Gun Work

He was experiencing pain, and was therefore alive, perhaps delirious. One of his eyes was swollen shut and crusted. His skeleton felt disconnected. Wounds everywhere. Teeth rocking in their gum beds. Brain hammering. Heart still pumping, blood still moving, even if a lot of it was vacating the premises. Dizziness, disorientation. He felt he had puked and shat so much that if you looked down his throat, you’d see light.

They — someone — dragged his dead ass out, down steps. Sacked his head. Stinky bag, probably the same one from his earlier trip. He was in the van again, the one in which he and Carl had been taken. Carl’s past few pay periods, by comparison, had probably been less debilitating. This time, he was not around to grab Barney’s hand and drag him up out of the smothering sand.

The unseen road trip that followed was not measurable in units of time. The only clock Barney possessed was his own heartbeat. It could have been a week. He had to remain inside of himself, sequestered. He thought of his organs, stubbornly churning away in spite of the memo that came down saying just die. Maybe they were taking him to a clínica. Maybe they were driving him home. Maybe Sucio had slipped up, gone overboard, and now they had to doctor him.

Yeah, right.

More bumpy roads and more roughhouse dragging. When the bag was yanked off his head Barney was staring bleary-eyed at the Rio Satanas, from the top of the bridge. Sucio was sporting a bandage beneath a patch on one eye. The glowering orb of the setting sun made everything shade crimson and blurred Barney’s own light-sensitive vision, but he recognized Mojica, standing back a pace, politic. He did not feel the usual waves of animal hatred broiling off Sucio; the big man seemed to have clamped down and toughened up, all business, curses shelved, silent again.

Sucio grabbed Barney by the scruff and the crotch and heaved him over the edge. No parting insult, no quip. Barney hit the oil-sheened surface of the mulchy water inelegantly and headfirst, sinking to brush the tar-like aggregate bottom, sucking a lungful of turbid liquid with floating chunks in it, then slowly ascending from his own buoyancy toward filtered light. He had a flash thought of his goldfish, under Armand’s stewardship, back in another world called Los Angeles. If you didn’t clean the aquarium for a couple of months and allowed the mold and algae to build up, shut off the filtration system so the fish were swimming in ammoniac piss and liquefied gray shit, then dunked your entire head into the tank, it would probably be a lot like this.

Back on the bridge a brief discourse ensued in Spanish between Mojica and Sucio concerning the number of minutes left to Barney’s life. Barney caught bits of it as he bobbed, water draining from one ear while it filled the other. One said Barney was dead, the other said Barney wasn’t, and it went back and forth, in the manner of gang taunts, no matter either way, a kind of yes-he-is, no-he’s-not time-passer.

Barney could imagine the sizzling fire-coal deep in Sucio’s good eye. He’d had hurt the huge enforcer, hurt him visibly and humiliatingly, and nobody hurt Sucio, that was clearly a rule in their world.

Barney floated on the surface, face-down, no bubbles.

“Mira,” said Mojica. “Muerte, carnal.”

Sucio unlimbered his revolver, aimed down at the floating body, and spent all six rounds.

Barney rotated in the water, surrounded by a corona of freshly freed blood.

“Now he is,” said Sucio, turning back to the van.

A disembodied woman’s voice seemed to ask Barney, Where are my children?

He had holes in him; that much he knew. He was hit. He had been hit a few times before, in his previous life.

Shock trauma took over once he ran dry of endorphins; he could not feel a thing. Bullet impact had flipped him over in the water, and instead of drowning, he was more or less afloat and still drawing air along with the occasional mouthful of sewage. He rejected the bilge. Autonomic functions had taken over and he did not think about willfully breathing. He worried in the abstract about taking on water — holes in a rowboat could sink it — but for the most part he was far away from his physical body, occasionally observing it from the distant place to which his mind had been exiled. But all he could see was the sky at dusk. The world seemed aflame.

The Rio Satanas was devilish in its commitment to seek the sea, or other, fresher tributaries. Sunrise, sunset and the tidal pull of the moon exerted their influence to provide a kind of current. He revolved, in the manner of a lazy sunbather in a hotel pool. He saw the ransom bridge receding, only once, before it became too dark to gauge distance.

This is how life ends.