A few drops of rain fell while the biker was inside. Fifteen minutes at the most for a sack of potatoes, corn, and beer.
“Looks like a wall cloud in the south,” Bob said. Everything looked like a wall cloud since the schools had closed.
“Any more of that hot Bud?” All he did anymore was sit at the window and complain about the weather, and the warm beer, and the groceries Stephanie shared with us. “Mighty poor pay for child care,” Bob said. “Right, Mary?”
The little girl hopped into his lap and kissed him on the lips. He pulled away, but not as quickly as he should have.
• • •
Bob said Stephanie was the best show in town now that TV didn’t work. “Too bad the X-rated stuff happens behind closed doors.” Mary watched with him and kept him posted on the male players in the grocery game.
“That one’s Papa Lobo.” She hefted herself onto the windowsill and shouted, “Hey Papa Lobo, did you bring me anything?”
Bob scooted his chair back as the biker strutted over to the window.
“Hi there, baby doll.” He fished a Tootsie Roll from a pocket of his greasy denim jacket and handed it to Mary.
She tried to show her prize to Bob, but he’d already backed his chair into the middle of the room. I moved in close, hoping to pull Mary into the safety zone, but I wasn’t fast enough.
She reached into the biker’s jacket pockets. She found a bag of M&M’s, which she kept, and a packet of white powder, which she returned. “I’m not old enough for crank, right Papa Lobo?”
“Right as rain, baby doll.” Lobo looked past Mary and searched my body with his eyes. The knife strapped to my ankle felt large and obvious. Maybe a man like Lobo could see it through the jeans.
I hadn’t washed properly since the electricity quit three weeks ago. I knew my lack of personal hygiene wouldn’t deter Lobo. Bob wouldn’t stop him either if it came to that, but a knife can change any man’s attitude.
The biker kept his eyes on me but ran his hands over Mary’s face. He lifted a lock of her glossy black hair to his lips and kissed it.
“Be back for you later, baby doll. Take you for a ride on my hog after your mom and me are done.” Lobo turned his hungry look toward Bob. “If your boyfriend don’t object.”
Bob’s lips moved but no sound came out.
Lobo stood, framed in our living room window, waiting for Bob to summon up a challenge. Dark clouds covered the sky behind him. Lightning flashed. Thunder rolled over the city in perfect harmony with the three bikers who pulled into the parking lot escorting a Winnebago recreational vehicle. The RV driver climbed out and took a seat on Lobo’s motorcycle.
“RV with eighty gallons of gas on board,” Lobo said. “That’s what the little girl cost me.” He hardened his look. “Be back before the rain starts falling. Have her ready.”
• • •
Sparse raindrops the size of marbles fell from low hanging clouds accompanied by occasional hailstones. They made a drumming noise on the Winnebago. If the television worked, we’d be getting warnings to go to the shelters, but we didn’t need television to tell us something bad was on the way.
The temperature fell twenty degrees while Lobo went into Stephanie’s condo, and the southwestern sky turned the color of corroded copper.
The bikers crowded their machines underneath a dying oak tree in the parking lot. There weren’t enough leaves to keep them dry once the real storm started, and it would be here soon. Chain lightning made their movements look jerky. The green color in the south deepened into a solid black wall.
Lobo left Stephanie’s front door open as he walked onto the parking lot. A second later she followed him, struggling with her miniskirt and blouse, which didn’t seem to fit as well as usual.
She grabbed at Lobo’s arm and he slapped her across the face hard enough to be heard over the thunder and rising wind. Hard enough to knock her down, but Stephanie didn’t fall. She grabbed Lobo’s arm again, and this time he didn’t hit her.
“A deal’s a deal.” Lobo looked from Stephanie to the Winnebago, then at Mary, who sat on the windowsill dangling her feet over a dead boxwood hedge.
Before I could stop her, Mary slid out the window and ran to her mother. Violence didn’t scare the little girl. A slap, a shout, bruised eyes, and bloody lips were all part of the grocery game.
“Do something,” I told Bob. “He’ll take Mary. You have to do something now.”
Bob made a face like maybe he could fix all this if I’d just give him enough time to come up with a plan. He could explain to Lobo about the Constitution, and the Declaration of Independence, and the Magna Carta.
“We’ll call the police,” he told me, as if the phones would ever work again, as if there were police.
A two-second hailstorm peppered the parking lot with pea-size ice crystals as I walked out the door. The four bikers underneath the tree started their engines but didn’t leave the shelter of the half-dead limbs. Tornado sirens wailed as I approached Lobo.
Bob called out, “Don’t be crazy, Cindy.” Taking Lobo’s side, the winning side, because that’s what men with college degrees in history do.
“Good advice, Cindy.” Lobo scooped up Mary with his left hand, drew a pistol from inside his jacket with the right, and shot Stephanie in the chest.
Mary covered her ears against the noise, but her back was turned away from Stephanie. So the little girl didn’t see her mother fall. Lobo did. He watched a pool of blood mix with ice and water, much more interesting than Cindy Silver. Lobo didn’t see me lift my ankle. He didn’t know about the knife.
Raven Blood.
The dirty jeans slid off the hilt. My hand closed over it as if I’d done this thing a hundred times. In one easy circular motion I drew the weapon and carried through with an overhanded thrust into the biker’s neck.
“Surprise!” I said, but Lobo didn’t look surprised.
He stared at me through eyes already glazing over, blue eyes that looked as innocent as the child’s whose mother he just murdered. He handed Mary to me, as if we’d planned it just that way, and then he slumped to the ground.
“Jesus,” Lobo said. The word sounded wet with blood like a confession given with a mouth full of holy wine. I could barely hear him over the storm warning siren.
“Jesus.” Lobo’s right leg trembled for a moment, and it looked as if he might reach for the knife, but he died before that happened, with a rush of air and a few bloody bubbles from his nose.
I held Mary so she couldn’t see Stephanie, but Lobo lay posed before her like a crime scene photograph.
“Momma says if you die with Jesus’s name on your lips you go straight to heaven.”
“Maybe so, baby.”
The bikers rolled our way. Rolled into a circle with me and Mary in the center. I looked each of them in the eye as they drove by, because there was nowhere to run, nothing for me to do if they decided to leave another body on the parking lot.
The siren faded. The bikers broke out of the circle like a lesson in centrifugal force and drove off the lot. Maybe because a storm was on the way. Maybe because even men like these couldn’t kill a woman holding a small child.
“Cindy?” Finally Bob came out of the condo. “That was really crazy, Cindy.” He nudged Lobo with his boot. He pointed to Stephanie. “Is she. . .?”
“Shut up Bob.”
He looked ready to object, ready to be brave now that there was no one to confront.
“Get in the RV,” I told him, “If those bikers come back I don’t want to be here.”
Bob looked around the parking lot the way a stray cat looks at the place it used to live before its people didn’t want it anymore.
“We’re leaving,” I said. “The city’s no place to be.”
“My job,” Bob said. “I have—you know—responsibilities.”
“School’s out, Bob. History’s in front of us now.” I handed Mary to him and climbed into the RV. “I’m driving. I think I’ll be driving
from now on.”
Deliveries don’t come regular to the halfway house since the electricity started going brown. Then it went all the way black so there’s no TV, or ice to put in tap water to wash down our capsules of RG1068, and after a couple of no-electric days there are no RG1068 capsules to wash down while we sit in dim rooms and listen to emergency sirens.
The councilor asks me, “How are you feeling, Wylie?” Bobby Tuesday is his name. He touches the tip of his extra sharp Mongol #2 pencil lead onto the surface of a yellow pad that used to have the power to take away my freedom, but doesn’t anymore.
I won’t speak until he calls me by my full name. Proof positive he can’t boss an Apache warrior around.
At first Bobby Tuesday doesn’t know why I’m not answering. He looks at his watch—reminding me this is his hour—then all of a sudden he gets it.
“How are you feeling Wylie E. Chatto?” Bobby keeps his voice flat so his anger doesn’t show until he gets to my last name, but Chatto comes out way too fast.
I tell him, “Fine, thank you.” Polite and careful, because things could still change if the electricity comes back. “Better every day.” I give Bobby my biggest Apache smile.
What would he do if I told him the voices are back? What would he do if I told him how the scent of rosemary fills the air again when bad things are on the way? What if I told him Chief Dan George’s ghost is standing right behind him? Chief Dan wants Bobby to leave so he can tell me all I need to know about girls but he won’t talk until we are alone.
I look at my watch so the councilor will know his time has all run out. Hours mean nothing to an Apache warrior, so the watch has no hands. Bobby is too busy looking at his powerless yellow pad to notice.
“Bobby Tuesday is a funny name,” I tell the counselor—to show him I still know about laughing. “So is Wylie E. . . .” I almost say, “Coyote,” but at the last minute I remember there are things you never tell a counselor. Like where you hide your knife, and what Chief Dan George tells you, and the war name your best friend gave you before someone shot her in the chest.
So instead of saying, “Coyote,” I make a zipper sign across my lips. I give the drop-in counselor a wink so he’ll have something else to think about. That’s how psychology works.
“I guess you’ll be OK.” Bobby doesn’t mean it, but there is nothing he can do. He can’t up my dosage of RG1068. He can’t even call the police when I shove him aside and walk out of the halfway house, because telephones don’t work anymore. He can’t wrestle me to the ground because I’m too big and too strong and just crazy enough.
He can’t stop me because I’m an Apache warrior coming back from a long visit with RG1068.
But I stop in the front yard anyway. I spread my arms the way Chief Dan George did in Little Big Man. I tell Bobby, “The Sacred Alarm Clock is ticking. Apache warriors are waking up.”
The Sacred Alarm Clock doesn’t really tick, but I don’t tell him that. When you keep white people guessing, they usually guess exactly wrong.
“Wylie. . .” Sometimes the Sacred Alarm Clock sounds like a counselor running out of words.
• • •
Oklahoma City streets are full of people wearing paper scrubs and masks, like the hazmat workers who came to the halfway house to clean up my best friend’s blood. The police have masks too, but they keep their regular cop uniforms so citizens don’t worry about their guns. New Flu makes them dress this way.
New Flu wants to kiss you on the lips and ride on your blue jeans and fly into your face with a sneeze. The first person with it had a number name—Patient Zero. He had a virus in his brain.
“Temporal lobe,” according to Counselor Bobby Tuesday. “The virus starts out like all the other germs and then it travels to the brain where it makes you crazy in a special way, like Joan of Arc, or Jim Jones.”
People wear masks and throw-away clothes and sometimes rubber gloves so the virus can’t tell them what’s on God’s mind. Halfway house residents know all about being crazy so the New Flu doesn’t scare us.
I hear ghost footsteps behind me on my right and left—movie star Indians and dead warriors follow me in two noisy invisible lines like geese migrating back to the way it was in fourteen hundred ninety-one.
Tonto, Cochise, Will Sampson, Black Elk, Rudy Youngblood, Red Bonnet. The ghosts string out behind me like the wake of an Apache powerboat that washes white Oklahomans into the street. Being an Apache is good. Being a crazy Apache is even better when the Sacred Alarm Clock wakes everybody up and for a few minutes they can’t remember where they are.
The police sit on their horses waiting for a reason to draw their guns. Gasoline is only for emergencies now. Mules pull trolleys of shoppers from store to store where they spend money before it loses all its magic. The air is filled with the sharp, clean scent of horseshit and trouble.
Rosemary is what trouble smells like when exhaust fumes blow away. Like the strings of herbs that cooks wrap around pork tenderloin. The smell of trouble makes me hungry.
Apache warriors used to eat U.S. Army mules and wild buffalo and Pueblo corn. We had everything we needed on the plunder trail, but that’s in Arizona and this is Oklahoma City—the place Indians came to rest between the wars.
On the corner is a 7-Eleven. It’s a number name, like Patient Zero, but they write part of it in letters so it’s hard for me to read. Letters move around like Hopi dancers calling on the rain, but numbers are as still and quiet as deer hunters in a blind. Like 4.85 and 99/100. The price of regular gasoline the 7-Eleven used to sell when there was enough to go around.
Tonto’s ghost tells me, “Apaches never had a use for gasoline.” He doesn’t call me Kimosabe—that’s for masked white men. He calls me Coyote. All the Indian ghosts call me Coyote. Spirits know your war name.
Tonto leads me into the convenience store, which really isn’t convenient without gasoline. He points to racks of corn chips and jerky.
“Some jerky is buffalo.” Tonto makes me guess which ones.
The man behind the counter is a Persian. I used to buy things from him with incidental money from the counselors, but Apaches live off the land when their RG1068 wears off. The clerk doesn’t know that yet. He gives me a big white Persian grin that isn’t hidden under a mask. His name is Mohared, but nobody will try that, so everybody calls him Mo.
“How are you, Wylie E.?”
I don’t make him say my full name because he isn’t trying to be the boss, but I zip my lip so my war name won’t come out by accident.
Mo thinks I am worried about New Flu. He zips his lip too, but unzips it right away and says, “Just got some Doritos in. Maybe the last ones in the world.”
Those are made of corn, so I grab a giant pack and tear it open. Corn and salt and other things disguise the scent of corn chip machines.
“Rosemary,” I tell Mo, because his store is suddenly so full of the trouble smell that even ranch seasonings can’t hide it.
“Hands in the air!” A man in a blue paper scrub suit with a pink doctor’s mask and a white cowboy hat points a pistol half way between Mo and me. This isn’t the kind of pistols cowboys used to take our land away, but it still smells like rosemary.
I crunch a Dorito, so I’ll die with a good taste in my mouth.
“I said get ’em up.” He makes a bobbing movement with the gun as if there’s some kind of connection to our hands. Mo raises his as high as his shoulders but I don’t raise mine at all.
“The boy is mentally challenged,” Mo tells the robber. “Don’t shoot him please.”
Sometimes the Sacred Alarm Clock sounds like a Persian clerk begging for your life.
Tonto stands in front of Mo, because the clerk is as brave as an Apache warrior. “A ghost won’t stop a robber’s bullet, Coyote,” he tells me. “You’ll have to think of something.”
Ghosts aren’t much good at all. I’m feeling kind of guilty about not having any money to pay Mo for the corn chips.
Tonto says
, “Living off the land isn’t the same as stealing,” so I don’t have to feel bad about taking things like Doritos and jerky.
I say, “As long as I’m not taking money,” so Tonto will know I get it.
He says, “A handful of corn turns defeat into victory.”
He talks like that when I’m supposed to figure something out. Something complicated, like how to stop a robbery when all I’ve got is a large bag of Ranch Flavored Doritos. I haven’t got a clue, but I reach inside the bag and take out the biggest handful I can hold and offer it to the robber, like he might trade it for his gun.
“Drop it, retard!”
That word makes me crunch the Doritos into a little pile of seasoned dust while the robber watches. It looks like a little golden pyramid when I open up my hand.
“Drop it!”
The man with the gun is trying hard to be boss, but I won’t let that happen now that my RG1068 is gone. I draw a double lungful of rosemary-filled air and blow Dorito dust into the robber’s face.
His eyes open wide with surprise and then close quickly when the pain comes. He fires a wild shot over my head and another wild shot into the jerky rack. He opens his eyes into a squint that looks like a pair of dog anuses over his mask, and I know his next shot will kill me, so I punch him in the surgical mask with my Dorito fist.
I shout, “Bam!” like in the word balloons in superhero comic books my best friend used to read me.
The robber’s white hat falls onto the floor. His gun falls to the floor. He goes down on his knees crying ranch flavored tears and shouting, “Jesus!” like the televangelists used to do.
The mask soaks up so much blood it looks like the flags truck drivers used to put on loads that stuck out too far.
“Jesus, Jesus, Jesus!” When three Jesuses don’t help him, the robber tries to pick up his pistol.
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