A Philosophy of Ruin

by Nicholas Mancusi

  Fucking pick up.

  He called back immediately.

  “Where are you,” she said.

  Oscar spat out in a whisper, “It’s real. I saw them again. They were just here.”

  “Where’s here?”

  “A motel somewhere. I don’t even know.”

  “What’s happening?”

  “Those guys, those same three guys, they followed me here. They were just standing right outside the door a second ago. There was a...a...tracking device in the bag. I found it before they showed up, otherwise they would have known exactly where I was. What do you know about that? Why would there be a tracking device?”

  “Ah—okay. A device?”

  “You need to admit to me that you don’t know what you’re doing. You’ve never taken on this much before. You’ve never dealt with this element before. You sent me out here because you weren’t sure if you were going to get fucked and now here you are, getting fucked, and I’m getting it worse.”

  “I know what I’m doing.”

  “Bullshit.”

  “You need to stay there. I’ll send Ramos.”

  “No way. Too far. And even if I waited, what then? Ramos covers my escape with a hail of gunfire?”

  “I don’t think he actually owns a gun.”

  “A hail of vague threats?”

  There was silence on the other end of the line.

  “Guess what else?” he said. He had mapped out in advance exactly none of this conversation.

  “What?”

  “I want forty thousand.”

  “Wha—”

  “I want forty thousand or I walk out of this room with this bag held above my head and hand it over on a silver fucking platter. On the world’s biggest coke mirror.”

  “You wouldn’t do that.”

  “I wouldn’t? Dawn, who do you think I am?” He was yell-whispering now. “You think I’m handling this well? You think I’m not close to the edge of reason? I am not supposed to be here. I am a fucking METAPHYSICIAN! You dragged me down out of an ivory fucking TOWER!”

  “Okay, okay. Forty. Jesus.”

  “Fine. Good.”

  “What are you going to do?”

  He hung up.

  17

  The clock read 2:15 a.m. He had only closed his eyes briefly, but for some reason, he felt completely rested, although perhaps it was just that his adrenal glands had had a proper recovery period and were now once again firing full force. He stuffed the hole he had made in the brick with a hand towel from the bathroom to stop any of the powder from escaping, returned all four bricks to the bag, slung it over his shoulder along with his own bag, and headed for the door.

  He would drive without stopping to get to the university in the morning (the thought occurred to him that if he found himself beginning to nod off that he was particularly well supplied to self-medicate), drop the bag at Dawn’s feet, receive the money from her if she actually had it but to be honest at this point he barely cared, and then go back to his room, sit down, maybe cry, and grade papers for the rest of his life. He fantasized briefly about this scene: no obligations, no concerns, no thoughts at all other than how to properly illustrate to a freshman that her conclusions did not follow from her premises.

  There were just a few more hours of road between him and his desk. All thoughts of pussying out had passed from him, like a fever.

  Outside all was still. The night had grown cool.

  He bounded down the stairs and jogged to the car and blipped it unlocked. He threw both bags into the passenger seat as he jumped up behind the wheel. He reached for the ignition with the key in his right hand while his left hand began to close the door but then there was another hand on the door holding it open and Oscar saw a nickel-plated handgun pointed at him and a voice was saying relax, relax, relax.

  “Give me the keys,” the voice said from somewhere above the gun.

  Oscar gave the voice the keys.

  “You don’t have a gun,” the voice said.

  “No,” Oscar said.

  The hand without the gun patted at Oscar’s pockets, his waistband, his rib cage.

  “Okay. Buckle up. I’m going to come around and get in.”

  Oscar buckled his seat belt. The door was shut. The man walked around the hood of the car, passed through the headlights. He wore a white button-down shirt tucked into his Wranglers, the big black vaquero hat covering his face.

  As Oscar watched the man pass through the headlights, he felt the bottom of his own soul drop out, shards of himself spill downward into a freezing chasm, and the cold rush in. This was something new.

  “Okay then,” the man said as he moved the bags down onto the floor and got into the passenger seat. He looked up at Oscar and smiled at him. His teeth were very white. “Boy, I didn’t think it would be that easy, just waiting in the dark. I thought I might be there all night.” He spoke with only a slight accent.

  Oscar couldn’t believe the simplicity, the dumb weight of his own foolishness.

  “I thought you were gone,” Oscar said, like a child.

  “No. Right over there behind that tree. You found the tracker, didn’t you, huh?”

  The man rested his hat on his knees. He looked to be in his early forties, light brown skin, with lines only beginning to hint at themselves in his face. His jet-black hair hung to his neck. He thumbed at his phone with the hand that didn’t hold the gun, pecking out the letters of a text message.

  The automatic dome light went off and the car was dark. Nothing stirred in the parking lot. About a hundred yards away, which might as well have been ten miles, a skinny woman in a tank top walked a small dog in the gravel that lined the sidewalk outside of the rooms.

  “What’s happening now?” Oscar eventually said.

  “Now we’re waiting. What’s your name?” The man was almost jovial. He sat in the passenger seat with the detached self-interest of a driving instructor.

  Oscar tried to think of a fake name that would sound convincing and came up with nothing, not one name, a complete blank. “I don’t want to tell you.”

  “We’re going to be looking through your wallet in a little bit.”

  After a moment, Oscar said, “Oscar,” and the man smiled.

  “Like the grouch!” he said. “Oscar, hombre, I really just cannot believe that that tree thing worked. You had us huffing and puffing for a while there, huh? This car can fly. Wouldn’t expect it, by the size. And then all I do is sit down behind a tree and you come jogging into my arms. What’s your last name?”

  “Boatwright.”

  “Boatwright? The fuck kind of name is that?”

  “My people used to make boats. A long time ago. At least, probably.”

  “And now you do this shit,” he said, meaning run around with drugs eluding armed men.

  “Not regularly.”

  The man turned his attention to the bag at his feet. He unzipped it and sucked some air over his teeth when he saw what was inside.

  “Well, damn, Oscar! Look at this. You were going to be rich, huh?”

  Oscar stayed silent. The man turned his attention back to him. He looked him up and down.

  “Oscar, I gotta ask,” the man said, in full mock-congeniality now. “What are you doing out here? I mean you specifically. Not many gringos in this line of work, and the ones that are, all meth’d out, shitty beard, no teeth, Pantera T-shirt.”

  “I’m not quite sure,” Oscar said. “It was out of my control.”

  “Well, you really ought to be sure. I can’t recommend this life for guys like you. Because now you’re thinking, well, shit, this was a bad idea, here I am in a car with a gun in my face, and who is this wetback and what does he have planned for me?”

  “I wouldn’t use that word,” Oscar said.

  “I can tell al
ready that you’re a good person. What’s this here?”

  He picked up the crumpled note that Dawn had left to Oscar on the dash about the GPS, with the Xs and Os.

  “Hugs and kisses? Oh my God, man, you never had a chance!” He laughed and slapped his knee with the hand holding the gun. With his left hand he hit power on the GPS and zoomed out until he saw the route’s destination. “And so far from home!”

  The man extracted a cigarette from his breast pocket and lit it and when he turned back to Oscar, a change had come over his face. He kept his eyes on Oscar.

  Oscar looked straight out through the windshield, watching an empty Doritos bag revolve in the breeze on its way across the parking lot. Cool Ranch, he noted with a pang of absurdity that threatened to either make him burst into laughter or tears.

  “Honestly, Oscar, you seem a bit too calm. Usually at this point there’s crying, begging, things like this. Let’s be clear about something. In Juarez I used to make a man kill his own wife before killing him. Put the gun in his hand and hold it up to her head for him, and bang. Make him drown his children. And this was not a long-ago period of my life. Men like me, it’s about reputation, so these things are important.”

  Oscar figured that the other two men, who couldn’t have gone far, were now on their way back to pick them up and take them somewhere, and that was as far into the future as he dared guess at. An epistemic horizon, the term occurred to him, and he was trying desperately to keep it as near to him as possible.

  “You didn’t tell me your name,” Oscar said.

  “That’s right, I didn’t,” the man said. He took a drag on his cigarette, and Oscar felt the first nascent pangs of a yearning for nicotine.

  “Ha! Just kidding. What a fake tough guy thing to say. I wouldn’t normally tell you, but it’s interesting. My surname is Matadamas. Do you know what that means? I assume you have no Spanish. ‘Lady killer.’ You believe that shit? And yet I’ve never killed a woman. You ever build a fucking boat?”

  “I thought you just told me about killing someone’s wife.”

  “I told you that I made him do it.”

  In the dim relief cast by the sodium lights, Oscar saw old acne scars on Matadamas’s face. His face had regal features, and implied an interesting long-arc story and layered internal states. Oscar struggled to divine some kind of intent from his expression but came up with nothing.

  “How does this business work?” Oscar said, trying to sound resigned and yet fascinated by his fate, which regarding the latter, he actually was. But there was still a slight element of resistance that he didn’t want to betray: the thought that every second that he could keep this guy talking was another second that he wasn’t being murdered.

  “You seem smart,” Matadamas said. “I bet you could figure it out.”

  “My guess is that you bribe someone along the chain of commerce to bug a—I don’t know the term—shipment? And then you pick it off when it’s easiest.”

  “More threaten than bribe. And it’s almost never this easy,” Matadamas said, a grin on his face that might have been mistaken for friendly.

  “And you don’t just do it in Mexico because—”

  “Because then I’d have to get it across the border myself. So thanks for that.” He flicked his cigarette butt out the window, extracted another from his shirt pocket and lit it, bringing the lighter up in his right hand, which still held the gun.

  “Oscar, can I tell you a story? I want to tell you a story,” Matadamas said, taking a drag. He looked out into the darkness. Oscar watched his expression soften with memory.

  “When I was a boy I had a younger brother and sister. My family was poor. My mother washed other people’s laundry and my father did not exist. You see the picture? It’s common enough. We had a tin roof, dirt floor, all that shit.”

  “This was in Juarez?” Oscar said, still preternaturally eager to please, engage as an active listener, even at gunpoint.

  “No. A different place. When I was ten years old my mother took up with a man who owned a store and had a little money and so he thought he owned us, too. He would hit my mother and do other things. Our walls were so thin that I could hear everything. What he told her to do, how to bend. He would hit me, for nothing, for being in the room, for being in the world. He would hit my siblings. He was a big fat man.”

  Matadamas’s phone chirped and he stopped to peck out a response. He returned the phone into one of his chest pockets and continued.

  “But I was only ten. What can you do? I would lay awake and hear him with my mother in the other room, plugging my ears. I couldn’t do shit. In the morning, my mother would have a black eye, and there he was drinking coffee at the table.

  “Six years I lived like this. Six years of listening for the sound of his boots so that I could hide under my bed. Six years of my mother hiding her bruised face with makeup. Six years, no power. And then one day I woke up and looked in the mirror and I had grown. I was tall. I had muscles. I had hair on my balls.

  “And then another day soon after that, the fat man, whose name was Juan, decided that my mother had grown too old and he turned his eyes on my sister, who was twelve. I was behind the house trying to fix a motorbike. He didn’t know I was home. I heard the sounds coming from the window.”

  Headlights from the road swept the car and Matadamas’s face was briefly illuminated. He took a drag on the cigarette and looked Oscar in the eyes.

  “Think for a second. Imagine it. See yourself there—the dusty ground and puddle of motor oil, the heat of the sun, the screams coming from inside. Feel the years bubbling up, boiling over. Feel it? You are glowing from head to toe, like steel in a forge. Now imagine how good it is to pick up that torque wrench, go into that room, see him with his back turned, fumbling with his belt over your beautiful little sister, to already know what was going to happen next and that it was going to happen because of you, that you and only you were the one that was going to make it happen. Everything is perfect. You feel like some kind of saint. The first time you hit a human body with something metal and feel the bones move around deep inside, get all messed up? That’s something you don’t forget.”

  He curled the fingers of his left hand up into a C, as if it wasn’t the slender handle of a revolver he was holding but rather a hefty wrench.

  “I started with his knee, because I thought I was just going to stop him, get him to the ground. But he went down in a pile and turned to look at me, and I saw that he knew what I knew before I knew it.”

  Matadamas paused. Oscar understood his role here.

  “What’d you do then?” he said.

  “The fuck you think I did? I sent my sister out of the room and fucking killed him dead as shit. First I messed his legs up though. We lived outside of town so there was nobody to hear him. Then I stuffed his body into an oil drum and buried him out in the desert where he’s been ever since, under a pile of stones and four feet of dry dirt, while I enjoy my life and go about on all sorts of adventures on the surface of the earth. Last time I was home, I went and pissed on him.”

  “Why are you telling me this?” Oscar said, although he had an idea.

  “Because it’s the best thing I ever did and I like to tell it whenever I can.”

  Oscar thought then, for the first time for real, that he was probably going to die. He was Matadamas’s confessor, meant to take some of his guilt with him up to the gallows.

  Here was that absurdity again. Die? Me? What?

  Matadamas looked at the time on his phone.

  “Just maybe a few more minutes,” he said.

  Oscar started to cry. He tucked his chin into his chest.

  “What’s this now?” Matadamas said.

  “I’m sorry. My mother died recently.”

  Matadamas nodded. “Ah, yes. We’re tough guys but it’s okay to miss your mother.”

 
“Also I don’t want to die.”

  “This is another thing that you hear frequently. Well, you’ve so far given us no reason for me to make it take any longer than it needs to.”

  Matadamas flicked his second cigarette butt out the window, went in to his pack to retrieve another one, and found that it was empty.

  “I have more in my bag,” Oscar said.

  “Well, gracias there, Oscar.”

  Matadamas leaned down to open Oscar’s bag with his left hand and tugged on the zipper, but it snagged.

  Oscar wondered, if he was going to be given an opportunity to save himself, would it be soon? It would have to be soon. But how would he know?

  For some reason, a random image saved in some deep-storage synapse returned to him from many years ago, that he hadn’t remembered in a decade. In the memory he was eight. There had been some confusion between his parents; both of them, it turned out later, had thought the other was going to pick Oscar up from the chess club that he attended in the auxiliary gym of a local Catholic church every Tuesday and Thursday afternoon over that summer.

  The administrator was supposed to watch each kid until they were picked up, but when all who remained were Oscar and another boy who was famous for his odd smell, Oscar became worried that he would have to follow this teacher down empty halls to an office somewhere, where a yellow rotary phone sat for the almost exclusive use of forgotten un-picked-up children, and he would have to work his way through the various phone numbers that he had memorized for these situations. He might even have to call and explain to Mrs. Anderson from up the road, around whom he was uncomfortable, and beg her to come pick him up and drive him the nine miles home.

  This ordeal, for whatever reason, seemed just simply entirely undoable, and although he didn’t know how he would get home otherwise, he slipped away from the teacher when she had her head down in a paperback, and watched from behind a bush as the other kid’s dad pulled up in a teal station wagon and opened the door for his son, and the teacher looked up, saw that there were no more children around her, assumed she had completed her job satisfactorily, locked the door behind her, and drove off in her own car. And so Oscar returned to sit at the top of the large stone steps all by himself, waiting, as the late afternoon turned to twilight and the fireflies rose up out of the lawns to laze in the cooling air.