Loosed Upon the World Read online

  Journo money wasn’t steady money. Wasn’t good money. Sometimes, you got lucky. Hell, he’d got lucky himself when he’d gone over Texas way and shot Hurricane Violet in all her glory. He’d photographed a whole damn fishing boat flying through the air and landing on a Days Inn, and in that one shot he knew he’d hit the big time. Violet razed Galveston and blasted into Houston, and Timo got page views so high that he sometimes imagined that the cat 6 had actually killed him and sent him straight to Heaven.

  He’d kept hitting reload on his PayPal account and watched the cash pouring in. He’d had the big clanking cojones to get into the heart of that clusterfuck, and he’d come out of it with more than a million hits a photo. Got him all excited.

  But disaster was easy to cover, and he’d learned the hard way that when the big dogs muscled in, little dogs got muscled out. Which left him back in sad-sack Phoenix, scraping for glamour shots of brains on windshields and trussed-up drug bunnies in the bottoms of swimming pools. It made him sympathetic to Lucy’s plight, if not her perspective.

  It’s all been done, Timo thought as he maneuvered his Ford around the burned carcass of an abandoned Tesla. So what if it’s been motherfucking done?

  “There ain’t no virgins, and there ain’t no clean stories,” he’d tried to explain to Lucy. “There’s just angles on the same-ass stories. Scoops come from being in the right place at the right time, and that’s all just dumb luck. Why don’t you just come up with a good angle on Phoenix and be happy?”

  But Lucy Monroe wanted a nice clean virgin story that didn’t have no grubby fingerprints on it from other journos. Something she could put her name on. Some way to make her mark, make those big news companies notice her. Something to grow her brand and all that. Not just the day-to-day grind of narco kills and starving immigrants from Texas, something special. Something new.

  So when the tip came in, Timo thought what the hell, maybe this was something she’d like. Maybe even a chance to blow up together. Lucy could do the words, he’d bring the pics, and they’d scoop all the big-name journos who drank martinis at the Hilton 6 and complained about what a refugee shit hole Phoenix had become.

  The Ford scraped over more ruts. Dust already coated the rear window of Timo’s car, a thick beige paste. Parallel to the service road, the waters of the Central Arizona Project flowed, serene and blue and steady. A man-made canal that stretched three hundred miles across the desert to bring water to Phoenix from the Colorado River. A feat of engineering, and cruelly tempting, given the ten-foot chain link and barbed wire fences that escorted it on either side.

  In this part of Phoenix, the Central Arizona Project formed the city’s northern border. On one side of the CAP canal, it was all modest stucco tract houses packed together like sardines stretching south. But on Timo’s side, it was desert, rising into tan and rust hill folds, dotted with mesquite and saguaro.

  A few hardy subdivisions had built outposts north of the CAP’s moat-like boundary, but the canal seemed to form a barrier of some psychological significance, because for the most part, Phoenix stayed to the south of the concrete-lined canal, choosing to finally build itself into something denser than lazy sprawl. Phoenix on one side, the desert on the other, and the CAP flowing between them like a thin blue DMZ.

  Just driving on the desert side of the CAP made Timo thirsty. Dry mouth, plain-ass desert, quartz rocks, and sandstone nubs with a few creosote bushes holding onto the dust and waving in the blast furnace wind. Normally, Timo didn’t even bother to look at the desert. It barely changed. But here he was, looking for something new—

  He rounded a curve and slowed, peering through his grimy windshield. “Well, I’ll be goddamned. . . .”

  Up ahead, something was hanging from the CAP’s barrier fence. Dogs were jumping up to tug at it, milling and barking.

  Timo squinted, trying to understand what he was seeing.

  “Oh, yeah. Hell, yes!”

  He hit the brakes. The car came grinding to a halt in a cloud of dust, but Timo was already climbing out and fumbling for his phone, pressing it to his ear, listening to it ring.

  Come on, come on, come on.

  Lucy picked up.

  Timo couldn’t help grinning. “I got your story, girl. You’ll love it. It’s new.”

  * * * *

  The dogs bared their teeth at Timo’s approach, but Timo just laughed. He dug into his camera bag for his pistol.

  “You want a piece of me?” he asked. “You want some of Timo, bitches?”

  Turned out they didn’t. As soon he held up the pistol, the dogs scattered. Animals were smarter than people that way. Pull a gun on some drunk California frat boy and you never knew if the sucker was still going to try and throw down. Dogs were way smarter than Californians. Timo could respect that, so he didn’t shoot them as they fled the scene.

  One of the dogs, braver or more arrogant than the rest, paused to yank off a final trophy before loping away; the rest of the pack zeroed in on it, yipping and leaping, trying to steal its prize. Timo watched, wishing he’d pulled his camera instead of his gun. The shot was perfect. He sighed and stuffed the pistol into the back of his pants, dug out his camera, and turned to the subject at hand.

  “Well, hello, good-looking,” he murmured. “Ain’t you a sight?”

  The man hung upside down from the chain link fence, bloated from the Phoenix heat. A bunch of empty milk jugs dangled off his body, swinging from a harness of shoelace ties. From the look of him, he’d been cooking out in the sun for at least a day or so.

  The meat of one arm was completely desleeved, and the other arm . . . well, Timo had watched the dogs make off with the poor bastard’s hand. His face and neck and chest didn’t look much better. The dogs had been doing some jumping.

  “Come on, vato. Gimme the story.” Timo stalked back and forth in front of the body, checking the angles, considering the shadows and light. “You want to get your hits up, don’t you? Show Timo your good side, I make you famous. So help me out, why don’t you?”

  He stepped back, thinking wide-frame: the strung-up body, the black nylon flowers woven into the chain link around it. The black, guttered candles and cigarettes and mini liquor bottles scattered by the dogs’ frenzied feeding. The CAP flowing behind it all. Phoenix beyond that, sprawling all the way to the horizon.

  “What’s your best side?” Timo asked. “Don’t be shy. I’ll do you right. Make you famous. Just let me get your angle.”

  There.

  Timo squatted and started shooting. Click-click-click-click—the artificial sound of digital photography and the Pavlovian rush of sweaty excitement as Timo got the feel.

  Dead man.

  Flowers.

  Candles.

  Water.

  Timo kept snapping. He had it now. The flowers and the empty milk jugs dangling off the dude. Timo was in the flow, bracketing exposures, shooting steady, recognizing the moment when his inner eye told him that he’d nailed the story. It was good. Really good.

  As good as a cat 6 plowing into Houston.

  Click-click-click. Money-money-money-money.

  “That’s right, buddy. Talk to your friend Timo.”

  The man had a story to tell, and Timo had the eye to see it. Most people missed the story. But Timo always saw. He had the eye.

  Maybe he’d buy a top-shelf tequila to celebrate his page-view money. Some diapers for his sister Amparo’s baby. If the photos were good, maybe he’d grab a couple syndication licenses, too. Swap the shit-ass battery in the Ford. Get something with a bigger range dropped into it. Let him get around without always wondering if he was going to lose a charge.

  Some of these could go to Xinhua, for sure. The Chinese news agencies loved seeing America ripping itself to shit. BBC might bite, too. Foreigners loved that story. Only thing that would sell better is if it had a couple guns: America, the Savage Land or some shit. That was money, there. Might be rent for a bigger place. A place where Amparo could bail when her boyfriend got
his ass drunk and angry.

  Timo kept snapping photos, changing angles, framing and exposure. Diving deeper into the dead man’s world. Capturing scuffed-up boots and plastic prayer beads. He hummed to himself as he worked, talking to his subject, coaxing the best out of the corpse.

  “You don’t know it, but you’re damn lucky I came along,” Timo said. “If one of those citizen journalist pendejo lice got you first, they wouldn’t have treated you right. They’d shoot a couple shitty frames and upload them social. Maybe sell a Instagram pic to the blood rags . . . but they ain’t quality. Me? When I’m done, people won’t be able to dream without seeing you.”

  It was true, too. Any asshole could snap a pic of some girl blasted to pieces in an electric Mercedes, but Timo knew how to make you cry when you saw her splattered all over the front pages of the blood rags. Some piece of narco ass, and you’d still be bawling your eyes out over her tragic death. He’d catch the girl’s little fuzzy dice mirror ornament spattered with blood, and your heart would just break.

  Amparo said Timo had the eye. Little bro could see what other people didn’t, even when it was right in front of their faces.

  Every asshole had a camera these days; the difference was that Timo could see.

  Timo backed off and got some quick video. He ran the recording back, listening to the audio, satisfying himself that he had the sound of it: the wind rattling the chain link under the high, hot Arizona sky; meadowlark call from somewhere next to the CAP waters; but most of all, the empty dangling jugs, the three of them plunking hollowly against each other—a dead man turned into an offering and a wind chime.

  Timo listened to the deep thunk-thunk-thunk tones.

  Good sounds.

  Good empty desert sounds.

  He crouched and framed the man’s gnawed arm and the milk jugs. From this angle, he could just capture the blue line of the CAP canal and the leading edge of Phoenix beyond: cookie-cutter low-stories with lava-rock front yards and broke-down cars on blocks. And somewhere in there, some upstanding example of Arizona Minuteman militia pride had spied this sucker scrambling down the dusty hillside with his water jugs and decided to put a cap in his ass.

  CAP in his ass, Timo chuckled to himself.

  The crunch of tires and the grind of an old bio-diesel engine announced Lucy’s pickup coming up the dirt road. A trail of dust followed. Rusty beast of flex fuel, older than the girl who drove it and twice as beat-up, but damn, was it a beast. It had been one of the things Timo liked about Lucy soon as he met her. Girl drove a machine that didn’t give a damn about anything except driving over shit.

  The truck came to a halt. The driver’s side door squealed aside as Lucy climbed out. Army green tank top and washed-out jeans. White skin, scorched and bronzed by Arizona sun, her reddish brown hair jammed up under an ASU Geology Department ball cap.

  Every time he saw her, Timo liked what he saw. Phoenix hadn’t dried her right, yet, but still, she had some kind of tenacious-ass demon in her. Something about the way her pale blue skeptical eyes burned for a story told you that once she bit in, she wouldn’t let go. Crazy-ass pitbull. The girl and the truck were a pair. Unstoppable.

  “Please tell me I didn’t drive out here for a swimmer,” Lucy said as she approached.

  “What do you think?”

  “I think I was on the other side of town when you called, and I had to burn diesel to get here.”

  She was trying to look jaded, but her eyes were already flicking from detail to detail, gathering the story before Timo even had to open his mouth. She might be new in Phoenix, but the girl had the eye. Just like Timo, Lucy saw things.

  “Texan?” she asked.

  Timo grinned. “You think?”

  “Well, he’s a Merry Perry, anyway. I don’t know many other people who would join that cult.” She crouched down in front of the corpse and peered into the man’s torn face. Reaching out, she caressed the prayer beads embedded in the man’s neck. “I did a story on Merry Perrys. Roadside spiritual aid for the refugees.” She sighed. “They were all buying the beads and making the prayers.”

  “Crying and shaking and repentance.”

  “You’ve been to their services, too?”

  “Everybody’s done that story at least once,” Timo said. “I shot a big old revival tent over in New Mexico, outside of Carlsbad. The preacher had a nasty-ass thorn bush, wanted volunteers.”

  Timo didn’t think he’d ever forget the scene. The tent walls sucking and flapping as blast-furnace winds gusted over them. The dust-coated refugees all shaking, moaning, and working their beads for God. All of them asking what they needed to give up in order to get back to the good old days of big oil money and fancy cities like Houston and Austin. To get back to a life before hurricanes went cat 6 and Big Daddy Drought sucked whole states dry.

  Lucy ran her fingers along the beads that had sunk deep into the dead man’s neck. “They strangled him.”

  “Sure looks that way.”

  Timo could imagine this guy earning the prayer beads one at time. Little promises of God’s love that he could carry with him. He imagined the man down in the dirt, all crying and spitty and grateful for his bloody back and for the prayer beads that had ended up embedded in his swollen, blackening neck, like some kind of Mardi Gras party gone wrong. The man had done his prayers and repentance, and this was where he’d ended up.

  “What happened to his hand?” Lucy asked.

  “Dog got it.”

  “Christ.”

  “If you want some better art, we can back off for a little while, and the dogs’ll come back. I can get a good tearaway shot if we let them go after him again—”

  Lucy gave Timo a dirty look, so he hastily changed tacks. “Anyway, I thought you should see him. Good art, and it’s a great story. Nobody’s got something like this.”

  Lucy straightened. “I can’t pitch this, Timo. It’s sad as hell, but it isn’t new. Nobody cares if Old Tex here hiked across a thousand miles of desert just to get strung up as some warning. It’s sad, but everyone knows how much people hate Texans. Kindle Post did a huge story on Texas lynchings.”

  “Shit.” Timo sighed. “Every time I think you’re wise, I find out you’re still wet.”

  “Oh, fuck off, Timo.”

  “No, I’m serious, girl. Come here. Look with your eye. I know you got the eye. Don’t make me think I’m wasting my time on you.”

  Timo crouched down beside the dead man, framing him with his hands. “Old Tex here hikes his ass across a million miles of burning desert, and he winds up here. Maybe he’s thinking he’s heading for California and gets caught with the State Sovereignty Act, can’t cross no state borders now. Maybe he just don’t have the cash to pay coyotes. Maybe he thinks he’s special and he’s going to swim the Colorado and make it up north across Nevada. Anyways, Tex is stuck squatting out in the hills, watching us live the good life. But then the poor sucker sees the CAP, and he’s sick of paying to go to some public pump for water, so he grabs his bottles and goes in for a little sip—”

  “—and someone puts a bullet in him,” Lucy finished. “I get it. I’m trying to tell you nobody cares about dead Texans. People string them up all the time. I saw it in New Mexico, too. Merry Perry prayer tents and Texans strung up on fences. Same in Oklahoma. All the roads out of Texas have them. Nobody cares.”

  Wet.

  Timo sighed. “You’re lucky you got me for your tour guide. You know that, right? You see the cigarettes? See them little bitty Beam and Cuervo bottles? The black candles? The flowers?”

  Timo waited for her to take in the scene again. To see the way he saw. “Old Tex here isn’t a warning. This motherfucker’s an offering. People turned Old Tex into an offering for Santa Muerte. They’re using Tex here to get in good with the Skinny Lady.”

  “Lady Death,” Lucy said. “Isn’t that a cult for narcos?”

  “Nah. She’s no cult. She’s a saint. Takes care of people who don’t got pull with the Church. When
you need help on something the Church don’t like, you go to Santa Muerte. The Skinny Lady takes care of you. She knows we all need a little help. Maybe she helps narcos, sure, but she helps poor people, too. She helps desperate people. When Mother Mary’s too uptight, you call the Skinny Lady to do the job.”

  “Sounds like you know a lot about her.”

  “Oh, hell, yes. Got an app on my phone. Dial her any time I want and get a blessing.”

  “You’re kidding.”

  “True story. There’s a lady down in Mexico runs a big shrine. You send her a dollar, she puts up an offering for you. Makes miracles happen. There’s a whole list of miracles that Santa Muerte does. Got her own hashtag.”

  “So what kind of miracles do you look for?”

  “Tips, girl! What you think?” Timo sighed. “Narcos call on Santa Muerte all the time when they want to put a bullet in their enemies. And I come in after and take the pictures. Skinny Lady gets me there before the competition is even close.”

  Lucy was looking at him like he was crazy, and it annoyed him. “You know, Lucy, it’s not like you’re the only person who needs an edge out here.” He waved at the dead Texan. “So? You want the story or not?”

  She still looked skeptical. “If anyone can make an offering to Santa Muerte online, what’s this Texan doing upside down on a fence?”

  “DIY, baby.”

  “I’m serious, Timo. What makes you think Tex here is an offering?”

  Because Amparo’s boyfriend just lost his job to some loser Longhorn who will work for nothing. Because my water bill just went up again, and my rationing just went down. Because Roosevelt Lake is gone dry, and I got Merry Perrys doing revivals right on the corner of 7th and Monte Vista, and they’re trying to get my cousin Marco to join them.

  “People keep coming,” Timo said, and he was surprised at the tightness of his throat as he said it. “They smell that we got water, and they just keep coming. It’s like Texas is a million, million ants, and they just keep coming.”

  “There are definitely a lot of people in Texas.”