Manuel Munoz - What You See in the Dark

Las Cuatro Copas isn’t the best cantina in town, but if you go there, you would do well to put on your best long skirt, the wider the better because there’s good music for dancing. Farther up Union Avenue is a grander space — a real nightclub — with a terrazzo dance floor so smooth you have to hang on tight to your partner to keep from slipping, and gorgeous dining rooms off to the sides with a full wait staff and a Los Angeles menu of roast beef and rib-eye steaks and Cornish hens. But Las Cuatro Copas does just fine by itself. It welcomes everyone, the little tables crowded as people sit to eat and drink until the kitchen closes at eight thirty. All the while, that girl comes around with plates of chicken legs and taquitos and bottles of beer, along with the check on a green slip of paper with her neat handwriting, and she collects the bills and brings everything over to Dan Watson, hurrying people along with their meals because the tables get put away for the dancing. Not enough space for a wide skirt to flow out full, and a wooden floor that sends up dust, but it’s dancing all the same. Friday nights or Sundays or Wednesdays, she’s there, handing the green slips of paper over to her boyfriend and waiting for the change, the two of them running the place smooth as smoke.

But you don’t have to go to the cantina to see all of that if jealousy gets to be too much. You can avert your gaze as they exit the supermarket, where he comes out holding two paper bags stuffed full of food. Or pretend not to see them loading boxes of tequila into the truck bed over at the discount liquor store. They show up everywhere: just a little west of Bakersfield, just far enough away from the city lights, is the local drive-in theater, a line of cars idling at the dusty entrance at sundown. A concession stand sits in the middle, and everyone goes there for big striped boxes of popcorn and hot dogs and candy, cradling everything close so only one trip is necessary. Horns beep whenever a car pulls in with its lights on, even though the sky is still lit orange with sundown and the double bill nowhere near beginning. Music comes in over the speakers, old big-band numbers that no one listens to anymore. Some couples sit out on the hoods after the engines have cooled down. The people returning from the concession stand darken to shadows as dusk finally breaks into night and the first feature starts, always something of mild interest: a monster movie with a beautiful blond raising her hands to her ears and screaming, then a pursuit with gunfire popping through the speakers all up and down the drive-in lot. Laughter carries across several cars, friends having spotted each other and walking over to say hello. Car trunks pop open quickly for six-packs to be brought out. By the end of the first film, night has settled in deep, and the drive-in lights up once more to help people make their way to the concession stand and the bathrooms, where the girls walk together in threes and edge for space at the mirrors, everyone finding out who came with whom.

She’s there, that girl. You looked for her among the faces surrounding the bathroom mirrors, but she was nowhere to be found. But you know she’s there — you spotted Dan Watson’s beautiful form gliding across the dusty lane toward the concession stand. He returns now to his pickup, just ahead, holding a box of popcorn in his hand and sporting a cowboy hat, his jeans taut, everything lean and hard the way he glides from one end of the windshield to the other before disappearing into the cab of his truck. That girl is the other shadow. He is handing her the box. Ten minutes later, the lot darkens and the second feature begins — a detective story. You can tell by the hat the lead actor is wearing. No one wears hats like that around here, unless they’re from Los Angeles. On-screen, a beautiful girl screams before a pair of anonymous hands close around her neck and she collapses as if struck by a sudden urge to sleep. She did not scream as terribly as the beautiful blond who was attacked by the monster in that other movie, but somehow it was more real, more probable, and enough to make you turn your head away and look out past the edge of the drive-in’s lot, the stretch of oil fields, the ring of mountains to the south and east of Bakersfield, to Los Angeles. Is that where the movie is set, where something like this could happen?

No one seems to care about questions like that, not by how the shadows in the cars ahead begin to blend together, one by one. Some stay separate, but most don’t. There’s been beer and slugs of whiskey and lipstick applied in the bathroom mirror and cigarettes and sweet talk. Hands on knees and short whispers and legs shaved that evening, baby smooth. All over town, getting ready, everyone knowing — or hoping — the evening would come to this, a lot of sweet talk in a dark car and the squeak of the vinyl as your polite date slides over. The taste of the beer in his mouth, slightly bitter, but sweet, too, the surprise that men taste sweet inside. All of them. Rough but sweet. Your hand on his cheek to feel the itch of his whiskers, what you can’t see but can feel. Forceful but sweet, and it’s that sweetness that calms the alarm about where his hands move, sometimes above the knee or underneath the hem at the back of your blouse, just two fingertips in that hollow space at the bottom of the spine. Forceful but gentle at the same time, his mouth moving to your neck, the smell of his hair, Prell shampoo just like your own. A moan escapes from your mouth, uncontrollable, because his weight is delicious and so is the thought that he’s leaving that sweet taste of his mouth on your skin. He reaches over to turn the knob down on the speaker, and the movie goes mute and you watch the screen while he’s occupied, the detective at a desk saying something into a phone, how you have to guess what he’s saying, the way you have to guess at everything in life — what you see and what you make of it, what you know for sure and what you have to experience, what others tell you and what gets confirmed.

You can see Dan over in his pickup truck. His shadow has merged with the other one, slipped into the same space, the passenger side of the cab. It is that girl. It must be. She knows that sweet taste, too, what that space in the hollow of his back feels like. A moan comes out of your mouth just from thinking about him, and here, in this dark car, this boy — earnest but inconsequential, strong but too sweet — hears your moan and lets his hands glide up, cautious, to the unworkable bridge of the bra hooks. There is patience and inexperience all over the drive-in, some hands retreating in defeat, and then there are others, like his, that manage and move quickly before being denied. On-screen, the detective lights a cigarette and seems to look out at all the cars. There is a woman whom the detective loves, too, but in the movie, you already know he’s going to have to wait to get to her. And still, it won’t be this, an earnest but inconsequential boy who is sweating at the brow from nerves and delirium, his mouth impatient at each nipple. He has never felt a pair of breasts before, not by the way his hands clamor underneath your bra. He has to learn to open the blouse completely first, how to caress buttons. He has to learn to be gentle and enjoy the feel of skin, give pleasure instead of just taking it. But right now, his eyes round out, dewy and unblinking at his first sight of rosy nipples. He is twenty-three but still a boy. He puts his mouth on each nipple and has to have his hand guided to your other breast. You reach down to feel him because this is what he wants, what he needs, and there’s just the sound now of months and months of his desires finally being met. He’s doing the moaning now, the teenage voice from years ago stuck in his throat as his thick cowboy belt buckle gets undone for him and the top button released. He wore brand-new underwear — the elastic is too tight — and there is his warm thickness. It’s enormous and probably beautiful, but he’s too young and inexperienced to know that yet. His stomach is coated with that familiar stickiness and he rests his forehead on the car door while he’s fondled. Who can tell what he is thinking, a soft hand stroking him hard enough that he actually has to pull away, but keeping his forehead on the door as if he’s ashamed? The detective on the screen is giving chase along the dark streets of a city, but no one cares about the pursuit. A car just ahead is bobbing ever so slightly. There is nothing wrong with wanting like this. Even better with a young man of twenty-three, still mired in shame: he won’t be bragging to anyone, still thinking what he’s doing is dirty, and you can go back to work at the shoe store with no one ever gossiping about you. His hands have to be brought down to the wet warmth that he’s never come close to, even in his imagination, his fingers guided around and inside. He’s a sweet boy, but you know, after he drops you off, that he’ll be smelling those fingers all the way home.