The Days of Anna Madrigal

  “He’s on the temple crew,” said Shawna. “It’s gonna be ah-ma-zing this year. All laser-cut with computers. Can you believe this?” She made a gesture that encompassed the three of them. “The world is so fucking small!”

  “Cool. Look . . . I better get back to Amos. Just wanted to say hi.”

  In truth, he just wanted to get away from Shawna’s weird energy. She was sounding like a Heather or something. You’d think he’d just caught her with an embarrassing online hookup, or a secret married lover, instead of an old fuck buddy she had long ago sent packing. It wasn’t like her. It made no sense at all.

  It unsettled him to find Anna gone when they got back to the flat. It really shouldn’t have, of course, since they had watched her leave, blowing kisses and waving from the window of Brian’s Winnebago like a homecoming queen on a float. But a couple of stiff drinks and a dark, empty house had set Jake to thinking: How would a lasting absence feel? How could he even prepare for that?

  He wanted her back. He wanted her back here right now, lighting candles all over the flat—real candles with real flames and tons of wax dripping everywhere—whatever the fuck she needed. He felt an icy panic scrape through his chest like a glacier, a dread so complete that Amos detected it and offered distraction.

  “I think somebody wants a word with you.”

  Jake looked down at the tiny black cat encircling his leg.

  “Hey, Notch baby—yeah, I know, where the hell is she?” He lifted the cat gently, letting her drape lifelessly over his hand. (That was the way Notch preferred to travel, having lived too long on the mean streets of the city to submit to anything on her back.) He brought her into the kitchen and set her down next to her food. Marguerite and Selina had obviously been here, since the bowl was already filled with Notch’s crunchy senior kitty food. She sniffed it once and politely declined.

  “Do you want me to stay over?” asked Amos.

  “Sure. Why wouldn’t I?”

  “I dunno. A whole week of Trans Bay ahead of us. Stinky porta potties. Loud music. You might want some down time.”

  “You mean you might like some down time.”

  Amos shook his head. “Nope. Not what I said.”

  “Then stay. I’m fine with it. It’s easier with the truck, anyway. They only have to make one stop.” And I won’t be alone here tonight, he thought. I won’t be alone here for the first time maybe ever.

  The truck had been loaded that afternoon in Emoryville. The Monarch had been dismantled piece by piece and strapped into place on the flatbed, a shapeless scrap pile of poles and pedals and painted canvas that would, he hoped to God, find its way to wholeness again in the desert. He was feeling as wingless and inert as his creation. So much of his focus had been on Anna (getting her there, keeping her safe, thrilling her with his magical ride) that he had lost a sense of purpose.

  “It’ll be a triumph,” Amos told him that night in bed.

  “Oh, yeah?” said Jake, settling into the crook of his arm.

  “It’s magnificent . . . and it grew out of you and her. Nothing has changed in that respect. And she won’t miss anything but the hardship. It’ll even have its own Facebook page. Felicia is going to film the fuck out of it.” Amos chuckled at this unintentional clustering of f’s and repeated the phrase slowly, like an exercise in enunciation. “Felicia is going to Film the Fuck out of it.”

  Jake couldn’t handle being silly right now. “The bitch of it is: Anna’s going to the desert anyway. She could just as easily die in that RV as in the art car.”

  “Nobody’s dying,” said Amos. “Let it go.”

  Jake turned and looked at him. “What was that you gave her today? When they were leaving.”

  “Just a card.”

  “A card?”

  “A bon voyage card. Telling her not to worry. That I’d keep an eye on you.”

  Jake was silent for a moment. “Really? You did that?”

  “She worries about you too.”

  Another silence.

  “I bought us something fun for the playa,” Amos said.

  “What?”

  “Magic underwear.”

  “Mormon magic underwear?”

  “Why not? You said it made you hot. Ever since you saw Patrick What’s-His-Name wear them in Angels in America.”

  Was that how he’d explained it? He had said so much during the gabfest of their first date, from their initial sniff-out at Hot Cookie to their exhausted predawn entanglement at Amos’s apartment in SoMa. It had all been true, if incomplete. He had wanted to share with Amos but not overshare, so he couldn’t remember exactly what was on the record. He decided to shift the discussion away from his libido.

  “How would you even get a pair of Mormon underwear?”

  “You mean how would Amos Karpel get a pair of Mormon underwear?”

  “No. Anybody. You can’t just buy it, can you? You have to have a note from your pastor or something.”

  “Orrrr . . .” Amos tiptoed his fingers across the raven tat on Jake’s bicep. “You could go to a website in China that makes a brilliant imitation.”

  “No!”

  “Oh yeah, that’s what I’m talking about. A fine blend of polyester and cotton, and baggy in all the right places. It’s already packed in my duffel bag.”

  “You’re nuts,” Jake said with a dismissive chuckle, though this was close to being the sweetest thing he’d ever heard.

  “So what’s the fantasy here?” asked Amos. “I’m . . . what? A young Mormon missionary? An unusually swarthy and well-nosed young Mormon missionary who’s come to the city to take away your marriage rights? You sense right away that I’m deeply repressed, so the moment our eyes meet at the front door—”

  “Pier 39.”

  “He’s canvassing at Pier 39?”

  “It’s his day off. He’s looking at the sea lions. He’s wearing a red jacket and jeans.”

  A sly grin crept over Amos’s face. “This is an awfully specific fantasy.”

  The game was obviously over. “It wasn’t that much of a fantasy,” he said ruefully. “More like a fucking train wreck in the end.”

  “But you saw the magic underwear?” Amos didn’t seem especially bothered that this scenario had its roots in real life.

  “Oh yeah,” said Jake. “Four or five times. We did this therapy thing.”

  “You’re losing me here, bud.”

  “He had a shrink back in Snowflake—”

  “Utah?”

  “Arizona. The shrink did this reparative therapy where he held him in his arms like a dad would do. Comfort him and call him son and shit. But with their clothes on. Said it would cure queerness. Fill some deep-seated need.”

  “I’m sure it did. For the shrink.”

  “Word.”

  “So you did this with him, huh? In his magic underwear.”

  “Yep.”

  “Right here?”

  “Sometimes.”

  “While he was campaigning for Prop 8?”

  “Pretty low, right? Sleeping with the enemy.”

  “Well . . . cuddling with the enemy.”

  “That’s even worse. The enemy should not be cuddled.”

  Amos laughed. “Or coddled.” He slipped his hand between Jake’s legs and pulled him closer. He smelled of Manhattans and hair oil and a good day’s work. His fingers found Jake’s clit and rolled it idly, speculatively, like a pebble he’d just discovered on the beach. “So now you have this thing for magic underwear.”

  “Sort of. It could be nice to see them come off some time.”

  “Damn. They never did?”

  “That was the deal. Neither one of us wanted to get naked. He didn’t want to go all the way with a fag, and I didn’t want him to see my vagine.”

  “He doesn’t know what he was missing,”
said Amos.

  Chapter 13

  ABYSSINIA

  The beauty of Lasko’s escape plan was that most of it could be discussed openly, even at Eagle Drugs, where Mr. Yee mistook the gleam in Lasko’s eye for fierce company loyalty. When Lasko crowed to Andy about the twelve cars on the Rexall Train or the hordes expected in Winnemucca or the efficiency with which this blue-and-white python would slither through all forty-eight states, there was no reason for suspicion. For Mr. Yee, and the rest of the town, the Rexall Train was just a one-day extravaganza, a vision that would evaporate as soon as it left the station.

  And so it would for Andy, since Lasko had not requested company on his exodus to Frisco. Andy’s job was to board the train an hour before departure and tour the exhibits with Lasko, leaving with the crowd once Lasko had found a good hiding place. He might not even need a hiding place. He’d be wearing a white shirt, he said, with the Rexall emblem stitched on the pocket. He could easily be mistaken for someone official, someone who belonged there. And if anyone asked where he was (Mr. Yee, for instance), Andy was to say that Lasko had gone home sick.

  Going home sick from the Rexall Train struck Andy as funny, since each of the cars, according to Lasko, was named for a different Rexall product line intended to improve health or well-being. There was Firstaid (gauze and bandages), Bisma-Rex (antacid powder), Cara Nome (cosmetics), and Kantleek (hot water bottles and enema bags). The last two cars were Joan Manning (chocolates), where the staff would be sleeping, and Puretest (Epsom salts and talcum powder), the private observation car of Mr. Louis Liggett Himself, the grand poobah of United Drugs.

  Andy had a cartoonish image of Mr. Louis Liggett Himself throwing Lasko off the train by the scruff of his neck. He saw angry steam coming out of the old man’s ears and Lasko flailing like they do in the movies. Then he saw a bloody, gravelly death. He shared this vision with Lasko one afternoon as they walked home from school.

  “You don’t get it,” said Lasko. “I ain’t no Okie, and this ain’t no boxcar. This is the Rexall Train, and I’m a Rexallite. They don’t wanna make a stink while they’re sellin’ these many fine products. It’s a palace in there. They’ve got a four-piece orchestra. They’ve got an exhibit that shows how maraschino cherries are made.”

  Andy was kind of curious about the cherries, having experienced them in Reno at the same time he experienced air-conditioning, but they weren’t relevant to this discussion. “Lasko, look, the other Rexallites will know each other. They’ll know that you don’t belong there as soon as the train starts moving.”

  “No, they won’t,” said Lasko, sounding testier than Andy had ever heard him. “Half the people on the train will be Pullman employees. I could be one of them. I could easily be that. Everybody will think I’m with somebody else.”

  Not if you’re wearing a Rexall shirt, thought Andy.

  Lasko walked for a while in sulky silence, kicking the rubble along the roadside. “I’m pretty convincing, you know. I can talk people into things.”

  Andy did know that. He thought of Lasko’s hand on his shoulder that day at the drugstore. He thought of the complimentary squirt of cherry syrup and the fancy supper at the Martin Hotel and, later that night, the Mediterranean heat of Lasko’s leg against his own. Lasko’s offer of friendship had been mildly suspect from the beginning, but Andy, after consideration, had decided that he didn’t care. For better or worse, Lasko was adventure in a red sash and baggy pants—Richard Halliburton on a shoestring. This train caper might be goofy as all get-out, but it was harmless enough, and Andy’s role as henchman was so peripheral as to seem unnecessary.

  So why had Lasko enlisted his aid? Did he just want a witness to his grand scheme, someone to tell people where he had gone and how he had pulled it off? Was it easier to entrust this secret to the bookworm whose mother ran the brothel than to one of his buddies on the baseball team? Or was there something else on Lasko’s mind, a secret longing he could never bring himself to name? No matter, thought Andy. Even if Lasko had asked him to run away with him on the train, hide with him god-knows-where until they reached San Francisco, even if he had lured Andy with talk of a magic heathen city, of a giant waterwheel in a giant swimming pool, Andy would have had to say no. He could never do that to Margaret or Mama.

  Lasko stopped walking and looked directly at Andy. The slanting afternoon light made his embarrassment golden.

  He’s not used to begging. That face gets him everything.

  “Are you in on this?” asked Lasko.

  “I’m in. Just tell me what to do.”

  “Swell.” Lasko thrust out his hand to be shaken.

  Andy shook it. “Are you coming back?”

  “What’s it to you?” asked Lasko.

  Andy shrugged and started walking again. “I think that’s a natural question for one friend to ask another.”

  “You don’t say,” said Lasko.

  It was one of those dumb things boys come up with when they don’t know what to say, some meaningless tough-guy expression they’ve learned on the radio.

  You don’t say, wise guy.

  But that was just the sound of it. If Andy had been looking at Lasko, if he had seen those dark eyes dance or the slightest curl of his lip, he might have known what to make of it. He might have even seen it as flirtatious, something overblown and sassy that landed, a little clumsily, halfway between Cary Grant and Mae West.

  You don’t say.

  They walked in silence for a while.

  “Are you enjoying the book?” Andy asked at last.

  “What?”

  “The Book of Marvels.”

  “Oh . . . yeah . . . it’s good.”

  Andy scuffed a cloud of dust at him. “It’s not a book report, Lasko. I’m not your teacher. I don’t care if you’ve read it. I know you’ve got a lot on your mind.”

  “Like what?” Lasko looked genuinely curious.

  “Well . . . packing, for one.”

  “Packing?” He made a noise like spitting soda.

  Andy found himself grinning. “Well, I guess, under the circumstances . . .”

  “You don’t pack for an escape.”

  “No, I guess not.”

  Lasko hooted and bounced around Andy like a prizefighter, his fists pumping slowly and steadily, teasing but never quite touching the parts of Andy’s body they purported to be demolishing. “Pack for an escape!” He sounded pirate-crazy at that moment, scornful too, but it was hard not to smile in the midst of that whirlwind.

  When he finally stopped, Andy said, “You must’ve made plans for the other end.”

  “The other end of what?”

  “The line, Lasko. Do you know anyone in San Francisco? Are you just gonna get off the train and take a streetcar to the swimming pool?”

  “I might. I could.”

  “You have to have a plan, Lasko.”

  “No, I don’t. Not after this. I don’t have to have a plan in the world.”

  They parted in town, not far from Lasko’s house. At least, Lasko said it wasn’t far from his house, leading Andy to think that he might be ashamed of the place. Either that or he was just ashamed of Andy, the madam’s boy he’d brought to the restaurant kitchen without so much as a how-do-you-do from his Mexican father.

  Lasko raised his hand in a parting salute, walking backward for a moment as he uttered for the third or fourth time a snappy new farewell that Andy liked to think had been invented just for him. “Abyssinia!”

  “Abyssinia,” echoed Andy.

  He watched Lasko as he headed down the street past Kossol’s Korner. He would walk for while, strutting almost, then stop to spar with someone who wasn’t there, some mighty invisible foe that had to be vanquished. Even from a distance his long, balletic shadow was comical and melancholy and completely magnificent.

  It was coming on dusk when Andy got back
to the Blue Moon. Several unfamiliar cars were parked out front, one of which almost certainly belonged to a customer, since Delphine was in her cabinette yelling “Peckerwood cocksucker!” at the top of her lungs. Mama would not be happy about that. She expected the girls to be ladylike. If there was yelling to be done, Mama would be the one to do it.

  Andy stopped outside Delphine’s cabinette to make sure she was all right. His answer came when the customer, a stumpy, baldheaded, beet-red man, stumbled out the screen door with his shoes and spats and most of his dusty blue serge suit piled in his arms. Upon seeing Andy, he shook his head in contempt, as if to say, These women!, presuming sympathy from a member of his own gender.

  “Fucking Cajun cunt,” he muttered, then stumbled toward his car, arms still brimming with clothes, stopping only to pee on the cactus painted on Violet’s cabinette. They despise women, thought Andy. Why do they even bother?

  Margaret, slouched against the porch swing, caught the world-weary look on Andy’s face as he headed into the house. “Elegant here tonight, ain’t it?”

  Andy rolled his eyes. “How do they get so plastered so early?”

  Margaret followed him into the house so eagerly that he assumed she’d been waiting for him. “Delphine was raisin’ more Cain than he was.”

  “I know. I heard it.” Andy’s eyes shot nervously to the corner of the parlor, where Mama’s big desk was piled so high with ledgers and Collier’s magazines that you could never tell for sure if she was there.

  “It’s okay,” said Margaret. “She’s in town. And what she don’t know won’t hurt her.”

  Andy agreed. At this point Mama needed only the slightest excuse to boot Delphine out of her cabinette. Delphine had lately been giving Mama lip, so Mama had been on the warpath. Margaret had never cared much for Delphine, she said, but she didn’t want to see her working the arcade either, doing it on the cheap for Chinamen behind the bowling alley. So that meant keeping Mama in the dark about Delphine’s tantrums with customers. Margaret liked keeping Mama in the dark.

  “It’s in her blood, you know. She can’t help it.”