After two years, Jim moved to Brazil. Retirement, he called it, though he was only fifty-two. He took his wife with him. When he left he said only, “Take good care of my babies, Manny boy. And the girls, too.” When Jim comes out for the annual audit, wheelchair-bound these days, he spends most of his time in the shady coop, the fiscal year’s ledger book open on his lap, his face tilted to the sun.
Manny, too, has come to love these birds. He feeds them at sunrise before he goes to bed, and again at dusk, after breakfast. At least once a week he takes a heavy-duty rake and cleans out the stalls, sifting out rocks and piss clods with the sturdy iron teeth. Sometimes he wakes and comes out to the shade of the coop at midday, when the girls are still asleep. He likes to watch the iridescent shimmer of blue all down the throats of the males, their shake and strut, the bobbing of their crests, the green and gold and red eyes spread across their fans. He admires the great effort with which they display, that they try so damn hard. Though a few of the girls complain about it, it soothes Manny to fall asleep to the trill and ca-ca-caw of the regal peacocks, the shades in his fifth wheel drawn against the desert sun.
He keeps a rosary in the coop, looped through chicken wire, and though he hasn’t been to mass since he was thirteen years old, he’s taken to praying out there some mornings, alone. To his mind, the coop at dawn is as close to holy land as there is.
That night, when the cab finally arrives at Michele’s motel, the driver turns back to Michele and asks him whether he’d like to do it again sometime. And Michele manages, “Yes, I like very much.”
The driver says, “Tomorrow, then?” Michele suspects this is meant to be a joke, but still he hesitates. Of course he’s realized the place isn’t just a bar. There are whorehouses in Genoa, and he’s no altar boy. But the people there are friendly, and they don’t ask his age. If he doesn’t go back to the ranch, what would he do instead? Unpack and repack Renzo’s bag, as he had the night before. Stare at the cell phone the police gave him, willing it both to ring and not to. Fiddle with the canteen—the only one they’d brought with them—that he was carrying when he abandoned Renzo. Try to imagine the feeling of three days thirsty.
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.