by Peter Craig
El Salvador said, “Pretty white bitch with black hair.”
Link stood with a groan. From the top step, a few feet higher than all of them, he saluted and said, “Come back tomorrow with a picture. I’ll make a stencil.”
“You don’t need a picture, old dude.”
Link stepped back inside and closed the door. Lydia had been watching through the blinds, perched on the couch in the monochromatic light of the TV.
“Friends of the deceased?”
“Uh-huh,” she said, squinting.
Link hooked his finger into the blinds over her head. One of the kids tore the mesh on the screen door and shouted that he wouldn’t go home without a tat, and the others kicked up dust in the parking lot. The youngest seemed to control the mood: When he grew frustrated and slapped on the aluminum wall, shouting for them to come outside, the others began kicking the trailer, shaking it on its foundation.
“Knock it down, man,” shouted someone. “It’s a piece of shit.”
They began throwing handfuls of gravel, which clattered like hail across the roof and windows.
“What do they want?” asked Link.
She licked her lips and said, “I guess—me.”
Link grunted. Glancing back through the window, he said, “These guys are the real thing, Lydia. What were you doing out there?”
“I told you,” she said, shaking her head and furrowing her eyebrows. “Dad—seriously. I don’t even know what to do.”
“No shit.”
The gravel was chipping against the windows and one boy was leaping into the wall. The trailer rocked, another cloudburst of gravel fell, and one of them circled around the brush in back, knocking on windows and hollering, “Lydia. Come on out, baby. It’s your boys. Let’s party, bitch.”
Link opened the front door and the youngest kid hustled back toward him again from the far end of the trailer.
“What do you want with her?”
“We want to talk to her, mang.”
“Why?”
The boy sniffled, tried to mimic respect, but there was the fleeting expression of lustful hatred on his face, a smile with teeth bared, and Link recognized it immediately from his years on the inside—the snarl of a fresh convict with a need to assert himself. Link could feel something in the kid’s expectant posture. He understood that these four meant if not to kill his daughter, then to make a brutal statement with her—in the backseat of a car or an abandoned shack.
“We want her side of the story, dog,” said the Salvadoran. “Some shit happened back in the city yesterday—and we want to talk to her about it.”
“What are you, the citizen police? What the fuck do you care?”
The Salvadoran kid said: “Easy, old dude. We don’t need to have no trouble with you. It’s just business we got wit’ her.”
The young boy with the gravel in his hand was angrier than the rest now. He stirred up the dust around him and yelled, “Yeah, motherfucker! It’s not personal shit—it’s business!”
“Stop throwing that shit at my trailer or I’m going to stuff it down your throat.”
“Fuck you, old man,” said the youngest, raising his shirt to show the handle of his gun.
“Get off my property. Now. Or I’m calling the cops.”
“You ain’t calling the cops—because you on parole, motherfucker. And she’s on the lam.”
“Yo, biker dude!” said the white kid. “Where’s your property line, man? Here?” He tiptoed along an imaginary line, then shuffled up a cloud. “Or here? Fuck, man—come down and show me.”
Link stepped back into the trailer and shut the door, and the kid yelled, “Don’t fucking turn your back on me!”
Lydia had moved to the kitchen window in order to watch, and when Link saw her in the broken stripes of light he said to her, “Better get down lower.”
She dropped beside the kitchen cabinets just as there came a loud blast and a single gunshot piercing through the aluminum door with a ricochet. Smoke steamed off the edges of the coarse peephole into a thin streak of light, and the room smelled like burning metal.
Link moved along the narrow hall in the darkness, muttering. As he began digging through cabinet drawers over Lydia’s head, another shot fired and shattered the living room window.
Link picked up a carving knife.
Lydia said in a whisper, “I have a gun.”
“I know,” said Link. “And I’m going to get blamed for this.”
He moved across the narrow hall to the bedroom as another bullet punctured the wall and rang across the trailer.
“This is a goddamn cluster fuck,” said Link. “I’m going back to the joint. They’re going to nail me on this bullshit. I guarantee.”
He found the gun in the bathroom. He loped like an ogre back into the main room, where the boys were butting the walls and scooting the trailer faintly back on its blocks. “Straight question, Lydia. What happens to you when the cops get here?”
“Dad. I can’t. I’m so fucking dead.”
“You’re telling me what I think you are?”
“I fucked up so bad.”
He sighed and turned in the darkness, and, when he saw arms scrambling up through the shattered living room window, reaching forward to grab the arm of the couch, Link lurched forward and stabbed the carving knife straight through the anonymous hand. Someone screamed as the blade penetrated all the way into the wooden frame, so that the kid hovered for a moment before the knife came loose. “That’s it,” shouted Link. “I’m going back down. Fuck! With my luck, that’s aggravated assault right there. Return to Custody.”
Someone was still shouting and groaning below; the kids had been riled into a frenzy by the sight of blood. A sudden barrage of shots came through the windows and walls, ripping through particleboard and plucking off letters and pictures. Link crawled back to his daughter under spraying chips of glass and flying thumbtacks. She was huddled in the corner between the refrigerator and the paneling. He touched her on the head, then he rose up, cleared glass and tangled blinds from the kitchen window and pulled back the slide on the Glock. “Just forget it now,” he said. “Firearm. Aiding and abetting, harboring a fugitive—they’re going to bury me in San Quentin.”
The white kid wandered back toward the car, clutching his bleeding hand, and Link fired a shot, intentionally missing but throwing up a splash of dust beside his foot. The others ran back to cover him.
“It’s all a third strike now! Attempted murder, failure to report a crime,” said Link. “Tack that on. Might as well go all the way—might as well take out the fucking president.”
“Dad, they’re going to kill us.”
Another flurry of shots tore through the walls, and one round struck the top of the kitchen faucet, spraying water upward like a geyser. Link moved to the corner and aimed the gun. “I fucking hope somebody hits me,” he said. “I’m not dying in the pen because you fell in with the wrong crowd.” He waited as the kids backtracked to the street. “And you better be damned happy the cops are so far away from this row of shit boxes.”
“Dad, I’m really scared.”
He closed one eye and braced the gun. “Which means somebody is either going to die or bitch up.” Then he pulled the trigger—and the window of the distant Chevy exploded and rained glass onto the street.
The four kids retreated to the car. When he saw them opening doors and the trunk, he cheered and shouted, “That’s right, you chickenshit motherfuckers! That’s right! Why don’t you come on back and gimme a little beso negro, you fucking maricón.”
The one clutching his hand stepped onto the street and broke into a fit, scraping his voice and choking on his words: “Fuck you! Fucking ink-slinging dick-sucking piece of motherfucking—”
And Link yelled over the top, “Chupame la polla! You’re such cute little punks. . . .”
Out of his mind with rage, the prospect jumped up and down and threw his arms around, shouting an indecipherable run of profanity; but j
ust then, as Link believed they were giving up, he caught a glimpse of El Salvador handing out assault rifles from the trunk. They had an arsenal. They climbed back into the car and placed a jacket over the broken window. Headlights awakened. Link saw the shadows of rifle barrels. The engine rumbled like an idling boat, then shifted into gear.
“Lydia,” he said, “you need to do what I say.”
“Okay.”
“Get in the bathtub. Now.”
She scrambled across the room in darkness, just as the car spun its tires into a hard U-turn and began crunching across the gravel.
Link fired his last shot as he saw it approaching, arms and heads and barrels hanging out the windows. Then he dropped his gun and began rushing ahead, wincing, feeling as if he were moving in slow motion across the rooms. “They’re coming huge, Lydia! Make room for me.”
He rolled into the bathtub, thudding on top of her just as the walls and the windows and the air lit up with crossing fireworks. They banged their arms and hips against the cramped porcelain, wrestling together and trying to find space as a horizontal storm came through the aluminum and ripped cabinet doors off their hinges, shattered mugs and mirrors, rang off pipes, burst through louver slats and tore through the bathroom tile, raining chips across their faces. The mirror exploded into slivers; the light fixtures burst; pigment bottles splashed across the living room; and the fire alarm in the bedroom rang as it was struck. They nestled their heads down together, and Link could smell her nervous breath and chemical sweat; they twisted sideways as the bullets seemed to gather and accelerate into a sideways torrent, until at last they found an interlaced formation in the tub, a contorted embrace, Lydia’s face pressed against the inner curve of his neck, where he could feel the warm puffs of her scared breath; and he draped his heavy leg over her side like a shield as the shots kept coming, loud as helicopter blades, tearing the shower curtain like a tattered pirate’s sail, chewing up his machines and benches and photographs, whistling and skipping off the porcelain turret, until at last there was a sudden, silent pause.
He could feel the jolting contractions in his daughter’s rib cage. He held her and said, with a touch of rowdy laughter in his voice, “Just hang on, kid—they’re almost out of bullets.”
The car moved with the ascending note of reverse gear, then spun the tires in the gravel. Link felt her body tighten in his arms, and he was overcome with the single-minded desire to hold her still as he closed his eyes and savored the twisted embrace, thinking this is the same little baby as the car accelerated toward them, rising in volume; and he whispered, “This is it.” The car smashed head-on into the side of the trailer, caving in the bedroom wall and throwing everything into chaos as they tilted upward off the blocks. With the deep scraping sound of yanked screws and burning bolts the trailer tipped sideways, and Lydia began to scream as at the first downturn of a roller coaster, as the last light flickered out, and autoclaves, needles, pillows, sheets, and broken glass flew across the air, jangling together. They were thrown against the showerhead and into a corner where the curving ceiling met the tile as the trailer slid down a gradual incline, uprooting yucca and skunk weed, until it finally settled in the desert sand.
Everything was still.
They listened as the Impala sped away, fleeing a nearby car alarm that had gone off in the distance.
Lydia was panting and they sat up together in the dark.
As if in the first lull after an earthquake, Lydia whispered, “Is that gas?”
“Yeah, the water heater. We’ll shut it off. I don’t know where your buddies went—they might just be off to reload.”
The next ten minutes passed like a dream. There was the steady sound of barking dogs and the shadows of neighbors standing on the road in the distance. Link waited for a siren, but it never came. He found the gas meter and shut off the valve, then, back in the shipwreck, he gathered Lydia’s bags and some of his own clothes. When he emerged into the parking lot again, his daughter was pacing through the piles of spent shell casings, trembling, slapping her hands onto her thighs. The sky was flooded with stars. Then she sat with him in the car, and Link realized that whatever meager life he had scraped together out here, with ink and needles—it was gone. The shadow of his trailer looked like nothing more than an old accident on the side of the road.
He turned the ignition and the car just sputtered.
“Don’t do this to me.”
Lydia sat stiffly in the shotgun seat, looking at him with huge, startled eyes.
He tried again, and the engine just strained and stammered.
“Not now—you fucking piece of shit!”
He tried a third time and the scrape deepened with each repetitive drone, but the car wouldn’t start as he flooded the carburetor and slapped the steering wheel and yelled, “Perfect! That’s fucking perfect. Whatever I fucking do—I got the worst luck in the world. God hates me.”
From her quiet gasp he could tell that his daughter was crying.
“If we sit here long enough an asteroid is going to fall on us.”
He waited for the rich smell of gasoline to diminish, then he cranked the ignition again, bobbing his head to each rhythmic stutter, saying, “Come on, come on, you stupid little bitch, you little whiny piece of shit, wake up! Wake up!”
“I’m sorry, Dad. I can’t believe what’s happening.”
He punched the dashboard and the knob fell off the radio. “What the fuck do I have to do?”
“Dad,” she said, breaking into sobs. “I’m so sorry.”
“Goddamn it, I’m going to rip your fucking valves out!” He beat on the dashboard, then took a deep wheezing breath and tried again, listening to the strangled sound of the engine, until he threw his arms up and fell back in his seat.
When he turned to his daughter, he saw her face streaked with tears that looked silver in the faint light. Her mouth was bent down into a pleading expression and her eyes were full of disgrace and longing. “I’m so so-ho-ho-horry,” she cried, a chugging sound in her lungs. “I did this to you. I’m sorry.”
He reached across the car and, with his rough thumb, wiped a thin stripe of water from her cheek. After he had watched her for a long time, he said quietly, “As soon as you’re all cried out, kid, we’re going to need a push.”
Link & Lydia
part four
eleven
Just before sunrise, the Nova ran out of gas. Link and Lydia pushed it along a flat dirt road that stretched between palm groves. The radio played a hip-hop station that echoed in the emptiness, until Link yelled at her that it would wear down the battery and wake up the town.
She crawled inside and turned off the ignition as he pushed the car ahead into an Indian reservation. It was a dark and dusty settlement amid wind-battered date palms, where houses were made of cinder blocks, the fences made of severed doors, and the chain-link gates of a schoolyard were clotted with migrating trash. In the purplish light, a few roosters and dogs were already awake. Link stopped the car beside a pickup truck and took out a piece of severed garden hose from the clutter in the backseat. He told Lydia, “Put two bucks under his windshield wiper.”
He fed the hose into the pickup’s tank and began sucking on the other end.
Lydia watched this procedure for a few moments as he tried to create a vacuum in the hose, then she said, “Wow, you must have been really popular in jail.”
He flinched back from a surge of gasoline, and, as he coughed, he fed the hose into his own tank. Rising up quickly, he spat and wiped his tongue on his sleeve, looking in the darkness like a giant boy throwing a fit over a spoonful of castor oil.
“I have some gum,” said Lydia.
“Fuck,” he said, shaking his head rapidly. “You made me swallow that shit, kid—anything I eat now is going to taste like a carburetor.”
“Are you mad at me?”
“Yes.” He stooped down and spit repeatedly at the ground, big raindrops diminishing into damp puffs of air. “Some screa
ming Indian is going to come out of that house.”
“Is he going to scalp us?”
“Just get in the car.”
An hour later, in the first weak light along the mineral-colored mountains and the Salton Sea, Lydia was painting her toenails with her feet propped against the dashboard. As Link drove south on a paved two-lane highway, he still periodically wiped his tongue with a napkin. There was the distinct smell of fumes coming from his breath and beard. Outside, the wind had picked up past dawn, and the sea was a ragged stretch of white streaks and metallic blue. Plumes of salt swirled over the highway and dust obscured the horizons. Just beyond her toes, Lydia saw two fighter jets making practice maneuvers, darting off as fast as hummingbirds toward the mountains. After gesturing to them, her father told her that, just to the east, there was an aerial bombardment range.
“I used to run away like this with Mom all the time,” said Lydia.
She had never seen anyplace quite so burnt-out and desolate. Every now and then they passed the torched remains of a solitary house or a stripped-down car frame in the desert. The one town along this stretch was a stubborn encampment of trailers in the shadow of a high protective sand berm, and beyond it there didn’t seem to be much but the sparse traffic of graffiti-covered freight trains.
Lydia asked, “Where are we going anyway?”
“Down to the slabs. Guy down there owes me some money.”
They stopped at a gas station in Niland. Lydia stayed in the front seat and watched her father at a pay phone, struggling a few times to remember some phone number before finally reaching someone. When he spoke, he had an expression on his face that she hadn’t seen before, a look of shame and dread; and she tried to read his lips as he shuffled his feet and grew exasperated, saying something like, “That doesn’t help.” He must have been talking to his sponsor, because when he returned to the car he seemed to have a grim new resolve.
They headed the last few miles into the desert toward Slab City, past a strip of plywooded windows and the portico of a long-abandoned government building, across several sets of train tracks and along a wide empty patch of desert now glittering with broken glass in the emergent sunlight. The “city” turned out to be a postapocalyptic trailer park, huddled under a dust storm on some of the driest topsoil in America. They entered the settlement past a huge monument, a mound of brightly painted adobe—pink flowers and colored waterfalls and crucifixes. There was a chintzy, childlike look to the sculpture, as if it were the world’s biggest grade school art project. A giant heart in the center read, “Say Jesus I’m a Sinner, Please come upon my body and into my heart.”