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| [The Adventures of La Carmichaela and the Corona Kid - by theholyinnocent] |
Breakfast was coffee loaded with rum and something they called “American apple pie”—a sludge-like concoction of soggy dough and obscenely glazed apples.
Olivia pushed away the “pie.” Her head retreated, turtle-like, into her body. Shoulders hunched like a fortress, hand protectively cupping the back of her neck, she awaited the inevitable—the literal wake-up call that had blistered her ears and popped the bloodshot capillaries in her eyes for the past 3 days of her life:
The mariachi band began to play.
The horns’ high melancholy was the sonic embodiment of the pink-orange sky, of the nauseous, sickly sweet cocktail that was the reality of three continuous hung-over mornings. Still, she wasn’t sure if the horizon was blurry because it was just that way in this part of the world, or because she’d been sleepless and living on a diet of cheap hooch and Abbie Carmichael.
When Abbie had invited her to vacation in Mexico, Olivia had imagined pristine white hotels, tanning on the glorious beach with the sea sparkling before her like a jewel, romantic ruins, and fabulous sex in crisply clean sheets. The saving grace of the trip thus far was fabulous sex—on a sagging, musty, squeaking mattress in a shitty room above a run-down, fleabag cantina in the middle of fucking nowhere, without a beach to be seen.
It was, Olivia had realized sadly, a piss-poor time to discover Abbie’s love of slumming.
She choked back the thick, acidic coffee and slammed the cup down like she always saw the bad-ass villain do his shot glass in the westerns. She scowled at imaginary patrons. Don’t fuck with me, man! I am El Benson, the Corona Kid, and I’ll fuck your shit up. Shakily, she stood.
Hey. Where’s my fucking gun?
She reeled from the wooden table and stumbled up the stairs, down the dark hallway, back to the room.
Unceremoniously she kicked open the door. Abbie was just as she’d been when Olivia left—clad in tank top and boxer shorts, cigar clenched between her teeth, and sitting at the rickety card table playing poker with the boys.
The boys were literally boys—teenagers. One was named Vicente and the other Miguel. One wore a green baseball cap all the time. The other didn’t. To her politically correct, bleeding heart liberal shame, Olivia always forgot which one was which. They were both pretty, wide-eyed, and completely in awe of Abbie. They followed her around the town, they listened intently to her broken Spanish, they brought her food and tequila, they carried her bags, pressed her clothes, polished her shoes.
Abbie thought she’d earned this strange respect merely because she was a take-no-crap Texan. Olivia, however, suspected otherwise: Abbie appeared to have left all her bras back in New York and was merrily jiggling her way through the countryside. Yes, it was that, that and the boxer shorts that showed off her long legs to their fullest, most glorious advantage.
The boys were no fools. They knew that this would be the closest they would ever get to a living, breathing goddess.
On the verge of collapse, Olivia swayed ominously.
Abbie shot her glance. She grinned and folded her hand, tossing crumpled bills into the pot. “Vamoose,” she growled at the boys.
The boys exchanged looks at one another and giggled.
“G’wan, get the hell outta here. I wanna be alone with my senorita.”
The sudden movement of their booted feet stomping on the floor and the cacophony of rickety chairs being vacated sounded akin to a heard of moose breaking through a wall. The door slam was a gun shot to Olivia’s addled mind. She collapsed on the bed and ducked her head between her knees to fight off a tide of nausea. “Fuck,” she moaned. “Abbie.”
“Hmm?”
“Where the fuck is my fucking gun?”
“Your gun?”
“Yeah. My gun.”
“Lent it to Vicente. He wanted to shoot some rattlers with it.”
“You—fuck!” Olivia unfurled her body and lay back on the bed. “Shit.”
“Oh, don’t be such a worrywart. He’s probably shot a damn gun even more than you, Miss Trigger-Happy.”
“Goddamnit, Abbie, if something happens—if he loses it or shoots someone with it—I’m in a lot of fucking trouble.”
“Don’t worry. We’ll tell ol’ Donnie that it got stolen, if it comes to that.” Abbie blew a smoke ring and it settled like a cancerous corona above her head before drifting off into the invisible world.
“I can’t do this anymore,” Olivia moaned.
Abbie’s response to this was jumping on her and straddling her roughly, as if she were a horse that needed breaking.
Olivia groaned.
“Sissy,” Abbie taunted.
“You’re fucking insane. Beautiful, but insane.”
“I’ll take that as a compliment. Now you just relax a bit. We have an appointment later.” Abbie’s dark eyes glinted with mad excitement. “We’re gettin’ us some peyote later, Ben. We’re meeting up with a gen-u-ine god-damn sha-man.” For emphasis, Abbie’s drawl stretched the words like taffy. “Well, actually I think he used to be a philosophy professor from Berkeley, but either way, he’s got the goods.”
“Fuck.”
“And we’re doing that right now. Just you relax, darlin’,” Abbie cooed, “you don’t have to do a thing. Sit back and let me drive.” She stretched and shed the tank top, pulling it over her head. The gesture rumpled her hair even more. In the morning light from the window, she glowed—her head backlit like a voluptuous, rhapsodic Madonna—and the very air around her seemed luminous and charged like lightening.
“Corona,” Olivia whispered, and reached out to touch the intangible.
Abbie laughed. “No more for you, baby. You’re shut off.”
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