Free Some Gods of El Paso by Maria Dahvana Headley Page A

eating sandwiches just like regular folks, but Vix and Lorna weren’t regular.
    It was a myth, as Lorna and Vix already knew, that everyone who sorrowed longed specifically and only for joy. Many people wanted darker medicine. Prohibition of alcohol had created a countrywide yearning for other forms of depressant—though no one referred to alcohol as such—and by the time Lorna and Vix met, ten years into Temperance, everything to do with high and low had become illegal. People were supposed to be living in the middle, but nobody liked the middle. New cures for pain were being distilled in basements and bathtubs.
    In secret dens in Manhattan, high rollers mixed powdered powerlessness with seltzer and drank it with a twist. In New Orleans, the drink that had formerly been bourbon punch got drizzled with barrel-aged despair, and backroom saloons poured it by the ladle-full. Most people cut rage into lines and snorted it, all to feel a little of the old days, the vigor and foolish giddiness that came just before a bar fight. There was glory in the knowledge that the price of wrath would be only a broken nose, not a broken country. A few people craved a mixture of different kinds of emotional disaster shaken up into a slurry, and that cost more.
    Soon after they met, Vix and Lorna realized there was a sweet market in fenced emotion, and though they’d never done this before, they started dealing along with their healing. The miracle makers had an easy supply of raw materials for what half the country craved. They had particular access to desperate love, which was cut with rage and sorrow, and for which people paid extra. Desperate love could be shot into a vein.
    Despite the shift in their business, Lorna and Vix still thought of themselves as mainly healers. They were taking pain away from people, after all, never mind that they were transporting it across state lines and selling it. On the way from a stopover to visit family in Florida, they drained the pain and rage from the hearts of ten or twenty normal people: a traveling saleswoman trying to get over losing her samples, a farmworker with a lost dog, a woman with a little son who looked too much like his daddy. Vix and Lorna sat naked on a motel-room bed and bagged that agony and fury up. They had big plans. They’d sell it in New York City, or maybe in Chicago. They got onto the Gulf Coast Highway, their Chevy loaded down with a few hundred grand in emotions.
    A bullhorn popped out the window of a state patrol car outside Gulfport, Mississippi, and lights flashed in the rearview. Lorna pulled over.
    â€œWhatcha got in that there?” said the trooper, and Lorna looked up at him and blinked.
    â€œSomebody’s child custody battle,” she said. “And an eighth of alcoholic spouse.”
    â€œLooks like contraband, bagged up like that. What else you selling, gal like you? How about a freebie and I let you pass?”
    Vix sat up from the backseat where he’d been napping.
    The patrolman’s pain ended up in a burlap sack, and Lorna hit the gas. Shortly thereafter, her face appeared on the TV news, all red lipstick and yesterday’s mascara, because the trooper had been entirely made of pain and rage, and when they took it from him, there was only skin left, not even bones.
    â€œMost folk’s souls,” said Lorna Grant on the newsreel that got around, “are made of hurt.”
    â€œAnd if they’re not made of hurt,” said Vix Beller, “they’re made of mad. Most folks don’t got much else making them human.”
    â€œWe’re providing a public service,” said Lorna, and then swiveled her hips for the camera of the cub reporter who’d happened upon the notorious two relieving a train conductor of the pain of the abusive brothers who’d put a snake in his bed back in Kansas, and a female passenger of the confusing memory of the one-off kiss she’d gotten from a beautiful