by Frank Bill
Tired, hungry, irritated. Anxious for amphetamines, Angus clasped his eyes and exhaled. “Let us spur the horses for a gallop.” Opening his eyes, he finished with “I’ve a single question.” He paused. Voices, he did remember hearing other voices like Fu’s when he was encased within the steel coffin of spikes. That he remembered. “Others, they’s more like myself?”
“Like you? Sort of. Yes.”
“No. Foreign-tongued. I recall conversations when I was in that fucking tin body sack of a tomb with sixteen penny nails pricking me at every angle.”
“There are others. My students. They teach another white skin known as Pete.”
That name rang a bell. Images drizzled down the snake hole of Angus’s memory. Pete. Pete. Cur’s Watering Hole. A shithole. A run-down shack. A house. Men bound by duct tape and covered in something sticky. Some of it was coming back to him. But most of it was tainted, seemed like one big fucking dream, the details or the meaning, his hunt for the crank, for his sister, Liz. Liz? She’d stolen what he’d cooked with that gar-mouthed pariah named … Ned.
Angus’s eyes whelped up. “They’re here?”
Fu shook his head. “Questions. Questions. Questions. No. They believe I’ve taken you to my senior, Si-Bok Lao, when I have not. I’ve kept you for my own means, that is, if you can survive. As I said, there is a test.”
“Tonguing goddamned riddles at me, survive what?”
Exhaling hard, Fu stared at Angus. “My training.”
That had been several years ago, before everything dissolved. When times were tough. When men and women lost jobs, but could scrap, cook crank, grow dope, do handyman work to get the layout of a person’s home and their possessions in order to thieve. And then a rumor of a militia group robbing the local Walmart spread throughout the working class. A group of ex-lawmen and military special ops who’d served overseas. They’d robbed not for the money but to prove a point. The robbery spurred an underground movement across the Midwest. That’s when things really unraveled. Got tougher. Debt piled up and the dollar was no longer worth the paper it was inked upon, and man, woman, and child had had enough of the bullshit laws and rules. Some believed it was these groups who took out the power grids.
Now Fu was feeble. Unwell. Seemed his early years of alcohol and cigarettes had damaged his liver, his heart, weakened his lungs. Internally he was not functioning properly. Was whittled down to the depth of a prisoner of war, more flesh than muscle and a railing rack of bones. He’d sent Angus in search of something more than those fuckin’ herbs. A strong dose of penicillin, an antibiotic to kill an infection, something to cleanse and bring his mind and body back to a functional state.
Here Angus sat, in the worn leather driver’s seat, hidden behind the tinted glass of the Tahoe. Dirt specked his view, taking the old road slowly, passing more and more abandoned vehicles, papers wadded about the weeds, plastic bottles of empty. He’d viewed humans beaten, shot, stabbed, or crucified, for what? Food. Fuel. Survival.
With his gut churning, Angus had a better understanding of why Fu had done as he did. Saved him from his reckless abandon. Otherwise he’d have ended up like one of these rotted specks smeared across the baked expanse of wilderness. The skills he’d discouraged himself from using for so long had been nurtured, fine-tuned him to become an ass-kicking machine.
In his search for medicine, he’d become tired and beat, wanted shut-eye. A place to rest, gather some provisions, ’cause one could never have too much; he turned down a long, winding stretch of dirt and gravel, hoping for a secure place to do all of the above.
In the front yard, from an oak tree, hung a pulped complexion leaning into a shoulder. A rope anchored around the shape’s neck, stringing the frame stiff as a copper wind chime from a limb of walnut for decoration. Cherry-tomato-sized holes stitched the outline. In its chest letters patterned the words THE MUTTS. Blood had spewed and baked black, ran down to bare feet that were dirtied with bruise.
It was that old fuck from the Donnybrook, Purcell. Goddamn, what are the odds? Angus thought.
On the radio in his concrete living quarters where he trained with Fu, Angus remembered hearing that once the U.S. dollar lost its worth, the militia groups took the power, then the bottom fell out and a real hell had inflamed each and every state, from the West Coast to the East. Men and women would have to depend upon one another, not others taking care of them. Those who had formed militias, or gangs, they’d be the wiser. The ruling class.
Angus carried a .45 Glock, 450 Bushmaster rifle. Extra clips of hollow-point ammo and empty jugs for fuel. Fu had his hand in many black-market schemes, and guns was one of them.
Out the windows, silence and the hint of smoke passed his inhale. Off in the distance sat a barn with something scarecrow-like hanging from it. Below Purcell lay what appeared to be a charcoaled torso. Did these men, the Mutts, he wondered, find Purcell? Is the body below me the infamous and unbeaten Jarhead Earl? Did the Mutts find them, believing they’d been the one to pull the trigger on ole Manny, their leader? Purcell and Jarhead had not been the ones who’d pulled the trigger. Angus did. They’d only pulled somewhat of a heist. Taking the Donnybrook’s earnings. This, Fu had explained to Angus. What robbery and murder had done placed a sizable bounty on each man’s head.
Shifting into park, Angus sat. Listening. And memories came like migraines, paining his mind with visions of his recent travels through the winding and beat concrete paths of road, searching for Fu’s medicine in a pharmacy in Paoli. Then Salem. Finding nothing. Witnessing gothic decorations similar to Purcell all throughout the highways and rural pavings of southern Indiana. Viewing a house or trailer busted, burned, or smoldering from flames. Men like scarecrows in a garden or pasture, mangled or ritualized. Dead vegetation, callousing heat, and the words he heard as a young boy, from his grandfather, speaking of the year without a summer in 1816. When spring came but what followed was ass-backward. No heat, just cold clothing the land with ash skies and farmers losing their crops and cattle.
Turning the engine off, sounds of heated metal popping beneath the hood as it cooled. Opening the truck door. Seemed the only vehicles that would run had to be carburetor engines due to the collapse of technology and the computer-chipped fuel-injected engines. And that was only if you had fuel and oil to make them go. Fu did. He had barrels of water. Fuel. Guns. Ammo. Blades of steel. Stockpiled plenty of rice and canned vegetables. Fu had been prepared. But he had run out of herbs and pharmaceuticals. And he was dying.
Paranoia branded Angus with the feeling of eyes watching him as he passed over the yard where, to his right, the screech of a chain braiding through the hickory slats of a swing flicked the air. A headless Captain America action figure lay with its garment snagged and torn. To his left hung a cracked and duct-taped leather heavy bag, strung by a barnacled chain that ivied up and around an oak limb.
Sliding the .45 from his side, Angus made toward Purcell’s faded farmhouse with a tin roof and its clay chipped barn off in the distance.
His chest pounded in his palms. Angus hoped to find something more than squalor. Some fuel or medications left behind in a medicine cabinet.
Bloodstained planks of stringer attached to the porch gave way beneath Angus’s boots. A bucket of decaying apple cores and eggshells lay next to the door, fuming with insects. He walked through the splintered front door. Hints of mold, perspiration, and struggle lined the once white-papered walls of the home. In short order it reeked of death.
Framed pictures of a man with a female and two young children hang on the walls. Jarhead Earl, he recognized, with his family, Angus surmised, out in a meadow where hogs grazed in the far.
Angus tried to remember a time before drugs spored throughout the Midwest. Wrung the working of their means. When men and women worked either in a factory for their hometown or upon the acreage for which they were born to bear something of continuance, be it a mechanism or roughage, when the worst one had to worry about was smoking too many cancer sticks and drinking
too much golden hops or sour mash instead of snorting, smoking, or shooting explosive chemicals that rotted the teeth, blackened the gums, and turpentined one’s body and mind. Where had it all gone?
In the living room, dust the color of burnt wood lined shelves of books, Old and New Testament, Foxfire books, hunting and trapping manuals, Hemingway, Bukowski, Céline, Shakespeare, Melville, Milton. There were figurines and German/Irish beer steins with lids. Pieces of memory. Dust coated. Flooring scuffed by fingernails. Stains in uneven circles, an upturned love seat with cushions hemorrhaging dull cotton.
A chill planed Angus’s spine. Fixtures without bulbs, lamps overturned. Papers wadded and tossed across the floor.
In the kitchen, dishes sat in the sink smeared the shade of a greasy lemon with green hair growing. Hints of fried pork lingered. Wheat-colored crumbs speckled the peach-shaded counter. Mason jars spread with the remains of a lardy grit lined the sink. Gnats irritated his meddling. Walnut chairs numbered in three were pulled from a Formica table freckled with gold spots, an ashtray of hand-rolled smoke butts, a packet of Zig-Zag rolling papers, and a wad of cut tobacco lay next to it, redlining Angus’s nerves.
Pushed into a corner was a platinum-tinted fridge next to the basement door that recessed into the stucco walls with handprints smearing unknown IDs. Faint pleas and corrugated grunts slipped from beneath its cracks.
Angus wiped the uneasiness from his thoughts. Narrowed his eyes, held his pistol high, stepped back toward the door. Positioned himself. Gripped the cold doorknob with his left. Turned it slow when the bark of a dog snorted and the front door from the living room screeched open behind him and a man’s voice came with the dog. “Goddamned ’passer!”
Angus turned to the tick of pins scraping across the floor in a drooling rush. A torso of ruby stood with sooty threads of hair fanning, lips a rash of poison ivy, teeth discolored pebbles with gum-ball eyes swiveling into his own, accompanied by a slick-coated dog of ash that reared and attacked.
Reaction was Angus shielding his left forearm into the dog’s slobbering mouth of marrow. Dividing the teeth that gnawed skin, tendon, and muscle. Pressing the steel into the beast’s belly. Pulling the trigger. Once. Twice. A quick yelp of fur, spine, and ass fragmented onto the floor. The slag-tinted beast lay strung on the curled linoleum.
The man rushed Angus, rearing a curved angle of steel. Years ago, Angus would’ve used fists, feet, knees, and elbows over a firearm, but times had changed. The reactive man lived, the slower man inked the final page of his existence. Angus punched the barrel into the creases of forehead. Dumb son of a bitch wielding a blade at a gunfight, Angus thought. Tugged the trigger. Blood spewed like a blown head gasket, greasing the kitchen’s décor, and the man dissolved onto the floor.
Fluid emitted from Angus’s left arm, warming his hand and dotting the curls of vinyl. Beside him, the smudged door unbarred. Feet came in stomps. A shoulder slammed his ribs. Arms circled and locked. Teeth bit through his faded black T-shirt and into the cobra-like muscle of his back. Gravity gave sideways, Angus took in the orange jumpsuit unbuttoned down to the attacker’s crotch and spotted with red. Hair pubic and stiff sprouted from his chest and pathed down over his cookie-dough belly. The man shouldered Angus across the floor. Rammed him into the countertop sideways. Teeth tugged at his muscle. The pain sliced through him. Wet lubed his ribs and his mind blinked.
COTTO
The blood-baked memories of his father painted his trail of guidance from day to day. Of how he’d arrived, how he’d react, carry out direction, and sometimes kill as they’d come silt-tongued and criminal-minded from South America.
Crossing the divide, his father, Manny, walked and hitched rides over the heated land where tiny red men, Yaqui Indians, had once crossed and found their resting below footing. He led Cotto and his mother, Kabeza, to a dope-smuggling village called Naco. Cotto was all of sixteen. The three of them holed up, lived off the grid, hidden from the Guatemalan government in a breached, broken, and leaking structure with a roof patched by aluminum, where termites, ants, and roaches lined the floor and walls, became their company. Outside those walls, garbage was picked from dumps. Sold to others to eat, to earn coin. There was no school in this area, no phones, clothing, furniture, or cars; it was peasants feeding on peasants, until Manny made contact with the coyotes. Men with shiny yellow watches and grease-burger guts, contacts that’d get Manny, Cotto, and Kabeza across the border and into America.
Trained as a Kaibil commando, Manny Ramos slept no more than three to four hours a day. As a commando, he woke to the obstacles of daily tasks that earned his nourishment, such as going hand over hand up a rope, doing push-ups, pull-ups, then sprinting three to five miles. Being schooled in guerrilla warfare, map reading, counterintelligence, demolition, jungle warfare, to devour anything that moved on recon missions, be it insects, reptiles, but also foliage such as roots or herbs, even tonguing midmorning dew from various organ-shaped leaves to keep hydrated. Cotto’s father was a man who’d lived by a code. Fought and struggled within the civil war of Guatemala in the late seventies and early eighties. Been involved in kidnappings and extrajudicial executions of suspected threats to the Guatemalan president and enemies of the state. When the heat escalated and numerous investigations surfaced about the commando units, Manny and several other men in his unit decided their responsibility was to protect themselves and their families. Each man abandoned all that he’d earned. Shelter, food, a job. Went AWOL to head north in search of prosperity, same as the Mayas, Aztecs, and the Spaniards before them, all had desired to build empires in America or along its border.
Manny wanted a simple existence, but that seemed fantastical. On the day of their departure to meet the coyote and cross the U.S. border, Kabeza had been anxious, had left before Cotto and Manny had woken. Unlike Manny, Kabeza was too trusting of strangers, felt all had good in them, that Manny was paranoid. She went to meet with the coyote who went by the moniker of Raúl at a dirt-walled watering hole. Kabeza was attractive. Curved where she needed to be, hair tinted to the pitch of a moonless night, skin heated the shade of a Brazil nut. And she was MIA upon the arrival of Manny and Cotto.
In a state of hysterical anger, Manny took to the dirt of the streets and alleys, asking any and all passersby if they’d seen this female graced by beauty with a binge-bellied male. Heads were shook. Mouths smirked. They’d seen and known nothing. And Raúl was missing, too.
Weeks later, Kabeza’d turned up in an alleyway beneath bean-sack curtains covering her maggot-hole eyes. Her once silk-soft flesh had been pinched by heat and welts that rang into the bones of her wrists similar to branding.
Cotto watched a choice being made, one that Manny knew all too well. One that Cotto did not want to follow, but his hand had been secured in an iron vise that tightened every time he turned his attention from it. Tugging him back, until he realized his true nature. Vengeance.
Anger stained Cotto’s father’s veins. The weeks that passed were learnings from Manny to Cotto Ramos. Teaching patience. Precision. How to become a man whom others dared not cross.
Cotto’s father explained how he’d wanted more for his son. For his wife. To not be submerged back into a chaotic existence of an eye for an eye. The life of criminalities and organized crime. But it seemed there was no other option for him except to do what he had been trained to do. Kill, take, and eliminate any who stood in his way.
It had seemed too simple. Knowing the coyote met at the watering hole with walkers, those who wanted to immigrate across the U.S. border to the north. Wanted to be placed into a menial job in the States, one that Americans didn’t appreciate. Saw as being too beneath them. Where immigrants could earn enough money to send back home. Pay for a new roof, remodel their shacks, build a nest egg for their families, to get ahead and return back home or maybe better themselves and one day become legal citizens.
Cotto and his father waited until Raúl returned to the watering hole. Studied this chicken. Watched
and followed his every movement. His going into town. Coming from the watering hole where he met other men, women, and their children wanting to travel to the north. Then his going back home miles and miles from where he’d met them. Once Manny and Cotto knew where Raúl laid his head, Manny came with nothing more than a nickel-plated Colt 1877 Thunderer revolver, not knowing if it’d even discharge the .41-caliber shells from its chamber. He had used what little money remained, buying it from a villager. Entering Raúl’s shack in the dry sand-blasted breach of night, Manny surprised him with “Remember me, you piece of scum?”
Cotto fence-lined beside his father. Watched Raúl, watched his eyes bore out of their coconut oil complexion. From the bone that housed them.
Manny held tight to the pistol. Took in his surroundings. A table to his left. No rugs on the dusted floor. No pictures upon the walls. Shelves to Raúl’s left, Manny and Cotto’s right held a revolver that lay on the center shelf within a clip-on holster. A thick square of shabby leather lay beside it with handcuffs chipped of their silver.
Raúl tensed his hands up like caution signs. “Wait, wait, señor, you never showed up, only your wife.”
“We showed up. Funny thing, my wife, she showed long before us. Went missing. Was found, rotted and sour as a fresh lime in the gut of a roadkill goat.”
Raúl’s eyes went to his left. Then back to Cotto and Manny. “Was … was not me. I…”
Precision wasn’t Raúl reaching with his left hand to the shelf, where the pistol lay. It was Cotto’s father testing the stale air, parting everyone’s hearing with the tug of the trigger. The explosive kick of the pistol that rifled the lead. Pinched a kiss between the thumb and index bend of Raúl’s reaching hand before his palm grasped the handle of his snub-nosed .38. A thud of a scream coughed from Raúl’s lips. Blood slobbered from the open wound that he pulled into his chest, pawed with his right hand, while the fresh meat of his left breathed a damp decoration about the sweaty cotton of his shirt that expanded with the pound of muscle behind sternum. His thumb hung nearly removed from his appendage.
