All My Relations

by Christopher McIlroy

  “Hey. O.K.” The boys whistled for the whores. “Ladies.”

  The scuffing of small feet followed Boehm to the hotel. Leaving the children outside his door, he went to the hotel bar. In his room, he flicked the light switch with his arm and set a case of Carta Blanca on the dresser. Olivia writhed from side to side under the sheet, frowning, lip curled over her chipped tooth. Spirals of hair clung to her face. The bed was soaked.

  Sitting cross-legged on the floor, the whores passed beer and lit each other’s cigarettes with silver lighters, fanning smoke away from their faces. The boys scrabbled through luggage and drawers, bickering over valuables, jerking the bottles to their lips. Beer foamed out of their mouths.

  “Now I’m going to show you about love,” Boehm said. He braced Olivia’s shoulders and sat her upright. Her skin was washed with sweat. He caressed her hair, twining the strands around his fingers. In the wall mirror he glimpsed his disembodied hands at her head. He remembered the child’s game: the performer crosses arms and fondles the back of his own head, neck, shoulders, his hands appearing to be those of a hidden lover. Boehm felt as if he were vanishing, becoming Olivia’s hands. Olivia sat alone on the bed, making love to herself.

  Boehm jumped as if shocked. Trembling, nerves stinging, he kissed her. Her mouth was slack. He kissed her again, smacking his own lips resoundingly to imitate the noise of two people kissing. Her head lolled against his shoulder. Repeatedly, loudly, he kissed her.

  “All right, sleep then. Sure, O.K., just go right ahead, sleeping. Christ.” Boehm shook out capsules and forced them down Olivia’s throat, pouring beer after. Olivia gulped convulsively, opened her eyes. Wide and alert, they met Boehm’s in a level gaze, then squinted shut. She whipped her head back and forth, quieted, sighing. Her chin dropped to her breast.

  “She can’t be in here,” Boehm said. He lifted Olivia in his arms. The sheet crumpled to one side. Passing the Guadalajara man’s door, he shushed the children in an undertone. Outdoors, a warm wind beat against their faces. Strips of cloud slid across the moon. At a sand hillock midway between the water and the cabanas, Boehm told the children, “Dig here.”

  The saneamienteros scooped the sand easily. Moonlight turned Olivia’s pubic hair silver, bleached buildings and palm trees so that they had no depth. Far out to sea, a green shine lay on the water.

  It seemed that Olivia had stopped breathing. Boehm covered her mouth with his and blew air into her lungs. Her chest expanded, deflated. Frantically he drew air, released it into her, over and over. Her chest rose and fell with his rhythm. Even after her breath caught raggedly, held, Boehm continued to breathe with her. Breathing for her, his body was soothed and refreshed. He felt the beginnings of happiness.

  He laid her in the hole, knees tucked against her chest, and buried her to the neck. Her head tilted to one side. Her breathing cracked the crust of sand over her chest. Stooping, Boehm brushed grains from her eyelids and cheek. The children were skipping and singing, and, linking arms with a boy and girl, Boehm joined them, feeling light as a ghost. He started toward the hotel to pack his belongings.

  The green radiance, riding swells toward land, had filled the bay. Plankton, Boehm knew, billions of phosphorescent organisms. Light rose from the water like a miasma, a virulent green fog.

  The first green wave poised to strike the beach.

  THE BIG BANG AND THE GOOD HOUSE

  The morning is thick enough to stir with a spoon. The tower of waffle is cold in a puddle of congealed syrup, sweet and good. My wife Annie’s nightgown is open to a beauty mark on her collarbone, which she taps distractedly with a pencil. Replying to her students’ journals occupies hours of her weekend.

  “Look here,” I say. “They think the universe might have arisen out of pure nothing.” From the newspaper I read:

  Even the void has mathematical structure. If that structure, that “nothing,” becomes unstable, through a random quantum event…

  “Presto,” I say. “Instant universe. The Big Bang.” A jagged hole ripped in the fabric of things, and the black nothing rushing outward.

  The objects in our kitchen, even my bathrobe, seem to stir. My scalp prickles. Senses keen with panic or desire, I smell the bready morning scent of Annie’s body. Grabbing her hand, I lead her toward the bedroom, but as we undress my urgency goes and I must flog myself through it. This has been happening.

  Annie smoothes my forehead. “Tony, it’s time we had a child.”

  “All right.” It’s as simple as that.

  The next morning I take refuge with a riprapping crew, heaving boulders, rather than presiding over DesertScapes, my nursery.

  DesertScapes’ profit is hemorrhage in reverse, no use to anyone, not Annie, with her respectable teacher’s salary and modest tastes. The trim nape of her neck is a statement of self-sufficiency. Recently I aired TV commercials exposing the disadvantages of my product. A beach ball deflated on an agave tip. Tweezers plucked millions of prickly pear barbs from panty hose. Mesquite branch snagged toupee. For the finale I sat on a barrel cactus, delivered an urbane pitch, then struggled vainly to rise. Sales ballooned another 19 percent.

  At the end of my workday, I tuck an ocotillo in the pickup bed for a fertility planting ritual. Delighted, Annie buries her diaphragm in the winter socks drawer. We’ve disagreed over the yard. When we bought the house, it was scoured bare, and I’ve chosen to leave it that way. In dry, monochrome June the vacant plain seethes as if it might crack.

  We choose a site by the kitchen window. I pick through caliche, Annie shovels dirt. Her happiness elates me. The sun is marvelously hot, and sweat bursts from us, streaming down Annie’s spine. I tongue it off, lifting her shirt. She bites my shoulder. Before setting the root boll we pop a beer, trade sips, and pour the can into the hole. I imagine ocotillo seeds littering the ground. Ocotillo thickets choke the yard; a sea of tossing red blossoms swallows the house.

  Though our next stop is bed, I’m not in the mood, definitely. “It’s good just to be held,” Annie says.

  “Goal-directed impotence. A vintage 80’s concept,” I say.

  Memorial Day we’re driving the interstate to Annie’s family, the Herreras. The hundred miles between our cities glide by like water, as if we’re paddling lazily, hands trailing in the river. This contentment when visiting the Herreras, which overrides whatever else we might be feeling, is the great achievement of our marriage. Three years’ worth.

  When I met Annie, she’d renounced her father over his infidelity. Because I’m true, she explains, the adultery no longer exists.

  “Healed?” I suggest.

  “Never happened. He didn’t cheat. You’ve replaced that. It’s a kind of transubstantiation. You’d have to be Catholic.”

  Annie nestled in my arm, the music on the oldies station sounds big. For the first time I feel joy about the baby plan. I know it will work.

  When we arrive, the Herreras are frisky about our “trying.”

  “Nothing good was ever accomplished without honest effort. Unnh,” Mr. Herrera grunts, winking. When he’s out of earshot, Annie’s mother confides naturopathic advice, spices to avoid, herbs to apply. These she smuggles to Annie in Baggies.

  A barbecue at the Herreras is no humble matter of hibachi and charcoal. Consistent with the estate’s Grecian theme—the mansion is a full-scale replica of the Parthenon—three marble torches, fueled by subterranean gas rivers, spew flame. Around them white-clad kitchen servants undulate hieratically, plunging long-handled forks into the spitting meat.

  Just before serving, Mr. Herrera takes Annie’s hands in one of his, mine in the other. The family stands around us, smiling faces roasted in the late afternoon light. All bow our heads. “Bless your child,” Mr. Herrera says. Shivering, I clench his hand.

  Driving home, over a hundred miles, Annie has dropped off, head against the seat rest. We are enclosed by the dark, our knees, lit by the dash bulb, reflected inside the windshield. Those bright, isolated smudges, her left kne
e and my right, are so dear to me my throat tightens. Resenting even the cone of road, yellow dotted line, illuminated ahead, I cut the headlights. With no moon I see nothing. I can’t even be sure we’re moving. The hair rises on my neck. The wind rushes by, not as sound but as the blackness touching my face. My foot presses to the floor. The car begins vibrating. The dark is irresistibly beautiful. My eyes are wet. Though my foot cramps fighting to release the gas pedal, I can’t let go the blackness, my body shaking, its paralysis, the tears rolling. Any moment Annie’s voice will break in—wake up!

  But instead there’s weightlessness, jarring, rocks spattering the chassis. Annie yells once, I punch on the lights. We are sliding broadside in a wide arc. Creosote and palo verde blur past, clubbing the hood. The oncoming hillside tilts suddenly as we are upended over a wash. We crawl up and out my door, drop to the ground. The car crunches into the gulley, spraying glass. The beams light clusters of foliage.

  An immediate, photographic recollection comes to me. While we slump in the back of a Highway Patrol cruiser, drained calm, I ask, “Do you remember the shoebox house?”

  “Of course. I’d never forget. Doesn’t it seem like another life?”

  “Oh, man. Have you got it wrong.” I shake my head. This is the other life.

  When I was busted, five years ago, I was twenty-two. Selling but mostly consuming narcotics and psychedelics, I conducted business through a weird tumbling of states, coke’s gregarious high-stepping giving way to the austere spaciousness, then private riot, of acid.

  Like hell, prison always had seemed a punitive societal myth, metaphorically purifying the spirit without one’s actually having to go there. Since the other cons were hallucinations, I didn’t speak to them. I performed my duty in the yard, picking trash that was replaced in the same location the next day. Refusing to join any faction in the gang wars, I catalyzed more violence—fists, feet, a tin shank, mop wringer handle, blood draining in the shower stall. I slashed at people without feeling anything about them. With as little reason they slugged my kidneys.

  Spurts of anxiety flushed away my substance, leaving me dainty, transparent. Looking through myself, I saw the ground behind, pebbles casting miniscule noontime shadows.

  For the general security and my own safety, I was isolated in the Hole, a windowless cell with cement bed. Nights were devoid of light, an emptiness that jumped, chattered, far more energetic than I. It was absorbing me. I didn’t know where I began or ended, what was inner or outer. Rising from the bed, I believed my legs were left behind, and my thighs tensed as if still sitting. It was bland agony, like attending a party, mechanically smiling, and shaking hands while under my dress suit the adhesive tissue between skin and muscle was being cut, the skin slipped off.

  Other times I was mildly euphoric, lying on the bed, strands of myself spooling into the cosmos, pulled by tides of space. It was in this mood that I slid apart the halves of a doctored shirt button, extracted a quarter-inch razor blade, and opened my wrists. The invisible blood dripped loudly.

  The guard’s periodic check was in time. Transferred to the state psychiatric hospital, I awaited the investigation that would officially commit me. Abruptly, the chronic jostling for space at a public institution forced my discharge. Supplied with parole officer, therapist, prescription, and a few bucks, I was put on a bus. By the time I reached my stop a cool storm muffled the city. I ducked into the first bar, the E-Z Lounge.

  The stools were soft red plastic, rips taped.

  “You look bandaged,” the barmaid said. “Take off your cap.”

  Shift’s end, I bought her a drink.

  “Annie Herrera,” she introduced herself, sitting beside me. She looked like someone inadequately disguised. A ducktail frayed over her collar as she threw back her head, chugging a cigarette. Her breasts wobbled inside a baggy T-shirt. Yet her face was symmetrical and lucid as a shell.

  “I ran away from home,” she said, that being her father’s Parthenon overlooking the state capital. Every evening he climbed an adjacent hill to admire the last sun gilding the portico. “He’s a pathetic blowfish,” Annie said. “Now I rent a shoebox for $110 a month.”

  She drank quickly. A ceiling bulb pulsed behind her head. With her incomplete loveliness entrancing me, her descriptions took on the force of image—roaches like bronze buttons rolling loose across her floor, her father’s lonely vigil on the mountain, his friends flopping like slugs into the jacuzzi.

  “I could have married a congressman,” she said. “His stomach hung over his tiny bathing suit. If he was naked, it would have covered his penis.” Neighboring drinkers glanced at her. “Penis,” she repeated loudly. A man shouldered beside her, ordering. Her elbow jerked as if he had snotted it, or ejaculated on it.

  I kept imagining she was dropping something, and I was picking it up for her. I wished it would happen. Then she would keep talking.

  “You listen,” she said. “Men don’t listen. If you say what they expect, they explain it for you. If you say something interesting, they deny it. What do you do?”

  “I washed out of prison.” I told what I considered a funny story about my original cellmates. The popeyed kid had constructed a woman from a pillow and a sheet stuffed with his clothes. Every night Pop humped her until the wide-shouldered, pompadoured lover of the unit could stand no more. While Pop was on the crapper, Pompadour stole her for himself.

  Tears came to Annie’s eyes. “That’s a terrible story,” she said, taking my hands in hers. “I liked you since you came in.”

  Every hair, my prick, stood on end, straining toward her. I kissed her mouth.

  “I don’t come,” she crooned in my ear, as if it were the most lascivious suggestion imaginable.

  We made love all our first twenty-four hours in the shoebox house. Through thin blue curtains sunlight drenched the bed, built into an alcove, and there we were, somebody’s butt in the air, somebody’s face buried in someone else’s neck. Finally Annie was distinct, sitting beside me, untangling her hair with a stiff brush.

  I had no background, I said. My history began with her. I lived in the sensations of my hands slippery over her body, the musk of her armpit and groin, her breast shaped to my mouth.

  “I’d do anything to make you come,” I said.

  “Lick my asshole?”

  It was salty as the rest of her.

  “Lock yourself in the closet and stay there all day?”

  I took the key in with me and turned it. The light sucked out, I sat in the exploding and collapsing densities, palms wet, breath tight.

  “Please come out. I’m going to call the fire department.” She beat the door. “The kettle’s boiling. If you’re not out by the time I count a hundred, I’m going to pour it on my arm.”

  “No you won’t,” I yelled back, and she burst into sobs.

  The radio came on top volume, then the vacuum cleaner.

  About noon I came out. The house was immaculate. Paper towels folded into birds spilled from the glasses on the table. “Easy,” Annie said. “This is how the maids do it at home. But I’m not ready. Go back in.” She laughed, silver hoop earrings dangling. The line of her cheekbones was so clean I could feel a coolness around her head.

  She served caviar on a filagreed silver dish, relic of her family’s Mexico City origins; chilled wine; her one consistent success, poached fish.

  “It’s not enough,” she said.

  A few days later Annie said, “I think I feel something,” and she came. “Oh,” she kept saying, tossing her head, eyes closed. Side by side we lay in the sopping bedclothes. Only her finger moved, tracing my entire body as if coloring me in.

  Her hands closed on my wrist as if it were my throat. “You can never leave me now,” she said, and then, “Don’t ever bring another woman inside me.”

  I think we might have enjoyed some repose then, but for my recurring panics. As I walked toward the Circle K one morning, something was wrong with the chinaberry trees. They became flat and st
ringy, then faded altogether. I felt the familiar bloating lightness. What if I fell in the street? A car skidding the corner…

  “You can’t go out until you’re well,” Annie said. “Don’t worry about work.” She took an extra shift.

  Alone at night, fear made me sick. I began accompanying Annie to the bar, where I nursed a beer, chatted with the manager, shot pool. At the bar a drunk reached for her breast; I caught his wrist and smashed his fingers on the counter. “Oh, Jesus,” Annie said, hands shaking. Carrying an armload of glasses, she slipped on the rubber mat. Her ankle, twisting beneath her, broke.

  Because she was employed on the sly, Annie couldn’t claim disability. My assets had been seized by the IRS. Our money ran out. Though I hadn’t left home alone in six weeks, I found a yard job in the classifieds. Annie swung alongside on stork-leg crutches to see me off. I was so frightened that my gas pedal foot and my hands seemed disembodied, floating beside me. But I backed out the drive. For hoeing and burning weeds I was paid cash.

  Gradually potted cacti and desert shrubs accumulated in our backyard. Cheap or less, hauled from development sites, they enabled me to bid more ambitious jobs. Customers were pleased with my gravel lawns, rock and mortar whodunits, oddments of brick and railroad tie, accented with plants. Income-producing thought issued like jet vapor from my head. With the Sun Belt boom, overpopulation had driven up water rates, and the desert was chic. By mid-fall I’d bought a monstrous old V-8 pickup and formed a crew.

  Healed, Annie didn’t return to the bar. Perennially employable, she took and quit jobs with an auto parts distributor, real estate office, Shaklee. Typically she drank rum-and-Coke and snoozed away the afternoon.

  “You’re making three hundred a week. Why should I work at all?” she said spitefully.

  Why indeed? I said.

  “At your jobs the women spy through the blinds when you take your shirt off,” she said.

  “They don’t tell me about it.”