Морин Макхью - Wastelands - The New Apocalypse

“What’s your best side?” Timo asked. “Don’t be shy. I’ll do you right. Make you famous. Just let me get your angle.”

There .

Timo squatted and started shooting. Click-click-click-click —the artificial sound of digital photography and the Pavlovian rush of sweaty excitement as Timo got the feel.

Dead man.

Flowers.

Candles.

Water.

Timo kept snapping. He had it now. The flowers and the empty milk jugs dangling off the dude. Timo was in the flow, bracketing exposures, shooting steady, recognizing the moment when his inner eye told him that he’d nailed the story. It was good. Really good.

As good as a Cat 6 plowing into Houston.

Click-click-click. Money-money-money-money .

“That’s right, buddy. Talk to your friend Timo.”

The man had a story to tell, and Timo had the eye to see it. Most people missed the story. But Timo always saw. He had the eye.

Maybe he’d buy a top-shelf tequila to celebrate his page view money. Some diapers for his sister Amparo’s baby. If the photos were good, maybe he’d grab a couple syndication licenses, too. Swap the shit-ass battery in the Ford. Get something with a bigger range dropped into it. Let him get around without always wondering if he was going to lose a charge.

Some of these could go to Xinhua , for sure. The Chinese news agencies loved seeing America ripping itself to shit. BBC might bite, too. Foreigners loved that story. Only thing that would sell better is if it had a couple guns: America, the Savage Land or some shit. That was money, there. Might be rent for a bigger place. A place where Amparo could bail when her boyfriend got his ass drunk and angry.

Timo kept snapping photos, changing angles, framing and exposure. Diving deeper into the dead man’s world. Capturing scuffed-up boots and plastic prayer beads. He hummed to himself as he worked, talking to his subject, coaxing the best out of the corpse.

“You don’t know it, but you’re damn lucky I came along,” Timo said. “If one of those citizen journalist pendejo lice got you first, they wouldn’t have treated you right. They’d shoot a couple shitty frames and upload them social. Maybe sell a Instagram pic to the blood rags… but they ain’t quality. Me? When I’m done, people won’t be able to dream without seeing you.”

It was true, too. Any asshole could snap a pic of some girl blasted to pieces in an electric Mercedes, but Timo knew how to make you cry when you saw her splattered all over the front pages of the blood rags. Some piece of narco ass, and you’d still be bawling your eyes out over her tragic death. He’d catch the girl’s little fuzzy dice mirror ornament spattered with blood, and your heart would just break.

Amparo said Timo had the eye. Little bro could see what other people didn’t, even when it was right in front of their faces.

Every asshole had a camera these days; the difference was that Timo could see .

Timo backed off and got some quick video. He ran the recording back, listening to the audio, satisfying himself that he had the sound of it: the wind rattling the chain link under the high hot Arizona sky; meadowlark call from somewhere next to the CAP waters; but most of all, the empty dangling jugs, the three of them plunking hollowly against each other—a dead man turned into an offering and a wind chime.

Timo listened to the deep thunk-thunk-thunk tones.

Good sounds.

Good empty desert sounds.

He crouched and framed the man’s gnawed arm and the milk jugs. From this angle, he could just capture the blue line of the CAP canal and the leading edge of Phoenix beyond: cookie-cutter low-stories with lava-rock front yards and broke-down cars on blocks. And somewhere in there, some upstanding example of Arizona Minute-Man militia pride had spied this sucker scrambling down the dusty hillside with his water jugs and decided to put a cap in his ass.

CAP in his ass , Timo chuckled to himself.

The crunch of tires and the grind of an old bio-diesel engine announced Lucy’s pickup coming up the dirt road. A trail of dust followed. Rusty beast of flex-fuel, older than the girl who drove it and twice as beat up, but damn was it a beast. It had been one of the things Timo liked about Lucy, soon as he met her. Girl drove a machine that didn’t give a damn about anything except driving over shit.

The truck came to a halt. The driver’s side door squealed aside as Lucy climbed out. Army green tank top and washed out jeans. White skin, scorched and bronzed by Arizona sun, her reddish brown hair jammed up under an ASU Geology Department ball cap.

Every time he saw her, Timo liked what he saw. Phoenix hadn’t dried her right, yet, but still, she had some kind of tenacious-ass demon in her. Something about the way her pale blue skeptical eyes burned for a story told you that once she bit in, she wouldn’t let go. Crazy-ass pitbull. The girl and the truck were a pair. Unstoppable.

“Please tell me I didn’t drive out here for a swimmer,” Lucy said as she approached.

“What do you think?”

“I think I was on the other side of town when you called, and I had to burn diesel to get here.”

She was trying to look jaded, but her eyes were already flicking from detail to detail, gathering the story before Timo even had to open his mouth. She might be new in Phoenix, but the girl had the eye. Just like Timo, Lucy saw things.

“Texan?” she asked.

Timo grinned. “You think?”

“Well, he’s a Merry Perry, anyway. I don’t know many other people who would join that cult.” She crouched down in front of the corpse and peered into the man’s torn face. Reaching out, she caressed the prayer beads embedded in the man’s neck. “I did a story on Merry Perrys. Roadside spiritual aid for the refugees.” She sighed. “They were all buying the beads and making the prayers.”

“Crying and shaking and repentance.”

“You’ve been to their services, too?”

“Everybody’s done that story at least once,” Timo said. “I shot a big old revival tent over in New Mexico, outside of Carlsbad. The preacher had a nasty ass thorn bush, wanted volunteers.”

Timo didn’t think he’d ever forget the scene. The tent walls sucking and flapping as blast-furnace winds gusted over them. The dust-coated refugees all shaking, moaning, and working their beads for God. All of them asking what they needed to give up in order to get back to the good old days of big oil money and fancy cities like Houston and Austin. To get back to a life before hurricanes went Cat 6 and Big Daddy Drought sucked whole states dry.

Lucy ran her fingers along the beads that had sunk deep into the dead man’s neck. “They strangled him.”

“Sure looks that way.”

Timo could imagine this guy earning the prayer beads one at time. Little promises of God’s love that he could carry with him. He imagined the man down in the dirt, all crying and spitty and grateful for his bloody back and for the prayer beads that had ended up embedded in his swollen, blackening neck, like some kind of Mardi Gras party gone wrong. The man had done his prayers and repentance, and this was where he’d ended up.

“What happened to his hand?” Lucy asked.

“Dog got it.”

“Christ.”

“If you want some better art, we can back off for a little while, and the dogs’ll come back. I can get a good tearaway shot if we let them go after him again—”

Lucy gave Timo a dirty look, so he hastily changed tacks. “Anyway, I thought you should see him. Good art, and it’s a great story. Nobody’s got something like this.”

Lucy straightened. “I can’t pitch this, Timo. It’s sad as hell, but it isn’t new. Nobody cares if Old Tex here hiked across a thousand miles of desert just to get strung up as some warning. It’s sad, but everyone knows how much people hate Texans. Kindle Post did a huge story on Texas lynchings.”