Round Rock (25 page)

She’d lost her hat. There were foxtails and stickers in her hair. Her cheek was bleeding. He craned upwards to kiss her. She bit his lip. Tasting blood, he squeezed handfuls of cloth and breast and she arched her back for him to unbutton her shirt. Braless, her breasts wobbled out, far, far larger than he ever dreamed, cubic feet of boneless flesh, the nipples small and dark. What to do with such excess? He cupped them ineffectively; pinched the nipples, sucked on one. Her eyes half-lidded, Billie lapped her tongue at him, a trick he’d seen only in porno movies, and he tried to feel the intended erotic force. She continued to move rhythmically, forcefully against him, her breasts swinging and looming. Desperate to please, to enter the spirit of their grappling, he grabbed crotch, breasts, ass. She grazed teeth along his chin. He felt the skin come up in thin curls.

“You’ve got condoms, right?” she said.

“Huh?” Lewis struggled to pull back, look at her face. “Are you kidding?” He wasn’t entirely sure, at that moment, if he had an erection.

As if she heard his thoughts, Billie grabbed his dick and, assessing it, frowned. “No condoms? Is that what you’re saying?”

“I don’t even have shoes on! Jesus! I went to the store for a pack of cigarettes. I didn’t expect this.”

“No?” Her hair formed a dark bower around his face. She kissed him sweetly, for which his heart lunged in gratitude. She hovered, panting into his mouth. “Libby said the best thing about you was that you took care of the rubbers.”

“
What?
” He scrambled in the dirt in a useless effort to turn her over.

“Don’t worry,” she whispered, “I got some in the truck.”

“Here?” he said idiotically.

“In the glove compartment.” She leaned over as if to kiss him, bit his lips, and gave his wilted dick another efficient squeeze. “Better work on that. I’ll be right back.” She lifted herself off of him, revealing empty blue sky, weak autumnal sun. “You wait here.”

Lewis sat up, stunned. His matches had fallen out of his pocket. He gathered them, and Billie’s hat, and gazed stupidly at the hat’s tree-nursery logo. From the crushed pack, he extricated a cigarette. His hands were shaking. His knuckles were bleeding. Scratches cross-hatched his arms. He was fearful, exhilarated, jangled. This was not what he expected, and yet a certain gratification twanged: Billie Fitzgerald did want to fuck him. Could he go through with it? Her style wasn’t at all what he would’ve guessed. He took a deep breath. Sure, he told himself, I’ll fuck her hair straight. He tried to light his cigarette, match after match, as the truck started up back behind him somewhere. Smart, he thought, she’s moving it closer. Mozart flew through the air like beautiful laundry. His cigarette lit and nicotine entered his brain like a cloud of cleansing sparks. He turned to watch the truck’s approach. From this angle, he saw the grinning chrome grille, the wheel, the mighty armature under the front end. Billie drove up even with him, then past. He turned, looked over his other shoulder. The engine idled. She lowered her tinted window. She had a hat on. This confused him: he had her hat in his lap. She was also wearing sunglasses. He sprang to his feet.

“Hey!” he cried, and started up the embankment. Rocks and dirt slid away underfoot. He paused, used her hat to swat stickers off the bottom of one foot. She revved the engine. He looked up.

“Tell me something,” she said. “You
really
think you’re so much smarter than Libby?” Without waiting for an answer, she hit the gas, and took off.

H
E BECAME
a connoisseur of orchard floors: some, mulched with shredded prunings, were a pithy mat; others, pink clay imbedded with sharp granite shards; the best were recently irrigated, the moistened adobe plumped up, softened, astringent and cool on his burning feet.

Although he didn’t know where the highway was, he couldn’t get too lost. The valley floor slanted south, toward the river. If he kept walking he’d come to a road. He needed another cigarette, but his last two matches went out before he got it lit. Instead, he contemplated a month spent pulling an encyclopedia of burrs, stickers, and splinters from the bottoms of his feet. Eventually, at dusk, he came to the lake road—the oiled asphalt warm and silken underfoot. He stuck out his thumb and wasn’t surprised when the few cars sped past. After all, he was filthy, barefoot, and his hair, full of debris, stuck out in every direction. He looked precisely like something risen from the orchard floor.

He started down the road to Round Rock in deepening blue twilight, up and down a series of shallow dips. He heard a truck grinding closer; then the beams of its headlights crisscrossed above his head. Coming over the hill, he saw not only the truck but a whole house moving toward him. Clapboard siding, windows shuttered with plywood. He recognized it, of course: a Round Rock bungalow, his old girlfriend’s new home. Standing on the shoulder of the road, he watched this slow, twilight procession, regret filling his mouth with the taste of rusty window screens. As the house passed, he had an urge to hop inside. That way, when the house was set down and Libby walked across the porch to open the front door, he could step right up. “Hello, dear.”

B
ILLIE
gave a dinner to celebrate the house-moving. Red arrived late, claiming a crisis at the farm. Oh, well, Libby told herself, I might as well get used to it.

Modeled after chapels in California missions, the Fitzgeralds’ dining room was a white hall with dark hewn beams overhead and stenciled geometric patterns on the walls. A chandelier held sixty-five candles, which Billie had lit for the occasion. And dinner was more a feast—sea bass with fennel and roasted vegetables, salad with avocado and grapefruit, a spicy steamed persimmon pudding.

Billie was in high spirits. “Why shouldn’t I celebrate when the universe coughs up exactly what I want?”

They had coffee in the library, and after Old Bill retired, Libby asked Red up to her room to look at some insurance papers. There were no papers, of course, so they took off most of their clothes and lay down on her bed. She didn’t even think he was fat anymore; she saw only his lived-in, fully mature male body and luminous smooth skin. His legs were remarkably strong. Against his considerable chest, she felt tidy, compact. “Remind me again why we’re not having sex?” she said.

“Maybe because we want to do it someplace where Billie Fitzgerald doesn’t have her ear to the heating vent.”

“Oh, that.” She nestled on his chest until her nerves calmed and she could hear clearly the hum of his body and its strong central heartbeat.

He gave her back a few absent pats, cleared his throat, then spoke into her hair. “I didn’t want to tell you during dinner, but the reason I was late tonight was Lewis.”

Libby carefully lifted herself away from his body, which somehow seemed appropriate.

“Apparently, our friend Billie sweet-talked him up to the hills and then ditched him.”

“She
what
?”

“He walked to the farm barefoot. His feet were pretty torn up, so I gave him a ride into town.”

Absorbing this information, Libby felt an unexpected protectiveness toward Lewis. Then she giggled. “God. You’d think he’d know better than to mess with her.”

“Strolled right into the bear’s cave,” said Red.

“Poor Lewis!”

“He’ll live,” Red said dryly.

“We shouldn’t laugh,” Libby said, and bit the pillow to stop.

N
O SOONER
had Red gone home than Billie tapped on Libby’s door, let herself in, and climbed onto the bed. “You guys consummating yet?”

“You’ll be the last to know.”

She lifted the sheets. “I gotta see if there’s a wet spot.”

Why in the world had Libby ever mentioned that she and Red were waiting? Some misguided notion that Billie would appreciate—or be instructed by—such restraint? Whatever the inflated moral purpose, Libby was now paying dearly for it. “There’s something abnormal about your interest in these things, Billie.”

“There’s something abnormal about two perfectly healthy adults not fucking. Can’t Red get it up?”

“You want to tell me what you did to Lewis?”

Grinning, Billie wiped a cloud of hair back from her face. “Yeah. I took him on a little one-way trip.”

“But why?”

“Because he was there.” She shook Libby’s foot through the covers. “And because he can’t fuck with my friends and walk away whistling.”

“I can fight my own battles.”

“Not to my satisfaction.”

“Oh, Billie.”

“What did you see in him, anyway? He’s got a little dick.”

“If you’d seen it, you’d know it wasn’t little.”

“I didn’t have to
see
it. It’s little.”

“Lewis has a perfectly respectable, above-average penis.”

“ ‘Penis’? Listen to you. All those intellectuals have teeny weiners. I knew a Goethe scholar once whose dick was the size of a baby carrot.”

“You weren’t really messing around with him, were you?”

“What would you care, even if I was?”

The answer was a tangle Libby couldn’t begin to unravel—not at this hour of night, nor with this conversationalist. “How’d you get him up there in the first place?”

“He’s easy, Libby. I don’t want to ruin any sacred memories you might have, but the guy’s kind of a dog, if you know what I mean.”

“He always had a thing for you,” Libby said bitterly.

“Not anymore he doesn’t.”

“So you drove him out in the hills and made him get out of the truck?”

“We were checking irrigation pots in the tangelo grove and I went back to the truck for a wrench. The old you-wait-here trick. I actually said that. ‘You wait here.’ And this beautiful inspiration came to me: Why not just leave? You should’ve seen the look on his face.”

“I have to feel a little sorry for him,” Libby said. “He was so out of his league.”

“I only wish I’d gotten his clothes off first. Made him walk home au naturel.”

That unexpected protectiveness again. “Lewis doesn’t mean any harm. Not really.”

“You’re defending him! After how he treated you? That’s sick, if you ask me. You dump Red and go back to him, I’ll kill you.”

“I’d kill myself first.”

Trying to sleep, Libby couldn’t stop thinking about Lewis, naked, striding through the woods, elusive as wildlife. She felt the old tug his elusiveness engendered. She recalled how he stared at her during sex so that small leaping sensations started up in her stomach and heart; and the expert, authoritative way he handled her body. Only then what? A cup of coffee, a shared cigarette, and back to their separate worlds until
his
desire—forget hers—built back up.

Insomniac, rehashing these old facts, she realized that
this
was the reason she and Red weren’t rushing into sex: so her long-legged and saturnine former lover could roam her thoughts a while longer, until she banished him for good. No matter how deeply or urgently she wanted Red, she wasn’t quite done with Mr. Fletcher. What more did she want—a final parting, a solemn handshake? Should the occasion to speak with him arise, she doubted she could even be civil. Nevertheless, part of her waited for him, for
something,
like an orphan girl sitting on a back stoop staring down an empty road.

O
N HIS
next visit to town, during one of his evening rambles, David Ibañez would notice the missing bungalow and ask his uncle what happened to it. “Up Howe Lane,” Rafael said.

David walked there through the orchards. The bungalow had belonged to the Rosales family, Octavio and Maria and their four boys;
Eduardo, a.k.a. Eddy, had been his great friend. Like David’s parents, the Rosaleses had used their settlement money to move to East Los Angeles. David had seen Eddy a few months ago; he was married with two teenaged daughters and worked as a lineman for Water and Power.

David slipped up to the empty house and hoisted himself onto the porch. There was a bright three-quarters moon, and through a low, gauzy blue mist he could see lights down among the trees and a brightly lit oil well on the far hill across the valley. Though the bungalow’s windows were still boarded up, he could remember the many times he had sat at the rickety wooden table eating beans and grilled corn on the cob and María’s handmade tortillas. Who could have imagined then that the Rosaleses’ small, tidy home would come, as if airlifted, to this hillside well above the valley floor, to be inhabited by a divorced, violin-playing white woman?

R
ED HAD
assumed—even hoped—that the inventory would never materialize and Lewis would essentially fire himself. Yet here he came, at the last possible moment, loping across the roadway, a fan of paper in his hands.

“Thanks,” Lewis said as he came inside. Red didn’t know what Lewis was thanking him for; then again, since the incident with Billie, Lewis had been consistently polite and subdued.

Red nodded at the coffee maker. “Fresh pot of mud.”

Lewis helped himself and took a chair at the end of the table. “Ready to hear this?”

“You want to read it to me?”

“Sure. Hell, I wrote it for you.”

“Let’s have it, then.”

“I’ll start with Fears,” said Lewis.

Red had heard so many inventories that the only thing he still found surprising was the candor of the writers. In addition to the standard fears—death, disease, intimacy—grown men had admitted their mortal dread of crossing bridges or riding escalators; accomplished, intelligent men feared that they were transmitters for space aliens, possessed by devils, or turning into wood, or thin air.

Lewis was afraid he’d start drinking again, that he didn’t deserve sobriety, that some invisible signal had gone out, and no woman would ever again desire him and he’d spend the rest of his life alone. He was afraid Red would fire him.

Red forced a smile and said, “Good secretaries are too hard to find.” He lit a cigarette; the cool air outside drew the smoke through the cracked window in a sinuous white rope. I should tell him now, he thought.

“ ‘I resent my father,’ ” Lewis continued, “ ‘for his taste test approach to families, UCLA for its endless red tape, my philosophy professor
for drinking, and’—don’t get mad, Redsy—‘Red Ray, for holding me at arm’s length since I got back from L.A.’ ”