Battleborn: Stories (6 page)

He can’t take it anymore. He sets the gleaming pint glass on the bar too loudly. “What were you doing out there?”

•   •   •

M
ichele tells them in slow, hesitant English how he lost Renzo. They’d gone to see the endangered desert pupfish, which their guidebook said live only at Devil’s Hole, a supposedly bottomless geothermal spring outside Nye.
“
Foro del diavolo
,” Renzo had said, the danger dancing in his eyes.

But Devil’s Hole was not anything, Michele says now, only a bathtub-size pool of hot water in the middle of nowhere, the rare fish just guppy-looking glimmers in the shadows. Renzo thought so, too. At the spring he was ill-tempered, railing that their entire trip had been ruined. He suggested—no, insisted—that they at least salvage the day by hiking out to the nearby sand dunes. “Go without me,” Michele had wanted to say. But he could see the ochre peaks of the dunes swooping across the horizon; they seemed that close. And there was a trail even, meandering through the crumbly bentonite hills. Renzo had complained of this too, the trail; he wanted authentic desert, pristine wilderness. He kept asking, “Why must Americans turn everything into an advertisement?”
That was the last thing Michele heard him say.

They’d been hiking only an hour, Renzo charging forward, Michele struggling to keep up, neither speaking to the other. Michele stopped to take a drink of water, to shake a rock from his shoe. When he stood up, his friend was gone.

He called for Renzo to wait, but there was no answer. He spit on the ground and watched the earth swallow the moisture. It was too hot for this. He followed the trail back and waited for Renzo in the air-conditioned rental car. But Renzo never came.

•   •   •

A
nd we, ah, are, ah, separate,” the boy says.

“You were separated,” Manny says.

“Now, I wait.” He nods to the bar, the brothel, the girls, as if they all have some arrangement.

“Wait for what?” Amy asks dully.

Michele is quiet for a moment, looking down at his large hands. “I wait, ah, for my friend,” he says. “For his return.”

Darla says, “Oh, you poor thing,” and puts her arms around his neck. She says, “Don’t you worry; they’ll find him.” She can probably smell him there, his cologne, his hotel soap. Cheap beer. Clean sweat. Salt.

Michele takes a swig of his Budweiser. “Yes, yes,” he says, then swallows. “Then I go home. With Renzo.”

Michele doesn’t go back with Darla that night. It’s slow. Geoff comes for Chyna, and afterward he presents her with another gift, a hideous gold-plated charm bracelet. Amy and Bianca take care of a pair of mortgage brokers from New Jersey, in Vegas for a conference. But Michele and Darla simply sit at the bar, talking. Under normal circumstances this would piss Manny off, one of his girls spending an entire evening with a man without taking him back. Under normal circumstances he would sit her down in his office and tell her, “You know I don’t like being the bad guy, but at the end of the day I don’t give two shits about making friends. Because, honey, if you don’t get paid, I don’t get paid, okay? Ask for the fucking order.”

That’s the way it has to be. These bitches would run all over him if he let them.

But tonight circumstances aren’t normal. Tonight the thought of Darla—or any of the girls—taking the Italian back to a trailer for an hour, maybe two, makes him feel sick with something like jealousy. It must be pure hormones—he hasn’t been laid in longer than he’d like to admit. Or perhaps it’s the terribly familiar way the boy looks at Darla, his face flushed with booze and all the want and wonder of a child. He’s seen that look before, on men two and three times this kid’s age, men who knew better. He’s seen Darla take everything they were willing to give,
and more. That’s what he’s always loved
about her.

When the cab honks in the parking lot at five a.m., Manny helps the drunk, sweet-faced boy down the front steps. As the sun comes up, he stands alone on the porch and watches the red taillights of the taxi shrink down Homestead Road, then up the hill toward Vegas. There’s nothing but the lolling violet mountain range and spiny yucca and creosote and that taut ribbon of road as far as the eye can see. Poor Renzo doesn’t have a chance out here, and sooner or later that beautiful boy is going to realize it.

Manny imagines the Italian looking back at him through the rear window of the cab. The ranch the boy would see looks like a dollhouse, down to its dormer windows hung with boxes of poppies and desert primrose. The wood siding is painted the bright fuchsia of deep flesh, the country trim a chalky lavender. Back east this building would be a bed-and-breakfast; in the Midwest it would be an antique store. But here there is a red light attached to the weather vane, rotating in the dawn. Here, it is what it is. Manny makes his way out back to the peacock coop.

Manny was hired to manage the Cherry Patch Ranch one day when he drove out from Las Vegas, where he grew up. He was eighteen, had been hustling for three years and always knew he was destined for something bigger, though it took a tranny john whipping him across the face with a stiletto for him to act on that instinct. Jim Hart—fifty then, with the girth and slope of an aging athlete and a full head of black hair just starting to gray—happened to be working the door that day, a stroke of luck, because Jim never worked his own door. Bad for business. Jim took one look at Manny and waved the girls off, saying, “Sorry, guy. We don’t have men in here.”

And Manny, prepared for this, said, “Why not? You’re losing money, honey. You want to know what I get for a hand job with Rentboys? Three fifty. A hand job. And that’s off
-
Strip, okay?”

Jim took him straight back to his office with Gladys, Jim’s assistant. After an hour Jim said, “Look, guy, bottom line: Every other Tuesday I load the girls into the van and we go down to Nye County Health and get them all looked at. Every other Tuesday. And no legal hooker, not in the entire state of Nevada, has
ever
tested positive for an STD. Not even crabs. It’s safe, clean sex. That’s the brand. I bring men in here . . . I’m not messing with a good thing. That’s all.” He tipped back in his chair and put his pen into his mouth. “But a fag madam. That’s unique.”

That was fifteen years ago. Manny walks past the girls’ fifth wheels lined in two rows behind the main house like eggs in a carton, with the courtyard and swimming pool between them. Beyond the fifth wheels are the single-wide trailers they call suites. The Oriental Room, the Hot Tub Room, British Campaign. The thick black wires of the intercom system droop between the buildings. The pool is ringed with knobby salt cedars and adolescent pomegranate trees. Manny drags Darla’s picnic table back to the courtyard where it belongs, in the rocky dirt peppered with screwbean mesquites and young cottonwoods. He plucks a cigarette butt rimmed with lipstick from a struggling patch of sod, puts it in his breast pocket; then he slips out to the coop.

On paper, Jim Hart raised Indian blue peacocks until 1970, when he got his operating license. Prior to that, as far as the government was concerned, Hart Ranches made its modest living selling the birds to zoos and private collectors. In reality, Jim hated selling the birds and found reason to do so as seldom as possible. When the cost of the food and upkeep was considered, the peacock business barely broke even.

The girls always brought in more money than the birds, but it was a long time before the Cherry Patch Ranch was much more than two single-wide trailers on either side of the wide, airy coop. Then, in 1970, as Jim and his friends in Carson City had suspected it might, the state legislature outlawed prostitution in Clark County. Jim remodeled, making the ranch straddle the county line, with the trailers and main house in rural Nye County, and the peacocks technically residents of Clark. By the time Manny arrived, the Cherry Patch was the closest a brothel could get to Vegas.

His second week, a courier came out and picked up three sedated chicks destined to roam some movie producer’s estate in the Pacific Palisades. Manny found Jim sitting on an overturned feed bucket by the coop, bawling into his hands. When he noticed Manny standing there watching, Jim leaned back against the chicken wire. “Goddamn it,” he said, and pressed the heels of his hands against his eye sockets as though he could stop his tears that way.

Manny squatted in front of the older man. “It’s all right.”

“I know that, kid,” Jim managed to say, before he crumpled forward again, crying and hiccuping like a child. Manny held him, stiff and awkward as a Joshua tree, half-stroking his head. He was no good at these things.

They stayed like this a while, and just as Manny’s thighs began to burn from squatting for so long, Jim calmed and his breath steadied, but he did not lift his face. Instead, he put his hand on the back of Manny’s neck and urged Manny’s head down toward his groin.

Working Jim’s
belt buckle loose with one hand, Manny was grateful as a pet: here was something he knew how to do. Jim finished in Manny’s mouth, with a string of quick jerks that scraped the feed bucket along the ground, then zipped his Wranglers and wiped his eyes. He squinted out across the sagebrush. “Jesus H.,” he said. “It’s like selling off one of your kids.”

From that day on, Jim never sold another peacock. He named the remaining sixteen after Nevada’s sixteen counties. Washoe, the eldest female, died in the winter of 2003, when coyotes got into the coop. One of her mates, Lander, died of old age shortly thereafter, though on darker days it’s not hard for Manny to convince himself that Lander died of a broken heart. Now there are four females and ten males, including White Pine, a rare albino, red eyed and completely white, down to his feet and the tip of his thick, five-foot train.

After two years, Jim moved to Brazil. Retirement, he called it, though he was only fifty-two. He took his wife with him. When he left he said only, “Take good care of my babies, Manny boy. And the girls, too.” When Jim comes out for the annual audit, wheelchair-bound these days, he spends most of his time in the shady coop, the fiscal year’s ledger book open on his lap, his face tilted to the sun.

Manny, too, has come to love these birds. He feeds them at sunrise before he goes to bed, and again at dusk, after breakfast. At least once a week he takes a heavy-duty rake and cleans out the stalls, sifting out rocks and piss clods with the sturdy iron teeth. Sometimes he wakes and comes out to the shade of the coop at midday, when the girls are still asleep. He likes to watch the iridescent shimmer of blue all down the throats of the males, their shake and strut, the bobbing of their crests, the green and gold and red eyes spread across their fans. He admires the great effort with which they display, that they try so damn hard. Though a few of the girls complain about it, it soothes Manny to fall asleep to the trill and
ca-ca-caw
of the regal peacocks, the shades in his fifth wheel drawn against the desert sun.

He keeps a rosary in the coop, looped through chicken wire, and though he hasn’t been to mass since he was thirteen years old, he’s taken to praying out there some mornings, alone. To his mind, the coop at dawn is as close to holy land as there is.

•   •   •

T
hat night, when the cab finally arrives at Michele’s motel, the driver turns back to Michele and asks him whether he’d like to do it again sometime. And Michele manages, “Yes, I like very much.”

The driver says, “Tomorrow, then?” Michele suspects this is meant to be a joke, but still he hesitates. Of course he’s realized the place isn’t just a bar. There are whorehouses in Genoa, and he’s no altar boy. But the people there are friendly, and they don’t ask his age. If he doesn’t go back to the ranch, what would he do instead? Unpack and repack Renzo’s bag, as he had the night before. Stare at the cell phone the police gave him, willing it both to ring and not to. Fiddle with the canteen—the only one they’d brought with them—that he was carrying when he abandoned Renzo. Try to imagine the feeling of three days thirsty.

The driver waits for an answer. God knows Michele can afford another run. Nevada Search & Rescue have given him a debit card for his living expenses. They said the money would come from the embassy, because he was foreign, that it was a loophole, a word he had to look up. The room he and Renzo had been sharing at the La Quinta on Tropicana was covered too. But before they’d explained all that, before they’d handed him the debit card, they gave him an international phone card and asked him to call Renzo’s parents and explain what had happened. They were sorry to ask that of him, they said, but none of them spoke the language. An officer showed him to a little room with a phone on a desk beside a stained instant-coffee machine. The officer said Michele had better advise Renzo’s parents to fly to the U.S. Then he shut the door softly behind him.

Michele wove the coils of the phone cord between his fingers for a moment. Then he lifted the phone, input the codes from the phone card, and dialed his own parents instead. His mother answered and asked whether everything was okay. She sounded more exposed than a mother ought to. He told her yes, everything was fine. More lies came warmly to him then. “Actually, something happened,” he said in Italian. He told his mother he’d left his wallet out on the beach in Los Angeles and someone had taken his money. Not his ID, just the money. His mother comforted him. She teased him gently for being so naive. She thanked God that it was only that. She said she would have his father wire him more spending money. I love you, his mother said before she hung up. Be good.

Afterward, the officer returned and set his hand kindly on Michele’s shoulder. He nodded at the phone and said, “We appreciate that.” Michele said nothing.

The next morning, Michele used the debit card he’d been given at the ATM in the gas station across from the motel. He halfheartedly withdrew stacks of twenties until the machine beeped and spit out a warm, smooth sheet of paper. On his walk across the parking lot he was dully surprised to count five hundred dollars in his palm. Once in his room, he used his pocket dictionary to translate the words from the sheet of paper, eventually understanding that five hundred dollars was the maximum amount he was permitted to withdraw in a single day.