God Is Dead (18 page)

“I don't know about that,” Crispy said. “I've got no real agenda, geographically speaking. No home to go to. I just want to get across the border so I can stop being crazy.”

Arnold, perplexed, said nothing.

“What,” Crispy said, gnawing another chunk of meat from the blade of the Ka-bar, “you think I don't know I'm crazy? It's not true, what they say. When you're nuts, you know. And there's no getting away from it. Crazy, morning, noon, and night. Crazy, crazy, crazy. Crazy dreams, even. But not for much longer.”

“I don't understand,” Arnold said.

“Hey,” Crispy said, “don't humor me, Arnie. Okay? Don't act like it never occurred to you I might be a few sandwiches short of a picnic.”

“That's not it, Crispy—”

“And don't get up on your high horse, either, superguy. 'Cause I've seen you do things that would qualify you for the bughouse, don't forget.”

The difference being, Arnold thought, that he'd carried out his duties as an interrogator with the grim determination of a true believer, taking no pleasure in it, while Crispy regularly sported a rock-hard erection when putting matches out in subjects' eyes or applying flame to the soles of their feet, and made no effort to hide it.

“I know what you're thinking,” Crispy said. “You're thinking there's a difference—you were just being a good soldier, and I would have done it for free—shit, I would have paid for the privilege.” He tossed a bit of gristle to the dogs and threaded another strip onto the knife. “Well, you're right about one part. But answer this: How'd you sleep after your first interview?”

“I didn't,” Arnold said. “For two days.”

“Exactly. And how do you sleep now? Like a dead baby, am I right?” Crispy smiled at him over the flames. “Would your mama recognize the boy she sent off to war, Arnie?”

Arnold wasn't sure what made him angrier: that Crispy had a point, or that he'd brought Arnold's mother into it. “Would your mama recognize the depraved cocksucker she spawned?” he asked.

“Whoooooo, yeah!” Crispy laughed. “That's what I'm saying, right there. Picking a fight with a crazy man.” He checked the meat for doneness, tore it in two, and handed half to Arnold. “We're not all that different, you and I.”

“That wasn't what I was talking about, anyway,” Arnold said. “If you'd let me get a word in edgewise.”

“Whatcha mean?”

“I know you're fucking crackers, Crispy. What I meant was I don't understand how getting north of the border will suddenly change that fact.”

Crispy studied him, as if trying to determine whether he was serious. “You don't know?”

“Know what?”

“How long have you been with this outfit, anyway?”

“Eight years.”

“Don't you talk with anyone back home?”

“My parents live on an island by themselves,” Arnold said. “They're a bit out of touch.”

“Well shit, hombre,” Crispy said, “one word, two syllables: nanotech.”

“That's three syllables,” Arnold said.

“Whatever. I'm talking robots the size of an atom. Programmed to cure whatever ails you. You got cancer, they find the tumor and kill it off. Got a bad memory you wish you didn't, they sniff out the brain cells that house it and wipe 'em clean. And if you're crazy, they just make little adjustments—patch up a bad DNA strand, scrub the neurotransmitters clean—along with any required memory purging. And presto-chango. The potential applications are pretty much infinite, but you get the idea.”

Arnold laughed. “You're crazier than I thought.”

“That's what your mouth says. But your eyes say something else. You're intrigued. You're thinking about all the things you'd like to fix. And why not?
You'd
be crazy not to.”

Arnold said nothing for a moment. Then he asked, “Can they restore memories, too?”

“Don't know,” Crispy said. “I'm not an expert. But you don't have to know how it works to know that it does.”

Crispy wiped the knife clean on his pantleg, sheathed it, and lay down on his side in the dirt. “Listen, it goes without saying that it's been a long day. I'm going to sleep. So don't talk anymore, all right?”

Within two minutes, Crispy was snoring. The dogs, realizing no more handouts were forthcoming, laid their heads on their paws and closed their eyes. Arnold fashioned a crude pillow with his boots. His mind, exhausted to the point of mania, gnawed at the edges of this nanotech idea, and he had just enough time to think there was no way he'd get to sleep before he passed out cold.

Crispy kicked him awake sometime before sunrise. “Rise and shine, amigo,” he said. He was wide-eyed, smiling nervously. “Can you hear the explosions? Those Evo-Psych fuckers are moving fast.”

Arnold turned an ear to the south and listened. He heard nothing but sagebrush rustling in the breeze.

Crispy was loading the animals into the tank. “Have you seen the goat?” he asked.

“I haven't seen anything. I've been asleep the whole time.”

Crispy eyed him. “You sure about that?”

Wary, Arnold kept his exasperation in check. “I have no idea where the goat is,” he said evenly.

“Little guy wandered off,” Crispy said. He climbed the side of the tank and lowered himself into the hatch. “Oh well. No time. Let's get a move on.”

Crispy had the tank rolling even before Arnold could scramble to his position atop the turret. They hurtled along the road for hours without slowing or stopping. Turbines screaming, the tank kicked and listed; Arnold's hands grew numb from clutching the lip of the hatch to avoid being bucked off.

By late afternoon they'd reached the Solidaridad Colombia bridge and found it destroyed. Nothing remained but the bridge's concrete supports, cut to half their original height by an explosion and jutting up from the waters of the Rio Grande like broken stalagmites. Across the river the Texas border town of Boca Buitre was visible, all squat dun-colored buildings and dirt streets.

“Dammit,” Crispy said, climbing out of the tank. “Who blew up the bridge?”

“There's a sign,” Arnold said, pointing.

And there was. A large white placard had been driven into the earth on the edge of the riverbank, bearing the same message in English, Spanish, Vietnamese, and Chinese.

“What the
fuck
?” Crispy said.

“Indeed,” Arnold said. “Precisely what I was thinking.”

Crispy threw a haymaker at the air. “How the fuck are we going to get across?”

“Hey, relax,” Arnold said. “We'll figure it out.”

Crispy seized him by the shirt. “Don't tell me to relax,” he said. “You heard the bombs this morning. They're
right behind us.
We don't have time for this.”

“Okay.” Arnold raised his hands in appeasement. “Okay. It looks like we're going swimming, then.”

Crispy released him with a shove. “No,” he said. “No way. The animals. We're taking the tank.”

“What? The tank will sink, Crispy.”

“It's not that deep. You can see rocks sticking up. There. And there.”

Those “rocks,” Arnold noted, were actually the broken remnants of the bridge, and there was no telling how deeply they were piled up under the surface of the water. Still, Crispy was frantic and dangerous, so he said nothing.

Crispy climbed back into the tank. “Get on, if you're coming,” he said.

Arnold didn't like this, but he liked his chances of swimming across with a bum leg even less. He clambered up to the turret as Crispy pushed the tank forward and over the bank. As they approached the river Arnold could see a shelf of rock just under the surface, extending maybe thirty feet from the river's edge, and beyond that nothing was visible in the dark water.

On the floor of the bank they hit a lip of level ground at such an extreme angle that the plow ripped up a chunk of earth the size of a Volkswagen. The tank bucked mightily and splashed into the river, driving foamy brownish waves before it. On the rock shelf the water rose only to the middle of the tracks.

“See?” Crispy hollered up at him. “Ha! I told you it wasn't deep!”

Emboldened, Crispy jammed the accelerator forward. Arnold crouched on the balls of his feet, ready to leap.

At the shelf's edge the tank paused, pitched slowly forward with a deep mechanical groan, and sank like the sixty tons of steel that it was.

Arnold pushed off with his one good leg, but couldn't escape the water rushing into the vacuum behind the tank's descent. The sun disappeared. In the darkness, enveloped by a cloud of swirling bubbles, he lost all sense of which direction was up. He could hear the deep, muffled clatter of the tank's machinery still grinding away, but in the water the sound was diffuse, coming from every direction, and so was no help in determining where he needed to go to find his next breath.

He fought to calm himself as his lungs smoldered, then burst into flames. He grew still and waited, trusting that his natural buoyancy would tell him what his senses couldn't. After a moment he felt his body begin to drift in one direction, and when he was sure he began to claw and kick at the water, following this drift, certain that at any moment he would break the surface and find air, but it was taking much longer than he'd hoped or expected, and now starbursts performed little slow-motion explosions before his eyes and he became
too
calm. Suddenly, taking another breath seemed not so urgent after all, and even as he struggled to focus on getting out of this mess his mind drifted along with his body, turning to thoughts of his mother, and how was it possible to love and hate one person with equal intensity at the same time, he wondered, just as his head broke the surface and the reptilian portion of his brain demanded and got a deep lungful of air.

The oxygen hit him like a slap to the face, and the urgency returned. He looked around and saw that two of the dogs had come to the surface and were paddling for the bank on the Texas side of the river. Arnold tried to follow them, but the current was too strong for him to swim against with just one leg. He called to the dogs. They continued swimming away, so he called again, and this time one of them did a slow, wide semicircle and headed back.

The dog brushed against Arnold and allowed him to grab hold of its tail. Legs pumping, it did another semicircle and pointed its nose toward the shore, dragging him along. He tried to help by stroking with his free hand, but the dog was strong and seemingly tireless, and soon they were in Texas, soaked, exhausted, and alive.

Arnold lay on his back. “Good boy,” he said to the dog, but it apparently felt no special bond had been established; already it had rejoined its companion, and together they trotted into Boca Buitre, sniffing and marking as they went, without so much as a glance back at him.

There was no sign of Crispy. The river had resumed its glassy, languid flow, with nothing to indicate that it had carried a man, a pig, a dog, a tortoise, a parrot, and a battle tank to their deaths only moments before. Arnold watched and waited. He wasn't sure if he hoped to see Crispy emerge or not, but he realized as the minutes passed that what he hoped for was irrelevant, and when he saw the lifeless body of Pepe the parrot bob to the surface, wings akimbo, he struggled to his feet and limped toward Boca Buitre.

He expected to find the town empty, as all the small desert communities they'd passed in Mexico had been, but to his surprise there were people about, mowing dead lawns, checking their mailboxes, lying in grease-stained driveways as they worked on old cars. Dripping wet and limping, he earned more than a few sidelong glances as he made his way to what passed as downtown: a four-way intersection with a general store on one corner.

Inside, Arnold took bags of chips and cookies, two cans of beef stew, and several bottles of water to the counter. A boy of twelve or so, slightly chubby, sun-freckled, sat at the register.

“I don't have any money,” Arnold said.

“Then you can't have the food,” the boy told him.

“I've just come from the war.”