Red finally gave Lewis half a Sudafed. This antihistamine, the first drug Lewis had taken in almost nine months, made him deliciously sleepy. He put his head on the desk and swam in near-sleep for over an hour until the office door burst open with a bang. Billie Fitzgerald entered with her head thrown back, blood streaming down her neck and soaking into her collar. “Nosebleed!” she yelled.
Lewis guided her into an armchair. He knew how to treat nosebleeds. Once, when he was in college, he went to pick up his grandmother for a drink at Lloyds of Loden. But when he entered her house, it looked like someone had thrown cups of blood all over her face and kitchen. He made her lie down on the floor and packed ice on her nose; then blood started running from the corners of her mouth. Terrified, he drove her to the emergency room, where a nurse promptly scolded him. “Don’t ever make someone with a nosebleed lie down. Do this,” she said, and pinched his nose so hard, tears squirted from his eyes.
“Forgive me,” Lewis said, grabbing Billie’s nose. Her eyes snapped open in alarm. She tried to tilt her head back, but he held it in place. “Don’t,” he said. “Or the blood will run down the back of your throat.”
“You bastard,” she said, her voice hoarse and full of self-pity.
“Shhh …” His hand was dark like a savage’s against her face. The sight of blood made him faintly nauseous and dissociated; his lips began to buzz and he sat down on the arm of the chair. Billie’s springy black hair was in a sloppy French twist. She glared at him sideways. Yet her upper arm was wedged against his thigh, generating heat. Was she actually leaning into him? “Remember to breathe,” he said, trying to discourage an erection. He demonstrated a deep inhalation and they breathed together.
Her beeper went off but he held her in place by the nose. “It can wait,” he said. She settled back against his thigh—there was no doubt now, she was snuggling—and he held her there for as long as was credible, four or five minutes, before letting go.
She daubed at her nose with the back of her sleeve, leaned forward. No blood came out. “Huh!” she said. “Hey, thanks.” She stood up cautiously. “This fucking wind. Can I use the phone?”
Giddy, Lewis wandered around the office until she hung up.
“I have to run.” She came around and grasped his wrist. Her eyes emitted raw wattage. “Wish we had more time to talk,” she said. “I’m dying to hear how you’re faring in this soap opera.”
“Soap opera? Oh, you mean with Libby.”
“Aren’t you a cool cucumber.” She gave his arm a rousing shake. “Still, your ego’s got to be a little bruised.”
“I know I’m an asshole, if that’s what you mean.”
She worried his arm again. “We’ll talk. Definitely. Thanks for the first aid.”
His right hand was mottled with her blood. Moist and red in the creases of the palm, it turned brown, grainy as it dried. These cells, he told himself, had strained through her liver, run fast through her heart, engorged the walls of her womb, and wound up here, on him, a form of concentrated, indecipherable knowledge.
EVERY time he set foot out of the Mills, Lewis checked to see if the coast was clear. He stayed out of Happy Yolanda’s even if the Falcon was nowhere in sight. What he feared more than a scene was a rapid, if temporary, reconciliation that would land them right back in the sack. Libby was incapable of holding a grudge—Lewis already knew that. Not that he would have minded another turn on that pony ride. He just didn’t want to start up again with her if he had any chance at all with the Princess Fitzgerald.
He saw Libby one afternoon from a window in the office storeroom. She and Red were across the road, peering underneath first one bungalow, then another, apparently studying the foundations. The heat had broken and Libby wore a denim jacket, her hair was in a ponytail. She looked exactly like herself, which made Lewis a little sad. He all at once remembered her warm skin, her leveling looks, her generous assessments of his character.
Lewis dug through boxes for mailing labels and, finding them, gave a final look outside. Red was pointing to something up on the ridge that Libby couldn’t see, so he nudged her into his line of sight. She nodded, and Lewis could hear a distant scrap of her laughter. Red then dropped his arm around Libby’s shoulder and gave her a paternal squeeze. That she clearly required and accepted such gestures of comfort—still, so many weeks later—evoked in Lewis a wave of pure, bone-melting guilt. He grabbed the labels and fled.
Red is giving me a house, Libby wrote, very similar to his own. She paused. Exactly what this gift implied, she and Red hadn’t discussed. She’d have a house on her property, he’d have one on his; it was, she thought, like evening up the sides before the contest began. At any rate, she needed a house. She couldn’t live forever at Billie’s, and she couldn’t move in with Red, not yet. To own her own square footage of personal sanctuary couldn’t hurt. And no matter what happened with Red—be it true love or a mutual or one-sided waning of interest—she would have a home. And that, she supposed, was the point.
She called a bulldozer man to regrade the site Stockton had surveyed. She called a house mover and applied to the county office for a house-moving permit. The house had to be moved between midnight and five a.m., when it wouldn’t impede traffic. Since this trip was only three miles on rural roads, the escort requirement was waived. Then the house mover said he didn’t want to lose a night’s sleep, so couldn’t he do the job on Sunday evening? Back to the permit office, then, for another waiver.
THE FIRST Sunday softball game ended at noon. Doodads 21, Shitheads 14. Lewis, once and always a Shithead, left amid the pleas and boos of teammates, who wanted him to stick around for game two. “Some of us,” he told them, “have inventories to write.”
He locked himself away in his room at the Mills. He crawled into bed and wrote two entries in the Money category before his mind went blank. He didn’t want to lose his job. No doubt his past was littered with crimes both grave and inconsequential; they just weren’t lining up for inspection. He thought a little nap might help.
He woke up after three in the afternoon, the room hot as a greenhouse. And he was out of cigarettes. Face swollen, hair smashed and linty, he sleepwalked barefoot across the street and smack into a late-afternoon coffee klatch at the grocería: Victor behind the register, Arvill Hartwood and Deputy Burt McLemoore perched on stools, and Billie Fitzgerald on the counter, swinging her muddy rubber boots.
Conversation stopped when Lewis entered. Victor’s eyes danced. Billie’s fabulous eyebrows inched in place. Lewis stepped between Arvill and Billie. “Camel straights,” he said, putting down his money.
Billie nudged his thigh with her boot. “Good pillow perm.”
He ignored her. Out on the sidewalk, he opened the pack. Two dogs were asleep in the middle of Main Street, a black Lab and a red dachshund. The afternoon was breezy, and when he tried to light a cigarette, Victor’s cheap-ass matches, one after another, wouldn’t stay lit.
“You mad at me?” Billie bumped up against him. “Sorry if I insulted your do.” She reached to ruffle his hair.
He dodged her hand.
“Cranky, aren’t we?”
“Not in the mood for this town.” His next match caught and he exhaled smoke. Billie was in dusty gray coveralls, her hair lumpy under a black baseball cap. “Pretty high-fashion yourself,” he said.
“On my way to check a couple irrigation pots we mended yesterday up by the lake. Try some water in ’em and see if the fuckers still leak.” She pointed to her hulking white truck. “Feel like taking a ride?”
“Got work to do,” he said. They started moving anyway. At least he could walk her to her truck.
“So, how’s it going?” she asked. Friendly, no edge.
He looked behind him, toward the Mills. The dachshund had left the Labrador retriever and was trotting up toward the stoplight. “No complaints.”
At her truck, she knocked on the hood. “Come on, hop in. Won’t take an hour.”
He shot another
look behind him. The dachshund stopped at the intersection, then executed a perfect left turn—left lane to left lane, just like a car. Lewis climbed into the cab as Arvill and Burt came out of the grocería.
“Libby still staying at your house?” he asked.
“You want information about Libby, ask Libby.”
“I don’t want information about Libby,” Lewis muttered. “I was just wondering how this is going to sit with her—you and me in one truck—because she’ll hear about it in about five minutes.”
“Why should she care?”
“Yeah.” They were passing the Mills. “Good point.”
Billie drove slowly, although the truck’s V-12 engine could’ve hauled the whole town into another state. “We’ll go cross-country,” Billie said, “if you don’t mind,” and a mile out of town she turned between two huge round river rocks into the groves. They bumped along even more slowly, the windows down. Fumbling in a box of tapes, she handed him one—Mozart’s Sinfonia Concertante for Violin and Viola—to stick into the tape player. The orchestral introduction blazed from the speakers, magisterial, perfect.
Billie turned down the volume. “You having second thoughts about Libby?”
“Naw. It’s just chickenshit how I handled it.”
“So you’re not jealous?”
“Why should I be?”
Billie grinned, then spoke in singsong, “Oh, I don’t know.”
“Is she seeing someone?”
“You haven’t heard?”
“No. But good for her if she is.” That someone else—by his estimation, Arvill—now had sexual access to Libby didn’t thrill him. He gave his head a good scratch, then stretched his arm along the back of the truck’s bench seat, his fingers inches from Billie’s neck.
“Don’t you want to know who?” said Billie.
He could see she was dying to tell him. “No. Just so long as she’s happy.”
Billie gave him a funny look. “Aren’t you curious?”
“If I was that curious, I’d probably still be seeing her.”
“What went wrong with you guys, anyway?”
“Nothing. Ultimately, I wasn’t all that interested.”
“You must not have gotten to know her.”
“I knew her, all right.”
“What did you know about her?”
“All sorts of things.”
“Like what?”
“You know. Sexual things.”
“Ahh.” Billie’s lips curved into a smile. She slowed to a crawl over a patch of washboard ruts.
“And other stuff,” he said.
“Yeah?”
“She’s a talented musician. She has an okay mind.”
“Just okay?”
“You writing a book?”
Billie smirked and rolled her eyes. The violin and viola took turns saying the same thing in different clefs. They came out of the groves, crossed a canal on a reverberative wooden bridge, and dove back into dark foliage, cold shade.
“Libby’s a good person,” said Lewis. “She was born good. It’s her temperament. Life’s no big struggle for her. She accommodates, adjusts, goes with the flow. But she lacks the kind of empathy you find in someone who’s really suffered. I couldn’t connect with her on a deeper level. Intellectually, she’s obviously bright and capable. But some people have more interesting, complicated minds, and bring more intelligence to everyday living.”
Lewis touched Billie’s ear so gently, he wasn’t certain she felt it. “I need someone who’s intellectually nimble,” he said. “Who’s emotionally and spiritually aware. Someone more …” He searched for a word.
“ ‘Tweaked’?” said Billie.
He laughed. “That’ll do.”
Billie raised her eyebrows as she navigated a series of deep ruts. “You two never did strike me as the best match,” she said.
“Why, did you have a better one in mind?”
“For her or for you?”
“Ha! Exactly.” Fine black curls clung to the back of Billie’s neck. With his thumb, he nudged one, and traced the cording of muscles below her ear. “I like quick, complex, one-of-a-kind minds,” he said.
As the violin and viola teased each other through a cadenza, they crossed a road that was either the Round Rock road or a paved spur down to the river. Lewis withdrew his hand, letting it rest on the seat back. They entered another grove on something less than a road and bounced grandly on those thousand-dollar shock absorbers as if on great swells at sea. The second, slower movement of the concerto began. The shade was submersive as water. Dried weeds brushed the underside of the truck’s chassis.
“You don’t ever get lost back in here?”
Billie didn’t reply, and they climbed back into sunlight on a dirt road carved out of the hillside. This road followed the folds of the ridge for maybe a mile, dropping back into trees and rising to hug the hill again. “I still don’t have a drip system in these older groves,” Billie said. “Until I do, it’s one pot after another crapping out.”
She stopped a good twenty yards above the orchards. The irrigation pots in question, small, squat cement cylinders extruding four spouts, resembled crude ancient fountains.
“Should I wait here?” Lewis asked, not keen to climb barefoot down the steep embankment.
“I gotta be down there until they fill. Could take fifteen, twenty minutes,” she said. “Come on.”
He followed gingerly. He’d gone barefoot all summer, his feet were toughened up, but this clay was bristling with small sharp rocks. By the time he reached the first pot, Billie was on her way to the next one, four rows away. He hurried to catch up. Water gushed up from the bottom of the second pot until it closed over itself, swallowed its own roar. The smell of wet concrete dilated his memory, bringing to mind wet sidewalks and playgrounds, the dankness of large, holy places.
He turned to face Billie. The zipper tab on her coveralls glinted like an insect wing. He pulled it down to reveal a man’s heavy blue and white plaid shirt. He reached inside and threaded his arms around Billie’s waist. She was still as a tree. He remembered to breathe. He put his face against hers. Her arms slid up around his neck and locked.
She started moving against him then, and there was nothing subtle or slow about her desire. Her tongue entered his mouth, a strong, wet muscle. His arms were tangled in her clothes. She slammed herself against him, again and again. He stumbled backward, stepped on something sharp, couldn’t regain his footing. They went down rolling. Blue sky flickered by, and the crude terrazzo of rock chips in pink adobe clay. They rolled into the moist shade of a citrus tree, lemon or grapefruit, Lewis couldn’t tell. She was on top, sucking his tongue as if drawing water from a rag. He tried to roll her over, wanting to get his bearings, to be on top. She almost allowed it, but as he was rising over her, she shifted her weight—she must have known some kind of Eastern self-defense—and again, she stretched above him, smiling wickedly.
She’d lost her hat. There were foxtails and stickers in her hair. Her cheek was bleeding. He craned upwards to kiss her. She bit his lip. Tasting blood, he squeezed handfuls of cloth and breast and she arched her back for him to unbutton her shirt. Braless, her breasts wobbled out, far, far larger than he ever dreamed, cubic feet of boneless flesh, the nipples small and dark. What to do with such excess? He cupped them ineffectively; pinched the nipples, sucked on one. Her eyes half-lidded, Billie lapped her tongue at him, a trick he’d seen only in porno movies, and he tried to feel the intended erotic force. She continued to move rhythmically, forcefully against him, her breasts swinging and looming. Desperate to please, to enter the spirit of their grappling, he grabbed crotch, breasts, ass. She grazed teeth along his chin. He felt the skin come up in thin curls.
“You’ve got condoms, right?” she said.
“Huh?” Lewis struggled to pull back, look at her face. “Are you kidding?” He wasn’t entirely sure, at that moment, if he had an erection.
As if she heard his thoughts, Billie
grabbed his dick and, assessing it, frowned. “No condoms? Is that what you’re saying?”
“I don’t even have shoes on! Jesus! I went to the store for a pack of cigarettes. I didn’t expect this.”
“No?” Her hair formed a dark bower around his face. She kissed him sweetly, for which his heart lunged in gratitude. She hovered, panting into his mouth. “Libby said the best thing about you was that you took care of the rubbers.”
“What?” He scrambled in the dirt in a useless effort to turn her over.
“Don’t worry,” she whispered, “I got some in the truck.”
“Here?” he said idiotically.
“In the glove compartment.” She leaned over as if to kiss him, bit his lips, and gave his wilted dick another efficient squeeze. “Better work on that. I’ll be right back.” She lifted herself off of him, revealing empty blue sky, weak autumnal sun. “You wait here.”
Lewis sat up, stunned. His matches had fallen out of his pocket. He gathered them, and Billie’s hat, and gazed stupidly at the hat’s tree-nursery logo. From the crushed pack, he extricated a cigarette. His hands were shaking. His knuckles were bleeding. Scratches cross-hatched his arms. He was fearful, exhilarated, jangled. This was not what he expected, and yet a certain gratification twanged: Billie Fitzgerald did want to fuck him. Could he go through with it? Her style wasn’t at all what he would’ve guessed. He took a deep breath. Sure, he told himself, I’ll fuck her hair straight. He tried to light his cigarette, match after match, as the truck started up back behind him somewhere. Smart, he thought, she’s moving it closer. Mozart flew through the air like beautiful laundry. His cigarette lit and nicotine entered his brain like a cloud of cleansing sparks. He turned to watch the truck’s approach. From this angle, he saw the grinning chrome grille, the wheel, the mighty armature under the front end. Billie drove up even with him, then past. He turned, looked over his other shoulder. The engine idled. She lowered her tinted window. She had a hat on. This confused him: he had her hat in his lap. She was also wearing sunglasses. He sprang to his feet.
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