‘Hey,’ said the vet. ‘Hey! I know you, man! ’Member me? The valley, man, the valley near Santander Jimenez.’ He hobbled a step forward, peering at Mingolla’s face. ‘Yeah, it’s you, man. You looked different… your hair was different or something. But yeah, I…’
‘Un-uh.’ Mingolla backed away, feeling unbelievably tall, worried that he might scrape his head on the orange sky; get wet with that polluted color. ‘You got the wrong guy.’
‘The fuck I do! You was there when I was hit, man. ’Member? The game with the beaner… y’gotta ’member the game!’
Mingolla stepped into the crowd, was carried away by their slow crush. He couldn’t remember the man, but then he couldn’t remember much of anything, and he was afraid someone else might recognize him, someone with an ax to grind.
‘You’re a vet, huh?’ A woman, a beautiful, pale, black-haired woman with carmine lips and high cheekbones, enormous eyes, and the voluptuous body used to mold pornographic beer glasses displayed beneath a full-length gown fabricated of tiny black-lace serpents and filmy mesh, a woman with silkburns on her hips and probably a really keen tattoo… she took his arm and pressed close. ‘I’m Sexula,’ she said. ‘And I’m free to vets.’
That started him laughing, thinking about the Gl Bill and benefits.
‘Hey, fuck you, Jim!’ She pushed him away. ‘I’m just tryin’ to be real, y’know. You some kinda faggot, get your ass over to The Boy’s Room!’
‘Faggot?’ Hilarity was peaking in him, graphing Himalayas of unvoiced laughter. ‘Want me to show you my dingus, prove my point? Want me to unholster my—’
‘I don’t have to listen this shit! Maybe the other rides like it, man, but not me. I…’
‘What you mean “rides”?’ The unfamiliar term brought him down to earth, reminded him that he was lost, that he’d lost… who the hell was it? The crowd moved them up against a window.
‘Rides, man!’ she said. ‘Like, y’know, this’—her gesture took in the street—‘this here’s the carnival, and I’m one of the rides.’ She caught up his hand. ‘You okay, man? You lookin’ pretty scorched.’
Laughter was mounting inside him again. He took in the woman’s body, incredible breasts, wild cherry nipples peeking from the twinings of black lace coils. Nice girl, he thought. A foreign student, no doubt. Working her way through junior college.
‘What’s in ya, man? Little too much frost?’
He remembered some more. ‘I’m looking for somebody… somebody’s looking for me.’
‘You found her,’ she said. ‘C’mon, let’s go see ’bout a room.’
He could use some rest, a place to get his thoughts together. Out from under the orange sky. But he didn’t trust her. He primed her for honesty, openness. ‘Why me?’
‘Like I said, man, you’re a vet… the town pays me for vets.’ She led him around the corner, through glass doors, along a carpet mapped with stains shaped like dark continents amid a burgundy sea, and into a narrow mirrored lobby at whose far end, hunched behind the reception desk, sat a gnomish old man with a beaked nose and tufts of white hair on the sides of his head reminiscent of goblin ears, and upon whose forehead the engraved word
Ludy squinted at Mingolla, who could feel cracks spreading across his skin from the power of that blood- webbed blue eye. ‘Ya gotcha card?’ he asked.
‘Uh… I was mugged,’ said Mingolla.
‘Ain’t gotcha card gotta pay the twenny.’ Ludy turned the page of a magazine, and peeping over the edge of the desk, Mingolla saw photographs of naked young boys in sexy yet playful couplings.
‘Didn’tcha hear him.’ Sexula spanked the counter with her hand, calling Ludy back from gambols with pals named Jimmy and Butch and Sonny. ‘Man says he got mugged.’
Ludy scowled, an expression that caused his eyes nearly to vanish into folds of inflamed pink flesh, and said to her, ‘You wanna pay the twenny pay the twenny.’ He punctuated. ‘Don’t wanna pay get the fuck out.’
A tap on Mingolla’s shoulder, followed by a girlish, ‘Excuse me.’
Behind him stood a thin mousey girl of nineteen or twenty, whom Mingolla perceived to be at the peak of her good looks, poised between the incline of plainness and the decline of just plain ugly. Wearing jeans and a T-shirt bearing a rendering of the Last Supper and the legend THIS IS MY BODY, GIVEN FOR YOU. Toting a shopping bag. Her brown hair lusterless, her breasts with the conformation of upturned saucers.
‘The gift of love can be a transcendent experience, but not if paid for,’ she said, her words sounding rote. ‘I want to give to you, brother.’
‘Get outta here,’ said Sexula.
The girl ignored her. ‘I am qualified to give you everything she might, and I can give you—’
‘Give him a goddamn fatal disease, what with all the sleaze been poppin’ you.’ Sexula took a little walk around the girl, shaking her head in exaggerated disgust.
‘I can give you much more,’ the girl continued, swallowing back embarrassment. ‘Through the act of love, I can give you communion with our Lord and Master Jesus Christ, in…’
‘These cunts come ’round sayin’ that ’cause they’re doin’ it for God, it’s pure,’ said Sexula. ‘But the truth is, they can’t get laid ’less they give it away. They ain’t nothin’ but hips and a hole!’
Ludy laughed, a sound like something large and pulpy falling into an empty paper bag.
The girl’s face worked. ‘Jesus Christ, in whose service I’ve…’
Sexula sneered. ‘Jesus got nothin’ to do with it!’
That waxed it for the girl. ‘I don’t care what you say about me, but you… you…’ She hefted her shopping bag behind her back as if preparing to use it on Sexula. ‘What would you know ’bout Jesus? He’s never laid his hands on you!’
‘Man lays his hands on me,’ said Sexula with a wink to Ludy, ‘and I give him that ol’ time religion with a brand new twist.’
‘Please, don’t go with her!’ The girl’s hands fluttered at Mingolla’s chest. ‘The things I’ve seen the Lord do, the things that were done… the miracles! Miracles from ashes!’
Her speech grew more and more disconnected, her manner more pitiable, and Mingolla, suddenly concerned for her, touched her mind and listened to the static of her thought, a crackle of half-formed images and memories…
