Authors: Michelle Huneven
“Come on, Victor. Please,” Libby said. “I’m seriously freaked out. If you don’t let me talk to Burt, I’m going to call the marshal.”
“She’s gonna call the marshal, Burt,” said Victor.
“Damn it, Victor.”
“Now, now,” Victor said. “Burt’s already on his way. I just wanted to call ahead to say Frank’s harmless. But lately he’s been taking these little walks away from home.”
“I don’t think going around and terrifying single women who live alone in the country’s exactly
harmless.
”
Libby heard gravel crunching outside as Burt McLemoore pulled into her driveway.
L
EWIS
woke up early in the morning from a dream in which the earth had tilted off its axis and everything was sliding away from everything else. Chairs flew from tables, pillows popped from sofas, highways lifted off the ground like kinked ribbons. In the next bed, Carl snored pianissimo, almost a purr.
Lewis decided to go running. He pulled on pants and loped downstairs. Movement was good. He pushed through the front door, jogged down the driveway, one footfall between each palm tree. It was cold out, gray and dewy, and Lewis’s wool sweater produced a faint wet-dog stink that intensified as he warmed up. His hands grew pink. Was it possible that his jerky start-and-stop pattern of drinking constituted a real disease, the same one his father had? His father seemed another species: a red-faced television exec, a five-martini luncher fixated on racehorses, already on his third family and second open-heart surgery.
Lewis hit flat ground and picked up speed. Light seeped slowly into the sky. As if hand-tinted, oranges and lemons acquired the faintest pastel hues. Near the garage, he heard the familiar glass-packed rumble of Red’s truck and looked around for a place to hide in case he was doing something wrong by being out at this hour. It
felt
like he was. Then again, he usually
did
feel like he was doing something wrong.
Red rolled down his window. “Beautiful morning, eh?”
“Just taking a run,” said Lewis.
“You and Frank both,” said Red. “I gotta go fetch him. Want to come along?”
“Sure.” Lewis clambered into the truck. He’d been only vaguely aware of Frank’s existence. Frank spent his days in a lawn chair in the kitchen, where Ernie Tola could keep an eye on him and light his cigarettes.
A couple times Lewis had seen Frank sitting on the front porch, and once Lewis went into a downstairs john and found Frank, pissing away with surprising accuracy: the big mute seemed too dim to have mastered even that basic art.
“Any more thoughts about the writing you did?” Red asked.
“No.” Lewis accepted a Pall Mall and light. “Although I don’t see how you can be so sure I’m an alcoholic.”
“Oh, I could be wrong,” Red said cheerfully. “Although normal drinkers don’t drink ice-tea glasses of vodka. Or get DUIs. Have four or five drinks a day and get drunk twice a week. Not to mention the blackouts. Then there’s the secondary stuff. Living in a garage. So alienated from family and friends you can’t call on anyone for help. Dropping out of school and—”
“Look, alcoholism is
your
paradigm,” said Lewis. “I say it’s more a basic, chronic misanthropy.”
Red smiled. “You’d be surprised what sobriety does for basic, chronic misanthropy.”
Lewis glowered at the passing groves. This was the first time he had been off Round Rock’s premises during the daylight. A river ran on the left, the water swift and green among willows and naked cottonwoods, the riverbed wide and filled with smooth, pale rocks. Lewis rolled down his window. The air was heavy with dampness and oxygen. “It’s nice up here,” he said.
Red ducked his chin as if accepting a compliment, then waved to an old man riding a bicycle. “Rafael Flores,” said Red. “The local
curandero
—witch doctor. The old gal who used to own my ranch supposedly swore by him. Said he kept her alive for years with a special tea. Whenever we kill a rattlesnake, we save it for him. He makes some kind of powder from the skins.”
“No shit?” Lewis twisted in his seat to get a better look at the elderly rider, whose long white hair fanned out behind him like a veil. “Think he does peyote and mushrooms?”
Red chuckled. “That, I wouldn’t know,” he said, and turned at a mailbox with “DAW” painted on it in red nail polish. The gravel spur climbed steeply through a silvery olive grove and up to a grassy plateau where a house trailer sat between two willows. A squad car was parked behind a Ford Falcon. Frank was leaning against the Falcon’s back door and smoking. Red said, “He does look like he lives in a pumpkin patch, don’t you think?”
The deputy was standing on the deck, talking to a woman in a flowered skirt and a down vest. The woman rubbed her arms. When Red parked, she put her hands on her hips and glared at the truck.
She was not unattractive—slim legs, shiny brown hair—but the allure of uneducated females had dimmed for Lewis after five years of dating checkout girls at the parts store. This woman looked like the kind you hear screaming at a loser boyfriend through the flimsy walls of a fleabag apartment. And what were trailer houses if not the rural version of fleabag lodgings? This one in particular, an older white model with a broad turquoise stripe, looked like a large, discarded laundry-soap box.
Lewis sat in the truck as Red tried to cajole Frank into leaving. Frank didn’t so much as blink. The deputy stood by until another call came in, and he backed down the drive. The woman stood out on the deck for a while, still rubbing her arms, then went back inside her trashy home. Frank took a few steps, only to stop, pull a cigarette from his pocket to his mouth, and point at its unlit tip.
Bored, Lewis got out and walked to the edge of the olive groves. The sun was burning through the mist. A breeze gusted through the trees and tiny fruit hit the ground. He tried to imagine life without another glass of wine or pull of mescal or ice-cold beer on a hot summer day. Who could camp without a whiskey bottle? Or endure a hard day’s work without the promise of a good stiff drink? Or face conversation without a little lube? How could he write papers without bourbon to ease him through the hard spots? Who would he even
be
without alcohol’s rambunctious energy? He could just see himself in thirty years, a wizened monkey out in suburbia, pushing a lawn-mower while sucking sports bottles of headache-sweet ice tea. A fat wife. Casseroles. Golf on TV. A library filled with
National Geographic
s.
Something large and brown rustled in the olive trees. Lewis threw a stone and the thing turned into a rabbit and bounded out of range.
Almost 7:45 and I’m still home! The famous Frank is from the drunk farm up the road. Brain damaged, apparently. His mahout arrived, but Frank isn’t ready to leave. Some other guy is down by the olive trees, maybe taking a leak. Why is it the men you want to stay leave, and the men you want to leave won’t budge?
She could go to work now, obviously, but she wanted to see everybody cleared out first. Actualize the departure, as they say in the mortuary biz.
Who knows? she wrote. Maybe I’ll sit here all day writing dreck in this journal. My last great remaining pleasure in life, this kinked string of words that has led me through the previously unimaginable—
Libby paused to answer the phone. Billie, back from Ojai, was calling from Victor’s grocería. “Frank’s fine,” Billie said. “I’ve known him for years. Since even before he got that way. Never hurt anyone. But hey, when Red shows up, have a good look at him.”
The mahout? Libby glanced out her louvered window. The guy was waving a lighter in front of Frank’s face. Red Ray. She’d seen him around town. He was fat. “What about him?”
“Just look him over.”
Not only fat, Red was old and, to be honest, kind of dopey; he was practically dancing for the big, bearded man. “I don’t get it,” said Libby.
Billie laughed. “I wish you were here,” she said. “Oh, how I wish you were here. Because then you could see Victor’s ears burning off his head.”
Libby could, in fact, hear Victor Ibañez cackling in the background.
“Do me a favor, Billie,” Libby said. “Don’t start anything, not at my expense.” Libby hated sounding like a prude, but Victor had a mind like a nuclear reactor. The tiniest piece of fodder was all it took for him to conjure an outrageous scenario he then would trumpet as fact. “I have to live in this town.”
“Okay, okay,” said Billie.
“I’m just trying to keep my head up as—”
“
Now
we’ve upset her,” Billie said to Victor. To Libby, she said, “I’ll shut up.” Long pause. “There, I’ve shut up.”
Libby didn’t answer. Frank had started to move. As he lumbered toward the truck, he looked like a large, upright animal in overalls, a panda or giant sloth.
“I’m only looking after your best interests,” said Billie. “I wasn’t making fun of you. I wanted you to check out the valley’s most eligible bachelor.”
“They’re leaving now,” said Libby.
“Do you have time for breakfast at Yolie’s?”
Surely she deserved some compensation for the early-morning adrenaline bath. “Order me
chilaquiles
,” she said.
R
ITO
was a tiny town, and brown, the few buildings industrial brick. Red pulled to a stop at the Ibañez Grocería; he wanted cigarettes, and also to call the farm, he said, to tell them that Lewis wasn’t AWOL but with him, and safe. Across the street, a man was sweeping the sidewalk in front of Happy Yolanda’s. “Our illustrious mayor,” said Red. “You mind staying here, keeping an eye on Frank?”
“No,” Lewis lied, even as he craved a retail moment. Unless you counted using the cigarette machine at the Blue House, he’d gone over two weeks without a single cash exchange—no doubt his personal record, considering he usually hit several convenience stores and coffee shops a day. Besides, if Frank chose to toddle off, he could do so at will; he had a good eighty pounds on Lewis, not to mention the ineluctability of a mudslide.
Lewis nevertheless sat in the warm cab and watched as the mayor swept dirt into a yellow dustpan and carried it to the trash can on the corner, where he paused. Then, carefully lifting the can, he upended it until a small yellow possum scuttled out, its tail pink as ham. Using his broom, the mayor nudged the creature down Main Street and into the azaleas at St. Catherine’s.
Red Ray emerged from the grocería with three to-go cups of coffee and trailed by a tall woman—six, six-one—dressed in muddy work clothes. Cheekbones like a shelf. Dark, flashing eyes. Curly black hair in a thick ponytail. She stuck her head in the truck’s open window, her face just inches away from Lewis’s. Her skin was smooth and white. “Hey, Frank, you old devil you,” she said, ignoring Lewis completely. “Have Red run you by Fat Judy’s, then maybe you’ll stop scaring all the gals.”
Frank clearly didn’t distinguish between inanimate and animate objects, even objects as animate as this woman. She couldn’t elicit a twitch from him. Pulling back, she gave Lewis an unabashed once-over. “Hey there,” she said. She had the kind of wide, beautiful mouth you see in toothpaste ads.
She looked to be about his age, thirty-four, thirty-five. Lewis nodded faintly and looked down, not keen to meet friendly, attractive
women while sitting in the drunk-farm truck beside the drunk farm’s resident wet brain.
After giving him another moment to speak, the woman made a teasing, sour face and, waving to Red, crossed the street and slipped into Happy Yolanda’s.
“Billie Fitzgerald,” Red said, climbing into the cab and passing Lewis a cup of coffee.
“No way.” This was the so-called Amazon Next Door? “How come nobody ever says what a fox she is?”
“She’s a piece of work, all right.” Red carefully uncapped a coffee for Frank. “Let’s drink these down some before we start moving.”
“Major good looks,” said Lewis. “Hey, you ever go out with her?”
“Me?” Red chuckled. “I do business with her. That’s all I can handle.”
“But she’s single?”
“Oh, yeah. Lives with her dad and her son. Billie and the Bills.”
“And the husband?”
“Never was one, so far as I know.”
“So the kid?”
“An indiscretion in college.” Red took a long sip of coffee.
“Does she hit the bar first thing every morning?”
Red smiled. “No. Yolanda’s also serves breakfast. Great
huevos rancheros.
And Luis makes his own
chorizo.
Big write-up in the
Times
a while back.”
“Well, I could go for some
huevos rancheros
about now.”
Red appeared to consider this, then cranked the engine with a decisive roar. “Another day,” he said. “By the time we got Frank in and out of this truck, it’d be tomorrow.”
So it was back to the monastery, the brotherhood, the lousy food. Lewis leaned his head out the window into the moist, green breeze. The air now was almost warm. It would be spring in a few weeks, and today was a sneak preview. Outside of town, orange groves briefly gave way to lush hay fields. A coyote crossed one field at a diagonal, leaving a slash of darker green behind him. A hillside of flat-paddled cactus burst with waxy yellow blossoms. Bees swarmed around the flowers like electrons and hit the truck with little clacks, tiny explosions of honey on the windshield.
Lewis turned to Red. “Fat Judy’s?” he said.
“Don’t even ask,” said Red.
“B
ILLIE
F
ITZGERALD?
” said Lee. “Yeah, I see her every day.”
“I think she’s stunning,” Lewis said.
“A frigid bitch,” said Gene, “is what she is.”
They were eating tuna casserole in the dining room. The two refrigerators quaked and hummed behind them like small cars idling in place. “You guys don’t know class when you see it,” said Lewis.
“She’s old,” said Lee. “And bossy.”
“And butch,” said Lawrence.
“And she never wears underwear,” said Gene.
“That’s bad?” asked Lewis. “And how would you know, anyway?”
“Oscar’s sister is her housekeeper and she’s never seen any women’s underwear in that house. Bras, panties, nothing.”
“Probably wears boxer shorts,” said Lee.