Round Rock (26 page)

“If you didn’t include me,” Red said, “I’d know you were lying.”

Money was a list of falsified invoices, petty thefts, uncompleted drug deals, and Sex a litany of impulsive encounters. He’d slept with his fourteen-year-old stepsister, cheated on his wife, slept with the wife of his boss at the parts store, with the wife of his philosophy professor in grad school. Pulling his feet onto his chair, Lewis hugged his knees and admitted to having sex with men, twice, in high school.

“Am I supposed to be shocked?” Red said. “Sorry, but that’s been in every inventory I’ve ever heard, including my own. Sex with men—and usually a particularly charming chicken, too.”

“Chickens?
Really
?” Lewis threw his head back and exhaled loudly. “So you don’t think I’m really a homosexual?”

“Do I care? You’re sure not
my
type.”

Lewis laughed long and loudly. Too loudly.

So far, so good, thought Red. Normally, he might’ve asked why Libby and Billie weren’t mentioned—an inventory should be current—but for this omission Red was inordinately grateful.

Secrets was mostly recap. Lewis had cheated on a final in college. And once, when drunk, he’d slugged his mother in the mouth. He told lies. Stole this and that. And for several months when he was very young—“I still don’t understand this one,” Lewis said—he’d used the backyard as his toilet and
didn’t bury it.
When confronted, he blamed it on his brother, Woody. “I don’t know why my parents believed me,” he said. “But they sent Woody to a psychologist. Every week,
for years,
he went to see Dr. Weiss. Makes me sick to think about it.” And Lewis did look pallid, scared, and tenderly young, as if in this room he’d become the very boy who dropped his trousers behind the eugenia bushes.

Never, Red knew, was it the ten thousand dollars embezzled from a business partner, or the drunken slapping of a new bride, but always this kind of ancient, shame-soaked, thumb-sucking, bed-wetting memory around which the personality had knotted, kinked, grown stunted. “It was probably the biggest favor you ever did for your brother,” he said. “At least he got outside help.”

“God. I never thought of that.”

When Lewis was finished, Red poured him a fresh cup of coffee
and squeezed his shoulder. “Good work,” he said. “How do you feel?”

“Pretty fucking weird. I thought I’d die before telling this stuff to anyone. And here I am.” Lewis patted his own face. “It’s almost embarrassing to see it spelled out so clearly. Always wanting the woman I couldn’t have, never the one I was with. Just like my dad.” Lewis sipped his coffee. “You know what I’ve been thinking?”

“Mmm.” Red gazed out the window at dry, bleached grasses and dark-leaved groves. The sunlight was fragile.

“I was thinking I’d stay on here indefinitely. Work for you. Commute to school a couple days a week. And maybe patch things up with Libby.”

Red nodded carefully, trying not to panic.

“All the time I was with her, I thought I liked Billie. My head was screwed on backwards.” Lewis smoothed the pages he’d written. “You were right. I had to do this work. See myself more clearly. Get a grip.”

Red gazed at his own thumbnails as if into tiny pink hand mirrors.

“I heard she’s seeing somebody, but how long could that have been going on?” Lewis shrugged. “She can’t be too far up the tubes, can she?”

Red combed his dim Catholic boyhood for guidance: who was the saint of the worst-case scenario? “Lewis,” he said, “there’s something I need to tell you.”

T
HE HOUSE
sat on jacks while masons built a reinforced cinderblock foundation. Libby climbed onto her new porch, which sat some fifty yards above the trailer’s former pad. She could see clear over the olive trees and a sea of darker citrus to the distant blue hills. In the foreground she saw the plume of dust from Red’s truck winding up her driveway.

She rushed down to meet him. “Look! It’s all here!” Taking his arm, she dragged him around the home site, pointing to pilings as if they were the most fascinating lapidary west of Egypt. She found herself tugging. He soon grew sluggish, then rooted. His skin had a grayish caste, a thin film of sweat. “Are you okay?” she said.

“Did Lewis come by?”

“Lewis? No. Why?”

“He and I had a talk this morning.”

“Oh, right, I forgot. You heard his inventory. How’d it go?”

“He did a good job. Took a good look at his shortcomings. And now he’d like to get back together with you.”

Libby gave a short, unbelieving bark. “Are you serious?”

“That’s what he said.”

“Did you tell him about us?”

“I felt I had to.”

“Thank God! And?”

“I shouldn’t have heard his inventory,” Red said. “It was a rotten thing to do. I thought I could get away with it.”

Libby reached to clasp his face in her hands. “I would’ve told him myself, but I never had the chance.”

Wincing, Red caught her hands, returned them gently to her sides. “He said he loved you, Libby.”

She swung away. “That’s just another thing he’s cooked up in his head.” She shaded her eyes and surveyed the crisped, golden-brown hills behind her house. “Oh, I suppose it is gratifying, a little, to know that I don’t thoroughly disgust him. Otherwise …” She grasped Red’s hand and kissed it.

“He quit, of course,” Red said. “I stopped by the Mills just now to drop off a check, but he’d already left. Told the desk clerk he was moving back down south. I thought he might’ve come by here.”

“No. And it wouldn’t have made any difference if he had.”

“I had to tell you what he said, though.” Red closed his eyes. “If not, I’d always wonder.”

Libby moved to caress Red’s face and again he shied away. “Also, he punched me.”

“No!”

Red turned to show her the faint dark smudge emerging on his jaw.

Libby grazed it with her fingertips. “This is only nervous laughter,” she said, trying to hold it back.

“It
is
funny.” Red smiled ruefully.

Libby grabbed the edges of his jacket, pulled his sternum against her forehead. “It’s been a month, Red. More than a month. I want to go to your house and lie down with you, skin to skin, no clothes.”

She sensed his resistance assembling—a pause, an alertness in his muscles, an intake of breath …

“This isn’t just a reaction to Lewis. Although I
am
thankful to him.” She looked into Red’s face. “Without him, I never would’ve got to know you. He made it easy. You were the one I talked to. You were the one who courted me. Lewis was just a smoke screen: when he cleared out, there you were. And I already loved you.” Libby tugged on Red’s jacket. “Now,” she said.

They drove in his truck without speaking. A few nervous smiles. Hands clutching. Libby felt empty and light. Once inside his bungalow, Red latched the screen door, then closed and locked the kitchen door. He moved down the counter, unplugged the telephone, untangled cords to the matchstick blind above the sink.

“You locking us in,” she said, “or them out?”

“Don’t ask me.”

The blinds fell in a soft clatter and the room filled with reticulated light.

He faced her, his weight resting against the counter, a swimmer about to push off. They looked at each other. Heavy furniture, it seemed, was being dragged around Libby’s chest. He’s a man, she thought stupidly. And then the panic arrived, the same she’d felt the first time she kissed him, the first time they lay down on a bed together. The panic came in hot waves, scalding, insistent. You can’t love him, she told herself. You don’t love him. This is just a silly experiment to see how far you two could go. A laugh on Lewis …

Red smiled at her with such kindness, her thoughts stopped in their tracks. “The back door’s still open,” he said.

She smiled too, then thought: Why, he’s a played-out loser who stinks of loneliness, a pathetic old drunk.

Red pulled himself away from the counter and was coming toward her, slowly. But I like this man, she told herself. I want this.

Red put one hand lightly on her hip, twisting her around until he was standing behind her. They started walking and her panic redoubled with such force, she grabbed for the doorframe between the kitchen and the bedroom.
Was
she just toying with him?

Red waited as she steadied herself. The same sorts of doubts had assailed her as she stood in the church narthex waiting to join Stockton at the altar, and had made her withdraw into sarcasm when Lewis
behaved tenderly. They were the protests of a frightened, atrophied virgin dwelling in some coal bin of her psyche who spoke up only to rail against the invasion of love.

Red’s hands were lightly on her hips, and they were moving again, into the bedroom. There was his bed, the comforter in its brown paisley cover, the pillows at odd angles. And the back door—such an easy leap! She imagined the cold, ridged roundness of the doorknob, the sudden abyss of daylight and vivid blue sky.

She took a long breath and spun instead within Red’s fingertips: a neat, perfect ballroom spin. He was smiling and she kissed him, gingerly because of his bruised jaw. As he lifted her onto the bed, she knew this was the most serious, and most adult, and most appropriate thing she had ever done.

D
AVID
I
BAÑEZ
, now forty-one years old and seventeen years sober, worked at the Villa de San Miguel Arcángel, a clinic for the alternative treatment of chronic pain in Tijuana. He’d been at the Villa for four years now, and had moved in with the woman who ran it, Pauline.

The clinic employed a variety of pain specialists: an M.D. from India with a vast knowledge of Tibetan medicine, two yoginis, a hydrotherapist, a hypnotherapist, a
curandero
named Olivero who’d attended chiropractic college in Utah, and David, who practiced his own syncretic mix of tantric medicine, acupuncture, and
curanderismo.

In early May, when Olivero was at a conference in Dallas, David met with his clients. One old woman came in with severe headaches, and David treated her with acupressure, herbs, and prayers. Reading David’s treatment notes upon his return, Olivero became agitated. The old woman, he said, was a
bruja
very unfriendly to his village. She’d already given cancer to one member of his family, and made his niece go blind. Olivero worried that she’d taken something of his—a photograph from his desk, a business card, anything she could use for
mal puesto,
evildoing.

David assured him that they’d met in his office, while Olivero’s was locked up tight. Still, Olivero would not be pacified. Did she say anything odd? Had she given David anything out of the ordinary? David said no, no, she’d paid him with a few pesos and a small cake. This wasn’t unusual: poorer clients often paid in fresh eggs, tamales, fruit, whatever they had of value.

“What kind of cake?” Olivero wanted to know. “Was there anything distinctive or unusual about it?”

“No, no—just a little sweet cake, with the number twenty-one stenciled on it in green sugar.”

“Where’s this cake now?” Olivero asked.

“I ate it,” David said. “I was running behind and hadn’t eaten lunch.”

“And you’re sure it said ‘twenty-one’ on it,” said Olivero.

“A lucky number,” David said, “and a lucky cake, since I was so hungry.”

This cake was not lucky, Olivero told him, not lucky at all. Most probably it was made with the
veintiuno
herb, which kills a man in twenty-one days.

David had never heard of
veintiuno,
and he wasn’t too worried; he felt fine, and besides, many folk herbs and concoctions were placebos. But he did call his uncle and teacher, Rafael Flores, back home in Rito. Rafael didn’t answer, and David remembered he’d gone to Arizona for two weeks. David then put in a call to a toxicologist at USC. Yes, the man said, there actually was a poison called
veintiuno,
and a few documented fatalities from it, but not many, and none since the fifties. Nobody knew how or why the herb was fatal: the plant itself contained no known toxins. The poisoned, it seemed, scared themselves to death.

David laughed, relieved by the absence of toxins, and promptly forgot about the
veintiuno
until a week later, when, as he was drawing his long, thick brown hair into a ponytail, a sickening clump fell out in his hands. For the next two days, hair sloughed from his head and terror mounted in his gut. When he called this time, his uncle was home. “You better come on up,” Rafael said in English. “The twenty-one can be tricky.”

David told Pauline he had urgent family business, loaded Sally, his old bluetick hound, into the Land Cruiser, and drove north. Around Anaheim, he heard a faint rumble in one of the wheels. By downtown Los Angeles, it was a grating noise: a wheel bearing, possibly, if not the whole rear end. Wasn’t it natural law that cars always break down only an hour before the repair shops close on Saturday afternoons?

At the Toyota dealership in Glendale, mechanics clucked over the Land Cruiser’s advanced age and said obtaining parts could take from two days to two weeks. David’s cousins in nearby Atwater gave him a couch to sleep on. He woke up on Sunday morning in their living room, more lost hair forming a detached shadow on the pillow. What I need, he thought, is a meeting.

A woman at the AA Central Office directed him across the Hyperion
Bridge to Silverlake. The meeting was called the Nightcrawlers Sunday Speaker and it started at noon. Even fifteen minutes early, David had to stand in the back of the overcrowded church auditorium.

I
T WAS
one of those things that sounded good from four months off—to give a forty-minute talk at the largest of all the Nightcrawler meetings. How would Lewis have known back in February that Lydia would dump him, then leave for Paris on the very date he’d agreed to speak?

A loose-knit AA group Lewis had fallen in with on his return to Los Angeles, the Nightcrawlers were mostly under fifty, mostly actors, artists, and writers who rented the auditorium for daily meetings. Lewis had made a lot of friends there, including Barbara, the woman who’d asked him to speak. An actress with long, curly light-red hair, see-through skin, and the endearing, perpetually worried expression of a pretty little girl squinting into the sun, Barbara was probably his best friend. Though they’d briefly dated, she quickly decided his attentions were too inconsistent. Once they each found someone else, Barbara had offered an avid, demanding brand of friendship. He had resisted—didn’t return her phone calls, wouldn’t meet for coffee—but she wouldn’t relent. Now they spoke daily, in person or by phone. Barbara browbeat him for the details of his life—what was he feeling, thinking, eating?—and he somehow had come to rely on this. She was like an emotional clearinghouse: “So, how do you feel about that?” she’d say, or “This one’s for your shrink, I think,” or “Maybe Harry could help you there” (Harry being Lewis’s present sponsor).