by David Cole
“I don’t know, man. Please. That woman, Deb, she takes the tapes. That’s all I know. I just run the cockfights. “Yeah, sure, okay? They own a lot of the birds, they dope the birds, they rig the fights, nothing is just fun for those people, not unless it makes money.”
“How much do you make?” Ken said.
“I’m paid five thousand a fight.”
“In cash?”
“Money transfer. It shows up in a bank account. Two thousand up front, the rest the morning after the fights.”
“What bank?” I said.
“Bank of America.”
“What branch?”
“Green Valley. The account’s in the name of Dakota Barbie. Like the state, like the doll. Okay, that’s all, that’s all I know.”
“Do we believe him?” Ken said to me. I nodded. “All right, Max. Whatever your real name is, I’ll keep your wallet, we’ll get your ID checked out real good. Hand me that duct tape.”
After being wrapped in the tape, this time around both hands and ankles, Cady thought he’d go back into the Porsche, but Ken dragged him ten yards away. Cady tried shouting, but the desert swallowed his voice as we drove away.
He pulled up next to the warehouse, got out to slide open one of the doors, drove the Porsche inside. “These people who run the fights, they’re worse than the animals that get slaughtered.”
The barn was almost totally empty, the bleachers gone, nothing left but an ancient Ford pickup parked askew in one corner, the hood up, two fifty-gallon iron barrels on the ground near the tailgate.
“What will happen to this place?”
“I’ll report it, cops might stake it out, probably not. These promoters move from place to place.”
We looked in the barrels, both of them full of dead cocks. Ken went berserk. Finding a rusted tire iron in the pickup cab, he went to the Porsche, smashed all its windows, headlights, taillights, long scratches and dents in the body. Back at the pickup, he found two red cans of gasoline and dumped some of it in the barrels, then took some rags from the barn floor and soaked them with gasoline before cramming the rags into the Porsche’s gas tank. The rest of the gasoline he sloshed over the wooden walls. Waving me outside, he stood in the doorway, touched a match to the trail of gasoline he’d laid down from the Porsche and lit it up.
We ran to the Harley and Ken popped a wheelie, he was so anxious to get away, fighting down the front of the bike as the warehouse burst into flame.
I flipped open my cell.
“What are you doing?” Ken shouted.
“Calling nine-one-one.”
“Let it burn,” Ken said. “Just let it burn.”
26
Home.
I pushed through my bedroom door, going to the windows. The door hung slightly askew and swung shut behind me. When I turned, I saw myself in a full-length mirror on the back of the door.
Startled, I saw myself regard myself with surprise. Biker chick, that’s not me, is it? Reddish spots on my bare legs, below the knee. More spots on my boots.
Still surprised, I bent toward the mirror to examine the spots, not even thinking to look at the real person. Speckles of blood all over my boots. I looked directly down at them. Sat on the floor, propped left boot on my right thigh. Boots flecked with rooster blood, like sprinkles on a mocha ice-cream cone. I’d not realized I’d splattered myself when dropping the dead rooster into the burn barrel.
I left my house at dawn. I drove west for a while, drove north, the sunrise low on the horizon and sometimes in my face, against my left cheek or my right and because I wanted its warmth, I turned south when I crossed I-10 for the fourth time.
Without noticing, I merged onto I-19, headed toward Nogales and the border, past the Desert Diamond Casino, with a dozen RVs parked on the edges of the lots and fifty or sixty empty cars around the front and side of the casino, early morning slot machine players.
At Esperanza, I exited into Green Valley, pulled up to the empty parking lot near the Book Shop, where I’d once parked window to window with Nathan. I read the scrapes and oil markings on the pavement like they were tea leaves, but found nothing there, so I eased out onto La Canada and headed south again until by sheer coincidence I saw the Bank of America branch, its clock reading the wrong time, big hand pointed at six and the little hand at eleven. I pulled into the parking lot, stopped, put both hands in back of my neck, trying to stretch tension out of my neck muscles. Using my fingertips, I tried a shiatsu massage on my temples, but nothing stopped my headache, so I turned onto Continental and saw I needed gas.
A brand-new GMC pickup pulled to the pump across from me. A tiny woman with pink hair jumped out to pump gas, the driver eyeing me from underneath his cheap straw hat, the straw crushed and folded until the sides came up almost vertical with the brow pointing down. As I pumped gas, I saw his eyes switch to the I-10 on-ramp, where three people stood in a huddle. A Mexican family, parents and a small boy.
“Damn Mexicans,” the pickup driver said. “You hear so many stories, you know, people down there on the take, bribes, up the food chain the bribes get bigger. But that’s their country, I don’t like ’em personally, I don’t want ’em in Arizona. Drive down here, look at that plastic everywhere, bottles, baggies, they’re just litterbugs.”
Wiggling his back against the beaded seat cushion, scratching a spot somewhere below his shoulder blades, then moving up and down, drawing his jeans tighter against his crotch until he had to reach inside his belt and rearrange his parts inside the white jockey shorts. Jerking so much the pickup bounced until he got everything in place. He’d dropped his seatback almost to a forty-five-degree angle, lying back like he was watching football on TV, his chin nearly on his neck, watching the road and his mirrors from the top of his eyes. I remembered a rodeo in Flagstaff, watching bronc riders stretched horizontal over the horse’s back, legs extended to rowel the bronc.
“I mean,” he said, “I got nothing against money, I got nothing against the smugglers and cartels and politicos and even the policia down there. What I got is this really pissed-off feeling that the money people are driving the poor people north, up here where they work illegally and take money out of my pocket. I could give a shit about what’s legal, what’s…how do you say it, what’s right? Morals. Morally right. Money talks, it don’t give no mind to morals.”
Slim Pickens popped into my head, Pickens spurring the bomb, waving his crushed cowboy hat with a free hand, riding the hydrogen bomb in Dr. Strangelove and hollering, YeeeeHaaaaa, toward the end of the world.
Finished pumping my gas, I swung down Continental and onto the ramp, the man with his thumb out, but he pulled it back when he saw my face. I stopped just ahead of them, waved them to my car.
“Where you going?” I said.
“San Xavier,” the man said. “The mission. Sunday mass.”
“Let me give you a ride. Get in.”
The woman and boy climbed in back, the woman smiling as she worked her way through a rosary. The man sat beside me, admiring the car’s interior.
“Mucho gracias, señora,” he said shyly. “We light a candle. For you.”
“No,” I said. “I mean, thank you, but you don’t have to light a candle.”
“I will pray for you,” the woman said, leaning forward from the back seat and pressing a card in my hand.
“No, no,” I said. “Please, por favor, no prayers.”
“But señora,” the man said. “It is us who pray for you.”
“Whatever,” I said. I dropped them off near the front of Mission San Xavier and circled the parking lot to return to I-10, but stopped the car dead when I passed the W:AK minimall. Three stray dogs bounded over, tails wagging as I half stepped out of the car and immediately got back in and slammed the door shut, the dogs standing on their hind legs, all on my side of the car, my power window down and not going up fast enough, my thumb aching on the button to close the window faster. But the dogs only wanted to lick my hand, lick my face, get so
me food. They trotted off after the next car, ready to beg all over again.
Dogs. The W:AK minimall. This is the place of my worst nightmare. The night five years ago when Rey Villaneuva and I went looking for Miguel Zepeda, and Charley Not A Bear set a boy on fire.
We hurried through the doorway just as a large German shepherd lunged at my ankles. Rey slammed the door shut. Broken glass crunched under my feet. Rey flicked the flashlight down and around.
Plates, cups, saucers, bowls, everything breakable had been swept from two shelves above the sink and lay in pieces on the floor. Every drawer had been pulled out, emptied, smashed, and broken. One of three wooden chairs had been used to smash cabinets, the other chairs, and a card table. Two framed photographs lay in the sink amid shattered frames and glass.
The dog threw himself at the wooden bottom of the door. Rey played the flashlight around the doorway frame and down the hallway leading from the kitchen into the rest of the house.
A board squeaked in a front room as somebody put weight on it, and it squeaked again when the weight was released. At the far end of the cone of light I saw a shadow flicker from one room to the next.
I crossed both arms across my breasts and gripped my shoulders hard, blood pounding in the vein in my right temple.
I moved backward into the kitchen, glass crunching with every step. The noise really set off the dog and he tried to jump through the broken glass at the top part of the door. I hunkered on my ankles against the wall, hands over my ears, wanting to scream. My left calf muscles tightened in an excruciating cramp and I had to stand suddenly, banging against the wall and flinging one arm out to brace myself.
The dog leapt up through the window, knocking the remaining shards of glass into the kitchen just as three shadows exploded down the hallway. Somebody crashed into Rey, knocking them both to the floor. Rey’s flashlight moved across a blue backpack and down onto a pair of lizardskin cowboy boots, one of them in motion, kicking Rey’s hand.
The flashlight bounced and skittered on the floor and came to rest, illuminating Rey’s head just as a second man burst into the kitchen, swinging a tire iron downward toward Rey. A third man got to the door and flung it wide open. Rey fired at him and missed, the man running toward the plaza as lights went on inside a house several doors away.
The dog snarled at the second man, sinking his teeth into the man’s leg. The man screamed in pain as he smashed the tire iron into the dog’s head so savagely it stuck there. He pushed Rey aside and ran out the doorway. Rey fell sideways, bumping against my leg.
I crashed to the floor, writhing among the broken dinner plates as he jumped out the doorway, turning to fire the Glock. My ears rang from the gunshots, the noise bouncing off the walls. Ejected shell casings clinked on the floor, and I drew in a deep breath filled with the acrid scent of sulfur and gunpowder.
Rey got up, unsteady, and staggered out the door and into the yard, streaked by the first rays of false dawn light. Charley stood there, his head angled sideways to keep his long black hair out of his eyes as he sighted along the barrel of his .30-30, tracking the man fifty yards away who was limping badly. He disappeared behind a house and we ran toward him as he entered the San Xavier Plaza parking lot.
Charley fired just as the man stumbled on a rock and lurched forward. The bullet caught him squarely in the center of his backpack. The man exploded into a fireball and dropped solidly to the ground, his arms and legs wiggling frantically as the fire consumed his entire body.
“Bad luck for him,” Charley said. A siren sounded down San Xavier Road. “And bad luck for me if I stay out here and they find me with a gun.”
“Give me the .30-30,” Rey said. “I’ll get it back to you later.”
Without hesitation, Charley tossed the rifle to Rey and disappeared into the next house. The red-blue bubblegum police lights came across the parking lot, stopping abruptly when the car’s headlights illuminated the burning man.
Two young Tribal Policemen crouched nearby, one with a nine-millimeter, the other with a riot gun. In the distance, a third man sprayed a fire extinguisher over the man’s body.
Except it wasn’t a man. Just a young boy.
“Geez, Rey,” one of them said, coming up to us, his hands shaking on the riot gun. “What the hell is happening, anyway? Why’d you shoot that kid?”
And so I stared at the charred body, only partially covered with some EMT cotton blankets. Just for an instant, I tell you. I swear I couldn’t have looked at the body for more than a few seconds, but that was enough for the image to get permanently locked into my head.
“Mary,” I said.
A hesitation on the cell phone, Mary trying to register my voice.
“Who is this?”
“Mary. It’s Laura Winslow.”
“Laura. Have you, what, why are you calling?”
“Can you meet me somewhere? Right now?”
“What’s wrong?”
Something in my voice alerting her, alarming her.
“It’s nothing to do with you. It’s just, um, I really need a friend. Right this time, this place, I really need a friend.”
“Where are you?”
“The mission. San Xavier.”
“I’ll have to bring Ana Luisa. Is that all right?”
“Yes. I’ll be up that small hill, to the right of the mission?”
“I know it. There’s a resting place up there, wait for me there.” I climbed the hill, alone at the shrine, the morning still early enough that those people arriving had come for early mass and not sightseeing. I’d taken the pink diary from my car, I’d hadn’t yet read it, but I couldn’t put that off any longer.
I read the only entry. Mary Emich finding two survivors of a terrible accident, the death of the boy, the discovery at the Arivaca Medical Clinic that both children were drug mules, each having swallowed somewhere around twenty balloons of heroin.
Diary clutched between my hands like a hymnal, like a prayer book, like a bad dream, I sat immobile for fifteen minutes, seeing only the contradictions of my life in front of me. The terrible chaos of the burned boy in the parking lot, the white towers of hope and serenity of the mission.
Shifting my body, a card fell out of my bag, the card that the Mexican woman had given me. A prayer card.
A beatific woman, head covered with a loose blue shawl, tears runneling down her cheeks, kneeling before a crown of thorns, hands clasped in prayer, looking hopefully upward.
Sorrowful Mother
You who held Jesus in your arms, please intercede with your Divine Son on our behalf. Ask Him to help us to know one another more readily; to love one another more deeply. Mother of all mankind, inspire us to travel without falter along that road at the end of which, under the Fatherhood of God, there is true peace.
Amen
Two shadows crossed my face.
“Laura,” Mary said. “Meet Ana Luisa.”
A shy brown face poked around from behind Mary’s waist, the head turned sideways as though to see me from a different perspective.
“Hola, Ana Luisa,” I said. She grinned, ducked behind Mary’s back, and then held tightly to Mary’s left arm. The mission bells rang and rang. “It’s a beautiful morning,” Mary said. “Please. Come with us to mass. We’ll add you in our prayers, and we’ll all light candles.”
I sat still and silent during the mass, barely following the liturgy, not kneeling with Mary and Ana Luisa, but gradually relaxing to the serenity of the service.
Afterward, we strolled the inner courtyard of the mission, the walls lined with tables of candles in glass jars. Mary bought three candles and we each lit one, Mary saying a prayer, Ana Luisa more attracted by the friendly stray dogs that roamed everywhere in the courtyard. I lit my candle and we walked back up the hill to the shrine.
“There are two or three hundred lit candles here,” I said. “What are they for?”
“To keep the flame of Jesus alive.”
“Uhh, well,” I said. “I
thought they were lit to remember somebody.”
“In keeping the flame of memory alive, sure. At different times, I light a candle for my husband, or Ana Luisa, or for her dead brother. For Mother Teresa. For Jesus. It’s the everlasting flame of love and life and remembrance.”
Dogs wandered around the courtyard, peering at us through closed wrought-iron gates. The courtyard itself peaceful and serene.
“And who was your candle for?” Mary said.
“I just did it. Because you did it.”
She pinched out the flame on my candle, handed me a match.
“Light it again,” she said. “But for a purpose of your own.”
I thought of Nathan and lit the candle.
Inside the church, I sat in a wooden bench at the back and watched Mary dip her fingers in a stone basin hung along the right wall. While she touched her forehead and signed the cross, Ana Luisa stood on tiptoes and repeated the gestures. They walked together, hand in hand, down the center aisle to a wooden altar beneath paintings and frescos, they knelt at a railing for a moment and then came to sit with me during the ritual mass.
Outside, walking to our cars, Mary smiled, lifted her face to the sun.
“This beautiful old mission just radiates peace,” Mary said. “It’s like our park, places of serenity.”
“I’m not feeling too serene,” I said.
“But you’ve had peaceful times? In your life?”
“Sure.”
“Tell me about one.”
I remembered Nathan, naked, playing one of his wooden flutes. I remembered his face, lying sideways on the pillow, eyes shut, lips open and relaxed as he breathed. It was the first time I’d seen him so relaxed. No vertical furrows on his forehead between the eyes, sleep even softening the lines which runneled down from the sides of his nose to the corners of his lips. I realized he was the kind of person who had to compose a business face, probably a Law face, tighten things down, form a skin barrier against showing emotions, eyes narrowed with a private, encoded life force and lips that would never reveal it.
