Not within range, anyway.
In the pale glow that came through the drapes, Debora looked worried, and he asked if she was thinking about the next day.
‘No… about the day after. About what we’ll do then.’
‘We’ll be okay.’
‘I know,’ she said, and turned away from him.
They awakened before dawn and ate breakfast in the diner next to the motel, a place called—according to its three-tiered neon sign—EAT VERNA’S TEX-MEX DELICIOUS. They had eggs-over-easy and bacon and toast and coffee, and sat in a booth of red vinyl sparkles, staring out through their reflections at the highway, the torrent of headlights and sleek dream machines westering, whispering toward the false dawn of Love City, piloted by men and women who wanted a good time then salvation and still believed this was possible, and thought maybe an immersion in the lingerie department of life would silver their hopes and streamline their wishes and send them home to boredom all chromed and supercharged with the horsepower of sexy experience. They lingered over their empty plates. No reason to hurry. Izaguirre wasn’t going anywhere, secure with his guards and his walls. There were no other customers, and when the waitress brought the check, she leaned on the booth and said, You folks goin’ or comin’?’
‘Coming,’ said Mingolla.
‘This your first time to Love City?’
‘Uh-huh.’
She nodded, a skinny fortyish woman with lines of sad wisdom on her face and rainbow stripes in her frizzy baby-chick-colored hair, an aging hillbilly punkette who had come late to a regretful morality, her disguise completed by a starched green uniform. ‘Ain’t nothin’ there you two couldn’t work out by yourself… if you take my meanin’,’ she said. ‘Don’t get me wrong, now. I ain’t preachin’ ’gainst L.C. God knows, I let it all wallow there a time or two. It’s just it don’t make nobody happy. Don’t make ’em sad, neither. It just sorta is… like everything else, y’know. So what’s the point?’
Debora murmured agreement; her response seemed casual, but Mingolla sensed between her and the waitress a woman-to-woman exchange to which he wasn’t attuned.
‘Where you folks comin’ from?’ the waitress asked, affecting deep interest.
‘Mexico,’ said Mingolla. ‘And Honduras before that.’ Made paranoid by the question, he checked her mind for signs of tampering and found her to be a mundane original.
‘Mexico!’ The way she said it, Mexico might have been something at the end of the boulevard of dreams, the distant glow of paradise. ‘Y’know, I sell Mex jewelry here’—she hooked her thumb toward the display case beneath the cash register; it was filled with cheap onyx and silver—‘and Mex food. Hell, I even had me a Mex boyfriend. That was ’fore the war, y’understand. But I never been down there. Always wanted to go. See the pretty boys and the lizards on the beaches and all. The ruins, too. Always wanted to see them ruins.’
Perky, feeling intimate with them now that she’d disclosed her heartfelt wish, she asked if they wanted more coffee… on the house. She brought the pot, poured, and plunked herself down beside Debora. She inquired about their backgrounds, said ‘uh-huh, uh-huh,’ in response to their minimal answers, impatient, eager to tell her story, the story she got to tell once every slow-predawn-while, the story that made her believe she’d lived that day.
‘This ol’ place probably looks pretty nothin’ to you folks,’ she said. ‘But believe me, you can see a thing or two here. The idea of gettin’ their Charlie doctored in Love City brings some strange ’uns thisaway.’
‘Oh?’ said Debora with polite interest. She glanced guiltily at Mingolla, and he checked his watch. They had time, and it would be okay to sit and listen and pretend for a little while that they weren’t going anywhere special, to have that much normalcy.
‘You wouldn’t believe some of ’em,’ said the waitress. And she told them about a man and a most unusual dog, and then about two women who’d looked as alike as two beans, pretty ol’ girls, y’know, like starlets, blondes, they was blondes, and it was surgery made them so alike, they’d told her about it, how they was eye-dentical down to their moles, and they’d had their voices altered so they could harmonize even when they just talkin’, not singin’ or nothin’, they sounded buzzy and high-pitched together like a coupla birds who’d learned to speak English. It had been a real treat hearin’ them order the same thing simultaneous, waffles and cream and bacon, that’s what they’d had, and they’d done all this surgery just to make a big splash in Love City.
Mingolla tuned the waitress out, watched Debora, and realized that she was watching him. He seemed to connect with her as he had back in San Francisco de Juticlan, to all of a sudden notice her, know her, and for a moment it seemed to him she was looking through younger eyes, seeing the kid he had been. It was such a clean feeling, that startled recognition, it confused Min-golla… and that was also part of the moment, part of the past, because he had long since learned to deny confusion. The moment was gone almost before it had existed, and he knew better than to try to hang on to it. It was simply there on occasion, one of their minor resources. He found it amusing that Izaguirre—in his guise as divinity—had told them the moment would always be a salvation. They hadn’t believed him; what he’d said had sounded too fanciful to be true… though now Mingolla realized that he’d been talking about a matter of basic psychology. He wondered if the fact that Izaguirre had brought it up was evidence that he had planted the idea in them, that he was still manipulating them. Everything remained suspect. But whatever its nature, the moment did save Mingolla. He began to listen to the waitress, to like her, to see the good thing she wanted to be, the sweet ineptitude underlying her wishes, and he joined in the conversation, joined with all his heart, putting aside who he was and what he had to do, and they talked on into the gray morning, with dirty clouds piling up like seafoam on the horizon, they spoke of common sorrows and touched each other’s hands, they told lies and believed them, they made a passion of forgetting and they laughed.
Mauve streaked the eastern sky, a couple of truckers came into the diner, leaking cigarette smoke like steam, braying for coffee and steak. The waitress bawled the order out to the kitchen, brought more coffee, and sat back down, still full of stories. But more customers pushed in through the glass doors, all as gray as the sky with fatigue, itchy with highway dirt, their underwear ridden up into their crotches from hours of sitting, and the waitress had to go back to work. Mingolla and Debora waited, hoping she’d have another break, but she kept getting busier and busier. They walked to the register, stood with money in hand, and at last she slopped steak and eggs in front of another trucker, and rushed up breathless to collect her bill. She told them to drop back, tell her how they’d liked L.C., and she’d sure enjoyed meeting them, wasn’t it funny how you could meet up with some people, perfect strangers, and next thing y’know you’d be like old friends talkin’? They promised to stop by again, tipped her big, and waved so-long. Then they went back to the motel and transferred the automatic rifles to the car…