Twentynine Palms. Daniel Pyne

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      “No, no—” Jack tilts his head toward the young woman in the green dress and meets the bartender’s expressionless gaze with an easy smile.

      The bartender tightens his lips. “Okay, one: don’t call her a girl, she won’t like it. And, two: you’ll have to ask her first, because, as you may have keenly observed with your single eye, my friend, I know her and I don’t want to piss her off. She’s ferocious, when she gets pissed.”

      Jack blinks.

      The older woman turns with her Margarita refill to go back to her friends. Her feet get tangled. She starts to fall. Jack reacts, grabs the pitcher—it sloshes, doesn’t spill—and simultaneously catches her by the arm, gallant. The old gal’s friends spontaneously applaud, delighted. Jack steadies the woman, hands her the pitcher.

      “You all right?”

      Blushing fiercely, she nods, “Fine. Yes. I’m—sorry. My feet . . .” Jack cuts his eyes toward the young woman in the green dress again, but discovers Rachel and her backpack sliding purposefully onto the stool beside him, directly in his line of sight.

      “Rachel,” she says.

      “I know. I heard you the first time.”

      “Oh.” She catches the bartender, “Hey, can I have some water, please?”

      The bartender frowns, annoyed. “I have to charge you a dollar.”

      “For water?”

      “Put it on my tab,” Jack says.

      The bartender looks at him a little irritably, and moves away to get a glass.

      “Thanks.” Rachel studies Jack for a moment, critically, as if he were a math problem, then picks at the nail polish on her thumb.

      “Where are your parents, Rachel?”

      “I’m not supposed to talk to strangers,” she says in a rote monotone.

      The marine sergeant slides heavily off his stool and walks over to the woman in the green dress, who stares straight ahead, measuring his approach in the mirror. Sipping her whiskey and shaking her head slightly in response to whatever the marine is asking her, she never stops smiling, even when the sergeant steps back, almost as if slapped, and runs his thick hand across the level playing field of his flattop. Regrouping, he asks something else. She turns to him, her whole body facing him, and talks to him kindly for a moment longer.

      Jack watches this, his heart in his groin. And then, shamelessly, he commits himself, suddenly, predictably, to wanting this woman as much as he has ever wanted anything; to fold her into his arms, soothe the disappointment from her smile, to move into one of those slant-roofed shacks on two hundred acres of barren desert, homestead, depurate himself, court her, win her, earn her. Well, and sleep with her, yes, but—it plays out for him in fast-forward, like a Lifetime channel TV movie, and, Jack realizes with the usual tinge of disappointment, that it actually was a Lifetime movie, a ten-hankie chick flick in which he played the part of the foolish marine who never stood a chance.

      Jack wants to sleep with her, and he knows from experience that he probably will, it’s just a matter of mechanics now. The real sergeant has retreated, fallen back to his stool and beer and is standing there, looking at nothing, square shoulders round, defeated. The young woman in the green dress sips her drink, nonplussed, eyes straight ahead again. Jack considers his opening gambit.

      Serendipitously, Rachel, petulant and feeling ignored, takes the glass of ice water the bartender has delivered and tilts decisively off her stool; she stands directly behind Jack and pours most of it down the neck of her sundress, front and back. Water splatters onto the waxed, worn linoleum under her feet.

      She’s got Jack’s full attention now. She’s got the whole restaurant’s attention. She makes a squeaking noise. The water is cold.

      “The hell are you doing?!” the bartender growls, and starts to come from behind the bar, but Jack intercepts him calmly, acutely aware that the woman in the green dress must be watching all this, too.

      “I’m sorry. She’s with me,” Jack says, about Rachel. “It’s okay. She’s my sister.” He takes the towel off the bartender’s shoulder, tosses it at the girl’s feet and starts to mop up the ice water. “She’s got—issues,” Jack is ad-libbing, and he says this loud enough to be heard halfway down the bar. “Impulse control issues. I’m really sorry, man. I’ll clean it up.” The old ladies in the booth are buying it, their faces showing sympathy and relief (that Rachel isn’t their problem). The bartender knows it’s bullshit, but seems relatively disarmed by Jack’s complete commitment to the role. The jarheads never look up from their plates, just want to eat before the shrimp gets cold; their dates look like they will probably believe anything.

      “Are you hungry?” Jack asks Rachel, for the benefit of his intended audience just down the bar, but she’s on his blind side and Jack can’t tell if the woman in the green dress is even paying attention anymore.

      “A little,” Rachel says, going with the performance.

      Jack flags the waitress, who’s hurrying past with empty shrimp plates. “My sister wants to order some dinner,” he says. “Can you put it on my tab?”

      “You like shrimp, hon?” the waitress asks absently.

      Rachel shivers, cold, her dark eyes never leaving Jack. “Deuteronomy 10: ‘And whatsoever hath not fins and scales ye may not eat; it is unclean unto you.’”

      “’Scuse me?”

      “It’s against my religion.”

      “Shrimp?”

      “Yes, ma’am.”

      “And your religion is—?”

      “No shrimp.”

      The woman in the green dress laughs out loud. The waitress shoots a slightly wounded look at her, and lets it slide contemptuously across Jack and Rachel before retreating into the kitchen. “Why’nt you look at a menu, I’ll be back.”

      Jack nods at Rachel. “Have a seat. Sis.”

      Rachel’s mouth is an ineluctable straight line. “Okay. Bro.”

      He gestures to a booth. She picks up her backpack and crosses to a banquette, where she flops down to wait, wet, staring grimly back at him. No one else in the restaurant meets her wandering gaze.

      “You coming?” she says, innocently. He pretends he doesn’t hear her.

      Barely another moment passes before the pretty young woman stands up, smoothes her green dress, takes her glass and her shoe and limps, one shoe on, one shoe off, down the length of the bar to sit next to Jack. She still hasn’t looked at him.

      The marine sergeant drains his beer.

      “I’ve seen some elaborate flirting in my time,” the woman says, “but that was positively Baroque.”

      Jack smiles at her. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

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