Hot Springs

by Geoffrey Becker

  “What?” said Bernice. She was feeling worse and worse. Gillian was right—she’d only been thinking of herself.

  “It’s just you, I guess.” Gillian turned and looked at her with sad eyes, reminding Bernice of the first time she’d seen her. The skin around her neck was leathery from too much sun. “It’s just who you are.”

  “Could you please do something for me?” Bernice asked, suddenly feeling as if all the air was being sucked from her lungs. She stood up and held out her arms, trembling. After a few moments, Gillian moved toward her. Bernice closed her eyes and felt the softness of Gillian’s wet cheek against her face. But it wasn’t a real hug—Gillian embraced her the way people do a relative they hope will soon leave.

  THREE

  Landis spent his first day back in the Springs attending numbly to all there was to be done. His trailer was a mess, and he brought a couple of loads of stuff to Goodwill: boxes filled with clothes he didn’t wear, old shoes, kitchen things they’d replace eventually, once they were settled. A waffle iron he’d never once made waffles in went, as did a blender he’d used for a week for smoothies, before he decided they weren’t all that tasty. His previous girlfriend, Junebug, had liked them, and he’d always thought of himself as someone open to new experiences. He threw away magazines and old pizza boxes and catalogs from Pottery Barn and Banana Republic that only proved to him that those people had no idea who he was or where he lived.

  The bus ride up from Tucson was a reverse version of the same trip they’d just gone on, almost, and in Truth or Consequences, where there was a scheduled stop, he bought himself a coffee across the street from the place where he’d gotten rid of the Hyundai, though he didn’t see the car in the lot. Back on the road, with a scheduled arrival time after 1:00 AM, he allowed the vibrations of the wheels to hum him into a light sleep, as if he were attached to a speaker cone and the whole bus were its cabinet. He enjoyed public transportation. He liked how it was this system that was always there, always in motion—man-made, certainly, but even so, more like a tide or a wind—to which you could attach yourself for the price of a ticket and magically get shot out someplace entirely different. A wormhole, maybe. Eyes closed, he imagined trains and buses and planes slowly inscribing an elaborate, hieroglyphic pattern onto the entire country.

  His neighbors at the trailer park were mostly gone during the day, but the woman who lived just across from him kept vigil in her lawn chair under her awning, a beer and a cigarette going at all times. Landis hadn’t spent much time at home since he’d met Bernice. Her place was larger and nicer. Still, on occasion they stayed at what she called “the spaceship,” and they both laughed about this woman, the way they’d hear her abrupt coughing inside following her morning bong hit, before her door clanked open and she came out accompanied by the strains of “Sugar Magnolia” to smoke a cigarette and stare at the sky.

  “You outta here?” she called over, now. She wore Ray-Ban Wayfarers that sat askew on her face.

  “Yeah,” he said.

  “Job?”

  “That’s right,” he called back. “New job.”

  “Where at?”

  “Tucson.” He felt Bernice kicking him and telling him he was an idiot. There was no point in leaving a big trail of clues behind.

  “Where’s she?”

  Landis finished tying up a contractor bag of garbage, stood it up, and walked over to her. He didn’t feel like shouting his business, and he thought he probably ought to be polite and act normal, just in case some Columbo-type ever came around asking questions about him.

  “We broke up,” he said.

  “Really?” The woman yanked her glasses down her nose just enough to peek over them in what she probably thought was a sexy way, but Landis couldn’t help comparing her thighs, which were pale and dimpled, coming out of a pair of white shorts, to Bernice’s. Landis loved Bernice’s body, found it almost inconceivable luck that at his age he got to sleep with her. “You guys have a fight?”

  “Not a fight. Things just kind of ran their course. You know how it is.”

  “Oh, yeah, I know. That’s my life in a nutshell. Want a beer?”

  Landis looked up at the sun—it wasn’t yet noon. “No, I believe I’ll hold off,” he said. “I get started now, the day’ll be over before I get anything done.”

  “I don’t plan on getting anything done,” she said. “That makes life a hell of a lot easier.” She ground out one cigarette and extracted another from her pack of Winstons. “It’s a shame we never really got to talk much, and now here you are leaving.”

  “Well,” he said, but could think of nothing to follow it with.

  “None of my business, I know, but that’s probably for the best. I never thought you two were right for each other. You seem more or less normal, but her—” she brought a red lighter to the end of her cigarette, lit the end, inhaled deeply, then dropped the lighter back on the plastic table and exhaled. “She just didn’t seem right. Nervous.”

  “She’s a little high strung. She’s from back east.” He’d learned that in the West this information could be used to explain a remarkable number of personality failures. He didn’t add that he, too, was from back east, originally.

  “I know about that. I meet lots of types doing what I do. I’m a nanny.”

  “How come you’re out here all the time, then?”

  She blew more smoke. “I’m between jobs.”

  “Well,” he said again.

  “That’s a deep subject.” She laughed. “Get it?”

  “Ho ho,” said Landis.

  “I just hope they’re as normal as you.”

  “Who?”

  “Whoever moves in next. Before you was a half-breed or a Mex, I never could tell. Spooky quiet. I believe he moved up to South Park someplace. I wouldn’t be surprised if he killed someone, or was a terrorist, even. I keep waiting to see his face on the evening news.” Her skinny, black-and-white cat pushed its way out the screen door behind her and started rubbing up against her leg. “Hey, Blaster,” she said.

  “Well, I can’t say,” said Landis. “It’s not up to me.” He’d rented the place through an ad in the paper, sent his checks to something called TNC Development at a PO box in Denver.

  “You got any eight-track tapes in there?”

  “No.”

  “I got a player, but I only got four tapes for it, and one of them doesn’t work, and one of them is by Chicago and I can’t stand it. Got it at a flea market—I figure it’s a collector’s item, or will be.”

  “Can I check that out?” Landis motioned to her copy of the Gazette.

  She held it out to him. “Keep it,” she said. “I already did the puzzle.”

  Landis took the paper back to his own stoop, sat down. There was a story about how the United States had accidentally bombed an Afghan wedding party, another about the fire in Woodland Park. He turned to the Local section. Nothing, just more about the fire, which was mostly under control. A local teacher had published a children’s book, which he’d illustrated, too. He paged further in, still expecting at any moment to find a photo of himself, or of Bernice, or of Emily. He didn’t know how the paper could have gotten such a photo, but he felt it was inevitable.

  When he was done looking, relieved that he still seemed to dwell in a temporary state of grace, he locked up and took the truck into town, dropping his trash into a Dumpster behind the Walmart on South Academy, where they’d bought the car seat. Bernice’s apartment was downtown, near where the highway cut through, in a complex that looked like a Motel 6, complete with a battered swimming pool. Apparently she paid quite a bit for it, and it was unclear to Landis where her money came from. She’d quit her job at the coffee place back in April and begun working part time at a little gallery in Manitou that sold pottery and paintings and kachina dolls and other stuff to tourists and the occasional intrepid Broadmoor lady. She’d already cleaned the apartment out, more or less, and told the manager she was moving even though she had two
more months on her lease, and she and Landis had stood one final time on her tiny balcony looking west toward Pikes Peak, improbably huge and wearing its barren top like some misshapen skullcap. On the horizon below it, attached to a building much closer, there was a red neon sign that read, simply, “Fish.” Bernice had insisted it was a Christian thing, and while at first he’d argued with her, pointing out that it was a restaurant, and that he’d even been there, she was impossible on the subject—to the point of growing sarcastic with him—and he’d given in. “You think some restaurant is just going to put up a big Fish sign ?” she’d said. “It’s the same thing as those symbols on everyone’s cars.”

  “OK,” he’d told her. “You’re right. I’m just saying, it’s a fish restaurant. That’s what they serve.”

  “Anyone who orders seafood in Colorado ought to have his head examined,” she’d said.

  Landis parked down the block, walked to the complex, and checked Bernice’s mail. There was quite a bit of it. He’d never been in her mailbox before, and it felt strangely personal. He told himself it was just a mailbox. And yet for a while she’d seen it as some kind of battleground, refusing to lock it, which resulted in the postman’s refusing to deliver her mail. This went on for weeks until, eventually, the postman gave in.

  He stuck the mail, none of which looked important, into the glove compartment of the truck, then walked three blocks to Tejon Street. Midnights was open for lunch these days, and he took a seat at the bar and ordered a Fat Tire and a burger special from a woman he didn’t recognize, who didn’t seem particularly friendly. She was probably around forty, pretty enough, with tattoos up and down her arms. There wasn’t an ounce of fat on her. She had blue-black hair, and her T-shirt read “Don’t Ask.”

  “What?” he said when she delivered his plate.

  “Whatever it is you’re thinking of,” she said. “Unless it’s more ketchup or another beer, it’s off the table.” She smiled at him. You could have slipped a quarter between her front teeth.

  “Where’s Reno?” he said.

  “She’s out sick. I’m Robin. You a regular?”

  “Sort of. I work here sometimes. Tate calls me in when he can’t do a show.”

  “Tate’s an old friend of mine. What’s your name?”

  “Landis,” he said.

  “Nope,” she said. “I never heard of you.”

  “Well, I do sound.”

  “So I figured.” She maintained eye contact but didn’t say anything else.

  “Can you give me an example?” he asked, finally.

  “A date. The time. Directions. To see my tits. You name it, I don’t want to hear it.” She leaned forward. “What don’t you want to be asked?”

  There was only one other person at the bar, a muscular young man with a military haircut and a newly sprouted goatee, reading a newspaper. “I don’t have secrets,” said Landis. “You can ask me anything you like.”

  “Hmm,” she said. “I might just do that. Let me give it some thought.”

  “There a pay phone in this place?” asked Landis.

  She held a finger up. “Uh uh uh.”

  “Just fooling with you,” he said. “I know where it is.”

  She went back to work and he considered his position. There hadn’t been a chance to call Bernice from the road, and today he’d continued to avoid doing it, so that now what he had was almost certainly a problem. The silence was a blister that was growing bigger and bigger, and when he finally did get in touch, the thing would burst and she’d use the opportunity to punish him and remind him how he was failing her, and possibly just failing in general.

  He ate his burger and had another beer, occasionally casting his eyes on Robin, who, he had to admit, intrigued him. We broke up, he’d told his neighbor. It sounded so simple.

  The military-looking guy asked him if he wanted to play pool, and he said sure. They didn’t talk at all for the first game, and Landis beat him handily. The kid—because looking at him close, Landis saw that that’s all he was, and possibly not even twenty-one yet—put in four more quarters and racked.

  “You don’t mess around,” said Landis, gesturing to the kid’s drink, which was straight whiskey. “Last time I drank that stuff in the afternoon, I ended up spending the night in jail. Drove off in someone else’s truck, if you can believe it. Looked just like mine. Key worked, too, which has to be a one-in-a-thousand chance. The judge was understanding, but they suspended my license for six months in addition to the fine.” He picked up some chalk and worked the end of his stick. “I’m Landis.”

  “Devon,” said the kid, reaching out a hand.

  They played two more games, and Landis won them both. Devon was intense, if not terribly good. He loped around the table like a highly focused dog.

  “If you don’t mind some criticism,” Landis said, “you could stand to take a little off that stroke of yours. You look like you’re trying to poke through a piece of drywall. You army?”

  Devon stood straight up. “What makes you say that?”

  “I don’t know. The hair?”

  “That’s right. I am.”

  “I’m a patriot. Buy you another?”

  Devon nodded and finished up his glass, then held it out for Landis to take.

  At the bar, he got refills from Robin. He was beginning to feel what he’d hoped he’d feel, the community of strangers, the warm sense he often got in a bar.

  “How’d you like jail?” Devon asked when Landis returned with his new drink.

  “Not at all. You planning on giving it a try?”

  “I might could. I’m AWOL right now.” He shoved another round of quarters into the table, which rumbled and coughed out the balls. He racked with drunken attention to detail—it took three tries before he was satisfied none of the balls had rolled.

  “From where?” Landis asked. “I mean, if it’s not too personal.”

  “Well, I was in Bagram, three weeks ago. Migraine, I call it. Migraine, Migrainistan. Got sent to Baltimore for a couple weeks as a special treat. Decided I’d just as soon stick around, if you know what I mean.”

  “I don’t get it. What are you doing here?”

  “I got a girlfriend here. Well, she was my girlfriend in Georgia. Now she’s here. Fort Carson, see? She likes army guys. Camp follower, you might say. We gonna play or what?”

  Landis broke, sank one of each. “Guess I’ll shoot stripes,” he said, and put in three more before finding himself with nothing. He tried a three-cushion bank that appeared possible for a brief, prophetic instant, and scratched.

  “Whoops,” said Devon.

  “Georgia?”

  “I was stationed at Fort Benning. Rangers. I probably said enough already.”

  “They out looking for you, you figure?”

  “Don’t know. I was about to be RFSed, anyway.” He grinned. “Disciplinary problems.” He got down very low to the table, eyeing the distance to a group of his balls at the other end.

  “You can’t see the angles that way,” said Landis. “You want to be looking down on things—that’s how to see them.”

  Devon ignored the advice, shot, and missed, simply moving the balls around. “Ah, crap,” he said.

  “No, seriously,” said Landis. “What happens when they find you?”

  “I don’t really know.”

  “But you must have thought about it. I mean, there you were in Baltimore, having a good time. Then what?”

  “First of all, I wasn’t having that good a time. My girlfriend never showed, although that was the plan. So I’m hanging around this strange city with nothing in particular to do and no place to do it. Good time. I went to a bunch of strip clubs, took a ride in a water taxi, got drunk. Finally, I just walked over to the bus station and got on a Greyhound.”

  “Just like that.”

  “More or less. You’ve got to understand. When you come back from over there, it’s just different. You wonder what everyone’s thinking . It’s like, What part of t
his shit is supposed to matter?” He shot again, this time sinking a ball, though not the one he was after. “It’s an education, though.”

  “You seem pretty calm.”

  “Hey, man, I jump out of airplanes. You know what? Fuck Afghanistan. See, I like to eat. In Baltimore, I went to restaurants. I ate crab cakes and pizza and steak and nice, fresh salads. I ate enough to last me another six months. And then I decided to come here.” He drank some more of his whiskey, fumbled a cigarette out of his shirt pocket and lit it. “Who the hell are you?” he asked.

  “What do you mean?” Landis tightened his grip on his pool cue.

  Devon smiled, revealing a tiny set of discolored uppers. “I’m just fucking with you, Captain. I mean, who are you? You got a job or something?”

  “I’m between things,” said Landis. “But I’m a soundman when I’m working.”

  “What the hell is that?”

  “Live sound, for bands, concerts—whatever. I always liked music, but I couldn’t play anything. I figured this would be a good way to get to hang around it and get paid.” In fact, he had yet to make any real money in his new career, but he had hopes, and it made sense to him in a way that most of his previous gigs never had. He’d always found work that involved using his hands and his body—lifting things, hauling things, fixing things. He’d had the idea that being a soundman would be substantively different—a chance to exercise his brain. Then he’d done his first job for Kevin at ProSound, helping set up for a fifties-sixties act called the Rockets who had a gig at one of the Cripple Creek casinos, and found himself wrestling speakers and equipment. It really wasn’t all that different from the moving business. He’d managed to get some time at the blackjack tables, though, and had won two hundred dollars, which seemed a good omen.

  Landis sank the rest of his balls, leaving only the eight, which was an easy shot for the corner, a little tougher for the side pocket, with some scratch potential as well. He decided to try that anyway, just for the challenge, and sure enough, although the eight dropped nicely, the cue ball headed straight for the corner, balanced momentarily on the rim, then fell.