by John Nichols
Jerry G. had a bad thing about taking leaks, namely, when others were present, he couldn’t. And now there was a terrific commotion as Horsethief Shorty shouted cheerful boozy greetings to the old men and to Joe, and as Amarante Córdova bent over to retrieve his blunderbuss, and as Marvin LaBlue’s voice suddenly cut through the laughter (and through little María’s bloody blue bawling), saying “That ain’t a Peacemaker, Amarante, that’s a pissmaker!” And Amarante stood there, weaving and grinning proudly at his gun and bumping into Jerry G.’s butt with each weave, while Bloom nodded hello to everybody as he grimly pushed through the crowd to the one toilet cubicle, in which a chair with a roughly scrawled cardboard sign saying “Out of Order” wired to its two front legs was set upside down on the toilet.
Meanwhile, only a plywood foot or so away in the women’s restroom, Vera, Flossie, and Nancy almost collided trying to get in out of the storm through the same door at the same time. All three were breathless from running through the rain. A week earlier there had been a rumble in the women’s head, during which one high school student had stabbed another, and somehow the door and the divider of the lone toilet cubicle had been uprooted and tipped over, and the management hadn’t gotten around to replacing it, so now the john was completely exposed.
Flossie said to Vera, “You go ahead, honey.” But Vera shrugged, saying politely, “No, you go first if you want, ma’am, I’m not in a hurry.” Flossie was a little embarrassed, though, so she told Nancy, “I can wait.” And Nancy replied, “So can I.”
On the other side of the wall, Joe Mondragón was taking a satisfying, totally clear, absolutely endless beer leak, while Jerry G., very redfaced by now, strained to release his own stream as Amarante Córdova kept bumping into him while happily waving his mammoth gun. Bloom, with his wailing daughter cupped in the crook of one arm, started pushing back through the people, the smoke, and the Spanish babble.
Onofre Martínez said, “If you ain’t gonna use that urinal, Amarante, I might as well,” but the Staurolite Baron lost his footing on the way over, bumping hard against Amarante who bumped hard against Jerry G., who lost his footing and bumped hard against Joe Mondragón, who lost his balance and sprayed a few drops of pee on Jerry G.’s pant leg. With that, Jerry G. exploded. “Look what you did!” he yelled at Joe, stuffing himself back into his pants.
At that instant Bloom set María down in the dirt outside the men’s room and drew off her panties, saying, “Just go here, sweetie, the toilet’s broken in there.”
“But it’s raining,” she complained. “I’m all wet.”
“Oh for God’s sake, dammit, go here,” Bloom cried in agony, “or don’t go at all.”
“I can’t,” she blubbered. “It’s raining.”
“Well then drown!” Bloom sobbed between clenched teeth.
In the ladies’ room, Nancy Mondragón said, “Aren’t you Mrs. Devine?” And Flossie smiled, saying, “That’s right, dear, and you must be Mrs. Mondragón.”
“That’s right,” Nancy said. “Boy, I sure never thought I’d run into you in a dump like this.”
Flossie didn’t know how to react to that, so she shrugged, fluttered a hand, smiled, and finally cooed, “Well, honey, even rich people have to go to the bathroom, you know.”
In the men’s room, Joe Mondragón answered Jerry G. with: “Whatta you mean ‘Look what I did’? Who bumped into who?”
“Well, it wasn’t my fault,” Jerry G. said. “This old fucking greaser bumped into me.”
Whereupon a silence, like the silence of Hiroshima ten minutes after the bomb, struck the men’s room with an audible thud. Of course, the instant Jerry G. let the word out of his mouth he realized that if he escaped from that men’s room in the next minute more or less alive, he would have to light candles to some saint for the rest of his life in gratitude for the reprieve.
One man whispered, “Ai, Chihuahua.” After that nobody said anything or made a move. Amarante stood there toothlessly half-grinning with his big gun held laxly, almost limply in his hands. Onofre Martínez was poised at the urinal with a cigarette between his lips, staring at a “SUCK MY BIG DICK, MOTHAFUCKAH” on the wall as the smoke from his cigarette gathered under his cowboy hat and then slowly curled around the brim, rising toward the ceiling. Tranquilino Jeantete, who’d been propped against the back wall, looked down at the floor, ashamed for Jerry G. Marvin LaBlue, also ashamed of, and afraid for, his fellow Anglo, did the same thing. The only sound was the noise Joe Mondragón made slowly and menacingly zipping up his fly.
The next sound was the one made by Horsethief Shorty taking out and opening his snuffbox, and drilling a powder-covered pinkie up either nostril. Following this rather bold action, Shorty sneezed. At that, everybody in the men’s room heard Flossie Devine in the women’s room say, “Well, if neither one of you sweet things is in that much of a hurry, you’ll excuse me if I camp first, because I got a bladder that’s ringing like a fire alarm.”
On the heels of this statement, Bloom raged back into the men’s room with red-eyed María in his arms, explaining to all those present, “I don’t give a shit if it is out of order!”
Jerry G. took a tentative step toward the door, then another. Shorty closed his snuffbox, letting him pass. Jerry G. proceeded cautiously to the door, opened it, and slipped into the rain. Shorty raised his eyebrows to all of them, shrugged a What can I tell you to each and every one, said, “Caballeros…,” and backed out.
Little María Bloom piped, “But I don’t want to anymore, Daddy,” and Bloom wailed like a stricken baboon. With that, the old men suddenly giggled, while on the other side of the partition Flossie Devine crowed to the two Chicano women who had their backs turned to her, “Honestly, when it rains cats and dogs like this I swear I start thinking about going into the kennel business, you know?”
“I figure,” Shorty said, drawing even with Jerry G. on the way back, “that you just came within a half-inch of getting your head blowed off.”
“Oh screw you, Shorty.”
And in the Dancing Trout station wagon, unaware of the high drama that had just taken place in a very low setting, Emerson Lapp suddenly fell asleep.
* * *
Still pretty much oblivious to the gathering storm, but very much aware of his own troubles, Herbie Goldfarb decided an escape into love might be just what the doctor ordered for his floundering soul. And there was a VISTA volunteer named Stephanie Milligan living in the Alamito section of Chamisaville who offered just such an escape; a tall, bony girl with tremendously vague blue eyes, who hailed from East Orange, New Jersey, she had only recently graduated from Skidmore College in upstate New York.
Herbie and Stephanie had often met during those times when Herbie traveled south on the Trailways bus to gather with his fellow volunteers, and also to take showers at the KOA Kampground north of town. At first Herbie shied away from Stephanie because she was a moody person who seldom spoke, and somehow her silence, her lack of complaints, placed her above the other VISTAs in an almost accusatory fashion. Too, Stephanie appeared to be involved with several community projects that had a halfway decent shot at success, and she was the only one in their group who could speak Spanish.
Stephanie wore peasant blouses, long colorful skirts, and sneakers; and the tall straight way she moved was almost regal. Unfortunately, she also sported a very flat chest, and never in his life had Herbie been attracted to such a titless wonder. Plump and rosy and Renoirish, Marilyn Monroe, Anita Ekberg, and Lainie Kazan—that’s where Herbie’s head had always been at, ever since his earliest pubescent fantasies. Even today, through all his dreams, there cavorted huge-breasted, olive-skinned, Ashkenazic, perpetual-motion, earth-mother, Sabra lovemaking machines. In fact, almost all Herbie’s affairs to date had been with nubile, occasionally musclebound, Westchester County kibbutzim girls named Rachel or Ruth or Hanna, warm and fiery-eyed, black-haired people of his own race and faith, whose flesh in the hay had enveloped him in a plump fermented way like fresh
bread dough. If he was destined to travel through life shelling out double, and in spades, for being a Jew, Herbie had always figured at least his love affairs with these women enabled him to skim some kind of interest off his personal checking account before paying the required dues. Hence for Herbie, nirvana was snuggling deeply into sunburned and throbbing female pectoral chub that cushioned him against the sensual beats of an eastern Mediterranean heart.
At first, then, he wasn’t very turned on by this unobtrusive, gaunt woman, whose abstraction bordered on the ethereal. But little things began to prickle his interest. For example, even though Stephanie was apparently the most competent volunteer, she never bragged about her accomplishments; she hardly deemed them worth mentioning. Which tantalized Herbie: What was her formula? Maybe she could teach him, if not to relate, at least how to defend himself when his neighbors started shooting bullets or chucking spears.
Also, in a way, Herbie had never met a less phony person. It got to him after a while, the fact that Stephanie waved no flags, had nothing to prove.
In the final analysis, though, it was probably her odor that nailed him to the cross. Stephanie smelled like freshly baked bread, sagebrush, and black tobacco: she chain-smoked French cigarettes called Gauloises, always blowing the smoke out with dispassionate and unselfconscious slowness, like a tired Depression farm woman (photographed by Dorothea Lange), or an exhausted, withdrawn whore. However she did it, her exhalations were sexy beyond belief.
So finally, more than anything else, that’s what wrapped a metal loop around Herbie’s heart and snapped the wire tight. My God, but he found himself almost crying out loud as she puffed her Gauloises during the volunteers’ weekly discussion periods!
Herbie fell in love.
He imagined Stephanie’s passion would be slow and lax and dreamy, unhurried and erotically vague, like warm moss in a southern swamp, not lush in the true sense of that word, but terribly profound.
Herbie was a romantic; he had loved Elvira Madigan; he had cried reading The Sorrows of Young Werther. In his daydreams, pebbles metamorphosed into sparkling rubies; chickens became peacocks; Stephanie Milligans dissolved into Greta Garbos. A day arrived, he popped the question: “May I come over to your place? Can I see what you’re doing?”
Stephanie shrugged, not unpleasantly, her face shifting from one vaguely preoccupied expression to another so curiously removed and yet unselfconsciously tender that Herbie’s heart did a back-flip, his guts began to ache, he was transformed into a carnal beast, a predator, a rapacious golem: tonight there would be a notching of pistols.
Together, with rolled-up towels under their arms, they hitchhiked into town from the KOA Kampground and caught another ride for several miles on the eastbound highway into Alamito. Stephanie lived in an old adobe farmhouse with eight empty rooms, a wood stove in the kitchen, and a refrigerator full of garden vegetables and chunks of goats, pigs, cows, and sheep donated to her by the neighbors. On raised screens beside the front door squash slices were drying. Graceful purple martins congregated around an elaborate miniature apartment house on a pole nearby. Chickens clucked lazily as they scratched in her yard; apples and pears were forming on fruit trees; fuzzily buzzing bees floated indolently through the lambent summery air; and, on the dirt roof of Stephanie’s bucolic mansion, radiant yellow sunflowers bloomed.
Herbie gawked at this serene woman who traipsed so placidly about her Shangri-la. They didn’t converse much as the peaceful afternoon waned toward suppertime. Shirt off, Herbie sat on a bench at a front-yard picnic table browsing through old Time magazines while Stephanie puttered around, doing her unobtrusive thing. Some local women involved in a day-care program came over and, speaking in hush-hush Spanish with Stephanie, they hung around for a while, occasionally laughing softly or smiling at Herbie who smiled back, amazed that these people could be so gentle and pleasant—what was the matter with Milagro? Or more to the point, what was wrong with Herbie Goldfarb?
The women departed. Some kids riding a horse bareback came by and shouted impertinently at Stephanie, who fed the sloe-eyed horse a carrot, ruffled the kids’ hair, then whimsically teased them while stroking the horse’s sleek neck—how could that Spanish language, which had always come on like a machine gun to Herbie’s ear, so suddenly be transformed by this lanky, shy woman into almost velvet, French-textured syllables?
By suppertime Herbie loved her so much it hurt. Whereupon Stephanie appeared—miraculously!—with steaming enchiladas, a bottle of homemade beer, freshly baked bread, and locally grown grapes. They ate while a church bell languidly rang the Angelus. Herbie had never been so smitten. He could barely look at her, afraid that on close scrutiny she might dissolve into sainthood and be blown like holy pollen into the sky. The few times he dared to look up, she looked up, too; her eyes drifting coolly, calmly, collectedly across his face, probing with a vapory lack of concern. Stephanie, aglow with a sort of ivory luster, ate like someone at home with food, at home with this place, at home with the weather, at home with the time of day—in tune with everything: life, strained through the aura of her personality, was a rhapsody in champagne.
Herbie sighed.
Tenderly he cupped his erection.
Stephanie drifted inside, returning with coffee that tasted of chicory and cinnamon. Its steam, curling through the windless evening air, caused Herbie’s nostrils to dilate sensually. Under the table their naked feet touched, they played a gentle game of footsie. It grew dark, the approaching night—languinous, honey-mellow, luminous—gleamed with a seraphic effulgence. It became time to go inside; they carried the dishes in to a sideboard and floated beyond, to her bedroom, coasting arm in downy arm onto her wide mattress on the floor, where they shed their clothes in a mystical trancelike manner, emerging into youthful nudity the way melodies are born.
They kissed: Stephanie’s lips radiated a celestial glow. She was the most even-tempered resplendent woman he had ever met. The pungent darkness, pregnant with intimate prickles, sparkling, too, bubbling like honeydew wine, flowed over their skin. She draped her arms around him. They pressed together, thighs, groins, stomachs, like slow-motion, enchanted ballet dancers. It was going to be like fucking a Madonna.
About eight feet away, in a dark corner, there was a sudden and violent snap! followed by a salvo of hysterical, tiny bloodcurdling squeaks, then a skittering, scuffling, scraping, frantic bouncing little scramble, all of which caused Herbie to stiffen abruptly in an attitude of abject terror.
“Don’t worry,” Stephanie cooed. “It’s only a mouse.”
The scuffling weakened, the scraping stopped, a last pathetic squeak—like a miniature champagne cork—was ejected into the darkness. And a small whiff of death, like a wisp of cigarette smoke, drifted through the gentle gloom, slid swiftly between their bodies (causing her nipples to stiffen), rose to the windowsill, curled outside, and was dissipated on a wholesome apple blossom breeze.
Herbie was paralyzed for thirty seconds. Then gradually, untensing muscle by painful muscle, he slumped against her, his hard-on gone.
They waited. Stephanie had all the time, all the patience in the world. Lightly, her fingers stroked his shoulder blades; quietly they plucked the long hair scruffing his neck. Slowly, he became aroused again, their lips met like butterflies in a flowery glen, they entwined spiritually and bodily in a long, smooth embrace. Honey replaced the blood in Herbie’s woozy veins.
Farther away this time, though still emphatically, there sounded another snap! that stabbed like a steel-tipped arrow driven from a hundred-pound bow into that part of Herbie’s spine located between his shoulder blades. The frantic and all too graphic squeaks, scuffling, and scraping followed, and when she felt him go rigid Stephanie again explained: “Don’t worry, it’s only a mouse.”
“What do you mean, ‘It’s only a mouse’?”
“This place is crawling with mice,” Stephanie said.
“So … so what do you do?” Herbie stuttered. “You set traps all over t
he place?”
“Sure. I’ve been catching five or six mice a night.”
Herbie rolled off her and lay on his back, staring at the ceiling. Sitting up, Stephanie lit a cigarette and blew her first exhale out across his stomach. Reaching down, she lightly stroked his penis, handling it the way she might handle a baby rabbit. But nothing happened: every muscle in Herbie’s body except his penis was so rigid that if she had chosen to pluck him he would have reverberated like a giant guitar chord. Leaning far over, Stephanie sucked his limp nub into her smoky mouth … just as another snap! and death struggle took place in the nearby kitchen.
“I’m sorry,” Herbie bleated hysterically, leaping to his feet, “but I better leave now if I wanna catch the nine o’clock bus!”
And their love, so immortal a moment ago, died in an instant like a little mouse.
* * *
For years the Pilar Café basement had been decorated more or less like an Edwardian brothel, with one-dimensional naked trollops, rather than real whores, debauching around on feed calendars, and framed Playboy centerfolds lining the golden walls. Off in a corner a small bar carried essential bottles of bourbon, Scotch, and some wine; a little refrigerator was always well stocked with beer. In the center of the thickly carpeted room, directly beneath an adjustable ceiling lamp, was a large round table covered with green baize. On any given late afternoon or evening, up to a dozen serious men might be seated around this table intently playing cards—poker, blackjack, monte, hearts, even bridge occasionally, you name it. And it was the habit of these men to wager rather heavily upon the cards they held.
In short, the Pilar Café’s basement was a gambling den.
By and large, only regulars inhabited this casino. Harlan Betchel, of course; and Bud Gleason; the Enchanted Land Motel manager, Peter Hirsshorn; and occasionally Peter’s brother Jim, Ladd Devine’s mouthpiece, drove up for the game. Ladd Devine himself had never attended a session; and Horsethief Shorty Wilson was persona non grata because although everyone knew he cheated, nobody could catch him at it; hence, Shorty was impossible to beat. Sometimes Jerry Grindstaff muddled ponderously through a game, but most players considered him too morose to begin with, and they grew gloomier as he grew gloomier as his losings inevitably multiplied. Therefore, Jerry G.’s attendance was discouraged in any way possible.