Garrett Rowlan
The desert on either side of the I-15 seemed to shrink me by its distances, recalling the memory of incarceration and my current living condition, a rented room; or maybe I just felt small by the thought of meeting Barbara’s father.
“Don’t stress the fact that this is his fifty-fifth birthday,” she said. “If the age thing comes up, just say how young he looks.”
“Just like his daughter,” I said. Barbara was thirty-two and didn’t react, though right now nearing the Nevada state line I saw the strain. They had had their differences. I was two years older than she and getting a little seamed around the eyes from the sun and the life I’d led, no doubt about it.
“We’ll treat it as a celebration,” she continued. “We’ll just sort of pass over what.” We had left LA at two and now we neared Primm. “I didn’t want him to be alone on his birthday.” She switched lanes. “It might be helpful if you recognized him, you know, like from the movies or TV.”
“I don’t own a TV.”
She told me the name of a TV show he’d played a part in. I’d never heard of it, but then life outside of prison was in one way like life behind bars, with its things better not to witness. Once released, I found most of what I saw to be too trivial to warrant attention.
It was dusk, and I thought of the hard, alkali flats at the California border near the highway in contrast with the pools I cleaned, their surfaces blue and soft and shattering with your hand. The water left transparent drops and the faint, sweet scent of chlorine.
Entering Nevada, we pulled off the freeway and parked. We walked through a cold winter’s evening and into Wild Bill’s. We checked into our room, freshened up, and headed to the casino’s corner-pocket steakhouse. Ralph rose from a booth and hugged his daughter. “And this is my friend Nick,” she said. I wanted to think of myself as more than her friend, but I let it pass. His smile was a frown inverted. We sat. We talked about the
drive.
I asked him about some scribbled paper beside him. He said he’d been sketching a biography of the character he was playing in the television commercial, which was being filmed in a small town a few miles away. He was deciding his character’s life at the point of the car commercial.
“I didn’t know a car commercial involved so much thought,” I said.
“Preparation,” he said. “Do your homework. That’s always been my philosophy, all fields of endeavor, not just acting. I always researched the investments I made.”
“I think that’s the way to go,” I said. “I wouldn’t make an investment without knowing the deal.” I caught Barbara looking at me, so I didn’t say anything more. She had said she would speak to him about the loan.
The waitress with her glasses and cropped hair resembled a moonlighting schoolteacher.
“This one’s on me, Dad,” Barbara said. “Happy birthday.”
“I’ll have a bourbon,” Ralph told the waitress as she handed him the menu, wrapped in imitation leather.
When she left, Ralph told us the story of the “shoot.” A couple are stranded beside a desert road, their car having broken down. Another man pulls up and the wife or girlfriend leaves. Ralph’s character, depressed, looks out on the desert and sees first a mirage, a shimmering oasis, and then a car, freshly washed, comes up and stops in front of Ralph’s character. He gets in the car. It has luxury features. “They’ll do an establishing
shot of the dashboard,” Ralph added. He drives, and soon passes the stranded man. “It’s not an illusion,” Ralph said, using his “voice-over” voice, “the new Sycorax SG is the most reliable car on the road.”
The waitress came and took our orders. When she left, Ralph turned to me.
“What is it you do for a living?” he asked.
“I clean pools.”
“It’s good honest work,” he said. “Did you meet my daughter while you were cleaning her pool?”
“This summer,” I said. “It was a new account.”
“I wasn’t happy with the old service,” Barbara said.
“I see it.” Ralph took a drink of the bourbon that the waitress had set in front of him. “Beautiful young woman in a bikini and muscled guy in shorts working his long pole in the water.”
I disliked him, and yet I managed a small smile. He wasn’t the only actor here.
“Actually,” I said, “I was checking the chlorine levels.”
“Not as visual,” he said, chuckling. “Do you own the business?”
“I don’t,” I said. I decided to make my move, regardless of what Barbara thought. If he turned me down, I could hate him with a clear conscience. “But I want to. I—”
Barbara kicked me under the table and I shut up. Ralph was about to say something when his cell phone rang. He answered, and I heard a woman’s voice before Ralph excused himself. He walked out of the restaurant door and into the casino.
Barbara glared. “You know him five minutes and you’re about to put the squeeze on him. Next, you’re going to tell him you’re a criminal.”
“I’m not a criminal,” I said. “I’ve made a few mistakes. I’ve paid my debt to society.”
“I know, I know,” she said. “And please don’t use that paid-my-debt cliché.”
“Well, excuse me, Miss English teacher.”
“You don’t know him, you don’t know people, you can’t just blurt things out.”
I had ordered a beer and took a drink. “You heard that comment he made about sticking my pole in the water, saying that to his daughter. What’s up with that?”
“He’s got issues,” she said. Her shifting jawline suggested she had a few of her own. “Let me handle it.”
“He says something like that again,” I said. “I don’t care if it’s his birthday or not. He’s not going to give me shit.”
“This isn’t prison, Nick. You have to put up with people.”
“I do put up with people, believe me.”
She glanced toward the exit where her father had disappeared into the casino. “I wonder who he is talking to,” she said.
We soon found out, for Ralph returned and sat. “Guess who that was?” he asked.
“Ann Seagram. She’s going to buy me a drink later.”
Beside me, Barbara jaw shifted again, and I wondered if she were grinding her teeth.
“We had a little thing going on during the making of the one film I ever made, co- starred in.” I knew the movie, a B-movie from the Eighties called The Last Kiss. Ralph leaned forward in man-to-man intimacy. “However, we were both married with children.”
“Are you saying,” Barbara said, “you stayed married because of me?”
“Barbara,” he said, “it’s my birthday.” He sipped his drink, looking at me. “Her son is living in the town near to where we are shooting the commercial. She wants me to talk to him. He’s got some problems.” He looked wistful. “I tell you, of all the actresses I’ve performed with, on stage and film, she was my favorite. It was a road movie and as long as we kept moving it was fine, it was great. When the movie wrapped, we both went back to our lives, to our wives. My marriage lasted another three years.” He broke off,
seeing Barbara’s expression.
The food arrived. We got through dinner, Barbara and Ralph talking about movies, mostly. Thank God for movies, I thought, or they probably wouldn’t have anything to talk about. She got the check. Later, she told Ralph she’d see him in the morning before he had to go and film. We walked back to our room in silence. I thought we could watch TV for a time, maybe take a shower together, but Barbara seemed angry.
“Notice how he didn’t invite us to meet her.”
“Who?”
“Ann Seagram, who do you think? He knows I don’t like her. I was twelve years old when they made that film. They claim kids don’t know but they know. As far as I’m concerned, she is evil, that woman. I blame her for the breakup of my parent’s marriage. And did you hear what he said, that she was the favorite actress? Like he’s worked with many actresses. That’s bullshit. He sells industrial real estate; this acting business is sporadic and is just for his ego.”
“Well, I’m sure he knows he’s made some mistakes.”
“Are you sticking up for him? Is that a guy thing?”
I could see her getting into one of her moods. She turned on the television, which irritated me, an English teacher who only read what she had to read, while I spent my evenings reading and listening to my radio in the rented room that was my life. I didn’t want to go two hundred and fifty miles just to watch the damn TV. When I offered to take her on a walk, she refused. I put on my jacket and left.
I was in a mood myself. I saw the sign for the pool and went to the elevator. The pool area would probably be closed, but I thought I would try. Pools relax me. Going up, I thought that Ralph was the kind of man my father hated, “the privileged white man,” he would have said, though he himself was half white he identified as an American Indian, though whether Crow, Comanche, or what I never knew. He worked as a printer all his short life. I reached the pool area and was surprised, now that I had arrived, to find it was open. No one was around. Not a surprise; it was a cold night. I went to the pool and knelt and touched the water, smelling the chorine on my hand. I touched the water, and the splash and the ripples left a faint music in the air.
It made me remember. I was a kid and riding with my father. We must have been coming back from Idaho, where my maternal grandmother lived, though all I remember of her was a vaporous, faintly medicinal scent that must have been alcohol, or perhaps medicine, or a combination of the two. We were coming back through Nevada and we stopped. Maybe the car had overheated. I got out of the car and walked into the desert, past the sage and sticks and tiny rocks. Ahead, I heard a faint, gurgling sound and in a few more steps I reached the sound’s source, a clear running stream, and though it must have been irrigation or runoff from the surrounding hills, its appearance in the desert had always struck me as miraculous.
A maintenance man came out of a door.
“We’re closed, sir,” he told me.
I wasn’t ready to go back to the room. I went downstairs and into the parking lot. I felt restless. Maybe it was the distance I had traveled today. It was as if, having been confined for so long, so much movement had forced me to keep going, to the back of the casino, where there were trucks parked and two workers sharing a cigarette and not seeing me as I passed. The back end of the casino wasn’t much, just a ring of cinder blocks forming a retaining wall, about five-foot high. It was easy to vault over.
I walked into the desert. The breeze through the weeds produced a soft shaking sound. I walked beyond the parking-lot lights and, when I turned, I saw the back of the hotel and tried to pick out which window Barbara was behind. I turned away, moved into darkness. Soon, I heard something. I stood a long time listening. It was the sound of running water, the way water sounds when a filtration system is running. I thought I saw
a blue shimmer like a lit swimming pool.
I came to it, standing at a low chain-link fence. I didn’t want to climb the fence and be busted for B & E and back to the pokey. I looked at the water from a distance of ten feet. I didn’t want to go any closer: if it was real, I was trespassing; if it was my imagination, I was crazy. Whatever it was, clear desert water or a mental event, I let it be. I walked back, vaulted the wall, and soon entered the casino.
I found Ralph in the bar. The stool beside him was empty and so I climbed onto it. After what had happened, I needed a drink. He was scribbling on a napkin.
I asked him if you were still sketching a biography of the “character” he was playing. “Nah,” he said, “doodling is all. I got my character in mind. He had promise as a young man but underplayed his hand. I don’t think that’s your problem.”
“What is?”
“Underplaying your hand.” A small smile rippled his features.
“Did you meet your friend?” I asked. “This Ann Seagram.”
“She cancelled,” he said. “She said, the past is the past.”
“Did your affair last a long time?”
It was a road movie, he told me. They had sex in a series of motels. Each one he remembered, and could describe, the nondescript rooms given character by the memory of her body. He imparted this information while playing, pausing at times to ponder his next move in video poker. I sipped my beer. He turned to me.
“You were going to say something about this pool business?”
“My boss is going to retire and move to Arizona. I know the customers. I do almost all the pools. He just does the billing and I know that too. It’s just that I need a little more capital. Well, a lot more, actually. I could go to the bank, but the thing of it is, my credit isn’t so good.” I took a breath, might as well put it out there. “I’ve got a record.”
“A rock and roll record?” Ralph asked.
“A prison record.”
“What were you in prison for?”
“Grand theft auto,” I said. “It started off as a legitimate job, I mean, helping this guy repossess autos, and then I sort of branched out on my own. It was a bad time in my life. I paid my debt to society, been out over five years now.”
This was a fib, but this was my chance.
“I’m no longer on parole, and I’m waiting to take it to the next level, which is why I thought about you. I can show you the numbers.” I felt that he wanted to hear something other than the numbers. “I want it,’ I added, “so that I can marry Barbara.”
Sometimes a thought can be in your head but you don’t know it. As I spoke, the nature of my feelings for her became clear in a way they hadn’t before.
“She’s been married twice at thirty-two,” he said.
“I haven’t been married at all at thirty-four,” I said, “and to me that’s pretty much
the same thing.”
He laughed, as if something about that struck him as funny. He finished his drink and said goodnight. I didn’t know what his reaction to my pitch had been. I watched him as he weaved across the casino, and when he vanished I finished my beer and went up to our room. Barbara was sleeping. I showered and crawled in beside her and when I touched her thigh she squeezed my hand but pushed me away. I rolled on my back and looked up at the ceiling. I heard sounds, other voices and toilets flushing, and at last I drifted off. When I woke, it was well into the morning, and Barbara, fully dressed, entered the room, slamming the door as she did so.
“I just got back from seeing my father,” she said. “He rang me up to have a cup of coffee before he had to go out to the set. Turns out he had an early call.”
“I slept right through it.”
“He gave me this to give you.”
She threw an envelope on the bed. I opened it. Ralph had left a business card with a note telling me to write him a letter, outlining the particulars of my situation, and wrote that he would see what he could do.
“Why did you say you wanted to marry me?” Barbara asked.
“I know we haven’t discussed it.”
“We sure haven’t!”
“I was thinking about it, but somehow it never seemed the right time.”
She frowned. “Until you wanted to ask him for money?”
“No, Barbara, look, it was just the two of us and…I don’t know.”
She shook her head. “I can’t believe you.” She took the covers and pulled them back, exposing me in my shorts. “We have to go. I have to pick up Audrey this afternoon.”
I sat up in bed. “I didn’t plan anything. Yeah, I’ve been thinking about it, so shoot me. But I had it in the back of my mind that somehow I had to be more than someone who cleaned pools, you know, you being a teacher and all.”
She walked to the window and opened the shades, letting in a volley of light. I got up from the bed and looked outside. There was no pool out there, just a back wall and desert. What was it I had seen, a vision or hallucination?
We checked out and stepped into the day. It was cloudy and cold. She asked me to drive. On the freeway, we rode west in silence. She sat looking straight ahead.
“Look, I’m sorry,” I said. “We were at the bar, had a drink, you know. I didn’t know what to say. He asked me why I wanted to own the business. It popped out. I don’t know why you’re so pissed. Okay, maybe it didn’t come out the way it should have, you finding out second hand and all, but there it is.”
She didn’t say a thing.
“Look, I’m stepping up here. I mean, a lot of guys, a woman divorced twice with a kid…”
Oh boy, I shouldn’t have said that.
“Okay, so you’re saying I’m damaged goods and I better take what you’re offering because that’s as good as it’s going to get.”
“I didn’t mean it that way.”
The casino disappeared in the rear-view mirror. We descended into California and passed jagged, barren, and bruise-colored hills. Barbara turned away toward the passenger window. A few miles later I heard her weep; she told me to stop. I pulled to the side. She got out and walked down a short ravine. I followed her. Above me, the cars passed on the interstate, the sounds of their engines like tangled wires. She stood at the ravine’s bottom, leaning against a barbed-wire fence. I stood beside her.
I put my left hand on Barbara’s shoulder. After a second, she put her hand on mine and squeezed. I didn’t say anything. Words would only betray me, I knew.
She pressed my hand to her cheek. It was wet and smelled sweetly of chlorine, a scent like a promise of better times.
Garrett Rowlan is a retired teacher and writer. His website is garrettrowlan.com.