Read Online The Pull of Gravity by Brett Battles - Free Book Online Page B

thought she would start crying then. I know I wanted to. But her eyes remained dry. Even with just a handful of months in Angeles, she’d learned how to control her emotions, a fact that in the long run probably disturbed me more than the news of the dead girl.
    •    •    •
    The girls weren’t the only ones affected that night. About an hour before I closed, Dominick Valenti and Josh Harris stopped in for a drink. Both were ex-pats who lived in Angeles.
    “No dates tonight?” I asked.
    Neither had come in with a girl on his arm. I couldn’t remember the last time that happened.
    “Shit, man, everyone’s freaked out over the thing at Las Palmas,” Josh said. He had been an aircraft machinist at Boeing in Seattle who’d retired early at fifty-five. “Last thing I want is some chick whining all night about some dead girl she never knew.”
    I tried to smile sympathetically, but I wasn’t sure I pulled it off.
    “Heard she was from Slo Joe’s,” Dominick—Nicky to most of us—said. He was a career Navy man who’d gotten a taste of the beautiful brown girls when he’d been a young sailor like me, only ten years earlier in the seventies. Now all that was left of his service days was a blurry blue tattoo on his left bicep and a perpetual crew cut. He was one of Angeles’ truly big boys, his gut taking up more than half his lap.
    “I’d heard The Lynx,” I told him.
    “God, I hope not,” Josh said. “I’ve got friends at The Lynx.”
    “You got friends everywhere,” Nicky said.
    We all laughed, but there was an undercurrent of tension. I could tell what they were thinking. They wanted to know if they knew the girl, and if they did, they wanted to know how well. 
    “Let me buy you both a drink,” I said.
    When the beers arrived, San Migs for Nicky and me and a Heineken for Josh, Nicky held up his bottle and offered a toast. “To the dead girl,” he said. “May she find peace.”
    •    •    •
    Like most things on Fields, the truth was slow in emerging. It was over two months later before I had the full story.
    The girl’s name had been Rosella Ramos. At the bars, she went by the name Vivian. She had been working at Jammers, not The Lynx, and had only been on the job for about four months. Somebody showed me a picture of her, but I didn’t recognize her.
    Her papers said she was eighteen. Apparently the guy whose room she was in, an American from North Carolina named Steve or Stan—that was one thing I could never get cleared up—had met her on a previous trip. They’d kept in contact when he went home, and he even sent her money every month. She was new to the scene so to her this meant he loved her. And, who knows, maybe he did. But not enough, apparently.
    When he came back, she latched on to him right away. Unfortunately, he probably hadn’t planned on spending his whole vacation with just one girl. Why he didn’t spend a few days in Manila first, sampling the offerings there before coming up to Angeles, I could never figure out. He had to know she was waiting for him.
    Anyway, about halfway through the trip, he got the itch to try someone new. Only he couldn’t shake his honey ko —his girlfriend. He started going out in the afternoons, saying he wanted to spend a few hours with his buddies drinking and playing pool. He’d leave her in the room with the TV and tell her he’d be back in the afternoon.
    Of course he was lying.
    There were two levels of bar fines: long time and short time. Long time meant an overnight stay sometimes lasting until the next evening. Short time was exactly what it sounded like: a few hours of fun then everyone back to the bars. What this guy did was rent a room at another hotel, then take a girl at one of the early-opening bars out for short time so he could get in his extra-curricular activities that way. What he didn’t count on was his honey ko following him the third day he used this scheme. Once she realized what he was doing, she