Mules:: A Novel Page 6

  “He told me the only time he left Montana was when he was in the Army. He said he was in the Special Forces, that they trained him to have skills that regular soldiers didn’t have, and that meant that he was never really done for good with the Army, that he could be called to go away at any time. He must have met my mother sometime after that, after he was back from the Army. I don’t know, though. He didn’t like to talk about her. Whenever I asked about mom he would say she died before I was born, but she didn’t, though. That was a joke.” An image of her at her father’s feet, outside on the porch. He sat in a chair overlooking the pines and the pines and the pines. She could still hear the blade of his knife scraping as he honed it on a whetstone. He grabbed a handful of her hair, ‘We have to keep it short, Elizabeth. We don’t need those long tangles hanging off your head like that. See? Isn’t that better. I’ll tell you about your mommy while I cut your hair, okay? Your mother was a slut. Do you know what a slut is? Sure you do, you’re a smart girl. Don’t move your head like that, hold still or I’ll end up scalping you like an Indian. Your mother liked to drink beer in filthy dark places and she would tease men with her cunt. I said hold still, goddamit. But she was a sly one, your mother was. She was sly and she was mean and she was a slut. She tricked your daddy into thinking she loved him. Isn’t that a mean thing to do? And by the time I found out that she was a liar and a slut, you were already in her belly. So I waited until you came out. I had to wait for a long time and put up with a lot of nonsense and deliberately mean things that your mother did. There were nights when I wondered if I couldn’t just cut you out of her and leave. I had to wait a long time, but it was worth it cause in the end I got to save you. I took you away to make sure that you wouldn’t grow up and learn all the mean things that mommy knows. I saved you from all of that.’

  “But when I was a teenager, daddy got real sick and I had to take care of him.” Els was 14, or maybe 15, in bed early before full dark, before she was sleepy. It was the only place she could hide from him. She was so scared of daddy. All he talked about anymore was the Great American Holocaust: economic collapse, the race wars, the sudden violent death of America, and the Great Starving of the millions of survivors living in the burned rubble of their fallen cities. None of it made any sense. He talked and screamed, even when he knew she wasn’t listening, he was still ranting with that nothing look in his eyes and flecks of slaver flying off his lips like a mad dog. She could hear him outside the door, pacing and babbling to himself. Els covered her ears and shut her eyes tighter.

  One day her father found an old Indian man walking around on their property. Els watched him beat the man to the ground, dry brown leaves tangled in his long white hair, the dirt sticking to the blood around his mouth. He went in the shed. Daddy took him into the shed and kept him there. Daddy said the man had information. She sneaked out the first night and tried to let the man loose, but he was too hurt. He just lay there on the floor, covered in dirt and dried blood while Els held the door open for him, begging him to leave. She didn’t go out to the shed again after that. And a few days later she saw the shed door open. She found her father setting traps, huge bear traps covered in leaves. They snapped shut if you stepped on them. Daddy said that there would be more of them. More men like the old Indian man, and he would be ready for them. Els asked her daddy what he had done with the man, if he had let him go. He said he was disappointed in her, he called her weak. Daddy showed her the man, he was hanging from a tree, thick rope around his neck, his red plaid shirt was stained with dried blood, he turned at the end of the rope with his arms and legs hanging down. He didn’t look human anymore to Els. He looked like a Halloween decoration.

  “But he kept getting sicker and sicker. I couldn't help him, not he way he needed to be helped.” She was 17, she remembered because this was one of the last times she would ever see daddy. ‘Just tell me what I want to know and we can stop this. All you have to do is say it, Elizabeth.’ Daddy had given her a set of specific numbers to memorize. This was their game. He made her memorize the numbers and then he tied her up in the shed and left her there. He would come back every few hours and ask for the numbers. She wasn’t supposed to tell him. He would be mad if she told him, and then a lot worse things than being tied up would happen. Her throat was burning, she hadn’t had anything to drink in almost two days, it hurt to swallow, and the rope was rubbing raw spots on her wrists. Daddy wanted the numbers, but she wouldn’t tell him. Her arms had little red circles up and down them from when daddy held his cigarettes to her, but she didn’t tell him the numbers. There was a crust of dried blood clinging to her nostrils, she knew because she could see her face reflected in daddy’s sunglasses when he leaned in to her and asked for the numbers. In some way, she hoped she was making her daddy proud of her.

  “And one day he just passed away.” She knew something was wrong because daddy hadn’t been to check on her for half a day. There were saws and all sorts of woodworking tools hanging on a pegboard above the paint-spattered workbench in the shed. She could get to them easily, even with her hands tied behind her back. She wasn’t supposed to use them, that wasn’t the game, she was just supposed to sit there, but she had to use them now. The game was over. She found the trap first. It was sprung. The jagged metal teeth were clamped around the bottom part of daddy’s leg, but daddy wasn’t there. He had to leave his leg behind in the trap, the bone was mashed to pulp and splinters where he severed it. It was easy to find daddy, there was a heavy trail of blood and he hadn’t gotten very far until he bled to death, crawling on the ground.

  “I stayed around Montana in the cabin for a while after that, but it was sad and I was so lonely. Daddy had left me a little bit of money so I decided to go somewhere new. That’s how I ended up in Florida. It’s different, but I like it. There’s so many people to meet, like you and Janna. There’s so many things I would have never done in Montana. And now here I am in Mexico.” She buried daddy in a grave she dug herself, no tombstone or any kind of marker, just like he would have wanted it. Private. She had a birth certificate, and there was a big Maxwell House can full of bills. There was about $30,000 in it, she thought that was a lot, but it hadn’t lasted her long.

  She still heard her father’s voice. When she was awake. She knew it was just herself pretending to talk like daddy, telling herself to be strong and to use her brain, but it helped her. But there was also the other voice; her father’s voice that spoke to her in her nightmares. The ranting screaming voice that came to her at night. It was the smoke-ravaged voice of insanity, and it wanted to know her Number. ‘Tell me what I want to know, Elizabeth. Give me the number or I’ll pull off your thumbnail with the pliers. Tell me what I want to know, Elizabeth, or you’re going to get the car battery again.’ That was the voice she heard when she woke up screaming in a cold sweat, the echo of it still in her head like a slug worming around her brain.

  Els stared out the window, watching Mexico roll by with a dazed look. She smiled slightly. “They call Montana big sky country.”

  NINE

  In Colzorona the phone was ringing. Myles Wade sat in the dark of his living room watching the smoke from his cigarette curl and rise, gray against black before disappearing into the fog above him. The phone rang again. He tipped the bottle of mescal and splashed some into a glass, noticing the slight tremor in his hands. The drink would steady them. They didn’t seem like the hands of a surgeon; they had all the finesse of a medieval barber. He should have been a butcher. He would have been an excellent butcher. But as a plastic surgeon in the States. . .

  He had been sued into oblivion by women with nerve damage from botched face-lifts or leaking breast implants, by men with crooked penile implants and grossly asymmetrical hair transplants. A woman choked on her own vomit while under general anesthesia for liposuction. She died, but the lipo looked incredible. He lost his license and his practice, he couldn’t even get a job as a middle school nurse, he knew that for a fact. He was out of options and the o
verly litigious nature of the American middle class had soured him on his homeland, so he did what any reasonable person would do, he faked his own death and took the policy payout to Mexico. He had connections to the underground here. He was Hernan Verde if anyone asked, not that anyone would. A guy like Wade could disappear in Mexico easy. Guys like him were hardly worth finding, and worth even less to look for.

  He listen to the ringer go off as he killed the glass of mescal. It wasn’t going to stop. He knew who it was without answering: some thug needed a bullet dug out of his belly, or worse, he was pissing fire and needed Wade to examine his weeping, puss-dribbling cock before being told to take penicillin.

  It kept his hands steady, though, knowing who his employers were. But he knew it was only a matter of time before he fucked up, before his hands twitched while he was closing the wrong guy’s artery and he would wind up in a shallow ditch with a bullet buried in his head. He would stitch up a thousand knife wounds and examine a thousand more infected dicks before he let that happen.

  He picked up the phone without speaking into it. As he listened, his face slowly dropped and he poured the rest of the mescal with his free hand, he lit another cigarette. This wasn’t a call about removing bullets or prescribing penicillin. This job was much worse; morally somewhere near the line of Nazi Science Experiment.

  The voice at the other end had finished speaking.

  “I don’t think I can do that. . . . No, it’s possible, I just don’t think I could live with myself after doing something like that . . . I understand, but it’s not a matter of money, there are certain ethical- . . . Of course I want to be paid, I wasn’t saying that. You’re not giving me a lot of options here. I just wanted to voice my objection before we- . . . Yes, I understand. I can be ready tomorrow. . . Yes. I’ll see you then.”

  Wade hung up the phone

  He stubbed out the cigarette in the already overflowing ashtray, picked up the empty mescal bottle and sat it back down again.

  He tried to light another cigarette, but he couldn’t keep the match steady.

  TEN

  Els watched the sun set in Mexico from behind the windshield of the Jetta, spewing dust off its tires as it tore across the unpaved road. The sky had lit up a furious pink before fading to a bruise-color as the sun sank behind the horizon and soaked up all the bright from the sky. Els wished she could paint it. She had never even held a paintbrush before, but that gorgeous sight begged to be captured by an artist’s hand. And now it was gone forever, thought Els sadly.

  She also wished she could roll down the window and breathe in the air, but she was still feeling grit crunch between her teeth from the last time she had attempted it. The whole country seemed to be coated in a sepia layer of dust. Even the air coming in from the vents smelled of dust to her.

  She liked it, there was something slow about this country; something that couldn’t be bothered about letting the dust settle over it.

  Earlier that day they had driven by a cluster of elderly women hanging laundry, their bodies squat, unhurried and arthritic hands reaching up to pin damp garments on the line to dry in the sun. In the brief moment before they passed them she saw the deep lines in their brown faces that looked like they had been hewn into their flesh with chisels. They reminded her of the Native American women she had seen on the reservations in Montana.

  They had stopped for lunch in a little town outside of Ciudad Victoria and, after ordering that involving a lot of gestures and pointing, sat down on a metal bench outside to eat some kind of shredded chicken with tortillas and cold Cokes.

  Neesha, who was feeling marginally better since waking, wondered aloud if they had overpaid for the food, and also wondered how strict the health code was.

  Els ate silently and watched a gang of children kick around a worn soccer ball, chasing the leader through the street, weaving between low brick buildings and out again.

  As they were leaving, Neesha leaned over and spewed her lunch out into the road to the amusement of some fat men smoking cigars in the shade. They pointed at her, laughing and spoke to each other in their alien language.

  She’ll feel better tomorrow, Els thought.

  Now it was early night and the stars were beginning to shine. They were still nearly 60 miles away from the resort in Blancasinato.

  Neesha was thankful for the dark, she felt like the sun had been boiling her eyes all day, and the vents were pumping in air that smelled like dirt. She wanted this day to be over, to check in to the resort and melt the grime off her body with a hot bath and then sleep for 12 hours. 60 miles, she thought, one hour. Then the little orange warning light lit up on the dash, telling her she was running low on gas. She didn’t want to stop, and the Jetta got pretty okay gas mileage, but she didn’t know if it could make 60 miles on an eighth of a tank. It seemed like a long way to her and the last thing she wanted was to be stranded in the desert in a foreign country. She realized then that only two people knew she was in Mexico, and one of them was with her. She could disappear so easily. She shivered and adjusted the air conditioner.

  “We gotta stop. We’re out of gas,” Neesha said, a hint of a whine raising the pitch in her voice.

  “We should have stopped earlier.” Els regretted saying that immediately, Neesha didn’t like to be told she had made a mistake, especially about driving. And she had been so grumpy all day.

  “Yes,” said Neesha with a flatness that belied her annoyance. “We should have stopped earlier. Maybe if you were driving you would have stopped, but I didn’t because I though we could make it, and I feel awful. That parasite con carne we had for lunch isn’t helping either.”

  “I feel okay,” Els muttered.

  “Look, there’s a place up ahead.”

  Els saw a little gas station with an attached garage and two ancient pumps out front. “I don’t know, this places looks a little skeevy. Are you even sure it’s open?”

  “This whole country is skeevy. The lights are on, though, and I don’t know when they’ll be another gas station, so it looks like we’re stopping.”

  Neesha spun the wheel into the parking lot and made for the pumps. As they turned, they saw an old Ford sedan, four-door, paint stripped to the primer, tearing out of the lot. The Ford’s tires lost traction as it swung out onto the road, kicking up a cloud of dust after it like the smoke from the burning fuselage of a plummeting aircraft. The car fishtailed and drifted across the road sideways before the driver slung it back around and righted it. The car sped off and they could briefly make out two male passengers and a driver in the front seat before it disappeared.

  “Well they were certainly in a hurry,” said Els.

  “Yeah, they probably saw the bathroom.”

  Neesha parked the car beside the pumps and climbed out. Els followed her outside and watched as she unhooked the nozzle from one of the pumps and shoved it into the gas tank.

  Els craned her neck up to look at a swarm of moths flying around and blindly bumping into the bulb on the lamppost shining over the pumps.

  “Fucking shit,” Neesha hissed, shaking the handle of the hose nozzle sticking out of the tank.

  “Maybe you have to pay first,” Els suggested.

  “Yeah, yeah. I’ll go in and pay. You pump. If I have to touch that thing again I’ll rip it off.”

  Neesha walked to the little store across the dirt and gravel lot. She pulled open the door and stepped inside. There was no one behind the counter. There were racks of candy, and a display of magazines, most of which seemed to be devoted to Mexican wrestling. She went to a big cooler full of soft drinks that she had never heard of. She pulled a long, thin bottle of something yellow out of the ice and set it on the counter. It had a picture of a pineapple on it. “Hello-o?”

  There was no answer. She leaned over the counter and tried to peer into a door leading to a back room that was open a crack.

  Then she noticed the register. The drawer with the little tray for holding different bills was protruding. And
it was completely empty.

  Neesha started to get a bad feeling. Leave. Get in the car and get the fuck out of here, fast. She ignored the thought and walked around the counter to the back room, pushed the door open.