The Desert Rose Read online

  After all, wearing those costmes every night, being a feathered beauty as Bonventre used to call her, sort of changed your attitude toward clothes. After the costumes it was sort of hard to know you were there if you didn’t wear clothes with a little color in them. Pepper just didn’t realize that, she was so beautiful she didn’t even need makeup yet.

  Harmony turned off the pavement onto a little dirt road that was the last road there was to turn off on, if you were going east out of Las Vegas. She rolled the window down—it was good to smell the desert in the morning, even in the winter she liked to get some air when she was driving home. After all the smoke in the casino just the clean air and the dry sagey smell made her feel lively. Now the outline over the mountains was gold instead of gray and the stars were beginning to die out in a cloudless sky.

  Seeing the line of sun over the mountains made her hopeful, it just about always did, for another beautiful day was about to get started, which meant to Harmony that things could really be fresh and there could be a lot to hope for if you took the trouble to notice, instead of getting depressed, as Jessie did.

  Harmony kept wishing Jessie had taken her advice and got a little house out closer to the desert, she had an apartment a block off the Strip, which was handy it was true but still didn’t offer the great sights Harmony had to look forward to every day, such as the desert and her peacocks and the streamers of sun creeping over the mountains—though of course Jessie was scared of peacocks along with about everything else, but still, just to get farther from the Strip and see a real morning once in a while might have at least taken her mind off bad comments she heard in the dressing room. Genevieve, the French girl, wasn’t that bad really, it was just her little boy had a learning disability and she got upset sometimes and said bitchy things, plus at the moment all Jessie had that might take her mind off her various problems was Monroe, not exactly the world’s greatest prize in the boyfriend department, at least not in Harmony’s opinion.

  When she turned off the pavement onto the bumpy dirt road Harmony looked back at the Strip, eight miles away. It looked so miniature, like a wonderful toy place, with all the lights still on, whereas on her other side there was a bright band of sun behind the mountain, from horizon to horizon. It was one of her favorite things, to turn onto her own road with the air smelling so good and be able to see the Strip, with the Trop up at one end and the Sahara at the other, and besides that have the sun coming up just as she got home. With sights like that to see every day, who could complain?

  Pretty as the sunrise was, though, it wasn’t enough to keep her mind off the fact that Myrtle’s car was acting like it meant to konk out. Harmony had been having to borrow it ever since Denny totaled their Pontiac, three weeks before. Myrtle was generous in emergencies, which was a good thing because it was definitely an emergency, since Denny had taken off the day after he totaled the Pontiac. The insurance check hadn’t come yet either, though Harmony had been told several times it would come any day. Myrtle’s car was an old Buick station wagon which was sort of manageable on the highway but got cases of the jerks when you had to go slow. There was no way to keep from going slow on the dirt road, to go fast meant probably knocking the bottom out, which Myrtle no doubt would not appreciate, she didn’t consider Harmony a good driver anyway.

  The more she slowed down for the bumps the worse the Buick jerked. Also, it could not be said that it smelled so great, mainly because Myrtle was in the habit of stuffing Maude, her main goat, into the car, so she’d have company while she roamed around Las Vegas or went to Boulder City to check out garage sales. Myrtle had very little to do except go to garage sales or else hold them in their mutual garage. The car had so many goat hairs in it that Harmony had to spread towels on the front seat in order to keep from being covered with them when she got to work.

  Well, this car’s not going to make it home, I guess we’re down to no cars, she concluded, about five seconds before the Buick konked out.

  She tried the ignition but all that did was make about fifteen little red lights flash on the dashboard, plus some white smoke was pouring out from under the hood so Harmony grabbed the newspaper she had bought Myrtle and took off down the road, it was just maybe a quarter of a mile on home and she enjoyed a nice walk anyway.

  Before she had been walking two minutes she heard her peacocks calling, she only had three now, Joaquin her favorite, the most beautiful of them all, had somehow gotten out of the yard and fallen prey to coyotes, but the three that were left were beautiful too. She knew some people didn’t like to hear peacocks but she loved to hear them in the still morning, across the quiet desert, it could almost make her cry if she was feeling lonely.

  Particularly since Denny had left she was spending more and more time with the peacocks, though Pepper thought it was creepy and Mrytle argued that peacocks weren’t survivors, like goats. Myrtle was hipped on survival and anyway Maude was every bit as spoiled as a peacock, if not more so. Harmony loved to sit and have the peacocks come and eat kernels of corn out of her hand, they were quite delicate and hardly ever pecked her. Then they would get through and go spread their beautiful feathers and parade them around the yard, which would have been just an ugly little yard in the desert if the peacocks hadn’t been there.

  Harmony liked to think the peacocks called just at dawn because they knew it was time for her to be getting back, maybe that was romantic but she had never seen anything wrong with being romantic, it just meant you were a little more tender about things and liked to think about the good kinds of things that could happen rather than the bad kinds of things, which there were enough of, there was no point in dwelling on them. Anyway she loved the peacocks and sometimes did her exercises for them, they seemed to take an interest, at least feeling that the peacocks were on the same wavelength as she was made coming home sort of better now that Denny had taken off. She just liked to feel in her heart that the peacocks were glad.

  2.

  WHEN HARMONY walked up the driveway carrying her bag and the newspaper, Myrtle had already laid out her garage sale for the day and was sitting in the only lawn chair she hadn’t already sold at previous garage sales eating a bowl of Cheerios and waiting for customers. Sometimes customers came early, too—a lot of the keno runners and even a few dealers, older women mostly, were into the garage sale scene and would grab a morning paper and hit a few sales before going home to bed. It was Myrtle’s theory that any sane person would rather buy things than sleep and the steady parade of would-be customers proved her right, although Myrtle actually had nothing left to sell except cheap glassware, cheap costume jewelry, some Reader’s Digest books, and a few bedraggled blouses that had hung for months on a rack in the garage, long since picked over by every bargain hunter in the area.

  Myrtle had set a bowl of dry Cheerios on the driveway for Maude, but Maude—a little black goat not much bigger than a dog—was sniffing around Myrtle’s old card table as if she would rather nibble the costume jewelry—mostly imitation pearls, Myrtle’s one area of expertise.

  Myrtle was a tiny readhead in her early sixties who had no intention of letting age or anything else get in the way of pleasure. She lived on Cheerios, except on the rare occasions when her boyfriend Wendell could be persuaded to take her to a fast food feast. Wendy’s was her favorite feasting place, but Wendell was not a big spender and would only pop for Wendy’s about once a month, which was, for that matter, about as often as Myrtle had any intention of popping for Wendell.

  “He’s too oldt and anyway he’s got that tricky back,” Myrtle said, in her own defense.

  Wendell was on the pool-maintenance crew at the MGM Grand, which, in Myrtle’s view, contributed to his sexual discontent.

  “Sure, he sees them gals with their floppies hanging out, what else would he come home thinking about?” Myrtle said.

  Harmony’s private opinion was that Myrtle took advantage of Wendell, a sweet gray-haired man with a big belly and sad eyes who had never meant to stay in Las Ve
gas but had come out and gotten stuck. His son had killed himself because of gayness, at least that was Gary’s angle on it, and Wendell’s wife had divorced him and married a cop. It had left Wendell with such a sad look in his eyes that Harmony could barely stand it.

  The sadness of men, once it got into their eyes, affected her a lot, she sort of couldn’t bear it and would usually try and make it go away if the circumstances permitted her to, often they didn’t but sometimes they did, it was mainly a desire to kiss their sadness away that had caused her to bring so many of them home, a habit she knew Pepper didn’t appreciate but then Pepper wasn’t even old enough to notice the sadness in men or if she noticed she wasn’t too sympathetic.

  Harmony was though, sad-eyed men just got her, she could rarely keep it from happening and might not could even have kept it from happening with Wendell had it not been that Myrtle was usually sitting there in the cool of the garage in her lawn chair, waiting for one last customer to come by and snap up some imitation pearls. Wendell didn’t talk much, he mostly just stood around looking down at his feet unless Myrtle was in such a good mood that she brought out one of the kitchen chairs for him to sit in.

  Harmony would look out her window and see him standing and think oh Wendell, she couldn’t help it, unhappiness just made her feel tender, when she saw a guy looking that way she wanted to maybe just lay her palm against his cheek, or maybe a kiss, something to let him know her heart did sort of go out to him even if she didn’t understand precisely why he looked so sad. Old or young, fat or thin didn’t matter so much although definitely fat rather than thin if she was given a choice, she was not so drawn to the skinny guys, it was just that she sometimes got the sense that she overwhelmed them, after all she was pretty tall and had a good bust and a few of them had sort of seemed to feel that they were being smothered.

  Also her preference for the husky ones might have had something to do with Didier, who had given her her first job, at the Trop, when she was only seventeen but looked a lot more mature. She had always thought Tropicana was a wonderful name, when she was younger just saying it or hearing it mentioned on the radio made her feel romantic, so that when she got off the bus in Las Vegas the first thing she did was walk right up the street and look at it. And about three months later, just when she thought she was going to have to be a waitress all her life there was an audition and she got up her nerve and Didier hired her right away, and then fell in love with her, although he was sixty-four at the time and was the producer of the show and very busy. She had even got to live in his suite at the Trop, which was a pretty big change from life in Tulsa, where she grew up.

  Probably it was Didier who got her to liking fat men, he was French and used to good food and was so fat he was dangerous to himself, which was proved for sure about six months later when he died in bed one morning while Harmony was downstairs unwinding with some of the girls.

  It was her first death, she was not experienced with it at all, she had come in meaning to give Didier a kiss and saw that he was dead, only she couldn’t admit it right away, couldn’t admit it one bit and went on and took her makeup off and looked and Didier was dead okay though she still couldn’t admit it, maybe not for an hour until she thought well I guess now I’ll order some breakfast so she did and Jimmy came up with it. They always sent Jimmy because Didier was fussy about his food, he was fussy about every-thing actually but particularly about his food, and Jimmy came in with the breakfast and stood around waiting to serve it until she just said “Could you go look at him,” which surprised Jimmy, that was a little unusual, and he looked and came back and said “Harmony, he’s dead,” which was when she admitted it and started to cry.

  Years later Jimmy’s wife, who by his own admission had been a hooker once, went back to her old habits, only she took it further and stole some guy’s wallet and he turned out to be pretty big time and the wallet had like a few thousand in it so she got sent to prison and Harmony was driving along the Strip one day and happened to see Jimmy standing at the bus stop in front of the Circus Circus looking so sad that she just immediately took him home, only the problem was all they could ever find to talk about was the morning Didier died, it was not a basis for a relation-ship they concluded, though Harmony had no regrets about it, she had for sure tried worse than Jimmy, he was from San Francisco and dressed nice and would definitely spend his last dime if it was something she and Pepper needed for the house, or doctor bills or whatever.

  Still, it was Didier she remembered every time she saw Wendell standing in Myrtle’s driveway looking down at his feet, it had to be the big belly that caused her to be reminded, they were otherwise not alike. Didier had been a happy man, at least he was as long as the show was okay and his food cooked the way it was supposed to be and he had a girl with an absolutely perfect bust to be his mistress, fortunately hers had been perfect when she was seventeen, Didier had stressed that fact a lot—on the other hand Wendell looked like he would like to stick his head in the pool he helped maintain and keep it there. He moonlighted at the all-night Amoco station and Harmony always felt a throb of love because he was such a gentleman and cleaned all her windshields and even her mirrors, even the rearview mirror inside the car which of course in a desert got dust on it too, she could tell he couldn’t get over his son losing his life like that because of the gayness, or his wife and the cop and who knew what else, Wendell probably had sorrows she didn’t suspect; after all he was in his late sixties and she had only known him for a year or two.

  Myrtle looked up from her Cheerios and saw Harmony but no car, which was a shock but secondary to finding out if there were any garage sales on that day that offered goodies she had urgent need of. Harmony pitched her the paper and squatted down to say good morning to Maude, knowing full well Myrtle wouldn’t even say hello until she’d checked the sales. Maude was nibbling the bottom of the card table and when Harmony made her stop she gave an annoyed little bleat and ran back in the garage to sulk.

  “Oh, Maude, don’t be mad, it’s such a pretty day,” Harmony said.

  The want ads were a cruel disappointment, all the garage sales being continuations of ones Myrtle had already been to at least once if not several times. She tossed the paper aside and began trying to get resigned to sitting and waiting.

  “If that goat was to have to wait for a cloudy day to get her feelings hurt she’d be out of luck,” Myrtle said. “I hope you didn’t forget the vodka, this one’s gonna be a long one.”

  “I didn’t forget it, I just left it in the back seat,” Harmony said. On her days at home Myrtle had a tendency to get looped, after which, if a customer irritated her by trying to bargain, she might capriciously double the price of everything in the sale. Myrtle had worked as a checker at the Safeway for twenty-five years, during which time she had often had the desire to double the prices when a snotty customer came along.

  “So where’s the car, I hope you didn’t knock the oil pan off again,” she said.

  “It just konked out between here and the highway,” Harmony said. “I was driving real slow when it happened.”

  “Well, there ain’t no interesting sales I could have gone to anyway,” Myrtle said. “Only Pepper’s gonna be pissed, if I know her.”

  That was for sure—if there was one thing Pepper hated it was being told she had to hitch to school.

  “If Wendell comes with the tow truck maybe she can hitch a ride with him,” Harmony suggested. Since her Pontiac hadn’t been exactly reliable even before Danny totaled it Wendell was frequently required to come out and tow in one car or the other before he went to work at the Grand.

  “Maude didn’t eat her Cheerios,” she added. Maude had wandered down the driveway and was staring at a weed.

  “She’s holding out for Captain Crunch. Likes the sugar,” Myrtle said. “You call Wendell. I’m going down and get that vodka before some alcoholic comes along and happens to look in the back seat.

  3.

  HARMONY WAS a little late, mainly
from having to walk the last part of the way but also partly because Gary had been explaining his views on the end of the world, which always got him sort of keyed up and meant that she hadn’t left the Stardust as early as she usually did. A lot of people in Las Vegas seemed to think the end of the world was probably going to come in about a year or two, Jessie certainly had the feeling there wasn’t all that much time left but Gary said all those views were nonsense. It wasn’t that he didn’t believe in God, he just felt there was no reason to suppose the end of the world was at hand particularly, which Harmony agreed with, it seemed to her why should it be?, maybe the people who thought otherwise were not reading the Bible right or something.

  Gary’s main point about the end of the world was that most of the people who felt that way were dancers who were so sick of the show they happened to be in that they would welcome any change, even one that was real drastic. Since Gary knew the whole life story of every dancer or showgirl working in Las Vegas once he got to explaining it could take a while, but also it was interesting, kind of amazing really when you stopped to think of all the things Gary knew. The one point she couldn’t agree with him on was that there was very little happiness, he mainly got off on that when he was drunk but it was a viewpoint Harmony couldn’t bear to listen to, she just would usually leave when Gary became pessimistic, it made her worry too much that Pepper’s life would turn out wrong or something.