“You okay, dude?”
“Yeah. Just nerves. I’m fine.”
The truck starts honking its horn a quarter mile out and Ramon is fumbling with the locks and shaking his head clear as it comes to a stop. Ramon and the driver begin bringing in the delivery, their arms full of boxes. Canned goods, sacks of flour, rice and potatoes, hygiene products, pornography and scandal rags, a few clothing items and a first aid kit for a laugh. The bulk of the shipment is liquor. You wait ‘till they’re behind the truck together, lifting a crate, then you slip into the cantina and take positions at the door.
Ramon’s short bat for you and a bottle of Jack for Metcalf. Ramon comes through the door first, backing up. In the split second it takes for him to register surprise, Metcalf has broken his jaw with a wicked two handed swing. Following suit, you take out the driver, stepping into the doorway. The crate of liquor crashes to the floor, just missing your feet.
Metcalf falls upon Ramon, straddling his chest and concussing him well beyond the point of necessity. You’ve never seen him alive like this, having his pathetic revenge. A wave of nausea washes over you and you wipe your palms on your shirt and get a good grip on the bat.
Metcalf slows down, panting and happy. Still on top of his victim, he wipes his bloody hands on Ramon’s shirt then runs them over his face and through his hair.
He lets out a whoop. “Yeeeaaahhh! How you like me now?”
Laughing, he turns his face up to look at you. You lay the bat across the bridge of his nose. It smashes like a ripe plum. He’s dead before he falls.
You stop in front of her hut and she scampers aboard like an excited puppy. That changes when she sees you. The hard look of violence still on your face, blood on your clothes and no Metcalf. The truck lurches forward and she’s thrown back against the seat. In the rearview, you spot a couple Marias running after you and others out staring, not understanding what’s happened. You mutter, “Kiss my ass, Politoburg.”
*
The cab of the truck is awash in emotions. Maria stares at you, waiting for an account of the blood and missing Metcalf. You smile at her, annoyed that you have to remind her to be glad to be gone. Timidly, she smiles, too, but the question doesn’t leave her eyes.
You feel a conversation coming on.
You: Look... he’s not coming... We’ve got to take care of each other, now.
Her: What happened?
You: It was bloody. I told you it would be bloody. That’s why I made you wait for me in the hut.
Her: What did you do?
You: What I had to. What I’d do again.
Her: Do you love me?
You: Are you serious? Let’s not have this conversation. Ever.
She sits there watching you have this conversation, all by yourself this time. She senses its conclusion and sets her eyes on the horizon, where they belong.
You abandon the truck a couple miles outside the city and hike through the hills surrounding, looking for a spot to sleep. It’s a few hours before midnight and the lights look delicious. It’s hard not to go down and find a drink and a meal and spend some of your cash on a hotel, but you’ve got to play this smart.
Maria sleeps with her head in your lap. The night is cold, but the exhilaration of freedom warms you, though you don’t join her in slumber. Tonight, you confess your sins to her. All of them.
When lights begin coming on again, you wake her up and the two of you make your way down the hill, toward the harbor. Maria understands what you want when you put cash in her hand.
You watch her work out passage for the two of you on a fishing boat for South America. She looks over her shoulder and smiles when she catches you staring, her tongue goes to the gap between her front teeth and you call the feeling in your gut devotion. You know it’s just a by-product of circumstance–two souls shrugging the weight of a common oppressor–but it’s there.
*
All day you sit on the deck, watching the sea.
That night you rock to sleep in your cramped cabin that feels like a five star hotel. The ocean smell sears the dust from your lungs. Maria hums a lullaby and your dreams are filled with the future instead of the past for the first time in years.
*
It’s past midnight when they come for you. You wake up a second before they burst into the room, suddenly aware that you’re alone and it’s about to go bad. Four sailors haul you from your bed naked and kicking up to the deck.
You scream her name every second, but you can’t locate Maria.
On the deck the captain is waiting. She is at his side. “If you touch her I will fucking kill every last one of you!” you yell as they drag you to the rail. The stars provide the only illumination, but it’s bright enough to cause the blade to glint an instant before the pink mist and the hot rivulets rush down your chest.
The world tilts and you hit the water with a smack you can’t even hear. The salt water fills your gasping mouth and when you break the surface you struggle to see the deck, wondering if she’s to join you in your grave.
As your strength fails and your vision dims, she appears at boat’s edge, looking for you. She’s alone and unmolested. She’s wrapped in a blanket against the chill. She’s not screaming. She’s calm and she’s free for the first time in her life. She waves to you once and watches serenely and without malice as you go under for the last time.
Good for you honey.
When Ramon awoke, his jaw was broken and the retard was already dead - splayed on his back, a euphoric expression writ across his wasted face. His nose looked to have been driven backward into that swamp of fuckwit he’d called a brain, and thus he was beyond reach for the revenge Ramon was so plainly owed.
Ramon’s head was engulfed in flames. The pain of his injuries–the swelling, his fractured bones–stoking a fever of unprecedented heights. The awful sunlight. His face running away from him in six different directions. And the shrieking of the whores resounded infinitely between his ears, building and intensifying into an ecstatic cacophony.
Metcalf the Retard had busted out along with the other gringo. They had beat him down, broke his face and mopped up the take. Then the other gringo had killed Metcalf’s ass and split with that ugly, crater-faced puta who’d been keeping him warm.
Polito would find them, gut the lovers and fuck their entrails. That was a fact.
Then what would he do with Ramon?
Ramon had been Polito’s custodian for nearly five years. Supervised the whores, kept the gringos in line, ordered and sold goods–food, clothes, drugs, alcohol, hygiene products, batteries–everything the guests and employees needed. Mr. Greaser-Whipple.
He knew what hell was–it was playing butler, nurse and janitor for a bunch of entitled, ass-licking gringos and being a middle-management toadie between Harlan Polito and his gaggle of crab-motel, jizz-mops in the desert. Mr. Beaner-Belvedere.
Fucking hell.
2. Carrion
The woman cradles her son next to the fire's last embers and rotates slightly to her left to keep the wind against her back. She runs one hand through his hair and lets him clutch the fingers of the other, squeezing while he slumbers. A dream has disturbed her and she won’t sleep the rest of the night. She guesses the time to be four a.m.
The dream unsettling her featured three corpses left to the elements and displayed openly upon the desert floor, but she isn’t sure that ‘corpse’ is the right word for them. A corpse still has meat. What tissue remained on the bones in her vision was withered and taught, leathery and colorless, stitched without pattern between odd bones and even the most florid report would hesitate to label it flesh. In her dream-logic she knows that the first and oldest osseous heaps belong to a man whose name she’d never learned, the second is a young boy and the third is her own. She’d gazed upon the decomposition of her own body without passion and the man’s without guilt, but the sight of her boy, exposed and somehow still vulnerable, though the worst had already come, had sent her spirit railing a
gainst the prison of sleep. She was held captive inside her dream a moment longer and forced to study the violation and it was the boy’s mouth, the ghastly rictus, black and deep, with irregular shape where the teeth had been broken out that burns into her now conscious mind.
After ten years, she has returned to this desert to lay hold of what she'd buried, and she knows the area well enough to be cautious, but the rumors she's picked up about bandits–nomads who haunted the region–are new. She’d paid them little mind until three days ago. The bodies they'd come across had unsettled her. There had been three. Naked, fed upon and missing their teeth, they had been left to the landscape by every level of scavenger.
Because of decomposition, it was impossible to determine cause of death, and all the stories she'd taken at first for colorful local lore not rooted in fact has begun to take seed in her subconscious, sprout restlessness and rob her the ability and the desire to sleep. Her son has remained stoically unaffected.
That night, she saw shadows. They were far off and hard to make out, but of an unmistakably animal movement and accompanied by a sound like that of trickling water at first, then more resembling wooden wind chimes. The more she fixed upon the sound in her memory she imagined a thousand mouths full of chattering teeth. It was the sound after all that brought to mind the words of the townswoman from a fortnight past.
They watch from the hills and descend at nightfall taking what they will and leaving only corpses behind. Their leader is a cudgel-wielding mute who wears the teeth of his victims in a bag slung from his neck, and their clattering as he walks is the only sound that they make. Sometimes it is carried to us from an unknown distance and always, soon after are discovered the bodies or whatever remains. They are followed by coyotes and wild dogs who feed in their wake.
The woman crossed herself at this point. But no one ever sees him. No one ever sees them. Few have followed after the dogs. None ever return.
The woman was one they met near the outskirts of a small village, where they had purchased dried fruit, coffee, rice and new blankets. They had walked some distance with her, and she told them the story as they went. When she had stopped and removed a candle from her satchel, they watched her sit down and prepare a small shrine with it, adding beads as well as worn photographs, which she lay face up and placed silver American dollars on top of.
"Who are they?"
"Wraiths. Restless spirits come for revenge."
"For what?"
"Everything."
The woman had arranged more scraps of paper underneath a glass jar, which she placed the large candle inside. Beneath could be seen a letter, presumably of her own hand, and the edges of a photograph of a teenaged boy. Inside the jar, next to the candle she placed two more coins. She had sat down in front of the display and told them that she was waiting for nightfall to light the candle. Then she would return to her home.
It had been high theater and she realized, when they had left the woman, that she had quite enjoyed the tale, and they began to hear it repeated with slight variation as often as they stopped. It made good fodder for the road and they even took turns reciting it to each other to pass the journey, adding their own embellishments along the way. Their journey was weeks by foot, stopping every few days in this village or that for supplies and the occasional luxury of sleep under a roof. It never took her long to earn enough and they never stayed long enough to risk eviction, or worse, at the hands of the village wives.
It had not been a story in circulation when she herself had lived nearby and she was amazed at its widespread and detailed consistency. There had always been bodies to be found in the desert, the last traces of those who dealt with drugs or guns or slaves and other dangerous commodities.
The bodies were always left alone. No one wanted to look too closely. No one wanted to be involved with that life. Parents, teachers and priests used them as effective cautionary devices to warn children away from evil choices, and children used them to build their own romances with the mysterious and the dark, but never, that she could recall, had there been so cohesive a myth explaining them.
Of course she knew something of their origin.
*
At dawn she wakes the boy and instructs him to rebuild the fire. He does so using sticks they have gathered as they walked. He knows without having to be told to make coffee and to take a ration of jerky and dried fruit. She tells him to stay there and she will return by nightfall. She leaves him armed with comic books against the day and a pistol against the night.
She sets off over the familiar terrain, following the trail she'd preserved in her mind since her last trip there, pregnant and alone, a hint of the capabilities harbored within her evidenced by the gringo’s murder, committed only weeks before, beginning to settle and confounding her hourly as she trod. She considers herself differently now. Since there is not peace to be had, she finds the best option she has left is honesty. It hurts truer than self-deception, and is also more likely to keep her alive. She has to live for the sake of her son.
At midday she stops, her destination before her. The familiar configuration of rocks that had cost her nearly a day's worth of labor, while with child, to assemble should be less than an hour in tearing down. Things always seem to work like that.
She returns in darkness to find the fire healthy and unattended. She sits herself down in front of it, carefully tucking her recovered vinyl bag behind the stone set out for her. She gives the boy a few moments to make his perimeter, the way she'd instructed before calling out to him under her breath. "Pablo, it's momma."
He emerges a moment later from the shadows, pistol in hand, smiling. He pours her coffee and places his head in her lap while she sips it. "Did you find it, momma?"
"Si."
"Are we going home, now?"
She strokes his hair and sings to him while he falls quickly to sleep.
*
The next day, she allows the boy to carry the provisions. She holds her recovered property over one shoulder and keeps the pistol in the opposite hand. This time, they do not pass through the villages, but keep the lights from the homes always visible at night. The mountains are over one shoulder, the darkened trails connecting them to the towns over the other. On their return they do not build fires at dusk, only in the morning, so they sleep huddled together against the wind.
On the third night, she wakes to the sound again. This time, it is never anything but teeth. The rhythm takes concentration to detect, but it emerges faithful to the concept of walking. A lurching cadence that she imagines spirits dragging chains to. Its proximity is impossible to guess. Sounds travel like billiard balls here, without impediment, banking off the stones and running over the smooth surface of the earth to be snatched out of the air by ears sometimes miles away. She cocks her pistol in reply, and lies flat listening until the shards of a hundred mouths stop speaking.
*
The chattering in her ears has stopped, but not in her mind. As she sleeps, she dreams of her childhood. She sees again, her father, clothes torn, shirt ripped around the neck, bloody about the nose and mouth, but still not sober as he grabs her sleeping sister from her bed. She follows after them, crying out and receiving continuous blunt rebuke across her wide forehead until her eyes cross, and she crawls on hands and knees following the sound of her mother's cries outside the house.
There are men waiting, talking now to her father who fights off his wife with one arm and pushes his eldest daughter toward them with the other. The men hold her sister then by the wrists and appraise her. One of them takes her into the back of a truck and sounds soon issue that cause their mother to wrench herself out of her husband's grasp and rush toward the bullet that meets her two strides from the vehicle.
Her father sits down and weeps the pitiful, drunken blubber of a coward awaiting merciful death, seeming only now to consider the payment he will make on his debts. The man with the gun stands over him, and hesitates briefly to wipe the sweat from his hands before taking o
ff her father's face with a single shot.
*
She wakes with a start, still in darkness. A scratching on the ground some fifty yards behind brings her senses up quick and she finds the pistol still in her right hand draped protectively over her sleeping son. Silently, this time, she re-cocks the hammer and turns over, rising quietly, seeking the source. She sniffs at the dry air, stingy with its information and listens for animal sounds.
With her left hand she rouses the boy, placing her palm over his mouth. He wakes, but does not move. She rises and steps away knowing he will listen until she is some distance before rising himself and seeking shelter. Crouching, she makes her way toward the sound's origin, careful not to disturb the stillness that has closed around them again. With every step her pulse thuds louder and she stands still a moment to soothe it back to a manageable level. Her eyesight sharpens in the darkness and she makes out shapes in the immediate terrain, but nothing moves.
She holds her breath and wills the night to expose its inhabitants.
Separated by an instant, two pairs of headlights a quarter mile away flash at the other. She remains still, afraid even to breathe. Two trucks face each other and floodlights from the racks mounted atop their cabins illuminate the twenty-yard gulf between them. Armed men exit both vehicles and two from each advance toward the center. Two more from each spread to the sides with their automatic weapons ready. Without turning around, she has begun to creep back toward the boy.
Pablo knows better than to call to her, but she desperately wishes assurance of his well-being. Whatever is about to go down it looks like a volatile situation and if bullets are going to be exchanged she wants to be with her son. Behind her she senses him and relief floods her senses. She stretches her hand backward for him, never taking her eyes off of the men with guns, but the rough hand that grips her arm is not her son’s. She feels herself jerked abruptly backward and lands in the dirt on her backside. She can just make out the figure of a man standing over her and something dark swinging toward her head before everything disappears.
Fierce Bitches (Crime Factory Single Shot) Page 2