James Hynes - Next

“Good thing we didn’t drive up South Congress,” she says. “There’s a store there called Just Guns.”

Kevin’s laughter doesn’t lessen the ache of his alienation. Moving here would mean that he’d feel fourteen years old for months, maybe even years, before he became acclimated to Texas. All along the street for the last few minutes, between the bungalows and under the trees, he’s seen several one- and two-bay specialty garages of cinderblock, where, repair by repair, you can remake your aging auto until it’s been rebuilt from the treads up — replace your muffler, rebuild your transmission, reline your brakes, rotate your tires. Change the oil in fifteen minutes, precision tune the engine in thirty, tint the windows, customize the audio. A collision shop, a paint-and-body shop, reconditioned auto parts. And the funky little businesses in the bungalows in between offer to rebuild and customize Kevin himself: he could get his hair and nails done; he could be tanned, tattooed, and pierced; he could lose weight under the supervision of a physician. He could bulk up or slim down; he could have his teeth whitened and his vision laser-sharpened; he could have his bones chiropractically manipulated; he could have his aura read and his fortune told in two languages. He and his Honda Accord could start at one end of Lamar, and shop by shop, repair by repair, treatment by treatment, they could weave helically past each other from one side of the street to the other, until, at the far end — wherever and whenever that was — they would be remade as Texans, like the ship of Theseus, plank by plank and oar by oar, until the question becomes, is it the same ship any longer? Remade as a Texan, would Kevin be the same man any more? Does he even want to be? And is it even possible to remake a fifty-year-old man? Or has he been remade once too often already?

Kevin’s still laughing, though.

“I’m sorry,” he says. “Is ranting a sign of heatstroke?”

“Not usually,” says Dr. Barrientos. “Fear of palm trees, though…” She wobbles her hand in the air between them. “And Mexican restaurants,” she adds. “What have you got against Mexicans?”

She says “Mexican” now with the hard X like a Norte Americano. He can’t tell if she’s being polite or condescending or both.

“Tell you what,” Kevin says, full of surprises, “you pick the place and I’ll buy you lunch.” He peeks at his watch; there’s two and a half hours yet until his interview.

Another silence, but not so awkward. Or at least awkward in a different way. Watching her sidelong he’s pretty sure she’s thinking it over.

“I’m not really dressed for it,” she says. “And I need a shower.”

“Look at me.” Kevin plucks at his wilted shirt, the knee of his torn trousers. “I look like I just survived a terrorist attack.”

Their gazes cross obliquely across the cab of the truck, neither quite looking at the other. Even here, light years from Glasgow, there’s a little Buchanan Street frisson between them.

“I appeal to your Hippocratic oath, Doctor,” Kevin says. “I’m still kinda wobbly. I may need a medicinal burrito.”

For the first time since Kevin got into the truck Dr. Barrientos has been stopped by a traffic light. It’s as if she’s been brought up short by his question, and the sudden lack of forward momentum seems to heighten the padded quiet of the cab. Her eyes look distracted again, and watching her past the edge of his sunglasses, Kevin’s not sure that what’s distracting her is his invitation, or even his presence. The silence stretches on as the vehicles waiting for the light on the far side of the intersection glitter and sizzle in the heat. Beyond them Lamar curves up and to the left, where he sees more colorful signs, more bilingual billboards, more power lines against the whitish sky. The cross street of the intersection cuts into Lamar at a bias, and on the arrowhead corner sits a scruffy little used car lot packed with five- and ten-year-old automobiles, mostly compacts and subcompacts, all a little the worse for wear. The dealer’s office is an old, flat-roofed, whitewashed, cinderblock service station with a sign in bright red letters that reads (with wholly unnecessary quotation marks and heavy-handed punctuation, thinks Kevin the professional editor), “IF YOU HAVE A CAR YOU CAN GET A JOB!!!”

I have a car, thinks Kevin. I have a job. I have a house, a mortgage, job security, a retirement plan, friends, a history, a life, all in Ann Arbor, Michigan. I have a girlfriend, even, more or less — a live-in lover, at any rate, who, from the outside, from the point of view of his middle-aged, married male friends with children, looks like an improbable piece of guilt-free midlife arm candy, wholly undeserved, and the incitement for a fair amount of jealousy and disbelief, thinly disguised as salacious joshing. They slap his arm and say, “You lucky bastard,” or they laugh harshly and say, “What does she see in you? ” Sometimes their rage is even undisguised, as when his friend Dale, at a Labor Day cookout in his suburban backyard, only half an hour after Kevin had introduced him to Stella, had shoved Kevin in the chest with both hands and said, “You mother fucker. ” Of course, none of them have seen Stella when she wakes up sweating and shaking at three in the morning, recoiling from Kevin’s touch, no recognition of him in her wild eyes; none of them have seen the faint white scars along the insides of her forearms and her thighs, which she covers with makeup and will not talk about, will not even acknowledge the existence of. And none of them (at least not recently, at least not in the last month) has discovered the used plastic wand of a pregnancy test stuffed at the bottom of the kitchen trash, under coffee grounds and eggshells and rusty apple cores, wrapped in three layers of paper towels.

Yeah, thinks Kevin, I have a girlfriend, and he looks at the doctor again, not so sidelong this time, and wonders if it’s too late to… what? Leave Stella? Leave Ann Arbor? Start his life over in sun-bleached Austin? Live happily ever after with Claudia Barrientos, MD? Just as Kevin is thinking he should change the subject, let his luncheon invitation die unanswered, pretend he never said it, Claudia’s eyes refocus and she speaks.

“All right,” she says.

Almost before the light changes her pickup has surged through the intersection and glided into the left-turn lane — where, after an instant of hesitation, it roars in front of oncoming traffic and into a parking lot that rides like it’s unpaved, though Kevin can see ancient, bleached asphalt. The truck lurches to a stop in front of a low, makeshift building with a latticed awning and a faded redbrick front papered with faded flyers. On the flat roof above the door, a large plaster woman with unnaturally pink skin and black, Betty Page bangs spreads her bare arms wide like an invocation. The figure’s six-foot wingspan and fixed, upward gaze makes Kevin think it’s Wonder Woman, then Eva Peron, then Madonna playing Eva Peron. But it’s none of these women, for across her bosom where a Stars and Stripes bustier or a spangled ball gown should be, instead there’s a hand-painted sign that reads ANNA’S TACO RAPIDO. Don’t cry for me, Austin, Texas.

Kevin’s still hanging against his shoulder belt as Claudia opens her door and steps down to the pavement.

“Leave your jacket, why don’t you?” she says, and slams the door.

In the time it takes him to catch his breath, unharness himself, and climb gingerly down from the truck — his scraped knee throbbing, the heat enfolding him — Claudia has already passed through the narrow door. In the patterned shadow of the awning, Kevin limps across the wooden porch, hauls open the glass door, and steps into a clammy gust of AC heavily scented with grease and grilling onions. It’s cooler inside, but smoky and humid and so dim that Kevin can hardly see a thing until he remembers to take off his sunglasses, thrusting them absently toward his jacket pocket. But his jacket’s in the truck, so he slides them instead into his trouser pocket. The long, dusky room has a smooth concrete floor and a low ceiling of crumbling particleboard, lit only by a couple of thin, purple fluorescent tubes and some tiny red Christmas lights. Even with his glasses off he’s still adjusting to the gloom, and yet there’s a strong feeling of déjà vu. The room is bisected lengthwise by a wide wooden counter — on the left are high, narrow tables and stools, and behind the counter on the right, a couple of sweaty figures in stained aprons and baseball caps jostle each other in the narrow aisle before the sizzling grill. Behind a cash register at the end of the counter a figure is silhouetted against a grimy window, talking to another silhouette across from him. Just as Kevin recognizes her broad shoulders and powerful thighs, the second silhouette speaks to him.