Fierce Bitches (Crime Factory Single Shot)

by Jedidiah Ayres

  When he turns around, she nearly cries out.

  His left eye is gone and the cheek collapsed. His jaw looks like it has been broken and set wrong. The lower half is shifted centimeters to the right, making his lips close awkwardly over his unaligned mouth. There is also age that the elements will put on you quick out here. His visage is one of melting wax; still, he is easily recognizable to her.

  "Hello, Ramon.”

  As soon as she speaks, the gasps break out. Hushed and quick, they spread around them and deep into the caves. Then all is silent. He looks at her for a long moment. Sitting forward on a canvas chair that is at odds with the natural environment, and with the heavy end of the bat planted in front of him, Ramon looks for all the world like some barbarian king about to pass judgment.

  When he speaks, it is barely audible. His mouth works in a grotesque way–his words slurred by the contortion of his face. Teeth are missing along his lower jaw and drool escapes when his lips part, but he is not mute, after all. "I suppose you think that it is yours now?"

  She does not look him in the face. The single eye roaming over her is unnerving, but she does not wilt. She nods, staring at the ground. "I suppose I do." More murmurs, then she continues. "If you have my property, I hope also that you have my son.”

  *

  One of the gringos had latched onto her. He'd stayed in her hut and she rarely took his money. She liked to pretend the one had nothing to do with the other. She'd found it could be an advantage to have one stay with you. Had to be the right type, though, not some psychotic who could flip out in the night and beat you to death or rape you with a bottle or burn you with cigarettes like sometimes happened.

  The advantage was a perverse play at domestication and companionship. They spoke often late into the night. Though they shared no words, she felt there was a spiritual understanding between them. His tones were usually troubled and she countered with soothing ones of her own. She would stroke his hair and sing to him, the same songs Lupe had comforted her with. She whispered her secrets to him while he slept and when he was awake she assured him, "Everything's going to be alright." No overlap of language could have substituted for the communication they shared.

  On the night she confessed her pregnancy to him, he looked at her with an intensity that pleased and frightened her. She knew he had not understood her words and she didn't repeat them with gestures so that he would follow, but he had obviously understood the importance of what she had shared.

  When he set the plans in motion for them to escape, he put himself at risk for her. But in the escape he had killed one his friends. Without hesitation he had sacrificed him because he knew that he would slow them down. And when she looked into his face that was dirty with the blood of both enemies and friends, she knew that eventually she and their baby would slow him down too.

  *

  They bring her son to her. Pablo looks healthy and unshaken. She smiles, knowing he is a strong boy. The women, her former colleagues, the Marias of the desert, fawn over her son, who had spent the last few days playing with their own children. Some embrace her. Others just nod solemnly when she looks at them. Some of their faces, she begins to recall. They are not old now, but they were never young.

  She understands their life without having to hear the story, and she agrees with the myths they have inspired. They are vengeful spirits; people who’d ceased to exist long ago and become instruments of destruction.

  She clutches her son to her, and looks Ramon in the eye. Ramon, the cantina owner, as shepherd to this gaggle of murderers and father to these many children is a hard concept to grasp. She remembers him as a cruel man. She sees him now that way, too, but there is a difference. Merciless, but not sadistic, is perhaps the best distinction she will come up with.

  Ramon speaks. “Be grateful for the life of your son and go.”

  “I have traveled a long and dangerous journey to reclaim my property.”

  Ramon smiles and slobbers on to his chin. “You want me to give back to you what you stole from me all those years ago?”

  Now she does look him in the eye. "Ramon, you can not stand here and tell me I did not pay for everything I took and more. Not in this company."

  Some of the women nod solemnly.

  He signals for the vinyl sack and when it is placed at his feet, he opens it. It is full of clear bundles of white powder, heroin sent from the gringo and entrusted to Ramon to sell and administer in the shantytown. She and Pablo’s father had taken it and all the cash they could recover from Ramon’s safe when they had fled. Now, Ramon lifts one of the small bags and examines it. “What use do you have for this?”

  “The usual.”

  “And who would buy this from you? Who would do business with you? Who would have use for this who would not simply kill you and take it?”

  "That is my concern."

  “What will you purchase with this?”

  "Freedom.”

  *

  She remained grateful to Pablo's father, but the fear of what he would certainly eventually do overcame her fondness for him and she killed him before Pablo was even born. She took the money they'd stolen from Ramon's and bought passage out of the country, then she had buried the drugs in the desert, thinking one day, she may return for them when they would serve her and her child.

  She lived on the stolen money till her after her boy was born, then put it away and found herself a pimp. A woman without means, raising a child alone would be an easy mark for bandits.

  Everything she did was for her son. For the future, despite the past. In open contempt of the present, she told him from his birth, he was precious and would be taken care of. Everything would be alright. One day he would be free of the lot she had drawn, it was a promise.

  *

  On the next daybreak, they set out. The woman and her son—now accompanied by guides who will deliver them through the mountains. These women, these Marias, whores that could not be bought ever again, had become skilled survivalists and killers. They entertain the woman with stories of their children, their victims and the life they have made for themselves.

  They never speak of the time or of the place they had shared. It is something that needs no refreshing. The things that happened there spawned everything that has come since and no other explanation is needed for what any one of them has become. They make observations of her son. He is clever. He is brave. If they see resemblance to his father, they keep it to themselves. Chances are they don’t remember him anyway. Just another gringo. Just another predator escaped.

  They travel together for three days. Before parting ways, they enter a village and make supply purchases as well as buying bus tickets for the woman and her son. The town’s people watch them curiously and give them wide berth wherever they go, but they are treated well and there seems to be routine to the transactions.

  At the bus depot they are approached by an elderly woman. She takes the palms of the nearest Maria and whispers something to her. Then she slips something into her cupped hands and kisses her forehead. The Marias watched her go before revealing that the woman had given them a photograph of a young man and a pouch full of pesos.

  The woman inclines her head to the pouch. "What is that?"

  The Maria holding the money says, "A gesture."

  "Of what?"

  "Appreciation."

  "And who is that?" Meaning the photograph. "A relative?" She doubts it as she asks. The picture does not look friendly. The subject has arrogance present in his mouth and eyes that she has seen many times before. The look as she remembered it generally preceded violence or verbal abuse, at least. She has a feeling that the subject is not long for the world.

  "A man." The Maria's voice is detached and matter of fact, as if describing any common object. A man, a tree, a house. There is no further explanation coming or needed.

  "A bad man?"

  The Maria does not even look at her. "That's a redundancy.”

  *

  Her so
n has not spoken during the days after leaving the Marias, but it does not worry his mother, she knows that he is only reserved. When they are on the bus with their supplies and package safe between them, he lies across his seat and puts his head on her breast.

  The bus begins to move. She scans the passengers for potential trouble and finds none. The young men traveling only have eyes for pretty women and the older ones would understand the steel in her hand if not in her gaze. The driver turns on a music box that hurls frenzied swirls of horns and guitars punctuated by laughing singers and radio static at them. The shocks on the bus are either shot or should be. She is jostled about, constantly knocking her head on the window, but none the less sleeps better than she has in weeks.

  Pablo dozes through the afternoon and wakes at sunset. They share a dinner of jerky and dried fruit and pass a bottle of water between them stretching the meal into total darkness. He lays his head upon her again and she runs her fingers through his thick black hair. She bends her neck and kisses his head.

  "Momma is proud of you."

  "Why?"

  She punctuates each point with a kiss, "Because you are a good boy. You are smart and brave and you love your momma."

  Pablo smiles. "Who are they, Momma?"

  "Just some people who took us in."

  "Do you know them?"

  "Once. Perhaps."

  "And Ramon? He knows you?"

  "Is that what he said?"

  "He said he knew my father."

  She waits to hear what he might add to that. He rarely asks about his father and she has not volunteered much.

  "He said my father was a pig."

  "Is that what you think?"

  "I don't know."

  "Are you a pig, Pablo?"

  "I don't think so." The statement is open ended, left hanging there for confirmation or correction. She offers neither.

  "Did you love him, Momma?"

  "Not as much as I love you."

  They ride along in darkness and silence, awash in the knowledge of each other's company. The journey has cemented previously untested notions of loyalty, strength and resourcefulness that they will take with them back to their home. Pablo knows something of their situation, but he does not understand desperation the way a fish does not understand water.

  He knows only that they have to bring back the package resting between them. He knows that it is dangerous and that their fortunes are linked for better or worse to each other and to the success of their journey. He is not worried, only awake.

  She knows her son is aware of some of the ways of the world. He is possessed of animal intuition for blood and consequence, but he is still a child. The things she keeps from him are her duty she feels to shelter him and make him feel safe, but the clarity of his instincts is alarming. An understanding hangs between them, of her duty to lie to him and the importance of his ability to see through it.

  "Momma?"

  "Yes, Pablo."

  "Are we going to be okay?"

  She resumes brushing his hair, long strokes from the base of his neck upward, ruffling thick tufts and pushing them down on his forehead. She will follow that with another in the opposite direction, combing everything out of his eyes and smoothing the tangles.

  "Shhh” she soothes him, “Si, Pablo everything is going to be alright.”

  The African woke to the clamorous sound of excited birds. In his youth this may have signaled a snake or an expired animal not yet reduced to bone lying in the bushes. In his recent past, the lid left open on an alley dumpster, the stench from its spoiling contents fermenting the very air and intoxicating the avian foragers into a frenzy. And so he awoke out of many shallow dreams simultaneously. He brushed his wide and calloused hand over his face, shaking off his past with a single motion, reducing it to a collection of impulses, reflexes and launching points for action in the present.

  He stepped out of his hut into the morning’s oven, set to slowly bake the intoxicants from the residents’ collective systems and leave them parched, sandy-veined and raw from scraping at that great ragged void where some folks keep their soul. By night’s end he would cut someone, break a nose or a finger, go to sleep, and do it again tomorrow.

  Job description: Reign in hell.

  And he had not yet begun to tire of it.

  The air that morning was especially fetid and he lit a cigarette to protect himself from the natural environment. The menthol cooled his nerves some and the smoke improved the general bouquet, but he knew it was only a matter of time before he was subsisting on rock again–the smoky poison that sharpened his senses even as it chipped away at his judgment until he could hardly believe the things he watched himself do. A reputation for appalling capabilities had secured his position here as much as it assured that he would never leave. The gringos would fear him and the whores would obey and that was enough for today.

  He rounded the side of the shack and pointed his footsteps toward the cantina where he saw a crowd had already gathered beneath the vociferous fowl lining the gutterless tin roof. On the turf beside the metal picnic table lay the ventilated corpse of the latest sadist sent down from Polito’s ranks of psychos, rough-necks and punks to dig their own graves quietly and out of the way. They may not know it when they arrived, but most of them figured it out sooner or later–that they’d officially ceased to exist the moment they arrived in this camp.

  Hades’ waiting room.

  The dark man strode toward the body and none of the assembled made a sound. The birds were reluctant to make room for him, but eventually abandoned the meaty tendrils they’d been gorging on, giving him an unobstructed glimpse of the desecrated body.

  Blunt trauma to the head. Impossible to determine how many blows to the nearest dozen. The human melon now looked like a rotten pumpkin spilling seeds. Blunt knife-work split the torso spilling viscera from the gaping cavity, and he tried to calculate the necessary torque and tugging strength to accomplish such a complete job.

  He looked into the recesses of the body and felt a shiver that ran up his asshole all the way to the back of his mouth. That acid taste, he knew with a sudden clairvoyance, was the flavor of fate.

  3. Exodus

  Fever enveloped him, and he ranted, gagging back at the devils communicating so brazenly, so plainly with him. They licked with avidity at the obscenity of his wounds, their sulfurous breath filling his lungs. He peered through the tear in mortality’s veil, and was grateful for an instant that his mangled maw prevented what would certainly have been a squeal from escaping. Infection was claiming his wounds, and the bat-winged spectres told him that, as soon as they had finished wrenching his soul from its fleshly cage, he would know true pain.

  So Ramon clenched his fractured jaw, and ran toward the agony. He mashed his ragged gums together and swallowed blood poisoned with demons and death. He strained against unknown bonds toward a flickering, purifying heat that he suddenly sensed was near.

  *

  His mind returned to him like the tide–advancing and retreating incrementally, the former finally dominating with poky persistence–and he was aware of the opiate effects. Consuela loomed over him administering a wet towel to his face. The slightest pressure should have driven nails through his brain, but he felt nothing. Nothing but the poppy cloud enveloping him. The heroin pussy loving him up.

  “Who were you speaking to?” Consuela pressed gently on the retreating swelling.

  Ramon didn’t try to answer.

  “The things you said,” a trickle of water ran from the rag and broke from his brow, down the left slope of his badly-set nose to join the trail of tears irrigating the crags of his face, slowing in the angry, irregular stubble along his distorted jaw. “I could not understand it, but I know that it was not gibberish.” With his eyes closed, Ramon’s consciousness was concentrated and entirely contained inside the globe of water pushing to clear his chin and rush now down the sharp decline of his neck and pool at his collarbone.

  Florence Mexi-g
ale.

  His mind retreated again in tidal fashion. In his delirium, Ramon dreamed that he was swallowing a great fire. He felt a woman’s mouth on his own, her lips parting his and delivering magma. Consuela’s voice told him that she was burning away the infection and he breathed in the acrid smoke of his own flesh. He walked barefoot through the shanty, feeling invisible flames leaping through the pores of his skin without burning his clothes as he came to the cantina door to receive Polito’s messengers. They arrived in winged, black chariots demanding tribute. He spoke to them with his ruined voice–No more tribute.

  They beat their wings, bared their fangs and spit venom at him from beneath their forked tongues, but Ramon was unmoved. When he opened his mouth an intense heat poured forth from the void where his teeth had been. The mercenaries melted away before the infernal wind issuing from him, and when they were dust, he turned to Consuela behind him.

  She reached her hand up to him and, on that command, he coughed until he caught the now cooled rock in the back of his mouth. Opening his lips, he rolled out his tongue and presented the stone to her waiting fingers.

  *

  One of the women had retrieved, from the dirt, the teeth that he'd lost, and placed their fragments inside a small leather pouch, which she presented to him with an absurd degree of ceremony. He'd accepted them in the same spirit, and wore the purse around his neck.

  When he could right himself without falling over, the pain and the opiates having reached an uneasy equilibrium, he'd ordered the retard’s body exhumed from its thin blanket of dirt. Consuela consigned two of the women to excavate the grave, and when they had done so, she told Ramon.