She turned from the bird and met
his eyes. If he thought he’d felt the force of her before, now he
knew he’d felt nothing, nothing. “Have you seen many of them,” she
asked, “who are just like me?”
He’s seen one or
two who might have become like her, in time, with work. But none so
perfect, so powerful, so unconsciously arrogant, so serenely
sure
, as
she and the others who hold his leash.
•
He’s on the
first landing before he remembers to check the weapon. Chisme
monitors that, too, and would have said something if it wasn’t
registering. But it’s not Chisme’s ass on the line (if, in fact,
Chisme
has
one). Trust your homies, but check your own
rifle.
He holds his left palm up in front
of him in the gloom and makes a fist, then flexes his wrist
backward. At the base of his palm the tiny iron needles glow
softly, row on row, making a rosy light under his skin.
He used to wonder how they got the
needles in there without a scar, and why they glow when he checks
them, and how they work when he wants them to. Now he only thinks
about it when he’s on the clock. Part of making sure that he can
still call some of the day his own.
When he finishes here, he’ll be
debriefed. That’s how he thinks of it. He’ll go to whatever place
Magellan shows him, do whatever seems to be expected of him, and
end by falling asleep. When he wakes up the needles will be there
again.
He goes up the stairs quiet and
fast, under his own power. If he fastlanes this close, the target
will know he’s here. He’s in good shape: he can hurry up three
flights of stairs and still breathe easy. That’s why he’s in this
line of work now. Okay, that and being in the wrong place at the
right time.
Introspection is
multitasking, and multitasking can have unpleasant consequences.
That’s what the names are for,
hijo
. Keep your head in the
job.
Half the offices here are vacant.
The ones that aren’t have temporary signs, the company name in a
reasonably businesslike typeface, coughed out of the printer and
taped to the door. Bits of tape from the last company’s sign still
show around the edges. The hallway’s overhead fluorescent is like
twilight, as if there’s a layer of soot on the inside of its
plastic panel.
At least it’s
all offices; one less problem to deal with,
grácias a San Miguel
.
Plenty of the buildings on Broadway are apartments above the first
two floors, with Mom and Dad and four kids in a one-bedroom with
not enough windows and no air conditioning. People sleep restless
in a place like that.
Which makes him
wonder: why
didn’t
the target pick a place like that? Why make this
easier?
On the fourth floor, the hall light
buzzes on and off, on and off. He feels a pre-headache tightness
behind his eyebrows as his eyes try to correct, and his heart rate
climbs. Is the light the reason for this floor? Does the target
know about him, how he works, and picked this floor because of
it?
Chisme gives his endocrine system a
twitch, and he stops vibrating. He’s a well-kept secret. And if he
isn’t, all the more reason to get this done right.
He walks the length of the hallway,
hugging the wall, pausing to listen before crossing the line of
fire of each closed door. He doesn’t expect trouble until the
farthest door, but it’s the trouble you don’t expect that gets you.
Even to his hearing, he doesn’t make a sound.
Beside the last door, the one at
the front of the building, he presses up against the wall and
listens. A car goes through the intersection below; a rattle on the
sidewalk may be a shopping cart. Nothing from inside the room. He
breathes in deep and slow, and smells, besides the dry building
odors, the scent of fresh water.
He probes his
right palm with his thumb, and when Magellan sends him the diagram
of the fourth floor, he turns his head to line it up with the real
surfaces of the building. Here’s the hall, and the door, and the
room beyond it. There’s the target: shifting concentric circles of
light, painfully bright. Unless everything is shot to hell, it’s up
against the front wall, near the window. And if everything
is
shot to
hell, there’s nothing he can do except go in there and find
out.
At that, he
feels an absurd relief.
We
who are about to die
. From here on, it’s
all action, as quick as he can make it, and no more decisions.
Quick, because as soon as he fastlanes the target will know he’s
here. He reaches down inside himself and makes it
happen.
He turns and kicks the door in, and
feels the familiar heat in nerve and muscle tissue, tequila-fueled.
He brings his left arm up, aims at the spot by the
window.
Fire
, his brain orders. But the
part of him that really commands the weapon, whatever that part is,
is frozen.
•
The
coyotes
mostly traffic in the ones who can pass. After all, it’s
bad for business if customers you smuggle into the Promised Land
are never heard from again by folks back in the
old ’hood.
But sometimes,
if cash flow demands, they make exceptions.
Coyotes
sell hope,
after all. Unreasonable, ungratifiable hope just costs more.
The
coyotes
tell them about the Land of Opportunity and
neglect to mention that there’s no way they’ll get a piece of
it.
Then the
coyotes
take their payment, dump them in the wilderness, and put a
couple of steel-jackets in them before leaving.
He’s done cleanup in the desert and
found the dried-out bodies, parchment skin and deformed bone, under
some creosote bush at the edge of a wash. The skin was often split
around the bullet holes, it was so dry. Of course, if they’d been
dead, there wouldn’t have been anything to find. Some that he came
across could still open their eyes, or speak.
•
Maybe in the dark this one can
pass. Maybe she looks like an undernourished street kid with a
thyroid problem. In the pitch-dark below an underpass from a
speeding car, maybe.
She should never have left home.
She should be dying in the desert. She should be already dead,
turned to dust and scattered by the oven-hot wind.
Her body looks like it’s made of
giant pipe cleaners. Her long, skinny legs are bent under her,
doubled up like a folding carpenter’s ruler, and the joints are the
wrong distance from each other. Her ropy arms are wrapped around
her, and unlike her legs, they don’t seem jointed at all—or it’s
just the angle that makes them seem to curve like
tentacles.
And she’s white. Not Anglo-white or
even albino-white, but white like skim milk, right down to the
blueish shadows that make her skin look almost transparent.
Fish-belly white.
Her only clothing is a plaid
flannel shirt with the sleeves torn off, in what looks like size
XXL Tall. It’s worn colorless in places, and those spots catch the
street light coming through the uncovered window. The body under
the shirt is small and thin and childlike. Her head, from above, is
a big soiled milkweed puff, thin gray-white hair that seems to have
worn itself out pushing through her scalp.
The office is vacant. An old steel
desk stands on end in the middle of the room. Empty filing cabinet
drawers make a lopsided tower in a corner. Half a dozen battered
boxes of envelopes are tumbled across the floor, their contents
spilled and stained. But the room’s alive with small bright
movements.
It’s water—trickling down the
walls, running in little rivulets across the vinyl flooring,
plopping intermittently in fat drops from the ceiling. Water from
nowhere. From her.
He hears the
words coming out of his mouth even as he thinks,
This isn’t going to
work
. “I’m here to send you back.” Once
one of the poor bastards becomes his job, there’s no “sending
back”. His left arm is up, his palm turned out. He should
fire.
The milkweed fluff rocks slowly
backward. Her face is under it. Tiny features on an outthrusting
skull, under a flat, receding brow, so that her whole face forms
around a ridge down its middle. Only the eyes aren’t tiny. They’re
stone-gray without whites or visible pupils, deep-set round disks
half the size of his palm.
She opens her little lipless mouth,
but he doesn’t hear anything. She licks around the opening with a
pale-gray pointed tongue and tries again.
“Eres un
mortal.”
You’re a mortal
. A short speech
in a high, breathy little-girl voice, but long enough to hear that
her accent is familiar.
He’s light-headed, and his ears are
ringing. He needs adjusting. Damn it, where’s Chisme?
Wait—he knows what this is. He’s
afraid.
She’s helpless,
not moving, not even paying attention. All he has to do is trigger
the weapon, and she’ll have a hundred tiny iron needles in her.
Death by blood poisoning in thirty seconds or less—quicker and
cleaner than the
coyote’s
steel-jacketed rounds
would have been. Why can’t he fire?
He tries again, in Spanish this
time—as if that will make it true. “I’m sending you
back.”
Something around
her brows and the corners of her eyes suggests hope. She rattles
into speech, but he can’t make out a word of it. He recognizes it,
though. It’s the
Indio
language his grandmother used. He doesn’t know
its name; to his
abuela
, it was just speaking, and
Spanish was the city language she struggled with.
He can’t trust his voice, so he
shakes his head at her. Does she understand that? His left arm
feels heavy, stretched out in front of him.
Suddenly anger cuts through his
dumb-animal fear. She’s jerking him around. She found out somehow
where his mother’s family is from, and she’s playing him with it.
He doesn’t have to make her understand. All he has to do is shoot
her.
“You are not of the
People, but you are of the land.” She’s switched back to Spanish,
and he hears the disappointment in her voice. “You cannot send me
back to something that is not there.”
“Whose fault is
that?”
Don’t talk to
her!
But he’s angry.
“I do not know who it
was.” She shakes her head, less like a “no” than like a horse
shaking off flies. “But the spring is gone. The water sank to five
tall trees below the stone. The willows died when they could not
reach it.”
Willows and cottonwoods mark
subsurface water like green surveyor’s flags all through the dry
country. He remembers willows around the springs in the hills
behind his grandmother’s village. “So you’re going to move north
and use up everything here, too?”
“¿
Que
?” Her white, flattened brow
presses down in anger or confusion, or both. “How can I use up what
is here? Is it so different here, the water and the land and the
stone?”
There has to be
a correct answer to that. Those who sent him after her probably
have one. But he’s not even sure what she’s asking, let alone what
he ought to answer.
Nothing,
you moron.
And what did he expect her to
say? “Sí, sí, I’m here to steal your stuff”? They both know why
she’s here. If she’d just make a move, he could trigger the
weapon.
“We keep, not use.
How to say...” She blinks three times, rapidly, and it occurs to
him that that might be the equivalent, for her, of gazing into
space while trying to remember something. “Protect and guard. Is it
not so here? Mortals use. We protect and guard. They ask for
help—water for growing food, health and strength for their
children. They bring tobacco, cornmeal, honey to thank us. We smell
the presents and come. Do the People not do this here?”
He tries to
imagine that piece of blonde perfection by the Chateau Marmont pool
being summoned by the smell of cornmeal and doing favors for
campesinos
.
The word
triggers his memory, like Chisme toggling his endocrine system. He
recalls his last visit to his
abuela’s
house, when he was
eight. She was too weak to get out of bed for more than a few
minutes at a time. She was crying, yelling at his mom, saying that
somebody had to take the tamales to the spring. His mom said to
him, as she heated water for his bath, “You see what it’s like
here? When your cousins call you
pocho
, you remember it’s better
to be American than a superstitious
campesino
like
them.”
He’d grown up
believing that, until
they
found him, remade him, and
sent him out to do their work. In that hot, moist room he feels
cold all over. To hide it, he laughs. “Welcome to the Land of the
Free,
chica
. No handouts, no favors, no fraternizing with the lower
orders.”