Transplant
The first thing Sanchez Miller did on his eighteenth birthday was change his name to Constantine. He didn’t want the things his parents had wanted. He kept the Miller, though. His dad, dead just one year then, always used to say, “The Miller Men, up to no good,” whenever they got in the truck and shut the doors one-two, to run an errand or go visit Pamela, who was just Dad’s friend, or to go on a drive to clear the head. At least one Miller Man had to stay.
Thirty-two now, which was extremely grown up, practically dead almost, Constantine fancied himself a sort of modern HRE, heavy on the “emperor,” light on the “holy.” It was good to have a namesake. His kingdom: Vacaville. Steel beams piled in a heap by the chain-link fence; some guy’s Datsun parked crazystyle, angled to the rebar warehouse, its rusted tan paint giving way to a message in graffiti: ASSRAT 606, whatever that was supposed to mean. The long stuccoed housing strips that looked like shopping centers; kids in mid-asscrack pants, their knees spread on sidewalks; backwards Giants caps; gummy shoe soles—what he’d grown up on—and through Vacaville’s mighty aqueducts, rivers of powdered milk in bulk, Marlboros, Slurpee cups crushed like wreckage in the gutters and along the pavement. Seasonally, the rodeo. He hadn’t seen much outside Vaca, but he knew there couldn’t be much to see in a place where he’d be invisible. Here he had history; they knew his dad. Where you had history, everything you could see was yours.
Constantine was the manager of Dad’s photo shop now, and assistant managers like just-a-friend Pamela had long ago been replaced with assistant managers like Ralphie Consuelos. The photo shop wasn’t exactly doing brisk business. Some professionals came in on their way to the City Coach, a few artsy-fartsy girls, but mostly the kids with the asscracks and the backwards hats, the kids who would jangle through the door and run their greasy fingers along the picture frames, smear the photocopied model prints with whatever was left of their double-chicken specials, hold the vegetables, double condiments.
“The fuck out of here,” Constantine would say. “The matter with you,” and as the asscracks receded with a cackle, the happy framed faces in his shop would smile back at him, behind glass, through the mayonnaise.
Allison came into the shop every day at one p.m. to see what he wanted for lunch. He was lucky to have Allison, everyone said so. She stayed at home and prepared lunch to order—more than most guys’ wives would do. Unfortunately, Allison was not his wife but a closeted dyke who he’d met at a rodeo show in September, when she was thirty pounds lighter and was still wearing her hair natural, the color of very underripe strawberries. She’d been working the door with another girl her age, similar to her in coloring and height. Constantine asked if they were sisters. It was the kind of question you were supposed to ask girls to show them you were sly. When it turned out that they were sisters, Constantine changed tacks. Allison and Lisa, newly arrived, had hitchhiked from Vermont to L.A. and had not sold their bodies for sex once; they were Christians and students and would never consider such a thing. He shrugged.
“And now you’re working the door of a rodeo?”
“It’s a job,” said Lisa.
“Although not a very good job,” Allison added, and Lisa looked at her sister like she had just shat into a flowerpot.
Constantine didn’t go into the rodeo; the girls told him it was a bust and not very entertaining, and definitely not worth his eight dollars and ninety-five cents. Instead he spent that money, plus change, on PBRs for them after they finished their shift. Lisa drank her beers and Allison’s one after the other, and Allison chewed gum.
“Ladies, may I be so bold as to ask where you’re staying tonight?”
This time it came out like a proposition.
“We said we don’t ho,” said Lisa.
“I’m not saying you ho,” Constantine told her. “I’m asking where you’re sleeping.”
The girls exchanged a look but neither one came up with something fast. Allison blew a bubble. “With you, I guess?”
