by Boston Teran
The motel used to be a whorehouse that catered to Anglos who preferred their stuff with a little color in it. Now it’s a roach hole for factory workers stacked sixteen to a room. Except for the back two units. One is where the bartender lives; the other is a playpen of sorts that’s seen a little blood in its time.
When they pull up by those grimly attired units and try to get Case out of the car, Gutter finds her gun. He hands it off to Cyrus without anyone else seeing. Cyrus holds the gun in both hands, staring at it as if it were a piece of petty foolishness. He slips it into his pocket.
They half-carry Case in, shunting her between the shoulders of Granny Boy and Wood. Lena follows, but again Cyrus cuts her off. “Whoa, Batgirl,” he says to her. “You gotta baby-sit Robin.”
“Fuck the little cunt. She’s almost totally out.”
“Then just think how equipped you are for the gig.”
Case’s eyes pinch to focus, and she opens her mouth to pull in as much air as possible. She finds herself looking down past the wooden chair she sits on, through her legs, to a shoddy burgundy shag rug.
Her eyes come up with a bleary blinking wideness. The room is lit by two lamps. Cyrus sits facing her with his arms and head propped on the back of a chair. Errol stands behind him by a few feet, near the bed.
“We all want to come home in the end, don’t we?” says Cyrus.
Case nods, adjusts to the light, to consciousness. Feels some blood still dribbling down her nose and into her mouth. She looks over toward a bureau where Gutter is sitting, and beside him Granny Boy and Wood have a spoonful of arm juice heating up.
“How much is it worth?” says Cyrus.
She turns to him. The room stinks of cheap fragrances. She goes to speak but Cyrus stops her.
“You better know the right price,” he warns.
He leans over and takes a few spittles of the blood that has trickled down around her lip onto his finger and puts it to his own lips and tastes.
“It’s worth all I have,” Case answers.
Cyrus takes her gun from inside his shirt and holds it up. “Good answer.”
The adrenaline clears her head quick now. Cyrus looks back at Errol.
“You know what the real equalizers are? Suffering and death. Everything else is day care. Suffering and death, they lay it out fast when it comes to who you really are.”
He looks back at Case. “How do I know I can trust you coming home? How do I know you’re not trying to fuck with me some way?” He holds her gun near her face. “What was this all about? Maybe you wanted to punch a few holes in the Messenger, huh?”
She sits there without so much as moving.
“You come tripping over the border, I wonder …” Cyrus looks at Errol. “People have all kinds of games. You too, Errol. You like games. Don’t you, chief?”
“I don’t know what you mean.”
“Mister Firewater. Mister fuckin’ yuppie redskin phony who changed his name so nobody knows he’s a piece of scum meat from the reservation. Wants to be Mister unqualified white bread.”
“What does this have to do with anything? I’m half …”
“How do I know you and baby dearest here haven’t gotten together and are planning a little court politics against me? You help her get back home. I go do the score, pick up your stuff. And then she does me. And maybe the others. Maybe she sets me up for a couple of your coolies? How do I know? How?”
Errol can feel a dampness clam across his chest. He looks around the room. It’s already started to change shape, as Gutter has slipped off the bureau and found himself a nice quiet spot by the door.
Errol churns out the words. “I’m not gonna buy into this.” He turns to Cyrus. “I never travel with protection. I don’t carry weapons. I don’t scam and I don’t screw anybody. And if I was ever gonna get into something so radical, would I use Headcase? Fuck no.”
Cyrus answers with bitterness. “It’s time you wear the death mask.” He hands Case the gun. “Do him, sister.”
“What kind of slashwork is going down here?” shouts Errol.
Cyrus forces her fingers around the gun. “We need blood to preserve the youth of America. Go to it, sister.”
She stares into her gun hand. It reeks of choices, all rotten. Errol is dropping into panic like a plane that’s lost all its engines. He tries to wand off the whole room but his arm hits a lamp, sending it to the floor and causing a collision of shadows along the ceiling. Great black images of Wood holding up the needle and Granny Boy doing a lewd mantra to get it on and Gutter playing bouncer by the door with fingers hitched in his belt. It’s a torched ensemble of swaying light and muted faces and music from some car radio ripping past the window.
She could do Errol without so much as a bump in her thoughts. She knows that. And she could put the gun under Cyrus’s neck just as quick and take out a few pints of brain matter.
But she must have gotten too clear too fast. She kicks the hammer back. It’s like dropping into some hypnotic recall. The gun cunt from Cafe Armageddon. The vengeful corpse from the Land of Gog. She knows Cyrus can read her, and that he knows she can read him.
Two witches they are, who have tightroped miles of mind warp together. The past and the present all turning into one split second of their lives. The rattler and its tail working in perfect unison but striking out for points unknown to the other. As she kicks the chamber and lets it snap back into place, her fingers tell her in shades of weights and measures how this deal is going down.
“Play Travis Bickle,” Cyrus whispers. “Go on. Do your Robert De Niro mohawk shit, but remember how far the door is …”
He can’t fuck with her, because she knows the game now. So she’s gonna ride this whole scene out. A griffin on a great black and chrome Harley aiming the gun at Errol, who is nothing more than a cutout scrap against a lit ceiling coughing up gibberish and gagging like he was forced to do a little deep throat.
The room is filled with Cyrus’s swill as he points to his heart and says, “That’s where we carry the true country!” And in the instant she should fire she turns the gun around and without the least touch of emotion gets her mouth around the barrel and pulls the trigger.
38
Bob walks that blinking yellow cursor building by building. From factory to warehouse to open lot through a half mile square of Maquila Row, till he finds himself staring through a battered roadside hurricane fence at a cantina where the flashing cursor pulses intense and spotted, like the heartbeat of a child in the womb.
He goes back down the road and brings up the Dakota. Parked there at the back of the lot, he gives the place a procedural looking over while he takes some rope and ties a mooring hitch to the stock of his shotgun, then slips the loop of it over his neck and slides the weapon under his slicker. He does the same with the cattle prod.
He cruises the lot from car to car, searching for Case. He must give off the smell of the unwelcome guest. La migra after the coyote. Maybe some white-trash racist biker come south in a hunting party of one, hot for wetbacks. He sees it in the faces of the drunks he passes, in couples posing against the bare moon, in the crews of factory workers pigeoned up around a bottle of rum cut with cheap cola and sipped from paper cups. They speak in a low native tongue that he doesn’t understand and now wishes he did.
“I don’t see the point,” Bob said. “It’s our country. It’s our language. They should be made to speak our language. Otherwise all bets are off …”
Sarah listened quietly, cleaned the dinner plates, then turned to him with a look of polite disagreement and in poorly accented Spanish thanked him for his political wisdoms.
Inside the bar, things serve up no better as he passes through a world of faces. From a handful of whites he gets the barest of acknowledgments. When he stops and asks them if they’ve seen a woman and three men, describing them and his concern, they have nothing for him.
From the bar he scans the room again. He manages to order a beer and a shot of tequila
with pathetic hand signals. That fuckin’ yellow light has to be dead on. He starts to come apart in a chain reaction of atavistic thoughts that end with Case having been done in and dropped nearby in some ditch.
His chest burns from the wound and the homespun stitches. He shoots down tequila and beer to fire the engines for another walking circle of hell.
He cruises the shitters, working the muddy stench of ground beneath those ridiculous carnival lights that sway with the wind. He looks out in all directions, at the fields stretching black and hopeless all the way to another road and a scattering of squat buildings.
A hallucination of self-blame for all the events that ever happened starts to tear away the little space he has left inside himself for clear thinking. It’s a night for foot-soldiering this rain-sogged caldera, and every fuckin’ inch of it he swears to himself he’ll cover. He whispers, “You just stay alive …”
He’s walking back toward the bar door when something catches his eye. A short fellow with a battered face and bare legs and flip-flops passes through a clump of men talking by the door. A drunken gnome carrying two six-packs up between a couple of Port-O-Sans and wearing a coat that looks close, too goddamn remarkably close, to the one he gave Case.
Beyond the lights, on a path that steeps to a moon-blue incline, Bob cuts the small drunken man off from his destination. His face is at once hostile and frightened till he sees inside the open slicker a pair of gray barrels moving up to greet him. Then he is only frightened.
He starts to speak in quick Spanish, stepping back, his shoes slip-slopping on the marshy gravel.
Bob looks the coat over, grabs it, feels for the tracer sewn into the lining. His thumb finds the small metal nub.
“The woman …” He tugs the coat. “The woman. Where is she?”
The little man shakes his head like a vendor saying no to a deal.
Bob yanks the coat harder. “Mujer … Mujer …” It’s all the Spanish he knows, and that from bathroom doors. “Mujer!”
The man’s little eyes skit away, and Bob rams the metal barrels against a set of milky teeth. “Mujer—” Bob’s other arm jerks the coat again. “Where, where?”
A hand missing one finger points at a silvery piece of wreckage lying about fifty yards out in a run of weeds that gullies down toward a sump.
A wave of the barrel and Bob’s got the man pacing off the ground in front of them. About twenty yards out, the silvery hull starts to detail into the chassis of a gas tanker that must have taken it pretty hard in a collision some time back and been left to rot away. The ass end has been shorn off, cutting through part of what looks to be a Shell logo. That heraldic signpost had the S chopped off clean, leaving just an expletive behind on a sundried yellow plate.
The little man stops and his hands move with an awkward nervousness toward a point beyond the high weeds where the ground gives way. “Mujer,” he says.
A nasty raucous dialogue comes faintly from that direction.A covert whistling of dog howls just under the peel of a breeze.
“Mujer,” the little man says again.
Bob holds the shotgun against the man’s throat and motions with his jaw for him to go on.
They clear the weeds in a few clumsy steps, and Bob comes around the man and forces him to his knees. His empty face looks up to entreat for mercy, but all he gets is a barrel slapped into the wet marl.
Bob’s eyes adjust to the darkness, where in a swill of ground beneath the rig about a dozen men prey on the white outline of a woman who is being held down and humped.
Case lies on a dark raft of mattress in a sea of trash. One or two of the men are naked. The others shamble around the body like apes, watching her beaten-down struggle.
In one gagging rush Bob charges them. He fires the shotgun into the air and the men go scattering or crawling for cover and others fall back into a pack like wolves. He fires again and the sky around him goes stark white from the flash. The one man who was on Case tries to crab away and get to his feet, but Bob kicks him hard in the face and his arms splay and he slides down into the damp morass of garbage.
Bob kneels down beside Case, holding the men away with his shotgun. She is dazed and wobbly as she tries to rise up on her elbows, and Bob can see they’d been juicing her, as there is still a hypo stuck up into her arm.
Some of the men have run off, but five or six lay out in a far circle shooting off sentences to each other in Spanish. Like beasts come for carrion, they’re figuring how to make a show of it.
Bob gets one arm under Case’s. “Can you stand?”
She tries to see through all the hitting and the heroin.
“You got to stand. I think they’re gonna try to take us down.”
“I thought I … was standing,” comes her wavy answer.
“Come on!”
He guides her up, moving the shotgun in a slow arc at the hunched-down shoulders and faces stalking the weeds or curled up around clumps of refuse. They start the game with a chant of wild sounds and hoot calls and low aggressive kisses.
“You’ve got to be able to stand on your own now. Do you understand?”
Case can hear the words move through her mind but they are like a slow, slow drawl. She answers by letting go of his arm and holding on for dear life with her feet to a broken cloud of mattress.
The catcalls and hoots reach the pitch of an orgied rite. An incensed demand for manhood rebels at being held off from the meat by one fuckin’ punk with a gun.
Bob tries to steer Case up through a rutted stretch of weeds. He’s got a sense that if the men are gonna come they’ll have to get it on before he and Case clear the rise and end up in sight of a cesspool of witnesses.
They start up through the reeking ground like a pair of battered prizefighters, but the men come on in a fanning web, grabbing up rocks and poleaxes of piping and broadswords of wood sheeting. It’s street-dog time now, and they’re shouting to each other in Spanish about how to do the takedown.
Case tries to warn Bob as best she can about what she hears, but the words come out muddy and lifeless.
“Tell them to go back,” he shouts, “or I’ll fire on them …”
She scores out the words in venomous Spanish up the steep side of the incline, naked and pale as a border of moonlight and reaching with her arms for something to grab onto.
The men come on in bent, bandy-legged charges and feints. Then one of them flings a rock and hits Bob in the side of the neck. The shock sends him reeling to the ground. Case tries to stop his fall but can’t. And the men charge in.
But the ground that works against one works against them all, and they can’t coordinate the surge. A fat grizzled thing, shirtless with a scarred belly, gets there first. He grabs hold of the shotgun. He and Bob start the struggle around the gray weapon and twist desperately, but Bob frees one arm and gets hold of the cattle prod and brings it up quick as the man tries to take the gun away. He shoves the prod up into the man’s throat and hits the joystick. There’s a short static zap, and the man’s voice shrieks and he collapses into a seizure.
Case slips down and tries to help Bob pull the shotgun loose from the man’s grip. They get it loose and he uses the barrel of the gun to stake himself up. Another man is in the middle of a charge with a six-foot draw of pipe, howling like a Mayan warrior, when he’s met head-on by a shotgun blast.
He is catapulted sideways and down into a sewered run of mud, and when he hits the ground it sounds like a hard slap across the face of the earth.
The men freeze.
Bob can barely get his breath. He stares at the reddening bloom across the moon-shaped white shirt.
“Tell them … Tell them …” He half grabs his breath. “If it’s blood they want … to come on …”
Case slogs through the words.
They begin a slow, deadly backtracking up toward the lights, moving behind the unwavering eyes of the shotgun as the men hold their ground, frozen where they stand like bone piles in a charnel house.
> 39
Case sits wrapped in Bob’s slicker, her legs pulled up like a battered child’s on the front seat of the Dakota, watching the night miles of the desert along the Canal Del Alamo issue up toward the border.
She’s coming off the nod after being shot up. Her voice is husky with stalled emotions. “When we were in that room and he flashed up my gun, I thought, Here comes the evil hour before the …”
She makes a weak stab like working a dagger into someone’s heart. Her eyes begin to swim and she rests her head against the frame of the open window.
“But when he started to mindfuck Errol, I thought I might have a shot. When he’s doing his face-to-face rattlesnake-to-ego fuck with somebody, it’s just a game. It’s not for the kill. And then he hands me the gun, so I’m in the game now. I think, I’m back. In the family …”
She takes a long breath through her nostrils to try to clear her head. They ride toward a coal-blue sky that presses the cutout edge of the hills.
“Yeah,” she says. “Yeah, fuck me is right,” she whispers to herself. “He hands me the gun,” she says. “I can feel it’s empty, man. I can feel it. Even swimming through my head I can. That’s how I am with all this, from all the years. I mean … then he looked at me.”
Bob turns to watch her for a moment. Her face is a wooden carving of the face she usually wears.
“Then I knew … I knew he would do me in his own way. So I quit the game and put the gun in my mouth like I was saying, Let’s get it on. And I pulled the trigger.”
Her face leans around. It is the color of autopsy flesh. “You better stop the car,” she says. “I’m going into relapse mode with some old witches.”
He pulls the car off into a stretch of desert blackness. In each direction the brooding silhouette of untouched and untamed landscape. She wanders from the truck, shivering and naked inside the slicker. She falls to her knees. She begins to retch.
Bob walks toward her slowly. “Can I help you?”
She fans him away with an arm. “It’s not the juice. It’s my head.”