Cecelia grasped his head with two hands and kissed him. He wasn’t ready. He put his hand out to brace himself and sounded a patch of keys. The noise was wrong but interesting, like his hair against his skin. The notes didn’t linger; the quiet they left wasn’t the same as the quiet from before. The guy, Nevers, tried to catch up, to get as much of Cecelia as she was getting of him. He shifted and pressed himself against her. She felt his fingertips descend the skin of her hip and she pulled out of the kiss. She rose off the bench and snatched her coat off the floor by its sleeve. She wanted to say something before she left, something reassuring. She wanted to tell Nevers that one day soon, when her mind was her own again, she would let him take her out to dinner and then she would sleep with him and then in the morning he might try to play her one of his pop songs.
THE WOLF
The songs had ceased.
There had been the songs, and when there weren’t songs there had been the pets to calm him. The wolf had still not taken a chicken, and that meant something to him. It had become a vow. Now the songs had ceased. The pets would no longer be enough. The wolf could feel that. His hope was dead. The wolf had abandoned the gully near the house with the chickens and had taken up residence at the ugliest spot in the desert, a place where the humans had once produced drugs. There were a couple trailer homes rotting into the earth, stinking of science. The old bristlecones had perished. They’d survived a thousand years in the most discouraging soil in the world but had not survived human fun. Drugs were not merely fun for the humans, the wolf knew. It wasn’t that simple. Every creature in the world was laboring to escape the perils of human intelligence, and often that went double for the humans themselves.
The wolf’s foreleg had healed and his teeth were stained, but the pets would no longer be enough. Not without any songs. The wolf understood right and wrong now but didn’t prefer one to the other. He was living out season after season, endless unconvincing winters.
The humans were on the lookout for the wolf but none had spotted him. All they had were their eyes. There were humans who were paid to look for things and they had never found this place. It hadn’t always been the ugliest spot in the desert. There’d been an explosion and a scattered buffet for the buzzards. If there were a human paid to look for the wolf, he would never imagine the wolf so close as the gully and he would never find this bankrupt place, would never smell the chemical-soaked carcasses of the trailer homes.
The chickens may have been the only pets left unguarded in the whole of the basin now. The songs had been protecting the wolf and the wolf had been protecting the chickens. The songs had been made out of something pure, something like instinct. The pets, they gave nothing but momentary glee and permanent knowledge, and knowledge was the worst thing for the wolf. And now he needed the knowledge. He didn’t want it but he needed it. Like the humans with their drugs. It was bad for him, knowledge, and he could never give it back once he had it, not a useless shred.
MAYOR CABRERA
Finally Cecelia had come home at a reasonable hour. Mayor Cabrera parked around the corner. He’d already gotten a copy of the key from his sister-in-law, and she’d called him and said Cecelia was fast asleep. Mayor Cabrera opened the passenger door and then reached through and unlocked the driver door and went back around and lowered himself into the Scirrocco. He puttered down the block a ways before opening it up. He had a guy on the outskirts of Santa Fe who’d agreed to work at night, a German compact specialist. He’d told Mayor Cabrera there wasn’t anything he couldn’t fix before morning, except his marriage.
The shop was made to look like an adobe dwelling, like all businesses in Santa Fe. The mechanic sat on an overturned bucket, outside on the driveway, fiddling with a pair of glasses. He slipped the glasses in his shirt pocket and motioned for Mayor Cabrera to pull inside. He shook hands then immediately propped the hood up and began poking around. Mayor Cabrera had no clue how much this night was going to cost him. He imagined a very high figure, so that he wouldn’t be shocked. The mechanic jacked the car up a few feet and wriggled underneath.
Mayor Cabrera stepped out the bay door and sat on the flipped bucket where the mechanic had been sitting. It was a brisk night, the sky a brimming void. It felt strange being this close to Dana, being back in Santa Fe. He had told himself he would confront Dana once his family affairs were back on track, and at the moment, so close to the ground with the sky so far above, he felt that he would confront her, that he had nothing to lose by doing so, that he was a guy with a couple troubles like every other guy. Things were on track with his sister-in-law and now he was doing something for Cecelia that a real uncle would do.
The mechanic stood back up. “One step at a time,” he said. “That’s how we climb this mountain.”
The mechanic talked as he worked. He told Mayor Cabrera he was going through a divorce, and that’s why he didn’t mind being in the shop all night. He was moving into a new place, but it wouldn’t be ready for another week. Hotels were too expensive, he told Mayor Cabrera, and Mayor Cabrera did not try to sell him on staying at the Javelina. Mayor Cabrera was not a salesman. The mechanic said he was going to need every dollar he could get for lawyers and furniture. He’d spent a couple nights in the shop and a couple in the garage of his house and a couple in his Caprice Classic.
“I ordered a pizza to the car,” he said. “I told them where I was parked and they brought over a pepperoni pizza.”
Mayor Cabrera laughed. He wasn’t comfortable sitting on the bucket.
“She didn’t seem like the type to turn on you,” the mechanic said. Mayor Cabrera could hear him straining, and then something came loose. “She’s always doing volunteer work and drinking soy milk. Always listening to music you never heard of. She seemed like she wanted to live in the moment and be forgiving. Not the case.”
Mayor Cabrera rose and asked the mechanic if he could bum a smoke from the box on the desk. He said he was going down to the street to smoke it, and left the mechanic clanging around under the car. Mayor Cabrera found his matches. He tried to always carry matches. He stood in the middle of the road and lit up. He hadn’t had a cigarette since he’d been with Dana — since he’d been with Dana successfully. He was grateful to be stuck at the shop, his transportation dismantled. That way he didn’t have to consider the option of going over to Dana’s right now. He didn’t have to worry about rushing over there with no plan and pounding on her door and finding her there with someone else, another customer. He didn’t have to worry about not going to Dana’s, about not finding the courage. He didn’t have to worry about going to Dana’s and deciding not to knock on her door and winding up creeping around in the bushes, a grown man, a mayor, trying to spy on a professional lady.
REGGIE
He had never been blocked before. He had refused to write for a time when he’d first found himself in this mute gray afterlife, when he was new to death, but that had been his choice. What was happening now was something else. He would sit at the piano to compose and it simply would not work. It would not happen. He could feel the plan brewing in his mind, could sense the glorified math of music within him, but at the piano it wouldn’t bang out. And now all this music that refused to cooperate, that refused birth, was getting mixed up in his head and he was slipping further and further from being able to write a song. He’d never thought of himself as confident, because he’d never lost confidence. On several occasions he’d stayed in front of the piano for what would have been hours on end if hours existed in this place. He would sit there with these melodic spare parts and half-strategies tangled in his mind, and he’d feel a sneaking pleasure at not being in control of his self-expression. He’d feel a slight, ephemeral thrill at failure, he who’d always succeeded.