Gun Work

by David J. Schow

  El Atrocidad’s chariot was a yacht-sized Cadillac in patchy, oxidizing gold, with enfeebled rocker panels and no air conditioning. Barney was packed into the back seat between two very wide luchadors, with a third riding shotgun as Atrocidad drove them to the airport, at dismaying speed, as though piloting a Jeep through a minefield during an air raid.

  Offstage, rudos and técnicos frequently hung together, or wolfed down heart-attack-sized tortas at the Café Cuadrilatero, a wrestling-themed eatery in Mexico City run by another legend, Super Astro. Bitter enemies in the ring dined together after bouts; trophies and captured masks adorned the walls. In the mythology of lucha libre, a good guy could become a bad guy in an instant, or the reverse; lose his dignity in a hair match, regain it with a “turn” or switch in loyalties. The cosmic balances of the universe had determined that Barney would be ferried north by an entourage of two good guys, two bad.

  No time to stop for a Super Gladiador at Astro’s, unfortunately. One of those monstrous sandwiches could feed about eight people... or two luchadors.

  To Barney’s right was Medico Odio, Dr. Hate, who without his máscara resembled a burly nightclub comic — acres of grin, big square head tattooed with scar tissue from all the times he had bladed in the ring, abundant mustachio, like Central Casting’s idea of Pancho Villa, fifty percent bigger and louder. All of the OC-bound crew were traveling incognito, maskless. To let Barney see them and know who they were in civilian life was in itself a trust not to be breached, and its name was kayfabe — not a Mexican word, pronounced K-fayb.

  You never outed a luchador; either by exposing his true identity or yakking about the rehearsed drama and cooperative elements of the sport. Breaking kayfabe was the worst kind of gaffe, and grounds for total ostracization and pariah status. The term itself was never uttered outside of the wrestling or carny industries until the 1990s, when it was hijacked by hip know-nothings to connote insider status, and grossly flaunted by Americans tone-deaf to mythic power.

  The gold standard of Mexican wrestlers, the world famous Hijo del Santo, scion of the legendary Enmáscarada de Plata, was so devoted to maintaining kayfabe that he was known to travel separately from his crew and peers, especially inside of Mexico, in order to avoid the chance that anyone might glimpse his real face when he had to do things like clear passport scrutiny.

  To Barney’s left was Flecha de Jalisco, a tapatío from Guadalajara, capital city of the state for which many wrestlers had named themselves, the most famous being Rayo de Jalisco and all his sub-named hijos and juniors, a whole multigenerational wrestling dynasty. His real name was Cristobal Campos Soriano; the flecha meant “arrow.” He was the oldest fighter in the car at fifty-five and, barring a crippling accident, would be doing suicide moonsaults for another ten years. Repeated hits in the throat and a lifetime smoking habit had given him a resonant radio announcer’s voice. He could speak almost sub-audibly and still be heard over the din of a crowd, without a microphone.

  Up front on the right, working his way through the third of many cans of Tecate stashed in a ice cooler, was Mega Poseidon, who had gotten his gimmick, trident and all, from watching Jason & the Argonauts as a child, but usually worked in a fish-man monster mask of green and gold, with costume to match. He had dyed blond hair black at the roots and shorn to a military-style brush cut. His almost Brazilian eyes were that mesmerizing aqua color, very calm but somehow alien in his swarthy face.

  Poseidon handed Barney’s newest passport back to him. It was a first-rate job of speed forgery and would pass muster in any American scanner.

  “Wow,” said Barney. He was learning the clumsy dance using his remaining fingers and thumb as a kind of grasping tool, an unsubtle crab-claw, and was able to dunk the passport into his coat pocket on the first try. “Who do we owe for tickets?”

  “We all got e-tickets,” said Flecha. “Taken care of by Tuntun, our homeboy in Orange County. The passport gets you through the computer, no problemo.”

  Dr. Hate made a joke about Barney’s stealth status being the grandest kayfabe of them all.

  “Yeah, you need a luchador identity,” said El Atrocidad with a half-smirk. “In case somebody asks us who the hell you are.”

  Thus ensued a long exploration into Barney’s attributes — if any could be said to apply to lucha libre — resulting in handles mostly cut from whole cloth anyway: first the dirty one (Chupacabrón), then the ridiculous one (Cangrejo Tres Mil, due to the crab-claw joke), then one that perversely fit: El Destructor Blanco, the White Destroyer.

  Insofar as he could grip anything, Barney gripped the pill vials in his pockets and tried not to sweat the rest of his life out through his pores. These hale and belligerent men were doing their best to keep his spirits up, to infuse him with their infectious energy. He hoped he would not have to hang between two of them and pretend to walk, like a marionette on downers. When they debarked at the airport, he saw how farcical this would be: El Atrocidad and Flecha towered over him, while Dr. Hate and Mega-Poseidon were each a foot shorter.

  Barney tried to remember how recently he had arrived at Benito Juárez International, Mexico’s largest air hub. Weeks or months? He had no baggage but with the number of gear trollies the luchadors were pulling, that really didn’t matter. He’d had to leave the assassin’s pistol with Mano and felt naked without it, even if he was incapable of bringing it into play. The usual security, cops and soldiers were toting auto machine guns everywhere, but the ’port had remained unrattled in the post-9/11 world. Besides, they were just jumping up to Tijuana, and luchadors have a quiet way of exuding a forcefield of celebrity even when they are traveling as civilians. It is okay to sense they are wrestlers because nobody knows which wrestlers they might or might not be, and strangers defer to the most tempting choice. They got smiles of acknowledgement even from the guards as they passed, and Barney was just another one of them. Hurt in the ring, no doubt.

  The hoodie coat Barney was wearing concealed a multitude of sins, but ventilation was not one of its virtues. Mummified in bandages beneath, he was starting to bake. Soon he would smell delicious.

  On the plane, Dr. Hate had to help him sip a soft drink through a straw. Barney had never felt more completely helpless. He knew the air trip was partially due to his condition, since the 800-mile drive to Tijuana from Mexico City would have wrecked him. More unknown benefactors to thank.

  The Tijuana airport was commonly referred to as “Rodriguez”; it had been named after some military general. The wrestlers helped Barney navigate through a tediously long bathroom stopover, got more medication inside of him, then dragged him forth to meet Valry Ayala, their blonde-headed Trojan Horse-mistress.

  Valry was a lean six feet tall in flats, and even dressed down to denim and sweatshirt she looked like a zillion bucks in bullion. Everybody hugged her as they took turns holding Barney up. Her smile was a little horsy — big teeth and a little too much exposed gumline — but her hair and eyes were classic, curly ash-blonde and penetrating green, like a Heineken bottle with a light behind it. Nice back porch and healthy natural breasts, yearning to run free. She switched her hips when she walked. It was no accident.

  “So you’re our special guest star,” she said to Barney, jamming out a hand.

  Barney held up one of his bandaged mitts. “Sorry.”

  “No worries,” she said cheerfully, touching his damaged face with long, lacquered nails. “We’ll fix ya up.”

  Tuntun Ayala was a fixture in the low-budget Orange County wrestling circuit, catering to Southern California’s bustling Latino populace. At various times he had wrestled as Jayson xXx, Ice Dragon, Sirial Killer, High Voltage and Deathmaster 2, and had at least twelve other rotating identities on his resume. He and his tribe organized the shows, carting a portable ring setup all over L.A. County, and he worked in Mexico as often as he “unofficially imported” the talent that locals wanted to see. Through several previous wives he had begotten his own generation of future ring workers and then met Valr
y during a televised match, right before the collapse of Canal Vente-Dos, Los Angeles’ Channel 22, which lost most of its analog-broadcast Hispanic programming to cable. Once Tuntun zeroed his sights on Valry and went blonde-blind, his then-current marriage was swiftly and completely doomed.

  Marrying a beautiful white chick had definite sociopolitical advantages, and she was the best den mother Tuntun could have wished for. The trip back across the border went exactly as El Atrocidad had said it would.

  Barney was back in the U.S.A.

  But the largesse did not stop there. Tuntun, who turned out to be a blustery, dark-skinned giant with cornrowed black hair, insisted on seeing to Barney’s comfort and taking him the extra hour or so north on the 101 to Los Angeles personally.

  Typically, Barney had to promise to see everyone again — unwanted connective tissue that was not in his nature. He had no idea how to even begin paying these people back, or what to pay them with. He was stony. Moreover, he got the idea that to fob them off with money would constitute an insult. Mostly, he kept quiet and grateful.

  In an astonishingly short period of time, less than a day, he had gone from being marooned in the middle of Mexico to dictating fill-out forms for hospital check-in. Tuntun did all the writing. Bed, board, doctors, nurses, beeping machines, and best of all, brand-name sedatives.

  The crew dispensed their hearty goodbyes and begged off — they had work to do and matches to fight.

  Barney drifted off to uncomplicated sleep on a real bed, clean linens, the clamor of demons inside his skull gradually receding.

  Nobody was more surprised than him when he awoke and found himself staring at his old buddy, Armand, in a bed in the same ward.

  Lather, rinse, repeat.

  First the hostage hotel, then Mano’s home, then the clinica, and now a modern hospital in an American city. The fourth Bleeding Room in which Barney found himself washed ashore was arguably the most painful, as they continually drugged him and hauled his ass to and fro to remove bullets, drain infections, resocket his shoulder, bind his ribs, flush his metabolism, and otherwise get him back to zero.

  A wadcutter is a flat-nosed bullet about as aerodynamic as a clinker brick, which tumbles to inflict maximum carnage on delivery. Sucio had shot Barney with four of them. But his aim had been totally bandido, more for show than efficiency, and Barney had miraculously slipped by on the curve.

  He had picked up an intestinal parasite in the Rio Satanas; no surprise there.

  He had been fast asleep the first time his friend Karlov had visited, to deliver a new Ruger .44 to Armand for his inspection and approval. Armand was packing heat in a hospital; you had to laugh.

  Armand looked starved and shrunken in a humid hospital jonnie. Normally swarthy and piratical of eye, his glint was diminished and he seemed pale. He didn’t rise from his bed.

  “What the hell happened to you?” Barney croaked. His throat was arid, his vision blurry. He felt doped and bulky, as though inflated to twice his rated capacity.

  “My appendix,” Armand said. “Bastard up and quit on me.”

  Armand had nothing but recovery time to listen to Barney’s story. He was stuck in the hospital for at least another four days, under observation to see that he did not blow a major hose in the aftermath of the unanticipated appendectomy that had landed him, by purest chance, in the bed next to Barney’s.

  Something Armand told him in response to his story stuck in the filter of Barney’s mind:

  “What happened to you... that was pure gringo.”

  There was a truth in there, and Barney could see it now. His distress had not issued from Mexican sadists, rough-riding a displaced gabacho. It had come as a result of respectable Americans acting less than respectable, as many do when your back is turned.

  “They took something of mine, Armand. And I want to get it back.”

  When Barney said that, he was not talking about his amputated fingers. He showed Armand the mutilations merely to slam the point home.

  Armand laughed. “Look at us, man.” It was pretty silly. Then he let out a long, contemplative sigh, and said, “So what do you want to do?”

  Barney stretched his neck back against the pillows and felt a vertebra pop with relief. “I’m working on that. But first I want to find out who the best sports surgeon is in this place.”

  That turned out to be Dr. Matthew Brandywine, an orthopedist who specialized in hand surgery. When Barney told him what he wanted, the doctor immediately expressed doubts, but it was already too late — Barney had put the glint of a challenge in the good doctor’s eye. In that moment, it was all over except for a ton of releases and indemnifications.

  Karlov broke the news that Barney’s apartment had been cleaned out and re-rented. It was no palace anyway, just a way station, a sleeping berth for the little time Barney did not spend at the shooting range, which is where most of his valuables were secure under lock and key — firearms, cash, assorted ID. He did not keep photographs. His quarters had always been rather Spartan and he was disinterested in television, popular music, the Internet. Politics, religion and mass culture held no appeal. What he enjoyed was keeping his profile below the radar of the ordinary world. After Iraq he had done a few gigs for subterranean figures who offered good money, which is how he had come to meet the Old Assassin. There were no relatives, no encumbrances. He had enjoyed the company of women from time to time, but only until he could feel the cement hardening around his ankles. He possessed very few legitimate documents of any relevance. Not one to horde his past, Barney found the past had a nasty habit of finding you when it wanted to complicate your current life.

  As it had with Carl, for painful example.

  Karlov had rescued Barney’s fish, of course, because Armand had been charged with its care. That was how unspoken duty worked. People like Karlov and Armand were part of the reason Barney had never needed contractually obligated friends.

  Christoph Ivan Karlov had come to America after the fall of the Berlin Wall. Having functioned at various times as weapons master for KGB cells and the former Soviet military, Karlov found in America a vast new horizon of firearms to modify, tinker with, improve or restore, particularly for gun collectors obsessed by the pristine or victimized by wily forgers. The tides of shifting jobs in a free market economy had deposited him on the shores of Los Angeles, where he had become the beneficiary of a large number of serious firearms enthusiasts with a lot of discretionary income. His lush hair had been white since his twenty-third birthday. He personally installed his corrective lenses into stainless steel shooter’s frames, and since he was a bit chipmunk-cheeked, the specs always appeared to be squeezing his head at the temples. If he was your audience, he tended to stare for long periods of time without blinking, less rudeness than a measure of the concentration he accorded you. Generally he was silent, contemplative, almost scary in his focus, infinitely patient, and knew more information about more guns than any ten other people Barney could name.

  Armand Arnott, by contrast, was hale and jokey. He occasionally got loud when he drank too much; he could be over-reactive when provoked, a steamroller who would not quit and would not back down, and absolutely the kind of man you would want at your back in a crisis. Loyalty was an almost Sicilian thing with him, and he cursed under his breath a great deal when Barney related, in fits and starts, the tale of what had befallen him in Mexico. Armand practiced regularly at the range where Barney worked, and routinely captured gold at shooting competitions, where he favored handguns he could wield with sniper precision — Barney had once seen him shoot the eye out of a jack of spades at nearly sixty yards with no optics.

  “How’s the fish?” said Barney.

  “Swimming. Pooping. Doing fish things.” Karlov folded his hands and sat down after ruffling his snow-white hair, the cleanest hair Barney had ever seen. “I think the fish, he likes watching my television.”

  Barney thanked him unnecessarily, for taking care of things in his absence, and picking up the
ball after Armand’s incapacitation.

  “Well now, this here looks like a meeting of some kind of terrorist organization for sure,” came a booming voice from the corridor as Sirius Johnson made his entrance. Ex-LAPD, currently diversified into public relations, Sirius was the guy who most often organized shooting excursions for this quartet, or the occasional poker night, bowling, dinner, or other diversions to space out their serious trigger time. He was also the man who could help you finesse a concealed carry permit, if you needed such a thing in the state of California. His heavy eyelids lent him a sleepy aspect, but beyond was a gaze of pure espresso that missed very little. He had recently started getting artful with his razor, sculpting a complicated beard-moustache-sideburn frame for his round face that looked like it took a lot of maintenance. Not quite vain enough to shave his head against encroaching pattern baldness, Sirius had compromised at a quarter-inch trimmer chop.

  Like Barney, these men moved between the spaces of the ordinary world of people. It would be useless to call them by race, profile, or statistics, because you walk past them every day and don’t notice them. Who was taller, shorter, older or younger, it didn’t matter. Their names, like Barney’s, were fluid things, adaptable at a moment’s notice to new identities, stealth personae.

  Appraising the wreckage that used to be Barney, Sirius arched a brow and said, “So... enjoy your trip?”

  “I lost my apartment,” Barney said. “Karlov collected my stuff, but if I ever get out of here, I’m officially homeless.”

  It seemed as though America did not want Barney back, either. His home, such as it was, had been assimilated. He assured everyone present that he could stay at the range, had done so many times. There was room, comfort and familiarity there. He had not really lost anything. Except.

  “I’m glad you guys are all here, so I only have to tell the story once. I’ve told Armand a little bit of it, but I’ll give you the definitive version, gory details and all. There’s a reason I’m doing this, and I’ll tell you up-front that I am in full possession of my senses, so don’t blame my meds. When I get done telling the story, I have a proposition for you, but it’s not really something I can ask of any of you. I think I know you all well enough to risk putting these ideas out into the air, and if I’m full of shit, tell me. As far as you’re concerned, this is just a made-up story about an imaginary guy named Barney, and what happened to him. Armand’s been asking me what I think I want to do after this, and I’ve been mulling it over — asleep, not asleep, coming at it from every angle I can think of. Here’s what I want to do: I want to tell you the story. And if, at the end of the story, what I have to say sounds insane to any of you, don’t say yes, don’t say no, no buts or maybes... just get up and walk out of the room if you’re not down. Fair enough?”