by Boston Teran
Bob pops it open, toasts, then downs a couple of gulps.
“That’s his fuckin’ bon voyage for us,” she says, nodding toward the Ferryman.
“A moment to be cherished,” says Bob cynically.
The Ferryman swings his invisible Fender over his shoulder, strut-hitches his way over to the truck.
“It’s been a ride, Ferryman,” says Case.
He nods. Gives Bob a glimpse. “I’ll probably see you both again. At least once.” He winks. “At the wrap party, as they call it.”
Then he folds his arms over his chest and closes his eyes, giving a good impression of a corpse.
A silent Sunday. The sun at high tide against the dead shore of the sidewalk where Lena waits leaning against the pink and black stucco wall of the House of Usher.
A child witch in colors gaudy. She rocks against the wall, waiting. Hoping Case never shows or shows quick.
A light-blue pickup turns into the empty street. Slows. Passes. She sees Case. Gets her first glimpse of Bob. A stutter stop of jealous, ugly thoughts. The pickup makes a hard U-turn and pulls up in front of her.
Lena looks down at her hands. They are trembling.
Case climbs out of the truck. Bob remains behind the wheel. Case works through a clumsy introduction. Two faces, each with her mark on their cheek, stare at the other with muted animus.
“You have the stuff with you?”
“In the back,” says Bob.
Lena glances at the open truck bed with its locked tool-chest area. Case surmises what’s going through Lena’s head and takes her chance.
“Cyrus want you to see it, too?”
Lena hesitates. “No. There’s no need.” She looks at Case, then at Bob. She looks back at Case uneasily. “You wouldn’t be that fucked up,” she says, “to show up and not have it. At least I hope not, Case.” She waits. “No? Alright. Let’s get it on.”
“Where’s Cyrus?” asks Bob.
Lena doesn’t even throw him a look. Answers Case instead. “Drive. Take 14 South.”
“To where?” asks Bob.
“Just fuckin’ take 14 South.” She motions for Case to get in first. “I’ll sit by the window.”
They swing south through Mojave. Three faces staring straight into a sun-washed windshield. The colors bled from the faces in the glass. Bob lights a cigarette, offers Lena one. The billowy black of her eyes reflected in the windshield looks away.
“You and I don’t have to not get along,” says Bob.
“We ain’t gonna be around each other enough for one way or the other, sheep.”
“Take it easy,” says Case.
“Yeah, sure.” Lena puts her head back, closes her eyes. Case steals a look at Bob. They both grab a little moment of reassurance.
“Where we going, Lena?”
“Just stay on 14 till we hit Palmdale.”
Case looks out the rear window to see if they’re being followed.
At Palmdale Lena has them truck east on 138. The wind blows through the open windows. The air is weary hot. They begin the slow curvy climb from the flats into the San Bernardino National Forest. A favorite hangout of skiers and corpses. The mood inside the truck is getting to be a testy wordless contest. The ground gets harder and scraps of pine trees begin their slow birth up into the foothills.
It’s about Lena’s feeding time, and they stop at a gas station at the Cajon Junction. They pull off into the grass at the end of the station’s lot. Bob takes a walk and keeps watch on the chance they’re jumped. Case stays close to Lena.
Inside the pickup Lena gets her black jeans off and a leg free. “Remember how we used to talk about buying some kind of coffee shop somewhere?”
“Sure. Real radical chic, right?” Case watches as Lena taps at the gray flesh of her thigh, skin-surfing for a vein. “Got us both through some pretty rough times,” Case says. “It’s still a good idea.”
Lena is readying a spoon of smack. Stops. Looks to double-check on Bob being out of earshot. “Let’s disappear,” she says. “You and me. Fuck everyone.”
Case’s mouth fishes for words. Lena is caught up on the thread of an answer. She watches Case. Waits. Picks up the commencement of sorrow in the chilly downturn of Case’s eyes. The Spartan move of a hand pulling back into the reaches of her shirt, across her heart. A throat taut without speaking.
Hackles of anger run up through Lena’s gut. “You ain’t gonna pull it off. It ain’t just him and me and Gutter. He’s got others. A hunting party. Case, don’t you understand? He’s got you by the throat. He’s already through the cracks and he’s hungry.” Her eyes half crazed with amorphous dreams that won’t shape true. “You and that fuckin’ sheep!”
Lena kicks hard at the dashboard. Case plops down on the siderunner, wiped out. Beyond the station is a decline where the roofs of boxcars a mile long lug their way down through Cajon Canyon. The muted iron couplings of the AT&SF like the rack chains of slaves on the run.
“Forget it. Just keep on the road to Palm Springs,” says Lena.
Case nods.
A long moment. Lena murmurs Case’s name.
“Don’t,” Case answers.
Lena sags, heats the needle. A singe of bubbles against the scarred concave apron of silver. Case looks up. The scene sears at her consciousness. A crossed index of rapture and wretchedness that were her personal annihilation. She turns away.
Lena whispers, “It’s gonna fuckin’ get us all anyway.”
57
Lena is doing the junkie nod as they hit east on 10. They have her bookended in the front seat. Her head leans back, her eyes are like two dirty pools of water on the hot cement after a storm.
Case looks down at Lena’s hand, which rests partly across her own thigh, and sees where the lick of the Ferryman’s needle has produced a date in the flesh: 12/21/95.
Bob drives. Case notes his mouth and jaw move as he scans the road through the rearview for any sign of trouble.
“Let’s get on with it,” he says to Case.
Between Banning and Beaumont, Lena starts her comeback from the junkie nod. Lena tries to slouch away from Bob as best she can. Inside the Dakota the air is stifling, like breathing in waste. Everybody’s nerves are getting hacked up pretty good in the silence until Case just comes out with it: “Lena, we got to find Cyrus. We got to know. So we can get to him first.”
Lena grimaces through a laugh. “You don’t need to find him. He’ll find you.”
Case tries to work her a little but Bob just flat out hits it. “Let me tell you something, you little cunt. What kind of fuckin’ needle do you think they’ll put in your arm if I hand you over for what you did at Via Princessa?”
They both can feel Lena constrict and straighten up.
“Via Princessa …,” he says again, with an extraordinary quiet in his voice.
On that, Case takes Lena’s hand, even before she speaks, so they all can see the date stamped against the flesh.
“We got to know, Lena.”
In a moment of controlled panic, Lena stares into the glaring bow of the hood with the road peeling away under it. Her stomach curdles.
“Pull the fuckin’ truck over,” Lena demands.
Bob keeps driving.
“Pull the fuckin’ truck over,” she shouts. Then, to make her point, she grabs the wheel and pulls right. In one scream the Dakota swerves through the slow lane, where an RV’s brakes burn against the asphalt. The Dakota skates past the full force of a horn and spins out on the gravel shoulder, racking the sand in long scrolls till it comes to a thud against a rocky abutment.
Lena manhandles her way out of the truck. There on the flats Bob and Case close in on her. In the distance are miles of naked mountains that track the freeway. Bald white and battered brown. A vast, incomprehensible keep where the silent bones of the ages watch forever.
Lena approaches them with the shoulder-tight stance of a stalker. “Hello from the gutter,” she rails. “You want me sewered. Put on the sho
w!”
She turns to Case, brokenhearted. “I told you. Begged you. But you been brain-fucked. Cyrus knows. He knows why you’re here.”
She turns to Bob. Puts the thumb to him at the end of an outstretched arm. Works it in hard short cuts like she’s gouging out an abscess with a stiletto.
“And you too. Daddyman. Right? Right, Daddyman!”
Bob takes a cautious step toward her. “What?”
“Cyrus knows. He knows you’re the girl’s father. He knows you’re trying to get her back.”
Bob’s throat clenches. He hangs on her words.
“And he knows you both ain’t got shit from that house. He knows. He knows you’re scamming him to get close. He knows. It’s a fuckin’ slaughterhouse. And you’ve showed your tails.” She comes around on Case. “Why? Why!”
Lena starts kicking at the ground. Her shadow is cast against the rocks like some jittering marionette. “Fuck! Fuck!” She grabs at her hair, makes grubby small fists, hits herself in the chest, in the legs. She’s a demon-tripped engine in self-slaughter.
“Is she alive?”
Lena turns to Bob.
“Is she alive? My little girl. Is she alive?”
With fiendish plainness Lena announces, “She ain’t a little girl no more.”
That’s all it takes. The whole earth seems to evaporate in the moment Bob spends to chest-pound into Lena. He’s got her by the throat. Case jumps him from behind, tries to pull him clear before he kills her.
His hands close on the muscles well up into her jaw, forcing them deep into the bone. The whizzing tires of cars pass and slow, watching this wild briar of boots and fists and violent spitting. But none stop.
Bob keeps screaming, “Is she alive?” Case keeps trying to get her arms around his chest to pull him back. Through a wreath of dust around her head, Lena manages to wrack out a dry shred of words: “She’s … a … live …”
But even with that, Bob won’t let her go. He keeps choking until Case can finally scream through his rage, “People are slowing. One might stop. Then what?”
When that thought settles in he lets her go.
Lena tries to crawl away, gagging.
Bob’s chest contorts with each suck-in of air.
Case comes around him, follows behind Lena, who’s reached a small lift of rockside and tries to sit herself up to breathe. Case goes to help her but Lena’s arm flaps birdlike to force her away. She begins to cry. Case leans down.
Bob yells, “What the fuck are you doing with that little rat’s ass?”
Lena is gasping and the crying only makes it worse. Case tries again to get her arms around Lena. Lena is too blown out to keep fighting.
“Lena. Listen to me, girl. Listen. You’re telling us the truth, aren’t you?”
“The girl’s alive.”
“Lena.”
“She’s alive.”
Bob wipes the spit from his mouth. “She’s probably lying just to save her rat’s ass.”
“Fuck you, sheep!”
“Lena. Cyrus … Where is he? Where is he?”
Lena cannot or will not answer that.
“If he knows we’re scamming him then what’s he gonna do to us? Where is he?”
“What a fuckin’ joke you all are.”
Bob squats down, opens his shirt enough so Lena can see the gun there. “Let’s just drag her into the brush and—”
“Stop!” yells Case.
“Drag me? You don’t get it, sheep. The evil is on you. And tight! Tight as a fuckin’ butt plug. And if you aren’t in Palm Springs by six when Cyrus calls …”
“If he knows we don’t have the stuff, then what is going down?”
“I don’t know.”
Case eyes her doubtfully.
“He’s the puppetmaster when it comes to this. And you know he wouldn’t tell me. Me of all people. He knows I might cop it to you. That’s why he sent me. He’s fuckin’ with your head.”
“She’s lying. She knows more.”
Case thinks through the situation.
“I don’t know why you’re whoring for this sheep,” says Lena.
“I’m not whoring for—”
“You don’t have to explain anything to this dege—”
“The Wicker Man is gonna put the wolf teeth to you, sheep!”
“We don’t need you. You could die here as easy as anywhere else!”
Lena jumps up. Throws out her arms in some crucifixion shock move. “Do me! Do your exorcism shit! Come on!! You’re a fuckin’ joke!”
She looks at both of them from behind wild eyes. “You think Cyrus hasn’t got the lock on both of you?” She points at Case. “He knows it was you that brought the cops down on the house in Escondido. You two are both gonna get leashed and shot.”
She gets a little closer to Bob. Works her arm around like a member of some carnival troupe trying to hawk her trade. Below the tattooed date of the Via Princessa murder, a hallucinatory mosaic of Cyrus’s mark is motifed on her arm. She lets Bob get a good look.
Then she whispers in the most cruelly singsong voice, “He knows when you are sleeping. He …”
Case grabs her and flings her toward the truck before Bob loses it. “Get in the fuckin’ truck! Get in!”
Bob wants to shoot the fire out of those eyes. “Let’s kill her now.”
“No,” says Case.
He turns. His eyes are cut hard stone as he looks her over. “It isn’t because she was one of your fuckin’ groupies, is it?”
“Don’t!” Case gets right in his face. “Don’t try and cut me up like that!”
“She’s a fuckin’ murderer and—”
“We’re all fuckin’ murderers here. Or have you forgotten?”
Bob steps back. They keep on facing each other in the heat.
“I’m fuckin’ asking you.” Then Case says, “Let it just settle out.”
Bob thinks a moment, tries to negotiate a current he can ride that idea through.
“Alright?” she pleads.
A barely discernible “Alright.”
Lena stands there watching them. Even curled around a bad moment they seem more together than not. So Lena leans into the Dakota and gets a palm onto the horn and rides it. She gives them the full-throttle bitch and a few choice words to go with it in a little nasty exercise reminder of whose hatred drives whom where.
58
Maureen lies in bed ravaged by a headache. Bone-pulsing deep. Temple to throat. As if the blood were tied in pulpy knots and being pulled through her veins by rope.
Behind her closed eyes, white spots flash. From her dark air-cooled bedroom she hears the front doorbell ring. Immediately when the door opens an argument ensues. She recognizes Arthur’s voice.
The front door slams shut, followed by hulking sounds moving hard across the thin tunnel of hallway, then farther off into the living room.
Something thuds. A hand against a wall maybe. She sits up in bed. Listens. Rises. She leans into the opening light of her bedroom door, and there’s a soft flourish of silk from her pajamas.
From the living room a harsh mass of sounds. Two voices. The sounds are getting more vicious but remain ill defined, so she starts down the hallway.
It’s a long turn, then another after that, through the one-story pseudo-hacienda. The soft carpet covers her approach and the words start to shape with clarity like the sound track of a film fading in at the start of a reel.
“Cyrus called me,” says Arthur. “And said you hired him to go into the house.”
“And you’re going to believe that psychopathic—”
“Why would he lie?”
“ ’Cause he’s trying to get back at us for Furnace Creek, baby, by fuckin’ with your head, by making you turn on me. He wants us to eat each other alive.”
“Don’t give me the shell game, John Lee, alright?”
Maureen makes the living room just as Arthur shoves John Lee, and his body twists back against his precious bar. She rushes in
to the room. “What’s goin’ on here? Stop! Arthur!”
She manages to get herself wedged between the two men as John Lee is coming up from the clutter of bar stools he stumbled through. Arthur stands there flat-footed behind two huge fists.
John Lee slams a bar stool back down in place where it belongs. “Cyrus is fuckin’ with your head.”
“With my head? He said you were the one that hired him to kill Sam ’cause he was fuckin’ Maureen. Now … How did he know that? How! You tell me!”
Maureen can suddenly hear a huge sucking sound coming up through her throat. The pain behind her eyes from the headache sears.
“If he’s a liar, then how did he know?”
“I don’t understand any of this,” Maureen hears herself say. She stares at her husband. His look reeks of the grim and unrepentant. “Who is this Cyrus?”
A question neither man wants to answer.
Maureen asks again. “Who is this Cyrus?”
“Go ahead, breast beater,” says John Lee. “Tell her our little secret.”
Arthur starts for John Lee, but John Lee is ready and he flings a stool. Arthur stumbles but comes up looking for blood.
“Go on, Arthur,” John Lee says again. “Tell your ‘friend’ here the truth about who Cyrus is. Tell her how we ‘got the property in probate, right?’ ‘Right.’ ‘ ’Cause some woman died, right?’ ‘Right.’ ‘She’d been murdered, right?’ ‘Right.’ ”
There is a queer cadence to his words.
Arthur stiffens up.
Maureen again stares at her husband. “John Lee. My God. Did you—”
“It was ‘we,’ darlin’. Not me. We. We were there in the desert when the old nigger got it. Your partner here was doing the hard sell. Cyrus—the one we’re talking about—put her down. He was the little manchild fuck she was raising. He put her down good ’cause she wouldn’t make the deal. And we thought it would be best if we just wandered off and let things be.”
“Is this true? Arthur?” Maureen asks. “Is it?”
John Lee eyes him cryptically. Arthur backs away from the truth. Nods.
Maureen turns away, disoriented.
“You want to blame me for bringing him back into this mess,” says John Lee. “Well, you can’t.”
