Last Days in the Desert

“Listen,” said the large girl, whose name was Itzel. She was talking loudly and tugging down the cut and unraveling hem of her black denim miniskirt. “We’re gonna fix this here wall today. This is a disgrace. All of us girls are gonna fix Stace and Yadira and Tiff’s wall right now for them. We’re gonna eat and then fix this goddamn wall. I’m gonna organize us, okay? My dad usta plaster for a living and I know what to do in a case like this, but this is a big disgrace, man.”

  “Oh, wow, maybe we can get him—” began Yadira.

  “No, we can’t. He taught me everything we need to know and we can do this ourselves,” she interrupted. “I know what to do for a big wrecked adobe wall like this and now I’m gonna organize us, okay? So do you have the stuff to fill it with? And do you got the trowels that we need?”

  “Sure, sure,” said everyone, amiably enough, holding up trowels and the pail of filler.

  “Okay, so we have the supplies to get started. That’s important. Now, first I have to think about how we’re gonna do it given the type of wall and the damage and everything.”

  Everyone nodded.

  She sank down on the floor, stretched out and shut her eyes. Within fifteen seconds, she was sound asleep.

  At first, the other girls were too shocked by her behavior and too afraid of her to say anything. They sat looking at each other, making big eyes in her direction, and snickering. Thinking that she would wake up any minute, they remained silent, but eventually they gave up on her and began talking among themselves.

  Yadira was lying on the floor near Itzel, stretched out on her side, watching her friends, some of whom were now up on their feet shoving white filler into the holes in the adobe wall using wide trowels. After they had put an insufficient quantity of the filler into one hole, they stepped back confidently and admired their handiwork.

  “It’s kinda going in too far,” said a critic from the floor. “You need to fill it to go out some cuz it’s gonna shrink.”

  “That’s just your angle,” said one of the workers who was standing. “It just looks that way cuz you’re down low.”

  “No, she’s right. It’s really going in like,” said Stacie. “You gotta put some more stuff in.”

  “You won’t notice that if I put some texture on it,” said one girl. She grabbed a triangular trowel and tried to add bumps, but she gouged a hunk out of the patch instead. “Oh shit,” she said, laughing at the damage.

  “Oh, that looks great,” said Tiffany sarcastically. “Now I gotta fix what you screwed up!”

  With some more work, they had filled that hole badly enough. They were going to have to wait an hour before painting the badly done patch, though. While waiting, they got a chair and tackled the higher hole. Some of them were too hung over and too drunk to stand on the chair for long and they took turns at the job.

  “You guys are such friends,” said Yadira, admiring their work. “You’re saving us our deposit and butts. Maybe we would have been sued in small claims. Go on, Stace, tell me about the thorns in my T.J. Tell me about how it was when T.J. came into the house with all the cactus thorns in him.” She spoke forlornly, addressing Stacie, especially, “I wanna hear all about him and what happened to him last night. How did he get in the cactus? Who pushed him in?”

  “He fell in on his own,” said Stacie coldly. “And you know I don't want to talk about him. You should have heard what he said to me. I really can’t stand that jerk. I’m glad you hooked up with him, cuz he’s like been your crush for years, but personally, I can’t stand him.”

  “I'll tell you about him,” said Mona, struggling out of her position lying on the floor with a beer propped on her stomach. “There were all these thorns. Thorn, after thorn, after thorn.” Each time she said the word ‘thorn’ she managed to elongate the sound, taking the th and making it sound most decidedly prickly and dangerous and one felt that the thorn was being plucked out of someone as she said the word. “I don’t think I’ve ever seen anyone with so many pieces of cactus stuck in so many different places. He had them all over his body, on his back and his legs, even his feet, believe me, it was amazingly awful to see it. I have never seen anyone with so many pieces of cactus stuck into him.” With this, every girl agreed. There were five of them still eating burritos and drinking beers, and three plastering the wall and drinking beers, and three lying on the floor smoking weed, and Itzel sleeping. Itzel was snoring now with her lips pursed.

  “He had so many pieces of cactus in him. And everyone was saying let’s take him to the hospital but he wouldn’t go,” Mona explained.

  “That was really fucking brave of him,” Yadira observed.

  “Yadira, why are you saying he was brave? He was completely out of it. The guy was so wasted it wasn’t funny. And it was you, Yadira, that begged us not to take him,” said Tiffany, “it’s not like he really wanted to be strong or something.”

  “Hey, shut up about that, Tiff,” said Yadira aggressively. She wasn’t sure herself why she was attacking Tiffany or defending her memory of T.J., which was already fading in light of the realization that he did not actually know who she was. It wasn’t as though she was a woman scorned, though. T.J. never scorned any woman; they all excited him equally. It was beginning to sink in through her drug-hazed brain that her interest in T.J. had evaporated. She was becoming more philosophical about it, even seeing a tinge of humor about the fact that she had slept with someone who thought her name was Kaydee or Jaydee or something. Yadira took it as a good sign that she was beginning to forget what her name was supposed to have been.

  “So they took him to the bathroom and started working on him. God, he has a lovely body. He is so trim like,” said Mona, “and his abs are amazing. Everyone was drooling over his bod.”

  “No, no, no,” whimpered Yadira, “I can’t take this. I was so wasted. I don't remember anything about what happened with my crush. My four-year-long crush. And it’s all over!” At this, Yadira groaned long and mournfully.

  “You slept with him,” they all exclaimed.

  “I don’t remember any of it! And neither does he,” Yadira cried.

  “So what. That happens to me all the time,” said Tiffany.

  “Shit,” Yadira cried.

  “Bad stuff like happens to good people,” said Stacie.

  “Don’t torment her. Don’t,” said Mona.

  “There were cactus pieces hanging on him and he was moaning and groaning. Poor baby, all the girls said. You poor, poor baby. Somebody was speaking to him in Spanish saying poor, poor baby over and over again and again. That’s what they were saying in Spanish to him,” said Tiffany.

  “Maybe that was that Jaydee bitch?” Yadira suggested.

  “I don’t think so. They weren’t any Jaydees there,” Stacie explained.

  “No, I knew them all. There were not any Jaydees,” said Mona.

  “Who were they?” asked Yadira.

  “Well, I knew them,” said Mona cautiously, “but not like I really knew them with their names attached or anything.”

  “Uh huh,” said Yadira narrowing her eyes at Mona. She sat for a moment trying to focus on the way her friend was evading her question, but with her brain so hung over she couldn’t keep her mind on one topic for long. “Ohhhhh,” Yadira let out a long tortured cry suddenly. “Why couldn’t I have been there?”

  “You WERE there,” everyone shouted back at her at once. They began laughing at her.

  Hearing them shouting, Itzel opened her eyes for a moment. She looked blankly around the room.

  “No, I wasn't,” said Yadira firmly.

  “Yeah, girl, you fucking were,” said someone. “I saw you, and so did everyone else who’s sitting here on your floor.”

  “Well, why couldn’t I have been sober,” Yadira protested. “Why couldn’t I have been able to remember me being there to help him?”

  Itzel awakened further when she noticed the girls repairing the adobe wall.

  “Did you spray the adobe with water first?” she asked, clear
ing her throat and blinking.

  “No,” said the girl with the filler can.

  “Oh, shit, then it’s all gonna fall out,” she declared before she closed her eyes and fell asleep again.

  “Do you think she’s right?” asked Stacie in a whisper.

  Tiffany shrugged. “Hope not.”

  Tiffany thought about the prior night for a moment. “What a nice back T. J.’s got,” she said. “He’s such a gym rat. Sheesh.”

  “Shut up. Just the fuck shut up about his back. I don’t want to hear about him,” said Yadira.

  “Don’t like torment her,” said Stacie.

  “Well, you have to admit he has good points,” Tiff added.

  “I don’t have to,” said Stacie, obstinately, to herself.

  “I’m never gonna be with him again and he didn't ever know who I was and why I invited him. To my party and to sleep with him,” whined Yadira.

  “Let’s get off this topic. You know what? I’m going to miss this town,” said Stacie.

  “Shit, yeah,” everyone agreed.

  “So, so real,” someone said.

  Stacie said, “I think it’s like the border. I never lived so near the border. Shit, this place was crazy for four fucking years of the best craziness I’m ever going to know. I do not want to settle down and settle. I want it to go on and on.”

  “I want to get back there, to Chicago. But I don’t, too, mostly,” Yadira said. “I miss the fall. I miss stuff. I’m going to miss this place, too. Serapes and burritos. Drugs.”

  “I know what you mean,” said Tiffany.

  “That so, erp, so proud,” said Mona.

  “What do you mean?” someone asked.

  “Some word like that—‘proud’,” said Mona.

  Everyone laughed.

  “I have never done so many shitting drugs as out here. In the desert,” said Yadira, by way of explaining herself.

  “We will never be able to do this many drugs again,” said Stacie. “Other places aren’t free enough. People can’t be free there.”

  “Yeah. It’s true. We could do what we wanted here. Nobody cared,” Tiffany said.

  Then one of the girls came out from using the bathroom, by way of the back bedroom.

  She came out to tell them something was there, somethings, besides the pile of luggage, and those somethings were kind of weird, actually.

  “I smelled a stink in your bedroom, Tiff. I went back there to see if you had vomited back there, too, and I found somebody left some weird shit in some pails for you.”

  Chapter Six