by David Cole
“Comin’ back atcha.”
He stared out the window, his mind completely elsewhere, not even noticing the waitress leave the diet Cokes. His cell phone rang. He listened without talking, folded the cell shut.
“You okay?” he said.
“No!” I shouted, and people looked around. I leaned forward, arms on the table, facing him, whispering. “No. I am so not fucking okay.”
“Yeah.”
“That’s a stupid thing to say to a person.”
“What? What’s stupid?”
“‘Are you okay?’”
“It’s just a thing,” he said.
“A thing.”
“You know. In bad times, that’s what people say to each other. You okay?”
“It’s stupid.”
He drank half the diet Coke, rattled the ice, finished off the Coke, and waved the glass at the waitress, who brought him another.
“Okay,” he said. “I’m sorry. I should have asked how you were doing.”
“Not good. I just want out of this, Nathan. I want to get my daughter pardoned, I want to take her away from all of this.”
“We’re not done yet.”
“I’m done,” I hissed. “I found out how the credit card stuff got out of the prison, I found where it all went. That’s our deal.”
“Half the deal.”
“The other half is your half. Not mine. I’ve done my half.”
“It’s all a piece.” He tried to hold my hands and I jerked them away from him and put them on my lap, under the tabletop. “You found out how.”
“And where.”
“You found out how and where.”
“So you do whatever’s left.”
“Why?” he said. “That’s the missing part. Why?”
“I’m not helping you with that part.”
“No,” he said carefully. “But your daughter will.”
“Uh uh. She’s outa that place. She’s outa there. We’re both done.”
“Laura, let’s get this clear. For now, she’s in that place. She stays in that place until we figure out why that place, that camp, why is it involved.”
“Oh, Jesus,” I said.
“Laura. You’re just not getting the picture at all. I’m thinking of your daughter’s safety.”
“Don’t shit me, Nathan.”
I couldn’t understand his logic, you see, I couldn’t see how staying in that camp made Spider safer than her being released in my custody. But I could also tell that whatever I wanted to do, Nathan would reject. He had a plan. I could see it working from one side of his head to another, knew he was figuring how to work it, how to put it into words and so into action.
“I’ve got no choice in this, do I?”
“Don’t do that.”
“I’m not doing anything. You won’t let me do anything, you won’t listen to what I want. What I need.”
“I meant, don’t trade on our relationship.”
“Excuse me?”
“Don’t let whatever we have come between me and my job.”
“‘Whatever we have,’” I mimicked. “There’s another stupid phrase. Something from a Sunday night movie of the week, from people who think they can use clichés and play a lot of fake feel-good piano music in the background.”
“Let me tell you what we need to do.”
“California Dreaming” came on the sound system. I listened to the entire song without even looking at Nathan. The next song prattled on about having fun in the seasons of the sun, and during the next song, Nathan’s cheeseburger and fries arrived, he poured ketchup on the fries, and started eating. At some point I stopped paying attention to him, to the music, the colors and chrome of the fifties interior, the pictures of Marilyn and Elvis and James Dean.
I didn’t want to think. I got up to look at the jukebox.
All the songs were fifties and sixties rock and roll. Mostly sixties. The music I grew up with and still love, CDs, the three-inch mini-size, no vinyl 45’s like a genuine jukebox. But the style was amazingly accurate. An old-style Wurlitzer, all woody-looking with the colored light tubes going up from the base over the curved top and the air bubbles bubbling up inside them. No doubt available from Wurlitzer by mail order, or from the Neiman Marcus catalog.
I saw the waitress headed to our table with my macaroni and cheese. Delicious. I ate the whole bowl, spreading fresh layers of ground pepper after eating through the previous layer. On the wall, I fiddled with the sixties-style control heads for the main juke, the kind that were typical at every diner during my youth. All chrome and plastic, a rounded top and bulbous front with a large window displaying pages you flipped using the metal dingus things protruding out the slot in the bottom. Songs were listed on small labels that slip into the pages, about twelve labels per page, each label listing one song, the artist, and the button combination to punch to hear it.
At the bottom of the control head, two horizontal rows of square plastic buttons having white faces with one red letter or number on each. One song for a quarter, five songs for a dollar. Feeding it quarters, I punched the two button codes each for five choices.
Elvis. Beach Boys. Connie Francis.
I barely paid attention, and the five songs ended quickly. I found some more quarters in my purse, stuck them all into the coin slot, and punched combinations of buttons until all my money was used up. The sound system started up with the little old lady from Pasadena.
Brittles had finished his food, sat quietly waiting for me to say something. At one point he half stretched a hand across the table to touch me, but pulled it back. I worked on deciding how I could play all of this and finally realized there was no other choice except to follow whatever he wanted me to do. That’s the only way I can get Spider out, I kept repeating to myself. The only way to get her released.
“It’s the only way,” I said out loud. “Let’s hear it.”
“All of it?”
He pushed his plate aside. Wiped his mouth with several paper napkins. Wiped his fingers. I nodded.
“Those two men,” he said. “The house belongs to Jesus Totexto. Don looked up his police record. A dozen arrests, most of them misdemeanors, a few felonies. At one time he seems to have been a bad-debt collector, another time a repo man. Got in trouble just last year. Chased a guy who owed money into a McDonald’s, pushed the guy behind the counter, and stuck his hand into the deep fat fryer.
“He was also a maintenance worker at Casa Grande. I figure he was at the housing development when you and I were there. He saw you, he told somebody. Who, I don’t have a clue. I also figure that he buried all those bones there. He knew exactly which spots had been excavated and wouldn’t be touched for years. Better than just dumping things out in the desert, where some new housing developer would run a backhoe through, laying sewer lines, dig things up.”
“The desert’s a big place,” I said. “Kinda dumb not to just drive over toward Yuma and pick a spot no developer is ever going to touch.”
“I never said Totexto was smart. But smart enough to know the exact plans of which areas on the grounds weren’t scheduled to be looked at for years.”
“Which one was Totexto?”
He hesitated, not wanting to describe the mutilations.
“The bigger guy,” he said finally, hurrying to talk so I wouldn’t dwell on the blood. “The other guy was called Early Thumb. A Pinal County deputy sheriff, although he’d been dismissed from the force some months back. He worked as a security officer at the boot camp, and for some reason he just kept wearing his deputy uniform. He was the next level up the food chain.”
“You think he set up the computers?”
“No. Somebody else did that. Probably Thumb collected the data, transferred it to a CD, delivered it to somebody. Except Totexto might have been smart enough to make copies for himself.”
“There’s a lot of holes in what you’re telling me.”
“This wasn’t random violence,” Brittles said. “Somebody knew exactly what inf
ormation they wanted, figured out who was most likely to tell what. None of this happened quickly. Whoever did it was very cool, very calculating. He started with this one, slicing him up, letting him talk, and letting the other guy shrivel with fear. Probably whoever did this promised the second guy that he’d not be tortured or killed if he could get the first guy to talk.
“Please,” I said. “Just…leave it.”
But he couldn’t.
“Torture requires patience,” Brittles said. “You can’t hurry it, you always got to make your head control what your hands are doing. You play games with the clock, judging how many minutes to torture and maim, how many minutes to stop it and let the victim hope it’s all over. You have the patience to judge the victim’s hope, rising up a curve, and just when it peaks you cut him again. I like old movies. You like movies. We’ve watched hundreds of hours of movie violence. But the only true violence you see on film is what happens to machines or animals.”
“Apocalypse Now,” I said.
“The water buffalo. Body almost completely chopped in two with one mighty swing of the…the, I don’t even know what the person used.”
“Enough. Enough,” I said, hands over my ears.
“It’s getting dark, it’s getting late. Don is going to call when he’s got more data. For now, let’s go back to my place.”
Too fatigued to think of anything else, I followed him mutely out the door. A small lime-green Volkswagen was parking beside our car. A bumper sticker on the back said WHAT WOULD JESUS DRIVE?
“What the hell does that mean?” I said rudely to the young couple in the car.
“Jesus wouldn’t drive an SUV,” the girl said with a huge smile.
“Jesus,” I said to myself.
27
I poured myself some pinot noir, looking at all of Brittles’s books. The only light in his study came from a west-facing window, and the falling sunlight lit up the room like a movie set. Rows and rows of books were highlighted against the walls, arranged by subject matter, standing exactly vertical, held together by all shapes and sizes of Mexican ironwood carvings serving as bookends. On another wall, an elaborate rack made of mesquite ribs held five wooden flutes, one of them distinctly different in design and texture from the others.
“That’s my shakahashi,” Brittles said from the doorway, toweling off after his shower. “Japanese. A bitch to learn.”
“Show me.”
He dropped the towel, walked nude into the room with no self-consciousness about his body. He raised the flute with both hands from its place in the rack, motioned me with his head to follow into the living room, where he sat cross legged on a three-foot-square soft velvet cushion. Expecting him to raise the flute horizontally, I was surprised that he held it vertical, his lips at the top so that he blew across the opening there, producing a mournful, delicate, elegiac sound that wavered in tone and intensity. He held the one note, then moved his fingers on the holes to play a sequence of notes in a minor key until suddenly he made a squeak.
“Sorry.”
“More. You aren’t even done by half.”
Hesitating, he put it to his lips, not playing for a moment. I thought he was thinking that we had no time for this, or that he wanted to get me in bed again, but as he slowly moved his lips on the flute, caressing his cheeks with the mouthpiece, I saw he was just trying to decide what to play.
The piece lasted four minutes, although I swear he played no more than half a dozen different notes and repeated sections again and again.
“Now your turn,” he said.
“I can’t play that thing.”
“No. Your turn to do something.”
“Do something?”
“Sing. Dance. Recite a poem.”
“What do you think about hiphop?” I said finally.
“Just do it.”
I sorted through different raps I’d written, not trusting to reveal myself yet with my latest rap about my life.
“Okay. Here goes.”
They call me Shorty but a tower over Bushwick Bill
The girl round the way with the same guy still
Chill with my girlfriends one night a weekend
Love J. Lo though I’m not Puerto Rican
I’ve been mistaken, smoked weed with Jamaicans and Haitians
While on vacation in the greatest city in the nation
That’s N.Y.C., I’m a b-girl with a capital B
And a rappin MC
So if you happin to see me
Just give me props if you’ve gots love for hiphop
And it don’t stop so cop the heat, hip the hop.
“Something more personal,” he said. “About you. With this.”
He knelt in front of me with his flute, blew a single note, sustaining the note by breathing somehow through his nose while he played. Who is this man? I thought, picking through all my raps to find the perfect one for him.
Not tonight dad
I have a headache
Put the chessboard away
If you’re busy I know where it’s stored away
But my favorite book is by my bedside
Could you read? That’s what I need.
There’s a story bout Adam and a story bout Eve
A story bout Noah, and a story bout Jonah
And when it’s all over, you can tuck me in
My one prince charming with disarming grin
While all these other men like to smile and front
But when my bedtime comes they know what they want
And some are so cute that I can’t resist
But I’ll always think of you as the handsomest
Who taught me that there’s nothing I couldn’t do
Now I count sheep chastised about for them what I wouldn’t do.
Setting aside the shakahashi flute, he sat on my lap facing me, kissing my neck, slowly removing my blouse, moving down…but if you’ve done it with a lover, you know what happens, there’s nothing more I need to tell you.
And yet…and yet…after he fell asleep, I went into the living room and watched the night sky. Brooding about why I was there and not with Rich. I mean, casual sex is one thing, and the first time with Brittles I’d mostly put out of my mind. But tonight our relationship had moved light years beyond casual.
I spent hours comparing the two men. Rich’s interest in Indians pretty much had to do with old bones and artifacts. Brittles lived as an Indian. An unfair comparison. On the few occasions when I talked with Rich about my attempts to find my daughter, he seemed to think it was more comforting to push me toward believing that it would be best if I never found her. Brittles liked her. He liked the two of us together. Not quite so unfair a comparison.
One thing seemed irrevocable. My Tucson house was never my home.
Brittle’s house felt like the home I’d been searching for.
Not the actual house, but the kind of home I wanted.
The kind of home I’d make for my daughter.
With all these conflicting thoughts in my head, I didn’t fall asleep until the wine finally made me drowsy. I laid my head sideways against the chair back, pulled up my legs onto the chair, and the last thing I remember before I fell asleep was the wonder of that flute and the magic.
revelations
Spider picked cotton for half an hour. Back and thigh muscles aching from continually stooping over the waist-high plants, removing the fluffy boles and stuffing them into her sack. Father Micah was in charge, picking himself. Some of the staff stood by, carrying water, some food, making bathroom runs every twenty minutes back to the main complex. Her sack filled, Spider brought it to one of the trucks. El Ratón stood on the wooden bed, about four feet high, hands on hips, watching her struggle to heave the bag up. Reaching down a hand, he took a bag and in one fluid motion threw it to the back of the truck. A red and gray motorcycle burred in the distance, slewing around a turn and braking quickly beside the truck.
“That’s enough, amiga,” Luis said,
taking off his helmet and holding up a cell phone shut. “I got a call. You checked out just fine. Leavenworth, amiga. What you doing in a bad place like that? Caught stealing credit card numbers, maybe? Sending lists through the mail, some federal fraud stuff? That you, amiga?”
For the first time since she came to the camp, Spider was afraid. But the rest of the day passed without anything happening, except that Luis gave her a ride on his motorcycle back to the main complex, dropping her off at her dorm.
“So what now?” she said.
“Tomorrow. We gonna clean some brush tomorrow. Chop some weeds, pick up some trash. Tomorrow, we gonna tell you more. Give you a test.”
“You’ll tell me about joining the Rapture girls?”
“Quien sabe? Just wear old clothes, bring gloves, wear a hat. Tomorrow you’ll be out in the sun all day.”
He revved the throttle, popped the clutch, and roared away.
But at three in the afternoon on the next day, Spider still waited, all the other girls in her dormitory off picking cotton. She thought of exploring the main complex, of trying to find the private rooms that Jennifer had told her about. Bad move, she thought. Wait it out. Wait for the test. Wait for Luis.
To her surprise, Father Micah came to get her at three-thirty.
“Some of that discipline duty,” he said with a broad smile.
“Picking up trash?”
“That’s part of it.”
“Why not early in the morning?”
“You mean, why not in a cooler part of the day? Three o’clock, that’s when it’s hottest. That’s when discipline really means something.”
He let her sit with him in the front seat of the truck. Several boys and girls sat in the back, Luis and El Ratón standing just back of the truck cab, their hands beating out rhythms on the metal roof. Another truck driven by a staff woman carried another dozen boys and girls. Father Micah drove south, leading the small convoy through Coolidge, stopping at a wide expanse of desert. He passed out heavy-duty plastic trash bags and some tools. Everybody seemed to know what to do without asking. Some picked up hoes, others took short-handled weed whackers, two others followed behind the laborers stuffing the trash bags.
