James Hynes - Next

“You get used to it,” she says.

“Sorry?”

“The heat.”

A silence descends, like an awkward pause on a first date. There’s something about the furrowing of her forehead, about her headrest-squeezing and her gunning of the accelerator, that tells him her mind’s on something other than her passenger and his tolerance for the Texas climate. He recognizes distraction, because Stella is always carrying on a conversation with herself in her head. Sometimes in the car, when they’re riding without talking, she gestures suddenly; sometimes her lips move silently. Or she’ll say quietly to herself, “Uh huh” or “That’s right,” with a sharp little nod. Times like this Kevin thinks of her as wandering in the Stella Continuum, and early on he learned not to disturb her, because when he has, she’s started with a wild look in her eye, as frightened, and frightening, as a sleepwalker jolted awake. (Actually waking her up at night, in fact, from one of her feverish nightmares, is even scarier.) So he knows better than to say anything to this intense woman he’s only just met. Instead, instinctively, he does what he usually does when Stella’s lost in the Stella Continuum.

“Cartridge World,” he says absently, reading the first sign he sees, a big, square yellow one.

“Sorry?”

“That sign.” Kevin gestures, Claudia glances. Cartridge World glides by, a narrow storefront with tinted windows.

“I think I’m having a Texas moment,” he says.

“Right.” She nods slowly. “Everybody in Texas drives a pickup and carries a gun.”

Kevin gestures palms up to encompass the cab of the truck. “Pickup,” he says. Tips his head back toward the shop, dwindling in the rear window. “Cartridge World.”

“They sell toner,” she says. “Printer cartridges.”

“Ah.” Repeat after me: KYMS, KYMS, KYMS.

“You’ll pardon my saying so,” says Claudia, “but you seem to be a man who jumps to conclusions.”

“Actually,” he says, “I’m not. I mean, I don’t. Jump to conclusions. Not usually. It’s just…”

He’s not even sure what he means to say. Lamar winds through a series of slow curves, still climbing slightly. Trees with bristling little leaves crowd close to the road again, and now there are actual houses along the street, little one-story bungalows, decades old. Most of them are small, funky businesses now: a hair and nail salon, a chiropractor, a pawnshop that advertises PAYDAY LOANS. A colorfully hip vintage shop, an immigration lawyer named Gonzalez. A psychic palm reader — as opposed to what, Kevin wonders, a nonpsychic palm reader? — whose hand-painted sign declares that she can HABLA ESPAÑOL. Just beyond that he sees a billboard in Español— La nueva AT&T —and an exterminator’s sign that features a giant, brown, neon cockroach, all legs and antennae, unlit and unwriggling at midday. And then he sees another Mexican restaurant, an unlit neon sign with a stepped Mayan pyramid and the name MEXICO LINDO in red tubing. The phrase rings in his head in Dolby surround sound — it’s a line from The Wild Bunch, but he can’t remember who says it. Not William Holden or Ernest Borgnine, certainly not Warren Oates or Ben Johnson. No, it was the fifth guy, the Mexican member of the gang. The first time Kevin saw the film, he watched a bootleg print of the director’s cut on the Michigan campus during his Big Star days. Saw it with McNulty, in fact, who slumped in his seat next to Kevin in the back row and laughed quietly to himself all the way through the orgy of carnage at the end. Kevin’s seen it half a dozen times since on VHS and DVD, but he still remembers that raucous, grainy, badly focused first viewing, a film co-op screening attended mainly by whooping, drunken engineering students, who cheered at the end when Holden shot the beautiful señorita who’d just shot him, and called her, “ Bitch. ” What was that character’s name, the Mexican guy? The one whose cut throat was the incitement for all that subsequent bloodshed, the wholesale slaughter of peasants, little boys, and women? The whole situation made him uncomfortable at the time, and makes him uncomfortable still, and the best he can do in defense of it is to put it in the context of when he saw it and who he saw it with. And where he saw it: Auditorium A, Angell Hall. That’s it! That was the guy’s name! Angel! The Mexican in the bunch, the guy they went back to rescue from the bandit warlord at the end. Angel says “ Mexico lindo ” near the beginning of the film, as they leave Texas and cross the Rio Grande. The Rrrio Grrran-day. “ Meh-hee-co leen-do, ” Angel says. Lovely Mexico.

But Kevin can’t point that out, because he doesn’t want to be seen jumping to conclusions again, doesn’t want to tell this touchy Latina who grew up on the border that everything he knows about Mexican culture comes from the films of Sam Peckinpah. He might as well invoke Speedy Gonzales or the Taco Bell Chihuahua, might as well tell her, “We don’ need no steenking badges.” His default liberal guilt and his native midwestern decency jerk him short like a leash. But he can’t help what he’s thinking, and right now he feels like he’s riding into another country — a hot, dusty, sun-blanched place with immigration lawyers and bilingual palm readers and corporate billboards in Spanish and leaves that bristle like blades and giant neon cockroaches and palm trees. Sweaty, dehydrated, and enervated, his torn trousers flapping wide over his bandaged knee, Kevin feels like Humphrey Bogart as Fred C. Dobbs in either the first twenty minutes or the last twenty minutes of The Treasure of Sierra Madre; all he needs is two days of stubble and the shakes. But he can’t tell Claudia any of this, either. Oh Christ, thinks Kevin, his liberal guilt cinching tighter, she’s right. I do jump to conclusions.

“It’s just what?” says Claudia.

“You know how it is when you’re in a strange city?” His voice shoots up an octave, which he hates, but he can’t stop himself. “It’s like you’re fourteen years old again, big and gawky and clueless. You know? Everything you normally take for granted, in fact everything that everybody around you is taking for granted, you have to stop and think about. You know what I mean?”

“Hm,” she says.

Of course, Claudia — Dr. Barrientos, that is — has probably never felt defenseless or clueless in her entire life. Or if she has, she’d never admit to it.

“It’s just that here I am, in Texas, where I never thought I’d be, and I’m seeing all this stuff I just don’t see at home — Cartridge World and palm trees and that neon cockroach we just passed and all these Mexican restaurants…”

Shouldn’t have said that, of course, but just then he points excitedly through the windshield at yet another Mexican restaurant, this one with a line of fraying palms around the edge of its parking lot.

“And Mexican restaurants with palm trees!” He’s laughing now, he knows he sounds like an idiot, but she’s laughing, too, at his excitement, if nothing else. “And I try to link it all with what I bring with me from Michigan, and what little I know about Texas. Which is, of course, mostly clichés and stereotypes.” He’s gesturing with both hands now, which makes him even more self-conscious. “So of course I get everything wrong, and not only that, I get it wrong in front of a native Texan. Who’s been very kind to me. Which only makes me feel more like a fish out of water. Like I’m fourteen years old all over again.”

Breathlessly he stops and lets his hands drop. At least he didn’t mention The Wild Bunch. He’s almost afraid to look at her, but when he does, he sees that she’s still smiling.