by Noreen Ayres
In the row next to me, a woman with a square face and ski-jump nose was singing a hymn, “Beulah Land.” She told me she normally gleans with a church group on Sundays, a day I specifically avoid because I don’t want people “the Lord”-ing me this and “the Lord”-ing me that. At the end of her song, she held up her plastic grocery store bag loaded with pods. “These I think I’ll bring home to my daughter. She cooks ’em up with a ham bone, mm-um. You know you can take some home, honey, don’t you?” She brushed sweat away under her ashy bangs with the hump of her wrist, then plucked at her lavender shirt to unstick it from her sides.
“I don’t care much for them, but thanks.” When I lifted a spray of leggy stems, a yellow moth flew onto the cusp of my glove and stayed there.
“Last year this program fed half a million people,” the woman said. “Thank the Lord it wasn’t all lima beans, or the whole county’d die of methane poisoning, you know what I mean?” She got the laugh from me she wanted, then went lumping over the rows to the roadside to dump her sack in a cardboard box.
I straightened to release the pull in my spine, realizing I’d been bending over the leaves stiff-legged the way you’re not supposed to. At the inner thighs was an ache from straddling a row too long.
The church woman yelled back, “Hey, you know what my daughter gave me for my birthday? A pin that says ‘I’m a natural blonde. Speak v-e-r-y slowly.’” Smiling broadly, she launched again into “Beulah Land.”
I grabbed a handful of pods. Hearing the knock of fetal bean against fetal bean, and enjoying the air and relative silence, I felt a wonderful peace. Only two or three times did I think of the canyon case, or Nathan, or my new job in competitive underthings.
Again the moth lit on me, audacious on my arm. “I must resemble a lima bean,” I said, standing up straight, showing my prize. “This butterfly likes me.”
“Moth,” she said. “Butterflies by day, moths by night.”
“There’s day moths, too,” a man three rows over said.
“Wings folded: butterfly. Wings flat: moth,” the woman in lavender said. “I heard about this scientist wanted money for a grant. So what does he do? He paints spots on a butterfly and calls it a new breed.”
“Butterfly fraud,” I said.
“Can you beat that? I tell you,” the Beulah Land lady said, “it takes all kinds. It surely does.”
15
Saturday night about ten, Monty came up to me in the alcove and said to quit for the night.
“Why? What I’d do wrong?”
“Don’t be so skittish,” he said. “I want to take you somewhere.”
A sure unease washed over me. “Where?”
“Dancin’. How’d you like that?”
“Who else is going?”
“Just you ’n’ me.”
I told him I didn’t think that would be a good idea. “Employer-employee. That never works.”
“Relax. I just want to get acquainted. I do that with all the new girls. Ask Sharon there,” he said, nodding toward the main floor where two models were drifting. “You’ll find out I’m a gentleman, too,” he said in his soft gentleman voice.
“I never had any doubt,” I said, delivering it like a warning. “What’d you have in mind?”
“Country Western. Been to Denim and Diamonds?”
“No way. I can’t do that. I don’t have the mind for it.” I said it without much conviction, because I wanted to go with him, wanted to have time alone when I could talk to him about his personal life, but didn’t want to sound too eager. And it was mostly true about me and that kind of dancing. It would give me a chance, though, to learn who his friends were. Ask, By the way, do you happen to know anyone named Miranda?
“You’re goin’,” he said, the way a man does who never gets told no. He reached out and traced the neckline of my zip-front cat suit that was supposed, somehow, to qualify for lingerie. “Get dressed.” And then he told me that in his office closet was a pair of boots, that I should see if they fit when I go in to change.
We were at Denim and Diamonds off Beach Boulevard, an upscale boot-scootin’ place no real cowboy would drop reins for. Monty was getting my drink at the bar.
Next to me, a server in white lace stockings and white cowboy boots bent over to give a man his change, and a hand from another table patted her at the puff below her blue denim shorts. She reeled around and said, smiling, “I’ll bounce you on your head you don’t behave.”
A man with a white goatee said, “That sounds like fun,” and plucked a twenty off the table and held it out to her in two fingers while his diamond-studded watchband winked. She took it with a phony “thanks,” and sashayed off. When the man’s gaze fell to mine and I didn’t glance away, his happy expression disappeared. Maybe my hard-ass look spoiled his fun.
The DJ put on a song by a woman looking for something in red, something for certain to knock a man dead, and a dozen couples began to glide around the room in a cowboy waltz. A man sitting on a bench that looked like a horizontal Coors can smiled at me.
By the time Monty came back with the mugs, the air seemed warm as flannel. I drew down the cool beer gratefully. He watched, said, “I’ll have you a changed woman in no time.”
“You know, Monty? I’m thinking maybe I don’t need that job as much as I thought.”
His mouth came close to my ear. “Don’t you know when somebody likes you?” He wore a musky scent.
I shifted away. “You know, this really isn’t my kind of music. I like Eric Clapton. Cocker. Bob Seger. Old guys.”
“You want to leave?” He leaned away from me and I watched his nostrils go into a wider flare than usual, and maybe that meant he was mad.
“Well, sometime,” I said.
“You nervous? I make you nervous?”
He was smiling, drawing pictures with his finger in the wet mark on the table, cocking his head at me.
I said, “It’s just I’ve got a life, you know, before Monty. Things to do.”
He came close again and whispered, “Before Monty. Nothin’ was before Monty.”
I needed to change the subject. I needed to get him warmed up to tell me about his life and friends. Maybe I was helped along by the beer, but I began to look at him as a man. A man, not a felon. My mother used to sing a certain song every time she ironed, about how when she was not near the man she loved, she loved the man she was near. Sometime in my early twenties I got the gist of it, and afterward that song rang a truth that delivered my mother to me in a new light. Monty had an appearance that would’ve appealed to me in an earlier time when my veins carried a bit of wild brew; when I was young enough to believe people just wanted to be different, individual, but they didn’t really want to hurt anyone. I tried to get back to that moment. Undercover, you become the part, didn’t Ray say?
I let my eyes follow the handsome men around the room moving their pretty-girl partners, heros all. I let Monty see it, this interest, and drank a little harder. I asked, “Do you know the actor Sam Elliott?”
“Don’t think so.”
“He was in Roadhouse, with Patrick Swayze.”
“Who’s Patrick Swayze?” He drank from his beer, grabbing off foam on his mustache with his lower lip.
“Never mind.”
“No, come on.” When I just shook my head, he said, “You gonna dance with me or not?” lightly grabbing my wrist.
“Later. Give me some time.” He let go of my wrist, but I saw a cloud cover his face. “Don’t you have a lady friend?” I asked. “I mean, to take out?”
He leaned toward me again. “Sure I got a lady friend. I’ve got a lot of lady friends. Now I got one more.” When he smiled, his eyes looked both suspicious and kind.
“Let’s talk about the weather,” I said.
The beat kicked up. Mary-Chapin Carpenter was singing about the Twist ’n’ Shout down in bayou country. “Look at that,” Monty said. “Don’t that look like fun?”
“That looks like my last geometry
lesson.”
He laughed, sat back, and said, “How you gonna learn, you don’t try?”
“I told you, Monty—”
“Okay. The weather? What’s your sign?”
“Right.” I just shook my head.
“Where you from? You grow up around here?” he asked, flagging down the waitress in the white lace stockings and boots. My boots, the ones Monty loaned me, were blue with white-flame insets. When I went to put the boots on at the Python, I found a necklace with beads and bones in the toe. I meant to ask him about it but I forgot then, and I forgot again as he ordered margaritas and as I tried to say no. He forgot I didn’t answer his question, when he said, “My mother says I was born in Pittsburgh. She lies a lot.”
“Really,” I said.
He was gently rocking to the music. His features from the side looked stubby, almost as though his nose had been broken and his brow had got clubbed by a pool cue. “Someday I’m gonna buy me a place in Idaho or Montana or some damn place. Anywhere but here.”
“I don’t know,” I said. “It’s got its moments.”
“You know Downey? That’s where I grew up. Cows. Dairy farms. Went to Downey High. Our mascot was a flea with his brains bore out.” He waited for a laugh, then said, “Actually, we had two mascots. Only school I know has two mascots. Vicky and Vic Viking. I braided my hair in pigtails, put on one of them funny hats with the horns? Vo-la, I was Vicky. Our team wasn’t worth a shit, man. I sure didn’t want anything to do with them. Might as well be Vicky.”
I couldn’t help but laugh, and the music did sound good, and the vibrating thunder of fifty boots hitting the hardwood floor with the same Texas stomp set me stirring. He put his hand on mine, and I took in the broad plane of it and the attractive dunes of forearm flexor and extensor spread with dark hair.
Monty went on, enjoying his audience. “I had a good time growin’ up. My mom, she thought I hung the moon.” He settled on both arms, confiding in me, drawing me in like a friend. “Let me have the whole garage all for myself, all the little toys she bought me. I was king of the neighborhood.”
“I don’t know if you’re being serious or not.”
“‘Course I’m serious.” He folded my hand into a fist and massaged it like a kitty head. I looked away at the woman on the dance floor who was teaching the steps to a new line dance. She wore red high heels instead of boots, and spoke into a microphone worn over her head like an operator’s headset, Madonna style. When I looked back, he was staring at me. “The boots,” he said. “They fit?”
“Perfect,” I said, though they were a tad loose.
“Yours. You gonna thank me?”
“Whose are they?”
“A friend of mine left ’em.”
“Left them.”
“Yeah,” he said, and the expression on his face changed, but I wasn’t sure to what.
“There was something in one of them. A necklace.”
I dug in my purse and came out with it. Two slim brown feathers latched with beads hung beside four short bones that looked like finger bones to me. “Your friend get this at some Satanic garage sale?”
He smiled and said, “My friend likes strange shit.”
“And you mean that in the most respectful of ways.”
“Did you tell me where you were from?”
“No. Mostly here. Sort of all over.”
He lifted his beard with four fingers in an almost scratch. “A woman of mystery. Sort of from all over. You can do better than that. Hey, I tell you you look good in that skirt?” Under a rosy neon lariat, the color looked hotter, pinker in a blue way.
The waitress came with the margaritas. Monty touched the salty rim of his to mine and said, “Here’s to you, girl.” The DJ put on one by John Michael Montgomery, a big-screen video of J.M. strumming and looking soulful and sincere as he sang about sappy old movies and how he loved the way his lady loved him. And then Monty got up and took me out on the floor to dance, and held me as if I might break, slow and easy as the man said.
When we sat back down, Monty was quiet and seemed far away in his thoughts until he scooted his chair closer, and we both sat in silence watching the dancers. I was feeling the swim of drink, but not too much. On the overhead video, Marty Stuart was promising to wipe those teardrops dry.
Monty’s mood broke and he looked at me with a smile. “The only thing I fear,” he said, “is standin’ in one place. Man, in Montana . . . Up there you can jam at a hundred and ten on your scoot. You can eat big and fuck simple and write home to your mama every twenny years.” His teeth gleamed in his beard.
“What’s holding you here?”
“Not much.”
“Well then?”
“How old are you anyway?”
I shrugged a shoulder.
“You don’t know or you don’t wanta tell?”
“You should only care if I look seventeen, which I don’t.”
“Oh, I’m not worried. You don’t look that young.”
“Thanks.”
“You asked for that one, now, didn’t you?”
“I guess I did. Thirty-three.”
“Not married. I don’t see a ring.”
“Even if I was, I might not wear a ring. Men don’t. Why should women? We all get branded or we none of us get branded, is the way I look at it.” I did have a ring, from Bill, but it was a Sears kind, and I only got to wear it six months, and it rested at the bottom of a drawer in cotton.
“See? That’s what I like about you. Different. How about another draft?”
“No thanks. It’s getting late.”
“It’s not even south of midnight.”
“I have to get up. Things to take care of.”
“Whatever’s waited this long will wait some more. Hey, you like motorcycles? I’ve got a purebred putt that’ll break your heart. I’ll give you a ride sometime.”
“Let me see now, that must mean a Harley.”
“Gnarly Harley. Right you are. I wouldn’t be caught dead on one o’ them Jap hair dryers.”
I looked around me, hoping I wouldn’t see anyone under a Stetson with Asian features going stony at the remark.
“What I do is buy baskets,” he said, “fix ’em up. Sort of a hobby, but income, too. I hammer their tanks—engrave ’em—paint on ’em for friends. Right now I got a beater somebody wants fixed up. When I’m done, he’ll have a softail mile-chaser outlaw Frankenstein freedom machine that looks like a work of art. Old Harleys never die. They just recycle.”
His thumb was traveling across my shoulder. “Hon, you are scooter trash if I ever saw it. I can see you on a crotch rocket of your own, breathin’ fire and eatin’ wind.”
“You’re full of a certain amount of shit, you know that, Monty?”
“Yeah but it’s good shit, huh? Hey,” he said, tipping his head. “Hear that? Dwight. ‘Maybe I’ll be fast as you.’ He’s an asphalt eater himself. He’s got a biker bar in Hollywood. All the rich actor jocks go there.” I had to admit the music got to me, and pretty soon Monty was saying let’s shake some tushy, and before I knew it, I was out on the floor going backward, two-stepping with him while the others were doing those geometric stomps. As soon as that finished, another Dwight Yoakam started. “Two Dwights,” Monty said, pleased that it was two in a row by the same artist, this new song slower, Dwight and Monty singing together, telling me not to look so pretty and he’d try not to be a fool.
When we sat back down, Monty took the last watery slug of his margarita, then popped a mashed lime rind in his mouth and chewed on it a few times, downing it while my eyes watered. He got back up and brought his glass to the bar. The bartender in his cowboy hat seemed to be riding a slow horse as he bobbed to the music, looking out at the floor.
In a moment another margarita sat in front of me, and I was protesting that I hadn’t finished the first.
Monty said, “You know what tequila means in español? ‘The rock that cuts.’”
“I’m glad to know
that,” I said.
“See what a good Downey High School education can do for you? Now,” he said, leaning close, “how else can I impress you?”
I ignored him, sipped the drink, and we talked about the thin women in their outfits and if they’d make good models, and in a while I began to forget for a moment the Undercover Me, and what I was there for. The black-and-white-spotted cowhide wrapped around the top of the bar island looked a little fuzzy. Monty was nibbling my neck near the ear, and in time my eyes closed in spite of myself. My back arched and I could feel my breasts wanting out.
He whispered, “You’re Harley gypsy, darlin’, I just know it. Beautiful scooter trash. I got a fuckin’ machine in my garage’ll purr your pants off, and I mean that in the most respectful of ways, yes I do. Come out with me sometime. You and me, baby, straddlin’ the best kickass, deep-throb, eighty-nine incher you’ll ever have the pleasure.”
I broke out in a laugh, said even I couldn’t handle that. I said, “There’s two things I always said I wouldn’t do for a man. One’s fly in his airplane.”
“And?”
“Get on his motorcycle.”
“No, no, no, no. You don’t get on his motorcycle, doll. You get on your own. Old Monty don’t mind missin’ out on the thrill of a beautiful woman wrapped around him once in a while if that’s all the poor boy can manage. Hey, I’m a fuckin’ knight. I know how to treat a lady.”