After Delores Read online

  “Look,” Coco said. “The first time was weird enough but the second time was sick because by then you knew what was going to happen but you did it anyway. That paint cost me eight bucks.”

  I didn’t feel like saying anything right then. Not “fuck you” or “shut up,” so I just sat there and Coco sat there too. Then she started braiding her hair. Then she left.

  When the door slammed shut, I pulled out my gun from under the couch and held it, first in the palm of my hand, then gripped it cowboy style. It smelled like stale licorice or polished wood and it tasted like Delores. I decided that day that I would carry it with me at all times, until it took me directly to her. Then I would make Delores suffer. It was the only way that I could be happy.

  22

  ALL DAY AT Herbie’s I wore the gun wrapped in a clean side towel, in the middle pocket of my apron. It felt great, hitting against my pubic bone.

  Things were slow that day, so by three o’clock Dino and I were taking a break on the back stoop smoking his Kools, which he always pulled upside down from the bottom of the pack. We were talking about what kind of day it was and what those kinds of days reminded us of.

  For Dino, it was about remembering being in San Francisco when he was young, “a few years back.”

  “It’s the weather,” he said, “that makes them all feel like that. It’s like you’re on vacation everyday and can take a bus in either direction. I had a friend, Max, who worked at the Do-City Barbeque. Eat Your Ass Off was their slogan. Old men be sweeping sidewalks anytime they got around to it because it’s bright morning all day long. There’s nowhere else I’ve ever been where you can take it so easy and still be in the middle of everything, except down south, but that’s another story altogether.”

  I looked up, leisurely smoking, when I saw Delores coming down the street. Her eyes were glazed over all fanatic like and she moved as quickly as the Wicked Witch of the West pedaling that bicycle through Kansas. In her left fist, she was clutching my Statue of Liberty postcard.

  I jumped up as fast as I could but she still caught me square in the chest.

  “Don’t think I care about your fucking postcard,” she said, shoving me again with a strength I remembered immediately. I stood there with no expression and let her shove me all around the back lot of Herbie’s. The gun in my apron was banging back and forth, cracking me in the bone.

  “Don’t think I care,” she said. ‘But everyone else is going to care a lot. I have some friends now, you know.”

  Well, the truth is, I never felt better. I felt successful. Delores looked so ugly that I didn’t even have to shoot her. For the first time ever, she knew exactly how I felt. I had touched her. Delores finally got the message.

  I watched her stalk away and picked up the beat-up old postcard she had discarded on the sidewalk.

  “Shit, Dino, I mailed this months ago. God, the mail is slow. Man, it has really gotten out of hand.”

  Cocky as all hell, I delicately dropped it into the mailbox that was standing, conveniently, right next to the streetlight.

  Dino was blinking, dragging on his cigarette, looking calm and very handsome.

  “Funny,” he said. “Funny how sometimes you’re just sitting down having a smoke and all of a sudden you’re in a movie. Right up there on the silver screen. And then, you’re out of it again.”

  I was smiling away, feeling that warm spot on my chest where Delores had put her hand.

  23

  THE NEXT DAY, I made a big mistake. I started looking at old photographs of me and Delores. There was this one that really got to me. It was taken one weekend the previous August. We’d gotten shriveled and passive from surviving the city all summer, and when a customer at Herbie’s recommended Ocean Grove, New Jersey, as not too expensive and not too far, we decided to stretch the budget and check it out.

  About a half-hour after we got there, it became evident that the whole town was run by Christians and everything was closed by nine usually, and all day Sunday. Delores started calling it “Ocean Grave.” The hotel that we were staying in was more like someone’s home that got too large so they rented out a few rooms. In the foyer were born-again Archie comics and a board game called Bible Trivia. I remember that Delores and I pushed our beds together over by the window so we could see and hear the ocean. When we made love, we had to be quiet because we were scared of getting caught. But the next morning we took a little stroll down the beach and found out that one town over was Asbury Park, home of Bruce Springsteen and the famous boardwalk. We jumped in and out of that scene, playing ski ball, eating fried clams at Howard Johnson’s, going to a rock-and-roll revival concert of the Marvelettes singing “Please Mr. Postman” for the seventeen thousandth time, and then we looked at the water. On the way back to bed, Delores and I crowded into an old-fashioned photo booth and took a strip of four shots. The first three were black-and-white with Delores sitting on my lap. But at the last minute, she grabbed my face between her hands and kissed it so deeply in front of the camera that my face got drawn into her face. When the pictures came out of the little slot, she snatched the strip right away, tore off the three posed ones, and threw them in the garbage, handing me the kiss.

  “Here,” she said, being nobody’s fool. “I want you to have this one.”

  That’s why I still have it and it hurts too much. Looking at it again made me realize what a pansy I have been, what a Caspar Milquetoast, letting her walk all over me. I conveniently turn to putty as Delores bops into my life for one second to cause total disarray and then she walks out of it again whenever she pleases.

  That was it. There was no more beating around the bush. No more pretending. The time had come for me to take that step and get Delores. I walked around the apartment with my gun for a while. It felt good. What was more important, it felt natural. I wasn’t going to shoot Delores and throw my whole life away. I was just going to scare her. Then she’d have to be polite for a minute or two. All I wanted was to say a few things to that bitch without having to hear her snappy comebacks. First, though, I had to get her into my house.

  “Hi, Delores? This is me. I just wanted to tell you that I’m very sorry for any inconveniences that I may have caused you. I’ve thought it all over very carefully and I’ve decided that you are right and I am wrong.”

  I was talking to Sunshine’s answering machine.

  “Delores, if I had known that you were going to smash me because I wouldn’t get married, then I would have married you. Being married to you could not have been worse than this.”

  I was trembling just a tiny bit.

  “Well, anyway, Delores, I would really like to make things up to you in person. I would really appreciate it if you would stop by here soon and I could tell you how wrong I’ve been.”

  I poured myself a short one.

  “Eight o’clock,” I said.

  Then I hung up.

  The plan was in motion. The first step was to finish my drink. Maybe then I should reassess my plan. Maybe I should take the gun and shoot my face off as soon as Delores walked through that door. Then I had another drink and looked out the window.

  “Everyone’s a liar.”

  I was talking to myself out loud by this time and gritting my teeth. “Take Charlotte, she’s as big a liar as Delores.”

  I hated her.

  “‘My house, her house.’ Charlotte almost had me fooled into thinking she cared about me, that we shared a secret, almost like best friends. But the real reason she didn’t want me talking to Beatriz was that Charlotte thought Punkette had told me something about Charlotte liking to get seriously high every now and again. In the meantime, there’s that Beatriz looking for tracks on my arm when her lover and her son were probably high in front of her every single day.”

  I was getting ready to walk right over to Charlotte’s place and give her a piece of my mind when I heard someone knocking on the front door.

  “Delores?”

  “No.”

  I ope
ned it to find three women standing there. They looked exactly alike, even though one was rail-thin and the other two were not. Looking alike was what was unusual about them. Separately they would have looked very usual. Their hair was dyed the same color, black. And it was all the same style, ugly. They looked, at the same time, like a bad hallucination and very familiar. But I couldn’t tell if that was because I was drunk. I couldn’t tell which was more familiar, having hallucinations or them. Maybe they really did look like everybody else.

  “We’re from the Rape Crisis Center.”

  “What?”

  “We’re from the Rape Crisis Center.”

  “Are you collecting clothes for a thrift sale?”

  “You have committed violence against women.”

  “What is this?”

  I was not in the mood for this at all.

  “You have threatened the life of Delores,” they said in unison. “We have evidence.” One of them pawed a greasy, crumpled Statue of Liberty postcard.

  “But I just mailed that yesterday.”

  “With the New York postal service, you never can tell. Anyway, you threatened to smash her face with a hammer.”

  “I didn’t say I would smash her face with a hammer, I said I wanted to. It’s not the same thing. Anyway, that’s not the issue. The issue is who the fuck are you and get the hell out of here.”

  “Delores is a victim,” the greasiest one said. “She is your victim. You are a rapist. You have metaphorically raped her.”

  “Why are you doing this?” I asked, almost crying.

  “For justice,” the skinny one said. “To get justice for Delores.”

  “Who’s going to get justice for me? Where were you when I asked Sunshine to stay away from my bar on my night and she said, ‘You can’t tell me what to do’? Is that right? Where were you when I asked Delores why she said she loved me when she only wanted a place to live and she said, ‘I changed my mind’? Where were you when Delores took my shirt off in The Blue and the Gold? Where were you when she was pushing me around Herbie’s back lot?”

  “We don’t care about that,” the middle one said. Her face was pasty-white and bloated, like she ate cortisone for breakfast.

  “Why not?”

  “Because your name is mud in this town,” they all said in unison.

  They each had their street names painted on their identical leather jackets: Dubble, Trubble, and Boil. Then I remembered where I had seen them before. They weren’t from any Rape Crisis Center. They were Useless Phlegm. They were that horrible rock band that Coco used to manage.

  “You’re not from the Rape Crisis Center,” I said. “Your names aren’t Dubble, Trubble, and Boil. Your names are Debbie, Amy, and Lynn. You have the three most boring names in America. You’re not social workers. Social workers drive Le Cars and carry appointment books. They really want to care. You don’t do anything for anybody. You must really need bucks to walk around giving rape crisis counselors a bad name.”

  “Your name is mud,” they said.

  “What’s the matter?” I said, walking past them and down the stairs. “No more gigs at the blood bank? Can’t find any more health clubs that will pay you to hand out circulars? Couldn’t find enough deposit bottles? Is that why you let yourselves be hired out as Sunshine’s paid goons?”

  “Why?” asked Boil. “Can you make a better offer?”

  “I hope you got cash first,” I said. “Or is she lending you her video equipment so you can make a music video of your band?”

  “Video?” the one who wasn’t skinny said. “All she promised us were free glossies.”

  “You are just bullies and cunts,” I said. “Bullies and cunts.”

  “Your name is mud,” they said. “All over town.”

  “Shut up,” I said, slamming the front door behind me and running off down the street.

  “Mud,” they yelled after me. “Mud, mud, mud.”

  I ran all the way to Charlotte’s house, but when I got up the stairs to the door, staring me in the face was that peephole. It was cavernous. I could have crawled into it. I didn’t need to knock. The peephole would let me in. My palms left sweaty handprints when I pressed up against the door to look inside. The light was out in the hallway, so I stood, like a thief in the night, like a traitor committing espionage. I looked in and they were naked. Charlotte sitting strong and beautiful on a kitchen chair with her arms around Beatriz’s tiny waist. They were sweating, their bodies glistening in the yellowed old kitchen.

  Beatriz was curved and slithering, snake-like, looking down at the seated Charlotte with the greatest tenderness. Charlotte holding her so closely, her jaw relaxed, actually looking content. I could smell them from the hall. I felt great love for them. I became their accomplice. I would never betray them. Charlotte killed a lover with her hands and hid that behind a high while Beatriz covered it all up with lies so they could make love together in a tenement kitchen in the afternoon. Their lies enabled them to keep a passionate relationship. I was one of them now. I was so evil. I was in love with them.

  I raced down the stairs onto the street, running, running again as fast as I could. My lungs were aching but I kept running, the gun bumping against my hip. My legs were sore and slapped against the pavement, but I kept running until sweat poured down my face and sliced my chin. I ran to Priscilla’s house and she let me in.

  24

  I WAITED IN the living room while Priscilla got comfortable. She brought out a bottle of good vodka and a 1940s ice bucket with long-stemmed art deco glasses, pink. Everything was something. Nothing was regular. It couldn’t be just a chair. It had to be tacky or exquisite or a great find. There were too many details, like coasters from various world’s fairs and ice tongs from here and there and an overload of truck-stop ashtrays. But, bless her heart, that little dollface stepped out of the bedroom all dressed up for me, in her gown and panty girdle and even that black fall. She put on rhumba records and we danced around laughing and drinking from the bottle in between sloppy, drunken kisses. Then Elvis sang, “Wise men say, even fools fall in love.”

  That’s when I murmured, “Don’t be cruel,” and fell on my knees at Priscilla’s feet, burying my face in her polyester. I rubbed my whole body in it. Polyster was my everything. I chewed on her girdle and she tightened the grip of tulle around my neck.

  “I’m a terrible lover,” I said, tonguing her thigh. “I’m the worst. You can still get out of it.”

  “I know you stink,” she said, scratching eight long nails and two short ones under my shirt and down my back. “As long as I know the truth, let’s just do it.”

  She put her hand on my thigh.

  “Cool,” she said.

  She put her hand on my cunt.

  “Feel how hot,” she said. “You’re burning up.”

  Pris tore off her Playtex and rocked back and forth over my face. So I ate her the best I could, which was like riding a bucking bronco, because she was not shy when it came to getting what she wanted. And there is little in life that is more terrific than being put in that compromising situation by a woman who outdoes her own fantasy. But then, surprise, surprise, Priscilla got all soft and dewy-eyed. That’s when it hit me.

  “Priscilla, you’re the kind to fall in love immediately, aren’t you?”

  “It’s true. I’ve never been able to kiss through walls or any kind of protection. That’s why I need to carry a gun.”

  We lay back on the floor, quiet and out of breath. She raised herself up on one elbow and brushed my hair off my forehead.

  “Honey,” she purred. “What made you know I would let you in like that and give you exactly what you were looking for if you just presented yourself at my front door?”

  “Well, Priscilla,” I said, noticing her face under the makeup. “You’re dangerous. You’re dangerous and I’m crazy. We smelled each other in a rathole so I thought it might work. By the way, while we’re on the subject. I’d like to ask you a favor. Take your gun back. I’ve g
ot it right here in my pocket.”

  “Why, thank you, honey” she drawled. “But I have plenty. And not one of them is registered. Why don’t you just keep it?” “I don’t know.”

  “It comes in handy. And don’t you worry about the address book. All that information is on my personal computer.”

  “Tell me, Pris, why did you start collecting firearms?”

  She stretched out flat on her back to answer that one. Her breasts stuck up right into the air like the legs of a dead animal in rigor mortis.

  “Years ago, when I was very young, I had a girlfriend who worked as a hooker. There were always creepy men coming around demanding things and she was very tough with them but sweet with me, real sweet. One night we were making love at her place. Her mouth was full of my breasts. She had such delicate bones, we were sitting together on a rocking chair. Suddenly, she stopped everything, right in the middle. I mean, both of our faces were flushed red. When you’re that turned on, the air is sparking, everything could burn. So her pause had this magical feeling. I understood perfectly not to say or do anything. She picked up her gun, naked, with those sunshine stretch marks girls get from making babies, those marks were gleaming like gold leaf in an old book. She pulled open the curtain and a man was standing there jerking off. His dick was flopping up and down in his hands, like a sausage. I remember the steel of her gun and the precious metal on her stomach. And I remember his expression, knowing she would blow his balls off. But she didn’t. He was some old boyfriend of hers and she forgave him. He left her alone after that, knowing that the next time she’d kill him for sure.

  “‘Get tough, cookie,’ she told me. ‘Get a gun.’”

  “That’s a great story, Pris. Do you know Coco Flores?”

  “I’ve got more,” Pris said. “If we’re ever in a car for a long drive with no radio, I’ll tell you six or seven.”

  “Do you honestly think I need a gun?”

  I was moving real slowly, not sure of what I’d be hearing or feeling next.