In the morning, after feeding the peacocks, Manny says a little prayer and then steps into Darla’s room, where she’s watching a black-and-white movie. She motions him to her and they lie together on the twin bed, head to toe. He says, “What are we watching?”
“You Were Never Lovelier,” she says. “Fred Astaire. Rita Hayworth. It’s public access.”
Manny rests his cheek on the tops of her bony feet. Rita Hayworth spins through Buenos Aires, all sheen and tinsel. “Honey,” he says finally, “you really like this boy?”
Darla keeps her eyes on the screen. “Is that why you came in here?”
“He’s been through some shit.”
She shrugs. “Him and everyone else around here.” She shifts her feet under the blanket. “You know I love you, Manny. You’ve been hella good to me. But that boy is my ticket out of here.”
“Girl, this is for real. You’re gonna hurt somebody.”
“Hurt somebody? What happened to ‘Give ’em a little attention’? What happened to ‘Make them feel better than their girlfriends, better than their wives, better than they are’? You don’t have to touch these men, Manny. You don’t have to fuck their sorry asses. You sit out there stroking your goddamn peacocks, writing letters to Jim about what a good boy you’ve been, how much money you’ve made him, hoping he won’t die on you. You come inside to sign the paychecks, to tell me I might hurt somebody? Too late, old man. I been hurting them. And you taught me how.”
When Michele leaves the La Quinta the next night, he leaves it for good, Renzo’s backpack laid out on his bed. Amy opens the door before he buzzes, and takes him to the bar. “Have a seat, baby. Budweiser?”
“Yes. Please.”
She puts a beer on a napkin and beside it sets a little shot glass filled to the top with brown liquor. “For courage,” she says. Michele drinks it and pats the bundles of twenty-dollar bills in the pockets of his cargo shorts. It’s all there, the Search & Rescue money from the teller machine, the two thousand dollars his parents wired him, his own money. Renzo’s money. He’s made up his mind. He can’t go back to Genoa. His flight leaves in the morning. He’ll buy a plane ticket for Darla. An engagement ring. Put a security deposit on an apartment in another city, away from his family. Away from Renzo’s friends. God, Renzo’s family. He feels his new life folded inside his pockets. Yes, a whole new life for nine thousand American dollars, he believes this. A new life with a woman there to busy his hands, to pour his drinks, to help him forget. A life where he came to America alone. Or not at all.
He waits. The night pulls on. He reaches around the bar for the tap and refills his own glass when he needs it. Men come and go around him, but each time the bell reverberates through the building it’s the old woman who opens the door for them. He waits for Darla, but she never comes. When he asks about her, none of the girls will answer him. His head is hot and clouded and his cab isn’t coming until morning. He doesn’t know what else to do. He walks outside through the dust and gravel to Darla’s fifth wheel and knocks on the door and then the windows. The lights are off but through the blinds he can see the paper-lined drawers of her dresser pulled half-open and empty, and the bed where he last saw her, stripped bare. He looks in the other trailers. He calls for her. There is no answer.
Somewhere in the night Amy comes and pours more shots. She lines them up on the bar like tiny monuments. They drink them together, one after another. “Where is she?” he says finally, a stinging in his voice.
She pours them another round. “Here.”
“Tell me.”
“I don’t know,” she says. “She was just gone. I swear.”
Near dawn, Manny appears from the darkness of the hallway and puts his hands on Michele’s shoulders. “Walk with me, honey.”
As he follows Manny out the back door, beyond the lights and sounds of the compound and into the desert, Michele looks to the sky. So this is what Renzo looked upon as he died, naked and faceup in the dirt: the wide brightening sky, the fading stars, the waning moon white like a jaw on the horizon. A peacock caws. A part of him—the part that speaks in a ghost’s voice—knows he’ll never see Darla again.
The peacock coop is shaded from the pink-purple of dawn by palm leaves and canvas overhead. The air is thick with the scents of seed and dust and bird.
The boy hesitates before coming inside. “These are, ah, your pets?”
“Not mine, my boss’s. I hear you’re headed out of town. You’re leaving.”
“Yes, I go back to Italy.”
“And you think you’re taking Darla with you.”
“She, ah, would like to leave. She has told me.” A bird rustles in its nest. “I, ah, like Darla.”
“I liked her, too,” says Manny.
“I love her.”
“Honey, I know. But she didn’t love you, okay?”
“She does,” he says, though he says it like a question.
“American girls, you don’t know how they are. All they care about is money, okay? Especially these girls. Don’t you know? It’s all business. Even with Darla.”
“Where is she?”
Manny combs his fingers through a trough of seeds, letting the breeze winnow away the empty shells. “Don’t worry about it.”
“Tell me where is she.”
“This is a business, kid. She had somewhere else to be.” There is a stillness pulled tight between them. Outside, dawn lightens the landscape but the last dregs of night linger in the coop. “They found your friend, didn’t they?”
Michele picks at the chicken wire. “Yes.” Then quickly, “No. They said he is dead. They stopped looking.”
He turns away and hooks his fingers through the chicken wire. His broad shoulders start to tremble. He begins to shake the entire wall of the coop back and forth, harder and harder, until Manny fears he might snap the old two-by-fours. The birds, startled from their roosts, squawk and dart around, frenzied, among them the bright albino flash of White Pine. All the while Michele wails, a feral, guttural sound.
“Fuck, kid,” says Manny, too quiet to be heard. “Come on.” He pulls Michele back and turns the boy to face him. Michele’s face is wet and slick where he’s bloodied his nose against the fence. Manny embraces him. The boy writhes at first, then goes limp and lets his head fall to Manny’s shoulder. He is sobbing.
“My boss, Jim,” Manny says, maybe just to have something to say. “The one who owns these birds? He’s dying, too. Half the time he doesn’t even know who I am. You think it’s not going to happen, and then. But these girls—”
“I, ah, have to take her,” Michele says, shrugging him off. “I love her.”
Manny takes Michele by his shoulders and turns him gently to face the yellow lights of the ranch in the distance. “Kid,” he says softly. “Look. There’s no love in there. Trust me.”
Manny lets his arms wrap around the boy’s waist and presses him close again, from behind. For a moment—just a moment—the birds are still and Manny feels warmth against him.
Michele wrenches away, shaking his head. “No—”
“She never cared about you,” says Manny, hot with want, walking toward the kid. Burning. Michele shoves him back, hard. The peacocks are screeching now, and flapping, but there’s nowhere for them to go. Manny comes at him still. “She didn’t. You’re a kid.” The boy tries to leave, groping drunk for the gate in the half-light. “A stupid, sad, foreign kid with a dead friend and too much money. That’s all you are, understand? I did you a favor.”