Barefoot Dogs

by Antonio Ruiz-Camacho

  “Let me see your hands,” Laura said. I offered them to her, palms up.

  She held them carefully at first, as if getting acquainted with an alien object. She massaged my knuckles with her longest fingers and my palms with her thumbs, maternally; fingertips tepid and unused, the color of raw pork meat.

  “Beautiful hands,” she said. “So soft and young. How old are you?”

  “Twenty-six.”

  She looked me in the eye, and chuckled.

  “I’m forty-five,” she said. “There. I said it. Now let’s pretend I didn’t.”

  “I’m cool with that,” I said, my hands still in hers.

  “Anything else you may want to know before we move on?”

  “You said you’re married.”

  “I am.” She sighed, her face sagged. “We moved to Austin five years ago, but he still spends most of his time in Mexico. Taking care of the business, or so he says. We have two girls, one finishing college, the other starting. They’re both on the East Coast. I’m stuck here, in this big, supercosmopolitan metropolis full of pickup trucks, where you may run into vultures and deer on every corner. Lovely, isn’t it?”

  I wanted to ask why she’d left Mexico, but I didn’t.

  “So, which part of the city are you from?” Laura’s face got playful again.

  “Are you gonna guess my neighborhood by abusing my hands?”

  “Why not?” She smelled like classic perfume, perhaps Chanel No. 5. “Are you afraid of a human’s touch? Have you become that American already?”

  “It’s not that, ma’am. I just wanna show a little resistance. I think you’ll like that.”

  “You’re definitely south. Jardines del Pedregal?”

  I laughed. I put my hands in my pockets and swiftly kissed her on the cheek. Her skin was a peach.

  Later, we saw our own clean clothes tumble away inside the machines. She rested her head on my shoulder.

  “Give me your phone,” she said.

  Laura pointed the camera toward us, her slender naked arm outstretched, her flesh loose and freckled, and brought her face close to mine. She closed her eyes, and took the first snapshot. In the days that followed we’d photograph each other like crazy. Pictures of us eating raw octopus; pictures of us in bed taken against the burning background of the hills. Pictures of me caressing the side of her breasts. What would her daughters say if they saw these photos? I’d ask. What about her husband? She’d say she didn’t care, and keep snapping, amour fou–style.

  She pretended to lick at my ear and said:

  “One more. Say por vida!”

  The laundromat was filling up with young hipster couples, middle-aged men, and frumpy single mothers, children hot on their trail. There was something tragic about washing your clothes in front of others, and I wondered why Laura would be here voluntarily.

  “You haven’t told me your name yet.”

  “Plutarco. Plutarco Mills.”

  “A portentous name for a dashing young man,” Laura said. “I think we don’t speak the same lingua anymore, Mr. Mills.” From then on, she always called me by my last name. It turned me on. The sound of my name on her lips made my limbs and ears rattle. Had I known what would happen afterward, I’d have recorded her voice with my phone.

  “Yes we do,” I contested. “Not only do we speak the same language, we also respond to the same impulse.” Listening to Laura made me feel at home: she twisted statements into questions that turned doubt into a familiar space.

  “No, we don’t, Mr. Mills. You’re young and still believe in things like love and the future. I don’t have the stomach to prove you wrong, not as long as my wrists are attached to my hands, but this you must know,” she said, and paused. “The main difference between us and other couples is not what you think, those naughty clichés working up your cute little brain that make me yawn. The main difference between us, Mr. Mills, and them, all of them, is that the words that come out of your mouth, even the simplest ones, ripen into origami prunes in my heart.”

  I imagined my tongue inside her mouth, swollen purple and moist. The dryers buzzed, and our hot clothes collapsed to the bottom of the machines as if life had suddenly been sucked out of them.

  “Would you like to go out with me, Mr. Mills?” she asked as we pulled them out and tossed them back into plastic baskets, two jumbles of color and undistinguishable fabric that made no sense.

  We walked out into the hazy afternoon air. It felt heavy and metallic in the mouth. The unexpected taste of smog and burnt debris that arrived in gusts brought me back to Mexico City. Laura looked up and took a deep breath, and I realized we both felt the same. Nostalgia is the saddest form of glee.

  “One more thing,” she said by the door of her black Porsche Cayenne. “Condoms? Don’t bother. I couldn’t care less.”

  “What if I care?”

  “Let me ask you something, Mr. Mills,” Laura said, the commanding words not matching the sudden frail tone of her voice. “This game won’t have many rounds. Are you man enough to let the lady take the lead?”

  • • •

  “Mr. Mills!” Laura yelled on the phone. “We’ve got to celebrate!”

  It was noon on Friday and we weren’t supposed to meet until Saturday. The news that day was full of rumors that Michael Jackson had taken his own life and reports that the Hill Country wildfires were reaching the shores of Lake Travis. Firemen from every corner of Texas and Oklahoma rushed in our direction as Jackson’s classics from the seventies and eighties topped the charts.

  “And why is that?”

  “Surprise, surprise! Can we meet now?”

  “I’m in the middle of something,” I said quietly so that only she could hear me.

  I was at the Brackenridge Hospital, translating for a family from Estado de México whose teenage son had been badly beaten the night before outside a gay bar on East César Chávez, and later dropped off by anonymous friends outside the emergency room. The kid’s mother was chubby and small. She looked devastated, her skin the color of cardboard blistered by the Texas heat. Her husband wore a ragged Longhorns cap, and explained that they were from Ixtlahuaca. I’d probably never heard of it, he said, but I had because most of the maids from home came from there. He’d been living in Austin for several years, but his son and wife had arrived only the year before. The boy was seventeen but had always shown a great talent for the arts, he said. The word arts sounded foreign in his mouth. He wanted to be a filmmaker; in recent months he’d been working on his first project, championed by his art teacher at school. “Teachers adore him,” the father said. The movie was titled Zombies and Narcos vs. Aliens, and was about zombies who are about to take over a small Mexican town controlled by a ferocious drug cartel when an extraterrestrial attack strikes. “He didn’t know who prevailed in the end,” the father said, his wobbly cheeks glossy wet and flushed. He looked insignificant and fragile in spite of his sunburnt, strong, hairless arms. I sucked at my job. I didn’t know how to comfort these people, how to make them believe that things would get better, because most of the time, they didn’t. I translated the doctor’s prognosis, that the kid had received too many kicks to the head, that the skull presented several fissures, and that the boy had slipped into an irreversible coma. My phone rang, and I asked them to excuse me for a minute. When I heard Laura’s voice, I felt grateful and safe, and cowardly.

  “Can we meet tonight then?” she asked.

  “Sure,” I said. “Where?”

  She said the laundromat. “I’ll bring some clothes, and we’ll celebrate while we watch them dry. How about that?”

  Years later, I still consider her words. I now divine longing and anxiety in her voice, but in that moment all I found was Laura’s unleashed self, a storm impossible to contain, an energy that made me want to laugh and be with her, to see her bare.

  When I returned
to the hospital room the parents were now sitting on plastic chairs, looking hopelessly down at the floor.

  • • •

  Laura walked into the washateria around seven carrying a basketful of clothes masterfully folded. She wore a narrow white dress and copper sandals with wedge heels. When she saw me, she dropped the basket on the floor, grabbed me by the hand, and dragged me outside.

  She opened the trunk of her SUV to reveal a small cooler filled with ice, two fuchsia thermoses, and a bottle of Taittinger Brut Millésimé 1998.

  “I didn’t want to overdo it, so real flutes were out of the question,” she said like the gracious host of a cocktail party apologizing for the mind-blowing hors d’oeuvres. “People’ll think we’re drinking iced tea.” She handed me the bottle of champagne.

  “You’re so definitely north.”

  “Shut up.” Laura cracked up as I poured bubbles. “Okay, let’s make a toast!”

  “To what?”

  “To this gorgeous Jean Paul Gaultier, that I got at Neiman today,” she said, gently pulling down the neck of her dress to show me a sliver of cream-colored ruffles, and clinked her thermos on mine. The evening air was nuclear hot, we were alone in the parking lot, and nothing moved, nothing else made a sound. I felt like we were the only ones left in Austin, the only ones left in the world.

  “Are you serious?” I said, and let out a nervous laugh.

  “Oh, absolutely, Mr. Mills. But wait, there’s more.”

  “I’m all ears, ma’am.”

  “I’ll let those beautiful hands of yours unhook it for me tonight,” she whispered in my ear.

  Before I could reply she kissed me on the lips for the first time, the childish kiss of a trembling gal is how I remember it now, but in that moment all I felt was her wetness on mine and a quick hard-on. She refilled our thermoses and dragged me back inside the Laundromat.

  We separated our clothes into two categories, white and everything else, and dumped each pile into a dryer. We cranked the machines and took a seat to watch each load create a distinctive palette while tumbling, makeshift flutes in one hand and in the other each other’s, like a couple of inexperienced schoolkids. My thoughts raced imagining the texture of her underwear.

  “White or colored?”

  “White’s so balmy.”

  “I know, right? But colored is like, rough and intense, and like, sexy.”

  “It is.” She sighed.

  “Balmy or sexy? Choose one.”

  “I can’t,” Laura said. “I just love seeing all those clothes fly away. I wish I could do the same.”

  We grew quiet. I felt Laura so close to me, closer than anyone else had ever been; her body washing all over me in waves of heat.

  “You can, if you want to,” I said, shaking my thermos; it was empty now.

  “It’s not so easy, Mr. Mills.” Her voice soured. “You think it is, because you’re juvenile and unharmed, but it’s not.”

  “Actually, it is. I can make that happen for you, ma’am. I can stand in front of the dryer while you’re inside, so that the manager doesn’t notice.”

  “Are you kidding me?” She stared at me, stunned. For once, I felt older, stronger.

  “I’ve never been more serious, ma’am. I can try it myself first. If something’s not right, I’ll just swing the door open.”

  A big mischievous grin spread across her face.

  “Would you do that for me, Mr. Mills?” she asked girlishly and ran a long, perfectly French-manicured index finger down my slender biceps.

  “You said you’ll let me dispose of your undies tonight, ma’am. It’s the least I can do.”

  We took the clothes out of the dryers, and dumped them into a metal basket on wheels. We waited for the manager to retreat to the back, and then I hopped into the dryer. Laura and I agreed that the cool-air cycle would be the safest. Once I was inside, she wheeled the metallic basket in front of the dryer and pretended to make herself busy with our clothes.

  “Watch your head, Mr. Mills,” she whispered before closing the door. I knew then what Laika felt like when she was launched into orbit—that damned solitary dog and I, two little furry animals searching for unknown forms of life in outer space.

  The first couple of spins were rough as my body adjusted to the metallic hardness of this new habitat. The air was itchy and had an artificial, eerie taste to it. It felt leaden in my lungs as if I were breathing from an air tank filled with morning breath. But then the space flattened out and the air cleared, the sense of flying in circles vanished, and I broke free. My body felt light as if made only of cartilage, the direction of my flight determined by subtle movements of my limbs and nose and brows. I hovered over the big city, savoring a bubblegum taste in the air I didn’t remember it had. I recognized the rooftop of the house I grew up in and the tennis courts of the country club where I learned to ride on horseback and where I almost drowned at four, and the lush, infinite garden where I saw myself and Grandma on the lawn, holding a book from Les Aventures de Tintin in her pouchy hands, my head resting on her lap.

  Then the muffled yells of the manager broke into the dryer. When the machine stopped I fell hard to the bottom; one hundred and eighty pounds of flesh and bone back in my body all at once. I was hot and claustrophobic.

  “What the fuck are you people doing?” The pale young woman dressed in a sad blue-gray uniform was now standing in front of the dryer, wide-eyed. “Get the fuck out of there! Now! And you, lady”—she turned to Laura, whose face I couldn’t see because I was desperately trying to hop out of the dryer—“you should be ashamed of yourself! At your age!”

  Customers of all ages and ethnicities and fabric preferences looked on amused as the manager escorted us out the door.

  “If I ever see you two here again, I swear to God I’ll call the police!” she shouted as she threw Laura’s basket of jumbled clothes into the parking lot.

  “Are you okay?” Laura asked.

  “I am. It’s just that some people don’t have a sense of humor at all. Tant pis.”

  “I’m not talking about her, Mr. Mills,” she said worriedly. “Are you sure you’re not hurt?”

  “Yeah, I’m perfectly fine.”

  “The sounds of your body hitting against that drum were unbearable. That’s why the manager noticed, but I freaked out and didn’t know how to turn the damn thing off. Even a couple of women started to scream when they saw you tumbling like a bag of potatoes in there,” Laura said, containing a laugh.

  “Well, ma’am,” I said as I combed my hair back in place with my fingers, feeling suddenly full of life. “You gotta give it a try.”

  “The poor girl said she’d call the cops on us. I don’t feel like getting myself a mug shot tonight, Mr. Mills,” Laura said.

  “My dryer at home works fine,” I replied. “It’s not as big, but I’m sure you’ll fit in.”

  • • •

  An amber night had settled in the city by the time we arrived at my place. I lived on the fourteenth floor of a brand-new apartment building on Second Street. Laura tumbled flimsily inside my dryer for almost five minutes, until I worried that the lack of air or the adrenaline rush would keep her from feeling pain, and that the next day she would die from unnoticed bruises or internal bleeding. She stepped out of the machine with a melancholic grin on her face, and we went straight to my room.

  She was surprised that I had such a furry butt, and asked me to tell the story about the scar running down my groin. Her dress and the new bra that I’d helped her remove were draped over a chair.

  We ordered sushi, and I brought it to bed along with an iced bottle of verdejo. We ate tuna-and-masago maki while she snapped pictures of us nude.

  “Why are you here, ma’am?” I finally asked.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Why did you leave?”

 
“We were having such a wonderful time, Mr. Mills,” she said, motherly. She stroked my leg, then my chest, drawing circles around my nipple with her index finger. “Why ruin it?”

  I tried to apologize, but she cut me off.

  “I’m teasing you, Mr. Mills. We’re all like that. Eventually, we all wonder.” She took a sip of wine. A siren howled in the distance. I didn’t say a word.

  “My father,” she said. “He left his office one evening; it was late May. He was supposed to drive home, but he didn’t. At first I didn’t think there was anything wrong. I thought it was even normal. He was not a kid anymore, his children were all grown-ups now; he was a widow. Why should he come home every single day? What for, to whom? But the next day his assistant called to ask if we knew his whereabouts. He hadn’t shown up for work. We called his cell phone, but he wouldn’t pick up. We never saw him again. We all had to leave. We didn’t know what could happen with us, who could be next.”

  I thought about saying many things, but none of them felt right. I whispered that I was very sorry.

  “I saw him tonight in the dryer, though,” Laura went on as if she hadn’t heard me. “The moment I was in the air, I headed to Paris—I couldn’t help myself,” she said. “It was his favorite city. I hovered over Le Marais, looking for him. I spotted him outside L’As, ordering falafel, which was odd because he used to say garbanzos were food for the poor. I called his name, and he looked up at me; I was floating above him like a lightheaded dragonfly. He seemed embarrassed that I’d found him, but I smiled to show him that he shouldn’t be. I’ve had similar encounters with him in the past, in dreams, always abroad, but nothing like this one. Many times I’ve dreamt that we bump into each other at the entrance of a department store, Barneys, Selfridges—he’s coming out as I’m walking in. His face flushes when he sees me, and he stammers, struggling to explain himself. My joy is so boundless. I kiss him on both cheeks and on the forehead and on the cheeks again, cupping his face in my hands as tightly as if I’d never let him go. The way he looks at me, with those eyes so repentant and sorrowful and yet so free and so alive, makes me believe that he wasn’t kidnapped at all, that he ran away.”