Savages (2 page)

He starts off all cool and controlled, deliberate like his dick is a pool cue and he’s lining up his shots, but after a while he starts anger-fucking her,
bam bam bam
, like he’s shooting her. Drives her small shoulders into the arm of the sofa.

Trying to fuck the war out of himself, hips thrusting like he can fuck the images off, like the bad pictures will come out with his jizz (wargasm?), but it won’t happen it won’t happen it won’t happen it won’t happen even though she does her part arches her own hips and bucks like she’s trying to throw him out of the fern grotto this machine invader cutting down her rain forest her slick moist jungle.

As she goes—

Oh, oh, oh.

Oh, oh,
ohhhhh
. . .

O!

When she wakes up—

—sort of—

Chon is sitting at the dining room table, still staring at the lappie, but now he’s cleaning a gun broken down into intricate pieces on a beach towel. Because Ben would fucking
freak
if Chon got oil on the table or the carpet. Ben is fussy about his things. Chon
says he’s like a woman but Ben has a different take. Each nice thing represents a risk—growing and moving hydro.

Even though Ben hasn’t been here in months, Chon and O are still careful with his stuff.

O hopes the gun parts don’t mean Chon’s getting ready to go back to I-Rock-and-Roll, as he calls it. He’s been back twice since getting out of the military, on the payroll of one of those sketchy private security companies. Returns with, as he says, his soul empty and his bank account full.

Which is why he goes in the first place.

You sell the skills you have.

Chon got his GED, joined the navy, and busted his way into SEAL school. Sixty miles south of here, on Silver Strand, they used the ocean to torture him. Made him lie faceup in a winter sea as freezing waves pounded him (waterboarding was just part of the drill, my friends, SOP). Put heavy logs on his shoulder and made him run up sand dunes and thigh-deep in the ocean. Had him dive underwater and hold his breath until he thought his lungs would blow his insides out. Did everything they could think of to make him ring the bell and quit—what they didn’t get was that Chon
liked
the pain. When they finally woke up to that twisted fact, they taught him to do everything that a seriously crazy, crazily athletic man could do in H
₂
O.

Then they sent him to Stanland.

Afghanistan.

Where . . .

You got sand, you got snow, you ain’t got no ocean.

The Taliban don’t surf.

Neither does Chon, he hates that faux-cool shit, he always liked being the one straight guy in Laguna who
didn’t
surf, he just found it funny that they spent six figures training him to be Aquaman and then shipped him to a place where there’s no water.

Oh well, you take your wars where you can find them.

Chon stayed in for two enlistments and then checked out. Came back to Laguna to . . .

To . . .

Uhnnn . . .

To . . .

Nothing.

There was nothing for Chon
to
do. Nothing he wanted, anyway. He could have gone the lifeguard route, but he didn’t feel like sitting on a high chair watching tourists work on their melanoma. A retired navy captain gave him a gig selling yachts but Chon couldn’t sell and hated boats, so that didn’t work out. So when the corporate recruiter looked him up, Chon was available.

To go to I-Rock-and-Roll.

Nasty
nasty
shit in those pre-Surge days, what with kidnappings, beheadings, IEDs severing sticks and blowing off melons. It was Chon’s job to keep any of that shit from happening to the paying customers, and if the best defense is a good offense, well . . .

It was what it was.

And with the right blend of hydro, speed, Vike, and Oxy it was actually a pretty cool video game—IraqBox—and you could rack up some serious points in the middle of the Shia/Sunni/AQ-in-Mesopotamia cluster-fuck if you weren’t too particular about the particulars.

O has diagnosed Chon with PTLOSD.

Post-Traumatic Lack Of Stress Disorder. He says he has no nightmares, nerves, flashbacks, hallucinations, or guilt.

“I wasn’t stressed,” Chon insisted, “and there was no trauma.”

“Must have been the dope,” O opined.

Dope is good, Chon agreed.

Dope is supposed to be bad, but in a
bad world
it’s
good
, if you
catch the reverse moral polarity of it. Chon refers to drugs as a “rational response to insanity,” and his chronic use of the chronic is a chronic response to
chronic
insanity.

It creates balance, Chon believes. In a fucked-up world, you have to be fucked up, or you’ll fall . . .

off . . .

the . . .

end—

O pulls her jeans up, walks over to the table, and looks at the gun, still in pieces on the beach towel. The metal parts are pretty in their engineered precision.

As previously noted, O likes power tools.

Except when Chon is cleaning one with professional concentration even though he’s looking at a computer screen.

She looks over his shoulder to see what’s so good.

Expects to see someone giving head, someone getting it, because there is no give without the get, no get without the give when it comes to head.

Not so fast.

Because what she sees is this clip:

A camera slowly pans across what looks like the interior of a warehouse at a line of nine severed heads set on the floor. The faces—all male, all with unkempt black hair—bear expressions of shock, sorrow, grief, and even resignation. Then the camera tilts up to the wall, where the trunks of the decapitated bodies hang
neatly from hooks, as if the heads had placed them in a locker room before going to work.

There is no sound on the clip, no narration, just the faint sound of the camera and whoever is wielding it.

For some reason, the silence is as brutal as the images.

O fights back the vomit she feels bubbling up in her belly. Again, as previously noted, this is not a girl who likes to yank. When she gets some air back, she looks at the gun, looks at the screen, and asks, “Are you going back to Iraq?”

Chon shakes his head.

No, he tells her, not Iraq.

San Diego.

OMG.

RU Reddy 4—

Decapitation
porn?

Check that.

Gay
decapitation porn?!

O knows that Chon is seriously twisted—no, she
knows
Chon is seriously twisted—but not like day-old-spaghetti-in-a-bowl twisted, like getting off on guys getting their heads lopped off, like that TV show about the British king, every cute chick he fucks ends up getting her head cut off. (Moral of television show: if you give a guy really good head (heh heh), he thinks you’re a whore and breaks up with you. Or: Sex = Death.)

“Who
sent
this to you?” O asks him.

Is it viral, floating around on YouTube, the MustSee vid-clip of the day? MySpace, Facebook (no, that isn’t funny), Hulu? Is this what everyone’s watching today, forwarding to their friends, you gotta check this out?

“Who sent this to you?” she repeats.

“Savages,” Chon says.

Chon doesn’t say much.

People who don’t know him think this is because he lacks vocabulary. The opposite is true—Chon doesn’t use a lot of words because he likes them
so
much. Values them, so he tends to keep them for himself.

“It’s like people who like quarters,” O explained one time. “People who
like
quarters hate to
spend
quarters. So they always
have
a lot of quarters.”

Okay, she was
ripped
at the time.

But not wrong.

Chon always has a lot of words in his head, he just doesn’t let them out of his mouth very often.

Take “savage.”

Singular of “savages.”

Chon is intrigued by the noun versus the adjective of it, the chicken and the egg, the cause and effect of that particular etymology. This conundrum (
nice
fucking word) emerged from a conversation he overheard in Stanland. The topic was FundoIslamos who threw acid in little girls’ faces for the sin of going to school.

Here’s the scene that Chon remembers:

EXT. SEAL TEAM FIREBASE – DAY


A group of SEALS—worn out from the firefight—stand around a coffee urn set on a mess table.


SEAL TEAM MEDIC


(shocked, appalled)


How can you account for people doing something so . . . savage?


SEAL TEAM LEADER


(jaded)


Easy—they’re savages.


CUT TO:


Chon gets what the clip is: Video Conferencing.

In which the Baja Cartel makes the following deal points:

1. You will not sell your hydro retail.

2.
We
will sell your hydro retail.

3. You will sell
us
your hydro wholesale, and at a price.

4. Or—

—let’s go to the videotape.

In this illustrative visual aid (an educational tool) we see five former drug merchants, formerly of the Tijuana/San Diego Metroplex,
who insisted on representing the retail version of their product in contravention of our previously stated demands, and four former Mexican police officers, formerly of Tijuana, who provided them protection (or not, as the case may be).

These guys were all fucking idiots.

We think you’re much smarter.

Watch and learn.

Don’t make us go live.

Chon explains this to O.

The Baja Cartel, with its corporate headquarters in Tijuana, exports by land, sea, and air a shitload of boo, coke, smack, and meth into the USofA. Originally they just controlled the cross-border smuggling itself and left the retail end to others. In recent years, however, they have moved to vertically integrate all ends of the trade, from production and transportation to marketing and sales.

They accomplished this with relative ease in regard to heroin and cocaine, but had to overcome some early resistance from American motorcycle gangs that controlled the methamphetamine trade.

The biker gangs quickly grew tired of throwing lavish funerals (have you checked the price of beer lately?) and agreed to join the BC sales team, and ER doctors across America were pleased that meth production became standardized so they would know what biochemical symptoms to expect when the ODs came rolling in.

However, sales figures for the three aforementioned drugs have sharply declined. There is a relentless Darwinian factor in meth use particularly, in which its users die off or become brain-dead so quickly they can’t figure out where to buy the product. (If you think you hate junkies, you haven’t met tweekers. Tweekers make junkies look like John Wooden.) And although heroin seems to be making a tenuous but noticeable recovery, the BC still needs to replace the declining income to keep its shareholders happy.

So now it wants to control the entire marijuana market and eliminate competition from the mom-and-pop hydro growers in SoCal.

“Like Ben and Chonny’s,” O says.

Chon nods.

The cartel will let them stay in business only if they sell solely
to
the cartel, which will then take the big profit margin for itself.

“They’re Walmart,” O says.

(Have we covered that O is not stupid?)

They
are
Walmart, Chon agrees, and they have moved horizontally to offer a wide variety of products—they sell not only drugs, but human beings for both the labor and sex markets, and they have recently entered into the lucrative kidnapping business.

But that is not relevant to this discussion or the vid-clip in question, which graphically illustrates that—

Ben and Chonny can take

De Deal

Or

De Capitation.

“Are you going to take the deal?” O asks.

Chon snorts, “No.”

He turns off the laptop and starts reassembling the pretty gun.

O goes home.

Where Paqu is in one of her phases.

O has a hard time keeping up with her phases—

But in rough order:

Yoga

Pills and alcohol

Rehab

Republican politics

Jesus

Republican politics and Jesus

Fitness

Fitness, Republican politics, and Jesus

Cosmetic surgery

Gourmet cooking

Jazzercise

Buddhism

Real estate

Real estate, Jesus, and Republican politics

Fine wine

Re-rehab

Tennis

Horseback riding

Meditation

And now—

Direct sales.

“It’s a pyramid scheme, Mom,” O said when she saw the boxes and boxes of organic skin-care products that Paqu tried to enlist her to sell. She’d already signed up most of her friends, who were all selling the shit to one another in a sort of merchandizing circle-jill.

“It’s not a pyramid scheme,” Paqu objected. “A pyramid scheme is like those cleaning products.”