by Lewis Shiner
Paul was still awake. He had a thick, bound document open on his lap, and he was staring into space. Madelyn undressed with her back to him, acutely self-conscious as she pulled a nightgown over her head.
She got into bed and said, “Do you want to talk?”
“About what?”
She ignored the warning and plunged ahead. “Are you disappointed in your job? Is it not working out the way you wanted it to?”
“Where did you get that idea? From your father?”
“From you. You don’t seem happy.”
“It’s not a day-to-day happy kind of job. It’s a long slog, hope for some satisfaction at the end kind of job.”
He was not going to let her pull anything out of him. “Don’t stay up too late,” she said. He nodded and picked up the document.
She lay down, facing away from him, and closed her eyes. I tried, she thought. At least I tried.
*
Alex barely remembered the last time he’d seen Cole in the flesh. He’d driven to Austin one weekend to see him with Los Cuervos at the Armadillo in, what, ’76? Had it really been four years? There had been phone calls and letters, and for a while Cole had sent the occasional thrift store postcard, pretending to be in Tangiers or Bora Bora. After Cole found out that Alex was seeing Ava, the postcards had stopped. Cole had nursed his unhappiness for six or eight months while Alex continued to write or call every few weeks, offering no apologies, until he wore Cole down. Once Madelyn moved to Washington, Cole had finally stopped asking about her, and now he was coming up to spend Labor Day weekend.
While Alex was counting years, he couldn’t believe that six of them had now gone into working for his father. Every time his alarm clock went off, he wondered how he was going to make it to dinnertime. Any minute, the bottom was going to fall out of his life and litter the ground around him with his own lies and deceptions. He wasn’t sure if he cared.
Pride of place went to his drug smuggling. Three or four times a year he made a run to Nuevo Laredo and put another five thousand in the antique safe, like Álvaro’s, that he maintained in an airconditioned storage unit out near Love Field. He kept a few other items there that he didn’t want Callie to know about, like a box of Penthouse magazines and a loaded Smith and Wesson snub-nose .38. He didn’t care about the money, and he didn’t know why he kept a gun that never left the shed, he only knew that the fear they inspired was part of the cocktail of risk that allowed him to tolerate his existence.
Brenda was another part of it. She was a graphic designer who occasionally freelanced for Compu-Tex, the local computer company that Alex had hired to automate the most tedious parts of his job. She was a few years older than Alex and not given to showing off her femininity or hiding her intelligence, both of which were ample. Their attraction had been mutual and immediate. She claimed not to care that he was married, and he let himself believe her. They met for athletic lunch-hour sex once or twice a week, always at her instigation, and whatever guilt he might have felt never pained him deeply or for very long.
Then there was Gwyn. Alex tried to shield her from the pitched battles between him and Callie, but Callie burned hot when she lost control. More than once Gwyn had opened the door of whatever room they were fighting in, sobbing in fear and confusion, and Alex had choked down his own rage to comfort her. You can’t hide a collapsing marriage from a kid, and even when they managed a pretense of normalcy, Alex could see the light of her childish joy starting to fade. He would have given up his drug money and his mistress to bring it back. A divorce would only make it worse, and he didn’t trust Callie to raise a child without his constant moderating presence. Not to mention what Callie might turn up to use against him in court.
When they were both at home, Alex mostly stayed in his “office,” a bedroom at the back of the house that he’d fitted out with a single bed, a desk and armchair, a tv with a cable connection, and a Betamax recorder. The room had developed a lingering smell of marijuana.
At the moment another smell had penetrated the room and Alex went to investigate. Callie was washing dishes, and steam trickled from the cover of the electric skillet. Gwyn sat on the counter in a playsuit powdered with flour and stained with Kitchen Bouquet.
“Is that pot roast?” Alex said.
“Yes.”
“You realize Cole is coming for dinner?”
“Yes.”
“And Cole is a vegetarian?”
“There’s potatoes and carrots in there.”
“Cooked with the meat.”
“A potato is a potato.”
His sister Susan was at tcu in Fort Worth, studying psychology, and Alex had told her everything. Well, everything except the dope stuff. Susan said Callie was passive-aggressive, acting out her hostilities in a way calculated to drive Alex crazy. Knowing the technical terminology didn’t help.
“Besides,” Callie said, “Gwynnie wanted pot roast.”
“Potroastpotroastpotroast!” Gwyn yelled happily.
Alex knew that if he said anything at all he would start screaming, despite Gwyn being there. Callie was expert at this, able to torment him endlessly and leave him no way to retaliate.
The doorbell rang.
“Your friend’s here,” Callie said. She dried her hands, took off her apron, and swooped Gwyn up under one arm, Gwyn laughing in delight.
Cole stood on the front stoop, a knapsack in one hand, his acoustic guitar case in the other. He looked like hell, hair long and oily, ragged beard, clothes tattered and loose on his wiry body. Without letting him in, Alex set the knapsack and guitar in the living room, then stepped outside and shut and locked the front door. “Hungry?” Alex said.
“I ate some veggies at the Turkey Shop,” Cole said. “But I could eat again.”
“Let’s go.”
Alex opened the garage and noted Cole’s reaction to his current set of wheels, a candy-apple red Z28 Camaro.
“Holy Christ,” Cole said. “What’s it got?”
“A three-eighty-three stroker,” Alex said. “It’s quick.”
They got in and Cole caressed the black vinyl dashboard. “So we’re just going to skip the ‘how long has it been, so great to see you’ part?”
As he backed out the driveway, Alex saw Callie at the front door, screaming, “Where are you going? I have a party tonight!”
The neighbors on one side had tried to have them evicted, and the ones on the other side had put their house up for sale. You lived in a ritzy neighborhood like this one so you could play string quartets on your fancy stereo at low volume, not to listen to no-class low-life assholes screaming at each other in their front yard like they were in South Oak Cliff.
Alex left a little rubber on the street to express his feelings about Callie’s party and the neighbors’ disapproval. “You and me,” he said, “we’re the kind of friends who can just pick up where we left off.”
“I don’t remember leaving things quite like this.”
Alex drove to the Black-eyed Pea on Cedar Springs, sticking to the surface roads since it was rush hour, and he never got a chance to open up the Camaro like he wanted to, not even for two seconds, and eventually the tremor left his hands and he was able to breathe normally. As he drove, he told Cole everything, Brenda, the drugs, the job, all of it. He looked over a couple of times and Cole’s face showed nothing but sympathy and interest. When he was done, Cole said, “I wish I had an answer. All I can say is yeah, man, it really sucks.”
“Well, that’s something. At least I’m not missing an obvious solution.”
“Not that I can see,” Cole said. “And now my turn.”
Cole, it turned out, had been shooting heroin a couple of times a week since the Led Zeppelin fiasco. He’d had an od scare in March that had kept him straight for two months, but now he was using again every week or two, “whenever I absolutely can’t stand it anymore.”
“Wow,” Alex said. “What a pair of losers we are.”
They lingered over dinner,
splitting a pitcher of beer, of which Alex only took a couple of glasses. He got them home by eight, and as soon as he pulled in the driveway, the front door swung open and Callie stomped out, her hair piled high, wearing a Calvin Klein sheath dress he’d bought her at Neiman’s and high-heeled cowboy boots. She got into her Fiat Spider and was already backing out as Alex pulled into the garage.
“You know what’s weird?” Alex said as he turned off the engine. “We still have sex. It gets a little rough sometimes, and there’s no pretense that we’re making up or anything. We just fuck each other.”
“That’s really screwed up,” Cole said.
“Tell me about it,” Alex said.
They went inside. Gwyn was watching hbo, where guys in baseball uniforms and weird makeup were beating people with bats. Alex hurriedly switched the set off and said, “Time for your bath, sugarplum.”
Gwyn looked up at him. He wished he could vacuum those violent images out of those dark, innocent eyes, wished he could teleport Callie to Mars and raise Gwyn on his own, wished he could make everything okay, if not forever, at least for a few years.
Gwyn pointed at Cole. “Who’s that?”
Cole squatted next to her. “I am your long-lost Uncle Cole, come all the way from the other side of Texas to see you at last.”
“Will you read to me?”
“Eventually, but before that we are going to do something even better. Your daddy and I are going to sing to you… in Spanish! Because long, long ago, before you were born, when dinosaurs roamed the earth, your daddy and I were known as… El! Mariachi! Montoya!” He blew a trumpet fanfare into his fist.
Gwyn gave him the bored look she’d learned from Callie. Cole, who’d obviously thought charming kids was as easy as charming women, wilted. Alex laughed until tears ran down his face.
And yet, when Alex got her bathed and into her pajamas and tucked in, when they brought in a couple of stools and tuned their guitars and turned off everything but her Pokey Little Puppy night light, when they started to sing slowed and quieted versions of the old songs, “Bésame mucho” and “Quién será” and “Perfidia,” she was asleep within ten minutes.
They took the guitars into the living room and carried on for another hour. Alex couldn’t get over how easy it was, the way their voices blended, the way his fingers knew where all the chords were, the way Cole’s guitar parts locked into his. He hadn’t felt that close to peace in a very long time.
*
All Saturday morning, Callie made an exaggerated show that Alex and Cole were invisible and inaudible, and by mid-afternoon Alex couldn’t take it any longer. They put Cole’s guitar in the back seat of the Camaro and drove to White Rock Lake. The afternoon sun was relentless and the park was mobbed with bumper-to-bumper stop-and-go traffic. Finally Alex crossed over to the west side, where there were no picnic areas and fewer trees. They ended up in a vacant lot a few blocks from the lake, near an abandoned railroad trestle and piles of broken concrete slabs.
“Scenic,” Cole said.
“Humble, but our own.” They got out of the car and leaned against the shady side, facing away from the road, and Alex took a joint out of his shirt pocket. “This is a sample of my wares,” he said. “I think you’ll find it has a pleasant bouquet and quite powerful legs.”
“Fire it up,” Cole said.
Alex had the joint in his hand, half-smoked, his lungs full and a good buzz in progress, when, loud as an explosion, came the unmistakable single whoop of a police car siren and an amplified voice shouting, “Freeze!”
Panic hit Alex’s brain like a lightning flash. He couldn’t see, couldn’t think. He threw the joint into the dried grass nearby and clawed the other two joints of out his shirt pocket and flung them in the same direction. By then the cops were on them, two of them, in black short-sleeved uniforms, sunglasses, and peaked caps.
This can’t be happening, Alex thought. This is the end of everything.
“Well, well, well, well, well,” said one cop. He was taller, with light brown hair and a mustache. He had his nightstick out and was tapping it in his palm. “What do we have here?”
“On first inspection,” his black-haired partner said, “it looks like we have us a wetback and some kind of street person.”
“Smoking themselves a little weed, it appears.”
“It does look like that.” The second cop walked over and picked up the lit joint. “Why, look here, I believe this little number is still burning, right here among all this flammable material.”
He showed the joint to his partner, who sniffed at it and smiled. “Yes, indeed, I have to agree that this is a bit of a smoking gun, as they say.”
The second cop stubbed out the joint on the bottom of his highly polished black shoe and put it in a plastic bag. Then he picked up the other two joints and dropped them in after it. He looked at Alex. “You speak English?”
“Yes,” Alex said. “Quite well, actually.”
“Which one of you is doing the buying and which is doing the selling? And how much more of this stuff have you got in the car?”
Cole spoke up. “Officer, I think there’s been a misunderstanding. This isn’t a drug deal. We’re old friends, just out enjoying the summer afternoon. We’re not hurting anyone. Surely you could…”
“Could what?” the first cop said.
“Give us a break?” Cole said, with an ingratiating smile.
The first cop said, “Both of you turn around and put your hands against the car. You’re under arrest for felony possession of marijuana, creating a fire hazard, and suspicion of trafficking in narcotics.” He then ran through the Miranda warning in a singsong voice and said, “Do you understand the rights I’ve just stated to you?”
“Yes,” Alex said, his brain still frozen in panic mode.
“Yes,” Cole said.
The second cop patted Alex down roughly, took his car keys, then frisked Cole. “Going to need to delouse this one when we get to the station,” he said, then he grabbed Alex’s right arm and jerked it behind his back, slamming him into the car. Alex felt a handcuff cut into his right wrist, then the cop pulled the left arm back and put the other cuff on. The hot metal of the car roof burned his cheek.
While the first cop handcuffed Cole, the second cop pulled Alex backward onto his feet and pushed him toward the squad car. “Let’s go there, Frito Bandito. Your chariot awaits.” Alex, to his shame, had become totally submissive. The cop shoved Alex into the back seat and slammed the door. Wire mesh separated the front and back seats and the back doors had no handles on the inside. The engine was running, and the air conditioning made Alex tremble.
Through the window he saw the cops double-teaming Cole, pointing fingers, getting in his face. Alex’s brain had started to thaw and his thoughts were desperate. Ten years in prison. Losing Gwyn in an ugly divorce and not being able to see her until she was an adult. His father’s humiliation. The life that had been unbearable to Alex yesterday now seemed impossibly sweet.
They made Cole lie in the dirt while they searched the car. They took their time, and Alex heard their laughter over the purring engine and the chatter on the police band radio. When they were done, both doors and the trunk of the Camaro stood open, and Cole’s guitar case, the spare tire and the jack, and some old towels were strewn around it in the dirt.
They marched Cole to the squad car and put him in the back seat next to Alex, then the first cop got in the driver’s seat and the second cop got in the other side.
“Where to, ladies?” the first cop said, looking in the rear-view mirror. “Just kidding.”
Cole said, “Listen, could you maybe not just leave that guitar lying there? It’s really valuable.”
“Oh yeah?” the second cop said. “My girlfriend plays guitar. What kind is it?”
“It’s handmade by this guy in Mexico. He’s famous down there.”
The two cops looked at each other and the second cop got out and fetched the guitar and put it in the trunk
of the squad car.
“Thanks,” Cole said, when the second cop got back in.
The second cop grinned and said, “Don’t mention it.”
Alex was afraid to ask what was going to happen to his car, so he sat in silence while the second cop called in a report of their arrest. He realized that he’d still been hoping the cops might change their minds, and now it was too late and everything was official. They drove through the park land north of the lake and then through a tree-lined commercial district. Alex tried to imagine himself making his one phone call to his father, then his mind darted away to prison horror stories—getting lost in the system and never coming out, rape, beatings, gangs, riots, shivs.
The police station occupied a sprawling, one-story mid-sixties industrial-style building. A metal sign read, “Northeast Patrol.” They parked in the rear and the cops immediately split them up again. Alex sat in an interview room alone for forty endless minutes before the cops returned. The second cop was grinning. “Your so-called pal Freddy the Freeloader just sang like a canary. He said it was your dope and you offered to sell him a kilo. He may just waltz out of here while you go on a long Huntsville vacation.”
Alex flushed with rage at Cole and then, a moment later, he realized that Cole would never have come up with the nonsense about the kilo. “I think I’ll wait until my lawyer’s here,” he said.
“There’s a good chance,” the first cop said, “we can make this all go away if you tell us where you got the dope. You might want to think about that. And think fast, because this is definitely a limited time offer.”
“That’s okay,” Alex said. “I’ll wait for my lawyer.”
When they saw he wasn’t going to budge, they took him to the booking desk. A woman in her forties with hair the color of redwood fence paint typed up his paperwork and took his wallet and belt. “What about my friend’s guitar?” Alex said. “Can you write down on that paper that they took his guitar?”
“No guitar here,” the woman said.
Alex looked at the second cop, who said, “Don’t worry about it. I’ll take care of it.”
