Revolution Number 9 by Peter Abrahams Page B

thousands of them. Yvonne wondered whether Felipe had ever even looked at the license plate. Almost certainly not, but when the time came, she would take precautions anyway. She got in, drove into the street and down the block.
    Felipe’s car was parked at the corner. It was too dark to see the velour dice hanging from his rearview mirror. Yvonne flashed her lights. He pulled out ahead of her and she followed him past an auto salvage yard, a tire retreader, then along a fast-food strip and onto the freeway. Felipe was driving fast. Hawngry tonight. Soon—she hoped it was soon—he’d be hawngry forever. She swung into the passing lane and sped under an overpass. Someone had spray-painted “Amerika” on the concrete abutment. She hadn’t seen that in a long time. It cheered her up.
    Felipe lived in the sprawl down the 880. Yvonne had never bothered to learn the name of the particular town. How could it be a town, with no border and no center? It was just exit 41B to her. She followed Felipe off the ramp and into a neighborhood of boxy houses, low-rise apartment buildings, and dusty lawns with litter on them.
    Felipe and Delores had a one-bedroom apartment on the second floor of a crumbling stucco building. There was a single-leafed palm tree out front and an unstable staircase in back. They climbed the staircase, Yvonne behind, because she didn’t feel like having her ass patted. Felipe unlocked the door and they went inside. Yvonne breathed in the smell of the Third World, or what she took to be that smell. She hadn’t been out of the country for a long time. Felipe closed the door and switched on the light.
    The place was a mess: curlers, Mexican magazines, Felipe’s barbells, all scattered on the living room floor; dishes in the sink; leftovers on the counter; dust on everything. Felipe didn’tseem to notice. He turned, put his arms around her, stuck his tongue into her mouth and began rooting around. He made a groaning sound. “I been dreaming of this,” he said. Yvonne knew it was true. She was the stuff his dreams were made on, an Anglo vision that was realized once a week, their three schedules permitting.
    Soon—because time was always a factor in their relationship—they were in the bedroom. It was messy too: clothes all over the floor, opened Coke cans on the bedside table, an ashtray full of butts, beds unmade, and Delores’s see-through black baby dolls entangled in the sheets. They got undressed and lay on the bed, leaving the baby dolls where they were. Yvonne felt the cheap synthetic material under her thigh.
    Delores’s bridal photograph stood among the Coke cans. It showed a young, smiling woman, copper-colored, black-haired, trim. The problem was she didn’t look like that anymore, Felipe had said. Now she was fat. Another problem was that she didn’t like giving him blow jobs and never had, skinny or fat. Oh, she would do it, all right, but she didn’t like it, and that irritated Felipe. He was
muy sensitivo
, he explained.
    The funny thing was that he never asked Yvonne to give him a blow job, never even gave her head a subtle little push, which was the kind of thing she would have expected him to do; and so she never did. He liked to lick her instead. That was mostly what their sex life, which was all they shared, was about. Delores blew Felipe, Felipe licked Yvonne. Some sort of class structure was being replicated, Yvonne knew: the entire U.S. immigration policy could probably be portrayed in one pornographic triptych. She smiled at the thought.
    Meanwhile Felipe’s mouth was sucking and kissing its way down her body. He had a bristly mustache. She liked that. He liked that she liked it, and made an excited sound, deep in his throat. Displays of female desire got him going. That’s what he meant by
muy sensitivo
. But she was being unfair. He was quite good, really, not as good as Annie had been, technically at least, but much more enthusiastic.
    He took his time, made her come,