Twentynine Palms. Daniel Pyne

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СКАЧАТЬ style="font-size:15px;">      “Yes.” But Jack feels the need to qualify it, “Santa Barbara, originally. I’m Jack Baylor.”

      “Mona Malloy. Nice to meet you, Jack.”

      The waitress returns from the kitchen with an order pad and crosses to the booth where Rachel is fiddling with her cell phone. The bartender asks Jack if he’d like some more coffee. Jack nods and notices, back down the bar, two bills left alone on the counter where the marine had been sitting. He is already gone, the door swinging shut behind him.

      Game, set, match.

      “That girl’s not really your sister, is she?”

      They both look at Rachel, who raises her phone and takes their picture.

      “No, she’s not,” Jack admits, grinning winningly, he thinks, and then, before he can stop himself, asks, “The jarhead give you any trouble, Mona?”

      Mona’s eyes flash amusement. “Why? Were you gonna come to my defense, too?”

      Fuck! Jack thinks. “If it came to that,” he says, trying to salvage his play. Jesus. Shut up.

      “You ever fought a marine, Jack? Even a fat, drunk one?”

      Jack has still never swung, in anger or in fear, at anyone in his life. There was the one time, with Tory, but that wasn’t a fight, as it turned out. “I took some Hapkido.”

      “Is that like Kung Fu?”

      “With the sticks.”

      “Oh.”

      The Hapkido lesson was a special offer at the Fat Burn Easy spa down on Oxford, in Koreatown. At the urging of Jillian, his pre-Hannah Best Friend with Benefits, Jack joined for six months when Jillian had him convinced he was starting to put on weight. Jillian, as it turned out, never joined at all.

      “Like Jet Li,” Mona says.

      “I’m in pretty good shape. I think I could hold my own.”

      Mona laughs. Jack feels the playing field tilting away from him. If he were actually standing on it, he’d be tumbling downslope, away from her, like a cartoon character. This is not going the way he needs it to.

      “Pretty good shape? You look like you’re in terrific shape. Mr. Ripply Abs, Bowflex, Buns of Steel.” She leans into him, casual, her shoulder almost touching his, “But, see, fact of the matter is that old leatherneck, Sergeant Symes? He did three tours in Kandahar, blew out his back, got a medal and a medical discharge, and lives out in a desert double-wide, and all day long he’s ex officio over at the Marine Corps Air Ground Combat Center, training young warriors and thinking about nothing but fighting and killing and getting laid, Jack. In that order. So if he decided to bother me, and you decided to come to my defense, it would probably be a very brief and unpleasant thing. And I’d probably have to step in and save you.” Mona finishes her drink, one big swallow. “Which wouldn’t play at all, would it?”

      The middle-aged gals are leaving, tipsy, calming their weepy red-eyed friend, the one who bought the last round and nearly did a face-plant; their cosmetic laminate crinkling and those slurry, collagen smiles, sneakers shuffling across the tile floor, thanking the bartender, brushing limp, sweat-heavy bangs of their sagging perms off their faces. In her booth, Rachel pokes at a vegetarian omelet, sleepy, and tries to text something into the void. No battery. Jack shifts uneasily, figuring Mona’s about to tell him to take a hike. He can’t read her. Everything’s gone flat. Mona stares at him until he feels about two inches tall. Then she looks away, into her empty glass. The sadness in her smile.

      “I guess you won’t want me to get you another one of those?” he says softly.

      Mona turns her head profile, and looks at Jack curiously out of the sides of her eyes. As if he’s suddenly come into focus.

      “No,” she agrees, “no. Not if you won’t stay until I finish it.”

      Half a cigarette, balanced ash-up on the edge of a bed stand, glows.

      Making a suction sound as it comes off his foot, taking the sock with it, Jack’s antique cowboy boot clunks loudly to the floor and flops on its side. The second boot gives up without a protest. Mona drops it, then pulls off the remaining sock with her fingertips, nose wrinkling.

      “Larry Mahan,” she says.

      “Huh?”

      Jack lies stomach-up on the bed, takes another drag on his cigarette. He’s where he wants to be, and yet didn’t get here in any of the usual ways. Tilt-a-Whirl, he thinks. I’m riding the ride. Mona rocks her hips back, straddles his legs, facing his feet.

      “Your boots. Those are Larry Mahan boots. He was World Champion All-Around Cowboy for a few years running, back when bull riders wore Stetsons instead of helmets and the clowns were all drunks. Larry Mahan had a whole line of clothing named after him, hat to boots.” Mona crawls up the bed and flattens herself against Jack’s chest. “I recognize the boots by the smell.”

      “I thought that was just my feet.”

      “Nope.” The straps of her faded gumball-pink brassiere have dug softly into her shoulders and back. Her pale skin shows crease marks from her clothes. Jack runs his hand along her side, up under the lace and silk of her underwear. “Everybody’s feet smell the same in Larry Mahan boots,” she says, shivering.

      “A voice of experience.”

      “Lots of guys want to be World Champion Cowboys, Jack.”

      He traces a small tattoo on her hip: outline of a heart, thin lines blue as a vein, with the faded red promise “Always Faithful” scrawled through it on a curled banner, in script.

      “The helmets have ruined it,” she adds.

      Her lips are dry. They skate across his neck, and down his breastbone, and over the slight rise of his stomach. Hair dusts his hipbones. Her slender hands slip under him, cool, and gentle. He feels everything and nothing. She moves slightly, adjusting her body. Small, tight breasts settle on his thighs. He strokes her neck.

      There is, in the aching quiet, the dry trill of heat-dazed crickets in the vacant field behind the motel. There is the dry trill of crickets in the bush muhly and the desert needle. There is the dry trill of crickets and the promise of another day.

       two

      Square-shouldered, blue-skinned, box-bellied Marine Sergeant John Symes sits, hunched, in a lawn chair beside the pool, staring intently up at the second-floor doors of the Rancho Del Dorotea motel. Two-oh-one through two-sixteen. Every door the same sun-blanched yellow. Between his teeth, he’s expertly cracking the pistachio nuts he picks singly from the bag cradled in one fat fist.

      Opposite him, in the shadow of the lone palm on the far side of the pool, Rachel is curled up on a chaise, her Hello Kitty backpack proving to be a lumpish pillow.

      Probably a runaway, Symes thinks. Somebody should call somebody. Maybe there’s a picture, maybe there’s СКАЧАТЬ