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.



Next >>

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