“I thought you’d like that.” He unzipped his coveralls and took them off, revealing the usual ripped shorts and tattered T-shirt. He folded the coveralls lengthwise and laid them on the ground. “Have a seat,” he said. The coveralls were still warm.
He sat down by the toolbox and opened it up. “I asked Gerald to go to the store for us while you were gambling his money away,” he said. He pulled out and laid on the ground a succession of items: a cluster of grapes, a block of cheese, sliced sandwich bread, a tomato, a can of tuna fish, a whole pineapple, a rotisserie chicken, a bottle of wine with a screw-off cap. It was a big box.
I started to laugh.
“Best I could do,” Angus said. He took his Leatherman out of his pocket and started cutting up the pineapple on the lid of the box. The spiny skin fell to the ground in spirals. The sky was a flat, clean blue, and the sun was making everything glisten. He kissed me and held my hand, his own hands sticky with pineapple. I lay down on the coveralls and wrapped my fingers around the belt loops of his cutoff shorts. He smelled like water and ammonia and pineapple.
“I don’t know why we’re here,” I said.
“You really are out of touch with nature,” he said. “Not to mention the concept of hanging out.”
“No, I mean, I feel like I’m probably not your usual kind of person. I picture you with an earth-mother type who doesn’t shave her legs and hews her own wood. I couldn’t survive a day by myself in the outdoors. I don’t even know what hewing means, come to think of it.”
He looked at me, then touched my face, and his expression almost made me laugh; but then I was past it, on the other side of laughing.
“I don’t know anybody like you,” he said.
I almost choked in exasperation. New York, I wanted to say, was full of people exactly like me. With Michael, for example, I’d always known I was a type, part of a crop, one in a long line of art-history girls with the same education and wisecracks and shoes. If he could see me now, on my back in the woods with a plumber and a pineapple, he’d raise an eyebrow and smirk. In my mind I told him to go to hell, and returned my attention to the moment at hand. “I’m not an unusual person” is what I finally said. “You, on the other hand, are definitely an unusual person.”
Angus put his sticky hand on my bare ankle. “You smell good.”
“Sure, compared to the other people you know,” I said.
He kissed me, and I kissed him back. I didn’t know how long we spent there, and didn’t care. After lunch we took a nap, then went for a walk. When we got back to the van it was dusk.
I fell asleep in the van heading back to Albuquerque. When I woke up, my mouth was dry and cottony from hanging open the whole time, and I smacked my lips together, dazed. Angus was driving with one hand on the wheel and his hat pulled down over his eyes. We drove past eighteen-wheelers barreling along the interstate, past hordes of motorcycles and people hauling boats back from whatever excuse for a lake they’d managed to find around here.
Angus bought gas when we hit town, peeling some bills off a wad of cash in the glove compartment, and when he got back in the van he asked where I wanted to go.
I looked at the money; it was a ball the size of a grapefruit, seemingly composed of large bills. “I know we can’t keep staying in motels,” I said, “but the thought of going back to that apartment with everybody else doesn’t really appeal to me.”
“A motel it is,” Angus said.
We drove back to another brown room, with brown wallpaper and a brown flowered bedspread. I took a long, hot shower. When I came out, he was asleep face-down on top of the bedspread, his arms spread wide to either side. I turned on the TV and watched a silent version of a sitcom from my childhood, Angus snoring gently, but I felt restless. I picked up his keys with the vague idea of going out to get us something to eat. The parking lot smelled strongly of baking asphalt and exhaust. I got in the van and glanced in the back at milk crates stuffed wildly with tools, which Angus, apparently, had emptied out of the toolbox for our picnic. There were wrenches and hoses and a plumber’s snake and some other tools I didn’t recognize. Which is why it took me a moment to notice the gun. It was stuffed in a crate with no regard for safety, and I grabbed its long barrel and pulled it out.
Then I went back into the motel room and shook Angus awake. “Why do you have this?” I demanded.
He rolled over, his freckled face creased by the polyester bedspread. “What are you talking about?”
“A gun. You have a gun. You have wads of cash and a gun.”
“This is New Mexico. Everybody has a gun.”
“I don’t have a gun.”
“You do right now,” he pointed out. “And I wish you wouldn’t wave it around.”
“Explain this to me.”
“Fine,” he said. He rolled to his side, quicksilver fast, and he had the gun out of my hand before I knew what was happening. He pointed it at the wall and shot, the gun making a surprisingly docile sound. I walked over to the wall and saw a BB embedded in the brown wallpaper, small and silver as an earring.
“I’m a peaceful person,” Angus said, “but I spend a lot of time alone in the desert, and going alone into people’s houses. Sometimes it helps to look less peaceful than I am.”
“Oh,” I said, rubbing my fingers over the bubble of the BB in the wall. When I turned around to apologize, he was asleep and snoring again, the gun dropped to the floor.
I lay down next to him and listened to the drone of traffic from the highway, the shuffling noises people made as they moved in and out of rooms. The occasional rustle of Angus moving. The rhythm of his breath.
Nine
Here’s what I learned in the flat hot days of early July: Angus loved his work. He left each day in the purple van, whistling as he went, his coveralls shining whitely, like movie-star teeth. He came home grinning with exhaustion and scrubbed himself clean with the rough towels of whatever motel we were occupying. In the evenings he washed his coveralls with bleach at a laundromat and folded them carefully. He seemed to get paid well and in cash, with which he paid our room bills. I had no urge to go back to Wylie’s, and Angus, apparently, didn’t mind. He kept whatever he needed in the van, and if he went back to the apartment he didn’t tell me about it. When we craved a change of scene we moved to some new dive, off the highway where the truckers stayed, or downtown, where our shiftless neighbors lounged all day on their balconies, drinking Tecate and watching the cars go by.
“When the water stops,” Angus told me at night as we lay in the sheets holding hands, “everything stops. And when the toilet doesn’t work, people can’t even stay inside their homes. They stand outside wringing their hands, waiting for the van to come down the street. They never think about plumbing until it goes away, and then—” he laughed—“panic.”
“So you like the panic, or calming the panic?” I said.
He laughed again. “Both.”
I thought about going back to the condo, but couldn’t bear the idea of staying there. I did slink back once, when I knew my mother would be at work, and took the Caprice. Every couple of days I left her messages, also during the day, saying I was fine. The machine always played her cool recorded voice telling me to leave my name and the time of my call, and I assumed, since she never changed this recording, that she wasn’t very upset by my disappearance. She was probably relieved, I thought, after the dinner party and my rudeness to and about David Michaelson, not to see me for a while. I didn’t know where Wylie was, and judging by the way he’d bolted from the condo without turning around when I called his name, I didn’t think he wanted to know where I was, either.