by Boston Teran
There in the living room, while Gabi slept the sleep of the innocent and protected, Sarah had taken their wedding picture in its scalloped silver frame, opened the desk drawer, and laid it away.
He hadn’t said a word as he watched, but he understood from the way she shifted her weight as she closed the drawer and took a slow, unpleasant breath. He had understood her look. Without one trace of apology. A look that had stillness and finality. The failure of the marriage, in that silence, had been squarely placed at his feet.
He has been shaken by tonight’s events. The proper orbit of his beliefs has shifted, and he is frightened.
He reaches for his wallet on the dresser and takes Gabi’s snapshot out from its place behind his new ID. The photo is all that is left of Bob Whatever’s previous life. He looks into the heart of the picture, and it devastates him to know she is no longer sleeping the sleep of the innocent and the protected.
Bob and Sarah swim under a summer sky that hangs above the lake like a perfect painting on the open wind. At the far end of the lake, in a small cove, shore willows bow like ballerinas at the end of a great dance. Bob and Sarah are both naked, and they float like great, lazy angels on charmed clouds. Her belly is two months shy of giving up Gabi to the world, and it rises out of the water like a pink, lucent sun at the dawn of all their dreams. Bob places his ear against her belly and listens for his unnamed child. The skin is warm and taut, and Sarah runs her fingers across her husband’s sandy hair and whispers, “Let’s walk a ways.”
They rise up out of the water, naked, and start through the woods. They walk hand in hand.
“Let’s go see the house,” she says.
Ahead is the cutline of the woods, and he can see the great earthmovers and trucks clearing the long rise of acreage that is becoming Paradise Hills. He suddenly is aware of the world around him.
“Come on,” she says.
“But our clothes are back at the …”
“We don’t need clothes.” She smiles. There is safety in her voice, and he follows.
They walk up the long dusty road, past surveyors and engineers and the boys laying out the concrete slabs for the first homes. A great train of workmen, sweating and drinking coffee, double-checking their depths and distances with plumbs and rods.
Bob and Sarah walk in the full throw of sunlight, unnoticed, and the light reflects off the chrome stacks of the dump trucks and sparkles like welding fire as the great wheels trundle past them and slowly gouge up the footprints they leave behind.
As they walk together, Sarah is alive and happy and Bob is ashamed and embarrassed that the men will turn and see him. They will see him naked, and they would see his wife naked. In the face of her purity, he becomes all too conscious of human sin.
They reach a small sandy lot, squared off with rope, at the rear of the development. On a stake planted into the ground is a tag. On the tag Bob and Sarah Hightower is written in Arthur’s hand.
They stand overlooking the dirt which is to become their home. She turns to him to speak. Her face has in it at that moment the legend of possibilities. It is lovely and warm and pink with youth. The life she bears shows in her eyes and skin, and her ethereal movements pull him into a sleep of wishfulness. Then in the cold dry dust of day she vomits blood.
He wakes to find the earth dark and the stink of the motel room all around him. He puts on a pair of jeans and, barefoot, walks out toward the road. He sits on the cinder-block wall and smokes, the red JO above his head. He is still wrapped up in the death sheet of the nightmare about Sarah.
He doesn’t know how long he’s been sitting there when he hears the gravel reefing, and then Case comes up and sits beside him. She carries half of a six-pack in its plastic harness.
“Couldn’t sleep?”
He doesn’t answer.
“I don’t ever sleep too good,” she says. “Junkie dues, I guess. Want a beer?”
He’s reluctant to take one. She presses the can toward him anyway in a kind of peace offering.
“Go on. I bought them off the manager of the place after we checked in. He’s an old pothead. We used to come out here when we lived in Escondido to buy pot from him. But he did a few turns in county, and now he’s a good old boy. Only grows a little weed for … medicinal purposes. He didn’t remember me too good but after a little cruise down memory lane his brain cleared up. I don’t figure you for a smoker so …”
Bob sits there like a photograph, looking out at the road, his eyes burning in his head. He could use a beer to wash down that dream, only he doesn’t want to go to her for it. But in the long run it’s do or do without, so he gives in.
Bob gets the first one loose from the harness and then glances in Case’s direction. She is sitting there with her legs pulled up and her cigarette arm dangling like a question mark off one knee.
“You want one?” he says.
“Oh-ho. Commandment number one: Junkies cannot do junk. Commandment number two: Junkies cannot do booze. From tequila on down to the beer chaser, all that’s left for me is the lime. Not even one of those friggin’ chocolates with the schnapps in ‘em. I could eat a box of those. But it’s all history.”
She sits back against the blue JOE. She kills the thought of a drink by counting stars. “I got an unnaturally consumptive personality,” she adds.
Bob gets down half a dozen good swallows before he comes up for air.
“The walls of that dump are no thicker than a rubber,” she says. “You can hear everything.”
She notes he will not and does not look at her. Even as he took the beer, his eyes managed to avoid her. And now they’re working the road. She bites her lip uncomfortably.
“I was sitting up in bed when I heard you come out. I was thinking. I was thinking, well”—she hesitates—“I was being a shit blaming you for what happened tonight.”
Bob suddenly finds himself turning to look at Case.
“By the way,” she says, “junkies are big on blame. I mean that’s a real trip for us. Junkies have to blame somebody when something happens. Blame is big fuckin’ business.”
Her face takes on the cold detachment of a judge’s. “You blame the failure of your relationships ’cause your daddy stuck his pee-pee in your mouth when you were five, or because instead of Mommy hugging you when you screwed up she took a pill and reamed your ass out. You blame the world ’cause you can’t get a better gig than being the french-fry girl at a McDonald’s. You blame strangers ’cause they don’t know you’re special or a star. You blame people you know for forgetting you’re special or a star. You blame fate when you don’t get what you want. And when you do, you blame fate for not getting you more.” She holds up her cigarette like a pointer. “A junkie will even blame the cigarette for lighting up the person.”
She rocks a bit. Her forehead wrinkles in the presence of the truth as she sees it. “Anyway, when I went into that trailer it was empty except for that big red stud stoned out of his mind in a back bedroom. He come to, and we got talking. He was pretty fucked-up, wanted some pussy. I gave him a little cha-cha about being one of Cyrus’s coolies. You know, just another lost chickie coming back for a little smoke and a pillow and some home cookin’. I could come off like I knew Cyrus pretty good, which of course I do.”
Bob is watching her intently now, and he sees a black cloud start to spread out from the center of her eyes and fill her whole face. It is like some disquieting eclipse. “It always amazes me,” she says, “how much you can get out of someone if you’re willing to put a lip-lock on their dick. It just goes to show you how little any of it means. I guess we’re all junkies in one way or another.”
Her voice is unbearably sad. “I fucked up back there. I didn’t think it all through, otherwise I wouldn’t have put myself … and you … in a position like that. Not with the girl out there and all, but …”
Her head comes around carefully, as if she is about to share a secret. “We didn’t come away empty.”
“What are you s
aying?”
“I’m saying … Red … made good with the tongue.”
“Cyrus?”
“Oh, yeah … been there. A week ago. He is working the border. Most of the pack with him I know. One …” She stumbles on that word, on using a faceless description like “one” for Lena. She goes on, avoiding for now what she feels will inevitably be a confrontation. “Most I know.”
Bob grabs her arm. “Was Gabi with them?”
“Fuck. How am I gonna get into a thing like that with him? Excuse me, Red, did Cyrus have this kidnap victim with him? A fourteen-year-old chick …”
Bob lets the arm slip away. “Yeah, you’re right.”
“This guy is just a house coolie. Keeps the furniture warm. You know. Passes messages.”
“Of course, you’re right, what am I thinking?”
“Well, don’t finish thinking till I finish talking. ’Cause I know who Cyrus is working the border with.”
“What?”
“I found out. His name is Errol Grey.”
“How?”
“I seen this message machine with all these messages on it. So … I start copping Red’s joint, get him nice and flushed. Then I … ‘accidentally’ kicked the machine on. And there ain’t ever no man who is gonna stop getting his joint copped to turn off an answer machine. Well, Mr. Errol Grey … Mr. Slick-Ass, Carry-My-Stool-Specimen, I-Never-Say-Please-and-Never-Say-Thank-You Errol Grey was getting a little anxious. There was lots of ‘Where are you, Babe?’ and ‘We need to talk, partner.’ ”
“You know where to find him?”
“Fuckin’ A. Errol put a lot of shit up my arm,” Case says caustically, “and I got your basic thermal package to zoom in on people like that.”
Case sits there listening to Bob toss out questions that she’s expected to answer, but all the while, each aggravated minute, she is pointed at one thought, one needling desire. She wants some slight acknowledgment for what she did. She knows what she did was chancy, even foolish. But still.
Bob is now star-wheeling on what comes after what comes next.
She begins to feel like one of those police informants. One of the necessary diseases of the times. She’s seen those empty-eyed souls on the border of life, who for a few bucks lay it all down so the bossman can make a bust that never ends up sticking. A few bucks under the table in a filthy envelope and then the wave of an arm to excuse them—but before they’re even up from the table, before they’ve even pocketed the Judas money, they can hear the soft conversation that precedes the hard snigger as Blue Boy gets his licks in.
Devalue the information you pay to get. Devalue that which brought it to you, and you don’t have to ask yourself the hard question: How come you couldn’t get it on your own?
She knows, of course, this is just the junkie in her trying to rat-bite the ex-junkie, trying to carve up her goodwill. That a serving of Bob Whatever’s shortcomings doesn’t have to end up on her plate for swallowing. She could let the hate get her off and look for a main vein to take it out on. Just a little pinprick, as Pink Floyd once said, and it’s sleepy time on Anxiety Row. But still …
So they sit there, like two ragged soldiers of the road, each locked into the puzzle of their lives.
23
Examining in a pocket mirror the deep fault lines that have grown up around the edges of her mouth and chin, Maureen remarks to herself in a resigned mood, “Ah well, maybe a steady diet of martinis and collagen is the answer.”
She snaps the mirror shut and sits by the bar at the dogleg end of her living room. She is a small gathering of one. She reaches for the Bombay gin and the shaker with freshly manicured nails and goes to work on number three and four in the batting order.
She looks out the glass windows that form the west wall of the living room. Her eyes drift over the terraced rows of the Paradise Hills tract which give way to a sun that isn’t yet pink. She quips, “I’ll be down before you will today, Mr. Sun.”
The phone rings. It’s her business line. Fuck ’em. Instead, those nails work the built-in wall console searching for a soft spot on the dial where she can get her shot of sixties music. She gives the gin and ice a few good turns, then tests those babies to make very sure they are bone dry.
She stares at the bar a moment. It has always been a sore spot in the decor. Her taste leans toward white, with hints of gold leaf or little splashes of color—notably red. She believes in the Three Musketeers of style: decorator fabrics, decorator carpets, decorator prices. There is a decided air of the Florentine and the rococo to everything she bought and paid for.
She enjoys her bad taste. Takes pride in it. It draws attention to her, singles her out, which she thrives on. It qualifies her in the most certain way of all, that she can well afford to be thought badly of. It always reminds her of the most tested need of all—that she, with her money, is in actual control of her life.
But that bar is John Lee’s pride and joy. It is chiseled from dark wood and rimmed with wrought iron. A hulking pseudo-antique with bar stools that have seats of cheap imitation black leather. Sometimes the black would rub off on a light skirt or pair of pants. Cut into the bar’s face is a conquistador helmet copied from the painting of a conquistador that came with the set and hangs dramatically behind and above a line of liquor bottles Maureen has nicknamed Murderers’ Row.
John Lee likes to say the bar gives him that old-world feeling. As if Coronado himself, or at the very least one of his prized lieutenants, had braced up, slapped down a handful of doubloons, and ordered a round for the boys. Then, after a couple of tall cool ones, they’d truck off into the Arizona desert for a few years’ hard target practice on a nation of defenseless digger Indians.
By the time number three hits the deck she’s got a good buzz on. She starts to mind-walk through the music, picking and choosing her memories as selectively as she would a dress for a first date, or a dance, or her wedding … An old Beach Boys tune … one of those girlie groups singing “Will You Love Me Tomorrow” … Percy Faith’s “Theme from A Summer Place.”
To her those songs represent a time of permanence. The time of the rock-ribbed world. Of simplicity squared. We were, she feels, a country that seemed to eat from the same plate, breathe the same air, look up into the same clear sky, and see the same God who looked down on us with His blessings, as we were the one people of His image.
Of course she knows this is all so much prepackaged memory. But she sits there anyway, a little drunk, a little teary-eyed, and she can’t help her suffering as she stares down at a picture of Gabi and Sam and Sarah. She can’t shake loose the feelings, and she won’t put away the photo.
There is nowhere to place all that. It stands in opposition to all things. She knows how much a broken heart is worth on the open market; she’s been trying to peddle one for years. But this does not alter her emotional view. That music, that music bleeds to the very heart of things. It gives her strength, even though she hates knowing that it enjoined them all in a cleverly cloaked fable: Illusion is at the center of all reality.
She’s got number three pretty much worked over when John Lee’s Caddy tires into the driveway. By the time he’s coming through the door, she’s got number three scored and number four poured.
John Lee tosses his keys down on a table in the foyer. He’s carrying a small folded garbage bag that looks like it might have a couple of videos in it. Stopping in the hallway at the far end of dogleg, he reads the signs: wifey dear at the bar, glass tinkling like the tail of a rattler warning him not to get too close. After a perfunctory hello, he turns and heads toward his study.
Maureen has noticed the bag under his arm and smirks. She turns to watch the smog help kick up a brilliant sunset. John Lee comes back into the room, around the bar, and pours himself a healthy Scotch.
“I talked to Arthur today,” says Maureen.
John Lee takes a drink, relaxes into a “so what” look.
“He says he hasn’t heard from Bob in about a week.”<
br />
“Bob is a fuckin’ idiot.”
Maureen’s tongue starts to rim the inside of her mouth. “Really?”
“Really.”
“As defined by whom?”
When she sits there like that, with her head cocked up and around and not moving, he is reminded of a deer that has been shot and stuffed.
“Is it true you offered Bob a situation managing the development?” he asks.
“Talk about old news.”
“So it’s true?”
“Yes. I felt that since … He needed a change, John. A healthy change. Arthur felt the same way, too.”
“Don’t consult me on this.”
“Consult you?”
“The boy works for me. It was me that got him the gig over a lot of … Just de-ball me at every turn, right.”
“Pass me the shaker and the gin, I have a feeling I’ll need a few close friends inside me.”
“Be your own fuckin’ bartender.”
“Okay.”
She gets up, comes around the bar. They try to make as much space as they can for the other, as if any contact would lead to ultimate contamination.
“You know, John Lee, when I first met you, back in the Paleolithic era, I found you modestly charming and weak. But like the polish on a cheap pair of shoes, your modest charm has scuffed away to leave you as you really are.
“Now, to your weakness.” Her tone drips with the malicious. “I didn’t mind it so much when I was young. There was something docile and sweet about it. Of course, I didn’t know any better, and in your uniform you surely gave out the wrong impression. Sometimes I actually believed you were sensitive. Imagine that … But your weakness by day brought out the mother in me, and at night, at night, it gave me ample opportunity to be on top.”
“You’re really putting it out there tonight.”
“I’m shooting to bat three for four, baby.”