American Monster Read online

  Beat.

  Because he blinked. Because what he saw in her eyes—subtle rings of pain, alien wants and extreme levels of cruelty—was not what he expected.

  It was because he blinked. He can’t not remember. Beat. He was about to sneer, laugh in her face, slap her need with his contempt, his sense of entitlement to something better. Hotter. Hell, women threw themselves at him, why would he even consider someone like Norma, crazy trailer freak?

  Beat. The empty ring of lost opportunity. A moment that widened into an uncrossable chasm. Something—his bad faith—registered with her, that’s all he knew, because a smile played at the corners of her mouth and her unsmiling eyes locked onto his.

  And she never looked at him again.

  So, he took it that from that little wrinkle in time they were locked in total combat and the wrinkle turned into a wound. So there was that. She had won even before the big ’breed rode into town with his long hair and abs of steel. Even before she made him watch from the sidelines. How they sat at the bar with their elbows touching, how he’d kiss her on the side of her head. They danced like a couple of Yetis, and that giant fucktard’d look up at the ceiling sometimes, the spray of lights, just holding her. And they danced.

  It didn’t seem right to Augustine. Made no sense to him how and why he’d let that opportunity slide. Take me home, she said with her eyes, and maybe he’d known even then that she was laughing at him. Just a little bit. Some cruel and terrible distortion of lust stabbing at him from those cold gray eyes. Something driving that need and monstrous in the singularity of its intent. People who always knew exactly what they wanted really pissed him off.

  Augustine didn’t let it get him down. He had plenty to distract him. The Dianabol caper had gone pear-shaped but in the end didn’t amount to more than a bunch of expired bodybuilders and a beheaded security guard, so when that was over he came back swinging. Long ago Augustine had fully figured out that his character was something of a cliché and for that he was grateful. How else would he know who or what to be? We can’t all be self-invented—self-made fucking American dreamers. Some of us need a little help, something to model ourselves on. Plenty of perfectly good digital dreams for sale, two for the price of one, like his Mexican nutsack—and looking at her then, that split second after she made him see that she was lost to him forever, Augustine told himself that if he couldn’t have her, no one could.

  Hell, he had always known exactly what he wanted.

  It took the ’breed a while to get a ride outside the Brew Box at Pacific Beach, stomping his boots on the wet shoulder of Mission Boulevard and blinking in the rain. He was looking for Norma at all the places like some lovesick puppy. A big fucking puppy. Augustine got so frustrated watching that he was tempted to pick him up himself but that would have given the game away, and Augustine was going to play this for all it was worth. The ’breed eventually got a ride in the trailer-car of a Flyer, giant legs bent up over the edge. His hair blowing in the wind.

  Augustine kept himself small, no more than a white speck in the rearview mirror all the way down to the Wang where the Indian got out of his ride and went inside. Augustine chained his ride to the post and messaged the others. He didn’t expect it to get this far south, but the lackey, as always, was standing by. Victory is preparedness and Augustine was prepared. The chief fist-bumped his way past the spic door bull and Augustine waited outside in the dark for his compadres, felt the rumble of their engines before he heard them, and when they pulled up he saw the glint of their 18mm gauge bike chains before he saw their eyes.

  *

  Gene sat slumped at the bar telling anyone who’d listen, which was mainly Jesus, about how he’d looked everywhere for Norma. Everywhere.

  – She’s left the building, said Jesus glumly.

  – I know it, said Gene.

  The Wang was unusually cold. Bunny was in LA with family, the androgens had gone home and the bar rippled in the ghostly light reflected from their tank. Gene explained through a tongue made thick by all the beer and shine in his system that he was just saying good-bye is all. Just going back to all the places they’d been together in Spill City. One more time.

  – Spare me, said Jesus, and Gene said how he’d said the same to Norma, but he didn’t mean it literally. Or maybe he did. She took everything literally. He loved that about her. But you had to be careful what you said around someone like that. They could take it the wrong way. The ends of his hair dangled in the puddles of beer at the bar. Jesus listened and tried not to cry. You had to choose your words carefully, Gene said, so when he’d said ‘spare me,’ what he maybe meant was that whatever she had to tell him it would keep. At least until the morning. Or maybe it meant he had enough faith in the way she felt about him not to need any explanation and maybe he meant that he didn’t want to know. Or that he already did. Pass it on.

  – I hear you, said Jesus, raising his fist to bump Gene’s. Respect.

  – There is a certain respect in secrets, Gene agreed. You step around them the way you step around a big dog sleeping in the street. Let him follow you with one eye open and keep walking. Live and let live was the way Gene’s brain worked. Didn’t mean that if he did know her secrets it would make any difference. He wasn’t going anywhere. He worried about her is all. He’d always worried. She acted one way, but something else was acting on her, and if he could make it go away he would, he’d do anything to make it better for her, and was she still bleeding from that cord around her neck, he wondered, and were those things that looked like broken wings still coming from her back, feathery slivers of bone popping wetly from the pale flesh, and were her eyes still smoking the way they were in the bath, because that’s when he knew for sure, yeah. That’s when he knew.

  – What? said Jesus. What did you know?

  – That she wasn’t from Australia, Gene said and threw up on his muddy combat boots.

  Then Jesus said how he’d gotten a text from Norma that said get Gene to Mexico safely and she’d be there in few days. Gene looked confused.

  – Norma doesn’t text, he said.

  – Well she texted me. Sounds like an eight year old, but here it is.

  He explained how, just to be sure, he asked her what he had tattooed behind his ear and she texted back, nueve, the exact number of his family members the SLA had killed. Jesus pulled back his dreadlocks to show Gene the ink behind his ear.

  – Show me the text, he said, but he was too far gone to read it, so Jesus had to read it for him.

  The text said to chaperone Gene as far south as possible, and that Norma would follow when she could. Get him to Monterrey, or Coahuila at least. Jesus had made calls and now one came in on his console, so he led Gene outside and hefted him up onto the passenger seat of a beat-up pickup where he slumped beside a Mexican who had mileage in his eyes and a customized Tech Zen nestled between his legs. Jesus gave the driver—a cousin—clear instructions and an envelope of cash and watched the truck head toward the arcing border lights and disappear before he went outside and felt the night close around her absence. Norma.

  *

  Augustine on his massive ride with the lackey in the side car and a couple other guys on supercharged Veelos waited in the middle of the road on a deserted stretch of highway. The pickup truck slowed about thirty yards away. Gene had thrown up again and was mumbling on the back seat. The men with their thick jaws and chains sat idling on their rides. The driver killed the engine and reached for the Tech Zen but one of Augustine’s men was already at the door and the door opened and the driver slumped out with blood raining from the slit across his throat. Augustine’s lackey jumped out of the side car, and was at the back passenger door in a half-dozen giant steps. He opened it and was momentarily taken aback by the way the big slumped Indian was staring at him with eyes the color of fake coffee full of amber lights and promise. Beat. And Gene was on him. That would have been it for the lackey if he hadn’t have had the hypo at the ready and got Gene in the groin, a 4mg do
ze of Scopalamine—not too much, Augustine said, this is a blood sport. Gene managed to land a sloppy punch which messed up the lackey’s recently reconstructed nose, but there was no time to retaliate. Not yet. The lackey pushed the jellied giant off him, frisked him and found a heavy steel screw driver in one combat boot and a fishing knife in the other, both of which he pocketed to give to Augustine. The lackey then cuffed Gene’s hands and ankles with packing ties (nice and tight) and took the wheel. He did a quiet U-turn with the bikes behind him and Gene sprawled on the floor. The convoy crossed Highway 20 several blocks from the Wang and, with the help of the the cash Jesus had given to his cousin, made it uneventfully through the check points. It rumbled down an unnamed dirt road off Eighth Street until it got to a bank of three drains scrawled with dark graffiti that seemed to suck all the light right out of the stars.

  The drains spilled out onto a junkyard. Chassis and battery cases, metal safes and baby carriages, rolls of rusty hog wire. The bikes pulled off and killed their engines behind the truck. The third guy on the Flyer pulled up alongside it. The lackey reached around and opened the door, shoved the big guy out onto the road.

  – Hey baby, Augustine was waiting by the side of the road. He inhaled from a small brown vial. Let’s Smoke Dance.

  – Ghost Dance, Tine.

  – What I said.

  *

  Gene lay dazed beneath the indifferent sweep of the Milky Way. Clouds curdled and massed around the constellations and satellites he could see gliding across the sky. The smell of the drain and all that dead metal wafted across to him from the junkyard. He watched through uncomprehending eyes as Augustine came up to him and cut the ties on his wrists and ankles. Breathing hard through the booze and the Scooby, he pushed himself to his feet where he wobbled and tried to focus and caught a 18mm chain around the side of the head that sent him staggering down the embankment. The lackey and the third man were waiting for him there. The lackey had a regular drive chain wrapped around his fist and the jab from that knocked out some of Gene’s teeth, and split his lip. Gene screamed. The next swing of Augustine’s chain got Gene around the knees and sent him folding in on himself, knees, waist, arms unfurled and collapsing, like a man made of cards. He lay there regarding Augustine with one eye, the other already shut and swelling. His massive chest heaved. Augustine nodded to the lackey who reached over and tried to snap Gloria’s baby teeth from Gene’s wrist, but Gene, without turning his head, had the lackey by the throat with his left hand before Augustine could stop him, and it was only after several swings of the chain (breaking both Gene’s legs, ripping a gash in his belly) that Augustine was able to pull the lackey free. The lackey lay oddly in the dirt and seemed very still and ashen with a purpling ring around his neck.

  *

  Augustine looked around for the third man who had melted into the night, so Augustine had to finish Gene off by himself. He didn’t mind. It was a clear night and he had nothing better to do.

  – Hell to the yeah, he said, bringing the chain high over his head.

  When it was done, he dragged Gene over to the roll of hog wire and wrapped him in it—he’d had a wicked wire motif tattooed around his neck and his wrists too—sweating like a pig, although he felt icy cold. He’d done this before more times than he could count—kickers along the Rio Grande dissatisfied with Cartel kickbacks. They’d wake up later, wrapped in wire, not even God to hear them scream. Not many of them were this big, though, and Augustine had his work cut out for him. He still had his bike gloves on, but he cursed not having brought his pliers. He cursed the latest batch of Indonesian D-bol which had given him an ass rash. He cursed the lackey, cursed the yellow-bellied third man who he’d have to kill when he caught up with him. But most of all he cursed Norma and each time he said her name he kicked the hog-wired body, which ruined his hammer-toe boots so he cursed her again and kicked even harder until he felt lighter and lighter with every kick. No more need to pretend, no more need to choose his words or watch his step. He kicked again, and finally he unzipped his fly and, regarding his disfigured manhood with a bitter moan, pissed all over the hog-tied man just because he could.

  He rolled the body to the drains and pushed and pulled until it was most of the way in. He wiped the cold sweat from his forehead and then he dragged the comatose lackey into the sidecar and headed south, Augustine trying not to think about what he’d do with the lackey when they got there (he didn’t look too good). Trying not to think about how it all hadn’t gone quite as well as it could have, and how, at the end, just before the ’breed went down for the last time, the howling shadow he threw on the starlit ground looked more like a wolf than a man.

  54//: opening

  This was something Raye thought she could get used to, finding room to move in men’s blind spots. Because there never was or would be a place for her anywhere else now. Never in the stories they told that were always the whole story, but there were holes in the whole, and if that was what Raye was now she better get used to it.

  She’d left a note for Norma with the priest at the clinic, hoping she’d understand. The note simply said, Plan B? Because Raye always had to have one—a contingency plan—and she was just trying to suggest that Norma think of one too. Well, that wasn’t how Norma worked. Norma was strictly a Plan A kind of deal. That’s why she was so cut up about leaving. It seemed to her that she had no choice and she was probably right. But sometimes Plan B isn’t a what, it’s a who.

  Look after your own, Norma had said. Problem was that Raye didn’t know who that was anymore. Maybe it was everybody. There was Mac, yeah but there was also Gene, who Norma loved and Raye loved Norma. Where did it end? Maybe nowhere. So Raye had to stay.

  Raye knew that first she’d have to get Mac onto the bus, and she fully expected that to get tricky and she was right. Raye knew something was up with her father as soon as she met him outside the shop and that’s when she changed her focus, knew that the hard bit was not getting him onto the bus, but getting him on alone. When she saw how crowded it had got in his head, his eyes a play of dark and shifting shadows, she didn’t know if she could do it. The voices had congealed like blood into the one voice and she could see it there, splashing out at her from his furnace eyes, telling him to do... things. Telling him to kill her. Except it couldn’t (she felt it flinch) and that pissed it off. Whatever it was inside him telling him to kill his own child then turned on itself, on the father. At first she’d felt victorious, strong, but then she got scared, wondering if she’d really won or if she’d lost him forever. There he was on the Coaster platform drawing a crowd but not in a good way: writhing and foaming and spasming on his back as he ruddered himself around in a circle with his kicking legs. The gold cod piece had come loose flopped obscenely around his crotch. A girl doesn’t like to see her dad that way, even if he isn’t her real dad but is the only one she’s got. Raye felt more scared than she’d been in her life. Really scared. It wasn’t a fear like she’d known before. She could see it dragging at him. He was giggling and crying and saying really shitty things about her. About how it was all her fault and she’d held him back all his life and that she was a c-word (Raye couldn’t say it, not even think it). The only other time she’d felt fear like that, cold implacable fear that you can feel like fingers, was when she was up high, in the dark. She’d gotten to taking pins with her when she climbed, just to stop herself from looking down and seeing the fear at her heels, reaching for a hold on an ankle, tugging at her clothes. You couldn’t look down or you were gone, and the only way to stop yourself doing that was pain. Even after she’d stopped climbing so much, she’d taken to carrying a pin with her on the streets, and giving herself a jab with it when she got the skeevies (in an alley, on the dark and rumbling rails), just to keep her eye on the job, just so she wouldn’t look down.

  It had gotten so crowded in Mac’s eyes that she could barely tell which was Mac and which was the fear. He was letting it take him, willing it to take him instead of her. Lucky some
one had a Plan B. Raye took a step toward her father’s land-wrecked body. His chalky face up at the mottled sky and his cosmetically-widened mouth was a foaming rictus; his eyes dark with concentration in a sea of crimson. Raye was wearing Norma’s Manolos for the occasion of her Sunday lunch with Mac. They were white patent and they were the real deal. The black stiletto heel was a six inch spike maybe a quarter inch in diameter. Mac’s hands were clenching and unclenching as he spun himself around. Raye waited for the right moment (like hopping onto a merry go round) when his right hand was near her feet. It unclenched and then she jumped. Her heel came down on the soft flesh of his palm and she felt the squelch of muscle and tendon from the tip of the spike to the top of her head. She screamed and he screamed at the same time, pinned to the pavement by a six inch heel. He stopped spinning and his body flopped up from the pavement in its entirety and slammed back down and lay still. He lay there a minute panting and his eyes rolled back in his head and came back clear to take in the blood spurting around the heel in his hand and then to follow the heel up the leg and body of his daughter, where she stood glaring at him and he glared back and the two words he said before the sirens cut out and the medics swarmed were exactly the ones that she was thinking.