Some Gods of El Paso Read Free

headlights. A mass of them, as many as there were stars. Looked like all of Texas had hit the highway, following Lorna and Vix as they tried to flee. There were intermittent gunshots.
    â€œI’m about ready to hang it up, Vix,” said Lorna. “I’ve been working since I was sixteen. Sometimes I feel bad about the work I’ve been doing. It ain’t all of it right.”
    â€œYou and me both, kid,” said Vix. “I’m getting tired of all this God. Maybe we’re messing with the fate of the forlorn. Maybe nobody oughta pray to people like us.”
    Lorna squeezed his fingers.
    â€œI ever tell you about the time I brought a boy back from the dead?” she said.
    â€œYou know you didn’t,” Vix said, and smiled at her. “You know everything you ever told me and everything I ever told you. I’ve got you memorized, but you still have some secrets.”
    â€œBet you do too. This was a few years before I met you. I came upon him right after he hung himself up. I cut that boy down and kissed him on the mouth, and there he was, resurrected. I took his sadness from him, and he gasped his way back into the land of the living. I’ve still got his batch of blues in my purse, and time to time, I catch my finger on them.”
    â€œI know the ones,” said Vix. “Those are the sads shaped like a pocketknife.”
    She nodded.
    â€œCouple years later, that boy was dead again, this time in the car with the engine on, his soul filled with tired instead of sad, and so I kissed him and took that away, too. He opened his eyes and saw me looking at him, and said, ‘Honey, just let me go. There ain’t no good place for me on this whole Earth, and I done my time.’ That’s the boy I married, twice risen, thrice dead. It turns out that people have to go their own way. I buried him in our backyard under a shade tree.”
    Vix gave her a look that said everything he’d ever loved about her, and she looked back at him, her eyes full.
    Lorna held his hand hard. “I wouldn’t mind settling down somewhere pretty. Seashore. I wouldn’t mind stopping this healing business.” She looked at him. “But I never did take your pain away.”
    â€œI never took your anger,” said Vix. “Figure you had uses for it. I like the ocean too. Town with nobody. Clapboards and a porch. Hot chocolate, me and you, some torches lighting the path down to the beach. We could get a dog and a hammock. Listen to a record player late at night.”
    â€œWe could count the stars,” said Lorna. “Maybe write a book.”
    â€œSometimes, we’d sit and look out at the waves, and just do nothing at all,” Vix said, and kissed her fingers.
    â€œDo people like us ever retire?” asked Lorna. She was twenty-eight and in her healing prime. It’d gotten so when she walked down a street, everyone turned to look, and automatically gave her every dark emotion they’d been carrying. Vix was the same. Two weeks before, he’d been followed down a main street by a couple dozen women, all of whom later resented him. At a post office in the panhandle, he stood next to his own face on a most wanted poster and let a bunch of people take his photograph. Lorna’s dress had gotten torn off in a crowd, and now people sold the scraps for souvenirs, all snipping little threads from little threads. Lorna had a new dress, but she still felt bad about the whole thing.
    â€œWe can retire if we want to,” Vix said. “Change our names and stop being Public Enemies. They can’t put us in jail. Can’t have a jail without sorrow and anger. Whole thing would fall down.”
    â€œThey could kill us,” said Lorna, and snorted. “That sheriff.”
    There was a bullet hole in their back left tire, and they could hear it hissing out air. Headlights were approaching from all directions. They were the tent of the revival.