Free Battleborn: Stories by Claire Vaye Watkins Page A

ochre peaks of the dunes swooping across the horizon; they seemed that close. And there was a trail even, meandering through the crumbly bentonite hills. Renzo had complained of this too, the trail; he wanted authentic desert, pristine wilderness. He kept asking, “Why must Americans turn everything into an advertisement?”
That was the last thing Michele heard him say.
    They’d been hiking only an hour, Renzo charging forward, Michele struggling to keep up, neither speaking to the other. Michele stopped to take a drink of water, to shake a rock from his shoe. When he stood up, his friend was gone.
    He called for Renzo to wait, but there was no answer. He spit on the ground and watched the earth swallow the moisture. It was too hot for this. He followed the trail back and waited for Renzo in the air-conditioned rental car. But Renzo never came.
    •   •   •
    A nd we, ah, are, ah, separate,” the boy says.
    “You were separated,” Manny says.
    “Now, I wait.” He nods to the bar, the brothel, the girls, as if they all have some arrangement.
    “Wait for what?” Amy asks dully.
    Michele is quiet for a moment, looking down at his large hands. “I wait, ah, for my friend,” he says. “For his return.”
    Darla says, “Oh, you poor thing,” and puts her arms around his neck. She says, “Don’t you worry; they’ll find him.” She can probably smell him there, his cologne, his hotel soap. Cheap beer. Clean sweat. Salt.
    Michele takes a swig of his Budweiser. “Yes, yes,” he says, then swallows. “Then I go home. With Renzo.”
    Michele doesn’t go back with Darla that night. It’s slow. Geoff comes for Chyna, and afterward he presents her with another gift, a hideous gold-plated charm bracelet. Amy and Bianca take care of a pair of mortgage brokers from New Jersey, in Vegas for a conference. But Michele and Darla simply sit at the bar, talking. Under normal circumstances this would piss Manny off, one of his girls spending an entire evening with a man without taking him back. Under normal circumstances he would sit her down in his office and tell her, “You know I don’t like being the bad guy, but at the end of the day I don’t give two shits about making friends. Because, honey, if you don’t get paid, I don’t get paid, okay? Ask for the fucking order.”
    That’s the way it has to be. These bitches would run all over him if he let them.
    But tonight circumstances aren’t normal. Tonight the thought of Darla—or any of the girls—taking the Italian back to a trailer for an hour, maybe two, makes him feel sick with something like jealousy. It must be pure hormones—he hasn’t been laid in longer than he’d like to admit. Or perhaps it’s the terribly familiar way the boy looks at Darla, his face flushed with booze and all the want and wonder of a child. He’s seen that look before, on men two and three times this kid’s age, men who knew better. He’s seen Darla take everything they were willing to give,and more. That’s what he’s always lovedabout her.
    When the cab honks in the parking lot at five a.m., Manny helps the drunk, sweet-faced boy down the front steps. As the sun comes up, he stands alone on the porch and watches the red taillights of the taxi shrink down Homestead Road, then up the hill toward Vegas. There’s nothing but the lolling violet mountain range and spiny yucca and creosote and that taut ribbon of road as far as the eye can see. Poor Renzo doesn’t have a chance out here, and sooner or later that beautiful boy is going to realize it.
    Manny imagines the Italian looking back at him through the rear window of the cab. The ranch the boy would see looks like a dollhouse, down to its dormer windows hung with boxes of poppies and desert primrose. The wood siding is painted the bright fuchsia of deep flesh, the country trim a chalky lavender. Back east this building would be a bed-and-breakfast; in the Midwest it would be an antique store. But here there is a red