by Weston Ochse
“Jesus never had a rifle, Maricone,” Enrique said.
“If he’d had one, Judas would never have got the drop on him now would he?” Harry glared happily from Enrique to Ronnie and back.
“Watch your blasphemy.”
“You’re fucking crazy,” Ronnie said.
“Not as crazy as Enrique. His cousins are all MS 13 gangbangers and even they’re scared of him. You ain’t seen crazy until you seen Enrique mad.”
“And he’s on my side?”
“Enrique?”
“You do what you gotta do, puto and I’ll keep Harry from stopping you.”
Ronnie looked from the rifle-toting Salvadoran to Harry, his long lost kidnapper, and for the first time braved a smile. It was a small one, but it carved the fear from his features as surely as a knife.
“So where were we? Ah yes, the many ways to come to Jesus.” Harry dropped his voice to a whisper. “Isn’t it ironic that whenever we say there’s going to be a ‘Come to Jesus’ that it’s something bad? You’d think that people would look forward to the savior of the universe not be in fear of him.” He tapped his forehead. “Just something to think about.”
“I hear that,” Enrique said.
“So where was I?” Harry asked. He glanced down at his fingers and realized he’d lost count.
“You were talking about me cutting off your finger,” Ronnie said.
“That’s right. I was. Is that what you want? Is that what will do it for you?”
Ronnie seemed to think for a moment, then mumbled something unintelligible.
“What was that?” Harry asked.
“Not enough. I said that’s not enough.”
For the first time concern flashed through Harry’s eyes. But he recovered quickly. “So you want to go past the easy things. I understand. I put you through a lot of shit.”
Ronnie just stared at him. The opaque squares now seemed menacing.
“You could always stake me to the ground near an anthill. I hear the Indians used to rub honey over the bodies of their enemies and watch as they were eaten alive.”
Ronnie tilted his head as if contemplating the idea.
“But that would be too much, I think,” Harry said holding up a warning finger. “You can hurt me. You can do whatever you want to me, but you aren’t allowed to kill me.”
“So what then?”
“Tell him about Pancho Villa,” Enrique commanded from the dark.
The boy craned his head. “What about him?”
Harry shook his head and rolled his eyes. “Nothing really,” he said. Then in a stage whisper, “Want to keep that shit to yourself, puto?”
“What about Pancho Villa?” Ronnie asked.
Harry sighed. He pulled the light from under his armpit and walked back to the car. He opened the door, briefly flooding the night with light. A dinging sound brought an electronic surreality to the newly illuminated graveyard. Harry snapped on the headlights bathing the Cooper family grave plot and those next to it in Cadillac radiance.
“There. That’s better,” Harry said, slamming home the door. He returned to where he’d been standing and addressed Ronnie who stood just outside the farthest beam. “So you want to know about Pancho Villa. Truth be told, I think it all started with Zapata. You know all of them rode around here. Pancho Villa probably stood on this very point of land. This part of the world was famous with Pancho Villa, Black Jack Pershing, Emiliano Zapata and their kind, all stirring up a history that still hasn’t died down.
“But I think Villa is the most famous of them. The Mexicans loved him like we love Robin Hood, although I doubt the green spandex-suited archer and his merry men would ever have conceived of a torture that included urging a plant to grow up someone’s ass.
“So it starts with a Maguey plant, although I haven’t seen any around here.”
“There’s a few back in the pauper’s section,” Enrique offered.
“Thanks,” Harry said. “That detail helps a lot.” He glared at the ground for a long moment, before he resumed. “The story says that Villa would torture those who came and did harm to his people with this plant. Now the Maguey is a perfect plant. You can build homes from it. You can make clothes from it. You can eat it. Even tequila comes from it. Maguey is a type of agave, you see. It grows wild and can reach monstrous proportions. Well, what Villa and his crew used to do is strip some poor soul down to their Birthday suit and strap them to a wooden contraption over the plant. They’d pile stones on the body and poor water on the parched plant. These plants can grow six to ten inches a night and the combination of the weight of the stones and the stimulus of the plant with the water, made it so that man would intersect plant sometime around midnight after everyone was drunk. And if they’d aimed the victim right, the Maguey would grow right up his ass.”
Ronnie’s mouth had fallen open sometime during the telling. It seemed to take a while for it to close, but when it did, there was a new cast to the young man’s jaw. He swallowed, his prominent Adam’s apple diving in and back out.
“Does that sound like something you’d like?” Harry asked.
Ronnie shook his head.
Although Harry looked perceptibly pleased at the answer, he was becoming frustrated with the boy’s lack of commitment. “What then? Really, Ronnie, I don’t have all day.”
“The ear.”
“What’s that?” Harry asked.
“I said the ear,” Ronnie repeated.
“What about it?” Harry asked.
“I remember somewhere that it only takes seven or eight pounds of pressure for someone to rip off an ear.”
Harry felt the Sahara enter his mouth. He licked his lips, wondering from what dark and dreary corner of the boy’s mind this idea had sprung. Still, he’d made the vow. “I heard something like that, too,” Harry heard himself saying.
“If I was to take off an ear, you could always put it back on,” Ronnie mused.
Harry blinked. “I’m sure they could at a hospital...as long as I had the ear,” he added.
“I wouldn’t do anything with it. I’d just take it off.” The young man smiled grimly. “If that’s what I decided to do.”
Harry tried to see through the reflecting squares of Ronnie’s lenses, but he might as well have been trying to peer through a mirror with the success he had.
“Now wait a minute. You have got to stick with something, Ronnie. Name it and commit to it. We could be here all night going through the catalogue of things that could be done.” He shook his head. “I can’t believe I’m saying this, but you found a good one. It’s painful as hell, it’s totally disfiguring if I can’t sew it back on, and it’s something you can live with.”
Ronnie seemed to agree with the argument. He leaned against a gravestone and began to untie one of his shoes. After a minute, he rose with a black Converse high-top in his hand. He began to murmur as he pulled the lace free.
“What are you doing? What are you saying?” Harry asked. Then he glanced to the dark. “What is he saying, Enrique?”
“Math,” the Salvadoran replied.
“What?”
“He’s saying math.”
“How do you say math?” Harry shifted from one foot to the other. “What’s Enrique talking about, Ronnie? You mumbling math?”
“Physics actually,” Ronnie said. He dropped the shoe and slid his foot into it, fighting for balance. Then he held the string out in front of him with both hands. “Hooke’s general law of mechanics states that that stress is directly proportional to strain. Although Hooke’s paradigm referred to coiled springs, using the zero-length spring and a two-dimensional stress state instead of a three-dimensional stress state, I can figure the force necessary to remove your ear with a non-elastic linear object.”
“The string?”
“Exactly.”
“And Hook’s Law tells you how to do this?”
“If applied correctly.” Ronnie gestured towards a tombstone with a flattened top edge. “Lay across this,” h
e said.
Harry looked at it and felt his knees weaken. That Hooke was one nasty fucking physicist. He took a step forward and felt his resolve weaken. Was this how it felt? Was this what all of his victims felt when the inevitable was presented to them? It was as if karma were dancing spider fingers along his spine. He gulped and walked over to where Ronnie indicated.
“Now lay your chest over here and balance it. Yep. Face down just like that.”
Harry lay across the top of the tombstone, the rock cutting into his chest. He faced the ground but couldn’t see it. Ronnie began to tie wrap the shoe string around Harry’s left ear, then tie it off with a granny knot.
“That should do it,” Ronnie said.
Harry wanted to say something, but a fist of bile clogged his throat. His eyes watered as he fought to stay balanced. He struggled against the urge to run, not because he knew Enrique would bring him back, but because of the vow and what it meant to Harry.
“So I guess we count to three,” Ronnie said. He held each end of the string in each hand. His arms were out stretched and his knees were flexed. “One... two... three!”
Ronnie swung his arms down and threw his weight to the ground.
Harry screamed and flew ass over head, landing with his back on the ground. His ear burned as white stupendous pain shot through his neck and head. He reached up and felt for it and was surprised to find it still attached. The pain had begun to die down and he felt himself breathe.
“Damn. I don’t know what happened,” Ronnie said.
“What?”
“I guess I better try it again?”
“Try it again?”
“Of course. I didn’t do it right the first time.”
“But—“
“You told me to be committed, Harry and now I’m committed. Get up and bend over the grave. I promise I’ll get it right this time.”
Harry crawled to his knees and found his feet. He stood shakily and made his way back to the tombstone. He wished it was over with. Having to do it again was worse than the first time. Now he knew how badly it was going to hurt, and worse if he did it right.
But he bent over the grave in the same position and allowed the boy to count one more time. Harry thought he’d puke when the boy got to three, and then he was flying through the air again. The pain was once again cataclysmic, Armageddon rainbows of pain firing through his head. But in the end, his ear was still attached.
He rolled over and clawed his way to his knees.
“What the fuck, Ronnie?”
Ronnie leaned against the tombstone and tapped his front tooth with his forefinger. “I don’t get it. My equation is just right. What could it be?”
It was then that Harry noticed the playful lilt to the boy’s rhetorical question. What could it be my ass, thought Harry. The boy knew. This was all part of his game. At that point, Harry almost smiled.
And they tried it again with the same result.
And this time Harry did puke...from pain and fear and giddiness.
“Aha!” Ronnie said finally. “It’s my fulcrum!”
“Your what?”
“Fulcrum. Your chest is all wrong.”
Harry felt himself being helped to his feet and led back to the tombstone.
“Here, let me have your jacket,” Ronnie said.
Harry struggled out of his lightweight denim jacket and passed it to Ronnie. The young man took it and folded it several times until it presented a square.
“Here, hold this against your head,” Ronnie said.
Then he led Harry down so that his forehead was resting on the square of denim which was balanced on the top of the tombstone. Had he not the fabric as a pillow, his head would be roughly scraped by the stone. Harry couldn’t help but appreciate the thoughtfulness of the gesture.
“There. Now I have it right,” Ronnie said. “Hold still. This might hurt a bit, champ,” Ronnie whispered.
Harry remembered hearing those words somewhere before. Then he remembered. He’d said them to the boy just as he’d snipped off the pinkie.
Then Ronnie fell before him.
Harry felt a great tug from the side of his head followed by so much pain as to fill the vacuum of space and time and the entirety of history. Harry screamed something that came from his toes, bile and spittle shooting free as he gasped and sobbed and created a new agony-based language.
Then he felt a cold icy warmth as the blood began to gush.
Ronnie stood, holding Harry’s ear on the end of the string. He swung it several times like a pocket watch then let it fall to the ground.
“Better stop the bleeding, Champ, or it’s going to be worse than it has to be.”
Harry swooned as he remembered that he’d said those very same words to the kid as well. Ronnie had a good memory. Even better, he had the killer instinct. Harry had made the boy into his image and he wasn’t so far off.
Harry somehow managed to get to his feet. He used his jacket to sop the blood as he pressed it against the hole in the side of his head. He picked up the ear and pushed it into his mouth. He gagged for a moment but he’d heard this done once before. He had to keep the ear moist. If it dried out, it would be no good. His body heat and saliva would help in the short term.
“So long, Champ,” the boy said from the dark.
Harry waved blindly and got into his car. It took him a moment to figure out how to work it through the pain, then he shoved it into reverse, took out a couple of stones with the rear bumper, and then shifted into drive. Soon he was roaring like hell’s fury straight to Lordsburg Hospital which was no more than ten miles away.
As the lights of the city came into view, with the frogs wailing in the night, Harry allowed himself the reminder that there were six more phones to be answered, which meant six more come to Jesus meetings. He wondered what he’d look like when it was all said and done. He wondered if he was even making a difference.
***
Story Notes: The geography of this story is where I live now in Arizona. After writing a lot of stories about L.A. and the South, I wanted to begin writing some located here. After I read The Straw Men and The Intruders by Michael Marshall I was intrigued by the idea that there can be something going on in a story like that akin to Clive Barker’s The Great and Secret Show. Almost as if the crime thriller had become an epic crime thriller. I decided to take that idea on a small scale and create a person whose job it was to create sociopaths and serial killers. Then I wondered how is it that someone would go about doing such a thing? This unabashedly violent piece of crime fiction is my answer to that.
NOW SHOWING ON SCREEN 9
Low Men Weeping
Starring homeless heroes Homer and Hemingway
“Totally destroys the idea of randomness in the world.”
–L.A. Times Weekender
Filmed in High Definition
Only when the morning winds shift landward and the sun rises above the marine layer to beat down upon a city prismed by smog and the neon aftermath of another Los Angeles night, do the Low Men emerge to journey across the land. Not the smirking revenants of the evening, nor the drifters waiting for an easy mark, nor the beggars shouting Jesus Saves to whomever will take a moment to listen, but the Low Men — those contemptible few who tread a higher path, balancing salvation and redemption with the cruelty of necessity as they divine the trajectory of our lives.
***
The flat face of the trashcan lid ate the man's smile in a bright detonation of blood and mucous. He crashed into the side of the wall, then fell in a heap. Three other men and a woman ignored the fallen man as they scrambled to find a better position. The hunger in their eyes supplanted any kinship as they gauged how best to defend, how best to attack.
Hemingway twisted the lid just in time to block a thrown bottle meant for Homer's head, shifting to protect his blind friend behind him. Homer placed his hand in the middle of the larger man's back to keep track of where Hemingway moved.
Suddenly the woman
lunged forward, the tip of a broken umbrella slicing millimeters away from Hemingway's abdomen. He kicked out. The woman slinked out of his reach, then lunged back like a dog. She picked up another bottle from the alley floor as one of the men decided that he'd had enough. He turned and ran, his soiled raincoat flapping behind him.
"Stay behind me, dammit!" Hemingway screamed, as he backed down the alley several feet, fearful for his best friend's safety.
Try staying behind someone you can't see, came the thoughts of the blind man.
"Then grab hold."
You say it ruins your timing.
"We won't have any timing with you dead."
The remaining three came at once. Hemingway spun, his taller frame shielding his smaller friend. "Which one is he?"
They're moving too quickly. I can't get a fix.
One of the men rushed Hemingway with a length of rebar, the dark metal easily capable of smashing his head or skewering him to the spine. Three steps and the man swung the metal in a sideways arc.
"Oh Hell," cried Hemingway, pushing Homer roughly to the ground. The larger man then sidestepped away from the blow, catching the length of metal under his arm as the energy of the swing dissipated. He growled at the pain of the impact, grasped the ridged rebar rod with his hand, and ripped the metal free from the grip of his attacker.
"Give it up and we'll let you go," snarled the woman. She might have been beautiful once, but meth had been an unforgiving mate.
Tell her we don't have anything.
"We don't have anything," replied Hemingway.
"You have more than me," she hissed, then launched herself at Hemingway.
Holding the trashcan lid with one hand and the rebar in the other, he felt like a knight from the days of old. He caught her in the side of the head with the lid. She gasped as her eyes rolled skyward. She tried to grab the trashcan lid as her balance deserted her. He swept her feet out from under her with the rebar. When she hit the ground, her head bounced twice. Her sneer slipped away with her consciousness.
Now there were only two left.
"Which one?" asked Hemingway.
The one on the left.