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

stranger one night in New Orleans. “And we’re not stealing. This is pay, fair and square, for services rendered. That officer threw his hurt at us. We took it from him. It’s no crime.”
    Vix let the reporter take their picture, Vix with his eyebrow raised, his biceps bulging out of his undershirt, and Lorna nestled there beneath his shoulder, looking at the camera too, a cigarette hanging out of her pout, her dress candy-striped and clingy. They drove off, Lorna in the passenger seat drinking pineapple juice with a straw, Vix pushing the speedometer faster than was legal, through torrential rainstorms and blinding sun.
    After that, they’d sometimes cross into a new state and find a whole town pooling resources to buy a few hours of healing, a pile of pain already waiting for them, but by ’34, the available sorrow and rage in America had begun to ebb, the market controlled by Lorna and Vix. That was when things went south.
    Vix and Lorna started to leave on occasion with more than just pain, anger, and desperate love. Sometimes, they took happiness, too. Vix fell into the bed of a woman wanting to be rid of a childhood crime, and found himself departing with her college graduation day. Lorna made off with the coffee, cigarettes, and first love of a trumpet player who’d only wanted to forget the sadness of an instrument stolen on a train. They both staggered out of those bedrooms, wondering what they’d done, knowing that even though they’d had been given freely, memories like those were nothing that should’ve changed hands. They heard too many whispers, felt too many heartbeats. Pain and rage had dimmed the feelings of much of the country for years, and it was wearing off. Now the people who asked Vix and Lorna for healing sometimes didn’t want anything more than a kiss from someone just like every other someone. People called for miracles, when all they really needed was a hand to hold.
    There was a sheriff in Texas who developed a yearning for them both. His name was Sheriff Hank Yarley, and he was about to be retired. He was thin as an old razor and wore his medals shiny, and he formed himself a posse of gun-toting men, some of whom had had run-ins with the doings of Vix in particular. Deprived of wives, the men of the posse wandered around Texas like drained oilfields, all sputter and no spout. Their former wives looked pretty as prayer dust and lit grocery-store candles in their bedrooms, the face of sex-mad Saint Vix painted right there on each label for everyone to see.
    Sheriff Hank Yarley’s own wife had gone on the run, driving her mother’s car clean across Louisiana to see if she could get her gaze on Vix Beller, and when she came back, she was no longer in love with the sheriff. Yarley wanted to repossess her love and fury (in her, they were one thing) and feed it back into her mouth by the spoonful, but it was with all the rest of the stolen emotions, in the trunk of one of Vix and Lorna’s stolen cars. He aimed to get it back.
    He pulled strings, and Vix Beller and Lorna Grant got declared Public Enemies, with a cash bounty of ten thousand dollars dead or alive. They’d been small-time celebrities before, but now they were fully famous. Every newspaper south of the Mississippi showed their portrait under the headline C OLD -B LOODED H EALERS . Their pretty faces decorated post office walls.
    They were in the process of forming a gang back then, and they’d attracted a few boys and girls, but nobody could kiss like Vix, and nobody could caress like Lorna. When Yarley began his pursuit, they dropped their extras off somewhere near the shipyards in Port Arthur and kept right on going. The gang wannabees resented it, but what could they do? They were out of anger and out of woe. Vix and Lorna had taken it all.
    Lorna and Vix were turned away from Oklahoma, Arkansas, and New Mexico, but the locals warned them in Louisiana, where the trade in