El Mundo es Nuestro Propio
They whipped the bitch 23 times. Her howls bled through floor joints and brick walls, higher and harsher still than the piercing wind. Even the soldiers - that's what the governor called them - sleeping upstairs and in the parlor were torn from soggy sleep. The Governor - that's what he called himself - had not ordered this but stood on, nodding, as if the action were as preordained as Christ’s crucifixion. Two soldiers knelt at the governor's feet, grappling with the bitch's arms and legs. The man with the arms swatted a hand over the Governor's feet to wipe blood flecks from his spats. The executioner - that's what the soldiers called him - threw the bull whip clumsily. It was not meant for use by a former altar boy, in a former dining room, in a former farm house.
A former farm house. Deep in the prairie. Tall grass; abandoned corn. The receding grasp of December twilight. A quarter of a gas tank from the nearest neighbor. No visitors. No passersby. Nothing here but the wind. Nothing but the screaming bitch. No one to remember, none to recollect. When they first arrived, a sheriff's deputy stopped by to ask about them. Garcia, who spoke clean English, told him they were a work crew, sent by the owner to rehabilitate the property. After that, no one came around.
The sunlamps in the master bedroom – where the men slept, including the Governor – cut out the day before. It broke any hope of heating their bones like home in Honduras. It was whether the bitch wrecked the sunlamp's wires from which the whipping arose. Like many of their lives, her beating served punishment without verdict. Reeking of piss and fryer oil, cracked elbows and dead villages somewhere south, these hombres were alien to the nation-state. All the nation-states. They skipped Honduras by bus, for neglect or lunacy; they crawled through the Mexican desert; they slouched into the highways of Texas and Oklahoma seeking work. It wasn't till they became their own world - we no longer belong to no one, the Governor told them the day he elected himself - that they took their freedom. Squatted in a one-bedroom apartment in Tulsa and plotted. Knocked over a gun shop and a gas station. Boosted a dented extended van. Executed Venancio, who muttered disdainful and moral disagreements. The World of Their Own - El Mundo es Nuestro Propio - was what they called themselves. Stragglers in tatters roaming a foreign and rich land like the Vandals of ancient Rome, they would take the meats and grains they needed. Take the shelter. Take the gold. Take the pussy.
The bitch came from Sioux City. Maybe she had a cousin who worked in meat packing. Maybe she he had a father who farmed. Maybe she ran away from the drug hells like Juarez. Maybe she was, like them, a drifter who couldn't quite hook on to the stringy edges of El Norte's social fabric. Maybe she prayed every day. Maybe she sucked cock for meal tickets. Now she lay taut beneath a whip for having maybe broken the heat lamps that they plundered from a hardware store. The heat lamps that would shake the chill from this snowy desert. The heat lamps that would sooth the Governor’s troops. The heat lamps would be the sun, the indoor anchor, for the nuestro world. They hung now like a string of empty martini glasses, the generator outside that powered them resting quietly.
The bitch barely breathed anymore. The lashes were 23, and then another 23. Executioner stopped lashing after she stopped howling. He rubbed his skinny arm. A former store clerk, the whipping, like his new life, depleted him. The Governor snarled at the blood on his spats. The soldiers considered ganging her and held a vote, which failed. Most were feeling lazy, others bored with her. They threw her in the kitchen and returned to their playing cards.
These soldiers - would they really fight to the death? - should not have made hay with a butcher's daughter. Tranquilla lay in the kitchen three hours, her fingers touching the frost that formed underneath the cracks of the porch door. She thought about how she knew blood, knew it well. When she was seven, she beheaded her first chicken. When she was eleven, her father sat her behind a sausage grinder. The blood on her skin didn’t seem to be hers. It coagulated and dried. It smeared on her palms. The whipping itself wasn't unexpected, considering what they'd done to her the past three weeks. And the cruelty was just to a higher degree what the 23 years of life had offered. Cruelty now made no impression on her mind. She lost her mother in the Arizonan desert; her sister to tuberculosis because they wouldn't go to an American hospital. The first restaurateur she labored for plundered half her pay check; the second flashed her nightly in the kitchen after the servers clocked out. There would be no Stockholm Syndrome. There was never a plea for mercy. Only prayers that this army may burn in a prairie fire.
The men, stoned on beer, migrated upstairs. Struggling from pools of saliva and blood, Tranquilla stood. She stumbled from the torment in her legs. She tripped on her shredded jeans. She bumped into the dining table, still shoved aside for the soldiers’ floor show. She thought back to her braggart of an older brother, who ran briefly with a gang. He spoke of executions, of burned houses, bricks in windows. Her horror then seemed unimaginable now. Two handguns lay on an end table in the living room. She understood from watching movies how they worked, but did not know if these guns were loaded. She fired one into the couch. The gunshot transformed the pukey wallpaper into a canyon of echoes. The gun shot up and back, grazing her cheek. Lock your elbows Tranquilla, she thought.
The soldiers raced downstairs, wasps out of an insulted nest. Tranquilla stood at the bottom of the staircase, both elbows locked, shooting into the yelps and hollers. The men were trapped, falling over each other to climb back up, or slide down, or jump the banister. Her bullets cracked their bones and tore their arteries. One or two of them had guns, but those dropped to the floor after only a few shots, all of which zinged past Tranquilla. Gunshots in the dark. Like a Hollywood picture. Her thighs tingled and she thought that was funny, that maybe she had found a new turn-on.
In a few seconds it was quiet, and there were no more bullets. Tranquilla climbed the pile of bodies to the upstairs to find the van keys. There was Garcia, who spoke clean English. His eyes followed her, though his body did not. She considered taking him to be her translator, but picking him up seemed like too much. She moved on. There was the Governor, at the top of the stairs. He breathed heavy, a pneumatic elephant like one she saw once at the circus. Up by his head, the Governor’s arms flapped like big floppy ears, but his legs remained still. The body that once wore a suit coat – he grew up a tailor in Tegucigalpa – now wore all its blood inside out. He whispered something military; she kicked his mouth with her bare foot, searched his pocket, pulled out the van keys, complete with purple rabbit’s foot. She took sneakers, sweatpants and a coat from the upstairs bedroom. She took one of the soldier's guns. She took a box of crackers from the kitchen.
Out the porch door and around the side of the house stood the generator, and next to it, propane tanks. She stood 75 feet back and fired. And fired. And fired. Finally, the night turned from still to orange. After, she climbed into the van, Tranquilla chose a direction and drove. The crackers tasted like dusty notebook.
Inside, the Governor's world warmed. He wondered how that could be if the heat lamps had still been broken. Did the bitch turn the heat lamps on to pester them? Flames from the bedroom lit his glassy eyes, and the Governor wondered what they'd write on his headstone, if he ever got one. El Mundo es Nuestro Propio died a blazing stillbirth in an abandoned farm house. Somewhere in the Dakotas, up norte in El Norte. Cause of death: broken heat lamps, nasty bitch. Those, he thought would be the words, the end of our new world.
They whipped the bitch 23 times. Her howls bled through floor joints and brick walls, higher and harsher still than the piercing wind. Even the soldiers - that's what the governor called them - sleeping upstairs and in the parlor were torn from soggy sleep. The Governor - that's what he called himself - had not ordered this but stood on, nodding, as if the action were as preordained as Christ’s crucifixion. Two soldiers knelt at the governor's feet, grappling with the bitch's arms and legs. The man with the arms swatted a hand over the Governor's feet to wipe blood flecks from his spats. The executioner - that's what the soldiers called him - threw the bull whip clumsily. It was not meant for use by a former altar boy, in a former dining room, in a former farm house.
A former farm house. Deep in the prairie. Tall grass; abandoned corn. The receding grasp of December twilight. A quarter of a gas tank from the nearest neighbor. No visitors. No passersby. Nothing here but the wind. Nothing but the screaming bitch. No one to remember, none to recollect. When they first arrived, a sheriff's deputy stopped by to ask about them. Garcia, who spoke clean English, told him they were a work crew, sent by the owner to rehabilitate the property. After that, no one came around.
The sunlamps in the master bedroom – where the men slept, including the Governor – cut out the day before. It broke any hope of heating their bones like home in Honduras. It was whether the bitch wrecked the sunlamp's wires from which the whipping arose. Like many of their lives, her beating served punishment without verdict. Reeking of piss and fryer oil, cracked elbows and dead villages somewhere south, these hombres were alien to the nation-state. All the nation-states. They skipped Honduras by bus, for neglect or lunacy; they crawled through the Mexican desert; they slouched into the highways of Texas and Oklahoma seeking work. It wasn't till they became their own world - we no longer belong to no one, the Governor told them the day he elected himself - that they took their freedom. Squatted in a one-bedroom apartment in Tulsa and plotted. Knocked over a gun shop and a gas station. Boosted a dented extended van. Executed Venancio, who muttered disdainful and moral disagreements. The World of Their Own - El Mundo es Nuestro Propio - was what they called themselves. Stragglers in tatters roaming a foreign and rich land like the Vandals of ancient Rome, they would take the meats and grains they needed. Take the shelter. Take the gold. Take the pussy.
The bitch came from Sioux City. Maybe she had a cousin who worked in meat packing. Maybe she he had a father who farmed. Maybe she ran away from the drug hells like Juarez. Maybe she was, like them, a drifter who couldn't quite hook on to the stringy edges of El Norte's social fabric. Maybe she prayed every day. Maybe she sucked cock for meal tickets. Now she lay taut beneath a whip for having maybe broken the heat lamps that they plundered from a hardware store. The heat lamps that would shake the chill from this snowy desert. The heat lamps that would sooth the Governor’s troops. The heat lamps would be the sun, the indoor anchor, for the nuestro world. They hung now like a string of empty martini glasses, the generator outside that powered them resting quietly.
The bitch barely breathed anymore. The lashes were 23, and then another 23. Executioner stopped lashing after she stopped howling. He rubbed his skinny arm. A former store clerk, the whipping, like his new life, depleted him. The Governor snarled at the blood on his spats. The soldiers considered ganging her and held a vote, which failed. Most were feeling lazy, others bored with her. They threw her in the kitchen and returned to their playing cards.
These soldiers - would they really fight to the death? - should not have made hay with a butcher's daughter. Tranquilla lay in the kitchen three hours, her fingers touching the frost that formed underneath the cracks of the porch door. She thought about how she knew blood, knew it well. When she was seven, she beheaded her first chicken. When she was eleven, her father sat her behind a sausage grinder. The blood on her skin didn’t seem to be hers. It coagulated and dried. It smeared on her palms. The whipping itself wasn't unexpected, considering what they'd done to her the past three weeks. And the cruelty was just to a higher degree what the 23 years of life had offered. Cruelty now made no impression on her mind. She lost her mother in the Arizonan desert; her sister to tuberculosis because they wouldn't go to an American hospital. The first restaurateur she labored for plundered half her pay check; the second flashed her nightly in the kitchen after the servers clocked out. There would be no Stockholm Syndrome. There was never a plea for mercy. Only prayers that this army may burn in a prairie fire.
The men, stoned on beer, migrated upstairs. Struggling from pools of saliva and blood, Tranquilla stood. She stumbled from the torment in her legs. She tripped on her shredded jeans. She bumped into the dining table, still shoved aside for the soldiers’ floor show. She thought back to her braggart of an older brother, who ran briefly with a gang. He spoke of executions, of burned houses, bricks in windows. Her horror then seemed unimaginable now. Two handguns lay on an end table in the living room. She understood from watching movies how they worked, but did not know if these guns were loaded. She fired one into the couch. The gunshot transformed the pukey wallpaper into a canyon of echoes. The gun shot up and back, grazing her cheek. Lock your elbows Tranquilla, she thought.
The soldiers raced downstairs, wasps out of an insulted nest. Tranquilla stood at the bottom of the staircase, both elbows locked, shooting into the yelps and hollers. The men were trapped, falling over each other to climb back up, or slide down, or jump the banister. Her bullets cracked their bones and tore their arteries. One or two of them had guns, but those dropped to the floor after only a few shots, all of which zinged past Tranquilla. Gunshots in the dark. Like a Hollywood picture. Her thighs tingled and she thought that was funny, that maybe she had found a new turn-on.
In a few seconds it was quiet, and there were no more bullets. Tranquilla climbed the pile of bodies to the upstairs to find the van keys. There was Garcia, who spoke clean English. His eyes followed her, though his body did not. She considered taking him to be her translator, but picking him up seemed like too much. She moved on. There was the Governor, at the top of the stairs. He breathed heavy, a pneumatic elephant like one she saw once at the circus. Up by his head, the Governor’s arms flapped like big floppy ears, but his legs remained still. The body that once wore a suit coat – he grew up a tailor in Tegucigalpa – now wore all its blood inside out. He whispered something military; she kicked his mouth with her bare foot, searched his pocket, pulled out the van keys, complete with purple rabbit’s foot. She took sneakers, sweatpants and a coat from the upstairs bedroom. She took one of the soldier's guns. She took a box of crackers from the kitchen.
Out the porch door and around the side of the house stood the generator, and next to it, propane tanks. She stood 75 feet back and fired. And fired. And fired. Finally, the night turned from still to orange. After, she climbed into the van, Tranquilla chose a direction and drove. The crackers tasted like dusty notebook.
Inside, the Governor's world warmed. He wondered how that could be if the heat lamps had still been broken. Did the bitch turn the heat lamps on to pester them? Flames from the bedroom lit his glassy eyes, and the Governor wondered what they'd write on his headstone, if he ever got one. El Mundo es Nuestro Propio died a blazing stillbirth in an abandoned farm house. Somewhere in the Dakotas, up norte in El Norte. Cause of death: broken heat lamps, nasty bitch. Those, he thought would be the words, the end of our new world.
