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.

NEXT >>


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.



Next >>

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.

Next >>

Image by Acrocynus, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons

Chapter 15

Chapter 15

Table of Contents


One common characteristic that people passing through the Gadsden Purchase, or having the misfortune to live there, both have taken note of is that time does not touch it. The chronology of Civilization has completely altered the face of most of the rest of the planet, but civilization has only passed through the Gadsden Purchase, as if it is in a hurry to escape the suffocating wasteland on the way to a beach cottage in San Diego. The proof of this is that the only notable works of engineering in the region are transportation corridors, none of which either terminate or begin there, the notable exception being Interstate 8. But the I-8, like many a desert stream, grows despondent of its unsustainable load and eventually fizzles out in the middle of nowhere, better known as a spot southeast of Casa Grande.

The only humans who have settled in the Gadsden Purchase are those who service the transportation corridors, and these only reluctantly and fleetingly, departing for a better place just as soon as they have accumulated enough loot fleecing bug-eyed, hallucinating, head bobbing travelers. Some would cite the legions of snowbirds in sprawling trailer parks as evidence against this assertion, but the frost-adverse migrants are also only passing through, just taking longer to do it, waiting for the thermometer to rise above 50 in their much more agreeable homes in Northern climes before getting the hell out of hell.

The only person who was condemned by confining watercourses to stay in the Gadsden Purchase forever was Tony Vargas, and he was making the most of it. To say he liked it there would be a stretch, but one couldn't say he disliked it either, because he had no frame of reference to compare relative levels of like and dislike.

Tony had inherited, or rather expropriated the clunky old Ford Explorer Mike had bought for a lifeboat in Nogales, and he used this on frequent forays to Tucson and all points between the Gila and unspecified points south. Mike left the vehicle abandoned in the parking lot and Tony had taken the liberty of getting it tricked out by a cousin, who removed the back seats to turn the rear compartment into a love nest. The rust bucket was now adorned with thick carpet, curtains, a mini bar, and plush cushions worthy of a Turkish Sultan’s harem. The Explorer soon became known around the neighborhood as The Love Machine, and Tony did nothing to discourage this. To compliment the fuzzy dice hanging from the rear view mirror and the playboy bunny ears on the dashboard, he thought about actually painting Love Machine on the side in bold letters, but that would be in bad taste.

Noting that he had seemed distracted for a while, one day Tony talked Mike into golfing with him at the local links, located within the property of the RV park. To make it sound exclusive, Tony claimed to have an "in" at this club. Mike had been here long enough, however, to know they could replicate the same effect by hitting golf balls into the desert from the back of the motel, since said “course” was essentially a vast expanse of sand, with clumps of cactus for hazards. Reversing the rule of practically all golf courses everywhere, the sand was the fairway and the vegetation the traps. In spite of the degree of difficulty involved Mike agreed to go, although Tony insisted they fortify themselves with a cooler full of beer and Mike's fruity flavored girly drinks.

Tony and Mike would be hooking up with golf buddies who had Saturday off, so they left Little Fucker with Aunty Linda. Because of strange but stern doodlings the boy made on the wall of Tony's deranged den, Mike had taken to calling him Little Fatwa. To Mike, the bold, accusing proclamations seemed spookily similar to the letters on the postcards, but how could a child barely walking be writing already? Mike was certain these were just crude baby attempts to copy letters, but Little F would gesticulate toward them and righteously rave in his incomprehensible language, so that Mike said he was issuing fatwas. From then on he called him Little Fatwa, but Tony still called him Little Fucker, never being able to, or never wanting to distinguish between Fatwa and Fat Ass.

Hal Owen was already on the golf course, leaning on a club around the head of which a small dune was forming from the breeze. He and Tony high-fived and exchanged a chest bump bro hug. A few minutes later the lights of a sheriff's car were seen flashing their way up the road. Sheriff Hal Owen emerged from it wearing a white golf hat, ivory white pants and a fluorescent orange polo shirt that stretched across his belly like the expanding magma dome of St. Helens. Everone exchanged friendly expressions of goodwill that were bound to change to accusations of cheating and other underhanded dealings once they started swinging clubs.

How you doing son?" Dustin said to Mike, clutching his hand in a bone breaking grip. “Did you make it home okay?” His light-hearted tone implied that Mike’s sojourn in Nogales had involved nothing more serious than a Sunday School picnic.

You look like a fucking Easter egg in that get up," said Tony. "How did you get away from Doris?"

It wasn't hard," Dustin said. "There's so much crap going on down by the border that I just told her I had to set up road blocks. The area is swarming with Feds in helicopters. They're doing something so secret they won't even clue me in on it. I'm just responsible for blocking off the search area. It's so gosh darn stealthy that nutcases from all over the country are showing up thinking it's a UFO crash."

"Well by the time you get done golfing she's going to think you were rolling in the dirt with your girlfriend. Who the hell wears white in the goddamm desert? You look like fat Arnold Palmer."

The golf game got underway, but everyone needed a little while to get warmed up. Instead of raising divots while they found their swing, they lifted up clumps of sand that turned into little dust devils in the breeze. Tony laughed himself purple because Hal's shots kept falling short of the greens, which weren't green at all but just more desert, with long ocotillo ribs marking the holes. In contrast, Dustin Diesel had a powerful stroke but no finesse, and kept overshooting the pin. Mike, who did not want to play at all but was strong-armed into doing so by threats of incarceration or deportation, kept slicing in random directions, one time knocking an unwary Cactus Wren off a Mesquite. Only wobbly-knee Tony had a smooth stroke, hitting the ball effortlessly into putting distance every time.

As the beer was guzzled down, everyone's stroke smoothed out and the quality of play improved. Tony lubricated Mike with beer, insisting that his pussy drinks wouldn't grow enough hair on his nuts to help his swing. The strategy seemed to work, because Mike began to sneak up on Tony, becoming increasingly tenacious and competitive until they reached the final hole neck and neck. Then after hitting the ball into a creosote bush, Tony made an illegal drop so obvious that even Mike noticed it, and he didn't know squat about the rules of golf. Tony wound up winning by a stroke.

"You fucking cheated," said Mike. “You practically threw the ball into the hole.”

"Sorry boss, course rules," Tony answered.

"You change the rules every time," said Hal, and Dustin nodded assent, but everybody was too buzzed to really care.

After the game, as they stood leaning on their clubs in wobbly fashion downing more brew, Hal Owen remembered something.

"Hey wait a minute. While I got you all here, have any of you seen this woman?"

Hal pulled out a flier that had an artist's rendering of an olive-skinned woman with large doe eyes, full sensual lips, and lovely scissor eyebrows. Although she was dark skinned, there was something undefinable about her that said she was not Mexican.

"If I had seen her, she'd be in back of the Love Machine right now," Tony bragged. "Who is she?"

"She might be the reason the border is crawling with Feds as we speak. We suspect that this woman is part of a terrorist plot, and is carrying messages to terrorists inside the United States."

"Why are you fucking up the golf game with work, Hal?" Tony complained.

"Hear me out," Hal said. "This will just take a minute. This woman crossed the border in my sector. I think the Feds are barking up the wrong tree looking for her over by Nogales. An illegal we scooped up warned us about her. She said the woman was carrying postcards containing messages for a terrorist cell in New Jersey. She had a small boy with blue eyes travelling with her. Our witness claimed she crossed the border on foot, but may not have made it, because she and the boy just disappeared into the desert."

Dustin said "These terrorists got so many ways of communicating on the computer and social media, why would they send messages on postcards with a lady traveling on foot? That doesn't make sense to me."

Mike looked over at Tony, who looked bored and peeved that Hal was ruining the fun talking shop. Somehow this attitude stimulated Mike to become protective of Little F.

"Maybe you're right," Hal agreed nervously. "But we would like to talk to her or find out what happened to her all the same. I think I'm on to something big here."

"This is why I'm glad I got no women in my life," Tony said. "Dustin here has to sneak out to the goddamm desert to have a beer with the boys, and you Hal have to chase shadows to keep getting promotions, to satisfy Mrs. Bates in the house up the hill from the loony motel. This isn't even in your jurisdiction, is it?"

"Well, not technically, but..."

"So let it go, bro. Let the FBI chase this bitch. Now look what you did, you ruined the party. I'm out of here."

On that sour note the gathering dispersed, but now came the fun part. Because Dustin Diesel was a Sheriff of great integrity, his conscience would not allow him to let everyone get away with driving drunk on home. That would be corrupt cronyism, of whick he would have no part. So in the time it took him to relieve his bladder beneath a Palo Verde tree and stagger back to his patrol car, he gave everyone a head start to their cars. After that his driver deputy would head off in hot pursuit of the offenders.

It was an exciting game that had resulted in a few near crashes and several DUI arrests over the years, but no one took it personally. It was the price of admission.

The Love Machine would not start the first couple of times the key was turned, and Dustin Diesel actually got his zipper up before Tony and Mike got away. Fortunately, Tony knew a bumpy back road through the desert. It almost took out their oil pan, and Tony had to stop once to hurl out the window, but they made it.

Back in town, they went and picked up Little F in a hurry. Tony whispered some words to Linda and she nodded eagerly. Little F smiled happily and on the way back to the motel showed off his new stack of postcards.

"That's Little F's Mom, isn't it, that Hal was talking about?" Mike asked as they drove, and Tony nodded. "What do you think happened to her?"

"I think the vultures are picking her bones clean in the desert."

"Look, we have to do something. We could be in a lot of trouble here."

Tony became angry. He was pissed off sometimes, but rarely angry, and it made the Love Machine rattle harder. "You don't know what will happen to Little F if they take him away, I do. Leave the boy to me."

"What does that mean? You scooped the kid up out of the desert and now you're going to keep him locked up in a cage with the rest of the critters? How fucked up is that?"

"Either way, he winds up on a cage. It's better to be in a cage with people who love you."

Mike had to think about this. Did the affection and protective devotion they felt toward Little F really constitute love? Had the boy somehow ingratiated himself into his own impenetrable heart? A child was definitely not part of the business plan, but somehow these three outcasts, uncomfortable and unwelcome in the environment in which they had been spawned, were now orbiting about a common gravitational center in which Little F was the sun.

I get what you're saying," said Tony. "I really get it. I know this situation can't last like this forever. But you've got to give me some time to work out a plan."

Mike threw his hands up in defeat. He went back to his own room, threw his feet up on the bed, and began scrolling through his phone notifications. There were half a dozen texts or Facebook messages from Lisa that he had not responded to. "R U alive?" with a smiley face emoticon attached. "We need 2 talk - I ❤ you" and the like. All of this made Mike want to hurl, just like Tony had lost his cookies on the bumpy desert road. He didn't want this faithless female who had left him rotting in prison to wriggle her way once more into his heart, via cutesy emotions and other sneaky feminine devices.

But then he scrolled to the bottom of the list, where he found an emoticonless message that made him think, a dangerous impediment to his determination.

"Look, I know you're angry and I don't blame you. The truth is that I wanted to go back for you, but that sexist bigot you have working for you was making me really uneasy. I was hanging around anyway, trying to see if I could get any information about your whereabouts, but Tony told me I better get out of town and let him take care of it. I went back to the motel but your friend showed up a couple hours later, drunk and acting really sleazy. I got scared and didn't know what to do, so I drove home. This is the truth. Please call so we can talk about it. Love U."

Mike put the phone down on the bed. Drunk and sleazy? That part was perfectly believable, but if it was true why had Lisa not told him this story from the start? Why had she waited so long to contact him and then, once she finally did, leave this very plausible explanation for last? Bitch was lyin', he concluded.

The next morning things were back to their usual state of monotonous normalcy at the Gasden Motel. Mike hit the buzzer, and Tony came out and beat up a pimp who was trying to pander girls in the parking lot. Tony had to admit that he earned his keep sometimes. After the pimp was disposed of, Tony went back to his room and Mike didn't see either him or Little F the rest of the day, so he spent the late morning and early afternoon tidying up rooms, folding toilet paper ends into neat little triangles, and the like.

Mike was lugging a load of trash out to the dumpster when he looked around the corner to see a Prius pull into the parking lot. When the driver saw Mike, the car steered away from the office, over to where he was standing with the garbage.

The driver of the Prius skidded to a stop, then sprang out and ran in his direction. "Mike!" Lisa shrieked, and threw her arms around him.

Next >>

Image from fergizmo.blogspot.com

Chapter 14

Table of Contents

Chapter 14

Perhaps other languages, being more cautious of blasphemy, don't have an exact translation for holy shit, but as the pagan tongue of a people that claims to be Christian but freely and legally encourages practices like usery, warfare, gluttony, and other deadly sins, English indulges in no such niceties. Holy shits are flung around freely to splatter on people and things indiscriminately, with little or not afterthought for the ugly stain they leave upon one’s own, or the splaterees soul.

After propelling his own Holy Shit bomb through the now befouled ether, Mike looked at the short stack of five postcards that Tony handed him. These were not the dirty French postcards he had heard referred to in lame oldtimer jokes. They were indeed in French, but all contained scenic photographs of various points of interest in a city clearly labeled Alep. Hmm, you didn't have to be a linguist to match that with Aleppo, he thought. One was of the Grande Mosqueé d'Alep, with its soaring minaret. Another displayed the Citadel of Aleppo, an old, crumbling fortress that was probably already a mound of rubble before the bombing began. A third that said Museé National d'Alep looked like a National Museum should look, with fierce stone-cast mythological beasts guarding the entrance. Another was a panorama of Aleppo at night, with tall ancient spires awkwardly rubbing elbows with modern buildings. The fifth held an image of the Al-Madina Souq, the great sprawling market of the city.

The back of each postcard was filled with looping letters that were not of the Roman alphabet. The characters were formed of weird dots, circles, upward slanting dashes, curlicues, and squiggles that looked down upon the loops, as if they were a chorus of angels and saints. Then there were other dots and slashes below the loops, angling upward like demons swimming upward from the lake of fire gradually, so as not to get the bends. None of the writing made sense, if writing was indeed what it was.

"There's no stamps on any of these postcards," Mike observed.

Tony had not noticed this himself, so of course he waved it off with a disparaging snort.

"You're missing the point," Tony said. "It looks,like the little fucker came from Africa, or something."

"Syria," Mike auto corrected him. "Aleppo Syria."

“Yeah duh. I can read. But Syria is in Africa, is what I'm saying."

"No, it's not," Mike differed. He didn't really give a shit about geography, but some of his Father and Brother’s mostly useless knowledge of geographical landforms had rubbed off on him.

"Look at the map,” said Tony. “You think beaners can't read maps but I used to work for the railroad. Anyhow, there's a giant tumor growing out of the side of Africa. That's where all the towel-head countries are. Syria is one of the towel-head countries.”

Mike knew he was being purposefully distracted from the main business at hand, but he couldn't let this little bug go unsquashed. "That tumor is called the Middle East. If anything, it's growing out of Asia.” There was no point in letting this whirlpool of pointless debate swirl any farther. “If there are no stamps on these postcards, I'm guessing he didn't get them in the mail."

“Yeah, nice detective work, Sherlock. The US mail don't deliver to that shit storm of sand south of the border Little Fucker must have crawled out of. I don't know, but I'm guessing this writing on the back must be in towel head."

“You mean, Arabic?"

"What the hell is that?"

"That's a nicer word for towel head talk."

"Oh, why didn't you just say so? You got this way of trying to trip me up with big words, like you think I'm stupid,just because you went to college and I got most of my education in jail."

Mike was learning how Tony could flip things around to make himself the offended party.

"Sorry," said Mike without being so. "But the question is, now that we know this kid is not home grown, not from Mexico, but probably from where you call towel-head land, who do we call to come pick him up?"

The child yawned sleepily. Tony scooped up the boy and cradled in a very maternal gesture. He was a fat, flabby-tit male Madonna with child, some drunken Renaissance master's profane altar art.

"Are you kidding me? This is even worse. If we call immigration, they'll dump him down in Mexico even though he ain't got no family there because he ain’t Mexican. Who will take care of him? He'll spend the rest of his life scrounging around some river valley, wondering who the hell he is, probably smoking crack or snorting meth to kill the pain. If we call the local Sheriff they'll put him in foster care, but even though he's a little guëro word will get around that he's a towel-head and people will bully him, which really will turn him terrorist. Then he'll set off some car bomb on the 4th of July and all those lives will be on your hands. Is that what you want?"

"We can't keep the kid!" Mike shrieked. "Don't you realize this is a human being, not some belly-crawling beast you scooped out of the sand? There are legal consequences for keeping people that don't belong to you!"

The boy was dozing off on Tony's shoulder. "Hey, keep it down, you'll wake the baby. I guess you're right. But we got to think this through." He snapped the fingers of his free hand and pointed to the postcards. "I got it. Maybe if we could translate the words on the back of the postcards we can figure out where he came from and where they were taking him. He had to be going somewhere. There's probably a professor at U of A who can tell us what those words say. We'll go tomorrow."

To Mike, this sounded like just another excuse for a Striggy's trip but who knows, now that his fiancé had ditched him that might be fun, if he could allow himself to have any fun. His brother was always telling him he should castrated himself and become a priest.

Mike stood defeated again. The scattered mass of electrons swarming through the circuit boards of the computing devices he manipulated could not bring him down, but this flabby old fart with the vocabulary of a fifth grader whipped him easily.

“Hey, but I still say Syria is in Africa," Tony said with the cheery good humor of victory. "I'm willing to bet you a twelve pack on it."

“I'll take your bet, but you know I don't drink beer."

“Okay, a twelve pack of those pussy-tini things you drink. While we're there at the college, we'll ask some egghead professor which one of us is right.”

Tony looked positively gleeful over being saddled with the responsibility of a human infant. Barely had the smoke from the postcard debate cleared that he started dictating a list of things he expected Mike to pick him up from the store, and pronto.

"Well, at least we got a name for the Little Fucker now," Tony said. "He's from Aleppo. We'll call him Al, for Aleppo. He'll be our little terrorist fucker.”

“I don’t know,” Mike said doubtfully. “Al just doesn’t seem to fit. He just looks like a fucker, if I ever saw one.”

Tony grabbed another clean towel and hung it off of the child's slumbering head. "He's our little terrorist towel-head fucker!"

Tony howled hysterically until he coughed, turned red, and looked like he might spit up. Mike chuckled a little too in spite of himself, while wondering if there was a defibrillator on the property. Little Fucker completely missed the joke at his expense, having fallen fast asleep. Tony now laid him gently upon the bed.

"Wait a minute,” Mike cautioned. “You can't let him sleep here in this chamber of horrors. What if child protective services finds out we let him sleep among centipedes and other toxic vermin? Put him in the room next door."

"You're probably right," Tony ruefully admitted. "The critters don't know him yet."

The two laid Little Fucker down in the next room. Even though he had been christened Al, "Little Fucker" stuck to him like desert dust on an abandoned, rusted Buick.

Mike went to the office to take a shower and change his clothes. When he was getting dressed, he perceived the faint whine of a child crying in the distance. Perhaps because of the paternal instinct that had sprouted almost instantly after the appearance of the child, or perhaps from fear of the authorities, he quickly adjusted his clothing and ran toward the source of the disturbance. There he found Tony already in place, sitting on the bed consoling the Little Fucker. The boy's face was bright red, but with white streaks that looked something like the drainage pattern of the desert.

"I don't think he likes to sleep here," said Tony. "He's scared."

After a couple more tries of trying to put the boy to sleep in different places, they finally had to return him to Tony's room, where he conked right out.

“He likes it here, it looks like," said Tony.

"Where's that snake?" Mike asked nervously, tiptoeing around on eggshells.

Tony shrugged.

“Did you find out if it was the poisonous kind?"

Tony pinched his right cheek and curled his lips, the same gesture he had made years ago when his teachers asked where his homework was.

“He'll be all right," Tony pronounced. "The critters like him. He's one of us."

The next day Mike arose early to go to Tucson, where he would speak to the Arabic professor. Before setting off he went to pick up Tony but found him still asleep, oblivious to the frightening specter of Little Fucker pulling himself up on furniture, teaching himself to walk in the minefield of venomous fangs and stingers roaming around in this petting zoo from hell. The boy smiled at Mike and Mike did his best to crease his lips in an upward fashion. Finally Tony woke up and said "Give me a minute. I'll tag along but I'll have to wait for you because the University is north of the river."

To his astonishment, Tony directed Mike to drop Little Fucker at the café with Linda. Mike was surprised that she wasn't surprised, but reacted like children wandering in from the desert was a common occurrence in the Gadsden Purchase. "Try to keep him in the back where no one can see him," Tony warned, and she gave him a whaddaya think I’m stupid look.

Mike dropped Tony at a café in Tucson, then drove to the University for his appointment. He wasn't aware if he crossed any rivers or not en route. How could you tell in this dried out sauna of a place? He would just have to assume Tony wasn't lying about his fear of water, although why he would think this he did not know, since he had come to expect a steady diet of wild exaggerations, sneaky half-truths, and shameless whole-cloth Fabrications from his “caretaker.”

As he proceeded alone, Mike carried the five postcards with their cryptic looping writings. He eagerly hoped they would provide the answer to Little Fucker's identity, so he could get the child back to his people and out of his motel. Apart from the legal implications, Mike just did not like children. They generally smelled bad and talked too much. He was annoyed enough by adult conversation, much less the non-stop, nonsensical chatter of kids. Prior to their engagement, Lisa had agreed that the planet was overpopulated and they didn't need to replicate themselves to.

He was walking across campus to his appointment with Professor Aziz, when Mike spotted a very tiny man in a green uniform scooted rapidly past him. Mike took note that the unique baldness pattern of his head was like a shining mosque dome surrounded by low hedges, and thought it an appropriate analogy for a department specializing in Islamic studies. Then he realized, not with too much surprise because nothing surprised him in this fucking place, that this man with the high hairline was Border Patrol Agent Hal Owen, the very person who had deported Tony Vargas not long ago.

His immediate thought was that agent Owen's presence here defied coincidence. Although everybody here seemed to know everyone else, the Gadsden Purchase covered some 30,000 square miles. How was it possible to encounter this individual in places so geographically far flung as Cornudo and Tucson, unless some sort of conspiracy was afoot? He went forward with cautious steps.

Inside the Islamic Studies department a polite, bespectacled secretary seated Mike, but she had a nervous abruptness about her. The office staff were chattering in low tones among themselves and sneaking surreptitious looks down the hallway, where Mike assumed the professors had their offices.

A door opened loudly and a man came storming down the hallway. Mike looked up from scrolling on his phone and saw a thin, short-haired middle - eastern looking man in a tweed jacket move briskly past him. "I'm an American citizen!" he shouted in perfectly unaccented English. "I was born here! What's wrong with you people?"

The prof raged out of the building. A minute later the phone on the secretary's desk rang. "Yes Sir" she said into it, then nervously hung up. At the same time, Hal Owen came down the hall and stopped directly in front of Mike.

"That sure was a pain in the ass," he said. "I hate doing that." There was no hint of recognition on his face as he left the building without further empty unpleasantries. When he exited the secretary looked toward Mike and obsequiously apologized that Professor Aziz was called away on an emergency and wouldn’t be back today.

“I drove all the way from Yuma." Mike said instead of Cornudo, because who the hell knew where Cornudo was? If you lived in the Gadsden Purchase your entire life and even drove down I-8 regularly to escape the stifling heat by soaking in San Diego's cool California current, Cornudo might never cross your consciousness.

"I am terribly sorry Sir. I would reschedule you, but I'm not sure when he will come back."

Mike sulked back to his truck, the postcards in his pocket feeling heavier than the Ring of Power at the gates of Mordor. At last he collected himself enough to drive back for Tony, this time taking note of the vacant lot of the Santa Cruz River with its eroded, pebbly banks, precariously glued together by clumps of desperate sage and anorexic tamarisk. He pondered the whereabouts of the raging torrents that supposedly prevented Tony from crossing to thither side. At any rate, the Red Sea did not come crashing down on him on his way to the diner where Tony waited, where he immediately saw a Border Patrol SUV pull out of the lot. At once things became clear.

"Asshole!" he muttered.

Mike rampaged into the diner. Tony looked up from his coffee and newspaper with his trademark ruffled innocence. "You asshole,” said Mike. “You had your Border Patrol friend scare away the Professor, didn't you?"

"Beg pardon? What border patrol friend?"

"The one who deported you a couple weeks ago. Don’t play stupid.”

The heat from his half mast coffee cup warmed Tony's mustache as he considered the accusation. He did not appear offended, just confused. "Oh, you mean Hal. Me and Hal ain't getting along lately, in case you didn't notice."

"I just saw a Border Patrol truck leave the lot," Mike said with conviction.

"So what? This is a big Border Patrol hangout, the substation is around the corner. That's why I come here. I don't like to be bothered by any pinche fat illegals ruining my digestion while I'm trying to eat. Look, two more just walked in." Tony nodded toward the door where indeed, two officers wearing the profession's unmistakable green had just entered. "Sit down and chill, I'll buy you some pancakes."

They drove back to Cornudo after Tony's chronic alligator arm syndrome forced Mike to pay for the pancakes. The Little Fucker was in the café office with Linda, who was tickling his feet. "This is just the sweetest child," she said. "He made a beeline for the postcard rack so I gave him some and he sat here and entertained himself. I put some real clothes on him too. Gabby came by with some hand me downs. He looked like Gandhi wrapped up in those towels. What's his name?"

"We call him Little Fucker," Tony said, "He doesn’t answer to anything else. He likes it.”

The Little Fucker now had postcards of Kartcher Caverns, the Desert Sonoran Museum, Old Town Tucson, San Xavier del Bac, Kitt Peak, Yuma Territorial Prison, and Picacho Peak to add to his collection. There was even one of historic Gila Bend thrown in.

“Gila Bend?" Tony complained. "Who the fuck makes a postcard for Gila Bend? What's so goddamn historic about it? You gave that to a little kid? That's child abuse.” He tried to take the postcard away, but Little fucker was particularly possessive of this one and yanked back.

They took Little Fucker back to the motel to lie down among venemous reptiles and distasteful bugs once more. Over the course of the next week, more suspicious sabotage of Mike's attempts to translate the postcards and find a home for the boy occurred, only to be plausibly explained away by Tony. Mike drove to Tempe to consult an expert at ASU, only to find out the building was evacuated for a bomb threat. A trip to Flagstaff to see the authority at NAU came to naught when the sprinkler system in the building was tripped. Mike even stopped to visit an Imam in Yuma, where he discovered the curate's visa had been revoked because he was from one of the countries on the terrorism watch list. At every turn Mike's efforts were thwarted.

“It's the will of Allah," said Tony.

“Fuck off,” said Mike.

Mike didn't officially admit defeat, he just sort of ground to a halt against insurmountable inertia. At the same time, the Little Fucker started to blend into the background. Mike would watch him and Tony feeding English muffins to Scooter, a ring-tailed cat with a lame paw who had wandered in from the desert, and almost accept the kid as a natural part of the warped reality of this place, a feature of the Dali-esque geography. Maybe Mike Gasden was the one who didn't fit. Maybe Mike Gasden better think about bailing out, about erasing himself from the map of the Gadsden Purchase.

At the same time, he didn't want to go just yet. In an amazingly quick period of time, the Gasden Motel had achieved a reputation as a clean and convenient stopover for tired travelers who couldn’t make the last push to either San Diego or Phoenix, depending on which way it was their misfortune to travel on the I-8. A steady trickle of customers was arriving every night. Mike was feeling the thrill of success, and seriously considering putting in a swimming pool, to better go head to head with the corporate bitches at the Wellton Microtel.

He did his best to discourage grizzled truckers arriving with painted vixens for a quick fling. When such showed up on the security cameras, Mike simply would not answer the buzzer. "I don't want this to be a hooker hotel," he told Tony. If one good thing could be said for his caretaker, it was that he did a good job scaring away the truckers and the hookers. All Tony had to do was appear in the parking lot on his wobbly, bad knees, and unwanted guests would disperse into the desert.

Of course, Tony wouldn't be Tony if he didn't run off on across the border binges from time to time, leaving Mike alone with the motel and the kid. Mike figured out that being "deported" was just a free ride down into Mexico. Tony would disappear there for days at a time, engaging in drunken and disorderly conduct, often with the very policia who sometimes arrested him so their amigo could sleep for free in a cell.

These extended absences of the Gasden Motel's caretaker weren’t much of a problem, because the Little fucker was very low maintenance. While Mike worked around the motel, all he had to do was give the kid his pile of postcards and he would scrutinize them for hours. In reality, he was less of a pain in the ass than Tony, who was constantly crying about his arthritis pain and begging for one thing or another.

The drawback was that when Tony was away on a bender, Little F still insisted on sleeping in his room, but Mike didn't feel right leaving him alone in that den of dysmorphic denizens of the desert. He would try to sleep on the bed with the boy but could feel the multitude of malicious, multi-faceted eyes upon him as a physical sensation, disallowing slumber. Furthermore, nobody had ever accounted for the whereabouts of the snake, or verified its toxicity. After a couple days of this ophidiophobia, Mike picked up a baby monitor and slept in the adjoining room, where he would be close by in the event the stealthy, concealed serpent emerged from its clandestine den. Would he be able to hear the sound of its forked tongue hissing over the intercom? Mike wasn’t sure, but nothing happened and he started sleeping peacefully again.

Motel duties, combined with the responsibilities of babysitting both infants and adults, meant that Mike had no time to brood on the emotional upheaval in his life. He was sufficiently distracted by the flurry of daily activity that his Lisa wound scabbed over. Then one afternoon as he was washing sheets, her name blew into his head from a dusty desert breeze, and Mike was quite surprised he had forgotten all about her. What did this say about the quality of his character, he wondered, that he could be engaged to a girl and then purge her so completely from his memory. What kind of unfeeling sociopath was he?

He was trying to feel some appropriate lonely longing for Lisa when Little Fucker looked up at him with his wide blue eyes as if to say I'm here for you buddy, if you need me.

“Stop that," Mike scolded. "I don't like kids and I don't want to. You're on borrowed time." But another parapet in Mike's defenses had been breached by those eyes.

At that very moment, whether by a decree of fate or not, the face of Mike's phone lit up. A text message from Lisa had somehow wormholed through the light years void between them. R U angry? it asked.



Next >>

Image by Unknown - Old postcard, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=47596456