by Logan Miller
He saw Lelah and his brother lifeless in the shovelhead and then he saw himself washing the blood from their faces and then he was burying them in the earth again. His breathing went shallow and his heart thundered in his ears. Every muscle and joint seized up and he managed to hold back a sudden convulsion, a fit of wailing. He was more alive now than he’d ever been and riddled with more sorrow than he’d ever known, exhausted and supercharged at the same time.
“Stop thinking,” he said. “And go.”
He put the cruiser in drive and rolled up to the trailer and parked. He killed the engine and stepped out with the shotgun and walked casually up to the porch.
He pulled back the screen and knocked on the white vinyl door. To his right, someone slid back the curtain and looked out the window. Then the door was ripped open. An average sized man with a big attitude stared down at him from the raised entryway. He wore jeans and a blue Pendleton buttoned to the collar.
Caleb recognized his face from the night before.
“This is private property,” the man said.
“You think I give a shit?”
“What?”
“I said: ‘You think I give a shit?’”
This paused the man. He responded with the only cliché he could think of. “You got a warrant?”
“Don’t need one.”
Caleb swung the shotgun level with his hip and fired a slug into the man. The gut shot hurled the man back inside the trailer where he crashed onto a folding table and twisted onto the floor, broken and dying.
Inside the trailer there was a yelling panic. The clatter of men scrambling and common objects knocked over.
Caleb pumped the shotgun and stood on the porch. The window curtain to his right was pulled open again. Huge eyes stared out at him for the briefest of moments until Caleb fired a slug into the center of the man’s face and the man disappeared in a plume of blood mist and head fragments and shards of glass.
Caleb chambered another shell and stepped inside. On his left a man turned to run toward a back room when Caleb fired and the man crashed to the floor and skidded dead on his belly like a walrus on ice.
Another man jumped up from a table with a wad of hundred dollar bills in his hand. A money-counting machine in front of him. Piles of cash. He reached for a pistol on the table and got hold of it. He tried to raise it but Caleb shot him first. Thousands of dollars exploded into the air and then fluttered to the carpet.
The bathroom door rattled ajar.
Caleb whipped around and fired. The slug tore apart the flimsy paneling and there was the impact of a body slumping onto the toilet and then onto the floor. Then a choking gurgle. Then quiet.
He stood and listened as smoke curled out of the shotgun barrel, the room thick with the acrid tang of burnt gunpowder.
He waited there for several moments and watched the smoke dissipate until he heard the floor creak in the back of the trailer and turned toward the sound with the butt of his shotgun grooved into the front of his shoulder.
He ducked.
A man fired two shots at him with an automatic pistol from the end of the hallway and then darted out the back door. Caleb held his fire and limped down the hallway and stood just inside the shaded interior. He could hear the man’s fleeing footsteps and gasping breaths across the prairie grass as he made for the safety of the cedar trees a hundred yards distant.
Caleb leaned the shotgun against the wall and drew the .44 magnum from his hip.
Using the doorframe to steady his arm, Caleb placed the fleeing man in the stainless gunsights, the neon orange bead on the front sight dead in the middle and flush with the rear white. The man turned and fired a panicked shot over his shoulder that cracked twenty feet overhead when Caleb squeezed the trigger.
The hollow-point ripped into the man’s spine and tore a bloody exit out his chest and he face-planted into the spidery roots of a cedar tree.
Caleb holstered the magnum and limped back down the hallway.
He stepped over to the money table and picked up a cell phone and scrolled through it. There were no entries in the address book. There were some recent phone calls but no names associated with them. Just the ten digits. There was no music or photos and he figured that the phone was used only for business and then only for a short time and then discarded. He continued searching the device and found a phone tracker app and opened it. Three red dots lit up in the valley. One red dot indicated his current location, the device in his hand. The second red dot appeared to be moving down I-84. And the third red dot was stationary at the end of a long dirt road between I-84 and I-96 about fifteen miles from where he was at right now. He figured it was a residence. He was familiar with the area but could not recall ever being down that particular dirt road. He’d hunted in the hills above when he was younger and remembered that there were a few scattered ranches in the valley below.
He looked around for something to write with. He found a pen and wrote down the address on a hundred dollar bill from the table and then set the phone back down where he found it.
He tucked the bill in his shirt pocket. He grabbed his shotgun from the wall and headed out the front door and drove the patriotic cruiser down the rutted track and across the scrubland and out to the blacktop.
41.
Blocka-blocka-blocka burped the exhaust pipes as the two men idled stripped-down choppers beside the smoldering carcass.
The trailer had been reduced to a twisted, charred, reeking mess of worthless debris. Wisps of gunky smoke rose from the remnant flames hidden deep in the heart where unexhausted material lay burning.
For a moment the men questioned if they were at the right place. The only thing they recognized from the night before were the piles of firewood.
One of them kick-standed his bike and walked over to the woodshed. He looked around and then walked back over to his bike and climbed into the saddle.
“No sign of anyone,” he said into his phone. “The whole place is burned to hell. Not sure what to make of it.” He listened. “We’re on our way.”
From atop the mesa Caleb watched them through the windshield of the cruiser.
I guess my twelve hours are up, he said.
He watched them ride back down the driveway and turn west onto the blacktop. He shifted the cruiser into drive and pulled slowly down the ranch road. He would catch up with them soon enough.
And he did.
He saw them up ahead on the road like wheeled apparitions across the rippling vapors of the desert. Shovelhead full-throater bucket rattlers with ape hangers and bazooka pipes, cherry bombs sparking hot dragon breath on down the squealing asphalt, real diamond-tumbling rumble machines, coarse putrid grease metal and rough leather, jagged steel chains and flare whip pom-poms.
Blocka-Blocka-Blocka-Blocka-Blocka-Blocka-Blocka.
He floored the cruiser and the augmented ponies under the hood hurtled him along at 110 miles an hour, sucking up the road, the broken yellow lines streaking under the chassis in speedy yellow blinks.
They saw the sheriff’s cruiser approaching rapidly in their rearview mirrors and thought little of it. Only: do they paint every fucking cop car in the flag around here?
The patriotic cruiser slowed and then stalked behind them, ten feet from grille to chopper tire, a soulless death-machine of the windswept mesa land, gliding at an easy sixty-five miles an hour.
The choppers rode on the metallic surface of Caleb’s sunglasses, thundering across the liquid mirror world within and the hot asphalt without. They were all he saw. A close-up in his eyes. A psychedelic image from a seventies grindhouse flick burned into the celluloid frames shuttering through his mind. Two bikers alone on an empty road out west and Johnny Law coming up behind them. Trouble in front. Trouble in back.
He rolled down the passenger window and gassed the cruiser and pulled alongside the choppers. They were riding abreast.
BLOCKA-BLOCKA-BLOCKA.
They glanced over and didn’t know what to make of him d
riving in the empty stretch of oncoming traffic.
Sheriff Caleb smiled behind the aviator sunglasses and raised the shotgun off the front seat and rested the barrel on the open window space. The rider nearest him saw the shotgun and looked blankly at it. Then the shotgun barrel flamed and blew him out of the saddle where he flopped and flailed and broke apart on the blacktop. His chopper fishtailed and highsided and then shattered, littering both lanes of the road and the grassy shoulder with chrome accessories and fractured steel. All this took about a second or two.
The remaining rider tried to brake—but he didn’t have time before Caleb shot him as well. The rider and his chopper launched off the side of the road and down into a red rock ravine where the bike collided with the bottom of an arroyo. The forks and front tire catapulted from the wreck and the riderless chopper continued to twist and cartwheel across the scorched clay.
Caleb drifted back across the yellow lines into the northbound lane and headed up the desolate stretch of highway.
Five miles ahead he approached a stop sign where the road came to a T. He turned left and headed north. In the distance he could see a vehicle parked on the shoulder. There was a woman standing beside it. She waved at him for help. But he drove past her.
“Don’t even think about,” he said. “Don’t go getting caught up in something extra.”
He watched her in the rearview mirror. She was alone on the empty road and he figured she’d been there for some time and would be for a while longer. He wondered who would eventually stop and help her and who had already passed her by. He watched her grow tiny and drop her waving hand to her side and give up.
“You are one stupid man,” he said. “Watch this come back and bite you in the ass.”
He turned the cruiser around and drove back toward her and then crossed the centerline and parked behind her car. He got out and walked over to her. The woman was round and short, very short, under five feet. He guessed that she was in her early fifties, about the same age as his mother if she were still alive.
“Gracias,” she said and smiled with great respect, clasping her hands in prayer and bowing to him. “Muchas gracias.”
Her two front teeth were silver and she had the appearance of an indigenous person from Central America.
“¿Habla inglés?” he asked.
“Nada.”
“Mi español es poco,” he said. “¿Cómo es la problema?”
“Gasolina.”
He thought about the situation here and what he could live with. He thought about what kind of man he was, and that he would never stop being the man he believed that he should be, even if he only had a few hours to live. You are one hardheaded fool, he told himself. A goddamn fool.
“Venga aquí,” he said, motioning toward the cruiser. “I’ll give you a ride.”
The center of her smile was a glinting silver square and she said, “Un momento por favor,” and rolled up the windows to her car and locked the doors and hurried over to him with a small black purse clutched across her chest with both arms.
He opened the passenger door for her and she climbed inside. She looked at the shotgun and the AR-15 in the back. From the way her curious eyes roved cautiously around the interior he figured she’d never been in a police car before.
He climbed behind the wheel and reached across the seat and pulled the seatbelt from over her shoulder and buckled her in. She was so short that her worn sneakers dangled above the floor and from behind one could not tell that there was a passenger in the vehicle. He put the cruiser in drive and pulled back onto the highway.
She set her purse in her lap and folded her hands atop it. They rode in silence for a few minutes and then she began speaking to him in Spanish, at first haltingly and then easing into what she had to say. She was soft-spoken and her mannerisms were humble and deferential. He figured she was telling him the story of how she came to run out of gas alongside the road but there seemed to be a great deal more to it than he would have expected. He thought he heard her voice crack a few times when she said the name Edgar and he thought nothing of the name until she removed a wallet-size photo from her purse and handed it to him.
“Es mi hijo,” she said. “My son.”
It was the same Edgar that had come to visit them at the wood yard and he sadly concluded that Edgar had not come back home the evening that he had left. Given all that had happened he was not surprised to hear that he was missing. He did not know the how but he guessed at the why. He lied to her and said that he did not know him.
“No sabe. No sabe.”
He gathered from her story that she was up here looking for him and he felt terrible pity for her. He knew that her son was never coming home.
Fifteen minutes later they turned into a gas station. He handed her two twenty-dollar bills and told her in broken Spanish to pagar el mercado por gasolina. ¿Comprende? She nodded and said, “Comprendo.” Then he spoke in English and tried to explain to her that she also needed to purchase a container to store the gasoline. After about thirty seconds of the charade she said that she understood and went inside.
He would’ve gone inside and paid for the gasoline and the jerrican himself but he was pretty sure he knew the guy working the counter and didn’t want to be recognized. About a minute later the woman emerged with a jerrican and he filled it with gasoline at the pump with his back turned to the cashier and they drove back down the highway.
He thought that he had never seen anyone so appreciative as her.
They drove across the low scrubland and neither of them said a word for several minutes. The road twisted out of a gorge and climbed a hill where the land flattened out along a broad plain.
She touched his arm and he turned and she was handing him a tissue. At first he was confused and then she touched her cheek just below her eye and pointed to his and said, “Lágrimas.”
He felt his face and it was wet with tears. He took the tissue from her and said gracias and wiped his skin but the tears kept falling until they reached her car and he stepped out. He took the jerrican from the trunk and walked over to her car and pulled the gas cap and started filling the tank.
He watched the road in both directions. In the opposite lane two trucks crested the rise a mile distant and behind them followed a dark sedan. He studied the sedan and what he thought was something on the roof. After a few more seconds he made out the emergency lights of a state trooper.
The trucks passed and the trooper slowed and then turned across the centerline and parked behind the cruiser.
This is gonna bite you in the ass, Caleb said to himself. You are one stupid son of a bitch.
He could see the trooper speaking into his radio. When the trooper was done he stepped out of the vehicle and approached on the grass shoulder. Caleb studied him and the trooper smiled and stopped at the rear bumper of the woman’s car.
“How’s it going?” said the trooper.
“Just fine,” Caleb said.
The trooper turned to the woman and nodded. “Ma’am.”
She raised her hand in greeting and smiled. “Buenos días.”
Caleb figured the trooper couldn’t have been a day older than twenty-five. His face was baby-skin shaved and there wasn’t a stain of living on his white teeth.
“I reckoned you had it all covered,” said the trooper. “I just wanted to stop and introduce myself. Name’s Taylor Skaggs. Just got hired on last week and I’m heading up to the Pueblo to introduce myself to the tribal authorities up there.”
“Nice to meet you, Taylor.”
“It’s my off day but I figured I should take the opportunity to acquaint myself with the county and some of its residents and such. I spoke with Sheriff Gates yesterday and told him I was coming on up. Is he nearby?”
“He retired.”
“Retired? Get out of here. I was looking forward to meeting him. He didn’t say anything about retiring yesterday.”
“I’m just messing with you…rookie.”
The
trooper chuckled. “Tell me about it. The troopers have been messing with me all week. I met a group of them for lunch yesterday. They were ordering all kinds of food. Some of them even ordered things to go on top of their meal, but I didn’t think much of it. So after we finished eating, one by one they walked outside to make a phone call, or have a cigarette, or disappeared into the back to use the restroom, and before I knew it, they’d all drove off and stuck me with a three hundred dollar lunch bill. You believe that?”
“Cops.”
“No kidding.” The trooper chuckled again and searched for something more to say. Then he remembered. “Seriously, though, is Sheriff Gates nearby?”
“He’s on the other side of the valley, about thirty miles from here.”
“Thirty miles?” He looked around and thought about it.
“Give him a call,” Caleb said. “You got his cell number?”
The trooper thought some more. He labored over the decision.
“That’s all right,” he said. “I’ll just see him next time.”
The trooper leaned forward and squinted. Caleb thought he might be looking for a nametag on his uniform but he wasn’t wearing one. The trooper smiled and his posture hunched slightly in an act of request. He pointed. “Hey, uh, I hate to ask, but can you spare a dip? I forgot my can at the house.”
Caleb looked down at his shirt and remembered that his can was in his pocket, the unmistakable circular outline pressing against the fabric. He fished out the can and tossed it to the trooper.
“Keep it,” Caleb said. “You got a long drive.”
“You sure?” He pinched out a chew.
“I got a fresh can in the car.”
“Well, I really appreciate it.” The trooper tucked the tobacco in his bottom lip and slid the can in his back pocket. He spit and flicked the shavings from his fingers. “I’ll buy you lunch one of these days—just you though. My wife is gonna shit when she sees the credit card bill. Take it easy.”
