by Boston Teran
Her body leans forward till her hands touch the ground and clench the dirt and squeeze till dust spindles through her fingers and the ground slops up her vomit.
She leans back, sits on her calves. She looks up and tries to get a mouthful of air.
“I fucked up,” she says. “I should have shot him outside that bar when I had the chance. We know he’s got her. It has to be her. I should have put the screw to him.”
Bob approaches her cautiously, squats down behind her. “Then what?”
“Then what? He and I would kiss oblivion, that’s what.”
She tries to sleep as he drives north. They pass the Mexicali airstrip, cool with the sun’s coming pink across the pumice rock and still life of planes.
Through a dazed restlessness she asks, “Why? Why would Cyrus risk trekking back and forth across the border with her? He wants her alive for a reason.”
His own body is so beaten and stiff, so burned down from the night before, so caught up in the replay of a murder, that he can hardly think through another thought. He can hardly hold on to the wheel except by a double-tight grip of both hands.
“The answer is close to home, Bob. It has to be. It’s a vendetta against one of yours. I’ve seen this. I’m sorry. But it has to be.”
He nods, but at this moment does not want to know.
A motel; a mew of five stucco shacks that face an asphalt road. The falling perimeter of a corral in high weeds is the only other mark on the landscape between here and the border.
Bob waits in curtained darkness while Case showers. He sits on the edge of the bed with his shirt off and her words in his head: “close to home … a vendetta.”
He tries to see the face of the man he killed, but all he can see is the color of the skin and the scream.
Case stands in the shower watching the water spin down through the drain with the mud and filth of the night before. She stands in the steamy white room before a damp mirror and clears a view. Her tattooed flesh begins to fill out the mist like the strange symbols on the cave walls seen all those years ago.
What would the dead flesh say if it were found somehow preserved centuries from now? What would it be worth, the story imprinted there? She notices the huge black-and-blues where her thighs were wrenched apart, and the broken vessel on her arm that has lumped out like a tumor from where the needle rammed its way home.
And on her arm, Ourabouris. The circular green and orange snake with its head devouring its tail. You lived to bleed another day, huh? Maybe there is more meaning to that fact than even she knows.
She lies in bed wearing only a T-shirt and stares at the ceiling. He sits on a chair by the window, where the daylight narrows through the short fall between curtain and frame. Across the road, on the withered posts of a corral gate, he watches ravens collecting for the day.
He tries to remember the story she told him about ravens when he hears the strain of her laugh.
“What?” he asks.
“You put a tracer in my coat on the chance I’d run. I’m lucky you’re such an untrusting son of a bitch.”
“I’m sorry I didn’t trust you.”
Her mouth rucks, her eyes close. “I’m sorry I fucked up.”
“You? How?”
“I should have killed him.”
“It wouldn’t get us where we need to go,” he says.
She does not notice that he used the word “we.”
She begins to drift some. “It’s rat patrol tonight somewhere around Algodones.”
“I guess we couldn’t find him there.”
“Not likely.”
“After that he’s up to Mojave, right?”
“Yeah … And I’m sure Errol will be putting pins into his prick thinking about that reunion.”
“We should cross the border tonight and get it on up to Mojave. Get in Errol’s ass.”
“That ought to be a sweet crossing, especially if the humper you flattened has got some relative with the pigs hereabouts and they tagged us.”
Bob puts his head back on the rim of the chair, and while sitting there in mid-quiet is caught by the sound of his own words. “Last night in the bar I was angry because no one was speaking English and I couldn’t understand them. I knew, I believed anyway, some could speak but were fucking with me. I felt they were fuckin’ with me. And when I got my drink, for some reason Sam came to mind.”
“Sam?”
“The man my wife married.”
“Oh, yes …”
“I thought she married him in part because he was black. To point out to me the differences between us. Thinking about that last night, in that bar, the way I felt then, says an awful lot, it seems to me, about who I really am. And I’m not sure who I am is the man I set out to be.
“You see, I’ve discovered during all this that in some way I truly believed I was better than everyone else. That I had inside me some sort of ethical superiority. That the universe was bound together by all I felt and believed in. That Bob Hightower knew what was right, and all remarks to the contrary were just that—contrary.”
He pauses. “I don’t know why I brought this up.”
She lies there a long moment, watching the single arrow of daylight that points across the ceiling above the bed.
She taps the bed. “Come over here beside me and lie down and sleep. You need rest. You need to shut the brain down.”
He does not move. She taps the bed again and slowly he rises and goes and lies beside her. They both seem to be staring at that single fixed arrow that marks the way from wall to wall. She glances at his suture marks, which rise and fall with his breathing.
“I’m sorry you had to kill a man. I’m sorry it was over me.”
“It’s funny what we tell ourselves without saying anything.”
“Yes.”
“I’m sorry you had to suffer last night,” he says.
“My body they’ve had, the rest they can never find.”
She feels him turn over and away from her. And then she hears him begin to cry. She knows he is crying because he thinks he has failed some higher order. She wants to tell him that the world works best without God, because the world is compromise, and impurity, and truth—yeah, even truth—and none of those are God. Not really.
But she doesn’t.
40
Cyrus and his war pack wait on a long gray escarpment. Far to the northeast the lights of Algodones begin to wash up on the shore of the desert through the faltering tide of dusk.
They move about the jagged dogleg of volcanic turf, listening to music from the van’s CD player and climbing on the fossilized nubs like the children of vacationers scrabbling for the best view.
Cyrus sits alone near the open back door of the van, watching.
When they have picked up Errol’s score they will head out to Algodones. Among their legion is an INS agent who works a border station and will assist their crossing. His sister was a sergeant at the North Island Naval Base and is a practicing sorceress. They share a small ranch on the Salton Sea. A remote portrait of dusty light and clapboard, where from the kitchen you can watch chickens roost in the remains of a wheel-less Dodge Caravan.
Cyrus has been a welcome guest at their rituals, and there are those who swear that beneath the Detroit-stamped chicken coop lie the remains of wetbacks and hitchhikers who have lost their way to the prowlings of the damned.
Cyrus glances over at Gabi. She is far back inside the van. She is neither bound nor gagged. He walks over and sits on the rear bumper where he can see her better. She is now leper to the child she once was. Her eyes are well into the hollowing process.
He motions for her to come forward, which she does. She sits near him. He takes her arm. The mark of the needle has found its way along a trace of veins. The slow helix of his will. He takes her by the hair. He searches that mute face for a seed of defiance that might be holding out against him. He begins to test her. “I know what you’re thinking. One day you’ll be safe. The police will
come. Or maybe your grandfather will come. That dear, dear man. Or maybe your father. I know that Uncle Tom wasn’t your real daddy. Ohhhh … They’ll be weeping for you. For a long time. Some will bleed to death from the tears. Stricken by evil, they will say. Right, pretty-pretty?”
Her eyes blink. She does not move.
“It wouldn’t matter. It’s too late anyways. Too late, child. Even if I were to send you back. Which I might …”
He waits on that note to see what his words draw out of the dead pale of her face.
Lena came crying back into the van. Kicking at the doors and walls, punching at the ceiling and cursing Cyrus. She sat in the corner like a petulant teenager, the corner opposite where Gabi lay. Gabi watched, hidden by a hand across her face, with drained eyes and the dull bilge of brain matter deadened needle by needle, as Lena rambled on. A grim trick child herself.
She listened as Lena swore she’d kill Cyrus if he hurt some woman. It must have been the one she saw when she was alone in the back of the van. The one behind the bar, knocked down into the mud and kicked. The one she saw through the bent eyelid in the metal frame below the hitch lock who fought against Cyrus as she was dragged from that motel room.
“It doesn’t matter,” Cyrus says. “Nothing you can do matters. Because even in the end, if they had you back, you would be poisoned. You’d be a whore junkie who’s been had by the dirt of the world. They’d speak about you behind your back. The men you’d want would hate you because of where you’d been. And the men you wouldn’t want would want you because of what you’ve been. And some will believe there is a little bit of Patty Hearst in your blood. You don’t know what I’m talking about yet, but sometime you will. Because people look for evil everywhere. But those wouldn’t be the only reasons …”
She tries to hide from the carnage he offers by staying fixed on a point in the sky where the day’s heat collects into the great bleeding rose of the sun.
“If you got back alive. If! Someday you’d ask John Lee or your grandpops why did all this happen. Do you think they want that? Do you think they want to come all over you with the truth? In the end they’d rather have you dead. And in the end you, too, would rather be dead. For you will blame yourself for all that’s happened. As absurd as it sounds, you will.”
His fingers do a slow crawl through her hair like lizards on the kill.
“Do you hear me? Think of that while you dream. You’re the price of their paradise. That’s how I fucked them. And no one wants to look into the face of what they’ve been. And they would know every time they looked at you that I’m there waiting. I am a piece of your heart now. The largest piece.”
She holds her eyes to a last dop of sun. The deep hypnotic she tries to visualize into the flashing light of her father’s cruiser. That is him out there on the dying landscape, coming for her, whispering to her parables and promises. She will believe in childlike degrees that which she can still hold on to. But clarity dies away into nightfall in the tomb of that van when she has to face them, one by one.
She will pray through God to her father. And through her father to God. She will make them into one. And she will pray that the one called Lena cuts Cyrus’s throat in his sleep. For that also she will pray.
Cyrus pushes her back into the van, where she swaddles up inside a blanket.
“It’s time we got you the devil’s tail,” he says. He looks out toward the country from where the mules are supposed to come. “Yeah. Maybe tonight.”
• • •
Up through black ravines comes a wind. Through the wind, Cyrus watches, his head turning like a huge slow battleship behind the night-vision goggles. Three small matchflames of heat begin to burn out of the sandy moonscape to the south.
“They made it across,” he shouts.
He points. Lena kneels beside a battery-operated signal flasher. She lines up the flasher to Cyrus’s long fingers and begins to flick the on/off switch in a slow progression.
The three candleflames of heat begin to fix on the blinking star of the flasher. Their progress is slow. They lift and fall among the stony dunes for an hour before they are within shouting distance.
Through the windswept grit, an old malabarista and his two ragged young charges from Delicias start the long climb up the escarpment. They are weighed down under the burden of their full knapsacks. Cyrus orders Gutter and Wood down through that crumbling trough of a pathway with flashlights to guide them.
Cyrus and the old man share a long embrace, their talk a vile mix of English and Spanish. They sit apart from the others and Cyrus lights the old man a joint while the three knapsacks are taken to the back of the Cherokee. There, Gutter begins the meticulous warranty of each carefully wrapped brick of heroin.
The old man takes in long draughts of smoke as Cyrus eyes the two young boys sitting off by themselves. Moonfaced youths. Flat and cheerless souls squatting there at the edge of the rock, quietly turning over a few silent phrases between them.
“Are these boys anything to you?”
The old man shakes his head no. “Why?”
“No reason.”
The old man gasps in a deep hit. “I did promise them freedom. I was going to give them something from my share and help them on. Maybe going with them to San Isidro. I have an ex-wife in San Isidro that I would like to—”
Cyrus cuts him off: “Kick around some.”
Both men laugh. The old man’s eyes move at the spice of the thought.
“Just enough to make me hard,” he says.
When the white powder has been proofed for the marketplace and the short cash handed over to the old man, Cyrus takes him aside and passes him half a bag more.
“And what is this?”
Whispering, Cyrus says, “I want to make a trade.” Then his eyes light over toward the two boys.
The old man speaks to the boys with the wisdom of a parent explaining how his good friend will take them to El Norte for the fine work they’ve done. That a job will be in the offing, this too for the fine work they’ve done. He is a virtual chapbook of compliments about Cyrus, about how he has helped others who helped him. He is contrite about having to go back alone. The boys listen, swimming with the heady hope their dreams are coming true.
All this holds until the old man recedes back into the darkness and the vehicles are loaded and ready. It is then Cyrus comes up to the two boys and lets them have a good look at a Colt banger.
“Take your clothes off, boys from Delicias,” he says in Spanish.
They stand dazed in their confusion, then look back toward where they came as if the old man might return and explain all this away. Cyrus fires the gun into the air and the boys strip down quickly. Their faces are etched confusion. The others watch. Soon the boys are naked and herded up alongside the van.
Cyrus walks past them, first left to right, then right to left, like a master sergeant before his new recruits. He stops at the one on the left and takes hold of his cock.
“Your God must have wanted you to be a priest,” he says.
Too scared to respond, the boy can only tremble. Cyrus goes to the next, gives his cock a hard looking over, then takes it up into his hand.
“That’s a real devil’s tail you got there.”
The boy is aghast and refuses to make eye contact.
“A real devil’s tail,” Cyrus repeats with hidden pleasure, letting the weight of it flex across his palm.
Granny Boy comes forward and rapid-fire bangs on the shell of the van with his palms. The boys jump fearfully. He continues on in drumroll fashion. One of the boys starts to cry, and the rest of the pack back Granny Boy up with a cadence of drumrolls against the van’s body.
Gabi lies there, listening through the echoing metal to a crying voice that couldn’t be much older than her own.
Cyrus walks up to the boy on the left and says in Spanish, “You’re crossing over.”
The boy’s face, which had been locked in blind confusion, slowly begins to see its way, b
elieving this “crossing over” to be good news. But before his lips can clear the teeth in a smile, the Colt jumps in and one shot takes off the better part of his face.
He is thrown back against the van. One of his teeth chings against the frame, scoring it. A hole of blood out behind the ear spurts the white of the wall like a whale’s spout.
The other boy collapses into the sand, begging for his life, groveling around Cyrus’s feet.
41
When Case awakens, she is alone. She tries to stand, but the rapes have left her insides swollen and bruised. She forces herself to walk, to muscle through the pain. She remembers something she heard once in Junkieland: Defilement, like good intentions, is always with us.
Bob sits against the western wall of the motel on a chink of cement almost wide enough for his ass. He whittles at the ground between his outstretched legs with a hunting knife. Case steps out into the light. Bears a hand over her eyes.
“What time is it?”
“Three o’clock or so.”
She lights a cigarette. He continues to core at the ground.
“Have you slept?” she asks.
He continues to dig with the robotic dedication usually assigned to the mad or the lost.
She squats down and with a calm cradling voice asks, “Don’t you think you should?”
“You’re right, you know.” He runs some dirt off the blade with two fingers. “The reason is close to home. Whatever the reason is. I had this dream days ago. About my … about Sarah and I and … Well, the short of it is we were walking up through Paradise Hills to our house. The house my father-in-law built for us. We were naked. She was pregnant. There were men there, workers, watching. Then for some reason she vomited blood.”
He presses the knife back into the ground. A deep thrust that turns out diamonds of salt-and-pepper rock and pewtery dust.
“It’s all just fragments. You know. Memories, dreams. They strobe at you. I wanted to call my father-in-law to tell him we’re alive. But I also … had a thought I wanted to ask him about. He wasn’t at his house or the office. But Maureen was there.”