Some Gods of El Paso Read Free Page A

They were miracle makers in the middle of a field. They were healer dealers, and they were tired.
    â€œOr we could kill him ,” said Vix. “What’ve we got in the backseat, Lorn?”
    Vix’s eyes were on the rearview.
    â€œAbout a kilo of that straight shit from El Paso. I don’t know what was going on there last week, but everything they wanted to be healed of is bagged up. They wanted to forget it ever happened. I threw it in just in case. Thought we might mix it half and half with the sad from Juarez, sell it like that.”
    Vix pulled the car over, and Lorna looked at him.
    â€œStrong stuff,” he said. “Good to know. Open that sack.”
    Behind their car, Sheriff Hank Yarley crept around in a ditch, belly flat to the ground, rifle strapped to his back, bowie knife in his teeth. The headlights of the mob approached the two most wanted. He’d called out all the cops and righteous volunteers from the border, and they converged on Lorna and Vix, stars in their eyes, bounty in their hearts.
    Lorna’s long arms lifted the sack onto the roof of the car and she ducked, and that was when Yarley started shooting.
    The sack was intact for a moment and then it was perforated.
    White dust spun out into the night and into all the parked cars. Men and women were aiming rifles and pistols, aiming darts and clubs and arrows, aiming cameras and holding lanterns, and all of them inhaled.
    On his belly, Sheriff Hank Yarley took a deep and accidental breath, and what he breathed was pure, desperate love, cut with nothing. It was burning, scalding, lost and found. Once he took one breath, he had to take another and another, and in a moment, all the people in the mob were choking on it, upending on it, overdosing on it, because too much love was like too much anything.
    The seizure of love went through all of Texas, rattling the ground and making strangers fall hard into each other’s arms. This was love that took the South and drenched it, and up over the land, a storm of heat and heart took the dirt off the desert. People died of love, writhing on kitchen floors and kissing in traffic, and other people just caught a whiff of it and lived the rest of their lives looking for more. For ten years after, the people in Texas were different than they’d been. The borders opened wide and the river was full of folks from both sides being baptized with tongue. You know the story. You remember those years when everyone forgot who they’d been hating. You remember the drugstores full of nothing but lipsticks and soda pop. The world’s past that now, though. That time’s long over.
    People say that Lorna and Vix stood up from the scene of that last great crime, grimy and gleaming. People say that when they came out of that car, there were fifty bullet holes in the doors and windows, but that Lorna Grant and Vix Beller walked away unscathed. Maybe they went to the seashore. Maybe they went to South America. Maybe they’re dead now, or maybe they’re old folks healing people’s cats, dogs, and parakeets in some faraway city. Sheriff Yarley went on to start a charismatic church, exposed to the great light of some gods of El Paso, and full to the brim with strangers’ love. The others in his posse went wandering around America, preaching peace and pretty-pretty, carrying scraps of Lorna’s striped dress and Vix’s vest.
    In a glass case in Austin you can see the preserved remains of Lorna’s little finger, shot off by Sheriff Yarley when she put the desperate love up on the roof. It’s lit up under cover for tourists to see, but the rest of the two most wanted are long gone.
    Here in Texas, sorrow and fury are back in the bodies of men and women. Some nights, we hear our neighbors moaning and country music on the radio, and some nights we go out walking late, looking to be healed of every hurt, looking for a hand-painted sign that says, COME ON SINNER.
    Some