Gun Work

by David J. Schow

  Confusion clouded Sucio’s anger, then redoubled it.

  Sucio roared in for the kill, and Barney nailed him in the left eye with the long-forgotten copy of ¡Alarma!

  A lot of things had to fall into place for that one desperate bet to work. But he had to chance it.

  Drunk, overconfident from the past beatings he had administered, Sucio would be easy to provoke, and probably never more vulnerable than he was now, alone, almost completely out of control.

  El Chingon had explained to Barney his lack of barter value. If Barney did not strike right-goddamn-now, even restrained and at such a major disadvantage, he might not get another opportunity.

  The ¡Alarma! was about thirty pages of blackly thumbed newsprint — limp pages, no staples. The word “tabloid” originated in the pharmaceutical industry to denote proper dosages in smaller tablets; it was quickly hijacked by newspapers to mean more info, smaller package, and came to refer to the size of the paper itself, or half-broadsheet size. ¡Alarma! was the next step down — “compact” size, or about an inch smaller than tabloid.

  Barney’d taken this furred and gray copy of a paper about the heft of a thin Sunday supplement and rolled it up into a tube, as tightly as he could compress it, in the hope that this object might make a good weapon. It was all he had.

  He jammed it into Sucio’s eye now and twisted, the paper edges cutting Sucio’s eyelid. The big man howled. Before he could fall back, Barney rapped him sharply across the bridge of the nose, breaking it, bringing a glurt of nasal blood.

  Barney’s plan was to bring his improvised stick up, hard, under Sucio’s jaw for a possible kill, or use it as a ram to drive Sucio’s Adam’s apple through the back of his neck. But Sucio’s skin was like rhinoceros hide or leather toughened by salt. This guy was used to having his nose broken, and the sight of his own blood was no deterrent, as it would have been with a normal human, thus losing Barney that critical split second.

  Sucio hoisted Barney into a brutal chokehold and held him aloft. The tendons in Barney’s neck snapped audibly, like misfired popcorn. No use in whacking Sucio’s bald, corrugated head; that would be like trying to knock down the wall.

  Plus, Barney was notably weakened, his response zone eroded, his countermove time all used up.

  After nearly a minute of asphyxiation and a possible crushed esophagus, most of the starch drained out of Barney’s brilliant plan, and he belonged to Sucio, who worked him over the way a chef pounds a cut of beef.

  Barney regained enough sense to realize his own gun, his stolen .45, was jammed up against his front teeth, which recorded the vibration of the hammer cocking.

  “You like this gun, eh?” Sucio growled. “You kiss it goodbye, because you ain’t never gonna shoot it again, pinche gringo.”

  That seemed a bizarre threat for Sucio to make; perhaps he had intended something a bit more acidic?

  Barney did not have the chance to inquire. Sucio pistol-whipped him with his own gun for nearly a quarter of an hour, mangling Barney’s face to raw burger.

  Barney never felt Sucio amputate his right index finger with the tin snips. His trigger finger.

  By the time Sucio repeated the procedure on Barney’s left index finger, Barney had passed beyond feeling simple pain. He did hear the liquid cellophane sound of the blades meeting through his flesh, though, and the more arid sound of them dividing bone like brittle chalk.

  Some time after that, Mojica entered Barney’s room long enough to cauterize the damage of amputation using a propane torch. Barney’s fingers were nowhere to be found. Mojica considered his own fingers — he still had a full set — and scuttled out as fast as possible, making sure he was not observed.

  At least, that was what Barney thought he saw. Funny, he could smell burning flesh, but he couldn’t feel his hands at all.

  The next thing Barney saw were the maggots, busily feeding on his hands, where his index fingers used to live. That was all right. The little buggers would eat the necrotic tissue. They were nasty, but they were protein. He might eat them himself, if he ever woke up again.

  Surely this was less traumatic than being shot in the head.

  Maybe that came next.

  Of all his freedom scenarios, Barney had not anticipated leaving the place he had come to call the Bleeding Room on his face, being dragged by one foot.

  A foot that was no longer encased in the unforgiving leg shackle.

  Assorted parasites had been at work on the rawed flesh of his leg. Where the cuff had secured him now felt like a third degree burn.

  He was experiencing pain, and was therefore alive, perhaps delirious. One of his eyes was swollen shut and crusted. His skeleton felt disconnected. Wounds everywhere. Teeth rocking in their gum beds. Brain hammering. Heart still pumping, blood still moving, even if a lot of it was vacating the premises. Dizziness, disorientation. He felt he had puked and shat so much that if you looked down his throat, you’d see light.

  They — someone — dragged his dead ass out, down steps. Sacked his head. Stinky bag, probably the same one from his earlier trip. He was in the van again, the one in which he and Carl had been taken. Carl’s past few pay periods, by comparison, had probably been less debilitating. This time, he was not around to grab Barney’s hand and drag him up out of the smothering sand.

  The unseen road trip that followed was not measurable in units of time. The only clock Barney possessed was his own heartbeat. It could have been a week. He had to remain inside of himself, sequestered. He thought of his organs, stubbornly churning away in spite of the memo that came down saying just die. Maybe they were taking him to a clínica. Maybe they were driving him home. Maybe Sucio had slipped up, gone overboard, and now they had to doctor him.

  Yeah, right.

  More bumpy roads and more roughhouse dragging. When the bag was yanked off his head Barney was staring bleary-eyed at the Rio Satanas, from the top of the bridge. Sucio was sporting a bandage beneath a patch on one eye. The glowering orb of the setting sun made everything shade crimson and blurred Barney’s own light-sensitive vision, but he recognized Mojica, standing back a pace, politic. He did not feel the usual waves of animal hatred broiling off Sucio; the big man seemed to have clamped down and toughened up, all business, curses shelved, silent again.

  Sucio grabbed Barney by the scruff and the crotch and heaved him over the edge. No parting insult, no quip. Barney hit the oil-sheened surface of the mulchy water inelegantly and headfirst, sinking to brush the tar-like aggregate bottom, sucking a lungful of turbid liquid with floating chunks in it, then slowly ascending from his own buoyancy toward filtered light. He had a flash thought of his goldfish, under Armand’s stewardship, back in another world called Los Angeles. If you didn’t clean the aquarium for a couple of months and allowed the mold and algae to build up, shut off the filtration system so the fish were swimming in ammoniac piss and liquefied gray shit, then dunked your entire head into the tank, it would probably be a lot like this.

  Back on the bridge a brief discourse ensued in Spanish between Mojica and Sucio concerning the number of minutes left to Barney’s life. Barney caught bits of it as he bobbed, water draining from one ear while it filled the other. One said Barney was dead, the other said Barney wasn’t, and it went back and forth, in the manner of gang taunts, no matter either way, a kind of yes-he-is, no-he’s-not time-passer.

  Barney could imagine the sizzling fire-coal deep in Sucio’s good eye. He’d had hurt the huge enforcer, hurt him visibly and humiliatingly, and nobody hurt Sucio, that was clearly a rule in their world.

  Barney floated on the surface, face-down, no bubbles.

  “Mira,” said Mojica. “Muerte, carnal.”

  Sucio unlimbered his revolver, aimed down at the floating body, and spent all six rounds.

  Barney rotated in the water, surrounded by a corona of freshly freed blood.

  “Now he is,” said Sucio, turning back to the van.

  A disembodied woman’s voice seemed to ask Barney, Wh
ere are my children?

  He had holes in him; that much he knew. He was hit. He had been hit a few times before, in his previous life.

  Shock trauma took over once he ran dry of endorphins; he could not feel a thing. Bullet impact had flipped him over in the water, and instead of drowning, he was more or less afloat and still drawing air along with the occasional mouthful of sewage. He rejected the bilge. Autonomic functions had taken over and he did not think about willfully breathing. He worried in the abstract about taking on water — holes in a rowboat could sink it — but for the most part he was far away from his physical body, occasionally observing it from the distant place to which his mind had been exiled. But all he could see was the sky at dusk. The world seemed aflame.

  The Rio Satanas was devilish in its commitment to seek the sea, or other, fresher tributaries. Sunrise, sunset and the tidal pull of the moon exerted their influence to provide a kind of current. He revolved, in the manner of a lazy sunbather in a hotel pool. He saw the ransom bridge receding, only once, before it became too dark to gauge distance.

  This is how life ends.

  Life ends not in triumph and fulfillment, but depletion and ignominy. Barney was used up, tapped out, leaking sentience from holes in his body, run dry of humanity, reduced to a kind of absurd chattel for the amusement of psychopaths. Alive or dead, he no longer existed; perhaps never existed before, except as a shade of himself, a suggestion of a person, a conglomeration of tics and traits and moot statistics, none quite diverting. It is easy to blow large holes in a tissue-thin simulacrum of life.

  His murderers had not only denied his humanity, but contravened his existence. He was not important enough to keep, nor unimportant enough to cut free. He was nothing, and the universe at large did not care about teaching him spurious moral lessons. Given a fresh, whole body and a set of guns, he could destroy everyone who ever did him wrong, but what would that change? Nothing. Because he was nothing; he mattered not, on the big scale.

  There was no balance to restore. Nobody would care. He was not a religious man; pie in the sky by and by when you die. He had structured his life so that he was never owed anything by anyone, so by what right would he claim recompense?

  Again his fractured perception registered the distant sound of a woman in tears. A local: “¡O hijos mios!” Perhaps Barney was a lost child, floating home.

  I have no one, the Old Assassin had told him. I care for no one. And I’m cared for by no one. So all I have is what I can do.

  Barney could not do anything except bob along in the disgusting mulch of the river. Perceptions ebbing. The quick hallucination, dream, or flashback. Not like the legend — no clip reel of your life’s deeds and misdeeds unspooling before your semi-conscious mind; no tunnel of light; zero choir. The dull pulse of biologically blocked pain, radiating like a distant, dying sun.

  This is how life ends.

  Life ends when you are totally free.

  Something was chewing on his foot. Maybe a sump rat the size of a terrier; maybe one of those monster catfish from the Amazon, a nine-foot-long killer mutated by the toxic waste in the river.

  It nibbled on Barney’s bare heel and he feebly kicked it away, splashing black water.

  Deep inside his mind, Barney was startled — a sign of life? What?! Something as simple as don’t eat me, you monster?

  Another nibble and he lashed out again, completely without thinking. His lungs were still stubbornly drawing air in clotted rasps.

  A bolt of pain scissored up his leg and somehow located nerve receptors long since shut down.

  Oww, fucker, I need that toe for a tag; leave me alone.

  Barney recalled the kids he had seen huffing paint, glazed and otherdimensional, casually homicidal. His strange hallucinations and prolapsed volition could be attributed to the poisonous bouillabaisse of the river-that-was-not-a-river, his new home. The toxic waste had recombined into luxurious new forms, folding its plasmas, infiltrating his metabolism through every bullet hole, gash and wound. It backed up in his liver and kidneys to percolate and birth new concentrated cocktails of bio-active excreta. All human activity generated some form of waste; Barney came to see himself, during his few lucid episodes, as just one more form of hazardous leftover, dumped in with all the others.

  His new world was very cosmopolitan. There was a little bit of everything in it: corrosives, explosives, solvents, mercury, lead, petroleum, ashes, antifreeze, propane, caustics, pesticide, acetone, benzene, ammonia, lye, alkalies and alkalines, formaldehyde, xylene... the whole encyclopedia of wanton chemical hazard, all of it blenderized with megatons of unprocessed human sewage.

  This was Mexico’s version of the Love Canal.

  Along the way, Barney had contributed his own throw-off: perspiration, blood, Numbers One and Two, mucus, saliva, skin flakes, but not a single tear, or so he believed.

  The sky floating above him assumed alien hues.

  He still could not feel his hands.

  He dreamt of a party.

  No, fiesta, down here it would be a fiesta.

  Piñatas, refrescos. Helado — ice cream.

  Gaily attired people. Music.

  Someone’s wedding, or birthday, or anniversary. Boda, cumpleaños, aniversario.

  Unless it was his party.

  A loose-limbed puppet carved of dark wood, with a baked-apple face, spoke to him in a language he did not understand.

  The puppet was wearing a battered straw hat; a neckerchief.

  Its voice sounded a billion years old.

  Barney began to levitate toward the sun, which spiked in through his slitted eyes like firebrands.

  The sun was all he could see, as Icarus saw it when his wax wings melted.

  Muy caliente. Very hot.

  If he closed his eyes, they would weld shut and he would never see anything again. His pupils dilated to microdots, overwhelmed.

  The puppet droned away, unseen now. Whatever it was talking about sounded very bad.

  Stupid puppet.

  Barney was inside the Bleeding Room again.

  Not the same as before; this was a madhouse where he was restrained, sliced up, tortured with needles. Bound down, hurling up his own guts. Beaten and stretched and bound again. Force-fed vile fluids and tormented by an army of imps who poked and prodded, cut away his flesh and seeded it with salt.

  In his mind, he retreated even deeper, hauling ass down a cobwebbed corridor — man, he had never been in this room! — and slamming a door, then finding another artery, moving swiftly, slamming another door until he was lost in the catacomb-pit of his own brain.

  Outside, they continued to raze his flesh. Whatever they wanted, Barney did not have it.

  Down deep in the catacombs, Barney confronted one of his worst personal fears — that he was really in an asylum, irretrievably insane, violent and bound down in max-lock, trapped and screaming inside his own ruptured head, unable to get a message to the outside world.

  Lunacy, coma.

  The second Bleeding Room made the first seem like a high-roller suite in Vegas, the kind you get comped when the hotel wants to clean out your bank.

  Not food, but cuisine; hookers on-call, all the amenities. No Sucio. No betrayers at all, in fact.

  In the second Bleeding Room all the inquisitioners were completely faceless. There was no crime, no clue as to your sin, and zero appeal. It was pretty much an atheist’s perfect picture of Hell.

  Barney fled, slammed another door, locked it, went deeper.

  Found another door, leading downward.

  It was very dark at the end of the corridor.

  The dead thing was clad in a moldering priest’s outfit, and had patches of moss on its head instead of hair. Its head was a skull glistening with gelid rot. It hectored Barney in a voice that had the sound of withered dry reeds, clicking. It extended skeletal fingers over his supine form and tried to touch him. Unable to move, Barney tried to will away physical contact. A squirming grub fell out of the creature’s
eye socket and landed on Barney’s chest, where it vanished in a corkscrew twist down one of the bullet holes there. The holy-collared gravewalker tried to smear stale blood on Barney’s head and its reach broke the mantilla of cobwebs in which it was shrouded.

  Get away from me. Take your superstitions and get away. Sell your lies somewhere else.

  Like a pestersome insect, the damned thing continued to hover and natter, its off-center jawbone waggling nonsense and dislodging tomb dust, which sifted down through baleful light to coat Barney’s open eyes. Apparently this annoying specter was going to yammer on until its script was done, and Barney briefly wondered if he could grab the tarnished bone crucifix that depended from its jackstraw neck and turn it to use as a stabbing weapon; anything to stem the tide of gibberish.

  Oh, for a firearm to blast this apparition into crypt dirt.

  The third Bleeding Room came as a total surprise.

  Barney saw low beamed ceilings and roof of thatch. The predominant odors were cooking food, incense, and something akin to ground stone. An unseen clock ticked ponderously.

  He tried to sit up on the narrow bed and was slammed down by nausea and his body’s inability to do what he told it. His muscles did not obey.

  The clock became maddening — an actual, undeniable measure of time, unless he was merely making all this up in his shell-shocked mind.

  “I see you dream,” said a voice. “Las pesdillas. The movement of the eyes.”

  “REM,” Barney said. His voice had been taken. All that was left was a dry tumbleweed whisper.

  His consciousness was a treacherous ascent over booby-trapped ice with a thousand hidden traps. One foothold wrong, and he would tumble. Funny that he saw an ice field; he had expected sand dunes to the horizon.

  “Ariem?” echoed the brittle voice. “That is not your name; how you are called — ¿como se llama?”

  The horrible puppet from the nightmare fiesta hovered over him, and Barney blacked out.

  When he awoke again, he was still in the third Bleeding Room, with the infernal clock ticking away.