Authors: Boston Teran
The House of Usher stands pat. It’s a kick-ass chain-shattering beer and whiskey bar. The place is shoulder-to-shoulder people taking in a blue-plate chickie Warren Zevon with a five-piece backup doing riff poison that would put a nice dose of sweat up between your legs.
To Errol she’s all mouth and nipples and a fist hammering out chords at the smoky air around the mike. It’s good to be back on home turf. He’s nursing a shot of tequila. Laughing with friends, giving out the high five as he does the long stroke down the bar. A word here, checking out the shape of an ass there.
“Fuck Mexico,” a voice he recognizes says.
He turns.
Case gives him one of those hotel-desk smiles, and all he can kick back is some glassy stare like he’s just felt something dead under the sheets.
Bob comes up behind him, puts a little chest into his back. “Yeah, fuck Mexico,” he whispers.
Errol turns again. Shifts his look between the two of them. He fumbles through a greeting, a weak confounded patronage that she answers by taking the shot of tequila from his hand.
She sniffs it. “I used to love tequila.”
She passes it to Bob, who shoots it down.
“Check those headlines, babe,” she says to Errol. “Junkie queen back from the dead.”
“Jesus Christ, I don’t want to get into the middle of a psychodrama between all of you.”
“Maybe you don’t understand. That shit back in the motel
room. It was a warning you should read. You’re on the verge of being dead or alive …”
It is written that America’s most cherished landscapes are its deserts. And the Mojave stands as America’s quintessential desert. Possibly for the fact that it sits between Los Angeles and Las Vegas, two of the nation’s most powerful demiurges.
Yes, it is also known, thanks to some
Los Angeles Times
quip artist, as the Bermuda Triangle of California. Within the borders of its spare geography, cemeteries of nameless people have walked never to be seen or heard from again.
For their private talk Bob and Case escort Errol down into a saline hollow far enough back of the House of Usher that the music just hangs on the edge of the night air. They walk beneath a black sky held in place by a pinboard of stars.
“You know where Cyrus is. We want to meet him head-on.”
Errol plays with the collar of his burgundy silk shirt, kicks at some burro grass. Case squats down and watches him.
“Hunted! Stalked! And slain!” she says.
Errol looks up.
“I know what’s wheelin’, you fool, fuckin’ prick. ’Cause you got some business thing goin’ on you’re alive and well. Forget it. When Cyrus started with you in that motel room he already had the vision. He may be putting the black evocation on your ass right now. The Eliphas Levi. I’ll bet you’re cooked between St. Mark’s Eve and St. John’s Eve.”
“You’re just trying to fill me with a lot of junkie devil shit ’cause you want to revenge your ass for—”
A revolver hammer clicks.
Errol’s head cocks about.
Bob’s hands are folded across his waist, in one the revolver stands ready.
“Don’t go ragging on her with that ‘junkie shit,’ ” Bob warns. “Don’t. We have business to attend here.”
Errol puts his hands up. “Sure. Any way you want to sell it is fine with me.”
Case scoops up a few rocks. Errol’s whole body language is the ten-inch-cock stare. She knows he’s trying to square out the con on how to serve his own ass while keeping himself alive. She tosses the rocks one by one into the sleeve of a stream a few feet away that’s being helped along by a runoff of sewage. Arrow weeds grow out of the mealy wet soil, mixing in raggy lines with the burro grass and giving the hollow an opposing natural geometry.
“I don’t know how to make it right for you, okay,” he says. “I know what Cyrus did was shit, leaving you to … But it wasn’t me. Not me. In that room, man, who had the gun on who? Who fucked with who?” His fingers point from her to himself, then again from her to himself. “It’s all asylum shit that went on down there.”
“We have to know where he is,” Bob says.
“I don’t know.”
Case tosses another rock hard into the stream. “This is all talk sickness.”
“I’m waiting for him to contact me.”
“We need to know where he is,” Bob repeats.
“He said nothing to—”
“When he needs a place to stash or chill out up here he hit on you. I’ve been there, man. I made the calls to you, remember? What do you have, synapse damage all of a sudden?”
From inside the bar the singer’s voice, distant and distilled out of some thundering dream and in the pull of a refrain: “It’s just a kiss away … Kiss away … Kiss away.”
“I told you, Case,” says Errol. “I don’t know. But … why fight him over … I mean, it happened. Okay. But you’re alive. Is it worth it?”
The hint in his voice. The callous judgment of what she is
versus the price of what she’s worth is all she needs to hear. Bob knows her well enough from the way she’s rocking back and forth on her boots and the turn her eyes take, getting black angry, that she’s gonna blow.
“You’re fuckin’ with the black rider, Mister Yuppie Boy.”
Bob can see her hand moving toward her boot. He takes a step forward.
“We ain’t making another pass at this,” she says.
“I told you I—”
She is up and across the stream, lunging at him with a hand shawled in darkness. Bob moves to stop her. Grabs hold of her in mid-flight. Errol snaps back as her hand makes its bird-quick move.
That half second saves his life. The steel tip of her stiletto just misses his jugular but takes a trowel line of inches out of his cheek. He collapses into the sand with his hands pressed to the side of his face. His blood strains through tight fingers while Case tries to break free of Bob and finish business.
“I’m coming up out of your dreams if you don’t tell us,” she screams. “I swear. I’ll play witch and disciple across your throat while you fuckin’ sleep.”
Bob stumbles to his knees, trying to hold back her rabid thrashings. Errol crawls away from her kicking boots, leaving a red scrapbook for the sand to leech.
“He’s up in the Bristol Mountains,” Errol cries. “At a ranger’s house. First road east of Bagdad Way that goes north into the mountains off the National Trail.”
Errol gets himself up and lurches away. A clumsy footrace to safety.
Once he’s gone, Bob lets Case go. She comes around with her knife.
“You should have let me kill him.”
“No.”
“We’re gonna have to kill him anyway. He’ll screw us.”
“Let it go, for now.”
“He has to. His mind is already there. The body will follow.”
“I couldn’t, alright?”
“You couldn’t?”
“No.”
“Because of the other night? For doing that piece of—”
“That’s right!”
Her knife shanks the air. Once, twice, again. Carving up thoughts. “Errol enjoyed the other night, you hip. That night you don’t want to remember. He enjoyed watchin’ me get dragged out and needled. I know that dick-hard look!” Her voice quivers. “We’re gonna have to kill him anyway. He’s gonna turn. It’s prepackaged and ordered. And you should have let me cross that bastard over.”
“Arthur, I talked with Bob.”
“When, Maureen?”
“He couldn’t talk long.”
“Where … how is he?”
“Mexico.”
“He’s in Mexico.”
“Yes.”
“How is he? Is everything …”
“He sounded pretty tired.”
“Why didn’t he call me?”
“He tried, but …”
“He’s alright?”
“I guess so. He sounded pretty stressed.”
“Gabi … Anything about …”
“He didn’t want to get too deep into it.”
“Too deep, what does that m—”
“He was stressed out. Said he didn’t have a lot of time. That he had to—”
“I miss his goddamn call, I don’t understand.”
“He said he’d call you in the next day or so.”
“At least he’s alive. Thank God.”
“Arthur.”
“I was beginning to—”
“Arthur, listen to me.”
“What?”
“He was asking me some pretty strange questions.”
“What do you mean?”
“… They were very odd.”
John Lee can watch his house from the dirt road that rises up into the national forest across from the Paradise Hills tract, a thin line of cypress trees affording him all the cover he needs.
He listens to Maureen and Arthur’s conversation through a headset. The small black computerized surveillance kit is laid out neatly on the front seat as if it is in a showroom display.
He has bugged the phones at the house for years as a means of keeping track of Maureen’s infidelities, or of any other quiet plans he would not be privy to, from their divorce through to his destruction.
“What did he ask you?”
“He asked me how we bought this tract.”
“How we bought it?”
“I told him we got it in probate.”
“In probate, that’s right.”
John Lee can hear the subtle rise in Arthur’s voice.
“We got it in probate because …”
“Probate, yes …”
“Some woman had died, right?”
“Died, yes.”
“I mean. She’d been murdered. Isn’t that right?”
A long silence through the headset. A gaping pause that begins to swallow them both.
A gunshot turned against the night air …
Arthur had walked down to that strange battered chimney which seemed to have been built by some timeless sect. He stood in the powder-black hours, staring at the old symbols painted into the stone. Foolish and childlike abstractions, he thought. The stuff of the lazy and the minstrel. Foremost in his mind he was trying to plot a new way to convince the old woman to sell the land
.
She had listened as she drank a beer with her bare feet up on the trailer’s kitchen table. Her toes rubbed together, one against the other. They were black as flint chips and she rubbed them as if she were trying to spark up a fire
.
All his and John Lee’s convincing could do nothing. And that junkie kid she raised, he could do no better. It was the process, she said, not proceeds, that interested her
.
A gunshot changed all that
.
He rushed back to the trailer. A fire in a rusting barrel burned with refuse and through the smoke he saw Cyrus on his hands and knees. Blood ran from his nose and mouth. John Lee hulked over him
.
“You stupid fuckin’ junkie,” John Lee screamed, then laced the boy’s ribs and back with hard boot kicks
.
The black smoke was a great tumbling spire that Arthur rushed through as he yelled, “John Lee, what happened?”
“The fuck shot her! She’s in the bedroom.”
Arthur jumped the mortared wall of bottle art and crossed the garden
.
The trailer was dark except for one slant of moonlight that fell across the sheet-draped doorway to the old woman’s bedroom. There was no wind, so the sheet was still. The heraldic lily and rose seemed to float against a white amorphous heaven. He pushed it aside
.
He looked down
.
She lay there on the floor. Her eyes were open but seemed to have lost their color. It was a bloody mucilage where the bullet had taken out a piece of neck and the lower part of her ear
.
He stared a long time. This eavesdropping on death left him numb
.
Then there was the frail movement of a finger. Like the motion of some dark caterpillar across hard ground. It began a slow scratching march. A failing point. He noticed her chest rise a bit and sink. Rise again and sink. Barely enough to be seen through the heavy cloth of her sweater. The milky white of her eyes seemed to clear and for a moment they found the shore of Arthur’s eyes holding in the darkness
.
“I’m frightened, Arthur.”
“Don’t be.”
“I don’t know why Bob’s asking such things.”
“It’s alright.”
“Is it? It scared me. His tone … it scared me.”
“It’ll be alright.”
Another pause filled with the confusion of breathing and silence. The perfect riff of the coming hardcore future.
“I wish we were together.”
“Maureen …”
“I do. You and I should have married.”
“Maureen, please.”
“You loved me.”
“It’s a long time now.”
“You loved me.”
“But I was married.”
“But we should have been. We would have been better off. And you know it. There wouldn’t be any John Lee …”
“You can’t blame him for it all.”
“Why not?”
East of Ludlow the old National Trail Highway, the original Route 66, follows its historical path through the Mojave. As Bob and Case head east, the truth of that road comes upon them. The remains of roadside diners and failed motels mark the yellow-brown landscape. The disintegrating shells of small homesteads and huge billboards are memorials to a post–World War II America. The town of Bagdad is just a sign. Amboy, a sign that a town of twenty is for sale. This architectural cemetery is all that’s left of those who settled there and rolled the dice that Route 66 would last forever.
Bob and Case find the road Errol talked about. It turns up into a trace of volcanic cones. Dark, hulking shapes whose centers have been culled out for cinders.
The approach is a miles-long climb. The ground is odd ridges and fissures. The road, a thin bend of the dangerous and vulnerable. Bob walks ahead of the Dakota, far enough to see through every cut or fall.
An hour later they are far into the Bristol Mountains. The white saline flats to the east are matched in the west by the “terrible desert” that John Steinbeck once wrote about. A dry salt hell where the mountains shimmer like ebony crows.
Bob searches every wash, every dun-toned crevasse that fans out from the road, until, at the end of a caldera, he spots the crumbling frame of a two-story ranch house.
He waves Case up. They hide the truck in a spooned-out cutoff. She takes one of the backup handguns from beneath the front seat. They move among the naked rocks to where they can watch unnoticed.
“You think she could be in there?”