by Jeff Johnson
“Two guns,” I repeated.
“Two guns are better than one.”
“And then you robbed the gas station.”
“Then we robbed many gas stations, man. We robbed all kinds of things.”
Neither of us said anything for a while. I wondered if Gomez or Flaco knew this, and I somehow suspected they didn’t.
“But then something went wrong,” I said. “You got popped.”
“Something went wrong all right. Miguel and I, we came to Portland for a wedding. It was right out here, where we’re going to bury sweet Bella. We had to come. If we didn’t, my uncle would have known we had left my piece of shit junkie mother and her husband. He would have been so angry with all of us. After that, we went back and forth. We had a car by then. Miguel had this woman. It started to get expensive, man, and so it became, er, risky.”
I didn’t say anything.
“I was into the coke. This one whole weekend, I don’t remember shit. One day it’s Thursday and I score big. Then it’s red lights and blue lights and music and, ah man, I don’t even know. And then someone is shaking me awake, screaming. Consuela, Miguel’s chica, and she’s screaming that Miguel has been shot. He tried to rob a gas station without me.” He stopped.
“Fuck, dude.”
“Yeah. The bitch took off. I did the last of the coke and I got my gun. I was gonna go and shoot the fuck out of everyone at that gas station, kill every one of them, but the cops got to me first. They came to the apartment. And there I was. Fifteen years old, high as a motherfucker, gun in my hand.”
“So, so they didn’t get you for robbery? I mean, you weren’t even there.”
“Nah, dog, I wasn’t.” Santos gave me a watery stare. “But they could smell it on me, see?”
“Shit.”
“Yeah. I dunno. I was in maybe a month, broke this rapey guy’s arm and I got an extra year pinned on. Fucked up again, took me all the way to my eighteenth birthday.”
“That’s fucked up,” I said finally. “Gomez, Flaco, they don’t know about this?”
“Sure they do. Now, anyway. Both of them, once upon a time, a long, long time ago, they did crime. Especially Uncle Gomez. But a man has to forgive himself, they say, before he can change his ways. So they wait. And watch.” He sighed. “And watch.”
“Family, man.” I shook my head. “You know how lucky you are? Those people care about you, dude.”
He frowned and said nothing.
“I don’t have any kind of family. That kind of life, you got no safety net. Break a leg, you die. Get too sick, you die. So a part of you gets tired way before it should and it just keeps wearing down, year after year, until there’s nothing left of that part of yourself but dust and echoes. Then you carry that empty around until the end.”
Santos looked at me, but his story was over for the moment.
“I think I understand why Gomez wanted me to talk to you,” I continued. “Maybe a little. It might be that you’ve confused the system for your family. They fed you and put a roof over your head. You’re a smart kid, Santos. I can tell. So think this through. You don’t think that in some way you’ve been tricked? You go back in as an adult, you know how much money they’ll make on you? All the years of your life, working for free? Juvie manufactures slaves, dummy. The system is for profit. What part of that don’t you understand?”
“You’re just like they are,” he said, disgusted.
“No, dude.” I laughed then. “I’m not. That’s my problem with Suzanne. The conversation has come full circle.” I whacked him on the arm. “See, there is no reason in the end to obey every fuckin’ goddamned thing. You live by a code is what you do. Look around with free eyes, little man. We live in a country where rich people eat the poor, where kids like you are set up to fail so some wad in a suit can live in a bigger house. ‘Business as usual’ is a disgusting proposition for me too. It’s so fucked up I don’t think I ever even considered it.”
That got him. He was paying attention now.
“But I do have rules,” I continued. “I break them from time to time, and when I do I feel bad. But one of those rules is to stay free. Don’t get caught. Someone wants to trade you on the New York Stock Exchange, little homie. Your response should be twofold. One, to say fuck that. Two, to spend your life robbing those fuckers for even trying that shit in the first place. You’re pissed off at what’s happened to you, but you aren’t pissed off at the right people.”
Santos snorted.
“I had all night and all morning to think up wise and wholesome shit to dump into your empty head,” I confessed, “but I came up empty, too. I guess all I have to say is this. Half of what is labeled ‘crime’ is something else. You be your own judge. Your own boss. The world is broken and you won’t fix it by obeying the broken rules. But two guns are better than one? Robbing gas stations? That’s criminally stupid.”
“We’re getting close,” Santos said. “Five more miles or so, we take a right. Dirt road, maybe a quarter mile in to the big clearing.”
“Time for one more road beer.”
The turnoff to the Gomez family wedding festival and animal cemetery was unmarked.
I took the narrow one-lane entrance and hit the mud and gravel road slowly. It was lined with tall trees, second growth that was at least twenty years old, and the forest floor still had the mossy stumps and fallen logs left behind from the last clear-cut. The canopy let through enough light for ferns to grow, and everything was covered in an emerald moss. Driving that slowly through it, I felt transported as I always did when I got out into the woods, and I wondered again why I didn’t leave the city more often. Suzanne always wanted me to, and maybe that had something to do with it. My face started to relax. Beside me, Santos stared out the window, lost in his memories. I cracked the window and the air was green smelling and fresh. The clearing came up two bends and five minutes in and I stopped. Tall grass, a little more than knee high, swayed gently, deep green, tipped with gold. Peaceful. We sat there appreciating it for a moment before Santos spoke. He pointed off to the right.
“There’s a big tree over there, one of the old ones they missed when they cut everything down the first time. My uncle bought this right after he first moved up here. It was all stumps then except one or two trees the hippies had driven nails into.”
“That where we should dig?”
“Yeah.” He opened his door. “Maybe I’ll go look first. Take a second to just, I dunno.”
“Sure. I’ll get Bella out of the back. No rush.”
Santos got out and slowly walked away, deep in thought. I watched him go and wondered what he was thinking. Probably about the last time he was here. Dancing with Cherry, music on the boom box, grill fired up, maybe strings of lights. The smells of sizzling meat and posole and fried bread. Laughter. I’d been to the parties his family threw, none of them out here, but they were good ones in a special way. He might have been daydreaming about fooling around with Cherry in the back seat of her car and wondering if I was full of shit. But he was probably remembering eating and drinking and feeling like an outsider, like he’d been tainted in some way he was having trouble washing off. I got out and walked around to the side of the van and opened the door. Reluctantly, I pulled the army blanket away. Bella had thawed enough for her eyes to go wide. Her purple tongue was no longer stiff, but had become sticky instead and was glued to the side of her face.
I put the blanket down and yanked the dog out onto it, folded the blanket over the top. We could drag her over the wet grass, I reasoned, and save the sweating for the actual dig. I lit up a cigarette and looked around, leaned up against the van. On the far side of the clearing, there were three picnic tables visible, old wooden ones that had turned ash gray with exposure. It was wide enough for more than a hundred revelers to comfortably do their thing. I wondered why Gomez had let the forest come back rather than plant grapes. The answer was probably the stumps, which were too huge to remove. Clearing the land after a clear-cut
would have been too much work.
Santos appeared a moment later and made his way to the van. He was still lost in reflection when he looked at Bella.
“You didn’t tell me what happened to her,” I said. He looked up.
“Cancer. Bella had it in her stomach. The vet told me she had a year, but she was in pain.” He looked down at the covered body and shrugged.
“You take the shovel,” I suggested. “I can pull her along the grass. Sound okay?”
Santos reached into the van and took the shovel out, slowly started walking back the way he came. I leaned in and put my cigarette out in the ashtray, then grabbed the edge of the blanket and followed. Dragging the big dog was far easier than carrying it, but even so I took my time, leaving him to his thoughts. Santos got to the edge of the trees before me and vanished into the woods. I stopped at the edge when I got there and peered in. He was twenty paces away and digging fast under a massive old Douglas fir. I walked in to take a turn, and as I did I understood why he was working so fast.
“Hornets!” I shouted. Right as I heard the buzzing sound the first of them flew up my shirt and stung me on the chest. Santos looked up, frantic, and I was amazed. One of his eyes was already close to swollen shut. “Santos, get out of there!”
“It must be here!” Santos screamed back. “Here! Here!” Then he was digging again, hacking at the soil with all his might.
I lurched back as another hornet hit me right in the chin. Then I was running, tearing my jacket off and using it as a giant fly swatter. I sprinted into the middle of the clearing, flailing the air around me, then stopped and looked back to shout again. Another hornet flew up the back of my shirt and I tore it off and threw it, then rolled in the grass. The hornets had found me, though, and nothing was going to stop them. Cursing, I scrambled to my feet again and ran toward the picnic tables, then shook out my bomber jacket and put it back on, zipped it all the way up.
“Santos!” I yelled. “Santos!” It echoed into the distance.
Nothing. I cocked my head and listened. He was still digging frantically. A patrol hornet zipped past, and before it could circle back and send out the alarm I jogged back to the van.
When I got there, I opened the door and took out two beers, cracked one and drained it and put the cold glass against my chest, held the unopened one on my chin. My cell phone started ringing and I was glad it hadn’t broken in all the rolling around, but not glad enough to take it out of my pocket and answer it. A lone hornet zipped past and I remained still until it was gone.
I was going to have to recommend therapy. I couldn’t believe it. The kid was fucked in the head in a way nobody even suspected. I’d never even heard of something like this. I held my breath for a second and listened, and abruptly the digging stopped. Santos screamed and I dropped the unopened beer.
“Kid! I’m by the van!” I wasn’t up to dragging him out while he was still capable of yelling. “Run for it, man! Run!”
Santos sprinted out of the woods at top speed. He was carrying a muddy metal box, clutched to his chest, and even at a distance I could see the angry halo around him.
“What the—”
“Start the engine!” Santos shrieked. “Hurry! Ahhhh!”
He was coming and there was no stopping him. I slammed the side door and ran around to the driver’s side, jumped in, and started the engine. Then I reached over and locked his door as he skidded to a halt. His eyes widened as he realized I wasn’t letting him in. I put the van in reverse.
“What the fuck, man!”
“Fuck you!” I yelled back. “Get those bees off of you!” I floored it and tore backward as fast as the van would go. Santos bolted off into the woods again and I watched him go. It became clear that he meant to lose as many hornets as he could in the trees, so I backed down the road another twenty feet and waited for him to circle in. As he did, running a little slower now that he was alone, I leaned out and unlocked his door. He jumped in and slammed it, then glared at me, panting. I glared back.
“You crazy dumbass,” I said.
He’d been stung several times on the face and hands. Shaking, he put the muddy box flat on his lap and fished out a beer, cracked it, and gulped down half before he came up for air.
“We made it, ese.” Santos let out a strange, broken giggle.
“Santos, you insane little fucker, if you dug up someone else’s dead pet I swear to god I’m leaving you here.”
He laughed and finished the beer, dropped the empty on the floor and took out another one, handed it to me. Then he patted the top of the box. It was a little bigger than a standard briefcase, off beige, and it looked like it had been in the ground for a while.
“Debbie,” he said finally. “Debbie!”
I looked at the box again. My skin crawled. Santos turned his wild eyes on me.
“My brother Miguel’s last words. ‘Tell Santos the money is with Debbie!’”
“What? Who the fuck is Debbie?”
“Three years in juvie I wondered who Debbie was! We don’t know a single Debbie, not one. So who is this mystery woman? Who is this fucking woman with all of our money? All of the money from the robberies Miguel had been saving so we could have a new life. The bitch had stolen it all. You see?”
“No.” But all of the sudden I did. My mouth went dry.
“He said the bees! The money is with the bees! He buried it here where no one would ever look!”
My first punch was a right cross to his jaw. It bounced his head off the door and dazed him, so I reached across and opened his door, then leaned back and awkwardly kicked him out of the van. Santos lay there unmoving, his eyes wide and unfocused and pointed at the sky. I climbed out and stared down at him.
“What did you do to that poor fuckin’ dog, you piece of shit!” Then I kicked him in the side.
Santos was just as tough as I feared he might be. He rolled with the kick and then he was on his feet, lightning fast. The metal box bounced off my shoulder and as it did he came at me swinging, poised like a street fighter, his body tight. I barely ducked out of his first punch and whipped in and chopped him once, hard in the stomach, then kneed him in the forehead before he could straighten out of the curl. He went down again.
I kept my distance, but he didn’t move. He was breathing but he was out cold, so I walked slowly back to the idling van and got in. The day hadn’t worked out well at all, I thought. I had no idea what I was going to tell Gomez. His nephew was a rotten scumbag to the core. He’d killed his dog to get a ride out to the family plot so he could dig up his dead brother’s loot. His loot, buried out there with the dead animals under a hornet’s nest. I wanted to get back out and hit him a few more times, but I didn’t. Instead, I made a laborious three-point turn and started back up the muddy gravel road to the highway. Santos could find his own way back, and if he returned to Portland, he could face the music of a different symphony. I was out. I had no idea what would happen to him next, but it wouldn’t involve me. There was not one damn thing I could do to fix a kid like that.
I lit a cigarette and blew out the smoke, coughed a little. My hands were shaking, and I felt sad and nauseated and dazed. The hornet sting on my chin hurt, but the one on my chest burned like fire. The first bend in the road was fifty yards up and as I rounded it I slowed, then stopped and stared. There was a gray Lexus blocking my path, parked sideways across the road. A tall, extremely thin, dapper man in a suit the same color as the car was standing ten feet in front of it holding a gun, pointed down but clearly visible. He smiled at me, and we were close enough for me to notice his dentures, which were perfect.
It was the bum from the last night, the one I had given some of my nowhere whiskey to and then listened to him jabber about kale and Oklahoma. He pointed the gun at me and gestured with it, making a winding motion, smiling his artificially perfect smile the entire time.
“Out of the car, Holland,” he called. His voice was high and loud and clear. “Come over here with your arms above your
head. You do anything else and you die a little harder and a little sooner than planned.”
I got out and slowly raised my hands. He kept smiling.
“You the guy who’s been staking me?” I asked. “Looking through my window? You fooled me with your whole ‘bum’ thing. Like it came natural to you, digging around in the trash. Nice choppers, FYI. White. Like, seriously.”
“Darby Holland.” He lowered the gun a little. “Of all the names you could have picked, you pick that one? It means something, right? Something to do with a band, or one of the little books you love so much? I have to know. I won’t tell anyone.”
“What the hell happened to your original teeth?” I stayed right where I was.
He shook his head. “I was told you’d try to bait me into a fight. You can keep trying if you like. Later on when I’m torturing you I’ll remember it. Come! I want you to see something in the trunk here.”
“Fuck no.”
He pointed the gun at my feet. “Right foot or left. God gave you two, so pick the one you like the least. Thirty-eight hollow point, so everything from the ankle down will be gone forever.” He cocked the trigger.
I started forward, as slow as I thought I could get away with, looking for any kind of play that would give me the upper hand. There wasn’t one. He backed away as I approached, staying too far away to rush him. He didn’t need to unlock the trunk because it was already ajar.
“You turned out to be a remarkable guy,” he continued. “You slip your federal monitors long enough to what? Come out here to the woods with a shovel and a young gangster? And now you’re returning alone?” He laughed. “Slick. I’d offer you a job under different circumstances.”
“How long have you been following me?”
“I wonder what your nine-foot-tall girlfriend would make of this behavior of yours. Drinking and driving, and at this hour. Burying boys in the forest.” He made a tsking sound. “Maybe I’ll tell her. Just so I can see the look in her eyes.”
