The Fool - Chapter II
November 16th 2006 10:20
Chapter II - Vincent sounds out the locals and then goes to visit the mysterious Nino, a reclusive Cuban gunsmith.
He pushes the batwing doors open and steps through, the doors swinging back and forth behind him with jagged squeaks of protest. The tavern's floor is bare wood, with a fine garnish of sand and sawdust. Tables are scattered around the hardwood floor. The only illumination comes from the smudged backlit mirror behind the bar and the ancient jukebox standing in the corner by a player piano.
There are a couple of men sitting at the bar, nursing mugs of beer, and one asleep at a table in the corner, in the depths of what looks like a truly foul drunk. The bartender is a fat man in a flannel shirt who stands drying glasses with a grubby white tea-towel. He is gazing off into nowhere as he mechanically goes through his little drying ritual, thinking about what to have for dinner or whether the Raiders will make the Superbowl this year or maybe about fucking his niece.
Vincent walks to the bar, his boots beating a hollow rhythm on the hardwood floor. He drops himself onto one of the stools and orders a beer. When the barman wordlessly turns around to comply, Vincent meets the eyes of his own reflection in the mirror behind the bar. He is somewhere between the end of youth and the onset of old age, his weather-beaten face furred by three-day stubble. The crow's feet at the corners of his pale eyes are deeper than he remembers; he guesses it's been awhile since he saw a mirror. His old shirt is unbuttoned, revealing a white slice of the singlet underneath. Even to his own eyes, he looks tired. The deep lines etched in his skin give him a worn-out look. The cigarette hanging from his mouth is wearing down to its last half-inch, so he breaks the eye contact with himself and grinds it out in an ashtray sitting on the bar.
Bang. The barman puts his beer down firmly in front of him, and he reaches for it absently and takes a long gulp. It tastes grainy and weak – he guesses the taps haven't been cleaned since they were installed. But it's cold enough, and in Vincent's experience, a cold beer cannot taste bad when you're really thirsty. The sensation of the first mouthful is a unique sensory experience, one that overwhelms your tastebuds completely, the taste equivalent of an orgasm.
There's some old bluesy track drifting tinnily from the jukebox, and there's a constant little squeak as the bartender buffs the glasses with the rag. No other sound. And that's all there is – the cold beer in his mouth, those minute sounds, and the shady gloom. Weariness washes over him. He rubs his eyes with his hand and sits up straight.
“Say, partner,” he says to the bartender. “You know anything about a gun shop down behind the motel?”
The bartender momentarily stops his endless glass-drying to eye Vincent suspiciously. He resumes his little ritual, but looks away from Vincent's gaze.
“If you're a cop, I don't know nothin' about nothin',” he says, surly.
Vincent laughs his dry laugh that makes the barman think of a handful of dry twigs snapping in a fire. “No, I'm not a cop.”
The bartender squints at him for a moment or two, and apparently decides he's telling the truth.
“Nino's,” he says flatly.
“Hm?”
“Some old spic who blew into town a few years ago. Started his shop down in the cellar behind the motel. Never been down there myself...he's a weird old coot.”
“I see.” Vincent looks down, following the gentle revolutions of the bubbles in his beer with his gaze. “I'm after some .357 shells, and the coot over the road wouldn't sell me any.”
The barman laughs as he replaces a glass on its shelf, then picks up another one from the dishrack. “Oh, I daresay you'll find whatcha need down there. He's got a lot more than that.”
“Really.”
“Nino's a gun freak. He makes the damn things. They reckon he's got enough to start a war. And re-packaged shells, too.”
“Wildcats?” Vincent is interested now. “I'll be damned. That's a weird place for a gun shop.”
“Ayuh. He sells cactuses, too-”
“Cacti,” Vincent corrects him, before he can stop himself. He takes another pull of his beer.
“Yeah, well, whatever. He sells cacti outta his store. To a lot of out-of-towners. Some folks round the traps reckon he's runnin' drugs outta Mexico, or somethin'...but, you know, small town gossip.”
“Yeah,” says Vincent, thinking of the sombrero-clad door guard he spotted earlier. He lights a cigarette. “A gun and cactus store, huh?” He gazes upward, thoughtfully, through the cloud of blue smoke.
The barman scratches himself. “Yeah. And he's got a goddamned fortune teller down there, too.”
“A fortune teller?” Vincent exclaims in disbelief. “Christ.”
“Christ got nothin' to do with it,” the barman says darkly, glaring at Vincent with his squinty little pig-eyes. “I never seen the old witch myself, but the godless whore's lucky we don't hang her from the belltower.”
Vincent silently raises his eyebrows, remembering he's under the Bible Belt. “Right,” he says. He is getting the impression that Nino is not a well-loved community figure, but that doesn't concern him. He drains the last of his beer from the glass, leaves a dollar on the bar and goes back to his truck.
He cruises down a block or so and rolls to a stop in front of the motel. He steps out and gazes up at the building, wiping the grimy sweat from his brow with the rolled-up sleeve of his old shirt. The motel is two storeys, weatherboard, with a few boarded-up windows and the door to the little lobby sitting wide open. Weird place to be selling guns from, he thinks. And cactuses. Cacti.
He tucks his hands into his pockets and walks around the right side of the building. There’s a door halfway up, a couple of overflowing garbage bins, and straight ahead, the baked wasteland of the desert. Turning left when he gets to the building’s end, he sees another door set in the ground at a 45-degree angle. But this one is a double door, and both are flung wide open, revealing a set of concrete stairs leading down into the gloom.
He begins plodding down the stairs, hands in his pockets, the cigarette smoke luminescent in the semi-dark. At the bottom is a door with flaking green paint, a hand-painted legend on it: NINO’S.
He tries the doorknob, but it won’t budge, not an inch. Puzzled, he knocks: three quick raps. Presently he hears footsteps within, and a little click. He looks down, startled, reaching reflexively for the revolver in the shoulder holster under the open front of his shirt, and notices for the first time a tiny glass peeper hidden in the centre of the “o” in NINO’S, cleverly camouflaged amidst the peeling paint.
He snorts the laugh of someone who hadn’t expected to be amused and relaxes, his hand falling away from the gun. The little click comes to his ears again, followed by the sound of a heavy bolt being thrown, and the door is swinging open.
The room is dimly lit, quite large, and very cluttered. The lighting comes from fluorescent lights built into glass display cases and the hydroponic lights that dangle on cables over the cacti scattered around. The long L-shaped counter has row upon row, box upon box, of every kind of imaginable ammunition; then racks of pistols and revolvers, from decorative antiques to Israeli military sidearms to bizarre designs he has never seen before. He notes immediately that while the cases themselves look fairly dingy and some of the fluoro bulbs flicker spastically on and off, every single gun has been polished to a high mirror shine, not a sign of neglect on any one of them. Freestanding racks hold more handguns, and small rows of individual bullets which he guesses are Nino’s infamous wildcats.
And the cacti are everywhere. One stands in the corner, as tall as Vincent himself, covered in what looks like long white hair. A very attractive green cactus grows directly to the right of the door, covered in red spines so minute that it looks like a fine red corona surrounds the plant. Pots hang from the ceiling with long, spiny tendrils dangling down. Beehive-looking bulbous cacti are arranged neatly in small pots along a shelf on the wall, crowned with evil-looking spines over an inch long.
All this he sees as his eyes follow the trail of smoke which drifts from the thin cigar jutting from the mouth of the short black-haired Cuban who is now walking back across the room to reseat himself behind the counter. A silenced sliver pistol dangles casually from his left hand, and he tucks it back into an unseen holster as he settles back in his chair behind the cash register. He is probably in his late fifties, with large brown eyes that now regard Vincent with a wall-eyed stare. Jazz plays from tinny speakers hidden somewhere – Bill Evans, it sounds like.
“You must be Nino,” Vincent says conversationally. “Do you greet all your customers with a loaded weapon?”
The end of Nino’s cigar glows bright orange as he draws deeply. Then, exhaling, he says in a thick Chicano accent: “One never knows when the local policia will get greedy and come barging in here looking for a larger incentive to leave me alone. And most of my customers make appointments.”
“Hm.” Vincent smiles. He takes a good look at his surroundings. Two doorways lead away from the room, obscured by brightly coloured curtains. Mounted on pegs around the walls are some very exotic – and very illegal – weapons. To his left is several models based on the ubiquitous AK-47 design, some clearly very old. Above them, chained to the wall with a lock through the trigger guard, is a grey ZM Weapons Model LR300, which is – in Vincent’s informed opinion – one of the finest assault rifles ever manufactured. He raises his eyebrows, impressed. To the right hangs a beautifully maintained M1 Garand below a Swiss SIG 552 Commando. The wall of assault rifles contains about thirty firearms in all, from antique to ultra-modern military issue. His view of some of the weapons is obscured by the crooked columns of green cacti, some short, some tall, nourished by the warmth of those garish hydroponic lights.
A brief scan of the other wall reveals some truly heavy weaponry. The sinister black hulk of an M2 machine gun sits on a tripod in the corner, facing into the room, complemented cheerfully by that enormous cactus with long white hair. Mounted by it on the wall is a stubby 40mm M79 grenade launcher; and above that, a Japanese Type 97 20mm anti-tank rifle, capable of punching a hole through a truck’s engine block from half a mile.
Vincent isn’t looking to start any wars, so he averts his gaze from the outrageous weapons on the walls and moves to the counter, tapping the glass twice with a fingernail above the .357 rounds.
”I’d like two boxes of .357 shells, please.” He feels slightly embarrassed making such a paltry purchase from a place which is obviously frequented by survivalist lunatics and soldiers of fortune, but Nino reaches in and places them atop the counter without passing comment.
Somewhere, a telephone rings.
“Excuse me,” Nino says politely, and brushes through the curtained doorway behind him.
The Fool - Chapter II
He pushes the batwing doors open and steps through, the doors swinging back and forth behind him with jagged squeaks of protest. The tavern's floor is bare wood, with a fine garnish of sand and sawdust. Tables are scattered around the hardwood floor. The only illumination comes from the smudged backlit mirror behind the bar and the ancient jukebox standing in the corner by a player piano.
There are a couple of men sitting at the bar, nursing mugs of beer, and one asleep at a table in the corner, in the depths of what looks like a truly foul drunk. The bartender is a fat man in a flannel shirt who stands drying glasses with a grubby white tea-towel. He is gazing off into nowhere as he mechanically goes through his little drying ritual, thinking about what to have for dinner or whether the Raiders will make the Superbowl this year or maybe about fucking his niece.
There's some old bluesy track drifting tinnily from the jukebox, and there's a constant little squeak as the bartender buffs the glasses with the rag. No other sound. And that's all there is – the cold beer in his mouth, those minute sounds, and the shady gloom. Weariness washes over him. He rubs his eyes with his hand and sits up straight.
“Say, partner,” he says to the bartender. “You know anything about a gun shop down behind the motel?”
The bartender momentarily stops his endless glass-drying to eye Vincent suspiciously. He resumes his little ritual, but looks away from Vincent's gaze.
“If you're a cop, I don't know nothin' about nothin',” he says, surly.
Vincent laughs his dry laugh that makes the barman think of a handful of dry twigs snapping in a fire. “No, I'm not a cop.”
The bartender squints at him for a moment or two, and apparently decides he's telling the truth.
“Nino's,” he says flatly.
“Hm?”
“Some old spic who blew into town a few years ago. Started his shop down in the cellar behind the motel. Never been down there myself...he's a weird old coot.”
“I see.” Vincent looks down, following the gentle revolutions of the bubbles in his beer with his gaze. “I'm after some .357 shells, and the coot over the road wouldn't sell me any.”
The barman laughs as he replaces a glass on its shelf, then picks up another one from the dishrack. “Oh, I daresay you'll find whatcha need down there. He's got a lot more than that.”
“Really.”
“Nino's a gun freak. He makes the damn things. They reckon he's got enough to start a war. And re-packaged shells, too.”
“Wildcats?” Vincent is interested now. “I'll be damned. That's a weird place for a gun shop.”
“Ayuh. He sells cactuses, too-”
“Cacti,” Vincent corrects him, before he can stop himself. He takes another pull of his beer.
“Yeah, well, whatever. He sells cacti outta his store. To a lot of out-of-towners. Some folks round the traps reckon he's runnin' drugs outta Mexico, or somethin'...but, you know, small town gossip.”
“Yeah,” says Vincent, thinking of the sombrero-clad door guard he spotted earlier. He lights a cigarette. “A gun and cactus store, huh?” He gazes upward, thoughtfully, through the cloud of blue smoke.
The barman scratches himself. “Yeah. And he's got a goddamned fortune teller down there, too.”
“A fortune teller?” Vincent exclaims in disbelief. “Christ.”
“Christ got nothin' to do with it,” the barman says darkly, glaring at Vincent with his squinty little pig-eyes. “I never seen the old witch myself, but the godless whore's lucky we don't hang her from the belltower.”
Vincent silently raises his eyebrows, remembering he's under the Bible Belt. “Right,” he says. He is getting the impression that Nino is not a well-loved community figure, but that doesn't concern him. He drains the last of his beer from the glass, leaves a dollar on the bar and goes back to his truck.
He cruises down a block or so and rolls to a stop in front of the motel. He steps out and gazes up at the building, wiping the grimy sweat from his brow with the rolled-up sleeve of his old shirt. The motel is two storeys, weatherboard, with a few boarded-up windows and the door to the little lobby sitting wide open. Weird place to be selling guns from, he thinks. And cactuses. Cacti.
He tucks his hands into his pockets and walks around the right side of the building. There’s a door halfway up, a couple of overflowing garbage bins, and straight ahead, the baked wasteland of the desert. Turning left when he gets to the building’s end, he sees another door set in the ground at a 45-degree angle. But this one is a double door, and both are flung wide open, revealing a set of concrete stairs leading down into the gloom.
He begins plodding down the stairs, hands in his pockets, the cigarette smoke luminescent in the semi-dark. At the bottom is a door with flaking green paint, a hand-painted legend on it: NINO’S.
He tries the doorknob, but it won’t budge, not an inch. Puzzled, he knocks: three quick raps. Presently he hears footsteps within, and a little click. He looks down, startled, reaching reflexively for the revolver in the shoulder holster under the open front of his shirt, and notices for the first time a tiny glass peeper hidden in the centre of the “o” in NINO’S, cleverly camouflaged amidst the peeling paint.
He snorts the laugh of someone who hadn’t expected to be amused and relaxes, his hand falling away from the gun. The little click comes to his ears again, followed by the sound of a heavy bolt being thrown, and the door is swinging open.
The room is dimly lit, quite large, and very cluttered. The lighting comes from fluorescent lights built into glass display cases and the hydroponic lights that dangle on cables over the cacti scattered around. The long L-shaped counter has row upon row, box upon box, of every kind of imaginable ammunition; then racks of pistols and revolvers, from decorative antiques to Israeli military sidearms to bizarre designs he has never seen before. He notes immediately that while the cases themselves look fairly dingy and some of the fluoro bulbs flicker spastically on and off, every single gun has been polished to a high mirror shine, not a sign of neglect on any one of them. Freestanding racks hold more handguns, and small rows of individual bullets which he guesses are Nino’s infamous wildcats.
And the cacti are everywhere. One stands in the corner, as tall as Vincent himself, covered in what looks like long white hair. A very attractive green cactus grows directly to the right of the door, covered in red spines so minute that it looks like a fine red corona surrounds the plant. Pots hang from the ceiling with long, spiny tendrils dangling down. Beehive-looking bulbous cacti are arranged neatly in small pots along a shelf on the wall, crowned with evil-looking spines over an inch long.
All this he sees as his eyes follow the trail of smoke which drifts from the thin cigar jutting from the mouth of the short black-haired Cuban who is now walking back across the room to reseat himself behind the counter. A silenced sliver pistol dangles casually from his left hand, and he tucks it back into an unseen holster as he settles back in his chair behind the cash register. He is probably in his late fifties, with large brown eyes that now regard Vincent with a wall-eyed stare. Jazz plays from tinny speakers hidden somewhere – Bill Evans, it sounds like.
“You must be Nino,” Vincent says conversationally. “Do you greet all your customers with a loaded weapon?”
The end of Nino’s cigar glows bright orange as he draws deeply. Then, exhaling, he says in a thick Chicano accent: “One never knows when the local policia will get greedy and come barging in here looking for a larger incentive to leave me alone. And most of my customers make appointments.”
“Hm.” Vincent smiles. He takes a good look at his surroundings. Two doorways lead away from the room, obscured by brightly coloured curtains. Mounted on pegs around the walls are some very exotic – and very illegal – weapons. To his left is several models based on the ubiquitous AK-47 design, some clearly very old. Above them, chained to the wall with a lock through the trigger guard, is a grey ZM Weapons Model LR300, which is – in Vincent’s informed opinion – one of the finest assault rifles ever manufactured. He raises his eyebrows, impressed. To the right hangs a beautifully maintained M1 Garand below a Swiss SIG 552 Commando. The wall of assault rifles contains about thirty firearms in all, from antique to ultra-modern military issue. His view of some of the weapons is obscured by the crooked columns of green cacti, some short, some tall, nourished by the warmth of those garish hydroponic lights.
A brief scan of the other wall reveals some truly heavy weaponry. The sinister black hulk of an M2 machine gun sits on a tripod in the corner, facing into the room, complemented cheerfully by that enormous cactus with long white hair. Mounted by it on the wall is a stubby 40mm M79 grenade launcher; and above that, a Japanese Type 97 20mm anti-tank rifle, capable of punching a hole through a truck’s engine block from half a mile.
Vincent isn’t looking to start any wars, so he averts his gaze from the outrageous weapons on the walls and moves to the counter, tapping the glass twice with a fingernail above the .357 rounds.
”I’d like two boxes of .357 shells, please.” He feels slightly embarrassed making such a paltry purchase from a place which is obviously frequented by survivalist lunatics and soldiers of fortune, but Nino reaches in and places them atop the counter without passing comment.
Somewhere, a telephone rings.
“Excuse me,” Nino says politely, and brushes through the curtained doorway behind him.
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