by Boston Teran
“By the way, I did that little porcelain doll wife of his.”
John Lee looks like Gutter’s knife was staked in his back. “You’re fuckin’ with me, right?”
“She made a good run at it, but came up short,” says Granny Boy.
John Lee looks from face to face. Each shucked out and darkening.
Cyrus steps up behind John Lee, his mouth right beside his ear. “Not only that, but I kept the pretty-pretty for myself.”
John Lee panics. “Gabi?”
“I didn’t get her name.”
Granny Boy starts to sing: “Well, he’s just an excitable boy. He took little Gabi to the Junior Prom.… ”
John Lee’s heart pounds. He rushes forward and around the van.
“… he’s just an excitable boy …”
John Lee yanks open the van doors. Gabi is lying there unconscious. She is bound and gagged and naked except for her shorts. Her T-shirt has been swathed around her head. He slams the doors shut, gulps air, stumbles backward.
“Why?!”
“… After ten long years they let him out of the home … he’s just an excitable boy …”
Cyrus and his pack have circled up around John Lee.
“Why? You’ll destroy ev—”
“You always thought you were in control!”
“… And he dug up her grave and built a cage with her bones … He’s such an excitable boy …”
“But you were only in charge. Understand the difference?” Cyrus’s teeth tear at his words. “Do you have the true vision of where it is at? Has it started to crack through that lie you’ve been living?”
“… He’s such an excitable boy!”
“It’s Furnace Creek all over again, Captain.”
When Cyrus sees John Lee’s face start to flush out with a fearful symmetry he leans in closer and says, “You don’t know how bad you fucked up, Captain.”
“You can’t believe for a—”
“What did you think was going on inside my head all those years I’d shuffle through that fieldwork for you, Captain?” Cyrus screams in John Lee’s face. He puts on a mock shuffling slave voice. “Yes, sir, Captain. I’ll sell that smack you copped in a bust. Yes, sir, I’ll get you some little boy so you can make hump movies to pass around with your belt-buckle stud queer-cop buddies. Sure. Just for a little taste. A few droppings.”
A monstrous whisper of voices around John Lee laugh at him, throw trash talk at him. Cyrus’s pack get off watching the Captain get punked.
“I was biding my time, Captain. Avengement. Retribution. Retaliation. Vendetta. Those words shrivel up your dick a little. Did you forget how you worked me when I was desperate for a little vein taste? Remember how you’d make me stick my ass up in the sky and you and your cop buddies make me be the bitch?
“Why’d you think I kept tight with you all those years after I cleaned up? It was the Path, dicksleeve. I kept the focus. I knew one day you’d want something done I could savage you and fatboy with. Where all that money you scored back then could not fill the hole I would blow through your lives.”
Cyrus holds up the money John Lee has given him. He tosses it into the sand.
Gutter walks over and spits on the money. Granny Boy unzips his leathers and lets his cock give that cash a good cooling.
“We left the cunt back there at the house all nice and bloody and wrapped for Christmas,” says Cyrus. “And the pretty-pretty, I’m going to take her and fuck her and shoot her up and let the young wolves here invent games for her pussy. We are going to rape her and film it and … I might even send you and fatboy a copy of that.”
Wood begins to scarf his hands against the van wall like he’s hot to climb in and get this hellbound train rolling. John Lee turns away from the sight.
“What is it you want, then?” he says.
Cyrus says nothing.
In a frenzy of collapsing emotions John Lee screams out, “What do you want?”
Cyrus does a little riff on the rock-and-roll classic “We Want the World and We Want It …” He breathes out one last word: “Yeah … It’s gonna be pretty watching you and fatboy come tumbling down on each other. Wait till he finds out. You ought to go home and slit your throat tonight.
“Maybe I’ll send the pretty-pretty back one day in a baggie. Maybe I should mail her to the FBI in a dog-food tin with a little note tagged to her clit to talk to you about it. What do you think, Captain? Is the suicide road lookin’ good? Or maybe we ought to cook you up right here?”
Cyrus watches John Lee’s hand start to quiver as it eases toward the inside of his coat.
“Forget it, Captain. If we were gonna kill you, we’d a taken you down in the dark without so much as a whisper.”
His hand just hangs where it is.
Cyrus comes forward. His hand slides up John Lee’s thigh, over his cock, lingering a bit, then up inside his coat. He slips the revolver out of his belt. He clicks off the safety, slips out the cylinder, and lets the bullets fall one by one to the sand.
John Lee remains where he is. He stares into freakshow faces bent out of the dark.
All the bullets have fallen to the ground save one. This Cyrus catches in his hand and holds up between two fingers inches from John Lee’s face. Cyrus takes the bullet, pops it in his mouth, and swallows it.
“I’m the belly of the beast now, Captain. So consider yourself swallowed.”
5
The hand-painted sign by the side of the road says: FIRST CHURCH OF CHRIST AND CHRISTIAN COMMUNITY CENTER RECONSTRUCTION PROJECT. Beneath that in noble blue metallic script is the phrase Christians are on the move in Clay!
A bulldozer lays waste to the old church while day laborers hose off a battered mastaba of slat, stucco, and collapsed spire to keep the dust down.
The church, a relic of pre-earthquake-proof simplicity, had been left by time an inconvenience on a barely usable acre of land. Short on parking, rec rooms, space for Christian counseling, Bible classes, and antisecular fund-raising, what else could religion do but suffer? To that end, a two-acre parcel of adjoining property and a trust fund of cash had been offered up in supplication by some sinner who, overcome with the best intentions death has to offer, saw rebuilding that church in his own name as a naked bribe at eternity.
Arthur Naci had been asked to oversee this project, and Clay’s most formidable developer went about the task with Napoleonic efficiency. A moment of service in the long history of serving. He considers himself just another of Christ’s foot soldiers living in the shadow of Los Angeles and trying to fight its impact with bulldozers, foundations, and crosses.
Arthur leans on the hood of his wagon, reaming a trio of engineers huddled up around him. Bob rolls up, stops, steps out of his pickup and waits. Arthur is stumping his fist down on the geologist’s map spread out on the hood when he sees Bob. Cutting his attack short, he folds the map up and tosses it at the engineers, goes through a brisk warning, then waves them off like they were panhandlers.
He walks over to Bob, shaking his head. “You even got to watch your own, you know that? Sons of bitches. They’re trying to cut the edge of the code book on the foundation without even telling me. We got a hundred straight feet of sand here and—ahhhhh! Watch your own, remember that.”
“Yeah.”
Arthur picks up something in Bob’s tone. “What’s wrong?”
“I’m not sure if it’s anything, but I’ve been trying to call Gabi all morning. I’m supposed to take her to lunch today. Give her her presents. The phone’s been busy all morning.”
“Between Gabi and that daughter of mine, I’m not surprised.”
“No, you don’t understand. I checked. It seems to be out of order.”
“Maybe it’s off the hook. Maybe the dog knocked …”
“Arthur, Gabi knows we’re having lunch. She should have called me by seven telling me where she wants to go and then again by nine after she changed her mind and then decided on someplace else. I know my daughte
r, and I’m a little … concerned.”
Bob’s tone is making Arthur nervous. “Did you call Sam?”
“I did.”
“At work?”
“He’s not there.”
“Hmmmmm.”
“Didn’t come in to work today. Didn’t call or anything.”
Arthur stands there thoughtfully, with the gut-grinding belts of a bulldozer turning behind him. He looks at his watch. It’s almost noon. He is trying to avoid the imperfect dramatics these situations arouse. Bob watches him as he glances across the lot to where six men are carrying the old church crucifix toward the back of a flatbed so it can be stored away until the new church is built. They are moving slowly through the dust left by the trundling wheels of the dump trucks.
“Well, what do you think should be done?”
Bob shrugs. “I’d go over there alone, but if it’s nothing, well, you know how Sarah might get, me just showing up.”
Arthur scowls at the way one predicament seems to pool-ball into another. “Divorce, shit. Let’s get over there before my ulcer starts acting up.”
They pull up in the driveway just past noon. The sun is December warm and then some. Around the house, trees pierce the pools of light. It is quiet to perfection.
“I don’t think anyone’s home,” says Arthur.
Bob says nothing. But rounding a turn in the driveway he sees both Sarah’s and Sam’s cars in the carport. The cop in him starts to calculate possibilities. He lets Arthur get out of the car first, then reaches over and takes a semiautomatic from the glove compartment.
For a moment he feels utterly foolish. It’s nothing, he tells himself. The father and the professional officer struggle with each other. Emotion and logic. One’s success is the other’s failure. He slips the gun into his belt and pulls his shirt out of his pants so it can’t be seen in case he’s wrong.
They reach the front door. Arthur rings the bell.
Nothing.
He rings again.
Nothing.
Bob notices the corral is empty. Where is Gabi’s horse?
Arthur rings the doorbell again.
Nothing.
“Why isn’t Poncho barking?”
Arthur steps into a bed of tulips and tries to look in the hallway window, but the screen obscures his view.
“Let’s walk around the house,” says Bob.
They pass the carport and now Arthur sees that both cars are there, and he becomes flat-out frightened. “You think they could have been overcome by fumes or something?”
Bob puts a hand on Arthur’s shoulder to silence him. Then he points at the back door leading to the laundry room. It stands half open.
They climb the two concrete steps and stand in the crease of light that runs past the washing machine and dryer and on toward the kitchen.
Bob calls out, “Gabi? Sarah? Sam?”
Nothing.
Then Arthur tries. “Gabi? Sarah? It’s Grandpops …”
Nothing. Just the silent face of white kitchen cabinets and the dark mouth of the doorway beyond.
Bob slips the semiautomatic from his belt. “You better wait here.”
“Oh, Jesus, God. You don’t think …”
“Take it easy,” Bob whispers. “Okay? Okay?”
Arthur nods. He watches Bob walk through the kitchen, then on to the dining room. Bob steps past a chair that has been knocked over. Arthur hears himself praying. His hands tremble, and he feels sick to his stomach. He suddenly finds himself walking into the kitchen, even though he was told not to.
As Bob moves down the hall he begins to smell the faint afterburn of gunpowder. He comes to Gabi’s bathroom. The door is closed. He presses it open with the barrel of his gun. As the room slowly fans into view he sees what looks like a dirty mop stuffed into the well of the toilet.
Wood grabbed the dog as it lunged at him. He grabbed it by the throat. It raked its claws at him as he stuffed it down into the well of the toilet and—
Before the sight registers in his brain, Bob hears a scarred cry. He runs down a length of hall and across the open living room with its fallen Christmas tree and straggle curls of blood leading out to the patio. He turns into another stretch of hall. He chases the cries, hitting photos along the wall, so they twist and fall with a shattering of glass. He finds Arthur collapsed on both knees in the doorway of the den, like some bull struck down, gagging up food and bile. Bob half steps over the gagging form and, passing through the doorway, comes flush up on Sam.
Death coldcocks Bob in his tracks. Sam is sitting against the wall naked. He has been trussed up with wire like a pig stalked and caught. He has been eviscerated, and what is left of his tongue bulges out of his mouth. It is held that way by a letter opener rammed clean through the flesh and used as a brace across the lips. Bob takes a first step forward, a first necessary step to separate himself from the horror that’s swallowing him. His lungs feel like stone, and he hears Arthur saying something when he notices, pinned to Sam’s chest and so covered with blood it is barely legible, what looks like some kind of playing card.
6
Case spends Christmas Eve like she spends most every other night since she got off junk, wandering Hollywood Boulevard. Junkies don’t sleep too good, especially when they’re working at being ex-junkies. The real world closes in with the dark, and that’s when they have to face up to the boredom and madness of the straight life.
To burn away the nasties those feelings arouse, Case clicks off the miles between Western and La Brea. She scopes out runaways who work the phone booths and Dumpsters behind restaurants off Cherokee. She checks out cops scoring hookers for free head. She cruises the Chinese where marks with names like Mr. Plain Wrapper Iowa and Mrs. Remodeled Kitchen Kentucky get their pockets picked by faceless hands or hammered for a buck by some aggressive shoeless Rasta. She passes scruff-faced junkies of all creeds and colors and stations in life, all with the same knight errant eyes for a hit. It’s a theme park of life addictions, disguised as civilization.
It’s also where she gets to swallow a full dose of the boredom and the madness to see how it tastes going down. And if it can stay down. Can she actually become a loose part of it without having to leave needle marks in her arm to get by? Every block is a test. Every Hollywood Boulevard star she walks over is a little distance covered, though to what end she has yet to discover. She never talks to anyone who tries to hit on her, and she never looks in storefront windows as she is not ready to see what she looks like looking back. But tonight the street is just overlit space crowding her thoughts about that kidnapped girl in Clay as she debates with herself about whether she should write the authorities a letter.
Case sits in the dark alone at the small Formica table in the windowless kitchenette of her apartment in the recovery house. The thin beam of her flashlight scans the flaking paint along the ceiling scrollwork, then drifts down the grease-skinned wall above the stove. It arcs like a prison searchlight along the refrigerator, stopping at some article on self-reliance or some aphorism she wrote down that has the juice of a philosophical idea she can cling to and is held in place by cheap magnetic replicas of knights and maidens that she bought as a joke at Pic and Save.
Three times she’s tried to beat the junk, and twice she’s taken the fall. They say the third time’s the charm. Kill the horse with this shot, baby, ’cause those veins can’t do another ten years of hard time.
She leans forward with an unfiltered cigarette hanging out of her mouth and aims the light down at the table where black-and-white headlines form up through the darkness: CULT MURDER IN CLAY … HUSBAND AND WIFE BUTCHERED … DAUGHTER ABDUCTED … THE WORST MASSACRE SINCE MANSON, SAYS D.A.…
Newspapers are always so clinically lurid, she thinks. Pushing the envelope of socially acceptable slash and burn. Unaware and ultimately uninterested in the truth behind their bullshit teasers.
There is a knock at the door.
“It’s open,” says Case.
Anne wal
ks in, but with the living room dark and the shades drawn, she can’t see a thing. She just stands there and calls out, “Case?”
Case points the flashlight to guide her. Anne’s shape filters past the furniture. She comes into the kitchen and looks around, then leans against the wall by the table.
“Why are you sitting here in the dark?”
“I was thinking.”
“About what?”
Case lets the light fall across the headlines she’d been looking at.
“Oh, yeah. I read about that. But why are you sitting here like this?”
Case rests her head against the wall. “I breathe better in the dark. I don’t know why. I just do. Maybe it’s anxiety. Did I ever mention that to you?”
“No.”
“Well, I’ve mentioned it now. And the flashlight, sometimes, it makes me feel like I have some control against the dark.”
She takes a long hit off her cigarette. Her eyes come back to the headlines. She swings the light up the wall, then lets it slide along that chipped sky of a ceiling.
“The girl’s so young,” says Anne.
“Young.” The word slips out of Case’s mouth, dragging a full history of personal loss.
“Case?”
“Yeah.”
“Do you think … the girl … Is she still alive?”
Case turns the light on her own face. Lets it fan up from under her neck, causing something unearthly to the jawline and eyes.
“She could be,” Case says, “she could be. But if she is alive, Anne, if she is, what she is going through ain’t like nothing those ‘sheep’ out in Clay could ever imagine. That family looks to me like it was taken down by what we call a ‘war party.’ Blood hunting for Scratch. Blood hunting, Anne, blood hunting. Helter Skelter and then some.”
Case turns off the flashlight and sets it down on the table, and continues to smoke silently. She moves her head as if to say something more, but doesn’t.