by Brian Hart
At the end of the hallway is a double door painted red with three golden stars and an arrow set askance between them. The man looks over his shoulder at the dark hallway and considers turning back. If he’d known, but he had. Who else would it be? The almost-dwarf pounds on the door and a bell sounds and the lock retracts. The doors open and the man’s escort holds them so he can get his bike and trailer inside but doesn’t follow.
The room is shabby, back of house, but well lit and arranged like an office with a receptionist sitting at a fake wood desk, a set of closed steel doors behind her. Two armed guards dressed in black fatigues stand in the corners. One of them comes forward and takes the man’s picture with his phone, then returns to his station. The receptionist is young and attractive, blond, wearing a yellow sundress that shows pale cleavage. She stands and smiles, hands on her desk, breasts shoved together. “You didn’t come empty handed, did you?” She nods at his rig.
“I couldn’t leave it outside.”
“Of course. You can sit down.” She points to a folding chair. “Would you like some water?”
“Yes, I would. Thanks.”
She comes around the desk with a dirty plastic bottle and a well-used paper cup. She’s wearing jeans under her dress and desert-brown army boots.
He holds the cup while she pours. Her hair is clean and shiny but her thick makeup makes her face look dead under wax. He drains the cup three times.
“Now, how about you show me what you showed them at the gate?”
He kicks out his leg so he can reach the bills in his pocket and shows them to her.
The woman takes them to her desk. She lifts a small metal case from a lower drawer and opens it and lays a bill inside. The lid snaps closed and she types in something on the keypad. Ten seconds later she opens the lid and smiles, holds up a bill. “This is counterfeit.”
The man stands and takes the money and weighs it in his hand, holds it up to the light, finds the hologram and the watermark. “I don’t believe you.”
“It doesn’t matter what you believe.”
“I need a vehicle,” the man says. “Just something that drives, has to have paperwork.”
She lowers her head and gives him a look that he assumes she means to read as forlorn but it arrives deranged. “I wish I could help but you aren’t giving me much to work with.”
“I’m giving you cash to work with,” he says. “And you’re telling me it’s counterfeit. I can’t prove you wrong.”
“I wouldn’t lie,” she says seriously.
“I don’t know what you would do.” The man motions to his bike. “Come look at this.” The woman follows him and takes a step back when she sees the dog. The guards perk up and move in.
“What happened to him?” She squats down, lowers a knee, and gives the dog a scratch at the base of the lampshade.
“He’s faking,” the man says. Then he digs the rest of the cash from the pannier and holds it out for the woman. “Some of this must be real, right?”
She projects exasperation and takes the money and holds it up for her associates, gives it a shake.
The guards are close enough to touch him now. The woman gives the dog a last pat and stands up. “Take him to the lot.” She returns to her desk, opens a drawer, and drops the bills inside. “It won’t be pretty,” she says to the man.
“I need paperwork too,” the man says. “That’s ten grand right there.”
“Take it or leave it.”
“You’re trespassing at this point,” one of the guards says. “You either come with me now or we’re gonna have trouble.”
“Counterfeiting can get you sent to the Dakotas,” the woman says.
“I told you it’s not fake and if it is I sure as hell didn’t know it was.”
Her manner changes again. She lowers her head and touches her sidearm. “We have options,” she says. “You don’t.”
“At least give me a bill of sale. Something.” He looks at his trailer. “I don’t have anything else.”
“What about the dog?”
“You aren’t taking my dog.”
“We’re done then.” She nods to the guard that hasn’t been talking and he puts a hand on the man’s shoulder. The man knows that this, if he chooses, could be where it ends.
The stone-age Prius is crumpled quarter panel, primer, and Bondo piebald with mismatched wheels, riding cockeyed on two donuts, and myopic with a spiderwebbed windshield. The batteries and charging unit have been removed so it’s petrol only. It won’t start at first and, if the gauge is to be believed, the tank is empty. The backseats are gone and the passenger seat has suffered fire damage and even after he puts down a blanket, the dog is hesitant to lie down. Even without seats, the man has difficulty cramming the bike and trailer into the back. The guard steps in to help him and when the hatchback finally closes, they are both fairly amazed. Next-level piece of shit.
Warning lights blink on the dash as the car sputters toward the exit. The windows won’t roll down. The smell of burnt plastic is overwhelming. He should’ve kept the money. He should’ve done something else. He should’ve never come here. But he always wanted a Prius. The car dies and barely restarts before the battery is drained.
Outside, the man is stopped, idling at the guard gate. He waits for the puncture strip to be dragged out of the road and surveys the Buzzard. The kid with the afro is lost in the crowd. Jeremy the guard waves him through with a grin.
He’s still waiting, revving the motor so it won’t die, when he sees the two cops coming toward him, codies, pointing their pistols and yelling at him to switch the motor off. Get out. Get out.
The contents of the Prius are emptied into the parking lot. People stand and watch. The dog is returned to the trailer and the trailer is reconnected to the bike. He thinks they might let him off. He considers jumping on his bike and making a run for it. Twenty years too late for that. After exchanging a few words with the codies, Jeremy the guard gets into the driver seat of the sedan and reverses it back into the superstore.
The woman cody finishes searching the man’s panniers and for some evil reason pours out the last of his water. “Do you have any ID?” she asks, as she applies a cable to his wrists.
“No,” the man says.
“Are you in the system?” she says. “Don’t lie either because if you are, we’ll know soon enough.”
“I’m not.”
“Another Juan Masa,” the male cody says. His accent is southern and he’s tall and dark-skinned. He looks down at the man and holds his gaze, the whites of his eyes are shot through with broken blood vessels. “You got someone that we can call to pick up your dog? We can’t allow it in the transport and if we call animal control, you’ll never see it again.”
He gives the vet’s number and the cody sends a text. A moment later he holds up his phone and shows the man the vet’s reply.
The male cody pushes the bike with the dog still in the trailer, while the woman leads the man by the cable tie through the Buzzard to their vehicle. People heckle them as a group but from a distance.
The man is loaded into the back of their transport and restrained with a retractable chain attached to his wrists like a dog leader. The woman cody takes his picture with her phone. The bike and trailer are leaned against the concrete base of a lamppost.
“Since you didn’t lie to us—you aren’t in the system,” the woman says over her shoulder a minute later, “we’ll wait until your dog’s ride gets here, OK?”
The institutional white walls of the cargo bay and the bench are smeared with dried blood and what looks to be excrement.
An old woman wearing a sari comes to the driver’s window but from the back the man can’t make out what she’s saying. The female cody eventually tells her to fuck off. After she’s gone, the man leans forward to look for the dog and sees that he has his head hanging out of the trailer with his ridiculous lampshade.
The vet pulls into the lot in her little yellow pickup truck. The man has
never seen her behind the wheel before and she looks uncomfortable. He doesn’t bother trying to yell to her or signal. She wouldn’t be able to see him through the smoked glass anyway. The female cody points at the bike and trailer and the vet waves and nods in the affirmative. She looks into the dark windows but she can’t see him. The dog will be safe and that’s enough.
They follow a four-laner south, out of the fractured city and through the suburbs. A few communities are making a stand—roadblocks and guard shacks, concertina wire—but most of it has been burned or bulldozed. Black canyons and burnt hillsides appear yellow under the dust-choked sun, black plumes of distant smoke, made more ominous and stark by the tinted glass.
“The Buzzard wasn’t the place for you,” the male cody says over his shoulder.
“I didn’t know who I was dealing with,” the man says. “Until it was too late.”
“We’ve seen that fucking Prius sold a dozen times,” the woman says.
“At least.”
“They called you?” the man says.
“Last week’s criminals are this week’s paychecks.” The driver opens a can of snoose and loads in a dip, offers it to his partner.
She pushes it away with a smile. “Your gut bacteria hate you,” she says.
“They best get in line.”
Dusty ag lands. There are no more houses, not standing at least. The odd mailbox tilts toward the road. What trees remain upright are stripped bare, thumbnail-raked stalks of rye grass. Large beige structures appear on the horizon as well as a grid of chain-link fence twenty feet high. It has the look of an industrial hog farm.
They turn off the highway and pass through an open gate and follow a potholed stretch of pavement into the parking lot and come to a stop. The codies open the doors and let him out. They stand in the parking lot and face the prison gates. The tops of the guard towers are visible above the roofline.
The woman cody cuts his flex cuffs with special pliers from her utility belt. “If you decide to walk out the way we came in,” she says. “We probably won’t say anything.”
He shakes the cuffs from his wrists onto the ground.
“We’re contracted to get you here,” the cody says. “They’re contracted to process you and keep you locked up. But right now, you’re not under anybody’s contract. Call it international waters or whatever. Call it the DMZ, or I’m not filling out the forms, or what’s the fucking point. Take your pick.”
The driver opens the door and stands up and speaks loudly over the roof of the transport. “Walk back to the road.” He points. “Then you’re gonna head east till you hit the tracks, turn left. Catch out when the train comes. Local slow roller so it ain’t hard.”
“All right.”
“Fucking Buzzard, right?” the driver says.
“We don’t want to see you again,” the other cody says. “You get picked up for any reason at all and it’s our asses.”
The man nods and starts walking.
[9]
M>35
CA 96118
He takes the child deer hunting even though she isn’t old enough for a weapon and he has to carry food and water for her and warm clothes. No good reason to drag her along. She’ll be traumatized. But he and the child’s mother have been arguing about everything and he had to get out of the house. Take her with you. Yeah yeah yeah. And build a shed roof on the side of the goat shed while you’re at it since you stole half of my barn space. Chores, everything is a chore. If you want to eat, it requires twenty-seven different tasks. Never mind going out. As if there’re any restaurants within fifty miles. As if any of that food isn’t redneck trash or GMO poison, sugar and pesticides. As if he cares. As in he’d better or he can hit the road because she doesn’t let that shit into her house, never mind into her child’s belly. Never mind turning on a light switch without checking the state of the batteries first. The stupid future.
Poaching would be more accurate. The land isn’t his and there’s no longer a season on mule deer, or enforcement if there were. If he doesn’t shoot it, some militia asshole will. He isn’t worried about the militia assholes today though because they’re celebrating their little Freedom Day in town.
“I’m tired,” the child says, bundled up, robot stiff.
“Domo arigato, Mr. Roboto.”
“What did you say?” She’s going to bust his balls all day, this mean little girl, as if her mother were here in spirit.
Deep breath, no going back. “We haven’t even walked anywhere yet. Look, there’s the truck. We can still see it.”
“I want to go home.”
“Not until we walk up there.” He points to the ridgeline. The ground is dusty and he hasn’t seen any sign, tracks or browse. “If I were a deer,” he says, “where would I go?”
“Home.”
“OK. But where is the deer’s home?”
“In town.”
“No.”
“We used to see them in town all the time.”
“Because people feed them.”
“Why don’t we feed them?”
“Because feeding deer is low rent.”
She knew what he meant by low rent. He’d explained it already. “But we feed the goats.”
“Goats aren’t deer. Look, we’re almost there.”
“Papa,” she says. And he’s more shocked that she’s called him Papa than by the deer that’s stepped from behind the ridge, and he misses his chance.
He scoops up the little girl and holds her under his arm like a bag of chicken feed and hustles up the hill to the ridge and sets her down. The buck he saw has disappeared into a thicket but there are two smaller ones and a doe working their way across the hillside below.
With his lungs burning, no breath, he sends his left hand through the sling and lies down on his belly, raises up on his elbows. The leather of the sling cuts into his arm above his triceps but he’s locked and steady. He calls it one hundred forty yards. Easy shot. Then the doe spots them and they all stop browsing and look up at the ridge. He glances to his left and sees the child’s shoes and she’s behind him enough that she’s safe. She’s talking and he considers telling her to lie down and shush but the deer are looking at her and not taking notice of him at all. He isn’t listening to what the child is saying. The deer don’t know what to think of her, but she isn’t a threat.
“Just keep talking,” he says to her. “They like you.”
He breathes in, lets it out halfway, and touches the trigger. The rifle jumps and kicks up dust and the child screams. He continues to ignore the child. He got a hit. He could hear it and he saw the buck jerk forward a little. Didn’t he? He has doubts. Why is it still standing? He works the bolt and prepares for another shot. The smaller of the two bucks bounds off with the doe right behind him. The other one watches them go and staggers a few steps and drops.
The man turns to the child with a look of triumph and is met with tears. The day only gets longer.
“Don’t cut him,” she pleads. “Don’t cut him open.”
“Too late for that,” he says. People always saying how things look wrong in death, leg twisted, neck bent; but not this deer, this deer, to him, looks just right. Lay down and died is all. Never mind the bullet hole.
He offers the child the CamelBak but she won’t drink. He offers her dried apples but she won’t eat. He’s traumatized her. He can’t figure why he thought this would work. She eats little fuzzy rabbits is why. She eats pigs that follow her like puppies everywhere she goes, right up to the moment when the mobile butcher guy, Brent, levels a snub-nosed .38 at their head. She eats chickens that have names. But the deer, for some unforeseen reason, is different.
“If you’re this pissed,” he says to her, “imagine what your mom is going to say.” This cheers her up enough to at least move down the hill.
She begins crying again when she touches the deer’s soft fur, but it isn’t like before. She’s hamming it up now, having painted herself into an emotional corner. His heart is
still clubbing in his chest and he’s fine ignoring her when she’s like this. It feels like the right thing to do. The deer’s tongue is out and an open eye surveys the haze, elegant snout with blood at the nostrils. They look at it, look at each other.
“Four point,” he says.
“There’s eight.”
“They only count one side.”
“Who?”
“I don’t know. Deer hunters.”
“Why?”
“Maybe they have trouble with numbers.”
“Like they can’t count?”
“I’m joking. You can’t eat antlers.”
“So they don’t count?”
“I don’t know. Probably not. Let’s say thank you.”
“Thank you.” She runs a finger over the large tendon on the rear leg.
“Thanks, bud.” And he means it. He’s probably never meant it so much. “OK, we gotta get this moving. Here we go. Ready?”
She nods yes.
The skin. He makes the V with his fingers so he doesn’t slice the paunch. He stops cutting and pokes around with his finger to make sure he’s not too deep. A sharp knife, tested on heavy card stock, only used for hunting, only used for this. The hair is soft and rabbit-like on the belly and falls out easily, sheds worse than a dog.
He’s up to his elbow now, hacking away at the inside of the deer’s neck looking for the windpipe. Didn’t bring a saw for the ribs, complicates things. His last deer was small enough he cut through the sternum with his knife. The windpipe feels like a radiator hose and warm. “Just give me a goddamn break,” he says. The child is at his shoulder as he slices the remaining threads of diaphragm and pulls the gut pile clear. The lungs are jelly but he only nicked one of the front shoulders so meat loss is at a minimum. He’s happy. This is an improvement. Last time he took out both shoulders.
“It smells.” She’s squatted down beside the bloating stomach, sniffing.
“Not bad,” he says.
“No, animal smelly. Kind of smelly like the basement is smelly but without smelling like a basement.”
He names the organs as he separates them. The child is interested in the heart. He explains to her how the blood flows in and out of the heart. She slides her thumb over the heavy ridge of muscle to the valve, then picks it up like an apple. Dark red blood pours from the valves and streams down her wrist.