“Look, man, how the hell are they going to trace that to us? Huh? We were in Ron’s truck, nobody associates us with Ron, and, hell, Ron did it. You can’t get in trouble for just being there. Besides, the guy’s fucking crazy. What the hell were we supposed to do? He’d have killed us if we’d have tried to stop him.”
Eli leaned against the counter and watched Eddie sop up the spilled coffee with the towel. In the silence, a radio played faint country music somewhere in the trailer, and the faucet dripped into a pan of greasy water in the sink. Eddie took a deep breath. Despite the surrounding desert, the air in the kitchen was musty and rank. Eddie shook his head and said, “Just our luck though. Another week and that body’d a been gone. What are the odds, man?”
“I don’t know. But hell, just cuz the leg turned up don’t mean they’ll find anything else. I mean, look around, there’s all kinds of crazy shit happening up here. They’ll probably chalk it up to a drug deal gone bad or something. Bunch a meth freaks killing each other, just like always. I wouldn’t worry about it.”
“I know. You’re right.” Eddie folded the wet towel and tossed it across the kitchen where it hit the edge of the counter and fell to the floor with a moist slap. Neither of them moved to pick it up.
Eli looked down at the counter. It was strewn with the wreckage of fifty meals. There were dirty plates; wads of cellophane, stains of innumerable variety; ashtrays overflowing with cigarette butts; wet paper towels and napkins crumpled and stuffed down into bowls with strange liquids still in them; there was a half eaten microwave burrito sitting off by itself, pristine and unbothered by the clutter; and balanced precariously atop a pint glass of flat beer with a ribbon of something that looked like snot floating in it, sat a spoon with a half eaten lump of hard, black chili still on it—mold spores half an inch long jutting out like the spines on a sea mine.
Eli picked up the spoon and turned it over. The chili had adhered completely and showed no sign of ever coming loose. Eli set it back on the glass. “Man, we need to burn this trailer when we leave. This place is filthy.”
Eddie snickered quietly and looked everything over. “I know it, man.” He started laughing harder, and leaned his chair back against the wall. “You’d think being laid off and all, we’d be able to find the time to clean.” Eddie doubled over in hysterics, feeling the tension of the previous two days flow out of him.
Eli watched Eddie’s silent laughter and felt himself giving into it as well. He tried to stifle a smile, and then it caught hold of him. Eli picked up the burrito and waved it at Eddie, then tossed it back on the counter. They both lost themselves in red-faced fits of spastic laughter until their guts hurt.
When it was over, and the kitchen was silent again, they could still hear the soft music and the dripping water, and they were both all too aware that nothing had changed. Eli watched Eddie sip his coffee and try to look relaxed, like he wasn’t thinking about the coyote and the leg and what had happened to the hitchhiker, and how the two of them lost their jobs and got caught up in a bargain with a lunatic.
Eli felt the tension building in his shoulders and he rotated them backward a couple of times, craning his neck to the left and right. “Fuck,” was all he could say. Finally, when Eddie’s eyes caught his own, Eli let out a huff and said, “I need some air.”
Eli stepped down, out of the doublewide, and onto the sandy ground. The desert stretched away in all directions, a brown, dusty land pocked with clumps of sage, an occasional Joshua tree, and many black, steeple-like frames of old-fashioned oil derricks—mostly abandoned now. Trailers and shacks dotted the landscape too. Denser near town, where there were lots as small as five acres, and spreading further and further apart as the lot sizes grew and grew and the desert expanded to the low horizon. There were jagged peaks in the distance, but they were meaningless. Eli doubted they even had names.
Way back when the federal government was trying to give the land away, there were only