Battleborn: Stories

by Claire Vaye Watkins

  The one who calls himself Tom suggests they walk up to the Bellagio to watch the fountain show. The girls glance at each other and say, Sure, as they do again at the show when one young man—Greg, is it?—offers them a cup of orange soda clandestinely cut with vodka. Lena’s mouth twists as she releases the straw, but our girl urges the straw up to her lips again, and Lena drinks more heartily. They pass the cup back and forth. This is what they came for.

  Soon, the industrial fountain spigots emerge from the glassy black surface of the water, and somewhere strings begin to hum. The song is “Rondine al Nido,” which pleases our girl, not because she recognizes it as such—she doesn’t—but because she wants Lena to experience the pure painful awe of the bright-lit Bellagio fountains and she believes this is best conveyed when the cannon blasts are paired with something classical, something like the agony of ill-fated love.

  After the show, the boy who calls himself Greg turns to them. He is large, with the overexpressed muscles that come from a university rec center, so unlike the aching, striated parts of a man who works for a living, as our girl’s stepfather would say. Greg asks, How old are you guys?

  Old enough, says Lena, and this makes our girl proud.

  Greg laughs. We’ll see about that.

  The boys ask them more questions—where they live, where they go to school—and meanwhile, one of them replenishes the soda cup. Our girl lies up a city life for them: moves them into adjacent two-story houses near the Galleria Mall, skips them ahead to senior year and enrolls them in a school whose football team once came out and trounced their own.

  They drink. They walk. The boys say they go to UCSB, though our girl will misremember it as UCSC, so that in the coming years, these boys and what they do to them will combine with far-off Santa Cruz, California, and years later, lying beside the sensible man with the devastating laugh—the first man she will not see beyond—the boys will have the scent of damp redwood and the sharp angles of that region’s mountain lions, which she once read about.

  In her bed, the candles dimming behind her, she will say nothing of these associations. She will be barely aware of them. She’ll tug the top sheet out from under her, absently touch her fingers to the dampness left between her legs, and say, They had a room.

  But the sensible man—being who he is—will find the angles in her face. The redwood wet will be in his throat when he asks her, You went there? Alone? You were just a girl.

  I had Lena, she’ll say. My friend.

  Because he’ll know what’s coming, this will only make it worse.

  • • •

  The boys lead the girls to their hotel, where entering once meant passing through the jaws of a fearsome gold lion and now means nothing. Warm with sugar and liquor, our girl wants badly to tell Lena this—about the original lion and the superstitious Chinese tourists—because tonight’s lion is the only lion Lena has ever known. It seems, for an instant, that if Lena knew about the old lion then at last the miles between Minnesota and Nevada might fold like a sheet, the distance crumpling into closeness, and they would tell each other everything, always.

  But the time for telling passes. In its place is the sudden chemical smell of chlorine and a flash of the too-blue water encircling the statue, and then the girls are met with a blast of air-conditioning and stale cigarette smoke and the noise of the machines inside the MGM Grand.

  The six of them make their way across the floor, toward the hotel’s two towers. The boy called Tom lays his hand on the back of our girl’s neck. As they pass a security guard standing beside a golden trash can, she is possessed by the impulse to sink her fingers deep into the glittering black sand of the ashtray atop it, but she resists this. Behind her, Lena stumbles, rights herself, then stumbles again. The boy called Brad grips her upper arm. Bitch, be cool, he says through his slick teeth.

  Lena walks steadily for several steps, then stops. She has felt his words, more than understood them. She says, I have to pee. Our girl tells Tom, We’ll be right back, and follows her friend to the ladies’ room.

  Lena locks herself in the handicapped stall at the far end of the bathroom and sits on the toilet without taking down her pants. Our girl goes into the stall beside Lena’s and shuts the door. She sits on the toilet in the same way. A woman is washing her hands at the sink, and the automatic faucet blasts in spurts. Lena breathes heavily through her mouth. The woman at the sink dries her hands partially and leaves, the door opening and closing behind the blast of the dryer.

  Our girl reaches her hand underneath the wall dividing them. Lena considers the fingers extended toward her, then laces her own between them. They say nothing for a long time, only hold hands under the stall. Lena begins to cry, softly. Aside from the dim noise of the casino making its way back to them, the wet efforts of Lena’s nose and throat are the only sounds heard.

  I don’t feel good, says Lena. I miss Kyle.

  Are you going to throw up?

  No, says Lena. Then, Yes. Our girl releases Lena’s hand and leaves her stall, allowing the door to swing shut behind her. She gets on all fours, the tile cool against her palms, and crawls under the partition into Lena’s big handicapped cube. Lena is on her knees leaning over the bowl, her purse on the floor beside her.

  Our girl says, Here, reaching over to lift the toilet seat. As Lena begins to vomit, our girl gathers her friend’s wavy hair in her hand and holds it. Get it out, she says. All out. Between purges Lena emits a mournful language intelligible only to herself, the main theme of which is certainly Kyle.

  Our girl fingers the soft baby hairs at Lena’s nape and says, Shh.

  Eventually, Lena lifts her head slightly. I think I’m ready to go home, she says.

  As though the word has materialized the cloth on her, our girl becomes instantly sensitive to the persisting dampness of her underwear. She sees the Sheetrock bathroom in the back of the pizza parlor. Jeremy the delivery boy. Her stepfather. His long commute to job sites in Vegas. The empty and near-empty potato chip bags swirling around the backseat of his car like deflated Mylar balloons. Then, her memory lurching from shape to shape, there is her mother, hands shaking, unable to sit through a meal without popping up to get him seconds or refill his glass with milk.

  Lena heaves again. Our girl tucks Lena’s hair into her shirt collar. She quickly removes her own shoes, her pants, and then her still-damp underpants. She folds the panties in half and half again and tucks them in the paper-lined metal bin meant for soiled feminine hygiene products and their wrappings.

  Lena moans into the toilet bowl. I want to go home, she says.

  Naked from the waist down, our girl stoops and fishes the car keys from Lena’s purse.

  No, you don’t, she says, and begins re-dressing.

  As the girls wash and reassemble themselves at the sinks, their eyes meet in the mirror. Our girl nods and says, You’re fine. Let’s have a good time.

  Lena smiles weakly. I’m fine, she repeats. They return to the casino.

  • • •

  In her bed, she’ll go on. The room, she’ll begin, remembering two queen-size beds with thin synthetic quilted coverlets in mauve and gold. All the lights turned on. No, the light was from the TV. Beer from cans in a torn box sitting on its side at the bottom of a small black refrigerator. But the sensible man will interrupt her.

  Was it all four of them?

  No. And she’ll see in his face relief, the excess of which will force her to turn from him, to the window and the pinkening dawn. One of them left to get pancakes, she’ll say. Allen. I gave him directions to IHOP.

  Three, then, he’ll say, his voice blank as a dead thing. And you two girls.

  We started watching a movie. Something with Halle Berry. Lena said she’d almost done it once with her boyfriend in Minnesota. But.

  Had she?

  No. I told her she
had to get it over with.

  Had you?

  Yes, she’ll say. But not like that.

  What did they do to you?

  She will shake her head, a movement nearly imperceptible. It wasn’t like that. Afterward, mine asked for my phone number. Tom, I think. He said, I really like you. Or something.

  Did he ever call you?

  This question will surprise her, and she will have to pause, trying to remember. No, she’ll say eventually. I gave him the wrong area code. They thought we lived in the city.

  And your friend?

  Lena. She passed out on the other bed. I thought maybe she was faking. I don’t know why. During the movie the big one got on top of her. Brad. He took off her clothes. Her eyes were shut but she was mumbling something. I don’t know what. The other one spread her out, kind of. The big one spit into his hand. I remember that. I was on the other bed, with mine.

  Jesus.

  The other one put his dick by her face. He hit her with it, softly. They called her names. Drunk cunt. Fuck rag.

  Jesus Christ.

  Here, she will stop. Are you sure you want to hear this? she’ll ask. Though she won’t be able to stop even if he asks her to. He’ll nod, slowly.

  Lena woke up, she’ll say, during. She got out of the bed and stood by it. They didn’t try to stop her. She was naked, looking at the floor around her. For her clothes, maybe. Or the keys. But then she stopped and just stood there, looking at me. Tom—or whatever—was already inside me. She was just standing there.

  Now Lena is limp in the light from the hotel television, as though, underneath her splotchy skin, her bones are no longer adequately bound together. She stares at our girl from between the two beds, her naked body like a question she can’t ask, a prayer she can’t recall. Behind Lena, the two young men look to our girl. The big one is shirtless, with his pants splayed open. The other has removed his pants, though he still wears his collared shirt, buttoned up. His bare ass glows blue in the light from the TV and he holds his dick in his hand. She forces herself to wonder what they want from her, though she knows. Permission.

  Once, before Lena got her license, the girls were waiting at the county clinic for Lena’s mother to drive them home, and they found a file folder filled with pictures of diseased genitals mounted on heavy card stock. Lena said her mother used them when she gave sex-ed talks at the high school. Our girl flipped through them. Lena giggled and looked away, saying the pictures were gross. Our girl went on. They were gross, but in a curious, enthralling way, like a topographical map of a place she would never visit. But then there was one photograph in which the photographer, or the doctor—Who takes these pictures? she had wondered suddenly, then thought, A nurse, probably, or an intern—had captured the patient’s thumb and index finger where they held the penis. She could see the man’s grooved thumbnail and a little rind of skin peeling back from the cuticle. It made her wish she weren’t a woman.

  In the hotel room, Lena reaches for her friend. She says her name. The boys look to her too, even the one called Tom, above her. Our girl takes Lena’s hand.

  It’s okay, she says. We’re having fun.

  She urges her friend back to the bed, gently, as though pulling the last bit of something shameful and malignant out through the tips of Lena’s limp fingers.

  Afterward, on the way down to the lobby, our girl watches her own face in the polished doors of the elevator, and then Lena’s, puffed around the eyes and mouth, her hair clumped to one side where they’d poured something on her. Through the summer, the tight circles in which the girls circumnavigate the pizza parlor will overlap less and less each day. Sometimes our girl will be at the oven, watching Lena’s back as she works the line, and the heat will well up in her and she’ll want to cry out. But what would she say? Sometimes, as she cuts a pizza, boiling grease cupped in a piece of pepperoni will spatter up and burn the back of her hand, or her bare forearm. This will bring her some relief.

  That summer, Lena will shrink and yellow. Her eyes will develop a milky film. Even her big teeth will seem to recede into their gums, as though the whole of her is gradually succumbing to the dimensions of their town, its unpaved streets, its irrigation ditches and fields of stinking alfalfa. The four walls of the pizza parlor, the low popcorned ceiling of her mother’s manufactured home. When Jeremy the delivery boy shuffles back to the walk-in where Lena stocks the commissary and asks her to come over to watch his band practice, she’ll say yes, her voice wet with inevitability and exhaustion. The master bedroom of his trailer will start to feel like her own. Jeremy’s love for her will be an unquestioning and simple thing, with rising swells of covetousness. It will be this particular strain of love—that’s what he’ll call it—that makes him hit her for the first time, on the Fourth of July, on the darkened plot of packed dirt in front of a house party where she’d danced too closely with a friend of his. Our girl will watch this from the porch of the house, where a crowd will have gathered. She will do nothing.

  By September, she and Lena will not even nod in the halls. When the announcement comes over the intercom first period, our girl will try to make herself feel the things she is supposed to feel: grief for dead people in buildings she didn’t know existed, sorrow for a place she can’t envision. Deadened, but afraid of the deadening, she will look across the classroom to Lena, hoping to inflict upon herself that sickly shame that the sight of her old friend now evokes, thinking it the least she could do. But Lena—standing humped beside her left-handed desk with her right hand over her heart, crying—will be barely recognizable. This will bring our girl a sturdy rising comfort, a swelling buoyancy: A person can change in an instant. This, almost solely, will take her away from here.

  The loudspeaker will emit a disembodied human breath. Things will never be the same, it will say, as if she needs to be told this. As if she doesn’t know the instability of a tall tower, a city’s hunger for ruin. As if this weren’t what she came for.

  THE PAST PERFECT, THE PAST CONTINUOUS, THE SIMPLE PAST

  This happens every summer. A tourist hikes into the desert outside Las Vegas without enough water and gets lost. Most of them die. This summer it’s an Italian, a student, twenty years old, according to the Nye County Register. Manny, the manager of the Cherry Patch Ranch, reads the story to Darla, his best girl, while they tan beside the pool in the long late sun.

  “His friend found his way back and told the authorities, thank God. Seven days they give this kid to live out here.” Manny checks his watch. “Well, six. Paper’s a day old.”

  “Fucking tourists,” says Darla, lifting her head from Us Weekly. She lies facedown, topless, on a beach towel laid over the sun-warped wooden picnic table she pulled next to Manny’s cracking plastic lounger. Darla has worked at the ranch for two years, nothing to Manny’s fifteen, but longer than most girls last out here, long enough to be called a veteran. She may have tits like a gymnast but she’s smart for twenty and has a round, bright face with a gap between her front teeth that makes her look five years younger—a true asset in this business. Straight men eat her shit up.

  Once, she and Lacy dyed their hair together, the same shade of coppery strawberry blond. Manny warned them it was a mistake. “Bad for business,” he said. “Men want variety.” But he marveled as the very next client to pass through the front door pointed to the two new redheads and asked, “How much for a mother-daughter party?”

  Poor Lacy’s lip began to quiver—as if she just realized she was old enough to be the girl’s mother—but Darla simply slipped her fingers through Lacy’s and said, “What do you think, Momma? Four grand?”

  “Put that shit away,” she says now. “You’re depressing me.”

  Manny lingers on the story of the missing foreigner for a moment longer, more exhilarated than is respectful to a boy likely dying of thirst. He scans the other goings-on of the rednecks and dirt farmers a
nd Jesus freaks in Nye. The Lady Spartans win the three-A state softball championship. Ponderosa Dairy petitions BLM for more land. He can’t be blamed for wanting some excitement around here. He puts the paper under his chair.

  Darla checks her phone and turns over on the picnic table, exposing her small stark breasts to the sun. She folds her magazine back along its spine and leans over to Manny, tapping a picture of a shirtless movie star standing in the Malibu surf, dripping wet. “I met him,” she says. “In L.A. He used to come into Spearmint all the time. One of my girlfriends gave him a lap dance. Said he had a huge cock.”

  “Girl, don’t tell me that. I’m so horny I could rape the Schwan’s man.”

  “I’ll trade you,” she says, slipping her hand gingerly between her legs. “My twat is sore.” She goes back to her magazine. Manny watches the heat waves warp and wobble the mountains in the distance. Six days. Poor kid. Soon, Darla lifts her sunglasses and presses two fingers to her left breast. “Am I burning?”

  Manny presses his fingers to her tit. “A little.”

  “Good.”

  • • •

  That evening, as the sun sets, a cab drops Michele at the ranch. He is twenty, the same age as his missing comrade. He’s a student of civil engineering, a field he chose because he did not have the grades for medicine or the head for law. In a family like his, a boy has only so many options.

  He pauses at the gate and looks up at the sky. A dense swath of stars cuts diagonally across it. If this trip had gone as it was supposed to, he and Renzo would be at the Grand Canyon right now. If everything had not in an instant become so horrifically and hopelessly fucked, they would have flown home in August, and when friends asked about his summer he would have told them of the unfathomable American landscape, the innumerable American drugs, the indefatigable American girls. Or, if he was feeling wistful, he might have said simply, It was beautiful. There were more stars out there than I’ve ever seen.