“Oh yeah. Hell yes!”
He hit the brakes. The car came grinding to a halt in a cloud of dust, but Timo was already climbing out and fumbling for his phone, pressing it to his ear, listening to it ring.
Come on, come on, come on
.
Lucy picked up.
Timo couldn’t help grinning. “I got your story, girl. You’ll love it. It’s
new
.”
• • • •
The dogs bared their teeth at Timo’s approach, but Timo just laughed. He dug into his camera bag for his pistol.
“You want a piece of me?” he asked. “You want some of Timo, bitches?”
Turned out they didn’t. As soon he held up the pistol, the dogs scattered. Animals were smarter than people, that way. Pull a gun on some drunk California frat boy and you never knew if the sucker was still going to try and throw down. Dogs were way smarter than Californians. Timo could respect that, so he didn’t shoot them as they fled the scene.
One of the dogs, braver or more arrogant than the rest, paused to yank off a final trophy before loping away; the rest of the pack zeroed in on it, yipping and leaping, trying to steal its prize. Timo watched, wishing he’d pulled his camera instead of his gun. The shot was perfect. He sighed and stuffed the pistol into the back of his pants, dug out his camera, and turned to the subject at hand.
“Well hello, good-looking,” he murmured. “Ain’t you a sight?”
The man hung upside down from the chain link fence, bloated from the Phoenix heat. A bunch of empty milk jugs dangled off his body, swinging from a harness of shoelace ties. From the look of him, he’d been cooking out in the sun for at least a day or so.
The meat of one arm was completely desleeved, and the other arm… well, Timo had watched the dogs make off with the poor bastard’s hand. His face and neck and chest didn’t look much better. The dogs had been doing some jumping.
“Come on,
vato
. Gimme the story.” Timo stalked back and forth in front of the body, checking the angles, considering the shadows and light. “You want to get your hits up don’t you? Show Timo your good side, I make you famous. So help me out, why don’t you?”
He stepped back, thinking wide-frame: the strung-up body, the black nylon flowers woven into the chain link around it. The black guttered candles and cigarettes and mini liquor bottles scattered by the dogs’ frenzied feeding. The CAP flowing behind it all. Phoenix beyond that, sprawling all the way to the horizon.
“What’s your best side?” Timo asked. “Don’t be shy. I’ll do you right. Make you famous. Just let me get your angle.”
There
.
Timo squatted and started shooting.
Click-click-click-click
—the artificial sound of digital photography and the Pavlovian rush of sweaty excitement as Timo got the feel.
Dead man.
Flowers.
Candles.
Water.
Timo kept snapping. He had it now. The flowers and the empty milk-jugs dangling off the dude. Timo was in the flow, bracketing exposures, shooting steady, recognizing the moment when his inner eye told him that he’d nailed the story. It was good.
Really
good.
As good as a Cat 6 plowing into Houston.
Click-click-click. Money-money-money-money
.
“That’s right, buddy. Talk to your friend Timo.”
The man had a story to tell, and Timo had the eye to see it. Most people missed the story. But Timo always saw. He had the eye.
Maybe he’d buy a top-shelf tequila to celebrate his page view money. Some diapers for his sister Amparo’s baby. If the photos were good, maybe he’d grab a couple syndication licenses, too. Swap the shit-ass battery in the Ford. Get something with a bigger range dropped into it. Let him get around without always wondering if he was going to lose a charge.
Some of these could go to
Xinhua
, for sure. The Chinese news agencies loved seeing America ripping itself to shit. BBC might bite, too. Foreigners loved that story. Only thing that would sell better is if it had a couple guns:
America, the Savage Land
or some shit. That was money, there. Might be rent for a bigger place. A place where Amparo could bail when her boyfriend got his ass drunk and angry.
Timo kept snapping photos, changing angles, framing and exposure. Diving deeper into the dead man’s world. Capturing scuffed-up boots and plastic prayer beads. He hummed to himself as he worked, talking to his subject, coaxing the best out of the corpse.
“You don’t know it, but you’re damn lucky I came along,” Timo said. “If one of those citizen journalist
pendejo
lice got you first, they wouldn’t have treated you right. They’d shoot a couple shitty frames and upload them social. Maybe sell a Instagram pic to the blood rags… but they ain’t quality. Me? When I’m done, people won’t be able to
dream
without seeing you.”
It was true, too. Any asshole could snap a pic of some girl blasted to pieces in an electric Mercedes, but Timo knew how to make you cry when you saw her splattered all over the front pages of the blood rags. Some piece of narco ass, and you’d still be bawling your eyes out over her tragic death. He’d catch the girl’s little fuzzy dice mirror ornament spattered with blood, and your heart would just break.
Amparo said Timo had the eye. Little bro could see what other people didn’t, even when it was right in front of their faces.
Every asshole had a camera these days; the difference was that Timo could
see
.
Timo backed off and got some quick video. He ran the recording back, listening to the audio, satisfying himself that he had the sound of it: the wind rattling the chain link under the high hot Arizona sky; meadowlark call from somewhere next to the CAP waters; but most of all, the empty dangling jugs, the three of them plunking hollowly against each other—a dead man turned into an offering and a wind chime.
Timo listened to the deep
thunk-thunk-thunk
tones.
Good sounds.
Good empty desert sounds.
He crouched and framed the man’s gnawed arm and the milk jugs. From this angle, he could just capture the blue line of the CAP canal and the leading edge of Phoenix beyond: cookie-cutter low-stories with lava-rock front yards and broke-down cars on blocks. And somewhere in there, some upstanding example of Arizona Minute-Man militia pride had spied this sucker scrambling down the dusty hillside with his water jugs and decided to put a cap in his ass.
CAP in his ass
, Timo chuckled to himself.
The crunch of tires and the grind of an old bio-diesel engine announced Lucy’s pickup coming up the dirt road. A trail of dust followed. Rusty beast of flex-fuel, older than the girl who drove it and twice as beat up, but damn was it a beast. It had been one of the things Timo liked about Lucy, soon as he met her. Girl drove a machine that didn’t give a damn about anything except driving over shit.
The truck came to a halt. The driver’s side door squealed aside as Lucy climbed out. Army green tank top and washed out jeans. White skin, scorched and bronzed by Arizona sun, her reddish brown hair jammed up under an ASU Geology Department ball cap.