Some Gods of El Paso Read online

  Lorna held his hand hard. “I wouldn’t mind settling down somewhere pretty. Seashore. I wouldn’t mind stopping this healing business.” She looked at him. “But I never did take your pain away.”

  “I never took your anger,” said Vix. “Figure you had uses for it. I like the ocean too. Town with nobody. Clapboards and a porch. Hot chocolate, me and you, some torches lighting the path down to the beach. We could get a dog and a hammock. Listen to a record player late at night.”

  “We could count the stars,” said Lorna. “Maybe write a book.”

  “Sometimes, we’d sit and look out at the waves, and just do nothing at all,” Vix said, and kissed her fingers.

  “Do people like us ever retire?” asked Lorna. She was twenty-eight and in her healing prime. It’d gotten so when she walked down a street, everyone turned to look, and automatically gave her every dark emotion they’d been carrying. Vix was the same. Two weeks before, he’d been followed down a main street by a couple dozen women, all of whom later resented him. At a post office in the panhandle, he stood next to his own face on a most wanted poster and let a bunch of people take his photograph. Lorna’s dress had gotten torn off in a crowd, and now people sold the scraps for souvenirs, all snipping little threads from little threads. Lorna had a new dress, but she still felt bad about the whole thing.

  “We can retire if we want to,” Vix said. “Change our names and stop being Public Enemies. They can’t put us in jail. Can’t have a jail without sorrow and anger. Whole thing would fall down.”

  “They could kill us,” said Lorna, and snorted. “That sheriff.”

  There was a bullet hole in their back left tire, and they could hear it hissing out air. Headlights were approaching from all directions. They were the tent of the revival. They were miracle makers in the middle of a field. They were healer dealers, and they were tired.

  “Or we could kill him,” said Vix. “What’ve we got in the backseat, Lorn?”

  Vix’s eyes were on the rearview.

  “About a kilo of that straight shit from El Paso. I don’t know what was going on there last week, but everything they wanted to be healed of is bagged up. They wanted to forget it ever happened. I threw it in just in case. Thought we might mix it half and half with the sad from Juarez, sell it like that.”

  Vix pulled the car over, and Lorna looked at him.

  “Strong stuff,” he said. “Good to know. Open that sack.”

  Behind their car, Sheriff Hank Yarley crept around in a ditch, belly flat to the ground, rifle strapped to his back, bowie knife in his teeth. The headlights of the mob approached the two most wanted. He’d called out all the cops and righteous volunteers from the border, and they converged on Lorna and Vix, stars in their eyes, bounty in their hearts.

  Lorna’s long arms lifted the sack onto the roof of the car and she ducked, and that was when Yarley started shooting.

  The sack was intact for a moment and then it was perforated.

  White dust spun out into the night and into all the parked cars. Men and women were aiming rifles and pistols, aiming darts and clubs and arrows, aiming cameras and holding lanterns, and all of them inhaled.

  On his belly, Sheriff Hank Yarley took a deep and accidental breath, and what he breathed was pure, desperate love, cut with nothing. It was burning, scalding, lost and found. Once he took one breath, he had to take another and another, and in a moment, all the people in the mob were choking on it, upending on it, overdosing on it, because too much love was like too much anything.

  The seizure of love went through all of Texas, rattling the ground and making strangers fall hard into each other’s arms. This was love that took the South and drenched it, and up over the land, a storm of heat and heart took the dirt off the desert. People died of love, writhing on kitchen floors and kissing in traffic, and other people just caught a whiff of it and lived the rest of their lives looking for more. For ten years after, the people in Texas were different than they’d been. The borders opened wide and the river was full of folks from both sides being baptized with tongue. You know the story. You remember those years when everyone forgot who they’d been hating. You remember the drugstores full of nothing but lipsticks and soda pop. The world’s past that now, though. That time’s long over.

  People say that Lorna and Vix stood up from the scene of that last great crime, grimy and gleaming. People say that when they came out of that car, there were fifty bullet holes in the doors and windows, but that Lorna Grant and Vix Beller walked away unscathed. Maybe they went to the seashore. Maybe they went to South America. Maybe they’re dead now, or maybe they’re old folks healing people’s cats, dogs, and parakeets in some faraway city. Sheriff Yarley went on to start a charismatic church, exposed to the great light of some gods of El Paso, and full to the brim with strangers’ love. The others in his posse went wandering around America, preaching peace and pretty-pretty, carrying scraps of Lorna’s striped dress and Vix’s vest.

  In a glass case in Austin you can see the preserved remains of Lorna’s little finger, shot off by Sheriff Yarley when she put the desperate love up on the roof. It’s lit up under cover for tourists to see, but the rest of the two most wanted are long gone.

  Here in Texas, sorrow and fury are back in the bodies of men and women. Some nights, we hear our neighbors moaning and country music on the radio, and some nights we go out walking late, looking to be healed of every hurt, looking for a hand-painted sign that says, COME ON SINNER.

  Some nights, all we want is the neon promise of a motel, a hot bed, and some hands to hold us under the covers, and some nights, looking for that much, we keep driving and driving in the dark.

  About the Author

  Maria Dahvana Headley is the author of the novel Queen of Kings and the memoir The Year of Yes. With Neil Gaiman, she is the co-editor of the New York Times-bestselling anthology Unnatural Creatures, benefitting 826DC. Her Nebula-nominated short fiction has recently appeared in Lightspeed, Nightmare, Apex, The Journal of Unlikely Entomology, Subterranean, Glitter & Mayhem, and Jurassic London’s The Lowest Heaven and The Book of the Dead. Magonia, a young adult novel, will be out from HarperCollins in 2015, and The End of the Sentence, a novella co-written with Kat Howard, will be released by Subterranean Press in August 2014. She grew up in rural Idaho on a sled-dog ranch, spent part of her twenties as a pirate negotiator and ship charterer in the maritime industry, and now lives in Brooklyn in an apartment shared with a seven-foot-long stuffed crocodile. You can find her on Twitter at @MARIADAHVANA. Or sign up for email updates here.

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  Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Notice

  Begin Reading

  About the Author

  Copyright

  Copyright © 2015 by Maria Dahvana Headley

  Art copyright © 2015 by Ashley Mackenzie