She had gotten from Raton to Taos and that would do it for the night. She had lost Tripper Jay and was posted up in some cantina. The house band was playing a rendition of "Red Red Wine" and she looked up at a plaque that informed her that the table she had been sitting at had been filmed in a movie starring Clint Eastwood and an orangutan. A man, some shitkicker with no eye for obvious cues that he signified nothing to her, had bought her enough drinks to form a bridge between feeling annoyed contempt to bubbling hostility. Now it was this woman, who, if she was forced to choose, would be the one person in the bar she could have fucked, but, within seconds of opening her mouth, the woman had erased any possibility of that.
The woman's name was Stacey and she was fucking stupid. Stacey had asked her where she was from and she had said that she was born by a river, in a little old tent.
Stacey said "You were born by a river?"
Any goodwill had plummeted off a cliff from there.
Stacey had asked her name and had been told it was Indira. This was true. From a mother who somehow got it into her head that Indira was the daughter of Mahatma and that such a child would be some marvelous angel. Who had never bothered to check and when she found out, had been deeply disappointed. Which was fitting. Anyway, Stacey didn't know who the fuck Indira Gandhi was, nor really Mahatma. And although she had a lot of energy, this stranger, and spunk, and used her hands to talk, to Indira, her stupidity was on par and it negated her.
The band finished up their set. Around them, ranch hands and bikers monopolized the pool tables. Everyone was connecting invisible lines to the few viable women in the bar and trying to come up with the correct formulae to get them to blow them in their pickups. The jukebox started up Charlie Daniels.
Indira had asked Stacey what she did. "Waitress" was the answer. "Waitress" in Indira's head was "wench," in the same phonic ballpark as "bitch."
When Stacey asked what she did, Indira told her she had thrown her backpack in the weeds out back, because she didn't have a job and was hitchhiking and currently hustling for drinks.
"I found a vacant lot to sleep in, under a semi trailer, in case it rains," she said.
Stacey hadn't felt right about this. It had shown on her face and it gave Indira pleasure. She imagined dragging her back to that lot like stunned prey.
Stacey had mousey hair and some interesting necklaces, hemp bracelets. It was obvious she was some sort of work-a-day hippie. She talked about a string of fests she was at, a litany really. Perhaps friends with ten thousand new-grass bands and a slave to those jam-electronica outfits that were both reminiscent of the Dead and neo-tribal. Stacey had maybe flamed out any part of her brain that could carry something admirable: an independent thought. Indira, with the onset of stomach upset she attributed to the Manhattans she was wrestling, had been at the table flipping pages of an old Dell paperback, Hesse, methodically folding down the pages and breaking the spine. She wondered, for an instant, if she was too rough on people and then concluded that she was not rough enough.
After her day with Tripper Jay, she was sunburned and scorched out and now she was drunk and she wanted, really, to fuck this girl violently, not against her will, but to shock her and rip the veil out from around her. To impose herself and to show this other person something new, to leave her someplace unknown.
Stacey said "I'm not coming on to you. I'm not a dyke or anything, but you can stay with me if you want, just for tonight."
Indira stared straight at her, would liked to have bludgeoned her if she had had something sufficient at hand. There was silence as the jukebox stopped and the band went back to their instruments.
Stacey asked "What are you reading?"
Indira held the book up and it fell apart in her hand. She got up and went out the back door.
