Claire Watkins - Battleborn - Stories

Michele shifts his weight from one foot to the other, the bulky white Nikes he bought at an outdoor shopping mall in Los Angeles looking too bright, like the shoes of a character on a children’s television program. He looks over the papers he was handed, front and back, absently pushing his hair from his eyes. He recognizes vocabulary words but can’t make sense of them in these odd couplings. Straight Lay. Chair Party. Reversed Half-and-Half. Not for the first time since he arrived in America four weeks ago, he wishes he had taken his language classes more seriously.

He turns to the man who answered the door — who, it seems, has been talking incredibly fast. Michele tries to explain himself but doesn’t have the English. He makes useless gestures with his big hands and says finally, “No, ah, I am not… I am Italian.”

“That’s okay,” Manny says, his hand on the boy’s shoulder.

This, Michele understands. “Okay,” he replies.

“Have a drink.” Manny shows him across the room to the bar.

“Ah, yes. A drink.” Finally. “I like Budweiser. How do you say, King of Beer?”

• • •

Manny doesn’t card him. It’s a slow night, better to keep him around than lose the customer. Better for business. You never make money on people leaving you. Jim taught him that.

Most of the girls see no business in the scared-looking teenager and return to the karaoke machine they’d paused when the doorbell rang. But Darla, Army Amy, and Lacy follow him to the bar. Manny fixes them their drinks. They jostle sweetly for a place at the boy’s elbows, but Darla jostles sweetest.

“How do you say your name?” she asks, leaning into him.

“ Meh-kay-lay ,” he says, drumming the syllables on the bar with his long middle finger.

“Meh-kay-lay. Like that?”

“That is it.” He bends to kiss her hand. “Very smart lady.”

Darla reddens. “Shut the fuck up.”

“What is…?”

“‘Shut the fuck up’? It’s like ‘be quiet,’ or ‘I don’t believe you.’”

“Who you don’t believe?”

“You,” she says.

“No, you,” he says. “You shut the fuck up.”

The boy drinks steadily. He pays for each beer with a smooth new twenty, gesturing for Manny to keep the change. Later, after the boy has gone, Manny will overhear Lacy and Darla gossiping in the hallway. Lacy will say, “Jeez. That kid must have spent eighty bucks on Budweiser.”

Darla will correct her. “A hundred and twenty.”

At the bar the girls ask Michele all about Italy, the fashion, the tiny cars, the Mafia. They make like they hang on his every word, but if you were to run into one of these girls on her next day out in Nye, at the grocery store or having a smoke outside Serendipity, not one would be able to tell you a thing about the climate of Milan or where Michele was when Italy won the World Cup. Because while he is talking they stare at him and nod in all the right places but think only this: Pick me, pick me. Oh, God, let him pick me .

Manny hasn’t been much better. He lets his eyes rest on the boy too often, watching that full flush mouth having trouble with its English. The hands. The curve of the chest. He polishes the same pint glass for five minutes, sets it down, then picks it up again. He needs to keep busy or his thoughts slide into forbidden territory. Is it the heat that does it, or the dehydration? What does forty-eight hours without water do to a body?

He can’t take it anymore. He sets the gleaming pint glass on the bar too loudly. “What were you doing out there?”

• • •

Michele tells them in slow, hesitant English how he lost Renzo. They’d gone to see the endangered desert pupfish, which their guidebook said live only at Devil’s Hole, a supposedly bottomless geothermal spring outside Nye. “ Foro del diavolo ,” Renzo had said, the danger dancing in his eyes.

But Devil’s Hole was not anything, Michele says now, only a bathtub-size pool of hot water in the middle of nowhere, the rare fish just guppy-looking glimmers in the shadows. Renzo thought so, too. At the spring he was ill-tempered, railing that their entire trip had been ruined. He suggested — no, insisted — that they at least salvage the day by hiking out to the nearby sand dunes. “Go without me,” Michele had wanted to say. But he could see the ochre peaks of the dunes swooping across the horizon; they seemed that close. And there was a trail even, meandering through the crumbly bentonite hills. Renzo had complained of this too, the trail; he wanted authentic desert, pristine wilderness. He kept asking, “Why must Americans turn everything into an advertisement?” That was the last thing Michele heard him say.

They’d been hiking only an hour, Renzo charging forward, Michele struggling to keep up, neither speaking to the other. Michele stopped to take a drink of water, to shake a rock from his shoe. When he stood up, his friend was gone.

He called for Renzo to wait, but there was no answer. He spit on the ground and watched the earth swallow the moisture. It was too hot for this. He followed the trail back and waited for Renzo in the air-conditioned rental car. But Renzo never came.

• • •

And we, ah, are, ah, separate,” the boy says.

“You were separated,” Manny says.

“Now, I wait.” He nods to the bar, the brothel, the girls, as if they all have some arrangement.

“Wait for what?” Amy asks dully.

Michele is quiet for a moment, looking down at his large hands. “I wait, ah, for my friend,” he says. “For his return.”

Darla says, “Oh, you poor thing,” and puts her arms around his neck. She says, “Don’t you worry; they’ll find him.” She can probably smell him there, his cologne, his hotel soap. Cheap beer. Clean sweat. Salt.

Michele takes a swig of his Budweiser. “Yes, yes,” he says, then swallows. “Then I go home. With Renzo.”

Michele doesn’t go back with Darla that night. It’s slow. Geoff comes for Chyna, and afterward he presents her with another gift, a hideous gold-plated charm bracelet. Amy and Bianca take care of a pair of mortgage brokers from New Jersey, in Vegas for a conference. But Michele and Darla simply sit at the bar, talking. Under normal circumstances this would piss Manny off, one of his girls spending an entire evening with a man without taking him back. Under normal circumstances he would sit her down in his office and tell her, “You know I don’t like being the bad guy, but at the end of the day I don’t give two shits about making friends. Because, honey, if you don’t get paid, I don’t get paid, okay? Ask for the fucking order.”

That’s the way it has to be. These bitches would run all over him if he let them.

But tonight circumstances aren’t normal. Tonight the thought of Darla — or any of the girls — taking the Italian back to a trailer for an hour, maybe two, makes him feel sick with something like jealousy. It must be pure hormones — he hasn’t been laid in longer than he’d like to admit. Or perhaps it’s the terribly familiar way the boy looks at Darla, his face flushed with booze and all the want and wonder of a child. He’s seen that look before, on men two and three times this kid’s age, men who knew better. He’s seen Darla take everything they were willing to give, and more. That’s what he’s always loved about her.

When the cab honks in the parking lot at five a.m., Manny helps the drunk, sweet-faced boy down the front steps. As the sun comes up, he stands alone on the porch and watches the red taillights of the taxi shrink down Homestead Road, then up the hill toward Vegas. There’s nothing but the lolling violet mountain range and spiny yucca and creosote and that taut ribbon of road as far as the eye can see. Poor Renzo doesn’t have a chance out here, and sooner or later that beautiful boy is going to realize it.