Round Rock (15 page)

“No?” Laughing a little. More in control than she ever dreamed he’d be. “You sure you don’t want to talk about this?”

She couldn’t talk if she wanted to, and he knew this. That was the point.

Afterward, they lay there like gasping fish. He held her forearm, squeezed it occasionally, kissed her ear. He got up first, and brought her back a mug of lukewarm tap water. They shared a cigarette. When she returned from the bathroom, his pants were on. “Breakfast,” he said.

At Happy Yolanda’s, they found Billie and the Bills sitting with Red Ray. Little Bill and Red jumped up to drag over another table. “We’ve been fishing,” Lewis said. “It’s so cool. Libby goes every Sunday.”

Libby blushed and sat up straight. Did she smell like sex? The back of her hair was a bird’s nest. Billie winked at her at least seven hundred times. Lewis and Red Ray talked about the softball game later that day. She drifted, chewing
machaca
and eggs, sipping burnt, weak coffee. Lewis grasped her hand under the table and placed it on
his erection. She inhaled coffee, coughing until Red handed her a glass of water.

She and Lewis walked outside with everyone else. She hung back, thinking he might want to say something to her. But suddenly he was half a block away—“Bye! So long! Thanks for the fishing!”—and she was still standing next to Billie outside of Happy Yolanda’s.

“You’re hooked,” Billie said.

“I’m not hooked.”

“You’re hooked, all right. Your eyes have turned to goo.”

“I
HAVE
before me a monster lasagna,” said Lewis. “And Red says you should come help us eat it. We have a meeting at eight, so it won’t be a long evening. If you got here at six …”

Libby went straight from work, pulling off her pantyhose at a stop sign. Dinner with the guys. She liked the idea. When she reached the bungalow, Red was inside and Lewis was out picking lettuce.

“How’s our friend Billie?” Red asked.

“Wild and woolly,” said Libby. “You hear she’s got a court injunction against the county? Doesn’t want ’em chopping down those eucalyptus trees. I agree with her.”

“Me too, this time.” Red’s eyes were blue and kind. “She filed three injunctions against me when I started Round Rock.” He laughed quietly. “Once she lost, she leased the groves and saved my hide.”

“She filed against us when my ex-husband and I brought the trailer onto the property,” said Libby. “I think it’s her way of saying hello. Some communities have welcome wagons. We have Billie and her court injunctions.”

Lewis walked in, his arms full of greens. Libby dried the leaves as Lewis washed them. She was careful, as was he, to reveal no hint of intimacy. “Sorry,” she whispered when she brushed his arm.

They ate on the porch, in a cave of bougainvillea. Red had set the table with a white damask cloth, sterling silver, a jar of pink roses. Lewis’s lasagna was made not with meat sauce and gloppy cheese but with layers of skinned tomatoes, bitter greens, roasted squash, and noodles brushed with olive oil. Sparrows hopped on the porch railing, begging bread crumbs.

“You ever been to an AA meeting?” Red asked Libby.

“I hear them when I work overtime at the union hall,” Libby said. “I always wonder, what’s everybody laughing at?”

“Their pathetic, desperate lives,” said Lewis. “That’s what they’re laughing at.”

“You should stop by some Friday night,” said Red. “It’s open to everyone, and the speakers are usually top-notch.”

“I’d feel like a voyeur.” Libby turned to Lewis, who was lining up bits of bread for the sparrows. “What do you think?”

“Do what you want,” he muttered. “I hated my first hundred meetings.”

“I wouldn’t want to make anyone uncomfortable,” Libby said.

There was a long silence. Red stood up and started clearing the plates. “Speaking of meetings …”

Lewis walked her out to the Falcon. The sun had set and the gray sky was darkening.

“Who’s that?” Libby asked, pointing at a man standing between two bungalows across the way. A tall man with long dark hair.

“I don’t see anybody,” said Lewis.

Indeed, when Libby looked back, the man had vanished.

“This place is kind of creepy,” she said. “All these empty houses.” She turned to face Lewis. “Thanks for dinner.”

He wrapped his arms around her waist and yanked her flush up against him. Over Lewis’s shoulder, Libby saw Red Ray framed in the bright orange light of the kitchen window. “Red can see us,” she hissed.

“I don’t care. I couldn’t stand it in there. All that arm’s-length crap. Can we get together later? I want to crawl into your clothes with you. Sorry if I’m being a boor. I can’t help it. Can I come over after the meeting? Ten-ish? To your trailer? Jesus, I never thought I’d be begging to come to someone’s trailer.”

“What’s the matter with my trailer?”

“Nothing. I hate trailers. Except your trailer. Your trailer seems like a big candy bar with a nougat inside. You’re the nougat.”

Nobody had ever called her a nougat before.

T
HE MAN
Libby pointed to was David Ibañez, born and raised in the very bungalow he’d ducked behind to elude her gaze. Thirty-eight years old and living in Tijuana, David was up visiting his uncle and teacher, the
curandero,
Rafael Flores. Taking an after-dinner
walk at dusk, David had wound up here, through no conscious intention, trespassing at his childhood home.

As Libby and Lewis embraced, David wandered off behind the bungalows, running his fingers over silvery siding, termite-tunneled sills. The citrus perfume and spicy sourness of decomposing oranges from the surrounding groves was as familiar to him as breath itself. David’s father had been Sally Morrot’s ranch foreman. His family lived better than most in the village, their house furnished with her discarded mahogany nightstands, linen draperies, couches whose small rents and tears loosed feathers or wiry horsehair.

Otherwise, conditions had been primitive: woodstoves, outhouses, peddlers, milk goats. The village generator went off at nine in the evening; afterward you lit kerosene lamps with fat cotton wicks and blackened globes that gave the air an acrid burnt-petroleum edge. The bungalows were plumbed when David was three—toilets, sinks, and tubs carried into bathrooms hastily constructed from sleeping porches and sections of hallways. A persistent image of black boxes, monolithic and evil, surfaced in David’s dreams for decades until, during a hypnotherapy session last year, he identified the ominous cubes as the septic tanks buried in the village of his youth.

David peeked between the houses; the couple by the Falcon were still embracing, so he slipped back into the shadows. He preferred not to be seen. Seventeen years ago, after Sally Morrot died and the villagers were evicted from their homes, David had called in the union and the press. He’d organized the civil action suit that failed to bring them back to these houses, but provided each family with enough money to scatter where they pleased; some stayed in town, some found farm work in the San Joaquin Valley, and others, like David’s parents, moved to the city—Boyle Heights in Los Angeles. Such activism hadn’t endeared David to the valley’s Anglo ranchers, some of whom still bore grudges. On past visits, he had been cited for jaywalking across Main Street, not leashing his dog, and tossing an apple core into the weeds; so he now kept such a low profile that only relatives and old family friends knew when he was in town.

Since leaving the village, David had traveled all over the world, dogged by a persistent homesickness for the valley, this ranch. He wandered back again and again, driven by a need to check on things, see what new twist fate had taken. Like many people who had grown up in the area, he was an ardent student of the curlicued local history,
all its false starts and surprises. When the ranch was sold to a wealthy San Francisco lawyer, for example, everyone anticipated subdivisions and commercial development. Then Red Ray turned out to be a profligate drunk and there were rumors of bankruptcy, repossession, a pending sale to Arabs. When Red sobered up and started the drunk farm, David had laughed about it for months; he himself had gotten sober, and this connection made it seem as if the ranch had, in a manner of speaking, stayed in the family after all. Someday, David thought, he might even risk slipping into an AA meeting to sit among fellow alkies in the former ballroom where once Sally Morrot and her companion, Dora, had tried to teach some of the local teenagers, including David, how to waltz.

David heard the Falcon drive off. Peering across the way, he saw Red Ray come out of his bungalow. David had followed his successes—the humanitarian awards and government grants Red received were well publicized in the local papers David’s aunt Gloria saved for him. And he’d observed Red out here on many occasions, alone in the village that fifty-odd people once inhabited: reading on his front porch or tending his rosebushes; smoking at his kitchen table or dozing in the living room. This was the first time David had seen any visitors.

Red and the younger man lit cigarettes and started walking east together down the road. Red walked calmly, hands in pockets, at a stately pace. The other guy loped sideways, gesticulating broadly, veering off first to one side, then the other, talking all the while: a man clearly desperate to make his point. They looked like king and frantic petitioner, or hunter and fractious spaniel. Hanging back in the shadows, David watched until the two men rounded the bend out of sight; then he struck off in the opposite direction toward his uncle’s house.

B
Y ELEVEN-TWENTY
, when Lewis knocked on her door, Libby had given up on him and dressed for bed in nightgown and kimono. She let him in and saw at first glance that his earlier, pressing enthusiasm had dwindled. He slunk into her kitchen, bad news incarnate.

“You okay?” she asked.

“Sorry it took me so long,” he said. “Red and I had to have a little chat. You mind if I smoke?”

“Go ahead,” she said, suddenly queasy. “What did you chat about?”

“You don’t want to know.”

“About me?”

“In the abstract.”

“What’d you say?”

“I didn’t tell him anything.”

What was to tell? “What’d he say, then?”

“He told me to watch my step in all this.” Lewis flung an arm to indicate her kitchen, her house, her.

“That makes two of us.”

“Maybe I should go,” he said. “No sense in dragging both of us down. I’ll finish this smoke and leave you the hell alone. Unless you want to make some coffee. I could stand a cup of coffee.”

“At this hour? Won’t it keep you up?”

“I only wish.”

Libby pulled the can of Yuban from the fridge and filled the coffee maker with water.

“This is it, this is who I am,” Lewis said. “Up and down, up and down, ever since I got sober.” He sat cross-legged on a kitchen chair. “This is me, the dull lump.”

Libby laughed softly. “ ‘Dull lump’ is the last term I’d apply to you.”

“I just think too much. My mind is an alternate digestive tract. I chew myself up. I make myself sick. I’m a living, breathing wreck. Hey, will you walk on my back?”

Holding on to the back of the chair, Libby took cautious, wobbly steps along his spine. He grabbed her ankle, reached for her hand, and pulled her down among the chair legs. After all that gloom, it was good to be thrashing around on the linoleum and kissing. When he took the condom from his pocket—she loved that he took care of such things—he said, “We might as well hit the bed. If you don’t mind. I mean, nothing against your cold, hard, gritty floor.”

He insisted on constant eye contact, an intensity she found compelling and connective. Did he know what he was doing?

They smoked afterwards, sharing a cigarette. Libby made herself get up to pee, otherwise it was cystitis for sure. When she returned from the bathroom, he was dressed, drinking coffee. Her heart sank. She’d been expecting him to stay. “You don’t have to leave.”

“You want to sleep,” he said. “I want to pull up trees. Or juggle chainsaws. I’d just keep you awake.” He sat on the bed to pull on his socks. She curled around him and it was true, his body hummed. “Maybe I’ll have one more cup of coffee.” He fetched it himself and drank, sitting on the edge of the bed, stroking her back.

In the morning, Libby wrote:
Running late, but will not abandon this journal just because I’m seeing someone. Don’t let me stop flossing either.

First man in my bed since Stockton. How do I feel? My emotions slide right off that question. I’m still in a sexual blur. Already feel a bladder infection coming on. Guzzling cranberry juice.

Lewis was trouble, she decided, but mostly to himself. She should leave him alone. But her whole body—muscles, skin, eyes, even her hair and teeth—wanted more of him first.

R
ITO’S
Fourth of July parade began with Luis Salazar, the mayor, driving through town in his marrow-red Mercury Cougar. Placards hung on the front doors:

Behind the mayor came twenty little girls in silver tutus, twirling batons. Some batons were only partially tamed. “This is the sort of thing I see with a really bad migraine,” Billie told Libby.

The entire town had shown up to watch: Victor and Aida Ibañez, Happy Yolanda’s staff, all the old guys from the Mills, the art institute students who rented a storefront in town. Libby stood between Billie and the Bills. She spotted Red Ray across the street with a group of men. Lewis wasn’t among them.

The Rito Lito bar was represented by a flotilla of Harleys; Happy Yolanda’s by their mariachi band. On a Sunkist truck, the Methodist youth group formed a tableau of the founding fathers. The Catholic youth group rode on a buckboard alongside several bales of hay, a goat, and a bug-eyed, wobbly Holstein calf bellowing in fear, no
doubt terrified by the high-school band marching up behind him playing a curious arrangement of “Stairway to Heaven.”

Billie elbowed Libby’s ribs, nodding at a red tractor pulling the Round Rock float. Lewis was driving, staring straight ahead like a farmer intent on a perfect furrow. Detached, possibly excruciated. In a black T-shirt, very skinny, his hair drawn back in a ponytail, he looked good to Libby in the daylight. Real. She would’ve thought he was too cool for such goofiness, and liked him for participating. The float’s theme was Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. Perched on a sofa, the man in the Snow White mask wore a low-cut ivory wedding dress, his chest bristling with lush black hair. He waved as if screwing in an invisible lightbulb. Men in dwarf masks sat along the edge of the flatbed. Not all seven were represented, and there were multiple Happys and Sleepys. Their placards read:
ROUND ROCK FARM … FREEDOM FROM BONDAGE … A NEW FREEDOM AND A NEW HAPPINESS! … HAPPY JOYOUS AND FREE.
Nothing identified Round Rock as a drunk farm, although one Dopey held a bumper sticker pasted on a piece of cardboard:
IF YOU MUST DRINK AND DRIVE, DRINK PEPSI.