Second Skin (15 page)

And Fernandez? Fernandez, I knew, was drunk. At least he was a jealous custodian of the bottle, or inconsiderate groom, a testy son-in-law. And forty or fifty miles beyond El Chico Rio the black sprawling ominous interior of the Packard was filled suddenly with the elated piercing sounds of a wolfish whistle, and I saw that Fernandez was sitting on the edge of the seat with the bottle gripped between his knees and two fingers stuck
between his teeth, grinning, staring at Cassandra, whistling those two loud terrible notes of his crude appreciation, and I knew that Fernandez was drunk or at least that he had given way, at last, to the psychic tensions of his mysterious past.

“Control yourself, Fernandez,” I said, trying at any cost to preserve the humor of our journey, “we have a long night ahead of us.”

“The heart cries out,” he said, dully, morosely, “the heart demands satisfaction, nothing less. But my wife will know what I mean,” nodding, wiping his brow. “Know what I mean, Chicken?”

The mere expression on her white face appeased him, though not for long because all at once we could see the moon shattering on the black chaos of the Pacific far below us and the first cigarette package was empty and Fernandez was hunched in the furthest dark comer of the car.

“Fernandez?” Softly, cheerfully, touching him lightly on the shoulder: “Are you all right? Shall we stop for a minute?”

“Drive on, good Papa Cue Ball, drive on,” he said, and I saw that he had removed his shoes, removed his green socks, rolled the white linen trousers up to his knees. What next? His legs were perfect white shapely bowling pins, and he was arching one foot, wriggling the toes, flexing one calf.

“Hey, Chicken! You like cheesecake? You like cheesecake, Chicken?”

The Packard swerved once—headlights chopping through the trees—but Cassandra applied the brakes, steadied her hands on the wheel, and we recovered again, accelerated, sped around a curve with the moon going great guns again and Fernandez quickly repeating the marriage service to himself in Spanish. And then my heart was floating in a dark sea, in my stomach the waves were commencing their dark action. And yet for two more hours I was aware of everything, the climbing Packard, sudden feeling of elevation, hairpin turns in the road, small rocks in the road, Cassandra’s white skirt riding above her knee, moon flitting behind stark silhouetted peaks, the white plastic Madonna fixed and comforting on the dashboard, clearly aware
of Fernandez sitting upright and all at once talking happily at my side.

“It’s silver mining country, Chicken. You see? Mountains of the great silver deposits. Think of the lost cities, the riches, thousands of little sure-footed burros laden with silver. Do you understand my feeling, Chicken? Silver is the precious metal of the church, the metal of devotion, ceremony, candlelight. The treasure of the heart, the blessed metal of my ancestors and of my somber boyhood. Out of these mountains they dug silver for old coins, Chicken, silver for the heavy girdles of young brides. Think of it. …

And slumped between them I listened, held my peace, drifted higher and higher into those black gutted mountains. There were ravines and cliffs and falling boulders all waiting to finish off the Packard, and we left our tire tracks in patches of fresh snow. Yet I merely grinned to myself, tried to imagine what our exact altitude might be.

… stumbling forward with the monogrammed traveling case in my hand, in the beam of the headlights stumbling, trying to breathe, feeling exhilarated despite the dizziness and pain in my eyes. “Is this it, Fernandez?” I called over my shoulder, hatless and suddenly hot and cold at the same time. “Pretty high up, Fernandez!”

“This is it, Papa Cue Ball,” he called back to me. “Honeymoon Hide-Away, which is the best place in all Southern Cal for the young men and women who have just taken the vows of marriage!”

Narrow rock-strewn deserted place, beginning of a steep gorge ringed with peaks, and I stumbled, paused, struggled for breath, looked up at the cold diminishing stars and birdless peaks. We were trapped, I knew. And yet I was unaccountably pleased to see that at the end of the headlights’ dull beam there was a shattered stone wall of a demolished building and leaning against it, fat and sullen and holding a little hairless dog in her arms, a Mexican woman who remained alone now with her little dog in all this rubble. I wondered how long she had been leaning there waiting to meet us.

“Señorita
,” I called,
“buenas noches!”
And I waved—she was a match for me, the fat brown unsmiling mother of that wrecked mining town—and hurried after her with the blood draining from my eyes and my heart pounding. Around the corner I found only a single sharply inclined street of the abandoned mining town, only a barred window, a row of doorless openings, a chimney fallen intact across the street like the skeleton of some enormous snake, a few streaks of moonlit mortar and a few jagged heaps of dislocated stone still lodged there in the bottom of the sheer gorge. Ruin. Slow collapse. The rank odor of dead enterprise.

But there was light in the hotel and the heavy long empty bar was ornamented with the plump naked bodies of young Victorian women carved in bas-relief and lying prone on their rounded sides down all the length of that dark dusty wood. A light in the Hide-Away, and I rushed inside, dropped Cassandra’s traveling case beside the bar.

“Three beers, 
Señorita,”
I said—she was standing in the shadows next to an old nickel-plated cash register that looked like a cranky medieval machine of death—“and the rooms are ready? You’ve got the rooms ready for us, I hope?”

She waited. Her small eyes were bright and glittering in the shadow, she could have been afraid or sullen but there was beauty still in the dark reticence of her enormous size. Then she moved, stood the little silver hairless dog on the bar—obedient, trembling, scared to death—and turned her back on me, groaned and stooped out of sight. It was a slow intimate process, the procuring of that first beer, headless, tepid, drawn in a small Coca-Cola glass and from what spigot or rancid keg I was unable to see, but at last she set the glass in front of me and braced herself against the bar, moved the dog out of my arm’s reach. Then she turned again and in the same way produced the second glass, and the third, until the three glasses stood in a bitter row and the dog tipped its sharp trembling ears at me from the far side of the cash register. I thought the woman’s eyes were warmer when she slid the last beer in line, at least her breath—rich, flaring, full of provocative hot seasoning and rotten teeth—was closer to my face and stronger.

“Now the rooms,” I said. “You’ve got the two rooms? OK?”

She nodded.

“Excellent,” I said, “excellent. You’re a real old queen of the Pampas.” She watched me, resting her breasts on the bar, and there was still beauty in the lines of her greasy face, still a strange promise of strength and gentleness in her short blackened fingers. I smiled, picked up the glasses, and was just arranging them on a dusty table when I noticed the soldier, a lone soldier near the jukebox with his dark head on his arms and khaki shirt wet and clinging to his thin ribs, and heard Fernandez calling out in the darkness beyond the fallen wall.

“In here, Fernandez! In here, Cassandra! Can you see the light?”

I waited, paced up and down. There was the odor of mildewed cardboard, odor of pack rats under the sagging floor, the Mexican woman had tacked an out-of-date girlie calendar above the jukebox. Then they appeared—I knew at once that they had been holding hands—and I embraced Fernandez, embraced Cassandra, seated them at our private table and sighed, smiled at both of them, winking at Fernandez, winking happily at Cassandra, and took a quick sip of my flat tepid beer.

“So, good Papa Cue Ball, you have seen to everything and all is in order?”

“All in order, Fernandez. Except for our unfortunate friend over there,” and I nodded in the direction of the soldier, tried to catch Cassandra’s eye over the rim of my glass. Fernandez turned, glanced at the sleeping figure, shrugged.

“It’s nothing, Papa Cue Ball. Merely a drunk GI. The GI’s are all over the place these days. Don’t give it a thought. But look, a woman of my own color! A very good omen, Papa Cue Ball, a very good omen.”

“I thought you’d be pleased, Fernandez.”

“Fernandez is very pleased. And Chicken,” looking now at Cassandra, putting his little brown hand on her wrist, “do you see that she’s a woman who has borne many children? Do you see from her size that she’s a woman of many glowing and painless births? Take heart from her, Chicken. Put a little flesh on the bones. …”

And interrupting him quickly: “Well, what do you think of having the wedding supper now, Fernandez? Pretty good idea?”

“Magnificent, good Papa Cue Ball. You think of everything!”

Tortillas. Soft brick-colored beans. Bitter nuts, half-moons of garlic, fish sweated into a paste with hard silver slices of raw onion. Ground meal, green peppers the shape of a finger and the texture of warm mucilage and filled with tiny black explosive seeds, and chicken, oh the tortured chicken skewered and brown and lacerated, running with pink blood and some kind of thick peppered sauce, chicken that fell away from the bone and in the mouth yielded first the delicate flavor of tender white meat and then the unexpected pain of its unleashed fire, chicken and murky soup and bits of preserved vegetable poisoned in such a way as to bring a sudden film to the eyes and pinched dry shriveling sensations to the nose and throat. So Fernandez kept calling out in Spanish to the Mexican woman, and the Mexican woman—now there was a new glazed color in her cheeks, a new odor of hot charcoal amongst the other smells of her enormous and unrevealed self—kept coming to us with still another clay pot steaming in one brown hand and always the little dog shaking helplessly in the other. And Fernandez ate, cocking his head, holding the food appreciatively on his tongue, then nodding, chewing, demanding more, and of course I ate right along with him, cooling myself, saving myself with innumerable glasses of the beer which was suddenly sparkling and as cold as ice.

“You know about the
cojones
, Papa Cue Ball? This is a feast for the
cojones
, let me tell you. …”

So that’s what our old mother of the mesquite was up to, and I blushed then, glanced at Cassandra—poor Cassandra, soft and unsmiling in the light of the half-candle which the fat woman had brought with the first brusque Spanish command—and bit down as hard as I could on a little tough root that was filled with devils. I was always afraid that Cassandra would marry a marine like so many of the girls she knew at school, but what would those marine wives think if they could see her now, waiting out this wedding night in the dark dining room of an empty hotel which was once the call house of our little abandoned and evil smelling
and still collapsing silver town? For that matter, what was I to think? No doubt I was too full, too excited, but eager, strangely eager nonetheless, to think.

In the end there was candy—what secret cache expended loyally for the sake of Fernandez? what dirty old shoe box or earthen pot lovingly exhumed and made to yield up this cracked plate of thick dark sticky chunks of sugared fruit?—and two twisted black Mexican cigars and a tiny glass filled to the brim—rare cordial? primitive aphrodisiac?—for Cassandra. I ate, I smoked, I looked the other way when I saw her slender white fingers reach for the glass.

“Well, Fernandez,” I said, and pushed back my chair, stood up, blew the ash off my black cigar—sickening cigar, heavy pungent odor of bad dreams—and for a moment held myself where the food lay, “how about a little music, Fernandez? Shall we try a song?” The sallow wizened face looked up at me and he was unable to smile, unable to speak, unable even to nod, but the eyes told me that he wanted me to try a song. Cassandra was still holding the full glass, Cassandra still untouched by these disreputable ghosts or the chorus of the pack rats below the floor. The candlelight was flowing in her hair and on her ring finger there was a little bright chip of fire. I wanted to suggest that I call out the titles of the numbers and that she, my poor Cassandra, select our song. But clutching the back of the chair I looked down at her and the phrasing of this well-intentioned thought never came to my lips.

I left them together, left the two of them sitting together in the midst of the debris of the feast of the
cojones
, as my son-in-law had said, and somehow turning abruptly toward the dusty colors of the obsolete jukebox, I knew that once I walked away from the table, away from the wreckage of the indelicate wedding supper, I would be walking away from them forever. It was a difficult moment, an awkward pause. But I stepped out, telling myself I always enjoyed the mystery of push buttons and the flamboyance of bright undulating colors.

Unsteady steps across the rotten floor. A good look at the white neck of the sleeping soldier. And then the old machine,
the colored water moving through the tubes, the rows of bright square buttons and, inside the dusty glass, the rows of printed song titles each one of which was a further notch in my knowledge of romance. I leaned down, hands on knees, never looking back at the table, and very carefully and slowly read each one of those little romantic titles twice. Then I made my choice, fumbled around in my pocket for a coin, pushed the bright button down. A click, a scratching sound, then music, and I started to wag my head to the rhythm of that awful tune.

Listening, swaying, smiling, hands still on knees, I did my best to dream up a little reverie of my own, a little romance of my own, and I did my very best, stood it as long as I could, then simply had to turn around and did so, humming along with the record, snapping my fingers, putting another nickel in the slot, turning slowly—oh I wasn’t going to miss a trick that night—until I stood facing them once more, but in shadow and with the colored lights revolving and dissolving across my poor wrinkled uniform. They had gotten up from the table—Fernandez, Cassandra—and I was just about to call good night to them, thinking that they wouldn’t leave the room until I called good night to them, when I saw the Mexican woman taking charge of them, watched with a curious shrinking sensation on my lips, my smile, as she took Cassandra’s submissive white face between her greasy hands and kissed her in the middle of that mere ghost of a white brow and then let go of Cassandra and quickly gave Fernandez a couple of coaxing pats on his white linen rump, and then pushed them out the door.