by Mary Miller
You go upstairs and call your boyfriend. He tells you he sold his truck to a friend for two hundred dollars. It was worth at least a grand but it wouldn’t have made it all the way to Tennessee and his friend needed a car. In California, apparently, this is how people operate. You take off your clothes and lie in bed. You get under the covers and listen as he reads you a story but you lose interest and then you fall asleep and dream you’re in San Francisco, riding on his handlebars as he bikes around the city and you are thin and beautiful and balance easily but you wake up because you have to pee and can’t go back to sleep because you are excited about your new life even though there is nothing to be excited about, as far as you can tell, at least not immediately.
HAMILTON POOL
Darcie hasn’t seen rain in over a year. She looks out the window, watches for signs. In the mornings, it’s cloudy. At night, there’s a breeze. These things don’t mean anything anymore but she tracks them regardless.
This morning it is unusually cloudy. She sits on the couch drinking coffee while Terry boils eggs. Downstairs, the baby begins to cry; somebody is moving something or bumps into a wall. Their apartment is on the second floor of a house, a married couple with a baby below—the man an architect, the woman a lawyer. The baby is often strapped to the chest of the woman, who goes about her business as if he isn’t there.
Darcie watches the fat-bodied quail pick through the dirt and gutted-out pecans. They make a lot of racket. The birds here are loud and insistent and have different calls than the birds back home because they’re different birds. It makes her feel lonely to think about it—her mother and father having drinks together in the living room, talking about the dogs and what they’re going to have for dinner. She wonders if they talk about her, or her sister, Laurie. She wonders if they’ll ever meet her boyfriend, but she knows they wouldn’t like him because he’s covered in tattoos, because he was in prison.
Terry hands her a bowl with two eggs rolling around. “Do you want salt?” he asks.
“Yes, please.” He brings her the salt, a paper towel. “Where are your eggs?”
“I ate them already. I’m going to heat up some tortillas. Do you want one?”
“Are they stale?” she asks.
“I don’t think so. When did we buy them?”
“I don’t remember.”
“I think it was Tuesday,” he says. “What did we do Tuesday?”
“I don’t know,” she says. “I don’t remember Tuesday.” He goes back to the kitchen, which is the only place she can’t see him from the couch, and she picks up an egg and knocks it against the bowl. The eggs are brown and spotted and come from the next-door neighbor’s chickens. Their shells are more fragile than the bleached eggs she used to buy at the store: you set them on the counter and they break; you squeeze them in one hand and they bust. She’d always heard you couldn’t break an egg this way.
Terry hands her a tortilla and then sits on his side of the couch and eats, looks out the window. She thinks about her last boyfriend, how he was always so eager to go out. This boyfriend isn’t like that. He’ll sit around with her all day. He says he’ll never cheat on her and it’s easy to believe him because they’re hardly ever apart.
“It looks like rain,” he says.
“It’s not going to rain,” she says, rolling the tortilla up. It has bits of jalapeño in it, her favorite. “It’s just fucking with us.”
“It, what?”
“The clouds,” she says. “Nature. God.”
He puts his thick fingers in her hair and yanks through to the ends. Then he goes over to the bookshelf and sorts through the DVDs. The DVD collection is something from their past life, when he worked fifty hours a week, building things. This wasn’t that long ago—three months, four—when they went to the bar at night and picked up a new movie every time they were at Target, when they’d go to Saturday afternoon barbeques so high they could hardly speak. They bought other stuff, too: a juicer, thick bath towels and camping equipment, a couch big enough for the two of them.
“Have you seen The Box?” he asks.
“No. Have you?”
“Part of it,” he says, “not the beginning.” He puts it in. “It’s pretty weird. Be prepared.” He takes the cushions off the back of the couch to make more room, and then climbs over her and organizes their bodies, their pillows and blankets. She looks at him and feels happy, but the happiness is heavy, like something should be done with it.
One day, he’s going to make her his wife, he tells her. They’ll have a little boy and a little girl and a house set back from the street. They’ll have their own chickens. Sometimes she doesn’t feel like pretending and asks how he’s going to support two kids when he can’t afford to take her out to dinner, but it’s more fun to imagine his blue eyes and long lashes on their babies.
Onscreen, Cameron Diaz and her husband sit in their kitchen looking at the box—taking it apart, unlocking it with the key and locking it again. If they push the button, someone will die, someone they don’t know, and they’ll receive a suitcase containing one million dollars.
“Would you push the button?” she asks.
“Hell no,” he says, like is she crazy?, but he’s seen what happens after the button has been pushed. She knows it can’t be anything good because that wouldn’t make for a very interesting movie but she doesn’t know the particulars.
“I think I might push the button,” she says. “People die all the time. People are constantly dropping dead.” She presses her nose to his shoulder and breathes in alcohol and sun-dried tobacco, and under that, the smell of him. She’s read about the science of smell, how people are attracted to those who have divergent immunity patterns. They would pass along a wide range of immunities to their children.
“Would you leave me if I pushed the button?” she asks.
“No,” he says, shaking her arm, which means she should be quiet now.
He falls asleep holding onto her leg, occasionally stirring enough to kiss her back, as she becomes more and more bored. When it’s finally over, he gets up and goes over to the bookshelf. “There’s nothing here I want to see,” he says. He takes off his shirt, his round belly hard. She keeps waiting for him to lose weight but he doesn’t seem to have lost a single pound; no matter how little money there is, there is always plenty to eat.
“How many condoms do we have left?” she asks, though she knows there is one condom. There are five cigarettes and two Four Lokos and one flask of whiskey above the stove that they don’t touch. They’re saving it. They’ll know what they are saving it for when the time comes.
“One, for tonight.” He turns and winks and then goes back to the DVDs. “We’ll have to go to campus and swipe some.”
“I could get back on the pill,” she says, but he knows she doesn’t want to get back on the pill. The pill makes her crazy.
He mutes the television and resumes his place on the couch, closes his eyes.
“Don’t go to sleep,” she says, and it’s her turn to shake his arm. He opens his eyes and kisses her and closes them again. She traces his tattoos with her fingers: the Mayan totem pole on his arm, three crazed jokers on his chest, his last name in ornate letters in a half-circle above his belly button. She fingers one of the large black stars on his stomach. In prison, he was a captain in an Aryan gang but that was a long time ago and prison isn’t like the outside world. In prison, you have to pick a team based on the most obvious thing and stick with it.
“I wish you hadn’t gotten all these racist tattoos,” she says.
“I wish I hadn’t gotten them either,” he says. The dragons on his arms cover up the words WHITE PRIDE. The stars cover up swastikas. The wings on his back—she forgets what these are covering up. She wouldn’t mind having wings but she doesn’t have any tattoos and if she got them now she would only be reminded she was late, that she had missed something.
“There you are,” he says. He puts his finger on the naked lady on the inside of his lef
t arm. The naked lady has the usual cartoon body: large breasts, a tiny waist, and full hips. Long wavy hair down to her ass. “You had longer hair then.”
“That’s not me,” Darcie says. “I never had hair like that.”
She thinks about the questions she used to ask him, how his answers were technically true and yet not true at all. For example, she asked if he ever stabbed anyone and he said he didn’t. Later, he told her he didn’t stab anyone because a knife wasn’t as efficient as bringing a rock down hard on somebody’s head. She asked if he killed anyone and he said he didn’t but then he told her he assigned people to carry out hits—the orders would come down from above and he was responsible for making sure they were carried out. That person was going to die, regardless, he explained. They were bad people, people who deserved to die. Darcie spent months asking the wrong questions and now she doesn’t ask questions and he tells her all sorts of things, more than she wants to know. She lets him talk because she wants to understand him—how he divides things into good and bad, how he believes the bad things he has done are actually good—but no matter how he explains them, she doesn’t understand.
She presses her lips to his and he opens his mouth, using a lot of tongue like she likes, and she gives him the soft moans he likes.
“Hold on, get up,” he says. He takes the red blanket off the back of the couch and spreads it over the white cushions.
“That was easy,” she says. “You’re so easy.”
“We’ll get more.” He runs to get the condom, tearing at the wrapper with his teeth, while she removes her tank top and panties. She looks at her body and wishes the blinds kept out more light. Or it was dark out. And then he’s kneeling in front of her and she’s feeling for the ring at the base of his dick before guiding him in.
“Go slow,” she says.
“I will,” he says, plunging in too fast like he always does, but after that he’s gentle. He looks at her like he might cry, says nothing more vulgar than how good it feels. Darcie holds his gaze for as long as she can and then buries her face in his chest, the hairs dry and graying; she breathes in his neck and shoulders and underarms, gets a whiff of his deodorant. She doesn’t like to smell deodorant on him—it’s like he could be any of the millions of men who use Speed Stick when she only wants his body above her, his weight. She puts her feet on his shoulders and grabs his ass, digs her nails into the backs of his thighs. She comes so easily for him, like she’s never been able to do for anyone else.
At twelve o’clock, Darcie turns the sound back on and they watch the news. The Doppler radar shows pockets of rain all over central Texas.
“Bullshit,” he says.
“I bet it evaporates before it hits the ground.”
The weatherman says it’ll be 107 again today and reminds them that the city enters stage 3 water restrictions on August 1st: no pools can be filled, no lawns watered, no cars washed except at commercial facilities or with a bucket of water filled directly from the tap. These things won’t affect them but the rolling blackouts will. So far they’ve only heard rumors of these blackouts. Darcie likes the sound of them. She went to the dollar store and bought batteries and tall Mexican candles: The Sacred Heart of Jesus, Our Lady of Guadalupe. Then the weatherman talks about the fires in surrounding counties. He gives them statistics she finds impossible to grasp—acres and miles—numbers that seem preposterously large.
“Are you comfortable?” he asks, because she keeps moving around, adjusting her pillow.
“Yes, baby. Are you?”
“Yes,” he says.
She presses her body to his so closely that she can only look at one of his eyes at a time. She stares at one of them and then the other.
“I hope our baby has your eyes,” she says. He can hardly see anything without his glasses but his eyes are bright blue, cracked and shining.
“I hope she has your wit,” he says, which is maybe the nicest thing anyone has ever said to her, but then she wonders if he finds her physical attributes lacking—what about her legs, her ass? What about her eyes? And then she’s annoyed but feels bad about it.
“Hold on,” he says, climbing over her again.
She watches him carry a chair over to the wall and stand on it, press a button on the smoke detector. It blinks twice and beeps. He makes some affirmative-sounding noises and puts the chair back where he got it. And then he talks about what they’ll do when the end comes, which body of water they’ll claim for their own. It has become his favorite topic, imagining the two of them together in a world that isn’t like this one. He tells her they’ll take Hamilton Pool, which will provide shelter and plenty of fresh water, that this is their best option. They’ll register the guns in her name.
At three o’clock, Darcie has to go to the doctor.
Since Terry’s van is on empty and they don’t want to spend the last of their money on gas, they decide to catch the bus. As soon as they step outside, they notice the haze and the smell of fire, which are new developments. Darcie is excited about these new developments until she thinks about what would actually happen if a fire came along and burned up all her stuff.
On their street, late-model SUVs are parked between cars with busted-out windows, black garbage bags filling the empty spaces. Some of the houses are in foreclosure and others are freshly painted with new roofs and yards full of flowers. The neighborhood is undergoing gentrification—about half the houses occupied by young white couples who are forever watering their tiny lawns and the other half full of people who would be described using words like habitual and chronic, with skeleton cars and underfed dogs.
Darcie doesn’t know where they fit but she likes it here. It’s like the whole world was thrown up into the air and everything got jumbled and nobody missed a beat, as her mother would say. There are roosters and chickens and dogs and babies and Volvos and former fraternity boys and gutted-out cars and old women in housedresses at three o’clock in the afternoon and it makes her feel like people might still be able to get along. The neighbors don’t get along—it isn’t uncommon to see them yelling at each other in somebody’s front yard—but it makes her feel like it’s possible.
They sit at the bus stop with a homeless guy who’s not going anywhere and a man in a pink shirt. The man in the pink shirt stares in the direction that the bus is expected to arrive. Darcie stares with him. The homeless man’s smoke blows past her face in a thick cloud. Sweat rolls down her back, her arms and legs, and she thinks about the clean white walls of their apartment, the space so small it gets nearly cold. She wishes she never had to go outside, never had to wear anything besides a tank top and panties.
Darcie takes Terry’s hand and sets it on her leg, feels the heat and roughness through her thin dress.
The man in the pink shirt stands before she sees the bus rounding the corner; it pulls up right in front of her, right on time. It’s her favorite driver, the friendly black man who waits when he sees her running and lets her off at red lights. The black women yell a lot and get mad if she asks questions and the old white men don’t even turn to look at her when she gets on.
In the waiting room, Terry reads a magazine while she drinks water and fills out paperwork. Her bladder has to be full. She drank 32 ounces an hour before, just like the instructions said, but she peed. She wasn’t supposed to pee, and now they’re waiting for her bladder to fill back up again.
She takes her insurance card out of her purse, a private policy her parents pay too much money for every month. They used to pay her Chevron bill, too, but they stopped because there’s a Chevron two blocks from their apartment and they were going there three times a day to buy cigarettes and condoms and wine and toilet paper and plastic containers of flavored noodles. It is an exceptional Chevron, filled with locally made sandwich wraps and this fancy chocolate she likes, a gold sticker sealing the box.
She leans over and looks at the magazine Terry’s reading: it’s for men who want to discover the six things they don’t know about women.
Terry is a good boyfriend in most ways but he doesn’t ask her questions about herself. He doesn’t seem curious about who she is and this bothers her when she thinks about it, when she wonders if he remembers her sister’s name, or what city her parents live in. When he asks her something, it’s about the immediate future: Does she want to ride bikes? Go to the pool? Yellow Jacket? There’s a barbeque at Boone’s house. Has she met Boone yet? She would like him. He’s good people.
Darcie turns in her paperwork and gets another refill. Then she sits back down and drinks: the water sloshing in her stomach. Terry puts his hand on her thigh and squeezes down it in increments until he gets to her knee. She knocks it off and elbows him as a pissed-off woman approaches the desk. The pissed-off woman tells them she’s late because the place was hard to find and she’s never been here before, and asks why she has to pay to park in the garage. The woman is well dressed, with careful hair and makeup. Darcie thinks she must have been beautiful once, the kind of formerly beautiful woman who had to find a different way of being in the world; she probably imagines she’s standing up for herself when really she’s just making everyone’s day less pleasant.
“What if I always bleed during sex?” Darcie asks, leaning forward to sort through the fan of magazines on the table.
“It would be okay,” he says. “We’ll buy red sheets and red towels.”
“No it wouldn’t be okay. We’d have to fuck in the shower every time we wanted to do it.” She locks eyes with the pissed-off woman’s husband, who sets his magazine on his lap and looks at her.