Chapter 20

Table of Contents

Chapter 20

If there is one thing a tech nerd cannot condone, it is having his computer skills called into question. Racoons get trapped because they cannot resist the allure of shiny objects, nerds get trapped because they cannot resist the adulation of being the king geek.

Danny Valero stood at the edge of the Gasden Motel parking lot as if it was a DMZ he was waiting for a pretext to cross the line, some Gleiwitz incident schemed up to attack Poland. As he waited he teeter – tottered restlessly on the balls of his feet. Mike looked at Danny, then over at the Cornudo Cafe, then back at Danny.

“Hey, I understand if you can't. .." said Danny.

To Mike the word can’t was throwing down the gauntlet. On paper he was a multi-million dollar software entrepreneur, but at heart he was still a hacker. A computer operating at less than 100 percent efficiency was an affront to his sense of geeky duty. Tony had told him this guy was bad news, but it was hard to distinguish how he could be any worse news than Tony.

Danny stepped in before Mike could answer. “I know my brother might have said some things about me..."

Mike staggered backward so he had one foot in the Café parking lot, and one in his own. He felt like he was straddling a fault line that could swallow him.

“Do I know your brother?" I'm sorry, I'm a little new in town."

Danny laughed and looked down at his feet, his hands stuck firmly in his flannel pockets. "Tony is my brother. Well, half, we have the same mother."

Mike could not read anything from Danny's expression. His face was an inert granite statue, like he had crawled down from the face of some sand-blasted desert Rushmore. "I didn't know he had a brother," said Mike, at the same time he was thinking he could understand how Tony could get on the outs with family members.

“No, he don't talk about it. Hey, if you got something..."

Mike looked again toward the illuminated island of the Café. Bugs flitted through the glow of the high lamps surrounding it, their numbers, size and ick factor increasing with each day the Gadsden Purchase moved toward summer. He yearned to take refuge there with Linda's reassurances, meaningless though they may be.

"No, it's not important. Let's go have a look."

Danny led Mike across the street toward the gas station. Lonely lights moved down the freeway that was ever in the background, some advancing white, some retreating red, but there was no traveler intrepid enough to risk a sojourn in Cornudo tonight.

They skirted around the gas station and over to Danny's house, located directly behind it. The sputtering bulb on the porch revealed a dingy, cracked, faded and rickety domicile. Mike doubted there was such a nicety as a building inspector in Cornudo, where people surrendered their property over to the elements way too easily. To Mike, this place had been stamped out of the same warped cookie cutter as that doctor’s house in Yuma - the yard featuring the same invasive weeds, and the walls displaying the inexplicable drip tracks that are eerily unnatural in a land without water. It was if the wall stucco itself had melted in the summer heat and formed dreary rivulets. On the outside the place looked barely habitable.

But on the inside the residence had a cozy, well-kept appearance, attesting to the fact that desert dwellers, from the tiniest furry mammal to upright walking monkeys, reserve their energy and thermo-regulating reserves for the interior of their burrows.

Mike followed Danny inside through a solid screen door, the one part of Cornudo abodes that had to be in good repair, to keep the bugs out. In the foyer beyond Mike observed crystal figurines on a curio table. Healthy house plants hung from hooks in the ceiling. Family photos of which none, oddly enough, featured Mr. Danny Valero, were displayed in ornate picture frames. Doilies were spread across end tables and the backs of sofa cushions. The place definitely spoke of a lady's touch, but Mike had never seen the mystery chick.

The riddle was soon resolved. As Danny led them further into the interior, Mike beheld the eclipsed half-moon face of a young lady watching television in the darkened living room. Of course nerdy Mike first noticed the really crappy TV therein, one of those legacy tube types that must have been stolen from a museum. It had to be the last of its species on Earth, a lonely Passenger Pigeon in a zoo. Bad technology always offended Mike, and he thought he detected an apologetic look on the female face that turned toward him.

This is my niece Marisol," said Danny, looking at one and then the other in turn as if sizing them up for breeding, like a horse farmer. The very slightest of smiles, ambiguous in purpose, creased Danny's lips for the first time.

"I'm Mike," Mike said with his eyes half on her, half toward a hiding place on the ceiling. He was admiring her smooth caramel skin and large harbor seal eyes while trying to look like he wasn’t. He was smitten. This was the homely girl peeking out the window?

“Very nice to meet you," said Marisol.

“Some people call her Solita," Danny said as if reading it off a list of expected pleasantries he could never remember, "but that's almost as hard to say as Marisol, so just call her what you want."

Mike was enchanted. Her name was hard core Catholic-Hispanic, Maria de la soledad, but Marisol was all California. Her English lacked the just crossed the border yesterday flavor, and her voice had that lilting Valley Girl tone common from Ventura to points south.

Danny seemed to approve of Mike's intrigue. "Mike is from San Diego too. You two should get together sometime and talk about whatever it is people from San Diego talk about. The beach. The zoo. Sea World. You know.”

"That would be nice," Marisol said, a meaningless melody that sounded like a sweet symphony when she said it. Like everybody else in the Gadsden Purchase she looked bored out of her skull, just wanting to talk to someone different. The TV wasn't helping her boredom much. Mike could not discern any cable or satellite box attached to it. The picture was fuzzy, as if it were beaming in from somewhere deep in Mexico.

"You know a lot about me," said Mike to Danny.

Danny shuffled and looked at his feet again. “My brother," he said.

"I didn't know you guys talked much."

“We keep in touch. You want to go look at the computer?"

In his hypnotic infatuation with Marisol, Mike had forgotten about the computer. Danny escorted Mike to his miserable old laptop on the kitchen table. It looked almost as obsolete as the television.

"What's it doing?”

“Well, when I try to go on the web all these weird links come up all over the page. If I run my mouse over them this thing called Binkiland pops up. Where the hell is Binkiland?"

"It's in your computer, but we will declare war on Binkiland. I know exactly what to do. I wrote a program to clean this out not long ago."

Danny gave a humorless laugh. "Solita, why don't you make some coffee for our friend?" There was immediate shuffling and stumbling in the next room. "Don't trip over your feet. Dang, here you are dissecting computers and that girl can't even tie her shoes. No wonder I can't auction her off.” He wasn’t smiling.

Mike sneaked a look toward the living room as Marisol got up. He noted she had a fine figure, leggy and curvaceous, quite unlike Lisa and her oriental Lolly physique that was more weathered Appalachians than majestic Rockies. Up until now, Mike thought he preferred Lisa's semi-androgynous look, but now he wasn't sure. Marisol was all woman. The only thing she shared with Lisa was her cute pigtail.

Mike could see where Danny and Tony were brothers, because they both liked to dish out smartass remarks. The difference was that Danny’s barbs were decidedly more sinister, designed to wound, not just tickle and discomfit. A scorpion versus an ant in the waistband.

Mike invaded Binkiland. Binkiland was a dangerous worm but Mike was a bird with a very long beak. He probed through the substrate of the app files and pierced the sticky mud of the registry. Danny sometimes pretended to be interested in what Mike was doing but mostly sat in the kitchen, sipping coffee and taking counsel with his own thoughts.

“How are things going over there?” Danny would ask at regular intervals.

Danny had the kind of eyes that could tune into the invisible wavelengths of the human brain. He saw lies visibly when they flew out of your mouth. Mike could sense that.

“Not too well, honestly."

"What's the problem?"

"Uninvited guests. At the motel.” Mike regretted saying that immediately. Danny couldn’t do anything and it just made him sound like a pussy.

Danny nodded and put down his coffee. "Let me see if I can make a couple phone calls." He got up and disappeared into a back room.

Mike felt reassured, though he had no real reason to, and this made him descend into the vital innards of Binkiland with renewed vigor. At the same time he experienced a Faustian-like feeling that he was somehow selling his soul, or perhaps selling out on Tony. He cast this irritating thought aside, preferring to focus on Binkiland.

This was difficult to do with Marisol was sitting in the next room. Mike's hormones buzzed her direction like she was a bug zapper.

He didn't know why he should feel this way. She wasn't his type of girl, he was fond of flat-chested squinties. Perhaps it was something about Marisol's vulnerability that turned him on. There were secrets buried in her bosom, and he could detect them with some inner seismograph as her ample breasts shifted like tectonic plates in response to her uncle's commands.

Danny came back out of the back room, interrupting Mike's meditation on Marisol's heaving bosom. Mike was realizing for the first time he liked tits, his reaction being like when he ate guacamole for the first time, after rejecting it for years because it looked disgusting.

Danny asked how it was going.

"Just about done."

"I got a friend who is tight with those guys. They're not bad guys, they just assume that since you a white guy here in this endless bean field that you will be sympathetic to their cause."

“They trashed my motel. I'm not here for a cause, I'm just trying to run a business. Thanks for the help."

Danny made an empathetic gesture of tilting his head to the side and raising his eyebrows. "Why did you come all the way out here to run a business?"

Mike was tired of this question, and got a little snippy. "I could ask you the same. Why do you stay here, trying to run a business when the big interstate corporate truck stops are plowing you under?"

Danny's eyes retreated somewhere deep into the past, to a place where there were lingering remnants of a soul that had survived the corrosive action of sand and sun. "Oh, believe me, there's still good business to be had in the desert. The desert is a beach where everything washes up sooner or later. Most of it crap, some is valuable. Most of it is just rotten kelp buzzing with flies, but some of it glitters. The trick is to keep your eyes open for the valuable and not get drowned by the crap. You, son, are valuable. I can see that. You can do well here."

Mike felt uncomfortable, like a pedophile had just asked to watch him masturbate. "I'm done. Your computer functions now, but it's an old piece of shit, if you don't mind my saying. There's only so much I can do for it. You need to upgrade."

Danny winced as if he had been slapped. What was that Mike wondered. Danny thanked Mike and extended his hand, but didn't get up. Mike got up instead to take it. Danny didn't say thank you, or how much do I owe you either. Mike would have rejected any attempts at payment, but most people still asked, out of politeness.

"Hey Solita, why don't you see Mike out."

This time Marisol glided off the couch with exaggerated grace. There wasn't much seeing out to do, but she walked him to the front porch. Mike felt a tingling thrill just having her next to her. He grew bold.

"Why don't you come over and have a cup of coffee and see the place sometime,” he asked on the porch.

"I'm on a short leash," she said, and nodded toward the house, "but I'll try. " Her gentle smile gave Mike hope.

Marisol shut the door softly. A harsh slam would have indicated don't come back but this was like an invitation. Mike floated from the porch into the street. Up above, an Al Quaeda cell of bugs cast themselves with suicidal fanaticism against the dull yellow street light, which would not surrender. Then Mike’s phone lit up with a call from Little F. "Pee-Pul," the boy said. Mike quickened his pace back to the ugly reality of the motel.

From the top of the parking lot Mike saw a large dark SUV in front of the rooms where the FF members had so snugly, or smugly, ingratiated themselves. Two large, lean Hispanic men returned from the motel back to the SUV as Mike approached, then drove off. There were sounds of groaning and swearing as the rooms spat out the foul contents of their innards. The rather tattered, unwashed affiliates of the Freedom Frontiersmen, steadfast in their determination not to emancipate themselves of their desert dust in Mike's clean bathrooms, filed out into the parking lot, boarded their various four wheelers, and drove off. Just like that, the Gasden Motel was liberated.

The night felt lighter, less oppressive. Mike checked on Little F, gave the boy a snack and put him to bed. He felt bad about having him cooped up all day, but had he known the circumstances of the tyke's upbringing, being cooped up day and night in an Aleppo basement with dozens of others, he would have understood that the amount of freedom the child had now was almost a sensory overload.

Mike checked the rooms formerly occupied by the FF, and found them relatively non-ransacked. He would have to change the sheets, possibly burn them for humanitarian reasons, but it wouldn't be the major stem to stern overhaul required after their last courtesy call.

He looked over at the sleepy Rosebud, wondering if the occasion called for celebrating. The look of the goons in the SUV gave him the unadmitted feeling he was just swapping one set of thugs for another. That lot certainly didn't look like preschool playground monitors, but right now he didn't care. He had to take one victory at a time, and was relieved to get rid of the present infestation.

Mike alternated his eyesockets back and forth between the prison yard floodlights of the Rosebud and the soft halo above the house where Marisol lived, debating whether he should go for a drink or not. At length he decided he didn’t want to jeopardize this happy moment rubbing elbows with pathetic drunks. No doubt about it, Mike Gasden was in love.

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Image from Mk2010 courtesy of Wikimedia Commons