Keys of Babylon (8 page)

Now that's right, she encourages. Take another mouthful. And another. You see, it's not too hot. It just tastes. It has a taste, Larry. That's why God gives us taste buds. Such a clever God. But don't tell the others about this. They'll all be wanting some. Hey. You're eating cactus, Larry. Oh boy, you're eating cactus.

If Larry can eat, she reckons, he can listen. He's not been shaved and already shows a silver stubble. There's cactus juice on his chin.

Yes, Maria thinks. He looks better like this. He seems a real man today. Is a real man. The whiskers have sexed him up a little. Larry's not the neutered cat any more. Not the coiffeured corpse. Yet he hasn't spoken.

Try the pepper now, smiles Maria. I grew it in my window box. Don't worry, I scraped all the seeds out. And saved them.

A trucker took me to the Paradise Valley, she says. He was hauling lavatory pans, I remember that. I sat up front and he gave me a Hershey bar. Welcome to the US of A. Then another ride got me to Phoenix. Big, bad Phoenix. Belly of the beast. With all those swimming pools. You ever have a swimming pool, Larry? Hey, three cheers for swimming pools. All those cleaning jobs they create.

The lavatory guy dropped me near the Greyhound station and, you bet, there were others like me there too. Oh yes. I washed in the Greyhound toilets and talked to the cleaners. Everyone spoke Mexican. But there were Indians too. And these people who'd come all the way up from Chiapas. And some from Guatemala, riding on top of freight trains. Little brown people. Like dolls. Hair cut straight across their foreheads, wearing serapes as if they were back in their villages. Their language was strange. Couldn't read or write they said. But they could work. So where was the work? Let us at it was their attitude.

And at once I started to feel better. Because all these other people had done what we'd done. Me, Juan, Juanita. I had kept thinking we were unique. But others had come further. Puerto Penasco? they laughed. That's just down the road.

But what surprised me was that Americans were so good. People are good, Larry. Or they want to be. The truck driver who took me to the station even had a sticker in his cab that read ‘The US is full up'. But he said I looked like I could use a ride. He knew, Larry. He knew.

And that was years ago and it's still not full. When I tried my luck in Flagstaff I lived in the forest. There's nobody there. When you've been in the Altar you might be scared of the forest. It's a different kind of loneliness. A different silence.

Maria pours him a glass of water.

In the desert we thought we'd never see people again. We slept one night at an abandoned mine. It was still the eight of us then. Juanita was afraid to sleep in the mine entrance; she said there might be dead people. I went in and found part of an old book. It was
Robinson Crusoe
. We'd never read it but we knew what it was about. Juan said there was a movie,
Robinson Crusoe on Mars
, that was filmed in the desert. Just over the border, he said, in California. We'd go to see it in Hollywood, Juan promised me. Or watch it in our own apartment when we owned a videotape machine. With popcorn and sundaes. Juan liked ice cream.

I worked everywhere. Cleaned up in Wendy's. It had just opened. Ever had one of Wendy's old-fashioned hamburgers? I might have flipped it for you. At Pizza Hut I crushed all the cardboard to be collected. Heated the plates. But I took the pizza crusts back to the room I was renting.

Larry looks up. His chin is shining. But after the third mouthful he hasn't touched his food.

You married? he asks.

No sir. No sir I'm not.

You should be married.

Why?

He studies her now. In her blue uniform with the Sunset crest. In her sandals that he hears slap down the corridor when she leaves his room. Bigfoot. He used to hear her on the night shift. Slap, slap. Before the new medication. Before they took away his phone.

Because.

Because what?

Just because.

I wanted children, says Maria. If I'd stayed home I would have had children.

How old are you? he asks.

Coming up to forty. Or is it fifty? Ha ha.

Larry sucks in his cheeks. I used to take my son to Wendy's, he says. Maybe not Wendy's but some diner in Phoenix. My son, Jacob. It was a treat. He liked root beer too. He always wore these big thick glasses. Made him look like a bug.

They're moving to Anthem this week, she says quietly. Exciting for them.

He prods the food. All my father brought to this country, mutters Larry, is a violin. A poxy violin. He played it on the ship coming over. He played it walking down the gangway, his ass hanging out of his pants. Then he never played it again.

He must have been proud of you.

The old man is scowling.

I bought a violin for Jacob. He never touched it. Always had his head in these encyclopaedias we had. He could reel off every president's name and dates. The capital of every state. Augusta, Maine.
Sheesh
. My wife bought them from a door-to-door salesman. Took up a whole shelf. You got kids?

No. I told you.

Why?

Because.

Because what?

Just because.

Maria looks out of the window. The Goliath truck is there again. The heaps of white sacks. From her pocket she takes the stone she had thought to show Larry. The black stone she had sucked in the desert. One round stone.

Hey, the sky's really red, she says. If you feel like it I'll take you out tomorrow. To our tree. Or you can watch the Cardinals game. Could be close, I hear. Now eat your
nopalitos
, Larry. They're going cold.

It was on the blackboard. So, I thought, it must be true. On a little blackboard at the back entrance, facing the car park. I was coming out of the Spar and the Polski Sklep and I had my provisions already, if you know what I mean. I was stocked up, and feeling good about things.

Because the town wasn't bad, and the weather had been dry all month. But better than anything was the sea. I could hear it as I looked at the blackboard. A sucking, a sighing. Big swell, they had said, for the next few days. I could imagine the spray with the sun in it. The ocean showing its muscles. And the smell of it. That was the difference. The shock. Even after a month, I wasn't used to that smell. Salt and catpiss and redcurrant leaves. Or boiling tar. Tar popping in its barrel.

Dangerous, really, the sea. That's what I think when I walk the promenade. All these pensioners and school children come to gaze at it. But the sea is threatening. Imprisoned for a thousand years, but capable still of killing its jailer. Yes that's the sea. Whispering in its own language. Waiting for something to happen as it loiters under the green railings. That's what the sea does. It waits. The sea has patience and will never run out of time. But I can feel the minutes pass. The days. Gone like bubbles of black tar. Gone like pounds and pennies.

The day I first went in I'd been nervous. You never know what idiots you're going to meet in places like that. Or, rather, you do. The failed and the flakey. The ugly and the deformed. The men whose first instinct, even at that time in the morning, is violence.

Most especially the women. The women will be few but they will be noticed first.These are women who by their very presence are exposed immediately as beyond salvation. Because walking into a place like that is an admission of guilt. Or desperation. Being seen there incites a verdict. For a woman, the walk up that pathway, out of the car park and past the dented keg, over the fag ash thick as cinders, is a long road.

Eight a.m. the blackboard said. It was 8.05 when I first stepped in. Yet the place was full. I'd say it was seething. But not like a workmen's café at that time, when there's a frenzy to life. Where you see men in plaid shirts starting enormous breakfasts. Swigging tea out of white enamel. All the coming, the going, the familiarities. In a café, there's an expectation for the day. Unimaginable things are going to happen. Fateful things.

But at the Seagull Room it's a different busyness. The act of entering says this is the day's highlight. Reached already. That this will be for you, the one who dares enter, the best part of that day. Before even the school buses have appeared. The locks drawn in the banks.

When I went in I was carrying two plastic bags, my coat over my shoulder because it was already warm, and I had a three-inch bolster in a side pocket of my jeans. Heavy, blue steel. Edge of brickdust on it. Scabs of concrete. But I'd recently had it under the grinding wheel and there was no burring on the blade. It's not something you'd want waved in your face. Which, I'm afraid, I had to do last week. To some waster. Some wanker.

I was on the hill going down towards the fairground. They call that stretch the Ghetto. It was about eleven, throwing-out time, and I was just wandering off to watch the waves. What's wrong with that? Maybe buy chips. Then out of this alley come three of them. Two kids and their dad. It was obviously their dad. Stubbies of Stella in their hands, so not hard up. Money to piss away.

One of the kids shoulder-barged me off the pavement. For no reason. Believe me, I was sober and I was orderly. He was only a kid, but it hurt and I stumbled. The three of them laughed, but I had the bolster out in a second and under the father's chin. Blue steel, like I said. Heavy in the hand. Serious heft.

Okay, that was a stupid thing to do. But you can't let yourself become a target. I learned that a long time ago. He was fat, clean shaven, the father. Nice white shirt, properly ironed. And he smelled of cologne. As sweet as a lemon. As it was dark he couldn't have known what I was holding. Only that there was a cold blade against his Adam's apple. A very big blade. Something immediately dangerous.

I looked into his face and ignored the boys. Boys? Eighteen, twenty. Big, drunk, unutterably ignorant. They could have floored me then and there. Imprinted their trainers on my face. But they froze. Surprised by the unexpected. By my reaction. And dulled by the booze.

Hey, all right, he laughed. The fat man laughed but I could hear the shock in his voice. The fear. Sorry, butt, he said. Only messing like. It's all right.

And they walked off. Slowly, but they left. Swearing, red-faced, bollocky men. Dad bandy-legged as a pitbull in his powder-blue, low-crotched Levi's, his riveted belt, the Samoan tattoos on his arms. Yes, some role model. Dad dragging his sons away. I expected them to throw the bottles but it didn't happen. What they aimed at me were the usual words. And unlike glass they were impossible to avoid.

Ten minutes later I was down on the esplanade. The sea was under the railings. And I was shaking. I was nearly crying too, then laughing, then everything together. And there was the bolster in my pocket. A dead weight. A deadly weapon. A comforter. Get caught by a bolster's edge and it will excavate your face. Its blade will depress and fracture your skull. Yes, I was laughing because I had won, but I was crying because I might have killed that man. And I was shaking because he could have killed me.

But now I think they were just playing rough. Rugby men, used to the scrum, bulked up by the weights machines. The boys swearing vengeance, one of them foaming, the father thinking it all over and, if he's sensible, shrugging it off. Oh yeah. If he's sensible. With his cologne on my skin.

When I enter, no one speaks but the room acknowledges me. Already I am a familiar and already I have my place, my back to the wall, my eye on the door. The barman puts a pint on the counter. I feel the cold beads of its industrial dew. The barman is another shaven man. Bulging, implacable. He smells of smoke, this man, and a few of the customers have cigarettes. It's illegal of course, but so is the violence of their streets, the pills and wraps they deal here, up this track behind the car park, the render coming off the brick, the pipework oxidised in the salt air. The Seagull Room they call it, though there is no such name front or back. Yet its protocols are stern.

Now seagulls I understand. They crowd the landfill. They harry one another for foodscraps. Even when a gull has swallowed a morsel its companions continue pursuit. They swoop on its vomit. They cry like the insane in the hospital in Naujoji Vilnia. But even seagulls, they say, are rarer now. Endangered species.

What I pay for the one drink could buy me four in the Spar, the Sklep. But I like it here. Money is a problem but it's not the only problem. And slowly, the routine begins, the regulars' routine.

Pancho's in with his guitar. It's good busking weather and has been all month. So Pancho's flush. In more ways than one. Sometimes he even sings in here and is tolerated, a sixty-year old with a duct-taped guitar, the hair on him long and thin, a man in jeans and a denim shirt, a necklace, a bracelet, what few teeth he's got left tobacco-stained.

Pancho washed up here years ago and liked it enough to stop moving. I see him on the street and laugh and put some pennies in the open guitar case, a case with stickers of towns where he's worked the streets. Torquay, Torbay, Saundersfoot they say. And all that's left of that case's turquoise silk is a rag around the rim.