The Chameleon Fallacy (Big Bamboo Book 2) (8 page)

She lay under her covers, her heart pounding like a sparrow in a snare. The book was against her knees. She held her breath and struck the match.

The Marquis de Sade.

After that, there was no other recourse than to steal a key, an act that in itself was requiring of penitence. The next three years were an agony of conflict and indecision for Arantxa. Puberty is not exactly a walk in the park for any young woman, but for one caught between damnation and desire, admonished by deities and tempted by demons, rolling in the thrall of a self-induced passion and then spending hours kneeling on cold flagstones in contrition, it is a nightmare of guilt and atonement, a radical reassessment of everything you have been brought up to believe and the people who taught it to you.

Her nightly raids into her father’s library had given her imagination eyes, and the visions she saw painted in the skies on dreamy summer days were now filled with violent passions and exotic landscapes, disturbing and exhilarating and frightening. And there was not a living soul that she could confide in. With her secret came a price. She was truly alone.

She became ever more bold and reckless in her deception, hooked on the thrill of the escapade, taking and returning books, sometimes in broad daylight, seeing how far she could go, almost daring someone to catch her. She had a few close calls, but no one ever did. Until…

She had just about been through the whole library, although her father replenished it on his occasional visits, when the wheels finally came off. On Jan 14th, 1973, she was surreptitiously returning
Lolita
when she heard footsteps outside. Normally, by that stage, she would not have been fazed by them. It happened all the time. Except…she recognized these footsteps. Her father.

The door had started to open before she could even think of heading for the window. On one wall there was a large authentic tapestry depicting El Cid and the Moors. There was nothing else she could do. She slid behind it, flattened herself against the wall, and froze in a kind of terrifying ecstasy. She listened to her father, rummaging around, moving closer and then away and then closer again. It was such exquisite suspense that she found herself becoming physically aroused. She wasn’t sure what her father would do if he discovered her. He was, after all, a virtual stranger. She was almost hoping he would, just so she could find out. Then her mother walked in.

Leire dreaded her husband’s visits. They were a torment to her. She would spend days in the chapel praying for the strength to resist and deny him, knowing all the while that it would be futile. Then when their passions were spent she would fly into a rage, and cry and scream and fall to her knees and beg for forgiveness, for although they were married in the eyes of God, in the eyes of God Oier Marinelarena was a faithless adulterer, an unbeliever and a barbarian, and to lie with him was to profane the name of the Lord, and she would run and bathe and try to cleanse herself but she could not, and Oier would laugh his great bull laugh and reach for the bottle.

Arantxa had never seen her mother naked. In fact, she had never seen another living person naked. She had never seen her mother with her hair down, and was shocked at how long it was. She had certainly never seen her father with his pants down, and was shocked at how long it was. Arantxa was able to observe all through a hole where the tapestry had frayed through.

Oier and Leire went for each other with such ferocious intensity that it was not immediately clear if they were fucking or fighting, and in the final analysis there were so many lesions that the distinction was a minor one. Oier grunted and snarled like a rutting boar, and Leire screamed and cried and prayed. And if this whole scene were not shocking enough for the poor secreted Arantxa, her mother did the unthinkable. She began to curse and blaspheme.

“
Fuck me fuck me I hate you you pig bastard I love you fuck me I hate you filthy shit cunt God damn you to hell for all eternity I love you you sow fucker you Godless sodomite oh fuck me oh please oh God forgive me.”

Oier had Leire pinned against the table and he abruptly stopped and pulled out, and she fetched him a clout across the chops and split his lips, and he chastised her pendulous breasts with vicious slaps, and spun her around and twisted her hair around his fists and violently forced her to the floor and mounted her in the forbidden and sinful passage and she screamed as if she were Joan of Arc tortured in the flames and Oier bellowed as he came and roughly extricated himself and struggled to his feet and Leire rounded on him like a lioness and punched him full in the nose and he staggered back against the wall and lost his balance and reached out and grabbed the tapestry for support and wrenched it from the wall.

In the recriminations that followed, the whole story came out. Leire retreated in shame and silence behind her cloistered walls, never to reemerge or speak another word to either husband or daughter. She did not protest when Oier took Arantxa, as if that which she had feared had been inevitable since the beginning and she had always known it would be so. And although she never laid eyes on her daughter again, she prayed for her immortal soul every day until the day she died.

A year with her father was all that was granted to Arantxa, for he died intestate in a bordello in Barcelona, in April of the following year, leaving her in a shit hotel on a whore-infested side street off La Rambla, with the equivalent of three hundred dollars and nothing else. Three days later, she stole her first watch, sold it, and took the train for Paris. And thus the die was cast.

***

“
Listen, son, any sumbitch who ain’t never travelled ’cross the states on a Greyhound bus don’t know shit about America. Sitting there in the darkness in the middle of the night, liss’nin’ to them folks talkin’ is an education in itself, boy. All them people’s stories, that’s all you need to know. See old folks, and derelicts, and mothers with young babies, climbing out of the bus in the middle of Desolationsville in the hard dawn, and rummies and winos and deadbeats panhandling the bleak stations at midnight. Lost and lonely motherfuckers stretched out trying to sleep on the plastic benches with the neon glaring on their flickering eyelids, you find out right quick what this country can do to you if you let it. That was my first lesson, and I learned it right off the boat, when I rocked up here from the Ukraine and landed up in Galveston when I’s fifteen years old, with six dollars, a secondhand Talmud, and dollar-sized hole in the ass of my britches. That’s why you gots to get on top a things, kid, claw your way to the top of the shitpile and dig in, and kill any motherfucker tries to move you. You dig?”

“
Oh, I dig. I dig all the way to fucking China. It’s just that all that digging and I ain’t found shit.”

“
That’s ’cos you goin’ about it all wrong, dude. You ain’t all that dumb. You got a halfway-decent brain in that there skull a yourn. Just you ain’t a-usin’ it right. Ain’t no use havin’ a computer iffen you don’t know how to plug the fucker in. And let me tell you somethin’ else fer free, kid. Ain’t no quantifiable correlation between intelligence and money in this country. Iffen they was, Harvard professors would all be loaded, and George Dubya would be sellin’ his ass outside the White House. The trick is, find one thing that you’re all good at, and stick with it. Use what you got. An’ in your case, what you got is that you look like Tiger Woods. Shit. Iffen I looked as much like Tiger Woods as you do, I’d have nearly as much dough as he does by now. Now I gots to go, son. Cain’t be a settin’ around all day blabbermouthin’ with no niggers. Time’s a-wastin’ boy. Pick y’all up in the mornin’. Don’t be late, and don’t get yer dick stuck in the cookie jar.”

Monsoon stood in front of the Venetian and watched the big Red Caddie ease into the traffic. The other cars seemed to make way for it like peasants making way for royalty. Monsoon’s dream machine turned on automatically.

He was onto a good thing and he knew it. It was time to play a smart hand for once. Rabbi Elmo Yorke was not a guy who was going places. Rabbi Elmo Yorke was a guy who had been places and was already on his way back. You could learn a lot from a guy like that. Plus, for some reason he seemed to have taken a shine to Monsoon. Ironically, it might have been because of an act of honesty on his part, which was so un-Monsoon-like as to be rarer than a pair of nuts in a harem. Without knowing why, he had just blurted it out, right off the bat on the first tee.

“
Er, Mr. Yorke. I have a confession to make. I ain’t really much of a caddy. In fact, I don’t know shit about golf.”

Monsoon had already been mentally flagellating himself for being so fucking stupid as Yorke looked up from his tee shot and gave him a piercing stare.

Way to go, asshole
, he thought,
now you really did just wipe your ass on a hundred-dollar bill.

He was extremely surprised and not a little relieved when Yorke said, “Don’t worry ’bout it, son. Neither do I. Stupid fuckin’ game. Knock the ball in the hole, take it out, knock it into another hole. What’s the fuckin’ point? It’s a game for fuckin’ peckerheads. I only play it because of the people I meet. It’s a kinda necessity, kid. Ninety percent a the deals that go down in this country take place on the golf course.”

“
I’m glad you feel that way, Mr. Yorke.”

“
Call me Elmo, kid. I hate it when some sumbitch calls me Mr. Yorke. Makes me think they’s a kiss-ass. And don’t sweat it. Alls y’alls gots to do fer me is look like what you look like. With that there kisser a yourn, you and me can go places.”

That had kind of set the tone for the whole round. On the ninth hole, some other guys came up. Yorke told him to go and look for lost balls for a while, and Monsoon stood in the shade of a stand of trees as he watched Yorke talking to the men. The men shook hands with Yorke, then climbed into their golf carts and bimbled off. Monsoon knew better than to ask questions. He handed Yorke his bag.

“
The hell with that, son. Fuck this shit. This game done be over, boy. I done what needed doin’. Scoot over and fetch the cart, boy. We’re gonna go get ourselves a drink.”

They went to the Laguna Champagne Bar at the Venetian. Monsoon decided to try to play an ace.

“
Elmo. I’d like to buy you a drink.”

“
Don’t be an asshole all ya life, kid. Take a fuckin’ day off. Y’all ain’t got a hole to shit in ’er nary a shovel ta dig it with. What y’all drinkin’?”

A waitress who looked like she could float on her own farts came up and asked them if they would like to see the extensive champagne menu. Monsoon was just shaping his lips to say, “I’d love to,” when Yorke said, “Hell, no. Champagne’s fer ladies ’n’ queers. Gimme a Mickey’s Big Mouth, would ya, darlin’.”

“
Er, yeah. Right on. Make that two.”

By way of conversation, as they waited for their drinks, Monsoon said, “So, Elmo. You must be Jewish.”

Elmo fixed him with a look that would have congealed baby shit.
“No. I’m a fucken Rosicrucian.
Now, son, they’s some folks that hold there ain’t no such thing as a stupid question, but you just done disproved that there theory right there and then. That is the dumbest-assed question I ever heard. I’m a fucken Rabbi, asshole. When’s the last time y’all encountered any kinda Rabbi who weren’t fucking Jewish. Next off y’all’ll be askin’ me if my mama was a female.”

“
Shit. Sorry, Elmo. I figured that Rabbi was just some kinda nickname or something. You don’t look like a Rabbi, and you sure as hell don’t talk like one.”

“
Well, son, you gots to cut the cloth to suit the garment. So’s I talks the way that seems appropriate at the time. Longer you hang around me, the more you’ll see it. Say, you all got a passport?”

“
Yeah. Why?”

“’
Cos I gots a proposition fer y’all, and it might be of a peripatetic nature.”

“
Huh?”

“
Means you might have to travel some. Now, I like you, son. Y’all just smart enough to be useful and just dumb enough to not be dangerous. I got a big mother of a deal comin’ up, and I could use a guy like you. How’d y’all like to come and work fer me, temporarily permanent-like?”

Monsoon had a mental image of himself in a Lakers outfit, dropping a trey from the halfway line at the buzzer. He flashed the enamel and his smile popped like a thirties flashbulb.

“
Deal me in, boss,” he said.

“
Well, good, then. Now, get yer stuff, move out of whatever deadbeat shithole y’all livin’ in, and we’ll fix y’all up with a room here tonight. Tomorrow we head fer Louisiana, boy.”