Almanac of the Dead

  Later Max tells Leah she is a hundred percent wrong about men’s fantasies; those are her fantasies—the excitement of the orgasm before the bullets. Max knows what the men are thinking as they ram it home to Leah:

  “ ‘His wife, his wife, I bury it in his wife! Over his dead body.’ They imagine you spread over my dead body.” Leah knows Max is right. Only a woman fantasizes bullets striking a man’s back at orgasm; a man’s fantasy at orgasm was firing bullets into the wife’s husband. Leah wonders if Max gets excited when they talk about sex.

  FAMILY BUSINESS

  ANGELO SANK BACK in the seat of the big Mercedes and let Sonny talk. He only half-listened because he was noticing that his Aunt Leah’s realty corporations owned every other commercial parcel in northwest Tucson. Sonny was talking as fast as he was driving, cutting in and out of traffic, doing sixty up Oracle Road. Before Angelo had come West, one rumor he’d heard was Uncle Max played golf only on one golf course. The course with the desert landscaping. He had pictured the holes with their colored flags and numbers on the pin surrounded by a green of solid rock or adobe clay. The first visit to Max on the golf course had disappointed Angelo. The greens had finely manicured green grass, and the fairways connecting the holes, while a little sparse and yellow on the edges, were still grassy. The hazards were desert hazards, and Angelo had found them quite wonderful. Not only did the unwary golfer risk sending a ball into a sand trap, the spiny desert trees—paloverde and mesquite—growing along the edges of the fairways created an impenetrable jungle. The best hazard was formed not with deep sand or boulders and big rocks or even with the desert trees. The best hazard was a wide strip of cholla cactus branching up as tall as six feet, their spines so thick they resembled yellowish fur. Max had all kinds of funny stories about vacationers, winter visitors, playing golf there for the first time and attempting a save from the center of the cactus hazard. Teddy bear or jumping cactus, Max called the chollas, and he claimed he’d seen golfers with segments of the spiny branches sticking to their heads, their asses, and even stuck to an ear.

  What Sonny is talking about is the task facing their organization. He is talking about percentages of nets and grosses. Sonny is talking expansions and resistance and what the competition is hoping to expand into. Angelo always feels a vague uneasiness when he hears Sonny or Bingo talk like that. Angelo likes what he does with the horses: checking up on the racetracks the organization controls.

  In the parking lot at the golf course Sonny wraps up his monologue with, “That’s where you come in,” and Angelo grins and laughs so his cousin won’t catch his inattention. At the pro shop the man behind the counter says, “Fourteenth hole,” and points, the minute he sees Sonny Blue. Sonny points, at one of the canopied golf carts. Everyone on the East Coast has theories about old Max Blue and the golf course. Most of them agree he is stupid or crazy. But Angelo sees how quickly the four bodyguards with his uncle sight the golf cart as he and Sonny approach. Angelo feels a wave of sweat break over him as Max Blue’s four bodyguards pull out their Uzis. The three golf carts and armed men in front of them barricade Max, who tees off calmly. Max hooks the shot and the ball disappears into the mesquite grove below the sixteenth hole. Angelo wishes he’d eaten more for breakfast. He knows what his uncle is going to ask him. Angelo prefers to leave things just as they are. He will tell his uncle that if he has to. He will remind his uncle they won’t find another man who knows horses as Angelo does. Unless you know horses, you can’t tell how much funny stuff is going on at a racetrack—throwing races, needles, and hopped-up ponies—all the monkey business Uncle Bill had taught Angelo to watch out for at the track. Uncle Bill had taught Max for a while. Max will listen when Angelo says Bill’s name. Angelo has had the fillies on the Southwest pari-mutuel circuit for two years now, and the best part is he had only seen a gun once and that was over a dope deal. The Southwest tracks are cleaner and quieter than any on the coast. Angelo wants to stay with the horses. Someone had to do the job, and Angelo and the racing fillies were assets.

  Max can see Angelo is uneasy with the bodyguards. Max jokes that the best bodyguards trust nobody, not even your grandmother. Max is smiling and nods his head in the direction the lost ball flew.

  “You can’t practice enough,” Max says, and glances at the gold watch on his wrist and then at the clubhouse. He is expecting a threesome at eleven, Max says.

  Angelo is always surprised at how much Max and Bill look alike. Angelo is always embarrassed at how his heartbeat quickens when he first sees his uncle Max’s face. But the eyes are different. None of them had eyes like Bill’s. Uncle Bill had been the only one who had wanted to give Angelo a chance. Because, Bill liked to brag, he and the boy were alike in their love for the horses—“the ponies,” Uncle Bill liked to call them. Bill had wanted the rest of the family to know Angelo belonged working with the horses.

  Angelo didn’t want to get involved with the expansion. The expansion involved the Mexican border and shipments from friends of Mr. B.’s. Angelo spots two golf carts speeding toward them in the distance. Angelo knows this is the threesome for the game at eleven.

  “Election year is coming up,” Angelo says when they get back to the car, but Sonny Blue doesn’t acknowledge the remark. Angelo as a horse owner has worked out well, Sonny Blue tells him. Angelo hates the condescending tone his cousin uses.

  “Bring your fillies to Tucson. Run them here this winter,” Sonny Blue had said. But all that time they had been maneuvering Angelo into position.

  MARILYN

  ANGELO HAD BEEN a little surprised at Marilyn. It was the difference, Marilyn said, between the East Coast and the Southwest. Angelo asked her where in the East she’d been, and she had hesitated for only a split second before she said, well, she hadn’t ever been anyplace outside New Mexico except for Texas, and then only to El Paso, which wasn’t really like Texas. But she’d heard. She’d heard about how people in New York City and New Jersey and places back there were not friendly. Marilyn had winked at Angelo. People had been lining up behind him at the quinella window, and some of them were beginning to get nasty and mutter at her out loud. But there again Marilyn had surprised him. She had told all of them, even the meek-looking old men with only one twenty-dollar bill in their hands, they could damn well stand there and wait, they could hold their horses (she had laughed at her own joke), that the gentleman ahead of them was placing a rather large wager. Angelo did pull out the roll of fifty-dollar bills then just because Marilyn had said that. Later on, after she got off work and Angelo met her at the ticket windows, he had teased her. Angelo told her that he had been at every window at just about every track on the East Coast since he was a kid standing beside his uncle. Angelo told her that he had never heard anyone, woman or man, anywhere on the East Coast talk like that to irate customers. She was, Angelo teased, a whole lot more like the East Coast than she was an Albuquerque girl. But she laughed that off and said that if you didn’t get tough, you got trampled, and she took off walking a little ahead of him, fast, determined, rooting around in her big tooled-leather cowgirl purse for a cigarette. Angelo had to hurry a little to catch up with her, and when he said hold your horses, hold your horses, what’s the rush, Marilyn laughed and then looked him right in the eye and said:

  “I am dying for a cold beer and a joint, and then I want to hit the hay with you.” Just like that.

  Marilyn picked the bar she said all the track employees went to. She said the good thing about it was the jukebox because it had all the old Bob Wills and the Texas Playboys albums on it. As soon as they’d stepped in the door, she had asked him for quarters. Give me all your quarters, she had said, winking again. And then even before they’d got their beer, she had gone to study the jukebox, sliding quarters and pushing buttons. The people on the barstools looked like track employees all right. Angelo saw a couple of the assistant starters, and two of the exercise boys, rubbing their hands around the coolness of the beer mugs. They all stared at him because of the white
linen suit. At first that had bothered Angelo a little. Because in the East, sharp dressers were everywhere. What you wore mattered a great deal so far as how clerks or cabdrivers treated you. But in El Paso or Albuquerque around the racetracks where all that remained of the cowboys could be found, snappy suits, and fancy shoes or hats, brought out the worst in people. The remains of what were once cowboys were the most nasty. The few blacks and all the Mexicans and Indians behaved a lot better, mostly to spite the broken-down white men in faded, torn jeans hanging so low the tops of their ass cracks showed. All that got better as soon as they found out that Angelo had no intention of giving orders or looking down his nose.

  Or as Marilyn used to like to remind him, even when they were in bed together, “Out here we don’t like people bossing us.” And the first time she had said it, something about the way she was raised up on one arm, her tiny breast dangling, made him burst out laughing. He had said, well, what do you think—that people in the East like to be bossed? And she had thought about it a moment before she had let herself slide down, hand and arm buried under the pillow, facedown on the bed. She had looked up at him slyly and said:

  “I boss you a lot and you don’t even know it!”

  Now, Marilyn glanced up and gave him a big smile as she took her beer. And then she hastily pushed two more buttons before she took Angelo by the hand and pulled him in the direction of a booth near the pool tables.

  “I noticed you the times you bought fifty-dollar WINS and quinellas and daily doubles,” she said. “I tried to imagine what you would be like.”

  “And were you right?”

  Marilyn was taking a long swallow of beer, so she just nodded. “I’m mostly right,” she said. “Mostly.” And then Angelo had seen an instant when the glitter in her blue eyes had gone. But she had bounced right back. The way her long blond hair bounced in the loose ponytail she wore. Long, lovely strands pulling loose along both temples and behind her ears so she was most like a racing filly, all motion and speed and spirit. Angelo wondered if this was another of those differences between East and Southwest: the suddenness that things happened here. Angelo wasn’t more than half through a bottle of beer and he was in love as he had never been before.

  Marilyn talked and told him everything, but then Angelo would see the glitter in her blue eyes flicker, and she would spring questions at him. Why did he grow up with aunts and uncles and grannys and no mother or father? How did he get away with not going to school? What was he doing wearing those white linen suits, strolling around the track every weekend? Had he watched too many movies? Too much TV? How come he was always alone? Didn’t he have girlfriends? A family? Marilyn had fired all the questions like a shotgun, but then she had backed off, letting him know he could answer one or some or none. And so he had pointed down at her scuffed cowboy boots and the bell-bottom blue jeans carefully faded and then embroidered with flowers and butterflies and rainbows.

  “So now you’re a cowgirl? Not a hippie?” Angelo was smiling as he said it, but something had disturbed Marilyn. She looked down and picked at the label on the beer bottle. Just as quickly, she brightened up again because one of her favorites was playing on the jukebox, “The Milk Cow Blues.” The bartender brought over two more bottles of beer and indicated that one of the exercise boys had bought them a round. Angelo looked in their direction and nodded. Marilyn glanced over her shoulder.

  “You know why I like this song? I like it because it’s about two things at once, you know? If you only want to hear the part about the milk cow, you can.” Marilyn winked as she added, “Or you hear the other side too.” Angelo nodded. He left a couple of dollars on the table and they walked out hand in hand.

  Angelo was staying at the Hilton. Was that okay? Marilyn clapped her hands together. The Hilton! That was better than any motel!

  She couldn’t keep from walking ahead of him, to pinch the plastic leaves of the fake fig trees decorating the halls. Angelo enjoyed her excitement at the small details. He liked the cowgirl belt with MARILYN tooled in white letters wreathed in red rosebuds and green ivy. She had pulled off her boots and rubbed her toes along the carpet. The socks she wore were men’s socks, mismatched, one black, one dark blue. Then she had spread-eagled herself facedown to sniff the nubby, white bedspread. Marilyn had only seen king-size beds, she told Angelo. She had never actually tried one. Angelo had undressed while Marilyn explored the bathroom and the closet. She laughed at how carefully Angelo hung up the linen sport coat and trousers. Her faded bell-bottoms were in a heap with torn white panties and the men’s socks. She left the red, pearl-button cowboy shirt for Angelo to take off.

  Marilyn was the expert. Afterward she told Angelo that all the guys wanted a good blow job, and so she had practiced and practice makes perfect, doesn’t it, and it had been all Angelo could do to smile and nod his head. She had said she was too nervous and excited about being in the Hilton to want sex very much. But Angelo had not been able to get enough of her. By morning Angelo had realized Marilyn preferred oral sex. Although Angelo held his weight off her, Marilyn seemed panicked when he was on top of her. She clawed at his shoulders, panting, fighting to escape suffocation. Later she admitted the feeling of suffocation was just something crazy, and her girlfriends told her that if that was true, then why didn’t she gag or feel as if she were choking when she sucked cock. Marilyn said she didn’t know. Even being on top of Angelo frightened her, although not as much. Marilyn had described the sensation nervously, defensively. All she could think of was one of those barbecue skewers piercing all the way through her. After breakfast as Angelo was driving Marilyn to her house, she had been silent, then suddenly she had informed him that blow jobs were what the professionals did. No diseases that way, no pregnancies. She didn’t like to be pinned down, not since her big brothers had teased her and wrestled her when she was a little girl.

  Marilyn did not explain her reason for leaving Angelo any better than she had explained her sensation of being suffocated. Angelo had thought she was as happy and as much in love as he was. The racing season in Albuquerque had ended when the state fair was over, and Marilyn wanted to water-ski at Elephant Butte Lake. “We were wild,” Marilyn said, and then she talked about Tim and the others. “Those were really bitchin’ days,” she said right before she fell asleep. When they stopped for gas in Truth or Consequences, Marilyn had asked for money for a long-distance call. Marilyn did not say whom she had called, and Angelo didn’t ask. She continued with the water-skiing story about taking acid at Elephant Butte Lake and the guy who had skied right over a rattlesnake.

  “I didn’t know rattlesnakes could swim,” Angelo said.

  “They climb trees too,” she added, lighting up another joint. Angelo could feel a strain even while they both laughed at the prospect of water-skiing legs spread wide open and suddenly straight ahead, swimming for the cattails on the lake edge, the big diamond-back rattler coming at you straight on. Marilyn was trying too hard to keep the mood funny and a little crazy. She kept passing Angelo the joint.

  Marilyn was staring out the window now. She had let go of the funny, silly mood. Angelo could almost feel her gathering up the words. He thought he could almost see the words rising up in her chest and then up into her throat. When she turned her head from the window, Angelo saw big tears in her eyes. Marilyn would not let him park the car or wait with her at the El Paso Airport. She said it was better that way. Somehow Angelo had known how it would be, after the first time they had made love and Marilyn mentioned Tim. She and Tim went back a long time together. Marilyn had told Angelo. She had warned him.

  CHANGE OF HEART

  ANGELO SAT IN HIS CAR for a long time in the El Paso Airport parking lot. Marilyn had been getting ready to return to Tim for a long time. Angelo had just been playing a long shot. He had known it all along, but it had not stopped him from loving her. Angelo sat and felt the street shake under the car as the big jets landed and took off. Marilyn had never told Angelo what had caused her to leave Tim.
Or even if she had been the one to go. Once she had described her “crowd” as the last survivors. Survivors of what? Angelo had wanted to know. “Oh, you know, we were the first hippies and now we are the last. Just us. Just our crowd. The people that hung out together.” Angelo felt Marilyn wanted the crowd again. Wanted that group that was hers, where what she did was what they all did. Angelo thought he had some idea of how to entice a woman away from another man. But with Marilyn, every expensive dinner, every shopping spree, had been followed with a strange remorse. She would tell Angelo how they had gone for weeks shoplifting what they needed in grocery stores. Cigarettes, beer, even steaks. Once she had got caught with two rib-eye steaks stuffed down the front of her jeans.

  An airport cop finally came over to the car and asked if he was okay. Angelo nodded. He drove slowly until he got outside the airport, and then he purposely took the narrow, twisting road over Mt. Franklin. Bingo had a black Trans Am and was always bragging about how fast he could get to the El Paso Airport from his house. Angelo made himself game rules that afternoon: he could shift down and use the accelerator, but he could not touch the brake. If he made it to Bingo’s without touching the brake and under forty-five minutes, then he would get Marilyn back. When Angelo skidded into the long, sandy driveway, he had not used the brake once. He did not have to glance down at his wristwatch to know he had come in well under forty-five minutes.

  The Hacienda of the Wall was what Sonny called the house Bingo had custom-built on sixty acres of yucca and white sand dunes northwest of El Paso. Sonny had made jokes about the design, asking if the architect also designed jails and prisons. Bingo argued he needed his home to be his castle; “like a fortress,” Angelo had suggested, and Bingo had leaped on that phrase, nodding his head enthusiastically.