The Last of the Smoking Bartenders

by C. J. Howell

  Out of the mountains and back into the desert. The desert at night was a vacuum. A cold blanket. There was no time in all that space. That was the hope. The hope of the desert was non-existence.

  Just before dawn, the Malibu pulled into a gas station at the intersection of Route 191 North and U.S. 60 West outside of Eagar. Halos on the floodlights above an empty parking lot. Lorne got out and tried the pump, but it needed a credit card to operate. Chevis twisted out of the passenger seat. The wind blew at his shirt but it was held in place by the crossbow bolt. The others watched like they were witness to Jesus’s resurrection or a mummy rising from its tomb. Red and black stained his shirt and ran down his pants in streaks. They watched him lumber past the pumps toward the convenience store. He pulled the glass door open and side stepped inside so he wouldn’t bump the projectile sticking out of him. They watched through the floor to ceiling windows. The clerk seemed frozen. Words were passed. The clerk stood motionless. More words were passed. The clerk made an imperceptible motion and the pump turned on with an audible clunk, and gas flowed into the tank from the pump handle Lorne held. Lorne watched the pump. Everyone else watched the store in silence. The florescent light inside was brilliant against the black emptiness of the desert. The pump handle clicked when the tank was full. Chevis pulled the .44 from his waist and shot the clerk in the head.

  Nobody spoke. Ashley thought about saying something, but everything in her experience told her there would be no point. She didn’t know if the others were silent because they were surprised, they expected it, or they were Indians. She looked down into those black pools and was calm, awash in a sea of obsidian.

  Chapter 16

  Tom picked himself up, secured his pack, and jogged alongside the moving train. The whistle blew again, shaking him to his core and jolting him a yard askew as he ran. The train coked back and forth with a sickening creak of metal joints. The hulking metal frame lumbered deceptively fast, and he could barely catch up. He reached out wildly several times and grabbed onto a metal ladder at the connection between two boxcars. He held on as he ran next to the train before he jumped as his friend had told him so many miles ago. But there was nothing for his feet to grab on to. He swung his legs around frantically and lodged his feet against the beveled frame of a boxcar door, holding his legs by centrifugal force so that he dangled horizontally over the tracks. Hanging on, face skyward, his pack was dead weight, dragging him to the ground. He sank until his head was eye level with the giant steel wheels grinding loose stones to dust on the tracks. One leg broke free and wandered under the boxcar and out of sight. He didn’t know if he’d see it again or if a stump would reemerge spouting blood. Would he even feel it? One errant jostle of the behemoth or a crick in the track and his body would be halved. The pack dipped and scraped and bumped against the weed and dust strewn ground speeding past below. His hand burned but he wouldn’t let go, terrified of being sucked into the meat grinder or hitting the ground and bouncing under the train. He wanted to live. It was crystal clear. He wanted to live.

  But he had made a horrible mistake. The weight of the pack made it impossible for him to pull himself up in his current position. This was why hobos in movies threw their bundles tied to the ends of sticks into an open boxcar before they jumped on board. A thick thatch of weeds pulpified between the top of his pack and his neck like a human combine harvesting thistle and ragweed. His pack spawned a cloud of dust, a plow blade set to fallow earth.

  The hot metal seared his hands, and he slipped another inch, the pack now grating the ground under the pressure of his body weight. The fabric frayed, polymers decoupling. He heard seams pop and actually felt the pack tear as if it was his own flesh. He saw dirty cloths flutter behind, snagging on bramble and little ground cactus and blown against barbed wire bordering the tracks. And then the plastic ziplock bag of change saw daylight. It dragged behind the pack and then broke free. It skipped once and then exploded like fireworks on the Fourth of July. The coins shimmered in the sun, streaking across the sky in a starburst pattern, like foam from a backlit cresting ocean wave crashing against a rocky shore.

  Not more than thirty seconds later the train clamored and stopped at a rail crossing. Tom let go and fell to the ground, his fingers frozen in their death grip, staring upward at nothing like roadkill. And then his lungs filled with hot air and dust. He rolled onto his stomach, brought himself onto all fours, and then pushed himself to his feet with much effort. He stared down the tracks at the wreckage of his belongings. His meager traveling companions strewn across the wasteland. Defiled. Dead where they lay.

  He spent the heat of the day stooped like a field worker, scavenging the change from the twigs and thorns and ground clutter weeds, tough and stringy, more like twine than any recognizable plant phyla, his fingers dirty, calloused and blistered, claw-like, mechanical. He recovered six dollars and forty-two cents. He put it in his pocket. He tied up the ragged ends from the gaping hole in the pack so it was now more like a satchel. He rescued a flannel shirt, a pair of boxers, and a balled up pair of dirty socks, and of course, the long wool coat. He used his pocket knife to cut strips of the black vein-like weeds that spidered across the desert floor and used them to tie the satchel.

  He slung the satchel and sat down and waited. His throat was parched. He had no water. The heat was infernal. But he made no move to start walking. He sat in the dirt and waited.

  At some point in the afternoon, although it was hard to tell with the daylight stretching fifteen hours into night, another train came and stopped exactly where the last one had at the rail crossing. Tom stretched his legs and climbed up on a small platform between two boxcars. The heat had grown throughout the day until now it was almost intolerable. He could feel his brains cooking. When the train began to move there was no relief. The heat radiating from the two boxcars was like a toaster.

  The ride only lasted ten minutes. The train came to a metal on metal stop at a rail yard downtown. Twenty sets of tracks. Rows of iron husks. Tom walked out looking over his shoulder, stepping carefully over the ties, the satchel slung over his shoulder. He eyed a white pickup with a rectangular orange light strip on the roof but no rent a cop in sight. No people of any kind.

  Even downtown the streets were six lanes across. The skyscrapers that seemed bunched from a distance were really islands each taking up a city block, surrounded by fenced vacant lots and concrete parking structures.

  The streets were empty. The first person he saw was clearly a meth head or one of the deranged homeless, a woman with pink skin like an albino left out in the sun, with hair the color and consistency of uncooked spaghetti.

  That fucker. That fucker. Condescend to me motherfucker. Police suck my dick!

  She steamed past him muttering to herself, wild eyed.

  A family came out of the mirrored glass doors of the downtown Grand Hyatt Convention Center. They crossed the street to avoid the woman. So did Tom. When they saw Tom also cross the street, they walked faster, the woman clutching the little boy to her breast, the man walking on the outside, pink polo shirt, white slacks, brown leather loafers. He pushed his wife forward with a hand on her back. Her summer dress was short over tan thighs, sculpted calves, thin strapped sandals. They got to the corner of the block and then stopped, looking up and down the wide cross street. They let Tom pass by and then turned around and walked back to the hotel.

  The sun was orange and low on the horizon. It reflected off of the glass skyscrapers in an apocalyptic glow, giving everything an irradiated hue. The buildings’ mirrored windows reflected pillars of fire. Towering neon stalks planted in the desert by man imitating God. He walked not knowing where he was going or what he was looking for. No cars were on the streets. A group of Mexicans a couple blocks ahead hopped a low chain-link fence and crossed an empty lot. He turned right for no reason and walked between the concrete buttresses protecting the service entrances to two tall buildings. A man crossed the street on a path to intersect him. He was the only one
on the street. The man moved like a slug, one foot protruding and dragging the body behind. In spite of the heat, which had only increased with the approaching sunset, the man wore pleated slacks and a blue cardigan over a pressed oxford shirt. Tom thought of a creepy Mr. Rogers. And he used to like Mr. Rogers.

  Excuse me, the man said as he got into earshot.

  Excuse me. Would you like to go somewhere? Somewhere cool. We could go somewhere. I could take you somewhere.

  His face was pasty white. There was something lecherous in the slanted grin. Thin lips. Something evil. Tom walked hurriedly passed him holding up a hand as if to shield himself, trying not to notice the man’s hand brushing against the front of his trousers. Tom was disgusting even to himself, caked in dirt and grime and sweat. Who could view him as a sex object? Only the truly depraved. The man apologized as he sidestepped away as if to confirm it. Ahead, a man with hair as bushy about the face as on top of his head so that atop his neck bobbled a spherical sun bronzed Brillo pad, rooted in a festering metal ringed trashcan for lord knows what. Tom turned into an alley just to get off the street, although there was no one of consequence about. The alley was flanked by tall buildings, and it bowed in the center like a miniature culvert, and down the center ran a thin stream of putrid liquid, the sun spoiled remnants leached out of trash heaps and funneled into a trickle of stink. It was the wrong alley. A man sunburnt red, face peeling and raw with pink blistered skin open to the sun for further debasement, rounded a dumpster and was unavoidable. Yellow pustules ringed his lips, and his face bore the scars of the meth itch that must be scratched to the point of bleeding and scabs and new bleeding and new scabs. He surprised Tom completely and he gripped Tom by both shoulders as if to embrace him, eyes crazy, an acrid evil stink coming off him like burnt plastic mixed with sweat.

  The speed and shock of the attack stunned Tom for a second, the man squeezing him, eyes bulging like a frog alive but paralyzed by some predator’s venom, nerves twitching ineffectually, short of breath, almost hyperventilating. Then he reacted spastically, suddenly repulsed more by the pustules and stench then the threat of impending violence. Desperate to get distance between himself and the man, he flung his arms wildly, but the man had drawn him in too close so his blows glanced off his shoulders and back. The man leered at him with crystal blue pinpoints straining against yellowed eye whites. His frozen grin seemed involuntary, stretching from ear to ear as if the corners of his mouth were rigged to the strings of some mad puppeteer. He hissed an eerie lock-jawed whine through clenched jagged teeth and blackened gums.

  Tom finally forced himself to speak.

  Let me go.

  The man grunted and formed words through his teeth.

  Go? Go where? Yes let’s go…let’s dance!

  And he gripped Tom even harder, lifting him totally off the ground, and began to twirl. Tom lost all of his leverage. He felt his legs lift off the asphalt with centrifugal force and felt the man’s hot, rancid breath on his face, and the next thing he felt was his hand pushing against the man’s stomach and into the man’s stomach. Something in the man’s eyes changed; his grin seemed more pulled tight across his face then ever. Tom was surprised to find his Swiss army knife open, the flimsy three inch blade going into the man’s abdomen and pushing through so Tom’s hand was in the man’s guts and then rooting around as if fumbling for the off switch, jabbing this way and that, until he felt the dull little blade hit what must have been his spine. The man shrieked and drew back his already protracted grin in a death scowl, a runover dog curling his lips in instinctual panic or a coyote caught in a snare lashing out at anything close, his already mottled face bubbling and distended like a vampire in the sunlight. The man convulsed and took Tom to the ground, his hands still gripping Tom’s shoulders. Tom withdrew his hand from the man’s innards and pried loose the man’s fingers from him one by one.

  The man lay prostrate in the alley, a river of blood mixed with the putrid stream of trash juice running to the street. His lips coated in blood, his jaw finally seemed to relax enough to speak clearly for the first time.

  Why?

  The man’s eyes seemed almost sane.

  Tom closed the blade on his knife, gummy and viscous. His arm was coated in blood to the elbow. Death is sobering, he thought ruefully and amazed. And then he picked up his satchel and ran up the alley. When he got to the corner he looked back. The man hadn’t moved except to hold up a quivering hand as if still asking the question.

  Chapter 17

  The world has gone insane. Tom walked through the night in a vaguely northernly direction, as much as the streets and sidewalks would allow. It was hot and strangely humid. Glistening sweat mixed with the blood on his arm and clothes that somehow refused to dry. The world has truly gone insane. He walked up Central Ave., across the gigantic overpass with traffic hurtling bumper to bumper on I-10 below. On the other side of the overpass, he found a second downtown, fake somehow like a movie set, with skyscrapers just as tall as the ones he’d walked through but spaced further apart. The streets were wide. At first he walked afraid the cops would pick him up, staggering and covered in blood, and then he realized nobody noticed. He was invisible. Traffic raced by. He came to think that the cars were moving too fast for the people inside to see him. But the more he walked the more he came to believe that it wasn’t that nobody noticed, it was that nobody cared.

  He was used to being weak and dehydrated, but that didn’t mean he wasn’t sick of it. He saw the neon glow of a Taco Bell a block up, but it still took him fifteen minutes to reach it, crossing a six-lane street, endless curb cuts, and a generous parking lot. He went inside feeling the blast of air conditioning and ordered a number three—three taco supremes and a large coke for $2.99 plus tax. A large Hispanic woman mechanically punched his order into a touch screen, her fat rolls straining against her tightly tucked in purple Taco Bell shirt. He loaded up the tacos with fire sauce and then scooped up the loose lettuce flacks and tomato cubes with his fingers. He sat in a plastic chair at a plastic booth crusted in dried blood and smiled. A family of six ate noisily in the next booth speaking Spanish in short bursts. He took the 44-ounce plastic cup of Coke with him on his long march, and when he’d finished it he pissed right into the street and kept walking.

  Noon the next day found him sitting on a curb in North Scottsdale. He had three dollars and change left, and he was trying to figure out if it was enough for another number three from Taco Bell, if he could find one, but he kept getting the count wrong, the change falling through his fingers to splatter on the asphalt—first $3.16 which wasn’t enough, and then $3.65 which was. He just wanted one more meal. After that it didn’t matter. He counted again and had $3.15. The streets were wide. Cars flew by at sixty miles per hour inches from his feet. Endless traffic. The world had gone insane. He could no longer tell which was worse, the people he chased, or the people he was trying to save. It seemed either could kill him at any moment. And the good ones, the civilians if there were any, he could kill without even realizing it. When had he become a murderer? The answer was yesterday. He decided to call his sister.

  The streets were wide. He walked a mile into a cul-de-sac and had to turn around and then crossed the wide street and did the same thing. A mile and a half up the road he found a wayward strip mall with a pay phone. It was an older strip mall, brick instead of stucco, and it was losing its battle with the desert. Sand swept across the mostly empty parking lot. The heat beat into his brain. Sweat trickled down his body and into every crevice. The phone was hot to the touch. He had to hold the receiver away from his ear and mouth. He was breaking a cardinal rule. He knew he would pop up on the grid within seconds of dialing the number. Still he spun the quarters into the slot and listened to the click of their acceptance. He dialed the number on the metal keys reflecting sunlight like mirrors scoring his eyes. In the stillness the heat intensified. He listened to the monotone electronic bleating indicating a phone ringing somewhere on the other side. He presse
d his forehead against the plexiglass phone booth and felt it sear his brain.

  Hello?

  Janey.

  Silence.

  Oh my god.

  Janey.

  Oh my god, David, is that you?

  Silence.

  It’s me.

  David, you’re alive.

  Apparently.

  David, where are you?

  I can’t say.

  You can’t say because you don’t know?

  I can’t say. You know why.

  David.

  The mission.

  David.

  I’m not crazy. You are fucking crazy.

  David come here. Come here now.

  I can’t.

  Do you need money?

  Tom laughed. He pressed his head back against the burning Plexiglas. It felt right.

  David come here now.

  I can’t now.

  David.

  I have to go. I love you Janey.

  David, come here now, we’ll…

  Tom gently hung up the phone. He walked until he found a Taco Bell and ordered a number three. With tax it was $3.17. After counting out his change he took two cents from the penny cup next to the register to pay for it. Now he didn’t have a penny to his name.

  Chapter 18

  Tank full of premium unleaded, the Malibu pulled onto US 60 West for a five-mile jog back to AZ 191, the Old Coronado Trail. They crept through Springerville and then headed north. The town was quiet. For the second time in one night, it surprised Lorne that nothing immediately happened when a man was murdered. In fact, the world carried on much unchanged.

  A long low stretch of 191. They passed a sign shaped like an arrowhead that said Apache County. This struck the Navajos as odd since the only Apaches they knew were around Dulce, New Mexico, several hundred miles to the Northeast, living good off their royalty checks from the oil wells that blanketed their reservation, bobbing up and down like drunken whores sucking black jizz from the earth. It was daylight now and the blanched desert naked in the scorching sunlight was eerie with its emptiness and wind-strewn sterility. Sometime in late morning they reached Sanders and decided to stop.