The Days of Anna Madrigal (6 page)

“I don't know whether to believe that or not,” Wren said jovially.

Anna carefully arranged one of her fragile long-fingered hands over the other. “I don't make up things, dear. The truth is hard enough to sell.”

A long silence before Wren asked: “Would you go back?”

“To Winnemucca?”

“Yes. I mean . . . all things being equal?”

Anna gave her a bittersweet smile. “All things are not equal, dear.”

Brian already recognized the purposeful gleam in Wren's eye. His mother (the one with the spoon collection) would have called it “a bee in her bonnet.”

W
hy not?” asked Wren. “Gimme one good reason.”

They were winding along the coast highway in their rented Ford Focus, heading back to the RV park in Pacifica. The air was still, bordering on balmy. The moon was just a sliver above the dark sea, the tart remains of a lemon Life Saver.

“She's old,” said Brian. “She's had several strokes. She falls down all the time. There's three good reasons.”

“She won't fall down with us around. She'll be safer than usual. We'll make her cozy in the big chair. She can have the private bedroom.”

“What if . . . something happens?”

“What if something happens
anywhere
? It's just three or four days. And we'd be with her the whole time. I'm sure Jake could use a break.”

Brian turned and looked at her. “What's gotten into you, anyway?”

“I dunno, pumpkin.” Wren smiled wistfully. “I just wanna know her better. I didn't expect to like her this much.”

They were silent for a while as the car ribboned along the ocean.

“The point is,” said Wren, sliding her hand onto his leg, “you know she wants to do it. You heard what she said about unfinished business.”

Brian had heard all right, but it made no sense to him. Who could Anna possibly know in Winnemucca after seventy-five years? And what difference would it make?

“Old ghosts,” said Wren, reading his mind.

Chapter 6

SCORCHER

J
eanette MacDonald's coat was slinky satin trimmed in marabou, but Andy had only a moment to admire it before the room shook and the balcony cracked and people began screaming bloody murder. He usually saved a few Milk Duds for after the movie, just to prolong the experience, but he gobbled every last one of them in the three minutes it took for the city of San Francisco to collapse into rubble.

“My goodness,” said Margaret as they spilled out of the American Theater into the unglamorous daylight of Bridge Street. “You were wolfin' down those Duds like gangbusters. Scared the hell out of you, huh?”

“It was sure realistic,” Andy replied, though truthfully he had been more shaken by Clark Gable's treatment of Jeanette than by the ensuing earthquake. Gable had just
humiliated
her onstage, after all, evicted her from his club and his life, this blustery brute who couldn't recognize true love when it came along. It was almost as if he had
caused
the earthquake. Andy had seen plenty such men, and so had Margaret, but Margaret, oddly, trembled only in the face of collapsing buildings.

“I ate all mine too,” said Margaret, holding up an empty box of Red Hots. Andy expected her to blow on it and make it honk like a goose, and that's just what she did, prompting an old lady standing by the ticket booth to jump, then turn and frown at them. He smiled a sheepish apology. Margaret could be childish sometimes.

“I love the song,” he said, hoping at the very least to keep Margaret from attempting a second honk while there were people around.

It worked. Margaret puffed up her ruffled bosom, shook her loose platinum hair, and began to sing: “
San Francisco, open your Golden Gate
—”

Andy took it from there. “
You'll let no stranger wait, la, la, la, la
.”

They burst into laughter and joined in a duet, heading down the dusty sidewalk like some goofball vaudeville act. “
San Francisco, here is your . . . la, la, la . . . saying I wander no more. Other places only make me la, la, la
—”

“Okay, that's enough!” Margaret brought an end to their routine by yanking on Andy's arm.

“What?”

“You were twirling.”

“I was giving it some pep.”

“We're making a scene,” she whispered. She nodded in the direction of two men in dirty overalls scowling at them from the alley by the five-and-dime.

Andy shrugged. “Big deal.”

“You can twirl at home, lamb. Just don't do it here. Folks will get the wrong idea.”

Andy could have told her that an old chippie honking on a Red Hots box was making just as big a scene as a boy twirling on the sidewalk, but he kept his mouth shut because he knew what she meant, and because he could hurt her feelings more than she could ever hurt his. They took care of each other in different ways. She did it with movies and tender conspiracies. Sometimes silence was all he could offer.

Margaret glanced at him as they passed Kossol's Kosy Korner. Even there, in the dim glare of the diner on a sober Saturday afternoon, people seemed to be watching them through the streaky glass, including old Kyle Kossol himself. “Did you like your birthday present?” Margaret asked him.

“Uh-huh.”

“I thought you'd like those colors.”

“I did. Yeah.” His face was aflame with mortification and unarticulated gratitude.

“You can't tell your mama, Andy.”

“I know.” This was not news to him. There was not much of anything he could tell Mama these days. Sometimes he wondered if Margaret actually preferred it that way, since it made him more like her own son and less like Mama's. In that sense it felt like a betrayal of Mama—a form of desertion, even—but there was nothing he could do about it; his very nature, after all, was the ultimate betrayal.

M
argaret had a customer back at the Blue Moon, so she left Andy at Eagle Drugs with the remains of their milkshake. He was stalling for time now, drawing petroglyphs on the frosty canister until the Basque boy showed up for work.

“Want another one?” asked Mr. Yee. He was wearing the same garnet bolo tie he had worn since Andy was a little boy. Andy figured it was to prove he was a cowboy, even if he was an old Chinaman who ran the Rexall. When Mr. Yee was a boy there had been lots of Chinamen in Winnemucca—thousands, even, according to Mama—but now his kind was rapidly dwindling, and that meant he had to fit in.

Andy waved away the offer of a milkshake.

“Hunky-dory, huh?”

“Yes sir.”

“He should be here pretty soon.”

Rattled, Andy pretended not to understand.

“Lasko,” said Mr. Yee, explaining himself. “Your buddy, right? He's got baseball practice until four. You're welcome to stay.”

“Oh, right . . . thanks.” Andy's heart was thumping with anxiety and hope. He wondered if Mr. Yee, through canny oriental powers, had detected his infatuation with Lasko, or if Lasko himself—and here's where the hope came in—had told Mr. Yee that he and Andy were buddies. In either case the jig was up. Andy poured the rest of the milkshake into his glass and stared at a postcard taped to the mirror.

Lasko
. It suited him perfectly—exotic and roughneck at the same time. While his name was officially Belasko (Andy had seen it on a roster at school), the shortened version was all he ever used. Lasko's father was Mexican, but his mother (a cook at the Martin Hotel and the daughter of a sheepherder) had insisted on Basque names for their children. Lasko had been extremely lucky in that regard; there were no awkward intrusions of
x
's and
z
's in his name. He had a brother who'd been saddled with Xalbador, and even worse, a sister named Hegazti, which sounded less like a name to Andy than some sort of muttered gypsy curse.

The summer before, Lasko had danced in Pioneer Park at his grandfather's birthday in traditional Basque garb. (Only foreigners were described as wearing “garb,” Andy realized, never Americans.) Lasko was as much of a local boy as Andy, but seeing him that day, dashing in his black beret and red-sashed white pajamas, Andy felt every gallant, grueling mile of the journey that had brought Lasko's people from the Pyrenees to Chile and, finally, to the high desert of Nevada. Andy had not been invited to the birthday party, of course—he didn't know these people, and his mother was widely known to run a whorehouse—but he watched, entranced, from a blanket spread under a nearby cottonwood tree. It was hot as the hinges that day. Lasko was dancing hard, so his white pajamas had turned gray in the places where sweat had stuck them to his strong, hairy legs.

“That's the Rexall train!”

Andy nearly fell off the stool when Lasko's voice broke his reverie. Then a hand landed on his shoulder, firm as an accusation and warm as a caress. “Pretty snazzy, huh?” Lasko's other hand was pointing to the postcard on the mirror, but Andy still wasn't seeing it. All he could see was their reflection: one of them seated, the other standing, both looking straight ahead, like a couple in an old daguerreotype.

All too soon the hand abandoned Andy's shoulder, and Lasko was behind the counter, wrapping an apron around his gabardined loins. He yanked the strings so tight he might have been a wonderful Christmas parcel in need of extra protection. “It's gonna be a big deal,” he said. “She's comin' through every state in the union.”

The train, thought Andy, trying to concentrate. The train on the postcard.

“Why is she doing that?” he asked feebly.

Lasko shrugged as if the answer were obvious. “To let folks know about Rexall. Spread the word. The Depression is over. Ain't she a beaut?”

The train on the postcard was a streamlined cylinder that seemed to stretch on forever, the horizontal cousin of a Buck Rogers rocket ship.

“She's stopping in Winnemucca next month. For a whole day.” Now Lasko was wiping the counter with a towel, his naked forearms circling hypnotically.

“But . . . why?”

“So folks can come on board and look at it. See all the Rexall products.”

Andy still didn't get it. There were plenty of Rexall products to be seen right here: corn plasters, enema bags, mysterious-looking trusses for old people.

“And it's air-conditioned,” Lasko added. “All twelve cars.”

Now
that
was something. Nothing in Winnemucca was air-conditioned, not even the movie house. Andy had experienced that supernatural coolness only once in his life: when Mama took him on a trip to Reno so she could interview a blackjack girl named Irene. They had dined on chicken salad sandwiches and cherry pie in an air-conditioned coffee shop next door to the casino. He had never forgotten the sensation, that instantaneous release from the blast furnace of summer.

“Do you have to get tickets?” he asked Lasko.

“Not if you're a Rexallite.”

“What's a Rexallite?”

“
He's
a Rexallite,” Mr. Yee piped up from over at the pharmacy counter. “You talk nice to him, I bet he'll pull some strings.”

Lasko laughed. “He's a Rexallite, too. And you don't have to talk to nobody.”

But I want to, thought Andy. I want you to pull strings for me. I want you to take care of everything.

“When is it coming?” he asked. “I mean she.” Trains had a gender, apparently, so Andy thought it best to follow Lasko's lead.

“We ain't got the schedule yet, but I could let you know. I could show you.”

Andy knew better than to give him the phone number for the Blue Moon. Mama had always been clear about that. It interfered with business, she said. “Maybe at school,” he said. “I sit two rows behind you in Geography.”

“I know,” said Lasko. “You brought in that book one day.”

Andy nodded, exhilarated by the knowledge that he'd been remembered. “
Richard Halliburton's Book of Marvels
.”

“With the pictures of the new bridge in San Francisco.”

“Yep. That's the one.” Andy almost never said yep, but he knew how boys were supposed to talk to each other, especially boys like this one.

Lasko, scrubbing a glass with a brush, looked over at Andy. His nose was indelicate, broken-looking, his eyelashes so long and luxuriant they might have been painted on, like Robert Taylor's on the cover of
Screenland
magazine.

“Could I look at that sometime?” asked Lasko.

“Uh . . . what?”

“The book.”

“Oh . . . You bet. . . . I could loan it to you, even.”

“I liked those pictures,” said Lasko. “And the ones with the Panama Canal.”

“Yeah, me too. Pretty nifty.”

Nifty
. Something else he never said.

“I could bring it by tomorrow,” he added, barely able to breathe.

Lasko shook his head. “Sundays I help my mama out.”

“At the Martin Hotel? I could bring it to you there.”

“Okay . . . sure. Swell.” Lasko's dark brows furrowed. “How did you know where she works?”

Andy panicked for a moment, then shrugged. “Everybody knows where she works. Her roast lamb is world-famous.” This was laying it on thick, but it was the best he could manage under the circumstances. “World-famous lamb” was actually painted on the side of the Martin Hotel, so it seemed a safe enough choice. And it was better than telling the truth, that Lasko had been under polite surveillance ever since Andy had seen him dancing in the park in those sweaty pirate pants.

Lasko nodded, acknowledging the fame of his mother's lamb. “Come after dinner,” he said. “We can eat something in the kitchen.”

“Sure. Swell.”

An awkward silence followed while Lasko washed spoons. Andy wondered if either of them had a clear understanding of what had just been negotiated.

Finally Lasko said, “Scorcher today, huh?”

Andy whistled—
whew
—and tugged on his shirt collar, a gesture that didn't come off nearly as natural—or as manly—as he had planned.

“Want some shaved ice?” Lasko asked. “No charge.”

“Sure.”

In one practiced movement Lasko yanked a paper cone from a dispenser, slapped it into a chrome holder, and filled it with shaved ice, glancing briefly in the direction of Mr. Yee, who was occupied with his ledger. Then, as if to say
This is our secret
, Lasko pressed a finger to his lips before hitting a tap and squirting cherry syrup into the cone. Andy smiled as the nectar bloomed in the ice like a rose.

H
e left the Eagle as soon as he had finished the shaved ice. It wouldn't do to hang around. Lasko was popular, and popular boys always knew when other kids were over-eager for their company. Besides he seemed to like Andy (or at least his book), and Andy had just been invited to dinner at the Martin Hotel. Well, sort of invited, if eating in the kitchen counted. The invitation to the train was less clear-cut, since it could have been done to impress Mr. Yee, but an afternoon of air-conditioning with Lasko, whatever the reason, was nothing to sniff at.

By five o'clock Andy was hitchhiking home on Jungo Road. A breeze had rolled down from the mountains, warm and velvety. Andy felt buoyed by nature and a wondrously unthinkable thought: I have a date tomorrow. He may not know it, and he may not even know my name, but I have a date for the first time in my life.

A beat-up Packard pulled over and stopped, so Andy ran to catch up with it. The driver was a skinny bald man in an old brown suit.

“Where you headin', son? Jungo?”

“No. Just a mile or two down the road.”

The man squinted at him. “The Blue Moon Lodge?”

Andy hesitated, then uttered the all-important “Yep.”

“Ain't you too young for that place?”

No, thought Andy, I'm too old for it.