4
The fall is beautiful in
Humbaba. Garlands spring from the ground, bursting forth from forests and
houses, twining over roads, clogging the wheels of cars and twirling out of
windows. In the bright humid heat’s circulated flow, the throbbing thrum of
plant-life fills nostrils, fills lungs, the green smell of earth filling the
air, rich, dense and plentiful, marbled purple strains so rich they glow with
the natural glow of growing life, the green smiling bounty grateful in the sun.
The coming of summer is beautiful, too. And for those with their fill of TV,
booze, dogma, bigotry, prejudice, prescription drugs—for those with their fill
of the corrupt hypocrites lying on OxyContin, lying on cocaine, lying on oath,
with smoke stacks puffpuffpuffing away, running the world into the ground, into
dust and death and ruin—for those with their fill of the criminal one percent,
lying in support of themselves, at the expense of the people, at the expense of
the planet, in Humbaba it was always fall, and spring, and the celebration of
the year anew, if only in the mind, where all reality grows.
At Hola John's, Phil said hi to Maya, who asked him what
he'd have. The radio, tuned in to the college station, playing Santana’s “Samba
Pa Ti.” People nearby ceased speaking the language of surf and got into which
album the song was off. Eventually they reached a consensus: Abraxas, 1970. Santana’s second. Phil,
glad to hear they got it right, observed Maya’s creation of his bean and cheese
burrito in benign silence. He knew she didn't recognize him, beyond the fact
that he was an occasional customer. There was no reason that she should. It was
easy to recognize her, however, with her fairly distinctive blonde dreadlocks,
as a friend of Dinah’s. She came over every few months.
Hola John’s was so
small, Phil wondered how long, as he sidled his way out, burrito in hand,
before somebody farted and they all died in there. He had parked almost
directly in front of the premises and ate inside the sleek machine in full view
of a dude and a chick who snagged the tiny window table and aimlessly
considered the crappy quality of a supersized business compared with the crappy
quality of a humble little mom and pop. Who owned Hola John’s? Was it the big
dream to sell out?
Music used to be records. Records were big. Then the
music got small. Was this somebody's idea of diminishing the importance of
music? Transforming the cultural influence of music into videos and CDs? Was it
only a coincidence that so much in the 80s got cheap and fake and plastic? The
corporations got bigger, the music got smaller. Experiencing a record might
influence a person. Might get a person to thinking. Thinking about maybe not
supporting the system. A music video can't do that. Nobody watching a music
video ever opposed a war. Where were CDs going? Shrinking down to nothing. Music
getting smaller, TVs getting bigger.
But TV was just a mask. It was the thing behind TV he
chiefly hated.
Before he could go drop off
any videos and pick up a big flat screen in Las Vegas, the thing to do was test-drive
the Pinto. The great news was he had it already marketed in his mind as a noble
old nag. He would call it Rozinante. In fact, already did. Giving the car a
name gave Rozinante an identity. Not since Leo Burnett aborted “Mild as May” and
gave birth to the Marlboro Man as an ad campaign had human perception been so
successfully manipulated. And Phil Stein did it without benefit of subliminal
coding or sheer repetition. Either he equated the Pinto with Don Quixote's
horse, or with the bean. And the bean lost that war, lost it to the workhorse,
but good. What with Rozinante all gassed up, Phil decided, hell, time to take Rozinante
up to the beach.
He had to wonder if finding Rozinante this way was as
big a moment for him as he thought. In TV life, they always tell you. Every
occasion is always Must See, but not always A Very Special one to Must See. Outside
TV life, things could go by and a person might not even know. When did the
friendship get canceled? When did the conversation start? Was it a repeat? How
do you know if something is funny when there is no Laff Track? What is it
you're supposed to be buying? Outside TV life, they don't even tell you.
Phil took to turnoff a few miles past Tertia, catching
sight of an osprey nest high atop a snag, and parking in the shade along the
old road before the state park entrance with the highway out of view. Somebody
else was parked there, too. Vigilance Is Freedom, the bumper sticker said.
Down the trail to the beach he passed slanted vegetation
shaped by winds like mind transformed by tube. Then in a whipping breeze he
reached the breakers rolling, mottled gray and green crashing yellow foam. Phil
left his mark, tracks in the sand, among the kelp washed up, translucent olive,
popping kelp bulbs on the gritty gray sand thick with sand fleas hopping,
noting the strata of the porous rock ringing round in carved coves, gulls
waddling ungainly in groups, moving together for protection, each seeking to
catch sight of some morsel before another. The beach always looked this way. To
early ancestors it looked this way, looked like this exactly. This was what was
real. Not one building on the ocean, no telephone lines imposed, he could stare
at it all day. Just sit and stare transfixed, staring at the ocean for sustenance
and guidance, like a rock at the ocean's edge, immutable, immobile, no one
giving any static, remote, glassy surface in the distance, smoothing, soothing.
It only went to show.
Phil produced writing
implements and wrote of white-bellied gulls with broad gray wings hovering and
gliding over limbo-dancing trees. Long
waves, he wrote, on a gray ocean. From
far away they build, growing into one long line until crashing they reach the
shore, and recede, as off in the darkening distance under the flat line of the
sky the long gray line swells and grows again.
5
Desert heat radiating
off the big white hood of the pickup distorted the scene viewed from the
air-conditioned cab. The men outside were poor, and the boys from the
fraternity who took advantage of this thought that they had conquered.
“Pooro’s lookin’ fit,” one of the boys from the
fraternity said through a mouthful of burger. His name was Jordan.
Royal, Jordan's fraternity brother, nodded in agreement,
inspecting his sandwich as he chewed, pulling out a slice of pickle from the
mess he held in his hands and tossing it into the bag at his side. “Thinks he's
hot shit.”
“Hey, punch up that one fight of his last Thursday.”
Royal produced his cell phone and subsequently the
fight. They stared in the cab at the tiny screen.
“I look at you,” Pooro had said at the time, the black
mask around his eyes painted on, “and I feel bad to think how your mother would
feel were she to see what's about to happen.” He had said it quietly, with
sorrow and regret. Royal's camera didn't even catch it. Nor did it catch him in
a clinch hissing how he hated hitting.
The street, of course, served as the Schwab's Drugstore
of Pooro's discovery. Jordan and Royal, whose purchases of exams freed up time
for playing lots of mixed martial arts role-playing video games, got the idea
from a billboard for Punch Drunk, the addictive artificially flavored drink
with cancer-causing additives.
Punch Drunk Packs a BigBig PUNCH!
Get Punched!
Drink Punch Drunk, Artificially Flavored Fruit Drink!
Now with Cheery Cherry and Mango Tango!
“We should get those drunks to punch each other,” Jordan
had said from the cab.
“I'd watch that.”
“I bet people would pay to watch that.”
And so Drunkfights was born.
Pooro's real name was Norman. The oldest one of the bunch,
although he didn't look it. His first fight was filled with the rapid shrill
talk of the viewers following along, wanting to appear experienced and
knowledgeable. The guy in his first fight kept looking toward the camera to
make sure he was being filmed. Royal did a suckass job filming, but Norman had
surprised them all.
He whipped a hook to the side of the guy's face that
took out two of his teeth, and the guy blankly stared where his teeth lay on
the blacktop of the parking lot all fresh, like out of a cartoon, then let a
long dark glop of blood slide out of his mouth and took a couple more nails in
the coffin—one to the head, one to the neck—before he went down.
“Looked like Zorro!”
Royal said.
“More like Pooro!” corrected Jordan.
It was a prophetic moment, and they had laughed. Derisively,
of course. Still, Pooro kept the name, just the same.
“How do you think he'd do against an animal?” Royal knew
a guy with a wild animal park. Maybe an old black bear, or maybe a sick
mountain lion?”
“Give him, what, like a lead pipe?”
Wavering in the distance, Pooro showed Cesar and Sampedro
how to slip a jab. Pretty soon they might think they were hot shit, too.
“I know a guy on HGH,” Royal said. “He’s all ‘roided-out.
He'll kick Pooro’s ass. Fuckin’ fast.”
“Not too fast.”
Lunch was over. It was time to go play some video games.
Like an approving parent presiding, behind the frat boys rose the tower.
6
“‘The DEA this week says
this explicitly shows the pen is mightier than therapists.’”
Dinah Zauber held a scrap of paper in her hands, sitting
at Phil's table in the attic. On the other side of the paper he had written, The wave directly viewed appears slow,
serene and constant compared to when seen crashing down at the sides, and so
great is the wave, it appears from a new angle as new, and the wave is greater
than the sum of its parts.
He stood at the tiny
section of counter nearby, putting banana in a blender. From the list he wrote
at the beach, she read aloud some more. “‘What do you think of Shiva, Gina?’”
and “‘Is there a La Brea Street around here?’” She still didn’t see it. “These
are supposed to be subliminal messages?”
“Sure,” he said, spooning some brewers yeast into the
blender. “Sex or death in every one.”
“‘I'm an American. U.S. all the way.’”
“You don't see it?”
“‘If you want a tan, use lotion.”
“How can you not see it?”
“‘There in the mud: Eat Here, the sign said.’ Where's
the subliminal message in that?”
“Wow. It's so obvious, I can't believe you don't see it.”
Food made at home tastes better,
thought Phil. “See, the thing is, I came up with those in a matter of minutes
just fucking around. But every single day, all over the place, everyone is
exposed to images in advertising so subtly and carefully constructed, you can dissect
them directly, and a lot of people still won't get it. They're the ones that
advertising affects the most.”
Dinah put down the list. Phil poured in some juice, put
on the cap, and turned on the blender.
It was 7:34. Down below outside, a serious-looking
cyclist worked a ten-speed left and right powering up the hill. Out of sheer
propriety, Phil held back a health shake burp.
“For all the constant
titillation, most people never talk about real sex and real death at all. Religion,
mostly, keeps the country repressed that way. So people respond subconsciously
to images of it manipulated into advertising. It's like a card trick I could
show you. Nobody really knows why it works. It just does. A lot of people
really hate hearing about it. You can point out the face of the Indian and
Native American prints—the face in the water, the face in the clouds, the face
in the rocks, the face in the trees—and people have no problem with that. But
show them how their hidden authority figures manipulate them, and the people most
susceptible for once refuse to believe.”
Phil put the cap back on the wheat germ and rinsed out
the blender. Remaining noncommittal, Dinah returned the subject to the car.
“Yeah, it seems to run well enough.”
“So you can leave tomorrow?”
“Yeah, it'll probably be good for me. Take me out of my
comfort zone, anyway.”
“Okay then, since you'll do it, part of what I need you
to do is pick up a couple of things at the mall.”
“The mall? I have to go to the mall now? Why the mall?”
“Just for a couple of things I need. Is that a problem?”
“Well, kind of. I don’t like the mall.”
“Then it'll be good for you. It'll take you out of your
comfort zone.”
“What things?”
“I'll write it down.”
“Well why can't I drive you?” He was really thinking, “Why
don’t you go yourself?” And would have said so. But now that he had gotten a
taste of freedom with the sweet machine, his trusty steed, Rozinante, there
could be no backing out.
Dinah looked at the clock on the wall, mind visibly
calculating. “If you need me to, I will.”
To this Phil repeated his earlier assertion, “Okay, yes,”
intending to facilitate a sense of déjà vu. It didn't really seem to work at
all.
Once Humbaba belonged to the squares and its land to the
squares; then hordes of tattered Hippies poured in. And so much did they love
to get high, that they bought the land with all the pot money they could barely
scrape together. Bits of land. They didn't run rum—had nothing to do with
booze. They weren't presidential at all. Aye, and meager they lived, turning
the earth and planting crops. That was possession, and possession pissed off
the squares, drunk with corruption and booze.
There was nothing the squares could do. The squares got
theirs already, and they didn't want anything as much as the Hippies wanted
their fair square share, their place in the sun and the fog, raisin’ in the
sun, just the right conditions, way out in the hills where nobody else had any
business going or growing, somewhere they could live like Thoreau and get away
from Vietnam and Watergate.
And they came from Haight-Ashbury, which was weird
because they wanted to be about love, not hate, and they made a lot of ash and
didn't want to get buried in Vietnam or some square job where they'd never get
ahead on account the system’s rigged. They deferred from all of that. They had
better things to do. And they weren’t hypocrites about it, either. They never
did be cheerleaders for war, some murder scheme concocted, all so some few
little people hidden in their undisclosed locations could privately profit from
all the contracts. Hell no, they didn't go for any of that at all. They made
love, not war. And dropped seeds instead of bombs. They didn't blow up
villages, they blew their minds, man. They expanded their consciousness. They
didn't torch villages with napalm. The only thing they torched was a fattie, the
natural medicinal herb. And drunkards with their booze drug, the squares, hated
it so much that so many young people didn't buy the lie, didn't do as told,
just like Mohammad Ali, didn't go give up their lives so whitey could make more
bombs, make the world less safe, with all that crap about Communism and the
Domino Theory, which never did happen, because it was only all a bunch of
bullshit anyway, designed to pump cash into the hands of the hidden few pulling
the strings. The squares had no clue. They were scared of hair.
And there was always the
music. The sweet, sweet music. The squares were scared of that, too. Even
though they started growing sideburns. And let their hair grow longer than they
ever would have if the Beatles hadn't come along. And the same liars who lied
about war being so wonderful lied about pot being so deadly. And the squares
bought that lie, sucked it up with a spoon, spoon-fed through tube, all that
slop cooked up by the same liars who lied about not being crooks.
Without the Hippies there wouldn't be any
environmentalists. It would all just be business as usual. Stupid greedy whitey
choking up the world with all the carbon pollution. Without the Hippies there
wouldn't be any hope. Not one goddam chance in hell. That pretend place cooked
up by crooked squares, just to keep everybody else in line.
Liberty Is The Price Of Freedom. This is what a bumper
sticker said in front of Phil and Dinah in the slow lane. Sit Down, Tune In,
And Stay Vigilant. That was another one. Shop Till You See TV. Stay Tuned Till
You Drop. Obey Is Okay. Difference Is Terrorism. Honor Through Obedience. Don't
Get More Real. It's The Real TV. Sit Tuned. To Watch Is To Serve. Just Do TV. Must
Do TV. Good Buy, World. If You Don't Trust Your Money, Then You Don't Trust
Your God.
It was tempting to go over fifty. It's hard on the
highway not to go over fifty. Somebody decided to make that the speed limit
between Carata and Egeria. A cop blazed down the Revenue Corridor. Phil wondered
why cars were made to go over the national speed limit at all.
“Hey, did you know that seventy percent of Americans
don't have a college degree?”
Dinah’s not saying anything might have indicated
willingness to hear more.
“And that seventy percent
of Americans don't understand evolution? And that up to seventy percent of
Americans are technically obese? At least seventy percent of communication, of
course, is nonverbal.”
Dinah's still not saying anything might have indicated
deep interest.
“Good thing the speed limit’s not seventy. This gives us
a chance to really get to know each other. Yeah, it's funny how the microcosm
reflects the macrocosm. And vice versa. Like fractals. I guess I don't have to
tell you about fractals. Professors
Zauber’s daughter and all. Everything made up of smaller and smaller units
reflecting the larger and larger condition. Don't you think?”
“Oh, sorry. I was thinking about the mall.”
“Wow. Why would you do that?”
“And I'm thinking about how my car doesn't work.”
“How does your car not work?”
“They don't know yet.”
“Well, I hope they don't milk you. Or bilk you or
whatever. You can't let people use you. So, how long do you think this'll take
at the mall?”
“Not long.”
“Where in the mall do you need to go?”
“Buy ‘N’ Large.”
A shadow crossed Phil's face. From some billboard on the
outskirts of each Egeria. That Uniform Suits You Fine.
Phil took a big gulp. “Buy ‘N’ Large?”
Buy ‘N’ Large: Slovenly,
uninformed, misinformed, malformed, unhelpful, intrusive rude employees lacking
service, lacking education, commenting on customers and what the customers buy,
gossiping, screwing up, screwing off, failing to acknowledge with apologies,
smirking in smocks, themselves the big victims, the big, big oversize victims
with their slow sagging bodies and pale drained minds, victimized by the corralling,
yes corralling function of the system, move along, mooove along, that funneled
them over to the sad low-pay depressing dead-end roles of the corporate model,
the crappy way, which prohibits full-time hours, prohibits medical coverage,
prohibits expertise, having rousted the mom and pops through valuing mere
volume, mere quantity over quality, as though the real goal were to run the world
through ruination.
Ruin.
Nation.
Phil parked outside the land of the dead and made his
way across the long hot lot with Dinah. We've Been Waiting For You, advertised
the bumper stickers. How Much Life Ya Earnin’? Shouldn't You Be Spying?
When they entered the mall Phil saw viewers of tube,
stuck in a case of mass perturbation. TV monitors used as threats scared
customers into believing they were being watched. TVs hung from ceilings,
nailed high for all to see. Everyone there was transformed. Somehow, some way,
no longer human.
Dying means going to a better life. WMDs still
somewhere. Saddam Hussein attacked the U.S. and the reason why countries fight is
because of shit-talk. War makes liberty. Evolution’s only a theory. Liberal
corporate media brainwash the world with loony liberal leftist lies. TV is
reality. Women controlling their sexual reproduction is wrong. Government needs
to stop them. Abortion bad, capital punishment could. The rich are rich because
of working harder than everyone else. The poor are poor because of being lazy. Global
warming is a Hollywood hoax. There is a Devil, who lives in Hell, and wants to
get people's souls. Universal healthcare would ruin the country. There are
angels and they are invisible and have wings. Terrorists are everywhere,
jealous of our way of life. We live in a free country, the only one, made free
by bombs and guns, and peace caused by war.
A voice overhead on endless loop announced, “You can always put your faith in us...Buy
‘N’ Large!”
Phil watched as Dinah disappeared into the yawning geometric
cavity, the exciting colors, shapes, sounds and smells of which expressed the
sum total of human knowledge regarding how to bypass the part of the brain that
uses reason and make people pay for their dopamine fix, make trained brains
squirt drug, and Phil and Dinah's agreement to meet at this same spot of
parting seemed to drag mournfully through the increasing space between them
until he was alone amid the wandering trained, each suffering the various
abuses that lay in store for all, and all down the mall from tube nailed high
programming snagged the living, spun them loose of coin and spat the freshly
spurted brain with its dim five-minute fix dizzily out to wander somewhere
else, TV flowing like a ceaseless river, an unnatural river of growing garbage
pushed along the banks, a river in disguise, a river of death.
“...and heaven knows, Scott, that's weather, back to
you.”
“Thanks, Sherry. You look cute today. Amen to that.”
“Oh, you! Merciful heavens! I do thank you kindly, sir.”
“I just thank the Good Lord God that God created you in
His heavenly mercy, Sherry, looking the way you do, you temptress! Ha ha! Next
time though, hey, use a little more hair spray, and it wouldn't hurt if you cut
back on a meal or two. Now for news. In the news today, those leftist liberals
are at it again....”
Like a low mumbled mantra, the words lifelessly and dutifully
leaked from the trained lips, faces upturned to the tube near the ceiling.
“Goddam leftist liberals,” came the monotone drone.
“Yes. Heaven knows that's true.”
In one of the stores, Wall Street Mart, a man tried to
sell little plastic flags made in China. Little plastic bobble head dolls in
suits, too. Corporate-looking suit dolls dangled from chains for necklaces. Homespun
corporate culture as depicted in the prestigious Local Logick line, such as
He’s All White With Me could be found stitched into framed embroidery on sale. He
had a hard shell of hair and wore a big soft suit, huge with foam at the
shoulders, which made him look gigantic, and he spoke with great authority to
some children standing in front of a TV near the counter.
“Fact is, if you ignore the truth enough, and say a lie
enough, really, only one thing ever happens: Magic. Pure magic. You see, a
magical change miraculously turns the truth into a lie, while at the same time,
turning a lie into the truth. It takes faith, yes. Patriotism, yes. Takes
repetition. Faith, patriotism. You have to faithfully repeat it. Takes
repetition. And if, with this strong belief in faith, you repeat the truth that
the truth is the lie and the lie is the truth, magically, you'll see that’s the
truth. Magic fact, really. The other stores are too afraid to report that to
you, though.”
The kids stared at the tube, where the dead stars of
rock, the dead stars of film, stars whose light still shines long after they
have died, still sold product.
Phil pulled himself away
from Wall Street Mart and merged into the glum stream.
“Your hidden overlords divert you and direct you with
pictures in a box,” he thought. “You've been told that you believe your life
isn't even real, that it’s a test on which you will be graded, and that the
quality of the real life which comes after you die depends on how well you
serve your hidden overlords now.” He could see it in their eyes. How could they
understand? Where was his channel logo when he spoke? Where the spinning
graphics, the lull of the hypnotist’s golden, swinging watch? Why no
distracting noninformation at the bottom of his screen running constantly
across and non-informing what he would be saying later and non-informing with
the gist of what things were being said by others elsewhere? Indeed, where
exactly was his screen? None of it
made any sense. And Phil thought, moving in the phantom shopper stream past
products of advertising, “Why aren’t the hidden overlords here buying what they
sell? Why are you stuck eating grease on a stick, while they order the last of
what's left in the ocean they polluted? You're the crab in the open net. The
tube is your chum. Having crawled in, you claw and snap at each other, and pull
back into the trap whichever of you tries to get out, and that’s the only thing
that keeps you in. Then the net gets pulled, and you travel up, up, up to a
higher place, where you get processed, and eaten, and your undigested remains
pass back into the ocean, eventually, and probably get eaten by crabs.”
Just How Many Trees Are Enough? This caught Phil’s eye
outside Stick Its, the bumper sticker store. Don't Like The Debt? You Pay It!
“Why they gotta make bumper sticker so hard to read?”
Freedom: Either You're With Us, Or We’re Against You.
“It's like I always say, they put so many words in
things, forget it.”
Conformity Has Its Privileges.
“You should get one of them stickers for Kinney.”
Religion With The Most Stuff Wins.
“Oh, he's read ‘em all. His high Q score’s like, through
the roof.”
Overhead, the TV said, “We here at us hate liberals. All
they ever want to do is ruin everything for us, when actually everything for us
is totally fine. Don't forget that the next life, now.”
Maim Street was a video game store featuring the endless
game of that name, as well as many others to be played in the store arcade-style,
and sold, too. Kids playing Maim Street inside slit throats, gouged out eyes
with their virtual thumbs, got to repeatedly see and pretty much feel what it
would be like to torture and brutalize people right on the street. One kid, who
had to sit around being bored only watching, sent a message to someone on his
list: uradume, it said.
Now it was almost time for Phil to go. He decided that
before meeting up with Dina he would go ahead and go on into Buy ‘N’ Large and
buy a pack of gum. But when he got to the counter, the cashier, twentyish,
fairly trollop-y, asked Phil for his Buy ‘N’ Large card.
“No,” he said. “I don't have one.”
“Would you like to get one?”
“No, thank you.”
“This will just take a second.”
“It's just a pack of gum.”
“Mother's maiden name?”
“No thank you.”
“Favorite color?”
Putting the pack down on the counter, Phil backed out. They
wouldn't be getting him on their list, charting his marketing, telling him how
much money he saved spending, and getting his name wrong. But a security guard,
a dead ringer for Little Alex’s droog Dim, quickly appeared and talked with the
cashier, both of whom pointed at Phil, watching him leave the store. Dinah was
outside, waiting. It may have merely been a coincidence, but all the way out of
the mall, cameras turned Phil's way, and mall cops spoke into devices clipped
onto uniforms requiring a button to be pushed by a thumb.
7
Early morning, summer solstice. Roll call:
Cesar—quiet, deadly, a man with a mysterious past and the capacity to throw up more Jagermeister than anyone had ever seen, and this included:
Cesar—quiet, deadly, a man with a mysterious past and the capacity to throw up more Jagermeister than anyone had ever seen, and this included:
Sampedro, who suffered psychic shock when he fell asleep
with the TV on shortly after September 11—the very night, in fact, when the
political correctness programming, which suddenly filled the void after the
fall of Communism, abruptly became the complete opposite. Chances are, had Sampedro
watched a normal amount of television, the transformation in programming would
have seemed more gradual—natural, even. But in receiving the full force of the
blast of immediately opposite programming,
during sleep, when the subconscious state is most vulnerable, the strain proved
too great, and Sampedro's mind broke. Also, he was poor, like:
Pooro. Pooro had been showing too much independence. He
was waking up too much now, twice the
man he used to be. Training gave him purpose, squeezed old toxins from his
skin, left him primed for his daily endorphin fixes. He had always been strong.
One cannot live on the streets and be weak. But now he was focused, now he was
a danger, for his was the supple bamboo strength of a hermit monk. He could
take his operation downtown anytime, if he chose. Probably even get his buddies
to go autonomous with him and keep all the profits for themselves. And then
where would the frat boys be?
Showing up bleary-eyed twenty minutes late came Royal,
big white rig kicking up the early morning desert dust still smelling of the
cool of the night, alternately sucking on a bottle of Pepto Bismal in his lap
and a jug of orange juice at his side.
When the rig got close enough and turned, all three
could see it was just Royal heading over, no Jordan.
“Fuckin’ dicked us again,” said Cesar.
“Gig idth fuggin’ ath,” Sampedro added, speech impaired
by tooth loss over the years, and the fact that he was stinko.
The white rig came up alongside Pooro. The window
lowered. Royal wanted to stay inside, up in the truck, issuing forth orders in
safety and in splendor, like a pharaoh to a slave at the foot of the Sphinx. Cesar
and Sampedro squatted and looked down at the ground, using sticks to draw dirty
pictures in the dust while the boss boy talked to Pooro—Pooro, who knelt to
none.
“Hey, mornin’.”
It was odd to hear Royal talk normally. He never did
that, following as he did the all-encompassing chain of command which governed
his life and accounted for his dragging his ass hungover to see the dirty
goddam fucking bums, and Pooro being on top of that twice Royal's age. Royal
was spoiled. He knew it good and well. For him that was on open display as a
source of pride which he wished to convey for underlying reasons it never
occurred to him to understand. He assigned himself the role of lackey, because
he wasn't the one with the parents who gave him a house where he could play
landlord, that was Jordan, and that was why Jordan didn't have to show up with
the news.
“So yeah, it's a no-go this mornin’. El negativo. But
fuck, Jordan's got a good one lined up for later this afternoon. So just show
up here again then. Okay? One thing: I think this guy is kind of big. So, shit.
Think you're up for it? You can handle it though, right? No problem for you. I
can take your silence for a yes then, right? Okay. Then we'll see you here at
three o'clock. Or around there anyway. There should be good light then. Kind of
a tougher fight than you might be used to. He's a big boy. But for whoever
wins, we got a little something special waiting. When I say that you know, it's
actually not so little that all. Pretty damn big, actually. So, yeah. We'll see
how you do three o'clock. And here. Here's ten bucks.” Royal held out a crisp
bill. “Jordan wants to make sure you eat. You can use that on yourself, or
split it with those guys if you want, I don't care.” Pooro took the money. “Three
o'clock,” Royal said, tires slowly crunching rock as the rig started moving and
the window went up.
Pooro watched as the big
white rig roared off, and the cloud of dust behind it bled away and blended
into the desert surrounding beyond...
MORE
SOON
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SOON
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TO READ
CHAPTERS
8, 9, 10, and 11!
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