by Boston Teran
Peeking out a broken portal of boards, she watches the final lunar eclipse of the millennium. She finds herself crying sometimes. Sounds she only allows from herself in the night. She buries her face in a shirt that once belonged to Bob, muffling her sobs so no living thing might hear. It is like trying to outlive the heroin times.
Then, one night, in the perfect calm of Indian summer, a battered and gray-primered minivan does a casual crawl down Encantada Cuesta. The evening is dun-colored as the minivan pulls around into the front yard. Only a short walk separates the passenger door from the front porch, and Case wiggles upward with her binoculars, pulling out extra slats, ripping them away so she can clear the roofs enough to cover that square shelf of steps leading up into the house.
There is little margin for error. Her breathing stops so as not to shake the binoculars. For a half beat beneath the solitary lamp a figure hauntingly leans out of the shadows to hug Carol Mooney …
Case can feel her blood make the rounds.
• • •
Case plans against a skull-colored moon, pacing starlight from meridian to meridian. She sees Cyrus’s face once, just once, a moving shape behind a window fan that turns silently against blades of brief light. Her plan is set, except for one detail: when. It should be during the week, when Bill Mooney is off at the border working his INS job. That will leave only Cyrus and Carol to kill. But give the leopard time to cool his spots and sleep the sleep of the dead. In the corner of her room she sits cross-legged, waiting for nightfall of the third day. She watches the sun set through a hole of broken boards. The single eye of a thousand years hypnotically centered on one instant of pure time. Then, when it’s the witching hour, the atavistic urgency to begin the deadly crawl comes upon her. She looks down at the snake on her arm, Ourabouris. She remembers the day she had that arted in the desert, the day she began to plan her freedom, and she whispers to herself, to Bob, to Gabi, to her gun, “It’s dyin’ time.”
Cyrus’s eyes open into darkness. He listens intently. Somewhere a mobile’s plaintive chanting of bones and glass and clay dance on a string of night air. The kick of an engine winds out on some distant road. A fragment of garbaged tide crests.
He rises, naked. His lean and hungry frame is white against dark corridors. Through the space of a bedroom door he sees Carol lying on her side, asleep.
He continues down the hall, stretching like a great cat. He enters the head. In the dark, his piss rings the water. An arcing stream that suddenly locks tight when a gun barrel lips his neck.
“Relax,” Case whispers. She tantalizes his hair with the gun. “Relax. Finish up.”
He lets go, finishes pissing.
“I’m gonna step back now,” she says, “so step back with me.” He does as he is told. “Alright, I’m gonna turn, so you turn with me.”
She gets him turned and headed up the hall. She sees his head drift slightly toward Carol’s room. “Forget it,” she says. She holds a knife up against the shadows. In her gloved hand he sees the pale silver blade discolored.
She forces him up the hall to the living room. She gets him down into a musty easy chair with a high-flanged back. She turns a table lamp on beside him. She stands away with her arm outstretched and the gun doing a hard line at the side of his head.
The light is dim and harsh. It is only their faces now, cast beyond the open space of the gun.
“Why all the fuckin’ drama, girl? Why not just do me when I’m pissing?”
“Because,” she says viciously, “I like to watch. You know that.”
He eyes her like she is garbage. “We’re in the heart of the true country. So come on, field hand. Send me home.”
She leans in just enough so he can feel the metal press like a boot heel against his temple.
“You left a long bloody dance behind you.”
He sits there staring at her like some contemptible deity carved from the white marrow of his victims.
“The Left-Handed Path awaits us all.”
“Fuck you,” she says.
“You’re just a shadow I’ll leave behind. A footnote to the cults to come.”
The boned-down essence of their lives comes into play.
“Why don’t you do me? Why? I know. You want to see if the cock’s got feet of clay. Right? You got a field-hand mentality. The prince-must-fall shit. Not happening, coolie. Go back to your fuckin’ junkie dreams, Headcase.”
His eyes move on in the slow pursuit of her courage. “Say it. You want it. It’s the new juice you need for your arms. Right? My weakness becomes something you can build on. A little piece of power you chipped away. Like some New Age stone you hang around your neck to ward away evil spirits. Bullshit! It’s a way for you to cop out on your blame. ’Cause remember, cunt, you helped put me here. You’re a coolie. From your fuckin’ head down to your clit. And if you expect me to go down, forget it. I’m not like those sheep whose whore you are. I don’t pretend to be. I am my freedom. I wear it. Look into my face. Go on. See it for yourself.”
Suddenly there is a maddening quiescence to him. A hoary, ageless wisdom.
“You have nothing,” he says. “You are nothing. There is nothing inside you, girl. And you know that. You are trying to buy yourself back with one bullet. You are just a hole the world shits through.”
She lines the muzzle to its mark.
“You’re crossing over,” she says. “And a part of me is going with you.”
Within that cavernous heap of years all the blue and stale and vitriolic imprisonments of her own making and the liquid river from the hidden spring of her unconscious form one surge down through the sinew of an arm.
The thunderbolts on his cheeks spear. His face tightens. A howling masterpiece starts to draw inward, like a building breathing with fire before it goes. Where the steel and stone seem to collapse into the sucking whale of heat that devours it.
Hannah watched a flock of great birds against the sky. Silver outlines shaped like arrowheads making their way. She sat drinking beer, with her bare feet up. Roasting naked in the sunlight to mark her time.
She looked out past the dunes, where the ground whispered about every death that haunted it. Gossip of the slain, poking fun at the fast-moving cars they heard whizzing by with all their tales of what would be.
She knew the boy was full of trouble. That his personal tragedy did not equal his degeneracy. That he resisted the line between explanation and excuse. No matter. She would let him absorb what he would.
She took a handful of sand. Looked it over. Then she laughed like a half-drunk raven.
Cyrus watched her. He despised her aphoristic meanderings. He despised them, but he didn’t know why.
Case leans down and whispers into that salt lick of wet bones that once was Cyrus, “Ourabouris.”
THE FOOL
69
For Bob, the passing summer is an absolute merge of disturbing episodes and despairing isolation. He must wade through his personal life, becoming the gristmill for five-minute blurbs and hard-copy snippets. He must watch Maureen and Arthur, via the news, work the tragedy with stoic sincerity and grace. There is a resurgence of interest in the Via Princessa murders. It is not only a showcase for photographers but for new editorials flowing back and forth, rag versus counterrag, claiming the ranch house as the ultimate symbol for the coming war between Christian good and pagan evil. And nothing less than the laws and morals of a nation hang in the balance.
All this becomes a trying absurdity as Bob sets about the act of restoring his daughter’s life. They must get through marauding nightmares and the horrible internal assault of her waking hours. He is both father and mother now, and he must reassess his view of the world.
He takes Gabi to therapy. They spend hours trying to talk through the madness. He tries to concentrate on the wounded simplicities of life: love, tenderness, need, resonant human contact. He finds the ordained world of the predawn light the time he is most connected to life.
He watches
the sun and wonders about Case. He tries to imagine where she is.
Sometimes the destruction of what they’ve been through overwhelms him, and he picks a spot to hide and just cry. Sometimes Gabi finds him, and he is no longer father and mother but just a casualty in the deep pit of a black ordeal pouring out his grief to a womanchild.
Even Gabi talks about Case. She sometimes remarks to her father that there are things it would be easier to speak of with her. Things Case would understand better and know how to deal with.
There is carnage in his soul that he cannot pretend won’t always be there. He feels it every time Maureen and Arthur stop by and he must rough his way through it. Or when he leaves his house to find someone grabbing a snapshot of his house or him or Gabi. When he stands naked in the bathroom and looks at the scar on his neck and chest, and the Ferryman’s unfinished mural across his shoulder. He wonders now about the last throw of the coins he never took. What it might have said. And, finally, at the small mark on his cheek Case inked there.
He is asked to come back to work at the Sheriff’s Department. But he is also reminded, in the politest manner, that facial tattoos are outside departmental regulations. He is requested to have it removed. He resigns instead.
He reads in an editorial a statement that he underlines and cuts out and places on the wall above his desk along with a collage of others that have preoccupied his thoughts since coming home: “Modern man is the singular entity that seems to shrink before anything that has any meaning.”
He wonders on which side of this thought he falls. Has he failed by letting it all pass, by letting lies become part of the living truth? And then he sees these thoughts for what they are—blame.
It comes to him that this is no different than the night Gabi shuffled into his room, crying desperately, and asked him if what had happened up on Via Princessa had in some way been her fault. Had she acted more quickly when she thought she saw something in the hills, or had she not left the glass patio doors open (and she’s not even sure she had), could this devastation have been avoided? As he listened to his child blame herself, it seemed as if the nightmare had caused the one who dreamed it.
Bob held her through the whimpering aftershocks of that trauma and tried to convince her that she was not to blame.
He walks alone with these thoughts on the night of the last lunar eclipse of the millennium. Walks the same field where he and Case talked, swigging from a pint bottle of tequila.
It has become a second home to him, this patch of scrub. He drinks and paces. Blame will not devour him. The truth will not devour him. The insane mechanics of the world will not devour him.
There are now bitter ironies everywhere. Arthur is rebaptized in the stone font of the church he has helped build, soon after its first Sunday mass. When John Lee’s car is discovered in a wash up Dove Springs Canyon Road, the police find it yields no clues to his death or whereabouts. Maureen establishes an organization for the victimized children of crime. As the months pass, Arthur and Maureen’s attitude toward Gabi becomes nervous and robotic, as if the sight of her brings home the sickening reality of who they are. Their visits soon become short and perfunctory.
The dark star attached to Bob may never go away, but he won’t kick it off, either. Not after what he’s paid for it. He wanders back and up the scrabbled hillside, looking into the black-green earth. The same faith that carried him out of that fuckin’ tract with an ex-junkie to find his stolen daughter is the same faith that carried him back home and carries him now. It is just colored differently. He squats and holds a clump of damp earth in his hands.
One night, Bob’s eyes open into darkness. There is knocking at the front door and he sees a Sheriff’s Department car in the driveway. At first he is afraid to answer, afraid that it will be bad news about Case.
• • •
By dawn he is pulling through a police barricade at the near end of Encantada Cuesta. He drives down that road strangled with apprehensions. He pulls into the yard. The forensic boys are there, Homicide, too. No coroner’s van, not yet.
He takes out his dated Sheriff’s Department ID tag and shows it to the sergeant in charge. “I’m looking for Lieutenant Anderson,” says Bob. “He called me last night about a murder and …”
Bob notices something register in the sergeant’s eyes as he scans the ID. An intrigued reshaping of the eyebrows is followed by “You the guy from Antelope Valley, right? The guy who went after his daughter?”
“Yes.”
“Shit … Good fuckin’ shootin’, man.”
Lieutenant Anderson is tall, gaunt. He wears a brown suit. It’s as plain as his plain pale face. He’s not yet thirty, but he walks stoop-shouldered beside Bob as he leads him up the porch and into the house.
“It’s a shame,” says Lieutenant Anderson, “what happened to that captain in your department. Disappearing like that.”
“Yes, it’s a shame,” says Bob.
“I’ll bet it was the son of a bitch in here that got him.”
“Yes,” says Bob, as if a curse were falling about him. “You’re probably right.”
“The woman who owned this place was also killed. Knife across the throat. From the way she was lying in there, I doubt she ever knew what got her. Her brother is an INS agent. He was working last night, but he seems to have disappeared since we notified him of the murder.”
The entrance to the house from the porch takes them through the kitchen. It’s a run-down affair. Cracked blue tiles and patchy white wood.
“Well, anyway, we got this weird call,” says the lieutenant, “from a woman who said to come on out to this address. That there’d been a murder. Then she gave us your name and said you could identify the man as the one who kidnapped your daughter.”
From the kitchen, through the dining room, Bob follows the lieutenant. There are double rows of potted plants along the walls and vines that grow up around the window frames. The place reeks of tobacco and incense, and in each corner stands a huge floor urn bizarrely designed and painted.
“The woman actually called from here. Can you believe it?”
Bob feels a prefiguration of knots inside his stomach as they pass along the edge of the dining-room wall to where the living room starts to open out and he can see a crew dusting for prints and doing up their photos.
He clears into the open room, lit by a triptych of window squares, and stops dead in his tracks.
The hunt is over.
Cyrus sits in the battered chair where Case shot him. Pinned to his chest is a card: the final enigma of the Tarot. The Fool. Cyrus’s head is tilted to one side as if some invisible friend were leaning down and whispering to him a secret. His eyes, what is left of them, are open. The right side of his head is a blown-out street lamp. A mass of mucousy brain matter dries sickly gray, the blood a simple brown.
The stark reality is nothing Bob would expect of stark reality. It is quiet and simple. He steps closer. A box fan windmills somewhere behind him. He looks over what was once the man. There is nothing expressed in the eyes or the face. There is not that one moment of implied disintegration he wanted to see in the drama of his enemy.
“Is that the man?” asks Lieutenant Anderson.
Bob does not answer. He is living out a horrific pleasure in seeing the bastard cut down and grouted. A sheer merciless adrenaline rush of black, righteous poison at this fierce bloodletting. Yet Bob’s face is as calm as the lieutenant’s.
“Yes,” says Bob. “This was the man.”
“The woman. The one who called. Do you have any idea who she was?”
She’d done it, Bob thinks to himself. She committed the ultimate sacrifice. Offered herself up as murderess.
“Mr. Hightower. Do you know who the lady was?”
He still does not answer. He looks at the card pinned to Cyrus’s chest. Remembers that night in Case’s apartment when they first talked of the murder on Via Princessa. He tries to imagine how it all went down in this room. Those last moments
.
“Mr. Hightower. The woman gave us your name and number. Do you have any idea why?”
“I don’t know what’s in people’s minds,” he says, without looking at the lieutenant. “Not after what I’ve seen.”
“And you have no idea who the woman is?”
“An idea? No.”
“The woman who helped you find your daughter …”
“Yes, what about her?”
“Do you think she could have been involved with this in any way?”
Bob takes a long moment. “She is long since gone, I’m afraid.”
Lieutenant Anderson eyes him skeptically.
“And you have no idea who might have killed him?”
“Yes,” says Bob. “I do. The woman even told you.”
The lieutenant’s long angular face pouches up. “I don’t understand.”
Bob sticks his jaw out toward the wall beyond the chair. “You’ve seen for yourself.”
The lieutenant glances at the wall where the light from the windows reaches up in three perfectly formed blocks of empty space. Written there in Cyrus’s blood, across the flaking white, the words GOD IS A BULLET.
“Are you screwing with me, Hightower?” asks the lieutenant.
Bob stares at the bloody aphorism on the wall. He thinks back to the night in Hinkley when he and Case sat talking in that seedy, dark barbecue hole while in her hand she held a Hornaday bullet and gave him two minutes of hard philosophy on what held ultimate power in this, our heartfelt world.
The lieutenant asks again, “Are you screwing with me?”
Maybe she was right, Bob thinks. Maybe the world does work cleaner her way. Better. Maybe the world works her way period. Maybe God is only a bullet. Maybe the ultimate parable is carried inside a cartridge with a gliding metal jacket and grooved points.
Of course, she could be playing a bit of coyote herself. Making the murder look like a cult killing, so the keepers will hunt through that wretched wasteland of crude desert for some aberration, for some Cyrus in the making. Maybe she is clever enough to be covering her trail. Or maybe she’s just leaving it all open to speculation. Maybe …