Sunland: A Novel

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• • 133 • • The taste of her salty, sun-bleached skin remained on my lips. For a day I replayed our collision, rewinding the conversations , pausing on mutually agreeable moments. In the morning she was still with me. I walked around the casita halfway dazed. I spilled coffee on my toes. I looked down and I was wearing only one sock. It was more than the sex. The sex was good, but it was her touch, her smell, her voice, smile, opinions, questions, demands. I was invigorated by the potential. Around noon I began on the backyard. The pale sky was a day galaxy of cottony clouds pressed flat on an invisible plane. My grandmother liked the weeds because they added green to the view, but the weeds had to go if we were to ever sell the place. I walked stiff-legged to the shed, searching for gloves and a trowel, replaying the moment I’d stepped into her apartment until the moment I’d left. Mona was a dealer in pleasure. Monsoon rain had softened the soil and the roots pulled easily. It was hard for me to tell weeds from wild desert flowers. Everything was sharp, thorny, tough, barbed. But consumed as I was by her taste, consumed by the idea of seeing her again, the chore became mechanical. I mined weeds with the trowel and tossed the carcasses into a bag, lost in sensuous daydreams , remembering my fingers grazing along the peach fuzz in the hollow of her back, remembering the circus act with her leg, so acrobatic, in the air just so. The handle of the trowel brushed my penis and my inner thigh tingled. I did not use protection. Another weed got a deathly yank. Soil clung to roots. Four times I did not use protection. I didn’t know whether to feel terror or joy. You could earn a blue-ribbon disease or an unexpected child with that type of behavior. A routine developed. I bent over, dug a weed, and brushed my penis with the trowel. I was hard after a dozen more weeds. Sweat rolled down my back. My bald spot warmed. Mona’s leg in the air—just, perfectly, so. Knees on the ground, I removed my glove, unzipped my jeans, and fit my hand through the opening. I moved slowly, closing my eyes and working until the veins were as hard as plastic tubing. Bloodred light pulsed behind my eyelids. I thought of hair falling across her pretty nose and the openmouthed, pained look of satisfaction. I heard the creak of a loose board. I opened my eyes and Alejandro was standing on his porch and looking into my yard. Alejandro was sipping from a mug, watching me become pornographically compromised. He just stood there, refusing to break eye contact, scaring the shit out of me. “Alejandro, hello,” I finally said. “I didn’t see you.” I removed my hand 18 • • 134 • • from my jeans as casually as possible. Without a word Alejandro took another long, slow sip. diego picked me up outside Paseo del Sol’s entrance gate. Jutting from the bed of his truck was a large wooden surfboard, a little yellow flag tied to the fin. Diego had failed to mention that there would be a third person along for the ride. In the compact area behind my seat was a mestizo boy, no older than twelve, with a diamond in his left lobe, who crouched on the hump seat, knees to his chest, hidden beneath the window. I noticed a steely look in the boy’s eyes. “Never knew there was an ocean around here to surf,” I said to Diego. “El Bebé gives me errands,” Diego said. “Do this. Do that. It drives me crazy.” “And the kid?” “Oh, he won’t bother us.” The drive south was desolate and striking and I allowed my heart to open to it. Home supply megastores turned into fields thick with purple prickly pear and teddy bear cholla. Pink, turquoise, and mauve tract homes gave way to blighted highway architecture, shacks without roofs, and abandoned gas stations with their guts plundered. The desert emptied of people , of buildings, of everything. To the east I saw swollen clouds drifting over the parched sweep. Diego cycled through radio stations, hunting around the dial like an explorer, finally settling on an accordion-heavy corrido, but my Spanish needed work, and I was left to guess at the dramatic tales being sung about...