Round Rock - Michelle Huneven [13]
“I love you for it, too,” said Red.
Frank slid into the life of a Rito idler. While Red kept up the semblance of a law practice, Frank had coffee at Yolanda’s and afterwards lounged in the sun in the park by the river. Red met him for long lunches. When Red returned to his office, Frank joined the old men on the shady porch of the Mills Hotel. They met again at Yolanda’s for drinks and dinner. Yolanda worried over them, insisted they eat, gave them milk cartons of albóndiga soup to take home. They spent nights at Red’s house, camped out in two rooms on the first floor. Red connected the water, but everything else remained as it had been when Yvette walked out: Cement had dried on hods. Paintbrushes sat in coffee cans of turpentine. Plastic wheezed in windows. The two men tracked plaster dust and sawdust, formed paths around stacks of lumber and the mammoth crated appliances. They were squatters at the construction site, vagrants at the scene of an abandoned dream. The days bled by.
Red received divorce papers just before Christmas and drove to San Francisco to work out a settlement with Yvette. Problems in property distribution arose only in the Rays’ mutual indifference. “All I really want is out,” said Yvette. “She can have everything,” said Red.
He was appalled when he found himself the sole, uncontested owner of the Sally Morrot ranch. “I bought it for you,” he told her.
“I don’t want it,” Yvette said. “Besides, you’ll need a place to die.”
Red returned to Rito an ex-husband and partial father. He found Frank at Happy Yolanda’s with a pretty sixteen-year-old Mexican girl on his lap. “Here’s Red back from the divorce wars,” Frank said. “Red, this is Isabel, Luis’s niece from Sonora.” She had braids as thick and long as arms, equine eyes, and strong white teeth. She lit Frank’s cigarette with a lighter shaped like a Saturday-night special, and ignored Red.
Everybody he loved, Red realized, was being taken away from him. “Frank,” he said. “Come outside for a minute. I have to talk to you.” Out in the blue dusk, he beckoned Frank into his pickup. “Come on, let’s take a drive.”
They drove for a month or more. They lived out of Red’s truck and checkbook. They showered at campgrounds, bought clothes as they needed them. They meandered down the coast through the bars of Oxnard, Malibu, Oceanside. They sat in the sand, passed a bottle, and watched the sun go down over the ocean. “Look at that,” said Red. “A path of gold right to me.”
“No,” said Frank. “To me.”
They drank draft beer in pool halls, Rob Roys in hotel lounges, told bartenders and fellow customers, “We’re on a drinking tour of the Southland….” Skirting the border, they turned east: Calexico, Mexicali, Yuma, Arizona. Between hangovers and sunsets, Motel 6s and cramped nights in the car, they kept driving. As Frank drove, he sang:
My daddy loved his bottle
Lord, it drove him to his grave
My mama loved her bottle too
And it done her just the same
Now there’s no one left to love me
And that old whiskey fills my days …
In a town whose name Red never knew, Frank swung too wide at an intersection, jumped the curb, and hit the side of a brick building. Red flew from the cab, then skidded to a stop in an alley. It was dawn in a grimy industrial zone. The sky was wintry overhead. Red saw the links of his watchband mashed into his wrist. He heard footsteps, saw dark forms standing over him, clouds of steam billowing from mouths. Shoes were tugged from his feet, his clothes were patted and probed, the watch extricated from flesh. A man’s voice said,