God Is a Bullet (32 page)

Arthur folds his hands across his lap. Looks down into the hard roots of knuckle and bone. He is caught up in a single thought: Could John Lee have been stupid enough, or just plain vicious enough, because of Maureen and Sam’s affair, to have brought the monster back into their lives? He looks up. Bob lies back against the pillows woodenly, his head turned at an odd angle, exposing the blackening edema that has begun to show itself in the folds of flesh around the neck wound.

Arthur cannot look at him for more than a moment, and so he looks out the window again, through a glaze of sand, toward a place whose past goes to the very heart of things.

“Arthur?”

He turns. “Yes.”

“You haven’t answered my question.”

He tries to think through a scenario of lies that would add up to some acceptable truth.

It is past midnight when Arthur leaves. Case opens the door to Bob’s room without so much as a tired creak. Bob is lying on the bed in the dark, with one arm resting across his forehead.

“Are you awake?” she whispers.

“I am.”

She crosses the room barefoot and slow.

“Did you find out anything?” she asks.

“He told me he knows nothing more than what we know now. But I think he’s lying.”

She sits in the chair where Arthur sat. “What makes you feel so?”

Bob gets his feet down on the floor, stretches his arms out on the bed for support. He’s light-headed but holds on.

“I don’t have a reason,” he says. “He didn’t act different. Didn’t seem different. I watched him, too, for anything that I could grab onto and say was different. But there wasn’t. And I still feel he’s lying.”

He works to stand. Wobbles. Case is right there with an arm around him. His pale and naked skin warm as an open mouth.

“Where are you goin’?”

“I don’t know. I just need to move, I guess.”

She takes the gray blanket from his bed. It is badly worn. She drapes it around his shoulders like a poncho.

“It’s me, Case. It’s me. I see him as guilty of something, but I don’t know what. Jesus, he’s Gabi’s grandfather. Maybe there’s an illness in me now.”

He steadies himself, using her face for bearings. She slips her arms up around his rib cage as support.

“I admire you, you know.”

She is caught off guard by this statement, and he can feel her against him twist self-consciously.

“You at least test your demons,” he says. “I didn’t confront Arthur.”

“I don’t mean to test my demons,” she offers, then spots him a little piece of smile. “I just shoot them a look every now and then. Make sure they haven’t given me the slip.”

In the silent reaches between his flesh and hers comes his hand edging out. The back of his fingers silk the side of her face. She does not pull away. His hand turns again with a thickish grace down the cotton-strap walkway of her shirt and along her back, where a peregrine idol of peacock colors rests above the thin perch of her milky shoulder blade.

Breathing and silence are all there is. The far reaches of
the universe. The moments that are separated only by the boatman’s crossings of the night river.

“I could, you know,” she whispers. “I could. And I would enjoy the shit out of it. Maybe even more than that. Maybe … But you know what’s out there yet. You know.”

He presses against her, a breath’s worth. “I know sometimes around you I feel like a boy trespassing in a man’s body.”

She rests her face on the blanket shawled down his chest. She nests in enough to feel muscles keeled on bone. Somewhere, though, in the belly of that hutch, she can hear the Ferryman moving about. A hobbler’s dirge going room to room. The very essence of the watchman. Putting down light after light. “I wonder,” she whispers again, “how well am I, compared to you.”

“Arthur, listen to me.”

“What?”

“He was asking me some pretty strange questions.”

“What do you mean?”

“…  They were very odd.”

John Lee stands off to one side, watching Cyrus with a wicked impudence as he listens to the tape. He would not meet Cyrus anywhere but in a public spot during the day after all that had gone down. And it had to be far enough out of the reach of the eyes that knew him. So a Love’s Restaurant parking lot in Victorville became the anointed location.

“He asked me how we bought this tract.”

“How we bought it?”

“I told him we got it in probate.”

“In probate, that’s right.”

Cyrus grins cynically at the rise in Arthur’s voice.

“We got it in probate because …”

“Probate, yes …”

“Some woman had died, right?”

“Died, yes.”

“I mean. She’d been murdered. Isn’t that right?”

A long silence follows. Cyrus looks up at John Lee. They are wedged between their two vehicles. John Lee is growing intensely aware of the people crisscrossing the lot. The talking on the tape kicks back in.

“Yes.”

“Why is Bob asking all these questions?”

“I don’t …”

“And that woman with him. The addict … Who is …”

A pink piece of ass was lying on a square of once-plush red carpet. Her knees were up, legs grinning wide apart. On her thigh was tattooed a spiderwoman with vampire teeth and long black legs working a web up toward where her fingers formed a V that held apart the dark patch around her vagina
.

Cyrus crawled on all fours around the edges of the rug. He was pretty well whacked on hallucinogens and soapers, and his cock was all humped out
.

In one of Cyrus’s tortoiselike stumblings, John Lee slipped over him, winding the 16mm Bolex camera. He squatted down so he could get in licking-close to film that filthy little mountain of love, as he called it. Cyrus tried to get away but a battery of boots rose up under his chest and forced him back like a small child. The men laughed and gave him an ugly time, calling him a drugged-out blowhole and warning him he better leave a few teeth marks on the bitch and he better make that cock of his go or he could end up with some black hose up his ass if the show wasn’t four stars
.

“Now tell me who’s been swallowed,” says John Lee.

Cyrus flips off the tape. Removes it from the cassette player with quick brash movements. Tosses it to John Lee.

“The junkie fingered you for Hightower. The guy that’s running with her. The girl’s father. She put the hose to you. Now, tell me, who’s been swallowed. You or me?”

Cyrus turns to Gutter, who waits in the driver’s seat of the car with arms folded. He speaks to John Lee through Gutter.

“The world is a pitiless example of the shortsighted.” Then Cyrus comes around to face John Lee. “I blinded a boy once,” he says. “When I was fourteen. Out in Chatsworth. In the hills off Santa Susanna Road. I’d seen him with friends. Hotshot. Whole-life-ahead-of-him crap. Nice looking. Wore clothes our mamas believed in. Didn’t know what hit him.”

Cyrus makes a sleek sound like an electric arrow moving through silent woods. “I called him months later. I told him I’d done it and why. I told him I owed him then. And he owed me his sightless future. And every day he should know the greater part of his existence belonged to me.”

He flips his fingers down along the tufts of hair studded into the leg of his jeans. “The taking of is the nature of all things. The taking of scalps, the taking of flags, the taking of men, of ideas, of patents, of wives, of pride, of trivialities, of slogans, of land. Of souls. The taking of, Captain Blood-soaked and sodomized. Call it our self-portrait.”

Then Cyrus shrieks out loud. A piercing femalish banshee. White-shirted businessmen working their gums with toothpicks and their trusty Janes gobbling up each other’s gossip as they follow behind turn in the direction of the two cars. Over a hurdle of car hoods, Cyrus grins and waves.

John Lee slinks back into the passenger seat, trying to make himself invisible.

Cyrus turns to John Lee. One arm comes to rest on the open car door, the other on the hood. Cyrus eases himself down like he’s about to share a private moment.

“Tell Arthur, when I get the chance I’ll dig up his little darlin’s skull and mail it back to him. Tell him,
or I will
.”

John Lee sits there, an imperiled look cauterized on his face.

“You thought you’d come out here and get aggro with me. Not happening. Paradise fuckin’ lost, Captain. Signed, yours truly.”

The next morning Bob wakes and there is an odd silence inside him. A kind of psychic refinement where one’s sensory skills have sharpened and the very least quiet speaks volumes. The truck and cellular phone being gone are merely facts he already feels.

Wearing only jeans and a blanket draped around his shoulders, he crosses the open yard. The dogs approach from beyond the shed, with the Ferryman not far behind.

“Where is she?” Bob yells.

“She put on new plates and took the truck to get it painted on the chance you got tagged from that little fuckup in Hinkley.”

“And then she’s coming right back?”

“She didn’t say.”

“I’ll bet Cyrus finally called and you’re goddamn lying to me.”

The Ferryman just stares at Bob. His dogs move across the open ground, sniffing at the droppings of rats and mice.

“Of course I am,” says the Ferryman. “Lying is the cornerstone of life, so why shouldn’t I practice it?”

• • •

Chairs oddly placed on a rise. A surreal image, as if the desert were waiting for dinner guests to arrive.

Bob climbs the hill, sits in a broken-backed chair, and looks out toward the bare browning-yellow painted flats stretching between the Paradise Range and the Calico Mountains. In the distance rise small shields of sunlight off the battered rotting hull of the old woman’s trailer.

“Center of the world, man.”

Bob turns.

The Ferryman walks toward him carrying two bottles of beer. “That’s what Cyrus used to say. This was the center of the world.” He offers Bob a beer.

The Ferryman half hitches around, sits in the other chair. Bob drinks. The sun has left slight sweat streaks down his reddening face and chest.

“You should have fuckin’ stopped her,” says Bob.

The Ferryman pays him no mind, just keeps talking. “Cyrus could have been right. When you think about it. The center of the world.”

His claw begins a slow sweep of the country. Second-handing from spot to spot in a twelve-o’clock crawl clockwise.

“There you got Death Valley. And there in the Panamint Mountains the forty-niners discovered silver. It’s also where Charles Manson made up his party favors for Helter Skelter. Over there is the Nevada Test Site. Frenchmen’s Flat and Operation Buster Jangle. You know they dressed up pigs like humans before they nuked ’em. It was called fabric testing. Over there you got Vague-ass. Capital of the white-knuckled dice roller. And there you got the Early Man Site and there Route 66 goes right through the largest hazardous waste dump in North America. There, Joshua Tree, and there the Sea of Cortez; each with the oldest species known to man on this continent. And there is America’s favorite self-help nightmare:
L
ittle
A
rmageddon.

He turns to Bob. “Shit, I left out Disneyland.” He takes a swig of beer. “And all of that within four hundred miles. What do you think, Bob Whatever? Was Cyrus right? Is this the center of it all?”

“I think you should have stopped her.”

“You know what I think? Dante meets Philip K. Dick. That’s what I think.”

Bob finishes his beer in one long bottoms up. Tosses the bottle to the Ferryman. With only his claw available for the catch, he can’t cut it.

“I don’t want to hear any more of your crap,” says Bob as he stands and starts away.

“Cyrus thought this was the center of the world. ’Cause this was his place. Where he got his head screwed in tight for whatever it’s worth. And since he thinks his life is the center of the world, then this place … You can see the Aristotelian madness of it.” He points a claw at Bob. “Just like you. Selfish implausibility.”

“What do you mean by that?”

“Too much white-boy carnival shit. You’re not here to tell me where the hot holes are and are not. You’re not gonna give me that somewhere-over-the-rainbow shit and I’m gonna do your housework. You got the wrong nigger.

“You want her stopped. Fuck … This country used to be grasslands, man, eons ago. And out here they found the remains of the largest reptile ever on the continent. A fuckin’ tortoise. You and that turtle got your share in common. You are fossils trying to fuck around in the next world. But not with me, Bob Whatever. Not with me. Your circus of horrors is so much shit as far as I’m concerned. You want her stopped, you shoulda been no sleeping turtle.”

The Ferryman tries to lean over and pick up the bottle but Bob gets there first. Hands it to him. The Ferryman takes it in his claw, but Bob does not let go right away. His eyes are still a little rheumy and dour. He could make a push-comes-to-shove hardball kick-ass drive at this nappy game bird. But
looking into that face is like looking into the heart of the desert itself, whose essence tests the very ideas of infinity or emptiness.

Bob lets go of the bottle and says nothing. Then he moves down that slippery grade as slowly as the grand tortoise he was mocked with.

Case waits as she’s been told. She’s got herself locked and loaded in a motel room about a mile from the House of Usher. She’s supposed to wait for the call, nothing more. Errol Grey, against his will, has been forced to play middleman and let his bar be used as a neutral spot for the meeting. He isn’t happy with his newfound position, and since the knifing he’s hired himself a couple of ex-cops with a taste for expensive designer drugs to play bodyguard. They’re a duo of thick wrists and bad attitudes, but they keep to themselves and they’re astute enough not to try to hump every chickie in the bar.

When Case got the call, Cyrus came with a few simple demands. He almost crooned his conversation to her. They all meet. Her and Bob and him. They bring the little party stash they’d stolen. They hand it over. Cyrus will pay a small finder’s fee. A kind of conciliatory gesture in lieu of having to track them down and turn them into bloated satchels. Then she and her “toy” can drive off into the moonlight. Which they better do, and quick, after it’s all done.