Stinger by Robert R. McCammon
He looked down again at the quiet town—population about nineteen hundred and slipping fast—and could imagine he heard the clocks ticking in the houses. Sunlight was creeping around curtains and through blinds to streak the walls with fire. Soon those alarm clocks would go off, shocking the sleepers into another day; those with jobs would get dressed and leave their houses, running before the electric prod of time, to their work either in the remaining stores of Inferno or up north in Fort Stockton and Pecos. And at the end of the day, Cody thought, they would all return to those little houses, and they would watch the flickering tube and fill up the empty spaces as best they could until those bastard clocks whispered sleep. That was the way it would be, day after day, from now until the last door shut and the last car pulled out—and then nothing would live here but the desert, growing larger and shifting over the streets.
“So what do I care?” Cody said, and exhaled cigarette smoke through his nostrils. He knew there was nothing for him here; there never had been. The whole freaking town, he told himself, might’ve been a thousand miles from civilization except for the telephone poles, the stupid American and even stupider Mexican TV shows, and the chattering bilingual voices that floated through the radios. He looked north along Brazos, past more houses and the white stone Inferno Baptist Church. Just before Brazos ended stood an ornate wrought-iron gate and fence enclosing Joshua Tree Hill, Inferno’s cemetery. It was shaded by thin, wind-sculpted Joshua trees, but it was more of a bump than a hill. He stared for a moment toward the tombstones and old monuments, then returned his attention to the houses; he couldn’t see much difference.
“Hey, you freakin’ zombies!” he shouted on impulse. “Wake up!” His voice rolled over Inferno, leaving the sound of barking dogs behind it.
“I’m not gonna be like you,” he said, the cigarette clamped in a corner of his mouth, “I swear to God I’m not.”
He knew to whom he was speaking, because as he said the words he was staring down at a gray wooden house near where a street called Sombra crossed Brazos. He figured the old man didn’t even know he hadn’t come home last night, wouldn’t have cared anyway. All his father needed was a bottle and a place to sleep it off.
Cody glanced at Preston High. If that project wasn’t finished today, Odeale might give him some grief, might even screw up his graduation. He couldn’t stand for some bow-tied sonofabitch to watch over his shoulder and tell him what to do, so he’d purposefully slowed his work to a snail’s pace. Today, though, he had to finish it; he knew he could’ve built a roomful of furniture in the six weeks it had taken him to do one lousy tie rack.
The sun had a fierce glare now. Already the bright hues of the desert were fading. A truck was coming down Highway 67, its headlights still on, bringing the morning newspapers from Odessa. A dark blue Chevy backed out of a driveway on Bowden Street, and a woman in a robe waved to her husband from the front porch. Somebody opened their back door and let out a yellow cat, which promptly chased a rabbit into a thicket of cactus. On the side of Republica Road, the buzzards were plucking at their breakfast and other birds of prey were slowly circling in the sullen air above.
Cody took one last pull at his cigarette and then flicked it off the Rocking Chair. He decided he could do with something to eat before school. There were usually stale doughnuts in the house, and those would do.
He turned his back on Inferno and climbed carefully down the rocks to the ridge below. Nearby stood the red Honda 250cc motorcycle he’d salvaged from parts bought at Cade’s junkyard two years ago. Cade had given him a good deal, and Cody was smart enough not to ask questions. The ID numbers on the Honda’s engine had been filed off, just as they were removed from most of the engines and body parts Mack Cade sold.
As he approached the motorcycle, a slight movement beside his right cowboy boot snagged his attention. He stopped.
His shadow had fallen across a small brown scorpion that crouched on a flat rock. As Cody watched, the scorpion’s segmented stinger arced up and struck at the air. The scorpion stood its ground, and Cody lifted his boot to smash the little bastard to eternity.
But he paused an instant before his boot came down. The insect was only about three inches long from head to barb, and Cody knew he could crush it in a heartbeat but he admired its courage. There it was, fighting a giant shadow for a piece of rock in a burning desert. It didn’t have too much sense, Cody mused, but it had more than its share of guts. Anyway, there was too much death in the air today, and Cody decided not to add to it.
“It’s all yours, amigo,” he said, and as he walked past, the scorpion jabbed its stinger at his departing shadow.
Cody swung one leg over the motorcycle and settled himself in the patched leather seat. The dual chrome exhausts were full of dings, the red paint had mottled and faded, the engine sometimes burned oil and had a mind of its own, but the machine got Cody where he wanted to go. Out on Highway 67, once he was far beyond Inferno, he could coax the engine up to seventy, and there were few things he enjoyed better than its husky growl and the wind hissing past his ears. It was at times like that, when he was alone and depending on no one but himself, that Cody felt the most free. Because he knew depending on people freaked your head. In this life, you were alone and you’d better learn to like it.
He took a pair of leather aviator’s goggles off the handlebars and slipped them on, put the key in the ignition and brought his weight down on the kick starter. The engine backfired a gout of oily smoke and vibrated as if unwilling to wake up—then the machine came to life under him like a loyal, if sometimes headstrong, mustang, and Cody drove down the ridge’s steep slope toward Aurora Street, a trail of yellow dust rising behind him. He didn’t know what shape his father would be in today, and he was already toughening himself for it. Maybe he could get in and out without the old man even knowing.
Cody glanced at the straight line of Highway 67, and he vowed that very soon, maybe right after Graduation Day, he was going to hit that damned road and keep on riding, following the telephone poles north, and he would never look back at what he was leaving.
I’m not gonna be like you, he swore.
But inside he feared that every day he saw a little more of his old man’s face looking back at him from the mirror.
He throttled up, and the rear tire left a black scrawl as he shot along Aurora Street.
The sun lay hot and red in the east, and another day had begun in Inferno.
2
The Great Fried Empty
JESSIE HAMMOND AWAKENED, AS was her habit, about three seconds before the alarm clock buzzed on the bedside table. As it went off she reached out, her eyes still closed, and popped the alarm button down with the flat of her hand. She sniffed the air, could smell the inviting aromas of bacon and freshly brewed coffee. “Breakfast’s on, Jess!” Tom called from the kitchen.
“Two more minutes.” She burrowed her head into the pillow.
“Big minutes or little ones?”
“Tiny ones. Minuscule.” She rolled over to find a better position and caught his clean, pleasantly musky scent on the other pillow. “You smell like a puppy,” she said sleepily.
“Pardon?”
“What?” She opened her eyes to the bright streamers of sunlight that hit the opposite wall through the window blinds and immediately shut them again.
“How about some lizard eyeballs in your eggs today?” Tom asked. He and Jessie had stayed up until well after one in the morning, talking and sharing a bottle of Blue Nun. But he’d always been a quick starter and enjoyed cooking breakfast, while Jessie took a little longer to get her spark plugs going even on the best of days.
“Make mine rare,” she answered, and tried seeing again. The early light was already glary, promising another scorcher. The past week had been one ninety-degree day after the next, and the Odessa weatherman on Channel 19 had said today might break the hundred mark. Jessie knew that meant trouble. Animals weren’t acclimated to such heat so soon. Horses would get s
‘“Morning.” Tom was standing over her, offering her coffee in a blue clay mug. “This’ll get you started.”
She sat up and took the mug. The coffee, as usual whenever Tom made it, was ebony and ominous. The first sip puckered her mouth; the second brooded on her tongue for a while, and the third sent the caffeine charging through her system. She needed it too. She’d never been a morning person, but as the only veterinarian within a forty-mile radius she’d learned a long time ago that the ranchers and farmers were up long before the sun first blushed the sky. “Smooth,” she managed to say.
“Always is.” Tom smiled slightly, walked over to the window, and pushed aside the blinds. Red fire hit his face and glowed in the lenses of his eyeglasses. He looked east, along Celeste Street toward Republica Road and Preston High School—“the Hotbox,” he called it, because the air conditioning broke down so often. His smile began to fade.
She knew what he was thinking. They’d talked about it last night, and many nights before that one. The Blue Nun eased, but it did not heal.
“Come here,” she said, and motioned him to the bed.
“Bacon’ll get cold,” he answered. His accent was the unhurried drawl of east Texas, whereas Jessie’s was west Texas’s gritty twang.
“Let it freeze.”
Tom turned away from the window, could feel the hot stripes of sun across his bare back and shoulders. He wore his faded and comfortable khaki trousers, but he hadn’t yet pulled on his socks and shoes. He passed under the bedroom’s lazily revolving ceiling fan, and Jessie leaned over in her pale blue, oversized shirt and patted the edge of the bed. When he sat down, she began massaging his shoulders with her strong brown hands. Already his muscles were as tight as piano wire.
“It’s going to work out,” she told him, her voice calm and deliberate. “This isn’t the end of the world.”
He nodded, said nothing. The nod wasn’t very convincing. Tom Hammond was thirty-seven years old, stood a bit over six feet, was slim and in pretty good shape except for a little potbelly that resisted sit-ups and jogging. His light brown hair was receding to show what Jessie called a “noble forehead,” and his tortoiseshell-framed glasses gave him the look of an intelligent if slightly dismayed schoolteacher. Which was exactly what he was: Tom had been a social studies teacher at Preston High for eleven years. And now, with the impending death of Inferno, that was coming to an end. Eleven years of the Hotbox. Eleven years of watching the faces change. Eleven years, and still he hadn’t defeated his worst enemy. It was still there, and it would always be there, and every day for eleven years he’d seen it working against him.
“You’ve done everything you could,” Jessie said. “You know you have.”
“Maybe. Maybe not.” One corner of his mouth angled downward in a bitter smile, and his eyes were pinched with frustration. A week from tomorrow, when school closed, he and the other teachers would have no job. His résumés had brought in only one offer from the state of Texas—a field job, running literacy exams on immigrants who followed the melon crops. Still, he knew that most of the other teachers hadn’t landed jobs yet either, but that didn’t make the pill any sweeter going down. He’d gotten a nice letter stamped with the state seal of Texas that told him the education budget had been cut for the second year in a row and at present there was a freeze on the hiring of teachers. Of course, since he’d been in the system so long, his name would be put on the waiting list of applicants, thank you and keep this letter for your files. It was the same letter many of his colleagues had received, and the only file it went into was circular.
But he knew that, eventually, another position would come his way. Running the exams on the migrant workers wouldn’t be so bad, really, but it would require a lot of time on the road. What had chewed at him day and night for the past year was the memory of all the students who’d passed through his social studies class—hundreds of them, from red-haired American sons to copper-skinned Mexicans to Apache kids with eyes like bullet holes. Hundreds of them: doomed freight, passing through the badlands on tracks already warped. He’d checked; over an eleven-year period with a senior class averaging about seventy to eighty kids, only three hundred and six of them had enrolled as freshmen in either a state or technical college. The rest had just drifted away or set roots in Inferno to work at the mine, drink their wages, and raise a houseful of babies who would probably repeat the pattern. Only now there was no mine, and the pull of drugs and crime in the big cities was stronger. It was stronger, as well, right here in Inferno. And for eleven years he’d seen the faces come and go: boys with knife scars and tattoos and forced laughter, girls with scared eyes and gnawed fingernails and the secret twitches of babies already growing in their bellies.
Eleven years, and tomorrow was his final day. After the senior class walked out at last period, it would be over. And what haunted him, day after day, was the realization that he could recall maybe fifteen kids who’d escaped the Great Fried Empty. That was what they called the desert between Inferno and the Mexican border, but Tom knew it was a state of mind too. The Great Fried Empty could suck the brains out of a kid’s skull and replace it with dope smoke, could bum out the ambition and dry up the hope, and what almost killed Tom was the fact that he’d fought it for eleven years but the Great Fried Empty had always been winning.
Jessie kept massaging, but Tom’s muscles had tensed. She knew what must be going through his mind. It was the same thing that had slowly burned his spirit to a cinder.
Tom stared at the bars of fire on the wall. “I wish I had three more months. Just three.” He had a sudden, startling image of the day he and Jessie had graduated together from the University of Texas, walking out into a flood of sunlight and ready to take on the world. It seemed like a hundred years ago. He’d been thinking a lot about Roberto Perez lately, could not get the boy’s face out of his mind, and he knew why. “Roberto Perez,” he said. “Do you remember me talking about him?”
“I think so.”
“He was in my senior class six years ago. He lived in Bordertown, and his grades weren’t very high, but he asked questions. He wanted to know. But he held himself back from doing too well on tests, because that wouldn’t be cool.” His bitter smile surfaced again. “The day he graduated, Mack Cade was waiting for him. I saw him get into Cade’s Mercedes. They drove off. Roberto’s brother told me later that Cade got the boy a job up in Houston. Good money, but it wasn’t exactly clear what the job was. Then one day Roberto’s brother came to me and said I ought to know: Roberto had been killed in a Houston motel. Cocaine deal went bad. He got both barrels of a shotgun in his stomach. But the Perez family didn’t blame Cade. Oh, no. Roberto sent home a lot of money. Cade gave Mr. Perez a new Buick. Sometimes I drive by the Perez house after school; the Buick’s up on concrete blocks in the front yard.”
He stood up abruptly, went to the window, and pulled the blinds aside again. He could feel the heat out there, gathering power and shimmering off the sand and concrete. “There are two boys in my last-period class who remind me of Perez. Neither one of them ever made higher than a C-minus on a test, but I see it in their faces. They listen; something sinks in. But they both do just enough to get by, and no more. You probably know their names: Lockett and Jurado.” He glanced at her.
Jessie
“Neither of them took the college entrance exams,” Tom continued. “Jurado laughed in my face when I suggested it. Lockett looked at me like I fell out of a dog’s ass. But their last day is tomorrow, and they’ll graduate a week from Sunday, and that’ll be it. Cade’ll be waiting. I know it.”
“You’ve done what you could,” Jessie said. “Now it’s up to them.”
“Right.” He stood for a moment framed in crimson light, as if on the rim of a blast furnace. “This town,” he said softly. “This damned, godforsaken town. Nothing can grow here. I swear to God, I’m beginning to believe there’s more use for a vet than there is for a teacher.”
She tried for a smile, but wasn’t very successful. “You take care of your beasts, I’ll take care of mine.”
“Yeah.” He summoned up a wan smile. He walked to the bed, cupped his hand to the back of Jessie’s head, his fingers disappearing into her dark brown, short-cut hair, and kissed her forehead. “I love you, doc.” He let his head rest against hers. “Thanks for listening to me.”
“I love you,” she answered, and put her arms around him. They stayed that way for a minute, until Jessie said, “Lizard eyeballs?”
“Yep!” He straightened up. His face was more relaxed now, but his eyes were still troubled and Jessie knew that, however good a teacher he was, Tom thought of himself as a failure. “I guess they’re good and cold by now. Come and get ’em!”
Jessie got out of bed and followed her husband through the short hallway into the kitchen. In this room also, a ceiling fan was turning, and Tom had pulled up the blinds on the west-facing windows. The light in that direction was still tinged with violet, but the sky was turning bright blue over Rocking Chair Ridge. Tom had already fixed all four of the breakfast plates—each with bacon, scrambled eggs (no lizard eyeballs today), and toast—and they were waiting on the little circular table in the corner. “Let’s go, sleepyheads!” Tom called toward the kids’ rooms, and Ray answered with an unenthusiastic grunt.