Sailor & Lula (23 page)

Romeo saw Rip Ford and Federal Ray Phillips jump out from the dark, guns drawn, just before the sheriff shouted, “Hands up,
amigos!
Hang 'em on your ears!”

Pete dived to his left and rolled behind the truck before Rip or Fed could squeeze off a shot. Romeo hit the deck and Dede pulled a nine-millimeter Heckler & Koch semi-auto loaded with hot Israeli ammo from his crotch, turned toward the cops and got a bullet between his eyes. The index finger of his right hand locked on the trigger and fired seven rounds through the roof of the Town Car after he was already dead.

Pete crawled under the truck, took out his .45 Browning automatic and blasted away. Romeo heard one of the cops cry out, followed by several more shots, then nothing. He lay on the ground behind the Lincoln, waiting for a voice, a noise. From where he lay, Romeo could not see inside the Cherokee. He shifted his position and looked under the truck, but Pete wasn't there. Romeo waited for thirty seconds before he crawled around the rear of the Town Car. He looked up at the front window of
the Cherokee but no faces were visible. He figured that Perdita and the others were on the floor, keeping their mouths shut.

He peered around the end of the car and saw both cops lying perfectly still on the ground. Romeo crawled toward Rip and Fed on his hands and knees, made sure that they were dead, then looked over by the side of the truck for Pete. He was lying on his back, his head toward Romeo, the .45 still in his right hand. Romeo stood up and walked over to him. There was a hole in Pete's chest the size of a silver dollar. He was dead, too. Romeo took the gun out of Pete's hand, then went back over to the cops and took their guns and ammunition belts. He carried the guns and belts to the Cherokee and tapped on the window of the passenger side. Perdita raised her head from the seat.

“Take these and stick them in the lock box,” Romeo said. “Everyone else is dead. Duane, you come with me in the truck. We'd better get started. It's a long way to go and no tellin' what other fun and games the gods got in store for us.”

Perdita lit a Marlboro. Estrellita was curled up on the back seat, shaking and crying.

“I tell you, Romeo,” said Perdita, “this bitch of yours don't straighten up, she ain't gonna make it to no California.”

Estrellita watched Perdita smoke. Perdita kept both hands on the steering wheel of the Cherokee and controlled the cigarette with her lips and teeth. She puffed on the Marlboro while it was between her lips and held it in her teeth when she exhaled. Perdita's long, loose black hair rested on the shoulders of her magenta tee shirt. She was wearing black cotton trousers and huaraches. Hidden by her hair were large silver hoop earrings, to each of which was attached a thin strip of red ribbon. Romeo had told her that a piece of red or brown material worn on the body neutralized the power of one's enemies, drained it from them like a grounding wire pulling electricity into the earth.

“How long you been smoking?” Estrellita asked.

Perdita did not respond. She did not really dislike Estrellita; she cared nothing about her.

“I only tried it twice,” said Estrellita. “The first was in the summer before high school. I was with Thelma Acker at her house when her parents were gone. Her mother had an opened pack of Pall Malls in a kitchen drawer, so we smoked one. Only about half of one, really. I took about three puffs and coughed like crazy every time. Then around a month ago at a Sig Chi party I tried a Sherman. You ever have one of those? They're black. Kind of sweet tastin', too. Didn't care for it, either, though I didn't cough so much as with the Pall Mall.”

Perdita took a final drag on her Marlboro and put it out in the ashtray.

“I know I'm just talkin' about nothin', and that you hate me,” said Estrellita, “but I'm so scared I don't know what to do. I always talk a lot when I'm nervous. Do you talk a lot when you're nervous? Are you ever nervous? Are you ever gonna talk to me?”

Perdita looked quickly at Estrellita, then back at the road.

“You're gonna murder us, too, eventually,” Estrellita said. “Isn't that right? Duane isn't very smart, really. I hope you know that. I mean, he's okay so far as pullin' on his pants one leg at a time, but he can't understand you people.”

Perdita grinned slightly. “Do you?” she asked.

“I think you and Romeo are incredibly deranged individuals with no morals. You're the most evil creatures on the planet. I know you'll kill me soon so I'm sayin' it. My only hope is in the next life, which is what my Aunt Crystal Rae Satisfy always says. Now I know she's been absolutely correct all this time, that it's literal truth. There's too much ugliness on this earth, seein' how it's crawlin' with soulless ghouls.”

“What's a ghoul?” said Perdita.

“What you and Romeo are. The worst kind of evil person. A person who'd violate a corpse.”

Estrellita bit her lower lip but didn't cry.

“Whoever gave you the notion you was God's perfect child?” Perdita said. “Does Romeo call you
Santa
Estrellita when you go down on him? He always likes the religious angle. Tell you straight, Miss Satisfy, honey, you're right. It was up to just me, you'd be buried by now out in that desert along with them others. Your blond pussy's what's keepin' you alive, so you'd best make use of it for all it's worth. Girls like you got a kind of sickness, the only way to cure it is to kill it. Always talkin' about love and what's good, that shit, when you're same as me, just no particular piece of trash.”

“You really think that? That we're the same kind of person?”

“Ain't seen no evidence to doubt it.”

“Well, you're plenty wrong, I don't mind tellin' you. God may create people equal, but after that they're on their own.”

Perdita laughed. She shook another Marlboro from the pack on the dash, stuck it between her lips and punched in the lighter. She kept her eyes on the jittery red tailights of the truck.

“A person don't never know who they are till someone knows better tells 'em,” said Perdita. “A person won't listen might never know, they never stop to hear. Romeo's good at figurin' out people.”

The lighter popped out and Perdita took it and lit her cigarette.

“He's a kind of fake, 'course,” she said, “but he's got a unlimited way of seein' things. He's got the power to make people believe him.”

“He's horrible,” said Estrellita. “You're both so horrible I bet God don't even believe it.”

Perdita laughed as she spit out the smoke.

“God don't take everything so serious,
gringa
. You see pretty soon how much He cares about you.”

Romeo turned up the radio. Ernest Tubb was singing “When a Soldier Knocks and Finds Nobody Home.”

“This is one of my daddy's favorites,” said Duane. “It's real sad. He used to sing it to us when my brother Herschel Roy and I were small. It and Jimmie Rodgers tunes like ‘Why Should I Be Lonely' and ‘Somewhere Down Below the Dixon Line.' ”

Romeo kept the truck headed west at a safe speed.

“One I always enjoyed was ‘My Darlin' Clementine,' ” Romeo said. “I seen that old movie, too, where the sheriff, Wyatt Earp, says, ‘Sure is a hard town for a fella to have a quiet game of poker in,' after Doc Holliday runs off a cheater in the Tombstone saloon. The best line, though, is from Walter Brennan, who plays Pa Clanton, father of the meanest boys in the territory. After Earp busts up the sons' tormentin' of a travelin' actor, Brennan comes in and horsewhips 'em, then says, ‘When you
pull
a gun, kill a man.' That's beautiful, Duane.

“Also, when Saint Henry Fonda, who's Wyatt Earp, walks out of the hotel into pourin' rain at three in the mornin' on the night his youngest brother's been killed, he walks alone away from the camera along the plank-covered street, and everything's gray and black streaks, like real life.”

Duane was silent, watching the shadows jump past as the refrigerated truck, carrying two thousand-plus pounds of female detritus, stuck East Texas in its back pocket.

“Man, I remember when I was in Tampa, Florida,” said Romeo, “seventeen years old, at my grandmother's house, and I saw the movie
Vera Cruz
on television. It changed my life, the way Saint Burt Lancaster looked and talked. He had about 108 giant gleaming teeth, and wore a dusty black outfit and black drawstring hat, a black leather wristband and a silver-studded black gunbelt with a pearl-handled revolver strapped to his right thigh. You ever see that one, Duane?”

Duane shook his head no and stared out the window. The desert at night looked like a tigerskin rug.

“Saint Burt is an outlaw,” Romeo continued, “operating in Maximilian's
Mexico, who hooks up with Saint Gary Cooper, playing a former Confederate colonel from Louisiana who has no desire to live under Yankee rule. Saint Coop's idea is to score enough loot to refinance the Rebel cause. Saint Burt is the greatest gunslinger alive. He can shoot equally well with either hand, and even backhanded! He and Saint Coop and their gang join up with Maximilian rather than Juarez because the Emperor pays better. They agree to help escort a French countess and her carriage to Vera Cruz. The trick, of course, is that a load of gold is hidden in the carriage, and everybody wants it. One of Juarez's generals, Ramirez, pulls a superb stunt when he surrounds Saint Burt and his men on the walls of a town square. Burt rotates his lion's head as dozen after dozen of Ramirez's peasant army appear, and when our Black Saint sees he's trapped, he unleashes his magnificent grin and the world stops, blinded by the glare. The scene resembles a painting by Velasquez.

“Saint Burt's name is Joe Erin; Saint Coop is Ben Train. Joe is slick, crude, flashy, schooled by old Ace Hannah, the man who gunned down Joe's father. And Joe makes a point of telling Ben how and when Joe paid Ace back. Ben Train is elegant, older, gentler. It's sincerely wonderful when Joe says of Ben, ‘I don't trust him. He likes people; you can never count on a man like that.' Joe spills wine on himself when he drinks from a glass. Ben speaks French and charms the countess, much to Joe's dismay. They make a great pair.

“Joe Erin is the kind of man I wanted to be: fierce, daring and dangerous, combined with the elegance of Ben Train. The Great Burt approaches that at the end of
Vera Cruz
, when he and Saint Coop have their showdown. Saint Burt twirls his pistol one last time into his holster before collapsing, grinning more brilliantly than ever as the reluctant but superior shooter Ben Train's bullet takes his life. It is a dramatic ending, Duane, the most perfect ending for a man. It's the path to sainthood.”

“You gonna shoot us, Mr. Dolorosa,” said Duane, turning toward Romeo, “after we get to the West Coast, maybe. Ain't that right?”

Romeo whistled softly, gritted his teeth and grinned.

“We ain't got to that part yet,” he said. “There's no script, like for a movie. Be best to work things out as we go along,
amigo
, don't you think?”

“I'd appreciate it.”

“Thought you would.”

“When I was twelve years old,” said Estrellita, “my mama and I and my friend Daisy Samples and her cousin Cutie Lewis were sitting on our front porch one summer evenin' talkin', when here come the preacher and his wife, and couple or three children and a pair or more other poor relations, to find out why it was our family hadn't been to church lately.

“‘Evenin', Mrs. Satisfy,' the preacher said. ‘Evenin', Estelle. Evenin' all of you.' We're Baptists, sort of. What I mean by that is none of us is really much on churchgoin' anymore. When I was real small we went more, maybe two or three times a month. But it was around the time I'm talkin' about, I guess, that we began to really slack off.

“Anyway, the preacher's talkin' about how terrible wet the air is, and how that brings out the mosquitoes, and so on, and his dumb kids are scratchin' and kickin' at each other, fightin', bored out of their skulls, the mother's shushin' 'em, and the couple of dumb souls are startin' to wander off in different directions. So the preacher asks mama why we ain't been around in church lately, and she tells him things has been shaky with her and Ernest Tubb, but we'll be back in by and by, the next Sunday, prob'ly.

“Then he asks Daisy Samples if she'd be interested in comin' on Sunday, too, and Daisy says, ‘Not me, preacher, I'm a Catholic.' Well, this takes the preacher back, 'cause you know how bad the Baptists hate the Catholics. He keeps up his smile, though, and turns to Daisy's cousin, Cutie, but before he can ask her, my mama, Glory Ann, says, ‘Don't think you'll be wantin' her, either, seein' how Cutie's half a Catholic and half a Jew.'

“Whew! Hearin' that word,
Jew,
just stunned the man, and he begun herdin' his people back to the car, tippin' his beat-up gray slouch hat with the sweat stripe around the middle, and tellin' mama and me he'd see us in church. I don't recall whether we went that week or not.”

Perdita kept her eyes on the road.

“We were Catholics,” she said.

“Did you go to church a lot?”

“When I was young, I did. Didn't impress me much, though, not like it did my sister, Juana. She was sold on it for a bit, until our neighbor, Cruz Fierro, told her about how the nuns ate their own babies.”

Estrellita looked at Perdita, then out the passenger side window. Blue shark's teeth nibbled at the black curtain.

“What do you mean, ate their babies?”