He learned more in high school, before he dropped out. “La luz del porche está prendida,” he says to Lu. “Pero nadie es en la casa.”
“What?”
“The porch light’s on, but nobody’s home.” He cracks himself up. “Pretty good, huh?”
“La luz,” Lu says. “Nadie.” She looks over at him. “What did I just say?”
You said, “The light. Nobody.”
“How do you say blue?”
“Azul.”
She repeats it, stretching out the ooooh sound. “I like it.”
“There are more where that came from.”
“More what?”
“Colors.” He starts to name them.
“Easy, Buckwheat. Don’t overload me.”
“Right,” he says.
They are at the corner of Nineteenth and Mission. A man with a Detroit Tigers baseball cap and a red halyard around his neck that says “I ♥ Guadalupe” is standing next to the bus, under their window, and talking to himself, waving his scrawny arms around like a drunken orchestra conductor, though he does not look particularly drunk.
Lu says, “I wonder where old Lupe is.”
“What?”
“Lupe. Guadalupe.”
“I think it’s a place,” Cole says.
Lu says, “I don’t think so. I think Lupe went out to shit and the hogs ate her.”
“You’re so bad,” Cole says. “I don’t know what Riley sees in you.” He is kidding, but somehow it comes out as if he isn’t.
Lu doesn’t appear to be fazed either way. “She sees this,” she says, pointing to her chest. “She knows I’m all heart.”
“Must be nice.”
“Oh, buck up.” She graze-punches him across the shoulder. “It’s a lovely day.”
Cole looks out the window. He loves this street. To him it is one big carnival all spilled out onto the sidewalk. Cotton candy is the predominant smell, but also chile ristras, oregano, pot smoke, pee. Every single building has a storefront on the ground floor, and they are selling everything. Furniture, clothes, animals, produce, flowers, luggage, chicharrones, toys, appliances, stereos, Mylar quinceañera balloons. He thinks there cannot possibly be enough people in this seven-by-seven-square-mile city to buy all this stuff, but there it all is, and hundreds of people crowd the street, carrying pink plastic bags, pushing shopping carts, lugging chairs and boom boxes to god only knows where.
At Sixteenth Street he sees the junkies nodding out, their backs to the broken-down escalators, and rockheads searching the sidewalks, picking up anything small and white, hoping for a miracle. He turns to ask Lu if they really believe that any of those pebbles or bits of chalk or cigarette filters or scraps of paper are actually going to turn out to be something they can smoke, something that will make their ass-out lives feel worth living awhile longer, but she’s gone. He looks out the window again, sees her cross the street. He starts to get up, to follow, but the doors close, and he watches as the bus pulls away; Lu’s shoulders are hunched up around her ears — she knows he’s watching — and her head is down, but she finds her way to a group of young men, bunched up and slouchy on the corner, and they take her in like a long-lost cousin.
He does not get off at the next stop. A plan is a plan, and he is a little bit angry with Lu for walking out in the middle of their expedition. He knows Riley won’t be very happy when he comes back alone, but it’s hardly his fault. Lu’s a free agent; she can do what she wants.
Riley refers to Lu’s wanderings as her “trajectory,” as if Lu were a satellite, or a spaceship exiting Earth’s atmosphere. “There’s never a warning,” Riley says. No indication that the spur Lu is traveling on is about to end. Because then there’s a chance someone will try to stop her, talk some sense into her thick skull, and she’s not having any of it. Which is fine, Cole thinks. Riley’s got more than enough to keep her busy, as far as he’s concerned. The bar. The boyfriends.
Rumor has it there’s a good boyfriend somewhere, sometimes, but he doesn’t seem to be a very effective one, so Cole dismisses him. The bad boyfriend doesn’t dismiss so easily.
No one ever sees the guy, since he doesn’t come into the bar, but Cole is sure he’s seen evidence of him. Riley won’t cop to it, though. She cops to running into things, like doors, cops to falling down. “I was so drunk,” she’ll say, as if this too is the start of some kind of a joke. Sometimes Cole wishes he had a gun and the backbone to use it, or knew some really badass guys who would rough the fucker up, make him stop, but thinking like that makes him feel out of his league, not to mention ridiculous. His only choice is to be there as much as possible, to take her mind off whatever bad thing happened last.
Riley doesn’t seem overly surprised when Cole tells her where Lu got off the bus.
“Her favorite corner,” she says, like she’s saying “Her favorite burrito place.” She bites her lip, taps Cole a big Anchor Steam and herself a little one, and goes outside to smoke a cigarette. Cole goes with her. They sit on the back stairs, from where they can see the bar, see if anyone wants anything, but it’s still pretty slow.
“What is it,” Cole says, “with you and Lu?”
Riley laughs. “You mean are we an item?”
“I don’t think that’s what I mean. Are you?”
“No.”
“What, then?”
“UFFUs.”
“What’s a UFFU?”
“Unidentified Flying Fuckup. Want to join the club?” She laughs, and it is not quite the unhappy sound he expects.
“Sure,” he says.
She wraps her arms around his neck, submerges her face in his chest. “You can be our mascot.” He doesn’t know what to do with his hands. He sets his beer down next to him to see if maybe they’ll figure something out on their own, find some landing place that maybe won’t freak her out, but before any of that can happen, she lets go and stands up, drains her beer, and pours the last drops over the railing into the scruffy garden. As soon as she gets five feet into the dark bar, he can’t even see her anymore.
Time passes, but it does not fly. Lu appears. Lu disappears. “Like magic!” Cole says, and Riley rolls her eyes and shakes her head. He doesn’t care. He is still alive. She still loves him.
One night in winter, when Lu has called an extended runner, and Riley’s boyfriend has taken off with all her cash and left his fingerprints on her arms in purple to match the black eye, and she has given Cole every shot of Beam he’s asked for and gone shot for shot with him and the bar closes, somehow, magically, all by itself, they end up on the pool table. Their clothes come off and the next thing Cole knows they are fucking and he is well over the moon, sober almost from the sheer relief of her legs around him, her hands somehow on his hip bones, her mouth her mouth her mouth. “Baby,” he says, next to it, into it.
“Don’t talk,” Riley says. “Shhhhh.”
He moans, collapses. Riley bites his shoulder, but not hard. More like an afterthought.
He moves to her side and decorates her with an array of shiny pool balls, placing them strategically on and around her body. He finds her scars. Shows her his. Riley points out constellations on the ceiling, as if the stars are really there. Wearing each other’s clothes, they head for the panhandle.
Riley gets pulled over on the way back, blows a 2-something, tells the cop to go fuck himself, and they keep her ’til she sobers up and the boyfriend himself comes down to throw her bail.