Multiplex Fandango (19 page)

Bao-yu stumbled forward, as if she’d tripped from a great height. Her hands reached out to catch her fall and she saw that the cloak she’d used to wrap herself was only a few feet wide. It was tiny in fact, hardly enough to protect her from the elements. She fell into herself and pulled her hands together in the same manner as the body. She placed her hands under her cheek and began to merge with what she’d always been, the gentle breeze tickling her dead hair as the scorpions clack-clacked their song.

Like a living thing, the cloth crawled along the ground, over the bones of the others who’d come before, bringing other pieces of skin, fed by their memories. When the cloth touched the base of the tree, the limbs shook, and the scorpions went silent. Bit by bit, the cloth spiraled up the trunk until it found its place. Then for one brief moment the outline of the man who was the tree could be seen, his face half-missing, his neck gone, but most of the contours of his body intact. Then the cloth merged into the skin of the tree as if it were the skin of the being, returning the dark, beautiful face to whole perfection.

Then the tree sighed.

Then the scorpions once again took up song.

And the dark memories flowed free upon the land, eager to make whole that which had fallen, eager to make wrong that which was right. And with it came the tale of the fall, the attack of the light, and the fall of the dark.

And beneath the scorpion tree, Bao-yu dissolved ever-so-slowly, rising again and again in spirit to serve the tree, the memories of her earthly violence a constant reminder of the perfection of the inhumanity on which it fed, and her impervious link with the darkness she’d forever call home.

***

Story Notes:
As you can tell, I’m big about stories
dealing with
identity and perception. We are who we are only because we believe it. What if our parents tricked us? What if there was something divine, such as the fallen angel, whose skin Bao-yu found half-buried in the desert, manipulating us?
How terrible would we feel about the deceptions? This is what I wanted to write about and what better way than to have a Chinese girl, desperate to come to
America
, but so buried in the horrors of her real life to ever make it. This story was influenced by Cormac McCarthy. Some of the themes of man vs nature were inspired by his
Border Trilogy
, as was the harsh, almost alien visualization of the landscape. Perhaps a nod could even be made to
Blood Meridian
.

NOW SHOWING ON SCREEN 8

High
Desert
Come to Jesus

Starring Harry Hargrove as a serial killer master builder

“Like something written by Michael Marshall Smith’s acid-popping doppelganger. Breaks new ground on the idea of serial killers and sociopaths”

–
Midnight Mystery Magazine

A Quinn Martin Production

Harry Hargrove entered his home, flipped on the light and tossed his keys on the table.
He went straight to the kitchen, grabbed two glasses, filled them with ice and vodka, then teased the drinks with enough orange juice to give them color.

“Why do you live so far out?” the blonde asked as she entered the room, swaying slightly as if it were the deck of a ship.

Harry handed her one of the glasses
,
which seemed to steady her.

“I like my privacy,” he said.

Harry’s home was sparsely furnished.
No extravagances.
Nothing expensive.
There were only a few decorations and these were Mexican knick-knacks bought in tourist stalls just over the border in Agua Prieta.
For all the space he had it might as well have been a hotel.

“What’s with all the phones?” she asked.

Her name was Meredith and she worked days at the local community college as a receptionist.
Her blonde hair, blue eyes and red lips had gone well with his martinis earlier at Hangman’s House just north of Douglas along the
Pan-American Highway
.

She giggled and pointed to one of the phones, his oldest.
“I had one like that when I was a teenager.”

It was a 1999 Samsung and was the Model A of his collection.
He doubted she’d had one within a decade of her teenage years, but he allowed her the conceit, if only for the tilt-a-whirl that had been promised him.
But what he couldn’t allow, even if it meant going to bed alone again, was for her to touch it.

“Refresh?” he asked, a little too loudly.

She jostled unsteadily, her hand poised just above the red and white plastic phone. She seemed about to touch it, then turned and sipped the last of the liquid from between the ice cubes.
Her expression was pure tomcat.

“I once dated a man who collected garden gnomes.”

“The kind with little pointy hats?” Harry asked, slipping close and taking her into his arms.

“Just.
He must have had a hundred of them.”

“What a strange thing for a man to collect.”
Harry glanced over her shoulder at the bank of seven phones.
Each was plugged into the wall with LEDs lit and ready for a call.
None of them had been connected to a service for a long time, but that was how it was supposed to be.

“He wasn’t much of a man,” she whispered.

Harry cupped one of her breasts in the palm of his right hand and guided her to his bedroom, his lips reading her skin like it was
War and Peace
in Braille.

***

Sometime during the night, while he lay staring at the laconic circuit of the blades on the ceiling fan above him, a sound penetrated his descending slumber.
Other than the soft snores of Meredith, who’d proved to be quite the athlete in both endurance and dedication, there was no other sound except the hum of the home’s electrical grid.

Then it came again.

The phone.

Harry leaped from the bed and tore into the kitchen.
He picked up the old red and white Samsung, pressed the talk button, and waited.

Finally a man’s voice came on and spoke one word.
“12,” he said.

“17,” Harry replied.

“21.”

“Red horse rising,” he said.

The wait on the other end was long enough to make him wonder if he’d gotten it wrong.
It had been years since he’d practiced the codes.
Years since he’d made the vow.
Frankly, he’d never thought he’d have to use them after all this time.

Finally the voice said, “We have him.”

Harry licked his lips.
“Where?”

Meredith entered the kitchen, came up behind him and put her arms around his midsection.
Her left hand slid down his hairless stomach and tried to tease him back to life.

“Shakespeare’s Graveyard,” the voice answered.

Harry felt himself stir beneath her ministrations.
He grinned.
“How long?” he asked.

“Two hours,” the voice said, then the phone went dead.

When Harry turned around, he was at full throttle.

Meredith smiled.
“Wanna get lucky?”

Harry kissed her on each nipple, then whispered in her ear.
”I just did.”

It took him ten minutes to toss on clothes and climb into his ’06 Cadillac CTS and head up
Arizona
80.
He had to pass Cazador and climb the hills near Chiricahua before he’d hit the
New Mexico
line.
Shakespeare
,
New Mexico
was a good ways away and would take him most of the two hours to get there.
Even if he wasn’t stopped by the police, he was so close to
Mexico
that the border patrol would be on his vehicle like white on rice until they were convinced he wasn’t an illegal or worse yet, a coyote.
That he was white
and
Anglo-Saxon meant nothing to them.
After all, he could be one of the coyote smugglers or an exotic illegal, or O
–
T
–
M, what they referred to as Other Than Mexican, a small but interesting category of illegals that included many men of Middle Eastern descent.

Harry left his window down as he raced along the road.
Arizona
was three weeks into summer monsoon season and the frogs were calling to him from the darkness.
Their plaintive barking sounded like geese flying overhead in the star strewn sky.
Soon the monsoons would stop and the frogs would dig themselves a hole, where they’d sleep until the ground moistened once more.

Their life cycle was a lot like Harry’s.
He hid away most of the time, waiting until one of the phones rang.
His past deeds had provided him with a set future as long as he spent wisely.
Living in the loneliest corner of
Arizona
, he couldn’t help but save money.

His lights lit a border patrol SUV waiting along the side of the road.
Harry slowed and made it a point to look at the agent behind the wheel.
Just enough cooperation and then he was gone.
He checked his rearview mirror and was rewarded with a continuation of the darkness.

An hour of hard driving saw him pass into
New Mexico
.
He had the choice to continue north on 80 to Interstate 10, or go East on Highway 9 to Animas, then head north along one of the dozen or so farm roads.
80 would be faster, but if there was someone laying for him, they’d expect him to go that way.

He checked the time.

The hell with it.
He couldn’t afford to be late after all this time.
He swung onto 80 and sped north.

Eight years ago was the last time he’d seen Ronnie Archie.
Then five years ago he’d spent time in
Florence
lock-up where he’d met the Salvadoran, Enrique, the voice on the phone, and the people he represented.
Harry had eventually made the vow and set the actions in motion.
The Salvadoran was charged with tracking down Harry’s victims and keeping the process honest.
Ronnie was the oldest, the first to turn twenty-one and therefore the first to be tracked down. Harry would never even have a chance of finding the boy.
Harry corrected his thoughts.
Man.
Ronnie was a man now, no longer the thirteen
-
year
-
old kid he’d been when Harry entered his life.

Why they’d chosen
Shakespeare
,
New Mexico
was an interesting question.
The place was a ghost town.
Formerly known as Mexican Springs, it had been a stop for the Butterfield Overland Stagecoach Company in the 1800s.
Legend had it that Johnny Ringo, The Clantons and Billy the Kid called it home when on the run from the law, for it was a dead run south to
Mexico
and freedom if any tinhorns interloped on their hiding place.
Then there was the Shakespeare connection, named after an old silver mining company, not the old bard.

Harry sliced across Interstate 10 for a few moments, then took the Lordsburg exit and headed south into the desert.
It wasn’t but a matter of minutes before he saw a cockeyed wooden sign, pointing down an even lonelier trail, strewn with river rock and tumbleweeds.
He took it slowly, the rocks banging against his under carriage like a door knocker slamming against a held-fast door.

The graveyard was on the near edge of town.
He pulled into it and saw a tall thin man standing behind one of the tombstones.
Harry turned off the car lights, got out of the car and closed the door.
He stepped forward into the light.

“You,” came the voice of the man.
The word came again, as if released from an old balloon kept alive through care and concealment.
“You!”

Harry shone his flashlight towards the man.
The light first flashed on the gravestone which told of the demise of old miner and his wife during a typhoid outbreak in 1870.
Then Harry drew the light upwards as if it were a brush of radiance, creating from darkness the visage of boy-turned
-
man, only hints of the terrified child he once was in the countenance of the man who stood outraged before him.

“You,” came the voice once more.

“It’s me, Ronnie” Harry said.

Harry lowered the light from the Ronnie’s eyes to his midsection.
He was thin hipped and thin shouldered.
The light reflected from his glasses, turning them into pale silver opaque squares.

“What do you want with me?” Ronnie asked after a few moments.

“The question is what do you want with me, Ronnie?”

“What?”

“I asked you, what do you want to do?”

“Me?”
Ronnie licked his lips like a boy waiting on carnival food.
“I don’t want to do anything?”

“Oh, come on, Ronnie.”
Harry smiled to himself.
He’d imagined a thousand versions of this conversation over the years and this was version six hundred.
He knew it well.
“What I did to you, what was done to you...show me your hand.”
He stabbed the light to the boy’s left hand shoved deep into a pocket.

“No.”

“Come on, Ronnie.
It’s just me and you out here.”

“Why do you want to see?”

“Hmm.
Good question.
Think of it as a calling card, or better yet, a fingerprint, excuse the pun.
With that I’ll know it’s really you.”

Ronnie seemed about to argue, but instead pulled his hand free of his jeans.
A silver watch adorned his left wrist.
His wedding finger was bare.
All else was normal, except of course the missing pinkie.

“Ah.
So it is you.”

“Of course it is you bastard!”

“Bastard,” Harry mouthed, tasting the word.
He said it a few more times as he rolled it around his mouth.
Finally, “is that the best you can do?”

“What?”

“You called me a bastard.
Is that what eight years of hatred created?
Is that all you feel?”

Ronnie shoved his hand back in his pants and balled it into a fist, the jeans pushing outwards and taught.
He frowned, the corners of his mouth jerking his entire face south towards some hellish remembrance.
His lip quivered like a bowstring ready to fire.

“Bastard.”
Harry sighed.
“That’s pretty pathetic, really.”

“What the fuck do you want from me?” Ronnie cried.

Harry grinned as he said, “I want you to get me back.”

“Get you back?”

“Sure.
What I did to you was heinous, there is no doubt.
I’m a changed man, now.
I’m a new me.”
Harry held out
h
is hands and spun, the light briefly leaving Ronnie then returning as Harry completed his rotation.
“Out with the old and in with the new.”

“Get you back?
Get you back?”

“You’re sounding like a broken record, Ronnie.
Ease up on the anger.
Mold it.
Savor it.
Use it as the engine for your revenge.”

“You’re a new man?”

Harry tsked and stepped forward.
“Get it together, Ronnie.
This is what you’ve been waiting for.
Think of all those nights you dreamed of getting me back.
That moment has arrived.”