God Is a Bullet

by Boston Teran

  Across the open flats the ground becomes a moonscape. An immutable playa. The pickup makes its slow trot northeast. A thin plume of warning dust follows in their tires’ wake. The temperature gauges start to take a beating. For a moment they think they see something on the horizon. A shimmering white parabola. There, then gone. Could it be the back of a van moving obliquely through the disorienting waves of heat?

  They stop to get their bearings. Wait. But whatever it was, the horizon has swallowed it.

  “Why is he doing it like this? Taking us all the way out here? Is he gonna give Gabi back?”

  Her voice cracks from the heat. “Rat patrol, Coyote. It’s a kill game. And we’re the game. Oh, yeah …” Her tongue sticks to the roof of her mouth. “He’s gonna take us way out. And somewhere out there … somewhere … he’s gonna dump Gabi back in our lap for the money. The money he got us to kill for. But, by then, we’ll be too far for any help. And he’ll put the wolves to us. It’s a blooding, Coyote. Clean and simple as … a slit throat.”

  Noon.

  Dirt spewing up from the turning tires and through the open windows has left grimy tracks across their faces. Ahead the ground turns again.

  Huge druidic rock shapes begin to rise out of the well of the earth. The gas gauge is getting lower while the temperature gauge is going higher. Through a composition of nature where oddly shaped tufa towers spire up like tombstones and battlements.

  It is an endless straight line they make.

  Case dampens a neckerchief and wipes Bob’s face and the back of his neck. She does the same for herself.

  Then they settle back into grim silence.

  Two hours later, they feel the quick heart-thumping of the tires as they cross a bridge built a century ago of railroad ties over a shallow ravine for wagons carrying salt out of the desert.

  The pinnacles flanking that burned playa were born of tectonic fissures when the ground was a lake a hundred thousand years ago. Their sundial shadows cast toward afternoon. A frightening sense of hopelessness is setting in.

  Case opens the satchel on the front seat. She takes out a few small packets and stuffs them in the glove compartment.

  “What are you doing?”

  She is tired, speaks with a shrug, “I was thinking … If they show, they ain’t gonna be counting it. If they show …”

  “They’ll show.”

  “Yeah. But we may need some money later. You may need some. I don’t think you got much to go back to.”

  They have now reached a point beyond those tufa monuments where the ground is a washed sheet of dry salt. Flat and ghoulish. Laid barren as if it were the hub of a nuclear holocaust or that Devonian moment when the earth was catapulted out of mystery and all was flung aside. A bleached apocalypse. The true face of the father and mother, of death. Shining as a shield. The witches’ brew, or the cauldron of God. The ultimate dissolution, or the reflection of the white light. Call it what you want, it exists beyond that.

  The burnished blue hood of the Dakota is a fast-moving bow. An incandescent eye-shutting mirage charging over an ocean of salt. They bear down against the glare with creased faces. Wavering now like sailors in the ebb and flow of the pickup.

  “Wait …”

  Exhausted, Bob turns toward Case.

  “There.” She points out the windshield. “I saw something.”

  They stop the truck. Watch. In the deep distance stand the heat-dazed Paramints where Charlie and his Hole Patrol searched for a sea of gold in the belly of the rocks, and beyond that the stark valleys the Indians called Tomesha, “ground afire.”

  They are barely footnotes against a horizon that may have tricked them.

  “Maybe my head’s just fried,” she says.

  Bob offers her some water.

  They are sitting there with the sun burning holes into the black sockets of their failing eyes when a penny spot comes again along the rim of the world. Arabic in its sheetwide rippling. A metallic warrior engulfed in white grime.

  “Look. It’s them,” she says. “I know it.”

  Their exhaustion burns away as the white salient of a van forms from this specter of running sand. The sleek metal grill coming on at a clipped seventy.

  Bob and Case get out of the truck.

  About a mile off the van starts to make a sweeping turn. “This is it,” warns Case.

  She goes for the shotgun. Bob goes for the money satchels. A hundred yards out, the van starts showing its ass end, then begins a long slow backup toward the Dakota.

  Fifty yards away it stops. The rear doors swing open, and there’s Gutter and a couple of warchildren Case hasn’t seen before. They spread apart enough to press Gabi out into the light. She is blindfolded, her hands bound behind her back. They shove her out of the van. She lands hard on her face. When Bob sees his child, he is so overwhelmed he screams out her name. When she hears his voice her head comes up like some wild, frightened bird. He calls out again. She begins to cry back. A haunted weeping plea, edging forward in the sand.

  One of the warchildren has butted up behind Gabi. He presses a small Luger against the back of her head while he choke-holds her hair.

  The drama of the trade begins to play itself out. Gutter yells for Case and Bob to come on with the money. They start forward. Case keeps her shotgun dead on Gutter.

  They’re only ten yards from Gabi when Gutter yells, “Toss the money over!”

  Gabi still yelps pitifully for her father.

  Bob glances at Case. “I’m tossing the bags over.”

  She nods.

  He tosses the satchels. They land with a low thud. Gutter shoots forward, kneels, gets those bags open quick. He doesn’t pay the least attention to the shotgun zoned in on him. He does a cursory hand-check of the cash. More for volume and show than a close count. He slaps the bags closed. Stands with a black-hearted smile. He steps back coolly. “Get in the van, Stick,” he yells.

  The kid with the Luger has got a skinned-down head shaped like a toad. He’s got what might be a pretty face, more girlish than not. He lets Gabi drop and slips back to the van, where he gives Case a couple of fingers brushing across his cock.

  Bob runs forward. Kneels at his daughter’s side. Starts pulling loose the blindfold.

  Case still has the shotgun aimed at the black square of space beyond the open van doors. As the van starts to kick out and pull away Gutter shouts, “How you gonna get back home?”

  He points beyond Case, to the south, as the van doors slam shut.

  When Gabi sees her father for the first time, she is so disoriented, and he looks so different with the mustache and tattoo and the scar on his neck, that she starts to unravel. But when she hears his voice again, and feels his arms around her, sees those eyes crying she remembers all too well from a world she thought dead, she starts to break down. A huge coming apart, with hands scrambling madly across her father’s back, his shoulders, up his arms, burying her head in his chest as if trying to feel every touch of him so she can know with certainty she is alive and free.

  Case looks back from where they came, calls to Bob. He holds Gabi tightly, looks up sobbing, sees Case point the shotgun.

  Miles back, amid those pinnacles above the desert floor, a flare has been set off. Welding spots of white shoot upward in a tinseled arc toward the baking sun.

  Gabi starts to rock like a child blithering out one word: “Him …”

  Case steps back toward Bob, and kneels beside the girl. Bob looks at Case. “Cyrus?”

  “Got to be,” she says.

  64

  They wait through the falling away of the sun. Beyond their grasp, the stone-backed foothills give up the day’s heat like dying coals at a fire, their gray skin going cooler with the advance of the dark blue icing of night.

  Bob has the hood up, is checking the wires and hoses and bolts making sure that what needs to be locked and loaded for a hard run across the flats is dead on.

  Gabi sits inside the Dakota, huddled up in one of her
father’s workshirts. The great rush of freedom has given way to stunning exhaustion. A mind-staring emptiness. Case sits beside Gabi. She’s seen this all before, in a mural of junkie faces and rehab breakdowns whose systems are eighty-proof Thorazine.

  The sun is great shocks of blown gold and orange coming through the clouded summer sky, and in a moment of half-clarity Gabi looks up at Case and whispers, “I know you.”

  Case looks down into that filthy ragdoll face. “Me?”

  “I saw you in Mexico.”

  Case’s face wans at the hideous connection.

  “I was in the back of the van. The door was bent funny, and sometimes when I was alone I could look out. I saw when Cyrus hit you. And when they dragged you into that field. I saw them rape you …”

  Case runs a finger up Gabi’s arm. Along the small purple beetle-back dots left from the needle.

  “I thought about you,” says Gabi. She looks up as if her father might hear what she is about to say. Her eyes press over the top of the dashboard. “I don’t want my father hurt.”

  It is a deplorable moment. The innocent and absurd reticence of the wounded.

  “I thought about you. When they were doing it to me …”

  Case can feel that curdling tremor throughout Gabi’s body, knows it full well. The very sensory touch of it goes back down her own dungeon steps through heart-mind fragments.

  “They used to talk about you. And I thought, If I could be like that, like someone they hated, feared, like someone, you know … And thought, I could live maybe. I could just zone in on that. So I would pretend. I would close my eyes and think …” She sees her father moving around the engine hood, stops on the chance he comes over. When he disappears again behind the blue hoodsheet, she goes on: “You know what I mean? Not that I didn’t think about my father. But … later. Later. I don’t know. I needed something else. And I was afraid … he’d hate me.”

  Gabi curls up inside the lean angle of Case’s shoulder. Whole blind moments of creation pull at Case. She feels those trigger pains for this raw thing of childhood that’s been devoured out. For a moment she feels a wish coming, but she knows better. And for a moment she hates herself for knowing better than to wish.

  “I don’t feel well,” says Gabi. “My whole body hurts.”

  In dusk, Case and Bob stand at the back of the pickup and talk through the facts that beset them. And on top of it all they’ve got a kid who’s gut-surfing through the first hits of withdrawal. Case sits on the tailgate, her hands bundled up inside the pockets of her buckskin coat. Bob paces, occasionally glancing through the rear window of the Dakota at Gabi. Her head lies back against the glass. The night wind has started up. The light is going fast, the mountains are already black.

  “We go north,” he says, pointing, “or east, we got nothing. Nothing. Just miles of Death Valley. We go south, maybe. There’s the China Lake Weapon Center. But that’s not shit for miles, and I’ve never been that way.”

  He stops, runs his boot along the sand, leaving a clean mark. “Going back the way we came is still the closest.”

  “Trona’s that way.”

  “Yeah. We might eventually see some lights on the horizon. Make a run at ’em.”

  “We can’t stay here.”

  “I know.”

  “Come dark, they’ll swarm us.”

  He nods. “There’s fire stations in the hills. We could try to make a run for them. There’s people there.”

  “Yeah. But do you know exactly where they are?”

  “No. But we could pick a direction. Get as far as we get. If they jump us, we blow the truck. That extra gas will kick up some huge flame.”

  He reaches into his canvas coat for a cigarette.

  “Are you counting on the search and rescue helicopters?”

  He lights the cigarette, shrugs a bit at the prospect. “Counting on them is a reach, but … If those rangers pick up on the flames they’ll have the choppers out fast.”

  “If they pick up the flames.”

  “If,” he says.

  “Could they get here quick enough?”

  “I don’t know, Case, I just don’t know.”

  “If they don’t, we’d have lost the truck. We’d be on foot.”

  “They’d be on us anyway by then.”

  “Yeah, you’re right about that, Coyote.”

  Things look pretty bad all the way around. He sits beside Case. They form a sullen, hope-lost pair. She leans back for a canteen lying in the bed of the truck. Earlier they’d poured the last water from both jugs into it. She shakes the canteen, uncorks it, takes a drink. She then offers him the canteen. As he takes it, he passes her the cigarette. Going through this simple ritual, they stare south toward an unspeakable creeping darkness. She passes him back the cigarette, he the canteen to her. She lays it stone-flat across her lap, runs her fingers along the smooth metal plate of its belly.

  Case looks back into the truck cab. Gabi is now just the barest of shadows. Her head moves listlessly.

  We are asked to do things that logic leaves us incapable of. Case goes through the checklist of her failings. Out there, out there in the country grafted from a thousand riddles and a thousand koans, where all things are completely exposed, she knows the Lord of Misrule is waiting. Filing his teeth. Getting ready to come at them twelve months out of the year, leading a host of warped goodies to take them down. Happy holidays from the dead, child. Dyin’ time starts early tonight. And she knows they’re only worth what they’re worth dead.

  “Why don’t we pack the brush right here?” she says. “Leave me with enough gas. I’ll start a fire. This will draw them. You take off with the truck.”

  Bob looks at her, knowing full well what that means. He looks back at Gabi. Her head jerks slightly. Inside him is a stinging bedlam. A nightmare that can’t be slept through.

  “I can do it,” she says.

  Bob’s eyes are full of fatigue and pain as he climbs down from the tailgate and stands. Even against the roiling night, feelings he has for Case speak to her in the tenderness of his features. “We’ll go home together,” he says, “or we’ll perish here together. Let’s start back.”

  He heads for the driver’s side of the truck and Case is up quick and stops him with the tug of an arm.

  “Thank you,” she says.

  The careful turn of his head. “For what?”

  “For considering me … that valuable.”

  65

  They move hard across the desert floor. No headlights. Gabi sits like petrified wood between her father, who drives, and Case. She is already suffering from the night sweats, ’cause she’s gone well beyond her required feeding. A shotgun is wedged between her leg and Case’s, just inches from where she holds Case’s hand.

  Every hole and hard spot they hit drives them like rivets toward the roof before they come slamming down. Gabi winces a cry with every hit.

  “It’ll be alright, baby,” hushes Bob.

  Then the black night explodes with electric fire. A white burning lance missiles toward them.

  Gabi screams and ducks down. Case braces herself against the dashboard. Bob armlocks the steering wheel.

  The flare rams the windshield. Sends out a phosphorous rain of thistles, blinding them. The truck goes out of control. Bob sees Stick rushing out of the circlet of darkness, firing his Luger. He sees Gutter charging the front end. Bob cuts hard right but keeps going.

  Gabi slides down on the floor, wailing. Bob hits the gas, trying to make a run out of it. The ground ahead is going by so fast it’s impossible to react to the nooks and rises. The Dakota takes a beating but the shots are getting more distant. Suddenly the bridge of railroad ties rises up out of the darkness at a hard angle.

  Bob tries to right the wheels and hit the brakes at the same time, but it’s too little too late. The tires trundle across the flat ties at a forty-degree cut, and going that fast the Dakota can’t make it. The tires on one side of the truck instantly spin air and the pick
up does a nosedive straight into the ravine. It hits hard ten feet down, hangs a second ass-end up, then dips against the incline in a thudding powder-bomb of sand.

  Dazed and cut with broken glass, Case stumbles out of the truck. Bob has to kick at his jammed door till it gives way in a croaking sigh. He grabs his daughter out behind him. Case scrambles back for their weapons. The gas pedal has stuck to the floor and the engine whines away, the front tires burning holes in the briny ground.

  They try to collect themselves in the darkness for the fight to come. They hunker at the edge of the ravine. Gabi lies on the ground in a fetal position. She has become just a gibbering thing. Case and Bob look out across the flats. It is silent and dark as a sacred island of the dead.

  They look at each other, fighting for their breath, fighting to compose themselves. A fierce psychic energy moves between the two.

  “Get Gabi out of the way. Find someplace to put her. Farther up the ravine. I’m gonna blow the truck!”

  Case grabs Gabi against her will and shakes her hard. Bob runs up onto the trestled parapet and hears Case yelling, “Come on! Come on!” He kneels, looks between the thick lattice pylons, sees Case dragging Gabi along the ridge-backed ravine floor under the bridge, sees the bumping shocks finally rattle Gabi’s legs into some kind of order.

  He stands, pumps a shell into the shotgun’s chamber. He waits till Case and Gabi are clear.

  A short way down that warped and eroded channelway they come upon the remains of a drainage pipe almost tall enough for a man to walk through. Case tugs Gabi hard, stumbling into the twenty-foot-long cement corridor. She gets Gabi down on the ground.

  Bob hears Case scream to him to blow the truck. He takes aim at the gas tank and fires.

  There is a depth-charge blow skyward that rocks Bob back-assed from the bridge into the sand. It’s followed in fast order by a raw burst of flames that geyser up and leap and lick at the thick trestle ties. The draft below the bridge sucks in the flames that shoot across its underbelly.