“Sorry?”
“Yes. Sorry. Really.”
“You insincere prick.”
It was an argument he wasn’t going to win, that was clear. She had singled him out as an adequate substitute for the guy who had fucked her over, and there was nothing he could do about that He bowed elaborately in a small effort to save face, then left the Lost Cause by the back door, fighting nausea.
The woman wasn’t willing to accept his retreat. She followed him out into the weedy field behind the bar and down the steep banks of the arroyo that tunneled under a railroad trestle—his shortcut back to his office. Thinking that he had taken enough humiliation at the hands of this woman, he decided to wait for her and give her the confrontation she wanted. He’d never hit a woman before, but equal opportunity was a two-way street, he reasoned. He was near the bottom of the arroyo where the greasewood bushes and ocotillo were tall and thick. The woman made her way down the embankment—not tentatively but quick and sure-footed, and this athleticism made him think twice about the wisdom of confronting her. When she was within a hundred feet, he saw the missionary adrenaline in her eyes. He back-pedaled, turned, and ran. Even so, she gained on him. But just as he broke into a full sprint, he stepped into a rabbit burrow and went down, his ankle exploding with pain.
The woman stood over him, digging into her kangaroo pack as if looking for some private, feminine thing. The tiny, snub-nosed revolver she drew out of it fit her hand as comfortably as a tube of lipstick. “I won’t take it anymore,” she said. “Not from any of them, and certainly not from you. ”
He cringed and rolled away from the righteous steel finger of the tiny pistol. It was pointed at his head. He offered it alternative targets on the meatier backside of his anatomy. He covered his head with his arms and hands. A small-caliber bullet in the brain was a terrifying thing: he might vegetate in an irreversible coma absorbed in hellish dreams for twenty years before he died. And given the subjective nature of the mind, twenty years might easily translate into eternity. The horrors of hell, he believed, were very real and always close at hand. A fall-en-away Catholic—though no Catholic, as the Jesuits often observed, ever falls completely away—he made the sign of the cross on his forehead with his thumb, giving himself emergency absolution.
When the shot came, as he knew it would, he felt nothing for several seconds. Then a burning shaft of pain, as if a white-hot poker had been laid across his bare shoulder, made him scream. The scream was involuntary. It embarrassed him. It was high-pitched, unmanly, without timber—an infantile shriek, a frightened primate’s formless vocalization. He rolled over, the flats of his hands held up as if they could catch bullets. “Ho now!” he said. “Don’t! Jesus!” The words were his but the voice was not. Somewhere behind these bursts of sound, a calmer part of him hoped no one besides this woman was listening. “Don’t kill me!” he begged, his hands up and moving. He’d experienced some bad depressions after his wife left, and had toyed with the idea of ending it all, but now he saw that life was sweet and necessary. He wanted to live. Life—weird and frightening and tiring and repetitive as it was—was good.
The drone of cicadas answered his plea. He braced himself and sat up. The woman was sitting in the weeds, holding the gun carelessly in her lap. “I’ve decided against it,” she said.
“Thank Christ,” he whispered to himself, like an amazed car dealer who had just sold a lemon. He decided to press his luck. “I promise I won’t report this. I was out of line. I admit it. It was my fault. I see that now. But really, I think I should go to a hospital.”
She raised the gun. She looked at the small revolver as if holding wordless dialogue with it. “I hate guns, really,” she said. “I supported the Brady bill.”
“Oh, yes! I did too!” he quickly agreed, happy to have found common ground.
She looked at him, almost shyly, as if she had seen something in him that should not be seen. “I can’t take you to a hospital,” she said. “They have to report gunshot wounds. It’s the law.”
He kept his eye on the gun. “Okay, fine. Look, let’s let bygones be bygones,” he said. “It’s not a bad wound. It’s just a scratch. I can take care of it myself.” He felt faint. A film of greasy sweat glistened on his face. His arms were tingling.
“No, you need attention,” she said. “I’ll take you to my apartment.”
He sagged. He could hear his blood’s strong arterial roar.
“Will you agree to that?” she asked.
“Oh, please,” he said as if waving off a second helping of a rich dessert. “Don’t trouble yourself. I’m fine. Really.”
The gun wobbled in her hand, the barrel cutting zees in the air. “I can’t go to jail. I just can’t—I have two children at home. Rolfe refuses to send child support.”
“Rolfe?” He saw a reassuring character trait emerge: The Mother. The Madonna. The Homemaker. The Giver, not the Taker, of life.
“Rolfe is my ex,” she said. “The bastard who gave me this.” She pulled up her sweatshirt, then her jogging bra. She pointed with the gun barrel to striated scars above her left nipple. Someone—Rolfe—had tried to brand her. “He did it with his salad fork. Pretty, isn’t it?”
An impersonal mask hardened her expression again. The awful migration of conscious personality left vacuums in her eyes. A faraway train, the afternoon Amtrak, gave a lengthy blast of its horn. Two longs, a short, followed by a long. Did railroad men want to visit loneliness and despair upon the land with their great melancholy horns? No no, oh no, it grieved—and he felt abandoned in a dark and lonely place without hope or luck or the last-minute clarity of grace.
The gun drifted down again. It occurred to him that he could easily reach out and snatch it away from her, but he was wounded and felt light-headed, while she was athletic and supercharged with craziness. If he made a move, she might empty the revolver into him. He knew that if he survived this, he would emerge with a severely downgraded opinion of himself.
The woman’s arm stiffened suddenly as she leveled the gun directly at his crotch. He felt the blood drain from his head. He saw the darkness behind the daylight—a consequence of the heightened vision of the doomed. “I suppose you think you can do me, now that you’ve seen my breasts,” she said.
He caught himself thinking this over. “Do you?” he said, three seconds too late. “I never thought that! I wouldn’t have. I mean, Jesus, what do you take me for? I respect you, I sincerely respect you!”
Her breasts were lovely: sturdily conical and tipped with pink rosebuds. The unfortunate thought—that the salad-fork tattoo only made them more interesting—he was sure was readable in his face. And now he had broken a drenching sweat. He could smell his bitter vapors.
“Shut up,” she said, taking aim. “I think I know when I’m being manipulated. I’ve gone to graduate school in manipulation.”
She approached him. Her eyes were bright and unblinking. She nudged his crotch with the gun barrel. He felt his genitals make the anatomical equivalent of a heart-stopping scream. They tightened and shriveled into microscopic pods—no doubt an evolutionary duck-and-cover cringe meant to let the hopeful tribes of mankind survive crisis and continue.
“Gee, looky there,” she said, suddenly cheerful again. “You’ve wet yourself!” She raised the gun and held it against his temple as she watched the rapidly expanding stain.
He looked down at his crotch, also surprised. The body had its own agendas. “Looks like I’ve made your day,” he said, disgusted with himself but suddenly very calm.
The afternoon Amtrak clattered frantically across the trestle. Passengers in the Sightseer Lounge waved at them. They believed they were witnessing a picturesque southwestern tryst—secret lunchtime lovers meeting at the bottom of a charming arroyo.
The roar and clatter of the train bullied everything else from his mind. He sat still, the barrel of the woman’s small pistol pressing a tiny O into the thin skin of his temple.
Abruptly, she put her gun away
and stood up. “I have a first-aid kit in my car,” she said. She did some stretching exercises for her hamstrings and calves. He watched melons of lively gluteal muscle lift and tighten her shorts. A vein in her calf stood out with pre-varicose intensity. She had slim ankles, a patch of hot-pink razor bums rising up the inside of each.
The arroyo hummed with a million cicadas, and it seemed to him that he could hear each one individually. A breeze moved in the ocotillo, the tall flowering stalks swaying voluptuously. She turned to face him and he saw, with a surge of gratitude, that her madness had subsided. She was relaxed, and a bit concerned, though not precisely contrite. She was not going to kill him, he knew this now, and he wanted to kiss her hand.
“I’m not sorry, you know,” she said. “They might put me away again for a while, to stabilize my medication, but I did not instigate. Or do you feel I am mistaken?”
“No, no,” he said hastily. “I instigated. It was me. I’m the one who should be sorry.”
“Should be? Then, you’re not?"
He bit his tongue. A bird with bright-red chevrons under its wings flew between them. He believed he and the bird had exchanged a microsecond glance. He felt he could have counted its feathers. The pain of the wound—a hot, steady throb—did not distract him. If anything, it sharpened his senses. He felt doubly alive. His ability to smell things, which had been wrecked by thirty years of Pall Malls, came back, bringing him the heady strangeness of a thousand subtle emanations. He felt overwhelmed with gifts. Life was not merely good, it was explosively good; it was singular, it was everything, it had no counterpart. Passionate tears of gratitude dripped from his chin. He was glad to be alive; not glad, ecstatic. This was pure gift: the afternoon, the woman, the wound—all of it. He’d been on the roller coaster of death and redemption, a five-minute ride that had taken an eternity. An educational trip, superior and more instructive than any sky-diver’s adrenaline rush. And he knew he would come out of it a better person. That which does not kill you makes you stronger. This Nietzschean sentiment always seemed bogus to him, especially since it had the cachet these days of a bumper sticker. But now he believed it.
She saw his tears and was affected by them. Her own tears came then, and he saw each one of them as they found pathways in the ridges beside her nose. He saw them, and smelled them, their human salt, their bittersweet strength. He smelled the dirt he sat on, the creosote bush that shaded him, the dry husks of dead insects scattered around him. He smelled his own blood, caking on his shoulder. He smelled his urine. And he smelled her—her perfumed sweat and her minted breath. He smelled the fragrance, stimulated by exercise and the desert heat, radiating from the dignified mound of her sex. He was sorry he had spoken crudely of that lovely mound, the mons venus, as the medical texts called it, sorry he made it the object of an ancient and worn-out contempt.
“I was wrong to speak as I did,” he said with a formality he believed the situation required.
“And I was wrong to shoot you,” she replied, also recognizing a need of formality. They had both been something less than fully human; now, in this moment, they were something more. He felt exhilarated. He believed she did, too.
She stepped toward him, placed a heatless kiss—the ethereal buss of an angel—on the top of his head. He caught her hand in his and pressed it to his lips. It was like the final reconciliation of extremes; a moment prefiguring the end of a worn-out world.
He felt suddenly bold, even inspired. “Lunch tomorrow?” he offered.
She studied his face, searching for insincerity. “Why not?” she said. “Same place, a few minutes before noon—before the lunch-hour crowd.”
She smiled then for the first time and it was dazzling with the unguarded brightness of restored sanity. She was lovely in a way that humbled him. He watched, not daring to breathe, as she cinched her kangaroo pack tight, the outline of the revolver visible under the Gore-Tex. Then she turned abruptly and charged up the steep embankment.
He felt light and porous. He felt defenseless and glad. He stood, shaky at first, then climbed out of the arroyo and into the new world that lay ahead.
Experience
Consider, if you will, the ancient Egyptians,” Stan Duval said, just as we were sitting down to dinner. “They had the correct attitude, in my humble estimation.”
I usually acted as though I hadn’t heard him. He made me nervous; I couldn’t get used to him being around. My mother had married him in Yuma, Arizona, a year ago. I couldn’t figure out why. He was twenty years older than she was and he always wore his green pin-striped suit at the dinner table even if he’d been walking around the house in stained underwear a half hour earlier.
Stan always characterized his estimations and assessments as humble. “In my humble way, I believe I am one of the most valued employees at Ryan.” He’d said this more than once, as if he suspected we had our doubts. He was in charge of an equipment shed at Ryan Aircraft. His job was to check out machine tools, and then check them back in again. Inventory Control Engineer. That’s what he called himself.
Mom had fixed fried chicken, lima beans, and scalloped potatoes, Stan’s favorite meal. He made a point of bringing up obscure subjects at the dinner table in order to educate us. Mom had quit school after the eighth grade, and I was going to be a freshman at Lowmont High School, a school Stan had no respect for.
“What do you mean, dear?” Mom said. She didn’t care about Egypt, but she knew Stan liked to be drawn out after he’d made a thought-provoking statement. It was a routine of theirs.
Mom’s eyes were glazed. She was still young-looking and almost pretty, even though she’d gotten thick around the hips and had developed a sizable double chin.
Stan leveled his fork at her. “Firstly, their social organization—sine dubio, ” he said. “Secondly, their thoroughly worked-out religious bureaucracy. Thirdly, their corps of civil-engineering professionals, par excellence. Those chaps knew who they were and had no doubt about their self-worth.”
He forked some potatoes into his mouth and chewed them thoughtfully, jaws rotating side to side, camel-style, his heavy-lidded, Levantine eyes studying the ceiling. His phony British accent got on my nerves. Stan had grown up in Boise, Idaho and had lived in California most of his life. He’d never been to England, or anywhere else, as far as I knew.
“They had slaves,” I said.
“Ah, slaves,” he said. The word seemed to stir up favorable memories for him. The long syllable slid down his tongue like gravy. “As an institution, slavery was not the social horror the present-day liberal thinker makes it out to be,” he said, smiling abruptly.
The accent was bad enough, but it was this smile that unnerved me most about him. Out of that gray, half-collapsed face came a sudden specter of long, black-edged teeth that animated his entire being with a parody of life-loving vigor. It was a smile meant to charm and convince. But it was as if a corpse in its coffin had leered flirtatiously at the passing line of mourners.
“Take some more chicken, Tony,” Mom said to me. “There’s more than enough for your lunch tomorrow.”
“I’m not hungry,” I said. In fact, my stomach was jumpy. Dillard Burdett was coming over in a few minutes. We were going to have Cokes in my basement room. My stomach was jumpy because Dillard’s sixteen-year-old cousin, Wanda Schnell, from Escondido, was coming with him. Dillard had told me incredible stories about Wanda. Once, when he was visiting his aunt and uncle in Escondido, he and Wanda went out into a grove of avocado trees where she took off her underpants for him.
“I—saw—it—all,” Dillard had said. He spoke gravely, with arresting eloquence. “I—shit—you—not—Tone,” he said.
“Did you show her yours?” I had asked. This question was out of line, but my curiosity got the better of me. Dillard, like me and most of our friends, preferred the mutual presumption of experience. Innocence and fear, our true condition, could not be admitted. This was the unstated given that made our friendship possible. We never challenge
d each other’s boasts in the area of sexual experience, though we understood that none of us had any. Of course the boasts had to be reasonable—flights of fantasy were shouted down instantly.
“What do you think, turd?” he’d said, annoyed with me. We dropped the subject, lit cigarettes.
“The slaves of Egypt were well taken care of,” Stan continued. Stan was a speedy eater. He took large bites and worked his sideways-grinding jaws fast. He usually finished minutes ahead of me, and I was often reprimanded for inhaling my food and bolting from the table. But I couldn’t finish tonight. I was too jumpy.
Stan lit a Chesterfield and blew a cloud of smoke into the hanging lamp above the table. “Slaves were highly prized possessions. And most certainly they were not excessively abused. You do not abuse your valuable possessions. It would make no sense to do so,” he said. “Are there any vestiges of doubt in your mind, Antonio?”
I hated my name. The way Stan dragged it out made me hate it more. He gave it the correct foreign pronunciation. It made me feel like an immigrant. My real father was an immigrant, a barber from Palermo who now cut the hair of movie stars in Beverly Hills. “Georgio Castellani—Modem Hair Styling.” He wore his hair long, like the TV wrestler, Baron Leone. Sometimes he tied the back into a ponytail.When I visited him, which was three or four times a year, he would give me a haircut that made me feel like a scented and oiled Sicilian hit man. I’d seen him just a week ago, and my hair was still squared-off and crisp. I could still smell pine trees and lemons.
“I guess not,” I said, wanting to leave the table. I didn’t like to argue with Stan. He was an educated man, having graduated from Cal Poly at San Luis Obispo. He spouted Latin at us as if it were our second language.
“Quae nocent docent, ” he said. ‘“That which hurts, teaches.’ You need to be a realist in this turbulent world of ours. Slavery was cradle-to-grave welfare, all needs and wants attended to.” He flashed his dark smile engagingly. “Now, Antonio, I’ve often mentioned how adamantly I am against the socialistic welfare system inspired by our late president, Franklin Delano Roosevelt. However, in ancient Egypt the social structure required a ready-and-willing workforce of considerable proportions. And remember, the Egyptians did not have the gasoline-powered machinery to do their work for them such as is available to the so-called modem world.” He leaned back in his chair and puffed his cigarette. He held it in the European style—cradled between thumb and forefinger, palm up. He blew a cloud of smoke toward the ceiling and squinted into it as if he could see pyramids and pharaohs assembling in the haze.
Borrowed Hearts Page 34
