Round Rock

by Michelle Huneven

  “You locking us in,” she said, “or them out?”

  “Don’t ask me.”

  The blinds fell in a soft clatter and the room filled with reticulated light.

  He faced her, his weight resting against the counter, a swimmer about to push off. They looked at each other. Heavy furniture, it seemed, was being dragged around Libby’s chest. He’s a man, she thought stupidly. And then the panic arrived, the same she’d felt the first time she kissed him, the first time they lay down on a bed together. The panic came in hot waves, scalding, insistent. You can’t love him, she told herself. You don’t love him. This is just a silly experiment to see how far you two could go. A laugh on Lewis …

  Red smiled at her with such kindness, her thoughts stopped in their tracks. “The back door’s still open,” he said.

  She smiled too, then thought: Why, he’s a played-out loser who stinks of loneliness, a pathetic old drunk.

  Red pulled himself away from the counter and was coming toward her, slowly. But I like this man, she told herself. I want this.

  Red put one hand lightly on her hip, twisting her around until he was standing behind her. They started walking and her panic redoubled with such force, she grabbed for the doorframe between the kitchen and the bedroom. Was she just toying with him?

  Red waited as she steadied herself. The same sorts of doubts had assailed her as she stood in the church narthex waiting to join Stockton at the altar, and had made her withdraw into sarcasm when Lewis behaved tenderly. They were the protests of a frightened, atrophied virgin dwelling in some coal bin of her psyche who spoke up only to rail against the invasion of love.

  Red’s hands were lightly on her hips, and they were moving again, into the bedroom. There was his bed, the comforter in its brown paisley cover, the pillows at odd angles. And the back door—such an easy leap! She imagined the cold, ridged roundness of the doorknob, the sudden abyss of daylight and vivid blue sky.

  She took a long breath and spun instead within Red’s fingertips: a neat, perfect ballroom spin. He was smiling and she kissed him, gingerly because of his bruised jaw. As he lifted her onto the bed, she knew this was the most serious, and most adult, and most appropriate thing she had ever done.

  TWO

  DAVID IBAÑEZ, now forty-one years old and seventeen years sober, worked at the Villa de San Miguel Arcángel, a clinic for the alternative treatment of chronic pain in Tijuana. He’d been at the Villa for four years now, and had moved in with the woman who ran it, Pauline.

  The clinic employed a variety of pain specialists: an M.D. from India with a vast knowledge of Tibetan medicine, two yoginis, a hydrotherapist, a hypnotherapist, a curandero named Olivero who’d attended chiropractic college in Utah, and David, who practiced his own syncretic mix of tantric medicine, acupuncture, and curanderismo.

  In early May, when Olivero was at a conference in Dallas, David met with his clients. One old woman came in with severe headaches, and David treated her with acupressure, herbs, and prayers. Reading David’s treatment notes upon his return, Olivero became agitated. The old woman, he said, was a bruja very unfriendly to his village. She’d already given cancer to one member of his family, and made his niece go blind. Olivero worried that she’d taken something of his—a photograph from his desk, a business card, anything she could use for mal puesto, evildoing.

  David assured him that they’d met in his office, while Olivero’s was locked up tight. Still, Olivero would not be pacified. Did she say anything odd? Had she given David anything out of the ordinary? David said no, no, she’d paid him with a few pesos and a small cake. This wasn’t unusual: poorer clients often paid in fresh eggs, tamales, fruit, whatever they had of value.

  “What kind of cake?” Olivero wanted to know. “Was there anything distinctive or unusual about it?”

  “No, no—just a little sweet cake, with the number twenty-one stenciled on it in green sugar.”

  “Where’s this cake now?” Olivero asked.

  “I ate it,” David said. “I was running behind and hadn’t eaten lunch.”

  “And you’re sure it said ‘twenty-one’ on it,” said Olivero.

  “A lucky number,” David said, “and a lucky cake, since I was so hungry.”

  This cake was not lucky, Olivero told him, not lucky at all. Most probably it was made with the veintiuno herb, which kills a man in twenty-one days.

  David had never heard of veintiuno, and he wasn’t too worried; he felt fine, and besides, many folk herbs and concoctions were placebos. But he did call his uncle and teacher, Rafael Flores, back home in Rito. Rafael didn’t answer, and David remembered he’d gone to Arizona for two weeks. David then put in a call to a toxicologist at USC. Yes, the man said, there actually was a poison called veintiuno, and a few documented fatalities from it, but not many, and none since the fifties. Nobody knew how or why the herb was fatal: the plant itself contained no known toxins. The poisoned, it seemed, scared themselves to death.

  David laughed, relieved by the absence of toxins, and promptly forgot about the veintiuno until a week later, when, as he was drawing his long, thick brown hair into a ponytail, a sickening clump fell out in his hands. For the next two days, hair sloughed from his head and terror mounted in his gut. When he called this time, his uncle was home. “You better come on up,” Rafael said in English. “The twenty-one can be tricky.”

  David told Pauline he had urgent family business, loaded Sally, his old bluetick hound, into the Land Cruiser, and drove north. Around Anaheim, he heard a faint rumble in one of the wheels. By downtown Los Angeles, it was a grating noise: a wheel bearing, possibly, if not the whole rear end. Wasn’t it natural law that cars always break down only an hour before the repair shops close on Saturday afternoons?

  At the Toyota dealership in Glendale, mechanics clucked over the Land Cruiser’s advanced age and said obtaining parts could take from two days to two weeks. David’s cousins in nearby Atwater gave him a couch to sleep on. He woke up on Sunday morning in their living room, more lost hair forming a detached shadow on the pillow. What I need, he thought, is a meeting.

  A woman at the AA Central Office directed him across the Hyperion Bridge to Silverlake. The meeting was called the Nightcrawlers Sunday Speaker and it started at noon. Even fifteen minutes early, David had to stand in the back of the overcrowded church auditorium.

  IT WAS one of those things that sounded good from four months off—to give a forty-minute talk at the largest of all the Nightcrawler meetings. How would Lewis have known back in February that Lydia would dump him, then leave for Paris on the very date he’d agreed to speak?

  A loose-knit AA group Lewis had fallen in with on his return to Los Angeles, the Nightcrawlers were mostly under fifty, mostly actors, artists, and writers who rented the auditorium for daily meetings. Lewis had made a lot of friends there, including Barbara, the woman who’d asked him to speak. An actress with long, curly light-red hair, see-through skin, and the endearing, perpetually worried expression of a pretty little girl squinting into the sun, Barbara was probably his best friend. Though they’d briefly dated, she quickly decided his attentions were too inconsistent. Once they each found someone else, Barbara had offered an avid, demanding brand of friendship. He had resisted—didn’t return her phone calls, wouldn’t meet for coffee—but she wouldn’t relent. Now they spoke daily, in person or by phone. Barbara browbeat him for the details of his life—what was he feeling, thinking, eating?—and he somehow had come to rely on this. She was like an emotional clearinghouse: “So, how do you feel about that?” she’d say, or “This one’s for your shrink, I think,” or “Maybe Harry could help you there” (Harry being Lewis’s present sponsor).

  As for this speaking commitment, Barbara refused to let him off the hook; it might even, she said, distract him from self-pity. And she was right: to command the podium, he had to pull himself together or else look like a fool. The group laughed, as they always did, at how he worked Step One thinking he was writing PR materia
l for Round Rock Farm. They gasped hearing how his first sponsor stole his girlfriend. And when he told them Lydia had scuttled, concern flickered in their eyes and he’d had to pause, catch hold of himself, accept the Kleenex Barbara held out.

  Afterward, people stood in line to shake his hand. He was numb with relief. Barbara slid up to him and whispered, “Tops,” meaning she and a few others were going to the Tops coffee shop and he should meet them there.

  “You going back up to Rito today?” said one Latino guy.

  “No, no, I haven’t been there for years.”

  “I thought you worked there.”

  “No, not for almost three years.”

  “I couldn’t hear well way in the back,” he said. “But my car broke down and I thought, if you were going up … It did seem too good to be true.”

  “Hey, sorry, man,” Lewis said. “Good luck.”

  By the time Lewis shook every well-wisher’s hand, two women had slipped him their phone numbers and three newcomer men had asked for his—all of which might have cheered him up, if he’d wanted anything besides a phone call from Lydia proclaiming her change of heart.

  AT TOPS, Lewis found Barbara and a fair sampling of the core Nightcrawlers in a large corner booth.

  “Our fearless leader,” said an actor named Kip, who moved over to give him a seat.

  Celia, a rock singer, spoke in her throaty voice. “I was thinking, Lewis, that maybe you should be a minister.” She turned to the others. “Don’t you think Lewis would make a good minister?”

  “What, was I too preachy?”

  “No, no. I didn’t mean that.” Celia turned to Barbara. “Jesus. I thought I twisted things around.”

  “You would make a good minister,” Kip said. “You’re funny, smart, sufficiently spiritual. You think well on your feet.”

  “I fornicate, I blaspheme, plus I don’t believe in God, per se.”

  “Who cares?” said Kip. “You’re a natural speaker.”

  “And you cried, Lewis,” Celia added. “That was so sweet it killed me. I don’t think I’ve ever seen you cry before.”

  “Are you kidding?” said Barbara. “He’s a total sponge-face.”

  “When I quit smoking,” said Lewis, “I was furious at everybody for about a month, and then I started getting weepy at Pepsi commercials.” He sat back so the waitress could pour his coffee. “Although I never actually cry cry, much less sob. Just leak from the eyes.”

  Kip laughed. “And I always love hearing about how your first sponsor stole your girlfriend. That’s really rich.”

  “I say that for effect, but the truth is, I’d already broken up with her.”

  “So you said. But the body wasn’t cold.”

  “I don’t want my friends going out with my ex-lovers,” Barbara said. “People should find their own mates, not pounce on your leftovers.”

  “Did you really punch your sponsor?” Renee was a robust young woman with thick straw-colored hair and clear blue eyes; she looked more like a picture of the right life than a girl who used to unplug the phone, lock her bedroom door, and retire for the weekend with a couple quarts of vodka.

  Lewis bowed his head. “It was awful, actually, to boil up so fast. It was like watching someone else. I still feel like shit about it.”

  “Sounds to me,” said Kip, “like you need to make amends to yourself.”

  “Yeah, well …” Steam tumbled upward from Lewis’s coffee cup in a small shaft of light.

  “So you made amends, right,” Renee said, “for hitting him?”

  “Renee’s about to make her amends—can’t you tell?” Barbara, who sponsored Renee, gave her an affectionate glance.

  “Good for you,” said Lewis. “I didn’t start feeling lighter and freer until I made my amends. But no, I never did with Red. I like to think that staying the hell away from his girlfriend was amends enough.” He tried to laugh, but what came out was a humorless hack. “Look, can we change the subject? Or do we want to spend the rest of the day on what an asshole I am?”

  “Hey, hey,” said Kip. “We’re all assholes here. Isn’t this Assholes Anonymous? Or am I in the wrong program?”

  Big sighs at this old joke, then the waitress came up to take their food orders. Lewis was too keyed up to eat. He had liked being on the podium, but it wore him out. After three cups of watery coffee, he felt scorched around the edges, and his friends were beginning to look like unflattering caricatures of themselves.

  “You okay?” Barbara asked.

  “It just caught up with me,” said Lewis. “I need a nap.” He stood and threw two dollar bills on the table.

  Barbara’s face darkened. She considered his naps “another place to hide,” an escape only slightly less contemptible than drinking.

  “I’ve got to,” Lewis told her. “Just a quick one.”

  “Well, thanks for speaking. You were great, Lewis. I really appreciate it.” She stood and put her arms around him and kissed his cheek.

  As if suddenly fragile, he walked slowly back to his car. Each time he remembered anything he said at the meeting, it seemed stupid or corny. Had he really snuffled over a woman in front of all those people? Quel dope. No wonder Lydia was leaving for Paris without him.

  The neighborhood Lewis walked through had Spanish-style homes with red tile roofs and tidy yards. Cars, cleansed from yesterday’s rains, sat in driveways. Not a soul was in sight. Sunday: the day of deep family burrowing. Throughout his childhood, other kids couldn’t play on Sundays—they had to go to church, visit relatives, sit down to the ritual Sunday supper—and not much had changed. Families and friends were still huddled indoors around hot meals, and here he was skittering through the empty streets, alone and unhinged.

  He’d been so good for so long now: sober, well-intentioned, consistent in schoolwork, meditation, AA, returning phone calls and library books, paying taxes, getting his teeth cleaned. The list could go on forever, yet the women he loved still left.

  DRIVING across the bridge, who did he see but that man who’d asked him for a ride to Rito. He was walking at a good clip, his jacket flapping.

  Lewis pulled over and rolled down the passenger window. “Want a lift?”

  “Great, thanks.” The man climbed in the car. “I’m staying just a few blocks away.” He extended a hand. “David Ibañez.”

  Lewis shook hands and introduced himself. “You live in Rito?”

  “Tijuana. But I grew up in Rito.” said David. “On your drunk farm, as a matter of fact. You know the farmworkers’ housing on the west end?”

  “Yeah! I worked in one of those bungalows. What do you think about your birthplace turning into a drunk farm?”

  “I love it. One of God’s great jokes. And much better than having it subdivided or paved into an industrial park. I only wish I’d gotten sober there.”

  “You always could, you know.”

  David laughed. “I’m not sure I have another recovery in me. Bleeding from the eyes kind of got to me the last time around.” He wore a nubbly sport jacket and, under that, a purple knit vest with iridescent hairs and a band-collar dress shirt: beautiful clothes, undoubtedly expensive.

  “You sober long?” asked Lewis.

  “Seventeen years.” David pointed to a Chinese restaurant. “Take a right here, please.”

  David’s destination was a small house on a treeless block. Lewis parked and, suddenly loath to relinquish the company, turned off the engine. “What do you do in Tijuana?”

  “I work in alternative medicine. I guess you’d say I’m a healer.”

  “You mean, like, hands-on healing?”

  David lifted his hands. The fingers were long and tapered, the skin an even brown. He flipped the palms up, showing pinker skin with creases like lines depicting rivers on a map. “I use my hands some,” he said.

  “I always wondered how someone knows they have the power to heal. You just discover it one day?”

  “It’s more an affinity than a power,” said David.
“And I grew up in the Mexican healing tradition. My uncle’s a curandero and he always said I had el don, the gift for it.”

  “And you can actually find jobs doing it?”

  “Hospices, holistic health clinics, rehab centers, you name it. A lot of curanderismo is very helpful in treating alcoholics and addicts.”

  “Really?” Lewis had an image of cravings being pulled from the body, hand-over-fist, like thick orange yarn. “How so?”

  “Oh, Western doctors constantly misdiagnose certain conditions as flu or depression when it’s actually susto, a disease of fear that’s epidemic in addicts.”

  Lewis promptly experienced a surge of fear himself; maybe he’d never been properly diagnosed. “How do you know if you have it?”

  “The symptoms are similar to depression—weight gain or loss, lethargy, irritation, volatility. But susto also means loss of soul, and that’s what makes it so much more helpful a description than depression. People with susto have lost any sense of true or higher self. They react to things only out of fear or guilt or shame.”

  Lewis tried to keep a keen interest out of his voice. “What’s the treatment?”

  “Herbs to relax. Conversation to examine the fears. A ritual to cleanse the person and reconnect them to both a higher power and a firmer sense of self.”

  “Well, I could probably use some of that myself.”

  “Come on in.” David smiled and nodded toward the house. “I’ve got time. I’ll give you a barrido—a quick, ritual sweeping. Fix you right up.”

  “Better yet …” Lewis articulated the idea as it occurred to him. “Why don’t I drive you up to Rito? It’s a great day. I don’t have anything to do.”

  “Oh, I’ll rent a car. I’d just thought if you were—”

  “Hey, I’m happy to go.”

  “I wouldn’t want to put you out.”

  “No, really, I’d like to.”

  “May I bring my dog?”