Denis Johnson - Nobody Move

“Where you calling from?”

“From the pay phone right outside where you’re sitting.”

“The fuck you are.”

“I’m right out here on Fourth, señor, with Gambol’s Winchester under my big old shirt. I’m looking right at you.”

Juarez was talking to somebody else now — probably

sending the Tall Man outside to verify. “Where you from, Luntz — Luntzville? You ain’t nothing but a little

puto

.”

“Gambol said something similar. Then I blew him up.”

“Guess what? He didn’t die.”

“Yeah, I didn’t think so.”

“Listen to me, Luntz. Do you remember this fucker Cal from Anaheim, they called him Cal Trans?”

“Yeah, sure, I heard all about that stuff.”

“Gambol and I sat down and made a meal of his balls. Anaheim oysters. Very tasty.”

“I heard all about it, yeah.”

“What about Luntzville? They make pretty good oysters there?”

Luntz said, “Best oysters in the world, Juarez,” and hung up.

She woke on the riverbank with rain falling on her face. She got up and closed herself inside the car. Burrowed into the big blue coat. Woke some time later stiff and cold, having slept deeply and freely.

She found the key and fired it up. Turned on the AM radio and caught a country station drifting over from Sparks, Nevada, while the engine warmed and the defroster blew the mist off the glass. Giant night of stars out there. She headed onto the highway.

The man from Sparks said it was 10:00 p.m. She’d

slept like the dead for nearly four hours. Eighteen months she’d spent fighting the judge and Hank, politicking the sheriff and the town council and harrying her lawyers and working the press, campaigning against the inevitable. Now it was over. Time for a long vacation. Not that she could afford even a short one.

At the lounge at the Ramada near the county airport she ordered a second tequila sunrise as the waitress delivered the first one. “And please, please,” she said, “don’t turn on the karaoke.”

“I’ll wait till eleven,” the girl said.

“Just wait till I’m gone.”

“Happy Hour starts at eleven.”

“Then I’m working on a deadline.”

Why do they call it happy, and why do they say it’s an hour? Happy Hour lasts two miserable hours. Aah, she thought — who am I talking to? And how many seconds till some asshole offers to buy me a drink and make me a satisfied woman?

Approximately eighteen seconds. The same skinny guy from the river — the one who’d tossed the gun to the currents — coming back from the pay phone and toilets, now sporting a checkered vest and white tux over his T-shirt. He paused beside her booth. Exactly the cheap bastard for whom the two-dollar window was invented.

“Hey, there,” he said.

“Very suave. You silver-tongued devil.”

“Are you a resident of this motel, or just a patron?”

“I’m not anything,” she said. “I’m having a drink.”

He dropped something, a quarter, stooped to pick it up, dropped it, picked it up again, and stood looking around him as if the room had changed drastically in the two seconds he’d had his eyes off it. Not drunk. A little too vibrant for drunk.

He perched himself on the very outermost corner of the seat across from her, saying, “I don’t usually just walk up and sit down with people.”

“Help yourself. I was just leaving.”

He peered at her, nearsighted or stupid, she couldn’t tell which, and said, “What is your nationality?”

“What?”

“Are you a Spic?”

She stared. “Yeah. I am. Are you an asshole?”

“Mostly,” he said.

“What’s your name?”

He said, “Uh.”

“Uh? What is Uh? Lithuanian or something?”

“You’re witty,” he said. “My name’s Frank. Franklin.”

“Frankie Franklin,” she said, “I have a lot on my mind right now, and I’d like to be alone.”

“No problemo,” he said, and kind of oozed out of the booth and dematerialized.

The barmaid brought her a second tequila sunrise while she ordered a third. “Hey, miss,” Anita said, “when do we get this karaoke rolling?”

Luntz watched it all unwind. The woman was the hit of the evening, at least in her own opinion. She sat on a stool she’d dragged from the bar and placed exactly next to the karaoke contraption, nobody daring to interfere with this spectacle — singing half a song and talking through the rest of it and selecting another through two hours of encores, but nobody called for them.

She wore a blue coat over the same gray skirt and white blouse he’d seen her in that afternoon by the river. A good-looking woman. With or without makeup, in any style of clothes, drunk or sober. “Thank you very much, I love this town!” she said many, many times.

She stopped reading the lyrics on the screen and made up her own instead, and then stopped singing the melodies and made those up too, closing her eyes and riffing about a guy named Hank who walked with the devil.

“That woman needs a pill,” the waitress said.

Luntz disagreed. “Man,” he said, “she breaks your heart.”

Once in a while Luntz went out to smoke a cigarette under the stars. The rest of the time he stood by the cash-out playing the scratch-off instant lottery, rubbing one by one at the numbers in a stack an inch thick, tossing the losers on the counter till he had quite a pile. He spent eighty bucks and made back sixty-five.

By 1:00 a.m. she’d cleared the place out and was just drinking and muttering into the microphone while the waitress chatted with the barmaid.

“I believe,” the woman said into her microphone, with plenty of reverb, “that’s Frankie Franklin over there. He’s piling up them lotto tix.”

He raised a hand high and gave her a thumbs-up.

“What is Frankie about to do with them lotto tix? Make himself a little bonfire?”

She punched buttons on the machine and after thirty seconds of music jumped onto the chorus—“Come on baby light my fi-yer! Come on baby light my fi-yer!” She stopped singing and her gaze drifted down and sideways, and she smiled at nothing.

Luntz walked over. “Can I ask a favor? I need a ride.”

“You do?”

“I do. I really do.”

“Where’s Frankie’s Cadillac?”

“Oh. The Caddy. Yeah.”

“I saw you by the river, Frankie. Remember?”

“I wouldn’t forget seeing you.”

“Caddy end up in the river too?”

“It was a loaner. So how about a ride to my motel?”

“Call a cab.”

“I was thinking you’d be quicker.”

“Which motel?”

“The Log Inn over there.”

“Across the parking lot? Very funny.”

“I’m witty, too, just like you.”

“The Log Inn. Doesn’t the wood stink when it’s wet?”

“So how about a ride?”

“I don’t drive a cab. Hey, Frankie. Let me buy a round. What are you drinking?”

“This is a Diet Coke.”

“Don’t you drink?”

He paused for a good little while before he answered.

“I gamble,” he said.

“And what about for a living? If it’s not too forward of me. What do you do?”

“I gamble. I gamble.”

“What’s the point of gambling?”

“I didn’t realize there had to be a point.”

“This is starting to sound like one of those messed-up conversations,” she said.

“You could get me a can of beer, but I probably wouldn’t finish it. My stomach burns easy. I can’t even drink coffee.”

She raised her mike to her lovely mouth and looked over at the waitress and said, “I better have some coffee myself. Black, please.” Up close, in somber light, he couldn’t say if she was supposed to be a Mexican or Hawaiian or some semi-Filipino mutt.