“Firewater.” She giggled.
“You’re not kidding,” he said, holding his throat.
“Careful it doesn’t go to your head.”
“Like the song.”
“What song?”
“You don’t know that song?”
She shook her head.
“Just a song. You’ll hear it sometime. We’ll go to a club-they’re always playing it. Encourages the drinking.”
“Like here?” she said, cocking her head toward the jukebox, still pumping out Western music.
“They don’t need encouragement here. If you can drink through that, you can drink through anything. God,” he said, reacting to another sip. “I’d better slow down.”
“It always hits you when you’re tired.”
“That was before. When we were hiking and fighting rattlesnakes and then had to watch Charles Atlas kick sand in my face.”
She laughed. “Did we do all that?”
“On one lousy sandwich.”
“Sounds wonderful.” She put her hand over his. “Let’s do it again.”
He looked at her eyes, bright in the smoky light. “Whenever you say.”
The Indian woman stood at the edge of the table, waiting for them to separate hands before she unloaded the tray-big heavy bowls of mutton stew with a large basket of Navajo fry bread. She set the table with surprising delicacy, placing clunky spoons down without a sound, arranging a bandanna-like napkin.
“Thank you,” Emma said.
“Sure.”
“And another round of drinks when you get a minute.”
“Sure.” She moved slowly away, pulled by an unseen tug.
Emma giggled. “Do you think she can say anything else? I haven’t heard one other word. Shall we bet on it? A dollar?”
“No fair prompting.”
“Okay. How’s the stew?”
“Now I know why the Anasazi went away.”
“That bad?”
“Not when you close your eyes.”
But it was hot, and each thick gray spoonful filled him, spreading warmth through his body like a wonderful liniment.
“How do they stay in business, do you think?” he said.
“It’s probably just outside Indian land. There’s always a place over the border to sell liquor.”
He tore off a piece of fry bread, amused at his own appetite. When he looked up again from the stew, he found her watching him, part of the slow, easy warmth that enveloped them now like steam. The beer took on flavor as he gulped it. They talked of nothing, little snippets that kept them company as they ate, then evaporated, forgotten. Before the bowl was finished he had to sit back, flushed with well-being, his head buzzing gently now with half-heard sounds from the bar. The loud, twangy music had stopped.
He got up and went over to the jukebox, hoping to find something before the ranchers could fill it with more nickels. He scanned the selection slips glowing under the yellow light, running his eye down one unfamiliar cowboy title after another, and then, unaccountably, a wealth of music in the right-hand column-Teddy Wilson, Lester Young. Where had it all come from? It was the last thing he’d expected to find here. He stood there for a minute, fixated on the puzzle. Maybe the cafe was so remote that no one came to change the records. Maybe they’d siphoned off some free V Discs. The music was colored; maybe the record company traveler, unable to place them on his swing south, had dumped them finally into a juke for Indians. What did it matter? He fed nickels into the machine, pressed the ivory buttons, then came back to the table, a silly grin on his face, as the room picked up the tempo of “Sweet Lorraine,” the piano dancing over the steady bass. The ranchers looked at him, surprised, then turned back to mind their own business. The Indians never moved, a stocky frieze.
They sat back, listening to the music and smoking, the stew bowls pushed to the middle of the table. The Indian woman came over to fill their glasses but didn’t bother to collect the dishes, as if she were still waiting for them to finish. They didn’t say anything for a while, watching the smoke, smiling at their luck. It’s the mood that I’m in. The music seemed to change the room like some slow trick of the light, the rough edges receding, so that the cafe took on the mellow glamour of the sounds, all wet glass rings on a bar and ashtrays and the hope of taking someone home.
“Is this what it’s like?” she said quietly. “That club you’re taking me to?”
He smiled. “Just like.”
“And we’d sit and drink and look at each other.”
“And dance.”
“Yes.” She looked lazily around at the ranchers and Indians. “Someday.”
The record changed to the piano runs of Teddy Wilson opening “The Very Thought of You.” Looking straight at her, he took her hand and stood up, the drink making him slow and fluid at the same time, an underwater movement.
“Here?” she said, a little laugh, her arm extended in his, but her legs were crossed so she was unable to move.
“Why not?” He continued to look at her, willing her upward with a gentle pull until her legs righted themselves and her body rose up, leaning into his. They stood still, awkward, his hand feeling the small of her back, and then the music led them, asking nothing more than one small conscious movement to start. Billie Holiday was doing the vocal. Their feet, slow with drink, moved forward without their thinking. The room slid into the haze of peripheral vision. I’m living in a kind of daydream. One of the old ranchers laughed at them, and Connolly, looking over her shoulder, grinned back, joining in the joke. They must look drunk. But every inch of him felt her now. He moved slowly, lightheaded, happy. When she pulled her head back from his shoulder, they looked at each other, surprised. The dancing was supposed to have been a joke, a little parody of another life. Now it was something else, another kind of joke. He wanted to laugh out loud at the unexpectedness of it. He had held girls like this before, half-drunken nights of good times and smoky rooms and sex, but it was here, miles from anywhere, filled with mutton stew and cheap whiskey, that it finally happened, the hope of a million popular songs.
There was another record, then another, and they kept dancing, too tired to sit down. They didn’t see the ranchers leave. Could he have had so many nickels? The lights went off in the general store.
“It’s late,” she said.
He nodded.
“I don’t know where we can go.”
“Doesn’t matter.” His words were slow, part of the music.
She touched the back of his neck. “This isn’t what you had in mind at all, is it?”
“No.”
“But it’s all right?”
And it was. He wasn’t thinking about sex; he just wanted to hold her.
“Can you drive?”
“Can you?”
“If I have some coffee.”
But when they sat down, moving dreamily away from the empty floor, they found fresh drinks on the cleared table and they sipped them, the coffee forgotten. The music had stopped, but it was too late to play any more. They sat enjoying the quiet, the faint rattle of crockery in the back room, a scurrying of night sounds. He couldn’t stop looking at her. When the Indians left, two of them supporting the third, he only glanced at them for a minute. Then there was a sputter outside, a roar as the pickup ignition caught and pulled away, and it was quiet again. The Indian woman didn’t bother them, so they sat finishing their drinks, warm with sunburn and liquor, too drowsy to get up and go. His legs were heavy, glued to the scratchy booth.
When the woman finally came to clear the glasses, she was dressed to leave, an old army jacket covering the beaded blouse. Emma asked about coffee as Connolly got out his money, looking up at the woman for the bill. There was no check. She took a few bills, then tucked them into her jacket.
“No coffee. Back room,” she said, indicating a door and leading them there. She pulled the string of an overhead light to reveal a small storage room, piles of boxes next to an old rolltop desk, and, against the wall, a day-bed covered with Navajo blankets. “Don’t drive,” she said. “Stay here.” Then, with a small smile, “Nobody bother.”