Given World Page 13

  Lu doesn’t appear to be fazed either way. “She sees this,” she says, pointing to her chest. “She knows I’m all heart.”

  “Must be nice.”

  “Oh, buck up.” She graze-punches him across the shoulder. “It’s a lovely day.”

  Cole looks out the window. He loves this street. To him it is one big carnival all spilled out onto the sidewalk. Cotton candy is the predominant smell, but also chile ristras, oregano, pot smoke, pee. Every single building has a storefront on the ground floor, and they are selling everything. Furniture, clothes, animals, produce, flowers, luggage, chicharrones, toys, appliances, stereos, Mylar quinceañera balloons. He thinks there cannot possibly be enough people in this seven-by-seven-square-mile city to buy all this stuff, but there it all is, and hundreds of people crowd the street, carrying pink plastic bags, pushing shopping carts, lugging chairs and boom boxes to god only knows where.

  At Sixteenth Street he sees the junkies nodding out, their backs to the broken-down escalators, and rockheads searching the sidewalks, picking up anything small and white, hoping for a miracle. He turns to ask Lu if they really believe that any of those pebbles or bits of chalk or cigarette filters or scraps of paper are actually going to turn out to be something they can smoke, something that will make their ass-out lives feel worth living awhile longer, but she’s gone. He looks out the window again, sees her cross the street. He starts to get up, to follow, but the doors close, and he watches as the bus pulls away; Lu’s shoulders are hunched up around her ears—she knows he’s watching—and her head is down, but she finds her way to a group of young men, bunched up and slouchy on the corner, and they take her in like a long-lost cousin.

  He does not get off at the next stop. A plan is a plan, and he is a little bit angry with Lu for walking out in the middle of their expedition. He knows Riley won’t be very happy when he comes back alone, but it’s hardly his fault. Lu’s a free agent; she can do what she wants.

  Riley refers to Lu’s wanderings as her “trajectory,” as if Lu were a satellite, or a spaceship exiting Earth’s atmosphere. “There’s never a warning,” Riley says. No indication that the spur Lu is traveling on is about to end. Because then there’s a chance someone will try to stop her, talk some sense into her thick skull, and she’s not having any of it. Which is fine, Cole thinks. Riley’s got more than enough to keep her busy, as far as he’s concerned. The bar. The boyfriends.

  Rumor has it there’s a good boyfriend somewhere, sometimes, but he doesn’t seem to be a very effective one, so Cole dismisses him. The bad boyfriend doesn’t dismiss so easily.

  No one ever sees the guy, since he doesn’t come into the bar, but Cole is sure he’s seen evidence of him. Riley won’t cop to it, though. She cops to running into things, like doors, cops to falling down. “I was so drunk,” she’ll say, as if this too is the start of some kind of a joke. Sometimes Cole wishes he had a gun and the backbone to use it, or knew some really badass guys who would rough the fucker up, make him stop, but thinking like that makes him feel out of his league, not to mention ridiculous. His only choice is to be there as much as possible, to take her mind off whatever bad thing happened last.

  Riley doesn’t seem overly surprised when Cole tells her where Lu got off the bus.

  “Her favorite corner,” she says, like she’s saying “Her favorite burrito place.” She bites her lip, taps Cole a big Anchor Steam and herself a little one, and goes outside to smoke a cigarette. Cole goes with her. They sit on the back stairs, from where they can see the bar, see if anyone wants anything, but it’s still pretty slow.

  “What is it,” Cole says, “with you and Lu?”

  Riley laughs. “You mean are we an item?”

  “I don’t think that’s what I mean. Are you?”

  “No.”

  “What, then?”

  “UFFUs.”

  “What’s a UFFU?”

  “Unidentified Flying Fuckup. Want to join the club?” She laughs, and it is not quite the unhappy sound he expects.

  “Sure,” he says.

  She wraps her arms around his neck, submerges her face in his chest. “You can be our mascot.” He doesn’t know what to do with his hands. He sets his beer down next to him to see if maybe they’ll figure something out on their own, find some landing place that maybe won’t freak her out, but before any of that can happen, she lets go and stands up, drains her beer, and pours the last drops over the railing into the scruffy garden. As soon as she gets five feet into the dark bar, he can’t even see her anymore.

  Time passes, but it does not fly. Lu appears. Lu disappears. “Like magic!” Cole says, and Riley rolls her eyes and shakes her head. He doesn’t care. He is still alive. She still loves him.

  One night in winter, when Lu has called an extended runner, and Riley’s boyfriend has taken off with all her cash and left his fingerprints on her arms in purple to match the black eye, and she has given Cole every shot of Beam he’s asked for and gone shot for shot with him and the bar closes, somehow, magically, all by itself, they end up on the pool table. Their clothes come off and the next thing Cole knows they are fucking and he is well over the moon, sober almost from the sheer relief of her legs around him, her hands somehow on his hip bones, her mouth her mouth her mouth. “Baby,” he says, next to it, into it.

  “Don’t talk,” Riley says. “Shhhhh.”

  He moans, collapses. Riley bites his shoulder, but not hard. More like an afterthought.

  He moves to her side and decorates her with an array of shiny pool balls, placing them strategically on and around her body. He finds her scars. Shows her his. Riley points out constellations on the ceiling, as if the stars are really there. Wearing each other’s clothes, they head for the panhandle.

  Riley gets pulled over on the way back, blows a 2-something, tells the cop to go fuck himself, and they keep her ’til she sobers up and the boyfriend himself comes down to throw her bail.

  “You should have called me,” Cole says the next day, when she tells him about it, how considerate and attentive the boyfriend was, how sweet, how good the Bloody Marys tasted down at the Ramp.

  “Right,” Riley says. “You don’t have a phone number. Or money.”

  “I’ll get a phone,” he says. “I’ll get a job, and a place. We can move in together.”

  Riley looks at him, slowly shakes her head. “Not gonna happen, kid.” She says it as gently (he knows) as she knows how. It still sounds like yelling to him.

  He wants to yell back, but it is not in him. “Why not?”

  They are sitting at the bar, with one bar stool between them. “For starters, you are too young for me. And you are too nice.” She is tracing someone else’s initials carved into the wood. “I’m a hot mess, honey. I’m the last thing you need.”

  For a second, he thinks he hears something in her voice, some chink he can break through, but when he looks her jaw is set, and, if anything, she looks like she’s miles away—from this place, from him. Like he’s the last thing on her mind.

  Finally, she faces him again and smiles. The word he is looking for is “rueful.”

  “How do you like them apples?” she says.

  “I hate them apples.”

  She stands up and kisses the top of his head. “I do too,” she says as she pulls her bar towel from her pocket and starts wiping down already-clean tables.

  Cole walks to the pool table to prowl its perimeter. “What about this?” He motions at the felt, never looking at Riley.

  “That,” she says, “was a whole lot of fun. You’re a whole lot of fun, sweetie. You’re a doll. You’re the best. You’re a champ.”

  “A champ?”

  “Yup.”

  “Fuck that,” he says. And leaves. Halfway down the block, he turns to see if she’s coming after him, but she’s just standing out front looking up at the sky, like she’s waiting for something good to fall out of it.

  When he gets to Mission Street, Lu is getting off the bus. She says, “I had
a dream about you. My cat was in it.”

  “You have a cat?”

  “No. Listen. Shut up.”

  He leans against the brick wall of the restaurant on the corner. He waits.

  “It was weird,” Lu says.

  All dreams, he thinks, are weird. Life is fucking weird. But he doesn’t say it. Because it’s too obvious.

  “You died,” Lu says. “They brought the coroner’s van, and they took you away. I missed you. I was sad and I forgot what color your eyes were. I had to ask my cat.”

  He doesn’t like anything about this dream so far. “Your cat you don’t have,” he says.

  “Yeah,” Lu says. “That one.”

  “So what did the cat say?”

  “Azul,” she says. Just like she said it the first time, stretching it until it won’t stretch anymore. It sounds like the low howl of a coyote at moonrise. Somewhere in the unbreakable heart of the oblivious desert.

  9. Take You Back Broken

  “I feel like someone’s put a torch to me,” Lu sighs, from the floor, as if there’s something appealing about that notion. I lie down on the cool, scarred hardwood next to her but don’t touch, my toes an inch from her ankle, stretching into her and away at the same time. I suspect she really would like to be on fire, that she would be pissed if I put her out. We are a pair, not a couple, mostly because I am still (stubbornly, she says) straight, still like boys despite the improbability of surviving them, and she may be too wild anyway, even for me. We are in Oakland, during a string of rare ninety-degree days, because we are out on a pass of sorts and because it is necessary for us to be here, as opposed to the city across the bay, where in our world people and their lives simply come apart, and we can’t seem to do a thing to stop them.

  It’s August and too hot to touch, skin to skin, too hot to even think about outside. Outside is where you go when you are being punished, at least until dark; then inside is punishment, jungly and fierce. Equatorial, like Papua New Guinea.

  She pronounces it Pa-POO-Ah. Irian Jaya, she tells me, is its other half. She starts meandering around peninsulas and archipelagoes—Indonesia, Malaysia—comes creeping up on Burma and the Irrawaddy.

  I say, “Stay out of Vietnam.” Sixteen degrees north of the equator but still scorching, from what Mick’s letters said.

  She says, “I know.”

  When she sits up, it will be to smoke a cigarette and work on a drawing of a forest, in deep green, brown, and black, with a few white smudges standing in as rabbits. She will say this forest is in the kingdom of Bengal, though it no longer exists as a kingdom. When I tell her that, she will show me one of her maps, of which she has many, some of them very old. She collects dog-eared . . . things.

  “Oh yes it does, Cookie. It’s right there.” She’ll flick that map with her index finger, a sharp, snapping sound. “See?”

  It is hard to argue when it is in black and white like that. Black and white, red and blue. She claims, when she is not drawing or painting, to be a geographer. When she is not drawing or painting, dope sick or high, or trying to figure out how to get high. She’s never actually been anywhere, except here and southern Indiana, the long black-tar highway in between. She left when she got old enough to fight off the inbred uncles, steal a car. I came later, from the north, and at first she was jealous of my wholesome, perfect family. Of how I led my personal Lewis and Clark expedition to the edge of the continent, obliviously determined to beat the crappy odds and discover the Pacific on my own.

  There was an intersection of sorts. A convergence. Or maybe an eclipse. And now it is nighttime. We fall asleep on the floor under the creaky ceiling fan. Even sheets weigh too much. The air trying to come through the windows smells like wild animals. Random gunfire in the distance wakes us up. Gang wars. Little boys with Uzis. Lu growls, but softly.

  “You want to bring the outside in, but you can’t,” I say. “Not even you.”

  “We could take out a wall.”

  “What about winter?”

  “What about it?” What she means by that, I know, is that winter is not certain, if nothing is. Besides which, these walls, not a one of them belongs to us.

  On the subject of fire, she continues to deny ever having set one in the bar. The burned spot in the faded linoleum, burned and melted through to the wood underneath, was someone else’s handiwork. She doesn’t say whose, but I bet she was there. That happened a long time ago, maybe ten years, way before me.

  “I hate that Andy keeps telling that story,” she says. I have not mentioned the fire, but she has reminded herself, and I know exactly what she’s talking about. It’s a sore point with her, being falsely accused. Andy is the swamper at the bar, queer as Liberace but not quite as glamorous, a long-haul regular and witness to years of bad behavior in what he calls the Lesbyterian Church. He tracks all of us, me included now, and although nelly and sweet and generous, he is a terrible gossip and not above making things up. I don’t know why the fire story bugs Lu so much; maybe because she has never lied about all the stupid things she actually has done, as she generally doesn’t give a rat’s ass what people say or think.

  When I first saw her, she was loudly berating a blind girl from her usual location, leant James Dean–style against the wall by the jukebox, cigarette perched on her lip, smoke narrowing her possum-brown eyes. She pointed at me and demanded to know what year it was. I thought maybe it was some kind of a test, but I didn’t know if there was a trick to passing it, so I just said. She did a little math, turned back to the girl. “I’m thirty-four years old,” she announced, poking a finger into her own chest. “Look at me.” To a blind girl. I was behind the bar, still new and not a little nervous, and everyone else who was in there at the time was appalled, or acting like it. I thought it was funny. I knew that girl. She was a pain in the ass. Got drunk every afternoon and tripped over the dog. Poor animal had a haunted look, bruised fur. I had to draw the line at rustling a blind girl’s dog, but, boy, was I tempted. Lu would have done it, I bet, if she’d thought of it and had someplace to keep it, but she was on the street more often than she was off. Or camping in someone else’s living room.

  She came back over and over to flirt with me, but could never get my name right.

  “Rachel.”

  “Not even close.”

  “Bailey.”

  “Bailey is a dog’s name.”

  She demanded a nickname. I had lots of those.

  “My brother used to call me Cupcake,” I said, and she promptly forgot that too.

  “Cookie,” she said, five minutes later. In a way, she invented me. I could not have invented her, as I did not have the experience or the capacity. When I got to know her, the bit that she let me, sometimes I called her Loopy, sometimes Sloopy. Sometimes she answered. She and Mick would have been close to the same age, and something about the way she leaned on that wall wanted to remind me of him, but I didn’t let it. I could already see it would be complicated enough without that, and probably hurt.

  • • •

  A few years on, Lu and I are both still alive, for reasons maybe some god knows and maybe doesn’t. We are house-sitting in Oakland for one of the regulars, who’s gone off to Thailand for a few weeks. “Probably to molest little boys,” Lu says.

  I shush her. “How come you always think the worst of everyone?” She just looks at me, her mouth pulled off to one side of her face, part of her lower lip between her teeth. I turn away, and she blows softly on my cheek, her breath black licorice-ish—she’s been eating it by the pound. Hardly drinking, no drugs for three weeks, the first two at Harbor Lights. Enough time to detox without dying, but not a chance in hell of even that first, let alone twelfth, step. I can’t believe she hasn’t jumped out the window yet. I hold her in place with my incredible will. She lets me. For now.

  We are here because it is unfamiliar territory. Not perfect, but Lu doesn’t yet know any of the local kids, the ones on the streets a little farther east, hawking their powdered obli
vion. Special. For you. Today.

  • • •

  Those first months at the bar, right before Wendy died, she and Lu were crashing at a friend’s place in Glen Park, maintaining: Lu still driving a cab sometimes, and Wendy cleaning a few houses, but they were not telling the whole truth. Wendy still looked like she’d just stepped off the porch at Tara—all girl all the time. She smelled exactly like magnolia blossoms, in memory if not in real time. They didn’t tell that she’d fallen backward, wrecked on rosé wine and Mexican Quaaludes, off the deck, and ruptured some critical organ. Too high, too scared to take care of business. Terrified of the emergency room at General: the iodine smell, triage. People utterly ass-out, moaning and raging. Because once you went there, you were officially fucked. Wendy finally died of hoping it would all, somehow, sort of, like it always had, work itself out in the end. When she had gone, Lu came to me, and I tried like hell to figure out a way to keep her.

  Pinball was one way, and the guy who came to collect the money usually left a bunch of credits for me. For us.

  We had totally different styles. She bashed the hell out of the machine, tilting it and swearing at it, as though it had intentionally done her wrong. “Motherfucker. I oughta—”

  “Oughta what?”

  “Cut its legs off.”

  “Then how would we play?”

  “We would sit on the floor, like little children. You could teach me how.”

  “Ha-ha. Out of the way. My turn.”

  My action was all in the hips, and mentally coaxing the ball to within reach of the flippers. It was an old one, Spanish Eyes, the score racking up by tens in a little square window behind the back glass, the clacking noise like dominoes falling. The gunshot crack of a win or a match sent us into a minor frenzy. A double match: we were untouchable.

  I rarely had many customers before three or four, so when we were all bashed out, we’d move to the pool table. Lu kicked my ass on a regular basis, but she taught me how to sink one or two on the break, how to leave the cue ball where I could make the next shot.