Chapter 3
“You did real good back there kid,” Tony said as they left the parking lot of the Cornudo café, so big you could plant a decent crop if there was water to make it grow. “But don’t drive back to the motel. Get on the Interstate and head east for a while. We’ve got to throw that asshole off your trail. We told him we were going to Tucson, so let’s head that way.”
Michael was inclined to believe him, because between Tony and Catalina Eddy, Tony seemed the less creepy of the two.
“Who was that guy back there?” Mike asked, turning onto the freeway.
Tony was looking over his shoulder. “His name is Eddy Rankin but he calls himself Catalina Eddy because he thinks it makes him sound like a high roller, but it really makes him sound like a carnival con man, which he once was. He’s the chief of a group of border militia scumbags that call themselves the Freedom Frontiersmen. I’ve known him all my life. I went to school with him. Now, someone needs to protect the border from all the criminals that come across it, but those asswipes ain’t protecting anybody except themselves. Anytime people have the words ‘Freedom’ in the name of their group, watch out for those people. It means they like their freedom, but will take away yours if they can benefit from it."
“Hey, I’m American. What can they do to me?” Mike protested. He thought Tony something of a carnival shyster himself now that the concept was being bandied about, an idea he would have never thought of.
“Just trust me on that one,” Tony answered. “You don’t know the ways of the desert yet. Eddy wasn’t in the diner by accident. He was sniffing around, trying to find out who the new owner of the Motel is. He probably already suspects it’s you, but the longer we can postpone the truth, the better.”
“Why does he want to stick his nose in my business?”
“The FF claims its mission is to protect the United States from invasion,” Tony said. “But it’s really just a white gang. They consider this their territory, and they are going to demand some kind of cooperation from you.” He held his hands up in double quotes around cooperation. “They will appeal to your patriotism to get it, but if that doesn’t work they’ll kick your ass because they are, how you say in ingles, an extortion racket.”
Michael looked troubled. His real estate agent had definitely left out these little details. His real estate agent had also neglected to disclose there was a fat, freeloading, loudmouth old man squatting in one of his rooms. Who was really extorting who?
“Welcome to the Gadsden Purchase, kid,” Tony said.
“Did Mr. Müeller give them kickbacks?” Michael asked.
“Who, Joe? Hell no. Josef was an ornery old prick. He gave them both barrels of a twelve-gauge shotgun, and told them to get the hell off of his property. But Joe was here a long time, and had a lot of friends to watch his back. You don’t have that kind of goodwill to draw on yet.” Tony shook his head sadly. “It’s going to be a tough road ahead for you, kid. If you really wanted to run a motel, if that was your dream, why didn’t you pick some peaceful white bread, pea soup town in Wisconsin, or something?”
Michael was tired of everybody telling how and where to spend his own money. “You don’t think Linda will tell them, do you?”
“Oh no,” Tony answered. “Linda’s a bitch. She’s a dried up old Milf bitch, but she won’t tell them shit. Linda can be your best friend, and she likes you. I can tell. But Linda ain’t the only one you got to worry about.”
They cruised the freeway eastbound, went all the way to Dateland, then Mike bought milkshakes at the shop in the date grove before doubling back. When they approached the Cornudo/Tacna exit again, Tony looked out the window to make sure it was clear. Then they drove another dozen miles to Wellton before doing the opposite U turn.
They turned around in the shadow of the three story Microtel Inn. “They got all these fucking fancy hotels here now,” Tony commented. “That’s why nobody stays at your motel, anymore. We used to be able to sucker in all the tired drivers who couldn’t make it to Gila Bend, or Yuma the other direction. Now they stop here instead because, let’s face it kid, your place is a dump. It looks like that motel in some movie I saw where they make snuff films because the place ain’t paying. Have you thought about snuff films?”
“It’s not going to be a dump for long,” Michael protested. “We’re going to fix it up, starting today.”
“I like that kid, I like your guts. Can I take a nap first?”
Mike parked his truck around the back of his motel, out of sight from the freeway. The motel had not officially reopened for business yet, and he wanted to do some extensive remodeling before it did. To this end Mike had brought in some rolls of carpet and padding last night, since stowed away in a shed on the lot, but he didn’t know what to do with them yet. So while Tony napped off his milkshake, Mike cruised You Tube for carpet laying tips. It looked easy enough but, being a perfectionist, he didn’t want to do it half ass. Some people called him “anal,” but he hated that word and refused to apply it to himself.
After a couple of hours assiduously absorbing every possible detail of carpet installation on the Internet, Mike decided to go check on Tony in room 20. Tony’s door was wide open, which Mike found peculiar at first, but then he remembered the power breakers were cut off down there and it had to be hot, even though it was technically autumn. Mike wondered how the hell Tony had been holding up, squatting in a room without air conditioning the last few weeks, when the temperatures still sometimes hit 100. He felt a pang of pity for the man, even though he still wasn’t quite sure what to do with him yet.
Mike peeked inside and found Tony sitting up in a chair, wide awake in a damp wife beater T-shirt. A hideous hairy spider as big as a fist sat atop one sagging man boob that was rather distastefully demarcated by the stretched fabric. “Holy crap!” said Mike. “You’ve got something crawling on your chest!”
Tony looked down with drooping eyes toward the bug, which Mike now noticed was missing a leg.
“Oh that,” said Tony sleepily. “That’s Molly. She lives here, she keeps me company.”
Mike next spotted a terrarium on the desk that contained a snake with red, black, and yellow stripes. To the side of this glass enclosed habitat were several smaller containers, all holding lizards, insects, and other creatures of varying degrees of loathsomeness.
Tony took note of Mike’s scrutiny. “I take in every ugly, handicapped, or abandoned stray animal,” he said. “Birds of a feather. Don’t worry, I got ‘em under control.”
Michael nodded uncertainly. “You ready to go to work?”
“Sure,” Tony answered. He rose up slowly and put Molly gently back in her jar.
Michael was soon to learn that Tony’s idea of work consisted of sitting on a lawn chair outside the door of the rooms where Mike laid carpet, pontificating on every subject from politics to pornography.
“They don't make that fucking porn like they used to," he opined from his ivory tower as Michael cut through carpet. "There used to be some mystery and mystique to it. The women looked like real women. They sagged in all the right places, and some were pale as ghosts, because they didn't have the sprayed on suntans the chicks got now. All these porn girls today look like they're genetically engineered in the same lab. They all have the same curves in the same places and the same fake boobs, they just shake the test tube so one comes out blonde, another brunette. Oh, and I forgot, they had some real nice music in those old porno movies. Some of the soundtracks were real artsy stuff."
At first, Michael had been annoyed by this constant babble, but then had come to think of it as background noise, same as the interminable drone of big rigs on the interstate in the back yard. After a while the monologue became almost soothing, but if you would have quizzed him on it five minutes later he couldn’t remember ten percent of what Tony said.
How was he supposed to tell Tony to go away? It wasn’t that he couldn't pay him so much as he didn't want to, because Tony didn't do anything. Tony said he got up early to pick up the cigarette butts and other litter on the lot, but all of that litter was made by Tony, who in the evenings, instead of blowing smoke out of his ass with his wildly exaggerated and embellished tales, would chain smoke in the gazebo in the parking lot, always wearing a contemplative, almost beatific look. His mouth might be closed, but the monologue was still going on in his head.
"We had a bum once here in Cornudo," Tony told Mike, "A fuzzy haired guy named Gilbert. I don't know why he chose this place or how he got here. I guess he got tired fighting for pennies in the city and decided he wanted a place with no competition, but he found out the reason there are no bums here is that people ain't got shit to share. Besides that, this heat makes you hostile, and even 118 fucking degrees is not enough to warm your soul with the spirit of charity. In the city you can get away with it, but here when you see some bum sleeping under your doorstep while you are sweating your ass off it just makes you run him off your property."
"Anyway," Tony continued, "the last time I saw Gilbert he was going the wrong way. He was heading south, into the desert at high noon in August. Some illegals tried to stop him. You're going the wrong way, they told him. Come with us, there ain't shit down there. There ain't shit here either, Gilbert told them, and kept walking. Of course I'm paraphrasing this from Spanish, where it is ten times more poetic, but that's the gist of it."
"I gave Gilbert a dollar once, so I guess he thought of me as a friend. He sent me a postcard from Puerto Vallarta, and it looked like things worked out for him. He hooked up with some well to do lady who wanted to drop an anchor baby in the US. Now Gilbert still don't do shit but the lady bitches at him all day, doesn't let him drink, and makes him take a bath. He wants to come back here and get a job. Amazing how much that fucker could write on the back of a postcard."
Little by little Mike finished laying the carpet, then began painting. At first he would let Tony drive to the cafe to pick up his breakfast, but Tony would disappear for hours then come back with lunch. Mike started eating pop tarts for breakfast instead.
"Tell me the truth, kid," Tony prompted him one day. "I haven't heard you talk to anyone since you got here. You're running from somebody. You got a girlfriend?"
More than anything else, Michael hated being asked if he had a girlfriend. He turned away from his brush strokes with a perturbed look. "I have a fiancé," he said.
Tony smiled slyly. "Must be one hell of a fiancé, if you left her to come out here."
"She can't get away from work right now," he said. "She's got vacation in a couple of weeks and she'll be coming out then."
"What kind of work does she do? Must be a real good job because you're kind of loaded and she still don't want to leave town to see you."
Mike tried to put on a mask of offended outrage, but it didn’t quite work. "She's got a law degree. She's a community activist."
Tony laughed with thinly veiled sarcasm. "Community activist? They pay you for that shit? I thought that's what you do when you're broke and need a free meal. I had a cousin..."
Michael returned to his paintbrush. He was learning quickly about the danger of answering Tony’s questions.
The next morning Tony informed Michael that "we're out of supplies, chief." All at once, from one day to the next, Michael had graduated from 'kid' to 'chief.' It didn't take Michael long to learn that when Tony wanted something really badly he dropped the diminutive in favor of the honorific. "You ate all the pop tarts. We gotta restock. Let me shave and we'll head to the Costco in Tucson."
"Tucson, why Tucson? Yuma's a lot closer."
"There’s only Sam’s Club in Yuma. Good enough, but I can't cross the river," Tony’s tone lowered uncharacteristically.” You gotta cross the Gila to get to Sam's Club in Yuma. I can't do it."
The real problem with Tony is that one couldn't filter out the rare grains of truth from the mounds of bullshit. That was why this statement made Mike lift his paint splattered eyebrows. "What are you looking at me like that for?" Said Tony. "I ain't bullshitting you. I don't never bullshit. I got what they call Aquaphobia. It's a real medical condition. I mean, of course I can drink a glass of water, although, truth be told, I try to stick to beer for health reasons. But I can't cross anything bigger than a puddle without freaking out. I mean, going completely spastic. The CIA could water board me and I would be okay with it, but I can't cross a running gutter."
Mike tried to suppress a smirk, somewhat unsuccessfully. "So how do you travel?"
Tony looked at his nervously shuffling feet. "I don't," he said.
Michael had learned that with Tony, it was better to pretend to believe him. "So what are you telling me? That you've never left this place?"
Tony could not peel his eyes from his wrapped ankles. "No, I never have. I've stayed in the Gadsden Purchase my entire life. Well, I joined the army when I was 18, thinking it would be fun to go somewhere else, someplace green for a change. I didn't know I had the aquaphobia so bad, then. Yeah I avoided swimming pools and all that, but I didn't know I couldn't cross water. Do you know they say spirits can't cross water?" He laughed, but in a single hoarse burst. "Maybe I'm just a ghost. Anyway, they flew us out of Tucson, but as soon as the plane crossed the Santa Cruz river I had a seizure. I unbuckled myself and started flailing on the floor. They had to turn the plane around."
Michael lowered his paint brush and looked at Tony. "So you've never even been to like, San Diego?"
"Hell, I've never been to fucking Phoenix."
Mike took a moment to contemplate the logistical difficulties of his association with Tony. "Well, I guess we could go to Tucson, but aren't there any rivers between here and there?"
"Ah, hell no," he said, his smile returning. "They're all dry now. Thank God for global warming."
Mike knew he was probably being bullshitted, but he went along with the plan because a change in the bleak, bleached, sandblasted scenery would probably be good for him. Everything in this town looked like it was eroding into dust. You couldn't tell where the buildings ended and the dirt started. The dwellings were mere sculpted sand, waiting their turn to disintegrate and blow away.
That said, they headed for Tucson.
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Image from Wikimedia Commons - Flash flood in the Gobi of Mongolia, 2004
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