Battleborn: Stories

THE PAST PERFECT, THE PAST CONTINUOUS, THE SIMPLE PAST

This happens every summer. A tourist hikes into the desert outside Las Vegas without enough water and gets lost. Most of them die. This summer it’s an Italian, a student, twenty years old, according to the Nye County Register. Manny, the manager of the Cherry Patch Ranch, reads the story to Darla, his best girl, while they tan beside the pool in the long late sun.

“His friend found his way back and told the authorities, thank God. Seven days they give this kid to live out here.” Manny checks his watch. “Well, six. Paper’s a day old.”

“Fucking tourists,” says Darla, lifting her head from Us Weekly. She lies facedown, topless, on a beach towel laid over the sun-warped wooden picnic table she pulled next to Manny’s cracking plastic lounger. Darla has worked at the ranch for two years, nothing to Manny’s fifteen, but longer than most girls last out here, long enough to be called a veteran. She may have tits like a gymnast but she’s smart for twenty and has a round, bright face with a gap between her front teeth that makes her look five years younger—a true asset in this business. Straight men eat her shit up.

Once, she and Lacy dyed their hair together, the same shade of coppery strawberry blond. Manny warned them it was a mistake. “Bad for business,” he said. “Men want variety.” But he marveled as the very next client to pass through the front door pointed to the two new redheads and asked, “How much for a mother-daughter party?”

Poor Lacy’s lip began to quiver—as if she just realized she was old enough to be the girl’s mother—but Darla simply slipped her fingers through Lacy’s and said, “What do you think, Momma? Four grand?”

“Put that shit away,” she says now. “You’re depressing me.”

Manny lingers on the story of the missing foreigner for a moment longer, more exhilarated than is respectful to a boy likely dying of thirst. He scans the other goings-on of the rednecks and dirt farmers and Jesus freaks in Nye. The Lady Spartans win the three-A state softball championship. Ponderosa Dairy petitions BLM for more land. He can’t be blamed for wanting some excitement around here. He puts the paper under his chair.

Darla checks her phone and turns over on the picnic table, exposing her small stark breasts to the sun. She folds her magazine back along its spine and leans over to Manny, tapping a picture of a shirtless movie star standing in the Malibu surf, dripping wet. “I met him,” she says. “In L.A. He used to come into Spearmint all the time. One of my girlfriends gave him a lap dance. Said he had a huge cock.”

“Girl, don’t tell me that. I’m so horny I could rape the Schwan’s man.”

“I’ll trade you,” she says, slipping her hand gingerly between her legs. “My twat is sore.” She goes back to her magazine. Manny watches the heat waves warp and wobble the mountains in the distance. Six days. Poor kid. Soon, Darla lifts her sunglasses and presses two fingers to her left breast. “Am I burning?”

Manny presses his fingers to her tit. “A little.”

“Good.”

That evening, as the sun sets, a cab drops Michele at the ranch. He is twenty, the same age as his missing comrade. He’s a student of civil engineering, a field he chose because he did not have the grades for medicine or the head for law. In a family like his, a boy has only so many options.

He pauses at the gate and looks up at the sky. A dense swath of stars cuts diagonally across it. If this trip had gone as it was supposed to, he and Renzo would be at the Grand Canyon right now. If everything had not in an instant become so horrifically and hopelessly fucked, they would have flown home in August, and when friends asked about his summer he would have told them of the unfathomable American landscape, the innumerable American drugs, the indefatigable American girls. Or, if he was feeling wistful, he might have said simply, It was beautiful. There were more stars out there than I’ve ever seen.

Instead, here he stands, listening for helicopters searching for his friend, lost somewhere in the Nevada desert. But the helicopters wouldn’t be searching at night; the police had said that at the station. It wouldn’t do any good.

He imagines Renzo tilting his head back in the darkness. Looking up at the faraway mechanics of the galaxy, listening for helicopters that aren’t there. The night before he disappeared, Renzo had pointed to the stars, an arm of the Milky Way adjacent to their own. He called it proof of something. He expounded on the ideas put forth in the books he read, about futility and hopelessness, ideas Michele had long since tired of. Renzo fancied himself a person with a cruel intellect and an unceasing sense of scale.

The cabdriver shouts from his window, saying something over and over again. But he’s speaking English, and Michele understands only when the driver jabs his index finger, pantomiming pushing a button. Where am I? he wonders. And what kind of bar has a doorbell?

The buzz of the bell reverberates deep inside Manny’s throat. The girls—showered, shaved, plucked, bleached, perfumed, lotioned, and powdered—arrange themselves in the neon-lit lobby facing the front door, waiting for him to open it, introduce each of them, and encourage the client to pick a date. Darla hangs back, waiting for her place at the end of the line. She thinks she gets picked most from that spot, Manny knows. Every girl would rather be picked from the lineup than have to go push for a date in the bar, even Darla, who’s a damn good pusher. Being picked from the lineup is a sure thing, cash in hand. This is how Manny convinced Darla to quit dancing in the first place. “Girl,” he said, shouting to her over the squeal of distorted electric guitar inside Spearmint Rhino. “Stripping is like waiting tables, okay? Come work for me and you’ll never have to beg for tips again.”

Manny claps his hands. “All right, ladies. Remember, they don’t come in here for interesting, okay? They come for interested.” This is the first client they’ve had all night and they need the business. He opens the door. “Welcome to the Cherry Patch Ranch.”

On the front step stands a good-looking kid with smooth olive skin, glossy black curls and eyes as bright and blue as the swimming pool out back. Manny hands him a packet of brochures and a menu, ushering him across the threshold. “Is this your first visit to the ranch?”

“Hello,” says the kid softly, reaching to shake Manny’s hand. “It is nice to, ah, meet you.”

“Well. It’s nice to meet you, too. You’re welcome to have a drink at the bar or choose a girl and let her take you on a tour. All these lovely ladies are here to make you feel at home.” Manny introduces the girls by their working names, the only names known here, a rule they need never be reminded of. Down the line they each say hello. They give a little wave and smile, and Manny can almost hear it in the space between their clenched teeth, louder than ever before for this polite, smooth-skinned kid with an exotic accent. Pick me.

First is Chyna, a heavy half-breed Shoshone in a plaid ruffled jumper outfit. Geoff, one of her regulars, brought the outfit for her as a present, hoping she’d give him an extra date for free, which she did, straddling him near dawn in the bed of his truck where they wouldn’t be heard on the intercom system wired throughout the trailers, where they thought Manny wouldn’t find out.

Next in line is Trish, a part-time beautician who does most of the girls’ waxing in a heavily wallpapered salon in Nye called Serendipity. She charges them half price, and they tip her accordingly. Bianca is beside Trish, her hair painstakingly straightened and oiled, her waxy pink C-section scar peeking out from under her red panties. Her two daughters, preteens now, live with their grandmother during the week. They think their mother is a masseuse at a spa in Summerlin.

Lacy is next in line, and though Manny can’t smell her from where he is, she’s no doubt spritzed on too much Victoria’s Secret Love Spell body spray. Beside her is Army Amy, wearing silver hoop earrings, frayed Daisy Dukes, and a squarish camouflage hat. She’s topless, except for a pair of blue sparkly pasties shaped like stars stuck to her big nipples with eyelash glue. Amy is the ranch’s big name, the only girl here who’s done porn. It’s her picture on the billboards, the cab signs, the snapper cards passed out by illegals on the Strip.

Next to Amy, Darla wears a black bustier and a dusting of silver glitter around her eyes. She put the glitter on to satisfy Manny, who made her change out of the satin pajamas she wanted to wear. “Honey,” he said, “those things makes you look—and I’m only telling you this because I love you—like a lesbian.” She pretends to fidget with her garters now, looking innocent and eager at the same time. Her niche.

The girls are all angles: the apex of their plastic pointed heels, the thrust of their wet-looking lips, their jaws extended in stiff smiles, the jut of their nipples made erect from a hard, quick pinch just before Manny opened the door. Each angle is a beacon emitting its own version of the same signal. Pick me, want me. But the kid is fumbling with the brochures, not getting the message.

A lot of young kids drive out here on their eighteenth birthdays. They ring the bell long and hard in front of their friends, drunk on machismo and MGD from the mini fridges in their fathers’ garages. Watch me become a man. How quickly they turn to boys again when they come inside and see the girls in the lineup, all tits and perk like they think they’ve always wanted. Most kids pretend to be lost, ask for directions back to Nye or Vegas, as if they weren’t born and lived all their days within seventy miles of here. As if they didn’t know what this was.

But this kid has no idea; that much is clear. He looks queerer here than Manny did his first time, and Manny is queer. Vegas cabbies are as attentive as any to the fresh currency plugging the pockets of overstimulated tourists. They drive them out to the brothels without telling them what they are, just to get the fare. Manny doesn’t condone it, but when he hears the boy’s velvety European accent he thanks God for doing whatever it took to set this fine white-toothed boy down in front of him.

Michele isn’t sure how he ended up out here. He thinks he asked the cabdriver, back in Vegas, to take him to a bar where they wouldn’t check his age. And the way the driver nodded and tapped the meter, asking whether he had cash, Michele assumed he’d been understood. In Italy, the legal drinking age is sixteen. The first time a clerk denied him and Renzo, they had been in San Francisco for two days. Renzo stormed out of the store, flailing his short thick arms in the air, shouting in Italian, “You Americans too moral for booze all of a sudden? We will just have to steal it then, like damn little children.” Stupid, stubborn Renzo.

Michele shifts his weight from one foot to the other, the bulky white Nikes he bought at an outdoor shopping mall in Los Angeles looking too bright, like the shoes of a character on a children’s television program. He looks over the papers he was handed, front and back, absently pushing his hair from his eyes. He recognizes vocabulary words but can’t make sense of them in these odd couplings. Straight Lay. Chair Party. Reversed Half-and-Half. Not for the first time since he arrived in America four weeks ago, he wishes he had taken his language classes more seriously.

He turns to the man who answered the door—who, it seems, has been talking incredibly fast. Michele tries to explain himself but doesn’t have the English. He makes useless gestures with his big hands and says finally, “No, ah, I am not… I am Italian.”

“That’s okay,” Manny says, his hand on the boy’s shoulder.

This, Michele understands. “Okay,” he replies.

“Have a drink.” Manny shows him across the room to the bar.

“Ah, yes. A drink.” Finally. “I like Budweiser. How do you say, King of Beer?”

Manny doesn’t card him. It’s a slow night, better to keep him around than lose the customer. Better for business. You never make money on people leaving you. Jim taught him that.

Most of the girls see no business in the scared-looking teenager and return to the karaoke machine they’d paused when the doorbell rang. But Darla, Army Amy, and Lacy follow him to the bar. Manny fixes them their drinks. They jostle sweetly for a place at the boy’s elbows, but Darla jostles sweetest.

“How do you say your name?” she asks, leaning into him.

“Meh-kay-lay,” he says, drumming the syllables on the bar with his long middle finger.

“Meh-kay-lay. Like that?”

“That is it.” He bends to kiss her hand. “Very smart lady.”

Darla reddens. “Shut the fuck up.”

“What is…?”

“‘Shut the fuck up’? It’s like ‘be quiet,’ or ‘I don’t believe you.’”

“Who you don’t believe?”

“You,” she says.

“No, you,” he says. “You shut the fuck up.”

The boy drinks steadily. He pays for each beer with a smooth new twenty, gesturing for Manny to keep the change. Later, after the boy has gone, Manny will overhear Lacy and Darla gossiping in the hallway. Lacy will say, “Jeez. That kid must have spent eighty bucks on Budweiser.”

Darla will correct her. “A hundred and twenty.”

At the bar the girls ask Michele all about Italy, the fashion, the tiny cars, the Mafia. They make like they hang on his every word, but if you were to run into one of these girls on her next day out in Nye, at the grocery store or having a smoke outside Serendipity, not one would be able to tell you a thing about the climate of Milan or where Michele was when Italy won the World Cup. Because while he is talking they stare at him and nod in all the right places but think only this: Pick me, pick me. Oh, God, let him pick me.

Manny hasn’t been much better. He lets his eyes rest on the boy too often, watching that full flush mouth having trouble with its English. The hands. The curve of the chest. He polishes the same pint glass for five minutes, sets it down, then picks it up again. He needs to keep busy or his thoughts slide into forbidden territory. Is it the heat that does it, or the dehydration? What does forty-eight hours without water do to a body?

He can’t take it anymore. He sets the gleaming pint glass on the bar too loudly. “What were you doing out there?”

Michele tells them in slow, hesitant English how he lost Renzo. They’d gone to see the endangered desert pupfish, which their guidebook said live only at Devil’s Hole, a supposedly bottomless geothermal spring outside Nye. “Foro del diavolo,” Renzo had said, the danger dancing in his eyes.

But Devil’s Hole was not anything, Michele says now, only a bathtub-size pool of hot water in the middle of nowhere, the rare fish just guppy-looking glimmers in the shadows. Renzo thought so, too. At the spring he was ill-tempered, railing that their entire trip had been ruined. He suggested—no, insisted—that they at least salvage the day by hiking out to the nearby sand dunes. “Go without me,” Michele had wanted to say. But he could see the ochre peaks of the dunes swooping across the horizon; they seemed that close. And there was a trail even, meandering through the crumbly bentonite hills. Renzo had complained of this too, the trail; he wanted authentic desert, pristine wilderness. He kept asking, “Why must Americans turn everything into an advertisement?” That was the last thing Michele heard him say.

They’d been hiking only an hour, Renzo charging forward, Michele struggling to keep up, neither speaking to the other. Michele stopped to take a drink of water, to shake a rock from his shoe. When he stood up, his friend was gone.

He called for Renzo to wait, but there was no answer. He spit on the ground and watched the earth swallow the moisture. It was too hot for this. He followed the trail back and waited for Renzo in the air-conditioned rental car. But Renzo never came.

“And we, ah, are, ah, separate,” the boy says.

“You were separated,” Manny says.

“Now, I wait.” He nods to the bar, the brothel, the girls, as if they all have some arrangement.

“Wait for what?” Amy asks dully.

Michele is quiet for a moment, looking down at his large hands. “I wait, ah, for my friend,” he says. “For his return.”

Darla says, “Oh, you poor thing,” and puts her arms around his neck. She says, “Don’t you worry; they’ll find him.” She can probably smell him there, his cologne, his hotel soap. Cheap beer. Clean sweat. Salt.

Michele takes a swig of his Budweiser. “Yes, yes,” he says, then swallows. “Then I go home. With Renzo.”

Michele doesn’t go back with Darla that night. It’s slow. Geoff comes for Chyna, and afterward he presents her with another gift, a hideous gold-plated charm bracelet. Amy and Bianca take care of a pair of mortgage brokers from New Jersey, in Vegas for a conference. But Michele and Darla simply sit at the bar, talking. Under normal circumstances this would piss Manny off, one of his girls spending an entire evening with a man without taking him back. Under normal circumstances he would sit her down in his office and tell her, “You know I don’t like being the bad guy, but at the end of the day I don’t give two shits about making friends. Because, honey, if you don’t get paid, I don’t get paid, okay? Ask for the fucking order.”

That’s the way it has to be. These bitches would run all over him if he let them.

But tonight circumstances aren’t normal. Tonight the thought of Darla—or any of the girls—taking the Italian back to a trailer for an hour, maybe two, makes him feel sick with something like jealousy. It must be pure hormones—he hasn’t been laid in longer than he’d like to admit. Or perhaps it’s the terribly familiar way the boy looks at Darla, his face flushed with booze and all the want and wonder of a child. He’s seen that look before, on men two and three times this kid’s age, men who knew better. He’s seen Darla take everything they were willing to give, and more. That’s what he’s always loved about her.

When the cab honks in the parking lot at five a.m., Manny helps the drunk, sweet-faced boy down the front steps. As the sun comes up, he stands alone on the porch and watches the red taillights of the taxi shrink down Homestead Road, then up the hill toward Vegas. There’s nothing but the lolling violet mountain range and spiny yucca and creosote and that taut ribbon of road as far as the eye can see. Poor Renzo doesn’t have a chance out here, and sooner or later that beautiful boy is going to realize it.

Manny imagines the Italian looking back at him through the rear window of the cab. The ranch the boy would see looks like a dollhouse, down to its dormer windows hung with boxes of poppies and desert primrose. The wood siding is painted the bright fuchsia of deep flesh, the country trim a chalky lavender. Back east this building would be a bed-and-breakfast; in the Midwest it would be an antique store. But here there is a red light attached to the weather vane, rotating in the dawn. Here, it is what it is. Manny makes his way out back to the peacock coop.

Manny was hired to manage the Cherry Patch Ranch one day when he drove out from Las Vegas, where he grew up. He was eighteen, had been hustling for three years and always knew he was destined for something bigger, though it took a tranny john whipping him across the face with a stiletto for him to act on that instinct. Jim Hart—fifty then, with the girth and slope of an aging athlete and a full head of black hair just starting to gray—happened to be working the door that day, a stroke of luck, because Jim never worked his own door. Bad for business. Jim took one look at Manny and waved the girls off, saying, “Sorry, guy. We don’t have men in here.”

And Manny, prepared for this, said, “Why not? You’re losing money, honey. You want to know what I get for a hand job with Rentboys? Three fifty. A hand job. And that’s off-Strip, okay?”

Jim took him straight back to his office with Gladys, Jim’s assistant. After an hour Jim said, “Look, guy, bottom line: Every other Tuesday I load the girls into the van and we go down to Nye County Health and get them all looked at. Every other Tuesday. And no legal hooker, not in the entire state of Nevada, has ever tested positive for an STD. Not even crabs. It’s safe, clean sex. That’s the brand. I bring men in here… I’m not messing with a good thing. That’s all.” He tipped back in his chair and put his pen into his mouth. “But a fag madam. That’s unique.”

That was fifteen years ago. Manny walks past the girls’ fifth wheels lined in two rows behind the main house like eggs in a carton, with the courtyard and swimming pool between them. Beyond the fifth wheels are the single-wide trailers they call suites. The Oriental Room, the Hot Tub Room, British Campaign. The thick black wires of the intercom system droop between the buildings. The pool is ringed with knobby salt cedars and adolescent pomegranate trees. Manny drags Darla’s picnic table back to the courtyard where it belongs, in the rocky dirt peppered with screwbean mesquites and young cottonwoods. He plucks a cigarette butt rimmed with lipstick from a struggling patch of sod, puts it in his breast pocket; then he slips out to the coop.

On paper, Jim Hart raised Indian blue peacocks until 1970, when he got his operating license. Prior to that, as far as the government was concerned, Hart Ranches made its modest living selling the birds to zoos and private collectors. In reality, Jim hated selling the birds and found reason to do so as seldom as possible. When the cost of the food and upkeep was considered, the peacock business barely broke even.

The girls always brought in more money than the birds, but it was a long time before the Cherry Patch Ranch was much more than two single-wide trailers on either side of the wide, airy coop. Then, in 1970, as Jim and his friends in Carson City had suspected it might, the state legislature outlawed prostitution in Clark County. Jim remodeled, making the ranch straddle the county line, with the trailers and main house in rural Nye County, and the peacocks technically residents of Clark. By the time Manny arrived, the Cherry Patch was the closest a brothel could get to Vegas.

His second week, a courier came out and picked up three sedated chicks destined to roam some movie producer’s estate in the Pacific Palisades. Manny found Jim sitting on an overturned feed bucket by the coop, bawling into his hands. When he noticed Manny standing there watching, Jim leaned back against the chicken wire. “Goddamn it,” he said, and pressed the heels of his hands against his eye sockets as though he could stop his tears that way.

Manny squatted in front of the older man. “It’s all right.”

“I know that, kid,” Jim managed to say, before he crumpled forward again, crying and hiccuping like a child. Manny held him, stiff and awkward as a Joshua tree, half-stroking his head. He was no good at these things.

They stayed like this a while, and just as Manny’s thighs began to burn from squatting for so long, Jim calmed and his breath steadied, but he did not lift his face. Instead, he put his hand on the back of Manny’s neck and urged Manny’s head down toward his groin.

Working Jim’s belt buckle loose with one hand, Manny was grateful as a pet: here was something he knew how to do. Jim finished in Manny’s mouth, with a string of quick jerks that scraped the feed bucket along the ground, then zipped his Wranglers and wiped his eyes. He squinted out across the sagebrush. “Jesus H.,” he said. “It’s like selling off one of your kids.”

From that day on, Jim never sold another peacock. He named the remaining sixteen after Nevada’s sixteen counties. Washoe, the eldest female, died in the winter of 2003, when coyotes got into the coop. One of her mates, Lander, died of old age shortly thereafter, though on darker days it’s not hard for Manny to convince himself that Lander died of a broken heart. Now there are four females and ten males, including White Pine, a rare albino, red eyed and completely white, down to his feet and the tip of his thick, five-foot train.

After two years, Jim moved to Brazil. Retirement, he called it, though he was only fifty-two. He took his wife with him. When he left he said only, “Take good care of my babies, Manny boy. And the girls, too.” When Jim comes out for the annual audit, wheelchair-bound these days, he spends most of his time in the shady coop, the fiscal year’s ledger book open on his lap, his face tilted to the sun.

Manny, too, has come to love these birds. He feeds them at sunrise before he goes to bed, and again at dusk, after breakfast. At least once a week he takes a heavy-duty rake and cleans out the stalls, sifting out rocks and piss clods with the sturdy iron teeth. Sometimes he wakes and comes out to the shade of the coop at midday, when the girls are still asleep. He likes to watch the iridescent shimmer of blue all down the throats of the males, their shake and strut, the bobbing of their crests, the green and gold and red eyes spread across their fans. He admires the great effort with which they display, that they try so damn hard. Though a few of the girls complain about it, it soothes Manny to fall asleep to the trill and ca-ca-caw of the regal peacocks, the shades in his fifth wheel drawn against the desert sun.

He keeps a rosary in the coop, looped through chicken wire, and though he hasn’t been to mass since he was thirteen years old, he’s taken to praying out there some mornings, alone. To his mind, the coop at dawn is as close to holy land as there is.

That night, when the cab finally arrives at Michele’s motel, the driver turns back to Michele and asks him whether he’d like to do it again sometime. And Michele manages, “Yes, I like very much.”

The driver says, “Tomorrow, then?” Michele suspects this is meant to be a joke, but still he hesitates. Of course he’s realized the place isn’t just a bar. There are whorehouses in Genoa, and he’s no altar boy. But the people there are friendly, and they don’t ask his age. If he doesn’t go back to the ranch, what would he do instead? Unpack and repack Renzo’s bag, as he had the night before. Stare at the cell phone the police gave him, willing it both to ring and not to. Fiddle with the canteen—the only one they’d brought with them—that he was carrying when he abandoned Renzo. Try to imagine the feeling of three days thirsty.

The driver waits for an answer. God knows Michele can afford another run. Nevada Search & Rescue have given him a debit card for his living expenses. They said the money would come from the embassy, because he was foreign, that it was a loophole, a word he had to look up. The room he and Renzo had been sharing at the La Quinta on Tropicana was covered too. But before they’d explained all that, before they’d handed him the debit card, they gave him an international phone card and asked him to call Renzo’s parents and explain what had happened. They were sorry to ask that of him, they said, but none of them spoke the language. An officer showed him to a little room with a phone on a desk beside a stained instant-coffee machine. The officer said Michele had better advise Renzo’s parents to fly to the U.S. Then he shut the door softly behind him.

Michele wove the coils of the phone cord between his fingers for a moment. Then he lifted the phone, input the codes from the phone card, and dialed his own parents instead. His mother answered and asked whether everything was okay. She sounded more exposed than a mother ought to. He told her yes, everything was fine. More lies came warmly to him then. “Actually, something happened,” he said in Italian. He told his mother he’d left his wallet out on the beach in Los Angeles and someone had taken his money. Not his ID, just the money. His mother comforted him. She teased him gently for being so naive. She thanked God that it was only that. She said she would have his father wire him more spending money. I love you, his mother said before she hung up. Be good.

Afterward, the officer returned and set his hand kindly on Michele’s shoulder. He nodded at the phone and said, “We appreciate that.” Michele said nothing.

The next morning, Michele used the debit card he’d been given at the ATM in the gas station across from the motel. He halfheartedly withdrew stacks of twenties until the machine beeped and spit out a warm, smooth sheet of paper. On his walk across the parking lot he was dully surprised to count five hundred dollars in his palm. Once in his room, he used his pocket dictionary to translate the words from the sheet of paper, eventually understanding that five hundred dollars was the maximum amount he was permitted to withdraw in a single day.

Since then, Michele has gone to the gas station every morning, buying a sugary Honey Bun and a squat carton of orange juice and withdrawing another five hundred dollars. Each morning he expects the machine to reject the card. If confronted about the money, he plans to say it was an accident, that he was confused about the machine or the currency, and hand the rest of it over.

On good days, he looks forward to spending the money on very good pot and Ecstasy that he and Renzo will take in the Grand Canyon. Even now, in the back of the cab, he imagines Renzo’s face flickered by a campfire, the Colorado River sliding by. Renzo laughs hard at something, barely able to get his words out. A girl sits beside him, laughing too, and looking at Michele lovingly, with silver glitter dancing around her eyes.

“Tell it again,” they are begging in Italian, tears rolling down their cheeks. “Tell us how you fucked the American cops for all their money.”

“Yes,” Michele says to the cabdriver now. “Please, you will come tomorrow?”

So the next day, as the streetlights come on and the shadows of the mountains grow long through the city, the taxicab returns and takes exit thirty-three west, spiriting Michele from Las Vegas up and over the Spring Mountains, out of that valley always saturated with light.

Manny watches from the peacock coop as a pair of headlights turn off the highway. Hot, immediate hope for the Italian boy blooms inside him, though he knows enough about the tricks of lust and loneliness to recognize his thoughts as pure fantasy. He returns to the birds; Gladys can handle the lineup. But soon, over the scrape of his rake against the gravel, he hears the front door open and the breeze carries to him the familiar squeals of surprise that Darla releases for all her regulars.

Manny stops in his trailer to change his shirt, wipe the sweat from his forehead and armpits with a bouquet of toilet paper, and reapply deodorant. By the time he steps into the main house, Darla is refilling Michele’s Budweiser. She flits and chatters around him like a hummingbird, finally perching herself on the upholstered stool beside him. Her legs dangle, not reaching the floor even with the added inches of her slick, clear-plastic heels.

“Did you go to the oh-six Olympics?” she asks. “In Turin?”

“Oh, ah, no.” Michele laughs. “I live far from there. But I watch on the TV.”

“Hella,” says Darla. “I love the Olympics. I like the Summer Olympics best, swimming, diving, all of it. I would love to go sometime. I’ve never been to Europe. I’ve been to Mexico, Canada, Australia, and Costa Rica, but never Europe.” This is a lie, one Manny must have heard a thousand times. Aside from the year she spent stripping in L.A., the girl’s barely traveled as far as Lake Havasu for spring break. But the line impresses tourists and townies alike. They’re pleased by the prospect of bedding a cosmopolitan whore.

“Yes, Europe is the best place for to visit. Take the train, when you go. The train is best.”

“You know, if you had enough fucking money, and spent it, like, in one of those weird sports like riflery or table tennis or the ribbon routine—shit like that—anyone could be an Olympian. That’s what I’m gonna do. Get a good trainer, a famous one, fucking quit my job.”

She babbles on like that, and the boy seems to like it. That’s the difference between the ranch and a strip club. Here, some men come in just to talk. Sure, they want a piece of ass so bad that they’re coming out of their skin to pay for it. But there’s something that brings out the lonesomeness in them. Maybe it’s being so far from civilization. Manny’s heard them afterward, over the intercom. Old men, young men, men with wives or steady girlfriends, men who’ve never had anybody in their whole pathetic lives. They listen to their date chatter until the hour is up, and when she reaches for her clothes or the white wedge of towel on the nightstand to wipe herself, they hold her tightly and say, so softly it might be mistaken for a blip of static over the wires, Wait.

The Italian returns the next night, and the next. Manny watches him and Darla get closer. They talk at the bar, then huddled together on the couch in the lobby, then with their feet dipped in the pool, splitting pomegranates on the concrete and spitting the seeds and pith into the dirt.

The other girls are talking. One morning before bed, Amy’s voice spills from the hall bathroom. “If Michele was one of these old farts, Manny would have pried him from that girl’s titty on day one. He’s just glad to finally have some ass around here.”

Jim would not stand for this. But Manny cannot bring himself to throw the kid out. Amy is right: He likes having Michele around, and, yes, a part of him thinks, Why not me? His last hookup—in the hot soak room at the Tecopa baths, Mormon crickets shrieking in the eaves—was a forlorn, unmemorable thing, as all since Jim have been.

Manny spends more and more time out with his birds, away from the trouble swelling indoors. He knows he can’t go on ignoring it forever, but he tries. He scrubs the salt deposits from the water troughs, hand-feeds the birds sardines and apple slices, and watches them strip a whole cooked chicken to the bone. He rakes and rakes the sand as the sun comes up, drawing intricate patterns like the monks on a show he saw once, as if the dirt were an offering to God.

On the sixth night, Michele is sitting close to Darla on the cheap red sofa in the corner, watching the other girls sing karaoke, when the buzz of the doorbell sounds throughout the bar. Michele notices for the first time small black blocks—they must be speakers—arranged throughout the room: above the glass shelves behind the bar, over the neon-lit lounge area, tucked up where the low ceiling meets the wall. The girls ebb to the front lobby, running their hands all over themselves while they walk, checking hooks and ties and the backs of earrings, adjusting their panty hose and breasts and hairdos. Darla stands up, runs her tongue over her teeth, and rolls something oily and fruit-scented onto her lips.

“Where you are going?” he asks the back of her.

Army Amy calls over the clacking of plastic heels on the laminate dance floor, “Don’t you worry, sugar. We’ll take care of you.” She winks.

Without leaving the couch, Michele watches a thick-armed man step through the front doorway. Plastic mirrored sunglasses dangle from the man’s neck by a fluorescent-colored cord. Flecks of cement speckle his work boots. He points to Darla and says her name. The two walk by the bar, arm in arm. She grins like a pageant contestant, a beauty queen. When the man isn’t looking, she blows Michele a kiss. This girl is trouble. Renzo would have loved her. Renzo was always looking for trouble.

Listen to him: Renzo was. This is what unsettles him, how easily the past tense comes now. The police had said, There is a chance. Maybe if the heat doesn’t get too bad. Even as Michele nodded, his tongue rolled silently through conjugation exercises. He’s young, the cops have kept saying. He’s athletic. And in his head, each time Michele has corrected them: He was young. He was athletic. Just this morning, Michele called the police station, and the woman who answers the phone said she was sorry, that there was no news, they would call the cell phone as soon as they found his friend. “But don’t you worry,” she said. “God works in mysterious ways.”

And as if he dreamed in English, Michele replied, “Yes, He did.”

All those years confusing the past perfect, the past continuous, the simple past, and now it comes to him, here. Now he thinks in the frantic notes he took before he quit trying altogether. Simple past: use when an action started and finished at a specific time in the past. The speaker may not actually mention the specific time, but he does have one in mind.

After the lineup, Manny returns to the bar with Army Amy. Michele joins them. Amy sets her overtanned tits on the bar, and they rest there like two globes in a skin sac. “I need a goddamn date,” she says.

Michele smiles broadly at her—the big, openmouthed smile of a foreigner pretending to know what’s going on.

Amy traces her finger up and down the boy’s forearm. “Why don’t you pour this kid a real beer, Manny?” Manny fixes Michele a pint of Boddingtons. The kid looks at the cloud of head billowing to the top of his new beer, mildly bewildered.

“Budweiser is piss,” Amy says. “It’s a joke here.”

Michele takes a long swallow of his new beer. “When she will, ah, return?”

“Darla? Depends,” says Manny. He calls back to the office. “Gladys, what’d she log?”

When he first started, Manny had asked Gladys whether she ever listened in on the suites, “You know, for fun?” Gladys only scoffed and said, “Fun? Baby, I’ve seen it all. My best client was a county commissioner. He used to drive his Buick all the way down from Tonopah once a month, just to have me tap on the floor with his dead wife’s peg leg. This was before you were even born.”

“Hold on,” she says now. They hear the click of the old intercom buttons as Gladys patches in to the suite. “Nothing special, baby,” she calls. “Just a suck and fuck. A grand.”

Manny whistles. Half of that is his. “Damn. That girl’s got a gold mine between her legs.”

“Big deal,” says Amy. Through her tank top she grips a breast in each hand and lifts them to Michele’s face, first one and then the other. “Think what she could do with some assets.” Michele looks away, and who could blame him? No one outside the industry would call Amy a beauty. She has big biceps and a bench-press chest left over from her time in the army, where she was supposedly a Green Beret. Whenever a new ad comes out, she flashes the proofs to anyone who will look, listing all the places the billboards will go up: off I-15 near Indian Springs, by the turnoff to the test site, on 395 in Stateline for all those rich, horny Californians. On the latest, Amy is saluting and smiling above the words, Visit Army Amy for an honorable discharge!

Amy swirls her finger in the foam of Michele’s beer. “When I was her age, I had to work for my money. I was hosting big parties. I’m talking twelve, thirteen hours of straight fucking. You learn a lot that way.” She sticks the finger deep in her mouth and licks it clean. “You want me to teach you, Luigi?”

Michele shakes his head.

“Come on. Won’t cost you no grand.”

He takes a drink of the Boddingtons and says, “Shut the fuck up, you.”

Amy straightens on her stool. “I know you want to make an honest woman out of her, Luigi, but your little prom date is—how do you say?—sucking some Teamster’s cock right now. Get it?”

Michele knocks his pint glass over, and beer soaks her wife-beater. Amy jumps back, dripping.

“I am sorry,” he says. “Very sorry.” He lays cocktail napkins impotently on the spreading puddle of beer.

She sets her jaw and leans in close to him. “I bet you’ll fuck me now, you wop drunk.”

“That’s enough,” says Manny.

“Me?” says Amy.

He wipes the spill with a dry rag. “Go change.”

Amy gathers the hem of her shirt and wrings it out. “I know what you’re thinking, Manny. Don’t bother. She’s got this kid’s dick on a string. And you?” She laughs. “You’re shit out of luck.”

The empty pint glass rolls off the bar and shatters on the laminate.

Manny looks straight at her. “Go change or go home.”

Amy stomps out the back door. Manny comes around and helps Michele pick up the glass from the floor. A few girls have gathered around. Lacy tries to help, but he waves her and the others back to the couch, to a pair of Southern truck drivers they called in off the road with the CB in the office. Something tortured and twangy and sour rises from the jukebox.

Michele, squatting on the floor, leans into Manny, so close that Manny can feel the boy’s breath on him. “When she will finish?” Michele asks.

Looking back, this is the moment when he should have known how truly fucked he was. But this is closer to the boy than he’s ever been, and he can’t help himself. He only wants to touch him. He presses his rag to Michele’s wet T-shirt. It’s impossible, but he feels the boy’s warmth underneath, the striations in the muscles of his chest. He feels his heartbeat. “One hour.” He removes the rag and holds his index finger in the air between them. “One hour.”

Michele finishes his replacement beer, and another. By the time Darla says good-bye to her Teamster, logs her cash with Gladys, and joins the boy at the bar, he’s a heavy, lethargic kind of drunk, leaning on his elbows, his eyelids wilted. Manny watches Darla rest her head on his shoulder, chewing on the stir straw poking out from her cranberry juice. No doubt she can feel the warmth of him, the pulse of blood in his neck. “Did you know that tug-of-war used to be an Olympic sport?” she says. “I could do that.”

With his mouth half in his new pint glass, Michele says, “You can do anything. You are a gold mine.”

And then Darla does something Manny’s never seen her do. She takes Michele’s face in her hands and bends him down to her. She kisses him softly on the forehead.

Day seven. At the motel Michele lies staring at the untouched bed across from him. He hasn’t slept in days, not really. When the red-orange glow of sunset permeates the crack between the two heavy panels of curtain covering the west-facing window, he gets out of bed and showers without soap or shampoo, though there are fresh supplies of both on the shelf in the shower, still sealed in their waxy sanitary paper. He keeps the water so hot that when he finally steps onto the linoleum and wipes the condensation from the bathroom mirror with his palm, his skin is flushed pink where the water began to burn his back and shoulders, his stomach and buttocks and balls. He sits on the edge of the bed, naked.

He and Renzo have been friends since they were boys playing for the same youth football club. They went to university together, took the same classes, shared a room in the dormitory, then in a basement apartment near campus. Every morning for three years Michele woke up to the shape of Renzo against the opposite wall, or stepped over piles of his soiled clothes to get to the toilet. But already Michele cannot recall Renzo’s hands, or the sound of his laugh, or the exact expression on his face when he was angry. All he can see is this smooth quilted square of bed, this worn white sheet pulled taut over these too-full pillows like dead open eyes in the daylight. All he can hear is the chug of the air-conditioning unit along the west wall, the underwater sound of cars idling in traffic along Tropicana Avenue, and the Search & Rescue cell phone on the nightstand ringing ringing—at long last—ringing.

That night the doorbell buzzes, and Manny looks over his lineup before opening the door. Darla is nowhere to be found. He last saw her on the couch with Michele, who’s missing, too. Manny does not open the door. Instead, he leaves the other girls standing there and finds Gladys in her office. She sits with headphones to her ears, half smiling, her mouth hanging loosely open. The light of Darla’s fifth wheel glows on the switchboard. “Young love,” says Gladys.

The doorbell buzzes again. “Come on, Manny,” calls Amy from the lobby. “Let’s get this show on the road.”

Manny motions to Gladys. With the same reluctance with which she pauses her tape of the previous day’s General Hospital to log cash, Gladys takes the headphones off and stretches them over Manny’s head, nestling the coarse black foam over his small ears. Darla’s voice comes through the crackle and fuzz of the old intercom.

“You don’t have the fucking Academy Awards in Italy? That’s crazy. I love the Academy Awards. Ask me a year.”

“I don’t, ah…”

“A year, a year. Ask me. Go on.” A game she plays with all of them.

“Nineteen ah, seventy… four?”

“Godfather II.” A pause. Manny pictures Michele’s smooth, perpetually puzzled face. “That’s what won Best Picture that year. Ask me another.”

“Okay. Nineteen ninety… one?”

“Easy. Silence of the Lambs. Too easy, none from the nineties.”

“Nineteen fifty-two?”

“That would be… The Greatest Show on Earth. DeMille.”

“Nineteen thirty-eight?”

“You Can’t Take It With You. Fucking classic Capra. Funny. Sad. Optimistic. One of my favorites.”

“You are very good.”

She can do Best Actor and Best Actress, too. The boy wouldn’t know the difference if she were making them up, but she’s not. She can list them all, every single year, forward and backward, which she does, she says, in her head when she’s standing in the lineup or straddling a new client or lying in bed trying to sleep, listening to the shrieks of the peacocks chasing one another around the coop.

There’s a faint rustling sound in the headphones. Manny hears Darla gasp, then say, “Shit, Mikey, where’d you get that?”

“They gave it to me, to live, to wait for Renzo.”

“How much do you have?” The intercom crackles.

“I am not sure. Here.” A longer pause. The doorbell buzzes again.

“There must be nine, ten grand here. What—”

The connection fizzles, submerging Darla’s voice in static. Manny shakes the cord furiously. He presses the headset to his ears so hard they sting. When the connection returns Michele is saying, “Come, ah, with me. To Italy.”

Manny presses his hand to his heart. That stupid boy.

The doorbell buzzes, long and loud, and for a moment it is all Manny can hear.

“I will come tomorrow,” Michele says. “And we will go.” Dumb, big-eyed Michele. “We, ah, fly home,” he is saying. “Tomorrow.”

Before she can answer, Manny presses the speaker button. “Darla,” he says. “The lineup. Now.”

When Manny finally opens the door, the chunky man who’s been buzzing spins his keys on his index finger and steps inside, tonguing a monstrous divot of tobacco down in his bottom lip. He picks Darla, though she barely bothers to look at him. What did Manny expect? Michele, this fat fuck, they’re all the same, stumbling in from the middle of nowhere, trying to fill the empty space in them with her.

In the morning, after feeding the peacocks, Manny says a little prayer and then steps into Darla’s room, where she’s watching a black-and-white movie. She motions him to her and they lie together on the twin bed, head to toe. He says, “What are we watching?”

“You Were Never Lovelier,” she says. “Fred Astaire. Rita Hayworth. It’s public access.”

Manny rests his cheek on the tops of her bony feet. Rita Hayworth spins through Buenos Aires, all sheen and tinsel. “Honey,” he says finally, “you really like this boy?”

Darla keeps her eyes on the screen. “Is that why you came in here?”

“He’s been through some shit.”

She shrugs. “Him and everyone else around here.” She shifts her feet under the blanket. “You know I love you, Manny. You’ve been hella good to me. But that boy is my ticket out of here.”

“Girl, this is for real. You’re gonna hurt somebody.”

“Hurt somebody? What happened to ‘Give ’em a little attention’? What happened to ‘Make them feel better than their girlfriends, better than their wives, better than they are’? You don’t have to touch these men, Manny. You don’t have to fuck their sorry asses. You sit out there stroking your goddamn peacocks, writing letters to Jim about what a good boy you’ve been, how much money you’ve made him, hoping he won’t die on you. You come inside to sign the paychecks, to tell me I might hurt somebody? Too late, old man. I been hurting them. And you taught me how.”

When Michele leaves the La Quinta the next night, he leaves it for good, Renzo’s backpack laid out on his bed. Amy opens the door before he buzzes, and takes him to the bar. “Have a seat, baby. Budweiser?”

“Yes. Please.”

She puts a beer on a napkin and beside it sets a little shot glass filled to the top with brown liquor. “For courage,” she says. Michele drinks it and pats the bundles of twenty-dollar bills in the pockets of his cargo shorts. It’s all there, the Search & Rescue money from the teller machine, the two thousand dollars his parents wired him, his own money. Renzo’s money. He’s made up his mind. He can’t go back to Genoa. His flight leaves in the morning. He’ll buy a plane ticket for Darla. An engagement ring. Put a security deposit on an apartment in another city, away from his family. Away from Renzo’s friends. God, Renzo’s family. He feels his new life folded inside his pockets. Yes, a whole new life for nine thousand American dollars, he believes this. A new life with a woman there to busy his hands, to pour his drinks, to help him forget. A life where he came to America alone. Or not at all.

He waits. The night pulls on. He reaches around the bar for the tap and refills his own glass when he needs it. Men come and go around him, but each time the bell reverberates through the building it’s the old woman who opens the door for them. He waits for Darla, but she never comes. When he asks about her, none of the girls will answer him. His head is hot and clouded and his cab isn’t coming until morning. He doesn’t know what else to do. He walks outside through the dust and gravel to Darla’s fifth wheel and knocks on the door and then the windows. The lights are off but through the blinds he can see the paper-lined drawers of her dresser pulled half-open and empty, and the bed where he last saw her, stripped bare. He looks in the other trailers. He calls for her. There is no answer.

Somewhere in the night Amy comes and pours more shots. She lines them up on the bar like tiny monuments. They drink them together, one after another. “Where is she?” he says finally, a stinging in his voice.

She pours them another round. “Here.”

“Tell me.”

“I don’t know,” she says. “She was just gone. I swear.”

Near dawn, Manny appears from the darkness of the hallway and puts his hands on Michele’s shoulders. “Walk with me, honey.”

As he follows Manny out the back door, beyond the lights and sounds of the compound and into the desert, Michele looks to the sky. So this is what Renzo looked upon as he died, naked and faceup in the dirt: the wide brightening sky, the fading stars, the waning moon white like a jaw on the horizon. A peacock caws. A part of him—the part that speaks in a ghost’s voice—knows he’ll never see Darla again.

The peacock coop is shaded from the pink-purple of dawn by palm leaves and canvas overhead. The air is thick with the scents of seed and dust and bird.

The boy hesitates before coming inside. “These are, ah, your pets?”

“Not mine, my boss’s. I hear you’re headed out of town. You’re leaving.”

“Yes, I go back to Italy.”

“And you think you’re taking Darla with you.”

“She, ah, would like to leave. She has told me.” A bird rustles in its nest. “I, ah, like Darla.”

“I liked her, too,” says Manny.

“I love her.”

“Honey, I know. But she didn’t love you, okay?”

“She does,” he says, though he says it like a question.

“American girls, you don’t know how they are. All they care about is money, okay? Especially these girls. Don’t you know? It’s all business. Even with Darla.”

“Where is she?”

Manny combs his fingers through a trough of seeds, letting the breeze winnow away the empty shells. “Don’t worry about it.”

“Tell me where is she.”

“This is a business, kid. She had somewhere else to be.” There is a stillness pulled tight between them. Outside, dawn lightens the landscape but the last dregs of night linger in the coop. “They found your friend, didn’t they?”

Michele picks at the chicken wire. “Yes.” Then quickly, “No. They said he is dead. They stopped looking.”

He turns away and hooks his fingers through the chicken wire. His broad shoulders start to tremble. He begins to shake the entire wall of the coop back and forth, harder and harder, until Manny fears he might snap the old two-by-fours. The birds, startled from their roosts, squawk and dart around, frenzied, among them the bright albino flash of White Pine. All the while Michele wails, a feral, guttural sound.

“Fuck, kid,” says Manny, too quiet to be heard. “Come on.” He pulls Michele back and turns the boy to face him. Michele’s face is wet and slick where he’s bloodied his nose against the fence. Manny embraces him. The boy writhes at first, then goes limp and lets his head fall to Manny’s shoulder. He is sobbing.

“My boss, Jim,” Manny says, maybe just to have something to say. “The one who owns these birds? He’s dying, too. Half the time he doesn’t even know who I am. You think it’s not going to happen, and then. But these girls—”

“I, ah, have to take her,” Michele says, shrugging him off. “I love her.”

Manny takes Michele by his shoulders and turns him gently to face the yellow lights of the ranch in the distance. “Kid,” he says softly. “Look. There’s no love in there. Trust me.”

Manny lets his arms wrap around the boy’s waist and presses him close again, from behind. For a moment—just a moment—the birds are still and Manny feels warmth against him.

Michele wrenches away, shaking his head. “No—”

“She never cared about you,” says Manny, hot with want, walking toward the kid. Burning. Michele shoves him back, hard. The peacocks are screeching now, and flapping, but there’s nowhere for them to go. Manny comes at him still. “She didn’t. You’re a kid.” The boy tries to leave, groping drunk for the gate in the half-light. “A stupid, sad, foreign kid with a dead friend and too much money. That’s all you are, understand? I did you a favor.”

Later, Manny will say it happened quick—the swing so fast it was a blur, the boy all sweet inertia, a dervish, and the rake’s prongs just a flash. Then he left, waited for his cab on the side of the road and never came back. But in truth Manny sees everything slow. The boy’s arched back. The contours of his ribs through his T-shirt. The blood around his nose and mouth already maroon with coagulate. His triceps made taut by the weight of the tool. The swing misses Manny so wildly that he doesn’t even move his feet. Michele wrenches the rake’s metal teeth into White Pine’s chest.

For an instant the air is filled with the report of the sternum snapping. Michele’s never seen a bird like this. The snowy feathers redden as blood wells up around the prongs. He feels the give of the meat as he plies the rake from the bird’s breast. Its beak opens and closes, leaking the tight sorrowful cry of a baby, a cry that will come to mean America.