Borderlands

by James Carlos Blake

  And it was a living, dammit, a real job, and she was supporting herself with it, and who woulda thought she could do that? The Burger Hut job was the only other she’d ever had, but she’d only been at it a couple of months before Aunt Rhonda suddenly decided that it was improper and made her quit. (“A decent woman’s work is in the home. The heart of the whore is forged in the marketplace.” That batty bitch.)

  On the day Shelton hired her she had asked if he knew of any place close by where she could rent a room, and he directed her to Miss Aurora’s, a boardinghouse for women, only three blocks from the restaurant. “I’m just saying it’s close by and it don’t charge a arm and a leg,” Shelton had told her. “I ain’t saying it’s the damn Hilton.”

  The place was a musty old two-story of peeling whitewash with a front yard gone to weeds and faded flowered carpets in the parlor. Except for a retarded girl of fifteen who was the live-in maid, Dolores was the youngest resident in the place by at least thirty years. The half-dozen others were all spinsters or widows. Most of them were usually roosting in the parlor whenever she passed through, and though they always nodded politely when she smiled and said hello, the smiles they showed in return were more like looks of pain. Through the cloying fragrance of their perfumes there always seeped the odors of old closets and turned milk. None of them ever received visits from men. Their eyes would follow her up the stairs when she came in, trail her to the door whenever she left for work. She knew damn well they talked about her, and the idea of it was a constant irritant. She figured that the landlady, Miss Aurora—a skinny fake redhead who looked like she got made up by an undertaker—had rented to her only to give the biddies something fresh to talk about. Juiceless, jealous old bags. She detested the place more than she could say, but it was all she could afford that was close enough to the restaurant to let her walk to work, so it would have to do for now.

  The other waitress on her shift was Rayette Nichols, a chubby middle-aged blonde who wore a girdle and the brightest red lipstick Dolores had ever seen. She was quick to laugh and had an easy way with the customers. In private, however, she admitted to Dolores that she didn’t really like the job all that much. After they got to know each other better, she confessed she’d “done a little flatbacking once upon a time—you know what I mean?—for a couple months up in Dallas, way back before I ever met my husband Henry.”

  It took Dolores a minute to understand what she meant—and then Rayette laughed at the look on her face. “Shoot, honey, it ain’t like I was committing robbery, for Pete’s sake. I wasn’t hurting nobody. Just the opposite. I was making fellas feel pretty damn fine, if I say so myself. I always gave dollar’s worth for dollar’s pay. Let me tell you, all them who look down their noses at it, they ain’t never been on their own and near to starving, you can bet on that.”

  Dolores was fascinated by Rayette’s tales of her hooking days in Dallas. Those days came to an end when a fellow grabbed her into a Lincoln Continental one night as she came out of a motel after doing a trick. The fella’s name was Victorio and Rayette had heard of him but thought the other girls had been making him up just to scare her. But he was real, all right, and she nearly wet her pants she was so scared. She’d heard he once put a cigarette lighter to a girl’s underarms. He told Rayette she had three choices: give him eighty percent of every dime she made from now on, or get out of town, or get nails put through her knees.

  “He was offering to be my manager, you see,” Rayette said. “That’s manager as in p-i-m-p. I didn’t even have to think it over. I was on the bus to San Antone that same night. Never done another trick again neither, no ma’am. I was lucky I got away with being a independent for as long as I did.”

  That had been a dozen years ago, and ever since, she’d stuck to waitressing. “But a place like this,” she said, looking around The Wagon Wheel. “There ain’t no future in it. Can’t make any money slinging chili to these clodhoppers and blowhards.” She said if Dolores was smart she’d get a job in a bar.

  “That’s where the money is,” Rayette said. “I oughta know. I worked most the best bars between San Antone and the border, and I mean to tell you, honey, I was raking it in before I married Henry. Especially out in Laredo. Them Laredo boys don’t know what to do with their money but piss it away in bars. Real good tippers, too. And I was good at my work, I ain’t lying. It’s something you can take a little pride in being good at, not like working in this place here with its two-bit tips. Why hell, even now, I lose me some of these extra pounds, and shoot, I’d be right back in business making gooood money.”

  She paused to light a cigarette, then cut a sharp look at Dolores. “So why don’t I do it, right? Henry—that’s why. Says he loves me just the way I am and don’t want me to lose a single solitary pound. He’s no lightweight, Henry. Always stuffing hisself with biscuits and gravy, fried chicken, slugging down beers—and getting me to pig out right along with him. Thinks I don’t know what he’s up to, keeping me fat so’s I couldn’t get a job in a good bar if I tried. He’s never said so, but I know he don’t want me working in the bars again. Jealous, he’s just flat-out jealous is what it is, even if he’d never in a million years admit it. I love him, you understand, but … well, sometimes he’s just such a dipshit.”

  She blew a stream of smoke at a wall calendar with a photo of a beautiful stretch of California coastline. “You know,” she said tiredly, “I’m still a young woman—damn if I ain’t. But I swear there are days now when I feel oldness trying to press up against me like some bold sonofabitch in a crowded bus. Pressing up on me and breathing on the back of my neck.”

  3

  On the day she got her eighth pay envelope she told Shelton she was quitting. He wasn’t surprised. “Fact is, you stayed longer than I’da bet on,” he said. When he asked who the fella was and she said there wasn’t any fella, he shrugged and said, “Right you are, sunshine, it’s none of my business. Luck to you.”

  She caught the early-morning bus to Laredo and arrived late that afternoon and treated herself to a motel room with a color TV and an air conditioner strong enough to frost your breath. There was a little machine attached to the bed and when she put a quarter in it the bed would vibrate gently. She lay in bed and watched TV and put three quarters in a row in the machine and wished she knew somebody she could call up on the telephone and tell about this. Before she knew it she was crying. She chided herself for a baby but it still took her a while to stop.

  The next morning she hiked out to the edge of town where she’d seen a strip of roadhouses as the bus came in. There were bars right there in town she could’ve tried, but they looked too dark and mean somehow, maybe because most of them didn’t have much in the way of windows. The roadhouses she’d spotted had plenty of windows and seemed the friendlier for it. But they were a lot farther out than she’d thought—and a lot farther apart. She worked up a good sweat and was honked and whistled at by several passing drivers before she finally came to a place called The Texas Star with a big sign out front saying BEER—FOOD—DANCING. She dried her face the best she could with a handful of tissues and dusted herself off and went inside. The bartender said they didn’t need anybody right now, thank you. The next two places said the same. One manager seemed real amused by her. “Come see me when you get dry behind them pretty ears, sweetheart.”

  She figured they thought she was too young, so at the next place, Sparky’s, she added two years to her age and claimed she was nineteen. The owner said he’d have guessed a tad older, if she didn’t mind him saying so. He gave her a job waiting tables, two o’clock to midnight, six days a week, starting today. She wouldn’t be serving much food, he told her; his customers were mostly drinking men. She almost hugged him, she was so grateful.

  She stopped at a laundromat on her way back to town and took a close look at all the handwritten ads posted on a bulletin board next to the dryers. Every laundromat she’d ever been to had a board like this. Sure enough, there were several notices for places
to rent. She asked a woman waiting for her clothes to dry, a tall sallow brunette with her hair in curlers, if she could tell if any of the rentals were nearby enough to walk to. The woman studied the ads as she pushed a squalling infant in a perambulator back and forth and a dirty-faced little girl of about three clung to her leg. She pointed to an index card written in red ink and advertising a two-room cottage, furnished and cheap. “That one’s just off the road about a quarter-mile down,” the woman said.

  Dolores used the pay phone to call the number on the card and spoke to a pleasant woman who gave directions and told her to go on out and have a look at the place—the door key was under the potted cactus plant on the back porch. If she liked it, call back and they’d settle.

  Dolores thanked the brunette for her help and started for the door and the woman asked if she was going to be living out there by herself. Dolores said she was. The woman looked down at the children, both of them now bawling for her attention. She seemed weighted with an exhaustion that could never be rested away. “Sounds nice,” she said.

  Three hours later Dolores was in the ladies’ room at Sparky’s, putting on a touch of lipstick before starting her first shift ever as a barroom waitress. She couldn’t stop grinning at herself in the mirror. A job and her own private place to live. Hot damn.

  Shoot, if she’d known it was gonna be this easy to get by on her own she’da started doing it long before now. Bet your ass.

  4

  Unlike the transients at The Wagon Wheel, Sparky’s patróns were mostly a regular crowd and lots of them worked together—ranch hands, construction workers, truckers, roughnecks. It was a rare Mexican who came in the place. Whenever any did, Sparky would unplug the jukebox and the room would get so quiet all you heard was throat clearing and chairs scraping on the floor as some of the old boys turned to give the Mexes some hard eyeballing. At such times Dolores always thought she heard something else too, a faint hum she seemed to feel rather than actually hear, a low keen humming of something to do with blood. None of the Mexicans who every now and then wandered into the place and ordered a beer ever stayed long enough to finish it. “Law says I gotta serve em,” Sparky said. “But it don’t say nothin about havin to be glad to see the sonofabitches.”

  Business was always light in the early afternoon, but then right at Happy Hour the guys would start arriving in bunches, dirty and sweaty and joking loud with each other. They were a lot more easygoing than the men she waited on at The Wagon Wheel. Most of the laughter she’d heard in the Wheel was nasty as spit, mean and bitter. But then, the guys in the Wheel had mostly been men on the move, rootless, men without women, men who were alone even in each other’s company. Naturally they’d been bitter.

  The men in Sparky’s laughed with a real sense of fun. Many of them were married and had families, or at least had a steady girlfriend, and some of them, to hear them tell it, had a lot more than one. Even some of the married ones (especially some of the married ones) liked to brag about how much fooling around they did on the side, although Dolores was pretty sure most of their bragging was just talk. All in all, they were a rough but likable bunch, and she surprised herself with the easy rapport she struck with them.

  She was a natural for the job. To the tables full of men she carried a breezy air of familiarity, a readiness to trade wisecracks and flirty banter. She soon worked up a whole catalog of retorts to their grinning propositions, an assortment of gentle rebuffs for the guys who were serious, and a set of firm putdowns for those who didn’t know when to quit. (“Hey bubba! I tole you bout them hands. Once more and I swear I’ll have those ole boys at the back table there see to it you stop doing what I don’t let them do.”) Whenever she was groped by a regular customer, which she occasionally and naturally was, she’d react with exaggerated shock but also with enough real indignation to keep the fondling from becoming anybody’s idea of a privilege.

  When she tended to a table of mixed company her approach was of course much more demure. She’d keep her smile bright but utterly unflirtatious, and she’d give most of her attention to the women. Even so, the mixed tables never tipped as well as the stags.

  She also learned fast how to deal with the solitary drinkers. A lot of these regulars liked a quick chat or a little gossip served up with their beer. Others took their drinking more seriously and just wanted to get on with it and never mind the bullshit. She learned when to laugh with the jokers, when to sing along with the guys who sang when they got drunk, when to nod sympathetically at those who never tired of telling their life’s sad story, and when to keep her distance from the guys who sooner or later started talking to themselves in accusatory tones.

  The only ones who really bothered her were the silent lookers. Solitary strangers who never smiled and rarely spoke except to order a drink. They almost never took their eyes off her. Even from across the room she could feel their stares trailing her like tracking dogs. These were the true loners, and almost every night one would come in. Sometimes he’d leave after just one or two drinks, sometimes he’d stay until closing. They hardly ever showed up in the place more than once, and only rarely did two of them come in on the same night. It was like they belonged to a club and that was one of the rules—only one to a bar on a given evening. There was something about them, something seething with restrained fury like it was pacing in a cage. They drank hard but didn’t seem much affected by it except in the eyes, which got brighter without gaining a thing in warmth. She avoided their eyes as much as she could—those cold hungry eyes that made her shiver.

  5

  Ten hours a day, from two o’clock till closing time at midnight, the job kept her busy and from thinking about things. Every night after closing she helped Wally the bartender clean up the place while Sparky tallied the day’s receipts in the back room. They’d sometimes all have a drink together at the bar before calling it a night.

  Sparky was over seventy years old and looked every day of it, his face dry and cracked from more than fifty years of working outdoors in the cattle business in North Texas, which Wally called Baja Oklahoma. He’d been married twice and had two daughters he never talked about except to say they were “a couple of damn tramps.” He liked to talk about his cattle days, though his tales of drives to Kansas when he was a youngster were more likely rooted in pulp fiction than actual biography.

  “The only cow Sparks ever really drove out of Texas was his first wife,” Wally told Dolores. “Drove her right into the arms of a string band player who liked his women hefty. I heard tell they run off to Missouri. Woulda drove his second wife away, too, except she caught the pneumonia and died before she could pack her bags.”

  Wally was in his early thirties and still hanging on to handsome despite his barroom pallor and a beer belly that would soon be sagging over his belt. When Dolores asked him if he was married he said, “That’s for me to know and you to find out,” so she knew he was. He finally admitted it—after she’d turned him down for a date every time he asked during her first couple of weeks on the job. He had two kids he was crazy about and he showed her pictures of them, a boy six and a girl four, but he never talked about his wife. He’d joke with the boys at the bar about women, and every now and then he’d ask Dolores with a big grin—and with a wink at the fellas—when she was going to ask him home for a drink “or something.” She’d give him an exaggeratedly vampish look with a lot of eye-fluttering and coo, “Well, I just don’t know, Wally honey. But play your cards right and one of these days you just might get real lucky.” The boys at the bar would laugh and encourage Wally to keep on trying and just generally ate the act up.

  On those nights when she joined them for a drink at the bar after hours, either Sparky or Wally would give her a ride home. But whenever she didn’t feel like sticking around, or whenever the two men chose to have one more for the road, she’d simply walk the two miles. She’d keep far off the shoulder of the road, preferring the risky footing of the dark uneven ground to the glaring attention of passing
headlights. She did not want anybody stopping to offer her a ride. Who knew when it might be a silent looker.

  The first thing she’d do when she got home was make sure the doors and windows were all locked and the window shades all pulled completely. And no matter how gritty she might be, she could not bear the idea of being naked and behind the shower curtain at that late hour of the night, and so she would not bathe until the following day. She would hurriedly slip into her long cotton nightgown and, no matter how hot the night, pull the bedsheet up to her chin. She dreaded the dark and would have preferred to leave a lamp burning, but she was afraid the glow of it might act as a lure to her window. Fortunately, she was usually so tired by the time she got home she had no trouble falling asleep before she was too scared to. And before the low moan of loneliness in the darkness rose to a sob.

  6

  Sundays were the worst. Her day off. She’d sleep as late as she could, until she couldn’t get back to sleep anymore and finally got tired of lying in bed. She’d take a long shower and wash her hair and then fix herself a breakfast of coffee and bacon and toast with apple butter. She would wash and dry and put away the dishes. She would dust the furniture and sweep and mop the floor. She’d wash her underwear in the sink and hang it on the shower rod to dry. She’d put the rest of her laundry in a pillowcase and hike to the laundromat and when she got back she’d put it all away neatly. She’d iron her clothes for work the next day. She’d spend a long time doing her nails. And all the while the portable radio would be playing—”Happy Together” and “White Rabbit” and “Love Is Blue.”