What You See in the Dark - Manuel Munoz [2]
Enough word has gotten around town about her eye for beautiful shoes, for high heels that don’t necessarily strain the arches, for knowing a budget without having to ask. She moves with confidence and assurance, even if she is not allowed to ring up the sales on her own. She stands nearby to translate, and you handle the money: you, the girl who should be trusted, the kind of girl that should end up with a man like the one she has.
She is no longer walking the streets, but riding around with Dan Watson, her elbow resting on the truck door while they drive with the windows rolled down. The two of them at the café for lunch sometimes, the waitresses acting as if nothing could be less ordinary. The two of them stepping out of the record shop several times a week with brown-papered packages stuck under his arms. People saying, by late September, that she’s picked up a second job, serving drinks to the patrons over at Las Cuatro Copas, the place where her boyfriend tends bar, and the owner of the rival place across the street is peeved because even the white crowd has trickled over there just to get a look at her.
Las Cuatro Copas isn’t the best cantina in town, but if you go there, you would do well to put on your best long skirt, the wider the better because there’s good music for dancing. Farther up Union Avenue is a grander space—a real nightclub—with a terrazzo dance floor so smooth you have to hang on tight to your partner to keep from slipping, and gorgeous dining rooms off to the sides with a full wait staff and a Los Angeles menu of roast beef and rib-eye steaks and Cornish hens. But Las Cuatro Copas does just fine by itself. It welcomes everyone, the little tables crowded as people sit to eat and drink until the kitchen closes at eight thirty. All the while, that girl comes around with plates of chicken legs and taquitos and bottles of beer, along with the check on a green slip of paper with her neat handwriting, and she collects the bills and brings everything over to Dan Watson, hurrying people along with their meals because the tables get put away for the dancing. Not enough space for a wide skirt to flow out full, and a wooden floor that sends up dust, but it’s dancing all the same. Friday nights or Sundays or Wednesdays, she’s there, handing the green slips of paper over to her boyfriend and waiting for the change, the two of them running the place smooth as smoke.
But you don’t have to go to the cantina to see all of that if jealousy gets to be too much. You can avert your gaze as they exit the supermarket, where he comes out holding two paper bags stuffed full of food. Or pretend not to see them loading boxes of tequila into the truck bed over at the discount liquor store. They show up everywhere: just a little west of Bakersfield, just far enough away from the city lights, is the local drive-in theater, a line of cars idling at the dusty entrance at sundown. A concession stand sits in the middle, and everyone goes there for big striped boxes of popcorn and hot dogs and candy, cradling everything close so only one trip is necessary. Horns beep whenever a car pulls in with its lights on, even though the sky is still lit orange with sundown and the double bill nowhere near beginning. Music comes in over the speakers, old big-band numbers that no one listens to anymore. Some couples sit out on the hoods after the engines have cooled down. The people returning from the concession stand darken to shadows as dusk finally breaks into night and the first feature starts, always something of mild interest: a monster movie with a beautiful blond raising her hands to her ears and screaming, then a pursuit with gunfire popping