God Is a Bullet (41 page)

On the incline two blocks over from the clapboard mess of a ranch, Case finds a house that is partly burned and boarded up. It has a garage and a shed. These too are boarded up. The garage has a second-floor loft. The property is protected by a rusty hurricane fence. It’s for sale, but no one ever comes looking.

Case sneaks in and sets herself up in the loft. She breaks away a few vertical boards and battens under the eaves so she can sit and use binoculars to watch the Encantada ranch over the roofs of the houses between.

Case spends each foul day, each frightful night, in that unholy hot alcove with its festering dust and dead air. Weeks of bad-ass summer pass at over a hundred and ten degrees. She has only a radio. It is as if she were pitting her will against Cyrus, waiting for him to show. If he will at all.

The ranch is owned by an INS agent named Bill Mooney and his sister Carol. He’d helped Cyrus cross the border from Mexico with Gabi. They’d met up later with the sister,
who was a sorceress of sorts. Before they’d headed back up through the Mojave, Cyrus had let Carol and Bill have their fifteen minutes with the child when she was blown out on smack. A real carpet-feeding, it was. After that, before they all split, Lena had overheard Cyrus and Carol talk about his using the place for a little chill time.

Inside her wooden catacomb the aridity and stink of the algae from the Salton Sea choke her lungs. The reeking cobwebbed wood ready at any time for the dry burn. The uninsulated gabled roof a devastating oven. No matter how much water Case drinks, she can hardly keep her body fluids even close to being right. Scurrying from that cribbed coffin to vomit under the overhang of the shed roof beside the garage has become a recurring theme.

Over half the summer and not once has she ever been spotted by anyone passing. She lives on the money Bob wired to L.A. She bought a beat-around pickup she keeps parked two miles away in a supermarket lot. Once a week she sneaks out at night to go to a motel and shower. She buries her stool like a cat in the small walkway between shed and garage. She hangs in space silently when kids maraud the property, as they sometimes do. She speaks to no one. She watches the pathetic comings and goings at the ranch. And every time a vehicle trundles down that dusty talused road, she goes into red alert. But each time it’s nothing.

The summer becomes a black hole in her life. Lattice-lit days and skyless perishable nights. Sometimes she wakes to find the staring eyes of bats watching from broken joists and exposed rafters. Bedeviled creatures of black crepe cut horizontally with white lines of razored teeth and pink gums.

The radio drones on about that cauldron of insanity called the outside world: A jet downed off Long Island people claim was hit by a missile or a bomb. Possible life on Mars discovered. A new abortion pill, a new fight. The conviction of Polly Klaas’s killer, and his mad insult to the world claiming
the child’s last words to him were that she had been molested by her father. But nothing at all about Cyrus.

She suffers through devastating loneliness. Thinks often of Bob and Gabi. Begins to replay conversations she and Bob had, adding to and subtracting from half-frozen moments. She realizes the inarticulate desperation of such folly. Feels life is sucking the marrow from her bones, turning her into something the wind could blow into potash.

Through blistering waves of heat Case watches airboat crews ski the glassy cloth surface of the Salton Sea, scooping up pelicans killed by the toxic pesticides and selenium that drain into this forty-five-mile-long sump. She watches poor children swim out past a garbage-slurried shoreline. It is one long continuous defilement of the laws of nature.

Peeking out a broken portal of boards, she watches the final lunar eclipse of the millennium. She finds herself crying sometimes. Sounds she only allows from herself in the night. She buries her face in a shirt that once belonged to Bob, muffling her sobs so no living thing might hear. It is like trying to outlive the heroin times.

Then, one night, in the perfect calm of Indian summer, a battered and gray-primered minivan does a casual crawl down Encantada Cuesta. The evening is dun-colored as the minivan pulls around into the front yard. Only a short walk separates the passenger door from the front porch, and Case wiggles upward with her binoculars, pulling out extra slats, ripping them away so she can clear the roofs enough to cover that square shelf of steps leading up into the house.

There is little margin for error. Her breathing stops so as not to shake the binoculars. For a half beat beneath the solitary lamp a figure hauntingly leans out of the shadows to hug Carol Mooney …

Case can feel her blood make the rounds.

• • •

Case plans against a skull-colored moon, pacing starlight from meridian to meridian. She sees Cyrus’s face once, just once, a moving shape behind a window fan that turns silently against blades of brief light. Her plan is set, except for one detail: when. It should be during the week, when Bill Mooney is off at the border working his INS job. That will leave only Cyrus and Carol to kill. But give the leopard time to cool his spots and sleep the sleep of the dead. In the corner of her room she sits cross-legged, waiting for nightfall of the third day. She watches the sun set through a hole of broken boards. The single eye of a thousand years hypnotically centered on one instant of pure time. Then, when it’s the witching hour, the atavistic urgency to begin the deadly crawl comes upon her. She looks down at the snake on her arm, Ourabouris. She remembers the day she had that arted in the desert, the day she began to plan her freedom, and she whispers to herself, to Bob, to Gabi, to her gun, “It’s dyin’ time.”

Cyrus’s eyes open into darkness. He listens intently. Somewhere a mobile’s plaintive chanting of bones and glass and clay dance on a string of night air. The kick of an engine winds out on some distant road. A fragment of garbaged tide crests.

He rises, naked. His lean and hungry frame is white against dark corridors. Through the space of a bedroom door he sees Carol lying on her side, asleep.

He continues down the hall, stretching like a great cat. He enters the head. In the dark, his piss rings the water. An arcing stream that suddenly locks tight when a gun barrel lips his neck.

“Relax,” Case whispers. She tantalizes his hair with the gun. “Relax. Finish up.”

He lets go, finishes pissing.

“I’m gonna step back now,” she says, “so step back with
me.” He does as he is told. “Alright, I’m gonna turn, so you turn with me.”

She gets him turned and headed up the hall. She sees his head drift slightly toward Carol’s room. “Forget it,” she says. She holds a knife up against the shadows. In her gloved hand he sees the pale silver blade discolored.

She forces him up the hall to the living room. She gets him down into a musty easy chair with a high-flanged back. She turns a table lamp on beside him. She stands away with her arm outstretched and the gun doing a hard line at the side of his head.

The light is dim and harsh. It is only their faces now, cast beyond the open space of the gun.

“Why all the fuckin’ drama, girl? Why not just do me when I’m pissing?”

“Because,” she says viciously, “I like to watch. You know that.”

He eyes her like she is garbage. “We’re in the heart of the true country. So come on, field hand. Send me home.”

She leans in just enough so he can feel the metal press like a boot heel against his temple.

“You left a long bloody dance behind you.”

He sits there staring at her like some contemptible deity carved from the white marrow of his victims.

“The Left-Handed Path awaits us
all
.”

“Fuck you,” she says.

“You’re just a shadow I’ll leave behind. A footnote to the cults to come.”

The boned-down essence of their lives comes into play.

“Why don’t you do me? Why? I know. You want to see if the cock’s got feet of clay. Right? You got a field-hand mentality. The prince-must-fall shit. Not happening, coolie. Go back to your fuckin’ junkie dreams, Headcase.”

His eyes move on in the slow pursuit of her courage. “Say it. You want it. It’s the new juice you need for your arms. Right? My weakness becomes something you can build on.
A little piece of power you chipped away. Like some New Age stone you hang around your neck to ward away evil spirits. Bullshit! It’s a way for you to cop out on your blame. ’Cause remember, cunt, you helped put me here. You’re a coolie. From your fuckin’ head down to your clit. And if you expect me to go down, forget it. I’m not like those sheep whose whore you are. I don’t pretend to be. I
am
my freedom. I wear it. Look into my face. Go on. See it for yourself.”

Suddenly there is a maddening quiescence to him. A hoary, ageless wisdom.

“You have nothing,” he says. “You are nothing. There is nothing inside you, girl. And you know that. You are trying to buy yourself back with one bullet. You are just a hole the world shits through.”

She lines the muzzle to its mark.

“You’re crossing over,” she says. “And a part of me is going with you.”

Within that cavernous heap of years all the blue and stale and vitriolic imprisonments of her own making and the liquid river from the hidden spring of her unconscious form one surge down through the sinew of an arm.

The thunderbolts on his cheeks spear. His face tightens. A howling masterpiece starts to draw inward, like a building breathing with fire before it goes. Where the steel and stone seem to collapse into the sucking whale of heat that devours it.

Hannah watched a flock of great birds against the sky. Silver outlines shaped like arrowheads making their way. She sat drinking beer, with her bare feet up. Roasting naked in the sunlight to mark her time
.

She looked out past the dunes, where the ground whispered about every death that haunted it. Gossip of the slain, poking fun at the fast-moving cars they heard whizzing by with all their tales of what would be
.

She knew the boy was full of trouble. That his personal
tragedy did not equal his degeneracy. That he resisted the line between explanation and excuse. No matter. She would let him absorb what he would
.

She took a handful of sand. Looked it over. Then she laughed like a half-drunk raven
.

Cyrus watched her. He despised her aphoristic meanderings. He despised them, but he didn’t know why
.

Case leans down and whispers into that salt lick of wet bones that once was Cyrus, “Ourabouris.”

For Bob, the passing summer is an absolute merge of disturbing episodes and despairing isolation. He must wade through his personal life, becoming the gristmill for five-minute blurbs and hard-copy snippets. He must watch Maureen and Arthur, via the news, work the tragedy with stoic sincerity and grace. There is a resurgence of interest in the Via Princessa murders. It is not only a showcase for photographers but for new editorials flowing back and forth, rag versus counterrag, claiming the ranch house as the ultimate symbol for the coming war between Christian good and pagan evil. And nothing less than the laws and morals of a nation hang in the balance.

All this becomes a trying absurdity as Bob sets about the act of restoring his daughter’s life. They must get through marauding nightmares and the horrible internal assault of her waking hours. He is both father and mother now, and he must reassess his view of the world.

He takes Gabi to therapy. They spend hours trying to talk through the madness. He tries to concentrate on the wounded simplicities of life: love, tenderness, need, resonant human contact. He finds the ordained world of the predawn light the time he is most connected to life.

He watches the sun and wonders about Case. He tries to imagine where she is.

Sometimes the destruction of what they’ve been through overwhelms him, and he picks a spot to hide and just cry.
Sometimes Gabi finds him, and he is no longer father and mother but just a casualty in the deep pit of a black ordeal pouring out his grief to a womanchild.

Even Gabi talks about Case. She sometimes remarks to her father that there are things it would be easier to speak of with her. Things Case would understand better and know how to deal with.

There is carnage in his soul that he cannot pretend won’t always be there. He feels it every time Maureen and Arthur stop by and he must rough his way through it. Or when he leaves his house to find someone grabbing a snapshot of his house or him or Gabi. When he stands naked in the bathroom and looks at the scar on his neck and chest, and the Ferryman’s unfinished mural across his shoulder. He wonders now about the last throw of the coins he never took. What it might have said. And, finally, at the small mark on his cheek Case inked there.

He is asked to come back to work at the Sheriff’s Department. But he is also reminded, in the politest manner, that facial tattoos are outside departmental regulations. He is requested to have it removed. He resigns instead.

He reads in an editorial a statement that he underlines and cuts out and places on the wall above his desk along with a collage of others that have preoccupied his thoughts since coming home: “Modern man is the singular entity that seems to shrink before anything that has any meaning.”

He wonders on which side of this thought he falls. Has he failed by letting it all pass, by letting lies become part of the living truth? And then he sees these thoughts for what they are—blame.

It comes to him that this is no different than the night Gabi shuffled into his room, crying desperately, and asked him if what had happened up on Via Princessa had in some way been her fault. Had she acted more quickly when she thought she saw something in the hills, or had she not left the glass patio doors open (and she’s not even sure she had),
could this devastation have been avoided? As he listened to his child blame herself, it seemed as if the nightmare had caused the one who dreamed it.

Bob held her through the whimpering aftershocks of that trauma and tried to convince her that she was not to blame.