by Boston Teran
It’s dig-down time.
Bob gets ready to rewrite the party book. Give the boys in blue a little vamp on procedure. He’ll show them a routine they ain’t practiced. That much he knows for sure.
He brings the shotgun up and puts a fast shell burst into the front of the police cruiser. The radiator punctures like a main artery and a line of blue Freon sprays out twenty feet. Both cops come to a dead stop, trying to get a handle on what is going down. Thinking time is lost time, boys. There’s another scream, and a dog starts howling. A baby begins to cry. Bob puts a second shot into the cruiser and the hood of the sedan is sent straight up, straight up like a blown jack-in-the-box lid spinning end over end.
For a moment Bob thinks he spots Case making a bust-out through a back door and rushing up into the darkness at the far end of the trailer park. He slips into the dark, back beyond the panic, out of view of the cops converging on the spot where the shiny black hood has slammed into the ground like the blade of an executioner’s ax.
Bob is running now, full-tilt boogie for the pickup, knowing full well that if he’s caught it’s just a matter of where they send the remains.
He’s behind the wheel now and spinning out through the brush with his headlights off when he sees someone shape up over a pile of fallen cypress limbs and stumble into the darkness. He comes to a ground-grinding stop. The shotgun door swings open. It’s Case. She’s got blood coming down her cheek from a wound over one eye. She isn’t even in when she yells, “Fuckin’ go!”
20
Gabi lies naked in the night sand, curled up and shining like a lucent egg. The sand against her back comes howling up the crooked wash eroded out of the hillside. The sand burns her flesh in waves and slowly brings her to.
Helpless and mute, staring at the grim remainder of the night sky, she tries to sit. The world around her is a bare ten feet of wind-whipped yellow sand. Her aching left breast is purple and swollen with nubbed red marks like sutures from endless teeth bites. Her left arm aches where the needle was shoved up into her veins. She is lazy and disoriented from the heroin. She is exhausted from the nightmares. She is unsure what she dreamt and what she lived. She is alone in the middle of some uncertain wilderness. Too confused to understand the fear that is coming up within her.
She remembers vague sentences, ellipsing feeble thoughts like ether … Words in Spanish … Crossing into Mexico … The one they call Cyrus endlessly talking … Crying … Breaking glass … There were gunshots, weren’t there?
Finally, like some newborn beast realizing it is alone and without, she struggles to her feet. Wary and wobbling, she cups her hands around her eyes against the wind. She cries out to her father. Panicked and swaying, she moves, lost, but some force leads her along. She follows the wind up through the charred yellow rock.
Her eyes sting from the wind, but she fights to keep them open. She trips, slides down a stretch of stone. Rolls over, weeping. It’s then she sees him. She struggles up on game-less legs. Looks for the will to lead her feet.
He is just an outline, really, a scarecrow figure above the rocks where the wind has thinned out. Beside some dark Jeep-like vehicle. It isn’t Cyrus. It’s not one of the others. It’s not the van she was raped in.
She calls to him. He doesn’t answer. She grabs at the rock with a child’s fingers. Squeezing them like cleats against the stone, pulling herself up and shouting.
He seems to turn.
She blubbers out a few more cries, trying to get his attention, but the wind overwhelms her words. She sees him move, move just slightly. There is something like a nod. Something that tells her he has seen her.
To clear the promontory and reach him she has to crawl. She drags herself up the stone detritus like a crab, top turning as she slips back a foot for every few she makes forward. “Oh, God. Thank you. Please …” Her words slur. “Help me, please …”
A hand pulls her skyward so quick the breath is shaken from her lungs, and there before her the gaunt form of Cyrus holds the wind back as he leers down at her. The upper part of his face and skull are hidden behind some sort of mechanical headpiece with protruding telescopic eyes. It is the color of camouflage, and the lenses are cold black.
He waves a bony arm, playing the center-stage showman. He waves, but not at her. He waves at the outline she saw from below.
It is a man, or was. Years mark his brown face. He is naked. He has been lashed to a tall cactus. His body is covered with flay marks from knives and bottle glass. His mouth is swollen and turning black where his tongue is awled to the side of his mouth.
“How do you like my life sculpture, child?”
A flashstorm of images is unleashed inside her head, and she resees the moments she remembers hearing. The crying, Cyrus’s endless talking, the burning needle up through her arm, the Mexican—it was him screaming through a whole world as it went black only to come back again in windswept color, and her curling into the sand to hide within its cool, dark membrane as that poor Mexican was cut again and again.
Gabi pukes onto the rock.
The Mexican tries to speak through his sewn mouth, asking for the death he had once hoped would never come.
Cyrus grabs Gabi’s head and makes her look. The bile is stringing down her mouth, and her head wobbles like a prizefighter who has been hit beyond repair. “Take notice here, Dorothy,” he says. “There’s lessons to be learned on the Yellow Brick Road.”
Wood and Granny Boy make their way up the back ass of the ridge where they have the van tucked away. Wood is carrying two five-gallon tins.
“There’s a lesson, alright,” Cyrus says. “There’s a lesson.” Squatting down he presses those telescopic eyes up against hers. “Some grub once said that every natural process is a version of a moral vision. You listenin’? That the whole plate of beings and things, actions and events, the whole fuckin’ dig down, is one vast ectochrome flashed up and called eternity.”
Wood crawls under the Mexican’s Jeep and puts an ice pick to the gas tank and lets it bleed fuel into the empty tin.
Cyrus stares up at the Mexican through the infrared goggles. Above the Mexican’s head are the bones of birds impaled on the cactus, driven onto a shore of spikes during the black winds.
“Well,” adds Cyrus, “it ain’t God with that camera eye. It ain’t him. No, no, no. It’s that bad boy down the block. And he’s doin’ some finger-lickin’ good portraits of his own.” Like a huge mantid lying in wait, Cyrus’s arms come up. He rests his elbows on his knees as if he were in prayer.
Wood slides the first tin filled with gas out from under the Jeep and passes it to Granny Boy.
“Well, Vaquero,” says Cyrus, “you had your fifteen minutes of glory trying to play Good Samaritan for this little pretty-pretty here. I hope your God was watching, ’cause you’re crossing over.”
Granny Boy begins to douse the Mexican down. When he’s half soaked and struggling with the little life he has left against the wire that holds him, Wood crawls out from under the Jeep and with the second tin finishes the job.
He tosses the tin aside and holds his hands up close so the Mex can see. Across each palm a piece of red cloth has been stitched, and painted on each, in white, the anarchist A with the circle around it.
“You bet on J.C., Cisco, you bet on a dead horse.”
Gabi lies there pitifully at the tips of Cyrus’s boots, unable to turn away.
The Mexican’s eyes wander. His mouth twists with confused pleadings that only make the blood run more fiercely from the wound.
Granny Boy begins to sing: “Cyrus said to Granny Boy, ‘Kill me a son.’ Granny said, ‘Man, you must be puttin’ me on.’ Cyrus said, ‘No.’ Granny said, ‘What?’ Cyrus said, ‘You can do anything you want, Granny, but the next time you see me comin’ you better run …’ ”
Cyrus stands and pulls out a lighter.
“Granny said, ‘Where you want this killin’ done?’ Cyrus said, ‘Out on Highway 61.’ ”
In that one
instant Gabi notices the poor human’s feet cudgeling the sand. The legs, glistening and damp, strain against the inevitable. There is a spark in the wind, followed by an eyelet of flame. Then Cyrus flings the lighter and a pair of black eyes flash against a burst of pupil white as they are engulfed in flames.
21
Those first minutes clearing the trailer park are a blind frantic run. Case is looking into the visor mirror and wiping the blood from where glass cut her above the eye. Bob is deadpan and shifting hard.
“What the hell happened back there?”
“It was that woman,” curses Bob.
“Why’d you start firing?”
Bob’s got the pickup doing clean cruising speed as he swings off El Norte Highway and onto Broadway. He’s running in the heart of a loose pack of traffic.
“Why’d you start firing, damn it?”
He gives the gearbox a hard lick and passes a low-rider.
“Jesus Christ,” she says. “And I thought you were Mr. Safe-and-Sane.”
He’s about to put both barrels to her when a couple of squad cars bull-charge out of a Burger King parking lot half a block behind them. Bob downshifts, Case slinks around low in her seat. Bob’s eyes are fixed on the rearview mirror.
“I don’t know why you had to pull a stunt like that,” she says.
“I wanted to get your ass out of there, is why.”
The sirens kick in and a flashing whirlpool of red climbs up their ass. Inside the pickup it gets that cold autopsy-room chill as they clear the fast lane and slow.
They both watch the squad cars rush up on them and the flashers comet across the roof interior. They hang on the next moments like a couple of hard timers, but the taillights of the squad cars take a greyhound turn out onto Lincoln Boulevard.
Bob and Case get their first real breath in the last few minutes. There’s one thing they’re sure of, for the time being anyway. Their vehicle didn’t get ID’ed at the trailer park.
Case now comes around in her seat for a little face-off with Bob. “I could have gotten my ass out of there,” she yells.
“Oh, yeah?”
“Yeah.”
He palm-humps the shift back into first.
She orders Bob, “Go down one more street, then go west on Dos Dios Highway.”
He orders her back, “And cover the window with that visor before someone sees you wiping blood from your face and starts—”
She swings out the visor. “I could have gotten my ass out of there.”
“It looks to me like your redheaded friend was using you as a saddle, so I don’t know how the hell you’d have—”
“Fuck you,” she screams.
“Do you know what would have happened if I didn’t get you out of there?”
“What am I now, some candy-ass clairvoyant?”
“You’d a been busted.”
“Ahhh.”
“The old lady saw you goin’ in. That’s breaking and entering.”
“I’d like to have seen them make that stick when they hit the bedroom.”
Bob sneers under his breath, “Goddamn junkie.”
Case turns on him, her mouth all pursed up like a viper’s. “What did you say?”
At a Y intersection Bob hits the gas and peels out onto Dos Dios Highway.
“What did you say?”
The pickup is pressing now. Dos Dios Highway is just a black streak running into the foothills.
“You don’t know what was goin’ down in there!”
Bob turns to her. The blood, which she has wiped clean, has begun again to trickle out of the wound above her eyebrow.
“You’re bleeding.”
She wipes again at the blood. “You don’t know.”
“No shit. I’m watchin’. And I see the old bitch see you go in. I don’t get a sign from you. Nothing. Nothing. I see her make a call. Still no sign. Nothing. Nothing.
“But I had a pretty good idea what would happen next. The police would put in a little appearance, and that old lady would have them inside that trailer no matter what. I didn’t have many options. I didn’t know if inside they’d come down on you. And when the police showed I didn’t know if you’d be in the middle … I didn’t know. I didn’t know if I’d have to get you out. Go in as back-up … I didn’t know. But once I saw … Red … come ass-kicking out the window and you …”
Bob is trembling like he is hot-wired with nose candy. He lurches for a cigarette on the dashboard, presses in the ashtray lighter.
“Jesus Christ,” he says. “Do you think I wanted you to get busted?”
“I could have dealt with it.”
“Well, thank you very much. I’ll know better next time.”
She leans back, closes her eyes. “Your confidence in me is inspiring. But remember, it was my ass on the firing line.”
“Is that what they call it now? I must be out of touch. They used to call it something else.”
For one second those death-camp eyes of hers open and she stares up at the worn fabric on the roof of the pickup. “You know, I believe we all have a kill clause in the contract of our lives. And I could say things to you right now, say things that would leave you groping to find out how bad I cut you up. I could. I could shave you and shear you.”
Bob grabs the ashtray lighter and jams it against the cigarette hanging in his mouth. Once lit, he eyes Case. Gives her a ride with a look as if he were tempting her.
She leans her head around, watches him. Both of them look like they’ve been dusted with contempt.
“I could shave you and shear you, Bob Whatever, shave you and shear you before you could even swallow your pride.”
“Get it on,” he says.
She sits up.
“I don’t hardly know you, Bob Whatever. But I think I got a pretty good touch on your m.o. And I bet I could list the reasons why your … late wife … left you.”
Her eyes take on a centered kind of calculating look. “I’m right, ain’t I, cow-trooper? Ain’t I? The old lady gave you the road, didn’t she? Got fed up stabling with Mr. Bob Whatever … found herself a buck she could talk to.”
One side of Bob’s body, the side where the heart resides, torques up. Torques up and his head is pulled to the left, as if the flesh on that side of the body had begun to warp.
Case makes a slight, decorous move with her mouth. As if she were begging the question: “Am I right, Bob Whatever?”
Along the curve ahead, a burst of approaching headlights. They get quiet and scared as they hear the heavy whine of an engine. Moments later a van passes close enough to blow warm air through the open windows.
Case and Bob are starting to reel a little from burnout. Not a thing more is said.
Farther on they pass Lake Hodges to the west. On the far side of the lake the single-bore searchlight of a chopper clears the teeth line of the hills. Silent as yet, because of its distance. They can make out its Cyclops-like turns, the light flushing out blue pockets of void along the brush roads that lead down to the lake.
“Is it a police chopper?” asks Case.
Bob slows the pickup to get a handle on its moves. The chopper starts to make low turns out across the lake. In the running moon of the searchlight, the surface of the lake, from the cut of the chopper blades, is a shimmering blue-black wave.
“It could be search and rescue,” says Bob. “It’s acting like it.”
“If they sent out a chopper, would they have a description of the truck?”
“They could. But sending out a chopper is no indication.”
The chopper makes a long sweep, the single eye turning away. Moving through a dark crease between the hills, the searchlight leaves what looks like flashes of lightning along the skin of the canyon walls.
“About ten miles further on,” Case says, “near San Dieguito Lake, is a motel. Low end, but …”
“I hear ya,” says Bob.
22
Jo and Joe’s Motel is a twelve-room lineup fifty yards from the roa
d and within walking distance of San Dieguito Lake. Wood and white stucco, with ample patches of stucco bark chafed from the walls and never replaced. The sign for the motel rests on a cinder-block pedestal beside a shantytown gas station and a fenced-in graveyard memorializing fifty years of automotive splendor. The sign itself is patriotic kitsch: against a white backboard the JO is done in relief and painted red and the JOE is done in relief and painted blue.
As they lug themselves out of the pickup, Case says, “It has that homey bombed-out American feel to it, don’t you think?”
But Bob isn’t listening. He’s looking back into the foothills where the horizon has begun to haze under the night damp.
“You want to push to Del Mar?” asks Case. “And get lost with all that freeway traffic.”
He turns to her, considers what she’s said. But the truth of it he keeps to himself. He doesn’t want to do a mile more in that truck with her. Not tonight, anyway. Maybe not at all.
He showers in the dark. The hot water full on his face. He sits on the edge of the bed in the filthy little monastic room and stares at a wall whose shade of green, whatever it was when it was first painted, is now just putrid and pale.
He sits smoking, with one light on. A feeling of morbidity is setting in. A feeling utterly devoid of sympathy. He worries that he has done everything wrong from start to now. He travels back into the last few days, and like any good policeman at the site of a murder, takes notes. But these he takes on himself, on his character. Every detail, from the first lie to John Lee, to excusing himself from his job via Arthur, to his little diversionary tactic tonight with the shotgun.
He looks at himself in the mirror as he sometimes looks at strangers on the street. Unsure and uncertain as he might be of them, he was sure and certain of himself. Except now he is no longer himself. He is a naked man, with a good dose of burnout under his belt and a foul-looking tattoo draped across his shoulder. And that other mark on his cheek. And all in such short order.
Sitting there, honing in on his faults, he begins to realize that this is not the first time he’s felt like this. His beliefs about himself, about the life he’d lived, about life as he thought it was, had all been rocked before.