Further Out Than You Thought (24 page)

Had she hung even then around Carlotta's neck, over her chest, like a lock, protecting?

Valiant emerged from beneath his jacket drenched in sweat.

“Here!” he said.

They were passing a hotel, if you could call it that. The Hotel Suiza, boasting rooms for only twenty-five dollars. She parked the car in front and they stepped into the blanched glare of the sun. The building was one-level, brick, with peeling dirty white paint. Gwen with her suitcase, Leo with Fifi, and Valiant with the two-foot Virgin statue entered the little office at the front of the hotel, where they all stood sweating. No one seemed to be coming. Valiant spied the metal ringer that looked like a boob and tapped the metal nipple with such enthusiasm, again and again, that when the man appeared from the back room looking—with his messed up hair and his scowl—like they'd woken him from his siesta, he moved the ringer pointedly out of Valiant's reach. Gwen paid the man cash for the two rooms before they'd even seen them.

“The dingier the better,” the Count declared. And the man and his scowl went back through the door, back, Gwen thought, to his siesta—something she needed, now that her night of little sleep was catching up with her. She felt the small room sway, and the hollow, metallic buzz just under her skin rendered her vulnerable, practically see-through. There was nothing she could possibly hide.

Another man stepped up to the desk, pushed his spectacles up the bridge of his nose, and showed them to their rooms.

The Count had one picture left, so they posed, the three of them, in the hall that looked just like a dimmer version of the outside of the hotel, with its old paint, its metal-framed sliding windows, its brown doors and large blue plastic garbage cans.

It was the last photo she'd put in the scrapbook.

She would remember how Valiant had handed the bespectacled man the camera, saying
por favor
a little too loudly, and how he had leaned on her and Leo, and they'd steadied him as they'd walked down the hall to where their faces and bodies and Fifi and the Virgin had grown small enough to fit into the frame. Valiant stood between Leo and Gwen, and he must have told them to wave, because in this last photo the three of them are waving.

Hello. See? Here we are.

Were.

That afternoon, they found a restaurant, a Mexican diner. Shirt and shoes were required, and Leo said he didn't need to eat, but Gwen went into the little market next door and found him a pair of plastic flip-flops and a Cinco de Mayo T-shirt that said
TODAY I'M MEXICAN
and they sat down in the restaurant and ate like real people. Huevos rancheros and coffee. It was delicious. Even Valiant ate his whole meal.

Beside the diner was a place called the Bar Del Prado and after lunch Valiant wandered in for a drink. There were a few Americans at the bar. An older woman with dyed-black hair, bright stripes of blush, and mascara so heavy her lids were giving in to the weight sat beside a blond loafing boy drinking Corona from the bottle. The room was cool and dark and Valiant slid into a booth against the wall. The red leather of the seats was torn, with the stuffing sticking out, and she could tell he felt at home. Lighting a cigarette, he settled in. A waitress slept on her feet in the corner of the room. After a while she shuffled over and Leo and Valiant ordered their margaritas with rocks and salt and Gwen got an orange juice—reconstituted, not fresh-squeezed. But this was Tijuana, she reminded herself, she should be happy to drink anything that wasn't alcoholic. The walls of the bar were painted bloodred and were tacked with posters of American girls—G-strings threading their asses, their breasts grapefruit-round, and their long blond hair shiny clean.

Cheesecake, that's what it was called. These airbrushed photos of semi-clad pinup girls. Like the cake itself, these photos were meant to please the senses, not to satisfy the soul. These posters were not meat and potatoes. They were cheesecake. Creamy, sweet. Good with strawberries and hot fudge and whipped cream. If you ate too much, you'd make yourself sick.

Leo was talking, his hands animated with such excitement she was afraid he might spill his drink. “You know,” he was saying. “We could just keep going. Explore Baja. Go all the way to Cabo San Lucas. What's to stop us? We're young, we're free.”

Valiant raised an eyebrow and looked at Gwen. The ember of his cigarette shone in the gloaming.

She rubbed her thumb across the cash in her front pocket. Hardly enough for a monthlong journey for three across the Baja desert, and Leo was extending the plan, pushing the journey off the continent and onto a boat. “We'll sail to Argentina. And we'll need a strong motor once we hit the horse latitudes. Did I ever tell you why it was called that, horse latitudes? When the doldrums hit and the wind died down and it was hot as hell, the sailors sang their prayers, and when they weren't answered, they threw their horses overboard. Of course, we won't have any horses.”

“There's some fine logic for you,” Valiant said. He was looking beyond Gwen at the bar, at the broad shoulders of the boy swiveling on the stool, drinking cerveza. When he saw she had caught him, he grinned.

“Leo,” she said, now that she had her opening. “How exactly do you propose we pay for this trip?”

“That's my Gwen,” Leo said, shaking his head. “The consummate rationalist.”
My
Gwen. The possessive irked her. She realized she was scratching her arms and her nails were leaving white streaks. Her skin was dry. She needed lotion. And the razor—once again, she'd forgotten to buy one.

Leo's eyes lit up. “Your car's not in bad shape. We could sell it.”

“We?” Gwen said.

“What do you say, Gwen. It's a once-in-a-lifetime chance.”

Now Valiant was laughing, a real guffaw, and choking on the cigarette smoke. It took a long time for his coughing to cease.

She watched Leo's hand tighten to a fist. “I'm serious,” he said. “Goddamn it. Is everything a joke to you?”

Valiant downed his margarita like medicine, lifted his empty glass and nodded to the waitress for another. “Sure,” he said, his face drained of humor. “Everything's funny to a dead man.”

“Will you two listen to me for once?” Leo said, and didn't wait for an answer. “If we went on foot, traveled by train, we could experience Baja like Mexicans.”

“The poor ones, you mean,” Valiant said. “I have an idea. Why don't you go into the Chiclet-vending business. You might have better luck selling chewing gum than you've had selling your music.”

The Count was getting mean, and this, she knew, went hand in hand with his level of intoxication. The waitress brought his drink, and Gwen watched him suck the yellow-green liquid through a straw as his finger described a small circle in the air, another round. He was on his way to oblivion, and she planned to be gone before he arrived.

Leo leaned toward Gwen. He put an arm around her and pulled her close. “What do you say? You up for a real adventure?”

She pictured Gandhi on the trains, getting to know the real India, and the young Che Guevara on his motorcycle, exploring South America. She saw the fire in Leo's eyes, so bright it seemed to blind him. She thought of the albatross and the griffin, and of how the two didn't mix. And she thought of the baby inside her, the fact that seemed to Leo already a dim fiction. So much for settling down, getting a job, making a home.

The room was smoky and loud, and Gwen was tired. The woman at the bar was laughing too loud. She had her hand on the boy's leg and Gwen watched Valiant watching, sneering. “Why don't you mind your own business,” he hollered to the woman's back, but nobody turned around.

Gwen polished off her juice as the waitress brought their drinks. “To the riots,” Valiant toasted, rollicking on the upswing of tequila and corn syrup, and he and Leo clinked their salty rims. She told them she'd be at the hotel. She'd see them there, later. Valiant kissed her cheek and Leo took a gulp of his drink and stood, a goofy, inscrutable smile on his face.

“I'll walk you,” he said.

OUTSIDE THE BAR Del Prado, night was coming on like a hopeless, drunken come-on, tequila on its breath, red neon signs and, outside the shops, strings of colored Christmas lights hung from the eaves like the sad close-lipped smiles of boys who would lure you in with their loneliness, that melancholia you'd try and try to fix.

Gwen and Leo sauntered. He took her hand in his and their arms were swinging. Singsong, like girlfriends in elementary school. She felt that way sometimes. That they were girlfriends. Maybe someday, like Love's husband, Leo would get a sex change. Leona, she'd call him.

Amused by the thought, she saw something moving in the corner of her vision, flapping. She turned. They were birds. Or not birds, but bats. So many of them, filling the sky. Their flight quiet, and quieting. On this clamorous street of cars with their horns and their stereos with the bass turned up, playing their booming Mexican songs, on this street of vendors and markets and bars, a hush had fallen.

Why was it hushes fell, like snow, she wondered as she and Leo stopped, with the others on the sidewalk and along the curb. Why didn't hushes rise, like steam, or bats?

They stood behind a mother holding the hands of her son and daughter, the kids in their navy-blue-and-white school uniforms. The small boy pointed and squealed. Across the street, out of a four-story, burned-out brick building, what looked to Gwen like an old apartment house, out of a hole in the wall where a brick or two just below the roof were missing, the colony of bats was coming fast. They were pouring into the evening, and they kept on coming. Hundreds, thousands of them. Snaking across the sky, flapping their way west, toward the sinking sun. They watched the bats until they were small and then smaller, until they became the gray, darkening sky.

They walked up the sidewalk to the Hotel Suiza, where, out front, a streetlight flickered, and Leo stopped. The light had the effect of a strobe, and when he pulled her to him and kissed her, it was like they were on a dance floor. His lips were soft. Always they were the soft lips of a girl. A fleshy, full-lipped girl. She thought of Brett, whose lips weren't full like his, but thinner, like her own. Brett, whose face would be smooth, whose body would smell of the spice of a forest floor, and clean as a creek carving through it.

She pulled back, but he kept his arms around her. “I'm not letting you go.”

“What is it?” she said. She'd missed something, when she'd been off, in the forest with Brett.

His eyes were watery, showing specks of green in the hazel, and he blinked back tears, shrugged. “Sometimes loving you hurts my eyes.”

She rested her head on his shoulder. A three-legged dog trotted by. He loved her more than anyone, and here he was, holding her how she'd wanted him to for months, or had it been years? “Dance with me,” she said. And under the slow sidewalk strobe, in the carne-asada-and-fried-onion-laced evening, they swayed. He sang, low and soft into her ear.

It was her mother's song. The one she'd sung to her when she was small, before she tucked her in. She'd never told him that. At least she didn't think she'd told him.

People might have been passing, staring. She didn't care. Her eyes were closed and it was only the two of them, the three of them. He was making it possible.

She could feel herself melting, her own tears starting, and she hated him. Just who was he, exactly, and why couldn't he decide? How was he this man, this one who took her in his arms and made her feel safe and loved, when he was the man who last night was planning on parading into East L.A. naked with only a white flag for protection, who a half hour ago was ready to sell her car for a trip down the Baja peninsula, a boat ride to the ends of the earth, but even more would never embark, not on any of it?

“I'm tired,” she said. And he let her go.

His arms hung at his sides. “I love you.”

“I know,” she said and left him under the strobe, alone on the dance floor.

She let herself into the room. Fifi was sitting upright on one of the bed pillows with the shock collar around her neck, as if she were modeling the awful contraption. Gwen unfastened the collar and had it in her hand when the knock on the door and Fifi's subsequent bark sent a jolt through her body before she could drop it. A solid jolt. Her hand was buzzing. Apparently the batteries had some life to them yet.

She opened the door to find Leo slumped against the doorjamb. “I thought you might like to know. I'll be back at the Bar Del Prado. In case you need me or something.” He fixed her with his hangdog eyes and then turned and shuffled away in his plastic flip-flops.

She felt the usual pull as she watched him go. She should run up to him and apologize. She'd been callous, cruel.

So what. She closed the door.

This
was
the dingiest room she'd ever seen. Decadent, the Count had called it, romanticizing. The floor was linoleum, tan to hide the dirt. The curtains, so sheer they were hardly there, were made from what looked to be old sheets—a faded rose pattern. The pale green bedspread was frayed at the ends, and was blooming with yellowish and brownish stains. The off-white walls had cracks, and large patches where the paint had peeled off and the old brown paint showed. One jagged patch stretched from the ceiling to the bed like a streak of lightning or, rather, its negative. She pulled the bedspread down. The sheets were pink. She pulled them back and searched. For what? Bugs? More stains? She found just sheets, clean sheets, and she slid off her boots and lay down in her jeans and T-shirt on the bed.