by Johnny Shaw
Angie looked up at me, not letting go but loosening her grip. “That’s great news. It wasn’t a complete disaster. Where was she?”
“We found her but she didn’t want to go. She was the one who shot Bobby.”
Angie pushed off me. “Get the fuck out of here.”
“She shot him and took off again. Left him on the ground bleeding. Saddest thing I ever saw. Stupid and sad.”
“And you were there? You saw that?” Angie said.
I nodded.
She took my hand and headed toward the hall in the direction of our bedroom. “Check in on your son and then let’s go to bed.”
“That sounds perfect.”
She took a few more steps, stopped, and looked me in the eyes. “Bobby’s sixteen-year-old daughter shot him.”
I didn’t know if she was asking me a question or saying it out loud, so I didn’t say anything.
“That’s seriously fucked up,” she said.
I opened the door to Juan’s room as quietly as I could, but old houses don’t do quiet. The door creaked and moaned and generally gave the impression that it was in some kind of pain from the few inches it had moved. A bit overdramatic for a door.
Juan blinked open two very sleepy eyes and stared up at me. I gave him a smile. It took him a second to register that it was me.
“Pop?” he asked sleepily.
“It’s me,” I said, walking into the room. I sat on the bed next to him, leaned down, and gave him a kiss on the head.
“You came back,” he said, sounding a little surprised.
“That’s right.”
“Are you going away again?”
“I don’t think so, but if I ever do, I’ll always come back.”
“People don’t always come back,” he said.
“I do.” I kicked my shoes off and stretched out on the bed next to him. He hugged up against my chest. I wanted to enjoy being with my son, but exhaustion caught up with me and in less than a minute I was out.
I woke up the next morning alone in Juan’s bed. The sun was up and if animated bluebirds had flown in the window to dress me, I wouldn’t have been surprised. I hadn’t slept that well since the time I ate some suspect “chicken” in Mexicali and then accidentally took an Ambien thinking it was Imodium. A great night’s sleep, but I had to throw away the sheets the next morning.
Angie appeared in the doorway, holding two cups of coffee. “This is as close as I get to breakfast in bed.”
She sat on the edge of the bed and handed me one of the mugs. I took a sip, burning my mouth and spitting it back in the cup.
“It’s hot,” I said.
“It’s coffee, Jimmy.”
“Thanks.”
“It’s just coffee.”
“No, I mean for everything. For being cool. I know it’s hard sometimes having two children.”
Angie climbed in the small bed next to me. I set the mug on the nightstand and sat up with my back against the headboard.
“I’m looking at this whole mess,” I said. “I’m looking at Julie. She might’ve been raised by Becky, but she turned into the teenage-girl version of Bobby. Whether example or genes, who knows? But she’s him. Or parts of him.”
“And you’re thinking about the example you’re setting for Juan?”
“It’s hard. I want him to see that I’m a loyal friend. That I help the people I love. But it’s also my job to protect him, to be his father. If I run off with Bobby doing a bunch of half-assed dangerous moronics, get myself killed, what then? This father stuff is still so new to me, scares the shit out of me some days, but if nothing was going on, none of this Julie shit, I know the place to be is here. I know what I’m supposed to do is take care of this family.”
“Life ain’t one thing at a time, babe. There’s always something else going on.”
“Bobby wants me to keep looking for Julie. He still wants to save her. And I think I might know where she is.”
“When you go away again, make sure that Juan understands.”
“Are you telling me to do it? To help Bobby? I don’t even know if I want to.”
“I’m not telling you to do anything. I’m telling you that you already know what you’re going to do. You might want to debate the pros and cons, make it feel like you’ve given it due diligence, but you know what you’re going to do.”
“How do you know—?”
“Because I know you. And even if I don’t agree with some of the shit you do, none of it surprises me. I know who I’m with.” Angie kissed my cheek. “I hate to point you toward danger, but I know you well enough to know that you don’t want to set the example of abandoning your best friend when things got bad. Even if it’s the right thing to do.”
“I don’t know. It could be dangerous.”
“Do you need me to give you permission for something you’d do with or without my permission?”
“Yeah. I do.”
I drank some coffee, keeping my eyes on Angie the whole time.
“Remember this,” she said. “I’m not the supportive-no-matter-what kind of girlfriend. I have limits. This relationship is solid. It can survive a lot. But it’s not unbreakable.” Angie took a deep breath. “You have my permission.”
“Thanks.”
“I didn’t sign a permission slip to go to Disneyland. This is serious shit.”
“Now I got to figure out what to do.”
“Start by getting your lazy ass out of bed, spending some time with your son—you really need to figure out a way to talk to him about Yolanda—and then decide if you’re going to save a teenage girl against her will.”
“Right. A normal Thursday.”
“It’s Sunday.”
“Getting the day right doesn’t make the joke any funnier.”
“No, a better joke would.”
“Did you find the girl that was lost?”
Juan lay on the ground, breathing hard. We had played a game we invented called “Super Soccer.” We found all the toy balls in the house and set them in a big pile. I was the goalie. The goal was two chairs set up at a random distance. Juan would kick, head-butt, and throw the balls at the goal. (Hands were allowed in “Super Soccer.” We’re Americans, after all. We believe in freedom.) I would try to stop them by deflecting them or catching them. The game moved very fast and it was hard to keep score, but it was fun as hell. Although at times, I got the sense that Juan was directing the balls at me rather than trying to score a goal.
Through gulps of air, Juan asked again. “Did you help Uncle Bobbiola find her?”
“Kind of. Not really. You were right. She’s a good hider.”
“Are you going to go again? To look more?” He looked up, his wrinkled brow telegraphing his concern.
I thought about it for a moment and answered. “I might. But you have to know that if I do, I’ll come back. I’ll always come back.”
“Why can’t you just stay here?”
“Uncle Bobbiola is my best friend and he needs my help. That’s what you do for friends. Even if you’re not sure you can help, you try.”
“But if you can’t help, how do you help?”
“When did you become a Zen Master?” I laughed. “You don’t know until you try. Trying is the important thing.”
“Always try to do your best. That’s what you tell me.”
“Because that’s all you can do. You can’t do better than your best.” I said, “Your mom said you were having some scary dreams. Do you want to talk about them?”
“No.”
“I think we should.”
“Super Soccer!” Juan screamed, changing the subject.
I let him, not sure how to broach the subject anyway. “What’s the score?” I asked.
“Forty-hundred to zero. I’m winning.”
As Juan wrangled all the balls in the room into a fresh pile, I had no idea what he remembered or thought he remembered from his past. But I couldn’t help but be reminded that he wouldn’t be here—that I wouldn’t have a s
on—if Bobby hadn’t helped me and risked his neck for no reason other than friendship.
It was time that I stopped acting like I had a choice. I knew what I had to do.
During Juan’s nap I got on the computer. I dug up my username and password to get back on the gonzo girl fight website, pretty sure I was unleashing a virtual version of the bird flu on my poor old computer. I clicked on one of the thumbnails that wasn’t Julie’s fight. I couldn’t watch that one again.
It played out pretty much the same as Julie’s fight: warm-up against a nondescript wall, then cut to the fight in the industrial, factory setting. Everything bleached white. I let it run while I reread the article and obituary in the Desert Sun about Driskell.
The obit elaborated on what Tomás had told me. Driskell was the heir to the founder of CaSO-Corp, but had run the business into the ground. It was the spelling of CaSO that had caught my eye the night before, at Becky’s place. When Tomás had talked about it, it sounded like a generic name. But seeing that small A, my liberal arts school “Chemistry for Poets” class came back to me. CaSO was calcium sulfate, also known as gypsum or Sheetrock or plaster of Paris.
I looked back at the fight video, two girls swinging wildly, connecting infrequently. In the crowd of men, I caught sight of some Los Hermanos jackets. But it was the ground that confirmed it. The same powder was on the ground. Powder I had thought was snow. But I was way off. It was plaster.
The girls were fighting at the abandoned CaSO-Corp gypsum factory. I watched two more of the videos. Shot at the same place. The same buildings. And the same factory towers. I eventually even caught a glimpse of the CaSO-Corp logo on one of the towers to confirm. All the fights were shot in the same place. And I knew exactly where that was.
They were in Plaster City.
THIRTEEN
Plaster City sat twenty miles west of El Centro on Evan Hewes Highway, the old road that had been at one time the only east/west passage through the mountains to San Diego. After the freeway was built, it got little use, nothing but desert between El Centro and Ocotillo. A few map dots, but even the largest town, Ocotillo, wasn’t much more than a gas station, garage, diner, and scattered trailers filled with antisocial desert outcasts who avoided “the big city” of El Centro. Plaster City sat smack-dab between blink and you-missed-it.
That whole stretch of desolation, the Yuha Desert, was chaparral, tamarisk, and diffused ugly. Nearer the border, it got more interesting, but only in the awfullest ways. There was a designated area dedicated to a specific kind of thorn. A thorn! The Crucifixion thorn, on the off chance you wanted to make your Easter more authentic. There was a geoglyph that might have been cool from a plane or a helicopter, but from the ground it looked like someone got crazy on their ATV, leaving circular tire tracks on the dusty hardpack. Someone once told me it was a horse. But that person did a lot of mushrooms, so it was hard to really take his word as gospel.
The best thing out that way was the Mount Signal Café. They made great pancakes and their own root beer from scratch. Unfortunately, the Mount Signal Café closed twenty years ago. But you could make a strong argument that dicking around in the husk of an abandoned restaurant was still the most fun to be had in that part of the desert.
Google street maps gave me a pretty clear picture of Plaster City, at least in terms of the structures. It also confirmed that it was indeed the site of the fight videos, easy enough to compare the factory towers. I hadn’t been out that way in a while, but it didn’t look like much had changed from the way I remembered it. And it still creeped me out.
When I was a kid, Pop preferred the old road. So on our shopping trips to San Diego, we would pass by (never stop at) Plaster City. If the sun hit it right, it glowed on the horizon, a blinding white against the world of dull brown. I had always been afraid of it, ghostly and unreal, the cold starkness in the extreme heat of the desert. It didn’t help that Pop always made the same joke. “It looks like Hell really did freeze over.”
The images and maps foretold the biggest obstacle. There was only one road—the old highway—that ran through Plaster City. No other way in or out. Surrounded by barren, flat desert.
I had been in a similar situation two years before, but that had been different. This time I was trying to save someone who didn’t know they were being saved and didn’t want to be saved.
It got worse. There really wasn’t an inconspicuous way to get a good look at the surrounding buildings of Plaster City without raising the inhabitants’ suspicions. There were plenty of people who used the old road, but there was absolutely no reason to stop in Plaster City. Not even to take pictures. It was ugly as shit. There was no gas station and the old company store wouldn’t still be open after the factory closed. If I stopped, eyes would be on me immediately.
I decided to go out there and see what I could assess in the fifteen seconds it took to drive from one end of town to the other.
The factory came into view a couple miles ahead. The gypsum factory made up the entire south side of the town, the highway splitting the town in half. Its tall towers loomed in the distance. As I drove closer, I saw the few buildings on the north side of the highway. There were a few freestanding structures with boarded-up windows that may have once been offices, but it was the old truck yard with a number of loading bays that confirmed my suspicions. The truck yard had been converted to a shantytown of sorts. Some mobile homes, a few fifth wheels, but also some converted truck trailers and makeshift structures made from pallets and corrugated tin. There was even the wall of a double-wide propped up against the side of the loading dock like a massive lean-to.
The funny thing is that I wouldn’t have been able to see anything if I had stopped, but driving past, I was able to see through the privacy slats that ran through the chain link. It was like watching an old zoetrope, images flashing in animated glimpses.
The dozen motorcycles peppered here and there within the fenced-in area were the most revealing things I saw. I only caught sight of a few people, but couldn’t determine whether they were men or women.
Two men on motorcycles passed me coming the other way, one of them giving me a quick glance, and turned into Plaster City toward the gate to the compound. I couldn’t see in the rearview whatever procedure they used to enter, but I had gotten a look at their patches. Los Hermanos. The same patch as in the fight videos. The same one Chucho wore. This was his gang’s clubhouse.
Beyond the makeshift town, there didn’t appear to be any other residents. It was the perfect hideout and the most likely place to lay low. It was a low-rent fortress.
If Chucho and Julie thought they were on the run, they would embrace the sanctuary of the people they trusted. Chucho would go to his bros, his gang. And out here in the middle of the desert, nobody cared what you did. It’s why people moved out this way, to be left alone. You could do anything in this stretch of desert. No one to bother, no one to complain, and no one to get nosy about whatever business or pleasure was going on.
I had no real proof, only a hunch, but it made sense that Julie and Chucho would be here. Now what the hell was I going to do about it?
“I think I know where she’s at.”
“Where?” Bobby shouted on the other end of the phone.
“Plaster City. That’s where those fights were.”
“Oh, man. I should’ve recognized it. But I’m guessing there’s something stopping us from just driving in and picking her up.”
“A whole bunch of somethings. It’s where Chucho’s gang makes camp. Why I think they’re there.”
“So you’re back in the band? You’re going to help get her?”
“I got conditions.”
“What am I going to do? Say no?” Bobby said, his annoyance obvious. “What are they?”
“I run the show. Even when you get out of there. No more cowboying bullshit. Unless I say that’s what we do. I got a kid to think about and every time shit goes catawampus, I risk everything. No bitching about my decisions. You
don’t like how I do it, say the word. I go home with a clear conscience.”
“Is that it?”
“And I’m home every night. No matter what. No Mavescapade bullshit.”
“How do I know how long shit’s going to take or where we’re going to be?”
“Those are my terms.”
Bobby was silent for a moment. “Okay. We do it your way. No interference from me.”
“Good,” I said. “We’ll find her, Bobby. We’ll find her and bring her back.”
“Damn right we will.”
“Holtville Police Department. How can I direct your call?”
Ceja sounded bored on the other end of the phone, probably anticipating another call about someone locking their keys in their car or a missing 4-H lamb. The best he could hope for was breaking up a bar fight, but bar fights before noon only happened on the weekends.
“Hey, Ceja. It’s Jimmy Veeder.”
“Jimmy. Hey. Sorry again for getting a little agitated at Pinky’s. There must’ve been something in that tequila. I never get that out of control.”
“Yes, you do. Every time. And you apologize with the same excuse every time. There is ‘something’ in the tequila, Ceja. It’s called tequila.”
“I said I’m sorry. You don’t got to be mean.”
“I need a favor. You hear about Bobby?”
“A little, not much. Indio called down here to ask me about him. Heard he got shot while looking for his girl. Don’t know more than that.”
“You want to help?”
“If I can.”
“With Bobby in the hospital, I’m asking around, doing some looking for his daughter. I think she’s involved with this Mexican gang. I want to confirm some stuff, but I need more information, maybe some files.”
“Sorry, Jimmy. I’m not your guy for that.”
“This is Bobby we’re talking about. Wasn’t it Bobby who introduced you to your wife?”
“He didn’t really introduce us. I mean, he took me to the titty bar where she worked, where we met. So kinda maybe.”
“Bobby’s done more than that for you.”