“You wouldn’t still be standing if you were in my position, would you?” The girl’s voice was almost a whisper.
“What?” said the cashier.
“You wouldn’t still be standing. Remember that.”
Smith picked up the bag of supplies and the girl cast a last look at the cashier and then they went out. The cashier stood there, slack-jawed, the empty conveyor belt he’d forgotten to turn off rotating slowly and every few seconds overturning a child-size handprint of blood.
Back at the truck Smith opened the door and the girl collapsed in the passenger seat. She pulled her shirt up slowly and as she lifted the fabric strings of meat came up as well. She separated her flesh from it with the other hand then yanked it away, looked as if to take the shirt off completely but the pained flexibility in the chafed arms stopped her.
It was a mess. The bullet’s path was ripped across the front of the abdominal muscles like a shovel’s trail in the ranch dirt of her skin. The tear was an inch wide.
She snapped the top off of the bottle of alcohol and poured it down. Stomach caved inward and she seemed about to drink from the bottle but he handed her the water jug. She leaned back into the seat and so he poured the alcohol again and then the iodine. She shuddered and spilled the water. The burnt sloughs of skin frayed from the mouth of the gash but the gash itself was clean. He pulled the bandage from the shopping bag and she snatched at it, wrapped it around herself with aggression but with a look of something like sympathy in her eyes. The first time he’d seen anything of mercy in her and it was self-directed. Wrapped it around four times and the rising of red through to the uppermost layer mushroomed like dread from underneath.
He passed her the second bandage and she used it as well and this time it stayed white. She dumped the boxes of ampicillin from the shopping bag and nested them around her lap as if they were something of comfort, some of them coloring from the seepage in the wet seat. She ripped open a box and started tearing the antibiotics from the blister seams and swallowing them in mouthfuls. After a half dozen she curled up in the seat and closed her eyes.
When she had not moved for several minutes, Smith took the iodine and alcohol bottles from the floor and held them between his knees, took off his shirt. The blood in the bedsheet bandages had dried but when he unwound them the cutout edges of the skin were circled in petals of inflammation. The moment he saw it he clamped the bandages back around it. Felt infection burning into them below his hand. He held them there for a while until he felt that the seeping had slowed and so he pulled the soiled bandages off and held them out and let them fall into the air through the open window. He rinsed the broken place and cleaned it, each falter of consciousness and grip of fever as much an infliction from her as the initial destruction of armflesh. Poured the disinfectants until it had gone numb with the stinging and bandaged it and replaced his shirt. No visible sign now of the rotting within him save the tracts of gold down his hand where the iodine had run. He reached over to the girl that was dying more slowly now and broke a sheet of ampicillin tablets from their blisters. She had not moved at the touch of the back of his hand when he’d reached for them, and did not move now when he tossed the box back onto her seat.
They sat there for an hour or more, Smith staring out the windshield at the empty parking lot watching sparrows pick at tumbleweeds of trash. The sun ran through the top of the glass and lit the dust in the air of the truck’s cab.
For a long time there was no sound and he looked over at the girl. Curled up creature that he hated. There was a moment in which he feared that she was not breathing, that he had admitted so much only to have to bury the small bones in the desert, but then she sputtered and went silent once more. He waited, and as he dizzied again he feared they would dry like that, atrophy into sand in a cooking truck. And then, in a voice as if she had been spending the time gathering it:
“There’s a place out there where they taught me to use fish antibiotics for gunshot wounds.”
“How far?” His hands had gone numb and he looked at them, their anesthetized vibrato at pace with the turns of light through the windshield.
“Where are we?”
“Halfway down the state. Three hundred miles to the Arizona border.”
She sat up just enough to see out to the road.
“Take Interstate 15 south until you hit 70 and then head west. Then the first dirt drive after the seventh cattle guard.”
“What is it?” He was still staring out the windshield.
She halted for a half-breath against the bandages then answered.
“I got the directions from the last of the men on motorcycles. I’ve been looking for this place for a long time.”
“The kneecapped one.”
She nodded, without any show of reverence toward it, and took another breath, measuring how much it agitated the diaphragm.
“They’ll be short on men with the breakup of the Cordova cartel. They might try to turn you away but if you don’t let them, and you’re as desperate as you seem, you can get it all back in a day’s work for them. That’s all I can offer.”
“What is it?”
“What?”
“What work is it, dammit.”
“You’re not in a position to be worried about that.”
He kept staring at his hands for a long time, looked up and stared out to the road for even longer. Then nodded and started the ignition.
In the four hours that followed neither spoke. His thoughts were blank and he saw the light skin around his sister’s cold eyes in the blankets of sand they passed, and the girl’s thoughts he knew were bloodied, repetitions of the slash on her gut imprinted in the anarchic tracks of the cliffs beyond. He’d seen the way wild game looked at themselves when wounded, and knew it was her first major injury. First mortal injury.
He’d repeated the directions in his head until they were memorized and then marked off the landmarks in turn. The girl twisted every few minutes in futile attempts to get her wound comfortable but kept her eyes always to the road, never lapsing in awareness as the serrated shadows of red rock formations hunted across her face.
He hadn’t noticed that the radio was on but heard it now. He reached to switch off the dial and realized it was too late to turn it off, that it might signal something. When he didn’t want to talk and was damn well sure that she didn’t want to either. He kept the truck pounding down the road while Conway Twitty crept again from the radio with that feeble humanness that belongs to songs made for dry country that is inherently without them. “Hello Darlin’” crossbred with static out the speakers and the girl enacted her slow-motion exorcism on the passenger seat.
Far onto Interstate 70 they passed the seventh cattle guard. The landscape had not varied for the entire journey and he would have suspected them of having gone in circles had the road not been so relentlessly straight. Scrubbings of dead brush crowded in the sun, bleaching under the sky, and buttes that split the sand like tumors and nothing more besides the lone man’s longhorns that roamed the grainless plains, swinging the burden of their temples with each step across that wasteland like gear-laden men bound for war or dispatched from it.
The pickup truck shifted onto unpaved roads as the directions progressed, raising a cloud of dust like plumage behind it. By the fifth hour the pain was leaching from his arm into white larvae in front of his eye. He took the water jug from her seat and tilted what was left in it into the right side of his mouth without taking his eyes from the road.
It had been twenty miles since they’d passed the last abandoned plywood produce stand and a hundred since they’d seen a living man. The pain clouded in again to blind him and his forehead hit the doorframe and when he rebounded from it the truck was drifting.
Smith got out and the girl swung open her door but didn’t move from the seat. The truck like a red beetle in a dish of sand and nothing else.
“Out of gas?”
He nodded.
She gestured at a ridge a
head shaped like a horse’s back, darkened with ribs of bat guano in the shadows.
“It’s just beyond there.”
He climbed into the back of the truck and stood on the roof and looked out past the ridge. It emerged below in the heat—a dark brown line like a strip of bark on the land. A compound of a half dozen flat-roofed buildings.
It would be over a mile and the truck would have to stay in the center of what was still called a road all the way out here, another abandoned thing to add to the compacted millennia underfoot. He climbed down, leaving it.
He did not ask whether she could walk. He put his shotgun against his shoulder and began to stagger on. She waited a moment, then stuffed the sheets of ampicillin into her bag and slid from the truck like something without bones and trudged forward with both her arms wrapped tight around her abdomen.
Three steps into the sand and she was down. She looked at him from below the shadow of the arm that she’d braced above her head, eyes gone cervine, the blacks of them obliterating the yellow-brown. He hesitated.
“Don’t you dare.” She took another breath but it caught in the throat then dribbled out onto her hand.
He looked down at his arm. The bandages were soaked through with more than one substance and heavy like a weight on the skin. The pain dug in along the nerves like maggots.
She raised her head again.
“They’ll kill you for this.”
“Shut up.” He turned away and began parting the brush with his boot, broken orbs of cacti clinging to it like smaller galaxies. Kicked a trench into the sand with his heel, then bent and used his right hand to dig.
“They’ll fucking kill you!”
He laid the shotgun in the shallow grave he’d made then filled it in and marked the place with two rocks laid beside one another. The girl had curled herself into a ball again and he lifted her up coarsely, like livestock you’ve butchered but is too heavy to sling over an arm. And the newly made killer carried the demon-child with black beaded eyes through the desert, as her hair dried in bars across her cheeks and his arm began to drip rot down his side.
CHAPTER SEVEN
Scalp
The compound wavered in the heat like an ownerless shadow on the breadth of sand and as Smith approached it the main building came into focus, raw in unfinished wood, clearly hand-hewn and not one laid by trailers as most in that kind of country were. There was a cluster of uneven shacks with flat roofs at its right and to the left was a great building of glass, with vaulted ceilings that reflected the glare in an explosive landing of sun.
A man reclining in a yellowed plastic lawn chair below the building’s overhang dropped his cigarillo and pulled a pistol from the back of his jeans at their approach. His front six teeth were white but shattered, and in their jaggedness took on the look of those belonging to child, canine, beast. His hair was matted into string-like dreadlocks that hung to his eyes, and stains blackened one of the embroidered skulls of his cowboy boots. He advanced with the pistol extended by one hand, then lowered it when the girl lifted her head.
“You …”
The girl dropped from Smith’s arms and landed in a crouch.
“Hi, Guillermo.”
He flashed an uncertain expression that exposed the blackness behind the teeth and ran to clap her on the shoulders, gun still in hand. She raised her arm to ward him off then pushed aside the frays of her shirt to expose the bandages. A red fan was beginning at the corner.
“Shit, kid …”
She slipped forward into the dirt but he lunged and caught her.
“Yo what the fuck? Are you shot?”
She didn’t answer. Guillermo cast a cursory look at Smith, who had his good arm braced against his legs, heaving, then slung the girl into a fireman’s carry over his shoulders and ran beneath the overhang and into the front building. Smith hefted himself up and followed.
There was no threshold to the room and the dust pooled in from outside and continued hardpacked as the floor. Inside, the yellow-paned windows were stained by fly excrement and the walls were feathered with dried baskets stacked to the low ceiling, sheets of ribbon pinned and faded down the far wall. A Formica cashier’s desk was blotched with sun discoloration like liver spots on a geriatric hand. Back to the left the ground turned dark and arched in muddied footprints below a plastic sheet door, and Guillermo turned there.
“Awan!” He shouted it and turned sideways to push aside the plastic slices with the girl’s feet.
As he followed through the doorway steam stuck to Smith’s face, his near sand-blindness washed over in green. Massive blue petals, marbled and cracked like the cliff faces of a hallucinatory desert, were crowded on the tables between leaves the size of horses’ faces. The sun rifled through the roof in white but was dispersed by the cloudiness of the glass and so the room took on an aqueous glow. Orchids curled along the wall with water-rotted leaves and blooms he had never seen before hung arrogantly or crawled the shelves in magenta and were laid to waste, violet, on the tables sopping with wet.
Guillermo ran down row after row and when they reached the back there was a Navajo blanket on the workbench and he kicked it to the floor and unfolded the girl upon it.
His hand was on Smith’s throat and his pistol to Smith’s temple before the girl had fully hit the ground.
“What did you do to her?”
Guillermo’s boots dug into the mud and Smith’s back was against the glass wall. There was blood in Smith’s mouth and the hand was jagged in its calluses, running with sweat that smelled like smoke.
“I didn’t do shit.”
“Then your people—”
“Not my people. She’s in my debt. I brought her here to get repaid.”
Guillermo was shorter than Smith but had the type of wild eyes that might squint or flinch but did not look away from things and had seen enough not to care about what they saw done henceforth.
“That a ransom?”
“A trade.”
“What makes you think she’s worth anythin to us?”
Smith jerked the side of his left hand up and caught Guil-lermo in the larynx and yelled with pain as he did it and grabbed the gun with his other hand and as the man bent over coughing Smith stepped astride the girl and pointed the gun down at her head.
“She worth anything to you?”
Guillermo still coughing and looking at him now with red watering eyes and a hand on the hurt throat. The girl looked up at Smith for a moment, then turned away.
“Tell me right fuckin now or I’ll shoot.” He could feel the socket flexing along the glass eye as he worked to keep his expression steady.
“I—” The man was visibly unsure.
“Right now.”
“Good, good.” The voice came from halfway down the overgrown aisle.
Guillermo stepped back against the wall and lowered his hands from his throat as quickly as he had raised them at the first.
The man was limping toward them, with a hand outstretched as if there were a cane that he leaned upon but there was not. The wear across his face was more a mark of weather than of time, though it was true that he was old. He wore a set of denim overalls with no shirt underneath and the hems bunched around the mouths of brown and blue cowboy boots. His ears were pierced with string and his hair cropped at the shoulder, and his arms laden with chunks of Navajo turquoise set against a crude span of hand-needled tattoos. He was missing two fingers off the right hand. He stepped slowly through the half-mud and knelt and looked the girl over with black eyes that had started to blue a bit around the edges from age and too much sun.
“What does she owe you?”
Smith stood, breathing slow, gun still aimed.
“Forty-six hundred dollars. For killed cattle.”
“I can’t give it to you. We have a shipment coming in tonight that needs to be paid for. Guillermo, help her.”
Guillermo went to his knees and cut through the girl’s bandages and wadded them up and pressed the bu
ndle against the bleeding. Smith didn’t move the gun.
“We’re moving product in two days. Stay the rest of the day and we’ll discuss your terms this evening.”
Awan bent down beside the girl and then looked up once more at Smith.
“Put the gun down, son.”
Smith stared at the old man, deciding, then put it in his back pocket.
“What happened to her?”
“Gang man shot her. Nine millimeter. Just grazed, there’s no entry wound, no guts hit. Thirty-six hours ago.”
Awan bent closer and turned her chin with his hand.
“Child.”
Guillermo left the bandages where they coiled from her stomach like the stuffings of a crude doll and went to loom behind the man, as if there were shade in that room that was all light.
“How did you find us?”
She blinked and focused her eyes at him but did not speak. He appraised her and turned to Smith.
“When did she last eat? Has she had water?”
“Water. Nothin to eat.”
“Her blood sugar’s probably shot to hell,” Guillermo spoke over the old man’s shoulder.
“Get a piece of sugar cane from the storeroom.”
Guillermo cast a last sideways look and went out.
Awan lifted the handful of bandages and they came away tissuey and damp.
The wound leered in a black open seam across her skin, still running slowly.
“Child, I’m going to have to stitch it.”
She shifted and turned her head.
“No. It’s been tended to already.”
“It’s clean but it’s still bleeding.”
“It’s been tended to.”
“Closing it all the way would do you no good but I have to put a few stitches in to slow the bleeding.”
She turned her face to the wall of shelves and did not look back from it when he went out and Guillermo returned with a chunk of sugar cane and she didn’t reach for it so he put it between her teeth and then the old man came back with a bent needle and plastic line and set to work.
Smith watched the closing of the fissure, realizing the bargain he had made.
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