Jon Ureña's Blog, page 13
January 17, 2025
Smile, Pt. 9 (Fiction)
[check out this part on my personal page, where it looks better]
Richard Alcala smiled with quivering lips. He wagged the index finger of his intact hand like a TV show host embarrassed by someone’s answer, but then he curled that hand into a fist and threw it at my face. I dodged. The killer used that momentum to pivot and run diagonally toward the bike path.
I sighed. I chased after him.
Richard Alcala was sprinting as if he’d taken advantage of the stroll to get his energy back, like he were grabbing the baton in a relay race. He had pulled his left hand out of his pocket, and with every stride the bloody smear flicked drops around.
His shoes kicked sand into the faces of beachgoers lying on their towels, and of children playing with their plastic buckets and shovels. They shouted at him as he pulled away. A surfer crossed his path, and the killer rammed him shoulder-first. The people in that area looked at us the way they’d stare at a howling ambulance.
Richard Alcala reached a group of vagrants sitting on bulging backpacks—gaunt women and men with tangled hair and dirty beards.
The killer shouted between gasps, “That maniac’s after me!”
He took off running while placing the vagrants between us, and they turned to watch me approach. A figure peeled away from the group. As I tried to sidestep her, she shoved me in the chest.
I found myself facing a gum-chewing girl around nineteen or twenty. The raven-black fringe of her hair covered her eyebrows. She wore a gray T-shirt with one sleeve rolled all the way up to her shoulder. Lacking a bra, the outline of her small breasts was visible through the fabric. One of her cheekbones was smeared with grime, like she’d rubbed it with a greasy finger and no one had told her.
“You think you can harass a vet?” she asked with a voice like a cartoon fairy’s.
My vision vibrated, partly because of my exertion and partly because the sun had baked my brain. I had to wet my mouth before I could speak.
“You don’t want to know what he’s a veteran of.”
I pushed her aside with one hand. As I passed the girl, she drew a standard-issue army knife and pressed the tip against my neck.
“Show some respect.”
I held my breath. The metal poked like a needle drawing blood.
She chewed gum with her mouth open, her front teeth sticking out. She smelled stale, like she’d been stuck on a bus for ten hours and slept on the beach. Her gray eyes stared calmly back at me.
From the corner of my eye, I noticed her companions: scruffy, bearded men, both white and Hispanic. Off in the distance, looking small as a toy, Richard Alcala was showing signs of fatigue, glancing over his shoulder.
I slid my left hand inside my jacket toward the right pocket, but the girl nudged the knife’s tip a few millimeters deeper and broke my skin. The nerves around the cut lit up with a jolt.
I could have snapped her wrist, but did she really deserve that? I recognized in her gaze the conviction that she was in the right, that she could dispense justice.
I pulled out the folded wanted poster. When I unfolded it, the movement jostled my shirt, and the girl’s eyes dropped to the butt of my pistol, which stuck out behind my belt. She looked back at me, suspicious, her brow creasing.
I showed her the wanted poster.
“You’re letting the Prowler get away. That’s how you’re helping.”
Her body jerked around in a swift half-circule, her shoulders shrugged as if she’d just waded into icy water. She slid the blade back into the sheath on her belt.
“Shit.”
She tore off after the killer. I followed, weaving through the scruffy men. Two of the vagrants tried to keep up, but they gave up after about ten meters.
Richard Alcala was getting away down the bike path. I was risking losing him in the crowd. As the girl ran in front of me, the way her T-shirt clung to the tendons in her arms and narrow back suggested she was long overdue for a decent meal.
When I rubbed the puncture next to my carotid, blood stained my fingertips. The heat of my neck kept me from really feeling the bleed.
We closed the distance on the killer, who was glancing sideways at people passing him on skates or skateboards. I blinked to stop the row of palm trees and Richard Alcala’s figure from shimmering like a desert highway. My lungs were on fire, each breath filling them with hot air.
A cyclist was coming up the path—a teenager with blond dreadlocks, wearing a psychedelic T-shirt. The killer blocked him. As the teenager swerved, Richard Alcala grabbed the handlebars. The teenager spoke up, frowning. The killer clutched his dreads and yanked him toward the sand like he wanted to tear off the kid’s entire scalp. The teenager screamed. A dozen beachgoers raised their heads like gulls. The teenager lay halfway on the path halfway in the sand, clutching his head with both hands. Richard Alcala shook out his hand to release the torn strands, then mounted the bike.
The vagrant girl shouted. The killer looked at us with eyes rolled white, his features twisted with anxiety. He wobbled the bike, forcing two women in bikinis and rollerblades to move aside, then straightened and shrank into the distance along the path. He was about twenty meters ahead.
When I sprinted, a stitch stabbed my sides. The girl ran like she’d just realized she needed muscles. She waved an arm while her other hand pointed at the figure disappearing on the bicycle.
“Stop that man!” she yelled between gulps of air, though her voice sounded like she was teaching kids to play a game. “The bald guy with the mustache!”
Coming the other way on the path was a black man riding a mountain bike. His afro made him look like a toasted mushroom. Judging by how built he was, when he walked, all those lumps of muscle must have gotten in his way.
The girl shouted her order again. The bodybuilder spotted Richard Alcala, who was pedaling like a speeded-up film clip. The man jumped off his bike, grabbed the frame, hoisted it onto his shoulders, and hurled it at the killer. It clobbered Alcala in the face and knocked him flat on his back, his head cracking on the asphalt.
We reached Richard Alcala, who lay sprawled across one lane of the bike path. I was breathing fire. Beads of sweat trickled down my face, chest, back, and limbs. I blinked until my vision cleared.
The vagrant girl bent over, rested her palms on her thighs, and breathed through her mouth while chewing her gum. The killer’s lips were parted, his eyes fixed on the sky. His arms were curled as though gripping invisible handlebars.
The bodybuilder picked up his bike and straightened it. Though the top of his hairline reached my chin, his torso was twice as wide as mine. The veins in his arms bulged like plastic tubes forgotten inside during surgery.
“Did I crack his head open?”
“He’s breathing,” I said.
“Thinking might be another matter,” said the girl.
On both sides of the bike lane, cyclists and skaters had gathered. Some beachgoers watched as they stood on their towels or sat in their chairs.
I needed to get Richard Alcala off the streets. I doubted I could have stopped him alone, but I had to get rid of my companions.
“Let’s get him out of sight. Behind that row of parked cars.”
The bodybuilder hurried to chain his bike to a signpost. He came back and lifted Richard Alcala by the armpits like a child. I took hold of the killer’s legs. Spit dribbled from the corners of his mouth.
We dodged skaters, staggered around tourists and passersby in tank tops and shorts. A child in a cap with the Eiffel Tower on it snapped our picture with a Polaroid. A couple noticed Richard Alcala’s vacant stare and the drool at his lips, and asked about it, their voices colored by concern.
“Booze and heat, bad combo,” the bodybuilder said.
Dozens of people hurried past, barely giving a glance at the unconscious man we carried. Maybe they assumed we had a valid reason.
We ducked behind the line of parked cars and laid the killer on the dirt shoulder. The girl was smiling, baring her yellowed teeth. Between chews, her tongue rolled the gum into a ball. The bodybuilder lifted one of Richard Alcala’s eyelids, finding his gaze had slipped downward.
“Who did I knock out?”
The girl laughed. She knelt and tugged one end of the killer’s fake mustache, pulling up his upper lip and revealing his gums. Flakes of adhesive clung to his skin like dead, sunburned tissue.
“Why was he wearing a fake mustache?” the bodybuilder asked.
I unfolded the wanted notice and handed it over. The man read the poster, then glanced at Richard Alcala.
“You’ve got to be kidding me.”
I scanned the boardwalk to see if any cops were around. If they took the killer in, maybe the problem would be over—unless he escaped. I’d return to my present and discover that for decades they’d put on this farce of trial after trial. What was there to discuss, when I knew this man had killed more than two dozen people? Maybe I’d find out that instead of executing him years earlier, they’d let him out of prison—gray-haired, a withered parody—so he could enjoy the California sunshine, thanks to judges who talked a big game about morality but at the end of the day went back to their gated communities with guards at every entrance.
My fists shook. I wanted to grab the killer by the shirt and drag him into an alley. How could I ditch these two?
“Now I can say I brought down a serial killer,” said the bodybuilder.
I sighed.
“It gets old fast.”
The girl laughed in a sudden burst, like someone tickling her. She leaned over Richard Alcala’s face. A peace sign pendant in silver slipped out from under her gray T-shirt, swinging back and forth.
“We got you, bastard. You enjoy raping women and girls, huh?”
She rested her hand on my shoulder for balance and pressed the grimy sole of her sneaker against the killer’s cheek. The skin around the shoe compressed, the eyelid on that side twitching. Then she lifted her foot away, leaving a print of sand and dust on his cheekbone.
Beyond the row of cars, a family passed. The mother and father peered over a hood, but after they got a look at Richard Alcala, they hurried their kids along toward the beach.
I placed a hand on the bodybuilder’s shoulder and the other on the girl’s.
“Keep him here while I call the cops.”
As I circled around the row of cars toward the opposite sidewalk, the bodybuilder called after me, “Cops show up here every few minutes.”
I turned back to face him with the kind of urgency I usually handled by breaking bones—but in his case, all that muscle would get in the way.
“No. Keep him hidden. Play it cool. I’ll be right back.”
The girl looked at me tilting her head, her thumbs tucked behind her belt.
-----
Author’s note: this is a translation of my novella titled “Sonríe,” contained in a collection I self-published a decade ago. Barely anyone read it, so I figured I may as well post it on my site.
I had completely forgotten about the punkish vagrant girl and the mushroom bodybuilder. This was likely the goofiest part of the tale.
Richard Alcala smiled with quivering lips. He wagged the index finger of his intact hand like a TV show host embarrassed by someone’s answer, but then he curled that hand into a fist and threw it at my face. I dodged. The killer used that momentum to pivot and run diagonally toward the bike path.
I sighed. I chased after him.
Richard Alcala was sprinting as if he’d taken advantage of the stroll to get his energy back, like he were grabbing the baton in a relay race. He had pulled his left hand out of his pocket, and with every stride the bloody smear flicked drops around.
His shoes kicked sand into the faces of beachgoers lying on their towels, and of children playing with their plastic buckets and shovels. They shouted at him as he pulled away. A surfer crossed his path, and the killer rammed him shoulder-first. The people in that area looked at us the way they’d stare at a howling ambulance.
Richard Alcala reached a group of vagrants sitting on bulging backpacks—gaunt women and men with tangled hair and dirty beards.
The killer shouted between gasps, “That maniac’s after me!”
He took off running while placing the vagrants between us, and they turned to watch me approach. A figure peeled away from the group. As I tried to sidestep her, she shoved me in the chest.
I found myself facing a gum-chewing girl around nineteen or twenty. The raven-black fringe of her hair covered her eyebrows. She wore a gray T-shirt with one sleeve rolled all the way up to her shoulder. Lacking a bra, the outline of her small breasts was visible through the fabric. One of her cheekbones was smeared with grime, like she’d rubbed it with a greasy finger and no one had told her.
“You think you can harass a vet?” she asked with a voice like a cartoon fairy’s.
My vision vibrated, partly because of my exertion and partly because the sun had baked my brain. I had to wet my mouth before I could speak.
“You don’t want to know what he’s a veteran of.”
I pushed her aside with one hand. As I passed the girl, she drew a standard-issue army knife and pressed the tip against my neck.
“Show some respect.”
I held my breath. The metal poked like a needle drawing blood.
She chewed gum with her mouth open, her front teeth sticking out. She smelled stale, like she’d been stuck on a bus for ten hours and slept on the beach. Her gray eyes stared calmly back at me.
From the corner of my eye, I noticed her companions: scruffy, bearded men, both white and Hispanic. Off in the distance, looking small as a toy, Richard Alcala was showing signs of fatigue, glancing over his shoulder.
I slid my left hand inside my jacket toward the right pocket, but the girl nudged the knife’s tip a few millimeters deeper and broke my skin. The nerves around the cut lit up with a jolt.
I could have snapped her wrist, but did she really deserve that? I recognized in her gaze the conviction that she was in the right, that she could dispense justice.
I pulled out the folded wanted poster. When I unfolded it, the movement jostled my shirt, and the girl’s eyes dropped to the butt of my pistol, which stuck out behind my belt. She looked back at me, suspicious, her brow creasing.
I showed her the wanted poster.
“You’re letting the Prowler get away. That’s how you’re helping.”
Her body jerked around in a swift half-circule, her shoulders shrugged as if she’d just waded into icy water. She slid the blade back into the sheath on her belt.
“Shit.”
She tore off after the killer. I followed, weaving through the scruffy men. Two of the vagrants tried to keep up, but they gave up after about ten meters.
Richard Alcala was getting away down the bike path. I was risking losing him in the crowd. As the girl ran in front of me, the way her T-shirt clung to the tendons in her arms and narrow back suggested she was long overdue for a decent meal.
When I rubbed the puncture next to my carotid, blood stained my fingertips. The heat of my neck kept me from really feeling the bleed.
We closed the distance on the killer, who was glancing sideways at people passing him on skates or skateboards. I blinked to stop the row of palm trees and Richard Alcala’s figure from shimmering like a desert highway. My lungs were on fire, each breath filling them with hot air.
A cyclist was coming up the path—a teenager with blond dreadlocks, wearing a psychedelic T-shirt. The killer blocked him. As the teenager swerved, Richard Alcala grabbed the handlebars. The teenager spoke up, frowning. The killer clutched his dreads and yanked him toward the sand like he wanted to tear off the kid’s entire scalp. The teenager screamed. A dozen beachgoers raised their heads like gulls. The teenager lay halfway on the path halfway in the sand, clutching his head with both hands. Richard Alcala shook out his hand to release the torn strands, then mounted the bike.
The vagrant girl shouted. The killer looked at us with eyes rolled white, his features twisted with anxiety. He wobbled the bike, forcing two women in bikinis and rollerblades to move aside, then straightened and shrank into the distance along the path. He was about twenty meters ahead.
When I sprinted, a stitch stabbed my sides. The girl ran like she’d just realized she needed muscles. She waved an arm while her other hand pointed at the figure disappearing on the bicycle.
“Stop that man!” she yelled between gulps of air, though her voice sounded like she was teaching kids to play a game. “The bald guy with the mustache!”
Coming the other way on the path was a black man riding a mountain bike. His afro made him look like a toasted mushroom. Judging by how built he was, when he walked, all those lumps of muscle must have gotten in his way.
The girl shouted her order again. The bodybuilder spotted Richard Alcala, who was pedaling like a speeded-up film clip. The man jumped off his bike, grabbed the frame, hoisted it onto his shoulders, and hurled it at the killer. It clobbered Alcala in the face and knocked him flat on his back, his head cracking on the asphalt.
We reached Richard Alcala, who lay sprawled across one lane of the bike path. I was breathing fire. Beads of sweat trickled down my face, chest, back, and limbs. I blinked until my vision cleared.
The vagrant girl bent over, rested her palms on her thighs, and breathed through her mouth while chewing her gum. The killer’s lips were parted, his eyes fixed on the sky. His arms were curled as though gripping invisible handlebars.
The bodybuilder picked up his bike and straightened it. Though the top of his hairline reached my chin, his torso was twice as wide as mine. The veins in his arms bulged like plastic tubes forgotten inside during surgery.
“Did I crack his head open?”
“He’s breathing,” I said.
“Thinking might be another matter,” said the girl.
On both sides of the bike lane, cyclists and skaters had gathered. Some beachgoers watched as they stood on their towels or sat in their chairs.
I needed to get Richard Alcala off the streets. I doubted I could have stopped him alone, but I had to get rid of my companions.
“Let’s get him out of sight. Behind that row of parked cars.”
The bodybuilder hurried to chain his bike to a signpost. He came back and lifted Richard Alcala by the armpits like a child. I took hold of the killer’s legs. Spit dribbled from the corners of his mouth.
We dodged skaters, staggered around tourists and passersby in tank tops and shorts. A child in a cap with the Eiffel Tower on it snapped our picture with a Polaroid. A couple noticed Richard Alcala’s vacant stare and the drool at his lips, and asked about it, their voices colored by concern.
“Booze and heat, bad combo,” the bodybuilder said.
Dozens of people hurried past, barely giving a glance at the unconscious man we carried. Maybe they assumed we had a valid reason.
We ducked behind the line of parked cars and laid the killer on the dirt shoulder. The girl was smiling, baring her yellowed teeth. Between chews, her tongue rolled the gum into a ball. The bodybuilder lifted one of Richard Alcala’s eyelids, finding his gaze had slipped downward.
“Who did I knock out?”
The girl laughed. She knelt and tugged one end of the killer’s fake mustache, pulling up his upper lip and revealing his gums. Flakes of adhesive clung to his skin like dead, sunburned tissue.
“Why was he wearing a fake mustache?” the bodybuilder asked.
I unfolded the wanted notice and handed it over. The man read the poster, then glanced at Richard Alcala.
“You’ve got to be kidding me.”
I scanned the boardwalk to see if any cops were around. If they took the killer in, maybe the problem would be over—unless he escaped. I’d return to my present and discover that for decades they’d put on this farce of trial after trial. What was there to discuss, when I knew this man had killed more than two dozen people? Maybe I’d find out that instead of executing him years earlier, they’d let him out of prison—gray-haired, a withered parody—so he could enjoy the California sunshine, thanks to judges who talked a big game about morality but at the end of the day went back to their gated communities with guards at every entrance.
My fists shook. I wanted to grab the killer by the shirt and drag him into an alley. How could I ditch these two?
“Now I can say I brought down a serial killer,” said the bodybuilder.
I sighed.
“It gets old fast.”
The girl laughed in a sudden burst, like someone tickling her. She leaned over Richard Alcala’s face. A peace sign pendant in silver slipped out from under her gray T-shirt, swinging back and forth.
“We got you, bastard. You enjoy raping women and girls, huh?”
She rested her hand on my shoulder for balance and pressed the grimy sole of her sneaker against the killer’s cheek. The skin around the shoe compressed, the eyelid on that side twitching. Then she lifted her foot away, leaving a print of sand and dust on his cheekbone.
Beyond the row of cars, a family passed. The mother and father peered over a hood, but after they got a look at Richard Alcala, they hurried their kids along toward the beach.
I placed a hand on the bodybuilder’s shoulder and the other on the girl’s.
“Keep him here while I call the cops.”
As I circled around the row of cars toward the opposite sidewalk, the bodybuilder called after me, “Cops show up here every few minutes.”
I turned back to face him with the kind of urgency I usually handled by breaking bones—but in his case, all that muscle would get in the way.
“No. Keep him hidden. Play it cool. I’ll be right back.”
The girl looked at me tilting her head, her thumbs tucked behind her belt.
-----
Author’s note: this is a translation of my novella titled “Sonríe,” contained in a collection I self-published a decade ago. Barely anyone read it, so I figured I may as well post it on my site.
I had completely forgotten about the punkish vagrant girl and the mushroom bodybuilder. This was likely the goofiest part of the tale.
January 16, 2025
Life update (01/16/2025)
[check out this post on my personal page, where it looks better]
I’ve been in a better mood these past couple of days, which isn’t saying much given that I was contemplating very dark thoughts until then. A significant part of my change in mood has been thanks to my basement girl (my subconscious, in case you picture a fragile female chained under my floor). Recently she brought my attention to a novel I wrote about ten years ago, that I abandoned midway through because it wasn’t viable. Its core was worth exploring: it dealt with an autistic, reclusive person who was writing a novel about the artist she was obsessed with. It delved deep into how I lived for most of my twenties: deep seclusion, detachment from society, sinking in obsession, etc. I never processed that period properly, I don’t think, and working through such issues with a story tends to help, so I’m not surprised that my basement girl has been focused on it. Throughout the day, she has come up with the proper tone for the narration, with a bold idea for who the narrator should be, and for how to handle the scenes of the book-within-a-book (the entire book the protagonist wrote is one that I actually wrote, so that will be interesting to depict). As I was standing on the bus or the train, either heading to work or back, new moments from that story kept bubbling up from my basement, sometimes even interrupting my daydreams, clear proof that my mute girl is hard at work piecing it together. It will take me quite a while to organize all my notes and structure the whole thing properly, but as for now, I feel like I’m going to do this.
I’ve also been translating one of the novellas I wrote back in the day. I was surprised to discover that I still like it a lot, although it puzzled me with how different I feel these days. Back when I wrote Smile, the vastly increasing crime where I lived, as well as the regular terrorist attacks in Europe, kept me enraged. I couldn’t understand how people kept Don’t-Look-Back-in-Anger-ing. It was like most people had been brainwashed into becoming perfect little lambs for the slaughter. The situation hasn’t changed much, and in many ways it has worsened, but I don’t rage about it remotely as much. That may be in part due to a mix of growing older and caring even less about the world. I don’t feel like I’m part of this society; I just happen to live here. If I had the balls to do it, I’d move somewhere else. Maybe the Catalina foothills in Tucson, AZ, to give 65-year-old Augusta Britt a massage.
Speaking of troubling daydreams, yeah, I’m still fantasizing about Alicia Western, the haunting character from Cormac McCarthy’s last couple of novels. The daydream has become so elaborate that I may as well detail it now: a version of myself (perhaps even the protagonist of Smile, who was a recurrent protagonist in my daydreams whenever my savior complex kicked up) travels back in time to the Stella Maris sanatorium in Wisconsin, before Alicia Western killed herself. I show up in her assigned room. She’s all blonde-haired and shit, wearing such a pretty white gown. Anyway, I convince her that I’m from the future, that Bobby will wake up from his coma and be ready to dick her down. After a good cry, she gets hungry, so I bring her over a plate of Italian pasta from the future or whatever. The following day she decides to leave the sanatorium and travel around with me until Bobby wakes up. A few days into the trip, that involves watching movies from the future in modern TVs installed in roadside 1970s motels, Alicia gets curious about her younger self, and she asks me to set up a line of video communication with her teenage self about the time that Bobby fell in love with her. So I return back in time to her grandmother Ellen’s home to show her older Alicia’s video. That leads to a whole bunch of interaction from both sides, with 22-year-old Alicia recording videos for her younger self to guide her through her troublesome hallucinations and all that. Probably lots of advice on how to seduce her older brother. Anyway, I’m feeling generous, so I gift her grandmother like a hundred thousand dollars. “Oh, we can’t accept this!” “This isn’t even chump change, old broad! I’m a fucking time-traveler: I can win the lottery then win the lottery then win the lottery. I know the locations of piles of gold that won’t be found for decades. Just take the goddamn money and buy yourself a platinum dildo or something, will you?” They spend some of it on a tractor.
Ah, daydreams are so soothing. Just being able to close my eyes in the train and be transported mentally to these inner worlds where I can have conversations with a delightful, fascinating fictional character (though based on real person) the likes of which I’ve never met in real life, in part because I hate dealing with human beings.
Oh, I forgot to say about my novella Smile, the one I’m translating at the moment, that it may come close to what I consider “angry autistic guy writing.” The closest form of that which I recall is the manga Gantz. I hope it never quite reaches that point. I was fully aware during writing it that I was making it harsh and generally unpleasant, because it had to be. The protagonist, although an avenger who saves people, is a nasty serial killer himself who has murdered far more people than the serial killers and terrorists he hunts down. Of course, he’s justified in doing so… or is he? There’s the whole dilemma about his methods, the way he interacts with others, etc. I found him a very interesting guy. Of course, such a story would never get professionally published, which for me is a plus, as seemingly most of what gets published these days is politically correct slop. I want my writers deranged and half-evil, possibly even escaping to Mexico with fourteen year olds.
Anyway, I hope you’re getting to orgasm on a regular basis. That’s what life is ultimately about.
I’ve been in a better mood these past couple of days, which isn’t saying much given that I was contemplating very dark thoughts until then. A significant part of my change in mood has been thanks to my basement girl (my subconscious, in case you picture a fragile female chained under my floor). Recently she brought my attention to a novel I wrote about ten years ago, that I abandoned midway through because it wasn’t viable. Its core was worth exploring: it dealt with an autistic, reclusive person who was writing a novel about the artist she was obsessed with. It delved deep into how I lived for most of my twenties: deep seclusion, detachment from society, sinking in obsession, etc. I never processed that period properly, I don’t think, and working through such issues with a story tends to help, so I’m not surprised that my basement girl has been focused on it. Throughout the day, she has come up with the proper tone for the narration, with a bold idea for who the narrator should be, and for how to handle the scenes of the book-within-a-book (the entire book the protagonist wrote is one that I actually wrote, so that will be interesting to depict). As I was standing on the bus or the train, either heading to work or back, new moments from that story kept bubbling up from my basement, sometimes even interrupting my daydreams, clear proof that my mute girl is hard at work piecing it together. It will take me quite a while to organize all my notes and structure the whole thing properly, but as for now, I feel like I’m going to do this.
I’ve also been translating one of the novellas I wrote back in the day. I was surprised to discover that I still like it a lot, although it puzzled me with how different I feel these days. Back when I wrote Smile, the vastly increasing crime where I lived, as well as the regular terrorist attacks in Europe, kept me enraged. I couldn’t understand how people kept Don’t-Look-Back-in-Anger-ing. It was like most people had been brainwashed into becoming perfect little lambs for the slaughter. The situation hasn’t changed much, and in many ways it has worsened, but I don’t rage about it remotely as much. That may be in part due to a mix of growing older and caring even less about the world. I don’t feel like I’m part of this society; I just happen to live here. If I had the balls to do it, I’d move somewhere else. Maybe the Catalina foothills in Tucson, AZ, to give 65-year-old Augusta Britt a massage.
Speaking of troubling daydreams, yeah, I’m still fantasizing about Alicia Western, the haunting character from Cormac McCarthy’s last couple of novels. The daydream has become so elaborate that I may as well detail it now: a version of myself (perhaps even the protagonist of Smile, who was a recurrent protagonist in my daydreams whenever my savior complex kicked up) travels back in time to the Stella Maris sanatorium in Wisconsin, before Alicia Western killed herself. I show up in her assigned room. She’s all blonde-haired and shit, wearing such a pretty white gown. Anyway, I convince her that I’m from the future, that Bobby will wake up from his coma and be ready to dick her down. After a good cry, she gets hungry, so I bring her over a plate of Italian pasta from the future or whatever. The following day she decides to leave the sanatorium and travel around with me until Bobby wakes up. A few days into the trip, that involves watching movies from the future in modern TVs installed in roadside 1970s motels, Alicia gets curious about her younger self, and she asks me to set up a line of video communication with her teenage self about the time that Bobby fell in love with her. So I return back in time to her grandmother Ellen’s home to show her older Alicia’s video. That leads to a whole bunch of interaction from both sides, with 22-year-old Alicia recording videos for her younger self to guide her through her troublesome hallucinations and all that. Probably lots of advice on how to seduce her older brother. Anyway, I’m feeling generous, so I gift her grandmother like a hundred thousand dollars. “Oh, we can’t accept this!” “This isn’t even chump change, old broad! I’m a fucking time-traveler: I can win the lottery then win the lottery then win the lottery. I know the locations of piles of gold that won’t be found for decades. Just take the goddamn money and buy yourself a platinum dildo or something, will you?” They spend some of it on a tractor.
Ah, daydreams are so soothing. Just being able to close my eyes in the train and be transported mentally to these inner worlds where I can have conversations with a delightful, fascinating fictional character (though based on real person) the likes of which I’ve never met in real life, in part because I hate dealing with human beings.
Oh, I forgot to say about my novella Smile, the one I’m translating at the moment, that it may come close to what I consider “angry autistic guy writing.” The closest form of that which I recall is the manga Gantz. I hope it never quite reaches that point. I was fully aware during writing it that I was making it harsh and generally unpleasant, because it had to be. The protagonist, although an avenger who saves people, is a nasty serial killer himself who has murdered far more people than the serial killers and terrorists he hunts down. Of course, he’s justified in doing so… or is he? There’s the whole dilemma about his methods, the way he interacts with others, etc. I found him a very interesting guy. Of course, such a story would never get professionally published, which for me is a plus, as seemingly most of what gets published these days is politically correct slop. I want my writers deranged and half-evil, possibly even escaping to Mexico with fourteen year olds.
Anyway, I hope you’re getting to orgasm on a regular basis. That’s what life is ultimately about.
Smile, Pt. 8 (Fiction)
[check out this part on my personal page, where it looks better]
I pulled out the gun, flicked off the safety, and yanked open the trunk in one go. The music hit me like a howling wind. On the floor of the van, the woman’s face was turning red, her eyes bulging toward the ceiling. A hand with every vein, tendon, and bone standing out clutched her throat. If it squeezed harder, it would’ve taken her head off.
On the man’s bald scalp, hundreds of pores dotted the skin. A missile-shaped sweat stain darkened the back of his T-shirt. His skin was bleached pale in the shape of underwear, extending from his waist down his thighs. His pants were bunched around his ankles.
Too many men in vans with their pants down.
I raised the gun toward Richard Alcala’s back while he twisted around, shoving his left hand in the way. I pulled the trigger. The blast rattled me as if a bell had tolled right by my ear. My vision blurred, and my eardrums throbbed. I blinked at the hazy shapes, my nostrils lined with the smell of gunpowder.
Richard Alcala shoved me. My back slammed against the side of the trunk, but my right hand still gripped the gun’s handle. The killer, on his feet, hunched in a cloud of smoke, eyes flared as though he’d lost his eyelids. On his raised left hand, the middle and ring fingers were gone. They ended about an inch from the knuckles in two bloody stumps.
As I straightened, something crunched under one of my soles—the aviator sunglasses—and my foot slipped. When I was about to aim at Richard Alcala, the woman kicked him in the ass, propelling the killer through the open door onto the pavement. The snapshot of his bald head and white butt cheeks pitching out of sight stayed fixed in my mind for a second. Too long.
I sucked in air. Over the ringing in my ears, I heard the jingle of a belt buckle and a guttural groan. The woman propped herself up on her elbows. Her face was flushed from the near-strangulation, but she looked at me calmly, as if waiting for me to answer a question. Her dress was hiked up and wrinkled under her navel, and blonde pubic hair peeked out over her tanned thighs.
When I spoke, it sounded like scraping rust from a pipe. “Go home, you idiot.”
As I climbed out of the trunk, I tripped over the record player and went sprawling on my chest. The impact knocked the wind out of me. The gun bounced free, but with a slap of my hand, I pinned it against the rough asphalt.
I got up, panting. On the pavement, a finger gleamed in the sun amid blood spatters, a bit of bone sticking out the bloody end. Richard Alcala was running, hunched forward with his left hand jammed into his pants pocket. He passed through the gate to the street and vanished from sight.
I went after him. The music spilling from the van drowned beneath the whine in my ears, replaced by the swell of voices, traffic, honking. I slowed near the gate as if I might trip—was he waiting on the other side with a brick in his hand? No, he was running off to lose himself in the crowd. I clicked the Smith & Wesson’s safety back on, then slid the barrel behind my belt and covered it with my shirt.
I was sweating, my chest hurt. I hurried to the sidewalk, drawing looks from passersby. At the far end of the street, toward Venice Beach, his hunched shape with the shaved head grew smaller. People stepped aside without really looking at him, like he was a homeless man.
As I threaded through pedestrians and their clouds of musk and patchouli perfume, I pictured myself catching up to Richard Alcala, whipping out the Smith & Wesson, and blowing out the back of his skull, replacing his nose with a crater. How hard had it really been to aim at the bastard before that woman kicked him? And she—why had she hauled a record player into the van of a shady guy in disguise? I lived among babies who’d stick their hands into a chainsaw, then act shocked when it chopped their fingers off.
The hairs on my arms still stood on end. I craved a release, that rush of relief I always got when the week’s target lay splayed out like a puppet with its strings cut.
A police cruiser made its way up the road. Before it got close to him, Richard Alcala slowed and mimicked the casual gait of the other people around him. A darkening stain spread across the left pocket of his navy-blue pants, but did anyone notice? Should I alert the police? Rage rippled through me. I clenched my teeth. Let the cops botch the arrest again, and I’d be stuck waiting for another ambulance.
Dozens of people walked by Richard Alcala—fliers with his mug shot stapled to posts and storefront windows—and they didn’t even glance at his flesh-and-blood version. I matched his pace, crossing walkways and heading under archways. If this society would wise up and pay attention, I’d turn and disappear. Even if the cops questioned who’d blown off two of the killer’s fingers. But if nobody took note, I’d decide how to squash this cockroach.
Sunlight dazzled off car hoods and windshields, half-blinding me. Richard Alcala wove through a crowd that neither saw nor sensed him. A man I’d almost taken for a plainclothes officer was leaning against the entrance to an alley, scanning the street. Richard Alcala slipped right past him like a ghost.
What unconscious filters were turning this serial killer into harmless scenery? He was oozing a tar-like trail that people stepped in, that clung to their soles like fresh asphalt, yet they moved along as though it had cooled and hardened. A myriad globs of seething tar, steaming like a compost heap, roamed in search of their next victim to swallow.
Richard Alcala waded through tourists pawing at trinkets in the boardwalk shops. A pair of street musicians sang while playing timbales and a harpsichord. He hurried past the outdoor gym, where shirtless bodybuilders lifted weights. He skirted the basketball courts. Then he headed toward the sand, crossing the bike path. He zigzagged among towels and groups of people, dwindling in size against the waves that, after crashing, draped foam along the wet sand.
I rushed after him. Richard Alcala kept opening and closing his right hand, maybe trying to shake off the nerves. His left pocket, bulging with his injured hand, had darkened to near-black, and thin ribbons of darkness trailed down that pant leg.
Walking on sand, I drew even with the killer.
“Nice mustache,” I said. “Almost looks real.”
He glanced at me sideways. The wrinkles that framed his mouth when he smiled looked like fissures and aged him.
“Pretty stupid showing yourself to the public,” I said.
“You won’t shoot me here.”
He’d hardened his voice, but lacked the confidence that usually charmed unsuspecting women.
“They’ve plastered your face all over the streets.”
“They took that photo back when I still had that blond mane I hated keeping up. People see what they want. They’ll figure I fled to Mexico.”
“You’d like it down there.”
As though ashamed to be walking hunched over, he straightened. His left arm trembled, and his eyelids twitched in sync.
“They’re watching the exits. Buses are out of the question. I should’ve guessed a man from the future would know I’d intercept that woman before she reached the fake address.”
“That has nothing to do with me being from the future, and everything to do with you being a moron.”
He laughed as though his mouth were full of sand.
“Anxiety makes me hungrier. And the cops must’ve impounded my Ford Thunderbird. God, I loved that car.”
“Not surprising.”
“You dirtied its trunk with corpses.”
“You’re the one who turned them into corpses.”
Richard Alcala shrugged and let out a sigh as if to say, what can you do?
We passed two women in their twenties lying facedown, their faces buried in folded arms. The sun gleamed off their oiled skin, and the smell of tanning lotion hung in the air.
“So, you’re from the future,” the killer said. “How is it?”
“Worse.”
A shirtless man walked by kicking up sand while carrying a candy-colored surfboard under one arm. We heard shouts from a nearby volleyball match.
“What do you think the people looking at us believe?” said Richard Alcala. “They’re thinking we’re veterans stuck in overseas horrors. Today’s convenient rationale moves us out of their heads.”
“Except you’re part of the horror those veterans have seen overseas.”
He let out a laugh, cut short by a cough.
“I get it, man. You don’t like me. Can’t please everyone.”
He flexed his left arm. For a moment, he pulled the hand free of his pocket to glance at it. I caught a blood-smeared blur before he stuffed his mangled hand back inside the soaking pocket.
“Maybe you did me a favor,” he said. “Women will see I’m missing two fingers, and pity me. No cast needed.”
“If you survive.”
His face twisted. His gaze swept the beach. He picked up his pace, then gave it up a few seconds later.
About thirty feet away, a couple swayed in a close embrace, whispering kisses, feet sunk in the damp sand.
“What good do you think you’ve done by saving her, Man from the Future?” he asked.
“You mean the girl on roller skates or your wannabe model?”
He raised his right hand and wagged the index finger at me.
“You put the kid in your car.”
“Sure did.”
“What a hero, distracting me from strangling her. What do you think you achieved by interrupting my fun? That girl’s dumb as a stack of bricks. She was born pretty and well-built, so she thinks the world exists to shower her with gifts. Why? Because packs of men—and maybe a woman or two—treat her like a goddess in hopes of undressing her one day. Now she’s free to spread her stupidity. Ten years from now, when her flesh sags by fractions of an inch and that endless parade of men seeking comfort in her holes turn to girls in their twenties, she’ll see the party’s over. She’ll spend the rest of her days crying, paralyzed by fear. She’ll wear herself out with makeup and surgery to fight the passage of time. Because what else is she good for? In three or four decades, sporting an old-lady hairdo and skin spotted with age, she’ll die without having developed another talent beyond having once been hot. Why let a person like that pollute the world?”
Why would I argue? We’d wander the beach another five or ten minutes.
Some kids had gathered around a woman seated on a backpack, strumming a Dylan tune on her guitar. If we stood by them, their weed smoke would probably get us high.
“You know,” said Richard Alcala, “I agree with what you told that idiot I was trying to rid the world of. But hearing you say it irritated me.”
I struggled to recall what I’d said yesterday when I barged in on them, but being this close to a killer—and needing to keep an eye on his hands—warped my thoughts like a pirated transmission.
“You revealed the trick while I was in the middle of it,” he said. “They believe in good intentions, in warm smiles. They submit blindly to these principles and rationalize any intrusion that sparks doubt. Something good must balance out the bad, they’ll say, so their world stays intact. What good counters what I do?”
“You mean raping and murdering women and girls?”
Richard Alcala smiled like we were sharing a private joke.
“Yes, my little hobby.”
“I don’t think like they do. There’s no balance.”
“But you still step in for them. You save them. You feed their fantasies. You must respect them a lot.”
I was shaking my head before he finished talking. Each laugh from the beach, like seagull squawks, raked at me, and I wanted to scream for them to shut up. Riding their surfboards, floating on their backs, climbing onto each other’s shoulders then jumping into the water—seals at an aquarium performing stunts for an invisible trainer.
“Respect? None. They don’t deserve it. Anything that unsettles or saddens them terrifies them, which includes most of what goes on. They’d rather drown the background music in noise. They wander with eyes shut and fingers in their ears. The more of them cluster together, the dumber they get. If evil blows up in their faces, they lock themselves in a shell of comforting platitudes and leave factual reality behind. They recast surrender as a virtue so they can still think of themselves as good people. Then when the inevitable happens, they’re shocked. They whimper, wondering how they could’ve foreseen it, even though they silenced anyone who tried to warn them. After a short time of mourning, back to business as usual. Life’s too short, right? Let’s keep believing in a nice world where prayers get answered and goodness reigns, and an invisible father in the sky makes sure disasters happen only to other people—who surely deserve them. Humanity is led by the nose toward complacency like cows. Locked in a psyche that survives by bouncing from one pleasure to the next, they see everything else as a minefield. Uncharted territory they sometimes refuse to even admit exists. They modify their beliefs to match public opinion’s definition of decency, and band together in righteous fury against anyone who names the darkness closing in, with the calm conscience of those who know they’re the majority. So no, I don’t respect them. I can endure five minutes around people before I feel nauseous. The world’s a puddle of vomit, and you, knowing that, still stomp on it and make the mess spread. I can’t fix humanity, but I can clean up some of your stains by wiping you out.”
“You think that’ll revolutionize the world? I barely matter.”
“All that pointless butchery. Breaking into homes and hotel rooms, abducting women and girls, raping and sodomizing them, killing them—sometimes torturing or mutilating them first—for what? You hardly ever stole money. The thrill was your drug, your pleasure. And that’s all there is to it. You did it because you needed to.”
Richard Alcala lowered his head. He slid along like a monk in a procession; all he lacked was a hood to hide his face.
“Do you have any idea how easy it was?” he asked. “They thought I came up because I was nice. I pretended I’d broken my right arm, so they saw me as harmless. My record was four women in one day. All it took was a dazzling smile, and they followed me to the slaughter. The killings they read about happen to other people, and they forget them by flipping the page or turning off the TV. They’ve convinced themselves the universe will protect them from guys like me. They’ve earned it, right? They glaze over the filth because their worldview depends on staying blind. If they really saw me, every pillar holding up their mindset would crumble. They’re dodos—like those birds wiped out in colonial times.”
“I know what the damn dodos were.”
“They exist to waddle until a predator guts them. In the last moment, right when I flash them that final smile, their expressions shift. They become different women. They’d have learned a lesson for next time—except there is no next time. Terror contorts their features as if the glass pane in their minds just got shattered. And when I squeeze their throats, their faces turn red and their eyes search around. They struggle to let some cry for help slip out, but even if they could, none of the people they love and who love them will save them. That just universe they believed in keeps on drifting by inertia, and that nasty business that only ever happened to others—who must’ve deserved it—winds up happening to them. As their brains shut down, they realize that God only ever looked down upon us with hate. I promise you, man, no other look gives me that kind of high.”
When I came back to myself, I was stunned to see we were still on the beach, kicking up sand. Everywhere I looked, the sun flashed on white smiles. Some couples sitting cross-legged or stretched out on towels laughed. But my awareness was tearing down centuries of dusty spiderwebs where I’d been hanging all this time.
I cleared my throat.
“A lot of those women and girls you killed grew up with people who loved them. Adults who took care of them. They didn’t see you coming. You, and monsters like you, thrive in this society because it has no clue how to process you. But I see what you see. On every street I walk, I have to know where I’d escape, how to keep someone from jumping me. If a stranger steps too close, I picture how to counter any attack, which nearby object I could use to stop their heart. I see myself yanking back their hair and landing a punch that shatters their windpipe. Or plunging a pair of scissors into their arteries, jamming them into their eyeballs. The techniques I’ve learned—and performed—loop in my mind over and over in detail. So I see you. And I used to spare people from seeing monsters like you, handing you over to the cops. I thought I was punishing you, forcing you into the system’s jaws, but you’d be coddled by psychs and sociologists who twist language so that you come out the victim. Their weakness seeped into the law. You served ten years. They shaved more time off because you kept busy knitting scarves or some other bullshit, and you walked free as the misunderstood victim, with your identity protected. Some of you went on to kill again. The fools on their thrones who let you back on the streets kept quiet. No one took responsibility. No one even apologized. After all, those rapes and murders happened to other people’s daughters. Our societies have gone soft, adopting the mindset of slaves. They think they’re riding a wave to a brighter future, guaranteed by God, or karma, or progress, or any made-up cosmic payback. Otherwise, they’d have to face that they survive on blind luck. Their sugar-cube minds would collapse. By the time they leave school or college, most have learned all they’ll ever know. They can’t even process new data unless it’s shoved up them like a suppository. Talking is the only tool they’ve got. When evil smears a tarry hand across their faces, they turn into a dog cowering under its master’s beating. Whimpering, tail between their legs, begging, “What do I have to do to make you stop hitting me? Name it.” In their so-called just universe, they must have deserved those blows. Stockholm Syndrome on a societal scale. They figure they’ll fix evil by hugging it, by giving away more of the taxpayers’ money. They feed a beast that dresses in designer brands and uses the latest phones, free to spread darkness 24/7. But I remember that only a sharpened stick keeps predators at bay—and there will always be predators and a flock that needs protecting, because the flock doesn’t know or doesn’t want to protect itself. You know that as well as I do. Even if you picked the other side, you understand.”
Richard Alcala cleared his throat and spoke in a low voice.
“I didn’t choose anything.”
“You should have.”
By then, we’d wandered below the fishing pier, held up by pillars, some angled, that had blackened and thickened at the base from shell encrustations. The pier’s shade spread over us, cooling me down.
I watched Alcala. Would he try to attack me or run?
He limped along, staring at the waves crashing against the pillars. A surfer balanced on his board and glided between the slanted beams as if racing a course.
We passed the pier. With the sun at that angle, every little dune in the sand cast a shadow, highlighting each lump and hollow like a pockmarked surface.
Then Alcala spoke again.
“Why’d you let me kill so many people? What, to teach me a lesson?”
“Cassie was the first victim of yours I found out about. I can only jump back in time if the right combination of rage and despair hits me the moment I learn about a specific victim’s death. That rarely happens when I read about the others. Also, the last time I meddled with the past, there wasn’t even a Richard Alcala killing dozens. Maybe you weren’t even born.”
He lowered his head, frowning, mouth half-open, as though struggling to grasp the joke.
A homeless man was asleep on the sand, using his backpack for a pillow.
“That’s how it goes,” I said. “I hear about some person who fell into a pit. If I care, I jump back and nudge them out of the way. Sometimes I kill the pit itself. If the ones I saved figure out I stepped in, they often get pissed. The rest of the time, I hear them chirp about how we should all be positive, how the universe blesses the worthy. But the universe killed them, and they’d have vanished had I ignored the news. I move on, trying to forget what I’ve seen and done, until the next person drops into another hole. A lot of times it’s just bad luck. But in cases like Cassie’s, if she’d thought twice before getting in your car, she would’ve skated home. And sometimes these same people later stumble into some other hole—because I kept them from learning the hard way. I’m sick of babysitting so many kids at play. If they’d stop running around blind, I wouldn’t need to guard the edge of the cliff to catch whoever’s about to fall.”
Richard Alcala smiled like a terrible poker player holding a winning hand.
“You’ve built a complicated reason for doing what you need.”
“And you cooked up some justification for doing what you want.”
“I’m doing the universe a favor. I’m filtering out the idiots who can’t see danger. Like killing spiders that run along the walls instead of hiding. A few years down the line, only the cautious ones remain. I’m strengthening the human race, friend. These dummies who trust without a second thought, who live in fairy tales—I dole out the fate they deserve. The rest survive to spawn a better generation.”
“You’re a real philanthropist.”
“I’m as vital as a shark. Nature made me. If you kill me, you’ll upset the ecosystem.”
“I’ve met too many serial killers, though none ever begged me to respect biodiversity as an excuse to spare them. Most adopt some moral code in which their murders represent the universe self-correcting. You kill because your brain wiring rewards you with an orgasm. The rest is just an excuse, a balm for whatever faint echo of conscience you have.”
“You don’t know what it’s like. I feel nothing for anyone. When some chick comes up to me at a bar or the office thinking I’d make a nice boyfriend, I feel like I’m hearing a robot talk.”
“I know exactly what that’s like.”
“But when I corner another idiot and the moment comes when I’m inside her and her life flickers out, I’m flooded with a pleasure not of this world. I see heaven. I see God. Why would He condemn me to a numb existence, if all I have to do is smile at a pretty, brainless woman and lure her someplace no one can hear?”
“I’m sorry you were born that way, or raised that way, or both, so that killing is the only thing that gives you feeling. I’m sorry because otherwise I’d be spending my day in a hotel room, discovering music and movies. The universe doesn’t care. You picked between being miserable and being slightly less miserable at the cost of destroying dozens—maybe hundreds—of lives. Those you killed deserved to live more than you deserve a climax.”
He muttered through breaths, like blood loss was making him groggy and he could barely form words.
“All this because I saw that roller-skating kid and wanted her. Cassie, you said. If you’d been one minute late, that kid would’ve climbed in my car like the others I’ve had fun with. She’s nothing special.”
“One among millions.”
“You think she deserved saving more than the others?”
“I don’t know. She’s of average intelligence. She’ll turn into a decent woman, like her mom. Go to school for something ordinary, work some job persuading strangers, or maybe stay home raising kids. Like most, she’ll toss aside her dreams to pay rent and serve others. A couple decades after she dies, all that’s left is a fuzzy memory and a row of photos gathering dust on someone’s table, little stabs of sadness at how time rots everything.”
Alcala let out a groan.
“None of this makes sense. Being born just to die. Such a waste. The more damage I do, the better. It can’t get worse.”
“It can. And some things are worth saving.”
“Like what?”
He asked it in a hollow tone, like he needed a reason.
“Curious people who seek answers, who unveil hidden truths. And art—literature, film, music.”
“I don’t kill musicians.”
“Right, you only kill stupid women. While you were raping and strangling them, did you pause to ask, ‘Sorry, by any chance do you play an instrument?’ When you destroyed a child’s innocence minutes before ending her, did you ever consider what person she might’ve become? You never cared. Don’t lie to yourself.”
He was trudging along like he’d been hauling a hundred pounds for half an hour.
“This is all God’s doing. I’m a demon who escaped from hell, and He sent you to drag me back.”
“Dangerous for me to believe that. You’d probably turn hell into a holiday.”
We’d reached the end of the beach, blocked by a narrow walkway, a breaker, and about three hundred meters of water where a white yacht was heading toward Marina del Rey. We either had to retrace our steps or move onto the walkway.
Richard Alcala halted a stride away and turned to me. His left arm was shaking. With his shaved head white as though it’d never seen sun, and his features twisted in pain, he looked like a patient fresh out of brain surgery.
“What do you think happens next, pal?”
I brushed my jacket, feeling the shape of the Smith & Wesson beneath.
“I’m done debating philosophy with a serial killer. I’m taking you somewhere nobody can hear you. Then I’ll slice off one of your fingers. Tomorrow, I’ll take another. Then another. When you have no fingers left, I’ll hack off an arm. I’ll use a tourniquet so you won’t bleed to death. A few days later, the other arm. Then a leg. Then the other one. Once you’re flopping around like a worm in a puddle of your own fluids, I’ll cut off your balls and make you swallow them. Then I’ll tear out your tongue, gouge your eyes. Finally, I’ll peel off your skin. If you’re still breathing, I’m sure I’ll think of something else.”
-----
Author’s note: this story was originally released in Spanish about a decade ago. It’s contained in my collection titled Los reinos de brea.
I pulled out the gun, flicked off the safety, and yanked open the trunk in one go. The music hit me like a howling wind. On the floor of the van, the woman’s face was turning red, her eyes bulging toward the ceiling. A hand with every vein, tendon, and bone standing out clutched her throat. If it squeezed harder, it would’ve taken her head off.
On the man’s bald scalp, hundreds of pores dotted the skin. A missile-shaped sweat stain darkened the back of his T-shirt. His skin was bleached pale in the shape of underwear, extending from his waist down his thighs. His pants were bunched around his ankles.
Too many men in vans with their pants down.
I raised the gun toward Richard Alcala’s back while he twisted around, shoving his left hand in the way. I pulled the trigger. The blast rattled me as if a bell had tolled right by my ear. My vision blurred, and my eardrums throbbed. I blinked at the hazy shapes, my nostrils lined with the smell of gunpowder.
Richard Alcala shoved me. My back slammed against the side of the trunk, but my right hand still gripped the gun’s handle. The killer, on his feet, hunched in a cloud of smoke, eyes flared as though he’d lost his eyelids. On his raised left hand, the middle and ring fingers were gone. They ended about an inch from the knuckles in two bloody stumps.
As I straightened, something crunched under one of my soles—the aviator sunglasses—and my foot slipped. When I was about to aim at Richard Alcala, the woman kicked him in the ass, propelling the killer through the open door onto the pavement. The snapshot of his bald head and white butt cheeks pitching out of sight stayed fixed in my mind for a second. Too long.
I sucked in air. Over the ringing in my ears, I heard the jingle of a belt buckle and a guttural groan. The woman propped herself up on her elbows. Her face was flushed from the near-strangulation, but she looked at me calmly, as if waiting for me to answer a question. Her dress was hiked up and wrinkled under her navel, and blonde pubic hair peeked out over her tanned thighs.
When I spoke, it sounded like scraping rust from a pipe. “Go home, you idiot.”
As I climbed out of the trunk, I tripped over the record player and went sprawling on my chest. The impact knocked the wind out of me. The gun bounced free, but with a slap of my hand, I pinned it against the rough asphalt.
I got up, panting. On the pavement, a finger gleamed in the sun amid blood spatters, a bit of bone sticking out the bloody end. Richard Alcala was running, hunched forward with his left hand jammed into his pants pocket. He passed through the gate to the street and vanished from sight.
I went after him. The music spilling from the van drowned beneath the whine in my ears, replaced by the swell of voices, traffic, honking. I slowed near the gate as if I might trip—was he waiting on the other side with a brick in his hand? No, he was running off to lose himself in the crowd. I clicked the Smith & Wesson’s safety back on, then slid the barrel behind my belt and covered it with my shirt.
I was sweating, my chest hurt. I hurried to the sidewalk, drawing looks from passersby. At the far end of the street, toward Venice Beach, his hunched shape with the shaved head grew smaller. People stepped aside without really looking at him, like he was a homeless man.
As I threaded through pedestrians and their clouds of musk and patchouli perfume, I pictured myself catching up to Richard Alcala, whipping out the Smith & Wesson, and blowing out the back of his skull, replacing his nose with a crater. How hard had it really been to aim at the bastard before that woman kicked him? And she—why had she hauled a record player into the van of a shady guy in disguise? I lived among babies who’d stick their hands into a chainsaw, then act shocked when it chopped their fingers off.
The hairs on my arms still stood on end. I craved a release, that rush of relief I always got when the week’s target lay splayed out like a puppet with its strings cut.
A police cruiser made its way up the road. Before it got close to him, Richard Alcala slowed and mimicked the casual gait of the other people around him. A darkening stain spread across the left pocket of his navy-blue pants, but did anyone notice? Should I alert the police? Rage rippled through me. I clenched my teeth. Let the cops botch the arrest again, and I’d be stuck waiting for another ambulance.
Dozens of people walked by Richard Alcala—fliers with his mug shot stapled to posts and storefront windows—and they didn’t even glance at his flesh-and-blood version. I matched his pace, crossing walkways and heading under archways. If this society would wise up and pay attention, I’d turn and disappear. Even if the cops questioned who’d blown off two of the killer’s fingers. But if nobody took note, I’d decide how to squash this cockroach.
Sunlight dazzled off car hoods and windshields, half-blinding me. Richard Alcala wove through a crowd that neither saw nor sensed him. A man I’d almost taken for a plainclothes officer was leaning against the entrance to an alley, scanning the street. Richard Alcala slipped right past him like a ghost.
What unconscious filters were turning this serial killer into harmless scenery? He was oozing a tar-like trail that people stepped in, that clung to their soles like fresh asphalt, yet they moved along as though it had cooled and hardened. A myriad globs of seething tar, steaming like a compost heap, roamed in search of their next victim to swallow.
Richard Alcala waded through tourists pawing at trinkets in the boardwalk shops. A pair of street musicians sang while playing timbales and a harpsichord. He hurried past the outdoor gym, where shirtless bodybuilders lifted weights. He skirted the basketball courts. Then he headed toward the sand, crossing the bike path. He zigzagged among towels and groups of people, dwindling in size against the waves that, after crashing, draped foam along the wet sand.
I rushed after him. Richard Alcala kept opening and closing his right hand, maybe trying to shake off the nerves. His left pocket, bulging with his injured hand, had darkened to near-black, and thin ribbons of darkness trailed down that pant leg.
Walking on sand, I drew even with the killer.
“Nice mustache,” I said. “Almost looks real.”
He glanced at me sideways. The wrinkles that framed his mouth when he smiled looked like fissures and aged him.
“Pretty stupid showing yourself to the public,” I said.
“You won’t shoot me here.”
He’d hardened his voice, but lacked the confidence that usually charmed unsuspecting women.
“They’ve plastered your face all over the streets.”
“They took that photo back when I still had that blond mane I hated keeping up. People see what they want. They’ll figure I fled to Mexico.”
“You’d like it down there.”
As though ashamed to be walking hunched over, he straightened. His left arm trembled, and his eyelids twitched in sync.
“They’re watching the exits. Buses are out of the question. I should’ve guessed a man from the future would know I’d intercept that woman before she reached the fake address.”
“That has nothing to do with me being from the future, and everything to do with you being a moron.”
He laughed as though his mouth were full of sand.
“Anxiety makes me hungrier. And the cops must’ve impounded my Ford Thunderbird. God, I loved that car.”
“Not surprising.”
“You dirtied its trunk with corpses.”
“You’re the one who turned them into corpses.”
Richard Alcala shrugged and let out a sigh as if to say, what can you do?
We passed two women in their twenties lying facedown, their faces buried in folded arms. The sun gleamed off their oiled skin, and the smell of tanning lotion hung in the air.
“So, you’re from the future,” the killer said. “How is it?”
“Worse.”
A shirtless man walked by kicking up sand while carrying a candy-colored surfboard under one arm. We heard shouts from a nearby volleyball match.
“What do you think the people looking at us believe?” said Richard Alcala. “They’re thinking we’re veterans stuck in overseas horrors. Today’s convenient rationale moves us out of their heads.”
“Except you’re part of the horror those veterans have seen overseas.”
He let out a laugh, cut short by a cough.
“I get it, man. You don’t like me. Can’t please everyone.”
He flexed his left arm. For a moment, he pulled the hand free of his pocket to glance at it. I caught a blood-smeared blur before he stuffed his mangled hand back inside the soaking pocket.
“Maybe you did me a favor,” he said. “Women will see I’m missing two fingers, and pity me. No cast needed.”
“If you survive.”
His face twisted. His gaze swept the beach. He picked up his pace, then gave it up a few seconds later.
About thirty feet away, a couple swayed in a close embrace, whispering kisses, feet sunk in the damp sand.
“What good do you think you’ve done by saving her, Man from the Future?” he asked.
“You mean the girl on roller skates or your wannabe model?”
He raised his right hand and wagged the index finger at me.
“You put the kid in your car.”
“Sure did.”
“What a hero, distracting me from strangling her. What do you think you achieved by interrupting my fun? That girl’s dumb as a stack of bricks. She was born pretty and well-built, so she thinks the world exists to shower her with gifts. Why? Because packs of men—and maybe a woman or two—treat her like a goddess in hopes of undressing her one day. Now she’s free to spread her stupidity. Ten years from now, when her flesh sags by fractions of an inch and that endless parade of men seeking comfort in her holes turn to girls in their twenties, she’ll see the party’s over. She’ll spend the rest of her days crying, paralyzed by fear. She’ll wear herself out with makeup and surgery to fight the passage of time. Because what else is she good for? In three or four decades, sporting an old-lady hairdo and skin spotted with age, she’ll die without having developed another talent beyond having once been hot. Why let a person like that pollute the world?”
Why would I argue? We’d wander the beach another five or ten minutes.
Some kids had gathered around a woman seated on a backpack, strumming a Dylan tune on her guitar. If we stood by them, their weed smoke would probably get us high.
“You know,” said Richard Alcala, “I agree with what you told that idiot I was trying to rid the world of. But hearing you say it irritated me.”
I struggled to recall what I’d said yesterday when I barged in on them, but being this close to a killer—and needing to keep an eye on his hands—warped my thoughts like a pirated transmission.
“You revealed the trick while I was in the middle of it,” he said. “They believe in good intentions, in warm smiles. They submit blindly to these principles and rationalize any intrusion that sparks doubt. Something good must balance out the bad, they’ll say, so their world stays intact. What good counters what I do?”
“You mean raping and murdering women and girls?”
Richard Alcala smiled like we were sharing a private joke.
“Yes, my little hobby.”
“I don’t think like they do. There’s no balance.”
“But you still step in for them. You save them. You feed their fantasies. You must respect them a lot.”
I was shaking my head before he finished talking. Each laugh from the beach, like seagull squawks, raked at me, and I wanted to scream for them to shut up. Riding their surfboards, floating on their backs, climbing onto each other’s shoulders then jumping into the water—seals at an aquarium performing stunts for an invisible trainer.
“Respect? None. They don’t deserve it. Anything that unsettles or saddens them terrifies them, which includes most of what goes on. They’d rather drown the background music in noise. They wander with eyes shut and fingers in their ears. The more of them cluster together, the dumber they get. If evil blows up in their faces, they lock themselves in a shell of comforting platitudes and leave factual reality behind. They recast surrender as a virtue so they can still think of themselves as good people. Then when the inevitable happens, they’re shocked. They whimper, wondering how they could’ve foreseen it, even though they silenced anyone who tried to warn them. After a short time of mourning, back to business as usual. Life’s too short, right? Let’s keep believing in a nice world where prayers get answered and goodness reigns, and an invisible father in the sky makes sure disasters happen only to other people—who surely deserve them. Humanity is led by the nose toward complacency like cows. Locked in a psyche that survives by bouncing from one pleasure to the next, they see everything else as a minefield. Uncharted territory they sometimes refuse to even admit exists. They modify their beliefs to match public opinion’s definition of decency, and band together in righteous fury against anyone who names the darkness closing in, with the calm conscience of those who know they’re the majority. So no, I don’t respect them. I can endure five minutes around people before I feel nauseous. The world’s a puddle of vomit, and you, knowing that, still stomp on it and make the mess spread. I can’t fix humanity, but I can clean up some of your stains by wiping you out.”
“You think that’ll revolutionize the world? I barely matter.”
“All that pointless butchery. Breaking into homes and hotel rooms, abducting women and girls, raping and sodomizing them, killing them—sometimes torturing or mutilating them first—for what? You hardly ever stole money. The thrill was your drug, your pleasure. And that’s all there is to it. You did it because you needed to.”
Richard Alcala lowered his head. He slid along like a monk in a procession; all he lacked was a hood to hide his face.
“Do you have any idea how easy it was?” he asked. “They thought I came up because I was nice. I pretended I’d broken my right arm, so they saw me as harmless. My record was four women in one day. All it took was a dazzling smile, and they followed me to the slaughter. The killings they read about happen to other people, and they forget them by flipping the page or turning off the TV. They’ve convinced themselves the universe will protect them from guys like me. They’ve earned it, right? They glaze over the filth because their worldview depends on staying blind. If they really saw me, every pillar holding up their mindset would crumble. They’re dodos—like those birds wiped out in colonial times.”
“I know what the damn dodos were.”
“They exist to waddle until a predator guts them. In the last moment, right when I flash them that final smile, their expressions shift. They become different women. They’d have learned a lesson for next time—except there is no next time. Terror contorts their features as if the glass pane in their minds just got shattered. And when I squeeze their throats, their faces turn red and their eyes search around. They struggle to let some cry for help slip out, but even if they could, none of the people they love and who love them will save them. That just universe they believed in keeps on drifting by inertia, and that nasty business that only ever happened to others—who must’ve deserved it—winds up happening to them. As their brains shut down, they realize that God only ever looked down upon us with hate. I promise you, man, no other look gives me that kind of high.”
When I came back to myself, I was stunned to see we were still on the beach, kicking up sand. Everywhere I looked, the sun flashed on white smiles. Some couples sitting cross-legged or stretched out on towels laughed. But my awareness was tearing down centuries of dusty spiderwebs where I’d been hanging all this time.
I cleared my throat.
“A lot of those women and girls you killed grew up with people who loved them. Adults who took care of them. They didn’t see you coming. You, and monsters like you, thrive in this society because it has no clue how to process you. But I see what you see. On every street I walk, I have to know where I’d escape, how to keep someone from jumping me. If a stranger steps too close, I picture how to counter any attack, which nearby object I could use to stop their heart. I see myself yanking back their hair and landing a punch that shatters their windpipe. Or plunging a pair of scissors into their arteries, jamming them into their eyeballs. The techniques I’ve learned—and performed—loop in my mind over and over in detail. So I see you. And I used to spare people from seeing monsters like you, handing you over to the cops. I thought I was punishing you, forcing you into the system’s jaws, but you’d be coddled by psychs and sociologists who twist language so that you come out the victim. Their weakness seeped into the law. You served ten years. They shaved more time off because you kept busy knitting scarves or some other bullshit, and you walked free as the misunderstood victim, with your identity protected. Some of you went on to kill again. The fools on their thrones who let you back on the streets kept quiet. No one took responsibility. No one even apologized. After all, those rapes and murders happened to other people’s daughters. Our societies have gone soft, adopting the mindset of slaves. They think they’re riding a wave to a brighter future, guaranteed by God, or karma, or progress, or any made-up cosmic payback. Otherwise, they’d have to face that they survive on blind luck. Their sugar-cube minds would collapse. By the time they leave school or college, most have learned all they’ll ever know. They can’t even process new data unless it’s shoved up them like a suppository. Talking is the only tool they’ve got. When evil smears a tarry hand across their faces, they turn into a dog cowering under its master’s beating. Whimpering, tail between their legs, begging, “What do I have to do to make you stop hitting me? Name it.” In their so-called just universe, they must have deserved those blows. Stockholm Syndrome on a societal scale. They figure they’ll fix evil by hugging it, by giving away more of the taxpayers’ money. They feed a beast that dresses in designer brands and uses the latest phones, free to spread darkness 24/7. But I remember that only a sharpened stick keeps predators at bay—and there will always be predators and a flock that needs protecting, because the flock doesn’t know or doesn’t want to protect itself. You know that as well as I do. Even if you picked the other side, you understand.”
Richard Alcala cleared his throat and spoke in a low voice.
“I didn’t choose anything.”
“You should have.”
By then, we’d wandered below the fishing pier, held up by pillars, some angled, that had blackened and thickened at the base from shell encrustations. The pier’s shade spread over us, cooling me down.
I watched Alcala. Would he try to attack me or run?
He limped along, staring at the waves crashing against the pillars. A surfer balanced on his board and glided between the slanted beams as if racing a course.
We passed the pier. With the sun at that angle, every little dune in the sand cast a shadow, highlighting each lump and hollow like a pockmarked surface.
Then Alcala spoke again.
“Why’d you let me kill so many people? What, to teach me a lesson?”
“Cassie was the first victim of yours I found out about. I can only jump back in time if the right combination of rage and despair hits me the moment I learn about a specific victim’s death. That rarely happens when I read about the others. Also, the last time I meddled with the past, there wasn’t even a Richard Alcala killing dozens. Maybe you weren’t even born.”
He lowered his head, frowning, mouth half-open, as though struggling to grasp the joke.
A homeless man was asleep on the sand, using his backpack for a pillow.
“That’s how it goes,” I said. “I hear about some person who fell into a pit. If I care, I jump back and nudge them out of the way. Sometimes I kill the pit itself. If the ones I saved figure out I stepped in, they often get pissed. The rest of the time, I hear them chirp about how we should all be positive, how the universe blesses the worthy. But the universe killed them, and they’d have vanished had I ignored the news. I move on, trying to forget what I’ve seen and done, until the next person drops into another hole. A lot of times it’s just bad luck. But in cases like Cassie’s, if she’d thought twice before getting in your car, she would’ve skated home. And sometimes these same people later stumble into some other hole—because I kept them from learning the hard way. I’m sick of babysitting so many kids at play. If they’d stop running around blind, I wouldn’t need to guard the edge of the cliff to catch whoever’s about to fall.”
Richard Alcala smiled like a terrible poker player holding a winning hand.
“You’ve built a complicated reason for doing what you need.”
“And you cooked up some justification for doing what you want.”
“I’m doing the universe a favor. I’m filtering out the idiots who can’t see danger. Like killing spiders that run along the walls instead of hiding. A few years down the line, only the cautious ones remain. I’m strengthening the human race, friend. These dummies who trust without a second thought, who live in fairy tales—I dole out the fate they deserve. The rest survive to spawn a better generation.”
“You’re a real philanthropist.”
“I’m as vital as a shark. Nature made me. If you kill me, you’ll upset the ecosystem.”
“I’ve met too many serial killers, though none ever begged me to respect biodiversity as an excuse to spare them. Most adopt some moral code in which their murders represent the universe self-correcting. You kill because your brain wiring rewards you with an orgasm. The rest is just an excuse, a balm for whatever faint echo of conscience you have.”
“You don’t know what it’s like. I feel nothing for anyone. When some chick comes up to me at a bar or the office thinking I’d make a nice boyfriend, I feel like I’m hearing a robot talk.”
“I know exactly what that’s like.”
“But when I corner another idiot and the moment comes when I’m inside her and her life flickers out, I’m flooded with a pleasure not of this world. I see heaven. I see God. Why would He condemn me to a numb existence, if all I have to do is smile at a pretty, brainless woman and lure her someplace no one can hear?”
“I’m sorry you were born that way, or raised that way, or both, so that killing is the only thing that gives you feeling. I’m sorry because otherwise I’d be spending my day in a hotel room, discovering music and movies. The universe doesn’t care. You picked between being miserable and being slightly less miserable at the cost of destroying dozens—maybe hundreds—of lives. Those you killed deserved to live more than you deserve a climax.”
He muttered through breaths, like blood loss was making him groggy and he could barely form words.
“All this because I saw that roller-skating kid and wanted her. Cassie, you said. If you’d been one minute late, that kid would’ve climbed in my car like the others I’ve had fun with. She’s nothing special.”
“One among millions.”
“You think she deserved saving more than the others?”
“I don’t know. She’s of average intelligence. She’ll turn into a decent woman, like her mom. Go to school for something ordinary, work some job persuading strangers, or maybe stay home raising kids. Like most, she’ll toss aside her dreams to pay rent and serve others. A couple decades after she dies, all that’s left is a fuzzy memory and a row of photos gathering dust on someone’s table, little stabs of sadness at how time rots everything.”
Alcala let out a groan.
“None of this makes sense. Being born just to die. Such a waste. The more damage I do, the better. It can’t get worse.”
“It can. And some things are worth saving.”
“Like what?”
He asked it in a hollow tone, like he needed a reason.
“Curious people who seek answers, who unveil hidden truths. And art—literature, film, music.”
“I don’t kill musicians.”
“Right, you only kill stupid women. While you were raping and strangling them, did you pause to ask, ‘Sorry, by any chance do you play an instrument?’ When you destroyed a child’s innocence minutes before ending her, did you ever consider what person she might’ve become? You never cared. Don’t lie to yourself.”
He was trudging along like he’d been hauling a hundred pounds for half an hour.
“This is all God’s doing. I’m a demon who escaped from hell, and He sent you to drag me back.”
“Dangerous for me to believe that. You’d probably turn hell into a holiday.”
We’d reached the end of the beach, blocked by a narrow walkway, a breaker, and about three hundred meters of water where a white yacht was heading toward Marina del Rey. We either had to retrace our steps or move onto the walkway.
Richard Alcala halted a stride away and turned to me. His left arm was shaking. With his shaved head white as though it’d never seen sun, and his features twisted in pain, he looked like a patient fresh out of brain surgery.
“What do you think happens next, pal?”
I brushed my jacket, feeling the shape of the Smith & Wesson beneath.
“I’m done debating philosophy with a serial killer. I’m taking you somewhere nobody can hear you. Then I’ll slice off one of your fingers. Tomorrow, I’ll take another. Then another. When you have no fingers left, I’ll hack off an arm. I’ll use a tourniquet so you won’t bleed to death. A few days later, the other arm. Then a leg. Then the other one. Once you’re flopping around like a worm in a puddle of your own fluids, I’ll cut off your balls and make you swallow them. Then I’ll tear out your tongue, gouge your eyes. Finally, I’ll peel off your skin. If you’re still breathing, I’m sure I’ll think of something else.”
-----
Author’s note: this story was originally released in Spanish about a decade ago. It’s contained in my collection titled Los reinos de brea.
January 15, 2025
Smile, Pt. 7 (Fiction)
[check out this part on my personal page, where it looks better]
1313 Main Street turned out to be a record store. I parked the car and got out. I walked past the neighboring shops in case I’d misread the address. Trees with white trunks and thick crowns, pruned where they touched walls and windows, were spaced out along the sidewalks. Their foliage obscured half the facades of the two-story buildings. Amid the sparse traffic, men and women rode by on bicycles. None of those shops hinted at housing a photo studio, nor did it seem likely that Richard Alcala could have convinced an aspiring model that they did.
I went back to the record store. Half the store window was papered over with posters announcing past concerts by Graham Nash, Neil Young, Roy Harper, Hendrix, Morrison. Behind that pane of glass, the rows of boxes must have held about a hundred records.
When I grabbed the door handle, I noticed a wanted poster stuck to the glass. In the headshot, Richard Alcala was smiling as if he’d foreseen I would show up.
I opened the door. A rippling, electrified Hendrix solo greeted me. Behind the record rack that split the store, a man perched on a stool was practicing the intro to “All Along the Watchtower.” A cable dangled from the body of his Stratocaster and plugged into a pedal, and after a small tangle of more cables and pedals, another cord climbed into the input of a Fender Deluxe Reverb amplifier. Though he’d turned the volume so low that from outside I barely noticed him playing, the notes still resonated through my bones. He glanced up while he played.
A door beside the counter led to the back room. I flipped through a crate of albums and came across a Karen Dalton record I wanted to buy.
The man kept tripping over a phrase; on his fourth try, he stopped. He sighed as the notes died away.
“Looking for any album in particular?” he asked.
I pointed at the pedals.
“A Vox Wah, the bulky Arbiter Fuzz Face with germanium transistors, and a Uni-Vibe. The same rig that went to Woodstock.”
He swayed on the stool and smiled.
“I guess I don’t need to sell you any of his albums.”
I kept an eye on the back-room door. How would I bring it up? Should I even bring it up? I’d turned toward the rows of records when I spoke.
“Have you noticed anything strange?”
He twisted the first tuning peg while plucking that string.
“Strange like what?”
“I was wondering if you keep a photography studio in the back, with lights and a king-size bed. Something somebody’s using for questionable purposes.”
He scratched at his stubble and set his pick on top of the amp.
“You know, something did strike me as off. You heard of that guy they call the Prowler?”
I straightened.
“I’m here because of him.”
He ran a hand down one pant leg and took stock of my clothes.
“As a friend?”
“More like the police would be after him.”
He nodded. He thumbed the low E string, and the amplifier dispersed the note.
“I used to see him, or maybe his twin, meeting up with girls across the street. I remember him ‘cause he always had gorgeous girls on his arm, and never the same one.”
“Any minors?”
He flinched.
“No, not that I ever saw. I figured he had money or maybe he could play guitar like Jimi. Then again, that blonde hair might’ve been enough.”
“You don’t know where they used to go?”
“Sorry. When I recognized the guy’s face on the wanted posters, I called the cops, but they must get dozens of calls like that. Are you a cop?”
“No. I won’t let him live. Thanks for telling me.”
As I turned to leave, the man struck a chord that swept through the store.
“Plenty of albums worth your while, buddy.”
“I noticed. I’ll be back another day.”
* * *
I recognized the aspiring model by her ass. She was walking under an archway on her way to Venice Beach.
My heart raced as though finding her guaranteed I’d also run into Richard Alcala. I pulled over across the street and got out as she rounded a corner. I followed the sway of her hips from about thirty feet back. I kept an eye on the people approaching from ahead and behind on my side of the sidewalk, and I alternated glances at the woman, who could’ve passed for an actress straight off a film set, wearing full makeup and somehow lost. Compared to that, yesterday she’d looked like she’d just rolled out of bed.
If the killer had forgotten that he’d mentioned the record store address in front of me and showed up to see his own wanted poster plastered on that door, both the aspiring model and I would be walking right into him.
I followed her for several blocks. A group of men whistled at her and told her to stop; she dipped her head politely, maybe faking shyness. She’d once said the positive vibes she emitted protected her, but getting hassled daily by random men must have worn her thin.
As I crossed a crosswalk to keep her in sight, I remembered that Richard Alcala knew who I was. I’d gotten used to, and even become an expert at, stalking killers and terrorists who didn’t know of my existence—or that someone could travel through time. If they saw my face, they rarely got to see another. But if Richard Alcala intended to kill this woman, he’d be tailing her, a skill he was trained in.
The sun hammered my forehead, frying my brain. My arms and legs tingled. I pulled the wanted poster from the inside pocket of my jacket and studied it, burning the photos into my mind. I spied on every reflection in windshields, car windows, and storefronts to keep tabs on anyone walking by. When a blond guy popped up, and there were a lot of them, I held my breath until I could rule out the Prowler.
I lost sight of the model. I hurried another thirty feet in case she had started running, but she wouldn’t have had time to reach the end of the block. I backtracked while scanning the buildings, the traffic, and the parked cars. If she’d hopped into a vehicle, whether Alcala’s or a stranger’s, she would be gone.
Then I spotted her Hollywood-starlet shape standing by a fenced area covered with identical posters advertising some concert. The entrance led to a wide asphalt lot around a building under construction. Through a gap in the fence, I made out piles of plastic tubing and a cement mixer. She was talking to someone.
I moved along my side of the street until the angle revealed her companion: a white man with a shaved head, aviator sunglasses, and a chestnut-brown mustache. He was wearing a promotional California T-shirt—white, with a black print of palm trees and a sun perched over a horizon—and flared navy-blue pants. His right arm was in a sling. He was smiling like a president who relies on such a charming grin to make people swallow whatever he says. He could have bought that mustache at a costume shop.
They walked deeper into the asphalt lot and stopped by a van. Richard Alcala rubbed his right bicep, the one in the sling, as he chatted through that permanent smile. He pointed at a record player abandoned on the ground.
I touched the outline of my Smith & Wesson under my jacket and darted across the road between two cars. My heart was pounding like a row of drummers awaiting an oncoming army. I hid behind the fence, peeking through an opening to watch the van.
The woman was climbing into the cargo area with the record player, whose weight made her tanned legs quiver. Alcala glanced around. He slipped his right arm out of the sling. He climbed in after her and shut the door.
I started in across the pavement. My right hand slid under my jacket and gripped the Smith & Wesson. The van’s body swayed up and down, side to side, testing the suspension. Music seeped out—“Venus in Furs” by The Velvet Underground—like the soundtrack of a late-night bar. Anyone passing the fence opening would see the van rocking; if someone looked out a window, they might notice, but they’d chalk it up to a spur-of-the-moment hook-up. In a few minutes, the van would settle, the music would fade, and it would drive off into some desert or wooded area.
I inched closer, the chassis dancing, the music growing louder. The van’s shape glowed like heated metal. My breath came in ragged bursts through flared nostrils, my blood rushing to my arms and legs. I wanted to retreat to a hotel room and curl under a steaming shower. I could look away and act like none of this concerned me, the way everyone else did. Let another woman die among so many, then go on living my life. But I had to acknowledge and snuff out evil without excuses, without mercy, saving myself from a future in which I’d regret turning away from that abyss. I’d face it like a legionary wall braced for a frontal assault. I’d guard the frontier of the light, holding back the inky tide even if it devoured my body and mind until I was reduced to a mass of scars. If I abandoned my post, that churning, smoking darkness would flood every corner of the world until it blackened entirely.
-----
Author’s note: today’s songs are “All Along the Watchtower” by Jimi Hendrix, and “Venus in Furs” by The Velvet Underground.
This story is a translation of the novella named “Sonríe” contained in my collection Los reinos de brea, self-published about ten years ago. In case you can’t tell, I was heavily into playing the electric guitar, a Gibson Les Paul concretely, annoying the hell out of my neighbors.
1313 Main Street turned out to be a record store. I parked the car and got out. I walked past the neighboring shops in case I’d misread the address. Trees with white trunks and thick crowns, pruned where they touched walls and windows, were spaced out along the sidewalks. Their foliage obscured half the facades of the two-story buildings. Amid the sparse traffic, men and women rode by on bicycles. None of those shops hinted at housing a photo studio, nor did it seem likely that Richard Alcala could have convinced an aspiring model that they did.
I went back to the record store. Half the store window was papered over with posters announcing past concerts by Graham Nash, Neil Young, Roy Harper, Hendrix, Morrison. Behind that pane of glass, the rows of boxes must have held about a hundred records.
When I grabbed the door handle, I noticed a wanted poster stuck to the glass. In the headshot, Richard Alcala was smiling as if he’d foreseen I would show up.
I opened the door. A rippling, electrified Hendrix solo greeted me. Behind the record rack that split the store, a man perched on a stool was practicing the intro to “All Along the Watchtower.” A cable dangled from the body of his Stratocaster and plugged into a pedal, and after a small tangle of more cables and pedals, another cord climbed into the input of a Fender Deluxe Reverb amplifier. Though he’d turned the volume so low that from outside I barely noticed him playing, the notes still resonated through my bones. He glanced up while he played.
A door beside the counter led to the back room. I flipped through a crate of albums and came across a Karen Dalton record I wanted to buy.
The man kept tripping over a phrase; on his fourth try, he stopped. He sighed as the notes died away.
“Looking for any album in particular?” he asked.
I pointed at the pedals.
“A Vox Wah, the bulky Arbiter Fuzz Face with germanium transistors, and a Uni-Vibe. The same rig that went to Woodstock.”
He swayed on the stool and smiled.
“I guess I don’t need to sell you any of his albums.”
I kept an eye on the back-room door. How would I bring it up? Should I even bring it up? I’d turned toward the rows of records when I spoke.
“Have you noticed anything strange?”
He twisted the first tuning peg while plucking that string.
“Strange like what?”
“I was wondering if you keep a photography studio in the back, with lights and a king-size bed. Something somebody’s using for questionable purposes.”
He scratched at his stubble and set his pick on top of the amp.
“You know, something did strike me as off. You heard of that guy they call the Prowler?”
I straightened.
“I’m here because of him.”
He ran a hand down one pant leg and took stock of my clothes.
“As a friend?”
“More like the police would be after him.”
He nodded. He thumbed the low E string, and the amplifier dispersed the note.
“I used to see him, or maybe his twin, meeting up with girls across the street. I remember him ‘cause he always had gorgeous girls on his arm, and never the same one.”
“Any minors?”
He flinched.
“No, not that I ever saw. I figured he had money or maybe he could play guitar like Jimi. Then again, that blonde hair might’ve been enough.”
“You don’t know where they used to go?”
“Sorry. When I recognized the guy’s face on the wanted posters, I called the cops, but they must get dozens of calls like that. Are you a cop?”
“No. I won’t let him live. Thanks for telling me.”
As I turned to leave, the man struck a chord that swept through the store.
“Plenty of albums worth your while, buddy.”
“I noticed. I’ll be back another day.”
* * *
I recognized the aspiring model by her ass. She was walking under an archway on her way to Venice Beach.
My heart raced as though finding her guaranteed I’d also run into Richard Alcala. I pulled over across the street and got out as she rounded a corner. I followed the sway of her hips from about thirty feet back. I kept an eye on the people approaching from ahead and behind on my side of the sidewalk, and I alternated glances at the woman, who could’ve passed for an actress straight off a film set, wearing full makeup and somehow lost. Compared to that, yesterday she’d looked like she’d just rolled out of bed.
If the killer had forgotten that he’d mentioned the record store address in front of me and showed up to see his own wanted poster plastered on that door, both the aspiring model and I would be walking right into him.
I followed her for several blocks. A group of men whistled at her and told her to stop; she dipped her head politely, maybe faking shyness. She’d once said the positive vibes she emitted protected her, but getting hassled daily by random men must have worn her thin.
As I crossed a crosswalk to keep her in sight, I remembered that Richard Alcala knew who I was. I’d gotten used to, and even become an expert at, stalking killers and terrorists who didn’t know of my existence—or that someone could travel through time. If they saw my face, they rarely got to see another. But if Richard Alcala intended to kill this woman, he’d be tailing her, a skill he was trained in.
The sun hammered my forehead, frying my brain. My arms and legs tingled. I pulled the wanted poster from the inside pocket of my jacket and studied it, burning the photos into my mind. I spied on every reflection in windshields, car windows, and storefronts to keep tabs on anyone walking by. When a blond guy popped up, and there were a lot of them, I held my breath until I could rule out the Prowler.
I lost sight of the model. I hurried another thirty feet in case she had started running, but she wouldn’t have had time to reach the end of the block. I backtracked while scanning the buildings, the traffic, and the parked cars. If she’d hopped into a vehicle, whether Alcala’s or a stranger’s, she would be gone.
Then I spotted her Hollywood-starlet shape standing by a fenced area covered with identical posters advertising some concert. The entrance led to a wide asphalt lot around a building under construction. Through a gap in the fence, I made out piles of plastic tubing and a cement mixer. She was talking to someone.
I moved along my side of the street until the angle revealed her companion: a white man with a shaved head, aviator sunglasses, and a chestnut-brown mustache. He was wearing a promotional California T-shirt—white, with a black print of palm trees and a sun perched over a horizon—and flared navy-blue pants. His right arm was in a sling. He was smiling like a president who relies on such a charming grin to make people swallow whatever he says. He could have bought that mustache at a costume shop.
They walked deeper into the asphalt lot and stopped by a van. Richard Alcala rubbed his right bicep, the one in the sling, as he chatted through that permanent smile. He pointed at a record player abandoned on the ground.
I touched the outline of my Smith & Wesson under my jacket and darted across the road between two cars. My heart was pounding like a row of drummers awaiting an oncoming army. I hid behind the fence, peeking through an opening to watch the van.
The woman was climbing into the cargo area with the record player, whose weight made her tanned legs quiver. Alcala glanced around. He slipped his right arm out of the sling. He climbed in after her and shut the door.
I started in across the pavement. My right hand slid under my jacket and gripped the Smith & Wesson. The van’s body swayed up and down, side to side, testing the suspension. Music seeped out—“Venus in Furs” by The Velvet Underground—like the soundtrack of a late-night bar. Anyone passing the fence opening would see the van rocking; if someone looked out a window, they might notice, but they’d chalk it up to a spur-of-the-moment hook-up. In a few minutes, the van would settle, the music would fade, and it would drive off into some desert or wooded area.
I inched closer, the chassis dancing, the music growing louder. The van’s shape glowed like heated metal. My breath came in ragged bursts through flared nostrils, my blood rushing to my arms and legs. I wanted to retreat to a hotel room and curl under a steaming shower. I could look away and act like none of this concerned me, the way everyone else did. Let another woman die among so many, then go on living my life. But I had to acknowledge and snuff out evil without excuses, without mercy, saving myself from a future in which I’d regret turning away from that abyss. I’d face it like a legionary wall braced for a frontal assault. I’d guard the frontier of the light, holding back the inky tide even if it devoured my body and mind until I was reduced to a mass of scars. If I abandoned my post, that churning, smoking darkness would flood every corner of the world until it blackened entirely.
-----
Author’s note: today’s songs are “All Along the Watchtower” by Jimi Hendrix, and “Venus in Furs” by The Velvet Underground.
This story is a translation of the novella named “Sonríe” contained in my collection Los reinos de brea, self-published about ten years ago. In case you can’t tell, I was heavily into playing the electric guitar, a Gibson Les Paul concretely, annoying the hell out of my neighbors.
Smile, Pt. 6 (Fiction)
[check out this part on my personal page, where it looks better]
The tracker shortened its beeping intervals, suggesting that if I looked around, I would spot the ruby-red body of the Ford Thunderbird. I parked in the first available gap by the curb and switched off the beeps.
A swarm of police officers clustered at the entrance to an alley, going in and out. One officer was struggling to unroll a coil of police tape. Between the uniforms, I spotted the ruby-red car and its open trunk. Two men in jackets and jeans were examining the corpses.
I closed my eyes. I folded my arms over the steering wheel, pressed my forehead against them, and let out a growl for about three seconds, muting the Graham Nash song on the radio. Then I lifted my forehead from my forearms and leaned back in the seat.
Two officers standing guard at the alley mouth were chatting with a reporter who thrust out a microphone connected by a cable to a briefcase slung over his shoulder.
If they had arrested Richard Alcala, the news would be all over it. He’d escaped on foot—who knew where. The throng of officers prevented me from getting close to the Ford Thunderbird to search for a clue or to rescue my transponder from under its chassis.
* * *
The cook—a black man with a shaved head and a wiry beard—arrived with my pineapple chicken dish, humming along to the chorus of “Hurdy Gurdy Man” on the radio. But the station cut the song short to talk about the Prowler, causing the cook to swear. When he set the plate in front of me, greasy sauce splattered onto the table, sending a piece of marinated chicken skidding. I pinched it up and ate it. He’d gone overboard with the pepper.
“Sorry,” said the cook. “It makes me sick.”
“No problem.”
“Another boogeyman.”
“They’re everywhere.”
“Every time they need to distract us from prices, from rising rents, from their corruption. They force us to look the other way, to distrust our neighbors.”
He walked off muttering and came back with a crumpled sheet of paper. He held it up: a wanted poster. Two pictures of Richard Alcala, facing front and in profile against a height chart. He was smiling like a Greek statue even though one side of his lips was split, a bump bulged under his right brow, and that eye was barely open.
“Does that look like the face of a man who could do the atrocities they’re accusing him of?” the cook asked.
“What does a killer of two dozen women and girls even look like?”
His features twisted in disgust.
“You’d see it right away in his photo, believe me. His eyes would scare you, his teeth would be rotted. They need a boogeyman. Out of the hundreds of women who vanish, plenty ran away from home or from a marriage and now live hundreds of miles away. Some took a ride with the wrong driver, sure. Others got killed in robberies, random assaults. But a single man skulking through Southern California murdering dozens, like Death incarnate? What a lie. In a week, the news will drop the story. They’ll say the police nabbed somebody, and they’ll stop talking about the Prowler like he never made headlines. And they won’t dig up the corruption they were covering before this so-called Prowler crawled out of the sewers.”
“I hope it ends in under a week, because I wish I’d never heard about any of it. That I’d slept through it for seven days.”
The cook snorted and smiled from a corner of his mouth.
“I could use a rest like that.”
“Are you going to hang up the poster?”
He bristled as if I’d demanded it.
“You heard what I said, didn’t you?”
“Mind if I keep it?”
He shrugged, folded the poster, and slipped it under my plate.
“Guess it’ll make a keepsake.”
“Maybe if I say his name three times in front of a mirror, the Prowler will appear.”
The cook laughed and shook his head as he moved on to another customer.
When I finished eating and stepped into the scorching two o’clock sun, a little boy darted across without looking, and I reached out to keep him from crashing into me. But a woman rushed up to grab the boy’s hand. They headed down the street as she glanced over her shoulder to see if I was following them.
I leaned on the roof of my car, which burned against my forearm. I rubbed my eyelids. The asphalt felt like a current, dragging at my legs. This Los Angeles, baked by heat in the mid-thirties, was losing color, sliding into black and white.
Back in my car, I drove to the end of the street and turned wherever my subconscious guided me. Sometimes I forgot the car was even carrying me. My arms felt weighed down by lead, and I wanted to hide between four walls in the dark.
I understood why I’d left Richard Alcala’s arrest up to the police, but I should have foreseen that even though I told them I was guiding them to the Prowler, they’d doubt me, just like the rest of the world that turns its eyes from the evil roaming around. If I’d shot Alcala in the face and left someone else to discover the corpse, I’d be wandering Los Angeles by now, looking for a movie theater. With the trunk stuffed with first-edition vinyl, I’d be planning which storage unit to rent so that years later I could retrieve all the records I’d stashed. But Alcala got away. I had rescued Cassie June, who now hated me, and drove Alcala straight to his next victim.
On the sidewalk, a few people had dragged out a radio and were seated around, listening to the latest on the fugitive. As I passed by, the volume rose and fell with the Doppler effect. Young skaters were everywhere—long hair, big smiles. Couples walked by hand-in-hand, wearing tight clothes that showed off their tanned skin. On one corner, a man narrowed his eyes and scanned the horizon, his gaze jumping from one passerby to another. A cop stapled a wanted poster to a telephone pole while a middle-aged couple with two teenagers came up, looking worried.
Was Richard Alcala in hiding? He had been killing every couple of weeks. Could someone like that hold back? When the police closed in on him, Alcala had kept himself busy with rape and murder, like an office worker putting in extra hours. On a map of Southern California, the spots where the Prowler had attacked women were scattered like shrapnel after an explosion, with Los Angeles at the epicenter. I doubted he’d gotten on a boat and set sail across the Pacific, but he could have stolen a car and driven off to Long Beach, Anaheim, Riverside, or San Bernardino, or west to Oxnard or Ventura. Nothing indicated he’d revisit the same hunting ground.
A patrol car went by in the opposite lane. The cop at the wheel had his tan arm sticking out the window, tapping the door panel right over the LAPD badge. My reflection flashed in the mirrored lenses of his sunglasses.
Would Alcala revisit the places where he’d left the bodies? Why would he? Sure, I’d made it clear I knew where three of his corpses were. But once he switched cars, he basically handed those bodies over to the police. That alone was enough to lock him up for life.
Sometimes I glanced at the wanted poster spread out on the passenger seat, then swept my eyes over the sidewalks in case the killer was blending in with the pedestrians. Playing the lottery.
My forearms itched every few minutes, and my sweaty palms made the steering wheel slick. I felt like I was digesting a concrete ball. Alcala remained at large because of me. Cassie’s mother’s face floated into my head, her scornful glare. If I were a serial killer who raped and murdered women and girls day in and day out, what would I do?
Yesterday, I’d caught him in the act of sweet-talking that woman. If I hadn’t visited his apartment, he would have met her at five o’clock at the address he gave her. She’d think this smiling photographer was going to jumpstart her modeling career, but maybe she’d have heard on the news that the police were after the Prowler in the area. She might have canceled the appointment. Really? With no way of contacting the photographer? I’d be following the news, but maybe she wouldn’t. Even if she heard about it, would she grasp the danger? Maybe she was dolling herself up right now to head off to a photo shoot.
-----
Author’s note: this is a translation of a novella I wrote in Spanish about ten years ago, that is contained in my collection Los reinos de brea. Regarding that tracker thing, I’m quite sure I lifted it straight from Cormac McCarthy’s No Country for Old Men. No shame in stealing from the best.
The tracker shortened its beeping intervals, suggesting that if I looked around, I would spot the ruby-red body of the Ford Thunderbird. I parked in the first available gap by the curb and switched off the beeps.
A swarm of police officers clustered at the entrance to an alley, going in and out. One officer was struggling to unroll a coil of police tape. Between the uniforms, I spotted the ruby-red car and its open trunk. Two men in jackets and jeans were examining the corpses.
I closed my eyes. I folded my arms over the steering wheel, pressed my forehead against them, and let out a growl for about three seconds, muting the Graham Nash song on the radio. Then I lifted my forehead from my forearms and leaned back in the seat.
Two officers standing guard at the alley mouth were chatting with a reporter who thrust out a microphone connected by a cable to a briefcase slung over his shoulder.
If they had arrested Richard Alcala, the news would be all over it. He’d escaped on foot—who knew where. The throng of officers prevented me from getting close to the Ford Thunderbird to search for a clue or to rescue my transponder from under its chassis.
* * *
The cook—a black man with a shaved head and a wiry beard—arrived with my pineapple chicken dish, humming along to the chorus of “Hurdy Gurdy Man” on the radio. But the station cut the song short to talk about the Prowler, causing the cook to swear. When he set the plate in front of me, greasy sauce splattered onto the table, sending a piece of marinated chicken skidding. I pinched it up and ate it. He’d gone overboard with the pepper.
“Sorry,” said the cook. “It makes me sick.”
“No problem.”
“Another boogeyman.”
“They’re everywhere.”
“Every time they need to distract us from prices, from rising rents, from their corruption. They force us to look the other way, to distrust our neighbors.”
He walked off muttering and came back with a crumpled sheet of paper. He held it up: a wanted poster. Two pictures of Richard Alcala, facing front and in profile against a height chart. He was smiling like a Greek statue even though one side of his lips was split, a bump bulged under his right brow, and that eye was barely open.
“Does that look like the face of a man who could do the atrocities they’re accusing him of?” the cook asked.
“What does a killer of two dozen women and girls even look like?”
His features twisted in disgust.
“You’d see it right away in his photo, believe me. His eyes would scare you, his teeth would be rotted. They need a boogeyman. Out of the hundreds of women who vanish, plenty ran away from home or from a marriage and now live hundreds of miles away. Some took a ride with the wrong driver, sure. Others got killed in robberies, random assaults. But a single man skulking through Southern California murdering dozens, like Death incarnate? What a lie. In a week, the news will drop the story. They’ll say the police nabbed somebody, and they’ll stop talking about the Prowler like he never made headlines. And they won’t dig up the corruption they were covering before this so-called Prowler crawled out of the sewers.”
“I hope it ends in under a week, because I wish I’d never heard about any of it. That I’d slept through it for seven days.”
The cook snorted and smiled from a corner of his mouth.
“I could use a rest like that.”
“Are you going to hang up the poster?”
He bristled as if I’d demanded it.
“You heard what I said, didn’t you?”
“Mind if I keep it?”
He shrugged, folded the poster, and slipped it under my plate.
“Guess it’ll make a keepsake.”
“Maybe if I say his name three times in front of a mirror, the Prowler will appear.”
The cook laughed and shook his head as he moved on to another customer.
When I finished eating and stepped into the scorching two o’clock sun, a little boy darted across without looking, and I reached out to keep him from crashing into me. But a woman rushed up to grab the boy’s hand. They headed down the street as she glanced over her shoulder to see if I was following them.
I leaned on the roof of my car, which burned against my forearm. I rubbed my eyelids. The asphalt felt like a current, dragging at my legs. This Los Angeles, baked by heat in the mid-thirties, was losing color, sliding into black and white.
Back in my car, I drove to the end of the street and turned wherever my subconscious guided me. Sometimes I forgot the car was even carrying me. My arms felt weighed down by lead, and I wanted to hide between four walls in the dark.
I understood why I’d left Richard Alcala’s arrest up to the police, but I should have foreseen that even though I told them I was guiding them to the Prowler, they’d doubt me, just like the rest of the world that turns its eyes from the evil roaming around. If I’d shot Alcala in the face and left someone else to discover the corpse, I’d be wandering Los Angeles by now, looking for a movie theater. With the trunk stuffed with first-edition vinyl, I’d be planning which storage unit to rent so that years later I could retrieve all the records I’d stashed. But Alcala got away. I had rescued Cassie June, who now hated me, and drove Alcala straight to his next victim.
On the sidewalk, a few people had dragged out a radio and were seated around, listening to the latest on the fugitive. As I passed by, the volume rose and fell with the Doppler effect. Young skaters were everywhere—long hair, big smiles. Couples walked by hand-in-hand, wearing tight clothes that showed off their tanned skin. On one corner, a man narrowed his eyes and scanned the horizon, his gaze jumping from one passerby to another. A cop stapled a wanted poster to a telephone pole while a middle-aged couple with two teenagers came up, looking worried.
Was Richard Alcala in hiding? He had been killing every couple of weeks. Could someone like that hold back? When the police closed in on him, Alcala had kept himself busy with rape and murder, like an office worker putting in extra hours. On a map of Southern California, the spots where the Prowler had attacked women were scattered like shrapnel after an explosion, with Los Angeles at the epicenter. I doubted he’d gotten on a boat and set sail across the Pacific, but he could have stolen a car and driven off to Long Beach, Anaheim, Riverside, or San Bernardino, or west to Oxnard or Ventura. Nothing indicated he’d revisit the same hunting ground.
A patrol car went by in the opposite lane. The cop at the wheel had his tan arm sticking out the window, tapping the door panel right over the LAPD badge. My reflection flashed in the mirrored lenses of his sunglasses.
Would Alcala revisit the places where he’d left the bodies? Why would he? Sure, I’d made it clear I knew where three of his corpses were. But once he switched cars, he basically handed those bodies over to the police. That alone was enough to lock him up for life.
Sometimes I glanced at the wanted poster spread out on the passenger seat, then swept my eyes over the sidewalks in case the killer was blending in with the pedestrians. Playing the lottery.
My forearms itched every few minutes, and my sweaty palms made the steering wheel slick. I felt like I was digesting a concrete ball. Alcala remained at large because of me. Cassie’s mother’s face floated into my head, her scornful glare. If I were a serial killer who raped and murdered women and girls day in and day out, what would I do?
Yesterday, I’d caught him in the act of sweet-talking that woman. If I hadn’t visited his apartment, he would have met her at five o’clock at the address he gave her. She’d think this smiling photographer was going to jumpstart her modeling career, but maybe she’d have heard on the news that the police were after the Prowler in the area. She might have canceled the appointment. Really? With no way of contacting the photographer? I’d be following the news, but maybe she wouldn’t. Even if she heard about it, would she grasp the danger? Maybe she was dolling herself up right now to head off to a photo shoot.
-----
Author’s note: this is a translation of a novella I wrote in Spanish about ten years ago, that is contained in my collection Los reinos de brea. Regarding that tracker thing, I’m quite sure I lifted it straight from Cormac McCarthy’s No Country for Old Men. No shame in stealing from the best.
Smile, Pt. 5 (Fiction)
[check out this part on my personal page, where it looks better]
The man, sprawled on the sofa as if he’d spent sleepless hours watching TV reruns, lifted his eyelids and peeled himself off the backrest. He avoided looking me in the face.
I stood up from my chair, which groaned. Years of running had sculpted the man’s legs, making it hard to tell if he was about to lunge at me.
He sighed and combed through his scalp with his fingers. He gathered his mane of hair as if meaning to tie it at the nape of his neck.
“You’re a pretty entertaining son of a bitch. First time I’ve heard a story like that. Let’s see. You say you come from the future. You found out that yesterday, my yesterday, I kidnapped and killed someone. The little girl on roller skates.” He walked around the coffee table toward the entryway, turning his back on me, and shook his head. “I knew I recognized that car parked outside.”
“You recognize it because you tried to kidnap Cassie, and I stopped you.”
He spun around to face me. His voice had peeled away to that of someone who’d been stuck in traffic for hours.
“You blocked my way, and when I insisted you keep going, you ignored me. You made me late to pick up that girl.”
“You had the oncoming lane free. You could have passed me.”
“And that would’ve been illegal,” he said as if underlining something obvious.
He paced between the record-player cabinet and the opposite wall, while rolling his shoulders like a boxer about to climb into the ring.
“Yesterday you saw me and figured I’d kidnap that girl. You must have heard of the one they call the South California Prowler, linked to at least two dozen disappearances. Assuming that was me, you followed my car to Venice and, I guess, back to my house. You spun some fantasy about coming from the future because you’re crazy, having a psychotic episode triggered by PTSD.”
“I didn’t fight in the war.”
“And now you think you’re some avenger.”
In under forty-eight hours, this man had broken into three homes, raped and murdered the women inside, and attacked two women in separate alleys. Now he was holding off on dispatching the stranger who refused to leave his apartment. Did he believe me? Or was he hung up by the fact that he was dealing with someone claiming to come from the future—someone who had revealed real information?
He stopped next to the record player and leaned one forearm halfway across the Velvet Underground album cover and the smudged lid. He regarded me with weary eyes and pronounced dark circles.
“Regardless of what you’ve heard, the police investigated, questioned me. They booked me and put me on the list of suspects, people they hassle whenever a woman goes missing, while the detectives run around like chickens. They can’t tie me to the Prowler’s victims. You said some employees at other magazines told you about my legal troubles.” He cut off and looked at the ceiling, taking a moment to close his mouth. “They arrested me for sexual assault. When the drugs wore off, the girl regretted having consented. She never told me her age.”
I smiled showing both rows of teeth, making it clear I rejected his lies.
The man bowed his head and rubbed a few smudges off the record player’s plastic cover. He inhaled deeply. He took two steps toward me, though the coffee table stood in the way. He looked at me as if a cold wind were stinging his eyes.
“What are you after, you crazy son of a bitch? You haven’t attacked me the way I expected, with all this crap you’re saying.”
“I’m going to call the police.”
He laughed, a sound like stones clacking together.
“You’ll tell them I was driving behind you when you stopped to pick up a stranger’s little girl, but that you did it because you knew I was going to kidnap her and kill her. You know because you’re from the future. Brilliant. And what if you’re the Prowler, picking up clueless kids in your car? Maybe I should be worried.”
“You’ll never worry that anyone else might be the Prowler.”
The man narrowed his eyes and tensed his jaw.
“Why not stop me, if you’re so sure? Why not try to kill me? Easier than giving me a lecture, I’d think.”
“I’m tired of saving this ungrateful society that staggers around with its eyes closed. Let the police handle it. You’ll remember how you ended up in prison, up until the day they sort out the paperwork and execute you. If you spend decades on death row and some politician forgets your rapes and mutilations and murders, decides that keeping you locked up is inhumane, lacking compassion, or whatever redefinition of weakness and cowardice they come up with, and lets you out, every time you look at a woman, you’ll know I’ll return to wreck your fun.”
He stretched one arm toward the phone mounted on the wall next to the kitchen counter.
“Go ahead. You’ve got no evidence, whoever you are. Your word against mine.” He raised his voice as though slapping me with it. “The word of some whack job who says he comes from the future!”
I walked past the coffee table, and past him, heading to the kitchen.
He stepped back until his spine hit the record player.
“I’ll tell them you refuse to leave my house.”
I took the receiver off the hook, pressed it to my ear, and dialed three numbers.
He swept the apartment with his gaze, from the kitchen to the curtain at the back of the living room, as if taking inventory of his possessions. A bead of sweat rolled down from his hairline and got caught in an eyebrow. He touched the handle of the first drawer under the record player cabinet, but within two seconds his arm jerked back. He tugged at the collar of his shirt.
“You’re really going to do it,” he said in a dull tone. “Call the cops. Jesus.”
An operator announced that I’d reached the Los Angeles Police Department.
“Write down this address,” I said. “Number twenty-four on Ninth Street at Hoffenbach Avenue.”
“Twenty-four on Ninth at Hoffenbach. What’s your emergency?”
“That’s where Richard Alcala lives, the South California Prowler. He’s inside his apartment. In the parking lot, you’ll find his ruby-red Ford Thunderbird. Check the trunk.”
I hung up.
He looked at me as if possessed. Past the sleeves of his shirt, the muscles in his forearms bulged. His nostrils flared, and his face reddened.
“You plan on sticking around till they show up?”
I moved away from the phone and blocked the doorway.
“Till they show up, if you don’t mind.”
He grabbed The Velvet Underground album jacket and wrestled to pull the record free.
“You’ve ruined my day, clown. You pretended you worked for that magazine, but nobody at that office knows you came, and I doubt you talked to any employee at the other magazines about me. Maybe you told someone else about your plan, but I can deny you ever turned up. And you’re not a cop.”
He hooked his index finger into the record’s center hole and slid the sleeve back into his collection. He lifted the lid of the record player. He set the disc on the turntable and guided the needle to the first track. He turned the volume knob and switched on the player. The opening of “Who Loves the Sun” flooded the apartment as if I’d snuck into a nightclub.
I moved near one arm of the sofa while he pulled on the first drawer’s handle. He took out a gun—a 9mm Smith & Wesson semi-automatic with a cloud-gray slide. As he raised the weapon, he froze and stared at it as if surprised to be holding it. He blinked. He extended his right arm, aiming at my chest. His brow creased. Between his parted lips, clenched teeth.
“You going to shoot me or what?” I said.
A drop of sweat slid down his temple. His pupils quivered. He smiled like a shy student posing for his yearbook photo.
“You’re accusing me of killing dozens of women, and you think that the notion of shooting you would bother me?”
“Twenty-something, that we know of.”
“You broke into my apartment. I could say you were robbing me and I feared for my life. You think a gunshot would alarm the neighbors? My neighbor on the right gets home at seven, and the old toad to my left cranks her TV so high I sleep with earplugs. They think I’m a friendly guy. They’ve never complained. Worst case, they’ll think it’s a champagne cork.”
“Then pull the trigger.”
The pistol trembled. He squinted. The artery in his neck was throbbing.
“You told me you took a minor girl home,” I said. “Or somewhere else. Then she later regretted that romantic encounter under the influence of any of the drugs that are all over the place at this time. Quite the euphemism for the fact that one afternoon you broke into a hotel room, where a woman was resting, and you raped her. And that her husband walked in while you were strangling his wife with a lamp cord. He beat the hell out of you. I’ve seen the pictures. You healed without scars. And you stayed out of prison because they refused to travel hundreds of miles to testify. Facing you again would have traumatized them, though less than you traumatized the victims who followed.”
I stooped to reach the open photo album and pulled it closer, onto my corner of the coffee table. He lowered the pistol toward my gut, distracted. I pressed a finger to the photo of a woman with bleached blonde hair done in two pigtails. Naked save for a bra printed with a red-and-yellow pattern. She was perched on the edge of a king-size bed, tilting her head so that locks of hair fell across her tanned features.
“I recognize this woman. Sandra Arras. You cornered her in an alley, I imagine in a way similar to how you cornered a couple of others who managed to escape. You faked having a broken arm under a phony cast. You smiled at her and led her to a van. Why would she refuse to help a friendly photographer? The moment she climbed in, holding onto one end of some piece of furniture, you shut the trunk and attacked her. You gouged out her eyes and kept them, who knows why. I don’t know the other women on these two pages. Maybe you killed them and no one ever found out, or you just took pictures and they lost themselves back in the jungle.”
I straightened. The man raised the gun to point at my heart while staring with a reptilian gaze.
“You loved it,” I said. “Locking them in the dark. Terrifying them. Torturing them. Making them realize no one would save them.”
“You’ve got a mic on. You think I’m going to confess? If I had killed those women, their bodies would be gone. Plenty of places to dump them. No bodies, no proof.”
“They took eight years to find the first one. They dug up Sandra Arras on one of the hills. They found Lisa Redman near Riverside, inside a buried car. Some divers discovered the trash bags holding Annette Warner at the bottom of a pond.”
His breathing came fast as a bird’s, his pupils twitching. He let out a growl that blended with the song’s vowels.
I took a step forward.
“When you picked up the gun, you felt the weight shift. You know you left a magazine in it.”
He hurled the Smith & Wesson at me. I sidestepped. The pistol ricocheted off the stack of books, scattering them, then hit the floor.
He sprinted to the kitchen. Grabbed the hammer. He charged at me, hair flying around with each stride, arm raised stiff as a stretched rubber band. His eyelids had stretched back, revealing the whites of his eyes, and his wet lips were pulled into a grin.
That would have been enough against a helpless victim. As he whipped the hammer at my skull, I blocked his wrist with my left forearm, then slammed a right-handed punch between his eyes. He spat a growl, spraying saliva. He staggered backward. I grabbed his right wrist and twisted that arm behind his back, then I shoved him down until he was on his knees, forcing his elbow as if to snap it. He loosened his grip on the hammer, and I ripped it away. I smashed the hammer into his side at kidney height. He screamed and collapsed.
When I let go of his wrist, he leaped upright. He climbed onto one arm of the sofa, dug a foot into a cushion, tried to clear the other arm, but tripped and went down on his shoulder with a crash. He crawled away, half on all fours like a cave beast, all the way to the closed bedroom door.
I looked for the Smith & Wesson. It had fallen behind me, between the entryway and the bookcase.
The bedroom door was open. The man was gone.
I crouched and picked up the pistol. With my free hand, I rummaged in the inside left pocket of my jacket. I took out the magazine. I slid it into the pistol grip and pressed it with my palm until it clicked.
After I straightened, I aimed at the bedroom doorway and racked the Smith & Wesson’s slide. The man emerged looking dazed. He’d gone pale as if dunked in ice water. He braced a hand on the doorframe and raised his gaze at me, confused.
“The shotgun under the bed,” I said. “I don’t know how much a decent security system costs these days, but you should’ve invested in protection against burglars.”
He hunched his shoulders, tucking his head in, and blinked slowly as though it took effort to keep his eyes open. A dark bruise was forming between his eyebrows.
When I opened my mouth to speak, he lurched at me, fists clenched. I aimed a few inches from his left ear and pulled the trigger. The shot echoed like a drumbeat. A crater of splinters appeared in the bedroom doorframe.
The living room reeked of hot gunpowder. He froze as though he’d just heard a voice call out inside an abandoned house. A loose strand of hair dangled over his left eye, and saliva glistened at the corners of his mouth.
The throb of blood in my ears gradually died down. When he glanced at the entrance door, I heard, faint under the music, someone pounding and, between the muffled words jumbled by the song, I caught the word “Police.”
He looked at me. He stepped gingerly around the space between the coffee table and the record player as if walking on shards of glass. I shifted to aim at him head-on. He slipped over to the entryway, and while the pounding shook the door, he glanced back as if waiting for me to shoot him in the back of the skull.
He opened the door and used his body to block the gap. Over his blond mane I saw the policeman’s cap.
I lowered the Smith & Wesson, flipped the safety on. Slipped the barrel between my waistband and stomach, pulling my shirt over it.
He left the apartment and closed the door. Through the window curtain, I saw two silhouettes move toward the stairs.
I rushed to the record player and shut it off. In comparison, the hum of the fans sounded as if I were floating underwater. I took out the Smith & Wesson again, though I hid it behind my body, and bent toward the window. I moved the curtain a few inches.
Beyond the railings I caught sight of the man and the policeman in the parking lot. The cop, back to me, had his right hand on the holster at his belt. The man—Richard Alcala—wore that grin that swayed anyone who believed in smiles. Except for his messy hair as if someone had shoved him off a bed, and the bruise between his eyes, he could pass for someone who’d just cranked up the music and smoked weed until annoyed neighbors called the police.
The cop’s head bobbed as he spoke, but from up here they might as well have been pantomiming. Alcala opened his Ford Thunderbird’s door and leaned in. He pulled out some folded papers. The policeman wrote on a notepad. The killer glanced over his shoulder at me like I was a ghost peering out a window. The cop nodded and handed back the papers. Alcala dropped them onto the driver’s seat. The officer pointed to the trunk of the Thunderbird. Alcala shrugged and moved his lips. They circled around the car to the trunk. Alcala, on the officer’s right, was smiling as he spoke and turned his key in the lock. When he lifted the trunk lid, both men recoiled. The cop went for his gun, but the killer, snake-quick, clamped onto the officer’s forearm. They struggled.
I yanked the apartment door open and stepped onto the second-floor landing. Shouts rose as both men traded punches like two boxers pinned in a corner. Should I brace my forearms on the railing and aim at Alcala?
At the far end of the landing, a neighbor stared with his jaw slack, a lit cigarette between his fingers. A dozen onlookers hurried toward the parking lot like people drawn to a burning house.
I was halfway down the stairs when a gunshot rang out. I ducked. The policeman had fallen, and clutched at his stomach. His pistol bounced across the asphalt. Alcala slid behind the Thunderbird’s wheel and slammed the door.
After I jumped onto the sidewalk, I tore through the parking lot as the Thunderbird’s engine roared and its tires screeched, smoking. The air smelled of burnt rubber. A cluster of bystanders shrieked and jumped aside while the car lurched onto the sidewalk and dropped onto the road with a squeal of rubber. The edge of the Thunderbird’s nose smashed into the left headlight of an AMC Gremlin, blowing it out in a spray of glass and grinding metal. The Thunderbird straightened and sped away.
I dashed to my rental, fumbling to hide the gun at my waistband. I nearly tripped over the policeman, who was gasping. I reached my car door, hand on the handle.
The Thunderbird had vanished at the far end of the street. The owner of the AMC Gremlin, the one Alcala had hit, shook his head and shouted at the onlookers near his wrecked headlight, as if they were to blame.
The cop groaned. His hat lay on the asphalt. His hair was jet-black and slicked down. He was pressing bloody hands to one side of his guts.
I seethed with rage. I had Richard Alcala in my sights, I could have blown a hole right between his eyes. I should have killed him, even if society stayed blind and other monsters came crawling up. But I’d banked on the police doing their job. Maybe I could track that Thunderbird in a few minutes, following the transponder signals.
The crowd that had seen the shooting was dispersing. The man with the cigarette was still leaning on the second-floor railing, eyeing the cop like he was roadkill on the highway.
Maybe someone had gone to call for an ambulance, but could I trust these people? They were like toddlers crawling around in diapers, babbling nonsense. I slammed a fist against my car door. I turned back to the wounded policeman, who was shaking, and I crouched beside him.
He had olive-toned, sweaty skin and a mustache that was notably thick for someone who seemed to be in his mid-twenties. Blood leaked between the fingers laced over his abdomen.
“I’m sorry,” I said.
The officer became aware of my presence and laughed through ragged coughs.
“I’ve spilled enough blood overseas,” he rasped in a shaky voice with a Hispanic accent. “They blew out my subclavian artery. Not looking to bleed out again. But give me a hand.”
“An ambulance, I suppose. Using the radio in your cruiser?”
He nodded vigorously.
“And tell them to put out a BOLO on Richard Alcala. He’s fleeing in a ruby-red Ford Thunderbird, plates number 1DNE049. You got that plate memorized?”
“I read it before.”
I notified dispatch that an officer was down. I repeated the address of the apartment and the name of the Prowler, plus the license plate. I rushed back to the officer. I wanted to check for an exit wound, but I held back from moving him. The smell of brass and diarrhea surrounded us. The bullet must have torn through his intestines. If they didn’t get him to a hospital, he’d bleed out or die from infection. As I started to pull off my jacket, I remembered I had the gun tucked there, so instead I used my bare palm to press against the bullet’s entry hole.
His face was drenched, and he laid his head on the pavement, breathing through his mouth like a woman in labor. Shadows covered us, blocking the sun. The circle of gawkers made me edgy as if they might gang up to beat me.
“Three people,” the policeman mumbled.
“What’s that?”
“Three bodies in that trunk. Decomposed. Three skulls. Maybe he really is the Prowler.”
I had to pretend I was just some citizen who’d called in. Meanwhile, I was kneeling in blood and filth. My shirt clung to my back, and I felt dizzy as if I’d been awake for twenty-four hours, hopped up on coffee. The people around us looked like tall silhouettes against a blue sky, their speech a tangled mass of nonsense.
I’d never stuck around to deal with the police whenever I involved them. I’d go back to my own time and read the articles they wrote about my intervention years before. This cop was suffering, and he might die, because I fucked up.
“You got a tip that the Prowler lived here?” I asked.
“The dispatcher said someone called in, naming him.”
“And they sent a lone officer, a single unit?”
He groaned. He lifted his head off the pavement to glance at the mess around his abdomen, and the skin under his chin bunched up.
“If they sent out most of us every time someone claimed they knew who the Prowler was, we’d barely solve any other cases.”
-----
Author’s note: today’s song is, predictably, The Velvet Underground’s “Who Loves the Sun.”
This is the translation of a novella I wrote in Spanish about ten years ago. It’s contained in my self-published book Los reinos de brea.
The man, sprawled on the sofa as if he’d spent sleepless hours watching TV reruns, lifted his eyelids and peeled himself off the backrest. He avoided looking me in the face.
I stood up from my chair, which groaned. Years of running had sculpted the man’s legs, making it hard to tell if he was about to lunge at me.
He sighed and combed through his scalp with his fingers. He gathered his mane of hair as if meaning to tie it at the nape of his neck.
“You’re a pretty entertaining son of a bitch. First time I’ve heard a story like that. Let’s see. You say you come from the future. You found out that yesterday, my yesterday, I kidnapped and killed someone. The little girl on roller skates.” He walked around the coffee table toward the entryway, turning his back on me, and shook his head. “I knew I recognized that car parked outside.”
“You recognize it because you tried to kidnap Cassie, and I stopped you.”
He spun around to face me. His voice had peeled away to that of someone who’d been stuck in traffic for hours.
“You blocked my way, and when I insisted you keep going, you ignored me. You made me late to pick up that girl.”
“You had the oncoming lane free. You could have passed me.”
“And that would’ve been illegal,” he said as if underlining something obvious.
He paced between the record-player cabinet and the opposite wall, while rolling his shoulders like a boxer about to climb into the ring.
“Yesterday you saw me and figured I’d kidnap that girl. You must have heard of the one they call the South California Prowler, linked to at least two dozen disappearances. Assuming that was me, you followed my car to Venice and, I guess, back to my house. You spun some fantasy about coming from the future because you’re crazy, having a psychotic episode triggered by PTSD.”
“I didn’t fight in the war.”
“And now you think you’re some avenger.”
In under forty-eight hours, this man had broken into three homes, raped and murdered the women inside, and attacked two women in separate alleys. Now he was holding off on dispatching the stranger who refused to leave his apartment. Did he believe me? Or was he hung up by the fact that he was dealing with someone claiming to come from the future—someone who had revealed real information?
He stopped next to the record player and leaned one forearm halfway across the Velvet Underground album cover and the smudged lid. He regarded me with weary eyes and pronounced dark circles.
“Regardless of what you’ve heard, the police investigated, questioned me. They booked me and put me on the list of suspects, people they hassle whenever a woman goes missing, while the detectives run around like chickens. They can’t tie me to the Prowler’s victims. You said some employees at other magazines told you about my legal troubles.” He cut off and looked at the ceiling, taking a moment to close his mouth. “They arrested me for sexual assault. When the drugs wore off, the girl regretted having consented. She never told me her age.”
I smiled showing both rows of teeth, making it clear I rejected his lies.
The man bowed his head and rubbed a few smudges off the record player’s plastic cover. He inhaled deeply. He took two steps toward me, though the coffee table stood in the way. He looked at me as if a cold wind were stinging his eyes.
“What are you after, you crazy son of a bitch? You haven’t attacked me the way I expected, with all this crap you’re saying.”
“I’m going to call the police.”
He laughed, a sound like stones clacking together.
“You’ll tell them I was driving behind you when you stopped to pick up a stranger’s little girl, but that you did it because you knew I was going to kidnap her and kill her. You know because you’re from the future. Brilliant. And what if you’re the Prowler, picking up clueless kids in your car? Maybe I should be worried.”
“You’ll never worry that anyone else might be the Prowler.”
The man narrowed his eyes and tensed his jaw.
“Why not stop me, if you’re so sure? Why not try to kill me? Easier than giving me a lecture, I’d think.”
“I’m tired of saving this ungrateful society that staggers around with its eyes closed. Let the police handle it. You’ll remember how you ended up in prison, up until the day they sort out the paperwork and execute you. If you spend decades on death row and some politician forgets your rapes and mutilations and murders, decides that keeping you locked up is inhumane, lacking compassion, or whatever redefinition of weakness and cowardice they come up with, and lets you out, every time you look at a woman, you’ll know I’ll return to wreck your fun.”
He stretched one arm toward the phone mounted on the wall next to the kitchen counter.
“Go ahead. You’ve got no evidence, whoever you are. Your word against mine.” He raised his voice as though slapping me with it. “The word of some whack job who says he comes from the future!”
I walked past the coffee table, and past him, heading to the kitchen.
He stepped back until his spine hit the record player.
“I’ll tell them you refuse to leave my house.”
I took the receiver off the hook, pressed it to my ear, and dialed three numbers.
He swept the apartment with his gaze, from the kitchen to the curtain at the back of the living room, as if taking inventory of his possessions. A bead of sweat rolled down from his hairline and got caught in an eyebrow. He touched the handle of the first drawer under the record player cabinet, but within two seconds his arm jerked back. He tugged at the collar of his shirt.
“You’re really going to do it,” he said in a dull tone. “Call the cops. Jesus.”
An operator announced that I’d reached the Los Angeles Police Department.
“Write down this address,” I said. “Number twenty-four on Ninth Street at Hoffenbach Avenue.”
“Twenty-four on Ninth at Hoffenbach. What’s your emergency?”
“That’s where Richard Alcala lives, the South California Prowler. He’s inside his apartment. In the parking lot, you’ll find his ruby-red Ford Thunderbird. Check the trunk.”
I hung up.
He looked at me as if possessed. Past the sleeves of his shirt, the muscles in his forearms bulged. His nostrils flared, and his face reddened.
“You plan on sticking around till they show up?”
I moved away from the phone and blocked the doorway.
“Till they show up, if you don’t mind.”
He grabbed The Velvet Underground album jacket and wrestled to pull the record free.
“You’ve ruined my day, clown. You pretended you worked for that magazine, but nobody at that office knows you came, and I doubt you talked to any employee at the other magazines about me. Maybe you told someone else about your plan, but I can deny you ever turned up. And you’re not a cop.”
He hooked his index finger into the record’s center hole and slid the sleeve back into his collection. He lifted the lid of the record player. He set the disc on the turntable and guided the needle to the first track. He turned the volume knob and switched on the player. The opening of “Who Loves the Sun” flooded the apartment as if I’d snuck into a nightclub.
I moved near one arm of the sofa while he pulled on the first drawer’s handle. He took out a gun—a 9mm Smith & Wesson semi-automatic with a cloud-gray slide. As he raised the weapon, he froze and stared at it as if surprised to be holding it. He blinked. He extended his right arm, aiming at my chest. His brow creased. Between his parted lips, clenched teeth.
“You going to shoot me or what?” I said.
A drop of sweat slid down his temple. His pupils quivered. He smiled like a shy student posing for his yearbook photo.
“You’re accusing me of killing dozens of women, and you think that the notion of shooting you would bother me?”
“Twenty-something, that we know of.”
“You broke into my apartment. I could say you were robbing me and I feared for my life. You think a gunshot would alarm the neighbors? My neighbor on the right gets home at seven, and the old toad to my left cranks her TV so high I sleep with earplugs. They think I’m a friendly guy. They’ve never complained. Worst case, they’ll think it’s a champagne cork.”
“Then pull the trigger.”
The pistol trembled. He squinted. The artery in his neck was throbbing.
“You told me you took a minor girl home,” I said. “Or somewhere else. Then she later regretted that romantic encounter under the influence of any of the drugs that are all over the place at this time. Quite the euphemism for the fact that one afternoon you broke into a hotel room, where a woman was resting, and you raped her. And that her husband walked in while you were strangling his wife with a lamp cord. He beat the hell out of you. I’ve seen the pictures. You healed without scars. And you stayed out of prison because they refused to travel hundreds of miles to testify. Facing you again would have traumatized them, though less than you traumatized the victims who followed.”
I stooped to reach the open photo album and pulled it closer, onto my corner of the coffee table. He lowered the pistol toward my gut, distracted. I pressed a finger to the photo of a woman with bleached blonde hair done in two pigtails. Naked save for a bra printed with a red-and-yellow pattern. She was perched on the edge of a king-size bed, tilting her head so that locks of hair fell across her tanned features.
“I recognize this woman. Sandra Arras. You cornered her in an alley, I imagine in a way similar to how you cornered a couple of others who managed to escape. You faked having a broken arm under a phony cast. You smiled at her and led her to a van. Why would she refuse to help a friendly photographer? The moment she climbed in, holding onto one end of some piece of furniture, you shut the trunk and attacked her. You gouged out her eyes and kept them, who knows why. I don’t know the other women on these two pages. Maybe you killed them and no one ever found out, or you just took pictures and they lost themselves back in the jungle.”
I straightened. The man raised the gun to point at my heart while staring with a reptilian gaze.
“You loved it,” I said. “Locking them in the dark. Terrifying them. Torturing them. Making them realize no one would save them.”
“You’ve got a mic on. You think I’m going to confess? If I had killed those women, their bodies would be gone. Plenty of places to dump them. No bodies, no proof.”
“They took eight years to find the first one. They dug up Sandra Arras on one of the hills. They found Lisa Redman near Riverside, inside a buried car. Some divers discovered the trash bags holding Annette Warner at the bottom of a pond.”
His breathing came fast as a bird’s, his pupils twitching. He let out a growl that blended with the song’s vowels.
I took a step forward.
“When you picked up the gun, you felt the weight shift. You know you left a magazine in it.”
He hurled the Smith & Wesson at me. I sidestepped. The pistol ricocheted off the stack of books, scattering them, then hit the floor.
He sprinted to the kitchen. Grabbed the hammer. He charged at me, hair flying around with each stride, arm raised stiff as a stretched rubber band. His eyelids had stretched back, revealing the whites of his eyes, and his wet lips were pulled into a grin.
That would have been enough against a helpless victim. As he whipped the hammer at my skull, I blocked his wrist with my left forearm, then slammed a right-handed punch between his eyes. He spat a growl, spraying saliva. He staggered backward. I grabbed his right wrist and twisted that arm behind his back, then I shoved him down until he was on his knees, forcing his elbow as if to snap it. He loosened his grip on the hammer, and I ripped it away. I smashed the hammer into his side at kidney height. He screamed and collapsed.
When I let go of his wrist, he leaped upright. He climbed onto one arm of the sofa, dug a foot into a cushion, tried to clear the other arm, but tripped and went down on his shoulder with a crash. He crawled away, half on all fours like a cave beast, all the way to the closed bedroom door.
I looked for the Smith & Wesson. It had fallen behind me, between the entryway and the bookcase.
The bedroom door was open. The man was gone.
I crouched and picked up the pistol. With my free hand, I rummaged in the inside left pocket of my jacket. I took out the magazine. I slid it into the pistol grip and pressed it with my palm until it clicked.
After I straightened, I aimed at the bedroom doorway and racked the Smith & Wesson’s slide. The man emerged looking dazed. He’d gone pale as if dunked in ice water. He braced a hand on the doorframe and raised his gaze at me, confused.
“The shotgun under the bed,” I said. “I don’t know how much a decent security system costs these days, but you should’ve invested in protection against burglars.”
He hunched his shoulders, tucking his head in, and blinked slowly as though it took effort to keep his eyes open. A dark bruise was forming between his eyebrows.
When I opened my mouth to speak, he lurched at me, fists clenched. I aimed a few inches from his left ear and pulled the trigger. The shot echoed like a drumbeat. A crater of splinters appeared in the bedroom doorframe.
The living room reeked of hot gunpowder. He froze as though he’d just heard a voice call out inside an abandoned house. A loose strand of hair dangled over his left eye, and saliva glistened at the corners of his mouth.
The throb of blood in my ears gradually died down. When he glanced at the entrance door, I heard, faint under the music, someone pounding and, between the muffled words jumbled by the song, I caught the word “Police.”
He looked at me. He stepped gingerly around the space between the coffee table and the record player as if walking on shards of glass. I shifted to aim at him head-on. He slipped over to the entryway, and while the pounding shook the door, he glanced back as if waiting for me to shoot him in the back of the skull.
He opened the door and used his body to block the gap. Over his blond mane I saw the policeman’s cap.
I lowered the Smith & Wesson, flipped the safety on. Slipped the barrel between my waistband and stomach, pulling my shirt over it.
He left the apartment and closed the door. Through the window curtain, I saw two silhouettes move toward the stairs.
I rushed to the record player and shut it off. In comparison, the hum of the fans sounded as if I were floating underwater. I took out the Smith & Wesson again, though I hid it behind my body, and bent toward the window. I moved the curtain a few inches.
Beyond the railings I caught sight of the man and the policeman in the parking lot. The cop, back to me, had his right hand on the holster at his belt. The man—Richard Alcala—wore that grin that swayed anyone who believed in smiles. Except for his messy hair as if someone had shoved him off a bed, and the bruise between his eyes, he could pass for someone who’d just cranked up the music and smoked weed until annoyed neighbors called the police.
The cop’s head bobbed as he spoke, but from up here they might as well have been pantomiming. Alcala opened his Ford Thunderbird’s door and leaned in. He pulled out some folded papers. The policeman wrote on a notepad. The killer glanced over his shoulder at me like I was a ghost peering out a window. The cop nodded and handed back the papers. Alcala dropped them onto the driver’s seat. The officer pointed to the trunk of the Thunderbird. Alcala shrugged and moved his lips. They circled around the car to the trunk. Alcala, on the officer’s right, was smiling as he spoke and turned his key in the lock. When he lifted the trunk lid, both men recoiled. The cop went for his gun, but the killer, snake-quick, clamped onto the officer’s forearm. They struggled.
I yanked the apartment door open and stepped onto the second-floor landing. Shouts rose as both men traded punches like two boxers pinned in a corner. Should I brace my forearms on the railing and aim at Alcala?
At the far end of the landing, a neighbor stared with his jaw slack, a lit cigarette between his fingers. A dozen onlookers hurried toward the parking lot like people drawn to a burning house.
I was halfway down the stairs when a gunshot rang out. I ducked. The policeman had fallen, and clutched at his stomach. His pistol bounced across the asphalt. Alcala slid behind the Thunderbird’s wheel and slammed the door.
After I jumped onto the sidewalk, I tore through the parking lot as the Thunderbird’s engine roared and its tires screeched, smoking. The air smelled of burnt rubber. A cluster of bystanders shrieked and jumped aside while the car lurched onto the sidewalk and dropped onto the road with a squeal of rubber. The edge of the Thunderbird’s nose smashed into the left headlight of an AMC Gremlin, blowing it out in a spray of glass and grinding metal. The Thunderbird straightened and sped away.
I dashed to my rental, fumbling to hide the gun at my waistband. I nearly tripped over the policeman, who was gasping. I reached my car door, hand on the handle.
The Thunderbird had vanished at the far end of the street. The owner of the AMC Gremlin, the one Alcala had hit, shook his head and shouted at the onlookers near his wrecked headlight, as if they were to blame.
The cop groaned. His hat lay on the asphalt. His hair was jet-black and slicked down. He was pressing bloody hands to one side of his guts.
I seethed with rage. I had Richard Alcala in my sights, I could have blown a hole right between his eyes. I should have killed him, even if society stayed blind and other monsters came crawling up. But I’d banked on the police doing their job. Maybe I could track that Thunderbird in a few minutes, following the transponder signals.
The crowd that had seen the shooting was dispersing. The man with the cigarette was still leaning on the second-floor railing, eyeing the cop like he was roadkill on the highway.
Maybe someone had gone to call for an ambulance, but could I trust these people? They were like toddlers crawling around in diapers, babbling nonsense. I slammed a fist against my car door. I turned back to the wounded policeman, who was shaking, and I crouched beside him.
He had olive-toned, sweaty skin and a mustache that was notably thick for someone who seemed to be in his mid-twenties. Blood leaked between the fingers laced over his abdomen.
“I’m sorry,” I said.
The officer became aware of my presence and laughed through ragged coughs.
“I’ve spilled enough blood overseas,” he rasped in a shaky voice with a Hispanic accent. “They blew out my subclavian artery. Not looking to bleed out again. But give me a hand.”
“An ambulance, I suppose. Using the radio in your cruiser?”
He nodded vigorously.
“And tell them to put out a BOLO on Richard Alcala. He’s fleeing in a ruby-red Ford Thunderbird, plates number 1DNE049. You got that plate memorized?”
“I read it before.”
I notified dispatch that an officer was down. I repeated the address of the apartment and the name of the Prowler, plus the license plate. I rushed back to the officer. I wanted to check for an exit wound, but I held back from moving him. The smell of brass and diarrhea surrounded us. The bullet must have torn through his intestines. If they didn’t get him to a hospital, he’d bleed out or die from infection. As I started to pull off my jacket, I remembered I had the gun tucked there, so instead I used my bare palm to press against the bullet’s entry hole.
His face was drenched, and he laid his head on the pavement, breathing through his mouth like a woman in labor. Shadows covered us, blocking the sun. The circle of gawkers made me edgy as if they might gang up to beat me.
“Three people,” the policeman mumbled.
“What’s that?”
“Three bodies in that trunk. Decomposed. Three skulls. Maybe he really is the Prowler.”
I had to pretend I was just some citizen who’d called in. Meanwhile, I was kneeling in blood and filth. My shirt clung to my back, and I felt dizzy as if I’d been awake for twenty-four hours, hopped up on coffee. The people around us looked like tall silhouettes against a blue sky, their speech a tangled mass of nonsense.
I’d never stuck around to deal with the police whenever I involved them. I’d go back to my own time and read the articles they wrote about my intervention years before. This cop was suffering, and he might die, because I fucked up.
“You got a tip that the Prowler lived here?” I asked.
“The dispatcher said someone called in, naming him.”
“And they sent a lone officer, a single unit?”
He groaned. He lifted his head off the pavement to glance at the mess around his abdomen, and the skin under his chin bunched up.
“If they sent out most of us every time someone claimed they knew who the Prowler was, we’d barely solve any other cases.”
-----
Author’s note: today’s song is, predictably, The Velvet Underground’s “Who Loves the Sun.”
This is the translation of a novella I wrote in Spanish about ten years ago. It’s contained in my self-published book Los reinos de brea.
January 14, 2025
Smile, Pt. 4 (Fiction)
[check out this part on my personal page, where it looks better]
I followed him inside. The apartment was painted parrot green. Two fans droned away, airing it out. Even next to this individual, I preferred the indoors to the barbecue-like heat outside.
“Small,” the man said. “It’s hard for me to guarantee steady income. But I develop the photos at home and don’t need much else.”
The kitchen had been installed on the short side of an L-shape, whose long side was the living room. The man set his grocery bag on the counter. I wanted to run to the sink and soak my face, or take a ten-minute shower in cold water. On the kitchen table, next to a bowl with milk and cereal leftovers, lay two pieces of plaster, like the cracked shell of a walnut, and a hammer.
“Remodeling?” I asked.
The man stepped toward me, casting a sidelong glance at the hammer.
“I needed to bash something. Arms up, friend.”
I raised an eyebrow. He made a gesture like surrendering to the police. When I obliged, he patted down the underarms of my jacket, searching for holsters. He checked the sides of my belt, then stepped back and rubbed his chin.
I straightened my jacket.
“Your potential employers come armed?”
He moved past me into the living room.
“After they booked me, a guy tried to stab me. You never know.”
He led me to the back of the room, partitioned by an orange velvet curtain with patterns like something that might emerge under the influence of hallucinogenic mushrooms. He pulled the curtain aside. On a table, he had left two cameras, three plastic containers for soaking negatives, and a lamp fitted with a red bulb.
The man closed the curtain, plunging us into inky darkness. The fans droned like a generator. My stomach turned, and the hair on my forearms prickled. After two steps and the press of a button, the lamp’s bulb struggled to ignite like an old engine, then bathed us in fluorescent red. His blond hair, skin, and teeth all took on the hue of a cartoon demon.
“I’ve gathered what I need in this nook,” he said. “The magic depends on how you treat women and on framing, and you can’t buy that. People like you just rent it for a while.”
He opened a cabinet. Inside were five albums stacked up.
“Want to take a look at this year’s work?”
“Sure.”
He pulled out the first album. The look on his profile hinted at the pride he took in showing it off. When he opened the album, I glimpsed three rows of photos per page: gorgeous faces peeking out from beneath full heads of hair, voluptuous bodies posed in varying degrees of undress. The red bulb tinted the pictures.
He closed the album.
“We’ll need a different light.”
With the album tucked under one arm, he switched off the bulb, and slid the curtain open. The living room consisted of a coffee table he’d pushed against an old sofa and a wicker chair. He might have bought them from a flea market or rescued them from a dump. Concert posters hung on the walls, including a stand-out shot of Hendrix in a fancy jacket, laughing as he held his guitar. Above the sofa, a poster of Kubrick’s version of Lolita: the close-up of a pale girl wearing heart-shaped sunglasses and licking a lollipop.
I nodded toward the piece of furniture where he’d set up a Thorens TD-125 turntable. In the open space below were about twenty vinyl records in their sleeves. On top of the turntable lay a record sleeve showing a cloud of pink smoke escaping a subway entrance—an album by The Velvet Underground.
“Nice setup for that other hobby of yours.”
“Photography’s my job, but yeah, you can’t live without music. And there’s never been better music than now.”
He set the photo album down on the coffee table. I sat in the wicker chair, which creaked as though riddled with termites.
“You must be surprised,” the man said.
“No. I love music.”
“There’s no TV. My guests always bring it up. They need the box that tells them what to think.”
“That’s a point in your favor.”
The muscles around his eyes helped shape his smile.
“Something to drink? A beer?”
“As long as it comes out of the fridge, anything works.”
He walked off and turned the corner that concealed half the counter, the oven, and the refrigerator. One of the fans rotated toward me, cooling my face. On the piece of furniture opposite the couch, the man had stacked a dozen books. Now that I was calmly looking around, I read the titles on the spines: Beyond Good and Evil by Nietzsche, Parerga and Paralipomena by Schopenhauer, the Bible, Story of the Eye by Bataille, Down There by Huysmans.
I heard a drawer slide open, some utensils clatter, then the drawer slam shut. The man reappeared holding the necks of two bottles in one hand and a bottle opener in the other. He collapsed onto the sofa, in front of the photo album. With the opener, he popped the cap off his beer.
“One of the greatest sounds.”
He took a swig.
“And the best one?” I asked.
He wiped his lips and glanced aside.
“A secret.”
He tossed me the opener in a smooth arc. I opened my beer. When I drank, the bitter liquid ran down my throat and settled in my stomach, cooling them the way flash floods scrub dry riverbeds.
The man opened the album halfway and turned it so we could both see. I studied the photographs, flipping through several pages. A blonde woman with cobalt eyes, nude and seated on a king-size bed, had tilted her face away from the camera in a calculated pose. A woman with wavy brown hair, kneeling on the bed, looked over her bare shoulder as though inviting the watcher; her half-lidded eyes suggested she might have been high. The same woman standing on the mattress or on a carpet, striking ballet poses. A necklace of wooden beads strung on a bronzed wire reached between her pale breasts. Another woman wore a salmon-colored blouse, and the ends of her hair flipped upward, mimicking the style shown in magazines and on TV. She was smiling as if mustering the courage to undress. The same woman leaned against a window that cast back her phantom-like reflection. She had slipped into a dress a size too big, and one strap had slid off her shoulder. Other photos caught this woman mid-conversation, her face suggesting she was talking to a friend. Another woman, her dyed-blonde hair tied into pigtails, knelt naked in front of the camera, looking up with the confidence of someone who knows her beauty. A woman silhouetted against an unlit spotlight had black hair streaked with glints of midnight blue, her gaze roaming the room as though familiarizing herself with her surroundings.
The sun washed out half the face of a little girl who was tucking a strand of hair behind her ear. A nude woman lay on the couch where the man was now seated. Huge headphones covered her ears, and her eyes were closed to listen more intently. A father, a boy, and a girl stood under a spray of water pouring from one of the Venice Beach showers, against the backdrop of the ocean and a lifeguard station. One photo captured a woman from her bangs down to the top of her breasts. She had rested her head on a pillow, and her lips glistened with moisture. A woman dressed as though she were out for a Saturday stroll posed shyly in front of blurred branches resembling a tattered curtain. The pigtailed girl, topless, sat in front of this apartment’s record collection, her hands pressed against her headphones. A series of pictures showed women in wet hair and swimsuits, outlined against water like molten metal where the sun had burned white holes.
I imagined these women living on for centuries. Wearing the same clothes and accessories, their skin immune to wrinkles, their expressions forever fresh. A secret community bound by the knowledge that they all once confronted the same camera lens. Perhaps I would find the bed, apart from the lights that had illuminated many of these shots, in whatever place the man and his aspiring model were heading to yesterday.
The man rubbed his chin as he nodded.
“Fascinating, isn’t it? How everyday life differs from those moments immersed in the ritual. The camera knows. If you saw many of these women on the street, you’d walk right by, but in the photos, they’re goddesses. And they’ll endure until the pictures turn to dust.”
I locked my eyes on his. When he noticed, he raised his brows. He tipped up his beer bottle and drank.
“How many of these women have you slept with?” I asked.
He laughed as he swallowed. After giving himself a thump on the chest, he bent forward, elbows on his thighs, and shot me a roguish smile.
“Trade secret. Pretty unprofessional of you to ask. But women open up to whoever makes them feel beautiful.”
I drank half my beer, swished the bitter liquid in my mouth, swallowed. I set the bottle next to the album and leaned back against the wicker chair.
“How many of these women are still alive?”
He gave me a once-over, imitating the way his future prey had scrutinized me yesterday, trying to figure out if I was joking.
“When they leave my studio, they vanish into the jungle.”
“You really don’t know if any of them dropped dead around the time they met you?”
He soured like a kid who just unwrapped the box for the game console he wanted, only to find socks inside.
“You drop remarks like you did yesterday. I get your perspective, but airing it is pointless. Do you think people want to stay close to someone who dredges up that stuff?”
“I don’t want them close. How many of these women walked into your studio, got photographed, and disappeared? How many families are searching for their daughters?”
His lips parted in a dark slit. His brow furrowed, and his face lost some of that California tan. He stood up straight. From his shirt pocket, he yanked out three fifty-dollar bills and slapped them onto the table.
“Your mind is twisted. I ignored the vibe you were giving off, but I should’ve refused the job the moment I realized who was offering it. Money corrupts—blinds you, blinds me too. Out. Don’t ever contact me again or show your face around here.”
“I’m staying for now.”
He held his breath, closing the fingers of his right hand on his knee so hard that his knuckles pressed white against the fabric.
“You think you can stay when I forbid it?”
“I’ll say what I have to say and then leave.”
The man squared his shoulders. His right fist trembled. A tendon in his neck bulged like a strip of wood.
I primed my muscles, bracing for an attack. While my gaze held his, I also kept an eye on the edges of my vision in case he reached for a weapon.
“Yesterday, July 16, 1977, you followed little Cassie June—doe-eyed Cassie—while she skated home. Maybe you smiled when you offered her a ride to spare her the heat and exhaustion. She trusted you. She got into a stranger’s car because you were kind enough to offer. She was raised to embrace life with a smile, to enjoy the rosy world inside her bubble, before that bubble popped and exposed her to the rancid air of adulthood. Cassie June. She belonged to a dance group with several school friends. Four days a week, she skated. She loved birds and had asked for books so she could learn to identify them. She loved spending afternoons at the beach. Sometimes, sitting on the rocks, she wrote in her journal. She wondered what lay on the far side of that mass of water, and kept saying how badly she wanted to find out.”
The man let one eyebrow drop. His fist unclenched, then tightened again as though trying to recall his anger. I didn’t let the rage quake my voice.
“But Cassie June got into your car. Instead of taking her home, you took her somewhere else. Maybe to your studio, where you shot many of the photos in this album. For two hours you raped her and sodomized her. When you were done, you strangled her until she was nearly unconscious—or with luck she passed out—and then you crushed her face with a hammer. You got rid of the corpse. It destroyed her family, obviously. When they woke up every morning, they remembered the midday they last saw Cassie, a scene that ate at them each night before they fell asleep.”
My red blindness faded as the pounding in my temples eased. The man was smiling like a TV host, a smile that said every hole he had to dodge was already paved over. He knew he had never picked up Cassie June in his Ford Thunderbird just as well as I knew he had—and thanks to me, the evidence for that knowledge was gone.
“You’ve made up one wild story,” he said.
I took another sip. The man did the same, tipping his bottle by fractions of an inch until the last drop trickled into his mouth.
“Those who knew Cassie remembered her as a beacon of joy,” I said. “She signed up for everything. She was inquisitive. Instinctively she got along with everyone she met, without hesitation or fear. The adults in her childhood listened to her, helped her. Whenever she needed them, they were there. People like her, with that innate trust and radiance, can make living in this world worthwhile. But Cassie believed a smiling stranger would drive her home, and that’s why you were able to rape and kill her. California and the West have turned into a hunting ground, open season all year round. If people knew what lurks in the dark, the diet of monsters like you, who would they trust? If Cassie had been afraid of strangers, if she had refused to get into strange cars, would she have been as happy? I don’t think so. Would she have been miserable? Maybe. She would have grown used to fear, to the myriad dangers it signals. But she’d still be alive. What does that mean?”
One fan blew a strand of the man’s hair aside. He looked at me like a blank sheet of paper, wanting to speak but unable to string words together, absently twisting his empty bottle.
“Not long ago, I questioned my role,” I said. “I could crush the trust of people like Cassie, scare them so they never get into strangers’ cars, never walk down dark alleys, never let a slick-talking man with a winning smile charm them. They’d learn they live in a sandpaper world, prowled by evil that would exploit their faith and innocence and grind them to the bone. Or I could keep them from discovering it. I could make sure that evil never reaches them—make sure they get into my car instead of the one behind me. They’d go on dancing, skating, sitting on those rocks by the beach, writing at sunset. Any stray bits of night would remain sedated beneath the anesthesia of their hope. Should I remove monsters like you so that these potential victims can go on living with a smile, still believing this world that almost devoured them is actually worth inhabiting? Is it better to stare into the abyss, or to look away and trust in humanity? Maybe those who see light everywhere must build the world they need, while people like me, the tar-smeared brethren, stand guard around the perimeter, making sure those who’ve drowned in tar don’t choke out that light. I followed that approach for years. And it worked, more or less. It saved thousands. But aside from sparing those people, what good am I really doing? I stand watch at the edges of the darkness, stopping the beasts from slipping into the glow of a streetlamp around which these bright-eyed souls flit. They learn they can let their guard down. They preach that self-defense is a vice or a sin, that monsters can be bought off or cured. I spare them the worst that might happen if they keep wearing those tinted glasses.”
The man reclined on the couch as he rubbed his eyelids, and snorted.
“You see,” I went on, “I found out by accident that this girl existed. I felt lost, torn from where I belonged, all while searching for the albums and classic movies that had bubbled into existence the last time I tangled with the timeline. Then I stumbled upon the news. They found Cassie June’s skeleton in the desert, stuffed in a rusted barrel under a pile of rocks. Usually I steer clear of news like that. The gallons of blood spilled in the darkness as I turn away corrode me, keep me up at night. But I read every article I could find about that girl. They described her life. They interviewed her family—whoever was left. I gathered every fact, every video, the court cases. Most people who heard the story during dinner might have lost their appetite for a minute, but what would that information do for them? They lock it away, forget it by the next day. They accept that the abyss has swallowed another sacrifice and are relieved it happened to someone else’s child. How could anyone keep walking burdened by the weight of so many injustices? Even I manage to let most of these stories pass right through me—otherwise, I might throw myself off a building. But that night, I was drowning in the black tide. Cassie’s murder stabbed me like a lance. I wanted to prevent it, to stop that trusting, life-loving girl from being snuffed out. A window of opportunity had opened, and if I’d refused to step through, I’d have to live knowing I could have saved her but instead swallowed a handful of sleeping pills, crawled into bed, and pulled the covers up to my forehead. I came back to get the job done and avoid Cassie’s ghost trailing after me to my grave.”
I paused for breath, but all the air had fled the apartment. The sunlight coming through the window had dimmed as though a translucent veil had wrapped my head. My body still sank into the wicker chair, but it felt like I was viewing the scene from a few yards beneath it, from the bottom of a pit. I spoke with effort, like cranking up some ancient, forgotten machine.
“It hit me, you know. The lack of meaning. We live for a handful of orbits around this star and then vanish. Some people, whether they deserve it or not, vanish much sooner, before they get to die in a bed surrounded by loved ones. Cassie’s life was cut short when she could have been spared. And that news story tied her to me, this irate beast. Merely annoyances and irritating noises stoke my anger until it boils over, and one day the flames might break out and burn this world to ashes. But my locomotive furnace devours that coal to plow into monsters like you. There have always been Cassies, and there will be more. Anyone you care about can die at any moment—I know that better than most because I live it week after week. It usually comes down to luck. Coincidence. Cassie’s luck was crossing your path. Your luck was crossing mine.”
-----
Author’s note: this novella belongs to a self-published book titled Los reinos de brea (The Kingdoms of Tar), that released about ten years ago. I presented this scene to the writing course I was attending at the time, and those present were disturbed, even the instructor, who is a reasonably famous local mystery writer. I don’t think the scene is that impactful, but I’m glad to find out that I still like it after these many years.
I followed him inside. The apartment was painted parrot green. Two fans droned away, airing it out. Even next to this individual, I preferred the indoors to the barbecue-like heat outside.
“Small,” the man said. “It’s hard for me to guarantee steady income. But I develop the photos at home and don’t need much else.”
The kitchen had been installed on the short side of an L-shape, whose long side was the living room. The man set his grocery bag on the counter. I wanted to run to the sink and soak my face, or take a ten-minute shower in cold water. On the kitchen table, next to a bowl with milk and cereal leftovers, lay two pieces of plaster, like the cracked shell of a walnut, and a hammer.
“Remodeling?” I asked.
The man stepped toward me, casting a sidelong glance at the hammer.
“I needed to bash something. Arms up, friend.”
I raised an eyebrow. He made a gesture like surrendering to the police. When I obliged, he patted down the underarms of my jacket, searching for holsters. He checked the sides of my belt, then stepped back and rubbed his chin.
I straightened my jacket.
“Your potential employers come armed?”
He moved past me into the living room.
“After they booked me, a guy tried to stab me. You never know.”
He led me to the back of the room, partitioned by an orange velvet curtain with patterns like something that might emerge under the influence of hallucinogenic mushrooms. He pulled the curtain aside. On a table, he had left two cameras, three plastic containers for soaking negatives, and a lamp fitted with a red bulb.
The man closed the curtain, plunging us into inky darkness. The fans droned like a generator. My stomach turned, and the hair on my forearms prickled. After two steps and the press of a button, the lamp’s bulb struggled to ignite like an old engine, then bathed us in fluorescent red. His blond hair, skin, and teeth all took on the hue of a cartoon demon.
“I’ve gathered what I need in this nook,” he said. “The magic depends on how you treat women and on framing, and you can’t buy that. People like you just rent it for a while.”
He opened a cabinet. Inside were five albums stacked up.
“Want to take a look at this year’s work?”
“Sure.”
He pulled out the first album. The look on his profile hinted at the pride he took in showing it off. When he opened the album, I glimpsed three rows of photos per page: gorgeous faces peeking out from beneath full heads of hair, voluptuous bodies posed in varying degrees of undress. The red bulb tinted the pictures.
He closed the album.
“We’ll need a different light.”
With the album tucked under one arm, he switched off the bulb, and slid the curtain open. The living room consisted of a coffee table he’d pushed against an old sofa and a wicker chair. He might have bought them from a flea market or rescued them from a dump. Concert posters hung on the walls, including a stand-out shot of Hendrix in a fancy jacket, laughing as he held his guitar. Above the sofa, a poster of Kubrick’s version of Lolita: the close-up of a pale girl wearing heart-shaped sunglasses and licking a lollipop.
I nodded toward the piece of furniture where he’d set up a Thorens TD-125 turntable. In the open space below were about twenty vinyl records in their sleeves. On top of the turntable lay a record sleeve showing a cloud of pink smoke escaping a subway entrance—an album by The Velvet Underground.
“Nice setup for that other hobby of yours.”
“Photography’s my job, but yeah, you can’t live without music. And there’s never been better music than now.”
He set the photo album down on the coffee table. I sat in the wicker chair, which creaked as though riddled with termites.
“You must be surprised,” the man said.
“No. I love music.”
“There’s no TV. My guests always bring it up. They need the box that tells them what to think.”
“That’s a point in your favor.”
The muscles around his eyes helped shape his smile.
“Something to drink? A beer?”
“As long as it comes out of the fridge, anything works.”
He walked off and turned the corner that concealed half the counter, the oven, and the refrigerator. One of the fans rotated toward me, cooling my face. On the piece of furniture opposite the couch, the man had stacked a dozen books. Now that I was calmly looking around, I read the titles on the spines: Beyond Good and Evil by Nietzsche, Parerga and Paralipomena by Schopenhauer, the Bible, Story of the Eye by Bataille, Down There by Huysmans.
I heard a drawer slide open, some utensils clatter, then the drawer slam shut. The man reappeared holding the necks of two bottles in one hand and a bottle opener in the other. He collapsed onto the sofa, in front of the photo album. With the opener, he popped the cap off his beer.
“One of the greatest sounds.”
He took a swig.
“And the best one?” I asked.
He wiped his lips and glanced aside.
“A secret.”
He tossed me the opener in a smooth arc. I opened my beer. When I drank, the bitter liquid ran down my throat and settled in my stomach, cooling them the way flash floods scrub dry riverbeds.
The man opened the album halfway and turned it so we could both see. I studied the photographs, flipping through several pages. A blonde woman with cobalt eyes, nude and seated on a king-size bed, had tilted her face away from the camera in a calculated pose. A woman with wavy brown hair, kneeling on the bed, looked over her bare shoulder as though inviting the watcher; her half-lidded eyes suggested she might have been high. The same woman standing on the mattress or on a carpet, striking ballet poses. A necklace of wooden beads strung on a bronzed wire reached between her pale breasts. Another woman wore a salmon-colored blouse, and the ends of her hair flipped upward, mimicking the style shown in magazines and on TV. She was smiling as if mustering the courage to undress. The same woman leaned against a window that cast back her phantom-like reflection. She had slipped into a dress a size too big, and one strap had slid off her shoulder. Other photos caught this woman mid-conversation, her face suggesting she was talking to a friend. Another woman, her dyed-blonde hair tied into pigtails, knelt naked in front of the camera, looking up with the confidence of someone who knows her beauty. A woman silhouetted against an unlit spotlight had black hair streaked with glints of midnight blue, her gaze roaming the room as though familiarizing herself with her surroundings.
The sun washed out half the face of a little girl who was tucking a strand of hair behind her ear. A nude woman lay on the couch where the man was now seated. Huge headphones covered her ears, and her eyes were closed to listen more intently. A father, a boy, and a girl stood under a spray of water pouring from one of the Venice Beach showers, against the backdrop of the ocean and a lifeguard station. One photo captured a woman from her bangs down to the top of her breasts. She had rested her head on a pillow, and her lips glistened with moisture. A woman dressed as though she were out for a Saturday stroll posed shyly in front of blurred branches resembling a tattered curtain. The pigtailed girl, topless, sat in front of this apartment’s record collection, her hands pressed against her headphones. A series of pictures showed women in wet hair and swimsuits, outlined against water like molten metal where the sun had burned white holes.
I imagined these women living on for centuries. Wearing the same clothes and accessories, their skin immune to wrinkles, their expressions forever fresh. A secret community bound by the knowledge that they all once confronted the same camera lens. Perhaps I would find the bed, apart from the lights that had illuminated many of these shots, in whatever place the man and his aspiring model were heading to yesterday.
The man rubbed his chin as he nodded.
“Fascinating, isn’t it? How everyday life differs from those moments immersed in the ritual. The camera knows. If you saw many of these women on the street, you’d walk right by, but in the photos, they’re goddesses. And they’ll endure until the pictures turn to dust.”
I locked my eyes on his. When he noticed, he raised his brows. He tipped up his beer bottle and drank.
“How many of these women have you slept with?” I asked.
He laughed as he swallowed. After giving himself a thump on the chest, he bent forward, elbows on his thighs, and shot me a roguish smile.
“Trade secret. Pretty unprofessional of you to ask. But women open up to whoever makes them feel beautiful.”
I drank half my beer, swished the bitter liquid in my mouth, swallowed. I set the bottle next to the album and leaned back against the wicker chair.
“How many of these women are still alive?”
He gave me a once-over, imitating the way his future prey had scrutinized me yesterday, trying to figure out if I was joking.
“When they leave my studio, they vanish into the jungle.”
“You really don’t know if any of them dropped dead around the time they met you?”
He soured like a kid who just unwrapped the box for the game console he wanted, only to find socks inside.
“You drop remarks like you did yesterday. I get your perspective, but airing it is pointless. Do you think people want to stay close to someone who dredges up that stuff?”
“I don’t want them close. How many of these women walked into your studio, got photographed, and disappeared? How many families are searching for their daughters?”
His lips parted in a dark slit. His brow furrowed, and his face lost some of that California tan. He stood up straight. From his shirt pocket, he yanked out three fifty-dollar bills and slapped them onto the table.
“Your mind is twisted. I ignored the vibe you were giving off, but I should’ve refused the job the moment I realized who was offering it. Money corrupts—blinds you, blinds me too. Out. Don’t ever contact me again or show your face around here.”
“I’m staying for now.”
He held his breath, closing the fingers of his right hand on his knee so hard that his knuckles pressed white against the fabric.
“You think you can stay when I forbid it?”
“I’ll say what I have to say and then leave.”
The man squared his shoulders. His right fist trembled. A tendon in his neck bulged like a strip of wood.
I primed my muscles, bracing for an attack. While my gaze held his, I also kept an eye on the edges of my vision in case he reached for a weapon.
“Yesterday, July 16, 1977, you followed little Cassie June—doe-eyed Cassie—while she skated home. Maybe you smiled when you offered her a ride to spare her the heat and exhaustion. She trusted you. She got into a stranger’s car because you were kind enough to offer. She was raised to embrace life with a smile, to enjoy the rosy world inside her bubble, before that bubble popped and exposed her to the rancid air of adulthood. Cassie June. She belonged to a dance group with several school friends. Four days a week, she skated. She loved birds and had asked for books so she could learn to identify them. She loved spending afternoons at the beach. Sometimes, sitting on the rocks, she wrote in her journal. She wondered what lay on the far side of that mass of water, and kept saying how badly she wanted to find out.”
The man let one eyebrow drop. His fist unclenched, then tightened again as though trying to recall his anger. I didn’t let the rage quake my voice.
“But Cassie June got into your car. Instead of taking her home, you took her somewhere else. Maybe to your studio, where you shot many of the photos in this album. For two hours you raped her and sodomized her. When you were done, you strangled her until she was nearly unconscious—or with luck she passed out—and then you crushed her face with a hammer. You got rid of the corpse. It destroyed her family, obviously. When they woke up every morning, they remembered the midday they last saw Cassie, a scene that ate at them each night before they fell asleep.”
My red blindness faded as the pounding in my temples eased. The man was smiling like a TV host, a smile that said every hole he had to dodge was already paved over. He knew he had never picked up Cassie June in his Ford Thunderbird just as well as I knew he had—and thanks to me, the evidence for that knowledge was gone.
“You’ve made up one wild story,” he said.
I took another sip. The man did the same, tipping his bottle by fractions of an inch until the last drop trickled into his mouth.
“Those who knew Cassie remembered her as a beacon of joy,” I said. “She signed up for everything. She was inquisitive. Instinctively she got along with everyone she met, without hesitation or fear. The adults in her childhood listened to her, helped her. Whenever she needed them, they were there. People like her, with that innate trust and radiance, can make living in this world worthwhile. But Cassie believed a smiling stranger would drive her home, and that’s why you were able to rape and kill her. California and the West have turned into a hunting ground, open season all year round. If people knew what lurks in the dark, the diet of monsters like you, who would they trust? If Cassie had been afraid of strangers, if she had refused to get into strange cars, would she have been as happy? I don’t think so. Would she have been miserable? Maybe. She would have grown used to fear, to the myriad dangers it signals. But she’d still be alive. What does that mean?”
One fan blew a strand of the man’s hair aside. He looked at me like a blank sheet of paper, wanting to speak but unable to string words together, absently twisting his empty bottle.
“Not long ago, I questioned my role,” I said. “I could crush the trust of people like Cassie, scare them so they never get into strangers’ cars, never walk down dark alleys, never let a slick-talking man with a winning smile charm them. They’d learn they live in a sandpaper world, prowled by evil that would exploit their faith and innocence and grind them to the bone. Or I could keep them from discovering it. I could make sure that evil never reaches them—make sure they get into my car instead of the one behind me. They’d go on dancing, skating, sitting on those rocks by the beach, writing at sunset. Any stray bits of night would remain sedated beneath the anesthesia of their hope. Should I remove monsters like you so that these potential victims can go on living with a smile, still believing this world that almost devoured them is actually worth inhabiting? Is it better to stare into the abyss, or to look away and trust in humanity? Maybe those who see light everywhere must build the world they need, while people like me, the tar-smeared brethren, stand guard around the perimeter, making sure those who’ve drowned in tar don’t choke out that light. I followed that approach for years. And it worked, more or less. It saved thousands. But aside from sparing those people, what good am I really doing? I stand watch at the edges of the darkness, stopping the beasts from slipping into the glow of a streetlamp around which these bright-eyed souls flit. They learn they can let their guard down. They preach that self-defense is a vice or a sin, that monsters can be bought off or cured. I spare them the worst that might happen if they keep wearing those tinted glasses.”
The man reclined on the couch as he rubbed his eyelids, and snorted.
“You see,” I went on, “I found out by accident that this girl existed. I felt lost, torn from where I belonged, all while searching for the albums and classic movies that had bubbled into existence the last time I tangled with the timeline. Then I stumbled upon the news. They found Cassie June’s skeleton in the desert, stuffed in a rusted barrel under a pile of rocks. Usually I steer clear of news like that. The gallons of blood spilled in the darkness as I turn away corrode me, keep me up at night. But I read every article I could find about that girl. They described her life. They interviewed her family—whoever was left. I gathered every fact, every video, the court cases. Most people who heard the story during dinner might have lost their appetite for a minute, but what would that information do for them? They lock it away, forget it by the next day. They accept that the abyss has swallowed another sacrifice and are relieved it happened to someone else’s child. How could anyone keep walking burdened by the weight of so many injustices? Even I manage to let most of these stories pass right through me—otherwise, I might throw myself off a building. But that night, I was drowning in the black tide. Cassie’s murder stabbed me like a lance. I wanted to prevent it, to stop that trusting, life-loving girl from being snuffed out. A window of opportunity had opened, and if I’d refused to step through, I’d have to live knowing I could have saved her but instead swallowed a handful of sleeping pills, crawled into bed, and pulled the covers up to my forehead. I came back to get the job done and avoid Cassie’s ghost trailing after me to my grave.”
I paused for breath, but all the air had fled the apartment. The sunlight coming through the window had dimmed as though a translucent veil had wrapped my head. My body still sank into the wicker chair, but it felt like I was viewing the scene from a few yards beneath it, from the bottom of a pit. I spoke with effort, like cranking up some ancient, forgotten machine.
“It hit me, you know. The lack of meaning. We live for a handful of orbits around this star and then vanish. Some people, whether they deserve it or not, vanish much sooner, before they get to die in a bed surrounded by loved ones. Cassie’s life was cut short when she could have been spared. And that news story tied her to me, this irate beast. Merely annoyances and irritating noises stoke my anger until it boils over, and one day the flames might break out and burn this world to ashes. But my locomotive furnace devours that coal to plow into monsters like you. There have always been Cassies, and there will be more. Anyone you care about can die at any moment—I know that better than most because I live it week after week. It usually comes down to luck. Coincidence. Cassie’s luck was crossing your path. Your luck was crossing mine.”
-----
Author’s note: this novella belongs to a self-published book titled Los reinos de brea (The Kingdoms of Tar), that released about ten years ago. I presented this scene to the writing course I was attending at the time, and those present were disturbed, even the instructor, who is a reasonably famous local mystery writer. I don’t think the scene is that impactful, but I’m glad to find out that I still like it after these many years.
Smile, Pt. 3 (Fiction)
[check out this part on my personal page, where it looks better]
At half past ten the next day, in my hotel room, I spread my jacket out on the rumpled sheets and slipped the ammo magazine into the left inside pocket.
I sat down beside the little table that held the phone. I cleared my throat. I picked up the receiver, wedged it against my ear with my shoulder, and dialed the number.
On the third ring, it cut off. I heard the man breathing against the microphone.
“Richard Alcala,” I said.
“You know who you’re calling.”
“The photographer.”
“My reputation precedes me.”
“I was flipping through some old issues of Black Tux. The photos you shot. These women you framed… if you ran into them on the street, you’d notice moles, asymmetry, maybe slack flesh, but thanks to your touch, they’re competing to be the next Marilyn Monroe.”
“You need to update your references, pal. But I remember those shoots. I was born with the gift.”
“I work for a magazine, and we need your gift. You’d coax the beauty out of a dozen or so women.”
“You tempt me, but a personal project has me busy.”
“It’s a well-paid week of work in Los Angeles. I’m sure you could squeeze it in.”
The line crackled as he crunched on something brittle. I pictured him hunched over bloody dirt, naked, caked in grime, gnawing on a femur.
“Have you talked to other magazines in the field?” he asked, voice turning gravelly.
“Yes.”
“And you’re still calling me? Lately, nobody wants to hire me. I bet they rushed to tell you why.”
“You mean your trouble with the law.”
He pulled the receiver away from his face to clear his throat.
“My trouble with the law, yes.”
“Who cares? You’ll take the shots we need. Your previous sessions prove it.”
He fell silent for a few seconds.
“How much?”
“Money? One fifty up front, three hundred at the end of the week. Four or five sessions, depending on a few variables.”
“Your usual photographers turned it down?”
“They don’t shoot like you. Plus, the women will be dressed in outfits many would call pornographic. In this decade, there are still plenty of photographers with outdated scruples. Listen, we need these women to look like Greek goddesses, not like they’re waiting around a street corner at three in the morning.”
“I get you, pal. Bring the money, and we’ll work something out.”
“I’ll drop by around eleven-thirty.”
“Today? I’m busy all day. Starting tomorrow.”
“I’m afraid I leave for Dallas tonight. You sure you can’t spare a slot at eleven-thirty? You’ll pocket the hundred and fifty, and we’ll iron out a couple details.”
A silence swelled on the line, undone by the ringing in my ears—scar tissue from years of gunfire. I heard him close a drawer or a door. Cloth brushed against cloth.
“Eleven-thirty,” he said. “Bring the money. You know the address?”
“I wrote it down before calling.”
At eleven-ten, I spotted the parking spaces outside the two-story building where he lived. Each floor’s facade was lined with doors and windows. Next to the metal stairs going up to the second floor stood two crooked, half-stripped palm trees like birds with plucked necks. The first-floor windows, right at street level, had iron bars.
They’d left a space free next to the Ford Thunderbird. While maneuvering into the spot, I scanned the surroundings in case he was loitering outside. I parked beside the Thunderbird, trunks aligned.
I switched off the engine and got out. Circling to my trunk, I rummaged in one pocket for both sets of keys—mine and the copy that would open the Thunderbird. I sized up the pedestrians drifting down the street as well as the silhouettes moving behind the building’s windows. I slid my key into my trunk’s lock and opened it. An acrid smell of dirt greeted me. As I lifted the trunk lid all the way, I slipped behind the Thunderbird. I inserted the copy of the key and turned it. The trunk popped open a crack.
I bent over my own trunk, grabbed the gloves from the back corner, and pulled them on. I wedged my forearms under the canvas bundle, held down by two bungee cords. Once I lifted it, the weight yanked at my arms, its lumps digging into my forearms and palms. I crouched, like lowering a loaded barbell, set the bundle on the asphalt, and stood up again.
In the apartment next door to his, an old woman in a robe had drawn her curtain aside. She scratched her nose while surveying the foot traffic and passing cars. Once she moved away, the curtain veiled the interior again.
I lifted the Thunderbird’s trunk. It held ropes, two rolls of electrical tape, a shovel, and a can of gasoline. I took the can out, laid it on its side, and pushed it under my car with my foot, metal scraping on asphalt.
I hoisted the bundle in both hands and placed it in the center of the Thunderbird’s trunk. I unclipped the bungee cords. Covering my nose, I turned my head away, unwrapped the bundle, and let the trunk lid fall until it clicked shut.
A tingling spread across my nape. My ears felt tight. I fully expected a line of passersby who’d pelt me with questions, or a group of cops, or the man himself.
I pulled off my gloves, tossed them into my trunk, and shut it. Then I leaned against the back, pressing my shirt sleeve to the sun-baked metal. If he showed up, I wanted to seem casual as I glanced over the street and the building.
Sunlight warmed my hair. Beneath my jacket and shirt, sweat trickled down my spine, probably making my scalp gleam. I crouched by the car’s side and nudged the half-empty gas can farther in with my foot so no one would notice it. I scanned the Thunderbird’s bodywork to be sure I’d left nothing behind. I forced myself not to check the transponder stuck underneath.
“I hope you’re not looking to steal it,” said a voice to my right.
He was walking through the lot with a paper grocery bag in one hand, two inches of a cereal box sticking out the top. He squinted against the glare, grinning like he adored the neighborhood. He wore a tight shirt striped in brass and peanut tones. The oversized starched collar cast triangular shadows. He had it tucked into flared navy-blue pants cinched with a white belt.
I pretended to be admiring the Thunderbird.
“It’s a beauty,” I said.
He set his free hand on the raised center of the hood, stroking it like a dog’s head.
“Best buy I ever made. A V8 engine with three hundred sixty horsepower. Zero to sixty in nine seconds. Never once let me down.”
When he looked at my face, his features slipped out of his control.
“You’re the gloomy guy from yesterday, on the beach.”
“An hour ago, we spoke on the phone about a job I want to hire you for. Yesterday I approached you about it, but we got sidetracked.”
“So that job was for real, I guess.”
I pulled three fifty-dollar bills from my jacket’s other inside pocket. When the sunlight hit the bills, he snatched them, folded them, and slipped them into his shirt pocket. He smiled.
“Which magazine did you say you work for?”
“Maybe I forgot to mention.”
I pulled out a card and handed it to him. He glanced over it and nodded.
“I’ll show you my gear, and we’ll hash out the details. Let’s go in. I’m getting cooked out here.”
We climbed the stairs to the second-floor landing. He pulled out his keychain, letting it jingle. Dangling from the ring was a tiny latex penis. As he guided the key toward the lock, he seemed to pause in slow motion. He propped the grocery bag against the doorframe and leaned over the railing to study the parking lot.
“You drove here?” he asked.
He stared blankly at my rented car.
“I parked at the Dallas airport. Came by taxi.”
He watched the passersby and peered at the windows across the street, as if searching for a hidden sniper. He shook his head, turned around. Still smiling, he fit the key into the lock and opened the door.
-----
Author’s note: this novella was originally self-published through my book Los reinos de brea, that I wrote about ten years ago. I figured that I might as well translate it and post it here, given that nobody buys my shit. Back in the day, I regularly set stories in places I had never visited, perhaps because I thought that it would make the story more interesting for others. These days, as I don’t expect other people to care, I try to make the places I know more interesting for myself by setting stories in them. Anyway, I hope you’re enjoying this tale to some extent. It’s going to get gnarly soon.
At half past ten the next day, in my hotel room, I spread my jacket out on the rumpled sheets and slipped the ammo magazine into the left inside pocket.
I sat down beside the little table that held the phone. I cleared my throat. I picked up the receiver, wedged it against my ear with my shoulder, and dialed the number.
On the third ring, it cut off. I heard the man breathing against the microphone.
“Richard Alcala,” I said.
“You know who you’re calling.”
“The photographer.”
“My reputation precedes me.”
“I was flipping through some old issues of Black Tux. The photos you shot. These women you framed… if you ran into them on the street, you’d notice moles, asymmetry, maybe slack flesh, but thanks to your touch, they’re competing to be the next Marilyn Monroe.”
“You need to update your references, pal. But I remember those shoots. I was born with the gift.”
“I work for a magazine, and we need your gift. You’d coax the beauty out of a dozen or so women.”
“You tempt me, but a personal project has me busy.”
“It’s a well-paid week of work in Los Angeles. I’m sure you could squeeze it in.”
The line crackled as he crunched on something brittle. I pictured him hunched over bloody dirt, naked, caked in grime, gnawing on a femur.
“Have you talked to other magazines in the field?” he asked, voice turning gravelly.
“Yes.”
“And you’re still calling me? Lately, nobody wants to hire me. I bet they rushed to tell you why.”
“You mean your trouble with the law.”
He pulled the receiver away from his face to clear his throat.
“My trouble with the law, yes.”
“Who cares? You’ll take the shots we need. Your previous sessions prove it.”
He fell silent for a few seconds.
“How much?”
“Money? One fifty up front, three hundred at the end of the week. Four or five sessions, depending on a few variables.”
“Your usual photographers turned it down?”
“They don’t shoot like you. Plus, the women will be dressed in outfits many would call pornographic. In this decade, there are still plenty of photographers with outdated scruples. Listen, we need these women to look like Greek goddesses, not like they’re waiting around a street corner at three in the morning.”
“I get you, pal. Bring the money, and we’ll work something out.”
“I’ll drop by around eleven-thirty.”
“Today? I’m busy all day. Starting tomorrow.”
“I’m afraid I leave for Dallas tonight. You sure you can’t spare a slot at eleven-thirty? You’ll pocket the hundred and fifty, and we’ll iron out a couple details.”
A silence swelled on the line, undone by the ringing in my ears—scar tissue from years of gunfire. I heard him close a drawer or a door. Cloth brushed against cloth.
“Eleven-thirty,” he said. “Bring the money. You know the address?”
“I wrote it down before calling.”
At eleven-ten, I spotted the parking spaces outside the two-story building where he lived. Each floor’s facade was lined with doors and windows. Next to the metal stairs going up to the second floor stood two crooked, half-stripped palm trees like birds with plucked necks. The first-floor windows, right at street level, had iron bars.
They’d left a space free next to the Ford Thunderbird. While maneuvering into the spot, I scanned the surroundings in case he was loitering outside. I parked beside the Thunderbird, trunks aligned.
I switched off the engine and got out. Circling to my trunk, I rummaged in one pocket for both sets of keys—mine and the copy that would open the Thunderbird. I sized up the pedestrians drifting down the street as well as the silhouettes moving behind the building’s windows. I slid my key into my trunk’s lock and opened it. An acrid smell of dirt greeted me. As I lifted the trunk lid all the way, I slipped behind the Thunderbird. I inserted the copy of the key and turned it. The trunk popped open a crack.
I bent over my own trunk, grabbed the gloves from the back corner, and pulled them on. I wedged my forearms under the canvas bundle, held down by two bungee cords. Once I lifted it, the weight yanked at my arms, its lumps digging into my forearms and palms. I crouched, like lowering a loaded barbell, set the bundle on the asphalt, and stood up again.
In the apartment next door to his, an old woman in a robe had drawn her curtain aside. She scratched her nose while surveying the foot traffic and passing cars. Once she moved away, the curtain veiled the interior again.
I lifted the Thunderbird’s trunk. It held ropes, two rolls of electrical tape, a shovel, and a can of gasoline. I took the can out, laid it on its side, and pushed it under my car with my foot, metal scraping on asphalt.
I hoisted the bundle in both hands and placed it in the center of the Thunderbird’s trunk. I unclipped the bungee cords. Covering my nose, I turned my head away, unwrapped the bundle, and let the trunk lid fall until it clicked shut.
A tingling spread across my nape. My ears felt tight. I fully expected a line of passersby who’d pelt me with questions, or a group of cops, or the man himself.
I pulled off my gloves, tossed them into my trunk, and shut it. Then I leaned against the back, pressing my shirt sleeve to the sun-baked metal. If he showed up, I wanted to seem casual as I glanced over the street and the building.
Sunlight warmed my hair. Beneath my jacket and shirt, sweat trickled down my spine, probably making my scalp gleam. I crouched by the car’s side and nudged the half-empty gas can farther in with my foot so no one would notice it. I scanned the Thunderbird’s bodywork to be sure I’d left nothing behind. I forced myself not to check the transponder stuck underneath.
“I hope you’re not looking to steal it,” said a voice to my right.
He was walking through the lot with a paper grocery bag in one hand, two inches of a cereal box sticking out the top. He squinted against the glare, grinning like he adored the neighborhood. He wore a tight shirt striped in brass and peanut tones. The oversized starched collar cast triangular shadows. He had it tucked into flared navy-blue pants cinched with a white belt.
I pretended to be admiring the Thunderbird.
“It’s a beauty,” I said.
He set his free hand on the raised center of the hood, stroking it like a dog’s head.
“Best buy I ever made. A V8 engine with three hundred sixty horsepower. Zero to sixty in nine seconds. Never once let me down.”
When he looked at my face, his features slipped out of his control.
“You’re the gloomy guy from yesterday, on the beach.”
“An hour ago, we spoke on the phone about a job I want to hire you for. Yesterday I approached you about it, but we got sidetracked.”
“So that job was for real, I guess.”
I pulled three fifty-dollar bills from my jacket’s other inside pocket. When the sunlight hit the bills, he snatched them, folded them, and slipped them into his shirt pocket. He smiled.
“Which magazine did you say you work for?”
“Maybe I forgot to mention.”
I pulled out a card and handed it to him. He glanced over it and nodded.
“I’ll show you my gear, and we’ll hash out the details. Let’s go in. I’m getting cooked out here.”
We climbed the stairs to the second-floor landing. He pulled out his keychain, letting it jingle. Dangling from the ring was a tiny latex penis. As he guided the key toward the lock, he seemed to pause in slow motion. He propped the grocery bag against the doorframe and leaned over the railing to study the parking lot.
“You drove here?” he asked.
He stared blankly at my rented car.
“I parked at the Dallas airport. Came by taxi.”
He watched the passersby and peered at the windows across the street, as if searching for a hidden sniper. He shook his head, turned around. Still smiling, he fit the key into the lock and opened the door.
-----
Author’s note: this novella was originally self-published through my book Los reinos de brea, that I wrote about ten years ago. I figured that I might as well translate it and post it here, given that nobody buys my shit. Back in the day, I regularly set stories in places I had never visited, perhaps because I thought that it would make the story more interesting for others. These days, as I don’t expect other people to care, I try to make the places I know more interesting for myself by setting stories in them. Anyway, I hope you’re enjoying this tale to some extent. It’s going to get gnarly soon.
January 13, 2025
Smile, Pt. 2 (Fiction)
[check out this part on my personal page, where it looks better]
I tracked the Ford Thunderbird to a parking lot bordering Venice Beach. I parked six spaces away, past three empty slots, two cars, and a delivery van. In case the man was roaming nearby, I took in the view through the windshield and side windows. Next to the half-buried asphalt of the bike path, clumps of palm trees had sprouted from the sand, some as tall as, or taller than, the shops along the boardwalk. The sun, sinking into the Pacific, bleached white the fronds of one palm, while the rest stood out like green torches. Silhouettes bustled across the wide beach, and at intervals lifeguard towers rose in the distance.
The beeps from the tracker echoed through the car like pinball ricochets. I switched the machine off. I could hear the surf rumbling, waves breaking their stride from the sand; the squawking of gulls; the din of shrieks and laughter from the bathers. The sun beating down on the windshield was browning me like a roasting chicken.
I had to find that man and stop him. I was following the plan like a musical score, but my back stayed pressed against the leather seat, and anxiety was growing in my chest. My subconscious lacked the vocabulary to describe the cataclysm it had foreseen.
I had saved Cassie, who had cried, yet tomorrow she would skate under the sun while her brain boiled and steam blew from her ears. If some grinning long-haired guy asked her to ride in another car, she would hop in before waking up to reality. And these folks ambling around Venice Beach like buffalo in a zoo enclosure, this pink-and-orange horizon—would it matter to them if one day Cassie ended up in the dark, panties gone, while the man on top of her strangled her?
The girl was alive and had learned nothing. Her mother, after rushing home, might have taken out her revolver and imagined forcing me to face the black maw of its barrel. I closed my eyes and saw her face as though draped in dusty cobwebs. Cassie’s mother, hating me. Hate upon hate, from people who refused to understand.
If I spirited the victims away from the shadows, they remained ignorant; if I saved them and they found out, they despised me.
I got out of the car and slammed the door. I wandered the parking lot to stretch my legs while the burning asphalt sucked at my soles. A car honked. I realized I was in the way of someone trying to maneuver into a space.
How long until the owner of that Ford Thunderbird got hungry? Or was he circling around to satisfy the hunger left over from when I saved Cassie?
What if I refused to hunt him? I could hit the nearby theaters in case they were showing Jaws or Star Wars again. I would make a pilgrimage to the record stores and buy first-edition vinyls of Nick Drake, Roy Harper, Karen Dalton. I could dine into the dusk until I emerged into the odd world I’d find.
If that starving coyote went hunting and left another corpse behind, would I even find out? Would I care? Another anonymous woman would vanish. Her face printed on milk cartons. With luck, in several years or decades, some hiker would discover that the femur his dog was slobbering over had belonged to a woman—or a child.
Dozens of miniature black holes roamed the United States, swallowing pretty hitchhikers, teenage runaways, prostitutes. Black holes wandering immortally: when one disappeared, another took its place. The rest of the population kept working, birthing, gathering to celebrate the Super Bowl, filling baseball stadiums, balancing on surfboards, or doing whatever else they fancied in this period of time that blended with all the others like spilled paint in a swimming pool. News of a woman’s disappearance would spoil someone’s snack in between bites of bacon and sips of beer. Most people believed (though they wouldn’t say it) that some sin had condemned that photographed woman to deserve it, or the universe would had chosen someone else to punish. The sacrifice was part of an obscure plan that someday would drain into some blend of justice and harmony. But if I stepped in, the masses would go on smiling in ignorance.
The tension in my neck hurt. How many times had I told myself that every life I saved was worth it, even if it stuffed my mind with skeletons and cadavers, a mounting heap at the bottom of a bloody pit?
Music drifted out from the turntables and radios in the boardwalk shops and apartments. Graham Nash protesting war and the military. Dolly Parton. Hendrix. As if at a concert, different acts played on neighboring stages. A warm breeze carried the scent of incense from the apartments. Dozens of people strolled around. A girl in shorts too tight to crease and a crop top that showed her belly button skated while holding the hand of another skater—a man in his early twenties with long hair and a mustache. On the sand, groups lying on their towels cackled like flocks of birds. They had been born in a cell where some invisible hand projected pictures of puppies, babies, cakes, and tropical beaches onto the walls.
All this laughter and enjoyment while somewhere in this city—not to mention the rest of the world—someone was getting beaten, raped, or murdered. Thousands of crimes went unnoticed, and criminals moved on to their next victim. So many beatings where the battered victim avoided the police, or reported the assault only for no reporter to pick it up. So many rapes where, for whatever reason, the victim stayed silent. In any neighborhood where kids pedaled on tricycles, in the basement of some house with neatly trimmed grass, a man might be exploiting a woman’s body as a semen receptacle the same way he would use a toilet for urine, and when he killed her, he’d dispose of her corpse like flushing a used condom. Maybe that woman never made it onto the list of thousands of missing persons, or she was mentioned briefly in a newspaper, and I would never find out.
I skirted the beach, eyeing every passerby and every group member, just in case I recognized the individual. I stuffed my hands into my pockets. Sometimes I had to remind myself that I had come out here to hunt. I stopped to look back at those who had just passed by, though some were already shrinking in the distance on their roller skates, skateboards, or bikes.
No matter which era I ended up in, I was surrounded by cheerful voices, smiling groups, couples holding hands. The same actors in different costumes, sporting whatever haircuts each era deemed acceptable. The plumage of exotic birds. In every decade, they believed everything would be fine, that a clear path lay ahead and they only had to look for it. I felt set apart from them, the last member of some other human species clinging to the edge of extinction. What could I tell these people? They would react as though I had blasphemed against their divine maxim that goodness always prevails. But goodness prevailed only because, before they even arrived, I had cleared their path. When I failed to worry about it, evil triumphed time and again.
I watched a volleyball game among a coed group where more than just the ball was bouncing. A figure nearby stood out. The man hovered near the bike path, scanning the beach. Sometimes he hid his face behind a camera and snapped a photo. His voluminous blond mane fell to his shoulders, and from behind one might mistake him for a woman.
When his name and surname flickered at the edges of my mind, I shooed them away. Names were for people unlike these rabid coyotes wandering around, ready to rip off a piece of someone unless the police—or I—put them down.
“I recognize that look. My friend Pete.”
It took me a second to realize the voice to my right was speaking to me. A man of about twenty-five. He was smoking a cigarette. The fringe of his long hair covered his forehead, and the wiry ends curled at his neck. His goatee protruded two inches from his chin. His gaze implied he enjoyed meeting strangers.
“He went from one party to another,” said the man, “loved to play guitar. Plenty of women would hang around for private songs. But he got drafted. When he returned, he threw away his medal. Every couple of months I spot him far off, just standing in the middle of nowhere, looking like you do.”
He drew closer as if to offer me a cigarette, but I wanted him gone.
“Do Pete a favor. Next time you see him, stab him through the heart.”
The man twitched his head like it was a nervous tic. He lowered his eyebrows and sucked on the cigarette filter. I walked away toward the bike path.
When the photographer’s features grew sharper, I stopped. By the look of him, his mannerisms, maybe he had a portfolio of pictures he’d posed in. As if his fishing line had gone taut, he fixed his gaze on a woman in her twenties wearing a black floral-print blouse with balloon sleeves and a triangular neckline. She had tied the blouse at her waist. Her jeans ended where her thighs began.
He held the camera at belt level and followed the woman’s rising and falling hips. That golden hair gleamed like satin. Any film studio would insure such breasts.
As she passed by, he blocked her path. His lips parted, curving along the gingival margin without showing the gums. A toothpaste-ad grin, with prominent canines. The muscles in his cheeks framed the smile like curtains revealing a show. Though I pictured those teeth pulverizing bones, splinters flying between his molars, she matched his smile in a fraction of a second.
“I had to stop you,” said the man. “Tell me, gorgeous. Which agency hired you?”
“What kind of agency would hire me?”
“A modeling one, of course.”
She cocked a hip to one side, and her laughter filled my mind with the urge to drop to my knees at her feet.
“Thanks, but no one’s ever noticed me for that.”
“They probably figured you were already taken by the best, under a million-dollar contract.” He lifted the camera to chest height. “Will you let me be the first to sign you?”
The woman swayed as if gripping an invisible pole, twirling a golden lock around her fingers.
“Do you just wander around the beach photographing girls?”
“I work for some magazines, making any man lust after mediocre girls and the world kneel before beauties like you. So tell me, want to get started? A few studio sessions and you’ll end up in Hollywood.”
Her nipples showed in the blouse like buttons. The man struck exaggerated poses and clicked away. She tilted her head, pursed her lips in a pout, and tumbled into a stream of laughter.
I closed my eyes and shoved my hands in my pockets. I would have preferred to buy a towel, lay it out on the sand, and bake until the sun dipped below the horizon. Tell me, beautiful: why should I bother, why should I sacrifice myself just to prolong your infinitesimal blink of existence, so your years can unfold—at best—for a handful of people who will also vanish? Cities buried under cities buried under cities. I’d save another person who had wandered blind and deaf into a trap, and if she found out I had intervened, she’d blame me for it. But I had to stop this coyote, or else he’d keep killing.
I didn’t know her name. I looked at another face and body I had to accept corresponded to a complex life. I had to assume this woman deserved salvation. But why add another nightmare to my crammed attic? Who would miss her? Whenever she set foot outside, hundreds of men—and some women—imagined the feel of her skin, how her breasts would fall when she took off her bra, how she would look lying in bed, eyes half-closed, face flushed, lips wet, thighs parted, displaying the earnings of her genetic lottery ticket—the product of a generation raised on the streets. But who actually loved her? A mother, a father? A little sister who yearned to see her? A boyfriend who believed she was irreplaceable? How many people would cry for her years from now, when barely any scraps of flesh were left clinging to her bones? Would this retinue of ghosts I was inventing convince me she was worth saving, instead of letting her get lost among the grains of sand formed by billions of forgotten humans?
I had to keep this man from killing her, or tomorrow I’d wake up in a sweat, haunted by the image of the woman talking to the photographer, stuck to my face like a gas mask. I would know I could have saved her but chose not to. I’d save her to spare myself the pain. Whoever she might be was irrelevant. I was just a pillar against the avalanche so that between me and the tongues of oncoming snow, someone might survive.
I approached, focusing on the man, his runner’s physique. I called his name. He lowered the camera and gave me the look of a hyena that, chewing on a carcass with strips of flesh dangling from its fangs, growls at another predator trying to sink its teeth into the entrails. But he rebuilt his grin and nodded at me, like you’d greet a neighbor you share a beer with every couple of weeks.
“How’s it going?”
“You sold several sessions to Esquire and Black Tux.”
His smile slanted, showing that canine.
“My reputation precedes me. You recognize me by my face?”
“I work in the field.”
He looked me up and down, while the woman—arched, chest thrust forward—cast her eyes down his body, tracing an invisible mole with her fingertips just below her mouth.
“What did my previous work suggest about how this shoot with this lovely thing will turn out?” the man said.
I stopped myself from staring at the woman’s bubblegum-pink lips or the dip dividing her full lower lip.
“That you woke up lucky this morning.”
She laughed as if nothing in her life had ever troubled her. She swept her hands through her hair, which unfurled in the air, glimmering in the late-afternoon light. My groin tingled.
The flash from his camera pulled my attention away.
“Spontaneous smiles are priceless,” he said.
The woman bent forward, laughing as if drunk, bracing her fingers on his arm.
A deep rumble was building inside me, an underground quake. Let her enjoy herself, and she would, ignorant—until she found out.
“Surprised by your luck?” I asked.
She hardly looked at me out of the corner of her eye.
“My turn was coming.”
“In what sense?”
“I radiate that vibe. My reward had to arrive.”
“With vibes like yours,” the man said, “I’m shocked fate hasn’t caught up with you already. But most men wonder if they have any right to approach you. They delayed the karma you deserve.”
She nodded, giving him a conspiratorial look. “Anyone who comes near me knows I’ve got love to give and receive. That’s what we’re born for, to share love in every way.”
“You do that often?” I asked. “Share the love?”
She glanced at me as if gauging whether she’d accept a proposition. “Whenever I can.”
“Does it ever cause you any trouble?”
“Some of them get too attached, become possessive. But that whole ‘ownership’ thing ended a couple of decades ago.”
“I mean, have you ever met someone who wanted more than just making love—who wanted to kill you?”
She forced a shaky smile. She shifted from wanting to ignore an inappropriate comment to wondering what my intentions were. The man’s stare pricked my temple like a dagger point.
“You sound like my dad,” she said. “That kind of thing doesn’t happen. Nobody would want to hurt me—I’m nice to everyone.”
“And if it does happen? Are you going to hug your attacker till he stops?”
She offered me her profile and gathered her silky hair in one fist. “It’s a sunny afternoon at the beach. I don’t get why you’d think about that.”
“Bad vibes, man,” said the man, as though giving me advice.
“You get what you put out,” the woman added.
She looked at me like a child. If I were shorter, she would have bent down and rested her hands on her knees. “Is that how you think because they sent you to the army? You returned, though. Rejoice! You’re safe now. Nothing to fear, right?”
“Everyone assumes I fought in the war. Maybe I did, and I forgot.”
“Classic stress, so they say. Just take a deep breath, relax your face. That sort of thing has a solution. God invented marijuana. Get some strong weed and it’ll wash away your dark thoughts like a flood. If you want, I can introduce you to a couple of people.”
“Weed ramps up my paranoia.”
She slipped a hand under her hair to scratch the back of her neck. “I’m not sure if you’re messing with me.”
“Crowds would gather around you at parties,” the man said to me.
I avoided looking at him. “I don’t go to parties.”
He inhaled deeply and held his breath. “In any case, my friend, I’m afraid you interrupted us.”
He slipped an arm around the woman. She returned the gesture while shining that radiant smile.
“Sweetheart,” the man said, “back to the important stuff. Do you live near Venice?”
“Close enough.”
“Keep going the way you were headed, and in ten minutes you’ll reach my studio. 1313 Main Street, on the corner of Horizon Ave. Ring a bell?”
“Near the school.”
“Barely worth a taxi. 1313 Main Street. Sadly, I forgot my cards at home—slipped the mind of this pro. Will you remember?”
“I can handle that. 1313, corner with Horizon Ave.”
“Will you swing by tomorrow at five in the afternoon, looking at least as gorgeous as you do now?”
“Five, you say?”
“Or whenever you prefer.”
She laughed. “Tomorrow at five.”
“I’ll let you get back to it. Bet your friends are waiting for you to brighten their day.”
She lifted herself onto her toes to kiss his cheek, but it happened right as he shot me a blank look, so instead she swayed in a little dance back toward the sand. She turned to wave goodbye with a broad smile and a flutter of her hand. Her hair rippled like a dream.
I forced myself to tear my eyes away. The man studied me, expressionless. As he walked off, he flapped a hand at me as though shooing a stray dog.
-----
Author’s note: I wrote this novella about ten years ago. It’s contained in my self-published book in Spanish titled Los reinos de brea. Written during my Serious Period, when I was sure that if I wrote in such a way, I would eventually get published. Newsflash: tough luck. If you’ve read my stuff, you know that I’m a silly bastard, that my tales usually devolve into deranged nonsense, but there’s none of that in this story or the other five I’ll probably end up translating. This protagonist is one bitter hardass. Anyway, I hope you enjoy the story, and if you don’t, well… I don’t know, go munch on rocks or something, will you?
I tracked the Ford Thunderbird to a parking lot bordering Venice Beach. I parked six spaces away, past three empty slots, two cars, and a delivery van. In case the man was roaming nearby, I took in the view through the windshield and side windows. Next to the half-buried asphalt of the bike path, clumps of palm trees had sprouted from the sand, some as tall as, or taller than, the shops along the boardwalk. The sun, sinking into the Pacific, bleached white the fronds of one palm, while the rest stood out like green torches. Silhouettes bustled across the wide beach, and at intervals lifeguard towers rose in the distance.
The beeps from the tracker echoed through the car like pinball ricochets. I switched the machine off. I could hear the surf rumbling, waves breaking their stride from the sand; the squawking of gulls; the din of shrieks and laughter from the bathers. The sun beating down on the windshield was browning me like a roasting chicken.
I had to find that man and stop him. I was following the plan like a musical score, but my back stayed pressed against the leather seat, and anxiety was growing in my chest. My subconscious lacked the vocabulary to describe the cataclysm it had foreseen.
I had saved Cassie, who had cried, yet tomorrow she would skate under the sun while her brain boiled and steam blew from her ears. If some grinning long-haired guy asked her to ride in another car, she would hop in before waking up to reality. And these folks ambling around Venice Beach like buffalo in a zoo enclosure, this pink-and-orange horizon—would it matter to them if one day Cassie ended up in the dark, panties gone, while the man on top of her strangled her?
The girl was alive and had learned nothing. Her mother, after rushing home, might have taken out her revolver and imagined forcing me to face the black maw of its barrel. I closed my eyes and saw her face as though draped in dusty cobwebs. Cassie’s mother, hating me. Hate upon hate, from people who refused to understand.
If I spirited the victims away from the shadows, they remained ignorant; if I saved them and they found out, they despised me.
I got out of the car and slammed the door. I wandered the parking lot to stretch my legs while the burning asphalt sucked at my soles. A car honked. I realized I was in the way of someone trying to maneuver into a space.
How long until the owner of that Ford Thunderbird got hungry? Or was he circling around to satisfy the hunger left over from when I saved Cassie?
What if I refused to hunt him? I could hit the nearby theaters in case they were showing Jaws or Star Wars again. I would make a pilgrimage to the record stores and buy first-edition vinyls of Nick Drake, Roy Harper, Karen Dalton. I could dine into the dusk until I emerged into the odd world I’d find.
If that starving coyote went hunting and left another corpse behind, would I even find out? Would I care? Another anonymous woman would vanish. Her face printed on milk cartons. With luck, in several years or decades, some hiker would discover that the femur his dog was slobbering over had belonged to a woman—or a child.
Dozens of miniature black holes roamed the United States, swallowing pretty hitchhikers, teenage runaways, prostitutes. Black holes wandering immortally: when one disappeared, another took its place. The rest of the population kept working, birthing, gathering to celebrate the Super Bowl, filling baseball stadiums, balancing on surfboards, or doing whatever else they fancied in this period of time that blended with all the others like spilled paint in a swimming pool. News of a woman’s disappearance would spoil someone’s snack in between bites of bacon and sips of beer. Most people believed (though they wouldn’t say it) that some sin had condemned that photographed woman to deserve it, or the universe would had chosen someone else to punish. The sacrifice was part of an obscure plan that someday would drain into some blend of justice and harmony. But if I stepped in, the masses would go on smiling in ignorance.
The tension in my neck hurt. How many times had I told myself that every life I saved was worth it, even if it stuffed my mind with skeletons and cadavers, a mounting heap at the bottom of a bloody pit?
Music drifted out from the turntables and radios in the boardwalk shops and apartments. Graham Nash protesting war and the military. Dolly Parton. Hendrix. As if at a concert, different acts played on neighboring stages. A warm breeze carried the scent of incense from the apartments. Dozens of people strolled around. A girl in shorts too tight to crease and a crop top that showed her belly button skated while holding the hand of another skater—a man in his early twenties with long hair and a mustache. On the sand, groups lying on their towels cackled like flocks of birds. They had been born in a cell where some invisible hand projected pictures of puppies, babies, cakes, and tropical beaches onto the walls.
All this laughter and enjoyment while somewhere in this city—not to mention the rest of the world—someone was getting beaten, raped, or murdered. Thousands of crimes went unnoticed, and criminals moved on to their next victim. So many beatings where the battered victim avoided the police, or reported the assault only for no reporter to pick it up. So many rapes where, for whatever reason, the victim stayed silent. In any neighborhood where kids pedaled on tricycles, in the basement of some house with neatly trimmed grass, a man might be exploiting a woman’s body as a semen receptacle the same way he would use a toilet for urine, and when he killed her, he’d dispose of her corpse like flushing a used condom. Maybe that woman never made it onto the list of thousands of missing persons, or she was mentioned briefly in a newspaper, and I would never find out.
I skirted the beach, eyeing every passerby and every group member, just in case I recognized the individual. I stuffed my hands into my pockets. Sometimes I had to remind myself that I had come out here to hunt. I stopped to look back at those who had just passed by, though some were already shrinking in the distance on their roller skates, skateboards, or bikes.
No matter which era I ended up in, I was surrounded by cheerful voices, smiling groups, couples holding hands. The same actors in different costumes, sporting whatever haircuts each era deemed acceptable. The plumage of exotic birds. In every decade, they believed everything would be fine, that a clear path lay ahead and they only had to look for it. I felt set apart from them, the last member of some other human species clinging to the edge of extinction. What could I tell these people? They would react as though I had blasphemed against their divine maxim that goodness always prevails. But goodness prevailed only because, before they even arrived, I had cleared their path. When I failed to worry about it, evil triumphed time and again.
I watched a volleyball game among a coed group where more than just the ball was bouncing. A figure nearby stood out. The man hovered near the bike path, scanning the beach. Sometimes he hid his face behind a camera and snapped a photo. His voluminous blond mane fell to his shoulders, and from behind one might mistake him for a woman.
When his name and surname flickered at the edges of my mind, I shooed them away. Names were for people unlike these rabid coyotes wandering around, ready to rip off a piece of someone unless the police—or I—put them down.
“I recognize that look. My friend Pete.”
It took me a second to realize the voice to my right was speaking to me. A man of about twenty-five. He was smoking a cigarette. The fringe of his long hair covered his forehead, and the wiry ends curled at his neck. His goatee protruded two inches from his chin. His gaze implied he enjoyed meeting strangers.
“He went from one party to another,” said the man, “loved to play guitar. Plenty of women would hang around for private songs. But he got drafted. When he returned, he threw away his medal. Every couple of months I spot him far off, just standing in the middle of nowhere, looking like you do.”
He drew closer as if to offer me a cigarette, but I wanted him gone.
“Do Pete a favor. Next time you see him, stab him through the heart.”
The man twitched his head like it was a nervous tic. He lowered his eyebrows and sucked on the cigarette filter. I walked away toward the bike path.
When the photographer’s features grew sharper, I stopped. By the look of him, his mannerisms, maybe he had a portfolio of pictures he’d posed in. As if his fishing line had gone taut, he fixed his gaze on a woman in her twenties wearing a black floral-print blouse with balloon sleeves and a triangular neckline. She had tied the blouse at her waist. Her jeans ended where her thighs began.
He held the camera at belt level and followed the woman’s rising and falling hips. That golden hair gleamed like satin. Any film studio would insure such breasts.
As she passed by, he blocked her path. His lips parted, curving along the gingival margin without showing the gums. A toothpaste-ad grin, with prominent canines. The muscles in his cheeks framed the smile like curtains revealing a show. Though I pictured those teeth pulverizing bones, splinters flying between his molars, she matched his smile in a fraction of a second.
“I had to stop you,” said the man. “Tell me, gorgeous. Which agency hired you?”
“What kind of agency would hire me?”
“A modeling one, of course.”
She cocked a hip to one side, and her laughter filled my mind with the urge to drop to my knees at her feet.
“Thanks, but no one’s ever noticed me for that.”
“They probably figured you were already taken by the best, under a million-dollar contract.” He lifted the camera to chest height. “Will you let me be the first to sign you?”
The woman swayed as if gripping an invisible pole, twirling a golden lock around her fingers.
“Do you just wander around the beach photographing girls?”
“I work for some magazines, making any man lust after mediocre girls and the world kneel before beauties like you. So tell me, want to get started? A few studio sessions and you’ll end up in Hollywood.”
Her nipples showed in the blouse like buttons. The man struck exaggerated poses and clicked away. She tilted her head, pursed her lips in a pout, and tumbled into a stream of laughter.
I closed my eyes and shoved my hands in my pockets. I would have preferred to buy a towel, lay it out on the sand, and bake until the sun dipped below the horizon. Tell me, beautiful: why should I bother, why should I sacrifice myself just to prolong your infinitesimal blink of existence, so your years can unfold—at best—for a handful of people who will also vanish? Cities buried under cities buried under cities. I’d save another person who had wandered blind and deaf into a trap, and if she found out I had intervened, she’d blame me for it. But I had to stop this coyote, or else he’d keep killing.
I didn’t know her name. I looked at another face and body I had to accept corresponded to a complex life. I had to assume this woman deserved salvation. But why add another nightmare to my crammed attic? Who would miss her? Whenever she set foot outside, hundreds of men—and some women—imagined the feel of her skin, how her breasts would fall when she took off her bra, how she would look lying in bed, eyes half-closed, face flushed, lips wet, thighs parted, displaying the earnings of her genetic lottery ticket—the product of a generation raised on the streets. But who actually loved her? A mother, a father? A little sister who yearned to see her? A boyfriend who believed she was irreplaceable? How many people would cry for her years from now, when barely any scraps of flesh were left clinging to her bones? Would this retinue of ghosts I was inventing convince me she was worth saving, instead of letting her get lost among the grains of sand formed by billions of forgotten humans?
I had to keep this man from killing her, or tomorrow I’d wake up in a sweat, haunted by the image of the woman talking to the photographer, stuck to my face like a gas mask. I would know I could have saved her but chose not to. I’d save her to spare myself the pain. Whoever she might be was irrelevant. I was just a pillar against the avalanche so that between me and the tongues of oncoming snow, someone might survive.
I approached, focusing on the man, his runner’s physique. I called his name. He lowered the camera and gave me the look of a hyena that, chewing on a carcass with strips of flesh dangling from its fangs, growls at another predator trying to sink its teeth into the entrails. But he rebuilt his grin and nodded at me, like you’d greet a neighbor you share a beer with every couple of weeks.
“How’s it going?”
“You sold several sessions to Esquire and Black Tux.”
His smile slanted, showing that canine.
“My reputation precedes me. You recognize me by my face?”
“I work in the field.”
He looked me up and down, while the woman—arched, chest thrust forward—cast her eyes down his body, tracing an invisible mole with her fingertips just below her mouth.
“What did my previous work suggest about how this shoot with this lovely thing will turn out?” the man said.
I stopped myself from staring at the woman’s bubblegum-pink lips or the dip dividing her full lower lip.
“That you woke up lucky this morning.”
She laughed as if nothing in her life had ever troubled her. She swept her hands through her hair, which unfurled in the air, glimmering in the late-afternoon light. My groin tingled.
The flash from his camera pulled my attention away.
“Spontaneous smiles are priceless,” he said.
The woman bent forward, laughing as if drunk, bracing her fingers on his arm.
A deep rumble was building inside me, an underground quake. Let her enjoy herself, and she would, ignorant—until she found out.
“Surprised by your luck?” I asked.
She hardly looked at me out of the corner of her eye.
“My turn was coming.”
“In what sense?”
“I radiate that vibe. My reward had to arrive.”
“With vibes like yours,” the man said, “I’m shocked fate hasn’t caught up with you already. But most men wonder if they have any right to approach you. They delayed the karma you deserve.”
She nodded, giving him a conspiratorial look. “Anyone who comes near me knows I’ve got love to give and receive. That’s what we’re born for, to share love in every way.”
“You do that often?” I asked. “Share the love?”
She glanced at me as if gauging whether she’d accept a proposition. “Whenever I can.”
“Does it ever cause you any trouble?”
“Some of them get too attached, become possessive. But that whole ‘ownership’ thing ended a couple of decades ago.”
“I mean, have you ever met someone who wanted more than just making love—who wanted to kill you?”
She forced a shaky smile. She shifted from wanting to ignore an inappropriate comment to wondering what my intentions were. The man’s stare pricked my temple like a dagger point.
“You sound like my dad,” she said. “That kind of thing doesn’t happen. Nobody would want to hurt me—I’m nice to everyone.”
“And if it does happen? Are you going to hug your attacker till he stops?”
She offered me her profile and gathered her silky hair in one fist. “It’s a sunny afternoon at the beach. I don’t get why you’d think about that.”
“Bad vibes, man,” said the man, as though giving me advice.
“You get what you put out,” the woman added.
She looked at me like a child. If I were shorter, she would have bent down and rested her hands on her knees. “Is that how you think because they sent you to the army? You returned, though. Rejoice! You’re safe now. Nothing to fear, right?”
“Everyone assumes I fought in the war. Maybe I did, and I forgot.”
“Classic stress, so they say. Just take a deep breath, relax your face. That sort of thing has a solution. God invented marijuana. Get some strong weed and it’ll wash away your dark thoughts like a flood. If you want, I can introduce you to a couple of people.”
“Weed ramps up my paranoia.”
She slipped a hand under her hair to scratch the back of her neck. “I’m not sure if you’re messing with me.”
“Crowds would gather around you at parties,” the man said to me.
I avoided looking at him. “I don’t go to parties.”
He inhaled deeply and held his breath. “In any case, my friend, I’m afraid you interrupted us.”
He slipped an arm around the woman. She returned the gesture while shining that radiant smile.
“Sweetheart,” the man said, “back to the important stuff. Do you live near Venice?”
“Close enough.”
“Keep going the way you were headed, and in ten minutes you’ll reach my studio. 1313 Main Street, on the corner of Horizon Ave. Ring a bell?”
“Near the school.”
“Barely worth a taxi. 1313 Main Street. Sadly, I forgot my cards at home—slipped the mind of this pro. Will you remember?”
“I can handle that. 1313, corner with Horizon Ave.”
“Will you swing by tomorrow at five in the afternoon, looking at least as gorgeous as you do now?”
“Five, you say?”
“Or whenever you prefer.”
She laughed. “Tomorrow at five.”
“I’ll let you get back to it. Bet your friends are waiting for you to brighten their day.”
She lifted herself onto her toes to kiss his cheek, but it happened right as he shot me a blank look, so instead she swayed in a little dance back toward the sand. She turned to wave goodbye with a broad smile and a flutter of her hand. Her hair rippled like a dream.
I forced myself to tear my eyes away. The man studied me, expressionless. As he walked off, he flapped a hand at me as though shooing a stray dog.
-----
Author’s note: I wrote this novella about ten years ago. It’s contained in my self-published book in Spanish titled Los reinos de brea. Written during my Serious Period, when I was sure that if I wrote in such a way, I would eventually get published. Newsflash: tough luck. If you’ve read my stuff, you know that I’m a silly bastard, that my tales usually devolve into deranged nonsense, but there’s none of that in this story or the other five I’ll probably end up translating. This protagonist is one bitter hardass. Anyway, I hope you enjoy the story, and if you don’t, well… I don’t know, go munch on rocks or something, will you?
Smile, Pt. 1 (Fiction)
[check out this part on my personal page, where it looks better]
Cassie June was hobbling along the scorching sidewalk, dragging her skates as though they were cement boots. She stood about four feet tall. She had jammed a plastic visor onto her head, and her knees were protected by thick pads like pieces of some armor. Beads of sweat glistened on the tanned skin of her shoulders, arms, and legs. As my car pulled up beside her, I noticed Cassie was blinking—maybe to keep the sweat out of her eyes, or because fatigue was overpowering her—and she breathed through her mouth like a fish on the lookout for food flakes.
It never ceased to amaze me that I could recognize living faces, that a person’s features in the flesh would match those I had memorized from a faded photograph, the frozen image I had stared at until I became familiar with the rage and hatred that filled me and shot through me like electric jolts.
A flash in the rearview mirror dazzled me. In that rectangle of glass, the ruby-red body of the Ford Thunderbird glimmered, except for the stripes of shadow along the raised center. Its grille: two rows of metal cells in a robotic smile.
The bronze-like, wavering glare of the sun sometimes concealed the silhouette of the man at the wheel. The lenses of his sunglasses ignited. The outline of his face showed pale holes for eyes, big as a startled owl’s.
I slowed my car to match Cassie’s skating speed. Behind me, the Ford Thunderbird closed the gap. I braced myself, expecting a metallic crunch that would jolt my back from the seat. With one hand still on the steering wheel, I reached to my right and, turning the crank, rolled down the passenger-side window. The car crept along, shielding the girl, who tugged a strap of her T-shirt up over her shoulder. On its chest, the superheroes from the Super Friends series posed.
“Cassie,” I said.
The girl was swaying on her skates, as though squeezing out the last dregs of her battery. The band of her visor pinned down some sweat-soaked brown strands. Little trails of sweat slithered down her neck.
I hardened my voice.
“Cassie, get in. I’ll take you home.”
She slowed down, turned her face, and cut off her panting with a little noise of confusion. She leaned forward to peer inside the car.
“It’s not far.”
“It’ll be less far if I drive you.”
A horn blared behind me, making me jump. In the rearview mirror, a rippling band of bronze now covered half the man’s body. He slammed his palm into the horn again.
I clenched the steering wheel’s rubber grip to focus my anger. When I opened the passenger door, Cassie skated backward in a semicircle to avoid getting hit by it. She let herself drop sideways onto the seat and lifted her legs inside with her hands, as though they’d fallen asleep. She shut the door.
I sped up to the tune of another long honk. I exceeded my previous speed, but in the rearview mirror, the Ford Thunderbird kept pace. Amid the haze of heat, the man’s knuckles rose over the wheel like an eagle’s talons.
“What’s this weird gadget?” Cassie asked.
She’d turned in her seat and pulled aside the cloth cover I’d draped over the tracker set behind the gearshift.
“What do you think it is?”
“Some expensive radio.”
I took her hand away from it and wiped the sweat off my palm onto my pants.
“Very expensive.”
“Does it pick up Nevada stations without static?”
“It doesn’t pick up any station.”
Cassie, still breathing through her mouth, laughed and studied my face.
“Why’d you buy it?”
“It seemed good and important. Isn’t that reason enough?”
I fixed my attention on the asphalt ahead, though for a few moments I felt the girl’s gaze burning into my right temple. The car was filling with the smells of plastic, hot fabric, and toasted skin giving off vapor. Over Cassie’s forehead, a membrane of heat distorted half an inch of the window. She leaned over to fiddle with the straps on one skate, leaving a sweaty silhouette in the upholstery.
“You might’ve passed out from heatstroke,” I said.
Cassie looked up. A bead of sweat rolled into her nostrils and, as she breathed in, she snorted it away.
“A what?”
“Too much heat. Coupled with exertion, you could’ve fainted.”
She shrugged.
“I finished my water bottle.”
Her legs—no thicker than one and a half of my forearms—were trembling, but the strain had washed off her face. The reddened skin was returning to normal. She tugged at her socks, sneaking glances at me without any sign of fear.
I sank into the seat, speechless. I kept switching my attention from the road to the stop signs, the turns I had to make, and the specter in the mirror. Would it have been enough if that man had just asked Cassie to get in his car? A smile, an offer, and the child’s ten years would swirl down the drain like food scraps in a sink.
Cassie was wiping sweat from her face. She peered out at the scenery through the windshield and side window. Along this unmarked stretch of asphalt I was navigating, houses in an Italian style passed one after another. The sun glinted in their windows and bleached the sandy façades. Concrete ramps led up to the closed garage doors. Over the flat sky—a cornflower blue that faded to white at the horizon.
I wanted to shout at Cassie, shake her. If I seized her wrist and took a detour, how would the girl react? Had she cried out before? Had she screamed? Those details were kept by the surviving witnesses, but I craved them like collectible pieces. If I weighed them all together, maybe I’d recognize a pattern that, in time, would form the stakes of a palisade to keep the beasts at bay.
I scraped the rubber of the steering wheel with a fingernail. I shook my head. Should I stay silent? When Cassie gave me a smile, I opened my mouth and frowned.
“Why did you get into my car?”
The girl wriggled and laughed, revealing teeth that were too big for her mouth.
“You let me get in,” she said, as though she was part of a joke.
“You don’t know me.”
Cassie tilted her head and lifted one skate onto the seat.
“You know my name.”
“Do you recognize my face? Do you remember me from anywhere?”
She let her smile drop. Her gaze wandered over the dashboard.
I stiffened my tone.
“A stranger offers you a ride home and you believe him.”
“You seem like a good person.”
“What gave you that impression?”
Cassie planted her palms on her knee pads, arms locked.
“You offered me a ride. You’re kind.”
“Do you think if I wanted to hurt you, I’d tell you up front? Would I have pulled up next to you, opened the door, and offered to make you suffer in ways you can’t even imagine? Does my tone suggest I’m kind?”
Cassie lowered her head and pursed her lips. She tugged the plastic visor down, as if to hide her eyes.
I scratched an itch on my neck. The seat felt as if a spring had come loose. The girl would refuse to cooperate or reason. She chose to remain blind, deaf, ignorant. Once I parked in front of her house and Cassie got out, what would she have learned, other than to avoid me?
At an intersection, I remembered the Ford Thunderbird. Behind us now was a moss-green Chevrolet Chevette, driven by a gray-haired woman. I berated myself. My arms tingled. I looked around, certain that the Ford Thunderbird would ambush us any second, but it must have given up and turned at some cross street. For the rest of the drive, I kept my eyes glued to the road.
“You were worried about me,” Cassie said in a tense voice, watching some spot above my forearm.
“I am.”
“That’s why you seem like a good person.”
“Cassie, anyone who wants to hurt you can pretend to have good intentions and you won’t see any difference.”
She turned to look out her window.
“Will you ever get into a stranger’s car again?” I asked.
Cassie’s voice wavered.
“I don’t know.”
I smacked my palm against the steering wheel.
“Maybe I should hurt you. Then the next time someone offers you a ride, you’d run away.”
She fixed me with a defiant stare, like a lion cub trying to roar.
“I’d shoot you.”
I let out a scoffing laugh.
“Oh, really?”
“With a huge gun.”
I hunched toward Cassie, pretending to check for hidden weapons.
“Are you carrying it?”
“My mom keeps it. I’ve seen it. She told me never to touch it.”
“How will you shoot me with that gun if you’re forbidden to hold it or pull the trigger?”
Her flushed face turned downward, and she clenched her fists on her knee pads.
“That’s what I thought,” I said. “Don’t get into strangers’ cars, whether they know your name or not.”
Cassie turned her torso toward the window as though to doze against her shoulder; her skates clacked when their wheels knocked together.
Two minutes later, I pulled up to her single-story ranch house, low-slung and cream-colored, with a wooden baseboard. Rhododendron bushes were gathered around the windows. Just above the roof, you could see firs and maples, as if the backyard bordered a patch of woods.
“Off you go.”
Cassie snapped alert. She looked around, frowning. Her eyes were glassy, and a tear trailed down one cheek, leaving a shiny line.
She huffed, opened the door, hopped onto the cement path, and skated as though in a final sprint toward the front door. She stabbed the doorbell, back turned to me. She tapped her fists against her thighs, jittering like she needed to pee.
The door opened a crack. Cassie slipped inside.
I leaned back in my seat. I’d pictured this scene. I’d pictured myself pulling up next to the lawn, perpendicular to the walkway that narrowed by a few inches until it hit the door. Cassie had been smiling on her skates.
When did she ever come out like this? How did I convince myself that this time the chain would break? Maybe I just needed to believe it.
A woman’s voice barked. I stirred like a carnival machine that had just had a quarter dropped in its slot. Cassie’s mother stood two strides from the passenger window, one hand on her hip. She wore a bright apple-green dress, possibly cashmere, barely reaching her thighs, with a pattern of stripes and mandalas. Loose sleeves draped to her forearms like a kimono. Her turquoise eyes, bulging lids and all, regarded me with keen alertness. Her mouth tipped upward toward her nose rather than down toward her chin, giving the impression she disapproved of everything.
The last time I’d seen that face, it was twisted in agony in the footage of one of the trials, when the woman pulled a revolver from inside her trench coat and the court guards pinned her down before she could fire. I’d paused the video at that moment. Wedged among those broad-shouldered uniforms, the woman’s dislocated face stood out—a blend of fury and desperation, her jaw clenched, rows of teeth forming a black gap, her pupils lit like red disks. Even though I’d frozen the image, her face seemed to vibrate among those bulked-up guards, and it would redden and swell like a balloon filling the screen, her teeth distorting like piano keys.
The face of the woman now standing by this rented car looked like an imitation, as though someone had bought Cassie’s mother’s body at a flea market and crawled in through her nose to steer the brain.
“You brought my daughter home.”
I let out a long breath. I slid over the gearshift to the passenger seat. I opened the door and got out, straightening up.
She approached so close that one punch would’ve reached me if she’d wanted. I had a head’s advantage on her, but her stance and expression suggested that from somewhere overhead, a sniper had me in his crosshairs.
“I guess that bothers you,” I said.
“She came in crying.”
I nodded. I leaned against the passenger door frame.
Tension in her eyelids betrayed her.
“Who are you to think you can put my daughter in your car?”
“Neighborhood watchman.”
She scanned my shirtfront.
“Where’s your badge?”
“I’m a volunteer.”
She shook her head sarcastically and folded her arms.
“Well, thanks for your concern, I guess. But don’t ever do it again.”
She wanted me embarrassed, worried about the consequences she might dump on me. Yet I resisted the urge to spin around, climb back in, and drive off. Why bother explaining myself? Why accept her contemptuous stare? If Cassie’s mother understood, she’d buckle at the knees, stammer her gratitude. Maybe she’d invite me in for a cup of tea, and maybe I’d accept, and relax for an hour among people who actually wanted me around, for a change. But she was glowering at me as if I belonged in a cage.
My voice came out low.
“I was hoping this would be the last time. A lot of bad people are out there.”
“Did you tell her things like that? Is that why she’s crying?”
“She got into a stranger’s car, and you’re mad I warned her about danger. You have bigger issues.”
She jabbed a finger at me, an invisible stinger.
“She’s a happy kid. She doesn’t need grim thoughts rattling around in her head.”
“You don’t understand.”
“Four blocks from here, I got shoved into the street, and my purse was stolen. For years, men have followed me around like I was prey in some alley. Cassie is a child.”
“A hammer blow would bounce right off her skull?”
The woman’s cheekbones flamed red as if I’d slapped her.
“Don’t talk about my daughter like that. I’ll keep her safe and carefree as long as I can. That’s none of your concern, stranger who put my girl in his car.”
“If she makes it to adulthood.”
She clenched her jaw and studied my face with a steely glare.
“You were in the war, weren’t you? You still think you’re hacking your way through a jungle, fearing that men with machine guns lurk in the treetops?”
I stayed silent.
“Things are different back home,” she went on with a teacherly lilt. “What are the odds someone attacks my kid? Astronomical.”
“Like the lottery. Today, your daughter would have won. A daily sacrifice to the void.”
She took a step back. Angled herself as if poised to bolt inside. Crows’ feet stood out at the corners of her eyes.
“Don’t ever force or even invite my daughter into your car again. Next time, I’ll call the real police. Or hunt you down myself.”
I started to duck into the passenger seat, but Cassie’s mother darted closer, so I froze mid-motion, rear halfway to the cushion. Her voice rose like a drawn pistol.
“Don’t mess with other people’s kids, you hear me? Under any circumstances.”
I let myself slide fully in. My heart thudded like a boxer’s punches. My vision tinted red. I wanted to slam the door without caring if it crushed her fingers.
“Your daughter was chosen today, Mrs. June. But sure, keep your rainbow world where you float among plush cushions and stuffed animals that beam out good vibes. You can afford to shut your eyes, I guess. Go on, stay blind. I’ll show up before the tar comes pouring in.”
“Fuck you too.”
She hurried back, arms folded tight, slippers tapping the cement path. She ducked inside her door. She glanced back over her shoulder as though a black bear might be lurking in the neighborhood. She closed the door. I pictured her running to the phone, lifting the receiver to call the cops.
I slammed the passenger door with a loud thud and a swirl of hot air. As I slipped behind the wheel, I squeezed the rubber of the steering wheel and floored the accelerator.
“You’re welcome,” I growled.
-----
Author’s note: in my previous post I talked about reviving a novel from ten years ago, but this ain’t it. I thought that perhaps OpenAI’s Orion 1 model would be great at translating, and it indeed seems to be. So I’m translating this novella, the third included in my self-published book in Spanish titled Los reinos de brea, published back in 2016-2017, that nobody fucking read because I don’t know how to get people to buy my stuff. May as well post the novellas here in case anyone likes them.
And man, I was angry back then. So angry. This is one bleak, brutal story.
Cassie June was hobbling along the scorching sidewalk, dragging her skates as though they were cement boots. She stood about four feet tall. She had jammed a plastic visor onto her head, and her knees were protected by thick pads like pieces of some armor. Beads of sweat glistened on the tanned skin of her shoulders, arms, and legs. As my car pulled up beside her, I noticed Cassie was blinking—maybe to keep the sweat out of her eyes, or because fatigue was overpowering her—and she breathed through her mouth like a fish on the lookout for food flakes.
It never ceased to amaze me that I could recognize living faces, that a person’s features in the flesh would match those I had memorized from a faded photograph, the frozen image I had stared at until I became familiar with the rage and hatred that filled me and shot through me like electric jolts.
A flash in the rearview mirror dazzled me. In that rectangle of glass, the ruby-red body of the Ford Thunderbird glimmered, except for the stripes of shadow along the raised center. Its grille: two rows of metal cells in a robotic smile.
The bronze-like, wavering glare of the sun sometimes concealed the silhouette of the man at the wheel. The lenses of his sunglasses ignited. The outline of his face showed pale holes for eyes, big as a startled owl’s.
I slowed my car to match Cassie’s skating speed. Behind me, the Ford Thunderbird closed the gap. I braced myself, expecting a metallic crunch that would jolt my back from the seat. With one hand still on the steering wheel, I reached to my right and, turning the crank, rolled down the passenger-side window. The car crept along, shielding the girl, who tugged a strap of her T-shirt up over her shoulder. On its chest, the superheroes from the Super Friends series posed.
“Cassie,” I said.
The girl was swaying on her skates, as though squeezing out the last dregs of her battery. The band of her visor pinned down some sweat-soaked brown strands. Little trails of sweat slithered down her neck.
I hardened my voice.
“Cassie, get in. I’ll take you home.”
She slowed down, turned her face, and cut off her panting with a little noise of confusion. She leaned forward to peer inside the car.
“It’s not far.”
“It’ll be less far if I drive you.”
A horn blared behind me, making me jump. In the rearview mirror, a rippling band of bronze now covered half the man’s body. He slammed his palm into the horn again.
I clenched the steering wheel’s rubber grip to focus my anger. When I opened the passenger door, Cassie skated backward in a semicircle to avoid getting hit by it. She let herself drop sideways onto the seat and lifted her legs inside with her hands, as though they’d fallen asleep. She shut the door.
I sped up to the tune of another long honk. I exceeded my previous speed, but in the rearview mirror, the Ford Thunderbird kept pace. Amid the haze of heat, the man’s knuckles rose over the wheel like an eagle’s talons.
“What’s this weird gadget?” Cassie asked.
She’d turned in her seat and pulled aside the cloth cover I’d draped over the tracker set behind the gearshift.
“What do you think it is?”
“Some expensive radio.”
I took her hand away from it and wiped the sweat off my palm onto my pants.
“Very expensive.”
“Does it pick up Nevada stations without static?”
“It doesn’t pick up any station.”
Cassie, still breathing through her mouth, laughed and studied my face.
“Why’d you buy it?”
“It seemed good and important. Isn’t that reason enough?”
I fixed my attention on the asphalt ahead, though for a few moments I felt the girl’s gaze burning into my right temple. The car was filling with the smells of plastic, hot fabric, and toasted skin giving off vapor. Over Cassie’s forehead, a membrane of heat distorted half an inch of the window. She leaned over to fiddle with the straps on one skate, leaving a sweaty silhouette in the upholstery.
“You might’ve passed out from heatstroke,” I said.
Cassie looked up. A bead of sweat rolled into her nostrils and, as she breathed in, she snorted it away.
“A what?”
“Too much heat. Coupled with exertion, you could’ve fainted.”
She shrugged.
“I finished my water bottle.”
Her legs—no thicker than one and a half of my forearms—were trembling, but the strain had washed off her face. The reddened skin was returning to normal. She tugged at her socks, sneaking glances at me without any sign of fear.
I sank into the seat, speechless. I kept switching my attention from the road to the stop signs, the turns I had to make, and the specter in the mirror. Would it have been enough if that man had just asked Cassie to get in his car? A smile, an offer, and the child’s ten years would swirl down the drain like food scraps in a sink.
Cassie was wiping sweat from her face. She peered out at the scenery through the windshield and side window. Along this unmarked stretch of asphalt I was navigating, houses in an Italian style passed one after another. The sun glinted in their windows and bleached the sandy façades. Concrete ramps led up to the closed garage doors. Over the flat sky—a cornflower blue that faded to white at the horizon.
I wanted to shout at Cassie, shake her. If I seized her wrist and took a detour, how would the girl react? Had she cried out before? Had she screamed? Those details were kept by the surviving witnesses, but I craved them like collectible pieces. If I weighed them all together, maybe I’d recognize a pattern that, in time, would form the stakes of a palisade to keep the beasts at bay.
I scraped the rubber of the steering wheel with a fingernail. I shook my head. Should I stay silent? When Cassie gave me a smile, I opened my mouth and frowned.
“Why did you get into my car?”
The girl wriggled and laughed, revealing teeth that were too big for her mouth.
“You let me get in,” she said, as though she was part of a joke.
“You don’t know me.”
Cassie tilted her head and lifted one skate onto the seat.
“You know my name.”
“Do you recognize my face? Do you remember me from anywhere?”
She let her smile drop. Her gaze wandered over the dashboard.
I stiffened my tone.
“A stranger offers you a ride home and you believe him.”
“You seem like a good person.”
“What gave you that impression?”
Cassie planted her palms on her knee pads, arms locked.
“You offered me a ride. You’re kind.”
“Do you think if I wanted to hurt you, I’d tell you up front? Would I have pulled up next to you, opened the door, and offered to make you suffer in ways you can’t even imagine? Does my tone suggest I’m kind?”
Cassie lowered her head and pursed her lips. She tugged the plastic visor down, as if to hide her eyes.
I scratched an itch on my neck. The seat felt as if a spring had come loose. The girl would refuse to cooperate or reason. She chose to remain blind, deaf, ignorant. Once I parked in front of her house and Cassie got out, what would she have learned, other than to avoid me?
At an intersection, I remembered the Ford Thunderbird. Behind us now was a moss-green Chevrolet Chevette, driven by a gray-haired woman. I berated myself. My arms tingled. I looked around, certain that the Ford Thunderbird would ambush us any second, but it must have given up and turned at some cross street. For the rest of the drive, I kept my eyes glued to the road.
“You were worried about me,” Cassie said in a tense voice, watching some spot above my forearm.
“I am.”
“That’s why you seem like a good person.”
“Cassie, anyone who wants to hurt you can pretend to have good intentions and you won’t see any difference.”
She turned to look out her window.
“Will you ever get into a stranger’s car again?” I asked.
Cassie’s voice wavered.
“I don’t know.”
I smacked my palm against the steering wheel.
“Maybe I should hurt you. Then the next time someone offers you a ride, you’d run away.”
She fixed me with a defiant stare, like a lion cub trying to roar.
“I’d shoot you.”
I let out a scoffing laugh.
“Oh, really?”
“With a huge gun.”
I hunched toward Cassie, pretending to check for hidden weapons.
“Are you carrying it?”
“My mom keeps it. I’ve seen it. She told me never to touch it.”
“How will you shoot me with that gun if you’re forbidden to hold it or pull the trigger?”
Her flushed face turned downward, and she clenched her fists on her knee pads.
“That’s what I thought,” I said. “Don’t get into strangers’ cars, whether they know your name or not.”
Cassie turned her torso toward the window as though to doze against her shoulder; her skates clacked when their wheels knocked together.
Two minutes later, I pulled up to her single-story ranch house, low-slung and cream-colored, with a wooden baseboard. Rhododendron bushes were gathered around the windows. Just above the roof, you could see firs and maples, as if the backyard bordered a patch of woods.
“Off you go.”
Cassie snapped alert. She looked around, frowning. Her eyes were glassy, and a tear trailed down one cheek, leaving a shiny line.
She huffed, opened the door, hopped onto the cement path, and skated as though in a final sprint toward the front door. She stabbed the doorbell, back turned to me. She tapped her fists against her thighs, jittering like she needed to pee.
The door opened a crack. Cassie slipped inside.
I leaned back in my seat. I’d pictured this scene. I’d pictured myself pulling up next to the lawn, perpendicular to the walkway that narrowed by a few inches until it hit the door. Cassie had been smiling on her skates.
When did she ever come out like this? How did I convince myself that this time the chain would break? Maybe I just needed to believe it.
A woman’s voice barked. I stirred like a carnival machine that had just had a quarter dropped in its slot. Cassie’s mother stood two strides from the passenger window, one hand on her hip. She wore a bright apple-green dress, possibly cashmere, barely reaching her thighs, with a pattern of stripes and mandalas. Loose sleeves draped to her forearms like a kimono. Her turquoise eyes, bulging lids and all, regarded me with keen alertness. Her mouth tipped upward toward her nose rather than down toward her chin, giving the impression she disapproved of everything.
The last time I’d seen that face, it was twisted in agony in the footage of one of the trials, when the woman pulled a revolver from inside her trench coat and the court guards pinned her down before she could fire. I’d paused the video at that moment. Wedged among those broad-shouldered uniforms, the woman’s dislocated face stood out—a blend of fury and desperation, her jaw clenched, rows of teeth forming a black gap, her pupils lit like red disks. Even though I’d frozen the image, her face seemed to vibrate among those bulked-up guards, and it would redden and swell like a balloon filling the screen, her teeth distorting like piano keys.
The face of the woman now standing by this rented car looked like an imitation, as though someone had bought Cassie’s mother’s body at a flea market and crawled in through her nose to steer the brain.
“You brought my daughter home.”
I let out a long breath. I slid over the gearshift to the passenger seat. I opened the door and got out, straightening up.
She approached so close that one punch would’ve reached me if she’d wanted. I had a head’s advantage on her, but her stance and expression suggested that from somewhere overhead, a sniper had me in his crosshairs.
“I guess that bothers you,” I said.
“She came in crying.”
I nodded. I leaned against the passenger door frame.
Tension in her eyelids betrayed her.
“Who are you to think you can put my daughter in your car?”
“Neighborhood watchman.”
She scanned my shirtfront.
“Where’s your badge?”
“I’m a volunteer.”
She shook her head sarcastically and folded her arms.
“Well, thanks for your concern, I guess. But don’t ever do it again.”
She wanted me embarrassed, worried about the consequences she might dump on me. Yet I resisted the urge to spin around, climb back in, and drive off. Why bother explaining myself? Why accept her contemptuous stare? If Cassie’s mother understood, she’d buckle at the knees, stammer her gratitude. Maybe she’d invite me in for a cup of tea, and maybe I’d accept, and relax for an hour among people who actually wanted me around, for a change. But she was glowering at me as if I belonged in a cage.
My voice came out low.
“I was hoping this would be the last time. A lot of bad people are out there.”
“Did you tell her things like that? Is that why she’s crying?”
“She got into a stranger’s car, and you’re mad I warned her about danger. You have bigger issues.”
She jabbed a finger at me, an invisible stinger.
“She’s a happy kid. She doesn’t need grim thoughts rattling around in her head.”
“You don’t understand.”
“Four blocks from here, I got shoved into the street, and my purse was stolen. For years, men have followed me around like I was prey in some alley. Cassie is a child.”
“A hammer blow would bounce right off her skull?”
The woman’s cheekbones flamed red as if I’d slapped her.
“Don’t talk about my daughter like that. I’ll keep her safe and carefree as long as I can. That’s none of your concern, stranger who put my girl in his car.”
“If she makes it to adulthood.”
She clenched her jaw and studied my face with a steely glare.
“You were in the war, weren’t you? You still think you’re hacking your way through a jungle, fearing that men with machine guns lurk in the treetops?”
I stayed silent.
“Things are different back home,” she went on with a teacherly lilt. “What are the odds someone attacks my kid? Astronomical.”
“Like the lottery. Today, your daughter would have won. A daily sacrifice to the void.”
She took a step back. Angled herself as if poised to bolt inside. Crows’ feet stood out at the corners of her eyes.
“Don’t ever force or even invite my daughter into your car again. Next time, I’ll call the real police. Or hunt you down myself.”
I started to duck into the passenger seat, but Cassie’s mother darted closer, so I froze mid-motion, rear halfway to the cushion. Her voice rose like a drawn pistol.
“Don’t mess with other people’s kids, you hear me? Under any circumstances.”
I let myself slide fully in. My heart thudded like a boxer’s punches. My vision tinted red. I wanted to slam the door without caring if it crushed her fingers.
“Your daughter was chosen today, Mrs. June. But sure, keep your rainbow world where you float among plush cushions and stuffed animals that beam out good vibes. You can afford to shut your eyes, I guess. Go on, stay blind. I’ll show up before the tar comes pouring in.”
“Fuck you too.”
She hurried back, arms folded tight, slippers tapping the cement path. She ducked inside her door. She glanced back over her shoulder as though a black bear might be lurking in the neighborhood. She closed the door. I pictured her running to the phone, lifting the receiver to call the cops.
I slammed the passenger door with a loud thud and a swirl of hot air. As I slipped behind the wheel, I squeezed the rubber of the steering wheel and floored the accelerator.
“You’re welcome,” I growled.
-----
Author’s note: in my previous post I talked about reviving a novel from ten years ago, but this ain’t it. I thought that perhaps OpenAI’s Orion 1 model would be great at translating, and it indeed seems to be. So I’m translating this novella, the third included in my self-published book in Spanish titled Los reinos de brea, published back in 2016-2017, that nobody fucking read because I don’t know how to get people to buy my stuff. May as well post the novellas here in case anyone likes them.
And man, I was angry back then. So angry. This is one bleak, brutal story.
