A Gorgeous Mess

by Layla Wolfe

  Ormond nodded, sliding his cell into his back jeans pocket. “Besides. Stumpy’s death left a void to fill here. It’s simple supply and demand. We’re going to have to take over whatever business Iceman’s conducting here. We won’t make as much profit, though, because we’re not going to bleed the Indians dry.”

  I nodded. I appreciated his interest in not ripping off the natives. “Let’s go peep that ranch out.”

  I had to ride a bit behind Ormond, as he knew the way. I chastised myself at how much I admired his striking Roman profile, the fringe of his soft, streaked chestnut hair beneath the rim of his brain bucket. So I forced myself to drink in the landscape instead. This was not the sort of Rez I was familiar with.

  This Rez was bleak, a wasteland of tossed “shake and bake” soda bottles, brilliant squares of alfalfa fields fringed with unwanted trash—and on a Rez, where almost everything useful was used, you knew it had to be the lowest sort of trash. I had grown up in “Beirut,” the Fort Defiance housing project, while my mother eked out a living farming sheep. Straight-up gangsta life enveloped me until I got the willpower to leave it all behind and join the army. Basketball and the thug life was all I knew until the army started bossing me around, probably the best thing in the world.

  My Rez was Four Corners, the great red sandstone monoliths of Monument Valley, the watercolor layers of the Painted Desert. I canyon carved the ravines and gulches of Canyon de Chelly every day on my way to basketball practice, to pray to the almighty saint, Michael Jordan, or just to wreak havoc with my crew. No one could seriously be suicidal surrounded by a wonderland like that.

  Gallup, where Sheena had grown up, is a wet town surrounded by four dry Rezes. Garden Deluxe wine is made there, and it’s called “Drunk Town” due to the risk of running over some adláaniis—drunks—stumbling down Route 66. The alcohol-related deaths are sky-high, and now drug-related deaths had started to catch up. But near Fort Defiance, no one would throw an old unwanted couch on the side of the road, like they did here alongside the Colorado River. People seemed to give a shit less here. It was a much more depressing place than Beirut where I’d grown up. Not to say we didn’t drink in Beirut. We liked our Garden Deluxe and “Ocean”—hairspray mixed with water—like any other self-respecting Diné. But we didn’t trash the land beneath our feet.

  Catching my eye, Ormond waved his arm to indicate we should pull over. We didn’t cut our engines but removed our lids to talk. “Twinkletoes texted me,” Ormond explained. “The next road after this little rise is the cutoff to Stumpy’s ranch.”

  His eyebrows wiggled as he read Twinkletoes’ text. “Well. Seems the phone number on Instagram posted with our weed for sale belongs to a local Rez youth, one Brick Mantooth. Okay. Well, at least we know who the Hellfires are using for baby gangsters. What’s our approach going to be?”

  “Well, one of our points is to make ourselves known. Only people with something to hide will run. My vote is for just riding up there and seeing what’s what.”

  “I’m in.”

  Jamming our buckets back onto our heads, we proceeded at a calm pace toward Stumpy’s ranch. Turk told me Stumpy had been blackmailing him and his lover Lock, threatening to expose their gay ways to their respective clubs, forcing them to frame some poor Hopi or other for the theft of some heroin. Even when they did as asked, Stumpy didn’t let up, and kept upping the ante until Turk had no choice but to take him out. Since then the ranch had sat idle in probate court, since no one could find any relatives of Stumpy. All the underpaid alfalfa workers had been soaked back into the filthy sponge of Rez life. Theoretically there shouldn’t be a soul on the land.

  But there was. We stopped by an old rusty dumpster. It didn’t take long to figure out that the cans of camp fuel, paint thinner, acetone, and drain cleaner were newer than six months old. We were getting involved in something much deeper than a vaguely illicit weed operation. These were all agents used in cooking meth.

  “Oh, son of a biscuit,” said Ormond, touching a plastic bottle of Red Devil lye with his gloved finger as though it were a turd.

  I sifted my gloved hand through a plastic grocery store bag full of empty pseudoephedrine boxes. “Well, what the fuck did we expect? The Rez is a safe, closed-off society. Feds not likely to venture in here. Stumpy’s property is perfect for a meth superlab. All we’ve got to do is look for a fucking RV.”

  “Right. Stumpy wasn’t known for his recreational enjoyment of campgrounds, so I doubt he owned any RV. That would be the dead giveaway. I just know that you…you’ve got a thing against meth.”

  “A thing?”

  Ormond seemed to redden. “I mean, your daughter…I’m sure you don’t want to have to deal with people who manufacture—”

  “Leave my daughter out of it,” I snapped, tossing down the pseudo bag and stalking back to my ride. It struck me I was acting irrationally. I was letting my angst over my daughter ruin my communication with my partner. Without communication, we had nothing. Men had been known to be shot because they couldn’t communicate something with their eyes. Without a mental or spiritual shorthand, we were just two guys working at odds with each other.

  “All right,” Ormond said boldly. “Then your daughter’s situation won’t affect how you feel about taking out a meth lab.”

  I straddled my bike. “Not at all. If anything, my hatred for those scumsuckers will give me more power. Now let’s get shaking. We’re burning daylight.”

  We drove past Stumpy’s alfalfa barn where heaps of body parts had been discovered last spring. They were the bodies of Mexican student protestors. The cartel had agreed to dispose of the bodies for the Mexican government, their brilliant plan to bury them on Rez land where no one ever went. Stumpy’s inert body had been discovered among these strewn body parts, stabbed through the spine with a pitchfork.

  The odor of solvent—a combination of ether and acetone—assailed my nostrils before I even caught sight of the RV. The mobile home was parked about forty yards from a ramshackle house that hadn’t been maintained in decades. As we neared, I saw the house’s windows were blacked out, another sure sign of a superlab. Garbage cans were overflowing with more cans of paint thinner, toluene, and funnels. I knew if I looked closer I’d see coffee filters stained red, lithium batteries, more empty pill bottles. We didn’t do many superlab busts in Afghanistan but I’d been a ride-along on a few private takeovers of labs in the states, so I knew what to expect.

  A couple of pit bulls snarled and gnashed their teeth at our approach, but they were on heavy chains, so we parked and nosed around. Only one car, the Chevy pickup favored by the Diné people, was parked by the RV. “Must be Brick Mantooth’s,” I told Ormond, “but don’t go near that RV door. Or the superlab door. All this shit could be rigged, wired to blow.”

  “I wasn’t about to,” said Ormond, wide-eyed.

  At one window of the shack, a rotten board that had been nailed to a window was easy to pry away. As expected, inside the fluorescently-lit room were shelves of propane tanks, mason jars, and metal cans all connected with plastic tubing. Ammonia seeped through the cracks in the window frame.

  I said, “Dollars to donuts these assholes know where our weed is, too.” I strode to the door of the RV and rapped on it. “Brick Mantooth! Iceman! This is Anson Dineyazzie of The Bent Zealots. Only I guess you already know that by peeking through the curtains as we rode up. My partner here is Ormond Tangier, muscle for the Zealots. We need to know exactly what you’re doing here in our backyard, or we’re going to come in here with a backhoe and flatten your entire operation.”

  I didn’t expect any answer, and I got none. It would actually be easy to borrow one of The Bare Bones’ backhoes and move it here on a transport trailer. I’d have to inspect the premises for unexploded ordnance.

  Meanwhile Ormond was around back of the rickety cook house. “Anson! Come here!”

  “They probably pay Brick five grand a month to cook twenty-four seven,” I said as I rounded the corner
. “That’s big bucks for a poor Diné out here, but he can’t leave the premises. What’s this?”

  Ormond’s eyes were round. He spoke with reverence. “Jesus Malverde.”

  “What the fuck?” A ceramic bust of some slick-looking cholo or other stood on a wooden table surrounded by dollar bills pinned down with push pins. Dead flowers, horseshoes, booze bottles, even the stock of a broken rifle all decorated the shrine. I wasn’t easily creeped out, but the way a dead rattlesnake was coiled around Jesus’ neck made my stomach clench with dread. “Who’s this pendejo?”

  “Jesus Malverde, angel of the poor, patron saint of drug dealers. He was a Sinaloan bandit who was killed around 1910, a Robin Hood among Mexicans. Traffickers like him because he promotes their images that they are stealing from rich addicted gabachos like us, giving back to the people of Sinaloa by improving roads and schools.”

  I knew why the snake bothered me. “I’m surprised Brick Mantooth is going along with all this hocus pocus. Diné don’t touch, kill, or eat snakes because snakes know holy mysteries.”

  Ormond reached for the snake. “Well, Spaniards don’t give a shit, so I’m going to show them who’s boss by ruining their fucking little shrine—”

  “Don’t!” My hand shot out to grab Ormond’s forearm. “That thing could be wired to blow. Any of this shit can be. It’d be hard to find the wire among all this garbage. I’m sure they heard us coming a mile away. They could’ve set whatever IED they’ve got.”

  Considering the topic of our conversation, we both jumped a mile in the air when something that sounded like a shot came from the other side of the cook house. When we heard running feet, though, we knew at least one cook was making a break for it from the RV, so we tore ass around the corner.

  Two Diné kids were racing across the desert with arms pinwheeling, not even bothering to jump into their Chevy. I leaped into high gear, doing the hundred yard dash after the kids while whipping my Ruger from my jeans. The slower kid seemed to give up once the faster one gained momentum. His arms wheeled furiously as he slowed, as though the short dash had taken it all out of him.

  “Brick Mantooth,” I assumed. The “kid” was a bruiser, probably a basketballer like I’d been, and I saw why he’d slowed. He was a sagger, a gangsta who thought it fashionable to wear pants so low his underwear-clad butt was in full evidence. He had to cling to a handful of the cheap jean material just to hold his pants up. Sleeves of real tribal ink decorated his arms—not the fake “tribal” tats people get to look boss, but genuine Diné artwork that I recognized from my childhood.

  I chambered a round in my pistol and pointed it at Brick’s head. Just because he was a fellow Diné, and somewhat young, I couldn’t single him out for favors. “Are you Brick Mantooth?”

  “I am.”

  “And who’s the guy who just got away?”

  Brick paused. “That’s not for me to say.”

  I had to admire his refusal to nark on his partner. “You’re both cooks at that cook house?”

  Brick shrugged. “I guess. What else would we be doing there?”

  He did have the ashen skin and sunken eyes of someone who worked round the clock under windowless fluorescent lights. “Where’s our fucking weed?”

  “What weed?”

  “You heard me shouting just now. You know I’m with The Bent Zealots, owners of Herbal Legends in Rough and Ready. And you were the moron stupid enough to post it for sale on Instagram.”

  That truly seemed to throw Brick for a loop. Ormond was coming up behind me now, chuckling at Brick’s shocked face.

  Ormond called out, “You didn’t figure anyone would notice that? Well, you’re about as much use as an ashtray on a motorcycle. You’re not even smart enough to be running this operation.”

  “Where’s Iceman?” I barked.

  Brick sneered. “You think he’d be stupid enough to be caught around here? He only checks in once in a while. Listen, brother-cousin. Our ancestors lost our land centuries ago. Isn’t it time we took something back? Might as well get rich off these fucking Anglos and their lousy drug addiction. Are you going to deny me my right to do that?”

  Brick had a point. He was just the cook, hardly the kingpin of the op. Iceman was the real bastard we wanted. “Are you denying you were one of the BGs who hit up the dispensary last week?”

  Brick stuck out his lower lip. “I’m not denying nothing. We’re mules, spitters, baby gangsters, BGs, whatever you want to call us, hyenas. We work for good pay, which is more than I can fucking say about any other opportunity around this hellhole.”

  “All right. If you tell us where the remainder of the weed is, we won’t hassle your cook house,” I lied. I had no intention of allowing any rivals to keep cooking meth in our backyard. “Dii ba’ahee’ nisin.” I am very thankful for this.

  I don’t know if it was speaking Navajo to him or what. But suddenly the punky BG raised his hands in surrender and shrugged. “You know if I give up the pot the fucking cartel is going to kill my family.”

  I don’t care, I told myself. If I didn’t recover the weed, I wasn’t doing my job. I bluffed my way forward. “The cartel didn’t put you up to jacking that pot. The Hellfires did. Iceman did. The cartel might be behind this cook house business, but they didn’t put you up to the pot heist.”

  I had lucked out. I could tell by his veiled look of contempt that I’d hit the nail on the head.

  Ormond added, “If you give up the pot, my friend here won’t shoot you in the brains.” He held his piece, too, held down at his side.

  That could have also convinced Brick. When I took another step closer, Brick flung his hands straight into the air and shrieked in a high voice, “The old alfalfa barn! You know the place where all those fucking body parts of Mexican students were dumped? Well that’s where the weed is! No one will go close to that barn because it’s way too creepy! Now can I leave?”

  I looked at Ormond. He looked at me. We shrugged at each other. What harm was there in letting the kid go? He wasn’t going far. Diné travelled some of the most dangerous roads in the country, on this and other Rezes. They didn’t know how to operate in the real world. I was in massive culture shock when I first joined the army. I’d pretty much stayed in massive culture shock ever since. That’s why it didn’t matter to me whether I was in Kabul, Winslow, or Rough and Ready. I had no home.

  I waved my piece. “All right, Brick. But if you’re shitting us, we’re coming back to get you, you know that. Ahéhee’, shik’e.” Thank you, my friend.

  His courage raised when I lowered the Ruger, Brick sneered. “Who the hell cares? I make ten times more money than you with your gay little caveman vests, anyway.”

  “Oh, yeah?” said Ormond. “You’re not exactly the height of fashion with your pants so low you have to wax your pubes.”

  Brick had no comeback for that one. He sort of sputtered until I waved him away with my piece. Then he tore ass back to his RV, yelling,

  “You’re still gay!”

  “So?” yelled Ormond. “Tomorrow morning, you’ll still be stupid!”

  We trudged slowly back to our rides. My dick was plumping in my jeans, riled by the adrenaline rush of almost having had to off the kid over some weed. Elif air ab dinikh, I’d been known to waste men over much less. I knew better than to start getting sappy because the kid was barely out of his teens. In this day and age, a “kid” was entirely capable of annihilating an entire race, of leading a cult to destruction. Just because I was a father, it couldn’t stop me from executing my mission.

  “We’re not going to let them keep this superlab here,” Ormond stated.

  “Nope. Let’s secure the weed first, deal with the cook house later. The Mexican strategy is to get gabachos hooked by increasing the purity and cutting the price. That’s probably why they established this lab so far north. They save on transport across the border, and they’re this much closer to distribution hubs.”

  “I’ve done it a few times,” Ormond ad
mitted. “The dopamine rush was sublime. The pleasure chemical racing through my body was a rush, a much bigger rush than cocaine.”

  “So I hear,” I said, cynical again. Sheena was risking her unborn baby for that rush. I’d grown up with people who couldn’t be stronger than their next hankering, their next crave. It looks so easy from the outside. Why don’t they just stop doing it? I can’t overestimate the reward factor that takes place in the brain. I’ve seen hundreds of old adláaniis with makeup like circus clowns and shoes with no laces walking down the center of a busy highway for their next shot of Aqua Net. And now I’d seen a seven months pregnant girl begging strangers for her next hit of meth. I’d done nothing about it.

  Back at our bikes, I couldn’t resist running my palm over the rise of Ormond’s butt. I’d been dying to squeeze that rounded globe for a while now. My excuse was to pull him close to me so I could grind my erection against his. I gasped in shock when the wave of pleasure was so overwhelming I nearly fucking spurted a jet of come inside my jeans.

  I had to stop, but kept my throbbing cock pressed against his. His widened and expanded against mine, too. I had never expressed much interest in cocks. The dominant man never did. But it crossed my mind for a brief second to wonder how hung he was. It would be nice, aesthetically, if he was hung like a horse. He was built like a brick shithouse everywhere else. But that was no indication.

  “Listen,” I growled. “Once we find that weed, why don’t you blow me again in that alfalfa barn? I ain’t afraid of no body parts.”

  Ormond grinned deliciously. My mouth almost watered to kiss him, another thing I rarely did. “Besides, the body parts have long since been cleaned up.”

  “That, too.” I slapped his ass, hard, before moving to straddle my bike. What perverts we are. Getting aroused by thinking of blow jobs in a barn full of body parts.