The Mortal Nuts

by Pete Hautman

  “I don’t want you to go. But I got to go, and you don’t live here.” Carmen wriggled into a pair of jeans, then sat down on the edge of the bed. Dean sat up and wrapped himself around her, grabbing one breast in each hand.

  Carmen broke free and stood up. “My head hurts, James Dean.”

  “Call me just Dean, okay?” He liked his name, James Dean, the only thing his mother had given him that he liked, but it bugged him when people called him by it. It was like they were calling him James Dean but they were meaning somebody else.

  Carmen said, “Okay. My head hurts, Just Dean. Look, I got all this stuff to do. I got to go to the laundry, and then I got to go to the institute, ’cause I’m gonna be gone for two weeks. I might be able to get them to let me do Anatomy over again or something, you know? I’ll tell them I’ve been sick, or my mom died or something. Was I drinking margaritas last night?”

  “You said you hated it, going to school.”

  “I do hate it. But Axel will be really pissed if I flunk out.” Carmen pulled a pink-and-white Reebok onto one foot, tied it. “I hate the fair too, but I’ve got to work it. I’m not like you. I’ve got responsibilities.”

  “To who? A guy lives in a motel and keeps his money in coffee cans?”

  “Axel’s done a lot for me.”

  “What? He sends you to school and you hate it. He pays you a lousy two thousand bucks to work your butt off for two weeks. What’s that? I thought you said this guy was rich. If he’s so rich, how come he doesn’t pay you more? For that matter, how come you don’t just grab one of those coffee cans?”

  Carmen stared at her feet. Dean was not that smart of a guy, but sometimes he took the words right out of her head. She’d been thinking a lot about Axel’s coffee cans lately.

  “You scared of him?”

  “Axel?” She thought for a moment. “He’s an old man.” She put on the other Reebok, stood up, found her cigarettes on the floor, lit one.

  “So maybe I oughta go with you.”

  Carmen did a double take, expelling an involuntary smoke ring. “You wouldn’t like it.” The idea of Dean coming to Minnesota struck her as bizarre. Dean was a separate thing, an Omaha thing. He had nothing to do with Axel, nothing to do with the state fair.

  Dean said, “We could borrow a couple of coffee cans and head down to Puerto Penasco.”

  “Head where?”

  “Puerto Penasco. Rocky Point. It’s in Mexico, down on the California gulf. I met a guy once lived down there. He said there were a lot of cool people down there, Americans, and you could get a villa with a cook and everything for a couple hundred bucks a month. If you have money, you can get anything down there.”

  “Anything? Like what?” she asked.

  “Anything. And they don’t have any AIDS. It hasn’t gotten down there yet.”

  That sounded a little fishy to Carmen, who after all had not slept through all her classes. But the concept of being a rich gringo in Mexico did have appeal. The only problem was, first, Axel would not easily let go of his money, and, second, she would be with Dean. She liked him okay for this and that, but she didn’t see him as a full-time gig.

  “Look, I gotta get going, okay?” She pulled an orange Bugs Bunny T-shirt over her head; somehow got it past the cigarette in her mouth and over her ample breasts.

  “So you saying you want me to leave?”

  Carmen sighed. “Look. I got to go out. I got to go get some aspirin or something. My head hurts. I got to go to school, okay? I got to go to the laundry. You can stay here if you want. I don’t give a shit. Okay?”

  Dean sat up, swung his legs over the edge of the bed, saw himself in the mirror. He liked his body. It was thin, and not very tall, but he loved the way his muscles moved under his skin. Dean stood, watching his abs ripple. He picked up his jeans. “That’s okay. I got to go anyways. I got things to do too.”

  Carmen scratched under her T-shirt as she watched him dress. “You shave your head every day?”

  “Depends.” He zipped his jeans. “Some days I just like to let it grow.”

  She let her shoulders drop, relaxing now, regarding him with the same regret and relief she might bestow upon an empty bottle. “You want to know something? If you let your hair grow out? You still wouldn’t look like James Dean.”

  Forty-five minutes before her flight was due to board, Carmen tasted her Rob Roy and smiled at the nurse in the mirror. She liked what she saw. She sipped the Rob Roy again. Strange, but not bad. It had seemed like the sort of thing a nurse might order. Maybe next time she’d try a White Russian. There were so many drinks to try.

  Carmen liked the feel of the white uniform. She twisted to her left, then to her right, breasts pressing hard against the stiff fabric.

  She’d bought it used, from a uniform company, just for fun. Originally she’d thought of wearing it when she graduated, sort of a gift for Axel, but since graduation now looked about as likely as winning the lottery, she decided to show it off for her homecoming. What the hell—she’d bought the thing; she might as well try it out.

  To her surprise, she found that she liked being in it. She liked the idea of being a nurse, white poly-cotton wrapping her like armor, smoking cigarettes and drinking a Rob Roy in an airport cocktail lounge on a Tuesday afternoon, getting a double take from every suit that stopped off for a beer. She liked that it messed with their heads, like a prizefight or a powerful new car, making their juices flow. Must be a hormonal thing, she thought. A biological process. Axel would love it. He had this thing about medical paraphernalia. Nurses and pills turned him on. But he hated doctors and machines. Carmen took a hit off her Marlboro, watching her reflection, seeing the smoke frame her face, filter through her hair. Carmen liked her hair unbound, never putting it up or tying it back no matter how impractical or uncomfortable it became. She was constantly pushing it over her shoulder, brushing it off her forehead. Sophie had once warned her that wearing her hair long and loose would make guys act crazy around her.

  “A girl does with her hair like she wants for her body,” Sophie had told her. “You quit messing with your hair like that and they won’t be bothering you all the time.”

  The problem with Sophie’s suggestion was that Carmen sort of liked the way men bothered her. She liked the sense of control, and of danger. Even old Axel couldn’t keep his eyes off her—seventy-three years old, probably hadn’t got it up in decades.

  The hair was nice. Carmen wrapped a thick strand around her index finger, let it fall free. The strand remained curled for a moment, then slowly unwound. Good hair. But it wasn’t the hair men looked at. It was the boobs. Axel probably wouldn’t notice if she shaved her head like Dean. God, what a strange guy that James Dean was. A good guy to know, always bringing her stuff, but weird-looking and sort of spooky. All he ever wanted to do was go back to her place and fuck. He seemed to think he was her boyfriend or something.

  She had met Dean only a couple of months before, through his sister, Mickey, another student at Eastern Nebraska Institute of Medical Specialties. One night Carmen and Mickey and a couple of the other students had gone across the street to Bailey’s Pub, and Dean had joined them. Carmen remembered her first impression: What a geek! Since then, Dean had popped up with increasing frequency, and she’d gotten used to his appearance. She thought it was interesting that he’d been to prison. Thirty months on a drug rap, he’d told her. They’d gone out dancing a few times. Dean had a peculiar style, bouncing around like a barefooted kid on a hot sidewalk. It was embarrassing. His performance in the bedroom was similar—frantic and arrhythmic. The guy didn’t even have a car.

  Thinking about Dean recalled the image of the blue Valium tablets in her carry-on bag. The thought sent a smooth wave rolling down her spine. A definite plus, where Dean was concerned. The Valiums would get her through the ordeal to come. The memory of the smell of the Taco Shop assaulted her: twelve days of hot grease, taco sauce, Sophie, and Axel Speeter. She shivered and dug in her purse, looking
for a Tic Tac or something. It seemed unreal, almost impossible to believe that she was going back to do another season at the Minnesota State Fair. For a lousy six bucks an hour, plus whatever fell out of the till. A cash business like that, what did he expect?

  There was one Tic Tac way down in the corner, covered with lint. Carmen dipped it in her drink and wiped it off with a little square napkin from the bar. She inspected the mint, popped it in her mouth, and looked up. The bartender, older and balder even than Axel, watched her. The Tic Tac was wintergreen, her favorite. She finished the Rob Roy and ordered a gin and tonic. How did Sophie stand it, having dinner with Axel every Sunday all year long? For that matter, how did Axel stand being around Sophie all that time? Carmen recalled the red mole on Axel’s left eyelid, its three white hairs, and the smell of Mennen Skin Bracer. One thing about Axel, he smelled okay in spite of being seventy-three, which was in Carmen’s view the next thing to having died already.

  The second drink pushed Axel and Sophie to a small stage at the back of her mind. One more and they would become like characters in a movie. Then, if she got really loaded, it would be like they were characters in a movie she had heard about but never seen. Her shoulder muscles relaxed, and she smiled. Carmen was good at imagining, making movies in her head. She imagined herself driving, a red Corvette with the top down and the stereo turned way, way up. Where was she going? Puerto Penasco? That sounded good. Who was that in the passenger seat? James Dean. No, change that. She looked again. It was still James Dean, but not the bald one. It was the dead one, the rebel without a cause, one sneakered foot propped on the dash, squinting at the horizon. She imagined coffee cans in the trunk, filled with fat, rubber-banded rolls of money. Hundred-dollar bills. That would be the way to live. She tried to recall whose picture was on the hundred. The face that swam into view looked a lot like Axel Speeter.

  Chapter 5

  “It looks like a junkyard, Sam. I can’t believe they let you do this.”

  “None of their business what I do, my own damn property.”

  “This is a nice part of town. Don’t your neighbors complain?”

  “Sure they do. I get letters and shit from the city telling me to get rid of ’em. I send ’em to my kid’s lawyer, he takes care of it.”

  They were looking at Sam O’Gara’s backyard in the company of eleven vehicles in various degrees of disintegration. There were two Volkswagen Beetles, a ’67 Camaro, three Chevys from the early sixties, an unidentifiable car with fire-blistered paint and all its windows blown out, the front half of a hood-scooped early seventies Dodge Charger, and three trucks: a badly rusted red flatbed and a green step van, with Axel’s ’78 F-150, the newest addition to Sam’s auto graveyard, tucked between them. Sam’s mongrel hounds, Chester and Festus, had tired of growling and snarling at Axel and were busy christening the new truck by pissing on its tires.

  “Looks to me like it’d take more than one lawyer,” Axel said.

  “Yeah, well, this fella, he’s a good one. Tells ’em I’m an artist. These ain’t cars, they’re sculptures. He gives ’em a bunch of First Amendment shit, scares hell out of them. It won’t be no problem, you leaving your truck here. It’s got this aesthetic appeal, kind of like that Venus of Milo.”

  “It’s still a good truck. Never know when I might need a backup.”

  “That’s the way I figure it. You was right to hang on to her. You can’t have too many vehicles.”

  “I don’t know about that,” Axel said. “You might just have done it, Sam.”

  “Yeah, well, one more sure as shit ain’t gonna make no difference. How you like your new one?”

  “It’s okay. Real smooth. No rattles or anything, except ever since you disconnected the air bag there’s a sort of clicking in the steering wheel every time I turn a corner.”

  Sam shrugged and looked away. “That ain’t nothing.”

  “And I still haven’t figured out how to work the radio.” Axel looked at his watch. “I’ve got to get going. Got to pick Carmen up. Thanks again, Sam. We ought to get a game up someday. You and me and Tommy.”

  Sam said, “Yeah, we got to do that, Ax. Sometime we got to do that. Been too fucking long, the three of us.”

  On the way across town to the airport, Axel amused himself by trying to figure out just how long it had been since he’d sat down at a card table with Sam O’Gara and Tommy Fabian. It didn’t seem that long ago, but the last specific game he could remember was the one in Deadwood, South Dakota. That had been in ’63, he believed. Axel was sure they’d played cards on and off for a few years after that, but Deadwood was the last game he remembered clearly.

  They’d been at a hotel called the Franklin, playing draw poker, he remembered. Never his best game, but one he could win at if he played his cards right. Sam was sitting on the biggest stack that night, maybe seven or eight thousand, a lot of money back in those days. Axel wasn’t far behind, having just raked in a nice pot on the strength of a pair of kings. Even Tommy, who’d been hitting the sauce a little too hard, was a few hundred dollars to the good.

  The other four players—a rancher named Bum, who claimed to own his own spread out near Belle Fourche, a pair of cowboys who worked for him, and a businessman who’d driven up from Rapid City—were steadily losing. The rancher and his boys had pumped about three dimes each into the game, with the businessman down only a few hundred. The way Axel recollected it, he’d had a feeling about those cowboys from the start, though he hadn’t said anything to Sam or Tommy at the time.

  As usual, Sam and Tommy and Axel had been exercising their three-way partner routine, signaling the strength of their hands to one another to squeeze out the maximum number of raises when one of them caught a good hand. It wasn’t exactly cheating, in Axel’s view, but that didn’t mean it was fair, either. In any case, Tommy quickly became too drunk to signal properly, so Axel had simply been playing his own cards, playing tight and winning.

  Tommy, who could irritate a squeal out of a dead pig, insisted on calling the rancher “Bud.” The rancher kept on correcting him, getting more prickly every time he had to explain his name was Bum, not Bud. Each time, Tommy would say something like, “You mean like a ho-bo?”

  It had started out, Axel supposed, as a strategy to throw the rancher’s game on tilt, and it had worked. But he was wishing Tommy would ease up. Bum was almost out of money anyways, so it didn’t make sense to keep on needling. But that was Tommy.

  At four feet eleven inches, Tommy was by far the smallest man at the table, an accident of birth that he used to justify a nasty streak all out of proportion to his size. Axel had met him back in ’44, when they were both in the merchant marine, sailing supplies out of Brisbane, Australia, to support the Allied efforts in the Solomons. They had matching kangaroos tattooed on their wrists, souvenirs of a four-day weekend in Sydney. Axel couldn’t remember their significance, but a lot of the guys had them. He didn’t think about it much anymore. It was a long time ago.

  Tommy Fabian had grown up working fairs and carnivals in the Midwest, and he had the carny’s contempt for a sucker. He figured he could say just about anything, and if some sucker got upset, fuck ’em, he’d just move on to the next town.

  That night in Deadwood, with most of a bottle of bourbon in him, Tommy’s mean streak was white hot. By two that morning, the game was showing signs of winding down. The businessman had long since descended into a melancholic haze, without the heart to call any sort of bet at all, and the three shitkickers were on tilt, throwing what little money they had remaining after every lousy hand they got dealt. At one point Tommy was dealt trip aces before the draw. He bet, was raised by Bum, and reraised. Everybody but Bum folded. Bum called Tommy’s raise, then drew two cards. Obviously, Tommy figured, the rancher was drawing to three of a kind. Which made his own three aces a very strong hand indeed. Once again, he bet heavily, was raised, reraised, and finally called by the rancher, who, it turned out, had been drawing two cards to fill a six-high straight. It
wasn’t the biggest pot of the night, but Bum was delighted to have some cash flowing his way for once. Tommy, on the other hand, had been mortified by such a display of fool’s luck. He would have won the money back in time, but Tommy, being Tommy, couldn’t let a bad beat go without making some kind of crack.

  “Guy draws two to a straight. What the fuck kinda poker’s that? I was sittin’ on the nuts. No way you should’ve called my trips.”

  Bum said, “I won, didn’t I?”

  “Well, it was a dumb play anyways. What I get, playing cards with a guy named Bud.”

  Bum, dragging the pot toward him, looked at Tommy and said slowly, “My name is Bum.”

  “You mean like a wino?” Tommy exclaimed, widening his eyes.

  “As in ‘bum steer,’ which I got a feeling is what we’re getting in this here game.”

  If ever there was a time to shut up and act nice, this is it, Axel thought. Naturally, Tommy did no such thing. He was too loaded to exercise anything resembling common sense, but not quite loaded enough to pass out like a civilized drunk.

  “Only problem we got in this here game is you boys don’t know what the fuck you’re doing, Bud,” Tommy said.

  Axel didn’t remember exactly how Bum had replied. As best he recalled, they’d played a few more hands, but the air over the table had gone thick and foul, and the game broke up shortly thereafter. He remembered walking out to his car with Tommy and Sam—he had been driving a ’56 Lincoln back then—the clean winter wind cutting through their jackets. Bum and his two cowboys had followed them out of the hotel, walking down the narrow, snow-dusted sidewalk about fifty feet behind them, laughing and making jokes about how broke they’d gotten. Their forced cheeriness seemed strident and out of place. When they were a block from the hotel, another block to go before they reached their car, Axel remembered saying to Sam, “Keep on walking. We get to the car, hop in fast.”