The Savage(48)
A chill planed Angus’s spine. Fixtures without bulbs, lamps overturned. Papers wadded and tossed across the floor.
In the kitchen, dishes sat in the sink smeared the shade of a greasy lemon with green hair growing. Hints of fried pork lingered. Wheat-colored crumbs speckled the peach-shaded counter. Mason jars spread with the remains of a lardy grit lined the sink. Gnats irritated his meddling. Walnut chairs numbered in three were pulled from a Formica table freckled with gold spots, an ashtray of hand-rolled smoke butts, a packet of Zig-Zag rolling papers, and a wad of cut tobacco lay next to it, redlining Angus’s nerves.
Pushed into a corner was a platinum-tinted fridge next to the basement door that recessed into the stucco walls with handprints smearing unknown IDs. Faint pleas and corrugated grunts slipped from beneath its cracks.
Angus wiped the uneasiness from his thoughts. Narrowed his eyes, held his pistol high, stepped back toward the door. Positioned himself. Gripped the cold doorknob with his left. Turned it slow when the bark of a dog snorted and the front door from the living room screeched open behind him and a man’s voice came with the dog. “Goddamned ’passer!”
Angus turned to the tick of pins scraping across the floor in a drooling rush. A torso of ruby stood with sooty threads of hair fanning, lips a rash of poison ivy, teeth discolored pebbles with gum-ball eyes swiveling into his own, accompanied by a slick-coated dog of ash that reared and attacked.
Reaction was Angus shielding his left forearm into the dog’s slobbering mouth of marrow. Dividing the teeth that gnawed skin, tendon, and muscle. Pressing the steel into the beast’s belly. Pulling the trigger. Once. Twice. A quick yelp of fur, spine, and ass fragmented onto the floor. The slag-tinted beast lay strung on the curled linoleum.
The man rushed Angus, rearing a curved angle of steel. Years ago, Angus would’ve used fists, feet, knees, and elbows over a firearm, but times had changed. The reactive man lived, the slower man inked the final page of his existence. Angus punched the barrel into the creases of forehead. Dumb son of a bitch wielding a blade at a gunfight, Angus thought. Tugged the trigger. Blood spewed like a blown head gasket, greasing the kitchen’s décor, and the man dissolved onto the floor.
Fluid emitted from Angus’s left arm, warming his hand and dotting the curls of vinyl. Beside him, the smudged door unbarred. Feet came in stomps. A shoulder slammed his ribs. Arms circled and locked. Teeth bit through his faded black T-shirt and into the cobra-like muscle of his back. Gravity gave sideways, Angus took in the orange jumpsuit unbuttoned down to the attacker’s crotch and spotted with red. Hair pubic and stiff sprouted from his chest and pathed down over his cookie-dough belly. The man shouldered Angus across the floor. Rammed him into the countertop sideways. Teeth tugged at his muscle. The pain sliced through him. Wet lubed his ribs and his mind blinked.
COTTO
The blood-baked memories of his father painted his trail of guidance from day to day. Of how he’d arrived, how he’d react, carry out direction, and sometimes kill as they’d come silt-tongued and criminal-minded from South America.
Crossing the divide, his father, Manny, walked and hitched rides over the heated land where tiny red men, Yaqui Indians, had once crossed and found their resting below footing. He led Cotto and his mother, Kabeza, to a dope-smuggling village called Naco. Cotto was all of sixteen. The three of them holed up, lived off the grid, hidden from the Guatemalan government in a breached, broken, and leaking structure with a roof patched by aluminum, where termites, ants, and roaches lined the floor and walls, became their company. Outside those walls, garbage was picked from dumps. Sold to others to eat, to earn coin. There was no school in this area, no phones, clothing, furniture, or cars; it was peasants feeding on peasants, until Manny made contact with the coyotes. Men with shiny yellow watches and grease-burger guts, contacts that’d get Manny, Cotto, and Kabeza across the border and into America.
Trained as a Kaibil commando, Manny Ramos slept no more than three to four hours a day. As a commando, he woke to the obstacles of daily tasks that earned his nourishment, such as going hand over hand up a rope, doing push-ups, pull-ups, then sprinting three to five miles. Being schooled in guerrilla warfare, map reading, counterintelligence, demolition, jungle warfare, to devour anything that moved on recon missions, be it insects, reptiles, but also foliage such as roots or herbs, even tonguing midmorning dew from various organ-shaped leaves to keep hydrated. Cotto’s father was a man who’d lived by a code. Fought and struggled within the civil war of Guatemala in the late seventies and early eighties. Been involved in kidnappings and extrajudicial executions of suspected threats to the Guatemalan president and enemies of the state. When the heat escalated and numerous investigations surfaced about the commando units, Manny and several other men in his unit decided their responsibility was to protect themselves and their families. Each man abandoned all that he’d earned. Shelter, food, a job. Went AWOL to head north in search of prosperity, same as the Mayas, Aztecs, and the Spaniards before them, all had desired to build empires in America or along its border.
Manny wanted a simple existence, but that seemed fantastical. On the day of their departure to meet the coyote and cross the U.S. border, Kabeza had been anxious, had left before Cotto and Manny had woken. Unlike Manny, Kabeza was too trusting of strangers, felt all had good in them, that Manny was paranoid. She went to meet with the coyote who went by the moniker of Raúl at a dirt-walled watering hole. Kabeza was attractive. Curved where she needed to be, hair tinted to the pitch of a moonless night, skin heated the shade of a Brazil nut. And she was MIA upon the arrival of Manny and Cotto.