But it was the two or three drunks who wouldn’t leave who fascinated Sunil. They sat, heads hung over the dregs of their drinks, holding on to the metal mugs as though drowning. Several times Ben came out and asked them to leave. Still they sat as though afraid of the night and the silence beyond it.
It’s like this every night, Ben said with a sigh. Usually Ten-Ten is here to get them out.
I’ll get them out, Sunil said.
Ben nodded.
Two of the drunks left easily enough when Sunil pried them up and gently shoved them out into the dark street. The third, a regular he knew only as Red, was harder to get out. Sunil could barely pry his fingers off the metal mug, and his butt seemed glued to the chair. Red was a small man and Sunil couldn’t figure out where he got the strength.
Please, Red begged. Please, it’s too damn lonely out there, bruh. You can’t send me out there.
Go home, please, we have to close, Sunil said.
No, no, you don’t understand, Red begged. They come every night, every night they come and I can’t, man, I can’t. I know you’re young, but surely you understand.
Go home, Red, Ben said from across the room. It’s the same every night. Go home.
Who comes every night, Sunil asked. The police?
My wife, Red sobbed. My wife and my boy, they come every night.
Go home, Red, Ben said. The boy doesn’t need your stories.
But he should hear them, Ben, then maybe he’ll understand.
Go home, sir, Sunil said.
I only informed on a couple of undesirables, Red babbled. Only a couple of times on criminals we all hated. Then I tried to stop, I did. I told the police I was no longer informing for them. So they told the ANC boys about me and they took my wife and my son to teach me a lesson. They just took them. I wasn’t there. I was here. I was here.
Go home, Red, Ben said again, this time crossing the room and pushing him gently to the door.
Where, Sunil asked. Where did they take them?
Red stood at the door of the shack, a bent shade of a man, bent even lower by the alcohol. He lifted a trembling finger and just pointed. Into the dark, man, into the night, he said.
Ben stepped up and gave him one last gentle but firm shove and shut the door. Finish up, he said to Sunil, and went back to the bar.
Finish up, Salazar said, nudging Sunil. We have to get back on the road.
Yeah, sorry, I was lost there for a moment, Sunil said.
Thirty-five
There was a quality to dusk that Sunil liked. There was something frenetic about it — a grouse disturbed from the brambles, or even a chicken with its brood struck by the shadow of a circling hawk. As though day, like Wile E. Coyote, had just run off the edge of a cliff and was winding his legs in space, desperately trying to keep moving before falling into night. But there was something else too, something besides the surprise. Something that had the quality of a dimly lit stage set just before the curtains rise on opening night. There was a rhythm to it, a beckoning, and a bittersweet tear in time.
Ruins too held that tear in time, that melancholic yearning, when detritus clings obstinately to a past that can no longer be and yet is unable to fall into the disintegration of a new thing. A lonely feeling.
They drove through the desert, lost and turned around, for a couple of hours. Finally they pulled up to the outskirts of Troubadour. Sunil and Salazar were tense from the many unspoken things that haunted them both.
They edged past houses blown apart by time and neglect, and others held together by the obstinate will of a rusting hinge dangling a window, or a door leaning drunkenly against a lintel, while in places roofs collapsed politely like deflated soufflés. Past weeds that grew tall from floors, past rusted and stripped cars that still hugged driveways and street corners with the dogged belief of a Jehovah’s Witness awaiting the Rapture. They were both silent.
As the road they were on wound even farther away from the freeway, they rolled past a graveyard of signs — giant high-heeled pumps with CASINO printed on the side in pinks and garish purples, studded with holes where neon bulbs used to live; a blue-suited fat man with pince-nez glasses, ruddy cheeks, and a leering smile lying prone as though the giant doughnut in his hand had pulled him over; a rusting fairground ride with cracked teacups; a sign in chipped green glass with the legend CARLOS O’KELLY, AUTHENTIC IRISH MEXICAN FOOD under a shamrock from which a taco shell sprouted; a seven-foot-tall duckling mouth open in mid-squawk, wings spread wide, in a yellow so bright it hurt to look at, standing among a litter of dead trucks, like a bath toy thrown from a kraken’s bathtub; MOTEL, HOTEL, GOLDEN, LAS VEGAS, EMPIRE, fragments of signs lost in the glossolalia; and the creepiest thing either man had seen, a twenty-foot-tall corpulent king who seemed a cross between Santa Claus and Henry VIII, beckoning with one hand, maniacal eyes wide open and crazed, lips curled back to reveal large white enameled and rusting teeth.
What the fuck, Salazar said as they drove by.
It’s as if Vegas came here to die, Sunil said.
Well, I guess we are in the right place, Salazar said. Even the fucking art is about freaks.
The road veered right around a large rock, and when it opened up again, there was the town, spread out before them like a lingering death.
Fuck me, Salazar said.
Extending backward from Main Street was a town with a well-laid-out network of small streets, all lined by houses, or the remains of houses. A few tenacious trees hung around, but for the most part it was just desert chaparral. Some houses looked well maintained, even lived in, and several sprouted satellite dishes. Even from where they were, they could see an airstrip with a crashed plane covered in graffiti to one side. The faint sound of music came from the town, a solemn guitar strum and a plaintive voice. Salazar pulled to the side of the road under the WELCOME TO TROUBADOUR sign.
Do you hear that too, or is it just me?
I hear it, Sunil said. Why are we stopping?
I need a minute here. I mean, aren’t you creeped out by this? Plus, it’s getting dark.
All the more reason to press on and get out of here as soon as possible, Sunil said.
Okay, Salazar said, but he checked that his gun was loaded first.
Sunil smiled. It was always the loudmouths who were the cowards.
As they headed into town, the sky was an indescribable palette of colors that brought a lyrical tint to the reality below, so that the poverty appeared romantic, artistic, and chosen. It was an alchemy that made denial easy, an alchemy that Sunil was practiced in. How else could people live the way they did in South Africa when they were surrounded by the chaotic set designs of the townships and shanty towns that circled the hearts of cities like Johannesburg.
He was reminded for a moment of Eugene and his love for Dante and the circles of hell. He hated to admit it, but Eugene had been right in his choice of Inferno, except their interpretations differed. Where Eugene saw only the internal battle of the privileged soul, Sunil saw the entire architecture and structures of racism and apartheid: three concentric circles of life and economics. Color-coded circles for easy understanding, whites at the heart, coloreds at the next remove, and finally, the blacks at the outermost circle; the closest to hell — the strange inverse sense of apartheid.