We Should Have Left Well Enough Alone

by Ronald Malfi

  “Hello!” boomed the man.

  “So nice to finally meet you both!” cried the woman.

  Lisa smiled at them wearily. Mark paused to shake their hands. To his surprise, the woman leaned in and kissed him on the corner of his mouth. The kiss lasted longer than it should have, and although it was dry and unobtrusive, she exhaled into his nostrils before pulling away. It was like tasting her breath. Instantaneously, Mark felt an erection threaten the front of his pants.

  “I’d love to see the upstairs,” the woman said to him, her stare hanging between them like cabling.

  “In just a minute,” he said, excusing himself, and dragging Lisa into the kitchen.

  “Do you mind if we put on another pot of coffee, Lisa, dear?” said Betsy, coming up and breathing in Lisa’s face.

  “Well,” Lisa said, her eyes skirting the room. “Do you think people will—”

  “You’re a peach!” said Betsy, then twirled away to address the coffee pot on the kitchen counter.

  “I’m exhausted,” Lisa moaned to Mark again. “It’s got to be close to midnight.”

  “The clock is dead,” he told her, glancing up at it again. Only now, it read 8:42 p.m. As he stared, he could see the second hand moving at nearly imperceptible increments. “Or,” he amended, “it’s nearly dead.”

  “Excuse me,” Lisa said to Betsy. She pointed to the woman’s sparkly gold wristwatch. “What time do you have?”

  “Oh!” Betsy cooed. “Don’t tell me you two are bushed already!” The woman glanced at her wristwatch. “Why, it’s not even nine yet!”

  Lisa said, “I’m sorry—did you just say it’s not even nine yet? Nine o’clock?”

  “This coffee smells so good,” Betsy said with a wink, then turned back to the coffee pot. She began shoveling spoonfuls of coffee into the percolator.

  From the parlor, someone shouted Mark’s name. When Mark turned, he saw a man he did not know waving him into the room. “I hear you’re a regular Liberace!”

  Mark just shook his head, a drawn expression on his face.

  A woman in a dark blue beret appeared in front of Mark and Lisa and said, “I think you were a bit premature putting the food away. Do you mind if I break it back out? The Wilsons haven’t even shown up yet, and they’ll be ravenous!”

  Lisa just blinked at the woman dumbly.

  “Have at it,” Mark interjected, then dragged Lisa out into the hallway.

  Yet the hallway was cluttered with people, too. Hands extended to shake theirs, to pat their backs, to congratulate them and welcome them to the neighborhood. Again, those invisible fingers gave Mark’s abdomen a pinch. This time he whirled around to address the culprit…but found himself staring at a wall of tightly-packed people, any of whom could have been the violator.

  Claustrophobia tightening around his neck, he pulled Lisa toward the staircase. Together, they bounded up the stairs to the second floor…yet froze at the top of the stairs as they saw the queue of people standing in the upstairs hallway. Wide eyes peered into the bedrooms. People murmured as they examined the bathrooms, the hall closets. A man in a tweed sports coat and a corduroy necktie stood before one open closet door, one of their bath towels in his hands. As Mark and Lisa watched, the man brought the towel to his nose and sniffed it.

  “Enough,” Mark called out. “It’s getting late. We’re going to have to ask that we at least keep the party downstairs. We’d appreciate it if—” But he cut himself off when he realized no one was listening to him.

  “Mark,” Lisa said, and touched his arm.

  Angry, he stormed back downstairs—

  “Mark!”

  —and shoved through the guests in the hallway on his way to the front door. It took nearly a full minute for him to reach the door, grasp the knob, yank it open.

  A man and a woman stood on the stoop, a platter of cookies in the woman’s hands. They both smiled warmly at Mark, their teeth big and bright. Mark could see lipstick on some of the woman’s teeth.

  “Ah,” said the man. “You must be Mark Schoenfield. Welcome to the neighborhood, old sailor.”

  Hands grabbed Mark around the forearms. Fingers snatched at his shirt and the legs of his pants. He craned his neck around to see the ghoulishly smiling faces of the men from the parlor breathing down his neck.

  “You’re quite the virtuoso,” said Bob O’Leary. There was spinach dip stuck in his teeth. “Come play us that horror theme again, will you?”

  Mark yanked one of his arms free.

  “Aw, come on, now,” Bob said, frowning playfully. “Don’t be a spoiled sport.” Bob checked his wristwatch. “It’s early yet.”

  Lisa appeared on the stairwell. Mark met her eyes. She opened her mouth to say something to him, but was immediately approached by the young couple who had come through the patio door and requested a tour of the house. Mark saw Lisa shake her head. Nonetheless, the couple advanced on her, ascending the stairs. Lisa slowly backed away from them, moving up the stairs herself. She glanced one last time at Mark before her head disappeared beyond the ceiling. He watched her legs move backward up the stairs as the couple continued to advance on her.

  Bob O’Leary and some of the other men dragged Mark through the kitchen toward the parlor.

  “Seriously,” Mark said, trying to shrug them all off. “I’m in no mood to play. It’s late. Everyone needs to go home now.”

  “Coffee’s on!” Betsy trilled from the counter. A wave of people flowed toward her.

  “Late?” Bob O’Leary said. Then he pointed to the clock above the kitchen sink. “What’s the matter with you, Mark?”

  The clock read 8:50 p.m.

  “That clock is wrong,” Mark said. He gripped the countertop and kicked at some of the more aggressive hands. They let him go. “It’s late,” he said, his breath coming in labored gasps now. “That clock is wrong.”

  Bob O’Leary’s face seemed to crease down the middle with frustration and, Mark thought, something akin to anger, too. He thrust his wristwatch in Mark’s face. Mark stared at the digital numbers. “Is my watch wrong?” Bob O’Leary wanted to know. “Is it, Mark?”

  Bob O’Leary’s watch read 8:50 p.m. As Mark stared at it, he saw the dual numbers indicating the seconds hang on 32. As he watched, the seconds did not change…did not change…did not change…until finally the 2 turned into a 3. It took what felt like a full minute for one second to tick by.

  Mark shook his head.

  “So,” Bob O’Leary started up again, that cheerful smile back in place, “how about regaling us with some tickling of the ivories?”

  “Oh, yes!” chirped a woman in a houndstooth scarf. “That would be lovely!”

  The hands returned, gripping him high up on the forearms, at the wrists, around the waist. Someone clenched him hard high on the thigh. Bob O’Leary winked at him…then reached down and tweaked Mark’s penis through the front of his pants.

  Upstairs, something heavy tipped over and smashed to the floor. A moment later, someone cranked the volume on the iPod.

  “No!” Mark shouted as his guests dragged him toward the parlor and the piano. “No! Leave me alone! Let me go!”

  “It’s so early, Mark,” Bob O’Leary said.

  “We’ve got all the time in the world,” said another man.

  “All the time in the world,” the woman in the houndstooth scarf echoed.

  Mark Schoenfield screamed.

  “Party pooper,” Bob O’Leary said, laughing.

  Some of the men stood around the bar, drinking heavily. The air in the café smelled strongly of perfume and flour and hops from the beer. There was plenty of beer on the bar and many of the men had gotten quickly drunk. The French prostitutes stood within the huddle of men, feigning innocence and susceptibility. They were all susceptible. The soldiers, too.

  Chupacabra

  I am a nervous wreck coming into Salinas Cove, my sweaty hands slipping on the steering wheel. I have come from Durango, down through Mesa Verde and acr
oss the Rio Grande toward Las Cruces, and the air is warmer. Even at twilight.

  I peer through the windshield at the oncoming darkness.

  It is a rundown motel outside the city. An illuminated sign promises its employees speak English. I pull into the parking lot and turn off the engine. It ticks down in the silence. There is less light out here, outside the city. Mine is the only car in the parking lot.

  The girl who signs me in is dark-skinned, pretty. She definitely does not speak English. I scribble my signature on a clipboard and fork over my driver’s license. Behind the counter, a wall-mounted television set flickers with the black-and-white, static-marred image of Cary Grant.

  And for a moment, I zone out. I hear the man with the ironworks teeth saying, You do not look like him. He says, Your brother—you do not look like him. Yet he extends his hand anyway—

  The room is bleak, tasteless, the color of sawdust. The shower stall is filthy and ancient, and there is the distinct impression of a foot stamped in grime on the shower-mat. Sketches of hunting dogs and wind-blown cattails cling to the walls in spotty frames. The bed looks miniscule, like something from a child’s fairytale about a family of bears, and it is packaged in an uncomfortable-looking bedspread adorned with fleurs-de-lis. The ghosts of cigarettes haunt the room. Yet none of this troubles me at the moment. I stand in the center of the room and look at the miniscule bed and am nearly knocked over by the sudden strength of my exhaustion.

  Immediately, I strip. I go straight for the bed and do not turn down the comforter and do not turn out the lights, for fear cockroaches will trampoline on my body in the dark. So I remain in bed, my hands behind my head, listing to my own heartbeat compete with the chug of someone’s shower through the wall. And despite my utter exhaustion, I cannot find sleep.

  I am thinking of the man with the ironworks teeth, and how he extended to me a set of pitted brass keys. Keees, he pronounced it. Keees, chico. And then I think of my brother, of Martin, and the way he looked after returning from the Cove, like some vital fluid had been siphoned from him. When he first saw me at the trailer park, he tried to smile, but his smile was all busted up, his lips split, his teeth jagged. His eyes were bulbous, swollen, amphibian in their protrusion. They did me real good, bro. Sure they did. Sure.

  Somehow, I become hostage to a series of dreams. They all have the sepia-toned quality of old movies. Shapeless, hair-covered creatures shuffle along the periphery of a nightmare highway; each time I try to look at them, they break apart into glittering confetti.

  At one point, I awake. I think I hear Martin talking somewhere in the distance. He speaks with the marble-mouth distort of a stroke victim. Because I cannot sleep, I rise and do calisthenics just beyond the foot of the bed in the half-gloom. I am too wired to sleep.

  Before I know it, morning breaks through the half-shaded window across the room. I shower with the dedication of a death row inmate. Brushing my teeth with my finger, I try to think of old songs on the radio to hum, but I cannot think of anything.

  With some detachment, I dress. And it is still early morning by the time I’m back in the car. I drive for some time without seeing anything, then finally pull over at a gas station to refill the tank. I purchase a cup of black coffee and a chocolate chip cookie nearly the size of a hubcap. The gas station is practically a ghost town; only a mange-ridden mutt eyes me from across the macadam. Back in the car, I drive for an hour and breeze by the twisted carcasses of chupacabra along the side of the highway.

  I glance out the window to my left and watch the mesas watch me. I’m surprised I haven’t seen any border patrol vehicles yet. This relaxes me a bit. I cross into Mexico with little difficulty, sticking to the route previously outlined for me by the man with the ironworks teeth.

  I pull into a deserted parking lot outside a diner somewhere west of Ciudad Juárez. An ice cream truck sits slumped and tired-looking in the sun, mirage-like in a halo of dust. The sun seems to be at every horizon. I park alongside the ice cream truck and step quickly from the car to survey the vehicle. It could be an elephant. Or maybe a bank safe. Its color suggests it was once a pale blue, the color of a robin’s egg. But both the desert sun and the passage of time have caused it to regress to a monochromatic gray, interrupted by large magnolia blossoms of rust and speckled with muddy chickenpox. Cryptic phraseology has been spray-painted along one flank. Reads, “Sho’nuf.” Reads, “Denis Does Daily.” Its windshield is grimy but in one piece and the tires, all four of them, look new.

  Inside, I sip a glass of tasteless soda while picking apart a sopapilla stuffed fat with beans that look like beetles. I wait. Soon, a young, scarecrow-faced man with a too-wide mouth and baggy dungarees materializes beside my table. He introduces himself as Diego. He seems friendly enough. He sits across from me and orders a 7-Up. To quell my nerves, he tells me about a helicopter ride into the Grand Canyon and how there is this entire Indian tribe living down there, just tucked away like a secret behind some waterfall, and I listen with mild interest. Then around noon, just when I think nothing is going to happen, I catch a glint of chrome on the horizon morph into a prehistoric Impala as it draws closer to the diner.

  “That’s him,” Diego says.

  His name is Caranegra and his face is indeed almost black as tar. He does not smile—not like the man with the ironworks teeth, the man who gave me the keees, chico—and he tries hard to be stoic when we first meet. He wears a tattered Iron Maiden concert tee which I find somewhat comical and his knuckles are alternately covered with tattoos and intricate silver rings.

  “I’m Gerald,” I say and am not sure if I should shake this man’s hand or not. I opt for a slight nod and leave it at that.

  Caranegra acknowledges both Diego and me with a grunt. “You are Martin’s brother?”

  “Yes.”

  “You do not look like him.”

  “Yeah, that’s what the other guy said.”

  “Pinto? Who gives you the keys?”

  “Yes. Pinto.” I hadn’t known his name.

  “You look nervous to me, boy,” Caranegra says. And before I can answer, he says, “Your brother, he was not careful. That is why his face looks like it does. He has been doing this for a long time, muchacho, and he got careless. If you get careless, then the bad things can happen. If you do not get careless, muchacho, you will not have a face that looks like his.”

  “I won’t be doing this for very long,” I say quickly. For whatever reason, I feel I need to make this clear. “I’m just working off what Martin owes.”

  “Why?”

  “Because he’s my brother.”

  Caranegra leans back in his chair. I can smell marijuana about him like body odor. His face is heavy with lines and creases, like a map that has been folded too many times, and I cannot tell if I am looking at a genius or an imbecile. “Martin, your brother, was not a stupid man,” he says. “He was a smart man. He just got careless. Did he ever tell you about his last crossing?”

  “Some of it.”

  “Not all?”

  “He told me enough. He just left some parts out.”

  “I would bet,” says Caranegra, “those are the parts that make him look careless.” And he smiles sourly.

  “I have to piss,” Diego says and rises automatically from the table. “Can we hurry this along? I’ve got things.”

  Caranegra watches Diego cross the diner and, when he is out of earshot, says, “He is my sister’s boy. He is the good kid.” Then he leans toward me over the table. Suddenly we are ancient friends and longtime conspirators. “How old are you?”

  “Twenty.”

  “You look younger.”

  “I can show you my driver’s license.”

  Caranegra waves uninterested fingers at me. “This is the delicate work, muchacho. Do you understand?”

  “You don’t have to worry about me.”

  “You have the map?”

  I remove a roadmap from my rear pocket and splay it out across the table. With a fat re
d thumb, Caranegra presses down on a section just southwest of Guerrero. “Debajo Canyon. Up here, then up here, then—do you follow? Then up here.” His eyes never leave mine. “But this is the delicate work, muchacho.”

  “You don’t have to worry.”

  Caranegra thumps his thick bronze fingers on the tabletop. Says, “Come with me.”

  Outside, he pats the side of the ice cream truck. “Pinto give you the route, no? The directions?”

  “Yes.”

  “That is the best route. Pinto knows all the best routes. You stay on that route and you will have no worries.”

  “What’s in the truck?”

  “Your brother was careless,” Caranegra says. “Also, he started to ask many questions.”

  Diego saunters out into the broad sunshine, hitching up his too-big dungarees. He smiles when he sees us as if happy to see old friends.

  “Diego will take you to Debajo Canyon to get the I.D.,” Caranegra says. “From there, you will travel alone.”

  Awkwardly, I move to shake his hand.

  Carangera just laughs. Says, “You do not look like him.” Says, “Get lost now.”

  No more than a minute later, Diego and I are kicking up dust in the ice cream truck, leaving the ruddy-faced Caranegra standing in the parking lot of the diner, his ridiculous Iron Maiden tee-shirt flapping in the breeze. The truck drives horribly, and I can feel every bump and groove in the roadway. It gives off the distinct aroma of burning steering fluid and someone has spilled M&M’s into the radiator ducts; they rattle like ball bearings from one side of the dash to the other with each sharp turn.

  Debajo Canyon is due south, near Guerrero, and we are closer to it now than I thought we were. Diego stares at the map and talks to himself and hums hair metal songs under his breath while drumming his fingers on his knees. Having driven all this way by myself, his presence is practically suffocating, despite the fact that we hardly speak to one another. Then, finally, Diego mentions Martin.

  “Did he ever tell you about this?” he asks. “About the job?”