God Is a Bullet (18 page)

The airport looks as if it was put together with scraps of day labor. No tower; unattended; a two-thousand-foot runway made of cinder, chipped out of a short throw of field that joists up to a rocky stand of boulders heaped in the shape of hills.

The Dakota cruises the field as Case looks for Errol Grey’s plane. There is not a face in sight, not a vehicle. Just a dozen or so two-seaters tarped or tied down.

“Looks mostly like weekenders or border rats,” says Bob.

“Among other things,” adds Case. “You see that plane there?” She points to a small red two-seater nicknamed Beansy. “Well, unless that’s a clone it belongs to a sheriff out of Imperial Beach and his cousin. His cousin is a gynecologist. They were always crossing the border, doing charity work at clinics. Right … They were also a flying fuckin’ pharmacy when they came back. Demerol, somas, European ludes. They kept me fucked up plenty with that drugstore. I even got my pussy checked, free of charge.” Then, with some slight savagery to her tone: “Lucky me.

“But Errol now. He is clean. He flies in from the Mojave, gets organized, sets up his trades, flies back, carries nothing.
Has it hand delivered to home plate. Thank you and good-bye. Cyrus does all the mean machine shit down here. Then has some coolie do the carrying.”

“Any of these Errol’s plane?”

Her eyes move from plane to plane around the paling runway like the quick blinking cursor on a computer screen. She gets a skewed frown. “No. He had this drab-looking thing. But it was pretty nice inside. Had four seats.”

“Of course, he could have sold that plane.”

“Yeah,” says Case. “I didn’t think of that.”

Bob gives the planes, the four that are partly tarped, a distant once-over. None of them is a drab four-seater.

They stop at the far end of the runway and look right into the pink and rose breach of the closing day. Bob starts to riffle through the debris that’s accumulated along the dashboard, looking for his cigarettes.

“You finished yours an hour ago,” says Case as she hands him one from her pack.

“Right. Thanks. When Errol Grey works the border, where does he go?”

“El Centro mostly. Yuma some …”

“You know where he stays?”

“Which hotel? No. I mean he moves around, I know that. El Centro is shit. But he owns a bar there. He owns lots of bars, that’s his thing. Music. He’s heavy into music. He hangs in his El Centro bar some.”

“If he’s not in Yuma.”

“Right.”

Bob puts his head back against the seat, begins a slow rub of the temples with thumb and index finger.

“Headache?”

“The sun fucks me up sometimes.” He takes a puff off his cigarette. “We could stay here and wait, but if he’s got a new plane and he’s already here, we’ll miss him if he meets up with Cyrus. If we go to El Centro and he flies in and goes
straight to Yuma or somewhere else we’ll miss him. Same thing if we go to Yuma.”

“We’re dancing, alright.”

“We’re gonna think this through a little more.” His voice sounds beat, like the edge has been polished off it for the day. “A little more,” he says.

He sits a long time with his head back and his eyes closed. His arm and face have scabs on them from the needlework. Brown, crusty fissures that are burning and sore as hell. He doesn’t speak.

Case turns off the radio to make it quiet as possible. She sits watching the land ahead. It seems vague and unwilling in the off-light. After a long while a pickup on a distant road traverses the valley. It’s just a small piece of silver at that distance, like a bullet moving above the hem of the earth and leaving a cat-claw of road dust in its wake.

“I want to thank you for today, Case. About the newspaper. I should not be reading stuff like that. It’s not … None of us needs any more suffering than necessary, do we?”

It is the first time he has addressed her by name since they’ve been on the road. The first time she’s been part of a sentence that is not fundamentally a condemnation. And it doesn’t go unnoticed. She wants to thank him, but kindness escapes her suddenly in self-consciousness.

That burning fuckin’ arm, and that burning fuckin’ mark on his cheek. Bob opens his eyes and looks in the rearview mirror to see a face that’s particularly hostile. A scrub and a shave would do wonders, but they’re history now. Look the part. You’re a junkie’s old man, her hot cock, pimp, suck-up, whatever is called for.

He keeps staring at his face and his arm. The unfinished roll of the dice the only spot not scabbed in a large blot. Then the brain does a quick jump. It’s like having your own
personalized decal. Like having your own personalized license plate. Personalized foolishness like they have on boats, and …

“That plane of Errol Grey’s,” Bob says in a sudden rush. “It have nose art on it?”

Case turns. “What does that mean?”

He looks down the runway at a line of plain props, spots a two-seat light-blue Piper. Its metal nose is painted white and there are huge cherries painted deep, deep red in a wreath around the words
THE CHERRY KING
.

He points. “That’s what I’m talking about.”

A creeping possibility she considers. She keeps running her finger round and round in midair, trying to stir the brain.

“Yeah, it had some shit on it. But it wasn’t on the engine like that. It was on the door. Does that count? It was on the door—it was small. Plaque size. It was like his initials done in a weird way. Or something with water, but … I was so fuckin’ loaded …”

“People change a car, they don’t always change a personalized plate. They change a boat, they don’t always change the name. He may change a plane, but …”

She gets it. Gives him the thumbs-up. The Dakota begins a police crawl around the field, pulling up to plane after plane … Nothing. They reach two that are partly tarped, both with their doors covered.

“Check it out,” says Bob.

Case climbs out of the truck.

Bob is watching the whole field on the outside chance someone shows. Case tries to pull back the first tarp, but it’s tied down tight. Bob watches her as she reaches down into her boot and pulls out a stiletto. The blade comes up in a neat flashing line. One jerk of the hand and the tarp splits. She sneaks a look inside. Nothing. Doesn’t even turn, just trucks off to the next plane, tapping the stiletto blade against her thigh. Bob cruises twenty feet behind her, keeps an eye on the perimeter.

Another quick slash. She lifts the ragged brown canvas with the blade.

She turns and lopes back to the Dakota. She leans in the driver’s window.

“There’s an old song lyric: ‘If you ain’t got good news, then don’t bring any.’ ”

Bob looks a little grim before she smiles, stands back, and lets the point of the blade lead the way back toward the flapping canvas gill.

A small hand-painted sign reads
FIREWATER
, with the
FIRE
done like water and the
WATER
done like fire.

“I told you it was some chooch bullshit. Good thinkin’, man.”

“El Centro first?”

She snaps the blade back home. “El Centro.”

El Centro is what the propagandists of the Imperial Valley call their big town. It even has signs billing it as the “largest city below sea level in the western hemisphere.” Case remembers a time when Granny Boy spray-painted on the unblemished green of a sign: “The only problem is, it’s below sea level but not water level.” Then he added an exclamation point sitting atop a smiley face with vampire’s teeth.

The town is an undramatic affair with streets raked out of the desert and innocuous squat-faced buildings.

Bob gets a handle on the place pretty quick as he and Case cruise the entrada of Heber Road. It’s a workhorse town duking it out with poverty. An army of filthy jeans and work gloves sporting accents from Laguna Salada to Oklahoma, and folks netted up on stoops like cawing flocks of birds. These towns always have a shortage of lookers, male or female,
most having fled for someplace where the minimum wage is not the maximum you can get away with.

It brings back drab recollections of his childhood in Keeler. A blot of a place in Inyo County where the imported toxins illegally dumped into dry Owens Lake mixed with the native salts and sulfates and created a dust-covered cocktail that choked you into drunkenness and disease. The town evaporated under this Rube Goldberg mushroom cloud till there were only a hundred inhabitants left. Bob had lived in a trailer with his father. A prodigy of divorce, as his father maliciously nicknamed him. The view from Bob’s bedroom window was of the Great Western freight car his only neighbors called home. It had been abandoned there years ago, when the tracks no longer had a point of origin. His father was the lone security guard for the then defunct Cerro Gordo Mines. There was little to do there. Heat and loneliness came in an assortment of colors, and you had ample time to brood.

His father, though, liked the desert. It suited his hostile and imperfect nature. All this would have remained just so, except for the lung disease the winds brought that drove his father out to Simi Valley, where his peculiar talent for making sure gates were locked and things were in place got him a job as night security at Jefferson High. It was as students there that Bob and Sarah fell in love and began the circle of disaster his life had become.

Bob and Case find a spot for the Dakota over by Camp Salvation Park. From there they can practically eyeball the Pioneer Hotel, which is where Errol Grey owns a lounge that doubles as a nightclub.

They cross Heber and make their way up Fifth.

“When we get in there, lay back. Errol can be a dick or he can be okay. Depends. Just play bass, let me chat it up.”

“Right.”

The Pioneer is three stories of rooms decorated and redecorated into a hybrid of styles. Early seventies meets late
Department of Water and Power with a half-assed border of red brick. It’s even got enough fake wood trim for a landmark chemical fire.

Bob and Case enter the lobby. By the elevator a maid is blow-drying a hole in the wall that’s been plastered over and is still wet. A parcel of transients is grouped around a television on which a sitcom with cartoon colors flashes mercilessly in the half light. They’re a sordid bunch of hipsters, the types who’d backpack with twist-top wine bottles in their pockets.

Bob and Case hold by the door, taking everything in.

“If Cyrus is here,” says Bob. “If we get close enough … he isn’t walking away from us. Understand?”

“Got it.”

“No matter where it goes down.”

“Got it.”

“Even right here in the fuckin’ lobby.”

“I got it.”

The bar is around back and down a carpeted hallway past the bathrooms and pay phones. Halfway there, a band riffing through a practice session comes through loud and clear. Heavy metal with some Tex-Mex thrown in. Another turn takes them to a three-stair drop that leads to a pair of eyelid-curved swinging doors. One of the hall lights is out. They stop in the dark.

“Well …”

Case crosses her fingers.

They come on and clear the rim of the doors. Bob can feel the wheelgun under his shirt pressed against his stomach, which is turning clammy on him.

It’s a stripped-down room. No windows. Black walls. A dance floor and tables squared up around a small stage, where the band practices. They’re a rough-looking foursome.

Bob hears Case take a deep breath, almost like a sigh, or a warning. Her eyes tail toward the bar, guiding his look.

There are a few locals tucked away in one corner. But at the other end Bob sees a man’s face turning toward them as if some instinctual chord-line from the music has pulled him to Bob and Case.

Case starts in his direction. Bob follows.

“Hello, Errol—I can’t believe my luck, running into you.”

Eyes behind a pair of nickel-sized tinted sunglasses take the moment in. Waves of liquid blue electric from the lights behind the bar fall across a face that remains expressionless.

“You’re not giving me the bum rap, are you? That I-don’t-exist shit.”

Bob hears the perfect pitch of begging in Case’s tone.

Errol reaches for a cigarette that has been quietly burning away. “The prodigal daughter returns.”

Errol isn’t more than thirty, and he’s got skull-tight black hair except for a thin patch across the top that’s longer and slicked back. Even sitting, Bob can tell that Errol’s got at least six inches and forty pounds on him. Bob checks him out to see if he’s carrying any metal, but those form-fitting black jeans and gray pullover don’t leave much room for doubt. Errol rests his arms back on the bar, stretching out some, and from the look of those over-defined pecs it’s a good sketch he’s got a taste for steroids.

Errol takes a moment, notices Case’s mark on Bob’s cheek. “I see there’s a new member of the family.”

“Oh, yeah. Errol, this is Bob. Bob …”

“What are you doin’ here, girl?” Errol demands.

Bob sits at a table instead of at the bar, five feet back of Errol, where he can play the mute shitkicker trailing his old lady and watch them both.

“We were driving in from Arizona,” says Case, “and—Bob’s got family there. And, well …” She squirrels down into the seat beside Errol, cutting off his line of sight to the band. “We stopped in Calexico for dinner and I remembered—I thought you had a bar here. I was here, right?
When you were dating that porno actress, and me and Cyrus and the others had come down from Brawley.”

Bob watches but on the beat of that name, nothing. Errol boy has perfected the Armani pose. Bob wonders if he could hold that look with a boot up in his chin.

“Anyway, we were just tripping along, and I thought, why don’t we come on up here. If you were here I could say hello and …”

Case starts to meander a bit, talking up trivia that could put comas out of business. She goes on, not even looking Errol in the eye, as if she were just making up a story to round out the emptiness. Bob notices her body language alter. An uneasy feeling starts to fill him up. She’s either putting on some kind of perfect act he can’t quite understand or she’s breaking apart in the face of it.