“I am a stone, but not a stone. Don’t you know anything?”
David tried to look slow, stupid. It came all too naturally. “About what?”
“About alchemy, stupid! Base metal into gold. Dad was right about you.”
Alchemy? Dad studied that old junk for a hobby, when other dads were studying parenting. “What did he say?”
“He said you were lead.”
David sprang. His legs betrayed him instantly; he knew it even as he sprawled out on the risers, his hands tangling with the boy’s bony ankles, as he leapt away like a kite.
“He said you were the necessary accident.” The boy kicked teasingly at David’s head, the toe of his moldy Keds sneaker parting his hair. “The raw ore that he had to refine for the Great Work.”
David wheezed, his chest a rat-infested accordion. “What’s the Great Work?”
The boy’s face smacked into his, cold, stale breath like a compost heap. “IT’S ME!”
He easily eluded David’s blind hands as he ran to the top of the stairs and, again, stopped.
This had gone too far. He had to get out and call the police from a neighbor’s; maybe the trigger-happy lowrider down the street would let him use his phone.
Why didn’t he have a cellular phone? Everyone else in the world did, but everyone else in the world wasn’t phobic about cancer like David. How many premalignant freckles have you had frozen off in the last year? He wasn’t phobic, just cautious. The studies waffled back and forth about the phones and brain cancer, and he had to be careful, cancer ran in his family—
“Did you ever see it?”
David blinked and crawled to his feet on the landing. The boy dangled off the railing, just in reach. “See what?”
“The cancer, dummy. The cancer that killed your mom. They cut it out of her, but it metastasized, and got her anyway. He used to show it to his class, so they wouldn’t smoke.”
David backed away, one step too many off the landing and he stumbled. He felt like throwing up. “My mom never smoked. She had ovarian cancer.”
“I know. He said you killed her. You know, when you grew up in there? He said that’s why you were spoiled. That’s why he made me.”
“Get out of my house!”
The boy chuckled and rubbed his hands together, skin sloughing off and floating on the dank, dead air. “You’re pretty old, too, huh? Dad said your mom’s family gets cancer a lot, so you probably have it by now, huh?”
David lost the power to speak. Finally, rage made him fast enough to catch the boy.
But not strong enough to hold him. The arm in his grasp seemed to deflate and slip free like a wet silk stocking. “Dad said you have too much of your mom in you.”
He squirted up the stairs and down the hall, but David was right behind him, and there was nowhere to lose him. This was his goddamned childhood home! The hall was narrower than he remembered, lined with bookshelves jammed and spilling out notebooks onto the floor. The boy danced through it, but David kicked up a storm of books and papers in his wake, still gaining on the little bastard, when his left foot snagged a tripwire and the shelves caved in on him.
He dove, hands over his head, through a downpour of books and junk. Something like a bowling ball smashed into his lower back, and it was raining jelly jars filled with pennies and marbles and jacks. He scrambled to his feet, gasping, and through tears of pain, he saw the boy just a few yards away, doubled over, laughing with his lips clamped shut.
David threw an encyclopedia, but the boy ducked it and shut a door to block David’s next shot with a shoeshine kit. David heard bolts slamming home on the other side.
David was locked out of his own room. He studied the door, trembling when he didn’t find the growth marks his mother had made with Magic Marker on the frame. The marks had been painted over. On the left side of the door, there were new growth marks in Dad’s writing. The last one, at age eleven, was smeared and faded. Above it, he wrote, MY BOY.
“You open this goddamned door!” David threw his shoulder into it.
Wood splintered and the boy gave a girlish shriek. “You break it, you buy it!”
David pounded the door like a speed-bag. “This is my room! You better let me in…”
“Or what? You left it, now it’s mine! Finders keepers, douchebag!” The boy’s whinnying laugh rose up and up into a squeal of ecstasy. He’d been waiting to do this, bred for it. Whatever he was, Dad had raised him to torment David, to hurt him, to—
What would he do next? David had him cornered. He could go and get someone, but the freak would leave, or burn the house down…
“Alright,” he shouted, stomping down the hall, “screw you, you little bastard. I’m gonna call the cops and the social workers, and you can go live in an orphanage, for all I care.”
Backtracking silently to the bedroom door, he practically hugged himself for his cleverness, but the boy was silent.
He heard a thump directly above his head, a scrape of something heavy being dragged, in the attic. So the little shit wanted to play hide and seek. David knew the house, too.
He went to the linen closet and got out the metal stepladder, quietly set it up beneath the trapdoor in the hall. He took a mop handle and, more or less balanced atop the ladder, jabbed it at the door. It flopped back and David cowered, but nothing dropped on him.
He planted his hands on the frame and jumped off the top rung just as the trapdoor slammed back down.
It cracked him squarely on the crown of his skull and he fell, hands still gripping the doorframe when the attic door smashed them.
For a moment, he hung there by his mangled fingers, his legs kicking the stepladder over, his screams ripping his larynx so blood sprayed from his lips.
Pure galvanic spasms launched David up and into the attic, where he flopped on the creaking floor. He sobbed and hugged his hands, frantic dying birds, against his chest. His vision was trashed. One eye saw only TV snow, lava flows and Jacuzzi bubbles. The boy—
“Gee, David, you look pretty bad.”
David looked up. The boy knelt on top of an antique mahogany wardrobe with a rusty red Craftsman toolbox held high over his head. David threw up his arms and rolled, but he was trapped between mildewed cardboard boxes of Dad’s junk. His hands rained blood in his eyes, so at least he didn’t see it coming.
Awake in a box, upright coffin, with no room to sit.
His hands throbbed like extra hearts. Most of his fingers were broken. His head felt like it had rocks and nails in it. His whole face was numb, and his tongue couldn’t find his teeth, but he could see again.
He knew the musty smell of Dad’s old Army locker. He used to hide in here and ogle the naked natives in National Geographic when Mom thought he was outside playing with friends, when he was the boy’s age.
Coldly, reasonably, he still very much wanted to kill the boy. His pains were nothing compared to the betrayal in flesh, the idea of this parasite slipping into the emptiness his father left in him, the place where most fathers, he imagined, build a man in their sons.
There was a slot cut out of the door, right at the height of his mouth. He slouched and peered out, winced away from bright white light.
“You hurt Dad a lot when you left, David. He blamed himself for the way you were. He doubted himself, David. That was his nigredo. Do you know what that means? It totally sucked, but he had to go through that crud to be reborn and commit to the Great Work.”
David tried to speak, but his head roared disapproval. He still couldn’t see the boy, but the flashlight beam bobbed just in front of the locker.
Rustling and scraping, the boy built a tower of junk at the foot of the locker, climbed it and peeked at David. “His soul was reborn, and he learned the Secrets, like the Philosopher’s Stone. But you’re so dumb…”
“I know what it is,” David mumbled. “Dad made gold, and got to live forever?” His own voice struck him funny, until he laughed. The words sounded mushy, and hot red spit dribbled
down his chin.
“Not even half-right, David,” the boy sneered, and through all his pains, David got a chill. The gestures, the tone in which the boy lectured him, were vintage Warren Mueller. He looked closer, and his chill became frostbite. “Alchemists used code words—the Stone is power to change things. Dead matter into life. Base metal into gold.”
In the light, the boy looked like David when he was young, but sharper, traits exaggerated, as if in caricature. He thought of old family photos of his own father as a boy, and saw the resemblance, but it was still too skewed.
And now he saw injuries, scrapes, cuts, bruises and even bent limbs, crudely bandaged or ignored, for they healed badly, the flesh remolded over the injuries like clay. The features, up close, had a pathetic crudity to them, as if they were shaped by a loving, but unskilled, god.
“What do you want?”
“He could have made gold or lived forever if he wanted to, but instead, Dad made me. He wanted a real boy, to try again, but he had to use some of you to make me real.”
“What did he use? I haven’t been here! I never knew—”
“You never asked! You never cared! He loved you, but you wouldn’t listen, so he made me out of what you left behind.”
The boy opened his hand and showed him eleven tiny green-black stubs. “Your baby teeth,” the boy whispered.
Almost peevish, David moaned, “Those were mine. He had no right.”
“He made me with these, so I grew like a normal boy, but they’re no good, anymore, and without him, I can’t grow up. But then you came…”
“What?”
The boy smiled now, and David recoiled from the stench. In his gray gums, six big white permanent teeth, like a horse’s in that tiny, underslung jaw. David’s teeth.
David probed with his tongue, dumbly thrilling to the fire drill agony of holes where his front and canine teeth had been.
The boy held up pliers and an ether rag. “I need the rest of them. You had your chance, you had everything, and you blew it. I only want what’s fair…”
David screamed and threw himself backwards. The locker rocked a few inches and hit a ceiling beam. David stampeded back and forth until the locker tipped over on the tower of junk and pinned the boy to the floor.
Through the slot, they lay nose to nose. The boy squawked and coughed up gouts of something like petroleum jelly. The pliers wiggled against his shoulder. Ether fumes softened the rough edges, so David felt only what he wanted to as he bit into the boy’s face with his remaining teeth. “You want these teeth? Have ‘em, kid, fucking have ‘em!”
David wept and broke the rest of his fingers without denting the locker, thinking about the empty urn, and Mom’s cancerous private parts in a jar.
Dad never threw anything away.
David rolled with the locker as something flipped it over and unbolted it.
Screaming, “You’re not my mother! You’re not my mom!” he tried to jump out, but she caught him and showed him that, as usual, he was only half right.
The sun beat down just as hard on both sides of the San Ysidro crossing, but something in the dirty sky ate the warm yellow light before it fell on Tijuana. Arid, ionized Santa Ana winds held the coastal breezes at bay and basted the traffic in dust, smog and sweat. In the No. 9 Lane of the Primary Inspection Zone of the San Ysidro Port Of Entry, US Customs Inspector Burt Gillis snorted a line and offered a prayer, to God and science and any Orishas who might be listening, to bless and protect him from the Santero.
For those waiting to cross into the United States, it was going to be a very long Memorial Day. For Gillis, it felt as if it would last the rest of his life. He had not slept in nearly forty-eight hours, but did not want the day to end, because he knew what the darkness would bring. The Great Night was coming.
From the iron-fenced compound of the primary inspection pits, Gillis watched the tar-paper and plywood shanties of Colonia Libertad, the most godforsaken slum district in Tijuana, pressing on the border like an invading refugee army in the last days of a siege. Whenever his attention wasn’t demanded elsewhere, he stared at it until his eyes wanted to cry blood, combing the brown shadows for some sign of the one who would be crossing tonight, the one he had to stop.
Pico told him, last night.
They sent Gillis home to sleep for a few hours before the insane holiday shift, but he hung around the US short-term lots to meet Pico. At four AM, the lot was still saturated in rusty iodine light and packed with cars. Drunken high school kids fucked or slept in the back seats, squirming pink worms behind fogged-up glass. No one saw them together.
Pico was Javier’s man on the other side. He received the cars Gillis let through, and distributed to the retailers. Gillis had known him for two years, a lifetime in such work. He had never seen Pico so wired as he was now.
Gillis zipped up the Padres windbreaker covering his uniform and tugged down his hat. “What happened to Javier? If anything changes, I want to hear it from him.”
“It is all new, Señor Migra.” Pico chuckled and gagged as he dragged on his cigarette. Pico liked his smokes shermed—dipped in liquid cocaine when times were good, in dry cleaning chemicals when they weren’t. A disgusting habit, it was also a status symbol: he started out with los cementeros—a glue-sniffing gang— so to him, it was swanky.
It was all the worse to watch because Pico had no lower jaw. Someone smashed it with a brick when he was nine. The meatball doctors at the clinic in Libertad just picked the shards out and sewed him up, so the lower half of his face was a slack pouch of scars.
Gillis fanned away Pico’s smoke cloud and looked in vain for the pupils in his eyes and wondered how bad things had to get for him to smoke formaldehyde.
“Señor Javier is no seeing you anymore, but you can see him.” Pico flashed a Polaroid. A badly overexposed shot of plaster walls festooned with red party decorations. In the center stood a battered steel cauldron brimming with a flyblown stew, but Gillis knew what it was in the same instant he realized the red stuff was Javier.
“Fuck!” he barked, looking around with his hand on his sidearm. “Who did it?” he demanded, daring Pico to say the name aloud.
Pico hit his smoke so hard it squeaked and touched the medallions on his chest. “He rules now, and the ground is red.”
Gillis felt hammers passing through his heart valves, but more than half of it was relief. They would cut up their own and feed them to the nganga, but they’d never dare hit a white man on his own side. He could just walk away. “He’s shutting us down?”
Pico coughed so hard meat from his throat hit Gillis’ gold-tinted sunglasses. “Nothing change for you. He ees taking over.”
“What the fuck? He’s a vigilante! He’s massacring the cartels…” It was insane, but it was Mexico. “So he’s just another pusher, so what? He doesn’t cross la linea.”
“Oh no, my main man. He bring something very new, very big. He leading his people to freedom. The Great Night coming, and the sun that rise after, will be a New Sun.”
“What the fuck does he expect me to do?”
“What you always do, amigo. Take what we giving you.” Pico slipped a bulging bindle to Gillis, brushed the back of the border guard’s neck with his other hand.
Something like sand tickled the hairs of his back as it sprinkled down his spine. Gillis snapped the bindle out of the fixer’s hand and almost decked him. He scratched the tickling itch on his neck away and made damned sure Pico didn’t try to put a Flower Of Darkness on him.
Gillis looked around. The glass and steel corridor of the bridge that crossed over the inspection pit was empty of all but a few drunk white kids going to get cavity-searched. Girls smuggled stray puppies and cats, filthy piñatas stuffed with parasites and bacteria; boys tried to sneak ounces of grass or coke, most of which weren’t even real. When he caught them, he had a good eye for people. He could see who was a smuggler and who just made a mistake. He gave them a second chance. Most wept with gratitude when he
lifted the contraband off them and waved them through.
Nobody on his side saw, but they saw. And that was the beginning of the deal.
That was what this was about—a new deal. But he didn’t want to live on the same planet as the Santero, let alone work for him, if half the stories were true. Not a year ago, stories like that used to make him laugh at the stupid shit Mexicans believed.
He fingered a dab of coke into each nostril as Pico laughed and coughed some more. Gillis flipped him off and started to walk away when his laughter turned to gargling screams.
Pico’s sock-puppet mouth vomited out an endless scarf of glossy black smoke like powdered obsidian that wafted around above him like a cloud of ebony moths, like a huge carrion bird.
A big pimply ass pressed against the rear window of the Ford Escort that Pico collapsed on, choking and retching out boiling blood. It reeked of the bacon-wrapped dog-sausages they sold on Avenida Revolución.
The smoke congealed into a wall between Gillis and the border, shining with an inner light that showed Gillis his reflection. The smoking mirror rippled and revealed another face he’d never seen before, and could never describe. Those eyes, staring out of a mask of blood, followed him as he backed up, they saw him… marked him—
Pico shriveled, wrung out like a rag, and Gillis turned and walked away. Nobody saw anything.
Faced with the prospect of going home to pack his things and run, Gillis just felt tired, and a craven repulsion at his own thought of deserting the border. If he turned and ran, the border would follow, and the moment he turned around, there, one step behind him would be Mexico, staring him down with those eyes—
Gillis’ father hated Mexico like cancer, a hate so pure it almost hid his fear. All Gillis ever learned about it was that his father went fishing down in at San Felipe once and ended up pulling a month in a Tijuana jail. He grew up cheek by jowl with Mexico, and had seen all the invisible shades of the border: the pollos, wetbacks, running like roaches to work and breed in los Yunaites Estaites; the coyotes and drug runners, predatory scumbags like Javier and Pico; macho monsters in uniform with licenses to steal, like the judiciales and the federales who fed the leviathan of ritualized graft below the border. La mordida—the bite—ruled all, and Gillis hated their cops most of all, when he first started. He’d really thought he was going to be better than that.
Silent Weapons for Quiet Wars Page 2