Read Online The Days of Anna Madrigal by Armistead Maupin - Free Book Online Page A

know.” This was not news to him. There was not much of anything he could tell Mama these days. Sometimes he wondered if Margaret actually preferred it that way, since it made him more like her own son and less like Mama’s. In that sense it felt like a betrayal of Mama—a form of desertion, even—but there was nothing he could do about it; his very nature, after all, was the ultimate betrayal.
    M argaret had a customer back at the Blue Moon, so she left Andy at Eagle Drugs with the remains of their milkshake. He was stalling for time now, drawing petroglyphs on the frosty canister until the Basque boy showed up for work.
    â€œWant another one?” asked Mr. Yee. He was wearing the same garnet bolo tie he had worn since Andy was a little boy. Andy figured it was to prove he was a cowboy, even if he was an old Chinaman who ran the Rexall. When Mr. Yee was a boy there had been lots of Chinamen in Winnemucca—thousands, even, according to Mama—but now his kind was rapidly dwindling, and that meant he had to fit in.
    Andy waved away the offer of a milkshake.
    â€œHunky-dory, huh?”
    â€œYes sir.”
    â€œHe should be here pretty soon.”
    Rattled, Andy pretended not to understand.
    â€œLasko,” said Mr. Yee, explaining himself. “Your buddy, right? He’s got baseball practice until four. You’re welcome to stay.”
    â€œOh, right . . . thanks.” Andy’s heart was thumping with anxiety and hope. He wondered if Mr. Yee, through canny oriental powers, had detected his infatuation with Lasko, or if Lasko himself—and here’s where the hope came in—had told Mr. Yee that he and Andy were buddies. In either case the jig was up. Andy poured the rest of the milkshake into his glass and stared at a postcard taped to the mirror.
    Lasko . It suited him perfectly—exotic and roughneck at the same time. While his name was officially Belasko (Andy had seen it on a roster at school), the shortened version was all he ever used. Lasko’s father was Mexican, but his mother (a cook at the Martin Hotel and the daughter of a sheepherder) had insisted on Basque names for their children. Lasko had been extremely lucky in that regard; there were no awkward intrusions of x ’s and z ’s in his name. He had a brother who’d been saddled with Xalbador, and even worse, a sister named Hegazti, which sounded less like a name to Andy than some sort of muttered gypsy curse.
    The summer before, Lasko had danced in Pioneer Park at his grandfather’s birthday in traditional Basque garb. (Only foreigners were described as wearing “garb,” Andy realized, never Americans.) Lasko was as much of a local boy as Andy, but seeing him that day, dashing in his black beret and red-sashed white pajamas, Andy felt every gallant, grueling mile of the journey that had brought Lasko’s people from the Pyrenees to Chile and, finally, to the high desert of Nevada. Andy had not been invited to the birthday party, of course—he didn’t know these people, and his mother was widely known to run a whorehouse—but he watched, entranced, from a blanket spread under a nearby cottonwood tree. It was hot as the hinges that day. Lasko was dancing hard, so his white pajamas had turned gray in the places where sweat had stuck them to his strong, hairy legs.
    â€œThat’s the Rexall train!”
    Andy nearly fell off the stool when Lasko’s voice broke his reverie. Then a hand landed on his shoulder, firm as an accusation and warm as a caress. “Pretty snazzy, huh?” Lasko’s other hand was pointing to the postcard on the mirror, but Andy still wasn’t seeing it. All he could see was their reflection: one of them seated, the other standing, both looking straight ahead, like a couple in an old daguerreotype.
    All too soon the hand abandoned Andy’s shoulder, and Lasko was behind the counter, wrapping an apron around his