Round Rock - Michelle Huneven [49]
“You ever been to an AA meeting?” Red asked Libby.
“I hear them when I work overtime at the union hall,” Libby said. “I always wonder, what’s everybody laughing at?”
“Their pathetic, desperate lives,” said Lewis. “That’s what they’re laughing at.”
“You should stop by some Friday night,” said Red. “It’s open to everyone, and the speakers are usually top-notch.”
“I’d feel like a voyeur.” Libby turned to Lewis, who was lining up bits of bread for the sparrows. “What do you think?”
“Do what you want,” he muttered. “I hated my first hundred meetings.”
“I wouldn’t want to make anyone uncomfortable,” Libby said.
There was a long silence. Red stood up and started clearing the plates. “Speaking of meetings …”
Lewis walked her out to the Falcon. The sun had set and the gray sky was darkening.
“Who’s that?” Libby asked, pointing at a man standing between two bungalows across the way. A tall man with long dark hair.
“I don’t see anybody,” said Lewis.
Indeed, when Libby looked back, the man had vanished.
“This place is kind of creepy,” she said. “All these empty houses.” She turned to face Lewis. “Thanks for dinner.”
He wrapped his arms around her waist and yanked her flush up against him. Over Lewis’s shoulder, Libby saw Red Ray framed in the bright orange light of the kitchen window. “Red can see us,” she hissed.
“I don’t care. I couldn’t stand it in there. All that arm’s-length crap. Can we get together later? I want to crawl into your clothes with you. Sorry if I’m being a boor. I can’t help it. Can I come over after the meeting? Ten-ish? To your trailer? Jesus, I never thought I’d be begging to come to someone’s trailer.”
“What’s the matter with my trailer?”
“Nothing. I hate trailers. Except your trailer. Your trailer seems like a big candy bar with a nougat inside. You’re the nougat.”
Nobody had ever called her a nougat before.
THE MAN Libby pointed to was David Ibañez, born and raised in the very bungalow he’d ducked behind to elude her gaze. Thirty-eight years old and living in Tijuana, David was up visiting his uncle and teacher, the curandero, Rafael Flores. Taking an after-dinner walk at dusk, David had wound up here, through no conscious intention, trespassing at his childhood home.
As Libby and Lewis embraced, David wandered off behind the bungalows, running his fingers over silvery siding, termite-tunneled sills. The citrus perfume and spicy sourness of decomposing oranges from the surrounding groves was as familiar to him as breath itself. David’s father had been Sally Morrot’s ranch foreman. His family lived better than most in the village, their house furnished with her discarded mahogany nightstands, linen draperies, couches whose small rents and tears loosed feathers or wiry horsehair.
Otherwise, conditions had been primitive: woodstoves, outhouses, peddlers, milk goats. The village generator went off at nine in the evening; afterward you lit kerosene lamps with fat cotton wicks and blackened globes that gave the air an acrid burnt-petroleum edge. The bungalows were plumbed when David was three—toilets, sinks, and tubs carried into bathrooms hastily constructed from sleeping porches and sections of hallways. A persistent image of black boxes, monolithic and evil, surfaced in David’s dreams for decades until, during a hypnotherapy session last year, he identified the ominous cubes as the septic tanks buried in the village of his youth.
David peeked between the houses; the couple by the Falcon were still embracing, so he slipped back into the shadows. He preferred not to be seen. Seventeen years ago, after Sally Morrot died and the villagers were evicted from their homes, David had called in the union and the press. He’d organized the civil action suit that failed to bring them back to these houses, but provided each family with enough money to scatter where they pleased; some stayed in town, some found