God Is a Bullet (2 page)

As they approach the screen door they hear the nickering of mobiles hung somewhere in the distance. Off-key brass and stone notes in a twilight chorus. John Lee can feel the sweat creeping out between his thumb and the hammer of his pistol.

They enter cautiously. The windows and air vents in the ceiling have been left open and the sand swirls around the frayed furnishings and unwashed dishes. The wind curls the edges of snapshots, taped to the walls, of passersby who once wandered across the barren plat and were caught by the woman’s camera. A confusion of faces going back generations. Faces spotted up between wind-furled clippings from magazines and cookbooks, between pages of poetry and bits of humor. The wind tears at the backs of some of the clippings and they float away. But it is the stench that overwhelms the sheriffs.

“Sergeant?”

John Lee glances at the deputy, who points to the floor. John Lee walks over to him and kneels down. He sees an arterial line of blood, dried the color of cheap wine and flecked with sand, running the length of the trailer toward a sheet hung across the bedroom doorway. The sheet lifts and turns like an apparition, then falls away. Through the sand both men can see the sheet had been hand-painted with a heraldic lily and a rose.

John Lee stands and starts for the bedroom. The deputy follows. They step carefully past the tracings of blood that have pooled out where the floor wasn’t level.

They turn the sheet back. The small grotto of a bedroom is filled with shells and fossil stones. The air is poisoned
with flies and their noses begin to burn from the vile odor of rotting flesh. Then they see her, lying on her side at the foot of the bed.

One moment taints John Lee’s dreams forever. He will see it all in fragments over and over again. The gas-bloated frame. The skin where it has burst apart and the open lesions rank with white maggots leeching pink-brown muscle. The bullet wound to the side of the skull that leaves shards of bone with blood and brain jelly trailing up the wall like the spanning wings of a bird. The eyes driven from their sockets by the concussion of the shot. The knife wounds across the back and chest that leave bloody chevrons on the woolly white seaman’s sweater. The skin sluiced in bizarre patterns that border on ritual. And in a wrinkled turn of her coarse garment, a single pearl.

It will all become an indelible part of his subconscious.

All that night Homicide and Forensics units hunt for evidence, but the sand had beaten them to it, papering over whatever tracks and prints might have existed.

There is one slim lead. A son named Cyrus. Hannah had taken care of a child she’d found abandoned on Fort Dixon Road. He was a tall boy with large hands and brooding yellow-green eyes, and as he got older he carried himself like some solitary acolyte. Twice he’d been sent to juvenile hall in Los Angeles for possession of narcotics and assault. But this just dead-ends. The boy had run off three years before, when he was seventeen, and had not been seen since.

By morning the newspapers get word and they rush the playa in their Jeeps and Travelalls. They’re hungry for a story, and this one reeks of lurid headlines.

One reporter, while wandering the playa, discovers in a dry riverbed a few hundred yards from the trailer a totem of
sorts. Granite and limestone boulders squared up block by block form what resembles a primitive furnace. Etched into the rock are prehistoric signs. A bird. A bull. A tree. Symbols of earth and air, fire and water. And in the center is a snake devouring itself. The sign of Ourabouris. The same sign that is discovered during the autopsy to have been tattooed on Hannah’s shoulder. All this the news draws up in squalid detail. Hannah’s death is christened “The Furnace Creek Cult Murder.”

NOVEMBER 1995

Case’s screams tear at her very bones and wrack the hallway outside her small apartment in the rehab house. She crouches on the bathroom floor before the toilet. She is only twenty-nine, but the free fall back into her two-hundred-dollar-a-day habit has left her gaunt. Her skin is yellow, her arms marked with blue-black welts. Two days off the junk. The third is always the black hole. A pure moment of hell before the resurrection.

Her stomach heaves in spasm. A guttural sucking out of the air. The woman in the apartment next door, trembling from the horrid screams, calls down to Anne.

Anne rushes through the dark hovel of the living room toward a crease of light, where she sees Case clawing at the white floor tiles, digging her chewed fingernails into the grouting.

Anne sits and tries to cradle Case in her arms. Case’s head jerks toward her in jarring lurches.

She was a small girl again. Not more than ten. A street runaway with small pointed breasts. She was naked and she was being carried by four of them like some vestal virgin. She was taken and forced inside the skinned torso of a dead cow. There was blood everywhere. She could feel the sweet sticky hourglass of the cow’s ribs press up against her own. The weight of its breastbone forcing air out of her. She felt as if she was going to suffocate and she gagged
.

She vomits before she can reach the toilet. Anne tries to press twenty milligrams of Robaxin into Case’s hand for the spasm, but she knocks the pills away and they twirl across the bare tiles.

“I’m gonna fuckin’ go at this straight up.”

“What!”

“I’m gonna go at …”

“Why! Why suffer the withdrawal?”

Case rocks back and forth. “You’re not gonna hear any of that ‘It’s not my fault’ shit, or ‘Nobody should blame me’ or ‘How can I help but be a heroin addict’ and ‘It’s not so friggin’ bad.’ I want to suffer.” She gasps. “Get it. Fuckin’ A. I want to feel it all. I want to fuckin’ bleed so I’ll know …”

Anne stares at her, frightened. Case grabs hold of Anne’s face, twisting her fingers through the woman’s dreadlocks. “I want it to cut me to ribbons. Then I’ll know.”

Cyrus clawed one hand onto her vagina and the other around her ass and he dragged her from the bloody carcass. She hung in his arms. He smeared his hand in the blood that covered the floor. He wiped it across his mouth and tongue and then he kissed her and pressed his tongue far enough into her mouth to make her choke. She retched and he pulled back and held her by the hair and whispered, “You are born again.”

Fuckin’ death. Her stomach contracts at the very words. Helpless, she’s thrown through a flash fire of thoughts.
You are born again
. Vivid life moments, three frames in length. Gutter and Lena and Granny Boy. Flashbulb fast. Sinister and moving and tragic. Snippets out of some Jungian MTV nightmare. Every black-and-white blowjob and backlit truck-stop hump. Watching your tits mature in blue-ice light under the pawing sweat-filthed hands of businessmen and junked-out middle-class housewives. Just one great juke hole to the upside-down cross.
You are born again
. Grovelling at the spray-painted slogans of the Left-Handed Path. Serving his alleged only begotten son. Knifing drug dealers
to cop their stashes in pitch-black parking lots on moonless nights. Robbing neon-framed gas station attendants for a few bucks or on a whim. Kicking some shopkeeper half to death ’cause Cyrus overheard him talking about his faith in Christ.

You are born again
.

She grabs at the stanchions that support the sink. Two bars to a cage. Or the two pillars Samson pushed apart to cast down the temple. No fuckin’ chance of that.

You are born again to the Left-Handed Path
.

What she would do for a little juice right now. Just enough to …

You are born …

She forces herself to live through the final beating, when she broke from Cyrus. The boot-hard kicks that broke her sternum and fractured her skull and the taste of …

She begins to feel herself split apart.

“I will not break …”

She’s living out a full dose of Mach One, and her teeth are clacking so hard they sound like the bones in some seer’s cup right before the roll of prophecy. There’s no sleep for junkies on the way down. None. Just reckless, restless nausea and diarrhea and cold sweats and fumbling speech.

“I will not break …”

Anne grabs a towel from the rack and wipes Case’s cropped black hair, which sticks up in sweaty greased clumps. She wipes at the sweat pouring off the edge of her nose and chin.

The old rage puts on its wolf’s-teeth mask. The tiled floor becomes the white stone slab waiting for her corpse. Case curls into a fetal position. Her drenched T-shirt clings to her back, and the cold from the tiles leaves her shivering.

Anne runs into the bedroom to get a blanket and covers her up.

“I will not break. I will not … I … will not … I will not. Fuck you, Cyrus. Fuck you. I will not break …”

She repeats the sentence over and over again. A delusional broken mantra she drives into the very essence of her being.

“I will not break. I … will not break. I will not …”

Saliva hangs in a string line from her lips to the floor. She hears a siren along Hollywood Boulevard swell up, shrill, then slowly slip away down past Western Avenue. She begins to cry. She cries from the center of her being. Cries for the little girl born to be left behind.

CHRISTMAS WEEK 1995

A small wooden windmill sits on top a mailbox near the entrance to a dirt driveway that crooks its way up a hill and onto a flat prow of stony ground and ends at a fifties-style ranch house. As the windmill’s warped vanes creak, five figures emerge from the brush like a coven conjured out of the black earth.

They are a patchquilt of jeans and leathers. Bare-soled boots and chain-braided vests over scrubby T-shirts. One, a boy named Gutter, has a safety pin awled through his lower lip. Another, a girl named Lena, has her hair greased back and dyed up like a rainbow. Their faces and arms are tattooed with anarchistic designs. They have pistols and knives wedged into their belts and boots. As they fan into the darkness they are a vision of post-apocalyptic rock-and-roll revenants.

Cyrus stops them about fifty yards shy of the house and looks the grounds over. The bushes by the front door are tasseled with holiday lights and dance to the wind like illuminated ghosts. He looks back down at the road. Via Princessa
cuts a silent, pitch-dark path around the hills toward the freeway. He listens and waits, his senses taking everything in quarter by quarter. The only sound is the windmill’s rusted spoke arcing round its unvarying center. He gives orders silently, using a spartan wave of the blue barrel of his shotgun.

He sends Granny Boy and Wood across the driveway to follow a ravine that backs up and around the house toward the shed and corral where the girl keeps her horse. Lena is sent along a row of cypress trees to the near side of the house, which faces the Antelope Freeway. She is to check out a set of glass patio doors that lead from the den to the pool. Gutter is left behind in case some car comes along Via Princessa and turns up into the driveway. He’s only to make for the house when Cyrus lets him know it’s dyin’ time.

Gabi sits alone on the window seat listening to her CD player and watching the headlights of the cars on the freeway flare by. She takes a kind of mindless pleasure imagining the lives tucked away behind those flooding headlights that fill out the dark and then dissolve on toward Canyon Country. At fourteen she is flush with the idea the whole world has a date with something interesting—except her. She is all will and dreams trapped inside a child’s body.

The door to her bedroom is cracked open just enough so she can hear the vague intonations of an argument between her mother and stepfather.

She gets up and crosses the room and slips out into the hallway. She peeks around the corner and sees the kitchen squared up within and beyond the dark frame of the den. Her mother steps into view. She is rubbing her right hand with her left, then the left with her right. It is a gesture of her mother’s Gabi knows all too well, and it means she is about
ready to cry or lunge into an angry outburst. Occasionally she does both at the same time.

The den carries their words through to the hall like some huge woofer.

“Talk to me, Sam.”

“About what?”

“Oh, Sam …”

“There’s nothing.”

Her stepfather’s tone has that uncommunicative edge she’s heard in a lot of their conversations lately.

Her mother passes out of view, and now the room is just a backdrop of white kitchen cabinets hung in space.

“Sam, don’t you know when you talk like that you give yourself away.”

“Sarah, I mean it. There’s …”

“Don’t do this,” she says angrily. “I won’t stand for a shut door to your emotions. I left Bob because of that.”

To hear her father’s name spoken that way, used as some sort of negative example, makes Gabi feel sick and angry. And lonely. That’s the worst of it. To feel like you’re the sum total of someone else’s separation.

It hurts her to listen, so she goes back to her room and sullenly closes the door on them. Her dog has already found the warm spot on the window seat where she had been and is making himself comfortable. She slumps down next to him and curls her feet under his belly.

“Make with some room, Poncho.”

He’s part cocker and part question mark: the floppy ears and pooly eyes of one, and the scruff-box short hair and gangly long legs of the other. He had been her father’s birthday present to her and a way of keeping them close.

She glances out the window to find herself there in the night, staring back miserably. The long slender face, the skin a burnished summer yellow pooling around deeply set eyes. The details of her features swim a bit in the glass, but their
import is unmistakable. Each day she is evolving more and more into the image of her mother. And at this moment, as much as she loves her mother, she hates her for having such a profound effect on her very being.

She looks back across the room at the clock by her bed. It’s closing in on 10:30.

She and her father have this little ritual every Tuesday and Thursday night when he’s working the late shift. At 10:30, as he cruises past on the freeway, he slows down and throws on the overhead flashers of his sheriff’s patrol car, and she responds by flipping her bedroom light on and off. It’s their secret way of saying good night.