Round Rock - Michelle Huneven [45]
“Jesus, Billie, you’re worse than Victor Ibañez.”
“Victor! Somebody’s gotta call and give him an update!”
“Billie,” Libby said. “Billie, I’m warning you….”
What a relief, then, to get to the shores of the deep, cold lake, its gray-blue water napped by the wind. Here, thought Libby, is my private life.
She didn’t say so to Billie, but she already knew how this thing with Lewis would end, and part of her was as unmoved as the lake’s muddy depths where the catfish lurked. She and Lewis would have an affair. She couldn’t say why. Objectively, he wasn’t all that attractive. Still, she knew what would happen from the way she couldn’t quite talk to him. When he stretched and yawned and rubbed his bare feet together, these movements played directly to her flesh and bones much like music. He’d fall hard. Eventually, there would be the problem of extrication. Libby pitied him already.
LEWIS had the definite sense of getting something out of his system. He’d needed to know that women were out there and that he could make contact, be admitted into their presence and become, however briefly, the object of their attention. He felt a few twinges about his behavior—overexcited, he’d talked too much, as usual—then decided not to think about it anymore. He’d spent all day worrying about what to cook and grocery shopping, soaking beans and picking flowers and washing up after himself, and was in no hurry to do it again. Too time-consuming, too expensive, altogether too harrowing.
BILLIE’S white dual-wheeled Chevy truck roared over the Tehachapis and into the hot, pesticidal bathtub of the San Joaquin Valley. It was dusk, and still in the nineties. The oleander blooming in the center divider exuded a sweet, poisonous perfume. “I’m overdue for this creep,” Billie said. “I haven’t been outta the valley in two months.”
Libby had heard so much about these excursions, Billie’s famous “creeps,” she had a mental image of every element—the drive over the mountains, the Gusher Inn, the roughnecks. The Gusher Inn she imagined as a cozy, knotty-pine tavern with shelves of arcane oil equipment and maybe a mural featuring a fat geyser of black gold. The roughnecks would be rugged and soiled, a pride of grease-dappled cowboys.
The real Gusher Inn materialized as a cinderblock cube set amid scrubby desert and squat oil derricks. One dirty picture window framed a view of the gravel parking lot.
On entering, Billie spotted a tall, sallow guy with a waxed handlebar mustache. “I’ll be right back,” she said to Libby, and went outside with him. Libby sipped a beer at the bar, the only woman in the room. A man named Ted bought her another beer. Libby wasn’t much of a beer drinker, but the Gusher served only beer or cheap wine-from-a-box. “I’m waiting for my friend,” she told him.
“Billie?” Ted said. “You’ll have a long wait, then. She took off with Moe.”
Libby checked the parking lot. The truck was still there, but no sign of Billie. Libby counted how many cinderblocks high the wall was; counting, the pastime of a prisoner. “Baby,” Ted said, “you got the best legs to walk into the Gusher all year.”
“Thank you,” Libby whispered.
He turned to the bartender. “Pour another beer here. Loosen her up, maybe she’ll give us a lesson. A love lesson. These uptight types can be real tigers in bed.”
“Easy, Teddy,” said the bartender. But he pulled another draft and set it behind the first one Ted had bought. When Billie reappeared, Libby had three full glasses awaiting her attention. Billie nodded to the untouched beer. “I see you’re doing all right for yourself.”
“I really don’t appreciate being left alone like that.”
“You will, when you see what I got for us. Come on, let’s powder our noses.”
In the bathroom, Billie chopped out two lines of cocaine on a pocket mirror. “This’ll lift your spirits.”
Stockton was fond of it, but Libby had tried cocaine only once; to her, it tasted and felt too much like going to the dentist. “Requisite creep candy,” said Billie. “This’ll give you the oomph you need.”
The cocaine did put Libby in a better