HOUSE OF JAGUAR

by Mike Bond

  “You’re going to skin your ass out of here.”

  “No! I mean about her?”

  “Murph! You plan to die today?”

  Murphy laughed, looked out the light well at stained concrete.

  “You better decide, man. I can testify you was here at one a.m. I can testify anything you want, but they’re not going to believe me, I’m already on the wrong side...”

  “You’ll just get accessory, Ray. You’ll get ten years.”

  “No I won’t. They’ll kill anyone who’s touched you. I wouldn’t make trial.”

  Murphy stood, feeling the room’s weight on his shoulders. “I’ve done all this.”

  “Think of what you did in Nam, man. You never did a thing to hurt people.”

  “Oh yes I have.”

  “You even used to even drag in the fuckin gooks! I’ve seen you run across a fuckin field of fire to pick up some dumb dink.”

  “You just didn’t like the dinks because they’ve got slanty eyes like you.” Murphy hugged him, turned, holding the door jamb. “How safe is this bike?”

  “It was wrecked and sold for parts and there’s no way to trace it. Calvin Wong doesn’t exist.”

  “Who the fuck is Calvin Wong?”

  “He’s your friend. The name DMV has it registered to.”

  NO COPS on the Bay Bridge and none on 580 going south, fields of pale tomatoes to the horizon. At noon he filled up at a truck stop near Coalinga, empty plastic cups sucked along the greasy parking lot by passing trucks, transmission lines like giant mantises across endless rows of beet and cauliflower. He bought a sixpack of Coke, sandwiches, maps, and two five-gallon gas cans, filled the gas cans and strapped one on each side of the bike beneath Ray’s blue sleeping bag, spare clothes and poncho.

  Highway 46 east was two flat lanes across half-irrigated fields stretching to the smudged horizon where oil derricks rose and fell like the heads of feeding vultures. There were white houses in willow groves and dusty pickups with gun racks, windblown soil and scummy sloughs, the air greasy with herbicides, crude tar and methane.

  East of Mojave he emptied the first gas can into the tank, but that made the bike off-balance so he stopped again and poured half the remaining can into the empty one. The cars were beginning to flick on their lights; in the south gray rainbursts slanted across a slug-pink sky. His arms were queasy with exhaustion and his feet stumbled bluntly over the volcanic soil.

  Barstow ahead seemed like danger so he dropped south on 395, a straight black line pointing at Mexico, trucks shaking him as they roared north, casting a fine spray that kept him wiping his eyes with the back of his arm. He turned east through Twentynine Palms and Earp and into Arizona at midnight, the cars and trucks fewer now, the stars like points on a great pinball machine.

  Mountains and constellations rose and fell. There was just the rumble of the bike, the white lines zipping beneath the wheel, now uphill, now on the level, now going down, nighthawks and jackrabbits darting from the headlight, semis rolling north like dinosaurs, crushed rattlers like red ropes on the highway, once a doe in a mass of blood and guts, remnants of a fawn beside her, saguaros beyond the headlight like shadowy hanged men. There was no feeling in his hands, no feeling in his arms, no sound but this freezing air screaming through his brain, his body locked into the seat by immovable legs, and he moved the bike by leaning only, tipping this way and that through the curves, the white lines flicking under, the tire’s tread a continual blur in which endless detail could be seen, the fluorescent green fuel gauge sinking from half to quarter, the speedometer needle jiggling between a hundred and twenty and a hundred and forty... If you hit anything going this fast, he consoled himself, you’ll hardly know it.

  South of Gila Bend the horizon grew lighter and the ground was rolling waves of boulders and cliffs like bone chips from which the dawn rose like yellow oil. A sign flashed past: Luke Air Force Bombing Range. Stay on Highway. Gray rubbled mountains hunched over thorn and cactus and chipped soil. As he floated over a long easy rise with dawn mirages on the pavement there were suddenly two cruisers across the road between narrow cliffs and he hit the brakes looking for a way out, the bike skidding sideways toward the two cops, one running for his cruiser, the other with a shotgun. He spun to a stop and stood, twenty feet away. “You’re moving too fast out there!” the one with the shotgun said.

  Maybe they don’t know, Murphy decided. “Wasn’t anybody around.”

  “We were around.”

  “Sorry about that.”

  “Let’s see your license.”

  US Air Force was stamped in gold on their cruiser doors. Not cops but MPs: maybe they didn’t know. He handed them the Arizona license.

  “From Flagstaff,” the other one said. “Hell I used to live in Flagstaff.”

  “Where you headed?” the one with the shotgun said.

  “Ajo.”

  “What’s there?”

  “My sister’s ex-husband. We’re going hunting.”

  “Where’s your gun?”

  “He’s got the guns.” Murphy dropped the bike into gear. “I’ll take it slower.”

  “We’re out here looking for drunk Indians,” the one from Flagstaff said. “But we catch you again we’ll pull you in too.”

  He accelerated slowly, watching in the mirror for them to turn and shoot, then for them to leap into the cars and speed after him, but the two cops and the two blue cars diminished in the mirror, stationary in their wobbling shrinking reflection, the sunlit mountains climbing up behind them.

  Ahead the road rose steadily into the vermilion sky scented with desert morning; soon he could kill the headlight, in an hour Mexico. In the mirror he caught a flash of blue, cop lights. The two cruisers were coming fast and there was only long straight highway ahead with no place to hide; he stood on the brakes and spun the bike off the road, whanging over the borrow pit and slamming through thorns and cactus. He glanced back to see the cruisers smashing through the brush behind him and he roared up an arroyo to shake them but one kept coming, banging and snarling up through clattering rocks and with a great ping like a ricochet the bike’s chain snapped, the engine roaring wild. The bike fell over pinning his thigh to the arroyo rocks, the car smashing toward him as he broke free and ran back downslope before the cop could shoot or turn round, then he cut left across the slope, above the other cruiser, out of pistol range, now out of shotgun range. Looking back he tripped on a saguaro root, needles in his hands, kept running through rolling bowl-like hills, already too hot to breathe, the sun melting over the ridge.

  44

  HE RAN upslope toward a saddle with a tan peak behind it. The ground was sloshy with lava gravel but open between the desert thorns and cactus so he could run quickly, pacing it, the cruisers now a thousand feet below, and still he could keep the pace, trying to reach the shelter of the tan peak before the planes came.

  The arroyo crested into a shallow valley of white boulders, the tan peak above on the right. He ran part way up the valley and then uphill between huge boulders with spiky cactus in the crevices between them. It had been fifteen minutes since the cops would have radioed. Planes could come any time now. If they were fixed wing he could hide among the rocks and maybe they wouldn’t see him. If they saw him he could still run, but if they were choppers once they saw him it was over.

  The slope turned to lava talus, a furnace of rock. His legs ran with no feeling. He crossed the ridge, looked back; no one had reached the valley below nor its far lower end dropping down into the arroyo. On his left rose the tan peak. To the northwest, back the way he’d come, was purple desert to a crotch of distant dark mountains with raw pale peaks. Behind him, south, stretched a string of ridges with long sweeping saddles between them, boulders, cactus, sun-tortured brush.

  Nearly half an hour, still no plane. Now he could put on the miles, stretch out the legs, nothing but running, running and thinking. Running and listening. If I get out of this I wil
l be happy no matter what deaths have happened and how much I’m to blame, he promised. I will force myself to be happy.

  There was a tiny airplane whine, a bug maybe. No, a spotter, the nasal blare of its motor as it came upridge hugging the slope. It was still far; he crawled into a clump of greasewood and saguaro and as the plane flitted past it crossed him with its shadow.

  It dove over the ridge down toward the valley. He ran as if the land behind him were on fire, down the long sweeping saddle from ridge to tilting ridge, the planes coming and going behind him in widening circles, lazy-sounding as bees seeking honey.

  The saddle toppled into a plain of red-flowered cactus widening toward low mountains. All the way across it he stayed ahead of the planes, then up the low mountains through a sharp and craggy canyon with cooler air in pockets in the shade of its great slabs.

  From the low mountains a vast chalky mesa tilted southward, millions of cactus pinioned against it, scrub and brush and desert grass and burnt arroyos. He ran in a trance now, knew he could run till night unless his body broke, his heart stopped. Several times there was a white glint of plane behind him, never close. After midday there were no more planes, the land leveled then rose and fell again; in late afternoon he stopped on the bank of an arroyo to look back; still there was no one, no planes, just an immense white land of crevasses and canyons and dry bouldered river beds across the rippled sand.

  Standing still made him dizzy so he ran again but could not lose the dizziness till he fell against a cactus and the pain made him sharp. He ran on, the setting sun on his right, saguaro shadows darkening the brush, ran till it was too dark, then walked, watching Scorpio rising in the east to point the way south.

  At dawn he could smell smoke and water, day rushing across the desert as he followed a goat trail down into a rocky valley with some palm trees and a stone hut with a palm-thatched roof and shed and a turgid pool. There were fresh goat droppings on the trail. An old woman came out of the hut wiping her hands. “Can I have water?” he said.

  She seemed frightened of him but brought a pail of well water and a clay bowl to drink. He made himself stop drinking after five bowls. “Where is this?” he said.

  “This? San Jacinto.”

  “But what country?”

  She turned from the ground where he sat. “Felipe! This is what country?”

  “It is the Sonora,” an old man said, coming out of the shed. He had a knife in one hand and a chunk of cactus in the other. “The land of the San Jacinto people.”

  Murphy forced his hand from the bowl of water. “It is Mexico?”

  “It is not the United States and it is not Mexico. Which one are you running from?”

  “I was hunting with my friends, got lost. Two days I’ve had no water.”

  “You’re going the wrong way. Go north, the way you just came down.”

  “Can I buy food – frijoles – anything? He reached into his jacket for his wallet but it was not there. He felt all his pockets, waiting to discover the wallet so he could relax and stop this horrible sudden fear that he had no money, that he’d lost the wallet when the bike broke or somewhere in between. The wallet was truly gone, only the false Arizona license left in his other shirt pocket.

  “We can give you chiles,” the woman said. “Some cactus tamale.”

  “No thank you,” he said. “I have plenty.”

  “You have nothing and no money,” the old man said. “She did not offer to sell them to you.”

  The woman took the cup into the hut and brought it back with sour goat milk and chiles and a cactus tamale with beans inside it. He ate the cactus shell last, breaking it in pieces with his teeth. He tried to remember where he might have lost the wallet but could not. He would have to go back, at least as far as the border.

  “You should stay,” the old man said. “Leave tomorrow. We will feed you.”

  He drank more water, turned back up the hill the way he’d come, up the goat trail whose droppings were now drier and harder in the sun. At the top of the arroyo he looked out on a wide canyonland of broken buttressed cliffs and rolling stony plateaus. A distant plane buzzed, came nearer. No, a hummingbird at a cactus flower.

  This moment would decide his life but he could not tell which way to go. Go back for the wallet and probably he would not find it and probably he would be captured. To go south without money or food or water was death.

  The old man was riding a burro up a switchbacked trail on the far slope. Murphy watched him till he crossed the ridge out of sight, then ran back down across the arroyo above the hut and climbed the slope after the old man. When he reached the ridge the old man was far ahead, an atom of black and white among the towering cactus. The trail grew firmer, other paths coming in, became a pair of ruts rolling over a mountain shoulder and down to a barbed wire fence with a gate and a few miles ahead a rancho with a silo and metal windmill, thin Brahma cattle standing motionless in its corrals. Next to the house was a creosoted pole with a telephone wire going from the house past the corrals and down the road. The old man was tying his burro to the porch. In the distance were the silver flashes of cars on a highway.

  Murphy circled the rancho to the south and followed a fence line east and reached the highway at dusk. Swallows were darting after moths; somewhere cattle were lowing. The cars on the highway made a low cadenced hiss.

  He followed the highway south to a town. Trucks were parked at a bar smelling of frijoles and steaks. He stood in a dark street watching the back of the bar. A boy came out and scraped plates into a bucket. Murphy waited till the boy went inside then crept closer to the bucket but a dog came snarling and rattling its chain, so he went round the bar to where two semis were idling, facing south at the edge of the highway, one driver standing on the ground and speaking up to the other. One was closed up, a refrigerator truck. The other was a flatbed loaded with large shapes covered with blue tarps; he came up behind it and crawled under the tarps; there were huge chunks of steel, pieces of turbine or motor of some kind; he squeezed up inside them. The voices tailed off, someone laughing, “Arriba!” The two trucks revved and Murphy’s slid forward, bouncing and jouncing over the potholes and onto the road.

  45

  THE TRUCK rolled endlessly through the darkness, gearing up and down for the hills, tires roaring against the tarmac, the huge iron segments jiggling rustily on the flatbed, the tarp and steel cables whistling in the wind. Murphy was sick from the goat milk the old woman had given him, crawled to the back to throw up over the end when there were no headlights behind. Once there was rain shower and he lay with his head in the open, drinking the oily water that funneled off the tarps.

  They went through a big city, lights reflecting on the asphalt, the truck starting and stopping, the iron lurching and squealing on the flatbed. Watching through a crack under the tarp he decided it was Hermosillo. The truck was still heading south.

  He woke to a blue-gray light filtering through the tarp, the truck gearing down through sloping long curves, diesel snarling, brakes hissing, tires grinding gravel off the edge. He took off his shoes and repaired the laces that had been frayed by cactus thorns. Again there was a city, stop and go traffic, car engines on all sides, their exhaust collecting up under the tarp. Beyond the city the truck geared down, ground into second and rumbled off the highway across a gravel lot. It pulled into a space where the sound of its engine echoed closely. The engine died; the cab door opened and shut.

  He waited what he thought was two minutes but may only have been a few seconds, squirmed to the back and looked out under the tarp. Trucks lined up all around, oil and dust, a distant radio. He could see no one, dropped over the side, walking unsteadily on the pockmarked ground, wandered around and between the trucks till he found a building with a water spigot that said no potable but he drank it anyway, long deep cool luscious liquid gulps that made him vomit but then he could drink easily and it was good. A man in boots with pointed toes and worn-down heels, Levis
and bow legs, silver buckle and red check shirt, tanned small face with a black mustache and thin black eyes and a black cowboy hat looked down at him. “That’s for radiators,” he said. You should ask at the café.”

  “Oh.” Murphy stood.

  “Where you going?”

  Murphy said nothing, watching him. “Why?”

  “I saw you get off the truck.”

  “Going south.”

  From his pocket the man took a fold of bills, flattened it and pulled one off. “Get yourself a little cleaned up and get something to eat.” He gave Murphy a bill. “You’ll be OK.”

  Fifty thousand pesos, a wrinkled blue bill in his palm. “Jesus!” He kept looking at it but it was still fifty thousand pesos. He ran looking between the trucks but could not see the man. He went into the café, steamy and warm and full of the smell of men and hot food and coffee. The toilet was filthy but he washed with water from the tank above the toilet and combed his hair with his fingers till it lay straight. He washed mud, oil and dust off his black jacket and shirt and jeans and shoes with wet toilet paper that left pink shreds. He had tortillas and beans and coffee at the counter for five thousand pesos, found two empty plastic cola bottles and filled them with water, and walked out into the new bright sun.

  In late morning the truck pulled off the highway again, halting among others in a huge lot rimmed by hog wire and wind-stunted dusty trees. The driver got down but came back in a few minutes, climbed up and shut the door. The truck did not start and after a few minutes Murphy decided the driver had gone to sleep.

  He climbed out the back and walked awkwardly among the other trucks. Most of their cab windows were open, the drivers sleeping on benches up behind the seats. He found a rig with DF plates carrying thick concrete pipes with canvas on each end. He put down his water bottles and crawled up underneath to feel the engine. It was cold. He crawled to the back, picked up the bottles, climbed up under the canvas into a pipe and fell asleep.