by Boston Teran
Fuckin’ death. Her stomach contracts at the very words. Helpless, she’s thrown through a flash fire of thoughts. You are born again. Vivid life moments, three frames in length. Gutter and Lena and Granny Boy. Flashbulb fast. Sinister and moving and tragic. Snippets out of some Jungian MTV nightmare. Every black-and-white blowjob and backlit truck-stop hump. Watching your tits mature in blue-ice light under the pawing sweat-filthed hands of businessmen and junked-out middle-class housewives. Just one great juke hole to the upside-down cross. You are born again. Grovelling at the spray-painted slogans of the Left-Handed Path. Serving his alleged only begotten son. Knifing drug dealers to cop their stashes in pitch-black parking lots on moonless nights. Robbing neon-framed gas station attendants for a few bucks or on a whim. Kicking some shopkeeper half to death ’cause Cyrus overheard him talking about his faith in Christ.
You are born again.
She grabs at the stanchions that support the sink. Two bars to a cage. Or the two pillars Samson pushed apart to cast down the temple. No fuckin’ chance of that.
You are born again to the Left-Handed Path.
What she would do for a little juice right now. Just enough to …
You are born …
She forces herself to live through the final beating, when she broke from Cyrus. The boot-hard kicks that broke her sternum and fractured her skull and the taste of …
She begins to feel herself split apart.
“I will not break …”
She’s living out a full dose of Mach One, and her teeth are clacking so hard they sound like the bones in some seer’s cup right before the roll of prophecy. There’s no sleep for junkies on the way down. None. Just reckless, restless nausea and diarrhea and cold sweats and fumbling speech.
“I will not break …”
Anne grabs a towel from the rack and wipes Case’s cropped black hair, which sticks up in sweaty greased clumps. She wipes at the sweat pouring off the edge of her nose and chin.
The old rage puts on its wolf’s-teeth mask. The tiled floor becomes the white stone slab waiting for her corpse. Case curls into a fetal position. Her drenched T-shirt clings to her back, and the cold from the tiles leaves her shivering.
Anne runs into the bedroom to get a blanket and covers her up.
“I will not break. I will not … I … will not … I will not. Fuck you, Cyrus. Fuck you. I will not break …”
She repeats the sentence over and over again. A delusional broken mantra she drives into the very essence of her being.
“I will not break. I … will not break. I will not …”
Saliva hangs in a string line from her lips to the floor. She hears a siren along Hollywood Boulevard swell up, shrill, then slowly slip away down past Western Avenue. She begins to cry. She cries from the center of her being. Cries for the little girl born to be left behind.
3
CHRISTMAS WEEK 1995
A small wooden windmill sits on top a mailbox near the entrance to a dirt driveway that crooks its way up a hill and onto a flat prow of stony ground and ends at a fifties-style ranch house. As the windmill’s warped vanes creak, five figures emerge from the brush like a coven conjured out of the black earth.
They are a patchquilt of jeans and leathers. Bare-soled boots and chain-braided vests over scrubby T-shirts. One, a boy named Gutter, has a safety pin awled through his lower lip. Another, a girl named Lena, has her hair greased back and dyed up like a rainbow. Their faces and arms are tattooed with anarchistic designs. They have pistols and knives wedged into their belts and boots. As they fan into the darkness they are a vision of post-apocalyptic rock-and-roll revenants.
Cyrus stops them about fifty yards shy of the house and looks the grounds over. The bushes by the front door are tasseled with holiday lights and dance to the wind like illuminated ghosts. He looks back down at the road. Via Princessa cuts a silent, pitch-dark path around the hills toward the freeway. He listens and waits, his senses taking everything in quarter by quarter. The only sound is the windmill’s rusted spoke arcing round its unvarying center. He gives orders silently, using a spartan wave of the blue barrel of his shotgun.
He sends Granny Boy and Wood across the driveway to follow a ravine that backs up and around the house toward the shed and corral where the girl keeps her horse. Lena is sent along a row of cypress trees to the near side of the house, which faces the Antelope Freeway. She is to check out a set of glass patio doors that lead from the den to the pool. Gutter is left behind in case some car comes along Via Princessa and turns up into the driveway. He’s only to make for the house when Cyrus lets him know it’s dyin’ time.
Gabi sits alone on the window seat listening to her CD player and watching the headlights of the cars on the freeway flare by. She takes a kind of mindless pleasure imagining the lives tucked away behind those flooding headlights that fill out the dark and then dissolve on toward Canyon Country. At fourteen she is flush with the idea the whole world has a date with something interesting—except her. She is all will and dreams trapped inside a child’s body.
The door to her bedroom is cracked open just enough so she can hear the vague intonations of an argument between her mother and stepfather.
She gets up and crosses the room and slips out into the hallway. She peeks around the corner and sees the kitchen squared up within and beyond the dark frame of the den. Her mother steps into view. She is rubbing her right hand with her left, then the left with her right. It is a gesture of her mother’s Gabi knows all too well, and it means she is about ready to cry or lunge into an angry outburst. Occasionally she does both at the same time.
The den carries their words through to the hall like some huge woofer.
“Talk to me, Sam.”
“About what?”
“Oh, Sam …”
“There’s nothing.”
Her stepfather’s tone has that uncommunicative edge she’s heard in a lot of their conversations lately.
Her mother passes out of view, and now the room is just a backdrop of white kitchen cabinets hung in space.
“Sam, don’t you know when you talk like that you give yourself away.”
“Sarah, I mean it. There’s …”
“Don’t do this,” she says angrily. “I won’t stand for a shut door to your emotions. I left Bob because of that.”
To hear her father’s name spoken that way, used as some sort of negative example, makes Gabi feel sick and angry. And lonely. That’s the worst of it. To feel like you’re the sum total of someone else’s separation.
It hurts her to listen, so she goes back to her room and sullenly closes the door on them. Her dog has already found the warm spot on the window seat where she had been and is making himself comfortable. She slumps down next to him and curls her feet under his belly.
“Make with some room, Poncho.”
He’s part cocker and part question mark: the floppy ears and pooly eyes of one, and the scruff-box short hair and gangly long legs of the other. He had been her father’s birthday present to her and a way of keeping them close.
She glances out the window to find herself there in the night, staring back miserably. The long slender face, the skin a burnished summer yellow pooling around deeply set eyes. The details of her features swim a bit in the glass, but their import is unmistakable. Each day she is evolving more and more into the image of her mother. And at this moment, as much as she loves her mother, she hates her for having such a profound effect on her very being.
She looks back across the room at the clock by her bed. It’s closing in on 10:30.
She and her father have this little ritual every Tuesday and Thursday night when he’s working the late shift. At 10:30, as he cruises past on the freeway, he slows down and throws on the overhead flashers of his sheriff’s patrol car, and she responds by flipping her bedroom light on and off. It’s their secret way of saying good night.
Through the tangled cross of manzanita trees at the edge of the slope, Cyrus watches the ni
gger sheep and his porcelain wife arguing in the kitchen. If they only knew the book of life was about to close on them.
Lena makes her way back from the house along the lip of the ridge, using the high grass as cover against the moonlight. She slips up behind Cyrus and leans against him.
The years of pills and junk have left her with a face that seems to hover between life and death. She points a hand toward the house. On the back of each finger is tattooed the date of a death she has had a hand in.
She whispers, “Besides the front and patio doors, there’s one more. And that goes to the service entrance behind the kitchen, there, on the far wall. I couldn’t find signs of no security system.”
“Just the nigger and his brood in there?”
She nods. “I crawled right up to the house and that’s all I saw. They got a dog though, but you could finish it with just a good set of teeth.”
“Give me the hypodermic.”
She takes a black needle case from her back pocket and hands it to Cyrus. He opens it. One needle, two vials of clear liquid. More than enough to play. He closes the case and slips it into the pocket of his frayed deerskin coat.
“Alright. Let’s go wish the sheep a Merry Christmas.”
“Why are you so sexually unresponsive to me?”
Sam leans back against the stove, short an answer. Sarah turns and grabs a photo from a nest of snapshots held to the refrigerator door by a miniature magnetic blender. She crosses the room and holds the photo up so Sam can see it.
“Is this all we are now?”
He looks at the snapshot Gabi took of Maureen and John at the last family barbecue. A perfect mismatch of people sitting side by side at a picnic table. Maureen a little too drunk to care about the disrespect her husband, John Lee, shows her. Sam says nothing, but he can’t believe that of all the photos she grabbed that particular one. It’s almost as if she were psychic.
“I don’t know what you mean, Sarah.”
“I mean, are we like them? Has our marriage boiled down to that? Just a hideous fraud. Something we make up along the way to get what we want until we want something else. And if we don’t get that or don’t want it anymore, well … we just cast it aside and keep what we have until … the next little thing comes along. Are we down to trade and barter?”
He can feel a guilty headache coming on. “I don’t know what you’re fuckin’ talking about,” he says.
Sarah swings the kitchen door shut. “Don’t use that kind of language with me. Not in this house.”
He throws up his hands.
“Do you know what commitment is?”
“Jesus, Sarah …”
“It’s not just an idea, or a part-time gig. It’s a way of life.” She throws the photo down on the kitchen table and gives him a hard look across folded arms. “Are you having an affair?”
She watches him carefully. His huff across to the refrigerator, passing within inches of her. The tug at the refrigerator door, the taking of a beer, the twisting off of the cap. All done with an uncomfortable boredom.
He goes to sit at the kitchen table when, outside, Gabi’s horse starts to stalk the corral, whinnying. A high, shrill call.
Gabi sits watching the freeway when something forms a withery outline just past the lamplit tiles of the pool. She leans up against the glass, cupping her hands around her eyes to see better. The bush grass wrestles and bends. Maybe it’s a coyote or a wild dog. Maybe even a deer. Sometimes deer make their way down from the hills of the Angeles National Forest, which backs up their property. What a hoot. Christmas week and a deer comes to visit. But then something steel-like and shiny seeps through a row of trees. It glistens once. Twice. Like a broken fragment of a star. And then it’s gone.
She begins to feel a little anxious. It wouldn’t be the first time someone wandered up the hill.
She goes out into the hall. The kitchen door is closed but she can hear her mother and stepfather still in the throes of it.
Poncho follows her toward the living room.
It is dark except for the twinkling lights of the Christmas tree, which cast starburst shadows onto the ceiling. She stands in the middle of the room looking from window to window. She is wearing a T-shirt and shorts and feels unusually cold. She glances at the patio doors. They are slightly open. Only inches, but enough to let the night air in. Her mother always keeps them closed. Maybe she and Sam went outside when they were talking and forgot to close them when they came back in.
Gabi is crossing the room to close the doors when something shapeshifts up behind her. She sees its alter-image lunge across the ceiling.
She manages one scream. Just one, before her voice is swallowed by a huge hand. Then everything happens at once. The kitchen door is flung open and hits the wall. Her mother shouts her name as Gabi is lifted off the ground, kicking. The tree is knocked over, taking a scythe line of glittering light spots with it. Gabi claws at the hand over her mouth as her head is pulled around. She is face-to-face with gaunt eyes above cheeks branded in ink with lightning bolts that drip blood. There is another scream and a shotgun blast discharges and the whole house seems to echo and shake and reek with acrid smoke.
Bob Hightower is cruising the Antelope Freeway and going through his Christmas list of disappointments. Another holiday alone, without Gabi, without Sarah. The sum total of his life; he’s thirty-eight, with a hatful of bad memories, and clinging to a job that is his last lifeline to order.
Come Christmas morning he’ll get up, shave, put on a suit, go to church, then be the odd man out at either Arthur’s house or John and Maureen’s. They’ll have the appropriate turkey dinner and they’ll pass out the perfunctory presents, say all the right things, and then he’ll drive home after dark, sit alone in his living room, the living room without even a tree, and get drunk and cry.
He looks at himself in the rearview mirror and tries to calculate who he is. He searches for the man who once incubated a kind of starry optimism. The face is the same, only the hopes have changed. Diminishing returns.
He should never have allowed himself to fall under his ex-father-in-law’s influence. No, “allowed himself” is not a fair accounting. Succumbed is closer to the truth. He succumbed to Arthur’s plan of manipulating John Lee into slopping him down behind a desk. He succumbed to the job’s safeties and proprieties and potential advances. All for Sarah’s sake. So she wouldn’t end up a sheriff’s widow. Was it all for her sake, though? He stares into the mirror to try to find the part of him that didn’t mind succumbing to the job’s safeties and proprieties and political advances. But what does he have now? He’s a seat warmer at headquarters. A late-night fill-in. And he doesn’t even have Sarah.
At least he has his faith. The one rock in a weary land that’s lately been short of miracles.
Just ahead, between the black shape of the hills, is Via Princessa. He slows down and turns on the overhead flashers. Runnels of red across the hood of the car. He looks up toward the gravelly reef where the house is.
Not a light shines. It sits muted and stark. Just an outline against the moon-swept canyon. Bleak as his own heart. He pulls over. Maybe they went out to dinner. Maybe she fell asleep.
How can such a little thing like the flipping on and off of a light leave him so discouraged when it doesn’t happen? He sits there and waits. The inside of the cruiser swims with the phosphory blood red of the flashers.
4
John Lee Bacon waits perched on a parcel of scrub rock at the cusp of the Shadow Range. There’s an ashtray’s worth of butts in the sand around his boots and a flask of bourbon hunkered down in his back pocket. Half drunk against the cold, he watches everything around him without expression. He pulls the flask and has another drink, cursing in short nervous bouts.
Through the beveled tiers of the Shadow Mountains, the rise and fall of headlights. He stands and approaches the road. An old white van looms into view, sidles down the incline, and stops yards away. The doors open. Cyrus climbs out, followed by
three of the others. He steps across the headlights and approaches John Lee. His boot spurs clang against the lit ground. The dust is full and floats around him.
“Well, look what the desert bred up.”
“Don’t start with your shit,” hawks John Lee. “Just tell me …”
“Your boy crossed over.”
A moment of finality.
John Lee nods. Takes a wrinkled envelope from his back pocket and tosses it at Cyrus. “Book closed,” he says.
“The book ain’t ever closed.”
John Lee stares at him apprehensively. “What do you mean?”
Cyrus doesn’t offer an answer as he counts off the loose packet of bills inside the envelope.
John Lee eyes the others. Gutter squats down beside one of the headlights. Lena sits on the bumper beside him and smokes. Granny Boy, still jacked up on speed from before the kill, is pacing and talking to himself.
“What do you mean?” he asks again.
Granny Boy mocks him by repeating, “What do you mean? What do you mean?”
John Lee tries to stare him down but Granny Boy holds up a hand, stretching his torn-gloved fingers. “Don’t look too hard, Captain. The smell of blood got me off and the night ain’t over yet. I’m still up for a little finger work.”
John Lee turns away, but not fast enough to allow the boy to think he’s got him rattled. He glances at Cyrus. “Did the nigger suffer?”
“I did it just like you would, if you had the guts to do it yourself.”
“You know, I think you were more personable when you were just a junkie.”
Cyrus pushes his face up against John Lee’s. “You mean when I was your fuckin’ field hand with my butt up in the air, doin’ that ‘Yes, sir’ and ‘No, sir’ shit? Those days are history.”
Wood, who is still sitting behind the steering wheel, leans out the open van door. “Why don’t you let me handshake the inside of that fuck’s asshole?”
John Lee doesn’t move, but from the corner of his eye he makes out Gutter unsheathing a blood-slaked hunting knife. He starts to shave it through the sand, cleaning it off. John Lee lets his hand slip up toward the revolver he’s got tucked inside his coat.