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