The Hellion

by S. A. Hunt

  “I’m not going to do it that way,” she said decisively. “No more humans. Monsters only. I made that decision a long time ago.” She leaned in to kiss him on the forehead, but he leaned away. A beat passed as she stared at the side of his head. He glanced at her, distrust on his face. Seems like the more he learns about me, the less he likes me, she thought, her heart slowly sinking like quicksand.

  To her surprise, Annie Martine stood in the hallway, only visible by the veneer of light on her spectral skin as if she’d been stenciled onto reality. As usual, neither Gendreau nor the two women noticed the ghost.

  “They need your help, baby,” her dead mother said with her hollow telephone voice. “You can’t leave them here to face this man all alone, ethics be damned.”

  Dammit. Robin sighed.

  “All right,” she said, addressing the Valenzuelas, “you’re coming with us up north.”

  Carly sat up. “What?”

  “I’m assuming there’s a battered-women shelter in Michigan near your granddad’s secret volcano lair, isn’t there, G?”

  “Yeah, sure.” The magician leaned against the counter, examining his impeccable nails. “I know of a couple. Heard about them volunteering at the soup kitchens. And Francis does not live in a volcano, thank you. There are no volcanoes in Michigan. Not anymore, anyway.”

  “You? Volunteering at a soup kitchen?”

  “Yeah? What’s wrong with that? Don’t think I’m the kind of person that does things like that?”

  Everybody gave him a dry stare, even the Valenzuelas.

  “Okay, yeah, I don’t exactly stand behind the line and ladle it out, but I donate on a regular basis and do a little driving … and I’ve been known to show off a little in the kitchen from time to time. You don’t grow up in Frank Gendreau’s house without learning a thing or two about Creole cooking.” His smile faded. “How come we’re taking them to Michigan? Why not Houston?”

  “Houston isn’t far enough.” Robin studied Marina’s and Carly’s faces. “How you feel about that? I’m sure there’s good schools there you can finish out high school in. You’re a pretty kid; it should be easy to make new friends.”

  Something nonverbal passed between the Valenzuelas in a glance.

  “I don’t know,” said Marina. “We have a life here, you know? How can we just leave it behind?”

  “This life?” As she said it, Robin rubbed her neck. “I’ll take care of you two,” she said, with perhaps a little more exasperation than she meant. “I … I promise. Just try not to cut open any more of my windows, okay?”

  This harried woman must not have heard anything like that in a very long time, because Marina’s eyes instantly filled up with tears of relief.

  Track 10

  After he’d wallowed on the front lawn for a while, Santiago gave up on the water and went into the house to look for milk. Someone—Carly?—had said something about milk, and he vaguely remembered hearing about a Klan shindig where one of the boys’ father-in-law got pepper-sprayed by a cop. According to what they said, the proteins in milk break down the oils in the spray. Oleoresin capsicum was the word he’d used. He wasn’t a big fan of having something with the word “cum” in it on his face.

  He didn’t find any milk, but a cup of expired yogurt lurked in the crisper. He dipped it out with his hands and smeared it all over his face, and the cold Yoplait felt so good, he almost pissed his pants.

  After he washed off the yogurt and had a quick beer, Santiago got on La Reina and canvassed the entire neighborhood, and then cruised down the highway going out of town at a stately pace, watching for his wife and daughter walking along the roadside. Traffic backed up behind him, honking irritably. He threw them the finger until it turned into a chore and he ignored them. “Go the fuck around!” he bellowed into the night wind.

  After riding all over town and not finding a damn thing, he came home and crashed on the couch.

  When he woke up early the next morning feeling like Rip Van Winkle, he called his brother, Alvaro, and told him to get the guys together and come out to the house. “Marina and Carly ran off,” he said, his voice low and hoarse from screaming. “Running around the neighborhood somewhere. Hiding, probably. All I know is, I can’t find ’em. Kid Maced me in the middle of an argument between me and her mother, and I guess I kinda overreacted. They took off on foot because I had the keys to the Blazer.”

  Alvaro paused for a second. “Yeah, okay,” he said, his own voice muted by the long grip of sleep. “Let me get a shit and a shower and I’ll be down there as soon as I can.”

  The morning wind felt good on his still-throbbing face as Santiago sat on the front porch.

  What happened to me yesterday?

  He was lucid and clear-headed, but his eye sockets radiated dumb, thick heat as if he’d spent all night fighting a fever. He put down his beer and looked at his hands, expecting to see that bizarre white shag draping from the outer edge of his wrist like Liberace’s shirtsleeves.

  Are my fingernails longer? Is that my imagination?

  He bit them, cutting them off one by one with his teeth and spitting the ragged little crescent moons onto the barren front lawn.

  El Tigre, said Grandmother.

  Abuelita had been dead for going on twenty years or more. Dropped dead in San Jose when he was in middle school. Never did an autopsy that he knew of, but he remembered his mother saying she’d had a blood clot in her brain.

  El Tigre.

  She used to tell him stories about the tiger that lived in a cave in the desert and ate bad little boys. “If you don’t behave and eat your vegetables and go to church, little Santi,” she’d say in her sweet, articulate Spanish, “El Tigre gonna catch you asleep in the middle of the night and eat you up.” Her pursed, weathered lips were like a leather wallet, full of false teeth instead of money. She would punctuate the warnings by raking a handful of fingers at him and uttering a fey “Rowr.”

  This boogeyman was born out of their nightly ritual, a bedtime story that consisted of selections from a Spanish-language edition of Rudyard Kipling’s The Jungle Book printed in the ’70s, a double-sided book, twice as thick as it ought to have been; if you flipped it over you could read Rikki-Tikki-Tavi. But he didn’t care about an Indian mongoose; he was all about Mowgli’s adventures in the jungle with Baloo the bear and Bagheera the panther. Abuelita didn’t want to use their names, though, because she thought giving them Spanish names made them more relatable, so she just called them Oso Papá and Gato Negro. Bear Daddy and Black Cat. Shere Khan the tiger was the antagonist of that story, the skulking-prowling villain that wanted to eat Mowgli the wolf-boy. Abuelita didn’t want to use his name, either, so she just called him the Tiger.

  What made him think of that? It’d been so long.

  He went into the trailer, where he stood in the kitchen, his eyes traveling slowly around the cabinets and cupboards.

  Two boxes, one brown and one blue: Carly’s Cocoa Pebbles and Marina’s Frosted Flakes. He took down the Frosted Flakes and poured a bowl of it, dropped a clean spoon in it, remembered too late there was no milk in the house. “You got to be kidding me,” he said to himself in the quiet trailer.

  He looked at the beer in his hand.

  Santi poured it out into the cereal, then sat and ate it, disconsolate but calm. Tasted like sweet foul horror, like a diabetic’s piss. Tony the cartoon Tiger gawped at him from the front of the box with his cheery, confident, idiot grin. He ate beer and cereal until the rip-roar of motorcycles rumbled into the driveway.

  * * *

  Three motorcycles, four riders: Tuco, Maximo, and Santiago’s brother and sister, Alvaro and Elisa. Elisa rode bitch with her brother, wearing her Walmart shirt; she must have just come from work. The rest of them were wearing colors: leather Los Cambiantes vests like his own, with the big wolf head on the back.

  “Morning, Santi,” said his brother. Alvaro was a shorter, slimmer, slightly more handsome version of Santiago. With their long hair
and lean figures, they both looked like failures from an Antonio Banderas cloning project, though Santi drew the short end of the genetic stick there.

  “Mornin’, Alfie.”

  Kid sister Elisa had that suspicious look in her eye—What did you do this time?—but she didn’t say anything.

  The second one off his bike was Maximo, the biggest goddamn half-Mexican any of them ever saw: six feet of pure muscle, his face masked by a Captain Haddock beard. Max ran a gym in Keyhole Hills, a country club for meatheads in a former five-and-dime, with a ragged-out boxing ring and just enough weights for a handful of people.

  Last of them to walk over was secretary Tuco, a spindly little hipster Cuban with a rat face and tortoiseshell sunglasses that made him look like he just stepped out of a remake of The Breakfast Club. Looked like a useless dweeb, but Santi knew Tuco used to work for the cartel as the kind of guy that knew his way around a car battery and a pair of nipple clamps.

  “Lost my temper.” Santi glanced over his shoulder at the broken window. “Carlita Maced me and I kinda … kinda lost my shit. Scared both of ’em right outta the house.” He chuckled stiffly. “Hurt like hell. Can said bear spray on it. Stuff could take the paint off a Cadillac.”

  “Where the hell did she get bear spray?”

  “Probably the internet,” said Tuco. “You can get that shit on Amazon, man. You can get just about anything online, if you know where to look.”

  “Don’t matter where she got it.” Santiago headed for La Reina and threw a leg over her saddle. “What matters is where they went. You guys help me look for ’em.”

  “Know what direction she went in?” asked Tuco.

  “No. I was too busy giving myself a hooker bath in the front yard.”

  Alvaro rubbed his face. “They could be anywhere, man. Got a night’s head start.”

  “Can’t have gone far,” said Santi. “They don’t have a whole lot of runnin’ money. Ain’t gonna be buying a plane ticket anytime soon. They’re still in town, unless they hitchhiked out, and I don’t see that happening. People don’t pick up hitchhikers anymore.”

  “Carly by herself, maybe,” Tuco said, hitching his glasses up on his nose with a knuckle.

  “That’s my little girl, Tuc.”

  Maximo grunted. “Goddamn pervert.”

  Tuco shrugged. “Hey, I’m just sayin’, yo.”

  “Yeah, you just sayin’. Hell outta here with that.”

  “Where are you assholes going?” asked Isabella Talamantes, scuffing down the sidewalk in flip-flops, a big fast-food cup sloshing with crushed ice in one hand. She shuffled into Santi’s yard and gave Elisa a kiss. “Goin’ out to look for Marina and Carly?”

  “Yeah,” said Maximo. “How’d you know?”

  “She came by the house yesterday while Elisa was asleep, looking for a place to spend the night.”

  Elisa blinked. “You didn’t let her in?”

  “If she hadn’t pissed off Santi, I might have.” Isabella looked Santi up and down. “I didn’t want this bull in my china shop throwin’ a bitch fit, tearin’ shit up,” she said, and sipped at her melted ice.

  “That’s my sister-in-law, Bella,” said Elisa. “You can’t just turn her away.”

  Isabella subtly recoiled from the growing anger on Santiago’s face. “Baby, I love all three of you girls,” she said, “but, I—uhhh, I just didn’t—”

  “You didn’t what?” said Santi, putting his kickstand back down.

  “I didn’t want to get involved.” Isabella made a half step behind Alvaro, subconsciously shielding herself. “I’ve had all the drama I can handle, you know?”

  Santiago casually walked toward her. Isabella held her cup behind her leg and Alvaro stepped aside out of morbid curiosity, maybe, or perhaps just because he didn’t expect what was coming. “Why didn’t you let my wife stick around?” He didn’t talk with his hands like he usually does, but they were tensing, tightening. “Why didn’t you stop them?”

  “I just—”

  Santi punched her once in the face, a meaty, soundless jab that popped her head backward. Isabella’s feet slipped out from under her and she fell on her ass.

  “Whoa!” hooted Alvaro. “Hey.”

  Elisa flew to Isabella’s side, clutching her girlfriend’s face. “Ohhh my God!”

  All three of the other men stepped in to separate them, but Santiago didn’t keep coming. He hovered on the other side of his fellow bikers, Maximo’s beefy hand holding one shoulder. Tuco paced back and forth in an invisible cordon like a hockey goalie from a video game.

  “You let her go, Isabella,” Santi fumed, “now they’re out there, God knows where, probably dead in a gutter for all I know.”

  Blood streamed down Isabella’s lips from her busted nose. Elisa took a napkin out of her purse and dabbed it against her girlfriend’s face, tilting Isabella’s head back. “Si no la golpeó, ella todavía estaría aquí, pedazo de mierda,” she growled, muffled by the fabric. If you didn’t beat her up, she’d still be here, you piece of shit.

  Santiago twitched, but Maximo squeezed him. Santi gave him a death-look, then turned and stalked over to his motorcycle, heeling up the stand again and heaving himself onto the kickstart. It didn’t start with the first kick.

  Before he could try it again, Max came over. “Hey.”

  Santiago met his eyes.

  “Listen, I’m going to help you find your wife and little girl, Santi,” said the barrel-chested biker. “But you got to ease up, man. You gotta chill. How you gon—”

  “Yeah,” Santi said curtly, interrupting him. He flicked his eyes down at La Reina’s gas tank, then back up at Maximo. Max said nothing, but the look on his face carried a grim concern. “Look, what happens in my house is my business, yeah?”

  “A man’s home is his castle, I guess.”

  “I’ll work on it. Arright? I got a temper. I know.” The motorcycle underneath him seemed to thrum even though the engine wasn’t running, a subtle throb, an aftershock of an aftershock. Santiago felt better astride La Reina, centered, like it was home base in a game of tag. A rolling sanctuary. Safe, more in control. “Maybe if I quit drinking or something.” Or maybe if that bitch quits sneaking around behind my back. That creeping insidious fingertip dragged down the inside of his skull. Santi chuckled. “Maybe start doin’ yoga.”

  Max paused. “You feelin’ all right? You look like you passed out in a hill of pissants.”

  “I got bear-Maced, you meatball. That stuff is supposed to drive away a six-hundred-pound bear. And I ain’t talkin’ about Yogi Bear, ’ey Booboo.” Jumping on the kickstarter again, Santi got the bike cranked and La Reina snarled to life. “Don’t worry about me,” Santi smiled, shouting over the engine. “I feel grrrrrrrrreat.”

  * * *

  Elisa glared at Santiago’s back until he rounded the corner and disappeared.

  Isabella looked at the wad of blood soaking into the Walmart vest. “Sorry I messed up your thing.”

  “Sorry my brother is such an asshole. He wasn’t always like this.”

  “I doe, you say it every dibe he gets pissy. Like that barbeque last Fourth of July when he spanked by little boy? I could have lost custody for that. He told be I should beat the gay out of hib for playing with baby dolls.” Isabella took the vest away. Her nostrils were plugged with blood. “Be! Can you beliebe that shit?”

  Elisa didn’t know what to say.

  “It’s that fugging bike,” said Isabella.

  “The bike?”

  “That green piece of shit he drives. He’s been getting bore assholish ever since he cabe hobe frob the auction with that thing.”

  “What? What are you talking about?”

  Isabella dropped her cup of ice when Santiago popped her in the face, and it now melted in a puddle on his patchy lawn. She halfheartedly kicked it into a healthier patch of grass. Maybe it would help the lawn grow. “Sobething about it. You haven’t ever seen hib cock his head like a dog and sneak a peek at the b
oater-cycle sometimes?”

  “Can’t say that I have.”

  “I ain’t crazy,” said Isabella, beginning the long plod back to their apartment a few blocks away. She spat a glob of blood into the weeds next to the Valenzuelas’ leaning mailbox. Falling into step behind her, Elisa clutched her hands behind her back, stooped like a miser on the verge of financial ruin. As she walked, she dreamt up cruel and elaborate punishments for her brother. Punch him back. Eye for an eye.

  Track 11

  A half hour west of Keyhole Hills, Kenway decided he was thirsty and the Valenzuelas needed to eat, so they pulled into a tavern at the city limits of Almudena: a tall neon sign outside depicted a spread-winged eagle and the word HEROES. A series of overcompensating pickup trucks lined the sidewalk, alongside a Harley Davidson in mint condition and a Jeep Liberty plastered in bumper stickers that said Long days and pleasant nights and Strangers by birth, ka-tet by choice.

  Inserts standing on each table boasted a military discount, along with something called “Mangorita Chicken.” Place was dark but clean, with a karaoke stage in one corner and a herd of rednecks nursing beers at the bar, all glued to a baseball game on the flatscreen mounted to the ceiling.

  “A sports bar for vets?” asked Kenway.

  “Pretty much,” said the waitress, a tiny, athletic Hispanic woman in a T-shirt and black Lululemons. As soon as Robin saw her, she knew who the Liberty belonged to. Her nametag read MONICA. “We’re the unofficial neighborhood VFW.”

  One of the men at the bar was not watching the game. A short Hispanic guy with an undercut and big fishy eyes glared at their table, studying the Valenzuelas as if trying to recognize them. Another man from the other end of the bar slid off his stool and carried his beer over to their table.