he says, lips sealed, eyes rolling up. “Don’t know where I’d go, though. Maybe Arizona, New Mexico. Spanish hid a lot of gold out there.”
“I’d like to get out of America,” I say, watching a pillar of red light behind the bar holding in its electromagnetic prison tight coils and marbles of tobacco smoke.
“What’s wrong with America?” he says, his forehead ridging.
“I’ve never fit well here,” I say.
“Why not?” He seems offended.
“People come here for one thing,” I say, hammering my shot glass down for emphasis. “To be rich. And they’ll do anything to get it—lie, cheat, kill, steal, poison a river. You ever been to Canada?”
“Nope. Had real maple syrup once.”
“It’s clean there. The people are nice. You know why?”
“Maple syrup?”
“Because nobody goes there to get rich.”
He tongues his bottom lip, then scratches his big chin. “Rich ain’t all that terrible of an idea.”
“A dream about money is a dream about shit.”
“Who said that?”
“Sigmund Freud.”
“Don’t tell me you wanna live in Canada.”
“I was thinking more like the coast of India, or maybe Africa, someplace with decent surf and no crowded freeways.”
He crooks an index finger and scratches the part in his hair. “How about an island?”
“Yeah,” I say. “That’d be good too.”
“With nekkid girls,” he says.
“And parakeets.”
“And buried treasure.” His eyes suddenly light. “Let’s go.”
“It wouldn’t be bad.”
“An island,” he says, tapping his nose. “Yeah. Jesus, pirate gold. Hey, where’s Inga?”
“Here she comes. See the woman behind the flames?”
The drinks are placed flickering in front of us. Mountain says—the blue lambency of blazing liqueurs playing on his eyes—that on our uninhabited island not far from Tahiti we will probably need a generator, a compressor, milking goats, and two topless house servants who speak no English. I add some laying hens and a still, and install a sunken Spanish caravel full of gold doubloons in the cove nearby to please his treasure-hunting instincts.
“We should leave now,” Mountain says, tossing back his pot of fire.
As I raise my asshole to my lips, a consumptive- looking rake in a black evening dress and tattered stole is limping toward me, her hands so thin they appear to be bone, her face lizardwhite, her cheeks collapsed. If I believed in zombies I would get up and run. I’m terrified for a moment and when she leans down suddenly into my face, the flaming asshole barbecues my nose.
“Hello, Mom,” says Mountain.
“Hi, Sullie,” she says in the charred, cement-mixer voice of the inveterate smoker. I’ve forgotten until now that his real name is Sullivan. “Where you been, baby?”
With sangfroid slowness he lights a cigarette. He smokes leaned back with the cigarette between his second and third fingers, covering the lower half of his face with his hand, as I imagine French aristocrats or Charles Boyer would do. “I’m going to college now, Ma,” he says.
“College?” she says, stifling a yawn. “Well, that’s nice. Who’s your friend?” She tips her skeleton head at me and her eyes are dancing now.
I toss off my extinguished drink, the tip of my nose thoroughly scorched. “I’m Edgar,” I falter.
Mishearing me, she unwittingly assigns me a new nickname. “Deadwood!” she cries, flipping back her stole in a blast of bug spray and cedar oil, moths flapping all around her head.
“I’m a friend of Mountain’s through college,” I explain, feeling for a blister. “Sit down, please, Mrs. Moses.”
“What kind of name is that, Deadwood? Are you a camp counselor?”
“It’s not really my—oh, never mind,” I say, wondering as she creaks into a chair, her eyes a frosted and moribund vacancy, how she could be related to the vital and venerable man sitting across from me. Her teeth are caked with lipstick and her hair is a whorl of mad licks, as if coiffed by the tongue of a cat.
“What are you boys doing here?” she asks, laying her chin on the back of an emaciated hand. “You like older women?”
“Ah, just drivin’ around, Ma,” says Mountain, slitty-eyed and finding sudden interest in the plumes of smoke rising from his cigarette.
“It’s my birthday,” I explain, gulping the last bit of residual syrup from my shot glass.
“No!” she says, regarding me with wonder. “We must dance.”
“No, Mrs. Moses,” I reply firmly, afraid she was going to say something like that. “Thank you, but I don’t dance.”
“Of course you do.” She swats the air.
“No, really I don’t.”
“No, we must.” She totters to her feet and extends a hand. “It’s your birthday.”
“I don’t dance,” I repeat.
“Come.”
It’s plain I won’t win. You can’t argue with the dead. The pickled hag that is somehow Mountain’s mother leads me to the black hole of a dance floor and we stride through the dingy, necrotic vapor with all the geezers nodding off into their diluted Smirnoffs. We don’t dance as much as we simply prop each other up. I have no concept of where to put my feet. I can feel her nipples and her hipbones jutting through her dress. She moans in my ear, “How old are you, honey, sixteen?”
“Forty-three,” I reply, my hand on her very palpable spine.
She cackles hotly into my ear.
Mountain watches us wistfully, hand in his hair.
“New York, New York” is finally over. You know I used to like that song. They must have played the long version. Mrs. Moses throws an arm around my waist and drags me back to her son. My plan if she asks me to dance again is to feign an epileptic seizure.
“I want you to meet Mel,” she wheezes, wiping a snake of hair from her eyes.
“We gotta go, Ma,” says Mountain.
“You can meet Mel, first,” she gurgles. “He’s right over here.”
Mel is poised on a stool at the bar, drumming his knee with three fingers. He’s a skinny guy about fifty with a barrel chest, big horn-rims, and a haircut like a Muppet. Everyone smiles and nods around except Mountain. Mrs. Moses is doing that blurry thing with her teeth and wagging her skull around airily, as if she is having the time of her life. “Mel is a contractor,” she says.
“So this is your son,” booms Mel cheerfully. “You’re a strapping one, aren’t you?” He’s trying to touch Mountain, slap his shoulder or grip his hand, but Mountain keeps his distance. “This your son too?”
Mrs. Moses tips her head in pride. “No, this is Deadwood, Mountain’s good friend from college.”
“Deadwood,” says Mel, pleased. “You must be a poker player.”
“We’re gonna go, Ma,” says Mountain.
“Don’t run off so soon. Stay for a drink.”
Mel is