Round Rock

by Michelle Huneven

  AT FIVE-THIRTY the next morning, Libby was making an egg salad sandwich to eat out at the lake when the phone rang. “You alone?” Billie asked. “Yes.”

  “So why aren’t you fishing?”

  “I’m going as soon as I can get out the door.”

  “So, how was it with the scholar?”

  “Fun.”

  “It can’t have been too much fun if you’re alone.”

  “No, really, we had a good time.”

  “What base did you get to?”

  “Don’t beat around the bush or anything,” Libby said.

  “Well?”

  “I never did know which base is—”

  “Just remember the four F’s.”

  “And I really don’t want to know,” Libby said loudly, “thank you very much. He didn’t even kiss me good night, okay?” “Frenching, feeling—”

  Libby held the phone against her thigh for a few seconds. When she lifted it back to her ear, Billie was laughing. “So where’d he take you to dinner?” “Round Rock.”

  “What? You ate at the cafeteria?”

  “No,” Libby said, “at Red’s.”

  “Red’s house? And where was Red?”

  “He came home later.”

  “Did he know you were there? I mean, was he expecting you?”

  “Of course. What’s the big deal? He’s very courteous.”

  “ ‘Courteous,’ ” said Billie. “Sometimes you kill me. So our history buff—he didn’t even try to kiss you?”

  “That’s okay.”

  “Did you want him to?”

  “I guess.”

  “Did he ask you out again?”

  “Not yet.”

  “You think you’ll see him again?”

  “Well, I lent him a book.”

  “I gotta give you credit,” Billie said. “Dating takes such stamina. Score me a roughneck at the Gusher Inn any day. At least I know what I’m getting—and getting it right away. I couldn’t stand the suspense. I get all the delayed gratification I need from raising citrus and a child. So does this mean we’ll be staring at the phone for the next three weeks?”

  “Jesus, Billie, you’re worse than Victor Ibañez.”

  “Victor! Somebody’s gotta call and give him an update!”

  “Billie,” Libby said. “Billie, I’m warning you….”

  What a relief, then, to get to the shores of the deep, cold lake, its gray-blue water napped by the wind. Here, thought Libby, is my private life.

  She didn’t say so to Billie, but she already knew how this thing with Lewis would end, and part of her was as unmoved as the lake’s muddy depths where the catfish lurked. She and Lewis would have an affair. She couldn’t say why. Objectively, he wasn’t all that attractive. Still, she knew what would happen from the way she couldn’t quite talk to him. When he stretched and yawned and rubbed his bare feet together, these movements played directly to her flesh and bones much like music. He’d fall hard. Eventually, there would be the problem of extrication. Libby pitied him already.

  LEWIS had the definite sense of getting something out of his system. He’d needed to know that women were out there and that he could make contact, be admitted into their presence and become, however briefly, the object of their attention. He felt a few twinges about his behavior—overexcited, he’d talked too much, as usual—then decided not to think about it anymore. He’d spent all day worrying about what to cook and grocery shopping, soaking beans and picking flowers and washing up after himself, and was in no hurry to do it again. Too time-consuming, too expensive, altogether too harrowing.

  BILLIE’S white dual-wheeled Chevy truck roared over the Tehachapis and into the hot, pesticidal bathtub of the San Joaquin Valley. It was dusk, and still in the nineties. The oleander blooming in the center divider exuded a sweet, poisonous perfume. “I’m overdue for this creep,” Billie said. “I haven’t been outta the valley in two months.”

  Libby had heard so much about these excursions, Billie’s famous “creeps,” she had a mental image of every element—the drive over the mountains, the Gusher Inn, the roughnecks. The Gusher Inn she imagined as a cozy, knotty-pine tavern with shelves of arcane oil equipment and maybe a mural featuring a fat geyser of black gold. The roughnecks would be rugged and soiled, a pride of grease-dappled cowboys.

  The real Gusher Inn materialized as a cinderblock cube set amid scrubby desert and squat oil derricks. One dirty picture window framed a view of the gravel parking lot.

  On entering, Billie spotted a tall, sallow guy with a waxed handlebar mustache. “I’ll be right back,” she said to Libby, and went outside with him. Libby sipped a beer at the bar, the only woman in the room. A man named Ted bought her another beer. Libby wasn’t much of a beer drinker, but the Gusher served only beer or cheap wine-from-a-box. “I’m waiting for my friend,” she told him.

  “Billie?” Ted said. “You’ll have a long wait, then. She took off with Moe.”

  Libby checked the parking lot. The truck was still there, but no sign of Billie. Libby counted how many cinderblocks high the wall was; counting, the pastime of a prisoner. “Baby,” Ted said, “you got the best legs to walk into the Gusher all year.”

  “Thank you,” Libby whispered.

  He turned to the bartender. “Pour another beer here. Loosen her up, maybe she’ll give us a lesson. A love lesson. These uptight types can be real tigers in bed.”

  “Easy, Teddy,” said the bartender. But he pulled another draft and set it behind the first one Ted had bought. When Billie reappeared, Libby had three full glasses awaiting her attention. Billie nodded to the untouched beer. “I see you’re doing all right for yourself.”

  “I really don’t appreciate being left alone like that.”

  “You will, when you see what I got for us. Come on, let’s powder our noses.”

  In the bathroom, Billie chopped out two lines of cocaine on a pocket mirror. “This’ll lift your spirits.”

  Stockton was fond of it, but Libby had tried cocaine only once; to her, it tasted and felt too much like going to the dentist. “Requisite creep candy,” said Billie. “This’ll give you the oomph you need.”

  The cocaine did put Libby in a better mood, except that for the rest of the night, she kept thinking something was falling out of her nose. She and Billie and three men piled into a large, boaty American station wagon. Jammed in the backseat between two men, Libby concentrated on not looking as tight-jawed as she felt. Billie, in the front, played with the neck and hair of the driver, a handsome, bulked-up blond guy called Mike. Bottles of sweet, strong liquor were passed, then a joint as they drove to a campground on the Kern River. Libby sat on an ice chest and watched a young woman with long, straight, flaxen hair make a pot of boiled coffee over the smoky campfire. They sat drinking the coffee laced with whiskey, Libby wondering why they’d come out here at all. The woman with the white-blond hair went into a tent and, once inside, called out for Mike. He went into the tent and came out almost immediately. The woman called him over and over, at intervals. Mike and everyone else pretended nothing was happening, but after a while he stood up and said, “I’m outta here.”

  Back in the station wagon, drugs were passed in brown vials. Libby politely refused. At a new apartment complex on the edge of the oil fields, they took an elevator to a nearly empty apartment on the third floor. In the living room, there was only a wide-screen television and two beanbag chairs; in the kitchen, only chips and hard liquor. Billie disappeared into a room with Mike. Libby sat in a beanbag chair and watched a Planet of the Apes movie without any sound. The other two men came in and out. One said, “Hey, Billie, want some of this joint?”

  “She’s not Billie,” said his friend. “Billie’s the pretty one.” Then, hearing himself, he slapped his face. “It’s not that you ain’t pretty, hon. It’s just, well, Billie’s about the prettiest thing.”

  Libby refused joints, shots of whiskey, and lines of coke, while sending telepathic emergency signals to Billi
e. Finally, when the apes were silently clobbering each other in the bloody, frenzied climax, Billie burst from the room—hair wild, eyes half-lidded—and threw an arm around Libby’s neck. Her breath smelled of alcohol, her words were slurred. “You look miserable, Lib. I knew this wasn’t for you. Come on. Let’s get you out of here.”

  Billie snatched some keys from the kitchen counter. In the parking garage, moving by feel, she tried various cars and finally unlocked the door of the station wagon. “Don’t worry,” said Billie. “We’ll leave it where Mike can find it.”

  Libby insisted on driving. She was so glad to be leaving that driving around oil fields in a stolen vehicle passed for heaven: derricks lit up like Christmas trees, soft cobalt sky, fat stars, the clustered yellow lights of Bakersfield. Billie suggested a turn here and there. Like a vision, the Gusher Inn materialized and beside it, Billie’s enormous truck as white and loyal as Trigger.

  Libby touched Billie’s shoulder. “Sorry to truncate your creep.”

  “I knew you weren’t creep material. I never should’ve let you come.”

  “You invited me!”

  “I invited you because you were all sad your historian hasn’t called.”

  “I’m not sad about that.”

  “You’re a total misery guts about it.”

  “You’re out of your mind.”

  “Your heart was broke and I took pity on you.”

  “I don’t even know the guy. I just went out with him once.”

  “Your heart is in a zillion beensie pieces.”

  Libby drove home. The dual wheels whistled on the asphalt. Billie slumped against the door, passed out. Libby listened to a talk show on the radio. One of the guests had taken a nationwide poll on happiness. Statistically, the woman said, the two happiest groups in America were married men and women who’d never been married.

  “That’s me!” Billie sprang up. “What have I been telling you? I’m one of the happiest people in America. Aren’t you jealous? Don’t you wish you’d never been married?”

  My mouth tastes like an electrical short, Libby wrote. My eyeballs are dry. My nose is packed with crystallized scabs which bleed when picked. I am not fishing—the first Sunday I’ve missed in a year.

  I’m depressed, thanks, I think, to the cocaine. I’ve forgotten why I live here in this valley-so-low. I can’t find a decent job. Or a decent man. And my closest friend … How does Billie do it?

  WHEN Libby returned the following week, the lake was socked in with fog. The air was was cool, even cold, but the weatherman said to expect temperatures in the high eighties by noon. She set up two poles, wrote in her journal, and caught one fish, which somehow slipped off her stringer. She dozed in the warming air, a slow bake.

  Someone called her name and Lewis pulled out of the fog like creation itself. Her first reaction was, How dare he? Her second, pleased surprise. Or maybe the two thoughts were simultaneous: How dare he cause her pleased surprise?

  “This is the second week I’ve come looking for you.” Lewis squatted by her chair. He threw back his head and gulped air. “This is a cool thing to do. I normally hate man-made lakes, but there is something to be said for large bodies of water. You’re right—it is like going to church, only better.” He touched the cane pole. “And murdering fish is the sacrament. Hey, want to go to Miserable Yolanda’s for breakfast?”

  “Can you go there?” she said.

  “Why not?”

  “Isn’t it a bar?”

  “What, you think I’m going to drink?”

  “No, no …” she stammered stupidly. Alcoholism etiquette, she sensed, was a minefield for the uninitiated.

  He punched her arm lightly. “I’ll be safe with you. You won’t let me partake, even if I want to, right?”

  His dark eyes danced with what? Derision?

  “Sorry,” she said to him. “It’s none of my business.”

  “Don’t worry about it.”

  When they got to town, he was too hot and wanted to change out of his sweater. “It’ll just take a sec,” he said. “You want to see my room?”

  She wasn’t crazy about ducking into the Mills with a man in clear sight of Victor Ibañez’s window, yet she’d always wondered about the fine white clapboard building with wide porches under tall, graceful deodar pines.

  The lobby, though dingy, was clean, with scarred, stunted cacti in pots, an atmospheric plein-air painting of red rocks and cypress trees, and rugs so worn that their patterns were mere tracery. Lewis’s room, at the top of creaky wooden stairs, was tinier, if possible, than her trailer’s spare bedroom. He barely had space for a bed and a bureau. Thumbtacked to the wall was a T-shirt silkscreened with a caricature of Wallace Stevens. A postcard of a blue jar was tacked upside-down above the T-shirt’s neck. “It’s a joke,” Lewis said. “Wallace Stevens wrote a famous poem about a blue jar.”

  The only poem of Stevens’s that Libby had read, which a pianist friend had recommended, was about somebody at the clavier. The vocabulary had cowed her, and she lacked the training, or possibly the patience, to decode the work. Lewis shuffled a stack of library books, suddenly determined to read this blue-jar poem to her.

  Libby sat down on the bed since there was no place else to sit, unless she wanted to roost on a big clump of laundry in the room’s only chair. Through a small window, she looked out on the bone-white limbs of a eucalyptus tree. Lewis began to read. She didn’t understand this poem, either. Lewis’s room smelled of old varnish and dust. The tap in the bathroom sink dripped. Her hands were chapped and speckled with fish blood. Her hair snarled from wind. The room was hot. Lewis was reading another poem now, with more dizzying words. “The Idea of Order at Key West.” At least she didn’t have to think of anything to say. Then, he put the book down on the foot of the bed—she assumed he was going to rummage in the laundry chair for a shirt—but without a word, he placed his hands on her shoulders and then slid them down her arms. He came in close; it was a stare-down, an ophthalmic assault. Her mind sped. He couldn’t kiss her when she was all fishy like this, and bundled up in shirts. But he did. He was relentless, even, nudging her down on the bed, kissing her neck and jaw, licking his way back to her lips. In no time he was undressing her, a series of insistent tugs. She didn’t mind. In fact she liked this focused, no-nonsense approach. This was what she thought would happen, although maybe not so quickly, and she couldn’t have predicted that he would have such authority. She was naked and he was still in that old wool sweater and jeans. He looked her straight in the eye. Scary, but fun. Really fun.

  Sprawled across the bed, he pushed his pants down, rolled away from her to put on a condom, and re-establishing eye contact, promptly guided himself inside her. His eyes flickered. It was a little much, a little intense, so she looked over his shoulder to where a wall met the ceiling. Jean buttons snagged on her thigh. The musty sweater was itchy, abrasive, like his beard. She didn’t even like beards, thought them slovenly. The whole grungy room was slovenly. She came fast and hard. Like I’m the man, she thought. Premature. He paused until she looked him square in the face. He smiled and, without pulling out of her or looking away, took off his sweater and T-shirt. His chest was hairless, the ribs pronounced. His olive skin was granular, like muscled sand.

  “Do you want to talk about this?” he asked, still inside her.

  “Not now!”

  “We’re doin’ it,” he said. “Shouldn’t we talk about it?”

  “God, Lewis.” She bundled his butt in her hands and, to shut him up, pushed him into her.

  “No?” Laughing a little. More in control than she ever dreamed he’d be. “You sure you don’t want to talk about this?”

  She couldn’t talk if she wanted to, and he knew this. That was the point.

  Afterward, they lay there like gasping fish. He held her forearm, squeezed it occasionally, kissed her ear. He got up first, and brought her back a mug of lukewarm tap water. They shared a cigarette. When she returned from the bathroom, his pan
ts were on. “Breakfast,” he said.

  At Happy Yolanda’s, they found Billie and the Bills sitting with Red Ray. Little Bill and Red jumped up to drag over another table. “We’ve been fishing,” Lewis said. “It’s so cool. Libby goes every Sunday.”

  Libby blushed and sat up straight. Did she smell like sex? The back of her hair was a bird’s nest. Billie winked at her at least seven hundred times. Lewis and Red Ray talked about the softball game later that day. She drifted, chewing machaca and eggs, sipping burnt, weak coffee. Lewis grasped her hand under the table and placed it on his erection. She inhaled coffee, coughing until Red handed her a glass of water.

  She and Lewis walked outside with everyone else. She hung back, thinking he might want to say something to her. But suddenly he was half a block away—“Bye! So long! Thanks for the fishing!”—and she was still standing next to Billie outside of Happy Yolanda’s.

  “You’re hooked,” Billie said.

  “I’m not hooked.”

  “You’re hooked, all right. Your eyes have turned to goo.”

  “I HAVE before me a monster lasagna,” said Lewis. “And Red says you should come help us eat it. We have a meeting at eight, so it won’t be a long evening. If you got here at six …”

  Libby went straight from work, pulling off her pantyhose at a stop sign. Dinner with the guys. She liked the idea. When she reached the bungalow, Red was inside and Lewis was out picking lettuce.

  “How’s our friend Billie?” Red asked.

  “Wild and woolly,” said Libby. “You hear she’s got a court injunction against the county? Doesn’t want ’em chopping down those eucalyptus trees. I agree with her.”

  “Me too, this time.” Red’s eyes were blue and kind. “She filed three injunctions against me when I started Round Rock.” He laughed quietly. “Once she lost, she leased the groves and saved my hide.”

  “She filed against us when my ex-husband and I brought the trailer onto the property,” said Libby. “I think it’s her way of saying hello. Some communities have welcome wagons. We have Billie and her court injunctions.”