by Boston Teran
Dusk has fallen blue about the room. Any dim chances of peace slip away through long silent moments. Maureen drops down onto the couch. Her tiny hands are pressed into balls, her wrists pressed against her temples. She can feel the dire call of blood pounding away from vein to vein. She begins to cry at the complete failure of everything around her.
“Why, honey,” John Lee jackals. “Don’t take it so badly. We were only trying to put a little away for our golden jubilees.”
Maureen screams out at him. A vicious, broken, ear-piercing shrill meant to silence his tongue for just one minute of the madness she’s locked in.
Again John Lee turns to Arthur. Again tells him in no uncertain terms that he did not hire Cyrus to commit any crime. Again says he does not know how, when, or why Cyrus could have any information about Sam and Maureen’s little trysts.
John Lee gets back in the stride of steadied arrogance. The cop’s ability to shape-shift into order-and-control mode. To give off that righteous indignation when you are called down by civilians. He turns, reaches over the bar for a Scotch bottle and glass.
But Arthur hasn’t copped to everything Cyrus told him, including the fact that the phone is tapped. And those queer phrases with their feeling of déjà vu John Lee used seem to fit somewhere suddenly. Arthur doesn’t know how much truth there is in any lie. He does not know how much lie there is in any truth, since he has long since lost the ability to scale it. But he does know …
“You tapped the phones here, didn’t you?” says Arthur.
John Lee drops three ice cubes cleanly into a glass. “Did Cyrus say that, too?”
Maureen’s eyes rise up between the pillars of her balled fists. “Our phones are tapped?”
“If they are, then that … maniac … tapped them.”
“Horseshit,” says Arthur.
“Don’t try to get me with your tract-home mentality, Arthur. I only live here. And remember, if Cyrus tapped this phone then he knows your boy is out there after him.”
“Our phones are tapped,” Maureen replies.
“He’s fuckin’ smart. Think about it. You better get to Bob. Get to him. Get him off the road. And not for his sake. You don’t want Cyrus caught. We’d make a pretty trio in the papers, wouldn’t we?”
“Our phones—”
“Shut the fuck up, you cunt parrot.”
John Lee pours the Scotch, shakes his head at his wife’s stupid repetitions. He knows now he’s got the upper hand, even with the facts out. He can see it on Arthur’s face. That he’s turning Gabi into a side issue against the more personal threat of his own survival. Then he decides to press. “Did Cyrus even say anything about Gabi?”
Arthur shakes his head no. “I didn’t get to ask him.”
“I don’t like to say this, Arthur. He’s stuck it to us all here. All. The girl is dead. I’ll bet on it.”
“Shut up!” yells Arthur. His face is blood-red. The lips bluish and hard. He doesn’t want to think it. To imagine it. He wants it all to not exist.
While he takes a drink, John Lee repeats everything he’s said. Slowly hammering away at his points. Maureen looks up at him from the low angle of the couch. She is not looking at the man. Not really. At a shape, yes. A form, yes. A human indictment, possibly.
Then, into that little corner of the mind where we all go mad from time to time, she slips. The pain in her head is gone and only the sheer slight drum-touch of blood against the flesh of her inner ear remains, like a heart already cut from the body but still beating inside a thin shell of music-box wood.
She stands. John Lee is still having at Arthur, sticking each detail well up his ass. Maureen catches a glimpse of John Lee’s shoulder holster just inside his coat.
She starts across the room. The next seconds unfold as slow as a Valium drip. John Lee turns, and when Maureen gets the full close-up of that salacious grin she’s come to despise all these years, the laws of constraint go jungle.
If someone had been sitting in their car across the valley on that dead-end road in the national forest watching the house with binoculars as John Lee had done so many times before, they’d have seen the fight he put up. How he managed to get the gun from her hand before she cleared his coat.
They’d have seen the violent mess the three would become when Arthur jumped forward and began pulling at their arms. When the bar stool skidded out from beneath him as he was pressed back into the bar and the three fell. And the turning of their shadows like acrobats across the ceiling as they crawled the floor toward the gun: that, too, they would have seen.
They would not have seen the sentences of their fight from then on to the end. They would see the exclamation point of smoke rising from beyond the bar and the couch. And the stilling of shadows. And the smoke continuing on and up across the ceiling to where its lacy color gave way in dissolved seconds before being pulled by air vents into the forever.
They would see that, but nothing more.
59
Bob and Case hole up with Lena in a motel room in Cathedral City, which is about halfway between Palm Springs and Rancho Mirage. It’s a U-shaped courtyard of well-appointed kitsch. Wagon-wheel motifs and fifties Gene Autry mirrors with steer horns where you can hang your hat, or your gun belt if you’re a carrier. Across the street on the open sand is a billboard advertising the Oasis Water Park, and beyond that the stark black line of Edom Hill and Indio, where singular lights flash like starships trailing the horizon.
Bob sits in the open doorway, his back against the frame, watching all this as he waits for Cyrus’s call. He smokes and keeps his arms folded across his chest so no one spots the gun he’s got tucked away. He intends to make sure nothing goes down here in Quaintsville, where truckers and families cross the open courtyard.
Lena is sitting on one of the beds. She’s had her second feeding and is coming off the nod. She has the television on, but mostly she steals glimpses of Bob while Case showers. Occasionally he spots her and stares back long and hard to make sure that if there’s any little nasty ideas in her head, they remain little nasty ideas.
The room is pretty much lit just from the television when Case comes out of the bathroom with her hair wet and wearing only underwear and a T-shirt.
Lena watches Case squat down and take a cigarette from Bob. They speak quietly so Lena can’t hear them.
Outside, a mama and papa bear and their three little waifs stroll the gravel lot. The kids all have some kind of fancy upscale toy flashlight, and they’re spraying the night air with long swaths of white. Bob watches this giggling trio march along behind their folks in that drunken cadence that children have.
Case goes over and sits on the edge of the bed by Lena’s feet. She spends a few quiet, solicitous minutes there, but it only serves to make Lena wary.
Then, turning to her and speaking in the lowest whisper possible, Case says, “You know where Cyrus is.”
Lena moves slightly and the pillows follow suit within the slippery sound of their cloth cases.
“You fuckin’ know, Lena.”
Lena shrugs. And tries her best to keep her emotions shut off.
“You gotta help us.”
“ ‘Us,’ ‘us.’ How beautifully fuckin’ romantic.”
“I mean—”
“I know what you—”
“I mean us all.”
Hours pass until they are just three sets of haggard eyes and a television.
The cellular rings.
Bob jumps up from the doorway.
Case reaches for the phone on the table beside her chair.
Lena slides down onto the edge of the bed.
Case stands. And there, on the other side of the line, is her old master.
“Have you come home to be swallowed?” he says.
Case nods to Bob, looks one last time to Lena, then says to her, “I’m sorry.”
Like some kind of harried creature, Lena stands. Sees Bob slowly closing the front door. Looks back at Case. Her eyes slowly backing
away and away.
“Cyrus,” Case says. “We know you’re onto us.”
“Shit!” cries Lena.
Case cups the phone to her ear. Steps away from Lena, who tries to make a grab at the cellular but is stopped cold by Bob.
“Be quiet,” he says.
“Lena told us everything, man. Every fuckin’ word.”
Lena tries again for the phone and Bob grabs her arms and flings her toward the bed, where she falls.
“You’re in this now,” he says. “You!”
“We want the girl back. You hear me?”
“You fuckin’ fools!” shouts Lena.
“Cyrus? Cyrus? We want the girl.”
Bob grabs Lena before she can shout again. Gets his hands around her mouth. Lifts her from the ground.
“Cyrus! Cyrus!”
“Remember those wind turbines out on Energy Road?” he says. “Where you tried to kill yourself that time?”
“How could I ever forget one of the high spots in my life?”
“Bring the money there.”
Confused, she asks, “What money?”
“Why do you think I had you come all the way out here?”
“You’re the magician. You tell me.”
“You’re still nothing but a coolie. You know that?”
“Yeah. So?”
“I told Errol Grey the stuff would be delivered tonight,” says Cyrus. “And to have the money ready. You don’t have my stuff. I’m sorry to hear it. But you’ve played field hand enough to know. You get out to Energy Road by tomorrow at first light, and I mean first light. With the money.”
“And what do we use to trade?”
“Your lives, I guess.”
Case looks at Bob. A troubled moment.
“What?” Bob whispers.
Case waves for him to be quiet. She walks into the bathroom and closes the door. She huddles in the corner of the white room.
“I don’t need the girl anymore anyway,” says Cyrus. “You can have her back. She’s been picked pretty clean. You remember how I am when I got a pretty-pretty with a little baby fat on her. I might even put some bus fare up her crack for the trip back home. How’s that?”
“Cyrus …”
He hangs up.
Case remains huddled in the corner. Looks around the cell-white room, which smells of disinfectant. Her eyes wander the plastic shower curtain of see-through lilies. Talk about a statement of the mind. She stares down at the floor, remembering her time crawling the tiles as she got off junk.
She goes back into the room. Lena is sitting in a chair, her head just dangling from its scrawny neck staring at the floor as if some message were hidden in the foot-worn western images of the rug. Bob stands over her, gun drawn.
“What happened?” he asks.
“Errol Grey has got a place here in Rancho Mirage. He’s waiting to make the trade. We bring Cyrus the money, he gives us the girl.”
“Shit.”
“I know.”
“He wants us to kill Errol Grey and take the money.”
“That’s it.”
“Shit! How do we even know Gabi is—”
“She’s alive,” growls Lena. “I told you, didn’t I! But you don’t—”
“Because you’re a fuckin’ liar.”
Lena’s head drops back down.
Bob looks at Case. “Well?”
Case thinks a moment. She goes to Lena’s purse. Takes out her smack and junkie toys. She walks over to Lena. Kneels in front of her. Lena has been watching all this carefully without so much as a word.
“You killed me,” says Lena. “Is that why you didn’t let that sheep asshole do me? So you could. Fuck. Now I can’t go back.”
“I know.”
“But I got nowhere to go now.” Lena sits there with her jaw a shriveled accordion of skin. “You can’t fight him.”
“But we are.”
Lena smirks at the idiocy of it. “Yeah. And look at you both.”
“Shut your fuckin’ mouth, girl,” shouts Bob.
Case takes Lena’s needle and hands it to her. Then the smack. She unbuckles Lena’s belt, pulls it through the loops. She ties it around her own arm so the veins welt up.
“Hey,” says Bob. “What are you doin’?”
“I’ll handle this,” says Case. “Heat a spoon, Lena. Shoot me up. Go on. I’ve been weak enough to want to do it myself plenty of times. Especially since our little party in Mexico. But we know about all that, don’t we? Come on. Shoot me up!”
Lena sits back, skulking in the chair.
“We filled those veins with one act of degradation after another, didn’t we? And I don’t mean with just that. Right? Lots of head shit, too, right! Come on.” Case’s voice cracks. “Till the back is broken, then the heart. Till all that’s left is the fuckin’ field hand. Come on. Watch me die!”
It is impossible for Lena to tell whether this is just a vicious outburst or some outrageous veiled point being made.
“Come on!” Case screams. Then her voice is flush with sorrow. “There’s only two things left you can be. Who I am now or who I’ll be after you kiss me with the needle once and for all. Get it. Get it! I stole your life. Get it! I shut you down tonight. You understand what I’m saying here? You’re now me in that irrigation ditch on the side of the road where Cyrus left me for dead.”
Horror could not be drawn better than in the slack eyes looking out from the weakly lit corner of the room where Lena sits.
“Where is he?” asks Case.
Not a breath now will go unnoticed.
Lena glances past Case’s shoulder to where Bob silently guards the door.
“Where is he?”
Lena thinks to herself she can’t make it on a hard run. Case’s gun—where did she leave it?
“Lena?”
In her jeans across the room.
“Where … is … he?”
She’s not sure she even has the courage for that.
“Don’t you get it? You’re just a street junkie now!” Case grabs her face. “Where is he?”
Lena looks down. She cannot go eye-to-eye with Case. “I don’t have the courage to fly,” she says. “I can only crawl.”
Case has heard enough. She lets Lena’s face slip from her grasp. She stands. Looks down at the dried-out body and soul hiding behind a painted skin. “Go on.” She pulls Lena up and marches her toward the door. “Get out!”
“Wait a minute,” says Bob.
“Let her go!” She follows behind Lena, puts an arm hard into the crease of Lena’s back. “Get out.”
Lena tries to twist around for her purse and junkie paraphernalia but Case won’t have it. “No. You’re going out naked. Into the wolves’ teeth. Just like us.”
Bob grabs Lena. “Hold on. Case … Let’s cuff this fuckin’ bitch up in here, split, and call the cops. Tell ’em what we have. I know people we can …”
Case presses her hand against Bob’s. “Bob, please …”
He feels her voice so filled with defeat that he lets Lena go. Case opens the door. Lena is trembling as she looks back toward the lifeline of smack left behind. Case pushes her again, this time out the door.
“Case,” cries Lena.
Case shoves her again. Lena crumples a bit. Boots haunting steps on gravel. Case shoves her past the truck and into the moonlight of the courtyard.
“Case …”
Case turns. Lena is left fumbling for a few pathetic moments to try to buy something back of her life.
Bob watches from the doorway. Lena runs back to Case. Takes her by the arm. They speak a few moments. The dark outline of the overhanging balcony makes it impossible for him to see their faces. When they’re done, Case nods.
She walks back into the room. Looks at Lena one last time and closes the door.
“Well?”
“Nothing.”
“What did she say? I saw you nodding at something.”
Case slumps down on the bed. “Nothing that
could help us now.”
60
Arthur sits on the couch for hours staring at John Lee’s body. He watches the tiny tricklets of blood fall in slow order on the wood flooring around the bar.
Maureen sits on the bathroom floor in the dark by the toilet. Her spirit has collapsed under the long charge of adrenaline. Her gun hand rests on the side of the porcelain bowl. Its coolness soothes her. She is covered with the dark brandy of John Lee’s blood. She wants the robe off, the blood away. But it is too much to even move.
Emerging through the dark is Arthur. He slides down beside her.
“I don’t think anyone heard the shot.”
“I guess by now they’d have …”
“But you can never know.”
“Would they believe it was …”
“With all that shit behind us?”
“Oh God, Arthur.”
She looks away from him and to the spots of blood up and across her hand, then out and along her arm. Marks that trace the blastline from where she held the gun against his flesh and fired.
“You need to know something,” Arthur says.
She is too weak to respond.
“It wasn’t Cyrus who fuckin’ killed that old lady in the desert. He’d shot her alright. ’Cause she wouldn’t sell her property to us. John Lee had extorted the kid, even promised him a cut. He was a junkie, see, and John Lee fed him with smack from busts, but he went ballistic when she said no.
“We went into the trailer.” His voice wheezes. “She was alive. Barely. John Lee—he put the finishing touches to her. Made it look like … seem like a cult …” He chokes on the word.
Maureen does not look at him. She does not want to know how much is a lie. She doesn’t care. She knows the truth is soundly somewhere between what he has said and what really was slammed home with a bullet.
“What do we do?” she asks.
“We try to survive.”
They wrap the body in a tarp. A shroud stained with lavender from when Maureen sponge-painted a kitchen wall. They carry John Lee through the darkened house. Past windows where the neighbors’ houses twinkle in small framed presses of moonlight. Arthur at the chest, she at the legs. He walks backward with straddling steps toward the inside door of the garage. She follows hunched over like some miserably tired charwoman, breathing hard behind the train of a sagging corpse.
