Round Rock Read Online Free Page B

grew twitchy. His mouth stung from a steady diet of pineapple
paletas.
The iambs in
Coriolanus
thumped in his head, spilled over into unworkable legalese in his briefs.
The client wishes only for some justice. A settlement of forty grand will do …
The rumblings in his stomach gave him visions of a Dantean Hell.
    When he closed his eyes or gazed at a blank piece of paper, the word “diet” floated there, a photographic afterimage; a diminutive of “die,” it occurred to him. In the fourth week of this self-imposed starvation, self-pity staged a coup and took over as the governing factor in Red Ray’s life.
    “I’m only drinking until I drop twenty more pounds,” he informed Yvette. She had already turned her back on him and was striding deep into the house. He stumbled after her, bumping off the hallway walls. From various rooms, workmen stared out at them. He caught up, gripping her shoulders. “Listen,” he said. “It’s very self-regulatory. I can’t possibly get drunk. If I can only ingest a thousand calories a day, that’s at most ten shots of scotch or six and a half cansof beer. Or four beers and three shots of bourbon. And that’s assuming I
eat
nothing at all!”
    T HE TOWN of Rito, population 750, had grown up around a large packing house. Most of the inhabitants were descendants of original Morrot serfs who, in one of “Don” Henri’s fits of benevolence, were allowed to buy small plots of land. Homes in Rito were modest and varied; a small wood frame house sitting next to a pink cinderblock cube, which neighbored a river-stone cottage whose yard stretched into a weedy vacant lot. Beyond the lot were two shacks sided in asphalt shingle and a fifties stucco tract home replete with fancifully scalloped plywood trim. Then another lot, a whitewashed wood bungalow, and so on, until the orange groves took over. The vacant lots served as a kind of village green where townspeople staked goats and ponies, and chickens roamed freely. If the community ever felt any pressure to cultivate the well-barbered suburban look found farther south in the bright new developments of Simi Valley and Newhall, nobody in Rito responded. Still, there was plenty of front-yard one-upmanship: birdbaths abounded, as did plaster animals of every species and whirligigs made of bleach bottles. There was even a half-ton pair of concrete tennis shoes, and in front of one home, ornamental bombs were planted nose-up and painted Caterpillar yellow and John Deere green. Cacti and the more prickly and primordial succulents proliferated, making the lush yards lusher and the austere, swept-dirt ones more forbidding. The favorite planters were old rowboats and red Cudahy lard buckets. Prized by every household, however, were round rocks from the Rito River. Some specimens were as small as walnuts, others as large as wrecking balls. They were placed atop fieldstone pillars or in gradated rows along flower beds. Boulder-sized matched pairs flanked the entrances of driveways. They were perfectly, naturally, remarkably round! The one coveted variation had a kind of hourglass shape and, depending on its size and who was describing it, looked like a bulbous bowling pin, a model of the moon pulling out of the earth, or a seamless two-tiered snowman. But the most popular rock by far was purely round. The very presence of these granite miracles in a yard was said to ease headaches, lessen female troubles, attenuate baldness, and nip melancholia in the bud.
    Rito’s busmess district featured the only sidewalks in town as well as a U.S. Post Office, Victor Ibañez’s grocería, the Mills Hotel, a laundromat called Casa de Wash ’n’ Dry, St. Catherine’s Thrift Store, and two bars: the Rito Lito and Happy Yolanda’s. Allegiances to these last two establishments cleaved the town neatly in two. Even teetotalers, bedridden grandmothers, and young children could express an immediate, ironclad preference for one bar or the other.
    The newly remodeled