Chapter 25

Table of Contents

On the modern day map of the Gadsden Purchase, there are a lot of nameless blank spots, expansive swaths that entire states could fit into. These have no label, though they are certainly cohesive units because they have been assigned a color. Not so much a color, really, as a stain. On Google maps, for instance, there is a brown stairstep-shaped stain running almost from Yuma to the Tohono O'odham Nation. Rhode Island could fit in there with Connecticut and have room to wiggle its toes.

Google, perhaps, does not think the stain is important enough to dignify with a title, but if that is true why even bother to stain it? A popular theory, of course, is that the government is doing something insidious and conspiratorial in the stain, like building toxic weapons or storing alien aircraft. This is the most widely accepted version, an idea adhered to by pretty much everyone, except the inhabitants of the Gadsden Purchase. These people, more than any other on Earth, completely understand why some places don't have names, and really shouldn't. But they will kindly take your money if you are stopping over to look for some non-existent alien aircraft facility.

Tony Vargas, meandering his way about the Gadsden Purchase, knowing where he had to go but not wanting to do anything hasty, drove across the stain on secret back roads, not worried at all that an alien air force would hit him with a stray smart bomb or he would run into some forgotten biological warfare canister. In this way he made his way through the town of Why, which lived up to its name, then onto the reservation. Shortly thereafter he got into a fight and got arrested.

When Tony worked for the railroad, he had a coworker named Tucker who liked to brag about being arrested in seven countries. Besides Mexico, Tony Vargas had never left the country, but he had been arrested down there, plus 7 Arizona counties. In his thinking he had Tucker beat. Come to think of it, he had also been the guest of the Tohono O'odham Nation’s lockup on more than one occasion, so that made nine arrests. Fuck Tucker.

Tony woke up in a jail cell, appropriately in a place called Sells, where there was always a cell waiting to accommodate people like him. A scrawling on the wall reading Trump ‘16 - Bite me Beeners was the first thing he saw. The first thing he smelled was puke wafting over from the toilet, which could have been his own. Hopefully his own, when he thought about it. The first thing he heard was the heavy stomp of shoe leather, which could only be law enforcement. The door clanked open, sounding like the angel rolling away the stone. Just like the recipient of celestial largesse in that other story, Tony felt like it could take him three days to get his ass moving. This was the first time he had slept in a bed in weeks and he didn’t want to get up.

"Get up Tony," the deep growl voice of Tohono O'odham undersheriff Jay Johnson coaxed him. Tony rolled over but made no effort to rise.

"Fucking arrest me," he said.

Jay Johnson was a big, dark, square-jawed man, which was not surprising, but other than that he was dressed like any white cop would be - olive green pants, khaki shirt and all the appropriate patches on his uniform. His apparel struck Tony as highly amusing.

"Where's your goddamn war bonnet, chief?" Tony asked, trying to prod the undersheriff into some police brutality, so he could stay in the cell.

Undersheriff Johnson was not amused. "Don't try to goad me into locking you up for another night. One night is all you get. You're a drain on the tribal economy. I told you last time you don't have to get drunk to spend a night in the lockup. Just drive up and I'll let you stay one night. One night."

"Hey I didn't pick that fight. Fucking Cochise in the bar threw the first punch. I just defended myself."

Jay Johnson tapped his heavy foot. "In the first place, Cochise was an Apache. Making that mistake is a scalping offense in this country. You're lucky you still got that little patch of hair on your head."

Tony tapped the top of his head protectively. Maybe these goddam Indians had scalped him in his sleep. "Shame on you about the scalping. That's hate speech."

"Whatever Mr. bleeding heart. You were too drunk to remember, but I believe the fight started when you called air quotes Cochise a Papago pussy, or something like that."

"Hey I was just stating a fact that a lot of people have a problem with. Nobody can pronounce that name you guys picked for yourselves just suddenly out of the blue. Papago rolls off the tongue. It’s a nice name, a friendly name. Why did you have to change it."

"What about the ‘pussy’ part, and the other thing, you know how Papago means little beaners?"

It's true, isn't it?"

"Why you gotta say shit like that, Tony?"

"I'm old. I can't control my farts and I can't control my words."

The under-sheriff rolled his eyes and puckered his face, as if Tony's farts and words had essentially the same effect on the atmosphere of the room. "Tony, get out of my jail. I don’t want to use police brutality on you. You ain't worth it."

"Pussy."

Tony had no choice but to move on. Jay Johnson escorted him to the border of the Nation to make sure he left and didn't sneak back in. The huge country that had swallowed the Tohono O'odham like an amoeba wasn't the only one that had a problem with border crossers.

Tony moved on reluctantly to Amado, knowing he had to face reality sooner or later. Well, at least the name is good, he thought. He needed to be loved. Even dogs need love. Tony was no dog, but he felt pretty damn close.

She was working at the old steakhouse across the street from the giant longhorn skull with a 45 foot wingspan, point to point. Tony didn't like to look at the skull, which glared at him hungrily, as if cattle were carnivores. Once you had seen something like this skull hundreds of times, it should have blended into the background, but it still made him nervous.

The longhorn skull and adjoining building, which looked like a lump of cattle manure, had a "For Rent” sign posted. Since its construction the strange building had been the home of one defunct business after another. Nonetheless, the people of Amado revered their skull, and prayed that its owner would not tear it down, even though it was financial dead weight. The skull was the totem saving their town from utter ruin or worse yet, complete obscurity.

Tony walked through the door of the restaurant across from the skull with his hat literally in his hand. It was only in the presence of the goddess occupying this temple that he assumed such an attitude of meekness. He also stowed away his wisecracking bluster. If he hoped to supplicate the goddess, he had to be on good behavior.

A wistful smile flashed across Maria's face when she saw him, but it was the smile of someone looking far into the distance. She turned it off quickly when she realized the reality didn't match the ideal. Then something like painful confusion was spilled there, but she wiped this off, like swiping the bar towel in her hand across it.

"Quit standing there stupid like it’s your first dance. You look like crap. I'll get you some coffee."

The restaurant was stalled in the pre-lunch doldrums, practically empty save for a gray-haired man in the corner who never looked up from his paper, a retired type who took a self-imposed exile from his nagging wife the same time every day. Tony had Maria practically to himself and she looked stunning. In spite of her near six decades, her breasts were still ample and firm, straining the weave of her black Desert Diamond Casino shirt. Her hips were ample, yet maintained the enticing form of an upside down heart. Only her hair and skin had lost their glow, as if the twin extinguishing agents of worry and disappointment had suppressed the fire once burning there. All the same, she remained a very desirable woman.

"What are you doing here Tony?" She set down his coffee and accompanying accoutrements.

"I heard Bill died."

"He died two years ago. You're just now getting around to extending your condolences?"

Tony lowered his head and fidgeted with the stirring spoon. "Maria you know I have always loved you, and I was thinking that maybe we could..."

Maria laughed and nearly dropped the coffee pot. "What happened? Did you run out of Striggy's girls?"

"Maria I'm serious this time. I know I've done a lot of bad things but I'm ready to settle down and do right by you."

Maria turned toward the window, perhaps to avoid Tony’s seducing puppy-dog supplication look. Her wide but lusterless eyes swept in the past, present, and future. Then her vision fixed at the sticker emblazoned on Tony's back window. "Love Machine? So how long ago did you have this great revelation about undying love? When they let you out of jail this morning? You haven't changed. You'll never change."

News traveled fast in the Gadsden Purchase. The waitresses in the handful of eateries scattered across the vast wasteland were its wire service. "No really, Maria, I really mean it. I get drunk and fight because I don't know how to live without you. I've been wandering around for weeks trying to get the courage to come in, say I'm sorry, and see if we could start fresh."

If Maria was listening to Tony's appeal she gave no sign. She kept looking out the window, but her thoughts were non cohesive grains of sand that would not add to the dunes of this changeless desert. Once she had loved this man with an unconditional passion. They made love like crazed desert jinn in the back of railroad cars and atop rocky pinnacles. But he had betrayed her time and again and it had taken 20 years to break free of his spell. Like a recovered addict, she knew she couldn't fall into his trap again, even if he was the only true love of her life.

Tony took the absence of a reply as an opening. "Maria I've been thinking. Here's what I have in mind. Remember when I told you I was going to set you up in your own wedding store, so you could sell those little chingaderas you're so good at making? Well, I've been saving. I've been finally saving."

"You've been saving because you freeload on people.”

Tony’s face went a a shade of pink that couldn’t entirely be explained by his hangover. "Hear me out. I'm going to buy that building across the street and you can put your own wedding store in right there. Then you can leave this dump for good."

Maria turned away from the window and lifted her coffee pot like she intended to smash Tony over the head with it. It wouldn't be the first time - there had been that incident in Bisbee back in '04 that had resulted in stitches. Tony winced thinking about that but he was ready to take it. A beating would have meant her love was back. God he loved a fiery woman.

Maria's knuckles went red as she slowly lowered the pot back into place.

"Are you crazy cabron? In the first place, don't try to bribe me into marrying you. There's not enough money in the world. You had your chance and you fucking blew it. Secondly, why would I put a wedding store there? Who's going to drive to the middle of nowhere to plan a wedding? Third place - what kind of wedding store has big horns on the top? Cuernos, idiota. You have infidelity staring at you before you even go through the door. Only you would be comfortable in a place like that. She put two fingers up to her head like the barrel of a gun. "Puras pinche pendejadas."

Maria poured more coffee for the gentleman in the corner before she was tempted to dump it on Tony's balls. Tony stirred cream into his own brew like it was the after dinner drink of his last meal, with all appeals exhausted. He had always thought Maria would be waiting for him. He had always assumed she would be his ace in the hole when things got rough and he was scraping bottom. He could see now that you couldn't survive on the currency of bullshit forever. People grew up and they wised up. It was over.

"Maria walked back over to Tony's table. "Why don't you go back to that little Maricon in Cornudo? You had free rent there but you fucked it up, like you fuck everything up."

"He's not a maricon," Tony said defensively. It was the only thing she had said so far that wasn’t true. "He's a good kid. A little pussy whipped, but a good kid."

"Your definition of pussy whipped meaning he is loyal to his lady." Maria stared deep into Tony’s face with angry eyes, double checking for any possibility of redemption. This was her last chance too. It was Tony or nobody.

"Finish your coffee and get out. Don't come back, for both of our sakes."

She turned her back and walked into the kitchen.

Tony was not the brooding type. Normally he easily shook off defeat and got on to the next stage of the game. But he couldn't help feeling the sadness of finality as he looked in the rearview mirror and saw the tips of the longhorn disappear from the glass.

It was time to cross the river, he thought. It was time to cross the river and take his chances on the other side. He had used up all his credit in the Gadsden Purchase, alienating everybody that had loved, or at least tolerated him. He could either cross the river North, the Gila, or cross the river South, the Sonoyta. Which one would it be? Where did he want to put an end to this?

He sighed, thinking about the way things might have been. Maria was a fine woman, not only beautiful but smart, loyal and strong. She had crossed the border with a baby in arms, and Tony had loved but neglected that child like any biological Baby Daddy would neglect his own. Tony had a knack for turning his back on little helpless ones that put their faith in him. This made him think of the little fucker. Shit. He was doing it again.

With a particular destination in mind Tony pulled off on the Elephant Head Road toward the National Forest. He needed to clear his own head before deciding which way to go. People didn't think he was a very deep person, everyone's impression of Tony Vargas was that he told dirty jokes and got drunk, sometimes in that order, sometimes in reverse. But in reality Tony was a deep thinker who liked to go into the woods and meditate. Of course, he liked to have a bottle of Tequila on hand while he was meditating. So Tony steered for his favorite meditation spot, after stopping at a little roadside liquor store first, of course.

Years ago, when Eddy had been pastor of a church in Wellton, Tony had gone camping and hunting out here with him. That night, after a couple of beers, that fucker had tried to go broke-back on him. Tony had had to knock his ass in the dirt, and things had been uncomfortable between the two since. The queers could do what they wanted to each other, but Tony's asshole was still a virgin and he liked it that way. It made his butt pucker a little, driving past the sight of that experience.

Tony steered onto a dirt road, then partway up a hill saw a line of jeeps and four-wheel drive trucks blocking his path ahead.

"Oh no, not that faggit again," Tony said.

NEXT>>

Image courtesy of John Margolies Roadside America photograph archive (1972-2008), via Wikimedia Commons

Chapter 24

Table of Contents

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

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

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

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

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

"She's not," Mike said.

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

"That's over," Mike added.

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

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

"Sure."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Do I need..." Mike hesitated.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Do you think the snake ate the mayonnaise?"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"I mean what I said."

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

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

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

"I can't. I love you."

"That doesn't make any sense."

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

"You grabbed me on the rebound."

"Maybe. But I still love you."

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

"Later," Mike answered.

"Tell me something. Be honest."

"What?"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Of course," said Danny, without hesitating.

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

NEXT>>

Image by Peter Paul Reubens, public domain via Wikipedia

Chapter 23

Table of Contents

The untimely, uncomfortable, and undesired discovery of the Little Fucker came about as follows:

It happened the day Mike discovered the war hero medals of Josef Müeller in the office wall of the Gasden Motel. It occurred approximately the same time the Right Honourable Earl of Easely, Royal Knight of the Most Noble Order of the Garter, Keeper of Her Majesty's Poultry, Pork and Petunias, along with various other sundry titles much too extensive to elaborate upon except in dull, extraneous footnotes, was tramping around the desert dirt with Lady Easely. He was carrying out his duty as a proud subject of the British realm by flying the Union Jack over the field of American Ornithology, repeating symbolically what British General Robert Ross did when he marched up the Potomac to burn Washington after the Battle of Brandenburg in 1814, but with no Francis Scott Key to immortalize the fireworks.  The Lord and his Lady were searching for the elusive LeContes Thrasher, which they planned to repatriate to the realm of her Majesty the Queen via their field notes.

Actually, it was Lady Easely who was doing most of the repatriating.  The Earl had set himself up in fine Earl style, reclining in a folding chair beneath a large umbrella, slightly modifying the old adage to read that only mad dogs and Englishwomen go out in the midday sun.  While the Earl sipped tea and surveyed his newly acquired fiefdom with a pair of military grade binoculars, a legacy of his service with the 9th Royal Lancers, the Lady tramped through the sand and spines of a wash that was situated between the open desert and the distant squat buildings of the Gasden Motel.

"Try that little thicket over there my dear," said the Earl, gesturing with an ivory handled cane toward a copse of Palo Verdes in a bend of the wash.  The cane bore the coat of arms of his house, a field of purple petunias the color of kidney beans overlaid by a boar's head and the silhouette of a rooster.  "That's right love," he urged her gently.  "This tea is absolutely dreadful.  Make that squeaking distress call again, darling.  My but you do that well."

The Lady Easely cupped her hands together, licked the place where her joined thumbs created a rather vulva-like opening, then pursed her pedigreed lips and blew into the aperture, producing a sound that rather resembled the death throes of a cat.  Nothing feathered stirred, but a Desert Woodrat deserted its untidy nest beneath a Palo Verde and skittered away to take its chances in the open desert, more out of annoyance than fear.

"Pity," said the Earl, when nothing became of her theatrical efforts. "Where is that little Tory?"

  Despite the absence of avian life in the clump of Palo Verdes, the Earl scanned the length of the wash with his binoculars to see if there was anything flying, flitting or scratching about upstream.  To use the word upstream is rather imprecise because there was no stream there at all, just gravelly dirt.

It was at that exact moment, just when the Earl was long distance scanning the area in front of the motel, that Mike popped out of Tony's room to go to his office, leaving Little F behind.  Not because he was spying or committing any other non-Earlish improprieties, the Earl had his binoculars trained at the open door of Tony's room as it swung closed, and in that fleeting instant he glimpsed the glow of Little F’s face through the lenses.

“Dashing little fellow.  Seems our good host has a son.  Blast it, we are out of tea.  I say, my Dear, we shall have to repair to our quarters to reprovision.”

With the Lady Easely lugging the lawn chair, heavy umbrella and teapot, and the Earl clutching covetously to his voluminous bird book, the pair took their stiff upper lips back to the motel, shuffling their feet through thick sand.  When they reached the parking lot they encountered Marisol heading toward the rooms recently evacuated by the FF militia.

"Good afternoon young lady," the Earl greeted her.  "Would you be the proud mother of that fine looking young fellow in this room?"  The Earl was pointing to Tony’s quarters.

Marisol looked at the tall horse faced gentleman, decided by his accent that he must be the visiting royalty, then looked at the door he was referring to.  She was not intimate with the operation of this motel, but she knew this particular room belonged to her Uncle, so the young fellow he spoke of must be Mike.  Had this goddamn desert worn her down so much she could be confused for Mike's Mom?

"Oh, you mean Mike, the owner?" she said, ready to take offense if the answer did not please her. The Earl laughed. "I don't believe so, my Dear.  You're much too young for that.  There was a child in that room, and I just assumed you must be his Mum.  No matter, we'll be off.  Good day."  The Lord and Lady ambled away.

As far as Marisol knew, this room was only used by Tony, but perhaps since her Uncle had left Mike had fixed it up again for customer lodging.  She didn't think so, because she had seen Mike come and go from there on repeated occasions.

So who was the kid the Earl was talking about?  Had his royal head been in the sun too long?  That was a possibility, but curiosity nagged at her.  She liked this guy Mike.  He was awkward and slightly flabby, not like the muscle-bound mental misfits who normally haunted her shadow, but he was also handsome, sweet and smart.  Was it possible he had children?  These were the kind of things a girl had to know.

She looked down at the lanyard of keys in her hand.  There were two card keys and three regular ones hanging there.  Her Uncle's room did not have a card key reader, so obviously one of the regular ones would open the door.

Her Uncle had asked her to give a report on anything unusual going on over here at the motel.  Her Uncle could investigate things on his own, so fuck him.  What exactly was she contemplating, then?  Why exactly was she about to pry into Mike Gasden's personal life?  She didn't know, she guessed it was the curse of the female, the one that trapped Eve into eating the apple in the garden and made Pandora open the box.  She couldn't help it.  She had not been able to help a lot of things in her life.

Marisol reached for the keys, and got it on the second try.  She peeked past the door and saw that the Earl's noble head had not been overly baked by the sun, after all.  A little boy was sitting on the bed.

To say that the kid was cute did not do him justice.  He was beautiful.  His eyes were the same unbroken blue as a cloudless desert sky.   His hair was golden blonde with tawny streaks at the roots.  All of his facial features - nose, lips, and ears, were architecturally perfect.

But the boy did not know he was beautiful - that much was plain to Marisol.  His beauty had been wasted on war, and though she could not know that, she could read the struggle in his face, it being out of place on one so young, but more out of place on a being so beautiful.  Beauty and suffering do not mix well.  Marisol did not know this, because a defining characteristic of the truly beautiful is that they do not believe themselves to be beautiful. Other people, however, would have observed that her own beauty and suffering did not mix well either.

The boy was focused on something when she opened the door, but immediately looked up.  At first he froze in fright, but there must have been something in Marisol that suggested a kindred spirit. Although Mike had been doing a satisfactory job taking care of him, he was also starved for female attention.  He extended his arms and Marisol, equally starved for a kindred spirit, picked him up.  Their souls bonded.

Marisol embraced Little F and spoke in gentle words.  "You poor little thing.  Where are your Mommy and Daddy?"  At that point, she was still not connecting him with Mike.  "Let's go find them."  She put the boy down, took his hand, and led him out the door.  He stopped in place and protested with sounds that were probably words, but she couldn't understand.  Only one word made sense and that was "Mike."

"Yes, Mike," she agreed.  "Let's go get Mike."  She started out again and this time he followed.

By that time the suffocating heat of the afternoon had descended to smother the life out of the land, and the inhabitants of the desert, two legged and otherwise, were all hunkering down. Way out on the empty horizon the occupants of a dirty jeep were catching a nooner, filthy ballcap visors tilted down over their eyes.  Nobody saw Marisol and Little F as they waddled hand in hand to the front desk.

Being engrossed in his archaeological discovery, Mike didn't focus on them either. He was so lost in concentration he did not process what was taking place when they appeared.  There was Marisol, there was Little F.  Two of his favorite people. The two of them together made sense.

Then he dropped the box and ran out into the lobby.  "Holy shit shut the door!"  He dashed behind Marisol and quickly sealed the entrance.  "Take him in the back, quick!"

"What's wrong?  Who is he?"

"Just take him back there.  I'll explain."

Marisol scooted the boy along but maintained a puzzled expression toward Mike.  He checked the parking lot, flipped the No Vacancy sign, dropped the drapes, then followed Marisol and Little F into the back and locked the door.

Little F tugged at Marisol's hand, wanting to be picked up.  She complied but kept her attention on Mike.  "Who is this kid?  Is he yours?"

Mike stared at her bug-eyed, incapable of answering.  He had known Marisol for less than a complete day, and had no idea whose side she was on, if there really were sides.  Should he lie and say Little F was his son?  Then he would be forced to allow the boy to move about openly.  Should he grab the child and make a dash for his truck?  That would be weird and definitely attract attention, possibly from Agent Smith and his associates, who were probably patrolling somewhere outside.  The only thing to do was tell the truth and hope for the best.

"The boy is a fugitive," he said.

Marisol lowered her eyes.  "Why are you bullshitting me if we just met?"

Mike's mouth dropped open.  "I'm not bullshitting.  People are looking for him in very high places."  Being aware he sounded like a paranoid lunatic, he went on to explain to Marisol how the kid had wandered in from the desert, how his mother was suspected of being connected with a terrorist cell, and how government agents had been hounding his motel.

"So you're just going to keep him?" Marisol asked.

"I didn't want to.  I tried to find his family but it didn't work out.  Look at him.  Look at you.  What would you do?"

It was obvious that Marisol had already fallen in love with the boy.  Their arms were inextricably entwined.  "Well shit we gotta hide him.  At least until we figure out something."

"We?"

Marisol rolled her eyes.  "Yeah, we.  I like this kid.  I like you too. It's been a long time since I liked anybody.  I don't want either of you to fall into the wrong hands."

Too late for that.  Mike had already fallen.  Whether she was the right or wrong hands remained to be seen, but Mike Gasden was a goner.



NEXT>>

Image of Le Conte's Thrasher, from a C. Hart Merriam article in the Jan 1895 edition of The Auk, illustrated by Ridgway?, courtesy of Wikipedia

Chapter 22

Table of Contents

“That, gentlemen, was a foregone conclusion," Eddy said to the glum faces riding in his command jeep.  "Did you really think he was going to keep letting us poop on his patio? Besides, we're on a mission from God.  We're off to do the work of the Lord."

Even in the dark Eddy kept his ridiculously huge hat on his head.  Apparently there was an ordinance in the Gadsden Purchase that wannabe cowboys had to wear their hats at night.  His flying saucer chapeau was not a garment, it was as permanent a fixture as a tortoise's carapace.  

"Now who wants to sing along on that Cure song, you know that one that goes please please please, let me get what I want?  Altogether boys."  

“That's the Smiths," corrected the goon who was the elected corrector of the group. His name was Costello, incidentally, as if it matters.

"The Who?"

"Not the Who, the Smiths. Same island, different decades."

"Well dadgummit, why can't we just for once just please please please sing the song and not worry about who done it.  Quit being a killjoy.  These boys just want to sing and make merry."

The two other occupants of the jeep were slumped over exhausted in their seats.  The dirt road was twisting and bumpy, with dust leaking in through the window seals. These men practically farted dust, but it still made things uncomfortable.  The four wheel drive vehicles in convoy ahead stirred up a cloud that made breathing, much less singing, an act of martyrdom.

“Well how about that one that starts out Hey Now..."

"I'm not sure.  Sing a little bit more of it."

"That's all I know.  Throw me a bone here.  Hell, you know all those trivial facts.  The one that begins

Hey Now..."

“That could be any of a hundred tunes. Does it have one hey now or two?"

"I don't know.  What dadgum difference does it make?"

"It makes all the difference in the world," said Costello.  "If it's just one hey now, then it's probably that hey now you're an all-star song by Smash Mouth.  If it's two hey nows it's gotta be that hey now hey now, don't dream it's over by Crowded House."

"Well Hey Now Brown Cow, I don't remember.  I think it had two hey nows."

"Boss, if you want to lead a sing along, you have to make sure we're all singing the same song.  Next time, if you can't remember the words, at least count the hey nows."

Eddy got quiet.  All this antagonism had killed his singing mood.  They bumped along in silence for a moment or two more, then Costello spoke while the others slumbered.  "Can you explain this mission from God to me again.  Instead of sleeping in a fine bed, we're out here snoring dirt into our lungs."

Eddy beamed beneath his big hat.  "I told you it’s just like that Jethro Tull song.  We're going to tear down the wall!"

Costello didn't have the energy to tell the boss it was a Pink Floyd, not Jethro Tull song, so he let it go.  "Wait, I thought we liked the wall.  We put all that time and energy strong-arming people into voting for Trump so he could build his wall, and now you say the wall is no good."

"No, no no don't get me wrong!" Eddy pleaded.  "I'm all about the wall as a psychological and spiritual abstraction.  We need to put an invisible barrier between us and the parasites that are sucking dry the blood of American culture..  But a physical wall?  No way, José.  I shudder at the thought.  Think of the implications."

“The implications would be no more dirty beaners giving me indigestion when I'm trying to eat breakfast."  Costello spit a mouthful of tobacco juice into a cup, exposing putrefying teeth. 

"Forgive them Lord, for they know not what they say."  Eddy shook his head and turned his beatific cowboy hat heavenward.  "If there's no beaners, there's no us. Don't you get it?  As it is now, we're the wall.  If a real wall goes up, how are we going to skim our cut off the marijuana mules?  How are we going to pilfer a percentage from the pollitos crossing the desert illegally?  How are we going to shake down border businesses in the name of protecting them from the alien invasion?  If there's a wall we no longer justify our existence.  We're just another criminal cartel, and a feeble one at that."

Costello let this all sink in.  With the jeep bumping up and down, thinking was like mixing a drink in his thick skull until the ingredients were evenly distributed.  "Okay, I get it.  So what's our move?"

"Well mind you now, no one gets hurt.  What we are going to do is head to that construction yard where they are fixing to pour concrete for phase one.  We hide on the hill and shoot over their heads until the security guards skedaddle.  Then we move in and destroy the equipment.  Of course, everyone will assume it's the cartel that did it.  We keep up these guerrilla tactics and it'll be too expensive to build the gall-dang wall. Accordingly, the good old status quo shall be maintained."

Costello thought that this was why Eddy was the boss, even though his rock stars and movie stars were always just a cunt hair off. It wasn't like he confused Alice Cooper with Barry Manilow.  He confused Alice Cooper with Marilyn Manson.  Honest mistake. Besides that, he seemed to be able to see the big picture where no one else could.  But could his big picture be just a cunt hair off too?  That was a disturbing thought.  Out here in the Gadsden Purchase, you survived on the knife's edge of cunt hairs.

“Did you get the green light on this from…you know?”. Costello said carefully, because Eddy didn’t like to be reminded he was subordinate to anyone, especially to a beaner.

“Why wouldn’t he give us the green light?” Eric fumed. “Goshdarn wall is bad for his business too.”

Eddy ordered all the lights in the convoy doused, and the FF cruised the last two miles by the brittle fingernail moon.  The caravan parked off-road behind a rise, and there disembarked.  Not being real soldiers, just pot-bellied wannabe warriors, it took them some effort to struggle up the hilltop.  Once they got there, sweating more than the entire Gila watershed in a dry spell, the militiamen looked down the slope to a fenced in construction yard, where bags of concrete were piled indiscriminately among sophisticated, state of the art earth-moving vehicles.  Here Eddy struck a commanding, cross-armed George Washington pose.

"Where's those two little messicans of ours?" He demanded proprietarily.

"You mean Leonard and Victor?" answered Costello.  "Leonard is half Phillipino, and Victor is a darker skinned Italian."

"Close enough.  Get 'em ready."

The idea was to fire down into the construction yard, over the heads of the three or four unarmed security guards, until the defenders found the situation untenable and ran off into the desert.  Then the two "Mexicans" Leonard and Victor, chosen for their latino-ish appearance and low stature, would rush in wearing Donald Trump face masks and blow up the construction equipment.  The video cameras monitoring the lot would expose them as Hispanic individuals and everyone would assume it was a cartel hit, on the face a brilliant plan.

Everything went off without a hitch, except that one of the security guards didn't wake up during the fusillade, and had to be carried out to safety by Leonard and Victor before the demolition work could begin.  Then, because the cartel always left a sinister message behind, for added authenticity they thought they should spray paint something threatening and menacing, but it was discovered that neither of the two "Mexicans" knew any Spanish.  To resolve the problem, Eddy had them smear Go Trump! on the side of a shed. Looking this over, somebody pointed out it sounded like they supported Trump, which would be uncharacteristic of Mexicans.  So they crossed out the Go and replaced it with Fuck, but this offended Eddy’s Puritan sensibilities.  Finally, he had them censor it by painting the word Screw over Fuck. Something in this order was lost in translation, however, so the two faux Mexicans graffitied Screw Over Trump on the side of the shed, a message that looked decidedly un-menacing, and decidedly un-cartelish. They were debating how to edit it when someone picked up radio activity on a law enforcement band, so they decided to let the message stand and get out.

“Next time get me some real honest to goodness beaners,"  Eddy complained as they bounced away on the rutted road.  He punctuated his angry sentences by deliberately hitting bumps, which caused the passengers to strike the rag top ceiling.

"Remember that Black Sabbath song Night in the Ruts, boys?" Eddy growled.  "That's where I'm going to kick you, night in the ruts, if you don't find me some genuine messycans when I need them. What a day-bacle! Night-bacle, if you wanna get technical.”

Costello rubbed his forehead.  Night in the Ruts was Aerosmith, not Black Sabbath.  Now the boss was starting to mix up American and British acts, something he had not done before.  Furthermore, that was just an album name, not a song.  The boss was coming unraveled.

"It's tough to recruit real pedigreed Mexicans these days," said Costello, his head aching from a blow on the canvas roof.  "They won’t take chances because they are afraid Trump is going to deport them.”

"Well at least somebody bring a Spanish dictionary.  You always got your ugly mugs in those phones of yours.  Can't somebody Google a translation?"

"No bars out here, boss.  No bars."

Eddy fumed in silence for a while, until the flashing lights of a pair of border patrol vehicles approached.  The FF convoy cordially pulled onto the shoulder to let them pass, if raw desert could be dignified by the word shoulder, but the border patrol vehicles stopped in the middle of the rutted road to block their passage.

"I got this boys.  Let me do the talking," Eddy said.

Hal Owen got out and waddled like a constipated penguin over to Eddy's jeep.  He looked  high-strung and weary, but whether that was because of the job or his overbearing mother was hard to say.  

"We got a report of explosions out at the construction yard," said Hal.  "Did you guys hear anything?"

"Holy Hades we did," said Eddy  "Sounded like a big firefight over there.  We've been patrolling around, trying to do our patriotic duty and protect the wall construction, but that was too much firepower for us.  We got out quick.

“Firefight?" said Hal.  "Who was shooting at who?"

Eddy smiled a smile so toothy it captured the feeble moonlight and amplified it to near solar status.  "You got me.  That's why you make the big bucks, big guy."

Hal scratched his boots in the dirt like a bantam rooster in battle mode.  References to his height really stuck in his gizzard, but he couldn't afford to fight with these assholes right now.

"How come you guys didn't radio it in?" Hal asked.

"We were just about to," Eddy said.  "We were kind of running for our lives."

Hal crossed his arms and stretched backwards, possibly to achieve the illusion of greater stature. It didn't occur to him to ask why, if they were running for their lives, most of the convoy was asleep, with unhinged draws drooling all over the dust saturated Jeep upholstery, making mud. "Well, I've got something to tell you.  I've been looking for you goons the last couple of weeks.  When we don't need you you're always sticking your noses in our business, but when we need help you're nowhere to be found.  You heard about that Arab woman who died in the desert, right?"

“I shore did," Eddy said, taking off his hat and lowering it to his heart, as a show of respect. Not surprisingly, it smelled under there.  "Sad, sad situation.  If those Ay-rabs would only take care of their own they wouldn't have to risk crossing this God-forsaken desert."

"Their country is a God-forsaken desert too,” Hal reminded him.  "I don't think she was over here fleeing hunger and persecution.  I think she was part of a terrorist cell.”

"Terrorist cell?”  That might explain your little shootout tonight."  Costello noted how clever Eddy was in planting the idea of the shootout in Hal's head, a shootout that had never happened.

Hal put his hand on his chin in the classical pose of thought, though deep thinker he was not.  "You know, that's something worth looking into."  He was giddy from the idea that this case had promotion written all over it.  When he told his bosses about the terrorist shootout they were bound to take him seriously.

"Why don't you run over there and look into it while the crime scene is still smoking," Eddy urged him.

Hal pivoted on his right foot and looked over at his lone partner in the other truck.  He then looked down at his sidearm, and found it woefully inadequate in its tiny holster.  "Truth is, I'm a little short-handed tonight."

Eddy slapped his knee and laughed.  “Wish I’d said that!”

Hal Owen went red, a glow so intense it could even be seen in the moonlight. Then he ran his fingers across the place he once had hair.  "Come on, get serious.  What's say we go over there and check it out together.  You got a lot of guys with guns here."

Eddy drew a dramatic breath.  "You know I would love to help you, old friend.  I've lived my life, I've had my fun, I've got nothing to lose.  But these boys here have their whole lives ahead of them.  They want to go home to their ladies and kids.  I can't send them on a suicide mission.  Besides, the way it sounded, those clowns were packing some heavy artillery, far superior to the pea-shooters we've got. So first you call in reinforcements, then you can deputize us. How about that?"

Hal nodded rapidly, shaking his nearly smooth head working like it was some vibrating sex toy.  "I get it," he said, "I get it.  You know, some of my colleagues think you guys are more of a liability than an asset out here. But I, for one, appreciate your effort and support.  I am thankful beyond words for your patriotism and your vigilance.  I won't ask you to put your lives needlessly at risk.  But there is one minor task I would like to request your assistance in."

"Go ahead.  Bounce it by me."

"The lady who died in the desert had a kid.  A little blue-eyed boy two to three years old.  The body of that child was never found.  We think the boy is still at large."

Eric's face went temporarily pale, even in the dim moonlight.  "A kid?  What do you mean a kid?"

"Just like I said.  Why does that surprise you?"

"Well, because...well because it's just sad.  The human tragedy.  It breaks my heart."

Hal fought back the urge to roll his eyes.  He had heard lots of stories from foot bound immigrants moving across the hostile desert about how the FF would nip at their heels like a pack of wolves, keeping them from water if they couldn't pay or if they hadn't been cleared by the coyotes Eddy franchised with. Sometimes there were children in these groups, but of course none of that mattered to these clowns.  There was only sensitivity to human tragedy if there was money to be made.  But right now Hal would turn a hypocritical cheek because he needed their eyes and ears.

"I need the boy," said Hal.  "He's carrying the key that could unlock the whole sleeper cell.  Somebody out here has him.  Maybe some immigrants took him in.  I need that kid and if you see him I want to be the first to know."

Eric scratched his cheek.  "Well, uh, what does he look like?"

"Come on man.  How many blue eyed, blonde haired Mexicans cross this border illegally?  You could spot him a mile away.  Do we have a deal?"

"Yeah, sure.  Whatever.  You know I do my part to aid and abet law enforcement whenever I can?"

"What's that supposed to mean?"

"Come on man.  We're old pals.  You know you can count on me."

Hal looked at Eddy suspiciously.  Eddy took note of his anxiety, remembering when Hal had been such a happy go lucky guy, when he didn't care about anything.  The badge had ruined him. Hal was married to his badge, and married to his mother, a thought made Eddy think fondly of his little gook wife. He had his bride shipped over in a rice crate straight from her jungle village, shielded from glittery sensory input that would taint her along the way.  She never gave him any lip while he did his thing, and never complained when he had difficulty performing his manly duty."

"It's a two way street," said Eddy.  "Tit for tat.  I bring you the boy and you leave my boys alone.  I know they do some things that sometimes might look bad to the general public, but you know that ultimately we're doing the work of the Lord out here."

Hal nodded.  Eddy smiled a second moon that lit up the night sky, but as he rolled up the window and drove away from the scene he shut off the smile immediately.  "How come nobody told me there was a kid there?" he barked at his passengers in the jeep.

The answer was so obvious it seemed like a trick question, so no one wanted to be the first idiot to answer.  Costello looked around for support but, with none forthcoming, he took it upon himself.  "You were there.  You must have seen him.  We all saw him."

"I didn't see anything!"  Eddy struck his hands on the wheel.  "I was busy pontificatin! You know durn well it's my job to pontificate, and your job to be my eyes and ears while I serve as the mouthpiece!" He pounded his chest in penitence. "Do you think me such a beast I would leave a child to die in the desert?  Where was he?"

"In the most obvious of places," Costello answered. "In his mother's arms."

"Don't mess with me.  I am not in the mood to be messed with."

"It's true," said Costello, and the others in Eddy's command jeep would have nodded in agreement, had they been awake.  "To be fair, she was covering him up with her body while kneeling down there in the dirt, chattering away in that sand beaner language.  Perhaps you were preoccupied."

Eddy let this sink in, upset for committing such an egregious error, but the massive ego filling the hat was unwilling to take the blame.  "Well, sometimes I do get carried away with my speech making but that's why I take you knuckleheads along. Why else?"  He made angry monkey faces in the darkness, then his tone turned conciliatory.  "Well, now we got a problem.  We've got to find that kid.  We don't know how much he saw or how much he knows.  We don't know how much he talks or what language he speaks, if he can even talk yet.  We don't know if he speaks any of the local lingua francas, or is that linguas franca?  Even if he speaks pure raghead, sooner or later they will find someone to decipher his jibber-jabber.  This is a problem.  A big problem."

The jeep bumped down the dark road.  The motor in Eddy's head hummed and lurched and clanked in time with its engine.  "I find it far from coincidental," Eddy said at length, "that the closest human habitation to this incident was the Gasden Motel.  I get the feeling that someone there saw that kid, or knows where he is.  Tony Vargas is in the habit of collecting critters, maybe he even collected the kid.  The problem is that now we are under the dictates of an agreement that require us to stay away from that motel. This does not mean, however, that we cannot maintain a clandestine vigilance from afar."

Eddy threw the jeep in a lower gear to climb a hill.  The engine strained, his brain strained.  "And that's exactly what we are going to do.  A couple of you are going to park your asses out in the desert with spotting scopes to keep an eye out for the kid.  The rest of us are going to patrol the highways and back roads of the Gadsden Purchase to find Tony Vargas, because I do not doubt he knows something.  This is our number one priority right now.  The future of our organization hangs upon it, just like this hat hangs on my head.”



Image courtesy of Lorie Shaull, flicker via Wikimedia Commons, altered into Black and White. Click to see her work.

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Chapter 21

Table of Contents

After watching the Freedom Frontiersmen evacuate his motel, Mike said screw it and went to the Rosebud anyway, even though there was no legitimate reason, other than drinking, to do so anymore.

 At least when Tony had been here there was someone to talk to, even if Mike’s part of the conversation consisted of rolling his eyes at Tony's wild boasts and inappropriate comments. With Tony gone there was nothing to do but drink. This made him realize that any attempt to organize an Alcoholic’s Anonymous chapter in Cornudo would have been derailed by the oppressive boredom that didn’t damage the liver, but ate holes in the psyche that could only be filled by liquor. Furthermore, there wasn’t a hall big enough in town to hold such a meeting, since everyone was essentially a drunk, or a drunk in training. In fact, the Rosebud was the only hall in town, and naturally they would be serving drinks there, which would pretty much kill the sobriety campaign.

 Mike staggered out of the Rosebud about 1:30 AM. He would have stayed until last call but that would have been irresponsible to Little Fucker. Some old hippy had been playing Grateful Dead tunes on the juke box all night. Sunshine ice cream, or Sunshine dank meme, Mike sang as he stumbled along back to the motel. He sucked at remembering words to songs. His Dad could remember the words to every song he had ever heard since the lullabies in the crib. God he wished he could see his Dad right now. They could get drunk together, throwing down Pabst Blue Ribbon or some bargain swill like that. His Dad would be so proud, maybe he should call him. No more appletinis. "Fuck appletinis!" Mike screamed into the night, shaking his fist at the heavens.

 Mike had to piss really bad, and started to unzip himself beneath a light pole. This was the single worst place a man could relieve himself, but drunken urinators seemed irresistibly, sometimes fatally attracted to light sources, just like the bugs buzzing overhead. The fact that his own toilet was only a minute away made the prospect even more tantalizing. Two things stopped him. First of all, he caught a glimpse of the gas station across the street. There was a light on in Danny's house just behind it, and he was sure that Marisol was probably awake, probably praying a rosary because that’s all those Mexican bitches ever did. Mike rocked drunkenly on his legs, laughing about the implications of this thought. Hell, they probably even prayed the rosary when they were fucking. He laughed himself stupid at this.

Another reason Mike couldn't urinate is because that fucking black car was parked in his lot again. It was that damned Agent Smith. "Get off my property!" Mike yelled, making a wild banzai rush on the car. Agent Smith's pasty white face, framed by those anachronistic dark glasses, multiplied in Mike's vision, reproducing itself via cellular division, proving he was some sort of spineless lower life form.

"Why don't you leave me alone?" Mike wanted to bang on the car, but thought Agent Smith might be armed, and he wasn’t drunk enough yet to test the theory.

 “I brought along a friend of yours, Mike," said Smith, flicking his tongue. In the back seat of the sedan, in a shadow where the glow of the street lamps barely reached, hunkered a figure whose identity, even in a silhouette, was unmistakable.

 "Mike, Mike, Mike," a voice from the back seat said in perfect Queens English, but definitely not the Queen's English. "I thought we had a mutual understanding. I pulled strings for you Mike to get you out of jail. That Sheriff was going to crucify you. And this is how you pay me? I'm really, really disappointed, Mike."

Mike really, really had to piss. He was seriously thinking about draining his valve on the wheel of Agent Smith's car.

 "What the hell are you talking about?"

The shadow puckered its lips in a Presidential pout. In his reeling and spinning drunken mind, Mike wondered how a Presidential pout would look on Rushmore, chiseled alongside Mao Tse Tung, Winston Churchill and Freddy Roosevelt, whoever that fat fucker was. His Dad was always ranting that the way the country was going they might as well chisel Chairman Mao into the Black Hills, so Mike grew up thinking he was really there. College had not changed that.

The pout was almost an entity unto itself, as if an infant had sprouted from the Presidential lip and become a being all its own. It is said that bright eyed Athena sprung like a tumor from the head of Zeus. Perhaps the pout too would break away to become a mighty warrior goddess, "I just want what's mine Mike. We've been combing the desert, and we can't find it."

Mike rocked on drunken legs. "Well, why don't you comb your crappy hair instead, if you really have any? I don't have it."

"I'm going to take that as a terrorist threat," said Smith, and started to get out of the car.

"Calm down Smith," the pout cajoled him. The pout seemed more compassionate than the human from whence it sprang. "We don't want him to hurt my baby. We've got to negotiate. Mike, I'm the greatest negotiator in American history. Are you willing to negotiate? You must know something. Bring my baby back, Mike."

“I don't have your baby," said Mike. "I just have to piss really bad. Excuse me." Mike stumbled toward the shining beacon for besieged bladders that the Gasden Motel had become. 

"Mike! Mike!" the desperate pout yelled after him.

 Anywhere but the Gadsden Purchase, this encounter would have seemed out of the ordinary. As it was, Mike shrugged it off and went to take a piss. The Gadsden Purchase was a DMZ, where world leaders sometimes showed up to placate you, so you wouldn't go over the line.

 Little F was sound asleep when Mike checked in on him. Instead of tormentors, the critters in Tony's room had become the kid's protectors. Even though there was still a highly toxic snake loose somewhere in the room, there was nothing quite as reassuring as sleeping among fanged beasts that are toxic enough to frighten the most determined and deadly human predator.

Mike tucked in next to the kid. The room spun around on its axis, Mike saw the stars in their courses, but it it was only the reflection from the spackled ceiling. He thought the critters must be getting one hell of a ride, then passed out.

Somewhere around dawn Little F woke him up, pounding on his chest and yelling "pee-pul." Mike checked the camera on his phone, thinking the FF was back, but was relieved to see what looked to be a normal traveling couple. As he put on his shoes something slithered against his foot in the dark, but he did not see it and was still drunk enough that it produced just another dulled sensation, like the rest of his senses.

 "Sorry to disturb your slumber good fellow," said a late middle-aged man with a long face and a chin so small it created an almost flat, featureless expanse down to the neck, something a geographer would call an intermontane plateau. His wife looked exactly the same, except shorter and with darker hair. The woman was wearing what could be classified as a sun bonnet, a ridiculous accessory at 3 AM, but in his motel, paying customers could wear what they wanted. The man had on a ball cap that read Hill Country Bird Festival, and had a pair of binoculars strung around his neck. He spoke in what would be classified as the Received Pronunciation dialect, but in his muddled state, Mike couldn't tell the real Queen's English from the Brooklynese of that shadow in the back seat.

The man said "The missus and I were kicking around the back country in the Huachucas, listening for the Whiskered Screech Owl, which has quite eluded us, I must say." Only the British would be smiling so cheerily at 3 AM after a night crawling around in the brush among thorns and cobwebs, Mike's Dad might have said. Once they had conquered the world with their warships, now they were conquering it with binoculars. "At any rate, we are quite exhausted, and thought we would layover here a while. We have heard the Le Conte's thrasher is splendid about these parts, and we would dearly like to cross that off our list. The sun never sets on our British birding Empire, old boy." It was clear the man had made this little jest many times in the past, to mixed reviews. His faithful wife was well trained to perform her espousal duty to laugh at the lame joke, even at 3 AM. "Can you give us a room dear lad?  And have you heard any updates about the local whereabouts of that species?"

Mike nodded in the negative.  Over at the Rosebud, nobody had been talking about LeConte's Thrashers.  But he was glad to check them in because they looked like nice people, compared to the blood-sucking fiends of late, so he gave them a special weekly rate, though no one had ever stayed a week before, and he found it slightly odd that anyone would want to. Then again, he had heard somewhere, probably from his father again, that the English were an odd lot. They deliberately sought out inhospitable places that normal people found absolutely inhospitable, all in the name of advancing the jolly good Union Jack.

Mike started filling in the bouncing registration blanks, perfect equilibrium still eluding him in his cloudy head. "Name is Easely. 37th Earl of Easely, but who’s counting?”

Mike learned quickly that Earls were fond of giving their titles even when no one asked. For this Earl, being a tourist in these rebellious colonies across the pond meant that no one knew what an Earl was, much less cared. Oh you mean like that feller on My Name Is Earl? - one particularly loathsome gas station attendant had asked him. And then there was that gang of ruffians singing Duke of Earl  behind his back in the hotel lobby in Albuquerque. But even though nobody here sympathized with his lofty rank either, the Earl of Easely couldn't help taking out his Earl card and waving it around.

 "This is the Lady Easely," the Earl Added, though it seemed obvious. He signed the registration slip as Mike informed them of the free HBO (hacked) and complimentary WI-FI (hacked). “Oh we won't be having any of that. The Lady and I like to live off the grid as much as possible. I've brought along a complete set of ornithological field manuals, and that should do for entertainment. We'll be up early for tea."

Mike wasn’t about to serve tea and crumpets to some pampered, self entitled Earl at the break of dawn. He gestured toward the Cornudo Café and the Earl got the point. “Splendid. Good night," the gentleman said, and Mike staggered back drunk to Tony's room. Hosting royalty or not, he just wanted to sleep off this bender.

In mid May in the Gadsden Purchase, the sun is in spring training for its regular season depredations of summer. The solar orb, eager to prove that its lackluster showing in winter did not indicate future performance, pried its way through the curtains and reflected off the glass fortresses of the menacing menagerie of desert outcasts lining the shelves, invading Mike's aching eyes. It's hard to sleep, thought Mike, when a hairy spider as big as your fist, sporting dripping mandibles, is staring straight at you with a multitude of malevolent eyes. He gave up and crawled out of bed.

Today he planned to hollow out part of a wall in his own room so he could install a safe. The way things were going here, he thought keeping a stash of ready cash was not a bad idea. He gave Little F breakfast and struggled to the office, trying to shield the sun with his left arm, but the sun was threatening to melt it, so he lowered his arm and forged ahead by alternating eyeballs, to limit the searing on any one individually. Half blind he almost didn't see Marisol walking over from the gas station, wearing cutoff shorts and a red tank top, but when he did his jaw almost came unhinged.

The Gadsden Purchase seemed to sprout buxom, beautiful women from cactus buds. Dear Jesus I didn't brush my teeth yet. Mike wanted to make a mad dash for his toothbrush, but leaving Marisol hanging might make a worse impression than his fermented breath.

"Morning Mike," she said sweetly as they exchanged a very girlish handshake that Mike tried to elongate by leaning back on his heels as far as possible, to spare her the cloud of noxious fumes percolating from his mouth and mandibular area.

"Muhning," he responded as tight-lipped as he could and still speak. She spared him further elaboration, obviously accustomed to men becoming morons in her presence. Meanwhile, the tan line peeking out from beneath her cutoffs was awakening parts of Mike that had lay dormant since Lisa's departure. Ursus Horribilis had awakened from hibernation. Further preparations for becoming a monk were put on hold.

“My uncle sent me by to see if you needed help cleaning up the rooms that Eric's people wrecked. Honestly, I volunteered, because it's so fricking boring around here. I need something to do besides waiting to jump when my uncle snaps his fingers. Can we cool it with the PC euphemisms for swear words, by the way? I mean, I'm cool with it if you're ultra religious, but if you want we can use real F bombs and ditch the fricking this and fricking that."

"Kbyme," Mike squeezed out from between clinched teeth. "All pay u."

"No, I'm not asking for a job, I just came by to help a neighbor. Is your jaw wired shut? Did you get in a fight?”

“Fall me,” Mike muttered. Marisol turned out to be fluent in bad breath dialect, because she followed Mike to the office without question. "Scouse muh secont," he said when they got there, then went in the back to brush his teeth. "Much better," he declared as he returned a new man. "I just got out of bed. I was up late last night entertaining visiting royalty. Some Earl from England came in."

Marisol didn't seem either surprised or impressed. She was crossing her own rather regally tanned legs in Mike's office chair. "We get all kinds around here."

"I think they're out scouring the sand right now, searching for some bird I didn't even know existed. My Dad always says only mad dogs and Englishmen go out in the noonday sun. I thought that was just one of his Dad sayings, but I guess he's right. It's only ten, not yet noon, but why split hairs?"

Marisol distracted, so Mike offered her some coffee. "I have a Keurig. It will be quick, it has these little cups."

"Sure. Hey, just because we have the only tube TV left in the free world doesn't mean I don't know what a Keurig is."

 “You should get one. They're great." Mike wished he could take that back. A beautiful woman shows up on his front door and the only small talk he can think of is about his freaking Keurig?

 "It would only confuse my Uncle. He would pace around the kitchen cursing it, then break it on purpose. He won't even use the remote control. I have to get up and change the channel for him."

Mike scrambled off for the coffee. "How do take it?"

"Just black."

 "Whoa! Really?"

 "There's no point sugar coating anything out here.”

 Mike handed Marisol the mug. She had a self-effacing streak that kept his hands from trembling in the presence of beauty. If he didn't know any better, it was almost if she didn't know she was hot, but that was impossible.

"Poor bird," she said.

 "Huh?"

 "That bird you said the Earl was looking for. Poor thing thinks this sandy shithole is the entire Universe. It could easily fly out of here, but it has no frame of reference, and probably assumes every place else is the same as here, so why bother? You and I, on the other hand, know better. Is that a blessing or a curse?"

 "I don't know yet. I'm still trying to figure it out. You probably think I'm a dumbshit for coming out here on purpose."

She took a seductive sip on the mug, her thin lips embracing the porcelain gently and softly, tasting it like a lover's skin. Down in its cave, the hibernating bear rolled over and scratched itself.

 “No, I think you're running from something.”

 "Whoa! Your Uncle always said the same thing.” But when Tony said it it was annoying, not charming. “Tony is your Uncle, right?"

 She smiled in a way that really didn't reveal anything significant from the password-protected part of her brain. "Kind of. I guess."

Mike let this little bit of awkwardness fizzle off. "How about you? Are you originally from here?"

She almost spit her coffee out. "Hell no. I'm from San Diego. Can't you tell from my valley girl voice? Everybody thinks it's strange to see a Mexican who talks like a Val. It's my curse. No one takes me seriously because of that."

 "Why did you leave?"

Marisol squirmed in her chair. Like everything else, she even made discomfort look sexy. "It's a long, tragic story. Why don't we get to work?"

 "Ssure," Mike said with one of his extended serpentile esses. He handed her a set of keys. "I'll tell you what. I'm doing a remodeling job in here I have to take some measurements for. I'll meet you out there in a few minutes. Those goons we're in rooms 11-16. Just start taking off the sheets and I'll be there in a minute."

Talking about sheets with such a sexy girl made Mike's hormones hum. Once Marisol was gone, he ran around to Tony's room to check on Little F. The kid was sitting on the bed before a captive audience of critters, his postcards spread out before him, sorted in geometric patterns that only made sense in his tiny head. "Stay here and be good," Mike cautioned him, though it was hardly necessary because the boy would not budge for hours. "Don't open the door." Mike didn't want Marisol learning about Little F yet. He wasn’t ready for that level of trust. 

"Be good," answered Little F with a wicked smile. Mike gave the boy a big bucket of animal crackers to keep him entertained. 

Back in the office, Mike  examined wall in his room he had torn out a few days ago with the idea of installing a safe, but in the excitement of the ordeal with the FF he had put it aside. Grabbing his tape measure he popped his head in the hole, and at once spotted a rectangular object hiding in the darkness, a shadowy lump that blended into the gloom. Leaning his head down and stretching his arm out gingerly, ever mindful of scorpions and other toxic creepy crawlies, Mike pulled the object toward him.

The thing was caked in dust, only in the Gadsden Purchase could dust penetrate a wall this thick, but still identifiable as a cigar box, the kind Mike's dad might have used to lug his pencils and crayons to school, before they invented those plastic boxes with the snap tops.

Mike carried the box to the table, where there was a letter from Lisa, addressed in her curling lovey-dovey script with letter i  dotted with hearts. This cuteness, once charming, irritated him now.

Next to Lisa's letter sat a surprise email from Otis, that he had printed in the event any common law domestic arrangements were disputed. It read: Bra, I don't wanna be the bringer of bad news, but you been good to me, and I thought you oughta no. I don't feel good doing this because Lisa used to be my friend too before she got all bossy bitch, but Lisa been two-timing you. Theirs this prof that has been visiting to give her so-call political instructin, but now the prof has move in. As far as I know Lisa is livin in your house, so this is a fuck up thing to do. I went there yesterday to so-call return Lisa a crappy book she tried to make me read. I thought shit was going on because the prof's car was always there. I heard them going at it through the door. I dropped the book and run. I don't wannabe a snitch, but you got no business with this bitch. She a ho, dump her bro. Love you bro, Otis

There was nothing new about the email. It was the same shit his Dad had been trying to tell him that he wouldn't listen to. But it helped Mike decide what to do with the unopened letter from Lisa. He needed room on the table to open the cigar box he had found, so he ran the letter through the shredder.

As the shredder teeth ripped ravenously through Lisa's letter, its wicked metal teeth seeming to savor the mauling, Mike carefully pried the cigar box open, wary that some fanged invertebrate would leap out. Turns out there were no bugs in there, but instead a collection of medals, the largest and most notable being a blue cross with a crown atop it, bearing the words F Pour LeMe Rite. That meant nothing to Mike, but beneath this was another that was most definitely an Iron Cross, a decoration Mike recognized from the Hogan's Heroes episodes he used to watch with his Dad. There was so much of this bling being flashed about on the show Mike assumed they issued them to all the krauts. His Dad said they handed them out for successful bowel movements. Even that bumbling bald fuck Klink had one, or did he? Mike would Google it. But the blue one? That one looked serious.

 Holy shit these must be Herr Mueller's medals, it occurred to Mike, that grouchy old fuck really was a Nazi bastard.  He wondered how they had gotten plastered up inside a wall.  Was he hiding this shit in case the Mossad came to drag his ass to a war crimes tribunal?

 Mike’s preoccupation with his archaeological discovery meant he didn’t see Marisol standing there in the office, leading Little F by the hand. The boy was not scared, but looked perfectly happy munching on an animal cracker. “Look what I found," Marisol said. She looked happy too.


NEXT>>

Image by MADe via Wikimedia Commons

Chapter 20

Table of Contents

Chapter 20

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Very nice to meet you," said Marisol.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"What's it doing?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Not too well, honestly."

"What's the problem?"

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

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

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

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

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

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

Danny asked how it was going.

"Just about done."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

NEXT >>

Image from Mk2010 courtesy of Wikimedia Commons