Horse Latitudes

by Morris Collins

  The bartender poured, slid the glass across the bar.

  “Would you like to pay now or put it on the entire tab?”

  It took Ethan a moment to realize what he meant.

  “No, I’ll pay now,” he said.

  Behind him at the piano, a new song starting up. In the back corner of the lounge a patron slowdanced with a woman in a red satin dress that seemed to shimmer and kick light like a cut ruby. The piano man began to sing and Ethan listened a moment and caught the tune. He couldn’t remember the name but recognized it as Cole Porter. He put his glass down and swiveled on his leather bar stool. The place, he noticed again, was nearly empty.

  “Say,” he said to the bartender. “What sort usually come in here?”

  “Sort, sir?”

  Maybe it was just early, Ethan thought. Maybe that’s why it was so empty.

  “You know, who’re your regulars? This place seems a little ritzy for a border town.”

  The bartender stopped wiping glasses and put his rag down slowly, put it down and folded it and looked back up at Ethan as if to say, look what you’ve made me do. Everywhere the crystal glasses sparkled and sharded light about the bar and Ethan knew that they were all perfectly clean, that this man stood here through every day and night and buffed his glasses past the point of any necessary polish. By now he knew enough about neuroses to recognize them pretty easily. Once you started looking closely enough, there were no sane people.

  “Is this your first time in Boystown?” the bartender said.

  Ethan nodded, sipped from his whiskey and found that already it was gone. The bartender poured him another as he spoke.

  “Boystown is not a border town, sir. It is its own city. What borders are there here? It is not Mexico. The laws here are not the laws of Mexico, they are not the laws of Texas. Here what you want you may have. And here, this lounge, it is for men whose position in some other world parches what thirsts must need slaking.”

  “What ho, Fortinbras,” Ethan said.

  “Excuse me?”

  “This is a gay bar? That’s what you’re saying?”

  “Sí.”

  Ethan turned again and looked at the dancing couple.

  “And she?” he said.

  The bartender unfolded his rag like there might be a present wrapped inside.

  “Yes,” he said. “And he.”

  “Goddamn,” Ethan said.

  HE SAT THERE and continued to drink. Once a woman wended her way out of the back corner room and sat down next to him. Her hair was bleached blonde and she put her gloved hand on his bare arm.

  “No thanks,” he said, and pointed at his whisky. “I can only do one thing at a time.”

  She slunk off and he watched her go.

  “So you’re saying that was a man?” he asked the bartender.

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Hard to tell, isn’t it?”

  The bartender looked up a moment from his polishing.

  “Not really,” he said.

  “Look,” Ethan said. “I’m not a hick. I’m from New York. I’ve been to plenty of drag shows. I’ve been to burlesques.”

  “No doubt.”

  “I can even spell burlesque.”

  “Don’t you think it’s time to go?” the bartender said.

  “B-U-R-L-E-S-Q-U-E,” Ethan said.

  OUTSIDE AGAIN, in the street, and the day fleeting now beyond the walls of the compound. A world, it seemed to Ethan, stricken by sudden carnival. Now the roads thronged with drunks, the stale air ripe with sweat and a steam of exhaled booze. Ethan stood in the street, looked up at the sky bleeding out above the Plexiglas and listened to the rising rush of it: laughter and shrieks, moans straining over music like voices coming in fever, the flap and call of dying birds. He stood and wiped sweat from his brow, stood and turned a dazed circle in the road, heard then everything else beneath the general din: boots splashing through mud, cash registers chiming open like typewriters finishing a line—from a near window, flesh thwacking on flesh.

  Ethan began to walk back the way he had come. He passed again under the green light of the saloon, the dead parrot now just stripped bones, feathers loamed in the marl of kicked mud. A woman called to him from the alley. She sat on a stool under a slanted portico and her face was inked by shadow, though the light from the saloon shone on her wide right thigh, glinted on the open eyes of her children hunkered just behind her.

  Ethan resisted the urge to remove his camera from his bag. He would not let himself frame and capture this. If he captured it he would not feel it and the point was to feel it, to feel it beyond everything else he could no longer bear. He turned and went into the saloon, and as he did so he brushed against a cowboy, Mexican or Texan, he couldn’t tell, not with the way his hat tilted over his face—not that he could tell the difference anyway.

  “Watch it,” the guy said without looking up.

  “Sorry,” Ethan said, still walking. “It’s just that you’re standing in the doorway.”

  Inside, a short staircase opened into a room of concrete floors, a row of wooden tables, a dark wood bar with no stools and no tap. Behind the bar slouched a man who must have just lost about a hundred pounds—loose skin wattled from his throat like an iguana’s crest. Behind him there was a refrigerator filled with beer. If there was anything else to drink, Ethan did not see it. Men sat at tables and stood at the bar with women who clung to their arms, laughed, drank their beer. In the corner, toward the back wall, more women stood waiting against the adobe.

  Ethan moved to the bar.

  “Dos cervesas, por favor.”

  “What you want? Bud Light, Miller Lite, Corona?”

  Ethan wondered why he bothered with the Spanish at all.

  “Corona,” he said. “With limes.”

  The bartender stopped moving, seemed to blow air through his wattle.

  “Limes?”

  “Yeah, limes. Limones verdes.”

  The bartender pointed at the empty expanse of the bar, the one refrigerator.

  “No limes here, mister.”

  “That’s too bad,” Ethan said. “I like limes.”

  He took his beers and walked back toward an open table as far from the door as he could get. It was amazing, he thought, how this kept happening to him. How he was drunk before he knew it. He sat down, pulled from his beer. He did not like Corona. The day’s first dawning at the cantina in the plaza seemed to be hours past. He drank again. It was just this sort of bullshit reasoning that he had to avoid. The day’s first dawning was hours past, that’s why it seemed that way. Also, he had just drunk fifty dollars’ worth of scotch in a town where cash went a long way—that’s why he was so drunk. Always, Samantha told him, you make things more complicated than they are. You make choices, she said as she stood at the door, as he raised his camera, and then you account for them. The rest is pretty much bullshit. In the dark, in the empty hours between when she’d pass out and when she’d stir again into morning, his guilt turned sometimes to rage, and later, when she thrashed through withdrawal or woke in the night clawing at him with nails already chewed to nubs, he would have liked to ask her, which choice, Samantha, are you accounting for now?

  Still, sitting there in the back of the bar with the two beers sweating on the table and the night coming on with a traveling pageant of stumbling drunks, with fat men and men in cowboy shirts and mesh caps and men so gaunt they seemed skeletoned against their own ill-fitting clothes proceeding into the bar and claiming women whom they led by the arm or the hip or the ass up the stairs and into back rooms, it seemed to Ethan that the cause untethered, in the smoke of the room, from the effect. He lived in New York and afterward, when that life ended, he went to Arizona. He left Arizona, he left Texas. He sat here now and emptied the first Corona and reached, then, for the second, as she touched his hand and settled into the booth beside him.

  “Not now,” he said. “Not interested.”

  But then she touched his hand again and he turne
d and looked and saw that she was older than most of the others. Not old, not much past thirty, but old enough here where youth might vanish in the space of an hour. Her hair hung black and down and ovaled her face against its frame. She did not smile at him, she did not reach up to touch his chest or feel his biceps or mimic any of the other performances he saw unfolding around the bar.

  “I think I just came here to drink,” Ethan said.

  “Well,” she said, and her voice was throatier than he’d imagined, a hard, purred whisper, “I could use a drink as well.”

  “Right, sure.” Ethan was standing now. “What do you want?”

  “Manhattan up, orange twist, no cherry. Comprende?”

  Ethan turned, stopped, looked back at her.

  “You’re fucking with me, right?”

  “A Corona. Or maybe two.”

  AT THE BAR and sliding money across the wet wood, grasping the Coronas and turning to go when the man from the doorway, the cowboy with the hat pulled low, put his hand on Ethan’s shoulder.

  “You bumped into me out there.”

  Ethan peeled the hand off his shoulder, palmed him five bucks. He’d try the Navajo’s tack.

  “Buy yourself a few drinks on me.”

  He patted him on the arm, everything casual and cool, and went on.

  BACK AT THE TABLE she touched his wrist, then with her other hand reached for the beer, drank from it.

  “You seem nervous,” she said.

  “What’s your name?” Ethan asked.

  She turned to look at him and cocked her head the way a parrot might, but kept her body facing the bar, the door, the rest of whatever this was.

  “Yolanda.”

  “That’s your real name?”

  She put her beer down, he felt the weight of her fingers on his wrist. Somewhere, outside, there was a scuffle in the street. Bottles breaking, shouts and cheers like men at a cock fight.

  “Why wouldn’t it be my real name?”

  “I don’t know,” Ethan said. “I just thought…”

  “Yes?”

  “I thought, that, well, you know.”

  “That whores are too ashamed to use their real names?”

  Yes, thought Ethan. That’s it exactly.

  “No,” he said. “But that you’d change your name to something exotic and sexy. That’s how it is in the States, with strippers, anyway. Everyone is called Mystique or Kristal or Natalia.”

  “What’s wrong with Yolanda?”

  The conversation had turned strange and in that moment Ethan again felt himself reaching for his camera. Was she flirting with him or asking him a serious question? Her name was perfectly exotic and perfectly sexy, but it was also perfectly real. He had come here, he realized, to see some walking approximation of damage, a motif of ruined women. Perhaps he had not wanted real people.

  “I’m sorry,” Yolanda said. “I’m just trying to get a rise out of you.”

  Ethan drank from his second beer, found it, again, empty. Her skin looked dull and textureless under the smoky bar light.

  “Was that a pun?” he asked.

  “In Mexico, prostitutes never make puns,” Yolanda said.

  Outside, the police had arrived at the fight in the street. A voice echoed through a megaphone in faster Spanish than Ethan could understand. The blue throw of light from the revolving flashers strobed the inside of the bar. In the moments of illumination Yolanda’s face looked hard and polished as stone.

  “I’ll go get us some more beers,” Ethan said. His words came thick and slow now. He wondered if she even heard him.

  Moving again through the press of bodies to the bar. What now, Ethan thought as he touched the cold glass of the bottle to his lips and returned to the table. Two Texans—truckers, Ethan assumed, by their mesh caps and the pocked scree of stubble on their cheeks, men who often shaved without mirrors—had removed the shirt of the girl at their table and took turns pouring and then licking beer off her breasts. There were men who did that sort of thing, and once you did it you were never anything else. Samantha had held her torn underwear up to the light of the streetlamps through the iced window.

  He placed the beers on the table.

  “So what happens now?” he said.

  Yolanda brushed her hair out of her face with the back of her wrist. Her index and ring fingers were bubbled with burn scars.

  “Any number of things can happen now,” she said. “But I don’t see why any of them should happen here.”

  “No,” Ethan said, as another Texan peeled off his shirt and began dancing some awful boogie to music only he could hear. His boots kicked sawdust from the floor and his belly bounced over his belt. He gritted his teeth and closed his eyes and his hands balled into fists. If the girl who was at his table was twenty yet she didn’t look it as she clapped and laughed and glanced often down at her feet and at the floor.

  “No,” Ethan said again. “This is a terrible place. You’re right, we should go, but I’d like to finish my beer first.”

  His beer, though, was already half gone, and maybe it wasn’t such a good idea, finishing another beer. The noise of the bar and the street and the sound of trucks and dogs in the distance came together like the echo of a festival blown on a loud and strange southern wind. He found himself raising the beer again to his lips.

  Yolanda stood and took his hand. She wore a dress of woven Indian silk and her hair reflected the strewn light of the bar and a raised scar twined from her collarbone down beyond where Ethan could see between her breasts. In the haze of drink and smoke he could not discern any expression in her eyes.

  “Come,” she said. “We can go upstairs. I have a room.”

  She took a step and Ethan followed. The sound everywhere of bottles set against wood. Lifted and set again.

  “Wait,” Ethan said. “I’m sorry. I don’t want to.”

  She turned, stopped, curled a loose strand of hair behind her ear, braced her other hand on her hip.

  “You don’t want to?”

  “I’m sorry if I’ve wasted your time. I’ll pay for it.”

  She stepped forward, reached out to him. Just the tip of her right index finger against his stomach. A whisper of a touch.

  “Of course you will pay for it. But what are you afraid of? Why are you here if not for this?”

  The shirtless Texan passed behind her, dragging his prostitute by the wrist—leading, not following, her to the back door, through the hung curtain and up the dark twist of stairs. Clearly a way he’d walked many times before. Ethan watched Yolanda’s face for judgment.

  “It’s that you seem nice,” he said. “It’s that I like you.”

  “All men like me and I am not nice. But neither matters.”

  Ethan’s tongue felt thick against his teeth and from somewhere, suddenly, there came the distinct scent of urine. He looked down at her hand on his stomach from what seemed a great distance and pushed it away. When she didn’t respond, he reached for his wallet, found it, and gave her what cash he had left.

  “I’ve seen what I came here for,” he said. “I don’t do this. I’m not trying to be rude, but it’s really awful here.”

  He turned and started to move away from her, toward the door. As if it could be that easy, to pay, and turn, and walk away. To escape without regret.

  One, two, and then he was out through the door and back into the street, where again he met the man with the hat, the man who stepped in front of him and put his hand on his chest, his fingers pale, skeletal in the blue neon, and said, “You bought me a drink. Now it is my turn. It is only fair.”

  “Don’t worry about it,” Ethan said. “I’m on my way out.”

  The man did not move aside or lower his hand. Beyond him the twirl of flashers came no more; the police were gone and the street was almost empty. An old man sat in the mud and played the accordion. Somewhere, huddling nurses dulled Samantha into chemical sleep.

  “I’m late,” Ethan said. “I’m very late.”

&nb
sp; “No,” the man said. “Excuse me, but this is unacceptable. You bought me a drink and then you sat with my girl. You sat with my girl and bought her at least two beers. I saw you do it.”

  “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to sit with anybody’s girl.”

  “Please,” the man said again. “My name is Javier. You bought me a drink and you sat with my girl and now it will be a great disrespect if you do not let me buy you a beer.”

  Ethan tried to smile. Not far off, a man was crowing like a rooster. Again the smell of urine, on the enclosed and fetid wind. The accordion player was on his feet now, wandering toward them, playing loud and off key, without harmony or melody.

  “One for the road,” Ethan said.

  AT A TABLE IN THE BACK of the bar near the stairwell, Javier said, “Tonight you made me very sad.”

  He placed two glasses on the table, he produced a bottle of tequila, he took off his hat. Without it his face looked slack and loose, hung from his forehead like fruit gone rotten on the vine. His bottom lip fell away from his teeth and his gums were dry and brown as liver.

  “Listen,” he said. “Tonight you made me very sad. With the things you said about Mexico and with the way you treated my girl.”

  “I didn’t say anything about Mexico.”

  “No, that’s not true. I heard you say that this place was an awful place. Didn’t I hear you say that?”

  Ethan waved generally at the bar before them, the truckers and the prostitutes, the growing quiet and the door farther away than he’d like.

  “I was referring to this cantina, not the country. We have bad bars in the U.S. as well.”

  Javier poured the tequila. There was something wrong with the worm at the bottom of the bottle. It was falling apart, flaking away, whirling and settling like sediment in a snow globe.

  “Drink your tequila,” Javier said.

  Ethan did and Javier refilled his glass. Outside in the street, the man began crowing again. Javier reached down into his pants and pulled out a small tube of Vaseline. He placed it on the table, next to the bottle.

  He said, “I do not understand why you came here? If you did not want to sleep with her? She is beautiful. Or anyway, she is not so bad. Not like some. And she is very kind.”