God Is a Bullet (25 page)

Her face leans around. It is the color of autopsy flesh.
“You better stop the car,” she says. “I’m going into relapse mode with some old witches.”

He pulls the car off into a stretch of desert blackness. In each direction the brooding silhouette of untouched and untamed landscape. She wanders from the truck, shivering and naked inside the slicker. She falls to her knees. She begins to retch.

Bob walks toward her slowly. “Can I help you?”

She fans him away with an arm. “It’s not the juice. It’s my head.”

Her body leans forward till her hands touch the ground and clench the dirt and squeeze till dust spindles through her fingers and the ground slops up her vomit.

She leans back, sits on her calves. She looks up and tries to get a mouthful of air.

“I fucked up,” she says. “I should have shot him outside that bar when I had the chance. We know he’s got her. It has to be her. I should have put the screw to him.”

Bob approaches her cautiously, squats down behind her. “Then what?”

“Then what? He and I would kiss oblivion, that’s what.”

She tries to sleep as he drives north. They pass the Mexicali airstrip, cool with the sun’s coming pink across the pumice rock and still life of planes.

Through a dazed restlessness she asks, “Why? Why would Cyrus risk trekking back and forth across the border with her? He wants her alive for a reason.”

His own body is so beaten and stiff, so burned down from the night before, so caught up in the replay of a murder, that he can hardly think through another thought. He can hardly hold on to the wheel except by a double-tight grip of both hands.

“The answer is close to home, Bob. It has to be. It’s a
vendetta against one of yours. I’ve seen this. I’m sorry. But it has to be.”

He nods, but at this moment does not want to know.

A motel; a mew of five stucco shacks that face an asphalt road. The falling perimeter of a corral in high weeds is the only other mark on the landscape between here and the border.

Bob waits in curtained darkness while Case showers. He sits on the edge of the bed with his shirt off and her words in his head: “close to home … a vendetta.”

He tries to see the face of the man he killed, but all he can see is the color of the skin and the scream.

Case stands in the shower watching the water spin down through the drain with the mud and filth of the night before. She stands in the steamy white room before a damp mirror and clears a view. Her tattooed flesh begins to fill out the mist like the strange symbols on the cave walls seen all those years ago.

What would the dead flesh say if it were found somehow preserved centuries from now? What would it be worth, the story imprinted there? She notices the huge black-and-blues where her thighs were wrenched apart, and the broken vessel on her arm that has lumped out like a tumor from where the needle rammed its way home.

And on her arm, Ourabouris. The circular green and orange snake with its head devouring its tail. You lived to bleed another day, huh? Maybe there is more meaning to that fact than even she knows.

She lies in bed wearing only a T-shirt and stares at the ceiling. He sits on a chair by the window, where the daylight
narrows through the short fall between curtain and frame. Across the road, on the withered posts of a corral gate, he watches ravens collecting for the day.

He tries to remember the story she told him about ravens when he hears the strain of her laugh.

“What?” he asks.

“You put a tracer in my coat on the chance I’d run. I’m lucky you’re such an untrusting son of a bitch.”

“I’m sorry I didn’t trust you.”

Her mouth rucks, her eyes close. “I’m sorry I fucked up.”

“You? How?”

“I should have killed him.”

“It wouldn’t get us where we need to go,” he says.

She does not notice that he used the word “we.”

She begins to drift some. “It’s rat patrol tonight somewhere around Algodones.”

“I guess we couldn’t find him there.”

“Not likely.”

“After that he’s up to Mojave, right?”

“Yeah … And I’m sure Errol will be putting pins into his prick thinking about that reunion.”

“We should cross the border tonight and get it on up to Mojave. Get in Errol’s ass.”

“That ought to be a sweet crossing, especially if the humper you flattened has got some relative with the pigs hereabouts and they tagged us.”

Bob puts his head back on the rim of the chair, and while sitting there in mid-quiet is caught by the sound of his own words. “Last night in the bar I was angry because no one was speaking English and I couldn’t understand them. I knew, I believed anyway, some could speak but were fucking with me. I felt they were fuckin’ with me. And when I got my drink, for some reason Sam came to mind.”

“Sam?”

“The man my wife married.”

“Oh, yes …”

“I thought she married him in part because he was black. To point out to me the differences between us. Thinking about that last night, in that bar, the way I felt then, says an awful lot, it seems to me, about who I really am. And I’m not sure who I am is the man I set out to be.

“You see, I’ve discovered during all this that in some way I truly believed I was better than everyone else. That I had inside me some sort of ethical superiority. That the universe was bound together by all I felt and believed in. That Bob Hightower knew what was right, and all remarks to the contrary were just that—contrary.”

He pauses. “I don’t know why I brought this up.”

She lies there a long moment, watching the single arrow of daylight that points across the ceiling above the bed.

She taps the bed. “Come over here beside me and lie down and sleep. You need rest. You need to shut the brain down.”

He does not move. She taps the bed again and slowly he rises and goes and lies beside her. They both seem to be staring at that single fixed arrow that marks the way from wall to wall. She glances at his suture marks, which rise and fall with his breathing.

“I’m sorry you had to kill a man. I’m sorry it was over me.”

“It’s funny what we tell ourselves without saying anything.”

“Yes.”

“I’m sorry you had to suffer last night,” he says.

“My body they’ve had, the rest they can never find.”

She feels him turn over and away from her. And then she hears him begin to cry. She knows he is crying because he thinks he has failed some higher order. She wants to tell him that the world works best without God, because the world is compromise, and impurity, and truth—yeah, even truth—and none of those are God. Not really.

But she doesn’t.

Cyrus and his war pack wait on a long gray escarpment. Far to the northeast the lights of Algodones begin to wash up on the shore of the desert through the faltering tide of dusk.

They move about the jagged dogleg of volcanic turf, listening to music from the van’s CD player and climbing on the fossilized nubs like the children of vacationers scrabbling for the best view.

Cyrus sits alone near the open back door of the van, watching.

When they have picked up Errol’s score they will head out to Algodones. Among their legion is an INS agent who works a border station and will assist their crossing. His sister was a sergeant at the North Island Naval Base and is a practicing sorceress. They share a small ranch on the Salton Sea. A remote portrait of dusty light and clapboard, where from the kitchen you can watch chickens roost in the remains of a wheel-less Dodge Caravan.

Cyrus has been a welcome guest at their rituals, and there are those who swear that beneath the Detroit-stamped chicken coop lie the remains of wetbacks and hitchhikers who have lost their way to the prowlings of the damned.

Cyrus glances over at Gabi. She is far back inside the van. She is neither bound nor gagged. He walks over and sits on the rear bumper where he can see her better. She is now leper to the child she once was. Her eyes are well into the hollowing process.

He motions for her to come forward, which she does. She sits near him. He takes her arm. The mark of the needle has found its way along a trace of veins. The slow helix of his will. He takes her by the hair. He searches that mute face for a seed of defiance that might be holding out against him. He
begins to test her. “I know what you’re thinking. One day you’ll be safe. The police will come. Or maybe your grandfather will come. That dear, dear man. Or maybe your father. I know that Uncle Tom wasn’t your real daddy. Ohhhh … They’ll be weeping for you. For a long time. Some will bleed to death from the tears. Stricken by evil, they will say. Right, pretty-pretty?”

Her eyes blink. She does not move.

“It wouldn’t matter. It’s too late anyways. Too late, child. Even if I were to send you back.
Which I might …
”

He waits on that note to see what his words draw out of the dead pale of her face.

Lena came crying back into the van. Kicking at the doors and walls, punching at the ceiling and cursing Cyrus. She sat in the corner like a petulant teenager, the corner opposite where Gabi lay. Gabi watched, hidden by a hand across her face, with drained eyes and the dull bilge of brain matter deadened needle by needle, as Lena rambled on. A grim trick child herself
.

She listened as Lena swore she’d kill Cyrus if he hurt some woman. It must have been the one she saw when she was alone in the back of the van. The one behind the bar, knocked down into the mud and kicked. The one she saw through the bent eyelid in the metal frame below the hitch lock who fought against Cyrus as she was dragged from that motel room
.

“It doesn’t matter,” Cyrus says. “Nothing you can do matters. Because even in the end, if they had you back, you would be poisoned. You’d be a whore junkie who’s been had by the dirt of the world. They’d speak about you behind your back. The men you’d want would hate you because of where you’d been. And the men you wouldn’t want would want you because of what you’ve been. And some will believe there is a little bit of Patty Hearst in your blood. You don’t know what I’m talking about yet, but sometime you will. Because
people look for evil everywhere. But those wouldn’t be the only reasons …”

She tries to hide from the carnage he offers by staying fixed on a point in the sky where the day’s heat collects into the great bleeding rose of the sun.

“If you got back alive. If! Someday you’d ask John Lee or your grandpops why did all this happen. Do you think they want that? Do you think they want to come all over you with the truth? In the end they’d rather have you dead. And in the end you, too, would rather be dead. For you will blame yourself for all that’s happened. As absurd as it sounds, you will.”

His fingers do a slow crawl through her hair like lizards on the kill.

“Do you hear me? Think of that while you dream. You’re the price of their paradise. That’s how
I
fucked
them
. And no one wants to look into the face of what they’ve been. And they would know every time they looked at you that I’m there waiting. I am a piece of your heart now. The largest piece.”

She holds her eyes to a last dop of sun. The deep hypnotic she tries to visualize into the flashing light of her father’s cruiser. That is him out there on the dying landscape, coming for her, whispering to her parables and promises. She will believe in childlike degrees that which she can still hold on to. But clarity dies away into nightfall in the tomb of that van when she has to face them, one by one.

She will pray through God to her father. And through her father to God. She will make them into one. And she will pray that the one called Lena cuts Cyrus’s throat in his sleep. For that also she will pray.

Cyrus pushes her back into the van, where she swaddles up inside a blanket.

“It’s time we got you the devil’s tail,” he says. He looks out toward the country from where the mules are supposed to come. “Yeah. Maybe tonight.”

• • •

Up through black ravines comes a wind. Through the wind, Cyrus watches, his head turning like a huge slow battleship behind the night-vision goggles. Three small matchflames of heat begin to burn out of the sandy moonscape to the south.

“They made it across,” he shouts.

He points. Lena kneels beside a battery-operated signal flasher. She lines up the flasher to Cyrus’s long fingers and begins to flick the on/off switch in a slow progression.

The three candleflames of heat begin to fix on the blinking star of the flasher. Their progress is slow. They lift and fall among the stony dunes for an hour before they are within shouting distance.

Through the windswept grit, an old malabarista and his two ragged young charges from Delicias start the long climb up the escarpment. They are weighed down under the burden of their full knapsacks. Cyrus orders Gutter and Wood down through that crumbling trough of a pathway with flashlights to guide them.

Cyrus and the old man share a long embrace, their talk a vile mix of English and Spanish. They sit apart from the others and Cyrus lights the old man a joint while the three knapsacks are taken to the back of the Cherokee. There, Gutter begins the meticulous warranty of each carefully wrapped brick of heroin.

The old man takes in long draughts of smoke as Cyrus eyes the two young boys sitting off by themselves. Moonfaced youths. Flat and cheerless souls squatting there at the edge of the rock, quietly turning over a few silent phrases between them.

“Are these boys anything to you?”

The old man shakes his head no. “Why?”

“No reason.”

The old man gasps in a deep hit. “I did promise them freedom. I was going to give them something from my share and
help them on. Maybe going with them to San Isidro. I have an ex-wife in San Isidro that I would like to—”

Cyrus cuts him off: “Kick around some.”

Both men laugh. The old man’s eyes move at the spice of the thought.

“Just enough to make me hard,” he says.

When the white powder has been proofed for the marketplace and the short cash handed over to the old man, Cyrus takes him aside and passes him half a bag more.

“And what is this?”