All Chuck felt when he squeezed his eyes shut was the chill of beefsteak tomatoes.
Forehead crinkling, Bret leapt up, hand on his cell-phone holster.
Ron began blowing like a walrus. Striding past the gaping faces to the steps, behind him over Pixie’s squalls he heard Max yell, “Let him go!” Twisting his head, he glimpsed not Bret Wilkes but the Native American pursuing, hair flapping behind him, Wall Street Journal rolled in a fist meatier than Ron’s own.
DAMAGING MR. FIXIT
THROUGH THE CLOUDS MASSING THIS LATE SATURDAY morning, the sun turned Lila’s cowgirl shirt and its mother-of-pearl buttons to warm peach. Lila had shampooed her shoulder-length hair, gathering its graying strands into a ponytail with peach-colored ribbon. Capillaries in her cheeks purpled the powder she applied. Though she often left her shirt open to show cleavage, this morning she also rubbed in Estée Lauder’s honeysuckle-based Beyond Paradise—determined, given Ron’s history in Fort Worth and, apparently, here, to attempt adultery herself before cellulite pocked her flesh in more places than just the backs of her thighs.
Try Manny Barnes? She stood now with Victor Valdez gazing at the tiles in the upstairs bath, convincing herself the stench of tobacco from his leather jacket turned her on.
Shorter by two inches than Lila, Victor raised dark eyes to hers. “Termites,” he muttered, removing the black-rimmed glasses that hid his eyebrows and stuffing them into the pocket of a denim work shirt. His belly hid a leather belt holding up gabardine slacks pleated at the waist. Kneeling, he reached under one of the four raised tiles, pinching up a mix of dark specks and sawdust. With his other hand he stroked the tip of a handlebar mustache.
“Dry-wood termites, you’ve got ’em.” He dropped the grains into his palm and pushed up the bill of a beige cap whose red band read Proud To Be American.
“Mr. Valdez,” Lila said, sidling to him until her arm nudged his battered jacket. “Aren’t you hot? Let me take that.” His pocketed box of cigarettes pressed her hip as she reached for the jacket’s collar.
Squinting at her with his right eye, he stumbled against the shelves that bore her towel-and-washcloth set imprinted with orange trumpet vine. “This powder? Cellulose. The black specks? Excrement. Your subfloor’s riddled. All we—”
Turning to face him so that he could ogle her cleavage, Lila dipped toward the wastebasket. “Toss it in here, sir. And leave those tiles alone. I’ve left word with our insurance broker to send someone Monday with a camera.” She thrust the green wastebasket at him.
He brushed off his palm above it as she flipped down the cover of the toilet bowl and, sitting, bent to pull her yellow skirt taut across her knees. “A terrible morning, Mr. Valdez. Mr. Kirkpatrick and I had a spat. Then Triple A came to patch his tire but couldn’t find the nail—I’ve got to learn to tame that white elephant. My husband took my Mustang. I’m trapped here all day. Can you imagine? We left a four-thousand-foot home and stables in Fort Worth because the rich Muslim husband of Mr. Kirkpatrick’s mistress sent him a note threatening his life. Muslims understand methods of torture, don’t they?” Her fingers twiddled the humpbacked Kokopelli that hung on a silver chain playing his flute between her breasts.
“Who doesn’t?” he murmured, turning to limp toward the bathroom’s doorway. The soles of his alligator-skin boots clacked on the tiles. “You have other problems I can help with?”
“Mr. Kirkpatrick may be having an affair right now with a woman you know,” she risked.
He twisted toward her.
“An affair with the realtor who sold us this heap of shit.”
Victor formed an O with his lips. He yanked the bill of his cap down over his forehead, now a mass of ruts. “About Mrs. Morgan I know nothing,” he said, “except she steers work my way. I’ll bring you a bid on these tiles Monday. They all need to come up. On the phone you mentioned a downstairs deck?” He shoved his glasses back onto his hawk nose.
“In a minute. That patriotic slogan on your cap, your limp—I notice these things. Have you served the U S of A, Mr. Valdez?”
“I sure have. We fought for a democracy in Vietnam and ended up with sixty thousand Americans dead and a country full of Commies. The steel ankle’s a gift from that screw-up.”
“And what do you think this new war will accomplish?” She fingered an end of the ribbon securing her ponytail.
Raising one arm to brace himself against the bathroom wall, he stared at her. “We got the firepower in self-propelled howitzers and GPS-guided bombs to end this mess in two months, maybe less. Are we gonna add billions more to the billion bucks a month we’re throwing into Afghanistan to try for democracy in Iraq?”
“You speak in depth, sir.”
“No way our dollars were going to work in Nam. Mrs. Kirkpatrick? I need to be home to fix lunch for Mom by twelve thirty.”
“Let’s go see that deck.” She stood and smoothed her skirt over her hips, smiling at him.
From under Victor’s cap, black ringlets jiggled down his neck as he turned and started across the blue carpet, the right side of his body dipping with each step. A yard from the doorway leading to the landing, he twisted his head to her. “Tell me something.” He peered through his glasses, breathing hard. “Are you—?” But she’d been glancing to the side to see if she’d picked the stuffed panda off the carpet after her fight with Ron, and squashed her breasts against Victor’s back.
“Oh!” she exclaimed, slapping her right cheek. “I was checking the bed, I didn’t realize you’d stopped.”
“The hell you didn’t, lady. You want it bad, don’t you? All drenched in that perfume.” He grabbed both her cheeks and rammed his lips to hers. His belt buckle pressed her belly.
Panting, she threw her arms around his neck. “Slowly, sir. It’s my first time out of wedlock.” Her arms went slack and she backed away. “You take care of your mother? What a good man! Will you come back later? I want to savor you.” Reaching to cup his erection, she laughed to see his eyes bulge behind his glasses.
Biting a hair straggling from his mustache, he pirouetted from her, throwing the shrapnel-blasted ankle toward the landing, and smacked his temple on the doorjamb.
“Unnhhh,” he groaned and staggered.
“Oh, my dear! The skin’s broken.” She grabbed her desk chair and wheeled it to him. “I’ll go get a washcloth.”
Blinking at her, he lowered himself to the cushion and gazed at the palm he brought down from the purpling bulge. Lifting his buttocks, he hauled a handkerchief from his rear pocket, wiping off the blood and grasping his genitals.
Lila rushed back. Kneeling, she squeezed the cold washcloth against the wound as drops of water dribbled down his neck. “Can you walk?” she asked, rising.
He nodded and stood. She took his elbow and hung on to the banister as they headed down toward the living room’s faux-elkskin sofa and two padded armchairs. A beanbag ottoman upholstered in scarlet vinyl squatted in front of each.
“I need you whole, sir,” Lila said, watching his buttocks sway under the leather jacket, feeling her vulva wet her black lace bikini. Might small talk comfort him? “Do you think our drought will bring out the millers early this spring? I hate it when they swarm.”
He paused beside a cabinet across whose doors cavalry raced toward a painted adobe labeled The Alamo. Next to it a cigar-store Indian capped by a red-and-yellow war bonnet guarded Ron’s home office. One of the yellow feathers had snapped. “I gotta pee,” Victor blurted.
“Of