Katya Reno

Cantu’s

After a long day at the Sunglass Hut, Bernie stops off at Cantu’s for one or sometimes two. It’s a long drive to her mother’s house from the Sunglass Hut, and Cantu’s neon stands out among the black pines along the highway. She doesn’t try anymore to resist the urge. She likes the sound the crushed gravel makes under her tires when she drifts into the lot. Likes how the screen door slams behind her and how the flies re-congregate on its webbing. Her perch is at the end of the bar’s hook, farthest from the door, because from here no one can catch her by surprise.

Only once has Bernie seen another woman come into Cantu’s alone. She was wearing an orange jersey and knee pads. She downed three shots of jagermeister, winked at Bernie, and left--with a walk not at all looser than the one she’d come in with.

Five o’clock is an hour when many might consider suicide if there weren’t a little something waiting for them at Cantu’s. At five o’clock Bernie feels old, but by six, with a whisky in her gut, she feels any age she chooses.

Her mother tells her she’s getting old.

She reminds her mother she’s already old, which is worse.

This is true her mother admits. Her mother who no longer has a uterus.

True., Bernie is older than most of the girls she sells sunglasses to. They look not completely formed--foetus-like.

Once Bernie found her mother’s old cheerleading outfit in a box. It was so small, she couldn’t get it past her shoulders. For a few minutes she was stuck inside of it, her arms straight above her head, hair spilling out the top, nose smashed against the part where her mother’s boob would have gone. Bernie tipped over and stepped on the collar to get it off. The zipper popped open on one side and the seam let go on the other. It seemed relieved.

Bernie always has the same at Cantu’s. A glass of Jameson, neat. She turns herself on by drinking this drink.

Today is no different. She pulls her hair claw out and sets it next to the Jameson. She’s ready, she’s been ready all day. Sometimes she makes the mistake of imagining the whole world feels the way she does, and she’d assumed since she was in the mood to drink, the bar would be filled. But the bar is empty, except for the bartender and a chubby, prune-colored man in a rumpled once-white buttondown.

Most of the men at Cantu’s kindly ignore her and she likes it this way. Especially on weekdays. On weekends, it’s different. On weekends, the advances start to feel like a kind of warfare. Once a man made as if to tackle her in the parking lot while his friends stood by their pickup trucks and hooted. Confusion fell on him when she wouldn’t skitter, so he changed course and fell to his knees with his hand over his heart.

It reminded her at the time of watching her father have a heart-attack by the pool. One hand over his heart, the other holding an amber beer bottle by its slender neck. It was a lovely and rare pose for her father. And she thought a fitting one for his death, though he didn’t die.

She’s almost done with her second Jameson when a man sits beside her. He’s got fingers webbed with tar. He rubs them together like he knows she’s looking at them. Then he uses one of them to point to her drink.

“What’s that?” He asks nodding at her glass.

“Jameson.”

He looks at her unsteadily and doesn’t respond. She thinks--he’s already drunk, and he’s just walked in.

After a serious silence, he tries again.

“You like this place?” he asks, doubtfully.

“Sometimes.” She notices that he has a blotch of tar on his neck, that he needs a shave, that his hair is black as a Cajun’s, and one eye is puffy pink and sealed shut.

“Never seen a woman in here, myself,” he says, politely.

“No? Why is that?”

He looks surprised. “Why is that??”

“I mean, where do the women go?”

“Wish I knew.”

Bernie thinks of her mother who is at home watching TV. A new dog at her feet gnawing its rawhide. Her mother hates TV but she’ll watch it. “Keeps me away from my comfort,” she says, meaning the Southern kind.

She doesn’t say it, but she’s seen women besides the kneepad woman in here before. But they were always with a date. The men walk in straight-backed with pearl-snap button ups tied into jeans, and the women hang onto their arms, doing a loose jangling walk that Bernie has only ever seen women do in Texas.

“I’m not from here,” she says. “I’ve only been here six months.”

“Huh,” he says. “Where you from, Houston?”

“No. Denver.”

“Oh, okay. Never been there.”

“What’s your name?” she asks.

“Luke. Luke Hart.”

She follows Luke to his house. Past pine trees and into swampy ground where it smells like someone’s burning something far off. Before her are the lights from his car and a crumbling patchwork of asphalt. On either side of the road are the dark, shaggy pines and occasionally a mailbox and a red dirt road. She can hardly hold her head up, and she’s reclined the seat so far back that everything looks like it’s coming at her from above. This is to try to keep herself from vomiting.

He parks and comes to help her out of the car. His hands are cold. He smells good, like cooked beets. She leaves her shoes in the car and walks across the warm, hard-packed ground to his front door. The night is brutally warm. Air twitching with mosquitos and bay water. He’s got CDs twirling on strings in a thorny mesquite. He’s got a torn out sofa on his front porch.

“Ma’am, I don’t have no lights,” he says when they enter the house. “Don’t worry though. I ain’t dangerous.” He says this from somewhere inside the darkness.

The last man she was with, a P.E. teacher, lived in a house that was white everywhere--blank walls, steam-cleaned, creamy carpet, but a black treadmill, which looked like a polished insect perched on snow. He had a shitload of camera equipment, and he’d talked her into a few nude photos. His house smelled like vinegar.

Luke’s house smells like wet cement and forest mold.

A light appears from a match. Luke transferring it to a candle looks monastic and intent. The light reveals his living room. Or at least it’s where he keeps one of his couches. It’s also where he keeps his cement mixer, spare timber, bicycle, work boots, and empty fish tank with fast-food wrappers inside. He’s clearing a space for her on the couch, swiping coins, wrappers, and a pot rimmed gooey orange, with a wooden spoon in it, onto the floor.

He’s holding a hand out toward the couch, candle in the other hand. 

“Welcome to your coffin,” she imagines him saying. She wishes he would tear her heart right out and take a bite out of it. Because she doesn’t sit at first, he stops with a welcoming gesture and rubs his brow hard, embarrassed. She drops to her knees and undoes his belt buckle. “Oh,” he says and jerks away a little, but she holds him close, pulls his pants to his knees, and finds him with her mouth.

She wakes in the night naked, thirsty. Luke is asleep in a star shape, his mouth open, belly tender and tracked with dark fur. She’ll wonder in the morning if the stars she saw in the house, through what should have been a ceiling, had been a carryover from a dream. No not a dream, he’ll say, smiling without guile but with some amount of shame. He’ll say it was the work of Gustave. Bernadette remembers this one, fretting it out in the bathroom with her mother. Painting their nails a color called Sunset Margarita to pass the time and Tillie, the poodle’s, too. But that was a year ago. Keeps it cool he’ll say. She’ll say he’s the first person she’s met in Texas without an a-c. She believes he’ll understand this to be a compliment, but can’t be sure. Later, she’ll reconsider: the hole has upended certain habits of mind, and she’ll come to think of ceilings as culprits of our disconnected lives. Their use something to reconsider.

The sun is breaking when she gets back to her mother’s house--in a new subdivision called The Woodlands, despite the lack of trees. Her mother, she discovers, has taken in a new dog. This one she calls “Gimme.” Because she says that’s what his eyes say. His stomach must be the size of a pecan, and his ribs are visible in their perfect symmetry, like an anatomical specimen. She says she found him by the lake on the drive to the house, which is where she finds all her strays.

She’s eating a taco from Taco Bell, and when beef grains fall from the taco, she pinches them up and presses them to Gimme’s mouth. Bernie snatches one of the tacos for herself. Her mother doesn’t complain.

How many dogs has her mother found? There’s a trail of names she’s sure somewhere in her head, but she can only recall a few. It is Bernie who makes the calls, posts the online ads, takes them to H.E.B in a box if they are young and cute enough. Her mother collects; Bernadette sheds. This one is so ugly, with a pinched up face and too small ears, and fur tough as Astroturf -- she can’t imagine anyone will want it. Her mother won’t mind. She doesn’t mind either that the coming and going of so many dogs has left a lasting stench in the house and a yard with scanty grass and dugouts for bones.

“It must have been almost midnight. And I had to lie when Greg asked where you were. Seems you weren’t picking up your phone. Told him you were out grocery shopping.”

The kind of lie that no one would believe, thinks Bernadette. She tells her mother so.

Her mother drops a blue and pink pill onto her tongue, swallowing them with soda. There are seven pills in all in the cell marked T on her daily case. They’re for depression, anxiety, and the missing uterus.

“What do you care, Bernie?”

Bernie wonders about the truth of this for a moment. It’s possible that she misses her husband, but when she tries to remember what she misses about him, she can only think of him washing his red Chevy convertible on the weekends with a maniacal intensity.

Instead of answering, she takes another taco.

“He’s a good man,” her mother says, as if this statement is new to both of them.

The next evening Luke is waiting for her at Cantu’s. Says he’s on his third drink.

“Bad day?”

He shrugs. His hands are tan, speckled with tar again. There’s a bone-deep tiredness about him that she finds sexy. He asks if she wants to play darts, and she says OK, though she’s never played before. First out he gets a bull’s eye. He’s a one-eyed wonder.

“Not fair,” she says. “It comes too easy to you.”

“It doesn’t,” he says, smiling, to say that, yes, it does. She loses three times, and then gives the game up to a small crowd of challengers. Some of them don’t notice the eye. But those who do shake their heads, befuddled, and to save pride buy him a drink. When she’s ready to go, Luke’s too toasted to drive, so they tell the bartender they’ll be leaving his truck there for the night. “Ain’t my problem if it’s gone in the morning,” he says. Luke waves his hand as if it doesn’t matter to him either.

That night she hears the story of the eye. He had been driving. His girlfriend looking out the window at the flat fields of green grass and bluebonnets, a sign of spring. His parents had both set into a nap in the backseat. A semi jackknifes. The car hits and tumbles. How many times, he can’t know, because from that point on his memory is dead. His head smashed upon the steering wheel, the top of the car crushing skulls.

Who gave him the news? The doctors did. Like you see in the movies. Not the best messengers. But then who else would it be? Two loved ones dead. The third, his girlfriend, in a coma she would never awaken from. Now he lives with a steel plate in his head. The doctors had said the eye might heal or might not. They’d sewn it shut for a month. He says the weird thing is that occasionally he’ll see shifting colors out of that eye, but most of the time it’s useless. He parts his hair so she can see the purple ridge that runs from his hairline to the nobby back part of his skull. He has trouble with the letter “r,” he says, and remembering basic facts, like his mother’s name.

He tells his story flatly because probably he’s told it a hundred times. She tells him it’s the saddest story she’s ever heard. He snicker-laughs, because of course he’s heard this a hundred times before, too.

She would tell her mother some things, but not about the hole in the ceiling or how the bugs have made the walls their very own pasture; these things her mother wouldn’t understand. Her mother tried suicide after learning of her husband’s affair with his intern. Pills of course and a hot bath. Bernie had found her and smacked her starchy face again and again, while she waited for the ambulance. It wasn’t the last time.

“That dog needs to go,” says Bernie about Gimme who is asleep on her mother’s feet, exposed rib cage expanding and falling.

The wince in her mother is subtle, but Bernie can make it out because she’s used to bringing her mother to it.

“Bernie, I don’t have the heart for it. But you do what you need to do.”

Bernie would like to see what the house would become without her in it. She knows her mother’s ineffectualness is a show— it was never part of her nature before. She’s trying it on. Perhaps to annoy Bernie. Perhaps to annoy herself.

“Is that your dog?” Luke asks. They’re in Cantu’s parking lot making giant shadows on the ground. The sun will not soften before it dips below the trees. It will torture as many as it can before it goes. Sweat has already wetted her shirt below her breasts, even though she’s been out of the bar only a few minutes. Just two drinks tonight because Luke says his head hurts. She wonders about the plate. Thinks of petting his head for relief, but doesn’t want the feel of the scar on her palm. Once was enough.

“It’s yours,” she says.

In the front seat, Gimme looks up from his pig’s foot briefly as she says this, wondering brown eyes. Luke’s brow sinks and he rubs the back of his neck with his hand.

“I don’t think so... Dogs doan like me.”

“Of course they do,” Bernie says, though she thinks the same is maybe true of herself. She makes dogs wary.

He ends up taking the dog when she says if he doesn’t, she’ll drive it to the pound where they have a 24-hour kill policy. She wouldn’t have done it, but he doesn’t know this much about her yet. He carries Gimme to his truck--Gimme’s legs are splayed and quivering on Luke’s stomach. Luke dumps him into the truck bed.

Greg would like her to come home, he says. He’d like to take her jet skiing. He’d like to build an addition to the house for their babies, and a hot tub in back for making love. He’d like to buy her some new clothes and take her downtown for a steak. Her mother must be better by now and maybe she’d even like the house to herself again. Her mother’s depression being the only explanation he can muster for Bernie leaving him.

It doesn’t matter what she says because somehow the parts he doesn’t want to hear will evaporate before they reach him. She says she’s been having a really nice time with her mother these last six months. Enjoying Texas and the warm weather, thoroughly.

“You always said you hated Texas.”

It was true. Her mother also had continually insisted that the state where she was born and raised was perhaps only a slightly milder version of hell.

“I didn’t know what I was talking about. Now that I live here, I love it.”

She’s pleased with the silence that follows because it seems to signify some amount of harm inflicted.

“I don’t believe you. It’s not like I’m not worried about your mother, too. But there are other ways, Bernie. Hospitals for one.”

“I will not talk to you again about hospitals.” Her mother has said she would jump out a window within the first hour of being sent to a hospital. Bernie knows this is not an exaggeration.

For five days now Bernie’s been coming to Cantu’s after work at the Sunglass Hut expecting to see Luke. Today, the fifth, she stays late, letting herself get good and ripe under the bartender’s indifferent assistance. The bartender stands with one long octopus arm against the bar, his other hip cocked, his lower back seriously curved. He’s got tight curls on his head, which she’s sure he greases. She would swear to anyone that he’s gay, but the bar is as far from a gay bar as they come. 

So she’s wondered about this, and wondered if once he found out she liked gay people--unlike most people around here--they might become friends. But he’s said no more than two words to her. He gives her a surprised, though not unfriendly, look when she comes in, like he can’t believe she’s still at it.

Today, she doesn’t care whether he likes her or not. She’s in a pissy mood because an asshole in an A&M baseball cap had walked into the Sunglass Hut and filched a pricey pair of Ray Bans. She shouted as he lurched out the door, his jeans falling off, so he had to catch at his studded belt with his other hand. She hightailed it to the door, and then stopped at its threshold, reconsidering. What was she going to do, tackle him? A suffering patch of daisies was standing in the heat, motionless, the daisies lined with concrete. A lady in pearls and nude pumps walked by eating a hot-dog, and Bernie immediately hated her. Which wasn’t fair, but there it was.

She taps her finger on the bar like she’s seen Luke do, and the bartender pours her another of Jameson. She takes it down fast, feels its sunshine spread across her chest. On TVs above the bar, football players are smashing into each other. She thinks about how it must be very loud inside one of those helmets with everyone knocking into you--and how it must feel good.

A man slides onto the stool next to her and for a moment she gets giddy, thinking it’s Luke. But this isn’t Luke. He smells like joint smoke and has a weasel’s smile. She lets him buy her another drink, and then another.

The bartender tells them to settle up and get out. As he’s paying the bill, she walks toward the door, but then the weasel catches her before she can get there. He hooks one arm around her waist and one around her wrist. She thinks he’s going to walk her to her car, but then what he’s doing is needling her up against the dark side of the building, where stucco is catching at her dress. She would like to think this is hot. It would be hot if this were Luke, but this guy is too eager--clawing, panting in a high pitched breathy twang--and his mouth smells like bacon. “You are such a slut,” he says, before coming with a gasp, and then in a desperate whisper. “Such a perfect fucking slut.” He zips up his pants, arranges his hair, and asks her if she needs a ride. She shakes her head, no. She stands just long enough to watch him roll away in his F150, a rack of lights at the top. Then she doubles over at the treeline. She lies in the pines for a while, on her back, looking at the white marshmallow of the moon, until she feels well enough to stand again, and then she stands and without realizing it, starts walking toward Luke’s house.

He is sitting on the porch, smoking, which she hasn’t seen him do before. He doesn’t greet her as she climbs the dark steps. The smell of his cigarette makes her want to gag.

“It’s you,” he says, which makes her wonder who else it could possibly be. Were there other women? She had thought she was the only one who could possibly understand or else overlook the obvious facts.

“It’s me.” She hesitates at the top of the stairs and rather than sitting beside him on the couch, chooses the top step.

“I was wondering about you.”

He laughs. His laugh comes from a faraway place she doesn’t want to follow.

“Your dog ran away.”

“When?”

“The day you gave her to me.”

“If a dog doesn’t know where it’s home is, it doesn’t know what to come back to” she says.

“Didn’t I tell you I’m no good with dogs?” He takes a long drag from his beer. He’s wounded too. The shame of it is all over his face. He offers her a beer from a case, which is keeping him company on the couch. She takes it, opens it, accepts the hot beer as punishment.

When he’s done with his beer, he pitches the can off the deck, where there are a half dozen others. She puts hers at her feet and rises to go. She’s not wanted. Another woman might inch her way onto his lap and nuzzle him toward warmth. But that woman would be wrong. His soul would contract. She knows because hers would, too.

Unwanted tears dribble out of her eyes as she makes her way back down the red dirt road. She’s calling for Gimme. “Gimme, gimme, here gimme.” She hears a skitter, sees shifting of blanched needles and a shadow. Gimme?! But it’s nothing--it’s a squirrel, or her imagination, or a god’s cruel trick.

At home her mother is in the tub again, water bobbing at her old lady breasts. Bernie drags her out. “Goddamnit! Stop it!” She shouts in her mother’s slack face. Her mother’s eyes open, and they are lakes of lost--blunted despair and pain unbounded. Bernie dries her off with a Snoopy beach towel. The one her mother gave her, weirdly, as a gift for getting her period. Once she’s dry, Bernie gets her mother to bed. She holds her by the waist and they shuffle as if in a line-dance down the carpeted hallway.

“You took Gimme,” her mother says to the speckled ceiling.

Bernie is lying next to her in the bed.

“He’s free now,” Bernie says.

Slowly, ever so slowly, she watches her mother part her lips in a faint smile, and then it's gone.

“I miss him,” she says.

“I know,” Bernie says, turning on her side and stroking her mother’s wet hair. “I miss him too.”