KARL KAHLER
AUTHOR, EDITOR, TRANSLATOR
Manic Dawn Excerpts
Highway robbery gone wrong
Even more frightening was the tale Dad told of being pulled over on an empty stretch of highway late at night. Driving back to Torreón after a long trip at about 2 o’clock in the morning, he had just pulled out of Cuatro Ciénagas into the desert. As he made a 90-degree turn to the south, he saw some tall trees to his left and a red pickup parked among them, shining in the moonlight.
As soon as Dad passed, the pickup pulled out behind him, followed for two or three miles, and then flashed its brights to indicate Dad should pull over. It could have been a cop — police cars in Mexico weren’t always marked — but it could just as easily have been a robber. And for that matter it could have been both.
Dad reached under the seat, took out his Smith and Wesson .41 Magnum revolver and stuck it between his legs, but he didn’t pull over. He was going about 70 miles an hour when the pickup pulled alongside him and veered in front of him, forcing him off the road.
A man got out of his truck, wearing a pistol belt but no uniform, and identified himself as a policeman. “How much dope do you have?” he asked.
Dad said he didn’t have any dope.
“What are you doing out here in the desert at night?” he asked.
Dad said he was on his way to Mazatlán.
“How much money do you have?”
For Dad that settled the question of whether he was a cop or a robber. Dad raised the gun and stuck it in the stranger’s face.
“Tengo cuarenta y uno,” he said: I’ve got 41.
The man dropped to the ground, and Dad raised up high in his seat to see what he was doing, thinking he was going for his gun. But the man had apparently fainted, or at least collapsed, from the shock of seeing that big pistol thrust in his face.
Dad first took away the supposed cop’s gun, an old .45 with pearl handles. Then he got the man on his feet again, gave him a pocket knife and told him to slash all four of the tires on his pickup. The man begged him over each tire, “No, por favor,” but Dad said, “Córtalo.” Cut it. When all four tires were slashed, Dad made him take off all his clothes, including his socks and underwear. Then Dad told him he was going to count to 100, and if he was still in sight when he reached 100, he was going to shoot him.
The man took off into the desert as fast as his bare feet could carry him, and was out of sight long before Dad reached 100. Dad gathered up the man’s clothes, pistol and gun belt, put them in the car and took off. About 20 miles down the road, he jammed all of them into the mud at the bottom of an irrigation ditch and drove home.
* * *
You were shooting guns in the house?
Noma called from Little Rock to say Dad was in jail again, this time on a charge of “terroristic threatening.” She was going to bail him out, but she said he wanted me down there.
Without a thought I packed a bag, said goodbye to Mom and jumped in the VW bus for the drive down. There was nothing I liked better than being wanted by Dad — plus, considering the charges, I wondered how much fun I was missing.
Dad was a free man by the time I pulled into town. We took a walk outside the bail bondsman’s office and I asked him what happened.
“Oh, we were shooting some guns,” he said.
“You were shooting guns? Where?”
“In the house.”
“You were shooting guns in the house?” Meaning the apartment above the liquor store.
“Yeah, that’s all. We were having a good time.” He started laughing. “Me and Omar — you know Omar.”
“Yeah.”
“And these two black gals he brought with him. Chuck Coyne told me there’s eight inches of concrete between the apartment and the store. There ain’t no such thing, that fucking idiot. It all started over that book of his. You know that book, The King and I?”
“Yeah?” I’d seen it lying around the apartment, hardbound in blue with the title in gold letters like it was some kind of classic, though in fact it looked pretty cheap.
“That’s Chuck Coyne’s,” said Dad. “I got to telling Omar about how much money Chuck was stealing from me, and about how tired I was of seeing his stupid book lying around, and about how much I’d like to mess it up a little bit.”
“Yeah?”
“So we started with the speargun.” Laughing. “And the speargun knocked it off the TV, you know, scuffed it up a bit, but didn’t hurt it much. So we took a couple of shots at it with the .22.”
“You shot the book with the .22.”
“Yeah, we did, both of us, we took turns. Just me and Omar. The girls were a little nervous, but Omar and me were just having a good time. We decided to try the .30-30. We both took a shot with that. That messed it up pretty good, but you could still read the title. So I got out the 12-gauge. One blast took care of that.” A long laugh.
“So then Omar decides he’s gotta take off. And he’s only taking one of the women with him. I told him to take ’em both but he said no, he’d come back later. So this black gal and I are sitting there and she’s saying, ‘Please don’t shoot no mo’ guns.’ ” Laughing at his own high-pitched imitation of her accent.
“Well. The problem was that there ain’t no eight inches of concrete under the floor, there ain’t even one inch of concrete, it’s just a floor. And every goddam one of my bullets went through the floor and out the plate-glass windows.”
A bucket of minnows?
A friendly neighbor left us a mess of fish in an Igloo cooler at our front door. However, we never used our front door, and we didn’t discover the Igloo until a couple of days later, after the fish already smelled. Dad put the Igloo in the back yard, thinking he might put these fish to good use in a week or so. The so-called cooler stayed in our back yard a couple of weeks, broiling in the Arkansas sun.
Late one night Dad got a bright idea. He looked around the kitchen until he found a mostly empty Cremora jar, 10 inches tall and four inches wide, with a screw-on lid. He poured the coffee creamer down the sink, took the jar to the back yard and opened the lid of the Igloo. The fish were bloated, the water was brown and the stink was strong enough to knock a man down. Dad gagged as he dipped the bottle inside and filled it with the putrid fish juice.
“C’mon,” he said to me. “Let’s go for a drive.”
Turns out he wanted me to drive. Dad had taught me to drive just this year, on our stick-shift Toyota pickup, which I found challenging, but I was getting the hang of it.
Clutching his jar of rancid fish juice, Dad told me to drop him off right in front of Deacon Joe’s house, drive down to the turn-around by the silo on Main Street and pick him up on my way back. I let him out of the pickup in a ditch across from Joe’s house, and he stole across the road. I drove to the turn-around and picked him up on the way back. The jar of fish juice was now empty.
He guessed correctly that Joe didn’t bother to lock the gold Monte Carlo parked in front of his house. Dad had simply opened the driver’s door and poured the reeking fish juice all over the front seat.
A few days later, there was talk around school that Joe’s car was in the shop for a new seat because he had spilled a bucket of minnows.
Dad chortled with glee. “A bucket of minnows!”
* * *
Unhappy hotel guest
Arriving in Los Angeles at last, Jerry found a fleabag hotel advertising rooms for $21. The clerk said they were out of $21 rooms, but they had one for $29 on the third floor that was much nicer. Dad would have preferred the cheaper one, but it was late and he was exhausted and there was no time to shop around.
Jerry climbed to the third floor and unlocked the door to his room. The first thing he noticed was that a band was playing loud music in a nightclub right across the alley, on the same floor, with the windows open. It was too hot to close his windows, and the band was so loud it sounded like it was right here in his hotel room.
The $29 room was a shabby, cruddy, filthy dump. The sheets were stained and the towels were dirty, both apparently unchanged since the last guest. It had to be the sorriest room he’d ever paid money for. They told him he was getting something nice, charged him the premium rate and then gave him this dump. “Well, those bastards,” he thought.
And the racket from the band! He doubted he could sleep through it, but he was so exhausted he had to try. He lay down in the bed, which had a broken spring that poked him in the back.
After everything he’d been through today, after paying a princely sum for this shithole and crawling into this filthy bed, he couldn’t even close his eyes and go to sleep because of the spring in his back and the racket from across the alley. It was the day’s final indignity.
It was a big ripoff, that’s what it was. To offer a place to sleep, charge that kind of money and deliver a place where sleep was impossible — why, it was out-and-out robbery, false advertising, consumer fraud.
It took Dad a while to figure out what to do. Complaining to the authorities hadn’t gotten him very far today. Sometimes you have to find justice on your own terms.
He got up, stripped the blanket and sheets off the bed, and threw them out the window. He muscled the mattress off the bed, folded it in two and pushed it out the window too. Down it plunged, three stories, to the alley floor. The box spring wouldn’t fit, so he broke all the boards until he could fold it small enough to fit through the window. Down it went.
He folded up the metal bed frame. Out the window. All the pillows, out the window. Chair, out the window. Lamp, out the window. The three drawers of the dresser, out the window. The dresser he had to destroy first, by kicking the shit out of it. Then out the window. Everything in the room, right down to the $2 picture on the wall — out the window.
He went in the bathroom, plugged up the bathtub and turned on the water full blast. He plugged up the sink and turned on the water there too. He took the roll of toilet paper and shoved it into the toilet as deep and tight as he could make it go with his long, strong arm — deep enough that it would be almost impossible to get out. Then he flushed the toilet until it overflowed and he was standing in a puddle of water.
Dad went back in the bedroom and smoked a cigarette, waiting for the flood to reach the bedroom. He picked up his stuff, set it in the hall outside and locked the door on the rapidly flooding room.
For his last act, he took a wooden match, shoved it into the lock and broke it off so nobody would be able to unlock the door.
Then he vanished onto the streets of Los Angeles, his $29 avenged.
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