by Boston Teran
She rolls the shirtsleeve back and tries to shake down the burning.
“Now, nobody but some airhead will believe I’m a shooter without checking me out like Errol did. And that’s just for starters. Especially with an albatross like you hanging around my neck. Those fuckers might want to test me with a load. You understand? You understand!”
“So you can’t just tell me all this right off …”
“No way.”
“You don’t trust me at all.”
“I’ve seen you in action. Trust. Ahhhh … to do the right thing at the right time. You don’t know the drill. Act like you’re shocked, Bob Whatever, when somebody rolls up my sleeve, ’cause most of the guys like Errol will know the only reason I’m with a dicksleeve like you is money. Money. That’s it.”
Bob leans back in his seat. Case licks at the little bit of blood on her lip. Tenaciously keeps shaking her arm.
“Also, I knew. I knew you’d act the way you did. That in your head if you’d see this”—she raises her arm and presses it toward his face—“you’d think right away I was a liar. Just like you did! You’d play it perfect as a stooge. Who don’t trust who? Who don’t trust who!”
“So test my ass—”
“So mine don’t get wasted. Right on.”
She gets out of the car, leans against the hood, lights a cigarette.
Some street trooper with gang emblems passes with a pit bull in harness. The dog muscles low and tigerish and smells at Case’s jeans while the trooper looks her over.
Case talks to the guy through the dog. “Nothing up there for you, babe.” The trooper hears her alright, but as he keeps on he gives her crotch the long look-see.
Bob comes out of the car, his shadow converging onto hers within the war circle of the lamplight. “Somebody throws you a lifeline,” he says, “and you don’t like the color of the rope so you throw it back.”
She folds her arms, blows smoke out her nostrils in contempt at such rhetoric. “You’re strictly the missionary position.”
He starts again. “Don’t you see me as guilty? No? Aren’t I worth the benefit of the doubt? I should trust you but you shouldn’t trust me?”
“You prove that about every ten minutes.”
“For a person who believes in nothing, then at least all things must be equal in their nothingness. I must be as equal as you in some barren hole somewhere. Or is there some pecking order to your nothingness? What was that you said the night we talked about going. That night in the field behind my house. ‘You don’t send sheep to hunt wolves.’ And I’m one of the sheep and you’re one of the wolves.”
“Strictly the missionary position.”
“You lie to me so you can get me to react a certain way, then you hold me in contempt for it. Shit.”
“The missionary position and not a trick more.”
“Is that a slogan or just venom? You want to control other people’s lives ’cause you can’t control your own. And remember something else, the last time I looked there were more sheep than wolves.”
“The last time you looked would be just that, the last time you looked.”
“I’m looking at you. At you! Through the banality of your cheap whore tricks and lies.”
She flicks her cigarette in his face. Without so much as a cue. Spits of red ash star across his nose and eye. His face muscles react sharply, his hand comes up quickly, trying to pad away the burning ember.
He jabs his finger at some ephemeral mark between her eyes. “I know why you’re here,” he whispers. “I know. And you’ve lied to me in the worst way of all.”
She stands there waiting, facing off with him.
“I know.” He comes forward, grabs her shirt, roughs her with a hard tug. “ ‘I’ll help him get her back. Otherwise, if we get close enough, maybe Cyrus will kill her quick.’ Right?”
Case’s head bends back uncomfortably at hearing her private words come back to her this way.
“Didn’t you tell that to the therapist back at the halfway house? What’s her name? Before you left. You think we didn’t talk? You think something like that would be left unspoken?”
Bob is all teeth and quiet tones, with a touch of guns behind the eyes.
It flushes them out of the amber streetlight. Puts them behind the crosshairs of a high beam like hunted doves. Bob and Case lock. They turn. A police cruiser has pulled up and taken dead aim at them.
That chilling cop stare on a bed of ice words: “Everything alright?”
The guns they’re hiding feel like weights that could sink you down to the Titanic. They shuffle apart.
“Everything alright?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Yes.”
The light moves up, then down, stripping them. Cars slow. Drivers take the look. Bob and Case lean into each other.
“Move along now. And if we see any more of this ‘foreplay’ we’ll do a little spot-checking. Understand?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Yes.”
The searchlight goes off.
They quietly gather themselves and get into the Dakota. Case hands Bob the keys. He sits a moment watching the cruiser take a right and start a long trek around the park.
“I did say that,” she says.
He wipes at the burns on his face. “I brought it up to make my own point.”
“If she had to go through what I …”
He hisses, “Don’t speak of it. Don’t. I can imagine it all.”
She had been buried behind a bush under a piece of plywood. The police had been led to her grave as easily as one is led to a 7-Eleven. She was two months into serious ground time. A third-degree turn of postmortem special effects. Pathetic, deformed, swollen, rotted death. The body as it truly was, devoid of water, of life. A filthy corpuscle that once housed laughter and love and longings. No ice-cream sky. Now, just truth devoid of mystery. Bob could only think of Gabi as he looked down at the forensic pictures of Polly Klaas.
They had been circulated by brother officers up the state line. A tactical adrenaline reminder of who and what they were fighting. A hot line to ensure the right level of hate in a holy war.
Bob leans back against the truck door. “The child’s face was full of wormholes. Madness. I had blood coming up from my throat I cried so hard.”
She turns to face a man being smashed between what-ifs.
“I’ve seen on your face the kind of pain I felt. I’ve seen it in your eyes when you talk about Cyrus and what went down. And I’ve seen more than that in your eyes. And I wonder if my baby will have that look in her eyes when we find her. I came with you knowing that part of you may want her dead. You understand?”
Case feels her throat begin to close up on her, and she holds her upper lip in place by using the clamp of her lower teeth against it. She can taste the blood from where he rammed his elbow into her mouth. She rests her head on the dashboard.
“Oh, fuck … We’re in the middle of some huge wound, Bob. Some huge wound and it feels like it’s getting bigger and bigger.”
He watches as the police car takes another slow right and begins running parallel to them on the far side of the park.
“If they’re coming back this way, it won’t be long.”
“Errol told me Cyrus is supposed to be here by tomorrow. The latest, the day after. He’s gonna arrange a little homecoming for me.”
“After listening to him talk, why would he be willing to do that? Money?”
“No such fuckin’ luck. He wants to see if I can grovel my way out of a good blooding.”
30
Case and Bob set up camp in the Dakota about a block off the park. They sleep in the truck, taking shifts watching the hotel. They work the streets around the Pioneer, moving up and down the dark scrim of alleyways. A desert wind carries past the border stations the muggy dust of the factories in Gonzales Ortega. The day passes inconclusively; the night just passes.
Case wakes screaming and covered with sweat. She is alone
in the pickup, pressed against the closed window. A small moon of foggy glass flares with each clipped breath.
Lena turned her flashlight on and up toward the stony roof of the cave. The branches of the acacia trees beyond the entrance dipped in the wind of a damp night.
“I wanted to bring you here,” Lena said, “to share this with you.”
Case let her flashlight beam follow Lena’s along the smoky rock to a painted red sun circled by black, then white. It was done with brushes made from animals’ tails.
“That’s supposed to be the time of the sun’s eclipse,” Lena said. “It was painted by some Chumash shaman. Eclipses were important events in their lives.”
The stone kept them side by side, huddled up like children of the running streams who bore out their gifts on the rock a thousand years back. Further up, on the painted rim of the universe, Lena pointed out a turtle and a bird borne together. Simple etchings done in red and black.
“Beautiful,” said Case.
“I see them as us.”
“How do you figure?”
“You’re the bird,” Lena whispered. “You have the ability to fly. To overcome. And me, well … I can only hide inside my shell.”
With the ancient ways and rights about them, it was a sad lingering moment that brought Case’s hand to Lena’s.
“I may not be as strong as you think,” said Case.
Lena kisses her. “But I’m weaker than you know.”
The dust of centuries hung in the floating cast of a moment’s light.
The second day passes in the slow waste of waiting. The third is no better. It’s all noose-making time, but around whose neck? Bob goes out and buys two cellular phones from a chooch shop that specializes in low-end tech equipment. The place is run by an Iranian woman who still keeps a picture of the Shah above the cash register. He signs up for some hatchet-priced service plan, then loads and locks in a couple of numbers so he and Case can stay in constant touch when they’re separated. They stay out of the Pioneer as much as possible, since Errol is growing short-tempered that Cyrus hasn’t shown. Case finds something that resembles a hotel room in a second-story walk-up with windows facing an alley that looks up toward the Pioneer. The place reeks of fumigation.
Day four is like death. Case and Bob hang in the park by a rock with a plaque on it that marks this as the site of Camp Salvation. Some bald old Russian Jew with skin the color of pus recites for them the history of this forgotten square. How poor travelers coming off the parched eskers of the Yuma desert collapsed here. They had wrestled the waterless waste to a standstill only to find themselves without supplies, and without water, in some uninhabited wilderness. Unable to go on, they lit fires and they prayed. They prayed and they stoked fires. Two days later, trappers and Digger Indians came down from Mount Signal to discover the meaning behind those fires.
The old man points to the only piece of rock within view climbing off the plat of gravel desert floor. “That’s Mount Signal,” he says. “The border goes right through it.”
The night of the fourth day is spent in a Chinese restaurant. One of the two surviving shops in a ten-slot strip mall. The food is dirt cheap. The music, phony white-bread country. Most of the dinner crowd is border Latin. A couple of truckers reminisce about Baton Rouge in a constant slapping together of beer bottles. Migrants all off that selfsame windblown esker of the interstate.
Case is moody, spends half of dinner sleeking chopsticks through a dead salad with shrimp. As if on cue, she pushes her food aside and begins to tell him of her life since that day Cyrus stole her off the street. She spares nothing. She makes no excuses. She asks for no sympathy. She spells out each disaster and desire in disturbing detail. She is like some witness in the court of the dead, guiding the prosecutor through the black land of plenty.
She tells him in fierce detail about the dentist in Orange County, with his white golf shoes and white golf pants, whom Cyrus took down in a blood coup. How she had been working the windows as his watchman. The cold eyes of warning. She explains how the facts of that dentist’s murder matched up with those in the pictures he’d shown her of the Via Princessa murders, from the paralytic injected into the victim to the twentieth enigma of the Tarot tagged on his chest. She remembers the town, but not the man’s name.
As they walk the street after dinner, Case spins out the story of her life with Lena. From the first time they made love in the back of a filthy van to the bleak bloodletting of being beaten half to death and left unconscious to perish in an irrigation ditch.
To the east, above the Cargo Muchacho Mountains, flumes of lightning stretch across a brandy-colored sky. Case shows Bob the picture she stole from the Ferryman’s album. Explains how Lena dates kills on her hand. Points out the ink art on a finger—12/21/95. She points out another date, two dates back on Lena’s hand. The date that the dentist crossed over.
It begins to rain. They run under the Romanesque archway of a boarded-up Italian restaurant. They smoke and watch the street as the rain gutters fill and the vigas flood.
She tells him about Gutter and Granny Boy. She fills him in on their family histories, crimes she knows they’ve committed, places they frequent. She leaves out nothing she was a party to with any of them. In the act of trying to bare herself, she is also trying as best she can to build a case on which the others could be caught and taken down by him alone should something happen to her.
He listens and understands. And when she finishes, neither speaks.
She leans against one of the plaster columns that brace the entranceway. Bob eyes her quietly. She is not wearing a long-sleeved shirt, and as the passing headlights rush into the well of the entranceway they flare against that path up the white of her arms.
It is a muggy and deplorable night, even with the rain, that allows Case’s shirt to play like the damp veil of some vestal sculpture. She begins to take on a strange elemental quality. Like the distant blue luminescence of the desert floor before the moon is full.
Case turns to him. Embarrassed, his eyes flit away, then come back. She points out the searchlights of the border guards on Mount Signal. They are swarming the rocky atoll like catch dogs. Some poor illegal is probably using the rain to try to make the run.
Bob leans against the other plaster column. And there together they watch the hunt along the mountain. An image in absolutes. Like guards on the face of some great shield at the entrance to eternity. And in the distance the searchlights climb and converge till eventually they are just the remains of heavenly stars caught in the sweep of the stone. Then they are gone.
Bob leaves Case in the alley behind their hotel room. In the doorway beneath the fire escape she thanks him for listening and not casting judgments.
Because of the rain he heads back to the bar at the Pioneer to wait and see if anyone shows up to do their little mating dance with Errol. The band that was practicing drives it home to a packed house. Either the rain or the music, or both, has gathered them all up tonight. It’s a real touch of urban voodoo. Rednecks and factory hands and chickies with their skirts hiked up. There’s your basic tabletop drunks and hotheaded rockers. But Errol Grey is nowhere to be found in that choked hole. Bob scans the room again, going from face to face, knowing that somewhere out there is the right freak with the right history.
He kills two beers with tequila chasers. He keeps flashing on Case leaning against that column. He looks in the mirror behind the bar. Five days without shaving, sleeveless shirt wet and dirty, his mustache drooping over his lip. He keeps staring at himself. It is just then, as he is walking among the not-quite-yets of his mind, that he hears a voice say, “Nice fuckin’ artwork.”
Bob turns to face a kid who’s not more than twenty and looks like he was processed out of some angry white rebel tribe. Studded collar. A heavy dose of battered leathers and silver highlighted by an earlobe that has been cut away, leaving just a ring of flesh into which a silver-dollar-sized candle has been wedged and lit.
“Tal
k about a gothic ride on paint fumes,” the kid says. His fingers dance over Bob’s shoulder tattoo. Bob plays it all laid back. The kid keeps checking out the artwork and sucking away on a Corona. They do a few turns around a couple of sentences. Nothing spectacular.
Then Bob notices something in the freak’s palms. At first it looks like he’s holding a piece of red cloth in each hand. But when the kid puts his beer down to mooch a butt, Bob notices that the red cloth has been stitched in place, and painted on it is a white A with a circle around it.
Gutter comes sliding through a pack of beer hounds and up to Wood, and they go screw to screw with a head butt as if Bob didn’t even exist.
“Come on, slash hunkie,” Gutter says.
Wood nods, turns to Bob. “We got waste to live off of. See ya, dude.”
Bob nods, watches Wood turn and put his head right into the other kid’s back and drive him through the crowd. “Put it in overdrive, Gutter!”
31
Case is in the shower when the cellular she left on the sink starts to ring. Bob’s voice is like a bone blade cutting through the bad connection. “They’re here!”
“What!”
“Gutter—that was one of the names you said, right?”
Down the back steps she slips the semiautomatic into her jeans. Starts to run into the face of a slick drizzle.
Bob does a slow cruise from the bar, following after Gutter and Wood. He picks up on the rat pack around the television. Something is drawing their attention away from the box, and they are whispering among themselves and eyeing the check-in counter.
Bob eases into the turn, sees Gutter working the house phone and Wood holding up the dead space beside him, the candle in his ear flickering away.
Case does a fast about-face in the Dakota, bringing the truck up on the chance they boogie. From Seventh she hard-turns through a red light down Heber. She tries reaching for the cattle prod she keeps tucked away under the seat.
