The Almanac of the Dead

BOOK ONE. NEW JERSEY AMBUSH

THE DAY THEY HAD BEEN AMBUSHED outside the dry cleaners in Newark, Uncle Mike Blue had been lecturing Max about security precautions. Max got bored with turnpikes and big thoroughfares. Max favored narrow roads through the backwoods. He liked the orchards and fields full of dairy cows. But Mike Blue had been vehement: back roads placed Max where any cheap punk could gun him down.

Suddenly Max had found himself in the batter’s box where he could actually see the blurred shadows of the.38 slugs dropping away from the gun barrel straight at him. But the concentration necessary to see the slugs had slowed his body. The dive Max had made for the open car door had been from his baseball days too, but the slugs he had seen shattered the radio. The ones you don’t see are the ones that get you, Max had been thinking the instant a slug tore across his back and exploded in his left shoulder.

Leah’s eyes were bloodshot from crying. The newspapers were calling it a major gang war. Uncle Mike was dead on arrival, and the doctors did not expect Max to live. Leah had not been naive. She had known since she was a young girl that theirs was a family special and apart from all other families. But nothing had prepared Leah for the violence. Leah’s father and two brothers had always administered vast real estate holdings in Florida and southern California. All Max Blue had ever done since Leah had met him was court death, although she knew she could not blame Max for the military plane crash. Each time she saw him lying with a bottle of blood dripping into a vein, bandages soaking up the blood as it leaked out, Leah wanted to end it, if that was how the marriage was going to be.

Max had wanted to talk. He had seen the anger in Leah’s eyes. Later Leah had blamed her mother’s death for her anger at the hospital. What Max wanted to tell Leah was how Uncle Mike had been talking about carelessness not five minutes earlier. About the precaution of the well-traveled street where assassins hesitated because of the exposure and numbers of witnesses. What Max wanted to tell Leah was about the argument they had had over lapsing into a pattern — regular route and daily routine enemies could read like a book — the morning stop at the bakery where the driver waited with the limousine idling in a tow-away zone while Uncle Mike bought strawberry pastries and a thermos of espresso. Then the drugstore where the driver left the white Cadillac double-parked to buy the morning papers. Uncle Mike Blue stopped by the cleaners once a week on Friday to pick up his shirts and suit. Max had wanted to laugh and tell Leah how they were on schedule for death. Both Max and Uncle Mike Blue. But Max had had a tube down his throat, and Leah had needed to talk, to pour out her fear and her anger. Max had tried to keep his eyes open and struggled to focus on her mouth until he saw her words in thick, bloodred waves. Behind his eyelids he kept seeing the last words from Uncle Mike’s mouth take the shape of shirts floating off the hangers as the old man sank beneath the suit and shirts he carried. In an instant Max had seen the words, the shirts, flutter into angels.

Moving to Arizona had not been what Leah had wanted at all. Then she had realized how much Max had been changed by the shooting, although the change in Max had actually begun after the plane crash. Much later, Max Blue had told her: he could not remember what it felt like to be Max Blue, to be who he had once been before the plane crash. It had been as if Max Blue had died that day in the sand and tumbleweeds next to the runway at Fort Bliss. After the plane crash, Max had still pretended to enjoy Leah’s thighs spread open on the bed. But the.38 slugs had blasted away the Max Blue who could pretend. The Max Blue who had survived no longer bothered to conceal what he felt. When he came home from the hospital after the shooting, Max preferred to sleep alone. He told Leah there was only one thing he wanted, and that was to move to Tucson, Arizona. He liked the looks of the skies around Tucson. He did not tell Leah, but after the shooting, the New Jersey skies had reminded Max too much of the gray fabric inside a coffin lid. He could not explain the importance of the high, open dome of bright blue sky except to connect the sky with the army plane crash outside El Paso.

Max had lain in the dry tumbleweeds and sand dunes overnight. He had hurt so bad in the night he had passed out and thought he had died. But in the morning he had lain on his back, unable to move his legs or arms, and he had watched the sky emerge from the darkness of the night, and he had seen the inky stain smear into thick gray terraces of clouds he realized later were no clouds but merely the fuzziness of his vision from loss of blood. But then Max had awakened into the deep, bright-blue depths of sky all around as if he were flying high above the desert, above the earth so he could easily see how it curved into the Pacific Ocean just beyond Yuma. Only Max and the plane navigator had survived the crash. Max had never forgot the instant he had seen the bright blue of the sky with full El Paso sun; he had awakened on a sand dune as the army jeeps approached. The old Max had died in the crash. A different Max had somehow pulled himself back into this world, but not completely. He could not rid himself of the sickening fear he felt each time he began to feel drowsy and drop off to sleep. “Dropping off” was so much like dying.

WHEELIE

THE OLD WING of the El Paso Veterans Hospital had housed First World War veterans and veterans of the Spanish and Mexican wars who had contracted tropical fevers and lung diseases. Supposedly they responded to El Paso’s dry climate. Most of the old wing had been taken up with the oxygen tanks and compressors, the hiss and hum of respirators for lungs seared with mustard gas in the First World War. Leah had pushed Max in a wheelchair down the dim, high-ceilinged halls of the old wing during visitors’ hours. But few of the old men had visitors. They had been sent far from their homes for the dry, warm climate, and gradually they had lost touch with their families and their lives before the war. Although they sat upright in bed, green plastic tubing from nostril to oxygen tanks, their eyes were motionless and blank. Max saw these men had been dead for years — worse than dead to their families, who got no insurance money for a vegetable hooked to a machine.

The new wing was full of Second World War and Korean War veterans, although new policy had placed patients in hospitals as close as possible to their homes. Max had noted that most visitors came for the “temporary admissions” like Max — people who could walk out the front door again. Families soon recognized when a man was as good as dead. Max had found no fault with his mother and sister or Leah. They had not left him for dead. All of them wanted to move to El Paso until Max had yelled at all of them — he was getting out. He wasn’t permanent like the other poor bastards in wheelchairs.

Max observed the permanent “wheelies”: they tended to marry bulldozer-sized social workers in their forties; wheelies married loudmouths who abused them. “Wheelie’s” huge social-worker wife threw him out of his chair when they had fights. While he was in a wheelchair himself, Max could not avoid these monologues from the wheelies. Max swallowed a pill and settled back with his eyes closed. Here is an army colonel’s son who talks a blue streak. He had broken his neck in a swimming-pool accident when he was fifteen and drunk. He tells Max he feels out of place there.

“Wheelie” must return to the veterans’ hospital from time to time for the bedsores he gets on his legs and butt, despite the sheepskins his huge wife buys for his wheelchair and bed. Wheelie has lifetime benefits from the veterans’ hospital because his neck broke at National Guard summer training camp. Max opens his eyes from time to time or nods and says “yeah” and “ah-huh,” but Max is not listening to Wheelie so much as he is drifting along in his own thoughts when Wheelie whispers that his prick gets hard and the women can’t get enough of it.

BLUE SKIES

THE MORNING THEY HAD KILLED Mike Blue and hit Max, the world had changed for Max. He had seen everything — every person — differently from before. Then gradually the truth had emerged for Max: he had already begun the change after the plane crash. The hit on him and Uncle Mike had been far worse than the plane crash. Max was beginning to wonder, how many chances did Death get in five years? What kind of lottery was it anyway? How soon before Max’s number did come up?

When Max had awakened, he did not recognize any of the people around the bed in his hospital room. Some were obviously hospital staff, but Max knew the others assembled there must be his family members. He looked at the women and tried to guess which might be his wife. Max had lost all sense of connection with the world the instant the.38 slugs hit his chest. Max had told Leah exactly how he felt; emotional bonds between everyone and himself had been severed.

Max kept other thoughts to himself because he knew how people were, especially his family, and the thoughts were thoughts better left in silence. The thoughts were always about death. One death or many deaths: how many times, how many ways, did a man die? Max knew there was nothing after death. Nothingness and silence. The silence and the emptiness were darkness. Max had recovered consciousness after the plane crash, but he had never forgotten the darkness and the silence that flowed endlessly. There were no devils or Jesus. Death was the dark, deep earth that blotted out the light of a vast blue sky Max called life.

In his delirium after the shooting Max had confused memories of the shooting with earlier memories of the plane crash Max never knew he had. The shooting and the plane crash had become a single nightmare, darkness flooding light until Max awoke sweating with terror.

The priest who had visited Max at the hospital after the shooting urged Max to meditate and pray for the precious gift of faith he had lost. Max did not tell the priest he had spent days and weeks drifting on painkillers meditating on death; all forms of death. All death was natural; murder and war were natural; rape and incest were also natural acts. Serial murderers who chewed their signatures on victims’ breasts and buttocks and even the baby-fuckers — they were all consequences of human evolution.

Now years later, Max thinks of himself as an executive producer of one-night-only performances, dramas played out in the warm California night breezes, in a phone booth in downtown Long Beach. All Max had done was dial a phone number and listen while the pigeon repeats, “Hello? Hello? Hello? Hello?” until.22-pistol shots snap pop! pop! and Max hangs up.

Max believed in death because death contained certainty. The changes in once-living tissue, the decay, were absolute. The dead were truly destroyed and gone. Max was fascinated by the thought that death terminated all being; death changed a man to a pile of rotting waste.

Max believed killing a man was doing him a favor; life insurance policies were good once the widow and family were cleared by police and private investigations. The men and women Max had got contracts for all deserved it. “Don’t play if you can’t pay.” Max had had little cards printed up for the hits. Cops ate up weird messages on calling cards left at the crime scene. Cops were criminals at heart. Leave the calling card and the cops would think they had a serial killer on their hands. Cops liked to believe the victims had it coming, so the printed cards were the finishing touch. “What goes around comes around,” was printed on another batch of cards. The cards had functioned as codes to alert contract-holders the job had been performed by Max. Max never lifted a finger, or if he did, he was hundreds, even thousands, of miles away lifting only a telephone receiver.

Max had spent considerable time thinking about the best modes of assassination. Max preferred the word assassination because each death had been “political.” Max had made a set of guidelines he followed. A death that disgraced or discredited the victim was, of course, the form of death most in demand in the international business world. The value of this guideline could easily be seen in the Philippines, where Marcos had made the mistake of assassinating Aquino at the airport, instead of the whorehouse. The result had been instant sainthood for Aquino and political jet-power for his widow.

Max favors.22 caliber pumped four times into the nape of the neck, point-blank, followed by a liberal dousing of white gas. Sign the.22-caliber bullet “Anonymous.” Under microscopes in the crime lab, even the best ballistics men could not distinguish which.22 had fired the bullet.

Arson after the hit was almost a necessity nowadays, due to the increasing sensitivity of lab tests for hair, blood, skin, and fibers. Fire took care of everything. Max had followed the fishing-boat murders in Alaska because the State had been able to produce so little physical evidence at the murder trial. The secrets of success had been a cheap.22 rifle and five gallons of white gas. The intense heat from the fire had melted dental fillings and the teeth of the corpses had shattered so that no identification on one corpse was ever made. Max liked to think of himself as somewhat a scholar, an expert in a very narrow field. He had favorites that regrettably no one would ever know about.

Max believed the ordinary details and normal circumstances of accidental death had been the components of his success. The one-car accident at night, the hit and run while the subject jogs a residential street, the garden hose to the car exhaust and the victim at the wheel with the engine running; irrefutable accidents. People slipped and died of blows to the head in tubs and showers all the time. People suffered strokes and heart failure in hot tubs; people died all the time while swimming laps.

Max had favorites. A lawyer had been found facedown in the swimming pool in his shorts with a wedge-shaped gash in the back of his skull. Tucson police were as stupid as they were corrupt. Tucson police saw accidents where Max had only tried for unsolved homicides. The lawyer had gone to a small apartment complex he owned to collect rents early one Sunday afternoon. Tucson police had ruled the death a swimming accident, and the head wound a result of “colliding with the edge of the diving board.” The guy who had whacked the lawyer had panicked and thrown the golf putter into a big tree near the swimming pool. Only by accident had a gardener found the golf club in the tree. Weeks had passed and the dead lawyer was just another unsolved murder.

Max had always delivered top-quality work because he had been careful to observe and to refine his methods. The key to success was to give the cops ample simple explanations for the death. Any appearance of even a remote possibility of accident or suicide was explanation enough to satisfy police and relieve them of further investigative work.

Max called the categories “big time” and “small time,” although they were all murder or assassination, the word Max increasingly preferred. In the “small” category Max had one or two he liked: the swimming-pool accident and the motorcycle accident. Max the choreographer and designer had been home asleep while “subcontractors” had followed his blueprints all night. They had done the neck-breaking and had then loaded the corpse, with his motorcycle, and driven them to a little grove of paloverde trees growing by the Speedway Exit ramp off I-10. Max had rather liked that it was March and the paloverdes had been thick with bright yellow blossoms when they had hung the “motorcyclist” upside down in a paloverde and left the bike appropriately skidded and smashed lying at the bottom of the exit ramp. Max had liked the newspaper report that a woman on her way to work had sighted “strange fruit” in the flowering desert tree at six o’clock in the morning.

GOLF GAME

MAX RUNS HIS BUSINESS from the men’s locker room of a municipal golf course. He uses the pay telephone in the lobby or outside the Jacuzzi. As far as local people know, Max is a retired businessman who plays golf every day for his health. But Max goes to the golf course every day for the light, and for the blue vastness of the sky. He played golf to savor the single instant of perfection when the ball and the head of the club met in absolute alignment, and the ball arched gracefully above the pale ribbon of grass. Max loved the purity of natural physics and geometry. When he watched the arch of the ball against the sun, Max thought of the great cathedrals he had seen in Europe where light was celebrated as the presence of God. After the shooting Max could remain indoors only a few hours before he felt claustrophobic. He returns to the house only for messages. Weather permitting, Max takes a nap on a chaise lounge on the patio. At night Max no longer sleeps more than a few hours.

Many nights Max stays on the driving range with two shifts of bodyguards until two A.M. The secret of Max’s security plan is the helicopter and.44 magnums with infrared scopes for all his guards. Max hires and trains the bodyguards himself. The most important parts of the process are the testing and the personal interview. Max hires the shy loners with the dreamy eyes who answer no when Max inquires about wives, children, parents, or close friends in the area. Max watches the men. He rotates the guards so he can watch them at the golf course. Max watches a few weeks and then he can tell which of the new men can be trusted for special assignments. Max has found the optimum number of men is twelve. Max provides the car, the housing, and pays for a telephone. The guards don’t seem to care that Max is able to keep an eye on them with this system. Max never pays armed guards anything less than top dollar because, after all, they do have guns. The quiet ones who worked out constantly and swam in icy rivers alone seemed relieved to have Max take a special interest in their personal lives. Max knew loyalty was always bought. A man had to eat. Humans bought the loyalty of the dog and the horse with food. The worst betrayals came from one’s own blood. Brothers sold out sisters, and sisters betrayed one another; mothers informed on their own children. Max had always avoided hiring family members or “friends” of friends. Preference was given to out-of-town applicants who had recently lived abroad in the Middle East or Asia.

Max sketches out the entire operation step by step, act by act, so all the gunman has to do is pull the trigger. Because Max had learned the hard way about assassins: if they did not have each step mapped out for them, the least decision became overwhelming for them. Assassins easily pulled triggers, but they might be paralyzed for hours deciding what model or color of car to rent. Max favors.22 calibers with cheap silencers he buys wholesale from a Church of God minister in Tucson. Max still can not get used to working with the white trash of Tucson. But he has little choice; the Mexicans and Indians all stick together in this town. The preacher who makes silencers fights income tax laws; the silencers are just a sideline to pay legal fees. White men had never been able to control Tucson or the Mexican border. In Tucson white men got the leftovers, as Sonny Blue had bitterly called them — cigarette machines, pinball games, and racetracks — dogs and ponies — kid stuff. Or garbage and toxic waste.

Naturally Max was pleased at the prospect of working with Mr. B. Mr. B., of course, was ex-military, still called “the major” by Greenlee. Max knows Mr. B. has important friends because the senator gives Max a call.

On the golf course Max finds out a great deal about a man; if he is deliberate and slow at the tee or if he rushes a hole or panics in a sand trap. Mr. B. has a nervous, tight swing that pulls the ball into the cactus and mesquite so many times Max quits keeping score. Max marches him through eighteen holes; Mr. B. talks about national security, and the need for good men.

Max likes to watch his guests flail at golf balls while attempting to carry on business discussions. Golf-course meetings give Max every advantage. Max is aware of a growing sense of satisfaction and well-being as he finishes off the last hole.

Max watches the major clench his jaws as he swings. Mr. B. jokes that he is more at home at a poker table as his ball disappears into the big arroyo curving near the eighteenth hole. As Max drove him back to the clubhouse, Mr. B. leaned out the golf cart to get a better look.

“What’s the real estate market like around here?” Mr. B. had asked.

Max smiled. “Ask my wife. The real estate developer.”

“Commercial property?”

“Absolutely!” Max said, proud that Leah had taken Tucson real estate by the throat. “Industrial parks — warehouses, showrooms, business suites.”

Mr. B. smiled. “These friends of mine,” he began, looking directly at Max, “are looking for warehouse and office space.”

Later Max had phoned Leah from the clubhouse. While Mr. B. was in the shower. Could she possibly join them for drinks at the Arizona Inn in an hour?

LEAH BLUE

MAX WAS NEVER HOME anymore with Leah and the boys. Max knew she would not say it, but he did not make love to her anymore either. Max had looked at Leah as she made the accusations. He said nothing. He did not feel angry or irritated. Leah was not a stupid woman. She knew what she needed and what her two sons needed. Leah was much like her brothers and her father, who operated real estate ventures in California and Florida. From time to time her brothers and father had found the “liquidation of certain assets or deficits” was necessary. Rival developers or difficult contractors had suddenly disappeared. Max had been attracted to that killer’s quality about Leah. But the attraction — the feeling — had been lost, left behind that morning he had slipped on the sidewalk in his own blood. Max had not forgot the murderous expression that had seized Leah’s face when he had told her about the move to Arizona. He had promised her the real estate business then. The money would be hers and she could run it any way she wanted. He didn’t care. Max had tried to sound lighthearted and tried to make a joke: “Almost a widow twice.” Leah would have the real estate to support herself and the boys if Max ran out of luck.

As the only daughter and with her mother dead, Leah had been a daddy’s girl. Her brothers had always taken her with them to parties and the beach. Her father had explained business deals to her and the brothers at the table after supper. Leah was one of them, and they had taught her to be bossy and had let the killer shine in Leah’s eyes. So Max had bought Leah off. Otherwise, no Tucson unless Max went alone.

Max left Leah alone and Leah left Max alone. The real estate market in Tucson and southern Arizona was wide open, ripe for development. Leah only had to visit her father and brothers to see the possibilities. Her father had driven down to San Diego by way of Palm Springs. Her father would only nod his head as they passed huge tracts of desert that had been bulldozed into gridworks scraped clean of cactus and lined with palm trees. Leah didn’t say anything. She just nodded. She got the idea, she got the idea.

“Max wants Leah to go into Tucson real estate.”

“Real estate what? Industrial, commercial, apartments, condos — what?”

“That’s what we were just trying to figure out.”

But Leah had laughed at all three of them. “This is Tucson, Arizona, we’re talking about — a dusty one-horse town,” she reminded them.

“You’ll knock them dead, sweetheart,” Daddy had told her at the airport, and given her a big kiss. Her brothers both stared out the windows at the airplane. It wasn’t any secret who was number one with Daddy.

Leah wore whatever she wanted when she went to look at acreage or city lots. If the housekeepers looked busy or if the kids wanted to go, she took them. They were good for about forty-five minutes playing with the knobs and buttons on the dashboard of the big Chrysler. The lights would flash and the wipers would go. The windows went up and down. But then Sonny would lose interest and tease Bingo. Finally Bingo would slump against the wheel in tears. The first time it had happened, the agent representing the seller turned pale. He paused, expecting Leah to rush across the vacant lot to get the kid off the horn. And Leah might have done that except she saw the agent’s discomfort. Cars on the street were slowing, and it was Leah, in her bright green mumu and matching heels standing in the center of the vacant lot, people were staring at. Leah had sensed the agent was about to give in on the interest rate; the sound of the car horn had worked like a vise. Leah never even glanced in the direction of the car. The agent broke. Leah opened her bright blue straw handbag and fished out a ballpoint pen. A light breeze shivered past carrying a springtime odor of blossoms — desert trees, she didn’t know which ones. The agent unfolded the real estate sale contract. At that moment she had felt something she had never felt before. The horn had stopped and she could hear the voices of the boys approaching behind her. But nothing could interfere or change what she had just experienced. She had outwitted the agent. The sensation was the closest to anything sexual she’d felt since Max got shot. Sometimes when she was driving back from the county recorder’s office or her lawyer’s office downtown, she would think about what she was doing. Max had told her to put the land titles in her name or the names of the boys. Max was busy with more important things. Anyway, she had already started financing her own deals. She didn’t have to wait for money from Max. If something really big came up, she’d call her brothers.

There was nothing to talk about. Max was working on something. That was all he would say. Max slept on a big leather couch in his office and took phone calls in the middle of the night.

DESERT REAL ESTATE

THERE DIDN’T SEEM to be any way to explain to Leah what had happened. A great deal of what had been his life before had vanished. When Max took a piss, he’d look down at his dick in his hand. He’d watch the urine spread in yellow clouds in the water of the toilet bowl. He’d watch the yellow stream flow away in urinals. In the shower he’d lather his balls with soap, then work the suds in the tip of his dick. But that was all. It might have been his foot he was touching.

Some nights Leah would lie with her eyes closed and imagine that the city limits of Tucson and surrounding Pima County were a gridwork of colored squares for Chinese checkers. They had been in Tucson for a year and a half, and Max had not had sex with her or even slept in the same bed with her. Going over offers and counteroffers and joint-partnership deals was Leah’s way of getting back to sleep. Otherwise Leah would be engulfed by loneliness and she would cry. All Max could tell her was the shooting had changed him. He lived and sometimes even slept at the golf course.

Buying real estate was a real rush, Leah was fond of saying. Max had hardly noticed the changes in Leah’s schedule or the full-time housekeeper. Max did not ask questions if Leah did not ask questions. In the beginning Leah had had to work late nights and all weekends to catch on to the real estate investment business. She called her father and her brothers and asked their advice. She canvased neighborhoods on the edges of the city, leaving her business cards in case large parcels of desert became available. Within the family and the organization, Leah’s real estate business was looked upon as evidence of how bad off Max really was. None of them, not even those who were suspicious of Max and his strange “retirement” to Tucson, bothered to look closely at his wife’s investments. Most assumed that her half dozen duplexes and bungalows next to the air force base constituted a modest real estate business the family had arranged to support Max. The ones who were suspicious kept close watch. Those who did not play golf had to learn. Max did not meet with anyone except on the golf course. Always outside, always in the open air. Max played foursomes three times a day every day. Max’s preference was to play in hot months; he had teed off by six A.M.

Leah had said nothing to anyone. Max wanted the confusion. Max could not leave Tucson, that was the rumor. It was supposed to have something to do with the hot, dry climate and how the doctors had sewed him back together. Something about the cold made his bones and joints ache.

For a long time Leah had not much enjoyed sex with the men she got. If they were not too terrified to fuck her, then they were either crazy or stupid.

Leah had been intrigued with the reactions men had when they learned they’d just fucked Max Blue’s wife. Some sent dozens of roses or pots of orchids in bloom addressed to Mr. and Mrs. Max Blue. Leah knew she would never get those suckers in bed again. But those who did not send flowers but telephoned with inside information on classy municipal bonds, followed by a call for lunch later in the week — well, those babes were few and far between. Leah sensed their sexual excitement was aroused by danger. They might race motorcycles or sky-dive, or they might be aroused by the danger of having the wife of Mr. Murder himself. Leah tries to imagine their fantasies — the race to pump a load into her before the gunmen break through the door, and everything explodes right then, every pore wrenched by prolonged throbs.

Later Max tells Leah she is a hundred percent wrong about men’s fantasies; those are her fantasies — the excitement of the orgasm before the bullets. Max knows what the men are thinking as they ram it home to Leah:

“ ‘His wife, his wife, I bury it in his wife! Over his dead body.’ They imagine you spread over my dead body.” Leah knows Max is right. Only a woman fantasizes bullets striking a man’s back at orgasm; a man’s fantasy at orgasm was firing bullets into the wife’s husband. Leah wonders if Max gets excited when they talk about sex.

FAMILY BUSINESS

ANGELO SANK BACK in the seat of the big Mercedes and let Sonny talk. He only half-listened because he was noticing that his Aunt Leah’s realty corporations owned every other commercial parcel in northwest Tucson. Sonny was talking as fast as he was driving, cutting in and out of traffic, doing sixty up Oracle Road. Before Angelo had come West, one rumor he’d heard was Uncle Max played golf only on one golf course. The course with the desert landscaping. He had pictured the holes with their colored flags and numbers on the pin surrounded by a green of solid rock or adobe clay. The first visit to Max on the golf course had disappointed Angelo. The greens had finely manicured green grass, and the fairways connecting the holes, while a little sparse and yellow on the edges, were still grassy. The hazards were desert hazards, and Angelo had found them quite wonderful. Not only did the unwary golfer risk sending a ball into a sand trap, the spiny desert trees — paloverde and mesquite — growing along the edges of the fairways created an impenetrable jungle. The best hazard was formed not with deep sand or boulders and big rocks or even with the desert trees. The best hazard was a wide strip of cholla cactus branching up as tall as six feet, their spines so thick they resembled yellowish fur. Max had all kinds of funny stories about vacationers, winter visitors, playing golf there for the first time and attempting a save from the center of the cactus hazard. Teddy bear or jumping cactus, Max called the chollas, and he claimed he’d seen golfers with segments of the spiny branches sticking to their heads, their asses, and even stuck to an ear.

What Sonny is talking about is the task facing their organization. He is talking about percentages of nets and grosses. Sonny is talking expansions and resistance and what the competition is hoping to expand into. Angelo always feels a vague uneasiness when he hears Sonny or Bingo talk like that. Angelo likes what he does with the horses: checking up on the racetracks the organization controls.

In the parking lot at the golf course Sonny wraps up his monologue with, “That’s where you come in,” and Angelo grins and laughs so his cousin won’t catch his inattention. At the pro shop the man behind the counter says, “Fourteenth hole,” and points, the minute he sees Sonny Blue. Sonny points, at one of the canopied golf carts. Everyone on the East Coast has theories about old Max Blue and the golf course. Most of them agree he is stupid or crazy. But Angelo sees how quickly the four bodyguards with his uncle sight the golf cart as he and Sonny approach. Angelo feels a wave of sweat break over him as Max Blue’s four bodyguards pull out their Uzis. The three golf carts and armed men in front of them barricade Max, who tees off calmly. Max hooks the shot and the ball disappears into the mesquite grove below the sixteenth hole. Angelo wishes he’d eaten more for breakfast. He knows what his uncle is going to ask him. Angelo prefers to leave things just as they are. He will tell his uncle that if he has to. He will remind his uncle they won’t find another man who knows horses as Angelo does. Unless you know horses, you can’t tell how much funny stuff is going on at a racetrack — throwing races, needles, and hopped-up ponies — all the monkey business Uncle Bill had taught Angelo to watch out for at the track. Uncle Bill had taught Max for a while. Max will listen when Angelo says Bill’s name. Angelo has had the fillies on the Southwest pari-mutuel circuit for two years now, and the best part is he had only seen a gun once and that was over a dope deal. The Southwest tracks are cleaner and quieter than any on the coast. Angelo wants to stay with the horses. Someone had to do the job, and Angelo and the racing fillies were assets.

Max can see Angelo is uneasy with the bodyguards. Max jokes that the best bodyguards trust nobody, not even your grandmother. Max is smiling and nods his head in the direction the lost ball flew.

“You can’t practice enough,” Max says, and glances at the gold watch on his wrist and then at the clubhouse. He is expecting a threesome at eleven, Max says.

Angelo is always surprised at how much Max and Bill look alike. Angelo is always embarrassed at how his heartbeat quickens when he first sees his uncle Max’s face. But the eyes are different. None of them had eyes like Bill’s. Uncle Bill had been the only one who had wanted to give Angelo a chance. Because, Bill liked to brag, he and the boy were alike in their love for the horses—“the ponies,” Uncle Bill liked to call them. Bill had wanted the rest of the family to know Angelo belonged working with the horses.

Angelo didn’t want to get involved with the expansion. The expansion involved the Mexican border and shipments from friends of Mr. B.’s. Angelo spots two golf carts speeding toward them in the distance. Angelo knows this is the threesome for the game at eleven.

“Election year is coming up,” Angelo says when they get back to the car, but Sonny Blue doesn’t acknowledge the remark. Angelo as a horse owner has worked out well, Sonny Blue tells him. Angelo hates the condescending tone his cousin uses.

“Bring your fillies to Tucson. Run them here this winter,” Sonny Blue had said. But all that time they had been maneuvering Angelo into position.

MARILYN

ANGELO HAD BEEN a little surprised at Marilyn. It was the difference, Marilyn said, between the East Coast and the Southwest. Angelo asked her where in the East she’d been, and she had hesitated for only a split second before she said, well, she hadn’t ever been anyplace outside New Mexico except for Texas, and then only to El Paso, which wasn’t really like Texas. But she’d heard. She’d heard about how people in New York City and New Jersey and places back there were not friendly. Marilyn had winked at Angelo. People had been lining up behind him at the quinella window, and some of them were beginning to get nasty and mutter at her out loud. But there again Marilyn had surprised him. She had told all of them, even the meek-looking old men with only one twenty-dollar bill in their hands, they could damn well stand there and wait, they could hold their horses (she had laughed at her own joke), that the gentleman ahead of them was placing a rather large wager. Angelo did pull out the roll of fifty-dollar bills then just because Marilyn had said that. Later on, after she got off work and Angelo met her at the ticket windows, he had teased her. Angelo told her that he had been at every window at just about every track on the East Coast since he was a kid standing beside his uncle. Angelo told her that he had never heard anyone, woman or man, anywhere on the East Coast talk like that to irate customers. She was, Angelo teased, a whole lot more like the East Coast than she was an Albuquerque girl. But she laughed that off and said that if you didn’t get tough, you got trampled, and she took off walking a little ahead of him, fast, determined, rooting around in her big tooled-leather cowgirl purse for a cigarette. Angelo had to hurry a little to catch up with her, and when he said hold your horses, hold your horses, what’s the rush, Marilyn laughed and then looked him right in the eye and said:

“I am dying for a cold beer and a joint, and then I want to hit the hay with you.” Just like that.

Marilyn picked the bar she said all the track employees went to. She said the good thing about it was the jukebox because it had all the old Bob Wills and the Texas Playboys albums on it. As soon as they’d stepped in the door, she had asked him for quarters. Give me all your quarters, she had said, winking again. And then even before they’d got their beer, she had gone to study the jukebox, sliding quarters and pushing buttons. The people on the barstools looked like track employees all right. Angelo saw a couple of the assistant starters, and two of the exercise boys, rubbing their hands around the coolness of the beer mugs. They all stared at him because of the white linen suit. At first that had bothered Angelo a little. Because in the East, sharp dressers were everywhere. What you wore mattered a great deal so far as how clerks or cabdrivers treated you. But in El Paso or Albuquerque around the racetracks where all that remained of the cowboys could be found, snappy suits, and fancy shoes or hats, brought out the worst in people. The remains of what were once cowboys were the most nasty. The few blacks and all the Mexicans and Indians behaved a lot better, mostly to spite the broken-down white men in faded, torn jeans hanging so low the tops of their ass cracks showed. All that got better as soon as they found out that Angelo had no intention of giving orders or looking down his nose.

Or as Marilyn used to like to remind him, even when they were in bed together, “Out here we don’t like people bossing us.” And the first time she had said it, something about the way she was raised up on one arm, her tiny breast dangling, made him burst out laughing. He had said, well, what do you think — that people in the East like to be bossed? And she had thought about it a moment before she had let herself slide down, hand and arm buried under the pillow, facedown on the bed. She had looked up at him slyly and said:

“I boss you a lot and you don’t even know it!”

Now, Marilyn glanced up and gave him a big smile as she took her beer. And then she hastily pushed two more buttons before she took Angelo by the hand and pulled him in the direction of a booth near the pool tables.

“I noticed you the times you bought fifty-dollar WINS and quinellas and daily doubles,” she said. “I tried to imagine what you would be like.”

“And were you right?”

Marilyn was taking a long swallow of beer, so she just nodded. “I’m mostly right,” she said. “Mostly.” And then Angelo had seen an instant when the glitter in her blue eyes had gone. But she had bounced right back. The way her long blond hair bounced in the loose ponytail she wore. Long, lovely strands pulling loose along both temples and behind her ears so she was most like a racing filly, all motion and speed and spirit. Angelo wondered if this was another of those differences between East and Southwest: the suddenness that things happened here. Angelo wasn’t more than half through a bottle of beer and he was in love as he had never been before.

Marilyn talked and told him everything, but then Angelo would see the glitter in her blue eyes flicker, and she would spring questions at him. Why did he grow up with aunts and uncles and grannys and no mother or father? How did he get away with not going to school? What was he doing wearing those white linen suits, strolling around the track every weekend? Had he watched too many movies? Too much TV? How come he was always alone? Didn’t he have girlfriends? A family? Marilyn had fired all the questions like a shotgun, but then she had backed off, letting him know he could answer one or some or none. And so he had pointed down at her scuffed cowboy boots and the bell-bottom blue jeans carefully faded and then embroidered with flowers and butterflies and rainbows.

“So now you’re a cowgirl? Not a hippie?” Angelo was smiling as he said it, but something had disturbed Marilyn. She looked down and picked at the label on the beer bottle. Just as quickly, she brightened up again because one of her favorites was playing on the jukebox, “The Milk Cow Blues.” The bartender brought over two more bottles of beer and indicated that one of the exercise boys had bought them a round. Angelo looked in their direction and nodded. Marilyn glanced over her shoulder.

“You know why I like this song? I like it because it’s about two things at once, you know? If you only want to hear the part about the milk cow, you can.” Marilyn winked as she added, “Or you hear the other side too.” Angelo nodded. He left a couple of dollars on the table and they walked out hand in hand.

Angelo was staying at the Hilton. Was that okay? Marilyn clapped her hands together. The Hilton! That was better than any motel!

She couldn’t keep from walking ahead of him, to pinch the plastic leaves of the fake fig trees decorating the halls. Angelo enjoyed her excitement at the small details. He liked the cowgirl belt with MARILYN tooled in white letters wreathed in red rosebuds and green ivy. She had pulled off her boots and rubbed her toes along the carpet. The socks she wore were men’s socks, mismatched, one black, one dark blue. Then she had spread-eagled herself facedown to sniff the nubby, white bedspread. Marilyn had only seen king-size beds, she told Angelo. She had never actually tried one. Angelo had undressed while Marilyn explored the bathroom and the closet. She laughed at how carefully Angelo hung up the linen sport coat and trousers. Her faded bell-bottoms were in a heap with torn white panties and the men’s socks. She left the red, pearl-button cowboy shirt for Angelo to take off.

Marilyn was the expert. Afterward she told Angelo that all the guys wanted a good blow job, and so she had practiced and practice makes perfect, doesn’t it, and it had been all Angelo could do to smile and nod his head. She had said she was too nervous and excited about being in the Hilton to want sex very much. But Angelo had not been able to get enough of her. By morning Angelo had realized Marilyn preferred oral sex. Although Angelo held his weight off her, Marilyn seemed panicked when he was on top of her. She clawed at his shoulders, panting, fighting to escape suffocation. Later she admitted the feeling of suffocation was just something crazy, and her girlfriends told her that if that was true, then why didn’t she gag or feel as if she were choking when she sucked cock. Marilyn said she didn’t know. Even being on top of Angelo frightened her, although not as much. Marilyn had described the sensation nervously, defensively. All she could think of was one of those barbecue skewers piercing all the way through her. After breakfast as Angelo was driving Marilyn to her house, she had been silent, then suddenly she had informed him that blow jobs were what the professionals did. No diseases that way, no pregnancies. She didn’t like to be pinned down, not since her big brothers had teased her and wrestled her when she was a little girl.

Marilyn did not explain her reason for leaving Angelo any better than she had explained her sensation of being suffocated. Angelo had thought she was as happy and as much in love as he was. The racing season in Albuquerque had ended when the state fair was over, and Marilyn wanted to water-ski at Elephant Butte Lake. “We were wild,” Marilyn said, and then she talked about Tim and the others. “Those were really bitchin’ days,” she said right before she fell asleep. When they stopped for gas in Truth or Consequences, Marilyn had asked for money for a long-distance call. Marilyn did not say whom she had called, and Angelo didn’t ask. She continued with the water-skiing story about taking acid at Elephant Butte Lake and the guy who had skied right over a rattlesnake.

“I didn’t know rattlesnakes could swim,” Angelo said.

“They climb trees too,” she added, lighting up another joint. Angelo could feel a strain even while they both laughed at the prospect of water-skiing legs spread wide open and suddenly straight ahead, swimming for the cattails on the lake edge, the big diamond-back rattler coming at you straight on. Marilyn was trying too hard to keep the mood funny and a little crazy. She kept passing Angelo the joint.

Marilyn was staring out the window now. She had let go of the funny, silly mood. Angelo could almost feel her gathering up the words. He thought he could almost see the words rising up in her chest and then up into her throat. When she turned her head from the window, Angelo saw big tears in her eyes. Marilyn would not let him park the car or wait with her at the El Paso Airport. She said it was better that way. Somehow Angelo had known how it would be, after the first time they had made love and Marilyn mentioned Tim. She and Tim went back a long time together. Marilyn had told Angelo. She had warned him.

CHANGE OF HEART

ANGELO SAT IN HIS CAR for a long time in the El Paso Airport parking lot. Marilyn had been getting ready to return to Tim for a long time. Angelo had just been playing a long shot. He had known it all along, but it had not stopped him from loving her. Angelo sat and felt the street shake under the car as the big jets landed and took off. Marilyn had never told Angelo what had caused her to leave Tim. Or even if she had been the one to go. Once she had described her “crowd” as the last survivors. Survivors of what? Angelo had wanted to know. “Oh, you know, we were the first hippies and now we are the last. Just us. Just our crowd. The people that hung out together.” Angelo felt Marilyn wanted the crowd again. Wanted that group that was hers, where what she did was what they all did. Angelo thought he had some idea of how to entice a woman away from another man. But with Marilyn, every expensive dinner, every shopping spree, had been followed with a strange remorse. She would tell Angelo how they had gone for weeks shoplifting what they needed in grocery stores. Cigarettes, beer, even steaks. Once she had got caught with two rib-eye steaks stuffed down the front of her jeans.

An airport cop finally came over to the car and asked if he was okay. Angelo nodded. He drove slowly until he got outside the airport, and then he purposely took the narrow, twisting road over Mt. Franklin. Bingo had a black Trans Am and was always bragging about how fast he could get to the El Paso Airport from his house. Angelo made himself game rules that afternoon: he could shift down and use the accelerator, but he could not touch the brake. If he made it to Bingo’s without touching the brake and under forty-five minutes, then he would get Marilyn back. When Angelo skidded into the long, sandy driveway, he had not used the brake once. He did not have to glance down at his wristwatch to know he had come in well under forty-five minutes.

The Hacienda of the Wall was what Sonny called the house Bingo had custom-built on sixty acres of yucca and white sand dunes northwest of El Paso. Sonny had made jokes about the design, asking if the architect also designed jails and prisons. Bingo argued he needed his home to be his castle; “like a fortress,” Angelo had suggested, and Bingo had leaped on that phrase, nodding his head enthusiastically.

The terrace above the pool was where Bingo spent most of his time. He had arranged all the furniture an executive suite might have — a big L-shaped desk of chrome and glass, two plump champagne sofas, with matching armchair. Although the terrace had a high redwood canopy, it was open on all sides, and whenever thunderstorms threatened, Bingo’s entire house staff — three Mexican women and the Vietnamese gardener — had to drag Bingo’s executive suite indoors.

Angelo did not get out of the car but sat looking at the high, massive walls of Bingo’s “hacienda.” A minute later he heard the voice of Bingo’s bodyguard, and Angelo followed him to the terrace. Bingo was in his swimming trunks; his hairy beer-belly sat like a stuffed toy in his lap. He had been looking at a Penthouse magazine. Bingo tossed the magazine down and reached for his short terry-cloth robe.

“Hey, Angelo, what’s wrong, man?” Bingo said, gesturing for the maid to bring Angelo the same as she was bringing for him. The maid brought them both double or triple margaritas in long-stemmed glasses that looked as wide and deep as fish bowls.

“Wow,” Angelo managed to say, “whatever’s wrong with you, this size will fix it!” And for a long time they sat in silence, both staring off at the southwest, where the sun was rapidly disappearing behind the dunes along the horizon. Halfway through the margarita Angelo thought he could feel a great pressure under his lungs and heart, pressure that seemed to press his ribs and the bones of his chest outward like limbs bending in the wind. The pressure was only there if he thought about it. If he remembered that Marilyn wasn’t back in Albuquerque in the little apartment she rented near the fairgrounds. If he remembered that she had arrived at a decision. If he remembered that she was gone. Angelo drained the glass, but before he could reach over to the glass-top coffee table in front of the armchair, the Mexican maid had taken the empty glass and disappeared inside. Bingo was used to the service so he just nodded and smiled, still gazing over the dunes edged in sage and last year’s tumbleweeds bleached white. Angelo could tell by the way Bingo puffed away at the marijuana cigarette and gazed out at the expanses of desert, Bingo liked to listen to the sounds around them, to the calls of nighthawks and crickets.

“I could just sit here like this forever,” Bingo said, but a moment later the phone beside him rang and Bingo disappeared inside. “Sonny,” was all Bingo said.

The maid set another margarita in front of him, but Angelo didn’t move. He sat facing the south with the bloodred sunset in the corner of his right eye. Bingo’s property was actually in New Mexico rather than Texas, where, as Bingo put it, state government is less flexible. New Mexico was one of those states with “a lot of flex,” Bingo liked to wisecrack. To the south in Mexico, Angelo could see the pale blue ranges of mountains, like layers of paint growing progressively paler. The distance and the space did not seem to end. Not ever. The colors changed rapidly after the sun set. The sky ran in streams of ruby and burgundy, and the puffy clouds clotted the colors darker, into the red of dry roses, into the red of dried blood. The dunes of the horizon were soaked in the colors of the sky too; then the light faded and the breeze slashed at the ricegrass and yuccas. The cooling brought with it deep blues and deep purple bruising the flanks of the low, sandy hills. By the time Bingo reappeared, the sudden dark blue of the night sky had descended. Angelo looked south and could see nothing but infinite night. He took a deep breath. He knew he was drunk, but the awful pressure inside his chest had rolled back momentarily. Women were always leaving but then came back. Everything would be all right. Things would work out. He would get Marilyn back.

The wrecking yard — all the equipment, the car crusher — all of it Uncle Bill had paid for himself. That was the source of the trouble. Bill had been so careful not to give them any reason to collect. No favors to collect on, no loans, nothing fixed up by old men. Nothing. Still they had come, and Uncle Bill had moved like a man tied in steel wire; the tension grew tighter by the day. Angelo had only known that something was wrong, something was brewing up day by day, and he could tell the men in the yard knew; it would enter through the wide chain-link gates in back. The waiting went on and on, and Angelo wondered if they were like him, hoping that whatever it was would happen late at night when they were all far away, safe at home.

Angelo watched the light become darkness. He had always thought before that the darkness was separate, that the darkness was a heavier liquid that displaced the shimmering, diaphanous glow — the darkness fell across it, overcame it. Tonight, with the peppery warmth of the tequila in both nostrils, Angelo realized that the light in the sky had receded, but not disappeared; instead it had undergone a change in the minutes that passed. The light had grown thick; it had grown heavy. The light had ripened into the darkness that now filled the sky from horizon to horizon. So the family had waited a long time for Uncle Bill. They had waited for years and years. And then when the time was ripe, they had come. They had come to Angelo now. First Sonny Blue in Tucson, and now Bingo outside El Paso. He was their man, they said. “Our man in Albuquerque.” Our liaison on all the Southwest tracks. You’ve done so well, man, you make us look great.” And now they were giving him a promotion. “It will be good for you, kiddo, believe me. Just what you need to forget that girl.”

Bingo came out, and even in the dim light Angelo could see the cocaine ringing his nostrils. His hair was messed as if Bingo had just finished sticking his head between a woman’s legs. Bingo was too high to notice Angelo had been crying. Bingo was talking too fast now to make much sense, rambling on about Sonny and his father in Tucson. Bingo tried to show off when his brother and father were not around because the minute one or the other of them appeared, Bingo became the dumb one. The one they had to tell to shut up. So with Angelo, Bingo had to launch into what he kept calling the “technical aspect” of the “operation.” Bingo needs to feel important.

At that instant Angelo thought how good it would feel to kill Bingo. To shut him up. To get the white-nostril clown face and cocaine breath away from his own face. To smash up Bingo’s face so he would never again have to be reminded of Bingo, flunky brownnose, and asshole-sucker. It was about killing all right. It was about Uncle Max, the “semi-invalid.” Uncle Max who made the front page of the Times when he “retired,” for “reasons due to health,” to the sunshine and year-round golf of the American Southwest. A little cow-town called Tucson. What had the movie been called Dial Max for Murder? No one had ever bothered to explain what Max did, but Angelo was convinced it had been Max Blue who had sent the men to crush new Lincolns and Cadillacs at Uncle Bill’s yard.

After Max Blue had been shot and had come so close to dying, the family had sent him to palm trees, perpetual sunshine, and enough golf courses that Max would never have to play the same one in the same week. Angelo had learned here and there, from his cousins and from others, that Max Blue had the perfect layout: as far away from the action as possible. All day out on the golf course for sunshine and fresh air, always following the orders of his doctors, and getting checkups every year at the Mayo Clinic. Max Blue had come West to unknown territories of vast, untapped riches. This was the modern age. Max Blue could take care of everything by phone. By private couriers. As the dust cleared, the smoke blew over, and the corpse got stiff, thousands of miles away Max Blue would be teeing off, looking off in the distance at the arid, blue mountain commenting to a congressman or federal judge that the mountains were as blue as lapis lazuli.

Marilyn used to laugh and say she did not mind helping Angelo play the part. She got to drive the Porsche. She liked living in hotel suites because she never liked being tied down to one place. She had started to keep a diary of the hotel suites they’d had as they moved between Sunland and Turf Paradise in the cold months, and Santa Anita and Ruidoso in the warm months. Marilyn rated the hotel suites according to the stale odors lingering and to mysterious stains on ceilings. Angelo thought she should not bother with cheap-wad polyester pillows and sour drains clogged with hair. But Marilyn even rated the free envelopes and postcards in bureau drawers, and soundproofing in the ceilings and walls. When dope was legalized, she liked to say, she’d include an index for each of the racetrack towns. “Where to Find Cocaine in Ruidoso, New Mexico,” and where to score decent smoke in L.A.

There was not enough for her to do. Marilyn had mentioned that twice or maybe three times on that afternoon they drove south to Truth or Consequences. The Porsche was right on ninety as the El Paso Airport came closer and closer, and the moment Marilyn would leave him loomed like heavy black lines across the horizon. She wanted them to be doing something together. Something more than fillies? She had nodded and stared down at her hands, because she had not been able to say exactly what was wrong. Not him. Nothing he had done. Yes, she had everything. She could do what she wanted. She came and went without having to explain anything. All the money she wanted. All the drugs. Well? She didn’t know. It was all too set. You know? Suddenly Angelo had seen Marilyn’s face light up. She had found an explanation. It wasn’t the best one; he could tell by the way she kept hesitating, then repeating the same phrases. “I just need to think. I just need time.”

Angelo would not let her go so easily. Why was she going back to Tim? She could have time. She could think without going back to Tim. Marilyn had grasped the armrest on the car door with both hands. She had clenched it until the knuckles of her hands went white. Angelo had kept one eye on the road and one on her feet. Angelo was afraid to press her. He loved her. He wanted to let her have anything she wanted. They had lain in bed after making love and talked about it. If either of them had ever asked, the other had sworn to give it freely. “My freedom,” Marilyn had said, looking into his eyes intently. “It is the most important thing I have. I will die before I give it up.”

So Angelo had let Marilyn go that day. He had stopped the car on the departure level of the airport where Marilyn had pointed because she did not want him to come in. She said she’d already cried enough. She didn’t like to find herself crying when it was her decision.

VENICE, ARIZONA

MAX SAVORED THE TEE-OFF for every hole. Every time was the first time, a fresh start, the moment before the best possible shot off a driver ever possible and the soaring of the heart with your eye following the arc of the ball into the center of the fairway before the green. Max preferred to have the strange Sonoran desert enclose the fairways and greens. He and Leah had argued for hours about building lakes and fountains in the desert. Max wanted Leah to build a desert golf course in her city of the twenty-first century, Venice, Arizona. But Leah had only laughed. No deserts in Venice, Arizona, not for an instant, and certainly not for eighteen holes of golf. Tucson had enough desert. It was ridiculous for longtime residents to try to pretend Tucson wasn’t any different from Phoenix or Orange County. People wanted to have water around them in the desert. People felt more confident and carefree when they could see water spewing out around them. Max had frowned. “I didn’t say human beings were rational,” Leah said. “Tell me they are using up all the water and I say: Don’t worry. Because science will solve the water problem of the West. New technology. They’ll have to.”

Max had lost all respect for science after he had been shot. Leah threw around the words science and technology like everyone else. Max had been hooked up to their science and technology — stitched up, then reopened for bleeding half a dozen times.

Leah had made it despite obstacles she had faced because she was a woman. Show her an obstacle and she would work harder, that had been Leah’s standard line at Chamber of Commerce banquets. The scarcity of water in Arizona and other Western states was an obstacle to the land developer. But Leah was accustomed to seeing obstacles removed — rolled or blasted out of her way. The market for new homes in the Tucson area had always been extremely competitive. Leah had to use every ounce of her will just to keep up with giant home-building corporations also pushing luxury communities. The water gimmick had really worked in Scottsdale and Tempe. A scattering of pisspot fountains and cesspool lakes evoked memories of Missouri or New York or wherever the dumb shits had come from. Leah wanted Venice to live up to its name. She had planned each detail carefully. No synthetic marble in the fountains. Market research had repeatedly found new arrivals in the desert were reassured by the splash of water. They are in the real estate business to make profits, not to save wildlife or save the desert. It was too late for the desert around Tucson anyway. Look at it. Pollution was already killing foothill paloverde trees all across the valley. Max catches himself looking at Leah. She had not talked about the effects of pollution on the desert until she met the owl-shit expert.

Leah had never cared whether Max knew about her lovers. In the beginning she had hoped he would find out and be moved, by hurt or anger or simple jealousy. What a joke. The spies Max used had been discreet. The spies were to prevent infiltration by an undercover agent in the guise of Leah’s lover. Max had always been especially careful about the household and grounds staff.

Max is surprised Leah is flirting with the owl-shit ecologist, but remembers “opposites attract,” and Leah does have an angle. She needs to head off protests by environmentalists against her plans for Venice, Arizona. Real estate development makes strange bedfellows. But Max is not interested in what happens in the bedroom. Instead, Max instructs the spies to learn what Leah talks about when she is alone with the owl-shit expert. Leah talks about water rights, the spies report. Max has to smile. Leah never misses an opportunity to save time; she fucks an expert witness on owl shit and water conservation. Max complimented Leah on this one. Had he been chosen by design or had the ecologist merely been a happy coincidence?

With the ecologist Leah has been doing two kinds of undercover work: her dream-city plans revolve around water, lake after lake, and each of the custom-built neighborhoods linked by quaint waterways — no motorized watercraft please! The amount of water needed for such a grand scheme was astonishing. Leah could not deny that. She was hoping her owl expert could help her and her lawyers make a case for Venice, Arizona, city of the twenty-first century. The water had to come from someplace, and Leah wasn’t about to settle for reclaimed sewage or Colorado River water. Leah’s “someplace” for obtaining all the cheap water she wanted would be from the deep wells she was going to drill. She had got a lease on a deep-well rig cheap because some Texans had been hiding oil-field equipment from creditors in Tucson. Leah had also bought three gigantic bulldozers from the Texans to scrape out the canals and lakes.

Max does not bother to catch all the details, but Leah wants him to play golf with Judge Arne. The case in question had already been heard by Arne in Federal District Court in Phoenix. Arne had the case “under advisement.” Leah could not have hoped for a better opportunity. No link would ever be made between the outcome of an obscure water-rights suit brought by some Nevada Indians against a subdivider in Bullhead City, and Blue Water Land Development’s applications for deep-water wells in Tucson. All Judge Arne had to do for Leah was dismiss a cross-suit by the Indians in the Bullhead City case, and the State of Arizona would have to grant Leah Blue her deep-well drilling permits. Indian tribes or ecologists might try to sue to stop her deep wells later, but by then the deep wells would be flowing in Venice, Arizona.

Judge Arne had made a good drive right down the center of the fairway. He was a better golfer than most who came to play Max. Of course, the others were usually coming to ask big favors — to have people shot or factories burned to the ground. Max was the one who needed the favor. Judge Arne, on the other hand, was simply “moonlighting.” Three “moonlight” jobs equaled Arne’s salary for a year.

Max had a good feeling for his irons that day while the judge seemed to have problems, overshooting the green on a couple of holes so that Max had finished strong, four shots up. Arne was a shrewd one though. Max could not detect any temper in Arne over the loss, but after all Arne had been in a somewhat official capacity that day, and Max had been the host. Max did not usually leave the course until sundown, but he and his bodyguards had walked the judge to the locker rooms. The judge had been in a generous mood. He told Max he felt he could influence the holdings in this water case at every level, all the way up to the Supreme Court. Arne believed in states’ rights, absolutely. Indians could file lawsuits until hell and their reservation froze over, and Arne wasn’t going to issue any restraining orders against Leah’s deep wells either. Max could depend on that. The judge had lurched the big Volvo sedan out of the parking lot, swerved, and disappeared down Tortolita Road.

Max had made no secret of his security measures for Leah’s “friends” or “associates.” He had called Leah to listen to an audiotape of the last “nature lovers” board meeting. As Leah listened with Max, she was relieved her owl-shit expert hadn’t been at the meeting. Leah was not sure if her “eco-defender” would have defended her or not. Still, the “nature lovers” had learned long ago to court the rich and their corporations with promises of tax breaks for large donations of money or land. But the tape Max played had not contained any talk about endangered waterfowl habitats or even how to get a million dollars out of Blue Water Land Development Unlimited. The “nature lovers” had discussed the owl expert Keemo, and Leah, and whether Keemo was fully aware of who that woman was. The Nature-Lovers Committee was composed of seven board members; six were women, and five had fucked Keemo in the desert at least once. Keemo himself had told Leah this. He was not bragging about himself, he said, but rather he was trying to communicate a mystical power he felt whenever he walked into the desert. Leah had made a mental note then never to walk in the desert alone with Keemo. She did not want to leave imprints in the sand with her bare ass the way the other women had.

• • •

Golf was pure geometry and physics; angle, trajectory, and wind speed; the wood and steel, the rubber and cork grasped in a human hand, and all in perfect alignment with the grass fairway clear of the sandy wash lined with green mesquite. Golf was ancient and ritualistic. A replacement for the Catholic Church. The little ball, Max imagined, had at one time been an enemy skull. Max did not complicate golf with any connection with business or personal life. He watched players better than he was with pleasure, though not many played better than Max when they came to the course for a “business game” to ask Max Blue a favor. Even the celebrity golfers the senator had brought around had been too tense and nervous to play well. The desert was too close for most of the Californians and New Yorkers. Texans could not swing their irons for fear of rattlers they imagined coiled on the fairway. Those not disturbed by the desert setting of the golf course got nervous because Max Blue made most people nervous. People had difficulty understanding why Max lived most of his life outside on the golf course. With the money Max had and with the favors owed to Max by those in the highest levels of government, Max could have enjoyed the life of a Persian prince.

Max and Leah had made no secret about their terms of marriage. Max’s friends and even some of his closest advisors had fantasies about the ripe young women in a secret room in the clubhouse. Max only laughed. Let the would-be assassins stumble around the clubhouse locker rooms looking for nonexistent love nests. Max could have any person or any thing in the world if he wanted it badly enough to make the series of telephone calls to his lawyers or his bankers. Even the worst trouble could be handled this way.

For a long time Max had brooded over the changes. Max had sent for sucking and fucking movies and had in expensive call girls, and then the more expensive and more ugly licensed sexual therapist. Max still lay awake for hours trying to feel even a spark, a last shiver of desire, some remains of an urge or a fantasy that brought even a tingle of excitement. Max could remember the daydreams and fantasies, but nothing about them excited him anymore. The bullets had torn Max loose from his own body. Now Max got pleasure only from precision planning, from perfect timing and execution. Max funnels money from his “contracting” business to Leah’s Blue Horizons and Blue Water corporations. Max is relieved by Leah’s happiness buying and selling real estate. For a long time Max had not seen any point in going on; he had felt the hopeless monotony of sleeping, eating, and shitting. Then one day he wandered into Leah’s office with its map scattered with blue, green, and yellow pins. Max had felt a flicker of interest stir. Max had leaned close to the display tables of the architect’s scale models of the canals and lakes and golf courses for Leah’s Venice, Arizona, development. Max had not been interested at first, but as Venice began to take shape with maps and models, Max had begun to feel faint anticipation stir. Leah saw Mediterranean villas and canals where only cactus and scraggly greasewood grew from gray volcanic gravel.

STEAK-IN-THE-BASKET

CALL IT A JOKE, a twist of fate, that after Max had endured hours of “Wheelie’s” rambling wet-dream scenarios in the Veterans Hospital, Leah should, years later, have an affair with Trigg, the Realtor in a wheelchair. Steak-in-the-Basket was what Max called Trigg. Leah had made it her practice to alert Max to her love affairs, and to give Max the names and descriptions of all business associates she was planning to see during the week. Max did not ask, but Leah had done this as a courtesy to Max. It was also a precaution. Leah did not want the security men to shoot a business client or new lover.

Max did not ask Leah about her lovers because he had no interest or curiosity about the men or anything these men did in bed with his wife. Max could imagine innumerable sexual postures and practices without feeling the least hint of arousal. Max had tried imagining himself anywhere with anyone doing anything, but nothing worked. It was as if folds of wet, pink flesh were as ordinary as the sky or the sidewalk, though Max could remember when he had got hard-ons every time he saw a pair of big tits. But Max had been more curious about Leah and Trigg because Trigg was a loudmouth in a wheelchair. Trigg considered himself a “legitimate businessman,” but in Tucson that only meant no firearms were used. Trigg had a specialty with zoning laws and property that was worthless unless the zoning changed. Trigg bragged once he got started, it was too late, no one could stop him. Leah pointed to red pencil dots on blocks of downtown real estate. The grid of blocks and lots on the Tucson city map was a chessboard. Trigg was buying downtown block by shabby block. Trigg had started out with ratty bungalows near the university, and Trigg had got one of the houses rezoned to allow Blood Plasma International to lease the building from Trigg. Naturally Trigg was Blood Plasma International. Trigg bragged to Leah that blood-plasma donor centers busted neighborhoods and drove property prices down without moving in blacks or Mexicans. With property prices down, Trigg came and cleaned up, buying most property at forty cents on the dollar. Max didn’t blame Leah for her interest in Trigg; in fact, Max himself was interested in Trigg. Max wanted to know the deals and schemes in Trigg’s mind.

“Wheelies” had something to prove. Short men needed to prove themselves, but for men sitting in wheelchairs, the need was absolute. Leah confided to Max that she had taken full advantage of the manhood Mr. Trigg had managed to resurrect between his legs. Trigg had managed to squeeze the blood flow to his groin with both hands until Leah had got what Trigg called his “rod” to ride. Leah had ridden herself raw the first afternoon. Trigg could not ejaculate, but claimed he felt orgasms inside his head. Leah had not intended to bring up sex, but there had been something in the way Max loathed Trigg for being paralyzed that had infuriated Leah. She hated how little sex mattered to Max. Leah had no intention of drying up just because Max had. Leah had gone after sex with the same confidence she had when she made her first real estate deal. Leah had thrived on afternoons in Phoenix with male clients who later invited her for drinks or dinner.

The first words Trigg had ever whispered into Leah’s ear had been a little breathless. “My cock gets real hard,” he said, the scotch smelling bitter on his breath.

Trigg had been in a wheelchair since his freshman year in college. He had spent eighteen months in hospitals and intensive physical rehab. He had read all the books in the hospital library and had asked his father to use his connections at the country club to get Trigg access to the doctors’ medical library at the university hospital. Trigg was adamant about the eventual miracle of medical science and high technology for spinal-cord injuries and nerve tissue transplants. It was only a matter of time and Trigg would be out of the chair.

Leah thought sex with Trigg might be interesting. She had not been disappointed. Trigg’s desire had a sharp edge, as if he still hungered for all he had lost. After Max Blue, Leah found she had enjoyed the fervency of Trigg’s desire almost as much as she had enjoyed the durability of his erections. Max had not been able to resist a bad joke. How lousy a lover was Max Blue? So lousy his wife replaces Max with a paraplegic lover. Leah had preferred sex at the Arizona Inn because it was elegant and neutral ground. But after six or seven weeks Leah had yielded to Trigg’s insistence that she come to his “condominium.” Trigg never used simple words such as home or house as long as words such as condominium or town house were available. Trigg didn’t just want sex with Leah, he wanted Leah to get to know the “real him,” “the man inside.” Although picking up men on the university campus was potentially dangerous to amateurs, sex with strangers did have a few advantages; at least you did not have to be bored with self-revelations.

Trigg’s condominium had been even worse than Leah had imagined. The development itself was no worse than other pseudo — Santa Fe stuccos, but Trigg had decorated the penthouse himself. Trigg had dragons everywhere. The front door knocker was a brass dragon’s-head knocker. The hat rack in the foyer was a black lacquer dragon with hat poles for spines. The dark red rugs had black and green dragons running their length. The draperies were fake oriental tapestries of intertwined gold and green and black dragons. Trigg kept the draperies closed carefully so the dragons could be clearly seen. The table lamps were writhing red and black dragons of plaster. The only decent object seemed to be a small jade incense bowl with a dragon’s head and tail for handles. Even the shower curtains had been custom-made to match the dragon pattern on guest bath towels.

All doorways were wider to accommodate the wheelchair. In the kitchen, the refrigerator and the shelves and counters were all at wheelchair height. Trigg wasn’t dependent on anyone for anything except “one thing,” and Leah had been too shocked to respond when Trigg had slipped his hand lightly over her crotch. When Leah had warned him never to touch her like that again, Trigg had been puzzled at her anger.

Leah hated handicap-designed toilets because they were so high off the floor to give easy access to the wheelchair. She sat on the toilet and only her toes touched the floor. Leah wondered if Trigg had thought about a custom development strictly for the physically handicapped. Was there “soft money” available from the government specifically for the disabled?

Trigg had already got out of his chair and undressed. From the bathroom door, the huge four-poster bed looked like a Viking ship, and the red dragon lacquered on the headboard was the mainsail. Leah slid into the bed beside Trigg pretending to squeal because the sheets were cold. She did not mention the idea she’d just had in the bathroom. She did not know how much further she and Mr. Trigg were actually going to travel together, and she wanted to get first crack at any preferential loans for housing the handicapped. The Viking ship tossed and rolled, and Trigg bragged later about all the ideas he had for future developments. The sky was the limit. Leah had enjoyed Trigg after they had fucked and smoked a cigarette because he had a childlike enthusiasm for all the schemes and plots he had. The word conglomerate had the same gravity as condominium for Trigg. He wanted to create his own conglomerate in southern Arizona. Cover all the squares. Touch all the bases. Own a hospital, an ambulance service, and a mortuary as well.

“Diversification,” Leah had said when Trigg had stopped talking. He had covered all her squares and touched all her bases, and Leah was in a tolerant mood. She let Trigg keep talking. Trigg claimed most of his ideas were outgrowths of his months in the hospital, and the medical texts he’d read. Trigg was convinced he was a genius. All his ideas and the connections with the accident, the months in the hospital and the wheelchair—all of it was in his diaries.

Trigg had reached into the drawer of the bedside table and pulled out a thick three-ring binder. Trigg had pointed at a closet door. He had all the other notebooks stored there — notebooks all the way back to the accident. As he talked to Leah about himself, his diaries, and his accident, Trigg’s eyes sought Leah’s eyes urgently, as if he feared Leah did not understand the extreme importance of the diaries. He wanted Leah to know the person he was deep inside. All Leah could do was to nod when Trigg said this. The notebooks in the closet were stacked three feet high. Leah resigned herself to sitting in bed naked surrounded by dragons, reading the story of Trigg’s life on lined, loose-leaf paper. She was mixing business with pleasure, and Trigg’s diaries were homework. She was fascinated with Trigg and his “orgasms in his head.” Orgasms had to be in his head. The scars across his lower back looked as if Trigg had been chopped in half and sewed back together.

But when Leah had reached for a notebook to settle back with and read in bed, Trigg had had other ideas. She could take the diaries home with her to read. Right now, though, Trigg said he wanted to talk about “diversification.” The health-care industry is a sleeping giant, Trigg said. His plasma donor centers had got Trigg thinking about alcohol and drug treatment centers. There were millions and millions to be made from treatments for people addicted to alcohol and other drugs. That had been what Trigg wanted to talk about.

“Talk?” Leah had said in a teasing voice. “Who said anything about talk? This was all I came here for.” Leah laughed. She had not felt so good in months. Trigg had fucked her one way, and in typical Tucson fashion he was ready to try to fuck her with a slick real estate deal too. Trigg wanted Leah’s Blue Water group to finance and build his detox and addiction treatment hospital. In return, Leah’s Blue Water Investment Corporation would receive stock in the blood plasma business as well as stock in the detox hospital. Leah said she’d have to think about it. She did not want to see Trigg’s tacky dragon logo within ten miles of her dream city. But if Leah herself took over planning and design, then the addiction treatment center might be one “jewel” in a triple crown of high-tech medical care facilities, within the first luxury community designed for the handicapped and the addicted. When Leah had finally got loose from Trigg, the trunk of her car was full of loose-leaf notebooks, pages filled front and back with Trigg’s urgent scrawls in pencil and ink.

DIARIES

MAX HAD NOT BEEN ABLE to resist Trigg’s diaries. Leah had not seemed interested. “Go ahead, save me the trouble — let me know if there’s anything juicy,” she said, and then laughed at the memory of Trigg, his face wet from his own saliva, grinning at her crotch.

Trigg’s diary entries appeared to begin in a rehabilitation center. The diaries were obviously kept for mental hygiene or group therapy. Max had experience with therapeutic diaries himself. Therapists were Peeping Toms. Your dreams and fears were their windows. Therapists were merely satisfying themselves though they claimed they were helping you.

Trigg had only ever had one thing on his mind, and that was the meat dangling between his legs. The accident had only served to intensify Trigg’s attention to his cock. The diaries were page after page of notes on attempts to get pretty girls from his college classes to go to bed with him despite the wheelchair.

Max shuffled through the stack of notebooks; the older they were, the more filthy they were. Max had started in the middle and flipped through the pages to the beginning, then fanned back through to the end of each notebook.

From Trigg’s Diaries

The black and Hispanic orderlies hate their jobs. Women’s work. They wipe shit off butts and mop up puke. They always smile for no reason when they lift me out of the bath.

My mother smiles that smile too. I catch her staring into mirrors behind my back to see the width and length of the scar.

Cut you down to size, I hear the orderlies say when I wheel by the nurses’ station late at night. I can’t sleep because I have the same dream every night.

Helpless baby. I don’t dream anything but the words themselves written in white on black. The whole dream consists simply of those words. Nightshift orderlies close the nursing station door and smoke reefer. I am the only patient with enough of a brain to know. The others are snoring.

The orderlies (blacks) hate white people. I can tell by the way the short one smiles when I complain about cold bathwater.

You will find out who your friends are. The guys from school. At first they call a lot. Then it’s only one or two. Rick and Brett still come over and play chess. Sally and her friend Elaine will bring over a new album. They always ask for dope to smoke. Say I am the reefer man. My parents’ friends are not the worst ones. They always try to show they are confronting my “handicap” head-on. They go out of their way to watch me to prove their minds are as broad as their fat asses.

Elaine came over with her friend Patsy. My folks were gone for the weekend. First vacation alone since the accident. A year and a half. Mother calls it “essential.” Elaine’s friend is a big girl but friendly. Pours Dad’s Black Label scotch too easily. I won’t bother with reefer if Elaine’s friend isn’t going to get friendlier. I want to reach down her white peasant blouse and pinch her nipples.

Max finds the diaries extremely satisfying. For one thing, they have enabled Max to begin to piece together details of the crash that had put Trigg in the chair. Trigg had been drunk when another drunk turned left in front of Trigg’s sports car. Both his parents had been corporate lawyers and alcoholics.

Susan is gorgeous. She has long blond hair and big tits. She smiles when she sees me, not like the others who smile but don’t want to look me in the eyes. I see Susan before class, then drop my notebook and feel really stupid because the chair almost tips when I reach down for the notebook. The dumb jock with F on all his quizzes sits and stares at the notebook. After class Susan talks about her fiancé. Two weeks to go to the third anniversary of my accident. In the hospital I had dreams about walking and running. The chair is not me. The chair is not part of me.

Diane, a girl from my language class, walked with me to my van. I wanted to ask her if she wanted to sit in the back of the van with me. But I could see her get nervous. She had to meet her aunt. Something for a birthday.

I don’t know what women really think of me. Even when they start out friendly and interested, I do something wrong. I scare them.

I want women to accept me for who I am and not what I have or do not have. They look down on me in my chair, so why not overlook my feelings too?

I can’t stand people who think they are better, who act superior. Bad day. I miss my swim because the city pool is closed for cleaning this week. I feel the difference in my bowels. Rocky roads as the chair bounces across campus to see if I can swim between collegiate workouts. But after I climb the chair over the curbs and fight the elevator up to the fourth level, the secretary cunt bitch tells me there are no exceptions to the athletic department’s rulings.

Mother won’t have time to see me in Key West over Christmas. The fourth “anniversary” in two more weeks.

My MBA classes look okay. All my friends are in law school. I tell them what I need from life only money can buy. I want to make as much money as fast as I can. Lisa is upset that I am not going to Baltimore for Easter. I can’t tell her I feel like I’m drifting — that I want to date other women again. I want a woman up to my level.

Lisa wants to get married in the summer. I try to explain my dream goal: to walk down the aisle with my bride, not roll in this fucking chair.

Tried to call Diana again today. She quit coming to language lab. I suspect it is because of me, no answer. I embarrassed her at the pool. After class I asked her to come watch me swim. I spat on an asshole crowding into my lane. Diana said she didn’t understand my hostility. I had to laugh.

Lisa calls while I have Diana half-undressed. While I’m on the phone, Diana gets dressed and leaves. Later I find her at the sorority house. She doesn’t want to let me put my arms around her. Goddamn Lisa. Diana says it won’t work out. I ask, can’t we go someplace more private? Diana told me she is dating another guy, but she did not tell me he is black. How does it feel? she wants to know. How does he feel? I ask her back. What do you mean? Aren’t cripples lower than niggers? I say, and I already see tears in her eyes, the kind that used to get my dick hard. I tell her about the orderlies in the hospital. I tell her she doesn’t know anything about them or the hospital.

Dad says Arizona does not have the best MBA program. But the weather is easier here in the winter. In the ice and snow it is easy to fall in the chair. I hate lying there waiting for someone to come over to help me. Time seems frozen while people look at me. I feel all my clothes getting soaked. Finally one of the morons comes over and asks me if I need anything.

All the women in MBA classes are ugly — no—“double uglies” like Rick and Brett and I always called the sows.

The review class is going to be terrible. Boring. Brokerage license, rules and regulations. But I will get rich off this.

Lisa called off our engagement. I try to sound upset. The telephone connection echoed and I couldn’t hear her. I estimate the money I make will more than finance all the costs of the breakthrough technology.

Max skips to the last notebook Trigg had lent Leah.

Breakthroughs in electrochemistry of the human brain. The rewiring of human nerves severed or badly crushed. Money buys anything.

Ike calls from West Germany. Says he’s got a deal over there. They will buy all the blood and bioproducts we can deliver. Blood plasma centers are only the beginning.

I see myself as being superior to the others. I am better than all of them.

Tucson, city of thieves. Third-generation burglars and pimps turned politicians. These alleged human beings, the filth and scum who pass through the plasma donor center, get paid good money for lying with a needle in their arms — an activity they pursue the rest of the day anyway. I could do the world a favor each week and connect a few of the stinking ones up in the back room and drain them dry. They will not be missed.

BOOK TWO. ARIZONA BIO-MATERIALS, INC.

AS TRIGG BOUGHT MORE AND MORE real estate, he had become paranoid about Mexicans and blacks. He could be rid of his own plasma donor centers anytime he had a hot prospect from the East Coast looking for condominium property in Tucson. But Mexicans and blacks could drift up from the bottom of the cesspool — and it only took a few of those brown floaters to stink up and ruin an entire neighborhood Trigg was “rehabilitating.”

Trigg said he knew right away not to bother bullshitting Leah. Look who her old man was anyway. Rumors went around that Max Blue had never retired.

Trigg wanted to talk about the blood and organ donor business because he had contacts who were developing a whole new market beyond plasma and whole blood. Trigg wanted to use the plasma donor centers to obtain donor organs and other valuable human tissue. Trigg had never known a woman like Leah. He had never found a woman who could listen to descriptions and price quotations for whole blood, human corneas, and human kidneys without turning green. Trigg had seen plenty of big guys faint over an ice-packed carton of cadaver skin for grafts. Trigg liked the way Leah was always thinking. He got ideas off her ideas. Leah was on track about a medical hospital. They could build the facility near the detox-rehab hospital. They would need a regular hospital from time to time for their detox patients. Leah had got the idea for a kidney dialysis machine that would serve the sector of town houses and condominiums that would presumably be bought by kidney patients and their families or by health insurers to house their Arizona dialysis patients.

Trigg had to stop and look in the mirror sometimes to believe his life now, and the new three-piece suit he had just bought. The problem with most of them in wheelchairs was they did not care about their personal appearance. They were ragbags. Many of them smelled ripe. Trigg had always known that to be a success you had to look a success. Money was the measure, and all Trigg had needed was a couple of lucky breaks in a row — a string of winners. Leah was the queen in his ace-high royal flush.

Trigg did not trust employees. Trigg handled all the bookkeeping and banking himself to ensure privacy. Trigg shipped out fresh-frozen plasma and whole blood and took pride in delivering the shipments himself. The Bio-Materials company van had a rear lift system that allowed Trigg to remain in the wheelchair while he was driving. A new Mercedes would not be so convenient. Trigg would have to pull himself in and out of the wheelchair into the driver’s seat and still stow the wheelchair. But the extra trouble would be worth it because the Mercedes he had bought was a beauty — a custom convertible for Tucson’s lovely weather. Trigg imagined speeding along the beaches heading for mother’s place in Palm Beach. He would buy a white three-piece suit for the occasion. All it would take was enough money and his mother would be telephoning to invite him for tea.

Trigg took pride in the strength of his shoulders and arms. He was always pleased when women asked him if he worked out. A stupid question when he was wheeling his body weight and that of the chair around campus eight hours every day before the wheelchair ramps became the law. The worst had been the dumb broad who had said, “Oooh! You really do have a great upper body!” Trigg hated the sorority-house piggies, pink and sweating in their bikinis. If they encountered him around the university pool, they invariably shrank back from him as if he were the Boston Strangler.

But when Trigg had finished his laps, if the mood struck, he could always buy himself a quickie with a piggie. All he had to do was offer a coed a joint in the back of the van, and then he’d tell them about his land development corporation and the Mercedes, and the little piggies would shed their tops and bottoms in a flash. Trigg was happy that Leah was a married woman. She could keep her gangster husband and Trigg could keep his panhellenic piggies.

Trigg made it his policy to check the daily ledgers and receipts as well as the contents of the freezer units at each of the plasma donor centers. Luckily Tucson employees were ignorant of the value of blood and other “bioproducts.” Nurses and medical technicians would steal any drug they could get their hands on. Except for pints of blood or frozen cadaver skin, there wasn’t much to pilfer from a plasma donor center except needles and syringes and the usual thefts of toilet paper and garbage bags by employees.

Trigg had had an idea buzzing in the back of his head for weeks, maybe months; he had not been able to forget the price quotes for fresh whole blood, human corneas, and cadaver skin. Trigg was becoming acquainted with human organ transplant research teams at the university hospital. Someday Trigg would walk again with the aid of their electronic-impulse hookups to his legs and skull. He wanted to help research teams obtain the fresh biomaterials they needed.

GREEN BERET

TRIGG DIDN’T LIKE THE RECEIPTS for the week from the two new locations. Volume was the name of the game, and no way were the two northwest plasma donor centers pulling in enough donors. The northwest locations had been intended to exploit areas where copper strikers were unemployed. Trigg had placed help-wanted signs in the donor centers because he wanted to find “one of them” to hit the streets and start recruiting plasma donors for him. Trigg could not implement his plan without substantially increasing the number of “resident” donors and donors who could be counted on to return month after month.

Trigg interviewed the job applicants himself. Trigg had noticed the big guy before. The staff members said street people called him Rambo. Trigg had looked him over without looking him in the eyes. The combat boots and the camouflage T-shirt made the guy “Rambo.” Trigg had to laugh to himself at the moron standing in front of him. But when Trigg finally looked into Rambo’s eyes, he saw something that had chilled him; after that, Trigg believed Rambo had been to Vietnam. Trigg had enjoyed Rambo’s military posture and the way Rambo would almost salute before he left the room.

Trigg had never regretted the money he had paid Rambo — fifty cents a head for a donor who returned at least twice. Rambo didn’t get paid until the donor had returned the second time. Trigg couldn’t lose. Rambo had showed up riding a really nice ten-speed bicycle one day, and after that Rambo had pulled in plasma donors he found in the unemployment-office parking lots and in the food stamp lines and at the government free-cheese lines. At first Rambo had not enjoyed riding the bicycle because he had been afraid of the cars. He had not been afraid the cars were going to hit or kill him; he had been afraid of the people inside the cars and what they might be thinking about him. He had vowed to always wear some article of clothing — combat boots or jacket and of course the green beret — to remind all of them of Vietnam and where he and a million others had been. He had to laugh. Americans got paralyzed with fear every time they saw a Vietnam veteran still wearing combat clothes; Rambo enjoyed the advantage this gave him. Army surplus stores had resupplied him when his last pair of combat boots wore out. On the road or living on the street, Rambo had found the green beret and combat boots did the trick; even cops and railyard bulls had been strangely transfixed by the green beret. They could not stop staring at the Silver Star and Purple Hearts pinned on the beret. But Rambo refused to discuss his medals or what he had done in the war. If people still pressed, Rambo simply told them the past was history and no longer mattered, and even the strangers had always walked away more relaxed. Rambo did not spend money on much, but he was careful to always have the beret dry-cleaned, and not at one of those dinky one-hour places either.

Rambo had tried going without wearing the green beret; the wool in the green beret did not make the top of his head any hotter in Tucson than it had in Thailand. A little sweat, a little discomfort, was necessary to give men the fighting edge. That had been one of the primary lessons at the Special Forces training school in Florida. The wool acted as an insulator against the heat as well as the cold. He had been sent home before the others in the Special Forces unit. When Rambo had awakened in the hospital, he had thought he was wearing his beret; he could feel the beret on his head, though somehow in his sleep the pillow had pulled the beret far down over his ears. But when Rambo had tried to reach up, he had not been able to get his arms loose from the mass of bandages that were somehow tangled with the bed sheet. He had bellowed and grunted a long time before one of the other patients in the ward had repeatedly hit the nurse-station button. Rambo had asked them what day it was, and where he was. Wednesday, and somehow he had ended up in Manila. He had demanded to know where the rest of his unit was, and they had told him that all the rest of his unit had gone home. They had already gone? They had left him? When was this? The nurse had been apologetic. He would have to wait until the following day and ask the doctor. The nurse said she was new; she had been rotated up from Australia and was headed back home herself.

“Don’t worry. You’ll get home too. If you want something, you can have a pill to help you sleep.” He had asked her about his beret. She had repeated the word, dumbstruck. “Beret?”

“Beret! Beret! Green beret! You know, you fucking cunt! My goddamn green beret!”

The following day the doctors had come. Rambo noticed immediately they were afraid of him because they had all approached his bed in a tight group, pretending they were merely crowding around to look at his medical chart. Rambo could see immediately the young doctors in their starched and pressed khakis were not real military because they did not wear their caps with the scrambled eggs — the gold braid army doctors got with rank. The war was over so they thought the men would not detect civilians in uniforms. He did not see why the military had tried to deceive wounded veterans.

Roy was a special name because it meant “king” in French. His mother had always loved the romantic sound of French, and she had never let him forget his name was special. After Vietnam, they had not got along. She had not liked the “vulgarity” of Roy’s vocabulary and the repetition of four-letter words; she had objected to the loud klomp! of his combat boots on her hardwood floors.

The young doctor had explained slowly and carefully that what Roy felt around his head were bandages, not a hat.

“Beret!” Roy bellowed. “My green beret!”

“Yes, of course,” the young doctor had said, smiling apologetically. It was not a hat on his head that he felt. The doctors had even showed him, pointing in a shaving mirror. That was him with a cone of bandages on his head. Of course then he had been called Roy, not the nickname Rambo. He had not even liked the movie because none of it was real or true. But the nickname Rambo had stuck with the younger men in the homeless camp. They had seen all the Vietnam War movies.

For a long time the doctors had not understood where Roy’s injury had been. He had not minded the bandages around his head, but he certainly had no wound on his head. That had been the most absurd notion the doctors had; Roy had screamed at them.

“Head! My head? You stupid cocksuckers! I never got hit in the head!” He got control of himself again after that outburst because he wanted the doctors to think he respected their military rank, when, in fact, he had guessed their charade. One of the other doctors had tried to trick him by saying that it was shrapnel, not a bullet. Of course he knew it was shrapnel! he screamed at them. But why did they have his head wrapped up? The army was always making mistakes. Here was another one. His head and arms all wrapped up and both legs bare. Roy had told him he did not understand it. They could see the scars on the leg where the wound had already healed. Why had they flown him to the Philippines with bandages around his head?

Roy had been happy when he had got the nickname Rambo because that meant the homeless men along the river had decided to let him in. Because at first they had all been certain Roy was an undercover cop in jungle fatigues and green beret. They had lost his green beret in the hospital in Manila. Because Rambo knew the pictures his parents had taken of him walking off the transport plane by himself showed him without his green beret. He had been wearing the bandages on his head, which they had finally forced him to admit were necessary. Bandages on his head were necessary. That was all he allowed to be said about the bandages. He had no head wounds. The beret had been stolen by custodians who scrubbed the floors of the wards. At the time Rambo had felt a great deal of hatred in his heart for the filthy gook who stole his green beret. The green beret had protected him from harm. Roy had never let on to the others, but he thought the Rambo movies were full of shit because Sylvester Stallone would have been blown to bits eight million times in his first week in combat in Vietnam.

Roy had worked the longest with the doctor who wanted to find out more about the killing of Sylvester Stallone. Finally Roy had had to tell the doctor it was no use. If the shrink did not know why Stallone had to die, then the doctor ought to give up psychiatry. Right after that, Roy had been wandering near the train station in Albuquerque and had seen the green berets in the front window of the army surplus store. The new combat boots had cost a lot too, so Roy had to cash in the remainder of his bus ticket. Wearing the green beret again all the time greatly changed the sort of thoughts Roy had. If he had still been talking to that shrink, he would have been happy to inform the doctor that he never gave Sylvester Stallone a second thought these days. He would have said, “Doc, unbelievable, but I never even think of him when the guys call me Rambo. Stallone the actor, who is he anyway? In a way I am more Rambo than Stallone is because I have a Silver Star and three Purple Hearts, and where was Stallone in the war years? Prancing naked in porno movies.”

No, Roy knew who he was. With the beret on his head, Roy’s thoughts had been crystal clear; it had been as if steam or condensation had been wiped off a window inside his head, behind his eyes. Too many of them had made money off the Vietnam War. Not just the actors, the Holly-weirdos, but all the giant corporations — Dow and Du Pont, Remington and Colt, General Motors and General Dynamics — the fat cats glutted with blood. Someday his army would arrive at their doorsteps; Rambo would lead his ragged army against the government. When he wore the green beret, all of the future became clear to him.

Rambo ate only peanut butter and the macaroni and cheese the homeless shelters fed the men year-round in Tucson. He had not been able to eat meat or fish or anything that had once wiggled or had blood. Someday he would show the fat cats blood, but the blood would be theirs. The fat cats had helped Roy’s thinking clear. He now thought of himself as Roy who was also known as Rambo. Communism had killed itself. Now the United States faced a far greater threat — the danger from within — government and police owned by the fat cats. Roy had seen for himself women and children hungry, and sleeping on the streets. This was not democracy. Police beating homeless old men was not the United States of America. Something had to be done, and Rambo and his army would do it.

The green beret made anyone — a man or a woman — look strong and clean. Roy’s beret had kept him alive on the helicopter ride to the hospital.

PLASMA DONORS

ROY SAID IT WAS HIS LUCK; he had spent two blistering years in Thailand crossing borders back and forth fighting the secret war. Television news had never mentioned it. Roy thought it was funny; his parents had not believed their own son when he told them he had been fighting in Thailand. His parents had believed what they had been told by television. What do you think of that? Your own folks don’t even believe you. They believe the TV.”

Trigg smiled and nodded. This Rambo guy would be perfect for the job; another certifiable nut case on the payroll. There might even be some kind of government money or a tax break for hiring a veteran. If the guy went nuts later, whose fault was it? “Independent contractor” like the rest of them, that was what Trigg had always had his attorney tell the police and the prosecutors. Unfortunate occurrences, tragic misunderstandings, and fatal injuries abounded in the world; when your time comes your time comes. Trigg had actually enjoyed listening to his attorney sweet-talk and seduce a jury. Trigg liked the lawyer’s philosophy: juries consisted of the leftovers who never watched the news or read newspapers because the world had left them behind years ago. Juries came from the bottom of the barrel; juries secretly resented their lowly position but also secretly believed they deserved the bottom. The lawyer believed it was important to talk directly to the jury about chance, fate, and luck.

Roy and Trigg get along fine. Roy’s job is to hand out leaflets to homeless people. He gets fifty cents for every new plasma donor he brings in. Avoid the ones with scabby arms and legs from needles, and don’t bother with the ones with runny noses or runny eyes. After a week or two, Roy had learned his job. Trigg hired him as a night watchman at the main cold-storage unit.

His secret was, Rambo knew how much the bastards wanted to be like him. He had listened for years, and he had got so he knew which ones had really been to war and which ones only talked. Rambo was most interested in the guys who’d actually gone. Sleeping in dry washes or rolled up in cardboard under mesquite trees above the river, they would be ready when he called. It was simple arithmetic. The punks would have been in diapers the first time Rambo had gone to ’Nam. The younger generations were weird. What they wanted most of all was to have been somewhere so they’d have a place to start from. Let them take whatever they needed, because the only legacy the U.S. had given them was as worthless as the string of dingy foster homes they had endured. Only a great and terrible war could explain how so many could find themselves sleeping in the street. They had lost fathers and brothers they could not remember to that war. That had been how Rambo explained their attraction to him. A few had had the stories down right. So a few of the young drifters had heard stories about the real thing from Vietnam vets along the way. The past could never be pinned down. Each person remembered a moment differently. Rambo had seen photographers and journalists in the combat zone. If that was how history got written, then the punks’ lies made no difference either.

“This is the issue,” Rambo had told the first few men. “Look where we are.” Rambo had paused so the men could look around. They were in a dry arroyo that ran parallel to the Southern Pacific tracks. Rambo had calculated all the distances: they were 850 yards east-southeast of the Tucson Police Department headquarters downtown and 840 yards due north from the university branch of the blood plasma donor center. Some of the men had seemed dazed by raising their heads high enough to see beyond the bank of the dry arroyo.

“Look where we are. We fought and shed blood for this nation and look where we are. I’m looking for a few good men,” Rambo said, and smiled at the tall, skinny guy nearest him. But the skinny man plucked at his beard nervously and never looked up from the ground. Some of the older guys, one black, had done tours in Southeast Asia, but they had stood clear of the others who were liars. For an instant Rambo had felt something in him sink, the feeling he got when no one believed him. But Rambo quickly caught himself.

“This is America! The land we laid down our lives for!” What Rambo had liked was that he didn’t have to do much talking. They all knew what it was about. They had fought and suffered for the U.S., but the U.S. had no place for them. Rambo saw them nodding their heads, all eyes on him; except the older ones who were drifting away, walking west down the arroyo. At a certain age you wore out. That was all there was to it. Rambo had seen it in veterans all the time. So young ones who did all the lying about Vietnam worked out better actually. What had to be done now required young men. Because after a certain age, a man learned to fear the sound of bullets as they split bones.

ARMY OF THE HOMELESS

“THE DAY WILL COME when I’ll need volunteers to head units,” Rambo had said carefully, because he didn’t want to scare them off like some nut case. He stood and watched their faces and waited to see who would step forward. He had begun to use silence. All eyes were on him. Rambo could tell a number of them thought he was crazy. As if they could judge! All of them were thin with scraggly hair and patchy beards. Most of them were white, but a few were brown and black. They all slept on cardboard in the bottom of the arroyo. They had been waiting for someone like Roy. They knew him when they saw him, and no name or nickname mattered. A leader for them was what was important to the men.

Roy didn’t want to confuse their minds with talk about the future. They would be ready when the moment was right. Roy didn’t want anything premature. The nickname Rambo had been a little premature.

Roy walked a distance west along Twenty-second Street to vacant land that was still desert bushes and cactus. He liked to sit in the desert alone, away from lights so he could see the stars more clearly. The sight of the millions and millions of stars had always got Roy’s thoughts channeled in the direction of man and God. How puny and vicious men were. Was God to blame or was man ruined?

All questions and no answers had been Roy’s life up until that night. But when Roy had returned from his walk in the desert, he knew what he would do. Everything was beginning to fit together; all these years Roy’s life had been scattered, and now suddenly he had seen how all the parts were going to fit together. Trigg has a sign-up program too. Now Roy carries a manila folder full of patient information-release forms. Donors in the monthly program were examined by a doctor periodically. The idea was to get a healthy and dependable source of blood products. Once Roy had asked Trigg if he had had to dump any plasma or blood because of AIDS. Trigg had laughed and rolled his wheelchair in a slow circle. “It’s a whole new ball game now,” he had said. In the beginning the feds and of course, the public, had been slow to catch on. Whole-blood and plasma products were too valuable to dump simply because of unverified reports and rumors. By the time the government had sent out bulletins with precautionary guidelines, Trigg had emptied his freezers. A short time afterward, fire had swept through Tucson Blood Products, and Trigg had left the old company’s name in the ashes. Trigg wanted no AIDS victims’ lawsuits.

New laws, new rules, new regulations, new tests, new procedures — all of it cost money. Recruitment and screening were critical. Trigg paid Roy to go out and find donors. Roy started with the city parks in the morning when the homeless men were at the water fountains washing up; by noon Roy would have worked his way south to the church kitchen and the sandwiches on Fifteenth Street. Roy used the soft sell. He didn’t know any other way to get men to sell blood or plasma every week. He told them up front he was getting fifty cents a head for their names if they showed up at the plasma donor center.

Roy wore the beret and the combat boots because he had to walk the arroyos and big washes to find the campsites and lean-tos. Even when he did not wear his camouflage pants, the green beret and the combat boots had been enough. Right away they wanted to talk about the war.

Roy had known a number of assholes and crazies who had been to Vietnam or the Gulf. They had not been “talkers” for one thing; that separated them from the liars. But he had watched them listen and stiffen with rage while skinny, pimply boys lied and bragged. Crazies let their silence simmer, sometimes for years; then all at once their silence exploded in the faces of all the liars.

What difference did it make years later whether a man had actually served in Vietnam and was now wandering the streets, or only repeated stories he’d heard from older guys who had been in combat? Roy was not going to pass judgment on what were lies and what were truths. The U.S. had used false figures; the enemy body count had been inflated.

No, Roy would never humiliate the skinny, young “Vietnam vets” who had signed up with him for twice-weekly visits at the plasma center. In America a man needed some kind of story to explain himself, to explain why he was here and how he had got here. The only good they would realize from that war were the stories.

Roy had read the mimeographed newsletters piled on a card table inside the Methodist soup kitchen where social justice and social activism were the name of the game. It had been simple dollars and cents. America’s wealth had bled away during Vietnam; now the U.S. was buried in debt. So Roy could not bring himself to expose the skinny, young impostors in filthy camouflage pants and field jackets. Because they had all been casualties of that war, all Americans no matter how young, even the unborn.

Roy could sense Trigg’s growing attachment to him as a “captive audience” for Trigg’s endless monologues about how much he was worth, meaning “assets” and how much he had bought at pennies on the dollar from government liquidations of real estate once owned by little savings banks established only to go belly-up. The best way to rob a bank was to own one. Roy had nodded his head and had pretended to be impressed because a plan was beginning to take shape, and Roy wanted to learn as much as he could about Mr. Trigg. Trigg blabbered on and on about profit-loss, percentages, and world markets, but Roy was thinking about the man in the wheelchair. Roy wanted nothing Trigg owned, not the Mercedes, not the big house with the special therapy pool, not the cashmere socks or the rich bitch who sat on Trigg’s face.

The world market was definitely changing. Real estate was going to take a dive.

Trigg congratulated himself on his wisdom and foresight in getting into the biomaterials industry. “Biomaterials,” not new antibiotics or drugs, were going to be the bonanza of the twenty-first century.

“Biomaterials?” Roy asked questions because he liked to watch Trigg preen and condescend to answer him.

“Biomaterials! Not just plasma, not just blood!” Trigg could not contain his excitement. The vodka had taken over, and Trigg listed to the left in his wheelchair as he attempted to be buddy-buddy with Roy and leaned toward him as he whispered loudly:

“Biomaterials!” Biomaterials — the industry’s “preferred” term for fetal-brain material, human kidneys, hearts and lungs, corneas for eye transplants, and human skin for burn victims.

Roy had heard rumors about Tucson before he ever hopped the freight train in Baton Rouge. Hoboes said Tucson had communist priests and terrorist nuns and even the Methodist churches in Tucson were communist. Then Roy heard the opposite too, that just outside Tucson the U.S. military had begun to create a “bastion of strength” to run the length of the U.S. southern border. In Baton Rouge stories circulated about the mysterious recruiters in white shirts, dark blue suits, and dark glasses who were looking for “good soldiers” willing to relocate to Tucson.

The afternoon Roy had hopped off the freight train in downtown Tucson, a group of homeless activists had been taking showers on the steps of City Hall. His first night in Tucson, Roy had watched himself shave and shower on the local TV news at the men’s shelter where he had gone with the other “shower protesters.” Roy had not stayed at the men’s shelter long. As the weather had cooled and the autumn rain storms came in November, Roy could see there were old men and sick men who needed the shelter. As he listened to Trigg run on about growth and opportunity, Roy had recalled the other reason he could not live at the men’s shelter. The homeless activists had wanted Roy to “become” involved in the struggle.

Roy had not answered them. He had packed his razor and toothbrush in the pockets of his field jacket and moved into a cardboard piano crate in the arroyo off Eighteenth Street. Roy had got Trigg to buy him a bicycle for his recruitment work, and as winter brought more and more drifters and homeless from the snow in the north, Roy had begun to carry two notebooks with him as he signed up “clients” for the biweekly bonus program. He carried Trigg’s notebook and he carried the homeless army’s notebook. He was not afraid to write the words Homeless Army across the notebook cover; he felt the excitement rise up into his chest and throat, and he felt his heart beat faster at the word army.

The skinny, starving Mexicans who managed to reach Tucson had to find people willing to let them sleep in a shed or chicken coop, otherwise the Border Patrol got them. The cardboard boxes and tin shelters under the mesquites along the Santa Cruz were filled with white men, though occasionally a Yaqui Indian with land on the Santa Cruz River rented camp space to blacks and Indians. Roy wrote down all the names and did not bother to note which were “phony” and which were “real” Vietnam veterans. What was past did not matter. What was important was how the men felt right then. Roy was looking for men who were incensed, who were outraged, at the government. He was not interested in the “shower activists” with their protests and polite lawsuits to acquire shelter for the homeless.

Trigg used to ask Roy what he did with his money. Trigg was repulsed by Roy’s cardboard and plastic held together with corrugated tin. Roy always smiled, shook his head, and told Trigg nothing. Trigg never pressed because Trigg had to do all the talking anyway. Trigg claimed he was only making money because he wanted to save enough to design and build a computerized walking machine; this had been Trigg’s dream since the day he had learned his spinal cord was severed. This dream of Trigg’s had also led him to buy the small private hospital in Verde Canyon. Trigg bragged about his plans to diversify; Trigg wasn’t going to make the same mistake other real estate investors had made. “You don’t know anything about Verde Canyon, do you?” Roy shook his head. Actually he had been reading through Trigg’s files methodically and knew exactly what Verde Canyon was all about. Money. Verde Canyon was a rehabilitation hospital for alcoholics and drug users.

Roy had read the hospital’s prospectus to shareholders. Trigg had shrewdly chosen a New Age theme for the brochure enclosed with the financial report. The brochure reverently described the cleansing, healing powers of the Sonoran desert. The Verde Canyon Hospital would depend chiefly on contracts from federal and state court systems to provide court-ordered “treatment” in lieu of jail. The advantages of sentencing a person to “treatment” rather than jail had a more hopeful outlook, although “treatment” was far more expensive than simple incarceration. Trigg had been rather careless with the keys to filing cabinets; Roy had learned a great deal about Trigg and was still learning. The night-watchman job meant a dry, warm place to sleep during Tucson’s winter rains. But Roy had also begun to spend more time around the plasma donor headquarters because the cold weather had sent hundreds more homeless men south, more men who wanted to look up to Roy, men who wanted Roy to lead them against injustice. They all knew him by the other name. He refused even to utter it. His men might call him any number of names; if one nickname was Rambo, Roy didn’t let it mean anything.

VACANT HOUSES

THE GROWING BAND OF HOMELESS “Vietnam vets” in the lean-tos along the arroyos and the Santa Cruz River had left Roy tense and self-conscious. Tension was inevitable because the men knew and Roy knew that he had something important to say to them, that he had something that would explain what it was they must fight for.

To shake off the tension, Roy had begun to ride his bicycle north of Silverbell Road and then west on a dirt road into the desert. Santa Fe or California-style houses were scattered on the tops of foothills and ridges, isolated from the desert as well as from one another. All winter Roy had bicycled up and down the dirt roads past the winter homes of the wealthy, who had begun to arrive in rented Jaguars and Mercedes in mid-November, and who left for Aspen on New Year’s Day.

Roy had learned to spot evidence of vacancy: the cables or chains with padlocks that had gone back across driveways. At first Roy had only explored outside the vacation houses because he did not know much about the new, high-tech security systems. Then Roy had realized the wealthy left little of value in their Tucson winter homes, and the alarms and security systems had been for their personal protection and were shut off once they had departed. The wealthy were so carefree; Roy discovered curtains and drapes carelessly left open to reveal rooms strangely bare except for a sofa or bed or chest of drawers. Carpeting was always wall-to-wall in shades of ivory-beige or light silver that reminded Roy, somehow, of coffins. He noticed blank spaces in the middle of walls, and empty corners where objects had been.

Roy tells no one what he does with his time. Trigg only cares about the steady flow of blood plasma donors. Trigg has too many other hot propositions and fancy deals. Roy had begun to make a map that pinpointed the vacant winter homes, and he jotted down information about security patrols, gardeners, or operative security systems. Roy no longer worried about what would happen next. All tension had dissolved the night Roy began to make the map. Because at the top of the map Roy had written Locations of Resources: Army of the Homeless. When Roy had finished snooping in Trigg’s files, he would quit. Trigg had been getting on Roy’s nerves lately on account of the mortuary and ambulance schemes.

Trigg had flashed money at Roy before, but this time Roy was thinking ahead. Number one, they would need money. Number two, what did Trigg need done so badly that he waved hundred-dollar bills in both hands? Trigg had said all he needed was the “right” ambulance driver, and then he had winked at Roy. Sure Roy would drive the ambulance or hearse, whatever meat wagon Trigg wanted. Trigg had winced at the mention of meat wagon.

Roy had begun to meet with the men in the arroyo two or three times a week to share a bottle with them. He did not try to pretend he was broke, but he did not let them borrow from him either. Roy didn’t care if he brought the bottle or the paper bag full of greasy tacos to the guys sleeping in the park. Roy met with four different “units,” as the men called themselves. Roy was content to keep the units low-key; he did not bother to inform the men he’d chosen as unit officers. No democracy in the army, not even this army. They would know soon enough what he had planned. For now he had to keep the secret; otherwise some of the braggarts or liars might snitch to the police. Food, drink, and companionship were exactly what the men needed in this phase of the plan.

Roy could feel the change taking place in his blood. Alert, but calm, if such a condition was possible. There was no hurry, no rush. It was coming, it was inevitable; nothing he did either way could or would affect what was coming. But Roy also knew that with planning, some casualties might be avoided. Roy had been going through Trigg’s files late at night, but he had not decided what use to make of Mr. Trigg’s files. Roy had no plans for snitching or for blackmail either. Roy no longer had any use for the Bible or people who called themselves Christians. Roy trusted the feelings he had in his chest and throat; that was how God led a man, not by TV evangelists or puffed-up shitbag reverends and cardinals. Roy hated all churches and organized religion because they had sold out Jesus Christ for sure, and probably Muhammad and Buddha.

Most of Trigg’s corporations existed only in manila folders. Beyond naming and registering the corporations, Trigg had done nothing with them. He had conducted no business through Alpha-Bio Products, Alpha-Hemo-Science Limited, Biomat, Bio Mart, or Biological Industries. But for Alpha Healing, Amalgamated Hospices, and New Century Corporation, Roy had already made real estate purchases.

Part of his job was to listen to Trigg shoot off his mouth. Roy had known guys in wheelchairs who liked to talk a lot; Trigg’s was that same nervous chatter sending out secret signals — I’m-not-a-freak-I’m-not-a-cripple-I-am-all-right. Trigg had shifted into his “benevolent asshole” pose and touched Roy’s sleeve to prove his sincerity. Trigg thought his wheelchair made him a goddamn hero. Trigg had big plans. Big big plans. The cornerstones of his empire were real estate and the plasma donor centers. But the cornerstones had got boring. So now Trigg wanted to branch out, and he would have great opportunities and benefits for his employees.

Roy had merely nodded. He knew all about Trigg’s plasma center employees. They were all women, and from what Roy had seen, they all took pills or drank vodka out of lab beakers. Trigg had no favorites. He was careful never to call the same one into his private office twice in a row. He was against favoritism. Trigg spooned out little lines of “employee incentive” on the glass desk-top. At least Roy didn’t have to sit on Trigg’s face to get a shot of vodka from him.

Roy had got to know the women at all three centers. They called for Roy if they had trouble with crazy, stinking bums who wouldn’t take no for an answer: “No, we don’t want your blood.” Roy was always gentle with the crazies; he talked to them as he escorted them out to the street and told them they didn’t want to sell their blood anyway; they needed to keep their blood. Their blood made them strong. Their blood was what kept everything moving inside them — everything — their eyes, their lungs, their brains; blood even moved their cocks.

Roy had only meant to soothe the crazies when he told them to keep their blood for themselves; but as he had talked to the urine-stinking, wild-eyed drifters, Roy had realized that he was telling them the truth, or at least what he himself believed to be true. Later at one of the unit meetings Roy had warned the men about the habit of selling their plasma or whole blood. He promised very soon there would be alternatives that would provide shelter and food without the sale of blood.

Roy did not waste his time on the women at the plasma centers because they talked about money and marrying men with money. But after a few months Roy had got to know Peaches. Peaches had worked for Trigg the longest; the others said she had lasted because she was in charge of cold-storage inventory and never had to see that chairload of shit-for-brains they called the boss. Peaches had a purple birthmark around her left eye, but Roy thought she was beautiful. The others had warned Roy not to feel bad if Peaches ignored him. Except for Trigg, they did not think Peaches had ever said more than a dozen words to any of them in the seven years she had worked in the freezers.

The doors to the refrigeration units were always kept locked, and the alarms were always set. “No entry. Strict orders,” Peaches had said. She was not rude, but she stood firm. “Are plasma and whole blood that delicate, that perishable?” Roy had wanted to know. Peaches seemed to understand that Roy found her attractive. She had laughed so Roy could watch her round tits bounce in their prim bra cups; these were how she had got the name Peaches.

Roy sensed her suspicion of him. Peaches was not like the others. She was right. Curiosity was stupid. He was wasting his time in the basement. Roy had been about to turn and go back to the freight elevator when Peaches had rapidly punched in codes on the freezer-unit door. “See — there’s nothing; all the units are enclosed.”

“All this for plasma—”

But Peaches shook her head. Her mouth had slowly spread into a smirk. “No, all this isn’t just for plasma. Huh uh.”

The first time Roy and Peaches fuck, Roy gets her so good she tells him about the arrangement between Bio-Materials and the human organ transplant industry across the U.S. The Japanese had developed a saline gel that kept human organs fresh-frozen and viable for transplants for months, not hours. Peaches did not explain where or how Trigg had obtained the human hearts and lungs carefully packed and clearly labeled: Type A Positive — Adult Male.

Frozen human organs, less reliable, sold for a fraction of freshly harvested hearts and kidneys. Of course, fetal-brain tissue and cadaver skin were not affected by freezing. Peaches said Trigg bought a great deal in Mexico where recent unrest and civil strife had killed hundreds a week. Mexican hearts were lean and strong, but Trigg had found no market for dark cadaver skin.

FIRST BLACK INDIAN

CLINTON WAS THE BLACK VETERAN with one foot, but he wore the best, the top of the line, the best kind of prosthetic foot you could buy. Clinton had to wear his full Green Beret uniform every day. Otherwise there would just be trouble for him because Clinton didn’t bow and scrape for no Arizona honkie-trash crackers. Clinton had grown up outside Houston where the cops and Texas Rangers really hated African-American folks. Clinton lives alone in a Sears garden shed he bought for himself. Roy hears rumors Clinton has relatives in Tucson, but Roy doesn’t ask questions because that sets something off in Clinton’s head. Some days Clinton says he’s okay. Other days he warns you ahead of time you better steer clear. Roy is not afraid of Clint’s bad days; on Clint’s bad days, Roy is free to talk wild-talk right back at that crazy black fucker. They don’t talk to one another; they talk at each other, and neither of them bothers to listen to the other. What is important is Clinton’s outrage — Clinton’s pure, pure contempt for any authority but his own.

Clinton reads books when he goes to wash up at the downtown branch of the public library. What he can’t get off his mind is what man does to man over and over again. A slave was the first thing any man thought of; someone to do the dirty work. Clinton thought women were correct about being enslaved by men; otherwise, Clinton had no use for bitches because what at one time had been so good in them had been ruined by their enslavement. Clinton’s paranoia knows no boundaries. He has cousins and stepbrothers in the army, and the word gets around among the brothers and the sisters. The army has to have lab technicians; there are security guards; there must be cleaning crews. The word leaks out.

Clinton always prefaces his remarks. He says no black American would ever betray his country. But a black man’s country was different from the white man’s country, no matter they both called it the same thing: United States of America. Clinton says the AIDS virus was developed in a biowarfare laboratory by the U.S. government and was stolen by military personnel sympathetic to white supremacists in South Africa. Naturally they had been careful to set AIDS loose in the African-controlled states; whites in South Africa would never have risked setting loose the virus on their valuable labor force. Still, the growth of populations in all-African states had to be stopped. Somewhere the men who had paid for the stolen virus sat around a conference table brain-storming.

“Mad scientists?” Roy tried to interject, but Clinton had waved away Roy’s remarks; white man’s words were always being shoved in the black man’s mouth.

“Mad scientists, mad generals, mad Church of God preachers — all of them want to see black folks disappear, but sort of gradually, you know.” Clinton says J. Edgar Hoover ordered the assassination of Martin Luther King. Right there Hoover’s wings got clipped. The old faggot was crazy. Assassination wasn’t “gradual,” and assassination had a way of creating folk myths and heroes. A secret bipartisan congressional panel had hastily concluded only a cover-up could save U.S. cities from burning and the outbreak of a race war. Clinton said J. Edgar had first practiced assassination on John F. Kennedy because Hoover hated the Kennedys. Kennedy supported civil rights, but John Kennedy hadn’t been the big fish. “Hell, no,” Clinton said, “all you whites can think about is ‘white.’ John Kennedy couldn’t lead no one; he couldn’t even lead the U.S. Congress.” Clinton had warmed up good on this topic. Later Clinton told Roy he was the first white man ever to listen through the whole rap to every last word Clinton said. Roy could see why Clinton pissed people off, even some black people. Because Clinton said Kennedy had only been used for target practice; J. Edgar’s dress rehearsal. Martin Luther King had been dangerous because he was a leader. He could lead all different kinds of people — more and more, white people had listened to and followed King. That was what had driven J. Edgar, the old butt-fucker, over the edge.

Clinton understood the cover-up; the whitewash. Clinton said young blacks would have burned down the United States that summer if the truth had come out. Clinton understood the need to be practical. He will be the only black unit leader, but he won’t have an all-black unit. Roy wants integrated units in this new army. They have more whites than blacks anyway. What Roy does not say is for now it is better to have whites outnumber blacks in integrated units. Otherwise whites feel uneasy. Roy and Clinton get along because neither man tries to argue good or bad, right or wrong, only what is necessary. Clinton likes to test Roy’s reactions.

“What if I get me an all-black unit?”

Roy shrugs. None of them are fortune-tellers, are they? For all they know, they may end on opposite sides, battling one another. Neither man rules out a race war, but both tend to agree, battle lines will be drawn according to color: green, the color of money, the only color that had ever mattered. The richest, whatever their color, had always escaped. Clinton has read about the wealth and greed of slave-dealing African tribes. The richest Jews had escaped Hitler’s ovens. Only poor Jews had died. Roy said he didn’t know if Clinton was right about that.

Clinton nodded his head. “The rich got the news; then the rich had the money to get away.”

Clinton had been curious about the tribes that had sold slaves on the African coast. But Clinton had not been fooled by the white man’s lies about African slave-holding tribes. To read the white man’s version, Africans were responsible for the plantation slavery in the New World. But African slaves only replaced the Native American slaves, who died by the thousands. Before the European slave-buyers had arrived, African coastal tribes had practiced only local war-hostage slavery. Prisoners of war worked until their ransoms were paid. Children born to war hostages were adopted and enjoyed all privileges. Where a tribe might capture fifty slaves in ten years, the demand for slave labor in Spanish and Portuguese colonies of the New World greatly increased tribal warfare for the procurement of slaves. Hundreds and finally thousands of slaves were needed in the gold mines and plantations that were worthless without slave labor.

Clinton had gone to Vietnam. It had been easy to see it was a white man’s war; the colored man was sent to do the dangerous, dirty work white men were too weak to perform.

On the GI Bill at the University of New Mexico, he had met a black woman, Reneé, who was reading about black history and black culture. Black studies had been a radical new subject for Clinton; the more he learned, the more angry he got as he realized how whites had had to scheme and manipulate day and night to keep blacks from realizing the power and beauty they had always possessed.

Clinton seldom talked about the two or three years he hung out at UNM in Albuquerque holding black power meetings in the basement of the student union building after midnight. They had had FBI influence in their group in those days, but the undercover FBI Toms all had to go home before midnight because they were flunking English. Clinton wasn’t sure now if the door whites offered America’s “colored” people was an opening or merely another trap. Vietnam had been a trap for people of color. White man expected the colored man to “lift himself” by killing little yellow people. Clinton had sat through all his classes the first semester, but his mind had always been on organizing the brothers and sisters on campus. Clinton didn’t expect to get grades when his real work on campus had been to try to warn his people, honest black folks who still believed all the lies fed to them about the United States of America. Clinton had seen how many dark American faces had been in the Asian war. Clinton had seen the white toads, Lyndon Johnson, and his generals smacking their lips at all the splattered brains and guts of black and brown men. Forces sent to destroy indigenous populations were themselves composed of “expendables.”

Roy generally had no problem following Clinton’s line of reasoning through the first bottle of wine. But halfway into the second wine bottle, Clinton tires of cursing the white man and begins to curse the black man and the brown man who sold their brothers down the river for the white man. Who was the blubber-bellied god of treachery, that god of snitchery and lies? Why did the brother betray the brother? Why did the mother call the police on her son?

Roy likes to get well into the second bottle of wine with Clinton before they start talking about rich people. Then Clinton starts sounding like a communist, something Roy has to caution Clinton about. According to Clinton, the entire war in Southeast Asia had been fabricated as a location and occasion for the slaughter of the strongest and most promising young men of black and brown and poor-white communities. Clinton swears he is no Marxist. African and other tribal people had shared food and wealth in common for thousands of years before the white man Marx came along and stole their ideas for his “communes” and collective farms.

“White man didn’t even invent communism on his own,” Clinton said, wiping his mouth on the sleeve of his shirt.

Black people called men like Clinton “crazy niggers” and blamed Vietnam for them. Everyone had the same thought: black people all knew deep down the Vietnam War had been aimed at them to stop black riots in U.S. cities. The war had destroyed some of their best young men. The war had destroyed two generations of hopefulness and cultural pride. A dangerous generation had emerged from the Korean War. Black warriors and warrior women who sat down at the lunch counters and refused to ride at the back of the bus had changed the face of America. Efficiently, the white man had sent sons and daughters to burn down Vietnam instead of Detroit, Miami, or Watts. Vietnam had been designed to stop the black man in America.

Roy nodded. The FBI probably had assassinated Martin Luther King. He did not agree with Clinton about the war in Southeast Asia. Roy thought it had been a war for the usual reasons. But Clinton’s conspiracy theories were his own business, and Roy didn’t worry about them; some of the other unit leaders whined about Clinton’s “racist theories.” All Roy would say was Clinton had a constitutional right to his views, the same as they had a right to their views. Southern whites nearly always agreed with Clinton. The FBI got rid of King, and Vietnam had been a war to eradicate gooks and niggers.

Clinton had “found” a good little mountain bike on the University of Arizona campus. Clinton and Roy rode together on the dirt roads between the vacant winter homes in the desert foothills. Clinton casually opened mailboxes.

“Rich folks really are different from the rest of us assholes,” Clinton said, “because they don’t care what happens to their mail.

“Everything we need is here,” Clinton had said, sipping some of the homeowner’s scotch as he reclined on a white leather couch. The rich were different all right. The Tucson vacation homes came complete with Tucson cars and Tucson bank accounts. Beside Clinton, on the pink-marble-top coffee table, were piles of letters he had opened. Everything they needed was there. Clinton had located a gold mine: gasoline credit cards, Tucson bank-machine cards, bank statements. In one instance, he had even found an Arizona chauffeur’s license among the piles of catalogues and junk mail flyers.

Roy helped Clinton finish the bottle of scotch. They had the giant-screen TV on with the volume down so they could talk. The setup with the vacant houses had great potential, but their timing would have to be right. “Timing is everything, timing will be everything,” Clinton said, happy and drunk. Until the appointed time, locations of the vacant houses, and the contents of the mailboxes, all were to be top secret, known only to Roy and Clinton.

Roy could not explain to himself why he confided in Clinton and not one of the other Green Berets. Roy thought it must have to do with Clinton’s color, but he didn’t know how. Maybe because Clinton was black, Roy could trust the man to know how to wait, how to lie low and wait. Roy had put himself in charge of recruiting. He beat the bushes in the city parks and in the mesquites along the interstate where homeless men slept. He was determined to find all the homeless Vietnam vets in Tucson, and Roy had started hitchhiking to Phoenix twice a month looking for guys around the free-cheese giveaway warehouse.

Late at night Clinton sometimes dropped by. Roy’s night-watchman’s job with Trigg came complete with an office. Clinton lit up the reefer and took a big hit before passing it to Roy. The basement “watchman’s office” was nothing but a janitor’s closet, with a mop sink at one end. But Roy had fixed up the closet with a light bulb so they felt cozy. While Roy sucked the joint, Clinton exhaled slowly and began to laugh softly, shaking his head. “You got keys to this place?” Roy was still holding the smoke in his lungs, so he only nodded.

“You know how much all this stuff is worth?” Clinton said, and gestured at the dark expanse of basement filled with refrigeration units, electronic cables, and consoles of switches, lights, and gauges that, in turn, were connected to computer terminals and a red telephone. Roy shook his head and slowly exhaled the smoke.

“But I know someone who does know.” It was too soon for Roy to know whether Peaches would tell him all she knew. To judge by the backup generator system for power failures, the contents of the freezer compartments were worth a great deal. They passed the joint in silence, and they both scrutinized freezer locker units that filled the basement. Clinton pulled another fat joint from his shirt pocket. What Roy likes best about Clinton is his sense of timing. They are almost alike in that respect; Roy thinks how funny it is to find out the man most like you in temperament is black. No one will ever know this because Roy will never tell, and he doubts whether Clinton feels the same way. Clinton would probably swear and laugh at the notion. So Roy carries these thoughts around with all his other thoughts. He imagines his ideas are popcorn kernels popping inside his brain. Into the third reefer, they are back to strategies and planning. They will wait out this year just to lay down the groundwork. Timing was crucial. They would prepare and wait until the riots across the United States kicked up again, and Arizona’s meager National Guard forces were deployed to aid California police and National Guard. Roy and Clinton know that all across the U.S. there are others who are also waiting for the right moment. When Arizona and southern California had consumed the last drop of groundwater, entire cities such as Tucson would be abandoned to the poor and the homeless anyway.

After Clinton became “relief” watchman, the basement closet becomes “headquarters.” Clinton drags in a filthy, torn crib mattress and a busted-up tape player held together with silver tape. Nights when Clinton is watchman alone, he presses the buttons and shakes the tape player twice to get it going. Then Clinton begins to dictate messages they will need later on, once their Army of the Homeless has begun to seize radio stations. The people of the United States, ordinary citizens, had set out to reclaim democracy from corruption at all levels. U.S. citizens by the thousands had been put out on the streets while elected officials gave away government money to their cronies. Taxation without representation!

Clinton’s messages would be a call to war. Homeless U.S. citizens would occupy vacant dwellings and government land.

SPIRIT POWER

CLINTON’S FIRST BROADCAST in the reborn United States was going to be dedicated to the children born to escaped African slaves who married Carib Indian survivors. The first broadcast would be dedicated to them — the first African-Native Americans. Clinton talked about the tapes he was making for radio stations, but he never let Roy hear any of them. Clinton said he could describe all the tapes, and Roy would have a better idea if he just let Clinton talk.

Roy had seen the box full of newspaper clippings. The one on the top was about an African woman who was leading an army of rebels somewhere in Africa. The headline had called the woman a “voodoo priestess.” Clinton said the African woman was only twenty-seven, but her troops loved her like children and called her Mama Marie. Mama Marie and her troops had raised hell with government troops. The ordinary people, the citizens in Africa, had the same problems with government politicians as the people had in the United States. The people worked day and night to pay taxes, but still found themselves hungry and homeless.

The voodoo priestess and her soldiers believed that with her power, sticks and stones would explode like grenades and bees would become bullets. Mama Marie had rubbed the chests of her young soldiers with special oils to stop bullets. Now here was the kind of army to have, the kind the voodoo woman had had in Africa, because Clinton had seen years ago in Vietnam that the little jungle people weren’t just good fighters. They used all kinds of poisons and spells and prayers to spirits to attack the GIs in Vietnam.

“You should know,” Clinton said to Roy. “You musta seen that stuff, little monkey gods on altars — things like that.” That was Clinton’s latest theory: the U.S. military had lost the Vietnam War because the Viet Cong had used magic and spirits. How else had the U.S. lost? They had had superior firepower, they had bombed every square foot of the entire country, and still the U.S. had lost. Clinton wasn’t saying the spirits had done it all or spirits had even done half of it; but the spirits had tipped the scale in the Vietnamese’s favor.

Roy did not bother to argue with Clinton about ghosts winning the Vietnam War. Clinton might be right. Roy had felt like a ghost himself since the war. When he saw Roy wasn’t going to argue, Clinton admitted he didn’t totally believe in that kind of superstitious stuff. He wasn’t convinced magic oil could stop bullets. Clinton still believed in the M16, don’t worry. He had seen saturation bombing by B-52s. He’d seen how napalm burned like a laser through flesh and bone. “I just mean that kind of spirit stuff helps,” Clinton said.

“Like God is on our side? That kind of stuff?” Roy said. He smiled so Clinton wouldn’t accuse him of being an asshole. Clinton believed it was important for the people to understand that all around them lay human slavery, although most recently it had been called by other names. Everyone was or had been a slave to some other person or to something that was controlled by another. Most people were not free, Clinton knew from experience, yet man was born to be free. The first slaves Europeans kept had been white. Slave keepers didn’t care about color so long as the slaves were strong and stayed alive. The European kings had slaves called royal “subjects” who worked obediently and paid their taxes to the kings. One kind of slavery had often been traded for another slavery as bad or worse. Slaves of past centuries had shelter and food. Yet today in the United States, so-called “free” men, women, and children slept under cardboard on the street.

White people wouldn’t like being called “slaves” by a black man, but Roy didn’t think most radio listeners would know what color Clinton was except red, commie red. Roy had found out the hard way Clinton couldn’t be teased about communism. Clinton had been all over him so fast Roy hadn’t ever seen where the razor had come from.

“Don’t ever call me that again! Don’t ever say my name Clinton and communism in the same breath!” Communism was dead. Communism was a failure, and that was not what Clinton was talking about. Maybe Rambo-Roy himself was the communist, Clinton said. Rambo was the one who had gone to all the rich people’s houses to steal in the name of the homeless and poor.

Roy had laughed out loud then, at Clinton and his razor; he laughed at himself. No wonder human beings never improved themselves over hundreds of years. He and Clinton would just as soon fight and kill each other as go to the trouble to confront a crooked politician.

Clinton had explained why his camp was separate from the others this way: he had been kicked out of rooms and then out of shelters or halfway houses because of his religion.

Roy studied Clinton’s face. “Religion?”

Clinton nodded, his face full again with indignation: “Because of my shrine. You think in the United States of America—” But then he broke off, shaking his head. Roy nodded. No one could argue: the U.S. was a Christ-biased nation. So Clinton kept his camp separate from the others because of his shrine. He set up the shrine in the center of his storage shed. At night he slept behind the shrine, keeping it for protection between himself and the door. Clinton had done that in his hooch in Vietnam at the firebase camp where the enemy had crept in at night to slit men’s throats while they were dreaming.

Clinton’s shrine held the knife, or the blade of a knife and what remained of a handle, a skeletal piece of metal. Clinton had kept the blade razor-sharp; he had carried the knife in combat because it had never failed him in the dangerous alleys and streets at home. Clinton’s people — women and men alike — all carried knives. Clinton had been hit by flying shrapnel that killed three men nearby. The handle of the knife had been shattered by shrapnel, but miraculously, Clinton had escaped with minor injuries. Clinton woke up and learned the medic had sent the knife along because anyone could see, the knife had saved Clinton’s life. The knife had power all its own. Clinton felt this power long before he studied African religions in black studies and realized his family’s regard for knives was a remnant of old African religion. Clinton had carried the blade wrapped in a piece of red velvet he had cut from the draperies in a whore’s room in Manila.

When he was not wearing the knife sheathed on his combat belt, Clinton kept the knife on its shrine. He had bought the local incense to burn for the shrine, which of course worked to cover the odor of opium or reefer. He bought tiny Japanese porcelain dishes he put in front of the red velvet bundle surrounded by small candles burning in glasses. Clinton put pinches of food on the tiny dishes and sprinkled rum on the blade each time he unwrapped the red velvet.

Roy pointed out that people might not want someone burning candles and spilling rum because it might cause a fire. Typical white-man thinking! Clinton had learned to expect that even the best of them, such as Roy, sometimes just didn’t see. Candles, rum, and incense didn’t necessarily mean a fire. The white man would stop everything before it started; the white man would pretend to know all the answers ahead of time, but of course, really, the white man didn’t have a clue. The white man had made some monumental errors in the five hundred years Europeans had disrupted Africa, China, and the Americas. The Chinese and Africans had broken free; now it was only a matter of time before all captive people on the earth would rise up.

Clinton talked to the blade when he poured the rum over it. The cutting metal edge of the knife was Ogou’s favorite dwelling. In Africa, metalworkers were Ogou’s priests, Clinton’s people all revered the knife. Clinton offered this prayer:

Ogou, Warrior and Metal-maker,

Ogou wages war every day.

Ogou, we suffer a great deal in this battle with our oppressors.

Ogou protects those who serve him.

Ogou is watchful.

Ogou has boundless energy.

Ogou is powered by anger.

Ogou-Feray you magnet power!

Pull iron fragments together

gather the lost to your chest!

Ogou, your father-love heals them—

all the scattered fragments—

ancestor spirits gathered!

Ogou-Feray you lead them to war

for the sake of us, their descendants.

Ogou-Feray, Commander of the Army-of-the-Lost-Is-Found,

Ogou fires the cannon to announce the uprising.

Rage blind rage destroys all in reach,

mad dog warrior, Ogou!

The shrine had made people, even other blacks, afraid of Clinton because Americans had swallowed all that Hollywood bullshit about voodoo and the Devil. Some guys even objected to the apples Clinton left out for the spirits. Clinton did not blame people for their ignorance, but at some point a man had to teach himself or learn something. He explained the apples had to be left to rot so the ancestor spirits could “eat” them.

OGOU, THE KNIFE

THE ONLY SUBJECT Clinton had ever cared about in college had been black studies. In black studies classes they had read about the great cultures of Africa and about slavery and black history in America. But Clinton had not agreed with Garvey and the others who wanted to go back to Africa. Clinton disagreed because blacks had been Americans for centuries now, and Clinton could feel the connection the people had, a connection so deep it ran in his blood. Clinton had been told by the old women talking when he was still a kid; they had been discussing all the branches of the family. The original subject had been marriages with whites, but one whole branch in Tennessee had been married to Indians, “American Indians.” “Native Americans.” And not just any kind of Indian either. Clinton had not got over the shock and wonder of it. He and the rest of his family had been direct descendants of wealthy, slave-owning Cherokee Indians. That had been before Georgia white trash and President Andrew Jackson had defied the U.S. Supreme Court to round up all the Indians and herd them west. Clinton had liked to imagine these Cherokee ancestors of his, puffed up with their wealth of mansions, expensive educations, and white and black slaves. Oh, how “good” they thought they were! No ignorant, grimy cracker-men dare touch them! So pride had gone before their fall. That was why a people had to know their history, even the embarrassments when bad judgment had got them slaughtered by the millions. Lampshades made out of Native Americans by the conquistadors; lampshades made out of Jews. Watch out African-Americans! The next lampshades could be you! Clinton did not trust the so-called “defenders of Planet Earth.” Something about their choice of words had made Clinton uneasy. Clinton was suspicious whenever he heard the word pollution. Human beings had been exterminated strictly for “health” purposes by Europeans too often. Lately Clinton had seen ads purchased by so-called “deep ecologists.” The ads blamed earth’s pollution not on industrial wastes — hydrocarbons and radiation — but on overpopulation. It was no coincidence the Green Party originated in Germany. “Too many people” meant “too many brown-skinned people.” Clinton could read between the lines. “Deep ecologists” invariably ended their magazine ads with “Stop immigration!” and “Close the borders!” Clinton had to chuckle. The Europeans had managed to dirty up the good land and good water around the world in less than five hundred years. Now the despoilers wanted the last bits of living earth for themselves alone.

Military solutions were no solutions at all; Clinton had seen what a “military solution” was in Vietnam: destruction on all sides; everywhere burned earth, and the souls of the people tortured. Clinton believed education was the answer although he had had his education cut short. Still, while others off the street used the downtown public library to wash and shave, Clinton always went from the rest room to the reading room. Clinton had plans. He kept pages and pages of notes from the books he read at the public library. Then Clinton had moved up to the university library where little blond sorority sisters roamed in fours looking for black athletes; no other black men would do but jocks.

Clinton took careful notes of inspirational passages and sudden ideas that came to him while he was reading. He was saving all his notes for use on the broadcasts he planned to tape for the radio. Clinton didn’t waste time worrying where or how he’d get hold of a radio station for his broadcast. That was something the white man did — worry ahead of time. The white man had had the radio waves all to himself; but funny thing was, white man didn’t have nothing alive left to say. Clinton wanted black people to know all their history; he wanted them to know all that had gone on before in Africa; how great and powerful gods had traveled from Africa with the people. He wanted black Americans to know how deeply African blood had watered the soil of the Americas for five hundred years. But there had been an older and deeper connection between Africa and the Americas, in the realm of the spirits. Yet for a while, it must have seemed to the Africans who had survived ocean crossings that their gods had indeed forsaken them. The Spanish plantations and mines of Hispaniola had been a fate worse than death for the Caribbean tribes, who had deliberately died rather than live as slaves. African slaves had been shipped in as replacements for the Indian slaves, who had proved to be nearly worthless.

From the beginning, Africans had escaped and hid in the mountains where they met up with survivors of indigenous tribes hiding in remote strongholds. In the mountains the Africans had discovered a wonderful thing: certain of the African gods had located themselves in the Americas as well as Africa: the Giant Serpent, the Twin Brothers, the Maize Mother, to name a few. Right then the magic had happened: great American and great African tribal cultures had come together to create a powerful consciousness within all people. All were welcome — everyone had been included. That had been and still was the great strength of Damballah, the Gentle. Damballah excluded no one and nothing.

Clinton wanted his radio broadcasts to emphasize the African people’s earliest history in the Americas because slave masters had tried to strip the Africans of everything — their languages and histories. The slave masters thought Africans would be isolated from their African gods in the Americas because the slave masters themselves had left behind their God, Jesus, in Europe. The Europeans had been without a god since their arrival in the Americas. Of course the Europeans were terrified, but did not admit the truth. They had gone through the motions with their priests, holy water, and churches built with Indian slave labor. But their God had not accompanied them. The white man had sprinkled holy water and had prayed for almost five hundred years in the Americas, and still the Christian God was absent. Now Clinton understood why European philosophers had told their people God was dead: the white man’s God had died about the time the Europeans had started sailing around the world. Clinton found himself smiling.

Clinton did not think of the knife blade itself as Ogou. He did not think the tribal people had confused the gentle, huge snakes at the shrines for the Great Damballah or his wife. The spirit of God had only been manifested in the blade and in the giant snakes. God might be found in all worldly places or things. Clinton was careful not to use any names that had been poisoned by Hollywood’s lies. Clinton simply called the religion “ancestor spirits.” Clinton wasn’t trying to scare anyone with his radio broadcasts; scared fuckers would kill you faster than any cocky son of a bitch. Clinton simply wanted people to know the truth. Clinton’s only regret was not listening more to the old granny women talking. The “spirits” had emerged as the most dangerous and potent forces against the European colonials after only two hundred years. Then once the spirits of Africa and the Caribbean Islands had made their marriage, the white man had heard rumors about the union of African and Indian spirits. The “spirits” had been outlawed by the French in Haiti, but too late. The French plantation men of Haiti went gunning for the traveling herb man the other slaves called Don Petro. Planters put a big price on the old man’s head. Creole slaves could only laugh privately at the white men’s mistake. Because old Don Petro, he was one of the “ancients” the white man could never catch. And each year this Don Petro had stirred up more and more trouble for the plantation and mine owners. Don Petro was the head of a new family of spirits, high in the Caribbean mountains.

The people found in the Americas that the spirits did not quite behave in the same manner as they had in Africa. In Africa the spirits had been predictable and generous. Ogoun, the Ironmaker, had been a gentleman-warrior and doctor back in Africa. The slave-hunting and the death on the ocean’s crossing had changed everything. The Africans had been changed by the journey just as Ogoun, Eurzulie, and Damballah themselves had been transformed by the slaughter in the Americas. Ogoun was no gentleman-warrior here; Ogoun was the guerrilla warrior of hit-and-run scorched earth and no prisoners.

Clinton wanted to make his point about the spirits. Not because he was some kind of missionary twisting people’s arms and reaching into their pockets. Clinton didn’t care about the religion part. Clinton just wanted black people to know the spirits of their ancestors were still with them right there in the United States.

Clinton remembered those old granny women sitting with their pipes or chew, talking in low, steady voices about in-laws and all the branches of the family. The branch of the family that was Indian always bragged they were the first black Indians. The old women had chuckled over this claim; they had only meant they were first black Indians in Tennessee, someone had joked; that made more sense. In the old days Tennessee had been nothing but trees and Indians anyway. The black Indians of the family went so far as to paint a black Indian in a warbonnet on the front wall of their house. The black Indians of the family had stories about the very first black Indians.

The first black Indians had lived in high mountain strongholds where they launched raids on the plantations and settlements below. Some said the first black Indian medicine man had been a Jamaican who wandered Haiti, calling himself Boukman; this Boukman of course was working for Don Petro’s spirit family. On an August night, Boukman, the black Indian, had performed a ceremony. A terrible hurricane came up during the ceremony, and then suddenly, an old woman appeared who danced wildly then killed a black pig. Everyone there drank the blood of the pig and swore to follow Boukman, whose name meant “spirit priest.” Ouidambala, Great Ocean serpent, was consulted about undertaking war. The storm winds and floods had struck a terrible blow to the Europeans and gave the slaves advantages they sorely needed to launch their revolution.

Right then the difference between the spirits’ behavior in Africa and the spirits’ behavior in the Americas had been clear: Don Petro’s mean old wife, Martinette, had come dancing up a storm, and she did not care if the winds blew away everyone’s things. Don Petro’s family was like that, harsh even with family members, harsh even with one another. In Africa the spirits behaved much more gently and peacefully.

On American soil these spirits had been nurtured on bitterness and blood spilled since the Europeans had arrived. To judge from the ferocity of Don Petro’s family, the spirits had tasted blood even before the white man came. Some nights when Clinton had felt the most desperate in his own mind or in his heart, he had squatted in a corner of the homeless-shelter shower room and read himself notes he had taken on African religion. Sometimes Clinton had nightmares about Africans and American Indians chasing him. The first nightmares had come after Clinton had been evicted from his room because of the rotting food on his shrine to Ogou.

Clinton was able to interpret his own dreams the way doctors did. Anyone would have had dreams of terror if they had slept on the street. The same dream night after night had become less frightening. Finally Clinton had dreamed the feathered tribal warriors were not chasing him to do harm, but only to bring him a message. The spirits were talking to dreamers all over the world. Awake, people did not even realize the spirits had been instructing them. It was perfect. People would not know why their feet were marching them north; people would not understand the joy they felt walking together side by side. Clinton knew what work was cut out for him and for Rambo-Roy and the others.

The old grannies had been sisters or sisters’ cousins, and they had constantly argued about the branches of the family. French colonials, terrified of poisonings and slave uprisings, but more terrified of the spirits, had asked the black Indians to lead the great opening Mardi Gras parade to acknowledge the people who had been in that place the longest. The white man needed the black Indians to quiet the anger of the spirits. The old grannies used to laugh. White man didn’t do enough for the spirits because the next thing they know there’s the Civil War and the old spirits drink up rivers of white man’s blood while the slaves run free.

CREOLE WILD WEST INDIANS

EVEN BLACK STUDIES CLASS got boring sometimes, especially once European conquerors showed up in Africa. The early history in Africa was great because the African kings had built great empires and African metallurgists had created great works in iron. In the North, African mathematicians created the zero, key to higher mathematics, while African astronomers charted the planets and stars.

But Clinton had always got a sick feeling in his stomach as the days in class passed and the terrible, fateful day approached; the day was when the first European slave-traders had appeared at African slave markets and not at the slave markets in France and England. The semester assignment had been to collect old folks’ talk about their memories of the past. Black studies had been a good class for Clinton in that respect: he had gone to talk with one of the last of the old grannies right before he got sent to Vietnam. She had talked about the spirits watching over Clinton. She saw them. Later in Vietnam when he woke up alive with the knife and its shattered handle, Clinton had known for sure the spirits were watching over him.

Clinton remembered the old grannies arguing among themselves to pass time. The older they got, the more they had talked about the past; and they had sung songs in languages Clinton didn’t recognize, and when he had asked the grannies, they said they didn’t understand the language either, because it was spirits’ language that only the dead or servants of the spirits could understand.

Clinton had only taken notes on particular details that had interested him. A lot of the African-American studies classes had been bullshit honkie sociology or psychology. Having a black professor didn’t make it the gospel. Clinton only took notes on the subjects that excited him, such as the black Indians or the spirits and African people.

From Clinton’s Notebook

Black Indians at Mardi Gras

Black Indian guards and scouts walk ahead of the Mardi Gras parade. The tribal queen is very black, but her face is painted intricately and she wears the feathers of the Kushada Indians. The medicine man strides beside her. Black Indian marchers in tribal costume and feathers are everywhere. “Wild creatures” are dressed in animal skins, and grass aprons with headdresses of horns and antlers. They wear huge cattle rings in their noses. “Wild creatures” dance by jumping up and down, and screeching and spitting. “Wild creatures” have been enraged since time immemorial, over human behavior, but now especially, they reserve special fury for white people along the parade route. They sing:

The Indians are coming

The queen is coming

The Indians are coming

The queen is coming

The cacique is coming

Golden Blades are coming

The cacique is coming

Golden Blades are coming

The black Indian tribes call themselves Little Red, Little Blue, and Little Yellow Eagles. The Golden Blades do battle to see who’s chief each year. Wild Squatoulas and the Creole Wild Wests (cowboys from Opelousas) sing:

Get out the dishes,

get out the pans!

Here comes all the Indian mans!

Black Indians dance with wild abandon. The dances are tribal.

No outsider knows where Africa ends or America begins.

A huge snake of pearls writhes on the black Indian queen’s gold-lamé cape. An immense spider of silver beads crawls over the flame-red satin of the queen’s dress. The cacique priest has chosen the pure white of crystal beads, snowy-egret feathers, white velvet, white satin trimmed in miniature roses of white rhinestone and crystal sequins.

The black Indians march, tribe by tribe, leading the Mardi Gras parade. Tribes sing their songs of arrogance:

Oh, the Little Reds, Whites, Blues,

and Little Yellow Eagles,

Bravest in the land.

They are on the march today

If you should get in their way

Be prepared to die!

In 1933, a policeman was injured by a war spear thrown by some rival tribes in battle. After that, the tribes agreed to act friendly in the Mardi Gras parade. They sang this song:

Shootin’ don’t make it no no mo no!

Shootin’ don’t make it no no mo no!

Shootin’ don’t make it no no mo no!

If you see you a man sitting in a bush

Knock him in the head and give him a push.

’Cause shooting don’t make it no no mo no—

Shooting don’t make it no no mo no!

Along the parade route young girls and boys act as spies for rival tribes waiting down the street, reporting the boasts and challenges that have just been made to give rival tribes and individuals enough time to make up songs in reply.

To a challenge from another black Indian woman, the black Indian queen answers:

Shoot! She don’t look so hot to me!

She don’t have no life in her!

Man! She’s got to have it like I have it!

Use it like I do! Do it like I do it!

Like a tribal queen! Like a tribal queen!

Here the queen darts her tongue out like a snake’s, and her hips and stomach writhe like a snake’s because black Indians still keep in touch with the serpent spirits Damballah and Simbi.

Chief Brother Tillman, leader of the Creole Wild West Indians, is dressed in simple buckskin with black fringe and black feathers. Late as 1947, white people of New Orleans feared the black Indians from the Wild West and tried to avoid them. Still the braves leaped on the trucks of white maskers and yelled, “Mardi Gras! Mardi Gras! Chew the straw! Run away and tell a lie!”

The notes Clinton had made on the black Indians never failed to make Clinton feel somehow hopeful and proud. Clinton especially enjoyed how rowdy and frightening the black Indians had been to whites. Clinton loved to imagine the exhilaration, the feeling of power, the Wild West Indians must have felt. But after 1947, black Indians had no longer appeared in the Mardi Gras parades. The black Indians were outlawed from the parade because changes were already in the wind in 1947. Blacks who had defended the U.S. overseas had come home to demand civil rights.

The black Indians had been part of the white Mardi Gras parades since the days wealthy Indians had owned slaves like the whites. The black Indians had been allowed in the parade because they were American Indians. Clinton felt proud the black Indians had shown the white people whose side they were on even if all the black Indians did get kicked out of the parade. The Negro Mardi Gras was held on March 19 in New Orleans, and he wondered if the Negro Mardi Gras parade had invited the outlawed black Indians to march in their parade. That would have been the right gesture for black people to make to their Indian brothers, but Clinton knew black people and Indians had not always been free to make the appropriate “gestures.” Clinton was no fool. He could remember how his old aunties and grannies had loved to sit smoking their pipes, teasing about one another’s lineage. Indians were Indians, even if they looked black. The black Indians didn’t get invited to any more parades, certainly not to the Negro Mardi Gras parade. Because the black Indians were troublemakers, and trouble had been the last thing the Negro middle class of New Orleans needed.

The old grannies and aunties used to say the people who had first come from Africa had been shocked by what they had found in the Americas. Even the African gods they had found in America had been toughened-up by their experience on this continent. Except of course for the pure-hearted Damballah, gentle but distant, who did not concern himself with worldly things; Damballah had not been affected. But right away it was clear that in America, the African gods were short-tempered. What the African slaves had met face-to-face in this land was Death. Death roamed freely night and day in America; in Africa, Death only went about late at night.

ARMY OF JUSTICE

SPIRITS DIDN’T FRIGHTEN CLINTON. He knew how to talk to them silently; he had ordinary conversations with them unless they had come to Clinton with a message. Clinton had not always believed. Then he got hit in Vietnam, and the knife changed everything. Vietnam had been full of Vietnamese spirits. Vietnamese people spent the better part of their time, and money, on incense, candy, liquor, and flowers for the spirits. The example the Vietnamese set had been inspiration for Clinton, and luckily, he had begun to “feed” his knife a little rum every morning, and every night. A month later, the knife had saved his life.

Back in the United States, the spirits seemed to be angry and whirling around and around themselves and the people to cause anger and fear. Clinton had seen madness and meanness everywhere in the United States, among whites and blacks too. Because people everywhere had forgotten the spirits, the spirits of all their ancestors who had preceded them on these vast continents. Yes, the Americas were full of furious, bitter spirits; five hundred years of slaughter had left the continents swarming with millions of spirits that never rested and would never stop until justice had been done. Clinton didn’t like to waste energy quarreling over little things. If Rambo-Roy wanted to call their army the Army of the Homeless or Army of the Poor and Homeless, that was okay by Clinton. But Clinton would have called it the Army of Justice.

First came the great serpent spirit, the pure and gentle Damballah. Damballah was so shy and apart from the world that he did not involve himself in the trials of humans except as a messenger. All the other spirits were more than eager “to work” for people who fed them generously.

The “Americanized” spirits used the name Ge Rouge after their African names. That was a warning: red for “danger.” Clinton had not been able to remember all the names and disguises the spirits took, but he knew Ogou Ge Rouge was a great warrior; it had been Ogou Ge Rouge who had saved his life. Native Americans had been talking to ancestral spirits who lived in clay jars when the African slaves had appeared. The Native Americans had died off deliberately to spite the Europeans. In death their spirits had been set free to roam at will and to help other powerful ancestor spirits already set loose on the slave masters.

Now it was simply a matter of time, that was all. Clinton knew his life, body and soul, belonged to the world of the spirits. When Clinton had looked around, he saw that people were all terrified, all fearful of death. Poor people were just as scared as rich people. Clinton had noticed that each time he had traveled. Clinton had read somewhere that the number of baptized Christians had been steadily falling in America since the Second World War. Clinton wondered if this had been the effect of the atomic bomb — to drive people away from churches; people blamed God so they did not have to listen to him anymore. Clinton had done the same; he had let go of one God when another had protected him in battle.

The time had come when people were beginning to sense impending disaster and to see signs all around them — great upheavals of the earth that cracked open mountains and crushed man-made walls. Great winds would flatten houses, and floods driven by great winds would drown thousands. All of man’s computers and “high technology” could do nothing in the face of the earth’s power.

All at once people who were waiting and watching would realize the presence of all the spirits — the great mountain and river spirits, the great sky spirits, all the spirits of beloved ancestors, warriors, and old friends — the spirits would assemble and then the people of these continents would rise up. People would rise up as they had for old Boukman and old Koromantin, the Gold Coast man who had raised the people in 1760.

The spirits worked in many ways. European overseers fell victim to terrible vices urged on by the spirits. Overseers no longer concerned themselves with business; instead, overseers lost themselves for hours in savage sexual pleasures, which commonly began after a midmorning corn-liquor toddy. White overseers had amused themselves with their slaves for hours on end, pausing only for more liquor or occasional naps. The spirits had been behind the excesses of the mine owners and plantation bosses who began to forget their purpose was to make money; the excesses they had committeed on their slaves had required time that had once been spent on keeping accounts, and inspecting the slaves’ work. Gradually the output from the mines, the harvests from the plantations, would begin to decline. The white men would be seen less and less except by a few of the house slaves. Second- or third-born sons without land, the Europeans overseas had been alone, without families to call them back to their senses.

Valuable slave women and children had been mutilated and slaughtered, had been driven mad by the depravity of the colonial masters. Smelter walls had cracked when the fires were allowed to die out, and still the spirits had ruled the overseers’ appetites. Each day the colonials had retired more and more into their private world, a world that shut out their terror because each instant had celebrated their personal power with the flesh of their slaves. European lords had had slaves; so had the Arabs and the Chinese; even some tribal cultures had kept slaves. But nowhere except in the Americas had the colonial slave masters suddenly been without their own people and culture to help control the terrible compulsions and hungers aroused by owning human slaves. Nowhere had so many slaves been consumed so lavishly or so quickly. Child rape and murder had been perfected in the New World by European slave owners, who had later returned to Europe infected with bloody compulsions they had indulged in the colonies, hidden away from the eyes of their peers and their God as they smeared the fresh blood of slaves on their thighs and genitals.

LIBERATION RADIO BROADCASTS

CLINTON NO LONGER FELT HIMSELF choking on anguish-on the rage and pain he had felt every day of his life, even in the army. What had made the difference were the spirits, and the army he and Rambo were putting together. Clinton was happy Rambo was in no hurry; Clinton had wanted to travel around a little to see which way the wind was blowing in such places as L.A., Houston, and Miami where recent rioting had been worst. Clinton wanted to do a little scouting work, that was all.

He reminded himself to be realistic. He wasn’t going to find many poor blacks in L.A. or Miami who would waste time listening to him. The poor were tired and sick. They would rather watch TV. A few were making big money from the others who bought a few minutes of forgetfulness from a pipe or a needle. Illness, dope, and hunger were the white man’s allies; only dope stopped young black men from burning white America to the ground. Clinton felt an obligation to try to locate recruits because numbers were not as important as loyalty or determination. Small groups had been changing the history of the world from the beginning. Clinton had seen the bloodshed in the black and brown neighborhoods — all the ammunition and guns, all the energy young people used up every night in L.A., San Jose, Oakland — never mind Washington, D.C. and New York City. For now, Clinton would settle for recruiting a few of the best men, and women too, who wanted to fight a real war, instead of selling crack to keep white men rich and safe. If he couldn’t find young recruits, then Clinton would go after old ones like himself, Vietnam vets. There might be one or two like himself still alive.

Clinton did not expect success overnight. He knew they would call him a crazy old man. But he would just keep hammering away at the young ones — he knew someday they would find out money alone wasn’t enough, because money didn’t buy respect. Sure, they could make money off one another; they could bleed on the street while white men got richer and richer selling them dope, and future warriors were killed by booze or dope. They were free to continue with all that. Clinton did not want his radio broadcasts to sound like Hitler’s, but people had to be warned: alcohol and drugs were intended to keep them weak, to keep them from rising up — to demand justice. Black slaves had labored to make the United States rich and powerful. The United States still owed African-Americans just as the U.S. owed Native Americans.

Clinton’s Slavery Broadcast

Opening music (Bob Marley, Jimmy Cliff, Aretha Franklin)

Voice reads: Now is the time to keep the promise you make.

Curse him as I curse him!

Spoil him as I spoil him!

May he have no peace in bed

no peace at his food

nor can he hide!

Waste him and wear him!

Rot him as these rot!

Voice-over continues:

1. Slavery is any continuing relationship between people and systems that results in human degradation and human suffering.

2. Women and children are the most frequently enslaved because slavery relies on violence and systematic terrorism to maintain control.

3. Terrorism takes many forms, but most often the violence is sexual, to convince victims suffering is part of their very identity, as unchangeable as their sex or skin color.

4. The slave is the polestar of the Master’s life. The slave will always receive the Master. The slave becomes part of the Master, and perfection becomes possible.

5. The slave has no identity but through the Master; slave identity is not a fully human identity.

6. Slaves may serve as laborers, but slaves exist primarily to satisfy sexual and ego needs of the Master.

7. The Master craves the pulse of cruelty and pleasure the slave arouses in him again and again.

8. Strike the Master’s son but never the Master’s slave; the son is a separate being, but the slave and Master are one and the same.

9. Slavery is highly productive and yields fabulous profits. Slavery makes cruelty valuable and useful.

10. Europe got fabulously wealthy off slave power in the Americas. Where does the greed of the European originate? Greed arises out of terror of death. People of snow and ice are haunted by freezing and starving. The wood on the fire never lasts for long.

11. Wealth from slavery buys storehouses of food and armies and the finest physicians. Wealth obtains more slaves and more property to barricade the Master in the world of the living.

12. The slave is offered to Death in place of the Master; thus the slave “becomes” the Master if only for an instant as the slave dies.

13. The slave accumulates power in the realm of the Master’s dreams. Gradually, the slave inhabits the Master’s idle thoughts during his waking hours. The Master’s obsession enslaves him. (End of broadcast.)

Clinton’s Radio Broadcast #2

First Successful Slave Revolution in the Americas

Slavery joined forever the histories of the tribal people of the Americas with the histories of the tribal people of Africa. On La Isla de Hispaniola escaped African slaves called maroons fled to the remote mountains where the remaining bands of Arawak Indians took them in.

In 1791 the slaves’ war for independence began with a ceremony to the spirits. Boukman, Biasson, and Jean François led the people into battle. Guerrilla army units of maroons and black Indians came down from mountain strongholds at night to leave various charms and “poisons,” and to burn barns and the mansions of the rich. In 1801, the Revolutionary Army of Slaves at Santo Domingo defeated 25,000 of Napoleon’s soldiers, commanded by Bonaparte’s brother-in-law. The French are defeated with the help of the spirits.

The spirits of Africa and the Americas are joined together in history, and on both continents by the sacred gourd rattle. Erzulie joins the Mother Earth. Damballah, great serpent of the sky and keeper of all spiritual knowledge, joins the giant plumed serpent, Quetzalcoatl. When someone dies, the spirit goes to the Dead Country. Legba-Gede, Lord of the Crossroads of Life and Death, directs the traffic of the human souls.

Spirits inhabit the “thunderstones” or flint blades the Ar-awaks and Caribs once carved. The spirit inside one “thunderstone” caused the stone to sweat profusely; another famous stone named Papa Gede urinated. The spirits are the most powerful beings. That is how the outnumbered and ill-equipped people’s army had held off the French navy and army.

First Legba-Gede takes on his favorite incarnation, Lord of the Cemeteries, who gave his secret followers special power against European soldiers occupying Haiti. The Lord of the Cemeteries had given his secret followers the power to hypnotize then overpower victims along the road. The soldiers of the Lord of the Cemeteries carried nooses of dried human gut to strangle new victims after midnight. Europeans are terrified.

Gede Ge Rouge has always been a cannibal. Ge Rouge is synonymous with the Americas. The power of Gede and spirits of the dead is original to the Americas. Gede was not worshiped in Africa. Ogoun had traveled with the other spirits to the Americas, but Gede, Master of the Dead, protector of small children, tricksters, and sexual athletes, Gede, who connects the living people with distant ancestors and forward in time to descendants yet unborn, Gede belongs to the Americas.

The signatures of the spirits are outlined in ashes and cornmeal on the ground. For Legba-Gede they paint the cardinal points, the crossroads of the universe. Sometimes the old man, Legba-Gatekeeper shows up, crippled, covered with sores and maggots. He is both male and female; he is both fire and sun. Old Gede prances like a horse in his old black overcoat, jabbering away and sipping champagne. His rites are performed during the new moon. Old crippled Gede sometimes has only one foot; then they call him Congo Zandor because a snake has only one foot, which is his belly that he crawls on, and he mashes his victims between giant stones.

Sitting across from old man Legba is Petro-Mait-Carre-four, young and strong, spirit of all points in-between, spirit of the moon, spirit who regulates all demons. Gede-Brav is Lord of the Smoking Mirror, wearing dark glasses; his words and gestures are full of constant sexual innuendo. Gede-Brav, Keeper of the Gate, is the cosmic phallus, muttering to himself and rubbing against objects.

Gede-Brav can swallow the hottest drink.

Gede-Brav has a ravenous appetite.

Gede-Brav always shows up at the wrong moment.

Gede-Brav shows up where he is not welcome.

Gede-Brav cross-dresses.

Old bent man, Cinq-Jour Malheureux, is Gede-the-dying-sun-soon-to-be-reborn; Cinq-Jour Malheureux represents unnamed, empty, and unlucky days at the end of the Native American calendar.

In Africa, Ogoun, spirit of the warrior, statesman, and metallurgist, reigned over the villages and towns of Dahomey and Guinea; but in the Americas, Legba-Gede, Lord of the Dead Spirits, Keeper of the Crossroads of Life and Death, became more powerful because the Europeans had killed so many people in the New World, dead souls far outnumbered the living. In Africa, Ogoun did not have to share his power; in Africa, Ogoun had great armies with the best weaponry. But in the Americas, Ogoun Ge Rouge must share his power with Legba-Gede, and right here you know this military spirit hates this “political maneuver,” this “compromise” in which he must share power with the Lord of the Dead.

The rage of Ogoun is terrible. Even in Africa, Ogoun’s anger had accidentally killed his people, and in despair he had thrown himself on his sword. But in the New World, where Ogoun faces far greater outrages, his fury has no limit. Thus it is that Ogoun Ge Rouge and his followers have many times outnumbered and double-crossed Legba-Gede and the people after they’ve won their independence. Ogoun Ge Rouge Jaco is the fast-talking, crooked politician who appears from the smoke and ruin after the revolution. Jaco tells lies and spreads rumors. Jaco works to create misunderstanding and suspicion among the people. Jaco and his cronies work fast; before the people realize, Jaco and the others are long gone with all the people’s money in the national treasury.

Ogoun Ge Rouge Feraille is the spirit of a great national hero who outlasts and finally defeats the spirit and followers of Jaco. Trouble is, politicians all call themselves “followers of Ogoun Feraille” and only later reveal themselves as followers of the crooked politician Ogoun Jaco. So far, Ogoun Jaco and his followers had been busy all over the world, not just in Haiti. Others had seen their revolutions eroded and betrayed, otherwise a Chinese poet could not have written: “Before the revolution we were slaves, now we are the slaves of former slaves.”

Clinton didn’t care if his radio broadcasts sounded like lectures from a black studies class. After the riots and Vietnam War, there had been no more university funding for black studies classes. That was no accident. The powers who controlled the United States didn’t want the people to know their history. If the people knew their history, they would realize they must rise up.

BOOK THREE. EL PASO SONNY’S SECRET SIDELINE

SONNY HAD BEEN EXPECTING a phone call from the Mexican, Menardo. Sonny hadn’t told Max anything about his contacts in Mexico. Sonny told Max he liked Mexican “beaches,” but “bitches” was more like it; Menardo’s wife, Alegría, was sensational in bed. She had been all over Sonny again and again.

Sonny was looking forward to doing business with the Mexican because Menardo’s prices were much better than what Mr. B. had offered. Sonny didn’t care if Max had worked with Mr. B. or the government; what Max did was up to Max. Sonny didn’t like B. He’d work for B. because Leah rented warehouses to him and because the job was so simple.

Sonny Blue had always thought Angelo was pathetic. Raised like an orphan by the fat uncle in a junkyard, Angelo had surprised Sonny Blue. Angelo had managed his racehorses and done his “accounting” for the family interests at both the horse and the dog tracks. Angelo had not been fooled by sob stories or excuses from the peons. Sonny liked to call white men in Tucson “peons.” Sonny used only white peons; he never used Mexicans when white men were plentiful and cheap.

Sonny Blue had been impressed when Angelo’s racehorses had won a race here and there. All the Tucson horses ran on California tracks. Angelo did not seem the type to work in the family business. Sonny Blue figured him for the type who would work for a while and then quit when he had the money he needed for legitimate business. The fat uncle who had raised Angelo had refused to take part in family business activities. Sonny Blue had heard the story of “Fatty,” and how he had never touched a penny of the family “dividends” and how he wanted to keep his fat hands clean. For what? Angelo had had to live in a small trailer crowded together with the fat uncle. Sonny Blue thanked his lucky stars he had been born who he was.

Sonny Blue saw many similarities between Angelo and his brother, Bingo. Bingo had been slow and had struggled through school. Bingo was taking care of the El Paso operations for now, but already Sonny had been thinking about sending Angelo over to assist Bingo. They needed a border toehold, and they needed someone in El Paso who would be ready to act when their “new friends” began making deliveries to them. Sonny Blue could not trust Bingo. Bingo stuffed too much coke up his snout. But the family politics were sticky; Sonny could not let Max or Leah find out how much cocaine they both used because heads would roll then. Max was old-fashioned. Cocaine was a drug the white man sold to niggers.

Max had given Sonny the vending machines and pinball games: the family organization had exclusive distributorships in Tucson and El Paso. Bingo was a poor manager, and the family organization was losing money in El Paso. Sonny Blue and Bingo had strict warnings: stay away from dope. Dope was the territory of the Mexicans. Max Blue had reminded them about the law of diminishing returns: they could start a war with the Mexican and Indian smugglers, but when the dust cleared, what would they have gained? The family had had some good lessons taught them over the years by Mexican and Indian smugglers.

Max Blue had gone on and on, preaching to Bingo and Sonny about their vending and game machine distributorships—exclusive distributorships. Distributorships such as these did not grow on trees. What more did they want? Sonny Blue had always known to be careful what he said to Max. Sonny had always felt a little uneasy, and secretly, he was afraid of his father. But it had been difficult for Sonny to hold his temper when Max had asked “what more” Sonny wanted. “Money!” Sonny wanted to scream. He wanted his share. He wanted a chance to show he was somebody besides Max Blue’s son. What did the vending and pinball machines bring in a year—$275,000 or $300,000? Exclusive distributorship? Well, Sonny had to watch constantly for “squatters” and independents who tried to go around Sonny with video games and hot-sandwich machines. The games division’s profits were shrinking because of all the home videos; but the instant-food dispensers were offsetting the games’ losses.

Sonny hated even to think about it. The stale smell of greasy lunch meats and rotting lettuce permeated Sonny’s office at the main warehouse. Sonny was sick of the pig slop. He was sick of the way things had been going for him and Bingo. He did not understand why his old man had rolled over so easy for the Mexicans, who thought they ran the town.

Sonny Blue had lived in Tucson all his adult life. In Tucson, the big thieves hanged the little thieves. It was that simple. In Tucson money talked louder than bullets. In Tucson a man might dare you to shoot him; but no man in Tucson ever refused a hundred-dollar bill. For five hundred dollars “trash” in Tucson would shoot their own brothers.

“Legitimate business”? That was the joke of the century in Tucson. Even the new Federal Building sagged dangerously because so much steel and concrete had been “diverted” by subcontractors during construction. Tucson had families of thieves going back three generations; they had been stealing from the U.S. government since the Apache Wars, so what were a few hundred thousand yards of concrete or a few dozen steel beams?

Sonny didn’t know which ones he hated worse: the white-trash “gringos,” the pigtailed biker gangs, or the filthy Mexicans. Human sewage all of them. What a relief there were only a few blacks; Sonny had counted this as Tucson’s one selling point. Sonny had not wanted El Paso. Tucson was bad, but El Paso was only more of the same two-bit players. Bingo had hated Tucson too. Bingo had been the smart one to jump on the El Paso deal. What difference did it make where the stinking food-vending machines were leased? Sonny had stayed in Tucson deliberately. Sonny wanted to prove a point.

Sonny Blue did not trust Mr. B. because he was a retired major. “Military” meant “police” as far as Sonny was concerned. Telephone call from the senator or no, Sonny Blue was not impressed by Leah’s half-million-dollar lease. The entire economy was shaky; the military would face huge budget cuts. Sonny Blue laughed at the expression on Leah’s face. “Snip! Snip! Off go their fat budgets!” But Leah Blue had had the last laugh. She wasn’t a bit worried about the money. The major had paid cash up front: out of his blue Samsonite suitcase. Leah pretended to fan herself with a bundle of hundreds. The warehouses that the major had rented had been vacant since their completion. Leah had used cheap government loans and development grants to finance the construction. Friends of the family had been generous in approving interest-free loans from certain banks the senator controlled in Phoenix.

Sonny Blue did not call her “Mother.” Sometimes he could more easily imagine Max was his father than he could imagine Leah as his mother. Sonny had been watching Leah with her men from the beginning when she had taken Sonny and Bingo in the car with her to show real estate. Sonny had sensed right away something was going on when she had bought them candy and pop and left them in the big Chrysler with the engine running and the air-conditioning on. Sonny had wanted to sneak into the house and spy on them. Bingo had been afraid of getting caught. Bingo had started to cry and would not shut up until Sonny had kicked and punched him.

“You can be with me or you can be with them,” Sonny had said to his brother, and even as he spoke, he could see fear in Bingo’s eyes. Without Sonny, Bingo had no one but the housekeepers or gardeners, who did not last more than a year or two. Sonny had taught Bingo to call her Leah and not Mama or Mother. Whiney babies called for their mommies.

Sonny Blue could not wait to see the expression of shock, the stunned look, of Max when he found out Sonny had got his own business rolling with the Mexicans. Sonny didn’t need any major as a go-between. Sonny wasn’t worried; his “business partner,” Menardo, owned something called Universal Insurance. As Menardo had explained it, the company was far more than a mere insurance company. For your money, you not only got insurance from tidal waves, fires, earthquakes, and hurricanes; Menardo had waved a thick contract in front of Sonny’s face. At Universal Insurance, for only a few thousand dollars or a few million pesos more, a businessman such as Sonny Blue could be protected against uprisings, riots, unrest, and even mutiny by government forces. Universal Insurance maintained its own highly trained, well-armed security forces for land, sea, and air. As governments went bankrupt and no longer paid police or armies, the services of private police and private army units became more important.

Menardo had talked at length about the federal troops and the police, who were in the pay of everyone (including Universal Insurance). Menardo did not think bribes alone were reliable any longer. In the end Sonny agreed to purchase the “foreign businessman’s protection package”; the package had been expensive, but had included everything. “Everything” included the use of Universal Insurance’s “air force,” and in the event of emergencies, one of General J.’s Learjets. Sonny Blue had savored the feeling of power and satisfaction that had spread over him like good wine; he gunned the Porsche and pulled away from the traffic on I-10. He would show Max.

Max had not been the same since the shooting. How many times had Sonny heard his uncles and aunts whisper about his father, about the changes in Max Blue that caused them to shake their heads. Sonny did not exactly blame Max; it wasn’t his fault he got shot. Max must be unlucky because he had got hurt in a plane crash in the army. Sonny couldn’t blame his old man for bad luck. What irritated Sonny was Max Blue’s assumption that Sonny and Bingo would be satisfied with some chicken-shit pinball games and sandwich machines in Tucson and El Paso while everyone else was getting rich running dope or guns across the border. Something was wrong with Max since the shooting. Max wasn’t interested anymore in women or money; Max might as well be dead. All Max did was play golf; all day, weather permitting, seven days a week, for fifty-two weeks.

Sonny had only heard rumors. He had not been able to bring himself to ask. Max would have told Sonny if Max had wanted Sonny to know. Killing was cheap, and getting cheaper every day. Sonny could make more on one big truckload of cocaine than Max Blue could make whacking a dozen bastards. Max must have done it for kicks. Sonny didn’t blame his old man. If sex didn’t work any longer, there had to be substitutes. Sonny could remember that when he was in grade school, Max had worked in his office all night even on Sunday and at Christmas.

Sonny knew his father did not like to be touched or to touch others. Sonny tried to imagine what the thrill was. Max didn’t even get the satisfaction of squeezing the trigger. He must have been excited by the planning and the step-by-step preparations for an execution. Sonny had not seen his father excited or happy when the family was together. Sunday dinners had been for the benefit of the grandparents, even if they only came to Tucson in the winter. Otherwise, they themselves seemed to know it wasn’t a real family, that the boys were separate parts of the lives of Max and Leah; small parts, pushed aside by bigger plans and greater schemes.

Sonny’s way was to be one of the cool ones — the kind girls went after. Sonny had made a study. A guy did not have to be much in the looks department as long as he had great-looking clothes and a great-looking car; women were looking for status, not good looks; good looks didn’t buy them champagne and strings of pearls. Sonny kept all his fraternity-alumnus dues and fees current so he could drop by the “house” whenever he wanted to pick up some nice fresh coed. Sonny had got used to dating college women, and after he had graduated, Sonny discovered he was attracted only to the coeds. Working women were a turnoff; they were always calculating what a man’s salary added to their salary might buy for them. The coeds lived on their family trusts or their papas’ monthly checks. Coeds had flexible schedules, so Sonny could screw them all afternoon if he felt like it.

Sonny had dated a few women who had good bankrolls or were hotshot businesswomen. But he had not felt comfortable talking with them about hydraulic lifts on trucks delivering video arcade games. Sonny took the precaution of announcing he did not wish to discuss business on a date, and the women had quickly agreed.

Sonny had never been serious about any of the coeds he had dated; he had no desire to see the same ass and same tits over and over 365 days a year. Sonny had never dated the same woman two nights in a row; that had been one of his frat-house trademarks. Fresh pussy every night. Of course he had dated a couple of the “better” girls more than once. Sonny had also dated not two but three coeds who had gone on to become Miss Arizonas; but they had been no different. Once Sonny got them in bed, he could begin to see things close up; sometimes he switched off the lights so he would not see the freckles or moles; Sonny did not watch them walk naked across the hotel room because he knew he would notice something — one tit larger than the other, dimpled cellulite on the thighs or the ass — even on the skinny ones.

Sonny had a secret that always worked. Once he got the girl in his Porsche, he poured out fat lines of coke on the dashboard and handed her a gold straw. Liquor might work quicker than candy, but nothing beat good cocaine for getting the panties off sorority girls. Sonny could take coke or leave it; he had watched Bingo stumble around half-blind from the drug, still searching for more.

Sonny and Bingo had started dealing a little while they were at the university. Everyone knew hometown boys had access to any drug you wanted — name it and Tucson had it, and at the lowest price. Now that Sonny had hooked up with Menardo, he and Bingo would have cocaine by the kilos. Mr. B. had only vague plans for Leah’s warehouses. Sonny had pegged the retired major right away as an arms dealer. Mr. B. wore a khaki safari jacket and matching pants and fussed a great deal with the chin strap of his broad-brim canvas safari hat.

Sonny had talked to Bingo about the possibility of expanding their enterprise in three or four years to include guns, but Bingo had not sounded interested in anything but the kilos of coke coming out of Mexico. Bingo had wanted to know what market there was for guns in Mexico. “Guns and dynamite,” Sonny had added, to see the expression on Bingo’s face. But Sonny could tell that Bingo’s mind was on the kilo packages.

BROTHER’S KEEPER

BINGO HAD ALWAYS WAITED for Sonny to tell him what he should do. Bingo didn’t care if the idea was not his own; Bingo never had any good ideas of his own anyway. There were leaders and there were followers, and Bingo knew what he was. He had always looked for Sonny during lunch or study hall when they were in school. Bingo had pledged the same fraternity; he had even graduated with the same 2.0 grade average.

Bingo had been known as the quiet one, who was shy with girls. But Bingo had changed all that when he had got his big house in the sand dunes outside El Paso. Sonny had given him pep talks; let the big Lincoln and the Olympic-size pool work their magic. “Linen suits and cashmere overcoats speak louder than words,” Sonny said.

Bingo had always had violent nightmares that woke him crying and sweating with terror. Sonny had been the one who had turned on the light and gone to the far end of the house to the master bedroom for Leah. Max Blue had just returned home from the hospital, and Leah did not let the boys in their bed. Bingo had cried and begged his mother to force Sonny to let him sleep in Sonny’s bed. Sonny demanded payment, although Bingo seldom wet the bed anymore. Bingo had to do whatever Sonny told him. Whatever Sonny said, Bingo was his slave; otherwise, some night when Bingo’s nightmare of the exploding gas furnace had woken him screaming, Sonny might refuse to let Bingo get into bed with him. Sonny had demanded to know what was so scary about the exploding furnace. Did Bingo see himself blowing up or burning? Bingo had not seen any of that; Bingo had only dreamed the furnace and then its explosion as if he had been blown to bits but was still able to describe the fiery clouds of debris and butane gas.

Bingo awoke sobbing because the explosion had been the end of all of them — Mother and Father as well as Sonny and himself. The effects of the dream, the grief, did not end once Bingo had awakened. Bingo could not stop himself from grieving for hours after he woke from the nightmare. Sonny had pointed out that once you were dead, love didn’t matter. Bingo had loved Sonny so much, but that day, Bingo had detected Sonny’s pleasure at seeing him cry. When Sonny wanted Bingo to shut up, he would threaten to push Bingo out of his bed. Lying next to Sonny was all that soothed the terrible feelings of grief and loss in the nightmare.

Bingo had always loved Sonny more than anyone. Sonny had whispered they were not wanted by their mother and father; Bingo started to cry when Sonny teased him. Or Sonny had been “wanted,” but Bingo had been an “accident” and had spoiled everything. Bingo had been a crybaby who had driven Max out of the house the morning he got shot. Sonny had told Bingo a number of lies, claiming they were true stories. Their parents weren’t like other kids’ parents. Bingo believed Sonny because Sonny talked to him, for hours and hours in the dark. Other kids’ parents didn’t get shot. Other kids’ parents came to their bedrooms if they got scared at night. Later Sonny told Bingo that he had lied; Sonny said he had been afraid to go all the way through the house in the dark to the master bedroom. So Sonny had only pretended to go tell their mother Bingo was calling for her. Sonny used to lie and say Leah was coming; then Bingo had waited hours and hours until he knew his mother would not come. “She never did come,” Bingo used to complain to Sonny. Sonny used to shrug his shoulders as if it were none of his concern.

“You know I would come running in a minute if I knew you were crying and wanted me!” Leah had said years later when they talked, but Bingo had not quite believed her; or he had believed Sonny more.

Sonny had been the only one Bingo had ever been able to talk to, but even in high school, there had been certain things Bingo had not been able to tell Sonny. The things Bingo wasn’t able to tell Sonny were things so weird Bingo didn’t dare tell them at confession. They were just dreams or strange ideas that had come to Bingo suddenly. He had imagined his homeroom teacher and the entire class sitting at their desks naked. When Bingo had told Sonny, Sonny had asked if Bingo was seeing Sister Thomas Mary naked at her desk; what about the guys in homeroom, was Bingo seeing them nude also? When Bingo had nodded, Sonny had become very animated; Sonny had begun laughing and dancing around the room.

“You’re a queer, Bingo-Boy! That’s what it means! Queers like to see old nuns and young guys naked!” Bingo had imagined far worse, far stranger scenes, but he could never tell Sonny.

Bingo often found himself daydreaming that Max and Leah and Sonny had all been killed in a plane crash or a car wreck. The daydreams left Bingo very sad; he felt as if he had really lost them. The move to El Paso had not helped, except in the beginning when the big house and the car and the expense account had all been new. Whatever money Bingo had, he always spent, and now that he was closer to the border, he could get all the good tequila and scotch he wanted and all the good pills and pharmaceutical cocaine. The Mexican maids had been the frosting on the cake. Bingo had been warned not to let the maids see him use cocaine; but Bingo had developed a taste for cocaine on damp flesh, and he found he enjoyed two women at a time more than one woman who expected all his attention.

The first mess Sonny had had to save Bingo from was the two coke-hungry Mexican maids. Sonny had driven the new Porsche from Tucson to El Paso to check on Bingo. Reports from the office in El Paso had been that Bingo was seldom seen except to sign paychecks on Thursday afternoons and to write himself $3,500 checks to cash for the weekend. Bingo had been glad to see Sonny climb out of the black Porsche; the two women had been fighting all night. Bingo had admired how Sonny knew exactly what to do: one call to Immigration and the women would disappear into the vast deportation process. Employers in El Paso and Tucson preferred illegal aliens because they worked so cheaply and they were afraid to make trouble. The cocaine and wild sex with Bingo had caused the maids to forget their manners. Sonny teased Bingo about sex. Bingo had learned his lesson with the maids; from now on, he would simply go back to telephone escort services. What had worked for Bingo in Tucson would have to work for him again in El Paso.

That was the chief disadvantage of Bingo’s big hacienda that was so far from downtown; escorts had cost more, and the better services did not allow their employees to leave the El Paso city limits. Bingo had not wanted to mention to Sonny that he was lonely at his house, and the Mexican maids were the only ones he had for company. Escorts were only good for part of the night; Bingo needed more. “Maybe you should get married,” Sonny had said as he was starting up the Porsche for the trip back to Tucson. Sonny had felt full of mischief that morning because Bingo looked so lost and sad to see Sonny go.

“Hire a live-in companion,” Sonny said as he wiped off his blue-mirror sunglasses. “I don’t care. Only next time don’t fall in love with two Mexican lesbians.”

Bingo had been uneasy when Sonny had showed up a few months later with Angelo. Bingo had let the general manager run the day-today business; how much intelligence did it take to refill candy machines? Bingo wasn’t going to waste his time pretending to be busy. Bingo was not as anxious as Sonny was to expand the business. Bingo did not like the fact the retired major knew so much about Angelo’s old girlfriend, Marilyn. Bingo did not believe this was mere coincidence. Bingo did not trust the phone calls from the senator. Bingo was the stupid one, but still he had been able to figure out the connection between the retired major and the pilots smuggling cocaine.

Bingo was reluctant to get involved; he shrugged his shoulders. “How about Angelo?”

“What about him?”

“I was only wondering.” Bingo had avoided Sonny’s eyes.

“Christ, Bingo! Just tell me! What? What is it this time?”

“Fuck you, Sonny! Never mind. Forget it! Do what you want! I don’t care! But I’m not fucking around with your fucking Mr. B.!”

Bingo did not care if Angelo took over everything in El Paso. Bingo did not want to be bothered with anyone, and he sure didn’t want to get involved with the government. Max Blue hinted he and others had performed special “services” for the U.S. government at home and abroad. Bingo didn’t give a shit about “rendering service” to his country. He didn’t trust the government, especially not if that government had got favors from Max Blue in the past. Because Bingo knew exactly what Max did. Bingo’s roommate had left a Time magazine open on Bingo’s bed. Bingo had felt a cold chill sweep over him when he saw his father’s name and the family name printed in a newsmagazine. The article concerned a big Mafia hit at an outdoor café in lower Manhattan. A gruesome photograph had showed one of the dead men still gripping a cigar in his teeth. When he found the magazine, Bingo had been on his way to a party. He had bought a fifth of tequila and a gram of cocaine, but he had not left the room that night. Bingo had stayed in the room sipping tequila and snorting coke as he read and reread the magazine article.

The magazine article had contained speculations from prominent law enforcement officials concerning the source and the meaning of the gangland assassination. On the long list of possible explanations, the name Max Blue had appeared four times. One theory was Max had only pretended to be badly wounded, and Max had only pretended to retire to the golf course in Tucson. The most macabre speculation had been that Max had indeed almost died from gunshot wounds, but that close call with death had also changed Max Blue. Max Blue and death had made a deal, according to the magazine reporter.

Bingo had never forgot that night. He had never snorted so much cocaine by himself before; he had never been so high or drunk so much tequila. Something about the cocaine had made Bingo read the article again and again; he thought it was quite funny to learn about his own father from the Crime section of Time magazine. All night Bingo had sat at his desk, snorting coke and sipping tequila with Pink Floyd tapes in the background while he brooded about himself and his family. Sonny had always tried to tell Bingo their parents didn’t want kids; but Bingo was not so sure. Everything had ended the morning Max had got shot and Uncle Mike had died.

The roommate had been away for the weekend. When he returned, Bingo had not mentioned the magazine. The roommate had already arranged for a new room the following term. Bingo could trace his all-night affairs with booze and blow to that night he had spent reading family history in Time magazine. Bingo had seen no reason to change anything now that he was settled in El Paso. In a family of go-getters, Bingo was the flop. Bingo wanted nothing more than to stay high in his hacienda in the sand dunes.

ORGAN DONORS

ROY HAD MADE IT a practice always to refuse the cocaine Trigg offered him. Roy was aware Trigg was watching him walk. If Trigg had not watched Roy, the cocaine might have been nice. Trigg had made a point of bragging about its origin and quality. Always a rock as big as a fist; always pink flake.

Trigg had not acted edgy before. Roy glanced at the glass desk top for signs of cocaine, but the glass was clean. Trigg had laughed nervously. “No, it isn’t that,” meaning cocaine. “I have something I want to talk to you about.” Trigg kept his eyes on Roy’s eyes. Roy wondered what meaning a blink might have had then. Would Trigg back down?

Roy could see Trigg was uneasy about something but at the same time anxious to talk to Roy. A sixth sense Roy had developed in ’Nam told him when a woman or a man wanted to talk about sex. Roy had not pegged Trigg for a faggot, just a pervert in a wheelchair. Roy expected a double date with a couple of whores to the hot tubs or maybe dirty videos of Peaches going down on Trigg in his chair. Later when Roy had been rethinking everything, he had to laugh at himself for being so slow. Born yesterday.

Roy had always known Trigg felt inferior. At first Roy had assumed it was the wheelchair, but Trigg had felt inferior long before he had collided with the car. Trigg liked to get drunk with the help, that had been one of Trigg’s negative points according to Peaches, who took her work for Bio-Materials seriously. Peaches had caught Roy staring at her titties. Still she had happily talked for hours with Roy about “negatives and positives.” Peaches didn’t consider discussing negatives and positives about coworkers as gossiping or snitching. Impulsively Roy had asked Peaches to tell him his own negatives and positives, but she had refused, saying she did not know him enough to say anything. Roy had looked down quickly before she could see his face. He had been surprised at the pain her words had pushed into his chest. He wondered how it felt to have a heart attack.

Peaches knew but did not care about Trigg’s “illegal” sales to certain West German biomedical consortiums. Peaches said once you were dead, it mattered little what became of your body. Peaches had seen something, but later when Roy had tried to get Peaches to talk, she had refused. Trigg had to be very drunk and use a lot of cocaine before he would start talking about “it.” That had been all that Peaches would say.

Trigg did not consider the subject sexual, but rather a story about the blood plasma and biomaterials market worldwide. Trigg disliked psychiatry and psychology, which could be twisted to explain anything. Trigg had never denied that picking up hitchhikers had excited him. He had thought of it as a roll of the dice or a hand of five-card draw. The winners and the discards. Discards were “locals” or those with too many kin. Trigg had found that his wheelchair automatically took the suspicion away from the hitchhikers who might have been uneasy about a drive with him. Trigg would always wave his hand at the backseat and his wheelchair. Trigg had not minded the killing.

They are both getting drunk and they have snorted a gram of cocaine between them.

“Nobody ever notices they are gone. The ones I get,” Trigg had said, looking Roy in the eye. Trigg had been too drunk to remember that Roy was himself “homeless.” Trigg talked obsessively about the absence of struggle as the “plasma donors” were slowly bled to death pint by pint. A few who had attempted to get away had lost too much blood to put up much fight even against a man in a wheelchair. Of course the man in the wheelchair had a.45 automatic in his hand.

Trigg had paid extra if the victim agreed. Trigg gave him a blow job while his blood filled pint bags; the victim relaxed in the chair with his eyes closed, unaware he was being murdered. What Trigg does with the swollen cock in his mouth never varies: he catches an edge or fold of foreskin between his teeth. The cock might shrivel temporarily, but then it would encourage greatly from the nibble. All this Trigg performs from the wheelchair. Trigg blames the homeless men. Trigg blames them for being easy prey. He holds their jizz in his mouth until he gags. They got a favor from him. To go out taking head from him. He doubted any of them could hope for a better death. They were human debris. Human refuse. Only a few had organs of sufficient quality for transplant use.

“Trigg the Pig,” Peaches had said bitterly, “he blabs his big mouth too much.” Peaches had been upset about Trigg’s drunken ramblings. Her face had reddened. “Did he tell you about ‘the harvests’?” Roy nodded his head, but Peaches had refused to talk any more except to say everything was done legally. She had seen court papers signed by a judge authorizing everything. Peaches recovered her composure. “Transients die all the time. They don’t go to doctors and they don’t eat right,” Peaches said. She had looked Roy squarely in the eye to let him know that was how she would testify under oath.

Clinton said there had been some grumbling among the men because their leader was not eating with them and sleeping in the tin-and-cardboard hooch the men called Command Headquarters. Roy told Clinton to tell them to assemble that night and he’d give them a full report. Rambo had no secrets from his men. Rambo had been working on secret sources of money for their group.

Clinton had got a group of blacks and a few Hispanics together for his own brigade. All of them were older men, and one look in the eyes and you could see they’d been there all right. Clinton’s men said they’d take women in their brigade too, although this was a signal for joking and laughing about the “orders” they’d give these women.

In private Roy had warned Clinton about accepting women into his unit. An integrated unit was one thing; all the men had fought together before in Vietnam. Most homeless women had a bunch of kids; they would be a mess. Women would be more trouble than they were worth.

Roy would not tell Clinton his suspicions about Trigg’s biomaterials business until the right moment. Unless they found a better “incident,” Rambo planned to mobilize and rally his army of homeless to accuse the blood and biomaterials industry of mass murder.

KILL THE RICH

THE DAYS WERE GETTING COOL by evening, and when Rambo came to “brief” the men in the evenings, they would be standing around bonfires, passing bottles, smoking and talking. Each week more tents and lean-tos appeared along the gray clay banks of the Santa Cruz River. The mesquite groves along the riverbanks were checkered with plastic-tarp shelters, and blankets and sleeping bags drying on mesquite branches. Rambo and Clinton marched their men in Homeless Day rallies, but they were careful not to have any member of their unit arrested in the protests. Rambo and Clinton got high just retelling the events over and over again, how the “activists” were keeping the poor and homeless stirred up and assembled, which was all Rambo and Clinton wanted or needed. The activists had urged the people to occupy vacant government buildings, but Rambo and Clinton were no longer interested in the scraps thrown to them.

Rambo let Clinton evaluate the volunteers. Clinton had a good eye for white men. Clinton’s blacks were always doing comparative studies among themselves, and they’d compare notes on white-man behavior. All Rambo said was he was glad it was they who had to observe white men’s behavior and not him. Observing the behavior of “white” people, his “own kind,” had been what had cut Roy loose from the world. He had no regrets. He was where he belonged. Corporations and big business had seized control of America during the Vietnam War, and only a poor man’s army of patriots could hope to restore the people’s democracy to the United States.

Clinton and Roy inventory the empty vacation houses twice weekly as the winter visitors begin to arrive in Tucson for the winter holidays. Clinton keeps the records and sorts through the mailboxes at each of the vacant houses. Some were so rich they forgot they had Tucson bank accounts. In the piles of letters at one house they had found blank checks and an all-time teller card; in a separate bank envelope they had found the personal code number.

Roy and Clinton regret they can’t tell the others about the vacant houses, but they don’t want to move too soon. Their operation requires a great deal of planning and thought. But when the cold rains come in November, Clinton is angered by the men who are shivering, and they begin to outfit their men with used field jackets from the surplus store. The bankcard works every time at the automatic teller machine. Clinton keeps careful records. Clinton organizes reconnaissance marches into the desert on the edge of the northwest side of the city where the men scavenge firewood for the camps. The trouble with these men is they are all wrecks — smashed by cheap wine and car wrecks, ruined by police and nightsticks. Clinton takes all the men who volunteer to go. He uses his wood-hauling patrols to weed out the drunks and the crazies from the “dependables.” Clinton organizes patrols when he feels the jumpiness begin to spread from his hands into his stomach. Moving the feet always helps, he says.

Clinton claims he can tell if owners of the vacation houses are keeping close watch or not by the mail that keeps coming to the home. Clinton is careful to avoid creating suspicion. The thrill was to open the mail, read it, and reseal it. Clinton had known guys who worked for the censors in Vietnam. The only tricky part, Clinton thought, would be to empty the automatic teller machine at the rate of $400 a day. “Did you ever stop to think how long it will take us to get that much money out of the teller machine?” According to bank statements, the account with the automatic teller card has thirty thousand dollars in it.

Late at night Roy and Clinton had talked about money — what they would buy with it, what they would do to get it. Neither of them wanted the usual stuff such as fancy cars, women, investments, or silk shirts. Roy had decided he would buy his own island to live on. Clinton said he didn’t know what he would do. Maybe he would travel to Africa and to Haiti to learn about the old religion. But after Roy had bought the island, and after Clinton had learned voodoo, they could not think what else to do with their imaginary money. Roy could not think of anything he needed beyond his jacket and sleeping bag. Clinton had done a lot of background work on “their” money-machine bankcard. The card would work at bank machines in fourteen western states.

“Meaning what?” Roy said.

“Meaning I could go and keep on going.” Clinton was smiling, watching Roy’s face.

“I already thought about all of it. Before we ever started this. Before I ever saw you. I decided to let things fall where they will.”

“You mean you figured me for a thief?” Clinton said, still smiling.

“No, not that. I just mean that whatever turns out, all of this has happened before, somewhere in the world. Some will go and some will stay.”

Clinton had touched Roy lightly on the shoulder. “Don’t worry, man. Me and this bankcard, we’ll be back.”

Roy touched Clinton’s sleeve. “You don’t have to say anything. You probably should just take it all and go. You, me, probably we’d be better off.”

Roy didn’t like the idea of trying the bankcard out of state, but Clinton assured him they had nothing to worry about. Clearly the owner of the vacation house used his Tucson bankcard as infrequently as he used his winter vacation house. Roy trusted Clinton to come back with the bankcard because they had talked about that.

Roy said, “We have endless wealth.”

Clinton’s face got tense. “That’s stupid. No one has endless money—”

“Except the U.S. government, who just prints more.”

Roy had tried to lighten Clinton’s mood, but Clinton sometimes got set off.

“Rich don’t want to give away any, but poor will come and take it all.”

The others in both units were afraid of Clinton’s storms of anger. Roy had overheard the men discussing him. The men had been drinking and were talking freely. A young white kid about eighteen said he was scared Clinton wanted to kill all whites. But the Mexican called Barney shook his head.

“Clinton, he’s after the rich. Clinton, he’d even go after Oprah Winfrey because the bitch is rich!”

“Kill the rich?” the skinny white kid said. “But someday I might get a lot of money.” All of them had started laughing then, even the guys who hated niggers and expected race wars, because the skinny kid was really stupid if he thought he’d ever have any money, let alone get rich.

The bank statement for the automated-teller card arrives at the house each month. Clinton says he is counting on there being only one bank statement sent out, the statement sent to the vacant house. They both agree they will have to clean out the bank account before cold weather to play it safe. They do not want to chance losing that kind of money. Because with that kind of money, they could equip their little guerrilla army. Speed was more important than size in guerrilla armies. The money was going to buy them everything they needed, the money was going to get them launched.

Clinton drops off to sleep every night thinking about the others. Far far away there are others like himself, men, right here in the United States, with nothing to lose. In the morning while the coffee is still heating in the campfire, Clinton tells Roy he wants to do some traveling.

Clinton’s argument had been a good one: they had some money to cover traveling expenses; the thing was to take advantage of the cold weather, which drove all the homeless and able-bodied to travel far to the south. Clinton could get one of those $99 bus passes and go right across the country. But Roy did not like the idea of Clinton moving around like that, from homeless camp to homeless camp. A black man in army camouflage pants was sure to get the wrong kind of attention.

Clinton had laughed bitterly. “Oh, I see. I travel like a bum and sleep in the ditch.” Roy realized his mistake then. Clinton was going to talk to people on the street, but he wasn’t going to sleep there. They wouldn’t find Clinton haranguing crowds outside soup kitchens. Not yet. Roy had only sighed loudly and walked away. He stopped himself from explaining. Explanations meant nothing. Clinton might figure it out for himself later; Roy had assumed Clinton would travel the way Roy traveled. Roy got a rush out of hopping freight trains. Roy liked to imagine he was a bullfighter with only split seconds and inches standing between himself and the charging freight train.

Clinton was quiet the night before he caught his bus. He was going to San Diego and L.A. first. The California riots had stopped when the weather cooled off.

Roy had told the men Clinton had to go to his grandmother’s funeral in Los Angeles. Roy tried to avoid the appearance of secrecy. Week by week the homeless men arrived, and always a few drifted to the ’Nam Veterans’ Camp, especially if they had run afoul of regulations in church soup kitchens or city shelters. The men who came to the ’Nam Camp were usually the crazies — the ones who “believed” they had fought at Khesanh or Mylai. Roy did not turn anyone away, but he had to watch each new arrival carefully because sooner or later the government would send undercover men posing as drifters as they had earlier in October, to report on any political activities by the homeless.

Roy had made it his business to listen closely to the men when they talked and drank; Roy visited Clinton’s unit each evening after he had checked with the men in his own unit. The fatigue jackets had helped pull the two units together. Just as uniforms were supposed to.

Roy was not as worried about police spies and informers as he was about the questions that came from local advocates for the homeless — Tucson church people and “liberals.” “Why don’t more veterans join in class-action lawsuits? Why don’t more veterans join in the marches and demonstrations?”

“More? You want more of us? You’ve already had enough!”

The men in camp had cheered Roy, and the “advocates” had hurried away. Later in the week, Roy read a newspaper article on the “apathy” of homeless Vietnam veterans. For Roy the article couldn’t have been better.

Apathy. Let them believe what they want to believe.

.44 MAGNUM HAS PUPPIES

STERLING HAD SEEN BULLETS and guns everywhere for days, but he had tried to avoid looking directly at the weaponry. He had tried not to be within earshot of Zeta, Ferro, or Lecha, who seemed to be constantly crowded into Zeta’s office door just as the computer printer began to chatter. Paulie had been strangely inactive during this time, and Ferro had complained about Paulie’s lethargy when they were loading or unloading gear. Sterling had also noticed the change in Paulie because one of the Dobermans had had puppies. Paulie had spent hours watching the dog before the pups were born.

Sterling could tell Ferro and Paulie had been fighting because more and more Ferro called Sterling to help him lift tarps into the back of the pickup while Paulie repacked the hot-air balloon or refilled water cans and plastic bottles. Paulie moved more slowly when Ferro was not speaking to him. Sterling had learned to stay out of Ferro’s way whenever Paulie’s eyes were swollen.

Sterling had found out a little from Seese about homosexual men. She said they were no different from other lovers, or other couples. Sterling could not explain his curiosity without sounding prejudiced. Paulie would have been strange even if he had not been gay. That was Sterling’s point. Sterling had watched Paulie become more and more worried about the pregnant dog. Mag had been a favorite of Paulie’s because she had crouched and growled at him even when he brought her dish full of food. “Mag” was short for her full name, 44 Magnum.

Sterling hosed down the kennels, raked dog turds into piles, and shoveled them into the wheelbarrow. The daily schedule was always the same. Paulie had been adamant about consistency. No consistency and these high-octane dogs would explode all over the place, and someone, probably Sterling, would get killed. At eight A.M. Paulie brought in the night dogs and set loose the day dogs in the twenty-acre outer perimeter. Paulie had trained the dogs to accept only the food either he or Ferro fed them. Under no circumstances were others even to attempt to feed the dogs. When Ferro and Paulie were away on business, the dogs ate from automatic feeders full of dry dog food.

Sterling was used to being ignored by Paulie. Sterling had ignored Paulie so they were even. Weeks had passed without either of them speaking to the other. Sterling had found Paulie in the kennel stroking the bitch and examining her belly. Sterling had stopped in his tracks with a wheelbarrow full of dog shit because he had never seen Paulie’s face so strangely expressive; Paulie’s eyes were filled with tears. Paulie’s voice sounded thick with his concern for the dog. He didn’t want the red bitch to die. Sterling asked if the dog was sick or having trouble because he had been cleaning kennels all morning and had not seen the red bitch lying down or vomiting. Paulie had seemed to misunderstand the question because he had started talking about there being “too many puppies.” “Too many” would kill the dog. Paulie’s voice had quickly dropped almost to a whisper, as if his throat were tight. “Too many.” Sterling could see emotion had choked off Paulie’s words, so he nodded and pretended not to notice the tears.

“Too many puppies will kill her. Too many and she’ll die.”

Paulie had not left the kennel until Ferro had telephoned twice; on the second call Paulie heard something bad because Sterling had watched Paulie’s muscles tighten the longer he talked on the phone.

Sterling had been startled to find Paulie still smoking cigarettes and talking to the dog at eight A.M. when Sterling came on duty. Paulie had spoken to Sterling without looking away from the dog. “I counted them,” Paulie had continued in a soft, even voice. “I counted them with my hands — feeling them through her belly like this.” Sterling watched the rough, bony hands, fingernails chewed to the quick, gently press the dog’s abdomen.

Sterling had begun to get a strange, almost light-headed feeling as he listened to Paulie talk about a dog. Not this dog, 44 Magnum, but another dog long ago. Had the other dog been Paulie’s dog? No, it had belonged to a man. A man who came to the house but who did not like Paulie. Sterling had been relieved when Paulie had clarified which dog he was talking about. “This other dog” had been Paulie’s dog, but the dog had died from having too many puppies.

“You mean too many all at one time? You mean too many inside her?” Sterling had floundered for the words to say it without making it sound too gruesome. Paulie did not respond after that. Sterling decided he had asked Paulie too many questions instead of just shutting up and listening.

For all his reading about the art of becoming a good listener, Sterling had forgotten all the cardinal rules with Paulie. Paulie had something inside him that frightened Sterling a great deal, so much that Sterling had forgot the art of good listening.

Sterling had been wakened almost every night for the past two weeks by the headlights on Ferro’s returning truck. Just before dawn when Sterling awoke to nature’s call and groped his way to the toilet, Sterling had looked out the window and saw the silhouette of only one person, the driver. Ferro had stayed out all night and left Paulie at the ranch alone.

Sterling kept an eye on.44 Magnum throughout the week, but she had eaten all her food and had gotten more fierce and lively as her stomach had grown. Paulie had increased the dog’s daily rations. Sterling had no choice but to obey orders. Day by day Sterling could feel the tension grow.

MEN IN LOVE

STERLING HAD WAITED around the swimming pool hoping to find Seese on a break from the nonstop typing she was doing on the old manuscript. Seese had difficulty looking at computer screens for long without developing a headache. Seese had come outside to smoke a joint. Sterling always said no to marijuana because it made him too hungry and too horny.

Seese had taken a big drag on the hand-rolled cigarette and closed her eyes for a long time before she spoke. Sterling could see something was bothering Seese because she seemed exhausted and distant on the lounge chair, intent on sucking and inhaling the pot as deeply as possible. Sterling had begun skimming leaves and dead moths off the surface of the pool. He thought it might make talking easier for Seese.

Seese said she was feeling strangely exhausted by typing Lecha’s old book or manuscript or whatever it was. Sterling thought Seese looked close to tears. Sterling had done a great deal of thinking about Seese: her pain did not recede because she was a mother whose child was lost. But Sterling had hoped maybe typing all the mess of old notepaper scraps and shreds of cards might help Seese, by occupying her mind with the stories or old reports or whatever Lecha wanted Seese to type.

“I dream all night about pages I typed the day before, except they aren’t the pages I’ve typed, they are pages I dream, but when I awake, the dreams feel they are real even though I know they are only dreams.” Seese was staring into the water at the deep end of the pool. “When I sit back down at the keyboard, the real manuscript page reads completely differently than in my dreams.”

“You are working too hard with the old papers,” Sterling said gently. He did not want to add to Seese’s trouble by giving bossy advice. He wanted her to know he cared with no strings attached. If and when Seese wanted him to know about the dreams, she would tell Sterling; it was that simple. Sterling was grateful he was no longer suffering from bad dreams. Now when Sterling slept, he remembered no dreams at all the next morning.

“I wonder what is bothering Paulie.” Sterling had decided that maybe focusing on someone else’s problems might help Seese get her mind off the sadness.

“Men in love,” Seese said, and Sterling thought she sounded bitter. “I never figured them out at all. I mean, the thing with David and Eric and Beaufrey.”

Paulie watched Mag almost constantly as milk began to fill her teats. Paulie was no longer Ferro’s shadow, available in an instant for Ferro’s orders. Ferro telephoned the kennels, and with a throat tight with fury, Ferro demanded to speak to Paulie. Paulie never said more than “yes” or “no” over the phone.

Thirteen puppies had been born a little before dawn. By the time Sterling had arrived at eight o’clock, Paulie was already pacing nervously outside Mag’s kennel, stopping frequently to look inside the doghouse. Sterling had seen no headlights at three A.M. as he had previous nights. Ferro had not come home.

Paulie had actually touched Sterling’s elbow briefly, but Paulie’s voice was still sullen. He ordered Sterling to take a good look. What did Sterling see? “Puppies.” Sterling started to feel nervous because Paulie had never looked at Sterling so directly before. The pale blue eyes were bloodshot and distant. He ordered Sterling to count the pups, but Sterling pointed out, the red dog growled each time she heard Sterling speak and was growling then as Sterling spoke. No way could Sterling count Mag’s puppies.

Paulie had already counted them three times himself; he just wanted to be sure the total was correct. The number had upset him a great deal: thirteen. Thirteen puppies were far too many. They had almost burst open her belly; now they were about to devour her, to eat her breast by breast. Sterling was horrified at Paulie’s description of the pups eating their mother; but when he checked, all he had seen were layers of little tails and little legs, and pup heads bobbing and weaving. Sterling didn’t know much about dogs, but he told Paulie the dog and her puppies looked okay to him.

“You don’t know anything about dogs,” Paulie said matter-of-factly. Paulie had spoken with such vehemence, Sterling had wholeheartedly agreed with him. Never argue with a crazy man, old Aunt Marie used to say.

Sterling had been pushing the wheelbarrow past the corrals when Ferro had come blasting up the long driveway ahead of a cloud of dust. Ferro had skidded the Blazer to a stop at the kennels and leaned on the horn until all the dogs were barking and howling, even the red bitch. But Paulie had not come out of the kennels, so Ferro spun the wheels and kicked gravel all the way up the hill to the house.

JAMEY LOVE

FERRO DID NOT LIKE the way he was feeling even when he was high on coke. He knew he had to do something about Paulie. Ferro knew he was obsessed with Jamey, but he wanted to work it out before Jamey realized what power his smooth, blond thighs had over balding, fat men the wrong side of thirty. Ferro had never felt the lust so strongly or the jealousy so quick in his blood. Jamey had appeared one fall day as Ferro was cruising the university for the tanned, blond jocks in their skimpy satin gym shorts. What else was the University of Arizona famous for?

Ferro had never had one as gorgeous as Jamey. Ferro had no trouble finding boyfriends while he was in his teens and twenties. He had never been good-looking, but when he was younger there had been a smoothness to his skin, and a roundness to his face that, coupled with expensive Italian shirts and leather trench coats, had won him almost any boy he had wanted in Tucson. Ferro had had a Porsche since eleventh grade and “income from the family ranch” as he delicately put it to the handsome country-club boys. But the big meals, all the imported beer, and weekends with his lovers at the best hotels had made Ferro fat. By thirty, Ferro was thick around the belly and the face. Ferro took no chances. He made sure the young, handsome men rode in the Porsche and consumed grams of coke so he already “owned” them before he ever brought them to his bed. Afterward Ferro took extra precautions to dump the boy before the boy dumped him. Paulie of course didn’t count as one of the “boys.” The “boys” were clean and elegant and from the white upper-middle class. Paulie was hardly more than a gardener or a chauffeur in hire to the household. Paulie was a convenience; similar to a valet or bodyguard.

Jamey did not mind if Paulie stayed on as the bodyguard and chauffeur for Ferro. Jamey had always held out for certain of his “old dear friends,” and now Ferro was exercising his right to keep “a dear old friend.” Jamey thought Ferro was too possessive and had encouraged Ferro to keep Paulie, although Paulie hated Jamey. Ferro took care the paths of the two men never crossed. Ferro had rented the town house so Paulie would never see Jamey. Zeta and Jamey had been indifferent about meeting one another so Ferro had let it drop.

COP CAKES OR NUDE COP PINUPS

FERRO HAD ALWAYS been a sullen, distant child, but Zeta had seldom ever had to correct him or speak to him about anything he had done. Jamey or Paulie made no difference to her. Zeta told Ferro it was his own business whom he slept with. Ferro worked hard. He sat up all night on mountain ridges, in the wind, or in the rain, because drops in bad weather were risky enough that the law did not expect them then. Ferro had ridden horseback when it was 108°, gathering the skinny cattle to drive across the border at the bitter-water windmill. Later he and the two Papago cowboys had wrestled the skittish Mexican steers, to retrieve plastic packets of cocaine taped under their bellies. Zeta never argued. Ferro earned his leisure time. It was his money.

Ferro had savored Jamey’s silky, smooth skin, imagining he, Ferro, was a captive. A victim of homosexual rape by lovely, cruel Jamey, who had immediately abandoned him. At first Ferro had waited for the kiss-off: Ferro would telephone and get a busy signal, the unreturned calls and unanswered messages. But Jamey had seemed oblivious to all the wobbling jelly-fat Ferro so much despised and abhorred about himself. Gay men especially hated fat, but not Jamey. Jamey loved to be “crushed” and “smothered” under Ferro’s body, and Ferro had felt Jamey lovingly poking his big cock into Ferro’s creases and folds of fat.

Ferro had never wanted anything, any high, any drug, the way he wanted Jamey. He had begun to think about Jamey at all times of the night and day.

Even when Jamey did not bother to go to his classes, Ferro had not been able to get over the awful feeling that Jamey would find a new lover on campus; someone who was blond and slender, and blue eyed as Jamey was. Jamey did not need money, but he was always ready to buy coke at a discount for himself and friends. Ferro could not stop making comparisons between Jamey and a runt like Paulie. Paulie had a grimy white face and the close-set eyes of a rodent. Paulie had wandered in like a stray dog that got fed and had stayed. Ferro had never wanted Paulie. Paulie had only been there to work for them — Ferro and the old woman, Zeta.

Jamey was Ferro’s opposite, yet somehow they were equals. Jamey was as blond and willowy as Ferro was swarthy and fat. Jamey’s diet consisted of raw fruits and vegetables chased down with expensive champagne and Ferro’s top-line cocaine. The foods Ferro ate and drank disgusted Jamey. Pure cocaine in moderation was not as bad as rich food or heavy whipping cream, Jamey said. Ferro had been open-eyed from the start. He knew he got the young pretty men because he spread around the cocaine. That was no mystery.

Jamey was Ferro’s opposite in temper; not a nervous bone in Jamey’s smooth, white body. Roll over, lie back grinning, take another snort. Jamey wanted nothing more in life than that: to snort and fuck all morning and all afternoon. Ferro had been through hundreds of boys, and he had immediately seen Jamey was too good to be true. The catch with Jamey was his taste in friends. Because of these “friends,” Jamey could not be trusted. A few of Jamey’s friends were actual Tucson cops, but most of them were like Jamey and only liked to dress up like cops; uniforms, even nurse’s uniforms, aroused them. Ferro found uniforms of all kinds disgusting. Jamey dressed like a cop for poster photographs and for videotapes and movies. Jamey’s friends called their calendar-publishing company Cop Cakes. Cop Cakes advertised all the calendar pinups were actual law enforcement officers. Ferro laughed and tossed the old Cop Cakes calendars on the floor. They could put out better pinup calendars themselves. Ferro wanted to finance his own pinup calendar. No cop or nurse uniforms either. Ferro did not trust Jamey’s friends, especially not the faggots who got hot when they wore a pig’s uniform.

A calendar would only be the beginning. The family business was about to consolidate. Now Zeta’s computers had completed projections designed by Awa Gee. Zeta’s computers were telling them to sell out because the wholesale price of cocaine worldwide was about to take another “nosedive.” Ferro hated Awa Gee and his stupid puns, but the gook son of a bitch was a master at invading or destroying enemy computers.

Calendars and publishing would be just the beginning. Ferro had been bored with the routine for years; he had begun to hate the endless driving all night on back roads, alert and tense for any sound, waiting and watching, for low-flying aircraft blinking tiny Christmas-tree lights to signal without detection. How many hours had Ferro and Paulie waited for donkey pack trains or teams of backpackers to emerge from the desert, uncertain whether the border patrol who took the bribes remembered which night the crossing was to take place. As long as the wholesale price of cocaine had stayed up, smuggling had been worth the danger and boredom; but not anymore.

Ferro would not forget the balloon trips they’d made with cocaine shipments. They had had a close call on one of their last balloon flights. Their balloon had been caught in a whirlwind as it was descending, and Ferro had seen how fragile the balloon was, how any strong wind might rip the nylon so the balloon collapsed into itself.

With their “guest ranch” business, hot-air balloon cruises along the border had been the perfect cover for moving large parcels. But after their near-miss with the whirlwind, Ferro had seen color photographs of a balloon crash in Albuquerque. The balloon and basket were on fire; tiny human bodies dangled from ropes as one body fell high above the Rio Grande. Later Ferro had lied about the reason he no longer used the hot-air balloon. But Ferro had kept dreaming over and over, he was dangling at the end of a long rope; all above him there were sparks and cinders and smoke from the fire engulfing the balloon.

Ferro was relieved he was about to retire. He did not want to risk losing Jamey; all the nights Ferro had to spend alone with Paulie waiting for drops or shipments might jeopardize their love. Jamey had been edgy about Paulie. Jamey did not like “rough trade” and Paulie was the roughest. Jamey was afraid Paulie might hurt him. Ferro had to laugh. Paulie did what Ferro told him. Paulie never questioned Ferro’s orders.

The reappearance of worthless Lecha, his mother, was another sign it was time for him to retire with Jamey and enjoy life far from smugglers’ paths and jeep trails. Ferro would leave the stink of old women behind in the old ranch house. He would finance Jamey’s calendars, and later they might branch out and publish a magazine or books. The subject of the books wouldn’t matter so long as they were not about women. As book publishers they would travel the world together.

The return of Lecha plus Jamey’s “cop cakes” pals were reason enough to leave town. Ferro did not trust the so-called artists Jamey snorted coke with. Jamey never stopped to think, did he? Where did these “artists” get money for coke? Bullshit artists were what they were. Undercover cops had plenty of money. Jamey had laughed at Ferro’s wild imagination. Tucson was full of “trust fund” artists, didn’t Ferro know?

Ferro wanted to savor each moment and all the pleasure he could get with Jamey. Ferro and Jamey. He can think of nothing else. Ferro wants to stop all of Jamey’s nights on the town without him. Suddenly that seems like the answer. There were important details he could not work out when his mind was always whispering, “Jamey, Jamey.” It seemed funny how Jamey had eclipsed all else — the return of the old women, the rise of Max Blue, or the rumors out of Mexico. Just the sound, the thought, of Jamey’s name gave Ferro a chill along his spine until something flashed bright in his brain. Ferro is consumed with pleasure as long as Jamey is close by. But if Jamey happened to be out, then the first burst of pleasure at his memory was immediately followed by the most terrible feelings of doubt and fear that somehow Jamey and his love would be lost. Jamey carries the beeper Ferro gave him, but it isn’t always on, and Jamey isn’t always near a telephone. Ferro tries to avoid confrontation over the beeper. Jamey laughs and says his friends think he’s a drug dealer because of the beeper. That showed what his pals were thinking about, Ferro said, although they had agreed not to quarrel over Jamey’s “friends” anymore. Jamey wanted to tell his friends, but Ferro had forbidden it. Jamey had wanted to announce to everyone he was Ferro’s love slave and that’s why he wore the beeper.

Jamey finds a great deal of amusement in Ferro’s suspicions and fears. Jamey is able to manage with his friends quite safely. One of the Cop Cakes calendar group was the undercover man called Perry. Jamey laughed and laughed because Perry the undercover cop loved to snort coke. Perry sells twenty-four-hour notice of police or drug strike-force raids in Pima County. Perry always takes his pay in ounces of cocaine. Jamey says the coke is for personal use, but Ferro suspects Perry the Pig sells half grams to other Tucson cops. Jamey finds straight men, especially straight men in uniforms, very exciting. Ferro sneers. Perry the Pig isn’t straight. Straight men did not pose nude in the positions Perry had taken with the other men for the Cop Cakes calendar.

“Touchy, touchy,” Jamey says, and laughs at Ferro’s hatred of Perry.

Jamey did not worry himself the way Ferro did with suspicions and questions. Jamey called it second-guessing or paranoia.

“Ferro, you can’t start thinking like that. Sure Perry might be a decoy. But he’s not. Perry is a cop who sells information because he wants the money. It’s that simple.”

Ferro does not argue, but he does not think bad cops or spies are that simple. Blond, dumb Jamey. Ferro doesn’t bother to point out that Perry sells information at below the current market value. Let smartass Jamey Boy learn the hard way. The Perrys of the world claimed to sell the secrets for the money; but the sums they accepted betrayed their true motive, which was not greed but revenge. Traitors were driven by the strongest human impulse, the deepest human instinct — not for sex or for money but to get even. Secret crimes or hidden injuries required secret and hidden acts of vengeance. Ferro was no stranger to the pleasurable sensations revenge excited — the exquisite pulse-surges behind both eyes and the tingling in the groin while the scalp prickles and sends a chill down the spine at the instant vengeance is performed. Ferro was willing to bet the undercover cop got a hard-on every time he “leaked tips” about planned raids and stakeouts. As “cop cakes” went, Perry’s pinup photo had been forgettable; his ass was flat and he had a pencil prick. Perry had begun as “Officer January,” bare assed in department-issued SWAT gear, brandishing a riot stick. In riot helmet and gas mask, Officer January appeared anonymous and cruel. The joke had been on the Tucson Police Department. All the cop beefcake shots on last year’s calendar had included badge numbers and squad-car numbers for blow jobs. Internal memos had been sent to all precinct chiefs from department of internal affairs investigators requesting photographs of all uniformed officers under their command. The latest edition of the Cop Cakes calendar had been comedy shots — tricks of photography in which the Tucson police chief’s head appeared on the nude body of a sexually aroused male with a nightstick up his hairy ass. The comedy calendar had been a best-seller in adult bookstores in Salt Lake City and Phoenix and had made the national television news. According to Arizona’s senators, the comedy calendar was an outrage and an attack on police and law enforcement in the United States.

The Tucson chief of police had been forced to hold a news conference televised on the national evening news to deny that the nude men on the Cop Cakes calendars were presently or had ever been law enforcement officers for the Tucson Police Department. The chief said pornographers’ actors and models had posed for the calendar, and all rumors about rampant homosexuality among police officers were untrue. The chief said he had been especially disturbed by rumors that neatly trimmed mustaches signaled gay cops. The chief had declined to discuss the photograph with the nightstick. The department was not taking the calendar lightly; when police were under attack in Arizona, then the whole American way was endangered. Law and order was threatened by these subversives — homosexual artists who printed their filth on calendars to incite disrespect for the law and contempt for the police and court system.

OWLS CLUB

JUDGE ARNE FOUND A BIG SCARE inside his copy of the Cop Cakes comedy calendar. Somehow, someone had got hold of a color negative from a roll of the judge’s “sensitive snapshots.” The color-film processing plant was fully automated — the judge took care to know important facts. The judge had paid the film-lab receptionists fat tips each time he had picked up one of his rolls of “fun film.” The judge would have to have a word with the lab manager — unless there was a security problem at the Owls Club. Fortunately, the yokels at the Tucson Police Department had been so stunned by their own “pinups” they had not noticed that Judge Arne’s “pinup” for the month of August was no trick-photography shot. Printed from a single negative, the color print clearly showed the federal judge merrily penetrating his own basset hound. For September, the Cop Cakes comedy pinup had been the Pima County sheriff superimposed over the figure of a man with his fly open and half-hard cock poking out, holding a stuffed owl in both hands. The judge did not like the use of the stuffed owl. The owl might be coincidence, but the judge did not think so. Whoever had found the color print of him with the dog had found it at the Owls Club. Because only members and honored guests knew that stuffed owls were one of the dominant motifs in the club’s decor.

The judge had to smile at himself and his maturity. Twenty or even ten years ago he would have been in a cold sweat, paralyzed with fear of detection; instead he had been secretly quite pleased with the bold, exotic figure he had made on the calendar. He could easily imagine hundreds of young men locked in bedrooms nude and gazing at the calendar on the wall hypnotized or weak with pleasure. Trick photography indeed! But the “weak link” in the chain had to be located. The judge would have to go to the Owls Club on a regular basis again and familiarize himself with the regulars and the pretty homeboys off the street. He would be careful not to partake, but merely to sip cognac downstairs in front of the oversize color TV. Since he had been appointed to the federal bench, the judge had had to stay at home with his photography and basset-hound stud. The judge liked to say delicately to old friends he was now retired from all that — as if the wave of his hand swept away all the rose-bud rumps of all the brown street boys. Still the judge had regulars who were more worldly-wise than the light-fingered street boys. The blond University of Arizona boys were Midwestern hustlers who could swing both ways for a few bucks extra. The brown ones knew their place, the white ones didn’t. But wasn’t that what increased police spending was for? Alleys and vacant lots across Florida and the Southwest were littered with human refuse from the Midwest and Northeast — cast-off white men, former wage earners from mills and factories. Remnant labor-union ideas made older workers dangerous in times of national unrest. Now there was the chaos spreading across Mexico. The refugees were thick as flies in barbed-wire camps all along the U.S. border.

The judge was scheduled for golf on important matters. The senator would be part of the foursome as would the chief of police. The senator had flown in from Washington with a top-secret briefing concerning internal American security as well as security along the international border with Mexico. Of course the judge had been privy to classified documents because of his military friends in high places at Ft. Huachuca. The Cop Cakes comedy pinup might not be such a light matter at the judge’s security-clearance renewal. But secretly the judge did not think they would bother to pursue such a trivial matter as trick photographs that libeled the police and courts. Over the years the judge had learned a great deal about lie-detector tests and the evaluators of the testing. The judge knew that the worst offenders remained serene, absolutely innocent in their own minds because the victims had always started the trouble. The judge thought the Tucson Police Department had botched the whole affair because they had been too quick to issue absolute denials that the calendar of nude cops had ever existed. Too many people in Tucson were like the judge and secretly subscribed to “art books and art calendars” for the discriminating male. The judge had breezed through all inquiries by the press concerning the comedy calendar. The judge had brushed aside the whole matter; trick photography could show anything — the public should not be misled.

The judge was not being premature when he put the finger on one of the “regulars” at the Owls Club. He was used to inhabiting a world in which one lived in dread of the plain envelope with no return address or the series of awkward phone calls. The Cop Cakes calendar had been a subversive act, not a simple act of blackmail. A storm of lawlessness was surging at the edges of respectable life in the United States. The judge thought the golf game might be a good opportunity to raise the subject of a large donation from the senator’s foundation to help southern-Arizona law enforcement. The volatile political situation in Mexico made donations imperative, especially since Arizona State government was nearly bankrupt.

The senator’s staff had printed briefings, which were stupid and useless on the golf course. Max had only glanced at his copy, then had stuffed it in his golf bag. Max hated the pretensions of sleazy politicians such as the senator. Max particularly enjoyed how conducting business on the golf course disrupted all the smoothly oiled routines; Max had exposed more rough edges and hidden dangers during a golf game than the best spies and informers could gather in weeks. The golf game interrupted conversations — the senator would just get puffed up to begin one of his “order and control at home, order and control abroad” speeches and whack! Max Blue had teed off, sending a lovely arcing ball hundreds of yards down the fairway to the edge of the green. The golf ball soared like a bright white bird, though occasionally the arc of the ball had reminded Max of the spring rain arching down from the clouds. The sight of the ball’s perfect flight, the ball’s absolute accuracy, silenced even the biggest assholes, such as the senator. Max could not imagine why the senator was alive at all. The senator was stupefied with greed.

He had stared blankly as Max explained the near-hypnotic quality of golf’s graceful marriage between physics and geometry. The senator’s aides had telephoned all week, begging for a golf game with Max.

Max had begun seriously to question what value this U.S. senator or any other U.S. senator had any longer. The U.S. Congress made laws and more laws. But laws meant nothing without enforcement. In today’s world, judges were a better buy; they gave more for the money than other politicians or the police. More and more often the senator had come for help and to ask small favors.