Marian Palaia - Given World

Rumor has it there’s a good boyfriend somewhere, sometimes, but he doesn’t seem to be a very effective one, so Cole dismisses him. The bad boyfriend doesn’t dismiss so easily.

No one ever sees the guy, since he doesn’t come into the bar, but Cole is sure he’s seen evidence of him. Riley won’t cop to it, though. She cops to running into things, like doors, cops to falling down. “I was so drunk,” she’ll say, as if this too is the start of some kind of a joke. Sometimes Cole wishes he had a gun and the backbone to use it, or knew some really badass guys who would rough the fucker up, make him stop, but thinking like that makes him feel out of his league, not to mention ridiculous. His only choice is to be there as much as possible, to take her mind off whatever bad thing happened last.

Riley doesn’t seem overly surprised when Cole tells her where Lu got off the bus.

“Her favorite corner,” she says, like she’s saying “Her favorite burrito place.” She bites her lip, taps Cole a big Anchor Steam and herself a little one, and goes outside to smoke a cigarette. Cole goes with her. They sit on the back stairs, from where they can see the bar, see if anyone wants anything, but it’s still pretty slow.

“What is it,” Cole says, “with you and Lu?”

Riley laughs. “You mean are we an item?”

“I don’t think that’s what I mean. Are you?”

“No.”

“What, then?”

“UFFUs.”

“What’s a UFFU?”

“Unidentified Flying Fuckup. Want to join the club?” She laughs, and it is not quite the unhappy sound he expects.

“Sure,” he says.

She wraps her arms around his neck, submerges her face in his chest. “You can be our mascot.” He doesn’t know what to do with his hands. He sets his beer down next to him to see if maybe they’ll figure something out on their own, find some landing place that maybe won’t freak her out, but before any of that can happen, she lets go and stands up, drains her beer, and pours the last drops over the railing into the scruffy garden. As soon as she gets five feet into the dark bar, he can’t even see her anymore.

Time passes, but it does not fly. Lu appears. Lu disappears. “Like magic!” Cole says, and Riley rolls her eyes and shakes her head. He doesn’t care. He is still alive. She still loves him.

One night in winter, when Lu has called an extended runner, and Riley’s boyfriend has taken off with all her cash and left his fingerprints on her arms in purple to match the black eye, and she has given Cole every shot of Beam he’s asked for and gone shot for shot with him and the bar closes, somehow, magically, all by itself, they end up on the pool table. Their clothes come off and the next thing Cole knows they are fucking and he is well over the moon, sober almost from the sheer relief of her legs around him, her hands somehow on his hip bones, her mouth her mouth her mouth. “Baby,” he says, next to it, into it.

“Don’t talk,” Riley says. “Shhhhh.”

He moans, collapses. Riley bites his shoulder, but not hard. More like an afterthought.

He moves to her side and decorates her with an array of shiny pool balls, placing them strategically on and around her body. He finds her scars. Shows her his. Riley points out constellations on the ceiling, as if the stars are really there. Wearing each other’s clothes, they head for the panhandle.

Riley gets pulled over on the way back, blows a 2-something, tells the cop to go fuck himself, and they keep her ’til she sobers up and the boyfriend himself comes down to throw her bail.

“You should have called me, ” Cole says the next day, when she tells him about it, how considerate and attentive the boyfriend was, how sweet, how good the Bloody Marys tasted down at the Ramp.

“Right,” Riley says. “You don’t have a phone number. Or money.”

“I’ll get a phone,” he says. “I’ll get a job, and a place. We can move in together.”

Riley looks at him, slowly shakes her head. “Not gonna happen, kid.” She says it as gently (he knows) as she knows how. It still sounds like yelling to him.

He wants to yell back, but it is not in him. “Why not?”

They are sitting at the bar, with one bar stool between them. “For starters, you are too young for me. And you are too nice.” She is tracing someone else’s initials carved into the wood. “I’m a hot mess, honey. I’m the last thing you need.”

For a second, he thinks he hears something in her voice, some chink he can break through, but when he looks her jaw is set, and, if anything, she looks like she’s miles away — from this place, from him. Like he’s the last thing on her mind.

Finally, she faces him again and smiles. The word he is looking for is “rueful.”

“How do you like them apples?” she says.

“I hate them apples.”

She stands up and kisses the top of his head. “I do too,” she says as she pulls her bar towel from her pocket and starts wiping down already-clean tables.

Cole walks to the pool table to prowl its perimeter. “What about this?” He motions at the felt, never looking at Riley.

“That,” she says, “was a whole lot of fun. You’re a whole lot of fun, sweetie. You’re a doll. You’re the best. You’re a champ.”

“A champ ?”

“Yup.”

“Fuck that,” he says. And leaves. Halfway down the block, he turns to see if she’s coming after him, but she’s just standing out front looking up at the sky, like she’s waiting for something good to fall out of it.

When he gets to Mission Street, Lu is getting off the bus. She says, “I had a dream about you. My cat was in it.”

“You have a cat?”

“No. Listen. Shut up.”

He leans against the brick wall of the restaurant on the corner. He waits.

“It was weird,” Lu says.

All dreams, he thinks, are weird. Life is fucking weird . But he doesn’t say it. Because it’s too obvious.

“You died,” Lu says. “They brought the coroner’s van, and they took you away. I missed you. I was sad and I forgot what color your eyes were. I had to ask my cat.”

He doesn’t like anything about this dream so far. “Your cat you don’t have,” he says.

“Yeah,” Lu says. “That one.”

“So what did the cat say?”

“ Azul, ” she says. Just like she said it the first time, stretching it until it won’t stretch anymore. It sounds like the low howl of a coyote at moonrise. Somewhere in the unbreakable heart of the oblivious desert.

“I feel like someone’s put a torch to me,” Lu sighs, from the floor, as if there’s something appealing about that notion. I lie down on the cool, scarred hardwood next to her but don’t touch, my toes an inch from her ankle, stretching into her and away at the same time. I suspect she really would like to be on fire, that she would be pissed if I put her out. We are a pair, not a couple, mostly because I am still (stubbornly, she says) straight, still like boys despite the improbability of surviving them, and she may be too wild anyway, even for me. We are in Oakland, during a string of rare ninety-degree days, because we are out on a pass of sorts and because it is necessary for us to be here, as opposed to the city across the bay, where in our world people and their lives simply come apart, and we can’t seem to do a thing to stop them.

It’s August and too hot to touch, skin to skin, too hot to even think about outside. Outside is where you go when you are being punished, at least until dark; then inside is punishment, jungly and fierce. Equatorial, like Papua New Guinea.

She pronounces it Pa-POO-Ah. Irian Jaya, she tells me, is its other half. She starts meandering around peninsulas and archipelagoes — Indonesia, Malaysia — comes creeping up on Burma and the Irrawaddy.