The Bottom Feeders and Other Stories Read Online Free PDF Page A

truck still wears patches of rust like bullet wounds.
    Saul knows when he hears the truck’s growl
fade. He knows it will be a late night for his brother and an early
morning for him. He closes that math book, knowing he will sleep in
the morning sunlight and his teachers will overlook his absence. In
his mind he counts the bullets in his father’s gun.
    When his mother cries, Saul says, “It’s
alright, Mama. He’s still our Tesoro.”

    On some evenings, rare evenings, Tesoro
joins the family and tells stories while his father drinks cold
cerveza. He tells the story of the old woman in a black berka, the
woman whose wrinkled fingers looked like wet tissue paper on a
piñata. Unreal fingers. Fake fingers. Tesoro talks about the
talisman, the blessed scroll of paper he bought and carried in his
shirt pocket, a superstitious custom to bring him home alive.
    Old magic, she said in her tongue. Dark
magic.
    The other Marines laughed. Tesoro smiled and
laughed, too.
    That afternoon, a car exploded in a small,
Baghdad market.
    That afternoon, Tesoro didn’t die.

    Sometimes, in Saul’s nightmares, Tesoro’s
eyes shine with a yellowish light, an amber light. He pulls his
shirt open, and then pushes fingers into the scar where the bullet
broke his skin. His fingers pull back, and the blood pours out like
oil, thick and dark. Tesoro smiles, and says, “Magia.”
    Sometimes, Saul wakes with a cold sheen of
sweat and listens to the songs of frogs and crickets floating on
the night air. He waits for the sound of his brother’s truck, but
it doesn’t come. He sees the faces of the children from school in
ditches outside of town, dead faces with open eyes, staring at him.
He knows it is a nightmare when the dead reach out, clutching with
gnarled fingers, accusing with their blank stares. His father’s old
handgun hides under his pillow, an uncomfortable lump, but Saul
keeps it close.
    But Tesoro is his brother. The dead are
strangers.
    A night comes when the rumble of Tesoro’s
truck takes away the dream. Saul wakes, creeps down the hallway,
and listens at his parents’ door. Nothing. Another sound, a door
clicking shut in the unfinished basement. Tesoro’s room is down
there. Saul checks the locks on the door and glances out the
window. The rusty Ford is in the lawn next to the drive.
    His mouth goes dry. Tesoro is his brother.
His flesh and blood. When he pulls the gun from under his pillow it
is heavy and cold. A shudder crosses his body.
    Saul starts on the steps, and a little
creaking noise calls out with each. Halfway down, he stops
breathing and waits for a moment. A light glows from under Tesoro’s
door. Like a moth, Saul is drawn to it, likely to burn up in the
flame. His hand rests on the knob, the other clutches the pistol
grip. The smell of stale blood is back, worse now. Amplified.
    “ Saul?” Tesoro asks through
the door, his voice cold like a block of granite.
    Inside, Saul finds what is left of Tesoro on
his bed. His shirt is off, bunched in a pile on the floor. Both
hands rest on his knees. When Tesoro looks up, his face is streaked
with blood. His teeth are dark and discolored, his mouth blotted.
Tesoro’s face wears neither a smile nor frown—a blank expression
with black eyes.
    “ You brought a
gun?”
    Saul looks at the pistol, his hand shaking.
“Papa’s.”
    Tesoro’s lips curl slightly at the corners
and one hand stretches toward his brother, palm open. “They will
come for me, sooner or later. They will need more than guns.” The
other hand touches the lump of lead dangling from his neck.
    For a moment, neither speaks.
    In that moment, Saul understands; in that
moment, he kneels to the old magic in his brother’s eyes. What
crawls Saul’s spine is damp and black and dead. His eyes close and
fingers uncurl. The gun drops into Tesoro’s open hand.
    He smiles, showing the full horror of his
tainted mouth.
    “ I’m leaving.”
    Saul steps forward and touches his brother’s
shoulder. The