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