“Empty beer cans,” said Jimbo, while snipping away at what was left of my hair.
“Could be anybody’s,” I shrugged.
“Oh yeah, get this—rag, used.”
“You mean like for the period?”
Jimbo nodded, a big grin across his stupid face. “Could be anybody’s,” he repeated. “Donner’s sure it was hers.”
“Oh yeah, did it taste like her?” I said, appealing to Jimbo’s subtle sense of humor. It worked. He about took an ear off, he was laughing so hard.
I couldn’t help thinking about her, at least whenever I drove past the Circle K, which was all the time. She hadn’t slipped through my fingers. I saw her, that’s all. Plenty of people had. She was always there, sipping a beer or a cherry Froster, smoking, minding her own, watching the traffic go by. I wondered if she had plans, dreams, a past. I guess everybody has a past. It was her present that sucked. Not much of a life. Who can blame a woman like that for sneaking into houses? Seeing how we lived gave her something to do. I blame myself for what happened because I’m the one that made a big deal out of it. I’m the one who tagged her as a cat burglar. I’m the one who brought Don Donner into it.
Kimberly Miller was lying on human skin, warm, moist, a chest moving up and down beneath her own. How long had she been here? No matter, it was nice. She kept her eyes closed. Better not look at him too close, there was no telling what she was cuddled up to. She used the same technique she had used when at Bernard’s—she had developed the ability to see without seeing. She could, for example, put on makeup without really looking at her face. She could walk by mirrors, shop windows, anything with a reflection, without seeing herself. It was better that way. She did remember things, though. She remembered handing money over in the dark, she remembered the small packet in her hand. She remembered an arm around her shoulder.
Suddenly she had a boyfriend! Who’s a ratface now? Ha ha. She liked having an arm around her, she liked being led this way and that, to a car, to a park, to blankets. There were stars and cicadas and she felt so good it was as if her whole body had become a young, lovely vagina. This is what God must be like, this arm around me. What is the matter with people? She had giggled at the thought last night, and the night before, and the night before that, when no one needed to sleep or to eat. If everyone got some of this there would be no wars, no murders, no sadness. Everyone would be a vagina and live free. She felt the sun on her face. The desert sun she knew too well, the thing that reveals everything that should be kept hidden. She could feel it burning her through the leaves, each ray a laser beam. She had to move, go find some real shade.
She opened her eyes a little bit, just enough to see through her eyelashes. Not too old, and in his sleep he appeared beautiful. Thank God he was beautiful. There he was again, God.
She managed to extract her arm from under him. He grumbled but continued sleeping. Standing up was difficult, but she clawed at a tree and it was as if the tree wanted her to get up, it stood strong for her. She felt her body—parts ached but she didn’t have to pee. Okay to get up, okay to walk. She couldn’t recall the last time she’d peed, she couldn’t remember how many days had gone by—could be two, could be twenty. She walked in the scorching sun. There was nothing anywhere. She thought of her homes, with her mom, with Bernard, her room at Betty’s.
None of them had been her home. A person without a home was always disoriented.
She looked up to the mountain that had always centered her, but the mountain was gone. Where the hell’d the mountain go? The sand was gritty and packed with boulders and the kind of trees nobody loves.
Her thoughts furiously arranged themselves into coherence, switches flipped, lights went on. Vision came into sharp focus and she regretfully knew where she was: back in Anza. Fuck me.
How did this happen? There was a vague memory of the back of a car and curves and a sense of nausea, stopping to barf. Just as well, she could always get money here without tending beejays. Her knees cracking and her guts wrenching, she pulled herself upright and headed for the comfort of the Circle K’s parking lot. She’d figure it out there. It was a good place to make a plan. Her brain hissed and sputtered with every step. Someone was walking behind her so she strengthened her resolve. The scent of goats and a tapping sound followed her, tap tap tap. Closer. Closer. And then she felt it, the pain, the back of her head, her body pitched forward, dropping fast, hard, and for good.
“Ah, but you’re a sad fuck of a creature,” Don Donner said with an uncharacteristic touch of sorrow as the cat burglar of Anza writhed in pain on the desert floor. The hair was still banana yellow but the rest of her looked like someone had taken a hooker, buried her alive until she died, then dug her up and brought her back to some sort of life. He’d hardly touched her with the cane and down she went.
Kimberly’s thoughts sliced through like ice shards: Go back to Betty’s, be a good mom to Carol, change Carol’s name to Destiny so you don’t hate her every time you look at her, divorce Bernard and take no money, talk to Eric about a job at Chica’s in Coachella, stay straight. Get a home of your own.
Forget Anza by never talking about it.
EVERYTHING DRAINS AND DISAPPEARS
BY ROB BOWMAN
Bermuda Dunes
“Do you have a better plan?”
I didn’t.
“Then this is the plan,” Monique said.
We were broke, sitting at the counter in our apartment, a tilting slab that the ad had said was a breakfast nook but was really shellacked and cracked plywood that managed the gloomy trick of always being damp, always, 115 degrees outside, AC broken, water shut off for not paying the bill. But everything in that place still clammy and sticky, damp without cooling or quenching, like a board made of swamp.
Meanwhile, you drive up and down through the desert and every gated community here sucks down electricity, whirls their AC turbines as the windmills churn just next to the mountains, the wind slamming down the slopes and crushing along the fans, chopping down the birds. Not that I care. I wonder about coyotes running along there, eating the obliterated birds.
Fly through this valley and get knocked down and eaten.
Ever seen the entrances to those neighborhoods? Waterfalls of the clearest water you’ve ever seen, crashing and slamming down or tripping down little stone steps or shooting straight up, and burbling down. Endless gallons of it in the desert in front of the homes of men who haven’t gotten it up without prescriptions in decades.
Those entrances.
Those gates.
Guard booths and cameras, spiked walls, sign-in sheets, parking passes.
I didn’t have a better plan.
We went to the library where you can get on the Internet for free and we were a hundred bucks and a half-hour drive away from a used massage table. I call Monique “Mo” and she says she doesn’t like it, but she never tells me not to say it. I thought it was cute but maybe not. We talked the old lady down to seventy-five because it was all we had, and she could tell we meant it. She looked Mo up and down, rubbed her craggy face with her gnarled knuckles, nodded but it made her whole body move up and down because of how her back was bent and humped. She looked at Mo and asked if we needed lotion and oil bottles. They looked disgusting. We took them.
“Get what you need, honey,” the old lady said.
We didn’t know what she meant but we knew what we needed. And we intended to get it.
Between us, Mo is the smart one. And the driven one. And the tougher one. So, what do I bring to the table, or to the cracked bar top? I exist. I show up. It’s more than most guys, Mo would say. It didn’t feel like much of a compliment.
We met not quite three years ago, when she came through the burger place where I worked as little as possible while selling weed to the other people who worked there. I was sitting at a Formica table on my break when I saw her come in with a friend. I liked her right away and I offered her a joint.
“How much?”
&nb
sp; “It’s a present.”
“Why?”
“’Cause I want to.”
Later she would tell me that was why she took it and why she gave me her number. Because I said I wanted to. She thought it sounded cool. What the hell did we know? You know what happened then or can figure it out.
It was good. It was really good. The furniture was old and lumpy, but we never noticed, curled up, smoking up, watching the TV and people living bigger than us, but it never seemed better than what we had. I’d cook her dinner; she’d do the dishes. We were happy. She would push me onto my back and lean over me, her long, dark hair falling over the edges of her face, like a curtain closing us in, our own little escape. Her hair would tickle my face and my chest, then fall more heavily onto me as she leaned closer, until she’d kiss me or blow a cloud of smoke into my mouth or both. It was really good.
And then six months goes by, a year. And we are doing okay. It’s not like when we first hooked up but it’s okay. Then I get fired but so what, the pot floats us by and her job answering phones for the extermination shop runs out when the owner goes to jail for poisoning some guy whose wife he was fucking or something, I don’t know, just that a hell of a lot of bug spray ended up in some guy’s body and he died something horrible, leaking from his goddamn eyes. So that job ends but we are okay.
Then the legal pot shops open and all the weed dealers are investment bankers and guys with MBAs and a clean criminal record to stand behind a counter, and I don’t know anybody with that where I come from.
And I’m not dealing in anything heavy. That’s how you find your way to the wrong side of the Loco Burros or the Bang Bang Boys, and last time I checked I don’t have an army.
And that’s how we started to get thin.
And that’s when Mo came up with her plan.
“Don’t you need like a license or some shit?”
“Who’s going to ask?” she said. “We’re not opening a shop somewhere, some fucking store. It’s just a drive and that’s it. Knock knock, motherfucker. Give a back rub and get out.”
“Is it safe?”
“How do you mean?”
“You are just going into some guy’s house,” I said, “and it’s just you and him? A stranger? I don’t like that. Seems way too fucking dangerous.”
“What are they going to do? Chain me up? You will be right outside. If I don’t come out, you call the cops. Or just charge right in, tough guy.”
She kissed me on the cheek and I felt a little better but not much.
We get the table and then it’s another trip to the library to post an ad online after we both sell plasma at the clinic for a little extra cash. Between us we got fifty bucks, a few stale cookies, and two miniature cups of apple juice. At the library we read a bunch of ads before we posted ours.
Sensual In-Home Massage. Satisfaction Guaranteed. We found a picture of someone who kind of looked like Mo, close enough to avoid someone flat out saying it wasn’t her even though it wasn’t actually her. Posted it with the phone number of a little burner phone we bought with the absolute last of our cash on our way to the library, after having bought a bottle of generic baby oil and a couple washcloths from the dollar store.
The fucking dollar store has everything you need to begin your own disgusting little start-up. Aisle after aisle of toxic plastic and stale food and discount Bibles. You ever seen someone buy one of those Bibles from the dollar store? Me neither.
Then we just waited for the phone to ring.
I drove.
Those first houses, those first guys, are all a beige, lumpy blur in my mind. I’d stop, help her get the table out of the back as she slung her bag over her shoulder, then get back in the car, lean the car seat back while she went and rang the doorbell or knocked or whatever. I would peek up, curious about these men. They were always men. They answered their doors in sweat suits, robes, khakis, football jerseys, without shirts. One guy in a full suit and tie. One guy with what looked, I swear to God, like a cape. Then I’d lie back in the car with the motor and the AC running, listen to music or sleep. Daydream. Worry.
I didn’t ask until after the third one. Because I already knew and I didn’t want to know.
“What happened in there?”
“What do you think?” Mo was double-checking the money. One hundred per hour and a forty-dollar tip. “Rubbed him down. Listened to him talk about a lot of nonsense. I’m pretty sure he was lying about all of it. Trying to sound cool or something.”
“Then what?”
Mo turned to look at me. “What are you asking?”
“Are you doing anything else? Who pays that much for a fucking massage?”
“Did you read the ad? It said sensual massage. What do you think happens?”
“You tell me.”
“Don’t boss me. You don’t own me. Who’s paying for your fucking lunch?”
“I drove. I did something.”
“Fuck you, you did something. You didn’t have to jerk off some guy, folding his gut up with one hand while you jerk him off with the other. Listen to his bullshit while wiping off your arm. Fuck you. What did you think was happening in there? Or did you just need to hear me say it? Is that what you want?”
I didn’t know what I wanted. I just drove on. We had another lined up for after lunch. And I still drove her there.
At night I would massage her hands and her forearms and her shoulders. She was sore all the time. I thought about her washing those hands, what she was washing off, I thought about the hunched-over old woman and her hands like tree roots. She told Mo to get what she wanted. I wondered what Mo wanted and if she was getting it.
I understood how it was and how it was reversed at night, me rubbing down Mo after a day of pulling and pressing flesh. Her sex drive pretty much disappeared. And so did mine. Then some days she would be all charged up, needing to fuck, to grind down against me until she came. She’d turn my face away, tell me to stop breathing, to not exist until she was done. Or she would hold my face with both hands and stare into my eyes and we’d feel fully in love. Then she would finish and curl up against me. Or she’d finish and leave for the couch. Or she wouldn’t finish and she would stomp out of the room and stand naked in front of the open refrigerator, the cool air chilling the sweat on her.
One time, as she stood naked in front of the fridge, I told her that having the door open would cool her off but the rest of the room would get hotter, that that’s how it works—it seems better but just gets worse all of the time.
“Shut up,” she said. “Go to bed.”
* * *
Then one day she said she had a new plan.
“You need to start pulling your weight,” she told me. “And we need to pull in more money.”
We were in a nicer place. New cell phones. No more going to the library to post ads. Bought a fancy new camera to get shots of her that would bring in more money, went out to eat, bought our pot from the places that had put me out of business. She’d chew down a gummy before going into the houses of the repeat guys she thought were disgusting. I hated those days. She’d lose track of time on the job, anything could happen. I had stopped asking questions, but I hadn’t stopped wondering.
“I hate these guys. Every one of them. I hate their stink. I hate when they touch me. It needs to be worth it. And that means we need to go bigger.”
“What does that mean?” I said. “Raise your rates? We could but we’d lose a lot of people. Probably just come out even in the end.”
“No. We need to make sure they tip more. Lots more. We need to get you better with that camera. And we need to get you some dark clothes.”
It wasn’t a sophisticated plan. I’d drop her off, unload the table, lie down, and wait, like always. Then, halfway through the massage, when she went to get the hot towels to wipe them down, she would open up the curtains, just enough for me, now hiding in the backyard, to get a shot with the long lens, a shot of them getting jerked off while rubbing her ass, make sur
e to get their faces, make sure to get their cocks, make sure to get wide shots and make sure to get close-ups, make sure it is obvious what is happening, make sure who it is happening to.
Then I’d text her the pictures.
She’d finish the job, collect, and ask for more. Then show them the pictures. Say she noticed the tan line from the wedding ring that was now sitting next to the bathroom sink. Say their wives might want to see these pictures. Say their bosses might want to see these pictures. Say that their HOA would probably be interested in these pictures. The HOA thing scares the shit out of rich people. It’s crazy. Then she collects more. She’ll take a personal check, sure. Write it out to cash. If it bounces or if it’s canceled, she still has those pictures.
And it worked.
Who were they going to tell? What would they say? They’d pay out.
And for some reason, there was still repeat business. They seemed to think it established something, made her safer in some way, made it certain she wasn’t a cop. They’d tip big and call again. Some guys seemed to love it, the danger of it, the torture of it. They wanted to see the pictures, asked her to be even meaner to them. That was mostly in Indian Wells, where the richest of the rich live. Something demented going on over there. She was asked to work a party there once. Turned out to be an orgy. They set up a room for her with her table in the middle and audience seating all around. She told me all about it. A crystal bowl for tips, larger bills for taking suggestions. I never saw the insides of these places, just slices through the curtains, backgrounds to all of that skin and hair.
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