g r a v e l

ANUBIS

 

 

“This is the meaning of mercy, wouldn’t you say, when it is offered to the underserving?" 

 

Narcopolis, Jeet Thayil

 

 

MY DAUGHTER. She places a photograph before him. You’ve seen her

 

She sits down across the desk, taking only the edge of the chair, leaning forward. The tremor in her hand

 

He picks it up –a brunette with large gray eyes, about seventeen. Small mole just below the right corner of her mouth

 

Tattooed stars red&gold orbit his neck and disappear down his collar

 

Know where she is?

 

No

 

She rises and stands before him, clasping her hands at her waist. She looks at him for a long moment. Think she’s still here?

 

Can’t tell you

 

I’m her mother

 

Confidential, lady

 

Shit, she says, no one helps, police, FBI, missing persons. What am I supposed to do?

 

Leans back in his chair.  Breathes a moment with closed eyes

 

I’ve got nothing left to lose, tell me what I’m supposed to do, sleep with you?

 

When you get here?

 

Just now

 

Drive out? That’s a long drive

 

Flew

 

Where else you been?

 

Nowhere

 

Nowhere?

 

Came straight here

 

He breathes heavily and closes his eyes. These people are very mobile

 

These people?

 

That’s what I said

 

My god

 

Sorry

 

My god

 

He hangs his head and rubs the back of his neck. Sits like this for a full minute. He stands and walks around the desk. I’ll help you, he says. I can’t but I will. He places a hand on her shoulder

 

Just like that?

 

Timing is everything

 

What did she say?

 

Not here

 

They walk a block to a coffee shop and take a seat outside

 

Avery Black, he says. But you know that

 

I got a postcard from Oskaloosa with your name

 

How long ago?

 

Two months

 

And?            

 

I’m in treatment, don’t worry. Call you soon

 

You Mormon?

 

Does that matter?

 

With a hand signal he orders two coffees. When they come he remembers Mormons don’t drink coffee and pulls one away

 

Least of my worries, she says, and slides it back

 

Goddamn it, he says, I let her walk, you know I did

 

You think she’s dead

 

He snaps the lid back on his paper cup and suddenly rises. Come with me

 

 

In crop-field country miles north of Lawrence she turns her head to him.  Are all drug counselors recovering addicts?

 

He laughs and says, It helps. Would you trust one who wasn’t?

 

So you know this? – she sweeps her arm at teeming green hectares

 

Bugs eating bugs, he says, like the back of my hand

 

She sits correctly in the seat and stares straight ahead. Should I give up?

 

Yes

 

Why?

 

Then you got nothing left to lose, not even hope

 

It’s that bad?

 

That bad

 

He pushes his seat back, reaches between his legs and bends over slightly. Take the wheel, he says, then leans over far as he can. He comes up with a holster, and places it on the console between them

 

Are you a cop, too?

 

No

 

Then what’s this?

 

Big medicine

 

Why?

 

You want to find your daughter?

 

Of course

 

No stupid questions

 

Where are we going? How stupid is that?

 

You’re leaving the comfort zone, let’s put it that way. I know someone

 

Where my daughter is?

 

We’ll see

 

She pulls the revolver out of the holster. What is it?

 

.44

 

Can I shoot it out the window?

 

He throws his head back and laughs. That’s the spirit, lady

 

Left the comfort zone when my daughter did

 

We’re going to see a man named Mars. Mars wants you to believe he’s a sports gambler: No-name teams nobody bothers to fix - Sam Houston State, Lamar, Akron, Central Michigan

 

What is he?

 

A conduit. A cockroach sonofabitch. The two are related

 

You going to shoot Mars?

 

I’m HIV positive, Hep-C to boot. Now Hodgkins

 

Chemo?

 

Yup, Wichita

 

He looks over at her. You roll your eyes on me, lady? He laughs again. That’s right, he says, nothin left to lose, me neither

 

One dirt road drains into another and an hour later he stops in the middle of a leafy copse strung to others in a jade archipelago ranging silently to the far horizon. He takes up the revolver and opens the door, hangs his head a moment as if catching his breath

 

There’s his trailer half-mile up that ditch

 

Irony is the human condition, she says

 

In there drinkin’ tea like an Englishman

 

Tea, she says, can you imagine

 

Watch your step. Snakes everywhere

 

They scramble along an overgrown ditch, approaching the trailer over a paddock thick with milkweed and thistle. There is an elevated wooden porch half-fallen facing them and the back door is open. They hear young voices and a song on a stereo from The Sound of Music. Four girls naked except for shoes fly out the door and circle clockwise around to the front.  A large man with wobbling gut wearing diapers, cowboy boots and an Indian chief’s headdress pursues them. He carries a flyswatter in one hand, a spatula in the other

 

God almighty

 

That him?

 

Batshit crazy

 

You think my daughter’s in there?

 

Put a stake in that thing’s heart

 

He knows where?

 

Where Red Bull & vodka get ya, that’s where

 

The man disappears around a corner and the girls reappear from the opposite end and clamber back inside

 

Come on says Avery Black as he runs toward the porch, grabbing a gray board off the ground. He slides his back against the trailer and lifts the board over his head. When Mars lumbers round the bend Avery smashes him across the face. The headdress flies straight up, Mars goes down, and after he rolls over twice clutching his face in his hands Avery Black grabs him by the ankles and yanks him backward towards the ditch

 

Hit him again, goddamnit!

 

She seizes the board and runs to where Avery Black jerks and curses the now-kicking man. She strikes his groin, throws the board at his head and punts his face again and again, screaming at the top of her lungs

 

We can’t goddamnit kill it yet, Avery Black cries and shoves her away

 

The man, well-beaten and dragged through stinging nettles is coated with blood and dirt, wholly unrecognizable as Sitting Bull. Avery Black unholsters the .44, thrusts the barrel in the man’s mouth and says You got thirty seconds asshole and if I don’t like the way you say it even if you tell the truth I blow your FUCKIN head off

 

The man bobs his head up and down

 

Avery takes the girl’s photograph from his shirt pocket and shoves it in his face. You seen her?

 

Up and down

 

She covers her mouth with a hand

 

Where is she?

 

The man points to the barrel and Avery Black pulls it out, then bangs him on the forehead with the pistol butt

 

AW AW AW! AW AW AW! Fresh blood pours through the man’s fingers where he clutches his head and he rolls again over rocks and thistles. Mama! he cries. Mama!

 

Avery Black cocks the hammer. The man hears this and sits straight up. Avery Black says, You’re gonna die anyway might as well do something good you see angry Jesus any second where’s the little girl?

 

Republic County, he wheezes, Nebraska line, place called Narka

 

You sellin’ her ass?

 

Mars stares with big eyes. Mandrake clan, he says. Salvinorin freaks. You know

 

Narka?

 

Uh hu

 

Achilles’s shack?

 

Zetas nail me soon enough, Avery, ‘lessin he gets me first, let them do –

 

BOOM between the eyes, woman stagger-shouting with the flash, brains crimson-gaudy splashing the bank behind, Mars’ lifeless mouth gaping. Avery Black flips him over with his foot, pulls a Buck folder from his pocket and shears the diaper down the middle. He pulls Mar’s butt-cheeks apart and she sees stool-flecked fifty-dollar bills duct-taped each side of his anus

 

What am I seeing?

 

Come and get it, that’s what. Pure evil

 

He kicks the body to the bottom of the ditch. Rubber gloves, lady, what you’re dealin’ with here. Go back to the car

 

Ten minutes later he packs four girls in the rear seat

 

Safe-house by Tonganoxie. They’ll take ‘em

 

The girls are clad in a motley assortment of too-large shirts. Their arms and necks are patterned with sores and burns and what appear to be injection punctures

 

Every bad thing, he says, body and soul. What’ll god do with them now? He turns to look at her. Same’s he did with me: Any damn thing he wants

 

 

Late-afternoon they are pointing north forty miles out of Manhattan, Kansas, eating Sonic from a sack. She wonders aloud what’s wrong with them, burgers after what they’ve done

 

Nothin. Piece a shit finally gets his due. Makes me hungry

 

I’m an accomplice

 

You are not

 

We’ll go to prison

 

We will not

 

Why?

 

In the first place, who knows?

 

Four girls for one thing

 

Didn’t see it

 

Didn’t have to. That thing sounds like the end of the world

 

Who they gonna tell?

 

I see, she says

 

Why you can’t find your daughter

 

I see

 

Or what’s left of her. Be ready for anything, lady, I’m sorry to say. That shit eats you up and what I saw she was well on her way

 

 

Speaking of the end of the world, she says as they drive into Narka, a tiny place dying by itself in a prairie ocean. He pulls into the parking lot of a boarded-up grocery store

 

Back in the day family farms far as the eye could see. He stretches forth his arm and sweeps it about. They came here to shop and play baseball. All gone. Progress. Bullshit

 

What do we do?

 

Wait

 

For?

 

Something

 

What?

 

I’ll know when I see it

 

He rolls the car out of sight around the side of the store and they stand behind barrels, road construction signs and barriers someone stored beneath the tattered awning. He shoves his hands in his pocket and watches the highway. Something comes, he says. You’ll see

 

You just killed a man, Avery Black

 

It wasn’t a man, he says, that’s your error. Sick in the objective, problem being it’s just one way of knowing. That man was a devil

 

I’m an academic, she says. No one’s a devil

 

What you teach?

 

History

 

What kind?

 

Civil War. Frederick Douglass in London

 

You teach this in Utah?

 

I do

 

Like fartin on the moon, isn’t it?

 

Or rehab in Kansas

 

 

Dusk a van drives in from the east and pulls over across the street. Ten minutes later a pickup from the west. The truck u-turns and the van follows, both bearing north on CR28 and accelerating out of sight

 

That’s our pig, he yells, supply run. They dash to the car and he pursues lights off. They see tail-lamps disappear below a rise nearly a mile away

 

They top the rise and see the van drop below the next hill, even further. He swears and guns it and she fumbles with her seatbelt and he says I can’t see shit yell if there’s a goddamn cow on the road we lose these fools we’re on our own out here. She leans to see the speedometer 110 the road shooting straight on hill after hill and those tail-lamps maybe a bit closer now and then they’re gone. Two minutes later he hollers and points west where both sets of lights crawl slowly over the earth. He decelerates just short of a skid and finally stops where he can see how far they are and reckon their progress

 

Trailer can’t be too far up there. Dirt road’s a bad getaway someone runs up a red flag. Next dip they go down I think

 

The lights disappear and Avery Brown thunders up the road again, overshooting the rutted turnoff by two hundred feet. He fishtails through a u-turn and they creep up. Before they reach the second rise he jumps out the car and runs to the top where he scans for a full minute. When he walks back he says Shit there’s a colony up there little gulch out a sight goddamn motorcycle gang. That’s good. She’s probably in one of them. And that’s bad, cause I can’t use the gun

 

What are you going to do?

 

Use the fuckin gun excuse me. Can you drive if you have to – like that?

 

You damn right

 

They inch over the rise and the next and at the bottom of the last pull far enough off the road the car is hard to see in near-dark. He points it back out toward the highway and leaves the keys in the ignition

 

I’m coming, she says, it’s my daughter

 

Gonna be a mess

 

Already a mess

 

He reaches across her to the glove box and takes out a box of ammunition then reaches over again and lays his hand on her head. What’s your name, lady?

 

Sandra Packer, she says, and they step out the low dark coupe and walk towards the lightless settlement. Careful, he says, snakes everywhere

 

Then he takes her arm and turns her to face him. I got the same Jesus problem old Mars did but worse because I believe. I’m a no-good son-of-a-bitch too and I’ll tell you why: I didn’t grab your girl off the street that day because I was loaded. I didn’t understand what I was seeing, what kind a girl she was, little girl from Salt Lake City. You hear what I’m saying?

 

Yes

 

Well I’m sorry, Sandra Packer

 

Me, too

 

You don’t tell a living soul what you see out here tonight, you just take her if we find her and get the hell gone, understand?

 

What about you?

 

He draws the revolver and declares, Whatsoever your hand findeth itself to do, do it with thy might

 

She lifts her head to a sky bejeweled and sees him do the same, mouthing silent words. He holds the revolver over his heart as if in benediction

 

If my mother could see me now, she murmurs. What she would say

 

 

There are four trailers with blackened windows, an assortment of bikes and pickups parked randomly. In the inky gloom they walk right up to the first. Then he backs them off and whispers, We wait a while and see what happens

 

A figure descends the steps of one trailer and carries a box to another; fifteen minutes later he returns with two boxes. OK, says Avery Black, these are factories

 

They circle toward the others and he slides against a trailer and attempts to see through the windows. They are taped with black plastic and cardboard from the inside. They wait somewhat beyond them for almost half an hour and he finally says, Holed up

 

I’ll go in, she says, don’t you doubt it Avery Black, I wish you had another gun

 

He pulls her close and whispers to her ear, Know how many times I was married? - five, each worse than the other. They say the same about me, every one

 

He lets her go and rubs his forehead. If she’s here she’s in one of those and it would be a big help if I knew which one

 

I’ll say a prayer. Hold my hands

 

I’ll jinx the whole thing

 

No you won’t

 

Her prayer lasts five minutes

 

Amen

 

He opens his eyes. What does He advise?

 

Whatever  

 

That’s the best He can do?

 

I want to ask you a question Avery Black: Are you high?

 

Now?

 

Yes

 

Is that important?

 

Not sure

 

Did god tell you to ask that?

 

Not sure

 

He thinks about this for a moment. Is belief in god intended? Is it intentional?

 

Maybe

 

Meaning?

 

For some it is and for some it isn’t. I can’t help it. Why don’t you ask what kind of mother I was?

 

Because I don’t have to

 

I was a Valium addict like half the housewives I know. How do you think she got the idea?

 

My dad was town drunk in Muscatine, Iowa. That’s not why I shot horse in Saigon

 

He lets go her hands and takes the heavy revolver from its belt-clipped holster, drops the cylinder and reloads the round he spent on Mars. He empties the box into both front pockets, takes a deep breath, closes his eyes and says, Find a rock. Give me a minute to get my place by the door then hit the side hard three times. Get around front but stay out a sight

 

She kicks the ground till she finds a stone the size of a big tomato and looks at her watch. With both hands she pounds the wall then runs in the dark around to the front, falling twice. She sees the shadow of Avery Black crouched by the steps, starlight glinting off his revolver. She holds her breath for the front door to burst open

 

Ten minutes later Avery Black straightens up and says, Well that simplifies the situation, doesn’t it? He motions toward the other trailer with the gun. They’re in there, ‘cept the chemists. Dozen give or take

 

Same plan?

 

We could set it on fire but there’s girls won’t get out. Can’t shoot through the walls either, which would be my first choice

 

You’ve done this before, haven’t you Avery Black? That’s the stars around your neck!

 

Knock the door, he says softly. Tell them you come fetch your daughter

 

She walks up the stairs, simply opens the door and steps inside. Blue smoke pours into the cool night air and she staggers backward into his arms

 

Weed, he says, little bong-fire

 

Avery Black pokes his head in and checks left/right. He goes left, moving soundlessly through the hall. A minute later four thin girls emerge clutching tattered t-shirts and plastic bags to their naked bodies, half-falling down the stairs

 

Shadrach, Meshach, Abednego sleeping on yonder couch, he nods, wiping a blade she hasn’t seen on his pants-leg. Rest in that trailer you hit with the rock. No more girls

 

The woman now crushing one so close

 

These three to that safe house

 

Come on Avery Black

 

Go

 

Repent Avery Black, my god!

 

But his eyes only glitter in the tumbling light. He points the way out and heads to the other trailer

 

Go, he shouts. Remember me

 

Halfway to the car the detonations begin and she knows he’s blasting through the walls. They cover their ears and run, then speed along the narrow rut, prairie grass ripping through the high beams, behind them a plume of dust rising and settling over the plains

 

She stops late in Lawrence, a darkened street near a darkened coffee shop. She wipes his car of fingerprints, locks it, blesses it, throws the keys down a storm sewer, takes her daughter’s cold rough hand and fades into the night.