Survival Tactics
By James M. Waltzer
Sparsely studded by cactus and tufts of milkweed, the desert sprouts an army of skinny turbines whose blades spin madly in the ferocious crosscurrents. The wind is tamer on the other side of the mountain pass, allowing the ramshackle cabin to remain upright instead of scattering into loose planks and tar sheets on the desert floor.
“Are we still on planet earth?” Devon shouts as the Hyundai splashes sand and tussles with the narrow, rutted trail onto which they’ve been dumped by the highway spur Pipeline Road. The car windows are up and thank God the air-conditioning works.
Mari grips the steering wheel with both hands and urges her vehicle onward as her daughter watches thick bands of dust rise outside the windows. Through the haze, looking like the frontier birthplace of some long-ago historical figure, the dilapidated shack squats a thousand feet away. Five miles ahead on the interstate they’ve just exited, billboards and trailers form the first outcroppings of the resort town.
“If I don’t need new shocks after this, it’ll be a miracle,” Mari says.
Beneath her sunglasses, her lucid blue eyes mirror the desert sky, and she wears her graying-blond hair long like a woman Devon’s age. For this trip, they’ve both donned Levis and combat boots.
“Why, exactly, was it necessary to come with you?” says Devon, brown-eyed, short, and athletically firm in contrast to her willowy mother. There’s no accounting for gene pools.
“Because this could be the last chance for you to see your grandfather while he’s still breathing.”
“Actually, it’s my first chance. We never did go to see him all those years.”
Mari’s sardonic smile signals she’s well aware of that, as the beleaguered Hyundai dips and rises like the dolphins Devon cheered at SeaWorld when she was small and her father was around.
“I wasn’t on speaking terms with him when they sent him up,” Mari says. “And prison’s not a suitable place to visit for a little girl or a young lady.”
“I would’ve survived.”
“That makes one of us.”
The car hits a rock and Devon feels it in her teeth. “How old is he now?” she says.
“Eighty-eight, by my calculation.”
“Maybe he’ll keep on going forever,” Devon says, squinting at the stark landscape.
“God knows he’s thornier than a cactus,” Mari says. “But my money says Tommie’ll stop him if it comes to that.”
“What do you mean, stop him?”
“Kill him.”
Devon jerks her head toward the driver’s side so fast, she worries it has disengaged from her neck. “What?”
Mari pulls to an abrupt stop thirty feet from the cabin, and a cloud of desert dust envelops them. She laughs erratically, so out of character that it disturbs her daughter.
“Are you all right, mom?”
“That’s debatable.”
“What’s so funny all of a sudden?”
“Nothing’s funny. The opposite, if you want to know the truth. Laughter is life’s great release valve.”
Devon gives her a sideways glance. Mari keeps the engine idling to sustain the refrigerated air. Through the windshield, their eyes fix on an ancient pickup below a lean-to extension of the dwelling’s lopsided roof.
“Looks like he’s home,” Mari says.
“He could be out jogging.”
“Now that’s funny.”
A weathervane sticks up from the ridge of the roof, its two-dimensional rooster stirring above an east-west arrow.
“What does he need that for?” Devon says.
Mari shakes her head. Shrugs. “Atmosphere,” she deadpans. “Fact is, sweetheart, men are like weathervanes. They blow with the wind.”
“You’re such a philosopher, mom,” says Devon. “Now please give me an answer: What did you mean about Tommie?”
Mari’s lips form a crooked smile, and Devon fears that more demonic laughter will erupt.
“Your Uncle Tommie’s never been too swift.”
“Like I don’t know that.”
“He actually vowed to kill him when he was a boy. More than once.”
She switches off the ignition.
“Why?” says Devon.
Mari thinks about it for a moment, searching for the right words. “Let’s just say that Byron isn’t the most trustworthy of God’s creatures.”
They leave the car for the desert furnace. After taking two short breaths of stifling air, Devon says, “No way he’s got electricity in this dump.”
“You never know⎯you saw that wind farm we passed. But I think you’re right, he probably gets by on kerosene.”
“At least he hasn’t come out yet with a sawed-off shotgun.”
This time Mari’s laugh is reassuring in its normality. Her kid tickles her⎯sharp humor but never wounding. Not such a kid anymore; 24, at last count.
“I’m sure he still has his guns,” Mari says. “He always treated them better than his kids.”
“How about his grandkids?”
“We’re about to see.”
“Why would Tommie want to kill him now, after all this time?”
The mirth has fled Mari’s face. “Better late than never.”
“C’mon, mom. He may be a little crazy but he’s not psychotic . . . Is he?”
“He’s tired of waiting.”
“For what?”
“His inheritance.”
Devon’s mouth is half-open. “What, is there a stash of gold buried out here? Was Byron a bank robber or something?”
“That’s exactly what he was,” Mari says.
“You never told me that.”
“It wasn’t his day job, but he and his partner hit half-a-dozen-banks right here in the valley before they got caught.”
“No one got killed, did they?”
“No. Should he get a medal for that?
“Was the money recovered?”
“Most of it, but he’s got some squirreled away, don’t worry. And collectors would pay a pretty penny for those guns of his. Ever since he brought them back from the war⎯not just before your time, but before my time⎯they’ve been his prize possessions. So I’ve been told.”
“Is he a collector?”
“You might say he collects human misery. But the guns are his defense arsenal, psychologically, that’s what I always thought.”
“Maybe he sold them by now.”
“No way, honey. He’s taking them to the grave.”
Devon flinches and idly touches the hood of the Hyundai and realizes a second too late that it’s hotter than a frying pan sitting at full flame. She yanks her forefinger back, shakes it, and sucks on it for a couple of seconds.
“For a smart girl, that wasn’t too bright, sweetie,” Mari says. She motions toward the cabin. “Come on, I’m wilting out here.”
They move toward the flimsy wooden door and, the closer they come, the more they realize that the shack is cobbled together with nails and spit.
“Does this place have an actual address?” says Devon.
“No. He gets mail at the post office.”
“He’s like a squatter, then.”
“Let’s just say I wouldn’t put it on Multiple Listing if I wanted to hold onto my license.”
Just as Mari is about to knock, the door flies open and an old man stands in the breach, straight as a steel beam. The first thing that strikes Devon is that his blue-gray eyes match her mother’s but his are hard, forbidding. The jaw juts pugnaciously, lines traverse the leathery skin on his forehead and spiderweb his cheeks. The nose is sharp and prominent, and a port-wine stain shaped uncannily like the continent of Africa imprints one side of his neck. His bearing suggests the memory of muscle tone beneath the blue denim shirt. He is not armed; Devon only imagines that he holds a shotgun across his chest. Mari removes her shades.
“Hello, daddy.”
“Daddy, is it? What’re you doing here?” The voice is as gravelly as the trail to his front door.
“We came here to pay you a visit.”
“After a hundred years?”
“You never told anyone exactly where you were.”
“Couldn’t find the state pen? Too far north?”
“I mean last couple years. I had to investigate.”
The old man’s lips jitter like a little boy’s the instant before tears, but the eyes’ surliness tells a different story. He notices Devon a few feet behind her mother. “Who are you?”
“This is your granddaughter,” Mari says before Devon has a chance to speak up.
“That right? What’s your name, kid?”
Devon squints at him through the sun-glare. She scrunches her nose and looks like a teenager, gives him her name and nothing else. The old man studies the two women a moment longer, then turns and disappears into the dim interior. Mari and Devon plod through the doorway. When their eyes adjust, they see planked walls, a transparent apron-curtain fronting a lone half-window, a blackened range and stove, what looks like an icebox, two brass-framed kerosene lamps tucked into one corner, a padlocked dull-green wooden trunk in the other, and the old man tilting a coffeepot consecutively over three tins, which, when filled, he ferries to a scarred wooden table sporting three collapsible chairs. He sits in one of them.
“That’s the last of it,” he says, gesturing. “Sit down and drink.”
And so they do after glancing warily at one another. When Mari takes a sip, she lets out with a “whew!” as the tar-colored liquid hits her tongue. Devon is brave enough to follow her mother’s example and have a taste. She makes a face.
“Strong enough for ya?” he says. His pinched, creviced face sheds years with a sudden smile showing a full set of teeth that have yellowed but not decayed. “Good for what ails ya.” The smile evaporates and he stares at Mari. “So give it to me straight, daughter. Why’d you hunt me down?”
The coffee is stronger than turpentine, but the second sip goes down easier. “I think somebody’s out to kill you,” she says.
He looks out through the half-window as if a clue might ravel up from the sunbaked desert. When he swallows, his Adam’s apple does a little jig. He fingernails the inside of his ear lobe. “Nothin’ new on that score,” he says.
“It may be new this time, Byron,” Mari says.
He takes a gulp and spits some coffee back into the tin. “That’s better. I’m more comfortable with ‘Byron.’ So who you talkin’ about? You talkin’ about the Boy?”
“That’s a pretty good guess.”
“He figures I live too long, is that it? He’s all mouth, that one.”
A shadow of worry creeps across Mari’s face.
“What’s wrong?” he says.
She is stunned by the simple question because she knows him to be a man who never had an ounce of perception or gave a damn about anyone but himself. “I just don’t like murder, that’s all,” she says.
Devon takes another sip of the awful coffee and pushes it to the side like a rejected trinket, annoying her host.
“What’d you bring her for⎯ want me to get her some money, is that it?” he says and dismisses the idea with a flick of his hand. “You can give her what you want from your share.”
“So, you’re distributing shares now?”
Devon rises and walks to the window. “You sure know how to make a girl feel welcome,” Mari says to her father.
“I give you coffee, don’t I?”
“Magnanimous,” says Devon, not even looking at him.
“The hell’s that mean?” He turns back to Mari. “She a college girl?”
“Art school.”
“Do you have a toilet here?” says Devon.
“There’s a bucket in the back.”
Devon’s nose scrunches again. “Great. I’ll wait.”
“Now that you brought it up, what’s in your will, Byron?” Mari says, leaning forward on the table. “Don’t you think I ought to know?”
“You’ll find out soon enough, evidently.”
She leans back and stretches her arms overhead. The shifting of her womanly contours is not lost on her father. “You know, you remind me of your mother. You’re a lot like her.”
“I take that as a compliment.”
“Of course it’s a compliment. What else would it be?”
She hunches forward and the shapeliness disappears. “Pesko put me on your trail,” she says.
Byron sneers. “I was wond’rin. How’d he know, anyway?”
“He had a general idea. ‘Far away from the human race,’ he said. You must’ve let something slip.”
“Shysters. Can’t trust any of ‘em. Go ask him what’s in the will, why dontcha. I got a big surprise for you and your worthless brother. I’m leavin’ everything to the donkey refuge.”
Mari discounts his bluster. “I did ask him, but believe it or not, he’s got principles, a little something called client confidentiality. We spotted this place from the highway, and I knew right away it was your forever-home.”
She says it with a straight face. Turning back from the window, Devon can’t suppress a short laugh.
“Something funny?” Byron says.
Mari straightens and points at him like a witness at a police lineup. “I wanted your granddaughter to meet you before you die.”
“All right, we been introduced. Anything else?”
She relaxes. “Who gets this pile o’ wood, pop?”
He grimaces. “Now it’s pop, huh?”
“Me or Tommie?”
“When I go, it’ll be a home for rattlesnakes, so either one of ya will fit right in.”
Mari hears her daughter’s sharp inhalation. “Don’t say it, Devon.” She turns back to her father. “I was just kidding⎯you know as well as me that the county’ll bulldoze it,” she says. “How about the rest of your loot? Got it buried under a rock out here somewhere?” She glances at the locked trunk in the corner.
He stands from the table without a single grunt or groan, spry and unrepentant. “Time you two left. Thanks for the warning.”
Mari rises and nods to Devon. “Any time, Byron.”
*****
Just before the ramp to the interstate, he waits in his Durango on the narrow shoulder of Pipeline Road, which feeds three other truncated trails along its lonely, four-mile length. From this elevated vantage point, he sees Mari and Devon walk about 10 yards from the godforsaken shack to the Hyundai. He hears the gravel crunch, as their car turns toward the knotty pathway and grinds away from the desolation, raising mini-cyclones of dust.
Two minutes later, the Hyundai slows appreciably as it approaches on Pipeline.
“What’re you doing, mom?” Devon glimpses the man at the wheel of the SUV. “Ohmigod, it’s Tommie.”
“In the flesh,” Mari says. “My baby brother.”
“I don’t remember him with a car this nice.”
“We haven’t seen him for a while. He must have hit at roulette.”
“What’s he doing here?”
“Same thing we are, I imagine.”
“Tell me you didn’t bring him out here.”
Mari nods at Tommie as the Hyundai draws even, facing the opposite way. There is little more than arm’s length between the driver’s-side doors of their vehicles.
“Looks like we’re both pretty good sleuths,” she says.
Tommie’s winning smile is the one he thought would conquer Hollywood when he took acting classes, made the audition rounds, and picked up some bit parts a quarter-century ago. That and the sunshine smacking his face are almost enough to make the ravages disappear.
“We must be following the same leads,” he says with the blase charm that he’d cultivated and never dropped despite its ineffectiveness.
“You’re not gonna do anything foolish, are you, Tommie?”
He lowers the wattage as if his smile is on Dimmer. “I’m past that, sis’. I just want to have a constructive talk with him.”
His well-modulated words seem to hang in the air and, dreamlike, he waits for a director to yell, “Cut.”
Mari flashes her own smile fit for the occasion, feminine and beguiling. “I’m relieved to hear that, Tommie . . . Keep me posted.”
“Always.”
The Hyundai drifts away.
“You’re not gonna stop him?” says Devon.
“Isn’t it obvious? Your grandfather can take care of himself.”
The Hyundai picks up speed and scatters the last batch of pebbles and patches of sand before reaching the ramp and firing onto the interstate.
Tommie raises a pair of binoculars to his eyes for a close look at the cabin. So this is the old man’s pad since he left the joint. Pretty pathetic. No, more than that, something out of a bad screenplay. Dig that battered pickup. Its rear bumper slants just like the cabin roof. The place is ripe for obliteration by the untamed wind. Tommie thinks that maybe he should just let nature take its course on both the absurd shack and its inhabitant.
Nah, not what I come fer, he says to himself, playing an Okie in a Depression flick.
He waits for Byron to show his face to the fierce desert. He’d like to see what that face, once intimidating beyond measure, looks like right now, after all that’s happened, after the man’s long dehumanizing stretch upstate, his ill-gotten gains beyond reach. Tommie tilts the glasses a touch to sight beyond the shack and scan the barren desert right up the base of the snowcapped mountains, then lowers them back to the sad dwelling. Still, there is no Byron to be seen. He is hidden inside, isolated, still a prisoner of sorts.
Tommie returns the binocs to the passenger seat, scratches stubble at his chin, nods and smiles modestly for his own benefit.
The Durango is back on the highway within minutes. He’ll go to the Home Depot but not until later because he doesn’t want flammables sitting in the car all day in the heat. There’s a casino-hotel in eight or nine miles, and he has an itch to try his luck, one of his many itches that never goes away. When he reaches the glistening sand-colored tower, he wheels the Durango into the parking lot and finds a space between a shiny black Range Rover and some beat-up, two-door coupe.
The hotel lobby and gambling floor are cool and carpeted. Tommie makes a beeline for the dice tables. Within minutes, he has a hot hand but not hot enough to persuade any of the women flitting about to go to bed with him, at least not the good-looking ones. When his luck cools and his winnings evaporate, he pigs out at the hotel’s American Grill because he needs extra fuel for the night ahead. Smokes a cigarette, has a couple of drinks at the bar to steady his nerves.
Dusk descends and lights pop on across the desert floor throughout the valley. Before long, a profusion of them competes with the stars above. Tommie drives to the multiplex off the highway exit a few miles west and takes in a movie about a hitman who decides to hit the guy who fingers the original target. He coulda played them roles if they’da given him half a chance.
Next stop is Home Depot.
At midnight, he doubles back to his studio apartment in a down-at-the-heels stretch beyond the city limits of the resort town. After a two-hour nap, he’s on the interstate again. He turns off the Durango’s headlights as soon as it exits for Pipeline Road. The Durango’s thick radials create a trailing shelf of dust. Tommie picks up a transitory reflection that the quarter-moon bounces off the rear of Roland’s pickup. That’s the go-signal. The truck’s there, the buzzard is home. Dead to the world.
He slows and brings the Durango to a stop as he reaches the access trail. Cuts the engine. He’s on the shoulder, right about where he was a dozen hours earlier. He gets out and inhales the cooled-off desert air, poised to reheat when the sun reemerges in three or four hours. An occasional car whooshes by on the highway, otherwise it’s silent as the grave here, this time of night.
He grabs two, two-gallon jugs of kerosene by their handles, lifts them from the rear cargo space, and walks them down the sand-and-gravel pathway. Should be more than enough to do the trick.
The available ground light is sufficient for him to avoid stumbling. He breathes silently and treads so carefully that few stones are dislodged.
Sweet dreams, pappy.
When he reaches the pickup, he uncaps a jug and pours kerosene through an open window of the cab, into the empty bed, and below the gas tank enough to form a puddle. Streaming kerosene to the cabin door, he empties the jug, then opens the other one and angles it downward so that the spout meets the narrow space above the threshold. The kerosene flows inside. Some of it pools outside the door, but Tommie keeps his boots out of harm’s way. A portable heater and other kerosene-fired appliances onsite (a spot-on guess, as it turns out) plus the freaking ammunition he knows his father always keeps on hand should make one hell of an accelerant.
He waits until the second jug is two-thirds empty, then pours the rest in a continuous line back to the pickup. He takes a deep satisfying breath, gazes at the curtain of stars above. He listens for movement, hears only the creak of the rooster on the roof.
The matches are in his pocket. He lights one and drops it below the gas tank. Parallel snakes enflame and sprint from pickup to door, then back again like a boomerang. The truck explodes and then the cabin, louder, instantly ablaze and disintegrating, but Tommie is already running with the two empty jugs back toward the Durango. Flying, scorched debris falls short of him.
A second explosion produces a fireball that whirls toward the sky. From a safe distance now, Tommie watches in wonderment and contained glee, as the mountain, too, looks on, suddenly spotlit like a massive piece of stagecraft. He lingers to savor his triumph. No need to hurry, he’ll shove off in a moment or two. He can feel himself speeding away on the interstate as he sings something raucous and off-key.
*****
Fire investigators and the sheriff’s department forensics officer are still combing through cinders when Lieutenant Contreras and Mari visit the site⎯now looking like a moon crater⎯ the following morning. Smoke curls from the blackened wound two hundred yards away down the gradient.
“No remains,” Contreras says. “Good news, no?”
He is a trim, compact man whose relaxed stance and expressive eyes signal that strength need not be brute, nor authority rigid. The surprise in his eyes matches that written on Mari’s face, for she does see remains: those of a pickup truck that already was a strong candidate for the scrapyard.
“They’re still looking,” she says.
“Mainly for arson clues at this point. They’re pretty sure that’s what it was.”
“And they haven’t found a trace of him in there⎯not even his teeth?”
“That’s what they tell me.”
“He never goes anywhere without that truck. So the question is, Lieutenant, where is he?”
Contreras jams hands in pants’ pockets, though the thermometer has already reached ninety. “That’s what I was hoping you could help me with.”
Mari’s half-baked smile has a cynical tilt. “You know about my father, right?”
“Of course.”
“The Desert Pox,” she says with a flourish.
Contreras’s expression allows a hint of amusement to surface but then a ripple of sadness seems to alter the shape of his dark brown eyes. Now his lips wriggle into a strange smile. “Isn’t it interesting . . ..?”
Mari looks at him. “What’s that?”
“How life can quickly go up in smoke.”
The approximation of a smile from Mari. “You see a lot of that on your beat, I suspect.”
“Yes, ma’am, I do.”
Mari again glances at the mound of destroyed truck. “I can’t imagine where he’d be. The truck was on its last legs, but it was his lifeline.”
“Any chance he has a lady friend in town?” says Contreras. “Someone who coulda picked him up?”
“I have no idea. He lived like a hermit these last couple years. He killed my mother, you know.”
She understands that Contreras’s level, patient stare means he’s simply waiting for her to explain. “What he did . . . killed her.”
She watches the gloved inspectors rummage through the slag, then looks up at the expanse of blue sky. “I guess you’d also like me to suggest who the arsonist might be, who would’ve wanted Byron dead,” she says.
This time, Contreras’s smile is broad. “Careful, if you get too good at this, the sheriff will want to hire you.”
It’s Mari’s first laugh since she and Devon negotiated this terrain a day earlier, testing her Hyundai beyond its factory specs. “I have a number of possibles,” she says, “starting with myself.”
They are distracted by a man wearing a helmet, coveralls, gloves, and boots as he walks up the rise, extending an object toward Contreras. It is the metal rooster of Byron’s weathervane. The directional marker is absent. The rooster’s red paint is fire-stained, and its edges are charred.
“I have a survivor for you,” says the fire inspector, briefly relieving the grimness of his work. “Consider it a keepsake.”
“‘preciate it, Manny. Anything new down there?”
Manny shakes his head and starts back down the incline. Contreras hands the rooster over to Mari, who says, “I’m glad you didn’t bother to wrap it,” and now they, too, have snatched a moment of levity.
Three days later, Devon, the only artistic one in the family, will finish refashioning the rooster into a kicky, modern lamp. It will sport a fresh coat of paint red as lipstick, and its fire-bitten edges will register as grungy-chic. “There’s always a new morning in the desert,” she’ll say to her mother. Her creation will occupy a prominent spot in Mari’s condo and quickly become a conversation piece. Mari will liken it to a thoroughbred being put out to stud after its racing days are over.
But at the fire site, after Manny hands off to Contreras, who, in turn, presents the metal cutout to Mari as surprise salvage, there is no such vision yet for the homeless rooster, and not the slightest bit of forensic evidence to suggest that Byron was consumed by the fire. However, a dreadful task remains. Contreras and Mari climb to a higher point, where she knows she’ll be unable to put off any longer the main reason for her being there.
“Can you identify the body?” Contreras says as they stand over it.
Dry-eyed and disbelieving, she reaches down to touch it to make sure it’s not a mirage. The desert is famous for mirages. The body is complete, uncharred. She straightens and tells the lieutenant who it is. Behind them, where the trail meets the highway access spur at the top of the incline, a Durango sits and broils. Not far beyond that, motorists shoot by on the interstate. Miles away, the magisterial mountain looks on, remote and dispassionate. Despite the black eyesore on the desert floor, and the officials slogging for answers, the scene is one of serene orderliness.
But as it unfolds seven hours earlier, Byron is scrambling toward self-preservation. By the time he awakes to the scratchy sounds of intrusion, he recognizes that tactical retreat and repositioning are the smart moves. Despite lugging a load, he moves across the sands like a young man, shielded from frontal view. The tepid moonlight might be enough for him, but now the blaze makes it a lead-pipe cinch. The desert is lit as if by an army of searchlights for a thousand yards in any direction. For a sharpshooter, this’ll be easier than using infrared. Two hundred feet behind the incinerated shack, he aims his rifle as he crouches near the military-surplus trunk he has dragged to safety, its padlock unlatched, its pale green goldened by the charged air. A thousand feet away, Tommie doesn’t notice because he can’t see through the smolder and, anyway, he is gawking at the sky like a kid watching fireworks. A motionless clay-pigeon, a target on the midway. The old man’s distance vision has never strayed far from 20/20. He sidesteps to find a seam in the flames. His M16 is polished and oiled and loaded and ready for action as it has been continuously for all these years since last used. He could fire a three-round burst, but no need to waste cartridges. They don’t come cheap.
A single shot will do.
James Waltzer is still surviving as a freelance writer. Six of his short stories have appeared in literary journals, and his novel “Of Sound Mind” was runner-up in the 2016 IBPA Benjamin Franklin Awards.
