“I’m Nick,” he says. He’s wearing a long-sleeved plaid shirt, despite the heat. He’s deeply tanned and has a turkey-wattle neck.
I introduce myself. Point to the car and say, “That’s Abby, the smart one that stays home.”
The trailer is dark and smells of old man inside. The couch cushions are covered in cheap throws, one of them decorated with a blue-and-white Christmas snowman. Outside, the scrub shimmers, flattened in the heat. Hudson is lying in front of the sink and scrabbles up when he sees us.
“He was just ambling up the road,” Nick says. “He saw me and came right up.”
“I live over by the river, off 109, between Belen and Jarales,” I say. “Someone broke into my place and left the doors open, and he wandered off.”
“You’re lucky they didn’t kill the dogs,” Nick says.
I fumble with my purse. “There’s a reward,” I say.
He waves that away. “No, don’t you go starting that.” He says he didn’t do anything but read the tag and give him a drink. “I had dogs all my life,” he says. “I’d want someone to call me.”
I tell him it would mean a lot to me and press the money on him. Hudson leans against my legs to be petted, tongue lolling. He looks fine. No worse for wear.
“Sit a minute. You came all the way out here. Pardon the mess. My sister’s grandson and his friends have been coming out here, and they leave stuff like that,” he says, waving at the junk and the bottles.
“I can’t leave the other dog in the heat,” I say, wanting to leave.
“Bring her inside.”
I don’t want to stay, but I’m grateful, so I bring Abby in out of the heat, and he thumps her and tells me about how he’s lived here since he was in his twenties. He’s a Libertarian, and he doesn’t trust government, and he really doesn’t trust the New Mexico state government which is, in his estimation, a banana republic lacking only the fancy uniforms that third-world dictators seem to love. Then he tells me about how lucky it was that Hudson didn’t get picked up to be a bait dog for the people who raise dogs for dogfights. Then he tells me about how the American economy was destroyed by operatives from Russia as revenge for the fall of the Soviet Union.
Half of what he says is bullshit and the other half is wrong, but he’s just a lonely guy in the middle of the desert, and he brought me back my dog. The least I can do is listen.
I hear a spitting little engine off in the distance. Then a couple of them. It’s the little motorbikes the kids ride. Nick’s eyes narrow as he looks out.
“It’s my sister’s grandson,” he says. “Goddamn.”
He gets up, and Abby whines. He stands, looking out the slatted blinds.
“Goddamn. He’s got a couple of friends,” Nick says. “Look you just get your dogs and don’t say nothing to them, okay? You just go on.”
“Hudson,” I say and clip a lead on him.
Outside, four boys pull into the yard, kicking up dust. They have seen my car and are obviously curious. They wear jumpsuits like prison jumpsuits, only with the sleeves ripped off and the legs cut off just above the knees. Khaki and orange and olive green. One of them has tattoos swirling up his arms.
“Hey, Nick,” the tattooed one says, “new girlfriend?”
“None of your business, Ethan.”
The boy is dark, but his eyes are light blue. Like a Siberian husky. “You a social worker?” the boy says.
“I told you it was none of your business,” Nick says. “The lady is just going.”
“If you’re a social worker, you should know that old Nick is crazy, and you can’t believe nothing he says.”
One of the other boys says, “She isn’t a social worker. Social workers don’t have dogs.”
I step down the steps and walk to my car. The boys sit on their bikes, and I have to walk around them to get to the Impreza. Hudson wants to see them, pulling against his leash, but I hold him in tight.
“You look nervous, lady,” the tattooed boy says.
“Leave her alone, Ethan,” Nick says.
“You shut up, Uncle Nick, or I’ll kick your ass,” the boy says absently, never taking his eyes off me.
Nick says nothing.
I say nothing. I just get my dogs in my car and drive away.
Our life settles into a new normal. I get a response from my dildo email. Nick in Montana is willing to let me sell on his sex site on commission. I make a couple of different models, including one that I paint just as realistically as I would one of the reborn dolls. This means a base coat, then I paint the veins in. Then I bake it. Then I paint an almost translucent layer of color and bake it again. Six layers. And then a clear overlayer of silicone because I don’t think the paint is approved for use this way. I put a pretty hefty price on it and call it a special. At the same time, I am making my other special. The doll for the Chicago couple. I sent the mold to Tony and had him do a third head from it. It, too, requires layers of paint, and sometimes the parts bake side by side.
Because my business is rather slow, I take more time than usual. I am always careful, especially with specials. I think if someone is going to spend the kind of money one of these costs, the doll should be made to the best of my ability. And maybe it is because I have done this doll before, it comes easily and well. I think of the doll that the man who broke into my house stole. I don’t know if he sent it to his wife and daughter in Mexico, or if he even has a wife and daughter in Mexico. I rather suspect he sold it on eBay or some equivalent—although I have watched doll sales and never seen it come up.
This doll is my orphan doll. She is full of sadness. She is inhabited by the loss of so much. I remember my fear when Hudson was wandering the roads of the desert. I imagine Rachel Mazar, so haunted by the loss of her own child. The curves of the doll’s tiny fists are porcelain pale. The blue veins at her temples are traceries of the palest of bruises.
When I am finished with her, I package her as carefully as I have ever packaged a doll and send her off.
My dildos go up on the website.
The realistic dildo sits in my workshop, upright, tumescent, a beautiful rosy plum color. It sits on a shelf like a prize, glistening in its topcoat as if it were wet. It was surprisingly fun to make, after years and years of doll parts. It sits there both as an object to admire and as an affront. But, to be frank, I don’t think it is any more immoral than the dolls. There is something straightforward about a dildo. Something much more clear than a doll made to look like a dead child. Something significantly less entangled.
There are no orders for dildos. I lie awake at night thinking about real-estate taxes. My father is dead. My mother lives in subsidized housing for the elderly in Columbus. I haven’t been to see her in years and years, not with the cost of a trip like that. My car wouldn’t make it, and nobody I know can afford to fly anymore. I certainly couldn’t live with her. She would lose her housing if I moved in.
If I lose my house to unpaid taxes, do I live in my car? It seems like the beginning of the long slide. Maybe Sherie and Ed would take the dogs.
I do get a reprieve when the money comes in for the special. Thank God for the Mazars in Chicago. However crazy their motives, they pay promptly and by internet, which allows me to put money against the equity line for the new tools.
I still can’t sleep at night, and instead of putting all the money against my debt, I put the minimum, and I buy a 9 mm handgun. Actually, Ed buys it for me. I don’t even know where to get a gun.
Sherie picks me up in the truck and brings me over to the goat farm. Ed has several guns. He has an old gun safe that belonged to his father. When we get to their place, he is in back, putting creosote on new fence posts, but he is happy to come up to the house.
“So, you’ve given in,” he says, grinning. “You’ve joined the dark side.”
“I have,” I agree.
“Well, this is a decent defensive weapon,” Ed says. Ed does not fit my preconceived notions of a gun owner. Ed fits my preconceived notions of the guy who sells you a cell phone at the local strip mall. His hair is short and graying. He doesn’t look at all like the kind of guy who would either marry Sherie or raise goats. He told me one time that his degree is in anthropology. Which, he said, was a difficult field to get a job in.
“Offer her a cold drink!” Sherie yells from the bathroom. In her pregnant state, Sherie can’t ride twenty minutes in the sprung-shocked truck without having to pee.
He offers me iced tea and then gets the gun, checks to see that it isn’t loaded, and hands it to me. He explains to me that the first thing I should do is check to see if the gun is loaded.
“You just did,” I say.
“Yeah,” he says, “but I might be an idiot. It’s a good thing to do.”
He shows me how to check the gun.
It is not nearly so heavy in my hand as I thought it would be. But, truthfully, I have found that the thing you thought would be life changing so rarely is.
Later he takes me around to the side yard and shows me how to load and shoot it. I am not even remotely surprised that it is kind of fun. That is exactly what I expected.
Out of the blue, an email from Rachel Mazar of Chicago.
I am writing you to ask you if you have had any personal or business dealings with my husband, Ellam Mazar. If I do not get a response from you, your next correspondence will be from my attorney.
I don’t quite know what to do. I dither. I make vegetarian chili. Oddly enough, I check my gun, which I keep in the bedside drawer. I am not sure what I am going to do about the gun when Sherie has her baby. I have offered to babysit, and I’ll have to lock it up, I think. But that seems to defeat the purpose of having it.
While I am dithering, my cell rings. It is, of course, Rachel Mazar.
“I need you to explain your relationship with my husband, Ellam Mazar,” she says. She sounds educated, with that eradication of regional accent that signifies a decent college.
“My relationship?” I say.
“Your email was on his phone,” she says, frostily.
I wonder if he is dead. The way she says it sounds so final. “I didn’t know your husband,” I say. “He just bought the dolls.”
“Bought what?” she says.
“The dolls,” I say.
“Dolls?” she says.
“Yes,” I say.
“Like … sex dolls?”
“No,” I say. “Dolls. Reborns. Handmade dolls.”
She obviously has no idea what I am talking about, which opens a world of strange possibilities in my mind. The dolls don’t have orifices. Fetish objects? I tell her my website, and she looks it up.
“He ordered specials,” I say.
“But these cost a couple of thousand dollars,” she says.
A week’s salary for someone like Ellam Mazar, I suspect. I envision him as a professional, although, frankly, for all I know he works in a dry-cleaning shop or something.
“I thought they were for you,” I say. “I assumed you had lost a child. Sometimes people who have lost a child order one.”
“We don’t have children,” she says. “We never wanted them.” I can hear how stunned she is in the silence. Then she says, “Oh, my God.”
Satanic rituals? Some weird abuse thing?
“That woman said he told her he had lost a child,” she says.
I don’t know what to say, so I just wait.
“My husband … my soon-to-be-ex-husband,” she says. “He has apparently been having affairs. One of the women contacted me. She told me that he told her we had a child that died and that now we were married in name only.”
I hesitate. I don’t know if legally I am allowed to tell her about transactions I had with her husband. On the other hand, the emails came with both their names on them. “He has bought three,” I say.
“Three?”
“Not all at once. About once a year. But people who want a special send me a picture. He always sends the same picture.”
“Oh,” she says. “That’s Ellam. He’s orderly. He’s used the same shampoo for fifteen years.”
“I thought it was strange,” I say. I can’t bear not to ask. “What do you think he did with them?”
“I think the twisted bastard used them to make women feel sorry for him,” she says through gritted teeth. “I think he got all sentimental about them. He probably has himself half convinced that he really did have a daughter. Or that it’s my fault that we didn’t have children. He never wanted children. Never.”
“I think a lot of my customers like the idea of having a child better than having one,” I say.
“I’m sure,” she says. “Thank you for your time and I’m sorry to have bothered you.”
So banal. So strange and yet so banal. I try to imagine him giving the doll to a woman, telling her that it was the image of his dead child. How did that work?
Orders for dildos begin to trickle in. I get a couple of doll orders and make a payment on the credit line and put away some toward real-estate taxes. I may not have to live in my car.
One evening, I am working in the garden when Abby and Hudson start barking at the back gate.
I get off my knees, aching, but lurch into the house and into the bedroom where I grab the 9 mm out of the bedside table. It isn’t loaded, which now seems stupid. I try to think if I should stop and load it. My hands are shaking. It is undoubtedly just someone looking for a meal and a place to recharge. I decide I can’t trust myself to load, and besides, the dogs are out there. I go to the back door, gun held stiffly at my side, pointed to the ground.
There are, in fact, two of them, alike as brothers, Indian looking with a fringe of black hair cut in a straight line above their eyebrows.
“Lady,” one says, “we can work for food?” First one, then the other sees the gun at my side, and their faces go empty.
The dogs cavort.
“I will give you something to eat, and then you go,” I say.
“We go,” the one who spoke says.
“Someone robbed me,” I say.
“We no rob you,” he says. His eyes are on the gun. His companion takes a step back, glancing at the gate and then at me as if to gauge if I will shoot him if he bolts.
“I know,” I say. “But someone came here, I gave him food, and he robbed me. You tell people not to come here, okay?”
“Okay,” he says. “We go.”
“Tell people not to come here,” I say. I would give them something to eat, something to take with them. I hate this. They are two young men in a foreign country, hungry, looking for work. I could easily be sleeping in my car. I could be homeless. I could be wishing for someone to be nice to me.