Round Rock

by Michelle Huneven

  “It doesn’t take much imagination,” Libby said evenly. “If you want to take someone out, you arrange it ahead of time.”

  “It wasn’t that premeditated! At eight o’clock, I finished at the damn laundromat. I had clean clothes. I put them on. Lawrence just gave me this jacket. I put it on. And that’s when I thought, Now I can take Libby out. Now that I look halfway decent. Was I supposed to squire you around town in ratty jeans and a T-shirt?”

  “Well, I can’t go. Not tonight. I have to get to bed early. I told Joe I’d take him fishing tomorrow at five.”

  Lewis looked around him. “May I stay?”

  “If you want.” She went into her bedroom and undressed, then washed her face and brushed her teeth. Out on the deck, she found Lewis lying fully clothed on the futon, smoking. She slipped under the covers, curled away from him on her side. The night was noisy with the high-pitched oscillations of mosquitoes, distant traffic, birds and beasts scuttling in the trees. Lewis switched on the clamp lamp and picked up a book he’d left next to the bed, whose pages had grown fat and wrinkly in his absence. After a while, he turned off the light. He stood, took off his jacket and slacks, and hung them carefully over the railing. He crawled in beside her. “Oh, Libby,” he said. “Come over here.”

  Her eyes were open. She didn’t move. He clambered over her, kissing her shoulder, licking her neck. “Come on,” she said. “I have to sleep.”

  He rolled away. She thought for sure he would leave, fell asleep expecting it, and was wakened, hours later, by a shriek.

  She thought at first the noise was a large tree falling to the ground, or a coyote’s otherworldly wail. Only after she’d seized his arm did Libby realized the sound came from Lewis. He was gasping for breath, covered in sweat.

  “Nightmare,” he panted. “A curly blond wig was eating me.”

  She held him, could feel his heart pounding in his chest. “You’re okay,” she said. “No wigs in sight.”

  He smashed himself against her, inadvertently pinching one of her breasts. “Ouch,” she said.

  “I was driving a car that was getting more and more stripped down, until it was more like a go-cart. The steering wheel was a screwdriver stuck in the column. I couldn’t steer away from the wig.”

  Libby tried to free her breast. “Don’t leave,” he said.

  “I’m not going anywhere. You’re squashing my breast.”

  “I hate it when you freeze up,” he said.

  “Me? Me?” Libby was pushing at him as hard as she could.

  “You turn into a rock, a frozen rock in a frozen sea.”

  “You’re hurting me!” she hissed, and finally he gave her some room. “And you’re the one who froze me out all week.”

  His arms started tightening again. “I know I’m a jerk. An incredible jerk. God. It wears me out.”

  “It wears you out?” Libby cried. Then, “For God’s sake, stop squeezing!”

  “Sorry.” His body was flush up against hers. “Listen.” He spoke into her ear. “I want things to be different. I don’t know if I can manage it, but I want it.”

  “Different how?”

  His lips moved for a while before any sound came out. “I didn’t expect to feel this way. So attached to you. To like you so much.” As if moved by his own declaration, he began nudging her legs apart. “I don’t want to lose you,” he said. “You’re so good for me.”

  They began making love, though all she could think about was how much sleep she wasn’t going to get before she had to pick Joe up. And Lewis was so tireless that she finally had to tell him to go ahead, come without her.

  Then he wanted to gab. “Did you ever notice how the Big Dipper is always up there, hogging the sky? Every time I’ve slept over here, that’s all I see,” he said. “We should build a deck on the back of your house, maybe we’d see some other constellations. You awake?”

  She didn’t answer, hoping he’d get the hint.

  “I could live here, Libby. I could—if you let me.” A moment later, he was snoring.

  She was too tired to think clearly. Maybe she didn’t understand some vital part of the evening. The word “scimitar” drifted into her mind. With a scimitar, she could slay Lewis. Off with his head. Like in those fairy tales where the princess sends her suitors on impossible errands. Harness the four winds. Suck up the Seven Seas. Eat a stableful of beef, including hide, tails, and hooves. Everyone who fails is slain. With a scimitar. She did want to live with Lewis. Maybe. Or slay him with a scimitar. One, the other, or both. No way she could fall asleep.

  But she must’ve dozed off, because when she next looked at her watch it was 4:12 and Lewis’s side of the bed was empty. He was in the kitchen, dressed and pacing before the gurgling coffee maker.

  “Would it be okay if I don’t go fishing?”

  “I wasn’t expecting you to,” she said. “Only hoping.”

  “I can’t take Red and Joe together, the whole father-son thing. Red’s so nervous around the kid.”

  “I don’t think Red’s coming,” she said.

  “Yes he is. He told me yesterday.” Lewis poured a cup of coffee.

  Libby sat in a chair. She could go to sleep right here. Or maybe she was asleep. She felt a dry peck on her cheek and the door clicked shut.

  At the lake, Libby huddled in her flimsy folding chair. The water was very low. Birds pealed in hunger. Red and Joe were a hundred yards away, slip-stitching the air with their fishing lines. A chilly breeze tempered the sun. A bird flew past like a black, disembodied hand waving across the horizon. Bye, bye, bye, bye.

  RED CAME into the office and started picking things up—a geode paperweight, a pamphlet, a pencil sharpener in the shape of an orange—and putting them down. Lewis, updating files on the computer, couldn’t concentrate. “You okay?” he asked.

  “Fine, fine.” Red lifted a vase off the mantel, studied its bottom. “So what’s cooking with you and Libby these days?”

  Lewis groaned. “What, she been boohooing to you?”

  “I was hoping we could all have dinner tonight.”

  “I haven’t talked to her for a few days.” Lewis squinted at the ceiling, counting how many. “Four or five days,” he added. “I’m probably in purgatory. She wears me out, Red.”

  “Relationships do take a lot of time and energy.”

  “I hate that word. And besides, it’s not relationships. It’s Libby. She so damn oversensitive.”

  “She’s oversensitive?”

  “What, you think I’m oversensitive?”

  “You?” Red pretended to think. “Oh, no, never. Not you.”

  “Trust me. You should try her out for a few days. You’d see.”

  “Why doesn’t that strike me as such a grisly proposition?”

  Lewis snorted. “I wish you would take her off my hands. You’d be doing me a big favor. You take Libby and I’ll become the monk.” When Lewis stood, his leg was asleep, and he staggered around the desk. “You’d come crying to me, man.” Lewis yawned. He was at Denny’s last night until past three, then up at seven. He wished Red would leave so he could take a nap, but His Corpulence lowered himself into an armchair and slumped in thought. Lewis straightened stacks of paper, banging the edges against the desktop with percussive glee.

  Red glanced at his watch. “Joe’ll be landing any minute.”

  “Joe?” said Lewis. “Oh, yeah. Gone, huh?”

  “I’m never ready to put him on that plane.”

  Red’s sadness was unnerving. Lewis was supposed to be distressed, and Red the steady one. “Hey, Redsy. You want a cup of coffee?”

  “I’m about coffee’d out, thanks.”

  “You want to, uh, take a walk or something?”

  “I thought it’d be good to have dinner with friends, that’s all.”

  “Well, all right, already. Why didn’t you say so?” Lewis called Libby at work. “Red Ray requests the honor of your presence at dinner tonight.”

  “Tell him thanks,” Lib
by said, “but I need more notice.”

  “Come on, where’s your sense of adventure?”

  “I can’t jump every time you say so, Lewis.”

  He looked at Red and rolled his eyes. “I’m not asking you to jump—Red is. Just kidding. But seriously, Joe left today and the old man’s moping.”

  “I still need advance notice.”

  Lewis said, “Okay, okay,” and “Goodbye,” and slumped in the armchair opposite Red’s. “I told you. She’s on a kick.”

  “Oh, well.” Red was philosophical.

  Now, they were two men with bad posture lost in thought. Lewis had to admit sitting there like that felt good. Guts bulging, mouth-breathing: a form of meditation for sunk white guys. All they were missing were a couple six packs and a wide-screen TV. Red’s eyes grew hooded and even his freckles started to fade. They sat without moving for six, nine, twelve minutes, until the phone rang.

  “If Red’s really sad,” Libby said, “is that invitation still open?”

  RED AND LIBBY took both jars of eggs, the neglected and the cradled, and examined them endlessly, as if rotten eggs were the prima materia. The eggs that had been held were now dark gray, with a rim of white froth. The yolks, when they rolled into view, were still a deep yellow, but their sacs were pocked with gray lesions, knots of stringy membrane. When Lewis shook the jar, there also seemed to be something solid in there, too, like butter forming in a jug of cream. “A whole clot of rot,” he said.

  “Joe says it’s the Alien,” Red said.

  “A homunculus in vitro,” said Lewis. “The child of your applied touch and affection.” Lewis picked up the other jar. “Ah, the slower, younger brother.” The control eggs still looked like regular eggs, only slightly cloudy, with the smallest fringe of now-pink froth. “I wonder which jar stinks worse.”

  “We should probably set them lightly in the Dumpster,” Red said, “and have done with the whole business.”

  “Seems a shame to waste two perfectly good Mason jars,” Libby said.

  “And a much greater shame to bring them this far and never smell the final product,” said Lewis. “Let’s take them out to the groves and throw rocks at them. Then run like hell.”

  “What a boy thing to do,” said Libby.

  Lewis held a jar at eye level. “Mustn’t we conclude from this that human touch is harmful and degrading? That prolonged contact leads to putrefaction?”

  “You would say that,” Libby said.

  AFTER dinner, they walked around the boarded-up bungalows so Libby could look them over and pick the one to move onto her land. On closer inspection, the houses were sturdy, simple, ingenious. The architect, said Red, had been a friend of the ranch’s former owner, and he’d used structural elements he’d seen in India and Japan: raising their elevation, extending the beams, placing windows for cross-ventilation. The same architect, said Red, eventually designed the first motel in San Luis Obispo. To open a door, Red pulled out nails with a cat’s paw. He swept a powerful flashlight over bubbling wallpaper and boarded windows. The air was sour, musty, old.

  Lewis started sneezing and had to wait outside. He watched as stars came out in the soft violet sky: a tricky pastime. A tiny sparkle. Then nothing. Nothing. Nothing. He’d look away, glance back, and there it was, a pinhole to another, brighter realm.

  Libby came up behind him, snaking her arms around his waist.

  He leaned against her, her breasts squashed cozily against his back. “You coming over tonight?” she whispered.

  He closed his eyes. “I have to work.”

  Her body stiffened and her arms withdrew. A chasm of air opened between them. “I need to see you alone,” she said. He closed his eyes. Here it is, he thought.

  He’d had a good run with Libby. Three months of happy, have-at-it, laugh-it-up sex. He’d known all along it couldn’t last forever. “Okay,” he said. “Why don’t you meet me later at Happy Yolanda’s for a drink?”

  “A drink?” she yelped.

  “I can drink water or juice,” he said. “Milk, Coke, whatever. A Virgin Mary. A virgin martini.” He laughed, bumped her arm. “A virgin martini—that would be an olive, right?” Libby wasn’t laughing. “Okay, then,” he said. “Meet you at ten for an olive.”

  HAPPY YOLANDA’S door was flung open. Inside the warm darkness, a coppery blur of faces and a sad Spanish love song rasping on the jukebox. Bottles clinked. A drunken laugh rang out. Lewis inhaled the sour breath of his old life: smoke, spilled alcohol, disinfected air.

  What if he walked in and ordered a double bourbon, neat? Surely nobody would say, “Hey, aren’t you Red’s assistant out at the drunk farm? Sure you want to throw away all that hard-earned sobriety?” The bartender would more likely pour the drink, his face blank as lumber.

  Libby sat on a stool at the end of the bar, talking to Arvill Hartwood, a big-shot rancher in the valley. Lewis had seen him around town. Though not in Billie’s league, Arvill was still rich by anybody’s standard. He was famous for having both Morrot and Fitzgerald blood, and for his kindly nature. Even Victor Ibañez, who praised no man, admitted Arvill was sweet, but he called Arvill’s wife, Charlotte, “the Barracuda.” The Barracuda had walked out on Arvill for the fifth or sixth time two months ago—which was probably why Arvill was slumming in Happy Yolanda’s—and Victor had a pool going for the exact date of her return.

  Arvill, thought Lewis, was probably just the right man for Libby; maybe fifteen years older, and not bad looking if you don’t mind grizzle. Wiry, charming, and rugged in spades. Arvill raised longhorns for a hobby in the pastures around his ranch-style home; if Libby married him, she could admire lunky cattle with silky, speckled hair and handlebar horns from various picture windows.

  Lewis sat at the other end of the bar. Libby spotted him, said something to Arvill, and carried her drink over. She’d been home and changed into jeans. Her hair was shiny and floating around her face. Her green, ribbed shirt was tight enough that Lewis could see bra straps and nipples. “Swacked yet?” he said.

  “It’s club soda, dummy. I know better than to drink around you.”

  Arvill was watching them. Lewis stood up. “Let’s get out of here. That guy creeps me out.”

  “Arvill?” said Libby. “He’s all right.”

  “He wants to fuck you.”

  “He does not.”

  Lewis put his hand on her back and urged her off the bar stool, steering her out onto Main Street. The night was bright, with an almost full moon. You could see the bricks in the buildings, the green bridge arching over the river, the brush-covered hills rising up behind town. He nudged her up Main to the Mills, then through the lobby and up the stairs. In his room, he pushed her down on the unmade bed. “Lewis,” she said. “We’re going to talk.”

  He evaded her hands, peeled her shirt up until she lifted her arms, and her breasts, in her lace bra, sprang free. She covered her chest in an ineffective show of modesty. “This isn’t talking,” she said.

  “We’ll talk,” he said, and unhooked the bra. He pulled her hands away, kissed her breasts, yanked the buttons of her Levi’s, which opened in a rapid arpeggio. She kept trying to cover herself, but she was also starting to laugh.

  He put two fingers inside her and looked her in the eye, which she never endured with equanimity. She bit her lower lip. “Talk to me now,” he said. “What’s on your mind?”

  “I remember this trick,” she said, and arched away from his fingers. With his other hand, he held her pelvis in place. She tossed her head and began moving against him. He climbed on top of her, still using only his hand. She felt juicy, warm, complicated. She couldn’t look at him for more than a second. She kept pulling stuff out from under her—a balled-up T-shirt, a pencil. She twisted and squirmed, cried out, pulled a book from under her thigh, and finally came, as if to get away from him.

  She was still, eyes closed, breathing hard. Then she reached for his belt buckle. “Take off your clothes,” she murmured.

  “I�
�m fine,” he said, and moved away from her. He stood, found the cigarettes, lit one. She reached for it; he gave her a puff. She closed her eyes and patted the bed. He sat down beside her. “So,” he said. “Let’s get this over with. I gotta get to work.”

  “Work,” she whispered. “I need a minute to recover.”

  “I work at Denny’s,” he said. “In Buchanan.”

  She sat up in bed and looked at him carefully. Her hands began reaching for her clothes. “You really don’t want to live with me, do you?”

  “Not if you push me into a corner.”

  “I see.” She dressed in rapid, hurried movements.

  “I need more time to think things out,” he said.

  “You got it.”

  Holding the door open for her, he saw that her bra strap was twisted under the ribbing of her tight little shirt, and this made him want to kiss her. He always appreciated Libby at moments of departure. She was such a trouper. Tonight, he was soppily grateful she was leaving without a fight. He disappointed her, he knew. She wanted and deserved more than he could give. Someone like Arvill would do far better, could help her along in life.

  Libby turned as he moved forward, his lips aiming for that anger-flushed cheek. Before he got there, she kicked him—hard—on the shin. He could tell she’d meant the kick as a jokey, incomplete gesture, but his momentum had swung him into her oncoming foot. The gently pointed toes of her black pumps connected with his shinbone like a dull axe.

  He muffled a shout and she grasped his arm. “I’m sorry! Jesus, I’m so sorry,” she whispered. He pulled away from her, away from the pain. Even so, he felt a thrill: for once, she’d done the wrong thing. “I’ll be okay,” he said. “Just go. Get away from me. Please.”

  She sprang away, into the stairwell, quick and light as a cat. Her swiftness startled him, and he realized how heartless he’d sounded. Hobbling, he pursued her to the first landing. “No hard feelings, Lib,” he called after her sotto voce. “I’ll call you soon. Take care, now.”