Authors: Joe Gores
“It is deep enough,” said Madame Miseria abruptly. “Put in the money and cover it over.”
Shoveling the grave full was easier than digging it out.
“No one must ever disturb this site again,” she told him. There was a terrible and utter finality in her voice. “If they do,
you will surely die.”
As the brown clods covered the green plastic bag, Teddy could picture the $75,000 in the dark earth, eventually rotting away
and disintegrating just as his stepparents were doing. No, he would never disturb this grave. Not ever.
As they got back into the pink Cadillac, Teddy turned for a last look. He seemed to see a shadow moving at the edge of the
trees behind them. He was glad to get away from there.
* * *
Ramon’s Cherokee nosed cautiously up the road. He parked where the Caddy had been, got out, started up to the grave with his
shovel and flashlight. Twenty minutes later he hefted the big green garbage bag onto his shoulder and almost ran back down
to his car. He didn’t like being alone in a cemetery at night.
* * *
Giselle rode the elevator up to Rudolph’s penthouse suite. A triumphant Giselle, despite being filthy, disheveled, hair hanging
down in her face, one knee skun, pantyhose run, and still wearing her running shoes. First, a hot shower in Rudolph’s big
tiled bathroom; then, fragrant with the hotel’s expensive soaps and perfumes, mating with her wild Gypsy lover in the big
bed…
He wasn’t there. The night clerk was gravely attentive to her dilemma. “Mr. Grimaldi checked out, ma’am. Early this morning.
No forwarding address. Of course if you want to contact Bookkeeping during business hours, perhaps…”
But Giselle was gone. She’d known all along it had to end, but… but… not
yet
. Not like
this
… A single word rose up unbidden in her mind.
Gyppo.
* * *
As Ballard, over in North Beach, started his hand toward the bell push beside Madame Miseria’s door, he stopped. The seamed
Gypsy palm and Madame Miseria’s sign were gone. He jabbed an overcoated elbow through the glass.
Stripped of its Gypsy artifacts, the nondescript flat had reassumed its real character: two tiny bedrooms, a living room with
a bay window, a kitchen, and a minuscule bath with water stains on the ceiling from some long-ago overflow in the apartment
above. Bare pine floors, bare plasterboard walls in need of paint, still bristling with the nails from which had been strung
the wires for the heavy drapes. Nothing of Yana remained.
He’d known it would have to end. But not
this
way. Not
now
… A single word came unbidden into his mind.
Gyppo.
* * *
As, in Sacramento, Yana and Ramon stared wide-eyed at one another across the open tailgate of the Cherokee. Between them was
an upended green plastic garbage bag, its contents heaped around it.
Torn-up newspapers, courtesy of Giselle Marc. The same word rose unbidden to both of their lips.
Gadjo.
I
t was getting hot. Trinidad Morales licked his crusted lips and bunched up his round brown face against the exquisite thunder
inside his skull, gathered his courage, and opened his eyes. And
SCREAMED
.
Facing him from a foot away was a monstrous dragon, tongue flicking, unwinking eyes staring into his own with cold intensity
and contempt. He tried to thrust himself back from the terrible monster, but he was gripped by a giant’s hand that…
Oh, The seat of the Brougham. Which was parked on a flinty narrow track in the desert, starting to cook in the morning sun.
When he had screamed, the three-foot iguana had fled to the far corner of the dash on which he had been sunning himself. He
crouched there now, hissing in terror and defiance, long whippy tail lashing his distress.
Morales groaned, He opened his door and staggered out into the sunlight. To one side were nearly vertical rock faces. He began
sending a seemingly endless yellow stream down over the rusted narrow-gauge railroad tracks beneath his feet…
Railroad trucks?
Hand-laid on rough-hewn ties, they ran toward the rock face and disappeared into the black mouth of a tunnel with a broken-down
miner’s shack beside it. Glassless window, gaping door, sprawling shamelessly in the desert sun like an overused harlot.
He shook, encased, zipped. Shards and snippets were coming back. The Giggling Marlin. Margaritas. Drunken Gypsy. Upside-down
Gypsy. Cadillac. Mexican ready to eat an iguana. Cow looking in through the windshield,
cow?
He remembered getting the keys, going outside,
buying
the iguana, taking it with him in the car. Driving north through the warm black night toward La Paz, the twisting rising
falling blacktop, the lights picking out cattle all over the open-range desert, the road itself… Almost off the road. Cow
looking in the windshield, front bumper two inches from its legs. Mooo.
Morales scrunched his way across the mine tailings to the shack. Legless chair, three-legged table, what once could have been
a bench to put a bedroll on. And a Mexican comic book. A romance, shamelessly saccharine. He left it for the next pilgrim,
crunched back to the Brougham.
After the cow, mountains. Terror. Drunk. He’d seen this rocky track off to his left, taken it until he was out of sight of
the road, had switched off and passed out. End of story.
The iguana was on the driver’s seat. Staring at him.
Good to eat; in Mexico, as often as not they were the chicken in your
pollo
. Tasted like chicken. They said that about everything from rattlesnake to, he bet, monkey meat. Tasted like chicken.
Morales had bought the iguana because the Mexican was going to eat it and Morales didn’t want him to. Between him and the
lizard was a gut connection, one of the few Morales could remember making with any living thing. He opened the car door.
“Okay, kid,” he said in English, “beat it.” The iguana stared at him unwinkingly. He made shooing gestures with his hand.
“Vamoose, muchacho.”
The iguana waited a moment longer, then flowed down over the edge of the seat past him, scuttled off a few yards across the
rocky terrain of his natural habitat. Stopped, swung head and trunk around to regard Morales from those ageless eyes.
“Vaya con Dios,”
said Morales.
With a sudden whip of his tail, the iguana was up on his toes and sprinting gracefully off across the rocks with a dry scrabbling
sound, out of sight and gone forever.
Morales got into the Brougham and started the engine and backed out toward the blacktop. He would follow it north to La Paz,
and, eventually, nearly a thousand miles north of that, to the U.S. border entry point at San Diego.
Meanwhile, Trinidad Morales had just done the first good deed of his entire adult life.
* * *
Giselle Marc stormed into Larry Ballard’s second-floor cubicle with a heavy green plastic garbage bag over her shoulder. She
thudded it to the floor by the corner of his desk, eyes flashing, fingers unconsciously hooked and ready for clawing.
“What did you do to him?” she demanded.
“To whom?” asked Ballard casually and grammatically, taking the precaution of getting to his feet for a few quick defensive
moves if she started clawing. As in eyes out.
“You know who—Rudolph! You tricked him out of the pink Cadillac and—”
“It was Yana’s in the first place.”
“It actually belongs to a restorer in Palm Springs, so don’t give me that Yana stuff. If you hadn’t taken it, Rudolph never
would have gone off without telling me and—”
“No?” Ballard leaned forward intently. “How do you think I knew I could snatch that pink Cadillac away from him?”
“H… how?” Giselle felt her face getting tight and hot.
“Maria, the check-in clerk, he was banging before—”
“That’s a lie!”
Ballard caught her wrists before her nails could bite his face. “Yeah. Cheap shot. Sorry.” She stopped raging and he released
her. “Anyway, she told me he’d settled his bill the night before and was leaving by midmorning yesterday. I bribed a car-parker
for a uniform and brought the car up for him.” Smugness entered Ballard’s voice. “Only I drove off in it myself. I rubbed
his nose in it!”
Giselle upended her plastic garbage bag over his desk. Out cascaded great heaps of small-denomination greenbacks, some banded,
some loose, spilling out and eddying down to the floor. Clods of dirt fell out also as she glared defiantly at him.
“The Teddy White score—I took it away from your precious Yana and rubbed
her
nose in it!”
Ballard’s brows were terrible to behold. He looked like a berserker from Norse mythology. They were face-to-face, inches apart,
quivering with anger and hurt, their voices crescendos.
“You drove her away from me!”
“She didn’t need me to leave you!”
she yelled. “She was on her way out of town with her brother—their truck was packed to the roof with all their cheap gimcracky
Gyppo crap.”
Ballard grabbed up Marino’s satchel from behind the desk. Clicked open the top.
“Yeah? Well, look at this!”
The satchel was stacked to the mouth with orderly banded packets of greenbacks. Giselle stared with stricken face.
“Rudolph spent three weeks—”
Dan Kearny’s voice crashed down on them from the doorway like a huge breaker on hapless swimmers.
“QUIT ACTING LIKE GODDAM TEENAGERS THE PAIR OF YOU!”
“He—”
“She—”
“Cry on your own time.”
But advancing into the room, he stopped to stare openmouthed at the money on Ballard’s desk. He faltered, “What in heaven’s
name… is going on in here?”
They talked over one another like siblings vying for a parent’s attention, Kearny listening with darkened face.
“What pink Cadillac?” he asked finally in ominous calm.
“The pink Cadillac the dying King wants to be buried in.”
Giselle added, “Rudolph wants to be King—”
“And Yana wants to be Queen,” finished Ballard.
“Dying King, huh?” said Kearny, a sudden gleam in his eye too brief for either of them to catch. “Pink Cadillac. Yana. Rudolph.”
He looked from one to the other of them. “What the hell else don’t I know?”
“Nothing,” they chorused too quickly, not meeting his eyes, then told him they didn’t even know where the King was dying.
“Steubenville, Iowa.” This riveted their attention: where the King was dying, there would be Rudolph and Yana. He suddenly
thundered at them,
“Put that goddamned money in the safe until I figure out what to do with it!
Get hold of O’B in Florida and Bart in Chicago and tell them to meet us in Steubenville. Counting the one in Baja last night,
we’ve only repo’d eleven, leaving us twenty to go—twenty-one if we add that pink Cadillac. Most of them ought to be at Steubenville.”
They started moving, reaching for the satchel and stuffing loose greenbacks back into the green plastic garbage bag.
“You two ought to fit right in there.” He smiled like a fat-smeared bear trap smiling in ambush under the dry leaves. “The
locals call it Stupidville.”
* * *
Under the bluffs a mile downriver from Stupidville, on the wide rolling field of a fanner who’d needed the money, the Gypsy
encampment was swelling. Trailers and RVs and pickups with camper beds on the back, vans and trucks and dozens of new and
beat and battered Cadillacs, fifty other cars of assorted makes and ages. Even a dozen horses and three or four old-fashioned
Gypsy caravans. They had been brought out to honor the dying King born in the early days of the century when creaking canvas-covered
horse-drawn wagons were the Gypsies’ only transportation.
Hundreds of
rom
, more arriving by the hour, in every conceivable sort of dress. Underfoot and assaulting the ears, countless dogs and cats
and children, even chickens. Overhead, a pall of sweet-scented applewood smoke from their cook fires.
In town, the encampment’s presence already was being felt. Christ Himself, remember, had given the Gypsy a dispensation to
steal from the
gadjo;
so Stupidville’s original pleasure to have so many new spenders in town was being hourly reduced to dismay.
All the tools had disappeared from Klinger’s Garage.
Ben Franklin Five and Dime was seeing its shelves cleared as if by goods-eating locusts.
The Deli Ice Cream Shoppe (“I’ll Be Dipped!”) had been forced to remove all their sugar cones from the front display case,
and were considering locks on their freezers.
All the summer dresses—along with their mannequins—had disappeared overnight from Sylvia’s Dresse Shoppe’s front windows.
Sylvia had checked her insurance, closed her doors, and gone visiting her sister in Dubuque.
Himmler Clothing (“Boys’ Wear to Outwear the Boy”) avoided similar problems only because Doug Himmler had played nose-tackle
for the Ohio State Buckeyes and would break bones if anyone messed with him. Gypsies were partial to their bones.
Kay Wenzel’s Jewelers (“It’s Okay to Owe Kay”) had a sophisticated alarm system and put all of their stock in the safe at
night, so they were so far untroubled by missing jewelry. Of course Immaculata Bimbai had not yet hit town.
Also untroubled were Steubenville General Hospital, the adjacent Hansel and Gretel Park (“Has Public Water Access”), and the
block-long marina (“The Boat Float”) the hospital overlooked.
But there were reasons for that. To have Barney Hawkins realize Staley was a Gypsy—
King
of the Gypsies, no less!—would be fatal. Until Democrat National coughed up money for Karl Klenhard’s terrible tumble down
the escalator stairs, Lulu had to keep the
rom
away from the hospital.
* * *
The tableau was familiar: Staley lying on his back with his eyes shut; Margarete in her chair beside the bed, bird-bright
eyes fixed on the pudgy Hawkins; Hawkins pacing up and down the tiny free area in the middle of the room.