by Dan Darling
I took off my father’s glasses, folded them, and put them on the side table. Once I’d done the dishes and finished my beer, I locked the door behind me and drove to my apartment.
With the lights off, I sat in the soft nighttime shadows with Ralph on my knee. The starlight sifted through the flora in my garden. Eventually, the moon emerged and hung its light in white drapes from the branches of the fruit trees, cottonwoods, and oaks. I didn’t move from that place for some time. My spider and I were alone, pursued by strange adversaries. Our childhood friends were damaged, destitute, and distant. The world teemed with predators, and life had no purpose. My spider and I inhabited in a world where ten thousand birds could drop dead in a heartbeat, with no cause, for no reason.
It was my birthday. I spent birthdays with my best friend.
Half an hour and a short drive later, I knocked on Rex’s door, a six-pack of Chama River beer under my arm. He lived in a run-down apartment complex. I stood outside his unit, bent at the shoulders to avoid brushing my hair in the cobwebs latticed in the beams of the catwalk overhead. I knocked again. I cupped my hand against the window. The front room of his apartment was bare. A disconnected cable lay on the stained shag carpet. The door of the refrigerator stood ajar, revealing a dark interior. Before I turned away, I spotted a tiny triangle of paper taped to the door. Some notice had been posted there and torn off, leaving a corner behind.
I drove home and called Leon Flowers.
“Hallo?” He greeted me around a mouthful of crunching corn chips.
“Flowers,” I said.
“Sticky!” He took another bite and munched away.
I tried to keep the meanness out of my voice. “Hey, Flowers. How is everything?”
“Oh, pretty great, and all. Eating some guacamole. Wrestling match is on.”
“Sounds fun.”
“Come over!” he yelled. “We’ll do Tequila shots.”
Getting drunk and watching sports was actually one of the few fun things one could do with Flowers. “Is Rex over?”
“Nah,” Flowers said. “He’s depressed.”
This was news to me. “More depressed than usual?”
Flowers crunched chips. “Yah. Can’tcha tell?”
Rex never exactly bubbled with joy. “What’s wrong with him?”
“You didn’t hear?”
“No,” I said.
“Hmm,” Flowers said. “Told me right away.”
“Told you what?”
“Guess it’s no surprise, on account of you being so distant, and all,” Flowers said. “Maybe if you weren’t always sitting down in that cave feeling sorry for yourself―”
“He’s been evicted from his apartment.” I gleaned that the corner of paper taped to his door was an eviction notice. “I’ve figured it out. Enjoy your tequila shots.”
“C’mon over!” Flowers hollered.
I almost hung up, but realized I needed a little more out of him. “Where is he staying?”
“Beats me,” Flowers said. “Some friend’s house, he says. I offered him to stay here. I got the spare bedroom. I even offered him to drive my ice cream truck. Good money in ice cream. He bought me a beer and punched my arm, which is his way of saying no thanks. I bought him back, too. I got no money problems.”
“Any idea which friend?” None of us had many friends, much less those who would let us crash at their houses after an eviction.
“Who the hell knows?” Flowers said. “He keeps his mouth shut almost as much as you do. You two need to loosen up and realize when a guy is on your side.”
I smiled. “You’re probably right, old buddy.” Flowers had the uncanny ability to infuriate you one minute and charm you the next.
“Yep. Come on over. It’s the Undertaker versus Triple H!”
I assumed those were the names of wrestlers. “I’ll get back to you.”
“Suit yourself.” Flowers hung up.
I wracked my brain for friends Rex could be staying with. His father was dead. His mother had moved to the East Coast to live with family. His little brother Lucas had taken his own life when Rex and I were in our early twenties. His sister had been missing since their teens. That left friends. I wouldn’t have been surprised if Rex had moved in with my father. However, I’d just been there―no mention of Rex. He had a couple of ex-army buddies, but none very close and all married. Wives didn’t generally appreciate Rex. He had a few shady business associates. I didn’t know them very well.
Except one: the Captain. His card still lay on my bar.
He answered after two rings. “Mr. Stick.”
I hated cell phones. It meant that everyone always knew you were calling. It ruined the element of surprise. “Hello.”
“You’ve thought about it, and you want the job.”
“No,” I said.
“You’ll be paid well,” he said. “You’ll find, after a few weekends of duty, that you hate working at the zoo. That you loathe government work. Private industry. It’s the American Way.”
“I’m looking for Rex,” I said.
“Give me a one weekend commitment and I’ll tell you.”
“I’ll work at the zoo until the day I die,” I said.
The captain blew a couple of nostrils’ worth of air into the receiver. “I’m afraid I don’t know where Rex is. No idea.”
“He’s your employee. If you don’t know, you’re not a very thorough boss.”
“He’s not my employee. His hire was contingent on your recruitment.”
I hadn’t known that. I felt a stab of guilt―maybe if Rex had been able to work for the Minutemen, he’d have been able to pay his rent. “You still know where he’s staying.”
“I suggest you check his residence,” the Captain said.
“He’s not there.”
“How mysterious.”
“You just admitted a second ago that you knew.”
The Captain paused. Across the room, Ralph stood at full attention. He didn’t like it when I got agitated. “He’s staying at Enchantment Campgrounds. They’re located―”
“I know where they are.” I leveled out my voice to sooth Ralph.
“Consider my employer’s offer, Mr. Stick. It’s not going away.”
I hung up.
I drove to the Enchantment Campgrounds, off I-40, west of the city, over the Rio Grande and past the volcanoes. The neon of the Dancing Eagle Casino bathed the turnoff in red light. I spun my truck around the curves and down the lanes of the site. There wasn’t much action, it being winter. I found Rex’s truck tucked away in the depths of the grounds. He’d pitched a dark green tent that he’d probably pilfered from the army. He sat by a smoldering fire, draped in a wool blanket, grasping a tin cup. His mustache hadn’t seen a comb in a few days.
I parked my truck beside his and sat on a log beside the fire. It took effort. The result was barely better than sitting in the dirt for all it elevated me off the ground. I had to extend a leg on either side of the fire pit to avoid burning my shoes.
“Hooch?” Rex asked.
I nodded.
He splashed something rust colored from a half-gallon bottle into a tin cup and handed it to me. I drank. It scorched a swath of flesh from the roof of my mouth.
“I’ll throw another log on the fire,” Rex muttered. He heaved a few chopped-up two-by-fours into the pit and poked at the heap with a broom handle until it lit. I held my hands up to the tongues of flame.
“So,” I said.
He grunted. I gave him a few seconds to mention my birthday―not because I needed the validation, but because it should have been the norm. He didn’t.
I had planned on telling him my problems. Spilling about my fight with Melodía. Telling him about Tanis, Marchette’s burglary, and revealing the Captain’s connection with it all. I hadn’t realized it until that moment, but I had an ulterior motive: I wanted to convince Rex to give up working with the Minutemen. Now that I saw him crouching in the dirt next to a fire made of scavenged
construction lumber, I didn’t have the heart. He needed whatever leg-up he could get.
Instead, I took another swig of whiskey. It carved a tunnel of heat into my middle. Rex drank too. We sat and looked at the fire. All around us, the world was still, apart from the occasional distant rush of a car passing on the freeway. I tilted my head back. Even just a few miles from the city lights, the Milky Way stood out in a dense stripe of sparkling white and silver in the sky.
“Flowers is throwing a party tonight,” I said, still looking up.
“Yeah?”
“Wrestling. Tequila shots. Guacamole.”
“Sounds like a real fiesta,” Rex said. “I’m sure lots of people will show up.”
“If you and I stop by, it’ll triple the guest list.”
Rex barked one short laugh. “Sad bastard.” He sipped from his camping cup.
I sipped from mine.
Rex sighed through his mustache. “You found me out here.”
I nodded.
“How’d you do that, I wonder.”
“Asked your pal the Captain.”
Rex looked up. The flames glimmered in his eye sockets. They smoldered like two old coals. “You taking the job?”
I put my gaze on the smoke twining upward in gray vines.
“You’re not,” Rex said.
“I’m Chicano.”
“I guess I never thought of you that way.”
Nobody did. They all thought of me as a giant. At least Rex was blind to my ethnicity because he thought of me as a friend.
“I can’t work for someone who goes around imprisoning Mexicans, Central Americans, or anyone else. It’d be like betraying my own blood.”
“The Minutemen go after lawbreakers. It’s only coincidence that they’re Mexicans.” Rex rustled the fire with his broom handle.
It was the same logic Melodía had used earlier that day, and the Captain before her. I didn’t point out that the Minutemen were all white and everyone they persecuted was brown, which inherently made it racial. I hadn’t come to argue with my friend.
“Anyway,” Rex said, “The Captain told me that you wouldn’t even be working with the Minutemen. You’d be with the company that develops the surveillance technology they’re using.”
“Same thing.”
“Maybe it is. I don’t think it’s so bad. Fewer immigrants, more jobs for us citizens.” He tossed a splinter of wood into the fire and a few limp sparks leapt out and died in the dirt. “Besides, when has blood ever meant anything to you?”
Blood didn’t mean much, but it wasn’t nothing either. “Why does he want me, anyway?” I knew the answer was more complex than met the eye, but I wanted to know what The Captain had told Rex.
Rex shrugged beneath the blanket. “Says they need an animal expert. Says his boss noticed you and wanted you to work for him.”
“Who’s the boss?”
“Man named John White. Don’t know much about him.”
John White. I’d heard the name from Tony. I’d seen no sign of any surveillance technology development facilities at the Typhon Industries campus. Unless they were engineering clairvoyant goldfish, then they must have had facilities elsewhere as well. “I wish I could take the job, buddy.”
Rex nodded and some of the air deflated from his shoulders.
I didn’t tell him that I knew it was ruining his shot at work. We liked to pretend that each of us still had his pride. “Wanna go to Flowers’? Watch some wrestling? Toss back some liquor? Laugh at the clown?”
Rex chuckled. “You know what he did the other day?”
I sipped my hooch and waited for him to tell me.
“He bought nunchucks.” Rex’s face split into a grin, revealing his stained and crooked teeth.
I chuckled despite myself.
“He starts whipping ’em around right outside the store.” Rex’s shoulders bounced up and down. “Hits himself on every elbow and knee he had on his body. Finally, whacks himself right in the forehead. He falls down on his butt in the middle of the parking lot. Cars are stopping. And he just sits there, big red mark on his forehead, big fat grin on his face.” Rex could barely get the words out. His laughed in near-silent spasms of wind through his graying mustache.
I could see the whole thing as clear as a memory. I had to put my head between my knees to catch my breath from laughing so hard. “Flowers,” I gasped.
Rex poked a finger in his eye. “That guy knows how to live.”
“Yeah.”
Our laughter stopped and we heaved a couple of sighs. We smiled into the fire pit. Later, we’d talk about driving to Flowers’ house, but we wouldn’t actually go. I’d offer to let Rex move in with me until he got back on his feet―he’d turn me down. Right then, it was enough just to sit together in the quiet desert night and enjoy the burning boards of an old fence.
I left Rex’s campsite after midnight. I’d stopped drinking an hour or so before and was sober enough to drive back to my apartment without worrying about killing anyone or getting pulled over by the cops―it took a lot of alcohol to intoxicate my body. My neighborhood sat dark and silent. Few lamps lit the streets and motion sensor porch lights, dark and vigilant, guarded the houses. The families and old folks who lived there had all gone to bed. With no one else driving and few other lights to notice, my tail had become exceeding obvious.
I hadn’t caught sight of it earlier, so I had no idea how long I’d been followed. I wondered if it were Tanis, the Newspaper Man, or someone new. Then I pulled up outside my house and found Tanis waiting for me. My tail eased on by and disappeared into the night.
Tanis wore a high-collared black coat over a black dress, leggings and knee-high boots. A rimmed black felt hat covered her head and sunglasses screened her eyes. She leaned against a big white van that read Lavadería Blanca―Spanish for some sort of cleaning service.
“You have a new job,” I said, once I’d gotten out of my truck. “I’m so proud. Maybe now you’ll leave me alone.”
“Oh this? It’s a fake decal. I have a dozen of them. I can switch them anytime I want.”
“How nice.” The back of the van exploded with the deep baying of some animal. It sounded like a mix between a basset hound and Cerberus. “I see you brought a monster with you.”
“Oh, it’s just a little pooch I’m hauling from one place to another,” she said with a casual toss of her shoulders.
“I didn’t know you kept pets.”
“I don’t believe in pets.” Her face was smooth and expressionless, her eyes invisible behind the dark lenses. “A pet and a master: it’s a sick relationship.”
“I have a pet spider.”
“You should free it.”
“So it can die a noble death in the desert?”
Tanis nodded. “That’s the way of the world. People keep pets for what reason? Because they get lonely? If you’re lonely, shouldn’t you go out and find a lover or a friend or reconnect with a long-lost family member? Pet owners are just using their animals as salves on an unhealthy lifestyle.”
“What can I do for you, Tanis?” I asked. “Or are you waiting outside my house just by coincidence?”
Tanis giggled and smacked me on the belt buckle. “I’m here for our second date, stupid. You men are so forgetful.”
“Did we have a first date?”
She applied a hurt expression to her face. “Why, I should slap you for being so insensitive. How could you forget our sexy beach barbecue date?”
“I forgot it because it wasn’t on a beach, it wasn’t sexy, and it wasn’t a date.” I leaned a hand on the van. The beast within clawed at the wall on the other side of my palm, shaking the vehicle from the tumult.
“Big dog. What is it, a timber wolf?”
“It’s a mutt,” she said.
The mutt howled. I wondered if it could tell that the moon was full.
“I will forgive you for insulting our first date if you invite me in and make me a cocktail. I’ll give you a few minutes t
o put on some nice clothes.”
“How about I give you five dollars and you can go buy yourself a malt liquor at the gas station?”
She hit me in the stomach and let her hand linger there one second longer than necessary. It made me feel something. Nerve endings lit up in neon and the rush of hormones overrode my good sense.
“Come in. I’ll make you a Michelada.”
She scrunched up her nose. “What’s that?”
“It’s beer, Tabasco, and Worcestershire sauce.”
She put a hand over her mouth. Her eyes took on a horrified roundness.
“I also have wine.”
She grabbed my arm and I escorted her down the stairs. Her dog sent a cascade of protest tumbling after us.
“Your animal is going to wake up the neighborhood.”
“It isn’t mine. Besides, I suspect it’ll shut up as soon as it senses we’ve left.”
“Most people refer to their dog as ‘she’ or ‘he,’ out of respect. You know, to show them that they’re more than an object to you.”
She smiled up at me and fluttered her lashes. “It’s a hermaphrodite.”
I let that one go.
I sat her at my bar. She removed her hat and sunglasses and craned her neck around, taking it all in. Her eyes settled on Ralph. He looked back at her. His eight eyes gleamed like polished obsidian.
“That is a big spider,” she said.
“He’s as tame as a puppy dog.” I took a bottle of Muscat from the cupboard above my fridge and uncorked it. “You wanna hold him?”
Tanis stared at the wine. “I’ve never seen that wine before.”
It was from Tierra Encantada, a local winery. “It’s from the city.”
“I didn’t know New Mexico made wine.”
“New Mexico makes just about anything worth wanting.” I set a glass in front of her and poured.
She swirled, sniffed, and held the glass up to the light. “I suppose you know you were followed here.”
“I was aware of that, yes.”
“It was that same man.”
“The member of the militant Pan-Chicano nationalist junta?”
She tilted her face away from the wine. “Don’t make fun. They’re serious.”