DANNIE
She’d broken up with Arn. She stood at the front window now, shifting her weight from one leg to the other, an eyebrow resting against the glass, gazing at the empty space where Arn always parked his truck. This time the truck would not be back. The permanently abandoned look of that particular parcel of concrete, this time, was not something Dannie was imposing. The oil stain would dry and fade and get blasted clean by the patient sand, sand that would never be anything but sand and would only grow finer.
There’d been no moment of disbelief. Arn hadn’t asked for a reason. He had never made a single demand on her since Dannie had known him and, this afternoon had held to form. He’d asked her to stay in the living room, out of his way, and he’d packed all his stuff in a duffel bag in about ten minutes. She had been the one crying, she who’d had a chance to prepare.
Standing at the window now, Dannie felt that she hadn’t known Arn at all. He could be an identity thief. He could be heir to a shipping fortune. Could be dying of a terminal illness. Dannie had watched him from the other end of the hall, stalking around with shirts and underwear in his fists, and he’d seemed ready and willing to be heartbroken but simply unable to pull it off. Emotions were a foreign language. They weren’t his element. His face had been empty as he jammed things in his bag and then sat on the bag and then jammed in the rest. It hadn’t all quite fit and he’d squeezed through the front door wearing two coats and with a hat on his head and a pair of sneakers in his hand.
Dannie didn’t want to keep playing the scene over and over. None of it was her problem anymore. She could quit trying to figure Arn out. She could quit wearing out her eyes on the empty spot in the world where his crappy pickup used to be. She’d had her explanation, her little speech planned out, and he hadn’t wanted to hear it. Now she felt like she had to tell it to someone. The words were lumped in her throat. She had to walk out into the desert and whisper them to a cactus or something.
Dannie pulled away from the window and went to the kitchen. She stared vacantly into her pantry. There were about a dozen boxes of crackers, all open. She didn’t even look in the fridge. She drank a glass of water and went to the back sliding door and looked out past the balcony. Her condo felt creepy, like a big country house.
Dannie remembered college, high school. She remembered all the breakups, the loss and the freedom. Breaking up back then had been exhilarating, but now she only felt adrift. Even her divorce had seemed positive, but there was nothing positive about losing Arn. Dannie didn’t open the sliding-glass door. It still wasn’t dark out, the moon a low bloom. Dannie was going to have to start from square one. She’d done it before and she was going to have to do it again. She was going to go to a fertility doctor and she was going to look for an appropriate partner. If she had to move back to LA to find one, that’s what she was going to do. She was going to set herself a deadline, and if she didn’t meet anyone by then she was going to look into other options. This thing with Arn had been built on deceit. It was a deceitful fling, and now all the deceit was gone, behind her. She was going to sit around for a couple days and wait to get her period. She could feel the start of it. Her periods had gotten worse in recent years. She would bleed like she’d been stabbed. She wouldn’t fit into her jeans. She would have horrendous thoughts. She’d be stuck in here alone, like someone coming off drugs.
THE RIVALS
Sometimes the wolf could withstand a series of full days without a song and sometimes he grew demented and out of control after only a few hours. He struck again, a dog and cat who lived next door to each other. The owners of the animals were not on speaking terms, but the pets were close. The wolf had broken their necks and flung their bodies under a shrub. Again he had not eaten his prey. At first look, the dog, an Australian cattle dog that for some reason had never grown to full size, and the cat, a massive tabby, looked to be cuddling, taking a nap.
The owners were two old men who’d worked in the turquoise trade and had each coached many youth baseball teams. Once, they too had gotten along famously. They were both lifelong bachelors. The cat was named Bonnie and the dog Clyde.
MAYOR CABRERA
The council meeting. Lofte had always scrimped and jiggered, but this year a lot of items would be plain neglected. No further magic could be performed on the numbers. There hadn’t been a security patrol or volunteer fire crew for some time, but now they would have to close the recreation center. There once had been a commercial alliance that spruced up the main drag every couple months. There once had been a parents’ alliance that stewarded the baseball diamond.
Mayor Cabrera had not gone to see Dana last night, the second appointment he’d missed. It had been two months since he’d had his troubles with her. He wondered if Dana thought he’d met someone, that he’d given Dana up for some other woman. Maybe she thought he was having money problems, as if that would’ve stopped him from visiting. He would’ve robbed a bank, if it had come to that. It was seeming more and more farfetched, the notion of Mayor Cabrera driving to Dana’s villa and propositioning her. Washing his car, slapping on cologne, knocking on her door and looking her in the eye and asking her to fully retire and become his woman — the idea seemed childish. Dana didn’t love him. At least at this point she respected him as a customer. Mayor Cabrera couldn’t have Dana think of him as pathetic. That just wasn’t something he could live with. If his dream of being with Dana was what had caused him to go to his sister-in-law when she needed him, then good had come of his falling for a professional lady. He could think of it that way. He’d only seen his sister-in-law four or five times and her spirits had already risen.
“Hidey there, Mayor,” said one of the council members. “You with us?”
The town council consisted of four members. One was Lofte’s lone lawyer, a guy who always wore a polo shirt and always carried a tape player with headphones for listening to books on tape. One councilman was a kid in his twenties who was a single father. He drove his daughter to Albuquerque every day, to a fancy school. The kid was awaiting a big settlement because a surgeon had messed up one of his hands. There was an elderly councilman who was a crack shot and had a range set up on his property. If you showed up at his house and asked to shoot, he’d lead you around back and load up his arsenal of old rifles and let you have at it, no questions asked. The last member of the council was a middle-aged woman who was loud and grating, but if you knew the facts of her life you couldn’t help but root for her.