Tumbledown (16 page)

The car bounced onto the curb.

“Excuse me,” he said.

“Oh, that,” she said, raising a hand to wipe the air clean of his mistake. As he bumped back onto the asphalt, she said, “Mrs. Karly . . . What’s your last name?”

“Coury,” he said.

“Mrs. Karly Coury.” She put her hand over her heart and then put her other hand on top of the first. “That’s so pretty.” Then: “You have to let me out at the corner.”

He pulled over. She didn’t like anyone to drive her to her door. She lived with family, Mick knew, but not her parents. A cousin, perhaps, an uncle or aunt, maybe grandparents. She wasn’t supposed to tell anybody. Her family worried about people taking advantage of her. Yet he knew which house was hers. He had watched her walk and counted the houses. Later he coasted by and memorized the number. Late one night, when his mother thought he was sleeping, he circled her block twelve times to stare at her black windows. He thought,
I’ll do this every night,
but he had never driven by again. It was enough to know it was there.

“It’s dark,” he said now. He wanted to show her that he knew which house was hers. It seemed proof of his love. “You shouldn’t walk alone in the dark.”

“Everyone knows
that,
” she said, opening the Firebird’s door. He didn’t know how to respond. “So it’s settled then?”

“Of course, silly.”

“We’re engaged then?”

“You and me?” she asked.

“You and me,” he said. “We’re engaged to be married. You’ll be Mrs. Karly Coury.”

“And you’ll be Mr. Karly Coury,” she said and laughed.

He laughed, too. When she got out of the car, she said, “That was so fun.” Then she sang, “
Wayne’s
World,
Wayne’s
World.”

He watched her form retreat into the darkness of the street. Her hair disappeared first, and then her cut offs, and then her legs and arms, and then the straps of her halter top. For an instant, he could see the white fringe of her cut offs, riding up and down like tiny, incandescent teeth. And then she was invisible.

“Mr. and Mrs. Karly Coury,” he said, and burst into laughter again, but this bout didn’t last long. He was engaged to be married. He needed to take his life seriously.

“Later,” Billy Atlas called, as Candler and the woman made their meandering way out of the bar. Billy wondered whether they would miss the doorway and bounce off the wall like the cartoon characters he and Jimmy had loved as boys. The band went on break, and Billy looked at women’s legs—a scrutiny unlikely to call up their scorn, as he seemed to be staring at the floor. He missed having a woman around. His ex-wife married him to get her citizenship, a fact he had understood and verbally agreed to from the outset. He had a year of sex, good enchiladas, and frequent bouts of kindness, and now he had the allure that went with being a divorcé.

Before Pilar, he’d had exactly one girlfriend and never had sex with anyone but prostitutes and once, years ago, with Candler’s longtime girlfriend Dlu, who had been trying in her way to encourage Billy to see himself as worthwhile. After Candler dumped Dlu, Billy attempted to get rebound action, but she told him very definitely there was no chance. He and Pilar had had sex twice a month. Exactly twice. You could (and he had) set your calendar by it.

The Hao brothers, whom he hardly knew, returned to the table, bearing the prized guitarist, a balding Chicano with a massive frowning mustache, as black as three a.m. Both the Haos had grown beards for their country-and-western band. Really lousy beards. Billy was reminded of his mother’s incompetently frosted cupcakes.
That’s a bunny hutch,
she’d explain.
That’s mud wrestling.

Clay introduced the guitarist as Enrique, who offered a long-fingered delicate hand. “You in the band?” he asked.

“
God
no,” Billy replied. Fearing he’d insulted the Haos, he added, “I have no musical talent whatsoever. I couldn’t carry a tune in a suitcase.” Their polite smiles were on Candler’s behalf, Billy understood. They were being well mannered with Candler’s boring friend. He had already made the mistake of saying,
I didn’t know Calamari was Chinese.
They had let him know the band’s name had nothing to do with their ethnicity. “I hang out with these guys to feed off the leftover groupies,” Billy said. This earned him a laugh from the Hao brothers, which doused the momentary hopefulness that had crept into Enrique’s black eyes.

“Jimmy took off,” he added.

Clay and Duke Hao exchanged a look. They’d seen him leave. Billy wished some pair of brothers somewhere had, once upon a time, shared such a look over Billy’s departure with a pretty girl when he was engaged to another pretty girl. No such swap of looks had ever happened on his behalf, and he suspected it never would.

“Whatta you do?” Enrique asked him.

“Nothing at the moment,” Billy replied. He explained that he only recently moved to town. “Starting tomorrow I watch over this workshop for differently empowered individuals.” He said this carefully because Clay Hao worked with James, and he wanted to sound like a professional.

“That’s worse than me,” Enrique said, sounding genuinely surprised. “I’m cleaning swimming pools. Of course, I’m twenty-four. If I’m cleaning pools when I’m your age, I’ll off myself.”

“Yeah,” Billy said, “I hear exposure to chlorine makes you simpleminded and in the long term renders people suicidal.”

The kid responded by wagging his head vaguely and drinking from his beer. If he understood that Billy was needling him, he gave no indication. Much of Billy’s wit went unnoticed, flung over the head of the intended like an errant—but very sharp—spear. This was the curse of being Billy Atlas. One of many curses.

The impassive oaf’s gaze that fixed his expression did not genuinely express his character, Billy believed, and yet it was the look he most often gave the world—or at least the masculine world. For as lame as his life with women was, his way with men was worse. Even when he needed nothing from them, he wanted their acceptance, and the role of fool was one men would willingly accept. They generally liked having him around, and they demanded very little of him, only to serve as the constant reminder of what they had surpassed, no matter how measly their circumstances. Billy did not know why he was this way. It had taken him a decade to finish college, and not because he was dumb. It didn’t require a lot of smarts to get a degree, but he kept coming up against blockades—all stemming from his screwed-up self. He’d forget deadlines, sleep through exams, work furiously on a paper for weeks but only half finish and have to tack on a conclusion at the last minute. Why? Because that’s what it was to be Billy Atlas, and it was relentless. He wasn’t a nice-looking guy like Jimmy, but who was he kidding? He looked okay enough. A lot of absolutely goofy-looking men had women, and sometimes they were babes. It wasn’t so much what you looked like but how you were perceived, and that stemmed from some cave of personality so deep down in your soul it was like pulling teeth to change it.

He loved women, but—this was something he could never tell anyone, not even Jimmy—he wanted an attractive girlfriend mainly as a ticket into the world of men. Men respected men who were able to get attractive women in the sack. Not that he didn’t appreciate sex. He did. He liked it, even though it made him nervous, all the what-do-I-do-now stuff, and the questions he couldn’t ask.
Are you getting anything out of this? Does this finger do something for you? Up and down or sideways?
Most disgraceful of all, he could not come unless the woman came first, or if she was at the very least having a good time. This meant that prostitutes were a waste of good money. The pity fuck, which had seemed like a decent target for a while, was also a no-go. Pilar figured this out about him early on in their year together, and to her credit, she quit putting a pillow over her head. She learned to pretend, and he learned to accept her fake moaning as the real thing. He thought—he was still sure—she had grown to like the whole rigmarole. He’d even imagined that maybe she wouldn’t want to break up after she passed her exam. That hadn’t happened, but she had given him an extra, off the calendar, adios plunge, which had to mean something.

Billy wanted these men at the table of this overwhelmingly mediocre bar to like him. Oh sure, he had matured a lot in recent years, but the approval of these three strangers touched on that remnant feeling from his boyhood, and hadn’t it, after all, been the principal source of all the vitality in his life? Anything that he ever accomplished—he wasn’t going to ruin the thought by trying to make a list—he owed to that desire to be accepted by other men.

He speculated on the thoughts going through the Haos’ heads. They were likely thinking about noble things, like art and beauty and naked women. Or maybe they were just as disposed to make a good impression. Billy had no way of knowing. The sole exception to all this was Jimmy Candler. The one person who saw him for who he was and said
good enough for me.
Billy sipped his beer and imagined Jimmy with the barefoot woman. They’d be at the house by now. They might be sitting side by side on the couch. They might be in the kitchen, leaning against the counter while they drank water. They might be in Jimmy’s bedroom. Or maybe he was giving her a tour of the place, his hand on the small of her back. She would see Billy’s room then. She would look at the bed where he would sleep tonight. He should have made the bed, but still, it was nice to imagine her there.

The pickup truck pulled into the parking lot of Congregation of Holy Waters Museum, which was downtown, across from the Onyx Springs Old Farts Facility, and Maura got out. She had visited the museum on a field trip—a dull local show-n-tell with nothing to look at but old clothes. Alonso’s place was nearby, and she had a general idea how to get there.

Ernie, the less gruesome one, volunteered to drive her farther to look for the street, but she’d had enough of them. Bert asked if he could have her underwear, and though she liked the idea of telling Mick that it cost her the very panties off her bottom to make the trip, she didn’t let Bert have them. That act was in the one-thing-leads-to-another category, and she had already made such a mistake by letting his finger have the run of her vagina.

“You okay here?” Ernie asked.

She told him she was fine. As they drove off, the stereo in the pickup was suddenly turned up loud, some predictable thumper rock, but the truck accelerated slowly. Ernie, driving, wanted to draw no attention, while Bert, wailing up the tunes, was celebrating. She had made Bert’s night, she understood, while frightening the hell out of Ernie. She was their adventure: Maura Wood, the human personification of adventure. She watched the truck disappear with the combined feelings of relief and pride—and something else, a slippery something she couldn’t name that swam her body and rested in the marrow, making her bones feel alternately bloated and hollow.

Alonso lived on Lapin Avenue, and she knew from the map in her room that Lapin crossed Main Street not far from here. She was confident she’d find it. The street name reminded her of something Mick had told her. His mother was the niece or grand niece or second cousin or
something
of an actress from the black-and-white days: Ida Lupino. It sounded like a made-up name, like Anita Peter, or I. P. Freely, but one time at Barnstone’s house she looked her up online, and Ida Lupino was beautiful just the way Mick was. She liked going to Barnstone’s. Besides the workshop and the occasional field trip, her visits to Barnstone’s were her only legit trips off campus. A freaky ex-patient lived with her, some scary-looking guy who hardly ever talked. Maura’s mother liked what she called
a tight ship;
Barnstone’s ship would sink like a cement block. But the house was comfortable. Maura didn’t have to worry about ruining a veneer. She needed to find some way to make Barnstone her ally in the recruitment—seduction? Was she the kind of person who could seduce another person? She needed Barnstone’s
advice
about Mick.

Lapin Street was just far enough from downtown to be residential, a typical Southern California neighborhood with a combination of green yards and cactus fiascos covered with orange rocks. There were trees here and there, and lots of bougainvillea. She spotted Rhine’s scooter parked by the curb and checked the address of the house. Alonso’s place had grass in its yard. She knew he lived in the garage apartment. She didn’t see Mick’s car, but the street might have been full of cars earlier, and his ridiculous humper was probably parked around the corner. She checked her watch. Not even eleven o’clock. He’d be here, and he’d be happy to see her.