by Boston Teran
“I miss his goddamn call, I don’t understand.”
“He said he’d call you in the next day or so.”
“At least he’s alive. Thank God.”
“Arthur.”
“I was beginning to—”
“Arthur, listen to me.”
“What?”
“He was asking me some pretty strange questions.”
“What do you mean?”
“… They were very odd.”
John Lee can watch his house from the dirt road that rises up into the national forest across from the Paradise Hills tract, a thin line of cypress trees affording him all the cover he needs.
He listens to Maureen and Arthur’s conversation through a headset. The small black computerized surveillance kit is laid out neatly on the front seat as if it is in a showroom display.
He has bugged the phones at the house for years as a means of keeping track of Maureen’s infidelities, or of any other quiet plans he would not be privy to, from their divorce through to his destruction.
“What did he ask you?”
“He asked me how we bought this tract.”
“How we bought it?”
“I told him we got it in probate.”
“In probate, that’s right.”
John Lee can hear the subtle rise in Arthur’s voice.
“We got it in probate because …”
“Probate, yes …”
“Some woman had died, right?”
“Died, yes.”
“I mean. She’d been murdered. Isn’t that right?”
A long silence through the headset. A gaping pause that begins to swallow them both.
A gunshot turned against the night air …
Arthur had walked down to that strange battered chimney which seemed to have been built by some timeless sect. He stood in the powder-black hours, staring at the old symbols painted into the stone. Foolish and childlike abstractions, he thought. The stuff of the lazy and the minstrel. Foremost in his mind he was trying to plot a new way to convince the old woman to sell the land.
She had listened as she drank a beer with her bare feet up on the trailer’s kitchen table. Her toes rubbed together, one against the other. They were black as flint chips and she rubbed them as if she were trying to spark up a fire.
All his and John Lee’s convincing could do nothing. And that junkie kid she raised, he could do no better. It was the process, she said, not proceeds, that interested her.
A gunshot changed all that.
He rushed back to the trailer. A fire in a rusting barrel burned with refuse and through the smoke he saw Cyrus on his hands and knees. Blood ran from his nose and mouth. John Lee hulked over him.
“You stupid fuckin’ junkie,” John Lee screamed, then laced the boy’s ribs and back with hard boot kicks.
The black smoke was a great tumbling spire that Arthur rushed through as he yelled, “John Lee, what happened?”
“The fuck shot her! She’s in the bedroom.”
Arthur jumped the mortared wall of bottle art and crossed the garden.
The trailer was dark except for one slant of moonlight that fell across the sheet-draped doorway to the old woman’s bedroom. There was no wind, so the sheet was still. The heraldic lily and rose seemed to float against a white amorphous heaven. He pushed it aside.
He looked down.
She lay there on the floor. Her eyes were open but seemed to have lost their color. It was a bloody mucilage where the bullet had taken out a piece of neck and the lower part of her ear.
He stared a long time. This eavesdropping on death left him numb.
Then there was the frail movement of a finger. Like the motion of some dark caterpillar across hard ground. It began a slow scratching march. A failing point. He noticed her chest rise a bit and sink. Rise again and sink. Barely enough to be seen through the heavy cloth of her sweater. The milky white of her eyes seemed to clear and for a moment they found the shore of Arthur’s eyes holding in the darkness.
“I’m frightened, Arthur.”
“Don’t be.”
“I don’t know why Bob’s asking such things.”
“It’s alright.”
“Is it? It scared me. His tone … it scared me.”
“It’ll be alright.”
Another pause filled with the confusion of breathing and silence. The perfect riff of the coming hardcore future.
“I wish we were together.”
“Maureen …”
“I do. You and I should have married.”
“Maureen, please.”
“You loved me.”
“It’s a long time now.”
“You loved me.”
“But I was married.”
“But we should have been. We would have been better off. And you know it. There wouldn’t be any John Lee …”
“You can’t blame him for it all.”
“Why not?”
45
East of Ludlow the old National Trail Highway, the original Route 66, follows its historical path through the Mojave. As Bob and Case head east, the truth of that road comes upon them. The remains of roadside diners and failed motels mark the yellow-brown landscape. The disintegrating shells of small homesteads and huge billboards are memorials to a post–World War II America. The town of Bagdad is just a sign. Amboy, a sign that a town of twenty is for sale. This architectural cemetery is all that’s left of those who settled there and rolled the dice that Route 66 would last forever.
Bob and Case find the road Errol talked about. It turns up into a trace of volcanic cones. Dark, hulking shapes whose centers have been culled out for cinders.
The approach is a miles-long climb. The ground is odd ridges and fissures. The road, a thin bend of the dangerous and vulnerable. Bob walks ahead of the Dakota, far enough to see through every cut or fall.
An hour later they are far into the Bristol Mountains. The white saline flats to the east are matched in the west by the “terrible desert” that John Steinbeck once wrote about. A dry salt hell where the mountains shimmer like ebony crows.
Bob searches every wash, every dun-toned crevasse that fans out from the road, until, at the end of a caldera, he spots the crumbling frame of a two-story ranch house.
He waves Case up. They hide the truck in a spooned-out cutoff. She takes one of the backup handguns from beneath the front seat. They move among the naked rocks to where they can watch unnoticed.
“You think she could be in there?”
Case shrugs gravely.
“Look at the windows down beneath the porch. That could be a basement. They could have chained her down there. I say we make our house call now if we’re gonna do it at all.”
“Truth or dare,” she says. “Let’s turn up the dial.”
They slide down a scarred hillside and crawl toward the house from the rear. They squeeze between crumbling posts held in place by wires. A few scrub oaks guard a well they slip past. They check each window. Each door. The silence is interrupted only by wind-stung branches.
A photographer’s floodlight was thrown on. A black pentagram within a red circle painted on a concrete floor came to life. Another floodlight formed the axis of a stage. Cyrus and his troupe moved about in strips of darkness.
Bob and Case approach the house. They follow their shadows up the creaking wood planks of the porch steps. Their halting images pass a window. They look beyond the curtain into the lightless room. Case touches Bob’s arm and his head comes up. Her gun barrel points to the next window over, which is open just a crack.
Cyrus knelt beside the kidnapped Mexican boy. He was naked, his hands and feet bound. A shivering adolescent until the needle shone transfixed in the light of Lena’s hand. He then turned into a shouting mongrel, fighting against death.
Like burglars, they move through a room filled with crates. They stop and listen through the milky light-washed silence, and only the breathing hull of the house’s chest answers back with a creak and a
groan.
The boy’s thighs wrenched and stiffened. Cyrus held his devil’s tail and squeezed it hard. The child winced like a calf and Lena pushed his scrotum up. The needle pricked the flesh and pressed in fast just beneath the sack. The boy’s world fell through screams and a rush of burning heat, and Gabi was dragged mouth-bound from a scrap of blackened basement into the light.
Case looks up the dark wood stairwell, enclosed so it’s no wider than a catwalk.
“You go find the basement,” she whispers. “I’ll go up.”
He nods. “Keep watch out those windows. We’ll go back out quick if they come.”
They separate. Bob feels his way down a shadowy hall for the basement door. By the pantry he can hear Case start up the creaking stairs toward the second floor. Walking past the glare of the dining-room windows, he looks outside. He notices a wooden shed near the remains of a garage. The doors are open, and an odd pool of water has accumulated inside and out.
Two more floodlights snapped on. Now the four corners of that basement world were lit around the moment when Gabi lay in waiting with the pentagram beneath her.
Light through yellow shades. The spice of perfume, musk incense, and pot attack her nose with the tincture of the satanic rituals she had been borne under with Cyrus. Her fingers nervously flit across the hammer of her gun as she senses what she will find somewhere within these walls. The hush is broken by a rusted hinge on the floor below.
Figures in ski masks moved like prankster effigies, herding in the boy as he crawled about the room on all fours trying to get away. He wailed at the drug-cornered chaos.
Bob approaches the shed. There is an angry buzzing from within. He gets close enough to see flies in the threads of light that have come through the lattice walls. Flies swarming the dead air like an army of locusts. Flies on the walls in staked columns across the thin reefs of wood like living tumors. Their green bodies some mossy cline grown over dark-brown rotting timbers.
Cyrus cut the tape away from Gabi’s mouth. She gagged but did not speak.
“It’s time to taste the devil’s tail,” he said.
Looking for Bob, Case finds the basement door. She steps down into the well of stairs, her hand reaching through the pitch-black for a light that doesn’t work. She calls to him, gets only the cradling wood of the stairs’ frame under her weight. Her face pinches nervously at the phosphorous bitters of gunsmoke and the damp of the earth below ground.
In his psychotropic delirium the boy is dragged over and tossed onto Gabi. Dazed, he tries to crab away. He is grabbed by the hair and pulled back. The black-gray head of a video camera zooms for each second of face. Behind the swimming phosphorous light and dark the picture-planet basement swims with shapes at converging angles shouting in English and Spanish, “Do it! Give her the fuckin’ devil’s tail, boy. Give it to her or … you will die!”
Bob’s stomach sours from the odor of spoiled meat. Dried, rank in the air like some shank of flesh hook-hung in a desert market. He looks down at a foamy scum spinning about the hose nozzle that snakes into that pooling well. There is a half-used bag of lime by the shed wall and a shovel lies in the sand beside it.
Behind the teardrop flame of her lighter, Case scans the basement within the compass of four silver floodlights and the pentagram painted onto the concrete floor between them. Imprinted on the wall, her flickering shadow stares back at her between two inverted crosses cut from wood planks and nailed to the wall with cleats. She stands there, heartsick and shaky. She knows what’s gone down. She’s been an honored guest at these death rites.
Outside, Bob probes at the black muck with a shovel. Inside, Case notices the lighter flame buckle with a sudden turn of wind. She stands, sensing someone’s presence.
She moves cautiously toward the stairs. Her eyes crane at corners the light can’t find. With the smell of earth heavy in her nostrils and the gun held tight against her hip, she follows that poor flame up the stairway.
Something hard pushes against the shovel, and Bob lifts. Brown muddy water slides off the shovel’s tongue until the outline of an arm comes clean. It is dark-skinned and three fingers have been ritually amputated.
He recoils and the arm drops. He stands there facing one thought: His baby could be in that grisly sump. He starts shoveling at the water frantically, calling Gabi’s name.
Case slips through the basement door and waits. She listens. She starts toward the dining room and sees reflected in the pantry glass the face of a man lunging from a dark alcove.
Before Case can get her gun hand up she is grapple-hooked around the shoulders by a pair of beefy arms. Two fast shots from her gun splinter the floor. Bob drops the shovel into the watery scum and starts running toward the house.
The man rams Case into a breakfront. The shock numbs her back. Bob shoulders the front door and the lock plate tears apart. Again Case is rammed against the breakfront, as she struggles to get her gun hand loose. Glass shatters; her gun hits the floor and goes off.
She can’t free herself. She can hear Bob down a far hallway. She tries to warn him but the man throws her across the dining room. She spills over a table and chairs, and her face hits the floor hard. She lies there stunned.
Bob stumble-charges into the living room, working his semiautomatic out from inside his shirt. The man grabs up Case’s gun to meet this new threat. Bob turns but he doesn’t see the man aim. Case tries to clear her head. As Bob starts for the dining room, he runs straight into a flash of gunfire that rips out slits of wood less than a foot from his face.
Bob body-slams right to the floor. Another shot burns out the air above his head. Bob scramble-crawls for cover. The man kicks away a fallen chair and sets himself to fire down on Bob.
In these few seconds Case shakes off her swimming visionand grabs her knife. The blade clears the boot and she comes up slashing at a few fine inches of neck.
One cut. Quick and clean. One clean, fast grunt. A jet of arterial blood spits into the still air. The man comes about. His mouth and jaw move frantically. His legs quiver. The great chest in a park ranger’s shirt mottles with blood.
Bob is up. He rushes into the room. Case steps back and away from the man’s shoulders. The man’s gun hand lifts to fire, but the gun has fallen away.
Case steps forward once more. She aims at the soft folds of neck just above the breastbone, then says, “You’re crossing over,” and she drives the blade in till her knuckles scrape against his jaw.
“Are you alright?”
She has collapsed down onto her knees and stares into a face at death.
“Case, are you alright?”
“Alright … Yes … yes …”
“What happened?”
“I don’t know.”
He steps over the body. “Who is he?”
“I don’t know. Probably the fuck that lives here.”
He helps her up, reaches for the gun, hands it back to her.
“I found a body,” he says.
Her face comes around to find his. She nods as if this is not something unexpected.
“In the shed. It’s buried in the shed. With lime. Under the water there. I guess to help it start to decay and …”
She looks back toward the basement door. “Was it …?”
“What?”
“Was it …?”
He understands what she’s asking by the way her eyes narrow down into a frightened honesty.
“No. The skin was too dark.”
“Was it a boy or a girl?”
“I don’t know. I …”
He sees her glance again at the door by the pantry that opens into an unlit stairwell.
“We better get out of here,” she says. “Now.”
She walks over to the dead man and pulls the knife out of his neck. There’s a threading hiss. Along the edge of the blade are blood bubbles, which she wipes on her jeans.
The whole time Bob stares into the kingdom of that door. He stops Case as she passes and points toward
his suspicions with the jut of his chin. “You know something, don’t you?”
“Let’s just go.”
“That body is not two days dead. Something’s gone down here. What was it? Have they killed Gabi?”
“I can’t say for sure.”
“Don’t lie to me now. I need the truth. I can’t …”
“The truth I don’t know now.”
“Have they killed her? Have they buried my child out there in that … slime heap?”
His cheeks are the coarse gray of blankets slid across the dead flesh of children from war to war.
“They might have,” she says.
“What do you know?”
“Let’s just go. Please. For your sake, now!”
He takes a step toward the door. She tries to stop him but that only tempts him on. He pulls free of her, and she has to chase him down the stairs.
In the dark he lights a match.
He scans the grubby basement fresco with its foul odors. “What is this?” he asks.
“It’s a death rite.”
“A what?”
“They bring children to this. Novitiates. Drug them hard. Force them to … rape each other. Or worse. And in the end they’re killed. Not all, but … mostly all. Some are kept. Like me. The rest … their blood is taken for … a taste of the spirits roaming in the night, as they say.”
He blows out the match, looks up at the ceiling, closes his eyes in despair.
“Bob. We better get out of here.”
Bob opens his eyes. He begins to pace.
“Bob, you know how many freaks one of these death rites brings out? Twenty. Thirty. They could be planning on coming back for some major blowdown. You don’t want to fight them in here.”
“Will he be back?” Bob asks Case.
“Maybe.”
“That shit he has to deliver to Errol, would he leave it here? Would he think it safe here?”
“I don’t know.”
“Before a delivery, did he ever stash it in a safe house like this?”
“Yeah. But I don’t think we got days to scope this joint out and see if—”
“We got to make him come to us.”
“What?”
“Him to us. He carried the plague to ours. It’s time to take the plague to his.”
