by Boston Teran
She watched the knife pierce then halve the breastbone of that yuppie prick dentist with his white BMW and his white stucco house and his white golf shoes and white capped teeth. The blood drenched his shirt in frenetic sprays and each thrust opened a new wound and released a rush of arterial fluid out into the air with a short hiss and soon there were only a few clean untouched spots left on his golf shirt and she couldn’t help but think, as bent as it was at the time, that those spots were shaped like white orchids attached to a red gown. And as the last of his breath seeped out the wounds, Cyrus held the card up and ran it past his dimming eyes.
“You haven’t answered my question.”
“You haven’t answered mine.”
“The Judgment …”
“What is that?” he asks.
“The twentieth enigma of the Tarot. The angel signaling …”
“Judgment …” Bob leans down, crowding Case between one hand gripping the back of her chair and the other crabbed over the photo.
“Why did you stop at that?”
Her eyes tug at the photo of Sam’s arm.
Bob’s voice takes on that cold cop casualness. “Why did you stop at that?” he repeats.
Cyrus lifted the hypodermic case from his pocket. He opened it with care and removed the syringe, playing out the moment for all its texture. Shots could be heard down the hall, then Poncho’s rending yelp. Granny Boy had scrabbled up on all fours alongside Sam, who struggled against the wire that held him. Granny Boy held up Gabi’s picture for him to see and spoke of the obscenities he would play out on the girl. Cyrus filled the syringe with clear liquid from a vial and Sam cried out in hoarse gulps. Cyrus held the needle up before Sam’s eyes, and he let a little fluid squirt a taste of torture out its silvery pin.
“Ah, poor Prometheus, without even a rock to hide behind.”
Case spiders through the autopsy photos till she finds the one of Sam’s arm. “Was it a paralytic he was injected with?”
His face draws closer to hers.
“Was it?”
He grabs her by the arms. “You’ve been asking me some pretty odd questions here.”
“Was it?”
“What do you know?”
She looks down wild-eyed at the cracked and speckled linoleum floor. He can feel her arms shivering.
“Go away,” she says.
“That’s not an answer.”
“Go away.”
“Please …”
“I can’t … Right now. No …”
“What do you know?”
“I’m not sure.”
“I could make you talk to me till you are sure.”
She pulls free and shoves herself away from the table. As she stands some of the photos spill onto the floor. Bob steps over them and grabs her again.
“Nothing? Is that it? Nothing?”
She rips free of his arm and takes another step back.
“What do you know? Tell me! What are you hiding here?”
She stares at him.
“What are you covering up?”
“I need to think,” she says. “So, just go!”
He takes a step forward and she howls an ugly, scarred call: “I told you! Get out! Let me just think awhile! Let me … let me alone to just think this out!”
THE RITE OF SEPARATION
10
Case sits on the edge of the roof’s coping. A shrunken form in the rain with her hands curled up inside her shirt. She watches Bob’s car turn over with a chugging line of muffler smoke against the cold night air and the headlights pooling out into the darkling street. They slow as they pass the front of the building. She leans back, using the dove-gray mist to cloak her as she stares down into the void of the windshield. That dark vexed face of his will haunt her now.
The rain moves in disordered streams across the black tar roof, down the rusting black drainpipes. The rain washes away nothing. It never did. The sump we all live in is too vast.
The Ferryman sat with a joint in the claw fingers of his prosthetic arm. He watched indifferently as Cyrus kicked the living shit out of Case. He sat on a flea-infested corduroy couch under a canvas tarp awning that stretched out from the slat and sideboard five-room hutch he’d built around an old trailer.
Case tried to stand, but Cyrus kicked her in the stomach. “You want to defy me? You want to defy me?”
Lena watched from the perimeter of the awning’s shade and winced as Cyrus kicked Case again. She cried and tried to speak out but the wind blew up and swallowed her words as the tarp riffed like a noisy banner of war.
The Ferryman’s dogs, the pack of them, howled and turned wind circles along the boundary of the fight.
Case was on her knees. But as Cyrus shouted at her, one wobbly hand rose up in defiance and gave him the finger.
He put his boot in her face. It hit flush on. A tooth cracked like a cheap cup and blood sprung from both nostrils.
Case fell backward.
“You want to try me again, bitch …”
She lay there dazed, her arms splayed at odd angles like those of a starfish.
“I got another boot here.”
The dogs sniffed and snarled at her body as it crabbed at the sand, and when the smell of blood juked their senses they began to rise up on each other with bared teeth fighting for position.
Among the rubble of the yard, Gutter leaned against a doorless antique Wedgwood stove. He played the white shell like a steel-drum street-corner artist, singing, “Freedom’s just another word for …”
Lena rushed over and took it to him with her nails and handfuls of flung dirt, and she spit and kicked as Gutter kept right on keepin’ on, just another baby-faced killer out of Grimm’s Fairy Tales.
The Ferryman sat there with the joint resting neatly between those silver metal parrot fingers as Cyrus grabbed Case by the back of her leather vest and dragged her over the bleached ground and over a landslide of bottles and a low pile of castaway boards. Lena rushed up behind them. She whimpered and pleaded her lover’s cause, and with the dogs strung out behind her they were like a goddamn fuckin’ parade on their way to an execution.
The Ferryman leaned to one side and balanced himself on his good leg so he could stand. His prosthetic leg hitched with each step as he made his way across the shade to a trunk that he kept along the wall of the house. He used it to store weapon parts. In the top drawer was a designer Bijan .38 taken as part of a settlement for a lost half-kilo of smack.
Lena kept following behind Cyrus till he’d had enough and turned on her. He was still holding Case off the ground with one hand gripped onto the back of her vest when he caught Lena in the hip with his boot and sent her squabbling like a turkey back into the dogs.
Then he stood Case up. He held her in place long enough for her head to clear. She tottered slightly. Her eyes began to focus up. She spit blood out of her mouth.
He shoved her. “You want to walk …”
Her chest flared and drained.
He shoved her again. “Walk! Go on!”
The dogs had caught up now and were close around her boots. They slopped at the damp dark where the blood had clotted in the sand.
The Ferryman fired three fast shots into the air and a series of echoes throated back across the flats.
Cyrus’s eyes peeled off in the Ferryman’s direction, but the shade from the canvas tarp left the African’s face unreadable.
“The dogs were making me crazy,” he said.
Cyrus regarded the moment without the least expression. The Ferryman did not move. He remained where he was, posing with the joint, then punctuated the moment with a leisurely toke.
Cyrus pulled Case toward him. The blood and sweat had caked dust down her face, and she looked like some aboriginal dried mud doll. “Choose your madness, girl,” he said, “because the catch dogs are on you.”
11
It is the first warm night of the season to come. The moon is moving into a new quarter above the rim of the high
desert. A shard of snow-white finery against a black sky.
In his front yard, the Ferryman sits on a low stool beside Lena with his prosthetic leg stretched out. He is hunched within the arc of a single halogen lamp, his eyes tending to the fine and dexterous needlework at hand as he adds a new date to the back of Lena’s ring finger—12/21/95.
It isn’t the first time he’s recorded a date after a kill.
Lena sits in an easy chair with her head leaning back against the musty mess of tuck and roll. She is hammered on smack, and her eyes sag and bob.
Music drifts out across the wildland over speakers hung along the eaves of the hutch. Gutter is inside the trailer, sucked up to the boob tube with a crack pipe and reruns of “Star Trek.” And Wood. He is totally raw. He’s punked on speed and giving the Ferryman a hyped-up rundown of the murder, laying out the whole night like some bob-eyed, jittering Herodotus.
“You should have seen us … Cyrus took us into that yuppie Christian tank and we … we ate their food … we drank their blood wine … we raped their women … we … we …” He fires an imaginary pistol down into the toilet, where he can still see that fluffy little mutt fighting for its life. “One more headstone for the Path. Yeah … We brought the jungle to that house. Blood and hair, baby …” His eyes are on fire. He weaves the fingers on both hands together. “That’s what we were like … See …” He clamps his hands together in some warped gesture of family and prayer. “It was bang-move-bang-move-bang-bang-bang-move … Total fuckin’ unity, and Gutter singing as he’s popping shells into the chamber, and Granny Boy leaps over this white-bread bitch and …”
From inside the parked van comes Gabi’s crying, cutting short Wood’s little rant. Not full crying, but a pathetic gibbering that rises a bit then falls away or is muffled.
Wood glances at the van. “They must be puttin’ the magic to her.”
The Ferryman pays no mind to the crying nor to Wood as he puts the last flourish on the dated finger. He leans down and licks the back of Lena’s hand. “Done, girl.”
Her eyelids flutter. She takes a look at her finger. Another bone of pride for a twisted sister. With a weak turn of her head she waves a job well done.
As the Ferryman puts his needle and ink to rest the music begins to fill Lena’s head with smoke. Some woman singing the dark night of the soul.
“I miss Case,” she says.
The Ferryman moves off into the darkness.
“I miss the way we used to sleep together in the back of that van. I miss the way we used to kiss each other’s arms after we shot each other up.” Lena seems to drift. “I was the turtle, she was the bird. That was the whole thing between us.”
The Ferryman says nothing.
“I wonder where she is now? Probably in some methadone clinic, copping a plea till she can get herself a score.” Lena’s voice fails a bit. “If she’s alive at all.” Her eyes slip away. “I miss her. Do you miss her?”
“I miss no one.”
Lena looks up at the moon. It is like the slightest touch of light coming from an opening door.
“I only flirt with the living,” says the Ferryman.
“I hope she ain’t with the sheep,” whispers Lena.
The Ferryman hears the girl inside the van begin to cry again.
• • •
Come midnight, Cyrus walks the ragged ridgeline north of the Ferryman’s. With his poncho flaring in the wind he moves through the shifting shades of black. He looks off into the well of a playa set between the Calico Mountains and the Paradise Range. The forgotten ground of his youth, where the old woman Hannah had tried to raise him in her image and likeness.
He makes his way down to the valley floor through a slippery rampart of rocks. It is a slow night crossing the flat, chipped ground, and he leaves barely a boot track. He slips down into a dry riverbed, and up the far side he comes upon those granite rocks humped skyward like the fin of a great whale appearing out of a sand sea.
The old life comes back. The day you kill and move on from. He lights a match and holds it to the rock. Those paintings Hannah did are still there. Earth and air, fire and water. And the snake devouring itself, Ourabouris, the green head fang-wide and swallowing its orange tail.
He can see Hannah’s eyes there in the head of the snake. Pagan jewels of beauty and knowledge, she called them, as she tried to usher his thoughts along the proper path. The old bitch could drink, too. Hold her juice and talk. A preeminent bullshit artist if there was one.
He blows out the match. He reaches for and fingers the loose gravel between a layer of stones. He finds a small pellet of limestone from the great rock fin and he swallows it. The world will be inside his belly, eventually.
Cyrus moves further out into the playa. The remains of Hannah’s trailer are still there. Odd bits of the cinder block and glass stalagmite garden wall.
Life has finally come full circle with this most recent expression of his will at Via Princessa. He lets the years circle around him like the dust blowing across the Calico Range and revisits the chapters of his life.
He can feel the heat of that day, even now, when as a boy he was orphaned, tossed from a car by his mother and her military hump of a boyfriend. Cyrus had already been blacklisted from the lives around him. The base psychiatrist was describing him as a sociopath, a potential criminal, while his mother was in a bathroom shooting up smack between her toes and Sergeant Joey, the human wallet she played camp-follower to, was in the serviceman’s bar swigging down Jack Daniel’s by the troughful as he swaggered through the zipperheads he’d killed during the Korean War.
Fuck ‘em all. Cyrus knew back then that life was a self-perpetuating fantasy of frauds. And that the only real demons to fear are those disguised as decent human beings. John Lee and fatboy proved that.
He watches as the dust blows through the rotting sieve of that old Airstream. Hannah was another piece of work. The grandmother of time, spitting earthy wisdoms from that pussy of a mouth. He put up with all that for a little bread and water and what he could con or steal. He got fucked trying to help John Lee close that deal. Of course, time rewarded him. He turned a lot of dreams to vapors on Via Princessa. That will be his Sistine Chapel.
He makes himself relive the ghostly years before the Path to reinforce the template of his strength. From the pretty province of juvenile halls to the manchild back alleys of Smack Road. All that time he watched them build up their Paradise as he went from giving blowjobs to beatings to black-throat lacerations to when he began the fight to beat the junk that robbed him of his will.
It was there, in that trailer, in that time, fighting down the withdrawal, that he found the true architect of the modern world. Where he found the essence behind the Son of Sam and Helter Skelter and Joseph Goebbels and Uncle Sam and the Pope and the Ku Klux Klan and the capitalist system and the Silent Majority. Where he found the only son of man—and he wasn’t some jerk-off named Jesus. He was the architect who allowed for the zero-sum game with all its depravities. Who found beauty in blood, a christening through ultimate chaos. Who understood it was better to reign in some perilous extreme than to serve a life sentence of propriety out of fear. Fear that nothing is at the end of the road unless we cop a plea after a lifetime of shortcuts.
On that inflamed desert sea of night winds, Cyrus and his aggro band of young wolves sit like native warriors who’ve come through another day of dyin’, together. He praises them. He reminds them of their place as bandogs taking on a bullshit society. As carriers of the great plague message. Their atrocities so far, culminating in the Via Princessa massacre, are a history replete and unto itself. Something horrible and haunted. Something for the pathetics to puzzle out. But ultimately, something to be acknowledged and idealized.
Most of them have been partying on smack, or ecstasy laced with a little battery acid, and cocaine with tequila chasers. But these foot soldiers for the Left-Handed Path are high on their own killings. They relive the blooding fury in that hilltop hou
se. Cyrus begins to reshape the events as a myth, with a hot filmmaker’s sense of pace and ferocity. Coloring the crime as an act of ultimate contempt, ultimate nonconformity, ultimate sacrifice, ultimate freedom, ultimate joy … ultimate service. It is, he says, a fixed point of infamy in a heaven of faulted lights, and their names will one day be as important to their god as the saints are to Christ the pig.
They can see themselves in Cyrus. The night culminates with Wood’s initiation into the inner circle of death coups, as this was his first real hunt. Each member of the tribe has a special insignia: Gutter has a safety pin awled through his nose, Lena the dates of kills tattooed on her fingers. Cyrus presents Wood with patches of red cloth. On these he will have painted in white the anarchist’s A, the sign of their ultimate meaning. When Wood asks Cyrus where he’ll wear the trademark, Cyrus tells him over the most important path of his existence—his lifeline.
12
For the next two days Bob tries to call Case. An endless series of phone voices tells him, “She’s not here,” “We can’t find her,” “No one answers when we knock.” Even Anne cannot, or will not, help him.
Over dinner Bob explains to Arthur what’s transpired. Arthur recoils at the thought that something like her might have knowledge about “his” Gabi that Bob can’t get. The rest of the meal is passed in silence, with Arthur mostly staring at his food and refusing Bob’s meager attempts at conversation.
Anne sits at her desk, afraid for Case’s life. “It’s one thing to offer a man advice, but to want to go out and attempt to find the girl …”
Case is standing at the window, barefoot, looking out through the curtains at a pool of street light.
“If you were stronger. More …”
“I don’t think I’ll ever be more … And I don’t think the girl could wait till I’m strong enough.”
“If he took her.”
“He took her.”
“You can’t be sure.”
Case turns, her eyes bleak with certainty.
“You can’t be sure,” warns Anne.