T. Parker - Iron River

He opened one of the safes to look again at his ninety-thousand-dollar transport payment from Herredia. You bet it looked good, and Bradley felt that low-down grinning happiness of cash on hand. He uncovered Joaquin and poured himself a bourbon and sat down at the workbench. Beside the bottled head now rested the chain mail vest, Joaquin’s own, a gift from Mike Finnegan, delivered by Owens, on Bradley’s wedding day. Bradley knew the story of the vest, how Joaquin had commissioned it from an arrogant French armorer, and how Joaquin had not trusted the armorer, so before he would make payment on the allegedly bulletproof vest, Joaquin had made the Frenchman put it on himself, then drawn his revolver and shot him in the heart. The speechless Frenchman collected his payment, and Joaquin rode the rest of his brief life protected by this armorer’s art. Bradley loved the story, but he loved even more the mystery of how Mike Finnegan had gotten the vest. Owens wouldn’t say. He could see that she knew, but she protected her knowledge with armor of her own-her pewter eyes and her damaged beauty. Bradley believed he would see those most strange people again. He all but knew it. He’d have a crack at the little guy, maybe trade him something precious for the story of how he had gotten the vest, maybe just hold him up by his throat until he was ready to croak out the truth.

Bradley had been working on a poem down here for weeks now, but there wasn’t much on the page.

He looked up from his yellow notepad and down the bench to see what was left of his ancestor. He sipped bourbon and read what he had written:

If you were a map and I had drawn you

In my blood, who would know where

Your border became my border or where

Your…

What? Where your what became my what? And who was he talking to anyway, Erin or Joaquin or himself or the whole world or maybe no one at all? Why were emotions a flood but words to convey them a dry little creek? He wished he could think and write like Erin, wished he could write something as beautiful for her as the songs she wrote for him.

He looked up at Joaquin. “Thanks for your protection on a dangerous job, El Famoso. There were some moments you would have appreciated. The look on Hood’s face. Priceless.”

He turned back and reread his fragment. Bradley wondered if his problem as a poet was his age. At nineteen he felt huge tidal emotions about many things, not just Erin: the tawny hills around him, the great machinery of the stars at night, the way a river changed every moment, the goofy nod of the poppies in the spring, his mother. He was once brought to tears by a baby horned lizard, a miniature thorn-crowned dinosaur enjoying the warmth of his palm. And not just nature, either: He experienced strong feelings when he saw good paintings and read good poems or saw something physically beautiful like a black Stratocaster with a maple fretboard or a staunch Craftsman cottage in Pasadena or a red Sears Craftsman toolbox or an M5. The trouble with being nineteen wasn’t the feelings, it was the words. He hadn’t lived long enough to get familiar with them. They weren’t his friends yet. They were still formal, standoffish. He sipped the bourbon and wondered if there was a way to hurry things along without getting old. He’d seen old and it looked like hell. What was old if not finally having the words but no passions left to describe?

He looked up again. “They’ll catch me someday like they caught you. I don’t think they’ll get my head. I’ll have lawyers and appeals. You only made it to twenty-three. I’m hoping for ninety-three, Gramps. So, any advice, you just pipe up anytime you want.”

Bradley reread his three lines and one word. Maybe the whole map deal was the problem. Nobody drew maps now. You got them on a cell phone screen. Technology is the end of poetry, he thought. What bullshit.

He thought for a long while with the pencil in his hand and the notepad before him. He opened a workbench drawer and pulled out the shred of cover torn from his LASD Explorer class syllabus on which Caroline Vega had written her phone number. He considered it, then he put the paper back.

Then he covered Joaquin and hit the switch, and the ceiling rose, and he climbed the stairs from the vault toward the few acres of earth that belonged to him.

Hood served the dinner outside on his patio after the sun went down. Beth sat in the high-backed rattan chair, her skin moist from the heat and her eyes reflecting the candlelight. Her dog sat beside her, viewing Hood with doubt. Minnie was a Labrador / golden mix, black and gentle.

“That was a bad scene today in the ER with the sergeant.”

Hood nodded and forked the asparagus onto Beth’s plate. He had noticed over the years that cops and medical professionals often made unusual dinner conversation. Maybe that bode well. As a cop’s daughter, Beth liked to talk crime.

“Did you know him?” she asked.

“No. But I heard he assigned the guards for the hospital that night those two men came for Jimmy. Well, didn’t assign them is more like it.”

“This is cop talk, right-not public knowledge?”

“It’s going to get public.”

“This guy made sure the real guards weren’t on duty, so the fake ones could kill Jimmy? That means he was doing a favor for the Gulf Cartel.”

“Yes.”

“Has there ever been an American cop on the take from a Mexican drug cartel?”

“Not that I know.”

“That’s going to be a huge scandal.”

“It will fit right in with everything else that’s happening.”

“Five cops murdered in Tamaulipas just today, Charlie. Heads in coolers left in a park. Notes on top.”

Today’s body count, thought Hood. Heads. Coolers.

The Imperial County Sheriff’s sergeant had shot himself this morning with his service gun. Hood heard that ICSD’s internal affairs team had been investigating him. Hood had learned that law enforcement rumors were almost always true. It was said that the sergeant had made the overtime deputy assignments for Imperial Mercy that shift, when Jimmy Holdstock’s room had gone unprotected. Investigation ongoing. Beth had seen the sergeant as they wheeled him into ER just moments before he expired.

“I treated a man once who lived through a wound like that,” she said. “But he was never the same. Not even close to the same. Imagine.”

Hood poured the wine. “We have a lighthearted pinot noir for your enjoyment.”

“No absinthe?”

“I’ll make you one later.”

“No. Please no.”

After dinner they sat with their backs to the house and the candles flickering and looked out at the new Buenavista. There was still the border town with its odd clash of old and new-its zocalo and Jack in the Box, the Rite Aid and St. Cecilia’s-and its wall right through the middle dividing Mexico from the United States, but a low wall, where people gathered and talked and exchanged news and sometimes gifts-grapefruit from El Centro, beer from Tecate. Now there was the National Guard headquarters to the west and the sprawl of tents and the mobile command center and field hospital and the new roads scratched through the desert for the convoys and the tanks and the half-tracks and the little machine-gun Jeeps that bounced along the roads with an almost recreational joy. And to the north was the new airstrip that was dozed out of the desert by the big Cats in just a few days’ time, wide and long and flat. And at this hour the town and the camp were alive with lights, headlights and searchlights and house lights and yard lights and landing strip lights and the lights of helos and the lights of Jeeps skidding along the new dirt paths, coming and going like ants, thought Hood, hard to say what they were really doing out there.