There Is No Otherwise

*

A
PICKUP RODE NORTH
on route eighty out of El Paso. Heat rose from the ground before it like a fog, twisting the air so that the road and the entire Mesilla Valley looked like a melted photograph. To the east the Organ Mountains stretched upward like fingers from a grave and to the west was the Rio Grande flowing behind a few good miles of bottomland.

*

T
HREE BOYS SAT IN
the cab of the pickup looking straight ahead. None of them spoke. Their hats were swung back on their necks and they each had on clean shirts. Cigarettes hung from their lips like they had a permanent place there. The oldest, Ashton Modine, drove through the towns of Canutillo, Vinton and Anthony Texas and across the line into New Mexico fast enough that dust rose behind the truck in a cloud and hung over the streets after they were gone.

*

T
HE OTHER TWO WERE
Modine's coworkers on the Tobin Ranch, Arliss Ermey and John Paul McGrath. The three spent more time together than most married people. They slept in the same bunkhouse, ate at the same table, and shat in the same crapper. There have been families built on less.

Arliss sat in the middle and he leaned over JP to flick a cigarette out the window. He took another from the pack on the dashboard and put it in his mouth. Outside, the blur of Anthony Texas as it appears from a vehicle moving seventy‐five miles an hour flew by and he said to the driver, ‘would it kill you, Modine, if we were to slow down? I mean, I'm all for getting there, but the journey's the sweetest part.’

‘It was you all didn't want to stay in El Paso.’

JP took himself a cigarette and pushed in the lighter and waited for it to pop out.

‘I'd have stayed in El Paso,’ he said, ‘if anyone would have asked.’ He lit his cigarette and passed the lighter to Arliss.

Modine said, ‘light me one of them would you?’

They burned through Vado New Mexico and Arliss almost swore he saw heads turn to watch them go by. ‘Goddamn it, Modine, what's the hurry? This here anticipation's the sweetest part.’

‘Maybe for you.’

A mathematical twelve minutes later and the truck was on Main Street Las Cruces and pulling over outside a bar. Modine got out of the driver side and stretched his arms behind his back. ‘How about this for a place, Arliss?’

‘Well we're here aint we?’

‘This good enough for you, JP?’

JP nodded.

‘Wouldn't want to go making no decisions on your behalf.’

‘This is fine, Modine.’

JP was straightening out his shirt. He smoothed it over with his hands and took a look at the bar. Whatever it had been in the past, its glory days were long gone. Paint peeled off the siding and a sign in faded lettering read, ‘La Luna’.

‘After you all,’ Modine said and they went in.

*

A
PART FROM THE BARTENDER
the bar was empty and they walked up to him and ordered three whiskies. He put three glasses in front of them and poured a round. They picked up the drinks and faced each other as if coming to an agreement and then drank the shots and Arliss made a circle with his finger for another round.

JP pulled up one of the stools in front of the bar and sat on it. He lit a cigarette and examined the place. In one corner was an old jukebox and beside it was an older piano. Neither looked like it would work. There were a few tables and chairs distributed around and some space in front of the piano and jukebox where you might dance if you had a mind to, and if you had a woman to dance with, and music. He nodded to himself. In his opinion it was about the kind of place where nothing good would ever happen to them and it was just like them to drive an extra fifty miles to find it.

He looked at Modine and Arliss. They were surveying the place for themselves. Arliss said to the bartender, ‘what's there to do for fun round here?’

‘Como qué?’

‘Como mujeres. Como chicas.’

The bartender smiled. ‘Ah sí,’ he said. ‘You stay here?’

‘We'll stay,’ Arliss said.

The bartender winked and poured them three beers. ‘There will be women soon. I will call.’

They picked up their beers and relaxed. JP leaned on his stool with his arms over the back and he looked like a man who'd been shot.

Modine said to him, ‘what's up, JP? You aint hardly said a word all night.’

‘I'm alright.’

‘You nervous?’

‘I aint nervous.’

‘Don't worry about it. If I was as inexperienced as you I'd be nervous.’

JP shook his head. ‘I aint as inexperienced as you imagine, Modine.’

Modine smiled. He liked bringing JP along with them. The kid had flair. ‘I got high hopes for you, son,’ he said.

JP looked up at the both of them. He drank some beer and wiped his mouth. ‘This here's my first time out of Texas,’ he said.

Arliss put his hand on JP's arm. ‘Las Cruces is practically Texas.’

JP shook his head. He looked round at the room, empty and dusty and dark. There was something in the atmosphere of the place, a moisture in the air, faint, but just enough to let him know he was no longer home.

‘No it aint,’ he said.

Modine drank. ‘Let's get one of them tables.’

They moved to the table at the center of the room. A forty‐watt bulb in a dusty shade hung from a chain above them, the only light in the place. They drank and the bartender brought them new drinks as they needed. Arliss took out his cigarettes and threw the pack on the table and they each took from it and smoked. He said, ‘how long them women going to take?’

Modine said, ‘we could be in El Paso right now. Or Juárez even. And I know what I'd be doing if we were.’

‘What's that?’

‘What a man ought to be doing on a Friday night.’

‘You don't know nothing about what a man ought to be doing.’

‘I know it and I'd be doing it.’

‘And you'd be finished already too,’ Arliss said.

JP laughed.

Modine shook his head. ‘Not me. You say the pleasure's in the anticipation, Arliss. But us Modine's are a different breed. Bred for stamina we are. An uncle of mine once got shot in the back with a forty‐four while he was on top of a woman at a whorehouse in Fort Stockton. Old sumbitch didn't even slow down. Just kept going on that whore till he was done.’

‘Did he survive?’

‘He survived and then he went and got the man who done it.’

‘The whore didn't mind?’

‘I think it done added to it for her.’

‘I bet it did.’

JP stubbed out his cigarette. ‘Why didn't the man who done it shoot him a second time?’

Modine looked at him and then back to Arliss. ‘Goddamn it, do I got to explain everything to this here kid?’

Arliss shrugged.

It was only in the last few weeks that they had started taking JP to bars. Hell, it was really only in the last few weeks that they had started hitting bars with anything approaching regularity themselves. Before, they would have counted themselves lucky to see the bottom of a shot glass once in two months. The old lady had kept a tight ship, no denying it, and there's no way she'd have stood for them going out on a weekly basis. JP was hardly sixteen and none of the three of them had any business going to those places, far as she was concerned.

Modine turned to JP and explained. ‘JP, a thing like that, it amazes a man. That poor sucker probably didn't know what he was seeing. I'd say it would be fair to conclude he done lost his nerve.’

‘Is that a fact, Modine?’

‘That's pretty verifiable I'd say.’

Arliss said to Modine, ‘bred for stamina?’

Modine shrugged. ‘They say it, not me.’

‘Who says it?’

‘It's known.’

Arliss said, ‘well how come I never heard it? And never heard about your uncle neither?’

‘I never told it.’

Arliss shook his head. ‘I seen you go up them stairs in Juárez, Modine, and come back down and me still on my first beer?’

JP laughed.

‘And the girl you took up never broke a sweat neither.’

Modine stubbed out his cigarette. ‘You two don't know a thing,’ he said.

‘I'd say that's a mite more verifiable than anything rumored to have occurred in Fort Stockton.’

Modine got to his feet. ‘Oh you believe me, Arliss. My uncle showed me the bullet hole in his back.’ He turned round and showed them the place between his shoulder blades where the man had been shot. Then he went to find a toilet.

Arliss said to JP, ‘that's what Modine drunk looks like.’

JP nodded. He leaned back, lit another cigarette. The door stood half open and he could see outside to the street. It had grown dark and but for a few cars passing there was nothing out there but the sound of cicadas. Las Cruces New Mexico — it was every bit as foreign to him as if they'd crossed to Juárez. Nothing about the place felt correct. He'd have almost given up the chance to get laid just to be back on the ranch right then with the Mr and Mrs.

He thought about the old man.

He said to Arliss, ‘Tobin aint getting any better, is he?’

Arliss shook his head. ‘You might as well out and say it, JP. He's getting worse.’

‘You think he'll get over it? When it happens I mean.’

‘Who's to say?’

‘Modine says he won't.’

‘Ashton Modine says a lot of things.’

JP nodded. Arliss and Modine were a good five years older than he was and they'd known Tobin a lot longer than he had. They'd been on the ranch since they were kids. They weren't brothers but they had arrived together courtesy of the El Paso County child protection service and Tobin and his wife treated them as though they were brothers — as though they were sons. The Tobins didn't have any children of their own. They managed to strike a balance between treating the boys as kin and as ranch hands and everyone seemed comfortable with it being that way. The boys went to school till about the age of sixteen, fifteen for Arliss, and up till then they slept in the house. When they started working on the ranch they moved to the bunkhouse beside the barn. In all that time, not one single day passed that they didn't sit at the table in the kitchen and eat dinner with the Mr and Mrs.

JP said, ‘you've known him a long time.’

‘I aint never seen him like this, JP.’

‘He ever been a drunk before?’

‘What do you think?’

JP shrugged. ‘Well I seen my own father go like this and there aint but one way it ends.’

*

J
P HAD WATCHED HIS
own father self‐destruct and he wasn't about to do it a second time. Every time he saw the old man cussing and swearing at the moon with a brown bottle in his hand he swore he would light out come morning. He never did though.

He had arrived at the Tobin ranch just before they found out about Mrs Tobin's illness and everything began to change. And it was amazing how much things could change. All them thousands of acres of chaparral and thousands of head of cattle and that little woman was the very heart of it all. Without her it didn't any of it seem worthwhile. It was her that found JP in the first place, and because of her he was there at all.

She saw him one night sleeping in a bar ditch by the side of the highway on her way back from bingo. She pulled over and asked him if he was all right and he said he was, and she asked him what he was doing and he said he was sleeping. She asked him if he had a horse and he motioned yonder to the field behind him. That was enough for her. She always prided herself on her ability to read a man. She told him to ride back a few miles to the ranch and when he got there she had a hot meal on the table and round it was Mr Tobin and Modine and Arliss and one empty seat. He took it and that was that.

*

M
ODINE CAME BACK FROM
the toilet and sat down. ‘This place is deader than a churchyard.’

‘What time is it anyhow?’

Modine looked at his watch. ‘It's gone eight. The night will be shot and we still won't have had no fun.’

‘We'll have our fun,’ Arliss said.

Modine called over to the bartender. ‘Amigo, dónde están?’

‘Ahora muchacho. Ahora.’

He turned back to the table. ‘Well I don't see hide nor tail of them.’

‘They're probably getting dolled up. Putting on their make‐up and such.’

‘We'll see,’ Modine said and leaned backward in his chair.

‘Remember the time the old man came into El Paso with us?’ Arliss said.

‘Don't even remind me,’ said Modine. ‘I never been so embarrassed of the man in my entire life.’

‘Embarrassed of the man?’

‘Embarrassed of him. Myself. I don't know.’

‘You know.’

Modine nodded.

Arliss shook his head. ‘What were you thinking?’

‘All I told her was to sit on his knee.’

‘That's the only time I ever been afraid of him, Modine.’

‘I thought he was going to shoot me.’

‘I did too. I truly did. You didn't make that mistake a second time.’

‘He didn't come in to El Paso a second time.’

‘You don't got to school the either of you but once.’

JP cleared his throat. He said to Modine, ‘where's that john at?’

Modine nodded toward the corridor. ‘Go down that hallway and you'll see it on the left.’

‘Alright.’

‘And whatever you do, don't go up the stairs.’

‘You went upstairs?’

‘I did.’

‘And what was up there?’

‘A Mexican family. Mother and child. Probably the bartender's.’

‘You seen all that and you didn't say nothing?’

‘I'm saying now.’

JP shook his head. He went off to find the john and when he saw the stairs he didn't go up. After he pissed he came back out to the hallway and noticed a back door leading to a yard. He went out and had a look. The yard was enclosed by a high wall and there was a skinny dog sleeping in one corner. There was a bench by the door and beside it a bucket filled with cigarette butts. He sat on the bench. The dog looked up at him and then went back to sleeping.

‘That a girl. You don't want to be bothering about a old sumbitch like me do you, girl?’