Barefoot Dogs (4 page)

“You’re so definitely north.”

“Shut up.” Laura cracked up as I poured bubbles. “Okay, let’s make a toast!”

“To what?”

“To this gorgeous Jean Paul Gaultier, that I got at Neiman today,” she said, gently pulling down the neck of her dress to show me a sliver of cream-colored ruffles, and clinked her thermos on mine. The evening air was nuclear hot, we were alone in the parking lot, and nothing moved, nothing else made a sound. I felt like we were the only ones left in Austin, the only ones left in the world.

“Are you serious?” I said, and let out a nervous laugh.

“Oh, absolutely, Mr. Mills. But wait, there’s more.”

“I’m all ears, ma’am.”

“I’ll let those beautiful hands of yours unhook it for me tonight,” she whispered in my ear.

Before I could reply she kissed me on the lips for the first time, the childish kiss of a trembling gal is how I remember it now, but in that moment all I felt was her wetness on mine and a quick hard-on. She refilled our thermoses and dragged me back inside the Laundromat.

We separated our clothes into two categories, white and everything else, and dumped each pile into a dryer. We cranked the machines and took a seat to watch each load create a distinctive palette while tumbling, makeshift flutes in one hand and in the other each other’s, like a couple of inexperienced schoolkids. My thoughts raced imagining the texture of her underwear.

“White or colored?”

“White’s so balmy.”

“I know, right? But colored is like, rough and intense, and like,
sexy
.”

“It is.” She sighed.

“Balmy or sexy? Choose one.”

“I can’t,” Laura said. “I just love seeing all those clothes fly away. I wish I could do the same.”

We grew quiet. I felt Laura so close to me, closer than anyone else had ever been; her body washing all over me in waves of heat.

“You can, if you want to,” I said, shaking my thermos; it was empty now.

“It’s not so easy, Mr. Mills.” Her voice soured. “You think it is, because you’re juvenile and unharmed, but it’s not.”

“Actually, it
is
. I can make that happen for you, ma’am. I can stand in front of the dryer while you’re inside, so that the manager doesn’t notice.”

“Are you kidding me?” She stared at me, stunned. For once, I felt older, stronger.

“I’ve never been more serious, ma’am. I can try it myself first. If something’s not right, I’ll just swing the door open.”

A big mischievous grin spread across her face.

“Would you do that for me, Mr. Mills?” she asked girlishly and ran a long, perfectly French-manicured index finger down my slender biceps.

“You said you’ll let me dispose of your undies tonight, ma’am. It’s the least I can do.”

We took the clothes out of the dryers, and dumped them into a metal basket on wheels. We waited for the manager to retreat to the back, and then I hopped into the dryer. Laura and I agreed that the cool-air cycle would be the safest. Once I was inside, she wheeled the metallic basket in front of the dryer and pretended to make herself busy with our clothes.

“Watch your head, Mr. Mills,” she whispered before closing the door. I knew then what Laika felt like when she was
launched into orbit—that damned solitary dog and I, two little furry animals searching for unknown forms of life in outer space.

The first couple of spins were rough as my body adjusted to the metallic hardness of this new habitat. The air was itchy and had an artificial, eerie taste to it. It felt leaden in my lungs as if I were breathing from an air tank filled with morning breath. But then the space flattened out and the air cleared, the sense of flying in circles vanished, and I broke free. My body felt light as if made only of cartilage, the direction of my flight determined by subtle movements of my limbs and nose and brows. I hovered over the big city, savoring a bubblegum taste in the air I didn’t remember it had. I recognized the rooftop of the house I grew up in and the tennis courts of the country club where I learned to ride on horseback and where I almost drowned at four, and the lush, infinite garden where I saw myself and Grandma on the lawn, holding a book from
Les Aventures de Tintin
in her pouchy hands, my head resting on her lap.

Then the muffled yells of the manager broke into the dryer. When the machine stopped I fell hard to the bottom; one hundred and eighty pounds of flesh and bone back in my body all at once. I was hot and claustrophobic.

“What the fuck are you people doing?” The pale young woman dressed in a sad blue-gray uniform was now standing in front of the dryer, wide-eyed. “Get the fuck out of there! Now! And you, lady”—she turned to Laura, whose face I couldn’t see because I was desperately trying to hop out of the dryer—“you should be ashamed of yourself! At your age!”

Customers of all ages and ethnicities and fabric preferences looked on amused as the manager escorted us out the door.

“If I ever see you two here again, I swear to God I’ll call the
police!” she shouted as she threw Laura’s basket of jumbled clothes into the parking lot.

“Are you okay?” Laura asked.

“I am. It’s just that some people don’t have a sense of humor at all. Tant pis.”

“I’m not talking about her, Mr. Mills,” she said worriedly. “Are you sure you’re not hurt?”

“Yeah, I’m perfectly fine.”

“The sounds of your body hitting against that drum were unbearable. That’s why the manager noticed, but I freaked out and didn’t know how to turn the damn thing off. Even a couple of women started to scream when they saw you tumbling like a bag of potatoes in there,” Laura said, containing a laugh.

“Well, ma’am,” I said as I combed my hair back in place with my fingers, feeling suddenly full of life. “You gotta give it a try.”

“The poor girl said she’d call the cops on us. I don’t feel like getting myself a
mug shot
tonight, Mr. Mills,” Laura said.

“My dryer at home works fine,” I replied. “It’s not as big, but I’m sure you’ll fit in.”

• • •

An amber night had settled in the city by the time we arrived at my place. I lived on the fourteenth floor of a brand-new apartment building on Second Street. Laura tumbled flimsily inside my dryer for almost five minutes, until I worried that the lack of air or the adrenaline rush would keep her from feeling pain, and that the next day she would die from unnoticed bruises or internal bleeding. She stepped out of the machine with a melancholic grin on her face, and we went straight to my room.

She was surprised that I had such a furry butt, and asked me to tell the story about the scar running down my groin. Her
dress and the new bra that I’d helped her remove were draped over a chair.

We ordered sushi, and I brought it to bed along with an iced bottle of verdejo. We ate tuna-and-masago maki while she snapped pictures of us nude.

“Why are you here, ma’am?” I finally asked.

“What do you mean?”

“Why did you leave?”

“We were having such a wonderful time, Mr. Mills,” she said, motherly. She stroked my leg, then my chest, drawing circles around my nipple with her index finger. “Why ruin it?”

I tried to apologize, but she cut me off.

“I’m teasing you, Mr. Mills. We’re all like that. Eventually, we all wonder.” She took a sip of wine. A siren howled in the distance. I didn’t say a word.

“My father,” she said. “He left his office one evening; it was late May. He was supposed to drive home, but he didn’t. At first I didn’t think there was anything wrong. I thought it was even normal. He was not a kid anymore, his children were all grown-ups now; he was a widow. Why should he come home every single day? What for, to whom? But the next day his assistant called to ask if we knew his whereabouts. He hadn’t shown up for work. We called his cell phone, but he wouldn’t pick up. We never saw him again. We all had to leave. We didn’t know what could happen with us, who could be next.”

I thought about saying many things, but none of them felt right. I whispered that I was very sorry.

“I saw him tonight in the dryer, though,” Laura went on as if she hadn’t heard me. “The moment I was in the air, I headed to Paris—I couldn’t help myself,” she said. “It was his favorite city. I hovered over Le Marais, looking for him. I spotted him outside L’As, ordering falafel, which was odd because he used to say gar
banzos were food for the poor. I called his name, and he looked up at me; I was floating above him like a lightheaded dragonfly. He seemed embarrassed that I’d found him, but I smiled to show him that he shouldn’t be. I’ve had similar encounters with him in the past, in dreams, always abroad, but nothing like this one. Many times I’ve dreamt that we bump into each other at the entrance of a department store, Barneys, Selfridges—he’s coming out as I’m walking in. His face flushes when he sees me, and he stammers, struggling to explain himself. My joy is so boundless. I kiss him on both cheeks and on the forehead and on the cheeks again, cupping his face in my hands as tightly as if I’d never let him go. The way he looks at me, with those eyes so repentant and sorrowful and yet so free and so alive, makes me believe that he wasn’t kidnapped at all, that he ran away.”

“Did you get to say something to him this time?”

“I mouthed that he looked dashing, and he seemed moved, but he didn’t reply.”

Laura’s eyes were closed in the scarce light, the expression of her face hard to read. The room smelled like soy sauce and ammonia; her skin, like Downy.

“I wouldn’t have the nerve to do that,” I said after a while.

“What do you mean?” she asked.

“Leave the people I love behind without notice. Run away from them.”

“I’m not saying he did,” Laura said with a hint of exasperation in her voice. “But if he’d done that, I wouldn’t blame him.”

“Why would you want to escape from those you love the most? I don’t know if I could forgive someone who did that to me.”

“You’re such a puppy, Mr. Mills,” Laura said, and reached for the sushi. She ate it slowly with her mouth open, making
unpleasant noises, as though she’d suddenly become a brat.

“Why would you like to hurt someone so close to you like that?”

“C’mon, Mr. Mills. That’s irrelevant—you know that. We’re raised to fulfill our big fat last name’s expectations, not to make sense of ourselves. But time is unforgiving. And when your belly sags and your skin turns orange, everything else is left to rot. When you grow older and you start realizing that this is it, you don’t want to hear things like
I love you
and
Family is everything
. It’s okay, but not enough to keep you alive. You want to hear
I want to fuck you,
you want to hear
Life would be meaningless without you,
but you stop hearing that. You wonder whether someone will still find you attractive, whether there’s something more exciting than what you settled for, and you want to find it, you want
to make sense of yourself
, but now you have kids, people whose so-called happiness depends on you, the same people you’re now teaching to believe in things like love and loyalty and family.” The sexy voice was gone, replaced by a jaded drunken old man’s. “You’re young and romantic, and you’re the owner of a beautiful cock, Mr. Mills.” She gave me a gentle squeeze between my legs. “Honor that cock. Don’t wait for the second chance.”

I remained silent, mortified for her and afraid of her all the same. Naïvely, I believed she was wrong—that life passes slowly, serving up chances every step of the way. But both happiness and misery are fleeting—longing and regret are all that remain—and I didn’t know that then. I only knew I wanted her to stop. I drove my hands in the dark toward her breasts.

We fell asleep, scooped against each other, in the eerie early hours of the morning.

• • •

Laura and I spent the weekend in my apartment, going from bed to dryer—we discovered I could fit in as well, albeit tightly—to the kitchen, where we consoled our rapacious appetites with leftovers of week-old takeout and frozen pizza. Sunday was particularly noisy. I heard movement in the building, and also far away, down the street; the kind of sounds you hear when someone’s moving in or out, mixed with a cacophony of sirens.

It was around midnight on Sunday when Laura approached the window, pulled the curtains open, and gasped.

“Mr. Mills!”

We hadn’t watched TV or checked our phones in more than forty-eight hours. We’d disconnected ourselves from the world, and the world was reporting back to us. The Hill Country wildfires had reached the city, and the hills of Westlake, where Laura lived, were raging in the background, a hypnotic wave of burning drapes framing in orange the summer dark.

We turned on the TV. The wildfires trumped any story related to Michael Jackson’s death, but the information was vague and chaotic. A mandatory evacuation of the city would be enforced the following morning. Military planes carrying evacuees were departing every few minutes. I asked Laura how I could help, make phone calls, get in touch with her family in Mexico or elsewhere, but she ignored me. She sat on the bed and stared vacantly through the window. I didn’t know what to say.

“Please turn off the TV, and the lights,” she asked. I closed the curtains and made to leave the room, but she waved me closer. She went back to bed and asked me to join her.

“We can’t stay here, Laura. We have to go.”

“I don’t want to talk about that right now.”

The sense of peace and separation from reality in the room had vanished. The sirens howled like a mother lamenting the loss of her children; they had been all weekend, but now that I understood why, I could no longer ignore them. Laura snuggled next to me as if an endless summer of love still lay ahead, but the skin of her butt felt dry against my stomach, and our toes remained freezing cold, even after they tangled.

“Have you ever read José Emilio Pacheco, Mr. Mills?” Laura asked after a while.

“A little bit.”

“Would you happen to know any of his poems by heart?”

“I don’t, ma’am; I’m sorry. I vaguely remember a couple of lines; something I read in college.”