“There’s more food in the kitchen, if you care to join me,” Luna said.
The sound of her voice was soothing, but her words were unnerving. Be something you’ve never been before, I told myself. Be cool.
“Okay.” The voice didn’t squeak. My sebaceous glands were on my side for the moment. I stood up with Luna, and the old man was too busy eating to note our departure. The sound of his fork scraping against the stone dish played us out of the room.
She stopped in the doorway as we were walking, and the soft warmth of her form bumped me. Blood rushed from my head to toes and I breathed.
I thought her face twitched, but it was only the slightest change in her expression and I couldn’t be sure. She spoke to him. “When you’re done with that, we’ll work on the writing, like we talked about, when Cliff comes.”
He nodded to that, rocked a bit in his chair. The classic music went to a station break and a tranquil midmorning DJ’s basso voice spoke from the golden radio, telling us which one of Verdi’s Four Seasons we’d just heard.
The rest of the food in the kitchen lay displayed smorgasbord-style, the eggs and tortilla shells covered in still-hot tinfoil. A crystal pitcher of orange juice sat in the center of the table where we’d all met last night.
“You can help yourself,” Luna said. “I already ate.” She sat down at the table, and I heaped a plate for myself, taking a seat across from her. Sunrays broke through the windows and hit the pitcher, turning it into a prism of blues and blushes, like a soap bubble on a hot sidewalk.
I looked across the table at Luna, or where she should have been. There was a glossy academic text opened in front of her face. I read the title, which was in blood-red serif font and featured some grinning idol or totem done in woodwork on the cover. Cannibalism among the Tribes of the Ancient Southwest.
She somehow sensed my eyes on the book as I strained to read the subtitle. I gleaned “Ceremonial” and “Gustatory” and two other words, which wasn’t bad for someone with eyes gummed in the dust of sleep.
“It’s for an anthropology course.”
“Online or is there a campus nearby?” I poured orange juice into one of those champagne glasses the old man had been sipping from.
“No, I…” She paused, lowered the text. “Okay, I’ll come clean.” She frowned for the first time since I’d met her, a pout that made her veer from sexy to cute. “I’m reading it for fun. But some people look at you weird if you tell them you’re reading something like this for fun.”
“Pellagra,” I said, dumbly, or maybe not.
She had been ready to put the book to her nose again, but lowered it and said, “What?” flatly.
“People in America, or the United States used to get this disease from corn, that they didn’t get from corn down in Mexico. Some doctor, I forget who, found out that the Mexicans ran their corn through lime-wash or something that gave them a source of vitamins that kept them from getting the disease.”
Thank you, Mr. Hurley! Thank you, me, for not getting stoned or skipping class that day!
“Pellagra,” she said, almost dreamily. I knew it was a disease, but it sounded like a wine request in her mouth.
It grew quiet enough that I could hear the radio from the den, the faint trill of a violin playing that Bumblebee piece that even the biggest philistine would recognize from old cartoons or TV ads.
Luna continued reading, but she had the book out in front of her set on the checked cloth over the table, scanning with the curve of her fingernail rather than holding the text up to her face.
“Who’s Cliff?” I asked, remembering her words from the den, and mention of my uncle’s notebook.
Luna reached toward a fruit bowl on the table, groping for it blindly since she wasn’t willing to take her eyes off the page to get a hold of it. I took the wooden bowl in hand and slid it across the table toward her. She picked up an apple, and bit it hard enough that juices spilled and flecked her honey-colored skin. She spoke with her mouth full. “Cliff is Charlie’s oldest and dearest friend.”
She turned the page and I let it go at that, content to watch her read her book about cannibalism, wishing that the half-eaten apple in her hand was my heart.
CHAPTER FOUR
AN OLD TIMEY TEXACO
The den was an unlimited trove of memories, spitting out new wonders one after another like a nostalgist’s version of a clown car.
“This is cool.”
I held up a trinket I’d found in the room, heavy and made of metal, like an old vintage lunchbox. It was a massive oversized refrigerator magnet shaped like a gloved fist cocked and ready to swing.
“Pabst Blue Ribbon Wednesday Night Bouts give me that.” My uncle rocked in the chair, softly and seemingly without worry. “Got some Christmas ornaments from them, too, one year.”
I imagined an evergreen tree in some living room where a son in his cowboy outfit laid track for his model train on the carpet, while his sister used her new Chatty Cathy doll to derail the train.
A red and silver glowing object caught my eye from the nearest open cardboard box. I leaned down and brought up the Christmas ornament he was talking about, held it by its fishhook, and let it dangle.
“Speak of the devil,” he said, grinning to make his ears twitch.
I put the shiny red ornament down and waded through the clutter that made the back of the room look like a packed storage locker. Near the rear wall there sat an old rosewood rolltop desk piled high with precariously perched boxes and stacked documents, an ancient piece of metal still catching a glint of light and serving as a paperweight for some loose files arrayed there.
“What do you call this?”
I picked up the piece of metal. He looked at it. “End-swell,” he said. “It stops swelling. They didn’t have that in my day.”
I carefully set it back on the pile of papers, turned around. I saw a canvas drop cloth tacked to the left wall near the corner where it joined the rear wall. From the front of the room it had looked like the sheet was up there to keep a new coat of paint from getting on the floor a million years ago, nothing more, but viewed up this close I saw it was a matte painting or some kind of background from a theater production.