The Days of Anna Madrigal Read Free Page B

but it would be years before he would learn that their midnight motor trip to Nevada had been paid for with cash Margaret had lifted from the notions counter at the five-and-dime.
    He would learn this from Margaret, mind you, not Mama. Mama, when pressed on the matter, had said only that Andy’s father was a “a hero of the Great War who succumbed to his wounds”—an explanation that, even at nine, Andy had found unconvincing, since he knew the radio show she was referencing. They had listened to it together, in fact, him and Mama, down in the parlor on a slow night. A doughboy and a crippled Irish girl finding true love in New York City, if only briefly.
    It embarrassed Andy when Mama’s lies became this bold, but he could see how a casualty of war would be easier to explain than some horny fifteen-year-old she had taught to play “Clair de Lune.” Even now, Andy’s paternity was vague in his mind, since he had never been able to put a grown man’s face to that nubile phantom. Sometimes he would study the boys in the lunchroom at Humboldt High, other sophomores with vaguely Grecian features, and imagine them in Rapid City with a younger version of Mama, but it led nowhere. Nowhere comfortable, at least.
    Mama had been straight with Andy about her business. She was proud of that story. She and Margaret would tell it in tandem sometimes, playing to a crowd of rowdy customers in the parlor, Mama banging out the funny parts on the piano, shaking everything she had. They had been “two sweet-ass gals flying on a wing and a prayer,” though, truthfully, that prayer had not been uttered until their third night in a Bridge Street hotel, when a railroad man, “a perfectly nice gent in a suit,” offered Margaret five dollars to go upstairs and give him a blow job. Margaret had been a knockout back then, a genuine Swedish blond with cornflower-blue eyes who never forgot her makeup. It had been a natural mistake, Mama had insisted, what with all the plug-ugly women out here in the desert, but maybe it had also been a sign from heaven. Maybe a nice girl mistaken for something else had just been shown her true calling in life. Especially if she had gone upstairs as readily as Margaret had.
    Their initial agreement had been simple: Mama would find the johns and take their money, and Margaret would “haul their ashes.” There were already a few girls working in cribs on Bridge Street, so Mama took them under her no-nonsense wing, promising a steady income and protection from the johns. By the time Andy was born at Humboldt General in the spring of 1920, Mama was offering six ladies (including Margaret) and setting her sights on a big private spread out on the road to Jungo. The old house was already there, so Mama added the cabinettes, a semicircle of cinder-block huts painted with tall organ pipe cacti, though there was nothing remotely like them growing on that barren expanse. Folks just naturally expected “a touch of the Old West” when they drove out for pussy in the middle of nowhere, so Mona Ramsey intended to oblige them. (Mama used the third person when she got really fired up, as if she were talking about someone else entirely.)
    Andy’s first memory was not of the house, or even the huge neon moon Mama had erected by the highway, but the cool, vaulting interior of the Catholic church on Melarkey Street. At four, Andy was a little old for a christening (and Mama wasn’t even Catholic), but St. Paul’s had just been completed, and it was the grandest place in town, a Spanish-style edifice with towers like a castle. Mama wanted folks to see that her son was being raised a proper gentleman. To that end, Margaret had made him a christening outfit with Irish lace she ordered from Denver. Technically, it was a dress, since she had simply enlarged a McCall’s pattern meant for babes-in-arms, but Andy had not complained. He had worn it all day, in fact,