“Right. I came all the way up here to get my face mashed in so I could get properly loaded. Got it.” Gina pulled her shirt on. “Beats whatever else I had in mind.”
They rattled into town, avoiding the fallen branches, hydroplaning through the rivulets streaming across the road. Monte Rio. Vacation Wonderland. Two bridges, one street. No beach in the winter, the river ate it. There was a movie theater in a Quonset hut with an immense mural on its side, runny with water. The metal ridges of the hut blurred the painted trees into menacing shapes. Gina muttered, “And my granma tol me this place was friendly. Ha.”
A large red amanita mushroom graced the sign for the Wonderland Diner. Alhambra said, “You’ll like it here, Gina.”
Gina looked dubious, but as they entered she murmured, “Whoa. A real diner. Cool.”
Knotty pine walls, sweet breakfast smells, a waitress with a sharp take-no-prisoners grin greeted them. “Good morning. Sit yourselves wherever you’re most comfortable. Coffee?” Not even a small blink at Gina’s broken face. Maybe smashed up faces were common. Maybe the waitress was just good.
Alhambra grinned back. “Mornin. Two double espressos, please, to start.”
“Comes double. You want double double?”
“Yes, please.” Alhambra whispered to Gina, “Great coffee. They tested every kind they could get their hands on-”
The waitress pulled the handles on the old espresso machine like an Italian barrista. Serious. No shortcuts like the machines at Peet’s.
“Sounds like my kind of job.”
“Pffft. You would be the worst waitress on the planet. It’s an art.”
Grumbling, “I wanta be the taster, not the server.” Gina bit the lemon peel, sipped her double espresso. “Damn. Well. All right then.”
“Country pleasures.”
Gina didn’t respond, she got up, bringing her coffee with her, walked to the side of the diner, called her job. They hadn’t missed her, really, but they were aware that the work wasn’t done. Not to worry. She’d deal with it when the roads opened up. Sometime in May. Monte Rio had a certain appeal.
“Okay, so tell me: What do people do up here?” Gina spoke through a mouthful of biscuit ten minutes from the oven with real Maple syrup poured over. She stabbed at her bacon and spun it around on her fork, pointing the whole arrangement at her friend.
Alhambra chewed her BLT on rye, considering an answer. “Same as anywhere. Folks try to get by, grab the energy of the earth and put it to work.”
“Energy of the earth? Crap.” Gina wasn’t going to be mollified by an outstanding breakfast. “Diddlin. That’s what happens when you don’t have the energy of the city. Ya go soft in the head and spend all your time diddlin.”
“Define.”
Gina’s mouth opened, closed. She scowled. “Eh. You know what I mean.”
Alhambra looked up.
Gina felt a large ominous shadow on her right. She craned her neck, wincing for effect, focused her one functioning eye on the steel worker who stood by their table.
“I know you.”
Gina’s lips parted, starting to snarl then wiggling into a limp smile. “Yeah?”
The six-foot steel worker with the blond buzz cut spoke in a melodic soprano, she stood sort of shy, one foot on top of the other. “Uh-huh.” She shifted to another self-effacing position. Her eyebrows lifted, her head tipped to the side, one shoulder raised up-a sort of traditional body language for you-know-where-we’ve-been.
“Jail?” As soon as Gina spoke she would have eaten her own head if only she could’ve fit it in her mouth. In for a nickel. “Which one?” In for a dime.
“Bryant Street. You were on your way somewheres else, probably don’t remember me. Name’s Joey. They called me Big Rig.”
It would be impolite to admit she didn’t remember anyone quite so large, impossible to say she had no memory at all of someone who tried so hard to be small. And failed so utterly. “Ah.” Perhaps the woman was smaller then?
Joey pointed, a small movement, at Gina’s arm. “That my design, that one there.”
Gina took a long breath, blew it out. This person was too sizable to insult, but truth is truth. “No. It ain’t. It ain’t yers. It’s from the hand and mind and soul of a monster great master in the Mission. I watched it bein born in his psyche, I watched it get drawn here on my arm, and I watched him, in total tattoo trance, ink this sucker by hand with needles he tied together right there in front of me with secret knots, and with ink he ground up hisself from pine sap. So don’t give me no shit about it’s yours.” Her lower jaw stuck out: Nobody fucked with Mission history.
Joey shrunk back, her lilting voice floating as if it was a whisper of wind. “Oh. I see.”
“No. You don’t see.” Gina made a small grunt as Alhambra kicked her under the table. “Yesterday a complete toad haulin around a Day-Glo wheelchair told me the same thing.” She moved her chair back in order to speak directly up at Joey. “I apologize for bein harsh to you, but the skinny fucker popped me in the eye when I told him to go fuck himself.”
“That asshole! He been stealing my designs, calling them his own.” The color rose in Joey-Big Rig’s face, her eyes went glinty gray, her arms swelled up like pumpkins as she clenched her fists. “That gnarly bastard couldn’t put a tattoo on a fucking grapefruit.”
Gina thought better of pointing out that the design on her arm wasn’t Joey’s. Instead she nodded, glad to have support in her appraisal of the man. “Dead eyes? Mummy face? Crap ink?”
Joey nodded, her color shading to something less volcanic. “He kills people. He uses the same needles on everyone. Steals other folks’ work and twists it into something ugly.”
“Carryin bad tattoo art is death in itself.” Alhambra spoke, cool waters to soothe a restless soul.
“You know what I’m talking about, then.” Joey became their comrade again. “You staying clean and sober? Yes?”
“Yes. Well, no. I mean…”
Joey laughed, a hearty trill-it would have been a trill except it came from a mountain, so it was, well, hearty. “Been seventeen months for me. Clean. And. Sober.” The laugh stopped and her eyes went flinty. “I ain’t never going back.” She paused, looked at each of them in turn, her huge hands opening and closing in spasm. “Never. Never going back.”
The air had gone out of the diner with a psychic whoosh.
“Never. You got that?”
Alhambra sighed, softly refilling the place with air. “We got it, Joey. Good for you.”
“Good for you.” Gina’s voice clicked in her throat, stuck on something she hadn’t known was in there.
The big woman’s face shifted into a smile, she leaned forward and knocked on the table, “Good talking with yas. Hope to see yas around, then.” She straightened up, “Don’t forget what I told yas. None of us ever going back. No way. None of us.”
The door closed behind her with a small plock.
“We done here, I think?”
“Dayam. We be done and done again.” Gina stared at her hands clenched tight as two poodles fucking. “Holy crap.”
“Let’s walk down to the river and catch a breath of massive water power?”
“Wash away all our sins?”
“Take more than a river in full mud raging flood to do that.”
They passed a sign: Welcome to Monte Rio! HATE STOPS HERE.
“You guys hava different definition of hate up here than we do down in the Mission where folks aren’t all completely bonkers?”
Alhambra, lost in her own thoughts, nodded uh-huh.
They crossed the parking lot, started down a scrubby slope to the curve of the rumbling river. “Jeezuz! She’s goin in the water!”
Joey-Big Rig, hip deep where the water curled against a set of rocks, was wrestling something out of the scrub.