THE ONLY BOB LEFT COMES TO ON HIS BACK, THE NIGHT SKY snapping into focus. Half a second earlier he was ten years old and swimming in the East River with kids he grew up with, Tommy Boyle treading water and reciting a limerick.
There was a young man of Leeds
Who swallowed a packet of seeds
Great tufts of grass
Sprouted out of his ass
And his balls were all covered with weeds.
But he’s back in Arizona now, lying at the bottom of a mountain, a sharp rock poking his liver. The pain when he straightens his broken left arm with his good right one nearly makes him scream.
He knew when he jumped the fall wouldn’t kill him, but he’s pretty sure he got as close to dying as he ever has before. If the fuckers up top came after him now, it’d be all over. He wouldn’t be able to fight back. He lifts his head to look around. Nothing but moon rocks and stunted cactus. He tries to hurry the healing by concentrating on where he hurts most.
Half an hour later his bones have knit enough that he can stand. He stomps to test his legs and sets off down the mountain. It’s a little after midnight. Five hours until dawn. He picks up his pace. Town is a long way off.
He comes to a trail, follows that until it hits a Jeep track, and follows that to pavement, the road back to Phoenix. He walks on the shoulder, ducking when cars pass. Distances out here are deceptive. He sees the lights of a ranch up ahead and figures it’ll take fifteen minutes to reach it. An hour later the lights are as far away as ever. His plan was to get back to the motel on his own, but he worries he might have miscalculated, might wind up in the open at sunrise, so when he comes to a crossroads, a four-way stop with a red signal blinking above it, he hides in the scrub and waits.
A pickup driving toward Phoenix approaches. Bob steps out in front of it, hands in the air. With his face smeared with dried blood, he’s a nightmare come to life. Still, the truck stops.
“What’s wrong?” the driver asks.
“I flipped my bike,” Bob replies. He fakes a limp as he moves to the window. The driver is a kid with a flattop and thick glasses. He’s wearing white pants and a white shirt with the words Danziger Dairy embroidered on it.
“Are you hurt?” the kid says.
“I’m banged up, but I’ll live,” Bob says. “My bike’s trash, though. I could use a lift into town.”
“I’m on my way to work,” the kid says.
Bob pulls a twenty-dollar bill from his pocket. “Drop me at the first pay phone.”
“Keep your money,” the kid says. “Get in back.”
Bob climbs over the tailgate. When he’s settled against the cab, the kid hits the gas. The crossroads dwindles until all Bob can make out is the faint red throb of the signal. For the first time since the fight, he thinks of the other Bob. Rest easy, he tells him. You will be avenged.
The kid stops at a gas station. Bob hops out and walks up to thank him, but he’s already pulling away. The station attendant is asleep in the office, head resting on folded arms. Bob goes to the phone booth, gets the number for the Apache Motel from the book, and puts a dime in the slot. The night clerk connects him to Antonia and Elijah’s room. Antonia answers.
“Bob’s dusted,” Bob tells her.
“Dusted?” she says. She sounds like she thinks he’s joking.
“We got ambushed, and he was killed.”
“Ambushed by who? Where?”
“I’m not getting into that now.”
“Are the rest of us in danger?”
“I have no fucking idea, but if you are, you’ll be better off with me there, so hurry and send someone to pick me up.”
Elijah and Pedro come for him. They ride back to the motel, and everyone gathers in Antonia and Elijah’s room to hear what happened.
“We were at the spot where we were gonna feed,” Bob begins. “A rover and an unturned girl tried to snatch the kid, but I caught them at it.”
He goes on to tell how the dude stopped his ticker with a lucky poke and Bob brought him back, but he was still too late to save Bob from getting dusted. He tells how he fought the rover who killed Bob and another who was with him and was almost dusted himself before escaping by jumping off the mountain.
He calls for a smoke when he finishes. Johnny Kickapoo passes a pack of Lucky Strikes.
“What happened next?” Antonia says.
“I laid there until I healed, then made my way back here,” he says.
“No sign of them on the way?”
“Not hide nor hair.”
“Would you know them if you saw them again?”
“The motherfuckers who dusted my best friend and tried real hard to dust me? Yeah, I’d know them.”
The Fiends are roiling, thirsty for revenge, ready to ride out and tear the city apart searching for the lowlifes who killed their compatriot, but it’s already 4 a.m.—only an hour until daybreak.
“We’ll come up with a plan and start hunting as soon as the sun sets tonight,” Antonia says.
“I’m not waiting,” Bob says. “Who’ll lend me a bike?”
“Take mine,” Johnny says.
“And I’ll ride with you,” Pedro says.
“No,” Bob says. “I’m going alone.”
He cruises the strip of seedy motels on East Van Buren, the ones that rent rooms by the hour and show dirty movies on the TVs. There’s hardly anyone on the street. A jitterbugging speed freak swatting at imaginary insects, two alkies grappling under a neon cactus, a cop walking from his patrol car into a diner. No rovers.
A dark-haired skeleton wobbling down the sidewalk makes him ease off the throttle. She resembles the girl from the mountain. As he rolls slowly past, she yanks the neck of her T-shirt down to flash her tits, and he sees it’s just some whore, some dope fiend. He feels like killing her anyway, feels like watching someone die. Problem is, the sun’ll be up before he could do her and get rid of the body.
Even so, he pulls over and waits for her to catch up.
“Hey, Daddy,” she says.
“Hey, beautiful,” he says.
“You looking to party?”
“You looking to die?”
The whore recoils. “Get the fuck out of here, man, before I call a cop,” she screeches.
Bob roars off, leaving her spewing curses.
He gets back to his room right before daybreak. As he lies down on the bed, the phone rings.
“Any luck?” Elijah says.
“Nope,” he replies.
“We’ll find them tonight, don’t worry.”
Elijah hangs up the phone and pulls the curtains tighter to keep out the rising sun. Antonia is reading on the bed. Her nose is always in a book, which delights Elijah. He views it as something special about her, as he’s never in his life known anyone else who read for pleasure.
And a long life it’s been. He’s the oldest of the Fiends, born in 1757 in Madrid as Diego Mateo Casal. His father was a wealthy trader and confidant of the king, but all Elijah remembers about growing up is learning to hunt. Boar, deer, mouflon, pheasant. Until he turned, stalking game with a rifle was his greatest passion, and he still finds it funny that a man who once lived to hunt now hunts to live.
He eventually went to work for his father, who sent him to New Orleans and put him in charge of the family company’s office there. He fell in with a crowd of dissipated expatriates, including a wild, troubled Creole girl, a rover, who introduced him to opium and persuaded him to turn. She killed herself a year later, dashing, in the throes of a drug frenzy, out of their room and into the sun-blasted courtyard at high noon one day, and he fled New Orleans bereft, disowned, and under suspicion. He changed his name and roamed the growing towns, swelling cities, and endless wildernesses of the new country of America. He met Antonia in Boston in 1842. She was the smartest and most beautiful rover he’d ever encountered, and they’ve been inseparable ever since.
“Bob didn’t find the men who attacked them,” he says to her.
“Did you think he would?” she replies. “They probably left town right afterward.”
“We have to search at least one night if we expect to keep him and the rest in line.”
“They do love to go on and on about loyalty, don’t they?” Antonia says. “One for all and all for one and how willing they are to die for the gang.”
Elijah sits on the bed beside her. “You used to feel that way, too, when we started this thing,” he says.
“And now most days I wouldn’t be comfortable turning my back on a one of them.”
“There’s another reason we need to find the killers. If word spreads that we let someone get away with dusting one of ours, it’ll make us look weak—weak enough that someone else will take a crack at us. We need to keep people scared. That’s what keeps us strong.”
“Nobody’d be scared of us if they knew how close the legendary Fiends were to coming apart these days, how little it takes to set us at each other’s throats.”
“Even so, now’s not the time to walk away,” Elijah says. “The least we owe them is to see this situation through. We’ve ridden together for a good while.”
Antonia scoffs and shakes her head. “You know what your problem is?” she says. “You’re tenderhearted.”
Elijah tears the book out of her hands and climbs on top of her. He pins her wrists to the mattress and kisses her hard on the mouth. “Who are you calling tenderhearted?” he says.