Tales of the City 02 - More Tales of the City

nervousness … or insanity.
    Bored himself, he shifted his gaze to the—what?—eighth floor? There, against a well-lighted window, a thin, balding man was lifting his foot slowly to meet his outstretched arm.
    The movement seemed too expressive for exercise, too erratic for dance. Some sort of martial art, maybe … or maybe the whole goddamn building was full of loonies.
    If he wasn’t careful, he’d start making up names for these people. Like Jimmy Stewart did in Rear Window.
    A light came on.
    He raised the binoculars again and zeroed in on an eleventh-floor room that was suffused with a dim, rosy light. Seconds later, a woman appeared.
    She stood near the window in a long gown of some sort, a dark form against the fleshy warmth of her room. She was motionless for a moment, then her hands went down to her waist and up again suddenly to her face.
    She was wearing binoculars.
    And she was looking at Brian.

The House
    A T DAWN THE DESERT AROUND WINNEMUCCA WAS gray and jagged-looking, as if built from shattered concrete, fragments perhaps of a pre-Columbian freeway.
    Or so it seemed to Mona from the window of the battered Ford Ranchero that bore her swiftly and unceremoniously from the bus station to a place called the Blue Moon Lodge.
    “Well, that’s her,” bellowed Mother Mucca, nodding through the windshield to the one-story stucco building squatting in the distance.
    “Nice,” said Mona.
    “Yep,” said Mother Mucca.
    “You had it long?”
    “Sixty years long enough for ya?”
    Mona whistled.
    The octogenarian emitted a gravelly chuckle. “Mother Mucca is an old motherfucker!”
    Before Mona could muster a comment about the Young at Heart, the Ranchero swung abruptly into a dusty parking lot adjacent to the brothel. Mother Mucca leaned on the horn.
    “Now where the hell is Bobbi?”
    An aluminum door banged open, revealing a nervous-looking blonde woman in her mid-twenties. She was wearing cut-off Levi’s and a pink Qiana blouse knotted at the waist. Hobbling slightly, she ran out to meet the car.
    “Welcome back,” she beamed.
    “What the hell happened to your feet?”
    “Nothin’.”
    Mother Mucca climbed out of the Ranchero, scowling like a cigar store Indian. “Nothin’, huh?”
    “Mother Mucca, I didn’t let him—”
    “Now, you listen to me, dolly! If you turn one more trick with that crazy-ass Elko shitkicker, I’ll boot your ass outa here so fast you’ll wish you never … You ain’t broke nothin’, have ya?”
    Bobbi shook her head.
    “Fetch the bags, then. This here’s Judy.” She jerked her head toward Mona. “Judy’s gonna stay and work the phones for a few days.”
    The two young women nodded to each other.
    “Give her Tanya’s room,” said Mother Mucca, mellowing a little now. “But take out the swing first.”
    Their first stop was the kitchen, where Mother Mucca swilled half a quart of milk and toasted Pop-Tarts for the two of them.
    “She’s a sweet little thing, ain’t she?”
    “Who?”
    “Bobbi.”
    “Oh … yes. She seems very nice.”
    “Fucked up, though. Loco as they come. You gotta watch her like a mother hen. Hell, when I found that dolly she’d sunk plumb to the bottom. She couldn’t go no lower.”
    Mona shook her head sympathetically. “Heavy drugs?”
    “Nope. Worse. Key punch operator.”
    Mona’s room looked out on the desert, the last of a series of rooms opening, motel-style, on a common sidewalk.
    Her furnishings consisted of a bed (neither waternor brass), a green vinyl butterfly chair, a Formica-topped night stand, and an Eisenhower-era vanity displaying, among other things, an Autograph Hound (Tanya’s?), a plastic fern and an Avon cologne bottle shaped like a stagecoach.
    Mona was face down on the bed—wondering whether a week in a whorehouse would seriously screw up your karma—when Bobbi entered the room.
    “Knock, knock,” she said sweetly.
    Mona rolled over, rubbing her eyes. “Oh … hi.”
    “I brought you some towels.”
    “Thanks.”
    “You settled in now?”
    “Yeah. Thanks, Bobbi.”
    She smiled. “Sure, Judy.”
    Mona returned the smile, feeling an odd sense of communication with this simple creature.
    “You’ll like Mother Mucca,” said Bobbi softly. “She talks real mean, but she’s not that way at all. She loves us all like daughters.”
    “I guess she never had any of her own, huh?”
    “No. No daughters. She had a son once.”
    “What happened to him?”
    “He ran away, they say. When