Gun Work

by David J. Schow

  The puppet moved toward him with a disjointed gait, as though inexpertly manipulated, its feet several inches from the ground.

  “Ah, amigo,” it said.

  It was not a marionette, but a man. A small, wizened man whose face was a map of desert sun-wrinkles, who smiled with gapped teeth that nonetheless lit up his mahogany countenance. An older man in the back third of a life that looked as if it had been equally rich in regret and joy.

  “You are back with us,” the man said. “The saints, if there are such things, love you.”

  Yeah, that idea was a laff riot.

  Barney struggled to say who, to ask where.

  “Shh, tranquilo,” said the man. “I am Jorge Estrada Gutierrez Maria Conejo Juan Sanchez Valasquez de los Piedras. I am called Mano.” He held up his hand, of which he possessed only one. “Solamente un mano,” he said by way of illumination.

  “‘Of the stones?’” said Barney.

  “Si, ‘de los piedras,’” he said. “My calling. I find the rocks. Agates, much opal... what do you call them, geodes? All kinds of rocks.”

  “Rockhound.”

  “I think I have heard that word...” His brows knit, pondering the meaning.

  “Miner?”

  “No.” Mano worked his tongue over his teeth, searching for a descriptive in the way one might speak to a child. “Pretty rocks.”

  “Gems, jewelry?” Forming words seemed a new challenge to Barney. They tasted rather good.

  “Yes, al veces. I dug up the diamond my son gave his esposa for their wedding. Some silver, some onyx, some... how is it called? Apache tear. El ojo de tigre. Yes. Here. Bebes. You must drink.”

  He offered a tin cup containing tea, strong, bitter, laced with herbs. Later he would alternate this with fruit juice and plenty of water. Swallowing, for Barney, had become a newly learned behavior. Mano patiently guided him through it.

  “My second son’s second wedding anniversary,” said Mano. “That is where we found you, on the bank of the Arroyo de la Llorona, where there used to be very good fishing. The fish, they have since died or gone elsewhere; the water is veneno, tosigo...”

  “Poison.”

  “The Arroyo feeds from many sources before it changes —” Mano dovetailed his hands, or hand and stump “— to the Rio Bramante, and seeks the sea. You were put in the Arroyo somewhere to the north, and — buena suerte — found your way to us.”

  “El accidente,” said Barney.

  “But for your wounds I would believe you,” Mano said sternly, like a parent. “Four bullets in you. Two remain. Los dedos...” Mano held up his only index finger and wiggled it.

  It was pointless to lie. “A very bad man took them.”

  Mano nodded. “Took them, then gave them back to you. I would not wish to meet such a man.”

  “What do you mean, he gave them back?”

  Mano seemed to be having trouble, chewing on how to properly express what he knew. “In your body,” he finally said. “You passed them en clínica.”

  Sucio had forced Barney to swallow his own severed fingers.

  Barney lost his grip on reality, and sailed down to embrace the blackness once more.

  Broth, now, stronger. Barney felt it flow into him.

  “When was I in the hospital? The clínica?”

  Night, now, cooler, with cicadas razzing outside.

  “Doctor Mendez says you are dead, then you are alive, then dead, and alive again. He wishes for city doctors, big equipamiento, but he is a very good and kind man. He fix your cuts, help your hands.”

  Barney’s mutilations were anonymous in a fat swaddle of bandages.

  “How long?”

  Mano calculated. “Dos semanas, minimo.” Two weeks at least. “My son’s wife, she prays for you every night.”

  No doubt to choke off the morbid idea that Barney’s appearance, floating right into the middle of her anniversary celebration, might be a bad omen. Los Catolicos were superstitious that way.

  “It was her, Soleil, who insisted the priest give you last rites. I said no, you are not yet a dead man. But she insisted.”

  So much for the grim specter in the clerical collar.

  Mano held several vials of pills. “These, says the doctor, are for infection. These, for fever. These, for... something else. They say when to take them. You must take some now, yes?”

  “Yes. More water, please — mas agua, por favor.”

  “You speak the Spanish.”

  Barney would have held thumb and forefinger an inch apart; would have said un poquito, muy mal, but he no longer had forefingers. Sucio had jammed them down his gullet and probably suffocated him until he gulped. What was left eventually emerged from his colon. Mano had seen them, perhaps salvaged them. Barney did not want to see them (at least not right this moment) and did not know if he even had the heart left to ask after their fate, just in case some nurse had flushed them down a toilet.

  One of the pills was obviously for pain, which Barney determined by squinting at the labels. His guts felt bulldozed and his body felt hotly gravid with infection. He knew he was in the midst of biologically processing an unknown smorgasbord of organic contaminants. His neck and throat burned, his injuries restricted his movements, and it felt like a toothache had nested in his right eye.

  “Why are you doing all this?” he asked Mano.

  Mano just smiled as Barney drifted away.

  Projectile vomiting in the middle of the next night. The soles of his feet felt aflame or peeled by acid. Blurred vision. Phantom pain from his hands. The bullet wounds radiating heat, swollen, growing ripe.

  Mano held the puke bucket, wrapped Barney’s feet in aloe, administered eyedrops from Dr. Mendez, re-bandaged his ruined hands, drained and dressed the gunshot wounds.

  It took Barney more than a week to work his stamina up to handling solid food.

  I was dead once, Mojica had said. They killed my ass. And I’m still here.

  The unseen clock kept ticking. Barney was always aware of it, but the passage of linear time remained a befuddlement, clouded by shifting tempo and sudden reversals. He imagined (or dreamt he could see through his closed eyelids) the second Bleeding Room, obviously a minimalist ward in some rural medical facility. No beeping machines, very basic — IV stands, worn but clean linens, and a broad toadlike man (Dr. Mendez?) leaning close, his wide, thick-lipped face speaking with no audio. He looked stern but kind. He gingerly lifted one of Barney’s mangled hands. Barney saw in great detail what would later be described as a crude transverse cut of the proximal phalange above the metacarpophalangeal joint, or halfway between the base knuckle and first finger knuckle.

  His trigger finger, gone. He had swallowed it.

  Barney could not feel a thing as Dr. Mendez disinfected a small row of sutures on the finger stump, where dying flesh had been trimmed and closed over the protruding stub of bone.

  Sucio could have taken his thumbs, or both his hands, to incapacitate Barney more hideously. There was a sinister motive in his choice, a perverse editorialization. He could have applied his cutters to the penis or testicles, the eyelids, the tongue. Instead, he had unmanned Barney in a way that would do the most damage on the inside; obliterating Barney’s carefully guarded sense of self, the identity that even Mojica had perceived — Barney was el hombre de las armas no more.

  Mano was the proprietor of a modest gem and mineral shop in the district of Xochimilco, once on the outskirts of Mexico City but now incorporated into its urban sprawl. Many of his repeat customers were Mexican wrestlers of considerable fame and standing in the Lucha Libre community, patrons of an adjacent shop where a retired grappler named Tigre Loco designed and manufactured masks, costumes and a few props for the wildly popular bouts held at Arena Coliseo and other venues. The luchadors spread the word, and their more well-heeled friends sought out Mano for handcrafted jewelry, hammered silver and uniquely designed mounts for his meticulously cut and polished stones.

  For most of the years o
f his life, Mano had grimly watched the fashion of kidnapping wax and corrupt Mexico like a metastasizing cancer. He had been robbed at gunpoint seventeen separate times (successfully and unsuccessfully), mugged on the street, and randomly assaulted by the cocky, the desperate and the drug-addicted. But these miscreants were few when balanced against the average Mexican citizen, so Mano remained in business, conceding to grated windows, iron doors, alarms.

  One abortive robbery attempt was rendered almost hilarious when three punks entered Mano’s emporium with one malfunctioning Saturday Night Special among them, and proceeded to yell threats because they’d seen too many movies. Next door in Tigre’s were no fewer than seven wrestlers who heard the commotion, bracketed Mano’s store from front and rear, and proceeded to pummel the fluid out of the trio of would-be highwaymen. This was neither fake brawl nor stunt show, and the kids were all hospitalized with a wealth of broken noses, lost teeth, splintered bones, concussions and dislocations. Typically, the wrestlers were hailed as local superheroes and no lawsuits materialized. This was not the United States.

  Mano settled into his role as Barney’s caretaker, relating such stories as these in a calm monotone as though telling tales around a campfire. The kind of stories a friend tells a friend as a matter of course. His daughter-in-law continued her prayers and vigils for Barney’s recovery.

  When Barney mentioned the ghostly woman’s voice he had heard while in the river, Mano told him three different versions of the La Llorona myth, after which the tributary had been named.

  It was a fundamental parable in Mexican culture, percolating through many iterations throughout all of Latin America and the southwestern United States. The Weeping Woman, the Crying Woman, or the Woman in White was the ghost of a mother forced to murder her children, nearly always by drowning them in a waterway. The stories varied as to her motivation, but her curse was to haunt riverbanks, calling out in a mournful voice in an attempt to re-locate her lost little ones.

  In one version of the story, Mano said that La Llorona was a woman named María, the “secret wife” of a man who jilts her for his higher-profile legitimate spouse. Enraged, she drowns their children and later kills herself in grief. In Heaven, God asks her where her children are. She does not know. In typical punitive pique, God condemns her to walk the earth in search of them, making the legend a cautionary boogeyman fable, since La Llorona might drown your wandering kids to replenish her family.

  In a more tragic vein, La Llorona is said to have drowned her children to spare them from starving to death, or to preempt their death in an oncoming flood sure to kill them. In sorrow, she searches eternally to get them back.

  More lurid versions of the legend have La Llorona stabbing her children to death and confronting their father in a blood-soaked nightgown; drowning bastards she bore as a prostitute, or killing her husband, then committing suicide out of remorse. Her manifestations — for anyone unfortunate enough to actually see her, sufficient grounds to mark the witness for death — included her in a flowing all-white or all-black gown, sometimes skeletal or with swirling black pits for eyes. One version has an ever-tetchy God sending her back to Earth with the head of a horse. Her signature wailing cry is sometimes said to be heard only by those about to die themselves.

  “I heard her speak,” Barney said. “She said, ‘Drink from my breast, for I am your mother.’ “

  “Impossible,” said Mano, his weathered visage dispensing an avuncular tolerance. “It is a myth, a legend. Not a real thing. You rest, now.”

  “Mano,” Barney said some days later. “Do you have a gun?”

  But Mano was not in the room. Barney realized he had been rehearsing aloud, trying to keep the question in his mind so he could sound less like a lunatic when the little man reappeared. He said it over and over, so he would not lose track.

  The extent of Barney’s exercise in the better part of a month was limited to a half-situp in bed, which generally cramped his stomach something awful, and trips to the bathroom, reliant on Mano for mobility. Today Barney was alone in the house while Mano tended his business, or had possibly gone on an expedition to dig up new stones for cutting and polishing. Until recently, one of his sons or their wives drew babysitting duty, but none of them spoke a lick of English, and when Barney tried to communicate in his pidgin Spanish, it was usually hopeless, reducing them all to grunts, gestures and grade-school monosyllables.

  He got the feeling that Mano’s family (none of whom lived with him, and that in itself was unusual for Mexico) did not approve of this half-dead gringo guest. They were all kind, but saw to Barney’s needs with a palpable air of burden. Barney guessed that the La Llorona anecdote had leaked. Being Catholic, they would race to distance themselves from the marked man; get thee behind me, Barney! Being Mano’s children, they would diddle rosaries and perhaps even go as far as to light a votive in church for the stranger, but as far as they were concerned, he was an agent of darkness sideswiping the familia. Barney noticed for the first time the absence of dogma-specific rickrack in Mano’s home. It could be that the vague rift he sensed between Mano and the rest of his brood had to do with his indifference to their faith. The few things Mano had mentioned about his late wife indicated that her death coincided with the point at which he and God had parted company.

  Mano was a much rarer commodity, a religious man unencumbered by religious beliefs. What he cherished was abundantly on display: his stones, rescued from riverbeds and caliche, lovingly turned and polished, doing quiet honor to the very planet from which they all had sprung.

  Barney’s first attempt to navigate toward the door of his little sickroom was either a catastrophe or a comedy skit.

  It took him nearly ten minutes to upright himself in the bed. Every muscle in his arms felt sprung and dysfunctional, corroded by toxins into rusty obsolescence. His inner ear’s balance system fouled him up when he tried to stand. He managed two clomping, Frankensteinian steps and then took a header as the room swam out of focus around him. He destroyed a spool table he tried to clutch on the way down to the floor, and lay boneless in the debris like an infant awaiting a diaper change. With a drunken sense of mission he used his teeth to shred the bandages from one hand and stared blankly at his truncated forefinger. The stump was lumpy and awkward; not a human tool any more. It would offend anyone who saw it.

  Worse, the big, bloody Q-Tips at the ends of his arms made it futile when it came to cleaning or feeding himself. He was entirely dependent on Mano’s good graces, and he hated himself for feeling beholden.

  Worse still, when Mano returned, the old man acted like it was all no big deal, calmly righting Barney and cleaning up the mess. Mano actually liked this lost soul, for absolutely no reason Barney could see. Perhaps Barney had become a project. Perhaps Mano got some unspecified satisfaction he could not reap from his many relatives. Perhaps he was a genuine samaritan, although Barney’s experience admitted no such largesse, dismissing it as a weakness. Barney’s life had largely coalesced around compensating for the weaknesses of others; doing the jobs others could not bring themselves to do. Being taken care of was new to him, and slightly scary. Uncharted terrain. It disrupted all Barney thought he knew about human nature.

  He wondered what he could do for the old man in return, if he regained the capability to do anything, ever again.

  “Mano, do you have a gun?”

  “A gonn?” He said it like cone.

  “A firearm. Sidearm. Pistol. La pistola.”

  Mano produced the rickety shooting iron used during the spectacularly misconceived attempt to rob his store. Barney examined it gently with one unbandaged, three-fingered hand.

  It was a short-barreled, seven-shot .32 caliber Omega revolver with two bullets still asleep in the cylinder and nodes of rust on the trigger. The top left side featured a stamp of Mercury or some other Roman god. It was a fifty-buck junk gun, a real Ring of Fire special, as likely to explode in your hand as drop the hammer shy of the primer. A lot of crap similar t
o it had floated through the shooting range’s repair and sales department even though such safety-last weapons had been illegal in California since the Gun Control Act of 1968, a misfired piece of legislation that provided a handy loophole by which the parts for such guns could still be shipped into the state. It was the kind of randy hot-pocket pistol a junkie would steal and try to pawn; inaccurate, cheap, easily concealed and totally dangerous. It had probably never been cleaned.

  Good .32s were still classic ankle guns for law enforcement, who used the revolvers to backstop the semi-autos that were now pretty standard sidearms. Barney recalled reading that in the early 1920s, police officers in the deep South switched to .38 caliber carry guns from .32s because they believed cocaine made Negroes impervious to the smaller rounds.

  Barney dumped the shells — pirate loads of disreputable manufacture — and carefully threaded his right middle finger through the trigger guard, grasped, and tried to cycle the hammer. It stuttered back about three millimeters, then relaxed as his hand gave out and began to bleed. It stung and throbbed like hell. Forty trigger pulls in thirty seconds, dry-firing... and Barney could not manage a single one, with his stronger hand.

  “Who you wish to shoot?” said Mano.

  “Nobody,” said Barney, omitting the yet. “This used to be...is... my specialty. Like you with rocks.”

  “Estas un malhechor?” Mano asked this with an utter lack of guile; his inflection made it clear that what he was really asking was: Are you a criminal, an evil man, or are you misunderstood?

  Barney almost smiled. “Depends on who you ask. I was once a soldier. I know a lot about guns. But no, not in the way you mean.”

  “A great wrong has been done to you that might cause you to become a bad man.”

  “A criminal, perhaps, but not a bad man. I would not harm a man such as yourself, for instance. Yes, I wish to do harm to those who harmed me. But it’s bigger than that. Mas grande. Besides, look at me, Mano. Mirame. The only person I can harm is myself, if I sit up too fast.”

  Blood was trickling down his wrist.