“What happened to your hands?” Bud asked.
“Oh, you know. Just fending off brush, stuff like that. I lost my footing once and landed on some rocks, nothing serious.” Reassuringly, the agent smiled, “There’s nothing wrong that an invitation to share whatever it is Bertha’s got going in that oven won’t cure.”
Bud looked down at his own clasped hands on the table. “You’re not staying for dinner, Ky. Drink the coffee, take the cigarettes if you want, but then leave, please. Actually, I’m not asking you to leave, I’m telling you to leave, do you understand?”
Kyril Montana glared evenly at the top of Bud’s head in the charged silence, trying to make him look up. “Bud, you’re not really in a position to tell me to go to hell.”
“If you won’t accept it from him, then accept it from me—” Bertha began.
“Shuttup,” Bud snapped, glancing up fleetingly at the agent, but immediately dropping his eyes again.
Kyril Montana said, “I don’t want to stay where I’m not wanted, Bud, but you have to understand this is fairly sudden. I’m a little tired, you know, I’ve had a long afternoon in the hills. So this comes as a relative surprise—”
“I don’t care, Ky. Do what you will, think what you will, plan some kind of revenge, but just finish your coffee and get out of here. Whatever happens from here on in, I’m not gonna be a part of it. And that includes letting you use my house for your red-baiting meetings or whatever. It isn’t because I’ve got high and mighty scruples against what you’re doing, understand; I haven’t had any great change of heart. I’m just finally more scared of them, now, than I am of you.”
“Well. You son of a bitch.”
Bud nodded. “Right, you’re right, I’m not up for any civic awards, Ky, I’m just looking after my own skin, you’re absolutely right. But do me a favor and finish that coffee and get out of here, and steer clear of our lives from here on in.”
Katie suddenly pranced into the kitchen, blurting, “Show’s over!” And then, noticing her father’s downcast face and the calm, infuriated agent, she said, “Hey everybody, guess what pennies are made out of—?”
For a second Kyril Montana felt murderous enough to turn around and slug that obnoxious kid; he wanted to knock her bratty little head right off her shoulders and send it splattering against the kitchen wall like a rotten tomato.
Instead, he shook loose a smoke from the pack Bud had given him, set the weed in his mouth, and lit it—flame flared up before his eyes.
“Hey,” Bud said, amazed, and then abruptly, nervously giggling: “You lit the fucking filter!”
* * *
It was a bright, beautiful night. Troubled, off-balance, and feeling strange, Horsethief Shorty wandered. He circled the dark swimming pool in which he had never splashed and crossed damp silver grass to the tennis courts, leaning against the wire with his hands hung in the steel webbing above his head. He had forgotten to loosen the nets at dusk and sweep the base lines, making sure they were securely tacked into the clay. Tomorrow evening he and a Chicano kid would sweep the courts and roll them flat.
But right now Shorty didn’t want to loosen the nets. He leaned against, laxly hung onto, the fencing, gazing across the courts down toward the scattered town lights, toward the few mercury vapor lamps his boss had installed around the store, the café, and the Enchanted Land Motel. Across the highway in the ghost town Amarante Córdova’s light glowed softly from the open door of his crumbling adobe.
Shorty rolled a cigarette, lit it, smoked quietly. After a while he snapped his cigarette butt through the wire onto the near court. “I sure spent my life kissing a lot of assholes,” he mused wearily. “And I guess maybe I chose the wrong side.”
Which was a thought that had been eating away at him for a while now, and it had really been driven home sharp as a lightning bolt when Bloom tossed that finger at him this afternoon: for some reason, the lawyer’s bitter gesture had made Shorty almost want to cry.
Well, tonight it all made him sad. But shit, he thought, he’d been lonely all his life; loneliness was the absolute condition of his days, and it had been that way ever since he was a kid opening his eyes at first dawn and lying still for a minute, listening to the roosters crowing in a tiny pen out back and thinking in a minute he would have to get up and plod off to the war that was his school.
Hell, Shorty had shared Ladd Devine’s dream about the golf course over there on the west side, and about the entire Miracle Valley project. He’d cast his hand in with that kind of progress, betting on the new people who were going to come in and make the town grow, and he was going to be a big part of that growth. You wouldn’t have caught Shorty dead on a golf course, but he owned some of that land over there, some of the choicest parcels, and he would be a strong partner in the corporation that developed it, and there was an excitement to that kind of life.
But there they were down there, those Spanish niggers at the bottom of the proverbial heap, their little lights twinkling—and goddam if Shorty didn’t have a yearning to traipse on down there and put away a few enchiladas and a quart of chokecherry wine with Joe Mondragón or Pancho Armijo, or even with that decrepit, ninety-three-year-old miracle, Amarante Córdova.
“Shorty? Is that you—?”
Flossie was up by the pool, wearing a swimsuit. Her long hair hung loose, shimmering like Christmastime fiber glass angel hair.
“Yep, this is me,” Shorty said, and on his way to the pool he rolled another cigarette. At poolside, he stretched out in a chaise longue and lit the weed.
“I’m going for a swim in the nude,” Flossie said.
“You go right ahead. Don’t mind me.”
Unselfconsciously, she undid the side zipper, let the top fall, and peeled the suit down her long legs. Her big breasts drooped a lot, and her belly had gotten pretty plump, but her legs were strong and lovely. She lifted her breasts a little wistfully with her palms, then let them fall, turned around, and slipped slowly backward into the cool water.
Flossie breaststroked quietly around for a minute before swimming to the poolside nearest Shorty, where she rested, arms folded on the tile border, chin resting on her arms.
“How’s the water?” Shorty asked.
“I guess it’s pretty cold, but I’m so drunk it’s hard to tell. You can’t swim, can you Shorty?”
“Nope. I’d sink like a stone.”
“What do you think happens now?” she asked after a silence.
“I don’t exactly know. They’ve won a small victory, but they won’t know how to take advantage of it. It might delay the dam and the conservancy district, though, also the golf course on the west side, and the Miracle Valley crap, too.”
“I wonder,” she said. And then: “Shorty, is it wrong for me to be on their side?”
“I dunno. I feel kind of funny about things, too.”
“There’ll be a fight, won’t there?”
“Sure, one hell of a fight. But then there’s always fights.”
“I’m pretty drunk, Shorty. I’ve been drinking ever since that posse went out early this morning. Ladd won’t talk to me at all. He’s very tense. He screamed at Jerry G. for losing a bulldozer or something, then he locked himself in the office for an hour. After that he took the Lincoln and drove down to the capital. I don’t know what’s going to happen. You know what?”
“What?”
“I wish I could fly,” Flossie drawled.
“What then?”
“I’d get the kind of drunk I am right now and fly Ladd’s plane over the mountains and crash it into a high meadow, or into one of those deep dark comfortable canyons nobody ever goes to.”
“Hell, I can fly that plane,” Shorty said quietly.
For a long moment, licking chlorinated bubbles off her lips, she said nothing. Then, closing her eyes, she asked, “Would you want to, Shorty?”
“I don’t see why not. It’s all over here for me, Flossie. I don’t want to be on one side or the other in what’s
coming up.”
“You really think it’s over for you?”
“Sure. I was up by the water tank this afternoon looking for Joe Mondragón, when his lawyer walked into a field down below and gave me the finger. It was sort of like he shot me in the heart. Suddenly I felt like a big creep. I can’t understand why something like that didn’t happen to me when I was twenty.”
“I just don’t want to die in a hospital, in a straitjacket, hollering and screaming from the DTs,” Flossie said. “And besides, Shorty, I’m so sick of being so comfortable, I’m so sick of this gentle life.”
“I suppose so,” Shorty mused.
“We could go right now.”
“Why not?”
Like somebody twenty years younger, all gleaming and graceful as a trout, she swam to the shallow end and stepped out of the pool, water drops rolling off her big, growing-flabby body like sparks of liquid moon. And she paused there, profiled to Shorty, looking at the sky. A breeze whisked through orchard branches, rippled aspen leaves, stirred across the lawn, and slightly tickled the swimming pool water.
Flossie toweled dry and tugged the swimsuit back on. “Let’s go,” she said softly.
They walked up the hill, Shorty a little behind her, appreciating her ass, and around the corner of the lodge: a station wagon was parked in the driveway. Shorty drove; slowly they swung away from the house, heading down through the canyon into the valley. Flossie clicked on the radio, then clicked it off. They turned onto the highway, aiming south.
During that forty-five-minute drive to the Chamisaville airport neither spoke very much. Flossie sat with her hands in her lap, her long peroxide hair lovely and rich against her bare shoulders, and she smelled Horsethief Shorty’s smell, of animals and tobacco and sweat, and something she couldn’t exactly define, a little bit like sagebrush, she guessed. And Shorty drove slowly down the highway smelling the sad, sagging woman beside him whom he had known so much of his life, her hair, the damp chlorine, faint traces of a lilac perfume, cherry lipstick on her lips. They drove south in the powerful car, while outside on the right the sagebrush plain stretched west, and the mountains rose on their left, dark and shining.
The airport was shut down for the night, Chet Premminger at home in the Chamisaville suburb of Arroyo Seco. Shorty unhooked the tiedown cables and helped Flossie into the plane.
When they were airborne she asked timidly, “How do you feel, Shorty?”
“I’m okay,” he answered thoughtfully. Then smiled: “I’ve had an okay life.”
“I had such a subdued life,” Flossie said, not with rancor, no hurt feelings there. “I’ve always been so comfortable, you know.”
He steered the plane over the mountains. The darkness in the canyons and valleys below was rich and soft. Neither spoke. Flossie looked down, looked up, gazed straight ahead, let her eyes unfocus and film over, fell asleep. Deer on a bald ridge halted, gazing skyward—Shorty waved. He was relaxing too, growing woozy; he cut the engine and settled back, eyes almost bemusedly on the silvered, shadow-casting landscape below. They were over a thickly forested, deep-canyoned region, inaccessible to most people.
The plane glided silently. And then the nose began to tip down toward the mysterious high country forest where they would not be discovered in years.
Laconically, almost too slowly, Shorty started the plane again, chuckled and shook his head, pulling them out of the glide, and he turned around, aiming away from the mountains over the mesa, heading south toward the airport. Everything gleamed, reflecting the moon so strongly he needed no lights to land. The plane bumped on the runway, straightened out, slowed down, and stopped: he cut the engine.
Flossie woke up.
“Hey,” she murmured. “What happened?”
“Nothing,” Shorty said, smiling broadly. “Nothing at all.”
“You bastard,” she whispered, tipping over and cuddling against him.
“I got to thinking about my life,” Shorty said matter-of-factly, cupping her breast. “I got to thinking about where I been and what I done and what it was I always wanted, and I reached a conclusion.”
“Which was—?” she murmured sleepily.
“I dunno, I guess mostly I just realized up there I was still curious. You know? I mean, I’m too old and too much of a bastard to change sides, but I’d like to stick around a while longer and see how things turn out.”
* * *
There had never been such rejoicing in the Frontier Bar. The jukebox blared mariachi music, everybody was very drunk, and, because more women than usual were on hand, people tried to dance. Joe and Nancy Mondragón were both so bombed they could hardly stand up, let alone walk, God forbid knock off La Raspa, a foxtrot, or the Monkey, but they had decided to perform a flamenco number to a trio of unabashedly drippy accordions, chunk-a-chunk guitars, gagging fiddles, and hysterically sobbing south-of-the-border voices, so they cleared the floor by elbowing everyone else aside, and—Nancy gritting an imaginary rose in her teeth, Joe with a fist clenched against his belly holding together an imaginary skintight gypsy jacket—they began to “dance.” And, as they insanely tattooed the floor with their uncontrolled feet, close to fifty intoxicated buffoons commenced clapping completely out of rhythm, and of course they hooted and shrieked, making vivid gestures and bearhugging each other deliriously while also commenting grossly on the Mondragón effort. Joe stomped, reeking of haughty sneers; Nancy stomped, twining a serpentine hand sensually in the air before losing her balance and zigzagging into the sodden crowd, which heaved her back into the center ring. The record ended, but so what? Nobody had heard the jukebox while it was going; nobody noticed when it was gone. They clapped and hollered while Joe rat-a-tat-tatted his feet and collided with Nancy, clip-clopped wobbly-kneed away, wavered off-balance, recovered, and kept on thumping his feet. And so it went until Joe keeled over backward, his head striking the floor with a sickening crunch. Stars did “La Bamba” in his brain. On awaking, he found himself propped up dazedly in a corner, his hair bloodsoaked; Tranquilino Jeantete was bumbling through a weird little jig with Nancy, who suddenly burped loudly and plunged uncontrollably once more into the soused hordes. Instantly, another reeling and reeking woman took over where Nancy’s rollicking had left off.
Joe clambered back into the spotlight and spread his arms, demanding silence. “Turn off the jukebox!” he shouted. “I’m gonna sing a song!”
Whereupon God cut his strings, and Joe sat down with a rude bump. The gathering hooted mercilessly. Somebody pulled the jukebox plug. Joe raised his arms, urgently wiggling his fingers until everybody piped down. All you could hear for a moment was labored breathing, carbonated bubbles going berserk in two dozen beer bellies, the beer coolers humming, and the ice machine tumbling chunks into its aluminum trough.
Joe’s plan was to sing “Malagueña Salerosa” so soulfully, mournfully, sadly, and beautifully that after the first verse he would need a rowboat in order not to drown in the mob’s tears.
But when he opened his mouth the first line sallied forth sounding like a mouse being squeezed to death by a king snake. Which made Joe and about twenty other men and women giggle. Ineptly smothering his own sputtering guffaws, Joe frantically thrust up his hands, again wiggling the fingertips for silence. This produced a chain reaction during which eighteen other blotto boozers uplifted their arms and wiggled their sweaty fingertips. And when Joe opened his mouth, instead of crooning like an Antonio Aguilar, he belched.
That broke up the fiesta. They hee-hawed and laughed, sputtered and chattered and babbled—a dozen cracked voices assassinated “Malagueña Salerosa,” jubilantly they murdered it up to the spider-webbed rafters and well beyond; rasping words collided against rasping words, gurgling carousers collided against gurgling carousers, and the magic of that breathless soap opera moment Joe had intended to create departed.
Nancy tried to lift Joe, instead she collapsed over him.
“Let’s get out of here,” Joe mumbled woozily. “I’m gonna
barf.”
Painfully, laboring to help each other up, they became hopelessly entangled instead. Finally, they got to their feet and, arm in supporting arm, careened toward a wall, thinking that’s where the door should have been; they wound up recharting their erratic course twice more before plummeting into the crisp night air.
Joe lurched about ten steps ahead, and, bending over with a hand braced against either knee, he erupted. Harlan Betchel’s Doberman watchdog, Brutus, danced excitedly in the front plate glass window of the Pilar Café, barking and snarling while Joe heaved. Nancy wobbled over to the café and pressed her nose against the window, infuriating the dog. “Shuttup, Brutus,” Nancy muttered, “or we’ll make a sausage out of you, comprendes? A great big sizzling sausage.”
Loping unsteadily over, Joe also pressed his nose against the window, merrily tapping on the glass with his knuckles. The dog retreated abruptly, neck hairs bristling, and knocked the salt and pepper shakers off one table.
Joe barked and snarled; Nancy growled and gritted her teeth. Brutus barked and snarled, yelped, retreated, charged forward, and crashed around in circles, going insane.
Onofre Martínez swerved gracefully out of the Frontier’s ruckus, caught himself and regained his balance, and then, oozing one-armed dignity, he navigated over to the café and, draping his left arm around Nancy’s shoulders and the invisible right arm around Joe’s shoulders, he commenced barking and growling and snarling along with them. Brutus leaped forward, skidded to a stop, danced about, and kicked over a chair, howling back.
Soon eight more addled rabble-rousers joined the fray. Lined arm in arm along the plate glass front of the café, they barked and growled and snarled and meowed and cock-a-doodle-dooed, while the infuriated dog danced like a demented devil, leaping and jumping and snapping at them with foamy jaws. He knocked off more salt and pepper shakers, then tipped over a table, yelping in fright, and, fangs bared, he repeatedly charged at the crazies gathered outside.
Joe roared like a lion. Nancy baaed like a sheep. Snuffy Ledoux crowed and clucked and cheeped; Amarante Córdova brayed like a mule. Benny Maestas growled and whistled; Sparky Pacheco bammed his palms against the window; Jimmy Ortega neighed; Betty Apodaca tugged her cheeks out with her fingers, grimacing and loudly clacking her teeth. Both terrified and incensed, the savage watchdog thundered around, tipping over another table and three more chairs—napkin holders bounced across the floor; a sugar bowl shattered. Brutus cut his paw and began splattering blood over everything. The motley conglomeration of joyful, tanked-up ruffians outside laughed until tears came; they continued to imitate animals; they sang songs and gestured obscenely at the livid dog.