by Boston Teran
61
Bob and Case sit at a table in the motel room. They fill small plastic bags with sugar and flour. They bind them up in gray tape. The table is stacked with the gray bricks, two overnight bags’ worth. The price of a score, or a takedown.
“Gettin’ in will be easy,” says Case. “They’ll frisk us pretty hard. Of course, when Errol sees it’s us he may pop a load. Gettin’ fuckin’ gun-crazy aggro on us. Or he might be cool. But either way, gettin’ out with money after they see this shit will be no friggin’ snack. Especially if we ain’t packin’.”
Bob sits there with his elbow resting on the table and the thumb of his upturned arm pressing against his teeth.
“They’ll chill after they frisk us,” she says. “But then what? I could slide my knife up my cunt but I’d have a fuck of a time gettin’ it out.”
Bob is staring hypnotically at the dead space on the table between them.
“I was makin’ some black fuckin’ humor here,” she says.
His eyes deeply creased, he looks up without acknowledging what she said. “He’s got ex-cops working for him, right?”
“Yeah,” she says. “He did, anyway.”
“Cops have a system for frisking. Systems have weaknesses. We have to create for that weakness.”
• • •
The moon is already halfway around the dark seam of the night when they climb into the balmy foothills just southwest of Rancho Mirage. A long spindly road past the rare gated estate.
On the seat between them is the smaller of the two cases with their phony kilos. This one is shaped like a duffel with curved handles. Its bottom is made of a hard Masonite-like board. It sits on four silver nubs, and what Bob discovered was that there is just enough of a channelway along the underbelly to tape Case’s semiautomatic to it and let the duffel still sit flat.
He double-checks the tape and the gun.
Case lets go of the steering wheel with one arm, shakes out the tension. “From here on up, there’s no more houses,” she says.
They start the last half-mile climb. Their headlights flooding the wild brush. At each rocky turnout a great sprinkling of lights crosses the desert floor. Jeweled buoys on a be-darkened sea.
“Pull over,” he says.
She slows and sides the road in a soft gravelly whoosh.
He sits looking back.
“Are you alright?”
“He’s made us his whores, hasn’t he?”
“I don’t get what you mean.”
“What we’re doing? We’re the catch dogs tonight.”
She sits back. Folds her arms across the chest of her buckskin coat. Her violet eye shadow gives her the sleek dark look of a hawk on the come.
“I was looking back down there and flashed on the house on Via Princessa. It was up on a hill like this. But not so high. Gabi would watch the road at night. I’d drive by. Pull over. Run my flashers. That was my good night to her.”
He leans his head forward. Rests it on the dashboard. “You got nothin’ to say, huh?”
“Sure. You know what I think?” she says. “Somebody throws you a lifeline and you toss it away ’cause you don’t like the color of the rope. I don’t think what we’re doing is anything more than—as Cyrus calls it—crowd control.”
The house is concrete and glass. A fragile container designed as stark low contemporary. With long sliding-glass-door views of Coachella Valley.
They pull up. Shut off the headlights. In a picture window, Case spots the two well-lubed drumheads from the bar.
She takes the heavier satchel from the bed of the pickup. Bob takes the duffel with the gun taped underneath. This high up, the wind blows pretty hard and everything crackles.
As they start along the pestled walkway they can see the drumheads cross the living room toward the door.
The chrome-fronted door is behind a gated open-air portico. Case presses the buzzer. The gate automatically opens. She and Bob glance at each other.
“Time to get swallowed,” she whispers.
They enter and the gate glides shut behind them. They stand in the locked-off alcove of ten-foot-high walls. A half-moon cup of cement where two pink floodlights flank the door and give the man-made stone its showroom look.
They wait. The dry air, the silence, their raggle-tag selves. And all in that pink designer light.
From behind them a polite voice requests, “Put the bags down, please. And put your hands up.”
Bob and Case turn to find they’re staring at the thoughtful presence of a .41-caliber Blackhawk.
They do as they are told. The drumhead at the gate calls to his partner. The door opens and he makes a gentlemanly approach behind the tight grip of his side arm.
The frisking begins. The two drumheads work clean and fast. They even find Case’s knife hidden down in the arch of her boot. One accidentally kicks the duffel bag and it grates along the walkway. Neither Bob nor Case even glances at the bag for fear of giving themselves away.
Then the drumheads go about the business of opening the bag and the duffel to make sure there are no little surprises. It all goes down clean and easy. They close the bag and duffel back up.
Case and Bob are made to wait at gunpoint while the one at the front door disappears inside the cool white-tiled foyer and calls to Errol. He comes back and with a mute crook of a finger ushers them in. Bob and Case turn and reach for their respective bags. The drumhead behind them has already got his hand on Case’s bag, but he’s a second late for the duffel.
“Let it go,” says the drumhead.
Bob does not let go.
“You haven’t paid for it yet, Slick,” says Case.
He starts to back them off with his pistol. “How ‘bout I pay for it right now?”
“Forget it, Case,” warns Bob.
She looks over at him. His jaw tightens all the way down to his throatskin. “It’s okay.”
He slips a look downward. Her eyes follow. He passes the duffel to the drumhead. She watches his foreplay as he gives the bag a half turn so the gun taped underneath, which was at the rear end, is now at the front and, possibly, still within reach.
The drumhead at the doorway orders them in. Case starts their little march by cutting off any view he might have of the bag. Then, with one drumhead in front and the other swagging up the rear, they begin their procession Indian file into the house.
They clear the foyer, pass down an entranceway of mauve wallpaper with original Indian headdresses. Pass a black-rock waterfall from floor to ceiling with colored spots of subtle lighting. Pass into a sunken living room of gray leather and Indian objets d’art.
The whole walk Bob is making sure he is not an arm’s length away from the gun. The whole while Case is watching, looking for something within reach to grab and use as a weapon. The whole while they’re both waiting for the moment when they got to make a show of it before any chance is completely gone.
Case looks back at Bob. There ain’t no mystery nor sentiment there.
The moment it may be completely out of reach comes on down and dirty as Errol rises from the soft gray comfort of his couch, turns, and sees it’s Case and Bob.
It’s a blowout. Bad news squared by ten. Errol is humping up those red clay steps from the living room with his bathrobe flowing outward, exposing long tanned muscled legs, yelling he’ll kill them both. Then thanks to fuckin’ God, thinks Bob, Errol slips.
In that perfectly human moment when the drumhead in front reaches out to keep his meal ticket from doing a nosedive into the fancy Italian tile, Bob jumps back and grabs the duffel. The other drumhead, in a moment of self-defense, lifts up the duffel and pushes it out to try to slow the charge. Bob’s hands scramble across the bottom of the bag, his fingers like the manic legs of a millipede looking for the trigger.
He scores it.
Fires.
The shot blows through the man’s pelvis and pings a tiny hole of dust into the far wall, with just a touch of blood. The duffel comes loose
from his grasp and Bob wields it around, one hand on the gun, the other on the curved handle.
Case hears him yell, “Get out of the way!”
She slamdives to the floor.
The other drumhead is just looking up when a shot sends him toppling back, one arm waggling, one leg pitcher stiff, a head jerked weirdly down into the chin. He falls, his spine hitting flush on the couch, his skull on the coffee table. The glass shatters into shark-teeth fragments.
Bob comes around, tearing the gun loose from the duffel’s underbelly. The guard behind him is lying on the floor, motionless.
Errol is splayed out on the tile, his robe spread open. He is exposed. Case stands, moves back. Errol does not move at all.
“Alright, alright.” Errol shivers. “Alright.” His hand starts pressing at the air. “Alright, take the money.” His back sinking as if he can avoid the bullet that will come. “Take the money, take it …”
“Cross him over,” says Case.
Bob looks at her with bald shock.
“Snuff him,” she screams.
Errol pleads for his life. Bob steps forward and raises his gun. Errol, without realizing it, begins to urinate.
For a moment Bob stares at the puddle spreading out across the tiles and through the silky damask of the robe.
There is a puzzle at work and the pieces are being taken away one at a time until the empty slot, the implacable void, is forever in play.
LE MORT AND THE RITE OF INCORPORATION
62
The thin paper of color is coming back to the sky. Restless light. Case and Bob set out to the north. Driving hard with satchels of money against time. With the past to the east, the future to the west. With the radio spewing news as they wait for reports of the murder.
Through the reaches of a Christian Mojave are billboards framed in fieldstone built by born-agains that spread Bible wisdoms, black on white, against the pink of a coming sun: WITH KNOWLEDGE COMES PAIN … ACT AS IF YOU HAD FAITH AND FAITH WILL BE GIVEN TO YOU … HUMBLE YOURSELF AND I WILL HEAL THE LAND.
These pass along the highway. Still and sure and stately. Yet there is only one truth, and they, Case and Bob, are heading toward it. Like Ahab, like Lincoln, with a fierce bigotry of purpose.
She is watching the road in silence. Intent on the haunting pockets of blue that border the as yet empty highway.
“What are you thinking?” he asks.
Without turning to him, and laboring through her words, she says, “I’m thinking about Gabi. I’m thinking about me. What she’s been through. What I’ve been through. I’m thinking about you. From where you’ve come to have all that sorrow. And what you’ll be. I’m thinking about the hole in the center of my heart, which is the hole at the center of my universe, the universe, all our universes. I’m thinking about Lena and Errol and … I’m thinking about him. And all those veins lost through all those years. And I’m thinking about those two sisters—meaning and madness. Coming out of the night sky like I seen in a painting. Those two sisters. Chasing some asshole rube down the road in his red robe.”
She leans forward, rests her hands on her knees, listens to the last sounds of her own voice. “Am I making any sense at all? Do you have any idea what the fuck I’m ranting about?”
He remembers a day at a pit stop in the heat. With its sweet greasy food and their little dogfight over a newspaper story on the Polly Klaas murder. And those chirping over-perfumed maquiladoras. He remembers. “We all hunt Leviathan in our own way,” he says.
Energy Road is a mile-long cut off Route 178 in the Salt Wells Valley. It’s the hard country along the Inyo County border. The land of furnaced playas from China Lake on through to the Panamint Mountains and Death Valley.
It is first light as they haul down that long empty road. In the distance a terra-cotta frieze of silver wind turbines, hundreds of them, begins to stand out like an army of knights’ spears rising futilely to the wind against the black and brown mountains beyond. They rise amid huge power lines. Cabled trestles moving on into the as yet unlit recess of the white country.
The dirt road ends among these giant, silent, turning blades. Bob and Case get out of the truck. Fifty yards ahead, standing among those steel monoliths, is Cyrus.
It is as if he were the lone watchman of this country. An almost unhuman guardsman coming through great red sheets of the sun rising behind him. There is a swept loneliness to the place, and the stillness of seeping sand. Case and Bob are each carrying a bag of money as they approach Cyrus.
They stop just feet away. The two men now face-to-face. Bob begins to fill in the details of what he had imagined Cyrus to be. The lightning bolts beneath his cheeks crinkle. “Gettin’ your eyeful?” asks Cyrus.
“Where’s my daughter?”
“You’ll get to take home your legacy.”
Case squats down. Opens the bag to show him the money. “Where is she?” Case asks.
Cyrus does not even look at her. He walks past them both toward the truck. Bob and Case glance at each other.
Cyrus moves around the pickup, notices the extra cylinder in the back for gas. “How you set for gas?” He taps the tank, listens to the slight thud. “You’re in good shape.”
He then glances into the cab. He looks around and spots the cellular phone. He reaches in and grabs it. He holds it up for them to see, and in one swift motion smashes it to pieces against the Dakota’s hood.
He comes back toward them, points to a thin patch of rubble that might pass as some kind of bare macadam that heads on into the hills. “Your legacy’s over that hill. When you see her, drop the money and take her. Easy …”
He passes them both. He stops and turns to Bob. They are just a foot from each other. Silence, augmented by degrees of hatred.
“When you get home,” says Cyrus, “ask Arthur and John Lee who killed the old witch. You ask. You ask who put the first bullet into her neck. You ask. You ask about her scratching at the floor, dyin’. You ask. You ask who did the final turkey carving of that beer-guzzling bitch. After she’d been shot again. You ask.”
Cyrus has the slow, unbreakable stare of the reaper. “You ask John Lee who hired me. Hired me—to go up onto Via Princessa and do the nigger and his porcelain bitch. You ask.”
With each statement Bob seems to draw up inside himself in horror.
“You ask Arthur if I didn’t call him. You ask. Have some fun. Ask John Lee who tapped his old lady’s phone. You ask. I can’t kill you better than you can all kill yourselves.”
Case watches all this go down. It’s a fuckin’ dreamscape, and not a mile away from where she bellied enough downers to put any bad omen to sleep. There’s war engines inside her chest plowing against her rib cage. Yet it’s all so still and quiet. Especially the two of them. Never a voice raised. Like businessmen talking life insurance or real estate.
It’s all coming out, she thinks. All the black-eyed poison he’ll have to live with. Yet he stands there just listening. Stoic, sure, but not immune. Case can smell the rage seeping out of his pores with every blow.
“I can see now,” Cyrus says, looking Bob over closely, “why you’re still alive. You have some of me inside you.”
Just enough of a bitter curve to snake-bite Bob Whatever. Just enough. But he doesn’t cop to it. The skin around Bob’s neck wound clips up with a hard swallow, like the chamber of an automatic.
“And there’s something else, then you can be on your way.” Cyrus flecks at the scalps studded down the seam of his jeans. “I have invaded you. I will always be the greater part of your existence. Yours and John Lee’s and Arthur’s. And your little piece of pink meat down the road. Every moment of your life from here on in will be determined by what I have carved out of you. I own your subconscious, I … own. Now get out,” he says.
Bob holds a moment to let Cyrus know in some fashion that this outlandish nightmare doesn’t end at the precise moment he says it does. Then he turns for the truck. Case follows.
“Not you,” s
ays Cyrus. “You wait.”
Bob looks over at Case. She nods for him to go on. He warns Cyrus with one glance, then starts for the truck.
Cyrus steps up to Case. Her back seems to lean away as he gets within kissing inches of her face. “Whatever happens today. Whatever. You are crossing over. I have put a bounty on your head. The word’s out on you to all the wolves. They’re gonna come up out of the gutter for you. You’ll never have a night’s sleep again. That I know. The creepie-crawlies, sheep. They’re on you now.”
He waits a moment. Around him and Case, dark scythe marks pinwheel from the on-high blades cutting at the coming sun.
“And as you cross over,” he says, “I’ll flay the skin from your bones while you’re alive. And I’ll cut out your cunt and swallow it while you watch.”
63
They climb the rubbled beltway into the brittle foothills as they were told. Cyrus watches them until they are just a morph of dust rising through slag-sided vents.
The pickup bolts and hitches wildly over potholes and cranky sinks. They climb through each meandering wave of slipshod talus until they reach a promontory where the road slides down to the basin. Staring at them is miles of nothingness.
“He’s gonna ride us right into a black hole,” says Bob.
“How much water we got?”
Bob looks behind the seat, counts two jugs of water. “Enough so we’ll remember what it tastes like.”
The descent is mean. An hour of rock-tearing nightmares. The muffler is grouted when the ground beneath them turns to sand. The transmission is shaken half loose from its bolts. The shocks sound like a twelve-story crack-up diving into cement. They pass a sign hand-painted onto the rockface: NO GAS OR SERVICES FOR MILES—ASSHOLE.
A little roadside humor for the wandering fool.
Case keeps looking back, as if Cyrus might come creeping right up their ass. But she knows better. This is gonna be the long ugly march. The slow fuck you to death.