by Logan Miller
“At every funeral I have ever attended the deceased always wears a thin smile,” he began. “As if they were now happily residing in a carefree place, lost in blissful slumber. It comforts the bereaved, or at least that is the belief of the Undertaker’s Guild of America. But I’ve never seen this smile occur naturally. Clearly, Ruben is not smiling.”
“He sure ain’t,” Gates said.
“But he will be smiling at his funeral. Trust me. Ruben will smile again. The undertaker will make certain of it. I have heard that freezing to death produces a smile on the face of the deceased.”
“I’ve heard that too.”
“Have you ever seen it?”
“Seen what?”
“A frozen man and his smile.”
“No.”
Marlo cocked his head to the side and pondered his nephew from a different angle. “I must say that this hideous pose isn’t a very accurate characterization of the young man. The attitude of Ruben’s mouth, this gaping rictus of dumbfounded horror, makes him look much dumber than he actually was.”
Gates didn’t necessarily agree with Marlo’s observation. Dead or alive, Ruben looked just as dumb as he’d always been.
Marlo turned around and motioned to three men who were standing in the doorway of the warehouse. Gates had never seen these men before. He’d seen plenty of other men at the compound, was familiar with their faces, but never these three. Maybe they were Marlo’s lovers. Maybe they were his henchmen. Maybe they were both. But whatever they were, Gates thought them creepy. He couldn’t exactly put a finger on it but he could feel it in a vaguely tangible way, like a faint odor.
Sparks was sitting inside the cruiser with the windows rolled up and doors locked.
“Could you please stick Ruben in the walk-in for now?” Marlo said to the three men striding across the gravel. “There should be plenty of room behind the ice cream. Thank you so much.”
The man in the point position of the trio was wearing a black mesh top and a yellow Speedo. Two large nipple rings were visible through the mesh. He was muscular and athletic with long sculpted legs and Gates supposed that he was from some place far away. His hair was gelled into a faux-hawk and he appeared to be wearing eye shadow.
Gates studied the three men and then looked over at Marlo for some possible answer to the inscrutable way in which he lived out here. But Gates was no wiser after the searching. He figured he should just accept it. Whatever IT was. He couldn’t tell if Marlo was forty or sixty.
The men lifted Ruben’s stiff corpse out of the trunk and carried him into the warehouse. He looked like a giant baby curled in a napping position after a long drive with his parents.
Marlo shut the trunk.
“What percentage of theft is employee theft?” he asked.
“Is that an accusation?”
“No. It’s a question. Don’t you deal in those types of statistics?”
“I don’t know the exact percentage. But it’s high.”
“Exceptionally high.”
Marlo threw his hands toward the heavens with his palms turned upward and held them there. He looked around at his vast property and inhaled the flowery sage that was riding on the afternoon wind coming down off the mesa above. He closed his eyes and shook his head with ironic resignation. The universe was unfair.
“His mother pleaded with me for months: ‘give the boy a job,’” Marlo said. “‘Give him a job. All he does is sit around and play video games and get high and drink with his buddies. Please—please—please—give Ruben a job. Give him a reason to get out of the house and stop wasting his life. Something that will make him feel better about himself. Make him feel like a man.’ And now she will undoubtedly blame me for his misfortune, for allowing him to be a man, or at least attempt to be one. Regrettably, Ruben always struggled with responsibility. He was like that as a little boy. People rarely take into account the pitfalls of an occupation. They only look at the potential rewards, the benefits. But as economists and the Devil are fond of saying: there’s always a trade-off.”
Marlo exhaled and admired Darius Gates in the slanting light that shaded the left side of his face, noting that he was handsome in a hard-lived, grizzled sort of a way, an old workhorse still carrying some of its virility. He wondered for a moment if the old cop had a big penis and concluded that he probably did not. He’d observed over the years that men with large penises had more easygoing dispositions. Most of them at least, there were always exceptions. He’d met several fiery sons-of-a-bitches with thunder cocks, even loved one of them for a time whose cuddle name was Hotspur. But they were defending other issues.
“Well, you know what needs to be done,” Marlo said. “You’re the sheriff of this fine county. You’ve been entrusted by these thousands of square miles of outlaw country and noble citizenry to find thieves and murderers and bring them to justice.”
“We’ll find them. Sure enough we’ll find them.”
“And when you do, we’ll make sure to put great big happy smiles on their faces, won’t we? Great big smiles so that when their mothers look down on them in their caskets they may take comfort knowing that they’re in a better place, and that God does everything for a reason.”
“It’ll be my pleasure.”
Marlo walked alongside the patriotic cruiser with his bare toes curling against the warm gravel. He traced his fingertips down the waves of red and white stripes that were coated with road-dust and knocked on the passenger window. Deputy Sparks jumped in his seat. Marlo blew him a kiss and waved with his fingers aflutter.
“I’ll suck your cock for five dollars, Dep-you-tee.”
Sparks turned away.
“How about ten? Fuckee suckee. Bang-bang-mee-assee.”
Marlo bellowed and watched the metal flag pull down the dirt road until it turned left behind the mesa, still laughing into the prairie minutes after they were gone.
18.
The monotonous drone and cleave of the log splitter under the sun and windless sky. The maul plunged and split a pine log with a dry crack. Caleb tossed the halves onto a pile and set another log on the holding plate.
Chop. Toss. Stack.
Chop.
Toss.
Stack.
Chop. Toss. Stack.
Chop.
Toss.
Stack.
For hours he’d been doing this and the time was lost to the cadence of the pounding maul. The dead man. The gunshot. The body falling. Coming upon his brother with a pistol to his head. Starting to control the situation—and then the shattering of it. Forever. He never should have left his brother there with the marijuana garden—he should have forced him to leave, taken the chainsaws, whatever it took—even if he needed to resort to violence, to whoop his brother, cave in his face, to beat him into coming down the mountain after they’d found that curse. Jake would’ve been pissed for a little while but he would’ve gotten over it. He would’ve seen how stupid he was. He never should have left his brother behind. You didn’t do that. He didn’t do that. He’d gone soft on the situation and now he hoped that they would not pay for it—that Lelah and his brother would be safe. He could take care of himself.
Damnit, why Lelah? Fuck! Fuck! Fuck! Fuck you Jake! You dumb motherfucker!
Chop. Toss. Stack.
Pull the bandana off your head and wring out the sweat. Wring it out. Pack a lipper. The nicotine does nothing today. It’s only there. In the fleshy pouch of your chapped bottom lip.
Chop. Toss. Stack.
Chop.
Toss.
Stack.
The arch of his right foot had been bothering him all day, a phantom pain in the foot that he no longer had. The foot that had been blown off and never found, leaving behind a flapping curtain of mutilated flesh and the fractured splinters of a shinbone. There was only aluminum and carbon down there now. But the pain running up his right calf and shin and along his sciatic nerve was real, very real, and he had a high threshold for pain. His lower back wa
s cramping. He bent over and stretched his hands to the ground. He glanced at his prosthetic leg and the pain shooting up it.
It ain’t no phantom.
When he had first lost his leg his body thought that he still had it. The brain took a while to get used to the leg being gone. For weeks he woke up and had to look down to see that it was not there. One night he forgot to look. He swung out of the hospital bed to take a leak and when he tried to step forward with his right leg he crashed onto the linoleum floor and broke his nose and chipped his front tooth. He still dreamed at times that the leg was there and oftentimes he ran in his dreams through the mountain trails and conjectured that it was no different than dreaming of loved ones that he had lost. Loss was loss. The brain sometimes remembered and sometimes it didn’t as though it jumped back and forth in time where it wanted and when it chose. Time travel was real in the mind.
Chop.
Toss.
Stack.
Spit the tobacco juice in the dirt.
He thought about his days and nights in the hospital and the grueling hours of recovery, the months spent strengthening his muscles and learning how to walk with the prosthetic. He remembered how painful the rehabilitation was and how he’d felt sorry for himself at times but then he thought about the others and he was just glad to be alive.
He was one of the lucky ones. There were those who had lost both legs. Men and women who’d lost both arms and legs. Faces and bodies burned and melted skin that looked like stretched plastic. Young men and women that would need constant custodial care for the rest of their lives. Men who had lost the unspeakable.
He was more than lucky. Below the knee and clean with a kickass prosthetic that was stronger than any bone or muscle tissue or ligament bound by the constraints of human evolution. Yeah, he was more than lucky. There wasn’t even a word for what he was.
He remembered how Lelah cried into his chest when she first saw him in the hospital and how he had cried too even though he had tried to hold back. He held her in his arms and she said that she was sorry and he told her that there was no reason to be and that everything was going to be all right. She had brought him flowers and she put them in a glass vase beside his bed and they ate brownies that she had baked for him and carried on the flight all the way from home. She stayed for over a month and pushed him around the hospital grounds in a wheelchair. It was early summer back east and very beautiful. She took him out one night and they got drunk and had sex in the wheelchair in the shadows of the hospital courtyard as the sun was coming up. He wasn’t supposed to drink on his meds but he did anyway. He had a terrible headache that morning and puked all over himself trying to get out of bed and the nurse stuck him with an IV and his headache was gone in less than an hour.
He remembered looking at Lelah sitting in a chair next to the window and thinking how blessed he was to have such a wonderful lady and he wondered how the other soldiers made it through without such support. There were a few that never even had a visitor.
He remembered when Jake came out to see him and how Jake had never been out of New Mexico before or on a plane and how he’d missed his first flight because his driver’s license was expired. He remembered how uncomfortable Jake was at the hospital, how nervous and anxious he looked, pacing around the room in his work clothes with his greasy baseball cap scrunched in his hands and craning out the door and down the hallway as if expecting some enemy to show up, and how after a week Jake said “I love you brother but I gotta go home.” And Caleb understood exactly. He was grateful that he had come at all.
The log splitter chopped a piece of dwarf oak in half and the violent sound brought him back to the wood yard under the heavy sun and windless sky.
He looked over at his brother. Jake’s face was drawn and pale and he appeared nearly helpless stacking the wood as though he’d forgotten the most basic of tasks. They’d been stacking wood since before he could remember. Little kids earning fifty cents a day from their dad. Two quarters. Stacking wood all day for a Snickers bar. You had to do very little thinking and arranging. The firewood almost fell into place. And his brother was lost right now. He was holding two pieces of the same log and staring at an impossible jigsaw puzzle.
Then Jake’s phone rang and life jumped back into him. Perhaps this was the call he’d been waiting for all morning and into the afternoon. He snatched his phone from the hood of the truck and checked the caller ID.
“It’s him,” Jake said. “Kill the switch.”
Caleb flicked off the splitter and the hammering echo faded. A hush fell over the wood yard and the prairieland that surrounded it.
Jake answered.
“Hey, buddy.” There was a pause. “Yeah, that’s right. I wanna show you something that I think you’ll like.” Jake listened and his face flushed with blood, with energy, with hope. “How soon can you come up here?” He listened. “Two days? You can’t come no sooner?” He faked a laugh. He was nervous and trying to mask it. “I just had some plans, is all. No, that won’t work. I’ll be gone all next week and the week after that. Vacation. Hawaii… So, I need to see you this week. Gotta be this week… Two days is fine. See you in two days. You know how to get here?” He listened. “I’ll text you the address. It’s way out in the boonies but easy to find. OK. Cool. See you then.”
Jake ended the call. His eyes were animated with the prospect of redemption and he couldn’t hold back a smile. Everything was going to work out just fine.
“Two days, bro,” Jake said. “He’ll be here in two days.”
Caleb spit into the dirt and hit the switch on the log splitter and went back to work. Jake waited for a nod of confirmation, a gesture of approval, a look, anything from his brother that said he’d done good. But it did not come.
The splitter droned away and Caleb wandered into the pounding monotony.
Chop. Toss. Stack.
Chop.
Toss.
Stack.
Chop.
Toss.
Stack.
Lelah.
19.
Gates and Sparks idled the cruiser beside the truck of Park Ranger Ortiz at the mouth of a recreational road leading into Carson National Forest.
Ortiz flipped through the sheets of a yellow notepad on his lap. It was scribbled with hieroglyphics that only he could decipher—and then only sometimes.
“We appreciate you meeting us out here,” Gates said.
“Any excuse to break up my day, I’ll take,” Ortiz said. He licked his forefinger and leafed through the coffee-stained pages. “Did anything untoward occur in the area that I should know about?”
“Nothing yet,” Gates said.
“Expecting something to?”
“We’re just looking into some complaints from a few nosy types.”
“Right. They got nothing going on in their own life and so they gotta make trouble in someone else’s.”
“You know the kind.”
“My ex-wife was one of them—the team fucking leader,” Ortiz said. “She’d stir up shit in an outhouse. She and her boyfriend have sued me three times now for alimony and to make bullshit repairs on the house I bought for us when we were married and that they live in now. You imagine that? My ex-wife lives with her boyfriend in the house that I bought. I bought. But somehow she owns it. I don’t even know how that happened. But it did. I lived in a teepee for a while, no kidding—thank God it was the summer. The lowness of some people just to take what someone else got. No shame. Well, I hope that bitch chokes on his black cock one night and then bites it off in a thrashing fit and they both die.” Ortiz paused. “She’s an epileptic you know.”
“I did not know that,” Gates said.
“Oh yeah, buddy. She’s had seizures ever since her second pregnancy. Big fits. Flaps around like a dog after it’s been road hit by a truck. You ever seen a dog right after it’s been hit?”
“Too many times.”
“Well, she looks like that. Yapping and squealing and spinning arou
nd. Hell, I like being single. Freest I ever been in my adult life. And you know why? ’Cause I ain’t the dumb son of a bitch I was when I was younger. I can see things coming now. I know that a hangover hurts and that it don’t get no better after the third beer.” He found the sheet he was looking for and scrolled down with his finger. “Let’s see. I issued over a dozen camping permits for the fall season. A handful of hiking permits as well.”
“What about logging permits?” Gates asked.
“Issued five of them. But most people don’t even bother with permits. Only the commercial outfits bother. Most of the people up there are just firewood poachers, trying to heat their homes for the winter without paying for it. Hell, I’m sympathetic. We don’t bother policing it much, at least I don’t. And even if I wanted to—we don’t have the manpower. There’s hundreds of thousands of acres and hundreds of miles of road up there and only three of us. Hey, to be honest, I buy my firewood from guys I know never got any permits. Anyway—”
Gates cut him off. Ortiz could flap for days. It was the curse of solitary employment.
“Can you email me the names on those permits?” Gates asked.
“I don’t do email. But I can read them to you right now if you like. You got a pen and paper handy?”
ᴥ
They pulled into Eagle Feather Timber Company at half past four o’clock in the afternoon. A monsoon had gushed through the mesa land and a flash flood had washed across the interstate, making it impassable for nearly an hour until the road crew showed up with a grader and scraped the silt and muddy clay off the asphalt.
Gates and Sparks had to redirect traffic and haul a woman out of her car after the torrent had pushed her into a ditch. When they arrived the car was nearly submerged and her lapdog had managed to swim out the window and find dry ground for a moment before the embankment collapsed and it was swept away. The woman was much too large and traumatized to swim through the floodwaters. So Gates waded into the churning brown current and tied the winch cable from the cruiser around the woman and hauled them both out, the woman screaming hysterically that the Second Coming had arrived and that her dog was its first victim, and heaven willing, its first Saint. After wrapping the bereaved prophet woman in a towel, and agreeing with her that this in fact might be the Second Coming, the ambulance finally arrived and carried her off to Hell, Gates hoped.