The Grand Tour (23 page)

Over the course of the next hour he roamed the grounds, gradually building to a thorough—perhaps overthorough—investigation of her breasts. She pulled minutely away from him, and he realized he'd been fondling them too long, delaying the next thing. With a sense of urgent, excited dread, he slowly moved his hand down her side, over the soft hard curve of her pelvis and underbelly, to the damp crevice where thigh met crotch. Here, it was warm and dark, and again he felt like a colonial explorer pushing timidly into some uncharted, humid jungle, expecting to be bitten or stung, waiting to die at every moment. Of embarrassment. He didn't know what to do, but there was only one path, and it led down. He moved past the thin elastic of her underwear, through a thatch of surprisingly bristly hair, and was edging toward a soft unknown when she pulled his hand away.

“Not now,” she'd whispered, rolling over. “Soon.”

He retrieved his wayward hand with disappointed relief and spent the night pressed against her back in a delectable agony.
Soon:
the word echoed softly in his ringing head. The slippery sibilance of the initial
s;
the voluptuous, gratified middle; the gentle moan of the final
n
. Plus what it meant, the actual woman pressed up against the concave mold of his torso. He would fade off for minutes at a time, only to be reawakened by his pounding heart, the movement of her skin against him, and, eventually, the thin light of the desert dawn entering the room. Finally he'd opened his eyes, knowing the night had fully passed; he did the same now, the act completed.

He hunched forward in the stall, shame and relief sprinting neck and neck toward the finish line, but his erection dwindled against his leg, exhausted and unable to continue the race. He wiped off and washed his face in the chipped plastic sink. An inadvertent glance in the mirror shocked him; he had managed to avoid looking in a mirror the last couple of days and therefore occupy his awkward body with less self-consciousness than usual. The night before, he'd been able to imagine himself as an actual man, not the gaping, pustular scarecrow in front of him cowering at its own image. There were no paper towels in the dispenser, so he wiped his wet hands on his jeans and exited back into the restaurant.

Returning to strained silence at the table, Vance could only assume Richard had said something awful, and Cindy had told him to shut the fuck up, or some variation on that general sequence of events. The old man hunched proprietarily over his shit-on-a-shingle, and Cindy stared over her coffee cup out the window, where the rain had slackened to a strafing monsoon. The neon yolk of Vance's eggs had already half coagulated, and he ate them quickly. As he did, her leg brushed against his, and he hardened again.

The reading in Denver was at a bar called the Seventeenth Street Tavern. It was packed with the usual motley assortment of veterans, bookish readers, middle-aged women, random spectators, and celebrity seekers eager for proximity to the aura of fame, however minor it might be. Vance watched from a spot in the back of the room, by the bar, drinking free PBR from a pitcher—he was part of Richard's crew, as the amiable and heavily tattooed bartender put it. The bartender had also warned him not to drink too much, saying, “Altitude, bro. You lowlanders can't handle more than about two beers.”

Vance had drunk more than about two beers. Hoping to impress Cindy with his devil-may-care attitude, he'd poured himself cup after cup of the rancid stuff. She had countered with her own, more authentic devil-may-care attitude, sitting by herself at a table across the room. At first, he'd gotten into the role of spurned lover drinking at the bar, since, in books, drinking at bars is the kind of thing spurned lovers often do. It gave him a momentary thrill when he realized that a spurned lover was what he actually was, sort of. But he'd drained the pitcher and gotten into another one and now felt more like a victim of head trauma than a spurned lover, like his face was a sucking wound stuffed with cotton and gauze. Nonetheless, he continued pouring beer into his mouthhole, in hopes that eventually it would lift his spirits the way it was supposed to according to advertisements and country songs. So far, it was just making him feel leaden and stupid. It was the first time he'd gotten really drunk, and he vowed never to do so again while pouring himself yet another foaming cup.

Every now and then, through the crowd, he caught a glimpse of Cindy's blonde hair. He thought of the pink scalp underneath, the perfect circle hidden from everyone's view. He already felt he knew her better than anyone had ever known her, though he knew this couldn't be true. No, but he was capable of knowing her better than anyone ever had. She glanced back at him, seemed to shake her head, and returned her attention to the stage. The combination she managed, of tough and doomed and okay with being doomed, yet vulnerable and really in need of help she didn't know she needed, could not have been more intoxicating for Vance if it had been calculated by a team of behavioral scientists.

Onstage, Richard read something, a chapter in which something or other happened. It was all the same, thought Vance. Drinking and death and mistakes and regret and something something something. They march through the jungle and something happens. Something about hope, some kind of chance! Shoots a gun or something. Talks to someone, then something something something, and finally he realizes something.

Vance cupped his hands and shouted, “On the Something Day, the Lord said ‘Let there be something,' and there was something and he saw it was really something!”

Richard paused and identified Vance as the heckler. “Take her easy there, Vance.”

“You okay?” said the bartender, hoisting his considerable eyebrows.

“No.” Vance looked out at the crowd, at all the people with their upturned faces, and silently despised them for blocking his view of Cindy. He poured the last of the pitcher into his cup and drained the warm froth in one swallow. Oh no. If he could press a button, he thought, he would vaporize all of them. He imagined the button on the bar, pantomimed pressing it. He would do anything for her, he thought, and it was a lucky thing, because she needed lots of things done for her. He'd felt her shaking the night before and seen how she was shivering during the drive, though he'd kept the car jungle hot for her benefit. She'd poured sweat during the night, but he thought—hoped—it was the closeness of the room and their physical proximity. Her hand, when he briefly held it while Richard napped, was moist and cold. He wasn't stupid. He knew she was detoxing, probably from the pills he'd seen her take at the apartment.

He also knew she was avoiding him, that she felt uncomfortable about the night before. Richard had probably said something. Fucking Richard. All Vance wanted, at that moment, was a chance to demonstrate his worth to her, his loyalty. He caught a glimpse of the blonde hair again and thought,
Use me.
What sweeter life could there be, than to be put to use by a woman you love?

“Dulce et decorum est pro domina mori,”
he said to the bartender, and motioned for another pitcher. The bartender took it away from him and shook his head. Vance wagged his finger back, solemn.

He loved her, yes. He knew it was stupid, didn't care. There were worse crimes than being stupid; being stupid was, in fact, not a crime! His heart sang. He felt something real and true for her, and he couldn't—wouldn't—be cynical about it. He rose to go to the bathroom, and the alcohol in his head seemed to be released, like the trapped torrent in a water-park ride, in a noxious flume that roared to his extremities. Whoa, look out, someone said. Timber. When he looked up, the bartender was over him, pulling him up toward the ceiling, walking him to a bench in the back of the bar. People were watching and laughing. “Being stupid is not a crime,” he yelled.

“Amen,” called a bearded boy, lifting a beefy arm in solidarity.

Cindy craned her head at the commotion in the back of the room, then returned her attention to the stage. Not that she was listening to what Richard read—she couldn't have cared less about that. But she was thinking about his earlier offer to help. A little late, buddy, she thought. She had no intention of enabling this tardy impulse toward fatherhood, now that he was good and ready. Thanks, but no thanks.

Still, help in one form or another was not without its appeal. Las Vegas, she knew now, was no longer an option. Even if she could have gotten her job back after missing two shifts, she wouldn't have wanted to. Her future lay before her like stretches of the Wyoming badlands they'd driven through earlier—a huge, monotonous plain uninterrupted by any points of interest or comfort.

She knew this feeling was at least partly due to the withdrawal she was currently going through. Her father's anxiety meds had provided a brittle shield for most of the drive, but they had worn off. Her back ached and her temperature fluctuated between icy, clattering chills and pinpricks of fire that flared from her groin through her armpits. But the feeling of complete desolation was by far the worst part. She'd gone through pharmaceutical withdrawals before, but was still surprised by the strength and severity with which this detox had bludgeoned her. The night before, she'd held on to Vance like a sailor in a typhoon clinging to the mast: he was approximately as tall and shaped the same way. She knew he liked her, and despite her brain fog had been aware of his adolescent attention trained on her throughout the day, but it had been all she could do not to get sick on herself in front of her father.

The money she still owed loomed in her mind, the Kilimanjaro of debt that would follow her wherever she went next. The top of her head itched, and she could almost visualize the single, naughty hair growing into the empty cavern of her skull, which she would isolate and set free later that night. Perhaps, she thought, you should really kill yourself this time and not just idly think about it.

Unable to sit still, she pushed back through the crowd and stood at the side of the bar. In the back of the room, Vance was slouched unconscious on a bench, his head lolling. She signaled to the bartender, whom she'd immediately identified upon entering the bar as a possible dealer and definite user; he ambled over with a sly smile, and she realized he'd probably identified her as a type, as well.

“I help you,” he said.

“I'm not from around here,” she said, leaning in. “I was wondering if you have any kind of a hookup.”

“What are you looking for?”

“Something to take the edge off.”

“I'll make you a drink—that usually does the trick.”

“Come on.”

“Tell me what it is you're looking for.”

“Downers, mostly. Painkillers.”

“You're in pain, huh?”

She imagined picking up a beer bottle and smashing the guy in his smug fat face with it, and then when he fell on the ground, kicking him a lot. It would feel very good, might, in fact, be just what she needed in the pain-relief department. “Oh, yeah,” she said. “Lots.”

Vance awoke in confusion, but Richard's voice droning in the front of the room reoriented him. Seeing Cindy talking to the bartender reoriented him further. But what were they doing? The guy walked out from behind the bar, and she followed him to an adjacent door that they both entered. Vance rose, and his gorge followed. With his left hand on the wall for balance, he lurched to the corner, then turned and made it the twenty or so paces needed to bring him to the door.

The room was a large supply closet that contained cases of beer and kegs, and also the bartender and Cindy snorting something off a shelf up their noses. They turned; Cindy held a rolled-up bill in her hand. The bartender said, “Employees only.”

“Leave her alone,” said Vance. It was meant to sound tough and serious, but the words rolled out of his mouth in a drawl that sounded equal parts southern and mentally disabled.

The guy laughed. “I didn't force her in here, boss.”

“Just leave her alone.” No other words came to mind, so he decided to rely on these, the way an inept foreign sightseer relies on a single greeting or expression of politeness to see them through every situation.

The bartender looked at Cindy for help. “Vance,” she said, “why don't you go lie back down out there. I'll get you up when we're leaving.”

“Leave
it
alone,” Vance said experimentally, gesturing at the small pile of crushed-up pill residue on the piece of cardboard behind them.

The bartender sighed. “Come on, bro. Get out of here, what are you going to do?”

It was a good question, and one for which Vance didn't have an answer. He felt like a child interrupting adults in the middle of something he didn't understand, which was more or less exactly what was happening. His childish response was to reach out and swipe at the cardboard—a cloud of white pharmaceutical dust momentarily hovered in the air and then was gone.

“Goddamn it,” the guy yelled, and he pushed Vance against the wall. He bounced off and used the momentum to uncork a wild right hook that caught the guy square in the face. Why, then, did Cindy yelp? Why did she drop to the ground? The bartender, completely unscathed, looked down at her. He shook his head and said, “You okay?”

“Fine,” she said, holding her jaw.

“I'm sorry,” said Vance. “Oh God, I'm sorry…”

The bartender pulled her up and said, “Would you please get him the fuck out of here?”

“Come on, Vance,” she said, holding him by the shoulder and attempting to maneuver him out the door. The cardboard Coca-Cola box on the rack across from him was stained with its own syrup. One gleaming, viscid drop hovered in the air, suspended on an impossibly fine thread. It's love, he thought, my God, love.

They were in the car, driving. Reds and yellows and blues smeared by outside the window, the primary tones of city night. Vance turned to her and said, “I was just trying to help.”