Moondogs - Alexander Yates [61]
Elvis smiles. His orderly white teeth part to reveal the healthy pink insides of his mouth. A long and pointed tongue emerges and goes rigid in what looks like a taunt. A bulge appears in Elvis’s throat and it moves up like backward gulping. A spider, big as a mango seed, climbs out of Elvis’s mouth and marches down his whitening tongue. Reaching the end, it dangles from the tip by a thread of spit-dripping silk, lowering itself down to where Elvis’s lap should be but isn’t, because there is no Elvis, just a spider, big as a mango seed, sitting alone on the vast empty rear passenger seat.
If the men in the jeep appreciate the trick, they don’t let on. Lorenzo crosses his arms over his chest and puffs air out of his cheeks, mustache aflutter. Reynato, hardly watching the road, moves right along with the magical introductions. He grabs the gnarled forearm of the scar-covered man in the front seat. “Racha’s act isn’t so fancy, but it’s just as useful. This poor son of a bitch has the worst luck in the world, and the very best luck in the world, all at once. He’s our one and only shit magnet, and believe me, before too long you’ll learn to love him the way I do. As members of Ka-Pow we get some doom thrown our way. I promise you right now that one of us will get hurt. Lucky for us, that person is always Racha. He’s been shot more times than I’ve been laid—burned up, sliced, dragged on a rope behind horses and Toyotas. So much that he doesn’t have an inch of baby-skin left—even his belly looks like ballsack. Racha will protect you whether he likes it or not, all the badness meant for you will land on him. And, worst of all, he always lives through it.”
His eyes on Efrem as they are, Reynato doesn’t see the knee-deep pothole ahead. They take it hard and Racha, unbelted, pitches face-first into the windshield. A trickle of purple blood unfolds, rolling thick down the bridge of his nose. He checks himself in the side mirror and wipes the blood off in a business-as-usual sort of way.
“What about me?” Lorenzo is reticent in the backseat, arms still tight across his chest, good ear cheated toward Reynato.
“Saving least for last,” Reynato says, his smile not bereft of affection, but not full of it either. “If you’ve ever seen the act of a cheese-ass stage-magician, you’ve already got a fair idea of Lorenzo’s sorry talents. He’s a treasure at parties. I’m talking the full package—balloons in animal shapes, white rabbits, sawing a full-grown woman in half and putting her back together again. He can untie tricky knots, make fizzy water come out of flowers and even pluck coins out of a birthday-boy’s ear. I know it sounds impossible, and call me a liar if you must, but it’s God’s honest truth. The man’s an asset, I tell you.”
Lorenzo assumes a shocked, offended, put out expression. “Ha ha ha,” he says. “You don’t ever tell it right.” Turning to Efrem: “I’ll show you myself.” He uncrosses his arms and makes a show of demonstrating, with pinched fingers, that there’s nothing up his nonexistent sleeves. Then he reaches into the folds of his transparent rain poncho and produces a tattered deck of cards. “Pick one,” he says, fanning the deck.
Efrem picks a card. The designs on the back are floral; intricate blue and white, like the inlay accompanying Arabic verse in the mosque his uncle used to take him to. The card is a king of hearts. Lorenzo snatches it and returns it to the deck. He shuffles in a vigorous, complicated way that makes the cards travel up and down his forearm, then along his shoulders and finally back into his left hand. He removes his straw cap, dumps