He stood and began his slow, shuffling walk once more. The sun’s heat sneered over the hills, already beginning to bake his chapped lips. He kept stumbling, trying not to fall, to add more bruises and scrapes to the ones purpled and weeping on his elbows and knees. Above him, a buzzard circled the sky, watching. He lurched forward and threw his arms up into the air and croaked. The bird flew off northward, crossing borders without concern.
Hours passed and the sun reached its blistering apex. He tried to keep an image of his sister in his mind — to hold on to the picture of her leaning over him, her blue dress washed with gold in the lamplight, administering him sips of chilled, sweet hibiscus tea. To call her forth from that place and that time in which she’d fit so perfectly. But the image blurred in the heat, her face turning to gnarled tumbleweeds, her dark eyes spiked through with the flitting tongues of red, white, and blue snakes.
Javier closed his eyes and craned his face skyward. The sun made the inside of his lids glow the colour of rust. When he opened them, the buzzard had come back. There was another one with it. They circled and dipped toward him, something in their turning making him look closer. There was no patience in their curves; their hunger was harder, more insistent.
When he heard the whine of their motors he knew. Not buz- zards, but crafts with no pilots, bodies with no hearts. Pure, merciless vision.
Drones.
Fear and adrenalin flooded his muscles and threw him into a run. Blind running, running anywhere, in search of cover that didn’t exist in this wide-open hell, running with whatever energy he had left in the direction he believed might lead him to safety. To his sister, still alive up there, stalked by darkness. The dust and grit and heat poured into him, and he began coughing, little catches to start, then huge, wracking coughs, his whole trunk convulsing and threatening to split apart and spill his organs out onto the baking earth. The power in his legs dissolved, giving way under the weight of his hurtling body, pitching him forward into the scrub. His cheekbone met the dirt and his vision went black.
Amid the high ringing and the warm touch of blood he fixed her in his mind and his chest, fused his own pounding heartbeats to hers, so that each would know exactly when the other’s stopped beating. He opened his shredded mouth and although he made no sound, called to her.
Valentina.
By the time he looked up and saw the green-and-white pickup truck bouncing over the horizon, dozens of little American flags lining its hood, he had to call it a victory. He would not die in the desert. They would send him back, but he’d be alive. To wait for her, again. Or the next chance to go after her.
Two men in fatigues jumped down from the truck and hauled him up by the arms, holding him out like a trophy deer for the cameraman that followed them. Another man, this one wearing a big suede Stetson and orange sunglasses and an embroidered cowboy shirt bulging with his gut, waddled over and stood in front of him, fingers hooked into a huge rose-shaped belt buckle.
“What’s your name, son?” he said.
Javier hung like a scarecrow. Sunlight blazed into his face and he squinted and groaned at the pain in his head, like a metal cog grinding away at the bone under his eye. Her face swelled up in his mind, and then folded into ripples and collapsed, like a stilled flag.
“Lopez,” he said. “Javier Lopez.”
Valentina kneeled in front of him, rubbing, squeezing. There were veins and callouses and hard edges, his feet pale and misshapen from years stuffed into hot boots treading rocky ground. The last two toes on each foot were clubbed, the nails yellowed and thick. She heard him take another long, oily swallow of bourbon and sigh. Some TV western blared out behind her, all tinny orchestra music and buckaroo drawl. Valentina closed her eyes and kneaded his troll’s feet, reciting out, with each application of pressure, a mantra in her mind. Last time. Last time. Last time.
She rubbed and pressed patiently, until the first twitch came, quick and sharp. Then another, a longer convulsion. She paused, holding his limp feet in her hands like a hunk of moist cheese, and now he wrenched and turned and pitched his glass to roll across the floor, emptied of the strong and fragrant bourbon, the extra squeeze of Nayarit coral snake venom she’d added in. Above her, his face reddened and swelled like a morning sun, suffused with his proud blood. As he thrashed, she listened to his choking, watched streams of white foam dribble from his lips. Even in the throes of death, he was so pink and fat, so much like a greased ham.
She thought about how thin Javier had looked, her brother’s smashed-in face recoiling from the cameras, golden skin whitened to ash, blue splotches darkening his eyes, making the ripped-open flesh of his left cheek all the more vivid as it streamed with blood. He was broken, defeated, and they held up his defeat like a banner, echoing the words that Earl Sampson had emblazoned on his cursed fence.
Valentina Lopez let go of the dead man’s feet. She reached over and picked up the little flag on the side table, which she waved once in a feeble victory salute before sliding its cheap, wobbly stem into the pocket of Earl Sampson’s cowboy shirt. The sun was nearly set, and she would need to be far away before morning came. He would be expected at the parade. When he didn’t show, they would look for him. Then for her.
She grabbed the knapsack she’d stashed behind the curtain that morning, and stripped off her purple dress, quickly changing into the dark sweats she’d plucked from the closet where his dead wife’s clothing still hung. When she slid open the glass door, the humid night rushed in at her, alive with the sizzle of crickets and the murmur of wind over the dirt, like a song pulling her forward into the nighttime, away from Monterrey, away from Cochise County, toward the silvered wonderland of America.
She thought about Javier, surely now slouched in the back of some filthy truck bouncing back down the rutted road to home. She thought about their crumbling house there with its suffocating adobe rooms, the time she’d watched her brother shiver through the fever for nine days, almost dying in the dust and heat. She remembered the stories she’d told him, about the land of hopes and dreams.
She was the one who’d made it. She was across now.
Above her, the stars were coming out, mirroring the twinkle of Tucson’s lights visible to the northwest, below the dark ridge of the Santa Catalina Mountains. She wanted to know it, all of it . . . the fullness of pride and pleasure. Behind her, a huge spangled flag stirred atop the late Earl Sampson’s ranch, gesturing toward the horizon, whispering its promise.
Sheepasnörus Rex
SSSH HHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH HHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH HHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH HHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH HHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHP
Quiet fell on the room like a cleaver. Where before a soothing hush had percolated from the countertop monitor, like a warm towel draped so comfortably over the atmosphere that Craig had stopped noticing it, now there was only gaping, cosmic silence — and only one way to fill it, one possible outcome.
When the sheep stopped, the screaming began.
On cue, the monitor crackled to life with the sound of Rosie’s shrieks. She’d only been down for twenty-five minutes. Not enough, not enough. Now she’d need a change and a bottle and most of all, her mom, who was probably still in the middle of the liturgy or creed or some other weird part of a ritual they’d both agreed was ridiculous until Elise got pregnant and discovered her lapsed Catholic faith growing in tandem with the baby. Craig stood by the kitchen counter, staring at a nugget of oatmeal congealed on the lip of a pot stacked in the sink, and fought down the questions burping up into his chest. Are you so terrified of her waking up? So rattled by an infant? Dad?
In theory, his weekly solo parenting sessions were easy. His duties consisted primarily of maintaining the conditions for Rosette to nap. But the sheep was critical to this. When it failed, it triggered a whole chain of incompetence: Craig fumbling through a diaper change, then trying to push a bottle of defrosted breast milk into Rosie’s wailing mouth as he carted her back and forth between the living
room and kitchen, singing soft nonsense in a ridiculous voice, dribbling milk all over the floor, his nerves chafed raw as tuna sashimi.
In truth, it ate at him that he needed a piece of cheap, mass-produced crap to preserve his sanity whenever he was alone with the baby. That on Sunday mornings, tension clung to him like a sour, flatulent funk as he surrendered control to a ridiculous doodad somehow possessed of both the witchcraft necessary to get Rosette to stay asleep and a functional inconsistency that bordered on sadism.
For this dark magic — the tuneless, mercurial song that brought calm to his child when he could not — Craig had come to loathe the bastard, Sheepasnörus.
“The fucking sheep has no clutch! No. Clutch. At. All!”
He whapped the sheep’s soft plush head against the lip of the vintage Formica table. On the chair beside him, Rosette cooed in her bassinet. Elise stood by the counter in a grey skirt and floral church blouse, squeezing tubes of Cha-Zee-Zee spread and Bruschetta Blend onto pieces of toast. In the fluorescence, her skin was almost translucent.
“It’s supposed to shut off after a certain amount of time,” she said. “It assumes she’s asleep.”
“And what if she needs it to sleep? What then? Then it’s a piece of shit with no clutch.”
“Language,” said Elise.
“What, is God listening?”
She frowned at him. “I’m listening. And Rosette is. That’s not enough?”
It wasn’t a sheep, exactly. Sheepasnörus was half lamb, half dinosaur, two silver vinyl horns, googly eyes, and a floppy spinal ridge sewn onto a snuggly bag of cotton batting housing a battery casing and the speaker box that produced its four varieties of soothing white noise. In the logo on its tag, the umlaut over the o was rendered as little cartoon lamby ears. Craig couldn’t say if Rosette loved its whooshing or not — wasn’t sure when she’d start being able to love things. Regardless, her being unable to sleep without it was untenable; it was madness, to rely on something so unreliable.
Craig’s stomach gurgled. He took a mouthful of coffee, heavily spiked with Bailey’s. Elise chewed toast slathered with the gloppy, sodium-rich condiments their house had been lousy with ever since Elise’s uncle had caved and agreed to give Craig a shot at junior marketing executive at KBC-Flaxos. She paused the argument to beam at Rosette and brush a strand of oily hair away from the baby’s face. Craig looked at his tiny daughter, her pale feather-fuzz over skin as soft as butter. For an instant, she caught his look with her wide, searching eyes, and he felt his heart lurch under his ribs.
God, he loved her. Both of them, both of them. Wrenching, desperate love.
He was so tired.
Elise was more tired. She unbuttoned her blouse for a feeding, a faint pink glow coming into her cheeks as she looked at Rosette. Sunlight from the window made a halo around her wispy hair. Mothering drained and recharged her. It was all beautiful to watch, hard to live through. Small things got inflamed, out of control before you knew it. The sheep, for instance: it was feeding off their weakness, an evil larva suckling on their fatigue, engorging itself. It had to go.
“I’m taking it out to the shed,” he said, shaking Sheepasnörus so that its googly eyes tittered and spun, clicking like moths trapped under glass. “Maybe I can fix it so that it doesn’t shut off. Tinker with it.”
Elise raised an eyebrow at him, a smear of Cha-Zee-Zee on her lip. “It’s not your Sheepasnörus,” she said, scooping up the baby. Rosette crossed her eyes and farted a loud squelch, an astonishing sound from a body so small. Elise scrunched up her nose and grinned. “Do we need to be changed?”
“I’m taking it out to the shed,” said Craig.
That night Rosette wailed for a full hour before falling asleep. Elise kept giving Craig stern looks, but on this he wouldn’t budge: the sheep was staying outside. After a marathon of hoarse lullabies, he agreed to a compromise and called up a white-noise app on his phone, and the baby finally fell into an exhausted calm.
Afterwards, they sat, frazzled and limp over bowls of turkey chili. Craig drank beer and Elise had lemonade, and they watched Mad Men on TV until ten thirty, when their eyes began to droop and the foot massage Craig was giving Elise dwindled to a feeble pinching of her big toe. They went quietly up to bed, Craig hyper-aware of every creaky step or popping of his ankle. Tired as he was, a good rest was still months away; tonight there’d be a three a.m. feed and another in early morning, before seven. When they got into bed, he picked up the thick paperback copy of Stephen King’s It that he’d been reading for the past four months, stared at the page for ten minutes, then fell asleep with the book on his chest.
Sometime later, he woke to a twinge in his bladder. He resisted opening his eyes to look at the clock. The air smelled of old sweat. Dust tickled his throat. He thought about that afternoon, about Sheepasnörus out in the shed, condemned to slump on the cluttered workbench amid pine shavings and cobwebs and rusty screws. In the moment, it seemed absurd, to have exiled an inanimate stuffy that was helping them through this lunacy. Something churned in his gut, and he felt a belch push up into his esophagus. He sat up to let it out, and the book tumbled from his chest onto the floor, with a thump that made him wince. He reached to get it, and when he rose again, the monster was there, in front of him.
It perched at the foot of the bed, huge and damp, breathing in heavy rasps, its wide black eyes glossy and indifferent. Milky goo streamed from its sluglike lips and dripped down a belly as broad and pale as boiled haggis. Its curled horns were calcified into scaly bone, and it had a tufted Satan-beard of cornsilk hair under its blunt nose. A pair of hooves jutted from its torso, wavering as though unmoored from the consciousness of its body, as it swayed ever so slightly back and forth on rumpled haunches of pink skin.
Its presence keened through Craig’s body like antifreeze. His mind screamed, What the fuck what the fuck? — even though he knew. There was no way it could be real, this gross, corpulent hallucination of his daughter’s mechanical sleep aid, sheep-aid, snorasaur, piece of junk, plastic god. This was exhaustion, or his Ativan mixed with one too many Budweisers.
“Hello, Carl,” it said.
Craig felt a reaching in his diaphragm, an upchuck of words: “My name’s C-Craig.”
“It doesn’t matter,” said Sheepasnörus. Its voice issued from somewhere near its groin, calm and deep, layered and laced with a tapelike hiss. Craig looked at Elise. She was asleep, her face round and peaceful. She couldn’t hear the ghost.
I’m also a ghost, Craig thought.
The thing wheezed, weeping fluid.
“I’m in the garage, Carl. I can’t soothe in distanceshhhhh.”
Was it revenge? An omen? Had he been drugged? Brainwashed? Could he possibly be tired enough that he was hallucinating? He resisted the urge to talk back to the thing.
“You’re tired . . . I can help youssshhh.”
“I don’t want your help,” Craig said, by reflex. It was all fine, fine.
“You know Rosette can’t sleep without me,” said Sheepasnörus.
“She’s sleeping now.”
“It won’t last, Carl.” It paused, oozing. “I have the soul of your child.”
“NO! No!” Craig almost shouted, loud enough to wake the baby. He put a hand to his mouth, bit down on his index finger.
“I can also provide for youssschhhhh,” said Sheepasnörus. Its black tongue flashed out, curling into a swizzle. “Your friends are all richer than you. You’ll never play soccer. I know about the Whopper lunches, Carl. Accept it: you’re not really here. Leave your body behind. I’ll make sure it continues caring for the woman and child. For your soul, there is a better plaschhhhhhhe.”
Craig’s mind reeled, conjuring hilly roads, ocean vistas, mountaintop palaces; a white beach house in San Diego, piña colada glasses frosted with condensation; palm leaves, lightness, distance. Himself, strong but without weight.
Then the smell of Rosette’s hair hit him, warm and sweet and cookie-like, and he fe
lt something being pulled from within his body, like a knot of chewed food dragged up through his intestine. Sheepasnörus drew its steaming, muttony snout close to his face and lashed its tongue across his pajama-clad chest, probing.
“We’re famished, Carl. Famished forever.”
“This isn’t happening!”
“The bounty of youth has past.” Sheepasnörus sat back, licking its chops. “Now is the time of sacrificeshhhhhhhhhhh!” Hooves flailing, it arched its snout skyward, revealing a patchy wattle of veins, and began a mad, desperate panting, punctuated with cracked bleats, which quickly rose into a sound like a chainsaw ripping through bark, splintering Craig’s skull.
In the morning, he remembered coming to in front of the open fridge, staring into its humming depths at shelves full of half-wrapped cheeses and jalapeño jellies, clutching a leftover meatball sub like a burning torch, unsure of how he’d gotten downstairs but aware of a pressure in his temples that was unfamiliar to him. Elise came and met him on his way back to the bedroom, saying, Are you all right? I saw you weren’t in bed. Her face blue in the shadows, a holy thing.
“It’s a big change. Big, oh yeah.”
Stephen sat, leaning on a bottle of Budweiser, nodding his head and staring at the TV above the bar, where Lionel Messi was helping Barça take apart Villarreal. Craig had known Stephen for seventeen years, since he’d come over from Mauritius to go to university and they’d shared a dorm room. Now his friend had a three-year-old son and made wheelbarrows of money writing security code for a software company. They saw each other every two or three months, a bit more often since Elise got pregnant. Stephen was the no-brainer to call after Craig had begged for an afternoon out of the house, craving beer; he and his wife, Gwen, were trying out a separation, sharing their kid, Dexter, on alternating weeks. Stephen knew all about escape.
Different Beasts Page 5