The Western Lonesome Society

by Robert Garner McBrearty

  I gave her big tips all the time. One night she came home with me after work. We really got it going. We were on the floor for awhile. She danced for me. Then she danced with me inside her. It was incredible.

  Somebody banged on the door of my apartment.

  “Oh shit,” she said. “It’s Tiny.”

  “Who’s Tiny?”

  “He’s going to kill us,” she said.

  “Oh shit,” I said. I knew who he was then. I’d seen him hanging around the strip joint. He was kind of her boyfriend, I guess. A biker. Huge arms, huge gut, about six foot six. Tattoos, leather jacket, chains, knife in the boot, tomahawk on his belt, silver tooth in front.

  “I know you’re in there!” Tiny roared. “I’m going to kill you!”

  “Do you know how to fight?” Candy asked.

  “Not all that well,” I said.

  “We’d better get out of here.”

  We threw on our clothes, what we could. The door splintered. Tiny busted it down and it fell into the kitchen of the efficiency. He stood there for a moment, looking stunned, as if he hadn’t actually expected the door to fall into the room. We screamed and jumped out the back window. We were on the second storey, but we just threw ourselves out and we hit the ground and got up and ran down the alley.

  “It’s okay,” she said, laughing. “We’ll go to my place. I’m high as a kite. I can fuck all night when I feel like this.”

  “That sounds good,” I said. “I love you, by the way.”

  “I love you, too,” she said.

  I don’t think either one of us was entirely sober. She had a little apartment not too far away. As soon as we got inside, we started up again. She was an incredible sight, naked except for that golden band around her waist. Tight hard narrow waist. With twists. These great slopes and twists. We were doing it on her kitchen table. She undulated beneath me. That’s the only word I can think of. She undulated. I was on top but it was really more like she was the one in control. I was just following her in some wild wonderful dance.

  There was a terrible banging on the door. “I know you’re in there!” Tiny yelled. “I’ll kill you!”

  We screamed. We threw on our clothes. What we could. I lost a shoe along the way. We jumped out the back window and ran down the alley. I busted my foot some in the fall and I hobbled along but we made pretty good time. We were running hand in hand, laughing. It had started to rain. I told her I loved her again, and told her I wanted to save her.

  “I don’t want to be saved,” she said. “I’m no good.”

  “You could be. You could change.”

  She laughed. “Why should I change?”

  We slipped into another house. A dumpy old house full of smoke and rotting newspapers and motorcycle parts and grease stains on the floor and roaches scuttling around and a few bikers snoring on the kitchen floor and a tall skinny guy asleep in the fireplace, but it was summer at least so there was no fire going.

  “Where are we?” I whispered. I have to admit I was pretty drunk through all this, though all the running had sobered me up some.

  She laughed. She had this gleeful, mischievous laugh that drove me wild. A girlish laugh, almost innocent on one level, but sort of wicked, too. “Come in here,” she said, and she pushed me into a bedroom and pulled me down on a water bed and I sank way down into her and the bed that smelled of smoke and beer, and each thrust seemed to take us way way down where it seemed like we would not come back up for air.

  The bedroom door opened and I turned my head and almost screamed, but Candy covered my mouth with her hand as Tiny came into the room. It was dark, almost black in there except for a little glow from a lava lamp. Tiny made all these grunting and groaning and snorting and farting noises, mumbling and stumbling around in the darkness. “Shit,” he said to himself. “Fucking bitch.” There was a little sob in his voice as he added, “No feelings. No more. That’s it.”

  I way lying on top of Candy, still inside her, trying to climb out so I could run out of there, but she scissored her strong dancer’s legs around my back and held me there. She bit my ear. She was giggling silently. Tiny lay down on his back beside us and started to snore. I felt a little strange about it, but I moved in and out of Candy in a discreet, tender sort of way.

  *

  “What do you think?” Dave, his student, asks Jim in his office a few days later.

  “Well, it’s gritty,” he says.

  “Do you like it?”

  “Well, it was interesting.”

  “I was reading some of your stuff,” Dave says.

  “You were?”

  “I was kind of rewriting some of your scenes in my mind. Sort of jazzing them up a little. They seemed, I don’t know, maybe a little flat.”

  “Why don’t you stick to your own scenes for now? What happened after that? What happened with you and Candy after that? Or does it just end there?”

  “Here.” He hands Jim another manila envelope, and after he leaves, Jim settles in with a cup of coffee and starts to read. His eyes flicker to a manuscript on his desk. He’s been working on a story about a trip the family had taken to Spain the summer before. Maybe the story needs a little jazzing up.

  *

  I fell asleep. We both did. Then it was morning. I opened my eyes. I was wedged in the bed between Tiny and Candy. I was right next to him, my face stuck in his hairy armpit. His chest and belly were enormous, his gut jutting up toward the ceiling like some gigantic iceberg. His huge tattooed arm draped around me and snuggled me into him.

  Candy was lying on the other side of me, still naked except for the gold band around her waist. She woke when I did and smiled and her hand slid down my belly and started stroking me. I got a hard-on right away.

  Some biker poked his head into the bedroom. Same kind of clothes as Tiny’s. A tall, really thin guy. So thin he looked like he might be diseased. Scraggly gray beard, wispy long hair. He was the guy from the fireplace.

  “Paper’s here,” he said. Kind of a domestic moment. It was like a ritual for them, you could tell, him and Tiny reading the Sunday paper together.

  Candy rolled her head and looked up at him.

  “Oh hey, Candy,” he said.

  “Hey, Sandy,” she said. She rose up on an elbow and smiled at him.

  “Who’s the guy?” he said. But friendly about it. Like I could read the paper, too, if I wanted, after we were done.

  She smiled from him to me. Her teeth were white with an attractive little space between the two front teeth. Then she laughed. “I forgot your name. I’m sorry. That’s really tacky of me.”

  “Dave,” I said.

  “Hey, Dave,” Sandy said. “You want coffee?”

  “Sure,” I said.

  He waved a hand as he backed out the door. “Take your time.”

  Tiny opened his eyes. He blinked like a man waking up out of an accident. My hard-on knocked against Tiny’s gargantuan hip. His huge eyes got wider.

  He tried to sit up, but Candy dove over me and landed on him, squeezing me out of the way, giggling her mischievous giggle. “Come on, baby,” she purred, undoing his belt buckle. “I’ve been waiting for you to wake up.”

  She was working on his belt buckle with one hand, while one of his massive hands reached over her and yanked my hair. “Who’s the creep?” he said.

  “I don’t have any idea,” she said.

  “Get lost, creep,” Tiny said. He gave my head a shove. He was starting to make little cooing sounds as her hand snaked inside his trousers. Candy winked at me and signaled with the movement of her head that this would be a good opportunity for me to leave. “Where were you?” Tiny said plaintively, like a little boy.

  I grabbed my clothes. What I could. And ran out of the bedroom.

  Some of the bikers were starting to stir and roll around on the floor. Sandy
turned from the stove in the kitchen. “You ready for coffee?”

  I kept going out the front door.

  “Nice meeting you, Dave,” he called cheerfully.

  I hobbled along with no shoes. Then the angels appeared beside me. They had never appeared in broad daylight before. They looked even younger in the light. They seemed a little sad, though. Maybe it was because they were seeing me in the light for the first time, and I must have looked horrible. Oh Dave, they said, what have you been doing? We need to get you home.

  It was summer, the nights hot and moist. I told myself to forget about Candy, but the days went by and I couldn’t stop thinking of that gold band around her waist. I stayed away from the topless bar for two weeks, but couldn’t stand it. I slipped back in there one night and sat in the darkness with a beer and watched her dance on the stage. She danced like she was on fire inside. She massaged her breasts, ran her fingertips along the insides of her thighs. She really loved dancing, you could tell. She was in some place all her own, like she was listening to some other voice, some other spirit, in her own time, her own world. She never really looked my way, or if she did her eyes just swept over me like I was just another one of the inhabitants of the darkness.

  I came back in again the next night, but this time I sensed that she knew I was there. I followed her around the bar with my eyes, from when she was on stage to when she was serving drinks. But she didn’t come to my table. I had a sense she’d sent another barmaid my way on purpose. But I kept coming back, and two nights later, without warning, she sat down at my table. She was wearing a black halter top. She looked almost sexier than when she was bare. Her nipples pressed against the cloth. I could hardly say hello. My voice cracked and stuck. “I missed you,” I heard myself saying.

  “Do I know you?” she said. She looked hard at me, she blinked. She smiled that beautiful smile with the little space between her front teeth. “Oh yeah. You. That was fun.”

  “I love you.” My voice came out in a dry, crazy whisper.

  She gave me a serious look. “Don’t get mixed up with me. It’s not worth it.” Then she laughed again, that wicked laugh, and she gave my nuts a squeeze under the table, and then she was up, doing a shuffling dance away from me, wiggling her ass in a taunting sort of way.

  I sat there and got drunk. Drunker than usual. The next thing I knew somebody was beating me up in the parking lot outside the club. There’s a curious, heavy, going down feeling when you’re drunk, real drunk, going down down down, like you’re watching yourself go down but you can’t do anything about it, and then I hit the pavement. I felt a few kicks in my side, but they didn’t hurt too much. The guy didn’t seem all that much into it. I covered up and after a while he got bored and wandered away.

  I walked home all bloody. The angels found me along the way. They sighed and clucked over me and led me back to my apartment and cleaned me up and bandaged me. I told them about Candy.

  Go away somewhere, the angel with the bad acne and the beautiful smile said. Go away until you’re over her.

  I decided they were right. I took a train down to Mexico. Way down to the interior. For a while, nine months or so, things went along great. I lived in an old colonial town with cobblestone streets. I wrote stories. I still drank, but I didn’t get so drunk most of the time. I met another angel. I couldn’t ever remember her name. She’d show up when I was walking home from the bars. She was some sort of model back in the States, she said, though she wasn’t one of those super thin models. She was fairly thin, but not super thin. She felt wonderful to hold. But that’s all that ever happened. She’d show up late at night and we’d smooch in a doorway on a cobblestone street. I’d hold her for a while and we’d smooch and then she’d be on her way and I wouldn’t see her for another week or so. Usually she showed up by just suddenly holding my hand. I mean, I wouldn’t even see her coming, then all of a sudden she’d be holding my hand and smiling. She didn’t say much, she wasn’t really much of a conversationalist. If she hadn’t always been slipping away and disappearing, I would have fallen in love with her. I’d walk around town all day during the daylight, but I could never find her.

  I thought I was over Candy. I took a train back to the border, but I did something stupid there. Instead of crossing the border, I spent the day drinking in Nuevo Laredo, and at night, I found myself at the whore houses. I don’t know why. I didn’t even want a whore. I was just there. It was pretty dismal. I went into a room with a plump Mexican woman. She lifted up a rubber bag and said we should clean up a little first. She had a plump, smooth belly but sad looking lopsided little breasts. I got really depressed and before we did anything, I said I needed to go. She was pissed at me. She followed me to the door and squirted something from the rubber bag onto the back of my shirt.

  Out on the street I weaved between bars. It looked like sort of an old western town out of the movies.

  A woman shouted at me from a dark doorway. “Two dollar, sucky fucky, two dollar, sucky fucky!”

  Maybe I wasn’t entirely sober, but I went up to her and I saw that she was old and toothless and she said, “You want sucky fucky?”

  “No,” I said. “That’s the last thing I want. I’m taking you out of here.”

  I had some crazy notion that I needed to get this poor old woman out of this hellhole. It suddenly burned in me, this sort of desire that I needed to free her from this place, that no woman, no human being on earth, should inhabit such a hellhole.

  I took her by the arm and started dragging her down the street and she started screaming. She screamed bloody murder like I was crazy or something.

  I heard shouts and footsteps coming my way and I kept dragging her as she kept screaming and my thought was she would be happy once I got her out of there, she would see that it was better in the outside world. The shouts grew louder and I had a sense of being surrounded, a flashlight blinded me, and then something slammed into the back of my head and I went down.

  When I awoke it was morning, the sun just coming up, and I was lying on my side in the desert, my hands tied behind my back. As I came to and sat up, I heard a man screaming. He was surrounded by several other men. There were a couple of pickup trucks in the desert with us. The men pushed him down on a boulder and hacked him with machetes while he screamed horribly.

  I realized I was sitting next to another man, tied up like me. Except he wasn’t being still. He was working his hands behind his back, trying to free himself from the ropes. I started trying that myself. “Take your fingers,” he said, “and work on my ropes.” He pressed his back against mine, and I started working on his ropes.

  The man was still being hacked to death. It was hideous the way he was screaming. I had a splitting headache and was having a hard time processing all this.

  “I’m an undercover cop,” the man behind me said in accented English. “I have a gun in my boot.”

  The man was finally still, dead on the boulder, and the men came for us now, six of them, some carrying machetes, some carrying pistols and rifles. They took me first, lifting me up and dragging me toward the boulder, but the dead man was still on it, hacked up, and they rolled him off it and started to push me down. One of the men raised a machete over my head and I shut my eyes.

  I heard the first shot and I opened my eyes and saw the guy with the machete dropping with blood spurting out of his head. The undercover agent was up and running right at the men, firing as the men tried to fire back at him. I got off the boulder and charged a man who was aiming a gun at the agent. I threw myself into him and knocked him off balance. He pitched to the side and the agent was a foot away from him now and he fired twice into his chest. They were all down now and he went around and fired a few more shots here and there into their bodies.

  The agent went around taking their wallets out of their pockets, taking the cash and throwing the wallets back on their dead bodies. The agent untied my hands. I recog
nized one of the wallets as mine and reclaimed it. The agent handed me a big bunch of cash, some in dollars, some in pesos.

  “I don’t want it,” I said.

  “Take it,” he said. “It’ll just end up with a crook.”

  I didn’t really want to, but he kept poking the bundle at me so I slipped the money into my own wallet. It was stuffed. I had thousands of dollars.

  We saw a cloud of sand and dust, kicked up by another pickup truck coming our way. “Oh shit,” the agent said. “We’d better get out of here.”

  We got in one of the pickups. The keys were in there. We rolled out of there. The agent handed me a gun. “If they get too close, fire a few shots out the window.”

  They got a little too close and I fired a few shots out the window and the pickup truck slowed and let us roll on through the desert. By late morning, we were back in Nuevo Laredo and the agent dropped me off with the border crossing in sight.

  “Don’t you need me to be a witness or anything?” I asked.

  He shook my hand. “I think it’s best if you just go.”

  That whole episode must have stirred something up inside of me because that night, back in Austin, I bought a cheap used beater of an old Mustang for six hundred dollars in cash and found myself going into the bar where Candy worked. My idea was that I would drive away with her in the car, rescue her from the bar where she was working. It had been nine months, though, and I wondered if she still worked there.

  I sat in the cool darkness. It occurred to me that I was home. I was in my element. I love the cool darkness of a bar, the air conditioner blowing. That’s it. That’s my life. There was a moment of peace there where I knew I would be okay, where I knew I didn’t need Candy. All I needed was a place like this, a cool dark place with the air conditioning pumping, maybe some music playing, some dancers on stage wasn’t bad, but I didn’t really need them.