Tough Baby (Martin Fender Novel)

by Jesse Sublett

  I could shoot him and he’d fall off the bridge into the lake with the key still around his neck, or we could fight. So I jammed the gun back in my pants and closed in, ready to tangle. He hopped down off the railing as soon as I came within striking distance and we went to it.

  It was a weird dance, feinting blows, dodging cars that came too close, trying to avoid slipping over the railing. He was quick and kept his fists up close to his temples like a boxer, blocking my jabs. I took a couple in the face once, and instead of ducking completely out of reach I kneed him in the groin. He connected solidly on my left side but I locked my arms around him and pulled him down. I was heavier than him and we hit the concrete hard. I felt the wind go out of him. He struggled like a wild animal, clawing and kicking, but I clapped his right ear and gave him a tooth-rattling right and then backhanded him. While he was still dazed I went for the key chain. But as I was slipping it off he nodded back and smashed my hand between his head and the pavement, then got a knee between my legs and wedged me off. By the time I got up on all fours he was dancing in front of me again, drooling blood and spit. First I saw him dangling the key off the side of the bridge, then I saw the sole of his shoe flash up. It sent me reeling backward like a rug had been pulled out from under my feet.

  That blow shot a new dose of adrenaline into my system, or maybe it was the blood I tasted. I scrambled to my feet and went after him with renewed fury, plowing into him with my head low. He went limp, his arms curling around me like a dead-drunk dancing partner. I found the chain entwined in my fingers and snatched it and slipped it over my head. For good measure I kneed him in the groin before I reached for my gun. Once I had the key, he wasn’t going to get it back. I didn’t care if I had to shoot him now or not.

  But somehow he locked a calf behind one of my legs and grabbed my belt and yanked, and the next thing I knew we were on the wrong side of the rail.

  The world shifted in an instant. The night tilted and we spilled out of it. There was nothing between me and the earth but the cool mossy air thick with bat wings freight-training by as I sailed off the bridge, down to the dark waters below.

  It wasn’t like flying, it wasn’t oblivion. It was being fried in bug juice, it was one long scream that turned inside out in my throat. I hit the water like a ton of bricks. Blackness. Coldness. Down, sucked down. Swirling currents, slimy, serpentine things caressing me, slick as vomit. Gargling sounds in my head. Open your eyes, a voice said. I opened them but it did no good; no way was up. A school of carp as big as dogs scraped past me, and still I tumbled. It took an eternity and it took no time at all. When I popped back up on the surface, it seemed I’d plunged down through the cold murk forever. Then it seemed like it had been only a second, or like a bad dream that hadn’t happened at all. Had I blacked out? It didn’t matter as I choked and saw red and gurgled and thrashed and belched water. I was too panicked to be scared. I was dead already.

  I’m a poor swimmer.

  &&&

  I sank down again, fought, surfaced again. A bat swooped down, shrieked, disappeared. Two black snakes spermed out of nowhere like black lightning. Somewhere in the dark cave of my brain, Logic clawed at Panic. Panic said fuck off, not now. But arms and legs had found a rhythm in the meantime, found a stroke that held the bottom-crawling monsters of the lake just out of tentacles’ reach. Realizing that somehow, some part of me was trying to save the rest of me, I gained a few inches against Panic and summoned up a Voice. It came on strong, roaring with authority, like a high school coach, like an old-time revivalist preacher, as full of fire as a hell-bent rock and roller.

  Do it, it said. You have a choice, a chance, a free throw in the game against death. Take it. Fight.

  I fought.

  No way you want to taste the nasty water down there again, said the Voice, and it was right. I would swallow more, I knew that, but tasting it on the surface with the bat-flecked sky above was one thing, tasting it in terror with the awful vegetation tickling my feet and the liquid darkness all around was quite another. I knew if I went down again I probably wouldn’t come back up. Not for a couple of days, anyway. I sucked in as much of the mossy air as I could and managed to hold on to the surface for a while longer, still fighting, still hearing that voice. Kick that lake in the balls, boy, it said.

  Around that time I suddenly became aware of a jolting sensation in my right arm as I struggled with the water. It seemed to happen with every stroke as I arced my arms outward, and there was a muffled, gargled explosive sound, too. Then I figured it out—I was still holding on to the gun, and I was shooting the damn lake. I stuck it in the pocket of my jacket. I immediately regretted it, too. The weight banging against my hip as I wrestled the water seemed like a fatal mistake, but I wasn’t going to stop treading water again to take it out of the pocket and discard it.

  The current had carried me under the bridge and past it to the east, toward Longhorn Dam. Above me, a soupy sky with no stars. On the south bank, the Austin American-Statesman building was just barely visible, obscured by a weedy no-man’s- land of transients’ plastic garbage bag tents and flickering campfires. On the north side, I couldn’t avoid noticing the red glow of the Sheraton Crest sign, several of the letters burned out, making it read “herat rest,” which I did not want for an epitaph, but the hotel was soon upstream from me. And the lights were still on at Vick’s Vintage. There I was, in sight of the place, drowning, and the money was there, and Barbra was about to be murdered, if it wasn’t too late already. I’d come a long way down since spending all afternoon and last night, newly cleansed of guilt, in the arms of my angel. Now I knew nearly the whole dark truth, and it was sucking me the rest of the way under.

  I never saw Ed the Head after we hit the water.

  My arms were getting tired, and I was starting to swallow more and more water. I saw more snakes. The Voice began to fade, and I faded with it. I began to see less and less of the banks and skyline and soupy overhead as my will wore down. So heavy, so tired. The water didn’t taste so bad after all.

  But for a little longer I kicked and flapped my arms and gulped air, not bothering to fight the current, not thinking of Lasko or Ed the Head or Barbra or Bingo. Maybe I thought of them a little. Maybe I was thinking of Retha, how if I died now she would probably die too and that would be my fault. Maybe I was thinking of Ladonna, and how unfair it would be for me to die without getting to say the things I should have said, without putting everything just right. Maybe I was thinking of Leo, how he could get past what he’d done, if he just tried. Look at me, I thought, I’m trying to keep afloat, and it’s hard as hell. Nothing you do in life is harder than not dying. Nothing. And once you’ve got that licked, even temporarily, you can lick anything. You’ve got to try. It’s your responsibility. Because other people can’t even keep from dying, the cards are so stacked against them. They’re unlucky. We aren’t. We were born lucky.

  But it felt like my luck was running out. I started thinking I was some kind of lake creature, nocturnal, reptilian. Some kind of slimy refugee from an oil slick Antarctica. My world was nothing but gurgles and slime and crickets. My limbs were numb, my extremities evaporating, evolving. I was the last of a strange breed. Current was taking me somewhere, someplace it had in mind for me to go. I fought to keep my eyes open and my muscles working for just a little while longer and suddenly there it was: something white, glowing surreally on the surface, dancing subtly, like the gently moving wings of a hovering angel.

  Like a dream, we came together, but each time I tried to grab her, she shot out from my grasp. Some of my will returned and I managed to get one arm around her, but still she fought. Lighter than I’d imagined an angel would be, and somewhat unyielding to my embrace, she bucked and bobbed underneath me, carrying both of us along. I made no promise to be gentle as I mounted her, skin actually squeaking as I dug my nails deeper. The lake seemed to move faster underneath us during the struggle. But I held her cheek to cheek and my eyes were filled with the whiteness o
f her skin, painfully aware of the dark universe above and below.

  Alive. There we were, after a nap, lying spent, side by side in a gooey bed of weeds and black mush. I opened my eyes and reached for a cigarette, extracted the memorial Camel pack from my jacket and dug out a wet wad of paper and tobacco and flung it on her, realizing how out of it I was, seeing that she had turned into a coffin, rocking rhythmically in the weeds. Six feet long and two feet deep and a yard wide, with the name McPhail florist and greenhouse on the side, she was a Styrofoam flower shipping container. She squeaked as I let my other arm fall off her to pull something out of my hair. A star winked overhead. I tried to focus on it, but it avoided my gaze, preferring instead to hover in a blurry circular pattern. A column of bats swarmed up from the southern shore and spiraled across the lake like a column of cinders from a large fire, squeaking like rusty bedsprings.

  Slowly, it seemed like hours, I got to my knees. Everything still moved with wavelike motion, and I could still feel the pull of the river, trying to tug me farther downstream, farther east, over the dam.

  Crawling wasn’t so bad. It was better than squirming and wriggling and drowning. The bank was slippery, almost impossible, but I clawed my way up it and rolled over on a grass embankment. Solid ground. Good. The grass didn’t seem to move underneath me, and the winking star overhead gradually stopped going in circles. I felt that withered morning-after feeling as I crawled up the rise to the street. I had the ragged, sick sensation that I’d run through a party naked, and now it was time to go home.

  It took another couple of years to get to my feet, but once I did, they worked OK. The feet were encased in solid black muck and they moved across the grassy expanse behind a construction site. A route between buildings led out to a street, and it was still 1st Street, the right side of the lake, thankfully, where one foot went in front of the other, squish, squash, until gradually, the feet were once again, although somewhat tenuously, connected to a brain. The gun banged against my thigh like a hard tumor. I felt around my neck. The key chain was still there. I began to run. Down one last long block to the thrift shop, up the sidewalk, through the glass door that wasn’t there anymore. I could still smell the sweet green smell from the wet grave as I stumbled toward the back of the store.

  Vick came out of the office and looked at me in abject horror. His mouth dropped open, his belly shook. “What? Oh, my God. Where’s Eddie?”

  I gave him a look that was as chilly as I felt, as chilly as the dripping gun I stuck under his nose, and he didn’t ask any more questions, just grabbed the key out of my hands and ran back to the safe in the office. I got the money and blurred out of there.

  The sound of screeching tires ricocheted around the streets as the Ghia careened around comers. There was a yellow blur through red lights, a lake in a rearview mirror.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  The trip was both nightmarishly long and surreally short. Every dot of the dotted lines on the road was a heartbeat, but my heart was beating very fast. My mental faculties had begun checking back in one by one, like tardy students. I’d have to play it by ear, I’d have to play tough. He wouldn’t really want to kill the girl, would he? But how would he be able to deny charges by Vick, Barbra, and me that he kidnapped her and we paid ransom unless—

  Unless everybody was dead.

  I put that thought out of my mind and concentrated only on the road, the rippling ribbon of asphalt rolling under my wheels. I felt the sideways pull of the curves, the displacement of gravity as I sailed over the hills into the blackness.

  Where would they flag me down? Somewhere past the loop, I reasoned, since there were other ways to get to Ranch Road 2222. Just a few miles past it, up a steep hill, then around that harrowing curve with the breathtaking view was Bingo’s house. I chewed up the miles, and finally just ahead, at the crest of the hill, there was a shape.

  It turned out to be a Mercedes station wagon. Two figures walked out to the middle of the road and pointed flashlights at me, signaling for me to pull off the road next to them. I slowed down and eased off the shoulder into tall dry grass. The figures turned out to be Roberto and his nameless companion. Both had double-barrel shotguns as well as flashlights.

  “Toss your gun out of the car,” said Roberto.

  Out it went.

  He walked over, pausing to pick it up, leading with the shotgun. The feel of my cold, wet gun in his hand elicited only a curled lip. As he came alongside he said, “Let’s see the money.”

  I held open the Safeway bag with what was left of the $100,000 after Vick had been to Antone’s. Roberto gave Nameless the OK sign, then came around to the passenger side and got in, curling his lip again at my appearance. “You’re late,” he said. “We better get a move on.”

  “To Bingo’s?” I asked.

  When he nodded, I decided that all the witnesses who weren’t on Bingo’s team were most likely not going to see the sun come up again. And by my estimation, it was nearly six o’clock. Not long to live.

  I begged for a cigarette.

  &&&

  A car that looked like Barbra Quiero’s Mercedes was in the drive when we pulled up. The station wagon stopped just short of the drive and flashed its high beams three times. Afterwards, a figure got out of the passenger side of the Mercedes and put his black cowboy hat back on his head as the car backed up and pulled out onto the road and sped away.

  The driver had looked like Barbra Quiero. It had to be, I reasoned. Well, Bingo had lied when he said she wouldn’t be out at the house, but at least they had let her go. The figure with the black cowboy hat turned out to be Bingo. He motioned for the station wagon to park in front and for me to pull in beside it.

  We went inside. Nameless led the way, I carried the money, and Roberto tried to fuse a couple of my vertebrae with the shotgun barrels.

  Bingo wrinkled his nose, looking over the pile of paper money as Roberto stacked and counted it, sorting out the counted stacks on one side of the shotgun lying across the long heavy oak dining table. “What the hell happened to you?” he asked. I had tracked in mud over the Navaho rugs and I was still dripping. At least he didn’t have to worry about me scuffing the floor. I had no shoes.

  “Ed the Head and I went for a swim,” I said. “I didn’t have time to shower off before coming out, and I guess Ed was going to wash up on shore.”

  He gave me a blank look, then almost laughed, slapping Roberto on the back, then going around the end of the table to sit down across from me. “That’s what they call gallows humor, isn’t it, Martin?”

  “Except it’s not a gallows I have to worry about, is it?”

  He shook his head slowly, pushing a liter bottle of Absolut over to my side, motioning for me to sit down. Roberto slid a chair against my legs. “Drink up, Martin. I insist.”

  I plopped down in the chair. Squish. Roberto gave me a little elbow room and went back to counting the money. He slipped a rubber band around a stack, wrote down a figure on a notepad, and started packing it all in a briefcase. Nameless wasn’t in sight, but I could hear him moving things around in an adjacent room.

  The interior of the house was totally committed to Southwestern style, with lots of pink and white and various desert tones, desert textures, Saltillo tile, Navaho rugs, rawhide- backed chairs. The dining area was high-ceilinged and looked out on a cactus garden on one end. There was a fireplace made of local limestone at my back and a wet bar with gold fixtures and a granite backsplash in one comer. Right out of Texas Monthly, except for the Danelectro case against the wall, which would be too hip for them. On the wall just over Bingo’s head was a glass-framed watercolor of a cow skull and cactus garlanded with marigolds.

  “You seem like you’re in a hurry, Bingo. Got a plane to catch?”

  He giggled. “As a matter of fact, I do. I don’t think I can stick around for this payola thing. Such a trial would result in a lot of time indoors for Bingo, and Bingo doesn’t like to be cooped up indoors like a mushroom. You see, Vi
ctor and his disgusting little hobby complicates things. It attracts things like that girl, Retha Thomas, snooping around, then she gets herself hurt real bad,” he said, knitting his eyebrows to show his distaste. “You see? It makes it very uncomfortable for me, since, as you can guess, I have other interests besides record promotion that are not, uh, as they say, completely legal? They are a little bit illegal, and like they say, you can’t be just a little bit pregnant, and you can’t be a little bit dead. So you, you have stumbled into this thing and I really am sorry, but the minute you stumbled into it you became a little bit dead. Now we have to help you get all the way, and I was wondering, Martin, would you rather get too drunk and fall in the lake and drown, or would you rather get too drunk and drive your Karmann Ghia off this mountain out here?”

  “Let me have a drink and think about it,” I said. I took a big two-handed drink. There was no other way to do it. Roberto had tied my hands.

  “Victor,” said Bingo, rocking back in his chair, “is going to have a heart attack. You know why?”

  “Why?”

  “Because he’s a fat tub of shit with nothing to lose if he testifies against me,” he spat, slamming his fist down on the table. Roberto looked up, grinned, and went back to shuffling papers. There were big stacks of them, and he was having trouble arranging them in a large black leather carry-on bag. The briefcase was full. Roberto’s shotgun lay next to it, a few inches from Bingo’s drumming fingertips, but a long way from my tied hands. I eased my chair back a few inches. The legs made a barking sound on the tile.

  “You’re going to help him have this heart attack, aren’t you?” I said.

  He nodded. “I got a guy down there now. He’s going to tell Vick he’s going to cut his balls off. But don’t worry. Vick will have a heart attack before he gets his zipper down.”