She opened her eyes a little bit, just enough to see through her eyelashes. Not too old, and in his sleep he appeared beautiful. Thank God he was beautiful. There he was again, God.
She managed to extract her arm from under him. He grumbled but continued sleeping. Standing up was difficult, but she clawed at a tree and it was as if the tree wanted her to get up, it stood strong for her. She felt her body — parts ached but she didn’t have to pee. Okay to get up, okay to walk. She couldn’t recall the last time she’d peed, she couldn’t remember how many days had gone by — could be two, could be twenty. She walked in the scorching sun. There was nothing anywhere. She thought of her homes, with her mom, with Bernard, her room at Betty’s.
None of them had been her home. A person without a home was always disoriented.
She looked up to the mountain that had always centered her, but the mountain was gone. Where the hell’d the mountain go? The sand was gritty and packed with boulders and the kind of trees nobody loves.
Her thoughts furiously arranged themselves into coherence, switches flipped, lights went on. Vision came into sharp focus and she regretfully knew where she was: back in Anza. Fuck me.
How did this happen? There was a vague memory of the back of a car and curves and a sense of nausea, stopping to barf. Just as well, she could always get money here without tending beejays. Her knees cracking and her guts wrenching, she pulled herself upright and headed for the comfort of the Circle K’s parking lot. She’d figure it out there. It was a good place to make a plan. Her brain hissed and sputtered with every step. Someone was walking behind her so she strengthened her resolve. The scent of goats and a tapping sound followed her, tap tap tap. Closer. Closer. And then she felt it, the pain, the back of her head, her body pitched forward, dropping fast, hard, and for good.
“Ah, but you’re a sad fuck of a creature,” Don Donner said with an uncharacteristic touch of sorrow as the cat burglar of Anza writhed in pain on the desert floor. The hair was still banana yellow but the rest of her looked like someone had taken a hooker, buried her alive until she died, then dug her up and brought her back to some sort of life. He’d hardly touched her with the cane and down she went.
Kimberly’s thoughts sliced through like ice shards: Go back to Betty’s, be a good mom to Carol, change Carol’s name to Destiny so you don’t hate her every time you look at her, divorce Bernard and take no money, talk to Eric about a job at Chica’s in Coachella, stay straight. Get a home of your own.
Forget Anza by never talking about it.
Everything Drains and Disappears
by Rob Bowman
Bermuda Dunes
“Do you have a better plan?”
I didn’t.
“Then this is the plan,” Monique said.
We were broke, sitting at the counter in our apartment, a tilting slab that the ad had said was a breakfast nook but was really shellacked and cracked plywood that managed the gloomy trick of always being damp, always, 115 degrees outside, AC broken, water shut off for not paying the bill. But everything in that place still clammy and sticky, damp without cooling or quenching, like a board made of swamp.
Meanwhile, you drive up and down through the desert and every gated community here sucks down electricity, whirls their AC turbines as the windmills churn just next to the mountains, the wind slamming down the slopes and crushing along the fans, chopping down the birds. Not that I care. I wonder about coyotes running along there, eating the obliterated birds.
Fly through this valley and get knocked down and eaten.
Ever seen the entrances to those neighborhoods? Waterfalls of the clearest water you’ve ever seen, crashing and slamming down or tripping down little stone steps or shooting straight up, and burbling down. Endless gallons of it in the desert in front of the homes of men who haven’t gotten it up without prescriptions in decades.
Those entrances.
Those gates.
Guard booths and cameras, spiked walls, sign-in sheets, parking passes.
I didn’t have a better plan.
We went to the library where you can get on the Internet for free and we were a hundred bucks and a half-hour drive away from a used massage table. I call Monique “Mo” and she says she doesn’t like it, but she never tells me not to say it. I thought it was cute but maybe not. We talked the old lady down to seventy-five because it was all we had, and she could tell we meant it. She looked Mo up and down, rubbed her craggy face with her gnarled knuckles, nodded but it made her whole body move up and down because of how her back was bent and humped. She looked at Mo and asked if we needed lotion and oil bottles. They looked disgusting. We took them.
“Get what you need, honey,” the old lady said.
We didn’t know what she meant but we knew what we needed. And we intended to get it.
Between us, Mo is the smart one. And the driven one. And the tougher one. So, what do I bring to the table, or to the cracked bar top? I exist. I show up. It’s more than most guys, Mo would say. It didn’t feel like much of a compliment.
We met not quite three years ago, when she came through the burger place where I worked as little as possible while selling weed to the other people who worked there. I was sitting at a Formica table on my break when I saw her come in with a friend. I liked her right away and I offered her a joint.
“How much?”
“It’s a present.”
“Why?”
“’Cause I want to.”
Later she would tell me that was why she took it and why she gave me her number. Because I said I wanted to. She thought it sounded cool. What the hell did we know? You know what happened then or can figure it out.
It was good. It was really good. The furniture was old and lumpy, but we never noticed, curled up, smoking up, watching the TV and people living bigger than us, but it never seemed better than what we had. I’d cook her dinner; she’d do the dishes. We were happy. She would push me onto my back and lean over me, her long, dark hair falling over the edges of her face, like a curtain closing us in, our own little escape. Her hair would tickle my face and my chest, then fall more heavily onto me as she leaned closer, until she’d kiss me or blow a cloud of smoke into my mouth or both. It was really good.
And then six months goes by, a year. And we are doing okay. It’s not like when we first hooked up but it’s okay. Then I get fired but so what, the pot floats us by and her job answering phones for the extermination shop runs out when the owner goes to jail for poisoning some guy whose wife he was fucking or something, I don’t know, just that a hell of a lot of bug spray ended up in some guy’s body and he died something horrible, leaking from his goddamn eyes. So that job ends but we are okay.
Then the legal pot shops open and all the weed dealers are investment bankers and guys with MBAs and a clean criminal record to stand behind a counter, and I don’t know anybody with that where I come from.
And I’m not dealing in anything heavy. That’s how you find your way to the wrong side of the Loco Burros or the Bang Bang Boys, and last time I checked I don’t have an army.
And that’s how we started to get thin.
And that’s when Mo came up with her plan.
“Don’t you need like a license or some shit?”
“Who’s going to ask?” she said. “We’re not opening a shop somewhere, some fucking store. It’s just a drive and that’s it. Knock knock, motherfucker. Give a back rub and get out.”