Always Happy Hour: Stories(41)

“The clouds,” she says. “Nature. God.”

He puts his thick fingers in her hair and yanks through to the ends. Then he goes over to the bookshelf and sorts through the DVDs. The DVD collection is something from their past life, when he worked fifty hours a week, building things. This wasn’t that long ago—three months, four—when they went to the bar at night and picked up a new movie every time they were at Target, when they’d go to Saturday afternoon barbeques so high they could hardly speak. They bought other stuff, too: a juicer, thick bath towels and camping equipment, a couch big enough for the two of them.

“Have you seen The Box?” he asks.

“No. Have you?”

“Part of it,” he says, “not the beginning.” He puts it in. “It’s pretty weird. Be prepared.” He takes the cushions off the back of the couch to make more room, and then climbs over her and organizes their bodies, their pillows and blankets. She looks at him and feels happy, but the happiness is heavy, like something should be done with it.

One day, he’s going to make her his wife, he tells her. They’ll have a little boy and a little girl and a house set back from the street. They’ll have their own chickens. Sometimes she doesn’t feel like pretending and asks how he’s going to support two kids when he can’t afford to take her out to dinner, but it’s more fun to imagine his blue eyes and long lashes on their babies.

Onscreen, Cameron Diaz and her husband sit in their kitchen looking at the box—taking it apart, unlocking it with the key and locking it again. If they push the button, someone will die, someone they don’t know, and they’ll receive a suitcase containing one million dollars.

“Would you push the button?” she asks.

“Hell no,” he says, like is she crazy?, but he’s seen what happens after the button has been pushed. She knows it can’t be anything good because that wouldn’t make for a very interesting movie but she doesn’t know the particulars.

“I think I might push the button,” she says. “People die all the time. People are constantly dropping dead.” She presses her nose to his shoulder and breathes in alcohol and sun-dried tobacco, and under that, the smell of him. She’s read about the science of smell, how people are attracted to those who have divergent immunity patterns. They would pass along a wide range of immunities to their children.

“Would you leave me if I pushed the button?” she asks.

“No,” he says, shaking her arm, which means she should be quiet now.

He falls asleep holding onto her leg, occasionally stirring enough to kiss her back, as she becomes more and more bored. When it’s finally over, he gets up and goes over to the bookshelf. “There’s nothing here I want to see,” he says. He takes off his shirt, his round belly hard. She keeps waiting for him to lose weight but he doesn’t seem to have lost a single pound; no matter how little money there is, there is always plenty to eat.

“How many condoms do we have left?” she asks, though she knows there is one condom. There are five cigarettes and two Four Lokos and one flask of whiskey above the stove that they don’t touch. They’re saving it. They’ll know what they are saving it for when the time comes.

“One, for tonight.” He turns and winks and then goes back to the DVDs. “We’ll have to go to campus and swipe some.”

“I could get back on the pill,” she says, but he knows she doesn’t want to get back on the pill. The pill makes her crazy.

He mutes the television and resumes his place on the couch, closes his eyes.

“Don’t go to sleep,” she says, and it’s her turn to shake his arm. He opens his eyes and kisses her and closes them again. She traces his tattoos with her fingers: the Mayan totem pole on his arm, three crazed jokers on his chest, his last name in ornate letters in a half-circle above his belly button. She fingers one of the large black stars on his stomach. In prison, he was a captain in an Aryan gang but that was a long time ago and prison isn’t like the outside world. In prison, you have to pick a team based on the most obvious thing and stick with it.

“I wish you hadn’t gotten all these racist tattoos,” she says.

“I wish I hadn’t gotten them either,” he says. The dragons on his arms cover up the words WHITE PRIDE. The stars cover up swastikas. The wings on his back—she forgets what these are covering up. She wouldn’t mind having wings but she doesn’t have any tattoos and if she got them now she would only be reminded she was late, that she had missed something.

“There you are,” he says. He puts his finger on the naked lady on the inside of his left arm. The naked lady has the usual cartoon body: large breasts, a tiny waist, and full hips. Long wavy hair down to her ass. “You had longer hair then.”

“That’s not me,” Darcie says. “I never had hair like that.”

She thinks about the questions she used to ask him, how his answers were technically true and yet not true at all. For example, she asked if he ever stabbed anyone and he said he didn’t. Later, he told her he didn’t stab anyone because a knife wasn’t as efficient as bringing a rock down hard on somebody’s head. She asked if he killed anyone and he said he didn’t but then he told her he assigned people to carry out hits—the orders would come down from above and he was responsible for making sure they were carried out. That person was going to die, regardless, he explained. They were bad people, people who deserved to die. Darcie spent months asking the wrong questions and now she doesn’t ask questions and he tells her all sorts of things, more than she wants to know. She lets him talk because she wants to understand him—how he divides things into good and bad, how he believes the bad things he has done are actually good—but no matter how he explains them, she doesn’t understand.