“Does it always take you like that?” she said.
“No, only when I’m stupid enough to get my head kicked in by a redneck cop.”
I smoked the cigarette and exhaled slowly, while my temple and eye beat with pain, then pushed the sweat back into my hair with one hand.
“Look, you’re not a drinker, so you don’t know the alcoholic syndrome,” I said. “I’m not a shithead all the time.”
“Sit down. Your cut is bleeding.”
“I’m going down the road. I’ll take a couple of those hot beers with me if you don’t mind.”
My legs were weak, and the blood seemed to drain downward in my body with the effort of standing.
“You can’t drive anywhere now.”
“Watch.”
“What you’re doing is really dumb.”
I started toward the counter where the remaining bottles of Jax stood, and a yellow wave of nausea went through me. The sour taste of buttermilk and last night’s whiskey came up in my throat, and I felt a great throbbing weight on my forehead. My cigarette was wet down to the ash from the sweat running off my face.
“I really got one this time,” I said.
“Come in the back,” she said, and put her arm around my waist. My shirt stuck wetly against my skin.
We went down the hallway through a side door into a small bedroom. The shade on the window was torn, and strips of broken sunlight struck across the floor. An old crucifix was nailed against one wall above a Catholic religious calendar with two withered palms stuck under the top edges. I drew in on the dead cigarette and gagged in the back of my throat. You’ve just about made the d.t.’s this time, I thought. Work on it again and you’ll really get there.
My body felt as rigid as a snapped twig. She pressed me down on the edge of the bed with her hands and turned on an electric fan. The current of air was like wind blowing over ice against my face.
“Lie down and I’ll put a dressing on your cut,” she said.
Something was rolling loose inside me, and my fingers were shaking on my knees.
“Look, you don’t need—”
“Lie down, Lone Ranger.” Then she leaned over me with her breasts heavy against her blouse, her brown face and wild curly hair a dark silhouette above me, and pressed me back into the pillow.
She rubbed ointment on the cut in a circular motion with her fingers and taped a piece of gauze over it. I could feel the heat of the sun in her skin and hair, and her eyes were filled with a dark shine. I touched the smoothness of her arm with my hand, then the light began to fade beyond the window shade, the fan blew cool over my chest and face, and somewhere out in the hills a train whistle echoed and beat thinly into a brass sky. I heard her close the door softly as on the edge of a dream.
It was afternoon when I awoke, and the wind was blowing hard against the building. The shade flapped back from the window, rattling against the woodwork, and dust devils spun in the air outside. The boards in the floor quivered from the gusts of wind under the building, and there were grains of sand on my skin. My head was dizzy when I stood up, my face tingling, and I could taste the hot dryness of the air in my mouth. I tripped over the fan and opened the door to the hallway. The sudden draft tore the religious calendar and withered palms from the wall, and the mobile made from beer bottles clattered and twisted in circles on the ceiling in the main room. I leaned against the doorjamb in the numbness of awaking from afternoon sleep. Through the front screen I could see the clouds of dust blowing along the street into the trees. I heard Rie walk out of the kitchen toward me. She held a tall glass of ice water in her hand, and she had put on a pair of white shorts and a navy denim shirt. There were freckles on the tops of her bare feet.
“How do you feel?” she said.
“I’ll let you know in a minute.” I took the glass of ice water from her hand and drank it down to the bottom. I didn’t believe that I had ever been so thirsty. The coldness ached inside my empty stomach.
“You have bad dreams,” she said.
“Yeah, I’ve got a whole wheelbarrow full of them.” I walked past her into the kitchen and put my head under the iron pump. I worked the handle, and the water poured over my neck and shoulders and inside my shirt. I wiped my face slick with the palm of my hand. Down the slope the Rio Grande was rippled and dented by the wind. The brown current was turning white around the wreck of the submerged car.
“You can stay here. You don’t have to go back today,” she said.
“I’d better hit it.”
“Wait until the windstorm passes.”
“They don’t pass this time of year. That’s a three-day affair out there.” The water dripped off my clothes onto the floor.
“You can’t see out of your eye.”