$200 and a Cadillac

by Fingers Murphy

  “Dude, calm the fuck down.” Eli rummaged through the cupboards, found a stack of white foam cups he’d stolen from the cafeteria during his last day at Monarch and poured himself some coffee. “It ain’t no big deal.”

  “Will you pull your head out of your ass?”

  “Look, man, how the hell are they going to trace that to us? Huh? We were in Ron’s truck, nobody associates us with Ron, and, hell, Ron did it. You can’t get in trouble for just being there. Besides, the guy’s fucking crazy. What the hell were we supposed to do? He’d have killed us if we’d have tried to stop him.”

  Eli leaned against the counter and watched Eddie sop up the spilled coffee with the towel. In the silence, a radio played faint country music somewhere in the trailer, and the faucet dripped into a pan of greasy water in the sink. Eddie took a deep breath. Despite the surrounding desert, the air in the kitchen was musty and rank. Eddie shook his head and said, “Just our luck though. Another week and that body’d a been gone. What are the odds, man?”

  “I don’t know. But hell, just cuz the leg turned up don’t mean they’ll find anything else. I mean, look around, there’s all kinds of crazy shit happening up here. They’ll probably chalk it up to a drug deal gone bad or something. Bunch a meth freaks killing each other, just like always. I wouldn’t worry about it.”

  “I know. You’re right.” Eddie folded the wet towel and tossed it across the kitchen where it hit the edge of the counter and fell to the floor with a moist slap. Neither of them moved to pick it up.

  Eli looked down at the counter. It was strewn with the wreckage of fifty meals. There were dirty plates; wads of cellophane, stains of innumerable variety; ashtrays overflowing with cigarette butts; wet paper towels and napkins crumpled and stuffed down into bowls with strange liquids still in them; there was a half eaten microwave burrito sitting off by itself, pristine and unbothered by the clutter; and balanced precariously atop a pint glass of flat beer with a ribbon of something that looked like snot floating in it, sat a spoon with a half eaten lump of hard, black chili still on it—mold spores half an inch long jutting out like the spines on a sea mine.

  Eli picked up the spoon and turned it over. The chili had adhered completely and showed no sign of ever coming loose. Eli set it back on the glass. “Man, we need to burn this trailer when we leave. This place is filthy.”

  Eddie snickered quietly and looked everything over. “I know it, man.” He started laughing harder, and leaned his chair back against the wall. “You’d think being laid off and all, we’d be able to find the time to clean.” Eddie doubled over in hysterics, feeling the tension of the previous two days flow out of him.

  Eli watched Eddie’s silent laughter and felt himself giving into it as well. He tried to stifle a smile, and then it caught hold of him. Eli picked up the burrito and waved it at Eddie, then tossed it back on the counter. They both lost themselves in red-faced fits of spastic laughter until their guts hurt.

  When it was over, and the kitchen was silent again, they could still hear the soft music and the dripping water, and they were both all too aware that nothing had changed. Eli watched Eddie sip his coffee and try to look relaxed, like he wasn’t thinking about the coyote and the leg and what had happened to the hitchhiker, and how the two of them lost their jobs and got caught up in a bargain with a lunatic.

  Eli felt the tension building in his shoulders and he rotated them backward a couple of times, craning his neck to the left and right. “Fuck,” was all he could say. Finally, when Eddie’s eyes caught his own, Eli let out a huff and said, “I need some air.”

  Eli stepped down, out of the doublewide, and onto the sandy ground. The desert stretched away in all directions, a brown, dusty land pocked with clumps of sage, an occasional Joshua tree, and many black, steeple-like frames of old-fashioned oil derricks—mostly abandoned now. Trailers and shacks dotted the landscape too. Denser near town, where there were lots as small as five acres, and spreading further and further apart as the lot sizes grew and grew and the desert expanded to the low horizon. There were jagged peaks in the distance, but they were meaningless. Eli doubted they even had names.

  Way back when the federal government was trying to give the land away, there were only two conditions. First, you had to take 640 acres. Second, it had to be settled, meaning a permanent, habitable structure of some kind had to be erected on the property. This explained both the numerous roads traversing the desert, as well as the seemingly random placement of cinderblock buildings scattered across the desert like mausoleums or funeral mounds built to commemorate desolation itself. When the brief oil rush was on in the 1920s, there had been lots of consolidation. Wealthy speculators would swoop in and buy 640 acre tracts by the dozen. Then, as the oil dwindled, the land was impossible to sell and the owners simply walked away. There were some properties that hadn’t had their taxes paid since the early 1940s. But the county never foreclosed. The government didn’t want the land either.

  At one point, Eli’s grandfather had acquired ten square miles of desert and erected nearly twenty reasonably good wells, and life was good clear into the late 60s. When Eli’s grandfather died peacefully of a heart attack on a beach in Hawaii, Eli’s father took over, and the slow, steady decline in the family’s fortune began. Not that it had anything to do with his father, it was just the way things were. Profits were poured into additional wells, all of which were either dry to begin with or soon went dry. By the time the writing was on the wall, it was too late to escape. The family house had been sold, most of the property mortgaged, and most of the rights to the wells that still produced had been doled out to various creditors. When Eli’s father finally drove his beat up Cadillac off the Pacific Coast Highway in a drunken stupor, just south of Point Lobos—killing himself and his wife—Eli was left with an estate consisting of a rusty doublewide on forty acres of hardpan desert, another two hundred acres further out in the middle of nowhere, and the pouch of personal effects the coroner had mailed him containing his mother’s jewelry and his old man’s last two hundred bucks in limp, weathered twenties. Two hundred dollars, a smashed Cadillac, and a pile of shit rusting on a bunch of land the county wouldn’t even repossess for back taxes. The sum total of three generations of hard work.

  So at twenty-four, Eli took a job at Southern Petroleum’s Monarch station, where oil from the remaining active wells in the area was dumped into the pipeline and shipped down to Long Beach. It was a steady paycheck in a town that got cheaper to live in every year, but everyone who worked there knew it was only a matter of time before Monarch closed and Nickelback deteriorated back into the wild desert. The oil was running out everywhere. People who had made money were quitting while they were still ahead. And the people who had lost money only had so much more to lose.

  The abandoned oil claims made the whole area perfect for people who were hiding from something or had something to hide from others. The dispersed and decrepit buildings were now home to all manner of criminals and outlaws. Those who didn’t have a job at the refinery were either retired, living off of some kind of disability, or making crystal meth in a makeshift lab in a shack behind their house. The whole county only had one sheriff and three deputies, barely enough to have one cop on duty around the clock.

  Eli stood in the dirt, perfectly still. He’d been trying to get out of Nickelback his entire life. When the family was desperately clinging to the last of the oil wells, he stayed around to help the old man work them, and to protect his mother from his drunken tirades. When they died, he spent nearly a year trying to make it work himself, and then took the job at Monarch. He told himself he’d work until he could save up enough to leave. Five years went by and he’d saved nothing, but he’d tricked himself into thinking he was happy with the way things were. And then, on a Friday morning, two weeks after his thirtieth birthday, he and Eddie, and fifty others, got told that that was their last day on the job. He’d felt cheated ever since. Screwed out of his twenties by fate, bad luck, and an oil com
pany that couldn’t give a shit about him or anyone else.

  The door creaked behind him and Eli heard the crunch of Eddie’s footsteps coming toward him. They stood shoulder to shoulder, oddly close to one another given all the surrounding space, and stared at nothing in particular. Finally, Eddie spoke. “A hundred grand in ten days.”

  “Shit.”

  “I don’t even know if that’s possible.”

  “It’s possible,” Eli spat at the ground, for no reason. “But unlikely.”

  “We only made twenty-five grand in the last two weeks.” Eddie’s voice was strained.

  Eli spat again and folded his arms across his chest. “Yeah, but those were small loads and we were still getting the kinks worked out.” He gave Eddie a sideways look. “And Ron doesn’t know we made anything at all yet.”

  Eddie returned the gaze. “Still, that’s gonna be tough to do.”

  “We can pocket about $7,500 a trip.” Eli stirred the dirt with one foot and stared at the ground, computing it in his head. “We load up at night and get down there first thing in the morning. I can leave first. Then you can fill the other truck and head down after. We should be able to turn two loads a day. That’s fifteen grand a day. Ten days? It’s doable, but it’s a helluva stretch.”

  “There’s no way we can count on doing two loads a day. There’s no room for error. No room for shitty traffic. It’s a long drive to Long Beach. And the trucks are old. They could break any time. Hell, they could both break and we could be out of business for a week or more.”

  “I know it.” Eli stared back out at the desert. “Hell, I don’t understand the hurry. I mean, we all want to make money, there’s no reason to push it like that.”

  “We gotta talk some sense into him.”

  VIII

  As far as Hank Norton could tell, the only thing the designation of the Egg Rock Basin as a National Monument had done for the town of Nickelback, California was result in the construction of a brand new Super 8 Motel on the edge of town. The brochures in his room—all of them several years old now—made it clear that there had been a flurry of excitement at first. There were a few new stores, another gas station, and lots of general preparation to become a paradise for mountain bikers and rock climbers. But the promise of becoming the next Moab quickly faded. The designation had been made back when the economy was booming, the government had money to burn, and Congress suddenly went on a brief and inexplicable spending binge protecting the environment. Nine new monuments were designated that year and Egg Rock was one of them.

  A three-panel, full-color pamphlet titled, “From Wildcatters to the Wild Outdoors: Exploring Nickelback’s Rich History” informed him that the basin had been accidentally discovered and named by a Standard Oil geologist in 1882 while he searched for fossil fuel in the remote parts of the Mojave Desert. On a particularly hot and cruel day, as Rodney Nickelback clamored over the alluvial remnants of a long ago eroded ridgeline, he crested the hill and saw the narrow valley stretch out below him. He marveled briefly at the odd sandstone boulders. They stood upright, running from forty to eighty feet high, and dotted the landscape like several hundred giant red eggs. Rodney cleaned his glasses on a corner of his shirt, made a hasty notation on his map regarding the location and description of the rocks, and headed back down the loose pile of stones in search of oil.

  By the time Rodney Nickelback’s map made it to the head office of Standard Oil and then on to Washington, his simple notation had become Egg Rock’s permanent name. A hundred twenty years later, as Hank Norton sat on his queen-sized bed in his non-smoking room, a direct beneficiary of the new deluxe Super 8 motel at the far end of Main Street, he reflected on the stupidity of the town’s name and wondered how quickly he could finish his work.

  He always made it a point to unpack his clothes in a motel room, even if he was only staying for a night. But the unpacking could only be done after all of the drawers and surfaces had been wiped with a hot, damp cloth. He’d done this immediately upon his arrival the night before, after meticulously arranging the damaged surveying equipment along the wall beside the bed. Then he’d taken a shower, and scrubbed himself thoroughly. After scrubbing the tub clean and wiping down the shower stall, Hank had finally been able to crawl into bed where he wondered what the hell he was going to do with no car.

  The next morning, Hank showered again, wiped everything down again, dressed, sat on the edge of the bed and got the quarter-inch thick phone book from the drawer of the nightstand. He flipped it open to find that there weren’t even any ads for any car rental companies. He’d forgotten the paperwork in the glove compartment and he had to dial information to get the number for Hertz. Hank put the phonebook back in the drawer, aligning its edges in perfect parallel with the sides of the drawer, and closed it slowly so the book wouldn’t shift. He fidgeted with the phone while he waited to be connected. The lamp was screwed to the nightstand slightly off center and the phone couldn’t sit square with the edge of the nightstand. Hank found it disturbing and cracked his knuckles while he listened to the muzak in the earpiece, trying to forget about the phone’s oddly angular placement next to the lamp.

  Finally, a lady came on and asked if she could help him.

  “Uh, yeah, I got in a wreck in one of your cars and I need to get a replacement right away.”

  This only seemed to confuse the Hertz woman. The fact that he didn’t have his reservation number didn’t help either. After a minute of listening to her type on the other end, the lady came back on the phone.

  “We can send a service vehicle out this afternoon.”

  “I don’t think you understand. This ain’t a flat tire, the car is wrecked. I need someone to drive a replacement car out here to me.”

  “You mean the car is not driveable?”

  “That’s what I’m saying.”

  “What happened?”

  “I hit a wild animal.”

  “Why did you do that?”

  “Jesus Christ, lady, are you kidding me with this?”

  “Sir, unless you cease swearing at me, I will terminate this call.”

  “What the fuck did I say? Look. I’m out in the middle of the desert without a car. That’s not good. The car I rented from you was in an accident and does not work. I paid for the insurance, the car is covered, and now I need a new car and I need someone to drive it out here. What’s hard about that?”

  The conversation burned through twenty more minutes and two managers and Hank hung up, unsure if anything was going to be done about the car. He walked across the parking lot to the gas station, bought a cup of coffee and a doughnut, and tried to come up with Plan B.

  Hank stood in the gas station parking lot and stared off toward the edge of town, which was all of a few hundred feet away. Beyond the last low building was a vast expanse of open terrain spreading itself below a wide and glowing sky. He had to have a car. There was no two ways about it. He picked up a small flyer full of local classified ads, thinking he might just buy another one. The folks at Hertz could figure things out whenever they decided to pull their heads out of their asses. He had work to do.

  Back in his room, Hank flipped through the ads, unable to focus, and then decided to turn his attention to the business of the day. He got the large yellow envelope out from the bottom of his bag. It was thin and unopened. Hank always made it a point to never open the envelope until he got where he was going, that way he really wouldn’t know anything ahead of time. Plausible deniability could come in handy some day.

  He sat back at the table and set his coffee on top of the wall-mounted air conditioner to avoid spills. He ensured the door was locked and the shades were drawn tight. He even went into the bathroom and pulled back the shower curtain—it was impossible to be too careful. Then, noticing a small puddle of water he’d missed after his shower, Hank took a hand towel from the rack above the toilet, wiped up the puddle, and then carefully refolded the towel and placed it neatly and squarely atop the stack of the other used
towels. Then he readjusted the positioning of the entire stack, moving it back an inch and a half from the edge of the counter so it was centered on the small ledge. Hank paused in front of the mirror and rubbed his chin, looking himself in the eyes. He couldn’t help it if he liked things perfect. Control was an occupational hazard.

  Back at the table, he sliced the envelope open with the edge of a key. Inside was a single manila file folder. There were ten photographs and a couple dozen pages of background information. Hank studied the pictures. They spanned fifteen or twenty years. He held one of the younger ones for a closer look and smiled. He knew the guy. Only barely, but he’d met him once or twice, many years ago.

  The man’s name was Howard Lugano. A former tough guy known as “Homerun” Howie, who had sold out to save his own ass at the expense of his employer. Hank remembered seeing him at least once at Jackie Johnson’s pool hall, after hours—probably four in the morning. Howie and a couple other goons were still shooting pool and Jackie was bitching about how he wanted to go home. Hank remembered Howie talking loud about how he’d smashed some guy’s head in by tying him to a chair and pretending he was playing T-ball. He said he liked to whack them full force from behind with a Louisville Slugger and watch their eyes pop out the front. Hank remembered sipping scotch and listening to the guy go on and on, trying to impress anyone within earshot with what a bad ass he was. Hank could also remember thinking that a real bad ass wouldn’t have to tie a guy up, or talk about it.

  Thousands of guys he’d met in thousands of situations just like that one over the years, and for some reason that one had stuck with him. Howie had been a strange one even then. Find yourself a gimmick, he’d said, be a machete guy, a golf club guy, a chainsaw guy, whatever, just get yourself a gimmick and everyone will know who you are and will know you’re a crazy motherfucker. Then, when you pulled out your trademark tool of choice, whoever you were dealing with would know you meant business.