The Tower of Il Serrohe (2 page)

“
Oh shit!” sleaze-ball cried as he hid behind Bess.

Naked as a Greek athlete, she strode down the hall, right up to Don, and kicked him between the legs with her hard bare foot. “Now that you know why I can go without your infrequent and indifferent love-making, get the hell out! I’m sick and tired of supporting you, your stupid little teaching job, and half the bars in Albuquerque.

“
He stays, you go!” she pointed down the stairs.

Don didn’t leave that very minute. As a result of the alcohol, the shock of Bess’s still active libido, and the kick in the balls, Don passed out on the study floor.

It wasn’t easy getting down the stairs the next morning, finding a pitcher of orange juice, and sitting, after a fashion, on one of the bar stools next to the dishwasher. Knowing his morning-after habits, he saw a note from Bess on the juice pitcher, held by a rubber band.

That jogged Don’s memory of what had happened the night before. Bess’s infidelity was only disturbing in its unexpectedness, but sex with that sleaze-ball was an insult to what was left of Don’s manhood after years of personal, financial, and occupational inferiority.

He took a slug of juice to brace himself for the note written in Bess’s precise printing.

It read, “Don, …”

Well, that’s an improvement over “Dear Asshole,” Don thought.

“
I’m at the office closing the deal on the El Cabron apartments and will be finished by 1 pm. I expect to find you and whatever personal shit you take with you gone.”

Don smirked with the knowing English teacher smile that had driven a generation of students insane. She may have great penmanship, but she still couldn’t write coherently.

“
If you want, you can spend everything in our joint account. Most of
my
money is in the business account anyway. The business is already in my name, and I’ll pay you one-fourth the value of this house because that’s all you ever put towards its cost and upkeep anyway. You can keep the Fairmont since it’s paid for. I’m keeping the Navigator and the Lexus…”

“
Yeah, right, bitch,” Don scathed at the notepaper. “Let me keep the thirty-year-old car while you have the ones we bought in the last two years. Fine. Those damned gas hogs are too expensive.”

But the note, like Bess, wasn’t done yet.
“Since you invested your savings in all the barley growers and brew masters of the Free World, the savings accounts are all mine, too. Sign the attached cards to cancel your name as joint owner. My lawyer, Ben Herrera, will be working out all the details in the divorce papers. If you don’t act like your usual whining asshole self…”

“
Enough adjectives, already!” Don railed at Bess’s precise printing.

“
I will have Ben grant you a $20,000 cash settlement from my money market account at the Denver bank. If you think you deserve one-half of everything—that’s in both our names—not what’s always been in only my name—right down the middle, you’ll have to get your own lawyer which will cost you more than what your share is worth. I do not want to see you until we sign the final papers in Ben’s office. And that will be the last time I want to see you. Try to be sober then. Bess”

“
Fine. That’s just fucking fine! Who wants all your damned property and bullshit possessions anyway? I sure as hell don’t!”

Don started for the refrigerator to trade the juice for a longneck Coors when it all became a little too real. His knees buckled, the plastic pitcher bounced and leaked on the cobalt blue Mexican tile, and he cried like the time his pet dog of fifteen years had died on the day he graduated from high school.

It wasn’t Bess so much, as it was the idea of her when they had first met. Thirty-five pounds lighter, a classmate in Math 201 at the university, and a nineteen-year-old virgin. She’d had a sense of humor, had helped him up the dorm steps after a few too many in the middle of the soccer field on a Wednesday night, and was happy to have someone literate correct her rough drafts before she handed them in.

Being with her had made Don feel ten feet tall. And even when she quit teaching elementary school after only one frustrating year and got her real estate license, she had still been fun.

What was it that went first? Was it the laughs, the incredible lovemaking or the mutual admiration? Whatever was lost was replaced by a growing drive to earn more, sell more, to manage, control, and disapprove.

Maybe Don did drink a little too much, but it was only on special occasions or with friends. He had outgrown the college student’s obsessiveness measured in gallons, not pints, but his recovery time had become increasingly worse. For a while, Don quit drinking entirely, but that was before the change in their relationship.

The first year their joint tax return showed that Bess had earned more than he, was when Don started drinking again, somewhat moderately. The richer Bess got, the more Don drank, though eventually he had become better at maintaining his composure before, during, and after.

So now, wallowing in tears, saliva, and orange juice, Don knew it was too late. He couldn’t wish back the past no matter how many sobs he wretched out. Going on the wagon wouldn’t do it either because it wasn’t him. It was going to bed no telling how many times with that sleazy office manager that truly told him it was over.

For all his drinking and leering at hookers in the bars, he had never cheated on Bess. Get drunk enough and one can feel more amorous than a rock star, but can’t do a thing about it. It was safer that way. No regrets, no venereal disease, no paternity suits.

Don couldn’t remember the last time he had made love to Bess. He would just remember the old days and let it go. All liquids evacuated from his body, he sat up and surveyed his mess.

He could leave now or clean it up. He decided he wouldn’t give Bess the satisfaction of finding his drunken mess, so he set to work. Going up stairs, he cleaned dried drool off the study couch. Then he decided he would clean every little thing that could possibly be his responsibility.

There would be no evidence he had ever lived in this house. What clothes and personal items he didn’t need he would pack and leave at the Goodwill. He would cease to exist in this house and her life.

He forgot that determination when he found how she had left their bedroom.

Clearly, unmistakable evidence of her and sleaze-ball’s night of lovemaking was all over the bed, the floor, on the wall near the master bathroom, and in the tub! Sleaze-ball had brought out a side of Bess Don had forgotten, and she had purposely left the mess to impress that on his mind.

“
If
I
had torn those precious sheets of hers like that, she would have—God, what am I saying? She punished me like a wayward teenager and I took it. No wonder…”

The hall clock showed ten minutes before one when he dropped his door key along with the Lincoln and Lexus keys on the table by the front door. Slamming the locked door shut, he left himself no way to get back inside.

two

Bess occasionally worked with a hell of a nice guy by the name of Bill Williams in Rio Luna, twenty miles south of Albuquerque. Don decided to look him up and see if he could get a cheap place around there. That way he could avoid any possibility of running into Bess as he went back and forth to work.

“
Don, I’m real sorry to hear about you and Bess.” Bill said, seeming all concern and no faking. “Is there anything I can do?”

“
There’s no way you can help us work things out because there’s nothing to work out,” Don replied. “It’s over. I’ll pretend it was another lifetime that’s dead and gone. But what you can do…”

It turned out there was this place north of Rio Luna near the border of the Isleta Indian Reservation between Rio Luna and the city: a small adobe house on ten acres of land two miles from the paved road.

“
I can’t afford to buy, Bill.”

“
That’s OK. The owner lives in Santa Fe and, frankly, he’s tired of having it on the market. He thought some developer would want to subdivide it, but every time someone looked at it, they lost enthusiasm. I can’t figure it. The property is what’s left of an investment his parents made about fifteen years ago. Anyway, I can rent it to you for just enough to cover the owner’s mortgage payments and taxes.”

“
How much will that be?

“
Hmm, let’s say seven-fifty a month due on the fifth.”

“
Make it the seventh, after payday, and you’ve got a deal.”

“
No problem. Let me take you out there.”

It wasn’t bad. An old cottonwood stood at the east side of the two room adobe house. Since it was early spring, the fields all around showed just the faintest hint of new growth tinting the relentless brown marking the desolation of the place.

Bill led Don around the house to the south wall and showed him what looked like the beginnings of construction on an addition.

“
The present owner was all set to add on another five rooms including studio, greenhouse, a central enclosed patio, the whole nine yards when he up and quit. Damnedest thing. He was an artist, so he figured Santa Fe was more in tune with his sensibilities.”

He took Don inside. The place was a study in New Mexico dust collection.

“
How long has he been gone?”

“
Almost two years. Look, I know it’s not much, but I can get him to agree to forget the first and last month’s rent and damage deposit if you clean up the place yourself.”

Don looked around at the amateur job of 1970s kitchen appliance installation with a diminutive avocado green stove and a short harvest gold refrigerator. A door near the kitchen stove lead to what promised to be an equally depressing bathroom with partially exposed pipes and electrical wiring.

In the southwest corner of the twelve by twenty-four-foot room was a couch and a dusty bed frame with a stained mattress. At the center of the south wall stood a full-length glass door of a vintage that seemed original to the little adobe house. Through the glass, Don could see the unplastered adobes of the south wall.

“
Is that where the artist was going to open up a doorway into his ‘addition’?” Don asked.

“
I don’t think so because that’s been there ever since I can remember. Odd to see an old door with a single pane of glass that large, isn’t it?”

“
Yeah, fascinating as hell,” Don said, showing no interest whatsoever. “Anyway, I can use the exercise and I need to save money, so yeah, I’ll clean it up. I’ve recently had practice. And, well, there’s something strangely appealing about this place.”

Bill put his hand on Don’s shoulder and squeezed sympathetically. “Yeah, buddy. Let’s get you back. Draw up some papers and you can move in this evening unless you have a place for tonight.”

“
I don’t have shit. Let’s go.”

It was twilight by the time they finished signing the papers. Bill insisted on dragging Don home for supper with his family and wanted Don to let him, his wife, and two kids come along to help settle him in. But Don countered that they didn’t need to bother. He finally found himself alone in his Fairmont as it rocked over the long, dirt driveway to his new abode.

Suddenly, as he passed under the massive cottonwood hovering over a front yard covered with weeds, everything went black. The Fairmont dropped in a chug hole, the engine died, and the driver’s side door flew open. Don’s seat-belt kept him in the vehicle, but he slid down under it enough that his left foot flew painfully out the door. At the same time, his right hand was jammed into the dashboard and bent back double.

“
Shit! What happened to the lights?” he asked.

Pitch dark pushed against his face threatening to crush him to the thinness of atoms like a hapless victim of an overhead bridge collapse. Flailing his arms to fight off claustrophobia, he succeeded in beating both hands against the steering wheel and windshield. That did the fresh sprain in Don’s right wrist even more good.

With his foot dangling from the door and arms hugging his chest, he heard the sound of leather wings flapping in this tunnel of blackness.  He pulled himself upright.

Then, like the fade-in of a movie, the light came back on.

“
Great start on my new life of independence! Dammit!”

He got his foot back in the car and started it up. Good thing it hadn’t kept rolling, he thought, or he would have crashed into the looming cottonwood.

It was odd; the blackness had come before the sudden stop.

That was when Don realized he had to try to stay sober no matter how lonely and depressed he got.

three

At least the electricity still worked. With new age music playing on a Santa Fe station on his stereo, Don dusted off the top layer of the mattress. He then realized two, no three things.

First, there was probably another fifteen pounds of dust soaked into the mattress beyond any chance of removal.