Transmissions from Marfa: By Tommy Robbins
[Shortly after that last Marfa entry, I stopped working on the Marfa stuff. I had this folder that Paul left me and I think I uploaded everything in it to this blog. If I left anything out, I’ll get to it later.
Why’d a quit the Marfa gig? I got fed up with art. What a fricking racket. It seems to get worse every minute. I enjoyed sitting at the table with the panel and all, but it was better for me to leave it behind the second I walked out the cafe door and into the brown LA sunlight.
I switched to fiction. The pulpy kind. Here’s one I revised sometime in 2007. I wrote the original draft I think in 96 or so.]
the comet’s shadow
By Tommy Robbins
The pale streetlight shone through the windows, casting icy luminous reflections and a weird assemblage of angular shadows on the oil-stained, veined and cracked concrete floor of the shuttered 2nd Street warehouse. The night air was brisk and foul with filthy chemistry from nearby pulp plants, perfuming a thick fog arising from the wretched brown Anders River cloaked the city.
NaMu is an ancient wholesalers’ mercantile neighborhood. Where National Blvd. and Murtha Avenue converge, the streets were known to be unsafe after dark. The footsteps of the rare passerby were muffled, and the direction of their origin veiled by the mist. During the day, thousands of trucks invaded NaMu. Within an hour of sunset, they were gone til early the next morning.
The staccato riff of semi-automatic weapons fire punctuated the district’s nighttime exhalations, the shoooshhhhh of cars on the shiny pavement. Sirens tore through the night, and alarms honked and whistled irregularly, but they were blocks away, then fading. The cops only showed up when the tripped alarms rang out, usually when a drunk tried to strong-arm his way under a roof to squat, or to get out of the near-constant rains.
Shrieking, raging voices rose and faded in a crazy anguished song of pain, echoing against concrete facades, the rusting abandoned autos, the chain link fences glittering with razor wire. The cacophony dissolved. Mongrel dogs howled and barked in the distance, then stopped.
The moon was full tonight but hidden beyond the dense fog. Still, a body sensed its presence, its monoptical performance as invisible witness, behind the veil of gloomy smoke. The dark settled upon the metropolis, like a huge blue-black raven with neon in its plumage, perched over its glowing strange halogen eggs, flickering in a nest of ooze and bricked steel.
Dark in the district was a thin, strange, finely drawn mask, whose purpose might have been to disguise. Behind it Jax could envision the fearsome and massive glowering skin of the alien monstrous Mysterious. An intricate weaving of Dreamings made manifest, some threads horrible, some glorious. This one was one of the horrid ones, a nightmare of lust and murder.
In a pool of thickening blood, he sat with his back to the wall. He was conscious of the sticky warmth of his leaking life-fluids, feeling oddly fine, even comfortable, as he meandered in and out of the present, not jarred by the chill of the cement on the backs of his quivering legs, or the jagged, labored breaths, dwindling in his chest. The brace of pistols in his relaxed hands, a Colt Combat and a Browning .45 1911 Model, both empty, seemed weightless. His lids were heavy, and he fought to stay conscious. His mouth worked spasmodically, the tongue coated with a sulfurous mixture of fear, blood and gunpowder.
His senses were keener than they had ever been, it seemed. He could clearly hear the claws of a rat scratching across the concrete on the far end of the cavernous warehouse, to his right. He tried to will his neck to lift his head and swivel it so he could face the sound, maybe catch a glimpse of the rodent, but his muscles would not respond. He chuckled, but it sounded more like a soggy rumble deep in his chest.
—i dont wanna die here. dont wanna die here. i wanna die in my own bed. after a burger fries and milk shake. i dont wanna die here man. fuck. fuckfuckfuckfuckfuckfuck. He thought.
Four bodies were sprawled across the loading dock at the rear of the building, which had once been a factory where silk was turned into lingerie, pantyhose, garters, the works. Jax had blown the cocksuckers away, but not before one of the bastards had hit him with a load of double ought in his belly.
There would be no ambulance coming, no high-speed race to the E/R, no blood infusions, no surgery, no painful recovery, no orange pajamas at the county jail. No judge, no jury, no prison time, no yard, no shitty food, no pumping iron or pushups, no shiv wars, no needle.
Jax was a goner, and he knew it, sure as the sun would rise tomorrow.
He tried to control his wheezing breath, slow it down, conserve it. He had read once in Tai Chi magazine about a chi gung master who could reduce his heart rate to almost nothing, by going deep within himself, focusing on the emptiness, the void, becoming one with it.
— Bet the gook fucker hadn’t got sawed in two by a fuckin shotgun though, when he done it. He said aloud.
Jax’s voice ricocheted off everything, then died. The wall behind him shed chips of light green lead paint.
— Don’t have to worry bout the cancer no more.
He laughed, little more than a gurgle. Yet in his ears, the noise was odd and loud. The bigness of the sound frightened him, making his body tense for a couple of seconds, which in turn sent shockwaves of wrenching agony shooting from his screaming nerves to his brain. He passed out for a little while.
When he came to, he suppressed a groan. Jax was afraid that somebody would come looking for the mules he’d blown away on the loading dock. God, he wanted a cigarette. A Marlboro would be perfect. Twenty would be better. More.
—they shoulda just gimme the shit n all this crap coulda been avoided. fuck. they didnt have a fuckin chance. shoulda just give it up. now we all r fucked. He thought.
The coke and crystal would wear off soon, and then the pain would crash in, a train wreck, he thought.
Jax heard the car door slam shut. Behind the warehouse. By the loading dock. Another car door. Another. Another.
—oh shit.
He could just barely make out a furious verbal tirade, a chorus really, four or five voices, babbling musically in spanglish: “Ay carajo”, “madre de puta”, “pinche fucking cabron”, “chingadera dick motherfucker”…and such, for what seemed to Jax like an eternity, voices fading in and out, louder, softer. Once or twice a wailing cry of grief rose above the other voices, probably when one of them found a cousin.
Jax managed to eject the spent clip from the Browning, set the Colt in his damp crotch, and reach into the inside breast pocket of his Overland Sheepskin black leather jacket (—fuckin ruined, the fuckin bean heads), and pull out a fresh clip, insert it, and put a bullet in the chamber, quietly. Jax then placed the Browning in his crotch, took a speed loader off his belt—he gasped and almost cried out when he twisted around to unsnap the clasp, to extract the cylinder and bullets from his webbing—and expertly loaded the snub-nose .38. He transferred the short-barreled pistol to his left hand, and picked up the semi-auto with his right.
—cocked n locked motherfuckers, he whispered.
Adrenaline was taking the edge off his agony. Jax blinked his eyes open and shut quickly a couple of dozen times, to clear them of sweat and fear. …Like a kid when he’s trying to make an old movie out of the world.
It was quiet now below. It wouldn’t be long before they discovered the military issue duffel bag filled with heroin and half-million dollars on the stairs leading to this floor of the warehouse. He’d had to dump the bag. Too heavy, when you got lead in your guts. Jax figured they’d spot his blood trail, which would lead them to the package, and then to him. They would torture him, if they could. It was Family with them.
—fuck m, he croaked.
Jax recalled a time on his Uncle Quint’s farm near Point Pleasant, West Virginia. Jax was sent out to check the traps, and in one, set along a bank of the little crick that wound through Quint’s land, under a big oak, it was fall, and the ground was soft with mulch made by the huge leaves, it was damp and you could see your breath, the mist hung in the nooks and crannies of the hollers…the birds had stopped and the woods were still, and Jax paid attention to where he was stepping…There was a wildcat in the trap, a big steel-jaw job that Quint had set to catch a big black bear that’d been gettin too close to the house. The cat’s leg had been broken, was twisted all wrong, the white bone stickin out of the soft beautiful pelt. It was breathin hard, watchin Jax, muscles all bunched, barin its fangs. Jax crouched on a low mound and watched him right back. He remembered thinking nothing, just watching, relaxed, the shotgun laid across his knees. After a while that wildcat lay down, painfully, still watching Jax, and waited. When Jax knew it was ready, he took up the shotgun and blew it away.
Jax heard the rasp of canvas on concrete in the stairwell, and low whispers. “…Sangre…”
He took aim at the top of the stairs with both guns. His pain had faded from a roaring in his skull, to an ache.
—cmon. cmon. here i am.
His breathing had steadied. Jax was taking air in through his nostrils, holding it in his lungs, and slowly exhaling out of his mouth, like Quint and his daddy had taught him, and then later, the D.I. on the firing range where he’d earned his marksman’s badge. Steady…Steady…
Jax sensed more than saw the movement in the stairwell, the head dart around the corner and back. He heard a light tap of metal on concrete, probably a barrel. Jax knew it was inky black in the warehouse, except in the blocks of filtered fluorescent artificial light from outside. He could feel their eyes (ojo) scanning the fields of fire (fiero), straining against the night’s (noche) power. He imagined their hearts (corazon) beating faster, the palms of their hands (mano) sweating, their fingers tensing (contraction) and relaxing (expansion) against the hard plastic or wood of their gun butts.
They were his brothers at this moment, relatives, joined with him in a deathly dance. Jax remembered what the I Ching said about the man who understands ceremony, dance, and music, that he would rule the world. Jax understood. In his heart he knew at that moment the significance.
It was all worth it, everything. The Long Road, of suffering, fucking, eating, shitting, living and dying. The friends he’d left on the side of the highway, dead or broken, the masks he’d donned and discarded, the heaviness of his memories, the loves, twisted or small. It was nothing compared to this.
Jax, Sorley Gillian Jackson Donald, son of Angus, grandson of Iain, descended of the MacDonalds of Glencoe, thanked his God, the God of Loch Leven and Ballachulish, Iona and Staffa and Fingal, whom he had never known to this day, and when the shadows of his stalkers emerged from the shadows in the stairwell, Jax paused for the most delicious of instants, and, from a place not in his body, he loosed a shattering battle-cry that momentarily froze the hard men across the hall. Jax was illuminated by the flash from the muzzles of his pistols, which spewed yellow-white flames. His bullets tore through their bodies, sending three of four lurching, jerking, spinning, falling backward, two clattering down the stairs, already dead.
The one on his feet, Filemonde Francisco Antonio Gonzalez y Reina y Romero y Gevrez y Perea, stood his ground and emptied the H&K into the body of the man that had killed his brother Juan, cousin Roberto, and crippled his brother-in-law Pasqual, and sent the others downstairs to God.
Through the blue smoke, Filemonde watched as Jax’s body gently slid to the floor, coming to rest in the light from the street lamps outside, leaving a descending crescent swoosh of blood on the wall behind where he had sat and waited. Filemonde saw the wide-open eyes of the corpse glistening, and the smile, blissful, serene, that Jax wore into the next world.
Filemonde sighed, lowered his gun, and his body unwound.
—son of a bitch. dios mio. He said, shaking his head.
Filemonde reached with his left hand into the pocket of his London Fog trench coat, and took out his cell phone. He used his thumb to dial a number, and nestled the phone between his cheek and shoulder. While he waited for an answer he took a pack of unfiltered Camels out of the breast pocket of his black silk shirt, shook the pack until he could grab a cigarette with his mouth. He lit it with a zippo he pulled out of the same pocket and took a deep drag, holding it in, and then slowly exhaling a thin line of blue smoke that langorously rose to blend with the gunsmoke lingering, floating dreamily in the noxious dead warehouse air.
—oyeme. esta muy malo hermano. no. yo tengo los chiles, pero mis hijos son enfiermos. muy enfiermos. salgan. si…
It was going to be a long night of tears for Filemonde and his family.
That year a comet streaked across the sky, over a period of four months. It was most visible in the northwestern sky right after dusk.
