by James Reich
“Yeah. Like it?”
“Definitely. The Girl Who Fell to Earth!”
“That’s what I was going for: fucked-up Martian rust-red.”
“Caffeine, girly? It’s made.”
“Why not?” Cash made herself at home on the couch, turning the pages of one of Molly’s hot rod magazines, pausing on the pinup pages where teenage girls adorned luridly painted machines. “Juanita is muy caliente,” she murmured as Molly brought coffee and started playing a bootleg James Chance and the Contortions live cassette. “Look, Moll,” Cash said above the soul-shouts and slabs of dissonant saxophone coming from across the room, “I’m going away for a while, but I need a car. Can I trade you my bike for your car for a few weeks, please? I’ll be extremely careful with it.”
“Where are you going to go?”
“East. Yeah, east.”
“So, you, Cash, you actually want to drive my low-rider through Texas, you, with that hair? You know that all of those mean, burly, butch, born-again cops will totally adore you? You’ll be pulled over every mile. Be sure to stash your Bible in your glove box, and use your registration as a bookmark for a pertinent passage, you know, something about Sodom and Gomorrah.”
“Totally.”
“And don’t even mention to me that you’re going through Oklahoma! Shun the panhandle, Cash. You’ll hate it, anyway. Dude, go south and see the oil slicks. I hear the Gulf is beautiful this time of year. I remember when Louisiana radio stations used to talk about the levels of human shit in the water, and they used to read out the fecal count. Oil! Huh. Oil is for squares, man.”
“So, it’s cool for me to borrow your car? I know it’s a big deal and I appreciate it.”
“It’s yours, sister. I’ll watch your house and your bike. Don’t worry about it. Maybe I’ll fix it up for you, again. I get bored. You know how it is.”
“Thanks, Moll.”
Molly was tall; Cash pulled the driver’s seat closer to the pedals and adjusted the low-rider’s mirrors. She regarded her Martian hair in the rearview. The vital thing was that it was radically different from the wigs contained in ziplock plastic bags that she had stashed in her army surplus backpack, so that she might divide herself between several theaters of conflict: ballsy reporter, grieving widow. Cash practiced pushing her snub gun inside her right sock, so that it lay against her pale calf muscle. She removed it and threw it into the bag. She had packed some spare clothes, with her original notebooks, diaries, photocopies, blueprints, reports, energy bars, mix-tapes, and all of her money. Her road atlas lay on the passenger seat, specific pages marked with inserts and details. The cassette player blared. Flimsy scenery in a hurricane, Madrid disappeared behind her.
Molly’s 1974 Chevy Impala had been refinished in dark gunmetal spray paint. It was almost black. Its long form skimmed the road surface on fourteen-inch radials. The interior was spacious, yet not as ornate and tacky as some she had seen in the magazines. Cash rode in this gothic chrome cocoon, beneath a wide, smoked windshield. She drove fifty miles south on 285 until she hit the eastward drag of I-40. At Clines Corners, she pulled into the large forecourt of the gas station, the underside of the car skimming the apron. Oversized red and yellow 1930s billboards projected from the roofs of the buildings. She would pay cash for everything, leaving no electronic trails to be followed. Large trucks maneuvered around her as she stalked to the grocery store to pay the attendant. Already, she had the suspicion that people were eyeing her. Yet, with different color hair and with the Polaroid being so indistinct, there was no way that she could be recognized yet. She forced the nervousness from her body and pushed the glass doors open to the bright store with its candy, beer, T-shirts, sunglasses, and souvenirs, as if this gas station and gift store were memorable for anything except the price of fuel and the spiderweb of the highways it clung to.
Inside the store, every surface was covered with memorabilia. Dreamcatchers and flags dangled from the cheap ceiling tiles. The air was thick with sugar, hot dogs, and cheap candles. The cashier was a Native American woman of approximately Cash’s age. She registered the money without putting down her enormous cup of soda as she inventoried elements of Cash’s appearance for which she obviously did not care: burnt-orange hair, pewter skull-and-crossbones earrings, no lipstick, messy black liner blurring about her eyes. When Cash told her the pump number, the woman sucked on her soda straw as she turned to see the low-rider through the store window.
“Sweet wheels, yo.” The cashier’s voice lacked affect.
“Thanks.”
“Your boyfriend’s?”
“Nah, it’s mine.” Cash rocked on her heels, glancing at the car.
The car was facing the window so the cashier couldn’t see any license plate. “So, where you heading’?” She guessed: “Home to Albuquerque?”
“No, I’ve never lived there. I’m from L.A., the Valley.” Cash began to lie, but when she looked into the cashier’s dark eyes, she decided that it was not worth it. There was nothing to lose here, but she maintained the Valley Girl accent. She continued without affect: “Actually, I’m traveling east.” Her voice rose higher on the last word as if ‘East’ was a doubtful word, or an inquiry. “I plan to kill a man.” She smiled. “So, I’ll also need a fifth of vodka and, like, a Zippo.”
“Do you have your ID?”
“Ah, shit. I left it in the car. But, I’m almost twenty-five, is that okay? April 26 is my day, and it’s coming right up. I’m a Taurus. Can you, like, take my word? I need to use the restroom and everything, and don’t have much time to kill here. Alright?”
“I guess . . . this time, yo. Which design of lighter do you want?” She handed Cash her vodka.
“Oh, I’ll take that tacky Playboy one, thanks.”
“Sure, that’s a popular one. Well, good luck,” she said. Moving her lips to her soda once more, and adjusting her heavy black ponytail, the cashier whispered down the straw. “Skanky cunt.”
Bells chimed on the door as Cash made her exit.
Driving east on I-40 with the unfurling of the tarmac and the rising of the red mesas in her rearview mirror, Cash could feel herself descending from the altitudes of New Mexico as she approached the western border of Texas. DRIVE FRIENDLY. THE TEXAS WAY. Speeding beneath a concrete overpass beyond the border, she was an hour from Amarillo and 200 miles from the Pantex nuclear facility, where surplus nuclear materials and warheads were broken down. Tactically, hitting the Pantex Plant, which Cash had determined was the cause of a jolt in the rhythm of birth defects, hydrocephalus, heart abnormalities, deformities, and infant deaths, in the hard daylight of the Texas panhandle might be a grave error. Yet, she was tempted. She needed to see it. If she could get within range, then she could decide between slingshot and Molotov cocktail. There were sufficient plutonium pits within the forty-square-mile precincts of Pantex to stud every contaminated acre. In her marrow, she sensed the leaking concrete cylinders and fractured bunker sites leaching into the soil, the workers tired and edgy, the fence line security guards always nervous. However, if she acted at any location at the wrong moment, trace lines would be too easily drawn. Those watching for her from the black sites and classified metal rooms of the state would calculate her moves with algorithms and simulations. From then it would be as futile as playing chess with a telepathic opponent. They would take her without a sweat, like they took Allen Ginsberg, manhandling him from the railroad tracks where with his poems he protested the transit of plutonium at Rocky Flats, Colorado.
The trouble with beatniks, she thought, as the sunlight heated the steering wheel, is that they become Buddhists. The road, being on the road, she decided, is to enter a sexualized terrain, this being a post-beatnik pantomime of phallic reaches and torpedoes in straight lines overcoming the horizon. Of course, this was all surface, mistaken and ridden by and with assumptions, cock-dreams behind macho windshields and sunglasses, and stick shifts warmed by the high sun of wide lands. Yet, the real road is not so conveniently mascul
ine, not the beatnik fantasy, not the boozy long miles of 4F poets. While Neal Cassady’s hard-on pointed ahead, Jack Kerouac, cradling his quiet imagined crush, slept on the backseat, curled and dreaming of his mother’s womb, of returning on the curved and complicated umbilical tar. On this terrain, Varyushka Cash would reclaim the road for the female. She pushed her leather boot down hard on the accelerator, imagining the smashing of a pair of glassy figurines of a man and woman beneath the steel pedal. With the window down, the hot air whipped her red hair. Wild Thelma and Louise posters unfolded in her wake and clung to the barbed wire. She drove through Coca-Cola and anti-abortion billboards and torn truck tires, refinery smoke. She saw the hitchhiking oilfield girls in cowboy boots and yellow skirts, black satin dresses and suitcases at the perimeters of derelict gas stations.
Cash reached the Pantex Plant in three hours. Closing in on it along Highway 60, the early afternoon sun flashed from the chrome trim as she made for the west gate along Pershing Drive. She knew that the road would become restricted. Even if there were no checkpoint, she realized that it would be patrolled. She was inviting trouble. Cash pulled over, throwing up a low wave of dirt. Through mercurial heat haze, she could almost see the hexagonal arrangement and the weird bunkers that let out waves of radiation across the flat landscape. She hesitated for a moment, breathing deeply as she pulled the keys from the ignition. Stepping from the car, she laced her fingers through the mesh of a chain-link fence. Then, with her binoculars, she studied the pale industrial buildings. She could not see the men inside, yet at intervals figures in bright blue HAZMAT suits would move between the bunkers, pipelines, and concrete domes. She saw herself throwing a vodka bottle with a burning rag against the curve of one of the domes, not sufficient to do real damage, but sufficient to terrorize the workers that there might be a fire cracking out of the containment buildings. She regarded the misshapen ground where the waste was interred. She needed to get in, to see it all from a closer distance, drawn by a morbid compulsion. She opened the trunk of the car and retrieved some bolt cutters that she had taken from Molly’s workshop. Cash began to slit the fence. The wind lashed over the panhandle, and within it she imagined brilliant particles of death. That wind also bore the engine sound of another car, circling the perimeter of the plant. She heard the acceleration of its motor, and the brief blare of a siren. “Shit-fuck.” Cash threw the bolt cutters back into the low-rider and slammed the trunk.
The black-and-white cop car pulled in behind hers, its lights rotating. Cash watched the cop behind the wheel, appraising her briefly, before he disentangled himself from his seat belt and rose from the white door, casually flicking it closed with his fingers. He moved toward her in his midnight blue uniform, polished boots grinding on the gravel. He was over six feet tall. When he addressed her, his voice was deep and incredulous.
“Ma’am, what on God’s green earth do you imagine you’re doing?”
“It’s my dog,” she complained. “He got through the fence.” Cash moved toward him, showing her palms, opening her eyes wide in deference and confusion.
“You can stay right there.” He slapped her across the face with his voice. He stared at the black rear window of the low-rider, taking in the New Mexico plate, as behind his sunglasses he cycled visions of meth labs, mace spray, and armed boyfriends concealed by two-way blackout glass. His right hand moved almost imperceptibly toward the belted weapons at his hip. “Anyone else in the vehicle?”
“No. No one, sir. But what about my dog?”
Resting his hand on the grip of his pistol, the cop moved cautiously around the car, pulling open the driver’s door and flashing a glance into the rear seat. “What kind of dog is it?” He reached in and pulled out Cash’s khaki pack, placing it on the gravel roadside close to his right boot. The cop removed a notepad from his pocket, pulled out a pencil that was gripped by an elastic band, and licked the tip as he prepared to make a note. “Let’s talk about this bag . . . ”
“A Chihuahua,” Cash interrupted. She turned her head back to the poisoned turf behind the fence, anxiously scanning the Pantex complex.
“I can call the gate, have them look out for it.”
“Her, she’s a girl, officer.” She saw his name tag flash in the sunlight. His name was Kern.
“As I say, ma’am, we’ll look for it, although this is a restricted area. You’re going to have to leave this area immediately, without your dog, I’m afraid. But tell me, what will I find if I open this bag?”
“Officer Kern, she has rabies! My dog, if she bites anyone . . . ”
“All right, don’t fuck with me now, girl. The bag. What’s in it, drugs from Meh-hi-co?” He sneered, his Christian cop façade slipping, all the nervous boredom of working the Pantex beat breaking out of his pores in the Texas sun. “You drive a spic piece of work like this around, and folks get their suspicions. Let’s step into my office.” He picked up the backpack and wrapped Cash’s elbow with a huge black-gloved hand. He pulled her to his car, and opened the rear passenger door with the same hand that gripped the bag. She could see that he was making calculations with the deserted road, the distortions of the fence line, and the great distance to the Pantex buildings. “Watch your head,” he said, pushing her down, the glove stitches catching strands of her red hair. “Move over.” He slid the bag to the center of the wide leather seat and climbed in after her. Within the suffocating interior of the patrol car, she fixed her mind on the image of a young woman, herself, holding a machine gun before an orange banner printed with the image of a black seven-headed cobra. “Open it.” Kern indicated the bag, slowly unpicking his gloves from his fingers. Removing his sunglasses, he watched Cash’s eyes as she unfastened the bag. She glanced at his face. Without his sunglasses, Kern appeared to her to be approximately her own age. There was something unformed, pubescent, about his face. Cash thought: His teeth are too small for his head.
Kern’s attention flickered between the opening of the army surplus pack and tense clasp of Cash’s mouth. Kern looked at the selection of wigs as he pulled them out the bag. “You turn a lot of tricks in New Mexico? Is that what we have here? Is that how you got the bruise on your face?” From a tangle of her spare underwear, he pulled out the vodka and the Playboy cigarette lighter. “Oh, yeah . . . I see now. You could show me a good time, then?” Kern put a large hand on Cash’s thigh. The hand moved and his gaze followed it as it caressed the girl’s shivering skin. Then he brought his fingers together hard, so that her flesh stood up white between them. Gasping, Cash gripped his wrist and slowly moved his hand away. She pressed herself into the corner of the patrol car’s wide seat. “I didn’t call you in . . . yet,” Kern whispered. “This could go your way.” He traced circles around her small breasts. His other hand discovered something else in the bag that made him hesitate. Slowly, he withdrew a strange, compact gun. “What’s this? Is it plastic? Looks like a toy.” Evidently, Cash thought, this young man had never seen a noiseless PSS pistol before. He didn’t know his KGB gimmicks . . .
“It’s just a toy,” Cash lowered her voice, feigning arousal. “A sex toy.”
“What?” Kern turned it over in his hands, his smile exposing small teeth.
“So am I.”
He did not resist as she unlatched his fingers from it, leaning closer to him. He could smell the peroxide that she had used in coloring her hair. His erection strained at the front of his uniform. He saw her watching it, and he moved to unfasten his utility belt and holster. Cash slid the bag onto the floor, so that there was nothing between them. As his belt licked through the final loop of his pants, she reached for it. She said: “Now, show me yours.”
Cash ripped Kern’s gun from its holster and shoved it violently into his throat, twisting the heavy metal vertical. She pressed it into his chin, and between his small teeth, raking it over his palate. His eyes widened and a noise came from his throat as he realized that she was squeezing the trigger. The bullet passed through Kern’s brain and exploded from his blo
nd scalp through the headliner and out of the roof of the patrol car; a fountain of Kern’s blood and tissue erupted with it before falling back onto the Plexiglas of the revolving lights. Blood sprayed her face and clothes. She tore off her bloody T-shirt and reached for her backpack. It was clean. She tore part of the shirt and held it in her teeth. Slamming the door, she left the shirt in the patrol car. She checked the contents of her bag to make certain that she had not left anything that Kern had removed before she blew his brains out. Cash opened the vodka bottle and threw the cap into the car through the open window. She would make her Molotov cocktail after all. She dowsed the remains of Kern’s face with some of the alcohol, watching it run with blood down his dark shirt. She took the rag from her teeth and pushed it into the bottle. The white cotton began to wick the vodka immediately, becoming transparent. Finally, she latched open the cigarette lighter and lit the cloth, before throwing it into the backseat of the cop car. Flames burst across the leather upholstery and lit the dead cop like a wax effigy. Cash ran back to her car and took off. The road flowed beneath her as she turned away from Amarillo.
What had Hippolyta, Queen of the Amazons, felt when she first killed a man? And when she killed more? What had Valerie Solanas experienced as the bullets moved in slow motion into the pallid body of her tormentor? The question arose, the singular question that demands a killer’s introspection: Will I do it again? That question mutated into: When will I kill again? How soon can I kill again? Her flesh was luminous with adrenaline. Murder, she realized, has its own momentum.
The gothic low-rider blasted through the Texas heat haze and into the night beyond the panhandle steakhouse dioramas, carved wooden Indians, horse motels, and primitive bars; strange concrete structures stood sentinel at the roadside, tall grass growing about them and mysterious bunkers that cracked the ground close by. Cash had observed the increase in roadkill immediately as she had crossed the state border from New Mexico. Armadillos lay punctured and sprawled in thick blood. Dogs, snakes, rodents were ripped open by speeding fenders all along the violent highways. Exhilarated, she drove without stopping through the tornado-blasted brownstones of Wichita Falls and on through Fort Worth and Dallas, vast blank buildings and careening overpasses. The highway was black and moonless, and she trembled as the car roared on, driving through her shock, the shimmering walls of nausea. Hurtling southeast, away from Pantex and Kern’s charred corpse, Cash turned up the volume on the cassette player. Perhaps Kern, a fine young Texan Christian, had not lied, and had not called in a report on her car. She could not take the risk. The edges of the state seemed impossibly distant. If she drove flat out, then she could make it to Shreveport, Louisiana, by morning. Then she might be able to rest.
