I set down my black bag next to the bed. And then I let my imagination do its thing.
Was I a bounty hunter who’d stopped at this outpost on my way to Carson City to find a snowbird on the lam, or was I monk sequestered in his friary, willing to go out and preach the Word of Christ to the heathens even if it cost me an ear or I ended up getting beaten to death with coup-counting sticks?
I hid my imagination from the kids at Redrock, and my penchant for storytelling from everyone but my English teacher, Mr. Granski, the same way I hid things from everyone but Mr. Hurley, the only person who knew my interest in history was deep enough for me to sit attentively in class while half the other kids snored and most of the others stared off into space.
I was alone now. That meant I’d not only let my imagination run free, but that I might have no other choice. There probably wasn’t a town around for miles, and I doubted there was much I could do with my uncle, or that Luna was keen to spend much time around me.
I sat on the edge of the bed, let my weary body unwind a bit from its aches. I fought to push school and the Shrooms Incident out of my mind. Leaning down, I unzipped my bag, rummaged through a swirl of blue and red t-shirts, brown khakis and jeans, until I heard the soft crinkle of my Kush in its baggie.
Where to smoke it, and with what? And what would Luna do if she found out? Flush it, or maybe smoke it with me, probably. Worst-case scenario she’d call Deborah, but my mom was probably on her way back to her apartment in Paris, filled with its Lautrec reprints and a couple postmodern butt-ugly originals, along with a view overlooking Charles Eiffel’s steel skeleton tower visible from the wrought-iron balcony.
I reached in the bag, the smell of the weed potent as fresh organic coffee, coming through in rich waves even though I’d taken pains to make sure the Ziploc bag was sealed.
“All settled?”
I looked up. Luna was standing in the doorway again, limned in the light spilling from the other rooms into the hallway.
I instantly regretted not paying more attention in Mr. Field’s Spanish class. I thought if I was fluent or at least conversant, then maybe that would impress her, or show her I wasn’t un gringo feo. But “Yo quiero papas” or some other basic sentence wouldn’t get me very far.
“Thank you,” I said.
“The laundry room is at the other end of the house.” She took her arm from the doorway and pointed. Stubbly hair slightly whitened with flecks of roll-on deodorant was visible in her armpit.
“Thank you.”
“De nada.”
She turned to go back to the bathroom where the sound of slowly running water echoed, like a distant babbling brook.
“Who’s Caddy is that out there?”
She stopped and turned. “Oh, it’s not a Caddy.”
“Batmobile?”
“It’s a Polara.”
“Is it yours?” I didn’t see her driving an American steel classic behemoth and him keeping current with the latest coupes.
She showed her teeth again in an open, unselfconscious smile. I think she knew she was pretty, but it didn’t much interest her. It was something she acknowledged maybe once in passing, like a naturalist stopping on a trail to look at a specific butterfly fluttering on a leaf before it lighted away.
“No, it’s his car. Or it was his.” She lowered her voice and walked closer to me.
I stiffened, quickly zipped my bag closed, but either she didn’t notice the gesture or thought nothing of it.
“He’s not allowed to drive. The mechanic showed me how to take off the distributor cap so he thinks it’s broken down.” She looked back toward the bathroom and a raven bit of bang spilled from behind her ear, cradling the right half of her heart-shaped face. “If he complains about the car not working, just go along with him.”
“Will do.”
She walked away from me and ceased whispering as she spoke. “If you need a ride into town, let me know and I’ll take you to Sonora Bend for provisions.”
“That’s what the prospectors call them way out here? Provisions?”
Luna giggled. If I’d had a diary, I would have marked that down in my moleskin notebook: the first time I’d made a female laugh intentionally. I wasn’t ready to belly up to the green baize in Monaco and tell a spy-seductress that I liked my martinis shaken, not-stirred, but it was a start.
“Gotta go.”
She turned from the door, and I exhaled as if I’d been holding my breath the whole time she’d been there. Then I bathed in the lingering scent of her perfume, deeply and with the same intensity I would have reserved for smelling another girl’s panties.
The tightness left my chest, and I thought about ways to ingest the weed besides smoking it. Maybe if she took me to town, I could get some cocoa powder and bake the herb into some brownies. I bet the wood-fire stove or adobe kiln would make killer cookies, though I’d have to be careful about putting the leftovers in the fridge or leaving them out on the counter. Then again, I’d heard weed was good for all kinds of old people diseases like arthritis and glaucoma.
The shrieking of beasts on the prowl outside brought me out of my thoughts, the mewls echoing on a desert wind. I knew that sound from Redrock. It was the call of the coyotes. It wasn’t like the bloodcurdling baying of a wolf, more like a scraping noise that was unsettling rather than terrifying, like the squelch of a caller’s receiver when they phoned in to some radio show but forgot to turn down their own set. Coyotes always sounded wounded, pathetic, yet dangerous at the same time. Especially when they started whimpering to each other in the night.
“They don’t hurt anyone,” I remembered Adam telling me during one rock-climbing Outlook weekend expedition we went on, where we had set out with the goal to pursue natural highs and to conquer our fears, but we had barely rationed our toilet paper. “It’s just the wolf-coyote hybrids that do the killing. And even then you just got to pick up a rock and throw it at them and then they run off like bitches.”
Sure, I thought, but what if you don’t have a rock?