God Is a Bullet (33 page)

It’s a lurid honesty Case isn’t buying. And Cyrus doesn’t know he’s only getting one out of the three he asked for. It should be quite a come-together. For Case the go-down is simple enough. She walks in alone. Demands the girl for the stuff. If she doesn’t get the right answer, it’s over. De facto,
babe. By gun, by knife, or by a jugular torn open with teeth. Cyrus will never get up from the table.

If he shows.

The first night is a bust. So is the second. It gets so she doesn’t sleep. She can feel the creepie-crawlies working against her. She sits up in bed all night with a pistol across her stomach, staring at the door as if he might be able to magic his body through.

The junkie squeeze, as she calls it. Days three and four her veins start to burn. As if someone were working out their route using strips of hot wire. She knows the pain isn’t real, just the haunted hours’ flights of fancy. She tries to hypnotize herself into calm using the motel sign’s flash-fading
S
that sigmas against the pulled shades.

Then the cellular rings, and she is on.

She takes a corner table at the House of Usher. The place is packed enough so that she feels fairly safe, even with the assortment of bad vibes being thrown at her from Errol and his two drumheads.

But it isn’t Cyrus that shows, it’s Lena.

Case picks her out squeezing through the smoky gloom of the bar crowd. Lena spots Case. Works up a gray smile in the dark reaches of the dance floor. A relic of an arm moves through a distant hello.

Errol has seen Lena himself, goes over to his crew, gets them ready to make sure this is played clean.

As Lena approaches the table, Case takes in everything carefully. She keeps looking toward the door to see if Cyrus is gonna show. When he doesn’t, she looks up into the nervous, thinly disguised sanctuary of her ex-lover’s face.

“Where’s Cyrus?”

Lena comes back tentatively with, “Not even a kiss hello?”

Case rises. They kiss. She sneaks another glimpse at the
door. Lena’s eyes fix on her, trying to read what emotion she can out of Case. She holds on to her hand a long time.

“Sit down,” says Case, as she slips her hand clear.

They sit. Lena looks tired and frightened. Frailer than in Mexico, but Case had only seen her then at a distance. The junkie years have done their double duty, and the skin on Lena’s arms has receded from the veins so much they are like strands of rope left in the sand after the tide has pulled out.

“Where’s Cyrus?”

“Where’s your toy?”

Case passes over Lena’s embittered tone. She waits silently, and Lena becomes self-conscious.

“I’m sorry about Mexico,” says Lena.

“It’s alright.”

“I tried to stop him, but …”

“Forget it,” Case says sadly.

Lena mumbles, “Okay.” She fumbles through a small lacy shoulder purse for cigarettes.

Each moment is stark discomfort. Lena’s tried to make herself attractive and feminine. She’s wearing a silk shirt and just a touch of perfume. She can’t find any matches so Case passes her lit cigarette over.

Before she even looks up from lighting her cigarette, Lena says, “I wish we could go back to that time in the Indian caves. You remember? I wish we could.”

“I’d like to try for better times.”

Lena nods, looks up, her face in anguish. “If you can find them I’ll … I’ll meet you there.”

Case nods impassively. Lena looks for something in Case’s face, in her demeanor, that doesn’t drain her of hope.

“Where’s Cyrus?”

Lena flicks at her cigarette with a thumb. The flesh around the battered nail has been badly chewed.

“Don’t keep asking, Case.”

“He’s a no-show, right?”

“Right.”

“Fuckin’ voodoo man.”

“I got to be able to tell him you and … the guy you’re traveling with … are here and you’re carrying the stuff.”

Case leans back, looks over at Errol, who is watching intently from the bar.

“Was Errol hip to this?”

Lena rolls her head from side to side as if avoiding a blow. “Errol is a fuckin’ corpse.”

“You know how deep I am into this, don’t you, honey?”

That single word: honey. Lena’s head comes up with a brittle quickness. A mime of desperate hope to her eyes.

“Where is he, Lena?”

“What?”

“Cyrus, where is he?”

“You better bring your friend here, with the stuff, and I …”

“He sent you ’cause he figured I wouldn’t, couldn’t cut you in the process.”

“I don’t think he gives a shit.”

“You won’t tell me?”

She hides her face as if the world might hear anything her eyes say.

“Don’t worry,” says Case.

Lena’s hand is shaky. The skin along her neck almost a see-through yellow where the veins pulse madly in their lackluster blue.

Case rests her hand on Lena’s. “Lena, help me,” she says.

Lena doesn’t pull away, but doesn’t answer.

“Lena?”

She shakes her head now. “I won’t lie to him. I can’t. But you better do something.” She looks back over at Errol, then at Case. “You better. He won’t show and let you try and sewer him. And he knows, Case. He knows.”

Lena snuffs out her cigarette, rises to leave, and her hand pulls away.

“What does he know, Lena?”

Lena hesitates. The music is raw as a hammer on sheet metal.

“Tell me, please. Don’t let me go down.”

“It’s me who’ll go down. Case, be here tomorrow. Out front. At twelve. Show together. Please, Case. If you’re gonna show at all.”

“Lena …”

Lena bends over, kisses Case again. Soft and touching and full on the mouth, with that long fearful sense of finality that never really comes when you hope for it. “I loved you,” she whispers. “I mean it’s still raw. I love you, now. And always. Always. Don’t meet him ever. Don’t. Run! Just run!”

“Lena, please.”

“And be careful about Errol,” Lena whispers. “It was him who told Cyrus where you were when you got hit. He’d followed you, then he went to see Cyrus.”

Lena starts through the crowd. Case stands and follows after her. On her way to the door, Errol cuts Case off. Lena is already halfway out into the street when she looks back to see Case circled up by that trio of buffed suits. They’re starting to give her the rough moves. Questions on the hard press. Not quite shouting face-to-face, but getting there.

Lena starts back into the bar in a rare moment of confidence.

“Let her loose, Errol.”

“What?” he says, turning.

“Let her loose.”

“What happened here?”

“Let her loose. We’ve got things worked out. Let her loose. You already been scratched up pretty good.”

Errol pulls his hands back and away. Case passes Lena, nods a thank you as she makes for the door.

Lena calls out, “Case, remember what I said.”

Bob is brooding on that broken atoll of a couch in the moonlight, smoking, when two pixels of light appear on the desert floor. Gleaming sensors that bleed away. He stands and watches. Somewhere nearby a mobile makes its music out of bones and glass and clay. The smoky lights rise again, cyanotic against the tilted sand, casting strobes into the sky that level out to long widening spills.

Bob crosses the yard as the truck pulls to a hard stop. Dust rises off the back tires and over the hood and around Bob. The dogs come barking out of their hidden scratch-hole hovels as Case climbs out of the pickup dead tired. There is a look of shameful failure in her eyes. The dogs scramble around her, leaping and snapping, and she has all she can handle in clearing a path through them to get to Bob. He waits with his arms folded and a cigarette hanging out of his mouth.

“I guess I should expect all kinds of shit.”

He takes the cigarette from his mouth. “Four days without a word. What do you expect?”

“Yeah.” Her head bows a bit. “Stick it up my ass. What the fuck.”

Bob is hurtling through that funhouse of emotions with the wicked twins of rage and relief that keep a person torn in two, so neither part of his personality can get a divine lick in. He flings the cigarette away.

“Just tell me. What were you trying to prove?”

“The call came, alright? I set up to meet them.”

“Alone?”

“They didn’t know. I was trying to con Cyrus into a little face-to-face.”

“Fuck.”

“But he no-showed instead.” She walks away, downcast, sees the Ferryman in a scrawny frame of window brushed by the orange light from an exposed bulb.

The Ferryman stares at them with distant objectivity.

“Well, come on,” she says. “Cut me up good. I admit I didn’t even call.”

“Were you just gonna kill him flat out?”

“Flat out, Coyote. Flat out.”

“I should crack your skull for being so stupid. And vain.” He starts past her, stops, motions with the slight toss of his head toward the Ferryman. “But your friend taught me something. I ain’t the center of the world. Think about that yourself. You aren’t either.”

He walks over to the couch, scoops up the blanket, and wraps it around his shoulders. She wishes there’d been more screaming. At least something to fight against after her failure. Instead she’s left with his receding figure walking off into the night beneath the silent blades of the wind turbine like some lost prodigal wandering the wreckage of his exile.

She lies on the bed, boots on. The beamed ceiling a black mirror of the floor below. She feels cruelly alone, hemmed in by a quadrangle of walls and crates and a bureau cliffed around the meager bed. A stifling proximity that seems to open up only when Bob silently enters and sits at the foot of the bed.

He stares grimly into a dusty corner where a spider’s loom-strings reach from a water-stained and relic-stuffed cardboard box to the broken staff of an Air Force flag.

She stirs and crosses the bed. She sits beside and behind Bob and puts her arm around his neck. He watches the spider’s slow assault up against the darkness.

“I wonder if he knows where he’s going. If he actually accounts for something at the far end of the string.”

“Tomorrow Lena will be waiting for us in front of Errol’s bar. If we’re gonna get it on, it’s gotta be then.”

“Was it hard seeing her?”

She sits there weighing out her words. “I don’t know. I was trying so hard to co-opt her. To co-opt her feelings. I don’t know.”

“We got to be of one mind,” he says, “if we’re gonna go through this. You understand?”

“I’ve hardly ever been of one mind, even on my own.”

In the morning Case sits against the open back of the pickup. It’s all packed and ready to go. English blues chords blow from the Ferryman’s speakers as Bob comes out of the house checking his revolver.

The day is showing signs of getting ugly hot. The Ferryman is off alone with his dogs, heavy into the music as he riffs cords on his invisible wind-driven guitar.

Bob eyes the Ferryman as Case hands him a beer. “For luck,” she says.

Bob pops it open, toasts, then downs a couple of gulps.

“That’s his fuckin’ bon voyage for us,” she says, nodding toward the Ferryman.

“A moment to be cherished,” says Bob cynically.

The Ferryman swings his invisible Fender over his shoulder, strut-hitches his way over to the truck.

“It’s been a ride, Ferryman,” says Case.

He nods. Gives Bob a glimpse. “I’ll probably see you both again. At least once.” He winks. “At the wrap party, as they call it.”

Then he folds his arms over his chest and closes his eyes, giving a good impression of a corpse.

A silent Sunday. The sun at high tide against the dead shore of the sidewalk where Lena waits leaning against the pink and black stucco wall of the House of Usher.

A child witch in colors gaudy. She rocks against the wall, waiting. Hoping Case never shows or shows quick.

A light-blue pickup turns into the empty street. Slows. Passes. She sees Case. Gets her first glimpse of Bob. A stutter stop of jealous, ugly thoughts. The pickup makes a hard U-turn and pulls up in front of her.

Lena looks down at her hands. They are trembling.

Case climbs out of the truck. Bob remains behind the wheel. Case works through a clumsy introduction. Two faces, each with her mark on their cheek, stare at the other with muted animus.

“You have the stuff with you?”

“In the back,” says Bob.

Lena glances at the open truck bed with its locked tool-chest area. Case surmises what’s going through Lena’s head and takes her chance.

“Cyrus want you to see it, too?”

Lena hesitates. “No. There’s no need.” She looks at Case, then at Bob. She looks back at Case uneasily. “You wouldn’t be that fucked up,” she says, “to show up and not have it. At least I hope not, Case.” She waits. “No? Alright. Let’s get it on.”

“Where’s Cyrus?” asks Bob.

Lena doesn’t even throw him a look. Answers Case instead. “Drive. Take 14 South.”

“To where?” asks Bob.

“Just fuckin’ take 14 South.” She motions for Case to get in first. “I’ll sit by the window.”

They swing south through Mojave. Three faces staring straight into a sun-washed windshield. The colors bled from the faces in the glass. Bob lights a cigarette, offers Lena one. The billowy black of her eyes reflected in the windshield looks away.

“You and I don’t have to not get along,” says Bob.

“We ain’t gonna be around each other enough for one way or the other, sheep.”

“Take it easy,” says Case.

“Yeah, sure.” Lena puts her head back, closes her eyes. Case steals a look at Bob. They both grab a little moment of reassurance.

“Where we going, Lena?”

“Just stay on 14 till we hit Palmdale.”

Case looks out the rear window to see if they’re being followed.

At Palmdale Lena has them truck east on 138. The wind blows through the open windows. The air is weary hot. They begin the slow curvy climb from the flats into the San Bernardino National Forest. A favorite hangout of skiers and corpses. The mood inside the truck is getting to be a testy wordless contest. The ground gets harder and scraps of pine trees begin their slow birth up into the foothills.

It’s about Lena’s feeding time, and they stop at a gas station at the Cajon Junction. They pull off into the grass at the end of the station’s lot. Bob takes a walk and keeps watch on the chance they’re jumped. Case stays close to Lena.