Ten

   I have no option but to spin home and grab stuff to pawn or sell. It's after four when I reach the house, willing it to be empty. Empty. Like: yeah, right. Lally's rental car is out front. I enter like a ghost through the kitchen screen. At first everything's quiet inside. Then there's a knock at the front door. An air-dam of perfume collapses into the hall. I freeze.
   'Shhh, Vernon, I'll get the front door.' Mom scuttles over the rug like a hamster.
   'Do-ris?' the kitchen screen opens behind me. Leona wafts in, flouncing her hair.
   'Shhh—Lally's sleeping!' hisses Mom.
   Get that. When my daddy used to doze on the sofa after a few beers, she'd put on high heels and clomp around the kitchen, just to wake him up. I swear to God. She'd pretend to be doing stuff that required clomping, but she wasn't actually doing anything at all. She'd clomp back and forth for no reason, instead of just saying 'Wake up'. That was in the days after he hit me, after things went kind of sour.
   A bedspring creaks up the hallway. Mom gently opens the front door to the reporter Lally owes money to. 'Afternoon, ma'am, is Eelio Lemeda here?'
   'Lally? Well, he's here, but he's indisposed right now—can I tell him who called?'
   'I'll wait, if you don't mind.'
   'Well he shouldn't be much longer.'
   The toilet flushes deep in the house. The bathroom door bangs, and Lally stomps down the hall. 'Vanessa, have you seen my therapy bag?'
   'No, Lalito—anyway, I think you're all out of your gin-sling things.'
   Fucken Vanessa? I search her face for clues. One thing you notice is her cheeks are all proud and peachy, like when she eats ice-cream in important company. Her eyelashes flutter double-time.
   'Vanessa?' says Leona.
   Mom blushes. 'Well I'll explain just now.'
   She hides another final notice from the power company behind the cookie jar, then goes to fuss over Lally, who only has his robe on, you can just about see his cock flapping all over the place. If you had a fucken electron microscope you could just about see it. He strides into the kitchen with this smile full of teeth, and grazes a hand to Leona's butt as he passes. She gives a wiggle.
   'Lally,' says Mom, 'there's someone at the front door for you.'
   'For me?' His smile stiffens. Joy wells up in my heart. As he turns to the door, I tackle Mom into the corner of the kitchen.
   'Ma, go check Lally's visitor—fast! Go on now!'
   'Well Vernon, what on earth's gotten into you? That's Lally's private business.'
   'No it ain't, Ma, quick—it's real important.'
   'Oh, Vernon—cope for God's sake.' She flashes her creamiest-pie smile as George and Betty clack into the kitchen, in the middle of one of their typical conversations.
   'Honey, no way,' says George, 'just being a shareholder doesn't mean he has to buy that whole ridiculous SWAT thing of Vaine's. Can you imagine? She can't even keep her damn flab under control, let alone a team of gunmen!'
   'I know, I know.'
   I try to shunt my ole lady up to the front door, to witness Lally's shame, but her skin-tight pants don't make her any lighter; she won't budge at all.
   Lally opens the door to the man. 'Don't tell me—you're on a recovery mission.'
   'Yeah, if you can spare it,' says the guy.
   'Here you go, fifty dollars—and thanks.'
   Now Mom grabs me by the shoulders—fucken me, no less—and spins me into the corner. 'Vernon, don't tell your nana, but I had to raid the lawnmowing fund to help Lally. His camera equipment wiped the code from his Visa card. I'll put it back as soon as my loan is approved.'
   'Ma, I needed that money …'
   'Well Vernon Gregory, you know that's Nana's lawnmowing account, and it's supposed to be earning interest for your college fund.'
   'Yeah, like you get a whole pile of interest off fifty dollars.'
   'Well I know it's not much, but it's all I have—just a mother on my own.'
   Lally finishes with the reporter, but he doesn't come inside. Does he fuck. Instead he stands on the porch and hollers: 'Park in the driveway, Preacher—the girls won't be leaving for a while.' He leaves the front door open, and swaggers into the kitchen, passing me by without a glance.
   'Lally, I forgot to mention,' says Mom, 'a lady called for you, from the network I think.'
   'A lady?' Lally's hand twitches over his crotch.
   'Uh-huh, she sounded very senior—she'll call back later.'
   'She didn't leave a name?'
   'Well she said it was your office—I told her to call back.'
   One of Lally's eyes snaps to me. A quivery eye. Then he grabs Mom around the belly and says, 'Thanks, Vanessa—you're indispensable.'
   'Van-essa?' say the ladies.
   Mom swells. 'Well, I can't tell you much now—can I, Lalito?'
   'Suffice to say,' says Lally, 'the network was impressed with her appearance the other day. No promises, but we could be seeing a lot more of her—when the right strategies are in place.'
   'I'll always be the same old Doris to you girls, though, you know I won't change a bit, deep down.'
   Check Leona. Her mouth flaps empty of words for a moment, then she goes, 'Wow, it's weird because, did I tell you guys my new dialogue coach is sending my reel to the networks? Right after I get back from Hawaii—God, that's so weird, isn't it …?'
   Mom just snuggles back into Lally's arms. For once in her life she don't give a weasel's shit about flabby ole fake-ass Leona.
   'Vanessa Le Bourget,' Lally says into my ole gal's ear. 'Boor-jay,' he croons, like the cartoon skunk off TV, the one that always tries to fuck the cat. Mom just about shits on the floor when she hears it. Leona nearly bursts out fucken bawling. Lally's on a roll. I just let him roll. 'Tch, I can't wait to share you with the crew back in New York, you'll just love those guys.'
   'Well don't be impatient, Lalito, everything has its time. Meanwhile you'll have everything you need, even though it's just HI' ole me, in this itty-bitty town.'
   'You can say itty again—damn hole doesn't even have a sushi bar!'
   'Not like Nacogdoches,' I say.
   'Nacog-doches?' says Betty. Lally shoots me the devil's eye.
   'Bwanas tardies,' booms the pastor, stepping through the door like he's a fucken Meskin all of a sudden. Bwanas tardies my fucken ass.
   'C'mon in, Preacher,' says Lally. 'Can I fix you a loosener?' Lally's eye doesn't scan my way anymore. His eye has a new scanning pattern.
   'Thanks, but no,' says Gibbons, 'I have to get that refrigerator moved into the media center—it's a mighty fine donation, I can't thank y'all enough.'
   'Vernon, perhaps you'll explain to the pastor why you abandoned his charity stall today,' says Lally. Tension turns the air in the room to crystals.
   'I got a stomach ache.'
   'Surely,' he says, 'a person bailed for murder would do better to …'
   'I'm not even on bail for murder, I'm a goddam accessory to Jesus Navarro's murders—fuck!'
   Lally leans in like a whip and smacks the back of my head. 'Control yourself!'
   I fill with acid blood. Mom starts to bawl in the corner, making it as difficult as possible for the ladies to maneuver her to the sofa.
   'Such aggression in that boy,' says George. 'He was bound to fetch trouble, with so much aggression.'
   'I know, I know–just like that, ehm—other boy …'
   A dizzy feeling comes over me as I hit the ring-end of my fuck-en tether. I pull Lally's business card out of my pocket, and hold it up in the air. 'Everybody—I called Yoo-lalio's office today, and guess who answered? His blind momma, who just had her house emptied by the finance company on account of his van repayments.' Lally's eyes turn to coal. 'Now she's facing a lawsuit over the camcorder he stole. Did you know he's actually a TV repairman, who works out of his momma's bedroom in Nacogdoches?'
   'Oh please,' says Lally. He squeezes his balls but forgets to let go.
   I glance over the bar. The ladies are way perked up. Land of Daytime Milk and Honey for them. I pose dramatically, hog-anger makes me do it. 'You think I lie? I guarantee his mother's gonna call here just now, hunting his ass. I guarantee it. Just ask her the story.' A smile comes to my face, know why? Because Lally's turning white. Everybody stares at him as he leans into the corner, wiping his face with his hand.
   'Tch, that's preposterous. The evil lies coming from this child's mouth.' He takes a heavy breath, then turns and spreads his arms to the ladies. 'Hands up who ever heard of a features reporter moonlighting as a repairman?' Everybody shakes their heads. 'And why might that be?'
   'Well, because—there's more money in reporting?' sniffs Mom. 'He wouldn't need to repair TVs, with all that extra money?
   'I rest my case.'
   'Wait up,' I say, 'I didn't say he moonlighted as anything—he's just a repairman with a whole pile of trouble left back in Nacogdoches. Look at his card, go on.'
   'Ladies,' says Lally, 'this is ridiculous. Do you know how many Ledesma Gutierrezes there are in this country? And have you ever seen me repair a TV?'
   'No,' they say.
   'Have you ever seen me on TV, presenting a feature report?'
   'Well sure,' they say, motioning the pastor to join in. 'We were in it with you!'
   'Thank you,' says Lally. He turns to stare at me. 'And now, in light of everything we've just heard, and, frankly, for our own protection—I'm calling the police.'
   'Oh no, Lally, please,' says Mom.
   'Sorry, Vanessa—I'm afraid it's my duty. The boy needs urgent help.'
   Then, just as my world starts to slip through my fingers, Fate plays a humdinger. The phone rings. Mom gasps to a halt, mid-fucken-sob. Everybody freezes.
   'I'll get that,' says Lally.
   'I don't think so,' I say, diving for the phone. 'Mom, come take this call.'
   My ole lady hunches off the sofa, all shiny around the nose and eyes, and does her finest victimmy shuffle to the phone table. She looks around at everybody, especially Lally, before picking up the phone. A pleading kind of look she gives Lally, real Kicked Dog. Then her voice smoothens like cream. 'Hello? Mr Ledesma, well sure—may I say who's calling?' She hands the phone to Lally. 'It's CNN.'
   I grab it back. 'Mrs Ledesma?'
   'Vernon!' snaps Mom.
   'Remember me? From Martirio …?'
   'Who is this?' asks the young New Yorker on the phone. Lally snatches the receiver and turns to the wall.
   'Renee? Sorry about that—things are a little crazy down here.
   I got the series? fan–tastic!' He raises a thumb to the ladies. 'Conditional on what? Not a challenge, we still have the firearm piece, the suspect, and the townsfolk coming to terms with their grief. It can spin-off in a thousand directions.'
   'Well you know,' whispers Mom to the ladies, 'I couldn't decide between Vanessa and Rebecca...'
   'I was coping with Doris,' grunts George.
   Lally finishes the call. He dangles the receiver over the cradle, taking a moment to gaze at everybody. The ladies stare into his eyes, Pastor Gibbons toys in his pocket. Then Lally drops the handset, 'Crack', cups his balls through his robe, and strolls to the middle of the room. 'Before we open the champagne, I guess we have a rather more—human challenge to share.' His eyes snap to me. 'Pretty outlandish behavior we saw there, Vernon. Damn scary, actually, in light of everything.'
   'Fuck you to hell,' I say.
   'Vernon Gregory!' snaps Mom.
   Lally pushes a little spit around his mouth. 'Simple compassion dictates that it's time to turn this boy over to someone who can help. If we cling when he needs professional care, we may only damage his chances of recovery.'
   'You're the one who needs care,' I say. 'Lalo.'
   'You are under a psychiatric order, after all.' He pauses to chuckle, to reminisce. 'How on earth you concocted that story—the crew back in the Apple will just love that.' He checks his watch. 'Come to think of it, they're probably down at Bunty's right now.'
   Mom hisses a footnote to the ladies. 'They have this bar called Bunty's, you probably heard of it—Bunty's?'
   'Or at the Velvet Mode, for melon slammers,' says Lally. 'I might have to give them a call. Right after I contact the sheriff.'
   'Well Lally, please,' says Mom. 'Can't we just wait till morning, I mean, he had a stomach ache—he does have this, er—condition …'
   The phone rings. Everybody's face lights up, as if more big deals will trickle down the line. But Lally tightens. This is where the horse would stop doing math on stage. I reach for the handset. He beats me to it.
   'Le Bourget residence?' He tries to flash a good ole boy's grin to the ladies, but a quiver beats him to it. 'I'm sorry, you must have the wrong number.' His breathing quickens.
   I dive around his legs and hit the speaker button. Mrs Ledesma's voice wails out.
   'Lalo, oh my God, Lalo? I ran out of groceries, Lalo, please …'
   Lally's lips dance uncontrollably, his eyes flash across the room. 'Oh—oh it's you,' he trembles.
   'How could you leave me so long,' cries the lady. 'Es que no queda nada Eulalio, hasta mi cama se lo ban llevado …'
   'Tell us in English!' I yell toward the phone. Lally's foot whips off the floor, dislodging me backwards onto the rug. He switches off the speaker.
   'Oh you poor souls,' he says into the phone. 'I left strict instructions with the network to keep up my charity visits while I was away …' I go for the speaker button again, but he keeps me at bay with his leg. 'Yes, I know, sweetheart—but mental illness can be cured, that's why I contribute, that's why I share myself with your cause—you and all the other beautiful ladies at the home …'
   I reach the far side of the phone table on my belly, but Lally quickly says goodbye, and slams down the phone. It rings again. He rips the cable from the wall. All breathing in the room gets canceled, along with platelet aggregation and whatever else your body does for kicks.
   Lally turns to face everybody. 'I guess I have—something to share.' I squint through a waterline of smoke, to the dark of the sofa where the ladies sit, riveted. Their knees stick tight together. 'Some time ago, I decided to share my resources with the less fortunate.'
   'Amen,' says the pastor softly.
   Lally's face falls. 'I surprised myself—I'd been so ambitious, so wrapped up in Me. Then I became involved with real people—real problems.' He pauses to dab a ringer at the corner of his eye. 'The voice you just heard is one of my ladies—one of my Sunshine Souls.'
   'Wow, she sounded so together,' says Leona.
   'Shhh, Loni, God,' says George.
   'Tragic, isn't it?' says Lally. 'Confined through no fault of her own. They all are.'
   'Bull-shit,' I say.
   'Vernon Gregory, that's enough,' says Mom.
   'Were you—supporting them?' asks George.
   Lally sighs. 'Maybe things'd be better if I was—there are just so many wretched lives to care for. And I have so little to give …'
   'No, son,' scalds the pastor, 'you're giving the greatest gift of all—Christian love.'
   Lally shrugs helplessly. 'If you see me a little short of cash—you now know why. I just feel so guilty having anything at all.' His eyes crawl over the sofa, snuggling into the ladies' pouts, sliding down their weeping lashes, before collapsing on the floor. He shakes his head. 'I guess the real tragedy is—they now know where I'm staying.'
   It takes a full second for Spooked Deer to take hold of Mom. She twitches. 'Well—why is that tragic?'
   He flicks a glossy eye at me, sighs. 'The home's strictest rule is non-disclosure of carers' identities. If they found out about this, I could be prevented from giving in future. I don't know if I could survive a month without visiting my special girls. It means—I'll have to move along.'
   There's a stunned silence. Then my ole lady implodes. 'Well God, Lally, no, I mean—no, God …'
   'I'm sorry, Doris. This is bigger than the two of us.'
   'But we can disconnect the phone, change the number … Lalito? You can't walk out after this whole month of bliss.'
   'Week of bliss,' corrects Lally. 'I'm sorry. Maybe if Vernon hadn't called the home, maybe if he didn't harbor such a grudge—but no. Things'll only get more challenging after I call the sheriff.'
   'Shoot,' says George, 'I'd call him myself if he wasn't tied up at the Barn meeting.'
   Trickles then torrents of blood and vein soak through the bottom of Mom's legs, her brownest organs sweat through her pores. In the end just these pleading eyes poke up, the eyes of a well-kicked dog. Squished Kitten even.
   Leona watches her quiver become a sob, then turns to Lally. 'There's space at my place.'
   'My God,' he says. 'The pure charity of this town …'
   Mom's eyes pop. 'Well, but, but, the home might find you there, as well–that woman, she could just as easy find you at Leona's as here …'
   'I'm unlisted,' says Leona with a shrug. 'I have call-screening and closed-circuit security.'
   Mom's eyes fall to the tan-line where her wedding ring once sat. 'Well but Vernon could just as easily give that number to the patients, you saw his behavior—couldn't you, Vernon, just give Leona's number to the home …?'
   'Ma, the guy's a goddam psycho, I swear to God.'
   'Well see? He could call them right now, see his attitude? I think Lally and I should take a room at the Seldome for a while … Lalito? And do all those other things you want to do, around town …?'
   'Tch, the Seldome's full.'
   'Well but they'd always find space for me, I mean, I was married at the Seldome.'
   Leona picks her bag off the sofa and fishes in it for her keys. 'Offer's open.'
   My ole lady's already halfway across the room. 'What's the Seldome's number?'
   Lally reaches out to stop her. 'Doris—that's not all.' He fumbles in his shirt pocket and pulls out two crumpled joints. 'Vernon didn't do such a good job hiding these.'
   'Cigarettes?' asks Mom.
   'Illegal drugs. You'll understand now why I can't be associated with the boy.' He throws the spliffs scornfully onto the coffee table, leaning past me to whisper, 'Thanks for the story.'
   In the background you hear Leona's car keys drop into George's lap. 'I guess I'll ride with Lally. Take the Eldorado when you're ready—it'll need some gas.'
   'We have a spare room,' says Betty. 'We haven't used Myron's studio since he died.'
   Lally and Leona clack out through the screen into a dirty afternoon. A promise of rain on dust puffs through the door behind them. To Mom I know it smells of their sex.
   'I'll be back for my stuff,' calls Lally. Mom's skin has all melted together. Her face drips down her arms onto her lap.
   I run a step after him. 'How'd you know it said Gutierrez on the card, motherfucker? How'd you know it said Ledesma Gutierrez, when you didn't even look at the card?' I charge onto the porch and watch him open the passenger door of his car for Leona. Then you see the Lechugas' drapes twitch open a crack. Leona flaps a little wave towards it, from behind her back. The drapes close.
   I'm a kid whose best friend took a gun into his mouth and blew off his hair, whose classmates are dead, who's being blamed for it all, who just broke his mama's heart—and as I drag myself inside under the weight of these slabs of moldy truth, into my dark, brown ole life—another learning flutters down to perch on top. A learning like a joke, that kicks the last breath from my system. The Lechugas' drapes. It's how Mom's so-called friends coordinate their uncannily timed assaults on my home. They still have a hotline to Nancie Lechuga's

Eleven

   I stand on the porch this Sunday evening and try to force Mexico to appear in front of me. I tried it all day from the living-room window, but it didn't work. By this time tonight I imagined cactus, fiestas, and salty breath. The howls of men in the back of whose lives lurked women called Maria. Instead there's a house like Mrs Porter's across the street, a willow like the Lechugas' and a pump-jack next door, dressed as a mantis; pump, pump, pump. Vernon Gridlock Little.
   'Lord God in heaven please let me have a side-by-side, let me open my eyes and it be there …'
   Mom's whispers sparkle moonlight as they fall to the ground by the wishing bench. Then Kurt barks from Mrs Porter's yard. Kurt is in trouble with Mrs Porter. He spent all day on the wrong side of the fence from the Hoovers' sausage sizzle, and eventually destroyed Mrs Porter's sofa out of frustration. Fucken Kurt, boy. His barks cover the creaking of planks as I step off the porch. It's a well-upholstered barking circuit tonight, on account of the Bar-B-Chew Barn hayride. A hayride, gimme a break. We don't even have fucken hay around here, they probably had to buy it on the web or something. But no, now it's the traditional Martirio Hayride.
   'Oh Lord God, bring Lally back, bring Lally back, bring Lally back …'
   It's been a long day. Cameras pinned me in the house since Lally left yesterday. Now they went to cover the hayride. Mom senses me approaching her willow; she sobs louder, and gets a hysterical edge to her voice, to make sure I don't miss the implication of things. A large flying bug scoots behind the mantis as I step close.
   'Wishing bench is airborne this end,' I say, to break the ice. 'Like the dirt's caving in underneath.'
   'Well Vernon just shutup!—you did this to me, all this—all this fucking shit.'
   She cussed me, boy. Hell. I study her ole hunched body. Her hair is sucked back into a helmet again, and she wears her regular toweling slippers with the butterflies on top, their rubber wings torn off by the white cat she used to have, before the Lechugas ran it over. I'm compelled to reach out and touch her. I touch her where the flab from her back dams under her armpit, and feel the clammy weight of her ole miserable shell, all warm and spent. She cries so cleanly you'd think her body was a drum full of tears that just spill out through the holes.
   I sit down beside her. 'Ma, I'm sorry.'
   She gives an ironic kind of laugh, I guess it's ironic when you laugh while you sob. After that she just stays sobbing. I look around at the night; things are liquid-clear, warm and dewy, with a snow of moths and bugs around the porch lights, and distant music from the hayride.
   'Papa always said I'd amount to nothing.'
   'Don't say that, Ma.'
   'Well it's true, look at me. It's always been true. "Just plain ungainly," Papa used to say, "Ornery and ungainly." Everyone was head of the cheerleading squad, and homecoming queen, and class president. Everyone was Betty, all sparkling and fresh …'
   'Betty Pritchard? Gimme a break.'
   'Well Vernon, you just know everything, don't you! Betty was class president in the fourth grade you know, and had all the bubbly parts in school plays—she never cussed or smoked or drank like the rest of us; bright as sunshine, she used to be. Until she started getting beaten black and blue by her father, whipped till she bled. So while you're all critical, and know everything about everyone, just remember the rest of us are only human. It's cause and effect, Vernon, you just don't realize—even Leona was relaxed and sweet, before her first husband went, you know—the other way.'
   'The one that died?'
   'No, not the one that died. The first one, and out of consideration you shouldn't even ask.'
   'Sorry.'
   She takes a breath, wiping her eyes with the palm of her hand. 'I lost a few pounds for the prom, though. I proved Papa wrong, just that once. Den Gurie asked me to be his date—Den Gurie, the linebacker!—I slept under the shawl of my prom dress all week.'
   'There you go—see?'
   'He picked me up in his brother's truck. I almost fainted from excitement, and from hunger, I guess, but he told me to relax, said it'd be like spending a night with my kin …' Mom starts to hiss from the back of her throat, like a cat. It's another way to weep, in case you didn't know. The early part of a strong weep.
   'So what happened?'
   'We drove out of town, sang songs nearly all the way to Lockhart. Then he asked me to check the tailgate on the truck. When I climbed out, he drove away and left me. That's when I saw the hog farm by the road.'
   A bolt of anger takes me, about the fucken Guries, about the ways of this fucken town. The anger cuts through waves of sadness, cuts through pictures of young Jesus, the one who nailed himself to a fucken cross before anybody else could do it. That's why this town's angry. They didn't get a shot at him. But they don't have anger like I have anger brewing up. Anger cuts through a wide range of things. Cuts like a knife.
   After a second, I feel the dampness of Mom's hand on mine. She squeezes it. 'You're all I have in the world. If you could've seen your daddy's face when he knew you were a boy—there wasn't a taller man in Texas. All the great things you were going to be when you grew up …' She narrows puffy eyes into the distance, through Mrs Porter's house, through the town, and the world, to where the cream pie lives. The future, or the past, or wherever it fucken lives. Then she shoots me this brave little smile, a genuine smile, too quick for her to pull any victimmy shit. As she does it, violins shimmer into the air across town, like in a movie. Even Kurt hangs silent as a guitar picks its way out of the orchestra, and a Texan voice from long ago herds our souls up into the night. Christopher Cross starts to sing 'Sailing'. Mom's favorite tune from before I was even born, before her days fell dark. Type of song you listen to when you think nobody likes you. She gives a broken sigh. I know right away the song will remind me of her forever.


It's not far down to paradise, at least it's not for me
And if the wind is right you can sail away
And find tranquility...


   Fate tunes. This one breaks my fucken heart. We sit listening as long as we can bear it, but I know the song has sunk a well into Mom's emotional glade, and I guess mine too. Dirty blood will gush high just now. The piano brings it on.
   'Well,' she says. 'George said she can only decoy the sheriff until tomorrow. And that isn't even counting the thing about the drugs.'
   'But at least I'm innocent.'
   'Well Vernon, I mean, huh-hurr...' She gives one of those disbelieving laughs, a hooshy little laugh that means you're the only asshole in the world who believes what you just said. Notice how popular they are these days, those kinds of fucken laughs. Go up to any asshole and say anything, say, 'The sky is blue,' and they'll wheel out one of those fucken laughs, I swear. It's how folk spin the powerdime these days, that's what I'm learning. They don't shoot facts anymore, they just hoosh up their laughs, like: yeah, right.
   'I mean—surely the damage is done,' she says. 'You did have that awful catalog, and now these illegal drugs …'
   Awful catalog, get that. Her closet is probably full of that lingerie, but now it's an awful catalog. I skip the catalog and move on to the drugs. 'Heck, plenty of dudes are into that stuff—anyway it ain't even mine.'
   'Well I know, that catalog was mine–what on earth got into you? Was it something the Navarro boy put you up to?'
   'Hell no.'
   'I don't like to speak badly, but …'
   'I know, Ma, Meskins are more colorful.'
   'Well I only mean they're more—flamboyant. And Vernon, they're Mexicans, not Meskins, have some respect.'
   The conversation is nano-seconds away from including the word 'panties', something you should never hear in conversation with your mom. Knowing her, she'd probably say 'underpants' or something. 'Interior wear', or something way fucken bent. A new resignation settles over me, that I can't run out on my ole lady while she's like this. Not right away, not tonight. I need to reflect, alone.
   'I think I'll take some fresh air,' I say, stretching off the bench.
   Mom opens out her hands. 'Well what do you call this?'
   'I mean at the park or something.'
   'Well Vernon, it's nearly eleven o'clock.'
   'Ma, I'm being indicted as an accessory to murder for chris-sakes …'
   'Well don't cuss at your mother, after all I've been through!'
   'I ain't cussing!'
   There's a pause while she folds her arms, and hunches her shoulder to wipe an eye. Clicking night bugs make it seem like her skin is crackling. 'Honestly, Vernon Gregory, if your father was here …'
   'What did I do? I'm only trying to go to the park.'
   'Well I'm just saying grown up people make money and contribute a little, which means getting up in the morning—I mean, there must be a thousand kids in this town, but you don't see them all at the park in the middle of the night.'
   Thus, quietly, and with love, she reels me out to the end of my tether, to that itchy hot point where you hear yourself committing to some kind of fucken outlandishness.
   'Yeah?' I say. 'Yeah? Well I've got live and direct news for you!'
   'Oh?'
   'I wasn't even going to tell you yet, but if this is how you're gonna be—I already talked to Mr Lasseen about a job, so, hey.'
   'Well, when do you start?' A smile's shadow passes over her lips. She knows I just cut lumber for a cross. The motivation behind her higher-than-Christ eyebrows gives me the fire to carry it on.
   'Tomorrow, maybe.'
   'Doing what?'
   'Just helping out, you know.'
   'Well I used to know Tyrie's wife, Hildegard.' She ups the ante, makes me think she'll bump into Tyrie's wife. But I hold my course, I say anything not to lose another knife game. My ole lady doesn't lose at knife games. She ain't lost this one yet. 'Well what about Dr Goosens? I'll die if I see the police around here again …'
   'I can work mornings.'
   'What will Tyrie Lasseen think, if you don't do a full day's work?'
   'I already fixed it with him.'
   'Well you can pay me a little lodging then, now that you're so grown up and all.'
   'Oh, sure, you can have most of it—all of it if you want.'
   She sighs like I'm already behind with my rent. 'The power company comes first, Vernon—how quickly will you get paid?'
   'Uh—I can probably get an advance.'
   'Without any working history?'
   'Oh sure,' I say, squinting into the sky. 'So now can I go to the park?'
   She blinks dreamily, her ole innocent eyebrows rise up to heaven. 'I never said you couldn't go to the park …'
   Needless to say, there is no fucken job. I stand insulated from my world by the buzzing tequila-ozone of what I just did. Lies scatter around me like ants.
   'Well I guess I'll have to make lunches for you now,' says Mom.
   'Nah, I'll come home for lunch.'
   'From Keeter's? But that's miles away.'
   'Twenty minutes, it takes me.'
   'Oh goodnight, it's almost twenty minutes by car...'
   'Nah—I know all the shortcuts.'
   'Well maybe I better call Hildegard Lasseen and see what they expect, I mean it's ridiculous.'
   'Okay, I'll take lunch.'
   'Y'all die and nobody told me?' Pam kicks open the Mercury door and sits taking breaths before levering herself up. Something as big as a goddam bullfrog jumps out through her legs, I swear. 'Vernie, come help ole Palmyra with these bags—I've been calling your damn number since Adam & Eve.' She drops some sacks onto the driveway, then struggles over to the willow, pulling back the branches like drapes. Mom sits sniffling underneath.
   'Lalito's gone,' she sniffs.
   'Took his time about it,' says Pam. 'C'mon now, this food's getting soggy.' She begins the long haul up to the porch. I gather the Bar-B-Chew Barn sacks, and linger beside her.
   'Vernie, look!' she says, pointing into the sky. I look up. 'Tsh,' she slaps my belly. She even makes the little sound, 'Tsh,' like a cymbal. It's just a thing we do, me and Pam. 'C'mon, Doris, or I'll call Lolly and tell him about your herpes.'
   'Shit, Palmyra, God.'
   Thunderclaps of laughter ripple through Pam's flesh. My ole lady struggles to keep her misery, squirms and wrassles with herself on the bench. In the end, she gets mad and scuttles up to the porch. 'You're just too damn perky—it's important to hurt sometimes.'
   'Want me to push ya down the stairs? Haugh, haugh, haugh.'
   'Well for God's sake, Palmyra. Anyway, we don't want your damn food.'
   'Haugh, haugh, haugh. You should've seen Vaine at the hayride, she put away more corn than a truckload of empty Meskins.'
   'But Atkins diet is supposed to be protein...'
   'Barry's out for the night.'
   'Oh?'
   'A few of the posse owe him a beer. He found a gun yesterday, at Keeter's.'

Twelve

   It ain't my idea to leave before dawn. My ole lady decided to visit Nana, that's why the house stinks of hairspray. You know why she's leaving early: so nobody sees her scurry through town on foot. All she wants is for them to see her arrived, all hunky-dory. Not scurrying. It's a learning I made since the car went.
   'Well I just can't believe there isn't a pair of Tumbledowns around town, I mean, I'll have to try down by Nana's.' She gives off breathy noises, and flicks her fingertips through my hair. Then she takes a step back and frowns. It means goodbye. 'Promise me you won't miss your therapy.'
   An electric purple sky spills stars behind the pumpjack, calling home the last moths for the night. It reminds me of the morning when ole Mrs Lechuga was out here, all devastated. I try not to think about it. Instead I look ahead to today. Going to Keeter's is a smart idea; if anybody sees me out there, they'll say, 'We saw Vernon out by Keeter's,' and nobody will know if they mean the auto shop, or the piece of land. See? Vernon Gray-matter Little. In return, I've asked Fate to help me solve the cash thing. It's become clear that cash is the only way to deal with problems in life. I even scraped up a few things to pawn in town, if it comes to that. I know it'll come to that, so I have them with me in my pack—my clarinet, my skateboard, and fourteen music discs. They're in the pack with my lunchbox, which contains my sandwich, the two joints, and a piece of paper with some internet addresses on it.
   As for the joints and the piece of paper, I heard the voice of Jesus last night. He advised me to get wasted, fast. If at first you don't succeed, he said, get wasted off your fucken ass. My plan is to sit out at Keeter's and get some new ideas, ideas borne out of the bravery of wastedness.
   I ride down empty roads of frosted silver, trees overhead swish cool hints of warm panties in bedclothes. Liberty Drive is naked, save for droppings of hay, and Bar-B-Chew Barn wrappers. In this light you can't see the stains on the sidewalk by the school. As the gym building passes by, all hulky and black, I look the other way, and think of other things.
   Music's a crazy thing, when you think about it. Interesting how I decided which discs not to pawn. I could've kept some party music, but that would've just tried to boost me up, all this thin kind of 'Tss-tss-tss,' music. You get all boosted up, convinced you're going to win in life, then the song's over and you discover you fucken lost. That's why you end up playing those songs over and over, in case you didn't know. Cream pie, boy. I could've kept back some heavy metal too, but that's likely to drive me to fucken suicide. What I need is some Eminem, some angry poetry, but you can't buy that stuff in Martirio. Like it was an animal sex doll or something, you can't buy angry poetry. When you say gangsta around here, they still think of Bonnie & fucken Clyde. Nah, guess what: I ended up keeping my ole Country albums. Waylon Jennings, Willie Nelson, Johnny Paycheck—even my daddy's ole Hank Williams compilation. I kept them because those boys have seen some shit—hell, all they sing about is the shit they've seen; you just know they woke up plenty of times on a wooden floor somewhere, with ninety flavors of trouble riding on their ass. The slide-guitar understands your trouble. Then all you need is the beer.
   Silas Benn has an ole washing machine for a letterbox. You have to watch out for it, because it's behind some trees as you approach his place from this end of Calavera Drive. I mention it because someday you might want to swing into Silas's driveway at speed. Watch out for the fucken washing machine. It's just one of the weird things about ole Silas. I know it's early to visit, but he always leaves his living-room light on, for security I guess, and it gives you the chance to say, 'Heck, Silas, I saw your light on.' He's wise to that ole line, but he still plays along. I nudge my bike up his driveway, and walk around to his bedroom window, tapping on the pane in the usual way. Then I stand back and hold my breath. A chink opens in the drapes. I tread softly to the back door. After some scrapes and rattles, Silas opens up and peeks out through crusty eyes.
   'Pork my henry, son, what kinda time d'ya call this?'
   'Heck, Silas, I saw your light on …'
   'Ya dint see my damn bedroom light on. Dog-gone it, hell to berries …' Silas didn't have time to strap on his leg. He just hangs on a kind of crutch. Silas had a leg amputated, see.
   'Sie, I got some real big business to run past you.'
   He rustles through his robe for his glasses. 'Lemme see, whatcha find for me today …'
   'Well y'see, that's the thing—I don't have any hard stuff, like on paper and all, on account of they took my computer away.'
   'So what the …?'
   'See, I have this plan how you can get all the pictures you want, hundreds of 'em—today even, when Harris's opens.'
   'Aw hell, son, shill my wincer—ya dragged me up fer nothing
   'Look,' I say, unfolding the sheet of paper. 'See these internet addresses? That's where all those hard-core pictures are kept, for free—even the Amputee Spree stuff that you really like. With these instructions, you can go by Harris's store, take the booth with the computer, and print out all you want. No kidding. With this list, you'll never have to pay for pictures again.'
   'Shit, I don't know—I never got with them com-puder machines.'
   'Forget it, it's easy. Everything you have to do is written here.'
   'We-ell,' he says, stroking his chin. 'How much ya want fer it?'
   'A case.'
   'Git outta here.'
   'No kidding, Sie, this list can save you a truckload of beer over the summer. A goddam truckload, at least.'
   'I'll pay a six-pack.'
   'We-ell,' I hesitate. You have to hesitate with Silas. 'We-e-ll. I don't know, Sie, plenty of kids'll wanna kill me, after I bust the business like this.'
   'Six-packa Coors, I'll go git it.' He swings away into the house like a one-legged monkey. You can't drink till you're twenty-one around here. I ain't twenty-one. Good ole Silas always keeps some brews in stock, to trade for special pictures. Us Martirio kids are like his personal internet. He's our personal bar.
   By seven-thirty this Monday morning I'm sat in a dirt clearing behind some bushes at Keeter's, sucking beer and waiting for ideas about cash. From where I sit you can watch the sun piss orange around the rims of those ole abandoned toilet bowls. I have my beers, my joints, and Country music pumping deep into my brain. I'm ready to howl like a coon-dog. I use it all to try and plot my position in life. There's me here, and Mexico down there. Taylor Figueroa in between. All I have to figure out is the rest of it. 'Get to the Nub of Things,' as Mr Nuckles used to say, back when his goddam mouth worked. To be honest, the only new information that comes to me is a whole swarm of lies about my so-called job. Take note of what happens in a lie-world like this; by the time you're in this deep, and you've invented an imaginary job, with an imaginary start time, and imaginary pay, and put your loved-ones through the sandwich routine, and 'Oh my God should I call Hildegard Lasseen,' and all—it doesn't matter anymore whether you admit the lie, or just get fucken busted doing it. People go, 'But he was so credible.' They start to realize you introduced them to a whole parallel world, full of imaginary shit. It's a pisser, I know it, I don't blame them at all. But it's like suddenly you qualify for membership in the fucken Pathology Zone, even though those same people immediately turn around and go, 'Can't make it, Gloria—my folks just flew in from Denver.'
   Nah, my slime's so thick, it ain't worth coming clean at all. Take good note; Fate actually makes it harder to admit slime, the farther in you get. What kind of system is that? If I was president of the Slime Committee, I'd make it easier to come clean about shit. If coming clean is what you're supposed to do, then it should be made more fucken accessible, I say. I guess the shiver that really comes over me is that I just handed everybody the final nail for my cross. All they needed, on top of everything, was a credible lie. You can just see my ole lady on TV when they break the news, don't tell me you can't. 'Well but I even stayed up to pack his sandwiches...'
   I fumble a lighter from my pocket, and spark up a joint. I ain't going by Goosens's today. Fuck that. My ole lady's safe with Nana. I'm going to find a way out of here.
   'Bernie?' It's Ella Bouchard. She stops behind a bush at the edge of my clearing, and moves her lips the opposite way to what I hear in my ears, which is crawfish pie and filet gumbo.
   Just let me say, in case you think I'm secretly in love with Ella, that I've known her since I was eight. Every boy in town knew Ella since they were eight, and none of them are secretly in love with her. Her equipment ain't arrived. You guess it maybe ain't coming either, when you look at her. Like her equipment got delivered to Dolly Parton or something. Ella's just skinny, with some freckles, and this big ole head of tangly blond hair that's always blown to hell, like a Barbie doll your dog's been chewing on for a month. Nobody yet figured out how to deal with Ella Bouchard. She lives with her folks, along the road from Keeter's Spares & Repairs. Her folks are like hillbilly types that don't move their arms when they walk, and just stare straight ahead all the time. The kind that repeat everything eighty times when they talk, like, 'That's how it was, yessir, the way it was was just like that, just like that, the way it was.' Probably explains why Ella's kind of weird too. Cause and effect, boy.
   'Hi, Bernie.' She enters the clearing slowly, as if I'll run away. 'Whatcha doin?'
   'Just hanging out.'
   'Whatcha doin really?'
   'Just hanging out, I toldja—you shouldn't even be here.'
   'You're getting fuckin loaded and fuckin wasted off your ass. Anyway, you fuckin promised.'
   Such a foul mouth on a girl probably shocks you. Then you must think: foul-mouthed girl, at Keeter's, alone with Bernie. Okay, yes, a bunch of us boys got our first whiff of nakedness from Ella Bouchard. It cured us of any horniness we might've had; you couldn't name the flavors of ice-cream it looked like she strained through her pants some days. Like, she probably set us back years in our sexual development. She just wanted to cuss, spit, and fart with us, and I guess the only currency she had was her ropey ole body. I know you're not allowed to say it anymore, about certain girls and all, but off the record, Ella was born with it. She'd always be the one doing messy tumbles on the lawn, legs flying open all over the place. Her underwear would always shine your way. When aliens land in town, Ella will be out front with her fucken dress up, I guarantee it.
   She takes another step into my space, and looks down at me. 'Fuck, Bernie, you're just like an alcoholic.'
   'My name's not Bernie, and I'm not just like an alcoholic.'
   'What's your name then? It's something like Bernie, I know that …'
   'No, my name's nothing like Bernie, not in the minimum.'
   'I'll go ask Tyrie what the name of the guy is who's over here smoking weed and drinking beer.' She gets that fabulous edge that girls get to their voices, the edge that spells oncoming Tantrum From the Bowels of Hell, that says, 'I'll scratch the heavens down around you and suck the fucken air from your lungs and spit you to fucken hell and you know it.'
   'Name's John, okay?'
   'No it ain't, not John, it ain't John, it ain't John at all, not John...' You can tell right away she spends too much damn time around her folks.
   'Ella, I don't want to make a big deal out of anything today, okay? I'm just trying to chill on my own, and just figure some shit out—okay?'
   'Not called John you ain't, not with a name like John, uh-uh, you ain't John, no way …'
   'Well—whatever, okay?'
   'I knew it was Bernie. Can I have a beer?'
   'No.'
   'How come?'
   'Because you're only eight.'
   'I ain't too so eight, I'm nearly fuckin fifteen.'
   'Still too young to drink alcoholic beverages.'
   'Well fuck, you're too fuckin young to drink—and smoke weed, fuck.'
   'No I ain't.'
   'Yes you are! How old are you?'
   'Twenty-two.'
   'You are not, you are fuckin not twenty-two.' All this goes to illustrate the First Rule of dealing with edgy people. Don't, under any circumstances, get talking to them.
   After a minute of clicking her teeth, and of me ignoring her, Ella starts to mess with the hem of her dress. She makes these noises, like a stroked snake or something, and goes, 'Fuck, it's hot out here.' Then she raises the hem up her legs, to where they start thickening and softening into thigh. You can tell she swiped this behavior right off some TV-movie. I hope it's not wrong to say it, but it's like watching a Japanese person barn-dancing, the credibility of it, I fucken swear.
   'Ella, c'mon will ya?!'
   No, here comes the dress on its way up her legs. I just grab my pack and start to stash everything back inside. So she turns to me, real polite. 'I'll go to the shop and scream. I'll tell Tyrie what you did to me, after all that weed and beer, Bernie.'
   A learning grows in me like a tumor. It's about the way different needy people find the quickest route to get some attention in their miserable fucken lives. The fucken oozing nakedness, the despair of being such a vulnerable egg-sac of a critter, like, a so-called human being, just sickens me sometimes, especially right now. The Human Condition, Mom calls it. Watch out for that fucker.
   I drop my pack and make a deal with Ella. It lasts until the ninth sip of the beer that we share. I know it's the ninth because she counts them. 'Every sip together makes our feelings grow,' she says.
   And strangely, for a nano-second before the ninth sip, I do kind of start to begin commencing to like Ella, don't ask me why. I get a few waves about how fucked-up she must be, and how she just wants someone to pay attention to her. I'm loaded, I admit it. But for a flash I even kind of take to her, with her ole straw hair blowing across her face, and the smell of warm bushes around. My hand even brushes against her leg, making silk hairlets stand up. She wriggles until a wedge of underwear shows up on the dirt. But at the same moment the breeze grates this smell off her legs, like salami or something, and I pull right back. I try not to wrinkle my face up, but I guess I kind of do, and she sees it. She tucks herself back into a knot.
   'Bernie, how come you don't fool around? You a pillow-biter or what?'
   'Hell no. I just think you're too young, that's all.'
   'Guys a whole lot older than you want to fool around with me.'
   'Yeah, right. Like who?'
   'Like Danny Naylor.'
   'Yeah, right, I don't fucken think so.'
   'Yeah he does, him and a whole shit-loada other guys.'
   'C'mon, Ella …'
   'Mr Deutschman'd even pay for it, I know that, I know that too well, too damn well.'
   'Fuck, Ell, Mr Deutschman's around eight hundred years ole.'
   'It don't matter, he's older'n you, and he'd still pay for it.'
   'Yeah, right. Anyway, how do you know? You been over there and asked him?'
   'I went by there once and he gave me a Coke, and touched me a little, on my ass …'
   Don't even think it. A man has his honor, you know.
   At the end of the day, I take all the gullies and back roads home, and keep my eyes lively to any roving cops or shrinks. I'm glad Mom's at Nana's—she'll have company, and food in her belly, if only macaroni cheese. I missed my date with Goosens, and have to leave town, see. I just couldn't abandon Mom if she was home sniffling, no way. That's how I'm programmed. By the time I get home, I'm ready to call Nana's and tell Mom the job didn't work out—really come clean, as a final gesture. Then, when I step inside my house, I hear an unmistakable set of squeaks and sighs. The wind falls out of my sails and stays at the door, like your dorky buddy on his first visit to your place. My ole lady's here. Bawling. I stand quiet, as if she'll ignore me. She doesn't though, and this is where her routine gets quite transparent, actually, because she clears her throat, loudly, then uses that energy to launch into a bigger, better bawl. It breaks my fucken heart. Mostly because she has to resort to these transparent kind of moves to get attention.
   'What's up, Ma?'
   'Shnff, squss …'
   'Ma, what's up?'
   She takes hold of my hands, and looks up into my eyes like a calendar kitten after a fucken tractor accident, all crinkly, with spit between her lips. 'Oh, Vernon, baby, oh God...'
   A familiar drenching feeling comes over me, like when the potential exists for serious tragedy. One thing I take into account, though, is that my ole lady always wants my blood to run cold; she bawls more convincingly the longer I know her, because my blood-freezing threshold goes up. This far down the road, she even fucken hyperventilates. My blood is icy.
   'Oh, Vernon, we're really going to have to pull together now.'
   'Momma, calm down—is it about the gun?'
   Her eyes brighten for a moment. 'Well no, actually they found nine guns on Saturday—Bar-B-Chew Barn disqualified the prize winners for planting guns along the route, there's all kinds of hell to pay in town today.'
   'So what's the problem?'
   She sets up bawling again. 'I went to cash the investment this morning, and the company was gone.'
   'Lally's investment?'
   'I've been calling Leona's all day, but he's not there …'
   This so-called investment was with one of those companies with names chained together, like 'Rechtum, Gollblatter, Pubiss & Crotsch'. If you want to know who the real psychos are, take any guy who names a business to sound like a lawyer's company, and is still surprised when folk won't turn their back to him.
   'Power's being disconnected tomorrow,' says Mom. 'Did you get the advance? I've been counting on your advance, I mean, the power's only fifty-nine dollars for goodness sake, but then when the deputies came …'
   'Ma, slow up—deputies came?'
   'Uh-huh, around four-thirty. They were okay, I don't think Lally said anything yet.'
   'So what'd you tell them?'
   'I said you were with Dr Goosens. They said they'd check you at the clinic tomorrow.'
   The Lechugas' teddy farm seems ole and squashed when I wake up next morning. Another Tuesday morning, two weeks after That Day. The shade under their willow is empty. Kurt is quiet, Mrs Porter's door is closed. Beulah Drive is clean of strangers for the first time since the tragedy. June is barely underway, but it's as if summer's liquor has evaporated, leaving this dry residue of horror. At ten-thirty the phone rings.
   'Vernon, that'll be the power company—when can I tell them you'll have your advance from work?'
   'Uh—I don't know.'
   'Well, do you want me to call the Lasseens and see what the hold-up is? I thought they promised it to you on your first day …'
   'I'll have it tonight, tell them.'
   'Are you sure? Don't say it if you're not positive, I can call Tyrie …'
   'I'm sure.' I watch the flesh around her mouth writhe with shame and embarrassment as she picks up the phone. My head runs a loop of Ella's words at Keeter's. 'Mr Deutschman'd even pay for it.' Proof that my mind hooked onto the idea, is that I pretended not to be interested. I just changed the subject. That's how you know the demon seed was planted.
   'Well hi Grace,' says Mom. 'He says he'll have it tonight, definitely. No, he's starting late today—he's studying marketing dynamics for work. Oh fine, just fine—Tyrie's real happy with his progress—says he might even get promoted! Uh-huh. Uh-huh? No, no, I've spoken to Tyrie personally, and he's definitely getting paid—Hildegard's an old friend, so it's not a challenge. Oh really? I didn't know you knew her. Oh, well—tell her hi.' Mom's eyes sink back into her sockets, she turns dirty red. 'What? Well if you could just hold them back until after lunch, I'd really appreciate it. The truck left already? Uh-huh. But if I give them cash when they get here, can't you stop them from …?'
   Blood splurches like paste from both ends of my body, caking hard in grotesque spike formations that only happen to liars and murderers, and that my ole lady can see from the phone. Thoughts dance through my head that shouldn't be there. Simonize the Studebaker, for instance. Mom puts down the phone. Her eyes cut me loose in a raft.
   'The disconnection truck already set off for the day,' she says. Razorfish slash the fucken raft. Mom's eyebrows lean up on one elbow to watch. 'I better call Tyrie.' She fumbles through the phone-table drawer for her address book. I stay on my stomach in front of the TV. Save me falling back down here when I'm fucken dead.
   In between snatches of my video research, the news plays on TV. 'Overshadows events in Central Texas,' says a reporter, 'with official sources confirming this morning's tragedy in California as the worst of its kind so far this year. Condolences and aid continue to pour into the devastated community …'
   'Vernon, do you have the Spares & Repairs number?'
   'Uh—not right here.'
   I don't look up. I hear you can get big money selling your kidneys, but my brain's stressed from wondering where to sell them. Maybe the meatworks. Who fucken knows. My only other plan, plan B, is the desperate plan. I browse through my daddy's ole videos for tips. For cream pie, actually, truth be told. Close the Deal is here, one of his favorites. One thing about my dad, he had every kind of plan to get rich.
   'Here it is—Hildy Lasseen,' says Mom. She shuffles back to the phone, and picks up the receiver. An important-sounding fanfare accompanies her, as the TV jumps from global to local news.
   'Mrs Lasseen doesn't work at the yard,' I say. 'That's just their home number.'
   'No, the Spares & Repairs number is here too.' She starts to dial. All you hear is the TV in back.
   'Don't write Martirio off yet,' says a reporter, 'that's the message from the team behind a new multimedia venture inspired by the struggle of our brave citizens—a venture its founder claims will spread the gospel of human triumph over adversity to every corner of the globe.'
   'Martirio is already synonymous with sharing,' says Lally. Mom squeaks. She throws down the phone. 'Many a crucial lesson about loss, about faith, and justice, can still be shared, be made a gift of—a gift of hope and compassion to a needy world.'
   'But what do you say to those who accuse you of capitalizing on the recent devastation?' asks the reporter.
   Lally's eyebrows sink to their most credible level. 'Every tragedy brings lessons. Hardship is only repeated when those lessons aren't learned. What we propose is to share our challenge, share the benefits of our struggle, in the hope that others can avoid those hard lessons for themselves. If we can save just one life, wherever it may be—we'll have been successful. Also remember that, being an interactive project, individuals across the planet will be able to monitor, influence, and support Martirio in its efforts, twenty-four hours a day, via the internet. I don't think anybody would call that a bad thing.'
   'Fair enough, but with the tragedy now behind us—do you really think there's still a market for a lifestyle show from what is, after all, only the barbecue sauce capital of Central Texas?'
   Lally throws out his arms. 'Who says the lesson's behind us? The lesson is still to come, we have perpetrators to be brought to justice, causes to be found …'
   'But surely the case is open and shut?'
   'Things may appear so from a media standpoint,' says Lally. 'But if we share the expertise of my partner in the venture, Deputy Vaine Gurie, we'll discover things aren't always as they appear …'
   Mom whimpers. 'Lalito …?' She stretches her fingertips out to the screen.
   'So,' says the reporter, 'you won't be relocating to California for the experiment, in light of today's tragic events?'
   'Certainly not, our investment is here. We believe the good citizens of Martirio will shine in their challenge, with the generous backing of the Bar-B-Chew Barn corporation of course, and in conjunction with the Martirio Chamber of Commerce.'
   Leona's hamster-petting eyes leap to the screen. 'Wow, how do I feel? It's just such a challenge, I never presented a show before …'
   Mom's hand snaps back to her body. We both turn to the kitchen window. Under the rattle of the pumpjack, you hear the Eldorado on its way up the street. 'Vernon, I'm not home if those fucking girls come up here—tell them I'm at Nana's, or no, better—tell them I'm at Penney's with my gold Amex …'
   'But, Ma, you don't even have …'
   'Just do it!'
   She scurries up the hall like a blood clot, as Those Girls bounce into the driveway. The bedroom door slams. It's too fucken much for me. I just continue to flick through Dad's videos. Cash Makes Cash, and Did You Ever See a Poor Billionaire? I have to learn how to turn slime into legitimate business, the way it's my right to do in this free world. My obligation, almost, when you think about it. What I definitely learned just now is that everything hinges on the words you use. Doesn't matter what you do in life, you just have to wrap the thing in the right kind of words. Anyway, pimps are already an accepted thing these days, check any TV-movie. Lovable even, some of them, with their leopard-skin Cadillacs, and their purple Stetsons. Their bitches and all. I can go a long way with what I already learned this morning from my daddy's library. Products and Services, Branding, Motivation. I already know I'll be offering a Service. I just have to Position and Package the thing.
   'Doris?' George lets herself through the kitchen screen. Betty follows. 'Do-ris?'
   'Uh—she ain't here,' I say.
   Leona wafts through the door behind them. 'I bet she's in her room,' she says, shimmying right up the fucken hall. Suddenly I feel like one of those TV-movie secretaries when some asshole barges into the chairman's office, 'Sir, you can't go in there …' But no, fucken guaranteed, Leona barges into Mom's room.
   'Hey, there you are,' she croons, like they just met at the Mini-Mart. 'Did y'all hear—I got my own show!'
   'Wow,' sniffs Mom.
   'You ain't got it yet, honey,' hollers George from her armchair. 'Not until Vaine raises the capital to partner up.'
   'Oh goodnight Georgie, she'll get it—she just got her own SWAT team, for God's sake.'
   'Uh-huh, and then appointed lard-bucket Barry to it, who's only a damn fail guard. I just hope by "SWAT" they mean "SWAT flies".'
   'Heck, you're just miffed because the Barn went over the sheriff's head.'
   'Sure, pumpkin, like I'm sooo devastated,' says George. 'I'm just sayin, a SWAT team don't qualify Vaine for goddam internet broadcasting, and it certainly don't give her the cash.' She pauses to suck half a cigarette into her chest. 'And anyway—our lil' ole tragedy just got shot off its damn perch.'
   Leona stomps back out of Mom's room, and throws her hands on her hips. 'Don't you throw cold water on my big day, Georgette-Ann! Lalo says they won't have time to set up the infrastructure in California, not if we move fast.'
   'We-ell.' George launches a finger of smoke at the ceiling. 'We-e-ell. I'll just try not to blink, in case I miss ole Vaine movin so fast.'
   'Look, it's gonna happen—okay?!'
   'Take one helluva new twist, is all I'm sayin.'
   'George–Lalo just happens to be aware of that fact, wow!' The thrust of the last word flicks Leona forward at the waist. She stays there awhile, to make sure it sticks. Then she chirps back into Mom's room. 'Hey, did I tell you we're setting up Lalo's office in my den?'
   Mom scurries into the hall. 'Well I guess we've got time for one coffee, before I go to Penney's. Vern, isn't it time for work?'
   'Hey,' says Leona, 'I can drop him.'
   'Loni, stop it,' says George.
   'But—he'll get there faster …'
   'Le-ona! It's just not fair.' George excavates a tunnel to Mom through her cigarette smoke. 'Honey, I hate to tell you, but Bertram's sending someone to get the boy. The shrink turned him in.'
   'Well, but—Vern's making money now, why, he's getting five hundred dollars, just today …'
   Leona shakes her head. 'You shouldn't've told her, George.'
   'Oh sure, so you could take him via Lally, and film the arrest. Doris is our goddam friend, Leona.'
   Mom's face peels off her head and hangs in tatters from her chin. 'Well, but …'
   I just get up off the floor. 'Either way, I should go brush my hair.'
   'Well, there, see? He's a changed young man, with a high-powered job and all.'
   I leave the ladies and slide up the hall, via Mom's room, to reload my backpack. I pack my address book, my jacket, and some small clothes. My player, and some discs. I remove the clarinet and skateboard. I don't think I'll be going past town anymore. I grab the pack and head out through the laundry door, without a word to the Forces of Evil. You can still hear my ole lady from the porch, struggling to pump cream into her pie.
   'Well I have to get to San Tone for the new fridge, and I'm getting a quote on one of those central-vac systems too, that plug right into anywhere in the house—I guess it's time to think about myself for a change, now that Vern has a career.'
   From the bottom of the porch stairs I see a power company truck idling past the pumpjack, studying house numbers along the road. It jackrabbits to me, and starts to pull over. I just creak away on my bike.

Thirteen

   Nobody will look twice at us, I'm pretty sure of that. A boy and a girl on a bike. A boy in regular jeans, and a tangled blonde in a bluebonnet-blue dress. No smells on us, just like TV. I have my pack with me, so it could even look like we're selling things. Selling things is a good excuse around here.
   'Guess what?' yells Ella into my eardrum.
   I stop by the side of the Johnson road to instruct her how to be a bicycle passenger without killing the driver. She lifts her dress to show me her clean white underwear. I only half pay attention, because it seems a troubled afternoon to me; gusts come threaded with thunder, and the horizon behind Keeter's is lit by a single strake of gold. Ella doesn't notice omens, you can tell she's just getting a kick out of today. Probably because she's in a business adventure with me. Fucken Ella, I swear to God. We're going to split the booty, although she says she ain't in it for the money. That's how fucken weird she is.
   I get some waves about it. For all I know, Deutschman could be trying to quit schoolgirls, he could be on the schoolgirl wagon, taking one day at a time and all. And now—heeere's Ella. I make an effort to think more like my dad's videos. I mean, the client has an Unfulfilled Need, so—here's a Timely and Caring Service. What's more, part of our Extensive After-Sales Service is that nobody will ever know. It's a Market Gap, for chrissakes. But my conscience still calls me from Brooklyn. 'Nah, Boinie,' it says. 'Yez openin up a whole can a woims for da guy.' Then I think of Mom at home. Probably with the power off, probably getting laughed at, on account of her poverty, and her lack of fucken pizzazz. Localized smirking from douche-bag Leona. I'm committed.
   The bike whirrs between flaky shacks and trailer-homes, down streets without edges, until the light almost disappears from the sky. We come to a cheap wooden house, of the kind you can build in a weekend, painted clean, though, with a neat little lawn, and tidy edges of bricks and gravel. Ole Mr Deutschman's place. We crunch past a clay figure of a sleeping Mexican, and carefully lay the bike in the gravel beside the house. Mr Deutschman ain't expecting us. This is known as Cold Calling, in the trade. I take hold of Ella's shoulders to give her a final briefing.
   'Ella, it's just look and touch, okay? Nothing heavy—okay? Call me if he goes too far.'
   'Chill out, Bernie—I'm the one with the poles, remember?'
   God she's fucken scary sometimes. The plan is for her to be shy and sweet, and leave the initiative to him. Like: yeah, right. I told her not to even open her mouth if she could help it, but that's asking a whole shitload from Ella, you know it.
   She crunches around to Mr Deutschman's door while I crouch in the gravel, out of sight. I pretend to rummage in my backpack. A couple of fat raindrops smack me like birdshit. Typical fucken Crockett's. Then I hear the door open. Deutschman's voice warbles out.
   'Who's this here?' he says, all kindly and ole. He has the voice quality of genuine oleness, like he swallowed a vibrator or something.
   After I hear them go inside, I unload my pack and crunch around to the door, scanning the street for neighbors. There's nothing to see, except an ole parked Jeep, and not much to hear except wire twanging in a gust. I try Deutschman's front door—it opens. I hold my breath until Ella's voice chimes out from deep in the house.
   'Mama buys them because cotton's supposed to be—wow, your hands are cold...'
   Game on. I close the door behind me, and creep into the living room. A new smell imprints on my brain; the smell of ole pickled dreams, like organs in a jar. Other people's house-smells hit you harder when you're not supposed to be there. I move down this narrow hallway toward Ella's voice, past the bathroom, where other industrial smells hang. Then a car turns onto the road outside. I dampen the sound of my heart with my hand until it hisses away up the street; the car that is, not my fucken heart. I shuffle forward again.
   Deutschman and Ella are in the room at the end of the hallway. The door stands ajar. I flatten myself against the wall, and crane for a peek through the gap. Mr Deutschman sits on one of those hard ole beds that you just about need a ladder to get up to. The bedclothes are symmetrically draped under his symmetrical ass, which makes a neat little crinkle on top. Next to the bed is a polished wooden table, where a lamp stands on a knitted doily. A wallet, a Bible, and a black-and-white picture in a heavy brass frame sit alongside. A friendly lady shines out of the picture, with clear, trusting eyes, and curly, woolen hair that blows alongside blossoms in a breeze. You can tell that breeze blew a long time ago. On the other side of the room is one small window that overlooks junk in the back yard, including a rusty kind of love-seat.
   Ella stands at the end of the bed with her dress held under her chin. 'Ha! That tickles–wait up, you wanna see my south pole—or my north pole?'
   She pulls her panties down to her knees; doesn't inch them down, sexily or anything, but fucken yanks them, smiling like you just found her in the Mini-Mart. See what I mean about Ella?
   'My, what's this here?' Deutschman's fingertips tremble onto her bare ass, his breathing gets jerky.
   I take a deep breath too. Then I jump in with Mom's Polaroid. Snap!
   'The psycho!' says Deutschman. His lips seem to quiver in midair, then his head slumps onto his chest, with shame I guess.
   'Mr Deutschman, it's okay,' I say. 'Mr Deutschman? We're not here to make any trouble, the young lady is here by choice, and I'm just here with her. You understand?'
   He raises dull eyes at me, and swallows some silent words. Then he looks back at Ella. She cocks her head like a game-show hostess, and fixes him with a grin. God she's bent, I swear.
   'Mr Deutschman,' I say, 'I'm real sorry to barge in like this, I mean no disrespect. But, y'see, you and I have special needs, we can help each other out.' Deutschman hangs his mouth open, listens like a Texan. 'See the young lady here? I bet you'd like to spend some time with her. Your needs'll probably get well satisfied.' I copy the salesmen in Dad's videos, who always spread their hands out and chuckle, like you must be the dumbest fuck in the world if you don't see how easy things are. 'A little cash is all we need, in return for everything. Your joining fee today could be three hundred dollars, for instance—one flat, easy payment—and I'll leave the two of you to hang out some more. I won't even come back at all. And Mr Deutschman, you can have this picture, and we'll never come by again, or say a word. That's our solemn promise to you, ain't it, Miss?'
   Ella puts her hands on her hips, grinning like a Mouseketeer, with her drawers around her knees. Deutschman stares at the floor awhile, then reaches for the wallet on his bedside table. He empties it of banknotes, and hands them to me without a word. A hundred and sixty dollars. My heart sinks.
   'Sir, is this all you have? Just this money here?' I look down at him, all ole and shaken, and my heart sinks some more. I open out the wad of cash and peel a twenty off the top. 'Here, sir, we don't want to clean you out or anything.'
   Some fucken criminal I make. He takes the note without even looking up. What suddenly stings me, though, is this: Ella's getting all the attention she craves, and getting paid for it. Deutschman's using up some stale ole cash, and getting the kicks he probably dreamed about his whole adult life. My ole lady's getting peace of mind about my so-called job, and a new little income. And all I get is the privilege of juggling this big ole mess of lies and fucken slime. The thing has me so bummed I just want to get the fuck out.
   'I'll leave you two alone now,' I say, turning to the door.
   When I reach the door though, I hear Deutschman groan behind me. I spin around to see him sliding onto his feet. Ella's panties fly back up her legs.
   'Don't stop,' says Lally from the window. He turns from the camera to call over his shoulder, 'Leona—come see what we got for the show!'
   I grab Ella, her dress half-scrunched into her panties, and pull her out to the hallway, fumbling and dropping Mom's camera along the way. Deutschman clatters into the bathroom ahead of us, eyes and mouth jammed open. I flick the photograph to him through the door.
   'Destroy it, sir, and whatever you do—don't talk to that guy.'
   Floorboards bounce as we charge to the front door and out over the steps. We're met by raindrops flying sideways through the porchlight, weaving at us like angry sperm. I yank Ella around the corner in a spray of gravel, to where my stuff is tucked in the shadows. And there stands Lally with his camera.
   'Whoa, kids—wait up.'
   I take Ella's shoulders and shove her away. She spins toward the road, one arm flailing, the other still adjusting the ass of her panties through her dress. Lally swaggers over to my pack, planting himself between me and the bike. He gives his balls a luxurious grope.
   'My but you're such a career man these days.'
   A thousand cusses jump to mind, but none of them come out. Instead I fix his leer in my mind, lower my head, and launch myself into his guts. 'Dhoof!' he flies back onto the bike, the camera spins through the air, then glances off his head with a crack.
   'Sack of shit!' He unpeels his spine from the bike's frame and takes a swipe at my ankle. 'Wanna play in the real world, cock-sucker?' he snarls.
   I snatch up the camera and rip out the cartridge. Then I take aim at him with my leg, and kick for all my life's worth. I connect hard, and he crashes back across the bike, dazed and bloody, in a shower of gravel.
   'Wow, Lalito,' calls Leona, still out of sight behind the house. 'Your star just saw a spider back here—is this how the job's supposed to be?'
   I haul up my backpack and sprint onto the road. Ella breaks cover from behind the parked Jeep across the street, lunging for my free hand. I pull her head-first into the dusk and we steam down the road, hand-in-hand, chased by fast-moving clouds.
   'Lalo,' says Leona behind us. 'Be honest, now—as a name, do you prefer Vanessa or Rebecca?'
   Our heartbeats trail us along rows of warped shacks, past makeshift porches dangling yellow light, into creekbeds, over bluffs; we suck air like jet-engines until we're spent. Lally will be back on the road by now, searching. Pissed as hell. And the law won't be far behind him. Feel the powerdime glow hot.
   'Fuck,' puffs Ella when we finally stop.
   I kneel next to her in the bushes behind her house. From here you can see down an overgrown alley that runs between her back fence and the shack next door. At the end of the alley, you can just make out the Johnson road. Keeter's, and the escarpment beyond, roll deep and black behind it. As my breath settles, I hear the first crickets, and the pulse of rustling grasses in the wind. Moist air from Ella's mouth strokes my face. I turn to look back through the bushes, where the outermost lights of Crockett's twinkle. In amongst the quiet you hear a soft bustle from town, then a car approaching. A learning comes over me gently, warm like a stroke. It is that I have seven fucken seconds to plan the rest of my life.
   'Ell, I have to trust you with something important.'
   'You can trust me, Bernie.'
   'We got a hundred and forty dollars. That's seventy apiece.' I pull the cash from my pocket, and rifle through it for a ten-dollar bill. I stuff the ten into my pocket, passing the rest to Ella. 'Can you take sixty of this to Seventeen Beulah Drive? Can you do that for me? You'll have to tie up your hair, change your clothes, and sneak down there like a shadow. Can you do that?'
   'Sure I can.' She nods like a little kid, you know how they nod too much. Then she stares at me through shining eyes. 'What're you gonna do?'
   'I have to disappear awhile.'
   'I'll come with you.'
   'The hell you will. They'd catch us in a second.'
   She presses her lips shut, and stares some more. I swear she's like your cat or something, how she just stares. A truck growls along the Johnson road. I tense until it passes. Ella just keeps staring. Then a door bangs in the middle distance, and a lady's voice screeches out.
   'E-lla!'
   Ella's face drops. I guess this was a real adventure we had just now; you can tell it broke the ice with Ella Bouchard. I squeeze her hand, for recent ole times' sake, and pick up my pack. 'If you see my ole lady, tell her I'm sorry, and I'll be in touch. Or, no, better—don't tell her anything, just slide the cash under the door. Okay?' I stretch out of the grass, but Ella's hand intercepts me at the leg. I look down at her face. It suddenly seems configured to make brave decisions in life, like willpower soaks through her pores or something. She leans up to my mouth and plants a clumsy kiss.
   'I love you,' she whispers. 'Stay clear of Keeter's track, they's settin up that SWAT thing tonight.' She reaches for my hand and stuffs all her cash into it, all but my mom's sixty dollars. Then she springs to her feet and swishes away down the alley like a cotton ghost.
   'Eee-lla!'
   'Comin!'
   I still feel her spit on my lips. I wipe it on my arm. As I melt into the dark on the escarpment side of the road, I see a figure bobbing through the light at Keeter's corner. It's Barry Gurie's unmistakable fat head. He ain't rushing. The hiss of a car approaches from the other direction. Lally's car. I run before its lights sweep the road.

Act III.
Against all odds

Fourteen

   Martirio twinkles like a nest of fireflies from the land above Keeter's. You can see the new sign at the Seldome Motel, and one corner of Bar-B-Chew Barn is visible, alongside the radio mast. If you squint, you can see the working spine of town, a centipede's legs of pumpjacks lit up along Gurie Street—fuck, fuck, fuck. I trace the spine as far as I can, down to Liberty Drive, at least. My town is beautiful from up here. It's as if a star shines for every creature in the constellation of Martirio, and a few more shine besides. There's just one tiny black spot at the northern edge of town, where no star shines at all. That'll be home.
   Waves are coming. My survival instinct wore off when I left the Johnson road. Now, stamping Lally's video into the fucken ground, I can taste the salt of waves. They come with pictures of Mom in her darkened kitchen, scraping up any ole crumb of hope, to parlay into pie. But all she scrapes is bullshit. It slays me. She'll be muttering, 'Well at least he has a job, and we still have his birthday to look forward to.' But I'm halfway to the escarpment, on my way to goddam Mexico. Probably forever.
   It's a little before ten. I can reach the highway in a couple of hours, then maybe hitch a ride, or catch a bus or something, down to San Antone. I take a last look at Martirio sparkling across the flats, my universe for all these long years. Then I set off toward the hills, all crusty and alone. My coping mechanisms open up to some cream pie. Remember that ole movie, with the beach-house? Plenty of folks must do that, for real. Nothing says you have to be a particular kind of person to do that. I imagine Mom coming down, after things blow over. I buy her some souvenirs. Maybe I send a maid back with her; she can jam that up. Leona's fat ass. A learning: deep shit sweetens your plans like crazy.
   It's midnight when the first headlights flicker through the branches by the highway. To be honest, I don't even know which way is south. My ole man thought Scouts was for sissies, so I don't even know which fucken way is south in life. Instead of trying to figure it out, I call some Glen Campbell to mind, to help me lope along, crusty and lonesome, older than my years. 'Wichita Lineman' is the song I call up, not 'Galveston'. I would've conjured Shania Twain or something a little more sassy, but that might boost me up too much. What happens with sassy music is you get floated away from yourself, then snap back to reality too hard. I hate that. The only antidote is to just stay depressed.
   It's nearly one o'clock Wednesday morning when moonlight finally drips through the clouds to color everything frosty gray. Texas is so fucken beautiful. If you ain't here already, you should come. Feel free to skip Martirio, that's all. Herds of trucks and cars pass on the highway, but none of them look like they'd stop. I mean, I know they won't stop if I don't get up and stop them, don't get me wrong. I just don't like my chances. A better idea is to wait for a bus, which has an established tradition of stopping. I settle in the crook of a bend in the highway, pull my jacket from the pack, and fashion a backrest against a bush. I sit and wait, and turn some learnings over in my head.
   Where TV lets you down, I'm discovering, is by not convincing you how things really work in the world. Like, do buses stop anywhere along the road, to pick up any kind of asshole, or do you have to be at a regular bus stop? You see plenty of movies where some crusty dude stops a bus in the middle of the desert or something. But maybe that only applies in the middle of the desert. Or maybe only the drivers who saw those movies will stop. This all scuttles through my head, and starts to warp into other kinds of movies, like the one with the black devil-car that has a vendetta against this guy. I feel my hair wisp in the breeze, the grasses and bushes wisp around me. Just nature and me, wisping, while the devil-car has this vendetta.
   A chill wades through my skin to wake me. It's after five in the morning. I hear the roar of a bus on the highway, and hoist my pack up to the roadside. A motorcoach hammers around the bend, glowing cool and cozy inside. I flap my arms, and make like I just arrived from the scene of an urgent reason to travel. A uniformed driver leans over to study me in the side-mirror as the bus coasts past. Then, 'Pschhsss,' he pulls over and stops, two hundred yards down the highway. I fly towards those tail-lights.
   The door puffs open. 'You in trouble?' asks the driver.
   'I have to get to San Antonio.'
   'Martirio's only a few miles away, you should pick up the next service there—I can't just stop on a whim, y'know.'
   'Yeah, but—I'm stuck out here, and …'
   'You're stuck out here?' he looks around. 'We have like predetermined stops, you can't just hail the service any old where.' I shoot him these puppy-dog eyes, and he eventually says, 'I'd have to charge you the whole fare, like from Austin—thirteen-fifty.'
   I climb aboard without even checking where the cowgirl's sitting, or even if there is a cowgirl. I just gulp down the aura of crumpled bedclothes, of travelers messy with chippings of sleep, and shuffle to an empty row at the back. My adrenal gland coughs as we move away, half expecting Lally to appear, or Ella's mom, or some kind of shit. I don't even want to think what, because Fate always pays attention to what you think, then slams it up your fucken ass.
   'Drrrrrr,' the motorcoach hits the road, and after nameless miles I hang suspended on the knife-edge of a doze, my brain like crystal grits. Then we pass a field of manure or something, the type of smeary tang your family pretends not to notice when you're in the car with them, and it suddenly floods my senses with Taylor Figueroa. Don't ask me why. I sense her in a field by the highway. She's down on all fours behind a bush, naked except for blue synthetic panties that strain hard into her thigh-vee, and glow dirty ripe. I'm there too. We're safe and comfortable, with time on our hands. I surf her upholstery with my nose, map her sticky heem along glimmering edges to the panty-leg, where the tang sharpens like slime-acid chocolate, stings, bounces me back from her poon. In my dream I bounce back too far. Then I see we're in a field of ass-fruit, and suddenly I don't know if it's Taylor's scent, or just the field I can smell. I scramble back to her cleft, but the edges have vanished. The forbidden odor dissolves into the body-heat and aftershave of the bus. I wake up snorting air like crazy. She's gone. Empty distance rolls past the window.
   I sit up straight in the seat, hoping to fool myself into normality. But the waves start tumbling in, tidal waves of horror on the back of this beautiful dream. Now bright images of Jesus form around me. He doesn't look at me. He looks away, and takes the barrel into his mouth, tastes its heat. Around him, milky eyes dot the school yard like flowers, jerky eyes getting slower, fading dead away. Boom. Fractured air oozes coughs and gurgles, the hiss of desperate clotting, of vital last messages nobody hears. Mr Nuckles the teacher is here too, his face trimmed with bubbles of young blood. The memories are back. I shoot disorderly tears for the fallen, for Max Lechuga, Lori Donner, and everybody, and I know I'm fucked for the rest of the journey, maybe for the rest of my life, fucked and nailed through the eye of my dick to the biggest cross. How could they think I did this? I hung out with the underdog, moved out of the pack, that's how, and now I fill his place, now anything original I ever said or did has turned a sinister shade. I understand him for the first time.
   'You all right?' asks an ole lady, approaching down the aisle. I must be gasping like a fish or something. She brings her hand to my face, and I meet with it like it was the hand of God.
   'I'll be okay,' I say through a curtain of spit. She withdraws her hand, but my face follows it, without instructions from me, aching for another touch.
   'I'm so sorry you have troubles. I'm right over here—if you need some company, I'm right over here.' She pulls herself back to her seat.
   An angel from heaven, that ole lady, but I can't feel a thing except pain and darkness, the darkness of purgatory. I bury my face in my hands, and sit shaking with hurt, praying for some kind of hopeful distraction. Then, I swear on my daddy's grave, Muzak starts to play in the bus. Just a welling violin note at first.


Sailing, take me away...


   It's light when we roll into San Antone, but too early to be busy. I'm as hungry as a loose dog. My eyes are still gritty with salt. I skulk around the terminal restroom until eight o'clock, then I go to the phones to call Taylor Figueroa's folks. I just feel empty, drained of my life juices. The current logic is this: if I can get Taylor's number, and take the first step into my dream, it'll boost me up, maybe even enough to call home and explain things. If I don't get Taylor's number, then I'll have so little left to lose that I'll call home anyway, because I won't care about being boosted up.
   I punch in the number. A thought comes as I do it, that maybe my ole lady became best friends with the Figueroas overnight, and is over there drinking coffee, or bawling, more likely. You know how Martirio is. It's shit, because my ole lady never went to the Figueroas' in her life. But you know how Martirio is. The number rings.
   Teaches,' Taylor's mom answers in a cool, deep voice.
   'Mrs Figueroa? This is a friend of Taylor's—I lost her number and wondered how I could get in touch.'
   'Who's speaking?'
   'Uh—just an ole school buddy, like, from school.'
   'Yes, but who?'
   'Oh, it's—Danny Naylor here, excuse me.' Big fucken mistake. Her voice immediately gets all relaxed and intimate.
   'Well hi, Dan, I didn't recognize you at all—how's life treating you up at A&M?'
   'Oh, great, great, I'm loving it, actually.'
   'I saw your mom at the New Life market the other day, and she tells me you're coming down for the bluebonnet cookout.'
   'Oh, sure—you know me.' Sweat runs down my fucken back, my vision gets metallic, like I just downed forty cups of coffee.
   'Hooray,' she says. 'I'll be seeing your mom at the committee meeting tomorrow, I'll let her know you called, and that you're fine.'
   'Oh, great, thanks a lot.'
   'And I just know Tay'll be pleased to hear from you—hold on, I'll get you her number.'
   Now there's a fucken thing. 'I just know Tay'll be pleased?' I get a sudden twist of the knife over that. Typical of asshole Naylor to horn in on my thing. Like, he only ever had one good joke in his whole school career. It makes me want to go, 'Yeah, I'll just update her on my genital cancer,' or something. Fucken Naylor, boy.
   'Here it is Dan, she's still down at UT Houston—I know she has a lunch date, so you'll catch her then, if not right now.'
   I list the number under 'T', and under 'F, in case I get amnesia, then I write it across the cover of the address book as well. 'Thanks Mrs Figueroa—you take care now, and give my love to Mom.'
   'Sure, Dan—see you at the cookout.'
   I hang up the phone, shaking my head from the dumbness of it all. You can picture Danny arriving at the cookout and going, 'What fucken call?' Or everybody finding out he died in a line-dancing accident a week ago, or something. I just take the fucken cake, boy. I mean, there must be some highly twisted gangstas out there, really hard cases and all, but I bet they never got involved in a dorky piece of slime in their lives. Like, I bet ole Adult Hitler, a nasty piece of action, never had anyone looking out for him at the cookout because he called pretending to be Danny Fucken Naylor.
   Having Taylor's number makes me look like I've got Attention Defecit Disorder, or whichever one it is where you freeze on the spot, or do mime acts or whatever. I devise a facial expression to cover it, frowning like I'm calculating Pi to eight billion decimal places. Underneath my new expression, I run all the thoughts that would've made me look stupid. Like the thought that my ole lady will be up by now. Probably being fucken defibrillated already, or whatever it is when the paramedics yell 'Clear!' I shuffle to the terminal doors, where a bus schedule is displayed. Buses leave regularly to Houston, which means I have plenty of time to call my ole lady. And buses from Houston leave regularly to Brownsville and McAllen, down by the Mexican border. I'm tempted to buy two tickets to the border, and just present one to Taylor, like a wedding ring or something. But my brain says no, don't even buy one yet. Chill for a second. Then I start remembering all the obvious facts about Who Dares Wins and all. Like, maybe the fact I don't take a ticket means I won't get her to come. I end up frozen at the fucken door, re-calculating Pi.
   Say, for instance, two guys want to drag Taylor Figueroa to Mexico right away. One brings her roses, and says he has this plan to go to Mexico, and would she like to come along. The other dude turns up with a quart of tequila, a joint, and two tickets to the border. He doesn't show her the tickets right away, but says, 'I have hours to live—help me kill the pain.' He gets her wasted in three minutes flat, sucks her tonsils out of her throat, then pulls out the tickets and says, 'Ten minutes till the cops arrive and take you in as an accessory—let's jam.' Which one does she go with? You know the fucken answer, I don't have to tell you. And let me say, it ain't all on account of one being nice, and one being a slime-ball. It's because one of them knew she would come. As Americans, we know this to be true. We invented fucken assertive-ness, for chrissakes. But in amongst all the books and tapes, in between that whole assertiveness industry—and I don't mean how to fast-talk people, and increase sales and shit, like, that's a whole other industry on its own, I mean in the industry where you end up knowing like day is day that something's going to happen for you—you never once hear how to actually fucken do it. Like, for my money, just thinking positive doesn't cut the ice at all. I've been thinking positive all year, and fucken look at me now. My ole lady thinks a new refrigerator will turn up on her doorstep, but you ain't seen the fucker yet.
   I limp back to the phones. I ain't sure Taylor will come along. In fact, if I'm really honest, I guess I feel she won't. She has a lunch date, and her life is all separate, and full of sunny-smelling skin and panty lace. I just have grisly fucken reality, uninvited, with its smell of escalator motors and blood, and whirrs and beeps that suck away your shine. Dreams are so damn perfect, but reality just always tugs the other way. The fact that our two lives will rub together for the time it takes to say hello doesn't automatically mean sparks will fly. The best you can probably expect is that her peachy-lace life gets smeared with booger-slime. It's enough to make you bawl. Specially because now I'm in the wrong frame of mind for it to happen. There's the learning, O Partner: that you're cursed when you realize true things, because then you can't act with the full confidence of dumbness anymore.
   In the end I just piss myself off. I pack up my goddam philosophical activity set, and pull a quarter from my pocket. I toss it. It comes down heads, which means call her in Houston immediately. I pick up the phone, and punch in her number.

Fifteen

   'Hello?' The voice is liquid ass in panty elastic.
   Taylor, hi—it's Vern.'
   'Wait up, I'll get her,' says a girl. 'Tay! Taylor—it's Vern.'
   'Wait up, I'll get her,' says a girl. 'Tay! Taylor–it's Vern.'
   'Who?' calls a voice in the background.
   Then you hear giggles. I fucken hate that. Your chances with a girl fall sharply in the vicinity of giggles. Learning: never try to deal with more than one girl at a time.
   She finally clatters onto the line. Tayla.'
   'Uh—hi, it's Vern.'
   'Vern?'
   'Vern Little—remember me?'
   'Vern Little? Like, gee …' As she speaks, you hear the other girl in quiet hysterics nearby.
   'You might've seen me on the news, Vernon Gregory Little—from Martirio?'
   'Like, I'm real sorry—I heard about the massacre and all, but I usually only, like, watch cable, you know?'
   'Anal Intruder Channel,' squeals the other girl.
   'Fuck off, Chrissie, God.'
   'Uh—well, I'm the messy-haired dude, from outside the senior party that time—I kept back some stuff of yours …'
   'Oh hey, Vern. I'm sorry–you took care of me that night, like, boy, did I overdo it or what!'
   'Hell, no big deal,' I say. In the background you hear her kick the other girl out of the room. Pause for giggles while she does it.
   'Well it was really, like—anything could've happened to me, you know?' I push some spit around my mouth, imagine some things that could've happened to her. 'So how'd you get my number?' she asks.
   'It's a long story—thing is, I'm coming over to Houston, I thought maybe we could grab a coffee or something.'
   'Gee, Vern, I'm like, wow, you know? Maybe next time?'
   'But, what about lunchtime, or something?'
   'See, my cousin's coming over, and it's just like, whatever, a girl thing, you know? Anyway, it's real sweet of you to call …'
   She utters the winding-up words, just like that. Then comes an awkward gap as she waits for the corresponding ending from me. A spike of horror makes me gamble.
   'Taylor, listen—I just got out of jail, I'm on the run. I wanted to tell you some stuff before I disappear, you know?'
   'Holy shit, like—what happened?
   'I can't really talk on the phone.'
   'God, but you seemed like, wow, you know, such a quiet guy.'
   'Maybe not so quiet, as it turns out. Not so damn quiet anymore.'
   'God, but you're only, like—fourteen, no?'
   'Uh, seventeen actually, now, these days. So yeah, I guess I must've just snapped, against the injustice and all.'
   'Oh my God...'
   I stand at the phones, flick my eyes around the terminal, and wait for the bait to drop. I wait in the name of all the conclusive knowledge, collected throughout the history of the world, that says girls just can't resist bad boys. You know it, I know it. Everybody knows it, even if you ain't allowed to say it anymore.
   'Vern, maybe I could, like—whatever, you know? I mean it's like, God. D'you know the Galleria in Houston?'
   'Not a whole lot.'
   'See, I have to be at Victoria's Secret around two—I could, like, catch you out front, on Westheimer or whatever.'
   'Victoria's Secret?' I trample my tongue.
   She giggles. 'I know, it's so embarrassing–I'm supposed to be, like, underwear shopping, I can't believe I just invited you.'
   'I'll wear shades.'
   'Whatever,' she says, laughing. 'Are you, like—in a car?'
   'I'll take a cab.'
   'Whatever, look—there's like this inflatable octopus out front of the Galleria, some kind of promotion—I'll keep an eye out around quarter of two.'
   See how things work? First I'm like a skidmark on her mouthpiece, and she wants to wind up the call. But see what happens now I'm in trouble. See the awesome power of trouble. Trouble fucken rocks.
   The Houston bus costs twenty-two bucks. I'm hungry, but I only have forty-four bucks fifty left. Getting both of us to Mexico will cost more than that. When my bus pulls into Houston, just before one o'clock, I head to the phones and look up 'Cash' in the yellow pages. My music has to go. A cab drives me miles away, to a pawnbroker where I get offered twenty-five bucks for my two-hundred-dollar stereo, which I accept because the taxi meter is running, and already cost me ten bucks, which I had to pay up-front as soon as the driver knew we were going to a fucken pawnbroker. I also get offered twenty-five cents apiece for my discs. I sneer at the pawnbroker, and he gets mad. Real red ass on the pawnbroker, actually, as we say down here.
   Then the cab drives me along this fancy set of highways, past big reflector buildings, to the Galleria. I try not to imagine what Taylor'll be wearing, or how she'll smell. Better not to get fixated on anything that leaves room to be bummed if it's not true. I might focus on those same shorts from before, then find her in jeans or something, and lose the wind out of my sails.
   I distract myself by watching the driver. He's a career driver, whose body and ass are permanently molded into the shape of the seat. He seems okay, kind of big and whiskery, with a relaxed smile. Reminds you of Brian Dennehy, from those ole movies, like with the alien eggs in the pool. A bunch of us at school used to wish Brian Dennehy could be our dad, same way we wished Barbara Bush could be our granny. Not like my snotty ole nana. But my ole man was still alive when I saw those movies, and I felt I kind of betrayed him by wishing Brian Dennehy could be my dad. Maybe that percentage of negative energy contributed to his death. Who knows?
   The cab turns onto Westheimer, which is like four Gurie Streets stapled together. I try not to be conscious of my pulse, but it goes up anyway. There's no fucken cure for that, by the way. In movies, your pulse goes up when you want it up—out here it just does its own thing. Your fucken pulse is the death of cool. I take some deep breaths as this humongous mall appears alongside us; a large blow-up octopus sways on some ropes by the sidewalk. My balls crawl up my throat.
   'Right there, by the octopus,' I tell the driver.
   The figure of a young woman stands by the road. I slouch low, hoping she doesn't see me yet. I hate it when you go to meet somebody, and they spot you twenty fucken miles away, and just stay staring at you. You feel like your steps bounce too much, or your shoulders are too dangly or something. You hold the same dumb smile.
   It's Taylor Figueroa. She's in a short khaki skirt. Her legs and arms flow warm and careless under sparkling brown hair. Her eyebrows flash up when she sees the cab. I feel sick to my fucken stomach.
   'That'll be seven-eighty,' says the driver.
   The cool of her smell hits me as soon as the door opens, but the cab seat is so low and busted that I make it look like climbing Mount Everest to get out. Taylor freeze-frames her smile while I haul my pack across the eastern face of the fucken cab. Then I drop my wallet in the road. She folds her arms while I scramble for a banknote, and hand it to the guy.
   'That's seven-eighty,' says the driver, 'and this is only five.' He holds the bill out the window like it's a turd.
   Sprinklers of sweat pop up on my forehead. I fumble through my pocket for change, but the pocket's so tight I can hardly get my hand in at all. Van Damme would rip the back of his hand off rather than squirm like this, he'd punch the driver's fucken lights out. I finally just pass the guy a ten from my billfold.
   'Keep the change,' I tell him, all nonchalant. Taylor leans over to kiss my cheek, but stops again, mid-air. The goddam driver waves a banknote out the window.
   'Don't forget your five.'
   'I said keep the change.'
   'You sure? Thanks, thanks a lot …'
   Fuck. Now Taylor's embarrassed. I'm embarrassed, and half fucken bankrupt, and at the end of it all, Taylor just scratches the kiss right out of the scene. I catch a closer blast of her perfume though, which has a hook in it, the barb of a real woman, in the sense of more complicated panties, probably silk, full cut, with lace panels and all. Maybe in a blue half-tone, or a kind of flesh tone. I'm slain by her.
   'Hi,' she says, leading me past the octopus. 'You robbed a bank, huh?'
   'Yeah—see this backpack?'
   I just sound weary now, like a regular smeghead on a flat Houston day. Sweat drips from my nose. Taylor looks me over. Her deep brown eyes narrow.
   'You okay?'
   'I guess so.'
   I just sound like I have no desire left to impress anybody, but in this new depression a curious thing happens. A life thing. What happens, I think, is that we establish a real kind of contact, like in a movie or something. She just saw me make a complete asshole of myself, and she knows I know it. And it's as if she relaxes some, and I relax along with her. Like the horse stopped having to do math on stage. It accidentally makes me genuine, I guess, and exposes me as an ole fuckaway dog, all beat up to hell. She leads me quietly into the mall, respecting the swirling ink of trouble, and other people's tears, around my soul.
   'So what's up, you dirty boy?' she teases on the escalator.
   'Shit, I don't know where to start.'
   'I'll drag it out of you.' She slips her dry little hand into my bunch of wet finger-meats, and coaxes me through the crowd. 'We'll check for my cousin, then maybe grab a juice, get private.'
   A juice. Grab a private juice. What a woman. I watch her neat little buttocks stretch the fabric of her skirt, left, right, left, without a panty-line in sight, not to the naked eye. I'm so fucken in love with her I can't even picture her panties.
   We reach the lingerie store, where all this hard-core, shiny kind of underwear is displayed out front. I'm not so interested in all that burlesque kind of stuff, to be honest. Simple cotton bikinis for me, like a girl wears when she doesn't expect you to go there. I look around at the women in the store. You can tell they fucken pray for you to go there.
   'I don't see her,' says Taylor, craning over the displays. 'Typical. You want to go talk? I'll understand if you don't …'
   'Sure, but you'll have to keep some pretty heavy secrets. I'll understand if you can't.' Girls just love secrets.
   'Whatever.' She wrinkles her bitty nose. 'Like, I don't need to know where the bodies are buried or anything.' She flashes her teeth, and walks me to a fancy-looking cafeteria across the concourse.
   'Hell, there's no bodies or anything,' I say.
   As she docks her ass onto a barstool, I notice she's not totally airbrushed after all—a couple of her teeth are crooked, and you can detect a recent zit under her make-up. I melt like a wad into Kleenex. She's so fucken real, so here.
   'So, like—are you guilty?' she asks.
   'Nah, I don't figure.'
   'Is it, like, robbery or something?'
   'Murder.'
   'Eek,' her face crumples like she just stepped in puke. 'Don't you think it'd be better to, like, stay and fight it out?'
   'Nah, the way things're stacked, I have to disappear awhile.'
   Her eyebrows scrunch in sympathy. What I realize as I melt into her syrup is that I have to steer talk away from the slime, and start to build a platform of excitement to tempt her along. Order tequilas or something, kiss her on the mouth.
   'Tay,' I frown, 'this might seem sudden, but—I have to ask you something real important.'
   Her face stiffens, like faces do when there's an incoming choice of shit. Right away I know it's the wrong approach.
   'Cash?' she goes. 'Like, if you need a loan …'
   A waiter turns up. 'What can I get y'all?' Taylor and my eyes take a moment to separate.
   'I'll have a guava licuado,' she says.
   'Uh—make it two,' I say. Tequilas my fucken ass. After the waiter leaves, I try another angle. 'Heck, Tay, I'm being real selfish here—I didn't even ask how you're doing …'
   She rattles both my hands. 'You're killing me, like, God. I'm just here, finishing this thing, I tried out for TV but didn't get casted yet—just like, whatever, you know?'
   I smile, and suck warmth from the moment to mold into a platform of romance. Then she flicks back her hair and drops her eyes.
   'And I'm seeing this doctor, can you believe it? He's an older guy, obviously, but I'm like sooo in love—he's the reason I'm shopping today, him and my cousin's new man are such panty-pooches.'
   I start to hear her through a distant echo-tunnel, you know how you do. Then Mom's voice scurries from my mouth.
   'Hey—wow.'
   'God, I can't believe I just told you that! Anyway he drives a Corvette, like an original Stingray whatever, and in November we're doing Colorado for my birthday …'
   'Hey, wow.'
   O-so-soft-and-gentle-on-your-skin Fate now makes me die squealing for every pixel of her being, and with each turn of her smile, every token of how remote my dream is from her mind, I fucken die knowing this is barely the germ of an infection for a thousand miserable deaths.
   Then Taylor stands off her stool, and waves up the concourse. 'Hey, there's my cousin—Leona! Loni!' she calls. 'Over here!'
   Jesus fuck. It's Leona Dunt from back home. I don't know if Lally's with her. Fuck. I explode off my stool, snatching up the backpack. Leona stands posing by the lingerie store, she hasn't looked over yet. 'What's up?' Taylor asks me.
   'I have to run.'
   'But—what were you going to ask me?'
   'Please, please, please, don't breathe a word of this to Leona.'
   'You know Leona?'
   'Yeah, please.' My Nikes fire me onto the concourse.
   'Vern!' she calls, as I vanish into the crowd. I glance over my shoulder and capture her image forever; she's there like a lost kitten, lips open, eyebrows scrunched. 'Be careful,' she mouths silently. 'Call me.'
   I fester and decompose in the back of a Greyhound bus bound for McAllen, under the tumor light, the twisted lava-lamp of sky, just a shell of meaningless brand names, a shelter for maggots and worms. Vernon Gone-To-Hell Little. And I didn't call my mom at all, you guessed it. I didn't even eat all day. All I did was hammer myself to a cross.
   Screen One in my brain plays endless warm close-ups of Taylor. I try not to watch, I try to stay in the lobby and avoid it. But the thing's right there, doing big rotations of milky ass. Screen Two runs that other timeless classic, Mom, or, Honey I Butt-Fucked the Family. I ain't trying to watch that one either. All I watch is a double-exposure of my ole goofy face in the window, as infinite distance rolls by outside; spongy, darkened distance, like rug-lint balls on wet graham cracker. Power lines and fence posts read past like sheet music, but the tunes are fucken shit.
   This is the scenario when I get the day's clincher, the one I forgot to expect. A song gets attached to Taylor. Just when you think you're dicked to the maximum extent of natural law, something always comes up that you forgot about. I know the routine from here. Everybody knows deep down there's no way to kill a Fate song once it's stuck. They're like fucken herpes. The only way to wash them out is to buy the song and play it day and night, until it doesn't mean anything anymore. Only forty gazillion years it takes. Everybody knows it, but I don't remember being taught that little pearl back in school, about the destructive power of Fate songs. Correct me if maybe I was absent that day, or if that was the day I spent cleaning the yard on account of liberating frogs from the lab. No, as I remember it, we were too busy trying to assimilate fucken Surinam to be taught anything of actual value to our lives, like Fate songs for instance.
   I hear Taylor's song through the 'Tss, tss, tss' of a guy's earphones, a couple of rows up. 'Better Man' is the tune, by Pearl Jam. I don't even know the words to the song, but you can bet I'll spend the next eighty years in hell making every line fit my situation. Even if it ends up being about fucken groundhogs in space or something.
   Worst of all, it ain't even a pure sex song. No dirty little bass riffs running up and down the back, swinging and plucking; nothing masturbation can relieve. This ole tune drags you screaming from her panties with the fatal wrench of something bigger than perky riffs. Anodized, gritty wanting and yearning. The deathly heem of love.
   A sob pops in my throat. I choke it, and look around for a harmless visual distraction, but all I see is a stocky young woman with a baby, a few seats up. The baby is pulling the woman's hair, and she's faking this look of terror.
   'Oh no,' she says, 'how can you do that to Mommy?'
   She pretends to bawl, but the baby laughs and gurgles like a psycho, and pulls even harder. I'm witnessing a fresh knife being laid into a brand-new soul. A training dagger. A maternity blade.
   Here's his mom quietly opening up the control incision, completely innocent in her dumbness to the world.
   'Oh no, you've killed Mommy, Mommy's goner She plays dead.
   The little guy giggles for a minute, but only that long. Then he senses something's wrong. She ain't waking up. He killed her, she abandoned him, just like that, over a pull of hair. He pokes her with his finger, then he gets ready to bawl. And there you have it: he takes the handle in his own tiny hands and pulls in his first blade, right up to the hilt. Just to bring her back. And sure enough, with the splash of his first tear, she wakes right up.
   'Ha, ha, I'm still here! Ha, ha, it's Mommy!'
   Ha, ha, that's the Scheme of Things.
   'Drrrrrrr,' the motorcoach fangs into a violet dusk, a bitter projectile full of knives and Vernon. I know I'm just being sour about shit. Tell me I'm just being sour about shit, on account of everything. I know it. But I just get this feeling in my head, like the Voice of Ages that says, 'This is no way for a young man to spend his learning years.'
   Taylor will have finished shopping by now. She's probably already in this fucker's Stingray, with her skirt up around her waist. As I picture it, her grown-up panties become skimpy just to finish me off. Now they're reckless bikini numbers, tight and fast, with a tiny bow on the waist elastic. They slash and slice me. A wet patch the size of a dime glistens on her mound, and if you take a silky buttock in each hand, lift her off the seat, and snuff your face up close, you only whiff the bittiest thumbtack of tamarindo jerky, just a pin-prick. That's how squeaky clean she is, even on a hot lathery day like today. Squeaky clean, like a doll. Oh Taylor, oh fucken Tay.
   The unexpected thing when the bus rolls into McAllen is the stillness. The driver switches off the engine, the door goes 'Pschsssss,' and the world just parks. It's nearly eleven o'clock and there's a new silence, loud with the creasing of clothes, as I rise out of the seat. It's like waking from a fever, specially after all these venomous thoughts. I follow other unfolded travelers to the front of the bus, where a smoky breath meets me at the door. Maybe a tang of freedom. The border is less than ten miles away.
   I savor the glassy crunch of my New Jacks on the concrete, and with it grows a feeling that at least I'm still alive, still have my arms and legs, and the dreams that fucken kill me. And twenty-one dollars and thirty cents. The mostly empty bus terminal shines a promise of comfort, so I shuffle over to look for a coffee, or maybe a sandwich, anything to stop my bowel cells from applying for other jobs in the body. A Mexican boy sweeps the floor by the doors, and two ole ladies doze on chairs next to some boxes tied with rope. Upholstery weeps flea-powder and farts. Then my eye catches a TV at the back. It's the news. My brain says, 'Don't fucken go there.' I fucken go there.
   'New shock for the Central Texas community of Martirio,' says the screen. Red and blue lights flash off the slick of a recent shower. Vaine Gurie stumbles up a driveway near the edge of town. She wears a tracksuit, and shields her face from camera lights. Another big woman helps her through a screen-door, then turns to the cameras.
   'Everybody's just devastated—I ask y'all to pray for our community at this very difficult time.'
   Cut to daylight. Crime tape flaps wearily across the Johnson road, around where my journey began last night. Lally enters the frame, walking towards the camera. His arm is in a sling. 'I was lucky to escape the scene. With a broken collarbone, and serious cuts and bruises, I can only be thankful I was here to witness a crime that dispels all doubt as to the cause of recent events in Martirio.' The stringy man from the morgue hovers over a corpse wrapped in plastic. Troopers haul it behind Lally to a waiting van. 'Barry Enoch Gurie was not so lucky. His body fell less than a hundred yards from the practice range of Martirio's elite new SWAT team—a team he was to have joined only hours after he was brutally gunned down with his own weapon.'
   A picture appears of Barry as a cadet, shiny-eyed, hoping blindly into the future behind the camera lens. Lally returns with a deeper scowl. 'I was an unfortunate witness to the shots, shots that cut short the life of a man who overcame childhood autism to become a glowing star in law management, an officer described by colleagues and townsfolk alike as a true human being. As federal forces descend upon the stricken district, attention now turns to the whereabouts of confirmed killer Vernon Gregory Little …'
   My school picture appears, followed by footage of me leaving the courthouse with Pam. Then a stranger in thick glasses comes on, wearing overalls and rubber gloves. 'The forensic environment is near perfect,' he says. 'We've already identified the tread of a sports shoe—an unusual kind of shoe for these parts—and there's evidence of tracks being covered up around the body's resting-place.'
   Lally returns. 'The task of securing the state's borders and highways will continue long into the night—authorities warn the suspect may be armed, and should not be approached …'
   I slap a stone eye around the terminal. The janitor sweeps halfheartedly in front of the restrooms. Behind a counter, a ticket clerk taps listlessly at his keyboard. I take a measured walk between them to the doors, then aim for the dark of the road and run, fly back to the highway.
   I cross the highway at the darkest point, and pound along its shadow side, invisible, just two clear veins throbbing slime and lightning. Up ahead a road sign points to Mexico. Traffic trickles past it. I don't even know how far I have to go, I just run till I'm dead, then limp till I can run again. It's after midnight when the sparks die under my feet. I slow to a shuffle, and strangle a hiss in my throat. Waves loom at my back, crested waves which instead of foam spill flies, flies I have to kill, thoughts of defeat in a grubby swarm. Jesus comes with them, waving, but he's engulfed, drowning, gulping flies that join with the night to claim all his colors, return him to black. I stop, the way a rock stops that never moved. My head hangs buzzing in the dark, and when I raise it up, after a century's pause, I see a glow up ahead. I stumble forward, and see the glow become a glare, a kind of high-beam extravaganza in the middle of nowhere.
   'International Bridge—Puente Internacional,' says a sign. 'Mexico.'
   From here the border looks like Steven Spielberg built it, a blast of arctic light framed in darkness. I pull on my jacket, though it ain't cold at all, and attempt to slick back my hair. I stride the last few hundred yards of home.
   Lines of trucks stretch into the dark on the other side of the bridge, cars heavy with people pass through the middle. There's plenty of traffic on foot, even now, and no sign of a roadblock, except for the regular border checkpoints. I step onto the bridge knowing I step into my dream, pinning its fucken hem with my foot, for me to climb aboard. The redemption, the souvenirs, the lazy panties in fragrant sunshine.
   You can already tell one thing: the clean concrete highway ends at the borderline, it's a different country after that. Tall, small people flow around me like tumbling store-displays, chubby types in denim carve between them, with all the confidence of home. Mexicans. The faces seem cautious, like you might interrupt a promise made to them. The hem of their dream hangs over this bridge too, that's why. You can taste it. I pass by an ole man wearing Ray-Bans, a Bay watch cap, a Wowboys jacket, fluorescent green Nikes, and carrying a Nintendo box tied with South Park bedsheets. Makes me stand out like a fucken shaved wiener, even aside from being six inches taller than everybody.
   Checkpoint buildings sprawl on the Mexican side, officials in uniform stop cars and search them. I stand up my jacket collar, and try to lose myself in the flow of people. I nearly make it too, until I hear this voice.
   'Joven,' calls a Mexican officer. I start to scuttle. 'Joven—Mister!' I look around. He holds up the flat of his hand.

Sixteen

   The border officer takes his time strutting over from the checkpoint. His skin is darker than a lot of folks down here, and strings of gray-black hair are greased onto his mostly bald head, like with axle grease or something. Kind of a gross little dude, actually.
   'Passport please,' he says. He looks pretty serious about things, and on top of everything he now has these gold teeth. Black eyes scald me.
   'Uh—passport?'
   'Yes, passport please.'
   'Uh—I'm American.'
   'Driver license?'
   'Well—no, I'm an American, visiting your beautiful country and all …'
   He stares at me. He's going to default to some nasty official type of shit, I can smell it coming.
   'Follow me,' he says, and marches me back to the main building.
   Inside smells of shoe polish. It's a kind of Jurassic Park for office supplies, with all these ole desks, and Chinese-restaurant kind of chairs, lit by lonely-looking supermarket lighting. A fan clicks in one corner. The effect is something between a courthouse and one of those public-health waiting rooms you see on TV, specially for the number of ole Mexican ladies in here. Don't fucken tell anyone I said that, though. I'm not crazy about the effect of it. The official ushers me to a desk, and sits behind it, all straight-backed, like he's the president of South America or something, like the borderline is the crack of his fucken ass.
   'You have identification?' he asks.
   'Uh—not really.'
   He creaks back into his chair, spreading his hands wide, like he's about to point out the most obvious fact in the fucken universe. 'You can't enter Mexico without identification.' He tightens his mouth across, for the Most Obvious Fact effect.
   Some lies form an orderly line at the back of my throat. I decide to go for tried and tested horseshit, which, if you're me, is the Dumb Kid routine. I cook up some family, fast. 'I have to meet my parents, see? They came down earlier, but I had to stay back and come down later, and now they're over there waiting, like, they're probably worried and all.'
   'You parents on vacation?'
   'Uh, yeah, we're going on vacation, you know.'
   'Where you parents?'
   'They're already in Mexico, waiting for me.'
   'Where?'
   Fuck. It's fatal when you get a guy like this, take note. How it works is that he'll narrow my bullshit down, make it slither to the spout end of the funnel of truth. See how the lie can start out all vague, like, 'Yeah, they're in the northern hemisphere,' or something? Well now he'll narrow it down, and narrow it down, until you end up having to give a goddam room number. Where the fuck are my parents?
   'Uh—Tijuana,' I say, nodding.
   'Ti–juana?' He shakes his head. 'This the wrong way for Tijuana—is the other side of Mexico.'
   'No, well that's right, but they came the other way, see, and I was over here, so I have to go across and meet them. You know?'
   He sits with his face pointed down, but his eyes pointed up, the way folks do when they don't buy your story. 'Where in Tijuana?'
   'Uh—at the hotel.'
   'What hotel?'
   'The, uh—heck, I have it written somewhere …' I fumble with my pack.
   'You don't enter Mexico today,' says the official. 'Better call you parents, and they come for you.'
   'Well it's kind of late to call now—I was supposed to be there already. Anyway, I thought our two countries were in a pact or something, I thought Americans could walk right over.'
   He shrugs. 'How I know you American?'
   'Hell, you just have to look at me—I mean, I'm American all right, sure I'm American.' I hold out my hands, trying to copy the Most Obvious Fucken Fact effect. He leans forward onto his desk, and levels his eyes at me.
   'Better call you parents. Tonight you stay in McAllen, tomorrow they come for you.'
   I do the only possible thing at this end of the funnel of truth. I pretend he just gave me a really smart idea. 'Hey, yeah—I'll use the phone and get my parents over, thanks, thanks a lot.'
   I limp to an ole phone on the wall, and pretend to put coins in it. Then I fuck around in my pack like a total dork-hole. I even pretend to talk on the goddam phone. Really, it's this kind of shit that brings up the whole psycho argument. After chewing the fat with my so-called parents, I sit on an empty stretch of bench, drifting into this endless purgatory while the fan squeaks like a sackful of rats. I sit until three in the morning, then three-thirty, horny for cool bedsheets. You know the one voice in your head that makes sense, like your internal nana or whatever? Mine just says, 'Grab a burger and cop some Zs, until it all makes a little more sense.'
   I'm distracted by a flash of red at the window. Then blue. A patrol car pulls up outside. Troopers' hats appear. American troopers. I twitch off the bench, and shuffle past a wrinkled ole man who dozes against a filing cabinet. He could've fucken been here since he was a boy. In desperation, I go back to the official's desk. He stands talking to another uniformed Mexican. They turn to me.
   'Sir, seсor–I really need to cross the border and get some sleep. I'm just an American on vacation …' Through the corner of my eye I see another trooper pass by the window. He nurses an assault rifle at the entrance, and says something to his partner, then a Mexican officer arrives and talks to them both. The troopers nod, and step away.
   'You parents coming?' my officer asks me.
   'Uh—they can't make it right now.'
   He shrugs and turns back to his partner.
   'Look,' I say, 'I'm just a regular guy, you can check my wallet and everything …'
   A different kind of shine comes to his eyes. He motions for my billfold. I hand it over. He pulls out my cash-card, arranging it on the desk with an official flourish, then he sits, takes the billfold to his lap, and checks out the twenty-dollar bill.
   'This all the money you travel with?'
   'Uh—that and my card.'
   He picks my card off the desktop and turns it gently in his fingers, pausing at the side that says 'VG Little'. He chews his lip. I get a sudden inkling that Mexico might have different Fate than home. What I think I see in his black eyes is a shine that admits we're ole dogs together in a lumpy game. A shine of conspiracy. Then, in a jackrabbit flash, he palms the twenty out of my wallet into his desk drawer.
   'Welcome to Mexico,' he says.
   The famous actor Brian Dennehy would stand quiet, narrow his eyes right now, with unspoken respect for the secluded dealings of men. He might rest a hand on the guy's back and say, 'Give my love to Maria.' Me, I snatch up my pack and fuck off. The troopers are thirty yards away on the American side, talking on their radios. I turn the other way and vanish into the night of my dream.
   Picture a wall of cancer clouds sliced clean across the border, cut with the Blade of God, because Mexican Fate won't tolerate any of that shit down here. Intimate sounds spike the tide of travelers, the new brothers and sisters who spin me south down the highway like a pebble, helpless but brave to the wave.
   Reynosa is the town on the Mexican side of the bridge. It's big, it's messy, and there's a whiff of clowns and zebras in the wings, like any surprise could happen, even though it's the dead of night back home. Night doesn't die in Mexico. If the world was flat, you just know the edge would look like this. Natural law is suspended here, you can tell. Border traffic starts to break up in the town, and I leave the highway to zigzag through shadowy side streets, until I come to an alley where stalls tumble with music, and food glistens under naked lightbulbs. One kid at a food stall accepts a buck in coins for some tacos, which don't even smudge my throat on the way down. The food exhausts me. I sloosh back out of the alley like a knot of melted cows, and travel for another hour before logic catches up with me. I know I have to put some distance between me and the border, but I'm fucked without cash, and dead on my feet. Jesus wisps around me in fragments, maybe happy to be home in the land of his blood, maybe vengeful for the foreigners that killed him. I beg him for peace.
   I find a dark nook by the edge of town, a bunker between houses, with a view of empty chaparral beyond, and settle against a wall to spin some thoughts. One house window has a curtain that waves in the breeze. As soon as their fucken dog quiets down, Taylor's body gets wrapped in the curtain like a Goddess, her tones flash milky through the lace bunched between her legs. Then she's in the dirt with me. Her hair is wild on the first day of our escape together; we lick and play into an anesthetic sleep, just conscious of life collapsing around us in grainy pieces.
   I wake late next morning, Thursday, and find myself in a strange place, sixteen days after the moment that ripped my life in two. I know I have to find money to carry on. I could try Taylor, but first I need to be sure she didn't squeal on me to fucken Leona Dunt. I also have to call home and straighten things out, but Mom's phone will probably be bugged, and anyway, on thirty American cents I ain't calling fucken nobody. I pick up my backpack, and lope to the highway out of town—Monterrey is one of the places it heads to. I'm glad to move on. I mean, Reynosa may have ended up having an Astrodome, or a petting zoo or something, but between you and me, I fucken doubt it.
   Dirty trucks tilt down the highway, with all kinds of extra lights and antennas, like mobile cathedrals or something. I follow them on foot for now. I just want to be alone with my waves. I shuffle, then lope, then limp all day long until my shadow starts to reach for the far coast, and blobs of cactus grow mushy with evening light. I come to a bend in the road that dips downhill, and I get a feeling it's like the borderline to my future. Up ahead is night, but behind me there's color in the sky. It brings a shiver, but a senior thought says: leave the future to Mexican Fate.
   As the sky unfurls a drape of stars, important omens arrive. A truck idles past with four million hood ornaments, lit up like JC Penney's Christmas tree, and painted with sayings everywhere. It doesn't snag my attention until it's past me, and I see the mud-flaps at the back. Painted on each one is a lazy road that snakes between a beach and a grove of palm trees. My beach. Before I can scan the palm trees for panties, the truck pulls onto the wrong side of the road, and coasts downhill toward lights burning in some shambly buildings at the roadside. I guess that's a Mexican turn signal, just moving your vehicle onto the wrong side of the road. Learning: when you see traffic splattered over the front of a Mexican truck, you know it was fucken indicating. I run after it down the hill.
   'El alacrбn, el alacrбn, el alacrdn te va picar …' Music twangs out of a bar next to a gas station. The truck parks by the bar, and I watch the driver climb down from the cab. He's smaller than me, with a bunch of growth on his face, and a hefty mustache. He takes off his hat to slide into the roadhouse, cool and straight, like he's wearing guns. Then, when he's nearly inside, he gives his balls a squeeze. A little boy jumps from the truck behind him. I shuffle into the building without touching my balls. Nobody seems to mind. Inside, the air's tinged with muddy cooking oil from an alien kitchen. The driver stands at a rough wooden bar, and looks around at some tin tables where a couple of other dudes sit hunched over their beers. The bartender is Mexican-looking, except that he's white with red hair—go fucken figure.
   The kid scampers to a table near a wall-mounted TV. Everybody else checks me out as I move to the bar with an idea in my head. A cold beer turns up for the truck driver. I pull a music disc out of my pack, point to it, then to the beer. The bartender frowns, looks the disc over, then thumps a cold bottle down in front of me. He hands the disc to the driver; they both nod. I know I should eat before I drink, but how do you say 'Milk and fucken cookies' in Mexican? After a minute, the men motion for my pack, and gently rummage through the discs. Their eyes also make the inevitable pilgrimage to the New Jacks on my feet. Finally, whenever a beer turns up for the truck driver, the bartender automatically looks at me. I nod, and a new beer shows up. My credit's established. I introduce myself. The truck driver flashes some gold through his lips, and raises his bottle.
   'Sa-lud! he says.
   Don't fucken ask me when the first tequila arrived. Suddenly, later in life, glass-clear skies swim through the open side of the bar, with stars like droplets on a spider's web, and I find myself smoking sweet, oval-shaped cigarettes called Delicados, apparently from my own pack. I'm loaded off my ass. These guys' mustaches are up where their hair should be, and huge fucken caves are howling underneath, full of gold and tonsils, just look at them, singing their hearts out. Other folk join in, one of them even kneels. The whole night is snatches of humdinger, me and the boys, yelling, laughing, playing bullfights, pretending to be iguanas—I swear you'd load your drawers if you saw this one guy, Antonio, being a fucken iguana. Dudes hug and bawl around me, they become my fathers, my brothers, my sons, in a surge of careless passion that makes back home seem like a fucken Jacuzzi that somebody forgot to switch on.
   It must be the same oxygen in the air, the same gravitational suck as back home, but here it's all heated up and spun around until nothing, good or bad, matters more than anything else. I mean, home is fucken crawling with Mexicans, but you don't get any of this vibe where I come from. Take Lally; what difference is there in his genes that he ended up so fucken twisted? His ole man probably did iguana impersonations, in his day. Nah, Lally caught the back-home bug. The wanting bug.
   Thoughts travel with me to the urinal, which I find is piled high with spent green limes, like they use in their drinks down here. I don't say it deodorizes a hundred percent, like you'd probably need them on the floor, and up the walls, but there's definitely a lemon-fresh effect, to boost up your thoughts. As I spray the limes, I realize there's a kind of immune system back home, to knock off your edges, wash out the feral genes, package you up with your knife. Like, forgive me if it's a crime to even say it, but remember my attorney, ole Abdini? They don't seem to have washed many of his genes out. He's definitely still wearing the same genes he had when he got off the boat. Know why? Because they're make-a-fast-buck genes. Our favorite kind.
   Down here, in another space and time, I spend a night among partners with correctly calibrated Mexican genes.
   An aneurysm wakes me Friday morning. I'm curled up on the floor behind a table. A brick in my head smashes into the back of my eyes when I look around. I give up, and try to focus instead on a rough, lumpy-looking wooden cross on the wall above my head. My Nikes hang from it.
   'Mira que te esta esperando Ledesma,' says the truck driver from the bar.
   'Cual Ledesma cabrуn,' says the bartender.
   'Que le des mamones al nabo, buey.'
   The driver drops a big ole load. You hear him spit on the floor. I sit up, and spy the boys at the bar straining to focus on the TV. I turn to the screen just as Lally's image is replaced by my school photo. Machine-gun bursts of Spanish rattle over the top. The boys don't seem concerned.
   'їQue le ves al güero?' says the barman.
   'Si el gьero eres tu, pendejo.'
   'Ni madres.'
   'Me cae—tas mas guero que la chingada, tu.'
   I know 'chinga' is the fuck word, I learned that at school. There must be a few ways to spin it, but 'chinga' is definitely the moth-ership of local cussing. Don't even ask me the rest of it. The bartender picks up three shot glasses, wiping each one with the tail of his shirt, and lines them up on the bar. I watch my picture shrink into a corner of the TV screen, while a map of Texas assembles underneath. Photos of strangers scatter across it. Glowing red dots appear, like throbbing pain sites on an aspirin commercial. Places I must've been sighted. Lubbock, Tyler, Austin, San Antonio.
   No dot appears at Houston, though. God, I love that girl.
   Suddenly, the driver's kid runs out of a back room, and switches channel to some cartoons. I tremble off the floor and make my way to the bar, island-hopping between tables for support. Then I notice something familiar about the bartender. He wears my fucken shirt. And my jeans. I turn to see if it's true about my Nikes, my soul, now hanging from another man's cross. It's fucken true. I stare at the bartender, and he points to my trouser pocket. I look down at myself, past a T-shirt with 'Guchi' printed on it, to some orange pants dangling loose above sandals with ole tires for soles. My body is a fucken shrine. I check the pants pockets. Two hundred pesos in local bills are stuffed inside. Vernon Gates Little, boy. Mexican Fate.
   The boys serve up a shot they say will cure me. It stings, and as I drink it, a sunbeam bursts into the room, a blinding shaft that frames the crucifix on the wall, and lights up memories of last night. Pelayo, the truck driver, is driving me south, to his home state of Guerrero. To the mud-flaps.
   He lifts his kid into the truck as I stumble to the gas station to buy a phonecard. I check the mud-flaps as I pass. Heaven, boy. Between them are painted the words, 'ME VES Y SUFRES.' My vesty surfers, or something. Wait till I tell Taylor.
   She answers after five rings.
   Tayla.'
   'Tay, hi, it's Vern.'
   'What, who? Wait up …' Bumping noises come down the line, a man's voice rumbles, then quiet, like she moved into a closet or something. 'Yeah—who?'
   'Vern.'
   Dead fucken quiet for around a decade, then she comes back, real close to the receiver. 'Oh my God.'
   'Tay, listen …'
   'Like, I can't believe I'm talking to a serial killer.'
   'Shit, I ain't no killer …'
   'Yeah, right–they have bodies mounted up all the way to Victoria!'
   'Get outta town,' I say. 'That can't be right.'
   'But, like, you killed some people, right? Something happened—right?'
   'Tay, please listen …'
   'Oh, babe. Poor tortured babe. Where are you?'
   'Mexico.'
   'God, have you seen back home? It's like Miami Beach, the whole town's wired for cameras, with live web access, twenty-four seven. The company that set it up floated shares and bought Bar-B-Chew Barn–my dad submitted a proposal for a sushi bar, right where the unisex used to be! If it comes off, I'm moving back to manage it—can you believe it?'
   I watch credits drip off my card like ketchup off a local fly. 'Tay I'm at a public phone …'
   Pulsating music and crowd noises break onto the line. You hear the man's voice, then Taylor yells back: 'It's my friend from outta town—okay?!' The door slams. She takes a deep breath, like a backwards sigh. 'Sorry, I'm, like, real vulnerable right now.'
   'Hell, I don't want to …'
   'You need cash, right? I have, like, six hundred put away for my vacation.'
   'It'd save my fucken life.'
   She sniffles, then her voice drops a tone. 'You talkin dirty to me, killer?' I swell in my new polyester pants. 'But, hey—where to wire it? Did you stop somewhere? And what if they, like—you know …'
   'Shit, I guess that's right.'
   'Vern, call me from wherever, like a city, or a big hotel—I'll check with Western Union.'
   Her Fate song rings in my ears as I put down the phone. Six hundred bucks will probably buy a fucken beach-house down here. I'm boosted up. I get smart, and decide to call Pam. The line clicks. I swat flies while she hoists a ton of arm-fat to her head.
   'He-llo?'
   'Pam, it's Vern …'
   'Oh my God—Vernie? We're devastated–where are you?'
   I detect Mom in the background. I should've known it, they're probably on their nine-millionth burrito by now. Her sniffle wavers up to the phone, but Pam fends her off. 'Are you eating properly? Don't tell me you're not eating, don't tell me that, oh Lord …'
   Mom snatches the receiver. 'Vernon, it's Mommy.' She immediately breaks into a runaway bawl. My eyes soak up with tears, which she feeds off, working up an even raunchier bawl. It's hard, this fucken moment in time.
   'Ma—I'm just real sorry.'
   'Well Vernon, the detectives say things'll be easier if you just come back.'
   'I don't think I can do that.'
   'But all this death Vernon, where are you? We know you were sighted near Marshall this morning …'
   'Ma, I didn't kill nobody, I ain't running for that. I just have to make good, see? I'll maybe go to Canada, or Surinam or somewhere.' Bad fucken move. Mothers automatically detect the missing word in any multiple choice situation.
   'Oh Vernon—Mexico? Oh my God, baby, Mexico?
   'I said Canada or Surinam, Ma.'
   'Well but the longer you stay away, the more trouble will be waiting for you, don't you see that? Vernon? Mr Abdini says you have a defense, he's been poking around, he found some clues and all, and when Lalito moves back we can be a real family again, just like before.'
   'You ain't still waiting on Lally …'
   'Well but that old woman at the home never called back, so why not? Vernon? It's love, a woman knows these things.'
   'Mom—when did you last speak to Lally?'
   'Well he's very busy, you know that.'
   I snort in an ironic kind of way. I guess it's ironic, when somebody passes off total bullshit as reality. Points drip off my phonecard as if they're points in my soul; I feel like I'll expire when they run out. I make a note to try and keep some points, in case they end up being cross-linked to my soul. Another learning about deep shit: you get real fucken superstitious.
   'Where are you? Just tell me that—Vernon?'
   'Ask him when he last ate, Doris.'
   'Mom, these credits are gonna run out—what's important is that I'm fine, and I'll call when I get settled.'
   'Oh Vernon.' She starts bawling again.
   I badly want to leave her some cream pie, tell her about my beach-house, and her visit and all. But I just fucken can't. I just kill the call.

Seventeen

   'Ay, ay, ayeeeeeee, Lw-pita! Ay, ay ayeeeeeee …'
   Tunes scratch out of the radio as we roll south in the truck, Pelayo, the kid, Jesus the Dead Mexican, and me. 'A veritable hotch-potch,' as bastard Mr Nuckles would call us. You'll drop a load when you hear the local hoe-down music; big ole polkas with guitar, bass, and accordion, and all these guys going 'Ay, ay, ay,' and shit. Even better is the station-breaks; announcers holler echoes like they're calling a fucken boxing match. I sit as high as a God on the passenger side of the truck, squinting through the slit of glass between an overgrown dashboard shrine of the Virgin, and a fringed curtain with baby soccer balls hanging off it. Pelayo's kid is in a game with me. His name is Lucas. Every time I look at him, he looks away real fast. So I keep him in the corner of my eye, train him to expect my eyes to move slow, until he's lulled into that pattern; then I suddenly cut back and catch him staring. Ha! He blushes like crazy, and buries his face into his shoulder. For some reason I get waves from this little game, I really do, a flock of butterflies in my heart and all. Don't get me wrong, I'm still an asshole. I haven't gone The Other Way, or anything. But, just honestly, it's like one of those Simple Things in Life, that folk always talk about, but you never know what they fucken mean. Imagine a regular ten-year-old doing this, back home. I don't fucken think so. He would've already primed some cusses, just in case you fucken looked at him.
   We heave deep into the guts of Mexico, past Matehuala and San Luis Potosi, where greener scenery blends with my hangover to weave frosted dreams, of home, and of Taylor. I try to push away the silken threads, the octopus flesh writhing, flashing purple and red, puffing tang-spray and honey, so I can air the musty, upholstered ole thoughts, lavender-smelling thoughts I get every day about the dead. Thoughts too big to even shiver at, thoughts just calmly there, to stay forever, like flounces on the satin in your casket. The thoughts combine with the climb into Mexico City to bring soundbites of everyone I know, crying behind their fly-screens, 'Devastated, devastated, devastated, the nightly news, the ni-ghtly newwws, the Nigh- tly Nooze …' until in my mind, I'm chased through skies of churning bile by a black and putrid vortex that swirls across whole states, whole fucken countries, just to gash me, hook out my guts, pulsating, and stomp them with boots and spurs, like a nest of baby rattlers, 'Get that end! Stomp! Cut that fuckin bastard, he's still movin!'
   Vernon Godzilla Little.
   By midnight on this foreign Friday in June, a permanent shiver hangs around me. I leave my flesh and bones at the northern edge of Mexico City, and just the noodles of my nervous system drive with me south. We only nearly get killed a dozen times. When we finally pop out of the city, we're in a dangerous condition to be driving. Just like everybody else around. Alpine forests we drive through, dodging humongous motorcoaches lit up like space shuttles, down to tropical places that give way to areas of rock and cactus, and empty noise on the radio. Everything adds up to make me edgy. I expect to see Dr Goosens's secretary out here, or the meatworks' marching band or something. I try to keep the dream weaving in my head, a thread of Taylor, a thread of beach, a thread of 'Sailing'. But the weaving gets harder, the threads get matted and replaced by veins. 'Devastated, devastated, devastated …'
   We finally stop in a town where they must have a fly farm. I fight with some flies over a sweaty hot-dog, until one gets stuck in the mustard. Mexican flies are slow. I look around. The place is just like the TV-movie where these casino gamblers are in death's lobby, waiting to see if the elevator's going up or down. You expect nightclub pianists' bones in a display case somewhere, I swear. There's Muzak, needless to say. Muzak, and evidence of rats. Then, when I step into the hot, dishwashy dawn, to take a leak before retiring to the truck, a fucken scorpion scuttles towards me. The omens just ain't clear anymore.
   Acapulco spreads out in a pattern just like Martirio: saggy, colored underwear districts on the outskirts, sharpening through Y-front and sensible-shoe zones to the center, where silk speed shines tight. The edges show up as we climb the last hill before the coast. Pelayo has to leave his load in Acapulco before heading to his village, farther north. Smells tag our progress into town. We should soon reach the Medicated Pet Soap district, then travel through the Old Spice, and Herbal Essence zones, if it's anything like home. Right now we pass a zone where you just jam a finger up your ass and sniff it.
   The road winds out of the hills until blue ocean unfolds in the distance. Acapulco is this huge round bay, with hotels and hotels and hotels. I have to find the biggest one, and call Taylor. I realize the risk of being recognized will grow, because I've heard about this place before, which means tourists will be here from home. Acapulco I've heard of, and Coon-Can, or wherever fucken Leona went one time. I start to feel the shiver breathing down on me. I scan the distance for the correct-looking hotel to call from, but deep in my soul I'm hoping I don't see it. That's how your mind operates, to avoid the shiver, fucken look at it. My face even acts like I'm scanning the bay, my eyes squint, and my lips push out with the concentration of looking for the correct hotel. I even play games with myself, like: if I see a blue sign on the street, I'll get Pelayo to stop. But I know if I see one, my brain will find some excuse why I can't stop. Then the game'll go: if I see a sign with the color green on it, I'll double-definitely stop. I just take the fucken cake, boy, fuck.
   Pelayo solves it by pulling over at a little roadside bar, behind the main boulevard. We haven't eaten since our death-dog, and now Saturday is well underway. Pelayo stops on the sidewalk by the bar, and just looks at me. He senses I have to melt back into my dry-cleaned world awhile. He makes me understand that if I want a ride to his town, I should meet him here in two hours, after he's unloaded the truck. An awkward membrane grows between us as he says it. As if he knows my natural habitat is in one of these towers full of wealthy people. He knows he'd be like a fucken gardener in one of these places, if so much. His eyes grow shy from the truth of things, and for the moments past of our unusual friendship. He slaps my back, and turns to the bar with his invisible guns. Lucas turns too, with confused eyes. So much for Vernon Gonzalez Little.
   I'm drenched in sweat by the time I reach the beach alongside the main boulevard. It's fancy. It doesn't cost anything to walk on the sand, so I take off my shirt, and my flappy ole Firestone sandals, and start to look American again. Two security guards watch me head for this massive hotel. They wave when I look at them, just another American dweebo, they must say. I spit back my hair and eyebrows, and strut into the hotel like I'm wearing guns, just like Pelayo learned me. The lobby is about the size of fucken Dallas-Fort Worth airport, marble floored, with beautiful lobster-people gliding around. Awesome place. A bellhop holds the elevator doors open for me, and I ain't even near them.
   'Going up, sir?' he asks.
   I try not to drop a load, but it's fucken hard. I see myself at that place last night, with the flies, and the nightclub pianist's rotting corpse, and today it's like I'm waiting for hula-girls to suck my boy, I swear. Leona Dunt could only dream of coming to this fucken place. An American family sweeps past me into the elevator, dressed like Tommy Hilfiger on a golfing convention; it's a mama with a tense ole man, and the traditional two kids—a good one and a bad one. Type of folk who get lighthearted over dinner-music, and start talking about their feelings, to show how liberated they are. Your fucken cutlery drawer on parade.
   'Now, Bobby, remember what we said—you know the deal,' says the mom.
   'Yeah, Bobby,' says the dad in back, like a fucken sock puppet. The girl hoists her eyebrows.
   'But I don't feel so great,' says Bobby.
   'We planned the bay cruise days ago, and it's already paid for,' says the mom.
   'Days ago,' says Dad.
   The kid just sulks. The ole lady tightens her lips. 'Forget it, Trey, you know what he's like. Let's just hope it doesn't turn out like the other time, after we spent all that money on scuba lessons …'
   World-class knifing, I have to say. And just one smug face left, on the girl.
   I saunter toward smells of sausage and coffee, looking for a public phone. Outside, I see a huge patio laid out with a buffet. I stupidly pick up a menu. The cheapest thing on it costs more than a fucken helicopter joyride. Then a waiter starts to hover, so I keep walking towards some bathrooms that are in a service area by the pool. I pass a real-life psycho on the way, too; an up-and-coming one. This fat little dork is standing next to another kid in the pool, being a real pal, while his little sister dive-bombs the water around them. Then, out of earshot of his buddy, the fat kid snarls at his sister: 'I told you to jump on him, not near him …' A future senator, guaranteed.
   I pass some lounge chairs facing the bay, with boats and parachutes gliding past them, and the squeak of bitty children in the surf nearby. I start fantasizing that some kid starts drowning right in front of me, and I jump in and save him. In my mind, I rehearse what I'd tell the reporters, and I even see the newspaper headlines spinning up. 'Juvenile Hero Pardoned,' and shit. After a minute, it's the fucken president's kid I'm saving. The president weeps with gratitude, and I just shuffle away. See me? All this drags through my head like a fucken rusty chain.
   To snap myself out of it, I go find a phone on the street outside the hotel. I punch in Taylor's number.
   'Glassbadanbow?' says a kid. He's handing out flyers by the road.
   'Say what?'
   'Jew like croose in Glass badan boat?'
   'Tayla,' the phone answers. I wave the kid away.
   'Mexico calling,' I say.
   'Hi, killer.'
   Something's wrong, I can tell. I get a pang to curl her up around me, her and her safe, deodorized world, where her biggest problem in life is getting bored, or smelling Glade around the house. Probably her biggest personal secret is eating boogers. She's been bawling just now, you can tell.
   'Everything okay?' I ask.
   Taylor gives a sniffly laugh. 'I'm just like, what the fuck, you know? This damn guy I was dating …'
   The doctor?'
   'The so-called doctor, yeah. I just want to run away, God...'
   'Know how you feel.'
   'Anyway, where are you?' she asks, blowing her nose.
   'Acapulco.'
   'Dirty dog. Lemme see the map—are you, like, by the beach?'
   'Yeah, on the main boulevard.'
   'That must be the Costera Miguel Aleman—there's a Western Union agent at a place called Comercial Mexicana.'
   'I'll make it up to you, Tay.'
   'But listen—it's Sunday tomorrow, and I can't get the cash till Monday. The agent's open till seven Monday night, so if you go at six …'
   'No sweat,' I lie, watching the last credits drip off the screen.
   'And babe,' she says. Beep. The line goes dead.


* * *

   The fucken Love Boat is here. I swear to God, from those ole shows my mom watches, with the horny cruise director, and Captain Stupid and all. It has the Wella Balsam kind of logo on the funnel. Star-studded Acapulco, boy.
   I pull my head into the cab as the bay falls away behind us. Pelayo's truck bangs over some hills, then heads north along this TV-movie coastline, with coconut trees, whole fields of them. The beach ain't as white as Against All Odds, and the water ain't as blue, but hey. A lagoon runs alongside us for part of the drive, right out of Tarzan or something. We even pass through a military roadblock, with a fucken machine-gun nest, no bullshit. My intestines pump, but they end up just being kids, these soldiers, like cartoon ants, in oversized helmets.
   After a few hours, we leave the road and turn down a track toward the sea. The track ends with some logs sunk into the beach, and jungle backed up behind. It's a minuscule town, of slummy wooden houses, with pigs, chickens, and grizzly-looking dogs around. Not even slummy, more like out of National Geographic. Fucken paradise. Pelayo parks behind a store that's held together with Fanta signs, and a porch of dry palm leaves. Two men lay in hammocks there, sucking beer. A flock of kids gather as we pile out of the truck. You can tell Pelayo's the dude around here. He's probably like the Mr Lechuga of town, except human. Now I'm the alien in his world. He takes trouble to make me feel at home, snapping at the kids to get away, and calling up a beer from the store. I just stand quiet, nose up to the breeze, listening to a dictionary full of new bugs. Ungawa wakashinda, I swear. Pelayo opens the beers with his teeth, and proudly walks me to a covered patio on the beach. Two older men sit at a table, and an ole lady leans behind a makeshift bar.
   A naked kid suddenly brushes past her, trying to spear a wounded crab on the sandy concrete. He finally stabs it clean through the back, 'Yesssss!' he says, stopping to pull back an imaginary lever with his fist. Pelayo kicks the crab out of my way, and sweeps me to a table by the beach.
   A crowd of bottles gathers on the table. Toward evening, a young dude turns up who speaks some English; a lean, smart-looking guy called Victor, with braces on his teeth—something you don't see much down here. He tells me how important it is for him to get ahead in life, so he can bring wealth into the village and all. Makes me feel like the lowest fucken snake. He translates the words painted between the mud-flaps on the truck. 'You see me, and suffer,' they mean. 'Me ves, y sufres.'
   When I first show signs of being loaded, the boys offer me oysters as big as burritos, right out of the sea. Fucken forget it. I ate one when I was a kid, and it felt like something I sucked down the back of my nose. They even offer me the oysters at a time when I have a booger-plug ready to suck down my throat. Without thinking, I point at my nose while I suck it down, then pull a face, and point at the oyster. They drop Acapulco-sized loads over that. They can't look me in the face for an hour after, for the fucken loads they drop. Typical of me to introduce slime to paradise.
   After a tequila, as lions and tigers stir under this silicon-clear evening, I try to explain the beach-house dream, the mud-flaps, and Fate. I'm a little loaded. Fucken loaded, actually. But as soon as I start to talk about it, Victor and Pelayo take my arm and lead me up the beach, through the palms, where bats now orbit, to a place ten minutes away, where the jungle almost pushes you into the sea. Kids follow us, shining in and out of the surf. Then Victor stops. He points through the fading light, and I squint to follow his finger across the sand. There, all locked up, almost hidden in the jungle, sits an ole white beach-house. My place.
   The boys say it's okay to camp here until Monday. Maybe longer. Maybe for fucken ever. After they totter home up the beach, I sit on the balcony of the house, let the evening filter off the sea and through my soul. Suddenly all the different waves inside me alloy into one tune, with feathers of my original dream dancing the edges of this new symphony; my ole lady down here, checking out the neat sanitation, reflecting on how good things got. I may have to change my name, or become Mexican or something. But it's still me, without any trace of slime around. I look out over the garden of this place, onto the beach, and see Taylor there running around in her panties, brown like a native.
   I spend all Sunday in this Valhalla, lazing with my dreams. When I wake Monday morning, a hot, wet wind blows across me, and my boy is like fucken reinforced cement, like he's chipped off Mount Rushmore. My hand's nowhere near him, he's just being guest of honor at his own little parade. I look around to see the sky clouded over, and shabby gray pelicans swoop and dive into the surf. The heads of coconut trees swish and move around at the speed I wish my life would go, cool and smooth. For the first time in a while, there's that little edge of gladness to be waking up this morning. Today's my birthday.
   Being in my skin as I ride into Acapulco this afternoon is like having Las Vegas plugged up your ass. I'm sixteen, and Las Vegas is plugged up my fucken ass. I'm on my feet before the bus even gets into town, buzzing with potentialities; tropical fish and birds, banana leaves, monkeys, and sex. The beach-house. Turns out it belongs to an ole fruit farmer behind the village, who doesn't use it at all. Victor thinks I could probably stay there for free, if I tended it.
   The boulevard in Acapulco is sticky this evening, colored lights blare as big as ideas along its length. Victor loaned me a straw hat, to soften my coconut-tree hair, and oyster-shell ears. I catch my reflection in the window by Comercial Mexicana; Huckleberry Finn, boy. I put on my guns before entering the store, to compensate for the hat, I guess, then just strut around in a circle, like a dog deciding where to lay down. I eventually spot the Western Union counter, with folk waiting around it, including shiny red and white folk from home. An attendant sees me right away.
   'Uh—I'm expecting a wire from Houston, Texas.'
   'Name?' asks the clerk.
   My face starts to calculate Pi. 'Uh—I ain't sure who she sent it to …'
   'You have the password?' asks the guy. Fuck. I feel more people line up behind me.
   'I better call and get it,' I say, shuffling away from the counter.
   Folk look at me strangely, so I keep on shuffling, right out of the store; out of the freezer, back into the fucken oven. I have to get hold of Taylor. Maybe she didn't send it, once she knew about the password. I have no points left on my phonecard. I can't even call Pelayo. Vegas sputters and dies in my ass.
   I walk up the boulevard until I find a phone. I don't know if it's like TV, where you can call anybody collect, from anywhere. I decide to call her collect. Sweat flows between my mouth and the operator when I talk. She speaks English at least. Then sweat runs between my ear and the operator when she tells me you can't call this mobile number collect. When I hang up the phone, sweat dammed on top of my ear crashes onto my fucken shoulder, then runs crying onto the road. Probably back into the fucken sea after that.
   It pisses me the hell off, actually, that all the well-raised liars and cheats will go to their regular beds tonight, with no greater worry than what they can screw out of their folks tomorrow. Me, I'm stuck in Surinam with a bunch of criminal charges forming an orderly line back home. Anger fuels me back to the store, up to the agent's desk. Nobody else is around right now. The clerk looks up.
   'I can't find the password,' I tell him.
   'What's your name?'
   'Vernon Little.' I wait for his eyebrows to blow off his fucken head. They don't. He just studies me for a moment.
   'How much you expecting?'
   'Six hundred dollars.'
   The guy taps at his keyboard, checks his screen. Then shakes his head. 'Sorry, nothing here.' I pause for a moment, to calculate the depth of my fuckedness. Then the agent's eyes rivet to something over my shoulder.
   I'm suddenly grabbed around the waist. 'Freeze!' says a voice.

Eighteen

   My ass jumps into my throat. I break the grip around my waist and spin toward the entrance, legs coiled like springs. Shoppers stop and stare.
   'Happy Birthday!' It's fucken Taylor.
   I spin a full circle, looking for the heavies who must be here to get me. But it's only Taylor. The clerk at the wire agent's counter smiles as she wraps an arm around my waist, and leads me shaking from the store.
   'You didn't wait for the wire details, like the password, dummy,' she says.
   'Uh-huh, so you hopped a fucken plane.'
   'Language, killer!'
   'Sorry.'
   'Well I couldn't leave you stranded. Anyway, I'm bummed back home, and this is my vacation money—I hope you don't mind sharing. Here's three hundred, and we'll work the math out later …'
   'I'll try to cope. How'd you know it's my birthday?'
   'Hell-o? The whole world knows it's your birthday.'
   The reality of what's happening starts to tingle in my brain. Taylor's here. I found a beach-house, and Taylor's here, with money. One thing to be proud of: I don't respond to the flood of joy-hormones, the one that makes you want to sniff flowers, or say I love you. I contain myself like a man.
   'Wait'll you see where we're staying,' says Taylor, dragging me along the street. 'If they'll let you in—you look like an Indian.'
   'You got a hotel?'
   'Twin room, so you better behave—serial killer you.'
   I become heavier for her to pull. 'Wait up—I found somewhere to stay you won't believe—on a beach, with jungle …'
   'Eew! With, like, spiders and bugs? Eew!'
   'You never saw Against All Odds?
   'I already paid for the room, Vern, like, God.'
   Whatever. As we walk, I remember I have to keep enough trouble around me to not give a shit how I act with her. You can only really be yourself when you have nothing left to lose, see? That's a learning I made. It may sound dumb, but it ain't easy when your dreams roll up. Take note, you can feel jerksville lurking in back. And as we know, just by thinking it, you suffer it worse. The learning: potential assholeness when a dream comes true is relative to the amount of time you spent working up the dream. A=DT2. It means I could even fucken puke.
   She's wearing white shorts, I can't tell yet if there's a visible panty-line because they're kind of crinkled. Maybe one of the crinkles has formed over the topography of her panty-line. She also has a peach-colored T-shirt with a little Scorpio logo on it, and a stiff kind of jacket that she wears over the top. Her long brown limbs are perfectly attached to her body. I kind of frown at the jacket, though. She sees me and smiles.
   'The plane was like a refrigerator.'
   It's almost dark when we reach her hotel, one of the bigger ones. She pulls me into the lobby, where all these folk start looking at us. My shoulders hunch. Everything suddenly looks alien, like some kind of store display, with me the only one moving. Except I ain't even moving, not at all. I just become silent.
   Taylor collects her key, then her voice goes into overdrive, or underdrive, more like it. 'C'mon upstairs—you'll like it—c'mon.'
   I look at her perfect nose and skin and hair. She smiles a crooked little smile, a horn smile, and takes my hand. Actually, she takes my fingers first, just the ends of them, and caresses them all the way up to my palm. I get electric fucken shocks to my boy. We climb into an elevator car and ride up to her room. Nice room she has, with a view over the whole bay. Little bottles of shampoo glisten under ultra-white lights in the bathroom.
   'Welcome home,' she says. She pulls some tequila miniatures out of the mini-bar, while I just stand here like a spare prick, then she curls up on the bed closest to the window. Somewhere in the composition of the air-conditioning is a licked-skin smell that brings a plague of fruity tangs to mind, damp edges of elastic crusted by sand and sea; salt lips pouting musk and vinegar. I scatter them, and move to the bed. Her sunny-smelling hair makes it seem like a regular day on vacation; fluffy, normal and free—I guess like your sixteenth birthday should feel. But my ole lady will be home, thinking it's my birthday, and trying to shut things out of her mind. She probably bought my cake while I was still there, just to start looking forward to it. I picture a lonely cake on the table, with my mom sobbing over it. 'Lord, you'll make it soggy!' Pam would say. Even the truth of things, like that she'd probably be at the Barn with Pam, even that makes me sad. Taylor must pick up some of this backwash, because she throws a tequila at me.
   'Snap out of it.'
   I fumble the catch. 'Tay—you're here to see I ain't committing any murders. You're a witness—right?'
   'Whoa, back up. I don't want to even, like—you know? I'm just here for whatever.'
   'But if a court, I mean if …'
   'You ain't quitting, are ya, killer? She pats the bedclothes by her thigh. Come to Tay-Tay, you bad boy.'
   Taylor raises her bottle, and we slug our tequilas down. I lie back on the bed like I'm wearing guns. She crawls half off the bed to grab some beers, and as she does it, her ass strains into the air. Panty-line. Bikinis. I'm fucken slain. In my dreams we're always alone, stuck tight together, somewhere secluded and safe, but never anywhere fancy like furnished rooms. Always just in a gap in some bushes, or in a field, where she absorbs me like an ameba, all kiss-smell, and thighs, and lips blow-drying the sweat on my skin. Part of the dream includes a kind of yearning to be in a room, all locked up with her, but I never am. Until now.
   After four drinks, I'm laid back on one elbow feeling like it's my birthday. Drinks are wonderful that way. Taylor kicks off her leather sandals, one of them flies behind the TV. She runs a finger around the lip of her bottle, and studies me through vixen eyes.
   'Vernon, tell me all those things you did.' Her voice is like a little girl's.
   What did I say about trouble? She rolls closer until there's an inch of breath between us, alcohol haze with a far-away hint of cheese. We don't touch at all, but hang suspended, sucking chemical data like trembling dogs. Then comes a shock from the tip of her nose, wire touching wire. We melt into each other's mouths, my hand finds the round of her ass, surfs it, a finger charts an edge of panty—doesn't pick, or lift—just teases and glides, moving higher, feeling the climate change around her rudest rebellion, all for Vern.
   'Violent, nasty boy,' she says. 'Tell me you killed for Tayla.'
   Her whisper becomes a thread in the lace, fibrous and baking with desperate heat. She squirms out of her shorts, kicking them onto the floor by the mini-bar. Panties—The Final Frontier. I lower my face as the creases on her mound disappear, taut glory unfurling, pressing into my touch, forcing my hand flat to squeeze nectar through the silk, lagoons that trickle over the elastic and run down her thigh.
   'Death-bug—God, murder—uuugh, God...'
   She tries to close back her legs, wriggles hard, but she's lost, I'm on fire, committed even more now she's shy of her musky damp. I pull aside her weeping panty to face a delta writhing with meats, glistening with sweat carrying spicy coded silts from her ass; olives, cinnamon dust and chili blood. She gives up, beaten, without a secret left in the animal world. Her knees bend up and she takes in my tongue, my finger, and my face, she cries and bucks, horny ridges, ruffles, and grits suck me up, suck me home to the stinking wet truth behind panties, money, justice, and slime, burning trails through my brain like acid through butter. Pink Fucken Speed.
   'Ugh, fuck! Tell me what you did to those people, tell me you loved it.'
   I don't make a sound.
   'Tell me! Tell me you killed!'
   She starts to tighten her legs, draw away, and I whisper until she relaxes, and pulls me back to her vee. I've heard about these kinds of girls.
   'Did you, Vern, did you do all that for me—for MS …?'
   I feel a fatal oscillation on the head of my man, press him into the bedclothes, rub the stitching across his veins. 'Yeah,' I moan. 'I did it for you.' I keep whispering, but a new reality seeps into me, heavy like the beginnings of an infection. Suddenly her pout turns to rubber, her breeze to raw shrimp and metal-butter. Something ain't right. She scoots to the edge of the bed. Her cleft sneers through the silk of her panties as she bends over one last time. I know I've had the last of Taylor Figueroa. My world dissolves under my belly with a jet like stung snakes squirted out through their own eye-holes. Then quiet. Just a slow ocean moving slowly, and spit-curry after-poon drying cold on my face. Taylor pulls up her shorts, ties her sandals, flicks her hair in the mirror.
   'Okay!' she says into the breast of her jacket.
   The door opens and four men walk in. I shield my eyes from the glaring camera lights. 'Vernon Gregory Little?' asks one. Like—duh.
   I could handle everybody in the lobby staring at me, if only one of them was Taylor. She doesn't stare, or even look. She crouches next to a smiling technician, and listens to an earpiece connected to wires in her jacket.
   Then she giggles into a microphone. 'It's so exciting. You really think I can anchor the show? Like, God, Lalito …'
   I'm led away from her crouching ass, an ass barely dry with my spit and my dreams. Her careless laugh follows me from the lobby. People around the hotel entrance fall silent when I come through in hand and leg cuffs. You can actually hear indoor palms rustling in the air-conditioning, that's how quiet things get. Quiet and icy-cold, I don't have to tell you. A plane is waiting at the airport. Right away you know some money got invested in the story. Like, it'd be hard to tell some anchorman it was all just a big mistake. Anchormen across the land would drop mountainous loads if you tried to tell them that. I struggle to work up some cream pie. But I can't, can I fuck. Instead I choke on aviation perfume, and the 'Goodbye' sound of jets whining, like when Nana used to go up north. Across the way, you can see stressed passengers shuffling to immigration without a thought in their heads except the shine on their mall-brand luggage. Me, I'm tied in a metal tube with two marshals who choose conversations according to how well they contrast with the fucken shit I'm in. Talk about their car, a steak dinner, a ball game. One of them farts.
   I just sit and watch a flashbulb on the tip of the wing light up the dark outside. After a couple of hours of flashes, which is a lot, we descend through puffy tumors that hang over Houston Intercontinental airport. When the plane turns to land you get a view of eight thousand patrol cars on the ground, lights flashing off recently wet concrete, and probably sirens and game-show buzzers running as well. All for little Vernon, Vernon Little. After landing, the plane turns toward some bleachers set up around an empty section by the airport perimeter. We slow and park sideways to the stands, and I'm drenched through the window by flashlight from crowds of media. You physically feel the jackrab-bit pulse that says, 'There he is!' It's Tuesday, exactly three weeks since hell's tumble-dryer went to work on our lives. Although it's four in the morning, you just know every household in the land is tuned in. 'There he fucken is!'
   The marshals handle me down the steps of the plane, and parade me in front of the bleachers. Behind the bleachers is a fence, and behind the fence you can sense hordes of angry people? the type that show up wherever angry people are needed. I'm lifted into the back of a white truck, where some men in lab coats and helmets are waiting. They harness me into a chair, and we get escorted into town by half the world's police cars. All the world's helicopters ride overhead, beaming lights down like a Hollywood premiere, the fucken Slime Oscars, boy. One learning I can give you from here: patrol cars don't smash up everywhere. Not at all. Nor do you get any simple ideas about how to distract the cops while you make a break for it, and leave them smashing into each other, and driving off bridges and shit. What's more, as soon as you're in a patrol car, you're immediately visited by the certainty that it won't happen. They drive fucken straight, take note.
   Everybody has their fucken fun tonight, showing some future impartial jury how innocent I must be. Then I get banged back up to hell. Not back home, but down here, in Harris County, where all the big stuff happens.
   I close my eyes in the cell, and do a re-cut of my life. In my cut of the thing, I ain't even in shit at all. Instead, I'm the kid out there who hears about somebody else's trouble, maybe some other kid took his dad's assault rifle to class and blew away half his buddies, Lord knows it fucken happens. Maybe I'd be the kid just hearing about it. Hearing about some poor fuck, probably the quiet one, the wordsmith, the one with thoughts and shit, at the back of the class. Until the gun came to school. I'd be the guy just hearing about it, with the tickly kind of luxury of deciding whether to be sympathetic or devastated, or not even pay attention at all, the way people do when shit happens that doesn't involve them. That's the kind of day I re-shoot in my head. Still full of different melted things, and dogs and all, but with me the outsider, up the street getting ice-cream, ignoring my carefree years, the way we do, and just getting bored and ornery.
   I'm trying to sleep when the other cons on my row are waking up. One of them hears me sigh, and tosses some words through his door. 'Little? You a fuckin star!'
   'Yeah, right,' I say. 'Tell the prosecution.'
   'Hell, youse'll get the bestest fuckin attorneys, hear what I'm sayin?'
   'My attorney can't even speak fucken English.'
   'Nah,' says the con, 'they dissed his ass, he history. I saw on TV he said he still workin on it, but that's bullshit, he ain't even hired no more. You get big guns now, hear what I'm sayin?'
   The guy eventually quiets up, and I snatch an hour of shitty sleep. Then a guard comes to maneuver me to a phone at the end of the row. He marches me proudly past all the other cells, kind of parades in front of them, and everybody jams up to their doors to watch me pass.
   'Yo, Burn! Burnem Little, yo!'
   I get sat by the phone. The guard fits himself an earpiece, then dials home for me. The number's disconnected. I get him to dial Pam's.
   'Uh-huh?' she answers through a mouthful of food.
   Tarn, it's Vern.'
   'Vern? Oh my Lord, where are you?'
   'Houston.'
   'Hell, that's right—we saw it on TV. Are they feeding you?'
   The guard leans over and whispers, 'Egg and chorizo, half an hour.'
   'Uh—egg and chorizo, we're having.'
   'What, just that? Just chorizo and egg?'
   The guard frowns. He makes the motions of a full tray of trimmings.
   'And a whole bunch of stuff,' I say.
   The guard shoots me a thumbs-up. Mom is already tussling for the phone, you can hear her in the background. She finally wins.
   'Vernon?'
   'Hi, Ma.'
   'Well are you okay?'
   'I guess so. Are you okay?'
   'Well Lally dumped Leona, so that's one thing, not that we ever thought he wouldn't. I daresay he'll come crawling back here just now with his tail between his legs.' She gives an ironic kind of grunt.
   'Ma, gimme a break.'
   'Well you just wouldn't understand, he needs a strong woman around, with all that new responsibility—specially now he edged Vaine out of the picture …'
   'Responsi-bility?'
   'Well you must've heard, he bought the rights to your trial and everything. The company's in negotiations to buy the correctional facility at Huntsville too, and he's just stretched to the limit, without someone who really understands him, who really cares.' She listens to my stony quiet for a moment, then tries to pump some cream pie. 'So—did you have a nice birthday?'
   'Not really.'
   'Well I left the cake this year, I didn't know if you'd be in town. Anyway, if you showed up I could've grabbed one at Harris's, their opening hours are extended till ten every night now, although Marjorie isn't too comfortable with the new arrangement, not yet anyway. These things can take time, I guess.'
   I'm still deciding if it's a bad or a good thing, this syndrome of loved-ones not talking about obvious shit. In a way it's kind of embarrassing, with this really obvious big maggot in my life, oozing and stinking in front of everybody. Nobody talks about it, though. I guess it speaks for itself.
   A pretty good breakfast turns up after I finish the call, with toast, grits, and hash browns on the side of my egg and chorizo. Then my new attorney arrives, appointed by the State. They cast Brian Dennehy as my attorney, no fucken kidding, all burly and wise. Ole Ricochet Rabbit really did get fired, I guess. Another underdog replaced by overdogs. This Brian gives me some real hope, though, you know he always wins his cases. I'm damn hopeful, and I just know the jury will love him, they'll be wishing he was their dad, all crusty and benign. I have a long talk with ole Brian, and tell him the way things are stacked.
   'You're saying you're innocent?' he asks. 'You weren't even there at all?'
   'Well, I mean I was there at, like, the school, and I guess my body crossed the same ground as where Barry Gurie fell, but …'
   He frowns and holds up a hand. 'Your testimony may not inspire a jury. You with me?'
   'Uh—sure.'
   'It's an important defense,' he says from the door. 'Let's not push our luck. It's important for you, and important for me.'
   'Glad to hear you say it.'
   'Oh sure,' he nods. 'Capital trials are the cutting edge of our justice system.'
   'So, Mr Little, you'll be the first to trial the new system—excuse the pun.' The man from the court chuckles, and looks away. Whenever he smiles he looks away. And he smiles plenty, sitting here all cozy on the bunk in my cell.
   'Before you decide, you should know there's no pressure whatsoever to press the buzzer, which will be prominently mounted in your, um—security enclosure. A camera will be trained on it at all times, to guard against accidents. But, if at any moment during the proceedings you should feel inclined to change your plea, or to in any way revoke the information given so far, the buzzer will give you recourse to instant and positive action, as well as providing a valuable visual aid in the interpretation of justice for viewers across the globe …'
   'Is there a buzzer for being innocent?'
   'Vernon, you are innocent. Until proven guilty—remember?' The man rolls my way and smiles into my face like I'm a very small child. 'I assure you every precaution has been taken in the system's design. Both the button and the lights it activates are green, thereby avoiding the more stressful implications of the color red. Also, although we jokingly call it a buzzer, the sound it makes is more of a chime …'

Act IV.
How my summer vacation spent me

Nineteen

   Every forty-three blinks, the flashing lights on the police cars that follow my van into Houston synchronize. They flash separately for a few turns, then start flashing in series, like leading-in lights. Then, for a second, they all flash at once.
   What I learn as I'm driven into Houston under low, still clouds, and choppers, for the first day of my trial, is that life works the same way. Most of the time you feel the potential for synchrony, but only once in a while do things actually synch up. Things can synch good, or synch bad. Take me, for example. I stand accused of just about every murder in Texas between the time I left home and when they hauled my ass back. With my face all over the media, folks started seeing me everywhere, I guess. Recall, they call it. Watch out for that sucker. And I'm still accused of the tragedy. Everybody just forgot about Jesus. Everybody except me.
   So the whole summer has passed since I last troubled you with my talkings. Yeah; I spent summer locked up, waiting for trial. Jesus kept me company, in a way. I just couldn't talk. Life got real, I guess. Maybe I just plain grew up. Watch out for that sucker too, I mean it.
   I turn to the bitty side-window in the van and watch fence posts slide by. An October damp has taken the landscape and wrung out the shine. Maybe it's better wrung out. That's what I think when I look back at the last weeks. For instance, my ole lady attempted suicide. Pam called secretly to ask me to be more encouraging about Lally, and the fridge and all. She said Mom closed up the house one day, turned the oven on full, and sat by its open door. Apparently it's still a Cry For Help, even though our oven's electric. Now Pam is feeding her up.
   As for me today, I'm like a refrigerator myself, stale, empty, not even plugged in. My body has realized it doesn't need sensory applications anymore, it just needs a real focused band of logic to survive. Just enough to play checkers and watch TV, that's how smart the human body is, cutting back on things like that. And wouldn't you know it—I needed glasses. The state discovered I have real bad eyesight, so it kindly got me these new glasses. I was none too sure at first, on account of they're kind of big, and thick, with these clear plastic frames. But, with my head shaved clean, and all polished up, I have to admit they look okay, once you get used to them. The whole outfit's kind of cool really, this pale blue pants suit, and my glasses with an elastic strap to keep them around my head. The strap was meant to hang around my neck, but I tightened it up to my head on account of it used to block my cross. Yeah—Mr Abdini gave me this crucifix on a chain. I couldn't believe it, he was so nice and all. Ole Abdini drove all the way over here just to bring me this cross, with the little dude on it. Well, not even just a little dude, like—that's Jesus on the cross. I mean, it's hard to see all the details, but you just know it must be Jesus.
   I had a talk with the psychologist here, told him I didn't have any human qualities, like any skills or anything. But he said it wasn't true, he said I had fine higher perceptions and sensitivity toward my fellow beings. In a way, I guess I do have those talents. I could sniff trouble before all this started, I say that must be a talent. It has to count for something. The other big news is that I quit cussing, believe it or not. I guess I've just used some of this time to, you know, watch TV, and not dwell on the bad side of things. Dwelling on the bad side of things has been identified as a problem area for me, that and being anal-fixated, if you'll excuse me saying it, where all my thoughts end up relating to human waste matter, and undergarments, and what have you. Big problem area, but the psychologist says realization is the first step to change. I can't even conjure tangs anymore, really. I'm just watching plenty of ole TV-movies, I guess checking back where I went wrong. The other day, a movie even brought a tear to my eye.
   A lynch-mob crowds the streets around the courthouse, throwing things, screaming, and hammering on the van as I drive through. I see them through this tiny window, them and the cameras watching them. One thing, though, at the back there seems to be a crowd of supporters as well. The front of the courthouse has turned into the Astrodome, with camera and light towers, and live studios with National Personalities on them. Then there are catering wagons, hot-dog stands, power trucks, make-up trucks. T-shirt stands, lapel-pin stands, balloon sellers.
   I don't get taken straight to the courtroom, but into a make-up room behind the building; apparently on account of its being 'Bathed in succulent, diffuse light,' as the dude explains who sits me down and strokes my head. Some other court folks are here getting blush on their faces. They smile at me as if I was a colleague from the mailroom in their office, and talk about today as if it was a ball game. I notice my make-up is kind of pale. Pale and gray.
   I'm finally walked up a long corridor, like the barrel of a gun. Bright light cuts the outline of a door at the end, and I'm led through it into the courtroom. Here we go. I enter this court an innocent man, I have to say, and I believe I'll leave it via the front door, once they hear my story. Truth always wins out in the end, see. I look around at the cast of my whole life, who sit waiting in the smell of finger-paintings and popcorn glued onto cut-outs of shepherd Joseph's lambs. Cameras whir on swivel mounts, people's heads turn with them to watch me being locked into this kind of zoo cage, with a microphone, and a big green button mounted on the front. The cage has shiny black bars set four inches apart, and stands three feet taller than my head when I stand. One guard unlocks a door at the back, while a second man handles me inside. A plaque on the cage door says it's made from a new alloy that no man alone can destroy. I cast an eye around the room and see my mom there with her mouth all tight across, like a Muppet or something. Her wrists are bandaged, I guess from her Cry For Help. Parti sits next to her with a face that tells you they're full of some plastic motel breakfast, of the kind where the ingredients come in matching shapes, like out of a clay mold. They just love hospital food, and motel breakfasts and stuff. Today Mom has her own camera position. No knife turning, though, you know it. My knife turns by itself these days, now that I'm all grown up. My conscience is what the knife ended up being, according to the psychologist. A knife is the greatest gift your folks can give you, according to him.
   My new attorney looks real positive, ole Brian, real confident about things. He stops for a moment to wink at me, then unloads a box of files onto his desk. There's a whole set of shiny new prosecutors too. The head prosecutor even wears baggy pants, if you don't think it's too vulgar to say, if it's not too regressive into my problem area. That's how damn funny he thinks today's going to be. At the bench on high, an ole judge clasps his hands together, and nods to the attorneys. Silence erupts.
   'Ladies and gentlemen of the jury,' says the prosecutor. 'Today we open one of the most cut-and-dried legal cases this state has ever seen. A person stands before you, having extinguished the lives of thirty-four decent citizens, many of them children—friends of his, even. A person who openly admits attending the scene of a high-school massacre, and who has been positively identified by eyewitnesses at the scenes of sixteen other capital crimes. A person whose childhood fantasies revolved around bloodshed and death. A person whose perverse sexual leanings link him inextricably to the other gunman in the high-school shooting. Ladies and gentlemen—today you will meet a person—and I use the term loosely—who, at the tender age of sixteen, has supplanted the notorious John Wayne Gacy, for the depth and boundlessness of his disregard for the most basic rights of others.'
   He sweeps a hand across the crowd to my cage. Faces turn to take in my shiny head, my huge swimming eyes through the glasses. I stay impassive. The prosecutor smiles, as if remembering an ole joke.
   'And you know,' he says, 'like Gacy—the boy cries innocence. Not of one crime, where maybe his identity could've been mistaken. But of thirty-four vicious slayings across this great state.'
   Parts of my body have retracted by the time Brian takes the mound. He paces slowly around the open space of the court, nodding quietly to himself. Then he stops to lean on the jury bench, and looks into the air, reminiscing.
   'Lord knows,' he says, 'it's a fine thing to relax in front of the TV after a hard day's work.' He rubs his chin, and strolls into the clearing. 'Maybe watch a movie.' A frown takes his brow. 'Must make life a little hard for the stars of that movie, though, having everyone recognize them on the street. Why do I mention it? I mention it because four-point-three murders happen every week across the region supposed to be my client's stomping ground. Four-point-three murders happened before the crimes of which he stands accused—four-point-three happened during his supposed reign of terror. And four-point-three are happening this week, while he's here with us.' He turns and stares at each jury member in turn. 'What we will discover, ladies and gentlemen, is that no allegation of murder existed against my client until the day his picture appeared on our TV screens. From that moment forward, virtually every murder in Central Texas and beyond has been attributed to him. That means all the regular murderers took a vacation, and Vernon Gregory Little fulfilled nearly the whole published quota of murders, some of them occurring almost simultaneously, with different weapons, at opposite ends of the state. Please ask yourselves: how? By remote control? I don't think so.'
   My attorney takes a walk to my cage. He looks thoughtfully at me, grabs one of the bars, and turns back to the jury.
   'What I propose to show you during the course of this trial, ladies and gentlemen, is the breadth of human suggestibility. Media arrive at the scene of every murder, with a picture of one suspect alone: the defendant. And not just any media. Media under the direct employ of the man who most stands to gain from these proceedings. A man who has built an industry—no, a virtual empire–on the relentless persecution of this single, hapless youngster. A man who, before the tragic events of May twentieth, was nobody. A man you will meet, and judge for yourselves, during this trial.'
   Brian saunters over to the jury, pulls his sleeve cuffs up a little, and leans intimately over their railing. His voice drops. 'How did this happen? Simple. Under the glare of camera lights, a confused and grieving public was offered the chance to be part of the biggest prime-time bandwagon since O J Simpson. "Is this the suspect?" they're asked. The face rings a bell. They've certainly seen him somewhere, recently even. Result? Even black witnesses to black murders in black neighborhoods recognize this sixteen-year-old white schoolboy as the suspect.'
   He scans the jury, narrows his eyes.
   'Fellow citizens, you will see that this meek, shy young man, with no previous record of wrongdoing, had the misfortune of being a living victim of the Martirio tragedy. Events overwhelmed him at a crucial point in the delicate unfolding of his manhood. He was unable to properly articulate his grief, couldn't assimilate the fragmentation around him. I'll show you that the boy's only mistake—and it was a big one—was not crying "Innocent!" quickly or loudly enough.'
   The prosecutor spreads his legs wide for that one, if it ain't too smutty to mention. But I like what Brian said. I look around the room, and I get to marveling that justice will visit here, just like it's supposed to, just like Santa. This is a special place, reserved for truth. Sure everybody's smug, but that could be on account of the confidence they have that justice is coming. Take the court typist woman—the stainographer I heard somebody call her, don't even ask me why they need her—is her head thrown back with confidence that justice is coming, or just because of the stench of the words, the stains she has to punch into her sawn-off machine? And why is her machine sawn-off, why can't you have the full alphabet in court? You wonder if she likes being close to the slime, or even loves it. Maybe she tells her buddies about it after work, and they all tighten their lips together. Sigh, 'Oh my God,' or something. And maybe the attorneys wear these kind of half-smiles all the time, even at home. Maybe they became attorneys because of this overdeveloped skill of making hooshy little laughs that suggest you're the only person in the world ignorant enough to believe what you just said. Maybe they let a hooshy laugh slip when they were babies, and their folks said, 'Look, honey, an attorney.'
   The wonderment of it all wears off by lunchtime on the first day. After that, I sit like a zombie for days of maps and diagrams, footprints and fibers. Jesus' sports bag comes out, with my fingerprints on it. It keeps all the world's scientists busy for a week. I just sit, impassive, I guess, with all these illogical thoughts in my head, like how the hell does anybody know whether a fiber was found on a shoe or a sock? The jury dozes sometimes, unless it's a new witness from the make-up room.
   'Can you identify the person you saw around the scene of the crime?' the prosecutors ask. One by one, the witnesses, strangers to me, cast their eyes and fingers my way.
   'That's him in the cage,' they say. 'The one we saw.'
   And like in all courtroom dramas, everybody turns up from the first part of the show, one by one, to tell their stories. You wait to see if they're going to help you out, or put you the hell away. By the time a November chill calls blankets to my jail bunk, proceedings have thawed their way down to the bone.
   'The State calls Doctor Oliver Goosens.'
   Goosens walks to the witness stand. His cheeks swish like silk bulging with cream. He takes the oath, and exchanges a tight little smile with the prosecutor.
   'Doctor—you're a psychiatrist specializing in personality disorders?'
   'I am.'
   'And you appear today as an impartial expert witness, without reference to any professional contact you may have had with the defendant?'
   'Yes.'
   The judge holds out a finger to the prosecutor, which means stop. Then he turns to my attorney. 'Counsel—has your objection been lost in the mail?'
   'No, your honor,' says Brian. He stands motionless.
   'This is your client's own therapist. Am I to infer you'll ignore the conflict?'
   'If you wish, sir.'
   The judge chews the inside of his mouth. Then he nods. 'Proceed.'
   'Doctor Oliver Goosens,' asks the prosecutor, 'in your professional opinion, what kind of person committed all these crimes?'
   'Objection!' shouts my attorney. 'The crimes aren't proven to be the work of a single person.'
   'Sustained,' says the judge. 'The State should know better.'
   'I'll rephrase,' says the prosecutor. 'Dr Goosens—do these crimes suggest a pattern to you?'
   'Most certainly.'
   'A pattern common to your area of expertise?'
   'Traits associated with antisocial personality disorders.'
   The prosecutor strokes his chin between thumb and forefinger. 'But who's to say these traits belong to one person?'
   Goosens chuckles softly. 'The alternative is a localized epidemic of antisocial disorders, lasting precisely six days.'
   The prosecutor smiles. 'And what makes sufferers of these disorders different from the rest of us?'
   'These personalities thrive on instant gratification—they're unable to tolerate the least frustration of their desires. They are facile manipulators, and have a unique self-regard which makes them oblivious to the rights and needs of others.'
   'Am I correct in thinking these aren't mental illnesses as such, they don't involve any diminution of responsibility on the sufferer's part?'
   'Quite correct. Personality disorders are maladjustments of character, deviations in the mechanisms of reward attainment.'
   The prosecutor drops his head, nods thoughtfully. 'I hear you mention antisocial personality disorder. Is there a more common term describing sufferers of that disorder?'
   'Antisocial personalities are, well—your classic psychopaths.' A muffled gasp shifts through the court. My glasses grow thick and heavy.
   'And known manifestations of the disorder include murder?'
   'Objection,' says Brian. 'Most murderers are not psychopaths, and not all psychopaths commit murder.'
   The judge's eyes fall weary on the prosecutor. 'Counsel –please,' he says. You can tell he wants to say stronger words, but he just says 'please'. The difference between what he wants to say and what he can say is what makes his eyes all cowy, I guarantee it. The prosecutor tightens up the bitty sinews that pass for his lips, and turns back to Goosens.
   'So Doctor—sufferers of the disorder you mention, am I right in thinking they're impassive to the results of their actions—they feel no remorse?'
   'Objection! Lack of remorse is consistent with innocence!'
   The prosecutor turns to the jury and smirks. I just stay impassive. 'Overruled,' says the judge. 'Your client is not being referred to.' He nods for Goosens's answer.
   'Sufferers have a much higher threshold of arousal than you or I,' says Goosens, swishing his cheeks at the prosecutor. 'Their appetite for thrills can drive them to ever-greater risk, without regard for the consequences.'
   'Thrills such as murder?'
   'Yes.'
   The prosecutor lets that one sit awhile, on the floor of the court. The stench of it wafts jurywards. He turns to look at me for his next question to Goosens. 'And tell us—does sexuality play a part in such behavior?'
   'Sex is our most powerful drive. Naturally, it's a primary conduit for behaviors directed toward the acquisition and maintenance of power over others. And in the antisocial mind—death and sex are common bedfellows.'
   'And how might these traits arise, in layman's terms?'
   'Well, a fixation can develop in childhood …'
   'A fixation for, let's say—a woman?' The prosecutor lowers his face, but swivels his eyes up to the witness stand.
   'Well, yes, the object of male fixation is most often female.'
   'A sociopath might kill a woman for thrills?'
   'Yes, or he might—kill for her …'
   'No further questions.'
   Macaroni cheese for lunch today. And bread. Later, it curdles high in my gut as my attorney steps up to the witness box, smiling.
   'Oliver Goosens, how are you today?'
   'Just fine, thank you.'
   'Tell me, Doc—do these antisocial disorders worsen with age?'
   'Not necessarily—to be classified, the characteristics must have been in place by the age of fifteen.'
   'Is the condition still treatable at fifteen?'
   'Most disorders remain treatable at any age, although with true antisocial personalities the results are questionable.'
   'You mean they can't be successfully treated?'
   'That's the prevailing evidence.'
   My attorney takes a little walk around the court, head down, thinking. Calculating Pi, probably. Then he stops. 'In your report to the Martirio Local Court, you recommended my client attend outpatient treatment with you, rather than be detained?'
   Goosens looks up at the judge. The judge nods for him to answer. 'Yes,' says Goosens.
   'Kind of a light-handed approach for an untreatable psychopath—don't you think?'
   Irritation skips over the doctor's face. 'These cases can be hard to diagnose in one session.'
   'You didn't have a problem implying it for the jury just now.' Brian gives a hooshy little laugh. 'And, Doctor, in terms of the sexual connotations you mention—would it be equally possible for an antisocial mind to fixate on a man, or—boy?' He starts to pace a narrowing circle around Goosens.
   'Of course. Jeffrey Dahmer is a good example …'
   'But what would distinguish regular homosexual desire from pathological fixation?'
   'Well, um—consent. A pathological deviant would trick or force his targets, without reference to their wishes.'
   'So, a person who forced his desires on boys—would be a psychopath?'
   'Certainly could be, yes.'
   Goosens doesn't look so smug anymore. My attorney finishes his circling, then nails him with an eye that says, 'Let's play ball'. 'Oliver Goosens,' he muses. 'Ever hear the name "Harlan Perioux"?'
   Goosens turns white.
   Brian turns to the jury. 'Ladies and gentlemen—Judge—please excuse my language here.' He moves to the witness stand, and leans into Goosens's face. 'If not, perhaps you've heard of an internet site called Bambi-Boy Butt Bazaar?'
   'Excuse me?'
   'A man named Harlan Perioux was indicted in Oklahoma for procuring and corrupting teenage boys for that website—tell us please, under oath—is there something you know about it?'
   'I don't have to answer that.'
   Brian smiles a lazy smile. He lifts some documents off his table, and hoists them into the air. 'I have exhibits showing that you, Oliver Goosens, previously went by the name of Harlan Perioux.' A sharp murmur breaks through the court. 'I put it to you, Doctor, that five years ago you were indicted under that name, on four charges relating to the corruption of boys for your pornographic website.'
   'Charges were never proven.'
   'And I further suggest to you, Doctor, that you own and operate that site still, under the name Serenade of Sodom.'
   Somebody in the back stifles a snort of laughter. The judge scowls.
   'Am I right, Doctor?' Brian says it slow and clear. 'Yes—or—no?'
   Goosens's eyes jackrabbit to the judge. He nods for him to answer.
   'No. Not entirely, no.'
   'My last question: is it true you also treated Jesus Navarro Rosario, around the time of the school tragedy, in May this year?'
   Goosens's eyes fall to the floor.
   'And that you presented him with these ladies' undergarments, a charge for the purchase of which has been traced to your credit-card?'
   Brian holds up a plastic bag. Inside are the panties Jesus wore on his last day alive.