clenching his eyes like a boy expecting a slap, stiffening his shoulders.
“Piss on you, Ronald Kirkpatrick. Piss on that fat. Piss on treating me like shit. And piss on you for making me leave our beautiful Fort Worth home.”
“That was your idea.” Flinching as her hot urine splashed his face and chest, he pressed his lips together—that smell, more than sulphurous. He was trying to suck air through his nose when she cried out:
“Ronnie, green, it’s green!” At that moment came a loud crrraaaak and a rumble like thunder at the rear of their house, below the upstairs sliding door. It was followed by what sounded like crockery hurled against the back wall that faced the downstairs deck.
“What was that? What’s that smell? Get off me!” He wrenched his head to spit onto the towel.
“Something’s wrong!”
“Who’s throwin’ things down there?”
“How should I know? Don’t you care I hurt?”
“Where?”
“My snatch—call nine-one-one.”
At last the crashing outside ended. Wet as a walrus, he heaved himself off the bed as she folded into a V. Green mottled the towel’s white stripes and the sheet; the red seemed blistered black.
“Oh, Lord,” she moaned, hugging her knees and rocking. “Something terrible is happening and worse downstairs and you stand there with your mouth open, squeezing your balls. The Lord’s punishing us, Ronnie. We’re crap and you’re crappier than anybody. Do something.”
Wheezing, he hurried into the bathroom, lifting his feet over the raised tiles into the shower end of the tub. He turned the faucet on cold, grabbed a washcloth, and, shivering, slapped the cloth to his chest, legs, and arms.
He dried off and wrapped the towel around him, then reached into the closet to pull his robe and blue Home Loan Champ cap from their hooks.
He was heading for the phone on her desk when he twisted to face her in the dimness. Across the TV screen, Super Hornets banked in unison, emitting white contrails. The soapstone waterfall gurgled, the four squat candles flickered in their hammered-silver bowls.
“Asparagus, Lile. We had asparagus for dinner. Take a laugh break.”
He flipped the switch to light the stairs and lumbered down.
ACTIVIST
PULLING HIS RED KNIT CAP OVER HIS EARS, MANNY KNELT in the mid-March chill beside the left rear tire of Ron’s new white 2003 Escalade. He winced as the gravel bit his skin. Lying in bed waiting, he’d heard Ron and Lila drive in; the tire’s wall was still warm. As the light behind the glass blocks in their upstairs bathroom dimmed, a gibbous moon lit the American-flag decal darkening the rear window of the gleaming sixteen-footer.
Manny stiffened as a gust rattled the string of dried red chiles hanging from the front porch. The only other sound came from below his and Joyce’s and the Kirkpatricks’ town houses, shouts from the softball game on Baca Field. Proud he’d slipped downstairs without breaking Joyce’s snoring, Manny swelled his lungs with a menthol-like whiff of the rabbitbrush that lined the Kirkpatricks’ drive, and bent close to the tire.
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
