by Johnny Shaw
Nobody was taking care of him. He was taking care of himself. Nobody was telling him what to do. He was making his own decisions. And most importantly he had something to look forward to in his future, erasing the bleakness that every man faces at the end of his life. Death wasn’t nearly as welcome a guest as it had been a few weeks back. It was good to be alive, no matter how short-lived life might be.
Frank reached out and touched the cave wall. He let the spindly legs of hundreds of spiders tickle the back of his hand.
FORTY-ONE
“We are lost and we are only getting more loster,” Ramón said. He glanced at the sun and wiped the sweat from his face, wishing he was a lot stoneder.
Mercedes violently shook her head. “We are Native Americans. Proud Chemehuevi. We cannot get lost. Our blood is never lost. Our souls are never lost. We are connected to the land. One with it. We are the land with feet.”
She held her arms to the side, her face to the sun. “Guide us, Mother Sun. We’re your wandering children. Show us the way.”
Bernardo leaned in to Ramón and asked, “Did you give her more of the weed?”
Ramón nodded. “A little bit. It calms her down.”
“And crazies her up. Do we have enough for three?”
“I have one pound of the Purple Peace Pipe and a half pound of the Oliver Stoned.”
“That will have to do,” Bernard said gravely. “If she gets paranoid, that is on you.”
Mercedes waved her arms at the rocky hills that surrounded them. They had hiked up the mountain into the deep grooves of the bajada. Without a horizon, all sense of direction was gone. “If our Mother Sun cannot tell us the way, then our white man will. He knows this land. The foot’s on the other foot. The white man will guide the Indians.”
Cooker chucked his pack to the ground and sat on top of it. “Sorry to shit in your teepee, Fatahontas, but I got no idea where we’re at. I might’ve at one point, but now I can barely tell which way is up. No point in walking in circles. Sun’s low, too. It gets dark in this maze, we’re likely to walk off a cliff. The big, dumb brave is right. We’re motherfucking loster than shit.”
“Get up!” Mercedes yelled, taking a few steps closer.
He shook his head, squinting at the sun and pointing. “Once that sun is gone, it’s going to be Pin the Tail on the Asshole, all blindfolded and spun around. Ain’t going to see nowhere from nothing. Just because I’ve been doing what you say don’t mean everything you say ain’t stupid.”
Bernardo stepped between them. “Worky has a point. We make camp here.”
An hour later, the four of them sat in the dark. A debate had erupted and quickly ended about starting a campfire. Ramón was disappointed. He had brought the fixin’s for s’mores and had his heart set on them. Their loss. More for him later. They were left with the country dark, their aching shoulders, and each other.
“How does this end for me?” Cooker asked.
Bernardo answered. “It ends good. You return home. Your addictions are gone and you are a better man.”
“Addictions? I ain’t addicted to shit. I cooked but never took. Except to test.”
“It is a disease. The first step is to admit that you have a problem.” Bernardo took a huge drag on a massive spliff and passed it to Ramón, who nodded in agreement.
“It is all about boundaries and self-control. Just say no,” Ramón said. He inhaled deeply on the joint.
“Papa Frank is trying to help. You will thank him when you see that he has saved you.”
“Saved me? Motherfucker kidnapped me. I’ve been telling you, you fucking morons. Your Papa Frank is keeping me on ice, because I know things he don’t want no one to know. Shit, he obviously don’t want you to know.”
“I know things,” Ramón said defensively.
“I know where Frank is going—you know that—but I also know why he’s going there.”
Mercedes stood up, dusted the dirt from her backside, and stood over Cooker with her hands on her hips. “He was taken by two men. Dragged against his will into these mountains.”
“Don’t think so, honey,” Cooker said, making a bad decision by following with a smirk. When Mercedes kicked him in the leg, he acknowledged to himself that that one was on him.
“We have no secrets. My father tells me everything,” Mercedes said.
“Sorry, lady, but if he didn’t tell you about the gold, then he didn’t tell you shit.”
Mercedes opened her mouth to speak, but Bernardo got in before her. “What gold?”
“They got a map, the three of them. From the look of it, they killed some dude—cut his head off—to get it. That’s what greed does to a person. They find that gold, they ain’t sharing. Your Papa Frank, he’s like their leader. Kidnapped me. Lied to you. He’s got gold fever.”
“My father does not lie to me,” Mercedes said defiantly.
“How much gold?” Bernardo asked, ignoring his mother.
“Maybe why they dove in the reservoir,” Ramón added.
Bernardo shook his head. “Obviously. That is where treasure maps are. There was probably a pirate ship or something down there. How much gold is there, Worky?”
“I don’t know, but it has to be a lot to hike straight into a fucking artillery range, yeah?”
Mercedes sat back down. “Doesn’t change a thing. We’re finding your grandfather and bringing him home. Gold, silver, diamonds, what does it matter? He is an old man. A sick man. And he needs me, his daughter.”
Nobody said anything else. But that didn’t mean they weren’t thinking. Thinking about gold.
FORTY-TWO
The sign read WELCOME TO BAGHDADVILLE.
“What now?” Harry said.
The three tired men and their burros stood in front of the makeshift sign. The rocky trail had opened up into a paved road. The craggy hills to a high plain. And in the center of the plain, past the sign, there was a small village of about twenty buildings. A wood and plaster village. Deep-black asphalt roads led into the town from four directions.
There was no movement or activity. No clouds of dust or smoke. Not even a bird in the sky. They listened for engines or voices, but it was impossible to hear anything over the mortar barrage in the near hills.
“We shouldn’t risk it. Let’s go around,” Frank said.
“I don’t see no one, nothing,” Harry said.
“It’s a town. Whyever it’s out here, it’s for people. Might not be anyone this moment, but they’ll show up eventually.”
Harry said, “We go around, it’ll take a day, maybe two. And we still got to cross those roads. I don’t know if you noticed, but none of us is any kind of shape. The mine is over that rise.”
“We get seen, we get caught, it’s over. We rush it, we screw ourselves.”
“We go through the town,” Ricky stated with authority.
They both turned, surprised. Ricky had been quiet since they had found him. “Don’t mean to vote against you, Frank. But look at the terrain. Going around, we’ll be just as out in the open. At least in there, there’s places to hide. And Harry is right. We’re beat-up. Maybe a place to fill our water. We’re running super low. It’s worth chancing it.”
Frank looked Ricky up and down. He was a mess. His whole body was a giant scab, some of the black from the explosion still embedded in his skin, and the burned bits were pink and yellow. Harry had told Frank that he was pretty sure the kid had some broken ribs, too.
Frank nodded and walked past the sign. The three men headed down the road into a town that shouldn’t be there.
None of the men had been to the Middle East. Hell, none of them had been to the Midwest. It didn’t matter. Walking into the town, they were convinced that they were getting an accurate taste of a Middle Eastern village. The attention to detail was impressive. All of the buildings had Arabic signs and advertisements in the windows. There were benches and chairs in front of a few places. The buildings looked authentic, like on CNN footage. But with
out people or animals, Baghdadville had that spooky ghost-town vibe of a place that had been evacuated quickly.
Ricky cautiously walked into one of the buildings, expecting to find wood frames and dirt floors like a movie set, but it was a regular room. Fully furnished with a worn table and old chairs and Arab pop music posters on the wall. Dishes on the table. A few oil drums felt out of place, but Ricky figured they had tons of oil over in Arabia, maybe so much the Arabs kept some in their homes. At closer inspection, the chairs weren’t old, but made to look that way. He thought it was called distressing. Like the fake bricks on the wall of an Italian restaurant or the rocks at Disneyland.
It was the cleanliness that gave it away. It was all too new. It usually only took the desert a matter of weeks to age a thing. The sun, the wind, the sand, all merciless. The only age these buildings showed was a new kind of old. Like seeing the seams of the latex on an actor’s old-age makeup.
“Let’s take a look around. Find some water. Anything else useful,” Harry said.
“Don’t push it. Get in, get out,” Frank said.
“Ain’t nobody around, Frank,” Harry said. “And I’d rather get caught than die from thirst.”
Ricky jumped in. “Place ain’t big. Got to be water somewhere.”
They led the burros through a wide door into one of the buildings and tied them up. The burros seemed pleased with the shade. As a reward, Ricky gave each of them a PayDay candy bar, which they downed without chewing.
The three men walked down the freshly paved street, each carrying as many empty water bottles as they could. Their eyes darted around for any sign of movement. They had to rely on their eyes, as the artillery fire drowned out most sound.
Inside the next building they found a big open space with a kitchen. The faucet yielded no water and the stoves no heat. It was like an Iraqi model home.
Next to the building was an outhouse that had no smell. Harry peered down the hole and took a big whiff. “Sucker’s fresh. You fellas look around. I’m going to christen this barge.”
“Grab the toilet paper when you’re done,” Frank said. “Miss July chafed my backside.”
Harry smiled. “Two rolls. Now you glad we came to town?”
“I’ll be glad when we’re at the mine. Until then I’m sticking with ornery.” Frank gave Harry a wink to tell him there were no hard feelings. “Enjoy your shit.”
After a failed door-to-door campaign to find water, Ricky and Frank were ready to give up. Each interior was no different from the one that preceded it. The same faux-weathered furniture and nonfunctional fixtures.
“Got no reason to believe that if we keep looking we’re going to find anything different,” Frank said.
At that moment, the artillery fire in the distance stopped. They both jumped. They had become so accustomed to it that the absence was jarring. But it wasn’t replaced by silence. It was replaced by what sounded like giant pots and pans clanking together. Ricky and Frank turned toward the sound.
They watched with horror as an M1 Abrams tank rolled through the intersection thirty yards in front of them. A perfect parade side view of a vehicle they had only seen in movies. It was beautifully frightening. As quickly as it had appeared, it was gone.
Frank and Ricky ran as fast as their battered bodies would take them.
Harry sat on the Army-issue toilet seat and wiped his ass with the Army-issue toilet paper. He was going to have to break it to Frank softly that the Army TP wasn’t any less abrasive than the magazine. Maybe the government thought a sore ass made a meaner soldier.
His thoughts were interrupted by gunfire. Automatic weapon fire, to be precise. It was so loud, so close, that it sounded to Harry like it was inside the outhouse with him.
Being in the single-most defenseless position, Harry did the only thing he could think to do. Panic. Losing all control of logic and filled with small-animal terror, he pulled up his pants and pushed at the outhouse door. It didn’t budge. He threw his body at the door, coming close to dislocating his shoulder.
He screamed through tears. He was trapped. The gunfire drowned out his wailing. It sounded like a war outside. He decided to hide in the outhouse rather than attempt an escape. Only one hiding place in an outhouse. He looked down into the deep hole where he had just deposited a considerable load.
“Why do I always end up covered in shit?”
The door swung in quickly, hitting him in the back and almost knocking him into the hole. He caught himself. He threw his hands over his head and turned. “Don’t shoot. Don’t shoot.”
“Time to go,” Frank said to Harry, grabbing him by the shirt and pulling him out of the outhouse. Ricky stood over Frank’s shoulder.
“They’re shooting” was all Harry could get out.
“Fake bullets. War games. Army’s on the other side of town playing soldier. We can’t get shot, but we can get caught. Got to get back to the burros. Hide and pray.”
Harry nodded stupidly, still in a daze. He reached back to the outhouse and grabbed the two toilet-paper rolls. He wanted to salvage whatever pornography he still had. He stopped and swung the door open and closed. “I get it. It opens in.”
FORTY-THREE
They made it back to the room with the burros without incident. That was about the best news they could report.
Outside, the gunfire continued. The mortar fire on the mountain started again to the east. And the metal grind of tanks rolled through the streets. They knew they were the sounds of pretend war, but they weren’t any less enveloping and frightening than the real thing. Especially for civilians in a piss-poor hiding place.
They didn’t have a choice. Waiting was their only option. If Frank, Harry, and Ricky tried to leave Baghdadville, they would be seen on the open plain. They had to make do with where they were and what they had. Suck or no suck.
The stairs leading to the second floor were wide enough for the burros. The men tugged on the reins to get the beasts to climb the steps, but the animals would take a step, think better of it, and back up, forcing the process to start over. It was as if God was directing an amateurish and perverse interpretive dance through the burro.
There was so much noise it was impossible to gauge its direction. There was no close or far away. Only loud and louder. The mortar on the mountain was the farthest but the loudest. It was like drowning in sound. Underwater without a sense of up or down.
Harry sat on the fifth step of the stairs pulling at the reins of the immovable burro. The animal’s neck stretched, but its feet remained rooted to the floor.
“I’m going to kill you. I’m going to chop you into little donkey pieces. Climb these stairs.”
“Maybe we should leave them down here,” Ricky said.
Ricky had tried to help by pushing the burro’s ass. But the first time the burro threatened to kick, he backed off. The pain in his ribs reminded him how stupid it was to stand behind a burro.
“We don’t get them upstairs, might as well stay down here, too. They find the burros, won’t take another minute, they’ll find us,” Frank said.
“They got to want to go,” Ricky said, reaching into the burro’s pack. He pulled out a handful of candy bars.
Ricky opened up a PayDay and held it in front of the burro. It tried to take a bite, but he pulled it away, walking backward up the stairs. The burro didn’t move for a few seconds, as if it knew it was being tricked. But its desire for candy outweighed any insight a burro was capable of, and soon both burros were standing on the landing of the second floor happily eating their peanutty reward.
With the burros as hidden as they were going to get, the best Harry, Frank, and Ricky could do was sit on the floor with their backs to the wall. Adrenaline dip, the heat, or plain boredom, it could have been all three, but within fifteen minutes the three men were sound asleep.
While outside, the war raged on.
Ricky woke to the sound of voices. He froze. How long had he been asleep?
He turned. Frank and
Harry slept soundly.
The voices were close, but how close?
Frank let out a sharp snort that sounded like the first tug on the cord of a chainsaw. Ricky put his hand over Frank’s mouth. Frank’s eyes opened in brief confusion. When he locked eyes with Ricky, he calmed. Frank woke up Harry in a similar fashion.
The gunfire had died down, though occasional bursts could still be heard. The voices grew from murmurs to words. Getting closer. But not as close as Ricky had first thought. Outside the building. Not inside. Not yet. Two voices, but no way to know how many people.
Ricky closed his eyes, held his breath, and listened.
“Quit dragging your ass, Larios. Why you always last? Is it a Mexican thing?”
“I’ll show you a Mexican thing, pendejo.”
“I’ll pass on that.”
“Let’s find a place, dig in. I’m tired of all this walking.”
“That what you going to say to Hajji? Don’t shoot me, bro. My feets hurt.”
“Fuck you, Gung Ho. You really think we going to learn something today going to keep us alive over there? If we ain’t learned it yet, we ain’t gonna.”
“Ten minutes. But only if you got a cig for me.”
“Done. I know how much you brothers love menthols, but alls I got is Marlboro Reds. Man smokes.”
“I got your man smoke.”
Laughter followed. The two talkers and two other men. Four men total.
Upstairs, the three men and two burros listened to the boots on the concrete floor below. The men entering the building.
Ricky’s stomach turned pukey. His skin quivered. Curious, one of the burros took a step toward the stairs. Ricky rose and tiptoed to the burro. He pulled a candy bar out of his pocket and fed it to the animal. The other burro took a step forward. He neighed, but it was drowned out by a fortunate volley of gunfire. Ricky took a deep inhale and quickly found another candy bar.
The voices continued below.
“You going to see your lady before we ship out?”
“Coming out Wednesday. You?”