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The assemblage gathered in the clearing of the Tamarisk grove gave the impression of a hastily convened wedding party, the mixing of two feuding families, with no dearly beloved we are gathered together, but more like a gunpoint roundup of two members caught in an unauthorized tryst. Mike was the reluctant groom, being pulled at gunpoint from a cookie cutter gangster SUV to make an honest woman of a parturient bride waiting at the altar, this being Marisol. Little F filled the role of Love Child, and the funereal dressed Danny Valero seemed poised to perform the nuptial rites. But contrary to the dignity of his vocation, he delivered a swift kick to groom-Mike’s rear that sent him toppling face first into the sand.
If Mike Gasden had known anything about football in his androgynous, appeltini world, he might have thought that Danny's rather effective right foot could have filled a place kicker vacancy for many an NFL roster. But because he had grown up a chronically sports challenged computer nerd, he was left without an analogy to describe what had just happened to him.
"So you thought you could steal my niece and kill my people!" Danny roared, then he kicked Mike again with the toe of a highly polished dress shoe, hard enough to cause intense pain but not hard enough to break anything. How does he keep his shoes so clean in all this dirt, Mike wondered as he lunched on dust.
"He didn't steal or kill anybody!" Marisol shrieked, motioning with a clinched fist, her hands having been left unrestrained. "I went with him on my own. I killed Sal. You're a beast. Leave him alone!"
Danny shuffled toward her with his own fists clinched at his sides. "How much did he pay you, you little whore?" He was clearly going to strike his niece. Mike took advantage of the distraction to roll toward Danny in the dirt and intertwine his legs with his, making Danny stumble and fall to his knees. Marisol then took advantage of Danny's compromised position to kick her Uncle Dear sharply in the chin, demonstrating that the skill set ran in the family. Danny fell back stunned before his goons could respond but got up quickly, dusted himself off and waved away the goons.
"I'm going to kill these two myself," he proclaimed.
"Don't do anything impulsive, Danny!" A loud voice declared from across the clearing. It was the narco by name of Vasquez. He and his men had moved in quietly while the riverside wedding was taking place. Danny's two watchdog goons,now laying garroted in their final resting places beneath wispy Tamarisk branches, had been rendered unable to sound the alarm. Danny Valero was an efficient killer, but he couldn't do everything himself and the cartel could afford to buy slightly smarter, slightly more stealthy goons.
Vasquez himself didn’t look the role of hardened, cold-blooded, cartel chieftain. He gave off the smooth, well-groomed vibe of an educated, urbane, civil servant Latino, a throwback from the days when affirmative-action was still strictly enforced and the sky was the limit as far as promotions for his type were concerned. "Is this your computer whiz kid? It's pretty clear you can't handle him,” Vasquez said. “Hand him over to us, Danny. We know what to do with him."
"He's mine," Danny growled.
"You were just about to kill him," Vasquez remarked. "Why waste all that talent, especially if he's loaded. You don't know how to treat your assets, which is why he should be taken away from you. Let us have him and maybe the boss will call it square."
"Per the franchise agreement my people are at my disposal," said Danny. "This kids skills are mine alone to decide what to do with."
"Yeah, but you're messing him all up, Danny, kicking him around like that. You really think he's going to want to work for you now? I know these kinds of nerds. They run from violence of any kind. You have to stroke them, tell them they're great. You keep them under the illusion they're living in a perfect world full of video games and comic books. All you got to do is pump them up with donuts and energy drinks and they’ll work all night. Hell, they get such a hard on when they successfully hack someone you barely gotta pay them. They're real pendejos when it comes to business, but who cares? By the way Danny, did I mention that the franchise agreement has changed?"
A voice from a wireless device buzzed in Vasquez's ear. If the big boss found out he was wired to a Fed he may as well bury his own dead ass beneath one of these Tamarisk tombstones. "Where is our item?" Agent Smith's voice said to Vasquez through the static. "Does he have it or is he just playing games? If he doesn't produce dispose of them as you see fit."
"I'm afraid we're taking your hacker before you beat all the good hacks out of him," said Vasquez, trying to keep his face blank. "Now where is that other... thing. Hand it over."
Danny gestured toward the Little Fucker. The boy was standing in his overalls, leaning against Marisol's leg, looking over at Mike in the dirt with more weariness than fear. He was thinking that for a while the world had been fun, life had approached the happiness he heard about in the songs his mother sung, songs rendered with a touch of sadness in her voice. Knock Knock, Who's there? I am the wind, open. I miss you my loved ones. Who could know that his mother would go away on the wind, with the dust, back to the place where the wind began.
How could a happy song be sad? Little F asked himself. To Little F this was proof that at the end of the day, sadness always won. Why should he stay in a place where sadness always won?
"What are you talking about?" Vasquez spewed angrily, breaking his cultivated character as he looked at the child. "Who is this fucking kid? What the hell is going on here?"
On the other side of the river, Tony Vargas was thinking that from the railroad bridge he would have a good shot down into Danny’s conference clearing. Maybe he could get a good vantage there without technically crossing the river. Would the inner demons that controlled his unnatural phobia be appeased by this compromise? How did he know? How many times had he put it to the test? The one time he tried he had to be resuscitated in a hospital. He was young then. He wasn't young now.
The mere sight of water seriously freaked Tony out. When he did laundry he dropped the clothes in backwards. He ate off disposable plates to avoid doing the dishes. The little it rained around here was enough to make him hide in the closet with his headphones on, surrounded by his critters for emotional support. Taking a bath was a grim ordeal that he endured only because he was a lady's man, and a lady's man can't stink. When he had to bathe he filled the tub about two inches, then used a cup to rinse himself. He always came out shaking and dizzy, so if he didn’t have a date he preferred not to risk it. The good thing was he didn’t sweat much, only in the butt crack region. Eventually his fear of water got so bad he tried bathing in beer, the only liquid his body could tolerate. This worked okay but got pricey, and he hated to see good beer go down the drain.
Only an aquaphobe like Tony Vargas could truly love the desert. People always asked him how he got this condition. Did you drown in a swimming pool, some moron inquired. “No you fucking idiot, would you be talking to me now if I drowned in a swimming pool?” Did your momma drop you on your head in the bathtub when you were a baby, a drunken imbecile said before Tony broke five of his teeth out. This was the kind of idiotic interrogation Tony had to endure his entire life. The truth, according to his mother, was that the first time she tried to bathe him Tony kicked and wailed like he was dying. After that she had to give him sponge baths. Tony had been born with an aversion to water programmed into his genes. So every day he thanked sweet Jesus, the blessed Mother, and the three or four saints he thought could kick his ass that he had been dropped into a place as God-awful dry as the Gadsden Purchase.
Tony tried to remove all aqueous thoughts from his head as he climbed the gravelly, rock strewn embankment that rose to the rickety bridge. His arthritic ankles and knees cringed and groaned as he strained his way on the poor, slippery footing. He had seen some movie where a bunch of kids had almost been run over trying to cross a railroad bridge. If a train came while Tony was up here there was no way he could get his fat ass out of the way in time, like a kid could. But what a bitchin way for a railroad guy like him to go, huh? Too bad no trains had used this line since 1996. He would rather die epic, getting run over by a locomotive, than dying of fright from water like some little pussy.
The bridge was a big metal cage atop concrete pilings. It had been built to withstand a deluge, but the flow beneath it was fickle. There were some cloudless July days when a gushing muddy torrent would come raging down here, fed by monsoon rains so far away you couldn't even see the thunderheads that produced it. Then there were days it was such a feeble trickle you could cross in flip flops and not wet your toes. Slimy, muddy rivulet or biblical inundation, either way Tony was terrified by the prospect of crossing the stream.
Somehow he kept his head as he set foot on the rusty trestle, which was scorching to the touch in the July heat. As he navigated the bridge, Tony tried to suppress his damp thoughts and focus on the semblance of the Little Fucker, but it didn’t work. The river was at low ebb, barely a drip, what Wikipedia would refer to as a "dry rut," well below its "historic flow." With a twinkle in his eye, Josef had often related to him the story of the German prisoners of war who tried to escape confinement in the desert by running down the Gila in a homemade Kayak. They had been rounded up and caught after finding out they couldn't paddle through sand. In other words, the Gila wasn't really a river anymore. There were suburban gutters that had a higher flow on lawn watering day. But no matter how many times Tony repeated this to himself, and thought about Herr Mueller's great escape, his legs turned rubbery as he staggered and stumbled across the ties.
Tony shuffled breathlessly to a place where he thought he would have a commanding view of the meeting. He propped Dustin's rifle up on one of the steal beams and swept the Tamarisk on the opposite bank through its sight, but from here he only caught the top of one of the SUVs. He clambered onward, wondering why they built so much bridge if all it bridged was sand. Maybe they should just build a bridge across the whole fucking desert, he thought, so no one would have to look at it. Why had nobody ever thought of that?
He went forward a few dozen more feet, until he reached the point where the sand ended and the thick brown oozing muck that was the mighty Gila began. He stopped again to survey the opposite bank. He could see a semicircle of parked cars there, and the occasional hairless head of a gangster thug moving among them, but it wasn't enough for a single good shot, and he knew he would have to make several good shots.
Tony stopped for a moment and leaned heavily against the rifle. There was not going to be any way to do this except bust into the clearing with guns a blazing. Meanwhile, the murky seep of the Gila taunted him below. He could hear it. Yeah, I may not be much of a river anymore, asshole, but I'm enough to stop your fat ass, because you're not much of a man anymore.
Ouch. Tony's expansive panza heaved with worried breaths. He felt lightheaded and weak. He was going to have to get over this shit. Nobody ever died just crossing a fucking river. Well, a lot of people had drowned that way, true, but there wasn't enough water in that stream to drown an ant. Then, with a wide grin, an idea came to him that turned his ugly mug handsome. I'll pretend it's beer down there, I'll pretend the Gila is a river full of beer! Tony loved beer. For all of his unnatural aversion to water in its unaltered state, he was fine with beer, he was down with beer! He looked at the Gila and replaced the mud with a foamy hoppy head. He visualized a clean amber pouring along that sandy spigot. It worked! The Gila was now a river of beer, just like the one in heaven awaiting good Christians when they died, like Father Luke had promised if he would go to mass once in a while.
With the delicious pale ale of the Gila bubbling beneath him, Tony crossed what was left of the bridge and emerged on the other side. He had done it! There was nothing to it! He had crossed the river, just like he had said he was going to do when he was ready to move on. Well, he was moving on, one way or another. But instead of going into epileptic convulsions or foaming at the mouth with seizures he felt renewed, invigorated! He was ready to kick some ass!
On the far shore, Tony worked his way carefully through the tamarisk. Down here in the thick grove he could see nothing yet, but he could hear angry, urgent voices. One of them sounded like his brother. He guided himself closer by the sound, which gradually became more heated and intense. He didn't care, he felt invincible. The oxygen on this side of the river must be better, purer. How was it he had chickened out of coming over here all his life? In High School his drunk friends had crossed the Roll Bridge in the middle of the night, back when trains still ran on it. Tony had declined, and they taunted him mercilessly, calling him a pussy. He sat calmly waiting in the moonlight, listening to the haunting cry of the coursing poorwills, then kicked all three of their asses one by one when they got back. Moral of the story? - Nobody got away with calling him a pussy.
Tony found a downed willow that had been uprooted by flood and clambered up its denuded trunk, which rose at about a 30 degree angle. From there he could see the clearing perfectly. He saw Mike, Marisol and Little F, side by side like one of those cute sticker families you see on the back window of people's cars, except on those decorations one of them is usually not face down in the dirt, with a sticker gun pointing at his sticker head, like here. "Danny what you gone and done?" Tony said, then propped the sniper rifle on a branch. Steadying his aim, he put his brother's head directly in the cross hairs.
"Shit!" Tony growled. Danny had that crazy thyroid eye look he got when he was really angry. Tony knew Danny was dangerously impulsive when he got like this. But although his finger hugged the trigger tight, he couldn't shoot him. Maybe he was cycling through typical big brother memories about Danny - Danny holding his hand, Danny taking him for ice cream, Danny telling him stories, every word of which he believed because Danny was his big brother, and he lived in awe of him. Maybe he was thinking of the kind, gentle Danny taking meals to shut-ins with him, then sitting around with the old folks, talking and holding their hands. But no, he wasn’t thinking any of that, because there were no such big brother memories on some mythical lovely, shady, flower-lined la la land lane of recollection. Danny had always been an asshole to him. Always had been, always would be.
What Tony was really thinking about was the year of the flood. The year when an irrigation damn overflowed, and an irresistible surge of muddy red water ran unchecked through Cornudo, turning streets into gullies. How old had he been then – three or four, he couldn’t remember, but he definitely remembered finding himself in waist-high water that hit him from nowhere while crossing the road, and he remembered feeling his legs coming out from under him from the force of the torrent, and he remembered thinking This is it, se acabó, when Danny rushed into the stream and pulled him to safety. After that Danny had beat his ass good but had not killed him, like the flood was planning to do.
He couldn’t do it. He couldn’t kill his own brother. His finger eased off the trigger.
Then a bullet rang out from somewhere else and Danny Valero's head exploded, right there in the crosshairs.
Just a minute or two before Tony took aim from a treetop, Danny Valero's eyes had been bouncing and spinning in their sockets as he ranted and flailed about with his handgun. Marisol hid Little F as best as she could behind her body but as for Mike, there was no cover whatsoever. Much as he wriggled into the dirt like an earthworm, there was no amount of burrowing that could get him away from Danny's craziness.
"Who's this kid, you mean who is this kid, with no F word!" Danny raged. "Don't come into my house and profane it with your filthy mouth. I warned you about that. WHO is this kid? You know who. This kid is the one you're looking for, the one that everyone is looking for! Don't play stupid with me. Acting like you don't know who the boy is doesn't mean you'll get him for free!"
Trying to crane his neck up out of the dirt so he could breathe something besides sand, Mike found himself rooting for Vasquez across the way. Something had snapped inside of Danny. That calm, emotionless, harmless looking old timer he had first seen sweeping the gas station parking lot had turned into a dangerously unhinged fiend, pointing his loaded gun at everyone in turn.
"You're the one playing stupid, Danny," said Vasquez. "This little boy is not what we want. Looks like you don’t really have it, which also means you are blowing smoke out your ass about this computer whiz and his mega millions. You've lost it Danny. You can't be trusted. Your franchise is terminated."
Danny turned toward Vasquez with a John Brown Tragic Prelude, wide-eyed scowl of wrath. "Don't say ASS! How many times do I have to warn you not to use profanity in my presence! Franchise, you say! I'm not the one taking franchises around here! I'm the one giving them! No one gives me permission to do business in my territory. I give the permission! I am the Gadsden Purchase! You say this little boy is worthless to you. Well then he's worthless to me too. I got no use for him, so I'll just bury him. I’ll bury them all! Let's see what you can do about that!"
Danny stormed toward Marisol, who was desperately squeezing the Little Fucker behind her. Even now Little F refused to cry. He knew this moment had to come sooner or later. Now was as good a time as any to go back with his mother.
"Step aside, you whore!" Danny shouted.
"Don't do this Uncle, I mean Uncle dear," Marisol pleaded. "He's just a little boy. He can't hurt you. You always said the life of innocents should be protected. Let him live."
"I decide who is innocent. No one here is innocent! You have all betrayed me! You have no right to call me uncle anymore. Now get out of the way before I kill you first."
"Good. Kill me first. I'll fall on him and you'll never get him. Kill me. I'm the one who betrayed you."
"Don't do it Danny," Vasquez warned across the way. He didn't care so much about this lady or this kid as much as he did about keeping this situation from getting out of control and attracting the attention of law enforcement.
"You stay out of it. Don't tell me how to discipline my family." Danny raised the gun on a level with Marisol's head, and that was when his own head exploded. It exploded not so much as a soda can explodes through the lid straight up, but as a watermelon does in scattered chunks, when smashed with a mallet by Gallagher or one of his bad drunken imitators. The effect was too sudden to inspire any emotions - neither outrage, sadness, or even relief.
Danny's outgunned goons were already running for their cars as Vasquez lowered his weapon. "Round them up!" he shouted, and it was the last thing he said, a curious epitaph for his unvisited tomb, as his own head exploded like a mushroom puffball.
Laying face down in the dirt, Mike did not have the best vantage to observe the proceedings, but he knew human beings were dropping around him from gunshots. From this view it was hard to keep score, to know if the bad guys or the good guys were winning, or even who the good guys and the bad guys were. He had already escaped once today, and the odds were a little unrealistic to think he and Little F might escape twice.
As Mike flopped helplessly like a beached fish on the sand, Marisol took a moment to ponder her uncle's lifeless body and wonder if she was supposed to feel sad, because she didn't feel anything. Then, during this briefest of moments when she thought she should recognize her Uncle's passing, she only thought about his gun. She lunged for the discarded pistol and prayed that it was really loaded.
"Get down behind the bad man, Little Fucker!" she yelled, and lowered the boy behind the unmourned meat pile that was Danny Valero.
Across the clearing, Vasquez's goons were proving to be more resilient than the flighty ones of Danny Valero. Perhaps the consequences of failure scared them more than bodily harm. So instead of hastily retreating, about a half dozen or more were moving toward Marisol, charging with their fallen leader Vasquez's injunction to round them up. They came buzzing out of the brush one by one, like some sort of swarming vermin unique to the Tamarisk, moving in on Marisol. The fiery-eyed lady, however, was not much in the mood to be rounded up. She stood like a textbook photo of proper handgun shooting stance, from which pose she aimed and hit the first goon square in his center of gravity. But more were coming, and even Annie Oakley couldn't have brought down so many goons in so little time.
Marisol was thinking she would go down in a blaze of glory when an unexpected thing happened, which was that instead of an irresistible quantity of goons rushing in to overwhelm her, they were dropping in place, seemingly of their own accord. One goon fell with half his head dissected, another flopped limply to the sand with an ugly exit wound in the side facing Marisol. Somebody was shooting, and shooting skillfully. The only explanation was that the cops had somehow gotten wind of this rendezvous. While this was not the most ideal source of assistance, she thought what the fuck any port in a storm, which was, ironically, the title of one of her most popular porno flicks. Then she turned her attention back to the goons.
The goons had been thrown into considerable disarray and confusion by the unexpected assault from behind. Smelling betrayal, one uncharacteristically bright goon knelt down over Vasquez's inert carcass and began probing his clothing, all the while using the fallen leader's body for a barrier as bullets continued to whiz by. "He's fucking wired!" the perceptive goon shouted. "Mother Fucker sold us out! Get out of here!"
Unfortunately for this goon, being uncharacteristically bright was not enough to save his life. As he rose to take flight, a bullet from the mysterious sniper in the Tamarisk took him back down. Now all the goons were abandoning the battlefield in scattered, disorganized retreat, but both Marisol and the secret sniper in the trees kept shooting because, to quote the military maxim of Confederate General Nathan Bedford Forrest, you have to “keep the skeer on ‘em!" Marisol had never read any military manual, she had never been drilled in assault tactics, she had embraced this truth instinctively, and very quickly.
Although the goons were on the losing end of this skirmish, and over half a dozen of their soon to be rotting cadavers lay scattered about, the ultimate outcome of this encounter in the tamarisk remained uncertain. With the clearing now de-gooned, Marisol swiped a knife from a body, knowing that these gangster types always carried a long blade to compensate for their penis anxiety. Surrogate phallus in hand, Marisol now sliced through Mike's bonds and helped him to his feet, though he hesitated for a moment. With all the bullets buzzing about he seemed to have taken a liking to being low on the ground.
"You were fucking bad ass," Mike congratulated Marisol as he turned his face upward and remembered with nostalgia that there was a blue sky. "Where did you..."
"Shut up," she said. "I never want to do anything like that again. I just want to forget about it."
Marisol carried Little Fucker into their circle and the three locked tight in a blood-splattered embrace, because who could tell if after today they would see each other again. They had survived, but the feds were after Mike, Little F was an illegal alien, and Marisol had just murdered several men. Even though the men were only useless, soulless, unloved goons, this still counted as murder in the eyes of the law.
Then, as the three were entwined in this inseparable starfish death grip, the secret sniper came into the clearing, brandishing his rifle at the hip, the business end now lowered safely toward the ground.
"Hey guys," Tony said. "Can I get a hug too?"