The Ten-Ounce Siesta

by Norman Partridge

  His blue eyes burned beneath the sharp ledge of his brow as he scanned the chapel for an answer.

  His gaze fell upon the inverted cross on the far wall . . . bones bleached of flesh, and those that were not . . . the old leather-bound books heaped upon a leaning bookshelf . . . the potions and balms that were useless to him now.

  Daddy Deke threw the silver goblet across the room and it banged against the weather-beaten door. The answers he required were beyond his reach.

  Before he could find them, he needed to get right with Satan.

  He needed to feel the dark one’s unholy power in his very grasp.

  He needed to handle Cthulhu.

  ***

  Eden ran through the bunker.

  How could Harold do it? How could he give the Chihuahua to Daddy? How could he be so blind?

  Harold just didn’t understand. She couldn’t blame him for that. He hadn’t grown up around Daddy and the snakes. He’d never seen Daddy try to heal the sick—

  Eden had seen that. Mostly, Daddy’s spells worked. But sometimes—

  And if this was one of those times. If it was already too late. If the dog had been bitten—

  No . . . no . . .

  If the ransom money slipped through their fingers. If they lost half a million dollars to a rattlesnake’s venom—

  No!

  Eden banged through the door and into the heat.

  Oh, please, no . . .

  ***

  Illnesses were demons. This Daddy Deke knew. And Satan held sway over every demon. His power could pluck the little pissants from a body as easily as Eve had plucked the apple from that tree in the Garden. If a man truly believed, he could channel that power. He could master demons. He could hold sway on earth, just as Satan did in hell.

  Daddy steeled himself to the notion. The door to Satan’s power covered a black box beneath his altar. With his right hand, he bent low and brought forth the box. It was hinged with gold and bore a knob of clear crystal.

  Like Pandora of old, Daddy Deke feared not to open the box. He did this with his left hand, the hand he had given to Satan many years ago.

  The dark one’s will would be done. Daddy Deke reached into the box with long bony fingers, giving himself over to the power of the Lord of Flies.

  “Hail Satan!” Mama shouted.

  Daddy stroked the rattlesnake. Corpse-cool flesh came alive beneath his fingers. Keeled scales rippled along the serpent’s thick body as it stirred, forked tongue flicking the hot air, yellow eyes alive with evil, slit pupils identical to those of serpents that had crawled the earth long before man trod upon it.

  “Hail Lucifer!” Mama screamed.

  Daddy drew the serpent from the black box. Nearly six feet in length and thick as a truck driver’s wrist, it was completely white save for those yellow slits that slashed its eyes.

  A herpetologist would identify the serpent as Crotalus atrox, or an Albino Western Diamondback Rattlesnake. Daddy called it Cthulhu.

  “The dark one is king!” Mama shed tears. “The dark one reigns omnipotent!”

  On the altar, the Chihuahua began to whine. Fright shone in its brown eyes. It tried to rise on weak legs.

  “Mama! Hold this beast!”

  Mama placed her hands on the little dog and held it still. Cthulhu’s great tail encircled Daddy’s forearm. The snake’s enormous head writhed and twisted, facing Daddy, a white diamond made of flesh. Spike’s whine cut the silence, but Daddy ignored it. He stared into the serpent’s eyes, and he began to fall, and tumble, and spin . . .

  Mama cried, “Satan! Lucifer! Beelzebub! All one! All eternal!”

  . . . descending into yellow slits in eyes unblinking. And the heat of hell poured through those slits the same way the desert heat slashed through the cracks in the chapel walls, and Daddy was scorched by hellfire, and he burned in the pit, and when he began to rise anew the power was burning in his blood, blistering his flesh, because his eyes were yellow . . . he knew they were . . . he could feel it. His eyes were yellow slits and Satan was a comin’ . . .

  SATAN WAS A COMIN’ . . .

  SATAN WAS A COMIN' . . .

  . . . AND SOON!

  . . . AND SOON!

  Eden threw open the door. Mama screamed. The dog squirmed in her grasp. The great snake’s head hovered over it.

  “Daddy,” Eden said. “No!”

  Her father’s eyelids fluttered. He looked at his daughter as if she were a ghost. His blue eyes were glazed with ecstasy or fear . . . and Eden didn’t know what to say, and for a millisecond all was silent.

  Then came the dry cadence of Cthulhu’s rattle. The snake sprang, jaws spread wide, fangs glistening as they ripped Daddy’s cheek.

  “No!” Mama screamed as she tore the serpent from Daddy’s face and flung it into the mine shaft.

  Daddy collapsed on the floor and the Chihuahua scrambled away, escaping between Eden’s legs.

  The dog scrambled past Harold, too. He gave chase, naked and pink under the hot Mojave sun.

  Eden wore a robe. Nothing else. She ran to her father’s side. He studied her with that same strange expression on his face, as if he were looking at a ghost whose presence stirred anguish and fear and love. And then a great spasm rocked him, and his eyelids fluttered closed, and he sank into Mama’s arms like a sickly child.

  “If he dies. I’ll kill you,” Mama said. “I’ll burn you down. I’ll rip your heart out.”

  “Mama . . . I’m sorry—”

  “You’re always sorry!”

  Eden started to cry.

  “Don’t you dare do that in here!” Mama spit the words. “Don’t you dare shed tears in your daddy’s church!”

  Eden couldn’t help it.

  “You’re so weak!” Mama’s voice was ice. “You can’t be no daughter of mine!”

  Shaking with unrestrained fury, Mama cradled Daddy Deke in her arms. “I never wanted you. But your daddy said it was prophetized that we have three babies. He said it was Satan’s will.”

  Eden stumbled back as if shot. Unable to speak, she could only listen.

  “If I had it to do over again I’d rip you from my belly with a coat hanger. That’s what I’d do. By Satan, I would.”

  Eden turned to flee but it was much too late. Her foot tangled in the rib cage of a tramp Daddy had sacrificed three winters past. She couldn’t move a lick, but she had to. She had to escape before Mama could say another word.

  She smashed the bones with her free foot and kicked the rib cage into a comer. Twisting toward the light, she nearly stumbled but righted herself at the last moment and pitched through the open door.

  Into the desert.

  She ran.

  ***

  Harold was dressed now. Night had fallen.

  “She still out there?” he asked.

  “Yes.” Eden stared at Daddy’s chapel, absently stroking the Chihuahua’s head.

  “This is fucked,” Harold said. “I don’t want to leave you here alone. But I gotta go out. I gotta call Angel Gemignani. I gotta do it from a pay phone. Otherwise they’ll trace the call. And I can’t take you with me, because the dog is sick and someone has to take care of it.” Harold punched the air. “This is fucked."

  Eden said, “Yes, it is.”

  “Here.” Harold held out his .357. “I want you to have this. Just in case.”

  Eden took the gun. She wanted to cry. She knew she couldn’t.

  Harold said, “Don’t let anyone touch the dog.”

  Eden nodded.

  “I mean it, Eden. Really. Don’t fuck this up. You understand? I mean it."

  “Yes,” she said.

  She watched him go.

  He was leaving her. Alone. With them.

  Don’t fuck this up. You understand? I mean it.

  And he had never spoken to her . . . like that.

  ABOUT TWENTY MILES OUTSIDE OF VEGAS, OFF HIGHWAY 95 as you headed west toward California, was a freeway exit. It connected to an overpass and a narrow
dirt road that headed toward a place no one wanted to visit.

  At least that was the way it seemed to Harold Ticks. Harold was parked on the north side of the overpass. He’d parked here plenty of times in the last few months, and in that time he’d seen drunks stop to take a piss and newlyweds pull off for a quick bang in the back seat and college kids pile out of dinged-up vans to light off fireworks that they’d bought at the Paiute reservation store seventy miles to the east.

  But no one other than Harold ever took that dirt road. Not too surprising, really. Drive forty miles on that road and you reached the home of satanic patriarch Deke Lynch and his family. Deke called the place Hell’s Half Acre, but Harold preferred to think of it as the Radiation Ranch.

  Spend some time with the Lynch clan out there in the middle of nowhere and your perspective was bound to change. Listen to Deke ramble on night after night about Satan and the government and a man’s responsibilities to his blood kin, and you’d begin to think that the Manson Family might have survived if only they’d been a little stronger in the family values department.

  It got so that every time Harold drove down that dirt road and hit pavement, he’d get to feeling pretty strange. It was like visiting a world he had forgotten about, a world that had nothing to do with Deke Lynch and his wild brood.

  Harold sat in his old Chevy. He was parked in a dirt lot about twenty feet short of the pavement. He always used this spot when he had to schedule a rendezvous. After a few months in the desert, the glitter and noise of Las Vegas made him as jittery as a caffeine fiend.

  This place was so quiet. Tonight there were no drunks or newlyweds or college kids. And that was good. Safe. A place where a couple of guys could meet without being disturbed.

  Harold popped the top on an Olde English 500 and looked at his watch. Tony was twenty minutes late. Where was the motherfucker?

  Tonight of all nights . . .

  Tony would show, though. Harold knew it. Tony wouldn’t let him down. Because Tony was his brother.

  Not in a biological sense. They weren’t connected that way.

  But just like Deke Lynch and his family, Harold and Tony were connected by blood.

  ***

  Harold sipped the Olde English and thought about the old days.

  Corcoran State Prison. The badass unit. The one they called the Shoe. The one where they put prisoners who caused trouble.

  Harold Ticks was in the Shoe for beating up some nigger queen who tried to turn him into a bitch. Harold broke every finger on the hand the nigger tried to slip up his ass, snapped each one at the knuckle joint just like fucking chicken bones while the nigger screamed like James Brown.

  Tony Katt was in the Shoe for fucking up a runty guard who liked to give him shit about his little dick. Tony hit the hack while he was talking, hit him so hard that the hack’s teeth slashed through his upper lip, nearly severing it.

  A couple of the hack’s teeth broke off, ending up embedded in Tony’s hand. The prison doctor dug those teeth from between Tony’s knuckles with a pair of tweezers. The word around the campfire was that Tony didn’t even flinch.

  That was Tony. It didn’t matter how big his dick was—Tony Katt was nobody’s punk. Harold knew that from jump.

  Everyone knew it. Even the runty guard with the ripped lip that never healed right. And all the other guards knew it, too. They knew that Tony Katt was a natural for their private gladiator wars, same way they knew that Harold Ticks would make one hell of a tag-team partner for the big white guy with the little bitty dick.

  It worked this way: the Shoe had a brick-walled exercise yard. A control booth with a big barred window overlooked the yard, and video cameras were mounted everywhere. When the guards needed some entertainment, they gathered together in the tower and set up a fight between the prisoners. With the paychecks the hacks were pulling, it wasn’t exactly like they were up for pay-per-view boxing matches on TV. Besides, the fights at the Shoe were better. Bloodier. For the hacks, it was just like having a ringside seat in the Roman Colosseum.

  Starting a fight was easy. All you had to do was mix the dark meat with the white meat. Toss a couple of Aryan Brotherhood boys into the yard with some cons who belonged to the Mexican Mafia or Black Guerrilla Family.

  Toss four guys like that into the yard, and make sure every one of them was wrapped tight as jailhouse TNT. The cons might as well have been sweating nitro. The slightest little shove and someone was bound to go boom!

  Harold remembered the day he got shot. Waiting in the yard with Tony. The hack with the ripped-up lip that wouldn’t smile anymore escorting a couple of Mexican Mafia guys into the yard. The hack pointing at Tony, whispering some little dick joke to the spies, who laughed their hard spic laughs.

  The guard laughing, too, laughing through that frozen lip while he took his post with a rifle in his hands . . .

  The fight . . .

  The guard with the ripped-up lip trying to smile while he watched the Mexicans take it really hard—

  ***

  Headlights washed Harold’s face. He glimpsed himself in the rearview mirror. His face was very pale.

  A car drifted across the dirt lot. Harold hadn’t even noticed it take the exit.

  But that was okay because he recognized the car as Tony’s Lamborghini.

  Harold drained the Olde English, crumpled the can in his fist, and tossed it out the window. Tony’s headlights went out.

  The ripe, pale moon hung behind the Lamborghini. Tony had paid $446,820 for the car. It was a 1971 Miura SVJ. There were only three others like it in the world.

  The car looked too low to the ground to hold a guy the size of Tony Katt. But it did. Tony hauled himself up and out of it. He came around the passenger side of Harold’s old Chevy, holding a six-pack in one hand.

  Olde English 500. Had to be. These days Tony might drive a Lamborghini, but some things never changed.

  Tony opened the door and slid inside. He popped a brew and handed it to Harold.

  Harold said, “You’re late.”

  “Yeah. I had drouble gedding away.”

  “Hey,” Harold said. “Are you okay? You sound like you’re sick or something.”

  Tony flicked on the overhead light. The skin around his eyes was black and blue. His nose was a mess of thick white tape and Popsicle sticks. Bloodstained cotton poked from his nostrils.

  “Dip me in shit and roll me in sugar,” Harold said. “What happened to you?”

  Tony said, “Jack Baddalach.”

  ***

  Harold could believe in a lot of weird stuff. Space aliens visiting Area 51. The Loch Ness Monster. Demons in Daddy Deke’s mine shaft. But Jack Baddalach, alive? When he’d been locked up tight with a rattlesnake? No way, man. No fucking way.

  “Yes way,” Tony said. “No fugging ghosd did dis do my nose.”

  “Maybe we should call the whole thing off,” Harold said. “I told Baddalach some stuff that I probably should have kept to myself. Just started talking, because I figured he was a dead man and I wanted to get him relaxed so he wouldn’t guess what was coming when I pulled off the highway. Anyway, he must have remembered the stuff I talked about. That must be how he connected me to you.”

  “Spilt milk. Like you said, you figured the guy was a corpse. No use worrying about it. So the motherfucker showed up on my doorstep. So he got lucky and broke my nose. No way can he make me talk, no matter what he does.”

  “It’s not just Baddalach.” Harold shook his head. “It’s this fucking family I’m dealing with. They’re getting nuttier by the minute. The only one I really trust is Eden, and I think she’s at the end of her rope.”

  “For a chick you turned out, she sounds pretty special. I can’t wait to meet her.”

  “Yeah. But this fucking family. I swear to God, Tony, it’s like The Hills Have Eyes out there—”

  “We’re close,” Tony said. “Real close. Just one more day and we’ll both have what we want.”

  Harold drained his
malt liquor and reached for another. It was hard to understand Tony with his nose all busted and everything. Jesus, this asshole Baddalach was something. Harold wondered how in the hell the motherfucker had gotten past that big fucking diamondback. And now this—

  “I don’t know,” Harold said. “This Baddalach is a bulldog. And he’s only one step away.”

  “He’s only one guy. And I’ve got a sure fire way to keep him busy. Believe me, the last thing he’ll be thinking about tomorrow is a kidnapped Chihuahua.”

  “Okay, then. I’m still up for it.”

  “The whole nine yards?”

  “Right down the line, brother.”

  “Good,” Tony said. “Did you call the Gemignani bitch?”

  Harold nodded. “You should have heard her. Man, she was scared shitless. Especially when I told her that she was going to have to make the drop alone if she wanted to see Spike alive.”

  “Think she’ll tell her grandfather?”

  “No. She’s got no reason to. She’s already got the money.” Harold sipped his Olde English. “All she’s got to do is unlock a safe-deposit box, right?”

  “Right. Granddaddy gave her the key on her twenty-first birthday. It’s her own personal stash of Gemignani Family swag, and the taxman doesn’t know anything about it. The rich bitch. She makes a withdrawal now and then, parties down with her little friends. They all know about it.”

  “Thank God for girl talk.”

  “Pillow talk’s more like it,” Tony said.

  “Don’t rub my nose in it, stud.” Harold laughed. “Anyway, I told Angel I’d call tomorrow and tell her where to deliver the ransom. Eden’s sisters spent the day getting the place ready. As long as Angel gets out of the casino without her granddaddy noticing, we’ll be in the clear.”

  “And you’ll have a half a million bucks.”

  Harold whistled through his teeth. “And you’ll have Angel Gemignani.”