To Salt and Torch This Vermilion Sea
Written by lzhoudidion
We swim, we tumble, we hallucinate, we withhold fealty, we undermine Darwin and spit in the faces of God. This is a Yuletide 2024 gift to the amazing TrapdoorViolet .
We busted out—just the two of us—through a hairline crack in the painting of Galileo being led hogtied up to the gallows and the cigarette-burn heavens above, and began making a run from the vault proper. Zephyrus took the lead, the collapsible stock of the PPS-43 beating at half-cock up against her duffel bag and thigh.
“See, my brother had brains,” she said as the faux marble and greened linoleum sparked, dimpled under our boots. "He was a fistfighter. Slugged draymen and hoodlums at all manners of the hour and still had the wits to stash away a good longarm. But…” We skid to a halt behind a bank of payphones. I cram a thumb down a dress pocket, feeling a Hi-Power magazine click in response to the nail and fingerpad as she preened her chin in the reflection of an acrylic guard. “You can’t say much the same thing about his crony. He’s a man. God made man. A blacksmith made his urn. And John Moses Browning made us all equal.”
“Amen.” Run, run. We spring over a barricade of filing cabinets, shoulders twisting past brownstone reinforcing ribs and stubs that once were outlines of Keurig cups and Oriental rugs, stretching plastic and fiber puddling irregularly with static sunset beneath French doors and nameplates like pools of Sterno. Repossession. Accounts Receivable. Janitorial.
Suck in a breath. Whistle through tongue and dull, seltzer-eroded teeth. Hook a hard angle down a stairway, stamped steel and lace and doeskin leaving yet another scratch among the pockmarks of nail lacquer and briefcase feet. South of the boardrooms and the intern pens, something behind the cerebellum tripped and the floor regained pulse, chandeliers and mismatched spotlights overhead sputtering—blazing alive—smothering out the streaks of blue phosphor and silver pigments in the walls: matte gray, titanium and vaguely translucent. Moving with sticky, shiny windbreakers and single-layer Kevlar and Taser wires, wound over the intersection of a cuff.
“God. Westin. I guess…I guess they grew wise. They’re flanking. Flanking-”
“Shut up and stay still, will you?” she replied. “Yeah, Wes’s mincemeat.” A paw bent up, palm rubbernecking the magazine while a thumb toyed with a crooked perforation in the barrel’s heat shield. I shuffled out of the path of the muzzle. In the chirp of some smoke detector and the first bend of approaching shadow, her frame appeared like an oversized baton sighted towards the elevator door—stock and pistol grip butting up to mottled pelt, the vinyl backing creaking slightly as it touched, bent the tail.
Cup shut an eyelid. Prop open the other—feeling the exposed nerve and the inverted, pinkish strip over the tear ducts quiver and burn—and press to drywall, past the entanglement of rebar and pipework and little subfloor solenoids beyond. Across from a wall of drinking fountains, pleather and time-delayed heartburn paced, nudged collarbone and kidney vessel and Fieldmaster forend—a strait of imitation redwood and silver and brass casings kicking across crimson, pus and fizz.
Fizz. Crimson. Heartburn. Slack-jawed pistol frames, plastic evidence and buyback tags and chalky suntan lotion. A bottle of waiting Cuban rum, spooned over mango syrup and crushed ice into cheap souvenir glasses: rims and embossed cocker spaniels glistening with table salt and lime juice in the Baja sunlight. Behind wrought iron and porcelain tiles fixed crooked with a adobe retaining wall, slanting downhill into a terrace of ornamental cacti and the grasp of the waiting Gulf of California—red satin, matted, multihued fur and rolled sleeves paced, crooned to music: some Motown track, tinny and insistent.
She had been trawling the coastline below for days, coasting over the shallows and sea-breached tidal pools with a mosquito net stretched with tungsten weights beneath an inner tube. He had blown in from the exercise yard of San Quentin—turning a fiberglass nightstick to the temple of a corrections officer as his pod buddies ignited Vaseline and styrofoam. Pages of Popper and Kierkegaard crinkled on his lap as he annexed my spare enchilada. Cut. Scratch. Tap. Grunt. His hair was long, then, the locks slicked and bonded together with some compound between huckleberry oil and pine sap. He slouches over to take another pull of his glass and one shifts too far—cresting over the temple of his reading glasses to dangle in the space between nostrils and sunken eyes—vaguely tracking Zephyrus’s and my own: fixed directly upon the digits and ridges etched in her Hi-Power slide. Smokeless, nine-mil. Nazaré.
Nazaré. Not Nazareth, an inky blot folding beige and green stamped out under a queen's slippers, nor Nazarene: that little plywood-tin shack on stilts and sunken lead piping over straddling the highway from San Diego serving second-rate booze, wayward looks and passes from polyester snake oil salesmen and frat house runaways. Na-z-er-eh.
A series of contradictions. Contractions. Dilations. His sketch on a napkin did no good—the squares, foyers, and corridors converging, intersecting one another until the paper crinkled and tore against the nib and ink began to dribble, black and borderline oily. A draftsman’s nightmare, Rococo and a bastardized Picasso smashed together, burning up in little pools. All bets now on red. Her paw splays open, tipping over an upright casing into an ashtray. We’ve been all over, F’jord and I. It must have shifted form. Or hopped through mediums, she says, it’s got to be. Lead and copper alloy and magnesite-phosphate shit can penetrate and track through plaster, drywall and low-denominator concrete—but not through Einstein’s body. Nazaré.
“Sixteen and a quarter to five.”
“What? I ain’t the guy footing the bill-”
“Shhhh. It’s not about pesos. Heh. That’s how many boys and souped up circuit boards I’ve cut down.”
“In a day or a goddamn lifetime?”
“Take a good look. What do you think?”
“For a two legged lioness and the half-tabby decked in makeup, no scars? Far cry from even three.”
“Bullshit.”
“They hunt your kind for keeps back home, y’know that? Stuff and mount them too.”
“How quaint. How…barbaric. We’re civilized creatures.” The slide snaps home, body gently rocking into quartz. “So the score’s changed. It’s an eye for an eye, is it not?”
Shudder. Pin stale air. Exhale.
Nazaré.
Ears perked—her breath, malted rye and stray flakes of salt expanding, wafting, condensing: sticky against my cheek. Motel bedsheets and minibar liners, linen and synthetic rubber ruffled and reeking with cologne. Nazaré. Past the border watchtowers, the corpses of summer homes at Mulegé, the incantations over the trunk of her Impala—tires and feet barely making grip on the edge of the cliffside before plunging headfirst: arms overloaded, interlaced and whistling like egrets into the Vermilion Sea. Nazaré. Rolled doubloons and silver Lincolns, polished, stacked, immaculate under riveted titanium and vaporizing ether. Nazaré. Shifting globs of sienna kneeling westbound, thrashing oxen, kissing ruined walls of sandstone. Exalting an misplotted epicenter, a plundered tomb. Nazaré. Flesh singed, crumbled and bound together with iron filaments and hand-felled timber. Ankles slashed and the wounds nursed, dappled over with stardust and gypsum. Nazaré. An amalgamation of pewter, bronze and hastily quenched brass and iron, pushing back against tan fabric and industrial-strength stitches. Nazaré. Fangs. Corinthians. Proverbs. Pawn shop sideburns. Mouths damp. Delaminating. Nazaré.
Nazaré.
Nazaré…
"Show me. Take me.”
“Can’t nail the name, shrink?"
"Huh?"
"The name. You're hissing it all wrong," he says, nodding to Zephyrus. “It's got an flourish. Think of it like its French. Or…er…Spanish. Fuck that. Speak it like how you read it off a shoebox.” No more social pretenses. The rum was in a chokehold, now, frost and condensation creeping up into his shirt sleeve. “I imagine that’s how they still spell and stretch the most 'prole' of terms, down those parts. Pounce it, mortgage it, roll it ‘round in your maw until it starts to stretch and bleed.” She snorts and glances away, fiddling with a decorative ribbon on her bathing suit. High tide. The Motown swoon had dissipated with the haze, replaced by cutlery and intermittent tambourines. In the half-yolk of the dusk and the caving, violet darkness beyond I saw an centurion’s breastplate, filigrees of Neptune and Medusa dragging with a gladius tip across pumice and sand dunes until the infrared light, the winds, the electrical diodes, the abrasion—stripped the surface of all sheen and hue and hard angle.
Twist. Simmer. Grimace. Splotches of green, sandy yellow, coral pink flitter, graze at the remainder of an open tear duct. Somewhere within the bowels beyond his body: rifles clack, accountants cower, and a dynamo lurches to a halt, elevator doors wincing open. Hunch, bend into a little alcove behind a potted plant—trying to minimize all form, all feeling as electrical cackling ceases, a hollow PPS-43 beckons, and her paws clasp my own, sparks and shore-slick and spotted doeskin surging dim yet sure and formed and full.