Carcass Trade (16 page)

“Let's talk about the weather,” I said.

The beat kicked up. Mary-Chapin Carpenter was singing about the Twist 'n' Shout down in bayou country. “Look at that,” Monty said. “Don't that look like fun?”

“That looks like my last geometry lesson.”

He laughed, sat back, and said, “How you gonna learn, you don't try?”

“I told you, Monty—”

“Okay. The weather? What's your sign?”

“Right.” I just shook my head.

“Where you from? You grow up around here?” he asked, flagging down the waitress in the white lace stockings and boots. My boots, the ones Monty loaned me, were blue with white-flame insets. When I went to put the boots on at the Python, I found a necklace with beads and bones in the toe. I meant to ask him about it but I forgot then, and I forgot again as he ordered margaritas and as I tried to say no. He forgot I didn't answer his question, when he said, “My mother says I was born in Pittsburgh. She lies a lot.”

“Really,” I said.

He was gently rocking to the music. His features from the side looked stubby, almost as though his nose had been broken and his brow had got clubbed by a pool cue. “Someday I'm gonna buy me a place in Idaho or Montana or some damn place. Anywhere but here.”

“I don't know,” I said. “It's got its moments.”

“You know Downey? That's where I grew up. Cows. Dairy farms. Went to Downey High. Our mascot was a flea with his brains bore out.” He waited for a laugh, then said, “Actually, we had two mascots. Only school I know has two mascots. Vicky and Vic Viking. I braided my hair in pigtails, put on one of them funny hats with the horns?
Vo-la
, I was Vicky. Our team wasn't worth a shit, man. I sure didn't want anything to do with them. Might as well be Vicky.”

I couldn't help but laugh, and the music did sound good, and the vibrating thunder of fifty boots hitting the hardwood floor with the same Texas stomp set me stirring. He put his hand on mine, and I took in the broad plane of it and the attractive dunes of forearm flexor and extensor spread with dark hair.

Monty went on, enjoying his audience. “I had a good time growin' up. My mom, she thought I hung the moon.” He settled on both arms, confiding in me, drawing me in like a friend. “Let me have the whole garage all for myself, all the little toys she bought me. I was king of the neighborhood.”

“I don't know if you're being serious or not.”

“‘Course I'm serious.” He folded my hand into a fist and massaged it like a kitty head. I looked away at the woman on the dance floor who was teaching the steps to a new line dance. She wore red high heels instead of boots, and spoke into a microphone worn over her head like an operator's headset, Madonna style. When I looked back, he was staring at me. “The boots,” he said. “They fit?”

“Perfect,” I said, though they were a tad loose.

“Yours. You gonna thank me?”

“Whose are they?”

“A friend of mine left 'em.”

“Left them.”

“Yeah,” he said, and the expression on his face changed, but I wasn't sure to what.

“There was something in one of them. A necklace.”

I dug in my purse and came out with it. Two slim brown feathers latched with beads hung beside four short bones that looked like finger bones to me. “Your friend get this at some Satanic garage sale?”

He smiled and said, “My friend likes strange shit.”

“And you mean that in the most respectful of ways.”

“Did you tell me where you were from?”

“No. Mostly here. Sort of all over.”

He lifted his beard with four fingers in an almost scratch. “A woman of mystery. Sort of from all over. You can do better than that. Hey, I tell you you look good in that skirt?” Under a rosy neon lariat, the color looked hotter, pinker in a blue way.

The waitress came with the margaritas. Monty touched the salty rim of his to mine and said, “Here's to you, girl.” The DJ put on one by John Michael Montgomery, a big-screen video of J.M. strumming and looking soulful and sincere as he sang about sappy old movies and how he loved the way his lady loved him. And then Monty got up and took me out on the floor to dance, and held me as if I might break, slow and easy as the man said.

When we sat back down, Monty was quiet and seemed far away in his thoughts until he scooted his chair closer, and we both sat in silence watching the dancers. I was feeling the swim of drink, but not too much. On the overhead video, Marty Stuart was promising to wipe those teardrops dry.

Monty's mood broke and he looked at me with a smile. “The only thing I fear,” he said, “is standin' in one place. Man, in Montana . . . Up there you can jam at a hundred and ten on your scoot. You can eat big and fuck simple and write home to your mama every twenny years.” His teeth gleamed in his beard.

“What's holding you here?”

“Not much.”

“Well then?”

“How old are you anyway?”

I shrugged a shoulder.

“You don't know or you don't wanta tell?”

“You should only care if I look seventeen, which I don't.”

“Oh, I'm not worried. You don't look
that
young.”

“Thanks.”

“You asked for that one, now, didn't you?”

“I guess I did. Thirty-three.”

“Not married. I don't see a ring.”

“Even if I was, I might not wear a ring. Men don't. Why should women? We all get branded or we none of us get branded, is the way I look at it.” I did have a ring, from Bill, but it was a Sears kind, and I only got to wear it six months, and it rested at the bottom of a drawer in cotton.

“See? That's what I like about you. Different. How about another draft?”

“No thanks. It's getting late.”

“It's not even south of midnight.”

“I have to get up. Things to take care of.”

“Whatever's waited this long will wait some more. Hey, you like motorcycles? I've got a purebred putt that'll break your heart. I'll give you a ride sometime.”

“Let me see now, that must mean a Harley.”

“Gnarly Harley. Right you are. I wouldn't be caught dead on one o' them Jap hair dryers.”

I looked around me, hoping I wouldn't see anyone under a Stetson with Asian features going stony at the remark.

“What I do is buy baskets,” he said, “fix 'em up. Sort of a hobby, but income, too. I hammer their tanks—engrave 'em—paint on 'em for friends. Right now I got a beater somebody wants fixed up. When I'm done, he'll have a softail mile-chaser outlaw Frankenstein freedom machine that looks like a work of art. Old Harleys never die. They just recycle.”

His thumb was traveling across my shoulder. “Hon, you are scooter trash if I ever saw it. I can see you on a crotch rocket of your own, breathin' fire and eatin' wind.”

“You're full of a certain amount of shit, you know that, Monty?”

“Yeah but it's
good
shit, huh? Hey,” he said, tipping his head. “Hear that? Dwight. ‘Maybe I'll be fast as you.' He's an asphalt eater himself. He's got a biker bar in Hollywood. All the rich actor jocks go there.” I had to admit the music got to me, and pretty soon Monty was saying let's shake some tushy, and before I knew it, I was out on the floor going backward, two-stepping with him while the others were doing those geometric stomps. As soon as that finished, another Dwight Yoakam started. “Two Dwights,” Monty said, pleased that it was two in a row by the same artist, this new song slower, Dwight and Monty singing together, telling me not to look so pretty and he'd try not to be a fool.

When we sat back down, Monty took the last watery slug of his margarita, then popped a mashed lime rind in his mouth and chewed on it a few times, downing it while my eyes watered. He got back up and brought his glass to the bar. The bartender in his cowboy hat seemed to be riding a slow horse as he bobbed to the music, looking out at the floor.

In a moment another margarita sat in front of me, and I was protesting that I hadn't finished the first.

Monty said, “You know what tequila means in
español?
‘The rock that cuts.'”

“I'm glad to know that,” I said.

“See what a good Downey High School education can do for you? Now,” he said, leaning close, “how else can I impress you?”

I ignored him, sipped the drink, and we talked about the thin women in their outfits and if they'd make good models, and in a while I began to forget for a moment the Undercover Me, and what I was there for. The black-and-white-spotted cowhide wrapped around the top of the bar island looked a little fuzzy. Monty was nibbling my neck near the ear, and in time my eyes closed in spite of myself. My back arched and I could feel my breasts wanting out.

He whispered, “You're Harley gypsy, darlin', I just know it. Beautiful scooter trash. I got a fuckin' machine in my garage'll purr your pants off, and I mean that in the most respectful of ways, yes I do. Come out with me sometime. You and me, baby, straddlin' the best kickass, deep-throb, eighty-nine incher you'll ever have the pleasure.”

I broke out in a laugh, said even I couldn't handle that. I said, “There's two things I always said I wouldn't do for a man. One's fly in his airplane.”

“And?”

“Get on his motorcycle.”

“No, no, no, no. You don't get on
his
motorcycle, doll. You get on your
own
. Old Monty don't mind missin' out on the thrill of a beautiful woman wrapped around him once in a while if that's all the poor boy can manage. Hey, I'm a fuckin' knight. I know how to treat a lady.”

“Do you, now?” I said.

“Oh man. Get you some leathers and tats—that's tat
toos
—say a lily or a rose right here,” he said, brushing my neckline, “and you'll be a hog jock happy in the wind, I promise.”

“Somehow I don't think that's me.”

Abruptly he stood and tucked in his shirt, and I could tell he was looking for the men's room, which I'd seen was marked
PODNAHS
when we walked in. He looked down at me with a grin. Like the Terminator, he said, “I'll be back.”

But then he sat back down, arm around me as if he were talking to a pure buddy, and said, “Think of it this way. It's the biggest vibrator this side of heaven. A steamin' black stallion pleasure plug that'll make you
cry
. You'll be thankin' old Monty for it night and day.”

I laughed and shoved him away with my shoulder.

He smoothed the corner of my mouth with a knuckle, then stood and strode off across the floor, looking back once with a smile. At the bar, a girl on a stool showing a good cut of thigh was watching him, thinking, I knew, the same thing I did, that that was not a bad-looking set of jeans. And he saw that too.

One beer and a couple of swallows of margarita didn't make me drunk, but I was feeling mellow and sad all at once and didn't want to go home.

I drove to the narrow road near my house that traces the bay's edge. Entering there at night is like advancing into a cave with no edges, or a giant, soft, black pocket. In its secret life under the waters and farther yet under the mud and deep among the reeds, nature cycles and churns in its own dull sureness, oblivious to the human world. It seemed the right place for me to be.

Pulling off the asphalt, I stopped as close to the shallow bank as I could, shut off the engine, and lowered the window to breathe in the cool air. Soon I was lost in my thoughts of the odd directions in which life takes us. I thought of Monty in the parking lot when I was leaving, pressing me to go on a ride, and me still balking, until he finally told me Jolene, one of the lingerie models, was going, and I said okay. I'd wanted to get next to one of the other models, ask if she knew a Miranda, but the timing was never right; maybe now it would be. I thought of Monty leaning me against my car, kissing me, just a little; giving me directions to his place.

Gray clouds whisking across the moon made it seem like a lighted carriage traversing the sky. I got out of the car and stood gazing over the black waters that carried a skin of reflected light. What had I learned on my evening with Monty? Nothing. I had to go on the ride. I decided to call Joe in the morning—maybe tonight—ask him what he thought about that. As if I didn't know.

A beetle made its stumbling way over pebbles in front of me, his moon shadow drawing him twice the size. From up on a higher bank, an owl questioned, and then the silence grew profound. Instinctively, I looked over my shoulder, as if someone might pad up out of the bushes and cross the gravelly plot to put a hand over my mouth and an end to this very long day.

One of Joe's fingers was purple around the first joint and the nail had evolved to deep blue. Every time he accidentally hit it, he winced, and I did also.

“It's what an old man gets who thinks he can still press two-fifty,” he said. “You just can't catch the down end of a load of bricks.”

“Some of us love you anyway,” I said. He'd come over at eight
A
.
M
. I was still asleep, made him wait till I brushed my teeth and got an eye open. He watched Road Runner cartoons while I made coffee and apologized for day-old muffins.

When I sat down, I ate in silence until the commercial came on and Joe turned his attention to me. Under the table his toes climbed my shin. I delivered my own five massagers into the soft Y of his shorts and asked, “More muffin?”

“Huh?”

“The man grunts,” I said.

“You distracted me.”

I got up and took his cup to refill it. Outside, the sun on the patio fired my Martha Washingtons into bright pink explosions as they drooled over their pot.

“I been thinking,” I said. “If Miranda ever brushed her hair at Nathan's, we could DNA it for a match with blood from the Jane.”