All My Friends Are Going to Be Strangers: A Novel (29 page)

My lust was gone, leaving me with nothing but the sad thing I had to tell her. I didn’t want to. She was a generous woman, unhappy in her sex life. I would have liked to spend months on beds and couches with her. She could be having orgasms, pretty soon. It was amazing that she could have stayed so nice, after so many years without them. Anyway, I had to let her down. It made me feel awfully low.

Jenny noticed. “Was something wrong with me?” she asked.

“No,” I said. “Stop thinking that way. You’re wonderful.”

“People are supposed to be happy after sex,” she said.

“How often have you been happy after it?” I asked.

Jenny sighed. “You couldn’t call Sammy sex,” she said. “I’m happy after you.”

“I’m happy after you too,” I said. “I’m low for other reasons.”

“Such as?”

I told her. I told her all about the night and Emma and
why I had to leave. She watched my face all the time I was talking. I told it quite straight.

“I guess it’s because you’re so young,” she said quietly.

“What?”

“Oh,” she said. “I meant that you could fuck your friend and then come right over the next day and fuck me. Sammy could never do that.”

She was silent, her face blank. Then she twisted around and put her face against my chest. I held her tightly. I knew she was crying because I felt her tears on my skin, but she didn’t make any sound. She just quivered occasionally. It seemed to me that I had spent a week just saying goodbye to women. I was thankful there were no more people who cared about me.

When Jenny finally looked up she had mastered something. There were tears on her face and pain in her eyes, but the look she gave me was remarkably dignified. “Do you need any money for your trip?” she asked.

“No,” I said.

Her look gave me to understand that her problems were not to be discussed. I didn’t humiliate her by discussing them. Once again there was no point in lingering. We dressed. “You sure have been nice to me,” I said, on my way to the car.

“Don’t say nice things to me, right now,” she said. “I don’t want to hear nice things.”

I wanted desperately to think of something to say that might help her, but there was just nothing.

“Thanks, old boy,” she said, when I was in the car.

“Thanks yourself,” I said. She still had her dignified look. She was crushed, but she wasn’t admitting it. She had more guts than Martha, I thought. Out where Martha lived it was easy to be strong, if one survived at all. Where Jenny lived it was easy to be weak. Jenny probably
was
weak.
She was probably scared to be alone at night. But she didn’t trade on her weakness at all. I was filled with admiration. I wanted to ask her to come and be with me in another city, but I didn’t dare. Until I had another city to offer, it would just be false consolation. I couldn’t just make her random promises, to ease the moment. The moment didn’t get eased. When I left she was standing on her lawn, in the bright noon sun.

WHEN I LEFT
Jenny I drove to a drive-in and parked. I ordered a malt, hoping it would distract me. I felt terrible about Jenny. I hadn’t hurt Emma. She might feel guilty for a while, she might have some trouble with Flap, but she still had a life to live. She could have kids—she had said she might be pregnant, already. Emma would continue. The night we had spent together would recede and recede and recede, until it didn’t loom over her present as it was probably looming over it at the time. What would be visible in five years, or ten? How much of it would her memory just discard? Or mine? What moments would I keep? Sitting with her in the kitchen, hugging. Watching her little female pout as she tried to pull her sloppy blonde hair down over her tiny breasts. There was no knowing what moments Emma might keep, but they wouldn’t dislodge her from her life.

But Jenny had no life. I might have dislodged her badly. All she had was a routine—flower beds, drinking, badminton, brassy talk. I had dislodged her into a day and a half of real hope, real touching. Maybe it would give her nerve. Maybe she would find a kind man and sleep with him.
On the other hand it might just have cost her her nerve. She had gambled big, and been hurt. The rest of her life would seem just that much emptier. I didn’t like being the hurter. I would rather have been on the receiving end.

I didn’t want to just drive off, either. I didn’t want to go right back to California. While I was drinking the malt I thought of Petey Ximenes. Maybe he would want to take a trip to the border, or somewhere. We had often talked of it. He knew a crazy man he wanted me to meet, a retired actor who ran a filling station in Roma, Texas, the little town where
Viva Zapata
had been filmed. Petey always kept an eye out for crazy people for me to know. He considered me crazy and thought I ought to have friends of my own kind.

I finished my malt and drove deep into North Houston. It was dangerous land. The Mexicans lived there, in little houses. The Negroes lived there, some of them, in horrible squalor. Rednecks lived there, in anger and terror. Anywhere you went, you could get killed. No color of skin was safe, in North Houston. It was all bars and corner groceries, smelly cafes and crummy schools with windowpanes out. Kids roamed the streets in search of Coke bottles to turn in. Dogs prowled for scraps. The more violent one’s pleasures, the livelier the area could be. Loud jukeboxes blared in the bars. Loud talk rang on street corners. Many knives were carried. At night guns went off, and women were pounced on. The rednecks drank beer, the Negroes drank rotgut and wine, the Mexicans drank beer and tequila. The whole area stayed as drunk as possible.

On Elysian Street, practically the worst street in town, all torn-up pavement, falling-down houses, a freeway overpass cutting off light, an old railroad track with dogs fighting on it, there was a pachuco bar. It was called the Angel. The street to it was so torn up I could hardly force El Chevy
down it. Mexican kids huddled in the tall grass by the railroad tracks. A hamburger with onions was frying when I walked into the Angel. I was in luck, for once. My old friend Petey was there, kicking the pinball machine, which had just tilted.

Petey was the same size as ever, about five two, and he still had an unkempt ducktail. He whiled away his mornings with pinball, waiting for the fourteen-year-olds to get out of school.

“Hey, man,” I said. It was the only greeting that would have been appropriate. Petey had standards in cool.

“Hey, man,” he said, giving me a limp handshake. He was glad to see me, I think.

“What’s wrong with the pinball machine?” I asked, as an icebreaker.

“It is full of shit,” Petey said simply. “If you got any money buy me some breakfast. I lost all mine in the fucking pinball machine.”

We got a booth and Petey dreamily ate two cheeseburgers, hot with grease and mustard and onions. A red-headed waitress sat on a counter stool, swigging from a bottle of Thunderbird wine. Petey seemed a little high, but he was delighted with my suggestion that we go to the border.

“I had this girl,” he said. “She was gonna come through, but doesn’t matter. She can wait. We might get some ass down there.”

“How do you know she was gonna come through?” I asked.

“She’s crazy about jellybeans,” he said, as if it were elementary.

We drove over to his house, a tiny little shack a few blocks away, where he lived with his mother and six or eight siblings. The only reason we went there was so he
could pick up some marijuana he had hidden under a brick in the backyard. His fat mother came out to the car and saw him off, chattering in Spanish a mile a minute. It didn’t seem to be a harangue she was delivering, but Petey was a little intimidated by it, anyway. He nodded like a metronome.

“She was jus’ telling me some people to see,” he said, when we finally got off. “She has many relatives in the Valley. Shit, I can’t find those people. I can’t even find my brother Roberto and he lives right here in this town. I don’t think I can find nobody, in the Valley. They will have to say hello to themselves.

“Anyway, we have to find some ass, right guy?” he said, a little later. “We can always find some ass, in the Valley.” At the thought, he smiled his sweet, dreamy smile. He kept smiling it at intervals for the first hundred miles. For April it was really hot. We stopped and got some cold beer and sat the bottles between us in the seat.

Petey wasn’t much of a talker. After a beer or two he dozed off. As usual he had a few pills, and he gave me a couple for my tiredness before he went to sleep. I wasn’t precisely sure why I had hunted him up for the trip to the border, or even why I was taking a trip to the border. Once I got out of Houston it seemed to me that I hadn’t really had to leave. I could have hid out from the cops. There were parts of Houston so obscure that even the cops didn’t know they were there—pocket ghettos and old forgotten neighborhoods that had been cut off by the freeways. Such neighborhoods were like giant old folks’ homes—the buildings, the smells, and the people all seemed to belong to earlier decades.

I could have hidden in some such neighborhood and seen Jenny and let the Hortons believe I was gone. Jenny and I could have had something. I grew very tired, pills or
no pills. I hadn’t really slept at Emma’s—I had really forgotten when I had slept. I didn’t know why I had left, or where I was going, or what to do about my daughter or my wife, or even what to do with Petey, who was smiling and sweating as he slept.

I tried to imagine living in some smelly, obscure part of Houston and just seeing Jenny, and I knew it wouldn’t work. I would get lonesome for my part of Houston, for Rice, for the Hortons, for the places I liked to walk. I couldn’t live in a town and hide from my best friends. I would just fall in love with Emma and complicate her life in a bad way. It would be impossible not to love her, if I stayed. It would be impossible not to love Jenny, too. My fate seemed to be to meet women it was impossible not to love, but whom it was also impossible to love right. It was impossible not to love Jill, too. At moments her face came into my mind. I would have to call her soon. Perhaps I would leave El Chevy in the Valley and fly to New York. It felt wrong to be driving away from my daughter. It felt irresponsible. But nothing it was in my power to do felt responsible. Other than money, I didn’t know what I could put in my daughter’s life.

In Kingsville I stopped and had a cheeseburger. I got out and made water for several minutes in a fly-blown John. I had gallons of liquid in me. Petey woke up and looked grumpy. Below us lay the King Ranch, seventy-five uninterrupted miles of it. I didn’t particularly want to go through it, and neither did Petey. El Chevy might break down. There was no telling what the overlords of the King Ranch might do to people who looked like us. I decided to skirt it. Petey went back to sleep and I turned toward Falfurrias.

Soon we were in the brush country. The brush was incredibly thick and tangled. Mesquite, chaparral, and prickly
pear all joined together. It was new country to me. I had never seen such brush. Apparently animals lived in it, but it was hard to believe. I decided to take a motel when it got night. I was running on my third wind, and my third wind was running out. I knew I would never make it back to California without sleep, if California was where I was going.

As usual, calamity took me off guard. I had given up trying to decide what to do about my life and was just driving dully through the hot brush country, when a patrol car passed me. El Chevy wouldn’t run fast enough for a Texas patrol car to bother with, so I paid it no mind. Pretty soon I saw it pulled off to the side of the road, ahead, and I passed it. I still didn’t pay it any mind. Suddenly I looked to my left and the patrol car was there, beside me on the highway. Two large men in Stetson hats were in it. They were grinning at me, but not pleasantly. One pointed his finger at the shoulder, indicating that I was to pull over.

I was surprised. I couldn’t have been doing much wrong, on a straight highway in a slow car. I pulled over, puzzled. Perhaps El Chevy had revealed itself to the officers as an unsafe car.

The patrol car stopped behind me. I got my billfold out and glanced in the mirror. My first apprehension of calamity came then. One of the officers was in the process of lifting a shotgun out of the back seat of the patrol car. He was casual about it. At that moment I remembered Petey’s marijuana and got scared. I had no time to act on my fright, though. The sight of the gun and the memory of the marijuana was like shock. The shock conflicted with my general sleepiness. Before I could even wake Petey two very big men were beside the car. The one outside my window seemed enormous. The one with the gun opened Petey’s door and yanked Petey out before he was even awake. The
one on my side had blue eyes and a jowly face. He nodded me out but then he grabbed my arm and the way he gripped it and shoved me hurt my shoulder. The next thing I knew Petey and I were bent over the trunk of El Chevy, being searched. Petey gave me a sad, pained look. They had already found the marijuana. My shoulder twinged, but bewilderment was my strongest emotion. Why had they stopped us? We couldn’t have been breaking any speed laws.

“All right boys, turn yourselves around,” one said.

Petey and I did. Two very large men were facing us. I had never seen such large hands. The one from Petey’s side held the shotgun by the grip, in one hand, and it looked as light in his hand as a flyswatter would have looked in mine. One look at him scared me. To him, I was a fly, okay. If he wanted to swat me, nothing was going to stop him. His head looked like it had inches of bone beneath about one sixteenth of an inch of flesh. There was no merriment in his face, only a faint contempt. The other one still smiled. Petey had begun shaking. He was extremely scared. I noticed they weren’t just highway patrol. They were Texas Rangers. The one from my side walked up and loomed down at me.

“Are you real?” he said. “I ain’t right sure.”

“Am I what?”

“Real,” he said. “I never seen nothing like you in my whole life. What about you, Luther? You ever see anythang like him?”