God Is a Bullet (16 page)

To her those songs represent a time of permanence. The time of the rock-ribbed world. Of simplicity squared. We were, she feels, a country that seemed to eat from the same plate, breathe the same air, look up into the same clear sky,
and see the same God who looked down on us with His blessings, as we were the one people of His image.

Of course she knows this is all so much prepackaged memory. But she sits there anyway, a little drunk, a little teary-eyed, and she can’t help her suffering as she stares down at a picture of Gabi and Sam and Sarah. She can’t shake loose the feelings, and she won’t put away the photo.

There is nowhere to place all that. It stands in opposition to all things. She knows how much a broken heart is worth on the open market; she’s been trying to peddle one for years. But this does not alter her emotional view. That music, that music bleeds to the very heart of things. It gives her strength, even though she hates knowing that it enjoined them all in a cleverly cloaked fable: Illusion is at the center of all reality.

She’s got number three pretty much worked over when John Lee’s Caddy tires into the driveway. By the time he’s coming through the door, she’s got number three scored and number four poured.

John Lee tosses his keys down on a table in the foyer. He’s carrying a small folded garbage bag that looks like it might have a couple of videos in it. Stopping in the hallway at the far end of dogleg, he reads the signs: wifey dear at the bar, glass tinkling like the tail of a rattler warning him not to get too close. After a perfunctory hello, he turns and heads toward his study.

Maureen has noticed the bag under his arm and smirks. She turns to watch the smog help kick up a brilliant sunset. John Lee comes back into the room, around the bar, and pours himself a healthy Scotch.

“I talked to Arthur today,” says Maureen.

John Lee takes a drink, relaxes into a “so what” look.

“He says he hasn’t heard from Bob in about a week.”

“Bob is a fuckin’ idiot.”

Maureen’s tongue starts to rim the inside of her mouth. “Really?”

“Really.”

“As defined by whom?”

When she sits there like that, with her head cocked up and around and not moving, he is reminded of a deer that has been shot and stuffed.

“Is it true you offered Bob a situation managing the development?” he asks.

“Talk about old news.”

“So it’s true?”

“Yes. I felt that since … He needed a change, John. A healthy change. Arthur felt the same way, too.”

“Don’t consult me on this.”

“Consult you?”

“The boy works for me. It was me that got him the gig over a lot of … Just de-ball me at every turn, right.”

“Pass me the shaker and the gin, I have a feeling I’ll need a few close friends inside me.”

“Be your own fuckin’ bartender.”

“Okay.”

She gets up, comes around the bar. They try to make as much space as they can for the other, as if any contact would lead to ultimate contamination.

“You know, John Lee, when I first met you, back in the Paleolithic era, I found you modestly charming and weak. But like the polish on a cheap pair of shoes, your modest charm has scuffed away to leave you as you really are.

“Now, to your weakness.” Her tone drips with the malicious. “I didn’t mind it so much when I was young. There was something docile and sweet about it. Of course, I didn’t know any better, and in your uniform you surely gave out the wrong impression. Sometimes I actually believed you were sensitive. Imagine that … But your weakness by day brought out the mother in me, and at night, at night, it gave me ample opportunity to be on top.”

“You’re really putting it out there tonight.”

“I’m shooting to bat three for four, baby.”

There’s just too much her, between her and her furniture and her music, so he goes over and shuts the radio off.

“I was listening to that.”

“You better watch your mouth tonight, you piece of rank clit. I’m in no mood.”

“I’d divorce you, John Lee, but I’d have to give up half the money I earned and then I wouldn’t get the pleasure of grinding your guts into the ground a little at a time.”

He shoots his drink down. That liquor wash he can feel right up into his pecs.

Maureen continues. “You don’t know how many times we’re at a social function, a party, a wedding, one of the many trivial pursuits we have to do together … You don’t know how many … Oh, let’s not forget church! Especially at church! Especially there! I’ll just sit and wonder while they’re giving out the communion wafer how many different ways there are you could possibly die of cancer.”

John Lee’s eyes have slipped toward the picture of Gabi and Sarah and Sam. Ultimately they lock onto Sam. It is like walking down the hallway of a terrible scream trailing to an end. A cocky smile no more, Sammy boy, he thinks. Even though repelled by the horror of it, by his complicity in it and the fear that it brought home, there is a blood-soaked spot in the white core of his being, a moral mischief knowing Mr. Cocky got it bad. John Lee gains a humiliating, morbid pleasure, imagining he could beam himself into the moment when the letter opener was picked through Sam’s tongue and he could whisper in Sammy boy’s ear, No more lickin’ clit. Not with that mouth.

The blood rush goes right to John Lee’s tongue. He shoves his glass hand in Maureen’s direction. “Say what you want, but you’re not gonna humiliate me anymore like you did with Sammy boy.”

For an instant, she is caught off guard. There is a touch of irony to John Lee’s presence, in the way he seems to knowingly relax within his own fury.

“You think I don’t know about you using that managerial job crap to bait your humps. You think I don’t know. A little pepper last year, a little salt this year. Bob ain’t the next in line.”

His tone becomes threatening. “Consider yourself lucky.”

“What does that mean?”

“What does that mean?” he mocks.

“You heard me.”

“Maureen, you could end up with your own personal Jack the Ripper slitting that sagging neck of yours!”

“Fuck you!”

He screams now, his voice cracking: “Don’t fuckin’ push it.”

“Why don’t you crawl back in your study and get yourself off?” she says nervously, but not willing to back down. “You know what I mean? At least I don’t have to bring my humps home in a brown paper bag so I can watch little boys with their mouths—”

He goes for her. It is all an absurd blur. White knuckles tearing at a train of black hair. Her arm wheels across the bar, taking out shaker and ice. He goes to drag her from the bar. She evades his grip, tries to run, half stumbles, one high heel does a somersault away from a falling leg.

He’s on her quick. His hands dig into her face. “Come on, smart-ass. Come on, humiliate me now! Come on.”

One of his hands flies free, whipsaws back, and cracks her so hard in the face her jaw snaps and her teeth click hard.

A half turn and she sees herself in a wall mirror. Her face is the color of salt and spotted with blood. She tries to spit some of the blood from her mouth into his face but misses, and he hits her again.

She goes down and tries to crawl away, but he puts his knees against her spine. Gasping, she tries to hide her face. He hauls back an arm and aims at the bones in the side of her face with an open hand. His arm is moving scythewise and inside his head all he can think of is beating that face till
it looks like a piece of spoiled meat, when he flashes on …

The gas-bloated frame that bore the woman, unrecognizable. The skin where it had burst apart and the open lesions rank with maggots leeching pink-brown muscle. The bullet wound to the side of the skull that left shards of bone with blood and brain jelly trailing up the wall like the spanning wings of a bird
.

It has become an indelible part of his subconscious. It taints him and sears thoughts he has not yet had, poisoning the well of innocence, if any such well ever existed within him at all
.

His arm stops. He stands. She lies there conscious but not moving. Her mouth forms small bites of words. Her eye lifts a bit and locks onto John Lee swaying there above her.

Come morning Bob and Case are racing through the asphalt nervous system of the southland toward San Diego. The shoreline has a splash of red tide in it, and small pockets of smog are collecting over the last wetlands that face the freeway. It’s only spring, so summer ought to be a double dose of nasty this year.

They’re both still pretty tight, watching for the blue boys. Bob sips at a piggyback-size double coffee. “Tell me about Cyrus.”

Case sits there in the shotgun seat with her arm hanging out the window like some spent trucker. “Chaos,” she says.

She doesn’t say a thing more. “That’s it?” Bob asks.

“Isn’t that enough?”

He starts to make a sound like a question but she cuts him
off. “I hear ya,” she says. “You want to get into that
inner person
crap.”

“I just want to try and get a handle on him, is all.”

“Well, I’ll give you a taste. I’ll give it to you like he would, except for the little flourishes of psycho poetics he wraps it up in. Yeah …”

She lets her head lean against the door frame, lets the wind take a run at her.

“Yeah,” Case says again, only this time with the cold-handed touch of someone fielding a proposition they aren’t interested in.

“Our boy was a junkie. He was also a pimp and a shooter and a prostitute. He was a small-time field hand for the straight and narrow boys. Selling all their goods. Doing all that bow-down time.

“Well, somewhere in that book of his, I don’t know which chapter and verse … You see, when he got hold of me I hadn’t quite started to bleed yet and he was maybe twenty-six, twenty-seven. But somewhere before me he found the Left-Handed Path. That’s what they call it. The Left-Handed Path.

“Whatever happened to him, I mean, however it really happens, as no one in their true mind ever knows, he put enough oven cleaner inside that brain of his and it was the end of the cloud master. Instant radicalization.

“He had the purpose after that. The focus. Zen boogie in shades of black. He saw the clear light. I know I’m mocking a bit, but …”

She takes a cigarette from her T-shirt pocket. She’s two hours up and half a pack in.

“It got him off junk. I wasn’t there, but I know some who were. The Ferryman … he saw it go down. Said Cyrus locked himself in that old trailer I pointed out to you. The one back at the Ferryman’s. Over the other side of that hill.”

Bob nods and for a stretch of moments notes a slick of red
tide reflected under the sun. He recalls all the blood in last night’s dream.

“Locked himself in that trailer,” says Case. “Like some Indian sweat lodge trip. They said he did it cold. And in one straight blow. In that grisly wrecked trailer. With summer dead on that metal roof. Nothing to perk him. Not methadone, not Robaxin. Nothing. Whatever was in that head of his had anchored him.”

Bob grows anxious watching that red tide. He thinks about Sarah and what the dream could have meant.

“Thinking on it,” says Case, “maybe I know what was in that head of his. Hatred. Hatred is the right strength oven cleaner to put in your brain and do the job.”

“You talking about him, or you?”

Her head flicks to one side. “I don’t know. I don’t know where I start and he leaves off sometimes.”

She sits back in the seat trying to feel the hard of it somewhere within her conscious self, trying for some pitiful small spot to ground her against the moving car as it winds through miles. Sitting there talking about Cyrus, the depth of the confrontation they’re driving toward suddenly unfolds in front of her. She starts to get a little anxious and light-headed, and her voice is tremulous and angry in the same wave. “Cyrus, fuck. He is darkness at the break of noon, Bob Whatever.” Her teeth look sharp against her pinched mouth. “He is the scream from a silent razor across your throat,” she adds. “He wants to make insurrection happen. He believes in breeding corruption like people breed dogs. Defilement. Seeing families suffer. That’s all the mojo in his head. Mankind has to go down. It’s the burning wreck of a fuckin’ bullshit middle-class
Titanic
and he is Captain Rhythm Stick putting it up their ass. That’s why he is so dangerous. Death looks good to him. It’s part of the prize. He’s like those freaks who find Jesus.”

Bob sneers at the insult of that comparison.

She counters, “If you’re gonna try and put him into some capsule review of a psychotic, you’re using your shirt collar as a dicksleeve.”

He sneers again.

“As mad as you think he is, there’s motive behind him. That’s why I believe he didn’t go into that house for nothing. Didn’t take … your kid … for nothing. He’s not a psychotic. You don’t see it right. His religion, like all religion, is politics.”

“Politics?”

“The politics of the what I want versus what you want.”

“It isn’t politics,” he says. “It isn’t religion. No fuckin’ way. What it is, is plain old-fashioned butchery.”

The great one-eyed hunchback camera painted on his shoulder starts to hulk up in the angry muscles that give the gearbox a hard kick. “And I want you to remember that’s my … was my wife back there. And I don’t want to hear comparisons about …”

Case gets aggravated. “You asked the question. I laid down an answer.”

“Some answer. It sounds like you’re trying to make a case for him.”

“Good choice of words.”

He doesn’t catch the humor in her comment. Instead, he goes after her: “The way you talk is the disease of the times. You compare religion to that mojo. The world has become a secular comparison nightmare.

“Religion is not any of that. Not any of it. It is the unmoved truth that all principles spin out from. It is a moment of attainment. It is faith in being; it is being in faith.

“It all disgusts me so. There’s only two real ways to handle this. What you can’t clean up in the family, you clear up with a jury. What you can clear up in the family, you won’t have to clean up with a jury. End of story.”

She sits there like someone not interested in what the salesman is selling.