Chapter 18

Table of Contents


Chapter 18

The effects of the unrelenting sand-choked wind reduce human civilization to a striking degree of similarity, no matter what part of the globe the scouring air performs its slow erosion upon. The cinder block homes of Cornudo were, in effect, the great pyramids of Egypt in miniature, surrendering their stucco to the atmosphere in microscopic bits. The wind did not respect the pharaohs, and does not honor would be monument builders among American Presidents, either. If the mightiest of men builds a wall the still mightier wind will reduce it to sand in due time. In the desert everything is eventually reduced to sand and this new sand, in turn, mounts the breeze to reduce other things to sand.

Even International borders revert back to sand this way. Drawing a line in the sand is a ridiculous proposition, and this is why the Mongol hordes could not be stopped, this is why the Israelites could not be contained as slaves in Egypt, and this is why the present day milk and honey seeking migrants from Syria to Central America cannot be suppressed. The desert scoffs at human geography. It laughs at man’s political maps, then pushes its grains of sand where it will, with no respect for the aesthetic appeal they will produce pinned to some man's wall.

Tony Vargas was being blown along like a grain of sand across the kitty litter box of the Gadsden Purchase. One day he bounced to Mexico, the next back to the USA. He couldn't tell the difference between them. Each dusty desert town was just another set of human Prarie Dog mounds, burrowed ever so fleetingly into the sand.

Back when Tony had a home to fall back on, his numerous friends across the great width but limited breadth of the Purchase - friends that were, in fact, as uncountable as the grains of sand, were always ready to receive him. But now that he was homeless, clunking along in the Love Machine like a traveling Gypsy, he was just a nuisance who should be run out before becoming a permanent fixture.

In Why they asked Tony why he was always dropping in unannounced. In Reforma they told him to get reformed and change his vagabond ways. In Somerton they advised Tony to go somewhere else, man. In Ajo a lady friend pleaded he stop taking those damn garlic pills for his heart, because they fouled his breath when he tried to steal a kiss. In Naco the people remonstrated that he stop acting like the town name. In Douglas nobody had a copper penny for his thoughts.

While Tony was clunking around the map, looking for that elusive welcome, searching for a friendly place to take a load off after his rude treatment by the kid at the motel, from time to time he would hear a loud thunking noise coming from outside. "I blew a goddamm tire," he would think, then pull the Love Machine to the shoulder.

When he got out he would see huge green military choppers, like monster metallic dragonflies, passing close overheard. Their whirring chopper blades, in fact, accounted for the noise, his tires were fine. So Tony would pee on the roadside so as not to waste a stop, then get back in the Love Machine to be on his way.

His way went unappreciated, unloved, and unwanted in the four Arizona counties, plus a slice of New Mexico, that together encompass the Gadsden Purchase. Even the Striggys girls gave him the cold shoulder these days. Women can smell the stink of desperation on you, Tony realized in a philosophical fugue, and desperate he was, really desperate. The Love Machine had turned celibate, had taken priestly vows.

Tony was by no means destitute. He had his railroad retirement sitting mostly unspent in the bank, because he didn't pay rent and suckered the kid into buying almost everything. That was okay, the kid had more money than he could spend in ten lifetimes.

How was the kid doing anyway? Probably really shitty by now without him around - the FF would have moved in to shake Mike down for protection money. The FF was just another gang with an operating territory that included Cornudo. When Tony was living at the motel they stayed away because he was a super chingon railroad thug who could still call upon his thuggery skills when needed, and call in other thugs as necessary. But Mike was at the mercy of those shit heads and even worse, shit heads who were yet to crawl out of the sand. Did that bother him? A little. But who had started it? Mike had chased him away because he was fixated on that two timing squinty bitch who put her hand in between Tony's legs when they were alone in the truck. That was when Tony bought the MAGA hat and started the get rid of Lisa process. But the scorpion in the shower? Shit - he only wished he had thought of that first. That was beautiful.

What about the Little Fucker? Tony felt really bad about leaving Little F alone the way he had. The helicopters meant the noose was going to tighten on the boy, and his protector Mike was an unknown quantity. Mike was not a fighter, that much was for sure, but Tony admired his stubborn streak. Muy terco, like him. The kid had brains too. Hopefully that would be enough.

After a couple of days of clunking around, sleeping in the back of the Love Machine, taking showers at truck stops because he was too cheap to get a motel, Tony crossed from Mexico, where he could find no quarter, back to Arizona again in an endless cycle of border hopping, feeling like he had finally scraped bottom, that not a soul in this world gave a shit. He had heard no word from Linda, had been proffered no apology from the kid, which he would have graciously accepted after making Mike squirm a few extra days. It was in this orphaned state that Tony washed ashore in Gila Bend.

He drove up to the river bank, mostly dry and suffocated by gray green Salt Cedar that had not enough foliage to hide neither bird nor vato, not enough water to save a fish from drowning, but nonetheless impassable to him. All he could do was look across the river wistfully. There was a girl on yonder bank in Buckeye who would take him in in a minute, but she might as well live on the fucking moon. There was no way he could cross that stream, no matter what a pathetic trickle it was.

Can fish really drown? he asked himself. What do you call that, when a fish has no water? Is it possible to drown in air too?

Why couldn't he just cross that fucking river to find love on the other side?

He would die, that's why. He would go into seizures and die. Mom had warned him about that. Was it worth dying just for a piece of tail? Hmm...depends. That would be a helluva way to go, but did he want his obituary to read “Died fucking?”

At that thought, Tony started thinking about Maria.

Meanwhile, over on the Nogales end of the Gadsden Purchase, Dustin Diesel was thinking about Doris. His thoughts were not as wistfully romantic as Tony's were - standing in the rheumatic elbow of the Gila River several leagues away, but instead revolved around about how pissed off Doris was going to be at him for missing her sister's birthday party.

"Aren't you the Sheriff? What good is wearing that big heavy badge if you can't do whatever you want?"

The badge weighed on Dustin like never before. It made his left man-boob sag distressingly. "You know that's not true, Doris. I'm a public servant. That means I have to sacrifice certain things from time to time."

"Why don't you ever sacrifice your drinking parties with your buddies? It’s only when I have something coming up, something you’ve known about for a year because it happens once a year on the same day, that you suddenly feel the call of duty. The rest of the year you're having one of the deputies shuttle you back and forth between benders."

How Doris found out about his occasional drinking outings was one of the confounding mysteries of women. Dustin covered his tracks thoroughly, even intimidating witnesses on occasion. Still, Doris could outperform any detective on his force, sniffing out a trail of debauchery like a bloodhound. Dustin often said that forensic science was wasted on men. A woman could take one look at a room and know exactly what had gone on there, without needing carpet fiber, blood splatter, or DNA analysis.

"I'm sorry honey but my hands are tied. This is something really big."

"Well you better get a big name lawyer, because there's going to be a messy, expensive diivorce after this."

Doris had been threatening divorce practically from the day Dustin said I do over 40 years ago. Of course, she had never followed through, but the warning still managed to throw Dustin into a funk.

The “something big” Dustin told Doris about didn't seem so big in comparison. It was a word that started with a capital B, all right, but that word was Bullshit. The Feds had Dustin's sheriffs sifting through the innumerable thorn-choked ravines, gullies, and arroyos surrounding Nogales, without telling them what they were looking for. "If it looks human-generated bag it," a particularly robotic, sunglassed G-man named Agent Smith instructed them.

When Dustin's officers toted back Heftys filled with paper cups, cigarette butts, beer cans and used condoms, Smith looked peeved. "I didn't tell you to bring back trash!" he raged.

“You said anything human generated," Dustin reminded him. "All of these items are made by people, including the contents of the prophylactics in those bags.”

"Do any of you hucksters have any brains,” he said, passing his reptilian tongue across his lips. "I mean something good! Don't waste my time on this shit!” He went to listen to the radio in his G-man sedan, pissed and worried at coming away empty handed again.

Armed with this vague directive, the Sheriffs Deputies of Santa Cruz County were driven off into the brush with a heightened sense of purposelessness. As he tilted his Smokey Bear cap up, which had slipped down over his eyes once more because it was a loaner a size too big, one such Deputy, named Prescott, complained. "Hey, I went out there last time.” He gave Sheriff Diesel an injured look.

Dustin Diesel pulled his badge away from his sweaty and beleaguered man boob, affording it some relief, as it was hanging even heavier than it had that morning. "Listen Prescott," he scolded the impertinent rookie. "Someday your punk ass will get some seniority, and you'll get to stand here and supervise. In the meantime I'm the Sheriff, so get back out there before I replace you with another Arizona city. I'm sure Deputy Williams or Deputy Kingman won't complain about crawling through the brush. Step up your game and tone down your mouth."

Deputies Prescott and Wickenburg, quite ironically named for obscure Arizona municipalities no one would ever get right on Final Jeopardy, moved grudgingly down a slot canyon. In the past, Dustin Diesel mused as he watched them sulk away, he would have gladly taken his turn at the grunt work, but the truth was he wasn't feeling too good lately. Just yesterday, while on a drunken hunting jag with the boys, he had missed a shot at a quail for the first time ever. He didn't know what the hell was happening, but his legendary aim was off. His eyesight had suddenly gone a little fuzzy. Luckily, no one had seen him miss, but he was going to have to give up hunting now. if word got around to the bad guys he had missed a shot there was no way he could maintain law and order around here. Every hunkered down hoodlum within fifty miles of the border would come crawling for him from out of the cactus.

Deputies Prescott and Wickenburg cursed and kicked rocks as they labored their way down the rugged ravine. "The boss seems cranky today," Prescott complained.

“Don’t take it personally. He's going through a midlife crisis."

“Midlife?"

“Yeah, midlife crisis, that's what they call it." Wickenburg sounded annoyed.

"Why do they call it midlife crisis? That old fart is more toward the end of his life, if you ask me.”

“That's just what they call it, asshole. Pay attention. Maybe we can find this thing and go home early.”

Prescott got pouty for a while, until he looked up from the rough terrain, not compatible with his spit shined dress shoes, and spotted something halfway up a Mesquite that seemed to merit attention.

“What's that red fuzz up in that bush, Wichita?" he said, pointing upward.

“Wrong state, idiot. I’m Wickenburg."

“Oh," said Prescott, not sounding particularly enlightened by the geography lesson. “Can’t you see that hairy shit in the tree?”

Wiickenburg scrutinized the distant clump. "Some kind of animal fur, I'll bet. There's a lot of wild jackasses out here in the desert. Sometimes they get horny and rub up against a bush. They leave hair everywhere."

“I don’’t know," mused Prescott, "I’ve never seen a red jackass. Maybe we ought to check it out.”

"Hey, dickweed," said Wickenburg. "I got a lot more years on the force than you. Besides that, I'm not touching that fuzz. It could be a biohazard."

Prescott peered at the mysterious, unkempt fur ball in the bush. It didn't look so much like burro hair to him but then again, what did he know? Best to leave it to the experienced experts, like Deputy Wickenburg here. Besides, he wasn’t much in the mood for fingering donkey pubes.

“Anyway,” said Prescott, “That asshole Smith said no trash. That looks like trash if I ever saw it.”

Wickenburg nodded agreement, then they kept moving on up the ravine.

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Image by $1LENCE D00600D, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons

Chapter 17

Table of Contents


Chapter 17

The next morning Michael Gasden woke up to someone banging on the front bell.

The bad part of running a motel, thought Mike as he groaned his way into a sitting position, is that if you want to stay in business you had to get up and answer the bell, even if you were on a bad bender the night before. There was always some asshole customer pounding on the door. The ice machine is broken. How do I operate the remote control on the TV. Is there a Starbucks here.

Mike threw on some sweats and squinted in the nascent sunlight as he looked toward the office window. The clouds were on hiatus until the summer monsoons. There was nothing in the heavens that could challenge the sunlight for supremacy, and the relentless beams took delight in scalding Mike's hungover eyeballs.

A thin man with a thin mustache, wearing spectacles that magnified his eyeballs to ridiculous Anime levels was standing in the doorway, looking indignant. He gave Mike a sanctimonious oh you were sleeping on the job look.

"I would like to speak to the manager please," he said.

"I am the owner."

The man's prissy face dressed down Mike in disbelief. He lowered his prissy spectacles.

"There's a child crying in the room two doors up," he said. "He's been crying for several hours. I think his parents abandoned him. You should call the authorities."

Mike's immediate response was to buzz Tony then go back to bed, but Tony was beyond buzzing. An uneasy realization came over Mike. This man, who he vaguely remembered checking in last night in his completely sodden state, was two doors down from Tony. This couldn’t be. Not even Tony was a big enough bastard to abandon Little Fucker in a room full of poisonous vermin.

“I'm sorry for your inconvenience," said Mike, taking a line from his hoteliers handbook of empty assurances. “I'll look into it right now."

“It really was an inconvenience," said the man, sniffing for something free, a trophy he could take back to the wife and kids and say look what an alpha male your old man is when all the time you thought he was a wimp with these pussy-ass glasses.

"Here's a voucher to the Cornudo Cafe next door," said Mike, handing him a slip of paper through the door, which the man scrutinized suspiciously. It was indeed worthless scrap, the man would never try to redeem it, because from this distance the Café looked like the international headquarters for botulism. "It truly is delicious dining," Mike said with a wink. "I'll look into the disturbance immediately.”

Mike left the office with deliberate deliberateness, because the hawkish dweeb was watching him like a hawk. Meanwhile, he puffed himself up with righteousness, thinking that if Tony had left Little F behind without telling him then he was indeed a douchebag extraordinaire, and he shouldn't feel so bad about chasing him off.

Mike pretended to swipe his key card in Tony's door, then pushed it open with his foot. Little F was sitting up on the bed, his face red and puffy. His arms immediately extended when he saw Mike. Mike hated snot-nosed crybaby kids with a passion, and had made a nearly priestly vow never to engender one, but goddamit when Little F reached out to him like this he no longer felt so goddam alone.

Mike had no nurturing qualities whatsoever, but he somehow knew what to do. He picked up Little F, walked him carefully around the toxic land mines, then put him down again when the child realized he wasn’t abandoned and calmed down.

“Damn, I'm sorry," Mike said soothingly. "I guess that fat bastard went off and left you. Let's go to the office, I'll get you something to eat."

Mike looked outside to see if the prissy prick was looking, then quickly carried Little F around the far side of the building to the office.

Mike made oatmeal and bacon for Little F, then sat him down in a corner of his own room, away from prying eyes. Even though he was technically a Muslim, Little F munched the swine flesh with great abandon.

"You like that pig meat don't you," Mike said, not worried about thunderbolts being cast down from Allah because there wasn't enough water in the air from here to El Paso to make a single thin wisp of a cloud, much less a thunderhead. Not even Almighty God could make a lightning bolt out of season in the Gadsden Purchase. "Stick with me kid, I'll teach you to do heretic right.” Little F didn't yet understand the exact meaning of Mike's words, but he caught the rebellious essence, and smiled.

The doorbell rang again. It was Eagle Beak, back to stick his pointed nose into dark secret places.

"What happened?" the man asked.

"I took care of it. The guy was exhausted from driving all night and didn't hear his kid crying."

“Did you call Child Protective Services?"

"No, why?"

"People like that shouldn't have kids."

"Thanks for being a good citizen," Mike said, and closed the door.

After that, they got busy. Life went on in the Gadsden Purchase. Rooms had to be cleaned, linens had to be washed, walkways had to be swept, the critters had to be fed, all while monitoring the front desk for activity. The latter had usually been Tony's job, but Mike had also installed a camera above the door to compensate for Tony's prolonged bathroom breaks. He monitored the device from his phone.

Still, it was hard for Mike to work and watch the camera, so on the off chance he showed the phone app to the kid, communicating instructions via pantomime, walking his fingers across a table to indicate a person walking on camera. Surprisingly, little Fatwa found this fascinating, and stared fixedly at the phone for hours, forsaking his postcards. He caught on what to do immediately, even picking up a little English, shouting "pee-pull" loudly at Mike when someone approached the window.

The only interruption in this otherwise productive routine was the ominous sounds of helicopters flying back and forth, combing the desert but not with an eye for style, searching desperately for whatever unholy grail Mr. Smith said Trump was missing. With all these birds in the air Mike thought he should move Little F incognito from room to room, so he put him on the bottom shelf of the cleaning cart. Mike suspected that Agent Smith was out there somewhere, spying on him from long range across the treeless flats of the desert.

For two days peaceful monotony reigned at the Motel. Then, on the third day. Mike saw the familiar car of a local dealer pull into the lot. It was an old Chevy Blazer, the kind driven by many of the poor, desperate types in Cornudo, where the empire of Japan and its industrial might had failed to make inroads.

With no one to buzz, Mike had to do the dirty work himself. "You know you're not supposed to be here, Versace," Mike told the kid in the Blazer.

Versace considered himself a player, a self-proclaimed gangster who grew some weed in his Mom's backyard to deal to the truckers and hippie snowbirds who came to town. His real name was Maurice, but he had taken the name Versace to cultivate a playboy image. Although nobody wanted him on their property, just about everyone in town had him on speed dial.

"Just giving the people what they want, bra," Versace said.

"Do it elsewhere."

Versace looked annoyed, but not angry. He was a very persistent type. Like a tick, sooner or later he was going to find a place to latch onto. "Where's your bulldog," Versace asked.

"He'll be back any minute."

“I heard he left."

“You heard wrong."

Versace put the car in gear and drove off. Mike didn't know if the punk had bought his bluff, but the word was already getting around that Tony was gone. For a place where cell phone service was horribly inadequate, news traveled fast.

This incident with Versace and others made it clear that life without an extra body around this place, even an inert lump of grotesque flesh like Tony, was not easy. At the very least, Tony went for provisions while Mike tended the farm. Motels were always running out of provisions. Mike never realized before how much people shit. He couldn't understand how a family of four could go through the four rolls of toilet paper he provided for a single night stay, then call the desk and demand more. He began to suspect there was a secret human-termite hybrid race scouring the nation's interstates, munching up toilet paper as fast as they could get it.

So now they were running out of toilet paper. Mike had no choice but to close the motel and high tail it to Yuma.

Mike and Little F stopped at the Cracker Barrel, where man introduced boy to the marvels of pancakes, gravy, and other food items probably condemned on pain of horrible death by the kid's Islamic faith. After breakfast they lingered in the country store up front, from which the boy wanted nothing except more postcards. Then they crossed town to Sam's club, because in the barbaric backwater border town of Yuma, Arizona there was no Costco.

“You're a little fucking brat," Mike said to Little F.

"Fucking brat," little F agreed. He learned quick.

The shopping spree was uneventful. They got back to the motel with toilet paper bursting the rivets of Mike's truck bed cover, so tightly packed that Tony and a Hooters girl would have been squeezed out like toothpaste through the seams. Mike was thinking he could adapt to this lifestyle. The kid was no trouble at all, crying only when absolutely necessary, and learning things fast. Little F walked fully upright now, having graduated from Neanderthal knuckle-dragging, and had mastered the art of the toilet. He copied the English words he read on the postcards from memory. As for Lisa, once the thrall of her physical presence wore off, Mike didn't think about her much. He just couldn't figure out why she had staged that elaborate exit strategy. Maybe she had been trying to lay the blame on Tony, to appease her own conscience for the break up. Anyway, there was no longer anything but silence from her. Lisa seemed to have voluntarily severed all ties, Mike's Dad reporting that she had moved out of his rental flat.

Now the only person that weighed on Mike's mind was Tony. But there was a lot of toilet paper to unload, so Mike deferred those thoughts until later. Fiddle-dee-dee I’ll think about that tomorrow, he thought, Scarlett O’hara-like. Other events quickly superseded this in priority, for upon that night, Allah got his revenge. Mike didn't know if it was the Cracker Barrel sausage patty or the hot dog from the Sam's Club food court, but Little F's innards were purged of the porcine evil in which he had immersed them. About midnight the boy started throwing up.

Mike didn't know what to do. He could drive the boy to Yuma, but he suspected that Agent Smith and his minions were probably keeping tabs on the medical facilities for just such an eventuality. Still, he had to do something, he couldn't have a kid puking himself to death on his property and besides, he was grudgingly growing fond of Little F. So he did the only reasonable thing he could think of, he scrambled over to the Rosebud to talk to Linda.

Mike silently beseeched Allah, promising he would never defile the boy with unclean food again if he would show mercy. The prayer must have worked, because Linda was pulling bar duty, drawing beer and slapping grabby drunks. Mike wondered when the woman slept.

Instead of her usual sunshine smile, Linda looked grim when she saw Mike. “Did you swallow a stupid pill or something?" she asked with a hand on her hip and the other on the beer lever.

It seemed to Mike that everybody thought he was popping pills - red pills, blue pills, stupid pills, but it was really Little F who needed a pill, and badly. He prepared to take his lumps, for the kid.

"You've got a lot of audacity walking in here, I'll give you that," she said. Mike was disturbed that, for the first time, she didn't refer to him as some kind of confection, blooming angiosperm, or baked good. "You're not the most popular person in town, including with yours truly. Everybody knows what you did."

Mike approached the bar like a penitent to the altar. "I know I screwed up bad," he confessed. "It was all a big misunderstanding. I want to contact Tony, but I don't know how."

“Don't look at me. If that boy don't want to be found he ain't going to be found."

"I need your help. The kid is sick."

“The kid?"

"Yes, the kid. Little F."

“He didn't take the kid? He said he loved that kid. Well, that don't surprise me. Kids got no business going where he's going."

"Tony probably explained to you the situation. I'm afraid to take him to a doctor."

Linda licked her very good teeth, not desert eroded, dust-stained teeth like most people out here. She was either lost in thought of what to do for Little F, or thinking about bouncing Mike from the bar with a shotgun. "It ain't your fault, tastee-kakes," she said. "People around here that are so indignant about what you did never lived a day with Tony. The important thing is you're not a snitch. You've embraced the code of the desert by taking care of one of us. You are one of us. But just to give you a heads up, you are going to have a trial by fire."

The world was okay, she had called him Tastee-kakes. "Yeah, I know what to do," Linda pronounced, "but it will cost you. This guy don't take no health insurance, but he doesn't keep any records either. Everything strictly under the table. I hope you got plenty of cash.”

Mike nodded. "Good, I'll call to set things up. Here's the address in Yuma. You better get going."

Mike drove Little F to Yuma, keeping a keen eye on the boy puking in a bag, hoping most of it landed inside and not on the truck upholstery. But Little F proved surprisingly adept at puking, too, even in the bilious state inflicted upon him by vengeful Allah.

The address in Yuma given to Mike by Linda was in an old neighborhood, even by run-down Yuma standards. The place had a rusty chain link fence and high hedges that were spreading jungle-like to cover the windows. The termite-riddled porch was missing a floorboard, and Mike nearly stepped through it as he carried Little F inside. Mike wondered what kind of voodoo medicine they practiced here.

On the inside, however, everything was surprisingly clean. A hard-bitten, tattooed Mexican man in a wife-beater led Mike across scrubbed, stainless carpet to a spotless examination room in the back. There were no posters of the human anatomy on the wall, no jars of tongue depressors or boxes of latex gloves, but the room had a calming antiseptic smell.

To Mike’s surprise, when this same frightening gang-banger put on a white smock he actually looked and acted like a doctor. When Little F splattered his diaper and the examination table with the fallout, the doctor cleaned it up with clinical indifference, even taking a sample. The man engaged in no bedside banter, only asking the necessary questions and humming gently to calm down Little F. The fact that the boy understood neither English or Spanish didn't seem to be important to him.

After taking Little F's vital signs, the doctor took the stool sample to the back. He came back with a verdict of "Shigella," then administered antibiotics with an injection so skillfully done Little F didn't know what hit him. The doctor then told Mike to give the boy fluids, took off his smock and resumed being a gangster. Mike paid, thanked him, was reciprocated with an indifferent grunt, then headed home.

The sun was creeping over the Eastern horizon as he drove, preparing to deliver an ass-whipping to the eternally scorched earth. Little F finally fell asleep, the lack of shit smell telling Mike he was holding it in. Whoever that doctor was, whether he even had a license to practice or not, he definitely knew his shit, figuratively and literally. He knew his shit from Shigella.

The Interstate flowed down the hill into a desert so bare it was an empty void like space, a vacuum that had sucked the energy and ambition out of many a good man, many a man better than Mike. The freeway had been engineered not to give even a glimpse of the green fields along the Gila, so as to offer no false hope and keep people moving along as quickly as possible. Phoenix and Tucson were mistakes, the freeway builders conceded - they didn't want similar untenable conglomerations of people to occur so close to California.

When you have been up all night scrubbing baby shit, however, the vista was as pleasant as any that were called home. But why was this home? Tony had inquired this of Mike once, while asking what he was hiding from. What the hell was he hiding from? At his current stage of exhaustion Mike wasn't feeling philosophical or introspective enough to answer the question.

The Cornudo/Tacna exit sign appeared like a beacon. This was not a source of contentment or hope for most travelers, but it made Mike happy at the moment. What did not make him happy was the flurry of activity taking place in his motel parking lot, which he spotted even before he hit the off-ramp. His property looked like the staging area for a white trash parade. But instead of colorful, festooned floats and marching bands accompanied by sexy baton twirlers, the parking lot of the Gasden Motel was populated by Eric in his big cowboy hat, standing out even hundreds of yards away, and several members of his rough crew pouring out of their dusty trucks and jeeps, all of them dirty, unshaven, and decidedly unfestive.



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Image by George Baker, about 1875, courtesy of Wikipedia

Chapter 16

Table of Contents


Chapter 16

As he stood there in the Gasden Motel parking lot, being squeezed like a clam in a starfish death grip, the bewitching power of womanhood overtook Mike's resolve. Like the poor clam, he suspected he wasn't going to get out of this without being consumed, digested, and shit out the other end.

Lisa's entire body had adhered to that of Mike. Her arms were entwined about his neck, and her gravity defying legs were wrapped around his thighs in an acrobatic position that is virtually impossible for non-gymnasts or pornstars to perform. The reason why females of the species do not die of loneliness, as many men in exiled, incarcerated isolation do, is because they have the power to receive absolution for their sins by transmitting electro-pheronomal chemical stimulation through their tentacles. This was exactly what Lisa was doing to Mike.

Lisa must have conducted a mind cleanse on Mike, because he immediately lost himself in the embrace and hugged back. The fact that he could feel her wet tears through his T-shirt expedited his quick and thorough defeat.

Sensing herself victorious, Lisa unpeeled herself by degrees, returning to the planetary surface again via the normal laws of physics. "Who's that kid?" She asked, already assuming proprietary airs.

Mike turned to see Little Fucker wobbling beneath the overhang along the front of the motel, wearing a Spider-Man T-shirt. "Oh, that's one of the customer's kids. Give me a second." She had been here about one minute, and he had already gone all St. Peter crack of dawn denial.

"Customers?"

“Yes, we have customers now."

Lisa looked disappointed, possibly thinking Mike would be at the point of giving up this foolishness by now. Mike broke off, took Little F by the hand and scurried him back down to Tony's room. The door was open, and he stepped in to see that Tony had all the critters lined up on the dresser in their jars, cages and terrariums for feeding. The tarantula was tearing into a cricket. A three-toed kangaroo rat named Skip was munching away in a dish of seeds. The scorpion was making short work of a mealworm. Since Little F had arrived, Tony had been keeping that hideous bug's lid closed, a great relief to Mike.

“So the bitch is back," Tony said lethargically.

Mike's brain was already so fogged up with love he was ready to fight over this offense, whereas five minutes ago he would have seen Tony's bitch, and raised him. But something held him back from protesting the insult.

"I just came to tell you to keep the kid inside for a while, just in case."

“Oh, so you can't really trust her, but you still let yourself get wrapped around her finger. That's why women suck.”

Mike couldn’t believe it, but Tony sounded jealous.

“You're a pendejo to get mixed up with her again. She ditched you."

Mike hated it was when people who had no business getting mixed up in his life got mixed up in his life. "Well, I don't remember needing your permission. Besides, you ditched me too!"

Tony pounded his hand on the dresser. Skip hopped. The tarantula bared its fangs. The scorpion raised its tail menacingly. Little F leaped. "I didn't ditch you!"

"What the hell else would you call it? You left me alone in jail in Nogales. You ran away in my own fucking truck. It sure as hell looks like you ditched me the same way she did, or the way you say she did."

Tony was rubbing his forehead. "What does that mean? Explain yourself."

“Explain yourself."

"I didn't ditch you. That's all you need to know."

Mike decided to retreat while the hypnotic thrall from Lisa's return still hovered around him like an opium cloud. He didn't want to lose his buzz, so he backed out slowly. Little F looked up at him with wide, sad eyes. Mike wanted to ruffle the kid's blonde mane but no - he couldn't go down that road. He had to center himself again.

"What was that all about?" Lisa asked as Mike was putting her bags away. She had brought several heavy suitcases along, apparently intending to settle.

"Just some unruly customers," Mike said.

The tenderness of Lisa's Lambeau leap into Mike's arms had already given over to bossy bitchiness, and she hadn't even kissed him yet. "Did you fire your caretaker yet?" she asked.

Barely five minutes had passed, and Lisa had already decided that the emotional energy required to maintain the façade was no longer necessary. “Lisa, I'm really happy to see you," Mike said.

"Didn't you get my message? That guy is a creep!"

"What do you mean? Did he try something?"

"Well, no..." Could that be disappointment in her voice? "But he makes me uncomfortable. He asks a lot of embarrassing questions. He has no filters.”

“He does that to everyone. He doesn’t know any better. He’s a feral animal with no social skills. He won't be a problem. He's in Mexico half the time."

Mike wondered how was he going to explain Little F to Lisa when Tony was in Mexico and he had to take care of him.

"Just fire him. You said he sits on his ass all day."

"That was before. I know now he performs a valuable service. You couldn't imagine how much criminal riff-raff the hotel business attracts. If some pimp or dope dealer tries to set up shop here, I push a button on the wall and Tony chases them off. I can't afford to lose him.”

“Can you afford to lose me?" Lisa squealed. Her eyes got puffy, but remained dry. "Why don't you just sell this shit box and come back to San Jose? I don't know what attracted you to this dump in the first place. I certainly don't plan to spend the rest of my life here."

When people tried to push Mike's buttons it tended to have the opposite effect. Instead of yielding, he would dig in and sometimes say something hurtful that drove people away forever. But Lisa's spell still lingered, so he controlled it. “We've been through this before, Lisa. I'm not going back to San Jose. I hate it there. The people are such goddamm fake assholes I go fucking nuts. I'm through with that.”

Lisa was demanding and unyielding herself, a bitch goddess who had attained her ascendance to Olympus through the adoration of the mortal masses. She had not been this way when they had first met at the San Jose Ikea, he selling cheap Scandinavian pressed wood furniture, she dishing out platters of slightly digestible meatballs to the low budget crowd. In that idyllic phase of the past, they were just two inseparable buddies, making silly faces and tickling each other in the breakroom. The relationship had not yet advanced to boyfriend - girlfriend, because Lisa was a pressure cooker of restrained ambition, and Mike was just a poor slob in a bright yellow Ikea shirt, fun to play with and useful when her computer crashed, or she had to take some bogus programming class she had no interest in. Unknown to Mike, Lisa only had the hots for power and money.

Even so, Mike worshipped Lisa with an impossible, puppy dog love that did not begin to be reciprocated. Then he wrote a foolproof anti-hacking program that earned him a six figure income even before he graduated. Only then did Lisa's tickling attacks grow amorous.

By that time the corrosive effects of ideology were starting to wear away at the strata of Lisa's soul, eroding her personality in the process, her infectious smile tumbling into the dogmatic stream in clods and clumps. Lisa learned in college that humor was a weapon of the bourgeoisie, designed to devalue marginalized groups, so it became very difficult to make her laugh. One thing that did make her happy was Mike's bank account, which blossomed merrily when he sold off his security software for double digit millions. It was only then that Lisa agreed to marry Mike, forgetting that money is a criminal tool in the pockets of the ideologically impure.

Lisa could not quite mold Mike in her own humorless image. She got the feeling he did not really care about persecuted peoples, because she had overheard him laughing at one of his Father's beaner jokes, and he still teased her mother about why there were no stray cats around her Korean restaurant. Lisa's mother contributed to this ideological impurity by asking Mike if he was enjoying the hairballs in his Korean BBQ. Lisa's mother could be forgiven for insensitive hate speech, having been indoctrinated from a young age by the white devil to be a submissive, smiling lackey, but Mike had been ideologically reprogrammed at school to atone for his burden of white guilt, and should have known better.

Despite the glittering allure of dollar signs, there were still chinks in the armor of Lisa and Mike's love, though she would never say chinks. If God were not merely the opiate of the masses invented by the white ruling class, she would have said that one of the chink-, er dents in the armor was that she didn't want to live in this god-forsaken desert. No amount of money could assuage the agony of life in a non-deodorized armpit of hell. Then, had she not been a rabid feminist completely liberated from male tyranny, Lisa would have admitted the second point of contention, which was that she was the sex toy of a fanatical left-wing college professor who made her feel things Mike could not. However, she and the Prof had a recent falling out, which was why she was here, trying to keep her lines of retreat open.

So now Lisa sat silently on Mike's bed, trying to look sexy and sullen at the same time. In the meantime darkness had fallen, and Mike saw a shadow on the face of the parking lot that had not been there before. "Wait a second," he said, seeing an opportunity to delay the Tony argument. He hit the buzzer on the wall, then went outside.

A large black car was parked on the far end of the property, beneath a burnt-out street light. The vehicle had an official look to it, it wasn’t a car that a horny Joe or a desperate tweaker would drive. Where the hell was Tony? Why wasn’t he answering the buzzer?

Mike slinked toward the sedan. The freeway washed in all kinds of flotsam. This could be just a tired traveler who had stopped to take a nap. Mike would knock on the door gently, then kindly tell the driver to pay for a room or get the fuck out.

By degrees Mike's eyes adjusted to where he could discern a man with dark glasses behind the wheel. The driver looked so much like Agent Smith in The Matrix that it was obvious he had cultivated the persona. Nobody that geeky could be dangerous, so Mike quickened.

"This is private property," he said.

“The President wants what you have, Mike," Agent Smith replied in a casual tone, as if his government plates were a parking pass for wherever the hell he wanted to.

To Mike, Nogales already seemed years ago. The incident there was so comically absurd he had shaken it off like a particularly vivid dream, healing over his encounter in that stinking cell with the President-elect like an oyster pearls over ocean grit. Now he realized it was not a shiny pearl, but a stuck kidney stone that had not passed.

"What do you mean?” Mike asked with real confusion.

Agent Smith licked his Reptilian lips, which glowed bright red in contrast to his pale, clammy skin. "Come on Mike. The President doesn't want to do you any harm. He just wants you to come clean and turn over what you have, in the interest of national security. After that, bygones are bygones."

Even though Mike never intended to keep Little F under his roof, and still did not, when people came around trying to strong arm him into doing something he got belligerent. "I don't like you coming onto my private property, clowning around in your bogus wannabe Agent Smith clown costume on the taxpayer's dollar, wearing your sunglasses at night like some stupid 80s music video, trying to push me around. Your routine doesn't scare anyone. Your Agent Smith costume is sad and pathetic. Grow your own identity.”

Agent Smith gave him a toothy lizard smile, then lowered his glasses so Mike could see the thin, pointed, somewhat slanted ovals of his pupils. "Your litany of pulp culture sins is impressive, but I am Agent Smith," he said while flashing his government badge, which was from an agency Mike had never heard of, a department so secret it was a secret even to the people who wore the secret label on their lapels. "This is not a costume. The movie copied me. And if I were you, I would swallow the blue pill and turn over what belongs to the President, so you can get back to the happy lie you were living before, your comfortable illusion. We'll talk again.”

Agent Smith put the car in gear and crept away, staring down an indignant Mike as he made a single slow loop around him. Everybody wanted Mike to take the blue pill and get back to life as it had been before the Gadsden Purchase. He had forsaken that life by swallowing the red pill instead of the blue, in so doing unplugging himself from that Matrix of phony people he had been entwined in. Maybe the Gadsden Purchase was just an illusion too, but it was starting to feel like what Mike thought life should be. No slick phoniness and meaningless mantras, just gritty Darwinism in the desert.

“I wear my sunglasses at night so I can, so I can, watch you weave then breathe your story lines," Smith half-sang half-hissed. "If you change your mind, Mike, and you will, just contact the feds, any feds, and ask for Smith. They'll patch you through."

"I reserve the right to refuse service. Get off my property."

Smith put his sunglasses back on like lifting his colors over the enemy's parapet, then drove away. His car speakers blared the synthesizer intro from the Corey Hart tune into the night, but Mike could still hear the agent's maniacal laughter rising above it.

"I hate that stupid song," Mike mumbled. He hated the frickin Matrix too, and would have run Hugo Weaving himself off the property, as he passed through Cornudo on his way to address the ring-bearers in Rivendell.

As Mike followed Smith's slow, deliberate departure with his eyes, he spotted Tony across the street at the gas station, standing in the illuminated pump area with the old flannel-clad guy who ran the place. The two were engaged in a very heated discussion, gesticulating in exaggerated Latin fashion, but Mike could catch only faint, mostly incomprehensible outbursts of Spanglish.

Mike brushed off Smith and became curious about this, because it was the first time he had ever seen the two talking to each other. The man at the gas station, who Mike had never seen sell so much as a gallon of petroleum, did not frequent the café or the Rosebud. Mike had assumed he was a hermit. None of the locals mentioned him in conversation.

At one point Tony lit a cigarette and passed the lighter to the other man, who lit one of his own before they resumed arguing. Finally the smaller man pushed Tony, Tony pushed back, then turned and started walking to the motel, billowing angry clouds of cigarette smoke behind him. Remembering Mike's California-imported tobacco ban, he tossed the half-smoked butt to the pavement.

Mike waited, wanting to warn Tony about Agent Smith. Tony approached, snorting smoke and fury, but apparently didn’t see Mike through the haze of anger.

"Hey Tony we need to..."

"Yeah I put out my cigarette already. Leave me the fuck alone." He raged back to his room, then slamme XDd the door behind him.

“Asshole,” mumbled Mike. He sulked back to the office, befuddled by the rapidity of what had happened. Just when he thought he understood the Gadsden Purchase, the rules shifted like its ubiquitous sand.

Lisa was standing outside the office door. She jumped when Mike came around the corner. She appeared to be out of breath.

"What's the matter?" Mike asked.

“Nothing, nothing," she said, fidgeting with her phone. "I just came outside for some fresh air. I'm going to take a shower, okay?"

“You’re in the wrong place for fresh air.” He tried to hug her, but she squirted away like a fish and went back inside. Molten magma surged into Mike’s head. This rivalry between Lisa and Tony was fucking up his life. Both of them were acting like little bitches, getting pouty and demanding that he pick a side. If he had to pick a side, he supposed it had to be the one wearing his ring.

Mike sat on the lawn chair outside the office with one of the leftover beers from the golf game. He let his anger evaporate into the dry desert air as he surveyed his creation and saw that it was good. Maybe tomorrow he would get Lisa and Tony together for a fence mending round of dusty desert golf. That had seemed boring at first, but had turned out fun. Maybe the cure for Lisa's dogma disease was some pointless fun. Maybe that would bring the old Lisa back, the one that used to lie in wait behind the lockers in the Ikea breakroom, then pounce on him for a sneak tickle attack.

Summer was coming. The temperature had hit 90 today for the first time, on its way to infinity and beyond. The mutated, alien bugs bouncing off the light fixture at night were the point men for an ungodly host to come. Would he still want to stay here, during the sweltering sauna of May through September?

Mike thought that with enough liquor and air conditioning he could ride it out. Daily trips to the Rosebud, to take comfort in the heartening swell of Linda's bosom and to profit from her boundless encouragement, her reassuring words uplifting him like her firm tits, might help him get through. Even Tony, though certainly a jerk at times, could help him endure, if he and Lisa could learn to get along. That was a big if.

A horrifying scream from inside burst the rivets of Mike’s peaceful reverie. Ever mindful of the shower scene from Psycho, which did indeed take place in the Gadsden Purchase, Mike rushed inside to investigate the disturbance.

He found Lisa rattling like a boiler that was about to explode, yanking her clothes up about her and springing out of the bathroom.

“What happened?" Mike yelled. "What is it?" Lisa could not speak. The only communication she managed was a wild gesture toward the bathroom as she threw her blouse and jeans over her still waterlogged body.

Mike crept into the bathroom. At first he perceived no signs of danger but then, even as he heard the squealing tires of Lisa's Prius fleeing the Hitchcockian nightmare of the Gasden Motel, he spotted a shadowy figure on the floor by the wastebasket. It was Tony's scorpion, poised with its single outraged claw extended in self defense.

The Arizona desert is certainly afoul with creeping, slithering, repugnant beasts, and it wouldn't be the first time that an arachnid of the species Paravaejovis spinigerus had wandered into a human habitation, or even into the hallowed cigarette stained hallways of the Gasden Motel itself. But this scorpion was not some random orphan that got lost on its way home to its cool, shady rock beneath a Palo Verde tree, this was an unmistakable member of Tony Vargas's mutilated menagerie, fingerprinted by the damning missing claw.

It took a moment for Mike to decide between running to smash Tony in the face, or rushing into the parking lot to stop Lisa, who was peeling away from the Gasden Motel forever, polluting the atmosphere as she fled with toxic synthetic rubber fumes from the squealing tires of her eco-friendly Prius. Mike considered that the terms and conditions of his engagement required him to chase her, but even now his damnable obsession with tidiness would not leave him in peace. There were unattended loose ends in his bathroom, namely a scorpion running around freely.

He couldn't leave the bug to its liberty, but he couldn't bring himself to smash it either, so he grabbed a plastic cup from the cucumber water dispenser in the lobby. Then he realized the ugly little booger would suffocate in the cup, so he ran into his kitchinette, grabbed a knife, and punched air holes in it. Following this, he crept back into the bathroom on tenterhooks, found the scorpion in the same defiant posture, and eased the cup over it. This done, he went through the motions of rushing into the parking lot but of course there were no signs of Lisa, not even a bread crumb exhaust trail from her smokeless green engine.

She was gone, gone forever Accepting the futility of pursuit, Mike stormed toward Tony's room with murder in his heart. Tony always slept with the door open, never running the air conditioner. But tonight he wasn't sleeping. He was sitting on the bed, as if waiting for Mike. As if knowing what was about to happen, so thought Mike.

“You scared her off, you evil prick," Mike raged as he burst in without knocking. Little F was asleep at Tony's side.

“You’re going to wake the baby. What are you yelling about?"

"Don't fuck with me you lying asshole. You put the scorpion in my bathroom."

"Scorpion? There's a shit load of scorpions around here and you better get used to it. This is the goddamm desert."

"I'm not going to let you hypnotize me this time with your BS. It was your bug, the one with the missing claw. Are you going to tell me there's a shit load of scorpions with missing claws too?"

“My scorpion is right up there on the dresser, for your information." Tony turned toward the dresser, but the jar was gone. "Holy shit, where the fuck is it?" He got up and began prowling around the room, not so much to appease Mike but because he looked worried about his bug.

"Get out of here," Mike growled.

"What?" Tony said, not so much for clarification as because he was genuinely distracted by his missing pet.

"I want you out of here in five minutes. This is the last straw. You've completely fucked up my life, and I want you gone."

Now Tony gave up searching among his specimens and turned toward Mike. "You fucked up your own life. You're better off without that puta pendeja but you're too stupid to realize it. But don't worry. I wasn't planning on hanging around anyway. I'm tired of babysitting your pampered, pathetic, shall I say pussy ass. Talk about bugs, you got one right up your ass. Maybe that's where my scorpion crawled, up your ass. Ever since you got here you strut around like you're royalty and we're your dumbass peasants. I'm sick of it. I'm out of here."

"Five minutes."

“Make it four."

“Good."

“You'll regret it."

"I doubt that."

Mike walked back to the office. He did not look back, but grabbed another beer from the refrigerator to take out on the porch. Passing through, he somehow noticed through the anger lying over him like the shroud of Turin taking an indelible image of the crucifixion of his soul, that all of Lisa's luggage was gone. She had fled the scorpion in the bathroom dripping and half naked, but had prepared her luggage in advance. What did that mean?

Mike scrambled around the apartment for clues. The trash bag in the bathroom was missing, which Mike thought strange, because Lisa was a spoiled slob that never cleaned up after herself. Mike ran out to the dumpster with a flashlight and a broom in hand, and after a bit of jabbing around with the broomstick found the trash bag with the bug jar in it.

"Bitch played me!" he shouted into the empty, unresponsive desert air. Only a chorus of frogs peeped back their shared outrage, from puddles unknown, unseen. Mike often wondered how fucking frogs could survive in the fucking desert.

Lisa had planted the bug. She had realized she could never adapt to life in this dreary shithole, and had planted the bug so she could blame Tony for making her freak out and run. There were other reasons for her abrupt departure as well, which everybody close to Mike could see, but he remained blind to.

Mike swallowed his pride so hard he nearly dislocated his larynx. Existence was too fragile out here in the desert. Linda was right, he couldn't make it here alone.

So like Scarlett O'Hara groveling back to Rhett when she realized Ashley was a big pussy, Mike ran around the corner to catch Tony before he could get away.

It was too late. The Love Machine was already clunking onto the freeway. Mike recognized the sound of its failing valves half a mile away.

Mike Gasden was alone in the Gadsden Purchase.

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Image by Acrocynus, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons