Angel Baby

by RICHARD LANGE

  The old man is still sitting at the picnic table when Malone wheels the truck around and bounces down the driveway to the dirt road. The vehicle is a little sticky going from first to second and there’s a long crack in the windshield, but it’ll get them where they’re going. Malone rolls down the window for some air, then rolls it back up because of the dust.

  “That didn’t have to go that way,” he says to Luz.

  “You were gonna sit there all day talking about books,” Luz says. “I need to get to L.A.”

  “You’re lucky he didn’t have a heart attack.”

  Luz stares out the window, done talking about it.

  “So where to?” Malone says. “The bus station?”

  “As fast as you can,” she says.

  A few minutes later they turn off the dirt road onto two-lane highway 94, which runs along the border from San Diego all the way out to the Imperial Valley. The fire zone ends here, and they wind through parched grassland and scattered groves of oaks. Luz keeps opening and closing the phone, checking for signal. When she finally gets one and punches in a number, Malone can hear the ring on the other end, and the message that the number is no longer in service. Luz’s face falls, and the despair revealed unnerves him.

  “What?” he says.

  “Nothing,” she says.

  “Tell me.”

  She sits quietly, composing herself, then says, “My aunt that was keeping my baby for me? The number I have for her doesn’t work anymore.”

  “Is there any other way to get in touch with her?” Malone says.

  “I know where she lived,” Luz says. “I’ll go there and see.”

  Annie. A single memory of her, the smell of her skin, slips through the bulwark Malone has built against the past. Even that hurts.

  “Do you want me to drive you to L.A.?” he says to Luz, the words spilling out before he can stop them.

  “I’ll be okay,” she says.

  “Take a minute,” he says. “Think about your daughter. Do you want me to drive you?”

  He watches Luz’s struggle with the offer play out on her face. After a few seconds, she says, “You can have the money.”

  “It’s already mine,” he says. “You gave it to me back in the canyon.”

  “The gun, too, then,” Luz says, sliding the .45 across the seat. “It’s worth a lot.”

  “Okay,” he says. “Deal.”

  They ride in silence after that, the old truck’s rattles and squeaks soothing in their constancy after the chaos of the last few hours. Chaparral gives way to suburbs as they skirt San Diego and turn north toward L.A., and Malone is strangely at peace. It seems to him he’s not driving anymore but falling instead, tumbling helplessly, blissfully, into his fate.

  15

  THACKER’S TRUCK IS LOW ON GAS, AND HE NEEDS TO TAKE A LEAK. The Mex doesn’t say anything when he tells him he’s going to stop, but Thacker can read his irritation in the line of his clenched jaw and the momentary narrowing of his eyes. The guy hasn’t spoken two words since they left the border—told him his name, Jerónimo, and that’s about it—and Thacker wonders what’s going through his mind. A quiet fucker can be a dangerous fucker. Or just stupid.

  He pulls off the freeway in Temecula and has a choice of Shell, Standard, or Arco. Arco’s cheapest, so he drives in, eases up to a pump, and steps out of the air-conditioned bubble of the cab. He decides to pay cash. Better not to leave a paper trail today.

  Walking across the lot to the mini-mart, he’s almost run down by a couple of girls backing up too fast in a Mustang convertible. They’re talking and laughing and blasting music and don’t even notice him until he shouts a warning. The driver, a ditzy blonde, looks like she’s going to mouth off, but then his uniform registers and she thinks better of it.

  “Sorry,” she calls out, scrunching her shoulders.

  Thacker approaches the Mustang and looks it over appraisingly. Where the hell’s a chick her age get the money for a car like this? Someone has a sugar daddy, that’s for sure.

  “Nice ride,” he says.

  “Thanks,” the blonde says. Tanned. Big tits. Her friend isn’t bad either.

  “Where you off to in such a hurry?” he says. Let them guess whether it’s an official query or friendly conversation.

  “We’re late for work,” the blonde says.

  Thacker moves in closer, rests a hand on top of the windshield.

  “Oh yeah?” he says. “Where at?”

  “Over at Applebee’s.”

  “Mmmmmm, good cheeseburgers,” he says.

  “Yeah, but I’m vegan, you know, so…”

  “So, no cheeseburgers for you.”

  “No cheeseburgers for me.”

  “Plenty of dick, though, I bet,” Thacker says.

  The girl’s big, fake smile disappears. Yeah, you heard right, you dumb bitch, Thacker thinks.

  “Excuse me?” the girl says.

  Thacker backs away from the car. “You gals be careful, okay?” he says, then lets them drive away. They’d scream bloody murder if someone called them whores, but that’s what they are, and if he had that Luz’s money, he’d prove it. He’d have both of them sucking him off in no time.

  He enters the store and walks to the men’s room, finds it occupied. Annoyed, he joins the line of customers waiting for the cashier. When it’s his turn, he tells the Mex behind the counter that he’ll be filling up and hands him his last eighty bucks.

  Back at the pump, he washes the windshield while the tank fills. As he draws the squeegee across the glass, Jerónimo turns away, staring out the side window to avoid eye contact.

  It costs $74 to top off. Thacker replaces the cap and opens his door.

  “I’m gonna grab a hot dog,” he says to the Mex. “You want something?”

  “No,” Jerónimo says.

  “A Coke? Some water?” Thacker couldn’t give a shit if the guy starves, but he needs him to be in good shape for whatever’s coming next.

  “Nothing,” Jerónimo says.

  Thacker walks back into the store and checks the men’s room again. The door is still locked, but the women’s is empty, so he uses that instead.

  Before picking up his change, he pulls a Jumbo Beefy out of the warmer and covers it with chili, nacho cheese, and jalapeños. He wolfs it down standing in a sliver of shade in front of the store, gulps from a bottle of Mountain Dew between bites.

  Jerónimo is sitting with his head tilted back, eyes closed, but comes back to life when Thacker opens the door.

  “Siesta time?” Thacker says, fucking with the guy.

  “Thinking,” Jerónimo says.

  Thacker gets back on the 15 and works the truck over into the far left lane, where traffic is whipping along. Past Lake Elsinore the freeway enters a range of rocky hills, and the country station he’s been listening to fades to sputtering static. He presses the scan button on the radio, and a few seconds later an angry drawl fills the cab, backed by an eerie, moaning organ.

  “Brothers and sisters, you know how folks are always daydreaming about heaven, about pearly gates and streets of gold and harp-playing angels? Well, I’m here to tell you it’s time they started thinking a little bit less about heaven and a little bit more about hell. Because hell is reality, people. The flames are real. The unimaginable, unending pain is real. The torment is real. ‘But that’s so depressing,’ you say. Ha! Listen up: If you aren’t scared of going to hell, there’s a darn good chance you aren’t going to see heaven.”

  Thacker grins at the fire and brimstone rant. It takes him back to the summer when he was fifteen, and Clyde Waters showed up in his hometown of Taft and took over as preacher of the Pentecostal Holiness church.

  Word went out that Waters was something to see, a natural man of God with a message of grace for all, and Thacker’s grandmother decided to investigate for herself. A lifelong Baptist, she’d been dragging Thacker to services since he was a toddler, determined to give him some sort of religious foundation, a
n effort his parents wholeheartedly supported because it got him out of the house every Sunday so they could nurse their hangovers in peace. As for Thacker, he enjoyed the post-sermon lunches at Sno-White Drive-In.

  So it was that one blazing July morning, instead of driving Thacker to the tidy little First Baptist church he’d memorized every warped board of, Granny turned her Buick toward the edge of town, where Pentecostal Holiness occupied an old Quonset hut set in a dirt parking lot across the road from an oilfield full of nodding pumpjacks.

  The inside of the church was hot and stuffy, and Thacker felt like Pinocchio in the belly of the whale, the way the ribbed metal ceiling arched overhead. He and his grandma slid into the last row of pews, drawing curious glances from the congregation, twenty old folks who fanned themselves with collection envelopes and folded newspapers. One of the deacons, a short, fat man bristled like a hog, made a few announcements about upcoming meetings and events and then introduced Brother Clyde Waters.

  Waters was a tall, stringy, baldheaded man, as dried up as a stick of jerky from too much sun and wind. He stepped up to the pulpit in a white shirt buttoned to the throat, a stiff pair of new Levis, and shiny black cowboy boots. His sermon started slowly, with corny jokes and too much scripture, and Thacker quickly grew bored. He was half-dreaming of dove hunting when a roar startled him awake. Something had taken hold of Waters. The man’s face was beet red, the tendons in his neck stood out like tree roots, and his voice had slipped into an incantatory cadence.

  For the next half hour he railed against the sickness of this world, the sin that stained mankind, and the everyday demons waiting to drag you down. He was a man for whom hell was as real a place as Taft or Bakersfield or New York City, who could describe the devil crouching on his tarnished throne as clearly as if he’d seen the sight himself, who was haunted to tears by midnight visions of sinners in the lake of fire, unfortunate souls who could have been redeemed if only they’d accepted Jesus as their Lord and Savior.

  Thacker hung on every word, transfixed by the preacher’s furious righteousness and caught up in the passion that led the man to pound his chest with his fist and wail, “I can’t wait to lay down this filthy body and go home to meet my God.” And when, at the conclusion of his sermon, Waters dropped to his knees, gasping for air, out of words at last, Thacker held his breath, halfway convinced that the man was about to burst into heavenly flame and be reborn as an avenging angel.

  “He was quite the performer,” was all Grandma had to say afterward, but Thacker was an instant convert. Astounded that a prophet like Clyde Waters walked the same dusty, potholed streets he did, he took to following the preacher whenever their paths crossed in the tiny town, ragingly curious about the man’s day-to-day existence.

  One Saturday afternoon he tailed him into the diner and observed from a few stools away as he ordered a patty melt. Another time, after spotting him and his wife in the grocery store, he pushed a cart up and down the aisles behind them and discovered that Waters liked bologna and Kraft Singles, orange juice, frozen lasagna, and sourdough bread. He also watched him get his hair cut and dawdled in the post office while he bought stamps and a money order.

  In little more than a month, though, Thacker lost interest in the preacher, because it turned out that Clyde Waters not only walked the same streets he did, he also lived the same stupid life. Who knew a messenger of God could be so boring? Thacker stopped following Waters and returned to his old pursuits: honing his shoplifting skills and trying to get further than dry-humping a neighbor girl he was hot for.

  It had been a couple of weeks since he’d even thought of the preacher when he happened upon the man’s car one evening, parked in a willow grove on the banks of a reservoir. Thacker had ridden his bicycle there to shoot tadpoles with his pellet gun. Curiosity piqued, he stashed the bike in a patch of weeds and crept up on the bird shit–spattered station wagon.

  The vehicle appeared to be empty, but a moan came from inside, a giggle, a whisper. Thacker almost ran off right then, but scolded himself for being a pussy. Slowly, slowly, he raised up to peek in the window. What he saw, he saw for only an instant before the fear of being discovered sent him fleeing: Russell Hall’s wife splayed out on the backseat, tits flopping, dress up around her hips, and Waters’s bald head between her legs.

  When Thacker tells the story now, it’s as a joke, and he never tells the last part, how he rode over to the Hall house one day soon afterward when he knew Russell was at work and let Mrs. Hall know what he’d seen. She asked if there was anything she could do to keep him from telling her husband, and before he could say boo, he was fucking her himself. He knows there was all kinds of right and wrong mixed up in that, but he’s never let it bother him too much. One thing is for certain, however: Nobody ever fooled him again.

  He hits the scan button over and over until an Eagles song comes up. Either he or the Mex stinks, so he adjusts the vent to blow more air his way.

  “You speak good English,” he says to Jerónimo. “Where’d you learn?”

  “I was born in the U.S., lived here most of my life,” Jerónimo says.

  “Oh yeah? Whereabouts?”

  The Mex grimaces and looks away. “Not to be an asshole,” he says, “but the less you know about me, the better for me, and the less I know about you, the better for you.”

  “Ten-four,” Thacker says. “No problem.”

  These punks and their shove-it-up-your-ass attitudes. Then they wonder why they end up wearing stripes on the wrong side of the wall. Fucking tough guys. Fucking idiots.

  When they get close to L.A., the fat man, Thacker, puts Luz’s aunt’s address into his phone and pulls up a map. She lives in Compton, in what used to be, in Jerónimo’s day, a black neighborhood, Spooktown Crip territory. Things must have changed. Thacker hands Jerónimo the phone and has him call out the directions, and he complies without kicking. Whatever gets them there fastest.

  They take the 91 west to Alameda, then head north. Thacker announces that he has to piss again.

  “For real?” Jerónimo says.

  Thacker chuckles to show he’s joking.

  “You wanted to kill me, didn’t you?” he says.

  Jerónimo doesn’t reply, just stares down at the map, at the little blue bubble that shows their current location. If you laugh at a clown, he’ll keep going, and Jerónimo doesn’t want to hear any fat cop’s jokes.

  They’re rolling through an ugly jumble of small factories, auto repair shops, and taco stands separated by trash-strewn empty lots carpeted with broken glass. The sky is the color of a bathtub ring, the sun a festering boil. A woman jogs from her car to a zipper factory with one hand clasped over her nose and mouth against the chemical haze, and psychotic pigeons strut along the deserted sidewalk, grudgingly stepping aside for a can man rattling by, his gimpy shopping cart piled high with recyclables.

  Jerónimo directs Thacker to cross a set of train tracks and make a right on Alondra and a left on Burris, a narrow tree-lined street of tidy stucco residences. The place they’re looking for turns out to be a Spanish-style house with arched windows and a large covered porch. There’s a square of lawn out front and a concrete statue of the Virgin of Guadalupe. A hand-lettered sign is wired to a telephone pole on the curb. SLOW, it reads, CHILDREN PLAYING.

  They cruise past and continue to the end of the block, Jerónimo watching the house in his mirror. The minivan in the driveway doesn’t look like the police, and neither do any of the cars parked on the street. Still, he’s a little worried. Luz’s mother might have gotten in touch with her and told her about his visit. Then Luz might have called the cops and said anything, trying to make trouble for him. The ringing of the phone in his pocket reels his thoughts back in.

  “What’s going on?” El Príncipe says. “I’m waiting.”

  “I’ll be heading back shortly,” Jerónimo says. “I’m right on her tail.”

  “You found her?”

  “I’m close. I’ll have good news f
or you soon.”

  “Perfect, because that’s the only kind of news I want.”

  “I get it,” Jerónimo says.

  “You get it?”

  “Yes.”

  “Good,” El Príncipe says. “Hey, did you know your son doesn’t know how to swim?”

  “What?” Jerónimo says, forgetting about the house, about Luz, about everything.

  “I asked him if he wanted to go in the pool, and he told me he doesn’t know how to swim,” El Príncipe says.

  “He’s young,” Jerónimo says.

  “If he’s here long enough, maybe I’ll teach him,” El Príncipe says.

  It’s scare tactics, straight up, but Jerónimo swallows his rage, keeps his cool. “I’ll call soon,” he says.

  “You know how I learned?” El Príncipe continues. “My father threw me in. It’s a fucked-up thing to do, but it works.”

  “An hour, maybe two,” Jerónimo says and ends the call, acting like he didn’t catch the threat.

  Thacker grins his stupid gringo grin.

  “Who was that?” he says. “Your jefe? The hog with the heavy nuts?”

  “Take me to the house,” Jerónimo tells him. “I’m going in.”

  “Hold on, now.”

  “Man, you don’t understand. I got no time to fuck around.”

  “I do understand,” Thacker says. “But you can’t go in there guns blazing. Let’s do this right.”

  What he comes up with is simple enough: They’ll both be Border Patrol. His uniform will get them through the door, and he’ll give Jerónimo his badge to flash in case there are any questions about him. Once they’re inside, Thacker will do the talking and feel the situation out.

  “And don’t go all loco if it looks like a dead end at first,” he says. “Let me work on them.”

  They park across the street from the house, and Jerónimo steps out of the truck and slides the Smith & Wesson into his waistband at the small of his back. He and Thacker walk up the driveway and peek into the minivan. Kids’ toys, a dream catcher hanging off the rearview mirror.