Loren begins running her hand over my thigh, tracing her fingers along the muscle, absently pulling out bits of mortar that have hardened in the hair. The little pricks of pain give me an erection so fast and sure I get light-headed. I describe the smell of Mexican creosote after rain, the wicked look to a yucca plantation, the taste of prickly pear meat.
“When you said things were complicated,” I say. “Complicated how?”
“You’re young. You’ll get older, you’ll see.” She rattles the ice in the bottom of her cup, then she chews a piece, her voice throaty through the plastic. “There’s a point of overconnection in life. Everything’s suddenly strung together, like with fishing wires you can’t see.”
I don’t really get what Loren’s talking about, and she sees it on my face.
“Earlier tonight I got a glass of water,” she says. “Plain water. But from somewhere in the house, Cheryl hears the ice crusher go off in the fridge door. Maybe the ice crusher makes her think of the cold packs for Jack’s tendons, my vodka martinis, or the fishing bait coolers Jack fills whenever he feels a ‘relapse’ coming on. Either way, Cheryl deals with things by blasting the Christian rock. And then here comes Jack, all red and worked up, concentration shot, stomping in from the garage where he’s been shadowboxing Jesus. The wires go a thousand places from there.”
An El Camino pulls up a couple car lengths away, and I give it a good look over while I try to wrap my brain around what Loren’s saying. The car’s seen some rough trade. Its panels have been blasted and primered, and there’s a pattern of Bondo rings consistent with the repair of damage from automatic gunfire. There is a homemade hood scoop large enough to funnel every bad idea in town into the motor’s smoky maw.
“Forget about all that stuff, though,” she says. “You don’t have to worry about that for a while. Maybe that’s why I was drawn to you. That and your hands. Soon as I saw your hands, I had a feeling about you.”
She takes my palm, touches all the little nicks from my trowel. She rubs the patches of red on my wrists. “My daughter has this,” she says, “on her neck, though hers is a softer red. I think it’s beautiful. Jack hates it. He thinks everything’s a sign.”
“This is just dye,” I tell Loren. “I lay block for my father. We buy colored block and then dye the mortar. It saves the cost of painting the wall later.”
“I still like it.”
Loren cups my hand, working her thumbs deep between the bones. Her breath is sweet with alcohol and Sprite, and over her shoulder I absently watch a man and woman exit the El Camino, come round to the front bumper, and unbutton each other’s jeans.
I touch her neck, running the back of my hand along that tendon there. I trace the underside of her jaw, smooth her brow with my thumb. She closes her eyes a moment, the outlines of her pupils roaming beneath the lids, and looking at her features, it hits me all of a sudden who her daughter might be: Cheryl, a girl I sometimes sit near in my Civic Responsibility class at Tempe Community College, a girl with a red mark on her neck, a locket-shaped pocket of red.
Behind Loren, the man and woman start going at it on the grill of the El Camino, humping with the bland monotony of a sump pump, while the hollow throat of the hood scoop exhales waves of heat from the motor. The guy’s around my dad’s age, fifty maybe, and though I’ve done the nasty at least three different times, I guess it kind of weirds me out to see older people doing it. I mean, they don’t even take their clothes off.
“Let’s sit in the car,” I suggest.
As soon as we’re in, Loren’s like a gymnast the way she sidles on top of me, straddling my lap, despite the close quarters.
Up close, the light coming in sideways, I notice the faint lines around her eyes, her mouth, a few gray strands in the hair that clings to my arm. But something seems to radiate from her, too, and it’s like I can see those fine wires she was talking about, extending out, connecting to a maze of things, like all those objects on her key chain. And now one wire strings to me, which makes me feel mature somehow, adultlike for once.
I kiss her, and we begin making out with enough fury to froth up a sweaty milk of Armor All from the vinyl seat. We finger gums, ears, cheek hollows, let our teeth run zippery down neck ridges, across clavicles. We revel in friction, fabric, hair, and then I discover something dangling from the key chain in the ignition that I hadn’t noticed before: a laminated photo of young Cheryl, the Goody Two-shoes in Civic Responsibility who gave her oral presentation on “Loving Thy Neighbor.”
I reach for the belt buckle of Loren’s shorts.
“Easy, tiger,” she says. She pulls back and grabs my shoulders, holding me at arm’s length.
I lift my eyebrows. “The night is young,” I tell her.
“Oh, that’s precious. A line from a movie.” She laughs. “You’re dangerous. You could really cause some problems.”
* * *
I drop by my father’s place on the way home. He only lives two blocks from my house, and I try to hang out with him when he gets down on himself. He refuses to have a phone, and after a running argument with the Postal Service, they stopped delivering his mail. So you deal with my father in person. He also doesn’t believe in things like licenses, bonding, registration, or insurance, which is why they impounded his four-ton flatbed truck last week, the reason I have to haul so much block by hand.
In the driveway, I park next to his Dodge, and our trucks are like twins with beds full of sand and pink block. Crossing the lawn, I move through the weepy branches of eucalyptus trees I climbed as a kid. I grew up in this house, and it’s always strange to see my old home as a bachelor’s place — bare couch, blank walls, a crate of motorcycle parts in the corner.
Mom got this place in the settlement, and then she and I moved to a new, “memory-free” house down the street so I could go to the same school. She kept the old house as an investment, and then, in a twist of fate, leased it to my father. Mom took some psychology courses in college, and she believes a male influence is important for me to have around. Providing this, in her opinion, is a good investment.
Before I’m through the gate that leads to the backyard and the kitchen’s sliding door, I hear my father’s rip saw and smell hot sap and green pine. Inside, I find him sawing lumber, which is generally a bad sign. In the dining room where we all once ate our meals together, he has positioned a lone table saw, and he smokes a little Mexican cigar called a rojo as he feeds the pitched blade. He is shirtless, and the sawdust frosts the hair on his chest and arms, obscuring his old navy tattoos.
“What’cha building?” I ask, and the board he’s mitering bucks back.
“Jesus,” he says. “Give me a heart attack.”
He kills the saw and gives me a big smile, even though I know he’s been real negative on himself lately. He’s gotten to a strange place these days, and I don’t even know what to call it. He’s a worker, however, and whenever he gets like this, he remodels something, though I don’t tell my mother about the skylights he cut into her roof or the bunks he built so he could sleep the way he did on the navy boats.
He grabs us two beers and explains his plan. “I’ve been thinking about building a breakfast bar,” he says, sweeping his arm. “Over here, so it catches the sunlight when I eat cereal and check out the paper. Breakfast is the most important meal of the day, right?”
There’s some sarcasm in his voice, but the gesture is sincere — a blue-panthered bicep, coated with sawdust, shows me the only way it knows to fix things.
“I think they’re calling them nooks these days — breakfast nooks,” I tell him. “Because of how a bar makes you think of alcohol.”