A Broken River Books collection
Broken River Books
103 Beal Street
Norman, OK 73069
Copyright © 2013 by J David Osborne
Cover art and design copyright © 2013 by Matthew Revert
www.matthewrevert.com
Interior design by J David Osborne
Our Blood In Its Blind Circuit first appeared in Demons: Encounters With the Devil and His Minions.
Amends Due, West of Glorieta first appeared in Bare Bone #10.
Three Theories on the Murder of John Wily first appeared in Warmed and Bound.
Vesica first appeared in Tales of the Flying Spaghetti Monster
Tesseract first appeared in LitStacks, September 29, 2011.
And A Wake Up first appeared in The Magazine of Bizarro Fiction #4.
Like Most Things Easy first appeared in Vol. 1 Brooklyn.
Imprinting first appeared in In Heaven, Everything’s Fine: A Tribute to David Lynch
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without the written consent of the publisher, except where permitted by law.
This is a work of fiction. All names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination. Where the names of actual celebrities or corporate entities appear, they are used for fictional purposes and do not constitute assertions of fact. Any resemblance to real events or persons, living or dead, is coincidental.
Printed in the USA.
Thanks to: Cody Goodfellow, Kevin Donihe, Jeremy Robert Johnson, John Skipp, Pela Via, Adrienne Crezo, Cameron Pierce, Jeff Burk, and all of you who’ve read these and liked them and listened to me read them and been there for me and shit. Seriously, thanks.
For Rios
Table of Contents
OUR BLOOD IN ITS BLIND CIRCUIT
ZIPPER'S KNEE
AMENDS DUE, WEST OF GLORIETA
THREE THEORIES ON THE MURDER OF JOHN WILY
VESICA
TESSERACT
AND A WAKE UP
LIKE MOST THINGS EASY
IMPRINTING
CASH ON THE SIDE
THE THICK FOG OF THE ALABASTER MOUNTAINS
GRITTY
OUR BLOOD IN ITS BLIND CIRCUIT
I
Tonauac Isidro awoke before the sun went down. He lit candles for Santa Muerte and got on his knees. He prayed and he pushed away dreams. He kissed his hand and touched the statuette. He scooped up his pants from the floor, pulled a cigarette from the pocket and laid it at the saint’s feet. Crossed himself and got in the shower.
When he left his room the sun was nearly gone, peeking under the flower printed curtains. The living room filled with a dark orange glow. His mother had the television on to the news. He smelled corn tortillas. She spooned eggs and salsa onto his plate. She brushed at invisible dust on his uniform and told him he looked handsome.
They talked while Isidro shoveled the eggs into his mouth. His mother spoke of relatives across the border in El Paso, about a young girl missing from the maquiladora, about the aches in her bones. When Isidro tilted his head and asked her if she needed to see a doctor, she shrugged him off the way she always did. He thought it was sweet that his mother brought up illnesses only to pretend they were nothing, to show how strong she was.
He lifted his gun belt from the wooden hanger and wrapped it around his waist. His mother bought the coat hangar at the Juarez flea market, struck with the beauty of the English words embroidered on a cloth above the wood: “Flowers are the friends of life.” Tonauac had laughed to himself, but didn’t have the heart to tell her the words didn’t make any sense.
He kissed her goodbye and grabbed his hat on the way out.
After Isidro closed the door, his mother wrote a short protection spell on a piece of yellow sticky paper, cut open an orange, and stuffed the note inside. She walked the two miles, in the dark, to the dirty creek behind her apartment and tossed in the fruit. She worked her magic because she loved her son, and Tonauac Isidro knew she did it and he loved her for that.
Isidro pulled the patrol car to the curb and walked through a waist high chain link fence and rapped on the door. The small flat sat between two identical houses, all of them with matching chipped paint and sun blasted lawn ornaments. Isidro swiveled his head back and forth as he headed up the lawn, one hand on his gunbelt. Alert. He hunched over, nervous, and rang the doorbell.
Jose Figueroa opened up and waved him in. He scratched his red eyes and walked out the back door. Isidro followed his partner, ignoring the smell of cat shit, through a living room covered in crosses, through a small kitchen with cracked yellow tile and the dishwasher rattling in the corner. Figueroa’s wife sat at the cluttered table, smoking a cigarette and wiping her eyes with the heel of her palm.
Figueroa’s backyard was pebbles and sand and a low stone fence. Feral dogs barked from the ends of chains in his neighbors’ yards. He had a section of his backyard cordoned off with barbed wire. He stepped over it and reached into the leaning henhouse and brought out a squawking chicken by its feet.
Isidro took his shirt off and knelt in the dirt. His friend removed a blade from his pocket and cut the chicken’s throat. The body twitched and blood spurted over the white feathers and onto Tonauac Isidro’s face and chest. He rubbed the viscera down his arms to his wrists, in his armpits, over his stomach. Figueroa lifted his shirt over his shoulders and sprinkled the remaining blood on himself.
The chicken blood turned cold and flaked in the desert night. Soon both men shivered. They put their shirts back on, then their overshirts. On their way out, Jose Figueroa kissed his wife on the cheek. She wrapped her arms around his neck and the smoke from her cigarette drifted past her husband’s ear into the yellow ceiling. He grabbed his belt on the way out and shut the door quietly.
“She watches the news all day,” Figueroa said. He looked down at his stomach as he applied his belt.
“My mom does the same thing. Every time I wake up I hear that shit.”
Figueroa checked the slide in his pistol and put it in his holster. He reached into his shirtfront pocket and took out a tiny baggie of cocaine in two fingers. He tapped some into his long pinky nail and inhaled. He wiped the excess off his moustache and sniffed several times. He extended the baggie and Isidro waved it off, the same way he did every time.
The city gained weight in the darkness. The cops turned their car down Mariano Metamoros, passing auto shops and Burger Kings with barred windows, making a right onto the 16 de Setiembre, cruising through the dimly lit streets, past the homeless drunks fighting and screaming and sleeping on doorsteps, past the mall at the intersection of Juarez, closed for the night, the windows inky black, past the clubs with open doors, inside the flashing lights and men and women moving in the dark, blue blacklight teeth and eyes floating.
Jose Figueroa drove, knuckles white on the steering wheel. The cage separating the back from the front rattled. The radio hissed and popped. Figeuroa pointed at the women walking from club to club. They turned left toward Bellavista and the tourists clogged the streets. Green, red, and white streamers glittered from the tops of the buildings, red faced white Americans laughing and slapping each other on the backs. Pissing in alleys and praying to God for women. Isidro watched the women in their glittering dresses and low cut tops, delicate origami figurines, carefully sculpted, lovely to look at, but fragile, not made to be out in the elements, glossy lips turned up in a frown at the slightest gust of wind. As the police rolled past, American soldiers from Fort Bliss stuffed half full
beers in their pockets or hid them behind their backs.
The fear came to Isidro just before he spotted the mark. The evil stretched its limbs through the back seat of the car, dark hands misting through the grate into the passenger’s seat, smothering him and tickling his stomach, bringing bile to the back of his throat. He’d lived in the city since he was a child, he knew it well, but when the darkness filled him it was a foreign land, full of sharp points and bullet holes. He rubbed a rosary in his pocket and flared his nostrils, sucking in the smell of the chicken blood, and he thought of his mother’s kitchen, thought of her, and his breathing slowed.
The mark was a hundred meters from the OK Corral club. They pulled up next to a young dark-skinned boy and a white girl and flipped on their lights. They stepped out of the car, one hand on their belts, and told the couple to back against the wall. The kids knew what this was immediately. The young man turned to the wall and deftly tucked the large necklace he was wearing down his shirt.
Figueroa did the talking. Especially when he was coked up, Figueroa became articulate and alpha, his smooth talking and white teeth initially preferable to Isidro’s hunched, feral grunts. He asked the couple if they had been drinking. The boy nodded his head and said, “Yes.” He spoke Spanish with an American accent.
“You look pretty drunk to me,” Figueroa said. “Turn around. Give me the necklace and you can go.”
The young man reacted immediately. He flailed his arms and swore and flipped Figueroa his middle finger. The necklace rattled under the boy’s shirt. The tall policeman didn’t step back. The boy was yelling right in his face. The liquor breath wafted over him. He sighed and held out a hand. He felt the drug flow and gritted his jaw. He could feel the chemical electricity burning off his fingerprints. He thanked God for the powder, thought of how sober Figueroa almost certainly would have botched this, wouldn’t have had the balls to do it, and that made him giddy. Made it fun. He clapped a hand on the young man’s shoulder. “Okay, my friend, okay,” he said in English. “You can keep the chain. You give me and my friend a turn with your girlfriend, we’ll forget the chain.”
The white girl turned green. She held out her purse to Tonauac Isidro. Her hands shook, the bracelets on her wrist jingling. She pressed her back against the wall. Isidro bit his cheek and stared at her legs. They were quivering, touching at a point just below the hem of her skirt. He put both hands on his belt and took a step towards her, feeling the power surging to his loins, breathing deep the dried chicken blood.
The young man swung at Figueroa, but the cop had done this dance too many times. The threat to masculinity brought the violence, the mark swung, and Figueroa would beat the man within an inch of his life, the drugs like a good corner man, sponging his face and congratulating him. Figueroa had been a boxer in his youth, wiry and energetic and lethal, and the coke only amplified this. He bounced away from the punch, fully intending to unleash a vicious beating, when the young man surprised him: he turned around and sprinted down the street.
The cops watched the boy’s clean white sneakers piston into the distance. The underwater bass rumble of the OK Corral club mingled with the shouts from drunken GIs. The woman started to cry. A lock of hair fell over her face and she held her purse to her stomach. She pissed down her leg.
The police officers laughed. They laughed until they were crying along with the girl. Her lips quivered and she covered her face with one hand. The men exchanged glances, Isidro lifting his eyebrows, searching for the go-ahead. Figueroa roared and slapped his friend on the back and shook his head. He told her to go. “You’ve had a bad enough night as it is, sweetheart. Maybe you pick better boyfriends next time.”
Between Texcoco and Ignacio Mejia the cops stopped for food. Jose Figueroa loaded up on tortillas and beans and Tonauac Isidro sat on the hood of their car and stared into a beer. Jose held out a burrito wrapped in tinfoil. “You’re not hungry?”
“No.” Isidro honestly could not figure how his partner could eat like that. Every time he’d done coke his guts had knotted at even the thought of food. Figueroa wolfed down his tortilla, roping thick strings of cheese around his finger.
“Must be nice.” Jose chewed. “Maria has never cooked. Ever. I bought her a rice cooker the other day. She asked me for one. I drove up to the Wal Mart in El Paso. It’s still in the box, on the floor.”
“You might as well return it.”
“I can see it now, man. She comes home and the thing is gone. ‘Where’s my fucking rice cooker?’ she’d say. I know it.”
“You can’t please women. No use trying.”
“Unless she’s your mother. You played it smart, staying with her. Free meals every day, shit.”
Isidro finished his beer and set it carefully on the curb. “You made the right choice,” he said. “I can’t fuck my mother.”
Jose Figueroa swallowed the last of his tortilla and wiped his hands on his pants and gave his friend that look he found himself giving more and more often, now, that look that said, “I have no idea what is going on behind your eyes.”
That morning Tonauac Isidro punched his timecard and waved goodbye to the officer on duty at the front desk and at the old women and young men seated in the folding chairs around the white room, the paint peeling off the walls, teeming with sounds and hand gestures. He dropped Jose off at home and watched until he was safely inside. He drove three miles down the road, the landscape dropping from low rent houses to shanties to hard brick apartment buildings. He parked his car in an alley and changed out of his uniform and strolled along the dirt road, stepping over potholes and peering into the foyers of these buildings, all the windows boarded up and barred up, some of them decorated with desperate trinkets, flowerpots or statuettes. Each apartment had a large iron gate at the entrance and Isidro peered into each one, the overhead lights dimly illuminating the foyers. Most of them were empty. Before he could give up hope, however, he spotted, at the top of the stairs, a young woman leaning against the wall. She had her foot propped on the opposite wall and he could see the bruises along her smooth leg and he felt himself becoming excited. She tilted her head towards him, dark circles under her eyes, and she stood up and descended the stairs deliberately, the flower print of her dress faded and sickly under the weak light, and stopped just before reaching the bottom stair. She planted her feet on the ground and spread her legs.
Isidro worked up some spit. “Long night?”
“Not too long,” she said.
The policeman could tell that she was young no matter how weathered her face. He told her what he wanted and she told him the price and he agreed and he felt his guts twist with a strange love at the way she hopped to her feet, her hair bobbing at her shoulders, unlocking the large iron gate, taking him by the hand, up the stairs and into her room.
Jose Figueroa showered and washed the chicken blood from his chest. He brushed his teeth and rummaged through his pants pockets. He found a crumpled dollar bill and rolled it into a tube and did a line from his sink. The drug hit him immediately, white fire in his brain, and he laughed at his reflection and clapped his hands. He stuffed the dollar bill in the skull sitting by the altar at the foot of his bed. He found Maria curled on the couch and he sat with her and watched TV. When the program was finished they went to bed. He wrapped his arms around her and she squeezed his hand. He felt himself become aroused and started to kiss her neck. She turned to him and took his face in his hands.
“Why do you do that?”
“Do what?”
“I heard you. In the bathroom. Sniffing. It’s four in the morning, Jose. How are you going to sleep?”
“I don’t want to.”
“Because of the dreams?” A lock of hair fell in her eye and Figueroa instinctively brushed it away. Fingers itching to do something. Jaw clenched. He wished he had never told her about his dreams. About the things he saw, every day. He saw the drug as a supplement, like coffee, but to those who didn’t have to use it, he knew how he looked. And he wou
ld not talk to his wife about how scared he was, every night, about how he had to will himself out the front door every evening.
But he did talk. At length and about nothing in particular. After ten minutes he felt the high receding, felt himself come down from the mountain, and the urge presented itself to go back to the bathroom, to do another small bump, to get his self-confidence back, to not have to face the crushing weight of the day by himself.
A few hours later Maria was gone, off to work with the rest of civilization, and he had the whole day to kill.
He bought a burger from an American fast food chain and caught a movie. He thought about going to see Maria at work and then decided against it. She hadn’t said anything that morning, getting dressed with hurried, angry movements. Tight-lipped.
He saw a crowd at the corner of Joaquin Terrazas and Jesus Escobar. He parked his car in front of a duplex and walked downhill, the gravel crunching underfoot, to where the people were. The sounds were familiar to him, as a policeman. Distant crying, the bustle of official talk, the shutter clicks of cameras. At the bottom of the hill, set in the center of the road, was a cylindrical metal trash can. Leaning against the can were two human legs, cut off at the calf. A cardboard sign was taped to the bin, a warning to anyone who might think about talking to the police. A photographer aimed his lens into the trash can and walked away shaking his head. A young woman was on her knees, crying and screaming though she had gone hoarse a long time ago. An older man squatted next to her, rubbing her shoulders, tears shining brightly in the sun. Figueroa lingered at the scene for a moment longer then got back in his car and drove home.
II
Isidro took the capsule from his pocket and unscrewed the lid. He poured the orange powder into a bottle of water and shook it up. “My mom gave me this energy drink stuff,” he said, “She bought a box of this stuff at Sam’s Club. It tastes awful but now she won’t let me leave the house without it. I hate them. Still drink it though, I would feel too bad throwing it away.”
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