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The Send Off

Ch. 3

By Monique AndersonPublished 3 years ago 23 min read
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It took a half an hour to get to Lexie’s ranch just outside of town. Tony was happy as hell because he thought I would chicken shit out. I’m not going to lie about it. I really did think about not going. Even on the ride out I had some pretty serious reservations about the whole thing because I began to see a lot of cacti and mesquite bushes. It looked like a barren wasteland, and I had the distinct impression that maybe this was some kind of ambush and I was going to end up under one of those bushes, deader than an alley cat but smelling like a Saturday afternoon barbecue.

Things like that go through my head a lot. I blame it on the cable industry. For decades they’ve been filling our heads up with a bunch of dramatic bullshit. Nobody today thinks they’re going to die in some boring nursing home being asphyxiated by their own snot bubbles or anything. We’ve all got it programmed in our delusional minds that we’re going to be kidnapped by a group of vampires or a psychopathic serial killer is going to make us solve some kind of machete wielding maze. It’s fucking bizarre. Odds are the last person who is going to see you alive is not a glamorous lunatic, but some fat nurse who really just wants to go home and eat pizza.

The world’s a shithole.

So Tony and I drove up to Lexie’s ranch and we had to go through two gates to get up to her place. A couple of guys who looked like they spent a lot of time at the gym unlocked the first gate and we drove through. The sand that was thrown up into the air by our tires made it hard for me to see until we actually drove close to the locked gates of Lexie’s house, which was a long adobe building surrounded by the second security fence.

“Hey, hombre! Long time no see, eh?” a man with a straw Fedora said as he came over to the car. Tony clasped hands with him and they rambled out a bunch of Spanish words I couldn’t understand. The man, named Carlos from what I could catch of the conversation, looked into the car past Tony to me and then back again.

“Who’s your friend?” Carlos asked.

“This is Justin,” Tony said. “We’ll see you at the ranch. Lexie wants to meet him.”

“Oh…yeah. She told me something about it,” Carlos said. “Does Manny know?” he asked smiling. One of his canines was crooked.

“Fuck no,” Tony said, half smiling. “He’s about to know something though. Wave us through hombre.”

Carlos did just that, laughing at their private joke. “Cojones,” the older man yelled into the night sky.

Another set of guys let us through to the adobe structure after Carlos’ waving approval, and we finally came to a stop. Tony got out and then I did, following his lead. As we headed up the stairs to the front entrance, this huge jackass suddenly stepped in between us. Before I could say a word, the asshole pushed me to the ground. I fell like a ton of bricks, mostly because I was not expecting it. After rolling over and hopping up quickly—I didn’t want to stay there in case this asshole felt like finishing what he’d started—I watched the drama unfold. Tony was in the doorway, wrestling with the overgrown jackass. I could tell that Tony was not going to come out well, him being smaller than the monster he was fighting. Finally, before Tony took too many devastating blows, the two guys from the second gate came running up to stop it, with Carlos right behind.

“Manny! Quit that shit…right now!” Carlos yelled. The two guys grabbed him off of Tony, who was bleeding out of his nose, and held the hulk away.

“Fuck him!” Manny yelled. “He snitched and then brings this black son of a bitch up in here to share our shit? Fuck him!”

“Nobody snitched. You got caught because you’re too fucking fat and stupid,” Tony said, and followed up by spitting in Manny’s direction, which only made the giant angrier. As he struggled to get loose Manny had a scary look on his face, the kind of look you get after you’ve been constipated for a long time and you realize you’re finally going to be able to take a shit.

“Shut up Antonio!” Carlos yelled in Tony’s direction before, “Take him out of here!” at the two men who held Manny.

“What the hell is going on out here?” a gruff female voice shouted from the doorway, which was open. Standing there was a woman with dark brown hair that looked to be in her late forties. She was smoking a cigarette and had a shotgun in her hand.

“Tony’s back,” said Carlos, throwing a napkin he grabbed from his pocket to Tony, who dabbed at his bloody nose. “Manny’s not happy about it.”

The woman looked around for a moment. They all seemed to be waiting for her to say something. Even the two men who were dragging Manny off stopped to look at her.

“Well…what is everybody doing? Nobody’s ever happy about anything damn it. Everybody get over it and get back to it.” She waved her cigarette in the air. “Manny, cut it out and go get a drink.” The two guards let him go, and he hesitatingly made his way towards another flat building in the distance.

The woman did a half turn and then swung back. My eyes stayed peeled on that shotgun. I already knew I was way over my head, but there was a thrill to it. I understood these crackpots all too well and the realization of my comfort in this southwestern wilderness was the scariest thing of all.

“Tony,” she said in a quieter voice. “Bring him in here. And don’t bleed all over my stuff.”

My first impression of Lexie was that she was a hippie. Her adobe house was full of new age and Native American chimes and dream catchers, and her coffee table had a bunch of collected rocks that New Mexicans call art. I call them rocks.

Tony and I sat down on a brown leather couch. Despite his swelling nose, which looked pretty smashed to shit, he seemed happy to be there and kept giving me excited looks as if we were about to go on the Ferris wheel at the state fair. He really did have quite a few screws loose.

“So Justin,” Lexie said slowly, sitting down across from us on a recliner. “My name is Lexie. I hope we didn’t scare you off with that show outside.”

I shook my head. “I like being called a black son of a bitch. It clears up my sinuses,” I said before I could stop myself.

She only smiled. “Manny’s a little…moody. You’ll get used to him.” She still had the shotgun leaned up next to her. I couldn’t keep my eyes off of it.

“Tony tells me you are going to some fancy school back east. Are you excited?”

“I haven’t gotten in yet. I have to pay an application fee first and then they have to review my application.” I shrugged. “It won’t be the end of the world if I don’t get in. I really only applied because my professor kind of boxed me into it.”

“Your mom must be proud of you,” she said.

She doesn’t know I’m alive, I thought to myself. “Yes,” I replied.

“Are you a cop?” Lexie asked out of nowhere.

“What?” I asked back, looking at Tony, who chose this moment to have an inscrutable look on his face, the bastard.

“I’m not a cop,” I said, shaking my head. “I’m still in college,” I said stupidly like a moron, as if that cleared up any confusion.

“Oh,” she said smiling as though she were talking to a fucking five year-old. She stood then walked out of the room while asking me if I wanted anything to drink. I said no, and continued to watch her actions until she disappeared, looking for any sign of a mental flip out. My experience with Dotty had made me watch closely for lunatics. My senses were heightened by the fact that this one had a shotgun.

Lexie returned after a moment with a small brown package. “I’m glad you’re not a cop,” she said, still smiling, which was beginning to creep me the hell out. She sat back down then slid forward in the seat. “I need you to do something for me, Justin,” she said.

“Okay,” I said, my blood on fire. Whatever this chick was going to ask me to do would be irreversible. I had to know what it was.

I had to do it.

“I need you to deliver this package right now to this address,” she said, sliding the package across her coffee table and handing me a small piece of paper with a typed address on it. I looked at it. The address was in town, not far from my house.

“What’s in it?” I asked, like a naïve moron. How my brain manufactures this sort of retarded shit I will never know.

Tony, who had been as silent as a fucking crippled cricket up until then chose that exact moment to laugh out loud. Lexie only smiled. That chick never laughed very much the entire time I knew her.

“It’s a surprise,” she said. “Let’s just see if you can deliver it first. It’s kind of what we do around here.” She leaned back in her seat again. “I’ll talk to you when you get back. Carlos will give you the truck to drive.”

I looked at Tony and he nodded slightly, the bastard.

My palms began to sweat, but still I managed to grab the package like I knew what I was doing, like I committed a crime every day of my life. It was heavy compared to its size. I stood and made my way outside.

Oh shit.

The two monsters let me outside the first gate, where Carlos was waiting in front of a large, white pick up truck with keys.

“The gas tank’s full,” he said, handing me the keys. “But here’s a little pocket change just in case. He stuffed three one-hundred dollar bills into my hand before I could say a word.

More than half of my application fee for pocket change. I had a habit of equating every amount of money to that damned application.

I watched Carlos turn back and signal to the two monsters and then that was it. I started the truck and pulled out back onto the paved highway road.

Sweet Jesus. My eyes kept rolling over to the package on the passenger seat. I wondered what it was. I knew this was a test, and that Lexie just wanted to see if I would come back with her shit, or hit the highway with her package, truck and three hundred bucks. She wanted to see if I would do something dumb.

She wanted to see if I was a snitch.

I kept thinking about my mother, who may have not paid me much attention, but who would have a fucking heart attack if I called her from even the vicinity of a prison. Could it be cocaine? Meth? The best-case would be marijuana, but even that prognosis was shitty.

My hands would not stop sweating, and the steering wheel slipped through my fingers in increments as I drove. I had to grip harder, I told myself. Grip harder.

I started to imagine all kinds of drama, things like my bastard of a father had probably been a criminal and that’s why I was headed down this path. I was a couple of weeks away from applying to one of the best Ivy League colleges in the world and I was delivering God knows what to God knows who in the middle of nowhere.

What the hell was wrong with me?

In twenty minutes I was back in town, back to the comfortable feeling of familiar streets. I drove around the block where the package was going for five minutes. Finally I parked on the street a few houses down and shut down the engine, turning off the lights.

My cell phone lit up. I hesitated answering it, but then I thought I should, not only because I always answered but also because it seemed like a tie to my own life. For all I knew it was Lexie.

It was a number I’d never seen before.

“Hello?” I said.

“Hello…Justin?” a male voice answered back.

“Who is this?” I said, sounding very much like the scared chicken shit that I was.

“Justin…this is Professor Elligan. I was calling to talk about your last paper. Is this a good time?”

Believe me when I tell you that this was the last person on earth I wanted to hear from at that precise moment…or any moment for that matter. It was this persistent jackass’ fault that I had applied to Martindale in the first place.

“Professor Elligan…I can’t talk right now. I’ll have to talk to you later.”

“I called the other number you listed…talked to your mother and she gave me this number. Call me back when you get a chance. I really want to talk to you about your Aristotle satire.”

“It’s not a satire,” I said immediately. Every time my writing came up this jackass would call it a satire just to piss me the off. It was legendary. We have stopped class for thirty minutes arguing about what the fuck I choose to call my own work.

“Just give me a ring back sometime tomorrow…alright?” he said. I could hear slight laughter in his voice. “Talk to you…then.”

He hung up.

“Son of a bitch,” I said out loud. Somehow, someway, I hoped that idiot’s ears were burning. He was as bad as Rob with his holier than thou bullshit.

Dr. Elligan was one of those bastards that was always there every time you wiped your ass the wrong way. He always wanted me to do everything like he wanted, and that was something I wasn't used to. Everyone in my house was so nuts that they all naturally followed my lead. I was the undisputed voice of reason in my house, a house full of fucking idiots.

“Son of a bitch,” I said again.

It was time to stop hesitating. I grabbed the package quickly and jumped out of the truck with it tucked under my arm. I walked slowly towards the small ranch house to make my delivery. I could feel the hair on the nape of my neck begin to bristle. With every fucking step it felt like my world was getting smaller and smaller, a world I hated more than I ever have before or after.

Before I knew it I was at the front door ringing the bell.

Nothing happened, so I tried again. Just before my finger could press the button for the third time, I heard a loud clicking noise. Like a jackass it took ten seconds before I realized what it was.

“Look here asshole,” said a voice behind me. “If you don’t stop ringin’ my doorbell, I’m gonna have ta to blow ya fuckin’ head off.”

It was then that I felt a barrel being pressed to the base of my brain, which is what I chose to call it because I knew that’s what the idiotic bastard of a coroner would say. He wouldn’t say the back of my neck like any normal person would, he would say the bullet had passed through the base of my brain and severed my spine and probably an artery and that’s what had killed me.

Fuck.

I put my hands in the air, which should have dropped the package on the ground except the man wielding the gun grabbed it from me.

“Hey Sunny!” he yelled. He had the most country voice I had ever heard in my life. It was such a dramatic voice that I almost wanted to risk my life to see who owned it.

Almost.

“Sunny! Getcho’ big ass out here! We got company!”

“Look…” I said. “I didn’t come here to bother you…I was just delivering a package. I’m probably at the wrong house…so if you just give me back the package I will just go about my business.”

“Looks like you just made yo’ bisness my bisness,” he said, flipping a police badge in front of my face. I closed my eyes. This is not happening was all I could think.

“Sunny…for fuck’s sake! Put down whatever it is you are shovin’ in your fat face and come out here!”

A very large, fat dark haired man with a slicked back ponytail stepped into view to fill the front doorway. “What’s goin’ on?” he said, his hand buried in a bag of chips.

“Look…Sunny! We got ourselves another mule! What do you think we ought to do with this one?”

“We should shoot him,” said Sunny, through a mouth full of corn chips. He shrugged. “Ain’t that what we do with all of them?”

“Yeah, but this one’s real special. He had the balls to pull up down the street in Lexie’s ride.” He poked the gun into my shoulder. “Sat there like a little chicken twat for fifteen minutes. Don’t you think we ought to celebrate God giving us such a gift…a real live version of one of Lexie’s friends? We oughta praise Jesus for such a special gift. I think we should take this one down to the station and actually process him through the system.”

I’m sure you think that I’m exaggerating his speech and that you have slipped into some type of strange warp zone, but I shit you not. This was exactly what he sounded like. Not in my wildest southern nightmares could I come up with a voice this warped. It was hard not to laugh it was so comical, even with a gun pressing into me.

“That’s too much work,” Sunny whined. “If we just shoot him it would be a lot less paperwork.”

“Now that’s jus’ damned ungrateful Sunny. Here you are talkin’ ‘bout paperwork when we should be invitin' our guest in and openin’ up the gift he brought.”

With a gun shoved in my back, I reluctantly stepped past Sunny as he held the door open and walked into the house. My main thought was of Lexie and that I was already up shit creek because I had not only lost her package, but to a cop, and to what looked like the stupidest cops in town.

All I could imagine was what Lexie would do to me with that shotgun.

“Cole…I was watching that!” Sunny bellowed when his partner suddenly turned off the television.

“We can’t do no interrigatin’ when all that noise is blastin’ in the background. Now,” Cole said, waving the gun around to motion I should sit on the dirtiest couch I had ever seen in my life. “Let’s see what ya got.”

He took a knife off of the dirty coffee table and sliced into the package. It only took a second before the unmistakable fragrance of marijuana filled the dirty room.

“Well lookee here! Woo-wee!” Cole shrieked. “It looks like a mule and it smells like a mule…it must be a fuckin’ mule. What do you think Sunny?”

Sunny had turned on the television once again and was completely ignoring the both of us. I kept looking at the gun on Cole’s hip and another sitting on a side table that was more than likely Sunny’s. I kept thinking that it might be somewhat easy to pull a gun and run out, but I had never shot a gun so a bluff might not be the best choice.

I watched while Cole took out a bit and started cleaning it. Before I knew it he had rolled up a joint and lit it. “Good ol’ Sour Diesel,” he said slowly, leaning back in his chair.

This was not a surprise in a place like Big Rock. Everybody knew everybody so it was easy not to have any fear.

I was an exception, not because people in town didn’t know me but because everybody was somebody’s cousin or grandkid or brother and I stood out like a blackberry in a bowl of cheerios.

I chose this moment to start feeling lost and lonely, like no one had ever really gave a damn about me. Like an outsider, which is exactly what I was.

Here I was with one fat Mexican and an idiotic hillbilly and I felt so homeless, like a bum looking in on decent people. One time I went down to the park and sat down on one of the benches. I watched all the families and children come and go until it was getting dark. When I got up to go, this old lady came from out of nowhere and said, “Hey…what are you doing out here so late?”

I didn’t know this lady from shit, but it was obvious that she thought she knew me. It was probably a case where she had met another black young guy somewhere and immediately thought it had to be the same idiot. I swear, the town was that color deficient.

So I ended up sitting down with that old lady and talking about all the different things we had seen together—the church picnic, the walk-a-thon, and, of course, the time that her dog Scooter had gotten loose and I had helped her find him. Oh the times we had! By the end of the conversation we both believed we had known each other forever. It was fucking pathetic.

That’s how it was for me in Big Rock. I wanted so badly to feel like I was connected to something that I completely made up a fake persona with an old woman in the park just to feel connected.

And that’s how I felt in Cole’s house, watching them smoke up Lexie’s weed. As if I was just an outsider that had landed on another planet.

“Are you going to let me out of here?” I asked after five minutes of looking at Cole get high.

“Settle down,” he said in his drawl. “Don’t get excited.” He sat up and looked at me. “Okay…I tell you what. If you tell me everything Lexie told you and who you saw up there in that fortress of hers then you can leave scott free.”

I just stared at him. There was no way I was going to say anything at all. Lexie looked like the kind of chick that you didn’t fuck around with.

“That’s the deal,” Cole said slowly, looking at me and sitting back in his chair. He was still holding on to the blunt, still taking puffs as if it belonged to him. “Take it or leave it.”

“Then I’ll leave it,” I said, praying to God I hadn’t just screwed myself.

He just stared at me for a few moments. “Okay, then.” He leaned forward and put out the joint. Then he stood. “Let’s get this over with.” He put on his cowboy hat. “Hey Sunny…Sunny!”

The fat Mexican turned slightly to us, away from the television he was so riveted to. “What…did you see that? Those fools can’t even dance and they voted them on to the next round.”

“Sunny…turn off the television! We gotta take our friend here down to the station and book him.”

“Dammit!” Sunny exclaimed. “I told you it was too much trouble! Let me shoot him for fuck’s sake!”

Cole smiled slowly. It was obvious these two screw ups had never shot anybody in their whole damn lives. “Shut up Sunny. We’re taking him to the station.”

I don’t know how I did it. If you were to ask me a million times over I couldn’t tell you what made me think it was a great decision to grab the rest of the pot, still lingering in the cut package and dart out the front door, but that’s what the fuck I did. Something told me these two would have had a hard time finding their guns and managing to get a shot off at me.

I was wrong. I sailed down the street to Lexie’s truck with Cole trying to trail me. He had taken off his boots, so he was tripping all over the place. He did grab his gun, the fucker, and popped out one shot in my direction. I was already in the truck, however, and watched as the driver’s side mirror exploded. I learned later that if Cole had really wanted to shoot me I would have been as dead as an alley cat.

I wasted no time turning around, destroying some poor asshole’s rock garden—serves him right for thinking it’s art and not just a bunch of stupid fucking rocks—and pulling back onto the main road. I immediately turned off of it, however, and took a back way I had learned once when I tried to work for the post office.

Yes, the post office. Dotty had almost shit a brick sideways when she saw that uniform.

Before too long I was on the dirt road again, looking at the same cactuses and mesquite bushes I thought I would have been underneath pushing up daisies, just earlier that day. I looked at the night sky, which was always filled with a billion stars. It was the great thing about New Mexico, no matter what kind of trouble you were in, you could always manage to feel worse by looking at the damn stars.

I pulled up to Lexie’s about midnight. It took a lot longer because I had to pretty much drive out into the wilderness and turn back into the desert valley where her ranch was located. The two steroid crazed guardsmen opened the first gate, and then Carlos was there to greet me.

“Hey…how’d it go?”

“Where the hell did you guys send me? I almost got busted.”

His reaction was not what I expected. He smiled. “I’ll wave you through. Tell Lexie.”

The second gate opened and I drove through. I parked, grabbed the opened package from the floorboard. Before I could even knock on Lexie’s door it opened and she stood in the frame.

“You made it back,” she said as if I had performed three miracles.

“Yes…I almost got busted though.” I showed her the rest of the pot. “Did you know you sent me to a cop’s house?”

“You kept the weed?” she asked. “How did you manage to do that?”

“He has the pot?” I heard Tony’s voice echo from behind Lexie. He stepped out, his eyes wide in disbelief. His nose still looked horrible.

That’s what a dumb shit I was. It was not until that moment that I realized that the fuckers had done it on purpose. I didn’t get a chance to get mad because it was then that I saw Cole’s truck almost running over the two front guards as they tried to open the gate. He pulled up to a stop in front of Carlos blowing his horn like a madman.

“Where’s my goddamn pot you little shit?” he bellowed out the window before getting out. He looked pretty pissed.

Carlos knew better than to question him and waved him though. Cole walked up to us and snatched the package out of my hands. “Well…just…fuck you,” he said to me before sliding past Lexie into the house.

“Oh man!” Tony exclaimed, slapping my shoulder and laughing like the excitable crazy little bastard he was. “Welcome to the ranch my brother! What did I tell you Lexie? Hmmm? What did I tell you!”

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About the Creator

Monique Anderson

I refuse to talk about myself in third person, so to make a long story short, I was born, did not become a famous writer as planned but learned lots of delicious things along the way. Writer, photographer, cook, caregiver, and dog mom.

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