Free Battleborn: Stories by Claire Vaye Watkins

sense of them in these odd couplings. Straight Lay. Chair Party. Reversed Half-and-Half. Not for the first time since he arrived in America four weeks ago, he wishes he had taken his language classes more seriously.
    He turns to the man who answered the door—who, it seems, has been talking incredibly fast. Michele tries to explain himself but doesn’t have the English. He makes useless gestures with his big hands and says finally, “No, ah, I am not . . . I am Italian.”
    “That’s okay,” Manny says, his hand on the boy’s shoulder.
    This, Michele understands. “Okay,” he replies.
    “Have a drink.” Manny shows him across the room to the bar.
    “Ah, yes. A drink.” Finally. “I like Budweiser. How do you say, King of Beer?”
    •   •   •
    M anny doesn’t card him. It’s a slow night, better to keep him around than lose the customer. Better for business. You never make money on people leaving you. Jim taught him that.
    Most of the girls see no business in the scared-looking teenager and return to the karaoke machine they’d paused when the doorbell rang. But Darla, Army Amy, and Lacy follow him to the bar. Manny fixes them their drinks. They jostle sweetly for a place at the boy’s elbows, but Darla jostles sweetest.
    “How do you say your name?” she asks, leaning into him.
    “
Meh-kay-lay
,” he says, drumming the syllables on the bar with his long middle finger.
    “Meh-kay-lay. Like that?”
    “That is it.” He bends to kiss her hand. “Very smart lady.”
    Darla reddens. “Shut the fuck up.”
    “What is . . . ?”
    “‘Shut the fuck up’? It’s like ‘be quiet,’ or ‘I don’t believe you.’”
    “Who you don’t believe?”
    “You,” she says.
    “No, you,” he says. “You shut the fuck up.”
    The boy drinks steadily. He pays for each beer with a smooth new twenty, gesturing for Manny to keep the change. Later, after the boy has gone, Manny will overhear Lacy and Darla gossiping in the hallway. Lacy will say, “Jeez. That kid must have spent eighty bucks on Budweiser.”
    Darla will correct her. “A hundred and twenty.”
    At the bar the girls ask Michele all about Italy, the fashion, the tiny cars, the Mafia. They make like they hang on his every word, but if you were to run into one of these girls on her next day out in Nye, at the grocery store or having a smoke outside Serendipity, not one would be able to tell you a thing about the climate of Milan or where Michele was when Italy won the World Cup. Because while he is talking they stare at him and nod in all the right places but think only this:
Pick me, pick me. Oh, God, let him pick me
.
    Manny hasn’t been much better.
He lets his eyes rest on the boy too often, watching that full flush mouth having trouble with its English. The hands. The curve of the chest. He polishes the same pint glass for five minutes, sets it down, then picks it up again. He needs to keep busy or his thoughts slide into forbidden territory. Is it the heat that does it, or the dehydration? What does forty-eight hours without water do to a body?
    He can’t take it anymore. He sets the gleaming pint glass on the bar too loudly. “What were you doing out there?”
    •   •   •
    M ichele tells them in slow, hesitant English how he lost Renzo. They’d gone to see the endangered desert pupfish, which their guidebook said live only at Devil’s Hole, a supposedly bottomless geothermal spring outside Nye.
“
Foro del diavolo
,” Renzo had said, the danger dancing in his eyes.
    But Devil’s Hole was not anything, Michele says now, only a bathtub-size pool of hot water in the middle of nowhere, the rare fish just guppy-looking glimmers in the shadows. Renzo thought so, too. At the spring he was ill-tempered, railing that their entire trip had been ruined. He suggested—no, insisted—that they at least salvage the day by hiking out to the nearby sand dunes. “Go without me,” Michele had wanted to say. But he could see the