Stateside Games
"Baby's hungry and the money's all gone. The folks at home don't wanna talk on the phone. She gets her long letters sent back, a postcard, times are hard..." - James Taylor, "Mexico"
***
Mexico was Carl's bright idea, but it sounds like a good one at the time so she gives him the money Patrick had slipped her for the trick she'd turned on him. They huddle against the sticky green seats, his arm around hers on the long bus ride down to the boarder.
That they crossed it was a miracle. At the logjam of cars the bus is briefly inspected, but they blend into the mass fresh-faced college students heading to Cabo for spring break, prying eyes never seeing her hand pressed to his left shoulder, holding her fingers his bloody wound.
***
Miserably sick for a week, the water and food disagreed with their constitutions terribly. For the first few days they argued like cats and dogs, then fell into a stupor born of rain and illness, listening to the neighbor kids argue and
She holds his head while he pukes in the kitchen wastebasket, then rests her hand against the middle of his back. "It ain't paradise, Carl, but it'll do."
***
He won't let her go back to hooking, but he doesn't have a problem with her trying to get a job in manufacturing. He ends up on a line at a sugar plantation, pouring sugar into bags, coming home with grit in his hair and stinging pain in his nailbeds.
She finds work at a cannery and comes home smelling of bananas and mangos.
Evenings are spent in their miniature shower. "We're a fucking fruit salad," he tells her as he scrubs her back.
***
There is no phrase in the English language as depressing as 'no, you didn't make me come'. Carl doesn't really believe her when she tells him that what he's doing isn't having any effect on her sex whatsoever, but Janie is unforgivingly frank - she's not going to spend the rest of her life faking it, he's not her john anymore, and did she mention the way he squeezes her tits actually hurts like hell?
It's a learning process that takes a little while to master. But they manage to get there one day, during a cold evening where only fucking around could warm them up.
Three fingers and his tongue. She'll make sure to remind him of that.
***
She tells him she wants to get a nursing degree. She'd be good at it, she insists.
He says maybe he ought to start up that Laundromat.
They save their pennies.
The money never mattered to her but this is about making an impact on the world.
***
It's a temptation every time he passes a stupid tourist, not to pick their pocket. She knows that temptation - it haunts her every day, reminding her she could easily turn a trick and get a couple of thousand pesos. They lamented over beer their fates. He was supposed to get rich - he was supposed to be famous. He tells her he doesn't understand what went wrong.
That's the question she's been asking about him for years, time wasted away on the their foolish pride, she obsessively hanging on to the wound he'd dealt her, he wounded by a world that had kissed his ass for most of his teenaged life.
She's never told him that she kept his letterman jacket for ten years. That she used to sleep with it after a particularly hard night walking 48th and Vine.
He's never told her what happened to him in prison.
It doesn't and does matter, nibbling at their nerves, biting into their sides like barbed wire.
***
The baby's a complete accident, and they snarl at one another in resentment for weeks.
One night he turns to her and asks if she'd have an abortion.
She says she can't, because it's his.
He's somewhere between honored and horrified.
***
Janie spends six hours in a phone both trying to get ahold of her mother. She tries letters and postcards afterward, only to be greeted by silence.
Carl burns the responses that brand her a demon seed, an unrepentant soiled dove destined to burn in hellfire forever.
***
The Laundromat and Joe are six months old when a shoebox containing Patrick's ashes are dumped on their doorstep. Some part of Carl has a bitter laugh over his ex-best friend turning up like a bad penny at the worst possible time, and he holds the little urn between his hands, staring at it sitting at the brand-new kitchen table in their brand-new coldwater hacienda.
"I'm flushing it down the crapper," Carl says.
"Even a prick like Patrick deserves better than that," Janie tells him. She leans against his shoulder, watching Carl's fingers stroke the vessel in a meditative gesture. "He got us back together."
Carl looks at their son, who coos in the highchair. The cold hard truth was that Patrick had pimped Janie out to him. "He was a stupid dick."
"Who got us together."
And he knows Janie's right. Without Patrick he never would have found her working the streets of Los Angeles.
"What do you want to do with them?"
****
They spread the ashes among a patch of cactuses off the highway. As he shakes the bits of dust blown over and onto his pants (Patrick's a pain in the ass even in death), Carl watches the sun turn the sky pale pink and soft aqua, the clouds pale orange puffs of cotton in the sky. His son creeps around carefully among the spines, Janie watching him with caution.
And then Carl realizes he did learn something from Patrick, after all. In his desperation to become rich, to recapture his high school glories, he had lost sight of the beauty of freedom. It's a lesson Carl relives every day in the presence of his family. He vows right then that he's never going back.