Read Online Battleborn: Stories by Claire Vaye Watkins - Free Book Online
Authors: Claire Vaye Watkins
Tags: Fiction
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girl a sturdy rising comfort, a swelling buoyancy: A person can change in an instant. This, almost solely, will take her away from here.
The loudspeaker will emit a disembodied human breath. Things will never be the same, it will say, as if she needs to be told this. As if she doesn’t know the instability of a tall tower, a city’s hunger for ruin. As if this weren’t what she came for.
THE PAST PERFECT, THE PAST CONTINUOUS, THE SIMPLE PAST
T his happens every summer. A tourist hikes into the desert outside Las Vegas without enough water and gets lost. Most of them die. This summer it’s an Italian, a student, twenty years old, according to the
Nye County Register
. Manny, the manager of the Cherry Patch Ranch, reads the story to Darla, his best girl, while they tan beside the pool in the long late sun.
“His friend found his way back and told the authorities, thank God. Seven days they give this kid to live out here.” Manny checks his watch. “Well, six. Paper’s a day old.”
“Fucking tourists,” says Darla, lifting her head from
Us Weekly
. She lies facedown, topless, on a beach towel laid over the sun-warped wooden picnic table she pulled next to Manny’s cracking plastic lounger. Darla has worked at the ranch for two years, nothing to Manny’s fifteen, but longer than most girls last out here, long enough to be called a veteran. She may have tits like a gymnast but she’s smart for twenty and has a round, bright face with a gap between her front teeth that makes her look five years younger — a true asset in this business. Straight men eat her shit up.
Once, she and Lacy dyed their hair together, the same shade of coppery strawberry blond. Manny warned them it was a mistake. “Bad for business,” he said. “Men want variety.” But he marveled as the very next client to pass through the front door pointed to the two new redheads and asked, “How much for a mother-daughter party?”
Poor Lacy’s lipbeganto quiver—as if she just realized she was old enough to be the girl’s mother—but Darla simply slipped her fingers through Lacy’s and said, “What do you think, Momma? Four grand?”
“Put that shit away,” she says now. “You’re depressing me.”
Manny lingers on the story of the missing foreigner for a moment longer, more exhilarated than is respectful to a boy likely dying of thirst. He scans the other goings-on of the rednecks and dirt farmers and Jesus freaks in Nye. The Lady Spartans win the three-A state softball championship. Ponderosa Dairy petitions BLM for more land. He can’t be blamed for wanting some excitement around here. He puts the paper under his chair.
Darla checks her phone and turns over on the picnic table, exposing her small stark breasts to the sun. She folds her magazine back along its spine and leans over to Manny, tapping a picture of a shirtless movie star standing in the Malibu surf, dripping wet. “I met him,” she says. “In L.A. He used to come into Spearmint all the time. One of my girlfriends gave him a lap dance. Said he had a huge cock.”
“Girl, don’t tell me that. I’m so horny I could rape the Schwan’s man.”
“I’ll trade you,” she says, slipping her hand gingerly between her legs. “My twat is sore.” She goes back to her magazine. Manny watches the heat waves warp and wobble the mountains in the distance. Six days. Poor kid. Soon, Darla lifts her sunglasses and presses two fingers to her left breast. “Am I burning?”
Manny presses his fingers to her tit. “A little.”
“Good.”
• • •
T hat evening, as the sun sets, a cab drops Michele at the ranch. He is twenty, the same age as his missing comrade. He’s a student of civil engineering, a field he chose because he did not have the grades for medicine or the head for law. In a family like his, a boy has only so many options.
He pauses at the gate and looks up at the sky. A dense swath of stars cuts diagonally across it. If this trip had gone as
The loudspeaker will emit a disembodied human breath. Things will never be the same, it will say, as if she needs to be told this. As if she doesn’t know the instability of a tall tower, a city’s hunger for ruin. As if this weren’t what she came for.
THE PAST PERFECT, THE PAST CONTINUOUS, THE SIMPLE PAST
T his happens every summer. A tourist hikes into the desert outside Las Vegas without enough water and gets lost. Most of them die. This summer it’s an Italian, a student, twenty years old, according to the
Nye County Register
. Manny, the manager of the Cherry Patch Ranch, reads the story to Darla, his best girl, while they tan beside the pool in the long late sun.
“His friend found his way back and told the authorities, thank God. Seven days they give this kid to live out here.” Manny checks his watch. “Well, six. Paper’s a day old.”
“Fucking tourists,” says Darla, lifting her head from
Us Weekly
. She lies facedown, topless, on a beach towel laid over the sun-warped wooden picnic table she pulled next to Manny’s cracking plastic lounger. Darla has worked at the ranch for two years, nothing to Manny’s fifteen, but longer than most girls last out here, long enough to be called a veteran. She may have tits like a gymnast but she’s smart for twenty and has a round, bright face with a gap between her front teeth that makes her look five years younger — a true asset in this business. Straight men eat her shit up.
Once, she and Lacy dyed their hair together, the same shade of coppery strawberry blond. Manny warned them it was a mistake. “Bad for business,” he said. “Men want variety.” But he marveled as the very next client to pass through the front door pointed to the two new redheads and asked, “How much for a mother-daughter party?”
Poor Lacy’s lipbeganto quiver—as if she just realized she was old enough to be the girl’s mother—but Darla simply slipped her fingers through Lacy’s and said, “What do you think, Momma? Four grand?”
“Put that shit away,” she says now. “You’re depressing me.”
Manny lingers on the story of the missing foreigner for a moment longer, more exhilarated than is respectful to a boy likely dying of thirst. He scans the other goings-on of the rednecks and dirt farmers and Jesus freaks in Nye. The Lady Spartans win the three-A state softball championship. Ponderosa Dairy petitions BLM for more land. He can’t be blamed for wanting some excitement around here. He puts the paper under his chair.
Darla checks her phone and turns over on the picnic table, exposing her small stark breasts to the sun. She folds her magazine back along its spine and leans over to Manny, tapping a picture of a shirtless movie star standing in the Malibu surf, dripping wet. “I met him,” she says. “In L.A. He used to come into Spearmint all the time. One of my girlfriends gave him a lap dance. Said he had a huge cock.”
“Girl, don’t tell me that. I’m so horny I could rape the Schwan’s man.”
“I’ll trade you,” she says, slipping her hand gingerly between her legs. “My twat is sore.” She goes back to her magazine. Manny watches the heat waves warp and wobble the mountains in the distance. Six days. Poor kid. Soon, Darla lifts her sunglasses and presses two fingers to her left breast. “Am I burning?”
Manny presses his fingers to her tit. “A little.”
“Good.”
• • •
T hat evening, as the sun sets, a cab drops Michele at the ranch. He is twenty, the same age as his missing comrade. He’s a student of civil engineering, a field he chose because he did not have the grades for medicine or the head for law. In a family like his, a boy has only so many options.
He pauses at the gate and looks up at the sky. A dense swath of stars cuts diagonally across it. If this trip had gone as