Pictures of Houses with Water Damage: Stories (5 page)

They laugh loudly, shaking their heads, pointing at him, pointing at his car.

What?
he goes.

He looks around.

Where is his wife, his goddamn wife, where is Wanda?

Wanda? he goes, and: Wanda?

There’s no restroom here, so she didn’t leave to piss. He puts the bags in the car. Her purse is gone. One of her shoes is on the floor.

He goes, Wanda?

He walks over to the three men who smell something bad like swear and dirt and piss and bad breath and he asks, Did you gentleman happen to see where my wife went?

They laugh.

The woman in the car, he says.

They laugh.

In the car, he says, his voice louder, you guys are right here, I know you saw where my wife went. Her name is Wanda.

They laugh.

He goes, What’s
wrong
with you?

They laugh.

They don’t speak English, a voice says.

The voice: belongs to a man wearing a cowboy hat, walks around from the other side of the store. Chewing something, tobacco or gum. In his forties, unshaven, too many lines on his face for a man that age.

What
do
they speak? David says.

The man with the cowboy hat shrugs and goes, Not sure; not English.

Well, did you see where my wife went?

Wife?

She was sitting in the car.

That so?

This isn’t like her.

Like who?

My wife.

Wife?

Wanda, yes, wife, he says; and he’s annoyed.

Hmm, the man in the hat goes.

Did you? David says.

Did I what?

See her?

A woman?

Yes, she’s a
woman.

The man goes, Haven’t seen a woman around here. They’re usually a rare catch—sight, you know. I mean, you out of town types with your nice fancy car and all. I mean, who the hell comes out to the Salton Sea when they come to the great outdoors?

We were just passing through, David says.

You all do, the man says.

Sheriff deputy says, Can’t file a missing person’s report until after twenty-four hours, I’m afraid. That’s the rules; that’s the law.

The deputy is just a kid, no more than twenty-two, twenty-three years old, smooth tan face, even white teeth, sparkling green eyes. David wonders when he got so old.

It’s 111 degrees out, David says, she has no water, she can’t be safe in this heat, not after two hours.

I’m sorry, says the deputy. Come tomorrow, eh.

Tomorrow?

Best we can do.

The three smelly tanned men laugh.

Do you know who they are? David asks the deputy.

Yes.

Who are they?

Local bodies.

They were here, they
had
to see where my wife went, David says.

I’ll ask them.

The deputy walks over and talks to the three smelly dirty men for a moment. Their voices are low.

The three men shake their heads.

The deputy walks back to David.

They didn’t see anything, the deputy says.

Bullshit, David says.

That’s what they tell me.

What the hell am I supposed to do?

Wait.

Wait for what?

To see if she comes back, the deputy says.

Where? Here?

Motel down that way.

Motel, David says.

Or you can go back to Borrego Springs and wait, the deputy says. You think maybe she went back there?

To Borrego?

Perhaps.

How? On foot?

The deputy shrugs and goes, Or hitched a ride. People do that.

Wanda is not the hitching type.

You never know when people change, they do it suddenly.

Oh, you’ve seen this? David asks.

I’ve seen some things, the deputy says.

Why would she want to go back to Borrego? David says.

You tell me, the deputy says.

In the motel room in Salton City: David drinks. He doesn’t know what else to do but drink. He drinks until things go very black, like he always does.

Nothing changes for him.

Behind the wheel: he drives.

He drives toward the outskirts of the Salton Sea and arrives in a town called Bombay Beach. An old VW bus sits halfway in a pool of sludge.

It smells like the end of the world here.

He has a terrible hangover, again. He walks into the only bar in town—the Sky Lodge—to help with the hangover. A couple of beers and a couple of shots should do the trick.

There are half a dozen men and women in the bar. They are all in their sixties and have leathery, tanned skin. They have bored eyes. Their heads turn and stare at him,

They stare at him like he’s a meteorite that fell from the heavens.

He is a stranger.

They are not used to strangers.

He nods at them but they do not nod back.

David sits at the bar counter and orders a draft mug and a shot of tequila. That goes down fast. He orders another mug and a shot of vodka.

Later, he’s ordering whiskey straight.

Has anyone seen my wife? he says a few hours later, loud and belligerent.

Her name is Wanda, have you seen her?! he goes.

And he goes: Don’t any of you dead people know anything?!?

Asleep: in his car.

On the side of the road.

He opens his eyes at two in the morning and sees a lot of stars in the desert sky. Something whizzes by in the air, a bright light shaped like a saucer.

Aliens, he mutters. UFOs and aliens.

Maybe she was abducted by aliens.

One story is as good as another.

From town to town, bar to bar, he drinks and asks questions. He says he is looking for his wife. No one knows a Wanda, has seen a Wanda.

He gets drunk and angry.

Maybe she doesn’t exist, a bartender says just before David is 86’ed out.

What? What’s that? David goes.

Maybe you made her up, says the bartender, I mean, really, dude, what kind of woman would want to be with a loudmouth asshole like you?

The town of Indio.

David: in a motel room.

Outside are date trees.

He looks at the TV and gets drunk, a twelve-pack of beer and a fifth of bourbon.

Maybe I made her up, he says.

It happens in Palm Springs.

After a night of looking around and asking about his wife—who may or may not be real—David goes to sleep in his motel room and two hours later, four men burst into the room, wake him up, slap him around, punch him, beat him, and tell him to stop his quest.

He knows his attackers, he has seen them before: at the Salton Sea.

The man in the cowboy hat and the three smelly men with tanned skin.

Only two of the smelly men hit him with their fists. The third stands in a corner and spins round in circles and laughs.

The man with the cowboy hat also hits him.

David is in pain, a lot of pain.

Too much pain.

His eyes are swollen, his lip cut in several places, a few teeth are loose.

He is on the floor, curled up like a fetus.

The spinning man stops spinning and makes his way over to David and kicks David several times in the chest.

There is the sound of something cracking.

And more pain.

The man in the cowboy hat bends down and looks at David.

The man in the hat says, Forget Wanda. Stop looking for her, stop asking about her. It’s over. She’s ours now.

He tries to talk.

We have your wife now, he says, and we have many plans for that hot piece of ass.

David drives.

He drives back to Los Angeles.

It’s not easy to do this: all the pain from the beating and what he knows must be two cracked ribs.

Three teeth are missing from his mouth.

He thought of going back to the Salton Sea and telling the deputy what happened, that those horrid men kidnapped his wife and were doing god-knows-what to her, but he has a notion that the deputy might be in on it.

He will go to L.A. and contact someone in the FBI.

He will get his wife back, even though he hates her.

He missed her.

Maybe I am free now, he thinks.

Maybe he won’t go to the FBI.

No, he has to save her.

He has to save something in this marriage.

She’s home.

David walks into the house in West Hollywood, where he and Wanda have lived for five years, and he hears music on the stereo system and finds Wanda sitting in the living room, sipping a glass of pinot grigio and reading the latest issue of
Harper’s.

She looks up at him.

Wanda, he says.

What happened to you? she says.

What happened to
me?

You look a mess. Did someone kick your ass?

What happened to
you?
At the Salton Sea, he goes.

Does it matter?

What the fuck, he goes.

Don’t start, she goes.

Those men, he goes.

Didn’t you get the
message,
David?

He thinks about it.

Now he understands.

He goes, Message received.

We’ll get lawyers, she says, we’ll be civilized about this.

He says, Of course.

Do you need to see a doctor? I think you should.

I will tomorrow.

Would you like a glass of wine? she offers.

I would, he replies.

I’ll pour it for you, she says.

He says, Thanks.

He means it.

T
here were seven dead birds on the porch when I opened up the house after being away for three months. This is what happens when things rely on me for survival. I decided to leave the bodies. I was just here to collect memories into suitcases. The phone kept ringing and ringing. I didn’t answer it. Before I left, I took one of the dead birds, placing it carefully in the smaller suitcase.

N
icole’s baby brother’s first word was a name for her—her baby brother called her “Gagol.” She didn’t like it. “I thought they were supposed to say something like ‘Da-da’ or ‘Ma-ma,’ not ‘Gagol,’ ” she said. Her parents, her daddy and mommy, were too busy working, always away from home, to notice or care.

“Gagol Gagol Gagol!” Nicole’s baby brother said over and over, laughing and hopping about like 18-month old babies like to do.

“I hate that,” Nicole said. “Stop,” Nicole said.

Nicole’s boyfriend, a nice young fellow with glasses, said, “Kind of sounds like Gogol.” He said, “Cool.”

“Who? What?” said Nicole.

“Gogol,” her boyfriend said, “a great Russian writer.”

“Whatever,” she said, “I wish he would call me something else.”

Nicole’s boyfriend was seventeen and was always reading this book or that. He was getting a comparative literature scholarship at some big university in the Midwest, based on an essay he wrote that Nicole tried to read but did not understand.

“Gagol!” said her baby brother in his sleep.

It was summer. Nicole had turned fifteen to sixteen that summer. She was given the task to look after her baby brother all summer long, cutting the family expenses down since her parents didn’t have to hire a babysitter or put the baby in baby daycare.

Nicole didn’t mind. What else would she do during the summer? Her boyfriend would come over and help her watch the baby brother, and when the baby brother took his necessary naps during the day, Nicole and her boyfriend were able to retreat to her bedroom and have sex. Sometimes they did it on the couch, watching TV, or she would sneak in a blowjob when the baby brother was preoccupied with the things that babies find interesting, such as dust in a corner or birds in a tree. One time she had sex with her boyfriend in the shower but she didn’t like it that much: too much water too close to their bodies.

When he wasn’t reading a book, she would have sex with him because that’s all there was to do, and she didn’t read books.

She was worried she would miss sex when he left to that university.

She would simply have to find another boy to have sex with.

They were having sex the day there was a car accident in front of the house. Two speeding cars. Nicole wasn’t sure what, exactly, happened, other than the two cars collided into one another and people were hurt.

There was a woman, in her 30s, lying on the ground. She was bleeding badly, all over her body, cuts from broken glass. She choked on her own blood, the sound went gurgle gurgle gurgle.

Nicole and her boyfriend witnessed all this blood because, upon hearing the cars smash into one another, they stopped having sex, got dressed, and ran outside to look at what happened.

She and her boyfriend were not the only ones. Everyone in the neighborhood came out to take a look.

“Someone call 911,” someone said.

“I did already,” someone said.

Nicole watched the woman choke on her blood and then watched the woman stop choking on her blood. The woman was not breathing anymore. Nicole grabbed onto her boyfriend and said, “Oh,” and “oh.”

Nicole did not notice that her baby brother had walked out of the house to join the crowd. Her baby brother walked up to the woman who was bleeding and not breathing. Her baby brother looked at the woman with curiosity.

“Someone get that baby away from her,” someone said.

Sirens were getting closer.

The baby brother leaned down and touched the woman and said, “Gagol.”

The woman coughed up an enormous amount of blood and sat up. She looked around.

The crowd took one step back.

“Gagol,” said Nicole’s baby brother.

“Where am I?” said the woman.

“She’s alive!” someone said.

“It’s a miracle!” someone else said.

“Oh brother,” Nicole said. She was thinking about what her parents would say, do, react.