by Logan Miller
“Have a good one.”
The trooper turned and took a step toward his vehicle and then swiveled back around.
“I never got your name,” he said.
“I never gave it, Rookie.”
The trooper smiled and shrugged. He had been fucked with all week and this was just a little bit more of the fucking. The guy had given him a can of chew and he figured that was welcoming enough for one day.
“See you around,” the trooper said over his shoulder.
“I doubt it.”
The trooper chuckled again and then waved to the woman, who had been watching the exchange.
“Good day, ma’am,” he said.
“Buenos días.”
The trooper climbed into his vehicle and turned across the centerline and accelerated north on the interstate.
The jerrican was now empty.
Caleb jiggled the spout and the last drops trickled into the tank. He looked over at the woman and her careworn face. She was staring down at the side of the road and shaking her head and talking to herself. He figured she must be heartsick and terrified but she had somehow found the courage to drive up here and search for her son, a tiny woman who spoke no English in a country that wasn’t hers to be born in, a country that was alien and at times hostile to her for being from somewhere else. She lifted her head and stared out at the inscrutable landscape as if lost, and he could only suppose that she was wondering where she would even start to look for him, searching the vastness with her eyes and calling out with her soul for her son to tell her where he was out there. But only her echo would return to her breast. For the rest of her days the nights would be long and the sunrise would bring sorrow, and always, she would be wondering.
You know what you gotta do and she ain’t a part of it, he said to himself. So stop thinking about her.
He placed the jerrican in her trunk and told her that he must be going. He wished her luck and apologized that he could not help her anymore right now. She thanked him many times and tried to offer him money from her purse but he said no. He waited for her car to start and watched it sputter and chug away and disappear over the rise before heading back up the road.
42.
An hour later Marlo stepped inside the trailer and surveyed the one-sided aftermath. Blood spattered walls and dead men, the flies planting their eggs in the drying eyeballs and mouths, the oozing 12-gauge wounds like meaty potholes, cash tumbling across the floor from the wind blowing in through the open doors and gunshot windows.
He had three men with him. One of them felt the need to editorialize.
“I knew it. We should’ve killed that cripple right away. I don’t want to play armchair quarterback, but I fucking knew it. Gimps, retards, mongoloids, they’re all slick. Need to be in order to survive. Their parents fill out paperwork, know how to game the system. Or else they die. It’s Darwin.”
Marlo was not listening. He squatted and picked up a spent shotgun shell. He brought it to his nose and smelled the discharged gunpowder.
“And that fucker gamed us,” the man continued. “We should’ve killed him. I’d say he’s up by at least two touchdowns right now.”
Marlo stepped between a pair of bodies and over to the table. There was a loose stack of hundred dollar bills sitting beside the Ribao currency counter. He set the stack in the top tray and the machine rifled the money through. The green digital display read: 100. He reached into a plastic bag of red rubber bands and snapped one around the stack.
The man continued to carry on with his side of things. Marlo still hadn’t heard a word. But now he did.
“I sure hope you didn’t let the guy live because you thought he was cute or some other weird gay homo reason like that.”
Marlo lifted his chin and swiveled his head. His right hand drew up from his side.
“Earl?” he said.
Earl turned. “Yeah?”
A gunblast shook the trailer and Earl dropped to the floor with a heavy whump.
Marlo lowered his Glock.
“Every organization, no matter what the profession, has at least one inveterate dumbass with the special talent for saying the wrong thing at the wrong time. Earl here, was just that man.”
ᴥ
They left the trailer with the money and the Ribao currency counter and locked the bodies inside. They would dispose of them later. They drove down the dirt road and padlocked the gate where it met the pavement at the end of the property.
Marlo sat in the backseat with his handgun resting on his thigh.
You never would have made this mistake twenty years ago, he said to himself. Not even ten.
He had underestimated the woodchopper and reproached himself for the miscalculation. Things had been too good for too long. He hadn’t faced any existential threat, or any threat of considerable magnitude, in quite some time. He had remained at relative peace, his operations that is, for a longer period than he ever could have hoped for in this business. He thought that perhaps he had become complacent.
Well you have, more than a little. The proof is here right now. It’s boiling across the valley. Like the kings of old, decadence has crept into the court, and now it’s laughing all around you in naked fountains of flesh and gold.
The formative emotions and drives, the rapacious lust, the attitude that had propelled him to his princely throne seemed to be waning. If he was honest with himself, truly, deeply, philosophically honest, if he searched his acquired knowledge and erudition, the thing that he wanted most now was irreconcilable with the present. A rational and honest inquiry would ring back the truth, unalloyed and undeniable.
You can’t have both in this business. You know that much.
But why had he underestimated the woodchopper? He already knew the answer.
For the first time in recent memory he did not know what his next move was.
The thought almost provoked laughter in him. He did not harbor any personal resentment toward his adversary. Nor was he seething with any particular anger or outrage. They were simply antagonistic forces converging in a fable of their own making.
In a dream. In an illusion.
And one of them had to win.
One of them had to prevail.
He puzzled over his next move and could only draw a straightforward conclusion.
He made a phone call and without disclosing the details of the present situation he merely asked for some friends to come northward and fish with him on his property. The man on the other end informed him that the boat would leave this evening and that the fishermen should arrive early tomorrow morning. That was the best he could do on such short notice.
Marlo ended the call and decided to go home and wait there.
He did not know where the woodchopper was at the moment or where he would show up next. But the woodchopper had shown formidable intelligence and bloodthirsty skill thus far. He had shown that he was deserving of his military medals and trinkets.
Marlo stared out the window at the white jet trails traversing the sky and felt vaguely indisposed. He felt ungrounded and unconnected to the planet’s energy. He felt outside the vortex. When he got home he would close his eyes and light some incense and meditate on the sound of the water curling over the smooth rocks and rebalance himself.
It had been many years since he had been to war.
When the men arrived in the morning they would set forth and hunt down the woodchopper.
43.
He was standing on the rim of a great promontory looking over the rusted country that fell below and beyond and he searched the gradations of color in its weatherworn statues of rock and the arid plains drawing to the horizon. He asked the land, would it know him when he walked upon its ancient sands millennia from now and his spirit soared above and would the land trace his memory and embrace his homecoming or would he only be forgotten?
He told the land that he was its son and brother and the image vanished and Lelah was standing before him holding their naked chil
d in a landscape unfamiliar to him. Her eyes were closed and her hair was wet and slack and her face was bloodless. Her shoulders were slumped and her arms cradled the child but there was no life to her posture and when she opened her eyes to him they were the sunless waters of a lake entombed in the earth. When she spoke her words frosted the air.
“You were supposed to protect us,” she said.
“I’m sorry.”
“Why didn’t you protect us?”
There was sadness infinite in her voice, infinite from a darkness that made no refuge for the lost.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “So sorry.”
He reached out to hold her and their naked child but she held out an arm to stop him and the arm was horribly longer than hers in life and he could not touch them.
“You promised,” she said.
He fell to his knees before her and she stared down at him from the pits of her eyes that held no color, no forgiveness, only an angry sadness. He professed his love to her and told her that he was sorry again and again.
“You promised, Caleb.”
“I know.”
He stared at her and she was pulled backward with the child in her arms as if on an invisible current and the land around receded with her until he was on his knees alone in the darkness and the light where she had been standing was only a pinhole on the horizon and he heard her whisper from that great distance, “You promised us.”
His eyes shot open and he was staring into sunlight. He couldn’t remember how or when he had fallen asleep. For a moment he couldn’t say where he was and what he was doing behind a rifle. His amnesia was total. He blinked and tried to gain his bearings. He could smell the familiar sagebrush and saw a whiptail lizard scamper down the face of a rock and then slide underneath. And then his memory came back to him and he knew where he was and what he was doing there.
It was now late in the afternoon and he was lying prone on a mesa several hundred feet above and two hundred yards to the east of the address he had written on the hundred dollar bill.
He peered through the riflescope and noted the adobe walls and the cactus garden and rows of cholla and then out to the pinyon stands to the north across a pocket of scorched grass and broken earth. He counted two men standing guard. They were posted at opposite ends of the compound. A tall and lean mestizo with shoulder length hair stood at the backdoor with an AK-47. From behind an outcropping of black lava talus the other guard watched the approach of the dirt road that wound through the saddle of mesas before spilling unseen into the prairieland.
Caleb repositioned the barrel of the AR-15 on his coat that was rolled up tight and resting on a flat rock. A natural bench as sturdy as one at the rifle range and only slightly less comfortable. He checked the crosswind and figured it about five to seven knots. He also figured that the high-velocity .223 round would cut through it just fine from this distance. Another hundred yards and he might need to recalibrate the rifle settings. He placed the mestizo in the crosshairs and exhaled and squeezed his right hand and the rifle recoiled. The man’s upper body jolted from the silent punch of the bullet and his knees buckled and he fell without notice onto the ground.
Caleb tracked the crosshairs over the adobe walls and cactus garden and found the other guard squatting in the black lava talus and squeezed the trigger. The bullet struck the man in the center of his back and he tripped forward and flipped over the crown of the outcropping and rolled down the jagged talus to the base of the gravel driveway.
Caleb walked down the backside of the mesa where he had parked the cruiser in a pocket of mesquite. He set the AR-15 on the front seat and drove down the spine and concealed the cruiser inside the pinyon grove. The crosswind had picked up and it would help muffle his approach. He slung the AR-15 over his shoulder and lifted the chainsaw from the backseat and then walked through the trees and crouched low across the grassland toward the compound.
He came to the oaken backdoor and looked down at the man he’d just shot. He was still dead. He checked the brass doorknob. It was locked. He ripped on the starter cord to his chainsaw and the engine spit-fired exhaust. He revved the throttle and the grating scream roared through the compound.
Inside Marlo and his two surviving men were meditating in the lotus position on tatami mats in his new age Zendo. A trickle of water fell over mossy rocks into a pool with marbled orange and white koi. Votive candles and incense burned on a jade altarpiece. Over the last twenty minutes he had cleared his mind and felt reconnected again with the universal energy source, the powerful magnetic forces, the timeless and the perennial. He could feel the vortex streaming white light up through the crust of the earth and gathering in his navel and radiating out to his limbs. He could feel the reduction in the beta wave activity across his cerebral hemisphere and he felt at peace with his consciousness now.
And then the screeching howl of the chainsaw disrupted the meditative journey and Marlo’s eyes took in the world again. He picked up an MP9 machine pistol from his tatami mat and he and his men left through different doors and vanished into the compound with rehearsed efficiency.
Caleb shredded through the round oaken door and kicked it open. He killed the throttle and slung the saw over his back. He shouldered his AR-15 and stalked down the hallway, his tactical training and combat experience resuming authority, guiding his actions with the unthinking precision of long conditioning. His eyes were blazing with the alertness that had kept him alive in the door-to-door battles that raged through Fallujah, alive and lucky, a hyper-alert intensity that injected so much adrenaline into your system that by the time the plunger had pressed into the bottom of the syringe a sublime calmness had taken hold, a blissfulness that gave over to the all-encompassing fear of death and, by giving over, dissolved the fear until later. He was there now. Only this was different. He didn’t give a shit anymore. There was nothing to go home to.
He led with his weapon and crept into a room brightly decorated with Native American artwork. Standing in the corner was a seven-foot Kachina doll with a mask of some hybrid otherworldly creature, a buffalo man bred with a bitch alien. A headdress of eagle feathers. A long wooden staff in one hand and a yellow rattle made from a gourd in the other.
He swept the room. It was empty.
He crept down the hallway and into the mirrored dance studio. His reflection stretched to infinity on all four walls. Thousands of him. When he moved, they moved, a pantomime army of identicals.
The hardwood floor was polished and shiny.
When he was halfway across the studio he regretted entering the space. He tunneled his vision toward the open door on the other side and saw the man’s shadow the instant before the man sprung into the doorway with an automatic rifle.
Caleb beat him to the trigger and shot the man in the kneecap and clavicle. The man fell with his hand clenched on his weapon, spraying bullets wildly like a field sprinkler—shattering the mirrored walls and blasting holes in the Sheetrock ceiling. One of the wild bullets pounded Caleb in the stomach and he was thrown backward onto the hardwood floor, gasping, the wind knocked out of him. Both men were now on the seat of their pants—Caleb got off a quick burst and the man’s head snapped back and he wilted onto his side against the doorjamb and did not move.
Caleb checked his wound. His Kevlar vest had absorbed the bullet. Felt like a horse had kicked him. Damn it hurt.
He caught his breath and pushed himself up and continued across the studio, his footsteps crunching on the shards of mirror that now carpeted the hardwood floor.
He stepped over the dead man in the doorway and came to another hallway and then turned a corner into a lavish kitchen when another man popped up from behind a wooden chopping block. The man unloaded his machine pistol and Caleb ducked behind the counter as bullets clanged through pots and pans, punctured the refrigerator and oven, shattered crockery.
There was a momentary lull and a loud hissing from a ruptured cooling hose.
Caleb rose quickly and fired a three-
round burst. Deft. Precise. Two of the bullets ripped holes into the man’s neck. His gun fell from his hand and he clutched his throat. He tottered and rolled off the chopping block and onto the terracotta floor.
Caleb limped over to the man and finished him off with a double-tap.
He proceeded through the kitchen and down another tiled corridor decorated with art. Pools of track lighting illuminated the works. A Cindy Sherman Hall of Horrors occupied the first twenty feet. Framed on the wall an androgynous clown and a portrait of a hairy vagina oozing a string of sausages and he took another step forward and the track lights illuminated the torso of a mannequin with both male and female genitalia. He tried not to look at the objects and images to his left and his right but it was impossible not to. He took another step forward and there was a niche with a diorama of Satan sodomizing Christ over a crucifix and then a painting of a tree with hundreds of bodies hanging from their necks and then Pieter Brueghel’s The Triumph of Death with a skeleton holding a sword over the head of a man kneeling in prayer and beside that DÜrer’s Knight, Death, and the Devil and then he saw Death pissing into a river and he wondered if the black walnut door at the end of the hallway was in fact the portal to Hell or the deranged sloping tunnel to some serial killer’s playhouse.
Then music grew out of the overhead speakers, low and gradually rising. Caleb squeezed his memory. He recognized the goopy sweet song from his childhood.
It was Barney, the giggling purple dinosaur, leading his chorus of bribed children in a frenzy of love and big hugs and kisses. It was playing on a loop. Barney.
And he couldn’t help but ask himself: Where the fuck am I?
On the other side of the black walnut door Marlo hummed along with Barney and the children, standing behind his retooled sixteenth-century naval cannon. It was aimed at the door and loaded with a coffee can of black powder and an eight-pound lead projectile. During the retooling process he had rifled the barrel so that he could fire more than just cannonballs. This modified update had deprived the instrument of its historical value, but he was only concerned with its entertainment value, not resale. And right now, specifically, its martial value, its value as a weapon. But perhaps the most appealing aspect of the retooling was that he could now fire the cannon without lighting a fuse. All he had to do now was pull a cord to ignite the powder and the cannon would fire near-simultaneously.
