God Is a Bullet (31 page)

He can feel Case’s arm around his neck pull him closer, and in a moment of clarity he sees the snake Ourabouris tattooed on her shoulder. He tries to touch it as he begs, “You have to get her home.”

“Shhh.”

“You have to promise …”

“Shhh.”

“If she’s alive …”

“Shhh.”

“You take her. You hear me?
You
. You take her. You’re the only one I trust … Promise me.”

She puts this down to the fever and hesitates to answer.

“Case … Promise.”

He thinks he hears the faint tide of her words in his ear. “I won’t forget this. Yes … I promise.”

The Ferryman sits on a dusty couch, his dogs around him. He smokes a joint and looks out through the front door into the darkness. He can hear Case in that cell of a room down the hall.

He’s got himself a good M16-level stoneout and watches the sun rise. Remembers those medevac choppers coming out of the heavens down toward the rivers. And the cadre of corpses. White-bundled skiffs caught in the mud tide streaming from the mountains to the sea.

A flying detachment of garbage collectors is what we were, he thinks to himself. Ferrymen all. There to scoop up the dead with nets. He wonders how many of those dead youth have come back. Come back to their next life too soon. With their anger intact. To become killers on street corners and coolly hip gangstas and white-collar legal bloodsuckers getting their revenge for an untimely death.

Case walks into the room, draped in a ratty blue blanket.

“Is he dead?”

Exhausted, she slides down the wall, sits on the floor. A couple of the dogs slope over and curl around her, sniffing.

“No.”

She looks at the snake tattooed on her arm, thinks of him in there when he was staring at it.

“Remember the day you needled this baby?”

He looks at the tattoo she’s pointing at. “Yeah. We were down by the chimney.”

“That was the day I was thinking I’m gonna break. I’m gonna give Cyrus the blowoff. You know I didn’t know what this snake meant. But a year later, in rehab, somebody showed me in a book. A picture. I didn’t know it meant rebirth.”

She looks back down the hall. “Bob was staring at it a long time and I kept telling him the story. I kept telling him over and over again.”

She stares into the circle of that snake. “I kept saying to him, ‘You’re gonna live.’ And I remembered when you were doing the snake on my arm, I was thinking, ‘I’m gonna live. I’m gonna live. I’m gonna break from Cyrus, and live.’ ”

Through the bedroom window the stars play bridge lamps across the distant hum of the desert. He can barely move, but he can feel Case asleep in bed beside him. He can smell her hair, and the soft odor of the woman in the night stillness. He can feel the settling of his system, like a downed prizefighter coming to after the long sleep. Weak and murky, but somewhere there is a deep easement along the muscles.

He lies there and listens to the breathing. His. Hers. The
earth’s. The breathing slow and uniform and without rancor or hatred or fear. All part of some great breathing ecosystem. Some eternally calm oneness.

He moans, turns. In sleep’s short fall she feels him move, turn, and she comes up quick.

A relief of afternoon light through filthy blinds across his face. His skin is ghostly but for the black welding wound around four fang holes. His lips move like great slow slugs. His mouth is dry as crepe.

He barely gets out, “I see … I’m alive.”

“It sure looks it, Coyote.”

“I’m thirsty.”

She rises up from under the sheets and gingerly steps over a couple of dogs that have taken to sleeping by the foot of the bed. Her naked form disappears into the gray hallway.

He listens to the sinkwater and a dog’s feet plucking at the wood floor as it moves around the bed and rests its head on the sheet by his hand.

She sits carefully on the edge of the bed, shoos away the animal, and hands Bob the glass. She does not try to conceal her nakedness. He drinks the water slowly. He is so dry that each swallow makes him feel he is immersed in it. He looks up at Case sitting with a baldric of light from one shoulder to her opposite hip. There seems to be neither purity nor exhibition in her. She is, as ever, the raw statement that is herself.

Watching her, it takes him a while to realize that her hand is over his.

“I’m glad you made it, Coyote.”

He looks over at her arm, at the snake tattooed on her shoulder. His other arm rises weakly, moving across the light like a minute hand, and one finger turns the length of the serpentine motif. A kind of sensual trace across the dreams of her talking to him there in the hard hours of suffering.

“Thanks,” he says, “for being the voice I heard.”

Her face seems to ebb and flow with a moment of relief and satisfaction, until they hear the cellular ring.

It cuts at the air with its staccato beeps. Their minds drain of everything but Cyrus. Bob nods to Case. She crosses through the dusty light to the bureau, where the phone lies.

She clicks on, puts the cellular to her ear, and listens. Bob watches the tightening around her eyes. Seconds later she clicks off.

“Was it him?”

“Yes.”

“What did he say?”

“He said he hoped we enjoyed the little party.”

She comes back, sits on the bed, reaches for a cigarette. She lights it and smokes intently.

“What else?”

She turns to him. “He says he knows what we’re about.”

Bob tries to sit, or at least begin to move some. “What do you think he means?”

“I don’t know,” she says. “But I know his tone. It had ‘fuck you’ all over it. Trying to get at Cyrus is like trying to spit away the sun.”

“Does he want to meet?”

With a chilling quiet bleakness she says, “Oh yeah.”

“When?”

She shrugs. “He’s gonna scarf around the edge of our nerves, I’ll tell you that.”

Bob tries to move a little more, but his body’s a no-show. “I need you to make a call.”

“To who?”

“Arthur. I want him out here.”

She’s not crazy about the idea of having him at the Ferryman’s. Or, for that matter, playing Little Miss Direction-Giver: “You keep driving through the desert till you reach that lovely little pile of human skulls, then you turn left and blah, blah, blah …”

Bob has to lie back down. He’s starting to drift with weakness. “Make the call, will you?” His eyes close. “I need sleep.”

When Bob’s eyes flutter open hours later, he’s looking up into the haggard features of his ex-father-in-law. Arthur’s mouth is moist and puckers in disbelief as he stares starkly at what could only be the war-torn imposter of the boy he knew.

“Oh God, Jesus, Bobby, what’s happened to—”

“I’m alright, Arthur. Just know I’m alright. Beat up, but—”

“Every day, every night. Do you know how I’ve been suffering, son?”

Arthur sits beside Bob as carefully as his hulking frame will allow. He takes Bob’s hand gently in his own. “I’ll get you home, boy.”

“I’m staying right here.”

“What do you—”

“We’ll be going back out on the road when I’m well enough.”

Arthur’s eyes dip, then come around toward Case. She walks out of the room. Arthur looks back at Bob. “What are you talking, Bobby. Look at you—”

“I can’t talk now. I need sleep, but later. You haven’t told anyone you were coming here, have you?”

“No.”

“Not anyone? Not Maureen or John Lee?”

“That woman
said you didn’t want me to tell anyone, so I didn’t.”

Arthur closes the door, storms up that vestibule of a hall after Case. They meet head-on in the bare light of the living room, where she turns on him.

“Goddamn you,” he says. “My boy is lying there almost dead. I knew when I first saw you, you were a disaster.”

“I can see I’m gonna be the brunt of another of your astute observations.”

“Don’t get smart with me, junkie.”

“Why not? One of us has to be.”

They circle that littered tabernacle with couch and table between them.

“Why didn’t you take him to a hospital instead of this shithole?”

“We saved his life in this shithole.”

“Saved it … You fuck!”

Through the door to the kitchen area Arthur sees the Ferryman click by and stop a moment. Arthur crosses the room. “You are nothing,” he shouts at Case. “You are garbage.”

“You know, I despised you before I even knew you,” she says. “And I was right. ’Cause I knew you even before that. You’d had me before that. But you want to talk about blame, Grandpa, I’ll bet you find you’re carrying a busload of it up that ass of yours.”

He can see in her face now that he’s gutted her a bit. Found a weak spot in her crude underbelly. “But I’m still right about you, aren’t I?” he says. “That’s why you’re willing to risk my boy’s life in there. It’s for your ass and nothing else.”

They’re running off at the mouth so fast that neither of them hears a wounded voice say, “Arthur, that’s enough.” And then more belligerently, “Arthur …”

They turn to find Bob scarecrowed against the wall, naked.

“Don’t talk to her like that.”

They both cross the room in a race to his side, but Bob gives way, his arms flapping out in an unjointed fashion as he tries to stop himself from hitting the floor. They close in around him to try to help him up. Arthur elbows himself between Case and Bob, but Bob presses him back.

“Don’t. You got to understand. If it wasn’t for Case, we wouldn’t know who took Gabi.”

His eyes become stark blue shreds. “You know who took her?”

Bob nods.

“His name is Cyrus,” says Case.

Whatever else she says, it’s just words Arthur doesn’t hear. Nothing more than sounds. His whole existence becomes a cold leaking wound and the timbre of a woman’s hand on the floor scratching out a few inches of wood to let him know she is alive.

Case finds herself in a shed storage room where, in a free-floating stack of drawers, the Ferryman keeps his private stash of heroin.

Looking down at the balloons of white bitter crystalline compound bundled neatly as gifts, she begins to feel the memory skin of it all. A black-and-bluesy cocktail in the key of H comes a-calling. The beautiful high-five sense of self-loathing that needs a little vein tonic to cut away the highs and lows, leaving you in the perfect flatness of its murky landscape.

She can see herself in the drawer: the heroin, the syringe, the sport trappings of the lifestyle. Heraldic in their callings. And each balloon a lung of breath to blissful forgetting. The white blind flatline to pain.

Blame. The fact that if she had done something during all those years—put a bullet in Cyrus’s head, cut his throat when he was asleep, something to end him. If for one moment she had risen above her own squalor, her own greedy self-serving private immolation, this chain of events that exists would not. As such, so much bleeding butchery would
not be. The fact that she got out alive and is clean and here now is nothing to her.

“Were you gonna steal some or buy some?”

Case turns, for a second relives the thief’s shudder. She looks up at the Ferryman, who stands just beyond the off-hung shed door, marshaled in grainy daylight.

She tries to calm herself. “I was just performing a little ritual moment of slaughter, is all. The old tapes, Ferryman, the old tapes. They still do hard time inside this head of mine.”

She puts the drawer back as carefully as one would a dowry box of horrors.

She goes and sits on a stack of old crates. It wobbles a bit. The Ferryman comes over and sits beside her. Case stares numbly at a walkway of light that crosses the dark dirt floor. There is a thick smell of workmanlike time in the shed. The aroma of dust mingling with that which is forgotten and stacked within its boards.

The Ferryman speaks in a seductive tone. “Stay selfish. That’s the key to survival. Walk away from these sheep. Walk away. Believe me, they are never the ones that die soon enough.”

She eyes him judiciously.

“I mean it, girl. You have no idea how black the myth inside them is. It’s a fuckin’ trip wire you’re walking over, trying to fleece your way through that world. You’re just playing out a myth dance. It’s all bullshit. I know. I know.”

“Do you know this man Cyrus?”

“Do I know him?”

“Yes,” asks Bob. He repeats the question very slowly: “Do you know him?”

“No. I don’t.”

“Are you sure?”

Arthur sits in a high-backed chair beside the bedroom window and stares imperiously. “I don’t.”

Bob is sitting up in bed as best he can, resting against a stack of pillows. He points out the window. “Do you know what’s over that hill there?”

“I don’t.”

“Furnace Creek,” says Bob.

Feigning thought, Arthur turns, looks out the window. The ocean wind has traveled inland as it does this time of day and is taking its toll against the sand. Along the hillside are breakers of yellow-gray dust.

The whole fuckin’ world is giving way, that’s all that’s in Arthur’s mind at the moment. The whole fuckin’ world.

Bob is watching his ex-father-in-law closely. “A woman was murdered there years ago.”

Arthur turns. “Yes. This is what Maureen was telling me about your phone conversation. Yes.”

“And you got her property in probate? Paradise Hills, that is.”

“Yes, in probate. She had died. Had no heirs.”

Bob points out the window again. “Cyrus lived there, with that old woman who was murdered. Did you ever try to buy the land from her?”

“Did we?” Arthur’s face moves through thoughtful poses. “Not that I remember.”

“There are two separate murders. Years apart. The only people connected to both of them are Cyrus, you, and Maureen.”

“Yes, I guess so,” says Arthur. Then he lays down the thread of a false afterthought: “And John Lee, of course.”

“And John Lee. Yes.”

The bedroom is bare sheathing. Just wood and tin. And with the wind whittling through its seams, the room is like an ancient caboose crossing a desert wasteland.

“What could have brought him back all these years?” Bob
asks. “Was it because he thinks something was stolen from him?”