Death Valley

by Perly, Susan;

  Val and Johnny stayed back. Vivienne ran to the playa and found the coyote in pieces. Cars, humans, mannequins, lab pigs, plane wings, coyotes, it is one world, one gigantic scientific experiment. Vivienne located the coyote’s heart under a length of golden fur. The heart was still warm, still beating. She held it like a baby to her own heart.

  Val and Johnny were standing about fifty feet away.

  DEEP IN THE heart of nowhere, where the land was a beautiful rootless rogue, Val Gold watched Vivienne Pink. She was all passion, plus the discipline to unfold it in art labour. He adored her. Why wasn’t she his?

  The years had slipped away. Val left Brooklyn during the Vietnam War. He moved to Toronto, saying he was a draft dodger as his cover story. But Johnny and Vivienne were his prey; the US government wanted to know more about these Canadians, and they had hired Val to do it. Then, as the years went by, as Val provided intel on the writer Johnny Coma and his wife, the photographer Vivienne Pink, to Washington, he began to realize that he was in love with Vivienne and that Johnny had become his best friend. Val’s secret was his very presence in their home in Annexia. He believed – as did many a man whose work becomes his life, whose country becomes his wife – that someday it would all sort itself out. Surely he was not going to live until he died without someone of his own to love him? This drought inside me.

  Who knew that when Val Gold, the other man, finally made his move to get Vivienne, he would do it by trying to kill her husband? Kill the opposition, rather than adore the homeland.

  In one move, Val got a flick knife out of his pants, a custom Italian stiletto switchblade that his pal Dale had given him on the night train from Baghdad to Mosul. Val and Dale had been travelling north to Erbil, in Kurd country. An intruder had come into their compartment when they had dozed off. Val had grabbed Dale’s stiletto out of Dale’s jacket and stabbed the intruder. Val dumped the body in the corridor. This was Iraq, during the Iran-Iraq War.

  After the Mosul train stabbing, Dale had given Val his stiletto. Dale called it a flick knife, as a Brit might from the Teddy Boys era. Or as a man might, if he wanted you to think that.

  Val pressed the little button and the seven-inch blade flipped out.

  Val loved the intimacy of the knife. No drone would ever replace the feeling of being close enough to slow dance with your adversary and slip that sharpened blade right into his rib cage, pulling with just the right amount of pressure to crack that rib, and if you were lucky in the same insertion get through to a lung. If your karma sat proper, you could move in with the blade retracted and flick it out right through bone and skin.

  Vivienne did not like the way Val was moving towards Johnny.

  Vivienne stayed with her telephoto lens. She watched Val fold the blade back into the holder. She breathed with his movements, snapping a pic as Val flicked the blade out again. Whoosh.

  It was one in the afternoon. The shadows were long. Val put his arm around Johnny’s shoulder. Vivienne kept taking pictures.

  Val was thinking: If I make a small war, I can be at peace again, with the beloved of my murdered best buddy. This drought will end. Val flicked the switchblade clinically into Johnny’s right side, under his breastbone. Vivienne heard a crack. Johnny was bleeding. He tried to wrest the switchblade from Val’s hand. Val pushed against Johnny, using Johnny’s rib cage as a fulcrum to push the blade in further to Jojo’s liver. Johnny twisted Val’s hand and pulled the blade out of his own body, then stabbed the bloody knife into Val’s right palm. “You fucker,” Val said.

  “Me fucker?” Johnny said. “You’re trying to kill me and I’m the fucker?”

  “I deserve her. You’ve had her long enough. It’s my turn now.” Val came at Johnny with his hands, one bloody and bleeding.

  “You’d better see to that hand,” Johnny said.

  “No, you’d better see to it,” he said, punching Johnny square in the jaw on the left side. They both heard Johnny’s jaw bone crack.

  “You’ve got no claim to her,” Johnny said, crouching, his tush back, his legs well planted. “You think we don’t know who you are? Vivienne takes pics of you when you’re sleeping, you two-bit government gumshoe. Even if I die, Vivienne would laugh at you; you’re her art pet. ‘Oh, Vivi, let me tell you about Van Gogh.’ Kill me. Go ahead. Marry the Pentagon.”

  “You don’t own her. She’s free to choose,” Val said, swiping at his knife, which was firmly in Johnny’s right hand.

  “She chose twenty-four years ago. You’re RSVP’ing a little late, Valerie.”

  Vivienne was behind them with her camera, with coyote guts and coyote amber fur on her arms, shooting the scene. “Don’t take my picture,” Val said. “Did you take photos of me when I was sleeping?”

  “Oh, grow up, Val,” Vivienne said. “Did you think my marriage meant nothing?”

  “You’re a parasite,” Val said, turning his head to look at her. That mistake gave Johnny the advantage. Johnny lunged at Val, slit Val’s thick belt, jumped down, slit his two shoes open, jumped back up and laid a full knife cut across Val’s forehead.

  “There,” Johnny said. “A souvenir of your love for Vivienne. Right, Vivienne?”

  “The two of you are so damn stupid,” she said. “You make me miss those sick dictators. At least I knew where I stood with them.”

  Val wiped the blood off his forehead. He was looking at Vivienne who was moving closer with her camera.

  Vivienne’s face was red, peeling. Her eyes kept blinking. She had lesions on her neck. She had coyote fur in her scalp. Her wrist had rust from the car on it and still warm bits from the coyote’s lungs, bowels.

  A freight train–like sound pumped their ears full of high-rolling sound waves. A plane buzzed fast and low over them, leaving its tail showing as it raced down between mountains. One more haircut free from the US military.

  Vivienne picked up a long piece of the coyote’s corpse, would you call it a carcass already? When the wild become tame through the forced agency of humans, they will become tame enough for humans to tie explosive devices on, domesticating wild animals for the purpose of human cruelty.

  It starts with the human, and you call the human not a human, for your dire purposes. You call the human an animal and he becomes an animal to you. You enact your dire darkness upon the animal, and you call the animal not an animal with breath and heart, you call the animal a thing. You enact your dire self upon a thing, a car, and you call it what it is, a car, and you mutilate and torture the car and you rip off the car door. The car door is as an animal, as is a human. Then you mutilate and torture the human, you burn the human alive, and beside the human you burn the car alive, and it is all the same thing. The human is as a car door, his arm is as a car door, the car door is as the human, in the dark fires of rage. Then you go to the human bridges over the human rivers, and you hang the car door by its noose, for the people to see. Then you hang the decapitated torso of the human over the river, for the people to see. And this happened in Fallujah, Iraq, in March of 2004. And Vivienne Pink was there. I am not human to them, I am a car door. I am rust on fire, from the river.

  She carried the side of coyote down the scrub sand to the car, also a corpse, but of steel. She hunched her body through the doorway on the driver’s side. She laid the coyote behind the metal springs coming out of the bottom of the car. Moments ago, he had been defiant and gorgeous; the photos she had taken of the coyote’s magisterial defiance were now ancient archival material. The coyote was a fur city that was no more. She stroked it. How could it still be warm?

  How to do a coyote odalisque? Vivienne looked down at herself. The pink leather jacket, the green khaki pants, the red-and-black shoes of Spanish leather, ah – the python vest.

  What a trip, that was the idea. Clothe the coyote, even part of the coyote, in Vivienne’s own snakeskin. Fur against reptile. Mammal and squamata. She took off her pink leather, draping it on the skeletal steering wheel. She took off her vest; she laid it on the coyote. She bent do
wn and lifted the elongated side of the coyote, the side that had turned and caught the light. The coyote might have known it was going to die, but if it did not, if it did not have that human knowledge, it knew in its animal heart it had been brutalized by men.

  She wrapped the reptile skin around the mammalian warmth. There was blood on her vest. She got low, immersing herself in available light. Down at the level of dogs. Shooting like a bloodied stray dog, feral with a camera. A stray dog ready to shoot her brethren, when they got thrown through the air and landed, broken.

  The coyote was full of dust, mesquite winter berries lifted off far trees, along with dry winter sage, resin and burn. BOOM! The deafness.

  Her ears could not hear, so the photographic eyes in her head were sharper. Ever so seldom the wild brutality, shaped in art, can begin to heal the pain. Ever so rarely the angels are present just this side of the frame. Down in the car bowels, the skin of the coyote thrummed. The python diamond skin shone on top of it. Vivienne lay down on the rusted coils. She pulled the coyote skin over her stomach, with the reptile skin covering it in part. She held the camera up to shoot a self-portrait, a female-identified head, with hair resembling the lower hairy shredded ripped parts of palm trees; the face covered in boils, black carbuncles, the right side swelling up with black bruising; a fur and snake body, white human breasts protruding, the nipples high and red, with blood and gold glowing coyote fur drifting down on them. Her eyes were indigo in white turning yellow. Ever so seldom, the choices conspire to make chance marry intention.

  Death Valley Odalisque, December 31, 2006.

  You could grow carrots in her hair, and offer radioactive sides for the dinner party. Her skull was a holiday decoration for the new nuclear age.

  THEY DROVE DOWN the corduroy road in bumpy silence. Vivienne had a coyote heart in her hand.

  They drove up the pavement road to a verandahed eatery on a rise in the pines.

  27

  ARROGANT BASTARD

  ANDY SAT WITH his back to the road, high up on the restaurant verandah of the Panamint Springs Resort, a rustic eatery with a fading old motel out back, set at elevation between the sand dunes and the badlands. He was the only customer. He amused himself reading the list of beer on the menu: Big Sky Moose Drool, Descartes Inversion, New Belgium Fat Tire, Pliny the Elder, Monk’s Blood, Consecration, Salvation, Defenestration, Sanctification. The Abyss. He ordered an Arrogant Bastard.

  He nursed his Arrogant Bastard, waiting for his ribs and smashed potatoes.

  He stretched out on the wooden bench. The dust from the salt playa was blowing across the grey road, covering a white sedan coming up, nose to the sky.

  THE WHITE CAR made a sharp left in front of the verandah. Johnny parked the vehicle. Val, Johnny and Vivienne came up the wide wooden stairs. “Let’s go around the side where we can have some privacy,” Vivienne said.

  “Anything the lady says,” Val said. He rubbed his forehead where Johnny had slashed him with the knife, a bit of blood came off. He was clomping in his stabbed shoes.

  “Right you are. Perfect. You lead, we follow, mi reina,” Johnny said. He was holding onto his side, where the stab wound Val had made was leaking a bit of fluid.

  Vivienne’s hair looked like singed bamboo. She was moving with wobbly exaggerated purpose along the verandah, like a dipso in the wee hours crossing Lonely Avenue. The three of them plopped down in a tree-shaded corner, on a long bench.

  Vivienne scanned the space. To her left down the bench fifteen feet away sat Andy, a cigarette dangling from his lips. Wearing the gold suede jacket.

  He looked over at Vivienne with blank eyes.

  She was disarmed. Her camera hand started trembling.

  A waiter appeared. Cowboy boots black, dark jeans, medium dark hair, black T-shirt with red lettering: SWISS CHEESE SANDWICH. “Can I get you folks something?”

  “Mercurochrome,” Johnny said. “Anything Mexican in a cerveza, inform me about the burgers, no names please, and if you have some heavy-duty tape for wounds that would be swell.”

  “Any specials?” Val asked. He held up his blood-smeared palm, drying and leaking. He wiped it on his grey pants.

  “We’ve got our house ribs on today,” the waiter said. “Sweetbreads on Monday.”

  “When’s Monday?” Vivienne asked.

  “Tomorrow,” the waiter said. “Hang on. I’ll go hunt down some menus.”

  THE WAITER WAS back, without menus. “Anything to drink?”

  “Rubbing alcohol on the rocks,” Johnny said. “How’s that Mercurochrome coming? Okay, make it a blue burger, double side of onions. Give it a whirl.”

  “And for the lady?”

  “I want a Red Truck,” she said. “You guys want to share a Red Truck with me?”

  “Bring the lady her Red Truck,” Val said. “Everything depends on it.”

  “Wasn’t that a red wheelbarrow, sir?” the waiter asked.

  “Another independent scholar heard from,” Val said. “One Dos Equis. Two. Four Equis.”

  THEY SOUNDED HIGH to Andy. But was it her? By what means had she appeared to haunt him? Was it truly Vivienne, who had unhinged him when she induced his shoulder blades to confess their grief story, as she photographed him? The pink jacket, the red bits in the dusty hair. It was her. Buzzing around with other men.

  “Just the Red Truck, darling,” she said. “The bottle works.” This voice had smoke, chocolate, tannin and notes of photographic fixer in it. Had she come from inside him to be incarnate, a hex radiating her damn grace vortex?

  THE WAITER WAS back, again without menus. He sat down beside Johnny, as if in a consultation. “Sir, do you mind if I ask you, you look injured, is that a stab wound I’m seeing? Do you know if the wound was penetrating or blunt?”

  “He stabbed me,” Johnny said, pointing to Val.

  “Man, you shouldn’t be doing that,” the waiter said to Val.

  “Stay out of it,” Val said. “I want to marry his wife.”

  “You shouldn’t do that either.” And to Vivienne: “Is he having any trouble breathing? Is his breathing compromised?”

  “Your breathing will be in trouble,” Johnny said, “if you don’t bring me a cerveza. Any brew works.”

  “You’re the boss, sir. Was that a mozzarella omelette with a house salad? Ranch or Italian? Sir, do you know if you’ve had a tetanus shot in the last five years?”

  “Lord in his mercy. No omelette, no mozzarella, no ensalada, no house, no ranch. I asked for a blue burger. Extra onions if you have them. Any Swiss in the house?”

  “No, sir, sorry. No Swiss,” said the man wearing a T-shirt that read Swiss Cheese Sandwich. “Do you mind if I take your pulse?”

  Johnny put two fingers on his wrist, looked at his watch. “My pulse is fine, my breathing is slightly shallow. You do feed beer to shallow breathers, don’t you?”

  “Yes, sir. But you do know your liver is exposed.”

  “Good. Perfect. Go fry it.”

  “Sir.”

  “An extra side of slaw and Percocet will do fine.”

  “Coming right up, sir,” the waiter said.

  In the bright high chill, the dry carnal geology inched along. Vivienne’s brain was bouncing back and forth in soft sea jelly against the hard carapace of her skull.

  ANDY CHUGGED Arrogant Bastard number three. He watched Vivienne. Johnny put his arm around Vivienne’s neck, kissing her neck, whispering in her ear, kissing her neck at the back. Andy turned away, watching her more intently in his mind that way. He put his head down on the table, seeing the sharp images of him and her; her photographing him in that hotel room in Vegas; the two of them on the bed, confidential, touching each other slowly; how she spoke to him of walking down the steps of Tudor City across to the UN, and there was a young Quaker burning himself alive for peace. How she knew the confusion of his intentions in enlisting. How there was something about her, and if he named it she would for sure disappear. A very white man picks you up in a night
alley and takes you in early dark to the heart of marginal America, and the deeper you go to the outskirts, the closer you come to your own uncouth centre. Andy could see her, like predatory gratitude, on that bed, letting him be the prey who stroked the hunter, murmuring tender lullabies. He lifted his head from the table: she was there. She needed to be with him. He needed to shelter in with her aromas.

  THE WAITER TOOK a fourth tour to their table.

  “Sir, here’s your burger, your duct tape, double onions, no Swiss, Percocet on the side – you said slaw, didn’t you? – the two Coronas,” putting it all down on the table. “What else have we got here? Here’s that gauze you wanted, a little gauze and goat, we threw in some sweet potato fries. Do you mind if I palp you?”

  “Go ahead,” Johnny said. “My best friend tried to kill me down on the playa. Palp away.”

  “Let me have her,” Val said.

  “Judas. Disloyal putz. Spy.” Johnny was doubled over.

  The waiter came around beside him. “No need for name-calling now.”

  “But he is a spy,” Johnny said. “He entered our house and our garden under the guise of friendship.”

  “Forgive and forget,” the waiter said, touching Johnny’s wound area. “You have to divide the abdomen into four quadrants to do a proper palp, sir. Okay, are you feeling pain?”

  “I’ve been feeling pain since Angola, 1986, son. Your Cold War really put a hurt on me. I hitched a ride on one of Reagan’s arms shipments, in a pretty pale blue plane. I got shot up in that Cold War. Yup. If they nailed Angola, that would take care of Cuba and the Soviets, wouldn’t it? Hey, I got a book out of it. Can you get me a new liver?”

  “I’m sorry, sir. We have bison next week.”

  “Ow. Oh. Whoa. Not there.”

  The waiter was pressing into quadrant number three. “Numero tres, right there, sir. I think I see some coffee grounds coming out of your wound, not a good sign. Have you been vomiting yet?”