Midnight Brunch

by Marta Acosta

  I hopped in my truck, but when I turned the key, the usually reliable engine made a strangled gargle that devolved into a whine. After a few attempts to start the vehicle, acrid smoke began pouring out of the hood.

  A man with a cancerous tan who was parking his sparkling Mercedes looked at me as if my malfunctioning truck was a sign of my own unworthiness as a Paragon guest.

  I got out of the truck and leaned my head against the window. My mechanical skills were limited to turning something on and then turning it off. Someone was approaching and I said, “Yes?”

  “Ms. De Los Santos, could I be of service?”

  I turned to see Charles, the concierge, wearing a dapper suit.

  “My truck seems to be having problems. Do you know of a garage with a tow-truck service?”

  “I do,” he answered. “There’s an excellent mechanic under contract with the Paragon. He maintains all our vehicles. Why don’t you give me your keys, and I’ll arrange everything for you?”

  His eyes shone with helpfulness and I wanted to grab him in un gran abrazo. I dropped the keys into his open hand and said, “Thank you, Charles. I really appreciate this.”

  “My pleasure, Ms. De Los Santos.”

  “Call me Milagro, won’t you? Could you please tell me how far it is into town?”

  “Several miles. If you’d like to exercise, we recommend that you stay on our trails, which are inspected hourly for rattlesnakes, scorpions, tarantulas, and other venomous creatures.”

  “Oh, I just needed to pick up a few things.”

  “Write out a list and we’ll get them for you,” he said. “We also offer many quality items in our guest shops.”

  “Right, okay, thanks.”

  “If you need to go tonight, I’d be happy to offer you a ride. I drive through La Basura on my way to visit my girlfriend.”

  It took me a second to register that he really meant, girlfriend. That was odd. My gaydar had definitely swung to the gay side of the gauge with him. “Thanks, but really, I’m fine.”

  Charles said he’d have the truck towed and repaired in the morning. When I asked to talk to the mechanic first about the charges, he held up his hand and said, “Mr. Taylor has instructed that all your expenses be charged to his business account.” He must have seen my surprised expression, because he added wryly, “Movie people.”

  “I don’t know what I’ll do without my truck,” I said.

  “As the Dalai Lama says, when one door closes, another one opens.”

  I appreciated his effort to cheer me up. “Thank you, Charles. Have a good evening.”

  After walking around the resort grounds, I veered into the dusk of the desert. When I was well clear of the Paragon, I broke into a run. There were no humans anywhere and I felt safe.

  I noticed all sorts of critters, mostly skittery little lizards and beetles, going about their business. I could see the outlines of rocks, mounds, and pits well enough to easily traverse the soft soil. The stars above were coming out, and I thought I detected the pungent scent of native salvias in the dry air.

  The miles passed, and soon I saw the lights from a small town. I slowed to a walk and realized that I was breathing easily, which would probably be useful when I was trying to outrun the cops if I degenerated further and committed a vicious assault.

  The two-lane highway went through the center of town, which consisted of small shops, including Lefty’s Happy Looky-Dat! Club, a chiropractor, a gas station, a doctor’s office, and a midsize grocery store. Vampires, who had a fondness for luxury and sophistication, wouldn’t be caught undead in La Basura.

  The chilled air of the grocery store felt marvelous on my hot skin. I grabbed a basket and tried to look as if I was shopping for a meal. This market held products that would have caused general hysteria among the food elite. I picked up fluffy white sliced bread, iceberg lettuce, tinned spaghetti sauce, a cardboard container of parmesan cheese, and spaghetti noodles. Then I went to the meat section, as if it was an afterthought.

  The pickings were slim. There were packages of hot dogs, grayish chicken parts, and hamburger. I checked out the frozen food section, thinking that frozen burger patties might be more appealing, when I noticed strange dark sausages half hidden behind giant bags of microwaveable buffalo wings.

  A label identified the frosty sausages as boudin noir. I didn’t know what they were, but some part of me went, “Whoa, baby, that’s what I’m talking about.” By the luncheon meats I found in plastic containers chicken livers sloshing enticingly in dark scarlet liquid. I put all of the packets of sausages and the liver containers in my basket.

  The middle-aged woman who rang up my purchases looked at me when she saw the sausages. “You like these?” she asked.

  “Sure,” I said, picking up a pack of wintergreen gum.

  “We only stock them ’cause of Lefty. Those Frenchies will eat anything.”

  Perhaps she expected me to join in a rousing condemnation of our brothers and sisters in liberté, egalité, fraternité. I was unable to read anything but pommes frites on a French menu, but I said, “Their food is fabulous.”

  “If you think sausages made of blood is fab-u-lous,” she said. “La-di-da. You like liver, too?”

  “One of my friends gave me a Julia Child cookbook,” I said. “I’m working my way through all the recipes. Um, do you have shallots and Spanish oloroso here?”

  “If shallots are onions, I got green and yellow ones by the potatoes. What’s that Spanish thing you said?”

  I had to buy a moldy yellow onion and a bottle of cooking sherry as cover for my story. I left the store and slipped into the parking area out back. I hid behind a Dumpster and tore open a packet of sausages with my teeth. Saying the boudin noir tasted like a chewy, salty blood popsicle cannot express the amazing scrumptiousness of this frozen confection. After gobbling the sausages, I chomped a piece of gum to freshen my breath.

  The snack had made me thirsty, so I decided to drop in at the local watering hole. Lefty’s Happy Looky-Dat! Club looked like the result of a fatal collision between a Western bar and a Victorian whorehouse. Which is to say: red velvet flocked wallpaper, brass chandeliers, mounted animal heads, ornate gilded mirrors, rusty horse shoes, stolen highway signs, and spittoons.

  I checked out the crowd, and they checked out me. It was a surprisingly mixed group of people, mostly white, but with Latinos, African-Americans, and a few Asians, too. The majority wore jeans, but a few people wore business clothes, rumpled after a long day.

  One fellow caught my attention because he was sitting by himself, a pile of newspapers and notebooks on the table in front of him. He was a paunchy man in his forties with a receding hairline in a plaid short-sleeved shirt. I sat at the empty table next to his and looked around.

  “There’s no waitress,” the man said, glancing my way. “Let me get you the house special.”

  He was gone before I could say “No thanks.” He conferred with the annoyed bartender and returned with an unlabeled wine bottle and two glasses.

  “Lefty makes his own wine. It won’t win any prizes, but it hasn’t killed anyone yet.”

  The pale gold wine glugged out of the bottle as he poured. “I’m Bernie Vines.”

  “Milagro De Los Santos.”

  He grinned. “Finally in La Basura there is a milagro de los santos. We’ve been waiting long enough.”

  “I’ve wondered how this town got this name,” I said.

  “One of my favorite stories.” He took a sip of his wine and made a face. “Once there was a Spanish don who had a beautiful but troublesome mistress named Carmelita. He owned this land and built a hacienda for her, saying that he would join her soon. But he never came—he’d just thrown her out like the trash, la basura, and she went mad with waiting. Some say that Carmelita still waits for him. If you listen to the wind you can hear her calling him.”

  “I hope she’s calling him bad names,” I said. “Is that story true?”

  Bernie shrugged. “
Could be, or it could be that radioactive waste was dumped here once.”

  “Which do you believe?”

  “Night like this, I’m inclined to hear Carmelita’s lonesome cry as I wend my way home.”

  “You’re a poetic soul, Bernard. What is it you do?”

  “By day, I’m a high school English teacher. I’m also a stringer for the Weekly Exposition.”

  “The tabloid? The one that runs stories about alien babies and two-headed goats?”

  “I see you’re familiar with our illustrious publication,” he said with a smirk. “Your turn. What do you do?”

  I tried not to sound as if I was bragging when I told him about my rewriting job. I didn’t tell him the name of the screenwriter, but I did say, “The script’s got a lunatic beauty.”

  “Now you’re the one with the poetic soul.” He asked about the plot and when I mentioned chupacabras, he started laughing.

  “What?” I said.

  “I’ve written a couple of stories about chupa sightings for the Weekly Exposition is all,” he said.

  “You expect me to believe that you’ve seen a chupacabra?” I asked, laughing.

  “Milagro, in the desert, you see all sorts of things. Chupas, werewolves, aliens, vampires, Elvis…” He was watching me as he said this, and then I caught him glance across the room.

  A woman sitting with a few girlfriends was staring at us. She was in her late thirties, I guessed, and very attractive if you went for thin, extremely tan, extremely angry dames.

  “A woman over there is staring daggers at you,” I said. “I get the distinct feeling she’d rather be throwing them.”

  “That’s my ex-wife. She dumped me for a golf pro at the Paragon.”

  “Why is she mad at you?”

  “She never realized how much time golf pros spend playing golf. She thinks I should have told her before she kicked my ass to the curb.” He shook his head, then snorted, “The Paragon!”

  “What do you have against the Paragon?”

  “Something bothers me about that place. There are things that happen in La Basura, and I wonder if there’s a connection.”

  “What things?”

  “Chupacabra attacks.” He grinned, just daring me to question him. “Or something. People disappear and show up confused and burnt out a couple of days later.”

  “I live in the country, Bernie. It’s an ugly secret that lots of bored people do lots of hard drugs,” I said. “Has anyone actually seen a chupacabra? Anyone sober and sane?”

  “I saw something once. Wouldn’t bet that it was a chupa—but I wouldn’t bet that it wasn’t one.”

  I finished my drink. The wine had a very low alcohol content, because I’d had a few glasses and felt almost nothing. “I’ve got to take off,” I said, picking up my bag of groceries. I didn’t want the meat to go too long without refrigeration. “I’m expecting a call from my boyfriend.”

  “It’s time for me to get home, too,” he said.

  He stood up and we walked out of the bar and directly into an argument. Technically, it wasn’t an argument because one belligerent, hairy, large man was shouting and cursing at some poor old skinny drunk, who wavered on his feet. It was an extended rant with phrases repeated over and over with a Mamet-like rhythm and intensity. This La Basura Sasquatch made me yearn to curse, too, except that every time I did, I pictured my abuelita shaking her head in shame.

  Then the large, angry man looked at Bernie and stopped shouting. “Uh, evening, Mr. Vines,” he said politely.

  “Get outta here, Joe,” Bernie said. The man went into the bar, and the drunk crumpled to the ground. “Joe was one of my students,” Bernie explained as we watched the drunk crawl on the sidewalk. “I didn’t mind his bad temper, but he couldn’t punctuate worth a damn. Since his abduction, all he does is rant.”

  “Abduction?”

  “Joe went missing for three days. Came back dumber than ever. Give me a hand with this guy, will you?” Bernie went to the drunk and took one arm.

  I steadied myself for the shock of gory visions, but when I took the drunk’s arm…nothing. Nothing. Maybe I had overcome the nasty, cannibalistic condition. My joy was so great that I laughed out loud.

  But before I had time to linger on this feeling, the drunk turned toward me. I was stunned. This shriveled old man was Thomas Cook. His copper skin, stretched tightly on high cheekbones, had a gray hue. There were dark hollows under his eyes, his clothes hung from his large, gaunt frame, and his straight black hair was greasy.

  “Well, if it isn’t Thomas Cook,” Bernie said.

  “Hey, baby,” Thomas mumbled with an attempt at a leer.

  It was a magical moment, the man of a million fantasies flirting with me. Of course, the fact that he was blind drunk and began retching immediately afterward somewhat tarnished the effect.

  When Cook had emptied his guts and I’d nearly lost my dinner, Bernie handed him a crumpled tissue from his pocket.

  “Wipe your mouth, Cook. Where’re you staying?”

  “Spa,” Thomas said.

  Bernie looked at me. “Can you give him a ride back?”

  “Actually, one of the drivers dropped me off in town so I could pick up some groceries.”

  If Bernie thought this was strange, and he did, he didn’t say. “You can drive his car.” Bernie shook Thomas’s shoulder. “Cook, where’s your car?”

  The actor muttered something about PCH and a party and the police and “I was set up.”

  Bernie frowned and said, “I’ll take him back. You coming?”

  “Sure. I call shotgun.”

  We hauled Thomas into the backseat of a beat-up brown car, rolling down the window so he could hang his head out like a dog.

  “You aren’t going to write about this for the Weekly Exposition, are you?”

  Bernie glanced my way. “A has-been is not news. No one cares about this guy anymore.”

  Thomas was snoring loudly. I looked back at him and thought that people should care about him, people would care about him again.

  Once we got to the Paragon, we tried unsuccessfully to find out his room number. He kept muttering, “Nine-oh-two-one-oh.”

  “Isn’t that too long to be a room number?” I asked.

  “It’s the zip code for Beverly Hills. Look, it’s better if you keep him tonight to make sure he doesn’t choke on his vomit.”

  “Why me?”

  “I’ve got to teach tomorrow. All you’re doing is writing.”

  “No one thinks writing is work,” I complained.

  “That’s because it isn’t.”

  We threw Thomas in the back of a golf cart and took him to my casita.

  Bernie picked up Thomas under the arms, and I took his feet. Bernie was walking backward, looking over his shoulder as we walked through the gate and the small courtyard, and into my casita. “Swanky,” he said.

  “Tell me about it.”

  The actor was too long for the sofa, so we deposited him on the bed. I put mineral water and aspirin on the nightstand, and then I went back to the main room.

  Bernie was surveying the view out the windows to the lighted pool. “How’d you score this?”

  “The production company is paying for it.” I stared at the surface of the pool. “He used to be so wonderful. What happened?”

  “He wasn’t immune to the hype.” Bernie shook his head. “Live fast, die young, leave a good-looking corpse.”

  “That’s a harsh judgment.”

  “Milagro, after J-school, I covered celebrities for five years. The stories were all the same. I just switched out the names as the actors came and went.”

  I must have looked disappointed, because he added, “Okay, Cook was something special. He seemed like a decent guy. He had some greedy management, got ripped off, made some bad decisions about his roles. His ex-wife took him to the cleaners. If he gives you any trouble tonight, thwack him over the head with something solid.”

  “I’ll be fine,” I said.


  As he left, Bernie said, “Milagro, you seem like a nice girl. Don’t get sucked into this business.”

  When Bernie was safely gone, I took my groceries to the kitchenette. I shoved the sausages in the freezer behind the ice cube bin. Then I removed the livers from the containers and put them down the disposal. I moved as quickly and quietly as I could, hoping that Thomas was a sound sleeper. I poured out a bottle of Paragon’s High Antioxidant Refreshing Berry Smoothie, rinsed the bottle, and poured in the blood from the livers. I put the bottle behind the other juices and mineral waters.

  I washed up and changed into one of the pretty nightgowns that Oswald gave me, but when I went to my makeshift bed on the sofa, the fabric kept twisting uncomfortably around me in a tragic case of style over function. I stared at the ceiling, listening to the water lapping in the pool. Nothing seemed real anymore.

  Every time I closed my eyes, I kept thinking of the vampire nightclub, remembering the madness on the faces that had gathered in the club for the bloodletting ceremony, the unnerving black script of the ancient book, and the language that predated reason.

  My dreams were dark and incoherent, but frightening. I remembered knives, blood, and running from something. I kept waking up in terror, unable to separate the danger of my nightmares from the dangers of my real life. At least I’d overcome the worst symptom of my condition. I could return to the ranch when I was done here. I could hold Libby again, and I could deal with Oswald and his family face-to-face.

  Fourteen

  The Man who Came for Nachos

  H orrible noises woke me. I was on my feet and ready to fight before I was even fully awake. I slipped on a silk wrap and stood still. Then it came again, a loud, unearthly “Agggh, Agggh!” cry, and it was getting closer.

  Thomas Cook, his emaciated body clad only in boxers, walked into the room. He squinted against the sunlight streaming through the windows and scratched his hairy underarm. Upright, he was taller than I thought, over six feet. When he caught sight of me, he looked surprised, but then gave me a cool once-over. “Hey, baby,” he said in his famous gravelly voice, “have a good time last night?”