God Is a Bullet

by Boston Teran

  “Who is Maureen?”

  “She’s his partner, best friend. She’s known us all—Sarah, Gabi, us all—since … well, forever, I guess. She’s one of the few honest people I know.

  “She had money from her family and when they went into business, Arthur and her, he was a contractor and they bought up land. Mostly probate stuff. When I was dating Sarah … we were in high school then. I remember they bought up the land of someone who’d been murdered. Out of probate.

  “I remember ’cause Maureen was drinking and arguing with John Lee about the bad karma of a thing like that. And Sarah and I were out by the pool thinking how utterly stupid adults were.”

  “The old lady out at Furnace Creek?”

  “That’s what I asked her.”

  “But her land is still there? Empty.”

  “Empty and useless as shit. But she had other land …”

  “The old lady?”

  “Yeah. Maureen remembers that discussion in the house about the property.” Bob stops digging. His throat turns dusky. “Paradise Hills. The tract where I live. The place you came to. That was her land.”

  Case blows the smoke out of her lungs in one great huff. “No shit.”

  He looks out into the perfect isolation of the landscape. Well across the road the ground reaches far up into a long, terraced hillside of boulders and rabbit brush. If he could have trucks and workers and a creek pool to swim in, it could be that same hillside of his dream.

  Case tries to put time and motive to the whole thing. “Cyrus was a junkie back then. So his brain was pretty fried. He could have thought himself wronged somehow. Especially him doing the cold throw on his habit in that trailer. That’s heavy shit straight out of the Twilight Zone. When you put that extra sting to it—look out.”

  “But he told you he offed her.”

  “Right.”

  “And twenty-five years later came back …?”

  “Don’t be surprised at that. Cyrus is the ultimate scalp hunter. I mean it. His pants—they have scalps on them. Braided hair held in by studs. Hair of people he’s done ten years after they wronged him. Ten years. Some fuckin’ cop that arrested him once, put him in truancy hall. He wrote his name down on a piece of paper. Kept it. Tracked the bastard. Found him in a little house somewhere near Disneyland. Retired. First time he went to off the guy, his life was such shit Cyrus decided to let him live and suffer. A couple of years later, he’s tracking him still, the guy’s daughter gets married. Has a kid. The old shit is now into the grandpa trip. Happy as hell. Bam! That’s when Cyrus got him.” She shakes her head. “He’s a fuckin’ black hole, man.”

  Bob sits stiffly, staring at the hole he’s dug. He considers what Case has said, what he has survived so far, what he has discovered by talking with Maureen. He almost gasps, “Twenty-five years later …”

  “Down and dirty,” she answers. “You have entered Club Scream with this motherfucker.”

  He reaches for her cigarette, takes a long drag and holds the smoke in, as if trying to warm the hole around his heart.

  “Have you only just thought about this? Only since you called Maureen?”

  “No. When you first said you didn’t believe it was a random act. And at the Ferryman’s. When you talked about the Furnace Creek murder. It was in my head after that. But I lied it away.”

  He starts to dig again at the hole. She watches his straining fingers around the bone handle.

  “Why don’t you go in and take a bath and get some sleep? We have to cross the border tonight. I’ll get you food if you want.”

  He continues grouting out the rock with a pathetic and limitless anger.

  42

  Case delivers Bob into the unfused bajada of broken rocks and boulders. From there he must walk four miles to cross the border just south of the few blocks known as Midway Well.

  The plan is for her to drive back to the Mexicali-Calexico crossing, make it through the INS station with the truck. He will carry the weapons so there’s no chance of them getting busted. Then she’ll turn east and wait for Bob at a tin-sheathed diner of sorts that has a death grip on the Route 8 and 98 interchange.

  He will start for El Norte and perform the ritual of the coyote, the foreigner, the wetback, the desperate one, to enter back into the land of his past.

  Before he embarks on the long walk they sit in the truck wrestling with nightfall and looking into the maze of skull-colored rocks the headlights play to.

  “The Hard Rock Cafe, huh.”

  He smokes, nods imperceptibly. “It’s got to be done.”

  “Bring lawyers, guns, and money.”

  “Guns and money, anyway.”

  He looks at his watch. The mountains to the west have become black as checkers, with a few remaining bits of their red counterparts along the teeth line.

  “Port of entry,” she says.

  “Port of entry,” he says back.

  As he gets out of the truck she adds, “I’ll buy you breakfast on the other side.”

  “I got all the money.”

  “I got enough for breakfast.”

  He closes the door. “Wait up for me.”

  “Yeah.”

  He moves off into the embryonic yellow of the headlights. A slow march with shoulders cross-beamed by the shotgun. Without warning, she wishes she had touched him. His outline becomes a snowy blend of the high-backed dark, and she kicks on the high beams to buy a few last feet of him.

  She sees him turn, using the shotgun as the pivot around which he comes. Fingers off the barrel rise into a good-bye.

  Sweating through that chilly cape of night, Bob marches woodenly until he reaches a boned pier of rocks. There he kneels and looks out across a cratered valley for signs of the border patrol in their all-purpose vehicles.

  He looks for the faint marks of dust their tires will spume up like distant whales on some smoky sea. Or the white searchlight fanning and stalking forward.

  Once he is exposed in the flat country, he must watch for any sign of a patrol. The truce he has with himself disintegrates and he begins to see worlds where Arthur and John Lee and Maureen could spell out the cause of the driving death before him.

  If that is so, if they were players in part to blame for Via Princessa … well, his mind begins to plan out atrocities. Horrific acts that would make even a Cyrus proud. Inside him a killing landscape unfolds, as alien to him as the landscape he trots through. Over that course of hard miles he is alive to its violent reality. It fuels him onward. The desk jockey they, and he, so thoroughly nourished is clearly dead.

  Then the face of the terrain to the west turns for the worse. A white beam flashes upward, then descends. A great hole out of the blackness rises again.

  He kneels down. The sand is turned up a mile off and coming. It’s time to run, coyote. Time to run.

  Case can feel drabs of poison from the night before running through her veins. The soft purple river of blood carrying the last stories of heroin from nerve ending to nerve ending.

  She watches past the road hour after hour. Past the hulking shapes of headlights rushing by.

  Eventually she crosses the road. Walks a long stretch of bedraggled sand watching for Bob in the remains of the night.

  She does the battle of putting it all aside. She is sitting morosely alone on a stoop of rocks that lead to nowhere when suddenly a figure andirons out of the earth. A speck against a shield of light coming on and coming on. She stands and blinks like a bird but her eyes are weary. She starts forward out into the desert.

  It’s him. She can see now he is dragging with exhaustion. Filthy and sweat-stained.

  Upon reaching her he says, “I did some running last night. I did some running.”

  “Border patrol?”

  He looks back like a soldier who’s cleared the wall, and nods.

  She puts her arms around his shoulders and lets him rest there. She feels his heart pumping out through the muscles of his back and into her hands. “I owe you breakfast
, Coyote.”

  43

  She drives. He sleeps.

  She puts some fire into that Dakota as she halfbacks up Route 5 through that great basin of worldly possessions, L.A. proper.

  With all that’s on her mind, the whole fucking drive up from the border is like a run through some parallel universe of car dealerships and warehouses and Holiday Inns and cemeteries and the arched yellow monster and billboards hovering electric above the sides of the freeway like dream-machine frigates. The full litany of franchised eyesores.

  The hours are one long extended strip mall flanking the road, much the same way shill games and food stands flank a boardwalk. The endless rush of blasted color and flatness from Long Beach to a sky-exhausted LAX.

  She floats the radio dial. Comes upon some college station down near Mar Vista in the fifth hour of a Dylan retrospective. The DJ is trying his best to drop his voice that extra octave of approval as he leads into the soundtrack for “Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid.” He does a few riff minutes about Sam Peckinpah’s take on Pat and Billy and his skew on that morality tale.

  They are humping it out to Mojave. California City, more precisely. To a bar Errol owns called the House of Usher, where they’re planning to make a snuff film out of his ass if he doesn’t come across with his planned tête-à-tête with Cyrus.

  All this going through her head with an underpinning of Dylan’s rustic guitar and spurs tambourine. Bob is asleep with a little bit of sunlight falling across his chest where the smiley face of his knife wound peeks through. There’s the war sound of the tires on hard cement. The pressing metal of six lanes charging traffic with their word-picture faces. Heaps of flesh all. Dispersing out through a waste of social landslides with no idea, none, how much blood is on their minds. It’s a blasted allegory that only the third mind of a William S. Burroughs could do justice to.

  The House of Usher stands pat. It’s a kick-ass chain-shattering beer and whiskey bar. The place is shoulder-to-shoulder people taking in a blue-plate chickie Warren Zevon with a five-piece backup doing riff poison that would put a nice dose of sweat up between your legs.

  To Errol she’s all mouth and nipples and a fist hammering out chords at the smoky air around the mike. It’s good to be back on home turf. He’s nursing a shot of tequila. Laughing with friends, giving out the high five as he does the long stroke down the bar. A word here, checking out the shape of an ass there.

  “Fuck Mexico,” a voice he recognizes says.

  He turns.

  Case gives him one of those hotel-desk smiles, and all he can kick back is some glassy stare like he’s just felt something dead under the sheets.

  Bob comes up behind him, puts a little chest into his back. “Yeah, fuck Mexico,” he whispers.

  Errol turns again. Shifts his look between the two of them. He fumbles through a greeting, a weak confounded patronage that she answers by taking the shot of tequila from his hand.

  She sniffs it. “I used to love tequila.”

  She passes it to Bob, who shoots it down.

  “Check those headlines, babe,” she says to Errol. “Junkie queen back from the dead.”

  “Jesus Christ, I don’t want to get into the middle of a psychodrama between all of you.”

  “Maybe you don’t understand. That shit back in the motel room. It was a warning you should read. You’re on the verge of being dead or alive …”

  It is written that America’s most cherished landscapes are its deserts. And the Mojave stands as America’s quintessential desert. Possibly for the fact that it sits between Los Angeles and Las Vegas, two of the nation’s most powerful demiurges.

  Yes, it is also known, thanks to some Los Angeles Times quip artist, as the Bermuda Triangle of California. Within the borders of its spare geography, cemeteries of nameless people have walked never to be seen or heard from again.

  For their private talk Bob and Case escort Errol down into a saline hollow far enough back of the House of Usher that the music just hangs on the edge of the night air. They walk beneath a black sky held in place by a pinboard of stars.

  “You know where Cyrus is. We want to meet him head-on.”

  Errol plays with the collar of his burgundy silk shirt, kicks at some burro grass. Case squats down and watches him.

  “Hunted! Stalked! And slain!” she says.

  Errol looks up.

  “I know what’s wheelin’, you fool, fuckin’ prick. ’Cause you got some business thing goin’ on you’re alive and well. Forget it. When Cyrus started with you in that motel room he already had the vision. He may be putting the black evocation on your ass right now. The Eliphas Levi. I’ll bet you’re cooked between St. Mark’s Eve and St. John’s Eve.”

  “You’re just trying to fill me with a lot of junkie devil shit ’cause you want to revenge your ass for—”

  A revolver hammer clicks.

  Errol’s head cocks about.

  Bob’s hands are folded across his waist, in one the revolver stands ready.

  “Don’t go ragging on her with that ‘junkie shit,’ ” Bob warns. “Don’t. We have business to attend here.”

  Errol puts his hands up. “Sure. Any way you want to sell it is fine with me.”

  Case scoops up a few rocks. Errol’s whole body language is the ten-inch-cock stare. She knows he’s trying to square out the con on how to serve his own ass while keeping himself alive. She tosses the rocks one by one into the sleeve of a stream a few feet away that’s being helped along by a runoff of sewage. Arrow weeds grow out of the mealy wet soil, mixing in raggy lines with the burro grass and giving the hollow an opposing natural geometry.

  “I don’t know how to make it right for you, okay,” he says. “I know what Cyrus did was shit, leaving you to … But it wasn’t me. Not me. In that room, man, who had the gun on who? Who fucked with who?” His fingers point from her to himself, then again from her to himself. “It’s all asylum shit that went on down there.”

  “We have to know where he is,” Bob says.

  “I don’t know.”

  Case tosses another rock hard into the stream. “This is all talk sickness.”

  “I’m waiting for him to contact me.”

  “We need to know where he is,” Bob repeats.

  “He said nothing to—”

  “When he needs a place to stash or chill out up here he hit on you. I’ve been there, man. I made the calls to you, remember? What do you have, synapse damage all of a sudden?”

  From inside the bar the singer’s voice, distant and distilled out of some thundering dream and in the pull of a refrain: “It’s just a kiss away … Kiss away … Kiss away.”

  “I told you, Case,” says Errol. “I don’t know. But … why fight him over … I mean, it happened. Okay. But you’re alive. Is it worth it?”

  The hint in his voice. The callous judgment of what she is versus the price of what she’s worth is all she needs to hear. Bob knows her well enough from the way she’s rocking back and forth on her boots and the turn her eyes take, getting black angry, that she’s gonna blow.

  “You’re fuckin’ with the black rider, Mister Yuppie Boy.”

  Bob can see her hand moving toward her boot. He takes a step forward.

  “We ain’t making another pass at this,” she says.

  “I told you I—”

  She is up and across the stream, lunging at him with a hand shawled in darkness. Bob moves to stop her. Grabs hold of her in mid-flight. Errol snaps back as her hand makes its bird-quick move.

  That half second saves his life. The steel tip of her stiletto just misses his jugular but takes a trowel line of inches out of his cheek. He collapses into the sand with his hands pressed to the side of his face. His blood strains through tight fingers while Case tries to break free of Bob and finish business.

  “I’m coming up out of your dreams if you don’t tell us,” she screams. “I swear. I’ll play witch and disciple across your throat while you fuckin’ sleep.”

  Bob stu
mbles to his knees, trying to hold back her rabid thrashings. Errol crawls away from her kicking boots, leaving a red scrapbook for the sand to leech.

  “He’s up in the Bristol Mountains,” Errol cries. “At a ranger’s house. First road east of Bagdad Way that goes north into the mountains off the National Trail.”

  Errol gets himself up and lurches away. A clumsy footrace to safety.

  Once he’s gone, Bob lets Case go. She comes around with her knife.

  “You should have let me kill him.”

  “No.”

  “We’re gonna have to kill him anyway. He’ll screw us.”

  “Let it go, for now.”

  “He has to. His mind is already there. The body will follow.”

  “I couldn’t, alright?”

  “You couldn’t?”

  “No.”

  “Because of the other night? For doing that piece of—”

  “That’s right!”

  Her knife shanks the air. Once, twice, again. Carving up thoughts. “Errol enjoyed the other night, you hip. That night you don’t want to remember. He enjoyed watchin’ me get dragged out and needled. I know that dick-hard look!” Her voice quivers. “We’re gonna have to kill him anyway. He’s gonna turn. It’s prepackaged and ordered. And you should have let me cross that bastard over.”

  44

  “Arthur, I talked with Bob.”

  “When, Maureen?”

  “He couldn’t talk long.”

  “Where … how is he?”

  “Mexico.”

  “He’s in Mexico.”

  “Yes.”

  “How is he? Is everything …”

  “He sounded pretty tired.”

  “Why didn’t he call me?”

  “He tried, but …”

  “He’s alright?”

  “I guess so. He sounded pretty stressed.”

  “Gabi … Anything about …”

  “He didn’t want to get too deep into it.”

  “Too deep, what does that m—”

  “He was stressed out. Said he didn’t have a lot of time. That he had to—”