Made in the U.S.A.: The 10th Anniversary Edition

by Jack X. McCallum

Bonnie felt woozy. She tried to sit up and couldn’t. The man holding her smiled patiently. Her vision was blurred and the contrast of the man’s suit and skin made darks darker and lights lighter. Above the collar of his shirt all she could see was a soft-edged darkness split by a smile showing perfect teeth. One of his arms was behind her back as she slumped against the seat of the booth. His other hand was merely a black, shapeless thing flowing out of his shirtsleeve like smoke. She squinted, trying to clear her eyes. Now the sleeve and the smoky blackness were moving closer, the darkness spilling onto one of her breasts like oil. Her breasts were cold, and within the blackness was a man’s large, strong hand stroking her.

  “I want to ask you a question,” the man in white said. He looked into her eyes. He had one firm tit in hand and wished he could grab the other one because they were lovely, but then he’d get aroused and his train of thought would be derailed. He concentrated on her eyes, letting his hand slip into her soft flesh. “I want to know where the hillbilly went.”

  Bonnie was having trouble breathing. The last thing she remembered was being shot, and now some clown was groping her and his touch was colder than anything she’d ever known. She shook her head, not understanding his question. Could she have survived the point-blank shot at her chest in some statistically impossible fluke? She looked down. The flesh between her breasts was unmarked.

  The man in white sighed. Bonnie Hubbard was staring into empty space like a Beverly Hills princess trying to decide what to wear to the prom. Another imbecile. Not that he was surprised. She was a woman after all, and the only things they were really good for were fucking and cleaning and foot rubs. He tried to recall the last time he’d had his feet rubbed. Damn, but it had felt good, and he’d had some major wood rising up out of his robes while he eyed the dusky-hued babe who was anointing his toesies with scented oil ...

  The man in white blinked rapidly. He was doing more and more of that lately, zoning out while there were important matters at hand, and seeing events which had gone before, and events yet to occur. He’d never worn robes. Why did he remember himself in a robe? He returned his attention to tittygirl.

  “I want to know about our country cousin.”

  “Who are you?” Bonnie asked. She had to get out of here and get to a phone. She could feel the weirdest sensations in her chest, little currents of icy water swirling inside her even as her breathing became easier. She looked down. The cuff of the man’s shirt was flush against her left breast. Then he started withdrawing his hand.

  “Who am I?” the man in white asked. “I’m the guy who just found a cancer in your tit.” He held up a red and black lump for Bonnie’s inspection. “I’m John Godson.”

  Bonnie gave him a dopey, uncertain smile. Why didn’t the guy just say he was Paul Bunyan, or the devil? “Godson’s a fairy-tale,” she said. Then she looked closely at the bloody bit of black and red jelly the man was holding. It was pulsating, and growing.

  Godson smiled. “Hey, lady,” he said, “You don’t want to help me, I’m not going to help you. Here, I’ll put it back, with interest.” He drove his hand at and into Bonnie’s left breast. When he pulled back his hand was empty.

  Bonnie doubled over with pain radiating from her breast, ripping down through her guts and up into her eyes. She wanted to scream, but she couldn’t draw a breath.

  Godson grabbed her hair to hold her up, watched with mild amusement as she twitched and jerked like a fish on the line, and then said, “Observe.”

  His dark hand disappeared into her breast again like smoke and withdrew the bloody blob. He flicked it away. It hit a chrome pole supporting one of the stools at the counter and stuck like a malignant booger.

  The pain was gone. Bonnie took a deep breath, and looked at Godson. She remembered talking to Peter about Godson one time, asking him if Godson could be real. Peter had laughed.

  “If Godson was real and able to do what the stories say he could do, he’d probably be running this country by now,” Peter had said. “Or sending it straight to hell. If we were in a world where bogeymen could come to life I’d rather run into Frankenstein’s monster, Freddy Krueger and the Terminator together than meet John Godson.”

  Bonnie looked the handsome face before her. “What do you want?”

  “I want you to answer my question,” Godson said. He reached out casually, grazing her left nipple with one finger.

  Bonnie jerked and grabbed at the table as an orgasm slammed through her, shaking her like an earthquake. Its intensity scared her more than the pain had a moment before. The pain she might have been able to deal with. If she came like that again, her heart would explode.

  “Want another dose of happiness?” Godson wiggled his finger in her face.

  “Do you know anything about the Compound?” Bonnie asked, covering her nakedness with her crossed arms.

  Nodding, Godson took her wrists in his hands and raised her arms over her head. Her arms were now frozen where he had placed them. She looked terrified. “That’s better,” Godson said. “I like your tits.” He was getting a hard-on. Damn me, he thought. “I know the Compound very, very well. Now tell me what you know.”

  “There was a guy who showed up,” Bonnie said in a distracted voice, struggling to lower her arms. “No hillbilly, though. He knew what he was doing. He knew about the Compound. He fucked us all up and tried to keep us away from the target.” The man in white raised his eyebrows. “He wasn’t the target,” Bonnie said. “Jeannie Norman was.”

  “Really!” Godson was shocked. That didn’t happen often. He had assumed he was the one of the few who knew about Eicher’s pet project. “I was told she was long gone. When did they leave here?”

  “Not long,” Bonnie said. “And that guy, he seemed to know a lot more than he should. We don’t know who he was.”

  Godson smiled thinly. “Was he lean, light-brown hair, scarred like he’s cried a track into his cheek?”

  Bonnie frowned. “Yeah. Who is he?”

  “Can’t tell you,” Godson said. He pointed his finger at her. “I’d be wasting my time because you’re already dead.”

  Before Bonnie could speak Godson said, “Bang,” and the wound reappeared in her chest. She slumped back onto the seat of the booth.

  The hick and Eicher’s little girl were together. How about that? Godson was intrigued by the woman, but it was the man he really wanted to meet again. He wanted to test himself against somebody who would be a challenge to him, and after their last face-to-face encounter he knew Mr. Hill was indeed challenging. He was sure it was Hill he’d seen on the road earlier in the day, and when he ordered the man to stop Hill had just driven right on by. Godson had never had a request refused, and he was intrigued by Hill’s ability, demonstrated twice, no less, to ignore his commands.

  The two file closers he had questioned at a rest stop earlier hadn’t been able to tell him much more than Bonnie. Godson had made Richards and Dicks forget that brief meeting and had moved on, leaving the interstate and following the road to Compound West when he got the inexplicable urge to turn right back around and head to this diner, an establishment he’d passed many times over the years.

  Yes, another showdown with Hill would be interesting. His work was getting to be too much of a routine. He had needed a test, a challenge, for years now. He was looking forward to wrapping up this latest assignment from the Compound and well aware of a growing inner darkness that was driving him to seek out and prove himself better than the defrosted hillbilly. He had to kill William Hill ... but before he killed Hill he wanted to conquer the man.

  And Eicher’s girl was supposed to be hot stuff. He wouldn’t mind checking her out.

  Thinking of women, Godson stared at Bonnie’s corpse a moment. He glanced at his watch. He looked at her legs. Her skirt had ridden up her thighs when she had slumped backwards. With a figure like that, she could have been a showgirl in Vegas wearing glitter on her tits and dancing in feathers and sequins instead of dying in the desert like this.
He rolled Bonnie unto her stomach. With one gentle hand he eased her skirt up to expose her buttocks.

  “Wonderful.”

  * * *

  On Route 40 the closest town to the In the Shade diner was Needles, on the Arizona border. At noon a tall man stood in the sun outside the Needles City Sheriff’s Office holding a microphone. He looked as if he were trying to be studious in the face of hilarity, wearing a permanent smirk which had lost him more than one audition as an anchor in L.A. and San Francisco. His hair and nails were perfect. He was always camera-ready.

  Bailey Avenue was quiet. Bailey Avenue was always quiet. Needles was always quiet, unless you were near the interstate. As his father always said, Needles was a place to pass through. People only stopped here to sleep, shit, or suck up grub. Dear old dad was always crude, and always right.

  The tall man loosened his tie and unbuttoned the dark jacket with a crest on the breast pocket. The crest showed an old-fashioned TV camera and the words Action Team 3.

  The tall man was waiting for a Sheriff’s Deputy to give him details on what could be a breaking story. He was desperate for something to happen. He loved his home town, but sometimes he wondered if he’d made the right choice in coming back here. It was the eve of a new year, a new century and a new millennium, and Needles was as quiet as ever.

  The tall man waited, nearly dozing on his feet as he stood in the sun. It was hot, in the high nineties. He could easily endure one hundred-plus temperatures, preferring the dry desert heat to the brutal humidity back east where you felt like you were drowning in a pot of boiling water on hot days.

  A Sheriff’s Deputy came out of the building. He wore the tan shirt of the San Bernardino County Sheriff’s Department, the shirt stretched taut by the man’s obscene gut. The Deputy glanced at a piece of paper and then bellowed in a voice like rolling thunder. “Mister Heinous! Is there a Brian Heinous here?”

  The tall man cursed.

  Brian’s cameraman Ravishankar Jamalamadaka, whose preferred moniker was videographer Ravi J, was trying to hide a grin behind the video unit on his shoulder as he stood near a van parked at the curb.

  “Are you Brian Heinous?” the Deputy rumbled. His fat white face made him look like an angry moon. Pinned above that incredible gut, the Deputy’s plastic name tag read SWELLING. Brian had to force his eyes elsewhere.

  Brian shook his head and said the words he’d said a million times. “Right guy, wrong name, Sheriff. It’s pronounced HA-nus—”

  “I don’t give a shit how it’s pronounced,” the Deputy said. “I’m here to tell you there’s no story.”

  Brian looked left and right as if making sure the man was still talking to him. He smiled at the deputy. “Yes, I know you might not think there’s a story here, but my cameraman and I have been hearing curious transmissions on what we thought was a police band until we checked it out and discovered it’s a frequency reserved for government agencies in emergency situations, and just a while ago we heard reports of shots fired not far from the In the Shade Diner out on highway—“

  “Listen, Mister Heinous,” the Deputy said. “Are you a police officer?”

  Brian’s shoulders slumped. Now he was going to get a lesson from this side of beef concerning the intricacies of law enforcement. “No.”

  The Deputy smiled, his face distorted by soft folds of flesh. Brian thought he now looked like a happy pig. The Deputy might have been handsome once, but now the muscle was turning to fat. He’s beefy and boorish, Brian thought. He’s beerish. Brian looked at the man’s gut. Yeah, that fits.

  “Well, Mr. Heinous, if you aren’t a police officer you aren’t qualified to make judgments on the status of radio broadcasts you shouldn’t be monitoring in the first place.”

  “I understand that, Deputy, but what I heard on the scanner wasn’t exactly open to interpretation. The unidentified individuals sounded quite distressed.”

  The Deputy showed Brian his freshly dead face. Glazed eyes, slack muscles, no expression. The pipeline had been capped.

  Brian forced a cordial smile. “Thanks for your time, Deputy,” he said. He headed for the Action Team Mobile Studio, a cramped van with as yet unused audio-video satellite links.

  Brian Hanus had been born in Needles and had gone to college at Berkeley. He spent a few years working for KRON 4 in San Francisco doing man in the street interviews that bored him terribly. In the early eighties he began doing stories on the rising tide of AIDS, stories that were essentially ignored. Near the end of the decade when the CDC issued recommendations that health care workers wear protection to avoid blood-borne pathogens, Brian invested most of his meager savings in a small American company that manufactured latex gloves. That company now had three plants in Thailand and two in Malaysia. Brian’s monthly income on his investments had grown enough for him to return home, build a studio, and buy the van and all the video equipment he needed to become the only TV station in the city of Needles.

  Needles Channel Three covered everything from news, sports, and weather to local and regional events an hour before the network news from the big three. The staff consisted of Brian, Ravi, and a disabled vet named Alan Dank, who sat in a small booth cutting between two fixed cameras during the news, swapping tapes of their syndicated programs and commercials, and writing down indecipherable notes whenever he answered the phone.

  SC3 showed old movies and endless reruns of Leave It to Beaver and Star Trek, and they were beginning to draw people in to their local news spots and get some advertising dollars. So far Brian had been footing most of the bills, including salaries.

  Brian dreamed about breaking a story big enough that the majors would turn to him for the inside dope. When he had first mentioned this to Ravi he actually used those words, inside dope, to which Ravi responded with a laugh. Brian wanted a story that would earn him a reputation at home and abroad, but how many breaking stories was he going to stumble across on the edge of the Mojave Desert?

  Now it appeared that something might actually be happening out on those empty desert roads where nothing seemed to move but heat shimmer, and he was damned if some fat-assed deputy was going to put him off. He climbed into the van and got behind the steering wheel.

  “Let’s go for a ride.”

  Ravi shrugged as he climbed through the side door, rolling it shut. “Okay. Where?”

  “Down the interstate,” Brian said, starting the engine. “I want to see what’s going on out there.”

  Ravi nodded as he began stowing his camera gear. He’d been with Brian on the hunt for the big story before; racing down the road in the van to a miracle birth out in the sticks which proved to be an obese woman who hadn’t known she was pregnant and swore that God graced her with a child that very day, or waiting to hear a deathbed confession to the murder of John F. Kennedy from a very old man, a toothless old man, and when the old man’s false teeth were found and inserted they realized they were hearing a confession to the depression-era murder of a fellow rail-riding drifter the old man referred to as John effing Kemby whom he might have killed in a fist fight. Ravi settled into his seat and prepared for another wasted day, making sure he rolled down his window, as Brian had apparently bathed in cologne again this morning.

  With their scanner tuned in to the dispatcher for the San Bernardino County Sheriff’s Department, both men listened to routine transmissions as they drove west, eventually pulling over at the rest stop near Fenner because Ravi had to take a leak.

  The rest stop was a concrete bunker with toilets inside and water faucets outside. The gaudy Action Team 3 van was eased between a Winnebago and a rust-eaten station wagon, the back of which was filled with scuba equipment. Ravi ran for the door marked MEN. Brian stretched his legs and paced under the hot sun.

  Tourists lounged while waiting for their significant others or their kids to finish their business. People traveling with dogs let them out to sniff around and pee. A few Native American women were squatting against one wall of the rest stop. On a bl
anket at their feet were hand-made necklaces, earrings, bracelets, and rings. The sun sizzled on silver, illuminated amber and quartz, and made pieces of jade glow like kryptonite.

  Brian was staring at a big silver and turquoise belt buckle and wondering if he knew anyone with the balls to wear something like that when Ravi joined him.

  “Finished?” he asked.

  “Bled dry,” Ravi said, striding back to the truck.

  Brian looked down at the jewelry again. The blanket was full of lovely pieces. It didn’t look like they had sold anything so far today, yet there had to have been tourists stopping off in the last few hours. A ring caught his eye.

  It was ludicrous. Chunky and heavy, the band was made of silver with a buttery sheen. The stone set in the ring was a bulging, egg-shaped turquoise. The way the stone was canted sideways and the thick metal of the setting made the ring look like a big eye with wrinkled silver lids. A left eye. A cat’s left eye, Brian thought, noticing the jagged black flaw in the turquoise that looked like a slit pupil. Brian hunkered down for a closer look. The ring was garish, but at the same time ...

  Two of the women wrapped in colorful shawls got a whiff of his Manly of Beverly Hills cologne and reared back. To the younger one it smelled like freshly turned earth and a lightly perfumed wet dog. The older woman showed a nearly toothless grin. The man kneeling before her in his expensive suit and touching her work with his soft hands reeked, bringing to mind the image of an unwashed scrotum doused with pine tar.

  “Powerful,” the older woman mumbled. The younger nodded quickly. “Strong,” she gasped, hoping for a breeze, however slight.

  Brian thought they were talking about the ring. He turned it over, feeling its warmth and weight. The bottom of the band was sculpted. It looked like two paws with long claws interlaced. Jeez, Brian wondered, is this some kind of Indian talisman?

  The older woman started to laugh and choke. The image in her mind had changed. Now she was cleaning the unwashed scrotum which was attached to the man holding the ring. She was scrubbing his testicles with a stiff-bristled brush. He was yelping like a slapped puppy.