by Boston Teran
“I’m glad you made it, Coyote.”
He looks over at her arm, at the snake tattooed on her shoulder. His other arm rises weakly, moving across the light like a minute hand, and one finger turns the length of the serpentine motif. A kind of sensual trace across the dreams of her talking to him there in the hard hours of suffering.
“Thanks,” he says, “for being the voice I heard.”
Her face seems to ebb and flow with a moment of relief and satisfaction, until they hear the cellular ring.
It cuts at the air with its staccato beeps. Their minds drain of everything but Cyrus. Bob nods to Case. She crosses through the dusty light to the bureau, where the phone lies.
She clicks on, puts the cellular to her ear, and listens. Bob watches the tightening around her eyes. Seconds later she clicks off.
“Was it him?”
“Yes.”
“What did he say?”
“He said he hoped we enjoyed the little party.”
She comes back, sits on the bed, reaches for a cigarette. She lights it and smokes intently.
“What else?”
She turns to him. “He says he knows what we’re about.”
Bob tries to sit, or at least begin to move some. “What do you think he means?”
“I don’t know,” she says. “But I know his tone. It had ‘fuck you’ all over it. Trying to get at Cyrus is like trying to spit away the sun.”
“Does he want to meet?”
With a chilling quiet bleakness she says, “Oh yeah.”
“When?”
She shrugs. “He’s gonna scarf around the edge of our nerves, I’ll tell you that.”
Bob tries to move a little more, but his body’s a no-show. “I need you to make a call.”
“To who?”
“Arthur. I want him out here.”
She’s not crazy about the idea of having him at the Ferryman’s. Or, for that matter, playing Little Miss Direction-Giver: “You keep driving through the desert till you reach that lovely little pile of human skulls, then you turn left and blah, blah, blah …”
Bob has to lie back down. He’s starting to drift with weakness. “Make the call, will you?” His eyes close. “I need sleep.”
When Bob’s eyes flutter open hours later, he’s looking up into the haggard features of his ex-father-in-law. Arthur’s mouth is moist and puckers in disbelief as he stares starkly at what could only be the war-torn imposter of the boy he knew.
“Oh God, Jesus, Bobby, what’s happened to—”
“I’m alright, Arthur. Just know I’m alright. Beat up, but—”
“Every day, every night. Do you know how I’ve been suffering, son?”
Arthur sits beside Bob as carefully as his hulking frame will allow. He takes Bob’s hand gently in his own. “I’ll get you home, boy.”
“I’m staying right here.”
“What do you—”
“We’ll be going back out on the road when I’m well enough.”
Arthur’s eyes dip, then come around toward Case. She walks out of the room. Arthur looks back at Bob. “What are you talking, Bobby. Look at you—”
“I can’t talk now. I need sleep, but later. You haven’t told anyone you were coming here, have you?”
“No.”
“Not anyone? Not Maureen or John Lee?”
“That woman said you didn’t want me to tell anyone, so I didn’t.”
Arthur closes the door, storms up that vestibule of a hall after Case. They meet head-on in the bare light of the living room, where she turns on him.
“Goddamn you,” he says. “My boy is lying there almost dead. I knew when I first saw you, you were a disaster.”
“I can see I’m gonna be the brunt of another of your astute observations.”
“Don’t get smart with me, junkie.”
“Why not? One of us has to be.”
They circle that littered tabernacle with couch and table between them.
“Why didn’t you take him to a hospital instead of this shithole?”
“We saved his life in this shithole.”
“Saved it … You fuck!”
Through the door to the kitchen area Arthur sees the Ferryman click by and stop a moment. Arthur crosses the room. “You are nothing,” he shouts at Case. “You are garbage.”
“You know, I despised you before I even knew you,” she says. “And I was right. ’Cause I knew you even before that. You’d had me before that. But you want to talk about blame, Grandpa, I’ll bet you find you’re carrying a busload of it up that ass of yours.”
He can see in her face now that he’s gutted her a bit. Found a weak spot in her crude underbelly. “But I’m still right about you, aren’t I?” he says. “That’s why you’re willing to risk my boy’s life in there. It’s for your ass and nothing else.”
They’re running off at the mouth so fast that neither of them hears a wounded voice say, “Arthur, that’s enough.” And then more belligerently, “Arthur …”
They turn to find Bob scarecrowed against the wall, naked.
“Don’t talk to her like that.”
They both cross the room in a race to his side, but Bob gives way, his arms flapping out in an unjointed fashion as he tries to stop himself from hitting the floor. They close in around him to try to help him up. Arthur elbows himself between Case and Bob, but Bob presses him back.
“Don’t. You got to understand. If it wasn’t for Case, we wouldn’t know who took Gabi.”
His eyes become stark blue shreds. “You know who took her?”
Bob nods.
“His name is Cyrus,” says Case.
Whatever else she says, it’s just words Arthur doesn’t hear. Nothing more than sounds. His whole existence becomes a cold leaking wound and the timbre of a woman’s hand on the floor scratching out a few inches of wood to let him know she is alive.
51
Case finds herself in a shed storage room where, in a free-floating stack of drawers, the Ferryman keeps his private stash of heroin.
Looking down at the balloons of white bitter crystalline compound bundled neatly as gifts, she begins to feel the memory skin of it all. A black-and-bluesy cocktail in the key of H comes a-calling. The beautiful high-five sense of self-loathing that needs a little vein tonic to cut away the highs and lows, leaving you in the perfect flatness of its murky landscape.
She can see herself in the drawer: the heroin, the syringe, the sport trappings of the lifestyle. Heraldic in their callings. And each balloon a lung of breath to blissful forgetting. The white blind flatline to pain.
Blame. The fact that if she had done something during all those years—put a bullet in Cyrus’s head, cut his throat when he was asleep, something to end him. If for one moment she had risen above her own squalor, her own greedy self-serving private immolation, this chain of events that exists would not. As such, so much bleeding butchery would not be. The fact that she got out alive and is clean and here now is nothing to her.
“Were you gonna steal some or buy some?”
Case turns, for a second relives the thief’s shudder. She looks up at the Ferryman, who stands just beyond the off-hung shed door, marshaled in grainy daylight.
She tries to calm herself. “I was just performing a little ritual moment of slaughter, is all. The old tapes, Ferryman, the old tapes. They still do hard time inside this head of mine.”
She puts the drawer back as carefully as one would a dowry box of horrors.
She goes and sits on a stack of old crates. It wobbles a bit. The Ferryman comes over and sits beside her. Case stares numbly at a walkway of light that crosses the dark dirt floor. There is a thick smell of workmanlike time in the shed. The aroma of dust mingling with that which is forgotten and stacked within its boards.
The Ferryman speaks in a seductive tone. “Stay selfish. That’s the key to survival. Walk away from these sheep. Walk away. Believe me, they are never the ones that die soon enough.”
Sh
e eyes him judiciously.
“I mean it, girl. You have no idea how black the myth inside them is. It’s a fuckin’ trip wire you’re walking over, trying to fleece your way through that world. You’re just playing out a myth dance. It’s all bullshit. I know. I know.”
“Do you know this man Cyrus?”
“Do I know him?”
“Yes,” asks Bob. He repeats the question very slowly: “Do you know him?”
“No. I don’t.”
“Are you sure?”
Arthur sits in a high-backed chair beside the bedroom window and stares imperiously. “I don’t.”
Bob is sitting up in bed as best he can, resting against a stack of pillows. He points out the window. “Do you know what’s over that hill there?”
“I don’t.”
“Furnace Creek,” says Bob.
Feigning thought, Arthur turns, looks out the window. The ocean wind has traveled inland as it does this time of day and is taking its toll against the sand. Along the hillside are breakers of yellow-gray dust.
The whole fuckin’ world is giving way, that’s all that’s in Arthur’s mind at the moment. The whole fuckin’ world.
Bob is watching his ex-father-in-law closely. “A woman was murdered there years ago.”
Arthur turns. “Yes. This is what Maureen was telling me about your phone conversation. Yes.”
“And you got her property in probate? Paradise Hills, that is.”
“Yes, in probate. She had died. Had no heirs.”
Bob points out the window again. “Cyrus lived there, with that old woman who was murdered. Did you ever try to buy the land from her?”
“Did we?” Arthur’s face moves through thoughtful poses. “Not that I remember.”
“There are two separate murders. Years apart. The only people connected to both of them are Cyrus, you, and Maureen.”
“Yes, I guess so,” says Arthur. Then he lays down the thread of a false afterthought: “And John Lee, of course.”
“And John Lee. Yes.”
The bedroom is bare sheathing. Just wood and tin. And with the wind whittling through its seams, the room is like an ancient caboose crossing a desert wasteland.
“What could have brought him back all these years?” Bob asks. “Was it because he thinks something was stolen from him?”
Arthur folds his hands across his lap. Looks down into the hard roots of knuckle and bone. He is caught up in a single thought: Could John Lee have been stupid enough, or just plain vicious enough, because of Maureen and Sam’s affair, to have brought the monster back into their lives? He looks up. Bob lies back against the pillows woodenly, his head turned at an odd angle, exposing the blackening edema that has begun to show itself in the folds of flesh around the neck wound.
Arthur cannot look at him for more than a moment, and so he looks out the window again, through a glaze of sand, toward a place whose past goes to the very heart of things.
“Arthur?”
He turns. “Yes.”
“You haven’t answered my question.”
He tries to think through a scenario of lies that would add up to some acceptable truth.
52
It is past midnight when Arthur leaves. Case opens the door to Bob’s room without so much as a tired creak. Bob is lying on the bed in the dark, with one arm resting across his forehead.
“Are you awake?” she whispers.
“I am.”
She crosses the room barefoot and slow.
“Did you find out anything?” she asks.
“He told me he knows nothing more than what we know now. But I think he’s lying.”
She sits in the chair where Arthur sat. “What makes you feel so?”
Bob gets his feet down on the floor, stretches his arms out on the bed for support. He’s light-headed but holds on.
“I don’t have a reason,” he says. “He didn’t act different. Didn’t seem different. I watched him, too, for anything that I could grab onto and say was different. But there wasn’t. And I still feel he’s lying.”
He works to stand. Wobbles. Case is right there with an arm around him. His pale and naked skin warm as an open mouth.
“Where are you goin’?”
“I don’t know. I just need to move, I guess.”
She takes the gray blanket from his bed. It is badly worn. She drapes it around his shoulders like a poncho.
“It’s me, Case. It’s me. I see him as guilty of something, but I don’t know what. Jesus, he’s Gabi’s grandfather. Maybe there’s an illness in me now.”
He steadies himself, using her face for bearings. She slips her arms up around his rib cage as support.
“I admire you, you know.”
She is caught off guard by this statement, and he can feel her against him twist self-consciously.
“You at least test your demons,” he says. “I didn’t confront Arthur.”
“I don’t mean to test my demons,” she offers, then spots him a little piece of smile. “I just shoot them a look every now and then. Make sure they haven’t given me the slip.”
In the silent reaches between his flesh and hers comes his hand edging out. The back of his fingers silk the side of her face. She does not pull away. His hand turns again with a thickish grace down the cotton-strap walkway of her shirt and along her back, where a peregrine idol of peacock colors rests above the thin perch of her milky shoulder blade.
Breathing and silence are all there is. The far reaches of the universe. The moments that are separated only by the boatman’s crossings of the night river.
“I could, you know,” she whispers. “I could. And I would enjoy the shit out of it. Maybe even more than that. Maybe … But you know what’s out there yet. You know.”
He presses against her, a breath’s worth. “I know sometimes around you I feel like a boy trespassing in a man’s body.”
She rests her face on the blanket shawled down his chest. She nests in enough to feel muscles keeled on bone. Somewhere, though, in the belly of that hutch, she can hear the Ferryman moving about. A hobbler’s dirge going room to room. The very essence of the watchman. Putting down light after light. “I wonder,” she whispers again, “how well am I, compared to you.”
53
“Arthur, listen to me.”
“What?”
“He was asking me some pretty strange questions.”
“What do you mean?”
“… They were very odd.”
John Lee stands off to one side, watching Cyrus with a wicked impudence as he listens to the tape. He would not meet Cyrus anywhere but in a public spot during the day after all that had gone down. And it had to be far enough out of the reach of the eyes that knew him. So a Love’s Restaurant parking lot in Victorville became the anointed location.
“He asked me how we bought this tract.”
“How we bought it?”
“I told him we got it in probate.”
“In probate, that’s right.”
Cyrus grins cynically at the rise in Arthur’s voice.
“We got it in probate because …”
“Probate, yes …”
“Some woman had died, right?”
“Died, yes.”
“I mean. She’d been murdered. Isn’t that right?”
A long silence follows. Cyrus looks up at John Lee. They are wedged between their two vehicles. John Lee is growing intensely aware of the people crisscrossing the lot. The talking on the tape kicks back in.
“Yes.”
“Why is Bob asking all these questions?”
“I don’t …”
“And that woman with him. The addict … Who is …”
A pink piece of ass was lying on a square of once-plush red carpet. Her knees were up, legs grinning wide apart. On her thigh was tattooed a spiderwoman with vampire teeth and long black legs working a web up toward where her fingers formed a V that held apart the dark patch around her vagina.
Cyrus crawled on
all fours around the edges of the rug. He was pretty well whacked on hallucinogens and soapers, and his cock was all humped out.
In one of Cyrus’s tortoiselike stumblings, John Lee slipped over him, winding the 16mm Bolex camera. He squatted down so he could get in licking-close to film that filthy little mountain of love, as he called it. Cyrus tried to get away but a battery of boots rose up under his chest and forced him back like a small child. The men laughed and gave him an ugly time, calling him a drugged-out blowhole and warning him he better leave a few teeth marks on the bitch and he better make that cock of his go or he could end up with some black hose up his ass if the show wasn’t four stars.
“Now tell me who’s been swallowed,” says John Lee.
Cyrus flips off the tape. Removes it from the cassette player with quick brash movements. Tosses it to John Lee.
“The junkie fingered you for Hightower. The guy that’s running with her. The girl’s father. She put the hose to you. Now, tell me, who’s been swallowed. You or me?”
Cyrus turns to Gutter, who waits in the driver’s seat of the car with arms folded. He speaks to John Lee through Gutter.
“The world is a pitiless example of the shortsighted.” Then Cyrus comes around to face John Lee. “I blinded a boy once,” he says. “When I was fourteen. Out in Chatsworth. In the hills off Santa Susanna Road. I’d seen him with friends. Hotshot. Whole-life-ahead-of-him crap. Nice looking. Wore clothes our mamas believed in. Didn’t know what hit him.”
Cyrus makes a sleek sound like an electric arrow moving through silent woods. “I called him months later. I told him I’d done it and why. I told him I owed him then. And he owed me his sightless future. And every day he should know the greater part of his existence belonged to me.”
He flips his fingers down along the tufts of hair studded into the leg of his jeans. “The taking of is the nature of all things. The taking of scalps, the taking of flags, the taking of men, of ideas, of patents, of wives, of pride, of trivialities, of slogans, of land. Of souls. The taking of, Captain Blood-soaked and sodomized. Call it our self-portrait.”
Then Cyrus shrieks out loud. A piercing femalish banshee. White-shirted businessmen working their gums with toothpicks and their trusty Janes gobbling up each other’s gossip as they follow behind turn in the direction of the two cars. Over a hurdle of car hoods, Cyrus grins and waves.