Chapter 24

Table of Contents

It seemed that Mike Gasden was no longer alone in the world. His Father had taught him that the way of women my son, is that they will thwart you at every turn. Lisa had supplied ample corroborating evidence for his Dad's theory. But now a woman had shown up upon Mike's doorstep who appeared to support him, not thwart him, in complete opposition to accepted principles. She not so much darkened his doorstep as illuminated it in a pleasing glow. Dare he believe it was for the good?

What else could he do but roll with it? His dick had already roadblocked the highway of good sense.

"What do we do now?" Mike asked Marisol, looking down at the boy.

"We just act normally," she said. There was the we thing again. Mike liked it. How long before he fucked it up?

"I heard you had a girlfriend. When is she coming back? I don't want to be a problem."

"She's not," Mike said.

Marisol looked over her shoulder at unseen phantoms, maybe expecting Lisa to barge in and bitch slap her.

"That's over," Mike added.

Marisol put Little F down on the bed. She looked antsy. Little F picked up Mike's cell phone and began pushing buttons on it.

"Can I ask you a favor?" she said.

"Sure."

"Can you show me my Uncle's critter room? I always wanted to see it."

"Of course. Let me get Little F's cart. We call him Little F by the way, short for Little Fucker, or Fatwa. We don't know what his Allah-given name is. We tried to call him Al, short for Aleppo, where we think he comes from, but it never stuck."

"That's horrible," Marisol said. "You can’t call him Little Fucker. You will scar him for life. I will call him Al."

"He won't answer to it. I'll get the cart so we can push F over."

Marisol put her index finger on her lower lip. "It might be better if we go alone. It seems like he takes care of himself."

Mike shrugged. He was suck a nerdy schmuck he didn’t read anything into her desire to go alone. In many ways, these hucksters in the Gadsden Purchase were a lot more sophisticated than he was. "Of course. He's the most amazing low maintenance kid I've ever met. I used to hate kids before Little Fucker. He changed my mind. He'll keep his nose in that phone for hours."

Three minutes later Marisol was sitting on the bed in the critter room with Mike, removing her top.

"I'm not a slut, Mike. Well maybe a little, but only with guys I like. I like you. And I like doing it in freaky settings. The thought of doing it in here in front of the hundreds of eyes of these animals really turns me on." She was already on top of him, dangling her beautiful breasts in his face.

"Do I need..." Mike hesitated.

She stopped a moment, withdrawing her tits from his mouth's reach and ceasing to grind. "Mike, there's something I need to be up front with you about before we go any further with whatever this is. I am physically incapable of having children. I am damaged goods. I'm not expecting you will pop me the question, but you need to know that."

Mike lay there limply, but did not go limp. He had never wanted children. With the exception of Little F, an adult trapped in a child's body, he hated little snot-nosed brats. He even suffered self-loathing over the fact that he had been one, once. But now that he was getting naked with the chick he dug more than anyone, ever, he couldn't help but experience a twinge of disappointment that if he did decide to settle down with this woman, they would never reproduce. There would be no Mike clones.

"Thanks for being honest," Mike said. "My biological imperative is protesting, but I'm still game."

"I want to feel your biological imperative in me."

"This sounds like a line from a bad porno movie," Mike laughed.

"My specialty." Mike didn't know what that meant, but she offered no explanation, and heretofore there was no more what could be called intelligent conversation for a while, only the most rudimentary form of inter-vertebrate communication, via a series of grunts or single syllable phrases.

So they rutted just like the critters surrounding them would, while these looked on dispassionately, not perceiving anything out of the ordinary. At one point Marisol slowed down her piston-like strokes just a bit, so Mike told her there was a snake under the bed, which there very well may have been. This sent her into renewed, spasmodic gyrations that were infinitely superior to the half-hearted twitching made by Lisa in between yawns. Mike’s ex had been fond of reciting cock-blocking segments of her feminist manifesto during the reproductive act, to remind him not to overly exploit her body with his invasive white male member. In contrast, this was having sex for the first time. It was surreal, other worldly, performing in this amphitheater of the grotesque. Marisol had superb muscle control and no inhibitions. But the pleasure went well beyond the mere physical act of sex. In addition to stimulating the reptilian centers of gratification in Mike's brain stem, Marisol accessed places in Mike's soul that were previously untapped. He was in love, in other words. He thought he had been in love before, but he had not, not even close. Mike thought Marisol was in love too, when she looked down with tender brown doe eyes and caressed his cheek. This was not fucking, it was making love.

It was impossible to say whether the bugs and the beasts or even the little one-legged freetailed bat Sylvester were voyeuristic on some level. Were they enjoying the show? Were they titillated or disgusted? Who could understand the reptilian, arthropod or non-primate mammalian mind?

The performance ended in an explosive crescendo that purged the bilges of Mike's soul.

"Is there really a snake under the bed?" Marisol asked after the flood, by way of pillow talk.

"That's the big mystery. A snake got away, and we can't find it. It's either one of the poisonous kinds or isn't. What does red on yellow mean? I also can't find the big jar of mayonnaise Tony was eating. I'm afraid it's going to spoil and stink up the place."

"Do you think the snake ate the mayonnaise?"

The pair debated the eating habits of reptiles while laying in shameless nakedness on the bed. They held hands and chatted about nothing in particular, as if they had been lovers for years instead of minutes. Then, as if a timer had gone off, Marisol got up and started putting her clothes on.

"Back to work," she said, like she owned the place. Mike found he didn't mind.

Marisol returned to cleaning rooms and this time Mike went with her. He would deal with Herr Müeller's medals tomorrow.

The pair was already in perfect synchronization. Marisol did things the way Mike wanted, without having to be told. She was industrious and energetic, and did not sit by pontificating, as was the wont of her Uncle Tony.

In this way they continued for the few days, cleaning and making love at least four times a day with the insatiable passion of newlyweds, sometimes under the scrutiny of the critters, sometimes wherever they felt like. In the evening Marisol would dutifully return to her Uncle's house. On the mornings after, after giving Little F his breakfast, they would begin again in earnest.

"There's some more things you need to know about me," Marisol said post-coitus one day, as they lay breathless on the bed. "If I didn't care about you I wouldn't bother but I really care about you, though I'm afraid to say love."

Mike propped himself up on one elbow. "I'm not afraid to say it. I love you."

"You're like a stray dog that follows the first handout home. Don't say love until you hear what I have to say. You might change your mind."

"I don't think so, but go ahead."

Marisol got quiet and began breathing rhythmically, winding her spring. "I got involved in some really bad shit," she started. "It began when my Uncle got me a job as a makeup artist in Los Angeles. Yeah, that's the career that I chose in all of my Val vapidness, makeup artist."

She took a few more breaths to steel herself. "I don't think my Uncle knew the guy I went to work for was a creep. I have to tell myself he didn't know, because how else can I keep what little bit of self-respect I have, living under his roof? Anyway, it turns out the place I was working for was a porn studio. I was going to spend a lot of time powdering pussies, instead of noses."

Mike laughed. "Don't laugh until you've heard it all," she cautioned. "You might not feel like laughing at the end of the story. When I found out this jerk was a Porn King, I should have run. But I didn't. Instead I hung around, thinking I'm not doing the porn, what's the big deal? That was a big mistake."

"From the beginning this guy Saul, that was the asshole's name, began to suggest not so subtly that I should do porn. He said I had the body for it. I kept telling him no, absolutely not, but these creeps have ways of wearing you down."

"He got the porn girls in on his twisted scheme. Misery loves company. They had their little porn parties in the studio. They start off innocently enough with booze, then they offer you this and that little pill, next thing you know you get giggly and you're going down on somebody. Of course, somebody films it and puts it on the Internet. What, you want us to take it down? Too late now. What are you going to do, call the cops? You really think they'll believe you, a little whore? So someone writes you a big check and you think damn, that was easy money. The drugs they give you in copious supplies kind of ease the guilt, Next thing you know you do it again, of your own free will, and the money beats nine to five at Wal Mart and you can sleep late, so just like that you're not a makeup artist anymore, you're a porn star. They even gave me my own porn name. I couldn‘t think of anything so they literally had me pull one out of a hat. Can you believe they have a hat filled with slips that have porn names written on them? Thàt's actually someone's job, brainstorming porn names. I chose Hannah Heat. My porn name was Hannah Heat. Pretty sexy,right, or is it skanky?"

She kept looking over at Mike while she told her story, maybe to check he was still there. "Eventually I was so spaced out that they convinced me to do hard core. They turned me into a little cum bucket. The worst part, the most humiliating part, is that nobody really twisted my arm. I could have left anytime, but maybe I liked being hot. Maybe I was proud of my AVN best three+way award. Maybe I was stoked that I got all the way to number 23 on the Porn Hub rankings. I'm still at 46 two years after I quit. A girl can't help but feel a little buzz about something like that. A girl can't help but get a certain sick thrill that millions of guys are jacking off to your image."

"But sick I was Mike. I was mentally ill. And then I actually got physically ill. I caught a disease and I lost the ability to have children. I don't want to go into details but no, I am not infectious. I suffered in the hospital for weeks. Not once was I visited there by my business associates. They are all a bunch of frauds. The girls hate you because you are competition, the producers because you are no longer useful to them. Nobody wants to watch a diseased porn star. My family also disowned me. The only one who came to visit me in the hospital was my Uncle Danny. He came and picked me up and brought me here. That has been a mixed blessing, because everything has a price. Now you know my story. What do you think?"

"I think I don't care," said Mike. Marisol sat up and leaned over him in her glorious, statuesque nakedness. "You didn't even think. What do you mean you don't care? How could you not care?"

"I mean what I said."

Marisol slapped him. "Liar! I'm damaged goods! I have no character! I have no pride! I let people ravage my body for a paycheck and liked it! How could you not care? You have no character! You have no spine! Tell me I'm a whore and be done with me! That's what everybody else does! Why not you?"

Mike rubbed his cheek. She had slapped him hard. It was no love tap. This girl was dangerous. "Why are you trying to get rid of me?"

"Because I don't deserve you. You're too good. I'm a jellyfish with no backbone. If you weren't so good I wouldn't care, I would stay and swallow you up in my jellyfish tentacles. Dump me Mike."

"I can't. I love you."

"That doesn't make any sense."

"No it doesn't. But it's true."

"You grabbed me on the rebound."

"Maybe. But I still love you."

Mike took her into his arms and she sobbed deeply. He was squeezing out two years of deep pain as if wringing a sponge. Mike made gentle comforting sounds but did not try to lecture or advise her. "Take me," she said at length.

"Later," Mike answered.

"Tell me something. Be honest."

"What?"

"You haven't seen any Hannah Heat porn, have you?"

Mike blushed. "Well, I admit I've seen as much porn as the next guy, but never any Hannah Heat porn. I was mostly into Asians."

"Mostly? I hope you're telling the truth, because I couldn't face you if I knew you had seen it. Promise me you won't search for it, out of curiosity."

"I promise. I don't want to. I want to think of you like this, alone here with me, or the three of us eating breakfast together, like a family. Besides, my cock is pretty much all milked out. I couldn't fap if I tried."

"Good." She spanked his floppy member and rose out of bed. "I have to go. I'll be back. My Uncle needs me to help him with something."

Mike watched Marisol walk away across the parking lot. She walked differently now, no longer skittering along like a cat scampering for cover, with her head ducked down low as if someone was going to beat her with a stick. Now she glided, her feet hovering a millimeter above the asphalt, flattened palms extended at right angles for stabilization, head tilted loosely, languidly to one side. Her feet did not appear to move but somehow she progressed.

She was walking for Mike, and Mike only. No woman had ever walked that way for him before. At one point she glanced back over from where she floated and fluttered her fingers at him by way of goodbye. His soul would die of hunger before he saw her again, he thought, but at the same time a fire burned in the hearth of his heart that would keep him warm whether that next meeting was in five minutes or five hundred years.

Mike saw Danny come out when she reached the gas station. She gave a little nod, and Danny met her with a wide beaming smile that made him look like a different person. Mike had never seen him smile before. He couldn’t help but wonder what that exchange all about.

As Marisol faded into the distance Mike came back to Earth and went to check on Little Fucker. He felt bad for abandoning the boy, so he sat him up on his lap and hugged him a little. He had never done this before. He shouldn't be doing it now. Why was he attaching himself to things that the inexorable desert wind would erode away?

The bell rang in the lobby. Mike made the be quiet gesture to the boy with one finger, which was unnecessary because the child was the soul of silence. Little F made the same gesture back at him, having learned the art of sarcasm.

Danny Valero was standing outside with a grim expression. He's going to murder me for banging his niece, Mike thought. Danny was as wrapped up in May as he would have been in January. His flannel shirt was buttoned up to the top, gangster style.

"Hello Mike. I just thought I would stop by to see how Marisol is working out." There didn't seem to be any hidden warning in his words. If he had any inkling about how intensely Mike and his niece had been going at it it didn’t show.

"She's great," said Mike. "She's a big help. Please come in."

"I'll get you coffee," said Mike. His visitor rubbed his hands together and blew into them, like he had a chill. The thermometer outside said 104.

"That would be great," said Danny. "Nice place. You fixed it up nice. Josef let it go a little."

Mike handed his guest a steaming cup from the Keurig, then sat down. "You did me a big favor the other night. My computer runs great now. Thank you."

Mike doubted the old clunky computer was really running great, it was just running less shitty than before. "You're welcome," he said anyway.

"Kind of chilly today. We're having a cool spring. I can't get these old bones warm. Now you know why I live out here in the desert. Say, I wanted to talk about something."

Mike tensed a little. Here was the crux of the matter. Serious people like Danny Valero didn't make social calls, they only came on business.

"We got a real problem out here on the border," Danny said. "There's all these criminal organizations running around preying on innocent people, making their lives miserable. Some of us stand up to them but they never go away. They just wait until somebody weaker comes along, or they move on to the next town. The cops don't do anything about it because a lot of the cops are on the payroll. Who can blame them? It's not an easy place to live."

Danny took a sip of coffee, wrinkled his nose, and set it down. The brew he was used to resembled the sludge dumped from the drip pans in his gas station garage, in both consistency and taste. "Well at least it's hot," he said. "Anyhow, me and some of the other parishioners at St. Joseph set up a charity. We call it T.I.B which stands for Take It Back. We want to take our homes back from these bastards, Mike. Are you following?"

Mike nodded without enthusiasm as he hunkered down behind his own coffee cup. "There's only way to hurt these guys, Mike, and that's in their pocketbook. What we have decided to do is go after the websites they use to conduct illegal operations, then siphon this money to our charity so we can help the people who really need it - people down on their luck who lost their jobs and can't pay their mortgage or feed their families. That's what we're about, Mike."

Danny's eye slits showed almost no white. The solid orbs behind them burrowed deep into Mike and made him squirm. "The people I'm talking about going after, Mike, are real cretins. Not your garden variety criminals in the wrong place at the wrong time, but real heinous individuals. We're talking murderers for hire. Dealers of dangerous drugs. Human traffickers. People who kidnap kids for pedophiles. Snuff film makers. These are the kind of people I'm talking about, Mike. All of them operate on the dark web. Do you know about the dark web, Mike?"

Mike was as insulted, like he had been slapped. No doubt Danny had asked the question intentionally, to push Mike's buttons. "Of course," he snorted over his coffee.

Danny crossed his flanneled arms. "Will you help us, Mike?"

Mike was hesitant. He suspected Danny was no Mother Theresa, dangling for sainthood by sticking it to the evil villains that preyed on the little guy. Mike wasn't worried about getting caught - he was worried about getting in too deep with this man, remembering the thugs in the SUV who had chased the Frontiersmen from his place. But then again, Marisol owed a debt of gratitude to her Uncle here didn't she? A troubling shadow of a thought flashed through Mike's mind that he declined to give form to.

"So you want me to hack these people, don't you? Who are they and how many?"

Danny reached into a flannel pocket and took out a list he handed to Mike, who scrutinized it briefly. There were about twenty names on it, but one was conspicuously missing.

"The creeps who hijacked my motel are not on here," Mike said.

Danny looked down at his shoes. He was wearing black high top Converse All-Stars. Nobody wore those anymore. "Too close to home and too many friends in law enforcement. They are scumbags, no doubt, but bide your time. They will go down, sooner or later. In all likelihood, they will just self-destruct."

Danny spoke as if Mike had already agreed. Maybe he could read the mental processes in Mike's mind as they played out on his face. The wheels were turning, the bug was back. He was already thinking about how he could carry this out. "I'm going out of town for a couple of days. May I borrow your niece to run the motel?"

"Of course," said Danny, without hesitating.

"When I get back, I'll see what I can do."

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Image by Peter Paul Reubens, public domain via Wikipedia