Leaving Allison

by Sedgwick, Grady

  Kianna finds a bottle of beer in the refrigerator, empties it into two coffee mugs and offers a toast to my future. “To Mitch McAllister and all his adventures.” She comes around the table to give me a hug.

  “Thanks,” I tell her.

  “You may have already figured this out, but Pablo is stuck. He won’t leave this place. He doesn’t want you to leave either. Hold on,” she says, “I have something to show you.” She walks back to her closet. I can see her through the narrow hallway taking boxes off a shelf.

  “Well then what does he expect me to do?”

  “Don’t look at the mess,” she says, “but come on back.” Her bedroom is tiny, her bed unmade.

  “Are you ready? This is what I want you to see.” She shows me a polaroid from college. In the picture, she’s standing on the steps at Berkeley, tight bellbottom pants, books under one arm. “I was young then, about your age.”

  “You were hot,” I tell her. “You still are.”

  “Thanks,” she says. “Oh I wish you wouldn’t look at that.”

  “Look at what? What am I looking at?”

  She puts the picture away. “My room, my bed. Everything’s a mess.”

  “No, that’s okay. I think your bed looks comfortable. Is it? I mean, are trailer beds comfortable? I always wondered about that.”

  “Come on,” she says. “I better get you out of here.” She takes my hand and leads me through the narrow hallway and out the screen door. Above the trailer, an amazing pink sunset is smeared across the sky.

  “What will you do?” I ask her.

  She reaches into her denim shirt pocket for cigarettes. “When things don’t work out, whether it’s Mexico or a marriage, you move on.”

  Pablo’s adding a quart of motor oil to his car. I walk over to shake hands. He slams his hood down. “What about you, Señor Pablo? You going to stay here forever?” He screws the cap closed on a quart of oil and uses his boot heel to smash a spark plug into the dirt. “Well,” I say to him, “Thanks for showing me around Ensenada. By the way, you never told me whose place this was?”

  “All of this,” Pablo says, pointing in a sweeping motion, “the hacienda, the land, the orchard—it all belongs to the doctor. Once, it was the property of my father. Now, it is not.”

  . . .

  American Jeep Cherokees speed through the nighttime streets of Ensenada, honking their horns, celebrating the race. I park in a dark neighborhood a few blocks from the action and pay a gang of young boys fifty cents to protect my car. After unloading my bicycle from the trunk, I ride over to Avenida Ruiz, where Mexican vendors sell bootleg cassettes from sidewalk tables. At a food stand, I buy two cabrito tacos, sit on the curb and watch gringo tourists stagger in and out of Hussong’s Cantina.

  The plan is to get two hundred for my bike, park on the beach every night, eat beans and tortillas and survive on six dollars a day. With an extra two-hundred, I can take my time driving south to Cabo San Lucas, and maybe, on a limestone hill overlooking the Pacific Ocean, I’ll find peyote. I’ve read Castaneda and Huxley plus everything they had at the San Diego library, so I know what peyote looks like, tastes like, and how it changes people.

  A drunk American asks me for a bathroom. “No comprendo Inglés,” I tell him. “Soy Mexicano.” After finishing my tacos, I look through the window of Hussong’s Cantina. American cyclists are gathered at a long table, drinking beer, comparing skinned knees. This might be a good place to sell my bicycle. I lock it to a lamp post and go inside.

  Sitting on a barstool, I watch the barkeep, a strong hombre, wrap a towel around block-ice and shatter it with a wooden mallet. He fills a row of buckets with Coronas, cracked ice, and lime wedges. I drink several beers and keep an eye on the cyclists in the mirror. They’re buying Corona buckets, laughing, congratulating each other on the great race. Some do tequila slammers. A waiter jerks a guy’s head back, pours a shot down his throat and blows a whistle while shaking the guy’s skull all to hell. He weaves back to his buddies, drunk, bumping into tables. His friends can’t stop laughing at him. Americans laugh at the slightest thing.

  The barkeep plunks down my fifth beer, and I show him my Amigos de Mexico business card. “It’s like the Peace Corps,” I tell him. He’s busy and doesn’t care, barely glancing at my card before turning away. With limited Spanish, a bit of hand language, I call him back over and tell him I might move to Cabo San Lucas, “todo mi vida.” He slices limes on a square of wood and surveys the crowd making sure his customers have everything they need. When I ask his advice about food stands, what items offer the highest profits, he rakes cut limes into a glass jar. When an American asks for a Corona bucket, he smiles and calls him amigo.

  I leave Hussong’s without trying to sell my bicycle. Pedaling along Avenida Lopez Mateos, I pass through Zona Roja, where groups of male tourists go for nighttime entertainment: barkers, sheet boys, trick towels and two drink minimums. Pablo had driven through here on our tour of Ensenada. It’s regulated and somewhat safe. I’m not looking for safe.

  Two blocks off the main drag is where everything breaks down. There are no groups of tourists, no hoards of drunk Americans like Zona Roja. It’s dark here, with only an occasional neon light outside a cantina. I slow to watch an overweight prostitute who’s getting screwed under the bushes beside a fence. The woman is on her back in the dirt. Maybe I’ll spend ten bucks and get my own whore. Maybe I’ll try heroin, if I can find some. Getting arrested is another possibility. Prison in Mexico? Why not? I’ve always had romantic visions of incarceration: suffering alone in a cold cement cell, push-ups on a filthy floor, knife fights in the prison yard . . . Hmm, doesn’t sound that bad really. If a cop wants a bribe, fuck that, I’ll go to prison and see if I can take it.

  Walking my bike down an alley, a man with a tattooed neck and jaundiced eyes gives me a hard look. We both swing around and glare at each other. I stop and lay my bike down. “Bring it on, maricon. I’m not going anywhere.” He comes toward me. I’m thinking the best way to handle this is hit him as hard as possible in the nose, then do the best I can until he finishes me off. When he gets to me, when he’s right in my face, it’s time to throw a punch. Throw a punch, Mitch. Throw a goddam punch! The guy squints his eyes, slaps me in the face, then laughs before walking off.

  Across the alley is the Sanchez used car lot. There’s a prostitute taking a break on the hood of a Monte Carlo. After leaning my bike against a rusty pole, I sit next to her. She’s wearing a short red skirt and black halter top, her heels firmly planted on the chrome bumper. “I’m a coward,” I tell her.

  “Que?” she asks.

  “Forget it. What about Cabo San Lucas? Sabe, Cabo San Lucas?”

  “No bueno.”

  “Huh? What do you mean, no bueno?”

  “No, bueno,” she says. “No bueno. No bueno!”

  “Okay, relax, I understand it’s not good. What about peyote cactus?”

  “NO BUENO,” she says again, louder, in my face.

  I’d like to communicate with this woman, ask if she’s ever heard of Pablo’s father, if he was a great bullfighter and what happened to him, but I don’t know enough Spanish to put the words together, so we just sit beside each other without talking. A police car passes by, shinning his hand light at us. She actually looks half decent, this prostitute. “Soy como un toro!” I announce, remembering the phrase Pablo taught me.

  Apparently this is not the right thing to say. She immediately jumps off the car and waves the back of her hand, telling me to get away from her, so that’s what I do. I get on my bike and ride back to my car.

  A couple hours later, sitting on the beach south of Ensenada, I’m running low on energy, having second thoughts about Cabo San Lucas. There’s a campfire below the sand dunes, and further down, an RV shining it’s headlights into the surf. In the morning, when the sun comes up, I’ll go for a swim in the Pacific Ocean, swim way the hell out until I’m fighting for air and see what happens after that.

 
. . . . .

  Allison

  Jack McAllister is thirty-three: He coaches his son’s baseball team, a good coach liked by all the kids, especially Gerald. Gerald is big for his age and one of the best players. In 1972, he’s also one of the few black kids in the league. It’s a Saturday morning game against the Red Sox, their first game of the season, and Gerald’s standing at home plate. Coach McAllister signals to him, “Hold up your bat, swing level.” The umpire straps on his facemask and shouts “Play ball,” but the pitcher won’t throw it. Gerald waits, unsure what to do.

  The umpire again shouts, “Play ball,” but the game has stopped.

  The Red Sox coach hollers, “Go home, nigger!” Gerald backs away from home plate.

  Coach McAllister charges onto the field to stand beside Gerald while shouting at the other coach. Some of the Red Sox fans’ stand up in the bleachers and tell Gerald to go back to the nigger league. Coach McAllister turns to the crowd and flips the rod at them. A deputy sheriff enters the field to calm everyone. First he speaks with the Red Sox coach, and then he has a talk with Coach McAllister. The game resumes. Gerald hits a home run, and so does Jack McAllister, in the eyes of his son.

  . . .

  I met Allison Fisher eight months ago on the sidewalk in front of my bookstore. I was thirty; she was twenty-two, smart, tan . . . beautiful. Summer on Galveston Island had just started and everything was coming together, my past disappointments forgotten, the wheels of Fortuna turning my way. Sale books were lined up on the sidewalk outside my store, and Allie was down on one knee digging through a box. She wore cut-off Levi’s and a camo tank top, her blond-streaked hair tucked behind one ear.

  “Who’s watching in the truck?” I asked.

  “Oh, him. He’s my brother,” she said.

  Her brother was waiting across the street in a small blue truck, his flabby arm hanging out the window, white fingers tapping against the door panel. He honked his horn and curled a finger at her. She told him to go play with himself and then started digging through another box of books.

  “His only passion in life,” she said, “is hunting for treasures at garage sales. He’ll probably fake a thousand heart attacks if I don’t stop ignoring him.” She pushed a box to the side and started on another. “I gave away my only copy of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance.”

  “That’s a tough one to plow through,” I said.

  She smiled and continued searching in the box. “Maybe for you.”

  “Nah, not for me, I zipped through it in a couple hours. It’s about fixing motorcycles.”

  She looked up to see if I was serious and then started laughing. “Allison or Allie,” she said. “They’re both me.”

  “Good to meet you, Allie. I’m Mitch McAllister.”

  She shook my hand and said, “I know who you are. If you feel like it, you can hit some garage sales with us.” I’d seen her around town, once at Rockin’ Java’s, once at O’Malley’s bar. I’d been thinking about her ever since. She pulled off a flip-flop and scratched her bare foot on the street curb.

  I asked my employee to watch the store, then crossed the street and squeezed into the truck beside Allie.

  “Mitch, this is my very dear and handsome brother, Alex.”

  Alex was overweight and wore tight polyester pants with polished black shoes. His spine had a slight hump near his neck. His shoulders sloped from his neck to his fleshy arms. He pointed a pen at a newspaper draped over the steering wheel. “If the advertisement mentions baby clothes, I disregard it along with any mention of toys, games or comic books.” Alex circled three sales. “I have made my selections now,” he said with conviction, carefully folding the newspaper before placing it on the dashboard.

  Allie leaned her shoulder into mine and said, “He’s the family brainiac.”

  Driving to the first sale, Allie sat in the middle and shifted gears, while Alex worked the clutch. For first gear, she shifted low and to the left, second gear was straight up, and for third, she shifted straight down between her legs. Alex was amused at the stick-shift rising from Allie’s crotch. So was I. “My Lord,” Alex said. “She finally grew a penis. Just what the girl wanted.”

  Allie elbowed him in the ribs, and Alex groaned, supporting his side, exaggerating the pain. “What I was about to share with our guest, before my ribs were crushed by an unwelcome intrusion, is the trade secret of reading beyond the words.” He paused and took in a large breath. “What do I mean by this? I mean scanning below the surface, pursuing clues and nuances. In particular, looking for a level of distress.”

  “I’m distressed,” Allie said.

  Alex continued. “Another gem, you should never discount the mental state of apathy. Some of the best opportunities for acquiring items of quality are from apathetic sellers.”

  Allie nudged my leg. “We’re so proud of him. Hey Alex, you mentioned items of quality. Why don’t we tell Mitch about last weekend and the items of quality you bought?”

  “We are not here to fatigue our guest with gratuitous vulgarity.”

  “My big bro, my MENTOR,” Allie stressed, rolling her eyes, “whose only goal in life was to— Wait, let me get this right, ‘Protect his precious sister from a deviant society.’ How’s that big brother?”

  Alex told us, “Society is more deviant than one should expect.”

  “Anyway,” Allison said, “he bought a collection of porno movies, went to his apartment and hurt himself.”

  Alex slowed to a stop at a red light. “Mitch, you should be informed, this is a tragic misrepresentation of the facts.”

  Allie shifted into neutral. “I had to bring him to the emergency room for an unnamed emergency procedure. And on the way home, he refused to talk about it.”

  “I still refuse to discuss the horrific event.”

  At the first garage sale, a boy was sitting on the roof watching the rush of people crossing the lawn below him. In the grass, there was a couch, patio furniture and a treadmill. Two long tables on the driveway had dinner plates, drinking glasses and a pile of clothes. Alex held a Hawaiian shirt to his chest and angled his chubby hip, striking a pose for his sister. She deflated him with a thumbs down and tried on a wide-brimmed straw hat. “How ‘bout this, bro?” She settled into a beanbag chair on the driveway, tilted her straw hat to block the sun and snapped her fingers at him. “You, cabana boy. Be a pal and bring me a piña colada. After that, if you watch yourself, you can apply my lotion.”

  Alex assumed a dignified posture, sucking in his flabby stomach as if he were above such callow humor. He went on to explore the sale, discreetly inspecting items, turning a vase upside down to read the imprint while discussing provenance with the owner. He found a small porcelain lamp and paid the lady ten-dollars from his yellow fanny-pack. After carefully wrapping a beach towel around it, he placed the lamp in a box in the bed of his truck. We squeezed into the front seat and Alex told us, “It’s a petite cherub lamp with silk shade and crystal-beaded fringe, worth in the neighborhood of fifty dollars.”

  Heading to the next sale, Allie shifted into second gear and told Alex we were fascinated with petite, lamp trivia. Alex threatened to muzzle her with duct tape. I waited for the shift into third gear. Allison, who appeared so young and innocent, clearly wasn’t. She gripped the stick-shift with both hands, thrust it into her crotch and said, “Yes, right there, and make it hurt.”

  At the next sale an unshaven man in his fifties told us he’s getting rid of everything. He wore house slippers and drank Scotch from a rocks glass. “Everything goes,” he said, leading us through the den. His library had two walls of books, each with shelves floor to ceiling. I found a first edition of Early from the Dance, my favorite novel. Allie found a copy of To Kill a Mockingbird signed by Harper Lee. I told her it was worth about three-hundred, that Harper Lee doesn’t sign many books. Her mouth fell open and she quietly stepped around one of the boxes. “Lower yourself,” she said.

  I bent my knees and she kissed me on the ch
eek.

  . . .

  When a calf is born for veal, the rancher takes it away from its mother, straps it in a restraining crate that limits all movement and shoves a tube down its throat for force-feeding. The calf lives like this, isolated from other calves, unable to turn its head or bite the cage. That’s what we were talking about at her apartment, examples of cruelty, while watching the Antiques Road Show. “If the method produces a more expensive veal, I’m certain people do it. That’s how people are.”

  “Yep, I know how people are,” Allie said.

  She opened a bottle of wine. I loaded one of my favorite movies into the VCR, Cool Hand Luke. “I hope you like this. It doesn’t have the typical, happy, Hollywood ending.”

  “Good. Happy endings are for lightweights.” She dimmed the lights. “Mind if I get comfortable?”

  “Heck no, get as comfortable as you want.”

  She stepped out of her jeans wearing only a t-shirt and white jockey underwear.

  “Your underwear, those are the same as mine,” I said. “Wanna see?”

  “No, keep your pants on, cowboy.”

  “You’re no fun.”

  “I am fun,” she said. “Show me.”

  I put the movie on pause and slowly unzipped my shorts, letting them fall to the floor. “See? We’re the same.”

  “Yep, I see.”

  I grabbed my package. “Except you don’t have one of these monsters.”

  Allie curled up on the couch with a pillow between her legs. “I’ve had plenty of those monsters,” she said.

  “Are you serious! How many?”

  “I don’t know how many.”

  . . .

  On a Saturday afternoon, we met at the Rosenberg Library and rode our bikes down 23rd Street to the seawall that runs beside the Gulf of Mexico. There’s a sidewalk promenade, where locals jog and tourists pedal four-wheel surreys. On one side of the promenade is Seawall Boulevard. On the other side is a beach where tourists rent umbrellas, loungers and wave runners. We pedaled to the Hawaiian Chill stand, sat on a bench and had rainbow snow cones.