Big Maria

by Johnny Shaw

  “He is. It is. But it’s one thing to follow. It’s another thing to go along. I ain’t going to pretend what Harry’s doing ain’t the right thing. All I’m saying is that we ain’t the ones doing it. His mess, his cleanup.”

  Ricky said nothing, the gears turning in his head.

  “I don’t know what they got me on, but it’s some good shit. What were we talking about? I’m so high.”

  “There’s another way.” Ricky took off in a run out the door.

  “Please. Let me confess. Listen to my confession.”

  “Don’t make this harder, man. Do I look like a priest? Take a minute. Say your confessing to yourself. I’ll give you time.”

  Harry gripped the sword in both hands, holding it front of his body. Every couple of seconds, he took a practice swing, stopping inches from Cooker’s neck. Cooker flinched, his eyes and pants wet.

  “Please. Please don’t do that.”

  Harry rested the sword against his leg. “Yeah, right. Sorry. You want me to do a decent job, right? Have to take a few warm-up whacks. Practice swings are going to make it better for both of us.”

  “Thinking my confession in my head ain’t enough. I got to say it. So it’s official. Let me say it out loud.”

  “Yeah, okay. Show on the road.” Harry leaned back and took a big swig.

  Cooker sucked in snot through his nose, swallowed, and gathered his thoughts. He blinked the tears from his eyes.

  “I could’ve lived better. Done less bad. When I was sixteen, I cut this guy up because he—you know what—I didn’t have no reason. I done it because I fucked his sister and he was pissed. I didn’t kill him but fucked him up solid. He came at me with a Wiffle bat. Like that could’ve hurt me. He didn’t deserve it. Defending his little sister. She wasn’t no more than fifteen. That same year, I cooked up my first batch.”

  “I don’t got all day for your autobiography, okay. I ain’t making no documentary movie. Hit the highlight reel.”

  Cooker broke down crying. “I don’t want to die. Don’t kill me. Please don’t kill me.”

  “No begging. Here’s the best I can do, give you two more sins to talk out, then the confessing is all done. We call it. And no long stories, just the goods.”

  Cooker nodded, unable to speak, only capable of making spit bubbles from his trembling lips. Finally, he said, “If I only got two, they got to be good.”

  Harry nodded and set a beer bottle on the counter. As Cooker thought, Harry tried to slice the bottle in half with the sword, but only ended up batting it across the trailer with a loud crash.

  Cooker winced at the noise. “Okay. This one time, this trannie blew me and I knew it was a trannie. Like not in the middle, but like before it even started, like the whole time. And this wasn’t inside, in prison, where, you know, that don’t count. This was at my niece’s birthday party in the bathroom. I think it was like the clown’s assistant or roadie or whatever. Does that make me gay? It was only mouth sex.”

  “Of all the stuff you must’ve done, you picked that? Not really a confession even. More of a clarification. If it was just the mouth, you’re cool. We’ve all been there. Doesn’t count, not official. Last one.”

  “Yeah, the last one. It’s bad.”

  Harry waited, looking at the cut on his thumb.

  “I killed a guy for no reason. I was twenty-three. Didn’t know him. Didn’t rob him. It was late at night. We were the only two people out. Walking. Dark. I saw him and knew I could get away with it, so I did it.”

  Contemplating murder himself, Harry grew more interested. “How’d you do it?”

  “Knife. In the stomach. Over and over and over. Until my whole hand was in his guts. Until my arm was red to the elbow. I think about it and it don’t make sense. I’m not that guy, but I am that guy. I did that thing. I was tweaking, but that’s no excuse, you know? I don’t think he was going to cure cancer or nothing like that, some Mexican, but maybe he had a family.”

  Harry exhaled loudly. “That’s messed up. Least you’ve made this easier for me. It’s go time. If it’s any consolation, I forgive you.”

  Cooker nodded. The confession had given him a level of acceptance that he didn’t even know he had in him.

  Harry held the sword to Cooker’s neck, the cold steel making a sandpapery sound on his neck stubble.

  As Harry cocked the sword back over his shoulder, the door swung open with a loud crash. The surprise was enough for Harry to lose his grip during the backswing, sending the sword flying behind him.

  Ricky stood in the doorway, his eyes cartoon-wide on the twanging sword stuck in the door, inches from his head.

  “Are you out of your mind?” Harry yelled.

  “I came to stop you,” Ricky said, in mild shock. “I got a better idea.”

  TWENTY-EIGHT

  “Here’s the deal. Your granddaddy said you’re supposed to watch this fella like you did Ricky. Keep him alive, sober, out of trouble. He’ll talk like he don’t belong, but you know tweakers. Lies and pity and cowcrap. If you need to, gag him.”

  Bernardo and Ramón leaned on their shovels, listening to Harry. They appeared to be digging some kind of canal in the front of their property. They were shiny with sweat and red from their natural coloration and too much sun. If one of them held a lace-bodiced woman by the waist, he would be camera-ready for a romance novel cover.

  Cooker sat in the front seat of Harry’s car. Twitchy and scared, he didn’t like the looks of those Indians. For all he knew, the two savages were digging a mass grave.

  Ricky sat in the backseat, an eye on Cooker. The dogs barked. He placed a hand on Cooker’s shoulder. Cooker jumped. Ricky said, “I hope you like dogs.”

  “How long do we keep him?” Bernardo asked.

  “Until Frank says, I guess. I’m just the messenger. He asked me to drive the guy up here. You been to see Frank yet?”

  “Today, maybe. I sent a card and a bouquet of dahlias.”

  “We. We sent them,” Ramón cut in.

  “Those are the big, alieny flowers, right? I like those.”

  Bernardo climbed out of the long hole and dusted himself off, kicking up a thick cloud.

  Harry walked to the car and helped Cooker out. He practically had to drag him. Not because he was resistant, but his legs had gone limp from fear. Ramón climbed out of the trench to join them.

  Harry said, “If you want, put him to work. He doesn’t look like much, but he’s wiry strong. Help dig your ditch.”

  “It is a moat.”

  “Like around a castle?”

  “Yes. Better than a fence. When it is done, we will line the bottom with barbed wire, broken glass, and punji sticks covered in dogshit and Saran Wrap. Then we will fill it with water. Our compound will be impenetrable.”

  “And piranha fish,” Ramón added.

  Bernardo rolled his eyes and whispered loudly to Harry, “I joked about piranha, and now he has it in his head. Piranha would be ridiculous.”

  Harry kept his mouth shut and nodded. He turned to Cooker. “You’re staying here. Keep quiet. This could have gone another way, but it didn’t. This thing ends right, may even be a payday for you.”

  Cooker looked at the two big Indians and nodded.

  Bernardo grabbed Cooker by the arm and threw him in the hole. Cooker landed awkwardly, twisting his ankle. He looked up confused and had to sidestep the shovel that landed in the dirt between his feet.

  “Kind of rough on him,” Harry said.

  “But alive. That is our only promise. If we are slow to make it down the hill, tell Papa Frank that his friend is safe. We will make him very strong.”

  It took Bernardo and Ramón three days to finally get down the hill. The moat had consumed them. With the extra labor, they saw the opportunity to exceed their initial completion date. The little biker was a good digger and Ramón was happy. It was the biker, not him, smearing dogshit on the punji sticks.

  When they were done, Bernardo and Ramón stood on the
ir roof and marveled at their work. They both agreed that their moat was awesome.

  Cooker was happy to be done and back on his mattress surrounded by the dogs. He assumed he had been fired from Denny’s by now and his parole officer had made the bad call. He was a wanted man. But every time he thought about that sword to his neck or that head in the trash, he felt lucky. What had they done to make it all snotty like that? How long had they been killing? Why had those sick fucks removed the teeth?

  When Bernardo and Ramón finally visited the hospital, Frank wasn’t there. According to the hospital staff, he was in room fourteen, bed two. But when they went to the room, he was gone. He hadn’t checked out. He hadn’t been cleared by a doctor. He had vanished.

  Too high to deal with hospital bureaucracy, Bernardo and Ramón did the only thing that made sense. They sparked another blunt in the parking lot, called their mother, and waited for the storm to come to them.

  It had been surprisingly easy getting Frank out of the hospital. One switched chart, a change of clothes, and Ricky, Harry, and Frank walked out the front entrance. The glass door even opened for them automatically, as if the building approved of their mission. With Ricky’s bad arm and Harry’s leg in a cast, Frank actually looked the healthiest of the three of them.

  Ricky had been against it. Frank was sick. Frank needed care. Frank needed medicine. He did not need to go. Having him along would make it more difficult. However, in the end, it had been Frank that convinced Ricky.

  “I’ve had it with people taking care of me. People that mean well, but don’t bother to ask what I want. Like I’m some child that needs protection. You’re asking what I want? I’m telling you. I want to find our gold. And if I die in the mountains, then that’s where I die. On my terms. In my way.”

  Harry took Frank’s side immediately, laying out his theories about how apart they were a disaster, but when they were together everything worked. How they were all a part of the same destiny. The three of them were meant to find that gold. Together. Everything had gelled to make it happen. Leaving Frank would be like spitting in fate’s face.

  Frank was tough. Frank was an Indian. Frank’s health wasn’t an issue. There was no doubt in Harry’s mind that Frank would live to walk into the Big Maria Mine. And walk out with their gold. It was simply their destiny.

  Mercedes did not take the information that her father was missing calmly. Her baritone echoed through the halls of the hospital. The nurse at the receiving end tried to stay professional, but the onslaught was unrelenting. None of the witnesses could remember hearing Mercedes inhale. She was all exhale and volume and spit. The poor nurse’s crying could barely be heard over the cyclone of words and accusations.

  “He is an old man. An old man with a heart condition. A heart condition and cancer. How is it possible that you could lose him? Are you the idiot in charge? The idiot that may have killed my father through your negligence? Or is there a different idiot I should be yelling at?” And it went on and on.

  The other nurses came to their colleague’s aid. But their numbers only aggravated Mercedes more. Her volume grew and the expression of her outrage shifted to the physical. The head nurse called the police when Mercedes repeatedly kicked a drinking fountain until it disconnected from the wall, shooting water in a horizontal stream across the waiting room.

  Bernardo and Ramón knew what came next. They had seen this movie before. They ducked out without any guilt. Abandoning their mother was the responsible thing to do. Someone had to pay her bail.

  It took five cops and a few sore groins to wrestle Mercedes to the ground. Her low center of gravity challenged them as much as her surprising hand speed. But even pinned, it wasn’t until they cheated by using a Taser that the big woman was subdued.

  TWENTY-NINE

  Harry would have liked more prep time. But with Cooker under wraps and Frank on the lam, the sooner they hit the trail the better.

  It didn’t really matter. All the time in the world and they would still be ridiculously unprepared. For starters, none of them were physically ready for the twenty-plus-mile hike. Maybe Ricky. Harry figured that what they lacked in strength and stamina, they made up for in sheer will. That would have to be enough.

  Frank tried to help load, but it quickly took too much out of him. So while Frank napped in Harry’s trailer, Harry and Ricky loaded the car with all the equipment and provisions that they could scrounge in the limited time. Cases of water and beer filled the backseat. Food raided from the nearest convenience store: beef jerky, Slim Jims, sunflower seeds, CornNuts, bags of chips, Fiddle Faddle, Hostess fruit pies, and a variety of Little Debbie snacks. Camping gear, a tent, flashlights, sleeping bags, and pillows were tied to the roof.

  Harry loaded his bag of books and personal items. Even though he wasn’t planning on mining, he brought a book along just in case, Gold Mining and You by Rufus Blankenship, copyright 1957. It was part of the Junior Woodsmen series, some off-brand Cub Scout rip-off. One of those groups that taught kids good manners, civics lessons, and survival skills for when the bombs finally fell. Harry had never heard of the Junior Woodsmen, although their logo of a Tonto-esque Indian wrestling (rasslin’?) a bear was vaguely familiar. The Indian and the bear weren’t just mascots, they also acted as the instructors throughout the book, walking the reader through the easy-to-follow steps to finding gold, although it appeared that the bear did more work than the Indian, who was basically a loafer.

  “How are we going to carry all this stuff?” Ricky asked, staring at the overflowing backseat, trunk, and roof.

  “I got it covered,” Harry said. “Soon as Frank is up to it, we’ll pick up the boat.”

  “Another boat?”

  “There ain’t any bridges over the Colorado this far north and no roads on the Arizona side that go near where we need to be. We have to take a boat over the river and then hoof it the rest of the way. The river will be the easy part.”

  Mercedes sat in the holding cell angrier than she had been in a very long time. It felt good.

  Everyone has a neutral emotional state. Some people are happy until tragedy befalls them. When the tragedy passes, they return to their natural state of happiness. It’s like a default setting. There are happy people and unhappy people. Nice people and assholes. Everyone has a gear they idle in.

  Mercedes’s neutral state was nowhere near neutral, closer to wrath. She was naturally angry, even if she had spent the last thirty years attempting to suppress it. A volcano building up pressure. A force of nature that could destroy the village below at any moment. In that jail cell, she was dangerously close to another eruption. She was about to go Vesuvius on anyone who got in her way.

  She knew the cops were just doing their job. She had trashed the hospital waiting room and goaded them into a fight. But fuck them. Pigs and their power. Fucking hair-pullers, Tasering a lady.

  Mercedes preferred Tasers over pepper spray. They might hurt more, but the effects didn’t last as long. And you got that weird sexual high from the tingly feeling it left throughout your skin and body. Mace and pepper spray were just annoying.

  In her younger, wilder days with the Native American Insurgents for Liberty & Sodality (NAILS), Mercedes had always looked forward to that moment when the pigs arrived at their protests. They would adjust their riot gear and Nazi-walk toward the protesters, batons at the ready. No interest in a fair fight. Just a beat-down they could jerk off to later.

  She loved a good fight. It’s the whole reason she had joined the movement. She couldn’t care less about saving tribal land or better education for Indians or any of that crap. She loved the protesting and the yelling and the fighting and the passion. And the pissed-off-ness. It was the only time she felt liberated.

  It had been a long time. She was fifty-two and felt it. After her deadbeat husband disappeared, she was forced to work three jobs to support the boys, sidelining her from any real action. By the time the boys were grown and she had put some money away, the coalition had disb
anded and violent protests had gone the way of rotary phones. The complete lack of passion that the eighties and nineties brought, took whatever rage she had left and jammed it deep down. Protests had become nothing but slogans, body paint, and drum circles. She missed the fighting.

  Sitting in the cell with little else to do, she thought of the good times. The picket-turned-riot down by Indian Wells over some forgotten land dispute. She broke two ribs there. It still felt worth it as she vividly remembered that rock hitting that pig’s face. The UFW strikes in the Imperial Valley when Chavez was at his best. It was a shame that nobody hit scabs with bats anymore. Then there was the sit-in to protest breaking ground for the new prison. That was the time the cop tried to fuck her in the back of the wagon but ended up with a ballpoint pen sticking in his left testicle. It went in like a meat thermometer into raw turkey. She almost started celebrating Thanksgiving to annually relive that stabbing, but as a Native American she just couldn’t do it.

  Bernardo and Ramón considered leaving their mother in jail. They discussed it. They even made one of those lists that had the pros on one side and the cons on the other. It was close. The cons actually won, but her being their mother and what she’d do when she eventually got out was like a triple pro. They decided to post bail but weren’t in any hurry to do so.

  Less high, they were better prepared to find out what had happened to Papa Frank. Through a best-of-nineteen series of rock-paper-scissors, Ramón was chosen as the spokesman. He sheepishly walked to the nurses’ station, eyes at his feet.

  “Excuse me, ma’am,” he said, just above a whisper. Women made him nervous, and pretty women even more. The nurse at the desk was a stunningly beautiful black woman.

  “Take a number and a clipboard. Fill it out front and back. A doctor will see you as soon as possible,” the young nurse said without looking away from her computer screen.

  “Excuse me, ma’am,” he repeated.

  The nurse made a show of it: huge exhale, slow head-turn, dark eyes staring at Ramón, an exhausted “Yes?”