by Dan Darling
“Get serious,” he said.
“Is this your new gig? Spying on the enemy? Or are you just a simple cowhand now?”
He slipped his hands into his pockets. A little smile messed with the edges of his mouth. “I got a good thing out here, buddy. Maybe it’s the answer to all life’s woes.”
“I thought you were a Minuteman hero, ready with a rifle and a four-by-four to defend Mother America.”
“I’m done with that. This place―you gotta keep your mouth shut.”
“I don’t know why everyone thinks I walk around talking to people.”
“Swear,” he said. “Hold up your hand and swear.”
I left my hand where it was. “I’m going to tell you something you already know: this ranch is part of a secret organization.”
He didn’t blink. “Why do you think I’m here?”
I thought back to the day I first met Cerberus the leech-dog and recalled Rex’s words as we’d driven away: Those Mexicans. They’re just like me.
“You’ve switched allegiances.”
“How could I be a decent person and stick with the Minutemen after seeing those people get chased down by that fucking monster? Damn right I changed sides.”
“So, what, you’re a double agent now? You pretend to work for Typhon Industries, but really help their enemy?”
“I could disappear from Typhon Industries, and no one would give a damn. They care about you.”
I was tired of being cared about.
Some of the tension drained from Rex’s face. His lines went slack, and he looked sad instead of angry. “That was the old me―always out to get somebody else and scramble a few bucks for myself. This place―we help people. This is a station in an underground railroad. We get people where they need to be. We scoop people up from the desert and dribble water back into them. We find them a shitty job where they can scrape some change into a pile and ship it back to their grandmothers. It’s a terrible world. We help people survive in it.”
“Giving yourself a shave doesn’t make you a new person. You’re Rex. I’m Stick. People who pretend they can choose their identities are living in Candy Land.”
“I’m tired of thinking about who I am. I’ve been thinking about myself for near forty years, and I’ve had a head full of bad thoughts for forty years. Maybe it’s not about who I am. Maybe if I stop caring about Spartacus Rex, he’ll become a decent guy to live with.”
Wind rustled the limbs of the trees. Gray moonlight shifted across Rex’s weathered face. Night had settled fully around us. I imagined a world where the sun never came up again, where the landscape grew dark and the silent chill winds chased the heat of day away for good, until the desert sat silent and dead like the surface of the moon. I wondered how long it would take for all life to fade to gray beneath the cold stars. I wondered if anything could adapt to such a planet, if life would go on with no prospects for warmth ever returning.
“What happened to our lives?” I asked.
“Nothing. That’s the problem. We started out on the bottom and we’ve stuck it out down here, duking out an existence for who knows what goddamned reason. I’m a tin can. I’ve been kicked back and forth along the same street for forty years. I can’t figure anything will ever get better.”
“Neither of us are optimists,” I said, “but I thought at least we’d find a comfortable place to wait out our lives.”
Rex spoke softly. “Our lives are shot to hell. But maybe we can help someone else. If that’s all the hope I can get, so be it. For the first time since I joined the army, my life’s actually looking up. Helping others. It feels good. I should have tried it earlier.” He laughed an easy, natural chuckle. It was the first time I’d ever heard Rex laugh at himself. He looked like a different man.
“I guess I should congratulate you.”
“You’ll keep your mouth shut about this.”
“I don’t even open my mouth for the dentist.”
“Don’t mess this up for me, old pal. It’s my last chance to die content.”
“There’s nothing as content as a corpse.”
He gave me a tight smile. “You say some dark shit, brother.”
“It’s a dark world.”
“Promise me, nothing about seeing me to the Captain or any of his psycho cronies.”
“I promise,” I said, knowing that human promises are just bad breath.
got home to my answering machine flashing its light at me. I pressed the button and braced myself. The Captain’s voice punched its way into my home.
“Got a present for you. You can go see your pops tomorrow. Call it a little reward for standing around doing nothing. If I had it my way, we’d send the man to a lower level of hell for every word that comes out of your mouth crosswise. But the boss has a soft spot for you. So, go get an eyeful of the geezer before we put him in an iron box and dump him in the Rio Grande.”
I sat at the bar and felt mean for a little while. After about an hour or so, the hairy mound of my pet spider twitched inside his terrarium. I went out into the moonlight and tickled a couple small orb spiders into a drinking glass. Ounce-for-ounce, spiders were the most protein-rich beings on the planet. I dug into the dark soil of my garden, laced with worms as thin as angel hair pasta and the roots of shrubs, little weeds, and snake-thick tree roots. I unearthed a millipede and a couple of stubby desert sand cockroaches. I put them all in the drinking glass, gave it a shake to stun them, and―voilà―I had a salad fit for a tarantula. I dumped it on my living room floor, scooped Ralph up, and set him a few feet away.
I felt better.
The next morning after breakfast, I drove back to Typhon Industries. It was all I did anymore. Get manipulated by a stranger. Eat a meal. Drive somewhere I didn’t want to be to talk to someone I didn’t like about something I didn’t care about. Drive home. Eat another meal. Have a couple of drinks with someone who showed up at my house uninvited. Drive somewhere else. Every now and then, I got to sleep a few hours or spend some time in chains. It wasn’t the American Dream I’d been promised.
A cloud front moved in from the West. It wasn’t fooling anyone. It was too fluffy and high to do anything for anybody. It’d stay up there, promising rain to any fool naïve enough to listen. Even after all these years of desert life, you’d overhear Albuquerque residents pinning their hopes on a cloud. Rain, they’d say. It’s coming. It’ll stomp the dust into the ground, turn my grass green, and give my rose bushes some relief. None of us with any sense bought into it. Those clouds were a pie in the sky.
Elysium, a bulky structure surrounded on all four sides by three stories of razor wire, squatted between the vaulted roof of Hades and circular Delphi. The only way in or out of Elysium was through a guardhouse separated from the main structure by a broad cement pathway bordered by more razor wire and a tall steel gate in the middle. Guards in a watchtower on the perimeter operated the gate remotely. To get in, I had to pass through a metal detector. I had to remove my shoes, belt, and pocket change. The guards took a copy of my ID. They told me I was lucky I hadn’t worn jeans because all inmates wore them. It was the prison uniform. Before I was allowed onto the cement alley that led from the guardhouse to the prison, a guard stamped an invisible symbol on the back of my hand.
“What is this, appearing ink?” I asked, thinking back to Georgia Tameed Schultz and her unique method of firing people.
“Infrared,” he said. “Only see it with a black light.”
“You afraid someone’s going to steal my pants and impersonate me?”
“Procedure is procedure,” he said.
I could relate to that. It was comforting to know that no matter what happened or who walked in the door, you dealt with them in absolutely the same way. That was how I’d handled my days before the cursed birds rained from the sky and ruined everything in my life.
An escort walked me through the double set of doors that led from the entrance building onto the cement walkway, stretching all the way to the main
prison facility, a distance that had looked small from outside. But walking down it, I felt tiny on that vast gray expanse. The razor wire fence towered over me on all sides. For a moment, my consciousness slipped, and I became a prisoner freshly interred. I felt tiny in the clench of that fortress of steel and cement. I slipped back into my identity quickly, but the vision left me sweating and my heart banging its fist against my ribcage.
We passed through more steel doors operated by someone unseen. My escort led me to a long room partitioned into alcoves along one side. Each alcove contained a stool, a counter where you could lean your elbows, and a phone receiver. Across the counter was a window crisscrossed with security wire. The window revealed a mirror world of identical stools, counters, and phones, but in a fundamentally different dimension of existence. A few people occupied the stools on either side of the glass. When I walked in, they all stopped their conversations and held their phone receivers beside their stupid, slack faces. They stared at me, and for a moment everyone in both dimensions of society banded together to treat me with ugliness, and I’m sure prisoner, visitor, and guard alike felt the better for it.
I packed myself into the alcove my escort led me to and managed to sit on the stool, my knees bent up around my shoulders. I plucked a receiver the size of my thumb from the wall and waited. The visitors around me got back to their conversations, most of them in Spanish and a few in what I guessed were tongues native to Mexico or Central America.
My father stepped into the frame of the window in front of me. He’d dressed neatly in a blue button down shirt and baggy jeans. His forehead shined with oil, and his eyes sunk into his face like caverns. He’d grown a black and gray beard, heavy at the chin and spare on his gaunt cheeks and upper lip. His hair was white, as it had been for years, but I’d never really noticed before. He looked like he’d been in prison for a couple of decades. Beside him stood another man in his middle fifties, his face clean-shaven, his hair curly and black. He had the solid body of a man who worked. He pulled up a second stool and the two men sat beside each other in the alcove. The other man picked up the receiver and held it to his ear.
“I am Manuel,” the telephone said in time with the man’s lips moving on the other side of the glass.
“Dad,” I said at my father’s face. I touched the window with my fingertips. The glass was a slab of ice. It was as thick as tank armor. “Are you okay?”
“He’s okay,” Manuel said. “He’s doing fine.”
I fixed my eyes on Manuel. “Put my father on the goddamned phone.”
Manuel turned to my father and said some words in Spanish. My father said words back. Every single one of them was foreign to me. “Your dad says you look tired.”
“If you don’t hand him the phone right now, I’ll punch a hole in this glass and give it to him myself.”
“Calm yourself,” Manuel said. “I’m a friend.”
“I have no friends. I have a father. I want to talk to him.”
“He can’t speak to you,” Manuel said.
“Why the hell not? Is it against regulations or something?”
“He’s lost his English,” Manuel said.
I opened my mouth and told him how stupid that sounded. But as I said it, I watched my father. He wore the expression of a lost person. His eyes flicked across my mouth as I spoke, and then he turned to Manuel with a pained look in the corners of his eyes. Manuel said some Spanish words to him. My father turned his face back to me and looked incredibly sad. He put his hand on the glass where my fingers had been and trailed some sentences out into the hazy ambient noise beyond the mouthpiece of the phone in the other dimension behind the glass.
“It happened when the police came for him.” Manuel had an accent, but spoke English well. “They broke in the front door of his home. They pointed their guns at him. He was afraid. He had never been so afraid before. And when they yelled at him, he couldn’t understand the words. He tried to reason with them, but he heard only the old language in his head. They brought him here. His English has not come back.”
I sat there with the tiny receiver pressed against my cheek and my body cramped into a child-sized chair. My father’s old palm, lined with the years of toil he’d spent cleaning the schools of little American kids―making sure their light bulbs worked and their chalkboards were clean and their toilets flushed―that palm pressed against the barrier between us. The face that he’d shaved twice a day since before I was born bristled with hair I’d never seen and formed words that I’d never comprehend.
I put my hand against his. It was cliché, but it was all I could do. “I’m getting you out.”
My father spoke to Manuel through the side of his mouth, his eyes still on my face.
“You can’t,” said Manuel.
“Things are in motion,” I said. “Tell him. I’m getting you out.”
Manuel shook his head. “Your father’s going back to Mexico. Lawyers have tried to see him. He’s turned them away. He wants to leave. He has money saved. It will go a long way in Mexico. He’ll be happy. He’s returning to his home village.”
I pointed a finger at Manuel. “Don’t talk. Translate.”
“I’m just telling you what I know about your father,” Manuel said.
My fist tensed up, and I thought about belting the glass in front of his face to show him how I felt about what he knew. “Translate.” My teeth gritted so tight they squeaked. “Don’t say another word unless it comes from his mouth.”
Manuel got my drift. Sweat broke out across his upper lip.
“I’m getting him out. Tell him.”
Manuel translated as my father talked. It was a tumble of rolled r’s and las and long o’s. He’d never spoken so easily or naturally to me in his life.
“I’m done with America,” Manuel translated. “I have retirement they say I can keep. I have savings they say I can keep. I’m returning to Tula, my hometown in Mexico. I will visit the graves of my parents. I will tell my sisters that I’m still alive. I will be able to help the family with the money I’ve made here, and maybe they will forgive me for disappearing for so long. I should never have left my home. People belong where they’re born.”
My father’s eyes clouded as he spoke. He touched the glass again with his fingertips as he spoke more Spanish.
“You should come with me, son,” Manuel said. “Hidalgo looks much like New Mexico. Mountains, cacti, rivers. There are churches unlike any in America. And monuments left by our ancient ancestors.” Manuel turned to face me. “He says some names of plants and trees that I don’t know in English. He says the names of the mountains and the rivers. He talks about avenidas lined with trees and plazas where people gather in the evening to dance. He talks about the nieces and nephews he might have. He talks too fast about it all.”
I waited for him to run down. My father hadn’t spoken so many words in a row since I’d ruined his life by being born. This might have been the only time I’d ever seen him get excited about something. He had hope. It looked good on him. Behind the bags beneath his eyes, the beard, and the sallow skin from too much time indoors, he harbored that special glow that only people who face a bright future exude―or at least a future that they’ve duped themselves into believing.
“Sounds like his mind’s made up,” I said. I was talking to Manuel. The man beside him was barely recognizable as my father.
“Sí,” Manuel said. “It’s for the best, too. He’s going back whether he wants to or not. The sooner the better.”
I sat trying to figure out how to say goodbye to my father. I couldn’t do it.
“Don’t worry,” Manuel said. “You’ll come see him again. He’ll be here for a few months at least. The process―mountains move faster.”
“Alright,” I said. I shifted my gaze to my father. “Bye dad. Anything I can do―or for you, Manuel―let me know.”
Manuel translated. He said something extra at the end. Both men laughed. “Thanks.” Manuel spread his hands and shrugged. �
��We’re here. Nothing much to do. We wait. We go back to Mexico. That’s it.”
I rose from my chair and towered over the partitions between alcoves. Members of both the free and the enslaved worlds gave me a good stare. Apparently, the first time wasn’t enough. I drank in the small man below that was once my father. He had a new friend. They chuckled and joked together in a language I’d never understand. He had a hometown I’d never seen and a family he missed. I wasn’t part of that family. I’d always thought I didn’t have a family―and I hadn’t been wrong.
I drove home. My throat was a dam that wanted to let water, but I had no one left in my life to talk to. In my old life, I would have shared a six-pack with Melodía. I tried to summon the smell of her hair. I tried to hear her voice thick with sarcasm and the slight slur of her stretched left lip. I tried to picture the latticework of arteries in her left eye. It all flitted just outside the peripheries of my memory. All I felt was my heart beat a little more desperately. My blood was sluggish and thick. I had to pull over and take some deep breaths. I gripped the steering wheel and felt gravity reversing itself inside my guts. I thought I might rise up and float off into the abyss of deep space. Instead, I opened my door and barfed on the blacktop. Afterwards, I felt solid enough to make it home.
Tony was waiting in my foyer. “I have something for you.”
“Is it a special hat?” I sighed. “Are we going to start dressing like twins?”
Tony lifted his hat from his head. He fingered the hatband and looked mildly hurt.
“If it’s a visit to my dad, don’t bother. I’ve seen what’s left of him.”
“Nope.” Tony handed me a CD with a label that read Spanish for Beginners. Rubber-banded to it was a slip of paper with the name of a private hospital and a room number. “You’re welcome.” He slipped up the stairs.
The address led me to a hospital in the rich part of town on Tramway Boulevard, where small mansions tucked themselves into the crooks of the foothills and red speedsters purred alongside lumbering Humvees. The Sandía Mountains raced for the sky overhead; they didn’t quite make it all the way, but you had to give them credit for trying. To the north, the Sandía tram station, for which the street tracing the foot of the mountain range was named, sent a car up the long drape of cable that stretched all the way to the peak.