by Brady Udall
Huila was different simply because he—he—had chosen her and she, by some miraculous coincidence, had chosen him.
Which only increased the pressure on him, somehow. He felt like he might lose her forever, might lead a sad life full of regret if he couldn’t do this small thing, a brief kiss on a romantic moonlit night by the light of the fire. It was Huila, in the end, who rescued him. She took his hand in hers, gave it an affectionate squeeze as if to say, It’s okay, don’t worry about it, and that was all he needed; he forgot about his buck teeth and his possibly stale breath and his propensity for producing too much saliva when he was nervous: he leaned in and kissed her for a good long time.
FIRST DRINK
Golden leaned back in his chair and wondered how he could formulate any of this in a way Nestor might understand.
“I’ve got a problem,” he said. “A pretty big one.”
“Very good.” Nestor rubbed his hands together. “I like the big ones.”
“You can’t tell anyone, Nestor. It would ruin me. Forever.”
Nestor frowned the frown of someone deeply offended. “I can’t tell anyone, that’s what you say? Who? Who I am going to tell? Lardo and his lady? These dogs? Nobody here cares about your problems Jefe, I promise you, except for me.”
“I have been seeing…another person. A woman.”
“Yes, a woman, good.” Nestor nodded encouragingly.
“I mean, you know, somebody my wives don’t know about.”
Nestor raised his eyebrows, and then abruptly threw out his hands as if to dismiss the whole thing. “We are sexual people, where is the harm? We are men! Do not apologize for being a man.”
“I’m not really talking about sex here.”
This appeared to confuse Nestor. “We’re not talking about sex?”
“No.”
“But we’re talking about a woman?”
“Yes.”
Nestor pooched his lips, only marginally reassured. “And now, what is the big problem?”
“This woman,” Golden said, “is my boss’s wife.”
“Oh my shit.” Nestor put his face in his hands.
Golden toed the dirt with his boot. “And I think I love her.”
Through his hands Nestor groaned, “Oh my fuck. Big, big fuck.”
“And she’s from Guatemala.”
“Oh-my-fucking-God-shit.”
Nestor smacked himself on the forehead, stood up, walked around in a tight circle and sat back down. “She’s from Wah-teh-mala?” Golden nodded.
“And she’s your boss’s woman, and you love her?”
Golden shrugged.
“Oh my shit.” Nestor shook his head, both impressed and dismayed, which was more or less how Golden felt about it himself.
“Maybe you are right,” Nestor said. “Maybe this is a big problem.”
“For me it is.”
Nestor looked up and smiled. “You know what they say about the hijas from Wah-teh-mala?”
“No.”
“Hmm, maybe you don’t want to know.”
“Maybe not.”
“They say they can fuck the stink off the devil himself. That’s what they say.” He smiled to himself, quickly glanced up at Golden. “But probably this does not apply to your particular lady.”
Nestor left for a moment and returned with two jelly jars filled with amber liquid. Immediately Golden held up his hands to decline but Nestor slapped the hands away and pressed the drink into one of them. “You drink a little, there is no harm. You are sneaking about with your boss’s woman and you won’t have a little mescal? Come on, Jefe, please. You are helping us with our big problem”—he gestured to the house, which, from this angle, seemed to have shifted on its foundation the tiniest bit—“and we will help you with yours. This is the first step, to relax. You are sitting there like you have something very unpleasant up your culo.”
Golden took the jar; he was not one to say no twice. He sniffed its contents: not too bad. In fact, it smelled like nothing at all. He had never had a drink, not so much as tasted alcohol of any kind. It was a little late, he thought, to be thinking about all the things he’d not done in his life.
He took an experimental sip, which went down as smoothly as a mouthful of liquid Drāno. His throat clenched and he shuddered with the burn of it.
“Aha!” said Nestor. He gave Golden a questioning look. “Ah?”
Golden blinked and opened his mouth to let out some of the fumes. He croaked, “It’s terrible.”
“Yes!” said Nestor, grinning brightly, taking another enthusiastic drink. “Yes it is.”
FAMILIES ARE FOREVER
Forty minutes later a small Toyota pickup arrived, transporting five Mexicans and a long steel beam, which Golden was brought around to inspect. Though he had had maybe three tiny sips of the mescal, barely enough to register in the jelly jar that he had drunk any at all, the ground felt soft under his feet. He could see immediately the beam was at least four feet too long. He grabbed a hacksaw from his work truck and told them they would have to cut it to eight feet. He then went inside to double-check the measurement, and he realized that the beam, even cut to eight feet, would not fit down the narrow back-and-forth stairs. He skirted the outside of the house, looking for a window or some kind of opening, though he knew there was none. How had they ever gotten a pool table down there? He came around the south end and, sure enough, there was a patched-up section of the sandstone-block foundation, about six feet long.
“Who knocked out the foundation here?” he yelled, but he was all alone on that side of the house. Feeling bold, he stalked around to the front and, with a slightly shrill schoolmarm timbre to his voice, shouted, “Who on earth busted out the foundation back here?”
Everyone stopped talking and laughing, Jorge stopped hacksawing, and they all looked at each other. “What foundation?” Nestor said. “We didn’t bust no foundation.”
“Then how did you get the pool table into the basement?”
They all looked at each other again, eyes wide, and started to laugh. Blind Emilio, who was holding an extended tape measure, had a high, sharp laugh—ah-hee-ah-heeeeee!—which caused everyone else to laugh that much harder.
“He is Sherlock Holmes!” Jorge said. “He has discovered our lies!”
“Or Kojak!” said somebody else, which made everyone laugh harder.
Golden had to admit it: he liked these people. He liked them a lot. And he didn’t care that they’d knocked out part of the foundation or that the Old Lady might collapse on herself at any moment. He told them to get a pick and punch out a hole in the patched-up section so they could get the beam through, and hurry up about it.
He had meant to supervise the cutting of the beam, but five minutes later he was back on his chair under the dead cottonwood, jelly jar tucked between his thighs, eating some kind of spicy stew from a pie tin. With the oncoming dusk the place had taken on a carnival atmosphere: children chased a soccer ball and Blind Emilio played a child-sized accordion, which induced much third-party harmonizing and crooning, and Cooter, who someone had let out of the cab of the pickup, raced wild circles around the town dogs, nipping at their ankles and showing his teeth, oblivious that he was the only one among them wearing underwear.
“What are we eating here?” Golden asked Nestor, who was dancing with a stout middle-aged woman in apricot spandex tights. “Chivo!” Nestor called over the music. “You know, goat! Perlita here, her recipe!”
Golden held up the pie tin to indicate how much he was enjoying it. In fact, it was a little too spicy for him—sweat had beaded up across his forehead and temples—but it was so delicious he couldn’t stop shoveling it down. As he scooped up the last bite, he took a moment to consider how far afield he’d come: not four hours ago he had been in church, blessing the sacrament and reading scripture in suit and tie, and now here he was drinking homemade liquor and eating goat with a bunch of devil-may-care Mexicans.
Some of the men called to him to
inspect the hole they’d made in the foundation, and he carefully sat forward in his chair, feeling around with his feet to locate the ground before he tried to stand on it. After a deliberate trek across the backyard, what he found was not the small, inconspicuous hole he might have preferred, but one nearly three feet wide and two feet high. “Bueno?” said Guillermo with a workingman’s pride.
“Muy bueno,” Golden sighed. “Let’s go ahead and get the beam in there.”
They went around to the front, where a crowd had gathered next to the ¡LOS JODIDOS! tour bus. At first Golden thought, because of the yelling and whistling, that it was a fight of some sort, but it turned out to be Cooter attempting to mount one of the female dogs. This particular dog was smaller than the others, but still larger than Cooter, who had given up his mounting attempt and now had his forelegs locked around the dog’s hips, his muzzle pressed into her hindquarters, his hips pumping away at one of her back legs. There was much applauding and encouragement, and Cooter began to look around, bug-eyed and clearly embarrassed at this turn of events, but unable to stop himself.
“Behold,” said Jorge, “life in its glory.”
“Who took off his underwear?” Golden said. He considered going in and pulling Cooter away, sparing him this public shame, but at this point he really didn’t want to get involved.
“He was in distress,” Nestor said. “Perlita thought he needed to relieve himself.” He motioned toward Cooter. “Clearly, she was correct.”
Grinning shyly, Perlita handed Golden the Swingin’ Baby Timmy undershorts, which he stuffed like a handkerchief into his shirt pocket. Perlita’s flashing smile, her lustrous black hair, brought Huila to mind in a way that made him go light-headed.
Nestor came up and stood next to Golden. “Hmm,” he said under his breath, “you think the girl-dog might be from Wah-teh-mala?”
Together they checked on the hacksawing, which was progressing slowly because Jorge and the thin drummer—Golden thought his name might have been Ronnie—spent most of their time arguing about what kind of saw stroke was the most efficient, and who had been guitarist for Three Dog Night before Al Cinder.
“Come sit back down,” Nestor said. “Have some more food and drink while we wait.”
“I’ve got to get home,” said Golden, making a sour face.
“You can’t go now, before we’re finished.” He pointed at the house. “You leave now and it will be on your head.”
Golden didn’t bother to argue—he followed Nestor around to the back, took up his spot under the cottonwood. Evening was falling and you could hear the cooing of doves who sat at equidistant intervals on the telephone wires. Even Lardo—placated by goat stew and a bottle of mescal passed through the high bathroom window—had quit his banging and complaining. Golden sighed and settled in. How lovely to sit under the lowering sky, the dead grass whisking his ankles, with springtime coming on and a feeling in his heart of imminent disaster.
Such a feeling could not last; as hard as he tried not to, Golden pictured his family back at Big House, waiting for him around the dinner table, faces pinched with expectation, the wives grim and perfunctory in their duties, the younger children circling back to the front window so as to be the first to spot him coming up the drive. He could see the framed needlepoint above the mantel, Families Are Forever, and wondered if the slogan was meant as a promise or a threat.
He took up his jelly jar from its place under the chair and held it up to the pink western sky, took a small sip from it, shuddered. He really ought to go—they were waiting for him, they always would be. He sat back. He took another sip.
25.
TO LOVE A SCOUNDREL
TOGETHER THEY WATCHED IT BURN ALL THE WAY DOWN. JUNE HAYMAKER, wearing a starched and pressed flannel shirt under his Dickies overalls, held on to the top wire of the fence with both hands and gave the fire his full and solemn attention, as if watching a ritual of profound cultural significance. Trish stole a few card-player glances at him, noticing the way the distant flames burnished his sharp cheekbones and flickered in miniature across the tear layer of his eyes.
Twenty minutes before she had been in the house reading her trashy book, so fully entranced she didn’t notice the wind whipping up, the sky deepening, the old red cedar at the side of the house creaking at its roots. Only when her eyes began to ache from the words on the page dimming and bleeding into each other did she look around. Thunder rumbled. A handful of rain spattered against the window. Trish liked thunderstorms, but she was annoyed at this one for rousing her from the dream (a ridiculous dream, but a dream nonetheless) of the book she was reading, for depositing her squarely back into her life. The phone rang once, a fretful little ring, and she was further annoyed by the way her heart rose at the sound—somebody was calling!—and at the way it then seized with disappointment when she realized it was only a phantom call, electricity on the lines. Quite suddenly she was angry—not merely annoyed—at her self-pitying self, at the circumstances that brought her to be so easily angered and annoyed and susceptible to self-pity, at the shiny absurd book in her hands as well as the fact that she was enjoying it so much, and when she heard the thunderbolt hit, the walloping crack that registered like a blow to the skull and the small bones of the spine, she thought for a moment it was the sound of her accumulated frustration and anger being released into the world in a single charge.
For a moment she didn’t breathe. She tried to turn on the lamp but the power had gone out. Only when the city fire station blared its distant siren and was answered on cue by the entire local dog population did she get up to have a look around. The fire was already well on its way, edging along the roof line of the old swaybacked barn that sat in a fallow, weed-choked field a few hundred yards to the north of the duplex, the same barn she looked at every day while doing the dishes. It had become such a familiar part of her surroundings she had stopped noticing it at all, except once in a while on Friday or Saturday nights when it filled with the laughter and catcalls of drunken teenagers—sounds that made her nostalgic for a wild, heedless adolescence that had never belonged to her. She always assumed the teenagers and their cigarettes would eventually burn the thing down, but it appeared God had beat them to it.
Brother Gunther, her widower neighbor, informed her one day over the fence that the barn was not a barn at all but a turn-of-the-century winery. “They called it the wine house back then, and for miles around, see, there was nothing but orchards and vineyards.” Brother Gunther, well past eighty and about as talkative and social as a department store mannequin, was brought instantly to life by the subject. His left eye caught a spark—his right was hidden behind a flesh-colored adhesive bandage–-and he waved his arthritic hands along the horizon. “Can you see what I’m saying? Climate and soil were perfect for it and Brother Brigham, a practical man if ever there was, told them not to worry about the Word of Wisdom, just go ahead and make wine. Good wine. Grape wine, plum wine, pomegranate wine, we made it all. I was a boy then. Picked the fruit of the vine. Had a nip or two of the good stuff, I won’t lie to you. A paradise, it was, like Palestine in Bible times. And now look. Weeds and empty fields and garbage and young people using Brother Brigham’s wine house for making whoopee and smoking their drugs.” He let out a quick, rattling sigh as if he’d taken a weak punch to the belly. “We’re a sad, sorry bunch, the lot of us.”
She had wanted to reach over the fence and give his shoulder a commiserative pat, to show just how much she empathized with his view of things, but as fast as it had come the light dimmed in his good eye and he turned without a word and shuffled across the dead grass to his empty house, his flock of hopeful turkeys trailing behind.
Today, when she’d come out to watch the fire, Trish had looked for Brother Gunther at the back of his house. He was nowhere to be seen, but his turkeys, who’d been hiding in the coop during the thunderstorm, spotted her and headed over to see what she might have for them. She had turned to go into the house to get them some potato
chips when she noticed June Haymaker standing at the garden gate at the side of the house. He took a half step back as if she’d caught him at something, and gave a shy half wave. The sight of him made her heart leap the way it had when the phone rang.
Though she’d waved him in, he stayed where he was. He explained he’d been in his shop working when the fire call went out over the police band. He’d come as quickly as he could. Watching his hand fiddle with the latch on the gate, he’d said, “I guess I was worried about you—about your house, I mean.” And she stood there smiling bashfully, energetically, her face grown hot with the simple pleasure of being the object of someone else’s concern.
“Well. Glad you’re okay, then.” He jerked his thumb toward his truck. “I should probably be getting home.”
“June,” she had said, amazed to hear a slightly coquettish tremolo in her voice. “Why don’t you come on back for a minute? It’s not every day you get to watch something burn to the ground.”
So now they stood at the fence watching the volunteer firefighters turn valves and unspool their hoses. There was a casual, prankish note to the proceedings; the men, most of whom looked, from this distance, to be no more than high school students themselves, shouted good-naturedly and threatened to spray each other before turning the hoses on the fire, which was now burning through the gaps in the partially collapsed roof. The men were in no hurry—this was clear—believing, no doubt, that the loss of this old barn in a weedy field would have no victims. If only they knew about poor Brother Gunther, Trish thought, and the local teenagers he so despised, who would be forced to find a new spot for making their whoopee and smoking their drugs.