Round Rock

by Michelle Huneven

  Sleep eluded him. With the not drinking, his body was on tilt. He could feel his blood and juices trickling and eddying and sloshing in confusion. He lay wide-eyed and electric for hours on end. He followed the progress of a vigilant moon from frame to frame in the bay window. The house surrounded him, a many-chambered hope.

  In the morning, her capable hands tugged him from sleep, pinched him awake. She’d be dressed, her hair hidden under a scarf, sleeves rolled up, breath steamy from coffee. Time for Home Improvement! Fix It! Do It Yourself! And in the middle of this mad race toward perfection, Red Ray decided to go on a diet: one thousand calories a day.

  When he told Yvette, she grabbed a handful of his abdominal sag. “I won’t object,” she said.

  In the first week, he lost eight pounds. “I set them free,” he told Yvette, “like Prospero released Ariel and all the sprites on the island.” The second week, he lost four more pounds. He grew twitchy. His mouth stung from a steady diet of pineapple paletas. The iambs in Coriolanus thumped in his head, spilled over into unworkable legalese in his briefs. The client wishes only for some justice. A settlement of forty grand will do … The rumblings in his stomach gave him visions of a Dantean Hell.

  When he closed his eyes or gazed at a blank piece of paper, the word “diet” floated there, a photographic afterimage; a diminutive of “die,” it occurred to him. In the fourth week of this self-imposed starvation, self-pity staged a coup and took over as the governing factor in Red Ray’s life.

  “I’m only drinking until I drop twenty more pounds,” he informed Yvette. She had already turned her back on him and was striding deep into the house. He stumbled after her, bumping off the hallway walls. From various rooms, workmen stared out at them. He caught up, gripping her shoulders. “Listen,” he said. “It’s very self-regulatory. I can’t possibly get drunk. If I can only ingest a thousand calories a day, that’s at most ten shots of scotch or six and a half cans of beer. Or four beers and three shots of bourbon. And that’s assuming I eat nothing at all!”

  THE TOWN of Rito, population 750, had grown up around a large packing house. Most of the inhabitants were descendants of original Morrot serfs who, in one of “Don” Henri’s fits of benevolence, were allowed to buy small plots of land. Homes in Rito were modest and varied; a small wood frame house sitting next to a pink cinderblock cube, which neighbored a river-stone cottage whose yard stretched into a weedy vacant lot. Beyond the lot were two shacks sided in asphalt shingle and a fifties stucco tract home replete with fancifully scalloped plywood trim. Then another lot, a whitewashed wood bungalow, and so on, until the orange groves took over. The vacant lots served as a kind of village green where townspeople staked goats and ponies, and chickens roamed freely. If the community ever felt any pressure to cultivate the well-barbered suburban look found farther south in the bright new developments of Simi Valley and Newhall, nobody in Rito responded. Still, there was plenty of front-yard one-upmanship: birdbaths abounded, as did plaster animals of every species and whirligigs made of bleach bottles. There was even a half-ton pair of concrete tennis shoes, and in front of one home, ornamental bombs were planted nose-up and painted Caterpillar yellow and John Deere green. Cacti and the more prickly and primordial succulents proliferated, making the lush yards lusher and the austere, swept-dirt ones more forbidding. The favorite planters were old rowboats and red Cudahy lard buckets. Prized by every household, however, were round rocks from the Rito River. Some specimens were as small as walnuts, others as large as wrecking balls. They were placed atop fieldstone pillars or in gradated rows along flower beds. Boulder-sized matched pairs flanked the entrances of driveways. They were perfectly, naturally, remarkably round! The one coveted variation had a kind of hourglass shape and, depending on its size and who was describing it, looked like a bulbous bowling pin, a model of the moon pulling out of the earth, or a seamless two-tiered snowman. But the most popular rock by far was purely round. The very presence of these granite miracles in a yard was said to ease headaches, lessen female troubles, attenuate baldness, and nip melancholia in the bud.

  Rito’s busmess district featured the only sidewalks in town as well as a U.S. Post Office, Victor Ibañez’s grocería, the Mills Hotel, a laundromat called Casa de Wash ’n’ Dry, St. Catherine’s Thrift Store, and two bars: the Rito Lito and Happy Yolanda’s. Allegiances to these last two establishments cleaved the town neatly in two. Even teetotalers, bedridden grandmothers, and young children could express an immediate, ironclad preference for one bar or the other.

  The newly remodeled Rito Lito, which was actually two blocks south of Main Street and across from the packing plant, attracted packers, commuters, trysting suburbanites, and underage beer swillers. An illuminated marquee announced live music and a daily happy hour. The cocktail waitresses, snub-nosed blondes imported from Newhall and Buchanan, served free peanuts and popcorn to generate thirst and profit. Happy Yolanda’s was right downtown, up from the Rito River bridge. On warm spring nights, with the door open, the sound of the river filled the pauses between Spanish ballads on the jukebox. Yolie’s regulars were the geriatric contingent from the Mills Hotel, neighboring merchants, the occasional adventurous student from the art institute down the road, and all of Happy Yolanda’s family, who made up about a third of Rito’s population. The back door of the card room was the front door to Yolanda and Luis Salazar’s living quarters, and due to the steady flow in and out, it was impossible to tell bar customers from houseguests and family. No gimmicks at Happy Yolanda’s.

  Red had gravitated naturally to Happy Yolanda’s. In addition to Luis’s heavy pouring hand, Red also appreciated his respectfully laconic posture. Although versed in local history and trivia, Luis refused to gossip. Nor did he count rounds or cast disapproval on any man’s drinking method. He would, whenever appropriate, drive a staggering customer home, and he could be provoked, on behalf of his regulars, to collar an intemperate and throw him into the street. He deferred all confessions and sob stories to Victor Ibañez at the grocería or to Yolanda herself, now a corpulent, middle-aged beauty who sat at the end of the bar with the serene air of a happy queen. Luis and Yolanda both took to Red and tended fastidiously to his dietary needs. If the grill was off when Red came in for a late lunch, Yolanda prepared him a tuna sandwich, no mayonnaise, or skimmed off the orange droplets of fat from the cooling albóndiga soup and heated a panful in her own private kitchen. Luis frequently interspersed a free drink among those Red paid for.

  As his diet progressed, Red bought drinks for a burgeoning pride of new friends. He arrived home later and later. In fact, the workmen came from his house and he stood them rounds and heard from their mouths how the restoration of his home was progressing. She hadn’t left. He was drinking and the windows were still being glazed, tiles grouted, floors sanded. Daily, huge appliances arrived. A new septic tank went in, the driveway was asphalted, the columnar palms trimmed. Well, he was drinking at a reasonable pace. He had yet to black out or get sick or even insult anybody. This time, it seemed, he could handle it.

  On a Thursday in the dead heat of September, Red had eaten the soup-and-sandwich special minus the sandwich, finished beer number three, and was on his way back to his office to meet a client and court recorder and take a deposition. Yvette’s work crew met him at the door. Red turned back toward the bar, beckoning them to follow. “Come on in,” he said. “I’ve got a few minutes. I’ll buy you all a drink.”

  They shuffled among themselves like shy boys at a dance.

  “Luis!” called Red. “Fix these fellows what they want and put it on my tab.”

  The plumber stepped forward. A sallow young man of about thirty, he came close and spoke to Red in a low voice. “She let us off, said the work that was going to get done was done. I tried to tell her, just let me finish this one U-joint and I could at least turn the water back on. She said no, we should pack up our tools and go home.” He pulled his blue Dodger cap low on his forehead. “We did what she said, put our tools in our
trucks, but you know, she owes all of us money—me quite a lot, as a matter of fact, since I’m under contract. So we stood there, thinking she’d come out with the checks. We waited and waited; then she and the boy came out all loaded down with suitcases. Look …” He stopped, removed his cap, and looked deeply into it, as if to read his next line or find a way to keep from speaking further, then gave up and put the cap back on. “I hate to be the one to tell you this.”

  “It’s all right,” Red said. “Don’t worry. Go on.”

  “Well, I think she was real surprised to see us all there on the porch. I had to step up and ask her for our money. I was real polite about it, I just said, ‘If the job’s really done, I guess we need to be paid.’ She looked at us for the longest time, with that suitcase in one hand, your boy’s hand in the other, then told the kid to go inside and she followed him. We stood there for ten minutes, sure she was writing our checks. But a couple of guys swore they saw her peeking out to see if we’d gone. Finally she came out, only this time she had that old shotgun you’ve been using on the ground squirrels.”

  “Come on,” said Red.

  “I’m not kidding,” said the plumber. “I know it’s just a four-ten single shot, but it doesn’t seem all that harmless when it’s stuck right up in your face. She was crying, crazy, saying stuff like, ‘I know where you guys go every night. You go down to that bar with the dopey name and get my husband to buy you drinks all night.’ Said we’d already been paid. She’d seen your monthly tabs, and we’d drunk up all our pay.”

  “She knows drinks don’t cost that much,” said Red. “She’s just upset.”

  “Oh, I know she’s upset,” said the plumber. “And we didn’t want to make her more upset. She could be in enough trouble as it is—brandishing a weapon and all. Some of the guys want to press charges.”

  “Now, hold on,” said Red. “Everyone’s going to get his money.” Red told the men to wait while he went across the street to fetch his checkbook. He hurried back, sat down at the bar, and ordered a shot of Early Times with a beer wash. After another shot, he started writing checks, although his lawyering self feared she’d already cleaned out the accounts. That was always his first advice to female dissolution clients: clean out the bank accounts, rent a U-Haul, and take everything that’s not nailed down. Get yourself into a bargaining position. …

  The men came up one by one, naming their prices and taking their checks, then leaving their drinks and drifting out until only the plumber remained. He folded his check, stuck it in his shirt pocket. “You okay?” he asked.

  “I’m okay,” Red said.

  The plumber left and Red drank some more. He remembered the court recorder and the client, then forgot them again. When the three o’clock whistle blew at the packing plant, he got up and walked outside. Yvette was parked across the street in the Mercedes. Joe was in the front seat next to her. Between Red and his family, two large retrievers slept in the middle of Main Street. Red gazed helplessly at his wife, her face framed and dark within the car. Did she want to speak to him? Did she want him to speak to her? On both scores, he thought not. She just liked these moments of high drama that harked back to her dancing days. Grand finales. Bowing. Bowing out. This was her final pose for him to view. He hitched up his pants, looked up the street and then down. The stoplight hanging in the intersection was green and swaying in the hot breeze. Red heard the diesel sputter of the Mercedes’s engine. The two dogs rose reluctantly and made for the sidewalk. The car slid away from the curb. As it turned the corner, Red saw his son’s hand out of the window: tiny, white, clutching at the air.

  AFTER his wife and son drove out of his life, Red Ray got drunk. Besotted, swacked, stinking drunk, and then some. He drank until he passed out, woke up, and started drinking again. He drank for a week, until he came upon a twilight calm in which he could walk, talk, even think, all without pain. From this dark, incorporeal state, he called Frank Jamieson, his oldest friend.

  Married and divorced three times, Frank was an expert on the extinction of matrimony. Red hadn’t seen him for over two years, relying instead on the occasional drunken phone conversation. Yvette had banished Frank after his last visit, when he took Red to pick up crabs for dinner and didn’t bring him home for three days. Red didn’t even know where they’d gone. East, possibly the Mother Lode country, maybe even Tahoe. Red swore that they’d only been gone a day although Yvette and the calendar said otherwise. But that was good old Frank, skilled since childhood in the short tonic excursion.

  Frank’s father died when he was seven. His mother shut herself away with a well-stocked liquor cabinet and tried to take Frank with her for company. She invented a chronic asthma for her son and kept him out of school for weeks at a time. Frank learned to escape. He memorized bus schedules. By age ten, he knew how to hop a freight train. He discovered transient camps in storm drains and abandoned houses, turning up at school filthy and hungry from these hobo lairs. Red was his sidekick. Frank had the plan, Red had the money and the clothes and the food. Even then, Frank eluded the authorities while Red got grounded or yelled at, once even suspended from school for truancy. In their teens, the two boys discovered an arroyo with several rustic cabins that mud slides had rendered inaccessible by car. For six months, they spent afternoons, and in Frank’s case nights, in different houses, entering through screens that parted at the touch of a pocket knife. They sprawled on strangers’ sofas, ate canned goods, read old magazines and shopping lists, and drank bottles of wine and Rock ’n Rye smuggled from Mrs. Jamieson’s stores. In those havens of rustic luxury, Red developed a taste for how he’d like to live and drink.

  This pattern of brief escape never left Frank. At seventeen, he joined the Air Force, and stayed on for twenty-four years. How many times had he shown up on Red’s doorstep, AWOL and drunk? Yet he always gauged the tolerance of his superiors with perfect accuracy; he never saw the inside of the stockade or received more than a stern reprimand. His wives and sidekicks and the wives of his sidekicks suffered more. Whenever Frank came to town, Yvette’s love died in chunks: Frank was the proverbial bad influence, a test to the Rays’ marriage, a test Red invariably failed.

  The Air Force trained Frank to be an aircraft engineer. Upon retiring at forty-one, he was deluged with offers from civilian corporations. He went through four companies in one year, claiming that civilian work lacked the military’s standard of perfection. The head-hunters soon stopped calling. Frank shed a third wife and moved back to his mother’s house. He quit shaving for the first time in his life and spent his days watching game shows and soaps and playing gin with his mother.

  The day Red called, mother and son were drinking Safeway-brand vodka, eating jalapeño cheese on Bacos, and betting a penny a point. The score was 7,243 to 5,689 in Mrs. Jamieson’s favor. Frank told Red, “I can be there in, say, four hours.”

  Three hours later, he walked into Red’s office. Six foot four, spindly and graceful, Frank carried himself with a polite slouch. Red did something of a drunken double-take. This was not the shaved-neck military lifer Red remembered. Frank’s black hair was shoulder-length, slicked back, his beard long and woolly and streaked symmetrically with white. He looked cultish, backwoods, ministerial. Red thought of Tolstoy’s fevered Russian saints. Then Frank smiled his old slow smile; it unwound like a revelation, a sly and knowing nudge to the heart. “Here I am,” he said.

  “I love you for it, too,” said Red.

  Frank slid into the life of a Rito idler. While Red kept up the semblance of a law practice, Frank had coffee at Yolanda’s and afterwards lounged in the sun in the park by the river. Red met him for long lunches. When Red returned to his office, Frank joined the old men on the shady porch of the Mills Hotel. They met again at Yolanda’s for drinks and dinner. Yolanda worried over them, insisted they eat, gave them milk cartons of albóndiga soup to take home. They spent nights at Red’s house, camped out in two rooms on the first floor. Red connected the water, but everything else remained as
it had been when Yvette walked out: Cement had dried on hods. Paintbrushes sat in coffee cans of turpentine. Plastic wheezed in windows. The two men tracked plaster dust and sawdust, formed paths around stacks of lumber and the mammoth crated appliances. They were squatters at the construction site, vagrants at the scene of an abandoned dream. The days bled by.

  Red received divorce papers just before Christmas and drove to San Francisco to work out a settlement with Yvette. Problems in property distribution arose only in the Rays’ mutual indifference. “All I really want is out,” said Yvette. “She can have everything,” said Red.

  He was appalled when he found himself the sole, uncontested owner of the Sally Morrot ranch. “I bought it for you,” he told her.

  “I don’t want it,” Yvette said. “Besides, you’ll need a place to die.”

  Red returned to Rito an ex-husband and partial father. He found Frank at Happy Yolanda’s with a pretty sixteen-year-old Mexican girl on his lap. “Here’s Red back from the divorce wars,” Frank said. “Red, this is Isabel, Luis’s niece from Sonora.” She had braids as thick and long as arms, equine eyes, and strong white teeth. She lit Frank’s cigarette with a lighter shaped like a Saturday-night special, and ignored Red.

  Everybody he loved, Red realized, was being taken away from him. “Frank,” he said. “Come outside for a minute. I have to talk to you.” Out in the blue dusk, he beckoned Frank into his pickup. “Come on, let’s take a drive.”

  They drove for a month or more. They lived out of Red’s truck and checkbook. They showered at campgrounds, bought clothes as they needed them. They meandered down the coast through the bars of Oxnard, Malibu, Oceanside. They sat in the sand, passed a bottle, and watched the sun go down over the ocean. “Look at that,” said Red. “A path of gold right to me.”