Chapter 17

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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