Tomàs comes back after dark in a light purple caballero shirt with a dark purple bolero jacket with pearl snaps and fuzzy balls. His patent leather pants squeak with each step, each breath, each thought. Sleek as stallion skin, his shiny pants swell over the sock in his crotch. His high-heeled fruit boots, holdovers from Carnaby Street when he was mod and wore them for real, attest to rock opera inspiration. He looks serious as usual but much different from a man with no moves. He cruises. He finds Gray Bruce and companion having dinner at Chez Nouvelle. He approaches boldly but with poise. “I was wondering, Mr. Bruce, if I could … join you for a drink.”
Dick Browning looks suspiciously at Gray Bruce, whose distinguished good looks and tweedy self-assurance won’t skip a beat over jealousy, not here any sooner than in the great cities of the world. Gray Bruce remembers the little troublemaker, but like a superior pressed for superiority, he says, “Of course you can.” He offers his hand for a shake and introduces his companion. “Call me Gray,” he says.
I’ll call you banished, Tomàs thinks, but he says, “Mi esta Rico. Rico Suave.” He pulls a hip flask from his pocket and adds a splash to a glass of water. He drinks it down. “Mm.”
“Rico,” Gray Bruce asks. “What’s that?”
“Yes, what is that?” Dick Browning wants to know.
“Just a very special tequila,” Tomàs says, offering to share.
Tomàs’ absence after that night isn’t so noticeable, because his presence isn’t either. The filmgoers fade in a hurry, losing interest in a town so … dirty. Barfly grumbling ceases, because the threat went away. A few people saw a movie or two. It was nice, so empty. Nothing changed, except for Marylin going from a frenzy to a mope to the depths of depression and down to self-loathing, until Tomàs resurfaces. He shuffles in thinner, gaunt in the face, unshaved, in need of a cocktail. Cisco says, “So? You bung-holed the head hot-dog. Big deal.”
Tomàs says, “Ah, Tutor. So, you don’t vant to be a drug dealer?”
“I’ll deal you a nice sedative,” Cisco says with no conviction, because it’s not right to fight little guys.
“You got your bunghole stretched and you know it,” Mal says.
“How indelicate,” Tomàs says, pulling his flask out again. “This is a special blend.” He pours three fingers.
Mal sniffs and drinks it down and shrugs. “Pshh,” he blows it off. “Tastes like cheap tequila and tap water.”
“You’re a genius,” Tomàs says. “Have I ever told you that?”
“Fucker!” Mal complains, scraping his chair and hurrying to the bar to suck limes. Everyone turns; foul language is so easy to leave at home.
“Take out the chief,” Tomàs says. “The braves will retreat.” He served tap water to the NUTS ’n CREAM Chair and companion. “Amoebae and Old Lace,” he says. “I was the perfect control.” He’d been down with amoebic dysentery, but not like Gray Bruce and Dick Browning. Tomàs has been around for years. Cisco nods slowly, seeing the simple truth: tap water. Kensho raises a toast to the Pied Piper of the high plateau. “They won’t be back,” Tomàs says. “They don’t like running on muddy tracks.”
Some laugh. Some moan. Some stare. Cisco calls Tomàs a little hero after all. Rhonda glowers from the end stool. “Why should anybody care about you,” she says. “You’re bestial.”
“Actually,” Tomàs begins, “the proper antecedent to your bestiality reference would be more …”
Beside Rhonda, Whippet slaps the bar with a riding crop. “You have no balls!” With blatant accusation she strides forth, garnering the kind of complete attention actors dream of. At least two weight classes below Tomàs, Whippet garners as well a five-to-one betting line in a toe-to-toe against him. This, later, in statistical analysis from Professor Kathryn, just for fun. “You have to hurt harmless people when a real man could work it out some other way.” Tomàs hangs his head, in no mood for exponentially negative potentiality. Refusing his concession to failure, Whippet engages his base of support. “How do you feel, saving a town for fascist alcoholics with no sense of anything. You just ruined a vacation for people who don’t want to hurt anybody. I’m sick of your smug bullshit, so why don’t you just …”
“Hey!” Cisco cuts in. “What about my fuckin’ vacation, Miss Smarty Pants?”
“Yeah. What about that?” comes the meek refrain.
“Yeah. Who’s not supposed to hurt me where I live? You and your ideas?” Cisco insists.
“Oh, Christ!” Whippet says, raising her whip to make her point. Cisco stands up and squares off; a whip is a weapon, canceling all handicaps. Some call it a photo op, the giant and the smidgen, but it doesn’t last, and nobody has a camera, or film. Whippet marches to the door. “You make me sick!”
“He wasn’t harmless,” Tomàs pleads.
“Hey, hey, hey,” Pancho calls from behind the bar. “Por favor.” He holds up her unpaid check.
“I got that one!” Cisco yells. “Call it aid to dependent bitches.”
“Your dying ass,” Whippet shoots back. “You lop-eared, filthy prick.” She flings a few grand at Pancho and leaves, as the rest take up the mumble over right and wrong. Rhonda leaves on a swagger and a nod to Cisco, handing him her bill. In the end, heroism belongs to Whippet for going toe to toe with the outlaw. Victory is Pyrrhic for Tomàs, who saved something vague.
Guilt drifts low like fog in a valley. Tomàs questions his motivation. Was he hurtful, harmful, mean and hateful? He wonders. Tony suggests that he not be paid the reward, then buys the skinny one a drink. Someone asks, “What reward?”
“Hey. It’s a joke.” Tony says. “Based upon the poor judgment of the people of Hamlin, when they didn’t pay the piper and he led the children away?” Nobody laughs. “We don’t have any kids anyway.”
“I might be a dumb fuck,” Cisco says, “so would somebody please tell me what’s wrong.” He draws a laugh with his sincerity.
“Oh, no,” Charles says. “Once informed you wouldn’t be a dumb fuck anymore. Then what good would you be? No, nobody wants to outlive their usefulness, even you.” Cisco advances. Charles turns to him with a steady smile. “You failed to adapt, my friend. It’s why we’re here. Can I buy you a drink? Or would you rather fight? I’ll fight you. But first you have to tell me why we’re fighting.”
“You said something,” Cisco says.
“What. What did I say?”
Cisco thinks it over as he scans the high-end tequilas. Bar mumble drifts over the relative merits of Herradura, and if a true Reposado should recoil, even with finesse, when it cost three times Centenario.
Marylin watches from a corner booth, simmering in revelation. Her friends did her in. Now they dismiss the crime casually over drinks, as if that perversion is perfectly acceptable. She broods. Charles sees it, pays his tab with a few grand extra for diplomacy and leaves in a rare display of discretion.
Marylin fixes a stare then stands and carries it to point blank range of her most trusted friend. He wants to explain. She swells up and looks like her eyes will blow if she can’t somehow ventilate. But she can’t. She turns and leaves.
Tomàs slouches on his stool like a dummy with no one to work the stick. He endures Cisco’s praise, chin on palms, elbows glued to the bar. “Hey, little compadre,” Cisco says. “You look frazzled as a stump broke pony at round up.”
Tomàs speaks: “He’s right. We failed to adapt.”
“Don’t you start on that adaption stuff,” Cisco says. “You let a bunch of mentals take over a place you can just as easy say anything is okay to adapt.”
Tomàs asks, “Do you ever feel shame?”
Cisco says, “No.” And he calls to Pancho for more sauce all around, for victory, but not that fa fa stuff because some people have to watch their money because they’re not rolling in it like some people who never had anything better to do than spend their lives in colleges and then go out in the world and try to mess things up with what they learned in books. With the bar crowd placated and
enjoying Pancho’s slow motion industry on their behalf, he leans over in confidence and says, “Hey, you always got some dead and wounded if the fight was worth a damn. Some people here used to think you’re a faggot. Not anymore. I know you messed it up with Marylin. That’s tough. She’d be some work, but goddamn worth it from eight to ten. I’ll tell you the truth, I haven’t been up next to a fair-skinned woman for so long I don’t know if I’d a blown that one if I was you.”
“The guy I made sick fucked with me,” Tomàs says, venturing in the language of the macho bond. Yet seeking commiseration on his own level as well, he explains, “He made me look bad and … feel bad.”
Cisco nods eye to eye with him, lip curled, and asks, “You’re not a faggot are you?”
“I experimented with it,” Tomàs says. “I didn’t like it.” Cisco stares in disbelief. Tomàs shrugs. “It’s not for me. I know that.”
Cisco’s brow compresses the muscle beneath it on a new idea: ex-faggot. He stands and says, “Good.” Tomàs is no faggot, not anymore anyway. Besides, the little man’s messing things up with Marylin improves his own chance of inspecting the contents of her underpants, and that’s good too, maybe even one of those potentialities he can plug into. He buys another round and says, “Drink up and stop looking so damn beat.”
Mal gets sick. For revenge he invites Marylin over to Casa Malcolm for dinner and TV. It could be so perfect. He’s considered Marylin for awhile, and now she can only be receptive in her need for revenge. But Mal is unhealthy and very fat, a wheezer and a grunter, so his lusty strategy makes no difference. Still he tries, she’s so depressed, so in need of what he can give her. She’s not up to it, so he insists. “Come over for some TV and a few drinks, anyway,” he says. “I got a hundred-four stations for chrissake.” But she can’t, not even for revenge.
She shakes the thing off. She stays away, indoors mostly, except for infrequent outings for produce. Two months later on a morning of apparent resolve or at least wearing its best face, she appears. She says she’s changed her name, Sweeny, to Swayne, and everyone knows she’s back to normal, kind of.
“You mean like John Wayne?” Cisco asks.
But she will not respond to that tripe. That’s what’s wrong with the place, and she finally sees what’s been banging her in the head all along, that if you want to live a positive life in a place like this one, you need to insulate yourself from the riffraff. She comes out of her funk calmer on the surface, eyes up, as if watching the big screen. A new season lies ahead. With it will come rebirth, another chance from a different angle. She knows it can work, the Second Annual Film Festival of the Hills. She speaks softly now, ignoring what needs ignoring, seeing only those who see the picture. “Sweeny,” she says. “It was an ice cream place, I think.” She laughs.
“That was Swensen’s,” someone says. But Marylin Swayne shakes that off too. She is busy. Busy hands are happy hands. Second Annual is her new letterhead—it has a ring, a perpetuity, a new light. She cannot meet Tomàs eye to eye, like he’s a rapist, and she knows. Discomfort prevails. They pass like fish in a bowl.
Their happiness one day turns to sadness the next. She holds him accountable. He knows his revenge on the ashen Gray Bruce was petty and mean-spirited. The National Unified Task Squadron Chair vowed never to return—“It’s simply not healthy.” Tomàs withdraws to deepest interior.
Marylin moves ahead with no regrets. Year I teaches her that show biz is like life; it takes you down. She learns resignation and calmness. She understands greatness from Year I, because she got so close she could taste it. She can score millions and knows it. She works toward Year II.
So it is that Tomàs shuffles down the street and into a bar for a drink if he has a few pesos or a lime wedge if he has nada. He slogs into a sultry afternoon in the summer of Year II. Into La Mexa and the heart of sleepy time he finds a gathering of sleepy people watching the dish-fed tube. He sucks a lime wedge for a minute and volunteers to check on Charles, by now conspicuously absent. Tomàs saves face and composure by leaving, because Marylin sits at the bar.
Cisco bellies up beside her when Tomàs is gone. He gives her the eye. She stares back with equal severity but doesn’t stare at his crotch. He’s not discouraged; some women take awhile to warm up. “Yup,” he says. “Movies. Good movies. Buy you a beer?”
She says, “I don’t think so. But thanks.” A minute later she says she will go herself to see about Charles, since Tomàs most likely went straight home to sit in a corner anyway. She says she’s over her trouble with Tomàs, and she’ll stop by the Little Casa as well and tell him so. She smiles sweetly, making it plain to see.
Cisco says, “What, stop and toss in a few fuckin’ hand grenades?”
“No,” she says. “I need to tell him, because I need a clean slate. Clear the air. Start fresh, I always say.”
“I never heard you say that.”
“He needs to stop moping around town.” And she’s on her way again.
Cisco says, “She needs to slit his throat.” But nobody har hars. It’s too dry, too sleepy. The swinging doors flap into stillness and the afternoon goes hazy. Missing nap time is cause for concern, a possible misjudgment on a community level. No siesta can lead to early fatigue, possible depression. The crowd thins. Most go home for some rack time, because a late start beats an early end any night.
“Big deal,” Heidi says, sprawled across a table, fag down to the plastic nub. “Rhonda had it right—he bagged another one. Big deal.”
Rhonda lights a smoke and breathes the truth of it. “I don’t know,” she says, uncertain on the cause of Charles’ absence and whether she should continue her thesis on the village influence on urban mural art in undeveloped nations. Maybe she should set it all aside for awhile to paint. She weighs pros and cons in a light sweat.
Tony contemplates the nature of sweat, how the droplets look macho but a light patina, well, you could run your tongue down her chest for a taste and … “What?” Heidi asks. He shakes his head—Oh, I was just thinking I’d like to lick Rhonda’s chest. “What?”
“Chicken butt,” he says. “Fried in grease. Five cents a piece.”
“What?”
“Chicken butt. Fried in …”
“Forget it.”
“Forget what?”
The fan groans on a bad bearing. A few flies buzz the lime bowl. The big blond Russkie calls for order. “Hot!” Mal calls out like the life of the party. But it’s not hot; it doesn’t get hot at six thousand feet, only dry and sunny with a stupefaction overlay allowing someone burdened by excess poundage to look up at the calendar, see July and say, “Hot.”
“You buying?” Cisco asks.
“Me? Buying? You know I got a rule about buying …”
“Will you shut the fuck up?” This from an elderly white woman with hair and earrings to match, a new woman in town who apparently thinks that kind of language acceptable among strangers. “I’m trying to hear the goddamn television, if you don’t mind.”
“Pretty stale around here,” Heidi says. “I’m going riding.” She gets up and leaves Mal, Cisco, Rhonda, Tony and a few transients. Maybe the booze is spiked or the barometer is falling. The afternoon slags like tired queso on yesterday’s relleños. Tony offers the waiter three grand to pour a beer over the white-haired woman. The waiter smiles nervously. “Okay, five grand.” The waiter wags his head. “Fifty-five hundred. Look, I’ll give you a thousand dollars and that’s my final offer.” A young couple with backpacks comes in. They unharness and order beer. The white-haired woman watches the tube with grave concern for a troubled world and grave contempt for the rude man in the corner. The waiter hurries off. Rhonda lights another smoke. “I don’t see the problem with pouring a beer over her head.” Tony says. “It’s hot. Beer’s cool.” It’s time to go. “What if we watched Wheel of Fortune?” The white-haired woman turns the volume up. “Heidi went riding. Where can she ride to? Charles is missing. What if he wasn’t? What if we weren’t? Missi
ng in action. That’s us.”
Cisco says, “World’s all gone. You got these children here with their backpacks, talking about where they been. Credit cards and travelers checks. Think all you got to do is get off the bus and you’re there. Shit, I bet neither one a you knocked off a 7–11, much less shot up a Coke machine. Did you?” The backpackers smile to indicate humor. Cisco gives up on them, turning to his drink. “They’ll end up shirts.” He finishes. “That’s what we oughta do. I don’t know what it is about a Coke machine, but I swear it feels good. They bleed you know. Hey, Pancho. Where’s a Coke machine?”
“Esta una en la mercada.”
“Do you mind?” asks the white-haired woman.
Cisco asks back, “You think they ever shot up a Coke machine?” He drops his butt on the floor and mashes it. The backpackers finish their beer and leave. Cisco calls for another drink. “Hey. You want a drink?” he asks the white-haired woman.
“No, I do not want a drink,” she says.
“Oh. I thought maybe you wanted a drink.”
Mal calls out to make it a double, hell yes, he’ll have a drink. He looks at Tony and calls out, “Fuck it, make it a three-pack.” Mal enjoys a session like this, with the guys. “This place is changing. I first got here, it was …”
Cisco turns to Tony. “Boy, I’d like to fuck Heidi.” He turns back to his new drink. “I mean, if you wouldn’t mind.”
“She wouldn’t mind,” Rhonda says.
“I’d mind,” Tony says. “She might mind.” Cisco drinks. “I don’t blame you though, Cisco. Afternoons are best, you get that light sweat, makes everything slick.” Tony downs his beer, trying to cool off.
“I thought you liked it in the dark,” Rhonda says.
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