13 Under the Wire

by Gil Reavill

  Or there was what was left of Raúl. Chupé felt a little sick. He couldn’t really say the body was the big sicario he had known as Raúl dos Santos. Just like if they take a truck apart in a garage, pull the engine and everything, they don’t really call it a truck no more until they put it back together. Raúl’s torso was like a black cavity. His heart, lungs, stomach and the rest of it had been taken out and set between his legs. Some Gil Grissom guy had hacked away at the stomach, too, opening it to the world. The intestines were gone somewhere else.

  So was the brain. The one thing they really wanted wasn’t there. Raúl’s head was stuck down by his feet like a fútbol. The thing was totally mangled, the top of the skull sawed open and then replaced like the lid of a garbage can. Or like one of the little caps Jewish people wear. But when Chupé popped it off the inside of the skull was empty. ¡Chingao!

  “Get the spine if you can, but you have to get the brain for sure,” Fausto had told him, looking into Chupé’s eyes when he said it, so that Chupé would know it was a direct order. Then Fausto and his sister went sailing away south, carefree as a couple of Yankee tourists, headed back to the ranch.

  Chupé thought of maybe hacking out the spinal cord from the corpse, satisfying the santero that way. There would be saws and scalpels and all sorts of blades around a lab like this, right? But the truth was he wanted to get out of there, and he had two strong boys along with him to haul the load. Why did he need to take only a single part when he could have the whole thing?

  Swearing and breathing hard, Marco and David hefted Raúl’s body. Chupé followed with the other body parts in a plastic shopping bag he had found on the premises. When Raúl went out the window where they had entered, they lost control of the corpse a little. It banged down on the top of the Dumpster and fell part of the way in.

  Not exactly a smooth move, but Chupé figured Raúl was in no shape to complain. They loaded the body into the van, drove east six blocks and then hit the on-ramp to I-45 south.

  “Tengo harta hambre,” David said, telling Fausto he was mad hungry. They didn’t stop for food until they got to Illinois, a twenty-four-hour roadside diner in Rockford.

  —

  After you’re in a car crash, for a while afterward you only want to talk to other people who’ve been in a crash themselves. You seek out the fellowship of shared experience. In the wake of their under-the-wire disaster, Remington and Julieta Bautista clung to each other’s company.

  “They say…asylum for me,” Julieta told her haltingly when they reunited in the hospital. She didn’t speak much English, and Remington had hardly any Spanish at all, but somehow they managed to communicate. Julieta said she didn’t have money or a place to go, and Remington responded that it was all right.

  “You’re coming home with me,” she told the girl.

  There was a knotty puzzle at the center of the tragedy. “They say había doce.” Julieta held up her hands, fingers spread wide for ten, then closed them and held up another two. “Pero somos trece.” She added one more finger.

  “Thirteen.” Remington nodded. Everyone was saying there had been twelve walkers in the doomed Jacumba Mountains group, because that was how the polleros usually operated, taking out groups of a dozen at a time. But with them there had been thirteen. Because no one was counting Val, Remington thought.

  Wildermanse, when she visited eight days after she had stumbled out of the desert and blundered onto U.S Route 98, was an armed camp. Officially, the police subscribed to the theory that with Subcomandante G dead and gone there was no longer any direct, credible threat to the Loushane family. The LAPD had withdrawn its protective forces.

  But Victor had the resources to hire his own army. Remington counted a dozen of his soldiers as she approached the house, guards from the Graystone Global security service, infamous for its involvement in Operation Iraqi Freedom. There were no doubt more that she could not see, the kind of granite-faced guys who hid their eyes behind sunglasses and spoke into their wrists. She texted Ellis and asked him to come out and guide her through the front lines.

  “We lost her,” Remington moaned when he met her at the front door.

  They embraced tearfully.

  “I know, I’m hard to look at,” she said. Her face was still mottled and swollen.

  “No, no.” Ellis gently took her ruined face in his hands and kissed her. He wept. “I’m trying to hold on. Really I am. I can’t—can’t…” He broke down over his dear departed sister. “I always thought, you know, ‘Stay born.’ That was my motto. Just, you know, stay born.” He stepped back from her and snuffled, wiping his eyes. “Did she…? Was it bad?”

  Remington took him back in her embrace. “Don’t think about it, baby.” And all the other clichés that people tell each other at such times.

  The two of them cried together.

  Ellis and Remington avoided the other family members, Victor especially. They broke away from the house as soon as they could. The two of them dodged the Graystone security troops and did what they always did when they wanted to be alone. They passed through the gardens into the woods and took the path back to the cascade.

  Water in the desert is always a miracle. Having the massive aerator on their property gave the Loushanes irrigation rights, allowing for the dense grove of California bay trees, eucalyptus and sycamore. The Loushane gardens bloomed like no others. The extensive plantings had the feel of an English country estate rather than that of a parched southwestern ranch.

  “Do you know what’s happening?” Ellis sounded like a little boy. Remington almost took him in her arms again. “This Atzlándia thing? Subcomandante G? I can’t even watch the news. It’s too confusing.”

  “And sad.”

  “And sad.”

  The universe dies and lives and mysteriously dies again, an infinite number of times every second. Ordinary non-enlightened citizens are caught up within a flurry of transformation. Asked to describe his philosophy in two words, the Buddha said, “Everything changes.”

  These were the beliefs to which Ellis Loushane supposedly subscribed. He called himself a Buddhist, anyway, blathering about it to anyone who would listen in endless late-night conversations. As far as Remington was concerned, a certain boyish superficiality was one of his endearing traits.

  Caroline had always sneered, “Ellis’s Buddhism is of the vague Malibu kind, you know? Like, not Buddhism but dude-hism.”

  How does a Buddhist accept the death of one as lovely, cherished and desired as a twin sister?

  “Listen, Ellis. I swear to you, I’m going to puzzle it all out somehow.”

  “Oh, you’re in no shape. It’s my stupid family. It’s not yours.”

  “Please,” Remington said.

  “We can do it together, then.”

  “You know who’s in no shape? You.”

  “I know,” Ellis agreed. “I feel jangled, like I’m coming off a meth high or something.”

  He crossed to the fence beside the cascade, weaving his fingers into the chain-link. The mist that rose in the air wet his face, so that the tears didn’t show as much.

  —

  It had always been Ellis for Remington. People usually thought it was Simon, but it was always Ellis. From way back when, the first time, the very instant, the very moment, the very second she saw him. At CYO camp in the hills above Malibu.

  She remembered the precise point it happened. Bob Marley’s “No Woman No Cry” was playing. Some guys sang along with that song as if they were taking it to mean that if women weren’t around there wouldn’t be any tears. But Remington had always thought Marley wrote it as a consoling lullaby, addressed to the woman. No, woman, please, don’t you cry.

  Remington had been too shy ever to confess her love for Ellis to anyone. But that evening, when she returned to the Los Feliz apartment after her visit to Wildermanse, she told Julieta. The thing about Julieta was, she was easy to speak to, because she understood only about ten percent of what Remington was saying. Which
meant she could say anything.

  The other thing about Julieta was that she made delicious food. She had rice and beans and chimichurri and chicken ready for them when Remington arrived back home. Remington knew of a little storefront on Eagle Rock Boulevard that sold fresh tortillas. Julieta disdained them and said that tomorrow she would make up a batch of their own. But for this dinner the storefront ones would have to do.

  They ate around Remington’s tiny kitchen table. The two women felt at ease in each other’s presence. They had walked across the border hand in hand, peed and pooped alongside each other, come right up to the threshold of death together. At first they slept side by side in Remington’s narrow bed, chastely, like sisters. But with one or the other of them waking so often with thrashing nightmares, Julieta had fixed herself a pallet on the floor.

  Ellis was on Remington’s mind. She spoke to Julieta about their first times together. He had gotten her alone in one of the numberless back bedrooms of Wildermanse, and had begun the age-old seduction gambit.

  “So he asks me,” she told Julieta, “ ‘Aren’t you curious?’ Of course, I knew what he was talking about. A boy that age, you don’t have to understand much to know what he’s talking about.”

  “¿Qué edad?” Julieta asked. How old?

  “Oh, young, very young,” Remington answered. She had bought a bottle of retsina on the way home, and they were drinking that. Or, at least, she was. Julieta screwed up her face at the initial taste and never touched her glass again.

  “¿Ya eras una mujer?” Remington didn’t understand the Spanish. Julieta faltered with the English. “You then are a woman?” Meaning Remington had reached menarche.

  “Ah, yes.” Remington was hesitant to say how young she had been. Hesitant to admit it herself. Fourteen. The afternoon came back to her full force, the wood-paneled room whose windows gave out on to the back garden, the awareness that no one ever slept in the bed except when there were guests, but that the Loushane housekeepers kept the place fresh anyway.

  She and Ellis had kissed for the first time in that room on that afternoon.

  “If there is anything sweeter than that first lingering tongue, no one knows what it is,” Remington told Julieta. She couldn’t tell if the girl understood, but her friend surely grasped the dreamy look on her face.

  “Well, I know I’m curious,” Ellis had said. “Aren’t you?”

  Layla had bantered, trying to keep the moment light. “You’re curious, all right. Curious odd.”

  “I’m serious.”

  “I thought you were curious.”

  “I am! Aren’t you?” Insistent. He had kissed her again. “So here’s the thing. I’m with Melissa Soder. You’re with…”

  “Mitch.” Layla had pulled the name out of the air.

  “Mitch. Okay. So we don’t want a boyfriend-girlfriend thing with each other.”

  “No.”

  Julieta struggled to follow the conversation but interrupted with a comment. “The cabrones always want…secreto.” She made a hush-hush movement by pursing her lips.

  “That’s right,” Remington laughed.

  “The way I see it,” Ellis had said, “we make ourselves as free as we can with each other’s body. I mean, really, as free as is physically, philosophically, spiritually possible, until we banish all shame. We’re friends. We like each other. Right?”

  “Right.”

  “You know, in movies,” Ellis had said, “the girls always get undressed first, but in real life it’s the opposite, it’s always the boys.”

  He had begun to take off his clothes. Her heart in her throat, Layla began to take off hers. At times during the rigmarole of undressing he had spoken hard with her.

  “You’re not a virgin, you can’t be a virgin—not when you’ve had a tampon shoved up your twat.”

  Other times, he had been solemn. “I can think of only one thing that could go wrong, after we’ve obviated the chance of pregnancy and secured ourselves against discovery.” Back then Ellis spoke that way, too much out of the dictionary.

  “What?”

  He was silent.

  “What?”

  “We could develop feelings for each other.”

  Layla laughed. “Anything but that, you ridiculous goose.”

  That afternoon she and Ellis had explored every square inch of each other’s body, every millimeter, every everything. They explored, but like kids. He came off too quickly, suddenly, explosively, rubbing against her thigh.

  Julieta chortled but didn’t fully understand. “You do it?” she wanted to know.

  “Sí, we do it,” Remington said.

  Actually, they had first fully consummated beside the cascade, on a September weekend when the adults had vacated the house and apart from a few servants the whole estate had been theirs. They wandered through the grounds. Layla purposefully wore a long dress of white cotton. Ellis had recited the first dream section of Rebecca out loud, having the passage half memorized.

  After that they embarked on a furious three months of immoderate, enthusiastic, exploratory sex, meeting secretly once or twice a week. They made love everywhere, on the beach at night and twenty yards off hiking trails in the mountains. But they were mostly discreet and kept to inside spaces, alternating between the garage apartment of a friend’s older sibling and the cupola of the Malibu beach house, slinking around like a pair of cheating spouses. Melissa Soder and the imaginary Mitch faded in the rearview. It was just them.

  Just them, but secreto, as Julieta described their affair.

  “Caroline knows,” Layla had suggested, deep into their period of hooking up.

  “Caroline,” said Ellis of his twin, “is so very much transfixed by the face in the mirror that she doesn’t know much of anything at all.”

  The face in the mirror, Layla had thought. With a twin, which face was that? “She’ll be pretty,” she had said. “I mean, when she gets older. She’s pretty now.”

  “Do you know Rilke’s line about beauty being the flip side of terror?”

  “I don’t think Rilke said ‘flip side.’ ”

  Caroline would bring Layla over for dinner at Wildermanse after some CYO function. Sitting with the family out on the terrace, across from each other at the big dining table of varnished oak, Victor Loushane glaring at them and barking out questions about current affairs, Layla and Ellis were smooth. Neither of them had geeked out. It had almost been fun.

  During the fall holidays that year, they had separated for a month and a half because of overlapping school vacations. They had a single, lousy, tearful reunion weekend, followed by another stretch of time apart.

  The death of Ellis’s mother finished them for good, with the Loushane family drawing in on itself and Layla being shut out.

  So it had been over long ago. In the sense that anything like that can ever be over. In the sense that both Layla and Ellis still carried it with them. It was like a small piece of personal baggage—a Dopp kit for him, a vanity for her—that they would have to lug around the rest of their lives.

  “Oh, this? It’s just something I keep around.”

  “El primer corte es el más profundo,” Julieta commented. The first cut is the deepest.

  Chapter 15

  Ardor cools. The mania in the media for the Loushane saga went the way of all passions, meaning that it faded and was displaced by the Next Big Thing. Remington had always liked a homey image she read somewhere: “The dogs may bark, but the caravan moves on.” In America at the dawn of the twenty-first century, the caravan was always hustled quickly off the stage to make way for the next act.

  Journalists and therefore the American public accepted an outlandish but nevertheless very clear story line. A venomous Chicano activist orchestrated a revenge killing targeting the family of a political enemy. The parents of Elizabeth Sanborn and Tiffany Howe, the other two Kappa Kappa Chi pledges killed in the massacre, mounted a civil suit against the sorority and the Loushane family. Two competing book deal
s were commissioned, a sure sign that the whole business would soon enough be entombed.

  Remington searched for Val Duran. The boy appeared to have vaporized. For a couple of weekends she went out to Zuma and marched up and down the beaches, concentrating on El Matador and Billionaire’s. Reaching out to the Malibu community, she spoke to sunbathers, slackers, surfers, plus the few homeowners who would give her the time of day.

  She showed everyone the single photo of Val that she had, a murky shot that Ellis gave her. Val had been vigorously unwilling to have his picture taken, saying it was a security measure adopted by his family as a defense against the threat of kidnappers. Almost by accident, Ellis had sneaked one anyway. The shot had been snapped from the upstairs deck, down onto the walled terrace of the beach house.

  It was almost too sad to look at. Caroline lounged on the chaise, smiling and looking up at Val. He stared off at the ocean. Both their faces were caught by the sun. They looked impossibly young, impossibly beautiful. Once more, Remington detected an elusive quality to Val’s features, as if he had a movie-star dad and she was seeing hints of celebrity in his face.

  Remington took scissors to the print and sliced the two figures apart. She told herself it was only in order that folks she showed the photo to wouldn’t get distracted by Caroline. “Oh, that’s the Loushane girl,” they would say. “Pity about her.” But Remington wondered if she might have other, personal motivations for separating the two of them.

  The denizens of Zuma Beach mostly failed to recognize Val. One slacker ID’d him as “the dude into flying discage,” but was vague beyond that. At Malibu Civic Center, off the PCH, Remington went through plat maps of the shore properties. The town clerk wanted to know why she needed to see them, interrogating her even though the records were clearly open to the public. Malibuvians liked their privacy protected.

  The search proved fruitless anyway. A lot of famous names turned up on the property listings, a lot of shell corporations, too, but no “Duran.” Val was the silhouette of a shadow of a mirage. Remington called Ellis and asked if he or Caroline had ever actually seen one of the fabled Duran beach houses: “three places in Malibu, one up by Matador, two more down on Billionaire’s.” He told her no, that in the brief time Val and Caroline had been together Val had always come to them, they never went to him.