God Is a Bullet

by Boston Teran

  John Lee slinks back into the passenger seat, trying to make himself invisible.

  Cyrus turns to John Lee. One arm comes to rest on the open car door, the other on the hood. Cyrus eases himself down like he’s about to share a private moment.

  “Tell Arthur, when I get the chance I’ll dig up his little darlin’s skull and mail it back to him. Tell him, or I will.”

  John Lee sits there, an imperiled look cauterized on his face.

  “You thought you’d come out here and get aggro with me. Not happening. Paradise fuckin’ lost, Captain. Signed, yours truly.”

  54

  The next morning Bob wakes and there is an odd silence inside him. A kind of psychic refinement where one’s sensory skills have sharpened and the very least quiet speaks volumes. The truck and cellular phone being gone are merely facts he already feels.

  Wearing only jeans and a blanket draped around his shoulders, he crosses the open yard. The dogs approach from beyond the shed, with the Ferryman not far behind.

  “Where is she?” Bob yells.

  “She put on new plates and took the truck to get it painted on the chance you got tagged from that little fuckup in Hinkley.”

  “And then she’s coming right back?”

  “She didn’t say.”

  “I’ll bet Cyrus finally called and you’re goddamn lying to me.”

  The Ferryman just stares at Bob. His dogs move across the open ground, sniffing at the droppings of rats and mice.

  “Of course I am,” says the Ferryman. “Lying is the cornerstone of life, so why shouldn’t I practice it?”

  • • •

  Chairs oddly placed on a rise. A surreal image, as if the desert were waiting for dinner guests to arrive.

  Bob climbs the hill, sits in a broken-backed chair, and looks out toward the bare browning-yellow painted flats stretching between the Paradise Range and the Calico Mountains. In the distance rise small shields of sunlight off the battered rotting hull of the old woman’s trailer.

  “Center of the world, man.”

  Bob turns.

  The Ferryman walks toward him carrying two bottles of beer. “That’s what Cyrus used to say. This was the center of the world.” He offers Bob a beer.

  The Ferryman half hitches around, sits in the other chair. Bob drinks. The sun has left slight sweat streaks down his reddening face and chest.

  “You should have fuckin’ stopped her,” says Bob.

  The Ferryman pays him no mind, just keeps talking. “Cyrus could have been right. When you think about it. The center of the world.”

  His claw begins a slow sweep of the country. Second-handing from spot to spot in a twelve-o’clock crawl clockwise.

  “There you got Death Valley. And there in the Panamint Mountains the forty-niners discovered silver. It’s also where Charles Manson made up his party favors for Helter Skelter. Over there is the Nevada Test Site. Frenchmen’s Flat and Operation Buster Jangle. You know they dressed up pigs like humans before they nuked ’em. It was called fabric testing. Over there you got Vague-ass. Capital of the white-knuckled dice roller. And there you got the Early Man Site and there Route 66 goes right through the largest hazardous waste dump in North America. There, Joshua Tree, and there the Sea of Cortez; each with the oldest species known to man on this continent. And there is America’s favorite self-help nightmare: Little Armageddon.

  He turns to Bob. “Shit, I left out Disneyland.” He takes a swig of beer. “And all of that within four hundred miles. What do you think, Bob Whatever? Was Cyrus right? Is this the center of it all?”

  “I think you should have stopped her.”

  “You know what I think? Dante meets Philip K. Dick. That’s what I think.”

  Bob finishes his beer in one long bottoms up. Tosses the bottle to the Ferryman. With only his claw available for the catch, he can’t cut it.

  “I don’t want to hear any more of your crap,” says Bob as he stands and starts away.

  “Cyrus thought this was the center of the world. ’Cause this was his place. Where he got his head screwed in tight for whatever it’s worth. And since he thinks his life is the center of the world, then this place … You can see the Aristotelian madness of it.” He points a claw at Bob. “Just like you. Selfish implausibility.”

  “What do you mean by that?”

  “Too much white-boy carnival shit. You’re not here to tell me where the hot holes are and are not. You’re not gonna give me that somewhere-over-the-rainbow shit and I’m gonna do your housework. You got the wrong nigger.

  “You want her stopped. Fuck … This country used to be grasslands, man, eons ago. And out here they found the remains of the largest reptile ever on the continent. A fuckin’ tortoise. You and that turtle got your share in common. You are fossils trying to fuck around in the next world. But not with me, Bob Whatever. Not with me. Your circus of horrors is so much shit as far as I’m concerned. You want her stopped, you shoulda been no sleeping turtle.”

  The Ferryman tries to lean over and pick up the bottle but Bob gets there first. Hands it to him. The Ferryman takes it in his claw, but Bob does not let go right away. His eyes are still a little rheumy and dour. He could make a push-comes-to-shove hardball kick-ass drive at this nappy game bird. But looking into that face is like looking into the heart of the desert itself, whose essence tests the very ideas of infinity or emptiness.

  Bob lets go of the bottle and says nothing. Then he moves down that slippery grade as slowly as the grand tortoise he was mocked with.

  55

  Case waits as she’s been told. She’s got herself locked and loaded in a motel room about a mile from the House of Usher. She’s supposed to wait for the call, nothing more. Errol Grey, against his will, has been forced to play middleman and let his bar be used as a neutral spot for the meeting. He isn’t happy with his newfound position, and since the knifing he’s hired himself a couple of ex-cops with a taste for expensive designer drugs to play bodyguard. They’re a duo of thick wrists and bad attitudes, but they keep to themselves and they’re astute enough not to try to hump every chickie in the bar.

  When Case got the call, Cyrus came with a few simple demands. He almost crooned his conversation to her. They all meet. Her and Bob and him. They bring the little party stash they’d stolen. They hand it over. Cyrus will pay a small finder’s fee. A kind of conciliatory gesture in lieu of having to track them down and turn them into bloated satchels. Then she and her “toy” can drive off into the moonlight. Which they better do, and quick, after it’s all done.

  It’s a lurid honesty Case isn’t buying. And Cyrus doesn’t know he’s only getting one out of the three he asked for. It should be quite a come-together. For Case the go-down is simple enough. She walks in alone. Demands the girl for the stuff. If she doesn’t get the right answer, it’s over. De facto, babe. By gun, by knife, or by a jugular torn open with teeth. Cyrus will never get up from the table.

  If he shows.

  The first night is a bust. So is the second. It gets so she doesn’t sleep. She can feel the creepie-crawlies working against her. She sits up in bed all night with a pistol across her stomach, staring at the door as if he might be able to magic his body through.

  The junkie squeeze, as she calls it. Days three and four her veins start to burn. As if someone were working out their route using strips of hot wire. She knows the pain isn’t real, just the haunted hours’ flights of fancy. She tries to hypnotize herself into calm using the motel sign’s flash-fading S that sigmas against the pulled shades.

  Then the cellular rings, and she is on.

  She takes a corner table at the House of Usher. The place is packed enough so that she feels fairly safe, even with the assortment of bad vibes being thrown at her from Errol and his two drumheads.

  But it isn’t Cyrus that shows, it’s Lena.

  Case picks her out squeezing through the smoky gloom of the bar crowd. Lena spots Case. Works up a gray smile in the dark reaches of the dance floor
. A relic of an arm moves through a distant hello.

  Errol has seen Lena himself, goes over to his crew, gets them ready to make sure this is played clean.

  As Lena approaches the table, Case takes in everything carefully. She keeps looking toward the door to see if Cyrus is gonna show. When he doesn’t, she looks up into the nervous, thinly disguised sanctuary of her ex-lover’s face.

  “Where’s Cyrus?”

  Lena comes back tentatively with, “Not even a kiss hello?”

  Case rises. They kiss. She sneaks another glimpse at the door. Lena’s eyes fix on her, trying to read what emotion she can out of Case. She holds on to her hand a long time.

  “Sit down,” says Case, as she slips her hand clear.

  They sit. Lena looks tired and frightened. Frailer than in Mexico, but Case had only seen her then at a distance. The junkie years have done their double duty, and the skin on Lena’s arms has receded from the veins so much they are like strands of rope left in the sand after the tide has pulled out.

  “Where’s Cyrus?”

  “Where’s your toy?”

  Case passes over Lena’s embittered tone. She waits silently, and Lena becomes self-conscious.

  “I’m sorry about Mexico,” says Lena.

  “It’s alright.”

  “I tried to stop him, but …”

  “Forget it,” Case says sadly.

  Lena mumbles, “Okay.” She fumbles through a small lacy shoulder purse for cigarettes.

  Each moment is stark discomfort. Lena’s tried to make herself attractive and feminine. She’s wearing a silk shirt and just a touch of perfume. She can’t find any matches so Case passes her lit cigarette over.

  Before she even looks up from lighting her cigarette, Lena says, “I wish we could go back to that time in the Indian caves. You remember? I wish we could.”

  “I’d like to try for better times.”

  Lena nods, looks up, her face in anguish. “If you can find them I’ll … I’ll meet you there.”

  Case nods impassively. Lena looks for something in Case’s face, in her demeanor, that doesn’t drain her of hope.

  “Where’s Cyrus?”

  Lena flicks at her cigarette with a thumb. The flesh around the battered nail has been badly chewed.

  “Don’t keep asking, Case.”

  “He’s a no-show, right?”

  “Right.”

  “Fuckin’ voodoo man.”

  “I got to be able to tell him you and … the guy you’re traveling with … are here and you’re carrying the stuff.”

  Case leans back, looks over at Errol, who is watching intently from the bar.

  “Was Errol hip to this?”

  Lena rolls her head from side to side as if avoiding a blow. “Errol is a fuckin’ corpse.”

  “You know how deep I am into this, don’t you, honey?”

  That single word: honey. Lena’s head comes up with a brittle quickness. A mime of desperate hope to her eyes.

  “Where is he, Lena?”

  “What?”

  “Cyrus, where is he?”

  “You better bring your friend here, with the stuff, and I …”

  “He sent you ’cause he figured I wouldn’t, couldn’t cut you in the process.”

  “I don’t think he gives a shit.”

  “You won’t tell me?”

  She hides her face as if the world might hear anything her eyes say.

  “Don’t worry,” says Case.

  Lena’s hand is shaky. The skin along her neck almost a see-through yellow where the veins pulse madly in their lackluster blue.

  Case rests her hand on Lena’s. “Lena, help me,” she says.

  Lena doesn’t pull away, but doesn’t answer.

  “Lena?”

  She shakes her head now. “I won’t lie to him. I can’t. But you better do something.” She looks back over at Errol, then at Case. “You better. He won’t show and let you try and sewer him. And he knows, Case. He knows.”

  Lena snuffs out her cigarette, rises to leave, and her hand pulls away.

  “What does he know, Lena?”

  Lena hesitates. The music is raw as a hammer on sheet metal.

  “Tell me, please. Don’t let me go down.”

  “It’s me who’ll go down. Case, be here tomorrow. Out front. At twelve. Show together. Please, Case. If you’re gonna show at all.”

  “Lena …”

  Lena bends over, kisses Case again. Soft and touching and full on the mouth, with that long fearful sense of finality that never really comes when you hope for it. “I loved you,” she whispers. “I mean it’s still raw. I love you, now. And always. Always. Don’t meet him ever. Don’t. Run! Just run!”

  “Lena, please.”

  “And be careful about Errol,” Lena whispers. “It was him who told Cyrus where you were when you got hit. He’d followed you, then he went to see Cyrus.”

  Lena starts through the crowd. Case stands and follows after her. On her way to the door, Errol cuts Case off. Lena is already halfway out into the street when she looks back to see Case circled up by that trio of buffed suits. They’re starting to give her the rough moves. Questions on the hard press. Not quite shouting face-to-face, but getting there.

  Lena starts back into the bar in a rare moment of confidence.

  “Let her loose, Errol.”

  “What?” he says, turning.

  “Let her loose.”

  “What happened here?”

  “Let her loose. We’ve got things worked out. Let her loose. You already been scratched up pretty good.”

  Errol pulls his hands back and away. Case passes Lena, nods a thank you as she makes for the door.

  Lena calls out, “Case, remember what I said.”

  56

  Bob is brooding on that broken atoll of a couch in the moonlight, smoking, when two pixels of light appear on the desert floor. Gleaming sensors that bleed away. He stands and watches. Somewhere nearby a mobile makes its music out of bones and glass and clay. The smoky lights rise again, cyanotic against the tilted sand, casting strobes into the sky that level out to long widening spills.

  Bob crosses the yard as the truck pulls to a hard stop. Dust rises off the back tires and over the hood and around Bob. The dogs come barking out of their hidden scratch-hole hovels as Case climbs out of the pickup dead tired. There is a look of shameful failure in her eyes. The dogs scramble around her, leaping and snapping, and she has all she can handle in clearing a path through them to get to Bob. He waits with his arms folded and a cigarette hanging out of his mouth.

  “I guess I should expect all kinds of shit.”

  He takes the cigarette from his mouth. “Four days without a word. What do you expect?”

  “Yeah.” Her head bows a bit. “Stick it up my ass. What the fuck.”

  Bob is hurtling through that funhouse of emotions with the wicked twins of rage and relief that keep a person torn in two, so neither part of his personality can get a divine lick in. He flings the cigarette away.

  “Just tell me. What were you trying to prove?”

  “The call came, alright? I set up to meet them.”

  “Alone?”

  “They didn’t know. I was trying to con Cyrus into a little face-to-face.”

  “Fuck.”

  “But he no-showed instead.” She walks away, downcast, sees the Ferryman in a scrawny frame of window brushed by the orange light from an exposed bulb.

  The Ferryman stares at them with distant objectivity.

  “Well, come on,” she says. “Cut me up good. I admit I didn’t even call.”

  “Were you just gonna kill him flat out?”

  “Flat out, Coyote. Flat out.”

  “I should crack your skull for being so stupid. And vain.” He starts past her, stops, motions with the slight toss of his head toward the Ferryman. “But your friend taught me something. I ain’t the center of the world. Think about that yourself. You aren’t either.”

  He walks
over to the couch, scoops up the blanket, and wraps it around his shoulders. She wishes there’d been more screaming. At least something to fight against after her failure. Instead she’s left with his receding figure walking off into the night beneath the silent blades of the wind turbine like some lost prodigal wandering the wreckage of his exile.

  She lies on the bed, boots on. The beamed ceiling a black mirror of the floor below. She feels cruelly alone, hemmed in by a quadrangle of walls and crates and a bureau cliffed around the meager bed. A stifling proximity that seems to open up only when Bob silently enters and sits at the foot of the bed.

  He stares grimly into a dusty corner where a spider’s loom-strings reach from a water-stained and relic-stuffed cardboard box to the broken staff of an Air Force flag.

  She stirs and crosses the bed. She sits beside and behind Bob and puts her arm around his neck. He watches the spider’s slow assault up against the darkness.

  “I wonder if he knows where he’s going. If he actually accounts for something at the far end of the string.”

  “Tomorrow Lena will be waiting for us in front of Errol’s bar. If we’re gonna get it on, it’s gotta be then.”

  “Was it hard seeing her?”

  She sits there weighing out her words. “I don’t know. I was trying so hard to co-opt her. To co-opt her feelings. I don’t know.”

  “We got to be of one mind,” he says, “if we’re gonna go through this. You understand?”

  “I’ve hardly ever been of one mind, even on my own.”

  In the morning Case sits against the open back of the pickup. It’s all packed and ready to go. English blues chords blow from the Ferryman’s speakers as Bob comes out of the house checking his revolver.

  The day is showing signs of getting ugly hot. The Ferryman is off alone with his dogs, heavy into the music as he riffs cords on his invisible wind-driven guitar.

  Bob eyes the Ferryman as Case hands him a beer. “For luck,” she says.