Free Some Gods of El Paso by Maria Dahvana Headley

 
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    They were healing the world, they figured, even though they lived in Texas.
    You know the story. In the town where they’d both grown up, they could look across the river to Mexico. Both of them had seen cheapo Catholic candles lit in the bedrooms of people they’d worked on, and both of them had been called miracle workers.
    Back in the beginning, Lorna Grant and Vix Beller were small time. They worked El Paso to Houston and down the Gulf Coast, him mostly on women and her mostly on men. For a while, they changed people’s hearts and fixed people’s minds. Then, because this was how things went in Texas, things got broken again.
    This was after the government collapsed but before God and the law got forgotten. Lorna and Vix were both practitioners of the oldest profession, and found easy employment. Their techniques dated from the time of Christ, but roadside religions found them to be sinners.
    By the time they finally met, late in ’29, Vix Beller’d been chased by a mob with pitchforks, and forced to steal a car to put miles between himself and the town whose women he’d waked into wanting. Lorna Grant had been thrown into the back of a pickup truck with a bunch of lost girls destined for the border, but she’d stabbed the driver when he gave her water, took the wheel, and drove them all to a halfway house where she used some of her healing powers to make them whole.
    Lorna’d been fucking like her cunt was a relic since she was sixteen. Vix had spent years doing the same thing, his cock like the True Cross, and the day they met, as the story goes, Lorna was walking out of some old boy’s front door, carrying the sorrow of a wife that wouldn’t, and Vix was walking out a door across the street, dragging a sack of a forty-three-year-old lady schoolteacher’s rage at climbing the Leaning Tower of Pisa on a once-in-a-lifetime grand tour and feeling high lonesome the whole way up.
    Lorna and Vix took one look at each other’s burdens, and then, without discussion, Lorna poured Vix’s out on the front lawn of the old boy, and Vix poured Lorna’s on the potted plants of the teacher. Within a couple of minutes, the old boy and the schoolteacher, both relieved of their troubles, opened their front doors, and stepped out into the sun, glancing shyly, longingly at one another.
    For their part, Lorna and Vix took a stroll down the street to put distance between themselves and the scene of their healing.
    â€œWant to drink some hot chocolate with me?” Lorna asked Vix, giving him the once-over. He was carrying a lot of his own pain, which he didn’t notice, because he was too busy carrying the anger of every woman he’d ever worked into a miracle. She thought there might be room for her to maneuver.
    â€œI wouldn’t say no. Want to go to a motel with me?” Vix asked Lorna, mapping the fury she glittered with. Her whole body was covered in things she didn’t see, given her own burden of every miracle-ized man’s blues. Her rage made him feel certain, along with the thought that he’d cure her of something of which she couldn’t cure herself.
    â€œI wouldn’t say no to that, either,” said Lorna.
    He strutted a little, and so did she. They both knew they were good at what they did.
    Turned out, though, that once they drank that hot chocolate and got to that motel, they made love for ten hours, got starry-eyed, and merged burdens. Some people say they got married shortly thereafter by a justice of the peace they’d cured of his miseries, and other people say they didn’t believe in marriage but did wear love tokens they’d had installed under their skin like shrapnel. Whatever the truth of it was, the two of them together were something to reckon with.
    After that, everybody knew that Lorna and Vix came as a set. They got spotted at diner counters time to time, drinking coffee, tea, and lemonade,