by Boston Teran
“Jesus, I need a drink,” says Maureen. “This is getting too fucked up.”
She tries to leave the room but Arthur stops her.
“He called again,” says Arthur. “Two hours ago. While you were in with Gabi. That’s how fuckin’ whacked Cyrus is. Called right on my line. Imagine me sitting in the living room with him giving me an earful. And he did. Told me all about Errol Grey. How you and the junkie went in to get his money. Took Grey down. Now am I supposed to believe that’s the truth or a lie? Am I? You tell me.”
“I guess it’s as true as you and John Lee killing the old lady,” says Bob.
“This is too much poison,” says Maureen.
Arthur politely forces Maureen to sit. He takes a few deep breaths to gather himself. “No one is clean, son. No one. Now what you did, getting Gabi back, you should get a medal for. I fucked up in the past. John Lee and me. But we never touched the old lady. When we went into that trailer she was dead. Carved up dead. We walked away. We washed our hands of it. We let the punk go. That’s the truth.”
Bob sees Arthur’s mouth shiver a bit. Then he watches him reach down for Maureen’s hands, which are rustling across her dress. He holds them both in his.
“You’re a fuckin’ liar, Arthur. I can’t put it all together. I probably never will be able to. But I know you and John Lee were involved in killing that old lady in the desert ’cause you couldn’t get loose her property. And Cyrus was there. You fucked him over, didn’t you? Just some junkie punk John Lee had under his thumb.”
Bob turns to Maureen. “John Lee went after Sam ’cause you were fuckin’ him. He brought Cyrus in for the bloodings, but Cyrus wasn’t some junkie punk and he turned John Lee over. He killed Sarah, and he took Gabi to get back at John Lee and Arthur.”
He turns to Arthur. “How am I doing? Care to share any little tidbits of truth with me? Am I close? You want to try and con me with a few tears about how wrong I am?” He looks from one to the other. “Ahhhh … No matter what you say, I know. I know where it counts. In my heart. You’re fuckin’ liars, both of you.”
“We all lie. We all fail. We all cheat in some way. We all have ugly spots on our heart and soul. Alright. Maybe I should go upstairs and have myself put away. Maybe Maureen should. Maybe you should. Maybe Gabi should be parentless.”
His voice is just short of being tear-framed anger. He continues. “You took us down here to lay blame. Isn’t that right? Blame. Fault. To find the ultimate cause. Don’t turn away from me. We know I’m right. Who are you to blame? Who? Blame is only for the ultimate judge. And there is only one—”
“Jesus,” grinds Bob.
“There is only one.”
Bob tries to turn away in disgust. Arthur grabs him by both arms.
“There is only one. And he will judge. Us all. I have tried and I will keep trying to make up for my disasters. I will do the best I can. I pray each day for right to be made of my deeds. I do. I am sure, too, that not everything you did out there on the road is without shame. I am sure there are at least a few ugly spots on your heart and soul. Failings that are crimes, crimes that are failings. The world’s true beauty is its ultimate forgiveness. Yes. Its ultimate forgiveness. Even in the face of our ultimate crimes.”
Bob pulls his arms loose.
“And remember this. If it all came out, if every sordid detail surfaces, who suffers most? Me? Maureen? You? No … The child suffers.”
Stiffly, Bob walks past Arthur and opens the door.
“The child, Bob. Remember that. The child.”
67
In the kitchen, Bob pours himself coffee. Lights a cigarette from the stove. He stands alone near the doorway, smoking. Maureen and Arthur pass. They get into a conversation with a couple of federal agents. It’s quite a little sideshow—worried wife and best friend of missing departmental chief. Even down to a few well-timed tears.
They notice Bob giving them a look that’s hard-line. They return his look with a few chalky stares no one picks up on.
Bob turns his attention to the dining area, where Case is walking through an intense interview. She sits with her back to him, and the rest of the table is a board meeting of corporate cops squared up around her. To watch them watching her as they work through a detailed write-up of events is a cloudless statement in the contradiction of conventions.
She is quick and precise and clean, down to every drop of blood. She speaks with broad, vulgar hand gestures, and she leans into her words like a wildcat working in on its prey. Even her rape in Mexico she describes with blunt savagery to this sorry tableau of white shirts, who listen with bland but shocked patience. To watch them is to wonder what is the real world and what is not. Which side of the table would you bet on for your survival? He is also certain they will never be able to run Cyrus down.
Bob listens as she explains away the last days: the motel rooms, Lena, the setup, having to bring money for the girl. It is a slow dirge to Palm Springs and Errol Grey.
Errol lay on the tile floor with his face buried in his hands. His hands on the cold floor wet with his own urine. Bob leaned down like some possessed vulture. This was no masquerade to Christian compassion as he placed the gun up behind Errol’s ear. He could not pretend to be the barbarian who saw evil as some distant malignant force to be dealt with. He felt it rising up within his own blood from the deep and seething reaches he once would have sworn his faith and civilization protected him from. He heard himself whisper above Errol’s shrieks, “Just don’t move. And I’ll be quick.”
Outside, he used sand the color of moonlit German silver to wipe the blood from his hands.
As he stares into his coffee cup, Case turns toward him before continuing. A few blank moments pass. Her look turns empathic, then rebellious. She turns back to the officers at the table as if she were facing the bar of history. She takes a moment, then begins with blood-chilling candor to lie.
She describes a fight inside the house and Errol’s final moments. The only caustic piece of truth is the fact that three men were left dead. Other than that, the whole frightening piece of bloodshed was caused by Errol’s ill-timed and dangerous irrationality.
A sundown sky is again the color of wounds, but the crowd outside Arthur’s house has yet to disperse. Reporters rush at officers who alternately enter and leave the house. Bob watches the madness through the curtain of the bedroom where his sedated child sleeps.
There is a light knock at the door.
“Come in,” Bob whispers.
Case enters, closing the door behind her softly. Dusk has fallen, powder blue through the sheer curtains. The rest of the room is dark. Case stops by the bed. Watches Gabi. Her eyes drink in the mood of the room, trying to believe in the comfort of that moment, but she knows that behind the serene sleeping face are demons to be dealt with.
Case squeezes up beside Bob as he peeks out at the crowd taking up the street. “Geeks,” she says.
His head leans around. “About before. Thanks.”
“Fuck the ass-hunkies, Coyote. Let them go back to their TV dream-life shit.”
“I really need to talk to you,” he says.
She looks back at Gabi, nods. “Me, too.”
With darkness they steal away through the wooden gate in the stucco wall at the rear of Arthur’s property. It opens out into a dense line of blue oaks that begin the Angeles National Forest. As they cross the summered black foothills, Bob explains to Case what went down in the basement between him and Arthur and Maureen.
It isn’t long before Case and Bob have been drawn to that same open field where they talked the first night she drove out.
“What is it you want, Coyote?”
He thinks about the violent legacies of his life.
“You’d like to break them down, wouldn’t you?” she says. “To burn them hard at the stake. Fuckin’ phony sheep. Fat-boy and that overly made-up matron. You’d like to ban their asses from ever being near Gabi.”
He sees she’s baiting him,
giving him enough lead line to bite. He looks across the dark filaments of the canyons where the lights of homes twinkle. Yet he is caught in a world beyond any fantasy.
“Be careful. Cyrus wants you to become a war junkie. So don’t get too much at home in the wasteland, Coyote. You got Gabi to think of.”
“You read me pretty well.”
“Only pretty well?”
“I would take them down,” he says. “But what am I, compared to them?”
This is a thought she has gutted through more than once. “You?”
“Me,” he says.
“Well, let me tell you. If there was something of a center out of that whole mess they bred, you’d be it, Coyote. You’d be it. You’re the one who got beyond that world down there to get it on. You’re the one who had courage enough to back up what you did, and enough after that too.” Her head lilts to one side and her voice drifts. “And enough to see something valuable where there was probably nothing.”
He knows what she means and takes her arm to tell her it isn’t so.
“Don’t you know? Don’t you see? You’re the real father now. And called to act.” Her voice fades. “Fuck.”
He senses a dark passion being played out in her mind that makes her look away. She looks to the south and then back along those steep inclines of the Paradise Hills tract toward the conflagration of lights around Arthur’s house. Somewhere amid that Gordian phosphored knot, Gabi lies asleep.
Case’s heart suddenly fills with grief. She is shocked to find she has that much capacity to feel, and then to bear it. It is a stark revelation, especially now, especially as she knows she will probably never see all this again.
She looks at Bob. “You got to go back down that hill. You got to go back home and face the fat prick and the hose-queen phony. And let’s be real, the law doesn’t equally administer the same attitude all the way around. I’m not saying to get into sleight of hand. But you ought to just let it all slide.”
He stares at her in shock.
“Yeah. You heard me.”
A soldier’s venom up through the veins of his soul.
“I see what’s in your eyes,” she says. “I can feel it over here.”
“And what do we tell Gabi?”
“Coyote, what the fuck could you tell her that she ain’t well past in her own life? She’s lived through the worst of the bottom feeders. But if you’re asking me. No one hides the future. You can’t. It’s got a life of its own. It’s like beatin’ smack. It’s always out there, watching. The Devil Doctor is always out there, watching and waiting. But that’s the choice you alone will make.”
“What do you mean ‘you’? Where are you gonna be in all this? I thought …”
“I’m going,” she says. “That’s what I wanted to tell you. Tonight … I’m going.”
He can feel the stone footings inside him give. “Going where?”
“Just going.”
“But there’s things we haven’t talked about …”
“Those are better left unsaid.”
She steps back but he stops her with a grip on her arm. He tries to read the storm in her face. The challenge behind the blue and windy darkness she turns slightly into. In that silence, the dark clots of emptiness he feels press up through the thorax and into the bony tube of his throat. Choking. But in her eyes he sees something else he recognizes. He knows, he understands now.
“You know where he is, don’t you?”
There is something in her eyes now that reads like flares along the roadside at night.
“Lena told you. At the motel. That much anyway. When you two were talking outside. I knew then …”
Case doesn’t answer.
“You know where he is. No, if she’d have told you that, we’d have gone right there and done it. Maybe where he’s gonna be, right? Or might be? You know, don’t you? You have an idea? Tell me that much.”
They stand close together, like two lungs keeping one consciousness alive. She looks back up at him.
“It isn’t done yet,” she says.
She leans up and kisses him with such passion and desperation she’d be unable to tell the difference. Finally she leans back. “Even though I don’t believe in any of your shit,” she says, “I’d play Mary Magdalene for you just to get you off. I would. I might even take a little blood. But I’d give you as good, man. I would. Now do me a favor, Coyote. Let me go.”
He does not want to, but in the scarce silken weight of the moment, he lets her go. She steps back into the darkness, and she keeps backing away.
“Take care, okay?” he says.
She nods.
“You’ll need money,” he says. “I’ll borrow what I can off my house. I’ll sell my fuckin’ furniture. I’ll wire it through Western Union. To downtown L.A. Enough for as long as you need.”
He can hear the dry grass breaking under her boots.
“If you need anything, wire me back. Anything … I’ll be here. Case?”
She slips like liquid mercury into the rising arc of the night hills to become a pitch-black shape that recedes into the greater black. Then he hears, “Watch out for the sheep, Coyote.”
68
A raven sits atop a stop sign at the near end of Encantada Cuesta Road with a piece of red carrion stringing down from both sides of its beak.
At the other end of the road, about a quarter mile or so, backed up to the shoreline of the Salton Sea, is a small, remote ranch with a chicken-coop roost in the remains of a wheel-less Dodge Caravan.
This is where Lena told Case Cyrus might do some chill time. It is a place Case knows he’s been a welcome guest, as she herself has. She also knows of more than one poor sot who lost his way among the prowlings and ended up buried beneath all the feed and droppings inside that roost.
South of Encantada Cuesta, the streets run east and west out from the Salton Sea through long miles of inclining sand between the towns of Niland and Calipatria.
This part of the California landscape is known as harsh and repellent. It is where blistered and cracked itinerants at the turn of the century went when they could find nowhere else to save themselves.
Here, homes are the shoddiest cinder block with false wood balustrades, or they are great open lots where a mobile home has been plopped down and a small garden pasted in that you have to water the shit out of to get a bare surface green. It is a slum really, but spread over vast squares of gravel and sand, so it doesn’t look like a slum from the hills beyond. A running joke has it that this is one of those places where even a bottle of beer goes flat just looking at it.
On the incline two blocks over from the clapboard mess of a ranch, Case finds a house that is partly burned and boarded up. It has a garage and a shed. These too are boarded up. The garage has a second-floor loft. The property is protected by a rusty hurricane fence. It’s for sale, but no one ever comes looking.
Case sneaks in and sets herself up in the loft. She breaks away a few vertical boards and battens under the eaves so she can sit and use binoculars to watch the Encantada ranch over the roofs of the houses between.
Case spends each foul day, each frightful night, in that unholy hot alcove with its festering dust and dead air. Weeks of bad-ass summer pass at over a hundred and ten degrees. She has only a radio. It is as if she were pitting her will against Cyrus, waiting for him to show. If he will at all.
The ranch is owned by an INS agent named Bill Mooney and his sister Carol. He’d helped Cyrus cross the border from Mexico with Gabi. They’d met up later with the sister, who was a sorceress of sorts. Before they’d headed back up through the Mojave, Cyrus had let Carol and Bill have their fifteen minutes with the child when she was blown out on smack. A real carpet-feeding, it was. After that, before they all split, Lena had overheard Cyrus and Carol talk about his using the place for a little chill time.
Inside her wooden catacomb the aridity and stink of the algae from the Salton Sea choke her lungs. The reeking cobwebbed wood ready at any time for
the dry burn. The uninsulated gabled roof a devastating oven. No matter how much water Case drinks, she can hardly keep her body fluids even close to being right. Scurrying from that cribbed coffin to vomit under the overhang of the shed roof beside the garage has become a recurring theme.
Over half the summer and not once has she ever been spotted by anyone passing. She lives on the money Bob wired to L.A. She bought a beat-around pickup she keeps parked two miles away in a supermarket lot. Once a week she sneaks out at night to go to a motel and shower. She buries her stool like a cat in the small walkway between shed and garage. She hangs in space silently when kids maraud the property, as they sometimes do. She speaks to no one. She watches the pathetic comings and goings at the ranch. And every time a vehicle trundles down that dusty talused road, she goes into red alert. But each time it’s nothing.
The summer becomes a black hole in her life. Lattice-lit days and skyless perishable nights. Sometimes she wakes to find the staring eyes of bats watching from broken joists and exposed rafters. Bedeviled creatures of black crepe cut horizontally with white lines of razored teeth and pink gums.
The radio drones on about that cauldron of insanity called the outside world: A jet downed off Long Island people claim was hit by a missile or a bomb. Possible life on Mars discovered. A new abortion pill, a new fight. The conviction of Polly Klaas’s killer, and his mad insult to the world claiming the child’s last words to him were that she had been molested by her father. But nothing at all about Cyrus.
She suffers through devastating loneliness. Thinks often of Bob and Gabi. Begins to replay conversations she and Bob had, adding to and subtracting from half-frozen moments. She realizes the inarticulate desperation of such folly. Feels life is sucking the marrow from her bones, turning her into something the wind could blow into potash.
Through blistering waves of heat Case watches airboat crews ski the glassy cloth surface of the Salton Sea, scooping up pelicans killed by the toxic pesticides and selenium that drain into this forty-five-mile-long sump. She watches poor children swim out past a garbage-slurried shoreline. It is one long continuous defilement of the laws of nature.