God Is a Bullet (17 page)

“If they did it right,” he says, “the streets wouldn’t be such scrap heaps of humanity with every kind of …”

Her look stops him. A look that is prowling his comments for the comment to come, waiting for his point, which is
her
.

“What you mean,” she points out, “is an atheistic, ex-junkie, bisexual piece of scrap heap humanity like myself.”

He watches road signs instead of answering.

“You’re a real clit dryer, Bob Whatever, you know that?”

Bob whistles, shakes his head. “They got you pretty good, didn’t they?”

“I wouldn’t use the word ‘pretty’ and I wouldn’t use the word ‘good.’ ”

She kicks off her boots and brings her bare feet up. She rests them on the dashboard. She pulls her jeans up a bit to scratch her foot, and Bob can see tattooed around her ankle a kind of artful shackle.

“Your boy cleaned up his act, but he kept all his troops junkies, didn’t he?”

“He sure did.”

“Talk about the mojo. He worked your heads pretty good, didn’t he? But I guess you can find a comparison for that, too. It’s all religion, philosophy. Right?”

She knelt in the dust at the Ferryman’s, collapsed under her own weight, twisted to one side like a broken squeeze box, tendrils of blood stretching out like liquid mercury from the corners of her mouth. Cyrus circled her, the ultimate ringmaster over the unfortunate creature. She was panting, groggy
.

The weight of her head on her neck almost too much to hold, her weaving shadow made her dizzy, dizzier as small red gems broke free from the tendriled blood. Small red gems that hit the dust and jellied like a glass eye. She stared at the small bloodlets collecting dust and in each she saw a little girl. The one that was, the one that was to pass away. She could see herself curled up inside those small red umbrellas
collecting dust. And she remembered the other little girl curled up inside the carcass of a dead beast
.

How one life can be killed so many times is the question. She looks out the window, scans the blue and silver glass buildings that wink with sun, the harbor with its gray boats built for saluting, the bridge over to Coronado with its seaside swells. It’s just a blanket of picture-postcard existence that seems literally thrown over the land. Just some great human theme-park ride that has no bearing on her feelings. She is like a tube of flesh inside a straightjacket skin.

“He didn’t work our heads,” she says. “I wish I could say he did. It wasn’t his charisma or chemistry, not his power or power of prophecy. You could blame him like you blame Hitler or Jim Jones or Rasputin or Charlie Manson for the crimes of their coolies, but it’d be a fraud.”

She leans around, all disheveled and tired and wearing a long-sleeved shirt that her anxiety has sweated through, leaving her armpits and back targeted by huge stains.

“The truth is worse. A hole looks into a hole and sees itself and looks full. I was, once upon a time, a junkie waiting to happen. And I happened upon the right ringmaster, who had a magic needle. And I bowed before the magic needle—that was my devil—so when I got low enough I could make a god out of it.

“The devil, which is only an idea, is an excuse for evil. A philosophy, if you will. Just as God, the idea of God, is just an excuse for good. They’re the fuckin’ needle, God and Devil, and they’re waiting for junkies like you and me to happen.”

He listens to this windfall with a kind of blasted-out certainty of at least one simple idea. “Words don’t define what faith allows,” he says. He runs his hand through his hair and turns his full attention back to the road. “I’ll keep my faith, you keep the rest.”

“Remember something else,” she adds. “From Simi Valley all the way out to that nice little three-bedroom community
of yours, you’d be surprised how many of God’s children, who talk just like you, are smoking or snorting or shooting some chemist’s handiwork the ringmaster brought them. You’d be surprised how many would be swapping sexual organs if they could.”

The cop in Bob asks the question: “The ringmaster? You mean Cyrus?”

She nods. “He worked that valley of yours better than your councilmen.”

“You know that?”

“Know it. Seen it. Done it.”

They run east on 94 toward Baja and the border.

It’s cigarettes and long throws of silence. Outside Jamul, Case takes over driving. At a rest stop, they pass each other around the hot running engine like two prizefighters between rounds. The towns east of Jamul have that eaten-up-by-poverty look, their main streets little more than boarded-up breakers trying to keep back the sand and sweep of Mexico.

Their plan is to check out Jacumba Airport, which is out beyond the Carizzo Gorge. Errol Grey keeps a small plane there when he flies down from Mojave to work the border. Somewhere along that pearl string of truck stops and bars, Errol Grey and Cyrus will have a date to talk about filling up their Christmas stockings.

Bob sits behind the dark of his closed eyes, evaluating the particulars of the dream and attending feelings of something forgotten, jump-cutting to the new information of Cyrus dealing in Antelope Valley and him breaking his habit in that old trailer by the Ferryman’s. And what about that remark of
Case’s right before the Ferryman wandered by, when she pointed to the trailer and told him that’s where the Furnace Creek murder took place?

Was Cyrus in junior high or high school when the murder went down?

“What do you know about the Furnace Creek murder?”

It is the first thing said to Case in over an hour. She doesn’t even look at Bob as she says, “Not much really. Only what Cyrus told me.”

“What did he tell you?”

“He told me he murdered the ‘nigger bitch.’ ”

Bob comes up in his seat, waits for her to continue, but she doesn’t.

“That’s it?”

“That’s it.”

“Nothing more?”

“If there was, it wasn’t gonna be me that asked. I got one throat and I wasn’t about to have it cut.”

In the afternoon, Bob and Case eat at the Campo Food Station, which is within rifleshot of the entrance to the Campo and Manzanita Indian Reservations. No speculators dream here. It’s just a pothole of cheap siding painted pink, with a single exhaust fan in the center of the ten-by-ten dining room that pulls out every conceivable stretch of living air but leaves behind the rank perfume of the disinfectant used to hose down the brick floor.

“You say he killed the old woman, then he went back all those years later to get off junk? He went back to the same place. Why? What was in his head?”

Case sips at a bowl of beef broth. Since she got off junk, that’s about all her stomach can usually get down before dark.

“What difference? It won’t tell you where he is now. And now is what matters.”

Bob shifts away from her comment. He sits picking at his food and thinking. At the table behind them facing Case is a carload of maquiladoras chicking away in Spanish. Case listens and watches these borderland girls who are panning for the gold of room and board and a sleepwalker’s wages in the fenced-off factories of the Zona Industrial. Even with their teased hair and faces powdered they look to be all of seventeen, full of long hopes and short budgets.

All except one. She seems older. Case notices that she has the crinkled look of a decade more of laydowns and she listens to her friends’ high-pitched clutter as if she knows that plans are just a disappointment in the making.

The older one’s eyes drift from face to face, only remotely pulled along by their conversation. A sort of night-eyed silence that seems to live quietly outside anything real. In that moment, Case sees Lena. Sees her sketched in faint moves the woman makes. The wild exhausted girl she had shared nights and needles with.

“I’m the turtle, Case, and you’re the bird,” Lena said. “That’s the way it is.”

One girl half whispers in Spanish to the older one about Case staring at her. The older one waves it off with the magic wand of the straw swirling around in her drink. They continue chirping in Spanish.

They all laugh and huddle up close, clucking away till there’s barely enough room for sunlight between them.

“I went back to the house on Via Princessa,” says Bob. “A month after the murders.”

Case stops sipping at her broth. “What?”

“I went back. At night.” He pushes his plate of chicken and beans away. He wipes a hand across his mustache. “Around the same time the murders were supposed to have taken place.” He talks like one would in a confessional. “I walked the whole thing through my mind. What we know, anyway. I lived the whole of it.”

“Why would you punish yourself by—”

“I’m making a point, okay?”

Case stops. The girls scrounge up enough among them to handle the bill. As they walk past, they slink a look at Case and then one at Bob. Case notices that at least two of them have the requisite gold crucifix hanging around their necks. Probably there like garlic, to keep the clap away.

“I sat there in the dark, crying,” Bob says. “And after I stopped crying, I tried to draw out of those walls what I could about what went down and why. At least draw out of those walls what they knew, as if there were messages there I could pick up, like in a telepathic way. But I also went there for strength. To take it all in. All the pain. I’d draw in all that pain, and plan, and see through to the end of what went down and why and how and then what I would do if, no, when I got that fuckin’ beast—”

He freezes up. He has overstepped his moment of honesty. He senses he sounds like a murderer in the act of becoming.

“Anyway. People go back to a place for a reason. Why’d Cyrus go back to that trailer?”

“Well … I was told he was raised there.”

“In that trailer?”

“I don’t know that exact one. Probably. I know he was raised there. On that spot. He walked it enough when we were out there. The woman who lived there raised him.”

“The one that was murdered?”

“Yeah.”

“I’ve got to remember when that was exactly. How old Cyrus was … If he was ever brought in and questioned. Go on.”

“The woman that raised him. She found him on the road wandering around. His folks, or his stepfolks, they just trashed him one day by the side of the road.”

“Why?”

“I don’t know. The man was Army, the woman a cunt. Maybe they were both cunts. Maybe Cyrus was already
Cyrus. What difference does it make? He is, isn’t he? Anyway, what little I know is because Le … I got it in bits and pieces over the few years I was with him.”

“If I could tap into the office computer and start digging through those old records. There might be something …”

“Forget all that. We get hold of him you can dig all the records you want out of his heart.”

Bob is turning a thought over in his mind and only half listening. “There is a moral government to all this. I know it.”

“Moral government? Forget bullshit slogans.”

Bob isn’t listening now, he’s intent on that thought. He continues: “Maybe the connection between one act of murder and the taking of Gabi is an exercise which I must deal with. Me. It’s my job task. I mean. Two murders. Twenty-five years apart, fifty miles close. The same man at the center of two atrocities. Maybe it’s random. There is no sure connection. But …”

“You’re trying to sell yourself life insurance, right?” she asks. “That’s what you’re doin’. Make it all nice and orderly. You’re puttin’ the needle in your arm, boy. You’re puttin’ the needle in.”

Bob stands and from his pocket pulls a few crumpled bills. He throws them toward her side of the table. “You’ll eat your weight in dirt before you die, but you’ll be no happier for it, and no better off. Stick to your own needles, okay?”

Outside, Bob is lighting a cigarette and staring at the coin-operated newspaper rack. He stands orphaned and pale in the dust of the roadside. She comes up behind him.

“About inside,” she says. “I know where you’re at.” She looks up the highway. It is flat and empty. A thin paper of black color that swims with afternoon heat. Just something grooved out of the daylight to give an illusion of direction. “We all hunt Leviathan in our own way, Bob Whatever.”

His eyes come around to take her in. She sees that he is crying. She looks at the paper rack, through the metal bars that brace the headlines.

TAPE OF MOTHER’S 911 CALL PLAYED AS KLAAS MURDER TRIAL OPENS

He reaches into his pocket for some change.

“Don’t read that.”

She watches a pile of copper and silver flatten out across a sweating, tired hand.

“Don’t put yourself in it.”

He pulls up the scarred metal lid and takes out the paper.

The need to hurt oneself has almost universal resonance. It is the prophecy of the suicide bridge: where one jumps, others must follow. It is life’s tribute to continuity.

As he begins to read, Case tears the paper out of his hand and pages sweep outward, cartwheeling across the lot.

By their rusted-out Toronado the maquiladoras are having cigarettes and checking their mascara. They take to the drama and watch silently.

“Why don’t you just carry around the police photos you showed me that night? Why don’t you, if you need this kind of fix? Why not?” She takes what’s left of the paper and crumples it and tears it and chucks it to the wind. “I did my life sentence in that roach hotel where you came to meet me, blowing off smack, crawling through every room in my head, every room, every state, relived and reviled it all, right down to a bloody carcass, and I wasn’t jacked, I tried to dig a hole in my bathroom floor till my fingertips ran with blood. That was my Via Princessa. I understand where you’re at, but …”

She is shaking so hard her arms move like violent whips. “I have seen enough little girls suffer, okay! Okay! Enough suffering, man, enough.”

Bob is, at this second, beyond the vocabulary of reason. Drained, he turns and walks toward the truck.

Jacumba Airport is about forty miles west of El Centro and just spit from that invisible part of the border where there is nothing on the El Norte side save an assortment of playas with eroded hillsides.