by Boston Teran
There’s just too much her, between her and her furniture and her music, so he goes over and shuts the radio off.
“I was listening to that.”
“You better watch your mouth tonight, you piece of rank clit. I’m in no mood.”
“I’d divorce you, John Lee, but I’d have to give up half the money I earned and then I wouldn’t get the pleasure of grinding your guts into the ground a little at a time.”
He shoots his drink down. That liquor wash he can feel right up into his pecs.
Maureen continues. “You don’t know how many times we’re at a social function, a party, a wedding, one of the many trivial pursuits we have to do together … You don’t know how many … Oh, let’s not forget church! Especially at church! Especially there! I’ll just sit and wonder while they’re giving out the communion wafer how many different ways there are you could possibly die of cancer.”
John Lee’s eyes have slipped toward the picture of Gabi and Sarah and Sam. Ultimately they lock onto Sam. It is like walking down the hallway of a terrible scream trailing to an end. A cocky smile no more, Sammy boy, he thinks. Even though repelled by the horror of it, by his complicity in it and the fear that it brought home, there is a blood-soaked spot in the white core of his being, a moral mischief knowing Mr. Cocky got it bad. John Lee gains a humiliating, morbid pleasure, imagining he could beam himself into the moment when the letter opener was picked through Sam’s tongue and he could whisper in Sammy boy’s ear, No more lickin’ clit. Not with that mouth.
The blood rush goes right to John Lee’s tongue. He shoves his glass hand in Maureen’s direction. “Say what you want, but you’re not gonna humiliate me anymore like you did with Sammy boy.”
For an instant, she is caught off guard. There is a touch of irony to John Lee’s presence, in the way he seems to knowingly relax within his own fury.
“You think I don’t know about you using that managerial job crap to bait your humps. You think I don’t know. A little pepper last year, a little salt this year. Bob ain’t the next in line.”
His tone becomes threatening. “Consider yourself lucky.”
“What does that mean?”
“What does that mean?” he mocks.
“You heard me.”
“Maureen, you could end up with your own personal Jack the Ripper slitting that sagging neck of yours!”
“Fuck you!”
He screams now, his voice cracking: “Don’t fuckin’ push it.”
“Why don’t you crawl back in your study and get yourself off?” she says nervously, but not willing to back down. “You know what I mean? At least I don’t have to bring my humps home in a brown paper bag so I can watch little boys with their mouths—”
He goes for her. It is all an absurd blur. White knuckles tearing at a train of black hair. Her arm wheels across the bar, taking out shaker and ice. He goes to drag her from the bar. She evades his grip, tries to run, half stumbles, one high heel does a somersault away from a falling leg.
He’s on her quick. His hands dig into her face. “Come on, smart-ass. Come on, humiliate me now! Come on.”
One of his hands flies free, whipsaws back, and cracks her so hard in the face her jaw snaps and her teeth click hard.
A half turn and she sees herself in a wall mirror. Her face is the color of salt and spotted with blood. She tries to spit some of the blood from her mouth into his face but misses, and he hits her again.
She goes down and tries to crawl away, but he puts his knees against her spine. Gasping, she tries to hide her face. He hauls back an arm and aims at the bones in the side of her face with an open hand. His arm is moving scythewise and inside his head all he can think of is beating that face till it looks like a piece of spoiled meat, when he flashes on …
The gas-bloated frame that bore the woman, unrecognizable. The skin where it had burst apart and the open lesions rank with maggots leeching pink-brown muscle. The bullet wound to the side of the skull that left shards of bone with blood and brain jelly trailing up the wall like the spanning wings of a bird.
It has become an indelible part of his subconscious. It taints him and sears thoughts he has not yet had, poisoning the well of innocence, if any such well ever existed within him at all.
His arm stops. He stands. She lies there conscious but not moving. Her mouth forms small bites of words. Her eye lifts a bit and locks onto John Lee swaying there above her.
24
Come morning Bob and Case are racing through the asphalt nervous system of the southland toward San Diego. The shoreline has a splash of red tide in it, and small pockets of smog are collecting over the last wetlands that face the freeway. It’s only spring, so summer ought to be a double dose of nasty this year.
They’re both still pretty tight, watching for the blue boys. Bob sips at a piggyback-size double coffee. “Tell me about Cyrus.”
Case sits there in the shotgun seat with her arm hanging out the window like some spent trucker. “Chaos,” she says.
She doesn’t say a thing more. “That’s it?” Bob asks.
“Isn’t that enough?”
He starts to make a sound like a question but she cuts him off. “I hear ya,” she says. “You want to get into that inner person crap.”
“I just want to try and get a handle on him, is all.”
“Well, I’ll give you a taste. I’ll give it to you like he would, except for the little flourishes of psycho poetics he wraps it up in. Yeah …”
She lets her head lean against the door frame, lets the wind take a run at her.
“Yeah,” Case says again, only this time with the cold-handed touch of someone fielding a proposition they aren’t interested in.
“Our boy was a junkie. He was also a pimp and a shooter and a prostitute. He was a small-time field hand for the straight and narrow boys. Selling all their goods. Doing all that bow-down time.
“Well, somewhere in that book of his, I don’t know which chapter and verse … You see, when he got hold of me I hadn’t quite started to bleed yet and he was maybe twenty-six, twenty-seven. But somewhere before me he found the Left-Handed Path. That’s what they call it. The Left-Handed Path.
“Whatever happened to him, I mean, however it really happens, as no one in their true mind ever knows, he put enough oven cleaner inside that brain of his and it was the end of the cloud master. Instant radicalization.
“He had the purpose after that. The focus. Zen boogie in shades of black. He saw the clear light. I know I’m mocking a bit, but …”
She takes a cigarette from her T-shirt pocket. She’s two hours up and half a pack in.
“It got him off junk. I wasn’t there, but I know some who were. The Ferryman … he saw it go down. Said Cyrus locked himself in that old trailer I pointed out to you. The one back at the Ferryman’s. Over the other side of that hill.”
Bob nods and for a stretch of moments notes a slick of red tide reflected under the sun. He recalls all the blood in last night’s dream.
“Locked himself in that trailer,” says Case. “Like some Indian sweat lodge trip. They said he did it cold. And in one straight blow. In that grisly wrecked trailer. With summer dead on that metal roof. Nothing to perk him. Not methadone, not Robaxin. Nothing. Whatever was in that head of his had anchored him.”
Bob grows anxious watching that red tide. He thinks about Sarah and what the dream could have meant.
“Thinking on it,” says Case, “maybe I know what was in that head of his. Hatred. Hatred is the right strength oven cleaner to put in your brain and do the job.”
“You talking about him, or you?”
Her head flicks to one side. “I don’t know. I don’t know where I start and he leaves off sometimes.”
She sits back in the seat trying to feel the hard of it somewhere within her conscious self, trying for some pitiful small spot to ground her against the moving car as it winds through miles. Sitting there talking about Cyrus, the depth of the confrontation they’re driving toward su
ddenly unfolds in front of her. She starts to get a little anxious and light-headed, and her voice is tremulous and angry in the same wave. “Cyrus, fuck. He is darkness at the break of noon, Bob Whatever.” Her teeth look sharp against her pinched mouth. “He is the scream from a silent razor across your throat,” she adds. “He wants to make insurrection happen. He believes in breeding corruption like people breed dogs. Defilement. Seeing families suffer. That’s all the mojo in his head. Mankind has to go down. It’s the burning wreck of a fuckin’ bullshit middle-class Titanic and he is Captain Rhythm Stick putting it up their ass. That’s why he is so dangerous. Death looks good to him. It’s part of the prize. He’s like those freaks who find Jesus.”
Bob sneers at the insult of that comparison.
She counters, “If you’re gonna try and put him into some capsule review of a psychotic, you’re using your shirt collar as a dicksleeve.”
He sneers again.
“As mad as you think he is, there’s motive behind him. That’s why I believe he didn’t go into that house for nothing. Didn’t take … your kid … for nothing. He’s not a psychotic. You don’t see it right. His religion, like all religion, is politics.”
“Politics?”
“The politics of the what I want versus what you want.”
“It isn’t politics,” he says. “It isn’t religion. No fuckin’ way. What it is, is plain old-fashioned butchery.”
The great one-eyed hunchback camera painted on his shoulder starts to hulk up in the angry muscles that give the gearbox a hard kick. “And I want you to remember that’s my … was my wife back there. And I don’t want to hear comparisons about …”
Case gets aggravated. “You asked the question. I laid down an answer.”
“Some answer. It sounds like you’re trying to make a case for him.”
“Good choice of words.”
He doesn’t catch the humor in her comment. Instead, he goes after her: “The way you talk is the disease of the times. You compare religion to that mojo. The world has become a secular comparison nightmare.
“Religion is not any of that. Not any of it. It is the unmoved truth that all principles spin out from. It is a moment of attainment. It is faith in being; it is being in faith.
“It all disgusts me so. There’s only two real ways to handle this. What you can’t clean up in the family, you clear up with a jury. What you can clear up in the family, you won’t have to clean up with a jury. End of story.”
She sits there like someone not interested in what the salesman is selling.
“If they did it right,” he says, “the streets wouldn’t be such scrap heaps of humanity with every kind of …”
Her look stops him. A look that is prowling his comments for the comment to come, waiting for his point, which is her.
“What you mean,” she points out, “is an atheistic, ex-junkie, bisexual piece of scrap heap humanity like myself.”
He watches road signs instead of answering.
“You’re a real clit dryer, Bob Whatever, you know that?”
Bob whistles, shakes his head. “They got you pretty good, didn’t they?”
“I wouldn’t use the word ‘pretty’ and I wouldn’t use the word ‘good.’ ”
She kicks off her boots and brings her bare feet up. She rests them on the dashboard. She pulls her jeans up a bit to scratch her foot, and Bob can see tattooed around her ankle a kind of artful shackle.
“Your boy cleaned up his act, but he kept all his troops junkies, didn’t he?”
“He sure did.”
“Talk about the mojo. He worked your heads pretty good, didn’t he? But I guess you can find a comparison for that, too. It’s all religion, philosophy. Right?”
She knelt in the dust at the Ferryman’s, collapsed under her own weight, twisted to one side like a broken squeeze box, tendrils of blood stretching out like liquid mercury from the corners of her mouth. Cyrus circled her, the ultimate ringmaster over the unfortunate creature. She was panting, groggy.
The weight of her head on her neck almost too much to hold, her weaving shadow made her dizzy, dizzier as small red gems broke free from the tendriled blood. Small red gems that hit the dust and jellied like a glass eye. She stared at the small bloodlets collecting dust and in each she saw a little girl. The one that was, the one that was to pass away. She could see herself curled up inside those small red umbrellas collecting dust. And she remembered the other little girl curled up inside the carcass of a dead beast.
How one life can be killed so many times is the question. She looks out the window, scans the blue and silver glass buildings that wink with sun, the harbor with its gray boats built for saluting, the bridge over to Coronado with its seaside swells. It’s just a blanket of picture-postcard existence that seems literally thrown over the land. Just some great human theme-park ride that has no bearing on her feelings. She is like a tube of flesh inside a straightjacket skin.
“He didn’t work our heads,” she says. “I wish I could say he did. It wasn’t his charisma or chemistry, not his power or power of prophecy. You could blame him like you blame Hitler or Jim Jones or Rasputin or Charlie Manson for the crimes of their coolies, but it’d be a fraud.”
She leans around, all disheveled and tired and wearing a long-sleeved shirt that her anxiety has sweated through, leaving her armpits and back targeted by huge stains.
“The truth is worse. A hole looks into a hole and sees itself and looks full. I was, once upon a time, a junkie waiting to happen. And I happened upon the right ringmaster, who had a magic needle. And I bowed before the magic needle—that was my devil—so when I got low enough I could make a god out of it.
“The devil, which is only an idea, is an excuse for evil. A philosophy, if you will. Just as God, the idea of God, is just an excuse for good. They’re the fuckin’ needle, God and Devil, and they’re waiting for junkies like you and me to happen.”
He listens to this windfall with a kind of blasted-out certainty of at least one simple idea. “Words don’t define what faith allows,” he says. He runs his hand through his hair and turns his full attention back to the road. “I’ll keep my faith, you keep the rest.”
“Remember something else,” she adds. “From Simi Valley all the way out to that nice little three-bedroom community of yours, you’d be surprised how many of God’s children, who talk just like you, are smoking or snorting or shooting some chemist’s handiwork the ringmaster brought them. You’d be surprised how many would be swapping sexual organs if they could.”
The cop in Bob asks the question: “The ringmaster? You mean Cyrus?”
She nods. “He worked that valley of yours better than your councilmen.”
“You know that?”
“Know it. Seen it. Done it.”
25
They run east on 94 toward Baja and the border.
It’s cigarettes and long throws of silence. Outside Jamul, Case takes over driving. At a rest stop, they pass each other around the hot running engine like two prizefighters between rounds. The towns east of Jamul have that eaten-up-by-poverty look, their main streets little more than boarded-up breakers trying to keep back the sand and sweep of Mexico.
Their plan is to check out Jacumba Airport, which is out beyond the Carizzo Gorge. Errol Grey keeps a small plane there when he flies down from Mojave to work the border. Somewhere along that pearl string of truck stops and bars, Errol Grey and Cyrus will have a date to talk about filling up their Christmas stockings.
Bob sits behind the dark of his closed eyes, evaluating the particulars of the dream and attending feelings of something forgotten, jump-cutting to the new information of Cyrus dealing in Antelope Valley and him breaking his habit in that old trailer by the Ferryman’s. And what about that remark of Case’s right before the Ferryman wandered by, when she pointed to the trailer and told him that’s where the Furnace Creek murder took place?
Was Cyrus in junior high or high school when the murder went down?
/> “What do you know about the Furnace Creek murder?”
It is the first thing said to Case in over an hour. She doesn’t even look at Bob as she says, “Not much really. Only what Cyrus told me.”
“What did he tell you?”
“He told me he murdered the ‘nigger bitch.’ ”
Bob comes up in his seat, waits for her to continue, but she doesn’t.
“That’s it?”
“That’s it.”
“Nothing more?”
“If there was, it wasn’t gonna be me that asked. I got one throat and I wasn’t about to have it cut.”
In the afternoon, Bob and Case eat at the Campo Food Station, which is within rifleshot of the entrance to the Campo and Manzanita Indian Reservations. No speculators dream here. It’s just a pothole of cheap siding painted pink, with a single exhaust fan in the center of the ten-by-ten dining room that pulls out every conceivable stretch of living air but leaves behind the rank perfume of the disinfectant used to hose down the brick floor.
“You say he killed the old woman, then he went back all those years later to get off junk? He went back to the same place. Why? What was in his head?”
Case sips at a bowl of beef broth. Since she got off junk, that’s about all her stomach can usually get down before dark.
“What difference? It won’t tell you where he is now. And now is what matters.”
Bob shifts away from her comment. He sits picking at his food and thinking. At the table behind them facing Case is a carload of maquiladoras chicking away in Spanish. Case listens and watches these borderland girls who are panning for the gold of room and board and a sleepwalker’s wages in the fenced-off factories of the Zona Industrial. Even with their teased hair and faces powdered they look to be all of seventeen, full of long hopes and short budgets.
All except one. She seems older. Case notices that she has the crinkled look of a decade more of laydowns and she listens to her friends’ high-pitched clutter as if she knows that plans are just a disappointment in the making.
The older one’s eyes drift from face to face, only remotely pulled along by their conversation. A sort of night-eyed silence that seems to live quietly outside anything real. In that moment, Case sees Lena. Sees her sketched in faint moves the woman makes. The wild exhausted girl she had shared nights and needles with.
