Since then, Michele has gone to the gas station every morning, buying a sugary Honey Bun and a squat carton of orange juice and withdrawing another five hundred dollars. Each morning he expects the machine to reject the card. If confronted about the money, he plans to say it was an accident, that he was confused about the machine or the currency, and hand the rest of it over.
On good days, he looks forward to spending the money on very good pot and Ecstasy that he and Renzo will take in the Grand Canyon. Even now, in the back of the cab, he imagines Renzo’s face flickered by a campfire, the Colorado River sliding by. Renzo laughs hard at something, barely able to get his words out. A girl sits beside him, laughing too, and looking at Michele lovingly, with silver glitter dancing around her eyes.
“Tell it again,” they are begging in Italian, tears rolling down their cheeks. “Tell us how you fucked the American cops for all their money.”
“Yes,” Michele says to the cabdriver now. “Please, you will come tomorrow?”
So the next day, as the streetlights come on and the shadows of the mountains grow long through the city, the taxicab returns and takes exit thirty-three west, spiriting Michele from Las Vegas up and over the Spring Mountains, out of that valley always saturated with light.
• • •
M
anny watches from the peacock coop as a pair of headlights turn off the highway. Hot, immediate hope for the Italian boy blooms inside him, though he knows enough about the tricks of lust and loneliness to recognize his thoughts as pure fantasy. He returns to the birds; Gladys can handle the lineup. But soon, over the scrape of his rake against the gravel, he hears the front door open and the breeze carries to him the familiar squeals of surprise that Darla releases for all her regulars.
Manny stops in his trailer to change his shirt, wipe the sweat from his forehead and armpits with a bouquet of toilet paper, and reapply deodorant.
By the time he steps into the main house, Darla is refilling Michele’s Budweiser. She flits and chatters around him like a hummingbird, finally perching herself on the upholstered stool beside him. Her legs dangle, not reaching the floor even with the added inches of her slick, clear-plastic heels.
“Did you go to the oh-six Olympics?” she asks. “In Turin?”
“Oh, ah, no.” Michele laughs. “I live far from there. But I watch on the TV.”
“Hella,” says Darla. “I love the Olympics. I like the Summer Olympics best, swimming, diving, all of it. I would love to go sometime. I’ve never been to Europe. I’ve been to Mexico, Canada, Australia, and Costa Rica, but never Europe.” This is a lie, one Manny must have heard a thousand times. Aside from the year she spent stripping in L.A., the girl’s barely traveled as far as Lake Havasu for spring break. But the line impresses tourists and townies alike. They’re pleased by the prospect of bedding a cosmopolitan whore.
“Yes, Europe is the best place for to visit. Take the train, when you go. The train is best.”
“You know, if you had enough fucking money, and spent it, like, in one of those weird sports like riflery or table tennis or the ribbon routine—shit like that—anyone could be an Olympian. That’s what I’m gonna do. Get a good trainer, a famous one, fucking quit my job.”
She babbles on like that, and the boy seems to like it. That’s the difference between the ranch and a strip club. Here, some men come in just to talk. Sure, they want a piece of ass so bad that they’re coming out of their skin to pay for it. But there’s something that brings out the lonesomeness in them. Maybe it’s being so far from civilization. Manny’s heard them afterward, over the intercom. Old men, young men, men with wives or steady girlfriends, men who’ve never had anybody in their whole pathetic lives. They listen to their date chatter until the hour is up, and when she reaches for her clothes or the white wedge of towel on the nightstand to wipe herself, they hold her tightly and say, so softly it might be mistaken for a blip of static over the wires,
Wait
.
The Italian returns the next night, and the next. Manny watches him
and Darla get closer. They talk at the bar, then huddled together on the couch in the lobby, then with their feet dipped in the pool, splitting pomegranates on the concrete and spitting the seeds and pith into the dirt.
The other girls are talking. One morning before bed, Amy’s voice spills from the hall bathroom. “If Michele was one of these old farts, Manny would have pried him from that girl’s titty on day one. He’s just glad to finally have some ass around here.”
Jim would not stand for this. But Manny cannot bring himself to throw the kid out. Amy is right: He likes having Michele around, and, yes, a part of him thinks,
Why not me
?
His last hookup—in the hot soak room at the Tecopa baths, Mormon crickets shrieking in the eaves—was a forlorn, unmemorable thing, as all since Jim have been.
Manny spends more and more time out with his birds, away from the trouble swelling indoors. He knows he can’t go on ignoring it forever, but he tries. He scrubs the salt deposits from the water troughs, hand-feeds the birds sardines and apple slices, and watches them strip a whole cooked chicken to the bone. He rakes and rakes the sand as the sun comes up, drawing intricate patterns like the monks on a show he saw once, as if the dirt were an offering to God.
• • •
O
n the sixth night, Michele is sitting close to Darla on the cheap red sofa in the corner, watching the other girls sing karaoke, when the buzz of the doorbell sounds throughout the bar. Michele notices for the first time small black blocks—they must be speakers—arranged throughout the room: above the glass shelves behind the bar, over the neon-lit lounge area, tucked up where the low ceiling meets the wall. The girls ebb to the front lobby, running their hands all over themselves while they walk, checking hooks and ties and the backs of earrings, adjusting their panty hose and breasts and hairdos. Darla stands up, runs her tongue over her teeth, and rolls something oily and fruit-scented onto her lips.
“Where you are going?” he asks the back of her.
Army Amy calls over the clacking of plastic heels on the laminate dance floor, “Don’t you worry, sugar. We’ll take care of you.” She winks.
Without leaving the couch, Michele watches a thick-armed man step through the front doorway. Plastic mirrored sunglasses dangle from the man’s neck by a fluorescent-colored cord. Flecks of cement speckle his work boots. He points to Darla and says her name. The two walk by the bar, arm in arm. She grins like a pageant contestant, a beauty queen. When the man isn’t looking, she blows Michele a kiss. This girl is trouble. Renzo would have loved her. Renzo was always looking for trouble.
Listen to him:
Renzo was
. This is what unsettles him, how easily the past tense comes now. The police had said,
There is a chance
.
Maybe if the heat doesn’t get too bad
. Even as Michele nodded, his tongue rolled silently through conjugation exercises
. He’s young
, the cops have kept saying.
He’s athletic
. And in his head, each time Michele has corrected them: He
was
young. He
was
athletic. Just this morning, Michele called the police station, and the woman who answers the phone said she was sorry, that there was no news, they would call the cell phone as soon as they found his friend. “But don’t you worry,” she said. “God works in mysterious ways.”
And as if he dreamed in English, Michele replied, “Yes, He did.”
All those years confusing the past perfect, the past continuous, the simple past, and now it comes to him, here. Now he thinks in the frantic notes he took before he quit trying altogether.
Simple past: use when an action started and finished at a specific time in the past. The speaker may not actually mention the specific time, but he does have one in mind.
• • •
A
fter the lineup, Manny returns to the bar with Army Amy. Michele joins them. Amy sets her overtanned tits on the bar, and they rest there like two globes in a skin sac. “I need a goddamn date,” she says.
Michele smiles broadly at her
—
the big, openmouthed smile of a foreigner pretending to know what’s going on.
Amy traces her finger up and down the boy’s forearm. “Why don’t you pour this kid a real beer, Manny?” Manny fixes Michele a pint of Boddingtons. The kid looks at the cloud of head billowing to the top of his new beer, mildly bewildered.
“Budweiser is piss,” Amy says. “It’s a joke here.”
Michele takes a long swallow of his new beer. “When she will, ah, return?”
“Darla? Depends,” says Manny. He calls back to the office. “Gladys, what’d she log?”
When he first started, Manny had asked Gladys whether she ever listened in on the suites, “You know, for fun?” Gladys only scoffed and said, “Fun? Baby, I’ve seen it all. My best client was a county commissioner. He used to drive his Buick all the way down from Tonopah once a month, just to have me tap on the floor with his dead wife’s peg leg. This was before you were even born.”
“Hold on,” she says now. They hear the
click of the old intercom buttons as Gladys patches in to the suite. “Nothing special, baby,” she calls. “Just a suck and fuck. A grand.”
Manny whistles. Half of that is his. “Damn. That girl’s got a gold mine between her legs.”
“Big deal,” says Amy. Through her tank top she grips a breast in each hand and lifts them to Michele’s face, first one and then the other. “Think what she could do with some assets.”
Michele looks away, and who could blame him? No one outside the industry would call Amy a beauty. She has big biceps and a bench-press chest left over from her time in the army, where she was supposedly a Green Beret. Whenever a new ad comes out, she flashes the proofs to anyone who will look, listing all the places the billboards will go up: off I-15 near Indian Springs, by the turnoff to the test site, on 395 in Stateline for all those rich, horny Californians. On the latest, Amy is saluting and smiling above the words,
Visit Army Amy for an honorable discharge!
Amy swirls her finger in the foam of Michele’s beer. “When I was her age, I had to work for my money. I was hosting big parties. I’m talking twelve, thirteen hours of straight fucking. You learn a lot that way.” She sticks the finger deep in her mouth and licks it clean. “You want me to teach you, Luigi?”
Michele shakes his head.
“Come on. Won’t cost you no grand.”
He takes a drink of the Boddingtons and says, “Shut the fuck up, you.”
Amy straightens on her stool. “I know you want to make an honest woman out of her, Luigi, but your little prom date is—how do you say?—sucking some Teamster’s cock right now. Get it?”
Michele knocks his pint glass over, and beer soaks her wife-beater. Amy jumps back, dripping.
“I am sorry,” he says. “Very sorry.” He lays cocktail napkins impotently on the spreading puddle of beer.
She sets her jaw and leans in close to him. “I bet you’ll fuck me now, you wop drunk.”
“That’s enough,” says Manny.
“Me?” says Amy.
He wipes the spill with a dry rag. “Go change.”
Amy gathers the hem of her shirt and wrings it out. “I know what you’re thinking, Manny. Don’t bother. She’s got this kid’s dick on a string. And you?” She laughs. “You’re shit out of luck.”
The empty pint glass rolls off the bar and shatters on the laminate.
Manny looks straight at her. “Go change or go home.”
Amy stomps out the back door. Manny comes around and helps Michele pick up the glass from the floor. A few girls have gathered around. Lacy tries to help, but he waves her and the others back to the couch, to a pair of Southern truck drivers they called in off the road with the CB in the office. Something tortured and twangy and sour rises from the jukebox.
Michele, squatting on the floor, leans into Manny, so close that Manny can feel the boy’s breath on him. “When she will finish?” Michele asks.
Looking back, this is the moment when he should have known how truly fucked he was. But this is closer to the boy than he’s ever been, and he can’t help himself. He only wants to touch him. He presses his rag to Michele’s wet T-shirt. It’s impossible, but he feels the boy’s warmth underneath, the striations in the muscles of his chest. He feels his heartbeat. “One hour.” He removes the rag and holds his index finger in the air between them. “One hour.”
Michele finishes his replacement beer, and another. By the time Darla says good-bye to her Teamster, logs her cash with Gladys, and joins the boy at the bar, he’s a heavy, lethargic kind of drunk, leaning on his elbows, his eyelids wilted. Manny watches Darla rest her head on his shoulder, chewing on the stir straw poking out from her cranberry juice. No doubt she can feel the warmth of him, the pulse of blood in his neck. “Did you know that tug-of-war used to be an Olympic sport?” she says. “I could do that.”
With his mouth half in his new pint glass, Michele says, “You can do anything. You are a gold mine.”
And then Darla does something Manny’s never seen her do. She takes Michele’s face in her hands and bends him down to her. She kisses him softly on the forehead.
• • •
D
ay seven. At the motel Michele lies staring at the untouched bed across from him. He hasn’t slept in days, not really. When the red-orange glow of sunset permeates the crack between the two heavy panels of curtain covering the west-facing window, he gets out of bed and showers without soap or shampoo, though there are fresh supplies of both on the shelf in the shower, still sealed in their waxy sanitary paper. He keeps the water so hot that when he finally steps onto the linoleum and wipes the condensation from the bathroom mirror with his palm, his skin is flushed pink where the water began to burn his back and shoulders, his stomach and buttocks and balls. He sits on the edge of the bed, naked.
He and Renzo have been friends since they were boys playing for the same youth football club. They went to university together, took the same classes, shared a room in the dormitory, then in a basement apartment near campus. Every morning for three years Michele woke up to the shape of Renzo against the opposite wall, or stepped over piles of his soiled clothes to get to the toilet. But already Michele cannot recall Renzo’s hands, or the sound of his laugh, or the exact expression on his face when he was angry. All he can see is this smooth quilted square of bed, this worn white sheet pulled taut over these too-f pillows like dead open eyes in the daylight. All he can hear is the chug of the air-conditioning unit along the west wall, the underwater sound of cars idling in traffic along Tropicana Avenue, and the Search & Rescue cell phone on the nightstand ringing ringing—at long last—ringing.