Authors: Boston Teran
Through the tangled cross of manzanita trees at the edge of the slope, Cyrus watches the nigger sheep and his porcelain wife arguing in the kitchen. If they only knew the book of life was about to close on them.
Lena makes her way back from the house along the lip of the ridge, using the high grass as cover against the moonlight. She slips up behind Cyrus and leans against him.
The years of pills and junk have left her with a face that seems to hover between life and death. She points a hand toward the house. On the back of each finger is tattooed the date of a death she has had a hand in.
She whispers, “Besides the front and patio doors, there’s one more. And that goes to the service entrance behind the kitchen, there, on the far wall. I couldn’t find signs of no security system.”
“Just the nigger and his brood in there?”
She nods. “I crawled right up to the house and that’s all I saw. They got a dog though, but you could finish it with just a good set of teeth.”
“Give me the hypodermic.”
She takes a black needle case from her back pocket and
hands it to Cyrus. He opens it. One needle, two vials of clear liquid. More than enough to play. He closes the case and slips it into the pocket of his frayed deerskin coat.
“Alright. Let’s go wish the sheep a Merry Christmas.”
“Why are you so sexually unresponsive to me?”
Sam leans back against the stove, short an answer. Sarah turns and grabs a photo from a nest of snapshots held to the refrigerator door by a miniature magnetic blender. She crosses the room and holds the photo up so Sam can see it.
“Is this all we are now?”
He looks at the snapshot Gabi took of Maureen and John at the last family barbecue. A perfect mismatch of people sitting side by side at a picnic table. Maureen a little too drunk to care about the disrespect her husband, John Lee, shows her. Sam says nothing, but he can’t believe that of all the photos she grabbed that particular one. It’s almost as if she were psychic.
“I don’t know what you mean, Sarah.”
“I mean, are we like them? Has our marriage boiled down to that? Just a hideous fraud. Something we make up along the way to get what we want until we want something else. And if we don’t get that or don’t want it anymore, well … we just cast it aside and keep what we have until … the next little thing comes along. Are we down to trade and barter?”
He can feel a guilty headache coming on. “I don’t know what you’re fuckin’ talking about,” he says.
Sarah swings the kitchen door shut. “Don’t use that kind of language with me. Not in this house.”
He throws up his hands.
“Do you know what commitment is?”
“Jesus, Sarah …”
“It’s not just an idea, or a part-time gig. It’s a way of life.” She throws the photo down on the kitchen table and gives
him a hard look across folded arms. “Are you having an affair?”
She watches him carefully. His huff across to the refrigerator, passing within inches of her. The tug at the refrigerator door, the taking of a beer, the twisting off of the cap. All done with an uncomfortable boredom.
He goes to sit at the kitchen table when, outside, Gabi’s horse starts to stalk the corral, whinnying. A high, shrill call.
Gabi sits watching the freeway when something forms a withery outline just past the lamplit tiles of the pool. She leans up against the glass, cupping her hands around her eyes to see better. The bush grass wrestles and bends. Maybe it’s a coyote or a wild dog. Maybe even a deer. Sometimes deer make their way down from the hills of the Angeles National Forest, which backs up their property. What a hoot. Christmas week and a deer comes to visit. But then something steel-like and shiny seeps through a row of trees. It glistens once. Twice. Like a broken fragment of a star. And then it’s gone.
She begins to feel a little anxious. It wouldn’t be the first time someone wandered up the hill.
She goes out into the hall. The kitchen door is closed but she can hear her mother and stepfather still in the throes of it.
Poncho follows her toward the living room.
It is dark except for the twinkling lights of the Christmas tree, which cast starburst shadows onto the ceiling. She stands in the middle of the room looking from window to window. She is wearing a T-shirt and shorts and feels unusually cold. She glances at the patio doors. They are slightly open. Only inches, but enough to let the night air in. Her mother always keeps them closed. Maybe she and Sam went outside when they were talking and forgot to close them when they came back in.
Gabi is crossing the room to close the doors when something shapeshifts up behind her. She sees its alter-image lunge across the ceiling.
She manages one scream. Just one, before her voice is swallowed by a huge hand. Then everything happens at once. The kitchen door is flung open and hits the wall. Her mother shouts her name as Gabi is lifted off the ground, kicking. The tree is knocked over, taking a scythe line of glittering light spots with it. Gabi claws at the hand over her mouth as her head is pulled around. She is face-to-face with gaunt eyes above cheeks branded in ink with lightning bolts that drip blood. There is another scream and a shotgun blast discharges and the whole house seems to echo and shake and reek with acrid smoke.
Bob Hightower is cruising the Antelope Freeway and going through his Christmas list of disappointments. Another holiday alone, without Gabi, without Sarah. The sum total of his life; he’s thirty-eight, with a hatful of bad memories, and clinging to a job that is his last lifeline to order.
Come Christmas morning he’ll get up, shave, put on a suit, go to church, then be the odd man out at either Arthur’s house or John and Maureen’s. They’ll have the appropriate turkey dinner and they’ll pass out the perfunctory presents, say all the right things, and then he’ll drive home after dark, sit alone in his living room, the living room without even a tree, and get drunk and cry.
He looks at himself in the rearview mirror and tries to calculate who he is. He searches for the man who once incubated a kind of starry optimism. The face is the same, only the hopes have changed. Diminishing returns.
He should never have allowed himself to fall under his ex-father-in-law’s influence. No, “allowed himself” is not a fair accounting. Succumbed is closer to the truth. He succumbed to Arthur’s plan of manipulating John Lee into slopping him
down behind a desk. He succumbed to the job’s safeties and proprieties and potential advances. All for Sarah’s sake. So she wouldn’t end up a sheriff’s widow. Was it all for her sake, though? He stares into the mirror to try to find the part of him that didn’t mind succumbing to the job’s safeties and proprieties and political advances. But what does he have now? He’s a seat warmer at headquarters. A late-night fill-in. And he doesn’t even have Sarah.
At least he has his faith. The one rock in a weary land that’s lately been short of miracles.
Just ahead, between the black shape of the hills, is Via Princessa. He slows down and turns on the overhead flashers. Runnels of red across the hood of the car. He looks up toward the gravelly reef where the house is.
Not a light shines. It sits muted and stark. Just an outline against the moon-swept canyon. Bleak as his own heart. He pulls over. Maybe they went out to dinner. Maybe she fell asleep.
How can such a little thing like the flipping on and off of a light leave him so discouraged when it doesn’t happen? He sits there and waits. The inside of the cruiser swims with the phosphory blood red of the flashers.
John Lee Bacon waits perched on a parcel of scrub rock at the cusp of the Shadow Range. There’s an ashtray’s worth of butts in the sand around his boots and a flask of bourbon hunkered down in his back pocket. Half drunk against the cold, he watches everything around him without expression. He pulls the flask and has another drink, cursing in short nervous bouts.
Through the beveled tiers of the Shadow Mountains, the
rise and fall of headlights. He stands and approaches the road. An old white van looms into view, sidles down the incline, and stops yards away. The doors open. Cyrus climbs out, followed by three of the others. He steps across the headlights and approaches John Lee. His boot spurs clang against the lit ground. The dust is full and floats around him.
“Well, look what the desert bred up.”
“Don’t start with your shit,” hawks John Lee. “Just tell me …”
“Your boy
crossed over
.”
A moment of finality.
John Lee nods. Takes a wrinkled envelope from his back pocket and tosses it at Cyrus. “Book closed,” he says.
“The book ain’t ever closed.”
John Lee stares at him apprehensively. “What do you mean?”
Cyrus doesn’t offer an answer as he counts off the loose packet of bills inside the envelope.
John Lee eyes the others. Gutter squats down beside one of the headlights. Lena sits on the bumper beside him and smokes. Granny Boy, still jacked up on speed from before the kill, is pacing and talking to himself.
“What do you mean?” he asks again.
Granny Boy mocks him by repeating, “What do you mean? What do you mean?”
John Lee tries to stare him down but Granny Boy holds up a hand, stretching his torn-gloved fingers. “Don’t look too hard, Captain. The smell of blood got me off and the night ain’t over yet. I’m still up for a little finger work.”
John Lee turns away, but not fast enough to allow the boy to think he’s got him rattled. He glances at Cyrus. “Did the nigger suffer?”
“I did it just like you would, if you had the guts to do it yourself.”
“You know, I think you were more personable when you were just a junkie.”
Cyrus pushes his face up against John Lee’s. “You mean when I was your fuckin’ field hand with my butt up in the air, doin’ that ‘Yes, sir’ and ‘No, sir’ shit? Those days are history.”
Wood, who is still sitting behind the steering wheel, leans out the open van door. “Why don’t you let me handshake the inside of that fuck’s asshole?”
John Lee doesn’t move, but from the corner of his eye he makes out Gutter unsheathing a blood-slaked hunting knife. He starts to shave it through the sand, cleaning it off. John Lee lets his hand slip up toward the revolver he’s got tucked inside his coat.
“By the way, I did that little porcelain doll wife of his.”
John Lee looks like Gutter’s knife was staked in his back. “You’re fuckin’ with me, right?”
“She made a good run at it, but came up short,” says Granny Boy.
John Lee looks from face to face. Each shucked out and darkening.
Cyrus steps up behind John Lee, his mouth right beside his ear. “Not only that, but I kept the pretty-pretty for myself.”
John Lee panics. “Gabi?”
“I didn’t get her name.”
Granny Boy starts to sing: “Well, he’s just an excitable boy. He took little Gabi to the Junior Prom.… ”
John Lee’s heart pounds. He rushes forward and around the van.
“… he’s just an excitable boy …”
John Lee yanks open the van doors. Gabi is lying there unconscious. She is bound and gagged and naked except for her shorts. Her T-shirt has been swathed around her head. He slams the doors shut, gulps air, stumbles backward.
“Why?!”
“… After ten long years they let him out of the home … he’s just an excitable boy …”
Cyrus and his pack have circled up around John Lee.
“Why? You’ll destroy ev—”
“You always thought you were in control!”
“… And he dug up her grave and built a cage with her bones … He’s such an excitable boy …”
“But you were only in charge. Understand the difference?” Cyrus’s teeth tear at his words. “Do you have the true vision of where it is at? Has it started to crack through that lie you’ve been living?”
“… He’s such an excitable boy!”
“It’s Furnace Creek all over again, Captain.”
When Cyrus sees John Lee’s face start to flush out with a fearful symmetry he leans in closer and says, “You don’t know how bad you fucked up, Captain.”
“You can’t believe for a—”
“What did you think was going on inside my head all those years I’d shuffle through that fieldwork for you, Captain?” Cyrus screams in John Lee’s face. He puts on a mock shuffling slave voice. “Yes, sir, Captain. I’ll sell that smack you copped in a bust. Yes, sir, I’ll get you some little boy so you can make hump movies to pass around with your belt-buckle stud queer-cop buddies. Sure. Just for a little taste. A few droppings.”
A monstrous whisper of voices around John Lee laugh at him, throw trash talk at him. Cyrus’s pack get off watching the Captain get punked.
“I was biding my time, Captain. Avengement. Retribution. Retaliation. Vendetta. Those words shrivel up your dick a little. Did you forget how you worked me when I was desperate for a little vein taste? Remember how you’d make me stick my ass up in the sky and you and your cop buddies make me be the bitch?
“Why’d you think I kept tight with you all those years after I cleaned up? It was the Path, dicksleeve. I kept the focus. I knew one day you’d want something done I could savage you and fatboy with. Where all that money you scored back then could not fill the hole I would blow through your lives.”
Cyrus holds up the money John Lee has given him. He tosses it into the sand.
Gutter walks over and spits on the money. Granny Boy unzips his leathers and lets his cock give that cash a good cooling.
“We left the cunt back there at the house all nice and bloody and wrapped for Christmas,” says Cyrus. “And the pretty-pretty, I’m going to take her and fuck her and shoot her up and let the young wolves here invent games for her pussy. We are going to rape her and film it and … I might even send you and fatboy a copy of that.”
Wood begins to scarf his hands against the van wall like he’s hot to climb in and get this hellbound train rolling. John Lee turns away from the sight.
“What is it you want, then?” he says.
Cyrus says nothing.
In a frenzy of collapsing emotions John Lee screams out, “What do you want?”
Cyrus does a little riff on the rock-and-roll classic “We Want the World and We Want It …” He breathes out one last word: “Yeah … It’s gonna be pretty watching you and fatboy come tumbling down on each other. Wait till he finds out. You ought to go home and slit your throat tonight.