The Head

Brayley Cadence Sanderson’s brain chattered and spiraled as the man driving the small Toyota Tacoma grimaced and adjusted his finger against the trigger of his pistol. The gun was resting in his lap with the dangerous end pointed directly at her. The man allowed himself a glance. The girl seemed to be done crying for the moment and was looking down at her hands which were folded tightly in her own lap.

He was surprised she had complied so quickly. He had been preparing himself for a struggle or, worse, a chase, but this huerca had taken one look at his gun and slid right into the passenger seat like they were dating.

Daniel Santiago Calaca didn’t quite know what kind of devil had gotten into him that Thursday night in deepest April. He did know that he had been sick to death of seeing these pristine, untouchable women parade around carelessly on their daddy’s dimes while he had to bust his hump seven days a week washing dishes and blowing leaves around.

He pictured them collapsing on scented feather beds at the end of their days while he went home to a one bedroom apartment he shared with two other men just like him. Well, not just like him. Ignacio, for example, was devout in his faith and sent home a much greater portion of his paychecks then Daniel did.

Ignacio, who went by Nacho, constantly left little cards depicting the Blessed Virgin all over the apartment, even in the bathroom, which Daniel found bizarre and off-putting. The other man, Enrique, was a bit easier to relate to. He was covered in tattoos that both Daniel and Nacho recognized but didn’t ask about. He was an aggressively friendly man with an underlying hardness that neither of the others could match. Daniel and Nacho agreed privately that Enrique was probably ex-cartel and was looking to get his life together. Neither man ever asked, however and Enrique never brought it up.

Daniel wondered what Enrique would think of what he was currently doing. He didn’t wonder about Nacho, with his prayer cards and sad-eyed gringo-looking Jesus candles. Daniel was pretty sure Enrique had killed people in his past, possibly a lot of people, probably some of them women. Daniel, however, had never even stolen a bag of chips, let alone done anything like what he was currently doing. The worst thing he could think of was receiving a reprimand from his boss for talking to one of the college girls who had, evidently, reported him for doing so.

What he had done, hundreds of times, was fantasize about this particular scenario. It generally went like this: Pick one of the snotty-looking girls he always saw on the college campus he did landscaping work at every other Thursday. Make her blonde. Make her wear those athletic shorts with a white stripe up the side. Force her into his pickup with the gun he bought from the parking lot of the indoor swap meet. Drive her out to some secluded area. Bruise her pretty face. Make her have sex with him with her head in the dirt. The fantasies always ended at this point, however, and Daniel wasn’t quite sure how he was going to resolve the real-life version of his most secret dream. Actually, he was in a real pickle, the more he thought about it. He wasn’t even aroused anymore. Daniel glanced at the girl again.

She was as close to perfect as he had any right to wish for, missing only the white stripe on her shorts. Her long blonde hair was hanging in a shining curtain between them, obscuring her tear-stained face.

Images came to him, one after another. The face of the girl’s mother, or at least what he imagined she would look like: an older version of the girl; gray-haired but still hot. The real face of his own mother, soft and lined, telling him to never eat the first tortilla from the stack or he would become a gossip like a woman. Himself, in the tiny apartment bathroom, flipping a Virgen de Guadalupe card over so he could masturbate free of her placid consideration. Enrique, sipping a Tecate Light, sitting spread legged in the folding chair on their apartment patio, making the tattoo of Santa Muerte at his throat jump with every swallow. Nacho looking up the bible citation that was scratched into Enrique’s walnut skin below this dubious saint on his battered phone; something from Proverbs about digging your own grave.

The rosary hanging from Daniel’s rear view mirror swung like a pendulum, far away, then close enough to kiss. He removed his finger from the trigger of the gun and took his foot from the gas pedal. They were about ten miles out of the city.

He pictured himself letting the girl out of the car and tossing her pink-cased phone out of the truck window after her so she could find a ride. Yellow hills surrounded them and the moon hung in the sky like a clipped fingernail. The First Methodist cemetery slid by his window as they slowed. Daniel moved to cross himself but realized he was still holding his gun and stopped.

Brayley shifted in her seat and peered at Daniel through her hair. He still held the gun in his lap and it was still pointed at her but something was different. It took her a moment to realize what it was. When she did, her heart surged against her breastbone. His finger was off the trigger. His hand jerked and she shifted her gaze to the passenger side window without moving her head. She couldn’t see much but she knew they had to be out in the hills somewhere, from the lack of lights and the amount of time they had been driving. When Daniel started to slow the truck down, she almost screamed but caught herself. Brayley knew it was time to draw her last card from the deck.

She felt her long legs, made sturdy by years of track and volleyball, tense up against the floorboard of the truck. Daniel Calaca turned to Brayley and opened his mouth to say something as he began to depress the brake of the truck. Brayley moved to face him and flung her full weight against his body with all of her strength.

Daniel shouted wordlessly as she grabbed the steering wheel and arched it to the left as far as it would go. The small truck spun around into the other lane, completely facing the opposite direction. Daniel lost track of the gun and was focused on correcting the truck’s trajectory when Brayley bit him hard in the stomach. He felt his mind detaching from reality as he watched Brayley’s hand flutter against the steering wheel. His midsection was in agony; it felt as though she had ripped a chunk from his small belly with her teeth. His last sane act was to grab that golden hair and rip the girl’s head from his midsection as the truck’s back tires fishtailed into a soft patch in the shoulder of the road and the entire vehicle began to roll.

When Brayley came to, she was lying on her back on the ceiling of the truck’s cab with her legs and most of her torso sticking out of the shattered passenger side window. She seemed to ache in a thousand places at once and her eyes were full of blood. She slowly raised her hand to her brow. Incredibly, an entire section of her forehead seemed to be hanging from her skull in a flap. She screamed in pain as she tried to flatten the skin back into the shape it was supposed to be.

She wasn’t sure where she was or what exactly had happened. She figured she had wrecked her car during some careless night out, but was this her car? There were only two seats. Brayley began to use her legs to slowly scoot backwards out of the window. It was agony. She found she could only move inches at a time before having to rest, though the acrid scent of gasoline was terrifying.

The movement slowly pushed her hoodie up toward her face and the cool night air raised goosebumps on her exposed stomach. As she moved, her right hand found an object. She fondled it mindlessly as she scooted, moving her fingers down its length and around the lip of a circular opening. Gun. She was touching the barrel of a gun.

The situation she was in came back to her in a jolt that rocked her entire body. She sucked in air and used an almost inhuman burst of strength to flip over onto her belly. She lay prone with her broken head resting on one of her arms for a few moments, feeling the greasy metal of the gun in her hand. Kernels of safety glass dug at her stomach as she gathered the energy needed to lift her ruined face to whatever she was sharing the vehicle with. When she finally did, she saw Daniel Santiago Calaca hanging upside-down by his seat belt in front of her.

His arms dangled limply on either side of his head and his hands rested on the ceiling of the truck, wrists loosely bent. The spent airbag slopped loosely out of the steering column like a used condom. It had covered his face in a strange ivory-colored powder. Bright red blood ran rivers through it, blood dripped from his head and blood pooled on the ceiling beneath him. As Brayley watched, Daniel’s eyes opened. They rolled white like the eyes of a whale before they settled on her. She swung the gun around her shattered body and pointed it at him.

"Mamá,” Daniel said to her, ”Mamá, lo siento. Rompí el portón y los perros andan sueltos.”

“FUCK!” Brayley shrieked. She squeezed the trigger with her eyes closed. The sound was deafening. When she opened her eyes again she saw that Daniel was still looking at her. He was smiling beatifically and his teeth were pink with blood.

”No te preocupes mamá. Dejaré la comida afuera. Ellos volverán,” he said and closed his eyes.

“FUCK FUCK FUCK!” Brayley screamed like a Valkyrie and unloaded the magazine of Daniel’s gun into the small space. Two of the bullets broke his face open and he died. Brayley passed out and did not wake up again until she was in the hospital.