by Boston Teran
The Cherokee does that easy turn toward nothing particular, and she’s had enough. She’s not taking chances. She is up quick, tossing money from her pocket onto the table and grabbing the cellular. She rushes past the waitress, almost knocking a tray out of her hand.
“Well, excuse me, honey,” comes the smoke-stained voice. Then the waitress turns to a couple sitting in the next booth and shakes her head. “Freaks,” she huffs.
Case presses through the heavy leather doors and out into the parking lot. The Cherokee takes another turn and stops, leaving a ripple of dust. Through the few rows of parked cars she can see the far door open and slam shut. The Cherokee takes off again, leaving a sidewinder of dust that screens the dark figure moving off at a forty-five-degree angle from the white Jeep.
Her pace quickens. She sees the Cherokee and the black outline converging on the axis of the Dakota where Bob leans into the open driver’s door trolling through their clothes on the front seat for cigarettes.
Case shouts his name and starts into a dead run, but he doesn’t hear. Her only thought is, How? How could they have found them here and this fast?
The gravel cuts away under her boots. Under a single run of light from a tall lamp that guards the lot she makes out the lanky shape that has broken into a hard trot and begun to lash something that looks to be a whip.
“Wood!”
She knows she can’t reach Bob in time so she pulls her backup gun and fires three fast shots of warning into the air and screams again, “Bob!”
Bob snaps around, and a series of erupted images blows down on him. A Pan-like figure waving what looks like a snake. A car’s headlights sweeping past him amid gunshots. His body, the quick mechanics of desperation and survival. The wheelgun torn loose from inside his shirt. Firing at the black form charging him, but too late.
The diamondback is cowboy-slung around his neck, and the pitted head slaps across his face as he fires a shot. A voice grunts. Dark leathers tumble into gray gravel. Bob tries to grab at the living thing coiled around his throat. Case in the far corner of his vision fires at the Cherokee coming at him. A crash of blue-tinted glass, and it steers away defensively. Something tears into a piece of his neck. Nerve endings razor down into the fault line of muscles.
He stumbles. Tires are rolling out dust. He looks toward the figure in dark leathers crawling back into darkness. Fires through the burning haze of poison. Misses.
The Cherokee makes a wide sweep around the Dakota, but the ground is rutted and the Jeep dips hard left, sending the right wheels airborne. The Cherokee lunges into the grubby lot, turning over on its side, driving a deep trench through the brush.
Bob is howling like a wild beast as he tries to latch onto the snake’s head. But that speed-junked thing is a length of crazed lunging and spitting with pitted fangs. He is bitten again in the throat. He can’t get it loose so he presses the pistol against its leathery skin and fires. Skewered streams of meat and powder-smoke singe his face and shoulder.
He stumbles down again and Case grabs him. She pulls the cabled lump of dead matter from his throat. Sees the puncture wounds with their stringy line of blood. Bob’s head turns from one spot of violence to the next. In the field where the dust from the crash has risen around the Cherokee, he sees Granny Boy climb out through the passenger door, jump down, and start across the field in a sprint.
Bleeding and poisoned, Bob comes up like a raging animal and takes off after Granny Boy. Case tries to stop him, knowing he’s only making the poison travel faster through his system. He hurtles a fence-high wall of detritus.
She knows she can’t catch him so she jumps into the Dakota and speeds out across the lot, weaving past a scattering of people who are running from the gunfire.
The field is gray and flat and Granny Boy is a target that can be followed at a dead run. He looks back over his shoulder to see a demonic shadow of pumping arms closing with each step. Closing and howling as if death itself made up that voice. Granny Boy angles for the safety of a stand of woods at the far corner of the field.
Case whips onto the road, the Dakota’s springs getting punished as she clears the tracks.
It’s a hundred yards of humping for Granny Boy over the caked sand, with heaps of weeds blooming up through leftover concrete-slab fittings and over great rafts of broken cement. A hundred yards of humping toward that stand of woods leaves Granny Boy and Bob almost done in. But Bob is still closing ground, and he wilds out his hunting knife from a hip sheath.
Case is racing along parallel to the open lot. The angle of trees the two are running toward means she has to take a hard left at Thomas Road to cut off Granny Boy in case he tries to clear the woods and cross the road.
She cuts her headlights and blows through a stop sign. The torqued-out engine burns down the black empty street. Down a strobe of trees where slits of moonlight slip through the flywheel clipped frames of Granny Boy and Bob, Granny Boy and Bob, Granny Boy and Bob. Then Granny Boy’s gone.
She swerves the pickup off the road and sideswipes a tree, tearing up the runner. She grabs the shotgun from under the seat and jumps out. She starts to scan the road and picks out Granny Boy kicking his way through the brush.
Granny Boy swings into the street as she pumps a shell into the chamber. He is looking back over his shoulder at Bob. By the time Granny Boy sees Case straddling the white line and aiming the shotgun at him, it’s a fuckin’ go-down. No time to skip-jump the shot, though he tries to dip left quick. The blast takes out both his legs. From ankle to knees he’s strafed, and his forward thrust over sundered limbs sends him onto the asphalt like a high stepper that’s been trip-wired.
Before Granny Boy’s hands can spider up a weapon, Bob and Case are on him, kicking and punching and tearing away the Luger he’s got strapped inside his leather jacket.
With blood fingering down his neck from the fang wounds, Bob takes a fast look up and down the dark street. “Let’s drag him into the woods,” he says.
Granny Boy is writhing at the edge of consciousness, and his only fight left is in his mouth.
Just off the road. A triangle of deep roots rising twenty feet. Granny Boy is tossed onto his back against a tree. His leathers are torn, exposing the cracked and dimpled mass of his legs.
Bob can barely hold on himself, pressing on with the last his adrenaline can give. He pins his hunting knife up against Granny Boy’s eyes.
“Where is he … Cyrus … Where is he?”
A gravel hiss comes out of the boy’s throat.
Without so much as a thought and driven with the blind pitiless agencies of a rawboned wilderness soul, Bob digs the knife into Granny Boy’s collarbone. Digs it deep.
The warboy fights back with teeth grinding against teeth like the metal rim of a speeding blown tire along cement.
“Where is he?”
Nothing. Bob stumbles over and collapses.
Case kneels over Bob, sees how bad off he is. His eyes have begun to flutter. She feels his pulse, which is way out of control. She comes around fast, stands over Granny Boy.
There is a lot of history in the mute minute of this passing. Catch dog and coolie. Coolie and catch dog.
“I got to know, Granny Boy, I got to know.”
His few words spit out. “Come get me, cunt!”
She takes a short step forward. “The girl. Is she alive? Granny Boy, the girl! Use your mouth now. The girl!”
There is an instant of confusion in his face as to why she would ask such a question. But it’s all the same. He eyes her like some dead thing and curses out one thought: “Sheep!”
She pumps a shell into the chamber and bears down point blank at his face from just feet away.
“You’re crossing over,” she whispers.
He stares into the steel gray moment of his execution and before the call of his nerves can react to the brain his world and face are taken out in a shredding sun of white.
49
Case hammers the pickup through the bla
ck setting of desert road those twenty-five miles from Hinkley to the Ferryman’s.
Her hand rides the horn. She brakes to a tire-winding halt, and from the darkness the dogs come and go wild about the truck. The Ferryman hobbles through an open doorway. Case tries to keep the dogs back while she lifts Bob from the Dakota.
The Ferryman swipes a claw at the dog pack as he hobbles through. Bob collapses into the sand. The Ferryman sees Bob’s blood-swamped shirt. He looks at Case. “What happened?”
“We took Granny Boy down. Shot up Wood.”
“Why you here?”
She points. “Snake bite. In the neck. It’s bad, and I couldn’t take him to no hospital. Not right on top of a murder.”
The Ferryman looks over this complete mess of existence. “I thought you’d joined the living,” he says caustically.
“It’s been thirty-six hours on the hellbound train, so don’t fuckin’ work me!”
In a cramped frame of a room just big enough for a bed, Case strips Bob down. As he lies there, the Ferryman looks over his wounds. The arrant swelling and blackness around the puncture marks speak for themselves.
“You got any numbness around the mouth?”
Suffering severe weakness and thirst, Bob manages a slender yes.
The Ferryman feels Bob’s pulse through the good side of his neck. It’s cranked up and erratic. He looks over at Case. “In the refrigerator, behind the beer on the bottom shelf, vials with yellow stickers on ’em. Should say antivenin. Bring me two vials to start. And in the closet, back where the dogs sleep. Upper shelf. Bags of saline solution. Bring one of those. I’ll also need syringes and needles and tape. But I know you know where that shit is.”
“Fuck you,” she says to the Ferryman.
She takes hold of Bob’s hand. “You’ll be alright.” Then she gets up, moves like quicksilver through the tangle of waiting dogs.
Once alone, the Ferryman takes hold of Bob’s jawbone with his claw and studies him almost scientifically. “I’m gonna play medic tonight, Bob Whatever. Do a little memory time on the night river.”
Bob drifts through the milky light. His eyes crawl across the ceiling to find the black, black face of that wizened mariner.
“We’re both going down that night river, aren’t we? Yeah. I’m gonna load you up with antivenin, ’cause all that runnin’, Bob Whatever, all that catch-dogging, has given those nerve endings a big taste. Burned them up pretty good. You might go into shock on your own from the way your heart’s workin’. Or that antivenin with all the horse protein in it. That could put you into anaphylactic shock. You could go belly-up.”
Bob’s eyes slew upward, leaving only the whites before they flit back.
“You hear me?”
“I’m very thirsty.”
The Ferryman shakes his head. “You hear me?”
Bob’s gullet jacks.
The Ferryman leans in closer. “She should have let me finish rolling the coins. We didn’t finish, remember. The Book of Changes.” He runs his claw along the artwork of Bob’s shoulder from ONE LOVE to HELTER SKELTER. His tone is nasty and impish at the same time. “We might have known what to make of this. You might be dead already, and we’re just wasting time.”
Bob tries to put together a patchwork of dissenting breaths but can’t.
Bob lies in the dark, being fed intravenously. Case sits beside him with a cloth, soothing his fevered skin. He tries to speak, but by now he is just a jumble of confused words.
She runs her hand up across his stomach and stops to feel his heart. She looks back at the door where the Ferryman stands working a beer. “His heartbeat’s a mess.”
“I expect he might go into shock, fucked up as he is.”
She looks across his naked body. Its wreckage painful to her. She wants to make it clean again. Her hand slides down his stomach and stops at his pubic hair.
The Ferryman cannot see all this in the dark, but he knows. He can read the breathing and silence.
“Leave that sheep to the wolves, girl.”
She turns on him violently. “What?”
“You heard. Let him cross. Or finish him yourself. He’s bad luck all the way around.”
“Listen to me, Ferryman. He is going to live. And if you fuck with him, I … I will tear off that claw and plastic leg and beat you to death with them. You hear?”
He says nothing and walks away. Somewhere down the hall he gives one slight hitch of laughter.
When it comes to get him, it comes with jerking random snaps. Shivering with fever, vomiting. The window to the night a moonlit hole. The sheet a hard skin of discomfort. Hot and wet from the saliva of his bones.
Case lies beside him. She is stripped down naked and presses herself against him tightly. She whispers over and over again, “You’re going to be alright.” She puts her mouth against his chest and breathes these words. The warmth carrying them to the flesh around his heart.
He sees into the black ceiling past the flickering silent film of himself and Case cradled in the shadows, where his mind backwashes down the stream of memory, pacing a lightless bathroom in his robe with Gabi when she was just a child and suffering the croup.
That steamed mossy darkness. The frailty of living pink in his arms, hoarse with phlegmed lungs. The arms around him are the arms around Gabi’s back then, and his arms between the dreamy realities like roots from an expanding tree of consciousness. And every time he hears Case whisper “You’ll be alright,” he hears himself as he stares down at his helpless cradled pup coughing out its life. “You’ll be alright, Gabi. You’ll be alright.”
He can feel Case’s arm around his neck pull him closer, and in a moment of clarity he sees the snake Ourabouris tattooed on her shoulder. He tries to touch it as he begs, “You have to get her home.”
“Shhh.”
“You have to promise …”
“Shhh.”
“If she’s alive …”
“Shhh.”
“You take her. You hear me? You. You take her. You’re the only one I trust … Promise me.”
She puts this down to the fever and hesitates to answer.
“Case … Promise.”
He thinks he hears the faint tide of her words in his ear. “I won’t forget this. Yes … I promise.”
The Ferryman sits on a dusty couch, his dogs around him. He smokes a joint and looks out through the front door into the darkness. He can hear Case in that cell of a room down the hall.
He’s got himself a good M16-level stoneout and watches the sun rise. Remembers those medevac choppers coming out of the heavens down toward the rivers. And the cadre of corpses. White-bundled skiffs caught in the mud tide streaming from the mountains to the sea.
A flying detachment of garbage collectors is what we were, he thinks to himself. Ferrymen all. There to scoop up the dead with nets. He wonders how many of those dead youth have come back. Come back to their next life too soon. With their anger intact. To become killers on street corners and coolly hip gangstas and white-collar legal bloodsuckers getting their revenge for an untimely death.
Case walks into the room, draped in a ratty blue blanket.
“Is he dead?”
Exhausted, she slides down the wall, sits on the floor. A couple of the dogs slope over and curl around her, sniffing.
“No.”
She looks at the snake tattooed on her arm, thinks of him in there when he was staring at it.
“Remember the day you needled this baby?”
He looks at the tattoo she’s pointing at. “Yeah. We were down by the chimney.”
“That was the day I was thinking I’m gonna break. I’m gonna give Cyrus the blowoff. You know I didn’t know what this snake meant. But a year later, in rehab, somebody showed me in a book. A picture. I didn’t know it meant rebirth.”
She looks back down the hall. “Bob was staring at it a long time and I kept telling him the story. I kept telling him over and over again.”
She stares into the
circle of that snake. “I kept saying to him, ‘You’re gonna live.’ And I remembered when you were doing the snake on my arm, I was thinking, ‘I’m gonna live. I’m gonna live. I’m gonna break from Cyrus, and live.’ ”
50
Through the bedroom window the stars play bridge lamps across the distant hum of the desert. He can barely move, but he can feel Case asleep in bed beside him. He can smell her hair, and the soft odor of the woman in the night stillness. He can feel the settling of his system, like a downed prizefighter coming to after the long sleep. Weak and murky, but somewhere there is a deep easement along the muscles.
He lies there and listens to the breathing. His. Hers. The earth’s. The breathing slow and uniform and without rancor or hatred or fear. All part of some great breathing ecosystem. Some eternally calm oneness.
He moans, turns. In sleep’s short fall she feels him move, turn, and she comes up quick.
A relief of afternoon light through filthy blinds across his face. His skin is ghostly but for the black welding wound around four fang holes. His lips move like great slow slugs. His mouth is dry as crepe.
He barely gets out, “I see … I’m alive.”
“It sure looks it, Coyote.”
“I’m thirsty.”
She rises up from under the sheets and gingerly steps over a couple of dogs that have taken to sleeping by the foot of the bed. Her naked form disappears into the gray hallway.
He listens to the sinkwater and a dog’s feet plucking at the wood floor as it moves around the bed and rests its head on the sheet by his hand.
She sits carefully on the edge of the bed, shoos away the animal, and hands Bob the glass. She does not try to conceal her nakedness. He drinks the water slowly. He is so dry that each swallow makes him feel he is immersed in it. He looks up at Case sitting with a baldric of light from one shoulder to her opposite hip. There seems to be neither purity nor exhibition in her. She is, as ever, the raw statement that is herself.
Watching her, it takes him a while to realize that her hand is over his.