Borderlands (21 page)

6

Sundays were the worst. Her day off. She’d sleep as late as she could, until she couldn’t get back to sleep anymore and finally got tired of lying in bed. She’d take a long shower and wash her hair and then fix herself a breakfast of coffee and bacon and toast with apple butter. She would wash and dry and put away the dishes. She would dust the furniture and sweep and mop the floor. She’d wash her underwear in the sink and hang it on the shower rod to dry. She’d put the rest of her laundry in a pillowcase and hike to the laundromat and when she got back she’d put it all away neatly. She’d iron her clothes for work the next day. She’d spend a long time doing her nails. And all the while the portable radio would be playing—”Happy Together” and “White Rabbit” and “Love Is Blue.”

Sometimes her backdoor neighbors, the Santiagos, would have a cookout that filled their yard with dozens of relatives, and Joselita, a mother of five at age twenty-two, would come over and in her broken English invite her to join them. Dolores did so once, but the warm ties of the Santiagos and their kin and all of them talking mostly in Spanish only made her loneliness feel the keener and thereafter she always turned down their invitations with some lame excuse. She’d sit at home the rest of the day and hear the sounds of music and laughter from the Santiagos’ yard while she chain-smoked Marlboros and leafed through one of the
True Romance
magazines she’d found stacked in the closet—left by the previous tenant, probably—and thought what dopes the women in the stories were and tried with all her might to ignore the loneliness hanging in the room like a noose.

7

She awoke in the dark middle of a drizzling Sunday night. Her throat was hot and tight. Silent lightning lit the window curtains blue. She was awake for several minutes before she realized she was crying.

All right, she thought, all right. You best
do
something.

Like what?

Like what do you
think
?

Well …

About time you faced up to it, girl. You know damn good and well what you’re wanting. You ought admit it instead of going on trying to fool yourself.

Well
…

Go on now, face it.

Dammit, I’m not no
trash
. I’m not!

Whoa now, girl, who said anything about
that?
Aunt Rhonda? What’s
that
crazy old bitch know? Not a thing, that’s what.

Well …

You just got a bad headful of her mean mouth is all. You ought not let it keep you from having a little fun. It ain’t right to do yourself like that. You
deserve
some fun.

Well …

You
know
you do. We’re just talking a little fun, for Pete’s sake, a little company. There’s not a thing in the world wrong with that.

Okay.

About time you faced it.

I
said
okay.

Well
…? Who’s it going to be?

8

She decided on Wally. He wasn’t bad-looking and he was always joking with the boys at the bar about hoping to get lucky with her someday. So why not? But first she went to a clinic and got fitted for a diaphragm. She’d been awful lucky with Uncle Frank and didn’t ever want to push her luck like that again. She felt her face burning with embarrassment the whole time she was in the clinic, but the doctor himself seemed bored with it all and the nurse didn’t bat an eye.

A few nights later she stayed for a drink with Wally and Sparky after closing, then asked Wally for a ride before Sparky could make the offer. When he stopped the car in front of her place she asked if he’d like to come in for a beer. Her pulse throbbed at the base of her throat and her tongue felt slightly swollen. He had long since quit trying to get asked in on the nights he drove her home, and her invitation seemed to puzzle him for a moment, as if she’d spoken to him in a foreign language. Then his grin practically lit up the car.

She let him into her bed five nights in a row. He was always clumsy, always quick, always left her feeling like—
knowing
that—it would be just terrific with somebody who really knew what he was doing. It was her tough luck that Wally wasn’t him. Even so, she might have given him more time to try to get it right with her if he hadn’t started talking about his wife.

He didn’t mention her until Friday night, after he was dressed again and she was in her robe and they were sitting at the table over nightcap mugs of coffee. His wife didn’t really know him, he said, she didn’t understand him. He did not refer to her by name until Dolores asked him what it was. “
Marion
,” he said—like the word was raw garlic in his mouth. She had no sense of humor, he said, she hated sex. If it wasn’t for the kids he would’ve left her a long time ago.

Dolores felt like she’d read this story in a hundred magazines. Listening to him talk about his wife the way he did was a little like watching somebody draw a beard on a woman’s picture. The woman might be a total stranger but you still felt sorry for her somehow. And you knew the person doing the drawing just had to be a real ass.

When he came around the table to kiss her goodnight she put up a hand and said, “No. No more.”

He grinned like she was joking and reached for her.

She pushed his hands away and backed out of reach. “I said
no
, Wally. It’s done with.”

It took him a moment to get what she meant, and then he said, “What you mean,
done with?
Done with how come?”

She told him she was sorry. She said the whole thing had been her fault. She said she should have known better than to do this with him in the first place.

“It was fun,” she lied, “but let’s leave it at that. I … I just don’t feel right about it anymore.”

“How come? Because I’m
married?
Well hell, I’m gonna get a divorce, didn’t I tell you? I am! It might take a little while, but—”

No, please, she didn’t want to hear about it. A divorce was his own business and she didn’t want to be any part of that. His being married didn’t have anything to do with it, really it didn’t.

“Ah now, darlin, come here to daddy.” He reached for her again but she hastened around the table and over by the stove. He let a long breath through his teeth and flung his hands up in frustration. And then suddenly backhanded a coffee mug off the table and it ricocheted off the wall without breaking.

“God damn it! What do you take me for? Some kid to dick around with?”

“I want you out of my house,” she said. “Right now.” She was scared but absolutely refused to let it show in her voice.

“Bullshit!” He kicked over a lamp table. “You don’t tell
me
to get out!” He flung magazines around the room. He upturned the table with a crash. He picked up her little radio and was about to fling it through the window when she snatched up the pot of boiling coffee and told him to put it down and get out—
now
.

He stared at her with his mouth open, then set down the radio and stepped toward her. She cocked the hand holding the coffeepot and said he was going to have a hell of a time explaining the burns to everybody.

For a moment he looked like a confused boy, and she nearly felt sorry for him. Then his face clouded over again and he said, “You fucken bitch!” He spat on her floor and stalked out and slammed the door so hard the only framed photo she owned—a picture of her mother in the dunes at Mustang Island—fell off the wall and its glass pane shattered.

She locked the door behind him and set the furniture right and picked the mess off the floor and then sat at the table till dawn, smoking and sipping coffee and thinking things over.

She was a good person, goddammit, and she had rights just like everybody else. She was proud of the way she’d handled herself with that peckerwood. She guessed she showed him. N-O spells “no” and don’t let the door hit you in the ass, bubba. Damn right. The same goes for the rest of you.

9

The next one was a pimply good-natured kid named Joey who wasn’t much older than she was. He was new to Laredo, a mechanic at the Ford dealership. He’d been in Sparky’s only a couple of times before and it was obvious to Dolores he never in the world expected his flirting with her to get him as far as it did. He’d seemed so stunned by her smiling acceptance of his whispered proposition that she was truly surprised to find him waiting for her in the parking lot, as she’d suggested, when she got off work. They sat in his truck for a while, kissing and running their hands over each other and he told her she had the nicest titties he’d ever touched.

On the drive to her place he dropped a lighted cigarette between his legs and narrowly missed hitting a parked car when the truck veered off the road as he groped wildly under his crotch. By the time they got to the house her nerves were nearly as frayed as his.

In the bedroom he turned off all the lights before getting undressed and joining her in bed. He was sweating like his bones were on fire. He smelled of motor oil. He was so nervous none of the right things happened and he apologized in a high strained voice. She told him it was all right, just relax, don’t worry about it, he was just tense, they had all night, everything would be okay in a while, he’d see. She said maybe they ought to take his mind off it by talking about something else, but all he could talk about was fishing or the stock car he and his cousin were building and planning to race at the dirt track in San Antone and she was asleep in five minutes.

He woke her an hour later with an erection as hard as a tap handle. Before she was fully awake he was in her and grunting like a man at work. Within seconds he was thrusting wildly and moaning on a rising note and her breath caught and her back arched and her mouth went wide with pleasure for a brief wonderful moment that was not quite long enough to deliver its promise of release before he cried out and fell away from her, sighing like a tire going flat. A moment later he was snoring. She lay gasping, her fingers working at the dampened sheets, and was not able to go back to sleep until a long while later.

In the morning he overslept and had to hurry if he was going to get to work on time. His acne was worse than she’d realized. As he was lacing up his work boots she noticed the gunk under his fingernails—and the pale band around his ring finger. He saw her looking at it and grinned sheepishly and took the ring out of his pocket and slipped it on. He shrugged and said yeah, he was married, but his wife didn’t understand the first thing about him and he never in the world would’ve married her if she hadn’t got pregnant. He had a baby daughter twelve weeks old.

That was it for Joey.

That was it for roadhouse pickups. Pete’s sake, you couldn’t even see them all that good in that dim yellow light. Only a puredee fool picks out somebody to go to bed with in worse light than you’d insist on for picking out a new blouse. No sir, no more of that. She swore to herself that the next man she did it with would be single,
clean
, and interested, by God, in
her
, not just her titties. Neither Wally nor the Joey kid had asked the first thing about her, about what she liked to do or the kind of music she preferred or anything. Neither one had given a damn is why. Next time it would have to be somebody who cared.

10

She was walking home every night now, passing up the after-hours drink at the bar rather than hang around waiting for Sparky to call it a night and drive her home. About six weeks had passed since she’d turned Wally out of her house under threat of boiling coffee, and his close-mouthed sullenness toward her had lately begun to give way to mooning looks and small tentative smiles. The dumb Okie’s pride was apparently close to fully recovered and beginning to nudge him to give her another try. She realized he was not only foolish but stupid besides. Just the same, she didn’t want to antagonize him all over again by refusing the offer of a ride home—or worse, by accepting the ride and then fighting off any moves he might try to make on her in his car, where she wouldn’t be likely to have a pot of hot coffee handy. So she’d been keeping her distance from him during work hours and leaving for home as quick as she could after they turned the
CLOSED
sign in the front window.

One night she came out after closing and was halfway across the dimly lighted and nearly empty gravel parking lot when somebody grabbed her from behind. Her immediate thought was that it was Wally trying to be cute, and she tried to wrest herself free more in irritation than in fear, wondering how he’d managed to slip out ahead of her. Then she recalled that Wally had left hours ago, right after receiving a call from his wife about one of the kids getting awfully sick and needing to go to the emergency room, and Sparky had taken over behind the bar for him. Suddenly terrified, she twisted around in her attacker’s grasp and saw his face—the face of a silent looker she’d served bourbon and branch to for most of the evening and who she’d seen go out the door an hour ago. His eyes were huge and furious and he was pulling her toward an idling pickup truck a few yards away. They struggled wordlessly, the only sounds those of their gasping and the scraping of their feet in the gravel as he wrestled her closer to the truck. She finally thought of screaming, and she did, even as she remembered that Sparky was tending to the books in the little office way in the back part of the building and probably wouldn’t hear her. The man punched her in the face and she saw stars and her knees gave way. Just like the cartoons, she thought, feeling herself being dragged by the arm for a moment before the man let go and she heard yelling and the sounds of running feet. She looked up and saw the man jump into the truck and slam the door just as two men in cowboy hats ran up and one of them kicked the tailgate as the truck leaped forward in a rooster tail of gravel and the other bounced a beer bottle off the back of the cab as the truck swung onto the highway with tires screeching and shot away down the road.

“Goddamn coward yellow sonofabitch!”

One of the cowboys was tall, one short, both lean. They helped her to her feet. Was she all right, could she walk, did anything feel broken? The little one was asking all the questions. His voice seemed to come from inside a barrel. The left side of her face was partly numbed, and she discovered that her elbow was torn and bleeding. She wasn’t crying but her nose was running something awful. The little one gave her his bandanna. He said they best take her to the hospital, but she said no, she’d be all right, just give her a minute and she’d be fine. She tried to walk unassisted, swayed, started to fall, and they caught her by the arms again and the little one said they really ought to take her to the hospital to get looked over. No, please. She was just a little groggy, really. She’d be okay in a few minutes, she knew she would. Well, all right, but they for damn sure would at least see to it she got home safe and sound.