Carla, jumpy and grim, fiddled with the radio. “I wonder if Roberto knows what’s happened,” she said. Among murky bursts of static she found Roberto’s voice: “—chase away all this gunk in the air with the funkiest music in Houston. You got the Morning Palomino here, the Love Stallion, on 98.6, KKLT, Houston’s hot and throbbing Latin heart.”
He played a couple of commercials in Spanish then came back on in English. “This one’s for all my Chilean-American friends — Victor Jara and ‘La luna es siempre muy linda.’” An acoustic guitar trilled above a muffled tambourine.
“Come on come on come on,” Carla said to the passing cars. “Give us a break.” To the scratchy ballad she tapped her fingers on the dash. “Let us in! Jesus, we’ll never get there.”
Despite the traffic, they’d be at Anna Lia’s apartment, Libbie knew, in twenty minutes.
Danny had heard the news on his car radio — the five a.m. report — on his way home from Austin. Twice in three days he’d made this trip. He’d got a lot more sack time last summer, when all he did was run the record store in Houston, but the store was losing money, so here he was — Mr. High Mileage, Mr. Assistant Vice President in Charge of Sales. Simtex Medical Supplies put him on the road as often as a trucker.
He made good money now: a five-figure salary on top of commissions. Good health and dental. Christ, he needed it all just to float Anna Lia. She came at a hell of a price. He hated being gone so much, but these days, even when he had a long stretch in town, she didn’t give him much of her time.
Yesterday evening, after his third straight sales pitch to another midlevel hospital administrator, he’d gotten the hell out of Dodge, hoping to make it all the way back to Houston. He thought maybe he’d surprise Anna Lia early next morning in the record store. But his eyes wouldn’t stay fixed on the curves ahead (the highway’s shoulders were blurred by weeds, paper cups, old hamburger wrappers), so just after ten he’d pulled off the road at a cheap motel in Bastrop.
On his bed, in the dim, deflating room, he had thought about his job. Big fucking deal if I pocket more now — I’m still blowing gas in the same old sorry dumps. Blue-light bars. Roach motels. Sooner or later, every extra cent he busted his balls for fell into the black hole of Anna Lia’s bank account.
He remembered his father shouting at his mother for wasting the family’s money. Danny was fifteen when his dad began peddling insurance for the Travelers Group in Kilgore, Waxahatchie, Dallas, and Fort Worth, making weekly runs up 1-35. Before that, he’d worked construction, but his body was stiffening up on him — “I’m turning into goddam peanut brittle”—early arthritis in his left elbow and in the joints of most of his fingers. Each Friday, he straggled back home looking like roadkill and stood helplessly in front of his wife’s latest purchase: an ice cream maker, a footstool, a sewing machine. He swore her extravagance was eating his heart, valve by bloody valve, and maybe he was right. The night he slipped from his chair at the supper table, dead of a heart attack (on his wife’s new carpet) just six weeks after his fifty-seventh birthday, Danny swore he’d never be a middle man, always running errands for others — bosses, clients, a careless mate.
Yet here he was, exactly as his father knew he’d be someday. “From me, Danny boy, you got a strong back, a kindly disposition, and an average mind, I’m afraid,” the old man told him one night, Danny’s senior year of high school, when they talked about college. “I’ll do what I can to help pay for your school, but promise me, son, you’ll study something useful. Fellows like you and me — strong-backs, eh? — we need all the advantages we can get.”
At three a.m., unable to sleep (a spasm, like a car seat spring, pronging his poor, strong back), Danny had slipped out of bed, thrown his stuff into his duffel bag, and taken off again. The sky looked wild — like some kid had colored it wrong in her book. He’d stopped for coffee and eggs at an all-night trucker’s spot. When first light hit the east, he’d switched on his radio. Farm report, cattle report, a report on yesterday’s stock market. A brief account of the volcano and all the ash it had spewed into the air.
Once, when Danny was nine or ten, he remembered, his father had taken him hunting here, in the woods south of Austin. Neither of them knew how to shoot a gun. His dad had borrowed a friend’s rifle so they could “pick off some quail or something.” Danny still knew shit about guns, but he knew enough to realize, now, how desperate his father had been to try to dazzle him, planning a crazy trip like that. “We never talk — I’m always busy, I know,” the old man had said. But standing in a cold, wet cotton field, just after dawn, squeezing shots into lumpy fog — it was like spitting into oatmeal, Danny recalled — didn’t help. The loud reports, pinging off the trees, made them nervous; they never again tried to get away, just the two of them.
On Danny’s radio now, a newscaster said something about a blast in southwest Houston. Danny kicked up the volume a notch: a mysterious explosion had “rocked” the Continental Arms Apartments sometime after three o’clock this morning. Witnesses claimed a second-story apartment had been gutted in the blaze, and a woman may have been fatally injured. “At this time, police aren’t releasing details,” the newsman said. “We’ll update you as soon as we can. In sports, the Astros upped their record — ”
Anna Lia, Danny thought. The Continental Arms. Second-story apartment. He didn’t know why, but he knew it was her. Damn. He rubbed his sleeping left leg. Oh damn.
A shot blared like a bad trumpet in his mind, a wind-tunnel roar keening off trees in a field.
That fucking weapons freak. What was his name? Nicholas Something. Nicholas Smitts.
Danny rolled his window down for air. The coming day smelled damp. He changed stations, hoping for more news, but all he got was a white-boy preacher trying to sound black. The preacher pitched his words like a talking blues twang, but he was smooth vanilla all the way — didn’t fool Danny, and he sure as hell wasn’t going to sucker any blacks. “Something moo-ving underneath,” he rumbled through the static. “Can you feel it, friends? Can you feel it? A mighty mighty shaking going on, underneath the cotton, underneath the oil, under Jesus’ fertile fields where the sweet sweet water be flowing on down to the sea …”
Danny tried to think. He’d call Libbie or Carla as soon as he got to a phone, ask them to meet him at his place.
Lord, Lord, she’d ripped it this time.
First it was debt, then her loud-mouthed Latin lover — the Morning Palomino … palimony, Danny thought, Palo-meathead. No-Pal-O-Mine.
He needed more coffee, something to eat. His eyes stung as he thought of his last “See you soon” to Anna Lia, three days ago in her place at the Continental Arms. He’d hoped for a coming-together again when he’d straightened out the money. By now, she must have learned that no one else would swallow her crap (one thing the old man taught him was how to stick). And though, lately, their time with each other was sloppy and rushed, she always seemed happy to see him, to talk. It could, he thought, it could be good again.
But now Smitts had gone and fucked her up.
By the time Libbie and Carla reached the Continental Arms, Danny was prowling the parking lot behind the strip of yellow tape that said “Police Line — Do Not Cross.” Two uniformed officers tried to ask him questions, but he wouldn’t stand still.
Libbie double-parked the van. The lot was jammed with cars, onlookers, reporters, cameramen from Channel n. She couldn’t hear what Danny was saying. He was waving his arms and pointing at a dark-haired man who stood quietly, hands clenched, by a row of wilting irises. The man seemed to have a problem with his legs — jittery and stiff, and when he moved he tilted to the left. His jeans were baggy and long, so Libbie couldn’t tell what was wrong.