Chapter 7

Table of Contents

Chapter 7

I didn't know your friend was Mexican," Lisa whispered to Mike in an awestruck voice when he got back to from the cafe with Tony's coffee, which he didn't drink because he was drinking the Keurig.  Her tone was that of the interplanetary scientist who has discovered life on Mars.  "That's fantastic.  That's perfect.”

     Mike and Lisa got into the pickup with Tony, who as usual insisted on driving.  Lisa wanted to ride up front, to bathe in the divine vibrations emanating from Tony's oppressed being. Meanwhile, Lisa's goons followed in the spray-painted Prius, sulking, shunned, and scolded for having wrecked their room that morning.  Not only had Mike found trash and bottles littered everywhere, but the punks had gouged a six by six inch hole in the wall to remove a NSA planted "bug," per Heyward, the spokesman for the group because his intellect at least Rose to earthworm level. The bug turned out to be a junction box that disabled power for that entire wing of the motel.

     Being completely focused on her new pet, Lisa was completely indifferent to the abuse Mike gave her henchmen.  Despite the depredations of these knuckle dragging brutes, the protest caravan seemed to be off to an auspicious start, until Tony remembered something and killed the engine.

     "I forgot to feed my dog," he said, bouncing from the truck on his two bad knees and limping toward his room.

     At the edge of the parking lot, Tony's disenfranchised coyote Rolf was sitting upon its sad haunches in the tumbleweeds. Mike pointed out the beast to Lisa and she gasped orgasmically.

     "The indigenous peoples here still interact with wild creatures,” she said breathlessly.

     Mike was tempted to tell her about Tony screwing the Hooters girl in the bed of his pickup, wondering what she would think about interactions of that sort, but why burst her bubble?  He was pretty sure Tony would do it himself, sooner rather than later.

     Tony came out of his room holding something that looked like beef jerky.  "Just like Dances with Wolves!" Lisa squealed.  Then a chorus of angry,  outraged yips and barks came from the other side of the parking lot.  Cornudo's local wolf pack, composed of seven or eight shaggy, dirty mixed breed semi-strays that all had some percentage of Chihuahua, including one quasi German Shepherd with a peculiarly elongated snout, was making its way toward the Coyote, led by the only dog that could be positively identified as a Chihuahua.  All fifteen inches of this diminutive beast was packed with blind aggresion and rage.  He very well could have been the  Father of the German Shepherd, who seemed to follow him with filial devotion, though the logistics of that mating strained the limits of both imagination and engineering.

     "Get out of here you mother fuckers!" Tony shouted, rushing toward the pack with a fistful of stones.  These he flung with surprising accuracy, pelting a mangy, discolored poodle on its fluffy haunches.  The pack of dogs lost its nerve and retreated beneath the barrage but it was too late. Tony's skittish Coyote Rolf had already spooked and scampered off.

     “Goddamn mangy fucking mutts!" Tony shouted, spinning upon his fat axis in frustration.

     Back in the truck, Lisa looked like she would cry.  Tony brushed himself off, as if the dog breath of the furry brutes had sullied him, then got back in the truck.  There he sat surly and silent, occasionally mumbling invective against the strays.  Drawing upon the reserves of her feminine wiles, Lisa coaxed him into conversation.

     Besides the stray dogs, Lisa couldn’t prod out the kind of greivances she was interested in, particularly how Tony suffered beneath the white man’s yoke.  When he confessed to being recently deported, Lisa was indignant, but Tony seemed indifferent. "Oh, that, that's no big deal.  Just a running joke between me and one of my border patrol homies.  I get a free ride down to Mexico, hang out with some of the old vatos, drink a few beers and hitch a ride back.  Sometimes you need a change of scenery.”

     "But doesn’t it make you angry that they are profiling you?"

     "Profiling?" Tony shook his head.  "I don't know.  I'm not really into photography."

     In the back seat Mike suppressed laughter.  Lisa closed her mouth and regrouped.

     "But doesn't it bother you, as a Mexican, when authorities deliberately target you because of certain cultural characteristics you might display?"  She was foaming up into a good hate crime lather.

      This time Tony was outraged. "Mexican? Who says I’m Mexican?  I'm a goddamm flag waving American mother fucker, sweetheart."

     Lisa had dealt with this sort of response before.  "That's what your Wall Street corporate  overlords want you to believe.  They want to suppress your heritage and pretend to be an American, even though you'll never receive the rights and recognition you are entitled to.  They do it to divide and conquer.  They do it in to the LGBT community too.”

     Tony smiled appreciatively this time. “LGBT?  Oh, I know that.  A friend of mine showed me that LGBT Facebook page.  Liquor, guns, bacon and tits."

     Tony laughed so hard he almost deployed the airbag.  He either did not notice or did not care that Lisa was not laughing.

     The drive got quiet for a while.  When they stopped for gas in Tucson, Tony went inside to use the bathroom.  When he came back, he was wearing a red Make America Great Again hat. Lisa shielded her eyes and switched places with Mike to the back seat.  An elephant climbed in the truck with Tony, and smothered all the conversation from there to Nogales.  Lisa avoided talking to anyone, and Mike was afraid to talk to Tony for fear of incurring Lisa's wrath.

     When they rolled into Nogales in cold silence, Lady Justice watched them vigilantly from atop the county courthouse.  Although she often peeks under the mask, in most other courthouse penthouses she resides on, Lady Justice is blindfolded.  This is not for any kinky sex games, but to keep her from drawing unfair conclusions based on things like skin color and socio-economic status.  In Nogales, however, the entire economy was fueled by unfair, culturally biased conclusions.  If this guy over here looks Mexican, we need to detain him for further investigation, and the local merchants will happily cater to his nutritional and toiletry essentials in the process.  If that guy over there has a towel on his head, we'll hold him for a few days to make sure he’s not wearing a bomb vest, and in the meantime he will have to be caged and fed, all for the benefit of local commerce.

     In the good old days of arbitrary frontier justice in Nogales, having a statue of Lady Justice with unimpeded eyesight atop the courthouse was accepted without question.  When the rule of law and its nagging insistence on impartiality moved in later there was some debate about whether to blindfold the bitch, but in the end it was decided just to keep her eyes naked and see what happened.

     What happened was revolution south of the border, when Pancho Villa and his associates moved back and forth across the boundary as if it was just an arbitrary line on paper, not an actual physical impediment.  Before Pancho Villa the two Nogaleses were really one, the inhabitants of both sides crossing freely either way.  If the locals had any knowledge of complex international law regulating citizenship, they didn't bore anybody with it.

     After Pancho Villa, however, people got scared.  As usual, fear caused them to do unfortunate things they regretted later but could not undo, any more than one can erase a facial tattoo applied as a drunken party dare.  After Pancho Villa the people decided to build a fence down the middle of town that could have been easily breached by Señor Villa's goons, but all the same somewhat soothed the town's institutionalized insecurities.

      So now an ugly, rickety fence snaked its way up, down and around the prickly hills of Nogales, looking like a geriatric boa constrictor that couldn’t strangle the life out of both countries, but did cause a great deal of indigestion. This is what Mike beheld when his hijacked truck rolled into town.  Tony didn't see anything because he had seen it hundreds of times before and, who knows, he may have been a descendant of one of Villa's merry band.  He preferred Lady Justice just the way she was, he had remarked more than once about what a hot babe she was and how he would like to lick her toes by way of foreplay. As for Lisa, she didn't see anything because she was looking at her own toes.  She was looking at her toes because she was trying not to look at Tony, who disgusted her, and she was trying not to look at Mike, who also disgusted her by not being disgusted enough by Tony.

     "Your friend is a pig," Lisa told him quietly as they dismounted the truck in a dirt lot where the protesters were gathering.

     Mike could not deny that Tony was a pig, but he had taken a certain proprietary shine to him.

     “Your friends are worse pigs.  They wrecked my motel.  They punched holes in the walls.  They're worse than pigs – they are insects."

     "You marginalized them by giving them second class accommodations."

     "If I had a livestock pen I would have locked them in there."

     As if summoned, the green spray-painted Prius carrying Heyward, Zack and Otis arrived.  The car had been improved since last seen in Cornudo.  In black paint sprayed across the green, slogans such as 'Dump Trump' and 'Tear Down the Wall' had been added.  What nobody knew was that Otis had dangled Zack from the moving car by his legs so he could write the manifesto.  Otis had also been the one driving.  Heyward supervised the process.

     Tony's Make America Great Again hat got menacing looks from the four or five dozen protestors that had assembled in the parking lot of a body shop.  The business operated on a strict cash only basis and primarily stayed in business by redecorating stolen cars.  The undocumented workers inside looked at the protesters suspiciously, rejecting any efforts to befriend or show solidarity with them.  The owner of the place disliked Trump because he might be bad for business, so he had agreed to let the kids use the lot, for a fee.  Otherwise, he had no interest in politics and thought these protesters were pampered idiots who should get a job.

     The platform where President Elect Trump was going to give his speech was about two hundred yards down the road, in the skinny shadow of the border fence.  As it turned out, it was impossible to walk there.  In addition to Secret Service and local law enforcement, a cordon of thuggish militiamen had formed an unofficial barrier around the rally to keep the protesters away.

     "I guess we'll just have to get as close as possible and make do," Lisa said when she saw the blockade.  "Find out where the media is and we'll do our demonstration in front of them."

     "Fuck that," Tony said to Mike.  "Your girlfriend gives up too easy.  Or did she just come down here to put on a cheerleading show?  Where’s her fucking pom-poms? Let me handle it!"

     Tony walked down the street toward the militiamen.  Mike watched him go uneasily, then looked at Lisa, who was wearing a disapproving bitch scowl.

     Tony knew most of the militiamen gathered there. They were delighted to see Tony, because a Mexican wearing a Trump hat was definitive proof that their orange-haired idol was not a racist.  Even though the militiamen's conversations were peppered liberally with beaner jokes, they were always trying to convince people that the movement was not about race.  They were happy to see Tony not only because he was a Mexican with a Trump hat, but because he told the best beaner jokes.

     Tony got high fives and fist pumps up and down the militia line. He laughed heartily when someone asked him where his low rider was parked.  He laughed heartily when someone asked if they had let him out of the border patrol holding tank to go to the rally.

     Then Tony saw a cute chick wearing a shirt that said 'Build the Wall, Enforce the Law,’ and knew what to do. Tony gave her his charming smile while wondering if this hat gave him a license to grab pussies.  He decided he better not, refocused, and instead asked where she got the shirt.  She smiled back and pointed to a booth about 20 feet away.

     Tony went to the booth and picked up a box of Build the Wall shirts, then returned to the protesters.  He met a wall of angry scowls cultivated by Lisa.

     "All right guys, listen up because here's what we're going to do. Put on these T-shirts and I can sneak you past the militia.  I'll get you right down to the front, where you'll really get on TV."

      "I'm not wearing that disgusting thing," Heyward protested.

      "You only have to wear it for a minute.  It's a Trojan horse, you know like one of those fake dissolving condoms you put on when you want to ride her bareback but she don't want to get pregnant."  Tony had no verification that such an apparatus existed, but he had always assumed that was where the Trojan horse expression came from.

     There were some chuckles in the crowd, which seemed to be lightening up to Tony.

     "This is wrong, guys!" Lisa protested to the protesters.  "You can't just sneak in like this. You'll get in trouble."

     Tony lowered his eyebrows at Lisa and his thick whiskers could not disguise his contempt.  "Get in trouble?  You're supposed to get in trouble.  If you want to make headlines you gotta get tear gassed and thrown in jail! Are you protesters or pussies?  Let's go!"

     The group surged toward Tony, thrilled with the prospect of being incarcerated.  This is what civil disobedience was supposed to be about, police dogs and rubber bullets, not standing back in a safe place and launching dud verbal grenades.

     Mike was torn between staying with Lisa or donning a T-shirt and going with the rest, but Tony settled the argument for him.  "Come on, I got these shirts on IOU.  You have to go pay the T-shirt lady."  Mike gave Lisa a helpless, palms out, what can I do look and went forward. Lisa stayed back alone with her bullhorn.

     Everybody was swept up in the moment.  The Trojan Horse Trumpsters pushed their way down the street toward the militiamen, who were suspicious about these young kids with corn rows, painted hair, and facial piercings, but lightened up when their pet Mexican Tony assured them that they were students from the U of A who were sick of liberals telling them what to think.

     “They smell like California to me," said one crusty old timer as he spit a wad of something onto the ground.

     "They were just on a field trip to San Diego,” said Tony. “That seaweed smell don't wash off."

     They listened because it was Tony doing the talking, and they all knew Tony.  Here was a man who had made a living chasing free-loading punks off the railroad through the skillful application of ass whippings.  They accepted his explanation and let the kids pass.

      Once inside the cordon, the protesters wriggled their way to the front of the crowd.  Tony used a combination of bullying, begging, bribing and finally, outright lying to get the kids through hundreds of adoring Trumpsters who wanted a front row seat for the President-elect. "Come on, step aside, they're just kids! Do it for the children!..Come on George, I got you onto the Duke's place in 1975.  You owe me one…Yeah Ralph, I can help you get a break on that shipment, I'll make a phone call.  Just make a hole...Hey people, the President wants some young, fresh faces up front, not a line of dried up, wrinkled old farts like you.  Don't make me go get the Sheriff!"

     When none of those techniques worked, Tony stuck out his two stout elbows and forced his way through like an angry rhinoceros.  The momentum of the disguised agitators gathered force behind him and they steamrolled their way to the front.  As he floated along in the flotsam of this kaleidoscope throng of rainbow skin colors, dazzling hair tints, and gaudy earlobe pendants, Mike stumbled and almost tripped on some hard object, which turned out to be a brick.  He kicked it aside thoughtlessly and kept moving forward.

     From the front of the packed mass of humanity, the greatest flock of two legged creatures ever splayed out across this upper Sonoran scrubland, Mike noticed that the brick he had stumbled over matched those piled on a concrete platform next to the stage, where there was also a tub of wet cement and a trowel.  Apparently the President-elect was going to use these implements to make a big show of laying down the first portion of his magnificent, legendary, holy covenant border wall, a barrier pledged to his dedicated, adoring disciples, an insurmountable fortress to prevent the unworthy from invading this thorny land of milk and honey.  In other words, Donald Trump was Moses in reverse.

     A chorus of boos erupted in the throng as the opening bass line of the famous Pink Floyd song about tearing down walls issued forth from the loudspeakers.  Then a familiar voice in a distinctive New York accent coming from parts unseen said "whoops!", after which boos turned to whoops as the song changed to Oasis' Wonderwall.

     "That's right folks!" Trump said as he walked out on stage to deafening roars of approval. "We're going to build a Wonderwall here, a real first class wonderwall, the best wall ever in the history of walls."

     As he presented himself to the throng, the President-elect quaked with undercurrents of suppressed enthusiasm, like an ADHD child forced into a straight jacket for a school assembly.  His unruly shock of orange blonde hair, its unnatural color proclaiming its dubious authenticity, gleamed in the infinite supply of Arizona sunshine.

     “There have been some great walls, wonderful walls, some really fantastic walls throughout history," the President-elect continued, gesturing to the crowd with a little circle formed by thumb and forefinger, a circle that represented a life ring for some but a noose for others. "The Chinese..." derisive cat calls erupted from the assemblage, "...the Chinese tried to build a wall once, as we all know, to keep out illegal immigrants.  They had the audacity to call it the Great Wall, but that wall turned out not so great. Hilary, yes our friend Hilary, tried to build a wall made up of lies and fake news to keep us from the White House. Let’s just say that all of those walls were real choke jobs, just like all the chokers and losers who said that, first of all, I would never be nominated, then said that I would never be elected, then said I would never, ever build a wall across the entire length of the Mexican border."

     The cheering reverberated, and the President-elect let it ring out freely across the length and breadth of the Gadsden Purchase, from where it spilled over into Mexico, a blast of hot wind that wilted foliage. "But here we are folks, here we are," Trump continued as the clamor gradually subsided.  "Here we are to build a wall, and to teach those Chinese a thing or two in the process.  First of all, we're going to teach them how to honor trade agreements, and then we're going to teach them how to build a really great wall, a wall that none of the rapists, or criminals, or drug lords, or freeloaders down in Mexico will ever be able to cross!"

     The crowd exploded again, and under cover of the hypnotic thrall Tony ordered the protesters to remove their Trump shirts, exposing diverse protest garments beneath.  One shirt read "Impeach Trump," a message urging that the President-elect be removed before he could leave so much as a sweat ring in the oval office chair, a slogan fueled by the fantasy that although no President had been ousted by impeachment before, the process was as easy as donning a T-shirt.  Another shirt declared "Tear Down the Wall," a catchphrase that earned enthusiasm points, even though no such structure yet existed. All of these taunting garments of the invading army of civily disobedient immediately drew unfriendly stares, though Mr. Trump was apparently so absorbed with himself he didn’t notice.

     When the buzz in the assemblage quieted, the Donald picked up one of the red bricks from the platform.  There was nothing especially resistant or inpenetrable about it, it was just a typical red brick that looked like the ones used to build houses in the days before seismic standards, a commonplace red brick that might stop the big bad wolf from blowing your house down but wouldn't stop the San Andreas from crumbling it into dust in a matter of seconds.  With the adoring, adorning crowd looking on, Trump inspected the brick lovingly, sensually, from each side.

     “These are great bricks," he said. "These are magnificent bricks.  We had these bricks custom made on the East Coast." This part was fake news, though in his defense the President-Elect did not know it.  In truth, a scared rookie Secret Service agent had bought them in a frenzy at a Home Depot in Tucson that very morning, hauling them onto the stage in such a rush that one or two had fallen off the cart.  But the truth was no obstacle for Trump. "They have the best brick makers in the world over there on the East Coast. Nothing against your local brickmakers, because Arizona has some fine, fine brickmakers.  I build folks, that's what I do.  I know my bricks.  So I can tell you that over there on the East Coast they have the best brick layers on the planet, making the absolutely strongest bricks. When I was building my fabulous casinos over there, we had these bricklayers that just boggled the mind.  Truly, truly magnificent bricklayers that..."

     Tony took Trump's long winded diatribe on the state of brick making in the US as a signal to launch the protest.  From his side of the protest group he evoked a chorus of rowdy anti-Trump cheers that quickly spread among the dissidents.  "Dump Trump!  We reject the President-elect!" Followed by soulfully singing  "We shall overcomb!"

     On the platform the President-elect lowered the brick, which he had been caressing and conversing with like Yorick's skull. Where be your jibes now, your gambols, your songs, he had been whispering in a gentle soliloquy to the brick, but now his full attention turned to the protesters, to whom he delivered an outraged, stalinistic stare of disapproval.  Next he shot a perturbed wtf look toward his Secret Service and the militia men, intimating there may be purges.  Trump didn’t like these Secret Service people. They refused to wear the TRUMP logo in large gilded letters on their clothing.  To him, if it didn't bear the TRUMP brand it couldn't be trusted.  Here was the proof.

     Trump let the brick roll off of his fingers.  It hit the concrete base of the podium and split in two. Somewhere along the high hills of inner Mongolia, stone soldiers  encased deep in some emperor’s crypt high fived in celebration of their own wall's continued supremacy.

     Out in the unruly crowd, a spectator took Trump dropping one brick as a cue to pick another up.  Meanwhile, Mike Gasden was nervously eyeing the proceedings.  Willingly enough, he had been swept along in the bum's rush to the front, but now he realized that this deed went beyond the abstract and was subject to the laws of cause and effect.  A year ago, when Mike was still just a starving software developer, social activism was his church on Sunday, but now he was a man of property and needed to keep his eye open for a safety valve, an escape route, a way to invoke plausible deniability later in case things turned sour.  This intensified scrutiny of his surroundings was why Mike was the first to see the brick as it whizzed inches above his head, flying from somewhere behind where husky Otis was standing.

      Civil disobedience, bored just standing around behaving itself, crossed the fine line over to rioting, just like when matriarch Eve, restless watching soap operas and waiting for Adam to come home from the bar, had started flirting with the serpent and wound up tasting the forbidden fruit.

     Trump removed his jacket and rolled up his sleeves in an instant. He assumed an intimidating pugilist stance, but his eyes grew wide and his face went pinker than normal as he beheld the projectile racing straight for him. Mike followed the President-elect's eyes backwards and saw the brick zooming in with a perfect spiral, like a cubist-rendered football that would drill Trump directly between the eyeballs, instead of between the numbers.  Reacting immediately, Mike extended his arm and lightly touched the spinning projectile with the tips of his fingers.

     The contact was not enough to stop the brick, but was enough to slightly alter its trajectory and velocity.  What the intervention of Mike's extended fingers did was to move the brick just enough in space and time that it missed its precisely aimed target, that being an imaginary bull’s-eye square in the geographical center of Donald Trump's face.

     There have been some great shot blockers in the history of the National Basketball Association, heretofore to be referred to here as the NBA, if referred to at all.  Hakeem Olajuwon, Dikembe Mutombo, and Kareem Abdul Jabbar constitute the top three in career shot block leaders.  The mighty Wilt Chamberlain once blocked 26 shots in a single game.  You won't find him or Bill Russell on any shot block lists because no one was really counting back then, but in 1967 the Celtics defensive legend Russel made an immortal blocked shot on Wilt the Stilt, demonstrating quite plainly who was the champion of diverting thrown projectiles from their path.  That is until Michael Gasden came along.

     Michael Gasden made the shot block heard round the world, one that probably changed the course of American history, although we will never know for sure because there is no one hundred percent accurate way of determining what the effects of a brick striking the unprotected face of a 70 year old man will be. Not bad for a computer nerd who had never touched a basketball in his life.

     Suffice to say that the brick did not strike Trump in the face, where it was aimed. Instead, it glanced off the top of his forehead, dealing there a greatly attenuated blow, though still a meaningful one.  Looking toward the President-elect in horror, Michael beheld a series of events that unfolded so rapidly there was no time to correctly interpret them.  First of all, he discerned a fuzzy, reddish-blonde mass fall from the general region of Trump's forehead onto the ground, where it seemed to scurry off to safety of its own accord, like a beleaguered rodent. Immediately thereafter, there followed a brilliant, blinding reflection of the sun off of a smooth, rounded surface, so intensely bright that Mike shaded his eyes against retina damage. But all of this flurried activity was impossible to make sense of to any degree of certainty, because Trump was instantly smothered to the ground by his Secret Service agents, who formed a protective dog pile over him, including the one who had bought the brick that almost took the boss out.

     Michael stood motionless, paralyzed into inactivity by the set of circumstances the quantum probability theory of human history had placed him in.  He froze in place and did not flee, even as his fellow protesters wisely scattered in every direction.

     From the bottom of the Presidential dog pile, a Secret Service agent now looked outward and pointed a finger at Mike, who stood pale faced and dumbfounded in an evacuated circle of bare dirt where the protesters had once stood.  "He did it!  He threw the brick!" growled the agent.  "Get him!"

     Mike turned meekly to the left, then timidly to the right, trying to see if he could locate the target of the agent's accusation. Before he could spot the culprit, Mike was blind-sided and wrapped up in a human cocoon until forced to the ground, smothered within his own not so Presidential dogpile.

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Photo of Lady Justice atop Nogales courthouse by Ken Lund.  Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

Chapter 6

Table of Contents

Chapter 6  - The next week and a half or so went by quietly for Mike there in the Gadsden Purchase, a place where events were measured on the scale of eons, rather than days or weeks.  Donald Trump was elected President and Cornudo buzzed with activity, people nervously bouncing about, hoarding as if for nuclear holocaust, fearful that this man whose orangeish scalp, as thinly vegetated as the surrounding desert, might erase them from the map with a megaton blast from his powerful vocal chords.

     Mike went about his business indifferent to these developments.  He was neither a Trumpster nor a passenger aboard the Hillary wagon, in spite of Lisa's attempts to forcefully drag him there.  In truth he thought the shrieking, self-entitled bitch had pretty much gotten what she deserved.  As far as Mike and politics were concerned, the primary policy issue to be rectified was where the hell were his truck keys, and when would they be back?

     As she drove Mike back to the motel in her faded Nissan Sentra, after another night bingeing at the 'Bud, Linda tried to reassure Mike that Tony should be crawling in the next day.  "Hal will lock him overnight in the Wellton holding tank then let him go," she said.  "He's not really going to deport him."

     "How could he deport him?  He’s a citizen?  Right?”

     Linda grimaced. "There's a lot of things you don't know about Tony, sugar britches.  I guess the answer is yes and no.  It's complicated."

     That did nothing to clear matters up, of course, as the days strung together into a week, and Tony did not appear on the horizon while Mike’s truck sat dead in the water In the Cornudo Café parking lot. In the meantime, there wasn't much Mike could do to keep his mind off things.   He wasn't going to waste any energy or money fixing up the back building, knowing that Lisa's activist friends would just trash it anyway.  Lisa's hooligan associates  interpreted cleanliness and order as evidence of fascism, and were quick to counterbalance it with the chaotic application of anarchy.

     Out of sheer boredom Mike decided to hang up his shingle as open for business.  His first three visitors were concerned citizen busybodies who dropped in to let him know his sign was spelled wrong.  After this, Mike never had more than two customers per night, all of them fitting into the same basic categories.  They were either nervous looking couples who kept their eyes guiltily lowered, or gruff, stocky Hispanic men wearing copious amounts of gold bling who grunted uninteligibly in response to Mike’s enthusiastic inquiries into their good health.  Everyone paid in cash.

     To break the monotony, Mike constructed a device to hijack the Internet signal beaming down from a repeater on one of barren hills between Cornudo and Yuma.  As a believer in the concept of life, liberty, and free internet, Mike suffered no moral qualms about this. His motel patrons were suddenly blessed with free Wi Fi, and in the spirit of net neutrality Mike hooked up the rest of Cornudo as well.  Linda enthusiastically drove him into Yuma so he could pick up a satellite dish and other fixings for his hacking heist.

     "Max is going to be so happy he might cream his Dickies," she chattered as they climbed the wall of granite between civilized Yuma and the badlands to the east, rising there like a fortress to keep the Mongol hordes out.  "It takes him forever to download his porn.”

     Mike blushed, but Linda kept her eyes straight ahead, unaware she had said anything saucy.  The inhabitants of Cornudo were very direct, and this took some getting used to.  In Northern California people were so politically correct they were afraid to say anything, no matter how harmless.  Linda's remark would have been interpreted by Nocal feminist bitches as subjugating herself to the oppression of the penis.

     "What?  What'd I say?"

      “Nothing.  When do you think Tony is coming back?"

     Linda grew somber.  "Hell, he should have been back by now.  He really set off Hal this time with those flapping lips of his.  Serves him right."

     Have you and Tony been friends a long time?"

      "All our lives.  Hell, we've been more than friends from time to time, if you know what I mean.  Let me tell you a little secret that ain't so secret, honeycakes.  Everybody in Cornudo has fucked everybody else at one time or another.  It's a small town, ain't shit else to do.  If you were smart, sugar britches, you'd be raking my coals right now, while there are still some embers to stoke."

     Mike blushed deeper.  It got quiet, and Linda lit a cigarette without asking permission.  "Boy, she sure do got your dick on a leash."

     High speed Internet was received in Cornudo with the same enthusiastic response as Moses drawing water from the rock at Horeb.  Although Linda told the locals to be sure and thank Mike, nobody really did. To them it was an a miracle akin to manna, something beyond the control of mortals.  Human to human gratitude seemed uncalled for, although more than one citizen did go to church to thank Jesus.

     For her part, Linda made sure Mike ate for free at the Cafe, and even bringing him a plate when she could get away.

     The day that Lisa arrived coincided ominously with Tony's return.  Mike was in the lobby, hanging up the portrait he had brought home from the Rosebud, having spent a couple of days refinishing the frame.  Synchronicity or not, he was in the same picture hanging pose as Jesse James was when shot in the back by the coward, Robert Ford.  As he centered the portrait, Mike would have been an easy target because he was meditating on the mysterious doe eyes he had glimpsed through the part in the curtain.  The doe eyes had come to dominate his dreams, sleeping and waking. Disembodied doe eyes moving across the face of the deep desert dust. Mike was so enraptured by thoughts of delightful doe eyes he didn't see Lisa’s Prius pull up.

     “Why are you hanging that baby killer in the lobby?" Lisa snarled as she walked through the door.

      For a moment Mike assumed he was hearing his own thoughts, so he answered himself back.  "The baby killer is a very famous man, and my ancestor.  His name is James Gadsden. He gave this place its name."

     “Well if he did, you spelled the sign wrong," said Lisa.

     The portrait of James Gadsden hanging now in the motel lobby was a reproduction of one painted by Claribell Jett when Gadsden was serving as Aide de Camp to General Andrew Jackson, during the Seminole campaign of 1818.  The young officer looked more baby faced than baby killer.  His cheeks had a fresh, rosy glow radiating from his ivory skin.  His thick locks were as curly as a babe's in the crib.  He had the air of the dandy about him, a decidedly effeminate quality.  The term foppish, currently out of favor but very popular in that era, might have been applied.  But the young Gadsden also seemed to bristle with energy and ambition.  He appeared impatient to sit for the portrait, giving the impression he would sneak out of the chair as soon as the artist's back was turned.  From certain angles, he looked a lot like Mike.

     Mike mumbled something about his ancestors changing the spelling as Lisa said
“Geez, aren't even happy to see me?"

     Mike snapped out of his trance.  "Lisa!" Mike lifted her off her petite Asian feet in a suffocating embrace.  He then tried  to put a lip lock on her, but she offered up a cheek instead.  "Coffee breath," she explained.

    Lisa Chu was, as Mike put it when she was out of earshot, your typical short, skinny, bouncy Asian twenty-bopper, soon to spin a cocoon, molt, sprout wings and transform into a fearsome dragon lady.  She wore huge librarian style spectacles that were too big for her face and seemed to have been picked that way on purpose, either to enhance her squinty eye size, to augment the illusion of intelligence, or to turn guys on with a naughty secretary look.  Her glossy black hair was tied up in a high, utilitarian pony tail that did not venture more than halfway down the back of her skull, as if denouncing materialistic excess. Her clothing, hair style, and overall vibe evoked a no nonsense impression of proletarian efficiency.  She wore no jewelry or other trivial adornments of bourgeois individual expression.  Her unadorned lips were locked tight in thought police perpetual suspicion of everyone about her.  Her eyes lacked the twinkle of laughter, at some point having decided that laughter was a white middle class luxury designed to denigrate the subject races.

"Let me help you with your stuff," Mike exclaimed merrily, bouncing out of the lobby and swinging Lisa's hand in his like a giddy child.  Here at last was a lifeline from the outside world, dispatched to this lonely skull island of castaways full of strange, mutated creatures.

     Mike's  enthusiasm over being reunified with civilization dampened considerably when he emerged into the parking lot and saw Lisa's friends standing there dumbly, obviously waiting for him to unload the trunk of the Prius that had borne them hither. The eco friendly car was spray painted a depressing shade of green Mike would not have believed existed in the visible spectrum.  The color looked more like a toxic algae bloom than the healthy, verdant forest that was supposed to be the goal of the tree huggers.

     "Tell your boys I'm not their bellhop," Mike told Lisa.  "They can unload their own crap."  This was the way all his problems with Lisa started, via peripheral criticisms of her associates that slowly strangled in tighter to include her.

     Lisa's three companions looked at each other in turn, each one incapable of labeling himself with Mike's accusations.  All three had lived at home far beyond acceptable nest booting time, and were accustomed to sitting on their asses until Mom got tired of looking at their mess and cleaned it up. They were Pavlovian conditioned to assume this was the way the world worked.  If they had noticed handles on their luggage they assumed they were for cosmetic value only.

     Lisa's crack civil disobedience team, assembled in the gravel parking lot of the Gasden Motel, consisted of Zack, Heyward, and Otis.  The tallest of the trio was Zack, who went through life either obsequiously apologizing for being a white man, or trying to deny that he was one.  His hair was braided in long ethnic dread locks that had been lovingly kinked and painted black by his mother, who he routinely emotionally abused and manipulated.

     Standing next to Zack was Heyward, a dark complexion Hindu of small stature who obviously hailed from some jungle choked subcontinent.  In contrast to Zack, Heyward expended most of his energy trying to convince people he was white.  He wore his dark hair in a fluffed and spiked dyed blonde pompadour, lovingly combed into place by his mother, who he routinely emotionally abused and manipulated.  His name Heyward was an Anglicization of some utterly unpronouncable Dravidian word.

     Otis, finally, was neither white or brown, but subtle combinations of both.  His hair was neither kinked nor straight, but subtle combinations of both. Unlike the other two, Otis was perfectly fine  with his racial composition, perhaps because he was too stupid to recognize any differences.  Otis gladly let others think for him, but he would never let others eat for him.  Otis was perfectly pacified as long as he was fed properly, and on time. "Feed Otis!" was a common precaution heard on these protest outings, because the ravenous, barrel-chested youth would get surly and want to smash something if he got hungry.  To remind his companions of this, he always wore the same Incredible Hulk T-shirt, an aging, mildewed affair that had patches of green coloring in places not on the Hulk's body. Otis's tremendous girth had been carefully cultivated through the constant application of nutrients, this wearying task being performed by his Mother, who he routinely emotionally abused and manipulated.  Despite the risks associated with caring for such an unpredictable beast, they always brought Otis along because he was good for punching or sitting on unruly Trumpsters, or they used his body for  a barricade against the cops.

     Not being able to conceptualize what was expected of them, Lisa's triad of troublemakers milled about stupidly, shuffling and looking up at the sky.  At last Lisa was forced to unload the Prius herself.  Being a gentleman, this meant that Mike was conscripted into bellhop duties, after all.

     As Mike was piling suitcases onto the motel porch, a hay wagon pulled up into the parking lot.  The only reason it could be called a hay wagon is because it was loaded with hay, otherwise it would have been an ordinary pickup truck equipped with high rails around the bed, the kind used for transporting salvaged merchandise to Mexico for resale.

     The passenger side of the hay wagon opened up and Tony Vargas tumbled out, like someone had rolled a bale down a chute. He was haggard and frazzled, the approximate color of withered livestock feed.  Without even a glance in Mike's direction, he staggered across the parking lot toward his room, ambulating along with a pronounced limp.

     "Hey Tony, what..." Mike started.

     "Don't want to talk about it," Tony said, feebly waving a tired hand that seemed too heavy to hold up.  Then he stumbled down to room 10 in an arthritic draftsman's attempt at a straight line, and shut the door behind him.

"Who was that?" Lisa asked with a distasteful look.

     “There goes your bellhop," answered Mike.

     Despite Lisa's protests about Michael's 1 percenter obsession with property, and Heyward's complaints that he needed isolation for his hair to spike properly, Mike corralled all three gorillas into the same cage. His only concession was to wheel in an extra bed, and he even did that under protest.  By putting them all in one room, Mike figured he could mitigate the damage.  He had installed a very old Xbox system in the room and as such was able to keep them shut in all night, only cracking the door occasionally to throw in pizzas and 12 packs of beer.

     "Hey, there's a Bible in here," Heyward complained, pointing to the Gideon's version on the lampstand.

     "There's one in every hotel room across the country,” said Mike. “If your Mother let you out more you would know that."

     "Hey, well like I'm not down with your instruments of Judeo-Christian oppression.

     "Yeah, Yeah," Zack echoed.  Otis did not look up from the Xbox.

     "Give it to me," Mike said.  It was entirely possible these apes would burn it, and the motel with it.

      The thrill of seeing Lisa quickly wore off.  She didn't want to get romantic, claiming she was on her period.  While Mike lay there, idly flipping through his hacked TV channels – he didn’t steal them out of poverty but simply because hackers gonna hack, Lisa spent most of the afternoon talking on her cell phone, apparently coordinating the impending activism.  As he listened to Lisa spew venom against the white devil, a few heretical thoughts buzzed through Mikes head, ideas he had been thoroughly indoctrinated never to voice out loud. For instance, if Lisa hated the white race so much, what about her five white boyfriends prior to him, Mike ostensibly being number six?  Why had she always spurned the amorous advances of the subjugated races?  What would Lisa do if Mike presented her with evidence of his black heritage? Would she break it off?  Dare he try?  What was he doing out here in the desert leaving a fiancee behind?  Was Tony right?  Was he hiding?

     It was dark already, so Lisa doused the lights and Mike finally coaxed her into  what was essentially unsatisfying sex for both.  Mike had to fantasize about Linda's milf titties to finish the business.  After that, they went to sleep.

     The next morning the motel occupants arose early for the Trump rally in Nogales.  Mike thought that now that he was President elect, the word rally didn't sound presidential enough. He had won, so who did he have to rally, and why?  But the anti-Trump people still talked about Trump's election like it was a mistake they could rectify with a little push.

     Lisa showered and Mike went to check on Tony.  Tony rarely locked or even closed his door, and as usual it was cracked open.  There was nothing the Gadsden Purchase could throw at Tony that he couldn't deal with.  Besides that, he had a roomful of mutant, often venomous critters that were better than a lock for deterring Intruders.

     Mike could hear Tony's light snoring as he cracked the door a little wider.  The sound was a rather pleasantly rhythmic, not like some people's snores that shake plaster loose from the walls.  Tony was laying flat on his back in a sweat-soaked wife beater T-shirt, having gone straight to sleep without changing.  Resting on his belly was an enormous scaly lizard that would have been identified as a Gila monster, if the idea wasn't so laughingly impossible.  When the reptile turned to scrutinize him, Mike could see it only had one eye, which made it seem more fierce and dangerous, like a pirate without a patch.

      Since arriving in the Gadsden Purchase, Mike was gradually becoming inured to such spectacles.  Nonetheless, he approached gently. "Hey Tony, you all right?"

     Tony immediately stirred on the bed.  "Aye Chingados. Hijo de su puta madre."  That said, he gently lowered the Gila Monster from his body. The lizard hissed its displeasure.

     "Sorry.  This is Roscoe.  I must have let him loose last night.  He likes the body heat, I think, but don’t worry, he’s harmless."

     "Aren't those lizards supposed to be poisonous?"

     "Only if they bite you on the dick or something, is what I read.  What's going on?"

     "My friends and I are going down to Nogales for some kind of Trump demonstration. I thought I would let you know in case you wondered.  I kinda need my truck keys, though."

     "Oh shit," Tony said, and he sat up anxiously on the bed.  "I forgot all about that.  Give me a couple minutes to get ready."

     “You don't have to go.  I'm just telling you so you won't - worry." It was hard to concieve how a man who slept with a toxic lizard on his belly could worry about anything.

     Tony looked up at Mike sternly.  "Are you kidding me?  I told you not to get mixed up in all that shit, but if you're going to do it you're gonna need someone there to help you, just in case.  Do me a favor.  Get me some coffee from the cafe while I take a shower.  It won't take long, it's only been a week."

     Mike thought it was pointless to protest and, if the truth be told, he preferred Tony's company over Lisa's goons. "I've got the Keurig machine right here in the lobby.  I'll make you a cup."

     “I can't stand that pussified pisswater.  Go get me some real coffee."

     Mike headed out the door then remembered why he had really come here.  "Uh, could I get my truck keys..."

     Tony rubbed his eyes and blinked.  "Oh yeah, sure.  Right over there with Sheila."

     He pointed to one of the dozen or so terrariums scattered about the room, some teetering precariously on the edges of the shaky furniture.

     Sheila turned out to be an enormous preying mantis, at least 6 inches long.  The bug had an extra half leg dangling in front, an appendage that could have been an evolutionary advantage, but probably meant it was hard to get dates in the mantis world, which was why she had washed up here at Tony's halfway house for wayward freaks.

     Mike's truck keys were in Sheila's protective custody.  She was standing in battle pose on top of them.

     "Do they bite?"  Mike asked.

     "Not really.  Only in self-defense."

     Mike delicately reached into the mantis den.  As Sheila shuffled backward in a defensive posture, Mike was able to slowly extend a pinky and drag his keys across the sand, then up the side of the container.

      Standing in a sultry hand on hip pose, Linda greeted Mike warmly as he entered the Cornudo Cafe.

     "Tony's back," Mike said.

     "Yeah peaches,” Linda acknowledged as she poured the coffee into a large Styrofoam cup.

     "Hey, what was really going on with that little incident the other day between Tony and Hal?"
 
      "Oh, that's just a little peacock tailfeather dance those boys do from time to time."

     "But Hal just can't deport him like that, can he?"

     "Technically he can," said Linda. You seee sugarplum, Tony is neither from here nor there. Officially, he is a man without a country.  He doesn't even have a real birth certificate.  There's no proof that he was ever born."

     Mike let this soak in a little.  All of the normal requirements of civilization couldn’t stand under the relentless desert dust.

     "How could he work all those years on the railroad?"

     "Back then it wasn't hard to fake documents like it is today.  This town takes care of its own, regardless where they crawl in from.  The rest of the world thumbs their noses at us when they speed by on the freeway, so we circle the wagons and give a big fuck you to the planet.  We do what we want here."

     Linda’s voice softened.  Her eyes floated away somewhere like two balloons set loose from a birthday party.  "From what I've been told, because it was long before my time," she looked at Mike sternly to make sure he pretended to believe it, "Tony's Mom and Pop were both of questionable immigration status.  Maybe Tony didn’t really crawl out of the desert like some say, but he was born somewhere South of the horizon, and that good for nothing derelict who claimed to be his Father didn’t take long to disappear back down there. Ruth Vargas settled in this town with her boys, raising them as only a tough Mexican Mama can, with a grab bag of choice Spanish swear words and by leaving just enough hair on their head so she could twist on it to make a point when needed.  Tony adored Ruth Vargas, she was the only human he ever obeyed without question.  But Ruth didn’t have any papers, and neither does Tony.”

     “You say Tony has brothers.  Do they live here?”

      Linda went into a defensive posture almost identical to that of Sheila the praying mantis.  “I’ll let Tony reveal that little secret in due time.  You’ll find out, one way or another.”

      Linda's face underwent a geologic transformation.  The plates moved beneath the crust, and deep valleys eroded into her skin.  "Ruth died young," she said, wiping away a tear with a corner of her apron.  "Tony was in his early teens and kind of went crazy.  He didn't have no place to go and started running with the wrong people.  He was heading for jail, is where he was heading.  But at that point Josef Müeller stepped in."

     “You mean Joe the guy I bought the motel from?”

     Linda nodded. "Josef Müeller had a thing for Ruth, that much was obvious to everyone, but it was what they call an unrequited love.  Yeah they had their flings in the sack, because this is the desert, but it didn't go past that.  He wanted to marry her but she was afraid of getting bounced again. So one day, a couple years after she died, Tony wound up in jail in Bisbee for a serious crime.  Josef went to bail Tony out.  Some say he paid off a judge. Josef told Tony his mother would not approve of the road he was going down. Mexican men typically only religiously obey one half of one of the ten commandments, and this is to honor thy mother. Tony went back with Josef to live at the motel, and he's still there today.  That's sort of his story.  So take that coffee and go before I bawl like a baby."

     Mike did as he was told, grabbing  the coffee and scrambling out the door. Outside, he found the path to his truck blocked by Catalina Eddy and several members of the FF, going the opposite direction.  Eddy was wearing an enormous grin beneath his cowboy hat, which was the only part of his face that showed from under the brim.

     "Well, well look who's here, Tony's nephew Mike who was just visiting, then decided to buy a motel and fix it up while he was passing through."  Eddy extended an enormous paw in Mike's direction, which Mike grabbed delicately with his fingertips, for hygienic purposes.

     "Is that a California handshake?  Give it the whole hand, son, that's how men do it around here."  Eddy grasped Mike’s hand and squeezed fiercely. "We're on our way to see the President elect in Nogales.  Hail to the Chief and all that.  We're going to make sure the out of town riff raff don't get out of hand.  He laid his thick digits on Mike's shoulder.  "But don't worry, we haven't forgotten about you.  Now that you had your grand opening, the boys are real anxious to stop by and sample the hospitality.  Expect to hear from us shortly.  We’re looking forward to it.”

Next >>


Image from Wikimedia commons by Jason: https://www.flickr.com/photos/webbaliah/4261934193/

Chapter 5

   

Table of Contents

Chapter 5

The drive home from Tucson was surprisingly less somber than the way over had been.  As usual, Tony had to drive.  “You’re wasted kid.  Yeah, I’m a little wasted too, but I know all the cops between here and Yuma on a first name basis.  I grew up with them or their fathers, and they know better than to give me a ticket.  Take your sunglasses off.  Why you wearing your sunglasses?  It looks weird.”

     “Sorry.  My eyeballs got scalded back there.”

     “Fuck you.”

     Somehow Tony kept the pickup smooth and steady as he elaborated upon their Striggy's experience as if nothing particularly unusual had taken place.  “Yeah, I know I’m a disgusting old fart, and I’m sorry you had to see that.  But believe me, those girls don’t care about how ugly I am naked. They’re all starving college students who could go into stripping easily and make a lot more money, but they’re locals with family nearby and don’t want to raise eyebrows. So basically they’re looking for a sugar daddy who can help them get through college.  I’m not stupid, I know that if I really became a Sugar Daddy I would get dumped just after graduation, but I let them think I’m interested in the job.  I also know that as soon as I said yes the sex would stop right there.  Those girls don’t want to have sex with a fat, flabby, wrinkled guy like me, they want to have sex with a guy like you, but you’re too stupid.  Anyway, I let them think I’m interested and play one off against the other.  It keeps me getting laid. They’re gold digging bitches anyway.  But I’m really sorry you had to see that.”

     Mike smiled stupidly with his drunken eyelids at half mast, but it was a nice smile,  made more brilliant because it was something rarely seen, like the Northern Lights.

     “You’re a stud, you’re a fucking stud,” Michael moaned.  “But you’re a big douchebag too.”

     Tony gave him a fatherly look of disapproval.  “Go to sleep, kid.  I need to concentrate on my driving.  You’re talking too fucking much.”

     They made it back to Cornudo in about two and a half hours.  Tony drove slightly above the speed limit, because in that part of the country driving below or on it attracted too much attention.  Law enforcement understood that people were in a hurry to get across the god forsaken desert, so driving below or at the limit meant they were shitfaced drunk.

     Mike woke up a little later than usual, feeling his appletinis.  He found Tony in front of his room, sitting on a lawn chair.  He had his gaze fixed out into the endless creosote and didn’t look up when Michael approached.

     “Shhh…” Tony said to Mike.  He had a piece of Kirkland beef jerky in his hand, extended outward.  “I’m trying to see if I can call in my coyote.”

     Michael leaned against the wall in the shade of the awning.  The overhang was grotesquely misshapen, making the place look like some cannibal village in the fetid interior of Indonesia.  Mike tolerated it because it lowered the air conditioning bill.

     After a few minutes Tony gave it up.  “I guess he’s not there today.  I call him Rolf.”

     “Rolf?” Mike said, not surprised that Tony was trying to make friends with a coyote, but that he had named him Rolf.  “Why Rolf?”

     “Why not?  Rhymes with wolf.”

      “I don’t think so,” said Mike, who was feeling a little more comfortable lately responding to Tony's bullshit.  “Rolf has an umlaut over the ‘o’, and you have to purse your lips when you say it.”

     “Look kid,” Tony responded with a scowl..  “We speak a lot of Spanish around here, and in Spanish Rolf rhymes with wolf.  End of story.  He’s my fucking coyote anyway, not yours.”

     “Do you actually feed it?”

     “I coaxed him in to about ten feet.  I have to toss the jerky to him, but softly or he’ll run off.  He limps a little.  I think he was abandoned.”

     Kind of like you, Mike was thinking.  And me.

     “In case you haven’t noticed,” Tony continued, “our county dogcatcher out of Wellton is not too efficient.  He don’t really give a shit about Cornudo, but who does? So we got a lot of stray dogs running around in little packs.  Some of them ain’t strays, they’re yard dogs that like to get out and mess around with the boys, because boys will be boys. You better watch out if you go for a walk, but why would you do that?  You ain’t that stupid.  Why the hell would anyone want to take a walk out here?  Anyway, those dogs sometimes harass Rolf.  I got to look out for him.”

     At that point the sinister image of the cosmic water demon Cthulu lit up on Mike’s cell phone screen, and he burst into laughter.  He contemplated not answering, but then decided he better pick up.

     “Did you call me?” Lisa asked without so much as a good morning.

     Mike chewed on this for a moment.  For someone he was engaged to, somebody who was carrying his expensive rock on her ring finger, she seemed a bit indifferent.  “Yes I did.  Where were you last night?”

     Lisa didn’t respond immediately.  She was a late sleeper, and Mike pictured her sitting on her bed, using one of his T-shirts as pajamas, or maybe somebody else’s T-shirt.  He really didn’t want to think about that.  "Are you going to start spying on me too?”

     “What do you mean by that?”

     “Your Dad was here all week.  Did you send him here to keep an eye on me?  He kept staring toward my place.  Kind of freaked me out.

     Mike lowered his eyes defensively, like a fighting cock. “My Dad was fixing up my place.  He can be there anytime he wants to.”

     When you are getting free rent, it is a wise policy to be nice to your landlord, and after a reflective pause,  Lisa conveniently remembered this. “Sorry, she said, “I was up late helping my cousin study for his poetry test.  I didn’t get much sleep.”

     “Your cousin?”

     “Yes, my cousin Rick.  You know him.  What did your Dad tell you? ” She laughed.  “Oh, I get it.”
     It never occurred to Mike that consecutive nights studying for a poetry test that wasn’t even a midterm was a bit out of the ordinary.  He was desperately seeking a life raft for his self esteem. 

     “My Dad worries too much about me,” Mike said.

     “I get it." Lisa turned on the spigot of the syrup fountain instantly, in that way women have when they know their man is teetering on the brink.  Mike now felt guilty bout his evil intentions with Suzy the night before, even though his flirting didn’t get past asking if he had really consumed all of those appletinis on the bill, which he had to pay after all, because Tony had conveniently left his wallet in the bed of the truck, where it probably lay soaking in a gooey primordial pool of Striggy's Girl and Old Fart DNA. “Oh, guess what,” Lisa shrieked perkily.  “There’s going to be a big Trump rally on the Arizona border next week.  A few of us Dump Trumpsters are coming out to protest the wall.  Do you think we could stay at your place?”

     “Umm…I guess.”

      “Come on, it’ll be fun.  What’s the matter?”

     “There’s something I found out yesterday I need to share with you, for full disclosure.”

     “Oh my God. You’re gay?  Do you have AIDS?”

     Mike pulled his lips back like a horse.  Just because he wasn’t some grabby horn dog, people mistook his subdued behavior around women for homosexuality.  “Ha!  Nothing like that.  I’m Black.”

     “Yeah okay.  I’m bringing three people with me.  Do you have room?”

     “Don’t believe me then.  When you give birth to a bunch of nappy Asians don’t say I didn’t warn you.”

     “The word nappy was used by the oppressors of African slaves to denigrate the unique texture of their hair.  Please don’t use hate speech in my presence.”

     “That’s what I’m trying to tell you.  I can use words like that now because I’m Black.  I’m one of the oppressed.  Mike's life matters."

     “This is totally not funny.  This is how the white ruling class tries to soothe its collective guilt, by reducing everything to joke status.  The grief and pain they cause is just a comedy routine.  Just joking about the chains and the lynchings, guys.”

     “Well, you were more than willing to put my ring on your finger when you thought I was the white devil.  Is that going to change now that you found out I’m Black?”

     “Fuck you.  See you next week.”

     No one believes I’m straight, no one believes I’m Black, thought Mike.
   
     One particularly dreary desert evening, when Mike had finished painting his last room and the heaviness of the surrounding nothingness weighed down upon the Gasden Motel, Tony invited Mike out for drinks at the Rosebud, the salty little dive hidden behind the back of the Cornudo Café like an illegitimate autistic child that is an embarrassment to his family but basically supports them by selling weed in the alley.

     “I’ll buy!” Tony said.  Mike knew he would get stuck with the bill, but he went anyway, so profound were the depths of his boredom.

     Mike lazily surveyed his surroundings as they drove in the direction of the freeway. On their right was Cornudo's tiny residential district.  It looked like an abandoned Hollywood apocalypse scene, with cardboard prop tumbleweeds blowing down the boulevard.  This dreary neighborhood, incongruously called Hope Street, was fronted by a service station painted in an ugly aquamarine that was splotched with greasy stains.  In front of the establishment stood an elderly Hispanic man, wearing a ballcap that covered his salt and pepper hair over a high collared long sleeve checkered shirt tucked neatly into khaki pants, with hardly a gap in between. The man had an earthy look, and it seemed like he was sweeping up the desert dust of the service station parking lot not so much to clean, but to reassemble his body parts.   

    As they drove past the gas station Mike gave a polite little wave, but noticed that Tony kept his eyes on the road.  In response to Mike's overture of politeness, the man raised his chin and pointed upward.

      "Who's that?" Mike asked.

      "That's Danny," Tony answered without his usual several paragraphs of elaboration.

      "Why's he pointing at the motel?"

      "He's letting you know your goddamm sign is spelled wrong.  Danny notices things like that.”

     "Hmm.  Looks like a nice guy."

     Tony snorted.  "Don't ever make that mistake.  He looks like someone's harmless abuelito, but that old dog has still got some mother fucking teeth."

     In the house directly behind the gas station bedroom curtains parted timidly.  Mike caught a brief but tantalizing glimpse of a pair of lovely brown doe eyes that sparkled at him with one of the rare instances of glitter Mike had seen so far in the desert, any extant glitter usually being scoured away in moments by the sandpaper wind.

     “Somebody was looking at us from behind the curtains.  Nice eyes.”

     “That’s Danny’s niece.  Forget about her.  She’s homely, that’s why she hides in her room.”

     Michael assumed there must be some long standing old fart rivalry going on here. Tony’s smartass smile had suddenly gone sour.

     The Rosebud saloon was a sad little place whose dingy, dilapidated decor seemed to have been chosen for maximum morose effect.  The bare furniture in the establishment had no plan or uniformity, as if it had been picked up from garage sales or thrift stores as the occasion demanded, probably when a table was smashed by an angry drunk over somebody's head.  At any rate, there didn't appear to have been any serious table or chair smashing here in a while.  The four or five patrons, hard core drunks who didn't even waste time chatting with the barkeep on the road to complete inebriation, looked like they didn't have the energy to stand, much less lift a table or chair to smash somebody's skull with.

     Events at the Rosebud were measured in geologic time.  Things changed, but not in any particular patron's particular lifetime.  There were several framed portraits leaning against the wall that had not quite made their way up to wall nails yet.  If the themes and subjects of these depictions ever had any meaning to the local folklore, it had been forgotten.  One was of some wild-eyed, bearded monk.  Another was a smooth shaven, boyish faced military officer in a gray uniform. Others were typical pastoral scenes that would have been more appropriate for the outlying worlds of Alpha Centauri, perhaps, than the scorching Arizona deserts.

      In the middle of the room was a billiard table with a big bare patch in the center of the green felt, making it look like a poisoned lawn.  From time to time some overly eager customers, temporarily aroused from their customary comatose states, would get up to have a game, only to realize that the felt was ruined before sinking down wearily into their seats again.  One day some truly abysmally bored drinkers had decided to play anyway.  In the process they invented a new game called "Black Hole," the object of which was to keep any billiard balls, of which three turned out to be missing, from falling into the "event horizon" of the missing patch of felt.

     On the wall behind the pool table, next to an old sign that said ‘-ill-- -ite,' hung a tilted dart board.  Most dart boards are perfect circles, but this one was decidedly elliptical, perhaps warped by the desert heat in a power outage, perhaps warped by the toxic breath of seedy drunks removing the pointed projectiles from its surface. It gave a certain Dali-esque feel to the room.

     Linda Lloyd was standing behind the bar, mechanically wiping its wooden surface, which was already spotless. One drunk was asleep in his own spit and she lifted his head by the hair to clean under him, like you would lift a vase to dust.  Above her, the television was playing a Donald Trump press conference.  From several hundred miles away the blustering candidate was talking about building a wall just a few dozen miles from the Rosebud.  He was getting thunderous applause from hundreds of people who had never even been to Mexico, while the customers in the Rosebud, who lived within the path of its long umbra,  remained indifferent.

     "Why bother?" Somebody said without looking up from his newspaper.  "Chapo will just dig under it."

     Linda accommodated her cheek and Tony gave his customary kiss.  She smiled warmly at Mike.  "You pulling double duty again?  Where the hell is Sergio?"

     "Sergio reports when he feels like it," Linda said.  "You know me, I've got no plans.  What are you doing, corrupting a minor?  That's a crime everywhere I know except Arizona.  Teach him to shave before you teach him to drink.  Sorry dumpling, that's just Linda's weird way of letting you know she thinks you're sweet. Too sweet to be paling around with this jerk."

     "He's not that bad," Tony said, and Linda slapped him.

     "Talking about you, asshole," Linda said.

     Over in the darkest corner of the bar, beneath a fly-specked yellow lampshade
illuminated by an old bulb that continued to burn tenaciously despite decades of bug splats, fizzling out slowly like the smoldering remains of a supernova, sat a short, squat man in a green Border Patrol uniform.  The agent was so diminutive in stature that one's first impulse would be to bring him crayons and the kids menu, but he had a mustache and was smoking a cigarette.  In the dim light a thoughtful expression radiated from his cherubic face, making him look like a votive candle on a mantelpiece.

     "Hey look, there's Hal," Tony said.  "Come on, I'll introduce you to my buddy Hal.  You need to make some friends."

     Hal Owen the border patrol agent stood up politely to shake both of their hands.  If he stood five feet it was only because of his thick soled border patrol boots.

     "Hey Hal, taking a liquid lunch at the taxpayer's expense, I see," said Tony. "If you were one of his underlings Hal would fire you for doing what he is doing."

      Hal tipped his beer in Tony's direction.  "And the beer I had for breakfast wasn't bad, so I had one more for dessert," he said.

     "The kid don't know none of that old stuff.  Go get us some drinks, kid.  None of those faggot-tinis you like, though.  Put it on my tab.  I got a running tab."

     Mike came back with a beer and a margarita.  "Linda said there's no room to write on the bottom of your tab, anymore.  She said they might have tabs on TV in Hooterville 50 years ago, but in the real world they require cash money.  I went ahead and paid for it."

     If Tony heard Mike's remark, he showed neither gratitude or concern.  Instead, he went straight into one of his usual rants.  "You see the way Hal is now in this spiffy pressed uniform, you should have seen him when he went to work on the railroad years ago, wearing shorts and flip flops.  I think his shorts were actually underwear he stole off some normal size dude. Tony laughed and pounded his flat hand at the table, enough to wake up the sleeping patron at the bar, who raised his head a quarter inch before sinking into his spittle again.  "But to make a long story short, and not to tell any tall tales," Tony howled again, "Hal here is just like me.  Hell, some people think he's my son.  But you put him in this green monkey suit and he overcompensates for his height.  I trained this güey on the railroad but back when he was just a regular dude, a class clown.  He stuffed my pickup cab full of plastic bags once. He put a live bird in my locker. He’s the only one who could catch a bird.  He's so small the birds are not afraid of him."

      Hal took this in with the faintest hint of a smile, holding his cigarette up at a sophisticated angle and listening with a polite calm that completely camouflaged any effect Tony's needling might be having upon him.

     Tony elbowed Mike.  "Hal here, he used to overcompensate with those practical jokes, but now he overcompensates with the uniform.  He used to be just a regular beaner like me, but then he got religion.  He joined the green uniform cult and boy did they ever brainwash him.  Before, he was just an anchor baby with a white Daddy who did the honors and disappeared. Now he hides behind the name of that white Daddy he never knew, because it looks nice on the uniform. Sergeant Owen.  Sounds a hell of a lot more impressive than Sergeant Sanchez or Chavez or some generic wetback name like that, don't you think?"  Tony elbowed Mike again.  "Hey, do you know why Sergeant Owen here came out so, well, only half a vato?  It's because his Daddy was only getting a quickie, so Hal only got half the regular ingredients.  Only half the baby batter went in the oven.  Get it?  Only half the...Oh that was a low blow!” Tony was so filled with his own joke that he wheezed and couldn't talk.

     "I need to go ask Linda something," Mike said, getting up.

     "Hurry up kid," Tony said through a cough as he suffocated on his own jokes.  "I'm on a roll.  I'm just getting started.  Bring me another beer too, while you're at it.  Put it on my tab."

     While Tony was busy belittling the Border Patrol agent with bad jokes, Mike had been eyeing  one of the portraits leaning against the wall.

     "Can I help you, chocolate bunny?" Linda said in a honeyed tone that had hypnotized ten thousand men and still had the power to enslave ten thousand more.

     Mike blushed. Chocolate bunny?  How did she know I’m black?

     "Do you know anything about that picture leaning against the wall?  I want to buy it."

     Linda looked disappointed.  "That?  Darn.  I thought you were going to hit on me.  I thought you wanted to take a tour through the cougar zoo.  Go ahead and take it."

     "No, really.  I'll pay for it."

     "Well cool whip, I'm sure whoever it belongs to would gladly take your money but that's the problem.  Nobody knows who it belongs to.  And nobody dares throw it out, just in case.  I don't know why you want it but just take it."

     "Thanks.  Oh, uh, one more thing.  Another beer, please."

     "Don't waste a perfectly good beer on him,” she wagged her head in Tony's direction.

     "He's only had one."

     "Yeah, but he ain't gonna drink it."

     "What do you mean?  He drinks a lot when he gets started."

     Linda smiled.  "Just watch the show, cocoa puffs.”

     Mike went back to the table empty handed.  Hal was still smiling in a bemused, tolerant way, his cigarette tilted up like a 1940s black and white film actor. "Where's my beer?" Tony barked.

     "Linda said you had your limit.  She wouldn't give me one."

     "Fucking cabrona vieja," he said, but didn't seem particularly bothered because he was drunk on the gags he was flinging at Hal.  “Check this out kid.  These green suit guys like Hal here never go after the real criminals.  They never chase the narcos and the coyotes hauling truckloads of illegals.  No, instead they go after the easy guys, the mom with three kids dragging themselves across the sand.  They stick to the low hanging fruit.  Low hanging fruit.  Get it?” Tony laughed himself dizzy and had to pound his chest to keep from going into a swoon.  “Everything around here is about the low hanging fruit.  Instead of stopping the real problem, they chase some poor asshole who just crawled from the mud of some river.  And why not?  The real crooks not only got guns, they got heavy artillery. They got better guns than the green suits got and what the fuck, the green suits want to go home alive, right.  So they pick the low hanging fruit.  And what's the biggest reason they go after the low hanging fruit?"

     Tony paused and waited for somebody to ask.  His eyes bulged out of his skull from the pressure of the punch line.  He looked like a bloated, crab eaten corpse washed up on the beach.

     There were no takers, so the pounds per square inch of anticipation overwhelmed Tony and he burst.  "Because he can't reach the high hanging  fruit.  Look at him!”

     Hal smiled and raised his cigarette in tribute.  Tony looked disappointed he couldn’t get under Hal's skin, and dug deeper.

     “Hey, did you know Hal still lives with his mother?  Fifty fucking years old, never been married, probably never even been laid. He can’t go anywhere, or do anything without Mama's permission.  You could say she has him on a short leash.  Get it?  A short leash.”  Tony banged his fist on the table and laughed uproariously.  It looked as though he might asphyxiate himself with a plastic bag of his own gags, like David Caradine in a Thailand closet.

     Hal Owen stood up slowly, although if you didn’t know him, you really couldn’t tell he was standing. The agent's squat physique nonetheless inspired respect.  He looked like he would be next to impossible to knock over, like a weeble that wobbles but won't fall down.

     "Get up, mother fucker," Hal growled.

     "What?" Tony protested, his lower lip falling down slackly to drape beyond the upper.  He looked like a platypus.

     "Quit quacking.  Stand up, put your hands on the table, and spread your legs.  You know what to do."

     Tony complied with sudden, surprising meekness, arising and putting both his palms on the table, which wobbled precariously.  "What the fuck are you doing?  We was just having a little fun.”

     "What the fuck are you doing Officer Owen, you mean." Tony Vargas was smiling, but Hal Owen was not.  "You know exactly what I'm doing.  I'm deporting your wise ass."

     "Not again," Tony groaned as Hal slapped the cuffs on him.  "Not today."

     As Hal led the uncharacteristically docile Tony out to his border patrol vehicle, Mike got up and staggered over to the bar on legs that were shaky even though he hadn't touched his margarita.  Linda put a gentle hand on his shoulder.  "Don't worry cupcake, those two are good friends.  These parties always end up this way.  He'll be back."

    "I'm not worried about that," Mike said with a quaking voice. "He's got my truck keys!"


Next >>

Image of James Gadsden from the public domain, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons








   
   
   
   

Chapter 4

Table of Contents

 The Gadsden Purchase has been a place of untamed lawlessness ever since it was first penciled in on a map.  Its 29,760 square miles may technically be part of the contiguous United States, but outside of isolated pockets of civilization imposed by brute force upon the anarchy of the desert, its borders are more flexible than Poland, expanding and contracting like the ribs on a cactus do between rain and drought. Recognized internationally as a US possession, it will at times pass back into Mexican sovereignty by temporary superior force of arms.

     The Gadsden Purchase has always and forever will be no man's land, a DMZ buffer zone, an American Gaza.  It always and forever will be a haven and a refuge for what is labeled criminal activity by some, business as usual by others.  Cochise and other marauding Apaches hid within its vastness, taking shelter in the Chiricahua Mountains that were left with his face permanently imprinted upon them, a phenomenon that can be observed from Interstate 10 by the casual motorist. Within this fortress the Apaches called themselves something like the people.  George Crook and his white tribe of "we the people," called them invaders and thieves, the same thing Cochise called the whites, the concept of outlaw only being a matter of perspective.

     What Crook called contraband was taken as legitimate spoils of war by the Apaches, no different then when Drake took his captured Spanish doubloons as booty.  Point being, the Gadsden Purchase has always, and forever will be, a conduit for contraband.  The Apaches raided Mexico and brought back unsanctioned cattle, horses, and humans.  The Mexican raiders of modern times bring across unsanctioned medicine, guns, and humans.  Technology and tastes in consumer goods has changed and moved on.  Taste in human flesh has not.

     Since the arrival of civilization to these shores, there has existed the fantastic, decidedly storybook notion that the region called the Gadsden Purchase can be easily conquered.  Looking at its smooth flatness on paper, unencumbered by major mountain ranges and piped through with lengthy blue watercourses, early exporters of civilization thought it would be a simple proposition to build a railroad there.  Modern exporters of civilization, looking at its tempting paper flatness, believe that it will be a simple proposition to corral it like an unruly beast by building a wall across it.

     The problem is that when standing on the ground, the Gadsden Purchase looks a lot different than it does resting benignly on a paper map.  There are no insurmountable mountains, true, but there are insurmountable expanses of sand that strangle lifelines for a railroad crew or a wall building crew.  Furthermore, when standing on the ground, the long blue watercourses that look so refreshing on paper turn out to be trickling muddy ruts that only truly flow in flood.

     What cartographers don't understand, sitting in their sterile, scrubbed map rooms poring over paper abstractions, is that the inhabitants of the Gadsden Purchase are digging creatures.  Desert creatures are digging creatures as a matter of survival.  They dig deep to escape the relentless rays of the sun and they will dig deep to escape whatever wall will attempt to domesticate them.

     This was the great unplacated void that Michael Gasden and Tony Vargas crossed on their way to Tucson, Arizona, one of the tenuous footholds of civilization in the Gadsden Purchase.  The freeway there was a straight line across waterless waste.  There was nothing significant in its path to impede its pure geometry.

     The metropolis of Tucson, home to about a million people shipwrecked on an island in a sea of sand, had been created as a temporary expedient by raping and plundering a river, the Santa Cruz.  Like most of the other elements resisting human  occupation of the Gadsden Purchase, the river has gone into hiding, but it pokes its soggy head out of sprinklers and swimming pools here and there.  Proof of its legendary existence can be seen in the green of golf courses and landscaped lawns.  The river has temporarily gone underground, but it will be back.  The desert reaches a critical mass of humanity, after which it will shake people off like fleas leaping from a burning dog.   The river cannot be indefinitely suppressed.  As such, Tucson is a besieged fortress.  Sooner or later the desert will overwhelm its walls.  The desert wins wherever it goes.  Ask the Sahara.

     Tony insisted on driving because he said they would get there faster.  Tony was one of those fellows always in a hurry to get places, for no apparent reason, but once there he could barely be coaxed into getting started on whatever business he had come for.  Tony brought along the knee scooter he used to navigate the concrete corridors in between towering pallets of merchandise at Costco.  To Michael the device looked painfully uncomfortable, but Tony claimed that the sample ladies took pity upon him because of it, and would let him come back multiple times.

     "You never told me what your fiancée's name was," Tony said as they cruised into the outstretched fingers of the Tucson suburbs, desperately digging into the desert for a grip.

     Michael sighed inwardly.  "Lisa," he said.

      Tony waited for details, but when none were forthcoming he felt satisfied that his point was proven.  "Most guys I know got a girl, they talk to her all the time.  I don't see you talking to her at all."

     "I talk to her," Mike said.  "I talk to her at night, sometimes...she's busy."

     "I guess so.  Because those community ac..., what'd you call them, activators?"

     "Activists."

     "Yeah those activators, they got a full schedule."

     They passed the Santa Cruz River, but it was a dry ditch, without enough water for algae to make a living.

   "I thought you said you said you didn't like rivers," Mike said, pointing out the window to divert the subject, just as others had diverted this pathetically empty river.

     "Oh that's not a river, it's a rut.  There hasn't been any water in there for years.  Let me ask you something, kid.  Now don't take offense."

     Even at his inexperienced age, Mike knew that when someone tells you not to take offense, you better brace yourself  to be outraged. “What?"

     "I don't know how to say this.  First of all, I got nothing against any kind of people as long as they ain't bothering me.  But you didn't...you didn't...you know, turn, while you was over there, did you?"

     "Turn into what?"  Mike was confused.

     Tony grimaced.  He bared his spotless white teeth that he claimed were kept immaculate by a good, cheap dentist across the border.  "You know, turn like..." he made a motion with his wrist.

     "Ha Ha.  You mean, did I go gay?  No. "

     Instead of being assuaged, Tony looked even more worried.  If it wasn't homosexuality making Mike behave this way, then what other loathsome disease could it be?

     "You know," Tony continued, "because it's a proven fact that people over there," he gave a dismissive sweep toward California, a gesture that was something like waving off the evil eye, "get sick with that and they can't help it.  A real good, highly respective preacher I know said there's something bubbling up from the San Andreas fault.  Every few years the fault moves and, not to get too scientific, basically the gay germs come trickling out.  He said we gotta pray for these people, because they got this homosexuality virus inside of them and it lingers there sometimes for years without them knowing it.  Then one day they wake up and – boom!”  He slapped his hands together, making the truck weave slightly on the road.  “That guy who was just their fishing buddy yesterday, all of a sudden wants to bend them over.  That's what could be bothering you, and you don't even know it yet.  I've seen how you, you know, spend two hours fixing your hair and plucking your eyebrows and then you don't even talk to your girl.  Most guys away from their women like you would be calling home every hour to make sure some other vato ain’t banging her.  Stupid, yes, but that's what dudes do.  But if you're infected with the gayness and you don't know it then..."

     "I'm not gay," said Mike with what he hoped was finality.

     "It's okay," said Tony.  "If you don't feel comfortable now, we can talk about it later."

     "No need," said Mike.

     They went to a Costco that was right off the Interstate 10.  Tony took a good ten minutes to assemble his scooter. Mike, naturally, had to push the shopping cart, because there was no way Tony could do it riding his scooter on one knee.

 As they ambled along, Mike thought Tony’s ridiculous scooter reminded him of a Facebook video he had seen of a dog riding a skateboard.

     “Riding on one knee like that looks hella uncomfortable.  Why don’t you just get a full scooter?”

     “Are you making fun of me?  Because then the sample viejas just think you’re a lazy fuck."

     As Michael did the shopping, Tony got busy with the sample tour.  He eagerly made the rounds of the chicken egg rolls, microwave burritos, and pizza bites.  He used his charming, gleaming smile to flirt with the grilled cheese sandwich lady so she would give him a bigger slice.  Tony basically disappeared until he calculated that Mike had already done the heavy lifting, but still got back early enough to make suggestions about extra items to throw into the cart.  Mike wound up buying a lot of stuff they really didn’t need, due to the hypnotizing allure of brilliant product placement, in conjunction with Tony’s incessant begging.

     Along with basic survival necessities, they carted away a barrel of Kirkland brand Tequila big enough to intoxicate a blue whale, an enormous latticed cherry pie, a container of mixed nuts that could sustain a flock of parrots for several months, an oversized bottle of Vitamin C tablets with pills so big they could not only choke a horse but probably a bull elephant, several boxes of orange and black Halloween lights, a crate of Otter Pops, a vinyl disc of Bruce Springstein’s greatest hits, and the three volume set of Shelby Foote’s History of The Civil War.  All of this cargo was skillfully wedged into the pickup beneath an old black plastic tarp Tony pulled from the motel shed, which had eyelets he looped a cable through then padlocked to the truck bed.

     It was about 4 PM when the loading was finished, after which Tony suggested they go to a “gentleman’s” restaurant over in Marana called Striggy’s. “They got cute chicks there,” he said, as a selling point.  “Come on, I’ll buy you a beer.”

     “We still have a lot of work to do,” Mike reminded him, as if the idea of work had any effect on Tony's plans.

     “What are you going to do today?  It’s almost dark.  Come on. I swear I didn’t forget my wallet.”

     The two settled in at Striggys.  In short order, a perky blonde wearing tight white shorts and a revealing orange wife beater decorated by a nocturnal avian predator with drooping, drugged eyelids, came over to take their order.  Her body said 30, but her plump, rosy cheeks aged her somewhere closer to 13.  This was due to the side effects of livestock hormones on America's youth.

     “What’s your name, honey?” asked Tony, not taking his eyes or his searchlight smile from her.  “Are you new here?”

     “Suzy,” she said, giving a little curtsy.

     “Bring me a big Budweiser off the tap.”  He looked over at Mike, who was busy scrutinizing the menu and awkwardly avoiding eye contact with the pretty girl. “What are you going to have?  Why are you looking at the menu?  Just tell the young lady what you want to drink.”

     “I’ll have an appletini,” said Mike.

     “A what?”

     Mike pointed nervously toward the colorful drink selections, and shrugged.  “I don’t really like beer,” he said.

     Tony had approximately the same outraged expression as Pope Paul III when Copernicus told him the earth revolved around the sun, not vice versa.  “Okay, you don’t like beer, I get it, but an appletini?  A fucking appletini?  Get something that will grow a little hair on your balls.  How about a shot of tequila, or even a Jack and Coke if you really need something sweet.  But a goddam appletini?”

     “How about just a glass of Zinfandel?” Mike said stubbornly.  “I’m driving.”

     Tony rolled his eyes.  Suzy gave a little giggle then winked at Mike, who lowered his eyes demurely and went pink.  The rosy-cheeked waitress went off to get the drinks.

     “Why you looking at the floor?” Tony asked him.

     “What?”

     “Why do you keep looking at the goddam floor, at your fucking shoes?  That girl liked you, I could tell.  You could bang her easy.  At least smile at her, for Christ’s sakes. You got a nice smile, why don’t you use it to get laid?”

     “I’m engaged,” Mike said.

     “Like hell you are.  This so-called fiancé of yours is like the Loch Ness monster.  There’s no documented evidence.  Man if I had your looks and your money, the chicks I’d be banging.  I’m an ugly broke beaner, and I still get laid more than you.  You know why?  Attitude.”

     “How do you know I don’t get laid?”

     “I can tell.  Your sperm is backed up to your eyeballs.  You don’t know how to act around a pretty girl because your brain is short circuited with your own jizz.”

     The drinks came in. Mike soon learned that the sure fire way to keep Tony from talking to him was to surround him with beautiful women.  One by one all the Striggy's girls in the restaurant, apparently all old friends, came to sit on Tony's lap. One girl slapped him, but still sat on his lap and took a selfie.  Later, two Striggy's girls bitch slapped each other. Mike noticed one girl had a little tear in her eye, causing Tony to console her softly, paternally.  Feeling awkward, Mike decided to go outside and call his Dad.

     “I’m going outside,” Mike announced, but no one cared.

     “I’m just calling to see how it went up in San Jose,” Michael told his Father, who seemed to be a little tired and distracted.

     “Where are you at?  It sounds noisy there,” Mikey’s Dad said in grouchy Dad dialect.

     “I’m in Tucson, Dad.”

     “Tucson, what the hell are you doing in Tucson?”

     “My caretaker at the motel wanted to come here and pick up supplies at Costco.”

     “But why Tucson?  Aren’t you only about 30 miles from Yuma?”

     Michael sighed.  No matter how much money you had in the bank, talking to old people always turned into a beat down about how you spend your own cash. “It’s a long story, Dad.”

     “Who is this caretaker?  I didn’t even know you had a caretaker.”

     “I didn’t either.  I guess he came with the place.  He was just there when I showed up.”

     “What the hell are you talking about, he was just there?”

     “He stays in one of the rooms.”

     “Sounds like a squatter, to me.  Can’t you just run him off?  Call the cops.  It’s your motel.”

     “Well Dad, it’s not that easy.”  Mike was beginning to think he should just hang up and go watch Tony flirt with the Striggy's payroll instead.  “He was Josef’s employee, and he’s been there for years.  I don’t have any customers yet anyway where I need his room. I don’t pay him, and he seems to be an okay guy.”

     “Well, be careful.”  When your parents are hundreds of miles away, the best they can do to help is say “be careful,” like a prayer to ward off evil.  It makes them feel less powerless, but has the reverse effect on the caution level of the progeny, who will deliberately do risky things afterward simply to defy them.

     “So how did it go in San Jose?” Mike asked with a cringe.  His Father had driven 500 miles from San Diego to Mike’s rental property in San Jose, to do some painting and change out a toilet or two.  Mike told his Dad he would hire somebody, but his father insisted.  Mike was afraid to admit he knew why.

     There was an uncomfortable silence on the other end.

     “Are you still there, Dad?”

     “Yeah.  To be quite honest, son, I don’t like what I saw there.”

     “What happened?  Was the place that much of a wreck? "

     “No, it has nothing to do with that.  It has to do with the tenant living in your granny flat."

     Michael looked upward.  The steel-gray desert clouds were edged in orange bunting by the setting sun, but Mike missed their beauty, being distracted by the sermon about to be delivered him on the subject of the occupant of said granny flat.

     “Come on, Dad, we’ve been through this.”

     “Well, what do you want?  I don’t like the fact that there are men going to and from her place at all hours.”

     “Dad, she’s a community activist.  She organizes big rallies and events from home.  The job description calls for late hours.”

     “But why is there a man going up her stairs at 2 AM in the morning?  That’s activism all right, but it seems to me it’s more biological than ideological. "

     “That’s because you come from Texas, where the only activism is Vacation Bible School.   You were up spying on her at two o’clock in the morning.  I don’t believe it.”

     “I wasn’t spying.  When I’m away from home I can’t sleep.”

     “You were probably getting drunk.”

     Michael’s Dad chuckled.  “Well, you know I like to tip a couple when the temperance committee is not around to monitor my activities.”

     “You like to get rip roaring salty.”

     “There was nobody there to get salty with.”

    “Except Lisa.”

     “Don’t worry, I didn’t say anything to her." There was a profound pause.  "Are you sure you really want to marry this girl?”

     Michael sunk his teeth softly into his upper lip.  “We have this conversation over and over again, and nothing has changed.”

     “Okay,  so when’s the wedding date?  When I married your mother, I was so overwhelmed by what I thought was love that I wanted to nail down the date as soon as possible.  I don’t see you doing that.”

     “Geez, you’re starting to sound like my father."

     “Really?  Wise man.  I would like to meet him. "

     “Hey, can we change the subject?  Check this out.  After I put up my sign that said Gasden Motel, several people told me that I misspelled it, that it should be G-A-D-S-D-E-N, as in the Gadsden Purchase, where my motel is apparently located.  Isn’t that sort of a weird coincidence, that our last name is almost the same as the name of this place?”

     Another uncomfortable silence ensued,  as if the signal had been swallowed up by the great electromagnetic void between Tucson and San Diego.  “That is a weird coincidence,” Mike’s Father finally said.

     “Is something wrong?”

     “No, not really, it’s just that there’s a little story I probably should have told you a long time ago, but really didn’t see the need.  It isn't that important, but now that you brought up the subject I might as well tell you, just as a matter of interesting trivia."

     “Is this ‘the talk' Dad?  You’re a little late.”

     “Ha ha, no.  But you may like to know that our family is more closely connected to the Gadsden Purchase than you think. James Gadsden of SouthChadlinaa was deputized by the Fillmore administration to buy from Mexico that overgrown sandbox you now call home.  I know this because your grandfather wrote his Master’s thesis on Gadsden's deeds and assumed I shared his enthusiasm."

     "Anyway, at that time, the Southern states wanted to open up a rail line to the Pacific Coast, basically to bypass Yankee ports up North. What the historians won’t tell you is that this James Gadsden who was in charge of the deal, had an illegitimate half-brother in South Carolina who went west around that same time to try and make his fortune in the gold rush.  The brother's name was Jacob and he was reputed to be half black, the son of a housekeeper slave mother who had been freed by the family, more to avoid scandal than out of any lofty abolitionist notions.  The mother went North, but the son stayed in Charleston, working at the docks, until he got the notion to head West.  Before he did, James Gadsden paid him to change his name, in order to avoid any embarrassment for his cousin Isaac Edward Holmes, a lawyer in San Francisco at the time.  Jacob obeyed, because he needed a grub stake to get him started.  But as a kind of fuck you he only dropped the first ‘d’ from his last name, creating our current spelling.  And that’s how we became Gasden."

      Mike stood looking out over the darkening Striggy's parking lot with his mouth agape.  “You mean…”

     “Yep, that’s right son.  We’re black.  How do you like them apples?”

     In an appletini, Mike was thinking.  He suddenly felt very thirsty and needed one now, and quick.  It was one thing to magnanimously declare your love and devotion to people of color and quite another to find out you are one.  So Mike said goodbye to his Father and went back into the restaurant to drown his confusion in liquor. Suddenly black lives matter felt closer to home. Did this revelation about his African roots really upset him, or was the knowledge about men visiting Lisa at 2 AM bothering him more?

     Lisa’s a nerdy little Asian girl, he tried to tell himself, who was probably helping this unidentified male with his homework.  In a college town, 2 AM is not an unusual time to be doing homework.

     The booth where Tony had been holding court was empty, except for a half eaten pile of chicken wings and half a pint of beer still foamy on top.  Suzy came by and took Mike's appletini order while asking where Tony had gone.  Mike tried to be friendlier this time, cracking an unpracticed smile that looked more like a scowl and caused the waitress to scamper off quickly.  Mike wondered how some people could turn on their smiles on demand and seem absolutely sincere.  Since he rarely smiled he had never mastered the art.

     An appletini or two later Tony had still not returned.  Mike sat staring at Lisa’s contact picture on his cell phone, a picture of the pink Japanese Koakkuma bear.  Koreans like Lisa supposedly had a deep seated historical hatred for the Japanese, but they couldn’t get enough of their cute and fuzzy pulp culture.  His thumb hovered above the bear’s pink pitchfork, reluctant to dial because their last date had not ended well.  Perhaps throwing himself upon that pink pitchfork would skewer him to Lisa forever, with bad consequences he was beginning to understand, but he didn't want to admit because he couldn't stand thinking about all the meddling bastards who told him so shaking their heads smugly.  Finally,  Mike's eyeballs began to burn from the effects of staring at that plushy pink pile of shit, so he ordered another appletini, told Suzy to hold their table, then went out to the parking lot.

     Buzzing with bravado from the appletini, he at last dialed Lisa and waited as the phone rang straight into voice mail.  Mike took the phone from his ear and looked at the contact photo, as if the fuzzy pink bear could answer to her whereabouts.  Damn he hated that fucking bear.  Feeling spurned, he gleefully replaced Lisa’s cutesy contact photo with Cthulu, complete with dangling face tentacles and ugly webbed bat wings.  A cute waitress coming in for her shift saw Mike peering at his phone screen with an evil expression and wriggled past him cautiously. Fuck it!  He was going to go back inside and try to ask Suzy for a date, just out of spite.  But first he thought he should figure out where the hell Tony was.

       It now occurred to him to take a protective look over toward his truck, parked where he could barely see its front end peeking around the corner.  Detecting something odd, Mike took a few steps to his right to get a better view, which revealed to him that the pickup was bouncing up and down.  Several disturbing options for the source of this movement occurred to him, but none of them were correct.  Was someone stealing his rims?  Were wild creatures trying to break into the passenger side, where he had left an open bag of Spicy Cheetos?

     Mike took a few careful strides across the lot toward his bouncing truck.  As he neared the pickup he tiptoed around to the unseen passenger side.  There was nothing there, yet the truck continued to wobble back and forth on its springs, as if of its own volition. Mike saw strange, wavelike undulations in the black tarp. Perhaps there was a herd, or pack, or whatever the hell you labeled an assemblage of marauding raccoons, feasting in there on the Captain Crunch and Pop Tarts.

     Mike peeled back the unsecured tarp cover while wondering who had unfastened it?

     “What?” Tony asked, popping his big head up like an inquisitive gopher.

     Tony and the Striggy's girl that had slapped him earlier were wedged tightly between the Kirkland bottled water and the Kirkland toilet paper.  Both were naked.

     Tony pulled the tarp down again.  “Be done in a minute,” he said.

     I really didn’t need to see that, Mike thought.  Feeling worse than ever, he went back inside to have another appletini.


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Image of:  The Gadsden Purchase historical marker; located at a restop for Interstate 10, just north of Casa Grande, Arizona.  By Solarpex, Wikimedia.org

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