Big Maria (2 page)

“Shut up, you fucking commie.” The Horseshoe Lounge’s equivalent of civil discourse.

“Such violent ignorance. The product of an American public school, no doubt. Commie does not mean un-American, my denim-clad brother. A Communist is a follower of Marx, Engels, Lenin, and so forth. I subscribe to no single belief. I am a true American trying to show you all—my friends, the small people, the invisible—the truth. The Communists, Fascists, Republicans, Democrats, Viacom, Fox, Amazon, the PTA, Major League Baseball, they’re all the same. Don’t allow ‘them’ to turn you into lemmings.”

Conspiracy Todd laughed loud and crazy, then stopped abruptly.

“I must call foul on myself. I referenced lemmings. When in fact lemmings—known for jumping off cliffs—never actually did such a thing. The kind of accepted lie I’m trying to unveil. We use that expression, ‘a bunch of lemmings.’ Animals don’t commit suicide. The reality is a Disney movie. A nature documentary. Walt Disney corralled the poor creatures off that cliff, my friends. Murdered innocent lemmings for the sake of the message. The power of mind control. Disney, McDonald’s, Coca-Cola—the corporations tell us what to think. Ironic that Disney’s head is preserved in a block of ice. Ultimate mind control.

“But maybe we are lemmings. Not because we blindly follow others off a cliff. But because we allow ‘them’ to throw us off it.”

There was no rebuttal. Harry heard only CT’s heavy breathing. Horseshoe regulars knew that when Conspiracy Todd hit that certain jag in his monologue, it was best to let him go. CT wasn’t your grandfather’s hippie. He was two hundred sixty pounds of tie-dye, yoga, and hurt. He was allowed to talk like he did because
he was scary muscular and enjoyed giving a redneck beating. If the redneck was lucky. Go too far and you’d end up coyote food. Or so the rumors went. Desert paranoids were a prepared bunch: tinfoil hats and automatic weapons. Conspiracy Todd was their de facto general.

Harry tried to tune out the voices. He tried to will himself to pass out. Nothing doing. The purgatory of one too many, but not quite one enough.

Conspiracy Todd continued. “You let them control you. Let them spit in your face. Let them walk into your backyard and take a greasy shit on your dog. The cities are lost, and small towns are following. Right here in our desert, corporations stole hundreds of billions of dollars’ worth of gold from the American people. And none of you even knew you had it.”

The word
gold
brought Harry to attention.

“Look it up. Google it. Early nineties, Congress passed the California Desert Protection Act. Sounds great, right? Protect our desert. What could be wrong about that? Everything. The government don’t do nothing without a back end. It’s always about money. Have you heard of the act? Read it? They know you won’t. That’s why their reports are ten thousand pages long. You can hide a polka-dot rhinoceros in all that paper.

“Here’s how they protected our desert. They made a land swap. In exchange for acres of worthless scrubland to expand Death Valley. A bunch of land that was no good to nobody. Wasn’t farmable. No resources. Butt ugly on top of it. The government traded that worthless land for the mineral rights to the Chocolate Mountains.”

In his drunken state, Harry was having trouble following the details, but he did his best to absorb the gist of what he was hearing. He wanted to hear about the gold.
Gold
was the kind of word that made you concentrate, even to the rants of a lunatic.

“Here’s the scam. Some corporation buys up a bunch of shit land around Death Valley. Then the government passes a bill that
says they need those exact parcels. Instead of buying it for the ten dollars an acre it’s worth, the government trades the corporation for the mining rights to the Chocolate Mountains. Those mountains are made of gold, my friends. Used to be two hundred mines out there. They say there’s hundreds of billions-with-a-B dollars’ worth of gold still there. And the government gave it to corporations that I’m sure showed their appreciation to the politicians that drafted the bill in the form of suitcases full of nonsequential bills. That gold was the property of the American people. They legally stole it. That’s our gold.”

Conspiracy Todd rambled on about the government and the mountains and the gold. And every time Harry heard
gold
, he listened hard. Even when CT went on a long digression about how the CIA made the Star Wars franchise and George Lucas was their shill and possibly an android, he did his best to listen. He had no idea if he would retain anything the next day, but he knew he had to try.

“Our gold,” Conspiracy Todd repeated.

Screw that,
thought Harry.
That’s my gold
.

T
he bus had been giving Ricky McBride trouble all week. The overheating and the burning oil were nothing new. The latest headache had the engine stalling whenever the bus dropped below ten miles per hour. It was exhausting having to anticipate every changing light and roll every stop sign, a geriatric version of the movie
Speed
.

As the small problems ripened, Ricky knew that his 1977 Blue Bird CV200 school bus had entered its golden years. But until he could save the money to get a high-end travel coach with a working air conditioner and chemical toilet, he was going to keep the Yellow Bomber on the road with baling wire, duct tape, spit, and prayer. There wasn’t anything that hard work and faith couldn’t fix. Ricky truly believed that.

At five that morning in the dim light of the not-yet-risen sun, he was trying to patch-weld the radiator and get it reinstalled before his first run of the day. In two hours a couple dozen old-timers would be waiting for him in the parking lot of the Palo Verde Senior Center. He would gently load them into the bus and drive them to another parking lot in Andrade, California. From there the seniors could walk across the Mexican border to buy their cheap prescription drugs. The seniors rode for free. Ricky got paid to make the twice-daily trips by a half dozen of the
farmacias
in Los Algodones on the Mexican side.

He had lucked into both the bus and the gig and needed to keep it going. If the bus gave out, he had no Plan B. He didn’t have a whole lot of skills, and it’s not like jobs were plentiful in Blythe, California. Everyone he knew was unemployed or picking
up low-wage piecework. He knew it was selfish, but Ricky prayed every morning and twice on Sunday for his good fortune to continue. He usually frowned on people who prayed for themselves, but it was really for his family. For his daughter. All his actions, all his work, and all his prayers were for her and her future.

T
he patch looked good and the radiator was back in place. It had only taken him an hour. He thought about getting back in bed with Flavia. The warmth of her body sounded nice. But Ricky didn’t want to chance falling back asleep. He grabbed a cup of coffee and sat on the steps of the trailer.

Desert Vista Estates was the cheapest trailer park in Blythe. And that was saying something. Even with the bargain prices, it never attracted a single snowbird. The winter flock from the north preferred the grassy havens with swimming pools and gravel roads for golf carts. Although some Mexicans lived at Desert Vista, it was mostly white. The Mexicans tended to migrate to Mesa Verde, the other super cheap trailer park on the other side of town.

Ricky wished he could move his family somewhere nicer, but Desert Vista was the only place that he could afford a space for both the trailer and the bus. It was where he was. Where his wife and daughter were. That made it home. He wanted so much more for both of them, but wanting wasn’t having.

Ricky drank his coffee and watched the morning pageant. If he had lived in the suburbs, business suits would have kissed trophy wives, gotten into their German-engineered cars, and listened to satellite radio on their commute. But most of the people in Desert Vista were desperately alone, drove beaters or hogs when not hitchhiking, and were unemployed or criminals or unemployed criminals. This morning’s procession of lost souls consisted of a couple drunks stumbling home, the sheriff’s department dropping off a well-beaten Mexican, and two prison widows on broken heels finishing their kneepad shifts outside
the truck stop. The poor women sold their bodies to pay the bills while they waited for their men to be released from one of the nearby penitentiaries. It was a sin, but Ricky found the devotion to their mates admirable, even beautiful. How could any sacrifice in the name of love be wrong?

In the four years that Ricky had lived at Desert Vista, he’d never made the effort to get close to his neighbors. It made it awkward when you shared a beer one day and the next day you caught that same person in your trailer stealing your toaster oven and DVDs. You never knew what kind of mischief a Desert Vistan was into. If someone asked for a ride to the bank, the only good answer was no.

He didn’t know anyone’s full name. He didn’t ask. Paranoid suspicion was a valuable survival tactic. Everyone referred to everyone else by aliases, nicknames, generics (chief, buddy, bro, etc.), or not at all. Most of the time, conversations consisted of little more than a head nod and grunt.

For that reason, he knew most people only by sight. He and Flavia had given each of them nicknames. The Sloth, Albino Wino, Matt Hardy, Roadhouse, and The Kurgan were a few of the men. The Michelin Woman, Fright Night, Goth Betty, and Lucky Tooth were the women. It was a little mean to call them names behind their back, but it’s not like he would say anything to their faces. What was the harm?

And just when Ricky thought the train had passed, the caboose arrived in the form of Shitburger staggering toward him with weaving purpose in his half-drunk stumble.

“M
orning,” Ricky said as he approached Shitburger. He didn’t know how loud the pockmarked drunk could get and wanted to make sure he didn’t wake Flavia and Rosie. The trailer walls were so thin, it was a wonder they kept out the light.

“Hey.” Shitburger swayed, eyes to the ground.

“You okay?”

“I puked my pants.”

Ricky was neither surprised nor curious.

Even from five yards, Shitburger’s breath smelled like an alcoholic baby’s diaper. But that was the prologue. The real odor came from his body. He smelled like a slaughterhouse in summer. Manure and dead beef. Ricky wondered if that was how Shitburger got his name.

“You got a computer, yeah?” Shitburger said.

Ricky nodded and backed up a step, wondering how long he could hold his breath.

“It got websites and that stuff? The Internet, right?”

Ricky nodded.

“I was wondering could I use it for a hour? Got some research to research.”

“Everyone’s asleep.”

Shitburger nodded. “Not now. In no shape. Pants all puked. Soon, but whenever. Later.”

“I don’t know. I got to work. Then I got things.”

“I’ll pay.”

“How much?” Ricky asked.

“Couldn’t be a good neighbor?”

Ricky smiled. “When was the last time you loaned someone a cup of sugar?”

“Twenty bucks. Hour or so. Don’t think I’ll need more than that.”

“Okay,” Ricky said. “But you got to wait until I’m back. Around three. Don’t come bothering my family.”

“Perfect. Three. I got to get cleaned up. Get my beauty rest, yeah?” Shitburger laughed a nauseating laugh until he inadvertently hawked a jellyfish onto Ricky’s boot.

F
rank Pacheco couldn’t stand a lot of things.

Frank couldn’t stand those four old hens. Not even seven o’clock and their piercing laughter grated on his every nerve. Being old don’t make you cute, honey. He wanted to tell them to shut up, but that would mean talking to them. That, he couldn’t stomach. When they spoke to him, they always reverted to a condescending baby talk that would make a cartoon princess vomit. He didn’t know if it was because he was an Indian or they thought he was simple. Probably both.

Frank couldn’t stand Blythe. It wasn’t that much different from the reservation, but something about the town depressed him. Like most desert towns he knew, Blythe was a sun-faded patch of concrete and dying palms. It felt like it was one good gust away from being swallowed by the sand that surrounded it. Or maybe it had been swallowed and spat out like a wad of indigestible fat. Blythe was the kind of town that you drove past on the highway, hoping that quarter tank of gas would last until a more hospitable stop down the road. Every Tuesday Frank’s grandsons drove him down to Blythe from Poston, dropping him off in the parking lot to wait for the Drug Bus with the other oldsters.

Above all, Frank couldn’t stand being old. Outside, his body was crumbling, but inside he still felt young and full of adventure. Whenever he saw some hoodlum acting tough, he thought about serving the punk a beating. He had at least one good scrap left in him. He wanted more. He wanted shots of mezcal and cans of beer. He wanted a nice Cohiba. He wanted to bang young quim.
Hell, he wanted to be useful. He was tired of people taking care of him. He wanted anything more than what had turned into a tedious and drawn-out wait.

No matter how many people he had around him, he had never felt more alone.

T
he Drug Bus pulled up in all its canary-yellow glory at seven on the dot. That was one thing Frank was thankful for. Ricky was always on time. You didn’t see a work ethic much anymore, but the big, muscle-bound kid was an exception. He may not have been the sharpest knife in the drawer, but Ricky worked hard and did his best to be polite and helpful.

Frank watched Ricky help one of the hens with her first step. She openly flirted with him. Wet, clumpy lipstick and shameless double entendres. It made Frank sick. Did they think that poor kid enjoyed it?

Ricky smiled when he saw Frank. “Morning, Mr. Pacheco.”

Frank grunted.

“You ain’t got to act mean around me. I’ve seen you smile when no one’s looking.”

“Who said I don’t smile? I smile. Laugh, smile, even giggle when I have a mind. Just not this early. All us Indians aren’t Iron Eyes Cody.”

“Who’s that? Relative of yours?”