The Western Lonesome Society

by Robert Garner McBrearty

  But then Candy came out on the stage and suddenly I was trembling all over. Something was wrong. She was thinner. Still beautiful. Maybe even more beautiful. But thinner, sleeker, her ribs showing. She looked like a creature out of the jungle. I just stared at her. You know that expression, your heart goes into your throat. I actually felt like that. I finally knew what that expression meant. I just stared, my heart in my throat. There was something else wrong. She wasn’t wearing the gold band around her waist. I was sure someone had stolen it from her. Someone had treated her cruelly and taken her gold band.

  I stared at her all through her set. Dancers feel it when you’re watching. When you’re watching quietly and appreciatively and not hooting and hollering and whistling like a fool. She stared back at me, finding me in the darkness and she tantalized her nipples with her fingertips. One pasty had fallen off, which is illegal. There seemed something wrong with her, something disoriented or frightened, as if she’d left the regular world, as regular as her world had ever been.

  After her set, she came straight to my table and sat down. “Hey good-looking,” she said. “What do you look so sad about?”

  My voice was stuck. After a few swallows, I said, “You used to wear a gold band around your waist.”

  She stared at me. “Do I know you?”

  “You don’t remember me?”

  “Are you some kind of weirdo?”

  “No. I mean, I don’t know. You don’t have to worry about me or anything. I’m harmless.”

  “I doubt that,” she said. “Stick around. I’ve got to wait tables and dance again.”

  The next time she danced just for me. You can tell that sort of thing. She undulated.

  After her dance, she sat back down. “What am I supposed to remember? I mean, did we fuck?” She smiled at me. “Isn’t that weird? Are you bullshitting me?”

  “Tiny kept breaking down the door. We ended up in bed with him.”

  She stared at me. “Son of a bitch,” she said. “I remember you now.”

  “How’s Tiny?”

  Her eyes went hollow, and her cheeks sucked in. “He’s dead.” She gripped my hand and her face suddenly turned fearful. I mean really scared. “Look,” she said. “There’s something you don’t understand. There’s some bad shit going on.”

  “I can take you out of it.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “Come with me to Mexico. I have money. I have a car waiting outside.”

  She swept her long blonde hair back. She was gorgeous. “Are you sure you can handle me?”

  “Let’s go.”

  She looked around. “I’m probably being watched right now. I’m going to go to the back and get dressed. Wait for me outside in the back parking lot. Have your car ready. I mean it, it’s bad shit. They’ll kill us both if they think I’m trying to get away.”

  “I’ll have the engine running.”

  “Don’t be fucking obvious about it. Have another beer before you get up.”

  She gave my nuts a quick rub under the table. She disappeared into the back of the bar and I drank another beer and made some nonchalant breathing noises. I clapped at the other dancers as if I were just another fan, and then I slipped out the door.

  I pulled my old Mustang into the back parking lot and sat with the engine running. It was an old battered car already, and I feared it would get worse. I wasn’t a very good driver and I tended to bump into things, though I was very careful. I wanted to leave it somewhere as soon as possible.

  I watched the back door of the bar. A tall curly-haired guy came out. He walked right up to my car and opened the door and sat down in the passenger seat. “Look, this is the deal,” he said, looking straight ahead and not at me, his hands on his knees. “Candy doesn’t need this.”

  “Who are you?” I asked.

  “I’m her doctor,” he said.

  “Her doctor?”

  “She’s a patient of mine from the mental hospital.”

  I remembered there was a mental hospital just down from the bar. I had walked past it many times. Sometimes I had longed to climb over the fence and take refuge below the oak trees.

  “She’s delusional,” he said. “I want to check her back into the hospital.”

  The door opened. It was Candy. She was wearing a black halter top and blue jean cut-offs. Her face was fearful but she looked incredible. “Get out, Curtis,” she said.

  The curly-haired man started crying. “I love you,” he said. But he got out.

  The moment he did, Candy slid in and said, “Drive!”

  We drove off for the border. We didn’t talk for half an hour. She sat slumped against the door smoking cigarettes. “Who did he say he was?” she asked finally.

  “He said he was your doctor from the mental hospital.”

  “This is so much shit,” she said. “He’s insane. Maybe he was a doctor at one time, but now he’s just crazy.”

  “You’re not from . . . ”

  “Are we going to bring up a bunch of shit?” she said. “Or are we going to have a good time.”

  We stopped at an all-night diner and she began to feel cheerful again. She wolfed down a huge breakfast. She smiled at me. “I think I was a little hypoglycemic,” she said. “Now I’m feeling good. I’m feeling real good.” She winked at me. “Is your back seat clean?”

  “It’s clean.”

  We found a deserted road and made love in the back seat. She didn’t make a lot of noise but she kept breathing in my ear the whole time, this wonderful little song-like breathing. We both fell asleep so it was morning by the time we hit Laredo. I left the car at a long term parking on the American side. Our train didn’t leave until evening so we spent the day shopping for some clothes for Candy, first in Laredo and then on the Mexican side, in Nuevo Laredo. She was cheerful the whole time, sort of skipping on the sidewalks, in the stores whirling around and prancing for me as she tried things on, then giving me these sort of shy looks as if maybe I’d think she looked funny in something.

  We bought the tickets and sat in the train station in Nuevo Laredo. I saw a man standing a little ways off across the station talking to two rough-looking men and then he broke off from the men and stared at me in astonishment. I realized he was the undercover agent who had saved my life. I started to get up, but he warned me away with a look and turned back to the two men and started walking with them. He glanced back at me with a look of sheer disbelief. What in the hell was I doing back in Mexico? I gave him a little shrug of my head and tried to encompass Candy’s presence with the look, as if that might say it all. Men had done crazier things for love.

  We stood between the train cars and screamed into the blackness of the night. “I’m in fucking Mexico!” Candy screamed in delight, hugging me. “I’ve never been in fucking Mexico before! I love you, Mexico!”

  “Mexico loves you!” I screamed back ecstatically.

  We made love in our compartment to the bucking and swaying of the train and maybe it had something to do with the loud clacking of the train wheels, but she really cut loose. Her fingernails clawed at my back and she belted out wild moans and screamed, “Fuck me! Fuck me! Fuck me for Mexico!” I felt like the luckiest man alive.

  Later we went to the club car, but we both only had coffee. It was like we were getting serious. “Wow,” she said as we crossed the desert in the night, seeing little campfires off in the distance. “Look,” she said, “I’m not crazy if that’s what you’re wondering. I was a little messed up at one point and I did forty days and they let me out. They said I was fine. Curtis was one of my doctors back then. He was the crazy one. He had a thing about me. I don’t even think he works there anymore.”

  “What kind of trouble are you in?”

  She talked low so that the other people in the club car wouldn’t hear, but nobody was paying any attention t
o what we were saying. They were just staring at her because she was so beautiful.

  “They killed Tiny,” she whispered.

  “Who did?”

  “The rug dealers,” I thought she said. It was hard to hear over the train wheels and the other conversations.

  “Why would rug dealers kill Tiny?” I asked.

  She looked at me like I was an idiot. “The drug dealers,” she said. “Tiny fucked them over. You don’t fuck over the drug dealers.”

  From my own incident the day before, I knew there were dangerous people in the world. “I guess not.”

  “They shot Tiny dead. They killed Sandy, too.” Tears welled up in her eyes. “Sandy was nice.”

  “Yes, he was,” I said. “I’m sorry.”

  “It wasn’t fair. He never messed with anybody. He was in Vietnam. He had a bad leg.”

  “I’m sorry about Sandy. Tiny, too, though I think he had some problems.”

  “Tiny was a bastard,” she said. “He had no reason to be mean. He just was.”

  “Why are they after you?”

  “I saw it. I saw them kill Tiny and Sandy. I hid in the bathroom but I saw it through a crack in the door. I know who they are.”

  “Do they know?”

  “They suspect, I think. I called the police. Anonymous. I don’t want to be involved in this shit. They’ll kill me. But I don’t like what they did to Sandy. He sat down when they shot him. He sat down on a kitchen chair and he said, ‘Aw, don’t do that,’ like he was more tired than hurt. Then he fell over. Then they started for Tiny. ‘Hey, hey don’t, man!’ he screamed and he backed up onto the bed. ‘Hey!’ he screamed, ‘hey don’t!” like they would give a shit, and then they blew off his head with a shotgun.”

  Candy was crying. “He used to hit me,” she said. “But he loved me. He was backing away as far from the bathroom as he could so they wouldn’t see me.”

  I handed her a napkin and she dabbed at her eyes while I kissed the backs of her hands. “Sandy was nice. I used to think me and Sandy might . . . But Sandy wasn’t like that. I don’t think he liked girls that way. He wasn’t gay, but he wasn’t interested that way. He was like an old man in some ways. It was like he’d gotten everything out of his system a long time ago. He just liked working on his bike and doing art. He did these paintings. They were beautiful. Skies and flowers and cactus and skulls and deserts. They were awesome . . . I told him, Sandy, you’ve got to take these to a gallery. Aw, he said, they ain’t so good. Sandy, I said, if you won’t take these to a gallery, I will. I’ll fuck somebody to get these in a show if I have to.

  “They smashed them up. The bastards smashed up all the paintings before they killed Sandy. ‘Now, aw, don’t do that,’ Sandy said every time they smashed one. It was terrible. It was like he was watching something that he loved die. ‘We’ll give you your money back,’ Tiny told them. ‘We’ll give you more.’ He begged them. They just laughed.”

  Candy and I took the train all the way to Mexico City. We stayed in the Zona Rosa in a beautiful hotel. We had an old fashioned elegant room with a chandelier. We took long baths together in a claw-footed tub. We ordered food in. One day we were walking around the Zona Rosa and she got very mischievous. She told me to wait outside a store and she went in. “What did you buy?” I asked when she came out. She giggled. This delightful giggle. She looked like a high school cheerleader when she giggled like that. I even noticed the freckles on her cheeks for the first time. I asked her to marry me. I felt incredibly happy all of a sudden, but incredibly sad, too. I wanted to take away all the crazy years. I wanted to be back in high school with her, just starting out, nothing gone wrong in our lives, no damage done.

  I kept asking her what she’d bought, and she kept giggling and acting mysterious, but she liked being asked, liked that I was buying into the game.

  That night she went into the bathroom and when she came out she was naked except for the gold band that she’d bought in the store. There it was. Around her beautiful waist with its wonderful twists and slopes. “Ta duh,” she said, raising her arms like a prize winner. Giggling, she spun around. She danced around the room for me, flying and whirling, up on the bed, on chairs, on a dresser, coming over to rub my nuts, swooping on. She spun, she twirled, she pirouetted. She gave it everything she had until she fell on the floor out of breath, curled on her side, panting and sweating. She rested for half a minute and then she rolled on her back and stuck her pelvis up in the air. She undulated. God, I’d go back there in a minute. If I could go back to one minute in my life, that would be it, Candy twirling around that room in Mexico City.

  I was in love. One day we took a subway out to Chapultepec Park and toured around Maximilian’s Palace and all that. We read about Maximilian and Carlotta, their disasters in Mexico and the execution. It was big news to Candy. She was amazed. She was blown away by them, by what happened. She had tears running down her face.

  When we went back to the hotel and rode up in the elevator I knew something was wrong. She sat down on one of the queen beds. “They’re here,” she said.

  It chilled me the way she said that. “Who is here?”

  “The killers,” she said. “I saw them in the park, near the swans.”

  There was a sudden knock on the door and I almost screamed. I looked out with the chain still locked, but it was only the maid with some towels.

  Candy was sitting on the edge of the bed. She clutched herself and shook like she had a fever.

  “I want to get out of here,” she said. “I want to go to the ocean.”

  I held her. “Okay,” I said. “Sure. We’ll go to the ocean.”

  She rolled over and lay on her side and I just held her like that, lying against her. In the morning, we took a bus to the Pacific Ocean and checked into a little white hotel. One day we went out on the beach, around a bend in the sand, away from the town and any people, and she took off all her clothes and started swimming out. I called out to her. She kept swimming out. Suddenly I knew what she was up to, and I didn’t even take off my clothes, I just kicked off my sandals and went after her.

  I wasn’t in too good of shape from all the drinking the last couple of years, but I was a good swimmer. I’d been on my high school swim team. I caught up with her. She fought me, scratching and clawing at my face. Then she wrapped those strong dancer’s legs around my waist and brought me down with her. We were sinking together. I didn’t fight any more. I thought, okay, then, if that’s what she wants, I’ll end it now, with her. Then her legs let me go, released me. I couldn’t help myself. I broke for the surface. I hated myself for that, but I couldn’t help it. My mind was saying one thing, but my whole body was screaming: Breathe! Breathe! My head burst through the water and I gasped for air.

  I propelled myself downward, groping through the water for her, but it was murky and my eyes filled up with salt water. I couldn’t see a thing. I came up for air. I called her name over and over, and I wanted to die myself. I would swim out and out until I went under for good.

  I heard a laugh and looked toward shore and she was in the breakers, rolling herself over and over toward the beach.

  I followed her in and when she got to shore, she started walking toward the hotel, not bothering to put on her clothes. I picked up her clothes from the sand and followed her, calling, “Candy! Candy, put on your clothes!”

  I sounded like an old man. I sounded like the responsible one. It was strange to find myself in that position.

  I caught up with her, tried to wrap a towel around her, but she shook it off. She hardly slowed down. “It’s all bullshit,” she said. “It’s all bullshit.”

  “Candy,” I said, “you’ve got to put your clothes on.”

  She stopped for just a moment, and her eyes looked through me, dull and flat, as if she felt nothing for me. “You can’t save me,” she said.

  Then she walked on,
and as we came around the bend, there were other people on the beach, regular people out swimming or lounging on towels. Mexico is a curious sort of country. You can get away with a lot, be forgiven for a lot, but there are things you can’t get away with and one thing you can’t get away with is walking through a public area naked, so when Candy kept going and went into the hotel and through the lobby and up the stairs, I knew there’d soon be a knock on our door so I was already packing when the knock came.

  The hotel clerk and the policeman were actually quite nice about it. From the doorway, they could see Candy sitting on the bed, shaking. The moment we’d hit the hotel room, she became more modest and now she did have a towel wrapped around her. She gave them a friendly, timid little wave and there was something fragile and frightened about her, so the hotel clerk, with the policeman standing behind him, his hand resting on the top of his nightstick, just said that we would have to leave.

  We took a bus to the next town over and from there we were able to get on a train. It wasn’t the same sort of ride back. We just sat in the Pullman, staring out the window. We hardly talked. We didn’t even drink.

  In Laredo, we picked up my car and drove back to Austin, mostly in silence, stopping at a diner to get a bite to eat.

  When we got into Austin, she said, “I need to go back.”

  I knew what she meant. I drove her to the mental hospital and we passed through the wide gates and drove up a winding hill beneath huge oak trees that shaded the whole road, that seemed to shade everything, as if one could walk through the hottest day in peace and comfort and quiet. She knew the whole procedure. She got checked in at an old red brick building with an antiseptic smell. She was nice and quiet and polite with the woman at the desk and with the white-suited attendants who came for her. They all seemed to know her and to like her. Before they took her off to the ward, she kissed me softly on the lips. Then she stepped back and looked at me calmly and said, “I don’t want to see you again.”