“Who wants to know?” he said.
His voice, growling and a little bit slurred, sounded vaguely familiar, but I couldn’t quite place it. “I’m sorry,” I said. “I must have the wrong number.”
There was a pause. “I’m sorry too, lady,” he said, then hung up.
I stood there for a moment sipping from my enormous drink, the sugar singing in my blood, and then called back. This time, the phone rang for almost a full minute.
“Yeah,” he said.
“Is this Gerald Lobachevski?”
“Who wants to know?” he said again.
Now I was sure it was him. In the background, I could even hear faint trills of slot machines and country music. “This is Lynn Fleming,” I said. The only reaction was silence. A boy in a red uniform came toward me swiping a dirty mop over the dirty floor, and I flattened myself against the wall to let him by. “Wylie’s sister,” I added. “I’m looking for Angus?”
“He’s not here,” Gerald said.
“Where can I find him?”
“I don’t know.”
“Can you tell him I’m looking for him?” I said.
“No.”
The conversation reminded me of the first time I met Angus, a memory that was dramatic and sensual in my mind: the dark, bare apartment, Angus bare-chested and heavy-lidded with sleep. The beginning of things. Angus then was every bit as unhelpful as Gerald was now; all he said was that Wylie had gone to the mountains, to grapple. Maybe Angus had some grappling of his own to do, or maybe his location couldn’t be discussed over the phone.
“If you see him, tell him I have a plumbing job for him.”
“I won’t see him,” Gerald said flatly, and hung up.
I left the Allsup’s and kept on driving. Where do you look in a sprawling city for an eggplant-colored van? Nowhere in particular. I went back to the foothills, where Angus saved me from heat stroke, and drank the rest of my Coke and dozed a little in a shaded picnic area. I was half-convinced that he’d automatically know where to find me, because he had a knack for showing up at the right place at the right time, and half-convinced that I’d never be able to find him again, a possibility that crashed inside me with dread. Inside the park restroom was a scrawl that read, JODI S. WILL SUCK YOUR COCK FOR FREE, ASK AT ALLSUP’S ON CANDELARIA, which was where I’d just been. I thought of the bored young woman watching the burrito argument from beneath her long fake eyelashes, and wondered whom she’d antagonized and how.
No one was home at Wylie’s. Turn your back on these people for more than ten minutes, I thought, and they completely disappear.
I tried to think this through, from Angus’s point of view. Say he was looking, what did he know about where to find me? That I was uncomfortable at my mother’s, that I drove around a lot, and occasionally rifled through books at the library. So I headed to UNM, to the fine-arts section, and spotted a redhead asleep in a carrel next to the books on Southwestern art of the latter twentieth century.
“Hey,” I said, shaking him. “Hey.” I wasn’t even going to pretend I wasn’t happy to see him. He woke up and pulled me onto his lap all in one second. Feeling his skin against mine was like coming home; it was like having questions only he could answer. He kissed me, his hands on the back of my neck. I moved around so I was straddling him. His hands moved down my sticky back, his mouth all over mine. We were jigsawed, meant to fit together, making a whole picture. He tapped on my shoulder, hard, and I leaned back to ask what he was doing. But it wasn’t Angus who had tapped.
“Excuse me,” a young woman said, “but you can’t do that in here.” A student worker with a cart of books to reshelve, she looked dismayed in the extreme.
I reached a hand up to wipe my mouth. My whole face was wet.
Angus said, “We were just leaving.”
So it started again: long hours in a motel room, the Nalgene bottle full of gin, the sweet delirium of sex, the TV on low. Midnight found us lying together hip to hip, the sheets disheveled, and Angus said, “We’ve got a real rapport.”
“If that’s what you want to call it,” I said.
“We don’t have to call it anything.”
“True enough,” I agreed, and fell asleep, breathing the smell of his skin.
Angus woke up laughing, which I’d never seen anybody do. He sat up and put his arms and legs around me from behind, my back to his chest, still laughing.
“What’s so funny?”
“I was dreaming,” he said in my ear. “I was dreaming this.”
It was another hour or two before we left the room. Angus suggested we go past Wylie’s and check in there; they needed to plan their next move, he said, now that the mountain project was over.
“No plumbing today?”
“I’m on a hiatus,” he said vaguely, and started the car.
“You know, I called Plumbarama yesterday, looking for you, but they wouldn’t pass on a message.”
“You did what?”
“Called Plumbarama. I didn’t know how else to get in touch with you, short of calling all the motels in town.”
He was staring at me. “How’d you get the number?”
“It’s listed.”
“What did you say when you called?” He looked worried, for the first time that I’d ever seen.
“Why do you list the number if you don’t want people to call?”
“Unlisted costs extra,” he said, leaning his forehead against the steering wheel. “Nobody ever calls.”
“Maybe you should look into advertising,” I said.
“What did you say?”
“I said I was looking for you. I said I needed some plumbing done.”
“You didn’t.”
“I told him who I was.”
“Told who?”
“Gerald.”
“How’d you know it was him?”
“I guessed,” I said, “on the basis of the fact that it sounded just like him.”
A smile broke over him then, and he shook his head and turned on some music. Frank asked luck to be a lady tonight, and Angus sang along.
I was nervous about going into Wylie’s apartment — having ducked out of their tunnel — and stuck my hand in Angus’s when we walked inside. He squeezed, then let go. Stan and Berto glanced up, looking unaffected by their stint in jail. I asked how they were doing, and Stan said, “We’re out on our own recognizance.” Sledge dutifully licked my hand. Irina smiled at me and said, “Look who’s here, Psyche,” and the baby stared at me as if I were a stranger. So, for that matter, did Wylie. Everybody was sitting around talking, and to my surprise nobody seemed distressed by their failure to keep people off the mountain for very long. They wanted to know if I’d seen their “event” on the news and made fun of Panther for being such a media hog. Every face had a rosy glow. Even Wylie looked happier than I’d seen him in ages.
Now they were talking about whether to take the day off. Wylie was against it, arguing that “the revolution doesn’t come with vacation time,” but was outvoted and backed down with little protest, which I took as a sign of how good he was feeling. Stan and Berto wanted to hang out and drink beer, and the rest of us decided to go for a hike.
Angus drove. The sun shone with a riotous purity, picking out sparks of bright metal in the streets and glinting off cars, the world seemingly lit and mineral, rampant with gems.
We stopped at a grocery store near the university, where shopping carts were scattered across the asphalt expanse of the parking lot. Angus and Wylie got out. A man in a cowboy hat was leaning against the Pepsi machine outside the sliding doors, panhandling. I watched Irina change Psyche’s diaper in the backseat, putting the dirty one in a plastic bag from the back of the van.
“I take it you don’t use disposables,” I said.
“Goodness no! I’ll clean that one when we get into the mountains.”