The Days of Anna Madrigal (16 page)

“Why not?”

“You didn't
ask
me, Lasko. You just say things and strut around like a rooster. You act like I'm not even here. You don't even call me by my name.”

Lasko stood up. “I did ask you—”

“No, you didn't. Never. I would've remembered.”

Their faces were even now, inches apart. Andy was awash in the smell of wine and sweat and hair oil. The almost tactile smell of transgression.

“I meant to ask you,” said Lasko.

“That's it? That's what you have to say?”

Lasko's eyelashes dipped like a raven's wing over a dark lake. “ ‘I meant to ask you, Andy'?”

Andy couldn't help but smile. “Too late for that now.”

“You woulda gone with me, you mean?”

“I mighta.”

“I thought you didn't like me.”

“Why would I have agreed to anything if I didn't like you? You don't say ‘Abyssinia' to someone you don't like.”

Lasko stumbled forward like a bear hit with buckshot, wrapping his arms around Andy's shoulders. It seemed no more than a drunken display of affection, so Andy received him awkwardly. The truth was, he would have liked a kiss at the moment, a tender, uncomplicated one, the kiss of a prince in a movie musical. But there was no denying how good the hug felt. He wanted it to last longer than it did.

When Lasko pulled away, he looked Andy square in the eyes. “Wanna stay?” he asked huskily. “Wanna mess around?” One of his hands had already moved from Andy's back to the front of Andy's trousers, where, in the most perfunctory way, he began to rub Andy's pecker through the rumpled linen, as if it were a magic lamp from which a genie could be summoned on command.

“Stop,” said Andy. “Don't.”

“Boys can do this, you know.” Lasko was still rubbing away. “We help each other out. It's what we do.”

“Lasko, no.”

“I'll suck you first, if you want. I don't mind.”

“I'm going now. Let go of me.”

“C'mon. We won't kiss or nothin'. I promise. We're buddies, right? We'll do it like men.”

Andy swerved away from him to make good on his word, but Lasko seized his arm and yanked him back. “You think you're better'n me?”

Andy winced, shaking his head. “No,” he said softly. “Just different.”

“You ain't no different,” Lasko snarled. “You're a godforsaken nance. Everybody knows about you.”

“Nobody knows about me,” said Andy.

He opened the door and went out. He knew Lasko wouldn't follow him, because their raised voices had already attracted attention from the house. Lasko's mother, the one who cooked the “World-Famous Lamb” at the Martin, was standing by her back door, watching him in leery silence. Andy passed within yards of her, projecting innocence with calm, letting his dignity ascend from his wisteria toes.

“Good night, Mrs. Madrigal,” he said quietly, heading into the night.

Chapter 17

THE SUDDEN RESIDENCE

B
rian had Yelped a place for breakfast in Winnemucca, a diner on the main drag with an old-timey sign that looked promising. They could have eaten back at the Winnie, but they were chasing down their little mystery today, so bacon and eggs seemed about right by way of fortification. Plus he wanted to get Anna out of the barge, help her reconnect spiritually with her long-lost hometown—a fucking
challenge
on this strip crammed with mini-marts and 1960s motels. At least the diner hinted at a serious lineage, with its shiny pine walls and leatherette booths.

“You know,” he said. “This coulda been here when you were here.”

“ 'Fraid not,” said Wren as she held up the menu for Anna to peruse. “Nineteen forty-eight. Says so here on the back.”

“Well, that's pretty old,” he offered, somewhat deflated.

“I was in Minneapolis by then,” Anna told him sweetly. “With a wife and a four-year-old daughter.”

“Ah . . . right.”

Anna gave him one of her private nice-try benedictions and turned back to Wren. “Dare we consider the raspberry crepes?”

“So how did that even happen?” asked Wren.

“What? Crepes in Winnemucca?”

Wren chuckled. “The wife and the daughter.”

“Oh . . . at an army dance.”

“No shit?”

“Fort Ord. Do you know where that is?”

“Monterey Bay,” Brian replied, though he himself had not been asked.

“They used to train troops there,” Anna continued. “I typed munitions reports for an alcoholic officer. I had a lot of drunks to deal with back then.”

“So you met your wife at this dance.” Wren was coaxing her back to the love story. Women, Brian had noticed, always want to know where people met. Even tough customers like Wren want to know. “What was it about her that made—”

“—a man like me want to get married?”

“Yeah.”

“She was pretty,” said Anna. “I was lonely. I was looking for normal, and she had more than her share of it.”

“Did you have a sex life?”

“When I put my mind to it.”

Brian made a secret screwy face at his wife. She made one back and handed him the menu with a flourish, as if to say “Leave us to our girl talk.” They were in love with each other, these two. He had known it since Tahoe. It's exactly what he had hoped for, of course—Wren's full grasp of the primal force that was Anna—but he was already feeling a little selfish about having laid such a terrible trap.

Don't get too attached
, he wanted to say.
I don't want you to hurt like I will.

T
he waitress who took their orders was a willowy blonde with loopy earrings who asked cheerfully if they were “just passing through.” The town did seem geared to people on their way to somewhere else, but Brian found himself touched by her low expectations, so he volunteered that Anna had grown up there.

“Really?” said the waitress, turning to Anna. “Whereabouts?”

“Out on Jungo Road,” Anna replied discreetly.

“Gah. My husband works out there in the gold mines. We moved here from North Dakota last year. He's an engineer.”

“There are gold mines on Jungo Road?” Anna's interest was clearly piqued.

“It's not what you think. Not like big chunks or anything—I wish. They leach little tiny bits out of the ground. With cyanide. In these big pits. Pays pretty good.”

“I would imagine,” Brian deadpanned, glancing at Wren.

The waitress, no dummy, seemed to catch his drift. “It's not harmful to the environment or anything. They've proven it. They've done tests.”

Yep, he thought. The best money can buy.

She took their orders and left. When she was out of earshot, Wren leaned across the table on her elbows and let her pewter ponytail flick once for emphasis.

“Do not give her a hard time.”

“Why not?”

“Because she's nice. And her husband works in a pit full of cyanide.”

He couldn't help but grin. “You know it's evil, right? There's not more gold left to take, so they're poisoning it out of the earth. And when that shit spills, which it does on a fairly regular basis—”

“On the other hand,” said Anna, “the crepes look a bit iffy.”

Brian recognized this tactic, the sly way Anna had of deflecting his zealotry. He looked at her directly. “But this is out where you grew up, right? The very ground.”

“Well . . . the very ground is now the Blue Moon Family Fun Center and Casino.” She smiled coyly, widening her eyes. “No relation.”

Wren chuckled. “What a hoot. We have to go out there.”

“No, dear, we don't.”

“Are you being a snob, Anna Madrigal?”

“No . . . it just seems to me that a place that calls itself a Family Fun Center and Casino couldn't possibly succeed at being either. Anyway, I've already seen it. Jake showed it to me on his magic slate. A virtual tour. Absolutely blood-curdling.”

Brian smiled at her.

“I wouldn't fret over the cyanide,” Anna added. “I'm sure they keep it away from the Family Fun.”

Wren took a sip of her water. “Did they have gold when you were here?”

“Yes, but . . . mostly just rumors of it. It was all so . . . negligible.” She seemed to meditate on that for a moment. “Pity Mama didn't know about cyanide. She would've jumped on that like a duck on a june bug.”

B
rian had rented a charcoal Jeep Cherokee for their tour of Winnemucca, so Wren insisted that Anna sit up front, the better to see the sights on her check list: the Catholic church, a local park, a Basque restaurant down by the Amtrak station. The first item, though—more crucial than the others, apparently—was the residence of Oliver Sudden at 2261 Sandstone Drive, so Brian had plugged the address into the GPS. On the way, however, he remembered something.

“You know they still have brothels in Winnemucca.”

“You don't say,” his wife said drily from the back seat.

“Aren't you a little curious?”

“I dunno,” said Wren. “What about you, Anna?”

“We're on an adventure,” Anna said, without really answering the question.

“It's on the way,” Brian told them. “Down by the freeway. They call it the Line.”

It was five minutes away, and easy enough to find once they arrived in the neighborhood. There were two homemade signs nailed at wacky angles to a dusty cottonwood. One had an arrow pointing to
PARKING
, the other to
BROTHELS
.

“Don't park,” said Wren. “Just do a drive-by.”

The Line was basically a mini-mall built of warping red plywood, its facade aping the storefronts of an old western town. Brian had seen this cheesy trick dozens of times in his travels. Sometimes the front disguised a gigantic box store full of Indian souvenirs; others were interstate rest stops designed to lure weary travelers with kids. He wondered if the Line was several brothels or just one big warehouse full of flat-broke girls, patiently waiting to do anal for truckers.

There was a stretch limo parked out front, but no sign of life whatsoever.

“Do you think that's a customer?” asked Wren.

“I doubt it. Where would a limo come from?”

“Good point.”

“It's probably theirs, is my guess. They use it to drive the girls around town. You know . . . to the casinos or something.”

“Let's go,” said Wren. “I'm getting the creeps.”

Brian felt the same way. Was there anything more depressing than a sex joint at 10:00 a.m.—without lights or music or lust itself to transform reality?

“Our place was a lot homier,” said Anna as they pulled away.

“I'll bet,” said Wren.

Brian regretted having made the suggestion, so he forced some cheer into his voice. “Okay, campers, here we go! Let's go find Mr. Sudden!”

The GPS led them to what might have been a suburban neighborhood if the houses had not been so random. It was certainly someone's effort at suburbia: vinyl-sided shoe boxes attempting grandeur with a single tall window in the middle. Their lawns, defiantly green, stopped abruptly at the edge of the tufted desert.

“That's it,” said Wren, spotting the number on a mailbox.

Brian parked on the road and turned off the engine. “I'll be right back. You should probably lock the doors. Just for the hell of it.”

Wren gave him a quizzical look.

“You never know,” he said. “It could be a meth lab or something.”

Wren rolled her eyes at him. “In that case, shouldn't I keep the doors unlocked and the engine running?” She leaned forward to speak quietly into Anna's ear, sister-to-sister. “You haven't been Googling meth labs, have you?”

“Not that I know of,” came the demure reply.

“I didn't mean you,” he said, irked by their teasing.

“No more
Breaking Bad
for you,” said Wren.

He climbed out of the Jeep and headed toward the front door, the sun falling hot on his neck. A fat-wheeled plastic tricycle in the driveway made him wonder for the third or fourth time if this place could possibly yield anything from Anna's past.

He rang a melodious doorbell.

A small dog began to bark inside. He could see it hurling itself into the air behind the lace on the glass panel in the door. Then there were footsteps, and someone appeared to scoop up the dog with one hand and open the door with the other. She was thirtyish and short, unusually short, with a heart-shaped face that tilted up at him like a shield against an alien invader. “Can I help you, sir?”

Sir.
Nowadays that meant old man.

“I'm sorry to bother you,” he said. “Is this the Sudden residence?”

She looked mildly annoyed. “Not really, no. That's my uncle's name. He lives with us. What's this about?”

If only I knew, he thought. “I have a lady here with me who thinks she may have a connection with him. She lived here a long time ago.” He gestured toward the Jeep as if the mere sight of it would confirm his claim. Armed with so little information, he sounded like an itinerant scam artist. A dangerous one, to boot.

“He's not here,” said the woman. “He's working today.”

“Oliver Sudden, right?”

“Yes, Ollie. Oliver. Whatever.”

“Is it possible for us to visit him?”

“If you're willing to drive. He's a greeter at the Blue Moon.”

Brian was struck dumb for a moment.

“Do you know where that is?” asked the woman.

“The Family Fun Center?”

“That's the one.”

He thanked her and almost sprinted back to the Jeep.

“Guess where we're going,” he said to Anna.

Chapter 18

NO TWO WAYS

T
he octopus stole the show that first morning in Black Rock City. Michael had already seen it online, spewing fire at night, tentacles flailing ominously. It had been an awesome sight in the old-fashioned sense of the word, but somehow it had not prepared him for the high comedy of the great beast in daylight, this eye-rolling assemblage of garbage cans nodding to its fans like a showgirl in a supermarket.

“El Pulpo Mecanico,” said Ben, as the octopus sashayed past their enclosure in its own churning ecosystem of dust.

“Marcus Bachmann,” Michael suggested.

Ben chuckled and returned to the task of assembling their camp stove. He was wearing the “cruelty-free” loincloth he had made at home. It was basically a string with a faux buckskin flap that managed to cover the crown of his dick while successfully containing nothing whatsoever. Michael was wearing his purple Etsy nightshirt. It had been custom-made for him by a seamstress in Turkey named Yosma, whose husband, a short, burly daddy with a mustache, had modeled this style next to a concrete Venus in their backyard. In their Etsy “convo” Michael had been tempted to tell Yosma (in the name of global goodwill) that his husband found her husband kind of hot, but Ben had nixed the idea as soon as Michael playfully proposed it. Words embarrassed Ben more than nudity ever could.

“Omigod, guys, you have to try Mystopia!” This was Shawna, with a childlike Christmas-morning madness in her dark brown eyes. Michael could see her mother there, the endearingly daffy Connie Bradshaw, who died a day after giving birth to Shawna. He would always regard Brian as Shawna's only functioning parent, but Connie lived on in Shawna's animated features and breathless delivery.

“What's Mystopia?”

“It's one of the camps—this lounge where they spray you with mist. Fucking heaven!”

“I dunno,” said Michael, searching for the sunglass lenses to his goggles. “I'm not sure I wanna be washed by strangers.”

“They don't
wash
you, they
mist
you. Like a big Evian spray bottle.”

“He's thinking of the Human Carcass Wash,” said Ben.

“Ah,” said Michael. “So I am.”

“You'd be able to tell the difference,” said Shawna. “At the Carcass Wash you have to wash other people before they wash you.”

“Isn't that always the way,” said Michael.

He found the lenses in a plastic storage box and, after some effort, popped them into his goggles. Now all he needed was his nuclear-strength sunblock, his purple boots for the bicycle, the right silk scarf for the nightshirt, his CamelBak filled with water, his stovepipe hat, and . . . what else? He should have made a checklist for every step of this transformational journey to radical self-expression.

“You know what would be nice?” he said. “If you could just fly into here without the six-hour traffic jam. You could land right on the playa . . . have a fully stocked RV just waiting for you, with delicious meals and killer costumes and everything you need. Then you'd be free to wander and find your bliss.”

Shawna gaped at him as if he'd just proposed genocide. “Ewww.”

“They have that already,” Ben told him. “It's called plug and play.”

“And that's a bad thing because—”

“Because . . . you have to
earn
this experience,” said Shawna. “Radical self-reliance is part of the deal. We're leaving the default world behind.”

“Meaning everything that's not here?”

“Yes.”

“And plug and play is just a bunch of CEOs and Republicans,” Ben added.

“C'mon! Here?”

“Well, libertarians, at the very least. Rich people getting their freak on.”

“A bunch of shirtcockers,” said Shawna. “Gag me.”

“Guess I'd better ask what that is.”

“They run around in shirts with no pants.”

Michael mugged at her. “As opposed to the half dozen
totally
naked people painted blue I saw on my way to the porta potties this morning?”

“It's complicated, Michael. It's a matter of intent. And commitment.”

Michael picked up the manual with the schedule of events. “You're right. It's just hard to know where to start with my intent and commitment. Let's see now . . .” He flipped through the pages, reading entries at random. “ ‘Valerie Hummingbird Birthing Your Inner Voice' . . . ‘Cirque du Cliché Morning Soiree' . . . ‘Kunda Your Lini' . . . ‘Fake Jamaican Accent Hour' . . . ‘Dr. Scrote's Circumcision Wagon and Calamari Hut.' ”

Ben laughed, still tinkering with the stove. “You made up that last one.”

“I swear to God.” Michael held out the manual as proof.

“That is fucking hilarious,” said Shawna.

“Maybe to you,” said Michael.

It
was
funny, of course, so he laughed along with them. “Forget about the stove,” he told Ben. “Let's go find someone who'll gift us some breakfast.”

She laughed, but gave him a faintly reproving look. “Now don't be a Sparkle Pony.”

“I won't,” said Michael, “and you can tell me what that is after breakfast.”

“There's a camp on the next plaza that serves bacon and Bloody Marys.”

“I'm there,” said Michael. “Soon as I find the right scarf.”

T
hey took their inaugural bike ride after breakfast. Michael was buzzed from the Bloody Marys, which helped to loosen him up as he attempted a bicycle for the first time in years. Fortunately, there were not that many other bikes to dodge as they pedaled down one of the clock-numbered streets toward the playa. He had not made a point of noticing street signs. He'd resolved simply to follow Ben and Shawna until he got the hang of things. He was happy to be their duckling.

“Lookin' good, Sofa Daddy.” Shawna was shouting encouragement over her shoulder. It was hard to imagine
her
not looking good in anything, which in this case included a pink halter top, a pink tutu, and clunky boots trimmed in pink faux fur. It made her easy to spot whenever she briefly wove out of sight. His other reference point, his husband, was a brown leather bowler above a sun-freckled back. He had swapped out the loincloth for a pair of shimmering (and sheer) green harem pants.

And so it went for the duckling—pink, green, pink, green—until they reached the broad crescent-shaped esplanade bordering the playa. There, without warning, he was swept into a perfect storm of vehicles: hundreds, maybe thousands, of bikes and art cars, some of them as enormous as tractor trailers and crammed with naked pagans, others small and troublesome, darting out of nowhere, tricked out like land sharks or Blinky from Pac-Man or chattering false teeth or cocks. This was not good. His time-honored ineptitude could do serious damage here—and not just to himself.

He flashed on the night he reunited with roller skates as an adult. He had zombie-walked his way into a rink in South City on a newly created “gay night,” only to cruise another guy so intensely that he crashed into him and drew blood. It had been
his
blood, at least—the usual bloody nose—and they had gone home together afterward, he and this beautiful doctor, this gynecologist, for God's sake. They'd had six good years with each other, off and on—six glorious years—before Jon had been erased by a horror so new that it had only just been given a name.

So, how am I lookin', Dr. Fielding?

What do you make of this old man in his nightshirt and top hat?

Am I grateful enough to still be here?

This rumination was all it took for him to lose sight of Ben and Shawna. Panicked, he began to wobble wildly on the bike, clutching the handlebars just the way you're not supposed to, before braking and dismounting in the middle of the traffic in full expectation of calamity. To his amazement, the other bikers parted around him with nonchalant grace, like skiers avoiding a tree. No one even yelled. Maybe the silver mustache helped. Maybe he'd just been the lucky recipient of Radical Geezer Tolerance or some other immutable principle of Burning Man.

He pushed his bike to the other side of the esplanade. Pink and Green were waiting for him in the relative openness of the playa.

“Are you okay?” asked Ben.

“I'm fine. Just had to stop for a second.”

“It gets easier up ahead,” Ben told him.

It occurred to Michael that this was the great perk of being loved: someone to wait for you, someone to tell you that it will get easier up ahead.

Even when it might not be true.

T
his time, though, it was. The deep playa freed them from the crush of others, and soon the three of them—
just
the three of them—were racing across a hard platinum plain under the noonday sun, scarves streaming like banners, arms held aloft like Evita, or the queens in
Priscilla
. The arm thing, of course, was mostly Ben and Shawna's contribution, though Michael shared their exhilaration. He had never ridden a bike with such sustained abandon. He felt like one of those kids from
ET
, lifting off into the sky while the orchestra swelled accordingly.

At the moment they were heading toward three enormous letters—EGO—floating in the hazy beige of the horizon. This was their third art installation of the morning, after the Hand Holding the Fish and the Shipwreck, and all of them had appeared as mirages demanding investigation. The dust had a way of doing that, of teasing with its veils. So now they were off in pursuit of the giant EGO—the superego, as it were—and Ben was shouting something over his shoulder. It sounded to Michael like “loose hand,” which he found disturbing, though not particularly informative.

The explanation came from the playa itself, when his wheels hit a patch of alkali powder—“loose sand”—that brought his bike to a dead halt,

Just. Like. That.

He hit the playa hard, but of course it was “loose” in that spot, not the cracked, unyielding pavement that made bike riding such a breeze. He had been spared by the very thing that brought him down. Had he been on some suitably friendly drug, he might have pondered that paradox for a while, lying there in the desert's silky embrace, but he felt filthy and achy and, yes, embarrassed, even among family. He sat up to prove that he wasn't dead. He was still sitting there, slurping from his CamelBak, when Ben and Shawna pushed their bikes onto the scene.

“I give up,” he said with a crooked smile.

“Now you're getting it,” said Shawna.

He laughed. They all laughed. Surrender had been the theme of her Burning Man orientation. He wondered, though, if she was also referring to something else.

A blue moon was on the way, after all. There was fertilizing to be done.

A
fter the bike trip, Shawna went to visit her friends at Chakralicious, so Ben and Michael returned to their tent for a nap. Ben's youth—and, okay, sure, his natural athleticism—made him more active than Michael, but he insisted on an afternoon nap. Michael was grateful for that. Not to mention Ben's love of a quality air mattress. The entire floor of the tent was thick, cushioned relief from the playa.

It was too warm to cuddle, so they lay side by side with their feet touching, listening to the murmurs of siesta time. Michael was still fretting over Shawna's dreams of a playa pregnancy, so he approached the subject head-on.

“Did you get a chance to talk to her?”

Ben knew what he meant and, thankfully, did not pretend otherwise. “There haven't been that many chances, honey.”

“I thought maybe when we were on the Shipwreck.” Michael had waited in the captain's cabin, slightly nauseous from the heat and the crazily tilting decks, while Ben and Shawna went off to explore the rigging. They had been gone long enough for him to start feeling one with the tableau, as if he were the captain himself, every bit as dusty and abandoned as the old maps and sea chests surrounding him.

“That was hardly enough time,” Ben told him.

“How long does it take to say thanks but no thanks . . . and I'm sorry my tactless husband didn't handle this as well as he should have?”

Michael had hoped for a smile, but all he got was another question:

“And you're sure that's what I want to say?”

The uncharacteristic sarcasm in Ben's tone stung Michael. He kept his gaze on the dome of the tent for fear of what he might find in Ben's eyes.

“Tell me then,” he said calmly. “Tell me what you feel.”

“Now he asks,” said Ben, as if he were talking to someone else.

There was a loud gas-jet roar somewhere outside the tent. Michael recognized it as the octopus, shooting flames for the sheer, frivolous hell of it.

“You don't
want
to have a baby with her, do you?”

Ben took a moment to answer. “Having a baby with her and giving her the chance to have one are two different things.”

“No, sweetie. They aren't. She's not going anywhere. She'll still be a part of our lives. It will be your baby, no matter what kind of spin you put on it.”

“She doesn't expect me to parent,” said Ben “Or you or anyone else. She's been really clear about that.”

“Do you really want a baby around? Do you want that sort of life?”

Ben sighed. “There's going to be a baby around no matter who fathers it. She wants to do this, and she's a part of our lives. You said so yourself.”

“And you just said ‘fathers.' ”

“What?”

“ ‘No matter who
fathers
it' is what you just said. You would be that baby's father, Ben. There's no two ways about it.”

A long, brooding silence before Ben finally said, “Haven't you ever thought about having a kid?”

He asked it so earnestly that Michael tried to answer accordingly.