by Boston Teran
“I’m the turtle, Case, and you’re the bird,” Lena said. “That’s the way it is.”
One girl half whispers in Spanish to the older one about Case staring at her. The older one waves it off with the magic wand of the straw swirling around in her drink. They continue chirping in Spanish.
They all laugh and huddle up close, clucking away till there’s barely enough room for sunlight between them.
“I went back to the house on Via Princessa,” says Bob. “A month after the murders.”
Case stops sipping at her broth. “What?”
“I went back. At night.” He pushes his plate of chicken and beans away. He wipes a hand across his mustache. “Around the same time the murders were supposed to have taken place.” He talks like one would in a confessional. “I walked the whole thing through my mind. What we know, anyway. I lived the whole of it.”
“Why would you punish yourself by—”
“I’m making a point, okay?”
Case stops. The girls scrounge up enough among them to handle the bill. As they walk past, they slink a look at Case and then one at Bob. Case notices that at least two of them have the requisite gold crucifix hanging around their necks. Probably there like garlic, to keep the clap away.
“I sat there in the dark, crying,” Bob says. “And after I stopped crying, I tried to draw out of those walls what I could about what went down and why. At least draw out of those walls what they knew, as if there were messages there I could pick up, like in a telepathic way. But I also went there for strength. To take it all in. All the pain. I’d draw in all that pain, and plan, and see through to the end of what went down and why and how and then what I would do if, no, when I got that fuckin’ beast—”
He freezes up. He has overstepped his moment of honesty. He senses he sounds like a murderer in the act of becoming.
“Anyway. People go back to a place for a reason. Why’d Cyrus go back to that trailer?”
“Well … I was told he was raised there.”
“In that trailer?”
“I don’t know that exact one. Probably. I know he was raised there. On that spot. He walked it enough when we were out there. The woman who lived there raised him.”
“The one that was murdered?”
“Yeah.”
“I’ve got to remember when that was exactly. How old Cyrus was … If he was ever brought in and questioned. Go on.”
“The woman that raised him. She found him on the road wandering around. His folks, or his stepfolks, they just trashed him one day by the side of the road.”
“Why?”
“I don’t know. The man was Army, the woman a cunt. Maybe they were both cunts. Maybe Cyrus was already Cyrus. What difference does it make? He is, isn’t he? Anyway, what little I know is because Le … I got it in bits and pieces over the few years I was with him.”
“If I could tap into the office computer and start digging through those old records. There might be something …”
“Forget all that. We get hold of him you can dig all the records you want out of his heart.”
Bob is turning a thought over in his mind and only half listening. “There is a moral government to all this. I know it.”
“Moral government? Forget bullshit slogans.”
Bob isn’t listening now, he’s intent on that thought. He continues: “Maybe the connection between one act of murder and the taking of Gabi is an exercise which I must deal with. Me. It’s my job task. I mean. Two murders. Twenty-five years apart, fifty miles close. The same man at the center of two atrocities. Maybe it’s random. There is no sure connection. But …”
“You’re trying to sell yourself life insurance, right?” she asks. “That’s what you’re doin’. Make it all nice and orderly. You’re puttin’ the needle in your arm, boy. You’re puttin’ the needle in.”
Bob stands and from his pocket pulls a few crumpled bills. He throws them toward her side of the table. “You’ll eat your weight in dirt before you die, but you’ll be no happier for it, and no better off. Stick to your own needles, okay?”
Outside, Bob is lighting a cigarette and staring at the coin-operated newspaper rack. He stands orphaned and pale in the dust of the roadside. She comes up behind him.
“About inside,” she says. “I know where you’re at.” She looks up the highway. It is flat and empty. A thin paper of black color that swims with afternoon heat. Just something grooved out of the daylight to give an illusion of direction. “We all hunt Leviathan in our own way, Bob Whatever.”
His eyes come around to take her in. She sees that he is crying. She looks at the paper rack, through the metal bars that brace the headlines.
TAPE OF MOTHER’S 911 CALL PLAYED AS KLAAS MURDER TRIAL OPENS
COURTS: Prosecution suggests that defendant Richard Allen Davis stalked twelve-year-old girl before kidnapping her from her bedroom and strangling her.
He reaches into his pocket for some change.
“Don’t read that.”
She watches a pile of copper and silver flatten out across a sweating, tired hand.
“Don’t put yourself in it.”
He pulls up the scarred metal lid and takes out the paper.
The need to hurt oneself has almost universal resonance. It is the prophecy of the suicide bridge: where one jumps, others must follow. It is life’s tribute to continuity.
As he begins to read, Case tears the paper out of his hand and pages sweep outward, cartwheeling across the lot.
By their rusted-out Toronado the maquiladoras are having cigarettes and checking their mascara. They take to the drama and watch silently.
“Why don’t you just carry around the police photos you showed me that night? Why don’t you, if you need this kind of fix? Why not?” She takes what’s left of the paper and crumples it and tears it and chucks it to the wind. “I did my life sentence in that roach hotel where you came to meet me, blowing off smack, crawling through every room in my head, every room, every state, relived and reviled it all, right down to a bloody carcass, and I wasn’t jacked, I tried to dig a hole in my bathroom floor till my fingertips ran with blood. That was my Via Princessa. I understand where you’re at, but …”
She is shaking so hard her arms move like violent whips. “I have seen enough little girls suffer, okay! Okay! Enough suffering, man, enough.”
Bob is, at this second, beyond the vocabulary of reason. Drained, he turns and walks toward the truck.
26
Jacumba Airport is about forty miles west of El Centro and just spit from that invisible part of the border where there is nothing on the El Norte side save an assortment of playas with eroded hillsides.
The airport looks as if it was put together with scraps of day labor. No tower; unattended; a two-thousand-foot runway made of cinder, chipped out of a short throw of field that joists up to a rocky stand of boulders heaped in the shape of hills.
The Dakota cruises the field as Case looks for Errol Grey’s plane. There is not a face in sight, not a vehicle. Just a dozen or so two-seaters tarped or tied down.
“Looks mostly like weekenders or border rats,” says Bob.
“Among other things,” adds Case. “You see that plane there?” She points to a small red two-seater nicknamed Beansy. “Well, unless that’s a clone it belongs to a sheriff out of Imperial Beach and his cousin. His cousin is a gynecologist. They were always crossing the border, doing charity work at clinics. Right … They were also a flying fuckin’ pharmacy when they came back. Demerol, somas, European ludes. They kept me fucked up plenty with that drugstore. I even got my pussy checked, free of charge.” Then, with some slight savagery to her tone: “Lucky me.
“But Errol now. He is clean. He flies in from the Mojave, gets organized, sets up his trades, flies back, carries nothing. Has it hand delivered to home plate. Thank you and good-bye. Cyrus does all the mean machine shit down here. Then has some coolie do the carrying.”
“Any of these Errol’s plane?”
Her eyes move from plane to plane around the paling runway like the quick blinking cursor on a computer screen. She gets a skewed frown. “No. He had this drab-looking thing. But it was pretty nice inside. Had four seats.”
“Of course, he could have sold that plane.”
“Yeah,” says Case. “I didn’t think of that.”
Bob gives the planes, the four that are partly tarped, a distant once-over. None of them is a drab four-seater.
They stop at the far end of the runway and look right into the pink and rose breach of the closing day. Bob starts to riffle through the debris that’s accumulated along the dashboard, looking for his cigarettes.
“You finished yours an hour ago,” says Case as she hands him one from her pack.
“Right. Thanks. When Errol Grey works the border, where does he go?”
“El Centro mostly. Yuma some …”
“You know where he stays?”
“Which hotel? No. I mean he moves around, I know that. El Centro is shit. But he owns a bar there. He owns lots of bars, that’s his thing. Music. He’s heavy into music. He hangs in his El Centro bar some.”
“If he’s not in Yuma.”
“Right.”
Bob puts his head back against the seat, begins a slow rub of the temples with thumb and index finger.
“Headache?”
“The sun fucks me up sometimes.” He takes a puff off his cigarette. “We could stay here and wait, but if he’s got a new plane and he’s already here, we’ll miss him if he meets up with Cyrus. If we go to El Centro and he flies in and goes straight to Yuma or somewhere else we’ll miss him. Same thing if we go to Yuma.”
“We’re dancing, alright.”
“We’re gonna think this through a little more.” His voice sounds beat, like the edge has been polished off it for the day. “A little more,” he says.
He sits a long time with his head back and his eyes closed. His arm and face have scabs on them from the needlework. Brown, crusty fissures that are burning and sore as hell. He doesn’t speak.
Case turns off the radio to make it quiet as possible. She sits watching the land ahead. It seems vague and unwilling in the off-light. After a long while a pickup on a distant road traverses the valley. It’s just a small piece of silver at that distance, like a bullet moving above the hem of the earth and leaving a cat-claw of road dust in its wake.
“I want to thank you for today, Case. About the newspaper. I should not be reading stuff like that. It’s not … None of us needs any more suffering than necessary, do we?”
It is the first time he has addressed her by name since they’ve been on the road. The first time she’s been part of a sentence that is not fundamentally a condemnation. And it doesn’t go unnoticed. She wants to thank him, but kindness escapes her suddenly in self-consciousness.
That burning fuckin’ arm, and that burning fuckin’ mark on his cheek. Bob opens his eyes and looks in the rearview mirror to see a face that’s particularly hostile. A scrub and a shave would do wonders, but they’re history now. Look the part. You’re a junkie’s old man, her hot cock, pimp, suck-up, whatever is called for.
He keeps staring at his face and his arm. The unfinished roll of the dice the only spot not scabbed in a large blot. Then the brain does a quick jump. It’s like having your own personalized decal. Like having your own personalized license plate. Personalized foolishness like they have on boats, and …
“That plane of Errol Grey’s,” Bob says in a sudden rush. “It have nose art on it?”
Case turns. “What does that mean?”
He looks down the runway at a line of plain props, spots a two-seat light-blue Piper. Its metal nose is painted white and there are huge cherries painted deep, deep red in a wreath around the words THE CHERRY KING.
He points. “That’s what I’m talking about.”
A creeping possibility she considers. She keeps running her finger round and round in midair, trying to stir the brain.
“Yeah, it had some shit on it. But it wasn’t on the engine like that. It was on the door. Does that count? It was on the door—it was small. Plaque size. It was like his initials done in a weird way. Or something with water, but … I was so fuckin’ loaded …”
“People change a car, they don’t always change a personalized plate. They change a boat, they don’t always change the name. He may change a plane, but …”
She gets it. Gives him the thumbs-up. The Dakota begins a police crawl around the field, pulling up to plane after plane … Nothing. They reach two that are partly tarped, both with their doors covered.
“Check it out,” says Bob.
Case climbs out of the truck.
Bob is watching the whole field on the outside chance someone shows. Case tries to pull back the first tarp, but it’s tied down tight. Bob watches her as she reaches down into her boot and pulls out a stiletto. The blade comes up in a neat flashing line. One jerk of the hand and the tarp splits. She sneaks a look inside. Nothing. Doesn’t even turn, just trucks off to the next plane, tapping the stiletto blade against her thigh. Bob cruises twenty feet behind her, keeps an eye on the perimeter.
Another quick slash. She lifts the ragged brown canvas with the blade.
She turns and lopes back to the Dakota. She leans in the driver’s window.
“There’s an old song lyric: ‘If you ain’t got good news, then don’t bring any.’ ”
Bob looks a little grim before she smiles, stands back, and lets the point of the blade lead the way back toward the flapping canvas gill.
A small hand-painted sign reads FIREWATER, with the FIRE done like water and the WATER done like fire.
“I told you it was some chooch bullshit. Good thinkin’, man.”
“El Centro first?”
She snaps the blade back home. “El Centro.”
27
El Centro is what the propagandists of the Imperial Valley call their big town. It even has signs billing it as the “largest city below sea level in the western hemisphere.” Case remembers a time when Granny Boy spray-painted on the unblemished green of a sign: “The only problem is, it’s below sea level but not water level.” Then he added an exclamation point sitting atop a smiley face with vampire’s teeth.
The town is an undramatic affair with streets raked out of the desert and innocuous squat-faced buildings.
Bob gets a handle on the place pretty quick as he and Case cruise the entrada of Heber Road. It’s a workhorse town duking it out with poverty. An army of filthy jeans and work gloves sporting accents from Laguna Salada to Oklahoma, and folks netted up on stoops like cawing flocks of birds. These towns always have a shortage of lookers, male or female, most having fled for someplace where the minimum wage is not the maximum you can get away with.
It brings back drab recollections of his childhood in Keeler. A blot of a place in Inyo County where the imported toxins illegally dumped into dry Owens Lake mixed with the native salts and sulfates and created a dust-covered cocktail that choked you into drunkenness and disease. The town evaporated under this Rube Goldberg mushroom cloud till there were only a hundred inhabitants left. Bob had lived in a trailer with his father. A prodigy of divorce, as his father maliciously nicknamed him. The view from Bob’s bedroom window was of the Great Western freight car his only neighbors called home. It had been abandoned there years ago, when the tracks no longer had a point of origin. His father was the lone security guard for the then defunct Cerro Gordo Mines. There was little to do there. Heat and loneliness came in an assortment of colors, and you had ample time to brood.
His father, though, liked the desert. It suited his hostile and imperfect nature. All this would have remained just so, except for the lung disease the winds brought that drove his father out to Simi Valley, where his peculiar talent for making sure gates were locked and things were in place got him a job as night security at Jefferson High. It was as students there that Bob and Sarah fell in love and began the circle of disaster his li
fe had become.
Bob and Case find a spot for the Dakota over by Camp Salvation Park. From there they can practically eyeball the Pioneer Hotel, which is where Errol Grey owns a lounge that doubles as a nightclub.
They cross Heber and make their way up Fifth.
“When we get in there, lay back. Errol can be a dick or he can be okay. Depends. Just play bass, let me chat it up.”
“Right.”
The Pioneer is three stories of rooms decorated and redecorated into a hybrid of styles. Early seventies meets late Department of Water and Power with a half-assed border of red brick. It’s even got enough fake wood trim for a landmark chemical fire.
Bob and Case enter the lobby. By the elevator a maid is blow-drying a hole in the wall that’s been plastered over and is still wet. A parcel of transients is grouped around a television on which a sitcom with cartoon colors flashes mercilessly in the half light. They’re a sordid bunch of hipsters, the types who’d backpack with twist-top wine bottles in their pockets.
Bob and Case hold by the door, taking everything in.
“If Cyrus is here,” says Bob. “If we get close enough … he isn’t walking away from us. Understand?”
“Got it.”
“No matter where it goes down.”
“Got it.”
“Even right here in the fuckin’ lobby.”
“I got it.”
The bar is around back and down a carpeted hallway past the bathrooms and pay phones. Halfway there, a band riffing through a practice session comes through loud and clear. Heavy metal with some Tex-Mex thrown in. Another turn takes them to a three-stair drop that leads to a pair of eyelid-curved swinging doors. One of the hall lights is out. They stop in the dark.
“Well …”
Case crosses her fingers.
They come on and clear the rim of the doors. Bob can feel the wheelgun under his shirt pressed against his stomach, which is turning clammy on him.