“You should have called me,” Cole says the next day, when she tells him about it, how considerate and attentive the boyfriend was, how sweet, how good the Bloody Marys tasted down at the Ramp.
“Right,” Riley says. “You don’t have a phone number. Or money.”
“I’ll get a phone,” he says. “I’ll get a job, and a place. We can move in together.”
Riley looks at him, slowly shakes her head. “Not gonna happen, kid.” She says it as gently (he knows) as she knows how. It still sounds like yelling to him.
He wants to yell back, but it is not in him. “Why not?”
They are sitting at the bar, with one bar stool between them. “For starters, you are too young for me. And you are too nice.” She is tracing someone else’s initials carved into the wood. “I’m a hot mess, honey. I’m the last thing you need.”
For a second, he thinks he hears something in her voice, some chink he can break through, but when he looks her jaw is set, and, if anything, she looks like she’s miles away — from this place, from him. Like he’s the last thing on her mind.
Finally, she faces him again and smiles. The word he is looking for is “rueful.”
“How do you like them apples?” she says.
“I hate them apples.”
She stands up and kisses the top of his head. “I do too,” she says as she pulls her bar towel from her pocket and starts wiping down already-clean tables.
Cole walks to the pool table to prowl its perimeter. “What about this?” He motions at the felt, never looking at Riley.
“That,” she says, “was a whole lot of fun. You’re a whole lot of fun, sweetie. You’re a doll. You’re the best. You’re a champ.”
“A champ?”
“Yup.”
“Fuck that,” he says. And leaves. Halfway down the block, he turns to see if she’s coming after him, but she’s just standing out front looking up at the sky, like she’s waiting for something good to fall out of it.
When he gets to Mission Street, Lu is getting off the bus. She says, “I had a dream about you. My cat was in it.”
“You have a cat?”
“No. Listen. Shut up.”
He leans against the brick wall of the restaurant on the corner. He waits.
“It was weird,” Lu says.
All dreams, he thinks, are weird. Life is fucking weird. But he doesn’t say it. Because it’s too obvious.
“You died,” Lu says. “They brought the coroner’s van, and they took you away. I missed you. I was sad and I forgot what color your eyes were. I had to ask my cat.”
He doesn’t like anything about this dream so far. “Your cat you don’t have,” he says.
“Yeah,” Lu says. “That one.”
“So what did the cat say?”
“Azul,” she says. Just like she said it the first time, stretching it until it won’t stretch anymore. It sounds like the low howl of a coyote at moonrise. Somewhere in the unbreakable heart of the oblivious desert.
9. Take You Back Broken
“I feel like someone’s put a torch to me,” Lu sighs, from the floor, as if there’s something appealing about that notion. I lie down on the cool, scarred hardwood next to her but don’t touch, my toes an inch from her ankle, stretching into her and away at the same time. I suspect she really would like to be on fire, that she would be pissed if I put her out. We are a pair, not a couple, mostly because I am still (stubbornly, she says) straight, still like boys despite the improbability of surviving them, and she may be too wild anyway, even for me. We are in Oakland, during a string of rare ninety-degree days, because we are out on a pass of sorts and because it is necessary for us to be here, as opposed to the city across the bay, where in our world people and their lives simply come apart, and we can’t seem to do a thing to stop them.
It’s August and too hot to touch, skin to skin, too hot to even think about outside. Outside is where you go when you are being punished, at least until dark; then inside is punishment, jungly and fierce. Equatorial, like Papua New Guinea.
She pronounces it Pa-POO-Ah. Irian Jaya, she tells me, is its other half. She starts meandering around peninsulas and archipelagoes — Indonesia, Malaysia — comes creeping up on Burma and the Irrawaddy.
I say, “Stay out of Vietnam.” Sixteen degrees north of the equator but still scorching, from what Mick’s letters said.
She says, “I know.”
When she sits up, it will be to smoke a cigarette and work on a drawing of a forest, in deep green, brown, and black, with a few white smudges standing in as rabbits. She will say this forest is in the kingdom of Bengal, though it no longer exists as a kingdom. When I tell her that, she will show me one of her maps, of which she has many, some of them very old. She collects dog-eared… things.
“Oh yes it does, Cookie. It’s right there.” She’ll flick that map with her index finger, a sharp, snapping sound. “See?”
It is hard to argue when it is in black and white like that. Black and white, red and blue. She claims, when she is not drawing or painting, to be a geographer. When she is not drawing or painting, dope sick or high, or trying to figure out how to get high. She’s never actually been anywhere, except here and southern Indiana, the long black-tar highway in between. She left when she got old enough to fight off the inbred uncles, steal a car. I came later, from the north, and at first she was jealous of my wholesome, perfect family. Of how I led my personal Lewis and Clark expedition to the edge of the continent, obliviously determined to beat the crappy odds and discover the Pacific on my own.
There was an intersection of sorts. A convergence. Or maybe an eclipse. And now it is nighttime. We fall asleep on the floor under the creaky ceiling fan. Even sheets weigh too much. The air trying to come through the windows smells like wild animals. Random gunfire in the distance wakes us up. Gang wars. Little boys with Uzis. Lu growls, but softly.
“You want to bring the outside in, but you can’t,” I say. “Not even you.”
“We could take out a wall.”
“What about winter?”
“What about it?” What she means by that, I know, is that winter is not certain, if nothing is. Besides which, these walls, not a one of them belongs to us.
On the subject of fire, she continues to deny ever having set one in the bar. The burned spot in the faded linoleum, burned and melted through to the wood underneath, was someone else’s handiwork. She doesn’t say whose, but I bet she was there. That happened a long time ago, maybe ten years, way before me.
“I hate that Andy keeps telling that story,” she says. I have not mentioned the fire, but she has reminded herself, and I know exactly what she’s talking about. It’s a sore point with her, being falsely accused. Andy is the swamper at the bar, queer as Liberace but not quite as glamorous, a long-haul regular and witness to years of bad behavior in what he calls the Lesbyterian Church. He tracks all of us, me included now, and although nelly and sweet and generous, he is a terrible gossip and not above making things up. I don’t know why the fire story bugs Lu so much; maybe because she has never lied about all the stupid things she actually has done, as she generally doesn’t give a rat’s ass what people say or think.
When I first saw her, she was loudly berating a blind girl from her usual location, leant James Dean — style against the wall by the jukebox, cigarette perched on her lip, smoke narrowing her possum-brown eyes. She pointed at me and demanded to know what year it was. I thought maybe it was some kind of a test, but I didn’t know if there was a trick to passing it, so I just said. She did a little math, turned back to the girl. “I’m thirty-four years old,” she announced, poking a finger into her own chest. “Look at me.” To a blind girl. I was behind the bar, still new and not a little nervous, and everyone else who was in there at the time was appalled, or acting like it. I thought it was funny. I knew that girl. She was a pain in the ass. Got drunk every afternoon and tripped over the dog. Poor animal had a haunted look, bruised fur. I had to draw the line at rustling a blind girl’s dog, but, boy, was I tempted. Lu would have done it, I bet, if she’d thought of it and had someplace to keep it, but she was on the street more often than she was off. Or camping in someone else’s living room.