The truck was in sight, undisturbed. They walked on unhurriedly, and Guillermo lit a cigarette and talked around it.
“So, you named my gun yet?”
Smith took the pistol from his waistband and popped the cartridge open and passed it back to Guillermo by the handle.
“She’s all yours.”
They reached the truck and Smith began filling it, looked for the place where the shotgun was buried and marked it in his mind.
Guillermo laid out the wires and untangled a few as he stood there.
“Motion detectors,” he explained. “For under the cattle guards on the road. Radios back to the place. Rain took em out two days ago, otherwise yall wouldn’t have made it near as close here as you did.”
He lit another cigarette and started to rewrap them as Smith closed the gas cap. When Smith turned for the doorhandle the man slammed a palm to the edge of the truck bed.
“I followed you when I seen ya out here to tell you one thing. You aint taking your chance and runnin now, are ya?”
“I’m not runnin.”
“Then I gotta tell you one thing. You gotta know it.”
“One thing.” Smith repeated.
Guillermo switched the dead cigarette for an unlit match between his teeth.
“You’re disposable now. Whatever use that girl had for you up until this point, she’s done got her worth out of it, she’s in a place now where she’s safe and can get work. There aint no more reason keepin you alive if any situation arises in which it’d serve her or suit her to kill ya. Those situations always arise. Awan aint safe from it an’ I aint safe from it, if she ever stops havin a use for our organization. We seen the method she used in gainin rank with the Cordovas.”
Smith’s hand tightened on the truck door.
“It’s a risk of our industry, but not yours. We need her now, and it’s better to have her for you than against you. But yer free for the moment, remember that. If I was you I’d run while I can.”
Smith swung up into the truck and Guillermo started on past him toward the cattle guard. He started the engine but after a moment he called out the window.
“Why a greenhouse?”
Guillermo turned around.
“We have to provide a viable surface operation if we’re gonna hide the other one. That’s what Awan says. That’s why we got all this shit to make the place smell nice.”
“All the work just for that?”
“Nah.” The day was warming and beads of dirtied sweat had striped Guillermo’s face in narrow bars lighter than the rest of it.
“Those bitches are all way high maintenance to grow here. All a us say we coulda done with just a few shitty perennials to throw the police off. But Awan wants those. Authenticity is what he calls it. But we all know what he actually does it for an’ he knows that we know.”
“What does he do it for?”
“Because he can. Because then he can make things that the sand and the desert don’t want him to make.”
Guillermo shrugged and started walking again.
“Awan’s got his flowers but at the end of the day god bless him he’s got his ecstasy formula right.”
“That so?”
“Yeah. More than anythin else I know.”
Smith rested his forehead on the wheel for a long time after Guillermo’s silhouette had receded into the white light of the open plain. An equidistant and limitless emptiness on all sides of him, save for where the girl traversed the arterial shadows between the fire and the compound like a clot. He raised his head and lowered his hands and drove back over the road that was not really a road, for the first time with a full belief in blood.
When they were teenagers they had long been taught to butcher livestock and hunt full-size game, and in the spring in which they turned fourteen there was a bullcalf born with which something was not quite right. They’d watched it for a week, observed its walk and whether the pigeoned back right hock was a severe enough impediment. Whether it lent itself to the crippling of the hip. And at the end of the week the father said that yes it had to be done and asked that they would do it and it was not an unusual task for them and more often one of them would have been asked to do it alone on the hunt or in the hog pen but it was a calf and too heavy for only one.
Lucy had roped it first and led it by the nose into the barn and she’d covered her eyes when he shot it though she’d seen the like and done it herself many times before but still shied from it when she had the chance but she was upon it as fast as he was when it went down with the shot and they’d laced the rope across the rafters above and threaded it through the Achilles tendons and hoisted it up.
The barn was warm at night, the walls of the ground floor cut into the bank of the field’s slope, the ceiling bending low under the bales and equipment above, and the corners packed high with timothy hay so that it seemed more a nest than a place with edges, and he’d set the lantern on the top beam of a stall and they’d set to work.
She made the first incision since she was quicker and more precise than his blundering teenage hand and she went around its back to work on the hide with Wyatt at the underbelly.
He leaned around the upside-down calf to speak to her.
“Don’t it ever freak you out, doin this stuff? When it’s just the right size to be a man?”
She didn’t take her hands from the hide but looked back at him, her eyes algaed with green from the flame of the lamplight.
“It don’t freak you out more when it’s a rabbit? Somethin so small it never had a chance.”
“I was just sayin.”
He turned back to his work and their voices vaulted to one another over the splayed bare hips of the calf.
“It’s always worse when they’re small.”
He didn’t answer as he worked his knife down from the pelvis and she went on.
“It aint real anyway. There’s always more of them to do and as long as we live there’s gonna be more. Couldn’t handle the cutting up if I thought of it as real, thought of em havin blood and guts instead of just colors and smells.”
“Aint real?”
She yanked down the hide below the shoulders with two hands but was expert in her movements and it did not tear.
“You done guttin that thing yet?”
“Gettin there. Hold up.”
He looked around the carcass at her again and a piece of hair fell into her face and without a thought she wiped it back and her hand left a four-inch smear of calf’s blood across her cheek. He pushed the knife downward further with one hand underneath the skin and the other gripped overhand on the handle but did not keep his fingers well enough away.
“Shit!”
He stepped back as the bag of entrails went out and then split on the concrete and he jerked his cut finger to his face, the knife still in his right hand.
She was against him before he looked up and he could smell the hay on her hair like on a barn cat’s fur and smelled the vague maple of her skin and felt the heat of her above any of that and her face close beside his, and it was all him, it was all him at the same time and he realized he was at once two people, and how antithetic to loneliness was it to occupy two bodies at the same time. She drew the cut finger into her mouth and took the blood but it was already hers and so she was merely preventing them from spilling it and her hair was in his face and as it dragged across his forehead it made it feel raw and her hands were cautious now. After a moment she took his finger away and pressed her thumb against the cut on the seam of his fingerprint. It had slowed in its bleeding and a last bit ran around the edges of her thumb.
“I thought you said it aint real.”
“That there is real.”
He watched the greenhouse closely as he drove up, and its green seemed to mount higher at his approach before the sun crystallized it and it all turned white.
Out back the men had busied around the fire again and the smell of cooking fat blended with the nasal burn of the chemicals. Matthew w
as manning the fire once more, and Awan was giving directions crouched in the shade of the woodpile. The girl was walking.
She moved slowly, with a crane’s gait of placing a foot and then the weight after it, but still she was up and circling the yard, as if the wounds of the day before had been no more than a surrealist’s take on the landscape. She had on a new shirt, another T-shirt of black, not bullet or travel-wracked but still a worn brother of the first.
The teenager with the deformed ear emerged from the set of buildings, carrying a bottle of whiskey and a boxcutter, and went directly to the girl.
The rest of the men were working in the yard now, back at the synthesis that had begun the day before and now there were plastic crates brought out and filled with the powder and laid out along the wall to dry for the simple reason that there was no other place to put them and even outside there was no attempt to hide them.
Matthew came and sat next to Smith, passed him a pan of breakfast.
“I offered to do it, but she wouldn’t let me.”
The tattooed boy took the lid from the whiskey bottle and sat down beside the girl. She leaned back and he reached the boxcutter into the flames then ejected its razor blade and only in his motions did Smith see the seriousness of it.
“She’s gotta cut out the necrotic stuff; a surface shot like that one makes a mess of it. You’re not the only one rotting out here.”
Smith watched her from above his plate.
“What is she?” Felt for the first time it was a question that could be asked.
“Her father was a leader in the Cordova cartel. Wanted a son of course but when she wasn’t he didn’t care and raised her like a boy anyway, and so she learned all that their boys did. Before she was eight years old he began taking her on drug runs, either to protect her from what would happen to her if she were left alone at the compound or to capitalize on the security she could bring to his dealings, we don’t know. Even cartel men are less inclined to cheat or kill when there’s a small child present.
“But naturally things still went to shit in some of their dealings, and the girl saw a lot and saw it early, even though he always protected her. She grew a knowledge of fighting and of guns and of how men act under the influence of desperation and fear. And when she had occasion to put that knowledge to the test, she proved she was a prodigy. After that it was encouraged, and the kid-daughter that normally would have been doomed to become a drug mule instead became a paid killer, and the maker of the kind of destruction I’m sure you’ve seen firsthand by now.”
Matthew laughed when he finished telling.
“Of course, that’s just what I’ve been told. Any man out here who’s seen her with his own eyes believes every story about what she’s done and not a word about where she’s come from. There are too many demons in the desert not to count this one among them.”
The girl had pulled up her shirt and was undoing the bandages. The crude stitching was caked with blood, and the lines of it made darkened track-marks strung almost arbitrarily over the wound. The dead tissue at its borders had gone black or near-black green, and the odor engendered a physical recoil from the boy but Smith sat too far off to smell it.
The girl pulled the shirt up a bit more so that she could see it well. She ran a finger over the frayed skin at the edges of the tear, then started at the left edge. Working the razor blade in parallel to the flat of her stomach, excising anything that had gone necrotic from the heat or the force of the shot.
Smith put down his plate and pushed it to the side with the sole of his boot.
“Where are they now?”
“Who?”
“Her cartel.”
“They’re gone.”
The boy crouched watching her there with reverent black-rimmed eyes.
“The Cordovas had most of the territory here—hands in Phoenix, Albuquerque. A quarter of Vegas. Within two years she’d worked her way to be one of their main runners and went out for special hits. Her reputation alone made them more than a few deals that would have otherwise been shot out. But they had too much power, or territory maybe. All of those in the top ranks came to believe they were gods because they could break society’s rules, and break them more smoothly than any of the other fugitives out there. It was too large of a network dependent on a few whose egos had come to manhandle their decisions.
“She wasn’t one of those of course. She doesn’t have an ego, only action. But the result was a culture of control, a nearly feudal power structure. She wasn’t a decision maker but someone they sent out whenever they needed things to happen. When she saw that her superiors were replaced only when violence took them out—because no one is fired or quits in this business, they’re only ‘dispatched’—she saw her means of climbing the ranks.
“Her abilities aren’t backed by reason, and she took it too far. Six weeks ago she killed four of the Cordova bosses at their compound along with everyone else present, and razed their supply route for methamphetamine. The very cartel she had meant to run was brought to its knees. In the weeks after, while the mid-ranks fell into a mad rush for power, she went through and extricated every desert and suburban Cordova stronghold she knew of. They weren’t all on her side, and it didn’t always work. Rival cartels smelled the blood and poached the small-scale city dealers and left those still loyal to the Cordovas either for dead or for the police to pick up, which is worse. The entire cartel dissolved.”
The boy jumped back as the girl swore halfway through the cutting; she had not made a sound beyond a hiss until then. He stepped back toward her after a moment and poured a swig of whiskey into her mouth.
“So she’s a free agent now?”
“She’s running.”
Smith nodded.
“A few of the old bosses didn’t die. They were radioed from the compound while out at a meeting. Her father’s one of them. He’s leading the manhunt for her now.”
The boy leaned in again with the whiskey and she waved him off.
“It’s not that she fears them or had any unbreakable ties to the Cordovas in the first place, besides her own blood and she hardly seems to believe in that. I’d guess she tracked us down not for protection but for work. She wants to survive by her own ways, but in these parts and by what her ways happen to be, it would mean working for another cartel, by any definition an enemy of the Cordovas. Which she would do if they would have her, but whether they would is still to be said. Her skill is valuable, absurdly so, but cartel men are as vengeful as they are violent, and they’ve seen her kill as many of their men in a desert battlefield as they’ve seen her lure into a bedroom and leave with snapped necks.”
“She can do that?”
“She can do anything.”
“She couldn’t kill me.”
“And how do you figure that?” Matthew smiled without anything of kindness in it.
“’Cause she tried and she aint done it.”
“Then she aint tried.” He nudged the heel of his boot toward the firepit until the rubber smoked gently. “She believes in an immortality gained by taking away others’ when they play their lives against hers. She’s already gotten it—she’s already immortal at this age, untraumatized and unabused, given the fate of any other skinny brown girl born in whatever floorless shack or wilderness she came from.”
When the girl was done the edges bled but only softly, and what were left were neat pink lines framing the black ends of the stitches. She went to replace the old bandages but the boy went inside for new ones. Leaning forward she threw the amputated skin into the flames, three jagged lines of grayed bloody tan.
The boy came back with fresh cloth and she tossed her old bandaging into the fire as she had the pieces of her flesh and she rewrapped herself and sat for a while, with no intention of standing.
He watched the exhalations of breath that she performed with patience, not pain. Smith’s own body something of rotting and of something undoubtedly missing and this girl so much more bullet-wracked and st
ill alive and alive hard enough that she might heal. Watching the body that was wrought as if by strength of will over chemical reaction, reawakening in antithesis to the desert’s calcifications. The body with which his war would be over come this time tomorrow, vanished in a flourish of dust to the south and to the north, behind his truck, toward home. He crawled to a space of shade behind the woodpile and at last felt safe enough or cared little enough about his own mortality to sleep.
When he awoke the day was nearly past and he awoke to the sounds of the teenage boys arguing as they mucked the corral.
“Why does anyone have horses out here anyway? There’s only one direction to go besides nowhere and it’s going away from something. The only reason there’s horses in the West is for you to find em when you’re on the run.”
“It’s ’cause you caint ride for shit.”
“Just ’cause you can ride aint mean you got anyplace to go.”
Smith stumbled up and the boys ignored him. He went back to the fire.
Guillermo was laughing at something the girl said and the fire smelled of spilled gasoline and liquor. The hardware and grates had been cleared from it. The perpetual fire, a light that gave nothing in a place where men were not sure whether it was the combustion or the heat of the day that made them sweat, yet they fed the fire nonetheless. The old woman was going around with plates again and Smith took one as he passed and went to sit beside Awan.
Guillermo and the girl were across the fire and it was with scant words of Spanish but mostly the language of the Navajo men there in which they talked, and the girl’s words held weight even when muted and made Guillermo nod solemnly, expressions flashing iterations of the broken animal teeth.
Smith spoke to Awan first.
“What is she telling?”
“Stories of her childhood.”
The other men had crowded around the heat, crouching in the shadow like a leaderless pack of wolves. Their eyes shone out of dulled sockets as if disembodied from the melting exhaustion of their faces, with a sense of something like excitement or hope.
“There’s something that caught you when I asked her how she found us. What was it?”
Rough Animals Page 14
