Yellow Mesquite (47 page)

“Sí
.
I know all the best place. I make the best bargain.”

“Whatever you say, Alfie old boy, just tickles the hell outta me.” He realized he was deliriously drunk. He didn’t care.
 

Darlene couldn’t stop laughing, stumbling against the little VW bug. “Alfie? Harley Jay, that’s the funniest thing you ever said! Alfie. Little Alfie. Ha-a-ha-ha.”
 

He slapped her on the butt as she climbed into the back seat. She squealed. “Harley Jay! You devil, you!”

 
“Fine pottery you like, no? Or the hand-blow glass most bee-u-ti-ful, made only for you, sí?
The finest artistas
in all México before your very eyes, sí?” Alfredo sat behind the wheel, half turned at them, mopping his brow with a wadded bandanna.

“Tequila,” Harley said. “You can’t visit Mexico without picking up a bottle of tequila. Alfie, stop at the first liquor store, will you?”

Darlene peeled the wrapper off a new plug of Bazooka. “Alfie, we wanna go to Boy’s Town. You know where that’s at?”

Alfredo’s expression changed. His gaze shifted from one to the other. “The señorita, she is know this Boy’s Town?”

“I was there with friends. We saw a real good show. I can’t remember the name of it…”

Alfredo lifted his eyebrows, smiled weakly. “La Puerta Alegre? The Joyful Door? Is the same, no?”

Darlene leaned forward. “It’s men and women, you know, up on a stage, doing it?”

Harley began to sober.

ALFREDO PARKED
THE
little VW. Harley and Darlene got out and followed him on the sidewalk. Dirty children clogged their path, palms up, guardedly watching Harley and his broken face. “Pesos? Pesos?”
 

Alfredo turned on the children, screamed in Spanish, shook his fist.
 

Darlene made a face. “Ain’t this just awful?”
 

Harley fell silent, adrift in some netherworld.

On either side women leaned over the parapets of flat roofs between laundry lines and terracotta pots overflowing with flowers. They called down, cooed from windows and alleyways—mouths of crimson, pink, persimmon. Darlene snapped her gum at them.
 

Alfredo opened a door in a concrete-block wall violent with graffiti. A blanket of cigarette smoke smelling of stale beer and soured laundry rolled over and sucked out on the draft. Just inside, a white T-shirt sat in the darkness behind a card table. Harley made out the eyes above, the whites of a big Negro man. Beyond, a crowd whistled and yelled in the smoky light of a small stage.

“Buenas tardes,” Alfredo said to the big Negro. “I bring good customers to my friends at La Puerta Alegre.”
 

A roar of laughter sounded from inside. Harley looked past to see a skinny man in big polka-dotted boxers run across the stage, high-stepping vaudeville-style, a naked fat woman with huge breasts chasing after him with a rolling pin.
 

“Ten bucks,” the Negro said. A sapper lay on the table, handcuffs locked to his belt loop.
 

Harley stared into the darkened room. “Forget it,” he said. “We’re leaving.”

Darlene hesitated, the excitement in her eyes failing. “What…?”

He stepped back out into the sunlight.

Darlene burst out after him. “Are you crazy? I’m not going anywhere!”

“Suit yourself.” He headed for Alfredo’s VW at the curb, Alfredo close on his heels.
 

A girl of ten or eleven appeared at Harley’s side. “Señor
,
you like little girl?”

Darlene stopped, crossed her arms. “Dammit, Harley Jay! What’s wrong with you?”

Harley turned on Alfredo. “Let’s get this car back across that bridge! Now!” He jerked the door open and fell into the backseat.

Alfredo got in behind the wheel. He looked anxiously at Darlene on the sidewalk. “But the señorita, amigo?”

“She doesn’t want to go, leave her.”

Alfredo’s shoulders hunched. “Señor, it is not good to leave the señorita in this place.”

“Two dólares only,” the little girl pleaded at Harley’s window.

 
More children crowded around Darlene on the sidewalk. “Un peso, señora? Un peso, por favor?”

Harley leaned forward, one hand on the door handle. “You gonna go, or am I gonna have to get another cab?”
 

“No, no! I take you!” Alfredo started the VW. On the sidewalk, Darlene stiffened as the VW eased into the street.

“Wait!” Darlene ran out past the children and alongside the VW, eyes flashing. “Harley Jay, you goddamn goody-goody-two-shoes son of a bitch!”

Harley whipped a five-dollar bill over the seat at Alfredo. “Move it!”

Alfredo downshifted and they moved out again, Darlene shouting after them. They stopped at the corner to make a turn. Darlene ran up and jerked the door open and fell into the backseat beside Harley. Alfredo sighed with relief, then hunched his shoulders as she slammed the door, rocking the little VW.
 

“A little shopping for the señorita? Leather boots? Handbags? Sandalias?”

“Get this damn wreck moving,” Harley said.
 

Alfredo let them off in the parking lot, bowing, mopping his brow, showing his big toothy smile as Harley shoved a handful of bills at him.
 

Alfredo’s eyes lit up. “Hasta luego, mis amigos. Gracias. Gracias.”
 

Darlene stood aside, arms crossed, face sharp as a hatchet. Harley unlocked the rental car.

Chapter 51

Doodlebug Town

“
I
HAVE TO PEE
,” Darlene said, breaking the silence that had shrouded them in the car for the last hour.

“Piss your pants for all I care.” But he had to go too. The stock pond was coming up in that ninety-mile stretch of nothingness between Del Rio and Sonora, and he pulled off and brought the car to a stop in a straggly stand of nearby mesquite trees. The pond was still, its sheet-glass surface reflecting a gray winter sky in the late afternoon. The dirt all about was fine as talcum, dotted with the hoof prints of livestock, peppered with thousands of inverted doodlebug cones.
 

Darlene took tissues from a box behind the seat and got out. Wordless, she marched off toward a clump of scrub in a shallow cut some thirty yards away. He went into the scrub in the opposite direction. When he returned, he opened the trunk, removed the bottle of Avión Reopsado tequila he’d bought in Acuña, poured an inch into a paper cup, then put the bottle back and shut the trunk lid. He sat on the stone lip of the stock tank, gazing toward the distant mountains where the evening sun looked like a dim dime against the flatted winter sky. At his feet, hundreds of little funnels pocked the finely powdered dirt. He picked up a straw and tickled a few grains down into one of the cones. The doodlebug popped up through the fine grit at the bottom, eager to grab its prey.

Darlene returned, cutting her eyes at him as she sashayed back to the car. “Drowning your sorrows, shit-face?” She sat in the front passenger’s seat with the door open, kicked her sandals off and placed her bare feet on the dash. She unwrapped a new plug of Bazooka, plopped it in her mouth and sat, frowning, reading the comic wrapper.
 

He recalled a saying his grandfather had, regarding gum-chewers: “The gum-chewing girl, and the cud-chewing cow; they’re both alike, but different somehow. Ah, I see it now, it’s the contented look on the cud-chewing cow.” But he resisted the urge to relate it to Darlene.
 

He crushed the empty cup, then took it back to the car and pitched it in the rear footwell alongside Darlene’s tackle box. He slid in behind the wheel but the keys were missing from the ignition.
 

“Give me the keys,” he said.

“So who’s in charge of going or staying now!” She craned her neck, stuck her tongue in the bubble gum and blew a big pink bubble at him. He swatted it aside; it poofed flat against her cheek. Though he hadn’t touched her, she jumped back in surprise. She swept back over the seat and before he realized what she was doing, she grabbed a wire coat hanger and swiped him across the jaw, then again on the bandaged bridge of his nose before he could grab her flailing arms. He managed to get one foot up in the seat against her hip, and shoved with all his might. She went sailing out the open door and hit the ground with a grunt.
 

He leaped out, snatched the tackle box from behind the seat, snapped it open and began grabbing vibrators, flipping the switches on, throwing them high in the air, one after another—plastic peckers raining down, plopping in the soft dirt, humming, little mushroom clouds of dust billowing up.
 

Darlene’s face warped into a mask of fury, teeth bared, eyes flashing. Head lowered, she came charging around the car.
 

With all his strength, he threw the tackle box high over the pond. It turned end over end, then came down and hit the water—
slush
—as Darlene plowed into him. They went down in a tangle of arms and legs. She kicked and gouged and scratched. He got his arm around her neck from behind. She tried to bite him, but he chocked her in the crook of one arm while trying to dig the car keys out of her pocket with the other. For one instant, he relived the fight they’d had over the horned lizard when they were kids. The top button popped on her jeans. He grabbed the zipper, jerked it down and scrambled to his feet. He caught her pant cuffs and jerked hard, bouncing her on her butt—if he couldn’t get the keys out of her pocket, he’d get them pants and all. Her jeans slipped down but she hooked them behind her knees and held to the waistband with both hands. He dragged her through the dirt, her teeth bared, snarling, trailing spit. Plastic peckers kicked up mushroom clouds as he plowed her through doodlebug town.
 

She let go. Her jeans slipped off. He went flying backward and slammed into the car, knocked breathless. He grabbed the keys out and threw her jeans out over the car, but she was on him, teeth and nails. She caught him by the hair, but he managed to fend her off with his shoulder. She tried to knee him in the groin, tried to drive her heels into his back, but he drew her in close so she could hardly move. She snarled slobber in his face, huffed steam up his throbbing nose. He grabbed her hair in turn, yanked her head back and burrowed his face in close, his nose protected in the hollow of her neck.
 

There was no definitive point at which one stopped and the other started—the furious fighting into furious sex. One segued into the other with hardly a pause—she had him by both ears, faltered, and instead of trying to bite his face off, held both hands tight behind his head, hooked her heels behind his knees and drew him to her, pressing herself against him—a frenzied moment as her hands fumbled his pants open. He suffered a moment of stark terror as she took his penis in hand. But instead of ripping his testicles off, she stripped her own panties down with one hand, and guided him up between her legs with the other until, with what seemed a mind of its own, his penis rippled up into her in a flood of heat.
 

They bucked and shoved and pushed; they moaned and groaned and tried to squeeze the life out of each other, knocking into the car, plowing up the weeds. Darlene began to howl, she began to jump, she began to tremble and shake and kick her feet; her panties flounced back and forth on one foot like a caution flag at a racetrack. The spit flew.
 

Finally they lay still alongside the car, Darlene’s body heaving under his as they sucked for air. She turned her eyes up to him, a dazed expression.

He stared, at a loss as to what had actually happened. Whatever it was, it hadn’t been love or intimacy in any recognizable form. Anger? Hate? Lust? It wasn’t rape, at least not on his part; she had been the initiator. Even so, he recognized that it was an act of violence—on her part as well as his. But why had he even had an erection? For that matter, why had he even driven her down here in the first place? His mind was a mishmash, a confusion of fragmented thoughts, impressions, sensations—Whitehead, Sherylynne, Leah, his family, Darlene, Frankie.
 

“Your nose is bleeding,” Darlene said.

In the same moment he became aware of a clattering noise on the other side of the car. He lowered his head, peering beneath the rental’s undercarriage. The bottom half of a pickup and a horse trailer were visible about twenty feet on the far side, a man’s booted feet, unloading two horses.
 

“Aw, shit,” Harley whispered.
 

“What?” Darlene scooted around so she could see. “My pants? Where’re my pants?”

He could see them on the other side of the car, near the horse trailer, among the little dust clouds blooming up.

He took his handkerchief from his back pocket, folded it in the cup of his underwear, and pulled his pants up. Then, still on his knees, he opened the rear door.

“Here,” he said, “climb in and stay down. Hand me some of those tissues.”

She scooted up into the footwell, her butt in his face, embedded with grit, what looked like a little birds nest tucked between her hips until she pulled her bikini panties up.
 

Darlene passed a handful of tissues back to him. She watched as he tore pieces off, twisted them, and gently tucked them up his nose to quell the bleeding. He found the car keys half-buried in the powder and put them in his pocket. He stood, then tucked his shirttail in, buckled his belt, and sauntered around the car to where Darlene’s jeans lay flopped in the dirt.

An old rancher of around seventy stood by the stock pond, stoic. He held the halter leads on a sorrel and a bay while they drank. He watched Harley through little wire-rimmed glasses from under the brim of a straw Stetson. His gaze shifted almost imperceptibly from Harley’s face—the dirty cup over his nose, the twists of tissue dangling out of each nostril—to the little puffs of dust rising from the vibrators in the powdered earth. The horses snorted and blew water and made big clean rings out across the pond.