Tall Cool One (21 page)

Anna raised her eyebrows. “When I think emergency, I don’t think of calling Cammie Sheppard.”

Sam rubbed a finger along the edge of the rough-hewn table. “Yeah, well, she’ll fool you now and then. Anyway . . .” She spread her arms expansively. “I’d say now’s the perfect time to cross it off your list.”

Moments later, the elderly waiter returned with a brown bottle, two brown shot glasses, a plate of tapas, and the bottled water. “Enjoy,” he said with a slight bow, then retreated to watch the soccer game.

Sam did the honors, pouring generous shots of mescal into Anna’s glass and then her own. Anna peered into the bottle from the top. “Do you know that they put moth larvae in the bottle? And that once it dies, they know the alcohol content is sufficient?”

“Well, that’s certainly different from the way Cristal is made,” Sam declared, raising her glass. “We should christen your mescal-drinking experience with a toast.”

“To new experiences,” Anna decided, and clinked her glass against Sam’s. She watched Sam down her shot in one swallow. Then she did the same. Instantly her throat was on fire.

“Water!” She grabbed one of the bottles, tore the cap off, and guzzled.

“Come on, Anna. Take it like a man,” Sam ordered with a laugh. “What kind of party girl are you?”

Tears came to Anna’s eyes. “Whew.” She fanned her face. There was a mirror on the wall near their table. In it, she could see the female bartender sneering at them. That was enough motivation for her to pour them each another shot. She could prove she wasn’t a wuss. This time, she knew what to expect. “Your toast, Sam?”

“To rich girls gone wild,” Sam decreed.

They clinked glasses and downed the second shot. This time the heat spread from Anna’s throat to her belly and the top of her head; she felt sunburned from the inside out.

Sam nodded. “Whew, baby, that is some potent shit.” Sam spun the bottle around and gazed at it. “Brown. No label. Huh. They probably
do
make their own. If we drink enough, maybe we can bring the little sucker back to life.”

“Give it mouth to mouth,” Anna suggested. Then she laughed, really feeling the alcohol. “That’s so funny.”

“I know!” Sam chortled. She poured them one more shot, her hand none too steady. “Last one. To . . . to what this time?”

“To Eduardo,” Anna decided.

“Eduar-r-r-rdo,” Sam repeated, rolling the
r.
“What a hot name. Isn’t Eduardo a hot name?”

“Very,” Anna agreed

“Why is he into me? That is the question. . . .”

“Why not?” Anna asked.

“He’s probably just a guy who wants to get laid,” Sam slurred. “I look like an easy mark.”

“Sam, think. He’s gorgeous. He obviously has money. I don’t think he’s hurting for female companionship. Besides, he treated you with respect.”

“True,” Sam agreed. “Drink up.”

They clinked glasses and drank. Anna gagged as she felt something slither down her throat. She tried to hock it up, but it was too late. “Yecch!” she sputtered.

“Too strong?”

“No. That larva must have spilled out into my glass. I think I just swallowed it!”

Sam grabbed the mescal bottle and peered inside. “Yep,” she pronounced. “You did.”

“Great,” Anna moaned. “Serves me right.”

“Don’t flip out. But I should warn you, it’s going to get you stoned out of your mind.”

“My friend Cyn told me that was a myth.”

Sam shook her head. “No, it isn’t. I saw a guy at a party down the worm. Fifteen minutes later he was standing on the kitchen table in his mother’s high heels, trying to hump his dog.”

Anna felt weak in her knees. “But Cyn told me—”

“Don’t worry,” Sam assured her. “Wherever you’re going, I won’t leave you stranded.” She waved her hand to get the elderly waiter’s attention. “Another bottle of mescal,
por favor. Tout du suite.
I mean,
ahora.
”

The waiter stared at her. “You are sure? We make strong mescal here.”

“Give the drinks to your friends.” Sam gestured toward the men watching the soccer game and playing dominos. “Just bring me the bottle with the worm. Okay?”

The waiter gave her a dubious look and repeated her instructions, as if to make sure he understood them. When he was sure he did, he made an announcement to the customers that resulted in raucous cheering and shouts of,
“¡Olé, la gringa!”

“The cheers are for you,” the waiter told her as he moved off to get the new bottle. “You have . . . how do you say in English . . . made their afternoon.”

“Tell them thank you. Don’t forget to bring me the worm,” Sam reminded.

For the next ten minutes, Sam chowed down on the delicious tapas while the waiter poured shot after shot for his happy customers. Many of them stopped by their table to toast the American girls. Anna, who ordinarily would have been happy for inducing such cross-cultural bonding, just sat there nervously. She was too unsettled to eat and monitored herself to see if—when—she might feel something weird.

Finally the waiter placed the second brown bottle on the table between them. “One bottle, one worm,” he said, then hesitated. “Be careful. There are special ingredients in our mescal. From the desert.”

“Works for me,” Sam told him. Then she tipped the bottle over and let three fingers worth of mescal plopped into her shot glass. Plus one dead worm. “Come on, Anna. Don’t make me drink alone.”

Anna swallowed hard. Her mouth felt fuzzy, her lips thick. The colors in the room were achingly bright. No. Maybe she was just imagining it. That had to be it; her overactive imagination was at work.

“Okay.” She poured one more glassful of mescal from their first bottle. “To what?”

“To the slaves of Beverly Hills; thank God we’re not there,” Sam pronounced.

“I’ll drink to that.”

And they did. More than once.

“Hey, Anna! Check out this lizard. Right here!”

Sam pointed to a large iguana that was sunning itself on a large sandstone rock. “C’mere, Bill.” She held out her hand toward the reptile. It didn’t move.

Anna flew across the sandy landscape toward Sam. At least she felt as if she were flying. She’d been utterly captivated by a purple desert wildflower that had sprouted from the side of a cactus. In fact, she’d gotten her nose practically inside the flower to examine it, amazed by the striations and curves on its interior.

How much time had passed since they’d left the restaurant? Anna wasn’t sure. A couple of hours, maybe. Knowing how wasted they were from the mescal, they’d had every intention going directly from the restaurant to the town square to hang out until the van arrived. But at the end of the alley behind Los Molinos, Sam had spotted a trail that headed off into the Mexican desert. And she’d convinced Anna that they ought to take a scenic detour.

That detour had extended as the girls—fascinated by everything they saw—strolled deeper and deeper into the wild, barren landscape.

Anna peered down at the iguana. “Sam? How do you know his name is Bill?”

“He told me,” Sam said seriously. “Shhh. Listen, he’ll tell you.”

Anna cocked her head to listen. The iguana flicked his tongue at her. “Hey,” Anna protested. “He hates me. Look what he just did!”

“Maybe he’s hungry,” Sam said. She reached into her pocket and found a piece of gum. She held it out to see what the iguana would do.

“Sam? I don’t think Bill has teeth. To chew gum. Which means he’d have to gum the gum.”

Sam found this comment hysterically funny. Anna thought that her finding the comment hysterically funny was hysterically funny. The two girls laughed so hard that the sound echoed off the distant hills.

“Wow, that is so cool,” Sam marveled. “It’s like our voices are all over the desert.” She cupped her hands around her mouth and turned toward the distant, golden hills.
“¡Hola!”

“Hi!” Anna yelled directly at Sam’s face.

Sam reeled backward. “Why are you yelling?”

“You said ‘hello’ in Spanish. So I said ‘hi’ in English.”

“Oh.” Sam nodded thoughtfully. “Right. That makes sense.”

Anna pointed at the lizard. It hadn’t moved despite their shouting. Maybe he really was magical. “You should give Bill the gum.”

“Good idea.”

Sam unwrapped the gum and tossed the stick at the iguana. Anna saw an arc trail as the gum flew through the air. “Did you see that?” She pointed at the trail, which still hung in the air.

“What?” Sam responded.

“That!” Anna couldn’t find the words, so she trickled her fingers through the air by way of illustration. A trail formed behind them, too.

“Your fingers?” Sam asked.

“What about my fingers?” Anna looked at her hand. “Fingers are so amazing, aren’t they?”

“You wanted me to watch your fingers?” Sam asked.

Then Anna remembered. “I meant the trail. Did you see the gum trail when you tossed it to Bill?”

“What’s a gum trail?”

“No,” Anna said. “In the air. Just before.”

Sam looked at her, puzzled.

“Sam. Are we tripping? We can’t be tripping. The worm thing is a miss!”

“Well, I think it’s a hit,” Sam said.

Anna licked her dry lips. “
Myth,
not miss.”

“Theriothly?” Sam lisped. That made them both crack up again. When Sam caught her breath, she reminded Anna what the waiter had told them about the homemade mescal. “He said it’s got some weird shit that makes you trip.”

“Like Don Juan,” Anna realized. “And Carlos Castaneda. ‘To seek freedom is the only driving force I know. Freedom to fly off into that infinity out there.’”

Sam looked at the iguana. “Bill, what’s she talking about?”

The lizard stuck his tongue out at Anna again. Then he jumped down from the rock and scurried away. Sam charged after him as he scampered up a small dirt mound and down into a hole. “See, he hates me,” Anna said.

But Sam was too fixated on the sky to respond. “Check it out, Anna.”

Anna looked up. Puffy cumulus clouds scudded across the endless blue from east to west, shapes morphing as they did. “I see a lion. And a girl fishing.” She turned to Sam—her friend had sprawled in the sand to get a better view of the sky. So Anna dropped down next to her. “This is so great. I haven’t done this since I was really young.”

“You don’t have to stop. You’re still really young. And we’ve got all the time in the world.”

Anna checked to see what time it was. Four-fifteen. But when she put her arm down and tried to focus again on the clouds, she was overwhelmed by the sensation of the watch on her wrist. It felt heavy. Really heavy. So she took off the watch and tossed it away.

Much better.

“What are you doing?” Sam said as the wristwatch skittered across some flat rocks.

“Being timeless,” Anna explained.

“Great idea. I want to be timeless, too.” With a few quick movements, Sam removed her own wristwatch, then flung it off into the desert.

“We should just be here now,” Anna pronounced. “Where no one can get to us. Nothing from civilization. No watches, no rings, no jewelry, and definitely no cell phones.” Following her own advice, she methodically took off her earrings and her rings, dug her cell out of her pocketbook, and heaved it all off the mound. “Yep. Castaneda would approve.”

“Didn’t he make half that shit up?” Sam asked rhetorically. “Oh, what the fuck.” She took off her necklace and rings, found her cell phone, and threw them each into the desert in a different direction.

“Bravo,” Anna told her as an overwhelming sense of freedom washed over her. No baggage. No worries. Just herself, her friend, and the cerulean sky.

Dinner With Eduardo

“I
t’s a beautiful sunset,” Anna said. “Amazing, really.”

“Yeah,” Sam agreed.

They were sitting together on a boulder not far back from the edge of a cliff that dropped down to the ocean. The cloud-strewn western sky was on fire from the setting sun. At least that’s how it looked to Anna, who recognized that she was still in an extremely altered state. She felt fine, though. Absolutely serene. She was not at all concerned about a bank of dark clouds that loomed on the opposite horizon. From the beatific smile on Sam’s face, she could only assume that her friend felt the same way.

Anna sighed contentedly. Maybe she needed to drink homemade mescal more often. Her mind wasn’t racing, worrying about her family or her love life.

“Life is so great,” she declared.

“I know,” Sam agreed, closing her eyes. “I think you’re right, Anna. About Eduardo. I mean, he really is into me. Isn’t that so awesome?”

Anna thought for a few moments. Eduardo. There was a guy named Eduardo. Wasn’t Sam supposed to meet this guy, Eduardo? And wasn’t she supposed to meet Kai?

“Sam?”

“Uh-huh?”

“How long have we been here?”

Sam shrugged. “A while.”

“Aren’t you supposed to have dinner with Eduardo tonight?”

“Yeah,” Sam replied. “Fine, no problem. What time is it?”

Anna looked down at her wrist. No watch.

“I had a watch. Didn’t I?”

“I think so. Yeah.” Sam stood up and stumbled a little. “Whoa. That was some intense mescal. Check the time on your cell.”

Anna reached into her bag for her cell. No cell.

“Check yours,” she told Sam. But Sam didn’t have a watch or a cell, either.

“I think we need to go back to that town,” Anna said as she stood up.

“Sure,” Sam agreed. “Sounds good. Which way?”

Anna looked behind her. Then to the right and to the left. She had absolutely no idea of the direction from which they’d come, and it was getting darker by the moment. “I don’t know. Do you?”

Sam gazed around. “Clueless.”

“I think we’re stuck,” Anna realized.

“We can’t be stuck. We just have to figure out how we got here.”

“That’s easy. We walked,” Anna said. The comment started them both on a laughing jag, which was interrupted by a slash of lightning in the sky behind them. And then, seconds later, thunder.

“Thunder. That means rain,” Sam reckoned.

“You’re right,” Anna agreed. She held her hand out. “Not yet, though. That’s good.” An instant later, there was another lightning-thunder combination. “Not good.”