God Is a Bullet

by Boston Teran

  Bob plays Johnny Low Key as he passes Wood and flips him a nod. Gutter is mind-pacing as he listens to the phone ring. Bob cruises the check-in desk, trying to eavesdrop. He rummages through a small wicker basket where the management keeps matchbooks. He lights a cigarette and scans their faces.

  The phone is finally answered. Gutter comes on like a real prick. “What were you doin’, taking a world-class shit or what? Who is this …! It’s a couple of crustys stinkin’ up the lobby till you get your ass down here.”

  Case would run the next light but that dynamic duo who creep the park slide through the intersection in their police cruiser. They give her their best Batman glare on the turn, inching along till the light turns green. Just a quaint reminder of who is who and who is not.

  Gutter and Wood are locked in a private conversation, which Bob is trying to circle in on. Wood’s head cranes around Gutter’s shoulder. “What’s to it, man?”

  Bob points upstairs. “Waiting for the old lady.”

  Gutter turns. His eyes scrag Bob. They’ve got that hooker’s abstract boredom until they land at the spot on Bob’s cheek where Case did her little Michelangelo. Bob picks up on a moment in Gutter’s eyes as he stares at the tattoo. A kind of shift hit like he’s seen on jail-cell cowboys when that first little kiss of Dex cooz’s the system.

  The elevator door shutters open. Errol Grey skims across the lobby, wearing a black oilskin raincoat and those same nickel-sized sunglasses.

  Where the fuck is Case?

  Case charges the lobby, moving with a boneless grace. Overhead the one-two punch: lightning, thunder. Case sees herself in the wavery glass of the sliding doors. Pale as a shiv of moon.

  Inside, the lobby is empty except for those transients slopped around the television. The cellular is strapped to her wrist. She flips it open, speed-dials Bob’s number.

  “Where the”—static on the line like poppers—“are you?”

  “In the lobby.”

  “What took you so …”

  “… I brought the goddamn car!”

  One of the transients turns and puts a yellow nicotine-stained finger to his lips and shhhh’s her. She turns on him with acid dripping off her teeth. “Shut the fuck up, zombie … Bob, where are you?”

  Waves of rain. Drumrolls sweeping in northerly gestures. Bob is walking south on Meadows trying to talk into the cellular. He squints against the coal-black night, struggling along behind the suggestion of three men a block ahead.

  Behind the wheel of the Dakota, Case speeds onto Meadows. Head twisted to one side almost obscenely so she can hold the cellular. She can barely hear Bob through the static. Kick out the fear, girl, she tells herself. We’re closing in! Kick it out! … Fuck. You might as well be jacking off under the sword of Damocles. She almost blows right past Bob as he tries to flag her down.

  “What was with that doorstop in the lobby?” Gutter asks. “With the fuckin’ decal work?”

  Wood shrugs. “What do you mean?”

  “That piece on his face. It didn’t look weird to you?”

  “Weird how?”

  “It’s the same fuckin’ mark Lena has on her face.”

  Wood stares at him oddly.

  “You better keep your head out of paper bags, prince. That’s Lena’s old girlfriend’s mark. She ran with us before going sheep.”

  “If this is a history lesson, you’re tiring me out.”

  “It’s just gothic to see it on some doorstop’s face in the middle of Shitville a couple of years later.”

  Errol is having to work double time to keep up with his rank bookends. “It ain’t gothic. She’s here.”

  Gutter turns. “Who?”

  “Headcase.”

  Gutter stops. “This is bullshit, right. ’Cause it’s too fuckin’—”

  “But it’s true. Case is here. That was her old man you blew off in the lobby.”

  “Gutter is Cyrus’s personal ass towel,” says Case. “His number one coolie.”

  “Well, he checked me out pretty good. Spotted this mark, and I could see something in his face click and—”

  “I hope I didn’t fuck up,” Case says.

  The Dakota is doing a careful crawl, slipping and sliding from open parking spot to alleyway.

  Bob leans into the darkness of the dashboard. “They stopped! See! Pull over …”

  “You mean to tell me,” Gutter demands, “that freak show back there is her old man?”

  “She told me he’s been her Visa card for the last year.”

  “And she does her little magic act all of a sudden. Cinderella knocking at Cyrus’s door. Right … Her showing up like this is too fuckin’ gothic.”

  “She’s pretty junked out. She wants to come home. Do I give a fuck.”

  Gutter begins to pace. Wood tries to huddle up inside his motorcycle coat. The rain is blowing into pools across the sidewalk.

  Errol gets testy. “I don’t want to stand out here in the middle of a fuckin’ river while you try to put a couple of coherent thoughts together, alright? As for me, I figure Cyrus would love to blood the little bitch.”

  “Yeah, but maybe we should make sure she don’t want to blood him any.”

  Through the sweep of the wipers, Case and Bob watch the three outlines haze into a small talking bundle, then clamber across the street and under the awning of a weathered liquor store. Gutter goes to a pay phone hooked up to the wall by the door.

  Case hits the steering wheel. “Rat shit.”

  “Is he calling Cyrus?”

  She nods. Her cigarette tip flares in the dark. “Fuckin’ black magic,” she says.

  After a few minutes of phone time Gutter hangs up. He walks over to Wood and Errol. Errol slumps his hands down into his pockets and appears to ask Gutter something.

  Gutter answers with a freaky pirouette of his hand for the others to follow.

  The pickup pulls out into the dimness past a parked Volvo that’s rotten with rust. Bob and Case follow the three men, who walk one block and then turn south on Route 111.

  There is a roll of fear and confusion inside the pickup. A tin-sided garden of agony cruising in second gear. Ahead, the mist only half obscures the border station that turns Route 111 into Adolpho Lopez on the El Norte side.

  “We’re fucked if they cross into Mexico,” says Case.

  “We’re fucked, but do we cross?”

  32

  Whatever confidence they share in their plan turns to wax facing the border. They pull over. For a minute they lose Gutter and the others in a throw of darkened one-story buildings.

  “Whatever we do, we do it now …”

  “Gettin’ across, maybe,” she says. “But if we’re stopped on that side for jack shit, or if coming back we’re stopped … how do we explain these?” She pulls up her shirt to show off the semiautomatic tucked in her jeans. Then she reaches for the cattle prod lying on the front seat. “Or this … On that side the only way anybody is gonna be looking at us is down.”

  He weighs each possibility, and each is grimmer than the last.

  “Get out,” he says. “You follow them on foot so they don’t disappear on us. I’ll drive across.” She doesn’t move right away so he shoves her at the door. “Go on …”

  She jumps out. He tosses her the balled-up canvas coat he has stashed behind the seat. “Go on!”

  Down toward the mist with her arms spread out like wings, trying to get that coat on at a dead run.

  Bob drives into a lit stretch of road behind two trucks waiting to pass through the guard station. Under a battery of overhanging roadside halogens the mist is orange and almost foul in appearance. He opens the window, lights a cigarette, looks over nervously to where the foot traffic is moving along a caged-in walkway spanned by concrete arches. He tries to pick Case out against the rain.

  Case can see the pickup forty yards out through the chain-links. She moves along under the concrete arches. Gutter and the others have already passed through the guard station a
nd continued on to where the caged-in walkway turns and goes down a flight of stairs to the El Norte side.

  The rain has made the INS boys uninterested and slow. Case feels herself pressing anxiously against the woman and small child ahead of her. They turn and stare at her impoliteness. When it’s her turn she goes through without so much as a bump. She looks back and sees that Bob is still a truck away. She runs down the walk, takes the turn, and half jumps the steps. She has reached the bottom of the walkway when someone steps out from beside a concrete pillar.

  “Hey there, Sheep.”

  She comes to a hard stop and wheels away. Her voice misses a beat. “Gutter …”

  He leans back against the pillar, raises his boot to the stone. A few people hurry past, first one way and then the other.

  “You’re gettin’ a little aggro, aren’t you, Headcase?”

  She works the coolie trade, hunching up her shoulders.

  “Why you following us, Sheep?”

  “I asked Errol to talk to Cyrus about me coming—”

  He cuts her off cold. “But you just couldn’t kick. You had to start playing Zorro. You and that doorstop of yours. I saw him in the lobby. I know the shit Headcase would try. I remember the child before she was dead to the world.”

  He makes a fist, holds it up for her to see. She recognizes the tattoo of a beer bottle with the fifteenth mystery of the Tarot as a label. The vessel of unwanted evils. Gutter’s own personalized decal.

  Bob clears the border station. The passing is short and sterile. The low-rent INS guards: one half asleep and the other couldn’t be bothered. Bob cruises Adolpho Lopez. He drives slow, led by the metronome of the wipers. The tires splay apart the images of shop windows cast onto the waters of a running street.

  At Uxmal he pulls over. He speed-dials Case’s number. It rings in a series of quick clicks. He scans the square ahead. He recognizes the names of national chains: Payless, Leeds. Shop windows glare with American goods for sale. With slogans conning you in English or in Spanish. It is more like America than America, he thinks. And the phone, it just keeps fuckin’ ringing.

  33

  Bob backtracks to where the caged stairwell empties out into Mexico. He parks close by, walks the area like a soldier facing off against some alien perimeter before the fight to come. In one hand he holds the cattle prod close to his hip in the folds of his slicker; in the other the wheelgun stands ready in a pocket.

  The street is empty save for a few stragglers going about the night. An occasional car or truck sprays rain onto the sidewalks. He dials again, gets thrown back in his face a flatline of unanswered clicks.

  He looks up the street where the mist seems to come up off the cement like coal gas. He spots a lone figure moving out toward him from the far sidewalk.

  Bob starts up the street. The isolated figure shapes up in the light-pool from a pawnshop window. Bob sees it’s Wood. He stays to his side of the street, but gets close enough so he and Wood are just two empty lanes apart.

  “Headcase wanted me to tell you she’s going a little night-skying with us.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “Night-skying—witches’ mountain shit. The making of the dead.”

  “Where is she?”

  “Over the hill and through the woods to Grammy’s house …”

  Bob begins to cross the street.

  “It’s best not to cross.” Wood holds up his hand, making like a marionette. “Go on back to Appalachia or whatever white-trash penal colony you escaped from. And things will be cool. You shouldn’t a been following us. It doesn’t look good on your résumé.”

  Bob keeps coming. Wood angles a few steps back. An alley begins to open up behind him like the cave for Ali Baba.

  “If she’s blowing me off I want to hear it from her.”

  “Sorry, no prerecorded messages …”

  Bob keeps coming. A cab runs the road, raising a wave of street rain against him. Wood steps back and, like an actor at the end of showtime, takes a bow. The mist flues out the alley and fills the night around him. A black and silver sprite, Wood traffic-cops up his hands and with the red padding in the palms wet and dull and the white circled anarchist’s A wet and shiny, he screams out, “Judgment!”

  He is gone as fast as Bob can charge forward. The alley is a dead blind, and Bob stops. He listens for a bootfall or a voice but there is only the steel dirge of the storm along the rooftops and gutter tins. One or two window lights from above and down the alley do nothing to improve the view.

  Bob readies the cattle prod and pistol for the walk forward.

  His feet hardly lift as he starts into the alley. The water runs over the ankle of his boots. His breath runnels through his nose like sandpaper. He flashes on that CHP poster by the bar, with the face hidden behind a gun. IS TODAY THE DAY? He draws up the pictures of Sam and Sarah and even those of little Polly Klaas. The unwilling dead breathe fire into the willing and alive.

  “If anything happens to her,” he shouts, “I swear to you, I swear, do you hear me …”

  A moment later one of those window eyes blinks in a blind’s move.

  “Go fuckin’ back …”

  He is shocked to hear Case’s voice.

  “Case?”

  “Go on back, Bob …”

  He can’t tell if her voice is coming from street level or higher up. There is a hollow ring to it as it waves from one wall to the other.

  “Where are you?”

  “Just go back! It’s alright …”

  At the end of the alley, sixty feet back, is a ten-foot-high brick wall with barbed wire curled across the top and held in place by metal rods.

  “Just let me see you.”

  He listens hard but she doesn’t answer. Within moments, somewhere beyond that brick wall a car engine turns over.

  “Case …”

  Something hisses near a Dumpster beside him.

  He jerks around. There’s a rush of boot metal, and a pinwheel of sparks comes flying at his face. He tries to block it with the cattle prod.

  He watches the next seconds in half frames. Something red and dynamite-shaped ricochets off his wrist. He jumps back, chased by a tearing jolt that sends burning white-hot rays up his arm and across his eyes. He smells the slicker as it starts to singe. Blinded, he fires a shot off without the slightest hint of an aim. He stumbles over a rut into the mist and lands with his back against a prop of rotting boards. He stops breathing, clenches his teeth. He torques out for the fight he can’t see but knows will come. A woman, somewhere high up, has begun to yell in Spanish. A figure leaps over Bob flashbulb fast, cutting the mist in half. Bob hacks at it with the cattle prod, which hits a piece of metal railing and sends out a fireline of sparks. The red flare lies guttering through the haze beside Bob, lighting the ground around him. He pulls himself closer within the folds of his coat, scrabbling sideways to become a harder target. The figure leaps out through the mist again, and he rakes the air with the cattle prod but misses. The figure counters with a knife.

  His breath rushes out of him. He feels a lit match across his chest. The figure shouts coarsely, “Couped!” It then rushes out the open end of the alley.

  He sits there for minutes with the gun aimed in case the figure returns. His hand comes up to his chest, feels where his slicker and shirt have been sluiced. He struggles to his feet, his eyes begin a half turn around the alley. That woman is now watching from a window. She is pointing down at Bob and talking to someone else in the room. Bob’s legs are a little wavy, but he hurries away.

  Walking back to the Dakota, with his hand inside his coat and pressed to his chest, he can feel the blood coming down his fingers. He climbs in behind the steering wheel and pulls the door shut. For a moment he rests his head on the wheel, but thinks better of it.

  He pulls away, working the wheel and shift with one arm, driving the car badly for blocks till he finds a small empty lot and parks alongside a couple of Dumpsters.

  He turns on
the overhead light. He tries slow breathing. His hand comes out of the slicker so he can unbutton it. He sees his open palm has been imprinted with blood. Dark, with the skin behind it pale and waxen.

  He flashes on Wood’s hand with the insignia sewn there. Blood brothers now, hey fucker. He takes off his slicker so he can look at the wound in the rearview mirror. He grunts as he pulls the shirt up.

  His eyes focus on the fifteen-inch-long beauty mark. Done with a fine hunting blade. He flexes the lips of the wound. Long, but not too deep. A dozen sutures will hold that kiss together.

  He turns off the overhead light. He lets his head ease back onto the steering wheel. Just a few minutes’ rest. A few minutes to gather his guts as best he can back in order.

  Order. It used to have some position in his day-to-day existence.Now it’s minute-to-minute, and even that is just a crowd of woes.

  Fuck it. Weld that wound closed with fishing line and needle. And when that’s done dig out the shotgun and a heart full of rounds, and then get a little aggro, as they say.

  34

  Cyrus sits at a table with a view of the road in what passes for a cantina. It is in the middle of Maquila Row. A mile-long encampment of low, mean-structured factories of cinder block and tin, asbestos and sheathing. Once just the desert of Baja California Norte, it now blooms with American-owned sweatshops and semis rigged out for points of profit across the border.

  The rain has stopped. Cyrus turns toward Errol, who speaks in a low, controlled, but furious tone. “I don’t appreciate waiting three days for you in El Centro. That’s bullshit. You understand!”

  Cyrus listens without interest, notices across the mud lot the van parked away from the trucks and battered vehicles lined up there. Lena is sitting behind the wheel as she’s been told. But Granny Boy has gotten out and is drinking a beer. He motions to Cyrus that he’s just talked to someone on the phone and then gives him the thumbs-up.

  “Are you listening to me?”

  Cyrus turns to Errol, his eyes like black ash. “I hear, but I don’t necessarily listen.”