The Last of the Smoking Bartenders

by C. J. Howell

  Chapter 20

  The windows were rolled down. The air rushed at them like a firestorm. The cell phone vibrated again.

  where r u

  She texted back:

  Dunno

  She pressed the buttons deliberately; her thumbs felt numb, the keys sticky. If the others saw her, they said nothing. She could have been texting anyone, the police, anyone. They either trusted her, or they just didn’t care. It was hard to care.

  WHERE ARE YOU!!!!

  At that moment she saw a sign for I-40. The Malibu crested onto a wide sloping on-ramp, its last hubcap shot off into the scrub brush. Lorne watched without interest. She texted:

  I 40

  east or west?

  She held the phone loosely in her lap, taking deep breaths and feeling her molecules bind and twist. Whatever it is that makes up consciousness revolved somewhere outside her body.

  West

  She snapped shut the phone and put it back into her backpack. The interstate spread out before them. A million shards of light danced in the roadway, beautifully stretching into oblivion.

  Chapter 21

  Bullfrog Frank’s eyes opened to the ceiling of the trailer. He’d never seen it from this angle before. Water stains. Cobwebs. The loose filaments from some disorganized spider. It was daylight. He could hear the chatter of birds outside and the rustle of the wind through pine boughs. His orientation to the world came slowly. He was flat on his back, his legs propped up by an overturned card table. Blood splatter coated the wall and ran up to the ceiling. Little circles of matter with their own red streaks streamed like tear drops of blood down the Virgin’s checks. He did not connect this bloody effluvium to himself until he noticed the wetness around his neck and he probed gently with his hand and lifted it to his face and saw with horror that his hand was covered in a serum of blood and pus. It came back to him in a flash. His eyes darted to where the Indian should have been crucified to his trailer wall. There was only a bloody hole where the crossbow bolt had been. He lurched to his feet, kicking the metal card table into the TV, shattering the picture tube. The trailer was trashed. He could still smell the gun smoke and meth.

  Ashley!

  He yelled it, but he knew the trailer was empty. Enraged, he brought a giant fist down on the kitchen counter, snapping the pressure treated plyboard in half so the mold-spotted sink collapsed and dangled to the floor by a rust colored pipe like a plucked goose with a kinked neck. He kicked down the door to the back bedroom. It exploded off its hinges, spraying wood shards all over the bed. The mirrored closet door was open, and he knew what that meant. The money and the gun were gone, along with the girl. He slid the closet door along its rail until he was face to face with his reflection in the full-length mirror.

  Jesus Fucking Christ.

  From his ears down half his chest he was coated in a thick sticky syrup, the color and consistency of sweet and sour sauce. The shot had blown his goiter clear off. The wound on his neck looked like charred ham drowning in pineapple glaze. A long flap of skin dangled from one side. A yellow ooze ran down the flap and mixed with the amalgam like a popped water balloon filled with piss.

  He went back into the kitchen and pulled a bottle of Jack out of a cupboard and emptied it into his mouth, swallowing half and letting the other half run down his neck, flushing the gaping wound. It stung like a son of a bitch. He injected a syringe full of meth into his hand for the pain. He was suddenly sky high. He found his first aid kit in the closet with his hunting gear, and wrapped his neck in gauze, tucking in the loose flap of skin as best he could. He looked at himself in the mirror again and laughed like a maniac. He looked younger, he thought. His face was thinner. The thought made him laugh again. He didn’t look pretty, but he never had. At least they’d have to call him something other than Bullfrog.

  He grabbed the sawed-off ten gauge from the bottom of the footlocker, the crossbow, and his stash, and headed out into the sunlight. He didn’t know what day it was and he didn’t care. He could have been in a coma for all he knew. Outside the sky was a crisp clear blue like the day of creation. The pick up, a ’78 Ford F150, started up on the first turn. The 350 V8 rumbled beneath him. The cab smelled of the plastic and vinyl dash warmed by the sun and the cloth seat cover steeped in old cigarette smoke. He gathered his fraying ponytail and smoothed back the loose strands of greasy hair. He took a snort of crystal off the back of this hand and lit a Winston. His eyes felt like razor blades. With one hand he wheeled the truck through a patch of thistles and wild flowers and started down the narrow dirt road, with the other hand he flipped up his phone and texted Ashley.

  Where r u

  The truck barreled down the jeep trail, two ruts in the weeds, the trees darting in and out, closing in. He could do it with his eyes shut, the wheel moving even faster than he could think about it, the truck floating through the woods like a leaf down a stream. He hit the county road and fishtailed wide. Unexpectedly, a pickup was coming the other way on the usually empty road, and he swerved onto the far shoulder as the oncoming pickup honked its horn and braked hard to the inside just missing him. The other driver extended his finger out the window. Frank flushed with rage and reached for the sawed-off. Then he eased back onto the northbound lane and laughed.

  That was my bad.

  He laughed and said it again.

  That was my bad you lucky fucker.

  Almost got you kilt.

  He punched the radio and got Kenny Chesney coming out of a Tucson station. The road snaked the valley ahead, the sky was dazzling, too bright for his gelatinous eyes. Greens, yellows and blues. It was all beautiful. He checked his cell. Ashley had texted him back.

  That’s cute he thought. Fucking adorable. I love that little girl. I’m going to kill them all.

  Chapter 22

  The Caprice cruiser glided along 160 West through much of the Navajo Nation and around the red mesas of the Hopi much like an escape pod launched into deep space by some dying spaceship. It was under Hailey’s control, but she was barely aware of it. A steady flow of cool air from the sixteen dashboard vents kept the interior chilly even as the green digital readout next to the tachometer measured the outside air temperature at one hundred and ten. Hailey felt like she was enveloped in bubble wrap, the Caprice a metal egg effortlessly transported hundreds of miles to her unseen destination. She was the yolk in the egg.

  She was briefly roused from her trance rounding a curve, when she couldn’t help but notice the pickup parked in a turn-out, her police instinct never totally muted by the pills. Not the pickup but the man next to the pickup. Not his general unkempt appearance, his unplanned beard, hair wild, ratty even, which she regarded in an instant, but the way he stared at her, as if he made her for a cop before she rounded the bend, as if he were looking for a cop. As she sped by she saw the second man, better dressed, urinating off of the side of the road, and then she glanced back to the disheveled one, eyes still locked on her, his head swiveling as she passed, frozen as if unable to look away. And then the curve finished its aperture and there were only smooth sandstone cliffs in the rearview, and she was already wondering if she’d really seen something in the man or if he were just another fool too fixated on discerning unmarked vehicles. And then she flinched from a sharp jabbing pain in her hip and became aware that she had been sitting frozen at the wheel for the last four hours since Bartonville. She fumbled through her purse, and with one hand she twisted off the cap to the Vicodin, rattled two of them out and swallowed them dry.

  The Caprice was quiet. Air tight. She could tell there was a wind outside by the dust devils and the bobbing antenna and the rivers of sand swimming across the open desert, but nothing penetrated the cruiser and the ride was steady. She was close enough to Flagstaff to get the NPR station crackling a benign conversation about the significance of San Francisco Peak to the native community and how snowmaking with reclaimed water was seen by some as spraying raw sewage on the sacred mountain. She felt the Viks merge with the
Perks and the Demerol (had she taken Dems today?) and the pain receded along with her interest in the case and the strange way that hobo had stared at her as if he saw her coming (wasn’t she looking for a bum? No, she was looking for two bums) and she once again enjoyed the drive with a passing appreciation of the scenery, the desert unfolding beyond her tinted windows,and the dark looming mountains of Flagstaff thick and green with dense pine forests under a liquid mercury sky. The mountains rose even higher as she approached Flagstaff so she was actually craning her neck. Silver clouds swirled above the peaks, and she felt her scalp tingle. But that could have been the Ephedrine she took to counter the Viks and stay awake. Still, she felt alive, insulated in her metal football. The land could still do that to her. She figured that was why she lived out here.

  She took the business loop to downtown Flag. Main Street had the feel of the old western mining town it was, two-story brick buildings with wooden balconies, saloons, historic hotels, a railroad depot still functioning, and rusty tracks running right through town. But on closer inspection most of the store fronts housed coffee shops, bead stores, tourist T-shirt emporiums, or sold snowboards or mountain bikes or climbing gear and the associated apparel. The streets were full of college kids from Northern Arizona University looking like they were either going to or coming from the ski area even though it was summer. There were fliers up in all the store windows and taped to telephone poles for concerts, classes, and every manner of festival from the High Plains Chile Cook-off to the 25th Annual Flagstaff Bluegrass Jamboree. She wondered why she didn’t move to a place like this, where something was going on. She watched two girls pass a group of boys on the street, and they stopped to talk to a sleepy looking kid with a beard and a nice smile. Someone they knew from class. They punched numbers into each other’s phones. They’d meet up later.

  Hailey parked the Caprice and found a seat on a crowded patio of a trendy bar and ordered a chicken Caesar salad and a microbrew from a wispy little college girl in a tight T-shirt with La Estrallita tattooed on her tit. She was bright and perky, full of what she was going to be. Hailey suddenly hated her. The patio was a jumble of people in animated conversation. A cluster behind her were talking about last season’s ski conditions. Another group were planning a climb in Escalante. A couple talked abstractly about the war.

  The salad was perfect. Fresh, locally grown vegetables. The air carried the crisp cool scent of mountain pines. The beer was complex, brewed with care and full of bitter flavor. A troop of dreadlocked hippies with guitars on their backs walked past, and a tall one with white teeth smiled her way, but she didn’t know she was supposed to smile back. She could never live here, she realized. Maybe she could have, but that time had passed. She just couldn’t take these people seriously. They didn’t have problems. She liked people and places with problems. She needed problems. Didn’t know how to live without them.

  A half hour later, cruising south on the divided four-lane highway down from Flagstaff, tall pines on both sides and the vistas opening up below with breathtaking views of the lower mountain ridges descending to the desert floor, her mood lightened. She was a career woman, she told herself. She had accomplishments, accommodations. Besides, she wasn’t ever going to snowboard, or rock climb, or mountain bike farther than the bar down the street. After her accident, one of her girlfriends emailed her an article about an Iraq vet who’d lost his legs and had gone on to climb Denali. But that was other people. She was no soldier, no athlete. She had a job. People with jobs don’t have time for that shit. And she still had a nice ass, she smiled to herself.

  For the final descent to the Valley of the Sun, she rolled the windows down and put on the hip hop station. The cactus flew by at ninety. The heat blasted through the open windows. Her mouth was dry. In front of her a gigantic city rose out of the fiery desert. She couldn’t help but feel optimistic.

  She took the 51 to Camelback and drove straight to Scottsdale, through faux adobe old town with its galleries, antique shops, and sushi bars, to the Embassy Suites adjacent to Scottsdale Fashion Mall. She parked the cruiser in a spot away from other cars and stepped out into the twilight. The heat stunned her. She stood straight and stretched and felt the heat work through her. It seemed to flush away all her thoughts. She felt the heat relax her joints, her bad hip, her contorted back, and gave her a head rush as if the heat relaxed a few extra molecules of pain killer in her veins.

  Parking far away had the disadvantage of leaving an expanse of superheated asphalt between her and the entrance to the hotel. If she had been wearing heels, she was sure the spikes would have sank into the pavement, so relaxed was the blacktop under the oppressive sun. As it was, she felt uneasy in her flats. A layer of heat puckered the air a few feet off the ground so that it shimmered, and she worried that black asphalt would stain the white soles of her shoes.

  Inside the hotel safely behind the tinted windows, it was three shades darker and fifty degrees cooler. The air smelled of chlorine and whatever’s in filters used in industrial dehumidifiers. The center of the hotel was occupied by a lush terrarium and a swimming pool ringed on all four sides by seventeen floors of rooms. She looked up like a child gaping at a full moon. Bougainvillea hung from each floor like a cascading waterfall. The ceiling was a glass pyramid protruding from the roof with four smaller glass pyramids on each corner for a total of five. She vaguely recalled an ad campaign the hotel chain had running, something to do with five, five stars, or five diamonds, something to denote quality, and she wondered if they built the roof around the ad campaign or the ad campaign around the roof. She guessed the latter, but she had a sinister suspicion it might be the former. She didn’t know why that felt sinister to her, that a corporation would build a roof to suit an ad campaign. But she did know that she was easily distracted.

  She checked in for two nights and was pleased to get the government rate of $99 a night. At the granite counter, the hotel receptionist, a man in a denim-looking shirt with a tie that matched the color of the carpet, studied her government I.D. for longer than she thought necessary. In turn she studied his carefully manicured 5 o’clock shadow and heavily styled hair.

  You’re too pretty to be an FBI agent, he said brazenly.

  She should have been taken aback, but this was Scottsdale where everyone was judged on appearances, so she smiled inwardly, almost giggled.

  You’re too cute to be bellhop.

  Concierge, madam, concierge, he said with a fake accent that was neither French nor English, Australian perhaps. She laughed nonetheless, then felt embarrassed, then worried that she’d offended the man by calling him a bellhop. She finished initialing and signing and hastily took the glass elevator to the eleventh floor. The sensation gave her vertigo. She thought about what she should have said back. Clearly you’re a man of many talents or something like that, but then she thought that might also sound condescending, and then she thought fuck this place. FUCK THIS PLACE.

  She put it all behind her with a flick of her hair and slid the key card into room 1117, grateful to see the light flash green and hear the door click unlocked. The room was cold. The door slammed shut behind her, and she felt safe. She dropped her roller in the center of the room and went instinctively to the windows. She fought through at least two layers of curtains to the hermetically sealed windows and pressed her forehead against a view that was higher than any in her half of the state of Utah. It was unnaturally silent in the room, as if the scene outside was on television. She halfheartedly unpacked, throwing her things into two of the six drawers and leaving her shoes in the roller and then returned to the windows, an eleventh story view of now unsellable houses and the Scottsdale Fashion Mall and a vast parking lot with cars as far as the eye could see. She was suddenly depressed. She wished she’d kept driving south, straight to Mexico. She locked her service weapon and her laptop in the room safe, grabbed her key card and her handbag and left, afraid of what would happen if she stayed.

  The Embassy Suites was connected to
the Scottsdale Fashion Mall by a glassed corridor with a moving walkway, so she didn’t have to go outside. The heat of the day was far behind her. She wore flip-flops, and that made her feel better. She smiled at her beautiful and sedate surroundings. The moving escalator ended at an ocean of marble flooring punctuated by the first of no less than seven fountains spouting water twenty feet in the air and splashing into turquoise pools. Although none of the spray hit her, she felt the coolness of the water evaporating into the air like a childhood summer day wasting into adulthood, unnoticed and taken for granted. The mall was bright. The marble, glass, and water reflected light back at her like a mirror and gave her an almost euphoric feeling, but one that was constantly leaving. She kept her sunglasses on.