Rough Animals

by Rae DelBianco

  He walked over, gun in hand, and fingered the nubuck tassels of the wrappings on the motorcycle parked out front. There were another eight bikes propped in various angles and the single semi truck and a few pickups. Looked up to the room directly in front of the tan-wrapped motorcycle and decided that that could not have been the one. People who posted up in places like these did not want to be so easily marked.

  He flattened his back against the wall starting there, and worked his way down, flannel catching in the rough bits of stuccoed clay. Three rooms down in the acid heat-quiet he heard a voice.

  “You, come on over here, you aint had none of this.”

  And the reply:

  “No ice. I said I want ecstasy.”

  There it was, the measured accent that was like nothing else he had heard in all his life before. Studied and overly formal and misshapen in a mouth not raised on it.

  He slid to the space between the door and window of the room. Back of the head to the wall so that he could fade into the dull of the paint and see sidelong through the window. The curtains were half-drawn, in the way that shows those within are hardly aware there are windows anyway.

  “You sure you don’t want any a this?” The first voice.

  There were two men in the room. The speaker was a dirtied miscreation of a man. His beard grayed down to the lapels of a leather jacket that looked rusted and was taut against the muscle of his neck. One of his ears was studded along its edge and his skull shaved and tattooed solid with multi-colored snakes like rotted laurels bestowed from the ruler of a place buried far below this one. His eyes moved slowly, a pair of mottled driftwood rafts in veined white gel.

  A much younger one sat at the shaky table by the window, probably still in his twenties, with stark black hair and green eyes a vulgar green like something printed onto the cellophane wrapper of a gas station sandwich. He wore only jeans and a leather jacket, shirtless under it, and as the girl walked by him he took a glass pipe from an inner jacket pocket and the movement exposed a jagged tear in the leather, directly over the heart. He caught the girl in her appraisal of him and poked a finger through the hole.

  “It was my big brother’s, but he aint needin it no more.” His fingers shook as he pulled them back.

  She had wiped most of the mud from her face and it showed that she truly was a child. The complexion underneath was so close a color to before that it gave the impression that the muck had emanated from beneath her skin to begin with.

  The bathroom door opened and a third man entered, equally worn as the first yet older, a biker with a whitewashed beard and hollow blue eyes as if they’d been wind-bleached the same way, and a facial expression that was altogether one for staring down rogue horses or rogue men. He closed a flip phone in his palm.

  “Your E man’s on his way.”

  The snake-tattooed man held out a one-inch bag of crystal to the girl.

  “You sure?”

  She looked from the older one back to him.

  “I only speak when I’m sure.”

  The man came closer to the window to take the pipe from the boy, and in the light Smith could fully see the tattoos, teeth bared above his brows and at his ears and twisting backward into a scaled nest furred with his patching hair.

  “Did Guillermo say where he was?” she asked.

  It was meant for the older one but the snake man answered.

  “He’ll turn up soon. We’re aimin to let loose a bit in the meantime.”

  He put the pipe behind his ear and went over to the bedside table.

  The old man on the other bed tapped a rhythm on his knee, fingers vibrating in a silent hysterical violence.

  Smith stayed against the wall, gun upright against his chest, the butt of it rested on a bent leg. Wait, had to wait. He worked his weight back and forth in the flexed boot and his foot started to go numb. Wait.

  He watched them fashion the device from a water bottle; rolled-up postcard pierced through the side for a straw and pipe inserted just below. The pipe’s end was jagged, looked as if it had been snapped from a piece of high school chemistry glassware.

  The snake man went first, the leader, and took a butane hand-torch to the end of the pipe. Breathed in and the pupils rose against the tide of eye fluid. The air was seeping through the rotted sideboard along the windows and smelled like burning plastic.

  The man leaned over to pass the mechanism to the other old one then fell back on an orange bedspread gone paisley half with its original print and half with burns or blood or tar. There was never enough seating in these motel rooms given what they were really rented for.

  The smoke-stained ceiling ticked away minutes. A quarter-hour as the ones inside numbed and Smith’s heartbeat bored away at the underside of his sternum.

  The girl sat with her legs crossed, meditative-faced, as the three men dropped in turn. She was fully lucid but adjusted her gestures when the men looked at her to assure them it was otherwise.

  An hour might have passed, the girl waiting. And it was a waiting, from the unaffected patience on her face. A strip of black hair was sweat-plastered across her forehead like an asphalt-lined scar. She stayed motionless, balanced there on the edge of the bed, and watched the tattooed man’s exhalations with a cocked head like a venom-eyed chimera dog. Smith against the wall remembering to breathe when the old air began to ache in his lungs and the untiring adrenaline numbing away the heat, his arm, the concrete below his boots, all save the crags in the stucco behind his back. At one point someone had turned on the radio but none noticed it now. Old country, Conway Twitty singing with a Nashville accent over “Hello Darlin’,” while the static in turn numbed the flat notes. The three heads watching the ceiling, punctuated by a turn of the face, an undead rising for another hit, then throat falling limp again, landing on the bedspread like with a snapping of the neck that bled through internally and up into the eyes, black blood.

  Outside the lot was silent. Smith watched a lone crow hook its toes into the buckshot holes in his truck mirror. No one out here but him. His own mind a desert with the unbounded time, watching the world that wasn’t his. Waiting for her to break through it just once more so he could make a last stand, with hands or teeth or buckshot to hang on and hold together the place that let his life exist.

  The man sat up after Smith didn’t know how long and lit a cigarette. The smell roused the other two a bit and the old one rose up onto an arm on the bedspread and lit one too. The young one’s head lolled as he sat. The tattooed man let the ash drop on the carpet and it blended with the rakish polyester instantly as if it were of the same material, and the cushion of the room merely layers upon layers of years of thousands of different sinners’ cigarette ash.

  The old one spoke first and broke the rhythm of the room: the faltering revolutions of the off-center ceiling fan, the pulse cracking from the muffled radio, the fevered tap of yellowing hands on lacquerless chair-arms and moldering bedspread.

  “Where you come from Jane?”

  She wasn’t any Jane.

  “Just around. Nowhere worth noting.”

  The man set his half-smoked cigarette on the edge of the bedside table. The girl watched it as the paper flaked, then reached over and caught the cylinder of ash as it fell. She crushed it between her fingers then drew a gray line from her forehead down the bridge of her nose and one beneath each of her eyes to her jaw.

  The tattooed one slipped the bag from his breast pocket and loaded another dose into the bowl of the pipe. The boy’s pupils were gaping badly now, dark but wide like the mouths of carp and as hungry, soft-walled and limitless in their green void, as if one could throw a breadcrumb in and then reach to grab hold of them. Black fish to sell in an unthinkable underworld market.

  The pipe was passed last to the old one on the bed and it was empty and he nodded to the boy in the chair.

  “Hey kid, throw me some more of that stuff.”

  The boy straightened in his chair and the leader’s eyes batted open.<
br />
  “I aint got no more.”

  “The hell you aint, you got a bag right there.”

  “Not for you I aint.”

  Smith slipped his hand down to the trigger guard.

  “You.” The old man stood shakily and reached along his belt for his knife, fingers discoloring in aural red, and the boy jumped up and in less than a second the leader stood and tore the glass pipe from the water bottle and shoved it jagged-end-first into the man’s left eye.

  Smith was down in a crouch with his hands balled at his temples before they all heard the glass splinter against the bone of the eye socket. He dropped the shotgun but the sound was lost to those in the room as the man made a “guhh” noise as if punched in the gut and then started to shriek.

  Smith shut his eyes and the sound kept coming and the space below his working eyelid was red against the sun and the sound was like a calf screaming. He could see the animal and it was dark and then the blue murk of the eye running like his had and he knew it would be running down the man’s face like half-cooked egg and it was all animal, so animal, and to anyone who had stumbled across the scene it would have looked like nothing but a solitary boy yoked with shoulders that looked broken, below a fogged window in the heat-wet pavement lot of a dilapidated motel.

  At last there was the sound of agitated springs as the man fell onto the mattress in the room behind Smith and the shrieking stopped.

  Smith lowered his hands but stayed on the ground. Glanced up into the window. The wounded man was flat on his back; a lusterless red froth foamed across his cheek.

  The leader let loose a single cough then reached over to the amputated pipe still in the man’s eye and scraped the remnants of powder from the bowl, spread it along the base-joint of his thumb, and snorted it, then added more from his bag and took that too and the boy bent, awkwardly deferential, to take the residue off his leader’s finger.

  The man pushed a nostril closed and inhaled harder to pull whatever was left in the nasal passages deep into the lungs.

  “Motherfucker.”

  The girl looked at him. She had shifted onto her knees but had not moved from her place by the head of the bed nor changed her expression.

  The younger one rose half out of his chair and grabbed her by the waistband of her jeans and pulled her into his lap.

  “Git over here.”

  She twisted loose from his grip and was standing in front of him before he’d realized he’d let go. Her face was corrosive.

  “You said that Guillermo was coming.”

  “Guillermo-whoever will turn up, whatever, les have some fun first.” The young one waved a hand in dismissal and reached for her wrist but missed it.

  The girl turned to the snake-tattooed man and held out an ash-stained hand.

  “I changed my mind.”

  He handed her the remains of the water bottle pipe and the butane torch and he and the young one leaned back, staring at the ceiling and breathing slowly, watching the fan limp through its repetitions in dusted off-white. The wounded one sputtered, his non-violated eyelid shut loosely like the unattached flap of an old scar.

  The girl looked to each of them for a moment then went into the bathroom and closed the door. When she came back into the room she pulled the door closed again behind her and soon there was the smell of burning.

  The smoke in the room began to grow and the two men that were still conscious stirred at the vague stimulus but in their state did not notice it more than that, and would not have been able to break through the drug-induced apathy if they had.

  “You’re amateurs.”

  The girl lit the corner of the dying man’s shirttail then unscrewed the butane canister and emptied it onto the bedspread. The leader’s eyes were still on the ceiling and she stood and watched him as his hand began to twitch uncontrollably and the air went mottled like the back of a rat snake.

  She must have stayed as long as she possibly could have, barring the door and watching the orange carpet blacken to polyester magma and the paper peel like gnat wings from the wall. Soon the window went dark and then the blackness was no longer arctic-gray waves of smoke but a powder that stuck.

  Smith stayed crouched below and watched the door, his shirt pulled over his mouth. A hand came through the window above him; it turned over from its punch then went limp. The leather sleeve about its wrist was curling with red edges and the hot glass showered into Smith’s hair and down his back and he pitched forward and his face almost met the concrete but then he was up on his feet again, stumbling into the heat of the day, his arm going warm from bracing himself in the fall. The asphalt rocked in the heat mirage and the plane of it bent upward and the parking lot felt the same temperature as the blood coming out of the arm and then they blended together and were the same substance and then he caught himself again, one hand outstretched into the air and the other hand on the shotgun.

  He staggered and turned around in time to see the girl walk out from under the overhang, the door closed behind her. The proprietor had run from his office and was standing there shouting and the girl passed him without a word, walking on like a wraith with melting rubber smoking from the soles of her boots. Her eyes were red from the ash-choked air. The proprietor looked from her to the flames that were now breaking through the roof and then back again and back again still shouting and not knowing what to do.

  Then Smith was striding toward her, shotgun readied.

  “You!”

  She, in a trance, did not answer, had stopped and was staring toward the road. The rubber of her boots had cooled and no longer smoked and was smeared in a trail of stalagmites on the asphalt behind her.

  “You!”

  There was a noise like cracking and a figure came screeching from the room where the fire had been set. Jacket in flames and beard already crusted black, the tortuous snakes recognizable even on the reddening effigy of their owner. He ran toward her with arms outstretched, burning fingers, and suddenly her focus shifted and she turned from the road and made a quick rotation to hook a foot behind his thigh. He went down onto the pavement and fell to rolling in an attempt to ground the fire out.

  The proprietor was screaming now at the smoldering man on the ground and a few more of the indistinguishables that had holed up there for sand or for ice had stumbled from their rooms. They watched from under the overhang with hands shielding their eyes, clothed in various items for the day and for the night, a mudstained T-shirt with stolen sneakers or a clubbing dress under a canvas construction jacket. Whispers over dried gums.

  The proprietor stood beside the burning man and would not stop screaming and the girl turned his way and pulled a penknife from her pocket as she ran and punched it into the side of the man’s neck and he too went down as the carotid artery sprayed up onto his chin and jaw.

  Smith watched the man fall and rushed after her with the shotgun aimed.

  “You!”

  But her gaze was trance-like again and she ignored him and mounted the motorcycle with nubuck tassels, toed it toward the woods, and fired the engine into the undergrowth.

  The man lurching on the ground was clutching at his face, the heat of his rings branding it further, and then he was rolling more slowly and then stopped altogether. Smith threw himself back into his truck and overshot it and the middle console hit him in the gut and he spit out onto the floor of the passenger seat and scrambled up. Got his foot on the accelerator and the truck kicked gravel as he swerved and he hammered down the road parallel to the direction in which she had gone.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Hanged

  He could see the smoke until he was a mile out. It chalked his rear windshield, went up in gunblack like Cerberus panting.

  Down the road his heart attenuated in its pounding and he slowed the truck to a crawl. She couldn’t be moving that fast in the woods. Police would be there eventually but she probably had forty minutes at worst in these parts before they arrived.

  He opened the window a crack bu
t heard nothing. The smoke was still lolling over the treetops, and the sweetness of its smell exposed the violence in it.

  She didn’t have to come back to the road but to her left was the Great Salt Lake and beyond that fifty square miles of desert and if she didn’t know that now she’d figure it out soon enough.

  He eased the truck over to the side of the road and put it in neutral and got his hunting scope from the glove compartment and propped it on the dash. Stared into the trees, his hand on the gearshift and his foot readied at the gas pedal. Deciduous and thickened here, bristled with sheets of chloroplast veins. Clear enough ground that she could make it through on the bike but too much brush to be able see the road from more than twenty yards in.

  A rusted Bronco came down the other lane but then it was silent again. Smith got out of the truck and lifted the hood and pulled the spark plug wires. She’d figure it out eventually if she tried to make a break for it with the truck but he’d hear her and it would give him enough time to get back. Kept the scope and the shotgun with him and when he broke through the tree line he got down onto his stomach and crawled.

  When he could no longer see the truck over his shoulder he stopped, worked himself by his elbows under the canopy of a newly fallen oak. She was either going to hunker down and wait this out or cut and run for it. The ground was fleshed with too much green to focus the scope. He put it down and listened.

  Cicadas kicking out wingbeats like shouts. The tree line had knocked down the breeze and nothing moved. He had not realized how hard he had been breathing. Took a longer breath and held it.

  Fingernails dug into his palms to stay quiet. And then, the near-silent purr of a motor in the blind distance ahead of him. Ten seconds he listened, and it seemed to get no closer. He was up and at a sprint over wrecked tree limbs back to the truck. She was going for it. He’d overtake her in the south.

  There is an unmarked line in Utah, somewhere among the flatworm lengths of invisible county borders, past the point when you can say you’re headed south and are now already in it and just going further down, where the plain opens forward and the plateaus are too high on either side for you to see the sun and so the sun seems to come from the ground itself. He watched the earth shed its green skin and dry into tan bruises of acacia bramble and sand—the top fingers of the desert, spread upon the map from below like a callus on the earth.