This Wicked World (16 page)

“You two sure make a cute couple,” Taggert rasps as Virgil and T.K. approach.

“Steak again,” T.K. says. “Man, I sure miss my Cheerios.”

Taggert motions to a cooler. “Grab yourselves a couple Buds,” he says.

T.K. waves him off. “Little early for me.”

“Not me,” Virgil says. He reaches in and takes a cold, wet can from the ice.

Spiller holds out a fat joint and says, “You probably want some of this too.”

Virgil hits it hard, then croaks around the mouthful of smoke, “You guys are my new best friends.” Taggert gives him a look he can’t figure out, half like a smile, half like he’d like to strangle him, and Virgil decides to keep his mouth shut for a while. He passes the joint to the Mexican and just grins and nods when Taggert says, “I hope you like your meat rare and your eggs scrambled, ’cause that’s the only way I do them.”

“Check this out,” Taggert says. He pulls something from his pocket that makes a sizzling sound when he shakes it and tosses it to T.K. “Got those off a snake we saw up at the new house this morning. Thing was huge, a man-eater. Spiller nearly dookied when he tripped over it.”

“Nice place you got here,” T.K. says. “Fucking snakes and scorpions and tarantulas and buzzards.” He passes the rattle to Virgil, who pinches it gingerly between his thumb and index finger.

“It’s what you call harsh beauty,” Taggert says. “Everything out here has to be tough or smart to survive, has to be ruthless.”

“I’ll take my chances in the hood,” T.K. replies. “Least motherfuckers there ain’t sneaking around trying to bite you.”

Taggert laughs and turns the steaks. Virgil holds out the rattle to him, but Taggert says, “Go on, keep it for a souvenir.”

Virgil would like to know when he can get out of here, back to L.A., but is too scared to ask. His sister, Olivia, might dig all this sand and sky, but it just makes him feel lost. He’s got enough cash left for a bus ticket to Tampa, and that’ll be that. He’s had his fill of California. Everything is so god-damn serious out here, and the cost of living way too high. A yellow jacket lands on the rim of his beer can, and he flicks it off.

Taggert closes the lid of the grill. “Watch the beef,” he says to Spiller, then turns to Virgil. “Come on. I’ve got something to show you.”

Virgil is fine where he is, thanks very much, but there’s no way he’s telling Taggert this. He drags his feet when they step from the shade into the sun and has to squint to see as they walk across the yard.

“Are there a lot of snakes out here?” he asks.

“Man, this is snake heaven,” Taggert replies.

He leads Virgil down a dirt road toward the barn, a big corrugated steel structure set off a couple hundred feet from the house. They pass a rooster on the way, scratching in the sand, and a twitchy black cat Taggert calls Satan. A dog barks as they get closer, then another, then another, until Taggert practically has to shout to be heard when he says, “It’s like a god-damn zoo out here.”

Next to the barn is a coop full of muttering hens and a pen containing a small herd of goats. The goats rush the fence, climbing all over one another to poke their noses through. Virgil reaches down to scratch a few chins. They’re kind of cute, except for their devil eyes: yellow, with strange, slitlike pupils.

Taggert opens a gate and steps inside the pen, and the goats gather around him, some standing on their hind legs to rest their front hooves on his thighs. He bends over to take hold of a little brown one with a white muzzle, picks it up, and cradles it against his chest. “Hey there, kiddo,” he growls as he backs out of the pen and closes the gate.

The barn’s sliding door is halfway open. Virgil follows Taggert inside. The barking of the dogs is louder than ever, bouncing around the cavernous space. Thin shafts of light squeeze through pinholes in the walls and ceiling and spark the dust that swirls in the air. Virgil, really feeling the weed now, can’t ever remember seeing anything so beautiful. It looks like stars, like rivers of stars.

Taggert flips a switch, and the lights — big, bowl-shaped fixtures that hang from a beam overhead — go on. A tractor sits in one corner, partially covered by an oily canvas tarp. There’s also an assortment of hand tools, a table saw, and the chassis of a VW bug. In the center of the barn is a pen with three-foot plywood walls. It’s maybe twelve by twelve and floored with a piece of badly stained green carpet.

Taggert walks to the pen and sets the goat down inside it. The animal bleats forlornly and butts the wall with its tiny horns. Beyond the pen are five cages. Three are occupied by pit bulls, the source of the barking. The cages extend through holes cut in the rear wall of the barn to allow the dogs access to sun and fresh air. The concrete floors are clean, and there are troughs of fresh water.

“Miguel takes good care of my boys, doesn’t he?” Taggert says as he and Virgil walk over to the cages. He stops in front of the first one, which holds a big red dog with one eye, and sticks his fingers through the chain-link fencing to let the animal lick them.

“This is Butcher Boy, a dead game fighter,” he says. “I traded a nice shotgun for him. He’s won five matches for me so far and once, no shit, took down a Rottweiler that outweighed him by forty pounds. They should make men as brave as this dog.”

The barking starts to get to Virgil, makes his guts jump around. And it’s hot in here too, stuffy. He feels like he can’t get enough air. He nods when he’s supposed to, but he’s not actually listening to Taggert go on and on about his fucking dog. He just wants to go outside.

Taggert grabs a leash off a hook on the wall and tells Virgil to stand back. “They’ll tolerate Miguel and me, but anybody else, we train ’em to go right for the balls,” he says.

Virgil moves toward a workbench and considers climbing on top of it as Taggert opens the cage and attaches the leash to a chain around Butcher Boy’s neck. As soon as the dog is outside the enclosure, he lunges at Virgil, barking wildly and foaming at the mouth, his single eye practically popping out of his head. Virgil backpedals into the bench and grabs a hammer.

“That’s real smart,” Taggert says, pulling the dog up short. “Now he thinks you’re threatening me. Put that fucking thing down.” Virgil lays the hammer on the bench, and Butcher Boy settles a bit. Taggert leads the dog to the pen containing the goat and motions for Virgil to follow.

“This is the pit where we fight them,” Taggert says. “We’ve had some epic bouts here, dogs in from Arizona, Mexico, New Orleans. This old boy from Memphis walked away with ten grand one night when his dog came back from the dead to beat a bruiser named Capone.”

Taggert opens a gate in one wall of the pit, and he and the dog enter. Butcher Boy goes nuts again when he sees the goat, which cowers against the far wall, clearly terrified. Taggert bends over the dog as the goat mewls plaintively.

“Gonna get him, aren’t you,” he whispers into Butcher Boy’s ear. “Gonna sic, sic, sic.” He unhooks the leash, and before he can stand upright, the dog is halfway across the pit. He leaps on the goat, clamps his powerful jaws onto its throat, and shakes his head. The bleating stops, and blood spurts. Virgil looks away. He killed a cat once with a twenty-two when he was a kid, but nothing like this. When he turns back, the dog is flinging the dead goat around the pit like a stuffed toy.

“Get me a breaking stick off that bench,” Taggert says. “Looks like a cutoff broom handle.”

Virgil locates the splintered length of wood and hurries to the pit to hand it to Taggert. Taggert stands over Butcher Boy and grabs his collar, then jams the stick into the back of the dog’s mouth, behind his teeth, and twists it to force his jaws open. The goat drops to the carpet, and Taggert leashes the dog and drags him out of the pit.

“You got to let them kill something every so often,” Taggert says. “That’s how you keep them good and crazy.”

He leads Butcher Boy to his cage and locks him up again. Virgil glances down at the goat. Its head is almost separated from its body, and there’s blood everywhere. Virgil flashes back on Eton and the whole scene at the house and gets a weird taste in his mouth, something sour. How fucking unfair can you get? The poor thing didn’t have a chance.

All of a sudden Taggert is standing right beside him, too close, crowding him. “We need to talk,” he says. His voice is little more than a whisper now that the dogs have quieted down.

Every muscle in Virgil’s body draws taut, and he has to stop himself from running away. “Yeah?” he says.

“That fucker who drew down on T.K. and Spiller and got shot to pieces, was he a friend of yours? Ethan?”

“Eton,” Virgil says.

“Eton. Right. Eton Dogfood.” Taggert smirks and spits on the floor. Virgil can smell the beer on his breath. “So he was your buddy?”

“I actually barely knew him,” Virgil says. “Olivia set it up, me staying at his house.”

“Still, it must have been pretty fucked up seeing him get killed like that, right in front of you.”

Virgil shrugs, trying not to give anything away.

“Yes? No? You ever see anybody shot before?” Taggert asks.

Virgil feels a sob building in his chest. He fights to keep it down, shakes his head.

“Answer me out loud,” Taggert snaps.

“No, sir.”

“Call me Bill.”

“Okay.”

Taggert reaches up and massages his forehead with the fingertips of his right hand. He licks his lips and says, “I’ll tell you this one time that I’m real sorry about what happened, but you’re a man, and you’ll get over it. If that kind of stuff bothers you, you should pick nicer playmates and take a job at Walmart, right?”

“Right,” Virgil says.

“In fact, it’s not you I’m worried about; it’s your sister,” Taggert continues. “I know Olivia was tight with Eton, and it would tear her up if she found out what happened to him. I don’t want her to go through that; know what I mean?”

Taggert is still all up in Virgil’s personal space. Virgil tries to put some distance between them, a few inches even, while looking around for something to swing in case it goes like that.

“I ain’t gonna say nothing,” he mumbles.

“Nothing, right?”

“Nothing.”

“Good,” Taggert says. “And what about when she asks how you ended up out here? What are you going to say then?”

“What do you want me to say?”

Taggert places his hand on Virgil’s shoulder and squeezes once, hard. “Tell her that my guys showed up to make a delivery, and you all got to talking,” he says. “Eton mentioned that Spiller and T.K. worked for Olivia’s boyfriend, and you decided that you wanted to visit her and asked if they could give you a ride. They called me, I said sure, and here you are.”

“Okay.”

“You got that?”

“I got it.”

Virgil remembers what T.K. said about Taggert’s eyes — look in them, and you’ll see the end of everything. He forces himself to raise his gaze to meet Taggert’s, but all he sees in the scary bottomless blackness is his own reflection.

Taggert moves away then, going to the wall to take down a saw hanging there. He holds the handle in one hand, the end of the blade in the other, and shakes it so that it makes a sound, a metallic wobble.

“I used to know a man who could play a saw like a fiddle,” he says. “You ever heard that? It’s a real sad sound.”

Virgil wishes he wasn’t sweating so much, wishes he’d been born with better luck, wishes lots of things. “No,” he says.

Taggert puts the saw back on its nail and says, “That idiot’ll charcoalize those steaks if we don’t stop him.”

Virgil lags behind on the walk to the house, his legs a little unsteady. He blames it on hunger, but it’s something more. He feels ashamed, like he’s backed down from a fight. He knows what Taggert was doing with the goat and everything: he was trying to put the fear of God in him.

Someone else is sitting under the awning now, on the car seat next to the Mexican. Olivia. She’s wearing a hippie skirt, a black bikini top, and a trucker cap that says CSI on it. Her hair is blond this time, short and shaggy.

Taggert leans down and kisses her on the cheek; says, “Mornin’, sunshine.”

She looks past him at Virgil and frowns. “What the fuck are you doing here?” she asks.

Virgil raises his hand in a weak wave and says, “Surprise, Olly.”

N
OTHING SPECIAL FOR
M
R
. K
ING TONIGHT, THE USUAL
martini on the dry side, one olive. Boone pours him Sapphire, instead of the well rotgut, a little treat. And why not? Delia, the other bartender, actually showed up for her shift, and it’s been nice and slow for a Saturday.

Besides Mr. King and Gina, the only other customers left on his end of the stick are four Germans — big, blond, sunburned beer-drinkers who’ve been tipping a lousy buck a round. He’s not about to let that dampen his mood though. He turns it into a private joke, ignoring them until they’re practically banging their glasses on the bar to get his attention.

Mr. King looks like he started early tonight. His tie is crooked, his hair mussed. He attended the funeral of an old friend earlier in the day, and it’s made him nostalgic.

“To Ben Crosson,” he says, raising his glass.

Boone raises his too, the martini Mr. King bought him. Might as well let the man get it out of his system.

“Ben and I met on a Western in forty-five, right after the war,” Mr. King continues. “We were production assistants, so low on the totem pole we had to provide our own meals. He was missing the little finger on one hand. A Jap — Japanese — sniper shot it off on Guadalcanal. Someone’d be half in the bag, and Ben would hold his hands up in front of the guy’s face and ask, ‘How many fingers do you see?’ Guy’d always say ‘Ten.’ Funny, you know. Ben was funny.”

Mr. King removes his glasses and swipes at his bloodshot eyes with the napkin from under his drink. Gina pats his arm and says, “Talk about something else, Papa. No be sad.”

They’re singing “Happy Birthday” at a table in the restaurant, the waitresses joining in. Boone sips his drink and glances at the Germans. This might be a good time to check on them, let the old man pull himself together.