Let the Good Prevail Read online

  Let

  the

  Good

  Prevail

  This is a Genuine Barnacle Book

  A Barnacle Book | Rare Bird Books

  453 South Spring Street, Suite 302

  Los Angeles, CA 90013

  rarebirdbooks.com

  Copyright © 2016 by Logan & Noah Miller

  All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever, including but not limited to print, audio, and electronic. For more information, address: A Barnacle Book | Rare Bird Books Subsidiary Rights Department,

  453 South Spring Street, Suite 302, Los Angeles, CA 90013.

  The authors would like to thank their tireless agent Shannon Hassan and Editorro

  Set in Dante

  ePub ISBN: 978-1-942600-63-3

  Publisher’s Cataloging-in-Publication data

  Names: Miller, Logan, author. | Miller, Noah, author.

  Title: Let the good prevail : a novel / by Logan and Noah Miller.

  Description: First Trade Paperback Original Edition | A Barnacle Book | Los Angeles, CA; New York, NY: Rare Bird Books, 2016.

  Identifiers: ISBN 978-1-942600-46-6

  Subjects: LCSH New Mexico—Fiction. | Veterans—Fiction. | Marijuana—Fiction. | Cartels—Fiction. | Brothers—Fiction. | Suspense fiction. | BISAC FICTION / General.

  Classification: LCC PS3613.I528 L48 2016 | DDC 813.6—dc23

  Contents

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  And no smooth tongue of fire,

  Or liquid poured on the ground,

  Or tears will now dispel,

  The quick edge of sharpened rage,

  Sing, sorrow, sorrow, but let the good prevail.

  —AESCHYLUS, The Oresteia

  1.

  Lifeless prairie beneath a ghost-blue sky without clouds and beyond that the lonely mesa land of bleached bones and pueblo ruins. A spiral of dust gathered and whispered into oblivion. Then a flash of chrome winked in the sunlight as a car grew out of the distance on the old ranch road. In the opposite direction another vehicle traveled at about the same speed, in no hurry. The two would soon intersect, but for now they rolled along at a casual pace, methodically drifting over the barren land, a timed rendezvous on the outskirts of hell.

  The cars slowed and parked. The trailing dust swirled around them and then settled upon the ground. One was a rented Chevy Impala, gunmetal grey. The other was a sheriff’s cruiser painted in the American flag, a blue hood spangled with silver stars, red and white stripes undulating along the doors and side panels and down the trunk.

  Sheriff Darius Gates stepped out, opened the rear door, and removed a young man restrained in handcuffs with a strip of blue duct tape across his mouth.

  Marlo emerged barefoot from the Impala. He had given up shoes years ago and preferred to connect directly to the energy of the planet with his callused flesh. He carried a clear plastic cooking bag and a long yellow zip tie as he strode noiselessly across the fine layer of silt that covered the old road.

  “How’s my nephew working out?”

  “He drinks too much,” Gates said.

  “He’s got the gene, that’s for sure. I’ll have a talk with him.”

  The young man in handcuffs stood as a terrified witness, mute behind the duct tape. His ordeal had been one of long suffering and his frame sagged under the weight of terminal despair.

  “Where’d you find this all-star?” Marlo asked.

  “Where they always go when they’re scared—his mother’s house.”

  “And where is she?”

  “The poor lady had an accident with a handgun. Thought it was a popsicle.”

  Gates produced a bindle of cocaine from his breast pocket and tapped a bump of the Peruvian flake on the back of his hand. He contemplated the pearly alkaline crystals, a dull, mindless, organic compound. When am I going to be able to put this shit behind me? Tomorrow. Always fucking tomorrow. At least it’s the pure stuff, not some synthetic horror show cut fifty different ways with baby laxative and Rolaids.

  He raised the back of his hand and hoovered the coke up his nose. It stung with brilliant intensity, a little discomfort for a half hour of mind-blowing heroism.

  “That shit will take you down the rabbit hole,” Marlo said. “Superman one minute. Commander fuckup the next.”

  “I want the handcuffs back,” Gates said over his shoulder, sniffing and wiping the remnants from his nostrils and the groove of his upper lip. He climbed into the patriotic cruiser and drove back down the ranch road the way he came. The shocks and chassis creaked over the ruts fainter and fainter until the vacuum of desolation took hold again.

  Marlo stared at the young prisoner. Only the sibilant hush of the void would bear witness. The sun-scorched wind blew faint and thin over the last trails of summer grass that were clumped like ancient broom heads inverted toward the sky, brittle and decayed, uprooted and dissolving back into the earth when the monsoon downpour raged each afternoon. The smell of rain approached in the gathering towers of clouds. The flood was coming. He began:

  “You can’t control your fate. That is certain. It’s happening right now. There is no cosmic puppeteer. No one to weigh and balance your soul at the end of the line. Those are invisible ideas invented by frightened and primitive creatures. So don’t beat yourself up about the situation you’re in—about the stupid decision you made that brought you here. That is behind you. In less than five minutes you won’t even know you’re dead—you won’t even know you were ever alive. You won’t know anything. There will be no more you. No more thought. Not even darkness. Only your corpse will remain—but that’s my problem. You shouldn’t worry about that.”

  Marlo circled the young man, not in a menacing way but in a perversely thoughtful manner, a deranged shaman imparting advice to the condemned.

  “All you have left are these precious few minutes. And you have a choice—the last one you’ll ever need to make. And it’s this: You can choose the way in which you spend these final moments. You can choose to spend them peacefully—or you can spend them in a wild and terrified panic, pissing and shitting yourself all over the prairie. Either way, whether peaceful or panicked, you’re dead. But you can decide, you can choose how you leave this place. How powerful is that? In this respect, you are more powerful than me.”

  But the young man, like anyone in his doomed position, could not heed the impossible advice, nor hear it. His face boiled with sweat and tears and his nostrils flared wildly for oxygen, heaving through the duct tape. His world was violent with his own noise.

  “How much time do people waste fretting about their death? But you know. You know exactly how it’s going to end. It’s ending right now. So be kind to yourself. Love yourself. Follow your memories to the past and res
t amid those youthful dreams. Your first love. The nurturing warmth of your parents. A Little League game where you were the hero. Dwell there. Don’t be here.”

  Marlo pulled the plastic bag over the young man’s head like a hangman with a hood. Then he wrapped the zip tie around the man’s neck and ripped it tight.

  “My conscience is clear. You were warned.”

  The young man staggered into the prairie land, suffocating inside the plastic bag, powerless in the handcuffs and shivering with convulsions from a defiant nervous system that did not want to die. And then he did it. His crotch bloomed with wetness as his bowels and bladder emptied into his jeans.

  Marlo observed the death-struggle with pathological detachment. A malevolent cipher. A bipedal sphinx.

  The young man faltered and then collapsed to the parched earth—his life ending in a spasm of twitches.

  2.

  A Stihl Magnum chainsaw roared through a felled pine tree and kicked up a spout of wood dust that fluttered through the sunlight of Carson National Forest. Caleb Boyd worked his way down the tree with the screaming blade, cutting the trunk into two-foot sections—bucking, in logging parlance. He had the rawboned frame and weathered skin of a man who worked outdoors and burned more calories than he ate. Sinewy muscles told of a functional strength and endurance, and he negotiated the uneven tinder with a severe limp. His shoulder-length hair was tied back with a coiled red bandana, salted with sweat stains.

  He stepped through a tangle of branches, which gave way, and he sunk to his knee. He laughed to himself—he should’ve broken his ankle. But his new prosthetic leg was composed of carbon fiber and aluminum and some other industrial-powered materials that he’d forgotten the names of. It would take a lot more than a misstep in the woods to snap the motherfucker. He set down his chainsaw and yanked his boot free. The branches clawed at his jeans but there was no flesh to damage anymore.

  The sudden movement caught the peripheral attention of his older brother. Jake eased on the throttle of his saw and brought the scream to a low belching idle. Caleb threw him a huge grin and fingered a can of Skoal Long Cut from his back pocket. He pinched out a gob of mint tobacco and tucked it into his chapped bottom lip and then winged the can over to his brother. The disc floated above the forest floor and slapped Jake in the chest and fell onto the dry pine needles. Jake packed a lipper and the forest began to howl again.

  For another hour the brothers wielded the dangerous tools of their trade with the ease and dexterity born from long use. They ate tamales for lunch on the tailgate of their wood truck and packed another chew of tobacco and began splitting the logs from the morning harvest.

  Into the afternoon the forest boomed with the driving maul of the log splitter and the brothers stacked the truck bed with several cords of firewood to the height of the plywood siding. They covered the hump with a blue tarpaulin and tied it down with ropes fastened into the truck spurs.

  They drove down the mountain to the flat mesa land and pulled the truck onto the shoulder of the paved road, brushed their teeth, combed their hair, and threw on rumpled collared shirts with their names embroidered above the left breast pocket below their company name: BROTHER FIREWOOD. GET SOME.

  “Let’s go sell this shit,” Jake said as they turned off the paved road and steered toward a scattered community of mobile homes.

  ᴥ

  The Apache woman with deep creases in her face stared at Jake from the doorway of her doublewide that rested at an angle on cinder blocks in the alluvial sand. The attempted sale was not going well.

  Jake adjusted his belt and switched tactics.

  “The Farmer’s Almanac is predicting the worst winter in fifty years,” he said. “Are you prepared for that reality?”

  “Dunno.”

  “Can I ask you a personal question?”

  The woman barely nodded. Maybe it was her age. Perhaps she didn’t like Anglos, which was understandable considering the history of her people and his. But it was hard for Jake to tell for certain. He could only hazard a guess.

  “What kind of heater do you have, ma’am?”

  “A big one.”

  “I’ll bet…electric?”

  She nodded.

  Jake shifted his weight from one leg to the other. He showed her his recently brushed teeth.

  “What happens if your power goes out in a storm? How are you going to heat your home? Keep your family warm? This is a very serious consideration, considering how cold it gets around here—don’t you think?”

  She said nothing.

  “Firewood never breaks down, ma’am. Ever-reliable. It’s been heating homes for thousands of years. It warmed the castles of Europe, the kings and queens of my people, and the pueblos and the chiefs of your people. More importantly, it’s twice as cheap as the average family’s heating bill. Those are facts.”

  He waited for a response. This woman could win a staring contest with a statue, he thought.

  “I’ll tell you what,” he continued. “I see you run a hard bargain—and I appreciate that in my customers. Money is hard to come by, and one shouldn’t part easily with it. A customer should demand more than average service, and that’s what people have come to expect from Brother Firewood. Ask around, they’ll tell you.”

  Jake paused, the closer on the way. “And that’s why me and my brother there will even stack the wood free of charge. No cost. Won’t even accept a tip.”

  Jake glanced over his shoulder at Caleb sitting in the cab of the wood truck. Caleb smiled and waved at the woman as if on cue. The Apache woman shut the door.

  “Have a nice evening, ma’am.”

  Jake walked back to the truck and jumped inside.

  “That cocksucker tarantula fucked the sale for me—I knew it the moment I ran over him.”

  “Fucked the sale? The tarantula’s dead.”

  “The fucker just jumped in front of the tire when I turned in here—fucking suicide mission. It’s bad luck running over one of them, especially during mating season. You’re supposed to be my co-pilot.”

  “I pointed it out a hundred feet down the road, bro. The thing was big as a turtle. I said, ‘Watch out for the fucking tarantula.’ Can’t get any clearer than that.”

  “That hairy cocksucker.” Jake backed the truck through the sandy lot and tumbleweeds and turned onto the pavement. “I hate this door-to-door bullshit. I’m thirty goddamn fucking years old. I was a Boy Scout a long time ago.”

  “I don’t like it either. But it’s effective sometimes.” Caleb grinned at his older brother. “If you know what to say and how to say it.”

  “You got the next one asshole.” Then Jake said under his breath, “That tarantula fucked me.”

  ᴥ

  About a mile down the road Caleb stood on the front steps of another doublewide looking up at a shirtless man whose skin wore a circus of faded tattoos rendered by a poor artist. Across his stomach were the letters PIMP—and below that he wore a pair of fraying jorts and further down a pair of white socks with red stripes and no shoes. He had a considerable gap in the front of his mouth where several teeth used to be and the involuntary twitches and agitated movements brought about from the prolonged use of methamphetamines.

  “I’ll tell you what,” Caleb said. “Me and my brother there will even stack the firewood free of charge.”

  Jake smiled and waved from the truck.

  An orange tabby meowed and slinked through the doorway, ribs protruding through a mangy coat. It brushed against Caleb and made a figure eight through his legs, leaving a track of dust on his work jeans.

  “What will you trade for the wood?” asked the shirtless man.

  Caleb paused. Trades were uncommon but sometimes they worked out. “What do you got?”

  “A bike.”

  He disappeared into the back of the trailer and wheeled out a banana-seater with pink and white streamers flowing from the handlebars.

  “I got eighteen of these,” he said.

  “I d
on’t need a bike.”

  “That’s cool.”

  The shirtless man ghost-rode the bicycle back inside where it crashed into some other junk before clattering onto the floor.

  “How about a phone charger? It works in the car and the house. It’s got a convertor thing.”

  “Two-hundred and fifty dollars, sir,” Caleb said. “That’s a great deal for a cord of wood.”

  “Two-fifty? Bullshit. I know where I can get a cord for one-fifty.”

  “No you don’t.”

  “Sure I do.”

  “Four feet by four feet, by eight feet?”

  “What’s that?”

  “A cord of firewood,” Caleb said. “We don’t dump it loose like some of our competitors. We stack it and measure it. You get a true cord from the brothers.”

  Somewhere near the back of the trailer a toilet flushed something heavy and then an irritated woman growled from the dark interior.

  “Who is it?” she said.

  “Firewood, ma.”

  “Shut the goddamn door. We don’t have a fireplace, you fucking idiot.”

  3.

  Cords of stacked pinyon and oak cured in the open air while others rose in great heaps waiting to be stacked. The brothers had sawed and split for seven hours and tried selling their hard work for two and a half and were now back at their wood yard, which served as both home and office for them. Independent contractors: if you don’t make the money, nobody does. But they had cold beer and a fresh can of chew and a New Mexican sunset of purples and reds and colors of flame they could not name, and that was all right for now.

  Caleb sat on the tailgate of the wood truck and rolled up his pant sleeve above his knee. He unhinged his prosthetic and tapped out the pine shavings and needles from the forest. Jake opened a bottle of Lagunitas IPA on the side of the truck with the pound of his fist and sipped the foam spilling out and handed it to his brother. He popped one for himself and the brothers chinked bottles and drank.