The Almanac of the Dead: A Novel (65 page)

She couldn’t keep from walking ahead of him, to pinch the plastic leaves of the fake fig trees decorating the halls. Angelo enjoyed her excitement at the small details. He liked the cowgirl belt with
MARILYN
tooled in white letters wreathed in red rosebuds and green ivy. She had pulled off her boots and rubbed her toes along the carpet. The socks she wore were men’s socks, mismatched, one black, one dark blue. Then she had spread-eagled herself facedown to sniff the nubby, white bedspread. Marilyn had only seen king-size beds, she told Angelo. She had never actually tried one. Angelo had undressed while Marilyn explored the bathroom and the closet. She laughed at how carefully Angelo hung up the linen sport coat and trousers. Her faded bell-bottoms were in a heap with torn white panties and the men’s socks. She left the red, pearl-button cowboy shirt for Angelo to take off.

Marilyn was the expert. Afterward she told Angelo that all the guys wanted a good blow job, and so she had practiced and practice makes perfect, doesn’t it, and it had been all Angelo could do to smile and nod his head. She had said she was too nervous and excited about being in the Hilton to want sex very much. But Angelo had not been able to get enough of her. By morning Angelo had realized Marilyn preferred oral sex. Although Angelo held his weight off her, Marilyn seemed panicked when he was on top of her. She clawed at his shoulders, panting, fighting to escape suffocation. Later she admitted the feeling of suffocation was just something crazy, and her girlfriends told her that if that was true, then why didn’t she gag or feel as if she were choking when she sucked cock. Marilyn said she didn’t know. Even being on top of Angelo frightened her, although not as much. Marilyn had described the sensation nervously, defensively. All she could think of was one of those barbecue skewers piercing all the way through her. After breakfast as Angelo was driving Marilyn to her house, she had been silent, then suddenly she had informed him that blow jobs were what the professionals did. No diseases that way, no pregnancies. She didn’t like to be pinned down, not since her big brothers had teased her and wrestled her when she was a little girl.

Marilyn did not explain her reason for leaving Angelo any better
than she had explained her sensation of being suffocated. Angelo had thought she was as happy and as much in love as he was. The racing season in Albuquerque had ended when the state fair was over, and Marilyn wanted to water-ski at Elephant Butte Lake. “We were wild,” Marilyn said, and then she talked about Tim and the others. “Those were really bitchin’ days,” she said right before she fell asleep. When they stopped for gas in Truth or Consequences, Marilyn had asked for money for a long-distance call. Marilyn did not say whom she had called, and Angelo didn’t ask. She continued with the water-skiing story about taking acid at Elephant Butte Lake and the guy who had skied right over a rattlesnake.

“I didn’t know rattlesnakes could swim,” Angelo said.

“They climb trees too,” she added, lighting up another joint. Angelo could feel a strain even while they both laughed at the prospect of water-skiing legs spread wide open and suddenly straight ahead, swimming for the cattails on the lake edge, the big diamond-back rattler coming at you straight on. Marilyn was trying too hard to keep the mood funny and a little crazy. She kept passing Angelo the joint.

Marilyn was staring out the window now. She had let go of the funny, silly mood. Angelo could almost feel her gathering up the words. He thought he could almost see the words rising up in her chest and then up into her throat. When she turned her head from the window, Angelo saw big tears in her eyes. Marilyn would not let him park the car or wait with her at the El Paso Airport. She said it was better that way. Somehow Angelo had known how it would be, after the first time they had made love and Marilyn mentioned Tim. She and Tim went back a long time together. Marilyn had told Angelo. She had warned him.

ANGELO SAT IN HIS CAR for a long time in the El Paso Airport parking lot. Marilyn had been getting ready to return to Tim for a long time. Angelo had just been playing a long shot. He had known it all along, but it had not stopped him from loving her. Angelo sat and
felt the street shake under the car as the big jets landed and took off. Marilyn had never told Angelo what had caused her to leave Tim. Or even if she had been the one to go. Once she had described her “crowd” as the last survivors. Survivors of what? Angelo had wanted to know. “Oh, you know, we were the first hippies and now we are the last. Just us. Just our crowd. The people that hung out together.” Angelo felt Marilyn wanted the crowd again. Wanted that group that was hers, where what she did was what they all did. Angelo thought he had some idea of how to entice a woman away from another man. But with Marilyn, every expensive dinner, every shopping spree, had been followed with a strange remorse. She would tell Angelo how they had gone for weeks shoplifting what they needed in grocery stores. Cigarettes, beer, even steaks. Once she had got caught with two rib-eye steaks stuffed down the front of her jeans.

An airport cop finally came over to the car and asked if he was okay. Angelo nodded. He drove slowly until he got outside the airport, and then he purposely took the narrow, twisting road over Mt. Franklin. Bingo had a black Trans Am and was always bragging about how fast he could get to the El Paso Airport from his house. Angelo made himself game rules that afternoon: he could shift down and use the accelerator, but he could not touch the brake. If he made it to Bingo’s without touching the brake and under forty-five minutes, then he would get Marilyn back. When Angelo skidded into the long, sandy driveway, he had not used the brake once. He did not have to glance down at his wristwatch to know he had come in well under forty-five minutes.

The Hacienda of the Wall was what Sonny called the house Bingo had custom-built on sixty acres of yucca and white sand dunes northwest of El Paso. Sonny had made jokes about the design, asking if the architect also designed jails and prisons. Bingo argued he needed his home to be his castle; “like a fortress,” Angelo had suggested, and Bingo had leaped on that phrase, nodding his head enthusiastically.

The terrace above the pool was where Bingo spent most of his time. He had arranged all the furniture an executive suite might have—a big L-shaped desk of chrome and glass, two plump champagne sofas, with matching armchair. Although the terrace had a high redwood canopy, it was open on all sides, and whenever thunderstorms threatened, Bingo’s entire house staff—three Mexican women and the Vietnamese gardener—had to drag Bingo’s executive suite indoors.

Angelo did not get out of the car but sat looking at the high, massive walls of Bingo’s “hacienda.” A minute later he heard the voice of Bingo’s
bodyguard, and Angelo followed him to the terrace. Bingo was in his swimming trunks; his hairy beer-belly sat like a stuffed toy in his lap. He had been looking at a
Penthouse
magazine. Bingo tossed the magazine down and reached for his short terry-cloth robe.

“Hey, Angelo, what’s wrong, man?” Bingo said, gesturing for the maid to bring Angelo the same as she was bringing for him. The maid brought them both double or triple margaritas in long-stemmed glasses that looked as wide and deep as fish bowls.

“Wow,” Angelo managed to say, “whatever’s wrong with you, this size will fix it!” And for a long time they sat in silence, both staring off at the southwest, where the sun was rapidly disappearing behind the dunes along the horizon. Halfway through the margarita Angelo thought he could feel a great pressure under his lungs and heart, pressure that seemed to press his ribs and the bones of his chest outward like limbs bending in the wind. The pressure was only there if he thought about it. If he remembered that Marilyn wasn’t back in Albuquerque in the little apartment she rented near the fairgrounds. If he remembered that she had arrived at a decision. If he remembered that she was gone. Angelo drained the glass, but before he could reach over to the glass-top coffee table in front of the armchair, the Mexican maid had taken the empty glass and disappeared inside. Bingo was used to the service so he just nodded and smiled, still gazing over the dunes edged in sage and last year’s tumbleweeds bleached white. Angelo could tell by the way Bingo puffed away at the marijuana cigarette and gazed out at the expanses of desert, Bingo liked to listen to the sounds around them, to the calls of nighthawks and crickets.

“I could just sit here like this forever,” Bingo said, but a moment later the phone beside him rang and Bingo disappeared inside. “Sonny,” was all Bingo said.

The maid set another margarita in front of him, but Angelo didn’t move. He sat facing the south with the bloodred sunset in the corner of his right eye. Bingo’s property was actually in New Mexico rather than Texas, where, as Bingo put it, state government is less flexible. New Mexico was one of those states with “a lot of flex,” Bingo liked to wisecrack. To the south in Mexico, Angelo could see the pale blue ranges of mountains, like layers of paint growing progressively paler. The distance and the space did not seem to end. Not ever. The colors changed rapidly after the sun set. The sky ran in streams of ruby and burgundy, and the puffy clouds clotted the colors darker, into the red of dry roses, into the red of dried blood. The dunes of the horizon were soaked in
the colors of the sky too; then the light faded and the breeze slashed at the ricegrass and yuccas. The cooling brought with it deep blues and deep purple bruising the flanks of the low, sandy hills. By the time Bingo reappeared, the sudden dark blue of the night sky had descended. Angelo looked south and could see nothing but infinite night. He took a deep breath. He knew he was drunk, but the awful pressure inside his chest had rolled back momentarily. Women were always leaving but then came back. Everything would be all right. Things would work out. He would get Marilyn back.

The wrecking yard—all the equipment, the car crusher—all of it Uncle Bill had paid for himself. That was the source of the trouble. Bill had been so careful not to give them any reason to collect. No favors to collect on, no loans, nothing fixed up by old men. Nothing. Still they had come, and Uncle Bill had moved like a man tied in steel wire; the tension grew tighter by the day. Angelo had only known that something was wrong, something was brewing up day by day, and he could tell the men in the yard knew; it would enter through the wide chain-link gates in back. The waiting went on and on, and Angelo wondered if they were like him, hoping that whatever it was would happen late at night when they were all far away, safe at home.

Angelo watched the light become darkness. He had always thought before that the darkness was separate, that the darkness was a heavier liquid that displaced the shimmering, diaphanous glow—the darkness fell across it, overcame it. Tonight, with the peppery warmth of the tequila in both nostrils, Angelo realized that the light in the sky had receded, but not disappeared; instead it had undergone a change in the minutes that passed. The light had grown thick; it had grown heavy. The light had ripened into the darkness that now filled the sky from horizon to horizon. So the family had waited a long time for Uncle Bill. They had waited for years and years. And then when the time was ripe, they had come. They had come to Angelo now. First Sonny Blue in Tucson, and now Bingo outside El Paso. He was their man, they said. “Our man in Albuquerque.” Our liaison on all the Southwest tracks. You’ve done so well, man, you make us look great.” And now they were giving him a promotion. “It will be good for you, kiddo, believe me. Just what you need to forget that girl.”

Bingo came out, and even in the dim light Angelo could see the cocaine ringing his nostrils. His hair was messed as if Bingo had just finished sticking his head between a woman’s legs. Bingo was too high to notice Angelo had been crying. Bingo was talking too fast now to
make much sense, rambling on about Sonny and his father in Tucson. Bingo tried to show off when his brother and father were not around because the minute one or the other of them appeared, Bingo became the dumb one. The one they had to tell to shut up. So with Angelo, Bingo had to launch into what he kept calling the “technical aspect” of the “operation.” Bingo needs to feel important.

At that instant Angelo thought how good it would feel to kill Bingo. To shut him up. To get the white-nostril clown face and cocaine breath away from his own face. To smash up Bingo’s face so he would never again have to be reminded of Bingo, flunky brownnose, and asshole-sucker. It was about killing all right. It was about Uncle Max, the “semi-invalid.” Uncle Max who made the front page of the
Times
when he “retired,” for “reasons due to health,” to the sunshine and year-round golf of the American Southwest. A little cow-town called Tucson. What had the movie been called
Dial Max for Murder?
No one had ever bothered to explain what Max did, but Angelo was convinced it had been Max Blue who had sent the men to crush new Lincolns and Cadillacs at Uncle Bill’s yard.

After Max Blue had been shot and had come so close to dying, the family had sent him to palm trees, perpetual sunshine, and enough golf courses that Max would never have to play the same one in the same week. Angelo had learned here and there, from his cousins and from others, that Max Blue had the perfect layout: as far away from the action as possible. All day out on the golf course for sunshine and fresh air, always following the orders of his doctors, and getting checkups every year at the Mayo Clinic. Max Blue had come West to unknown territories of vast, untapped riches. This was the modern age. Max Blue could take care of everything by phone. By private couriers. As the dust cleared, the smoke blew over, and the corpse got stiff, thousands of miles away Max Blue would be teeing off, looking off in the distance at the arid, blue mountain commenting to a congressman or federal judge that the mountains were as blue as lapis lazuli.