Twentynine Palms. Daniel Pyne
For a few minutes he’s still hurtling down the highway. With his eyes closed Jack can feel the speed, conjure landscapes to flicker past in his peripheral vision.
Slowly, his body sinks into the warm plastic webbing, and he brakes. A liquid heat washes him. He arranges the towel over his eyes, inhales the pungent smell of industrial laundering and disinfectant. The setting sun scrapes its hot needles across his skin. Now, finally, perhaps he will sleep.
“Zach. Zachary, don’t you go in the deep end!”
Splashing sounds bring Jack to consciousness under the towel. He’s missed sunset, and the desert sky glows cobalt blue. Pale orange neon lights that rim the eaves of the motel are sputtering to life.
Jack adjusts the towel. The water in the pool at his feet is choppy, someone in it, splashing.
“If you go into that end, young man, we’re going back inside.” A woman’s voice ricochets, hollow, around the concrete courtyard, followed by more splashing, and a child’s imitation of an outboard motor. Lips to water.
“Zach—”
Jack doesn’t look up. He doesn’t need to. He paints a mental picture of the pale, plump woman with jet-black perm standing flaccid-thighed in plus-size swimwear at the end of the pool, glowering as her little tyke flails his way toward the five-foot mark, deaf to her threats. Former high-school prom princess turned pumpkin, her lips flattened into a humorless slit. Foam flip-flops slap over wet concrete, water churns—
“Ooowww!”
“You heard me.”
“That hurts!”
“Out.”
“I could still touch bottom.”
“Let’s go.”
The boy’s reluctant, soggy footsteps recede into the shadows, and Jack sits up in time to catch the greenish-white, fleshy backs of a woman’s legs as she leads her son toward a unit on the ground level, at the far end of the motel. Her white shorts gleam iridescent, lit from below by the pool lights.
What is Tory’s theory? Something about women, marriage, children, the time bombs mothers plant deep inside their daughters; hard body spoilage, breasts drooping, butts dropping, faces inflating like bread dough, the tight hats of sensible hair, car pools, Botox, and the desperation. Jack rises from the chaise and leaps out over the pool, arching his back, knifing into the tepid water.
Opening his eyes to the sting of chlorine, Jack grazes the pool bottom with his stomach, and then lets his momentum bring him back slowly to the surface. The hot night air inexplicably gives him goose bumps.
Jack floats easily.
“I lost the sight in my left eye when I was twenty.” Three gentle taps to the business end of Jack’s unlit cigarette, then he spins it in his fingers, forestalling the inevitable trip outside to smoke it. “If you look close, the pupil is distorted. Like a teardrop. But I don’t consider myself disabled or anything. I don’t even think about it all that much anymore.” Salisbury steak is the blue plate special, and Jack ordered his at the bar. “You adjust,” Jack says, answering what he always assumes is the unasked question. “I’m supposed to wear glasses, clear lenses, for protection. Of the, you know, good eye.” Jack is making conversation, enjoying the thrum of his own voice. “I don’t know why I never have.”
The lean bartender nods, cutting limes.
“I see like a camera. Everything’s flat. Compressed. But if I move my head, slightly, like this,” Jack shifts imperceptibly, “I’m taking two pictures, my mind compares them, measures the difference, and I get my sense of depth.”
“Okay.”
“At first it was hard, though.”
“I know some soldiers, lost eyes in Iraq. They say they have trouble shaking hands. Parking the car. Chopsticks.”
“Chopsticks are tough for everybody,” Jack allows.
There are few customers tonight in the Roundup Room. Jack prefers the anonymity of his corner stool at the bar to the checkerboard-cloth-covered wagon-wheel tables for six and slide-in booths in the over-lit dining area. When was the last time, he wonders, there were six people having dinner together in here? Two couples, marines from the nearby combat training facility and their dates, are the only diners. The jarheads are having the all-you-can-eat popcorn shrimp, and their ketchup-splattered plates suggest it has become a how-much-will-they-cook situation. Three heat-jacked, love-shot, middle-aged gals sit in a booth with a pitcher of margaritas, sharing their perky loneliness. Another marine, older, in street clothes but with the unmistakable high-and-tight haircut, gunnery-sergeant set to his mouth, and intricate, indecipherable tattoos on both biceps, sits hunched at the opposite end of the bar from Jack, nursing a lite beer and occasionally glancing up, hopeful, at the door.
“I’ll tell you what, though,” Jack continues, unable, for some reason, to shut up, “it makes you greedy, about what you do see. It forces you to see more clearly. You don’t waste your time on the visual garbage. A man with one eye wants to focus on the things that are worth seeing.”
The bartender rolls out some more limes. “So I guess you spend your free time surfing porn sites on the web.”
“He’s a comedian,” Jack says, smiling. Shut up, Jack tells himself. Shut up, go outside, have your smoke.
Salisbury steak with Brussels sprouts and cactus shavings is an attempt, Jack guesses, at nouvelle Western cuisine. He eats hungrily, without thinking about it. It’s his first meal since an Egg McMuffin and Diet Coke breakfast, on the grey, fog-bound road back from Santa Barbara at dawn.
For a moment he wonders if he dreamed it.
“Been out here before?” The bartender is bored. Just grinding through another shift.
“I’ve got this friend, married a swimsuit model. She’s filthy rich and they’ve got a house in the north hills. Usually I stay up there.”
“Not this time?”
“No.”
“Swimsuit model. That’s sweet.” Jack pushes his plate back, politely trying to put a punctuation on the conversation, but, apropos of nothing, now the bartender waxes on: “Before he got married, my cousin Cody was, like, this major poozle hound. He had a theory that, before you get serious about a girl, you want to meet her mother. Seriously. Because, according to Cody, the mom is what she’s going to look like when, you know, the fruit goes past ripe.”
“Past ripe.”
The bartender smiles. “Hey. Two pictures.”
“What?”
“Two pictures, one eye. Like you were saying. It’s the multiple pictures that give you the depth of perception.”
“It’s bullshit, though,” Jack says. “Don’t you think?”
The bartender shrugs, suddenly on the defensive for his cousin. “So, your friend, did he ever meet the swimsuit girl’s mother?”
Jack thinks. “He did, yeah.”
“And?”
There’s a commotion in the kitchen. Raised voices, pans clattering. Everyone in the restaurant pretends not to notice. The bartender takes Jack’s empty plate away and replaces it with a cup of coffee and brandy snifter filled with two fingers of Sambuca. Jack swirls the glass, trying to rinse a stray bean back down with its buddies.
Abruptly, the kitchen doorway bangs open, a lanky cook appears pushing ahead of him a sullen girl with a Hello Kitty backpack. He scolds her in Spanish, she says nothing, her Day-Glo sunscreen smeared across her cheeks, her unscreened arms sunburned painfully red. The girl just stares at her feet until the cook gets tired of yelling and goes back into the kitchen with a sense of finality.
“Hey.”