When The Gods Clash

By Christopher Brennan

When The Gods Clash is a novella in modern times taking place in Las Vegas, Tecate,CA,and, Mexico.

• Language: English
• Publisher: BookBaby
• Release date: May 6, 2013
• ISBN: 9781626758643

Book preview

9781626758643

1

FICKLE GODS

Four numbers. A Tecate, California lotto ticket won the man $920. Delighted, Slot headed for Vegas. That’s how he got his nickname, always losing to One-Armed Bandits.

Slot drove an old, well-maintained Ford pickup into a sand-parched morning. Air-conditioned, he mirage-sailed on a desert highway before getting to Vegas, out there with fossilized dinosaur bones and shorter term human losers. Soon he passed bereft, far developments where the boom died before cement had dried. If he let down a window, he thought he’d inhale mold.

Still miles from Vegas a clockwise dust devil materialized, pirouetted, flirted, into an eight-foot skittish whirling cone. She toyed along a quarter mile from Slot’s pickup, coyly darted at him, then cha-cha-chaed away. The dust devil was drawn to the heat from his Ford and the highway surface inferno. She tickled, then slapped into his truck. In her vortex was all life – dust, water particles, snake, jack rabbit, human cells, all desperation-mixed in glowering sun beams. She jolted Slot’s truck. It trembled momentarily, then the dust devil sashayed off, taunting. She gained power, suddenly petulant, and smashed her rage along a row of deserted, scorpion breeding town homes.

A man sweating in a limp suit, white sun-surrender handkerchief stuck on his wet skull, took photos of street blocks for some out-of-state real estate cartel. The dust devil made for him. He ran in starch-grained air for his BMW.

Slot drove to a cheap, off-Strip motel, a Pay-Bi-Nite, faded vinyl lair of alkali dreams. The lobby had ten slots. After a soggy pizza he lost $230 and had his first drink.

Screw it. Slot got a cab to a Big Time Strip casino. It hypnotized with lights, no clocks, beguiled greed, girls with boobs, serving plastic-cupped booze. Boobs and booze – f-r-e-e.

Slot owned a junkyard outside Tecate. A vet of the first Gulf War, he recalled a few French phrases from a Kuwait City whore. Looking around the casino, Slot intoned, I’m a’ bon vivant.

Meanwhile, back at Slot’s junkyard…. a wolf- dog hybrid won a Rat Lotto. Shrewd eyed, Junkyard Bitch spied yellow-white rat tails. She knew rats, and snapped off heads from behind. They bit hard, otherwise. She devoured scant rat family scraps then hobbled to a cracked pink boudoir sink and lapped tepid, sharp rain water, rust-colored, like Slot’s Vegas booze.

Junkyard Bitch was more wolf than Alsatian in her crafty ways. She’d known violence from Mexico, outside Tecate, below Devil Rock and Thunder Canyon Oasis. She also learned pain in Mexico. As a pup she hid and foraged by a coke courier’s tree-hidden pueblo. She ate garbage, and rats.

One high, star-pocked night, three men came to the pueblo in a new, black SUV. One remorseful Mexican, a fat man, practice-swung a baseball bat with exposed nails hammered into the wood. The protruding spikes made soft air whistle sounds. The other two had snake-gray assault rifles. Soon, shrill screams came through the windows up toward those far, squinting stars. Junkyard Bitch hopped into a pickup truck’s open bay and cringed.

Two drug peddlers survived the attack. They tire-spun into California, shouting high speed Mexican curses – Dios Mia! Santa Maria! Bastardos!

They discovered Junkyard Bitch on California Route 64 and kicked her from the speeding truck. She landed on a hot asphalt-gravel median, broke and mangled her left leg. Bloodied, fearful, she crawled into California drought low desert, just like Mexico. She groveled and half-hopped to scrub oak shelter and Manzanita tree shade. She limped on all day and night, over hot sand, cooled sand, through grasping buckwheat. Junkyard Bitch had never known such pain, and she couldn’t reach her lower left leg to gnaw it off. So she dragged it, like a curse, from the scrub to a dust road, passed a grocery-gas-taco store. She collapsed in a dank ditch. The next day, she crawled down a narrower track to Slot’s junkyard. She hid there in the rubble, in her own dust-tinged, eternal suffering.

Slot, in faded GI fatigues, didn’t know he had been only just allowed inside the glitzy casino. He played dollar machines and lost $390.00. Half drunk now, he eyed the sassy, jiggling hostesses. He thought, hell, not even enough left fur that. God-damn! He mulled his next steps. Better save enough – fur booze an’ gas, back t’ yard. But – gonna play one keno run.

A casino security man eyed Slot limp-sway to a keno tube bubble. One more drink and he’d bum rush him out, through a back door with an inside bar lock. Miserable SOB was near drunk, and lame, both.

The booze was sour in Slot’s mouth and throat. He played a 20-20 long number bet. And imagined his junkyard waiting in a no-win, vivid flash bright as the winking keno numbers – tennis racket frames, chipped Mexican pottery, plastic, dank, spring-broken easy chairs, beds, scorpions under tread-worn tires, broken TV’s, a plaster of Paris statue of Saint Francis of Assisi, his perplexed face molded to a faint green hue, old metal, lead, iron, tin. Lamenting magnets, sucking Slot back to – rust.

The last of statue-faced lonely to bet, Slot floated to the keno counter and watched 20 of 20 numbers. He got them all. His odds? Like a watermelon hitting him from the sky in Death Valley.

Things happened fast. Slot went hard sober when the woman teller whistled, Oh God! Wow-eee! Congrats! Follow me!

In a very cold, super air-chilled office, red-gold sofa and chairs, a zebra-striped carpet, Mozart’s Horn Concert Three in E-Flat Major, Slot became iced-sober. Two glitter strip men in dark suits checked Slot’s claim on a computer.

The older man echoed above Mozart, You got it. And the concerto stopped.

How much I win?

We need to see your ID. You know how things are, today. Then we calculate our five percent casino fee, and the fed tax.

Fed tax? Yuh mean, I’m taxed on what ain’t mine, five minutes ago?

The older man sulfurous acid-smiled. We’ll be taxed to breathe, soon.

The younger man resembled a frog on a crash diet. In casino floor neon, his suit would shine, maybe radiate. He was frog-like because of wet, protruding eyes, and mottled sausage lips stuck to sallow facial skin alien to daylight. He crossed his arms, goggle-eying Slot’s many times laundered fatigues and scared boots. Driver’s license? Social? Credit cards – if you got any….

Nope. Don’ cotton t’ ‘em. Got social. Driver’s license. Vet’s disability card. My foot got crushed on a’ highway t’ Baghdad. Slot lifted his left foot, to show an unlaced boot, a size bigger than the right one. He didn’t want sympathy. The flattened foot gave proof he’d ’served.’

The older man frowned. That’s tough. Glad you won. We’ll calculate your winnings from the accumulated pot on your play.

They took Slot’s driver’s and social. Inside a smaller glassed-in sub room, they ran a computer scan for outstandings, wanted posts, and FBI invites. A big-badged house guard came and watched the computer. He never glanced at Slot. Then he left.

Slot watched, as wily as his yet unknown wolf-dog guest.

The two men re-entered. The younger one looked annoyed, the older, pleased. You cleared two-hundred and eighty-five-thousand, and forty-eight cents, Mister J. Edward ‘Slot’ Stanley. He near-italicized, "we didn’t print Slot on your check, here – in this big envelope."

Christ have mercy! How much?

The frog-eyed man gave a lip-down sneer, like he’d tongue-darted a slow pond fly. "Two-hundred-and eighty-five-thousand, and forty-eight-cents -- Ed."

Well – God-damn! Eureka!

The older one had a real smile. There’s more, ah – Slot. Our casino has a deluxe deal, for big winners. You get twenty-four hours free -- our guest. A big room with a strip view. Plus, five-hundred dollars, free, at any of our tables.

Well damn! I git t’ stay here?

The older man sighed. And we want your photograph, for winner’s house screens, our publicity.

Yuh folks are real – big-hearted.

The younger man