Battleborn: Stories

by Claire Vaye Watkins

  Michele, squatting on the floor, leans into Manny, so close that Manny can feel the boy’s breath on him. “When she will finish?” Michele asks.

  Looking back, this is the moment when he should have known how truly fucked he was. But this is closer to the boy than he’s ever been, and he can’t help himself. He only wants to touch him. He presses his rag to Michele’s wet T-shirt. It’s impossible, but he feels the boy’s warmth underneath, the striations in the muscles of his chest. He feels his heartbeat. “One hour.” He removes the rag and holds his index finger in the air between them. “One hour.”

  Michele finishes his replacement beer, and another. By the time Darla says good-bye to her Teamster, logs her cash with Gladys, and joins the boy at the bar, he’s a heavy, lethargic kind of drunk, leaning on his elbows, his eyelids wilted. Manny watches Darla rest her head on his shoulder, chewing on the stir straw poking out from her cranberry juice. No doubt she can feel the warmth of him, the pulse of blood in his neck. “Did you know that tug-of-war used to be an Olympic sport?” she says. “I could do that.”

  With his mouth half in his new pint glass, Michele says, “You can do anything. You are a gold mine.”

  And then Darla does something Manny’s never seen her do. She takes Michele’s face in her hands and bends him down to her. She kisses him softly on the forehead.

  • • •

  Day seven. At the motel Michele lies staring at the untouched bed across from him. He hasn’t slept in days, not really. When the red-orange glow of sunset permeates the crack between the two heavy panels of curtain covering the west-facing window, he gets out of bed and showers without soap or shampoo, though there are fresh supplies of both on the shelf in the shower, still sealed in their waxy sanitary paper. He keeps the water so hot that when he finally steps onto the linoleum and wipes the condensation from the bathroom mirror with his palm, his skin is flushed pink where the water began to burn his back and shoulders, his stomach and buttocks and balls. He sits on the edge of the bed, naked.

  He and Renzo have been friends since they were boys playing for the same youth football club. They went to university together, took the same classes, shared a room in the dormitory, then in a basement apartment near campus. Every morning for three years Michele woke up to the shape of Renzo against the opposite wall, or stepped over piles of his soiled clothes to get to the toilet. But already Michele cannot recall Renzo’s hands, or the sound of his laugh, or the exact expression on his face when he was angry. All he can see is this smooth quilted square of bed, this worn white sheet pulled taut over these too-full pillows like dead open eyes in the daylight. All he can hear is the chug of the air-conditioning unit along the west wall, the underwater sound of cars idling in traffic along Tropicana Avenue, and the Search & Rescue cell phone on the nightstand ringing ringing—at long last—ringing.

  • • •

  That night the doorbell buzzes, and Manny looks over his lineup before opening the door. Darla is nowhere to be found. He last saw her on the couch with Michele, who’s missing, too. Manny does not open the door. Instead, he leaves the other girls standing there and finds Gladys in her office. She sits with headphones to her ears, half smiling, her mouth hanging loosely open. The light of Darla’s fifth wheel glows on the switchboard. “Young love,” says Gladys.

  The doorbell buzzes again. “Come on, Manny,” calls Amy from the lobby. “Let’s get this show on the road.”

  Manny motions to Gladys. With the same reluctance with which she pauses her tape of the previous day’s General Hospital to log cash, Gladys takes the headphones off and stretches them over Manny’s head, nestling the coarse black foam over his small ears. Darla’s voice comes through the crackle and fuzz of the old intercom.

  “You don’t have the fucking Academy Awards in Italy? That’s crazy. I love the Academy Awards. Ask me a year.”

  “I don’t, ah . . .”

  “A year, a year. Ask me. Go on.” A game she plays with all of them.

  “Nineteen ah, seventy . . . four?”

  “Godfather II.” A pause. Manny pictures Michele’s smooth, perpetually puzzled face. “That’s what won Best Picture that year. Ask me another.”

  “Okay. Nineteen ninety . . . one?”

  “Easy. Silence of the Lambs. Too easy, none from the nineties.”

  “Nineteen fifty-two?”

  “That would be . . . The Greatest Show on Earth. DeMille.”

  “Nineteen thirty-eight?”

  “You Can’t Take It With You. Fucking classic Capra. Funny. Sad. Optimistic. One of my favorites.”

  “You are very good.”

  She can do Best Actor and Best Actress, too. The boy wouldn’t know the difference if she were making them up, but she’s not. She can list them all, every single year, forward and backward, which she does, she says, in her head when she’s standing in the lineup or straddling a new client or lying in bed trying to sleep, listening to the shrieks of the peacocks chasing one another around the coop.

  There’s a faint rustling sound in the headphones. Manny hears Darla gasp, then say, “Shit, Mikey, where’d you get that?”

  “They gave it to me, to live, to wait for Renzo.”

  “How much do you have?” The intercom crackles.

  “I am not sure. Here.” A longer pause. The doorbell buzzes again.

  “There must be nine, ten grand here. What—”

  The connection fizzles, submerging Darla’s voice in static. Manny shakes the cord furiously. He presses the headset to his ears so hard they sting. When the connection returns Michele is saying, “Come, ah, with me. To Italy.”

  Manny presses his hand to his heart. That stupid boy.

  The doorbell buzzes, long and loud, and for a moment it is all Manny can hear.

  “I will come tomorrow,” Michele says. “And we will go.” Dumb, big-eyed Michele. “We, ah, fly home,” he is saying. “Tomorrow.”

  Before she can answer, Manny presses the speaker button. “Darla,” he says. “The lineup. Now.”

  When Manny finally opens the door, the chunky man who’s been buzzing spins his keys on his index finger and steps inside, tonguing a monstrous divot of tobacco down in his bottom lip. He picks Darla, though she barely bothers to look at him. What did Manny expect? Michele, this fat fuck, they’re all the same, stumbling in from the middle of nowhere, trying to fill the empty space in them with her.

  In the morning, after feeding the peacocks, Manny says a little prayer and then steps into Darla’s room, where she’s watching a black-and-white movie. She motions him to her and they lie together on the twin bed, head to toe. He says, “What are we watching?”

  “You Were Never Lovelier,” she says. “Fred Astaire. Rita Hayworth. It’s public access.”

  Manny rests his cheek on the tops of her bony feet. Rita Hayworth spins through Buenos Aires, all sheen and tinsel. “Honey,” he says finally, “you really like this boy?”

  Darla keeps her eyes on the screen. “Is that why you came in here?”

  “He’s been through some shit.”

  She shrugs. “Him and everyone else around here.” She shifts her feet under the blanket. “You know I love you, Manny. You’ve been hella good to me. But that boy is my ticket out of here.”

  “Girl, this is for real. You’re gonna hurt somebody.”

  “Hurt somebody? What happened to ‘Give ’em a little attention’? What happened to ‘Make them feel better than their girlfriends, better than their wives, better than they are’? You don’t have to touch these men, Manny. You don’t have to fuck their sorry asses. You sit out there stroking your goddamn peacocks, writing letters to Jim about what a good boy you’ve been, how much money you’ve made him, hoping he won’t die on you. You come inside to sign the paychecks, to tell me I might hurt somebody? Too late, old man. I been hurtin
g them. And you taught me how.”

  • • •

  When Michele leaves the La Quinta the next night, he leaves it for good, Renzo’s backpack laid out on his bed. Amy opens the door before he buzzes, and takes him to the bar. “Have a seat, baby. Budweiser?”

  “Yes. Please.”

  She puts a beer on a napkin and beside it sets a little shot glass filled to the top with brown liquor. “For courage,” she says. Michele drinks it and pats the bundles of twenty-dollar bills in the pockets of his cargo shorts. It’s all there, the Search & Rescue money from the teller machine, the two thousand dollars his parents wired him, his own money. Renzo’s money. He’s made up his mind. He can’t go back to Genoa. His flight leaves in the morning. He’ll buy a plane ticket for Darla. An engagement ring. Put a security deposit on an apartment in another city, away from his family. Away from Renzo’s friends. God, Renzo’s family. He feels his new life folded inside his pockets. Yes, a whole new life for nine thousand American dollars, he believes this. A new life with a woman there to busy his hands, to pour his drinks, to help him forget. A life where he came to America alone. Or not at all.

  He waits. The night pulls on. He reaches around the bar for the tap and refills his own glass when he needs it. Men come and go around him, but each time the bell reverberates through the building it’s the old woman who opens the door for them. He waits for Darla, but she never comes. When he asks about her, none of the girls will answer him. His head is hot and clouded and his cab isn’t coming until morning. He doesn’t know what else to do. He walks outside through the dust and gravel to Darla’s fifth wheel and knocks on the door and then the windows. The lights are off but through the blinds he can see the paper-lined drawers of her dresser pulled half-open and empty, and the bed where he last saw her, stripped bare. He looks in the other trailers. He calls for her. There is no answer.

  Somewhere in the night Amy comes and pours more shots. She lines them up on the bar like tiny monuments. They drink them together, one after another. “Where is she?” he says finally, a stinging in his voice.

  She pours them another round. “Here.”

  “Tell me.”

  “I don’t know,” she says. “She was just gone. I swear.”

  Near dawn, Manny appears from the darkness of the hallway and puts his hands on Michele’s shoulders. “Walk with me, honey.”

  As he follows Manny out the back door, beyond the lights and sounds of the compound and into the desert, Michele looks to the sky. So this is what Renzo looked upon as he died, naked and faceup in the dirt: the wide brightening sky, the fading stars, the waning moon white like a jaw on the horizon. A peacock caws. A part of him—the part that speaks in a ghost’s voice—knows he’ll never see Darla again.

  • • •

  The peacock coop is shaded from the pink-purple of dawn by palm leaves and canvas overhead. The air is thick with the scents of seed and dust and bird.

  The boy hesitates before coming inside. “These are, ah, your pets?”

  “Not mine, my boss’s. I hear you’re headed out of town. You’re leaving.”

  “Yes, I go back to Italy.”

  “And you think you’re taking Darla with you.”

  “She, ah, would like to leave. She has told me.” A bird rustles in its nest. “I, ah, like Darla.”

  “I liked her, too,” says Manny.

  “I love her.”

  “Honey, I know. But she didn’t love you, okay?”

  “She does,” he says, though he says it like a question.

  “American girls, you don’t know how they are. All they care about is money, okay? Especially these girls. Don’t you know? It’s all business. Even with Darla.”

  “Where is she?”

  Manny combs his fingers through a trough of seeds, letting the breeze winnow away the empty shells. “Don’t worry about it.”

  “Tell me where is she.”

  “This is a business, kid. She had somewhere else to be.” There is a stillness pulled tight between them. Outside, dawn lightens the landscape but the last dregs of night linger in the coop. “They found your friend, didn’t they?”

  Michele picks at the chicken wire. “Yes.” Then quickly, “No. They said he is dead. They stopped looking.”

  He turns away and hooks his fingers through the chicken wire. His broad shoulders start to tremble. He begins to shake the entire wall of the coop back and forth, harder and harder, until Manny fears he might snap the old two-by-fours. The birds, startled from their roosts, squawk and dart around, frenzied, among them the bright albino flash of White Pine. All the while Michele wails, a feral, guttural sound.

  “Fuck, kid,” says Manny, too quiet to be heard. “Come on.” He pulls Michele back and turns the boy to face him. Michele’s face is wet and slick where he’s bloodied his nose against the fence. Manny embraces him. The boy writhes at first, then goes limp and lets his head fall to Manny’s shoulder. He is sobbing.

  “My boss, Jim,” Manny says, maybe just to have something to say. “The one who owns these birds? He’s dying, too. Half the time he doesn’t even know who I am. You think it’s not going to happen, and then. But these girls—”

  “I, ah, have to take her,” Michele says, shrugging him off. “I love her.”

  Manny takes Michele by his shoulders and turns him gently to face the yellow lights of the ranch in the distance. “Kid,” he says softly. “Look. There’s no love in there. Trust me.”

  Manny lets his arms wrap around the boy’s waist and presses him close again, from behind. For a moment—just a moment—the birds are still and Manny feels warmth against him.

  Michele wrenches away, shaking his head. “No—”

  “She never cared about you,” says Manny, hot with want, walking toward the kid. Burning. Michele shoves him back, hard. The peacocks are screeching now, and flapping, but there’s nowhere for them to go. Manny comes at him still. “She didn’t. You’re a kid.” The boy tries to leave, groping drunk for the gate in the half-light. “A stupid, sad, foreign kid with a dead friend and too much money. That’s all you are, understand? I did you a favor.”

  Later, Manny will say it happened quick—the swing so fast it was a blur, the boy all sweet inertia, a dervish, and the rake’s prongs just a flash. Then he left, waited for his cab on the side of the road and never came back. But in truth Manny sees everything slow. The boy’s arched back. The contours of his ribs through his T-shirt. The blood around his nose and mouth already maroon with coagulate. His triceps made taut by the weight of the tool. The swing misses Manny so wildly that he doesn’t even move his feet. Michele wrenches the rake’s metal teeth into White Pine’s chest.

  For an instant the air is filled with the report of the sternum snapping. Michele’s never seen a bird like this. The snowy feathers redden as blood wells up around the prongs. He feels the give of the meat as he plies the rake from the bird’s breast. Its beak opens and closes, leaking the tight sorrowful cry of a baby, a cry that will come to mean America.

  WISH YOU WERE HERE

  It begins with a man and a woman. They are young, but not so young as they would like. They fall in love. They marry. They have a child. They buy an adobe house in a small town where all the houses are adobe. The McDonald’s is adobe. The young man is named Carter. Carter often points to the adobe McDonald’s as proof of what a good decision they made in moving away from the city. The woman, Marin, is also glad they’ve moved here, but she misses her friends, and the constant sound of city traffic whispering like the sea. She feels this little town tries too hard.

  As soon as Carter and Marin learn they’ve conceived the child, they begin to argue about it. What will they feed it, what will they teach it, what of this world will they allow it to see? They fight about these things before the child is more than a wafer of cells. Before the child is anything, it i
s a catalyst for fights.

  All the fights are the same fight: Carter wants to be sure Marin will change for their child. She has irresponsible habits. She eats poorly. She never exercises. She is terrible with money. She smokes and watches too much TV and gets bored easily and antagonizes people at parties.

  Carter used to be fine with her habits. They were the things he once loved about her. Marin points this out, many times. She asks who it is he thinks he married. A child changes things, he says. A child is sacrifice. This is inarguable, and eventually she gives up arguing it. Each day he has a new stream of questions about what kind of mother she will be.

  Does she plan on using disposable diapers?

  Of course not.

  Will she allow the child to watch television?

  Only in small amounts. No. No. Not at all.

  Will she use a microwave to heat the child’s food?

  Never.

  When he was a boy, Carter says, his family had a garden where they grew fresh fruits and vegetables. He’s told Marin about this garden, many times. The garden was monstrously fecund. His mother spent days and days in their basement, canning its yields. He wants to know, Will she garden? Will she can?

  Of course, she says.

  Why does she say this? She doesn’t know. She is not willing to can.

  Marin never cooks. For dinner, she likes to make herself cereal or cheese and crackers or half an English muffin with mayonnaise and a microwaved egg on top. This is another thing that will have to change. Carter never cooks either, but this is not something that will have to change. Carter has seven brothers and sisters and when he was a boy, he says, his mother made them all a healthy, hot meal, every single night. She never used a microwave.

  When he was a boy, Carter says, his family never ate out. He and Marin are always eating out. Their refrigerator is crammed with wire-handled Chinese takeout boxes and containers of pasta with the lids pinched on and Styrofoam clamshells of crab cakes and vegetable quesadillas and leftover restaurant steaks wrapped in aluminum foil. Marin pretends to be apologetic about these—it’s just that they’re so busy, she says. But she likes eating out. She is comforted by the choreography of a restaurant. And she likes to bring the leftover steaks to bed and gnaw on them, cold, while she watches TV.