Round Rock - Michelle Huneven [51]
Holding on to the back of the chair, Libby took cautious, wobbly steps along his spine. He grabbed her ankle, reached for her hand, and pulled her down among the chair legs. After all that gloom, it was good to be thrashing around on the linoleum and kissing. When he took the condom from his pocket—she loved that he took care of such things—he said, “We might as well hit the bed. If you don’t mind. I mean, nothing against your cold, hard, gritty floor.”
He insisted on constant eye contact, an intensity she found compelling and connective. Did he know what he was doing?
They smoked afterwards, sharing a cigarette. Libby made herself get up to pee, otherwise it was cystitis for sure. When she returned from the bathroom, he was dressed, drinking coffee. Her heart sank. She’d been expecting him to stay. “You don’t have to leave.”
“You want to sleep,” he said. “I want to pull up trees. Or juggle chainsaws. I’d just keep you awake.” He sat on the bed to pull on his socks. She curled around him and it was true, his body hummed. “Maybe I’ll have one more cup of coffee.” He fetched it himself and drank, sitting on the edge of the bed, stroking her back.
In the morning, Libby wrote: Running late, but will not abandon this journal just because I’m seeing someone. Don’t let me stop flossing either.
First man in my bed since Stockton. How do I feel? My emotions slide right off that question. I’m still in a sexual blur. Already feel a bladder infection coming on. Guzzling cranberry juice.
Lewis was trouble, she decided, but mostly to himself. She should leave him alone. But her whole body—muscles, skin, eyes, even her hair and teeth—wanted more of him first.
RITO’S Fourth of July parade began with Luis Salazar, the mayor, driving through town in his marrow-red Mercury Cougar. Placards hung on the front doors:
NO SMOG
NO FREEWAYS
NO HUNGER
NO BETTER HOMETOWN
RITO, CALIFORNIA
Behind the mayor came twenty little girls in silver tutus, twirling batons. Some batons were only partially tamed. “This is the sort of thing I see with a really bad migraine,” Billie told Libby.
The entire town had shown up to watch: Victor and Aida Ibañez, Happy Yolanda’s staff, all the old guys from the Mills, the art institute students who rented a storefront in town. Libby stood between Billie and the Bills. She spotted Red Ray across the street with a group of men. Lewis wasn’t among them.
The Rito Lito bar was represented by a flotilla of Harleys; Happy Yolanda’s by their mariachi band. On a Sunkist truck, the Methodist youth group formed a tableau of the founding fathers. The Catholic youth group rode on a buckboard alongside several bales of hay, a goat, and a bug-eyed, wobbly Holstein calf bellowing in fear, no doubt terrified by the high-school band marching up behind him playing a curious arrangement of “Stairway to Heaven.”
Billie elbowed Libby’s ribs, nodding at a red tractor pulling the Round Rock float. Lewis was driving, staring straight ahead like a farmer intent on a perfect furrow. Detached, possibly excruciated. In a black T-shirt, very skinny, his hair drawn back in a ponytail, he looked good to Libby in the daylight. Real. She would’ve thought he was too cool for such goofiness, and liked him for participating. The float’s theme was Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. Perched on a sofa, the man in the Snow White mask wore a low-cut ivory wedding dress, his chest bristling with lush black hair. He waved as if screwing in an invisible lightbulb. Men in dwarf masks sat along the edge of the flatbed. Not all seven were represented, and there were multiple Happys and Sleepys. Their placards read: ROUND ROCK FARM … FREEDOM FROM BONDAGE … A NEW FREEDOM AND A NEW HAPPINESS! … HAPPY JOYOUS AND FREE. Nothing identified Round Rock as a drunk farm, although one Dopey held a bumper sticker pasted on a piece of cardboard: IF YOU MUST DRINK AND DRIVE, DRINK PEPSI.
Libby’s favorite entry was the Vince’s Bait-and-Tackle-at-the-Lake float: a yellow El Camino with an enormous papier-mâché largemouth bass lashed