by Logan Miller
Gates changed his uniform and they continued the seventy-mile drive into Santa Fe. The sky was blotched with cotton swab clouds and the rain was now a thing for tomorrow. The ground was already dry underneath their boots as they spoke with Arnold Weston beneath stacks of milled wood.
“You guys are permitted for Carson, isn’t that right?” Gates asked.
“Yeah, but we ain’t been up there for months,” Arnold said. “We were up in the Santa Fe Forest a week back. Just a few of us.”
“Any of your guys doing any side work up there, you know, weekend or after work stuff?”
“They’d better not be. This equipment ain’t cheap and I ain’t known for paying much. It would be a check none of their asses could cash.”
“What about other companies?”
“Might be,” Arnold said. “But there’s nothing but old snags and fells up there. A company like ours can’t survive on that. We need the big timber for the vigas and corbels that all the rich Texans and movie stars want in their second and third and tenth homes up in the hills around here. Those Texans right now got more goddamn money than the movie stars, especially those assholes from Fort Worth. It’s gushing out of the hair in their ears. They’re trying to outspend Hollywood. Of course they try and pretend that’s the last thing they care about, you know, making a showy display of wealth, them being humble Christians and all, but in reality, it’s all those Texans care about. That, and making sure their wives stay blonde.” He smiled. “But it’s good for business. Go Longhorns.”
“I appreciate your time, Arnold.”
“Yeah,” Arnold said, “Carson was a big let down this year. It just wasn’t worth the time and the cost of the machinery to get up there. But the roads were in pretty descent shape. I remember we could hump it pretty quick.”
“Adios,” Gates said.
He and Sparks climbed into the cruiser. Gates took the notepad from the dashboard and crossed off Eagle Feather Timber Company from the list Ortiz gave them.
It was getting dark.
They drove to Buffalo Thunder Casino and gambled and drank Jack and Cokes and snorted a bluff of Johnny Yayo in the parking lot before riding home north on the interstate after midnight with blown eyes of flame like cod brought up from the deep.
20.
There was a new violence to their sex. Her back arched and she bit hard into his neck, suppressing a scream but commanding him—Fuck me. Fuck me harder. Drive your fucking cock into me.
She had clawed and scratched into his back till the skin bled and he had enjoyed the pain and she had enjoyed inflicting it. He came inside her from behind and slapped her ass. You liked that didn’t you—you little fucking slut. The words rose up in him from some unfamiliar place and she liked being called that right now. Afterward, they didn’t talk about it. But they thrilled at the carnal discovery and wanted to revisit the act with the same violent pleasure.
They curled in each other’s arms, mingling sweat with sweat. It was early in the evening and neither of them had slept the night before. They hadn’t eaten dinner and were not in a rush to leave each other’s embrace. Food could wait. There was no sense of time, no schedule, all was nothing until the grim matter was resolved.
“I’m sorry for the other day on the mountain,” she said. “I wasn’t siding with your brother. I just didn’t know what to do and say. I was confused and I didn’t want you two to argue or get into a fight.”
“I know.”
“You sure?”
“Yes.”
There was a candor in his tone and she knew that he meant what he said. So far as she knew he’d never lied to her and she believed that he never would. He kissed her softly and she felt warm and she could not help but smile so close to him.
The room was dark and humid and their words seemed to float through a shapeless dreamscape. Fluorescent light shafted through a slit in the curtains from the naked bulb on the woodshed roof where the marijuana lay heaped under the tarpaulin.
Caleb caressed her back and she thought about the pregnancy scare they had in high school, how they had talked about what they would do and how he said that he would stand by her, whatever her decision. Two weeks later her period came, and that was that. But now she hoped that this time was not a scare, but a blessing, that they would be welcoming a child late in the spring. And the vanity of having a perfect figure in her wedding photos? Oh well. It was just that—vanity. She had a great man. She could get used to a larger dress size. Or maybe slim down after the birth and get married then. Stop. Wait till you see the doctor.
“Can you come with me on Friday?” she said.
“What day is it today?” he asked, nodding off.
“Monday.”
“Of course. I just gotta tell my brother… Of course I’ll come with you.”
Then she thought of the killing in the forest and wanted to scream at the image and remove it forever from her mind. The young man. Where was he now? Was he still up there alone on the mountain, cold and rotting, torn apart by the vultures and coyotes and maggots? Were his eyes open? Did he have a family? Was there a mother somewhere crying over her dead son?
But the most disturbing aspect about the whole nightmarish incident was that she had been part of it. No matter what happened, no matter if it just went away because nobody cared about the dead man or whomever he was involved with covered it up or a court of law cleared them of any wrongdoing. No matter what happened, the raw and simple truth, the irrevocable fact remained: it had happened. The nightmare was real. The nightmare would forever change the course of her life. It was changing it now.
Why are the bad images so much more powerful than the good?
Her blood pressure increased. Her heart rate jumped. Her pupils dilated and she could make out forms in the room where minutes before she could not.
Then she said, “I just don’t want you to think that I would choose anyone over you on anything. Ever.”
“I don’t.”
“Are you sure?”
“Yes. Now put your head on my chest and close your eyes and let’s try and sleep a bit.”
ᴥ
In the other room Jake heard the low rattling and stifled moans and started to become aroused. He bent his ear to the flimsy trailer wall, spit in his hand, and rubbed one out. The going was quick. He didn’t last as long as his brother. He had no one to please but himself.
He felt guilty afterward, but not for very long. He rationalized that his brother, most men for that matter, would’ve done the same in his shoes. So what the heck? It was only his mind at work and he wasn’t thinking about really having sex with Lelah. The real object of his pleasure was some trashy-looking blonde chick with floppy tits he’d seen on the back of some dude’s Harley a few weeks ago. A real road hag. Perfect whack-off material. Lelah’s suppressed moans and the headboard rattle merely served to stimulate the creative process. They were the erotic soundtrack. The mood lighting. The mode of imaginative transport.
He put on his earphones and blasted Appetite for Destruction. He made himself a peanut butter and grape jelly sandwich for dinner and sat down on the company computer, an ancient desktop that he barely knew how to operate. It took a minute to warm up. He was a two-finger hunt and peck typist who hunted for every keystroke. He never understood why the keyboard wasn’t in alphabetical order beginning with A at the top left corner and ending with Z at the bottom right corner. That would make sense.
But smart people always did stupid shit.
His research began with one word: mariwana, which Google miraculously corrected for him. The word opened an infinite corridor of possibilities and an overwhelming wealth of information. He was not a fast reader. He started with the Wikipedia page and before long he was swimming through a constellation of hyperlinks on the subject. He soon realized that there wasn’t just one type of marijuana—there were countless strains of the stuff, with exotic and sensational names like California Skunk, OG Kush, Bob Marley Sativa, Grand Daddy Purple, Sour
Diesel, Girl Scout Cookies, Early Misty, White Widow, Blueberry Yum Yum, Hawaiian Gold, G-13, Cherry Pie, Green Crack, AK-47, Alien Blues, Jagoo.
I wonder what kind we have?
He studied photos of numerous strains but they all looked about the same to him. He lacked the practiced eye of a connoisseur, of someone who smoked bud and rolled fatties every day, one of the stoned masses that worshipped the green leaf and adhered to the cult of cannabis. He knew firewood, could distinguish between oak and walnut, pine and fur, redwood and cedar, maple and birch, eucalyptus and ash, hard wood and soft wood, dry wood you could light with a match and wet wood that would never burn, long-burning woods and those that burned faster, what made for good kindling and what made for bad. Sure, he and Caleb would smoke the occasional joint or bowl if it was around. They had even taken a few bong hits at a high school party in Española. But they had always been nicotine and alcohol guys. It was the high they liked most.
About an hour later Jake concluded that all he needed to know about marijuana was that there was a lot of money in that green herb—and he had a bunch of it. A motherfucking truckload. Literally.
He scrolled through his iPod and “One in a Million” started playing and it triggered a cascade of positive thoughts.
Before long he was spinning fantasies again, fantasies about the riches to be made, the riches sitting out there in the woodshed. Make the big deal and ditch this dump of a life. Even take a little less to get the cash quick. He’d ask his brother and Lelah to come with him. Wanted them to. Thought it would be best. He loved them. They were his best friends, the only family he had. What was done was done.
No. Grow the firewood business for a little while. A year or two. Then hire someone to take it over and manage once the money rolls in. Take out ads. Get new trucks and equipment. More efficiency. Generate more money. Feed the cash back into the business. Grow it. Become a better businessman. View this cash as the big loan they needed. Yes. That was the right thing to do. Supply every house from here to Albuquerque with firewood. Then up to Colorado. Take over Denver. The big city. Thousands and thousands of homes. Millions of dollars in revenue. Yes. That was the plan. Brother Firewood. Get some. You’re damn right.
The new money would also give him time to pursue other things, leisurely activities, hobbies. Isn’t that what rich people had—hobbies? He’d take up chainsaw sculpting again in earnest, really learn the craft this time, hone his skills and carve some amazing pieces, redeem that humiliating chapter of his life in his early twenties when he had hoped to transition out of the firewood business and into the art game.
In the peak of tourist season he had trundled one of his sculptures around the square in Santa Fe, but nobody ever stopped to admire his work, not even a friendly inquiry: What’s that? How’d you do it? How much?
Nothing. Just the random glance and then the casual turn away.
He compared his sculptures to other sculptures in the galleries and discovered that he had a considerable ways to go before climbing the ranks into the professional realm. His sculptures lacked personality. The problem was he could visualize what he wanted to carve but he couldn’t quite execute his vision. The wood never seemed to cooperate.
The final humiliation came when he attempted to carve a standing grizzly bear out of a slab of redwood. He’d saved six months for that magnificent cut of wood, shipped from a mill in Northern California. For weeks he worked tirelessly into the night with white-hot passion to carve something great, true art, an expression of the beauty trapped within his soul. He was talented, even if nobody ever told him he was. But try as he might he was never able to coax the bear from its hibernation inside the burgundy slab. The sculpture never resembled a bear any more than it did a pudgy human pawing at the wind.
Sure, he could carve chains out of wood. But any half-decent woodsman could do that. The old wooden chain was a cheap carnival trick.
Chainsaw sculptures were old news though. Their heyday was over. Sales had peaked in the mid-eighties. It had been downhill from there. But Jake remembered hearing somewhere that markets could always be resurrected. What’s old becomes new again. He’d bring back the demand with his newfound leisure time bought with the green gold outside in the shed.
He might even try and track down their father. They hadn’t heard from him in over fifteen years. They had received one letter from him, about a year after he left. It was written on a torn piece of brown paper bag and said: YOU WILL BE A STAR. It was addressed to both of them.
Last they knew he had disappeared somewhere out there in the great people-swallowing pit of Los Angeles. He was probably dead though, some homeless man scraped off the street one morning and never claimed by his family, chilled in some stainless steel drawer at the county morgue until the policy for the body storage of unclaimed indigents expired and he was incinerated to bone ash and laid to rest with the other anonymous dead. Yeah, he might try and track him down. But what was the point?
Back to the good thoughts, the positive things in his life, marijuana and money.
M&M, he laughed.
But he had killed someone—no he hadn’t. It was self-defense. That guy had probably killed other people in his life and a lot more would’ve followed. He was a dirty drug dealer. Better him than me.
21.
Darius Gates had a cleaver wedged into his skull. It was buried deep into the heart of his dehydrated brain. He was pale and frosted with a sweat that reeked of whiskey and cocaine. His nose had bled during the night and left a flaky black crust on the side of his face and a ruddy brown stain on his pillow, a monstrous cloud of it. The scene looked as though he’d been bludgeoned to death while he slept. God he felt like it. And the stench curling up from under his sheets informed him that he had in fact shit himself again.
When he swung his feet out of bed and planted them on the carpet a sledgehammer pounded the cleaver and chopped his brain in half. He saw a white flash and there was a terrible shrieking in his ears. He went blind for a moment. Then flitting sparks of light danced around his vision for the next few minutes.
He ran a hot shower and then vomited all over the tub and mildewed curtain. A violent green bile of abuse. It reminded him of the chile verde sauce they drench over enchiladas and the thought made him vomit again. He swirled the chunks down the drain with his fingers and then stood under the flowing heat with his head bowed like the End of the Trail.
It had never been this bad. He stared at his .45 on the nightstand and thought about blowing out his brains. End this filthy charade once and for all.
I’m tired of hiding. Always hiding. You smear yourself in shit when you sleep. Your own shit. You’re a fucking ape.
You can’t start over. Not at your age.
You’ve got no money. Nothing.
You’re back in overdraft.
He’d blown it all. Literally. Every penny he’d ever saved, up his nose and on the table, that green and red felt thief, that cardsharping bastard. The bottle played a role too, of course. But that was a cheap addiction. It was more of an enabler, the catalyst that triggered the reaction and caused the nose to start sucking and the bets to start humming. The curtain of inhibitions rolled up and bound tight, the naked man dancing his dick off, abandoned of all cares, the future be damned, this is the moment, the only one I’m alive. The only one I know for sure. Pour me a shot, chalk one up, throw down the bet—this one’s a winner. You lose. No worries. I’ll win the next one. Honk goes the rail. I’m a winner.
Because that’s what addicts did. They did what they were supposed to do. They followed orders. As predictable as time.
He took the gun into his hand. It would only take a slight bending of his arm at the elbow to raise the barrel to his temple and then six pounds of pressure against the trigger. Just go away, float into nothingness, no more shame and infantile helplessness. No more lies. No more hate. No more murder. Just one more. The murder of myself.
But one name stopped him: Lelah.
I can�
�t leave her alone in this fucked-up world. There’s plenty of other horrible creatures out there like me. They’re all over the place.
Still in his towel he stripped the bed down to the mattress and threw the soiled clump into the trunk of his cruiser and discarded it in a dried out gulch that the Pueblo Indians used as a dumping place, ensuring that Lelah would never find the filthy incriminating evidence.
He called Sparks and told him to pick up some brandy on his way to the office.
Hair of the dog, he said as he poured several seconds of the bottle into his coffee mug. Then with morbid amusement: But does he bite this morning? Yes, he does. He’s a pitbull from the E&J farm of pain. Always reliable. A sweet bite after a sour night.
“Why didn’t we stay in Santa Fe yesterday?” Sparks asked on the drive back down the interstate.
“Because I like sleeping in my own bed.”
Well, he thought. Some nights.
They pulled into Bud Allen Lumber shortly after lunchtime and started talking to the owner. It was over quickly.
“Carson is only good for firewood harvesting right now,” Bud said. “We’re not in that business.”
“Thanks for talking to us,” Gates said.
“I can sell you some vigas though?”
“Maybe next time. So long.”
Gates and Sparks climbed into the cruiser. Gates took the notepad from the dash and crossed Bud Allen Lumber off the list, the third name to be struck. They had started with the permit holders that were farthest away and were now working back toward home. That morning they had hit up a company in Pecos and came away with nothing other than the strong impression that nobody at the company had been involved in the heist either. It was quite possible that the list wouldn’t reveal anything of value. The most likely scenario was that Ruben had confided in the wrong people about his agricultural endeavor and the indiscretion had cost him his life. Random crimes of this nature were rare. The victim almost always knew the perpetrator on some level. You knew who robbed you. And you knew who killed you. Those were the odds. And they were stacked heavily along these lines. Moreover, there was almost always some level of premeditation involved in the commission of a high crime. So who had planned it and who had done it?
