God Is a Bullet (21 page)

It is a muggy and deplorable night, even with the rain, that allows Case’s shirt to play like the damp veil of some vestal sculpture. She begins to take on a strange elemental quality. Like the distant blue luminescence of the desert floor before the moon is full.

Case turns to him. Embarrassed, his eyes flit away, then come back. She points out the searchlights of the border guards on Mount Signal. They are swarming the rocky atoll like catch dogs. Some poor illegal is probably using the rain to try to make the run.

Bob leans against the other plaster column. And there together they watch the hunt along the mountain. An image in absolutes. Like guards on the face of some great shield at the entrance to eternity. And in the distance the searchlights climb and converge till eventually they are just the remains of heavenly stars caught in the sweep of the stone. Then they are gone.

Bob leaves Case in the alley behind their hotel room. In the doorway beneath the fire escape she thanks him for listening and not casting judgments.

Because of the rain he heads back to the bar at the Pioneer to wait and see if anyone shows up to do their little mating dance with Errol. The band that was practicing drives it home to a packed house. Either the rain or the music, or both, has gathered them all up tonight. It’s a real touch of
urban voodoo. Rednecks and factory hands and chickies with their skirts hiked up. There’s your basic tabletop drunks and hotheaded rockers. But Errol Grey is nowhere to be found in that choked hole. Bob scans the room again, going from face to face, knowing that somewhere out there is the right freak with the right history.

He kills two beers with tequila chasers. He keeps flashing on Case leaning against that column. He looks in the mirror behind the bar. Five days without shaving, sleeveless shirt wet and dirty, his mustache drooping over his lip. He keeps staring at himself. It is just then, as he is walking among the not-quite-yets of his mind, that he hears a voice say, “Nice fuckin’ artwork.”

Bob turns to face a kid who’s not more than twenty and looks like he was processed out of some angry white rebel tribe. Studded collar. A heavy dose of battered leathers and silver highlighted by an earlobe that has been cut away, leaving just a ring of flesh into which a silver-dollar-sized candle has been wedged and lit.

“Talk about a gothic ride on paint fumes,” the kid says. His fingers dance over Bob’s shoulder tattoo. Bob plays it all laid back. The kid keeps checking out the artwork and sucking away on a Corona. They do a few turns around a couple of sentences. Nothing spectacular.

Then Bob notices something in the freak’s palms. At first it looks like he’s holding a piece of red cloth in each hand. But when the kid puts his beer down to mooch a butt, Bob notices that the red cloth has been stitched in place, and painted on it is a white
A
with a circle around it.

Gutter comes sliding through a pack of beer hounds and up to Wood, and they go screw to screw with a head butt as if Bob didn’t even exist.

“Come on, slash hunkie,” Gutter says.

Wood nods, turns to Bob. “We got waste to live off of. See ya, dude.”

Bob nods, watches Wood turn and put his head right into
the other kid’s back and drive him through the crowd. “Put it in overdrive, Gutter!”

Case is in the shower when the cellular she left on the sink starts to ring. Bob’s voice is like a bone blade cutting through the bad connection. “They’re here!”

“What!”

“Gutter—that was one of the names you said, right?”

Down the back steps she slips the semiautomatic into her jeans. Starts to run into the face of a slick drizzle.

Bob does a slow cruise from the bar, following after Gutter and Wood. He picks up on the rat pack around the television. Something is drawing their attention away from the box, and they are whispering among themselves and eyeing the check-in counter.

Bob eases into the turn, sees Gutter working the house phone and Wood holding up the dead space beside him, the candle in his ear flickering away.

Case does a fast about-face in the Dakota, bringing the truck up on the chance they boogie. From Seventh she hard-turns through a red light down Heber. She tries reaching for the cattle prod she keeps tucked away under the seat.

Bob plays Johnny Low Key as he passes Wood and flips him a nod. Gutter is mind-pacing as he listens to the phone ring. Bob cruises the check-in desk, trying to eavesdrop. He rummages
through a small wicker basket where the management keeps matchbooks. He lights a cigarette and scans their faces.

The phone is finally answered. Gutter comes on like a real prick. “What were you doin’, taking a world-class shit or what? Who is this …! It’s a couple of crustys stinkin’ up the lobby till you get your ass down here.”

Case would run the next light but that dynamic duo who creep the park slide through the intersection in their police cruiser. They give her their best Batman glare on the turn, inching along till the light turns green. Just a quaint reminder of who is who and who is not.

Gutter and Wood are locked in a private conversation, which Bob is trying to circle in on. Wood’s head cranes around Gutter’s shoulder. “What’s to it, man?”

Bob points upstairs. “Waiting for the old lady.”

Gutter turns. His eyes scrag Bob. They’ve got that hooker’s abstract boredom until they land at the spot on Bob’s cheek where Case did her little Michelangelo. Bob picks up on a moment in Gutter’s eyes as he stares at the tattoo. A kind of shift hit like he’s seen on jail-cell cowboys when that first little kiss of Dex cooz’s the system.

The elevator door shutters open. Errol Grey skims across the lobby, wearing a black oilskin raincoat and those same nickel-sized sunglasses.

Where the fuck is Case?

Case charges the lobby, moving with a boneless grace. Overhead the one-two punch: lightning, thunder. Case sees herself in the wavery glass of the sliding doors. Pale as a shiv of moon.

Inside, the lobby is empty except for those transients
slopped around the television. The cellular is strapped to her wrist. She flips it open, speed-dials Bob’s number.

“Where the”—static on the line like poppers—“are you?”

“In the lobby.”

“What took you so …”

“…  I brought the goddamn car!”

One of the transients turns and puts a yellow nicotine-stained finger to his lips and shhhh’s her. She turns on him with acid dripping off her teeth. “Shut the fuck up, zombie … Bob, where are you?”

Waves of rain. Drumrolls sweeping in northerly gestures. Bob is walking south on Meadows trying to talk into the cellular. He squints against the coal-black night, struggling along behind the suggestion of three men a block ahead.

Behind the wheel of the Dakota, Case speeds onto Meadows. Head twisted to one side almost obscenely so she can hold the cellular. She can barely hear Bob through the static. Kick out the fear, girl, she tells herself. We’re closing in! Kick it out! … Fuck. You might as well be jacking off under the sword of Damocles. She almost blows right past Bob as he tries to flag her down.

“What was with that doorstop in the lobby?” Gutter asks. “With the fuckin’ decal work?”

Wood shrugs. “What do you mean?”

“That piece on his face. It didn’t look weird to you?”

“Weird how?”

“It’s the same fuckin’ mark Lena has on her face.”

Wood stares at him oddly.

“You better keep your head out of paper bags, prince.
That’s Lena’s old girlfriend’s mark. She ran with us before going sheep.”

“If this is a history lesson, you’re tiring me out.”

“It’s just gothic to see it on some doorstop’s face in the middle of Shitville a couple of years later.”

Errol is having to work double time to keep up with his rank bookends. “It ain’t gothic. She’s here.”

Gutter turns. “Who?”

“Headcase.”

Gutter stops. “This is bullshit, right. ’Cause it’s too fuckin’—”

“But it’s true. Case is here. That was her old man you blew off in the lobby.”

“Gutter is Cyrus’s personal ass towel,” says Case. “His number one coolie.”

“Well, he checked me out pretty good. Spotted this mark, and I could see something in his face click and—”

“I hope I didn’t fuck up,” Case says.

The Dakota is doing a careful crawl, slipping and sliding from open parking spot to alleyway.

Bob leans into the darkness of the dashboard. “They stopped! See! Pull over …”

“You mean to tell me,” Gutter demands, “that freak show back there is her old man?”

“She told me he’s been her Visa card for the last year.”

“And she does her little magic act all of a sudden. Cinderella knocking at Cyrus’s door. Right … Her showing up like this is too fuckin’ gothic.”

“She’s pretty junked out. She wants to come home. Do I give a fuck.”

Gutter begins to pace. Wood tries to huddle up inside his
motorcycle coat. The rain is blowing into pools across the sidewalk.

Errol gets testy. “I don’t want to stand out here in the middle of a fuckin’ river while you try to put a couple of coherent thoughts together, alright? As for me, I figure Cyrus would love to blood the little bitch.”

“Yeah, but maybe we should make sure she don’t want to blood him any.”

Through the sweep of the wipers, Case and Bob watch the three outlines haze into a small talking bundle, then clamber across the street and under the awning of a weathered liquor store. Gutter goes to a pay phone hooked up to the wall by the door.

Case hits the steering wheel. “Rat shit.”

“Is he calling Cyrus?”

She nods. Her cigarette tip flares in the dark. “Fuckin’ black magic,” she says.

After a few minutes of phone time Gutter hangs up. He walks over to Wood and Errol. Errol slumps his hands down into his pockets and appears to ask Gutter something.

Gutter answers with a freaky pirouette of his hand for the others to follow.

The pickup pulls out into the dimness past a parked Volvo that’s rotten with rust. Bob and Case follow the three men, who walk one block and then turn south on Route 111.

There is a roll of fear and confusion inside the pickup. A tin-sided garden of agony cruising in second gear. Ahead, the mist only half obscures the border station that turns Route 111 into Adolpho Lopez on the El Norte side.

“We’re fucked if they cross into Mexico,” says Case.

“We’re fucked, but do we cross?”

Whatever confidence they share in their plan turns to wax facing the border. They pull over. For a minute they lose Gutter and the others in a throw of darkened one-story buildings.

“Whatever we do, we do it now …”

“Gettin’ across, maybe,” she says. “But if we’re stopped on that side for jack shit, or if coming back we’re stopped … how do we explain these?” She pulls up her shirt to show off the semiautomatic tucked in her jeans. Then she reaches for the cattle prod lying on the front seat. “Or this … On that side the only way anybody is gonna be looking at us is down.”

He weighs each possibility, and each is grimmer than the last.

“Get out,” he says. “You follow them on foot so they don’t disappear on us. I’ll drive across.” She doesn’t move right away so he shoves her at the door. “Go on …”

She jumps out. He tosses her the balled-up canvas coat he has stashed behind the seat. “Go on!”

Down toward the mist with her arms spread out like wings, trying to get that coat on at a dead run.

Bob drives into a lit stretch of road behind two trucks waiting to pass through the guard station. Under a battery of overhanging roadside halogens the mist is orange and almost foul in appearance. He opens the window, lights a cigarette, looks over nervously to where the foot traffic is moving along a caged-in walkway spanned by concrete arches. He tries to pick Case out against the rain.

Case can see the pickup forty yards out through the chain-links. She moves along under the concrete arches. Gutter and the others have already passed through the guard station
and continued on to where the caged-in walkway turns and goes down a flight of stairs to the El Norte side.

The rain has made the INS boys uninterested and slow. Case feels herself pressing anxiously against the woman and small child ahead of her. They turn and stare at her impoliteness. When it’s her turn she goes through without so much as a bump. She looks back and sees that Bob is still a truck away. She runs down the walk, takes the turn, and half jumps the steps. She has reached the bottom of the walkway when someone steps out from beside a concrete pillar.

“Hey there, Sheep.”

She comes to a hard stop and wheels away. Her voice misses a beat. “Gutter …”

He leans back against the pillar, raises his boot to the stone. A few people hurry past, first one way and then the other.

“You’re gettin’ a little aggro, aren’t you, Headcase?”

She works the coolie trade, hunching up her shoulders.

“Why you following us, Sheep?”

“I asked Errol to talk to Cyrus about me coming—”

He cuts her off cold. “But you just couldn’t kick. You had to start playing Zorro. You and that doorstop of yours. I saw him in the lobby. I know the shit Headcase would try. I remember the child before she was dead to the world.”

He makes a fist, holds it up for her to see. She recognizes the tattoo of a beer bottle with the fifteenth mystery of the Tarot as a label. The vessel of unwanted evils. Gutter’s own personalized decal.

Bob clears the border station. The passing is short and sterile. The low-rent INS guards: one half asleep and the other couldn’t be bothered. Bob cruises Adolpho Lopez. He drives slow, led by the metronome of the wipers. The tires splay apart the images of shop windows cast onto the waters of a running street.

At Uxmal he pulls over. He speed-dials Case’s number. It rings in a series of quick clicks. He scans the square ahead.
He recognizes the names of national chains: Payless, Leeds. Shop windows glare with American goods for sale. With slogans conning you in English or in Spanish. It is more like America than America, he thinks. And the phone, it just keeps fuckin’ ringing.

Bob backtracks to where the caged stairwell empties out into Mexico. He parks close by, walks the area like a soldier facing off against some alien perimeter before the fight to come. In one hand he holds the cattle prod close to his hip in the folds of his slicker; in the other the wheelgun stands ready in a pocket.