Play It as It Lays

50

EVERYTHING MARIA could think to do in the town she had already done. She had checked into the motel, she had eaten a crab at the marina. At three in the afternoon she had been the only customer in the marina restaurant and it had been a dispiriting thirty or forty minutes, sliced beets staining the crab legs and a couple of waitresses arguing listlessly and a piped medley from Showboat. After that she had walked on the gravelly sand and she had driven aimlessly to Port Hueneme and back to Oxnard and now she sat on a bench in the downtown plaza, watching some boys in ragged Levi jackets and dark goggles who sat on the grass near her car. Their Harleys were pulled up to the curb and they seemed to be passing a joint with furtive daring and every now and then they would look over at her and laugh. Because there was an oil fire somewhere to the north a yellow haze hung over the town, a stillness over the plaza. On the next bench an old man coughed soundlessly, spit phlegm that seemed to hang in the heavy air. A woman in a nurse's uniform wheeled a bundled neuter figure silently past the hedges of dead camellias. Maria closed her eyes and imagined the woman coming toward her with a hypodermic needle.

When she opened her eyes again the boys in the Levi jackets seemed to be rifling the glove compartments of parked cars. To hear the sound of her own footsteps Maria stood up and walked to the pay phone by the public toilet and asked the operator to try the number in Los Angeles again.

She would tell him she could not wait.

She would tell him she was sitting in a park watching some hoods rifling cars and she could not wait.

Maybe she would not feel this way if she talked to him, maybe he would make her laugh. Maybe she would hear his voice and the silence would break, the woman in the nurse's uniform would speak to her charge and the boys would get on their Harleys and roar off.

But when the operator got the studio a voice said only that Mr.

Goodwin could not be reached.

When she hung up the phone the silence was absolute. The boys in the Levi jackets were all watching

her now, because they were standing around her car, they knew it was her car, they had watched her lock it.

They were trying various keys. They were watching to see what she would do. As if in slowed motion she

began walking across the grass toward the car, and as she got closer they melted back, formed a semicircle. Abstractly she admired the way that she and they together were evolving a choreography, hearing the same silent beat. She kept her eyes steady, her pace even, and when she found herself unlocking the car under their blank gaze it was with extreme deliberation. As she slid into the driver's seat she stared directly at each of them, one by one, and in that instant of total complicity one of them leaned across the hood and raised a hand in recognition of what had passed between them, his palm out, inscribing an arc in the still air. Later those few minutes in the plaza in Oxnard would come back to Maria and she would replay them, change the scenario. It ended that way badly, or well, depending on what you wanted.