“Oh—all right then. I’ll give you back to Jake.”
“No, I wanna come visit. There’s someone I want you to meet.”
She knew what that usually meant, but with Brian you had to wonder. Could it be that the senior member of her brood, this perennially roving bachelor of (good heavens, no) sixty-seven, had finally found someone worthy of a permanent cuddle? The last time she had spoken to him (when he was parked somewhere in the Great Smoky Mountains), he had seemed placidly committed to his solitude. She had come to believe that his divorce from Mary Ann had forever soured him on cohabitation. Not to mention the fact that Brian had a lovely grown daughter from that marriage, and—to hear him tell it, at least—Shawna had always been family enough for him.
“Is this a new thing?” she asked.
“Yeah—fairly.” He seemed amused by the thought. “Not really, though. We just sort of . . . picked up where we left off.”
“Someone I used to know?”
“No . . . actually. Come to think of it.”
“Now you’re just being mysterious.”
He laughed. “We’ll make a date soon as I’m hooked up.”
“Hooked up?”
“At the RV park! Gotta run, Mrs. Madrigal.”
He was gone, so she handed the phone back to Jake.
“What’s up?” he asked.
“He has a lady friend. He wants to bring her by to meet us.” She fiddled with the cuff of her Chinese pajamas, pondering this enigma until she finally spoke it out loud: “It’s someone he used to know. That I don’t know.”
“Does that bother you?”
“It puzzles me.”
As soon as Jake had helped her into bed and doled out her pills, she found herself wondering why Brian had called her Mrs. Madrigal on the phone. It was an echo of her landlady days, curiously out of time, and she could only surmise that he had reverted to this formality for the benefit of his listening lady friend. These days she was on a first-name basis with all the members of her logical family, since the ever-shrinking distance between the middle of life and the end of it encouraged a level of informality. She had never been a Mrs. anyway. The honorific had been her way of further musicalizing her new name—the pleasing rhythm of “Mrs. Madrigal”—though she sometimes told those who had yet to learn of her past that single women are less likely to be harassed if they are thought to be widows or divorcees.
That was true enough, but there had been another motivation. She had assumed the Mrs. upon her return from Denmark in the 1960s not only to imply a respectable history but also to invent a shadow companion for her daunting new journey. She had married herself, in essence, so she would not be alone in her skin. “There never was a Mr. Madrigal,” she used to tell her new tenants at 28 Barbary Lane, and that had certainly been the case from the very beginning. There had only been scared-silly little Andy Ramsey, the lone male resident of the Blue Moon Lodge and no one’s idea of a mister, least of all his own.
Funny, she thought, sinking deeper into the folds of a wilting cannabis balloon. Blue Dream is not that far from Blue Moon.
Then, somewhere beyond the window, out in the white mirage of a desert afternoon, she heard the most curious thing.
It was the sound of a chicken squawking.
Chapter 2
A PROPER GENTLEMAN
The chicken was in the pen out back, and the ruckus it was making woke Andy from an afternoon nap. They had not kept poultry for some time, so he figured Margaret was turning a trick with the Okie from down the road who sometimes paid in livestock. He wondered if Violet had heard the chicken and if she would be ugly about it at dinner and hurt Margaret’s feelings again. Andy couldn’t see why doing it for a good hen was any less respectable than doing it for a couple of bucks.
He rolled on his side and gazed at the window shade. It had darkened to amber during his nap, and the acacia bush swam against it like mint in a glass of iced tea. These hot afternoons made him languid and dreamy. They made him think about the Basque boy at the drugstore, with the raven locks and long eyelashes.
“Listen up, ladies!”
Margaret’s voice. Addressing the various cabinettes.
“Who nabbed my Lysol?”
Not a good time to open the shade.
“Do you hear me, ladies?”
No reply.
“If I get knocked up—”
Explosive laughter. Probably Sadie’s.
“I mean it,” yelled Margaret.
“You ain’t havin’ no baby, Grandma.” This time it was Violet being mean. Margaret was forty-five, the oldest girl at the Blue Moon, older even than Andy’s mama, who ran the place, so the other girls could be spiteful. Andy figured they were jealous that Margaret had repeat customers. She was even asked for by name when college boys drove in from Reno, drunk as lords on casino gin.
Violet’s wisecrack brought raucous laughter from the cabinettes, but there was no response at all from Margaret. Andy felt bad for her, so he cupped his hands and yelled through the shade. “There’s a bottle of Lysol in the crapper.”
Another silence, then Margaret spoke in a more subdued tone. “Now there’s a gentleman.”
Andy knew where this was leading. “Want me to get it?”
“Would you, lamb? If I move an inch, this tapioca is gonna make its way to glory.” The urgency of the mission was underscored by the clanky flatulence of a jalopy coming to life just beyond the cabinettes. The customer was already leaving.
Andy hurried out to the crapper and found the bottle. By the time he got to Margaret’s cabinette with a basin, there was only a distant plume of dust trailing out to the highway. Margaret was sitting on the edge of the bed in her peach camisole. She looked weary and resigned when he set the basin down beside her on the bed.
“That’s gotta be watered down,” she said.
He nodded. “Already done it.”
“You have?” She touched the pee-colored solution with a look of tender amazement, as if he had just presented her with the Hope Diamond. “If that don’t beat all,” she murmured. “Where can I find one like you, Andy?”
He shrugged, since it wasn’t really a question.
Margaret grabbed a sponge off the nightstand and dipped it into the basin, turning away from him as she began to scrub vigorously between her legs. Andy headed straight for the door, eyes to the floor, but Margaret was still talking.
“I swear. What did ladies do before Lysol?”
Another shrug.
“I ain’t takin’ any chances. That Okie has thirteen kids of his own.”
Andy knew that already. Two of the girls were classmates at Humboldt High, compulsive gigglers who lived with their aunt on Mizpah Street. One of them had flirted with Andy on the bus the day before. He wondered if she would be trouble.
“Anyway,” said Margaret, “we’ll have us some eggs for breakfast.”
“That’ll be swell,” he mumbled.
Margaret was still scrubbing away. “I know you like your eggs,” she said.
Margaret knew lots of things about Andy. She knew things that happened before he was born, back when Mama was teaching piano in Rapid City and Margaret was her friend, working at the five-and-dime. Margaret had always claimed that they were both ready to get out of there, and the opportunity presented itself when Mama got pregnant by a piano pupil whose father was, in Margaret’s words, “a big muckety-muck in the Chamber of Commerce and a hotheaded Greek to boot.” Margaret’s mean-as-a-snake husband had keeled over dead at the cement plant a week earlier, so she paid her debt to the Almighty by helping Mama through her ordeal. “She was our salvation in our flight from the Pharisees” was how Mama had put it, implicating the unborn Andy in this biblical-sounding event, but it would be years before he would learn that their midnight motor trip to Nevada had been paid for with cash Margaret had lifted fro
m the notions counter at the five-and-dime.
He would learn this from Margaret, mind you, not Mama. Mama, when pressed on the matter, had said only that Andy’s father was a “a hero of the Great War who succumbed to his wounds”—an explanation that, even at nine, Andy had found unconvincing, since he knew the radio show she was referencing. They had listened to it together, in fact, him and Mama, down in the parlor on a slow night. A doughboy and a crippled Irish girl finding true love in New York City, if only briefly.
It embarrassed Andy when Mama’s lies became this bold, but he could see how a casualty of war would be easier to explain than some horny fifteen-year-old she had taught to play “Clair de Lune.” Even now, Andy’s paternity was vague in his mind, since he had never been able to put a grown man’s face to that nubile phantom. Sometimes he would study the boys in the lunchroom at Humboldt High, other sophomores with vaguely Grecian features, and imagine them in Rapid City with a younger version of Mama, but it led nowhere. Nowhere comfortable, at least.
Mama had been straight with Andy about her business. She was proud of that story. She and Margaret would tell it in tandem sometimes, playing to a crowd of rowdy customers in the parlor, Mama banging out the funny parts on the piano, shaking everything she had. They had been “two sweet-ass gals flying on a wing and a prayer,” though, truthfully, that prayer had not been uttered until their third night in a Bridge Street hotel, when a railroad man, “a perfectly nice gent in a suit,” offered Margaret five dollars to go upstairs and give him a blow job. Margaret had been a knockout back then, a genuine Swedish blond with cornflower-blue eyes who never forgot her makeup. It had been a natural mistake, Mama had insisted, what with all the plug-ugly women out here in the desert, but maybe it had also been a sign from heaven. Maybe a nice girl mistaken for something else had just been shown her true calling in life. Especially if she had gone upstairs as readily as Margaret had.
Their initial agreement had been simple: Mama would find the johns and take their money, and Margaret would “haul their ashes.” There were already a few girls working in cribs on Bridge Street, so Mama took them under her no-nonsense wing, promising a steady income and protection from the johns. By the time Andy was born at Humboldt General in the spring of 1920, Mama was offering six ladies (including Margaret) and setting her sights on a big private spread out on the road to Jungo. The old house was already there, so Mama added the cabinettes, a semicircle of cinder-block huts painted with tall organ pipe cacti, though there was nothing remotely like them growing on that barren expanse. Folks just naturally expected “a touch of the Old West” when they drove out for pussy in the middle of nowhere, so Mona Ramsey intended to oblige them. (Mama used the third person when she got really fired up, as if she were talking about someone else entirely.)
Andy’s first memory was not of the house, or even the huge neon moon Mama had erected by the highway, but the cool, vaulting interior of the Catholic church on Melarkey Street. At four, Andy was a little old for a christening (and Mama wasn’t even Catholic), but St. Paul’s had just been completed, and it was the grandest place in town, a Spanish-style edifice with towers like a castle. Mama wanted folks to see that her son was being raised a proper gentleman. To that end, Margaret had made him a christening outfit with Irish lace she ordered from Denver. Technically, it was a dress, since she had simply enlarged a McCall’s pattern meant for babes-in-arms, but Andy had not complained. He had worn it all day, in fact, chasing a billy goat around the yard. He could still remember how fine it felt against his skin, and the flinty look in Mama’s eyes when he refused to take it off.
When hard times came and poor folks headed west in droves, Mama never lost faith in the business. There were rumors in town that gambling was about to be legalized in Nevada, and she reckoned that was a good thing, since the fools who went bust at the tables would be even more needful of female consolation. She had been right, as usual. The Blue Moon Lodge thrived, gaining a fresh coat of paint and a scarlet slot machine in the parlor, shiny as a new Hudson and emblazoned with an Indian head. Customers came from as far away as Boulder City, where thousands of workers, predictably starved for ladies, were building a colossal new dam.
Lately, Mama’d had her mind set on gold. She had heard from old Mrs. Austin, whose husband ran the general store in Jungo, that Mr. Hoover himself, the former president, had arrived in a private railway car with an oilman from San Francisco and inquired about George Austin’s claim in the Slumbering Hills. It was common knowledge, Mama said, that old George and his college-boy sons had been poking in the ground up there. They had recently shipped two bags of gold ore to the mint in San Francisco. Everybody in town was talking about it, but Mrs. Austin had been tight-lipped with Mama, saying only that Mr. Hoover had been a regular feller and that she had grown accustomed to famous folks when she was a nurse in San Jose.
“The nerve o’ that woman!” said Mama, wielding her fork like a saber at the dinner table. “There she is, sellin’ chaw tobacco to the goddamn section hands, and she’s actin’ all high-and-mighty with me!”
A tiny fleck of mashed potato flew off Mama’s fork and hit Violet square in her hennaed spit curl. Margaret winked at Andy; Violet had not even noticed.
“The ol’ biddy is about to get filthy rich on that claim,” Mama added sourly. “And she don’t even have the decency to say so.”
“What were you doin’ in Jungo?” This was Delphine, the back-talking Cajun girl, but Andy was wondering the same thing. Jungo was over thirty miles up the road, a pissant little railroad junction that made Winnemucca look like Gay Paree.
Mama was glowering now. “Hush up, Delphine.”
“If you’re lookin’ to buy property, there ain’t that much poontang in Nevada.”
“Delphine, I mean it. Another word out o’ you and you’re gettin’ that fatty from Battle Mountain the next time he comes in for a dry bob.”
Delphine stared down at her plate as a cautious silence fell over the table. Andy knew from experience that it was in everyone’s interest to change the subject. None of these girls wanted to give a dry bob to the fatty from Battle Mountain.
“What famous folks?” he asked.
Mama frowned at him.
“Mrs. Austin,” he explained. “Who did she know?”
This brought a grunt. “Some feller named London. Who cares?”
“Jack London?”
“I reckon. Yeah.”
“Wow,” Andy said under his breath.
“You heard o’ him?”
“He wrote The Call of the Wild. We read it for English last year.”
Mama stabbed a sweetbread with her fork and poked it into her mouth. “Well, don’t go tellin’ that ol’ battle-ax. She’s already too big for her britches.”
A smile flickered at the corner of Margaret’s mouth, but she managed to conceal it by turning toward Andy. “How was school, lamb?”
He shrugged. “Okay.”
“You pass your history test?”
“A-minus.”
“Get you,” said Margaret, beaming. “You’re heaps smarter than the rest of us.”
Mama shot Margaret a crabby look. “Where do you think he got it from?” Mama had finished high school, while Margaret had dropped out early to go to beauty school in Rapid City. Mama used that dubious advantage to lord it over Margaret whenever they squabbled. Lately, there had been more squabbles than usual, though Andy was not sure why. Maybe Mama was just worn out.
“I saw the Watson girl at the post office today,” Mama offered, reassembling her face to look more pleasant for Andy. “She asked after you.”
He doubted this was true. If anything, Mama had probably raised the subject herself, since Gloria Watson’s family was known to be well fixed. Her father was a doctor—a widowed doctor to boot—who had once conducted the monthly exams at the Blue Moon. Mama’s coquettish overtures had failed to get a rise o
ut of him (and most likely scared him off the job), so now she was working on his daughter.
“I think she’s taken a shine to you, Andy.”
Andy sighed so she could hear it.
“What’s the matter with Gloria Watson?”
“Nothing. She’s very nice. She’s dating the class president, that’s all.”
“Well, that don’t make no never mind.”
Margaret glanced at Mama sideways. “Leave him be, Mona.”
“Andy’s a damn sight better-lookin’ than any class president.”
“Mona . . .”
“Well, look at him, Margaret. He could get any pretty girl he wants.”
Andy rolled his eyes. “You’re a stitch, Mama.”
“Don’t you sass me, kid. You know I’m right.”
He stayed calm and smiling as he rose and took his plate to the sink. Half the time Mama was just spoiling for a fight, so he had learned not to engage her.
“I’ve got homework,” he said, heading off to his room.
By nine o’clock the yard was full of cars, so Andy stayed in his room, reading under a lampshade printed with a map of the world. Down below he could hear the usual music from the Victrola, the usual howls from the customers and counterfeit squeals from the girls. Not an awful sound, really, just an awfully familiar one, and the wrong accompaniment to Richard Halliburton’s Book of Marvels. He wondered if Mama truly wanted to go on like this forever, selling good-for-all-night tokens unto death, or if she ever dreamed of being somewhere else entirely. That would be fine with him, unless her escape plan involved the acquisition of a wealthy daughter-in-law, in which case leaving would be just as grimly unimaginable as staying.
He had just turned sixteen, though. There was still time to figure it out.
“You there, lamb?” Margaret was cooing from outside his door, so he invited her in. She was wearing a calf-length green velvet gown that was balding in places like the arm of an old settee. Her palomino hair was now loosely corralled on top of her head with bobby pins. She was holding a parcel about the size of a shoe box, wrapped in the funny papers and tied up with twine.