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  what my last man did

  The Blue Light Books Prize was founded by Indiana Review and Indiana University Press in 2015. This annual prize is awarded to an outstanding short story collection or poetry collection on alternating years.

  what my last man did

  ANDREA LEWIS

  INDIANA UNIVERSITY PRESS

  Bloomington and Indianapolis

  This book is a publication of

  Indiana University Press

  Office of Scholarly Publishing

  Herman B Wells Library 350

  1320 East 10th Street

  Bloomington, Indiana 47405 USA

  iupress.indiana.edu

  © 2017 by Andrea Lewis

  All rights reserved

  No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. The Association of American University Presses' Resolution on Permissions constitutes the only exception to this prohibition.

  The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48–1992.

  Manufactured in the United States of America

  Cataloging information is available from the Library of Congress.

  ISBN 978-0-253-02670-5 (paperback)

  ISBN 978-0-253-02676-7 (ebook)

  1 2 3 4 5 22 21 20 19 18 17

  for Deb

  contents

  1

  Tierra Blanca

  2

  Rancho Cielito

  3

  Queen Juliette

  4

  Straight Next Time

  5

  What My Last Man Did

  6

  Tchoupitoulas

  7

  Do Nothing Till You Hear From Me

  8

  The Empire Pool

  9

  Castle Bravo

  10

  Family Cucurbita

  Credits

  what my last man did

  1

  Tierra Blanca

  I had what I wanted. I was alone with Charles. He was driving and I was so nervous I was tearing little pieces off the edges of his road map.

  “The Spanish called it Tierra Blanca,” he said. We were on New Mexico Highway 85, headed northwest out of Las Cruces. “But only one stratum is white.”

  Charles was a chemist. So was I, but he was the head of New Mexico State’s chemistry department and I was a TA in freshman labs. Besides chemistry, he loved rare cactus, meteorology, and geology, including every rock he ever saw. “There’s a fabulous collapse caldera up there, miles wide, filled with all kinds of pyroclastics.”

  I envied him these passions. If you had passions, you were living. Without them, you were watching—the way I was watching desert sand and half-dead creosote go by and wishing I’d stop craving attention from Charles.

  I had met him three months before, when I interviewed for my job, buzzed on truck stop coffee, glazed doughnuts, and No-Dōz. I hadn’t slept in two days, ever since I saw the job listing on a bulletin board at Rice. I called for the interview, packed my station wagon, went to Galveston and said goodbye to my mother and my sister Iris, both of whom pleaded with me not to leave, and drove nonstop from Galveston to Las Cruces. I changed clothes in a Texaco bathroom and went straight to Carmony Hall.

  The door labeled “Dr. Charles Lancaster” was guarded by a secretary with huge tortoiseshell glasses frames and white correction fluid smudged on her cheek. Her nameplate said “Dorothy.” I remembered her from my phone call.

  She dragged her gaze up from the papers on her desk. “Name?”

  “Hannah Delgado.” I held out the single sheet of 28-lb ivory paper that was my résumé. “We spoke on the phone.”

  Dorothy took the sheet and dropped it on the blotter as though it were radioactive. “Applying for?”

  “Lab instructor. I have an appointment. Remember?”

  The door behind her opened and a tall man appeared. “Dottie? What’s next?”

  She leapt from her chair and almost bowed as she handed him my résumé.

  His office was hot. Midday sun streamed through side windows, their sills crammed with plastic pots of cactus and two big chunks of purple crystals. His blue Oxford shirt had big sweat creases across the back. He was well over six feet, tan and fit, with a comfortable, rumpled look—messed-up brown hair and shovedback shirtsleeves. I put him around forty-five and not handsome exactly, but striking because of his height and large head and thick forearms.

  He pulled up two wooden chairs so they faced each other. When we sat down, our knees almost touched. While he glanced at my résumé, I studied the white squint lines embedded in the tan skin around his eyes. He looked up, smiling, and said, “My wife is giving me hell.”

  “Why?” I might’ve decided right there to fall in love with him.

  “Because I put off these interviews for two months, and now the semester’s about to start.” He folded my résumé into quarters and leaned in, elbows on knees. “So. Hannah. Talk to me. Why should I hire you?”

  He was sitting too close. A rapidly dissociating lime deodorant scent emanated from the open neck of his shirt. The blunt question, the physical closeness, the opening gambit “my wife,” all demanded an intimate answer. What happened next was strange, but the whole eight-track of interview-speak that had looped through my brain since Galveston shunted to a forgotten section that contained the truth and I heard myself blurt, “My father died sixteen months ago. April tenth, 1974.”

  Charles straightened a little and tilted his head, as though he suddenly heard a baby cry deep in the woods.

  Tears collected in my eyes. One rolled down my cheek when I blinked. He nodded, as if to affirm that crying was the one qualification he was looking for. I knew then I had the job, such as it was, with its poverty-line wage and the straight-faced imperative I would discover later in the NMSUCD Lab Assistant Handbook “to guide students in the proper techniques of the professional chemistry laboratory” and even “to write detailed and helpful correction-orientated notes” on their weekly lab reports.

  He unfolded my résumé and scanned it again, perhaps seeking data that would explain my outburst. “I’m sorry about your father,” he said. “You have other family?”

  “That’s the problem.”

  I did not mention the sinkhole that threatened to suck me back into Galveston. Did not mention my sister Iris or how she once pointed a Remington over/under shotgun at a flesh-colored Chrysler Newport full of developers my mother had invited to evaluate our land. Did not mention the financial setbacks my mother faced now that my father’s businesses—opal mines, silver mines, nickel mines—proved to be a propped-up maze of illegalities. Did not mention Louis Paradiso, the faithful man who worked for us for twenty years and was now watching, bewildered, as our family and his life fell apart. Definitely did not mention Quentin Boudreau McKenna, III, who stood to inherit an oil fortune, small by Texas standards, but large enough to stem the rising tide of Mother’s bad luck. My mother wanted me to marry him. He wanted me to marry him. Iris wanted me to do anything that would hold off the sale of our land. I wanted to get out of Galveston and start over.

  A partially converted janitor supply closet in the basement of Carmony Hall became my office. The few books I had brought from Texas shared shelf space with boxes of brown paper towels that emitted the same alkaline aroma of defeat I remembered from junior-high bathrooms back home. Under the cataleptic flicker of fluorescent tubes, I graded lab notes at a primer-gray desk whenever I was
n’t in the laboratory watching football-scholarship linebackers break beakers or stoned sorority sisters stare into Bunsen burner flames without blinking.

  All the students—except one or two standouts who would’ve done fine without me—handed in lab reports that were at first shocking in their inaccuracies, then for a while hilarious, and finally depressing. I had been scrawling C-minuses and D’s on quarterfinal tests when Charles stopped by my office that morning. He looked over my shoulder at the red slashes on the papers. “Ah,” he said. “Our future Pasteurs.”

  “I showed them how to filter lead sulfate,” I said. “I think they all left most of it in the filter paper.”

  “Maybe they were too dazzled by their instructor,” he said.

  I loved these compliments, which he lobbed at me like popcorn at a pigeon. I felt silly for craving his attention and powerful because he had noticed me. I bounced between those extremes, every other heartbeat, laying down hope one stratum at a time. The fact that he was all wrong—married, my boss, a flirt—gave me a perverse desire to make it right. Prove to some unseen audience—as if anyone were watching—that my considerable emotional and sexual powers, once unleashed upon the world outside Galveston, would be irresistible.

  “All these Tertiary volcanic terrains up there.” He was talking about Tierra Blanca, inviting me to go there that afternoon. I was wondering when I’d have the chance to kiss him.

  We had been in the car for an hour. I had used that time to shred his map and hyperventilate.

  “Along the river, you can see whole profiles of ash-flow tuffs, basalt, rhyolite.” When Charles realized I didn’t know what he was talking about, he added, “We’ll see some fantastic views, too. Sunset, the Mogollons, everything.”

  My joy at having him to myself was chemically deteriorating into panic. I was afraid he would see how little of me actually existed. Afraid the pure New Mexico light pouring into the car from every angle would illuminate an outline of my body and the hollowness within. I wanted to catch him off-guard and blurt something crazy like, “What do you love most in the world?”

  Without warning, Charles called out, “The open road,” as if answering my question. “I could drive like this forever.” He pointed at a wan streak of cloud on a horizon that seemed a million miles off. “Cirrostratus,” he said. “Gorgeous.”

  My brain scrabbled like a gerbil in sawdust, looking for a way to match his enthusiasm. “It’s beautiful,” I said weakly. “It’s so bright here. And dry.”

  “I forgot,” Charles said. “You’re from—where was it?”

  “Galveston.”

  “Never been there.”

  “It’s nothing like this. It’s humid, it’s hazy, it’s lazy. I mean this kind of sun—” I waved my hand in a big arc, knocking my knuckle against the side window with a clunk. “This kind of sun feels like an interrogation. Like you better tell the truth all the time.”

  Charles laughed. “Were you planning on lying?” He turned off the highway onto a dusty strip of one-lane blacktop. “What’s Galveston like?” he asked. “Sangria on the veranda? Mexican servants?”

  He thought he was joking, but he wasn’t far off. We did have a cook and a housekeeper, in addition to our all-around-everything man, Louis Paradiso, who seemed more like a benevolent uncle to me than a hired hand. “My family has a huge place there,” I said. Then I worried that made us sound rich. “We used to be rich, but it all fell apart when my father died.” I didn’t want to talk about this. “I mean, the land’s worth a lot. My mother wants to sell it. If she did, my sister Iris would probably kill herself.”

  “Really?”

  “Well, she’s distraught. She wanted me to stay and help her.”

  “And your mother?”

  “She wanted me to marry this guy—”

  “An arranged marriage?” He seemed to savor the possibilities. “Sounds medieval. Do you need to prove your virginity? Produce sons?”

  The only man I had made love with was Quentin Boudreau McKenna, III, the heir to the oil fortune. We figured what-the-hell since our families were so keen on our union. He was very courtly, very gentlemanly, even as a teenager. We had been friends since we were five years old, playing games with Iris in our pecan orchard or looking for shark teeth on the beach. Whoever found a shark’s tooth would close their eyes and make predictions. Iris always predicted Quentin Boudreau McKenna, III and I would marry. Ten years later, sex with Quentin was just another game. The hoped-for mingling of the families’ DNA was our private joke, as we used double condoms and practiced what we thought were daring moves. I never dreamed he’d fall in love with me.

  The road curved, bringing low hills into view. They had white bands of sediment near their crests. Eager to change the subject, I asked, “Is that the ash-flow tuff?”

  “Very good,” Charles said. “The layer above it is called Gila Conglomerate.” The strip of blacktop we had been driving on ended abruptly and became a dirt road.

  I folded the map. My hands were shaking. Where were my irresistible powers? Why was I trying so hard to make an unavailable man like me? I felt sick with uncertainty, but knew I deserved misery for what I had done last week to Rudy.

  Rudy was the Quantitative Analysis instructor who worked across the hall from me. One afternoon he had walked into my Chem 101 lab and asked me to dinner. There were students around, so I said “Sure,” just to get rid of him. Rudy picked me up wearing a navy blue suit in ninety-degree heat. I had on shorts and a tie-dyed t-shirt because I assumed we were going for pizza or tacos. Instead we went to a steakhouse, a place Rudy probably could not afford, but where he had made a reservation. His sad efforts to impress me brought out a meanness I didn’t know I possessed. I ordered the most expensive New York sirloin strip and complained about how it was done. I lolled in the leather banquette while Rudy spilled water, mispronounced Beaujolais, and struggled to spear limp lettuce with his fork. In minute detail, he described his dissertation on coupled clusters of mercury hydride. Even when he told me about his mother’s death two months earlier, I couldn’t muster much sympathy. As he dropped me off at my apartment, he asked me out again. I jumped from his car almost before it stopped moving and pretended not to hear.

  Charles slowed as we passed a sign in the middle of nowhere that said “Gila Wilderness.” He pointed again to the low cliffs. “The white outcrops are called Bloodgood Canyon Tuff. Of course the Spanish called it Tierra Blanca.” Farther on, there was a parking area with a boarded-up Sani-Can at one end and an overflowing trash bin at the other. The smells merged mid-lot like a freak weather system.

  Charles took a flashlight and a blanket from the trunk. As we climbed a steep trail he lectured on the welding of pyroclastic fragments and the formation of feldspar. He described the tuffs of Bloodgood Canyon which, over a few million years, had filled the collapse caldera. I was a pathetically willing student. If he wanted a woman who knew the difference between welded tuff and non-welded tuff, I would become that woman.

  The top of the trail opened onto a flat stretch of pebbled ground above the Gila River. The light was kinder here. It was almost five o’clock and the afternoon sun slanted soft and gold from the west. A cool wind blew up from the river valley. We sat on the blanket near the edge of the bluff. The river traced silver curves below us, winding around yellow-green clusters of cottonwoods. On the opposite bluff, dark and light layers of basalt and sand were lit by the setting sun. I expected Charles to continue the geology lesson. Instead he touched my cheek and brushed back my hair. I was so grateful I leaned over and kissed him immediately, a little off-center and a little too hard. He pulled away and smiled. “Let’s go real slow,” he said. “That’s how I like it.”

  I felt so foolish I almost cried. I lay back on the blanket and covered my face with my hands. “Well, not that slow,” Charles said.

  When he unbuttoned my blouse and started pulling it off my shoulders, I sat up and pressed my face into his chest. He had on a soft yellow polo shirt th
at smelled like Tide. I could’ve gone on breathing that scent for hours, but instead I grabbed the shirt on either side and pulled it over his head. His chest was very white compared to his tan arms. He sat there in his khaki slacks and I sat there in my shorts and pink bra.

  When I looked at Charles’s back framed against the blue sky it gave me a crazy impulse to make a wish—the way Iris and I would wish on things back in Galveston. Turtle eggs, meteors, seashells. Bring me a boyfriend, breasts, eternal love. I had an eerie sensation that Iris was watching us. She always seemed to know everything about me, sometimes before I did. When I was sixteen and snuck in after my first encounter with Quentin Boudreau McKenna, III, she sat up in the dark and said, “How was it?” She also seemed to know before I did how badly I would hurt Quentin. She used to say, “You’re going to kill that boy.”

  We pulled off the rest of our clothes and Charles kissed me all over my body, even my feet. The cottonwoods below must have held a thousand cicadas; they thrummed along with us. Tierra Blanca seemed like a softly humming universe all its own. Finally Charles pulled me on top of him and kissed my mouth. He had a way of kissing that reminded me of Quentin. Was I destined to think of Quentin in every sexual encounter for the rest of my life?

  When he entered me at last, it was so much better than the teenage practice sessions; it made me hope poor Quentin had found bliss somewhere too. I didn’t do much except follow Charles’s lead. I was too terrified to initiate anything or ask for anything or say anything. I moved with him, groaned with him, came with him, from sheer will to please.

  Later, as we walked back in the near dark with Charles shining the flashlight on the trail, I relaxed for the first time all day. In the car, I wanted to talk, wanted Charles to pull off the road and grab me, wanted to drive all night until we reached Mexico, Honduras, Tierra del Fuego. But Charles hummed to himself and tapped the steering wheel as we sped down the dark highway. He had a green mask of dashboard light across his eyes. I remembered that same mask of light across Quentin’s face the night he tried to give me an engagement ring. I did feel affection for him, his Cajun good looks, perfect olive skin and solemn mouth. We had driven to Freeport, where we sat in the car necking, looking at the Gulf, and talking. I knew I couldn’t marry him.