Desert Blues

by Bill Albert

  Too old, too short.

  Archie neither heard the echo nor saw the fierce look on Enid’s face. He was looking inside and thinking about Archie.

  “I been in the trade for more than forty-five years, man and boy. Since I was a kid working for my old man on the East Side in New York. Forty-five years. Learning it from the bottom up. Started sweeping the floors, pushing racks, making deliveries. Can you imagine? A lifetime. Yeah, sure. I suppose it’ll take me some time to get used to the change, that’s all.”

  He sat up straight, rubbed his hands vigorously and then slapped them together a few times like a basketball coach trying to fire up his team.

  “Right. I shouldn’t worry. You’ll be OK, Archie Blatt! OK! Better than OK, you’ll be GREAT!”

  Then he noticed Enid, and his newfound enthusiasm for Archie Blatt dissolved. His hands collapsed back into his lap.

  “What, babe? What is it?”

  “Nothing,” she said unable to conceal her feelings.

  “It’s going to be OK, really. What’s the matter, aren’t you pleased for me? Gee, at least somebody oughta be happy.”

  “Of course, Archie. Of course, I’m pleased. It’s just a shock. Suddenly to tell me like that. Completely out of the blue.”

  “Like Harold and your father I suppose?”

  “Jesus! Haven’t we been through all that already? What do they have to do with it anyway?”

  “Well, you know, it’s like you had to tell me something and now I have to tell you something. That’s all I mean. Come on, babe, don’t get so mad.”

  She lit a cigarette, all thoughts of quitting long since abandoned.

  “Anyway, that’s the first part. Selling the business. The second part is a little more tricky, but I want you to know that it’s going to be alright. I’ve figured it all out. We’ll just have to make a few sort of minor adjustments.”

  His hands had revived and were weaving the minor adjustments in the air in front of him.

  “Going to be alright? Figured out? Adjustments? What are you trying to tell me, Archie?”

  “Just let me finish, babe. Please. I’ll explain everything. Like crystal. Clear just like crystal.”

  Warily, watching Enid all the time, he began to speak quickly.

  “The thing is that we’re, that is Sarah and I, are going to move out here. To Palm Springs. Now that I don’t have to worry about the business, I figured who needs the cold and the wet back East. Right? The girls are both in college now, thank God, and the doctor says it would be good for Sarah. The dry heat that is. I thought maybe a little place on that new golf course. You know the one called . . . what is it? . . . Eldorado. That’s it, Eldorado.”

  Enid was stunned. The brush-off had come from a completely unexpected quarter. Her father and Harold hadn’t been important. All the worrying for nothing. She felt cheated. She felt stupid.

  Archie didn’t wait for her, he rushed on.

  “I know. I know. Listen, now, please, babe. I’ve thought it out. You and I will simply have to be much more discreet about seeing each other. That’s all there is to it. I’ll still come over, you know, and, but . . . well, going out in town together to dinner and that kind of thing is going to be sort of difficult with Sarah here. I’m sure you can see that. Of course, we can still play golf at O’Donnell, maybe even at Eldorado. I mean, there’s nothing wrong with that, is there? Sarah won’t object to me playing a little golf with friends.”

  Not a brush-off, she thought, more of a re-negotiation. A good business term—re-negotiation. Like with contracts. It meant she wouldn’t have to move out. No Safeway. No waitressing. No trailer park So, why wasn’t she happy?

  “Well?” Archie asked, with a benevolent smile. “Wadda you think?”

  “What do I think?” she replied unsteadily. “What do I think? I don’t know, Archie I need some time to think . . . And, of course, there’s Harold. What about Harold?”

  He opened his arms wide and beamed at Enid. Archie was pleased with himself. Happy almost.

  “Don’t worry, babe, I got something figured out there as well. When the girls were younger I thought they should go away to school. You know, it would have been a lot easier all around. Me working all the time and Sarah not well. But, Sarah, she didn’t like the idea, so they never went. However, I did a lot of investigating at the time and found some great places. He likes horses, right? Well, there was a school in Arizona somewhere. Can’t remember the name. Very progressive and big on riding, tennis, all that kind of stuff. It would be a real adventure for Harold. He’d love it. And, if you needed help or anything like that, of course . . .”

  “Of course,” Enid said distractedly.

  Archie had worked out everything. It was so easy. All her problems solved just like that. She had been silly to worry so much, she told herself. Such a very silly woman.

  Enid and Harold

  The Lifetime I’ve Wasted, The Love That I’ve Tasted

  The funeral was simple. Harold, Enid, John, Charlene, and a man with a shovel to fill in the hole. She couldn’t get a rabbi and in the end decided that Abe could go without one. She cried for herself and because she felt so little. Harold cried for himself and because it reminded him of his parents’ funeral, at which he hadn’t cried. So, despite the odds against it, Abe Cohen had a tearful family send-off. It was what he would have wanted.

  “Well,” said Big John, putting a consoling arm around Enid’s shoulder, “you gotta think that he’s better off this way. He’s gone to a far, far better place.”

  “Sure, honey,” added Charlene solemnly, “outta this pail of tears.”

  “I think,” interrupted Big John, “that’s ‘vale,’ dear. ‘Vale of tears.’”

  “Oh, yeah, that’s right!” Charlene laughed and immediately clapped her hand over her mouth. “I’m sorry, Enid honey. Didn’t mean no disrespect or nothing.”

  Enid didn’t notice. She was still stuck with Big John’s first remark. How, she asked herself, could anyone’s death be better, except perhaps for the living? No more stench of urine. No more having to listen to his stupid self-pity. No more washing his emaciated body. No more inconvenience. Better for her, that was for sure. But, for Abe Cohen? . . . Nothing for Abe Cohen. Six feet under in a place he didn’t know and didn’t like.

  She looked out over the desert which lapped at the low cinder-block wall surrounding the cemetery. The white sand stretched off a few miles to the east until it ran up against the Little San Bernardino Mountains, dark pink in the late afternoon sun. Behind the mourners was the highway and the rubber-tire hum of passing traffic. A tumbleweed jumped the wall and bounced across the cemetery in the hot wind. Caught against a tombstone, its dry arms scratched and rattled against the hard surface. Enid shivered.

  She had found him in the morning. Lying in bed on his back, eyes and mouth fallen open. It wasn’t necessary to take his pulse to know he was dead. Rigid, with skin like yellow wax. There was no mistaking the signs. She couldn’t remember whether she had said goodnight to him.

  She called the doctor and then Harold.

  “Does that mean I can I bring my stuff back?” had been his first question.

  “Harold!” she said, shocked by his indifference, “your grandfather has just died!”

  “I know that,” he replied stolidly.

  She decided it would be impossible to make him feel what he didn’t, what she didn’t. It was just that she thought they both should feel something, besides relief.

  “Does anyone wanna say any last words?” asked the man with the shovel.

  He looked as if he wanted to go.

  “No,” said Enid, wiping her eyes. “No last words. You can fill it in now if you want.”

  They turned and walked toward the car as the first shovelful of dirt thudded on the lid of Abe Cohen’s coffin.

  One of Harold’s
records was blaring out from the small phonograph in the corner of the room. Enid smiled at her nephew, trying her best not to dislike his music. The music was obviously something so very special for Harold.

  “How nice, darling.”

  “Yeah?”

  You could say a lot of things about Howlin’ Wolf, but he didn’t think “nice” was really one of them. Still, Aunt Enid was trying. He had to give her that.

  They stood together in the middle of the empty room, paint brushes held loosely in their hands. Enid wore an old pair of Levis cut off short and a blouse with the tails tied around her waist. Her hair was up and covered with a scarf. She hadn’t worn such clothes for years, since she left Lockheed in ‘49. She had never done any painting. Neither had Harold.

  Through the first thin coat of white paint they could see the roses still pumping out their redness as they struggled to hold onto the light.

  “One more coat don’t you think, Harold darling?”

  “Yeah,” replied Harold, “I think so. One more coat.”

  He was pleased that the room was finally being painted. The roses would be buried, but more importantly the fresh paint made it his room. Not Aunt Enid’s dressing room. Not the room in which his grandfather died. His room. It reassured him and he needed reassurance after what she had said the previous day.

  “But, Harold darling, it’s not only a very good school but it will be fun. They have riding, and they take you on camping trips. You’ll be with lots of kids your own age. And . . .”

  “I don’t wanna go,” he insisted, jaw tight set.

  “It will be fine. Really it will, darling. You will be home for the summer and for Christmas. At Easter they take the entire school down to Mexico. Doesn’t that sound exciting?”

  He wouldn’t answer. Arms folded, he stared at the floor.

  “Harold, there is . . .”

  Enid stopped. She sighed, reached over and ruffled Harold’s hair. He looked up at her, questioning. She grinned.

  “Yeah, I know, darling. I know you don’t want to go. And you know something? You don’t have to. The hell with it! Right? The hell with it all!”

  The decision had been growing since Archie explained the new regime to her the previous Sunday. Then she was so bruised and sick, so preoccupied about her father, so relieved that she and Harold weren’t going to be thrown into the street that she had swallowed her anger and her pride. She persuaded herself that she should at least try it, if only as a temporary arrangement. Besides she had Harold’s future, not to say his present, to consider.

  “You know something, babe? It’ll be better than before. Sure. Now I’ll be able to see you any time I want. Don’t have to wait for an excuse to get away and then fly 2,000 miles. Won’t that be great? We can even go up to LA together once in a while.”

  “That’s just wonderful, Archie.”

  He didn’t hear the defeated irony. He was too busy promoting his new life.

  He left on the plane for St. Louis the next day. He said it was business. Something to do with the final arrangements of the sale. She was still having her period.

  After his departure Enid’s doubts and misgivings grew increasingly corrosive. Archie’s wife being right there in Palm Springs, having to hide away, an unpalatable secret in a very small town. Archie sneaking over to see her—no, not to see her, to screw her—that was what it was going to be. No more restaurant dinners, evenings at the Chi Chi, going out to see friends. None of those frills. At long distance and three or four times a year it had settled into a perfectly reasonable arrangement. Up close and all the time she wasn’t at all sure. It was too near Sylvia’s version of her life. But then there was the Cathedral City trailer park, nylon uniforms, cash registers, swollen feet. She had looked again and convinced herself that it really would be good for Harold to go away to school. He would like it when he actually got there. Sitting across from him, watching his face, she had realized that it didn’t matter if it was good for him or even good for her, she couldn’t send him away.

  “You ready?” she asked.

  He nodded and picked up the can. They dipped their brushes and, to the howling of the Wolf, gruff and loud, explaining in twelve softly jolting bars why this was his last affair, they began to put on another coat of paint.

  This time the roses disappeared almost completely.

  All rights reserved, including without limitation the right to reproduce this ebook or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright 1994 by Bill Albert

  ISBN 978-1-4976-3315-5

  This edition published in 2014 by Open Road Integrated Media, Inc.

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  New York, NY 10014

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  BILL ALBERT

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