by Jon Pineda
The ball zigzagged across the field of scuffed felt and then returned only to be shoved harder. It came back that much harder the next time. Momentum accrued from their impatience, more nods and shoving of the cue ball, until the two men took notice of the one walking past, dragging his foot behind him. The smaller of the two, with his round, penny-colored face, said, “Hey, bud, you fall off your bull or something?” and the taller friend laughed and nodded as he took a long swig from his bottle, its glass the color of wet pine bark.
“Hey, friend, Lee asked you a question,” the taller one said.
Exequiel stopped at the edge of the table and grabbed the cue, lifting it up so that he interrupted its course. “I’m not your friend, puta,” Exequiel said, making sure he eyed both of the men. They looked to him like off-duty rodeo clowns, men who should otherwise be wearing makeup and polka-dotted pants ten sizes too big with hula hoops for waistbands, all of it held up by fat pairs of matching suspenders.
Exequiel took a slow breath and then said, “Sorry,” and at this, the smaller one, Lee, smiled and came around the side of the table and said, “Oh, now don’t piss yourself, bud. What was that you said? What did you say? Roger and me didn’t quite get that last bit there.”
“Yeah,” Roger said.
“I said I’m sorry,” Exequiel said, staring into the cue ball like it was a crystal ball. Something a dwarf fortune teller might use. He looked hard into its milky core but could find only some traces of blue smeared in erratic streaks on the surface. Its life consisting of hits.
“Sorry? Sorry for what?” Roger said. He hadn’t moved and stood where he was, sipping his beer. When he started to walk around, his smaller friend held up his hand to stop him.
“Yeah, bud,” Lee said. “What would you be sorry for?”
He was happy that this stranger was the kind of man who would take Roger and him seriously. He was happier, too, that the near-stoic look on this stooped man’s face might be masking a rising fear. Lee wondered what they could get him to do, what strange routine this man they had stopped would suddenly perform for the two of them. Would he buy them both a round for the inconvenience, maybe? Or maybe he would buy a round for everyone within earshot, beers for the women in the back corner booth and beers for the men, this stranger with a sheepish grin and scraggly mustache, his strange way of crossing a room, beers for the band? Even a shot of whiskey for the pretty blonde leaving the restroom?
When Exequiel looked up he saw the woman pause, assessing him and the others. Exequiel didn’t care. He asked her if she knew these guys. Perhaps it was the way she reacted, scoffing almost, that sent fire through him, a goring that burned in his blood and washed over his chest like that same blood burning.
Gaslit grass gone in one gush of wind.
His eyes watering from the smoke inside him.
Not that Exequiel could have known this woman’s past, but he sensed in her a reckless stretch of judgment. Rather than laughing off his proposition of a whiskey shot, she stood closer to Exequiel and leaned on him to get a better look, as if to peer into the future the cue ball held inside.
She whispered, “You shouldn’t let them get to you.”
“I know,” he said. “I’m sorry.”
“Don’t do that. You haven’t done anything yet.”
“Yet?”
“Yes,” she said. “You know what that means, don’t you?”
He left her to move closer to Lee, the smaller one. Once Exequiel was within an arm’s length, he grabbed Lee’s throat. His thumb threatening to snap the larynx altogether. He felt it give, but then it slid back without breaking. The trauma alone, though, caused the smaller man to collapse onto the table. It was then Exequiel began to shove the cue ball into the man’s mouth. He was bloodying the teeth and the lips, trying to get it inside him, trying to get him to suck it like an egg.
“Hey,” Roger said, confused. “Hey, friend! What are you doing, friend?”
Lee, the smaller one, had passed out.
Exequiel thought at first he was going to have to break the friend Roger’s cheek, especially if he tried to interfere now, but the friend Roger remained in place, as if paralyzed. Better yet, as if his boots were nailed to the floor.
Roger would make a terrible rodeo clown. They both would.
Before anyone could make sense of the scene, the woman pulled Exequiel through the back exit and into the parking lot. A film lay over the stars in the Taos night sky, as if the sky were packaged. A store-bought cosmos.
Across the road was a field of sagebrush. Tumbleweed rolled like ghost cue balls roaming the pocked felt. The yellow lights from nearby adobe houses were brighter than the stars themselves.
“What’s your name?” Exequiel said.
“Elle,” the woman said. “Why?”
“I don’t know,” he said and then kissed her.
She kissed him back.
“What’s your name?” she said, pulling away finally, smiling. She was embarrassed.
“Jeff,” he said.
“That’s bullshit. What is it?”
“Jeremy.”
“Now you’re just fucking with me.”
“I am?”
She laughed.
He seemed different from the recent ones. A part of her was still burning from the encounter she had witnessed. She wanted to return to the bar and see him do it again. She almost said for them to go back inside. She wanted to see what he would do if he had to own up to the damage he had done.
“I don’t think we should stay out here any longer,” she said, scanning the parking lot. “What do you drive?”
“I don’t.”
“Here,” she said and took his hand. It was warm.
It wasn’t until she was leaning against the door of her Chevelle that she realized it was the same hand. The one that had held the cue ball almost lovingly at first. Or so it had seemed to her.
Before he smashed it, mashing and smashing again, on the guy’s mouth.
His frayed way of saying, “Is this what you wanted? Is this what you want? Is it? Sit?”
Before Elle was born, her father had worked as a smoke jumper for the U.S. Forest Service in Okanogan County, Washington. Elle and her younger brother Wallace grew up hearing lots of stories about their father’s former life. It was almost too much to imagine. Even so, each night the stories would begin in a vivid burst, their father young again, beaming as he described the rush of being aloft and drifting down through billowy tents of smoke.
During such stories, Wallace would be busy giggling. Elle, on the other hand, would almost always drift off into sleep, already thinking of what lay underneath those dark sheets of smoke pulled taut by gusts: dancing horses, bejewelled and riderless, spinning in brilliant circles, and those horses turning easily into spun shadows. Images, for Elle, sweet as cotton candy. Sometimes her brother’s giggling broke the dream.
Until their father had met his wife, Marsha, and settled down in nearby Winthrop, Samuel Lufkin had spent his life looking for an opportunity to make an impact. He had just missed serving in the war, and everywhere he went, banners in storefronts stretching jubilant phrases, newspapers in succession printing the same victorious stories, he was reminded how he hadn’t been needed at all. He could just as easily have vanished into the surrounding wilderness and the country would have continued on in its history of having won the war without him.
This was Samuel Lufkin’s dilemma, the kind of thing that kept him up nights in his own parents’ house thinking of how it was he wanted to be remembered. When he first learned there was a training facility nearby, he knew what he had to do. He signed up to become a smoke jumper. Five years he jumped out of planes, risking his life to put out the flames of mindless fires.
Fire, the head of the Lufkin family preached each night, does not know it is evil.
For this reason, it seemed worse to Elle. It was no different from the monsters in the stories she had already read as a girl. The many heads of the Hydra. T
he way cutting off one side caused the flames to split into two directions. In the scenes her father described, she sometimes pictured the flames rejoining to flicker like a large forked tongue.
Years in this line of work had given Samuel Lufkin an appreciation for the mere fact of being alive. He realized that who he had been before was a child caught in his own yearning. And he was surprised that he didn’t care how, after a few years of marriage, his life took on a routine, his days consisting mostly of pumping gas and running a cash register at the service station, or the occasional minor challenge of setting points for a tune-up in the adjoining garage.
Samuel and Marsha were pleased with the quiet, consistent life they had given their daughter and son. Their routine afforded them a certain kind of stability that suited the people they had naturally become. Bills were paid on time. Meals were always on the table. Sundays after church had, out of a joyful habit, become outings at Pearrygin Lake. Bodies cradled in huge inner tubes Samuel had saved from the garage spun aimlessly across the lake’s surface. Here clouds drifted just as slowly among the reflected images of willows and ash of the Methow Valley.
During these tuck-in stories, though, what Samuel Lufkin had failed each night to explain to his children was the reason he had given up on being a smoke jumper in the first place. In the woven fabric of their family lore, it was known, by Elle especially, how their mother Marsha had spotted him, the young Sam, dashing in his uniform. He had been stepping off a Greyhound bus. Marsha and her best friend in high school, a girl named Esther whom the children had grown up never meeting, had flipped a coin over who was going to talk to the boy with the bright eyes. Who was going to ask him for his name?
Elle always remembered thinking how uncharacteristically brave her mother seemed for approaching this stranger from elsewhere. Elle, as a young girl, could never imagine doing such a thing. Not then at least.
“He must have been so handsome,” Elle would often offer as a prompt, and her mother would laugh in disbelief and respond, “Yes, yes, oh yes.” She would clap her hands together, as if trying to catch the elusive image. She could have been a girl herself, cupping the air to trap the first lightning bug aglow in the evening.
“Oh, Elle, you should have seen him then,” her mother would say, walking into the room with freshly folded clothes and setting them down next to each child’s dresser, then kissing her husband on the cheek. She would leave so that he could finish his story before Wallace asked for another glass of water, or Elle tried to get them to begin an impromptu waltz, something they would claim they had danced at their wedding. Of course their daughter knew then that there had been no celebration, only the visit to a justice of the peace and a stiff handshake from her grandfather Roy, her mother’s father.
“Here’s the thing,” Samuel Lufkin started out once. “You never know how much sky you can hold inside you. Until you try, I mean. Go ahead, Elle. Take a breath.” He wanted to bring his children always to that moment of drifting, the parachute a translucent dome overhead.
For Elle, sometimes the parachute was a fading hand collecting the wind.
When Elle went away to college and briefly studied art history, what she felt seemed to her more than a simple affinity for spaces held in the ceilings of basilicas. It was the sculpted infinity within each apse that lifted her, that promised another dimension to the faith in life her parents had provided her. The family settling in for the night, she and her brother listening to their father’s voice while the rest of Winthrop prepared for sleep as well. And in her memory, she could still see the reddish fused fingers of her father’s left hand peeking out from a sleeve. That hand gliding down and whipping about, like a leaf in a storm. Tailspun and drifting. Then gently, always gently, and punctuated with such patience, the idea of bringing back to life one’s former self.
When the Chevelle pulled into the driveway, its tires displaced the gravel easily, even though there were sizable chunks, flotsam of larger rock pulverized for domestic use. The car slid to a quiet stop, but just barely, and Elle thought for a moment of the way the bottom of a canoe can smooth water underneath with the flatness of its hull.
Exequiel spotted in the cast glow up ahead a woman lying on a couch in the front room, the long window like a television screen broadcasting another fictitious life. When Exequiel turned back to Elle, the woman he had just met in the bar, he found she had been the one, in fact, watching him. She was studying his expression to glean how he might be taking in the scene of the one sprawled, passed out.
“Can you tell if she’s sleeping?” Elle whispered to Exequiel.
He shrugged.
Elle leaned over to kiss his neck, just as he happened to turn his face. Their lips brushed each other. It was awkward. Elle smiled, trying to hold back from laughing altogether. He did the same.
She sensed something about this man. That he was kind. Or kinder than others she had known, especially since she had been a single mother. There was not any one thing she could point to that would justify her feeling this way, especially so quickly, but just this conscious thought in her head, that he was a kind man, made her want to laugh out loud.
How had she become so pathetic?
She needed to be more mysterious. Bringing him back to her house seemed dangerous. Or worse, desperate. It wasn’t the kind of thing she needed to be doing anyway. She shuddered hearing the tone of her mother’s voice as she said it in just that way, telling Elle that she’d had more opportunities than she, her mother, ever had. Just look at what you’ve made of yourself.
. . . .
“Who is she?” Exequiel said.
Elle hesitated.
She gazed at the window. In the haze of the room, the older woman sprawled on the couch. Her nightgown open some. Nothing was showing. Elle wished there could have been something, at least.
Elle knew there was a knife. It was hidden, used as a bookmark. The Bible, with its tattered leather cover and gilded onionskin pages, rested on the floor next to the couch.
“One time I scared my mom so good,” Elle said, biting her lip.
“Scared her?”
“Yeah, I tiptoed up to the window and then banged on the glass as hard as I could. She said I almost gave her a heart attack.”
Elle laughed and shook her head.
“Isn’t that funny?” she said, wiping her eyes.
“Why would you do that to your mother?” he said.
Her laughter trailed off. She smiled.
The man beside her was becoming someone else. It was almost too easy, the way it could occur. How he could stop being the kind man she had met in the bar, whom she had driven here in her car. The man she had allowed herself to be foolish in front of and not care how she appeared to him.
Maybe he wasn’t so different from the others.
It could be Joshua, her son’s father, sitting beside her now. If that were the case, Elle knew she would already have slipped the house key into the front door. She would have gone inside, stepping along quietly so as not to surprise her mother, and she would have reached down for the Bible and opened the book and found the knife hidden there and seen, before standing back up in the artificial glow, a line from Psalms. The one about the valley of the shadow of death. Her mother’s favorite. Elle would have used that knife to cut away every memory Joshua still had of her and their son.
Seeing again the stranger beside her, she leaned into him and said, “I’m sorry.” He did not respond with words. He nodded at the quiet surrounding the car. At the image of the woman’s mother asleep on the couch. The television continued to wash her body in bluish neon.
“You’re welcome to stay the night,” Elle said. “Or should I take you home?”
“I don’t care,” he said to her.
She put the car in reverse and backed out of the driveway. A streetlight had smoothed out its small, yellow dress over the distant intersection, where other cars were parked crooked near the curb. She let the car idle.
She was starin
g ahead.
“Where are you from anyway?” she said.
“Nowhere.”
“Really,” she said. “Where are you from?”
“A bunch of places.”
“Name one.”
“I don’t remember their names.”
“You make them sound like women.”
He laughed.
“What?” she said.
“I wish,” he said.
When he woke, Exequiel could smell coconut. That and oranges. The blended scent had stirred him from his slumber. He rubbed his eyes to see a boy sitting on the bed and observing him. The boy had an angry cowlick curling above the back of his head. It looked like the top of a question mark.
“Who are you?” the boy said.
“Exequiel,” he said, trying to sound American.
“What does that mean? Your name means something, doesn’t it?”
“You must be Wendell.”
“No,” the boy said and shook his head. The scent of coconut fell on Exequiel again, and he realized it was the boy’s hair, the tropical fragrance of the shampoo.
As his eyes adjusted, Exequiel could see that the sides of the boy’s hair were still damp, fresh from a morning bath.
“So you’re not Wendell?” Exequiel said, squinting.
Exequiel pretended he could not hide his confusion very well and pinched lightly at the bridge of his nose. The boy sensed this play. He cupped his mouth to keep from showing the wide gaps in his teeth.
“I’m kidding,” the boy said.
“Oh, I see. You’re a jokester.”
The boy nodded quickly, happy to be given this title.
“Where’s your mother?” Exequiel said.
“Making breakfast. Do you like eggs?”
