Rick Moody - The Four Fingers of Death

In fact, Vienna had just fucking called him, in that fucking ridiculously fucking sexy voice of hers that sounded like a ten-year-old on helium, and said that he had to drive over now, forget Iguana Juana’s, come right over because she had something really intense that she wanted to show him, and when she talked like that, you know, it always meant that her parents were out trying to convince the tent community inhabitants to agree to the union, and that she needed some kind of sexual fucking liaison to distract her, at least for a little bit, because she was alone.

Bix Rafferty cradled his ArmaLite in his survivalist hands, out beyond the incorporated edge of Rio Blanco, where the fighter planes lifted off in formation from their heavily reinforced base for the sowing of freedom in the world. Bix Rafferty had no position on the sowing of freedom exactly, because he believed none of what he heard or saw or read from any news source, when he chanced on one. What he did believe in was the land , and this particular expanse of land south of Rio Blanco, owned by the federal government, as much of the state where he found himself was owned by those thieves, had been leased to him so that he might be able to find in the land a vein of most precious metals that would make him, Bix Rafferty, impervious to humiliation, just as lead was once transmuted into gold . The fact was that there was plenty of gold, silver, copper, and other metals here in the desert, this was well known, the problem being that there were cheaper ways to extract precious metals in China and India and Africa, and cheaper workforces to do the job, workers whose lives were expendable, as most lives were, according to Bix Rafferty. Bix Rafferty, having conceived of this mining claim that was officially entitled the Forsaken Mining Corp., believed that lives were on the whole more worthless than the four dollars and eleven cents’ worth of minerals included in them, that life was instead a system of mathematical reiterations, and that the ingestion of cough syrups and other alcoholic beverages purchased at the local cut-rate purveyor of health and beauty aids would sustain him in his search for precious metals at the Forsaken Mining Corp. However, what Bix Rafferty mainly did in that landscape of sage and desert poppy was try to drive away trespassers, who were not trespassers so much as they were hot-rodding, dirt-biking, internationalist youths bent on depleting the last of the desert of the likes of Bix Rafferty, settling it instead with golf courses and adobe spas that specialized in seaweed wraps, and he was certain of this, it was an article of conviction, even if the part of the desert where Bix was settled basically had nothing in it but some trailers, and a few trucking operations, and a general store or two.

It paid to be vigilant, and in this regard he had purchased the ArmaLite and other weapons of gunmetal blue from a dealer who came by now and then and played Parcheesi with Rafferty, during which they discussed their mutual preference for the mule, as opposed to the horse, which had somehow gained an undeserved dominance among those who trafficked in cloven hooves. The mule was naturally smarter, and its ears were more attractive. Better situated for mountainous treks, for long voyages in the desert, noted Rafferty, as he cradled the ArmaLite.

On this particular swing shift, let it be said, Rafferty did believe that he was seeing clouds of dust from the unpaved track that led in this direction. Clouds of dust kicked up into the afternoon sky. Red dust, red sky, elegiac crimson. Bix lived in one of the last beautiful places, but he did not traffic in beauty, because he believed beauty was not a manly pursuit, and that the ratio of incidences of humiliation to the perceptions of beauty was approximately seven to one, with seven being a prime. When he needed to overlook beauty, as a banker steps over the supine wino, he overlooked it, the better to see such signs of trouble as the dust in the road, the clouds of dust — some vehicle headed down through the wastes toward the Forsaken Mining Corp.

Rafferty ticked off a list of possible human visitors: (1) Frank, the aforementioned gun dealer, (2) Sergeant Gerald Cross from the AFB nearby, who had come on occasion at the behest of the military brass to explain to him, Bix Rafferty, when it was important for him, a neighbor of the air force installation, to evacuate; when, for example, there were going to be military exercises that might alarm him if he didn’t know about them in advance, (3) his bookkeeper, an elderly lady with type 2 diabetes, (4) his cousin Wade, who dropped in from time to time but who was at the present moment doing a short stay in a county lockup for driving things across the border that should not have been. Rafferty concluded that none of these persons was likely to be coming at this time, and thus he made sure that the ArmaLite was loaded and that the safety was not sticky, and then he went from his post out into the desert, where the unrelenting sunshine was like a philosophical revelation, like a revealed apocalypse, and he pulled down the main gate and locked it with the padlock, and then he hustled up and over a small hillock, rushing to the best of his ability, which was not so good, because the years of poisoning and heavy metals and pulmonary compromise (from breathing in ground-up stone), these made haste difficult. Bix hoisted himself up through a copse of paloverde, and he betook himself to the very throne room of purgatorial suffering, namely a grove of cholla that had been successfully propagating itself on the hill despite the slag that he poured into the wash just beneath, and then he laid himself down on his belly, as though he were some sort of zoo seal flopping there. He awaited the vehicle and its intentions.

He loved and hated the excitement in equal measure. He reckoned that he had seen four or five men of a deceased persuasion who had no business being in this county, in this state, in this country, or who had gotten themselves deceased by persons unknown, and he had buried these men way down in the mine, and he felt certain that no one would ever find them or miss them, and that was just the way of things in this part of the world. There was no need to summon the authorities, the blatherskites, because the authorities ferried over these men from the other side in the first place, the Mexican side, because there were no authorities any longer, just men with nicer outfits. The responsibility of it, the responsibility of every man for himself, was more than Bix could tolerate without white flashes, and that was what accounted for the cough syrup, and the OxyPlus nasal inhalers that he sometimes bought from the gun dealer in exchange for the odd nugget of the gold stuff. There was the occasional nugget, after all, because there is something for every kook and nut to tide them over until more suffering can arrive. And, in down markets, the conservative money always returns to the safe haven of gold.

It was an all-terrain vehicle of some kind, Rafferty reckoned, probably operated by the kind of person who lived in Rio Blanco, who, in general, were the kind of people who believed that there was never a time nor a season when you should be ashamed of short pants, particularly not short pants that had slogans that traversed the section behind. Rootless cosmopolitans, it seemed to Bix, though because of the heat he himself was wearing nothing but an overlarge T-shirt that he had sweated clean through, and a pair of torn-up sweatpants that he had gotten at a thrift store. These constituted his mining gear today, along with a hard hat and a tool belt.

The all-terrain vehicle slowed to a stop, and a wake of dust overtook it. For a moment, in the light of late afternoon, he couldn’t see the driver or drivers of the trespassing vehicle. A gust of dry desert air blew through, however, from the west, and when it had done so, Bix Rafferty saw at last a young sunglasses-wearing American Indian man, with long black locks, combed back in a kind of stylized version of rockabilly idol, nattering like a madman into one of those things implanted into his wrist. What would bring that here? People came this way sometimes by accident, but the array of survivalist signage along the primitive road that led to the Forsaken Mining Corp. usually created in them the strong desire to reverse direction.