by Boston Teran
His eyes flip upward toward the ceiling. “Upstairs? He’ll know it’s us. Or Errol will have copped to him it’s us.”
“Yeah. So …”
There is desolation in his voice. “In the Roman Colosseum, when the Christians were sent to face the lions, the lions didn’t always attack. They didn’t get the gig. What they were there to do. So the Christians sometimes attacked them. Forced them to quick-kill. To end it. That’s what we’re gonna do to him.”
“How?” she says.
Devastation across the shapeless mortality of his features as Bob turns away. “We’ll start with something he should understand … Fire.”
46
Within an hour the first flurries of smoke are spotted along the nape of the horizon by a couple of National Chloride execs who are lunching on chili at Roy’s Cafe in Amboy.
By dusk there are helicopters circling the black mushroom cloud the wind is dragging toward the ocean. It takes the fire engines over an hour to make the grade through the foothills. By then the house is a mural of flames that yaw and spit through its charred shell.
Errol sits quietly in his office at the bar, staring at his food. His stitched and bandaged face a swollen and slow-moving Vicodin haze.
Outside, the sounds of talk and music mean nothing. He is a well-dressed privateer staring at the thought of death in the scraps of an unfinished meal.
He pushes the plate aside, leaves without a word.
In the alley behind the bar he goes to unlock his car door. A flash of bad news comes between him and the lock. He looks up, too wasted to move.
“I hope you didn’t cop to Cyrus,” says Bob.
“Have you been out there?” Hesitating, Errol glances around. Sees Case waiting by the Dakota, which is parked across from the entrance to the alley. “Keep her away from me,” he says.
“She’s harmless … for now.”
Errol is a physical statement of defeat, pretty much mooked out on downers and fear. “Have you been out there?” he asks.
“Yeah … But no Cyrus.”
“Oh,” Errol says. He tries to open the door but Bob blocks the move with his hand.
“What! What!”
Bob holds out a cellular phone, presses it into Errol’s hand. “We need you to pass on some bad news.”
The word passes quickly from one friend of Cyrus’s to another, and by nightfall Cyrus and Gutter are parked along the shoulder of the National Trail Highway in a borrowed Bronco watching the coroner’s wagon trek up through a posted roadblock of police cruisers toward the house.
Cyrus walks a line of news vans and reporters filing video blurbs under a battery of handheld floodlamps. He picks up the few sketchy details that have surfaced: The charred remains of one person found in the smoldering ruins. The remains of another found in a half-burned shed. There is a rumor that the second body had been decomposing for two days, but this the police will not verify.
He has a sense of what has moved against him, but he’ll know for sure when Errol shows. He crosses the road, kills some time by walking among the watchers.
A dozen cars are staked out around the site. Those who bring a camera and basket lunch to the moment of black death.
Heading back to the Bronco, he overhears a young woman talking to a friend about the “Vampire Rapist” in Florida, who spent only ten years in jail for kidnapping a hitchhiker, raping her, and drinking more than half her blood over a twenty-two-hour period.
Three dim-faced angels listen from their car seats as mama questions her friend: “I don’t understand how anyone can commit such a crime and get out after ten years. By what rationale? How is it possible? What reason could they have for ever letting anyone like that out of jail?”
Cyrus turns and with a quiet, familiar reverence answers, “Crowd control.”
Cyrus sees Errol pull up. He waves to Gutter. The three converge on a strip of brush a short way up from the news vans.
Cyrus has the light to his back, notes the gauze bandage across Errol’s cheek. “What do you know?”
Terrified, Errol answers, “Headcase.”
Cyrus does not react. “How do you know?”
Errol has to lower his eyes against the light from the floodlamps the police are setting out to guide their vehicles up into that remote trail. “I saw her less than an hour ago.”
“The fuckin’ cunt’s got nine lives,” hisses Gutter.
“Go on,” says Cyrus.
Another forensic truck passes. Errol shields his eyes to watch as it slows and turns into the police barricade. “What the shit went down up there? The news is saying …”
“Fuck all that, chief. Go on.”
“She says she scored the stuff you brought across the border.”
Gutter eyes Cyrus.
“She does?”
“Her and that guy she’s traveling with. They said they scored it out of the house.”
Cyrus looks back up that narrow hallway of a road.
“Did you stash it up there? Did you?”
Cyrus glances at Gutter. His teeth rub against his lip. “They’re trying to bet the magic …”
Gutter nods.
“Did they get it?” asks Errol.
Cyrus turns toward him. A dark precision to his voice. “How did she know about this place?”
“Your own,” Errol answers.
Cyrus studies Errol.
“That’s what she said. She heard in Mexico. Remember, we talked in Mexico—”
Cyrus turns away, looks back at the watchers.
“Before she’d even showed, we—”
“Close the hole up, chief,” says Gutter.
Errol quiets, then says, “She wants to meet you. She and the doorstop.”
“Does she?”
“Yes.”
“And how is this to be done?”
Errol reaches into his pocket. He takes out the cellular phone Bob has given him and holds out his hand. “All you got to do is hit C on the speed dial.”
Cyrus looks down at the phone, then up at Errol’s face. “What happened there?”
“Knife wound.”
“You didn’t try and cut your throat, did you?”
“It was Headcase. Payback for Mexico.”
Cyrus looks at the phone, then at Errol, who waits uncomfortably behind an outstretched hand.
In a treacly tone Cyrus says, “There ain’t no watchers, Errol.” His eyebrows form Vs above his eyes as they rise up in a black hoodwinking smile. “Most think they can beat the blooding. Live it out from the sidelines. But it ain’t so. From minstrel to fool.” He adds, “No watchers.”
47
“Do you think we can pull this off?”
Case looks down at the cellular phone as she snuffs out a cigarette. “If he left that stash in the house, it’s belly-of-the-beast time. It’s too much ego cash for anything but. Now, if he’s got it and knows this is all just so much douche, he may fuck with our heads for a—”
“But we took it to him at the house. He has too—”
“I wasn’t finished. He may fuck with our heads for a while. But we burned one of his safe houses down. He won’t let it pass. It’s dyin’ time for us both.”
They sit quietly for a minute, entombed in the last table of a boxcar-style rib and beer joint. Each table is just a small map of light from the booth lamps swimming down a long dark aisle. From their post they can watch across the parking lot and past the railroad tracks to the street. It’s the shit-crank section of Hinkley, which is on the road between Barstow and California City.
“I saw you in there,” he says. “I saw …”
She looks over the top of the cup of coffee she is nursing with both hands. Bob’s eyes are hooded as he stares at the battle line of shot glasses and empty beer bottles in front of him. “You could take him with impunity. You took it right to him like you would have Errol. It’s a trait I’d like to be able to pull up out of myself.”
“I know why you’re talking like this.”
“You do?”
“You want to find that moment because you think she’s dead.” She pauses. “Or she should be.”
“Am I that obvious?” he asks.
“No. I’m just getting to know you, is all.”
“I prayed she was alive every day. I did. But I’ve also found myself starting to pray that she is dead and not suffering. At first it was just thoughts I pushed out of my head. But … Now that she’s probably dead I find no … I still pray she’s alive and I pray she’s dead. I’m the ghost of two men. Bob Hightower is … He’s nothing. A waste really. And Bob Whatever, he—”
“Isn’t so bad,” she says. “Even Bob Hightower doesn’t deserve your sudden self-hatred.”
He rests his elbows on the table, his hands come up, and he hides his face under an awning of both palms. From across the lamplight she can hear him start to cry.
The waitress passes, looking from Bob to Case. Case shakes her head to just let it be, then points so the waitress will bring him another round.
“I used to believe that every action of the soul was meaningful,” he says. “Maybe that is old-fashioned. But I did. I did in the face of evidence that might have been otherwise.”
He looks up, wipes at the tears. “That’s what we all want, isn’t it? Where all things inhere with meaning. That we are more than just …”
He sees in her face empathy for him, the man. For the plight of Bob Hightower and Bob Whatever. But he also sees in her eyes that same elusive terrifying stillness as when she killed.
“You don’t believe in any of that, do you?” he says.
“No, Coyote, I don’t.”
“How do you get through, then?”
She sets the coffee cup down, pushes it aside, rests her arms on the table. Her face is darkly moving and eloquent. “I do,” she says, “what any good junkie does. I try to do the right, now, in the right-now.”
“That’s it?”
“That’s hard enough.”
“Nothing more?”
“You mean no moral imperative beyond that?”
“Yes.”
“No, Coyote.”
“Then why are you here? Why are you in this with me? Is it revenge? Retribution? Blood? Honor? ’Cause it ain’t about the right-now. Not with what you’ve been through when you don’t have to.”
Case leans forward to take the pack of cigarettes from Bob’s shirt pocket. The lamplight catches her hand as it brushes against his and stops a moment, then moves on.
“I don’t have all the answers. Revenge. Maybe that’s why I’m here. Retribution. The same. But of course I know that is not entirely fair. I am responsible for my own exile.”
She lights the cigarette, inhales with her head back. “But I don’t judge why I’m here. I’m just here.”
The waitress comes with Bob’s shot and bottle of beer. Case reaches for the shot, runs her nose across the tequila, sniffing. “Fuck,” she says, “I could get wet just smelling it.” She slides it across to Bob, leans back in the booth, brings her legs up.
He holds up the tequila, toasts her, and shoots it down. She gives him a thumbs-up sign.
“See,” she continues, “I believe everybody knows what life really is about. Only they are just not ready for what they would call ‘bad news.’ They fight against it with God and the devil and all that holographic New Age bullshit. Yeah, I believe everybody knows there is nothing. Everybody knows down in their guts. It’s x number of years, then the ground and done, and it frightens them.
“I believe the human beast is desperate and saw fit to retro a god in its own image to conform to what it wants when it wants it. To what it needs when it needs it. To what it must have when it sees suit to have it. And worse yet, it was Michelangelo’s vision. You know …”
She stretches out her arm in a mock imitation of the God of the Sistine Chapel ceiling reaching out for Adam. “The big man,” she says. “Great White, as I like to call him. The shark of sharks.”
She shakes her head. “Yeah. White. And a man. You want my opinion, that was the original bullshit sin. ’Cause it set a precedent. It said the godhead—perfection—was a male. Which the white culture turned into their own native son. So everyone and everything else was a step down. Women. Blacks. Indians. Animals. Gays.
“Shit. It’s Genesis. Which is just so much muckraking bullshit. So much moral and philosophical gerrymandering. It’s Hitler’s Mein Kampf, but a better mindfuck people can get into.
“Those who buy the faith ostracize those who don’t. And countries are built on the back of that faith. Civilizations on the back of those countries. The fuckin’ dollar bill, man—‘In God We Trust’—what a fuckin’ wink.”
She flicks her ashes hard, and they rim the ashtray before dropping in. She takes one of the empty shot glasses and separates it from the others, letting it stand alone at the edge of the table.
“Then an outsider comes along,” she says. “And has a thought. Other outsiders buy into the idea. You know what it is. Cyrus. They create a devil in their own image and likeness. Their patron saint. And the war starts. And why not? Why should the outsiders lie down and die at the feet of the bullshit holy? You and Cyrus …” She slaps her arm where the needle would go. “You need each other. Like junk. ’Cause neither side can see it all for what it is without their fix.
“Everyone needs a club. Club God and Club Scream. On the same block. With different bands. But the riffs are begged, borrowed, and bullshit. And the cover charge is too much, no matter what. You want the real truth, Coyote, go knocking on coffins.”
She points her cigarette at him. “And you want the real reason why you’re breaking apart? To believe in your God is to believe in him. Cyrus. To believe in him is to believe in the power of it all. And I don’t just mean what he did. I mean the implications around what you feel like. Being the rat’s ass in the Great White’s eyes. To believe in that is to believe in the reason for things to be what they are, and since that reason is beyond your grasp, you pray for your baby’s death. The end of suffering. The end of some failure in the Great White’s eyes.”
She holds up the cigarette, lets it burn some. “But whose suffering, Coyote, hers … or yours?”
He sits there, troubled by her remark. “I don’t know,” he says.
“Right.”
“I don’t. I swear it.” He pauses. “But what about you? What you said to Anne, that at least if we get close enough she’d be dead. Cyrus would kill her.”
“It would have made it easier for me. I wouldn’t have to think too much. Dead means you don’t have to.”
She holds out her arm where it is still black-and-blue from the needle that was jammed into it. “And I wouldn’t have to confront my old religion either.”
“I can’t let go of what I have always believed,” he says. “No. ‘Can’t’ is not the right word. I won’t. I’ve been wrong on many things. And maybe this, too, about Gabi. Maybe wanting her dead is a cowardly act on my part. Maybe it’s because I don’t have enough faith and I need more.
“I know I don’t want to see the world as you do. I don’t want to believe in a world that way. Call it whatever you want. Stupidity. Denial. I won’t. Just so much shoveled dirt. That is beyond my comprehension. It lacks everything we aspire to. There has to be some greater force offering up what it wills. I mean, even something like you writing me that letter could have—”
“Maybe it’s no different than you keeping me from slashing Errol the Stool-Specimen-Carrier’s throat so now we can exploit him. And when you bugged that coat. Good luck out of bad, is all. Maybe that’s the term of terms. The real Great White. People see what they see when they want to see it.
“Of course, there is one loose cannon running around that could pass itself off as the real thing.” She looks around, reaches under the table and into her shirt. Bob watches her arm fiddle a bit, then come up with a closed hand. She opens it clandestinely. In the palm is a Frontier cartridge—a good old gliding m
etal jacket with brass bullet for better, deeper penetration.
“Take a look. This is the ultimate life form, the highest art form. The great equalizer. It crosses all political, social, and religious lines. It has no ties. It plays no favorites. It cuts both ways. It is as simple and profound as any fuckin’ parable the Bible could slop up through all that magisterial garbage. It carries history on its back. All life falls before it. All faith resides within that virgin brass casing. The virgin birth, baby.
“Yeah. It births new religions and bears down on old ones. There’s god, Coyote. Grin and bear it.” She slips it into his hand.
He sits a moment with the shell firmly tucked away in his palm. “Thanks for that Spartan treat of reality.”
“Of course, the whole thing could be just that,” she says, pointing out the window toward the remains of a cinder-block wall in the next lot that at one time had been part of the shell of some long two-story building. Graffitied there in gaudy blue letters it says: Y’ALL IS FANTASY ISLAND.
Gutter holds the diamondback down on the table. It’s stretched out to its full seven-foot length. The mottled underbelly in marked contrast to the white pine. Its tongue flickers at the heat of Wood’s face, staring at table level, watching in veiled light as Cyrus loads a hypodermic with speed.
Cyrus slides the needle in at mid-belly. A slight crackling where the steel fang breaks through. The snake tries to fight the cold metal, but Gutter holds fast.
Cyrus puts the needle down and takes the snake from Gutter. Holding it by the head, he starts to walk the room, whipping the snake at the air. Getting that speed to venom through its whole body.
48
Case sits alone with the cellular while Bob goes out to the truck to get another pack of cigarettes. She stares at the phone, trying to will it to ring.
As she watches Bob walk to the truck parked over by the brush-strewn field and battered cinder-block wall, she notices a white Cherokee in the middle of a slow crawl around the dirt lot. She tries to squint against the glass to see if it’s the warboys, but the light from the table lamp obscures her view.
