God Is a Bullet (37 page)

She leans forward, rests her hands on her knees, listens to the last sounds of her own voice. “Am I making any sense at all? Do you have any idea what the fuck I’m ranting about?”

He remembers a day at a pit stop in the heat. With its sweet greasy food and their little dogfight over a newspaper story on the Polly Klaas murder. And those chirping over-perfumed maquiladoras. He remembers. “We all hunt Leviathan in our own way,” he says.

Energy Road is a mile-long cut off Route 178 in the Salt Wells Valley. It’s the hard country along the Inyo County border. The land of furnaced playas from China Lake on through to the Panamint Mountains and Death Valley.

It is first light as they haul down that long empty road. In the distance a terra-cotta frieze of silver wind turbines, hundreds of them, begins to stand out like an army of knights’ spears rising futilely to the wind against the black and brown mountains beyond. They rise amid huge power lines. Cabled trestles moving on into the as yet unlit recess of the white country.

The dirt road ends among these giant, silent, turning blades. Bob and Case get out of the truck. Fifty yards ahead, standing among those steel monoliths, is Cyrus.

It is as if he were the lone watchman of this country. An almost unhuman guardsman coming through great red sheets of the sun rising behind him. There is a swept loneliness to the place, and the stillness of seeping sand. Case and Bob are each carrying a bag of money as they approach Cyrus.

They stop just feet away. The two men now face-to-face.
Bob begins to fill in the details of what he had imagined Cyrus to be. The lightning bolts beneath his cheeks crinkle. “Gettin’ your eyeful?” asks Cyrus.

“Where’s my daughter?”

“You’ll get to take home your legacy.”

Case squats down. Opens the bag to show him the money. “Where is she?” Case asks.

Cyrus does not even look at her. He walks past them both toward the truck. Bob and Case glance at each other.

Cyrus moves around the pickup, notices the extra cylinder in the back for gas. “How you set for gas?” He taps the tank, listens to the slight thud. “You’re in good shape.”

He then glances into the cab. He looks around and spots the cellular phone. He reaches in and grabs it. He holds it up for them to see, and in one swift motion smashes it to pieces against the Dakota’s hood.

He comes back toward them, points to a thin patch of rubble that might pass as some kind of bare macadam that heads on into the hills. “Your legacy’s over that hill. When you see her, drop the money and take her. Easy …”

He passes them both. He stops and turns to Bob. They are just a foot from each other. Silence, augmented by degrees of hatred.

“When you get home,” says Cyrus, “ask Arthur and John Lee who killed the old witch. You ask. You ask who put the first bullet into her neck. You ask. You ask about her scratching at the floor, dyin’. You ask. You ask who did the final turkey carving of that beer-guzzling bitch.
After
she’d been shot again. You ask.”

Cyrus has the slow, unbreakable stare of the reaper. “You ask John Lee who hired me. Hired me—to go up onto Via Princessa and do the nigger and his porcelain bitch. You ask.”

With each statement Bob seems to draw up inside himself in horror.

“You ask Arthur if I didn’t call him. You ask. Have some
fun. Ask John Lee who tapped his old lady’s phone. You ask. I can’t kill you better than you can all kill yourselves.”

Case watches all this go down. It’s a fuckin’ dreamscape, and not a mile away from where she bellied enough downers to put any bad omen to sleep. There’s war engines inside her chest plowing against her rib cage. Yet it’s all so still and quiet. Especially the two of them. Never a voice raised. Like businessmen talking life insurance or real estate.

It’s all coming out, she thinks. All the black-eyed poison he’ll have to live with. Yet he stands there just listening. Stoic, sure, but not immune. Case can smell the rage seeping out of his pores with every blow.

“I can see now,” Cyrus says, looking Bob over closely, “why you’re still alive. You have some of me inside you.”

Just enough of a bitter curve to snake-bite Bob Whatever. Just enough. But he doesn’t cop to it. The skin around Bob’s neck wound clips up with a hard swallow, like the chamber of an automatic.

“And there’s something else, then you can be on your way.” Cyrus flecks at the scalps studded down the seam of his jeans. “I have invaded you. I will always be the greater part of your existence. Yours and John Lee’s and Arthur’s. And your little piece of pink meat down the road. Every moment of your life from here on in will be determined by what I have carved out of you. I own your subconscious, I … own. Now get out,” he says.

Bob holds a moment to let Cyrus know in some fashion that this outlandish nightmare doesn’t end at the precise moment he says it does. Then he turns for the truck. Case follows.

“Not you,” says Cyrus. “You wait.”

Bob looks over at Case. She nods for him to go on. He warns Cyrus with one glance, then starts for the truck.

Cyrus steps up to Case. Her back seems to lean away as he gets within kissing inches of her face. “Whatever happens
today. Whatever. You are crossing over. I have put a bounty on your head. The word’s out on you to all the wolves. They’re gonna come up out of the gutter for you. You’ll never have a night’s sleep again. That I know. The creepie-crawlies, sheep. They’re on you now.”

He waits a moment. Around him and Case, dark scythe marks pinwheel from the on-high blades cutting at the coming sun.

“And as you cross over,” he says, “I’ll flay the skin from your bones while you’re alive. And I’ll cut out your cunt and swallow it while you watch.”

They climb the rubbled beltway into the brittle foothills as they were told. Cyrus watches them until they are just a morph of dust rising through slag-sided vents.

The pickup bolts and hitches wildly over potholes and cranky sinks. They climb through each meandering wave of slipshod talus until they reach a promontory where the road slides down to the basin. Staring at them is miles of nothingness.

“He’s gonna ride us right into a black hole,” says Bob.

“How much water we got?”

Bob looks behind the seat, counts two jugs of water. “Enough so we’ll remember what it tastes like.”

The descent is mean. An hour of rock-tearing nightmares. The muffler is grouted when the ground beneath them turns to sand. The transmission is shaken half loose from its bolts. The shocks sound like a twelve-story crack-up diving into
cement. They pass a sign hand-painted onto the rockface:
NO GAS OR SERVICES FOR MILES—ASSHOLE
.

A little roadside humor for the wandering fool.

Case keeps looking back, as if Cyrus might come creeping right up their ass. But she knows better. This is gonna be the long ugly march. The slow fuck you to death.

Across the open flats the ground becomes a moonscape. An immutable playa. The pickup makes its slow trot northeast. A thin plume of warning dust follows in their tires’ wake. The temperature gauges start to take a beating. For a moment they think they see something on the horizon. A shimmering white parabola. There, then gone. Could it be the back of a van moving obliquely through the disorienting waves of heat?

They stop to get their bearings. Wait. But whatever it was, the horizon has swallowed it.

“Why is he doing it like this? Taking us all the way out here? Is he gonna give Gabi back?”

Her voice cracks from the heat. “Rat patrol, Coyote. It’s a kill game. And we’re the game. Oh, yeah …” Her tongue sticks to the roof of her mouth. “He’s gonna take us way out. And somewhere out there … somewhere … he’s gonna dump Gabi back in our lap for the money. The money he got us to kill for. But, by then, we’ll be too far for any help. And he’ll put the wolves to us. It’s a blooding, Coyote. Clean and simple as … a slit throat.”

Noon.

Dirt spewing up from the turning tires and through the open windows has left grimy tracks across their faces. Ahead the ground turns again.

Huge druidic rock shapes begin to rise out of the well of
the earth. The gas gauge is getting lower while the temperature gauge is going higher. Through a composition of nature where oddly shaped tufa towers spire up like tombstones and battlements.

It is an endless straight line they make.

Case dampens a neckerchief and wipes Bob’s face and the back of his neck. She does the same for herself.

Then they settle back into grim silence.

Two hours later, they feel the quick heart-thumping of the tires as they cross a bridge built a century ago of railroad ties over a shallow ravine for wagons carrying salt out of the desert.

The pinnacles flanking that burned playa were born of tectonic fissures when the ground was a lake a hundred thousand years ago. Their sundial shadows cast toward afternoon. A frightening sense of hopelessness is setting in.

Case opens the satchel on the front seat. She takes out a few small packets and stuffs them in the glove compartment.

“What are you doing?”

She is tired, speaks with a shrug, “I was thinking … If they show, they ain’t gonna be counting it. If they show …”

“They’ll show.”

“Yeah. But we may need some money later. You may need some. I don’t think you got much to go back to.”

They have now reached a point beyond those tufa monuments where the ground is a washed sheet of dry salt. Flat and ghoulish. Laid barren as if it were the hub of a nuclear holocaust or that Devonian moment when the earth was catapulted out of mystery and all was flung aside. A bleached apocalypse. The true face of the father and mother, of death.
Shining as a shield. The witches’ brew, or the cauldron of God. The ultimate dissolution, or the reflection of the white light. Call it what you want, it exists beyond that.

The burnished blue hood of the Dakota is a fast-moving bow. An incandescent eye-shutting mirage charging over an ocean of salt. They bear down against the glare with creased faces. Wavering now like sailors in the ebb and flow of the pickup.

“Wait …”

Exhausted, Bob turns toward Case.

“There.” She points out the windshield. “I saw something.”

They stop the truck. Watch. In the deep distance stand the heat-dazed Paramints where Charlie and his Hole Patrol searched for a sea of gold in the belly of the rocks, and beyond that the stark valleys the Indians called Tomesha, “ground afire.”

They are barely footnotes against a horizon that may have tricked them.

“Maybe my head’s just fried,” she says.

Bob offers her some water.

They are sitting there with the sun burning holes into the black sockets of their failing eyes when a penny spot comes again along the rim of the world. Arabic in its sheetwide rippling. A metallic warrior engulfed in white grime.

“Look. It’s them,” she says. “I know it.”

Their exhaustion burns away as the white salient of a van forms from this specter of running sand. The sleek metal grill coming on at a clipped seventy.

Bob and Case get out of the truck.

About a mile off the van starts to make a sweeping turn. “This is it,” warns Case.

She goes for the shotgun. Bob goes for the money satchels. A hundred yards out, the van starts showing its ass end, then begins a long slow backup toward the Dakota.

Fifty yards away it stops. The rear doors swing open, and
there’s Gutter and a couple of warchildren Case hasn’t seen before. They spread apart enough to press Gabi out into the light. She is blindfolded, her hands bound behind her back. They shove her out of the van. She lands hard on her face. When Bob sees his child, he is so overwhelmed he screams out her name. When she hears his voice her head comes up like some wild, frightened bird. He calls out again. She begins to cry back. A haunted weeping plea, edging forward in the sand.

One of the warchildren has butted up behind Gabi. He presses a small Luger against the back of her head while he choke-holds her hair.

The drama of the trade begins to play itself out. Gutter yells for Case and Bob to come on with the money. They start forward. Case keeps her shotgun dead on Gutter.

They’re only ten yards from Gabi when Gutter yells, “Toss the money over!”

Gabi still yelps pitifully for her father.

Bob glances at Case. “I’m tossing the bags over.”

She nods.

He tosses the satchels. They land with a low thud. Gutter shoots forward, kneels, gets those bags open quick. He doesn’t pay the least attention to the shotgun zoned in on him. He does a cursory hand-check of the cash. More for volume and show than a close count. He slaps the bags closed. Stands with a black-hearted smile. He steps back coolly. “Get in the van, Stick,” he yells.

The kid with the Luger has got a skinned-down head shaped like a toad. He’s got what might be a pretty face, more girlish than not. He lets Gabi drop and slips back to the van, where he gives Case a couple of fingers brushing across his cock.

Bob runs forward. Kneels at his daughter’s side. Starts pulling loose the blindfold.

Case still has the shotgun aimed at the black square of space beyond the open van doors. As the van starts to kick
out and pull away Gutter shouts, “How you gonna get back home?”

He points beyond Case, to the south, as the van doors slam shut.

When Gabi sees her father for the first time, she is so disoriented, and he looks so different with the mustache and tattoo and the scar on his neck, that she starts to unravel. But when she hears his voice again, and feels his arms around her, sees those eyes crying she remembers all too well from a world she thought dead, she starts to break down. A huge coming apart, with hands scrambling madly across her father’s back, his shoulders, up his arms, burying her head in his chest as if trying to feel every touch of him so she can know with certainty she is alive and free.

Case looks back from where they came, calls to Bob. He holds Gabi tightly, looks up sobbing, sees Case point the shotgun.

Miles back, amid those pinnacles above the desert floor, a flare has been set off. Welding spots of white shoot upward in a tinseled arc toward the baking sun.