Lizard Brains
Short Fiction | Crime
Conrad Penney, age 29, Caucasian, height 6 feet 2 inches, weight 205 lbs. Blue Eyes. Brunet. That is me. I have heard it listed out, or read it on a screen, damn near every day for the last ten years. That’s the sum of the man. My body, my mind, my race—my name. That is quite literally all I have.
The blacktop outside of the prison is baking. The West Texas sun above me white hot. Its not the familiar golden sun of my childhood. Its changed, or maybe I’ve changed. I don’t rightly know. What I do know is that it used to be a warm, golden color. It used to smile down softly. Now it glares. Menacing. Its color has changed too. There’s a harshness to it, as if its just gone supernova and the truth of life after death will be discovered in about eight minutes flat.
Eight minutes is the time it takes for light from the sun to reach us—allegedly. Prison fills your head with all sorts of facts. Some of them useful. Most not. After all, information without an outlet is just schizophrenia. That’s the problem with book heavy programs. Some minds grow inward, rooting deeper into themselves. Thats why a physical regimen is paramount. For every page read, comes ten pushups or thirty air squats. Sometimes I would throw in burpees. Pullups if my area could support it.
I stare down at the toes of my cowboy boots. They still fit. They are ten years old. Not really any worse for sitting on a shelf somewhere. Still scuffed like the day they hauled me in. In my hand is a trash bag with the clothes I wore when I was 19. The shirt no longer big enough to accomadate my frame. And the jeans are too tight in the legs and loose in the waist. Time and age are a weird thing to face.
There’s a weird dichotomy with prison. It strips you of all the things that matter, but also all the things that don’t.
It perfects the animal.
The real thing I’m getting at is that a man is only as strong as his program. You learn that quickly. You do pushups. You do squats. You do pull ups. You do them, because your life depends upon it. Its an arms race, literally. Without that sort of competition, without life and death stakes, a body withers. But even that is just an excuse. The stakes are always life and death. You can stay on a program anywhere, you don’t need to be in prison—
—brake squeal interrupts my sermon. Talking to the imaginaries that keep you company all day is another art you perfect in the pen.
The little red toyota corolla hits the curb as it turns in. My ride, and she’s on time, her name is Lolo. Women that can’t drive… something immensely attractive about it. Endearing is probably a better word. She pulls to a stop in front of me. She’s hotter than her picture—weird.
“Get in,” she says. Her voice is high, feminine, a very slight and throaty rasp at the end.
I open the door and slide into the passenger seat. She has raven black hair, hazel eyes, and a slightly aquiline nose. Just enough hook in it to be preposterously attractive. The Japanese apparently call this phenomena wabi-sabi—beauty that is “imperfect, impermanent, and incomplete.” I’ve always held that the concept mostly only applies to women.
“Fuck,” she says. “You’re not what I expected.”
“What did you expect?”
Green eyes dart. Color fills the space between chin and high cheekbones. She does a little waving motion at the length of me, and says, “not this.”
“Good, I hope.”
“Yeah,” she says a bit breathy. “Not bad.”
I lose focus at the pale flash of her wrist. Ten years in the pen and all I can notice are her delicate, slender wrists. Femininity.
The cheeseburger tastes like something from another planet. Beef. Real beef. Not beef cut with whatever they cut it with. Nothing but prime, Grade A Texas-raised Angus topped with American cheese, onions, lettuce, tomatoes, pickles, and whatever this sauce is.
Lolo is staring at me.
“What?” I say.
“It’s that good?”
I nod. I feel like her subject. She’s done nothing but ask me questions and make observations since I got in the car.
She sinks her teeth into her own burger, taking a massive bite. A bit of sauce drips on her chin. And then its gone, wiped away quickly with a napkin.
It sort of blows my mind how attractive I find her. Everything in the right place, the right size, a body full of curves, and that fucking voice.
But there’s something else. A deep appreciation. Mostly for not having to be alone right now.
We met through a letter exchange program the prison set up. Which seems weird maybe, but I don’t really care. Who am I to judge. I’m the con, right? I’m thankful for her. Mostly for the company. Loneliness sucks. It sucks bad. The sights, the colors, the noise, the everything… its really kind of overwhelming, and her smile steadies me. More than she probably knows. I’m sure half the kink of this is some mix of danger and safety for her—yes, when you read every book in a library sometimes you catch a taste for harlequin romance.
But the truth is, I keep looking to her for my cues. For how to act, for how to seem normal, for whether that loud noise is something I should be concerned about.
“So,” she says slowly, her mouth still half full. “This is weird.”
I look at her. “I know.”
“I thought it would be more awkward,” she says. “I almost didn’t come.”
“I’m glad you did. I can’t imagine having to eat this burger alone.”
Her mouth makes a small mock frown, the type women do when they see something cute like kittens or a baby deer. “My friends all think I’m crazy...”
“Are you?”
“A little.” She shrugs a shoulder and grins.
“Anything I need to worry about?” I say.
“Maybe,” she says. “Just don’t look at anyone else, and you’ll never have to see it.”
“Who would look at anything else?”
“Tell that to my ex.”
“Strikes me as a dumbass.”
“He was.”
“Why didn’t you go back?”
“To Arizona?”
“Yeah,” I say.
“Eh, I left the Rez for a reason, even if following a guy was the wrong one. Besides, writing you kept me sane.”
“Still coulda gone back.”
“I just kind of waited around when I found out you only had two years left. You probably think I’m needy, or like have a hang-up. I have—”
“—it’s cute. It helped. It kept me out of trouble.”
She gave that small frown again. Smaller this time, reflexive.
“What next?” I ask.
“We rob my ex,” she says.
“I thought that was a joke.”
“It doesn’t have to be. We rob him. Take the cash and run to Mexico and they never find us.”
“And then we live happily ever after.” Read enough romance and that’s how they always end.
“Obviously. Or kill each other over the money.” She smiles.
“Or murder suicide.”
“Toxic,” she says, taking another bite.
“How about we keep that option on the backburner.”
“I know,” she says. “It is actually a joke… mostly.”
She always does that. She jokes about something, but you aren’t sure if it is a joke or if she’s just testing the waters.
“I promised myself I would give it a shot,” I say. “A normal life. I don’t really plan on breaking it. If you can’t keep promises with yourself, how can you keep them with anyone else.”
“I like that,” she says. “Buuut, if we really need to.”
“Like I said, backburner.”
We both return to our burgers. The silence between us pleasant. A comfortable silence. Then she breaks it.
“Do you want to go to back?” she says. “To my place.” Her demeanor is playful now, eyes sparking, and my pulse quickens.
“In Dallas?”
“Yeah,” she says. “It’s only a two hours from here. You can stay with me. Fuck this place. I would want to go far away from here if I were you.”
“Alright,” I say.
She waves the waiter over and he brings the check. “I wasn’t planning on taking you back tonight, was going to set you up in a hotel, but you passed. You’re not a weirdo.”
“How do you know?”
“I know. And you talk how you write in your letters. It’s funny. Cute-funny. I feel like I know you.”
“Well shit, I would hope so after two years.”
She smiles, and drops forty bucks down on the table. Then flicks her head towards the door.
She wakes me. Hand on my stomach. Her face inches away from mine. Sunlight is pouring in through dirty apartment windows and resting on sun-kissed shoulders. We’d probably only actually fallen asleep three hours ago.
“Hey,” she says. “Do you want breakfast?”
“Coffee. I miss real coffee.”
“I got you,” she says, then she slips into a baggy t-shirt that hangs over her butt and doesn’t bother with pants. Dancer’s legs carry her around the little kitchenette. The studio apartment is small. But clean, and put together. Paintings of desert landscapes hang on the walls. Over the bed is a tapestry of beadwork that makes some sort of tribal design. I push myself up in bed, and watch as she makes coffee.
“Is Lolo short for something then?”
“Lozen,” she says. “It’s Apache, obviously.” She does a half-curtsy. “She was a warrior. Fought with Geronimo. Bad bitch if you ever look her up.”
“What’s it mean?”
“Horse thief,” she says. “At least that’s how it translates.” She walks over and sits on the edge of the bed.
“Are you full Apache then?”
“Half. Daddy was white. Never knew him. Momma met him at the Casino.”
I nod. “Do you have a laptop?”
“Yeah, why?”
“I got an interview. They make you set one up before they process you.”
She grabs a computer from beneath a pile of clothes on the floor. Cocktail dresses, and glitzy things. I feel a pang of jealousy at the sight of them. “Do you work tonight?” I ask.
“Yeah,” she says. “But you can stay here while I’m gone.”
I nod.
“What’s wrong?” she asks.
“Nothing.”
I take the computer out onto her little second floor balcony. The sun feels good as I fumble my way onto zoom. She opens the glass sliding door, and sets the plate of eggs down, then the cup of coffee, and wishes me good luck.
I log in and wait for someone else to join. Its just a black screen. I hope I haven’t fucked something up. Five minutes of this, and I open the sliding door.
“Hey, can you make sure I did this right?”
“Yeah,” she says.
I show her the link in my email, and she checks it.
“You’re good, they just haven’t joined yet.”
“Oh. Thanks.” I feel stupid. Like the world has passed me by. Everything is so different. Everyone is so different.
Two minutes more and someone logs on. Its a heavy set guy with wire frame glasses and a pudgy face. The interview starts off well enough. I answer his questions. I try to talk about myself. But there is something in his tone. Something I sense. Condescension maybe? Or like I’m supposed to impress him… an expectation for me to impress. I think that’s it. And something of charity. Like this is my big chance to work at a warehouse, since I’m a felon, and if I don’t get with this guy’s program, I’m going to blow it.
Maybe that’s it. Everyone is living someone else’s program.
I see his desk, the pen he keeps twirling between chubby fingers, and then in my mind’s eye his head is slamming into that desk, and that pen is meeting that fatty neck—
“—Conrad, you still with us buddy. Can you tell me why you think Metalworks Solutions would be a good fit for you?”
Shut-up. Shut-the-fuck-up. Why, does he have to talk so nice. So sing-song. Like I’m a child. Its quite frankly faggy. I know he’s not gay. Likely has a wife at home probably. But just talk to me, man. Like a man, man-to-man. I want to strangle him. I don’t know why.
I bumblefuck my way through the rest of the interview but my heart isn’t in it. It ends. I sit there in the sun for a while and wonder what the fuck just happened. I wonder why I can’t be normal.
There was a guy I was friends with. He was only out a year before he landed right back in the same cellblock he’d left. I asked him why? Why did he fuck it up?
“I couldn’t do it,” he said. “I couldn’t help myself. Its all so gay. Its like a script. You have to stay on it. But its bullshit. This right here is real. You fuck up, you bleed out. Circle of life baby. Out there, you know. You fuck up, and they just like bitch at you, or do some other shit and tell you it has nothing to do with what you did. The truth is, its an open air prison, but with enough complexity you can pretend. Nothing happens as long as you pretend, but its the pretending that was hard. Its weird. But I’m a retard, what do I know.”
I thought he was nuts. I don’t know now. I think I get it. But I’m not fully convinced I’m the abnormal one. I think its universal. It has to be universal, just most people learn to ignore it.
I want to strangle that interviewer. I want to hunt him down and shove his face into that keyboard and… I don’t know why.
Think to the last time you road raged. Someone just cut you off, and you thought about what you would like to do to them. Think about that split second image. Just a curb, a head, a boot. It flashes through your mind. Its like that scene in Fight Club, where they splice a split-second of porn into movies at what they call the *cigarette burn. That’s what its like having a capacity for violence. Pay attention. Everyone has it. If it wasn’t in the genepool, you wouldn’t even be here. Its a legacy. All day long you have this lizard brain whispering at you. Its barely audible. Blink and you’ll miss it, but its there. Kill. Take. Do. Fight. Fuck. Its intrusive. They aren’t thoughts as much as inputs. Reactions. Your lizzard brain whispering the secrets of evolution. Animal instincts. Violence the basecode of civilization. Everything else, polite abstraction.
I shut the laptop, and sit there for a long while.
The sliding glass door pulls back with a woosh. Lolo fills the space.
“How did it go?”
“Not great,” I say. “Well, maybe fine. I’m not sure.”
She sits down in the chair across from me, and pulls a pack of marlboros out of her sweatpants. Lights up. Hands me one.
I light it and inhale.
“I don’t want you to dance anymore,” I say, exhaling smoke. The nic hits me like a freight train.
She laughs. “I thought you said you didn’t know how it went. Now you want me to quit my job?”
I say nothing, ashing the cigarette over the concrete. She’s so fucking hot in sweat pants and a baggy shirt. Cigarette between thin fingers. Smoke whisps rising. Fuck her. Take her inside now. There it is. The lizard brain. Did you hear it? That’s its other main—
“—Oh, you’re serious.” She says. “Fine. Done. I won’t dance anymore.”
“Just like that?” I ask.
“Yeah, why not. You asked me too. I’m into you. Honestly, I think it would be weird if you were cool with it.”
“How seriously have you really thought about Mexico?” are the next words out of my mouth, they come spilling out before I can even think them through.
The stash house is on the edge of town, fully in the ghetto. She sits in the car next to me. Stray cats do loops around the neighborhood. A little black and white one peers out at our parked car from the shade of a dumpster.
“Rico was a dealer,” she says. “This is where he would hang out. He told me that there’s a safe in the back. Upstairs. He kept the money there. Someone would come collect it the last saturday of the month.”
“So two weeks from now.”
“Just before is the time to hit him,” she says.
“Do you know who he worked for?” I ask.
“Some guy named Ekon.”
“Cartel?”
“No God, not cartel,” she says.
“Good. That would be a bad way to die,” I say. “When was the last time you were here?”
“A year ago, maybe.”
I shoot a look.
“You were in jail. Besides you hadn’t asked me to be your girlfriend yet.”
“I was in prison. Jails are county.”
She rolls her eyes.
“Is there an entrance in the back?” I ask.
“Yeah, but it was always chained up and locked.”
“How many usually hang out in there?”
“Four or five. They’re dumbasses. Always high, they just sit down stairs and smoke, and play video games, or put porn up on the big screen.”
“Why were you even with this guy.”
“He had money. And then I caught feelings. I was in a bad place, ok. Sometimes you think you deserve things.”
“Geez,” I say.
“I’m a soft-bitch ok. Lucky for you.”
“We need to work on your choice in men.”
“Oh do we.” She shot a be-careful-what-you-wish-for in my direction.
“I’m an upgrade, shush.”
“Time will tell.” She cracks her gum, and squirms down in the seat folding arms across her in a manufactured pout.
It took a week for me to get my license situation figured out. Best not to commit a misdemeanor in the process of committing a felony. She cancelled the lease on her apartment. And I helped her toss the furniture, and most everything else that wasn’t clothes or sentimentals.
The trunk of clothes is damn near the width of the bed, and is the heaviest trunk of clothes I have ever lifted. I asked her to take some of them out, but she flat refused, said she needed all of them.
Then we camped in a little conservation area at the edge of Dallas for three days. We barbacued burgers and drank beer. We fished. I caught a few bass one day, and Lolo just hung out, watching me, laughing with me. She was down with it. People have a certain idea of dancers or strippers as being high maintenance, but they’re not. Not usually. A bit brash, maybe, but they aren’t afraid to live the moment for what it is. They aren’t put off by the shit life throws at you.
We traded the Corolla in for this old ranger. Anything newer would make us an immediate target once we crossed the border. Driving a new car down there was a death wish or so I’d been told.
She still isn’t sold on the guns.
“Will those work?” she asks. She’s sitting on the tail gate next to me, bouncing her feet and smacking mosquitoes. The trees at the campsite are thick and green and all around smells sweet from the wildflowers at their base.
I palm one of the guns. Its a Pietta 1851 Confederate Navy Black Powder revolver chambered in .44. “Theres a little public range up that trail, half the reason I suggested this.”
“Let’s go,” she says.
I take my revolvers, two of them, one looped over my neck with a piece of paracord threaded through an eyelet I screwed into the buttstock, the other tucked into my pants.
“Do I look the Outlaw Josie Wales?” I ask.
“Who’s that,” she says.
“Its a movie I liked.”
“Why not just get a regular gun though?” she asks.
“Because I’m a felon,” I say, hefting one of them in my hand.
“Buy one off the street.”
“I don’t know anyone.”
“I know people,” she says.
“Look, I get it. But blackpowder guns don’t require a background check or really have very many restrictions on them at all. Sure, they have their drawbacks. But for a pinch, the kind we are in now, they work. I don’t know, its always made me feel good knowing they were an option. So this crackhouse is just gonna have to deal with being teleported backwards about 150 years.”
We spent the rest of the evening blowing holes in cans. I was a bit surprised by their accuracy. A bitch to reload. Definitely not happening in the middle of a shoot out, and I get why the rangers carried around like five of these things.
Over 30 yards and you were flirting with misses fairly often. But up close, which is where I would be. You couldn’t really miss too bad, not with a steady hand anyways.
***
It was dark out when we pulled up and parked outside the little safe house. We had our escape route from the house planned, and a back up, both of which would dump us out on the I-35 S. Then it would be another 15 hours to the border. Yeah. Texas is big. But I doubt anyone would be looking for us.
Lolo pulls out the little plastic bag with my silicon halloween mask. Its a “realistic” old man mask, complete with wrinkles, and a shitty white mustache. Its pretty good. Not as good as Bodhi and Johnny Utah’s Dead Presidents, but still good.
We watch the safe house for about twenty minutes. Then, like clockwork, her ex drives up in a Chrysler 300 and parks down the block. He sits for about ten minutes, and then gets out, puts his hood up, adjusts his ballcap, and makes his way to the house.
“That’s him,” Lolo says.
“What if he won’t give up the code?”
She looks at me with that deer in the headlights type of look, and then shrugs.
“Yeah. I didn’t think of that either.”
I’m wearing a hoodie. I stick one of the revolvers in the big front pocket. I crack the door on the ranger, and the cabin lights stay black because I disabled them earlier. The other revolver goes into my waistband at the small of my back.
I watch as she slides over into the drivers seat. Once shes situated, I give her a wink and pull the mask over my head. Casually, I walk towards the house.
I have killed with shivs, shanks, and once with my bare hands. Most they never caught me. Or didn’t want to. Sometimes the gaurds let you make their life easier. But all were some form of self-defense, even if pre-meditated. Anything that happens in the pen is self-defense because the stakes are survival. But this is different. But not enough for me to care. They only ever tagged me for one of the stabbings, and that bitch added eight years to my original two and probably caused just as many of the shivings.
One of the weirder things about being out now is all the sharp edges. They’re everywhere. Edges, blades, points, shoe laces. Outside is littered with weapons. And yet nobody has to worry, there’s something nice about that. I realize then that I am the problem now, cursed with knowledge that I’ll never be able to let go of. The world is changed, because I am changed, even if its only because of the way I see it.
I turn the corner and walk the ten feet to the front door. I hear music thumping inside. I pause, listening, waiting. I check the hinges. It opens inward like most all front doors.
My foot meets the door just next to the knob. A sharp crack and splintering, but I’m still not in. I give it one more kick, drawing the revolvers as I do so, and the door flies open slamming against the opposite wall with force.
Someone is running down the hall towards me. I have a split second to register the baseball bat in his hand. I raise one of the pistols and fire. He takes a lead ball in the chest, shuffles backwards, falls… immediately the house is ringing.
Cocking the hammer, I pivot into the living room leveling both revolvers to find three white pie-pan-faces all illuminated by the reflection of cartoons playing on the tv. They stare back in suprise. Freeze reflex in full effect. Or just stoned…
And then there is a moment where they try to help themselves. But its in my past and their future, for my adrenals have bent time, and I work my way down the line, one-shot-after-another, rythmically, the single-action pistols clicking and barking thick clouds of white smoke and the smell of sulphur and then they are all some form of dead.
The place is dark, but I see a light on in a far room, near where the stairs should be. He’s in here somewhere, because we just watched him enter. His hoodie is not among the bodies on the floor. Probably, upstairs. I need him alive. I need the code to the safe.
I step over the bodies in the living room, give the revolvers a rest, and pick a Glock up off the coffee table. The smoke from the guns still hangs acrid in the air. I check to make sure a round is chambered, and then move forward, holding it with two hands, scanning the bannister.
Then there is a rush of movement from somewhere in the house, the sound of nails on a hard wood floor. Thats the first time my brain connects the giant doggy bed next to the tv to the fact that dogs exist, and not only that, exist in this house, and that’s when a gray mass of fur and muscle rounds the corner into the room, slips on the hardwood, slams hard into the couch—I shoot—but I miss… and then the dog is lunging.
He bites down hard on my blocking forearm, and I crash backwards through one of those tray tables found in bachelor pads and drug dens and meant for eating tv dinners. I feel it shatter underneath me as 75lbs of all american pitbull tries to tear my left arm free of my body. The Glock clatters off somewhere in the darkness.
I give the dog two quick punches right in its ribs, but it ignores them, punishing me by biting harder. I scramble to my feet as best I can, the dog still hanging on for dear life. I’m too mad and terrified to care about anything other than killing this fucking dog.
I scoop the whole damn thing up with my other arm, lifting with my legs. He squirms, and I almost lose my grip, but his mouth is still latched on my arm, and then like a pro-wrestler I jump and dive, and slam the pit as hard as I possibly can into the floor with the full weight of my body.
Ribs or something crack, and I feel him release. I scramble backwards through the wreckage of the dinner table, and the dog struggles back to his feet, looking slightly dazed.
That dive wrecked my shoulder, but the dog misses only a beat, and he’s back on me, latched on again in the same damn face, and my whole arm is fire.
But my hand, quite by chance, finds one of the heavy wooden splinters from the tv tray table and then I attack its neck, stabbing repeatedly with all the animal fury that ten years of pushups can lend. The dog fights harder at first, but we are both slipping around in pools of blood, his and mine, and the floor is slick as a wine press, and I know he’s done for.
He still doesn’t release though, even when sweet death collects him, and I spend another panicked minute prying his jaws off my arm which is made more difficult by only having one hand to do it with.
Then I sit there. I heave and wheeze, my mind swimming with pain, and I hold my arm. Then another man rounds the corner, and he has a gun. He holds it like a jackass—side-ways—
But I roll hard through the blood, and reach one of the revolvers. Wood splinters behind me and I can hear the thwump of bullets. But I’ve got one of the revolvers up. I fire and the gun bucks the same instant I see another one of his muzzle flashes.
I stand over the body. Revolver in hand, silicone mask in the other.
“You killed him?” I look up to see Lolo standing in the front door.
“Yeah,” I say.
She moves in slowly, tentatively. Then she see’s I’m bleeding, and rushes over. “We have to get out of here.”
“What about the safe or the code?”
“He’s dead!” she says. And then spits on the body. “Fuck the safe. Let’s go.”
We run outside then, and there are people watching from cracked blinds. I jump in the driver seat and hit the gas on the little Ford. And I drive with my good arm, the piece of mincemeat that was my left, cradled in my lap.
We are on the Interstate when she starts, “I didn’t mean for you to get hurt.”
“I don’t know what we are going to do for money,” I say. “But we can’t stay here.”
“Fuck the money. I have money.”
“What money do you have?”
“I was a stripper stupid?” she says. “Cash. What do you think we get paid in.”
“So why did we have to rob your ex?” I ask. I glance over at her, and can feel the heat rising.
She scrunches her face, that universal sign of female embarrassment at a chain of (il)logic and impulse that only looks so in hindsight. In a small voice, she says, “he pissed me off.”
I turn my attention back to the road. Then I remember the trunk of clothes. The heaviest trunk of clothes that I had ever carried. “How much is in the trunk?”
She makes a sucking sound with her teeth, knowing I’ve put it together. “About one hundred thousand.”
“How much really?”
“Two hundred and thirty five thousand,” she says, her voice getting higher at the end of it.
“I feel a little manipulated, you know.”
“I know. I’m sorry. I just wanted to get him back.”
“Well… you did that alright.”
I take a beat, watching the phosphorescent lines, the road sign that says 540 miles to Monterrey. And I start to laugh. Deep laughs that hurt everytime I jostle my arm, and she asks me what is so funny.
I don’t have a good answer, but I suppose its something to do with lizard brains, and the fact she has them too.