Given World (16 page)

Lu breaks in. “Before you know it,” she says way too brightly, “you’re getting a blow job from some guy behind the fence in Queen Wilhelmina’s tulip garden. Under a
wind
mill.”

“Jesus, Lu,” Riley says. “Give the kid a chance.”

“Well, it’s true,” Lu says. “That’s what they do out there.”

“In a very small part of a very large park. You are such a cynic sometimes.”

Lu snorts.

Cole says, “Sometimes?”

“I am not cynical,” Lu says. “I am a realist.”

Riley shakes her head, does that oh-no-I-won’t-smile maneuver with her mouth and her eyes, and goes back to washing glasses. “Don’t you two have some trouble to get into somewhere else?”

Lu downs her brandy. “Come on, you little rat fink. We’ll find something. Let Glamour Girl here entertain the masses.”

It’s early afternoon. There’s no one else in the place. Cole hates leaving Riley alone, because he thinks it makes her sad. Sadder. But she sounds serious. And they won’t be gone long.

“Shot for the road,” he says, as if he is just another customer and his money is as good as anyone’s.

“Fat chance,” Riley says. “Nice try, though.”

Cole laughs. “Thanks, Mom.”

Riley raises her eyebrows. He tries again. “Thanks, baby.”

“You two make me sick,” Lu says. “Stop it right now.”

She and Cole leave arm in arm.

Lu says they should take the bus downtown, straight down Mission Street, all the way to the end. But first someone has to go back into the bar and get two dollars from Riley for the fare. That someone being Cole. Riley gives him ten bucks.

“Aren’t you going to tell me not to spend it all in one place?”

“Nope.”

“Cranky.”

“I’m not cranky, sweetheart. I’m tired. I’ll be better when you get back. Promise.”

“Okay.” He stands on the rail and leans over the bar, turning his not-quite-clean-shaven cheek toward her.

She kisses it. “Git,” she says. Behind the bar smells like limes and bleach and spilled liquor. He wonders if she even notices it anymore.

“Will you miss me?”

“How can I miss you if you won’t go away?”

“Ha,” he says. “That’s
my
line.”

“Mine now.”

He waits. She sighs, and her eyes are a little squinty. He still sees a light in there, though. “Yes, I will miss you.”

Outside, he finds Lu sitting on the curb with her back to a parking meter, smoking a cigarette with her eyes closed. The sun is out and the wind hasn’t begun to blow yet.

“Pretty day,” Cole says.

“What do you know about it?” She pushes herself up off the concrete, offering him the crook of her arm.

“Nothin’,” Cole says, certain it is the correct answer.

“That’s right,” Lu says, as they head down the hill to the bus stop.

The 14 arrives and they get on, finding seats together because this far south it is not jam-packed with bodies yet. As the bus crawls through the Mission, stopping at nearly every corner, more and more people board, and nearly all of them, when they speak, are speaking Spanish.

“Do you understand any of that?” Lu says.

“A little.” Because he is a California kid, Cole had Spanish in elementary school, and his mother would practice with him.
“¿Cómo se llama?”
she’d say. Some days he would be Roberto. Others, Antonio. Someone new every day.
“¡Me llamo Zorro!”
Leaping onto and then off the couch, into her arms.

He learned more in high school, before he dropped out.
“La luz del porche está prendida,”
he says to Lu.
“Pero nadie es en la casa.”

“What?”

“The porch light’s on, but nobody’s home.” He cracks himself up. “Pretty good, huh?”

“La luz,”
Lu says.
“Nadie.”
She looks over at him. “What did I just say?”

You said, “The light. Nobody.”

“How do you say blue?”

“Azul.”

She repeats it, stretching out the
ooooh
sound. “I like it.”

“There are more where that came from.”

“More what?”

“Colors.” He starts to name them.

“Easy, Buckwheat. Don’t overload me.”

“Right,” he says.

They are at the corner of Nineteenth and Mission. A man with a Detroit Tigers baseball cap and a red halyard around his neck that says “I ♥ Guadalupe” is standing next to the bus, under their window, and talking to himself, waving his scrawny arms around like a drunken orchestra conductor, though he does not look particularly drunk.

Lu says, “I wonder where old Lupe is.”

“What?”

“Lupe. Guadalupe.”

“I think it’s a place,” Cole says.

Lu says, “I don’t think so. I think Lupe went out to shit and the hogs ate her.”

“You’re so bad,” Cole says. “I don’t know what Riley sees in you.” He is kidding, but somehow it comes out as if he isn’t.

Lu doesn’t appear to be fazed either way. “She sees this,” she says, pointing to her chest. “She knows I’m all heart.”

“Must be nice.”

“Oh, buck up.” She graze-punches him across the shoulder. “It’s a lovely day.”

Cole looks out the window. He loves this street. To him it is one big carnival all spilled out onto the sidewalk. Cotton candy is the predominant smell, but also chile
ristras,
oregano, pot smoke, pee. Every single building has a storefront on the ground floor, and they are selling
everything
. Furniture, clothes, animals, produce, flowers, luggage,
chicharrones,
toys, appliances, stereos, Mylar
quinceañera
balloons. He thinks there cannot possibly be enough people in this seven-by-seven-square-mile city to buy all this stuff, but there it all is, and hundreds of people crowd the street, carrying pink plastic bags, pushing shopping carts, lugging chairs and boom boxes to god only knows where.

At Sixteenth Street he sees the junkies nodding out, their backs to the broken-down escalators, and rockheads searching the sidewalks, picking up anything small and white, hoping for a miracle. He turns to ask Lu if they really believe that any of those pebbles or bits of chalk or cigarette filters or scraps of paper are actually going to turn out to be something they can smoke, something that will make their ass-out lives feel worth living awhile longer, but she’s gone. He looks out the window again, sees her cross the street. He starts to get up, to follow, but the doors close, and he watches as the bus pulls away; Lu’s shoulders are hunched up around her ears—she knows he’s watching—and her head is down, but she finds her way to a group of young men, bunched up and slouchy on the corner, and they take her in like a long-lost cousin.

He does not get off at the next stop. A plan is a plan, and he is a little bit angry with Lu for walking out in the middle of their expedition. He knows Riley won’t be very happy when he comes back alone, but it’s hardly his fault. Lu’s a free agent; she can do what she wants.

Riley refers to Lu’s wanderings as her “trajectory,” as if Lu were a satellite, or a spaceship exiting Earth’s atmosphere. “There’s never a warning,” Riley says. No indication that the spur Lu is traveling on is about to end. Because then there’s a chance someone will try to stop her, talk some sense into her thick skull, and she’s not having any of it. Which is fine, Cole thinks. Riley’s got more than enough to keep her busy, as far as he’s concerned. The bar. The boyfriends.

Rumor has it there’s a good boyfriend somewhere, sometimes, but he doesn’t seem to be a very effective one, so Cole dismisses him. The bad boyfriend doesn’t dismiss so easily.

No one ever sees the guy, since he doesn’t come into the bar, but Cole is sure he’s seen evidence of him. Riley won’t cop to it, though. She cops to running into things, like doors, cops to falling down. “I was
so
drunk,” she’ll say, as if this too is the start of some kind of a joke. Sometimes Cole wishes he had a gun and the backbone to use it, or knew some really badass guys who would rough the fucker up, make him stop, but thinking like that makes him feel out of his league, not to mention ridiculous. His only choice is to be there as much as possible, to take her mind off whatever bad thing happened last.

Riley doesn’t seem overly surprised when Cole tells her where Lu got off the bus.

“Her favorite corner,” she says, like she’s saying “Her favorite burrito place.” She bites her lip, taps Cole a big Anchor Steam and herself a little one, and goes outside to smoke a cigarette. Cole goes with her. They sit on the back stairs, from where they can see the bar, see if anyone wants anything, but it’s still pretty slow.

“What is it,” Cole says, “with you and Lu?”

Riley laughs. “You mean are we an item?”

“I don’t think that’s what I mean. Are you?”

“No.”

“What, then?”

“UFFUs.”

“What’s a UFFU?”

“Unidentified Flying Fuckup. Want to join the club?” She laughs, and it is not quite the unhappy sound he expects.

“Sure,” he says.

She wraps her arms around his neck, submerges her face in his chest. “You can be our mascot.” He doesn’t know what to do with his hands. He sets his beer down next to him to see if maybe they’ll figure something out on their own, find some landing place that maybe won’t freak her out, but before any of that can happen, she lets go and stands up, drains her beer, and pours the last drops over the railing into the scruffy garden. As soon as she gets five feet into the dark bar, he can’t even see her anymore.

Time passes, but it does not fly. Lu appears. Lu disappears. “Like magic!” Cole says, and Riley rolls her eyes and shakes her head. He doesn’t care. He is still alive. She still loves him.

One night in winter, when Lu has called an extended runner, and Riley’s boyfriend has taken off with all her cash and left his fingerprints on her arms in purple to match the black eye, and she has given Cole every shot of Beam he’s asked for and gone shot for shot with him and the bar closes, somehow, magically, all by itself, they end up on the pool table. Their clothes come off and the next thing Cole knows they are fucking and he is well over the moon, sober almost from the sheer relief of her legs around him, her hands somehow on his hip bones, her mouth her mouth her mouth. “Baby,” he says, next to it, into it.

“Don’t talk,” Riley says. “Shhhhh.”

He moans, collapses. Riley bites his shoulder, but not hard. More like an afterthought.

He moves to her side and decorates her with an array of shiny pool balls, placing them strategically on and around her body. He finds her scars. Shows her his. Riley points out constellations on the ceiling, as if the stars are really there. Wearing each other’s clothes, they head for the panhandle.

Riley gets pulled over on the way back, blows a 2-something, tells the cop to go fuck himself, and they keep her ’til she sobers up and the boyfriend himself comes down to throw her bail.

“You should have called
me,
” Cole says the next day, when she tells him about it, how considerate and attentive the boyfriend was, how sweet, how good the Bloody Marys tasted down at the Ramp.

“Right,” Riley says. “You don’t have a phone number. Or money.”

“I’ll get a phone,” he says. “I’ll get a job, and a place. We can move in together.”

Riley looks at him, slowly shakes her head. “Not gonna happen, kid.” She says it as gently (he knows) as she knows how. It still sounds like yelling to him.

He wants to yell back, but it is not in him. “Why not?”

They are sitting at the bar, with one bar stool between them. “For starters, you are too young for me. And you are too nice.” She is tracing someone else’s initials carved into the wood. “I’m a hot mess, honey. I’m the last thing you need.”

For a second, he thinks he hears something in her voice, some chink he can break through, but when he looks her jaw is set, and, if anything, she looks like she’s miles away—from this place, from him. Like he’s the last thing on her mind.

Finally, she faces him again and smiles. The word he is looking for is “rueful.”

“How do you like them apples?” she says.

“I hate them apples.”

She stands up and kisses the top of his head. “I do too,” she says as she pulls her bar towel from her pocket and starts wiping down already-clean tables.

Cole walks to the pool table to prowl its perimeter. “What about this?” He motions at the felt, never looking at Riley.

“That,” she says, “was a whole lot of fun. You’re a whole lot of fun, sweetie. You’re a doll. You’re the best. You’re a champ.”

“A
champ
?”

“Yup.”

“Fuck that,” he says. And leaves. Halfway down the block, he turns to see if she’s coming after him, but she’s just standing out front looking up at the sky, like she’s waiting for something good to fall out of it.

When he gets to Mission Street, Lu is getting off the bus. She says, “I had a dream about you. My cat was in it.”

“You have a cat?”

“No. Listen. Shut up.”

He leans against the brick wall of the restaurant on the corner. He waits.

“It was weird,” Lu says.

All dreams,
he thinks,
are weird. Life is fucking weird
. But he doesn’t say it. Because it’s too obvious.

“You died,” Lu says. “They brought the coroner’s van, and they took you away. I missed you. I was sad and I forgot what color your eyes were. I had to ask my cat.”

He doesn’t like anything about this dream so far. “Your cat you don’t have,” he says.

“Yeah,” Lu says. “That one.”

“So what did the cat say?”

“
Azul,
” she says. Just like she said it the first time, stretching it until it won’t stretch anymore. It sounds like the low howl of a coyote at moonrise. Somewhere in the unbreakable heart of the oblivious desert.

“I
feel like someone’s put a torch to me,” Lu sighs, from the floor, as if there’s something appealing about that notion. I lie down on the cool, scarred hardwood next to her but don’t touch, my toes an inch from her ankle, stretching into her and away at the same time. I suspect she really would like to be on fire, that she would be pissed if I put her out. We are a pair, not a couple, mostly because I am still (stubbornly, she says) straight, still like boys despite the improbability of surviving them, and she may be too wild anyway, even for me. We are in Oakland, during a string of rare ninety-degree days, because we are out on a pass of sorts and because it is necessary for us to be here, as opposed to the city across the bay, where in our world people and their lives simply come apart, and we can’t seem to do a thing to stop them.