Vernon God Little (22 page)

‘I have to run.'

‘But – what were you going to ask me?'

‘Please, please, please, don't breathe a word of this to Leona.'

‘You know
Leona
?'

‘Yeah,
please
.' My Nikes fire me onto the concourse.

‘
Vern!
' she calls, as I vanish into the crowd. I glance over my shoulder and capture her image forever; she's there like a lost kitten, lips open, eyebrows scrunched. ‘Be careful,' she mouths silently. ‘
Call
me.'

I fester and decompose in the back of a Greyhound bus bound for McAllen, under the tumor light, the twisted lava-lamp of sky, just a shell of meaningless brand names, a shelter for maggots and worms. Vernon Gone-To-Hell Little. And I didn't call my mom at all, you guessed it. I didn't even eat all day. All I did was hammer myself to a cross.

Screen One in my brain plays endless warm close-ups of Taylor. I try not to watch, I try to stay in the lobby and avoid it. But the thing's right there, doing big rotations of milky ass. Screen Two runs that other timeless classic,
Mom
, or,
Honey I Butt-Fucked the Family
. I ain't trying to watch that one either. All I watch is a double-exposure of my ole goofy face in the window, as infinite distance rolls by outside; spongy, darkened distance, like rug-lint balls on wet graham cracker. Power lines and fence posts read past like sheet music, but the tunes are fucken shit.

This is the scenario when I get the day's clincher, the one I forgot to expect. A song gets attached to Taylor. Just when you think you're dicked to the maximum extent of natural law, something always comes up that you forgot about. I know the routine from here. Everybody knows deep down there's no way to kill a Fate song once it's stuck. They're like fucken herpes. The only way to wash them out is to buy the song and play it day and night, until it doesn't mean anything anymore. Only forty gazillion years it takes. Everybody knows it, but I don't remember being taught that little pearl back in school, about the destructive power of Fate songs. Correct me if maybe I was absent that day, or if that was the day I spent cleaning the yard on account of liberating frogs from the lab. No, as I remember it, we were too busy trying to assimilate fucken Surinam to be taught anything of actual value to our lives, like Fate songs for instance.

I hear Taylor's song through the ‘Tss, tss, tss' of a guy's earphones, a couple of rows up. ‘Better Man' is the tune, by Pearl Jam. I don't even know the words to the song, but you can bet I'll spend the next eighty years in hell making every line fit my situation. Even if it ends up being about fucken groundhogs in space or something.

Worst of all, it ain't even a pure sex song. No dirty little bass riffs running up and down the back, swinging and plucking; nothing masturbation can relieve. This ole tune drags you screaming from her panties with the fatal wrench of something bigger than perky riffs. Anodized, gritty wanting and yearning. The deathly heem of love.

A sob pops in my throat. I choke it, and look around for a harmless visual distraction, but all I see is a stocky young woman with a baby, a few seats up. The baby is pulling the woman's hair, and she's faking this look of terror.

‘Oh
no
,' she says, ‘how can you do that to
Mommy
?'

She pretends to bawl, but the baby laughs and gurgles like a psycho, and pulls even harder. I'm witnessing a fresh knife being laid into a brand-new soul. A training dagger. A maternity blade.
Here's his mom quietly opening up the control incision, completely innocent in her dumbness to the world.

‘Oh no, you've
killed
Mommy, Mommy's
gone
!' She plays dead.

The little guy giggles for a minute, but only that long. Then he senses something's wrong. She ain't waking up. He killed her, she abandoned him, just like that, over a pull of hair. He pokes her with his finger, then he gets ready to bawl. And there you have it: he takes the handle in his own tiny hands and pulls in his first blade, right up to the hilt. Just to bring her back. And sure enough, with the splash of his first tear, she wakes right up.

‘Ha, ha, I'm still here! Ha, ha, it's
Mommy
!'

Ha, ha, that's the Scheme of Things.

‘Drrrrrrr,' the motorcoach fangs into a violet dusk, a bitter projectile full of knives and Vernon. I know I'm just being sour about shit. Tell me I'm just being sour about shit, on account of everything. I know it. But I just get this feeling in my head, like the Voice of Ages that says, ‘This is no way for a young man to spend his learning years.'

Taylor will have finished shopping by now. She's probably already in this fucker's Stingray, with her skirt up around her waist. As I picture it, her grown-up panties become skimpy just to finish me off. Now they're reckless bikini numbers, tight and fast, with a tiny bow on the waist elastic. They slash and slice me. A wet patch the size of a dime glistens on her mound, and if you take a silky buttock in each hand, lift her off the seat, and snuff your face up close, you only whiff the bittiest thumbtack of tamarindo jerky, just a pin-prick. That's how squeaky clean she is, even on a hot lathery day like today. Squeaky clean, like a doll. Oh Taylor, oh fucken Tay.

The unexpected thing when the bus rolls into McAllen is the stillness. The driver switches off the engine, the door goes ‘Pschsssss,' and the world just parks. It's nearly eleven o'clock and there's a new silence, loud with the creasing of clothes, as I rise out of the seat. It's like waking from a fever, specially after all these
venomous thoughts. I follow other unfolded travelers to the front of the bus, where a smoky breath meets me at the door. Maybe a tang of freedom. The border is less than ten miles away.

I savor the glassy crunch of my New Jacks on the concrete, and with it grows a feeling that at least I'm still alive, still have my arms and legs, and the dreams that fucken kill me. And twenty-one dollars and thirty cents. The mostly empty bus terminal shines a promise of comfort, so I shuffle over to look for a coffee, or maybe a sandwich, anything to stop my bowel cells from applying for other jobs in the body. A Mexican boy sweeps the floor by the doors, and two ole ladies doze on chairs next to some boxes tied with rope. Upholstery weeps flea-powder and farts. Then my eye catches a TV at the back. It's the news. My brain says, ‘Don't fucken go there.' I fucken go there.

‘New shock for the Central Texas community of Martirio,' says the screen. Red and blue lights flash off the slick of a recent shower. Vaine Gurie stumbles up a driveway near the edge of town. She wears a tracksuit, and shields her face from camera lights. Another big woman helps her through a screen-door, then turns to the cameras.

‘Everybody's just devastated – I ask y'all to pray for our community at this very difficult time.'

Cut to daylight. Crime tape flaps wearily across the Johnson road, around where my journey began last night. Lally enters the frame, walking towards the camera. His arm is in a sling. ‘I was lucky to escape the scene. With a broken collarbone, and serious cuts and bruises, I can only be thankful I was here to witness a crime that dispels all doubt as to the cause of recent events in Martirio.' The stringy man from the morgue hovers over a corpse wrapped in plastic. Troopers haul it behind Lally to a waiting van. ‘Barry Enoch Gurie was not so lucky. His body fell less than a hundred yards from the practice range of Martirio's elite new SWAT team – a team he was to have joined only hours after he was brutally gunned down with his own weapon.'

A picture appears of Barry as a cadet, shiny-eyed, hoping blindly into the future behind the camera lens. Lally returns with a deeper scowl. ‘I was an unfortunate witness to the shots, shots that cut short the life of a man who overcame childhood autism to become a glowing star in law management, an officer described by colleagues and townsfolk alike as a true human being. As federal forces descend upon the stricken district, attention now turns to the whereabouts of confirmed killer Vernon Gregory Little . . .'

My school picture appears, followed by footage of me leaving the courthouse with Pam. Then a stranger in thick glasses comes on, wearing overalls and rubber gloves. ‘The forensic environment is near perfect,' he says. ‘We've already identified the tread of a sports shoe – an unusual kind of shoe for these parts – and there's evidence of tracks being covered up around the body's resting-place.'

Lally returns. ‘The task of securing the state's borders and highways will continue long into the night – authorities warn the suspect may be armed, and should not be approached . . .'

I slap a stone eye around the terminal. The janitor sweeps half-heartedly in front of the restrooms. Behind a counter, a ticket clerk taps listlessly at his keyboard. I take a measured walk between them to the doors, then aim for the dark of the road and run, fly back to the highway.

I cross the highway at the darkest point, and pound along its shadow side, invisible, just two clear veins throbbing slime and lightning. Up ahead a road sign points to Mexico. Traffic trickles past it. I don't even know how far I have to go, I just run till I'm dead, then limp till I can run again. It's after midnight when the sparks die under my feet. I slow to a shuffle, and strangle a hiss in my throat. Waves loom at my back, crested waves which instead of foam spill flies, flies I have to kill, thoughts of defeat in a grubby swarm. Jesus comes with them, waving, but he's engulfed, drowning, gulping flies that join with the night to claim all his colors, return him to black. I stop, the way a rock stops that never moved. My head hangs buzzing in the dark, and when I raise it
up, after a century's pause, I see a glow up ahead. I stumble forward, and see the glow become a glare, a kind of high-beam extravaganza in the middle of nowhere.

‘International Bridge – Puente Internacional,' says a sign. ‘
Mexico
.'

From here the border looks like Steven Spielberg built it, a blast of arctic light framed in darkness. I pull on my jacket, though it ain't cold at all, and attempt to slick back my hair. I stride the last few hundred yards of home.

Lines of trucks stretch into the dark on the other side of the bridge, cars heavy with people pass through the middle. There's plenty of traffic on foot, even now, and no sign of a roadblock, except for the regular border checkpoints. I step onto the bridge knowing I step into my dream, pinning its fucken hem with my foot, for me to climb aboard. The redemption, the souvenirs, the lazy panties in fragrant sunshine.

You can already tell one thing: the clean concrete highway ends at the borderline, it's a different country after that. Tall, small people flow around me like tumbling store-displays, chubby types in denim carve between them, with all the confidence of home. Mexicans. The faces seem cautious, like you might interrupt a promise made to them. The hem of their dream hangs over this bridge too, that's why. You can taste it. I pass by an ole man wearing Ray-Bans, a
Baywatch
cap, a
Wowboys
jacket, fluorescent green Nikes, and carrying a Nintendo box tied with
South Park
bedsheets. Makes me stand out like a fucken shaved wiener, even aside from being six inches taller than everybody.

Checkpoint buildings sprawl on the Mexican side, officials in uniform stop cars and search them. I stand up my jacket collar, and try to lose myself in the flow of people. I nearly make it too, until I hear this voice.

‘
Joven
,' calls a Mexican officer. I start to scuttle. ‘
Joven
–
Mister
!' I look around. He holds up the flat of his hand.

T
he border officer takes his time
strutting over from the checkpoint. His skin is darker than a lot of folks down here, and strings of gray-black hair are greased onto his mostly bald head, like with axle grease or something. Kind of a gross little dude, actually.

‘Passport please,' he says. He looks pretty serious about things, and on top of everything he now has these gold teeth. Black eyes scald me.

‘Uh – passport?'

‘Yes, passport please.'

‘Uh – I'm
American
.'

‘Driver license?'

‘Well – no, I'm an
American
, visiting your beautiful country and all . . .'

He stares at me. He's going to default to some nasty official type of shit, I can smell it coming.

‘Follow me,' he says, and marches me back to the main building.

Inside smells of shoe polish. It's a kind of
Jurassic Park
for office supplies, with all these ole desks, and Chinese-restaurant kind of chairs, lit by lonely-looking supermarket lighting. A fan clicks in one corner. The effect is something between a courthouse and one of those public-health waiting rooms you see on TV, specially for the number of ole Mexican ladies in here. Don't fucken tell anyone I said that, though. I'm not crazy about the effect of it. The official ushers me to a desk, and sits behind it, all straight-backed, like he's the president of South America or something, like the borderline is the crack of his fucken ass.

‘You have identification?' he asks.

‘Uh – not really.'

He creaks back into his chair, spreading his hands wide, like he's about to point out the most obvious fact in the fucken universe. ‘You can't enter Mexico without identification.' He tightens his mouth across, for the Most Obvious Fact effect.

Some lies form an orderly line at the back of my throat. I decide to go for tried and tested horseshit, which, if you're me, is the Dumb Kid routine. I cook up some family, fast. ‘I have to meet my parents, see? They came down earlier, but I had to stay back and come down later, and now they're over there waiting, like, they're probably worried and all.'

‘You parents on vacation?'