, “when you
were talking about tomorrow and the car, you didn’t say ‘we.’ You said that Lenny and I would get in the car and go on. You didn’t mean that, did you?”
She thought for a few moments he was not going to answer her. Then he said, “I can’t believe how I hunted you down here like you were an animal. It seems wrong.”
“And I can’t believe I ever ran away from you.”
“I almost killed Lenny yesterday.”
“What?”
“I did. I came that close,” he said, holding his thumb and index finger a hair’s breadth apart. “And I don’t know if it’s out of me even now. I don’t know if I could stay around him and you and not have that feeling again.”
“I don’t believe it,” she said, looking perplexed and a little afraid of him all of a sudden.
“I’ve wanted you too much.”
“I don’t believe it,” she said again.
“I won’t be getting in that car with you.”
She felt like she had been kicked in the chest. He had come all this way for her, had finally conquered her and put her under his spell, only to abandon her. So much of her life had been a kind of dull hell of a life, a life of stunted emotions and a background white noise of nauseous distaste for almost everything that was not mineral or vegetable or non-human animal. Even her beauty had been small consolation, had merely made her an object of pitiless desire, coveted even by her father. She had never before suffered the excruciating, discrete hurt of a seemingly unbearable loss because her whole life seemed to have been but one long, dull hurt, one long, dull loss that had happened so long ago she could not remember what happened or how. The pain seized her in successive, silent, shuddering waves. She tried to cry out, let the pain escape out into the air of the world, but she could hardly breathe, and it took a long time for tears to come.
“I’m through drifting,” he said. “And wanting.”
Her eyes told him she did not understand.
“Do you remember what you said back at your house that day? That you’d been a wisp blowing in the wind. That’s me, too. I’ve been like that all my life. Right up to now. I’ve been a fool all along, but I’m not drifting anymore, not even for you. I’m sorry, Tag, but I’ve got a daughter back there. It’s time for me to make some kind of stand.”