God Is a Bullet (8 page)

Cyrus’s eyes peeled off in the Ferryman’s direction, but the shade from the canvas tarp left the African’s face unreadable
.

“The dogs were making me crazy,” he said
.

Cyrus regarded the moment without the least expression. The Ferryman did not move. He remained where he was, posing with the joint, then punctuated the moment with a leisurely toke
.

Cyrus pulled Case toward him. The blood and sweat had caked dust down her face, and she looked like some aboriginal dried mud doll. “Choose your madness, girl,” he said, “because the catch dogs are on you.”

It is the first warm night of the season to come. The moon is moving into a new quarter above the rim of the high desert. A shard of snow-white finery against a black sky.

In his front yard, the Ferryman sits on a low stool beside Lena with his prosthetic leg stretched out. He is hunched within the arc of a single halogen lamp, his eyes tending to the fine and dexterous needlework at hand as he adds a new date to the back of Lena’s ring finger—12/21/95.

It isn’t the first time he’s recorded a date after a kill.

Lena sits in an easy chair with her head leaning back against the musty mess of tuck and roll. She is hammered on smack, and her eyes sag and bob.

Music drifts out across the wildland over speakers hung along the eaves of the hutch. Gutter is inside the trailer, sucked up to the boob tube with a crack pipe and reruns of “Star Trek.” And Wood. He is totally raw. He’s punked on speed and giving the Ferryman a hyped-up rundown of the murder, laying out the whole night like some bob-eyed, jittering Herodotus.

“You should have seen us … Cyrus took us into that yuppie Christian tank and we … we ate their food … we drank their blood wine … we raped their women … we … we …” He fires an imaginary pistol down into the toilet, where he can still see that fluffy little mutt fighting for its life. “One more headstone for the Path. Yeah … We brought the jungle to that house. Blood and hair, baby …” His eyes are on fire. He weaves the fingers on both hands together. “That’s what we were like … See …” He clamps his hands together in some warped gesture of family and prayer. “It was bang-move-bang-move-bang-bang-bang-move … Total fuckin’ unity, and Gutter
singing as he’s popping shells into the chamber, and Granny Boy leaps over this white-bread bitch and …”

From inside the parked van comes Gabi’s crying, cutting short Wood’s little rant. Not full crying, but a pathetic gibbering that rises a bit then falls away or is muffled.

Wood glances at the van. “They must be puttin’ the magic to her.”

The Ferryman pays no mind to the crying nor to Wood as he puts the last flourish on the dated finger. He leans down and licks the back of Lena’s hand. “Done, girl.”

Her eyelids flutter. She takes a look at her finger. Another bone of pride for a twisted sister. With a weak turn of her head she waves a job well done.

As the Ferryman puts his needle and ink to rest the music begins to fill Lena’s head with smoke. Some woman singing the dark night of the soul.

“I miss Case,” she says.

The Ferryman moves off into the darkness.

“I miss the way we used to sleep together in the back of that van. I miss the way we used to kiss each other’s arms after we shot each other up.” Lena seems to drift. “I was the turtle, she was the bird. That was the whole thing between us.”

The Ferryman says nothing.

“I wonder where she is now? Probably in some methadone clinic, copping a plea till she can get herself a score.” Lena’s voice fails a bit. “If she’s alive at all.” Her eyes slip away. “I miss her. Do you miss her?”

“I miss no one.”

Lena looks up at the moon. It is like the slightest touch of light coming from an opening door.

“I only flirt with the living,” says the Ferryman.

“I hope she ain’t with the sheep,” whispers Lena.

The Ferryman hears the girl inside the van begin to cry again.

• • •

Come midnight, Cyrus walks the ragged ridgeline north of the Ferryman’s. With his poncho flaring in the wind he moves through the shifting shades of black. He looks off into the well of a playa set between the Calico Mountains and the Paradise Range. The forgotten ground of his youth, where the old woman Hannah had tried to raise him in her image and likeness.

He makes his way down to the valley floor through a slippery rampart of rocks. It is a slow night crossing the flat, chipped ground, and he leaves barely a boot track. He slips down into a dry riverbed, and up the far side he comes upon those granite rocks humped skyward like the fin of a great whale appearing out of a sand sea.

The old life comes back. The day you kill and move on from. He lights a match and holds it to the rock. Those paintings Hannah did are still there. Earth and air, fire and water. And the snake devouring itself, Ourabouris, the green head fang-wide and swallowing its orange tail.

He can see Hannah’s eyes there in the head of the snake. Pagan jewels of beauty and knowledge, she called them, as she tried to usher his thoughts along the proper path. The old bitch could drink, too. Hold her juice and talk. A preeminent bullshit artist if there was one.

He blows out the match. He reaches for and fingers the loose gravel between a layer of stones. He finds a small pellet of limestone from the great rock fin and he swallows it. The world will be inside his belly, eventually.

Cyrus moves further out into the playa. The remains of Hannah’s trailer are still there. Odd bits of the cinder block and glass stalagmite garden wall.

Life has finally come full circle with this most recent expression of his will at Via Princessa. He lets the years circle around him like the dust blowing across the Calico Range and revisits the chapters of his life.

He can feel the heat of that day, even now, when as a boy he was orphaned, tossed from a car by his mother and her military hump of a boyfriend. Cyrus had already been blacklisted from the lives around him. The base psychiatrist was describing him as a sociopath, a potential criminal, while his mother was in a bathroom shooting up smack between her toes and Sergeant Joey, the human wallet she played camp-follower to, was in the serviceman’s bar swigging down Jack Daniel’s by the troughful as he swaggered through the zipperheads he’d killed during the Korean War.

Fuck ‘em all. Cyrus knew back then that life was a self-perpetuating fantasy of frauds. And that the only real demons to fear are those disguised as decent human beings. John Lee and fatboy proved that.

He watches as the dust blows through the rotting sieve of that old Airstream. Hannah was another piece of work. The grandmother of time, spitting earthy wisdoms from that pussy of a mouth. He put up with all that for a little bread and water and what he could con or steal. He got fucked trying to help John Lee close that deal. Of course, time rewarded him. He turned a lot of dreams to vapors on Via Princessa. That will be his Sistine Chapel.

He makes himself relive the ghostly years before the Path to reinforce the template of his strength. From the pretty province of juvenile halls to the manchild back alleys of Smack Road. All that time he watched them build up their Paradise as he went from giving blowjobs to beatings to black-throat lacerations to when he began the fight to beat the junk that robbed him of his will.

It was there, in that trailer, in that time, fighting down the withdrawal, that he found the true architect of the modern world. Where he found the essence behind the Son of Sam and Helter Skelter and Joseph Goebbels and Uncle Sam and the Pope and the Ku Klux Klan and the capitalist system and the Silent Majority. Where he found the only son of man—and he wasn’t some jerk-off named Jesus. He was the
architect who allowed for the zero-sum game with all its depravities. Who found beauty in blood, a christening through ultimate chaos. Who understood it was better to reign in some perilous extreme than to serve a life sentence of propriety out of fear. Fear that nothing is at the end of the road unless we cop a plea after a lifetime of shortcuts.

On that inflamed desert sea of night winds, Cyrus and his aggro band of young wolves sit like native warriors who’ve come through another day of dyin’, together. He praises them. He reminds them of their place as bandogs taking on a bullshit society. As carriers of the great plague message. Their atrocities so far, culminating in the Via Princessa massacre, are a history replete and unto itself. Something horrible and haunted. Something for the pathetics to puzzle out. But ultimately, something to be acknowledged and idealized.

Most of them have been partying on smack, or ecstasy laced with a little battery acid, and cocaine with tequila chasers. But these foot soldiers for the Left-Handed Path are high on their own killings. They relive the blooding fury in that hilltop house. Cyrus begins to reshape the events as a myth, with a hot filmmaker’s sense of pace and ferocity. Coloring the crime as an act of ultimate contempt, ultimate nonconformity, ultimate sacrifice, ultimate freedom, ultimate joy … ultimate service. It is, he says, a fixed point of infamy in a heaven of faulted lights, and their names will one day be as important to their god as the saints are to Christ the pig.

They can see themselves in Cyrus. The night culminates with Wood’s initiation into the inner circle of death coups, as this was his first real hunt. Each member of the tribe has a special insignia: Gutter has a safety pin awled through his nose, Lena the dates of kills tattooed on her fingers. Cyrus presents Wood with patches of red cloth. On these he will have painted in white the anarchist’s
A
, the sign of their ultimate
meaning. When Wood asks Cyrus where he’ll wear the trademark, Cyrus tells him over the most important path of his existence—his lifeline.

For the next two days Bob tries to call Case. An endless series of phone voices tells him, “She’s not here,” “We can’t find her,” “No one answers when we knock.” Even Anne cannot, or will not, help him.

Over dinner Bob explains to Arthur what’s transpired. Arthur recoils at the thought that something like her might have knowledge about “his” Gabi that Bob can’t get. The rest of the meal is passed in silence, with Arthur mostly staring at his food and refusing Bob’s meager attempts at conversation.

Anne sits at her desk, afraid for Case’s life. “It’s one thing to offer a man advice, but to want to go out and attempt to find the girl …”

Case is standing at the window, barefoot, looking out through the curtains at a pool of street light.

“If you were stronger. More …”

“I don’t think I’ll ever be more … And I don’t think the girl could wait till I’m strong enough.”

“If he took her.”

“He took her.”

“You can’t be sure.”

Case turns, her eyes bleak with certainty.

“You can’t be sure,” warns Anne.

“I know the blood sign of my countrymen.”

“What kind of talk is that?”

“Down and dirty, but true.”

“You don’t even know if she’s alive.”

The curtains shift slightly as if a touch of air brushed past them.

“I read the sign of my countrymen,” Case says again.

“What are you talking about?”

“Oh, Jesus,” says Case. “He showed me one of the police murder-scene photos. This Hightower, cop. The motherfucker who was dead had this Tarot card pinned to his chest … the Judgment … the twentieth enigma of the Tarot … That is Cyrus’s sign game. His signature. He’s the bringer of death. The taker of the soul. It’s like a mock on the card.

“It was him, Anne. And I’ll tell you something else. This was punishment to the max. It was fuck you in the face.”

Case looks over at the desk, where she has set down the picture of Gabi that Bob slipped under her door as a “subtle” reminder after he was thrown out. She walks over and fingers the snapshot. “Cyrus used to say that once all the bullshit is stripped away, all that’s left is what there was to begin with.”

Anne sees Case glance at her arms, where the pussed blister marks from the needle are now dark thumbprints of healing.

“Redemption has a lot of faces,” says Anne. “You don’t need to find it by …”

A fierce look comes across Case’s face. “I don’t want to hear that. Don’t try and brainfuck me by turning this around and making it some sort of redemption thing. That’s so much Sermon-on-the-Mount crap and no better than when Cyrus used to lay on us one of his rants about the Left-Handed Path. We only agreed with him ’cause we needed to have something up our arms. That idea you have in your head doesn’t put anything up my arm.”

“Why, then?”

Case leans down and across the desk. “Do you have any idea what is going to happen to that girl?”

Anne sits there trying, trying to imagine what for Case is just simple memory.

“It’s me times seven. He’ll take that pretty-pretty and load her up on junk, and pretty soon he’ll have her on her knees in some crack house takin’ it up the ass from some infected junkie. He’ll take pictures of it. Maybe video it. He’ll make her go down on him while he shows her the pictures. He’ll fuck with her till the movie’s done, and over the credits he’ll hang her upside down naked, and he’ll field-dress her by gutting her from clit to …”

The words collapse in Case’s mouth. Anne is too unsettled to speak.

“You ask why,” Case says. “Maybe I miss the fuckin’ blood. Maybe it’s time to get a little retribution. Maybe it’s just time.”

Anne sits back. She tries to look into her psychologist’s bag of magic for a response, but this demands the kind of primal honesty the job description doesn’t include.

“They’ll never find her,” Case whispers. “Never. I might. I might get close. There’s always a way to get close, if you know how to grovel. Maybe then I get her back. If not, I may get close enough to force them to kill her quick. At least that.”

Case can read the sign
PARADISE HILLS
as soon as she makes the turn off Soledad Canyon Road. Bronze letters stamped into the fake stone columns on both sides of the entrance to the tract are lit by blue lights.

Nice friggin’ name, she thinks. A real selling point for some hungry family with a couple of kids.