David Corbett - The Devil’s Redhead

She drew herself up using the chair and the table, then lunged across the kitchen to the cabinets. She reached them on her knees, pulled herself up, sucking air, and searched drawers until a towel appeared. She had no idea if it was clean.

“Here.” She held it out for him to take.

The floor was sticky and there was a smell of mildew brewing in the sink. Cesar snagged the towel, dried his arm, and said, “Come over and sew up the holes.”

“I was never much at girl stuff,” she began, but he aimed the gun at her.

“I can’t, I can’t,” he said, in a mocking whine.

“You can’t just darn it up like a sweater.”

“Do it.”

He kicked a chair across the room for her and, using it like a walker, she forced herself around the room, pulling open the drawers she hadn’t already checked. One drawer seemed the catch-all: In a tangled heap lay buttons, matchbooks, a church key, dice, string, safety pins, pennies, rubber bands, candles, a shoelace, gum- and a spool of black thread with a single needle.

She worked her way back to the table, sat down and wet the thread with her tongue. Her hands shook. He told her to hurry, pressing the towel to his arm to keep the wound clean and stay the blood. Finally, she had the needle threaded and told him to bare the wound. He drew the towel away and she gagged. The flesh was black and mangled. Muscle and bone gaped through the tear.

“You need a doctor,” she said.

He slammed the gun butt down again, this time on the table. “What I need is you to do what I tell you. Stop telling me why you can’t.”

She took a moment to regain control of her hands. Once they stopped trembling, she started with the wound on the upper side of the arm, where the skin was softer. She set about looping the thread through his skin, aiming the needle tip at a shallow angle, having no idea if she was doing it right or wrong. Her hands grew sticky with his blood. Cesar drank from the rum bottle, he cursed, he bit his fist. The thread broke twice, his skin ripped where the thread tried to hold and the whole thing fell apart. He savaged her with obscenities then told her to try the underside, where the skin was thicker. That was when the needle broke. He jumped up, screaming. He pulled back the hammer of his pistol and pressed the barrel to her head.

“You are trying, goddamn trying, to fuck me up,” he shouted.

She sat there, holding a bloody length of thread, her eyes closed, waiting to die.

“I saved your life,” he told her.

“I didn’t ask you to.” She looked up past the gun into his eyes. “I asked you, if they were going to kill me, to make sure you were the one who did it.”

He grinned, thumbing the hammer down gently. “Same thing.” He lowered his chin onto his chest and laughed. Closing his eyes to hide his tears, he put the gun down and wiped his face. “Check the bathroom,” he murmured. “Maybe there’s some gauze, some bandages. Anything.”

She pulled herself up on the chair she used for a walker and hobbled down the hallway, stumbling twice, one time banging her teeth against the chrome back of the chair. In the bathroom she checked the medicine cabinet for anything that might ease her pain, finding nothing for her effort but toothpaste, hydrogen peroxide and laxative. Never go to a junkie for drugs, she thought.

Closing the cabinet door, she saw a stranger’s reflection in the mirror. Good God, she thought, as recognition finally claimed the image. A sensation of cold swept through her, and she associated the chill with something her grandmother used to say: Someone just walked across my grave. The phrase evoked an image: a tall cloaked figure stepping across fresh earth. It’s not my grave, she realized. It’s Danny’s.

Live, she thought, clutching the sink to keep from falling. Whatever happens, to me or anybody else, please live.

She pulled herself away from the mirror. In the drawer she found gauze squares and an Ace bandage. Shoving them down into her pocket, she turned her chair about and trounced back toward the kitchen where Cesar sat, his head buried in the crook of his good arm, the other arm hanging at his side. Blood dripped from his fingers to the floor.

“Talk to me,” she said, tearing open the wrapper of one of the gauze squares. “Tell me about Hidalgo.”

“I already told you. He’s a spike.”

She applied the bandage to the underside of his arm, covering the exit wound, which seeped blood. “Hold that there,” she told him. He obeyed. “How do you know him?”

“Hidalgo? I know him from home. His old man’s a jefe like mine.”

“What’s that?” Shel ripped open the next bandage.

“ Jefe? It’s like a boss. Guy in the community who’s connected. Hidalgo’s family lives in Netzahuacóyotl, east of the airport.”

“Is that nice?”

“It’s a slum. For garbage pickers. Which means it’s paradise compared to Chalco.”

She remembered the name. “That’s where you’re from,” she said, overlaying the first square with the second, forming a Star of David.

“Yeah.” He held the two pieces of gauze in place as she opened the next. “Hidalgo’s people know my people. They look down their noses at us. Fucking garbage pickers. Can you believe that?” Shel applied the next bandage to the wound on top of his arm. It was the smaller of the two. Cesar spread his hand, to hold both the top and bottom bandages in place at once. “The joke is,” he continued, “they can bitch about us all they want. We’re family. There’ve been a couple of marriages. I met Hidalgo as a kid at one of the weddings.”

“You’re related.”

“He’s my cousin,” Cesar said.

Shel began unraveling the Ace bandage. Cesar gestured with a nod back toward the room in which Hidalgo lay in his stupor. “What should I tell his people?” he said. “I’ve seen him loaded dozens of times. Never like this.”

“Is that where you’re going?” she asked. “You’re going to hide with his family?”

Cesar cackled. “Papa Cleto wouldn’t waste a fucking second to decide. He’d sell me to the highest bidder.”

“That’s your uncle?”

“Hidalgo’s old man,” Cesar confirmed.

“What about your own family?”

“Worse.”

She wrapped the elasticized bandage around his arm as tight as she dared, enough to hold the bandages in place, not so much as to cut off circulation and risk gangrene. “If you can’t trust your family, where are you going to run?”

“We,” he corrected. “Where are we going to run?”

The sound of a tow truck from the street below interrupted them. Cesar stood up, hobbled to the window over the sink and peered out from the edge of the curtain.

“Fucking hell,” he whispered.

Coming up behind him, Shel saw a patrol car and a tow truck positioned at opposite ends of the car. The tow truck’s yellow light spun in the opposite direction of the cruiser’s blue-and-red flasher, the beams intersecting in circles across the grime-caked cars parked along the cul-de-sac. The cop pointed his flashlight through the windshield, holding it like a spear. The light refracted through the shattered glass, creating an etchwork of shadows across the bloody upholstery. Wait till he finds the hand stuffed under the seat, Shel thought.

“Get back,” Cesar hissed as a second cruiser pulled up behind the first.

He pulled her away from the edge of the window. There’d be other cruisers soon, they both knew that. Turning his back to the curtains, Cesar put his hand to his head, gritting his teeth. Eyes closed, he started pounding his forehead with the heel of his hand, whispering, “Think, motherfucker, think…”

Shel clutched the kitchen counter for balance. Through the fog of her pain and fear an idea took form. “We get out of here somehow,” she said, “before they start doing a door-to-door. Hole up in the bushes if we have to. Tomorrow morning, we make the ferry, I know a guy in San Francisco. Name’s Eddy, owns a body shop out in the avenues. We can get a car.”