“Yes, Europe is the best place for to visit. Take the train, when you go. The train is best.”
“You know, if you had enough fucking money, and spent it, like, in one of those weird sports like riflery or table tennis or the ribbon routine—shit like that—anyone could be an Olympian. That’s what I’m gonna do. Get a good trainer, a famous one, fucking quit my job.”
She babbles on like that, and the boy seems to like it. That’s the difference between the ranch and a strip club. Here, some men come in just to talk. Sure, they want a piece of ass so bad that they’re coming out of their skin to pay for it. But there’s something that brings out the lonesomeness in them. Maybe it’s being so far from civilization. Manny’s heard them afterward, over the intercom. Old men, young men, men with wives or steady girlfriends, men who’ve never had anybody in their whole pathetic lives. They listen to their date chatter until the hour is up, and when she reaches for her clothes or the white wedge of towel on the nightstand to wipe herself, they hold her tightly and say, so softly it might be mistaken for a blip of static over the wires, Wait.
The Italian returns the next night, and the next. Manny watches him and Darla get closer. They talk at the bar, then huddled together on the couch in the lobby, then with their feet dipped in the pool, splitting pomegranates on the concrete and spitting the seeds and pith into the dirt.
The other girls are talking. One morning before bed, Amy’s voice spills from the hall bathroom. “If Michele was one of these old farts, Manny would have pried him from that girl’s titty on day one. He’s just glad to finally have some ass around here.”
Jim would not stand for this. But Manny cannot bring himself to throw the kid out. Amy is right: He likes having Michele around, and, yes, a part of him thinks, Why not me? His last hookup—in the hot soak room at the Tecopa baths, Mormon crickets shrieking in the eaves—was a forlorn, unmemorable thing, as all since Jim have been.
Manny spends more and more time out with his birds, away from the trouble swelling indoors. He knows he can’t go on ignoring it forever, but he tries. He scrubs the salt deposits from the water troughs, hand-feeds the birds sardines and apple slices, and watches them strip a whole cooked chicken to the bone. He rakes and rakes the sand as the sun comes up, drawing intricate patterns like the monks on a show he saw once, as if the dirt were an offering to God.
On the sixth night, Michele is sitting close to Darla on the cheap red sofa in the corner, watching the other girls sing karaoke, when the buzz of the doorbell sounds throughout the bar. Michele notices for the first time small black blocks—they must be speakers—arranged throughout the room: above the glass shelves behind the bar, over the neon-lit lounge area, tucked up where the low ceiling meets the wall. The girls ebb to the front lobby, running their hands all over themselves while they walk, checking hooks and ties and the backs of earrings, adjusting their panty hose and breasts and hairdos. Darla stands up, runs her tongue over her teeth, and rolls something oily and fruit-scented onto her lips.
“Where you are going?” he asks the back of her.
Army Amy calls over the clacking of plastic heels on the laminate dance floor, “Don’t you worry, sugar. We’ll take care of you.” She winks.
Without leaving the couch, Michele watches a thick-armed man step through the front doorway. Plastic mirrored sunglasses dangle from the man’s neck by a fluorescent-colored cord. Flecks of cement speckle his work boots. He points to Darla and says her name. The two walk by the bar, arm in arm. She grins like a pageant contestant, a beauty queen. When the man isn’t looking, she blows Michele a kiss. This girl is trouble. Renzo would have loved her. Renzo was always looking for trouble.
Listen to him: Renzo was. This is what unsettles him, how easily the past tense comes now. The police had said, There is a chance. Maybe if the heat doesn’t get too bad. Even as Michele nodded, his tongue rolled silently through conjugation exercises. He’s young, the cops have kept saying. He’s athletic. And in his head, each time Michele has corrected them: He was young. He was athletic. Just this morning, Michele called the police station, and the woman who answers the phone said she was sorry, that there was no news, they would call the cell phone as soon as they found his friend. “But don’t you worry,” she said. “God works in mysterious ways.”
And as if he dreamed in English, Michele replied, “Yes, He did.”
All those years confusing the past perfect, the past continuous, the simple past, and now it comes to him, here. Now he thinks in the frantic notes he took before he quit trying altogether. Simple past: use when an action started and finished at a specific time in the past. The speaker may not actually mention the specific time, but he does have one in mind.
After the lineup, Manny returns to the bar with Army Amy. Michele joins them. Amy sets her overtanned tits on the bar, and they rest there like two globes in a skin sac. “I need a goddamn date,” she says.
Michele smiles broadly at her—the big, openmouthed smile of a foreigner pretending to know what’s going on.
Amy traces her finger up and down the boy’s forearm. “Why don’t you pour this kid a real beer, Manny?” Manny fixes Michele a pint of Boddingtons. The kid looks at the cloud of head billowing to the top of his new beer, mildly bewildered.
“Budweiser is piss,” Amy says. “It’s a joke here.”
Michele takes a long swallow of his new beer. “When she will, ah, return?”
“Darla? Depends,” says Manny. He calls back to the office. “Gladys, what’d she log?”
When he first started, Manny had asked Gladys whether she ever listened in on the suites, “You know, for fun?” Gladys only scoffed and said, “Fun? Baby, I’ve seen it all. My best client was a county commissioner. He used to drive his Buick all the way down from Tonopah once a month, just to have me tap on the floor with his dead wife’s peg leg. This was before you were even born.”
“Hold on,” she says now. They hear the click of the old intercom buttons as Gladys patches in to the suite. “Nothing special, baby,” she calls. “Just a suck and fuck. A grand.”
Manny whistles. Half of that is his. “Damn. That girl’s got a gold mine between her legs.”
“Big deal,” says Amy. Through her tank top she grips a breast in each hand and lifts them to Michele’s face, first one and then the other. “Think what she could do with some assets.” Michele looks away, and who could blame him? No one outside the industry would call Amy a beauty. She has big biceps and a bench-press chest left over from her time in the army, where she was supposedly a Green Beret. Whenever a new ad comes out, she flashes the proofs to anyone who will look, listing all the places the billboards will go up: off I-15 near Indian Springs, by the turnoff to the test site, on 395 in Stateline for all those rich, horny Californians. On the latest, Amy is saluting and smiling above the words, Visit Army Amy for an honorable discharge!
Amy swirls her finger in the foam of Michele’s beer. “When I was her age, I had to work for my money. I was hosting big parties. I’m talking twelve, thirteen hours of straight fucking. You learn a lot that way.” She sticks the finger deep in her mouth and licks it clean. “You want me to teach you, Luigi?”
Michele shakes his head.
“Come on. Won’t cost you no grand.”
He takes a drink of the Boddingtons and says, “Shut the fuck up, you.”