by Jim Nesbitt
“Now cut the shit, J.S. I’m in a jam.”
“Aw, let her puff and blow, Big ‘Un. I’ll just duck behind your coattails, stay out of the wind and wonder why it took you so long to file for divorce.”
“Well, it speaks. Where’s the pull string, Double E? Does Mattel give up-holler accents to all its talkin’ dolls, now? Or just the wet-and-change models?”
“It speaks, it walks, it talks and it’s been out of diapers a long time. The only thing it doesn’t know how to do is keep the roots from showin’ through the Clairol. You’ll have to teach me some time.”
“Oh, I like her, Eee Eee. Got a bite on her. And me takin’ her for a piece of blonde fluff. You know how I feel about blondes, now matter how cuddly they look.”
“Look, can we cut this fandango? I need your help and I need to know if you’ll give it. If not, we’ve gotta get gone. Where’s fast fingers?”
“Road gig. Gone two weeks.”
Carla Sue heard a slight tightness hit the other woman’s voice. Big ‘Un did too and stepped over, cupping his ex-wife’s elbow in one hand, gently leading her into the kitchen to talk. She heard him start to lay out their deal and turned to look at the artwork scattered around the parlor and dining room.
Kerosine lamps gave off flickering, yellow light, tagging an oily tang on the breeze stepping through the open windows. Her eye was drawn to the nearest wall, to a box about the size of a large birdhouse, hanging about head level with an open front and a peaked roof of tongue depressors painted black and white.
The walls of this little box were also made from tongue depressors, also painted an alternating white and black. Inside, was a diorama, of sorts -- the claws and legs of birds forming the base for figurines made from tiny, crossed bones. They stood around an altar formed from the ribcage of a squirrel or rat.
Behind them, a figurine sat at the keyboard of a tiny organ, its pipes the fine bones of birds. The organ player had the body of a robin and the head of a rattler. A cross of bone stretched across the back wall of the box, bleached white on flat black.
Scattered across a nearby table was the jewelry that made Juanita Schmidt faddishly famous, worth a blurb in Esquire and a short feature in People. She picked up a pair of earrings made from rattler and armadillo vertebrae. The bleached armadillo bones reminded her of that worn X-wing fighter Luke Skywalker flew in Star Wars.
She held the earrings up to the lobes of her ears as she looked at herself in a small wall mirror. She twirled them and let them dangle. Oh, yea-yus. Stylish. Then she looked at a price tag that reminded her why she was glad to be born a Southerner -- two hundred bucks.
Another child o’ Dixie exercising the birthright of carney barkers, chicken thieves, dude ranch owners and television evangelists. It had something to do with the war -- the Yankees may have won it, but we’uns hammered out the right to rip them off. In perpetuity.
It was a tradeoff, written in blood. Payback for Shiloh, Sherman’s March and all those goddam carpetbaggers. And George Steinbrenner. She couldn’t stand that paunchy blowhard, his cigars or his Bronx Bombers. Gave baseball a bad name. Not that she gave much of a damn about baseball, but when Carla Sue’s eye was caught by something that stuck in her craw, lack of knowledge or interest in the field never stopped her from working up a full-blown, bile-speckled opinion.
And in her opinion, George Steinbrenner deserved the stern weight of Islamic law -- public castration. Without ether. Followed by an inning on the mound against the Texas Rangers.
She heard Juanita’s loud voice in the kitchen -- “Well, Eee Eee, are you playin’ hide the hot dog with her?” There were tears, anger and pain in that voice. She heard Big `Un’s mumbling reply. Then the bedroom door slammed and she started her lonely vigil on the couch.
Carla Sue couldn’t sleep, but it wasn’t the sound of sex keeping her awake. It was her own memory -- the roar of Eldon’s shotgun, the sight of her uncle, splattered across his eggs and coffee like pulp from a grapefruit, the look on Neville Ross’s face, his hair smoking and his shirt on fire, as she pumped out those rounds that slammed him onto the tile.
She had waited four years for this, sleeping with Ross, running errands for him and the dicey double-cross for her. His chest hair was white and ghostly against the tan of his skin. He was old, but the ways of a pimp were still alive. He knew how to seduce a woman and make her feel like a goddess in bed. And he still had staying power, enough for two or three rounds in the night.
Afterwards, he would stroke her pussy and pubic hair and murmur, “Mi gringa querida.” She got to where she could even fake liking that.
She could have killed Ross many times in those four years but wanted to wait until she had a sizeable nest egg built up and a chance to nail both Ross and T-Roy. The Burch ploy looked promising -- stay close, look for an opening and play it.
But the raid on the rancho scotched that plan. She was afraid one of T-Roy’s Rambos would ice Ross, cheating her of the chance to do it herself. She also had no faith in T-Roy; he’d whack her just for being Ross’s lover and a double-crosser. So she took the shot and watched Ross die.
Carla Sue lit another Lucky and heard the bedroom door open and bare feet slap down the hallway. It was Juanita, wildhaired and wrapped in a thin kimono, black Japanese letters on white cotton.
She took the Lucky from Carla Sue’s hand and took a deep drag before grabbing a bentwood chair and straddling it backwards.
“He’s asleep. Listen at him snore. Like a hog snortin’.”
“He needs it. It’s been hard the last two days.”
“You two in a lot of trouble?”
“You don’t want to know.”
“Yeah, I do. He meant something to me once. Still does. I don’t think you ever lose that for someone, even when things go bad. You just bury it someplace and move on.”
“Is that what happened, things went bad?”
“Yeah. He lost his fire for life. When I first met Ed Earl Burch, I thought he was the funniest, most hard-bitten man I’d ever seen. He was battered and knocked around, but he still cared about friends and good whiskey and having a good time and not letting those bastards squeeze him into a box.
“He seemed bigger than life and wiser than God. At least, I wanted him to be. But the closer I got, the more I realized he was just going through the motions. He was hollow inside. It was like he knew he ought to care about his friends and not let life eat him up, but it already had. He was such a good storyteller and went through the motions so well that I didn’t catch on until after we got hitched.”
“Sounds like what little I know about him. Seems like a guy who wants to be left alone but wants to do the right thing.”
“Yeah, that’s the shitty part. Wanting to do right ain’t enough. And when I figured out he wanted to do right by me but was just going through the motions, I left. For ol’ fast fingers.”
“Who? Oh, the guitar player. He’s long gone, ain’t he?”
“Sure is. One of life’s bitter little boomerangs. He finally figured out I was just goin’ through the motions with him.”
“How long?”
“About three months. Just long enough to get so horny that an ex-husband looks like Tom Selleck, even if he is bald, walks with a limp and drags some blonde cutie along with him to your front door.”
Carla Sue laughed, then coughed up some smoke from the Lucky. Juanita grinned, stood up and stretched.
“I need a drink. Bourbon do you?”
“Be fine.”
Juanita ambled into the kitchen and came back with a bottle of Wild Turkey and two juice glasses. She put three fingers of brown liquor in each. They tilted their drinks and Juanita eyed Carla Sue with an arched eyebrow.
“Are you sleepin’ with ol’ handsome in there?”
“No.”
“Well, somethin’s put the fire back in him
. I couldn’t hardly keep up and he’s got this look in his eye that I haven’t seen in a hellish long time.”
“I think he wants to kill somebody.”
“Who?”
“The same somebody I do.”
Chapter 21
Drowsy with sleep, Ana Patrice Aguirre traced the muscular back of her boyfriend of the moment, her fingers lingering on a jagged knife scar just above his left kidney. It puckered as he leaned forward to pull on his boots.
Her ears still rang from a night tending bar at The Silver Concho, a cowboy club with cheap beer, thick smoke and loud, loud live music from Curry Slick and the New Delhi El Dorados. She was vaguely horny and reached toward his belt buckle, tugging with one hand as she rose up on her knees to press her breasts into his back.
“C’mon back here, lover. It’s early. You don’t have to go nowhere yet.”
She nibbled on his neck, nosing her way underneath long shanks of straight black hair.
“It’s afternoon. I gotta open and work happy hour.”
His tone was hard and flat. She tried to change his mood by dragging her fingernails along his crotch, scratching lightly on the surface of the denim. She arched her back, brushing her nipples against his shoulder blades.
“C’mon, Luis. That bar’ll still be there when we’re through.”
He shrugged her off with a sudden roll of his shoulders, knocking her off balance and sprawling across the sheets.
“Pendejo! I’m trying to give you a little action before you go trudging off to work and you knock me over. What the fuck is that?”
“I told you I have to go.”
“And I told you I want you back in bed, doin’ your duty.”
He was putting on his shirt -- shiny grey with silvery mock-pearl speed snaps. She was on her knees in the middle of the bed, left hand on hip, right hand wagging a finger at him. He stepped to the side of the bed and swept her to him with one arm, kissing her hard then breaking away with a slap on her ass.
“Gotta beat feet, lover.”
“Yeah, yeah -- just like a man. Get what you want then get gone.”
He winked at her and picked up his straw Resistol with the quarterhorse crease and the rattlesnake band, smoothing his hair with one hand and settling the hat on his head with the other.
“Adios, tragona.”
“You call me a glutton, cabron?”
“Si, baby. My kind of glutton. A glutton for sex. You’re voracious.”
She threw a pillow at him as he ducked through the door. The front door slammed and she heard his pickup crank, the engine exhaust snorting through the twin glass packs as he accelerated down the street.
Her ears were still ringing as she padded across the floor, pulling on a black San Antonio Gunslingers jersey, heading for the small bathroom that sat just outside the door -- a pee and a dose of headache powder on her mind.
Gunning the mix of powder and tap water like one of last night’s shooters, she checked herself in the full length mirror that hung on the back of the door. Not bad -- jet black hair that was as straight as a Chinese girl’s, thin lips with a haughty curl to them, a nose that was slightly too wide and flat, muscular dancer’s legs that flashed underneath the tail of the jersey.
Still got the goods, girl, she thought.
Wandering back into the bedroom, she glanced at the clock radio and saw she had three hours to go before work. She climbed back in bed and started leafing through an old copy of People, the one that featured randy Prince Andy and his fling with Koo Stark, the soft-porn starlet.
Sleep drifted over her, pulling her into a gauzy dream of the prince and the porn star making love in her bed and drawing her into a slow-moving threesome. She saw the prince poised above her, smiling and rolling a condom onto the royal cock. Then Koo, offering a breast to her mouth. Then Luis, popping his pearl snaps and shucking his boots, getting ready to take his turn.
Something hard slipped inside her and she moved her hips in sleep. In her dreams, it was Andy, still smiling, but wearing a white airman’s helmet. Andy became Luis, still wearing his hat, grinning and leaning down to talk dirty in her ear.
“Wake up, chiquita. Wake on up. You dead if you don’ wake up.”
That wasn’t the voice of Luis. In her dreams, Luis was still inside her. But that voice belonged to somebody else. In her dreams, Luis was reaching for her breasts, tweaking her nipples the way she liked.
A huge hand clamped around her throat. Her eyes flew open to the face of a large, ugly black man, sweat popping from his jowls and forehead, eyes bulging and angry. And a high voice trying to whisper, sounding like a steam pipe popping pressure.
“Don’ move, don’ say nothin’. You dead if you do.”
She bucked and lashed out with a free arm but found it had all the impact of smacking a sedan with a piece of bamboo. The hand on her throat got tighter. And the hardness inside her wasn’t a dream, it was the fingers of his other hand, stretching her painfully.
“You liked that while you was sleepin’. Dreamin’ ‘bout that cock that just lef’? Well, he gone now and Mr. Badhair is here. Let’s see what you got.”
The hand left her throat and ripped the jersey with one pull. She coughed and tried to gulp in air. He smiled as he looked at her breasts, brown against the ripped black fabric.
“Hmmm, yeah. Nice. So very nice.”
She was breathing now. She was angry.
“Go ahead, motherfucker, do what you’re gonna do.”
She tried to claw his face. The hand clamped back on her throat, the fingers burrowed deeper inside, causing her to cry out. He leaned into her face. She could smell sour sweat and breath that stank of coffee and stale cigarettes.
“Oh no, baby. Mr. Badhair ain’t here to rape your puta ass. I ain’t got time for that. I’m here to get some information out of you. I’m here to find out if you seen your ol’ boyfrien’ lately. You know -- Ed Earl Burch. Your squeeze up in Dallas.”
She couldn’t speak. She shook her head back and forth.
“I cain’t hear you.”
The fingers rammed her again. She gasped through the pain.
“Ain’t seen him in four years.”
A raspy breath.
“Don’t know where he is.”
“He call you?”
She shook her head.
“Any of his friends call you?”
She shook her head.
“I want to believe you, baby. I truly do. But I gotta be sure.”
He grabbed her right hand, wrapping his fingers around her pinky.
“This gonna hurt. One more time -- you seen Burch?”
Her eyes shifted from his face to her finger and back to his face. She shook her head then stared at him because she couldn’t watch what he was about to do. She clenched her jaw and felt him start to bend her finger back. She stared.
His head snapped to one side. He bellowed like a freshly castrated steer. Something black and furry slapped her in the face. She clawed it away from her eyes -- a toupee, she hadn’t noticed that. She heard the dull thwack of wood on flesh and bone, and felt him fall away from her. She was yanked from the bed.
“Get the hell out of here.”
Luis pushed her toward the bedroom door. She stumbled and glanced over her shoulder. The black man was crouched on the floor, but rising with a gun in his hand. Luis was stepping forward, swinging a baseball bat. He chopped at the gun hand, knocking a Colt semi-auto to the floor.
She backed into the hallway and saw the black man body slam Luis into the bedroom wall. Luis bounced off and lunged forward, slamming shoulder into midsection. The black man slapped Luis aside with a huge forearm, sending him sprawling into the hall. He grabbed Luis and pulled him up like a sack of dog food, running him head first into the bathroom.
He grabbed Luis by the hair and sl
ammed his head into the hard, white porcelain of the toilet bowl. She could hear his skull smack the hard stone -- one, two, three, four times. The fifth time broke the bowl and sent water gushing onto the tile.
She ran for the door and didn’t stop until she was at her uncle’s house, ten blocks away. By that time, Badhair was headed for the outskirts of town, pointed west-northwest toward the Hill Country, stomping on the accelerator of a borrowed, black Olds 88, 70s vintage.
Four hours later, Cortez and Cider pulled up next to five cop cars and a meat wagon. Ana Patrice Aguirre was in a bathrobe on the front porch, curled up in her uncle’s arms, rocking back and forth.
“Better call ahead for some law, rainmaker. I wouldn’t give two shits for anybody who used to sleep with this pendejo.”
“You’re still so damn sure it’s Burch.”
“Who else? And it really don’t matter ‘cause whoever it is, he’s riding the same trail we are. Only he’s ahead of us.”
“Make the goddam call. Get the sheriff there to hold the ex till we hit town. Tell him we’ll be rollin’ his way real soon.”
Cider stepped up on the porch. He leaned down and looked into the young woman’s eyes.
“Was Burch here?”
No answer. Her eyes were blank.
All she saw was angry eyes and a grimacing black face. All she heard was the sound of a lover’s skull hitting the rim of a toilet bowl. Again and again.
Chapter 22
They left before dawn, running along the edge of town, keeping on the back roads until the lights of Mason, few and weak, were out of sight, then picking up a farm-to-market that headed north and west, toward Hext.
As he drove, he could see Juanita standing on her porch in the dark, wrapped in that thin kimono. He gave her the Bulldog and the only speed loader he had left, urging her to buy a box of .44s and stay with friends. She shook her head.
“Guns are your thing, Eee Eee. Not mine. And this place is all I have left in the world. This and what’s left of daddy’s ranch. Y’all head out there. All that’s left is that double wide. Had some college boys out there, studyin’ the bat cave not too long back, so it should have some canned stuff still. All you need is some milk, eggs and bread.”