Wakefield (26 page)

Hours later, Wakefield brakes in the dust outside a road-house called The Dead Mule. There is only one other car in the lot, a beat-up Plymouth riddled with shotgun holes, and there's a well-kept old Harley parked by the door. Inside, the saloon is adorned with cracked saddles, a pair of longhorn horns, and frayed lassos; there are a couple of video poker machines and an unattended blackjack table with raked felt. Must be Nevada, Wakefield deduces. The bartender is watching basketball on a TV high above his head. He swivels around abruptly when Wakefield takes a seat a few stools away from a grizzled geezer planted halfway down the bar. He orders a bourbon and Coke.

“That would be Bourbon Libre, and tell you what, you ain't gonna see no Cuba Libre long as that Castro still smokes cigars.”

“All his drinks come with homilies,” the geezer pipes up, and begins to cough. He hacks for a minute and relights the butt of a cigar. “A bar is not a lecture hall!” he chides the bartender.

“Nobody ever lectured you on nothing that might stick, Alferez.”

Alferez turns to look at Wakefield. “I've been here since they rid the desert of the Manson family. It's been a hell of a lot nicer since.”

The bartender takes this personally. “I never cared for that sonofabitch, but there were a lot of interesting people around then. They discussed things. They did what they felt like. If a chick liked you, baboom, right up on the pool table. People didn't sit around worried about the stock market!”

It's the geezer's turn to take it personally. “If you'da bought that one stock when I told you, you'd be sittin' pretty in Palm Springs by now.”

“Well, if you're so smart, why aren't you?”

“My teeth. Fifteen thousand dollars. Good as new.”

“Anyway, who'd want to sit around fuckin' Palm Springs with all those goddam Republicans?”

Wakefield likes this bar. The purpose of a good bar, as far as he can see, is to provide a space for freedom of all kinds, and a great barroom can expand practically to infinity. It always amazes him to see a room full of people in the evening reduced to its true size in the morning. Empty, it's impossible to imagine how such a small space could have accommodated so many bodies and contained those bodies' dilatory bathos and need for attention. A body among other bodies in a grocery store or on a public conveyance tries to make itself small, to take as little room as possible. The opposite is true in a bar, where the aim is to achieve maximum presence in order to attract other bodies.

The conversation moves on to more pressing local matters. The bartender has an original take on the recent proposal to make a nearby mountain the repository of the nation's nuclear waste.

“With that stuff here, nobody'll be bothering us for a half-million years, and that's the way I like it. Look what the yuppies done to the rest of the West! Nothing but goddam mansions and water-suckin' lawns. Where does all that water come from? Colorado River, that's where. And what are they gonna do when it runs dry? Nothin', that's what.”

After they debate prostitution (all in favor), gambling (we do what we please), and the water problem (again), they congratulate themselves for living where they do.

“Fifty people spread over three hundred square miles, not counting the whorehouse and commuter traffic,” the geezer says. “That's what I call room. Try that in the East.”

Enjoying his second Bourbon Libre, Wakefield joins the conversation.

“Don't you guys miss urban civilization?”

“There is nothing urban civilized,” snorts the bartender. “Cities are jungles and the people are rats. We get your kind all the time in here. They run from some city, buy themselves a hundred acres and a bunch of sheep, and think they're gonna be happy.”

“I did that. Chicago,” the old man says, “never looked back. I shot a sonofabitch for playing bad music next door. If he'd a had some taste he'd be still alive.”

The bartender takes a rifle from behind the bar. “Hey, you want to have some fun?” he says.

They all go outside and the bartender shoots a hole in the door of the Plymouth.

“Why did you do that?” the old man protests. “You're fucking crazy.”

“Look at that thing,” laughs the bartender. “Like one more's gonna make a difference.”

Wakefield eats a couple of pickled eggs and a strip of rattlesnake jerky from behind the bar. Pretty soon more people trickle in: leathery cowboys with showy sombreros, tough middle-aged country gals in jeans so tight they look grown on, a few army personnel in civvies, and a fat man with a peroxide blonde. Johnny Cash, who owns half the jukebox, sings “Ring of Fire.” Just as Wakefield thinks of taking stock of his condition, feeling a little too drunk to stay on his stool, a hand grips his shoulder. He turns his head to see who it is and sees a familiar face.

“Anton, what the hell?” Wakefield says as he literally falls off the stool.

Anton helps him up and sits him down again. It's too weird; this is the guy Wakefield used to call Marianna's SYL, her Sanctioned Young Lover. But his face is like a jowly mirror of his young, pretty mug, and a much heavier body carries the weary head.

Marianna and Wakefield met Anton at a yard sale; Wakefield had his eye on a small wooden box with a little window in the top through which could be seen a dollar bill, and Marianna wanted a baby doll with curly blond hair. It was rare that their interests converged in the same place and Wakefield was feeling pleased, until the box he was eyeing was picked up by a hand. The hand was attached to Anton, an innocent-looking young man with washed-out blue eyes and blond curly hair resembling uncannily but, as it turned out, significantly, the doll Marianna desired. Anton knew what the box was; he had seen one just like it at a magic show. The trick was to open the box, and he and Wakefield both tried unsuccessfully until Marianna, who had bought her baby doll, laughed, “Why don't we take it home, have a drink, and work on it there?”

Wakefield and Anton each pitched in five dollars for the ten-dollar object, and Anton followed them home in his vintage MG. They had lots of drinks, were frustrated late into the evening by the box, and by then Anton was too drunk to drive. He slept on their couch that night and for the next three nights. When Wakefield left on a travel assignment to Egypt, Anton stayed. In fact, he moved from the couch into their bed, and Marianna didn't hesitate to tell Wakefield about it when he called home. Strangely, Wakefield felt something like gratitude.

“Is he there now?” he asked.

“Don't you get ugly with him,” Marianna said ominously.

“Not at all. I just want to ask him a question.”

She put Anton on the phone. “Did you ever get that box open?” Wakefield asked.

“No, man. Either I'm stupid or it just can't be opened. I bit it with my teeth, I nearly took a hammer to it. But that would be cheating,” he said mildly.

In further conversations from the staticky phones of Egypt, Wakefield reassured Marianna about her lover and invented the acronym SYL as a code for their use. Then one evening on a hotel terrace in Cairo, Wakefield watched a magician perform the trick of the wooden box. He paid the magician to reveal the secret, and it was quite simple, really. It was opened by squeezing diagonally opposite corners simultaneously and then gently pushing the slightly sprung top.

When Wakefield returned from Egypt, he opened the trick box immediately, and Anton, humiliated, left that night. As far as he knew, Marianna never slept with Anton again.

Anton had been a student in those days, though it wasn't clear what he was studying. He'd been quite frank in describing himself as something of a gigolo, loved by gay men and straight women alike. At school, he told them, he had been passed like a toy from one woman to another, but none of the relationships lasted longer than three or four days.

After the affair with Marianna ended, Anton would call to talk about his life and problems, but his life and problems were boring and they couldn't wait to hang up. Then Anton had shared the good news that he had obtained a degree in something called creative writing. He was calling to see if Wakefield could help him find a job. As it happened, Wakefield had met an art dealer in Egypt who was looking for an attractive young man to learn the business and act as a buyer in Europe. The dealer was certainly gay, but he was sincerely looking for help. The job paid very well and it included an apartment in Paris. Wakefield set up a meeting; the dealer flew in and took Anton to an expensive restaurant. By the end of the evening they had agreed that Anton was perfect for the job, and he was enthusiastic about the idea (as he was about all things). Then a friend of his father's came through with an offer to work for an Internet newsletter in California. Choosing between Paris and San Francisco was a no-brainer for Anton, whose surfer good looks reminded everyone of the beach. He went West, and that was the last Wakefield heard of him.

The surfer-boy good looks are shot, but his enthusiasm is undaunted.

“Man, it's great to see you! What the hell are you doing here?”

“Running away.” Wakefield is definitely drunk and wondering how the universe can get away with so much synchronicity. Perennial problem. Serious nonetheless.

“Let's catch up!” Anton drags him to a booth and proceeds to tell Wakefield the story of his life from the minute he went West. It's not a long story. The Internet newsletter paid well enough to live in an expensive apartment on Russian Hill. He also bought a new car, with big monthly payments. Three months after he'd settled in, he met the love of his life, a Las Vegas divorcee. She was living in Vegas at the time, but she flew in to see him every weekend. On the second weekend, she confessed that although she'd been married twice, Anton was the first man ever to give her an orgasm.

Here Wakefield permits himself a snort of disbelief.

“No, really,” Anton affirms, with eternal earnestness, “I found her G-spot.”

Now Wakefield laughs out loud. “I was wondering what happened to that damn G-spot. Never hear about it anymore. It must have fired its agent.”

“No, seriously, man. Whatever. That's not the important part. Love, that's what I'm talking about.”

They got married a month later, but she continued to commute because she said Anton's apartment made her uncomfortable. On their three-month anniversary she asked him for bigger breasts. Her breasts had always seemed more than adequate to Anton, but love is without price. He borrowed money to pay for the new breasts, and then the Internet company folded. He followed his wife to Vegas, where he found out that she was an exotic dancer, which was a good thing because he was broke, and she supported them both. After six months of vainly seeking employment, tired of living on the proceeds of his wife's work (in which he did have an investment), they split up and he moved to the desert. Now he sells real estate.

Wakefield's ex-wife's former SYL lays his hands on the table and his blue eyes quiver like water. “I can get you so much land for next to nothing, you'll thank me for the rest of your life!”

“What's next to nothing?”

“Four, five thousand. And you'll be literally next to nothing. Not another house in sight. Well defended, besides.”

“Electric fence? Fortifications?”

Anton laughs. “Better than that. There's this one place next to a hardened missile silo. An intercontinental ballistic missile.”

Wakefield has noticed the missile sites dotting the land, neat white fences enclosing what looked like the lid of a soup tureen. Hundreds of feet below ground were nuclear warheads.

“Hardly a defense, I would think. More like a target.”

“Well,” Anton says, “everybody likes attention, don't they?”

Wakefield is speechless: speechless before the vastness of the West, speechless before the vastness of the innocence between Anton's ears, speechlessly drunk.

“I gotta go piss,” he says, and negotiates a path between dancing couples (the place is packed, a western-swing band has appeared, there's a dealer at the blackjack table), and is pointed to the john in an outbuilding across an alley. He inhales deeply the cold desert air that doesn't sober him up a bit, gazes at the star-studded sky (billions of pinholes of light, close enough to burn him), and pushes open the door labeled Hombres. There's a woman sitting on the lap of a man who's sitting on the toilet. The man is holding a mirror and a rolled-up dollar bill to her nose.

“Forgive me,” Wakefield mumbles, staggering back, and he tries the other door, marked Chiquitas. There's another couple in there, a woman and a kneeling cowgirl with her head buried between the woman's legs. “Excuse me,” mutters Wakefield, backing out once more. He waits a few minutes, during which his bladder is about to burst, and then he pees loudly on the side of the outbuilding. During this overdue exercise, both couples finally come out of the rest-rooms.

“Men are such pigs!” says the woman who'd just been snorting something in the men's room. The cowgirl and her lover just say, “Yuck.”

Wakefield shoves his way back through the crowd at the bar, and tells the bartender, his new friend, “I understand that a great bar must have private places for a bit of furtive action, but do you know what people are doing back there?”

The bartender, his good buddy, turns mean. “I don't know where you come from, pal! But you're in the only goddam bar in this country that doesn't have cameras in the toilets!”

Several fierce libertarians put down their drinks and nod approvingly. One of them points to a sign above the cash register. Restrooms Out Back. Ten Minutes Maximum. No Cameras.

Soon Wakefield is leaning on Anton, who is leading him to an old MG convertible parked in the sand.

“It looks just like your old one,” Wakefield observes blearily.

“Funny thing, after I sold the Mercedes and left the wife, I got my old car back. I'm more broke now than I was when I met you. Thing is I can never make a goddam sale.” For the first time, there's a note of weariness in his voice, and Wakefield feels sorry for him. He wants Anton to be the way he always was. Somehow someplace somebody's got to stay the same, but no one ever does.