The Beasts of Juarez R.B. Schow (reading the story of the .TXT) 📖

phone sounded, a Bruce Hornsby and The Range tune he had loved so long ago: “The way it is.” The song reminded him of a time when there was still some good left in him. He shut it off then checked the phone for messages. He didn’t see any.

“Get up, loser,” he mumbled.

Forcing himself out of bed, he grabbed the phone then padded across the linoleum floor to a small bathroom that hadn’t seen a clean day since he was in his thirties. He guzzled down a glass of cold water to get the bowels moving but the cold water wasn’t nearly cold enough. While he waited for a call, for his colon to respond, he checked the weather app on his phone. It was going to be another hot, dry day.

“Surprise, surprise,” he said, mimicking Gomer Pyle from The Andy Griffith Show.

Leaning sideways, he both burped and farted, and then he pulled down his boxers, sat on the toilet, and tried to undo the damage he’d done less than twelve hours ago.

When he thought about how much food he’d eaten last night, he tried not to be too hard on himself. After all, there was nothing like a pre-celebration celebration, and what better way to party the night away than with drinks and a victory meal. Today, victory would be his. Granted, it would come at the expense of four innocent people, but that was life. Sometimes you’re the hammer, sometimes you’re the nail. Today, he got to be the hammer.

Thinking about his situation, he heard his old man in his head. He used to say, “Early to bed, early to rise, makes a man healthy, wealthy, and wise.”

“That’s your world, Pop,” Otis muttered in response to the memory. “Not mine.”

The old man had died in his own vomit at sixty-three. Now, Otis’s motto was, “If you shit, shower, shave, and show up, you should be just fine.”

He felt a low rumble in his belly. The noise held promise, but his bowels had yet to move sufficiently. Pressing an elbow against his stomach, fighting to spur his colon to life, he groaned and wondered if he’d eaten too fast the night before.

“We ain’t making bricks in there,” he said to his stomach. “Just let’r go. I know you don’t want them turds in there no more.”

An air bubble pressed against the inside of his stomach expanding so fast and so large it caused him to fold over in pain. Heat rose to the surface of his skin. He started to sweat. Using a wad of toilet paper, he wiped his balding forehead thinking this was not a good sign at ten in the morning. If he started now, he would be sweating all day. And if he couldn’t get it under control before it was time to go, the second he stepped out into that dry Texas heat, he’d just keep that internal faucet going.

The air bubble inside of him either popped or found a way to move on. Whatever the case, the pain subsided long enough for him to recover.

Leaning forward to put the good kind of pressure on his colon, he relaxed his sphincter and said, “Stop being so damn stubborn!”

His phone buzzed—a text alert. Sitting up, his face red from the straining, he took a breath, then turned to the vanity and reached for the phone. The toilet seat pushed sideways under his shifting weight, the lid’s two screws straining. He grabbed ahold of the sink to keep from falling off the bowl, and then he snatched up the Samsung. He swiped across the screen, then pressed the message folder and read the text message.

THEY’RE HERE.

He typed in a reply: GOOD. KEEP ME POSTED.

With his three-day-old boxers circled around his ankles and his tight wife-beater creeping up over a round, white belly, he waited for a text reply. When none came, he scrolled his phone for something interesting to look at while struggling to crunch his morning grumpie. Naturally, he ended up scrolling through his feed on Facebook.

The social media site was all politics, family pets, memes, and pictures of everyone’s keto diet progress. There were friends of his chatting about their cancer, their dying parents, how they just put their dog down because it was time. While sitting on the toilet hoping his life was about to change for the better, he sent his prayer-hand emojis, made his sad faces with a colon and an open parenthesis, and he called some guy he didn’t know a few choice names because the douchebag’s politics were garbage and Otis wasn’t afraid to say so.

Then movement inside his gut finally happened, a sort of unclenching that had him thinking the elevator was finally moving south…and then the phone rang.

“Dammit,” he cursed.

The distraction stalled that creeping-down elevator inside his gut, the one that NEEDED to offload the goods. He checked the caller ID, drew a deep breath, let it out slowly. The elevator stopped on the first floor, the brown passenger angry, stuck.

“Yeah,” he grunted.

“All four of them are together, plus the bodyguard,” the voice said, his words heavy with a Hispanic accent. This was the same guy who texted him a few minutes earlier.

“Has the opportunity presented itself?” Otis asked, still sweating.

“Yes, sir,” the voice said. “Just now it has.”

“It’s broad daylight.”

“We’ve already gone over this,” the man said, his tone reeking of disappointment.

Otis knew this moron from a few jobs before. He said he only spoke English when he was dealing with gringos, which was as little as humanly possible. Otis had said, “Well I ain’t no fans of you people either, but money transcends both borders and racial intolerance.” Back then, the guy laughed and wholeheartedly agreed with him.

“And you still feel confident about grabbing them