The Cowboy

When I get back inside, the phone’s ringing and Jessie’s at the cash register wearing a cream-colored robe that shows her outer-thigh tattoo of some Asian writing. I asked her once what it said and she told me, “It’s smart to know your enemies—it’s truly wise to know yourself.” I pick up the phone and toss her the register key. She lifts the drawer, takes her twenty dollars, gives me the key, and heads upstairs. I watch her walk away for a moment before I answer the phone.

It’s Sergei. “Nick Ray must be here,” he says.

I ask him what the hell he means and he tells me Nick Ray needs to be in his apartment, needs to be there fast, needs to be there yesterday, so that we can head out of town to go see a man he knows about a thing he needs. This is how he puts it—a man he knows about a thing he needs.

“That doesn’t tell me much,” I say. “Plus—I’m going to sleep.”

“Sleep in car.”

I tell him I just turned shifts with Hank Crow, and I’m done, kaput, tired, beaten flat as matzo. But he tells me that he’s got to go out to the desert and I have to come with him. It’s for my own good, he says.

“Is this necessary?” I say. “Totally, absolutely necessary?”

“Yes, Nick Ray.” He pauses. “Get Maggot friend of yours and come.”

At Sergei’s condo, I tell him about the cowboy from last night. He’s wearing a paisley blue smoking jacket and his socks have garters. He sees me looking at them.

“Forget, Nick Ray. You cannot afford.”

And I think about telling him that’s not why I was looking, but figure what’s the point and I fill him in on the snooping cowboy. He seems calm about it, nodding as I tell him about how the guy seemed to be on the lookout for us.

“This nothing.”

“You sure?”

“I feed him finger—he go away.”

“You feed him finger?” Maggot Arm Joe says. “What the fuck does that mean?”

“Mean what say.” Sergei shoves his index finger deep into his throat like he’s trying to make himself puke. “Feed finger.” He nods, confident as G. Gordon Liddy talking about killing a man with a golf pencil, confident as the lunatic he is. “Cowboy go home.”

I say, “I don’t want to be around for that.”

“Who point out cowboy?” Sergei says. “Not Nick Ray—who?”

“He’s a cowboy,” I say. “How many cowboys are there around the Lincoln? Find the cowboy—feed him his finger, if that’s what you think you have to do—but leave me out of it.”

Sergei chuckles. “Leave him out.” He looks at me like a mean older brother. This is finger-in-the-chest time. This is a lesson. Bad news in a hurry, like those time-lapse sped-up nasty cloud formations on the Weather Channel. Sergei says, “You want money?”

I see where he’s headed and I say, yes, I want the money.

“You want cigar? You want to suck tit and swim in pool?” He pauses and holds up a hand to stop me from answering. “You want”—he gestures to his foot like it was gold-plated—“Sergei sock.” He smiles. “Then you feed finger. With Sergei. Against Sergei. Nick Ray must pick.”

I nod.

“Pick,” Sergei says.

“With Sergei,” I say. He hugs me, my nose is full of Old Spice, and some medallion the size of a switch plate on his chest is cool against my cheek.

“With Sergei,” he says. “Much happy, much happy.” He releases me and holds me at arm’s length like I’m something he’s thinking of putting over his mantel. “Now—go wait in lot while I dress.”

Me and Maggot Arm Joe wait for Sergei in his parking lot. Sergei’s condominium shares its parking lot with one of those historic reenactment restaurants. It’s called “Medieval Madness” or some shit and they dress their poor servers, as if it wasn’t quite a cruddy enough job, as feudal slaves. People come and watch jousting and log-rolling contests and they eat huge Henry VIII leg bones and they don’t use forks and they spit gristle on the floor and act, more or less, like the morons they are.

I mention this because a couple of waiters dressed like medieval servants just walked by us shaking their heads and swearing. One of them, who looks and talks like a twenty-year-old surfer, says something about “Dude—one more day and one more asshole calling me one more fucking name, you know what I’ll do?” he asks the other guy.

“You’ll kill him,” the other medieval slave says.

Surfer medieval guy nods. “I’ll kill him. You got that right.” They crush out their cigarettes and head to the restaurant elevator.

Maggot Arm Joe offers me a cigarette. I shake my head.

“Trying to quit,” I say.

“Why?”

“Because they kill you,” I say.

He lights a Benson & Hedges. “Good plan,” he says. “People who don’t smoke—they never die.”

Sergei struts out of the elevator and stands in front of us, hands on hips, like Superman with the earth and the American flag behind him. He’s wearing this blue sparkly see-through shirt and white pants that look like my grandmother’s couch from the seventies and he looks like he thinks he’s the best-dressed man on the planet.

I wonder what goes on in his head to make him feel and look like he’s so invincible. He walks around and it spills out of him, as if with every step he’s saying, What can hurt me you don’t have, and what can kill me hasn’t been invented. I wonder what that’s like, that confidence.

“Because I am late,” he says, which means he’s about to give the reason he’s late. “I am watching your Guinness World Record show,” Sergei says. Whenever he doesn’t understand something, he calls it “your” like all Americans know what the fuck’s going on, like it’s a big club he hasn’t been invited into, like we’re the Elks, or the Masons, or Mary Kay. We start to get into the SUV, but Sergei stops us.

“Presents,” he says. He reaches into the back of the car. “Close eyes,” he says.

“What the fuck?” Maggot Arm Joe says.

“Close eyes.”

And we do. My hands are out and I feel him place a weight in them, and some gritty sand in my palms.

“Open,” Sergei says.

I’m holding a nice little cactus that looks like a miniature of the one Spike, Snoopy’s cousin in the desert, leans against whenever he reads his mail.

Maggot Arm Joe’s holding what looks like a big clear plastic pocketbook. He holds it away from his body to read. “A blowup chair?”

“Clear,” Sergei says. “You see through.” He claps twice. “Read cards.”

We open our cards. Mine promises me fifty pounds of freeze-dried Vac-U-Seal meat. I look over at Sergei. The cactus is very nice and I feel momentarily guilty for not trusting him. I thank him. “You know I’m a vegetarian, right?”

“It freeze-dried and drained,” he says. “More like jerky.”

“Still meat,” I say—and I don’t mean to argue, but I continue with it for no good reason. “I don’t eat meat—jerky or not.”

Sergei pats me on the back like I’m a naive little fool. “You eat meat when the Armageddon comes. When the world ends, you eat meat.”

And who could argue? Sure, when the world ends, I might eat meat. What the hell? “Thanks, then.” I raise the certificate. “I’ll save it for the Armageddon.”

“That exactly the plan,” Sergei says.

“What plan?” Maggot Arm Joe says. “Who are we going to see that’s so important? And why—nice as it may be—do I have a blowup chair and shrunken meat?”

Sergei waves a you’re-getting-way-ahead-of-yourself hand. “Let us move.”

We get into the SUV and Sergei turns to me in the backseat. “Nick Ray. I am watching your Guinness,” he says. “And they show record breaking no?”

“Right,” I say. “They show people breaking records.” I get the image of Frank “Cannonball” Richards, the guy from Los Angeles who used to get shot in the stomach with a cannonball.

You’ve seen the film. Few people know who he is, but that black-and-white footage of Frank Richards getting rocked in the gut by the cannonball, everybody’s seen that—a still photo of it even ended up on a Van Halen album. The film’s from 1922, and shot about fifteen miles from here, by the downtown rail yards up in L.A., near what’s now the Toy District where they have undocumented workers from Mexico make children’s toys in dreadful work conditions.

But back then, on the dream coast, Frank Richards used to get shot in the stomach, he used to pull railroad engines with his teeth, he let people hit his head with sledgehammers. When my grandfather was still doing sideshow work, before he became a strip-joint barker, he worked with Frank Richards, and he used to tell me that as long as a man had a high pain threshold, he could always make a good living in America, which was what made this country great. People loved to pay to watch other people suffer, my grandfather always liked to remind me, and if I could remember that, I’d never be totally broke.

Sergei says, “I am watching and there man who stick nail in face.” He points to his own face and looks. “In face. In brain. Nails.”

“So?”

“Take drill and drill up nose,” Sergei says. “Into brain.”

“Welcome to America,” I say.

But Sergei’s having none of it. “Show is Guinness World Record, no?”

We nod.

“How is it possible that this record?” he says. “What record about nail into face and drill into brain?”

I say, “I saw a guy lift fifty pounds with a pierced tongue.”

“That is record, no?” Sergei says.

Is it a record? Who knows? Maybe someone’s lifted more than fifty pounds with their tongue. Who keeps track of this shit? “I suppose,” I say.

“The face man—it fake face, I’m sure,” Sergei says. “No real face can be drilled and nailed. That not record. The fake-face man. What record he break?” He shakes his head. “Your country.” Sergei says this like everyone drilled into their sinus cavity, into their brains, like we taught it in public school. “Strange place.”

He turns the key and the SUV doesn’t start. Nothing but a click. I expect Sergei to blow up, but he takes a deep breath, releases it slowly, hissing like a bike tire that picked up a brad nail, and leans back with his eyes closed. “Nick Ray,” he says. “Your piece of shit can make it to desert, no?”

“Could be,” I say.

Sergei nods. “We must risk.” He gets out and we follow. “Bring gifts. Bring them to desert. Very important.”

My car, my piece of shit, as Sergei calls it, my Subaru wagon, has not been the same since it hacked and gagged and wheezed its way past the methane-drenched cattle farms on the grapevine on my way out here from my old life a few years back. But it can still, usually, get where it’s going. We walk over to the Lincoln to get my car, and Jeanine Clark’s out front with her daughter Molly watching city workers clean out the burbling sinkhole in front of the hotel. We stop and say hello.

Molly says, “I don’t have to go to the day care today.”

“Good for you,” Maggot Arm Joe says.

Molly points to the sinkhole and smiles. “My mommy says hell opened up. That’s why I don’t have to go in.”

I look at Jeanine. I hadn’t known she was religious, but she’s got a calm look on her face, like she meant it when she said that hell had opened up. “Well, that’s a pretty good reason for missing day care,” I say.

Sergei bends down, and when he does, his gold medallion flops out of his see-through blue sparkly shirt and swings like a pendulum between him and Molly. He pats her on the head and looks up at Jeanine. “Your little girl—she grow fast as tumor.”

Jeanine looks horrified. She yanks Molly’s arm hard enough to separate her shoulder and drags her away from us. She stares back at Sergei as she walks down the street.

Maggot Arm Joe chuckles and lights a cigarette. “Grow like a tumor.”

“What?” Sergei says. “Tumor grow fast, no?”

Sure, I say, tumors grow fast.

Maggot Arm Joe says, “It’s just not something we say, man.” He starts to say something else, but points and nods toward the Mole’s pawnshop. “Cowboy,” he says. “Three o’clock.”

The cowboy sees us, sees the way we must be looking at him, because we’re not two steps walking toward him when he starts to run away. Sergei runs straight after him, south toward the water, and me and Maggot Arm Joe take off into the alley by the parking lot and cut across to the alley. When we turn left, I can see that Sergei’s already caught him and has him shoved and bent toward the Dumpster behind Wang’s restaurant.

I stop running and walk quickly over to the Dumpster. The air’s thick with the smell of leaked motor oil and doughnuts and Chinese food that’s spilled onto the alley after the homeless eat what’s left that hasn’t turned. Broken glass, small and aqua blue and beautiful, like it’s from car windshields, flashes in sunlight and crunches under my work boots as we approach the Dumpster.

Sergei holds the cowboy by the windpipe and it hurts me just to see it. “This cowboy?” he says to me, and I’m thankful he’s smart enough not to use my name.

I think about saying no, about letting this poor bastard leave, but then I realize he may be a link in a chain that could end up with me dead. “He’s the cowboy,” I say, and my stomach starts to churn and flip as I think of what Sergei said about feeding this guy his finger. I look up the alley both ways to make sure we’re alone and don’t see anyone.

Sergei says to me and Maggot Arm Joe, “Make shield.” He mimics a semicircle. “Around cowboy.”

“What the fuck do you want?” the cowboy says.

Sergei puts one of his hands over the guy’s mouth. “I talk. Not you.”

The cowboy nods. I look back up the alley both ways and see Mookie pushing his cart and looking over at us. He gives me a little wave, and not knowing what else to do, I wave back. Mookie stares for a second like he’s thinking of coming over, but he thinks better of it and takes off.

Sergei says, “One finger? Ten fingers?”

The cowboy looks confused. I’m not sure where he’s going, either.

Sergei says, “Your choice. One finger broken? Ten finger broken?” He takes his left hand off the cowboy’s mouth.

“One finger?” the cowboy says.

Sergei nods, slaps him on the cheek like a friend. He looks like he’s about to dance, happy and bouncy as a Greek wedding. A hot breeze blows and a pretzel bag sticks itself to my leg before tumbleweeding its way down the alley.

“One finger,” Sergei says. He looks at me and Maggot Arm Joe, smiling. “Good choice.” He slaps the cowboy’s cheek again. “There catch. Ten finger—I break. One finger—you break.”

The cowboy looks sick, and I can’t blame him.

“Understand?” Sergei says.

The cowboy nods and Sergei begins to lessen the pressure on his throat. I see the redness and the fingernail indentations on the cowboy’s throat. Sergei lets him go and the cowboy’s eyes dart around and make him look like the trapped animal he is. He lifts the metal lid off the Dumpster with his right hand and slides the left hand under it. The lid looks to be about twenty pounds and it should break it if he lets it go. I start to grimace.

Sergei stops him. “No. You break finger with hand.” He pauses. “Right-handed?”

The cowboy says yes, he’s right-handed.

Sergei says, “You break finger on right hand with left hand. No Dumpster.”

The cowboy looks at him for a second. He looks to my eyes, and I look away and study the cracks in the concrete and feel bad. This is a place where a good person would step in—a place where the good stop the badness and walk away with their hands clean. I’m coming up short here. I have been tested and I have failed. That much I know.

My high school basketball coach used to call me a shithead. Used to shout at me—“Hey, shithead, hey, numb-nuts—you got an intelligent cell in that fucking body of yours?” I’m hearing him now. If someone shouted shithead or numbnuts, I’d raise my hand and turn around.

The cowboy has his left hand wrapped around his right index finger and he’s bending it back toward the shoulder. He’s pulling hard. He’s trying, but this is unnatural, and maybe that’s the point, and he’s not doing too well.

Sergei is loving it. This is his forum of violence. He’s got a grin like a dad whose kid is pounding the shit out of a piñata. “Try sideways,” Sergei says. “Break better.”

The cowboy slumps against the wall. “I can’t.” He shakes his head.

Sergei shrugs. “My turn. All ten.”

He takes a step toward the cowboy, who leans back into the brick wall and quickly snaps his finger sideways. I hear it, it’s a stick breaking, it’s hard candy under teeth. That sound. His eyes roll and waggle and he flops down to the ground. His head hits the side of the Dumpster and his tight jeans begin to darken with his piss. Vomit trickles from the side of his mouth. He makes a high-pitched moan that, doesn’t sound human, sounds like a rusted door hinge opened and closed over and over. I want him to stop.

I can’t believe I’m here. I’m part of this. I look at Maggot Arm Joe and think he’s thinking the same thing. It clicks on me, Sergei could do this to me, would do this to me. Would do it to people I love. I see him standing over me and I’m snapping my finger back. This could happen as much as anything else could happen. I’ve put myself in this position and I feel stupid and scared. And I know it’s too late to get out, so I better follow the right steps.

This is his world, not mine, and while I knew that before, this has made me feel it like a presence. I don’t know what I’m doing here.

Sergei bends down to the cowboy’s face. He wipes a trickle of puke off his chin and holds it in front of the cowboy’s face.

“Lick,” Sergei says.

The cowboy licks his puke off Sergei’s finger and begins to really vomit and Sergei clamps his mouth shut. The cowboy spasms a couple of times, he’s puking and wrenching, but Sergei’s still got his mouth closed. When the puke starts to dribble out of the cowboy’s nose, Sergei drops him to the ground and he doubles over into a fetal position and spills himself into the alley. Sergei kicks him in the back of the leg.

“You stay away?” he says. “You—we never see, okay?”

The cowboy nods.

Sergei takes the guy’s wallet but of his jeans. He takes the money out and tosses it down at the guy, but he keeps the ID and the credit cards. “Say,” Sergei says. “Say we never see you.”

“You’ll never see me again,” the cowboy says, and it looks like he’s passed out again. The money flutters in the breeze. Me and Maggot Arm Joe follow Sergei out of the alley and toward my car. Pigeons turn as we walk toward them, they start to run and then they take off across the alley.