“Andy, lamb, listen to me—”
But he was already out the door, heading for the house and ready for revenge.
In the parlor Mama was banging out a tune for the customers. It was easy enough to slip unnoticed into Mama’s office, where he grabbed one of her envelopes and a sheet of her fancy stationery—the one with a howling pink tomcat in a top hat. He took them up to his room, latched the door, and began, furiously, to write.
Dear Mr. Madrigal,
I am sorry to have to write such a letter, but I feel I must explain your son’s injury. He came by my establishment last night and made an indecent advance toward my son. My son is all man, and gave him what for. I will speak of this matter publicly if your son ever returns to the Blue Moon. He is not welcome here.
Sincerely,
MONA RAMSEY
P.S. I mean the sheriff!!
Letter in hand, Andy crept out of the house and into the truck. It took him twenty minutes to reach the Madrigals’ house. He knew there was a strong chance that Lasko had taken Hegazti directly home, so he waited in the shadows beneath the big lighted LOTHING sign and watched Lasko’s garage room for signs of activity. It was completely dark, so he crossed the backyard and went to the porch, where a mailbox and a door buzzer were all he needed to carry out his plan.
Only one had been strictly necessary, of course. Delivery would have been enough. They would have found the letter in the morning, and the message would have been conveyed. But Andy, in his pain and jealousy, wanted the satisfaction of being a witness. He wanted proof that he had stood his ground and fought back like a man, that this story had not ended with Lasko’s heartless “Abyssinia.”
He opened the mailbox, slipped in the letter, rang the buzzer, and ran like crazy.
Breathless, he took refuge in the truck, which was hidden behind a stand of cottonwoods. It wouldn’t matter anyway, if someone saw the truck, since it belonged to Mama, and that would only confirm the authenticity of the letter. Andy was banking on his belief that no one would contact Mama. There would be too much shame and dishonor involved. This would be a family matter conducted in private.
Someone opened the door and stepped onto the porch. Even from this distance Andy could hear the momentous squeak of the mailbox.
The first voice he heard was Hegazti’s. “Papi,” she was calling, “Papi!”
The porch creaked under the heavy tread of the man of the house. Hegazti was speaking to him in Spanish, presumably translating the letter.
It serves you right, thought Andy. You had your way with my family. I’ll have my way with yours.
Mr. Madrigal’s growl grew into a bellow. “BELASKO! BELASKO!”
Lasko answered feebly from somewhere inside the house.
That’ll keep you away, thought Andy. That’ll keep you away for good.
How right he had been.
Chapter 20
THE TEMPLE OF JUNO
A blue moon—the second full moon of the month—was rising over Black Rock City when Shawna set off on her own to look for Otto. She knew already he was part of the temple crew, so she made that her first destination, so she could praise him on his communal effort when she came to look for him at Seltzerville, the camp he shared with a dozen other street clowns. There was no way to do this but to do it. No phones, no tweets, nothing. Just this roulette of random souls, cycling through the watercolor twilight on their way from somewhere to somewhere else.
Once in a blue moon. As in rarely, but sometimes.
It was what she adored about Burning Man: the way one thing could lead you to another like an undertow. You threw yourself into it, and it took you from there, swirling you into moments so rich and rare that you could almost forget you had ever written LOL or OMG on someone’s Twitter feed. Burning Man wasn’t a link to life; it was life itself, immediate and astonishing. All those weeks of planning and ticket scrounging had led to this sweet release into the wild and woolly Now.
That’s why it made sense to stop at the Hug Deli on her way to the Temple of Juno. Because it was there, this hand-painted sidewalk stand in the middle of nowhere, fake as can be yet completely archetypal, like something Wile E. Coyote would erect as a ruse for the Roadrunner. The menu at the Hug Deli included, among other items, the Warm and Fuzzy Hug, the Beverly Hills Air Kiss Hug, and the Gangsta Hug, with side orders of Pinch, Tickle, and Back Scratch. She ordered the Long Uncomfortable Hug, because she thought that was funny, thereby prompting a nut-brown Venice Beach–looking dude to hold on to her, earnestly pokerfaced, for a seeming eternity.
“Are you uncomfortable yet?”
“Fairly, yes.”
“Excellent. My work here is done.”
She laughed and mounted her bike, pedaling away from the zany mirage as her gratuitous hugger shouted “Namaste” in her direction.
Insemination should be so easy, she thought.
The spire of the Temple of Juno appeared in the dust as fragments of filigree, looming so high in the sky it could have been someone’s last hallucination. It felt Asian, but not entirely, with a courtyard that made it sprawl like a kingdom. It took ten minutes to reach, pedaling hard, so she needed a long swig on her canteen once she had chained her bike out front. There were dozens of others joining her, freed from their wheels and continuing their pilgrim’s progress toward the structure.
It was plywood, this temple, blond and raw up close but intricate as lace, a computer-hewn patchwork assembled by Otto and a multitude of others, people who had built something magnificent to be burned in a week on the premise that simple creation was its own joy, and everything, everything, must be released.
The more she thought about Otto, the more he seemed like the perfect guy to ask for sperm. He was strong and sober and kind. He’d been nice to her the night they ran into each other at Martuni’s. He had even joked about the two exes who had come later. She had let him down gently, after all, when he started getting serious, and that had been four whole years ago. He seemed to have let her go as thoroughly as he had let go of Sammy, his monkey puppet—minus the ritual cremation.
But the real bonus was the fact that he was moving to Ottawa in a month. (He liked the sound of Otto from Ottawa, he said, and it was easy to find eco work in Canada.) The sheer geographical distance would lessen the chance of him forming an emotional attachment to the child. And maybe he’d be totally cool with the idea, expecting nothing in return for his contribution. Seltzerville was an easy bike ride to Dusty Dames, where the insemination would be staged. Or held. Or whatever.
She hated all the language of this, the mechanics. She wanted to focus on the end result, so that one day she would be able to tell the apple of her eye that she had loved her/him long before he/she had even been a seed. That she had dreamed of him/her in a place so profoundly infertile that life itself was imported for one magic week, and that love and art were the only intentions. Once pregnant, she would not (she swore) be one of those women who natter away about the future to their growing bellies, but she wouldn’t mind having a word with the kid right now. She would tell her/him that the coast was clear, that it was beautiful here.
She flowed with the others into the temple, where beams of light slashed through the lacy walls like swords through a magician’s cabinet. A great wooden pendulum—an inverted pyramid—swung almost imperceptibly above a mandala of humans arrayed beneath its point. Dust was the constant here, making everything velvety and sumptuous. The walls were covered with felt-tip scribbling that would have seemed defamatory without the knowledge that this was the soul of the space: poignant and pithy (or not so pithy)
farewells to dead friends and old lovers, lost pets and bad vibes, anything that needed remembering and releasing through fire.
The people beneath the pendulum were in their own orbits of bliss or grief, which Shawna did not want to invade. Instead she made her way upstairs, reading the inscriptions that caught her eye, moved by the sheer accumulation of loss.
Grief-fiti. That’s what it was.
She stopped on the landing and found a clear space on the wall, claiming it benignly with her presence, as she would a good spot on a beach. She was digging in her knapsack for a felt-tip marker when someone approached her with his own, presenting it to her with a courtly flourish. He was her age or thereabouts, and so coated in dust that the fabric-store fur of his Pan legs was indistinguishable from his own smooth flesh. His horns, in much the same way, merged with his head.
“Thanks,” she said, “but I may be here for a while.”
“Please,” he said. “Keep it.”
And with that he was gone—somewhat theatrically, but thrillingly just the same. She wondered if he had blessed her on the spur of the moment or if felt-tip markers were part of his official gifting. But even if he had a whole sack of those suckers stashed somewhere, it was a cool thing to do. It was good to give people things they needed. To be there for them in the moment. It showed you noticed.
She went to the wall and began to write in bright green ink:
Dear Connie Bradshaw,
We’ve met only once. You held me in your arms and looked into my eyes. I wish I could remember that. My friend Michael says you were kind and sort of daffy and liked guys a lot. I do, too. And gals, by the way. Something tells me we would get on great. I’ve heard what you went through to give me life, and I REALLY FUCKING APPRECIATE IT, CONNIE. I’m living for us both now.
Your daughter,
SHAWNA HAWKINS
P.S. Would you like to be a grandmother? Wouldn’t that be fantabulous?
When she was finished, she left the temple and strolled around the courtyard. Night was falling swiftly. The lights in the temple made it glow like candlelight through old scrimshaw. She sat on one of the courtyard benches and wondered, idly, which parts of this otherworldly palace Otto had helped to build.
Juno, goddess of fertility and overseer of childbirth, protector of women and preserver of marriage.
Could there be a better place for her tonight?
She had been there for ten minutes before she noticed the writing on the wall behind her. It was rendered in the same green ink she had used for her own.
WANT TO BE A MOTHER? NEED SEED FROM A NICE GUY? THAT’S WHAT
I’M GIFTING THIS YEAR. NO STRINGS ATTACHED. SEE NEXT BENCH.
It wasn’t like her to blush, but the message felt so intuitive of her situation. She was like one of those starving wretches on Survivor getting a tree-mail message promising doughnuts and milk. She looked around the courtyard furtively—guiltily—to see if she was being watched. There were several dozen people there in the indigo gloaming, but none of them seemed especially interested in her.
The nearest bench was unoccupied, so she walked there and checked it out, using her pocket flashlight to examine the graffiti. Much of it was written in green ink, so the color was obviously not exclusive to the faun in the temple. The marker might have been provided by the temple crew itself. The anonymous benefactor could be anyone at all. Anyone.
His handwriting, however, was instantly recognizable from the other bench: loopy letters with open O’s. This time he had written:
HEALTHY EX-MORMON RESPECTS ALL WOMEN. NO CONTACT DESIRED. TOP TIER OF TEMPLE, PLAYA SIDE. INFO UNDER RAIL. LOOK 4 HEART. PROMISE NEVER TO SEE YOU AGAIN.
Three minutes later, as she headed back to the temple, she thought, It’s a good thing I’m not fucked up. It’s a good thing this is my first e-less unmollyfied Burn in . . . well . . . ever. Otherwise, I might invest this moment with something falsely mystical, something beyond the lark of a treasure hunt in the desert. I might see it as a viable option, too, a natural progression of the Hug Deli, a great big why-the-hell-not.
She knew better than that. Especially sober. Otto would almost certainly end up being her go-to guy, because sperm was not a fast food proposition.
Except of course, that it was. What else was it if not that? It was always a thing of the moment, best served warm. And anonymity had certain advantages in this situation. Someday soon she would have a spouse, someone under the same roof who would love the Kid as deeply as she did. Why burden that person with a third person—some long-gone retired street clown boyfriend in Canada, for instance? It muddled things unnecessarily. Ben would never have been a problem in that regard, since he was already part of the package, already inextricable from her life.
What the hell was she talking about? Yes, a very good thing you aren’t fucked up tonight, missy.
Reaching the mezzanine of the temple, she followed the railing until—yes!—she found a plain green heart without an inscription. It was almost too easy, this game. She sank to her butt on the spot and used her flashlight to inspect the underside. She found a smattering of words there. Green capital letters. Eureka.
IMMACULATE CONCEPTION
CAMP COINKYDINK
5:30 AND JASMINE
ASK FOR DUSTPUPPY
Here was the thing:
She didn’t have to see Otto right away. She didn’t have to see him at all, in fact, since he didn’t even know she was coming. You couldn’t break a date that had never been made, could you? She could tell him tomorrow how much she admired and respected his work on the temple. Tonight there was curiosity to be satisfied. Maybe—just maybe—there was a fourth option, beyond Ben and Caleb and Otto.
Camp Coinkydink was out toward the scattered edge of things. As Shawna pedaled across the gleaming playa under a silver-dollar moon, she remembered something Mrs. Madrigal used to say:
“Your regrets, my dear, are all about the things you didn’t do.”
Chapter 21
HAZARD OF THE PROFESSION
Anna waited on a circular settee in the lobby of the Blue Moon Family Fun Center and Casino. An enormous arrangement of roses (artificial but convincing until she touched them) erupted volcanically from the center of the settee. She smiled at this effort—the wrongheadedness of it—since cut flowers had not been allowed in the original Blue Moon. Mama had very few superstitions (not even the acceptable Catholic ones), but she had clung to the orthodoxy of her profession. Cut flowers were seen as omens of death in a brothel, emblematic of beauty cut down in its prime. You did not bring roses to the girls without catching hell from Mama.
Brian and Wren were talking to a young woman at the counter. Behind them, in a room with a glass wall, children were frolicking in a pit of brightly colored balls. Their muffled squeals merged with the bells and whistles of the one-armed bandits in another room. Innocence and adult pleasures were efficiently segregated here.
Not like the old days at all.
She remembered the afternoon when she finally felt remorse for having written the letter to Lasko’s father.
Andy had driven over to Eagle Drugs with an apology already forming in his head, somehow believing—a full week after the fact—that he could fix things with a kind word to Lasko or a confession to his father.
I should have brought pastries, he had thought. Or a pack of Camels.
He hated to think how Lasko might have suffered because of his offhanded wickedness. Lasko’s banishment to the garage could
have already assumed a dreadful new coloration—beatings, humiliation, who-knows-what. A man who had ordered his son to be “fixed” by a prostitute was capable of much more than that.
Andy had known there was little chance of finding Lasko at the drugstore—his father had no doubt removed him from public scrutiny—but he had gone to the Rexall in the hope that a conversation with Lasko would prove more benign in the presence of his boss, the even-tempered and professional Mr. Yee.
Mr. Yee, however, had been in a state when Andy arrived, muttering to himself as he swept shards of glass from the checkered linoleum floor.
The pharmacy had been robbed that morning, the old man said with a scowl. Some hooligan had broken the window and stolen pills from the cabinet.
“What sort of pills?” Andy had asked, suddenly sick with panic.
“Barbiturates!”
“What’s that?”
“Sleeping pills . . . Sorry sonofabitch!” Mr. Yee, still sweeping furiously, saw Andy’s stricken expression and collected himself long enough to offer reassurance. “Not your fault, son. If you see your buddy Lasko, tell him I need help pronto.”
But it is my fault, thought Andy as he raced through back streets and alleys toward the hideous truth that he already knew.
It’s nobody’s fault but my own.
He was thinking that as he reached Lasko’s garage.
As he entered that dim, dirt-floored room and smelled the rancid vomit and saw the body slumped like a sack of potatoes.
As he looked at that face, already gray and waxen with death.
As he choked down his sobs to keep from being heard in the house.
As he spotted the Book of Marvels and snatched the incriminating evidence from the shelf above the bed.
As he sped across the bridge toward the Blue Moon Lodge and the soft consolation of Margaret’s arms.
The Days of Anna Madrigal Page 17
