The onions make me sniff and tear up, but what I really feel is pissed.
“What a hypocrite,” I say. “Does he think Jesus is just going to forgive him? I wouldn’t forgive him if I were you. I say don’t do it.”
“Please,” Loren says. “Let’s just drop it.”
I can’t drop it though. I’m getting all worked up out of nowhere.
“Who does he think he is? Why doesn’t he pick on someone his own size? That’s what these Christians do, they—”
“You ever stop to think about the kind of problems you’d have to have to want to be born all over again?” Loren asks me. “I suppose other people become marines or wind up in jail. But before this church thing, Jack was raging all the time. All the time. My daughter, Cheryl, was completely out of control.”
The city lights dim with the curving road, reducing the flurry of skins to two cones of mothlike flutter in our high-beams until the highway finally divides, and we can pass the rig. It’s so dark that it’s hard to know how fast we’re going — creosote and palo verde appear in flashes, leaning over the road’s tight shoulders, and then are gone.
As I swing into the new lane, I ask, “How come you didn’t join the church? I mean, what kept you in control?”
“I can cope with lots,” Loren says, bracing a hand on the dash. “I can roll with just about anything.”
The trees start to disappear in the west, and I know we have taken up with the SanTan rail line beside us, though the only sign is the rise and fall of a purple shine that paces us in the power wires that follow the tracks.
In the dark, I find a turnoff that looks like the one we took before, but I can’t tell, and we’re pretty much committed when we hit the soft sand. We wander through a web of scrub brush, the lights casting stark shadows that wheel and bounce through all our wrong turns and back-outs.
We wallow down a dry arroyo, and the virgin desert we’d hoped for isn’t in the cards. We come to a halt before some old drums and a pile of blackened bedsprings left from a giant mattress fire. I switch off the dome light so it doesn’t blind us when we open the doors, and even making the few steps to the tailgate in such dark is like negotiating the cold ass of the moon. In the Chevy’s work bed, we make out for a while under a low sky, staticky and featureless. I scatter the tools, throwing shovels and trowels over the side, and then I peel back a plastic tarp to reveal a half ton of cool, wet sand, into which we sink our shapes like snow angels.
Loren lays her body on mine, and as our clothes come off, our breath alternates, hard, in each other’s faces. She pulls me inside her, then presses her thumb hard behind my scrotum. The feeling is deep and weird, and I am erect forever. For a while, about six degrees of the moon, I am outside of myself, I am a part of someone else, and it doesn’t feel like flying, the way you might think. It feels like landing, maybe the way a jet comes down out of the clouds, or a ship steams all the way around the world and finds its slip.
I drop her off in the church parking lot, rolling in with my headlamps off. Across the street, instead of seeing the green-black Chevelle in the driveway, the garage door is open, with all the lights on, and we make out the distant figure of Jack, leaned-back on an incline bench, smoking a cigarette with one hand while his whole other arm soaks in an orange cooler.
Loren kisses me quick, climbs out, and then leans in the window. “It’s been a night,” she says to me. “You’ve joined the ranks of the complicated.”
I look over at Jack. “I don’t think the night’s over.”
“Don’t worry about him. He’s harmless for now.”
“I guess I’ll see you at the Redirection meeting tomorrow.”
Loren turns and walks away, but as she nears the streetlamp, she slows, then underneath it, stops. She stares at her arms, leans over to examine her legs. She looks back at me with astonishment, and I start to realize what has happened.
I put the truck in gear and creep forward into the light of the streetlamp. I stick my arm out the window and it’s splotched with patches of fluorescent yellow.
“Shit,” I tell her. “It’s dye. We got mixed up with it in the bed.”
I climb out of the cab, and she shows me her hands. “What the hell is this?”
“It’s yellow dye. It won’t come off for a while, a couple days.”
She rubs her hands on her jeans. “This is some kind of joke, right?”
“Come on,” I tell her. “Let’s try to get you cleaned up. This dye is strong stuff.”
“Forget it,” she says and turns to leave.
I grab her arm. “You can’t go in there. Jack’s right there.”
“You don’t get it. He’s so guilt-racked right now. He can’t even look at me while my eye’s like this. I could punish him all week, if I had the spirit to, but I don’t anymore. I really don’t.” She pulls her arm back and then uses it to touch my shoulder, squeezing it once, before letting go. “That’s why I’m with you.”
Then she walks down the street, following the neighbor’s lawn and garage, and turns up her driveway. She ducks into her own garage, where she passes a hanging speed bag, stacks of iron plates, and a husband who lifts his head to watch her before reclining again when she’s gone inside.
* * *
In the morning, I drive to the end of Ocotillo, a quiet street with small, thick-walled houses. I didn’t sleep well, so I’m early and my dad’s not here yet. I park in the alley and unload tools for a while. The job is to repair a backyard wall smashed by a car that didn’t stop when it reached Ocotillo’s dead end. Two whole panels of block lie in a pile of rubble. There’s glass and motor oil everywhere, and one thing’s for sure, whoever cracked up was on his way back from the grocery store. As I sift through the block, I find a potato, a thing of Aquafresh toothpaste, and a can of creamed corn. I drop these things in the holes of the wall that still stands.
I upturn a grout bucket to sit on and start chipping the old mortar off the blocks with a mason’s hammer, throwing cracked and oil-soaked block to one side, and stacking the ones I chip clean to the other. About half the block looks okay, and I set out to save as much of it as I can. Where the old block will meet new, the wall will look patched, but there’s nothing else to do. I come across a broken cassette tape called Aloha, Elvis in the pile and then an onion. I toss this junk in the wall. There’s also individual grapes everywhere, and it’s pretty amazing that there was enough force to pull the grapes off the bunch, and yet the grapes are still not squashed.
An older man comes out of the house to watch me work. He stands a little bit away, on the grass, with his arms folded in a brown suit, and I don’t figure him to speak English until he says, “Enrique has departed to his occupation.”
“Yeah,” I say to the guy. “Enrique probably talked with my dad.”
“Concerning the payment, you must dialogue with Enrique.”
“Sure,” I tell him. The old cement’s really hard to chip off the blocks, which means they used plenty of lime in the mortar.
There’s a pack of Breath-O-Fresh gum, still good, in the pile. I undo the wrapper and stick a square in my mouth. The gum has a liquid-flavor center, and it’s perfectly okay. I offer the old guy some, but he kind of backs up. Under the next block I move is a Volvo emblem. It looks like silver, but you can tell it’s really made of plastic. That sucks because those cars are supposed to be real safe. I picture some guy spending a lot of money on a Volvo — he’s a regular guy who likes his corn and potatoes and rock ‘n’ roll — and then bam! Here’s this wall.