Editor's note: "Coin Op" is from a series of short stories in Baker H. Morrow's book, McKelligon Canyon.
El Paso is hot and still, with smelly refineries just up from the Rio Grande oozing pea-green smoke, Mexicans across the river driving hell-bent down dirt roads, a lot of crushed gravel everywhere holding tightly to the heat as though it were something precious. It’s a raw town, not totally hopeless but raw at the edges and in the center, too, as though big bugs had gnawed it through no fault of the people. But of course it’s their fault; there are just too many of them (a million or so, counting Juarez) on their piece of land, and every guy’s thoughtless minor peccadillo multiplied a few hundred thousand times gives you El Paso in July.
It’s not all bad. Even Montana Avenue becomes charming the closer you get to the Franklins, with old mansions built on mining or trading fortunes, I suppose, just waiting out the heat, flea-bitten elms and more or less scorched palms in their front yards. Across the concrete and black tarmac is Juarez against the Mexican hills, and in clear parts of summer days it’s a fine town with the river slicing the north side of it so cleanly in its valley.
But that’s enough border daydreaming. I had to do laundry. I sat in the coin-op in Bassett Center waiting for it to quit spinning so that I could dry it. Bill and Louie were a man and his wife sitting down a little distance from me, smoking, fidgeting with their fingers, hot with laundry humidity and nothing to read but TV Guide. Bill had screwed up. He was about twenty-eight or thirty, one of those guys with a really grim face full of cross-crevices and bumps from old acne wars, an angry face, not a smooth patch of skin on it—and Louie was doing a slow boil about him.
“You can’t know it,” she said to him, flipping clothes with an extra slap on a clothes-folding table.
He was blond-headed and sweating, cigarette smoke spinning up from his fingers like vague gray strings, and he knit his brows like a high school jock just asked about the Diet of Worms. “These’re done,” he said. He drawled slightly. He turned around to a spin dryer.
Louie seemed worried, too. Over-worried, I think, or maybe over-wearied for twenty-seven or twenty-eight. She didn’t look her age. She looked as though she had been practicing for years to be forty-five, and had made it. She was all soft sagging curves, a long soft stomach with an inside radius of a couple of feet covered loosely by a red and gray checked shirt (cotton or thin wool), and blue pants that were too tight. They wrinkled up under her bottom. She moved solidly but heavily, honestly but without grace. She had thin lips, watery blonde hair, and a jutting chin set against the tide of things. Probably out of necessity, I thought, not really petulance.
She was twenty-seven, though. She and Bill talked loudly about her birthday.
They were American Anglos, with the tell-tale signs: Aqua Velva lotion in Bill’s shaving kit (he spilled it on a clothes table looking for something), Pepsodent toothpaste in her purse (the smell of it came out of the bathroom with the ventilator currents after she’d left the door a little open).
I hated waiting for clothes and kept looking up from a newspaper and back over my shoulder to check on my car. There had been night noises in the parking lot.
Bill never looked around, or out, and neither did Louie. He had a lot of gray short-sleeved shirts. She dumped clots of polyester slacks and blouses in to wash, and after the clothes came out of the machines she watched them whirl through the little round glass doors in the dryers without getting sick. She was sitting on a formica table, her ankles crossed and her legs rocking back and forth under her.
I walked across a jumble of cars and tarmac to have a box of popcorn from the shopping center theater. There were two movies, one about the undead in heaven (good), and the other an idiot’s romance about Vikings in Labrador. Now, a well thought-out saga would make a real movie—say, something about Eric the Red having to flee Norway for his intractable temper and then being booted out of Iceland for shoddy behavior and sailing on to Greenland, always looking for something, and Leif Ericson catching fire from his father’s talk and spirit and setting out for Vinland himself just to see what was there. That would be a story. This thing was just a parrot in eagle’s feathers.
I went back to the laundry from the movie house. Bill and Louie came out of the front door looking pretty drawn. It was probably just weariness. They might have needed supper, too. Louie had her wrists clamped loosely under the heap of his gray shirts and she was trudging. Bill was smoking another cigarette with exaggerated puffs and walking a few feet in front of her.
They had an orange Cummins diesel tractor out in the lot, looking like half a machine without its semi-trailer. Bill and Louie Carlisle, it said on the door. Wallace, Idaho. The cab sleeping berth was big enough for them, I suppose, but the bedclothes in it were rumpled and wadded against the window and had seen a few nights of cramped and airless turning. The plates said Alabama and Nevada; no Idaho in sight.
I thought of the freeway noise just off the parking lot, not loud but steady, the northbound highway only half a block south in a windless night, and of Montana Avenue, which led into it, not two hundred yards away up a treeless hill and neon-lit, well-paved, well-drained, an unseen heart somewhere pushing cars like lifeblood down its endless blocks. It was a hard hot capillary to a night stream of whishing metal cells.
(Laundry mat photo by spiesteleviv)
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