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

Chapter 19

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Chapter 18

Table of Contents


Chapter 18

The effects of the unrelenting sand-choked wind reduce human civilization to a striking degree of similarity, no matter what part of the globe the scouring air performs its slow erosion upon. The cinder block homes of Cornudo were, in effect, the great pyramids of Egypt in miniature, surrendering their stucco to the atmosphere in microscopic bits. The wind did not respect the pharaohs, and does not honor would be monument builders among American Presidents, either. If the mightiest of men builds a wall the still mightier wind will reduce it to sand in due time. In the desert everything is eventually reduced to sand and this new sand, in turn, mounts the breeze to reduce other things to sand.

Even International borders revert back to sand this way. Drawing a line in the sand is a ridiculous proposition, and this is why the Mongol hordes could not be stopped, this is why the Israelites could not be contained as slaves in Egypt, and this is why the present day milk and honey seeking migrants from Syria to Central America cannot be suppressed. The desert scoffs at human geography. It laughs at man’s political maps, then pushes its grains of sand where it will, with no respect for the aesthetic appeal they will produce pinned to some man's wall.

Tony Vargas was being blown along like a grain of sand across the kitty litter box of the Gadsden Purchase. One day he bounced to Mexico, the next back to the USA. He couldn't tell the difference between them. Each dusty desert town was just another set of human Prarie Dog mounds, burrowed ever so fleetingly into the sand.

Back when Tony had a home to fall back on, his numerous friends across the great width but limited breadth of the Purchase - friends that were, in fact, as uncountable as the grains of sand, were always ready to receive him. But now that he was homeless, clunking along in the Love Machine like a traveling Gypsy, he was just a nuisance who should be run out before becoming a permanent fixture.

In Why they asked Tony why he was always dropping in unannounced. In Reforma they told him to get reformed and change his vagabond ways. In Somerton they advised Tony to go somewhere else, man. In Ajo a lady friend pleaded he stop taking those damn garlic pills for his heart, because they fouled his breath when he tried to steal a kiss. In Naco the people remonstrated that he stop acting like the town name. In Douglas nobody had a copper penny for his thoughts.

While Tony was clunking around the map, looking for that elusive welcome, searching for a friendly place to take a load off after his rude treatment by the kid at the motel, from time to time he would hear a loud thunking noise coming from outside. "I blew a goddamm tire," he would think, then pull the Love Machine to the shoulder.

When he got out he would see huge green military choppers, like monster metallic dragonflies, passing close overheard. Their whirring chopper blades, in fact, accounted for the noise, his tires were fine. So Tony would pee on the roadside so as not to waste a stop, then get back in the Love Machine to be on his way.

His way went unappreciated, unloved, and unwanted in the four Arizona counties, plus a slice of New Mexico, that together encompass the Gadsden Purchase. Even the Striggys girls gave him the cold shoulder these days. Women can smell the stink of desperation on you, Tony realized in a philosophical fugue, and desperate he was, really desperate. The Love Machine had turned celibate, had taken priestly vows.

Tony was by no means destitute. He had his railroad retirement sitting mostly unspent in the bank, because he didn't pay rent and suckered the kid into buying almost everything. That was okay, the kid had more money than he could spend in ten lifetimes.

How was the kid doing anyway? Probably really shitty by now without him around - the FF would have moved in to shake Mike down for protection money. The FF was just another gang with an operating territory that included Cornudo. When Tony was living at the motel they stayed away because he was a super chingon railroad thug who could still call upon his thuggery skills when needed, and call in other thugs as necessary. But Mike was at the mercy of those shit heads and even worse, shit heads who were yet to crawl out of the sand. Did that bother him? A little. But who had started it? Mike had chased him away because he was fixated on that two timing squinty bitch who put her hand in between Tony's legs when they were alone in the truck. That was when Tony bought the MAGA hat and started the get rid of Lisa process. But the scorpion in the shower? Shit - he only wished he had thought of that first. That was beautiful.

What about the Little Fucker? Tony felt really bad about leaving Little F alone the way he had. The helicopters meant the noose was going to tighten on the boy, and his protector Mike was an unknown quantity. Mike was not a fighter, that much was for sure, but Tony admired his stubborn streak. Muy terco, like him. The kid had brains too. Hopefully that would be enough.

After a couple of days of clunking around, sleeping in the back of the Love Machine, taking showers at truck stops because he was too cheap to get a motel, Tony crossed from Mexico, where he could find no quarter, back to Arizona again in an endless cycle of border hopping, feeling like he had finally scraped bottom, that not a soul in this world gave a shit. He had heard no word from Linda, had been proffered no apology from the kid, which he would have graciously accepted after making Mike squirm a few extra days. It was in this orphaned state that Tony washed ashore in Gila Bend.

He drove up to the river bank, mostly dry and suffocated by gray green Salt Cedar that had not enough foliage to hide neither bird nor vato, not enough water to save a fish from drowning, but nonetheless impassable to him. All he could do was look across the river wistfully. There was a girl on yonder bank in Buckeye who would take him in in a minute, but she might as well live on the fucking moon. There was no way he could cross that stream, no matter what a pathetic trickle it was.

Can fish really drown? he asked himself. What do you call that, when a fish has no water? Is it possible to drown in air too?

Why couldn't he just cross that fucking river to find love on the other side?

He would die, that's why. He would go into seizures and die. Mom had warned him about that. Was it worth dying just for a piece of tail? Hmm...depends. That would be a helluva way to go, but did he want his obituary to read “Died fucking?”

At that thought, Tony started thinking about Maria.

Meanwhile, over on the Nogales end of the Gadsden Purchase, Dustin Diesel was thinking about Doris. His thoughts were not as wistfully romantic as Tony's were - standing in the rheumatic elbow of the Gila River several leagues away, but instead revolved around about how pissed off Doris was going to be at him for missing her sister's birthday party.

"Aren't you the Sheriff? What good is wearing that big heavy badge if you can't do whatever you want?"

The badge weighed on Dustin like never before. It made his left man-boob sag distressingly. "You know that's not true, Doris. I'm a public servant. That means I have to sacrifice certain things from time to time."

"Why don't you ever sacrifice your drinking parties with your buddies? It’s only when I have something coming up, something you’ve known about for a year because it happens once a year on the same day, that you suddenly feel the call of duty. The rest of the year you're having one of the deputies shuttle you back and forth between benders."

How Doris found out about his occasional drinking outings was one of the confounding mysteries of women. Dustin covered his tracks thoroughly, even intimidating witnesses on occasion. Still, Doris could outperform any detective on his force, sniffing out a trail of debauchery like a bloodhound. Dustin often said that forensic science was wasted on men. A woman could take one look at a room and know exactly what had gone on there, without needing carpet fiber, blood splatter, or DNA analysis.

"I'm sorry honey but my hands are tied. This is something really big."

"Well you better get a big name lawyer, because there's going to be a messy, expensive diivorce after this."

Doris had been threatening divorce practically from the day Dustin said I do over 40 years ago. Of course, she had never followed through, but the warning still managed to throw Dustin into a funk.

The “something big” Dustin told Doris about didn't seem so big in comparison. It was a word that started with a capital B, all right, but that word was Bullshit. The Feds had Dustin's sheriffs sifting through the innumerable thorn-choked ravines, gullies, and arroyos surrounding Nogales, without telling them what they were looking for. "If it looks human-generated bag it," a particularly robotic, sunglassed G-man named Agent Smith instructed them.

When Dustin's officers toted back Heftys filled with paper cups, cigarette butts, beer cans and used condoms, Smith looked peeved. "I didn't tell you to bring back trash!" he raged.

“You said anything human generated," Dustin reminded him. "All of these items are made by people, including the contents of the prophylactics in those bags.”

"Do any of you hucksters have any brains,” he said, passing his reptilian tongue across his lips. "I mean something good! Don't waste my time on this shit!” He went to listen to the radio in his G-man sedan, pissed and worried at coming away empty handed again.

Armed with this vague directive, the Sheriffs Deputies of Santa Cruz County were driven off into the brush with a heightened sense of purposelessness. As he tilted his Smokey Bear cap up, which had slipped down over his eyes once more because it was a loaner a size too big, one such Deputy, named Prescott, complained. "Hey, I went out there last time.” He gave Sheriff Diesel an injured look.

Dustin Diesel pulled his badge away from his sweaty and beleaguered man boob, affording it some relief, as it was hanging even heavier than it had that morning. "Listen Prescott," he scolded the impertinent rookie. "Someday your punk ass will get some seniority, and you'll get to stand here and supervise. In the meantime I'm the Sheriff, so get back out there before I replace you with another Arizona city. I'm sure Deputy Williams or Deputy Kingman won't complain about crawling through the brush. Step up your game and tone down your mouth."

Deputies Prescott and Wickenburg, quite ironically named for obscure Arizona municipalities no one would ever get right on Final Jeopardy, moved grudgingly down a slot canyon. In the past, Dustin Diesel mused as he watched them sulk away, he would have gladly taken his turn at the grunt work, but the truth was he wasn't feeling too good lately. Just yesterday, while on a drunken hunting jag with the boys, he had missed a shot at a quail for the first time ever. He didn't know what the hell was happening, but his legendary aim was off. His eyesight had suddenly gone a little fuzzy. Luckily, no one had seen him miss, but he was going to have to give up hunting now. if word got around to the bad guys he had missed a shot there was no way he could maintain law and order around here. Every hunkered down hoodlum within fifty miles of the border would come crawling for him from out of the cactus.

Deputies Prescott and Wickenburg cursed and kicked rocks as they labored their way down the rugged ravine. "The boss seems cranky today," Prescott complained.

“Don’t take it personally. He's going through a midlife crisis."

“Midlife?"

“Yeah, midlife crisis, that's what they call it." Wickenburg sounded annoyed.

"Why do they call it midlife crisis? That old fart is more toward the end of his life, if you ask me.”

“That's just what they call it, asshole. Pay attention. Maybe we can find this thing and go home early.”

Prescott got pouty for a while, until he looked up from the rough terrain, not compatible with his spit shined dress shoes, and spotted something halfway up a Mesquite that seemed to merit attention.

“What's that red fuzz up in that bush, Wichita?" he said, pointing upward.

“Wrong state, idiot. I’m Wickenburg."

“Oh," said Prescott, not sounding particularly enlightened by the geography lesson. “Can’t you see that hairy shit in the tree?”

Wiickenburg scrutinized the distant clump. "Some kind of animal fur, I'll bet. There's a lot of wild jackasses out here in the desert. Sometimes they get horny and rub up against a bush. They leave hair everywhere."

“I don’’t know," mused Prescott, "I’ve never seen a red jackass. Maybe we ought to check it out.”

"Hey, dickweed," said Wickenburg. "I got a lot more years on the force than you. Besides that, I'm not touching that fuzz. It could be a biohazard."

Prescott peered at the mysterious, unkempt fur ball in the bush. It didn't look so much like burro hair to him but then again, what did he know? Best to leave it to the experienced experts, like Deputy Wickenburg here. Besides, he wasn’t much in the mood for fingering donkey pubes.

“Anyway,” said Prescott, “That asshole Smith said no trash. That looks like trash if I ever saw it.”

Wickenburg nodded agreement, then they kept moving on up the ravine.

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Image by $1LENCE D00600D, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons

Chapter 17

Table of Contents


Chapter 17

The next morning Michael Gasden woke up to someone banging on the front bell.

The bad part of running a motel, thought Mike as he groaned his way into a sitting position, is that if you want to stay in business you had to get up and answer the bell, even if you were on a bad bender the night before. There was always some asshole customer pounding on the door. The ice machine is broken. How do I operate the remote control on the TV. Is there a Starbucks here.

Mike threw on some sweats and squinted in the nascent sunlight as he looked toward the office window. The clouds were on hiatus until the summer monsoons. There was nothing in the heavens that could challenge the sunlight for supremacy, and the relentless beams took delight in scalding Mike's hungover eyeballs.

A thin man with a thin mustache, wearing spectacles that magnified his eyeballs to ridiculous Anime levels was standing in the doorway, looking indignant. He gave Mike a sanctimonious oh you were sleeping on the job look.

"I would like to speak to the manager please," he said.

"I am the owner."

The man's prissy face dressed down Mike in disbelief. He lowered his prissy spectacles.

"There's a child crying in the room two doors up," he said. "He's been crying for several hours. I think his parents abandoned him. You should call the authorities."

Mike's immediate response was to buzz Tony then go back to bed, but Tony was beyond buzzing. An uneasy realization came over Mike. This man, who he vaguely remembered checking in last night in his completely sodden state, was two doors down from Tony. This couldn’t be. Not even Tony was a big enough bastard to abandon Little Fucker in a room full of poisonous vermin.

“I'm sorry for your inconvenience," said Mike, taking a line from his hoteliers handbook of empty assurances. “I'll look into it right now."

“It really was an inconvenience," said the man, sniffing for something free, a trophy he could take back to the wife and kids and say look what an alpha male your old man is when all the time you thought he was a wimp with these pussy-ass glasses.

"Here's a voucher to the Cornudo Cafe next door," said Mike, handing him a slip of paper through the door, which the man scrutinized suspiciously. It was indeed worthless scrap, the man would never try to redeem it, because from this distance the Café looked like the international headquarters for botulism. "It truly is delicious dining," Mike said with a wink. "I'll look into the disturbance immediately.”

Mike left the office with deliberate deliberateness, because the hawkish dweeb was watching him like a hawk. Meanwhile, he puffed himself up with righteousness, thinking that if Tony had left Little F behind without telling him then he was indeed a douchebag extraordinaire, and he shouldn't feel so bad about chasing him off.

Mike pretended to swipe his key card in Tony's door, then pushed it open with his foot. Little F was sitting up on the bed, his face red and puffy. His arms immediately extended when he saw Mike. Mike hated snot-nosed crybaby kids with a passion, and had made a nearly priestly vow never to engender one, but goddamit when Little F reached out to him like this he no longer felt so goddam alone.

Mike had no nurturing qualities whatsoever, but he somehow knew what to do. He picked up Little F, walked him carefully around the toxic land mines, then put him down again when the child realized he wasn’t abandoned and calmed down.

“Damn, I'm sorry," Mike said soothingly. "I guess that fat bastard went off and left you. Let's go to the office, I'll get you something to eat."

Mike looked outside to see if the prissy prick was looking, then quickly carried Little F around the far side of the building to the office.

Mike made oatmeal and bacon for Little F, then sat him down in a corner of his own room, away from prying eyes. Even though he was technically a Muslim, Little F munched the swine flesh with great abandon.

"You like that pig meat don't you," Mike said, not worried about thunderbolts being cast down from Allah because there wasn't enough water in the air from here to El Paso to make a single thin wisp of a cloud, much less a thunderhead. Not even Almighty God could make a lightning bolt out of season in the Gadsden Purchase. "Stick with me kid, I'll teach you to do heretic right.” Little F didn't yet understand the exact meaning of Mike's words, but he caught the rebellious essence, and smiled.

The doorbell rang again. It was Eagle Beak, back to stick his pointed nose into dark secret places.

"What happened?" the man asked.

"I took care of it. The guy was exhausted from driving all night and didn't hear his kid crying."

“Did you call Child Protective Services?"

"No, why?"

"People like that shouldn't have kids."

"Thanks for being a good citizen," Mike said, and closed the door.

After that, they got busy. Life went on in the Gadsden Purchase. Rooms had to be cleaned, linens had to be washed, walkways had to be swept, the critters had to be fed, all while monitoring the front desk for activity. The latter had usually been Tony's job, but Mike had also installed a camera above the door to compensate for Tony's prolonged bathroom breaks. He monitored the device from his phone.

Still, it was hard for Mike to work and watch the camera, so on the off chance he showed the phone app to the kid, communicating instructions via pantomime, walking his fingers across a table to indicate a person walking on camera. Surprisingly, little Fatwa found this fascinating, and stared fixedly at the phone for hours, forsaking his postcards. He caught on what to do immediately, even picking up a little English, shouting "pee-pull" loudly at Mike when someone approached the window.

The only interruption in this otherwise productive routine was the ominous sounds of helicopters flying back and forth, combing the desert but not with an eye for style, searching desperately for whatever unholy grail Mr. Smith said Trump was missing. With all these birds in the air Mike thought he should move Little F incognito from room to room, so he put him on the bottom shelf of the cleaning cart. Mike suspected that Agent Smith was out there somewhere, spying on him from long range across the treeless flats of the desert.

For two days peaceful monotony reigned at the Motel. Then, on the third day. Mike saw the familiar car of a local dealer pull into the lot. It was an old Chevy Blazer, the kind driven by many of the poor, desperate types in Cornudo, where the empire of Japan and its industrial might had failed to make inroads.

With no one to buzz, Mike had to do the dirty work himself. "You know you're not supposed to be here, Versace," Mike told the kid in the Blazer.

Versace considered himself a player, a self-proclaimed gangster who grew some weed in his Mom's backyard to deal to the truckers and hippie snowbirds who came to town. His real name was Maurice, but he had taken the name Versace to cultivate a playboy image. Although nobody wanted him on their property, just about everyone in town had him on speed dial.

"Just giving the people what they want, bra," Versace said.

"Do it elsewhere."

Versace looked annoyed, but not angry. He was a very persistent type. Like a tick, sooner or later he was going to find a place to latch onto. "Where's your bulldog," Versace asked.

"He'll be back any minute."

“I heard he left."

“You heard wrong."

Versace put the car in gear and drove off. Mike didn't know if the punk had bought his bluff, but the word was already getting around that Tony was gone. For a place where cell phone service was horribly inadequate, news traveled fast.

This incident with Versace and others made it clear that life without an extra body around this place, even an inert lump of grotesque flesh like Tony, was not easy. At the very least, Tony went for provisions while Mike tended the farm. Motels were always running out of provisions. Mike never realized before how much people shit. He couldn't understand how a family of four could go through the four rolls of toilet paper he provided for a single night stay, then call the desk and demand more. He began to suspect there was a secret human-termite hybrid race scouring the nation's interstates, munching up toilet paper as fast as they could get it.

So now they were running out of toilet paper. Mike had no choice but to close the motel and high tail it to Yuma.

Mike and Little F stopped at the Cracker Barrel, where man introduced boy to the marvels of pancakes, gravy, and other food items probably condemned on pain of horrible death by the kid's Islamic faith. After breakfast they lingered in the country store up front, from which the boy wanted nothing except more postcards. Then they crossed town to Sam's club, because in the barbaric backwater border town of Yuma, Arizona there was no Costco.

“You're a little fucking brat," Mike said to Little F.

"Fucking brat," little F agreed. He learned quick.

The shopping spree was uneventful. They got back to the motel with toilet paper bursting the rivets of Mike's truck bed cover, so tightly packed that Tony and a Hooters girl would have been squeezed out like toothpaste through the seams. Mike was thinking he could adapt to this lifestyle. The kid was no trouble at all, crying only when absolutely necessary, and learning things fast. Little F walked fully upright now, having graduated from Neanderthal knuckle-dragging, and had mastered the art of the toilet. He copied the English words he read on the postcards from memory. As for Lisa, once the thrall of her physical presence wore off, Mike didn't think about her much. He just couldn't figure out why she had staged that elaborate exit strategy. Maybe she had been trying to lay the blame on Tony, to appease her own conscience for the break up. Anyway, there was no longer anything but silence from her. Lisa seemed to have voluntarily severed all ties, Mike's Dad reporting that she had moved out of his rental flat.

Now the only person that weighed on Mike's mind was Tony. But there was a lot of toilet paper to unload, so Mike deferred those thoughts until later. Fiddle-dee-dee I’ll think about that tomorrow, he thought, Scarlett O’hara-like. Other events quickly superseded this in priority, for upon that night, Allah got his revenge. Mike didn't know if it was the Cracker Barrel sausage patty or the hot dog from the Sam's Club food court, but Little F's innards were purged of the porcine evil in which he had immersed them. About midnight the boy started throwing up.

Mike didn't know what to do. He could drive the boy to Yuma, but he suspected that Agent Smith and his minions were probably keeping tabs on the medical facilities for just such an eventuality. Still, he had to do something, he couldn't have a kid puking himself to death on his property and besides, he was grudgingly growing fond of Little F. So he did the only reasonable thing he could think of, he scrambled over to the Rosebud to talk to Linda.

Mike silently beseeched Allah, promising he would never defile the boy with unclean food again if he would show mercy. The prayer must have worked, because Linda was pulling bar duty, drawing beer and slapping grabby drunks. Mike wondered when the woman slept.

Instead of her usual sunshine smile, Linda looked grim when she saw Mike. “Did you swallow a stupid pill or something?" she asked with a hand on her hip and the other on the beer lever.

It seemed to Mike that everybody thought he was popping pills - red pills, blue pills, stupid pills, but it was really Little F who needed a pill, and badly. He prepared to take his lumps, for the kid.

"You've got a lot of audacity walking in here, I'll give you that," she said. Mike was disturbed that, for the first time, she didn't refer to him as some kind of confection, blooming angiosperm, or baked good. "You're not the most popular person in town, including with yours truly. Everybody knows what you did."

Mike approached the bar like a penitent to the altar. "I know I screwed up bad," he confessed. "It was all a big misunderstanding. I want to contact Tony, but I don't know how."

“Don't look at me. If that boy don't want to be found he ain't going to be found."

"I need your help. The kid is sick."

“The kid?"

"Yes, the kid. Little F."

“He didn't take the kid? He said he loved that kid. Well, that don't surprise me. Kids got no business going where he's going."

"Tony probably explained to you the situation. I'm afraid to take him to a doctor."

Linda licked her very good teeth, not desert eroded, dust-stained teeth like most people out here. She was either lost in thought of what to do for Little F, or thinking about bouncing Mike from the bar with a shotgun. "It ain't your fault, tastee-kakes," she said. "People around here that are so indignant about what you did never lived a day with Tony. The important thing is you're not a snitch. You've embraced the code of the desert by taking care of one of us. You are one of us. But just to give you a heads up, you are going to have a trial by fire."

The world was okay, she had called him Tastee-kakes. "Yeah, I know what to do," Linda pronounced, "but it will cost you. This guy don't take no health insurance, but he doesn't keep any records either. Everything strictly under the table. I hope you got plenty of cash.”

Mike nodded. "Good, I'll call to set things up. Here's the address in Yuma. You better get going."

Mike drove Little F to Yuma, keeping a keen eye on the boy puking in a bag, hoping most of it landed inside and not on the truck upholstery. But Little F proved surprisingly adept at puking, too, even in the bilious state inflicted upon him by vengeful Allah.

The address in Yuma given to Mike by Linda was in an old neighborhood, even by run-down Yuma standards. The place had a rusty chain link fence and high hedges that were spreading jungle-like to cover the windows. The termite-riddled porch was missing a floorboard, and Mike nearly stepped through it as he carried Little F inside. Mike wondered what kind of voodoo medicine they practiced here.

On the inside, however, everything was surprisingly clean. A hard-bitten, tattooed Mexican man in a wife-beater led Mike across scrubbed, stainless carpet to a spotless examination room in the back. There were no posters of the human anatomy on the wall, no jars of tongue depressors or boxes of latex gloves, but the room had a calming antiseptic smell.

To Mike’s surprise, when this same frightening gang-banger put on a white smock he actually looked and acted like a doctor. When Little F splattered his diaper and the examination table with the fallout, the doctor cleaned it up with clinical indifference, even taking a sample. The man engaged in no bedside banter, only asking the necessary questions and humming gently to calm down Little F. The fact that the boy understood neither English or Spanish didn't seem to be important to him.

After taking Little F's vital signs, the doctor took the stool sample to the back. He came back with a verdict of "Shigella," then administered antibiotics with an injection so skillfully done Little F didn't know what hit him. The doctor then told Mike to give the boy fluids, took off his smock and resumed being a gangster. Mike paid, thanked him, was reciprocated with an indifferent grunt, then headed home.

The sun was creeping over the Eastern horizon as he drove, preparing to deliver an ass-whipping to the eternally scorched earth. Little F finally fell asleep, the lack of shit smell telling Mike he was holding it in. Whoever that doctor was, whether he even had a license to practice or not, he definitely knew his shit, figuratively and literally. He knew his shit from Shigella.

The Interstate flowed down the hill into a desert so bare it was an empty void like space, a vacuum that had sucked the energy and ambition out of many a good man, many a man better than Mike. The freeway had been engineered not to give even a glimpse of the green fields along the Gila, so as to offer no false hope and keep people moving along as quickly as possible. Phoenix and Tucson were mistakes, the freeway builders conceded - they didn't want similar untenable conglomerations of people to occur so close to California.

When you have been up all night scrubbing baby shit, however, the vista was as pleasant as any that were called home. But why was this home? Tony had inquired this of Mike once, while asking what he was hiding from. What the hell was he hiding from? At his current stage of exhaustion Mike wasn't feeling philosophical or introspective enough to answer the question.

The Cornudo/Tacna exit sign appeared like a beacon. This was not a source of contentment or hope for most travelers, but it made Mike happy at the moment. What did not make him happy was the flurry of activity taking place in his motel parking lot, which he spotted even before he hit the off-ramp. His property looked like the staging area for a white trash parade. But instead of colorful, festooned floats and marching bands accompanied by sexy baton twirlers, the parking lot of the Gasden Motel was populated by Eric in his big cowboy hat, standing out even hundreds of yards away, and several members of his rough crew pouring out of their dusty trucks and jeeps, all of them dirty, unshaven, and decidedly unfestive.



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Image by George Baker, about 1875, courtesy of Wikipedia