Laustin, TX

It was a whiskey night. Brad had dragged Chris from the mud somewhere up north, bought us each six or seven rounds of rye, finally convinced me to ride along with the two of them to the Parlor, a gambling room tucked away in a strip mall behind the carnicería, beyond the sports bars, far past the reach of the gentlemen’s clubs. In the time it had taken him, it’d gotten late, the sun had gone down behind the overpass, first in minutes, then in hours, then finally in what had turned out to be a whole night.

The glow of the hot red neon gave everything the glimmer of immediacy as we pulled into the parking lot. Each moment was anchored to some untraceable subtlety, every trap out there already snared, wound tight like a clock. There were bars on all the windows in the strip mall, from the bail bond office to the discount electronics store, maybe even back again. I couldn’t tell from the truck. Opening the rear passenger door, I made sure it gave some of my weight back to me, swung it into the parking space adjacent to us. I stumbled out of the Toyota and got my bearings, tried to see things once instead of two or three times, but it didn’t matter all that much—there was nothing worth seeing here anyway, no sign above the door, only the bright red lights that seemed to turn everything into a crapshoot.

We opened the glass door and walked into the room clumsily, drunk, stinking of liquor. Everyone inside was glued to their own old and flickering CRV television screens—from front to back the place was adorned with simulations of slot machines and black jack tables. Each person in front of them—old, tattooed, drinking out of McDonald’s cups they’d brought from home—seemed to have just wrangled themselves out of some kind of mechanical womb, was plugged into artifice, immersed in a different world. Call girls walked up and down the aisles, as though they could lure in the mechanized hustlers, but they knew they were on standby until after the games, whenever the old boys were ready. They were tall, thin, dressed head-to-toe in outdated clothes, looked like they could’ve been my mother’s age.

“Who’s he?” A big man to my left asked, suddenly having stepped out from behind a counter, taken hold of me by the collar.

“This is just Sam,” Chris said, voice shot through with nerves, and brought both hands up, out in front of him. He wasn’t even good at guarding himself. “He’s good people.”

I tried to peer through the dark and into the guy’s face, but sometime over the course of the night I’d come to accept that the haze was all I could really trust for a little while, until I got past it, everything behind it just some dream that had been distorted, mutilated, given to me in chunks with cracks in between them big enough for the details to slip right through. His silhouette horribly refracted across my field of vision, like a Hydra conjured up from the depths of the booze, the cocaine, the exhaustion. He moved his arm in a winding motion of some kind, spinning it backwards at the shoulder, signaling, grabbing for something. I balked a little, but my strength had been squandered in the earlier hours of the evening, when I still had a glass to bring up to my face.

“Really, man,” Chris told the guy with what seemed half like acceptance, half like some perverse kind of responsibility. The tone in his voice had changed from sincere to rote and monotonous, and he turned on a heel, walked over to a screen, threw his day’s earnings from splitting logs onto the table. He picked through a handful of the rest of the debris from inside his pocket—lighters, a necklace, a couple of loose cigarettes—and picked up a small pair of earphones to wrap around his head.

I turned over to look at him, head nodding from the alcohol, but lost him somewhere in the dark, until two more bouncers, each smaller than the first, grabbed me under either shoulder. Brad watched the whole production with a dull grin as they cut my feet out from under me, hoisted me up by both arms into the dim and spinning room.

“Kid’s no good,” Juan said, fired up a Black and Mild right there. Whatever point he was trying to make, it was working, firing on all cylinders. These weren’t the kinds of guys you wanted to see once they stepped out, into the daylight. He took a quick puff from the cigarillo and let it back into the world as a cloud that looked like a treetop, high above the counter, the slot machines, the people. “Get him out.”

The guys threw me onto the sidewalk lining the strip mall, right back into the red neon soup, and I fell hard on my front, crumpled my body. Brad held the door open for them to walk back in, then came out and stood beside me on the ground.

“Why do you think they did that?” he asked, grin draped from both ears.

“I don’t know,” I said. I really didn’t, but I didn’t care, either. “Just get me home.” He grabbed me by the shoulder and lifted me into the front seat of his truck, producing a beer can from somewhere behind me. I heard a metallic crack, and he handed it over through the open truck window, slowly disappeared back into the Parlor.

I measured the beer in long and heavy sips, each making its own whirling sound in my stomach, kneading itself into the liquor, what food I’d scarfed down that morning. I fumbled through Brad’s cupholder and found a nearly full pack of Camels, fired one up, blew smoke in heavy pillows that hanged outside the window in the humid, thick air.

Brad came out after what had seemed like an eternity, but was probably only half that, if I was being honest, with one of the girls, taller than both of us.

“Chris is going down with the ship,” he slurred over his shoulder, let out a laugh, then started the long drive home through the auto body shops and the payday stores that lined the long stretch of road between here and there, past a couple of Pizza Huts, handfuls of whiskey bars that had been closed now for hours. My head nodded the whole way home, door to door, part from the booze, part because I couldn’t tell if I wanted to lay down or throw up. Brad rolled up to the curb at the house where I’d counted out the first seven hundred dollars of rent all those months ago, when I’d first made it to Texas, stood for my first full minute under its unforgiving sun.