Maybe Betty would like to tag along. Set her up with some bourbon or a couple shots of tequila. Then show her why the world was worth a look.
On Telephone Road, he zipped past car lots and honky tonks. Black women in slit skirts smoked cigarettes on crumbling yellow sidewalks. Anna Lia used to talk of the devil whenever Danny drove her through neighborhoods like this. She’d been raised to believe that the devil was an actual presence in the world, leading men and women astray. When she’d had her abortion in Rome, she felt Lucifer had sunk his claws into her womb. Three years ago — four? — she’d told Danny she no longer believed the church’s teachings. But she never failed to whisper, “It’s the devil,” whenever she saw poor people on the streets, shattered houses, ruined schools.
Danny turned past a boarded-up store. Surely old Satan lives over here, he thought, sitting in a rocker on his porch, plucking at a wicked old git-box.
Anna Lia had a dash of evil in her. Oh yes. You could see it when she danced. A gleam in her eye. A challenge. Take me if you can. Lord, her hips and legs! Shimmying to blazing salsa trumpets, those sweaty summer nights at Carla’s. “Get me another drink,” she’d croon, draping her arms on him, grinding her pelvis into his groin. She’d bite his lip, then pull away, laughing. He’d run to the kitchen to fetch her a beer; when he returned, she’d be in command of the room, swaying in the center of the floor, her head back, her hair a yellow pinwheel.
One moonlit night — castanets clopping like horses, crickets cheeping through the window screens — he’d stood watching her, holding her beer, when Edgar sidled close to him. “My friend, looks to me like she’s way too much for just one man,” he said. Her shoulders were bare in the snapping candlelight, and her long neck, exquisite, was the color of toasted bread.
He remembered driving her home after Carla’s parties. He’d undress her, then tuck her into bed. Asleep, she was as soft as the critters.
He pulled into a Wendy’s drive-thru. The high school girl at the cashier’s window told him to have a nice day. She wore a silly red hat.
Nibbling bland fries, he passed Discomundo and Chimichanga. He felt a pang for Marie but didn’t stop. Past Hobby Airport and the pawn shops. In The Silencer’s parking lot, six or seven men in camo suits milled around a pair of jeeps. Sunday soldiers, playing at war. Danny slowed and searched the group but didn’t see the Smitts brothers. “Hey buddy, what the hell are you gawking at?” yelled one of the men.
Danny raised his pistol. “A bunch of goddam militia geeks, that’s what!”
They jumped behind their jeeps. A beer can exploded on the pavement. Danny hit the gas. Within minutes, the city filled his rearview. The soily smell of pine trees. Grilled meat, from pits behind roadside smokehouses. Seagulls circled the freeway.
On Houston’s northern edge, shoddy businesses ringed the woods. Auto salvage yards, massage parlors, bail bondsmen, Sprayfoam. Wasn’t it Shakespeare, something he’d read in school a million years ago — Hamlet? Macbeth? — where the woods began to move? A military threat? If that happened here, Houston was doomed. Its first line of defense was aching old men in rickety shacks, bitter from trying to make a living: “Go ahead, take the damn place!”
He tossed the burger bags out the window. They rolled across the road. He switched on his headlights. On his radio, another white-boy preacher: “Jee-sus’ finger moo-ving through the land, nudging the mighty Blessed Ones.”
Just past Chimichanga, Libbie turned the corner and drove the half-block to Hugh’s apartment. It was dark. Of course he was still with his girls. She parked by the curb. What time did his daughters go to bed? Sometimes, too, he stayed late talking to his ex, working out money or scheduling. The woman had just moved back to Houston from her parents’ house in New Orleans. She was unemployed, a drain on Hugh. She’d be part of the marriage package too.
Libbie reached into her car pocket and found a scrap of paper.
The fact that he’d been right about Danny’s gun made her miss him fiercely. “Call me,” she scribbled. She dropped the note in his mail slot. The night air felt good on her face, and she walked to the corner, just to breathe.
When he’d told her about Danny, he wasn’t insensitive to Danny’s grief; he was expressing his fear for her. In her shock and exhaustion, she’d misread every nuance. Making love with him, she’d been so detached. Was she going to wreck everything, right before her wedding?
Tattooed teens straggled up Richmond Street, and a pair of older women in short skirts. Libbie took them to be prostitutes. Last year, when Danny opened Discomundo here for Anna Lia, southeast Montrose had seemed clean and prosperous. Small businesses were developing on all the sidestreets. Now it looked shabby, out of luck.
How did neighborhoods die? AIDS? Price wars? Greedy landlords? As soon as you got chummy with one part of the city, it changed on you. She felt unmoored, as she had when she’d seen Anna Lia’s charred apartment.
“Howdy, sugar,” said a woman in a tight blue skirt. She leaned against a FOR LEASE sign in front of a dry cleaning store. “You adventurous?”
“No, thanks,” Libbie said.
“You might like it, sweets.”
Libbie moved on. A Circle K sign flickered down the block. A white minivan slowed to inspect the woman. “How many black-owned businesses profited from the Juneteenth Celebration?” a voiced barked from its radio. “Do the math. White Daddy making a killing off’n us, while our brothers getting killed.”
Libbie crossed the street, unable to walk past Discomundo’s door. She felt — imagined? — a cold draft from the entryway. A year from now, would Anna Lia’s dream still exist? Could Marie run the place on her own? Would Danny lose interest?
The minivan chugged by her with the woman in back. She stuck her tongue out at Libbie.
Red lights lined Chimichanga’s sea-green eaves. A smell of peppers, melted cheese. Libbie saw a cook step out of the kitchen, pull a cigarette from his pocket, and try half-a-dozen times to get his lighter to work.
Nicholas imagined Anna Lia sitting at the table in her dark apartment, following instructions in her bomb manual, placing her fingers just so. Then something — a noise from outside, a fleeting thought, a sting of jealousy, a whine from one of the cats — and slip, clack. Shrapnel in the heart.
He taped together another cardboard box and began dumping his knives into it.
“Nick? Nicholas, what the hell are you doing?” his brother asked, standing in the bedroom doorway, popping the tab on a Silver Bullet.
“What does it look like I’m doing?”
“You’re not getting rid of your shit?”
“Tomorrow I want you to take this stuff to The Silencer.”
“I may want to keep it. Hell, the cops said — ”
“I don’t want it around anymore.”
“You’re flipping, bro.”
“Fuck you. Leave me alone.” His thigh throbbed. He swallowed six Advil.
From his window he could see the new balcony railing. A woman opened the sliding-glass door. Not the woman he wanted to see. A stranger. The new tenant. From now on, he thought, tossing a leg strap into the box, they’re all the wrong damn woman.
When Libbie woke Monday morning, sunlight glinted off the wine glasses she and Hugh had left on the night table the other day. She smelled him on her pillow.
Lonely, mildly lustful, she put on a bathrobe and slippers, walked downstairs, and called him. No answer. She tried his office. Maybe he’d stepped out to grab a bagel somewhere, though that wasn’t like him.