by Logan Miller
“What the hell are you doing?” Jake asked. But he knew.
“What we should’ve done in the first place.”
“Let’s get a second opinion.”
“Don’t need one.”
Caleb did not slow and limped back through the dust that was now rising from the dirt floor and clouding the shed. “I’m burning this curse right now.” He punched his hands into the pile and latched onto several hefty stalks.
“Edgar was probably just lying to us so he could get a lower price,” Jake said, striding alongside his brother and trying to get his attention. “He’s a drug dealer.”
“And I’m not going to become one.”
Caleb stuffed the armload of plants into the shovelhead and pressed them down with his palms and snapped branches to make more room.
“Take it easy, brother,” Jake said. “Slow down and think about what you’re doing. Don’t go getting all huffy.”
Caleb limped over to Jake and seized him by the shoulders.
“Listen to me,” said Caleb. “We’re going to burn this right now and you’re going to help me. You got us into this fix and now you’re going to help get us out of it.”
“Burning it ain’t gonna make it go away,” Jake said in a defeated tone that was moving toward despair.
“No, but it will get us closer to where we should be.”
Truth kicked Jake in the teeth again. He’d banished the reality for the last couple of days, since the incident in the forest, and now it had returned to crash the party of his delusions. His work-hardened muscles ran slack and empty as a punishing regret came over him—he could see the face of the man he killed. He wasn’t even a man. He was a boy, maybe twenty, more like eighteen or nineteen, a teenager. A teenager. For what?
For what?!
The question shouted at him as he stared far beyond the painted distance, his cigarette passing between his lips and back to his side in unthinking draws, and there was nothing that he could find, no foothold which to grasp onto in the horizon of his thoughts or the horizon of the darkening land. He was out there searching and there was nothing that came back to him that would reconcile the future with the past.
He dropped his cigarette into the dirt and grabbed a bushel of plants and hauled them across the shed and packed them into the loader.
ᴥ
The marijuana had been piled in a large heap in the barren field beyond the wood yard. The brothers doused the heap with gasoline from rusted aluminum jerricans as the sun died in the western sky and brought light to another part of the world.
Caleb struck a wooden match and the pile went up in a whoosh. The brothers stood back and the hungry flames ate wildly across their faces and upon the watery surface of their eyes and licked the yellow moon already watching through the fast black smoke.
28.
The ache in Edgar’s ass increased with the thought of his colossal misadventure into the northern wastelands of the state where dumbfuck yokels stole marijuana crops and drunk-howling Indians shot and stabbed each other over casino sluts and two-dollar bets.
Albuquerque had never shined so holy and bright.
One road into this shitville county and one road out and he was cruising at the speed limit with a half-eaten bag of chicharrones between his legs when the unmistakable blue and red lights of authority flashed in his rearview.
“Fuckin’ pigs,” he said and pulled onto the shoulder. Black prairie encircled a tunnel of broken yellow lines vanishing into the asphalt strip. Not even a distant ranch light could be seen so remote was the stretch of road.
Sheriff Gates and Deputy Sparks stepped out of the cruiser and walked forward through the swirling red and blue. Gates approached on the driver side of the sedan and Sparks on the passenger.
“Howdy, Edgar,” Gates began. He raised his flashlight and blinded Edgar with the beam.
“Howdy,” Edgar said.
“Edgar the Bandito Burrito.”
“Do I know you?”
“No, but our computer sure does,” Gates said. “It knows all about you. You haven’t exactly been a law-abiding citizen.”
“Those days are behind me.”
“I doubt it.”
“If it’s not absolutely necessary officer,” Edgar said in a tone of mild respect. He was used to police harassment and the law always won. “Could you please take the light out of my eyes?”
“It’s necessary.” Gates wiggled the beam mockingly across Edgar’s face like a strobe light at the club. “What are you doing up here?”
“Just going for a drive.”
“A drive, huh?”
“Yep.”
“Where to?” Gates asked.
“Up here.”
“Where up here? It’s a big county.”
“This town.”
“We’re not in a town right now,” Gates said. He grinned. “Edgar the Bandito Burrito.”
“Did I break the law?”
“Don’t know yet.”
“This is harassment.”
“Who you visiting?”
“Like I said, I was just going for a drive is all.”
“Who?”
“Nobody.”
“We’re a long ways from Albuquerque,” Gates said.
“I like to get away.”
“You know what I hate, Edgar?”
“Hemorrhoids?”
“A cocky felon.”
Sparks leaned in from the passenger side. “I smell alcohol.”
“So do I,” Gates said. “We’re gonna need you to step out of your vehicle, Edgar, and take a look inside. Bandito Burrito Comosito.”
“Fine by me. I ain’t got shit. I’m clean.”
Edgar stepped out and placed his hands behind his back in a compliant manner. Gates handcuffed him and sat him on the shoulder of the road.
Sparks began to search the vehicle. He looked under the seats and opened the center console. He rifled through the glove box and produced a handgun without surprise.
“What do you know, Sheriff.” He displayed the 9mm. “Edgar’s packing.”
“That ain’t mine,” Edgar said. “You know that ain’t mine. You just fucking planted that.”
“A felon with a handgun,” Gates said. “Bad, bad, news.”
“Very bad news,” Sparks added. “You got any kids, Edgar?”
“You crooked motherfuckers. Fuck you.”
Sparks whirled and kicked Edgar in the kidney with his steel-toe boot. “Of course you got kids, Edgar. You’re Mexican.”
“He asked you a question, Edgar. Bandito Burrito.”
“Two,” Edgar said, gasping. He coughed several times. The intense pain keeled him onto his side and he felt as though he might pass out. “I got two kids.”
“How old?”
“Three and six.”
“So much for enjoying their childhood,” Gates said. “By the time you get outta prison this time, they’ll be your age, grandpa.”
“You never know what you’re liable to find on a gun until you run it,” Sparks said.
“You’re absolutely right, Deputy. That weapon could be tied to a murder or two. Or three.”
“If that’s the case he ain’t never getting out, Boss.”
“No he ain’t. Just another dead beaner in a prison jumpsuit.” Gates stepped around Edgar and squatted down until their eyes met in the flashing darkness. “Do you want to die in prison, Edgar? It’s a lonely place to go. Some two-bit wannabe doctor-in-training guts you like a fish and pulls out all your insides, and then they set you out in a cardboard box for your family to pick up at the front gate.”
“They do all kinds of nasty experiments to a prisoner’s body once they’re dead,” said Sparks.
“That’s right. ’Cause we own you.”
The cruiser lights swirled red and blue all around as Edgar stared across the road and into the night prairie that was blurred by the liquid pooling in his eyes. He could only shake his head weakly. He thought about three year-old
Lupe on the carpet with her coloring books and crayons and six year-old Rosa playing princess with her dolls and about his wife frying empanadas right now and his mother who spoke no English and his abuela who wasn’t even a citizen. He thought about what would happen to them if something were to happen to him. He supported them financially and what would they do without his livelihood? What hardships would they endure? How would his children fare without their father? Who would raise them, another man? He grew angrier with each thought and all he wanted to do was get out of the handcuffs and back to his family. He thought about Jake, the very reason for coming up here, and he told himself that he should have trusted his instincts. He knew better. He had made a rookie mistake. He had no business being up here and now he was certain of it.
“So, once again, who were you visiting, and why?” Gates asked. He could see Edgar’s resolve breaking down. He could see the mounting fear in the prisoner and that he was weighing everything with only self-interest and survival in mind. “We already know. We just need you to confirm a few things, is all.”
“I’m not a snitch,” said Edgar.
“Tonight you are.”
29.
White gloves flared at Marlo’s wrists and his back was turned in the silence of the studio. His hands rose up from his sides and he began snapping his fingers in that signature Fosse style of absolute precision and physical articulation, every movement meticulously choreographed with magisterial intention, nothing wasted, nothing arbitrary. He whistled along with the soundtrack and then doffed his pilot’s cap to his dance partner. When she returned the gesture they began the performance.
He had flown his dance partner in from New York. Last year he’d seen her on Broadway in a Fosse revue and was impressed with her grace and lines and technical facility. He was paying her $15,000 for the day plus agent fee, first class flight, and two nights’ hotel with an eighty minute deep stone massage at Ten Thousand Waves in Santa Fe. She was nearly six feet tall and mostly legs with perfectly round petite breasts and if he were sexually attracted to women he thought that he would most certainly be attracted to her. He had brokered similar deals with her agent for over a decade now and the agent was always happy to take the call from the retired dancer and art collector out west who always paid upfront and never haggled over price and amenities and who always had town cars waiting for his dancers to take them to and from the airport.
They had worked all day modifying the choreography of the ensemble piece without compromising the integrity of the original. The props were in place, the scaffolding had been assembled, and she was lying atop the varnished plywood on her side, playing the central role.
She rose up swanlike and fell into his arms.
He eased her onto the dance floor and laid her flat on her belly. Resting on her elbows she placed her white-gloved hands on her cheeks and continued the lyrics and then Marlo lowered his right hand down to her and helped her off the floor and they hip rolled in a diagonal line across the studio.
Marlo’s movements were masculine and powerful in accordance with his physical composition and artistic sensibility. There was nothing effeminate about his style. In fact, there was a complete absence of it. He considered it a moral violation for some queen to corrupt the form with accentuated femininity. It was a gross stereotype and one that he loathed in many American dancers. The form should be pure and loyal to the discipline and betray nothing regarding one’s sexual orientation. The very nature of dance itself was a force of sexual expression. It didn’t require additional ornamentation, especially from those with poor taste.
The cymbals clanged and the piano dropped and Marlo lost himself in the performance and his mind reflected on his early days in the trade, the cowboy days, the screaming-disco-fuck-yeah and the glitter-rock-oh-yeah before all the telephony wizardry and the DEA super-jet task force and paramilitary outfits hunting drug runners. When the players were so far ahead of the authorities in trade and craft. When America was blown white from its first cocaine blizzard and wanted more-more-more at fifty-five grand a key. When you could flip bales of Thai Stick out the cargo bay of a Cessna in an Illinois farm field or stroll onto a TWA flight bound for JFK with twenty chickens packed snug in a Samsonite suitcase without a single uptick in blood pressure. The analog freewheeling foot-chasing load up and roll in the night flight commercial or private and score a huge payday in old hundreds without the Big Brother watermark. When you could buy a ranch in NorCal after one score and grow organic produce for the rest of your days rolling joints of your own outdoor and nobody would ever know that you came and went in the exotic trade. When you could drive semis of brick-hard Columbian as seedy as a watermelon from Miami to Forest Knolls for $250 an elbow and flip them for $400. Thirty-five thousand pounds of it in one haul and celebrate the coup with bottles of Louis XIII, swilling the cognac directly into your mouth from the Baccarat crystal like upstart kings without pedigree. When you could redline your eighteen-wheeler across the Deep South past the redneck Mississippi and Louisiana and Texas troopers and not get pulled over so long as you had a Confederate flag draped across your grille—just another good ole boy—or a real shrewd hippie fucking those crackers in the ass all the way across I-10. When you could pilot a fishing vessel with a bellyful of tar straight across the Pacific and pull into Seattle or San Francisco or little Albion with counterfeit credentials that only had to deceive the scrutiny of imperfect or indifferent eyeballs.
From there the trade went this way and that way and he had begun back then. He had lived all over and been here for some time.
Because how did one get into the trade of mass murderers and money printing kings and the earthly princes of darkness?
He had started small while on tour with his dance company in Europe, a young smuggler with big balls and cutthroat acumen. He could buy a kilo of Moroccan hash in Paris and triple his profits on the other side of the water. And it wasn’t long before he made new connections and met new people and he grew and they grew with him.
The music paused.
They concluded the first piece and during the interlude he turned off the lights save one strip overhead that cast the studio in dramatic shadows. He turned on the smoke machine and grabbed two vintage Sportsman chrome flashlights from atop the sound system and clicked on the beams. He held the flashlight with both hands just below his chin and shined the beam on his face and she did the same with hers.
They welcomed their imaginary passengers aboard Air-rotica and promised to fly them anywhere their fantasies wished to take them.
He pulled off his gloves and slid off his pants and unzipped his shirt and tossed the articles to the side so that only a dance belt girded his genitalia and he wore nothing else. His lithe musculature held a gleam of sweat.
When the music changed she climbed back atop the scaffolding and stripped down to a black crop top and black thong. She pulled off the crop top and unsnapped her lace bra and flung them with a dramatic wave of her arm and her breasts were naked in harmony with the original piece.
“My name is Zola,” she said.
“My name is Marlo.”
The piano played slowly and his movements reflected the cadence, elongated and graceful, the momentum building. The drums came in and the tempo grabbed hold and his mind was off again, speeding across oceans to images long ago, dirty, foul, misguided, loud and cacophonous, and he saw the ruffled plumage and the blood spray as roosters fluttered up and crashed together and sliced and stabbed one another with Philippine long knives. He could see the dusty smoke veiled arena and hear the yelling and the staccato Tagalog shouting of bets. He saw the nobility and the colorful plumage of the roosters and in their danse macabre he saw himself and the bloodletting and the raging vibrancy of the spectacle and the beauty and the courage in the roosters’ heaving breasts. He saw the twitching of the vanquished lying in its shredded feathers on broken wings, its eyes trying to comprehend the gash ripped across its throat and the blood pooling in the dust. The avian victor held
aloft and the crowd seething in the blood sport. His bird. His victory.
He fought roosters in the Philippines and in the states with the Oakies and then the sport took him to Mexico and opened up business for him on both sides of the border.
He was in a palenque now in the state of Guanajuato, the cerveza and tequila vapors hanging in the stagnant breath of the place, the cigarillo smoke, the peanut shell floor, the raucous crowd and the wailing music.
He saw the handlers bring the roosters together in the center of the pit and let them peck each other so that each may know his adversary. He saw the handlers draw the roosters behind the long score lines, and when the referee signaled, the handlers released the roosters and they scurried toward each other with inborn truculence and flew up and stabbed and slashed neck and breast in combat old as the species with weapons harnessed on them by a much younger species more savage than they.
And on those same travels he had swam in ocean waters that felt of liquid dreams against his skin, gliding along the emerald blue surf, the smooth waves and the gentle curl descending and rolling him under its caress that was warm and forgiving and carried him along with beatific grace. He could smell the tropical flowers along the shoreline and feel the white sand of the finest powder and there was perfume in the air that made him lightheaded from its beauty. He had met gorgeous brown-skinned boys and traveled on scooters around island roads with them holding him around the waist and the blooming current that ran its fingers through their hair and upon their faces, the universe wonderful and alive with rum-soaked epiphanies. He had seen the world as a young adult from a boyhood without privilege and a manhood that knew wealth and violence and understood that they were one and the same.
The drums, the piano, the keyboard, and the tambourine rallied into crescendo and then all went silent at once.
