Belching, he unscrewed the ridged cap of the air valve and laid it aside. From a pocket of the sheepskin coat over his robe and sweats, he pulled a long finishing nail and leaned to jam its head into the valve. He pinched his nostrils against the stale hiss, watching the Escalade’s stack of brake and backup lights tilt and begin to sink.
The junipers and prickly pears fronting a town house on the dirt road’s other side suddenly brightened from charcoal to lime green. Starting from the bottom of Plaza Hill, where the private neighborhood began, a crunching grew louder. It’s nine-thirty, go to bed, he thought, and rolled to his side, scraping his left cheek.
Like a rattlesnake he wriggled to the front end of the listing Escalade. He tucked his lankness below the grille’s five blades of chrome, which sparkled from the lamp that lit the Kirkpatricks’ steps. He patted his cheek; blood made his fingertips sticky. Had he ripped his coat, he wondered?
Headlights jerked left and right as the Range Rover with its three-tiered, wraparound brush bar swerved across his view. Maxine Morgan’s—he could see “Morgan Realty” on the door, an albino bobcat springing along the letters’ tops.
The behemoth skidded and paused. Pressing his stomach to the gravel, Manny listened to the engine idling. He peeked past Ron’s front tire as acid rose to his throat. In the moonlight the driver’s window lowered with a hum and a fist flung a tiny bundle rolled up like a newspaper. It plopped near him. White smoke puffed from the tailpipe, another hum, and the SUV wove down the other side of the hill, rear lights waving.
What was she doing up here tonight driving drunk?
The pounding behind his eyes told Manny that he’d stopped breathing. He pursed his lips and blew out air, then eased out the gas that had built up in his colon so not to make a noise. Standing, he threw his elbows behind him to unkink his bony shoulders.
He stared at the white handkerchief or rag rubber-banded to hold some sort of cylinder from which wafted a stench of pepper sauce. Pinching his nose to keep from sneezing, he kicked the bundle toward the rabbitbrush, padded back to the Escalade’s rear tire, and knelt again to finish his task.
Following the new hiss, the corner of the white bumper settled a few inches above the drive, curling back the mud flap as the trailer hitch thumped the gravel.
He screwed the valve cap tight and closed his eyes. Still on his knees, he arched backward and, shivering, steepled his fingers. To the first dirty-footed burkha-wrapped Iraqi clutching her infant, blasted to shreds by an American Tomahawk tagged for Saddam Hussein, I dedicate this hamstrung White Diamond Escalade, he whispered to himself.
Rising, he tasted the sweet salt of blood on his fingertips, then pressed them to the Escalade’s fender. Blood sacrifice, fat Ron. He watched his breath pulse out.
With the toe of his moccasin he nudged the cloth-wrapped bundle out of the bushes onto the gravel, kicked it, and kept kicking until it rested beside the flat tire. He hurried around the piñon-strewn embankment that separated his and Joyce’s town house from the Kirkpatricks’.
Except for the red-eyed surge protectors he’d bought to save his stereo equipment from lightning zaps, no light showed in the hallway. He climbed the stairs’ thick blue pile. Crinkling his nose against the hot-pepper scent rising from his moccasin, he eased open the door he’d shut twenty minutes before, and peered at the bulge of Joyce, curled under the electric blanket in the far corner. Off the master bath he dumped sheepskin, robe, and red knit cap on the walk-in closet’s floor.
Above the bed the moon lit two of Joyce’s anti-war poems just accepted by Cholla Review; he had framed and decorated the typescripts with cholla spines and sunflower petals. He stood on his side of the bed and lifted to his nose his left moccasin, wondering whether to scrub it. She mumbled, “Hey, bud, where’ve you been?”
A foot shorter than he, Joyce sat up in the moonlight, and pulled the blanket around the top of her flannel nightgown. “What’s that stink?”
Sighing, he sank to the mattress and told her; his gut hurt as though she were twisting a loop of his intestines with pliers.
“Knock it off, Manny! It’s not your business what real estate games Maxine Morgan wants to play. Who do you think you are letting air from that tire, Mahatma Gandhi?” She jerked the electric blanket tighter around her shoulders. “I don’t like what’s happening since we moved to Santa Fe, bud.”
“Meaning?” Pressing his lips against a belch, he raked the tips of his fingers through his short hair.
“Your games with women. Two years ago, after we signed the deal for this place. The lunch that Maxine Morgan and Ron bought us at the Great Books Cookhouse. I should have stayed alert.”
“You’re saying what?”
“How you spooned blackberry flan from her dish.”
“What the hell, Boodie.” It was the name he’d given her after she’d startled him, leaping around the corner like a blonde cricket at Sun Microsystems in Silicon Valley, where she’d edited Sun’s employee newsletter.
The sharp sweetness of blackberries filled his mouth; again he saw Maxine widening those violet-smeared eyes at him.
“And telling Ron Kirkpatrick’s wife at the homeowners’ meeting how you love blue flax. You mean loved her unbuttoned blouse. She’s an easy ten years older than us, Manny.”
Tenderness swamped his insides. He loped around the foot of the bed, pulling Joyce’s mop of blonde hair against his stomach. He felt her shoulders sag, and for the moment didn’t care that she’d decided to let the hair of her armpits and legs grow.
“Boodie, it’s your breasts I love, especially when you rub them on my cock and face.”
“Your flirting scares me. So does wanting us to quit drafting marketing newsletters for Sun and Hewlett-Packard and Cisco. What are we supposed to do, live on the settlement from my divorce?”
“Chuck’s diversified me into green stocks and municipals. I’m in good hands.”
“You’re as naïve as he is. He may be fine as your CPA, but with investments Chuck Ridley’s a fool.” She freed her small head from his grasp and pushed him away. He staggered to the wall—its rough plaster pricked his back. “Stocks are tanking, it’s the deepest bear market in thirty years. We’ll have to sell this place.”
She clutched the sheet to wipe her eyes, then faced him. “We’re planning marriage and a baby before I’m forty-five, aren’t we? I should be ovulating midweek. Moving here makes me nervous. Okay, we got desperate. Christ, in every Bay Area garage some geek is lying on a cot scheming how to infect our lives with nanoelectronics. And I know your therapist suggested you go—don’t stand so far away from me.”
He crossed the four feet between them, plopped on the bed, and threw his sweatshirted arm around her waist. “We’ll cut our spending, Boodie. I won’t need to fly to San Jose for editorial meetings anymore. No hotel bills.”
“Naïve. Hey, I’m tired, too, of grinding out newsletters. And I’m sick of writing poetry. What’s the point? I told Allie at lunch today I want a life of muesli to prepare for the baby. But we can’t afford muesli. Meanwhile, you stir up trouble next door and fantasize I don’t know what about women.”
“Enough, Boodie.” He swallowed against another belch. His gut was crimping and, though clothed in sweats, he’d begun to shiver. The furnace must have quit for the night. “I gotta get my robe.”
He was on his way to the closet when he heard her cry out.
“What’s wrong?”
“It’s that scrabbling noise again!”
“Switch on the