by Boston Teran
“Alright?” he says.
She nods.
Bob walks back toward the passenger door where Arthur stands waiting for him. Arthur puts out his hands and the two men hug. It is a long and somber moment. Arthur starts to cry. He slaps Bob’s shoulders tenderly, as if he were a baby he was patting to sleep.
Case moves along the side of the truck toward the driver’s door, watching them all the while. She can feel the sun on the back of her neck and hear children on bikes down the street. Watching Arthur and Bob only aggravates her sense of isolation and loneliness. It is the kind of moment she could deal with only when she was loaded. As she opens the driver’s-side door, Arthur calls out to her.
“Hold on,” he says.
He comes around the truck. “I want you to know something. I don’t trust you a rat’s ass worth. I know what those veins suck up. Now if something happens to my boy out there … Your fault. His fault. Nobody’s fault. I won’t put it under an act-of-God clause. You won’t be able to make any excuse that will save your ass with me. You understand?”
Case says nothing. She looks past Arthur’s shoulder at Bob, who has been listening to the whole conversation. Silently he climbs into the passenger seat. She presses her tongue against her upper lip and tries to slide around Arthur’s surly frame.
He slips in front of her again. “You understand?”
She looks away, takes off her sunglasses, and, turning back, presses them right into his sternum and forces him back a step. She comes around him quick and climbs up into the cab. She turns and leans back against the open door. She puts her sunglasses back on and eyes him levelly.
“I’m blown away,” she says. “You know that? Just blown away. As a matter of fact, it’s left me a little wet between my fuckin’ legs.”
15
Bob stares out the window, watching the descending blocks of tract homes slip by.
“You didn’t say anything back there. I’d like to know what you think.”
He turns to Case. “Forget it.”
“Forget it?”
“You’re trying to help, so I don’t want to judge.”
“Is that so?”
“That’s so.”
Silence follows. Bob notices a man in shorts spraying his roses with pesticide. A woman hauling bags of groceries from the back of a minivan while a crying kid drags along behind her. There’s a dog sleeping in a driveway, his muscles flexing through some dreamy chase. Life’s details going by in a stately slow motion. It’s all slipping away. He can feel it.
She eyes him hard. “You don’t want to answer, okay. But I’d like to know.”
“Alright,” he says. “Alright. I believe if you’d had enough strength of character none of what happened to you would have happened.”
He tries not to sound derogatory, nor to appear as if this whole fuckin’ stretch of conversation is just too distasteful. “You want the truth. You got it.”
Case shifts a bit in her seat. There is a sardonic clip to her voice. “Yeah, but I’m not quite sure I wanted a lethal dose.”
She had no idea what town it was. Just another “trick” stop somewhere in Texas. Texas: too much sun, too much dust, too much space. And always too many miles between places you could politely piss in.
She couldn’t have been more than twelve at the time. Yet she had the drill down cold. Cyrus got a room in some shit motel. She took a shower, put on a little perfume, a little lipstick. She opened the window, no matter how hot a day it was, to get out the stink of Lysol and fumigants. She’d heat a spoon, shoot up. And then she’d wait like a lady.
That’s how it went down in the redneck border country where grease and beer and Jesus were specialties of the house. Everything there was as real as the cinder block it was built on.
She sat naked on the edge of the bed. The sheets were coarse, cheap. Through a crack in the door she saw money change hands. A flush of daylight followed along with sounds of the highway. A middle-aged trucker and his old lady filled up the room.
A perfectly good species of white trash. Overweight some, baggy jeans, flannel shirts. A little gristle around the eyes. They gave Case a good looking over.
She could smell the body odor on them as she waited. She reached over to an ashtray by the nightstand. Her fingers fumbled for the cigarette beside the hypo and spoon. She drew in deeply and blew smoke out her nose. Her arms already looked like the odometer on them had been run pretty far. She tried a coquettish smile. She was mimicking the women she’d seen on television when they come on just so.
“Half an hour,” said Cyrus. “And I want to get her back in pretty much the same shape I left her in.”
The woman nodded and sat. The bed sagged like an old set of lungs. Cyrus closed the door behind him. One good shot of smack had Case drifting.
The woman said, “You got nice white skin, baby doll.”
Her trucker boyfriend took his John Wayne Stetson, creased the brim, and laid it neatly on a table. He began to undo his belt. It had a huge gold eagle buckle that shined. It made a loud click as it snapped open.
The woman slid her coarse red fingers up between Case’s legs, which came apart with a slight rustle of sheet. “Mommy and Daddy always wanted to have a little girl of their own.”
Case gets a quick hit of herself in the rearview mirror. Her skin is drawn and white. A penny-size five-pronged star stands out on her left cheek. She wonders why in the hell that incident in Texas came to mind. Why right now? You get off junk, you start to try and track these things. Sometimes it’s just busywork, like some burned-out worker ant going from nest to nest looking for queens. But sometimes … sometimes you want to try to follow that mystery up through the main vein and back to the source.
She wonders if it’s because at this minute she feels like a hooker again, sitting beside some trick with his squat answers but willing to pay for trade. No judgments, of course.
Maybe it’s that. But maybe it’s the child. Maybe seeing herself in the deep past is envisioning the child in the foreseeable future. Maybe imagining it that way will keep her angry and hateful. And she can use that diseased hate to give her the zealot’s strength she needs to cut the demon down to size.
Maybe it’s that. She hopes it’s that.
“You a good Christian fellow, Hightower?”
Bob reaches for a cigarette in his shirt pocket.
“Are you?”
He taps the edge of it on the dash, packing it down. “I guess.”
“You guess? You don’t know if you’re a good Christian fellow?”
There’s a tone to “good Christian fellow.”
“What’s the point?” he says.
“Well, Mr. Good Christian Fellow. You ought to thank that god of yours.”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah. You see, if it wasn’t for my lack of character, I wouldn’t have been where I was. Experiencing what I did. Screwing up all the way. And so I wouldn’t be able to be here now, trying to help you. How do you like it with that spin?”
He lights his cigarette. It’s a question he doesn’t have an answer for. An apology would be simple enough, but that’s not in the cards.
THE RITE OF TRANSITION
16
Case pushes the Dakota pickup out Route 138, Palmdale Boulevard, and then they take the hard turn on Route 15, heading northeast to Barstow.
“Where are we goin’?”
“The desert. To see the guy who’s gonna dress us for the party. But you don’t say anything about what we’re doin’.”
“No …”
“No. You leave that to me. You see, this guy, he knows Cyrus, too.”
They drive up through Barstow in silence.
The Dakota is just body primer puttied over a shell of ripples and bumps, but Bob can hear the engine’s been bored out and has plenty of muscle, and when Case drives her boot against the accelerator the chassis snaps forward like a buffed halfback.
“Nice truck.”
“Yeah. I’d li
ke to own one like it someday.”
As Bob glances at Case, he can see she’s grinning slightly.
“Don’t tell me,” he says.
“No, sir, Mr. Hightower, sir. It ain’t hot, sir. A little warm maybe, but not hot.”
At the Calico Road exit the ruins of the old mine form a wind wall along the hogback. A brown one-dimensional world pitted against the sun. She follows Paradise Springs Road. It’s spotted with shacks and cinder-block pit stops for liquor. There are billboards and abandoned Dumpsters. The ground is marked by coyote prints and dirt-bike tracks. What is left of a neon sign is now just a metal rim framing a few chevrons of white plastic. It rises up on a pole, in a lot where only the cement-block foundation of someone’s hard work is left to tell the tale.
“Ravens,” she says.
Bob has been watching all that passes out the window. He turns, and she motions with her chin toward the Dumpsters.
A small communal roost sits in a crafty lineup along the rim of a Dumpster. In the dry haze of afternoon they look like black and purple shapes painted there, watching.
“I was reading a book about Indians,” remarks Case. “In myths of a lot of tribes in the West, the raven created the world. He was interesting, that raven. ’Cause he was both creator and trickster. This trickster, he’s sort of like God with an edge, or at least a sense of humor. Would do as he pleased. The book said the raven created mosquitoes ’cause man had it too easy. Fuckin’ A. I wonder if he created Demerol to cut the edge off all them mosquito bites.
“I read a lot since I got off junk. It helps keep me … occupied. You know what I mean? Helps keep away the hot burns that go on inside my head. In this book it said at first the raven made man out of rock. But he was too durable. So, raven, he turned around and remade man out of dust. What a joker, huh?
“I’m not into that god-myth dance,” she says. “But the dust part …”
He says nothing, just watches those bristly crows lined up along the Dumpster like a scale of notes and thinks to himself, We better be more durable than dust.
The Dakota moves like a sloop over the dunes. Its tires spin out clay pinwheels on what may miserably be called a road. Then, upon one wave of sand, gloating there in the sun like some ephemeral gatepost at the frontier, is the Ferryman’s.
“Un-American Airlines, arriving on schedule,” says Case.
Bob sits up in his seat to get a better look. Ahead, a dark tangle of slatboard and tin and cinder blocks stolen from a thousand piles of refuse along the road. A sort of Quonset castle around a shiny trailer. An alchemist’s kingdom of scraps and draff.
As the Dakota circles the front yard, the Ferryman’s dogs come lunging out from between shadows and behind shrubs of cholla and worn couches. They charge the pickup, barking and snarling at the tires. When it stops, they press the doors with their front paws, scraping the metal. They lean in toward the windows with wet, white teeth to make their point. Bob sits back, but Case leans right into them, snarling and laughing and calling each by name.
Bob hears a voice from behind the truck ordering the dogs down. He turns.
Out of the rippling shadow of the tarp awning, the Ferryman steps into the daylight. He’s wearing a smock kaftan made of an old gray striped sheet and jean shorts and cowboy boots. They’re white alligator skin, scarred from the brush. His skin has a glossy chocolate shine. As he comes hitching forward with his prosthetic arm and leg, and those dogs whirling around him, he’s like some biomechanical entity.
“You just be cool now, okay?” she says to Bob.
“I’ll play my part.”
“Right.”
Case comes high-stepping out of the pickup. “Ferryman.”
“Girl.”
He slips that claw and arm around her and slides the claw up along her ass. They kiss and his tongue takes a little turn inside her mouth. He steps back, looks at her arms.
“You kept up with the living, heh, girl?”
“Just call me Little Miss Sunshine.”
“Ready for prime time?”
“Sign me up.”
She eyes the place. “I see you redecorated.”
“As long as there’s people and garbage, I’m in business.”
They flash on each other a little longer. Do a real surfacy rap about “the old days.” Then the Ferryman checks out Bob, who has been pretty much a snapshot in the background.
“What do they call this?”
“They call this … Bob. His last name will be whatever is on his new ID.”
“Hey, Bob Whatever.”
Bob comes forward. “Hi.” He puts out his hand to shake. The Ferryman has no interest in it.
“Did you get me some armor?” asks Case.
“I got a whole toy store for you to choose from.”
“Same place?”
He nods.
Case heads for the old pine-wood trunk lumped up in the shadows against the side of the trailer.
“Shall I do his ID first?”
“Decal work first.” She runs her fingers up her arm. “I want some shit with real bite, too. No street-shop shit.”
Bob starts to get an idea what Case is talking about, and it’s something she hadn’t discussed with him. He watches the Ferryman slide into the recess under the awning. Bob comes closer and sees him maneuvering a bar on wheels toward an easy chair. The bar has been fitted out as a portable tattoo artist’s studio pallet.
The Ferryman checks Bob out. “You got some nice WASP skin there, Bob Whatever. This ink is gonna kiss you good.”
It’s not something he’d counted on. He finds tattoos classless and unsightly. A sort of permanent defilement. Bob goes over to Case. She has the trunk open and is handling a number of semiautomatics and revolvers that are laid out on the top shelf.
“I need to talk to you.”
“Sure.”
“I thought we were coming here for guns.”
She points down at the row of weapons. “What are those?”
He leads her a few steps off and speaks lower so the Ferryman won’t hear. “But what’s the point of this tattoo shit? I don’t want to look like some—”
“That is the point.”
He goes to speak; she cuts him off. “Hear me now. Suppose come Sunday I went with you down to your nice little Paradise Hills Church. And I sit next to you looking just like I am now. You think I might get a few stares? You think most minds wouldn’t be made up space-shuttle fast about me? You think I got zero survival rate in that social club of theirs? Well, you’re walking into a different church now. And it’s just as bigoted as yours. Only they won’t kill with looks. And you don’t look like you’d be with me. Now, the Ferryman ain’t gonna turn you into a walking art show. But you got to show.”
Bob breathes a long dry sigh. He watches the Ferryman set up shop.
“Why didn’t you tell me this before, on the way out here?”
“ ’Cause I didn’t want to have this discussion more than once.”
“Well, I don’t like surprises.”
“Then don’t be surprised by anything.”
“Don’t fuck with me this way.”
He turns and walks away. She kneels down and starts to check out the weapons. The bum’s rush hits her full force. A real gut gashing. The whole fucking nine yards of heart plunder. She can imagine the juice going up her arm, she can feel its warmth. She can smell the heat coming off the needle and the backs of her arms going limp with cherry bumps.
She holds herself together by holding the trunk, by staring at the weapons, by conjuring the blood they’ll spend. The fucking anxiety comes out of nowhere. Out of nowhere … shit!
Just breathe. Don’t negative-think the whole thing with this Bob Whatever goin’ south into Crapperville. Just breathe.
17
John Lee passes the morning with a number of other prominent law enforcement officers from the northern and western valley towns. They are together at a news conference in a show of force to back up Chie
f Randy Adams of Simi Valley.
The previous week at a city council meeting, Chief Adams had asked for tighter restrictions on handguns sold in Simi Valley. He’d asked that the applicants pass mental exams, get fingerprinted, and buy a million dollars in life insurance. The NRA, which was represented by its own show of force, booed and catcalled rudely at such anti-American ideas. After all, this is the nation of The Deerslayer, Darwinism, and Disney’s Davy Crockett.
All this had started because a Simi Valley councilwoman named Sandi Webb, a pro-gun zealot, had been lobbying for the city to make it easier for residents to arm themselves.
The whole series of incidents had become a public relations nightmare for the quiet little bedroom community. It didn’t help matters that Ms. Webb was known to travel to Los Angeles armed with a gun and that in Washington she had politely flipped off Senator Feinstein at a discussion over the assault weapons ban.
John Lee’s speech is his usual taciturn, slim-volumed lecture. The stubborn party line on gun control and stiffer legal sentencing that falls from the lips of every U.S. chief of police and head of a sheriff’s department. Afterward, reporters draw John Lee into a question-and-answer party about the Via Princessa murders.
The reporters beat him up pretty good, looking for some fresh quote for the six o’clock news, but all they end up with is a lot of slippery jargon. Before leaving to drive home, John Lee goes into the bathroom and, seeing he’s alone, pukes. He may be able to hold the truth down, but for his belly it’s a tougher slide.
John Lee is slugging down his second Greyhound when Arthur shows up at his house.
“Talking about the power of positive thinking,” John Lee says. “I was getting ready to call you. I felt like gettin’ loaded. You want a drink?”
“No, thanks.”
John Lee is sloppily making toward the living room. “Don’t say no. Please.”
John Lee always did get stiff easy. It wasn’t a point of pride with him, but …
