Chapter 15

Chapter 15

Table of Contents


One common characteristic that people passing through the Gadsden Purchase, or having the misfortune to live there, both have taken note of is that time does not touch it. The chronology of Civilization has completely altered the face of most of the rest of the planet, but civilization has only passed through the Gadsden Purchase, as if it is in a hurry to escape the suffocating wasteland on the way to a beach cottage in San Diego. The proof of this is that the only notable works of engineering in the region are transportation corridors, none of which either terminate or begin there, the notable exception being Interstate 8. But the I-8, like many a desert stream, grows despondent of its unsustainable load and eventually fizzles out in the middle of nowhere, better known as a spot southeast of Casa Grande.

The only humans who have settled in the Gadsden Purchase are those who service the transportation corridors, and these only reluctantly and fleetingly, departing for a better place just as soon as they have accumulated enough loot fleecing bug-eyed, hallucinating, head bobbing travelers. Some would cite the legions of snowbirds in sprawling trailer parks as evidence against this assertion, but the frost-adverse migrants are also only passing through, just taking longer to do it, waiting for the thermometer to rise above 50 in their much more agreeable homes in Northern climes before getting the hell out of hell.

The only person who was condemned by confining watercourses to stay in the Gadsden Purchase forever was Tony Vargas, and he was making the most of it. To say he liked it there would be a stretch, but one couldn't say he disliked it either, because he had no frame of reference to compare relative levels of like and dislike.

Tony had inherited, or rather expropriated the clunky old Ford Explorer Mike had bought for a lifeboat in Nogales, and he used this on frequent forays to Tucson and all points between the Gila and unspecified points south. Mike left the vehicle abandoned in the parking lot and Tony had taken the liberty of getting it tricked out by a cousin, who removed the back seats to turn the rear compartment into a love nest. The rust bucket was now adorned with thick carpet, curtains, a mini bar, and plush cushions worthy of a Turkish Sultan’s harem. The Explorer soon became known around the neighborhood as The Love Machine, and Tony did nothing to discourage this. To compliment the fuzzy dice hanging from the rear view mirror and the playboy bunny ears on the dashboard, he thought about actually painting Love Machine on the side in bold letters, but that would be in bad taste.

Noting that he had seemed distracted for a while, one day Tony talked Mike into golfing with him at the local links, located within the property of the RV park. To make it sound exclusive, Tony claimed to have an "in" at this club. Mike had been here long enough, however, to know they could replicate the same effect by hitting golf balls into the desert from the back of the motel, since said “course” was essentially a vast expanse of sand, with clumps of cactus for hazards. Reversing the rule of practically all golf courses everywhere, the sand was the fairway and the vegetation the traps. In spite of the degree of difficulty involved Mike agreed to go, although Tony insisted they fortify themselves with a cooler full of beer and Mike's fruity flavored girly drinks.

Tony and Mike would be hooking up with golf buddies who had Saturday off, so they left Little Fucker with Aunty Linda. Because of strange but stern doodlings the boy made on the wall of Tony's deranged den, Mike had taken to calling him Little Fatwa. To Mike, the bold, accusing proclamations seemed spookily similar to the letters on the postcards, but how could a child barely walking be writing already? Mike was certain these were just crude baby attempts to copy letters, but Little F would gesticulate toward them and righteously rave in his incomprehensible language, so that Mike said he was issuing fatwas. From then on he called him Little Fatwa, but Tony still called him Little Fucker, never being able to, or never wanting to distinguish between Fatwa and Fat Ass.

Hal Owen was already on the golf course, leaning on a club around the head of which a small dune was forming from the breeze. He and Tony high-fived and exchanged a chest bump bro hug. A few minutes later the lights of a sheriff's car were seen flashing their way up the road. Sheriff Hal Owen emerged from it wearing a white golf hat, ivory white pants and a fluorescent orange polo shirt that stretched across his belly like the expanding magma dome of St. Helens. Everone exchanged friendly expressions of goodwill that were bound to change to accusations of cheating and other underhanded dealings once they started swinging clubs.

How you doing son?" Dustin said to Mike, clutching his hand in a bone breaking grip. “Did you make it home okay?” His light-hearted tone implied that Mike’s sojourn in Nogales had involved nothing more serious than a Sunday School picnic.

You look like a fucking Easter egg in that get up," said Tony. "How did you get away from Doris?"

It wasn't hard," Dustin said. "There's so much crap going on down by the border that I just told her I had to set up road blocks. The area is swarming with Feds in helicopters. They're doing something so secret they won't even clue me in on it. I'm just responsible for blocking off the search area. It's so gosh darn stealthy that nutcases from all over the country are showing up thinking it's a UFO crash."

"Well by the time you get done golfing she's going to think you were rolling in the dirt with your girlfriend. Who the hell wears white in the goddamm desert? You look like fat Arnold Palmer."

The golf game got underway, but everyone needed a little while to get warmed up. Instead of raising divots while they found their swing, they lifted up clumps of sand that turned into little dust devils in the breeze. Tony laughed himself purple because Hal's shots kept falling short of the greens, which weren't green at all but just more desert, with long ocotillo ribs marking the holes. In contrast, Dustin Diesel had a powerful stroke but no finesse, and kept overshooting the pin. Mike, who did not want to play at all but was strong-armed into doing so by threats of incarceration or deportation, kept slicing in random directions, one time knocking an unwary Cactus Wren off a Mesquite. Only wobbly-knee Tony had a smooth stroke, hitting the ball effortlessly into putting distance every time.

As the beer was guzzled down, everyone's stroke smoothed out and the quality of play improved. Tony lubricated Mike with beer, insisting that his pussy drinks wouldn't grow enough hair on his nuts to help his swing. The strategy seemed to work, because Mike began to sneak up on Tony, becoming increasingly tenacious and competitive until they reached the final hole neck and neck. Then after hitting the ball into a creosote bush, Tony made an illegal drop so obvious that even Mike noticed it, and he didn't know squat about the rules of golf. Tony wound up winning by a stroke.

"You fucking cheated," said Mike. “You practically threw the ball into the hole.”

"Sorry boss, course rules," Tony answered.

"You change the rules every time," said Hal, and Dustin nodded assent, but everybody was too buzzed to really care.

After the game, as they stood leaning on their clubs in wobbly fashion downing more brew, Hal Owen remembered something.

"Hey wait a minute. While I got you all here, have any of you seen this woman?"

Hal pulled out a flier that had an artist's rendering of an olive-skinned woman with large doe eyes, full sensual lips, and lovely scissor eyebrows. Although she was dark skinned, there was something undefinable about her that said she was not Mexican.

"If I had seen her, she'd be in back of the Love Machine right now," Tony bragged. "Who is she?"

"She might be the reason the border is crawling with Feds as we speak. We suspect that this woman is part of a terrorist plot, and is carrying messages to terrorists inside the United States."

"Why are you fucking up the golf game with work, Hal?" Tony complained.

"Hear me out," Hal said. "This will just take a minute. This woman crossed the border in my sector. I think the Feds are barking up the wrong tree looking for her over by Nogales. An illegal we scooped up warned us about her. She said the woman was carrying postcards containing messages for a terrorist cell in New Jersey. She had a small boy with blue eyes travelling with her. Our witness claimed she crossed the border on foot, but may not have made it, because she and the boy just disappeared into the desert."

Dustin said "These terrorists got so many ways of communicating on the computer and social media, why would they send messages on postcards with a lady traveling on foot? That doesn't make sense to me."

Mike looked over at Tony, who looked bored and peeved that Hal was ruining the fun talking shop. Somehow this attitude stimulated Mike to become protective of Little F.

"Maybe you're right," Hal agreed nervously. "But we would like to talk to her or find out what happened to her all the same. I think I'm on to something big here."

"This is why I'm glad I got no women in my life," Tony said. "Dustin here has to sneak out to the goddamm desert to have a beer with the boys, and you Hal have to chase shadows to keep getting promotions, to satisfy Mrs. Bates in the house up the hill from the loony motel. This isn't even in your jurisdiction, is it?"

"Well, not technically, but..."

"So let it go, bro. Let the FBI chase this bitch. Now look what you did, you ruined the party. I'm out of here."

On that sour note the gathering dispersed, but now came the fun part. Because Dustin Diesel was a Sheriff of great integrity, his conscience would not allow him to let everyone get away with driving drunk on home. That would be corrupt cronyism, of whick he would have no part. So in the time it took him to relieve his bladder beneath a Palo Verde tree and stagger back to his patrol car, he gave everyone a head start to their cars. After that his driver deputy would head off in hot pursuit of the offenders.

It was an exciting game that had resulted in a few near crashes and several DUI arrests over the years, but no one took it personally. It was the price of admission.

The Love Machine would not start the first couple of times the key was turned, and Dustin Diesel actually got his zipper up before Tony and Mike got away. Fortunately, Tony knew a bumpy back road through the desert. It almost took out their oil pan, and Tony had to stop once to hurl out the window, but they made it.

Back in town, they went and picked up Little F in a hurry. Tony whispered some words to Linda and she nodded eagerly. Little F smiled happily and on the way back to the motel showed off his new stack of postcards.

"That's Little F's Mom, isn't it, that Hal was talking about?" Mike asked as they drove, and Tony nodded. "What do you think happened to her?"

"I think the vultures are picking her bones clean in the desert."

"Look, we have to do something. We could be in a lot of trouble here."

Tony became angry. He was pissed off sometimes, but rarely angry, and it made the Love Machine rattle harder. "You don't know what will happen to Little F if they take him away, I do. Leave the boy to me."

"What does that mean? You scooped the kid up out of the desert and now you're going to keep him locked up in a cage with the rest of the critters? How fucked up is that?"

"Either way, he winds up on a cage. It's better to be in a cage with people who love you."

Mike had to think about this. Did the affection and protective devotion they felt toward Little F really constitute love? Had the boy somehow ingratiated himself into his own impenetrable heart? A child was definitely not part of the business plan, but somehow these three outcasts, uncomfortable and unwelcome in the environment in which they had been spawned, were now orbiting about a common gravitational center in which Little F was the sun.

I get what you're saying," said Tony. "I really get it. I know this situation can't last like this forever. But you've got to give me some time to work out a plan."

Mike threw his hands up in defeat. He went back to his own room, threw his feet up on the bed, and began scrolling through his phone notifications. There were half a dozen texts or Facebook messages from Lisa that he had not responded to. "R U alive?" with a smiley face emoticon attached. "We need 2 talk - I ❤ you" and the like. All of this made Mike want to hurl, just like Tony had lost his cookies on the bumpy desert road. He didn't want this faithless female who had left him rotting in prison to wriggle her way once more into his heart, via cutesy emotions and other sneaky feminine devices.

But then he scrolled to the bottom of the list, where he found an emoticonless message that made him think, a dangerous impediment to his determination.

"Look, I know you're angry and I don't blame you. The truth is that I wanted to go back for you, but that sexist bigot you have working for you was making me really uneasy. I was hanging around anyway, trying to see if I could get any information about your whereabouts, but Tony told me I better get out of town and let him take care of it. I went back to the motel but your friend showed up a couple hours later, drunk and acting really sleazy. I got scared and didn't know what to do, so I drove home. This is the truth. Please call so we can talk about it. Love U."

Mike put the phone down on the bed. Drunk and sleazy? That part was perfectly believable, but if it was true why had Lisa not told him this story from the start? Why had she waited so long to contact him and then, once she finally did, leave this very plausible explanation for last? Bitch was lyin', he concluded.

The next morning things were back to their usual state of monotonous normalcy at the Gasden Motel. Mike hit the buzzer, and Tony came out and beat up a pimp who was trying to pander girls in the parking lot. Tony had to admit that he earned his keep sometimes. After the pimp was disposed of, Tony went back to his room and Mike didn't see either him or Little F the rest of the day, so he spent the late morning and early afternoon tidying up rooms, folding toilet paper ends into neat little triangles, and the like.

Mike was lugging a load of trash out to the dumpster when he looked around the corner to see a Prius pull into the parking lot. When the driver saw Mike, the car steered away from the office, over to where he was standing with the garbage.

The driver of the Prius skidded to a stop, then sprang out and ran in his direction. "Mike!" Lisa shrieked, and threw her arms around him.

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Chapter 14

Table of Contents

Chapter 14

Perhaps other languages, being more cautious of blasphemy, don't have an exact translation for holy shit, but as the pagan tongue of a people that claims to be Christian but freely and legally encourages practices like usery, warfare, gluttony, and other deadly sins, English indulges in no such niceties. Holy shits are flung around freely to splatter on people and things indiscriminately, with little or not afterthought for the ugly stain they leave upon one’s own, or the splaterees soul.

After propelling his own Holy Shit bomb through the now befouled ether, Mike looked at the short stack of five postcards that Tony handed him. These were not the dirty French postcards he had heard referred to in lame oldtimer jokes. They were indeed in French, but all contained scenic photographs of various points of interest in a city clearly labeled Alep. Hmm, you didn't have to be a linguist to match that with Aleppo, he thought. One was of the Grande Mosqueé d'Alep, with its soaring minaret. Another displayed the Citadel of Aleppo, an old, crumbling fortress that was probably already a mound of rubble before the bombing began. A third that said Museé National d'Alep looked like a National Museum should look, with fierce stone-cast mythological beasts guarding the entrance. Another was a panorama of Aleppo at night, with tall ancient spires awkwardly rubbing elbows with modern buildings. The fifth held an image of the Al-Madina Souq, the great sprawling market of the city.

The back of each postcard was filled with looping letters that were not of the Roman alphabet. The characters were formed of weird dots, circles, upward slanting dashes, curlicues, and squiggles that looked down upon the loops, as if they were a chorus of angels and saints. Then there were other dots and slashes below the loops, angling upward like demons swimming upward from the lake of fire gradually, so as not to get the bends. None of the writing made sense, if writing was indeed what it was.

"There's no stamps on any of these postcards," Mike observed.

Tony had not noticed this himself, so of course he waved it off with a disparaging snort.

"You're missing the point," Tony said. "It looks,like the little fucker came from Africa, or something."

"Syria," Mike auto corrected him. "Aleppo Syria."

“Yeah duh. I can read. But Syria is in Africa, is what I'm saying."

"No, it's not," Mike differed. He didn't really give a shit about geography, but some of his Father and Brother’s mostly useless knowledge of geographical landforms had rubbed off on him.

"Look at the map,” said Tony. “You think beaners can't read maps but I used to work for the railroad. Anyhow, there's a giant tumor growing out of the side of Africa. That's where all the towel-head countries are. Syria is one of the towel-head countries.”

Mike knew he was being purposefully distracted from the main business at hand, but he couldn't let this little bug go unsquashed. "That tumor is called the Middle East. If anything, it's growing out of Asia.” There was no point in letting this whirlpool of pointless debate swirl any farther. “If there are no stamps on these postcards, I'm guessing he didn't get them in the mail."

“Yeah, nice detective work, Sherlock. The US mail don't deliver to that shit storm of sand south of the border Little Fucker must have crawled out of. I don't know, but I'm guessing this writing on the back must be in towel head."

“You mean, Arabic?"

"What the hell is that?"

"That's a nicer word for towel head talk."

"Oh, why didn't you just say so? You got this way of trying to trip me up with big words, like you think I'm stupid,just because you went to college and I got most of my education in jail."

Mike was learning how Tony could flip things around to make himself the offended party.

"Sorry," said Mike without being so. "But the question is, now that we know this kid is not home grown, not from Mexico, but probably from where you call towel-head land, who do we call to come pick him up?"

The child yawned sleepily. Tony scooped up the boy and cradled in a very maternal gesture. He was a fat, flabby-tit male Madonna with child, some drunken Renaissance master's profane altar art.

"Are you kidding me? This is even worse. If we call immigration, they'll dump him down in Mexico even though he ain't got no family there because he ain’t Mexican. Who will take care of him? He'll spend the rest of his life scrounging around some river valley, wondering who the hell he is, probably smoking crack or snorting meth to kill the pain. If we call the local Sheriff they'll put him in foster care, but even though he's a little guëro word will get around that he's a towel-head and people will bully him, which really will turn him terrorist. Then he'll set off some car bomb on the 4th of July and all those lives will be on your hands. Is that what you want?"

"We can't keep the kid!" Mike shrieked. "Don't you realize this is a human being, not some belly-crawling beast you scooped out of the sand? There are legal consequences for keeping people that don't belong to you!"

The boy was dozing off on Tony's shoulder. "Hey, keep it down, you'll wake the baby. I guess you're right. But we got to think this through." He snapped the fingers of his free hand and pointed to the postcards. "I got it. Maybe if we could translate the words on the back of the postcards we can figure out where he came from and where they were taking him. He had to be going somewhere. There's probably a professor at U of A who can tell us what those words say. We'll go tomorrow."

To Mike, this sounded like just another excuse for a Striggy's trip but who knows, now that his fiancé had ditched him that might be fun, if he could allow himself to have any fun. His brother was always telling him he should castrated himself and become a priest.

Mike stood defeated again. The scattered mass of electrons swarming through the circuit boards of the computing devices he manipulated could not bring him down, but this flabby old fart with the vocabulary of a fifth grader whipped him easily.

“Hey, but I still say Syria is in Africa," Tony said with the cheery good humor of victory. "I'm willing to bet you a twelve pack on it."

“I'll take your bet, but you know I don't drink beer."

“Okay, a twelve pack of those pussy-tini things you drink. While we're there at the college, we'll ask some egghead professor which one of us is right.”

Tony looked positively gleeful over being saddled with the responsibility of a human infant. Barely had the smoke from the postcard debate cleared that he started dictating a list of things he expected Mike to pick him up from the store, and pronto.

"Well, at least we got a name for the Little Fucker now," Tony said. "He's from Aleppo. We'll call him Al, for Aleppo. He'll be our little terrorist fucker.”

“I don’t know,” Mike said doubtfully. “Al just doesn’t seem to fit. He just looks like a fucker, if I ever saw one.”

Tony grabbed another clean towel and hung it off of the child's slumbering head. "He's our little terrorist towel-head fucker!"

Tony howled hysterically until he coughed, turned red, and looked like he might spit up. Mike chuckled a little too in spite of himself, while wondering if there was a defibrillator on the property. Little Fucker completely missed the joke at his expense, having fallen fast asleep. Tony now laid him gently upon the bed.

"Wait a minute,” Mike cautioned. “You can't let him sleep here in this chamber of horrors. What if child protective services finds out we let him sleep among centipedes and other toxic vermin? Put him in the room next door."

"You're probably right," Tony ruefully admitted. "The critters don't know him yet."

The two laid Little Fucker down in the next room. Even though he had been christened Al, "Little Fucker" stuck to him like desert dust on an abandoned, rusted Buick.

Mike went to the office to take a shower and change his clothes. When he was getting dressed, he perceived the faint whine of a child crying in the distance. Perhaps because of the paternal instinct that had sprouted almost instantly after the appearance of the child, or perhaps from fear of the authorities, he quickly adjusted his clothing and ran toward the source of the disturbance. There he found Tony already in place, sitting on the bed consoling the Little Fucker. The boy's face was bright red, but with white streaks that looked something like the drainage pattern of the desert.

"I don't think he likes to sleep here," said Tony. "He's scared."

After a couple more tries of trying to put the boy to sleep in different places, they finally had to return him to Tony's room, where he conked right out.

“He likes it here, it looks like," said Tony.

"Where's that snake?" Mike asked nervously, tiptoeing around on eggshells.

Tony shrugged.

“Did you find out if it was the poisonous kind?"

Tony pinched his right cheek and curled his lips, the same gesture he had made years ago when his teachers asked where his homework was.

“He'll be all right," Tony pronounced. "The critters like him. He's one of us."

The next day Mike arose early to go to Tucson, where he would speak to the Arabic professor. Before setting off he went to pick up Tony but found him still asleep, oblivious to the frightening specter of Little Fucker pulling himself up on furniture, teaching himself to walk in the minefield of venomous fangs and stingers roaming around in this petting zoo from hell. The boy smiled at Mike and Mike did his best to crease his lips in an upward fashion. Finally Tony woke up and said "Give me a minute. I'll tag along but I'll have to wait for you because the University is north of the river."

To his astonishment, Tony directed Mike to drop Little Fucker at the café with Linda. Mike was surprised that she wasn't surprised, but reacted like children wandering in from the desert was a common occurrence in the Gadsden Purchase. "Try to keep him in the back where no one can see him," Tony warned, and she gave him a whaddaya think I’m stupid look.

Mike dropped Tony at a café in Tucson, then drove to the University for his appointment. He wasn't aware if he crossed any rivers or not en route. How could you tell in this dried out sauna of a place? He would just have to assume Tony wasn't lying about his fear of water, although why he would think this he did not know, since he had come to expect a steady diet of wild exaggerations, sneaky half-truths, and shameless whole-cloth Fabrications from his “caretaker.”

As he proceeded alone, Mike carried the five postcards with their cryptic looping writings. He eagerly hoped they would provide the answer to Little Fucker's identity, so he could get the child back to his people and out of his motel. Apart from the legal implications, Mike just did not like children. They generally smelled bad and talked too much. He was annoyed enough by adult conversation, much less the non-stop, nonsensical chatter of kids. Prior to their engagement, Lisa had agreed that the planet was overpopulated and they didn't need to replicate themselves to.

He was walking across campus to his appointment with Professor Aziz, when Mike spotted a very tiny man in a green uniform scooted rapidly past him. Mike took note that the unique baldness pattern of his head was like a shining mosque dome surrounded by low hedges, and thought it an appropriate analogy for a department specializing in Islamic studies. Then he realized, not with too much surprise because nothing surprised him in this fucking place, that this man with the high hairline was Border Patrol Agent Hal Owen, the very person who had deported Tony Vargas not long ago.

His immediate thought was that agent Owen's presence here defied coincidence. Although everybody here seemed to know everyone else, the Gadsden Purchase covered some 30,000 square miles. How was it possible to encounter this individual in places so geographically far flung as Cornudo and Tucson, unless some sort of conspiracy was afoot? He went forward with cautious steps.

Inside the Islamic Studies department a polite, bespectacled secretary seated Mike, but she had a nervous abruptness about her. The office staff were chattering in low tones among themselves and sneaking surreptitious looks down the hallway, where Mike assumed the professors had their offices.

A door opened loudly and a man came storming down the hallway. Mike looked up from scrolling on his phone and saw a thin, short-haired middle - eastern looking man in a tweed jacket move briskly past him. "I'm an American citizen!" he shouted in perfectly unaccented English. "I was born here! What's wrong with you people?"

The prof raged out of the building. A minute later the phone on the secretary's desk rang. "Yes Sir" she said into it, then nervously hung up. At the same time, Hal Owen came down the hall and stopped directly in front of Mike.

"That sure was a pain in the ass," he said. "I hate doing that." There was no hint of recognition on his face as he left the building without further empty unpleasantries. When he exited the secretary looked toward Mike and obsequiously apologized that Professor Aziz was called away on an emergency and wouldn’t be back today.

“I drove all the way from Yuma." Mike said instead of Cornudo, because who the hell knew where Cornudo was? If you lived in the Gadsden Purchase your entire life and even drove down I-8 regularly to escape the stifling heat by soaking in San Diego's cool California current, Cornudo might never cross your consciousness.

"I am terribly sorry Sir. I would reschedule you, but I'm not sure when he will come back."

Mike sulked back to his truck, the postcards in his pocket feeling heavier than the Ring of Power at the gates of Mordor. At last he collected himself enough to drive back for Tony, this time taking note of the vacant lot of the Santa Cruz River with its eroded, pebbly banks, precariously glued together by clumps of desperate sage and anorexic tamarisk. He pondered the whereabouts of the raging torrents that supposedly prevented Tony from crossing to thither side. At any rate, the Red Sea did not come crashing down on him on his way to the diner where Tony waited, where he immediately saw a Border Patrol SUV pull out of the lot. At once things became clear.

"Asshole!" he muttered.

Mike rampaged into the diner. Tony looked up from his coffee and newspaper with his trademark ruffled innocence. "You asshole,” said Mike. “You had your Border Patrol friend scare away the Professor, didn't you?"

"Beg pardon? What border patrol friend?"

"The one who deported you a couple weeks ago. Don’t play stupid.”

The heat from his half mast coffee cup warmed Tony's mustache as he considered the accusation. He did not appear offended, just confused. "Oh, you mean Hal. Me and Hal ain't getting along lately, in case you didn't notice."

"I just saw a Border Patrol truck leave the lot," Mike said with conviction.

"So what? This is a big Border Patrol hangout, the substation is around the corner. That's why I come here. I don't like to be bothered by any pinche fat illegals ruining my digestion while I'm trying to eat. Look, two more just walked in." Tony nodded toward the door where indeed, two officers wearing the profession's unmistakable green had just entered. "Sit down and chill, I'll buy you some pancakes."

They drove back to Cornudo after Tony's chronic alligator arm syndrome forced Mike to pay for the pancakes. The Little Fucker was in the café office with Linda, who was tickling his feet. "This is just the sweetest child," she said. "He made a beeline for the postcard rack so I gave him some and he sat here and entertained himself. I put some real clothes on him too. Gabby came by with some hand me downs. He looked like Gandhi wrapped up in those towels. What's his name?"

"We call him Little Fucker," Tony said, "He doesn’t answer to anything else. He likes it.”

The Little Fucker now had postcards of Kartcher Caverns, the Desert Sonoran Museum, Old Town Tucson, San Xavier del Bac, Kitt Peak, Yuma Territorial Prison, and Picacho Peak to add to his collection. There was even one of historic Gila Bend thrown in.

“Gila Bend?" Tony complained. "Who the fuck makes a postcard for Gila Bend? What's so goddamn historic about it? You gave that to a little kid? That's child abuse.” He tried to take the postcard away, but Little fucker was particularly possessive of this one and yanked back.

They took Little Fucker back to the motel to lie down among venemous reptiles and distasteful bugs once more. Over the course of the next week, more suspicious sabotage of Mike's attempts to translate the postcards and find a home for the boy occurred, only to be plausibly explained away by Tony. Mike drove to Tempe to consult an expert at ASU, only to find out the building was evacuated for a bomb threat. A trip to Flagstaff to see the authority at NAU came to naught when the sprinkler system in the building was tripped. Mike even stopped to visit an Imam in Yuma, where he discovered the curate's visa had been revoked because he was from one of the countries on the terrorism watch list. At every turn Mike's efforts were thwarted.

“It's the will of Allah," said Tony.

“Fuck off,” said Mike.

Mike didn't officially admit defeat, he just sort of ground to a halt against insurmountable inertia. At the same time, the Little Fucker started to blend into the background. Mike would watch him and Tony feeding English muffins to Scooter, a ring-tailed cat with a lame paw who had wandered in from the desert, and almost accept the kid as a natural part of the warped reality of this place, a feature of the Dali-esque geography. Maybe Mike Gasden was the one who didn't fit. Maybe Mike Gasden better think about bailing out, about erasing himself from the map of the Gadsden Purchase.

At the same time, he didn't want to go just yet. In an amazingly quick period of time, the Gasden Motel had achieved a reputation as a clean and convenient stopover for tired travelers who couldn’t make the last push to either San Diego or Phoenix, depending on which way it was their misfortune to travel on the I-8. A steady trickle of customers was arriving every night. Mike was feeling the thrill of success, and seriously considering putting in a swimming pool, to better go head to head with the corporate bitches at the Wellton Microtel.

He did his best to discourage grizzled truckers arriving with painted vixens for a quick fling. When such showed up on the security cameras, Mike simply would not answer the buzzer. "I don't want this to be a hooker hotel," he told Tony. If one good thing could be said for his caretaker, it was that he did a good job scaring away the truckers and the hookers. All Tony had to do was appear in the parking lot on his wobbly, bad knees, and unwanted guests would disperse into the desert.

Of course, Tony wouldn't be Tony if he didn't run off on across the border binges from time to time, leaving Mike alone with the motel and the kid. Mike figured out that being "deported" was just a free ride down into Mexico. Tony would disappear there for days at a time, engaging in drunken and disorderly conduct, often with the very policia who sometimes arrested him so their amigo could sleep for free in a cell.

These extended absences of the Gasden Motel's caretaker weren’t much of a problem, because the Little fucker was very low maintenance. While Mike worked around the motel, all he had to do was give the kid his pile of postcards and he would scrutinize them for hours. In reality, he was less of a pain in the ass than Tony, who was constantly crying about his arthritis pain and begging for one thing or another.

The drawback was that when Tony was away on a bender, Little F still insisted on sleeping in his room, but Mike didn't feel right leaving him alone in that den of dysmorphic denizens of the desert. He would try to sleep on the bed with the boy but could feel the multitude of malicious, multi-faceted eyes upon him as a physical sensation, disallowing slumber. Furthermore, nobody had ever accounted for the whereabouts of the snake, or verified its toxicity. After a couple days of this ophidiophobia, Mike picked up a baby monitor and slept in the adjoining room, where he would be close by in the event the stealthy, concealed serpent emerged from its clandestine den. Would he be able to hear the sound of its forked tongue hissing over the intercom? Mike wasn’t sure, but nothing happened and he started sleeping peacefully again.

Motel duties, combined with the responsibilities of babysitting both infants and adults, meant that Mike had no time to brood on the emotional upheaval in his life. He was sufficiently distracted by the flurry of daily activity that his Lisa wound scabbed over. Then one afternoon as he was washing sheets, her name blew into his head from a dusty desert breeze, and Mike was quite surprised he had forgotten all about her. What did this say about the quality of his character, he wondered, that he could be engaged to a girl and then purge her so completely from his memory. What kind of unfeeling sociopath was he?

He was trying to feel some appropriate lonely longing for Lisa when Little Fucker looked up at him with his wide blue eyes as if to say I'm here for you buddy, if you need me.

“Stop that," Mike scolded. "I don't like kids and I don't want to. You're on borrowed time." But another parapet in Mike's defenses had been breached by those eyes.

At that very moment, whether by a decree of fate or not, the face of Mike's phone lit up. A text message from Lisa had somehow wormholed through the light years void between them. R U angry? it asked.



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Image by Unknown - Old postcard, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=47596456

Chapter 13

Table of Contents

Chapter 13

Mike's truck smelled like biological fluids had been deposited or exchanged, and this became a source of anxiety as he made the short drive to the Cornudo Cafe. Was it possible that Tony had sweet talked Lisa into repeating the Hooters truck bed incident, the one that was forever burned into his retinas? Why should he even be worrying about a girl who had left him stranded in a desert shithole prison? Wasn’t Lisa out of his life forever?

Still, this was among the questions to throw by Tony that might make the post-Lisa transition easier. Who was he kidding? It would probably make the transition more difficult - who wanted to think about his fiancé getting banged by a flabby old man that had bigger tits than she did? But now these questions, and whatever action he intended to take in regard to his mayonnaise-munching zookeeper for desert rejects, had been put on hold by the arrival from out of the brush by another abandoned waif, human this time. Well, at least that was not going to last. Some branch of the local authorities would arrive any minute to pick the kid up, then Mike could get back to his regularly scheduled woes.

A trio of unnaturally dirty trucks were parked in the huge cafe lot - lacking only goal posts to be a football field, but Mike gave them short shrift as he got out of his truck and made his way inside. His eyes casually wandered to the back of one of the trucks, where lay a black tarp, rolled up and duck-taped shut, looking like a human-sized mock up of a cigar. This rather incongruous spectacle didn’t penetrate very far into his conscious mind, because when you are a single man in your mid to late twenties, the only thing that penetrates is penetration. This mindset does not improve until the latter stages of matrimony, when female menopause completely emasculates a man. This is why men who survive the horror to rise to the top of their profession are generally older ones, like Dustin Diesel. Such men are not thinking exclusively with their dicks anymore, so their brains are free for useful observations, like why is a human-shaped lump rolled up in a tarp in the back of a truck?

Mike’s obsession with Lisa took a reprieve when he entered the cafe and saw Linda Lloyd leaning seductively against the register, wearing a tight yellow T-shirt. Linda had seen him coming, and thought it was her duty to remind the young man why he should never go gay.

"Morning, lemon drop," she said sweetly, with a delicious, candy-coated smile.

"Morning," Mike reciprocated awkwardly, spellbound by the enormous lemon drops trapped in Linda’s shirt.

“Did you come down to see me, or do you have other business in mind? Please say you came to save me from those ass-grabbing apes over there."

Linda gestured to three men sitting in a booth behind the register. Eddy, the man in the big hat who made him think of the yellow bonneted guardian of Curious George, gave Mike a girlish grin and a little wave. The two men with him in the booth looked dirty and ragged, as if they had been up all night burying their turds in a sandbox. Mike tried to smile politely, but the tips of his lips just wouldn’t turn the corners.

"So how's your little vacation going here in our fair burg?" Eddy asked. "Our desert hospitality must appeal to you, because you decided to stay a while with your...Uncle."

Mike shrugged it off and turned toward Linda to order his stuff, but Eddy wasn't ready.

"Linda here was just telling us a charming story about how she got her lovely name. Why don't you continue with your engaging little tale, dear, so the young man can hear it.”

"Shut up Eric, you big noisy fuck," she barked at him. "That's way before his time. It won't mean anything to him."

One of Eric's henchmen, a man of bony, almost skeletal features, with a permanent scowl eroded into his face and a three days growth beard that looked like it would resist removal by razors of all human manufactured alloys, leered in Mike's direction. "Well, if he don't like it he can just crawl back to his hotel with the rest of the creepy crawlies over there. Just tell it."

Linda bent over seductively, at an angle where only Mike received an ample view of the Valley of the Shadow of Death between her two luscious lemon drops. The goons in the booth bristled with envy. “Well fellas, if you boys can stop being assholes long enough, I'll go ahead and tell you the story. As some of you know, I have a twin sister named Louise in San Diego, who we call Lou-Lou around here. Unlike me, a natural blonde, my sister is a ginger."

"How can we be sure you two are naturals?" laughed the third creep, who was wearing a dirty John Deere cap over a dirty John Denver T-shirt. This was his idea of a pickup line.

Linda ignored him. She thought he was cretin, and cretin was a very high bar for her indeed. She had been naked with just about every swinging dick that ever walked through the door of the Cornudo Cafe, Eddy included, though that had been a disappointment.

“My Daddy was a big fan of Lynrd Skynrd, to the point of being delusional about it. Charles Manson thought the Beatles were talking to him through Helter Skelter, but my Daddy thought Gimme Three Steps had some kind of hidden, prophetic meaning. In that song, the storyteller is cutting a rug down at a place called The Jug with a girl named Linda Lou. My Daddy was expecting a boy who he would name Ronnie after the band’s singer Mr. Van Sant, and that boy would carry on the proud redneck tradition of whiskey drinking, wife – beating, and cow fucking. In the disappointing event it was a girl, once he was done beating my Mama for negligence he was going to name her Linda Lou, like the two-timing slut in the song. But when he beheld, to his grave chagrin, that he got two little tramps for the price of one, he decided to name the blonde one Linda and the Ginger, Lou. And that's how I arrived at my lovely name."

“And it is a lovely name," Eric agreed, tipping his coffee cup. "For a lovely woman."

Linda nodded her appreciation. Eddy's goon growled, "I still say I've never seen a real God-given blonde or ginger around here, and I'd like some proof."

Linda draped an arm around Mike's midsection and softly tapped out the beat of Dixie with her fingers on his ribcage. "I'll tell you what. Next time Mike here goes to visit his folks in San Diego I'll go along. Then me and my sister will tag-team him so he can bring you back a full report. Does that sound fair?"

Eddy laughed himself red. Mike's face turned the approximate color of Lou-Lou's fabled ginger patch. The goon’s face was an ugly purple.

Linda shuffled Mike over to a table on the other side of the restaurant.

"How you feeling, gummy bear?"

Mike was not one to share his feelings. He came from a long line of stone-faced introverts who wouldn’t even talk about the weather to strangers. Nonetheless, Linda seemed the type who might say something honest, not just meaningless and sappy.

"Shitty," Mike answered. "Everybody ditched me over there in Nogales, except for one fat dumbshit. The dumbshit was the only one who stuck around. All the people that I counted on bailed."

Linda sat down next to Mike and took his hand. "You have to realize something, my little Milk Dud. This sounds ridiculous, but I'm sure Tony didn't mean anything by it. He might even have had good reasons for leaving you back there. The politics in the Gadsden Purchase are complicated. Tony is like those critters in his cages. He does what needs to be done at the moment without thinking about your emotional reaction.”

Linda leaned in closer and lowered her voice to a whisper that melted through Mike's skin. Her lemon drops hugged up close against his skin. "Let me tell you something sugar plum. If you intend to stay here in Cornudo for a while, and I don't know why the hell you would, I suggest you keep Tony around. Yeah he's a lazy pain in the ass freeloader and he eats a lot, but he's a lot better than the alternative. The alternative is sitting right over there. Tony is the only one keeping them degenerate a-holes from moving in on your motel."

“Why do they want to move in on my motel? How is that going to happen? How is Tony stopping that?"

Linda squirmed languidly in her seat, and either accidentally or on purpose gave Mike another titty shot. "There's a lot of things you don't know about this town. There's a lot of dirty secrets your real estate agent didn't tell you when she was selling you the Brooklyn Bridge over there. Hell, there's a lot of things I can’t see the complete details on, but I can smell the generalities. Just take my advice that you better keep Tony around if you intend to stay here, no matter how much of an asshole he turns into."

Mike thought it peculiar how the uncensored form of asshole had been applied liberally to Tony, but the goons in the booth had been discretely christened a-holes.

Green Army helicopters flew over at that moment, buzzing dead east like perturbed hornets. When the rotor noise died down, Linda said "There’s more than your coffee brewin', here in the Gadsden Purchase."

Mike got Tony's burger, cream of wheat for the kid, and a half gallon of milk. He walked out half forgetting why he had come here. Who was all of this food for? Distracted by his own thoughts, he was staring straight at the black tarp in the back of the truck when a rough, calloused hand fell on his shoulder.

"See something you like?" said an equally rough, calloused voice, like a rusty pinball bouncing around an empty machine, with no lights or bells going off.

"Not really," Mike said. He wasn't trying to be clever.

The goon literally huffed and puffed like the big bad wolf. Mike had never heard anyone do that before, he thought it just happened in fairy tales. "Well, if you don't like it," said the goon, “just keep walking."

Mike did that. He walked to his truck, then drove back to the motel. He didn't think much about unsanitary goons in the process, or the tarp rolled like King Kong's blunt in the back of that truck.

Tony was there feeding French vanilla creamer packets from the Keurig to the boy, who lapped them up greedily, thimble size plastic cup by thimble size plastic cup. The kid already looked cleaner. Tony had bathed and wrapped him in clean towels, making him look like a mini-Gandhi.

"What took you so long! The little fucker is hungry!" Tony scolded, but he sounded happy.

Mike handed over the Cream of wheat, which the boy immediately devoured. "The way he's eating, he's going to need some diapers fast,” Tony said.

“I think that will be somebody else's problem soon," said Mike. "Did you call the police?"

“The police? What for?"

“What do you mean what for? A lost kid showed up at our door."

The kid was now drinking milk straight from the half gallon carton, and getting half of it in his mouth. "The police are the last people you call in these kind of situations." Tony said these words with authority, as if a lot of stray kids had wandered up to his door in the past. In the Gadsden Purchase, this was entirely possible.

"Well, we need to call whoever the appropriate authority is."

"Let's not get hasty," said Tony. "Let’s think this over."

"Think it over! You can't just keep lost kids. This is not one of your critters. He's a human being!"

The kid put down the milk, belched loudly, farted twice and began to yawn.

"True enough,” Tony admitted. "But he's been through a lot. Maybe his parents got picked up or killed in the desert. Maybe he had to escape some really bad people."

“He doesn't even look Mexican!" Mike protested. "He's obviously a white kid. Maybe his parents got into a car accident. People are looking for him!"

"Oh, so now you're playing the beaner card. You're saying it's okay to keep lost little Mexicans, because nobody cares what happens to them, but just because he's white we gotta call out the national guard. I see how you are."

Mike made hair pulling motions at the sides of his head, then let out a long, frustrated sigh. "Just a few minutes ago you told me I could let the M-word fly whenever I wanted, and now you're getting all butt hurt about it."

“It's because I'm pissed that you're right, goddamit. I mean you're right, but you're wrong."

Trying to argue with Tony was like trying to exercise logic on Lisa when the new moon provoked her menstrual tides. "What does that mean?”

"What it means is that he sure as hell looks white, which means they mobilize the army, navy, Air Force, Marines, maybe even the goddamm girl scouts to find him. Just a minute ago I saw some helicopters flying hell bent east, but they didn't look like they were stopping to search anything here. So they weren’t looking for the kid, which makes you temporarily wrong, unless they think a baby who doesn't walk could have crawled to Tucson by now. By the way, when I undressed the little fucker to give him a bath, I found these in his pants.”

Mike took the objects from Tony's hand. "Holy shit," he said.

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Photo by Ragtimedorianhenry2010 Bernard, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons

Chapter 12

Table of Contents

Chapter 12

When Michael Gasden arrived back in Cornudo after a circuitous journey home, the first thing he intended to do was fire his grounds keeper slash maintenance man slash car thief slash worthless malingerer Tony Vargas, then chase him off the premises. He was pretty sure Tony was responsible for his afternoon in jail, and in spite of the fact Mike had been granted clemency for his own alleged crime, he could feel no clemency in himself for the alleged crimes of others.

Michael actually wound up spending the night in Tucson, where he put Otis on a plane. Otis kept repeating that his mother was worried, and if he didn't arrive home on time she was liable to slice her wrists and bleed out in the bathtub.

“At least somebody worries about you,” Mike kept reassuring his unlikely friend, and he meant it. He had never spoken meaningless platitudes with such sincerity before, feeling lonelier than ever. Otis helped a little, though not much.

It was impossible to rent a car in Nogales because of the Trump rally, but Mike bought a Ford Explorer selling for 1500 bucks in a gas station parking lot. He hoped the shitty clunker would at least get them to Tucson, where he could ditch it if it broke down. The car made a lot of inexplicable noises and shook badly over 60, but it moved.

The only flight available to San Jose was a late one. Otis looked so scared and vulnerable in the airport that Mike couldn’t bring himself to leave him.

“I never flew before bro," Otis admitted.

The comment stirred Mike from a nap. He was exhausted, more emotionally than physically. "Seriously?"

“Heyward won't let me take an airplane anywhere. He says they make a big carbon football."

Mike thought it futile to tell Otis the real term was carbon footprint.

"Don't tell Heyward," Otis said. He looked worried.

"I won't." Mike drifted off to sleep, where he dreamed he was throwing a black carbon football at Donald Trump's head. He woke up to see people lining up for boarding, with Otis still sitting there clueless.

Mike bounced awake, then scurried over to get the gate attendants to get them to preboard Otis with the handicapped, elderly, and children. At 260 pounds Otis beggared no sympathy, even though Mike had been able to accompany Otis to the gate by claiming handicapped. So Mike stood in line with Otis, resisting the brute's attempts to hold his hand. At last he got his friend on the plane, where he promptly took a nap on a nice lady's shoulder. Luckily the nice lady managed to squeeze a drool towel over her shoulder, or things would have gotten sticky. Getting drooled on at 50,000 feet was a strange new variation of the mile high club.

Completely worn out, Mike checked into a motel that matched the ramshackle Ford Explorer the closest. Being somewhat of a germaphobe Mike did not like cheap motels, but you didn't pull up to the Hyatt in a rusty bucket of bolts like this.

After a restless night atop yellowed, itchy sheets Mike got rolling, or rather rattling down the I-8 west. As he approached what was now home by dint of nowhere else to go, Mike tried to rehearse what he was going to say. Should he use the hardass or diplomatic approach? Yesterday he was so full of righteous fury that hardass would have been easy, but by now his anger had mostly evaporated into the desert air, as anger will in proximity to one's own bed. Now Mike was thinking that hardass would come across as feeble and unconvincing. Maybe the best tactic would be to lay down a polite ultimatum. He tried to compile a list of grievances in his busy head. His Dad had made him memorize the Declaration of Independence when he was a kid, so he used this as his guide. When in the course of human events. We hold these truths to be self evident, he chanted, then modified the text to meet his own needs.

It becomes necessary for one person to modify the political bands which have connected him to another. In other words, no hard feelings, but get the fuck out.

....but when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design... Translated - you designed to leave me stranded when I got arrested and you usurped my truck on more than one occasion, you fat mother fucker.

…The history of the present caretaker of the Gasden Motel is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations.

...He has refused to do any work, the most wholesome and necessary for the public good...When given work, he has utterly neglected to attend to it.

He has screwed Striggys waitresses in my truck repeatedly, imposing with manly firmness his invasions on the rights of these young ladies.

He has erected a multitude of new shopping lists, and sent hither his appetite to harass our people and eat out their substance.

For transporting us over deserts to be arrested for pretend offenses.-

He has plundered our seas, ravaged our coasts, burnt our towns, and destroyed the lives of our people. That part was pure hyperbole, but he liked how it sounded, so he kept it.

As he drove along, keeping his hands tight on the steering wheel of a rattle trap that tended to veer out of the lane, Mike completed this statement of circumstances of Cruelty & Perfidy scarcely paralleled in the most barbarous ages, then rehearsed through the injuries and usurpations until he thought he had it straight. By the time he pulled off of the freeway he was laughing with psychotic glee. Immediately his eyes shot to his motel, where he saw his own truck parked in front of Tony's room, a sight that sent him seething with rage again. He forgot his carefully constructed list of redresses and thought he would just burst in and bitch slap the son of a bitch.

The clunky Explorer rattled across the gravel lot. The brakes protested with a metallic whine before the jalopy finally skidded to a stop. Mike dismounted and charged toward Tony's door, but then pulled up politely, stopped and knocked.

"Come in," Tony's weary voice entreated.

Mike opened the door, then immediately wished he had not. Tony was sitting shirtless in front of the television, his man boobs sagging pendulously and his belly flab flapping over his underwear, making him look naked. How could he lay his angry hands, furious or not, on such a disagreeable ball of slime?

Tony looked up as if Mike has just popped in from the parking lot, not from across the width of the state after spending a day in jail. He was as shameless about his dishabille as a two year old in a diaper. His loose hanging bearded jowls were stuffed with mayonnaise, which he spooned from a industrial-size jar labeled Kirkland. Around his neck hung what at first glance appeared to be a black, yellow and red striped necklace, but unlike most necklaces it was wriggling.

“Yeah, hey, what's up?" Tony said blandly.

The unsavory spectacle had taken the wind out of Mike's sails. "What the hell is that around your neck?"

"Huh?" Tony looked down at the squirming thing entangled about his collar, and for a moment looked as surprised as Mike. "Oh. That's Florem. She crawled in last night."

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

Tony looked upward in contemplation. "Well, let me think." He set the jar of mayonnaise on the dresser and started making balancing movements with his hands, as if physically weighing ideas.

“There’s a coral snake and a King Snake that look a lot alike, and one of them has the most potent venom of any North American snake. The toxin can paralyze your breathing muscles and kill you without antivenin, it’s so bad. I think the dangerous one is the coral snake, or maybe the King Snake." He kept flagging his palms up and down, as if the truth lay there and not between his ears. "There's something I heard about the snake stripes to help remember who the dangerous one is - red on yellow will kill a fellow. Or is it red on yellow, stay mellow? Fuck, I don't remember. I'll look it up later. Why, what's up?"

The snake around Tony's neck, whichever kind it was, curled upward contentedly to lick some mayo off of Tony's finger.

How do you deliver an angry ultimatum to a person sitting there practically naked, with a potentially poisonous reptile dangling about the neck? Mike felt grossly outnumbered. For all he knew, Tony could summon his entire deadly menagerie against him at the snap of his fingers.

But if his carefully crafted manifesto stayed stuck in his head, it was likely to rot and become infectious, perhaps metastasizing to other parts of his being, including his vulnerable soul. He had to be a man and let this out, or risk remaining a cringing bitch the rest of his life.

Just then, a series of agitated yips and howls pierced through the walls, like a siren in Mike's conscience blaring out a warning. The sound did not immediately register with Mike, but Tony reacted instantly, bouncing to his feet before lowering the snake gently to the floor, where it slithered off to find a warm, dark place to hide. Tony threw on a pair of Ninja Turtle pajama bottoms hastily and scampered for the parking lot, with Mike following cautiously.

"Mother fuckers!" Tony roared as he ran shirtless toward the brush at the edge of the lot.

For a man who routinely and purposely treated human beings badly, Tony was very protective of his animal friends. He would tolerate absolutely no insult or injury against Rölf the Coyote by members of that ragged, mangy, degenerate pack of half-feral mutant canines that prowled the prickly fringes of Cornudo. Tony paused only for a moment, to grab a baseball bat he kept by the door for such contingencies, before rushing out barefoot at full speed on bad knees.

Upon reaching the brush, Tony immediately skidded to a stop, then flailed his arms comically to keep from falling face first. His astounded eyes landed on a point of the Earth just beyond the lot.

"Holy shit," he said in an uncharacteristically reverent tone for fecal material.

Tony's completely un-Tony like stance indicated something out of the ordinary out there in the bushes. By the standards of someone who lets venomous creatures forage freely around and upon his body, this something had to be pretty fucking amazing. Realizing this, Mike quickened his pace and caught up.

A tiny boy in ragged clothing sat at the foot of a cluster of weeds. "It's a little guëro," Tony said with the awe of a naturalist who has discovered a new species. The little fellow's hair was golden brown in color, but much lighter than his face and arms, which were smeared with dirt and badly scratched. He was wearing a T-shirt of Dora the Exploradora so unrecognizably filthy it made the iconic children's cartoon heroine look like Jabba the Hut. His blue denim pants were equally ripped and soiled.

"This poor little fucker has been through a lot," Tony said tenderly. The child looked up attentively, as if he had been called.

"Where did he come from?" Mike asked.

"How the fuck should I know?" Tony swept one arm southward. "From out there, obviously. Nobody is coming to this shithole from up north. They only use our shithole as a way station to places less shitty. Don't you know by now we're the unwiped butthole of the country?"

This statement succinctly summarized the conclusions Mike had formed since unwisely choosing to settle here, but right now he was more preoccupied by the abandoned child sitting in the dirt at their feet.

“He doesn't look...well, Mexican," Mike said cautiously. "Do you think they abandoned him at a rest stop on the freeway?"

"You don't have to say Well, Mexican, with me. Just spit it out and if it bothers me we'll duke it out, best man wins, then go have a beer and tell beaner jokes. It’s pretty obvious the kid ain't no Mexican. It's pretty obvious he didn't crawl all the way here from a rest stop. The closest one is miles away. And nobody abandons little güeros like this.”

The little boy was looking down morosely at the furry, lifeless splatter that had once approximated a Chihuahua. He pointed toward it, then began to mumble incomprehensible sounds that seemed too organized to be mere baby talk.

"What's he saying?" Mike asked.

"I don't know. He ain't speaking beaner, that's for sure. I guess he's trying to say something about the dead dog there. I think my coyote saved his life. Those furry fuckers would have eaten him."

The two men stood there with their jaws dropping down to the tumbleweeds. The boy continued to point at the splatter and to insistently repeat the same words. Then he drew some squiggly lines in the dirt that to them looked like childish scrawling.

“Well shit, we better get him inside," Tony said. "He's so dry he’s like a tumbleweed that blew in. Come here, little fucker."

When the little boy saw Tony's outstretched arms, something dormant inside woke up. Although angry apes hold their arms upward to make themselves appear bigger and more threatening, arms stretched downward is a universal invitation for nurturing made by all the primates, including human monkeys. The boy realized instinctively that he was now safe, and reached up with his own arms. As Tony scooped him up the boy started to cry, his tears carving little wadis in the dirt of his face, while at the same time he gestured outward into the desert.

"What's he pointing at?" Asked Mike.

Tony looked over toward where the boy pointed. "I don't know. He's probably worried about those dogs. Let's get the little fucker inside."

“Why do you have to call him little fucker?"

“ I don’t know, it just fits. What would you call him? We'll think of a good name later."

Although it didn't occur to Mike at the time, this concern about an appropriate name was the first indication that the situation could assume a degree of permanence.

Tony followed the boy inside while Mike followed nervously, thinking his flight to freedom in the desert was becoming more like a prison all the time. He had escaped his business in the city to get away from complications, but complications stuck to him like dirty chewing gum to shoes. Now there was a kid in the mix. Mike didn't like kids. They were noisy, asked annoying questions, made a mess and smelled bad. He had to put his foot down. He could not let Tony add a baby to his zoo.

The child was already perched in a chair, drinking thirstily from a bottle of Kirkland water. He was a little tyke, but he gulped it down like a camel and Tony gave him another.

Tony reached for his jar of mayo. "You like mayonnaise, little fucker?" The child grabbed the jar greedily.

"Wait, you can't feed him mayonnaise," Mike protested.

"Why not? Mayonnaise is good for you. It has anti-oxidants. That’s science. Besides, I had the munchies bad and scrounged around, but nothing else to eat."

"Fake fucking science. I'll go to the cafe and get him something. Do you mind if I take my truck?"

"Watch your mouth around the little Fucker," Tony said. He grabbed the truck keys off the dresser. Some kind of beetle crawled over his knuckles. "Get milk," he said. "The little fucker needs milk. And grab me a burger while ...you're there. Hold the mayo. I hate that shit on burgers."

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Photo courtesy of Luther C. Goldman,Courtesy of US Fish and Wildlife Service, via Wikimedia Commons

Chapter 11

Table of Contents

Chapter 11

Before the sun rises she steals out of her hiding place. The fierce wind of a simoon whips up the stinging dust and dries her body and soul, so it seems her very bones will wither and crumble. On the horizon headlights stir, shake off sleep, and peer in her direction. She has been warned of white wolves, but she is desperate with thirst. Is being taken from this land of the dead prophets such a calamity? She has heard of the human rights they repeat like a prayer here. If the wolves pray this samr prayer, what else can they do except give water to her baby then send them back from where they came?

The wolves do not pounce yet. Instead, they sniff and harry her heels. All day she plods down the sand of the wadi, and all day she watches the wolves'' dust trails, keeping pace to the East, the direction of the holy city, as if taunting her to make a dash in that direction, daring her to seek help from her prophets of the black cloth Kaaba. Instead, she stays the course toward the new Mecca of New Jersey. To take her mind off thirst, she trys to imagine what this new place will be like. Will there be date palms hanging heavy with fruit? Is there water bubbling out of the ground, creating an oasis surrounded by silken tents and flocks feasting on soft grass? Are there the raucous sounds of strong, honorable men, racing their camels and sleek Arab chargers on the fringes of the camp? They tell her America is a mighty, wealthy country but so far this desert is more empty than her own. It supports neither camel, goat or sheep, she has seen no signs of these beasts. The people here must be miserably poor, because they do not offer the required hospitality. Perhaps New Jersey is different, perhaps New Jersey is a place where they venerate the holy prophets. Perhaps there the mercy of God makes the water run freely.

It is an unseasonably warm winter's day. Without her prohibited veil to cover her face, she feels as if she has ingested and digested a sand dune. Ridiculous rule, to ban something so useful in this climate, but she knows no other climate. The world is a continuous desert, and this place is proof. All of the dreamy stories she has heard about forests and jungles of infinite water are but myths.

The wolves keep pace in their trucks, but they do not approach. She thinks of a plan in case they finally come. Because of his Circassian father, the boy is as white as the wolves. If need be she will tell them she kidnapped the boy. They will have to be merciful to one of their own. As for herself, she is just a carcass, a withered skeleton. They can do with her as they please.

In the searing heat of midday she finds a sprawling tree in the bend of the wadi. Here she takes refuge from the heat, so exhausted and dessicated that she thinks she will just lie here and wait for the wolves. Scarcely has she settled into the shade when the rumbling of the wolves' engines grows closer. Incomprehensible threats are shouted in a vile tone through a bullhorn. As she tries to lie still through the growl of the bullhorn guns are fired. A whirlwind of dust explodes on the nearby wall of the wadi. She clutches the quiet boy and shields him with her body. In her own tongue she shouts "don't shoot!" then carries her boy back to the scorching brazier of the desert. As long as she keeps walking the wolves do not shoot.

Her reality is haunted by unreal visions borne on the madness of thirst. Ghosts from the past walk by and vanish. The voice of her mother scolds her for dropping a lamb down the well. Her husband stumbles down the wadi, carrying his head in his hands. The severed head speaks, asking if she is an angel. A train of camel-mounted Bedu appear at the top of the waadi. She runs towards them, begging to be taken along, but they pull back their keffiyehs to reveal the fanged, furry snouts of wolves. “No hospitality here!” they snarl, and ride on.

There is no quarter in this cruel desert, she realizes. The prophets of the book have no authority here. Perhaps they are dead.

The tower of the life-giving water teases her just ahead. She is close enough now to see the large plastic tanks at its base, filled with blessed liquid. She is meters away from salvation. Or is this just another vision that will crumble into dust?

In desperation she rushes down the dry wadi that has been her highway, stumbling along in the sand, her little boy clutching her fiercely. The tower with the blinking lights transmitting the irresistible temptation of water stands on a small rise that conceals the desert behind it. When she has scrambled to within a few yards of this low hill she hears motors, then two trucks equipped with enormous flood lights seem to rise out of the sand itself and stop on either side of the tower.

The woman drops to her knees in the sand. She doesn’'t know if she intends to beg or pray. What is the difference?

A tall, bulky man gets out of the passengers side of one of the trucks. He is wearing shorts, but has heavy boots on his feet. In different circumstances, the effect might be comical. On his head is an enormous hat, of the type worn in American John Wayne movies that even the humble Bedu love. The hat and his gleaming mirror sunglasses hide his eyes, or perhaps hide that he has no eyes. The eyes are the mirror of the soul, some say, so if you have no soul why do you need eyes?

Two other men get out of the trucks, also wearing glasses to cover the place where their eyes should be. They carry rifles, but perhaps worse they carry pitiless scowls. All three have the same red white and blue patch sewn on camouflage jackets.

When the woman sees the scowls she instinctively kneels lower, covering the boy with her body. The man with the enormous hat gives her a snakelike smile, licks his lips and says "Welcome to America!”

The woman begins to beseech him in her native tongue. She begs them to allow her to get to the water then to take her away, if they please.

The snake smile grows wider. Venom glistens upon the serpent's teeth. "Well if that ain't just the biggest head spinning earful of jibberish I ever heard! I don't claim to be no linguist, but that sure as hell don't sound like any Mexican I ever heard. Any of you fellas speak beaner?"

The men on either side nod negatively. "No, no, that ain't beaner” they concur.

"Where you from, honey?" the man in the hat asks.

She does not understand the man, but she hears the question in his voice, and she takes it as a cue to beseech him even more loudly and fervently than before. She sinks lower in her prayerful posture, her head touching the Earth, her body hiding her baby.

“Now look sweetie," the big man says, merrily kicking up a little cloud of dust with the tip of his boot. "If you were of the beaner tribe, I may not like it, but I would be forced by the laws of humanity to let you drink from our well. As dirty and scuzzy as they may be, the beaner tribe has certain core values that we hold near and dear."

She commits a thousand blasphemies, praying to this snake for the life of her child. Up on the tower, the dead lights clack in the wind.

"But you are of the Howeitat tribe, and the Howeitat may not drink from our well!" He kicks up a big clod of dirt and breaks out into raucous laughter. Then he looks up at his henchmen for approval, but sees only confused expressions.

Come on guys, that's a famous line from Lawrence of Arabia. Haven't you ever seen Lawrence of Arabia? Not even you, honey?" The man begins to hum the theme song, but she did not rise from her supplication. "Well, hell! What a waste of a wonderful monologue!”

"It's the Hazimi," one of the filthy goons holding the guns says.

"Beg pardon?" Says the man in the hat.

“The line is, the Hazimi may not drink from our well. He knew that."

“No, no, I'm pretty sure it was the Howeitat. I've seen the movie like 500 times. I've practically got it memorized."

“Boss, it is the Hazimi," a second goon with a gun disagrees. "The Howeitat were the tribe led by Auda Abu Tayi, portrayed by Anthony Quinn. He is the dude who said, I am a river to my people, after which everybody screeches out that ear piercing yodel.”

The man in the hat strokes his whiskered chin thoughtfully. “Well I could just poop.myself, I'm so embarrassed. Here I am trying to impress this pretty young lady with my knowledge of Ay-rab culture, and I completely fall flat on my face."

Prancing around in his shorts, boots, and cowboy hat, the man in the hat looks like one of the fabled Dallas Cowboys Cheerleaders, but 40 years past the prime. It is a rather uncomfortable caricature to behold. Even the two henchmen seem to avoid looking at him.

Failing to register any response to her repeated entreaties, the woman switches to French. The village near her tribe once had a school teacher who instructed her and the other children in many subjects, including French. This teacher is a cruel tyrant who punishes incorrect answers with a sharp ruler slap on the hand. One time he misses and the injured pupil, a sheik's daughter, goes home with an ugly red welt on her wrist. The sheik shoots the teacher. The tribe escapes to Jordan for a while. Her French lessons are stalled, but she still remembers a few words.

“Well hell," says the man in the hat. "I believe I heard a see voo play in there. Our little lady here speaks French too."

The man in the hat goes up to one of the henchmen, which just coincidentally rhymes with Frenchmen, and unceremoniously yanks the rifle from his arms. "That's where you effed up, little girl, just as I was starting to like you. If there's one thing I can't stand it's those effing frogs."

"I'm a good upstanding Christian, honey, well I'm a flippin ordained minister for crying out loud, what you would call a mulah who takes no moolah for it. But my sense of Christian charity gets drowned out by all of your frog talk. Ribbit, ribbit. When you were still speaking Ay-rab I thought for a minute we might be friends, but I'll have no truck with those whiny, faggy frogs. How can you condone the language of a people that, after we save their ass from the Nazis turn around and spit in our faces by not helping us bomb that Krud-dafi, may he rot in hell, sorry if he's one of your uncles, by the same she goat.”

The man in the hat cocks the rifle back hard. The woman tucks her baby's body further under her own.

“The Howei-, I mean the Hazimi may not drink from our well!" the man shouts. Then he turns and shoots holes in the two water tanks, stowed there in the shadow of the tower.

The life-giving blood sanctified by the heartbeat of the towers gushes forth from the broken jugs, to be greedily swallowed by the thirsty, parched sand. Muddy bubbling puddles form beneath the rivulets pouring from the bullet holes, but such is the greed of the desert that it swallows every drop. Not a molecule of muddy water is left, not even fit for a dog to lap from. Within seconds all that remains is a non-potable brown stain on the ground.

Just to be sure, the man in the hat picks up the ragged remains of the plastic containers and shakes them fiercely, to remove any lingering droplets. Then he throws the shattered tanks into the back of one of the trucks.

"See, sweetheart. I'm not a litterbug. I keep my desert clean.”

The alpha wolf crosses over to the henchman and hands back the rifle. "As you can see, I am not a violent individual. I am allowing you to continue forward into the bountiful generosity of this great land, to let events unfold as they may. Once again, I say welcome to America."

The three men get back into the pickups. As they board, the man in the hat can be heard to say "Make sure she doesn't make it to the highway." Then they drive off.

As with the sparkling Janat Eadn of New Jersey and all the other shining allures of mighty, glorious America even the lowly Bedu hear about, the tower is just another false promise. All hope is now dead. All gods are dead. She does not want to live in a world abandoned by God and his prophets. She would stay here and move no more, but she can't make that decision for her baby. Her baby boy has to live, somehow. For what other purpose has she lived? But she is powerless - What else can she do to affect the salvation of her baby, but to pray to the dead God’s? Can the gods of her people hear her from so far, across so many waters? Just in case, she prays to the god of Abraham to come back, she prays to the God of Jacob, she prays to the God of Yeshua, she prays to the God of Mohammed. Finally, she prays to the god of the hieroglyphs rock, to see if he will listen. It is blasphemy, but she must save her child. Only men quarrel and quibble over the fine points of theology. To protect her children, a mother will pray to any spirit that moves across the face of the desert.

Her head lifts from its supplicating posture as she feels, more than hears, a low humidity rumbling through the bare creosote flats. She pust see her head back down, smothering the boy again, who still will not complain or protest. Pressing her ear to the earth, she picks up a low drone that increases and decreases in frequency. It starts off like the frontal attack of an angry bee, then slowly recedes like the bellow of an elephant. Flashing back to what seems like the good old days of jolly old bombed out Aleppo, she recalls the same kind of sound made by Russian jets when they bomb or strafe the city. They come in with a high squeal, then fly off with a low snore. She doesn't have enough school to know anything about the Doppler effect, but when you live under constant battering in a war zone you learn these principles instinctively.

Looking up, she spies no planes in the endless, cloudless lid of blue above, but something is moving fast out there. It occurs to her that it must be cars and trucks. There has to be a highway close by!

Quickly she rises to her feet, silently thanking the god of the rocks, who must be the leading deity in this area, for the revelation. As she stands buzzing pain and a wave of dizziness envelop her head like a turban wrapped too tight. She wobbles and falls. Descending to the Earth she is careful to land on her back, being mindful not to crush the boy.

She passes out for a span that might be a moment, might be a millenium. In this semi-conscious state she is aware only of the constant whine of automobiles and the rumble of big trucks on that distant highway, amplified through her pillow of sand. She had to get to them, but she is powerless to move. Her body will not rise.

Then she feels the shadow of someone standing over her, someone she cannot see because she cannot open her eyes.

“Arise!" The voice commands and she does not disobey, for it is the voice of her mother. She springs into a sitting position, the baby asleep upon her breast, but sees no one. She longs to sink back down, to merge her weary bones with the dust of the Earth and sleep forever, but forces herself to stay up. There is a highway out there, and the highway is her only hope.

Pulling herself to her feet, she defies death one more time. By all rights she is dead already, but the mysterious force of the will pulls her from the tomb. Outraged demons haunt her steps. An earthenware jug laid in her path sweats cool liquid on the outside, but contains only dirt and scorpions. A precocious pack rat, gifted with the art of speech, invites her to rest upon a luxurious canopied bed beneath a Palo Verde tree. A wren on a high, dead stick whistles the theme song to Lawrence of Arabia. She ignores these distractions and keeps her feet moving in the direction of the highway, from where the noise of speeding automobiles grows louder. Or is this an illusion as well? She is not certain, but it is all she has to cling to.

The hieroglyph god of the rock is a cruel and capricious one who will not deliver her to the highway without further trials. Now her path is blocked by a steep ravine that can only be traversed by an eroded cut in the bank. The far side is less pronounced in grade, and past that the highway is so close she doesn't need to listen to the rumble in the earth anymore. But to reach it, she has to cross this one last wadi.

With no other recourse, the woman starts down the slice in the steep bank. Her head throbs with pain, her desiccated throat cries for mercy, her spinning head cannot issue the correct commands to her wobbly legs. Halfway down the cut, a loose rock comes out from under her foot and she slips and rolls the rest of the way into the wadi. The last act of her physical body is to toss the baby into the soft sand at the bottom. Then her foot catches in a crack in the rock and she feels something snap in her leg. Gravity forces her leg loose from the hole but she tumbles into the wadi with her wounded limb horribly distorted, bending forward instead of back. She is aware of it only as a curiosity. It doesn''t matter anymore.

The baby sits in the sand, his face puckered as if he wishes to cry, but does not know how.

“Go. Up," she commands, making a feeble gesture with one hand as she lays immobile. The boy does not move.

In the wild there is a biological imperative for organisms to reject their offspring when they no longer have the resources to care for them. In humans the instinct is rarely used but still exists, coming forward only in times of extreme duress. Both the mother's impulse to use it and the offspring's instinct to heed the call emerge at these times.

"GO! UP! WOLVES!" She shouts with her last strength, and her last breath.

The boy lingers yet a moment, looking across the waadi sand at the body of his mother. Then the biological imperative kicks in and he crawls for the other side of the ravine she indicated to him.. His skin scrapes the earth through the worn out knees of his trousers, but he accepts the departure of his mother and he accepts the urgency of her warning. It is definitely a liability that he never learned to walk, but there is no use beating himself up for that now. From now on, he will have to grow up fast.

The thick sand at the bottom of the wadi makes his pace sluggish. The slope beyond is packed more firmly, but covered with thorny brush. The words of his mother echo through his mind as he crawls upward, but he cannot visualize her word for wolf. He has never seen a wolf, only stray dogs prowling about the ruins of Aleppo. The thought of Aleppo makes him check the postcards hidden inside his shirt. They are his amulet, a magical transport to times before bombs and ruins. Maybe they will lead him back to his mother, someday. The mass of flesh lying lifeless in the wadi is no longer his mother. He knows that.

The boy crawls scraped and bleeding up the waadi wall. He hears the sound of motors racing down a road not far away, but he does not see it. In the bombed out city he can peek out the broken window to see trucks rolling through the rubble. Those trucks and the ones he hears now make the same sound. Is his mother sending him to the trucks? Or maybe he should find another bombed out building to hide in.

He crawls a little farther but it is very painful, so he stops in the shade of some high weeds. From there he sees a long building, and thinks that is the place where his mother wants him to hide. He waits in the weeds, but then the plants rustle and several dogs emerge through the tangle of plants. He thinks the wolves are coming, but they are only dogs.

The four beasts are led by a rather large Chihuahua, but the boy doesn’t know breeds, so he is not surprised by the dog's large size. Next there is a mongrel shaggy type, bigger but much meeker than the Chihuahua. Another is like a sausage on four legs. The final dog looks like a beagle, but the wrong color.

Had these dogs been just somebody's pets they might have let him off with a nip on the leg, but they are not. Being semi-feral they do not have the same respect for humans as pets do, and just now they are hungry. They intend to eat the boy. He is small, weak, incapable of flight, and smells of distress - easy prey. The human smell makes them hesitate, but their hunger is strong.

Snarling, the dogs form a wolf ring around the boy to block his escape. Big shaggy sneaks around the rear, while hot dog and semi-snoopy take up posts on the left and right. Chihuahua plants himself in front.

So now the refugee baby finds his salvation blocked by other kinds of wolves, not the kind his mother warns him of. Instinctively he gets back on his knees and tries to crawl away from the Chihuahua. Seeing the boy's back awakens the dog's predator instinct, and it lunges forward to nip him in the back of the foot, where fortunately its canines find only a tattered shoe. The attack awakens violence in the other pack members, and at once they all lunge in.

The feral dogs are obviously going to eat the boy. A pack with the killing urge, canine or human, will perform vile acts unthinkable to an individual. The human infant has survived bombings, crossed the pirate infested Red Sea, journeyed over two vast oceans and the bandit-plagued wastelands of Mexico, only to be consumed by flea-bitten mongrels while a few feet from freedom. Some call this irony, others just bad frickin' luck.

The little pack growls, barks and lunges, gradually gaining confidence to rush in for the kill.

Then a loud, angry yip comes from beyond a stand of creosote, and in a blur the Chihuahua seems to explode in a red cloud. Still another canine has emerged from the brush and is shaking the small dog fiercely in its jaws. The dogs bark and bellow in fake ferocity, but it is all bluster, for they know they are beaten. The Chihuahua constitutes the better part of the pack's valor. Before this attacker can make similar carnage of those left, they split up and run meekly toward the last points that had been home, a pack no more.

The coyote drops the limp Chihuahua carcass, finding it distasteful. Then it turns and faces the baby, who has no fear. The animal lowers itself down on its front legs in a sort of bow but raises its head to let off a triumphant series of barks, yips and howls.

The boy points at the coyote and waits for what is to come next. “Wolf!” he cries, in his mother's tongue. Mama is wrong. Wolves are nice.

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Photo courtesy of Sarah Studd, National Park Service, via Wikimedia Commons