$200 and a Cadillac

VII



F*cking coyotes.

That’s all Eddie Gates could think when he heard about it on the local radio report. He slammed his hand on the narrow kitchen table and sent a wave of coffee sloshing over the edge of the cup and onto his plate of toast, soaking the bread. “Motherf*cker,” he mumbled, lifting the cup off the table and trying to contain the spill with the edge of his other hand.

Eli came in from the hallway, barely awake and scratching at his wild hair. “What the hell is wrong with you?”

“Nothing’s wrong with me, man. It’s the news. The radio said some a*shole was driving in on the south road last night and ran into a coyote.” Eddie forgot about the coffee and stared at Eli, waiting for him to ask what else. The coffee worked its way to the edge of the table and began running onto the faded yellow linoleum.

Eli shrugged, “So what?”

“So what? I’ll tell you so what. Apparently the coyote this guy hit was carrying some guy’s f*cking leg.” Eddie raised his eyebrows, like a mime faking laughter. “Now how many bodies do you think are lying out there in the desert right now?”

“I dunno. Twenty?”

“This shit ain’t funny.” Eddie got up and snatched a dishtowel off the counter and tossed it on the puddle of coffee, then sat back at the table. His elbow stuck to something when he leaned his head on it. “This goddamned place is a f*cking mess.”

“Dude, calm the f*ck down.” Eli rummaged through the cupboards, found a stack of white foam cups he’d stolen from the cafeteria during his last day at Monarch and poured himself some coffee. “It ain’t no big deal.”

“Will you pull your head out of your ass?”

“Look, man, how the hell are they going to trace that to us? Huh? We were in Ron’s truck, nobody associates us with Ron, and, hell, Ron did it. You can’t get in trouble for just being there. Besides, the guy’s f*cking crazy. What the hell were we supposed to do? He’d have killed us if we’d have tried to stop him.”

Eli leaned against the counter and watched Eddie sop up the spilled coffee with the towel. In the silence, a radio played faint country music somewhere in the trailer, and the faucet dripped into a pan of greasy water in the sink. Eddie took a deep breath. Despite the surrounding desert, the air in the kitchen was musty and rank. Eddie shook his head and said, “Just our luck though. Another week and that body’d a been gone. What are the odds, man?”

“I don’t know. But hell, just cuz the leg turned up don’t mean they’ll find anything else. I mean, look around, there’s all kinds of crazy shit happening up here. They’ll probably chalk it up to a drug deal gone bad or something. Bunch a meth freaks killing each other, just like always. I wouldn’t worry about it.”

“I know. You’re right.” Eddie folded the wet towel and tossed it across the kitchen where it hit the edge of the counter and fell to the floor with a moist slap. Neither of them moved to pick it up.

Eli looked down at the counter. It was strewn with the wreckage of fifty meals. There were dirty plates; wads of cellophane, stains of innumerable variety; ashtrays overflowing with cigarette butts; wet paper towels and napkins crumpled and stuffed down into bowls with strange liquids still in them; there was a half eaten microwave burrito sitting off by itself, pristine and unbothered by the clutter; and balanced precariously atop a pint glass of flat beer with a ribbon of something that looked like snot floating in it, sat a spoon with a half eaten lump of hard, black chili still on it—mold spores half an inch long jutting out like the spines on a sea mine.

Eli picked up the spoon and turned it over. The chili had adhered completely and showed no sign of ever coming loose. Eli set it back on the glass. “Man, we need to burn this trailer when we leave. This place is filthy.”

Eddie snickered quietly and looked everything over. “I know it, man.” He started laughing harder, and leaned his chair back against the wall. “You’d think being laid off and all, we’d be able to find the time to clean.” Eddie doubled over in hysterics, feeling the tension of the previous two days flow out of him.

Eli watched Eddie’s silent laughter and felt himself giving into it as well. He tried to stifle a smile, and then it caught hold of him. Eli picked up the burrito and waved it at Eddie, then tossed it back on the counter. They both lost themselves in red-faced fits of spastic laughter until their guts hurt.

When it was over, and the kitchen was silent again, they could still hear the soft music and the dripping water, and they were both all too aware that nothing had changed. Eli watched Eddie sip his coffee and try to look relaxed, like he wasn’t thinking about the coyote and the leg and what had happened to the hitchhiker, and how the two of them lost their jobs and got caught up in a bargain with a lunatic.

Eli felt the tension building in his shoulders and he rotated them backward a couple of times, craning his neck to the left and right. “F*ck,” was all he could say. Finally, when Eddie’s eyes caught his own, Eli let out a huff and said, “I need some air.”

Eli stepped down, out of the doublewide, and onto the sandy ground. The desert stretched away in all directions, a brown, dusty land pocked with clumps of sage, an occasional Joshua tree, and many black, steeple-like frames of old-fashioned oil derricks—mostly abandoned now. Trailers and shacks dotted the landscape too. Denser near town, where there were lots as small as five acres, and spreading further and further apart as the lot sizes grew and grew and the desert expanded to the low horizon. There were jagged peaks in the distance, but they were meaningless. Eli doubted they even had names.

Way back when the federal government was trying to give the land away, there were only two conditions. First, you had to take 640 acres. Second, it had to be settled, meaning a permanent, habitable structure of some kind had to be erected on the property. This explained both the numerous roads traversing the desert, as well as the seemingly random placement of cinderblock buildings scattered across the desert like mausoleums or funeral mounds built to commemorate desolation itself. When the brief oil rush was on in the 1920s, there had been lots of consolidation. Wealthy speculators would swoop in and buy 640 acre tracts by the dozen. Then, as the oil dwindled, the land was impossible to sell and the owners simply walked away. There were some properties that hadn’t had their taxes paid since the early 1940s. But the county never foreclosed. The government didn’t want the land either.

At one point, Eli’s grandfather had acquired ten square miles of desert and erected nearly twenty reasonably good wells, and life was good clear into the late 60s. When Eli’s grandfather died peacefully of a heart attack on a beach in Hawaii, Eli’s father took over, and the slow, steady decline in the family’s fortune began. Not that it had anything to do with his father, it was just the way things were. Profits were poured into additional wells, all of which were either dry to begin with or soon went dry. By the time the writing was on the wall, it was too late to escape. The family house had been sold, most of the property mortgaged, and most of the rights to the wells that still produced had been doled out to various creditors. When Eli’s father finally drove his beat up Cadillac off the Pacific Coast Highway in a drunken stupor, just south of Point Lobos—killing himself and his wife—Eli was left with an estate consisting of a rusty doublewide on forty acres of hardpan desert, another two hundred acres further out in the middle of nowhere, and the pouch of personal effects the coroner had mailed him containing his mother’s jewelry and his old man’s last two hundred bucks in limp, weathered twenties. Two hundred dollars, a smashed Cadillac, and a pile of shit rusting on a bunch of land the county wouldn’t even repossess for back taxes. The sum total of three generations of hard work.

So at twenty-four, Eli took a job at Southern Petroleum’s Monarch station, where oil from the remaining active wells in the area was dumped into the pipeline and shipped down to Long Beach. It was a steady paycheck in a town that got cheaper to live in every year, but everyone who worked there knew it was only a matter of time before Monarch closed and Nickelback deteriorated back into the wild desert. The oil was running out everywhere. People who had made money were quitting while they were still ahead. And the people who had lost money only had so much more to lose.

The abandoned oil claims made the whole area perfect for people who were hiding from something or had something to hide from others. The dispersed and decrepit buildings were now home to all manner of criminals and outlaws. Those who didn’t have a job at the refinery were either retired, living off of some kind of disability, or making crystal meth in a makeshift lab in a shack behind their house. The whole county only had one sheriff and three deputies, barely enough to have one cop on duty around the clock.

Eli stood in the dirt, perfectly still. He’d been trying to get out of Nickelback his entire life. When the family was desperately clinging to the last of the oil wells, he stayed around to help the old man work them, and to protect his mother from his drunken tirades. When they died, he spent nearly a year trying to make it work himself, and then took the job at Monarch. He told himself he’d work until he could save up enough to leave. Five years went by and he’d saved nothing, but he’d tricked himself into thinking he was happy with the way things were. And then, on a Friday morning, two weeks after his thirtieth birthday, he and Eddie, and fifty others, got told that that was their last day on the job. He’d felt cheated ever since. Screwed out of his twenties by fate, bad luck, and an oil company that couldn’t give a shit about him or anyone else.

The door creaked behind him and Eli heard the crunch of Eddie’s footsteps coming toward him. They stood shoulder to shoulder, oddly close to one another given all the surrounding space, and stared at nothing in particular. Finally, Eddie spoke. “A hundred grand in ten days.”

“Shit.”

“I don’t even know if that’s possible.”

“It’s possible,” Eli spat at the ground, for no reason. “But unlikely.”

“We only made twenty-five grand in the last two weeks.” Eddie’s voice was strained.

Eli spat again and folded his arms across his chest. “Yeah, but those were small loads and we were still getting the kinks worked out.” He gave Eddie a sideways look. “And Ron doesn’t know we made anything at all yet.”

Eddie returned the gaze. “Still, that’s gonna be tough to do.”

“We can pocket about $7,500 a trip.” Eli stirred the dirt with one foot and stared at the ground, computing it in his head. “We load up at night and get down there first thing in the morning. I can leave first. Then you can fill the other truck and head down after. We should be able to turn two loads a day. That’s fifteen grand a day. Ten days? It’s doable, but it’s a helluva stretch.”

“There’s no way we can count on doing two loads a day. There’s no room for error. No room for shitty traffic. It’s a long drive to Long Beach. And the trucks are old. They could break any time. Hell, they could both break and we could be out of business for a week or more.”

“I know it.” Eli stared back out at the desert. “Hell, I don’t understand the hurry. I mean, we all want to make money, there’s no reason to push it like that.”

“We gotta talk some sense into him.”