Virgin Heat by Laurence Shames Page A

mushrooms. Fried onions, ya got 'em. And a Coke. No. Dr. Pepper. Large."
    He leaned against a wall as his wedge of pizza was slid into the oven, and he found contentment in the unlikely coolness of the tiles against his moistened clothes.
    Back on the street, he soothed his burned mouth with Key Lime sherbet eaten off a wooden spoon with the astringent feel of a doctor's tongue depressor. A little while after, he happened upon a sidewalk stand that offered mango smoothies, and he had one because he could not resist anything with mango. Up and down the street he walked, twirling postcard racks, looking in store windows displaying leather bathing suits and harnesses, discreetly glancing at people with paisley tattoos, ripped denim vests festooned with bits of chain, silver staples through their noses and their eyebrows.
    At length his legs got tired, but his mind still had some verve, he wasn't ready to surrender the easy fascination of the streets. So he tapped into his small store of extravagance, and hailed a pedicab, a sort of bicycle rickshaw powered in this case by the muscles of a beautiful young woman with skintight purple shorts, blue hair in a soup-bowl shape, and a rivet through her cheek.
    She asked where to, and he told her there's this bar, he couldn't remember the name of it, it was outside sort of, off the main drag, by where the boats were, with like a frame for a roof, flowers hanging down.
    The driver smiled pleasantly, didn't mock him, said she thought she knew the place he meant.
    Louie settled into the broad and curving rickshaw seat, watched the dimples migrate in the driver's buttocks as her legs pumped up and down, and rolled slowly through the town he already thought of as his own, feeling nothing short of royal.
    *
    The first thing Angelina noticed was the vines.
    They didn't really hang from their trellises; it was more like they were plucking downward, abrupt and greedy like monkey fingers, snatching whatever they could. The vines seized tree limbs, annexed the dark wood columns of the back bar, created by their grasping beauty a sinister impression that time was on their side, that vines and jungle riot would someday soon own all.
    She recognized the vines—or thought she did, as she had thought about other things in other bars before. She reached for Michael's arm, twitched as though to hold him back. He felt her hesitation, that discouraged tug away from life and toward the unsatisfied ease of one's quiet room and empty bed. He urged her on, through the dim courtyard open to the sky, nearer to the gleaming horseshoe of well-rubbed wood, the smoky mirror, the celebrated bottles.
    They found two stools on the near side of the bar.
    At first the place seemed unattended. Then Angelina saw the bartender—saw the back of his dampened shirt as he crouched before an under-counter fridge, taking out lemons and limes. Slowly he stood, still facing away, and cocked his head just slightly as he took an order from a guy whose shirt said free moustache rides .
    A hollow burn was set aglow in Angelina's stomach as the barkeep reached back for a bottle, his nubbly index finger arched away from all the others. Her throat clamped down as she noted the small flourish of the heavy wrist that now stretched upward for a glass. And when he poured, pinkies lifted, his arms defining a languorous loop that closed in like a slow embrace, she reached out silently, spasmodically, for Michael and her red nails dug deep into his skin.
    There was no mistaking what was powering that grip. Michael felt the glory of the moment in his own empathic loins.
    In the next instant, Angelina was twisting off her bar stool, her vision blurry, her thrumming body poised to flee.
    Michael held her by the arm. You couldn't rush destiny, he felt, but you couldn't dodge it either. "Steady, kiddo. Steady."
    She worked hard for a breath. Her nostrils flared, her forehead flushed, she felt the wet weight of her heart squeezed like a sponge by the