Claire Watkins - Battleborn

The driver waits for an answer. God knows Michele can afford another run. Nevada Search & Rescue have given him a debit card for his living expenses. They said the money would come from the embassy, because he was foreign, that it was a loophole, a word he had to look up. The room he and Renzo had been sharing at the La Quinta on Tropicana was covered too. But before they’d explained all that, before they’d handed him the debit card, they gave him an international phone card and asked him to call Renzo’s parents and explain what had happened. They were sorry to ask that of him, they said, but none of them spoke the language. An officer showed him to a little room with a phone on a desk beside a stained instant-coffee machine. The officer said Michele had better advise Renzo’s parents to fly to the U.S. Then he shut the door softly behind him.

Michele wove the coils of the phone cord between his fingers for a moment. Then he lifted the phone, input the codes from the phone card, and dialed his own parents instead. His mother answered and asked whether everything was okay. She sounded more exposed than a mother ought to. He told her yes, everything was fine. More lies came warmly to him then. “Actually, something happened,” he said in Italian. He told his mother he’d left his wallet out on the beach in Los Angeles and someone had taken his money. Not his ID, just the money. His mother comforted him. She teased him gently for being so naive. She thanked God that it was only that. She said she would have his father wire him more spending money. I love you, his mother said before she hung up. Be good.

Afterward, the officer returned and set his hand kindly on Michele’s shoulder. He nodded at the phone and said, “We appreciate that.” Michele said nothing.

The next morning, Michele used the debit card he’d been given at the ATM in the gas station across from the motel. He halfheartedly withdrew stacks of twenties until the machine beeped and spit out a warm, smooth sheet of paper. On his walk across the parking lot he was dully surprised to count five hundred dollars in his palm. Once in his room, he used his pocket dictionary to translate the words from the sheet of paper, eventually understanding that five hundred dollars was the maximum amount he was permitted to withdraw in a single day.

Since then, Michele has gone to the gas station every morning, buying a sugary Honey Bun and a squat carton of orange juice and withdrawing another five hundred dollars. Each morning he expects the machine to reject the card. If confronted about the money, he plans to say it was an accident, that he was confused about the machine or the currency, and hand the rest of it over.

On good days, he looks forward to spending the money on very good pot and Ecstasy that he and Renzo will take in the Grand Canyon. Even now, in the back of the cab, he imagines Renzo’s face flickered by a campfire, the Colorado River sliding by. Renzo laughs hard at something, barely able to get his words out. A girl sits beside him, laughing too, and looking at Michele lovingly, with silver glitter dancing around her eyes.

“Tell it again,” they are begging in Italian, tears rolling down their cheeks. “Tell us how you fucked the American cops for all their money.”

“Yes,” Michele says to the cabdriver now. “Please, you will come tomorrow?”

So the next day, as the streetlights come on and the shadows of the mountains grow long through the city, the taxicab returns and takes exit thirty-three west, spiriting Michele from Las Vegas up and over the Spring Mountains, out of that valley always saturated with light.

Manny watches from the peacock coop as a pair of headlights turn off the highway. Hot, immediate hope for the Italian boy blooms inside him, though he knows enough about the tricks of lust and loneliness to recognize his thoughts as pure fantasy. He returns to the birds; Gladys can handle the lineup. But soon, over the scrape of his rake against the gravel, he hears the front door open and the breeze carries to him the familiar squeals of surprise that Darla releases for all her regulars.

Manny stops in his trailer to change his shirt, wipe the sweat from his forehead and armpits with a bouquet of toilet paper, and reapply deodorant. By the time he steps into the main house, Darla is refilling Michele’s Budweiser. She flits and chatters around him like a hummingbird, finally perching herself on the upholstered stool beside him. Her legs dangle, not reaching the floor even with the added inches of her slick, clear-plastic heels.

“Did you go to the oh-six Olympics?” she asks. “In Turin?”

“Oh, ah, no.” Michele laughs. “I live far from there. But I watch on the TV.”

“Hella,” says Darla. “I love the Olympics. I like the Summer Olympics best, swimming, diving, all of it. I would love to go sometime. I’ve never been to Europe. I’ve been to Mexico, Canada, Australia, and Costa Rica, but never Europe.” This is a lie, one Manny must have heard a thousand times. Aside from the year she spent stripping in L.A., the girl’s barely traveled as far as Lake Havasu for spring break. But the line impresses tourists and townies alike. They’re pleased by the prospect of bedding a cosmopolitan whore.

“Yes, Europe is the best place for to visit. Take the train, when you go. The train is best.”

“You know, if you had enough fucking money, and spent it, like, in one of those weird sports like riflery or table tennis or the ribbon routine—shit like that—anyone could be an Olympian. That’s what I’m gonna do. Get a good trainer, a famous one, fucking quit my job.”

She babbles on like that, and the boy seems to like it. That’s the difference between the ranch and a strip club. Here, some men come in just to talk. Sure, they want a piece of ass so bad that they’re coming out of their skin to pay for it. But there’s something that brings out the lonesomeness in them. Maybe it’s being so far from civilization. Manny’s heard them afterward, over the intercom. Old men, young men, men with wives or steady girlfriends, men who’ve never had anybody in their whole pathetic lives. They listen to their date chatter until the hour is up, and when she reaches for her clothes or the white wedge of towel on the nightstand to wipe herself, they hold her tightly and say, so softly it might be mistaken for a blip of static over the wires, Wait .

The Italian returns the next night, and the next. Manny watches him and Darla get closer. They talk at the bar, then huddled together on the couch in the lobby, then with their feet dipped in the pool, splitting pomegranates on the concrete and spitting the seeds and pith into the dirt.

The other girls are talking. One morning before bed, Amy’s voice spills from the hall bathroom. “If Michele was one of these old farts, Manny would have pried him from that girl’s titty on day one. He’s just glad to finally have some ass around here.”

Jim would not stand for this. But Manny cannot bring himself to throw the kid out. Amy is right: He likes having Michele around, and, yes, a part of him thinks, Why not me ? His last hookup—in the hot soak room at the Tecopa baths, Mormon crickets shrieking in the eaves—was a forlorn, unmemorable thing, as all since Jim have been.

Manny spends more and more time out with his birds, away from the trouble swelling indoors. He knows he can’t go on ignoring it forever, but he tries. He scrubs the salt deposits from the water troughs, hand-feeds the birds sardines and apple slices, and watches them strip a whole cooked chicken to the bone. He rakes and rakes the sand as the sun comes up, drawing intricate patterns like the monks on a show he saw once, as if the dirt were an offering to God.