tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-69004602024-03-13T04:27:19.005-07:00Dogger Gatsby's BluesRon Southernhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08604305014713612990noreply@blogger.comBlogger20125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6900460.post-34500312481919825402007-07-29T15:21:00.000-07:002007-11-30T12:29:38.612-08:00The Trick“In one way or another,” she said, “life always revolves around eating. Don't you think?” <br /><br /> Billy looked up and turned around. It was the first thing he heard her say and it made a strong impression. Bunny's remark floated on the air, skimming the surface of meaning as lightly as a mayfly skims the water. Her communication was as vaporous and as overwhelming as the sandalwood scent she wore, a perfume that would have delighted him if she hadn't worn too much of it. She wasn't aware of having said anything interesting; she merely meant that she liked to eat and that others did, too. Bunny in fact loved to eat, and Billy always wondered where she put it all. It never occurred to him that she fasted as well as she feasted. <span id="fullpost"><br /><br /> “My real name's Beatrice,” she said, “But nobody ever calls me that.” <br /><br /> “It's an old‑fashioned name, isn't it?” Billy said. “Wasn't it the name of Dante's beloved?” <br /><br /> Bunny shrugged and glanced around at different parts of the sky as if for an answer to his question. She vaguely knew who Dante was, but she didn't understand why Billy should be so interested in a name that nobody called her. <br /><br /> “Well,” she said with a nervous laugh, “I mean, it's just a name. You know, like Beatrice Foods Incorporated!” <br /><br /> “Or Rappaccini's Daughter?” <br /><br /> “Whose daughter?” she frowned. <br /><br /> “One of those heroines of tragic love,” he said. “If they haven't changed textbooks since I took it, it's in your Lit course this year.”<br /><br /> "Heroin?!" <br /><br />Billy smiled and shrugged, though inwardly he was annoyed. Bunny noticed when he did that, though he didn't think she did. <br /><br /> Bunny knew that love had something to do with kisses, kisses that sometimes frightened her because she liked them so much. She was 19 and a freshman in college, yet it still embarrassed her to get so involved with herself. (“Her sweetness is endearing,” Billy thought with a grimace, “but such complete innocence is just ridiculous!”) One moment her large clear eyes would open wide as if to take the whole world in and the next moment squeeze so tightly shut that not a sliver of light could enter. Like some cursed, neurotic flower, she was forever opening and closing. Billy could barely stand it. <br /><br /> “I think you probably just need glasses,” he told her on their second date. <br /><br /> “And I think you're the most irritating person I've ever met!” Bunny snapped back. <br /><br /> “I see,” Billy grinned. He was trying not to show how annoyed he was with himself. He figured that it would be a long damn time now before she'd talk to him again. He was wrong. <br /><br /> “I'm not ready for another relationship,” she told him later with an incongruous look of embarrassment and pride. It was their fourth date, and she meant to imply that she had a past. <br /><br /> “I guess we could just be friends,” he said. He meant to imply that she had a chance of being more, yet until this very moment the thought hadn't entered his head. <br /><br /> He had met Bunny a few weeks ago on the way to his Entomology class. He was enjoying it immensely, especially the work with the dissecting microscope. He thought of her sometimes like that, as if she were some interesting carabid beetle that nature had painted in gorgeous red or iridescent green. He had an overwhelming desire to turn her over and see what she looked like on the other side. <br /><br /> “A thoroughly odd little specimen,” he'd thought the first time he'd met her, one whom until now he had considered far too immature for anything but a passing amusement. She was cute as a bug, all right, but a lot of goddamn trouble, too. Her various states of helplessness were sometimes attractive, but just as often awful. And yet here he was leaning down sympathetically, listening to her ingenuous claptrap with a stupid shit‑eating grin on his face. His own words (“just friends, just friends!”) rang in his ears like a soft alarm bell. <br /><br /> “I'm glad you feel that way,” she said, though she didn't look glad. She was squinting at him as if she had a headache. Was it just her usual I‑need‑glasses look or did she think she'd make some kind of mistake? Billy felt sorry for her and smiled. He took her hand, hoping to set her at ease. At times her unconscious thoughts were written so plainly across her small mobile face that he couldn't help wanting to help her, even if he didn't know how. In short, her transparent fragility made her more attractive than she really was. And being—as he thought—far more intelligent than she was, he was easy prey to a young man's fantasies about how he might “save” her from herself. <br /><br /> When they kissed goodnight at her door, he wondered why she pressed her innocence against him like that, as if she didn't know the effect it had. Billy—overheating rapidly, but hoping not to show it—patted her cheek softly and walked away smiling. He was 22 and couldn't help feeling superior. He knew what kisses were for, but just this once he didn't feel compelled to say so. Still—now he really was interested. <br /><br />************************************************ <br /><br /> Two weeks later Priscilla was leaning over Bunny's shoulders to check her lipstick in the mirror. <br /><br /> “We have the most wonderful long conversations,” Bunny told her roommate. She was talking about Billy, of course. <br /><br /> “Uh‑huh,” Priscilla said to show she was listening, though she barely was. She was pursing her lips, wondering if she'd look good in Bunny's new Literal Red. Strands of Priscilla's long blonde hair kept getting in Bunny's mouth, but she was determined not to be bothered by it. Again and again, she shook her head sharply and ejected the hairs with small quick breaths. <br /><br /> “This bathroom just isn't big enough, is it?” Priscilla said, grinning into the mirror, then waited for an answer. Their conversation wasn't going anywhere fast. <br /><br /> Bunny, solemnly plucking her dark eyebrows, was too intent to answer. Years ago a friend had horrified her by saying her eyebrows made her look like a Neanderthal, and Bunny had followed a strict depilatory discipline ever since. <br /><br /> “I mean, we talk about everything,” Bunny went on. “But, really, sometimes he says the most outrageous things. For God's sake, he makes me feel like I'm the last one in the world to know about anything—especially sex—and that's not true!” <br /><br /> Priscilla's eyebrows crinkled in puzzlement as she glanced at Bunny in the mirror and wondered what was true. She'd been living with Bunny for six months now and still didn't know. She bit her lower lip lightly. <br /><br /> “If she's going to be so damned interested in sex,” Priscilla thought, she's sure going to have to change her style!” In the meanwhile it made her a little sad that it was so hard for them to talk about things. She blamed herself and tried to think of something that would help. <br /><br /> Bunny was very interested in sex, she just didn't want to lose her composure. Billy was just as interested, but he, of course, was positively indecent about it. <br /><br /> “Someday I'd like to eat you,” he told her. <br /><br /> Bunny stopped chewing. Her face turned red and she unconsciously opened her mouth. This was only their sixth date! Her mouth snapped shut again and she quickly glanced left and right in the crowded restaurant, then bowed her head toward her plate. She was terrified that someone might have heard him, but everything seemed to be all right. It was a very noisy restaurant, she realized, and felt that she could breathe again. Billy, who had been aware of her paralysis, saw her take the breath and thought, “Good.” <br /><br /> Then—inexplicably—she said, “Good grease.” <br /><br /> Billy smiled as if he understood. He didn't have a clue. Was she talking about her steak and French fries? What was she gabbling about? Finally it dawned on him that what she'd mumbled was “good grief” and that was a big relief. His proposal was unlikely enough to succeed without having her talking in tongues or non-sequiturs. <br /><br /> Too often already, he felt, she was going one way and he was going the other. This business about eating, for instance: she was always hungry when she was with him, he was always hungry when he left her. They enjoyed the same movies, but when they came out, they argued over what was good about them. About music, Billy felt he was beating his head against a wall. He loved Randy Newman's songs, for instance, but Bunny wouldn't even listen. She hated Newman because she thought his song, “Short People”, was spiteful. Billy tried to explain that the songwriter had adopted a persona to tell the story, but Bunny didn't buy it. <br /><br /> Bunny looked up from her plate and gave him a stern look. Then she sighed and continued to eat. Billy played with his food and continued teasing her. He was like an insect buzzing around her head—a big slow bumblebee perhaps who had mistaken her for an interesting plant. He was terribly irritating, yet his outlandish manners held a fascination for her that she couldn't quite fathom. She smiled a little when she thought he wasn't looking. He was always saying things that no one else ever said to her, and it made her feel very different. He excited her whether she knew what to say to him or not, and she excited him whether she answered or not. They were in perfect harmony. <br /><br /> Bunny was used to boys whose reserve was only a little less coy than her own, young men who'd hold doors for her, who would never put her on the spot. Billy wasn't like that. Once begun, his litany of seduction whirred around her like endless variations on a theme. It dizzied her, it made her nervous. Yet it was really all right; what he was saying now didn't seem to require much attention or any response at all. He lingered over his monologue the way she lingered over dessert, and they both enjoyed the taste. She kept her ice cream bowl close to her mouth and slowly, languidly fed herself with very large spoonfuls. Over the top of the bowl she kept a close eye on Billy. <br /><br /> As usual his curly black hair was unkempt and a little too long. It didn't seem to matter how early in the day she saw him, he always seemed to need a shave. He always had a day's growth, but seldom any more, so he did shave, but when? His wine‑colored shirt with its unbuttoned sleeves was as wrinkled as if he stored even his clean clothes in a laundry hamper. She wanted very badly to iron it, even though she hated ironing. His untidiness bothered her, but in a way it was interesting. She had decided that his problem was not that he wasn't vain, but that he thought he wasn't. <br /><br /> Inaudibly, Bunny sighed. Whatever he thought of himself, she quite liked to look at him. His lean, almost gaunt good looks seemed somehow improved by his disregard for them, though it maddened her that he never seemed to work at any of it. For her it was always work. The big dark-rimmed glasses (which he claimed to hate) gave his face, she thought, an ascetic look. He was always setting them down and forgetting where they were. He was the only person she'd ever known who had three pairs—there was always a spare at home and yet another in the glove compartment of his car. Even then, sometimes he'd misplace all of them at once and the world had to stop because he couldn't drive without them. No, he wasn't any hero in shining armor, but to Bunny he seemed as appealing as some rumpled errant knight in a fairy tale. <br /><br /> Billy paid the cashier, then as an afterthought bought a chocolate mint for Bunny. She took his arm and smiled. She loved it when he remembered little things like that. Outside in the moonlit parking lot, she leaned against him, closed her eyes, and “walked in the dark” beside him until she tripped on a crack in the pavement. As she stumbled forward Billy caught her and swung her back, then leaned down and lightly kissed her. Eagerly—she would have said eagerly—she pressed her mouth to his, but she wouldn't part her lips. Billy could detect the slight taste of chocolate mint on her lips and wanted to taste more of it. Yet he realized that he was jumping the gun entirely when he fantasized about this prim girl parting her legs; she wouldn't even open her teeth! <br /><br /> Bunny twisted away from him and hopped in the car when she saw that he was getting too passionate. Billy stuck his head through the window, took off his glasses, and stared at her. It made her uncomfortable when he did that—she felt as if he was trying to see her too clearly. <br /><br /> “It's not,” he said, “as if I'm going to rape you. I only said I'd like to eat you.” <br /><br /> While Billy walked around the car to the driver's side, Bunny made another inaudible noise, a small breathy sound just short of being a whistle. Billy said nothing, but wondered what she was “whew”‑ing about now. In fact, she was thinking, “Well, that wasn't too bad.” She'd even decided that she didn't have to sulk. <br /><br /> “Someday I may let you,” she said in a tense small voice. <br /><br /> He looked at her and grinned. Then she grinned back and ducked her head. The words she said aroused him and somewhat improved his temper, but the rest of the message was plainly written on her face: “But not now.” He understood that it was only an exciting abstraction to her. He'd still have to wait. <br /><br /> “I see,” he said and smiled. <br /><br /> Bunny knew that smile by now. It was a crooked, disappointed smile, a fixed and carnivorous expression poised above her like a bird of prey waiting for nature to take its course. <br /><br /> “I really like you, you know,” Bunny said, trying to brush aside his impatience (as well as her own) with a big friendly hug. <br /><br /> The longer he had to work at penetrating her defenses, the less such sweetness pleased him. Or even when it pleased him, it aroused and aggravated him. Even as she hugged him with the uncritical energy of a child, he was glad she couldn't see his face. <br /><br /> “I love you too,” he told her, not thinking for a moment that she might apprehend his irony. <br /><br />************************************************ <br /><br /> Despite Bunny's praise of him to Priscilla, it was difficult to say just what was so wonderful about their conversations. Billy thought she was slow and frustrating, inclined to parochial views. Bunny wasn’t dumb and she often found him duplicitous and uncharitable, always on the brink of laughing at her. One Saturday afternoon in Eastwoods Park they were lounging quietly beside the remnants of their picnic lunch. A single tiny insect hovered obnoxiously in front of Billy's face. It was flying and alighting, flying and alighting, and in between doing figure‑eights in front of his nostrils. Billy's eyes began to cross. Just as he took a breath to curse it, it flew up his nose. Billy sneezed violently a couple of times, then frantically searched around for a paper napkin. <br /><br /> “What's the matter?” Bunny asked. <br /><br /> “Hippelates fly,” he muttered after blowing his nose. <br /><br /> “What's that?” <br /><br /> “A gnat,” he told her, his eyes starting to water. “We studied them in Entomology last month. Nasty little creatures.” <br /><br /> “Is that the little bug that gets in your face and won't go away?” she asked. <br /><br /> “That's the one,” he said, surreptitiously checking his napkin for semi-disintegrated insect parts. <br /><br /> “Why do they do that, anyway? <br /><br /> “They're attracted to mucous and fatty secretions,” Billy answered with a teary grin. Bunny grimaced. “And blood and pus,” he added. He was starting to enjoy this. “They don't bite, but their mouthparts have spines that produce lesions in the flesh. I imagine they're a terrible torment to cattle. <br /><br /> “Ugh!” Bunny shuddered. “How can you even talk about them?” <br /><br /> “I like nasty things,” he said and slid his hand unexpectedly up her skirt. In quick reflex Bunny's knees clamped down hard and imprisoned his hand. <br /><br /> “Quit that!” she told him. “Someone might be watching.” <br /><br /> “Someone's always watching,” Billy laughed and slowly withdrew his hand. <br /><br /> They had promised themselves that they would study after they ate, but the hot sun made them lazy and inattentive. Bunny pushed aside her English Lit book and picked up a newspaper. Billy gave up on Economic Geology and casually browsed through Bunny's book. He had just settled into reading a poem by Robert Browning called “My Last Duchess” when Bunny interrupted. <br /><br /> “I think these hijackers and bombers are just terrible! Don't they have any sense of morality?” <br /><br /> “Of course they do,” Billy laughed. <br /><br /> “What do you mean?” <br /><br /> “Well—everyone believes in the honor of their own race, their own kind. And everyone believes in the dishonor of their enemies. Terrorists are just the most extreme form of moralist—they don't give a shit what they do as long as it's in the name of honor.” <br /><br /> “That doesn't make any sense,” Bunny insisted with a pained look. “To me, it's just plain immoral.” <br /><br /> “But immoral from whose point of view?” he laughed. <br /><br /> She wondered sometimes if Billy was crazy; his words sounded serious, but he never did. It wasn't just that he laughed at what she said; he also seemed to laugh at what he said. <br /><br /> Had Billy's sense of humor been more forbearing, he might have saved her a lot of confusion. He didn't want to instruct her, but every time he turned around she asked another question. Either he had to answer it or fend her off. In either case, he figured, he had a fifty/fifty chance of pissing her off. When she complained about it, he always brushed her aside. <br /><br /> “For the love of God,” he told her, “you need to toughen your mind a bit! You can't depend on me all the time.” <br /><br /> It didn't occur to him that what she most needed to toughen it against was him. (It did occur to her, but she never acted upon it.) Bunny looked injured by what he'd said, but also considered his point. She wanted to be honest. She wanted to understand. <br /><br /> “An attractive woman, goddamn it, should have more confidence, should know her own mind,” he kept insisting. “If she doesn't, then what's in her that's worth knowing?” <br /><br /> Bunny wasn't sure whether to be hurt or flattered. His complaint was blunt—almost bludgeoning—yet he had also implied that she was an attractive woman. To Bunny it seemed to be a startling revelation. Billy's attentions raised her opinion of herself simply by distracting her from her own opinions. And yet he was so critical of her that she wondered why he bothered at all. Sometimes she hated him worse than Randy Newman. <br /><br /> In night clubs or theaters, she'd ask, “Do you see where the little girls' room is?” She used that euphemism in place of the ordinary one, and it made him cringe. He could see where it was, and so could she—she just wanted an escort. She always seemed to be in need of some “kind gentleman” or reassuring mother, and he wasn't prepared to be either one. <br /><br /> Sometimes he tried to tell her, “You won't get lost, you won't get mugged, go on!” <br /><br /> Yet most of the time he went along. The times he'd absolutely refused to go with her, she'd sat in front of him squirming until his own bladder began to have sympathy pangs. Her silent suffering made him feel about as noble as one of those sensitivity‑training major-domos who think you've got your priorities wrong if you need to piss more than you need to listen to them—in short, a major shitheel. He disapproved of Bunny so strongly that in the end he even disapproved of himself. Bunny was aware of his disapproval; she didn't think he tried very hard to hide it. That's why she was in love with love, but only infatuated with Billy. <br /><br />************************************************ <br /><br /> “God, he's passionate enough though,” she told Priscilla and covered her grin with both hands. <br /><br /> “What about his indecencies?” Priscilla asked. <br /><br /> “He's passionate about those too,” Bunny giggled. Sometimes she enjoyed talking about Billy more than she enjoyed him. <br /><br /> “You know what I mean,” Priscilla said impatiently, but gently. “I mean, he's awfully vulgar, isn't he?” <br /><br /> Bunny looked stricken, but thoughtful. There was more than that to Billy, she knew, but what her friends thought of him bothered her a lot. <br /><br /> “Have you got a date tonight?” Priscilla asked suddenly. <br /><br /> “Nope.” <br /><br /> “Me neither. Let's get drunk!” <br /><br /> “Prissy!” Bunny squeaked. <br /><br /> When Priscilla came back from the kitchen with a bottle of white wine and two glasses she said, “Oh, I don't mean really drunk, you know. But if we're not driving, we can drink, can't we?” <br /><br /> “I guess,” Bunny replied in a doubtful tone. <br /><br /> Priscilla thought that the wine would help them talk. Several glasses later, the girls were relaxed and a little loud. <br /><br /> “I think it's awful,” Priscilla said, “when men want to paw you and you're not in the mood!” <br /><br /> “Yeah, I know what you mean,” Bunny said in a steady but studied voice. <br /><br /> “They don't seem to understand that a girl might like being with them without wanting to be teased and poked and squeezed all the time. I'm no trained seal or ewe in heat,” Priscilla said forcefully. <br /><br /> “You?” Bunny asked tipsily. <br /><br /> “I mean, they can't just expect us to switch on at the touch of a button. I'm a person, not a machine!” <br /><br /> “Sure,” Bunny agreed again lightly, “you have to be in the mood. Otherwise, it's just embarrassing.” <br /><br /> Bunny was thinking about Billy. He embarrassed her a lot, yet that was a big part of what she liked about him. So many people treated her like a good little girl, but Billy always chastised her for trying to get away with it. She interpreted his laughter and antagonism as challenges, signs that he had a “special faith” in her. By attacking her so ruthlessly at the root of her weakness, Billy had given her the impression that he cared for her as no one else did. <br /><br /> “Well, more than embarrassing,” Priscilla said with a dubious look at her roommate. “What I don't understand though is how come men never get embarrassed. If you say “yes” or if you say “no”, they're still encouraged! They're just so obsessed with their precious pricks!” <br /><br /> Bunny blushed and Priscilla thought, “Oops, now I've done it.” <br /><br /> Actually, Bunny had only half‑heard her. Her cheeks were warm and she felt very disconnected from her senses. She thought she might be smiling too much and put her hand in front of her face. The picture of a word floated in and out of her mind and finally settled like a diagram on a jiggling blackboard: “Em‑Bare‑Assed”. She giggled, then jumped up. <br /><br /> “Hold on a minute,” she said, “I've got to go pee.” <br /><br /> “Bun‑Nee!” Priscilla exclaimed, drawing the word out. She laughed loudly and nearly spilled her wine. She couldn't have been more surprised. Where was that usual sweet euphemism?! <br /><br /> All the way to the bathroom Bunny was aware of an exaggerated slow unsureness in her step. “I must be drunk!” she laughed. She was conscious too of a dangerous sensation in her loins; her bladder was very full, but even that seemed funny. As she flipped her skirt out of the way and sat down, she smiled and relaxed, making friends with her dizzy state. When she closed her eyes, she thought for a moment that she might lose her balance. A feeling of intense warmth spread between her legs; she ran her palms over the smooth cool skin of her outer thighs and sighed in relief. It took a few seconds for her to realize that the warmth was wet and in just what manner it was wet. Her eyes jerked open and she tottered forward, but when she felt it running down her legs she fell back again in confusion. She'd forgotten to pull down her pants. <br /><br /> Some time later Priscilla asked,, “What took you so long? I thought you fell in.” <br /><br /> Bunny said nothing. She had put on her frumpiest nightgown and was hugging her breasts. She stuck out her tongue as if to say “Yuck!” and put her hand on her forehead. <br /><br /> Priscilla could recognize a snit when she saw one; she bit her lip to keep from smiling. “A little trouble with the wine?” she asked. “I'm sorry, sweetie.” Priscilla had another drink and Bunny didn't. After a while they both felt better and their talk turned to boys again. <br /><br /> “I swear to God, Prissy, I think he knows me better than anyone else and yet half the time I'm not even sure that he likes me!” <br /><br /> “I don't think he does,” Priscilla said softly. She knew how easy it was to hurt Bunny. She hadn't meant to say anything, it just slipped out. <br /><br /> “Of course he does,” Bunny said. “He's just—uh, crazy, that's all.” She smiled, aware that she was trying to smile the problem away, then frowned and said, “Anyway, maybe it's good for me to get shook up a little. I'm 19 now and I want to be treated like a woman, not like a little girl!” <br /><br /> Priscilla wanted to say more, but didn't dare. Bunny was so fragile at times. Which was all the more reason to worry about Billy. <br /><br />************************************************ <br /><br /> Billy thought that Bunny was childish, of course, but he tried to treat her like a woman because he wanted to get in her pants. And if he wasn't quite in control of the situation, well, neither was she. And if his incidental bad behavior made her feel guilty sometimes, that too might serve his purpose. <br /><br /> “I'll be her benevolent irritant,” he smugly told his roommate George. He was reaching for his second beer. <br /><br /> “Apparently you think she's an oyster,” George said and reached for his third. <br /><br /> “An oyster without a pearl, I'm afraid.” <br /><br /> “Not all oysters have 'em,” George sighed. <br /><br /> They were girl‑watching in their usual perches on the porch of the student union building at the university. George and Billy lounged expansively in big metal patio chairs; they both wore that indolent, inexplicable look of hunger you sometimes see on well‑fed housecats. The girls who passed in groups of two or three on their way to and from the library knew that look. <br /><br /> “Here's another covey of beauties,” George said. <br /><br /> The girls strolling by took no more notice of the boys than of the two stone lions that stood staring out from either side of the porch entrance. They were used to being watched. <br /><br /> “The parade is better on weekdays, of course,” George said in a tone of resignation. Today was Sunday and the groups were coming infrequently. There was plenty of time for talk. When the girls had passed, he turned to Billy and said, “It sounds to me like you're playing games with someone who doesn't know it's a game.” <br /><br /> “I know, I know,” Billy said with chagrin, “and I hate games. But you have to play games with Bunny if you're going to play at all.” <br /><br /> Suddenly it dawned on him that his smugness over Bunny's embarrassments was tainted with some embarrassments of his own. He wanted very much to justify himself, but worried that he just sounded weak and self‑serving. <br /><br /> Another covey passed by, the bright piercing voices borne to the young men's predatory ears not as explicable speech but as signatory sounds that identified the species. <br /><br /> “I like the tall one,” George said. He himself was tall. <br /><br /> “She isn't even my type,” Billy complained in a preoccupied tone. He reached for another beer, now quite warm. <br /><br /> “Who, the tall one?” George asked. <br /><br /> “Bunny. She isn't very smart and she's flat‑chested!” <br /><br /> “Oh, Jesus, that!” George laughed. “What's the attraction then?” <br /><br /> “It's a goddamned compulsion, that's what it is!” Billy said with theatrical grimness. Even with George he wasn't quite ready to say what he meant: that he knew she was hot, whether she admitted it or not; that he wanted to fuck her brains out. <br /><br /> “She's devouring my soul with her endless questions, boring me to tears, and yet teasing me to distraction! No one has ever appealed to me so much sexually and so little in any other way. I'm hooked, hooked like a fish—except that isn't where the hook is!” <br /><br /> George fell forward in his chair, exploding with laughter, spluttering beer all over himself. He had meant to listen sympathetically to Billy, but this was too absurd. <br /><br /> “It isn't that funny,” Billy admonished him. But he was stifling a smile. He was just too pissed off at himself to laugh. <br /><br /> “She'll have to be half‑tricked if you ever expect to nail her,” George smirked. <br /><br /> Billy smirked back. “Silly rabbit—tricks are for kids,” he said. <br /><br /> “And of course she'll take a lot of time,” George pointed out. <br /><br /> “Umm...that's depressing.” Billy's smile was slipping. <br /><br /> “She'll need subterfuge, patience, lots of lyrical lies!” George said. He was practically cackling now. <br /><br /> “That's disgusting,” Billy said. All the same, he looked thoughtful. He was trying to decide if he knew any lyrical lies and he had the feeling that George knew exactly what he was thinking. <br /><br /> “Very disgusting,” George winked. <br /><br /> Billy nodded, clicked his beer can against George's, and grinned. “Well, then—to Beatrice, my beloved.” They looked askance at one another for a moment, then broke into helpless laughter. <br /><br /> Later that night in bed Billy thought, “God, she probably will have to be tricked. Or caught half‑asleep.” <br /><br /> He was giving himself the creeps. He turned out the light and yawned, assuring himself sleepily, “This is only trickery, anyway, not trespass.” He'd never had to worry much about the difference between manipulation and rape, but now he considered it. For what it was worth, he had found an out, yet guilt hovered over his sleepy speculations like a police helicopter in a blind alley at midnight. Even his guilt worked against her, though, for the sharp scent of evil was in his dreams, an ether as sweet as Bunny's sandalwood perfume. Something about it was attractive. <br /><br /> It was true Bunny had some kind of past, but as far as he could tell from the muddled tales she told—she talked so much in disconnected mumbles, sighs, and inferences!—the closest that she'd ever come to sex had been a masturbatory tryst a year or so ago in the back seat of a Ford station-wagon. They'd folded down the seats and Bunny had pulled up her skirt and let a grateful high school sweetie insert himself somewhere between her knees and what Billy liked to call her “virtuous v”. The boy had felt so cool against her skin at first—yet nervous, breathless, not in control—that for a while she'd forgotten to be afraid. She'd squeezed him gently, gingerly, until she felt a warm sticky surprise spill slowly down her leg. <br /><br /> Billy had thought that her description of it resembled some sort of connect-the-dot puzzle, but he could well imagine how afterward she must have scrambled up with her eyes carefully averted. If that “mess” and those torpid twitchings were discussed at all by those two lovers, it was both euphemistically and very, very brief. Bunny wouldn't have stood for it, he was sure. And equally sure that she had soon pretended that it had never happened, and never let it happen again. <br /><br /> Billy thought it was hilarious and more than a little erotic. Bunny's behavior, however, made it clear that for her every memory of it was a painful one. He tried to get her to tell him more about it, but she was too locked up. Talking about it would be good for her, he thought, but such discussion was no more a real option for her with Billy than it had been with the boy in the back seat. Having told this much grudgingly, she withdrew again into her shell. Billy felt sorry for her, but such vulnerability was also a terrible invitation to the devil in him. <br /><br /> “You're still a virgin, aren't you?” he asked one night. <br /><br /> After a blank hesitation, she grinned self‑consciously and said, “You're crazy! I don't have to answer that!” <br /><br /> “That's true,” he conceded. <br /><br /> “I figured as much,” he told himself. Only a virgin could look that guilty over something that was none of his goddamn business. Of course he was wrong about that, but perhaps in Bunny's case he was still somewhat right. Bunny was in a more seriously invaginated state than even Billy supposed, more so than the presence or absence of her hymen could possibly effect. The greatest barrier she possessed was this terrible notion she had that she was still a “nice girl”. <br /><br /> George snickered. “Her role as a masturbatory fuck‑doll didn't disturb her romantic idealism in the least, I take it.” <br /><br /> “I don't think it even woke her up,” Billy laughed. “The notions she clings to may be silly, but you have to give her credit: she clings to them heroically.” <br /><br />************************************************ <br /><br /> Thursday afternoon in front of the student union. It was a good day for girl‑watching, but Billy stood staring thoughtlessly at one of the stone lions by the porch. Actually he was waiting. They had just attended a lecture by the notorious atheist, Jennifer Nelson Hardy, and Bunny was in the ladies room. Billy was not in attendance because they'd met one of her girlfriends in the hall and Bunny had “gone” with her. <br /><br /> “I'll never understand,” Billy mused, “why going to the john is such a social event for women. What do they do in there?” <br /><br /> As a bosomy redhead in a clinging white dress clattered down the steps toward him, all of Billy's attention was drawn to a single focus. When her smoothly‑rolling buttocks came into view, he was struck by an oddity almost more compelling than the shape of her behind: a pair of dark green panties clearly visible through the stretched white fabric. <br /><br /> “Ass‑stonishing,” Billy muttered softly to himself. <br /><br /> He wondered if she was one of those women who objected to being treated as objects. If so, she sure dressed funny, he thought. Maybe it was an accident of nature, certainly it was subjective, that the young woman was beautiful and shapely. He was even willing to concede that her deliciously clinging dress was more nearly meant to be stylish or comfortable than erotic. He could live with that, he figured, and would probably have refrained from raping at least a hundred thousand delicious morsels just like her before his life was through. But, for the love of saintly Jesus, why in hell was she wearing that incredibly provocative green underwear under a white dress?! Did she know nothing of men at all? <br /><br /> “Dammit, if she isn't driving at anything,” Billy thought, trying not to lick his lips, “then she's asleep at the wheel!” <br /><br /> He was trying to catch one last glimpse of the young woman when he became aware of a young man on a bicycle standing still in the flow of pedestrian traffic and twisting his head off to turn around and get a good look at the green panties. <br /><br /> “Jesus,” Billy said and smiled to himself. Suddenly his curiosity was aroused beyond the arousal the girl had stirred, and he began to watch the boy instead. When the young man lost sight of her and turned his head forward, he noticed Billy looking at him. Their eyes met, and they shook their heads and smiled as if at the same joke. <br /><br /> Bunny came up from behind and took Billy's hand. “Who is that?” she asked. <br /><br /> “I don't know. Some would‑be rapist, I suppose.” <br /><br /> “What?!” <br /><br /> “I'm kidding.” <br /><br /> “Oh.” <br /><br /> They began walking slowly uphill toward the library. Bunny was disquieted, Billy amused. He was thinking about that taut white dress. <br /><br /> “How can Mrs. Hardy say such terrible things about God?” Bunny suddenly asked. <br /><br /> “I don't know.” Bunny looked disappointed that he didn't have more to say, so he added, “Why, are you worried about her being rude to God?” <br /><br /> “I didn't say she was being rude to God,” Bunny complained. <br /><br /> “That's good,” Billy said. “It didn't seem to be the case with some of the other people at the lecture.” Then he laughed and said, “Anyway, you can't help but laugh at so much impatience.” <br /><br /> “Impatience with what?” Bunny asked in an irritated voice. <br /><br /> “Impatience with one another's intelligence, silly rabbit.” <br /><br /> “What do you mean by that?” she asked suspiciously. <br /><br /> “I don't mean anything by it,” he told her. “They—Mrs. Hardy and the Christians who heckled her from the audience—mean that whatever they don't believe in is stupid and that,” he said with another punctuating laugh, “seems to justify a good deal of rudeness on both sides.” <br /><br /> “Well, even if that's true, I don't see what you find so funny about it,” Bunny whined. What is so great about being impolite?” <br /><br /> “I don't know exactly,” he said comfortably. “What's so great about being polite?” <br /><br /> Bunny looked hurt and said, “I don't think you're taking me very seriously.” <br /><br /> Billy paused a moment as he considered it. “I think I am,” he said. “Anyway, I'm not so sure that being taken seriously is the best goal that you can have. Look at who's in charge of the world, and look at the shape the world is in.” <br /><br /> “What shape?” <br /><br /> “Commie bastards with guns. Capitalist bastards with guns. Terrorists throwing tantrums. And in the middle starving children of every creed, who never have a gun—otherwise they wouldn't be starving. <br /><br /> “Oh, you're just going off the deep end!” she said impatiently. <br /><br /> “Sometimes it's good for you to go off the deep end,” he told her and grinned, a little too smugly. “You just don't have any sense of humor, that's all. If something tastes bad, spit it out—that's my advice to you.” <br /><br /> Now what did he mean by that? Was he threatening her or being helpful? Was he telling her to like it or lump it, or warning her against himself? In either case, it sounded more serious than he supposed. Bunny had listened hard, frowning in concentration. <br /><br /> “God!” she thought. “He can be so—! Oh!” Words failed her. <br /><br />“Abstruse” might have been the word she was looking for, and if she could have told him that, they would have both been better off. She might have surmounted his foolishness or at least circumvented her own. Instead she asked another question. <br /><br /> “You sound like you think that the solution is just to be rude to everyone. Is that what you mean?” <br /><br /> She was staring at him so intently that it made his skin crawl. He was convinced that she needed glasses and just wouldn't admit it. <br /><br /> “I suppose you could say that,” he said, removing his glasses and rubbing his eyes. “But that isn't what I mean.” <br /><br /> His sense of humor was declining rapidly. He felt a strong burden of responsibility to be “nice” to her (how else was he to get anywhere with her?) and just as strong an impulse to say “Fuck it” and walk away. <br /><br /> “I mean,” he said, “that laughter is the only relief you ever get from yourself, that's all.” <br /><br /> It seemed as if neither one of them had the sense or sense of humor to escape this bickering mood. They were nearing the library now and the end of the long ascent. They stopped and leaned against a tree as if to rest. Billy kept trying to see Bunny's expression, but she hid her face against his arm and clung to his sleeve. Now and then she brushed at imaginary lint on his cuff. Nearby a grounds crew was reworking a flowerbed, taking old plants out and replacing them with plants in bloom. Billy watched the men sweating in the flowerbed and thought, “Shit, it could be worse; I might have to work for a living.” He was willing to think of anything except what he was actually doing. As if she'd heard something, Bunny looked up at him solemnly and said, “What?” He knew he ought to let the conversation die, but he was too exasperated. <br /><br /> “Your problem,” he told her with sudden energy, “is that you work too hard to believe in the things you already believe in.” <br /><br /> “But we have to believe in something, don't we?” Bunny insisted. “And anyway you make me sound as if I'm afraid of Mrs. Hardy or that I want to squash her, and that's not true. I just think she's a troublemaker, that's all.” <br /><br /> “You're probably right,” he said in a tired voice. He didn't care anymore. His levity was what was squashed, dying from exposure to her persistence. <br /><br /> “You don't agree at all, do you?” Bunny's frown of concentration was in danger of turning into a pout. Her pose of reasonableness wasn't fooling anyone but herself. <br /><br /> “I said you're probably right,” he said at length, “what else do you want?” His pose of fairness wasn't fooling anyone at all. <br /><br /> “I just don't see all that in it,” she said softly. <br /><br /> “I see,” he said and gave her a hard look. <br /><br />************************************************ <br /><br /> The silence between them was heavy as they reached the library, turned right, and headed downhill again. At the bottom of the long incline lay one of Billy's favorite places, Littlefield Fountain. He often went there alone. He found it peaceful, although clearly the fountain and the bronze sculptures that formed its centerpiece were some sort of memorial to war. <br /><br /> “Look,” Billy said when they got near it. <br /><br /> Bunny looked, but she was restless and didn't know where to look. She saw a soldier and a sailor standing guard on each side of a sort of streamlined ship—a ship of state perhaps? The faces of the warriors were handsome, but dispassionate and tired. Bunny didn't think much about them, but Billy had always thought they looked like they'd just gotten laid and then been forced to go back on duty. More likely, they were supposed to be the calm and compassionate faces of decent, God‑fearing victors, but Billy ignored that. <br /><br /> Forward of the warriors, in the prow of the ship, there stood a tall stately goddess with wings outspread and arms uplifted. Someone once told him that she was Columbia, but the name didn't sound familiar to him and he just called her Miss Victory. She was gorgeous, dramatic, yet Billy thought she was remote and formal, as unawake and unliving as the figures behind her. <br /><br /> Arrayed in front of this—also bronze, yet more living, like something wild forced to pull a silly parade float—were three massive horses with demonic riders, fantastic horses from some uncharted seascape of the imagination. Their hooves spread strangely out so that they appeared to be webbed. Stranger still, only the front half of each beast was equine, the rest was crazily aquatic, with dorsal and pectoral fins and a fluked tail. <br /><br /> The horses' heads and forelegs strove furiously forward in the water, rearing and twisting, their nostrils flaring in the arc of the fountain's spray. You could almost hear them snorting the spray back at you, they looked so fierce. The naked demons riding bareback leaned back for balance, their strong hands clinging to the horses' manes, their veined legs crooked in stress over the huge pectoral fins. Their groaning musculature seemed almost more defined than that of their turbulent steeds, and Billy often wondered which one was riding which. <br /><br /> The whole fountain was beautiful, but it was the horses that Billy found irresistible. All this unrestrained effort, restrained by the sculptor's art! And beyond that, the whole effect so artfully heightened by a green patina of random oxidation. The warriors, the ship, the goddess really made no sense to him. Perhaps those remote figures had been made to satisfy the artist's contract and the rest to satisfy the artist. He didn't know. Perhaps he didn't understand the symbolism, perhaps he didn't know enough about art—but like any arrant gangster or moody intellectual misfit, he knew what he liked. <br /><br /> Bunny stood now between him and the fountain, looking bored and agitated. Yet when she turned her face toward his, he felt a sudden strong compassion toward her. There wasn't any point in being angry with her, it was crazy. He studied the lipsticked lines of her mouth and the sight both aroused and softened him. <br /><br /> For once the aquamarine eyeshadow she used so much of didn't seem so overwrought. A wind came up from behind her, blowing her dark hair slightly forward, wafting a scent of sandalwood to him. In the open air it smelled fine and thrilling. Light from the setting sun filtered through the branches of the nearby trees, flitted among the leaves, then struck the surface of the fountain's ringed pools with a softly glowing brilliance. In such a light, Bunny looked remarkably inviting. He felt forgiving, though what he was forgiving might have embarrassed him to say. He was caught on a wave of sentiment. He put his hand on her shoulder and started to tell her something about the fountain. <br /><br /> “I still think she was awfully rude,” Bunny said. <br /><br /> “I see,” Billy muttered. He took off his glasses and stared at her as if she were a bug. <br /><br /> “Don't you?” <br /><br /> She was begging now, he thought, but the very act of asking for it killed his compassion. He'd already done his best to explain something that was only half‑interesting to him, not even half‑real. The horses in the fountain were more real to him. He was thoroughly fed up with her. He wished he could put her in the refrigerator and come back for her when he was in the mood again, as he sometimes did with half‑eaten bowls of ice cream. He looked away from her and said, “Never mind.” <br /><br /> Bunny frowned, sensing their distance. She came up behind him and touched his elbow lightly. <br /><br /> “Let's just watch the fucking fountain,” Billy said. He desperately wanted her to shut up. <br /><br /> “Good grease!” she mumbled, her eyes squeezing shut as if she were about to cry. She'd heard him all right. “Let's watch the damned old fountain then!” <br /><br /> As evening fell, the fountain's spotlights shone brightly in the flow and spray, their rays scattering crazily like glints of quicksilver diamonds across the water's surface. It is possible that neither the sculptor nor the university's architect had foreseen all of this fountain's effects. Bunny began to feel one of those effects: she grew romantic and forgave Billy. Or perhaps she merely noticed how many other lovers loitered in the area, taking advantage of the fading light. She kissed him then and enjoyed it thoroughly until he tried to stick his tongue in her mouth. Then she pulled away from him. <br /><br /> “Dammit, you always try to go too far,” she muttered. <br /><br /> Billy pulled her back, but she wouldn't face him. Stealthily he slipped his hand beneath her sweater and stroked her belly button. Bunny blushed and shoved his hand away. She looked around, but everyone she saw was similarly occupied. No one was watching. The next time he kissed her she startled him completely by sticking out her tongue experimentally and letting it tangle with his. Then, just as he got his finger back in her belly‑button, they felt a sprinkle of rain. <br /><br /> “Let's go back to your car,” she whispered, and together, fleetly, they ran. <br /><br /> The shower increased steadily to a downpour, but Billy's car was nearby. Damp and flushed they scrambled into the front seat and Bunny turned to him and buried herself in his arms. Breathlessly, she said, “Let's kiss. Just kiss.” But one thing led to another. <br /><br /> When his hand slipped beneath her sweater again, she started to speak, but he darted his tongue in her mouth. She sucked it and forgot to argue. She trembled steadily as his hand pushed slowly upward under her sweater. Billy took a deep breath; he was pretty nervous himself. When his thumb and forefinger reached their mark, she nearly sucked the breath out of him. Her eyes stayed tightly closed and that was a green light as far as Billy was concerned. Later, when his hand strayed downward and pushed between her legs, her face took on the worried look of those who dream of locomotion in their sleep. Like a sleeping dog, her body moved in place. It surprised him to find that she could feel anything at all through the stiff material of her new blue jeans, but she was sensitive, amazingly sensitive. He'd never seen anyone wriggle or quiver so much. <br /><br /> “Dear Christ,” he thought, “she's turned into jelly!” <br /><br /> In no time her body arched and her arms fell limply to her sides. Billy couldn't decide if she was convulsive or catatonic. He himself could hardly have been more astonished, amused, or aroused. Rain was falling noisily now, resounding through the roof of the car. Rivulets of rushing water streamed down the windows, resembling a heavy curtain. They were hidden from the world by the darkness and by the unrelenting noise and downpour. To some extent they were even hidden from one another—Billy could barely hear her, but he could see that she was gasping the air like a fish out of water. His hand was still buried in her lap and she was stirring against it. <br /><br /> “Please don't stop!” she whispered urgently. <br /><br /> Once her pleasure began, it appeared, there was no stopping it. She went from zero to sixty in nothing flat, and could come on a dime in the dark without brakes or headlights. At the moment, however, she was coming on Billy's car seat and about to break his hand. She threw back her head and gasped and shuddered. The lights from a passing car flickered across her face; in the quick white flash, he could see the dark streaks of mascara running down her cheeks. Her face looked like a mask from a Greek play, except that her mask moved: her mouth gulped, her eyes clinched, and she kept on humping his hand. <br /><br /> Billy thought she’d never looked cuter, but began to wonder if she'd kill herself like this. He was amazed to see just how thoroughly involved with herself she could get. It didn't seem to dawn on him how thoroughly she had forgotten about him in the process. She wasn't thinking of Billy at all, but was dreaming of some elegant butterfly, fluttering exquisite wings frenetically as its guilty proboscis gently nuzzled a lovely, lovely flower. How disparate their views were, caught in the focus of a single intimate act! <br /><br /> It was a wonderfully long orgasm, but at last she reached the end of it. She lay there sprawled and trembling with her head in Billy's lap. Billy was thinking of something she could do, yet he was too distracted to say it. The rain had nearly ceased, but now the air was filled with the noisy stridulations of crickets. Below the threshold of that wall of sound, he could feel rather than hear something else, an indistinct but vibrant murmur. Stroking Bunny's hair, he bent forward carefully and listened: it was the sound of some querulous child in a distant room, quietly crying—not yet convinced of sleep, but victim to it. That sound, so close and distant, inexplicably quelled Billy's lust. <br /><br />************************************************ <br /><br /> Later that night, of course, he regretted all notion of having been “nice”. It had seemed like the thing to do at the time, but now he wished—ah, never mind! He kicked off his shoes and got into bed with all his clothes on. Billy's mind reeled before the magnitude of her orgasms! They were almost a work of art—and no less so because their construction was so unconscious, so unconfessed. She wouldn't talk to him about them, but what could be said anyway? <br /><br /> “But, dear galloping God, who would ever have suspected that so much talent lay hidden in this nice little nice girl's erogenous zone?” he groaned to his roommate a few days later. <br /><br /> “She's got a talented cunt,” George laughed. “That's what you're trying not to say.” The hour was late and they'd given up studying to talk about more pleasant things. <br /><br /> Billy laughed too, but said, “Shit. We're a couple of adolescent bastards, aren't we?” <br /><br /> “Just the usual selfish sexist bastards, I think,” George replied. <br /><br /> “That's not much better, is it?” <br /><br /> “Probably worse,” George admitted, but you can't expect me to cry about that.” He was aware of Billy's bullshit philosophy about humor and wasn't above needling him. <br /><br /> “I only wish I understood this better, Billy said wistfully. “I mean, none of the women I've slept with made me feel this terrible.” <br /><br /> “That's just it,” George told him. “You got to sleep with them.” <br /><br /> “That's not what I mean. I mean terrible as in 'a terrible person', as in 'where's my goddamn conscience?'“ <br /><br /> “It's hard to be fair when you're really just a horny bastard, isn't it?” George laughed. “You worry too much.” <br /><br /> “It's just that I don't understand why Bunny's vulnerability, instead of exciting my sympathy as it should, puts my whole moral nature to sleep.” <br /><br /> “I think I understand,” George said, “what she excites in you.” <br /><br /> “Yeah?” <br /><br /> “Yeah. You've found the pearl in your little oyster.” <br /><br /> “Jesus, I guess so! When it comes to coming, those other women couldn't hold a candle to this one.” <br /><br /> “Maybe a candle was what they wanted,” George leered. <br /><br /> “Are you suggesting that my dick is too short?” Billy asked in mock outrage. “But maybe you're right about the candle. How can you tell when they won't ever say what they really want?” <br /><br /> “Beats me,” George agreed. “Sometimes you wish they'd learn to talk dirty or else teach us their goddamn sign language.” <br /><br /> “The true burden of sex is in its guilty silences, huh?” Billy grinned. <br /><br /> “Right! Why won't they ask for what they want?” <br /><br /> “Don't ask me,” Billy said. <br /><br /> What was really so impressive to Billy about Bunny as a woman was that she very nearly had no requirements at all. The trick wasn't to satisfy her—for apparently who couldn't?—the trick was to get her started. George thought that Billy had hit the jackpot, but it wasn't that simple. Two of the hardest things to overcome in life are momentum and inertia, and Bunny was a prime illustration of both. She could go back inside herself as fast as she could come, and getting her out again was like trying to talk sense to a pet turtle. She'd give him that stupid pained look, then duck her head as if she could hide from him. It was amazing how guilty she could make him feel, but nothing she did could make him stop trying. <br /><br /> “God damn it,” Billy fumed at her, “you're pretending to yourself that nothing's happened between us. Every other time I see you, you act like we're out on our first date.” <br /><br /> “I'm not pretending,” she whined. “It's just too soon, too fast, that's all. Can't you see I'm nervous?” <br /><br /> “You're nerve‑wracking too,” he said in disgust. <br /><br /> Talking to her about it was silly, he finally realized. It just made her more likely to resist. He took another tact. He courted her with praise and compliments, asked her opinions, answered her endless barrage of questions. If she wondered about his change in behavior, she was too pleased to question it. Billy was ready to try anything. He thought of sending her flowers, but she was convinced that she was a jinx where plants were concerned and hated to see even cut flowers die. He bought her records instead, then found that he had to spend too much time explaining the lyrics. He did it anyway, gritting his teeth all the while. He fell into the habit of bringing her candy and that seemed to please her most. She was, he finally realized, ridiculously easy to please; all it took were simple kindnesses. <br /><br /> Yet it seemed to him that when a dozen pleasantries had made her feel better, it took a hundred more to make her feel secure; he began to count and grudge her every one. At unexpected times she'd let him grope her again, but she had a nasty habit of stopping him just when things were getting good. All these machinations in between embraces were starting to take the luster off his lust. Bitterly he began to think that he didn't like her at all, that no one could be more unsuited for one another. Everything was wrong. He dreamed of being rid of her, rid of the responsibility and the deranged desire for her. <br /><br /> Even George finally said, “Maybe you should just let this one pass before you lose your sense of humor entirely.” <br /><br /> “I told you to start with that this was a compulsion,” Billy answered. <br /><br /> “Yes, but all you're really doing is fucking with each other's minds, aren't you?” <br /><br /> “More or less,” Billy conceded. <br /><br />************************************************ <br /><br /> A few weeks later Billy and Bunny came out of a movie theater and began walking toward her apartment complex. Her roommate was out of town and she had the place to herself. She hadn't seen much of Billy lately and she had missed him. She didn't know about George's advice or that Billy had done his best to take it and sharply felt his failure. All through the movie, she'd been unusually untroubled and untroubling, neither asking those persistent questions about the progress of the film nor protesting much when he rested his hand high on her thigh, just below her “virtuous v”. Billy began to like her better than he had in months. <br /><br /> At home she turned on the radio and the lights, then disappeared into the kitchen. Billy examined the living room and found it excessively pink and frilled. It was overfilled with ceramic animals, fluffy animals, posters of animals. Everything on earth that was cute was represented there, including two bigger‑than‑life Pink Panthers—one for each roommate, Billy presumed. It was to be expected, he thought, that young women living away from home for the first time would bring some girlish baggage with them, but this was a lot! “Mementos of their long virginity,” he smirked to himself. <br /><br /> Bunny brought out a tray that held glasses of Coke and two large pieces of chocolate cake. Billy nodded and smiled, but wasn't really hungry or very pleased at her presumption. Bunny thought nothing of it, and wandered the room nervously, keeping her glass poised beneath the cake to catch the crumbs. She ate neatly in small fast gulps. Billy took a sip of Coke and watched her. She moved about the room rearranging nick‑knacks, wiping at invisible dust, trying to appear unconscious of Billy's unwavering gaze. He looked at her as if she were prey. <br /><br /> On the radio, the easy‑listening station played something soft and chirpy, and her feet seemed somehow in tune with it. It had that anonymous sound of elevator music, though the tune wasn't anonymous. Bunny didn't recognize Randy Newman's “Short People” without the lyrics, but Billy did. He smiled. He figured as long as he didn't laugh, she wouldn't say “What?” and he wouldn't have to explain. As she moved she spoke of inconsequential things, restless small‑talk leading nowhere, and at intervals he answered, though he barely knew what he said. He was trying, once and for all, to decide why she attracted him. <br /><br /> She wasn't pretty or quite plain. Her cheeks were a little too round and her forehead a bit too flat to allow her face to achieve its full incipient cuteness, yet sometimes her eyes lit up with laughter in a way that made him wish he really were in love with her. That light never lasted. It was as inscrutable as if he'd broken a dull‑colored stone and found it full of phosphorous light that immediately, inexplicably faded. Unquestionably she had beauty, for all youth has beauty, but hers didn't seem to lead anywhere except back into itself, into that sweet and tragic cell. <br /><br /> He liked the way her dark mid‑length hair curved forward and framed her face, always drawing his attention directly to her lips. Why he found her mouth so erotic he could never quite say. It wasn't just her kisses that were amateurish, but the very shape and texture of her lips. How can anyone look “just‑kissed” and “never‑been‑kissed” at the same time? But she did, he thought. It didn't make any sense, but he yearned for that mouth. That virtuous, silly mouth. At the start of every kiss he felt that he might bruise her, and yet he never did. Like a prepubescent boy looking at pictures of ladies in their underwear in the Sears catalog, he was confused—certain that there was something wicked about what he was doing, but confident that he was going to do it anyway. <br /><br /> In a fit of exasperation with himself the week before he had told George, “This is childish! Self‑indulgent. Probably perverted.” <br /><br /> “That's what makes it such fun, you fool,” George grinned. He was sitting at his desk reading and looked up just long enough to answer. <br /><br /> Billy threw himself on his bed, covered his face with a pillow, and hollered, “ARRGH!” His face behind his book, George grinned as if nothing could be funnier, but pretended to still be reading. When Billy got up again and started irritably fiddling with the radio, George couldn't contain himself any longer and laughed. “Wait a minute, listen to this,” he said, and read aloud from the book in front of him: <br /><br />“'A happy equitable eroticism is more nearly the province of Harlequin Romances than of pornography, though life ought not to be characterized as either. What pornography most exults in is the dramatic reduction of innocence to carnality and in the blearing of the distinctions between them. What pornography most denies is that it degrades or subjugates anyone. It's a very convenient philosophy, for in it everybody's having fun and everything leads everywhere. <br /><br />“This hedonistic attitude is rampant in fantasy, of course, because of the correlative prevalence in reality of man's inability to reconcile true love objects with the temporal tickles of lust, or to distinguish between love and domination. We all want to sleep with a seductively innocent, helplessly wanton woman, although we seldom meet one. This perpetual state of aroused schizophrenia and arrested development concerning women is both conscious and subconscious and as such is responsible for a great share of society's sexual, moral, and economic ills. In pornography, none of these things need be taken into account; the greatest thing about it is its reprieve from responsibility. In such dire fantasy all problems are reconciled long before foreplay, and guilt follows no one home—at least not anyone for whom it is a fantasy.'“ <br /><br /> “Jesus!” Billy exclaimed. “What the hell are you reading, 'The Psychopathology of Pornography'?” <br /><br /> “Not at all,” George cackled. “It's just some space-filler psychobabble from the murder victim in this detective novel called 'The Purple Slut.'“ <br /><br /> “Well, I’m glad he’s dead!” Billy grumped, moving back to the bed. “I don't think I need this shit, you know?” <br /><br /> “What you need is to get laid,” George laughed. “What you really need is to stop trying to have your cake and eat it too. So you're really a shit where Bunny is concerned, so what? Either stop it or enjoy it! Don't moralize it to death.” <br /><br /> In Bunny's apartment later that same week, Billy fumbled a little in setting his Coke back on the tray, his attention fixed on Bunny. His heart was beating fast, but he looked calm enough. Bunny flitted from one side of the room to the other, still pursuing phantom motes of dust. Billy didn't plan to force her or even to say that he needed her—that might sound like love—but he had made up his mind to fuck her. If only she would hold still. <br /><br /> “Do you like Helen Reddy?” she asked, pulling some records from a shelf. “Yes, I think so,” he said distractedly, and then remembered that he didn't. <br /><br /> He was thinking how tragic it was that a mouth he only wished to kiss should always look so injured. She reflected the damage the world inflicted more ably than anyone he'd ever known. And yet at times her smile could spread across her face so suddenly and so forcefully that she looked like a joyous child. But no child's joy could be dashed so utterly as hers, her bright impassioned smile extinguishing like a candle-flame caught in a draft. She was as unstable as nitro‑glycerin. <br /><br /> None of that mattered now. Bunny bent over to set the record on the turntable. Billy observed how the olive velour fabric of her dress seemed to strain toward iridescence as it stretched across the apple‑roundness of her ass. Aware of him, she straightened quickly and adjusted her skirt. She sensed that he was turning the natural curves of her body parts into pornographic geometry. It was as if he could see through her dress. <br /><br /> “What in the world are you looking at?” she asked and stepped back. “You look like—” <br /><br /> “Like I want to eat you?” <br /><br /> “Good grief,” she said and averted her eyes. <br /><br /> “Ah‑ha,” Billy said under his breath. <br /><br /> Bunny was partly hidden now behind a glass étagère filled with painted ceramic turtles and small stuffed bears. She looked like a little girl playing hide‑and‑seek, like someone who thought she could make herself smaller if only she could concentrate hard enough. <br /><br /> “That won't do you any good,” he laughed at her. “You're not Alice in Wonderland, you can't get any smaller.” <br /><br /> She was small—a full foot shorter than Billy and he was of average height. Her short legs and lower torso seemed slightly broad in comparison to her narrow chest and shoulders, but she wasn't fat, just soft. She had the softest flesh he'd ever seen. Her slim pudding breasts made a mouthful each, no more, and when he pressed his palms against them, they disappeared entirely. It was eerie how all of her felt the same to him, whether breasts, belly, arms, or buttocks. If he groped her too long in the dark, he'd found, he began to imagine some amorphous organism, something primitive without correlation to compass, gravity, or modern evolution. Bunny couldn't help it, of course, and Billy was exaggerating. He was pushing toward some foregone conclusion, the solution to an abstract equation in his forebrain: that her physical and mental states were of one shape and kind. She was as undifferentiated as a good night's sleep, and yet he had to have her. He was as repulsed as he was drawn to her, but even in that confused state he could tell that all of her parts were in the right places. <br /><br /> Embarrassed by the long persistence of his staring, Bunny sought something more substantial to hide behind. She was peeking at him now around the corner of a tall heavily‑laden bookcase. Billy was on the sofa, leaning forward, smiling that vulturine smile. He stood up slowly, carefully, but couldn't hide the fact that the front of his pants stuck out. <br /><br /> “Good grief,” she said. She said it very plainly. <br /><br /> “You said that already.” <br /><br /> “I know, I know.” <br /><br /> She was cornered now in a small triangle formed by the bookcase, the wall, and the bulge in Billy's pants. <br /><br /> “What—uh, what are you doing?” <br /><br /> “I'm not doing anything yet, silly rabbit.” He didn't know what he'd said. <br /><br /> Bunny turned her face to the wall, crossed her arms over her chest, and leaned back toward him. Billy put his arms around her and pressed forward. Nuzzling her hair aside with his chin, he blew the last few strands away with two quick breaths and nibbled the back of her neck. Her eyes were tightly closed. <br /><br /> “Ummm,” Bunny murmured. She squirmed, not least perhaps because she could feel so distinctly his erection poking her buttocks. She arched her body away from him, but whether to escape his passion or to accede to her own, he could not tell. Unless she stopped him, he didn't care. He ran his hands up and down her dress, caressing her flanks and ass. Soon she was breathing heavily, as if in a labored trance. He placed his hands on hers for a moment and then she moved them, extending her arms forward to place her palms flat against the wall. Billy's fingers searched the smooth fabric of her bodice and quickly found her nipples. With a shiver she moved her bottom against him, then stood as if transfixed. She was leaning forward from the waist, her trembling legs slightly spread. <br /><br /> Billy listened carefully to her breathing. He was deeply aroused, but also in a panic. If he let up even for just a moment or if he made just one mistake, she might wake up. Exactly what spell he had cast he wasn't sure, but he could see that it was working and he wanted it to stay that way. <br /><br /> He spun her around and kissed her hard on the mouth. She kissed him back with all her heart and most of her tongue. He sucked it avidly, then seized her by the waist and lifted her off the floor. For a moment she dangled in the air, her arms around his neck, her lips glued to his—then slowly, with her eyes still closed, she demurely turned her head aside and let her legs (like separate entities) open wide and wrap themselves around his waist. <br /><br /> “Ever the unconscious lover,” Billy thought derisively. He kissed her neck and throat, but only as a ruse. His real attention was riveted on a different objective, an exercise in Braille, an awkward unacknowledged struggle to extract her long skirt from between them. He had to get at her flesh, but he was terrified of disturbing her trance by too sudden a move. An agonizingly long time later he was rubbing her exposed pink belly with a slow circular motion that was clearly pleasurable to both parties. Her stomach seemed distended and hard now, as if an incipient pregnancy had been engendered there by the mere proximity of their hidden genitals. Nothing could have been further from the truth. Billy kept stroking her as if he were trying to hypnotize a cat. His legs ached, but with this purring pussy snuggled against him, he wasn't about to give in to that sort of frailty. <br /><br /> Bunny's legs were tiring too, but her stamina could not withstand the constant pull of gravity. Slowly she was sliding and her downward drift was bringing her “virtuous v” into more and more vital contact with the upright effrontery in Billy's pants. He kissed her, kissed her, kissed her, and whispered fervently in her ear. The unconvincing things he said to her must have sounded convincing anyway for she seemed oblivious of what he was doing now, slowly and with such great stealth. The hand he'd been rubbing her belly with was now unzipping his fly. It seemed to take forever to find the overlap at the front of his jockey shorts, but now goddammit he had it! <br /><br /> Upon release, his straining erection sprang upward and nestled lightly against the warmth of her panties. He thought he felt her moving against him and his heart began to drum. Perhaps she wasn't really wiggling, just trying to adjust her grasp to keep from falling. No matter. She was there, and he was below her, waiting for her fall. He continued to ignore the tension building in his legs, but it was hard to keep believing in mind-over-matter when what mattered most had clearly pushed his mind out of the driver's seat. He wanted desperately to push those feather-white panties aside and jam himself into the nest, but he didn't dare risk it yet. <br /><br /> Even so, he was pretty far out of control. He flung her dress over her head and tongued her breasts. Her nipples were appropriately pink, erotically long, yet felt as soft and anonymous in his mouth as earlobes, utterly quiescent. That her nipples didn't stiffen seemed to him another symptom of what was wrong with her. Perhaps a “real” woman would not have provoked such preposterous criticism in him, but Bunny had never been real to him. She was a fantasy, and fantasies are always specific, unyielding, ultimately unforgiving. <br /><br /> Whether her nipples were stiff or inert, Bunny's excitement was otherwise wildly evident. With her legs she clenched him ever more tightly and leaned far back, letting her head and shoulders come to rest against the wall. In this position there was nothing she could do with her arms but let them hang wantonly loose. Billy liked it. He had a strong desire to whisper something vulgar in her ear and a stronger desire to hear her whisper it to him. There wasn't time, however, for any of this dirty talk, for the obscene position they had assumed simply wasn't going to work. <br /><br /> He felt her slipping away again, and this time she was really going. He stepped forward, got his hands beneath her bottom, and caught her—and was thoroughly amazed that he did. He had fully expected to drop her, but she didn't seem heavy at all. His libido had raised his physical stamina to a ridiculous level of athleticism, it seemed to him, and he grinned at the absolute foolishness of it all. He felt like an idiot, but he felt good. Her moist little beautiful “v” was pressed heavily against him now and its vivid hidden presence gave him confidence. He gave himself the reward of a few hard bold thrusts against her snatch, thinking that the only barrier to his pleasure now was the thin white veil of her panties, but he had forgotten about the wall. He had made a small miscalculation about his distance from it and smashed his erection against the sheetrock. <br /><br /> With a stifled groan he jerked back and Bunny lost her grip on him. She started sliding headfirst down the wall. Billy rushed forward in an effort to catch her, but as he bent toward her that long-awaited charley horse clutched the calf of his leg. His body went into auto‑retract, attempting to assume the fetal position, but Bunny was in the way. It looked as if he were trying to catch her by sinking his teeth into her belly‑button, but he only succeeded in catching the full weight of her ass directly on his injured prick. For a searing moment, it felt like she'd broken it off. <br /><br /> Still doubled over, Billy stumbled backwards and bumped the étagère, then veered sideways and jarred the bookcase. With one hand he clutched at the charley horse, with the other he held his erection obscenely in a firm protective grasp. Meanwhile, Bunny fell in what seemed to him a terrible slow motion, her feet high in the air, her face covered by her skirt, her arms waving blindly. For a moment she looked like a turtle on its back trying to turn over, and then her head hit the floor with a bump, quickly followed by a soft plop as her bottom struck, and she was flat on the floor. <br /><br /> Horrified, Billy forgot himself and went to her, hobbling like the Elephant Man. He twitched the skirt off her face, but was afraid to actually look at her. He had just grabbed her by the armpits and started lifting when, in a delayed reaction from the top shelf of the bookcase, several books tumbled down on them. One hit Bunny in the stomach and knocked the breath out of her; another struck Billy on the head. In an attempt to dodge any further blows he stood up straight without letting go of her. The straighter he stood and the higher he lifted her, the more his rampant erection thrust forward straight toward Bunny's startled face. She saw it coming and tried to jerk aside, but she wasn't fast enough. Billy felt his adrenalin pumping wildly as his glans poked her hard in the ear, then glanced aside into her tangled hair. <br /><br /> He was thrilled and mortified equally, but neither feeling could compete at present with the pains in his calf and cock. He limped away from her and collapsed on the sofa even as he heard her cry out. <br /><br /> “Stop! Stop it!” she said with shrill force. <br /><br /> Among all the bumps and thumps and thrusts, something had finally awakened her. <br /><br /> “I've got a charley horse!” he groaned at her and thought he must sound pretty stupid. Bunny didn't look like she'd understood him. <br /><br /> The thought that this would be the end of their sinful scene made him bad tempered toward everything, including Bunny. For Christ's sake, he thought, did the little twit think that in the midst of these absurd pratfalls he was trying to stuff his bruised organ in her mouth? When he calmed down enough to think who he was dealing with, he wondered if she would even choose to recognize what she'd seen. Whatever she saw, or thought she saw, or thought about what she saw, Bunny scrambled hastily to her feet and dashed to the bathroom. <br /><br /> Billy sat uncomfortably and massaged his calf. He would have felt preposterous massaging the other, but that pain, fortunately, was short-lived. The tension in his leg lessened much more slowly. He wasn't sure whether Bunny would ever come back, but he was damn‑well prepared to wait. Even by the time his leg had ceased hurting, his foolish erection still had not subsided. <br /><br /> “Just another idiot aspect of this night's goddamned athletic extremities,” he muttered. He felt ridiculous. No matter what mood Bunny might be in when she finally emerged, he knew he'd have to hide it. He stuffed it back in his pants, but didn't zip up—a compromise between caution and concupiscence. He noticed that the Helen Reddy record had ended and was about to repeat itself. <br /><br /> “Not if I have anything to do with it,” he growled. He slid across the sofa and tuned the radio to a classical music station. The unctuous voice of the announcer was apologizing for some delay, saying, “We now return to the scherzo movement of Beethoven's 7th Symphony.” <br /><br /> “Big deal,” Billy muttered and turned the volume down. At last Bunny came out of the bathroom and walked swiftly past him. She was wearing a very light cotton shift, mostly beige but trimmed with a border of interwoven flowers in red and green. He'd never seen her look prettier. Moving quickly she turned off all the lights except one. As she stood for a moment poised before the last lit lamp, the light passing through her shift revealed the outline of a perfectly fluffed little puff of pubic hair. Billy sucked in his breath, and then was afraid to let it out again. He and his prick were ready to do the Snoopy Dance of Spring. <br /><br /> Bunny sat down stiffly at the far end of the sofa. Silently she slid one hand toward Billy and he slowly reached for it. When he'd grasped it, he pulled at her but let the tension pull him to her. Bunny slowly reclined so that by the time his face reached hers, she was fully recumbent beneath him. As he pressed down on her he was vividly aware of her naked “v” beneath the thin beige shift. By now you might think that Bunny's expectations and permission were fully apparent, yet he could still feel resistant tension in her body. He kissed her eyes and nose, then licked behind her ears until she giggled and gave him one of those big friendly hugs. He knew how much she liked it when he courted her “innocent” parts, and he meant to use that knowledge to effect. Bunny relaxed and snuggled against him, a happy volunteer and victim of seduction. <br /><br /> By careful stages Billy got his hand beneath the shift. He caressed her calves and counted signals and gradually worked his way upward. As her muscles relaxed he pushed her knees apart, flipped the shift upwards onto her belly, and kissed his way to the top of her legs—to her beautiful “virtuous v”. Its emanations of warmth made him think insensibly of ice cream. He stuck out his tongue and licked it. <br /><br /> He sensed the shiver that sped up her body and issued forth in a satisfied murmur. It was as if with that expulsion of breath the last resistant tension had been expelled from her and she spread her legs wide. He grabbed her buttocks and shoved his face in her cunt. She arched her back and yelped and moaned, gasping like a homeless fish. Her inarticulate pleasure made him crazy and vain with lust, almost as if she'd finally uttered that long‑sought obscene request. <br /><br /> “Who's talking in tongues tonight?” he thought gleefully. <br /><br /> He was in a fog of sensuality. He meant to chew her to a frazzle and Bunny was clearly ready for it. She was heaving toward him, faster and faster, and he had to hang on tightly. He closed his eyes and had a vivid vision of steering a speeding car through a jumble of careening traffic. She took every curve faster than the last one, a Ferrari in the world of orgasms. <br /><br /> There he goes again with those auto‑erotic automotive images! Whatever odd visions were zooming around in his head, what was real and in front of him was overwhelmingly ripe and procreant, alive and slick as some preconscious swamp. His tongue slid slipperishly though her like an eel slithering through primordial petroleum soup. She seemed as wild just now as some preacher's child who'd just had her first taste of lust and liked it. At this drugged moment he could almost have been in love with her. <br /><br /> “Just let me get my cock out,” he thought frenziedly, “and I will be in love!” <br /><br /> He groped wildly for the elusive opening in his underwear, but just as he extricated himself again, suddenly and violently she pushed him away from her and came. But more: she came, and came, and came... <br /><br /> “Welcome to the wonderful world of multiple orgasms,” he thought, almost with envy. He leaned back to watch. He hid his grin, but she wouldn't have seen it anyway. Despite everything he knew about her, he still thought her pleasure a reflection on himself. He pushed away from the sofa and stood up. He turned aside to loosen his belt and just as he was about to drop his pants, he looked back at her and froze. <br /><br /> Bunny had drawn herself up into a tight little ball; the loose shift now covered her from neck to ankles. Breasts and belly, cunt and buttocks, all of those playthings he thought would be his had disappeared. With a total lack of self‑consciousness she was hugging one of the tiny teddy bears that had fallen off the étagère. There was an infuriatingly childish look of tranquility in her eyes, a terrible air of self‑possession in her demeanor. If she'd had her thumb in her mouth and a machine gun under her arm, the picture would have been complete. Billy felt his ears burning and experienced a desire to kill her. <br /><br /> “Dear God,” he thought, “the deranged little succubus is going to pretend that nothing's happened!” <br /><br /> She had retreated already into that incomprehensible and incontrovertible insulation of which she was master. She'd orgasmed her brains out, but she wasn't going to orgasm him! With a demure and luxuriantly relaxed grace, she rose from the sofa and walked (rather teasingly, he thought) toward the kitchen. <br /><br /> “I'm going to fix a late supper for us, sweetie,” she called back over her shoulder. <br /><br /> Billy stared in disbelief, then looked down at himself. He thought confusedly: “How did I lose control?!” Control? “I had it, just a few minutes ago!” Had he? <br /><br /> “I should have made her ask for it!” he thought despairingly. <br /><br /> It was too late now. Now she was rattling pots and slamming the refrigerator door. Now he was “sweetie”. He began to have an inkling of what the real trick was. <br /><br /> What was he supposed to do about it, rape her? Not likely. He could no more force her than fly; the “trick” had been his only device and he'd been outdone. He wanted to scream at her, but he could no more form the words, “You come right back here and fuck me!” than she was going to whisper in his ear for him to do it. <br /><br /> His imagination and desire had been rapacious, but now he felt tamed and squashed. Was anything he'd thought about her true? Had the shy little creature exaggerated or had she simply lied? Was she a “nice girl” or not? Had she pretended to believe his lies as he had pretended to believe hers? He wanted to spit. <br /><br /> Billy's face was already a vivid red when he heard a fumbling at the front door and the turning of a key in the lock. Just what he needed. As Priscilla came through the door Billy was headed hastily toward the bathroom. He held the loose ends of his pants together with one hand, the flapping tongue of his belt with the other, and hoped it was not apparent from behind. His mis-informed erection waggled in front of him, deathless in defeat. Slamming the door a little too hard behind him, he collapsed back against it, closed his eyes, and took a deep breath. His eyes popped open and he made a face. The room reeked of sandalwood perfume as if someone had broken a very big bottle of it. <br /><br /> Through the door he could hear the roommates chattering happily. Would she spill the beans to Priscilla, he wondered, or was it too much a dream to her? Would she, would she, would she? Damn! Nor could he tell which was more awful—his dread, his lust, or that dizzying reek of sandalwood that filled the room. He felt sick and thought he might get sicker. He felt like he'd been poisoned. <br /><br /> Priscilla might be out there saying, “You didn't let that bastard—.” <br /><br /> No, no, no, he didn't think so. <br /><br /> Nor would Bunny smile and say, “No, but you should have seen—!” <br /><br /> Surely not. But you never can tell. Billy heard the young women laughing and began to beat his head slowly, softly, rhythmically against the tile wall and to silently, repeatedly curse. His sense of humor was about as depleted as it could get, and he knew what he could do about it. <br /><br />THE END <br /><br /><br /><em>Special Thanks To Pompeo Coppini <br /><br />For The Horses In Littlefield Fountain </em> <br /><br /> <br /><br /><small>Notes on Rappaccini's Daughter, a short story by Nathaniel Hawthorne <br />Set in Padua “very long ago,” this is the story of a “mad scientist” working in isolation on a completely unethical (at least by modern research standards) experiment involving poisonous plants. A young student of medicine observes from his quarters the scientist's beautiful daughter who is confined to the lush and locked gardens in which the experiment is taking place. <br /><br />Having fallen in love with the lovely Beatrice, Giovanni ignores the warning of his mentor, Professor Baglioni, that Rappaccini is up to no good and he and his work should be shunned. Eventually, Giovanni sneaks into the forbidden garden to meet his lover, and begins to suffer the consequences of encounter with the plants—and with Beatrice, who dwells among them and has been rendered both immune to their effects and poisonous to others. <br /><br /> <br /><br />read <a href="http://www.shsu.edu/~eng_wpf/authors/Hawthorne/Rappaccini.htm">Rappaccini's Daughter</a> <br /></small><br /><br /><br /> <br /><br />20th draft: 01/10/03 <br />©1989 Ronald C. Southern<br />rcs. <br /><br /><br /></span>Ron Southernhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08604305014713612990noreply@blogger.com7tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6900460.post-34127622609782500042007-06-16T17:39:00.000-07:002007-06-16T17:52:31.948-07:00Lady's Blouse"Half‑wit," he said. <br /><br /> He was talking to himself, which was not unusual. It was a quiet summer afternoon from one end of Mosquito University to the other, including the sleepy labyrinthine halls of the Greenwich Liberal Arts Building. On Fridays, most of the students and staff went home at midday. Some of the faculty stayed late, either to lounge or to catch up on their work, and of course there was always a skeleton crew of maintenance workers. Johnathan, the "bug man", at the top of a six‑foot ladder, had been feeling pretty sleepy himself. He now hovered, eyes damp and bleary, over exotic Dr. Almquiski's desk and sighed. The woman below him had long beautiful bright red hair, but he wasn't looking at that. He was staring down her blouse. <span id="fullpost"> <br /><br /> He didn't usually do such things, but he was in just the right position for it. Nonetheless, he was trying not to be too obvious. He liked the view, but he didn’t want to make a scene. <br /><br /> "I didn't used to do this sort of thing," he told himself reproachfully. Sometimes lately he worried himself. <br /><br /> Her blouse wasn't cut all that low, but it was loose and fell away from her in just the right way. He could see the long graceful curves of her plump freckled flesh as it bulged out and sloped downward, terminating at last in sharp, beautiful tips. He almost licked his lips. <br /><br /> The nameplate on her oak desk said "Dr. Rita Almquiski". A crooked half‑smile of chagrin appeared on his face and he rolled his eyes. Voices in his head were insinuatingly singing: <br /><br /> <br /><br /><em>"Love‑lee Ree‑ta Mee‑ta Maid, <br />Nothing can come between us!" </em><br /><br /> "Goddamn half‑wit!" he told himself. <br /><br /> He had been to her office a couple of times the week before to check for wasps above the suspended ceiling. Late one afternoon, after everyone was gone, he'd used the electric duster in her office and several adjacent offices to coat the area above the ceiling with boric acid dust. He'd only come in today to check his success. Everyone, including Rita, said the problem seemed to be solved. He wanted to see for himself, he said, and brought in the ladder. He knew that his fiddling around above the ceiling was taking too long, and he suspected from her expression that she knew it too. <br /><br /> As a rule, he liked to get out of these offices quickly; he didn't really care for strangers, and, besides, the more often he worked in offices, the more firmly convinced he became that he was going to lose his temper with someone. There were too many people doing "clean" work in offices who were unpredictably hostile to people like him, who did their dirty work for them. The office workers were demonstrably more crazy, too. <br /><br /> "Which is a pretty great accomplishment," Johnathan thought, "since most of us are pretty crazy!" <br /><br /> Most of the office workers on campus were women, of course—who else would work so cheaply for the State?—which made it all fit together nicely as far as he was concerned. In his mind, at least, women and craziness were inextricably linked. (Either they were, or else made you feel crazy.) <br /><br /> "Secretaries," he'd told his friend Ike, "are God's major illustration of that point." <br /><br /> "Yeah, there's really nothin' uglier, I guess, than a beautiful woman in an ugly mood," Ike had grinned cheerfully. <br /><br /> "Yeah, exactly," Johnathan smiled. The Negro custodian pleased him very much sometimes with his astute observations. The old man was nearing mandatory retirement and was one of the few people Johnathan ever enjoyed talking to. The old man read a lot and was very well informed for an uneducated man; still, none of his "intelligent" habits changed his "low-class" drinking habits. He was a lush from the word "Go". He wasn't exactly "impressed" with Johnathan, but for some reason the old man found the younger man amusing. <br /><br /> "I've sure met a lot of secretaries like that," Johnathan insisted. "Women who were so beautiful. And yet so ugly about it." <br /><br /> "Beautiful‑but‑ugly," Ike nodded agreeably. "Yep, that's right. Those bitches are all over the place. If you pay enough attention, though, you might find the other kind, too. There's some women that are butt‑ugly, but beautiful, you know." <br /><br /> "What?" <br /><br /> "You heard that song about, 'If you wanna be happy for the rest of your life, make an ugly woman your wife?', haven't you?" <br /><br /> "Yeah, sure," Johnathan said. <br /><br /> "Same thing," Ike told him. "It ain’t rocket science.” <br /><br /> "I see." <br /><br /> Johnathan often thought he "saw". He worked in a variety of buildings every day and he watched people and drew conclusions. He was smart, though he was never as smart as he thought he was. Well, who was? <br /><br /> "All these people who work in offices go bug‑shit crazy from the lack of windows and fresh air," he insisted. "That's my theory." <br /><br /> "You figured it out, huh?" Ike laughed. <br /><br /> "Sure, I'm a fuckin' genius.” <br /><br /> “A rocket scientist,” Ike nodded as he lit a cigarette. <br /><br /> “Anyway, I figure the buildings all have air‑conditioning, but that's hardly the same thing as fresh air. Even air doesn't really have that much to do with it, though. It's that they can't be in the world and can't see it, either, not even as they work. The buildings have all been denatured, and so in a manner have their inhabitants. Half of the secretaries on campus think that the world owes them an apology because they work in buildings where sunshine can't fall, breezes can't stir, and butterflies can't rise on the wind." <br /><br /> "Well, maybe the world does owe them," Ike teased.<br /><br /> "Maybe so, but I can't do anything about it!" <br /><br /> Ike argued with him a while, pointing out that some of the secretaries on campus were the best people in the world. He mentioned some names they both knew and Johnathan grudgingly had to agree. The women around campus did their best, he supposed, under the circumstances. <br /><br /> "That still doesn't explain these other ones, though!" he snapped. <br /><br /> "There ain't no explainin' 'em," Ike said. "Just like there ain't no explainin' guys who are sons-of-bitches. Either fuck 'em or fuck it, you know?" <br /><br /> Back in the present, however, Dr. Almquiski was no secretary. She was an English professor, even though she was a foreigner. "That makes a lot of sense," he considered. And she did have one small window on the second floor, so maybe she wasn't as crazy as the others. "I'm getting more and more sensible as I go along!" he thought mockinging. <br /><br /> Or maybe the window explained everything. You can never be sure. At first, as usual, he'd talked to her about the weather and so forth—all the safe, dull things that you have to talk about to someone you don't really know. She'd smiled and talked freely for a while, speaking in that slight and charming accent, then all of a sudden she'd clammed up. Had she misunderstood something he'd said and taken offense? It was possible; even if she was a goddamn English professor, this wasn't, after all, her native language. Maybe she'd missed a "nuance" or some such thing, he thought. Yet she must have been in this country for a good while—she didn't have that lost look at all. She was bound to understand. Maybe she'd just gotten bored with him. "That happens often enough," he sighed. <br /><br /> She shuffled papers rapidly across her desk and started marking them. He'd gone back to trying to get the screws back in the light fixture, working slowly. Some of the screws didn't want to screw in. He'd never been in her office before and, for all he knew, might never get sent again—he might as well enjoy the view while he could. The job hadn't been too hard, and looking at her was easy. Very easy. He sighed again. He'd stretched out the job about as long as he could, though; he was going to have to speed it up. He noticed she'd stopped and started staring at him. For the last few minutes, she'd been working sporadically, looking up at him only now and then with a slight expression of annoyance. Maybe he should say something—hopefully, something sensible—before he left. <br /><br /> "You're looking very beautiful today," he told her softly. <br /><br /> She looked up from her desk, glancing at him without much expression. <br /><br /> "Oh, hell, I shouldn't have said it," he thought nervously. <br /><br /> He'd only meant to say something friendly, something in passing. He hadn't much expected a response. A smile perhaps, or a raised eyebrow. Maybe she would just shake her head self‑deprecatingly, something like that. He'd seen it before. <br /><br /> "Well, shit!" she said, slamming her pencil down hard on the desk and breaking the point. <br /><br /> "What's the matter?" he asked, looking down at her in surprise. His face flushed and he felt a strong presentiment of trouble. <br /><br /> "I'm so sick of—!" <br /><br /> He waited, wondering. Sick of what? Compliments? <br /><br /> "I've been very busy lately," she said irritably. <br /><br /> It sounded like a complete non sequitur to Johnathan. Perhaps she knew it and was just being rude. He wondered if he should be rude in return. It was one of his defense mechanisms, and he was good at it. <br /><br /> "Am I boring you?" he asked. <br /><br /> "No, that's not it." She still sounded irritable, and it was irritating him. <br /><br /> She pursed her lips, picked up her pencil again and bit it. Then she leaned back in her chain, crossed her arms in front of her, and looked at him sternly. She spoke in a stiff, but amused, foreign accent. <br /><br /> "I know you think I don't know what you are doing, but I do, you know." God, her voice was charming, he thought. <br /><br /> "What?" he asked, suddenly realizing he might be expected to answer. Of course, he'd heard her perfectly well. <br /><br /> "What am I doing?" he asked in what he thought was an innocent tone.<br /><br /> "I suspect that you are just looking down my blouse," she nodded. <br /><br /> "She must have been in this country for a while," he thought, listening closely to her tone of voice. She sounded very firm, and she didn't have that lost look. She knew what she was doing. She probably did know what he was doing. His heart began to thump. He still wasn't putting his guard up as fast as he should, though. <br /><br /> Why had he told her that she looked beautiful? Did he think that was any kind of sensible thing to say? Had he thought she'd be bowled over by it or something? Why say it at all? He'd never even seen her before today and had no former view to compare her to. For the love of God, the sentence didn't even mean what it meant to mean! Except to say that he thought she was attractive. "Big deal," he thought now. <br /><br /> She was tall, slim‑waisted, wide‑hipped. Like some kind of virgin Amazon, though of course she was not that perfect. (All humans compare badly to human myths—he knew that much!) Her bright red hair, worn long and straight, seemed to pour down over her shoulders like cascading water from a high fall. It was gorgeous. Her face, pale and handsome, was slightly marred by a sharp‑edged witch's nose, on which her large green-rimmed glasses rested easily. Johnathan thought her nose was handsome, though it was hardly her nose that interested him. <br /><br /> Her prominent breasts, at which he'd been staring, were not as firm as he would presume Amazonian flesh to be, but neither were they clad, as he supposed a warrior's would be, in armaments impervious to daggers, arrows, or simple outrageous passes. In fact, two small fascinating arrow-points were pointed poutingly outward beneath the thin white fabric of her shirtfront. In short, he could see the damn things right through her blouse and he felt like making a grab for them! <br /><br /> "You've looked long enough," she added sternly. Her voice thrilled and irritated him; it sounded like that of the strict, stiff-necked teachers he'd hated and loved in elementary school. As if to complete the picture, she stood up and looked at him over the rim of her glasses. "You must see that I do not wear a bra. That has not much to do with beauty, yes?" <br /><br /> She had her arms crossed in front of her, yet her bosom was still plainly in view. She looked thoroughly intimidating and thoroughly inviting to him. Lulled by her voice in the quiet room, he smiled, enjoying her accent. It wasn't a thick or unpleasant accent, just an unusual tone, an off-the-beat syntax. For him, it was sexy, and quite hypnotic. <br /><br /> Finally he snapped to what she'd been saying and his face felt very hot. He wondered if he was blushing. Jesus! Why couldn't he stop staring?! Hastily he finished his work and climbed down off the ladder. He knew that the safest maneuver would be to deny the whole thing and get out of there as quickly as he could. That would be realistic. But Johnathan's grip on reality wasn't firm. And maybe hers wasn't either. Maybe she wasn't the kind of woman who preferred being lied to. She looked like a woman who could tell. <br /><br /> "I saw where you were looking," she persisted. "What does it have to do with beauty? That is what I asked." <br /><br /> "Beauty?" he said in a puzzled tone. "Nothing much, I guess. But it's as good a way as any I know for judging a woman that I don't know yet," he told her. Johnathan glanced again at the front of her blouse. Those prominent arrow‑points made his heart skip a beat. <br /><br /> "Christ, quit looking!" he told himself. <br /><br /> He felt that he was getting totally out of kilter, and far too far out of line. Maybe he shouldn't have said what he'd said to her, but she'd brought it up, hadn't she? <br /><br /> "Why do you have to judge?" she said sternly. "What's the point of that?" <br /><br /> Damn, he thought, she's got a question and an answer for everything. <br /><br /> "I don't have to," he laughed uncomfortably. "It's just the major flaw in my character, I guess." <br /><br /> He folded the ladder nervously, carried it out into the hall, and laid it down against the wall. She walked behind him with some papers in her hand, evidently getting ready to leave. Possibly she was getting ready to tell him off, too. He knew very well that he ought to quit talking to her, just get out now before anything went really wrong, but he couldn't stop himself. <br /><br /> "But why so judgmental?" she said. She was persistent, he'd say that for her. She sounded earnest, but her face looked scornful. <br /><br /> "Well—listen, I didn't mean the word that formally, lady. I just meant 'appreciate', that's all. It's not my fault if you're beautiful." <br /><br /> "It isn't exactly my fault, either," she told him. <br /><br /> "It isn't? No, I guess it isn't," he thought. <br /><br /> But he didn't really have time to think, he was supposed to be working. But, hell, if it wasn't her fault, then she couldn't take credit, and if she couldn't take credit, then what was she looking so smug about? <br /><br /> "Oh, well, I guess you're right," he said, trying to worm his way out of further conversation. <br /><br /> He said it to seem agreeable, and only being agreeable because it would probably save time. Not that he thought that being agreeable was likely to smooth her feathers any. He was starting to get the feeling that she wasn't angry so much as agitated, and that she didn't disapprove of him so much as she wanted to demonstrate how clever she was. He was fairly certain that disapproving of what he'd said was just her excuse for talking to him. Did she mean for him to demonstrate how clever he was or not? He couldn't decide. <br /><br /> "I'm sorry if I'm bothering you," he said, sounding bland, but feeling rather acid about it. <br /><br /> "No, it's not a question of 'bother'," she told him. "It's more a matter of your looking down my blouse." <br /><br /> "Back to that?" he asked grimly. <br /><br /> "Unpleasant subject, all of a sudden?" she asked with a grin. <br /><br /> "Sort of." <br /><br /> "You looked like you were enjoying it before. But good!" she laughed. "Yet not entirely so!" <br /><br /> "Not entirely what?" he asked. "Good or unpleasant?" <br /><br /> "Either! Don't you think?" <br /><br /> "You're confusing me now," he told her. "Maybe you're confused." <br /><br /> "Maybe I am. Maybe something else?" <br /><br /> She seemed to be asking him a question about her own feelings and he couldn't guess how to field it. <br /><br /> "You are confused," he said with a sudden grin. He was starting to get comfortable with her odd talk. He was starting to remember how nice her breasts had looked. <br /><br /> "Yes, but aren't you?" <br /><br /> "Entirely." <br /><br /> She leaned forward suddenly and kissed him lightly on the lips, then stepped back and smiled, almost shyly. He considered shyness rather unlikely in her, however, and felt uncomfortable all over again. What was she up to now? <br /><br /> "Uh, look, I'm sorry I brought any of it up, okay?" <br /><br /> "Ah! I wonder!" she said sharply, and looked thoughtful. "But I do not have the time," she added, shaking her head and shuffling the papers in her hands. She started to turn away. <br /><br /> "What the hell?" he thought. <br /><br /> They were in a dead‑end hallway that wasn't much traveled, especially not on a half‑holiday like this; nonetheless, he glanced both ways before he spoke. He already knew that most of the faculty and staff wasn't even in the building. Anything might happen. She had aroused him, of course. Her kiss had felt wonderful, but it had also frightened and irritated him. <br /><br /> "It wouldn't have sounded any better, would it, if I'd just said that you look eminently fuckable?" he said quietly. <br /><br /> "No!" she said quickly and frowned, looking as if the taste of lemon had suddenly flooded her mouth. "No, certainly not!" <br /><br /> "Oh. I didn't think so," he said. <br /><br /> The appearance of a few frown-wrinkles on her forehead made her look suddenly severe, suddenly older than he'd thought. Certainly not 30. He looked at Rita again. Or 40, either. "No, she's not that young." She was more beautiful than most of the college girls, but she must have been nearer to 50. "No matter, though," he thought, "she definitely has character." Who else would be having this bizarre damn conversation with him?! <br /><br /> "You are not as complicated as you think, are you?" she said, her frown suddenly dissolving. She looked as if she thought she'd solved some puzzle. <br /><br /> He smiled at her, feeling awkward and yet like the Cheshire cat. <br /><br /> "Why do some women always think they know so much?" he wondered. He gave her credit for being smart, but she seemed to see something else in him. Maybe she was looking at his work uniform and not at him. "This is great," he thought. "She's figured me out: I'm simple!" He felt like he needed to say something clever. <br /><br /> "Perhaps not. But no one knows that about themselves, do they?"<br /><br /> As soon as he'd said it, he realized it just another stupid thing to have said. He was deeply chagrinned. Clearly there was only one thing he knew that she didn't know—namely, that he wasn't as stupid as he sounded! <br /><br /> Rita nodded knowingly and walked away. He wanted to watch her walk, to see that wide foreign bottom of hers rocking and rolling inside her tight black skirt, but he was afraid she'd turn around and look at him. That's all he needed, was to have her assert that he was looking at her ass. Of course, he was, but he'd already discussed anatomy with her enough. <br /><br /> He managed to take his eyes off her bottom, went back into her office, and grabbed his few scattered tools. He tossed them into a wooden box, grabbed hold of the large dowel rod that served as a handle, and walked out into the hall. He was surprised to see she wasn't as far down the hall as he'd expected. She had paused, poised, half‑facing away from him, looking back over her shoulder. What was she thinking? Was she thinking at all? <br /><br /> "She looks awfully seductive like that," he sighed. "She looks like she knows it, too." <br /><br /> She faced him, taking several steps in his direction, and looking him up and down. <br /><br /> "So, you want to fuck me, yes?" <br /><br /> "Uh, yes," he said, now thoroughly confused. It embarrassed him that she said it like that, right out loud, there in the hallway. He'd felt safer when they'd been near her office. He hadn't said it nearly that loud. <br /><br /> "When?" <br /><br /> "Uh, any time, anywhere..." <br /><br /> Is that my big mouth, he wondered. Sure, he'd dreamed of saying something like that to a stranger like her, but now that he had, he wished he hadn't. Christ! <br /><br /> "Right now?" she asked, lifting her eyebrows and nodding her head toward her office door. <br /><br /> "Yeah, sure, I guess." What do I do now?! <br /><br /> "You do not sound too sure?" <br /><br /> "Listen, are you really serious?" <br /><br /> She smiled at him—it was that smirking look again—then glanced down the hallway in both directions. "Here, I'll show you," she said. Slowly and with some effort she pulled at her tight black skirt and didn't stop until she'd raised it all the way to her waist. As her skirt rose the first few inches, Johnathan was a little repulsed by the moderately thick dark red hair on her legs. <br /><br /> "Christ, it looks like she only shaves it as far as the hem of her skirt!" <br /><br /> Or maybe it was just how her hair grew. He wasn't against women being women, but he couldn't help it, he was used to regular fastidious American girls. It only took a moment however before he got vividly interested. She wasn't wearing any panties. Like many other men, his interest in vaginas was so universal as to be limited only to his own species. Coyly she patted herself. It was the most delightfully fluffy bush of pubic hair he'd ever seen. It was bright red, of course; he'd seen a lot of redheads, but he'd never had one of them show him her—. <br /><br /> "How you like my—umm, ah, what you call it? Ha! Good, hah?" <br /><br /> He'd never heard any woman smirk so much. She was still patting it, looking terrifically pleased with herself. Her tone seemed so prideful, and he wondered about it. He got the impression she'd done this before and knew its effect. No doubt the others had enjoyed the sight. He certainly did. <br /><br /> "No reason I should be different," he thought, and tried to swallow. <br /><br /> Involuntarily, he took a couple of steps toward her. <br /><br /> "No!" she snapped, holding up her hand to ward him off. "You stay there, for now! You just watch!" <br /><br /> He was ready to watch; she had his undivided attention. Her bush fascinated him as thoroughly as her hairy legs had upset him. His responses to signals like these were unerringly predictable. It's one thing that men understand traffic lights better than they understand most women, and quite another that, in all probability, traffic lights understand women better than most men do. Johnathan nodded his head as if he might say something, but didn't. His throat was dry and his ears were hot and there was a painful, growing tightness in his trousers. <br /><br /> "Egads, I could hammer nails with it," he thought idiotically. <br /><br /> Rita turned loose of her skirt, but it was so tight that the folds of the thin fabric clung to her belly and buttocks as tightly as a spider's web. She put her hands on the lapels of her blouse and pursed her lips as if tossing him a kiss through the air. <br /><br /> "Why don't you pull out your thing and show it to me?" she grinned. <br /><br /> "Uh—oh, ah—well, not here!" he spluttered. <br /><br /> "Okay," she said agreeably, sounding easy to please. "But is it a nice one? You can tell me that, at least!" <br /><br /> "Uh, yeah, sure..." <br /><br /> "Good. Anyway, it better be! You want to see more of this?" <br /><br /> Johnathan swallowed hard, then nodded nervously, and said, "Yes." <br /><br /> "Say please." <br /><br /> Why not? "Yes, please," he grinned. <br /><br /> Quickly she separated the snaps on her blouse and pulled it open. Her pale freckled breasts were heavy, yet seemed as finely and purposely shaped as artfully constructed pottery vases. Johnathan sucked in his breath. She moved her thumbs deliberately, slowly, across her nipples. He licked his lips.<br /><br /> "I'm dreaming," he thought, feeling faint. <br /><br /> She was an erotic cornucopia. Johnathan was terrifically excited and excitedly terrified. He thought about running toward her and he thought about running away. She was probably crazy. He was certain he was. <br /><br /> "Are you trying to give me a hardon?" he asked her. <br /><br /> "Nothing as nasty as that!" she teased him, grinning and closing her eyes. She slipped her hand between her legs. <br /><br /> "Nasty and crazy!" he thought. <br /><br /> He would have bolted right then, except that her face and arms flushed such a bright lovely pink! He stood there paralyzed, wondering if she flushed like that between her legs as well. What would it feel like to be inside her when she did it? Johnathan sighed. Rita definitely had nerve, he concluded. <br /><br /> He wasn’t certain whether she was more likely to consummate his passion or tear off his flesh and consume it! It was what he'd always wanted—a lewd and attractive woman coming on to him at ninety miles an hour, and yet it was—not exactly what he'd imagined. It wasn’t as if he hadn’t been scared of women before; he’d just never been scared Shitless! As he watched her, she shivered a little and shook her head. She said something in Russian—at least he thought that's what it was—maybe she was just telling herself to stop while she could. With a final shudder, she closed her blouse and pushed her skirt down, brushing hurriedly at the wrinkles. She straightened her collar with one hand and pointed to her office with the other. Her face looked very businesslike for a moment, then she smiled and spoke softly. <br /><br /> "You wait for me," she said, leaning forward and kissing his mouth again. "I will be right back." <br /><br /> She smiled brightly, then turned and walked purposefully down the hallway. <br /><br /> As she turned away, he still couldn't help admiring her behind. It shifted gently back and forth in her tight skirt. He felt like a dog on a leash; more than ever he wanted desperately to follow her and just as desperately to run away. He swallowed hard and stayed where he was. <br /><br /> He lingered in the hallway, pacing back and forth in front of her office. He was overjoyed and paranoid at the same time. If she was serious, he was in the catbird seat! But if she was teasing? What if she'd only nailed him down there so she could go call the Mosquito University Police Department and have him arrested? <br /><br /> He hadn't actually done anything, except speak to her, but sometimes, he knew, just speaking to women can be the worst crime. He could at the least lose his job. He was supposed to be working, not teasing lady professors into fondling themselves in the hallways, and certainly not boffing them in their offices, rutting around on the carpeted floor as if nobody had a home or a bed! <br /><br /> Maybe she'd simply gone for the day—he hadn't seen her carrying any purse down the hallway, but he hadn't seen one in her office either. Maybe she just meant for him to sit there in her office until his stiff crazy cock shriveled down to a Vienna sausage. <br /><br /> It hadn't happened yet, though. He shifted nervously from one leg to the other, as aroused as he could possibly get, as agitated as a kid who needs to pee, knowing that he didn't have the nerve to stay and wait. He was stewing in his own foul juices. <br /><br /> "Goddamn it," he thought miserably, "That is what she means for me to do!" <br /><br /> Oh, but maybe she really would come back. It was possible. She might get him naked and wildly excited, have him leaping and prowling around her office like a beast—then she'd snatch his clothes and laugh and run out the door with them! Where would he be then? Standing there like an idiot, his erection waggling, his ego flagging, his libido popped like a pimple. Job security kaput! He tried, but couldn't think his way out of it. There was no clarity in it, no clarity at all. <br /><br /> He waited a long time and she didn't come back. Twenty minutes, then thirty, passed. He got more and more nervous. His erection began to fade. At last he picked up his ladder and tools, and walked slowly toward the elevator, barely lifting his heavy black shoes, scuffling them softly but insistently across the smooth polished floor. <br /><br /> It was stupid to try to screw up the floor, he knew. Three times a year he had to pitch in to strip and wax them. It wasn't a job that he liked, and now he'd have reason to like it even less. <br /><br /> When he came to the fire exit, he glanced down the hallway to the elevator, but decided he'd better not. He knew he could get to the first floor and out of the building faster and more simply by taking the stairs. He didn't want to go past all those offices. He didn't want to see any faces. There was no telling what was there. Maybe Rita, maybe something worse. He had a sudden terror that if indeed he had escaped from anything, it wasn't by a very wide margin. Opening the door anxiously, he stumbled on the stairs, cursed under his breath, and wondered if he'd given up too soon. Had he screwed himself out of a fast and easy, loose lucky lay by being so neurotically fastidious? <br /><br /> "It's possible," he sighed. "Shitfire!" <br /><br /> Why couldn't he just forget it? How she'd found the key to him so quickly, he couldn't imagine—but she had. This wasn't anything to tell anyone about, not even Ike. The way he felt now, he wondered if he'd ever have the nerve to look down a lady's blouse on campus again. <br /> <br /><br /> THE END <br /><br />Current draft: 06/27/05<br />©1989 Ronald C. Southern </span>Ron Southernhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08604305014713612990noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6900460.post-58792907763651841502007-04-13T18:48:00.000-07:002007-04-13T19:15:36.851-07:00DominoesDominoes: The Theory and Practice<br /><br />Dogger Gatsby was lying in bed, lazily meditating about going to the bathroom, but at the same time contemplating how long he'd been without a woman until tonight. He'd been painfully celibate for the past four years and it'd made him a nervous wreck. Lately, he'd thought of nothing else. He was only in his mid-thirties and his sex-drive hadn't ceased, just the sex. He didn't know how it'd happened—or, rather, he didn't like to think how it'd happened. Something had gone wrong with his ego—that was all he'd ever admitted, even to himself. <span id="fullpost"><br /><br /> “I like this girl,” he thought dreamily. “Uh, young woman, I mean!” he corrected himself quickly as if she might be eavesdropping on his thoughts. It was hard to remember not to call them girls any more. “Boy, I feel good now!” He was sweaty and overheated, but he didn't mind that. He was luxuriating in sex, dripping with satisfaction. Other bodily functions could wait. He was young enough, he had good control of his bladder, if nothing else. <br /><br /> “God, I like fucking you,” he murmured happily. <br /><br /> The pneumatic young blonde beside him stirred and began to look uncomfortable. <br /><br /> “What's the matter?” Dogger Gatsby asked. He supposed it was his frank language that had bothered her. He had always had trouble keeping his tongue in check. Karen was nearly ten years younger than he was, and she seemed to see everything from a different perspective than he did. What they saw in one another was more or less a mystery to both of them. <br /><br /> “Oh, I don't know!” Karen said irritably. She flung the sheet back and sat nude on the edge of the bed, holding her chin in her palms and facing away from him. <br /><br /> He ran his hand down the small of her back and softly sighed. His penis felt resolute, his belly firm, but in truth he had the same ordinary soft organ and the same fat stomach that he'd started with earlier tonight. (The former had experienced a temporary glorious change, the latter had not.) He felt great and, feeling as good as he did, he had no idea what was coming. <br /><br /> “I've just never known anybody who fucked like that,” she finally blurted out. <br /><br /> “Like what?” He felt relief that she was speaking as frankly as he had. Maybe now they would understand one another. <br /><br /><br /><br /> “Well, sort of stiff and self?absorbed. Like you were just masturbating inside of me. And I don't like the way you talk about it, either. It isn't a joke, you know.” <br /><br /> “Gawd, what a tough cookie!” he muttered, more to himself than to her. <br /><br /> It wasn't the kind of frankness he'd expected. He reached for the corner of the sheet and pulled it up over his crotch and stomach. He'd overcome his fear that she'd despise him for being overweight these past few weeks and then, as he always used to, forgot about it entirely when they began making love earlier in the evening. Now that she was acting like this, though, he began to feel uncomfortable again. <br /><br /> “Well, it might be,” he said after a long silence. <br /><br /> “Might be what?” <br /><br /> “A joke. Who sent you, anyway?” he said bitterly. <br /><br /> “What?” she asked, scrunching up her eyes at him. He shook his head and waved his hand. Had she never heard a rhetorical question, he wondered? <br /><br /> “Never mind. You know, I wonder if the problem might be that you're just too innocent.” <br /><br /> “What?!” she asked incredulously. <br /><br /> “Maybe you're only now finding out that sometimes life just sucks,” he told her. <br /><br /> “What are you talking about?” <br /><br /> “That nothing's perfect,” he said. “And if that's the case, you're sort of overreacting to the bad news, aren't you?” <br /><br /> “Good Christ!” She blurted out the second word with a vehemence that made it sound like the most terrible epithet in the English language. <br /><br /> “I just don't understand where that kind of comment comes from,” he said. <br /><br /> “It comes from me!” <br /><br /> “Yeah, well, I figure it does, but—.”<br /><br /> “And I don't understand you!” she added vehemently. <br /><br /> “I guess not. Listen, you aren't taking something else out on me, are you? How are things in the rest of your life? You aren't just punishing the nearest cock or something like that?” <br /><br /> “God, I just can't believe the way you talk!” Karen sneered. <br /><br /> “You've got an answer for everything, don't you?” he said. <br /><br /> She turned her back on him and shrugged. He pulled the rest of the damp sheet out from under him and tucked it under his neck, then shifted his bottom and shivered. “Jesus, now I'm naked on the wet spot!” he thought. He didn't understand why that should disgust him so, but it did. “Hell, it's my wet spot, after all.” He was confusing himself, and he knew it. He had meant to be thinking about what she'd said, not communing with wet spots on the sheets. <br /><br /> “You don't know a goddamn thing,” she said bitterly. <br /><br /> What could he say to that? Even if she'd just made it up to hurt him, even if it meant something else, it was exactly the right thing with which to crush him. He sighed and thought about pulling the sheet the rest of the way over his head. He could just wrap himself up like a dead man and hide until she left. But, no. He decided to brazen it out. <br /><br /> “It felt that good, huh?” he asked. <br /><br /> “Well, don't get in an uproar about it,” she drawled. “It isn't as if we were in love. I don't have to pretend you're a great fuck if I don't want to.” <br /><br /> “No, I suppose you don't,” he told her. “Where do they come from?” he added, seeming to speak to the ceiling. He had spoken sotto voce, but not enough so. <br /><br /> “Where do who come from?” she frowned, glancing around the dimly-lit room. <br /><br /> Dogger grimaced—he hadn't meant for her to hear him—but grinned at her suspicion that someone else was in the room. “Nice women like you,” he answered. <br /><br /> “Nice women like me?” she asked. “Why should you say that about me?” <br /><br /> “Irony, just irony. I mean cutthroat women. Except throats aren't usually what they cut.” <br /><br /> “Oh, go to hell!” she snapped at him. “You just think I'm—!” <br /><br /> She paused, looking frustrated and furious, unable for a moment to think of anything terrible enough. “You think I'm some kind of goddamn sex-doll, don't you?!” <br /><br /> “Where do they come from,” he wondered? “The same place as guys with inadequate whatchamacallits, I guess.” <br /><br /> Karen stood up and swivelled her head rapidly, her mid-length blonde hair swishing smoothly back and forth. Her unblinking gaze scanned the room savagely. She reminded him of a snake looking for a place to strike after it's been stepped on. <br /><br /> “Goddammit, what's happened to my goddamn clothes?” she demanded. <br /><br /> Dogger looked at her, but didn't answer. “Her stupid damn clothes might be anywhere,” he thought, “including the next damn county!” When she'd taken them off so hurriedly a little while ago, her interest in him had been as passionate and promising as her current mood was cold and condemnatory. He couldn't fathom the change in her, but he didn't want to, either. <br /><br /> Karen bent down and snatched her brazierre and panties off the floor. She put the bra on first, which struck him as somehow backwards. As her breasts disappeared from sight, he noted the unattractive red spots on them that she'd gotten from sitting on the edge of the bed with her chest pressed against her knees. He tried to remember a word he'd heard which might apply—was it “sanguine” or “sanguinary”? He wasn't sure, he could never remember which was which. One had something to do with blood and the other with being optimistic. It probably didn't matter much; he was always remembering irrelevant things and forgetting important ones. <br /><br /> “No, you're right; we're not in love, are we?” he sighed. <br /><br /> She said nothing, he noted, just slipped quickly into those silly pink panties with the white embroidered rabbits. <br /><br /> “Cute rabbits,” he'd told her when he first saw them, and she had been pleased. But he only liked her panties because she was in them and because he had expectations of getting her out of them. He hated the notion of a woman he was sleeping with wearing those little-girl rabbits. It had made him feel like a cradle-robber when he'd finally stripped them off of her. <br /><br /> “How cute can cute be before you puke?” he thought now, seeing them again. He was starting to get a headache and definitely didn't want to think about rabbits. He poured himself a drink from the bottle of Tangueray gin on the nightstand and made a face. There was still ice, thank God, but he'd run out of ginger ale. <br /><br /> “A tragedy in the making,” he muttered. He preferred to water down his drinks. Just at the moment, though, it might not hurt to get drunk as fast as he could and not be so damn fastidious. He sipped rapidly. <br /><br /> “No reason to be very particular, I guess,” he said aloud. <br /><br /> “What?” said a muffled, faraway voice. <br /><br /> What the hell? Where was she?! He couldn't see her, but she was there somewhere. <br /><br /> “What?!“ she repeated from somewhere. Her voice was louder, but just as muted. <br /><br /> “Good Christ, she's under the goddamn bed!” he groaned. “What is she, a root-hog or what?” <br /><br /> He leaned out over the edge of the mattress with an almost childish sense of trepidation as if, in the current semi-darkness of the room, he half-expected the bogeyman to jump out at him. (“Or should I say 'bogeyperson' these days?” he wondered. “Doesn't sound very scary, though.”) There was nothing to see, of course, except her buttocks and legs sticking out from under the bed. Karen's head was buried down there somewhere, assiduously searching for something, and she hadn't understood a word he'd said. <br /><br /> “What the fuck's she looking for, anyway?” he wondered. “Dust bunnies, probably,” he snickered. He resisted the urge to reach down and tickle her waggling behind. “Nice, though,” he conceded. “Even if she—” <br /><br /> “What?!” she yelled at him in a muffled, angry voice. “You'll have to speak louder!” <br /><br /> “Uh—I take it you mean that since we're not in love, we're not going to do anything to make the situation better?” he said, speaking louder.<br /><br /> Karen had come up from the floor and was pulling her sweater on over her head. When her face emerged again, she repeated again, this time clearly: “What?! Dammit, I can't hear you!” <br /><br /> “We're not going to make love anymore?” he yelled. <br /><br /> “Good god, no! What are you shouting about it for, anyway?” <br /><br /> Dogger frowned a moment, then nodded his head, smiled, and poured himself another shot of gin. “This is great,” he asserted. <br /><br /> “Do you have to drink like that?” she said. <br /><br /> It hadn't been very long since the last one, he was willing to admit that. But since she seemed to be more nearly making a statement than asking a question, he shook his head and stared at the ceiling. Suddenly he grinned; he'd thought of something killingly clever to say. He wanted to catch her eye, then pierce her through with his comment, but he couldn't even find her. Where the hell was she?! God, she could move fast! He leaned down to see if she was chasing dust bunnies under the bed again. No, not there. <br /><br /> “Christ, she's snuck out!” <br /><br /> Her disappearance irritated him, and yet he felt relieved, too. At least now he could get up and go to the bathroom. He swung one leg off the bed, then heard a noise and froze. He glanced down; there she was, crawling on her belly across the floor again, this time over by the sofa. <br /><br /> “Very odd girl,” he thought, moving back under the covers. <br /><br /> It wasn't her eye at all that caught his attention, but the broad dual bumps of her behind encased in those precious pink panties! Her pink posterior and the white backs of her legs were disappearing like some awkward wide-bottomed rabbit—bump, wiggle, bump—behind the sofa. He became aware of the smell of musk and sweat rising from the sheets and mingling with the gin, and he felt more intoxicated than gin could explain. <br /><br /> “What a butt she has!” he thought. What had always looked so good to him before began now to look more and more outlandish. “What do women have such butts for, anyway?” he wondered. <br /><br /> Maybe childbearing had something to do with it, but it wasn't clear to him. What did her butt have to do with that phenomenon? Just as he was ready to do some serious philosophical speculating, he heard a bump and saw the lamp on the table behind the sofa tilt suddenly and turn on its side. The lamp shade fell off and apparently hit Karen in the head. <br /><br /> “Ouch!” <br /><br /> “Don't wreck the fucking house,” he said softly, trying to keep his tone noncommittal. <br /><br /> Karen emerged with her dishevelled hair swept forward inelegantly over one eye. The other eye blinked repeatedly as sweat dripped from her forehead. There was an expression of triumph on her face as she held up her dusty shoes in one hand and her saggy-looking stockings in the other. Wisps of lint and fluff clung to the stockings and her forehead and forearms were smeared with a layer of ash-colored crud. <br /><br /> “Poor demented little Dust Bunny Queen!” Dogger chuckled. He pulled the sheet up over his head and shook until tears came to his eyes. He was overcome by his own perverse humor, almost hysterically so. <br /><br /> “I'm sure she doesn't think she's funny at all,” he reflected, wiping his eyes. He finally had to put the pillow over his face. He started to say something to her about how comical she looked, then remembered—they weren't on speaking terms. She'd probably just accuse him of treating her like a joke. “Even now,” he thought, “the worst thing about her is she doesn't have much sense of humor!” Of course, it was always possible that nobody had his sense of humor. “God's balls, though,” he muttered in a choking voice, “somebody's got to find this funny!” <br /><br /> “What's the matter with you?” She spoke disdainfully, barely glancing at him. <br /><br /> “You don't even want to talk about it now, do you?” he asked her. <br /><br /> He looked her in the eye, trying to keep a straight face. He hadn't quite given up on his question about the future of their sex together, but he couldn't get over how odd she looked, either. <br /><br /> “No!” she answered with annoyance. She hadn't forgotten his question either. She wasn't about to sleep with the son of a bitch!<br /><br /> “Not now?” he asked. <br /><br /> “No.”<br /><br /> “Not later?” <br /><br /> “No! Would you hand me my goddamn scarf, please?” <br /><br /> “Are you pissed off at me?” he asked her. <br /><br /> “No, of course not!” she told him in an infuriated tone, her face turning crimson. “I'm just not a fool, that's all. You put a lot of energy into—this exotic sex and stuff, I give your credit for that. But what I mostly want is a nice normal fuck with no apologies and not to have to feel like I'm a watermelon or that there's someone jerking off in there. I'm sorry if that hurts your goddamn feelings!” <br /><br /> She didn't sound very sorry, but Dogger was in no position to judge. He was too uptight. Besides, he was just a guy who used women to masturbate with. His opinions didn't count for much. He wondered if anything could be explained to her or if any right question could ever be asked. <br /><br /> “I've been so wrong about her so far that it really wouldn't surprise me if she laughed in a deep voice, ripped off her tits, and called me a homo. She's a tough cookie, no doubt about that. Maybe she has to be, though, if she's ever going to get what she wants.” <br /><br /> What did she mean about his jokes and “exotic sex” and feeling like a watermelon, for Christ's sake?! Even if his oral services hadn't been any fun for her and if he wasn't funny, was that really a good reason to smash him to smithereens as she left? Did she think, “He's got his, now I'll get mine!”? <br /><br /> “She might be right; you can't trust these masturbators,” he told himself. “They might do anything.” <br /><br /> Up to a few minutes ago, he'd liked her as well as he knew how to like her; she was the most pleasure he'd had since God was a boy. She certainly gave great head, though now he rather wondered why she did! Was it some kind of knee-jerk trade-off? Was she paying him back for his amateurish Watermelon Act, even though she hadn't liked it? Had she been trying to prove something that he, for one, didn't believe—that she believed in fair play? Why had it taken her so long to figure out that she was pissed off?<br /><br /> “Maybe she's a man after all,” he thought, “someone who knows too much to be burdened with only one cock? Maybe she—uh, he—needs a lot of them, and this is how she gets 'em! Or is she only looking for that absolute rarity, the perfect one? Good luck, babe—I mean, dude—there's no such thing!” <br /><br /> Should he try to stop her from going, he wondered? How could he stop her? What would be the point in it? She'd just told him practically the worst thing she could say about him, with no pretence of regret and no hope of remedy: he was a self-absorbed, gin-soaked jerkoff prick, and a substandard one at that. He wasn't fit to fuck. He should probably go jump in a river. <br /><br /> “The problem is,” Dogger considered, carefully pouring himself another drink, “you know, the problem is—I know how to swim.” <br /><br /> “For the love of God, what are you mumbling about now?” Karen asked. <br /><br /> “Uh—well, never mind.” <br /><br /> “What?!” Karen spat in an exasperated tone. <br /><br /> He didn't answer. She knelt hurriedly by the bed to pick up her purse and car keys. Dogger noticed something askew and watched. “Ever the keen observer,” he thought disgustedly, observing himself. Somehow he couldn't stop watching things happen even when what was happening was awful.<br /><br /> Yet all that was happening at the moment was that one end of Karen's purse strap had come undone. For a moment the purse was held in place beneath her arm, but as soon as she shifted her arm the bag turned sideways and spilled its contents across the floor. <br /><br /> “Shit!” she screamed at the top of her voice. <br /><br /> Apparently she was speaking to the walls or ceiling, since she wasn't on speaking terms with him. She glanced at him resentfully, then got down on her knees and hurriedly began to sweep everything back inside with the flat of her hand. It seemed like it took her forever to get all her minute cosmetic devices and other junk back in the bag. Dogger leaned out over that side of the bed and watched her. <br /><br /> “Having trouble, cutie?” he leered. <br /><br /> “You drink too fucking much, you know that?” she said. He nodded and shrugged. It was too much trouble to explain to her that he seldom drank. He was bound to get sick before the night was over. <br /><br /> Finally Karen had collected everything and stood up. Dogger Gatsby noticed something that she'd missed, a small white index card covered on both sides with handwriting. He said nothing. While she wasn't looking he leaned down, scooped it up, and smugly slipped it under the sheet. <br /><br /> “That's one thing she's not getting out of here with!” he thought. <br /><br /> “Where's that goddamn umbrella?” she said to the walls. <br /><br /> She was still collecting things. She sighed in relief as she spotted her umbrella under the coffee table. Dogger understood she just wanted to find all her stuff and get out. He began to try to think of her as if she was already gone, as if she were a character in some book he'd finished and could think about her or not, as he wished. He couldn't help wondering why she kept saying, “What?” all the time. Was she deaf? She certainly wasn't curious. <br /><br /> “If I cared anything for her at all, this sort of shit could kill a man,” he thought. Of course, it might kill him anyway if he failed to maintain his pose. <br /><br /> And if she'd cared anything for him—he couldn't help thinking it—they could have tried to work something out. Sex surely wasn't as set a thing as all that. People could talk, couldn't they? No matter how wrongly he'd done it, surely something different could be done, something that would suit her. If it wasn't enough, he could do more. If it was too much, he could do less. <br /><br /> “Less could be more,” he thought unsteadily. <br /><br /> He was dreadfully drunk now, but didn't mind it for the simple reason that he'd never been more embarrassed in his life. He kept thinking that there'd been other times when he'd had unhappy sex with women who'd had enough sense of humor or patience to smile and wait, to see what happened, or just to say what they wanted. God, how he loved the ones who'd say what they wanted! But none of them had nailed his privates to the floor and kicked him in the face like this. <br /><br /> “I never set out to have sex with a watermelon,” he thought plaintively. “It just turned out that way!” It was hard to think that Karen was ready to give up on him so easily, so quickly. “Oh, well, fuck it—I deserve it, I guess. I don't love her either, if that's relevant.” <br /><br /> He glanced up and saw that she'd finally gotten around to putting on her skirt. Trying to, anyway. That same awful brown cowgirl skirt she'd been wearing the first time he'd seen her, covered with green horses, lariats, and cacti. The first time he'd seen it, he'd loved it, despite himself; now he loathed it. She was having a terrible time stepping into the skirt; she tried one leg and then the other, cursing under her breath every time she failed, hopping a little nearer the bed with every failed attempt. When she got near the bed, she jammed her foot blindly toward her skirt and struck it forcefully against the bed-frame. She yelped, then tripped, pitched forward, and landed with her elbows in Dogger Gatsby's stomach. <br /><br /> “Oof!” he gasped, folding in the middle and pushing at her feebly. “Get off of me, goddammit!” he croaked. The jolt she'd given him had him about ready to urinate on her, whether involuntarily or otherwise. <br /><br /> Karen looked at him with hatred in her eyes, struggling to get up as quickly as she could. She was as horrified as he was at where she found herself. <br /><br /> It was an endless comedy routine, but Dogger Gatsby wasn't smiling. Self-consciously he wrapped the sheet a little more tightly around him and poured the last of the Tangueray into his glass. He took a big sip and squeezed his legs together. God, did he need to pee now! He was ready to wet his pants, though in fact he wasn't wearing any. When he looked back at Karen, she had just finished opening the skirt's zipper. She stepped into it easily now. <br /><br /> “That's clever!” he sneered under his breath. <br /><br /> “Well, goodbye,” Karen said. <br /><br /> She looked around, making one last survey to be sure she'd gotten all her things together. She made a grab for a couple of heavy shopping bags she'd had with her when she came in, hooked them both with one hand, then headed for the door. Dogger had never known a woman who carried so much baggage anywhere, much less to an assignation. Had she meant to move in with him or what? <br /><br /> “Guess I'll see you sometime,” she said. <br /><br /> “I can't imagine why,” he said. <br /><br /> “I guess that's right,” she said. <br /><br /> At least now he could go to the bathroom, he thought miserably. He was sitting on the edge of the bed, wrapped in his sheet as tightly as a bug in a cocoon and squeezing his legs together. He wasn't going to get up while she was still there if he ended up having to wet the goddamn bed. When she stopped in the doorway and glanced back at him, he glared at her, wondering if she was ever going to leave. She looked at him questioningly, looking him in the face for the first time since she'd started getting dressed. She nodded as if she'd found some answer there. <br /><br /> “I guess that's everything. Goodbye.” <br /><br /> As soon as the door closed, he kicked madly at the sheet wrapped around him, grabbed the index card he'd snatched off the floor, leaped up, and scrambled like a wild man for the bathroom. As he stood naked in front of the toilet bowl, splashing noisily and sighing with relief, he read with growing consternation the spidery hieroglyphics that Karen had crowded onto both sides of the index card:<br /><br /><small><i> “Dear Bernie: I tried to call you, but you weren't home. Did you spend the night with a whore or something? I hope not. I love you too much to even imagine that you'd do something like that to me. Besides, I'm always here for you. I love you and I'd do just about anything legal for you. All you have to do is ask.<br /><br /> “The other night when we were making love, I enjoyed you so much. All I could think about was when you'd be all mine again. I hope soon and I can't wait. <br /><br /> “I'd like for you to come over tonight to watch TV or play dominoes with me. I do miss you so much. I can't wait to hold you in my arms. Please call and leave a message on my answering machine about whether you're coming or not. I'll be waiting for you and I should be home at around 11:00. I love you!” </small></i><br /><br /><br /><br />THE END<br /><br />Current draft: 03/11/07<br />©1989 Ronald C. Southern </span>Ron Southernhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08604305014713612990noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6900460.post-21421136213032988572007-02-20T15:16:00.000-08:002007-02-20T18:37:58.369-08:00Luck Of The Road“It feels like we've been on this highway forever,” Sam complained. <br /><br />“We couldn't have found a better place for it,” Rick said. <br /><br />Rick had his hands in his pockets and was kicking a small smooth rock back and forth along the edge of the asphalt. He hadn't looked up when Sam spoke. Sam knew irony when he heard it and didn't look at Rick either. He just didn't have the energy to respond. Both of them were overheated and disgusted. They were standing on the outskirts of a little town called Blythe at the eastern edge of California, but it looked like the middle of nowhere to Sam. <span id="fullpost"><br /><br />The desert wasn't far away and the Arizona border not much further, but they'd been stuck in this same spot all day, hatless under as hot a sun as he could imagine. With one hand he was trying to thumb a ride east while with the other hand he was wiping at his forehead over and over again. Beads of sweat reformed faster than he could shake his fingers dry. <br />The year was 1969. The hitch-hikers were in their early twenties. They looked a little scruffy, yet not much different from how they'd looked before they dropped out of college the year before. Still, they were conspicuous enough on the side of this dusty road. Sometimes they called themselves “freaks”, meaning it as an amusement. It was slightly less offensive and a little more accurate than “hippie”, a term invented by the news media to cover such a broad spectrum of human possibilities and eccentricities that it meant nothing at all. At any rate, both hitchhikers had had some trouble in the past with locals who thought they were from another planet. (In some parts of the country that year, it didn't take much deviation from the norm to end up branded inhuman. Thirty years later, it would seem as if the only people who wore their hair long were rock stars and those self-same rednecks who used to throw beer bottles out the car window—but the significance of that peculiar pairing is beyond the scope of this writing.) <br /><br />Rick, whose shaggy brown hair was dull-colored, had a blazing red-brown beard which he kept cut short. He never shaved or shaped it, which made him look a little like a Neanderthal. There was a gentle confusion in his eyes, however—something resembling the abstracted look of a panda or the stoned gaze of a teddy bear—that suggested he was probably pretty tame. <br /><br />Sam was stocky, considerably more bear-like in appearance than Rick, though certainly not a teddy bear. His nose was too sharp and so was his temperament. His moderately long hair, blond and curly at the ends, was carefully parted in the middle. It might have given his face a 1940’s look if it hadn't been for his beard, an unusually long goatee which seemed more to suggest beatniks than the full-faced beards of the hippies. To add to the confusion there was the shiny red-white-and-blue scarf he'd bought in Berkeley because it resembled an American flag, but wasn't. On one hand, freaks were not supposed to worry very much about what they looked like; paradoxically they were also supposed to “let it all hang out”, or, in the words of some song of the time, to “let their freak flags fly”. Thus Sam's appearance was a bit schizoid, consisting of an absolute disdain for what he thought of as fashion and a proud premeditated peacockery. <br /><br />“Son of a bitch,” Sam said numbly, loosening the scarf. His vanity had just caved in. He pulled it off and put it in his backpack, noting that small bits of softened road tar were sticking to the canvas pack. He licked his lips and spat. The heat and dust were horrible. Hitchhiking was horrible. <br /><br />Though Sam didn't see it, Rick was grinning. It was a rare sight; he was generally pretty stoic. He had, for instance, been listening to Sam gripe for a day and a half now without saying very much himself, though he wasn't having any better time of it than Sam. He could tolerate practically anything, he'd thought, including Sam's noisy bad humors about the discomforts of cheap travel, but now the heat was making him light-headed and Sam's complaints had become an amusing distraction for Rick. It gave him a sense of balance, and he liked keeping his balance as well as the next <br />man. He just didn't make as much noise about it. <br /><br />“Damn!” Rick swore softly, his expression of amusement changing to a preoccupied frown. He had kicked his rock too hard and it had skittered sideways toward the road. Sam saw it coming, but it went between his feet and landed in the middle of the blacktop before he could even think of doing anything. <br /><br />“Sorry,” Sam said. <br /><br />“No problem,” Rick shrugged. “Lots of rocks.”<br /><br />A few minutes later, it was Sam's turn to curse again. “I can't believe this!” He threw his arms up and let them fall to his sides. “I'm beginning to wonder if we'll ever get any further,” he said irritably. <br /><br />“California's a nice 'n easy place mostly,” Rick sighed, “but sometimes it just won't turn loose.” <br /><br />Sam grunted his agreement and lit a cigarette. He could have said more. He had wanted loose from California after only six weeks, but he'd been too embarrassed to just turn around and go home to Texas. He had already despaired of liking California when he injured his back in a ridiculous bicycle accident going down a steep San Francisco hill. He had fallen on his head and pulled nearly every muscle in his back. He was more seriously injured than he had first wanted to admit, and when he finally admitted it, he didn't want to go to a doctor, he just wanted to go home. He was sick and tired of California. <br /><br />Rick, also a Texan, had lived in Berkeley for a couple of years and seemed to like it, yet he had suddenly announced that he was going, too. Sam wondered if Rick was tired of California, too, or just homesick for Texas. A few weeks ago he wouldn't have believed it, but now he understood how someone can get desperately homesick for a place they were sick of when they left there. Now here they were trying to get back to Texas the only way they could afford, and not having much luck. Cars had been passing them by all morning. When he'd thumbed his way west, catching rides had sometimes been slow, but nothing like this. Broiling on a dusty highway like this was intolerable. <br /><br />“This is worse than Texas,” Sam said, “and I never even imagined anything worse than Texas.” <br /><br />“We're almost in the desert here, you know,” Rick yawned. “You've never really dealt with a desert before, I guess. You must have caught good rides coming out here.” <br /><br />“Well, maybe.” Sam took a short sip from an oversized canteen and spat it out. “This goddamn water was cold thirty minutes ago and now it tastes like it came out of a radiator! Let's go get something cool to drink.” <br /><br />Rick glanced at him with sleepy eyes, then at the brightly-colored restaurant on the other side of the road. They'd been trotting in and out of Sambo's every hour or so all morning, going for coffee and ice water and, of course, the air-conditioning; it was hard to stick it out very long in the open sun. If anybody was that tough, it certainly wasn't Sam. <br /><br />“What a ridiculous town to get stuck in, anyway!” Sam fumed. <br /><br />“What a ridiculous name for a town,” Rick said amiably. <br /><br />“That's true,” Sam snickered, suddenly sounding in a better humor. “It looks like the dark side of Middle Earth, doesn't it? There's hardly anything here but tourist provisions. If it weren't for these bright plastic gas stations and food joints, there wouldn't be any color here at all. Right behind the 'Food-Gas-Lodgings' sign, there ought to be one that says, <br /><br />'Welcome to the Desolation of Blythe. Free sun strokes with every purchase.'“<br /><br />“Well, I see you're in a better mood,” Rick said. <br /><br />“Don't depend on it!” Sam laughed, wiping his wet forehead. <br /><br />“Anyway, let's go see what the other tourists are eating.” <br /><br />As they were going in the door at the restaurant Rick yawned <br />again and said, “If we don't catch a ride pretty soon, I think we'd better split <br />up. Sometimes it's just impossible for two people to catch a ride.” <br /><br />Sam nodded. Rick was a more experienced hitch?hiker and was likely to be <br />right. Sam hated it, though. <br /><br />They sat down at a booth and Rick put his feet up and closed his <br />eyes. When the waitress came, Sam ordered something to eat, but Rick just <br />shook his head and dozed. It was well past noon when they came out again <br />and the sun hit them hard. Sam put his hand in front of his face and <br />frowned. <br /><br />“Shit, getting out of the sun didn't make it better, it made it <br />worse.” <br /><br />Rick, suddenly and fully awakened by the hot air, jerked his head <br />toward the sky and squinted. “What the hell did you eat, anyway?” he asked <br />Sam. <br /><br />“Something that looked a lot better in the picture on the menu <br />than it did in real life. And then it still looked better than it tasted.” <br /><br />“I actually like Sambo's food,” Rick said with a shrug. <br /><br />“Oh.” Sam shrugged too and wondered if Rick was running out of money. He wasn't very flush himself, but now he felt bad that he hadn't offered to buy Rick something. He tried to catch Rick's eye to see if there was any hunger or resentment there. Rick didn't look very concerned about anything, except that he kept scratching himself. Then he remembered why Rick was so sleepy and grinned. The fleas. <br /><br />When they'd gotten into town the previous night they'd searched all the closed service stations for the cleanest dirty rest room and that's where Rick had slept. The idea, of course, was to stay out of the cold. Sam, the less experienced hitchhiker, had been horrified at the notion of lying down anywhere that smelled so strongly of urine. Fortunately, he'd had a sleeping bag and had “volunteered” to sleep outside in the doorway since there was so little room on the rest room floor. <br /><br />The temperature dropped into the 30's, and Sam shivered miserably. His back was hurting, too, and it seemed like it took forever to get to sleep. By the time morning came, he'd only had a couple of hours rest and he ached all over, but at least he had gotten some sleep. When Rick came out of the Ladies Room griping about flea bites and not getting any sleep at all, suddenly Sam didn't feel as bad. (It's reassuring, sometimes, no matter how cruel it might seem, to feel that you're not the last man on the totem pole, that someone has it worse than you do.) <br /><br />“Fleas, huh?” Sam said, unable to contain a huge grin. <br /><br />“Fuck you,” Rick said instantly, but without heat. He never held grudges against people who were merely more comfortable than he was. Walking back to the highway now, Rick kept scratching and Sam kept grinning. <br /><br />“It could be worse.” <br /><br />“How?” Rick said. <br /><br />“Hell, I'm not sure. I'm just trying to distract you from those fleas.” <br /><br />“I'm distracted enough, thank you,” Rick said. <br /><br />A half hour later by the side of the road, the bottoms of their feet felt thoroughly burned and Sam's head was spinning with the heat. <br /><br />“Shit, this is too much!” he said. <br /><br />“Yeah, it is,” Rick agreed. <br /><br />“What time did we get here last night, anyway?” Sam asked. <br /><br />“About eight o' clock, I think.” <br /><br />“Christ, that means we've been here over sixteen hours!” <br /><br />“That's about right, I guess,” Rick frowned. Suddenly they both felt like idiots. <br /><br />“It doesn't take long, does it?” Sam said, pointing to the hot asphalt. <br /><br />“No,” Rick answered, looking fidgety. <br /><br />“You're thinking that we ought to split up now, aren't you?” <br /><br />Rick nodded. Sam nodded back. There wasn't much choice. He would miss Rick. Having company on the road had been pleasant, but being stuck like this wasn't. It would be worth anything to catch a ride out of there. They flipped a coin to see which of them would go first, and Rick won the toss. <br /><br />“Well, see you in Austin,” Sam smiled. <br /><br />“No doubt,” Rick said. <br /><br />He wondered if he should shake Rick's hand or say something like “We'll meet again,” but they both knew they'd meet again and he didn't want to seem effusive. Rick never seemed very comfortable when people made too much of him, whether he was leaving or staying. Maybe he'd been too many places and parted company with too many traveling companions to worry about it. Sam shrugged his shoulders and smiled wistfully, then <br />picked up his backpack and moved away from the road. <br /><br />He watched Rick from a distance. In less than 15 minutes, a small pink car with bright splotches of primer paint and bondo all over it stopped and Rick got in. The VW bug took off with a lurch, leaving a small poot of beige smoke behind it. Rick stuck his long arm out of the window and waved twice without looking back. Sam was glad to see him catch a ride. “Maybe my luck will change with Rick's,” he thought. But after another 90 minutes in the heat, he began to feel jealous instead. When an <br />eighteen-wheeler slowed down and pulled to the side of the road just beyond him, he was more relieved than he'd been in ages. As the driver took the backpack and stowed it in the back of the cab, Sam noticed the “No Riders” sign attached to the windshield. If the driver wasn't going to mention it, though, he wouldn't either. <br /><br />“My name's Jake,” the driver said as Sam climbed in and closed the door. “Damn hot out there, ain't it?” <br /><br />“It sure is,” Sam answered loudly. “I feel like I've been broiled!” <br /><br />As the truck picked up speed, the engine noise and the wind rushing in through the windows made it necessary to shout. <br /><br />“Yeah, I can imagine!” Jake hollered. “Where you going, <br />anyway?” <br /><br />“Austin!” <br /><br />“Really? Austin's a great town! A trucker can always find a party and pussy in Austin!” <br /><br />Sam smiled knowingly at Jake, though inwardly he grimaced. <br /><br />He figured that now he was going to have to listen to a lot of self-centered sex talk. He'd had the experience before and thought it odd, how many of the men he'd met on the road had felt compelled to talk about women hefore they would talk about anything else. It was as if they didn't really trust one another until they'd made certain of one another's heterosexual constitution. Just as he was preparing to grin and bear it, the driver looked like he was remembering something and changed the subject. <br /><br />“You know, the last time I drove through Austin, I picked up an old man who was hitch-hiking on a day just about as hot as this. He was standing in the middle of nowhere, somewhere out toward Llano; cars were whizzing by him like he was nothin' but a signpost. I've passed up some oddball hitch-hikers in my life, too, but you know what?” Jake paused and leaned a little toward him as if he might take a guess. Sam shrugged. <br /><br />Jake slapped his leg and boomed, “That old man only had one leg!” <br /><br />Sam smiled politely. He wasn't sure just how decent it was to laugh at an old one-legged man stranded on the side of the road. Jake had no qualms at all, though; he thought it was hilarious. Sam began to think that the guy might be a little weird. <br /><br />“He'd been standing out there for hours with the asphalt burning the shit out of his one foot. Most men would've been hopping from one foot to the other for relief, but he didn't have any choice in the matter! He'd tried sitting down for a while, he said, but that just burned his ass! And there wasn't no shade anywhere unless he walked so far from the road that he'd never catch a ride!” <br /><br />“I guess that guy really appreciated seeing you then.” <br /><br />"Shit!" Jake spat out the window and then grinned. “I might as well've tried making friends with a rattlesnake. That old man was the most goddamn bad-tempered hitchhiker I ever met! You couldna made him madder if you'd pissed in his hat! Most guys you pick up on the road try to get along and not be a bother, but this old fart was mad at the world. He was mad because a thousand cars had gone past him that afternoon and didn't give a shit about a poor old cripple. And he was mad because he'd lost the leg in the first place!”<br /><br />“That's quite a list,” Sam thought. <br /><br />“And in particular,” Jake snickered, “he was mad 'cause he'd gone to Austin only meaning to visit his niece for a couple of days but he got pneumonia and had to spend two whole weeks in the hospital! Then, when he got out, the niece was out of town and he didn't have no money and the only way he could get back to Houston—which the hardheaded bastard was absolutely determined to do—was to stand out there on the side of the goddamn road like a fuckin' sideshow attraction!” <br /><br />“Sounds like an awful lot of bad luck for one old man,” Sam said. He was thinking, “This guy talks a mile a minute.” <br /><br />“Maybe,” Jake said, “but I kinda thought he'd made his own bad luck with that fuckin' bad attitude he had. Hell, I don't know, I guess he just kinda wore out my patience with his bitching and grumping all the way to Houston. By the time we got there, I'd heard his goddamn life story, including shit about everybody who ever owed him money and didn't pay and everybody who'd ever refused him a favor. I was so desperate to get rid of him that when he touched me for some money for the bus, I gave him my last couple of bucks just so I wouldn't end up having to drive his miserable old ass to his doorstep.” <br /><br />“Sounds like you got pretty sick of him,” Sam said. <br /><br />“You're goddamn right I did,” Jake said. “I guess he was about the least entertaining rider I ever picked up in my life. Yeah, I just about hated that guy by the time I got rid of him.” <br /><br />They drove on for a few more miles while Jake fiddled with the radio dial. The wind rushing in the windows was hot, but it was better than standing still in the sun. At least he was going somewhere. Apparently Jake couldn't find anything he liked on the radio, so he drove along talking amiably at the top of his lungs about everything that occurred to him, and a lot of stuff seemed to occur to him. He finally realized that the trucker wasn't weird, he was wired. <br /><br />“He must be on speed,” he thought, but as long as nothing went wrong, he didn't really care. When things did go wrong, they did it so suddenly that Sam never quite knew what had happened. <br /><br />“Shit, there's a cop coming after me!” Jake said. <br /><br />Jake squirmed around in his seat and began talking even faster, babbling something incoherent about company policy. Sam could guess what it was about and felt irritated. He wanted to tell him, “Christ, if you weren't supposed to pick me up, then what'd you do it for?!”, but then he pictured himself burning to a crisp back there in the desolation of Blythe and realized what an immense favor Jake had done him. It would be stupid to holler at the guy. All the while Jake was talking, he was slowing down and pulling to the side of the road, the cop right behind him. As he came to a stop, Jake's voice got a little clearer and he managed to finish his jumble of sentences with a single intelligible remark. <br /><br />“So tell him you're a bobtail driver, OK?” <br /><br />Sam's mouth dropped open to say something, but Jake had already jumped down from the cab and walked back to talk to the cop. <br /><br />“Christ God,” muttered Sam. Sam, the bookworm. Sam, who couldn't tell a Dodge truck from a Chevy truck unless he was close enough to read the letters on the emblem. “What the hell's a bobtail driver?” <br /><br />Through the mirror on the driver's side, he could see Jake talking rapidly and showing a pile of papers to the policeman. He turned around and lit a cigarette. Maybe if he just ignored the situation, the cop would give up and go away. The next thing he knew the cop had climbed up onto the cab on the driver's side and leaned in. He looked around the cab appraisingly, as if he already owned it, then grinned at Sam as if he might own him too in another minute. <br /><br />“This old boy says you're a bobtail driver. Izzat right?” he said. <br /><br />He sounded as if he thought it was the funniest thing in the world. “Come <br />on, lemme see your license.” <br /><br />Sam found the situation nerve-wracking, and the evil leer on the cop's face wasn't helping. “How the hell did I get in the middle of this anyway?!” he wondered. “I have no reason to lie to the cop, but I don't want to fuck Jake over, either. Crap!” He got out his Texas driver's license and slowly handed it over. <br /><br />“Listen, officer—I don't know why you've stopped this guy, but I'm just a rider. I don't even know what a “bobtail” is.” <br /><br />If possible, the cop grinned wider than before. Apparently, this was splendid news. “Yeah. Yeah, that's about right,” he laughed, then jumped down from the cab and walked away, still holding Sam's license. <br /><br />Sam's face burned. He felt idiotic. For all he knew, a bobtail driver might be somebody that didn't even drive. He might even have been willing to lie about it, if only he'd known what lie to tell! He'd never felt more awful about telling the truth in his life, or more compelled either. For a heartbeat, perhaps, it had been a dilemma—but he was too far from home, and he hadn't met a cop yet who liked his looks. <br /><br />“I just can't afford the hassle,” he told himself anxiously,” piling one good excuse on top of another until he'd covered every angle. No matter what he told himself, though, he still felt like a moronic shit. <br /><br />“Goddamn it,” Sam muttered, “why do these guys always have to try to be so goddamn intimidating? They've got the power, what else do they want?” <br /><br />Jake came back and slowly got in the truck, looking dejected and beaten. He leaned his head down for a moment, then started the truck. The cop pulled out onto the highway in front of him and waved his arm. Jake followed him. <br /><br />“You were a lot of damn help,” Jake finally said. <br /><br />“I guess so,” Sam answered, feeling horribly guilty. “But I don't even know what a bobtail is, how was I gonna lie about it?” <br /><br />“Shit,” Jake said, “everybody knows what a bobtail is!” But he seemed to be talking to himself now. “I'm in so much deep shit now that I don't know what I'm going to do. The company's gonna grab me by one nut and this fuckin' cop by the other one.” He leaned his head forward, smacked it against the steering wheel, and said, “Jesus God, I am just fucked, fucked, fucked!” <br /><br />After that, Jake brooded silently. Sam didn't dare say anything, for fear he'd start banging his head again. Jake was weird indeed. Maybe this wasn't such a bad idea, after all, Sam thought. Somebody needed to take this guy off the road. <br /><br />The wait at the station was interminable, though all they did was leave him alone to worry about what would happen. Eventually he saw Jake going down the hallway with his head down, muttering to himself and looking lost. He got a drink from the water fountain, nodded at the cop who'd brought them in, then turned and walked straight out the door. A minute later Sam could hear the big truck start up and drive away. It was mystifying, but what did he care if they turned Jake loose? So long, <br />sayonara, good luck, it's my turn next! <br /><br />He expected that they'd eventually play some interminable game of twenty questions with him, but what they were doing was digging around trying to find some esperado's description in their files that would fit him. It seemed to Sam as if it was taking forever. <br /><br />“Cops love to make you wait,” he grumbled. <br /><br />Apparently he didn't look like any criminal of currency, for they only questioned him briefly, then told him he could go. They took him to the front door and nodded their heads down the road. He'd lost his sense of direction when the truck had left the main road, but the cops didn't look like they cared to be asked. He shouldered his backpack and started walking, unsure whether this was the way back to the highway or not. <br /><br />“I wouldn't put it past them,” he thought miserably. <br /><br />“Just keep on moving,” one of them said sternly. <br /><br />“There's an original line,” Sam thought. He had to make an <br />effort not to laugh. <br /><br />As he passed a road sign, he turned and looked back at the station. The cops were still standing around watching him, smiling as if they knew something he didn't. He nodded grimly to himself, considering it highly probable. He'd played these games before. He glanced at the city limits sign behind him, then looked again. He wanted to laugh, but he didn't have the heart. The sign said everything: <br /><br /><strong>WELCOME TO SURPRISE, ARIZONA </strong><br /><br />“Mother of God,” he muttered. <br /><br />Surely that wasn't what had the cops going, though; it didn't make sense that they'd be laughing at the name of their own town. As soon as he got out of sight of the police station, he was, without knowing it, in another jurisdiction, another town even smaller than their own. He hadn't been away from the Surprise police more than ten minutes when a squad car of a different color pulled over to check him out. A very young and very overweight cop got out and grinned at him, hardly able to contain his amusement. Sam recognized what these sniggering cops were up to, but <br />knew better than to show it. While the cop sat in his squad car and talked on the radio, Sam fidgeted, thinking that he'd talked to the wrong end of more cops on this trip than he had during his entire life as a motorist. He'd decided that cops just didn't like people moving around much, at least not without four wheels. It seemed to him that the police wanted everyone to just sit home watching television; it would make their jobs so much easier. <br /><br />The young cop got out of his car and walked back over to the hitchhiker. He tapped the backpack with his foot and said, “You wanna dump that shit out?” <br /><br />“Sure, Sam said, “I've been waiting all my life to do it.” No, he didn’t actually say that. He just wanted to. <br /><br />It was hardly the first time that his stuff had been searched. <br /><br />While the Arizona cop leaned down and poked his billy club around slowly in the jumble of clothing, careful not to touch anything with his hands, Sam smiled, reminded suddenly of a cop back in Bakersfield. “This guy could be his nephew,” he thought. When he'd hitchhiked west his first impression had been that California cops were polite, no matter what kind of scum they thought you were. But up until Bakersfield, he'd only been stopped by the clean-cut men of the California Highway Patrol. In Bakersfield he and Rick and some other hitchhikers had piled up by accident near an overpass on the outskirts of town. Someone brought up the subject of small-town cops and Rick had said this looked like the kind of place where they liked to catch you. <br /><br />A skinny young girl with long blonde hair laughed and said, “Imagine John Wayne with plenty of belly and billy club—and proud as punch of both!” The girl seemed far too young to know so much, but she didn't think so. <br /><br />“Isn't Merle Haggard from around here?” a guy with a blonde surfer cut asked her. The others assumed he was her boyfriend. <br /><br />“That's right!” she said. “I grew up around here and I know these guys better than I care to think. They're all weird and self-righteous! And the cops,” she giggled, “they wear so much aftershave that you can smell them from further away than a college sorority girl!” <br /><br />When the cop from Bakersfield arrived a few minutes later, Sam sniffed aftershave at twenty paces and frowned, wondering at the girl's accuracy. Rick shrugged. A chunky middle-aged cop with a bad complexion and red hair that looked like it'd been dipped in a french-fry vat got out of his police car, hitched up his pants awkwardly and stared at them. <br /><br />When he took off his dark glasses, Sam whispered to Rick, “He must be the ugliest man I've ever seen—doesn't seem much like California.” <br /><br />“It is,” Rick said. <br /><br />“Watch this,” Sam said, facing away from the cop and grinning at Rick. “He'll be on my backpack like stink on shit.” <br /><br />He was right. He'd wished several times already during this trip that he hadn't brought the large backpack because so few cops could resist the idea that it must be filled with contraband. The worst thing it contained, however, was his dirty clothes, sealed tightly in a plastic bag. He had begun to suspect that the cops just liked to mess up his stuff, not to mention his head. The only thing different about this cop was that he was too fat to bend down to inspect it. Sam had started unloading it on the ground, but the cop objected loudly. <br /><br />“No—shit, no!—put it up here on the trunk!” <br /><br />Sam narrowed his eyes and said, “Well, you know, this metal frame might scratch—” <br /><br />“That doesn't matter. Just put the damn thing up here!” <br /><br />Sam put it on the trunk, being careful despite the cop's disclaimer. He remembered the polite young California patrolmen and realized that this was a different kind of beast—a pushy middle-aged local boy with manners learned at home, not at any police academy. He didn't like transients and didn't have any qualms about showing it. Fortunately, the cop quickly got bored; he quit poking through the pack when it was still half-full. <br /><br />“Pack that shit up and get it off my goddamn car,” the cop said, <br /><br />not even looking at the hitch?hikers. He slipped his dark glasses back on and faced them, his hands splayed lazily on his hips. “You know, there's a saying in some towns I've heard of. You mighta heard it too. It says, 'Nigger, don't let the sun set on you here.' All you young longhair bastards better just assume you're that nigger.” <br /><br />It was deathly quiet for several moments after that. None of the young people dared to look at one another, though they badly needed to. <br /><br />Later somebody said glumly, “Amerika with a k. “Love it or leave it.” <br /><br />“Suck its red-white-and-blue dick or leave it, you mean!” the girl said angrily. She seemed to have tears in her eyes. “That's what the bastards really mean!” she added, flinging her small backpack on the ground and marching off down the concrete embankment. She stumbled slightly at first, then, picking up speed as she neared the bottom, skidded on her heels and lost control. When she reached level ground, she was moving fast. She pitched forward and scuffed her hands on the dirt, caught her balance just enough to turn her behind toward the ground, and sat down abruptly. Like some cats he knew when they'd missed their footing, she crossed her arms <br />calmly and continued to sit as if it'd all been planned. As if she weren't <br />crying. <br /><br />“I sort of thought she was tougher than that,” Rick said, glancing at her boyfriend. <br /><br />The boy glanced at Rick, obviously embarrassed. “Yeah, well, she sure likes to think so. She's the best piece of ass I've ever had, though.” <br /><br />He grinned at the others, knowing they'd understand, then slid down the embankment, his soft moccasins gliding with the grace and balance of a surfer, and sat down beside her. <br /><br />“If I wondered about such things,” Rick frowned, “I'd kinda wonder how those two ended up together.” <br /><br />Sam nodded, waving his hand as if to dismiss them both. He agreed, but there was nothing he could do about it and he was still annoyed at the cop. <br /><br />“You know, there could have been a load of guns or dope in my pack, but that lazy bastard knew good and well there was nothing there before he even started. He just wanted to make us keep moving.” <br /><br />“That's all any of them ever want,” Rick laughed. “Don't you know that yet?” Sam nodded again, too angry to say anything further. <br /><br />“Actually,” Rick grinned, “it's a pretty good thing we had the distraction of your innocent old backpack. I do, after all, have a few joints in my pocket.” <br /><br />Sam tried to grin back, though actually the information made him feel a little squeamish. He'd forgotten entirely about Rick's stash. He had a sudden flash of spending the rest of the night in some Bakersfield jail, not knowing if he'd ever get out. <br /><br />Back to the present—when the young Arizona cop finally finished with the backpack, he tossed it on the ground, put his dark glasses back on, and wiped his nose on his sleeve. <br /><br />“Well, keep movin', boy,” he said. Sam watched him drive away as if he had somewhere to go. <br /><br />“The silly shit isn't much older than me,” Sam thought irritably. <br /><br />What was this “boy” shit? He knew that the police were there “to serve and to protect”, but it seemed to him as if their major interest was in protecting everyone else from him. <br /><br />“But what the hell did I do?” he wondered bitterly. <br /><br />In the distance, he saw a pickup truck coming. He put out his thumb, eager to get moving. As the truck passed, an empty beer can sailed <hr color=crimson>Post Options Labout of the window, followed by a brawling voice, “Hey, hippie?shit!” <br /><br />“I'll be amused by this later in life,” he thought. <br /><br />He thought about the final scene in “Easy Rider”, gritted his teeth, and wished he didn't go to movies. He considered hiding in the high grass until morning, but if he did that, one set or another of these local cops was bound to find him and start the whole thing over again. There wasn't any choice but to keep on going, and he only had one way to go. He put out his thumb again, feeling uptight every time he saw anything resembling a pickup truck on the horizon. He was scared, tired, pissed off, and shit out of luck. <br /><br />Just as dark was coming on, a friendly middle-aged businessman picked him up and gave him a ride into Phoenix. The minute he hit the pavement, a young couple stopped for him and offered him a place to crash. <br /><br />That night he slept in a bed, and took a long overdue shower. The next morning, they ferried him to the outskirts of town and wished him good luck. As they drove away, smiling and waving, he thought, “At least everybody you meet on the road isn't crazy.” <br /><br />But the very next ride, an old man picked him up who talked incessantly and turned off of the main highway without mentioning it. <br /><br />Before Sam caught on to what had happened, he was hopelessly lost. The old man didn't seem to know where they were either. He had to do some fast talking just to get the old man to stop, and then he found himself stranded under a cloverleaf of overpasses so complex that he doubted whether anybody on it knew where they were or where they were going. It didn't matter much; he was under the damned cloverleaf, with no easy or legal access to the traffic. There was plenty of noise and activity overhead, but for all practical purposes it was the middle of nowhere. <br /><br />When he found his road again, he caught a ride from a farmer who only went five miles before he had to turn off. Sam wondered why the guy had even bothered, but figured there was plenty of traffic and he wouldn't have much trouble catching a ride. After traffic whizzed by him for an hour, he realized he'd been wrong. It was desolate and hot, not a stick of shade anywhere. It was worse than Blythe, and Blythe had been his limit. He started talking to himself. <br /><br />“Goddamn it, I can feel the goddamn heat through the bottoms of my goddamn shoes! I hate this!” Thinking about the one-legged man, he wondered, “Since I've got two legs, do I get to be twice as mad or half?” <br /><br />Another half hour went by and he felt he was getting delirious. He had a canteen of water with him; he was confident that he wouldn't die, but the water was sickeningly hot. When the shiny white Cadillac with the California license plates began slowing down, he could hardly believe his luck. He glanced in and caught a vague impression of a handsome, dark-haired cowboy with broad shoulders, wearing a fancy hat and dark <br />wraparound sunglasses. <br /><br />“Toss that in the back and jump in,” the cowboy said. Sam gently eased his backpack onto the floorboard, but apparently took too long. <br /><br />“Come on, buddy, get in!” the cowboy said. “It's mighty hot out there. You lettin' the cool stuff out!” <br /><br />He nodded and smiled at the driver appreciatively, then slid delicately across the blue velour seat and closed the door as quickly as he could. The guy behind the wheel must consider himself a very sharp dresser, Sam thought; everything he had was new and crisp and creased. <br /><br />He was wearing what appeared to be a very expensive hat, a bolo tie with bright chunks of irregularly-shaped turquoise, and a well-tailored suede jacket. Then Sam caught sight of the cowboy's faded old pants and smiled to himself. He wondered why cowboys were always getting that dressed up and then just wearing their jeans with it. It was as if they always had one foot placed tentatively in clean-cut, middle-class middle-America and the other planted stubbornly in some mudhole of the old west. <br /><br />The hitch-hiker noticed all of this at a glance, but what he noticed most was the air-conditioning. The AC was turned up full blast. He leaned back and closed his eyes. <br /><br />“Thanks,” Sam sighed. “I really needed this ride!” <br /><br />“Yeah, boy, it must be pretty bad out there,” the driver drawled. <br /><br />The cowboy was slumped so low and lazily in the car seat that it looked like he'd been glued there or born there, as if he and his white Cadillac were one machine or beast. The words he'd spoken had been friendly enough, but then he'd shrugged his right shoulder as if it made no never?mind to him and pressed down hard on the accelerator. Suddenly they were flying down the highway. At 80, Sam looked at the speedometer and hoped that was it, but it wasn't. The cowboy kept the pedal to the metal. <br /><br />The hitchhiker felt a little nervous, but couldn't see any point in worrying <br />about it since the driver's aim seemed rock?steady. It was good enough that he'd gotten out of that murderous sun! God, the car felt good! He didn't realize it, but he'd hardly begun to feel the full effects of heat exhaustion. He was far more faint and light-headed than he knew. The cowboy didn't seem disposed to talk much after those first few comments and that suited Sam, too; he didn't much feel like he could <br />keep up a conversation. In fact, he was starting to nod. Zooming down the highway like that was hypnotic, and conducive to sleep. He couldn't keep his eyes open much longer. Still, he didn't think it would be very polite to just fall dead asleep. He glanced at the driver, meaning to use his last ounce of strength to say something appreciative and friendly, and that's when he saw that the guy had his fly open and his hand in his pants. Sam jerked his head back and stared straight ahead. He studied the oncoming rush of white lines and wondered if he could just pretend that he hadn't seen anything. Son of a bitch! <br /><br />Well, but he had seen something. His mind spun crazily, like a narrow tire in a hip-deep mudhole, trying to come up with something that would minimize or reinterpret what he'd seen, but he couldn't get traction. <br /><br />Speaking of traction, the cowboy was still at it. It was real, even if it didn't make sense. “Maybe he's sick,” Sam thought. He shook his head and wondered why the hell that notion was supposed to make him feel better about being trapped in a car with a masturbating lunatic! “Listen, God, I don't think I have the energy to deal with this shit.” He realized his prayer wasn't very respectful, but then he wasn't usually very religious. <br /><br />He'd read in an underground comic book somewhere that there are no atheists in foxholes and now he knew it was true. He was under pressure and breaking fast. <br /><br />“Maybe he's just scratching himself,” he thought a few moments later. The cowboy was up to more than that, however. Out of the corner of his eye Sam could see what he didn't want to see; the bastard had taken it out of those tight-fitting jeans and was playing with it. <br /><br />“Dear God,” Sam thought wearily. His eyes kept trying to close. If the cowboy's intent was to freak out the freak, he'd done a good job. Sam was freaked. Heat exhaustion and panic were producing a hallucinogenic state of mind completely inappropriate to his situation, and he knew it. Thoughts that would ordinarily not have occurred to him passed through his mind without censor or censure. In effect, his brain had put out a sign: “You can make me stay awake, but you can't make me make sense.” <br /><br />“Don't do this to me! Help me!” Sam pled, arguing with his own mind, then froze—he was horrified that he might have said it out loud. Lord knows what the masturbating cowboy would think he meant by that! <br /><br />His scrambled brain made a suggestion: “You could just think of this as a chance to experience something new. You've had women, drugs, rock and roll and alcohol, you've had mild intellectual perversions out the ass. Maybe this is your chance to try something new? What the hell, no one will know unless you tell 'em! You're in the middle of nowhere—go ahead, get weird if you want to! If he makes you a proposition, just lean on over there and—” <br /><br />“Whoa, Jack! Christ!” <br /><br />Sam was a hedonist from way back, a voyeur, a backseat frontseat on-the-floor in-the-closet in the gutter libertine, an egalitarian willing to get naked with women of all persuasions whenever and wherever he could. He was a free spirit, a freethinker, a pro-abortionist, and all kinds of uninhibited progressive self-serving claptrap, possibly including a goddamn Johnson democrat (if his friends only knew!), but he wasn't any cocksucker, and this was too damn much! Yes sir, this had to stop. No matter how irresponsible a state his brain was in, there were some things that a good ole hippie boy from Texas still wouldn't do, not even in 1969. He'd just figured out one goddamned important one. <br /><br />He looked closely at the cowboy's face. He'd gathered a different impression when he'd first gotten into the car; on closer inspection now, the guy's face looked older and defaced by dissolution. <br /><br />“Christ, this old boy looks rough,” he thought. <br /><br />He wanted to do something—spit in the guy's face or scream bloody murder or something, for the love of Christ!—but somehow the big Cadillac seemed a lot smaller than it had at first. He was beginning to feel claustrophobic for the first time in his life. Even though the bastard must be pretty well distracted by the business at hand, Sam presumed that the guy hadn't exactly forgotten him. Who else was this stupid show for? He tried to think of some surprise he could spring, but nothing occurred to him short of bringing up his foot and kicking the goat-fucker's face in! <br /><br />“Sure, that's a great move,” he thought. “Wreck the car and kill the both of us.” <br /><br />Besides, he was worried about that bulging map compartment over there in the lower part of the driver's door; maybe this peckerhead had a rod of a different kind in there. “Watching a little lettuce-whackin' won't kill me, I guess,” he thought morosely, “but a gun might do the trick.” <br /><br />Suddenly his renegade brain began to argue. “Look, fool, you're just intimidated! This fruitcake can't shoot you while he's playing with his wang dang doodle! He needs one hand to drive, you know.” <br /><br />“Yeah, that's what you think. But I think this guy is loony-tunes. He might rather turn loose of the steering wheel than of his sausage, you know? Where would we be then?” <br /><br />“Oh, don't be such a candyass.” <br /><br />“Yeah, sure—now I'm a candyass for not wanting to jump out of a Cadillac going 90 miles an hour.” <br /><br />He checked the cowboy's movements in his peripheral vision and saw a bit more than he'd intended. “God, this twinkie does have a big instrument, doesn't he?” Sam was from Texas; he was used to cowboys who, other than a few idiot “Yeh-Haw!s" in the middle of the night were otherwise the most conservative creatures on the face of the earth. This tough-looking fruitloop dressed up like a cowboy was spoiling Sam's sense of balance worse than anything he'd ever encountered. <br /><br />“Silly bastard,” Sam thought with disgust. Every time Sam got up the nerve to glance at him again, the idiot was doing some new trick with it. Ugh! Never saw a cowboy do that! He wanted to say something cutting, <br /><br />but the most he could think of was, “Do you have to do that?” and all the guy would have to say was, “Yeah!” and that'd be the end of that. The cowboy started to hum along with a song on the radio and Sam decided to keep his trap shut. <br /><br />For some reason the phrase, “Leave that alone, you don't know where it's been!” came to his mind unbidden, drifting to him out of childhood memories. His mother or aunt used to say it about money, he wasn't sure which. In any case, it seemed to fit the hysterical humor he was in and he had to stifle a snort of laughter. It was sneaking up on him faster than a speeding Cadillac, and was threatening to turn into an absolute howl. He knew he'd better suppress it even if it choked him. He quickly turned his face toward the window and pretended to clear his throat. When some guy <br />is humming “Red River Valley” and playing rhythm guitar with his toodle-oo while driving 90 miles an hour with demon-accuracy, you don't want to offend him. <br /><br />He stole another glance at the cowboy's face. He had removed his hat and sunglasses, and Sam saw now that his dark hair was receding and very thin on top. He couldn't help feeling a sense of relief that the guy didn't look particularly strong. He was just a middle-aged phony-looking dissolute thing pretending to be a cowboy. If there was really no way around it, Sam figured he could live with hitting him. Maybe it ought to have been interesting, but it wasn't—it was exasperating and boring. He <br />was just too damn tired to appreciate the oddity of it. He felt like a sullen <br />child who'd stayed up past midnight. If he didn't lay his head against the passenger window right now and fall dead asleep, he'd... <br /><br />Sam woke up and almost immediately knew where he was. He felt better, but he still felt awful. He had no idea how long he'd slept. The Cadillac was still moving fast down a straight highway and he looked for a road sign to make sure they were still on the right road. When he saw that they were, there was nothing left to do but turn and face things, though it took a lot of effort to make himself do it. The cowboy was throwing a wad of Kleenex into the back seat and stuffing his salami back in his pants. <br /><br />Unless the cowboy was a truly marathon masturbator, Sam figured, he hadn't slept very long at all. <br /><br />“Well, maybe this won't be so bad, after all,” Sam thought <br /><br />hopefully. The guy might just be a showoff who had now done his duty. He didn't really believe it, but he was trying not to expect the worst. Looking on the bright side wasn't his forte, but someone he'd met on the road had told him that that was the best way to avoid bad luck. She'd talked a lot about “karma”, and Sam had laughed at the mystical-sounding word. He couldn't help thinking about her nostalgically just now. <br /><br />When he first got to California, he had caught a ride with a gentle young couple named Flowers and Charlie Showers. They were traveling the country in an old VW bus painted with the wildest psychedelic designs he'd ever seen. Woven through the wild design was the word, LOVE, over and over again. They were the most unrealistic people he'd ever met, but still the nicest. They talked about picking up hitchhikers no matter where they found them or what they looked like, or whether it was day or night, or—you get the picture. Sam had smiled and nodded, realizing that though he was the beneficiary of their philosophy and shouldn't complain, he wouldn't be able <br />to keep quiet. <br /><br />“But surely you have some sort of criteria?” he asked. Flowers took her granny glasses off and rubbed her nose, shook her head vigorously and grinned in his direction as if she couldn't quite tell where he was. <br /><br />“No, none,” she said happily. <br /><br />“But what if something goes wrong, what if something bad does happen?” Sam had smiled. <br /><br />“Well, that's just the luck of the road, isn't it?” she said lightly, shoving her glasses firmly back on her nose. Complaining about it won't change anything.” <br /><br />“You have to keep going,” Charlie shouted at him over the noise of the VW motor.” “You have to keep faith with the world, you know.” <br /><br />“That's right,” Flowers said. “If you expect bad things to happen, they probably will.” <br /><br />Bad things indeed. He had thought about Flowers when he fell off the bicycle in San Francisco. If he'd been inclined to believe in such things, he'd have known that his karma had caught up with him then. If it hadn't hurt so much, he might even have thought it was funny. Surely karma was just an odd notion that—. But suddenly Sam remembered that he was in the Cadillac with this guy trying to make pudding in his lap. Well, there wasn't any choice here but to keep going, was there? He looked at the demented cowboy and sighed. <br /><br />“If this is karma, I've certainly conjured up the very devil of a bad incarnation!” <br /><br />Thinking about it was tiring, though, and his eyes were getting heavy. <br /><br />His nap hadn't done him much good, after all. He wanted to get out, but still couldn't figure out any way to jump out of a speeding car, so he just got as close as he could to the window and leaned his fevered head on his arm. Despite everything Sam smiled, remembering Flowers and Charlie Showers; he hoped they were somewhere safe. He wondered if their karma merely enabled them to handle stuff like this or if it was gracious enough to protect them from ever having to find out. He nodded off to sleep again, hoping for the best. <br /><br />Later—again he didn't know how much later, though the sun was approximately in the same place—Sam woke up and found the cowboy happily talking about his dick and massaging it through his tight blue jeans. Before Sam could yawn or clear the sleep from his eyes, the vulgar toad had whipped it out again! <br /><br />“Keep faith with the world, my ass,” Sam thought furiously. Just on the edge of his outrage, he could hear the cowboy crooning along with the radio again. Sam didn't know the song, though he recognized Merle Haggard's voice. <br /><br />“Another criminal cowboy,” he thought. <br /><br />“The head of my dick is so thick,” the cowboy said. <br /><br />“That's not all that's thick,” Sam thought. <br /><br />“The girls really like it, they can't get enough of it.” <br /><br />“I'm glad to hear it's the girls he wants to impress, but if that's really true, <br />then why the fuck is he showing it to me?!” <br /><br />“I call it my vulva-popper,” the cowboy said with a snicker. <br /><br />“Volvo popper?” Sam thought sleepily. “What sort of demented—?” <br /><br />Then he got it, and grimaced. <br /><br />His mind wasn't functioning. These dismal catnaps under stress weren't helping. Why had things gone so wrong? Was this really that goddamn California karma? Was it going to follow him all the way to Texas? <br /><br />“You bet,” his tired brain said flippantly. “Hell, maybe that's Cowboy Yogi Karma himself over there with his Yankee Doodle in his hand. Maybe you'll reach a higher plane together and drive straight through to Austin holding hands and hollering out the window, 'Ya?hoo, we're Cadillac cowboy faggots!'“ <br /><br />“Jesus save me, be sensible,” Sam told himself. He cleared his throat and lit a cigarette. He liked the idea that a cop might pull them over for speeding, but he didn't much expect it. His luck didn't seem to be running that way. He watched the road carefully, nonetheless. “Hell. First I can't go anywhere without them swarming over me, and now there's not a piss-ant one of them in sight!” It figured. <br /><br />He tried to recall the exact position of his backpack. When he got a chance to escape, he wanted to be ready. “Escape” was the only word for it; even if the cowboy wasn't queer, anybody who was that much in love with the head of his dick had to be deranged and dangerous. Sam glanced again at the bulging map compartment on the cowboy's door. Did the good old boy have a good old cowboy gun in it or not? Or maybe one under the seat? Maybe there wasn't one at all. <br /><br />“Goddamn it, I hate mysteries, I've always hated mysteries, I don't like surprises of any kind!” <br /><br />The longer he rode in the Cadillac, the more his middleclass breeding took over. He longed for “normality” the way mothers yearn for children lost in snow storms. He was tired and freaked out. All he wanted was to get out. If he'd ever been more uptight in his life, he couldn't remember it. <br /><br />All the while the driver kept talking, and when Sam had to look at him again <br />he did it with as much disdain and disinterest as he could plaster on his face. <br /><br />Every so often he'd nod or shake his head in response to the cowboy's talk, but mostly he steeled himself and gave no visible reaction. <br /><br />“Yes sir,” the cowboy was saying, “this dick has had some mighty good pussy, and that pussy was glad to get it too. They really jump when this big ole hog gooses 'em. I can poke 'em in places they didn't know they had!” <br /><br />Sam glanced at the guy's eyes. “Crazy as a rat,” he thought. <br /><br />“Didja ever fuck a black girl, buddy?” the cowboy asked with a giggle. “I love that dark meat! Those bitches, they really go crazy, you know?” <br /><br />Sam leaned his forehead against the window and talked to the God he didn't believe in: “Letting him wave his flag around is one thing, Lord, but you don't have to let him put peaches and cream on it!” <br /><br />He could hardly tell now if the cowboy was talking to him or to himself or directly to his penis. It was all very confused, but it was clear the guy thought the thing between his legs was his best friend. Sam still felt an awful sense of claustrophobia, yet he couldn't help being curious how the idiot had developed such a gross fixation. It was a regular horse-cock, no doubt about that, yet the size of the cowboy's pride seemed even more abnormal than that of his member. Sam looked again at the cowboy's face and thought he could imagine him as “one of the guys” who watched football with his buddies and laughed as loudly as anyone at the homos on <br />the talk shows. Yet surely his buddies had tired long ago of his braggadocio. Maybe he had to come out on the road like this just to have an audience. <br /><br />Perhaps, Sam conjectured, this human donkey might have been more comfortable in some lost backwater of Africa, someplace where priapic hugeness and fecundity were still insensibly confused. Someplace where the natives wouldn't be judgmental about a man so in love with his love muscle that he couldn't stop waving it around. Maybe some native artisan would trot out a beautiful dutiful daughter for him, and carve their copulations in wood—the bedazzled cocky cowboy looking happier than a comic Gladstone Gander!—thus preserving for future tribal consideration something truly amazing: a man using a woman to make love to his own penis. <br /><br />Just now, however, the cowboy was performing another kind of rite, doing something energetic with his thumb. There was another one of those moronic Merle Haggard song on the radio about the moral superiority of mumble-mouthed cowboys; maybe he was playing along. Whether consciously or unconsciously, the cowboy was certainly keeping rhythm. <br /><br />Dee dee dee, dew, dew, dew... <br /><br />“Horseshit!” Sam thought, half-tempted to giggle. “This is an absolutely ridiculous thing to watch! I'll never be able to touch myself again. What's he think he's doing, anyway, getting it in condition for the Olympics?”<br /><br />There was a rest stop on the side of the road up ahead, and Sam looked at the people in the cars and trucks longingly; there was normality, and here he was. He felt the Cadillac slowing down and his heart began to beat faster and faster. The cowboy was pulling off the highway and into the rest stop! <br /><br />“Salvation!” Sam thought, and tensed himself for action. <br /><br />There was a little distance between the Cadillac and the other vehicles, but otherwise they sat in the middle of the vacationers with all engines running. The Cadillac vibrated smoothly, the cowboy jerked proficiently, Sam was having a conniption fit. On the brink of freedom, he wondered more than ever about the presumed gun. He was from Texas, after all. In Texas you could trust a cowboy to do a lot of things right and a lot of things wrong, but you could absolutely depend on it that he had a gun somewhere. “Cowboys always have guns,” Sam sighed, “even the sensible ones.” <br /><br />Right now, though, he was primarily concerned that if he jumped out while the engine was running, the cowboy might panic and drive away before Sam could get his pack out of the back seat. If he could just wait another minute or two, maybe the guy would get out to stretch his legs. He'd already stretched every other damn thing, from his wang to Sam's credulity. The seconds ticked by; Sam measured every minute step it would take to jump out and get his pack. He was so busy with his scheme that he <br />had only been keeping track of the cowboy in a peripheral manner, but now he became aware that the cowboy was still pumping himself, but also saying something. <br /><br />“Willya look at the tits on that little bitch!” <br /><br />Sam looked and saw that the object of the bastard's lust was a very young girl; somewhere around 12, Sam thought. His throat went dry and he felt a hot anger rush through him. “That tears it,” Sam thought. <br /><br />“He's a baby-raping wacko.” Sam had his right hand was on the door latch and the left prepared to knock some teeth out. <br /><br />“God, I'd like to fuck her,” the cowboy was moaning. “I'd like to fuck her with this till she felt it in her throat!” He was flexing around in the seat now, entirely out of hand. His tone had changed, becoming more fervent. He said, “The head of my cock is so big and smooth and hard—” <br /><br />Although he had managed not to react to all this moronic talk so far, Sam could hear a new aching tone in the pervert's voice. It gave him the creeps, as if a snake had just crawled over him. He had heard too much not to expect it to just keep getting worse and it didn't take much imagination to see what had to come next. The cowboy turned and looked at him mournfully. <br /><br />“Here it comes,” Sam thought grimly and braced himself. <br /><br />“Here, feel it,” the cowboy offered. He sounded as if he were merely inviting Sam to stroke the nap of his expensive corduroy jacket. The cowboy turned his body sideways in the seat, aiming the awful thing at him as if to allow Sam a better grasp of the situation. That was one snake too many. <br /><br />Sam pushed the door open so quickly that he fell out and scraped his palms on the pavement. He didn't lose a moment, just pushed himself upright and headed for the back door. <br /><br />“Hey, shut that goddamn door, somebody'll see me!” the cowboy yelled. <br /><br />“Somebody ought to see you, you malignant twitching masturbating son of a bitch!” Sam wanted to scream, but even now he didn't say it. For some absolutely ludicrous reason, it was more important to save that backpack than to tell the cowboy what he thought of him. Sam was crafty to the end. <br /><br />“Thanks for the ride,” he said loudly, “but I think I'll get out here!” <br /><br />Furiously Sam opened the back door. In the meanwhile, the cowboy had ducked down in the seat, awkwardly trying to cover himself. He looked like some bizarre species of seal or slug with a handle in the middle, writhing and flailing and hunching toward the passenger door. One hand was desperately groping for the door handle while the other was frenziedly trying to tuck his erection back into those ultra-tight jeans. Sam couldn't see how the bastard would manage to get it in without breaking it off at the stem, but he did it. <br /><br />“The hell you say!” Sam thought. He had no intention of being thwarted at this point. Just as the jerkoff jerked the door shut and jumped behind the steering wheel again, Sam yanked his backpack out with such force that the aluminum frame ripped a gash in the velour upholstery. He didn't pause, just turned and walked away. A few seconds later he was 40 feet away, breathing hard and feeling like he'd come out of a long tunnel. God, the air felt good! He lit a cigarette, his hands shaking, and when he looked up, the Cadillac was speeding like a bat out of hell down the access road and back onto the freeway. The cowboy glanced back at him, his face grim. <br /><br />“Someday this will be funny,” Sam thought. <br /><br />In the meanwhile he muttered under his breath every filthy and violent epithet he knew and it made him feel better. He hung around for a while looking at the vacationing families, but from the looks they gave him, he could tell they thought as little of him as he thought of the cowboy. There wasn't any sense in asking them for a ride. He considered asking the truckers, but thought better of it. He went to the road and put out his thumb; this time he didn't care if it took forever. He felt that he had just acquired a brand-new reserve of patience. <br /><br />Though it took a long time, he finally caught a ride with a couple of vacationing lawyers from Denver headed for El Paso. Their station wagon was so full of fishing and camping gear that Sam could barely squeeze in, but after the exposed spaciousness of the Cadillac, he felt snug and comfortable in the clutter. <br /><br />“I'm surprised you guys stopped since you were already so crowded.” <br /><br />“Hell, I guess you're just lucky,” the driver said. <br /><br />“What?” <br /><br />“Yeah, that's right,” the one in the passenger seat said, turning around. <br /><br />“We weren't going to stop, but then Dave here said that there must be some very interesting story to explain why a guy would have his thumb out at a rest stop out here in the middle of nowhere.” <br /><br />Sam thought a moment. They were in New Mexico now, he'd figured that out back at the rest stop. But nothing was different, not really. He'd found a “middle of nowhere” in every damn state he'd been in. <br /><br />“Well, it does take talent,” he told them with a grin. “Or plain old Bad Karma,” he thought, and began to laugh. Once he got started, he felt like he wouldn't be able to stop. <br /><br />“Sounds like there's some kind of story,” the driver yelled back in a friendly voice, and Sam nodded vigorously and grinned. The lawyers laughed too, because they were amiable people. <br /><br />“Yes, well?” the one in the passenger seat asked, turning around in his seat and looking at him expectantly. <br /><br />“Well, I’ll tell you,” Sam said…<br /><br />The ride to El Paso was the best ride he'd ever had. <br /><br /><br /><br />THE END<br /><br /><br /><br /><h5><i>rcs.<br /><br />4th draft: 02/20/07<br />©1990 Ronald C. Southern</i></h5><br /><br /></span>Ron Southernhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08604305014713612990noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6900460.post-27131361824103952112007-02-10T14:48:00.000-08:002007-02-10T14:53:25.334-08:00Incest: Callow Postulation In The CaveThe boys were sitting around that evening in an apartment that they referred to as “the cave” because it was a converted basement that had no windows and a very low ceiling. Being young, they were comfortable enough in it, though, and were talking—sometimes laconically, sometimes excitedly—about sex and The World. The usual sort of late-night talk among young men smoking pot. The subject turned to incest and a couple of them started saying they thought it might be perfectly natural for a man to want to introduce his own daughter to sex. <br /><br /> “He'd certainly be kinder about it than most young men would be, don't you think?” George postulated. <span id="fullpost"><br /><br /> Dogger nodded, but Roddy turned serious and his face turned red.<br /><br /> “Oh come on, guys, that's repugnant!” Roddy said with an air of quiet disgust. “I bet you two will sing a different tune about all that when you're older.” <br /><br /> “That may be,” George laughed, “but if so, it may be because we lost ourselves rather than because we found some sense.”<br /><br /> “You have no way of judging that in advance, though!” Roddy told him pointedly. “You don't know all that, you're just guessing!”<br /><br /> “We all are, aren't we?” George smirked. “About all of it.” <br /><br /> “Well, if you know you're guessing, why do you try to sound so sure of yourself then?” Roddy's voice was quiet, but clearly he had become almost uncontrollably disturbed by their talk of incest as something that might be natural. It didn't matter to him how long he'd grown his hair or how many drugs he'd taken; he refused to think about sex with his daughter, not even one he didn't have yet! <br /><br /> “We're just postulating about the possible, Roddy,” George said in a conciliatory voice. “Just talking aloud about what might be true now, or what could be true in the future. Sounding “sure” when we talk about it is just another way of testing how good the theories sound.”<br /><br /> “I think you're postulating about the horrible!”<br /><br /> “Well, okay then, the horrible possibility!” George grinned.<br /> <br /> “I think you're nuts!” Roddy said.<br /> <br /> “I've never denied it,” George grinned back. <br /> <br /> “It's not that we're less moral than you are, Roddy,” Dogger said, who in fact couldn’t even imagine having a daughter, much less having sex with her. “But it’s just that we're determined not to be intimidated by what we think about. Being afraid to think about things is like all those straights you ordinarily despise who shit a brick every time they hear somebody say “shit”, much less mention a terrible societal taboo like incest. Or who want to ban all the dirty books that they’ve never read. They're hung up on words and afraid of words, which is only another way of being afraid of communication. Communication is never a bad thing, I think; not even arguments, for that means that at least you're not fighting yet!”<br /> <br /> “Yes, but—” Roddy muttered. <br /><br /> Somebody knocked at the door just then and their conversation ended. It was Andrew, just in from his place in the country. Soon George, Roddy, and Andrew were smoking another j and arguing about the importance of the lyrics on the new Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young record. <br /><br /> “Goofy bastards,” Dogger thought. He was more inclined toward the Doors, if he was going to worry about “important” lyrics. He was goofy, too, of course. <br /><br />THE END<br /><br /><i><h5>Current draft: 02/10/07<br />©1989 Ronald C. Southern </i></h5> </span>Ron Southernhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08604305014713612990noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6900460.post-62620770449232599352007-02-09T09:48:00.000-08:002007-02-10T23:20:50.563-08:00Another Convoluted Conversation“I don't know about those days, anyway,” Marilyn said. “The Vietnamese people were dying, and we kept on worrying about the price of drugs,” she complained.<br /><br />“It's not much different now,” Dogger Gatsby said. “The students in China are dying now, and we continue to worry about Literature.” <br /><br />“Literature's probably more valuable, don't you think?” <span id="fullpost"><br /><br />“Probably. But the Vietnamese and Chinese may not think it.” <br /><br />“Touché.” Marilyn laughed. <br /><br />“Does that word have anything to do with 'touch'?” he asked. <br /><br />“Oh... Well, I really don't know. Why?” <br /><br />“Just checking. Hoping.” <br /><br />“Oh, Mr. Gatsby, get outta town!” she laughed. <br /><br />He laughed too, but didn’t leave town. He sat down beside her and hoped for the best. <br /><br />5th draft: 02/09/07<br />©2003 Ronald C. Southern </span>Ron Southernhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08604305014713612990noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6900460.post-73596091387245971342007-02-08T19:34:00.000-08:002007-02-08T18:58:53.689-08:00A World Of Satisfaction“Oh, hell, those people!” Mike snapped when somebody mentioned a couple of the supervisors at work. “Far as I'm concerned, somebody just needs to rip their fuckin' heads off and shit down their goddamn necks. Maybe then they'd wake up!” <br /> <br /> “Jesus, that's gross,” Don said, though he was clearly amused by the idea and by the ferocity with which Mike expressed it. <br /><br /> “I don't care,” Mike drawled, “and I don't give a rat's ass! He was grinning and snarling at the same time, apparently enjoying his diatribe. “It'd improve their goddamn dispositions, if you ask me. I know it'd give me a world of satisfaction to see it!” <span id="fullpost"> <br /><br />Over in the corner Jason, had been listening quietly as usual and now he cracked up. <br /><br />“Jesus, I can't believe the stuff you're liable to say, Mike!” <br /><br /> Mike Patterson was the major domo, the prima donna, the loudest voice, among the boys at the shop. His style was intelligent, high-flown, imaginative, yet thoroughly gut-bucket vulgar and nasty. He could talk informatively for hours about his home computer and all his new programs, then turn around and praise to the skies some poorly-drawn crude cartoon from Hustler Magazine, usually one having something to do with excrement or women with the most immense exaggerated genitalia, preferably being penetrated by male organs the size of a man’s leg. <br /><br /> “Look at this guy!” Mike would chortle, shoving the magazine in somebody's face all the while so they could get a good look. “Just look at him, willya!” He was leaning back comfortably in his chair and snickering, pointing to the cartoon character whose penis had grown as large as he was. <br /><br /> “Well, he might be able to fuck the whole world now,” Red shrugged, “but the boy sure can't fuck any women.” <br /><br /> “Why's that?” Mike grinned. “Oh, hell, sure, he can, there's plenty of these skags around here with cunts big enough for one a those,” he smirked, exploding with laughter, yet seeming to speak with thorough conviction. <br /><br /> Red grinned back slightly, not wanting to show how dumbfounded or offended he was by the remark. He'd heard guys talking like this all his life, but he'd never understood it very well. Sometimes it seemed to go beyond the meanness of a joke. He wondered if Mike really believed all that moronic, humorless, and hateful stuff or if he talked like that because he hated women? <br /><br /> Maybe his momma dropped him on his head when he was little, Red thought. <br /><br /> Or could it have perhaps gone beyond that for men like Mike, that it somehow expressed how little respect Mike had for anyone, for life itself. It bothered him, but he knew better than to say anything about it. He knew he didn't have to say anything about it, so he always tried not to, yet sometimes Mike would read his thoughts. <br /><br /> “You can try to act like you're above it,” Mike grinned, but face it; men have got to have their revenge against women, and this is about the only civilized way there is.” <br /><br /> “What the hell do you mean by that?” <br /><br /> “Every man feels it, but not every man needs to go out and act it all out. These porno stories and cartoons act it out for most of us. I figure porn keeps the number of axe-wielding sex murderers down in the dozens instead of up in the thousands. Just my theory, of course.”<br /><br /> “Yeah, I guess so,” Red muttered. “Just a theory, I mean.” <br /><br /> “Except, of course, I seem to recall you saying a couple of times how hundreds, maybe thousands, of women owe you gratitude for not following your initial momentary impulse to just jump on 'em and fuck 'em!” <br /><br /> “I have said something like that,” Red said with chagrin. “I don't know if we're talking about the same thing or not. I wouldn't actually say that to a woman.” <br /><br /> “Well, I don't drag 'em over here and force their heads down in these gut-bucket nasty Hustler magazines, either,” Mike snapped. “You think you're better than me when you're only a little more insistently polite about your language and your images than I am. A lot of this stuff is all the same stuff, I say.” <br /><br /> “Maybe. God, I hope not, though,” Red sighed. <br /><br /><br />THE END<br /><br /><i><h5>4th draft: 02/08/07<br />©1990 Ronald C. Southern</i></h5> </span>Ron Southernhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08604305014713612990noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6900460.post-55539101204941146632007-02-04T18:01:00.000-08:002007-02-10T14:15:44.980-08:00TAKE TWO(Razor Blades and Dominoes)<br /><br /> Sharon Goodnight and Dogger Gatsy sat together after dinner, talking, laughing, and drinking beer while the radio played softly in the background. They had always enjoyed bantering. Dogger noticed that some rock group on the radio was singing a frenetic refrain which he could only half-hear since the radio was set at such a low volume. He wondered what the hell was so important about “razor blades and dominoes”. Maybe he'd heard the lyrics wrong. <span id="fullpost"> <br /><br /> “I'm sorry, you know,” Dogger said after a while. “I couldn't help thinking that I'd think about sleeping with you once I realized I was going to see you again after so long.” <br /><br /> “I thought about that, too,” Sharon smiled. “That you'd think about it, I mean.” <br /><br /> He nodded at her and lit a cigarette. <br /><br /> “Is that what you're thinking now?” she asked. “I mean, do you want to? It's not something that always worked out well between us.” <br /><br /> Dogger nodded again, a dumb, but not dumbfounded, look on his face.<br /><br /> “I guess,” he sighed. “I don't know whether it'd be the right thing or the wrong thing, but I know I couldn't turn it down. After 15 years, I'm afraid that nothing will work, that—”<br /><br /> “Fifteen years?” she asked, leaning forward to touch his wrist with her fingertips. She looked astonished. He nodded, but didn't look at her. <br /><br /> “After that,” he continued, “It's hard not to worry that nothing's ever going to work out again. That I'm completely crazy. That I don't remember what's necessary.”<br /><br /> “No one forgets that, surely, Ed,” she whispered. “I mean, sex is—”<br /><br /> “Like riding a bicycle?” he grinned. “No, I don't guess that you do forget the mechanics. But I suspect you can, or that I can, forget the instinct, the feelings, the emotional balance of making love. I'm so pathetically, monolithically blind and empty and hungry now that I could devour a woman, finger-nails, eyes, teeth, and soul altogether. All at once—wham!—in a fell swoop, in a single gulp! Or try to, anyway, even if it turned out that my dick didn't really work any more.”<br /><br /> “Seems like you'd know already whether your dick works or not,” she teased. “It doesn't take two for that.”<br /><br /> “That's true, Sharon,” he laughed. “It doesn't take two at all.”<br /><br /> “Well?” she asked. <br /><br /> “Well, technically, it works,” he sighed. <br /><br /> She nodded and waited for him to continue, seeing that the moment hadn't lightened at all. <br /><br /> “But a sexual life so far removed from either real sex or real life for such a long time creates a world so artificial and strained that feelings and sensation become—well, artificial. Listen, I don't know how to say it clearly, or maybe I just don't have the nerve. But, to make it short, it's very far from real. So I don't know if what is wrong is real or not, either. Something's wrong, of course, even if it's only symptomatic of everything else that's wrong.” <br /><br /> “It sounds terrible,” she said.<br /><br /> “It feels worse. Like being dead, without the obvious benefits.”<br /><br /> “What benefits, for the love of Christ?” <br /><br /> “Cessation of stress. The end of thoughts and dreams. Peace. What else?”<br /><br /> “Jesus, Ed, maybe I should sleep with you,” she said softly. It almost sounded like a question. <br /><br /> “Maybe you should. The thought of it excites me and sickens me at the same time. It may be too late. It might destroy me as surely as my imagination wants to suggest that it would unerringly save me.” <br /><br /> “You've bit the big one, haven't you?” she smiled. <br /><br /> “The mother of all donkey dongs,” he nodded, making a wide gesture with his hands. “And it's not a thing that you can generally tell, not even to people who know you, love you, and probably suspect it anyway. It's like all that clamminess and claustrophobia in Conrad's Heart of Darkness. All those savage feelings and yet being so powerless at the same time. It won't go away, and you can't leave it. At some point, you just surrender to it, I guess. It's just—”<br /><br /> “The horror,” she interjected, as if finishing his sentence. “I know about that,” she said. “A lot of people do. There's lots of roads to Africa.”<br /><br /> He smiled tiredly, leaned back in his chair, and blew smoke into the air. <br /><br /> “Say, what was that damn question you asked me a minute ago, Sharon?” he asked vaguely.<br /><br /> They looked into each other's eyes for a moment, then both laughed loudly as if the tension had finally broken a little. After that, they sat for a long while, staring at each other in affectionate silence, two old friends wondering if it was really possible to make things any worse or any better and if they were about to do so. As kind as they wished to be to one another, the way things were going, it didn’t seem likely. <br /> <br /><br />THE END<br /> <br /><i><h5><br />3rd draft: 02/04/07<br />©2002 Ronald C. Southern </i></h5> <br /></span>Ron Southernhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08604305014713612990noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6900460.post-19286899399711062392007-02-04T10:58:00.000-08:002007-02-08T18:12:40.130-08:00The DrowningWhen the nude young man, tall and tan and apparently drowned, was washed up out of the sea, Stella Frances found him. Stella Frances Irons was a plump, somewhat stern-looking, ash-blonde woman in her mid-fifties. Though it hadn't always helped her, she had always loved the beach. Since her husband's death six years ago, she'd spent every summer alone in the beach house the two of them together had seldom had time for, now a mile or so behind her. She had strolled along this part of the beach every afternoon of every summer, but she'd never encountered anything like this. <span id="fullpost"><br /><br /> Stella Frances didn't mean to be, but she was a little bit frightened of the man. She was afraid that he might be dead, yet even more afraid because he was naked. She had been married for a good long time and knew what men looked like when they were naked, but her husband had been dead for six years now and she no longer felt comfortable (if she ever had) in the presence of nudity—anyone's nudity. Even alone in her own house, she liked to keep most of her clothes on until it was time for shower and bed. <br /><br /> The presence of this naked man in daylight, this mysterious foolish-looking tan man who was either dead or unconscious, was only slightly less unnerving than if he'd been awake and looking right at her, maybe even—well, saying something awful! At least while he was unconscious, she neither had to look at him or pretend that she wasn't looking! <br /> <br /> She rubbed her hands anxiously and frowned very hard. She couldn't think, couldn't think straight at all, but she should do something, she was sure of that. She whipped off her straw hat and stared at it blankly for a moment, then trotted down to the sea and scooped up a hatful of water. She ran back, breathing hard and feeling her weight with every step, remembering sadly how prettily she used to bounce! She had never quite gotten used to being overweight. All her life she'd been a pretty girl, and it was hard now sometimes for her to remember about her loss of looks and grace. It had been hard for her these last few years, unlearning her confidence in herself. As she ran, Stella Frances stumbled and looked down. The tightly-woven straw hat was leaking more and more with every step she took. "Hurry, hurry!" she told herself. She was convinced she had to get there soon or she'd look like a bigger fool than she felt, arriving without any water in her hat! <br /><br /> Finally she got there, gasping for air. She leaned down over the naked man and splashed what remained of the water on his face. He didn't stir. She still couldn't tell if he was dead. Just then, a small Negro boy ran up, seemingly out of nowhere. <br /><br /> "Shit, lady, that man's drownt with water, he don't need no more!"<br /> <br /> "Listen, young man, don't you—!" <br /> <br /> Stella Frances paused, looking confused. She had been about to give the boy a long sharp sermon about his language, then considered that there were more important things. <br /><br /> "Oh—yes. I suppose you must be right," she said, shaking her head. What the little fellow said was really quite sensible, she thought. "I'm just being stupid." It was a great relief, really, for someone else to come along, even if it was just the colored boy. <br /><br /> "Well, you're a very smart young man, aren't you?" she told him. <br /> <br /> The boy looked slightly startled at her change in tone. He seemed to frown at her with his eyes, though he kept his mouth firmly set in a straight, inexpressive line. Regionald was ten and he already hated being talked to in that patronizing tone of voice. White people were especially good at it, he knew, though it wasn't peculiar to them. Anyone older than him was liable to use it. <br /><br /> "Makes 'em feel smart!" he thought sullenly. <br /><br /> "Maybe you know where the nearest telephone is, dear, and can get some help over here?" Stella Frances asked in a sugarcoated voice. <br /><br /> "Yeah, I know, lady," the boy muttered disinterestedly. "There's a house real close." <br /><br /> "Do you know who lives there?" <br /><br /> "Sure, lady." <br /><br /> "Yes?" she asked hopefully. <br /> <br /> "I do." <br /><br /> "Oh..." <br /><br /> Stella Frances couldn't comprehend the little boy's cloudy answers. Why was he making it so hard, she wondered? He did seem bright, but he just wouldn't volunteer anything. She'd have to try again. <br /> <br /> "Well, run as fast as you can, dear, and call the sheriff or the operator or somebody and tell them to send an ambulance out here right away!"<br /> <br /> As she spoke, the boy rocked back and forth, changing restlessly from one foot to another. He stared at her relentlessly all the while, his mouth opening wider and wider until, to Stella Frances, he looked like a gaping idiot. What was the matter with the boy, she wondered! He started walking backwards toward his house before she finished speaking, and by the time she'd said the word "ambulance", he was already trotting. If he had run in a straight line he'd have been out of sight already, but the boy ran playfully, looping back and forth. Still he was quite a distance off when he hollered back over his shoulder. <br /> <br /> "It won't do no good to call for the sher'ff, lady!" <br /><br /> The child's voice was shrill, though not weak, and it seemed as if the wind was going to blow his words away before she could catch them. She screwed up her face and strained to hear him. Her hearing wasn't what it used to be. She paused before answering, waiting to make sure she'd understood him. <br /><br /> "Why in the world not?" she yelled hoarsely, as loudly as she could. She was annoyed at the child, running away so quickly and making her have to shout like that, but she realized that it was neither fair nor wise to let her crossness show in her voice. He was only a little boy, after all. And if she made him mad, he might just run away and not do what he'd promised. <br /><br /> "Why not?!" she yelled again, her throat aching with the unaccustomed strain. <br /><br />"Cause that's Sher'ff Constancio you got lying there 'thout no clothes on!" the boy yelled from far off. <br /><br /> "Oh, my goodness!" she muttered. She stood there frowning for a moment, then smiled. "Well, that explains it," she thought. "He isn't tan, he's Spanish! I've never seen a Mexican man undressed before." She wasn't sure why it was, but she was certain it was something interesting. <br /> <br /> Suddenly her smile dropped away as she thought of something and she raised her hand to her forehead. "Oh, no!" she thought. "That's exactly what that silly little boy will tell them, too—that I've got the sheriff naked out here! It'll be all over town in no time. People will be talking about it a long time before they have any facts—the same way they talk about things a long time after all the facts have been forgotten and the truth won't much matter. The truth never does."<br /><br /> Stella Frances understood about gossip; she'd started enough of it herself. She just knew she was going to end up looking ridiculous. Ever since Edward had died, the fear of it had been her constant companion. No one had ever liked her as much as Edward did. <br /><br /> She couldn't understand why she acted like this, felt like this. It was only when she was at the beach that she felt so insecure. At the university where she worked she was fairly masterful, she knew, at times even intimidating with people. Before she'd been demoted from the position of executive secretary to the President of the college, some people had even feared her. To her, that part had all been funny, though. She'd never felt very frightening; she'd only felt like herself. But why, oh, why did she get so disconcerted during the summers now? She couldn't understand it. Even though she was old enough to know better (and knew it very well) and even though she'd dealt with enough men at work not to take them very seriously, still she wasn't used to baby-sitting naked men, Caucasian or Spanish, dead or otherwise. She was shaken by an uncomfortable premonition that everyone she knew (and even some she didn't) were going to be preternaturally curious about this mess she'd stumbled into. <br /><br /> "God, they'll be asking me no-telling what-all silly questions about it!" she muttered, her face turning red. "I wonder if I shouldn't go and look at him more carefully so I'll have some kind of answers?"<br /> <br /> Her lips were dry and she licked them. She knew she couldn't just keep standing there like an ignoramus, a frightened woman who refused to notice a single detail of an interesting situation, but she couldn't very well go stand and stare at that naked Mexican either. <br /><br /> "What about that butt-naked man you found on the beach?" the smart-aleck kids on the beach would laugh. <br /><br /> Stella Frances shuddered. Young people were always so direct and vulgar. It was just awful, she felt, sharing a love for the beach with such wild and unpleasant creatures. She really couldn't see where they loved anything. She had to suppress a desire to call the police every time she saw them, but police these days, she'd found, weren't interested in anything less than murder or bank robbery or arson. They didn't have time for her complaints at all. In fact, the last time she'd called them about prowlers one of the detectives had spoken rather brusquely, she'd felt. <br /><br /> "Look, lady, things are changin'," Detective Trunnels had said, "and I ain't in charge of the changes. Don't blame me 'cause things are getting worse all the time, 'cause mostly it's the same damn people that pay my salary that are getting worse! Miz Irons, you just can't do nothin' when everything changes!" <br /><br /> The policeman's talk frightened her; it had given her the impression that he was as helpless as she was and she didn't like thinking about that. The world had gone topsy-turvy enough when her husband had died without men in general ceasing to be what she expected of men. She was often confused and angry. "But so's that policeman," she sighed. <br /><br /> The ladies at the Bromeliad Club would have their say too about the drowned man, she knew that. "What did you see, Stella?" they'd ask her, their faces prim, but their eyes snickering at her. Why was everyone like that these days?! What was the matter with everyone? It made her so uncomfortable! <br /><br /> And what could she say, after all? "I found a naked man unconscious on the beach. That's all I know."<br /><br /> "That's all, Stella?"<br /><br /> Say something else! Say something else, they're snickering!<br /><br /> "Uh—a little Negro boy ran up and said he was the sheriff. I just took his word for it, though. I'd never seen him before in my life!" <br /><br /> But didn't that sound a little like the boy said he was the sheriff? Oh! She'd sound stupid, all right, she just knew it. All because she hadn't paid attention. She couldn't focus, just couldn't focus! <br /> <br /> "Maybe I should take a better look at him," she thought nervously, "just to see if he's still alive." <br /><br /> Actually she'd been staring at him the entire time since the boy had run away, though only at his face. She had held her hat in front of her so that it obscured the rest of him. He might be bleeding to death, instead of just half-drowned, as far as she could swear later in a court of law. Somebody might hold her responsible, she worried. For all she knew, some kind of murderous Spanish obscenities might be scrawled across his belly in lipstick and blood. "I really ought to look him over!" <br /><br /> She moved the hat and looked, but had to look away immediately again. It was really too much. The horrible man, though certainly still unconscious, was—well, aroused! She cleared her throat several times. <br /><br /> "Oh my!" she thought. "They'll be here pretty soon. Someone will come up and this is what they'll see. Oh...oh, dear..." She had to stifle an urge to wake him up, to shake him and make him stop it. "That wouldn't work, though," she told herself impatiently. Besides, how good an idea could it be to wake up a man with—well, one of those! <br /><br /> She thought about throwing her hat over it, but that didn't seem like such a good idea. She didn't want to lose her hat, and she wouldn't exactly want it back after—putting it there! But what if she did it anyway, she thought? Every time she put her hat on again, she'd think about the man who'd—. <br /><br /> Suddenly, for the first time in years, she really laughed. "This is so ridiculous!" she gasped. <br /><br /> She walked over to the man, smiling now, blurred her vision intentionally so she wouldn't have to see what she'd already seen, and threw her big straw hat over his crotch. She sighed with relief and then leaned down. <br /><br /> "Well—no obscenities, at least," she thought as her eyes came to rest on his chest. She giggled a little as she lightly held her fingers against his cheek and nose to check his breath. Yes, he was breathing—fairly regularly too. When she stood up, she jumped back quickly, quite out of breath. <br /><br /> "Goodness! That took more nerve than I've used in years!" <br /><br /> Suddenly she remembered how her husband, Edward, used to wake up like that several mornings a week, no matter how old he got. When she'd been a young woman, she'd accused him of doing it on purpose to aggravate her, but she'd finally realized it didn't have much to do with her and that it wasn't anything he had much control over. Usually it went away as soon as he'd gone to the bathroom, so she just stopped looking at him in the mornings until after he'd gone. <br /><br /> "Bluesteel boners!" she thought suddenly and giggled again. She'd almost forgotten that silly, vulgar phrase of her husband's until now! She put her hand over her mouth, trying to stifle herself, fearing someone would choose that exact inopportune moment to come rescue the half-drowned Sheriff Constancio.<br /><br /> "I'm really feeling rather giddy," she thought. "Is this what they mean by hysteria?" <br /><br /> She looked up and down the beach desperately. Far, far down the beach she saw several teenagers poking around in the sand. She knew she ought to stand up and wave at them, do anything she could to get their attention, but she sat down quickly beside the sheriff and crouched there, low and out of sight, breathing heavily. Even if her failure brought injury to the poor drowned sheriff, she couldn't bring herself to deal with those awful young people. She couldn't tell too well from this distance, but one of them even looked like he might be the one she suspected of peeking in her windows at night. She couldn't stand the idea of being friendly or obligated to that boy! She'd heard them talking among themselves and they talked so roughly for no reason at all! They were probably all on dope. She could just imagine him saying something like, "Hey, fuck you, lady! You deal with it!" What possible use could those crude and cruel children be to her or anyone else? <br /><br /> She went back and checked the man's breathing again and he seemed to be breathing even better now. She placed her right hand on his forehead to check his temperature. Unconsciously her left hand rested lightly on the curve of his stomach. His belly was rising and falling noticeably now, reminding her of a sleeping dog. <br /><br /> "He's just an ordinary-looking man," she thought charitably. "Kind of handsome, kind of stupid." <br /><br /> Suddenly she wasn't afraid of him at all. She felt warm toward him, almost maternal. She smiled and began to pat his belly. But moments later she realized what she was doing and stiffened. It suddenly became clear to her how the most embarrassing thing would be if he woke up before anyone got there, not if someone showed up before he woke up! She liked the new idea even less than the old one! "But how embarrassing for him!" she couldn't help thinking. <br /><br /> "Poor man," she whispered. Affectionately, yet still quite unconsciously, she patted his stomach again. "Poor, poor fellow," she thought. But somehow she was thinking of herself as well. "Maybe I should put something else over him, something less ridiculous than this," she sighed. <br /><br /> She tried to think what that might be, but there really wasn't anything else, whether ridiculous or not. She had a scarf, but the wind would just blow that away. It wasn't big enough to tie around him and she could hardly tie it to—! <br /><br />"Oh!" She laughed louder than ever, finally clapping her hands over her mouth to stifle her noise. <br /><br /> "Dear God, I'm cackling!" she grinned. "Why is this so difficult?!" <br /><br /> She looked up and down the beach anxiously. Off in the distance in one direction she could see the small group of young people moving away. From the other direction the young Negro boy was returning, running lazily, unconcernedly. Drat the boy! He hadn't brought a blanket or anything. Or had she even asked him to? She couldn't remember. She hoped he'd at least called for help. <br /><br /> "I tole my mama!" the boy hollered in his thin unfriendly voice. "She phoned somebody, okay?" <br /><br /> "He sounds so far away," she thought. "Or is it just me?" <br /><br /> Stella Frances Irons sighed, feeling confused again and inconsolably sad. She felt cheated. She hadn't felt this way—threatened, excited, involved, called upon—since her husband had died, and she'd missed it without even knowing it. If there had been enough time, she would even have thought of something to cover the young man with, she was sure of it. Still, a part of her was relieved that someone was coming, even if it was just the colored boy. She wasn't responsible for this nonsense, after all. She just happened to be there. <br /><br />THE END<br /><br /><i><h5>4th draft: 02/02/07<br />©1989 Ronald C. Southern</i></h5> </span>Ron Southernhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08604305014713612990noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6900460.post-46838558225816055852007-02-03T17:35:00.000-08:002007-02-08T21:06:31.352-08:00Odd PhrasesOdd Phrases <br /> <br /> “I don't know about you,” she said, not sounding very serious. “Sometimes I think you're just a moralizing chauvinist.” <br /><br /> “That's just some new crackpot term for an old‑fashioned sexist, isn't it?” Harlan laughed. <br /> <br /> Suzanne smiled, shook her head, and took a slow sip from her glass. “No. Let me think a minute. I'm trying to remember something.” <span id="fullpost"><br /><br /> “Take your time.” <br /><br /> It was an early Sunday afternoon at her home on the outskirts of Farless River Estates. It wasn't on one of the more expensive lots on the bank of the river and certainly not one of the fancy hill‑houses that seemed to hang by a fingernail far out over the water. One of her favorite pastimes was skinny‑dipping late at night, but she had to walk down a long muddy hill to get to the water, so the house wasn't that well‑placed, and she regretted that. When she first bought it ten years ago, her friends had all teased her. <br /><br /> “Far less than what?” they'd smirked. <br /><br /> She didn't know. (Or very much care, either; it was her damn house and she liked it.) Maybe the Indians had called it that, she told them. There were no Indians left to ask about it. <br /><br /> Suzanne and Harlan were taking things slowly, staying out of the afternoon sun. It was August, and they were in the midst of the “dog days”, a terrible time in Central Texas. The central air conditioner was furiously running up a bill and the ceiling fan blades turned slowly overhead. They sat at her kitchen table and talked, drinking W.L. Weller whiskey, and waiting for the soup to cook. Every so often, they had a cup of coffee and mentioned that tired old joke about wide‑awake drunks, though neither of them was very drunk yet. <br /><br /> The smell of steaming vegetables and beef seeped from the big pot on the stove. It made Harlan's mouth water. His stomach grumbled slightly and he wondered if Suzanne could hear it. Apparently she couldn't. She would probably have offered him something if he'd spoken up, but he preferred to wait for the soup. <br /><br /> Harlan sat gazing out the big picture window and thought how much he had always liked her kitchen. The grass in her long back yard, as usual, was overdue for a mowing. Her son Willy was nineteen and always had to be hounded a good deal before it got done. Harlan remembered being bad about that himself. <br /><br /> “Christ, I still am,” he thought. He could have offered to give Willy a hand, but never did. <br /><br /> Close by, he could see Suzanne's longhaired old terrier Frabjous lying in the cool dirt under the storage shed, as still as a turtle. He stared for a long time without seeing movement of any kind, then wondered if the dog might be dead. When he was a kid his dog had turned up dead like that—unexpectedly, just looking asleep at first, so that he had laughed and yelled, “Wake up, sleepyhead!” and gone over and smacked the dog on the hindquarters. But then he'd noticed the stiffness in the dog's legs, and he had backed away and screamed until everybody came running. <br /><br /> “The dog's dead,” his father told him, shaking his head, “you can't do anything about it.” <br /><br /> “Don't cry,” his mother said gently, “we'll get you another one.” <br /><br /> Grownups say such stupid things to you when your best friend is dead, he thought. Yet he was the grownup now and shouldn't be thinking like that. He leaned forward, though, staring out the window and starting to get uptight. Suddenly Frabjous kicked his legs out and rolled over, turning his scarred head toward the window. <br /><br /> “Frab, you stinking old bastard!” Harlan sighed and leaned back. <br /><br /> The tough little terrier had always been a fighter. The street vendors down on the drag used to call him “the little terror” and smile when he padded by, looking so deceptively innocent. Everyone knew that a moment later they might have to risk their lives pulling him out of a fight, for Frabjous wasn't afraid of the devil's Dobermans, much less any ordinary members of his species that were twice his size. <br /><br /> “Why the little canine psychopath was so damned popular was never very clear to me,” Harlan thought. Yet he had always liked the dog too. <br /><br /> Suzanne hated those fights, but she loved the ridiculous dog. She called him “The Old Territorial Bastard”, a nickname taken humorously these days, but dead serious in origin. One evening some years ago the neighborhood kids had wheeled Frab home in a little red Hi Flyer wagon. The kids all talked at once, trying to explain how the terrier had gotten so badly cut up. The fight, they said, had started when the German shepherd down the road jumped on a young cocker spaniel. The children, of course, thought Frab was a hero. Harlan looked down at the little triumphal procession and smiled, remembering how much fun it used to be to think about dogs that way. Frabjous, of course, had no need of such heroic excuses; he would have done it eventually just for the hell of it. <br /><br /> They eased the dog into the back of Harlan's truck, and he drove them to the vet. All the way into town, Suzanne sat holding the dog's bloody ear onto his head with one hand and nearly choking the life out of him with the other to make him hold still. She was weeping and hollering at the same time, and for a while he couldn't make out what she was saying. She scared the shit out of Harlan, but Frabjous just looked a little guilty and quietly closed his eyes. When Harlan slowed the truck for the red light in Oak Hill, he finally heard her. <br /><br /> “You goddamn old murdering territorial bastard,” she was yelling, “I'll kill you for doing this to me, I'll kill you!” Somewhere around the tenth time, Harlan ceased to believe her. <br /><br /> That was a few years ago. Frabjous was twelve now and going blind in one eye and didn't fight as often, though he fought just as hard. This afternoon in his favorite shady spot, the old bastard panted steadily. With his eyes closed tight and his tongue hanging out, his face seemed to wear a lascivious grin. Harlan figured the heat was getting to the dog and said so to Suzanne. <br /><br /> “Look again,” she said with a grin. Harlan looked. The old dog's rosy little member was peeking out from between his furry legs. “Now you know what the Old Territorial Bastard dreams about,” she laughed. <br /><br /> “I always thought he dreamed about eating those stupid cats of yours,” Harlan said. <br /><br /> In the middle of the yard Suzanne's two Persians, Bhagwan and Dali, were prowling and leaping through the long grass, apparently practicing their death‑pounce. They left the old dog alone, though not because they were charitable; Suzanne's son Willy had told him once that they'd learned their lesson in that particular quarter. They worked the small fry—mainly lizards, cockroaches, and tarantulas, although there were several phantoms that only the cats could see. “Maybe it's chinch bugs,” Harlan thought. He wondered where the cats got the energy for it. For that matter, how could they even stand being outdoors on such a hot day? <br /><br /> “You give those cats too much catnip,” Harlan laughed. “Look.” <br /><br /> Suzanne glanced out the window and smiled. “They're just full of piss and vinegar,” she said. <br /><br /> “Don't they ever run out of victims?” <br /><br /> “Never.” <br /><br /> Harlan thought that the cats were strange. It may have been the names she'd given them, or the reason she'd given them the names, he didn't know which. The names, of course, didn't impress the cats. In fact, the names had barely stuck to them at all. Most people thought Dali was “Dolly” and nobody felt comfortable saying Bhagwan. It was easier to use Suzanne's nicknames, so most of the time the cats were just Bogs and Dolly. <br /><br /> Harlan stubbornly insisted that the self‑absorbed little toads didn't know one name from another, that they'd come just as quickly if you called them “Doorknob”. Suzanne disputed that, of course. Sometimes he proved they would, and sometimes she proved they wouldn't, but mostly the cats ignored him no matter what names he called them. That wasn't what made him think the cats were toads, though. What brought him to this conviction was that Bhagwan and Dali seemed to like nothing better than to jump in his lap and make a graceful slow circle (sinking their claws firmly into his legs at every step), then raise their fluffy tails and show him a view of the moon. <br /><br /> “See this?” they seemed to say. “Isn't this nice?” Somehow Harlan was never properly impressed. “Listen, you smug Persian toadfrog, I'd smash your silly face if it wasn't already smashed,” he'd say. Why, he wondered, did he never have a sharp pencil when he needed one? <br /><br /> “Do you train them to do this?” he'd asked Suzanne once, making a face nearly as puckered as the cat's behind. He had his hand around Bhagwan's fluffy tail, and looked as if he meant to do something extreme, possibly involving aerodynamic cats. <br /><br /> Suzanne put her hand over her mouth and laughed, but hurried to remove the cat from his lap. “No, I think it's just something they have a natural talent for! They must like you, though, they don't show their ass to just anybody!” <br /><br /> “Yeah, I'll bet,” he said. “I don't think anything much impresses those little furballs or that they like anybody much except you.” <br /><br /> “Maybe so, but they get to do what they want to do, and I think somebody in this world ought to,” Suzanne said. “I guess that's why I like to watch them so much. And, besides, sometimes even I'm just the lunkhead that feeds them. Nothing's snootier than a snooty cat.” <br /><br /> “I can believe that,” Harlan said. He didn't really like cats, although Bhagwan and Dali were so bizarre and obstinate that he couldn't help being interested. He liked to watch them, as long as he could keep a safe distance. He put his feet up on a kitchen chair full of newspapers, and closed his eyes and sighed. The cats were outside, there was nothing to worry about. Suzanne lit a cigarette and closed her eyes too. She put her fingertips to her forehead and frowned, still trying to remember. <br /><br /> “Okay,” she said, “I've got it! 'A moralizing chauvinist is a man who wants the perfection he sees in women, but doesn't know what to do with one unless she makes perfect sense.'“ <br /><br /> Harlan shook his head and furrowed his eyebrows at her, as any sensitive guest might have done. (He remembered reading somewhere that you don't hear the bullet until it's already whizzed past you or through you.) Suzanne's eyes, though still closed, looked to Harlan as if they might be twinkling. She looked smug, as if able to detect his reactions through her eyelids. She knew that his curiosity was bound to overcome any sensitivity he had, and she waited. Harlan hated waiting. <br /><br /> “What is this,” he asked impatiently, “the goddamn dramatic pause? Is that all of it or not?” <br /><br /> She shook her head and held up a finger, signifying “wait”. Then she resumed: “'He wants to fully know a woman—which is really only a civilized form of ravishment—and yet no one, male or female, really wants to be known like that.'“ <br /><br /> “Good grief, where'd you get that from,” he teased, “the Kinsey Report or Hitler's Diary?” <br /><br /> Suzanne opened her eyes and laughed, “From the goddamn Sunday Parade, where do you think!” <br /><br /> “Yeah, sure; they have stuff like that all the time,” he laughed. <br /><br /> Suzanne had a good memory, after a fashion, he knew that. She finished every book that she started, though, even the bad ones, and sometimes got overloaded. She couldn't always recall where these things came from. Harlan didn't have that problem. If a book wasn't any good by the hundredth page, he would quit flat. “That's where you miss the jewel in the shitpile, though,” she always insisted. He meant to ask her if she could remember which shitpile this latest one had come from, but he got distracted. Suzanne often did that to him, though it wasn't any of her doing. <br /><br /> “For what it's worth,” he thought, “she really looks lovely today.” <br /><br /> It would probably be dangerous to say so, however. Suzanne was such a modern, unromantic woman. Worse, she was an old friend and his best friend; she was bound to object to his compliments on one ground or another. It would have been complicated enough if she'd just been a woman. He never noticed just when it had become so wrong to mention their beauty to women, only that it had. All it took was them to look at him as if he had some wretched ulterior motive, and he'd begin to feel that he did. Talking about beauty to women these days was a vice with its own immediate punishment. <br /><br /> “You're the most damnably intellectual woman I know,” he told her. Crap, what a self-conscious sentence, he thought. <br /><br /> “Oh, bullshit,” she said, shaking her head and giving him a sweet-sour glance as she got up to check the soup. It was about what he'd expected, of course; she'd been giving him those looks for years. For some reason he wanted to impress her today, but he wasn't off to a very good start. He felt clumsy and transparent. He wanted to suppress that ridiculous grin on his face, too—not kill it, just suppress it a bit, before she asked him what was so funny. Nothing was funny, really. Though he'd spoken as if he was still teasing her, he had meant it as a compliment. She had of course recognized that it was a compliment; she just wasn't good at taking one. She wouldn't take credit for her beauty, or this either. <br /><br /> He followed her to the stove and stood too close. When she lifted the pot lid, she automatically leaned away from it, but Harlan didn't think and the hot suffocating steam rose rapidly, unexpectedly into his face. He jumped back. <br /><br /> “Godalmighty, I can't breathe!” <br /><br /> He grabbed a newspaper and fanned his face. Suzanne chuckled and reached for a wooden spoon. She hadn't really liked him standing so close, anyway. She hated anyone breathing down her neck when she was cooking. <br /><br /> “Well, you are very clever,” he insisted, resuming his subject. Once he began, he hated to lose a train of thought. <br /><br /> Suzanne was studying the spice rack and didn't seem to have heard him. She added some tomato sauce and stirred it in. Harlan licked his lips and lit a cigarette and watched her. If he looked longer or more longingly at the blush of her cheeks or the curve of her breasts than at her hand or at the soup, that was something she didn't have to know. She was only stirring the soup, but she was stirring him too. <br /><br /> She had the nicest breasts he could imagine, but he had always imagined that. He knew that he ought not to dwell on it. There wasn't any imagination to it, actually. He knew what her breasts looked like and they weren't that perfect—he liked them because he liked her. Years ago, they used to have these same long daffy conversations in the bathroom while she bathed and it used to drive him crazy. <br /><br /> “Compulsively hip,” he thought uneasily, “that was our disease in 1968.” <br /><br /> That was what he told himself these days, whether it made any damn sense or not. They had all been full of “revolution” back then and endless talk about “freedom”. Now, of course, those things didn't exist at all, or else were everywhere, gutted and co-opted. <br /><br /> “But that's evolution, isn't it?” he thought. <br /><br /> But still, back then, living in Suzanne's spare room for a few months while out of a job, he wasn't so wise. He was young and hip—that is to say, passionate and inhibited. He had leaned against the washbasin each evening and nervously pushed his long blonde hair off his forehead and talked to her, talked ceaselessly, while she took those long slow baths that never made any sense to him. He had always hated being wet. He preferred quick showers. Still, he didn't mind watching her get wet. And, after all, it wasn't as if she waved her nudity around in front of him like a flag—she just didn't hide it. Nor had he jumped in with her; it hadn't been anything like that. <br /><br /> “No,” Harlan thought irritably, pouring himself another whiskey, “that would have been sex, and we were just—free, I guess.” <br /><br /> But still, it was clear that they had loved to talk. Sometimes she had looked at him curiously as if seeing him for the first time and asked if he was really comfortable. He had lied to her, of course, and hated himself for it, though not enough to stop. It crossed his mind now that perhaps those baths had been as prolonged as they were because she had been as disturbed as he was and hoped that he would go away before she had to stand up. <br /><br /> “Maybe that's it then,” he thought. “Ha! The old men are right; wisdom comes late—mostly when you have no use for it at all.” He was only 38, but the feeling had been creeping up on him more and more often lately that it was too late for a lot of things. His health was failing in a dozen small ways, and he missed those easier times. <br /><br /> She might have felt comfortable about nudity, but he never had. He'd always had to pretend, and it hadn't been “easy” at all. So why did he stay there? “I just like seeing her naked, I guess,” he'd told himself. And yet sometimes he didn't even like that. “God, I really must be nuts!” he told himself now. <br /><br /> But why all this hassle, then or now? She was cute, but nothing out of the ordinary. Why did it have to be her? She was intelligent, and she had that wonderful intrinsic beauty of youth—and that was all. But that was all it took. He loved her so much that no one could have been more beautiful, and beauty was what he loved. He was in a self‑defeating circle. <br /><br /> Thus, all things considered, her beauty was wasted in the bathroom. Being so near a naked woman who wasn't going to make love to him may have been adventurous, but it wasn't advantageous. A lot of the time, he just felt sick. Even at more innocent moments, with their clothes on and nothing in mind, if she touched him lightly in passing, as friends will, it thrilled him far too much—he couldn't enjoy it. Being in love with her made everything she did complicated and dangerous. <br /><br /> They had drifted in and out of one another's lives for twenty years now and every time they came together, she was always the right woman in the wrong place or time for him, always bright and desirable in a world full of humorless, dull people. Compared to Suzanne, everyone around him seemed slower than Christmas, duller than untumbled stones. Yet even when she did love him, it was always only as a friend. There had been times, you see, when things had slipped. There'd been three times. But each time they'd slept together, he'd gotten up the next morning madly in love with her and Suzanne went on with her life as if everything was normal. So why in the world had she slept with him?! Did she think he'd been broken and needed fixing? <br /><br /> “She fixed me, all right,” he told himself. <br /><br /> He'd felt inadequate, of course, right in the heart of the matter, except his heart wasn't the organ called into question. Either something was wrong with his brain or something was wrong with his dick, or both. Was it that he didn't know how to make love to her? <br /><br /> “Maybe she wants orgasms by the dozens,” he thought. <br /><br /> Or maybe she didn't want any at all. <br /><br /> Was it only that he'd worn her down, that somehow he'd caught her in a weak moment? Thinking about it made him defensive. <br /><br /> “I think she just fucked me and then rolled over and went back to sleep!” he fumed. <br /><br /> She hadn't been rude about it, no, or very passionate either. Just horribly practical, he supposed. Or perhaps she was passionate; at any rate, she had been very good in bed! Ah, but that only made things worse. Passionate or not, it must have been about as memorable for her as a game of miniature golf—hardly worth discussing once it was over. And in fact she seemed to have forgotten it. But he, no matter how many women he'd known since, or how often she married, or how crazy things got, had not. <br /><br /> “Pass me the salt,” Suzanne said, still tinkering with the recipe. <br /><br /> Abruptly he became aware of her in the present and realized how vividly the past was intruding this afternoon. Sometimes the past was more real than the future, and it made him feel old, as if somehow everything had already happened that was ever going to happen. “This is only middle‑age!” he reminded himself forcefully. <br /><br /> “You're going to spoil the soup if you just keep screwing with it, aren't you?” he said. <br /><br /> “Naa. It's almost impossible to ruin soup. Give me the pepper, too.” <br /><br /> Harlan gave her the pepper, then sat down and watched her measure it out, but the past continued to intrude. He could remember so well those old sensations, those perverse and wonderful conversations in that drafty old house on 15th Street. She'd always left the tap running and the drain plug slightly askew so that her bath wouldn't get cold, and the water had eddied constantly, slowly against her small pale arms and breasts, seeming to caress them, as he wished to. When she leaned forward to offer her lips, it was not to him, of course, but to his cigarette. He held it for her so that she wouldn't get it wet. If her face touched his fingers sometimes by accident, he pretended that it didn't mean anything. <br /><br /> “Bathroom decorum,” he'd told himself. Well, he took what he could get. He was half‑convinced that she was playing a game and half‑aware of his own unstable acquiescence in it, and he felt completely foolish. Yet it was also a game from his side—worse than a game, a terrible self-conscious lie! So how could he fault her? Faulting her was the least of it; sometimes he loved her so much that he hated her. He wanted her and wanted her to want him back. <br /><br /> And so he talked, cautiously, rapidly, always furtively watching her and just as furtively looking away, wondering if she was crazy or he was crazy, or if all of it made some kind of sense and he was just being stupid to feel uncomfortable. He liked her too much to do what he most needed to do—pitch a towel over her head and walk out the door. <br /><br /> But that was nearly twenty years ago. Surely none of that applied any more. “We're not as young as we used to be,” he sighed, “and maybe we're not as cruel either.” <br /><br /> All he could really do was guess—there were a lot of things about the past that he would never have the courage to ask her. Perhaps she had merely indulged herself too freely in freedoms that neither of them knew how to handle. Maybe they'd both been crazy; that seemed likely enough. Maybe things could be different now. <br /><br /> “Goddamn it, why do I bother to even think about it?” <br /><br /> They were just friends now. God, how he loathed that phrase! What was so just about it? <br /><br /> “You've always had a delightful intelligence,” he said. <br /><br /> She was leaning over the cook pot, blowing on the wooden spoon. He was blowing smoke‑rings with his cigarette, ostensibly paying her breasts no mind. Suzanne leaned forward carefully and pushed back her long brown hair. She licked the spoon and murmured, “No.” <br /><br /> “It's the thing I like best about you,” he said. “Even your good nature is second to that.” <br /><br /> “Thanks, I guess,” she said absently, licking her fingers and looking to see if there were any clean soup bowls. Then she seemed to think about what he'd said and looked at him quizzically. <br /><br /> “Is there a 'but' about to intrude itself here like some kind of rooting hog?” she asked. She knew him pretty well. Harlan smiled with appreciation; he loved it when she turned an odd phrase. He'd have to remember it. <br /><br /> “But,” he said with a smirk and a grimace, “there are factors I don't control, at least I don't think so.” <br /><br /> “Such as?” <br /><br /> “Well, dammit, you are pretty cute, you know—no, you wouldn't know that, would you?—and I have no idea how much less 'cute' you could be and still be a viable object of my lust. At some point everyone—I mean, every man—must finally say, “She's too ugly; I could always be her friend, but—” <br /><br /> “But you could never fuck her, right?” <br /><br /> “Ah—right.” <br /><br /> “Big deal,” she said. “Aren't you aware that women think the same things about you?” <br /><br /> “I'd heard a rumor, but I wasn't sure. I'm certainly glad to hear you say it! Every little bit of equitable villainy helps in this unbalancing battle to fool the object of one's desire.” <br /><br /> “Fool them into what?” Suzanne asked. <br /><br /> “Into a reciprocal desire.” <br /><br /> “An odd way to talk about love,” she told him, though she was used to him talking like that. Suzanne opened one of the cabinet doors, then slammed it and said, “Shit!” <br /><br /> “What's the matter?” <br /><br /> “I don't have any bread. Let's make a quick run to the store; it'll only take a few minutes and the soup's not ready yet.” <br /><br /> They took Suzanne's car. She drove rapidly, smoothly, through the familiar winding hills along Farless River. “Well,” Harlan thought, “she evaded that conversation pretty neatly.” She never did say very much when he talked like that. It was that damned practical nature of hers again, he supposed. He told himself to forget it. Then he remembered what she'd been saying earlier. <br /><br /> “What's all this 'demoralizing' business you were talking about, anyway?” he asked her. <br /><br /> Suzanne grinned, not watching him. She had to concentrate on her driving. There was a sharp curve at the bottom of the hill and she always waited until the very last minute to slow down for it. Even though she'd done it hundreds of times, it still took some concentration. With the curve behind her, she relaxed and seemed to remember him. <br /><br /> “Oh. Moralizing, you idiot. A moralizing chauvinist, you know, is just a man who—who wants what he wants, like every other man, I guess. Someone who makes good excuses and feels virtuous about it.” <br /><br /> “And women don't do that?” Harlan asked. <br /><br /> “Perhaps. Though women aren't as good at excuses.” <br /><br /> “Yeah, I know—they just clam up. I don't know much about a 'moralizing chauvinist', but I think a moralist is just someone who wants everything to turn out even in the end, you know? A search for truth, so to speak. Is there something wrong with that?” <br /><br /> Suzanne lifted her eyebrows and shrugged. She knew how easy he found it to make up philosophy on the spur of the moment, hopping from word to word and connecting one meaning to another with an agility that seemed questionable to her when one was supposed to be looking for “truth”. The truth was never that neat, surely. She sighed and punched a button on the dash and groped around in her purse for a cigarette. A few moments later, her head bent down toward the car's lighter, she heard Harlan yell. <br /><br /> “Uh! I think we're dead!” <br /><br /> Suzanne looked up and squinted, the smoke rising into her eyes. An 18‑wheeler with an enormous pig painted on it was bearing down on them. Suzanne blinked once (Harlan, paralyzed, thought maybe she was too), then looked down at the lighter with a puzzled expression. For a terrifying moment, Harlan thought she was going to try to fumble it back into the dashboard. When she extended her right arm toward him, he thought she'd gone crazy and was trying to hand the hot goddamn thing to him! Actually she had come to life with a vengeance and was taking the absolute shortest route to ridding herself of this preposterously inconvenient convenience. She threw it out his window. <br /><br /> As it sailed past his head, her left arm was already madly spinning the steering wheel, the tires of her old Kharmen‑Ghia screaming in protest. A split second later, as she swerved back into her own lane and overshot it, she furiously jerked the wheel back again with both hands. The car fishtailed in the loose gravel several times as she brought it back onto the blacktop. She'd barely avoided the plunge over the embankment. <br /><br /> For a split second Harlan had looked straight down on the top of the trees below and pressed back against the seat, shifting his weight slowly toward the middle. He thought seriously about crawling into the back; if the car was going over the edge, he didn't want to be the first to go. But in fact the whole thing was already over. The big truck thrummed past them so loudly that the little VW chassis continued to vibrate for a long moment like a strummed string on a symphony bass. Still half‑turned in his seat, he felt it in his sternum. And then he caught a glimpse of the sign on the back of the Piggly‑Wiggly truck. Under the circumstances that idiotic happy‑go‑lucky pig‑face seemed frighteningly hallucinogenic to him and he looked away. <br /><br />Harlan took a deep breath and brushed Suzanne's shoulder with his fingertips. <br /><br />“Jesus, that'll make your heart beat fast!” he said. <br /><br />“It didn't exactly slow me down, either!” she said sharply, shrugging his hand off and throwing her crumpled cigarette out the window as hard as she could. How she'd managed to keep it in her hand while wrestling the steering wheel like that, he couldn't imagine. She looked mad, but Harlan realized she was mad at herself, and scared. His own adrenalin still continued to rush. <br /><br /> “God, one of these days, if I live long enough,” she said emphatically, “I'm going to quit smoking!” <br /><br /> “Might be a good idea,” Harlan sighed, and nervously lit a cigarette. <br /><br /> Suzanne was watching the road with care and didn't bother to answer. He waited a few minutes before he said anything else. <br /><br /> “Where is this moralist business from, anyway?” he asked. He could see she was still uptight, but he thought that talking might calm both of them. <br /><br /> “Huh? Oh—it's just something I read last week in that new Austin magazine called Silences, that's all.” <br /><br /> “Oh, yeah, I saw that once,” Harlan said with a grimace. “It looked sort of artsy‑fartsy to me.” <br /><br /> “Oh, for Christ's sake, I didn't write it, I just said I read it!” Suzanne snapped. Sometimes he was just too damned argumentative for her. Harlan decided it would be better to just shut up and appreciate still being alive. It wasn't the worst thing in the world. <br /><br /> Coming back from the store, he remembered another ride with her, a couple of years ago. He had given Suzanne and one of her friends a ride home from work one day and the three of them had ended up pressed together like sardines in Harlan's small truck. She was married to her second husband then and Harlan hadn't touched her at all in several years—even their kisses hello had ended by some unspoken agreement—and this involuntary intimacy just seemed horrible to him. It reminded him too much of when he'd first known her. <br /><br /> “For Christ's sake,” he told himself, “this is eighteen years later!” <br /><br /> As soon as he'd moved the floor‑shift into fourth gear, his hand slipped unintentionally between her knees—nothing indecent, but there it was. His hand rested lightly against her, and her flesh was cool and smooth, supple and inviting. Despite everything he knew about her, he felt that old juvenile thrill. “Jesus, it doesn't feel eighteen years older, it feels eighteen years old!” He felt like jamming on the brakes and grabbing her then and there. Fuck making sense, her friend could get out and walk or sit still and watch, he didn't care! He imagined rush‑hour traffic splitting and going past his truck on both sides, like water rushing past a stuck log down in that goddamn Farless River of hers! He tried to imagine what she'd say if she didn't say no, but nothing came to mind. He licked his lips and looked at her, but said nothing. The traffic in front of him slowed a bit, and he downshifted into third. <br /><br /> Later in her kitchen, suddenly and appropriate to nothing that had just been said, he started again. “Back to my point—if any: Not every woman has your character and mental acuity. Some women have to figure out how to be attractive without having an iota of character or humor.” <br /><br /> “But I need both—is that it?” <br /><br /> “No, no! Don't get riled. Christ, these “honest” conversations we have are dangerous things! What I'm saying is that you're so attractive that I—I can't always ignore what I feel. I do love you, you know.” <br /><br /> “But you know how I feel about that,” she said. <br /><br /> Harlan nodded and looked grim. Of course he knew. He kept on anyway. <br /><br /> Suzanne tried to kid him into taking about something else. She never felt comfortable talking about love, least of all with Harlan. The world seemed to lurch sideways when he talked about love. Sometimes he was like the feisty old terrier in the back yard, who'd get hold of something and wouldn't let it go. There were times when his sense of humor would let him back out gracefully if she teased him skillfully enough, but this time Harlan seemed to feel more deeply about it and fell deeper and deeper into his own trap. At length, she began to frown. He poured himself another shot of whiskey and wondered if he was drunk yet. Probably not, even if he did feel overheated and dizzy; that might be something else. Sometimes it took all of his courage just to be a fool. That's as good a guess as any why, when he couldn't imagine that she wouldn't find his next words offensive, he said them anyway. <br /><br /> “It's just hard to concentrate when I want to fuck you so bad.” <br /><br /> Dear Jesus! As soon as he'd spoken, he regretted it. He'd already opened a door that he knew she would rather close, and now he'd jammed his foot in it. His face flushed, his soul shriveled, he wanted to run away. He lit a cigarette and looked her in the eye as if he could handle it. Suzanne didn't blink either; she was used to this. She shook her head and reached for the Weller's. She poured a drink and looked thoughtful. <br /><br /> “Well, I can imagine that,” she replied with a trace of a smile. “I'm not unsympathetic, you know. But your real problem isn't how much you want me, it's more a matter of how badly you want somebody—anybody, perhaps.” <br /><br /> “Well, not anybody,” he said. <br /><br /> “You know what I mean. Listen, we've been friends for twenty years now and it's been at least half that long since we were close to being any kind of lovers. Those few days of groping at one another like adolescents in heat—and we weren't young even that long ago!—came to a dead halt when you went apeshit and chattered to my husband about it as if it would be good for his character! Ugh! Your near‑betrayal of your best friend and my near-betrayal of my husband—” <br /><br /> “Not to mention our betrayal of ourselves?” Harlan added. There was a sort of smirk on his face, but actually he felt sick. <br /><br /> It had been very odd to him, of course, that so long after he'd made such a fool of himself over her, she'd begun to make a fool of everyone by falling in love with him. For by then, she was married to her first husband, Stuart, and she must have seen that everything would blow up in everybody's face. This time they hadn't even made love, but fooled around idiotically. They met in clandestine places. They flirted and kissed, slowly pulling one another's shirt‑tails out and sliding their hands underneath. Then, pausing just for a moment to speak—to say, “I love you” or else to split hairs about what they both considered highly questionable behavior—they always got stuck in the moment. Like teenagers, they edged constantly toward doing “it”, but always edged back again. They were only in their thirties, but already on the cusp of being too old for such complicated romances. Once the cops had caught them “parking” after curfew in Enfield Park, and the incident amused everyone, including the cops, but the laughter didn't last. Soon everything fell apart with a vengeance. Even now, the kindest thing he could call it was Betrayal. Even now, he felt guilty. That Suzanne should bring it up was fair enough, he supposed, but it made him feel like a kicked dog and he could sense the other foot being lifted. <br /><br /> “No, not to mention that. Goddamn it.” She paused for several seconds as if remembering what she hadn't meant to remember. <br /><br /> Harlan remembered, too. 1977 just hadn't been a very good year, not even with it's two lucky sevens. Maybe it had all been a last bit of craziness for both of them before the world blew up. But the only world that blew up was their own, and mostly he'd done that himself. But why? Revenge? Or just bad nerves? Maybe it was nerves; Stuart's foolishness must figure in there somewhere. He was one of Harlan's best friends at the time, but sometimes he was such a sappy, trusting guy that Harlan wanted to slap him—”Wake up, wake up!” he wanted to yell. But that wasn't it, either, was it? Had he really thought he was protecting Stuart from himself? You don't wake people up by pushing them off the edge of a cliff, do you? Well, Harlan might, even though he'd gone off the cliff with the rest of them. After all these years, he still didn't understand it or like to think about it. <br /><br /> “Betrayal!” She almost spat the word. “Goddamn, Harlan, you will never comprehend the horror I went through with Stuart over that! It's too late to trot all that horrible old business out, but you must know that that killed everything romantic between you and me. We were lucky to ever become friends again, don't you realize that?” <br /><br /> “Yes,” Harlan said emphatically, “I do.” <br /><br /> “I don't think our friendship has been too strained since then—even if it has been—strange. Do you?” <br /><br /> “No, of course not,” he smiled. He couldn't remember with certainty just how they had gotten back on a friendly footing. Even that was years ago now, and his memory was terrible, or at least selective. He recalled that he'd run into Stuart and Suzanne on Sixth Street one day, and just as he was about to duck his head and cross the street, they both spoke to him. God knows where such forgiveness comes from, he'd thought, since they hadn't spoken to him in more than a year. Since then, Suzanne had thrown Stuart out twice and another husband besides, and was on her own again. And Harlan had suddenly been tempted to think of her as a woman again and not just a friend. <br /><br /> “No,” she repeated, “not very strained at all, not until now—” <br /><br /> “Now when I talk about wanting to poke you?” <br /><br /> “Yes—exactly. God, what an awful phrase!” <br /><br /> “Life gets full of odd and awful phrases when you go around like an idiot falling in love with every woman you like,” Harlan said. <br /><br /> “Oh, if only that were really true of you, Harlan, you probably wouldn't have any problem! It's your own damn fault if it's complicated, you know. You're the most hard‑headed person I know!” Harlan opened his mouth and then shut it. It was starting to sink in what a dangerous door had been opened. <br /><br /> Suzanne shook her head and added, “I understand that you're silly enough to still love me. Sometimes it's very flattering, I guess. But it's certainly not my fault if you don't get laid enough to keep yourself distracted from me! You never ask enough women out, it seems to me. Love is sometimes more of a dance or a numbers game than you seem to realize. I mean, if you'd try enough partners, you might find one that you like. In any case, you have to keep trying.” <br /><br /> “I guess so. It's always been hard on me that I like certain women when it seems that I don't really know how to just 'like'. Anyway, what should we do now?” Harlan asked. <br /><br /> “Nothing, I suppose. Nothing, I'm sure of it. You may want it a lot or need it a lot, I don't know which, and you have a good deal of my sympathy. Because we're friends, of course. But I don't want to sleep with you and I don't want to have to sleep with you.” <br /><br /> “Sure, you're right,” he said quickly, grimacing with embarrassment. He couldn't quite believe they were talking about this. He wondered why he could never keep his stupid mouth shut when he knew where it would lead. But in fact he didn't know. <br /><br /> “It may sound sort of odd to you,” she added, pouring herself another drink, “but I haven't been very interested in sex for some time now, anyway.” <br /><br /> “You mean, not since the last marriage failed?” <br /><br /> “Perhaps.” <br /><br /> He'd run across this before. Sometimes it seemed that all the good women who weren't already taken had simply given up on sex. The “sexual revolution” had produced some very curious survivors. Could it be, it suddenly occurred to him, that they felt as unlucky as he did and just didn't say it? <br /><br /> “But there's more to it than that,” she added. “It has something more to do with who I am than with who I slept with last, more to do with what I think about myself, and maybe something to do with having passed 40 now and having a grown son who's finally going to leave the house.” <br /><br /> “Oh. How is Willy, by the way? I haven't seen him in weeks.” <br /><br /> “He's fine, I guess. I think that new job of his is going to work out really well. Young men are so strange though—everything so raw and vivid! It's just like what we've been talking about here. He's a part of it, too, always on the throb! I hate hearing my own son doing it! But when he and his friends bitch to one another about their lunatic sex drives—” <br /><br /> “Good grief, Suzanne, you listen to that?” <br /><br /> “Well, the walls are thin. Oh, fuck it, it's my house! Yeah, I listen. I just don't holler at them about it, that's all. Sometimes, it's amusing and sometimes it pisses me off, but I figure a good mother knows what's going on in her house and also knows when to keep her mouth shut.” <br /><br /> “Definitely a new generation of Mom,” Harlan laughed. <br /><br /> “Yeah, sure. Blame it on sex, drugs, and rock and roll.” <br /><br /> “What do they talk about?” he asked with interest, then bit his tongue. His curiosity had overcome him for a moment. If she was going to go on opening these unpredictable doors, surely he didn't have to nudge her along. <br /><br /> “Well—I don't know. It's the same old thing I've always heard, really, when men thought no one was listening to them. Mostly it happens when they've all come back from a party where none of them had a date and none of them got lucky. Willy and his pals sit around in his room and groan and bellyache about all the women that evening who just weren't “compassionate” enough. Compassionate! You know what they want, of course. They want a mercy‑fuck with no strings attached. They don't want much! Christ, the generations don't change much, do they?” <br /><br /> Harlan didn't quite nod, just sort of tilted his head in acknowledgement that he'd heard what she said. He wasn't going to open any doors of any kind. <br /> <br /> “If a girl ever does come along who seems to have this kind of crazy companionable compassion that you men dream about, or who maybe just happens to need a little mercy at the same time you do, all you do is screw it up!” <br /><br /> Suzanne, a little red in the face now, paused for breath. Harlan swallowed hard and kept his mouth shut. Maybe these weren't doors at all through which her thoughts were escaping this afternoon, but Pandora's box. <br /><br /> “Goddamn it, you don't recognize mercy when you get it! You just fall in love with her! Then you get resentful and fall apart because your “good Samaritan” doesn't fall head over heels in love with you too! No, you don't want much—just everything! You want somebody to take pity on you and do you a favor—a mighty personal favor, too!—then you think...oh, hell!” <br /><br /> Harlan nodded solemnly as if he understood. (Well, after all, perhaps he did know—finally—what she meant.) His face burned as he remembered those times she'd slept with him. He felt like a roast on the spit when he thought of all the years he'd spent unable to forget it. He'd been a fool. <br /><br /> “So much for getting what you say you want,” he told himself. <br /><br /> “Sometimes there just isn't any way for a woman to win,” Suzanne said in a persistent tone. She was on a roll, as if she'd repressed saying this for a long time—perhaps to Harlan, perhaps to anybody. <br /><br /> “You guys want to fuck every woman that you see, and then you get upset, distracted, despondent, if an attractive woman refuses to be attractive, or is attractive and yet refuses what she attracts.” <br /><br /> To Harlan's relief, a fly started buzzing around their heads, and seemed to like Suzanne best. He hoped it would distract her from him. She fanned it away with her hand, got the fly swatter off the top of the refrigerator, and scanned the room with a murderous stare. She hated flies and wouldn't tolerate them in her kitchen. <br /><br /> “Where is that little shit?” she said. Harlan shrugged. The fly had disappeared. “Anyway,” she said, sitting back down, “You're probably the worst of the lot, with all of your intellectual convolutions and pretensions. You even complain about beautiful women not knowing how to wear their beauty! I've heard you do it, so don't deny it!” Suzanne said. <br /><br /> “Well, I am particular, I guess. Or maybe just bizarre, I don't know,” Harlan sighed. His face was turning red; he knew from her tone that she was going to nail him whether he argued or not and that he might as well stand there and take it. <br /><br /> “If you were only particular, that would be one thing. But, hell, you're so absolutely insanely—!” <br /><br /> “God love you, you little bastard!” Harlan thought. There was that elusive fly again, and it was dive-bombing Suzanne's ear. She shook her head slightly and sat motionless. She held the fly swatter stiffly in her hand; she was frozen but poised, using her peripheral vision to follow the fly's flight path. Clearly, she meant business. Harlan waited too, slightly amused, thinking that they might have to wait a long time, these blue bottle flies were pretty fast. Suzanne knew it would make a mistake. <br /><br /> “Patience, my ass,” she muttered. <br /><br /> Harlan understood what she meant. He was glad the fly was there, but he prayed that it didn't land on his head. She'd probably knock his brains out if it did. At last, the fly settled for a moment at the edge of the table. Suzanne's arm snapped down as suddenly as the spring‑loaded backbreaker on a mousetrap. Whap! Harlan flinched, even though he'd been expecting it. With a practiced twist of the swatter, Suzanne flipped the corpse off the table, straight into the trashcan. She ran her hand through her long brown hair, pushing it away from her forehead, and nodded with satisfaction. <br /><br /> “Good shot,” he said. <br /><br /> “No offense, Harlan, but a woman's beauty has something in common with a pile of garbage—it attracts every pest on the block, whether you like it or not!” <br /><br /> Harlan shook his head, slightly mystified. He had still been thinking about the fly and it took him a moment to realize that Suzanne wasn't any more able to turn loose of the conversation she wanted to have than he'd been able to turn loose of his. <br /><br /> “Including every stray dog with a hardon?” Harlan said tiredly. It was not really a question. <br /><br /> “That's an ugly way to phrase it, but yes. Something like that, anyway. I've tried deflecting my son from going too far in that direction, but it just doesn't sink into his head. I've pretty much stopped trying now, though; I don't want to ruin my relationship with him by going too far myself. All I can do is hope that it's just a temporary condition, something in the hormones, and that Willy will be more sane when he's older. But I'm probably expecting too much. I sometimes think that what it really is, is that something's wrong with the entire genetic structure of the male! Some kind of built‑in stupidity—an auto‑pilot of some kind that nature still thinks you need, even though the present state of human progress doesn't need it at all.” <br /><br /> “I need a gene splice, huh?” <br /><br /> “It wouldn't hurt you,” she said. Then she laughed and added, “Or, even if it did, it might be worth it to turn off that insatiable auto‑pilot you're all flying by!” <br /><br /> “It's not nice to fuck with Mother Nature, though,” he grinned. “Some of this 'auto‑pilot' business is natural biological impulse, you know.” <br /><br /> “Be that as it may,” she said, “we are where we are. I wouldn't be the first one to point out that human evolution has a side to it rather different from our animal evolution.” <br /><br /> “And I have to catch up with it? I'm afraid you'll be talking about our souls next.” <br /><br /> “Our souls probably both need a talking to! As for all that other stuff, I don't know, not really,” she said with a shrug and a wave of her hand. “I was just being imaginative, I suppose, and blowing off steam. I guess the short version of it is that all I'm asking is that you keep your passion in your pocket and just be my friend.” <br /><br /> Ah! Just friends. But, yes, that was it, after all these years, wasn't it? Harlan smiled and nodded his head dispiritedly. He admired her phrase about passion (no matter how killing it was) and he believed every word that she'd said, but he still felt how he felt. <br /><br /> “You can live with that?” Suzanne said. <br /><br /> Harlan nodded again. <br /><br /> They both seemed to run out of steam at the same time. Suzanne got up to check the soup and took longer than usual to do it. Harlan got some more ice for their drinks and took his time too. <br /><br /> After a while, he spoke again, but it was as if the alcohol were finally beginning to bleed over from his brain into his speech. “You know, I've hurt that some—same—sort of line before,” he said with a careful slur. <br /><br /> “I imagine you have,” she smiled tiredly. <br /><br /> “I always manage to deal with it.” <br /><br /> “Good!” she told him. <br /><br /> He laughed loudly—almost cackled—and said, “You know, I remember a girl once who told me that she didn't want to fall in love, she wanted to stand in love! It was a fine and noble sentiment, I realized, once I'd figured out what she meant. But it struck me as being suspiciously dispassionate! I even wrote myself a note about it, and I still remember it—well, more or less. It was something like this: 'A puppy's love is unconditional, and a mother's love unreflective, and God's love is—well, God's love is everlasting! (Those are wonderful things, aren't they?) But if everybody loves you like that, then what, I ask you, what is passion for?'“ <br /><br /> “Are you sure you don't have passion mixed up with your wet dreams?” Suzanne said with a grin. Sometimes she liked his speeches even when she knew he was making them up as he went along. <br /><br /> “Well—shit—I don't know! I can't even decide if I'm drunk or sober, much less whether this conversation is comedy, or tragedy, or just a simple act of self‑serving‑preservation. Why the fuck am I always trying to fall in love with my best friends and they never fall in love with me?” <br /><br /> “I don't know. Lucky you don't make best friends with men, huh?” she teased him. <br /><br /> “Yes, well—,” he grinned. “Christ, you know what I mean! But it seems to me that I've spent my life watching beautiful women's faces turn to such disappointment when they find out that I'm a different kind of friend than what they wanted me to be. Fuck, it's awful! It makes me look as if I had this ugly rooting little hog of an ulterior motive all along and makes me feel like I'm never going to be taken seriously! I must be an awful shit.” <br /><br /> “The inevitable ulterior motive!” Suzanne laughed. “Yes, I know, Harlan, you are a terrible shit and incredibly selfish, and a bit drunk, too,” she said gently. <br /><br /> “Don't try to get on my good side,” he told her lightly, waving his hand at her as if the fly had returned to life and come after him. His mind was still bearing down hard on the conclusion he was trying to arrive at, though it was taking more concentration than usual to do it. He took a big drink of his whiskey made a face and shuddered; the ice had melted. “Agh, I hate warm bourbon,” he muttered, then shook his head to clear it and resumed. <br /><br /> “I wonder—even though it seems as if I ought to know!—whether it's a typical male perspective that passion gills—I mean, gilds a friendship and if—” <br /><br /> “If it's a typical female attitude that passion kills it?” Suzanne interrupted. <br /><br /> Harlan nodded, grinning sheepishly. God, how he loved her when she knew what he was going to say! “I'm that predictable, huh?” <br /><br /> Suzanne covered her mouth and giggled hysterically. She quickly put her hand on his arm as if to restrain him and laughed, “I'm sorry, Harlan! I'm not trying to make you squirm, I swear!” <br /><br /> “No, that's all right; I'm used to being an idiot by now,” he shrugged. “If they were handing out medals, I'd probably get the 'Best in Show'.” <br /><br /> “Really, Harlan,” she gasped, wiping the tears from her eyes and trying to stop laughing, “I've never liked you more or loved you less than I do right now! I like it so much when your sense of humor comes back.” <br /><br /> Harlan still felt awkward, but he did feel better. If she could laugh like that, then clearly she didn't hate him, and he hadn't been very sure. Harlan cleared his throat. <br /><br /> “I say all that about passion, by the way, speaking from limited but consistent experience. I've never done a statistical inquiry.” <br /><br /> Suzanne laughed again, but with more control now. “I should hope not!” she told him. She took a long slow sip of whiskey and said, “I wonder how you'd word the questionnaire?” <br /><br /> “I don't know,” he laughed back. “I guess it would be embarrassing to everyone concerned!” <br /><br /> “Precisely,” she assured him with a smile. She sat down and lit a cigarette, then looked a little more serious. “And so it is now, even though we've been friends for so long. It's embarrassing to have to withhold kisses from you that you so clearly deserve from someone—just not from me! And it makes me very unhappy to think that you may be getting romantic when I'm merely talking to you. We always have such nice conversations, yet surely it's destructive to the clarity of our communications?” <br /><br /> “Sometimes, yes.” <br /><br /> “I don't know what to say. If I don't feel like you do, what can I do about it?” <br /><br /> “Nothing,” he said flatly, “clearly nothing. Yet even this negative conversation excites me, because it approaches the subject even as it averts any culmination or advance. Ha! Do you remember those books we read by Alexander Durrell?” <br /><br /> “Lawrence Durrell,” Suzanne corrected. <br /><br /> “That's right. The closer I get to forty, the worse my memory gets, I guess! Christ, how did we get so old, anyway?” <br /><br /> “I don't know,” she smiled. “I guess it snuck in through the bathroom window.” <br /><br />“You're quoting Beatles at me, and I'm talking about Durrell. Anyway, I always recall what he said about love.” <br /><br /> Suzanne raised her eyebrows and said, “I believe he said a great deal about love.” <br /><br />“Yeah, everything except 'All you need is...'“ <br /><br /> “Soup!” Suzanne said suddenly and jumped up to check it. She came back to the table and said, “Almost ready.” <br /><br /> “Good,” he said, “I need something to go with this drink.” <br /><br /> “I imagine you do!” she said. “How many does that make?” <br /><br /> “Fewer than yours, I think.” <br /><br /> “Yeah, but I'm a better drinker than you are,” she said. <br /><br /> “I know you are, but I've got more brain cells left. Listen, do you want to hear my Durrell quote or not?” <br /><br /> “Are you sure you have enough brain cells?” <br /><br /> “Probably.” <br /><br /> “Let's have it then,” she grinned. She knew how he liked to quote. <br /><br /> “Let's see now. Okay, I've got it. 'What is to be done when one cannot share one's own opinions about love?'“ <br /><br /> Suzanne looked startled. Somehow she'd forgotten that one. But she knew what it meant. <br /><br /> “Nothing,” she answered in an unhappy voice. “Nothing, I'm afraid.” <br /><br /> As so often in the past, her honesty devastated the insistent stance Harlan had taken. “Suzanne's an awfully good friend,” he thought with a sigh, and that was some help, after all. She had her virtues, as he had his—well, one or two, anyway! He knew all that, though he suspected that he'd gotten too drunk for it to matter. In a sense he felt more desperate, foolish, morose, and aroused now than ever. <br /><br /> “Patience, my ass,” he thought grimly. There was precious little virtue in this sort of virtue, as far as he could see. But still, if he loved her? She had sounded so unhappy for both their sakes, and he hated that. <br /><br /> “Sometimes maybe it's better just to lie a little,” he thought. He had reached the other side of truth—his truth, anyway—and felt compelled to say something. But what? <br /><br /> “There's always soup,” he said aloud, smiling idiotically. <br /><br /> “Oh, God, that's right!” she said, and jumped up. <br /><br /> She turned out the fire and moved the pot off the burner. When she began to make a clatter with the bowls and bread platter, he thought for a moment that he should get up to help her, then blew it off. “Fuck it, I'm drunk,” he decided. <br /><br /> “Watch out, it's hot!” she said, setting the steaming bowls on the table. Harlan looked carefully at the bowl. He pushed the vegetables around with his spoon for a while, then looked at Suzanne. <br /><br /> “Maybe I don't know what women are for,” he said dispiritedly. <br /><br /> “Maybe you don't know what friends are for,” she countered. <br /><br /> “Maybe we're both right.” <br /><br /> “Always looking for the last word, aren't you?” she grinned. <br /><br /> “Yep. But maybe I've got it right this time.” <br /><br /> “Maybe you do, but—” <br /><br /> She was interrupted by Dali jumping up on the table. “Oh, crap, Dolly, how did you get in here? No wonder there was a fly in the house!” <br /><br /> Suzanne rushed off to find what door or window in the house was open. The cat gave her backside a cool conceited look (as if to say, “I can walk through walls!), then tiptoed straight toward Harlan. <br /><br /> “Watch out, Doorknob,” Harlan muttered, but Dali came on anyway, and performed his fluffy‑tailed pirouette with the usual grand finale: he stuck his ass in Harlan's face. While Harlan leaned back, wishing he had a fork instead of a spoon, the cat sniffed the soup, then sneezed. Suzanne's soup was heavily peppered. <br /><br /> “That's nice,” Harlan said with an icy smile. “Nice little kitty,” he said softly while slowly, uncertainly, reaching for Dolly's tail. <br /><br /> Suzanne walked in and whisked the cat to the floor. She sat down on the edge of her chair and tapped her forefinger on the cat's nose, nodding at it as if they were carrying on a conversation. The cat watched her finger closely as if he was thinking of eating it, then complained noisily and tried repeatedly to jump in her lap. Suzanne tried again and again to get her soup spoon to her mouth and finally lost patience with Dolly. <br /><br /> “You don't even like soup, stupid!” she said, and lightly slapped the cat on the head with the fly swatter. Dolly cringed for a moment, then seemed to think better of it and moved out of range. Harlan was startled, even by this gentle remonstrance. Suzanne's patience with the cats was usually infinite. It must be the whiskey, he thought. Braincells gone to hell in a soup cart. Bread cart. Handcart! <br /><br /> “Maybe you do have it right, Harlan,” Suzanne said, turning back to him, “but that's no reason not to eat your soup. Try it, it's good.” <br /><br /> Harlan frowned. He'd lost track of who she was talking to or what she meant. Right about what? Did he or didn't he like soup? “How drunk am I?” he wondered. “Oh, God, the Weller's ate the last of my braincells!” <br /><br /> “I don't know about this,” he said, shaking his head. <br /><br /> “What don't you know?” <br /><br /> He shook his head some more and wrinkled his nose at the soup. “That asshole cat of yours just blew his nose in my bowl!” <br /><br /> “Oh, for the love of God, Harlan, nothing's perfect!” she laughed. “Just shut up and eat your soup!” <br /><br /> <br />THE END <br /><br /> <br /><br /><i><h5>4th draft: 02/03/07 <br />©1988 Ronald C. Southern</i></h5> </span>Ron Southernhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08604305014713612990noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6900460.post-50894592167554039972007-02-02T14:35:00.000-08:002007-02-10T12:54:53.450-08:00After-sex Conversation With Felice Orwell“Fucking you is sure a lot of trouble,” she grinned. <br /> <br /> “Yeah, but what about your urinary infections? Sex with you has its drawbacks, too," Dogger Gatsby replied. <br /><br /> “I guess,” she sighed. “Maybe we should just give up sex.” <span id="fullpost"><br /><br /> “From what I've seen of you, that doesn't seem likely.” <br /><br /> “I do sort of like it!” she giggled softly. <br /><br /> “Me, too. Especially with you. You've got the tightest twat in Texas; nobody feels as good as you do.” <br /><br /> “I wish you wouldn't say such graphic things!” she said, half-grimacing, half-smiling. <br /><br />“What're you grinnin' about, then?” he asked her. <br /><br /> “I don't know; I just think it's funny!” she giggled. <br /><br /> “What is?” he asked. “Twat?” <br /><br /> “It is a comical-sounding word, isn't it? Hell, Dogger, I told you I don't know, I just think it's funny!”<br /><br /> “Okay,” he told her, putting his arm around her shoulder and drawing her to him. <br /><br />“You know, I'm already thinking about getting on top of you again, don't you?” he whispered. <br /><br /> “Yeah, I can tell!” she answered. “I'm even thinking about letting you do it. Even though you seem to think I'm a dang twat.” <br /><br /> “A great twat. A gorgeous twat. A beautiful, heart-warming…”<br /><br /> “Yeah, well, I get your drift,” she interrupted him. “God knows why I'd want you to, though,” she added in a semi-grouchy tone, “it's probably letting guys like you stick it in this comical twat of mine that makes me have all those goddamn urinary infections.” <br /><br /> “Oh, Miss Orwell, what big eyes you have!” <br /><br /> “You know why, Mr. Gatsby,” she said. <br /><br /> “Because you’re so full of piss and vinegar?” <br /><br /> “For a girl as slim as I am, and with all my organs so close together, I guess you could say that,” she sighed. <br /><br /> “Well, if I were more well-endowed, I might apologize, sweetie, but I’m about as safe as you can get without molesting little boys.” <br /><br /> “Don’t worry about it,” she sighed. “I’ll work it out.” <br /><br /> “I’d rather you let me work it in,” he smirked. <br /><br /> She gasped, then grinned as he suddenly slid his left hand deftly under her skirt and right to the top of what he always observed to be her beautiful, long slim, white and freckled legs. <br /><br /><br />THE END<br /><br /><i><h5>Current draft: 03/19/03 <br />©1996 Ronald C. Southern</i></h5> </span>Ron Southernhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08604305014713612990noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6900460.post-1121031504280447412005-07-10T14:34:00.000-07:002007-02-08T18:17:58.995-08:00Never Say Goodbye<p id=daily>She was 35, he was 26. She was married and had two children. She was out of reach, she was constantly at hand. She was out of the question, she was the only answer. He told himself that she was none of his goddamned business, but his unexpected admiration for her had broken his defenses. She was all that he wanted. He tried to dismiss his feelings but his desire swelled inexorably, like some sweet secret creation being brought silently to term. Rodney was in love with Marie, but no one knew it, not even Marie. <span id="fullpost"><br /><br />He had met her at work just a few months earlier and at first might almost have forgotten her. Even now he couldn't recall the moment they'd met or the first words they'd spoken. It was by no means love at first sight, yet she had crept into his consciousness slowly, imperceptibly, completely. Now everything had changed! In a span of time that seemed like a blur to him, Marie had been transformed from a total stranger to a passing acquaintance to an overwhelming presence. Suddenly he felt, not just that he knew her, but that he'd known her all his life! He was obsessed with her-yet he spoke of it to no one. <br /><br />Rodney Cathcart and Marie Fischer worked in different departments of Bio-Search, an environmental research company whose principal virtue was its greatest fault: an overriding desire to please the client. Before Marie came to work there, Rodney's principal fault and greatest amusement had been to deride that virtue. <br /><br />In the lunchroom one day, the annoying phrase "requisite expertise" rose above the murmur of conversation. For Rodney, the phrase dangled in the air tantalizingly, like a red flag before a bull. An amused sneer spread across his face as he considered his next words. <br /><br />"The experts here have already taken every side of every scientific issue known to man except whether or not the world is flat!" he laughed. <br /><br />"Everyone knows that the world is flat," someone at another table teased him. "Be careful that you don't go too far." <br /><br />"Maybe so," Rodney answered with the same serene disregard as before, "but Opposing Experts can always be found if the price is right. Bio-Search is here to serve, isn't it?" <br /><br />The more he talked the more the others wondered what he was doing there. They had often accused him of being philosophical about purely fanciful things, of talking about art as if it were real. <br /><br />"It's as real as what we're doing here," he had answered with a crooked grin. <br /><br />A gray-haired woman across the table lit a cigarette and said something in a light-hearted vein about "the marriage of art and science". Though Rodney had only half-heard her, he had caught the gist of it and it set him off again. <br /><br />"You must be thinking about the scrupulous Dr. Frankenstein," he drawled." <br /><br />"Jesus," a young man with red hair said irritably, "what's that got to do with anything?" <br /><br />Rodney stood up from the table and grinned. He always had wild opinions when he got in one of these soapbox moods, but this was an old saw. Some of the people at the table had heard it all before: how before the man caught up with his monster on that icy northern seascape, Frankenstein was no longer a scientist or a man at all. <br /><br />"He'd become as malevolent and unyielding as the pitiful creature he'd invented!" Rodney insisted with a seriousness that struck most of them as curious. This time, after a measured pause, he pointed his finger at nothing in particular, shrugged, and said lightly, "There's probably a lesson in that for all of us. I wonder what it was?" <br /><br />Dr. Raskolnikov, one of the younger biologists and yet already a senior partner, seldom paid attention to Rodney's arguments, but was sometimes amused. This time he raised an eyebrow. He said, "That's just a piece of fiction, you know." <br /><br />And Rodney replied, "That's true-but so are we."<br /><br />Raskolnikov laughed or snorted-it was hard to say which-and walked out. Rodney wondered if he'd gone too far. His coworkers grinned nervously-some of them at his joke, some at his stubbornness-but those who knew where their bread was buttered frowned thoughtfully and walked away. Rodney understood: he wasn't one of the experts. They figured he was either hostile or foolish and couldn't decide which. For that matter, neither could Rodney. Dr. Raskolnikov had hired him as the only non-technical editor at Bio-Search and Rodney felt that everyone except Raskolnikov saw him as little more than a glorified proofreader. Marie, the newest member of the word-processing department, also lacked expertise, which may explain why she didn't shy away when she heard him, but laughed aloud instead. <br /><br />"Hello!" she said. "Looking for the moral lessons in life, are you?" <br /><br />Rodney looked at her and nodded, feeling inexplicably weak, confused, and cornered. All in an instant, it seemed, some potency in her had challenged and conquered him. An unknown, terrifying, unbelievably attractive force. He glanced toward the door that Raskolnikov had gone through. <br /><br />As the others moved away, Marie leaned forward and whispered in a conspiratorial tone, "I guess you realize you're not supposed to make them up as you go along!" And when she laughed again, smiling at him as if they'd known each other forever, Rodney liked the sound of it. <br /><br />Even so, it wasn't apparent to him at first how much he was drawn to her or just how secretive he was about talking to her. At the end of most workdays, he found that he could speak with her alone. Other employees gravitated toward the time clock, but Marie sat at her desk and knitted. They talked at first about books and he was pleased to find that she was so well read. He was sick to death, he said, of people lazily admitting they "didn't read anymore". <br /><br />Rodney spoke passionately about books "that reach beyond the ordinary veneer of people's pretenses", but then was chagrinned by how pretentious he must sound. He didn't want her to think him a fool, yet his rash pronouncements about people they knew always confirmed his foolishness. Going too far was never beyond him. He might say, for instance, that people bored him or that he often saw through them. Marie would look up from her knitting and laugh. <br /><br />"But you so seldom see through to their hearts, Superman!" <br /><br />"Maybe they're wearing lead shields," he parried, trying to laugh his way out of being laughed at. <br /><br />Marie smiled and shook her head as she resumed her knitting. Rodney could not remember amusing anyone so much in his life, but he had no control over it. If he tried to make her laugh, she only smiled; he amused her most when he was perfectly serious. He had never felt more vulnerable.<br /><br />"It's remarkable," she said one day when he had talked too long, "what lengths you go to just to obscure the fact that you care for anyone. No one here knows what you think or what you feel because you don't talk to them." <br /><br />"I talk to you," he protested. <br /><br />"Yes, well," she grinned slightly, "that's a wonder in itself. I mean-I can't understand it, but no one realizes that you do talk to me, no one sees what friends we've become!" <br /><br />"You see, I'm invisible," Rodney smirked. Marie moved her hand in the air as if waving a fly away and continued speaking. <br /><br />"Oh, yeah, sure. Maybe you should have been a magician-or a pickpocket even! Nobody sees what you don't want them to see!" Her teasing observations tickled his vanity, but worried him too. He liked being thought clever, but if her insights became too penetrating, she might not like what she saw. <br /><br />"When people speak to me about you," she continued, "they talk as if you are as inexplicable to me as you are to them, and I never know what to say. I don't know whether to explain you or laugh!" <br /><br />"Laugh," Rodney said. <br /><br />Yes, perhaps," she said absently. She wasn't convinced. "You see, the thing is that they don't know whether to laugh or not either-about you, I mean." <br /><br />"Fuck 'em if they can't take a joke." <br /><br />Rodney spoke lightly, but in fact she was making him nervous. She smiled wryly at his remark, but otherwise ignored it. If she was as clever as Rodney thought, she must have seen that the hardheaded bastard didn't know how awful he sounded. <br /><br />"Sometimes it does seem funny," she conceded. "They think you're serious when you're just being facetious. I see how much it amuses you to purposely talk over their heads. But it isn't very funny when some of them dislike you for it and a few of them are even afraid of you." <br /><br />"Well, they don't know me," he said evasively. Her insights were landing around him like arrows now and he began to pace back and forth. <br /><br />"The reason they don't know you, numbskull, is that you don't let them! You never want to talk to anybody until they've shown themselves worthy. You apply the most ridiculously strict standards to ordinary conversations and people you've just met! Just because you're intelligent is no excuse for being such an ass!" <br /><br />Rodney squirmed and said, "I don't know if that's-"<br /><br />"You're far too fastidious for this world, earthling!" Marie interrupted. <br /><br />"I'm a very flawed son of a bitch, I guess," Rodney said distractedly. If<br /><br />he couldn't come up with any real defense, he'd roll over and play dead. <br /><br />"Yes," Marie agreed, "there's no question about that!" <br /><br />Rodney was wondering if he dared to attempt any defense at all when she added, "But you are very sweet sometimes, too, and I think you should try to remember that along with the other. Nobody is as perfect as you sometimes seem to imagine, Rodney-not even you. There are more gray areas in life and more dumb kindnesses in the world than you allow." <br /><br />He needed desperately to see the expression on her face, but she was busy stowing her knitting materials in a large cloth bag at her feet. When she rose and came out from behind the desk, he suppressed an urge to step back. She looked up at him abruptly and he froze, terrified of what she might say next. <br /><br />"Just be a little nicer to the ignorant sons of bitches!" she told him, shaking a stern finger in his face. A moment passed, and she cocked her head and winked at him, then smiled questioningly as if she thought he was a little slow. It was yet another long moment before he caught on. <br /><br />"Oh," he said flatly. <br /><br />Marie laughed, looked at her watch and said, "School's out! I have to run or I'll miss my ride." As she passed, she swatted him gently with the cap she'd been knitting and said, "Never say die." <br /><br />Rodney just sat. Her footsteps sounded lightly in the hall outside while her laughter rang in his ears. Someone hurried in looking for lost car keys and trying to make small talk, but Rodney only lifted an unlit cigarette to his mouth and held it there. Behind his trembling hand, he nursed a wide, idiotic grin. <br /><br />In a bright blue spiral notebook, new that year, he began keeping a diary. Somewhere toward the beginning he wrote: <br /><br /><font size=2>For the first time in years, I feel that I am dealing with an equal. I don't have to explain the world to her or define the words I use. I never have to tell her 'Never mind.'" </font><br /><br />You may surmise from this that Rodney's egotism could be obnoxious! He was elated, and yet his rising joy was clouded by the burden of his own clear perception: he only had to look at her hand to see that the world was a better place than he could know. She was perfect for him, but he could never have her. <br /><br />Lust and guilt churned in him until his stomach felt like a clothes dryer. He was rising heart over head, falling head over heels, tumbling ass over backwards. His passion was swarming over him like ants on a chocolate bar, his brain was swamped with wild and varied similes. Metaphors jumped out of the dark and yelled, "Boo!" and it scared him silly. He'd been in love before, but not like this. This time he was as afraid of success as he was of failure. In the spiral notebook he wrote: <br /><br /><font size=2>"What do you do with a married woman? Talk to her, talk! And what to do when you've become best friends? Talk! Keep talking!" </font><br /><br />He didn't know what to do. When she crossed her legs too slowly, he looked away, lit another cigarette, and wondered if smoke was coming out of his ears. He wanted her, of course, but oddly he could not conceptualize making love to her. True Love, like Disneyland, keeps the utility lines carefully hidden. You never see the hand that turns the valve that releases the steam that passes for dragon's smoke. Everyone, of course, likes to pretend that the dragon is real and that the plumbing is not, but Rodney was starting to believe it. <br /><br />Ten years later now, lost in memory among the pages of a faded blue diary, he writes: <br /><br /><font size=2>"It would not tell enough to speak in words about her square handsome face, or her voice deep yet tender, or her long brown hair which extended, when unbound, nearly to her waist. What could it possibly reveal about beauty if I say that I liked to watch her whether she was walking toward me or away?" </font><br /><br />Heroic self-denial may have its place, but if even a fraction of this was true, how was he going to resist such beauty? He could not look into her eyes without seeing further than ordinary decency allowed. He felt he saw beyond the trap of flesh and each new view took another rough edge off of him. Whatever beauty is, Marie had it. Behind the flesh, it sprang to life, and it enlivened all her being. <br /><br />Once, meeting her unexpectedly at the supermarket, from 20 feet away he could see it: her happiness seemed to create around her an aura, a refraction of light waves, something! Who knows what? Other people's happiness showed in them sometimes, but the light in Marie blinded him. Suddenly he could guess why medieval artists had portrayed Christ with a halo. In the bright new notebook he wrote: <br /><br /><font size=2>"Perhaps such a light might be visible in many people if only one were to look intently enough and with a steadfast belief." </font><br /><br />"Good grief!" he laughed aloud. "It sounds as if I've fallen into faith instead of love. Have I gone over the goddamn edge?" <br /><br />He didn't know and didn't care. His soul was on fire for a woman and that condition has burned many a more saintly imposter than Rodney. Still, he persisted. He was not going to put the make on a married woman, to make a pass at his best friend, to pass off his lurid delusions as reasons sufficient for her to spread her legs! <br /><br />Whew! As you can see, Rodney had gone a little beyond being a fool in love. He was a sap. A crackpot. A parvenu of daring denial strutting his stuff among the saints, even if he did limp a little from an earthly case of blueballs. <br /><br />He began to visit her at her home, but he kept a respectable distance. If he thought of kisses or caresses, it was only as children may dream of wings and flight. They would be "just friends". That's all. Damn! Well, they were friends. He read his poetry to her and she didn't just say, "That's nice." She teased him about his posturings and his self-absorbed abstractions, then told him which poems she liked. <br /><br />"This girl in the poem, 'Reflections'," she said, "who was she? Was she a lover?" <br /><br />"No, just my roommate's girlfriend. A beautiful sad dreamer who seemed to know too much for someone so young. It was as she'd been stained by some inexplicable, inescapable despair. I guess I wanted to make love to her, but no one else's lovemaking had saved her, so why should mine? It was embarrassing then; it seems ridiculous now." <br /><br />"Don't be so glib," Marie chided him. "You really cared for her, didn't you?" <br /><br />"I guess so," he answered reluctantly, "but nothing came of it. I only knew her briefly, and felt what the poem expresses even more briefly. In me, only pity survives. I guess the poem is all that remains of her. I can't even remember her name." <br /><br />"That wasn't her name you used in the poem?" Marie asked. <br /><br />"No." <br /><br />"Why did you call her Jenny, then?" <br /><br />"Because I'd been watching that old movie, "Portrait of Jenny", on TV that night, that's all." <br /><br />"Your brain works in mysterious ways," Marie said softly, but in her compassionate eyes he could see a twinkle of amusement. Her laughter both thrilled and terrified him. He was afraid of mistaking her delight for an invitation. <br /><br />Beneath the civilities of these quiet talks over porcelain cups of tea-hindered in part by the front door banging as her children went in and out-Rodney often imagined a perfect intimacy. Her compliments and her criticisms reached out to him and he felt them press against him like something familial, forbidden, almost forgotten. They seemed as real to him as hugs from a favorite aunt or palpitant promises in the dark from a pneumatic distant cousin-but infinitely more desirable. He didn't give a damn for "this girl" or "that girl" from any pitying poem or palpitating scheme. What Marie herself did not understand, what he dared not let anyone in the world see, was that he cared for nothing in the world except Marie. <br /><br />The first time she came to his apartment, he was thrown completely off balance. He hadn't realized that she knew where he lived. He opened the door, and she began to speak in a rush. <br /><br />"Here!" she said, thrusting a pile of library books into his hands, "I don't want you sitting around getting bored to death!" <br /><br />Rodney was too surprised to see her to say anything. He just stood there grinning, feeling ridiculous. He was grateful when the books in his arms began to slip askew and he had to step back into the room to set them down. <br /><br />"I hope you don't think this is presumptuous of me," Marie said. <br /><br />Rodney missed his cue. For some reason, he had never been more aware of the difference in their ages. She stood in the doorway looking very adult to him in what she called her "severe business suit". "Actually," he thought, "it's very pretty." He held onto the door with one hand and stood lightly on one foot, feeling far younger than he was. <br /><br />"Won't you come in?" he said.<br /><br />"No, listen, I can't stay to visit; I was just passing by and I, uh-." <br /><br />She had lost the thread of her thought. She laughed at herself and leaned back breathlessly against the doorframe. Suddenly she looked quite girlish. Rodney was transfixed; he wanted her more that moment than he wanted to live. <br /><br />In a moment she breathed deeply, grinned, and said, "I've been running errands all day today and I'm frazzled! Just let me catch my breath." <br /><br />Rodney glanced at the stack of books, but his attention was on Marie. He knew he should say something, but couldn't think what. <br /><br />"I just wanted to see that you got these right away," she said, "and I-I hope you don't mind?" <br /><br />"No, this is great," he finally assured her. "I'm always too lazy about going to the library. Thank you." <br /><br />He smiled at her, but she didn't see it. She seemed to be examining the room behind him, which made him very self-conscious. On the coffee table lay an overflowing ashtray, a Time magazine six weeks out of date, and an open copy of Charles Dickens' "Great Expectations" with a pair of pliers for a bookmark. On one of the chairs an oversized art poster was draped that he'd never gotten around to hanging. Nearby, an open umbrella stood on its head and dust was clearly visible on it. It bothered him that so many of his bad habits were evident, but at least she hadn't seen the pile of unopened mail beneath the book. <br /><br />"Are you sure you can't come in?" he asked. <br /><br />"No, no," she replied hurriedly, "I have to get home. It's my turn to cook dinner tonight. But, listen, don't feel that you have to read all these books. If you have time for them, though, I think you'll like them." She picked one up and added, "Try this one first. It's like you," she said in a nervous, but teasing voice, "too thoughtful for its own good." <br /><br />She shoved it at him, said goodbye, and was gone before he could answer. He glanced down at the book; it was something called "The End of the Affair" by Graham Greene. When he set it down with the others, he saw another title by Greene, "Brighton Rock". <br /><br />"Jesus," he muttered, "she really likes this guy." <br /><br />Only a few moments had passed since she went out the door. <br /><br />Rodney stepped hurriedly into the hall and pushed open the exterior door in time to catch a glimpse of her driving away. Her ten-year-old daughter was in the front seat, talking animatedly to her. Her son, who was six, stood up in the back seat; catching sight of Rodney, he waved his hand wildly and stuck out his tongue. <br /><br />Rodney smiled. He had always been impatient with children, seeing them as claimants for attention with whom he could not respectably compete. Jodie and Samantha, however, seemed charming. They had disarmed him with their intelligence and their decency. Rodney had a weakness for anyone with a sense of fair play, even if it was only the play of children. He felt unsteady, as if up to his waist in deepening water, but still it was pleasing. Back in his apartment, he sat down heavily and wrote a single long line:<br /><br /><font size=2>"I feel her life drawing me, as if I am some floating leaf in a swift mysterious stream." </font><br /><br />He pushed the note aside, thinking he'd come back to it some day and develop it as a poem. He never did. Yet, sitting at his desk and staring at his handwriting, he became conscious of its most important implication. The closer he got to Marie, the nearer he came to what he couldn't help dreading. Rodney had cautiously regarded Marie's husband and hoped to find fault, yet couldn't. <br /><br />Oh, God, how much easier it would be to yearn for the wife of a terrible man! <br /><br /><font size=2>"But Elliot is gentle and intelligent, good-humored and considerate. I've been so eager to hate him, but now I'm mortified to realize that Marie's husband and I might easily become friends. Damn! His decency has deflected my prurient desire more ably than any armed resistance!" </font><br /><br />When Society said, "Thou shalt not screw around with a married woman," Rodney had only grumbled. When Elliot Fischer generously said, "Your new poem was good; stay for dinner and we'll discuss it," Rodney felt he was sunk. <br /><br />"In a world full of husbands who are witless shits," he sulked, "I get the good guy." <br /><br />One Saturday afternoon Marie and Elliot dropped in on Rodney with classical records from the public library. After an hour, Elliot left to run an errand, but Marie stayed. Rodney had never been this much alone with her. She picked out a song to play for him, something in French. <br /><br />"Listen to this one," she said excitedly. "I don't know what the words mean-right, I know, you love that!-but the music is so poignant, so evocative, like a dream out of Faerie." She was right about the music, and they played it again. <br /><br />"It does haunt you," he told her. "There's so much longing in it!" <br /><br />"I think so too," she answered happily. "I'm very glad you like it, I like it so much!" <br /><br />"You look remarkably satisfied with yourself about it," he teased her. In fact, she was glowing. <br /><br />"I just haven't heard it in so long, that's all. It's like a long-lost friend, you know? More familiar than you'd expect after so long, and-and yet so new and full of beauty!" <br /><br />Rodney jumped a little when she said "beauty" because he had just been thinking how beautiful she was. Perhaps she thought his movement was some kind of protest; at any rate she smiled widely at him, raised her eyebrows comically and said, "I can't help it! When I'm happy, I look like the cat who ate the canary!" <br /><br />Rodney grinned too. He was staring at her mouth now and thinking that her smile was larger than the Cheshire Cat's. He hoped she didn't disappear. <br /><br />"What is it?" she asked, leaning toward him. <br /><br />"Nothing," he replied. <br /><br />The song played on. They smiled back and forth like childish conspirators in some simple secret. Sitting beside him, she pointed out the song title on the record jacket. He could feel through the cardboard the slight pressure of her finger against his knee and it dizzied him. He was overheating and he was afraid that it was beginning to show. Marie turned her face to his, then slightly frowned. (It was thoroughly disconcerting-how lovely she looked, even then!) He was convinced that his adulation was leaking out of him, filling up the room like smoke, but Elliot's breezy return cleared the air at once and Marie bustled out with him. He closed the door behind them softly, then collapsed against it and sighed. <br /><br />It perplexed him that no one gauged his obsession. He'd lost all sense of how large a hope the human breast can harbor and yet keep hidden from prying, foreign eyes. To the world, nothing was stirring, nothing was expected, but Rodney's soul was gravid with desire. In his notebook he wrote: <br /><br /><font size=2>"I remember that Marie once said that I should have been a magician or pickpocket. But I just feel like a goddamn sneak-thief." </font><br /><br />Going unnoticed was killing him and going too far, for once in his life, was beyond him. He couldn't go on like this. In a moment of crude lucidity he wrote: <br /><br /><font size=2>"Keeping this secret has been as troublesome as keeping those schoolboy erections hidden when it's two minutes to the bell and it is twice as big as it'll ever be when you actually need it." </font><br /><br />Before his smug humor could finish its laugh, however, he'd think about her eyes and see, or remember her voice and hear, a hard and brilliant tenderness which saved him from his wild despair. He had mistrusted life so many times, but now he had found someone in whom he believed completely-and he was going to give her up. <br /><br />Was this a nice guy or what? Don't believe it. He was as energetically and cautiously crazy as a rat trapped in an empty cheese barrel. What he longed for most was some secret power in the universe to spring up from the ground or swoop down from the sky and save him from his resolution to be a good boy. He was wrapped too tight and he knew it. <br /><br />"Sproing!" he said, bobbed his head like a jack-in-the-box, and laughed weakly. <br /><br />In the diary he scribbled, "Where Ego I Go," and stared at it. "That may or may not be funny," he told himself. Turning the page over, he wrote: <br /><br /><font size=2>"It is so hard to love you without guilt, hard to feel such guilt without having given you a single kiss." </font><br /><br />He was trying to screw himself up to be his stronger self-to simply say Goodbye. He teased himself-"You act as if your dog just died"-but he was morose and couldn't sustain the humor. <br /><br />One cool spring night he told himself, "This will be my final visit to Marie." They talked, sitting close but separate on the sofa, until it was time for her to put the children to bed. In apparent lethargy, he waited and smoked while she settled them down. Elliot had gone to a meeting and was not expected back soon, but that didn't really matter. Rodney nervously noticed how few cigarettes he had and figured he couldn't stay much longer anyway. Marie returned and sat down beside him again, but now their speech together was desultory and Marie began to look tired. She increased his sense of panic by smoking two of his cigarettes. <br /><br />At last, he said, "I'd better go." <br /><br />She nodded. "Yes, it's time for you to go." He thought that she looked relieved. <br /><br />He was heartsick. He had committed himself to denial, to convention, to safety. Still, he had to speak. He rose and began to turn toward her, his eyes fixed on the floor. He meant finally to express his heart somehow, then hurriedly say Goodbye. It bothered him that he had never even held her hand. <br /><br />Marie rose with him. She rose on one leg first and as the other, which had been beneath her, came off the sofa, she was unsteady and pitched a little too far forward. Rodney continued turning toward her in a distracted, despondent state. When he reached for her hand, he missed, and the rest of her kept coming and fell into his arms. When her lips touched his, he was shocked as if by electricity. In a moment the kiss was broken, but they held one another tightly as if afraid that gravity might fail to hold them. Their hands explored one another's backs as if some message in Braille were hidden there. No purple prose or undying declarations occurred to them; they expressed their affection and gladness in silence. They trembled and they sighed. At last, Rodney opened his eyes, stumbled back, and looked at her. Holding her by the waist, he smiled and leaned his forehead against hers. <br /><br />Almost apologetically, he whispered, "I only meant to say Goodbye." <br /><br />"Dear heart, I know," she said. She put her hand on the back of his neck and gently shook him. <br /><br />They held hands quietly after that; they stroked one another's hair. They kissed modestly and confided that they hadn't expected this-then had to laugh because they saw the lie. They giggled foolishly and said, "Well, how soon shall we fuck?" It was comically unreal and carnally obscene, and yet as straightforwardly unembarrassed as some archaic folk-song about the joy and sin of kings and queens long dead. A long time later, in an old blue notebook, Rodney wrote: <br /><br /><font size=2>"Was it right? Was it wrong? The truth is: it was. Was it love or was it lust? Yes, I think it was."</font><br /><br />Marie kept her affair secret from her husband only briefly. Elliot did not appear to be angry. It is difficult to explain someone who by some quirk is not as jealous as the rest of us. Perhaps he was merely the same kind of fool in love as Rodney, except that he'd been at it longer. Elliot was hardly eager for her to take a lover, but he knew that he couldn't control it. That she was prized and loved by others was something that he had always taken for granted and taken pride in. He had trouble finding fault, even in this extreme example. Of any other man, Rodney might have said that the guy had merely been emasculated<br /><br />by his vanity and liberal pretenses. But it didn't seem to apply to Elliot. Like Rodney, he believed not just in his love for Marie, but just as deeply in her fidelity to love. Whether rightly or wrongly, Elliot thought that she was incapable of betraying him except by ceasing to love him. You can see by this that Marie was either a remarkable or a very lucky woman-the men in her life were convinced that she could do no wrong! <br /><br />Domestic problems are more diverse, of course, than who's been sleeping with whom. Thus Elliot visited Rodney several times and talked half the night. Rodney listened, smoking and shifting uncomfortably in his chair. At first he thought that Elliot was trying to undermine his admiration of Marie by telling tales out of school, but how could that be expected to work when it was clear that Elliot held her in the same regard as Rodney? <br /><br />Some of Marie's less attractive qualities were disclosed those nights, yet it was less damaging that might be supposed. Both of them still believed that she was lovely. In the end, they dismissed everything, concluding that if she was hard to live with at times, so was everyone else. Rodney was impressed that spousal familiarity had bred so little contempt in Elliot. Each time Rodney closed the door behind Elliot, he shook his head and laughed at himself; he wondered if he shouldn't feel more a bit more competitive. Marie's old lover seemed almost to match the new lover in senseless, stainless devotion! But now, no matter how unlikely or awkward it seemed, he and Elliot had become friends. Rodney's loyalties became, not divided, but complex. <br /><br />Rodney and Marie loved easily for nearly six months. They were together as often as they could be, which wasn't often enough for Rodney. He saw her at work, of course, but that wasn't the same. Sometimes as he lay close beside her, he would say too much. <br /><br />"I can't imagine you," he told her, "alone or unconnected. Everything you touch comes alive and everyone you love loves you in return. Knowing you is more than pleasure for me-it's an astonishment." <br /><br />"Hush!" she told him. "Don't be so worshipful. You embarrass the hell out of me." <br /><br />Even as she spoke, she nuzzled against him and sighed. Minutes passed. She said, "I love you too, you don't have to doubt that. You 'astonish' me, too, you know." <br /><br />They were charmed by one another, as all new lovers are charmed. They explored one another through kisses and each discovery was celebrated with another kiss. Nothing marred Rodney's happiness. If it bothered him that he had to love so quietly, as if this monumental thing were not really happening to him, he dismissed it. His heart was calm for the first time in years, and Marie must have seen how softened he was by her influence. <br /><br />From Rodney's diary: <br /><br />"She brought out the best in me, or dispelled the worst-I don't know which. I only know that her happiness increased and that I was amazed to be the cause of it." <br /><br />Indeed, Marie seemed to bloom as she basked in the love of two men, one at home, one `a la carte. For her, everything was working out. But then it turned out that part of her glow was not subjective-she was pregnant. Precautions had been taken, but hadn't taken. <br /><br />"It's the Earth-Mother in me," Marie tried to joke. Rodney was taken aback. For once, he said nothing. <br /><br />"I'm just so damnably fertile," she added miserably, "that I get knocked up if a man even looks at me wrong." <br /><br />"Well, somebody must have looked at you wrong," Rodney thought of saying, but bit his tongue. He knew that Marie was bluffing, that it wasn't a joking matter. She didn't want another child, not now. <br /><br />But Elliot did, she told him. He wanted them to be happy about the pregnancy. The idea of abortion was so oppressive to him that he lost all perspective at the very mention of it. He debated and pled with her. If he had been capable of violence, he would have been violent. Beyond anyone's comprehension, he offered to take the baby and go away forever if only she would have it. <br /><br />But Elliot loved his family and couldn't have lived without them; his plan was preposterous and impossible. To Rodney, it seemed like madness. To Marie, it was maddening. She felt battered before she had even begun to decide about the child. <br /><br />When she first told Rodney that she was pregnant, he wasn't sure what to think. He wanted to ask if she wasn't past the age of wanting new babies, but he was afraid that anything he'd say would just sound foolish. <br /><br />"What are you going to do about it?" he finally asked. If the form his question took implied some presumption, Marie didn't seem to notice. <br /><br />"I don't know!" she answered in an irritable whine. Suddenly her voice sounded like that of a stranger, and he hated it. He was utterly off-balance with her; her sudden petulance frightened him. He wanted to say something to calm her, but first he had to calm himself. While he hesitated, Marie looked thoughtful, and when she spoke again, it was in her own voice. <br /><br />"I've been thinking lately that the children aren't babies anymore. Jodie's not so grownup that I don't have to watch him, but I don't have to be such a hawk anymore. I'd been thinking about going back to school, having more of a career, having more money in the family-all sorts of things that having a baby would put an end to. God forgive me, but I'm afraid that this child would make me feel cheated. It would be unforgivable if I had this baby and then resented it." <br /><br />"Doesn't that make the solution pretty straightforward?" Rodney asked. <br /><br />"No, it doesn't! I can't stand the idea of an abortion much more than Elliot can! I'm pulled in more directions that you can understand, Rodney. You've never been pregnant, you've never been me! Don't you understand that your imagination's no good in this? You just don't know." <br /><br />Marie smiled at him wanly. Rodney shrugged and smiled back. Everything was changing. He didn't know what to say, he didn't know what she was saying. <br /><br />"I had a little morning sickness yesterday," she said, "and a part of me was just plain happy about it. You can call it 'physiological response' or 'biology at the wheel' or anything you like, but there it was. It didn't care what I thought or about any practical consequences. It just swept me along like some aboriginal bush-wife drunk on hormones! So much for the modern woman in me."<br /><br />Rodney had an impulse to laugh, but stifled it. The image she had conjured might seem comical, but the panic in her voice was plainly serious. "That sounds overpowering," he said. <br /><br />"Up to a point, I guess it is," she laughed bitterly. "I am a good mother and I'm proud of that. I don't apologize for it to anyone. But it makes me furious to be at the mercy of some goddamned automatic pilot! It makes me wonder if there's something wrong with me for there to be this much division between my body and my mind. Am I myself or a baby factory? A woman or just a thinking machine?" <br /><br />"Slow down, please," he said. "Getting overwrought won't help." <br /><br />"I can't help it! I thought I was smarter than this. There are so many arguments chattering away inside of me, I don't know what's sensible. Even the ghost of Catholicism has raised its head, shouting 'Thou shalt not!' as if I were still a little girl, as if I still believed... <br /><br />"Christ, I don't want to murder this child, I don't want to have this child! There isn't any solution to this, just a choice. I can be selfish or I can be selfless, but there's precious little comfort for the person who got caught in the middle." <br /><br />Irritably she dug in Rodney's shirt pocket for a cigarette. He handed her his lighter and smiled. She laughed humorlessly and said, "Choose and lose!" <br /><br />Rodney reeled back from the magnitude of her dilemma. He couldn't even imagine it. If nothing else, he was too selfish to be that irresolute. His heart ached to help her, but he might as well have been dealing cards in the dark. <br /><br />"Even if this is my baby-" he started to say. <br /><br />"It isn't," she said firmly. <br /><br />"Jesus, how can you know that?" <br /><br />"Oh, I can't explain. I don't really know. I just feel that I know. Don't ask me, it's too complicated." <br /><br />Rodney didn't understand at all. Had being pregnant conferred on her a mystical intuition? He wanted to shake the truth out of her, but somehow with very few words and little gesture Marie had crossed over into another country. It was a land where Rodney didn't have the right to ask questions-or where, if he did ask, he might regret the answers that he got. <br /><br />Secretly he had been thrilled to think that Marie's child might be his and that if she chose to have it, it wouldn't be such a terrible thing. Now he gave up the idea. He decided suddenly that he didn't give a damn about anything or anyone that threatened Marie. He began to oppose himself to all of Elliot's arguments, sometimes with great heat. Years later, in the faded blue notebook he wrote: <br /><br /><font size=2>" "It seemed cruel then-or does it just seem so now? -to oppose myself with such force to all of his lofty sentiments-but I did." </font><br /><br />Marie sat in the middle and seemed to listen. She began to smoke too many cigarettes, once even buying her own. She continued the ritual of making tea, but no longer sat down to it. Her otherwise orderly home became strewn with forgotten cups. Late one night he wrote:<br /><br /> <font size=2>"This morning I talked to Ralph Raskolnikov who has-very oddly-turned out to be a good friend who asks no questions. He phoned back this evening and gave me the addresses of some clinics in nearby states where abortions are legal. I have said nothing of this to Marie, and perhaps won't have to. She isn't helpless, she has her own resources. Nonetheless I feel-." </font><br /><br />By now perhaps you see the drift of things. In a sense, Rodney had chosen to believe in Marie whether he believed her or not. His swift decision to protect Marie had not been without complication. His self-interest was deeply confused. Neither the old nor the new entries in his diary shed much light on this. Yet how much intuition did it take to see that the question of paternity cried out for a better answer? That he might have been the father of the unborn child and what effect that might have had on Marie's decision are not explored in Rodney's diary. Did it never cross his mind or has he just conveniently<br /><br />forgotten it? Was everything that unclear to him-or was he possessed of a clarity of purpose so cunning that he had even fooled himself? <br /><br />She would not let either of them go with her on the flight to the out of state clinic. She didn't want to have to deal any more with their certainties and their doubts. She had her own. <br /><br />"I'm not mad at either of you," she told them, "but you have to let me do this alone." <br /><br />While Marie was gone, Rodney and Elliot were both too somber for civilized company. Part of the time, they waited together. Jodie and Samantha were sent to visit friends. Husband and lover alike wandered through Marie's house like strangers, looking at household objects as if they were indecipherably foreign. Rodney studied Marie's knitting as if for the first time and suddenly wondered how she did it. <br /><br />"It looks so tedious," he thought. <br /><br />In the late afternoon Elliot made tea, as Marie always did, but it wasn't the same. They barely tasted it. They stared silently at the white cups as evening slowly fell and no one thought to turn on the lights. At length, Elliot and Rodney would speak carelessly, yet carefully, about car repairs and restaurants and movies, but they wouldn't talk about Marie. It was all they could do to look at the cups. They had shown a similar hardheadedness from the beginning of this dilemma; between them, the abortion might have remained endlessly arguable. Now they both felt impotent and guilty. In a narrow biological sense, one of them was responsible for this disaster, but Marie bore the burden. The responsibility wasn't theirs to take. Elliot couldn't stand the idea of death, and even Rodney-who didn't give a damn-did not want to think about it too damn much. They felt as bad as they knew how to feel, perhaps, but their loss was theoretical, hers was visceral. They didn't have to lie down on the stainless steel table, she didn't have to wonder whose baby it was. <br /><br />After the abortion, Marie was restrained-polite, but easily irritated. She didn't want anyone to get too close to her, and her frozen smiles froze Rodney's heart. He wanted to believe that he was imagining it, but Elliot felt it too. Elliot was fatalistic. Rodney was frantic. Dr. Raskolnikov, who heard only the bare details and was presumably unaware of who was being discussed, suggested that it was postpartum depression and that clinical-sounding phrase seemed to relieve Rodney. Putting a name to it made the enemy discernible. It allowed him to blame her hormones instead of her. <br /><br />Some time later they began to make love again, but it was different now. She was distracted, not entertained, by his conversations. Perhaps she only wanted to make love. He tried to shut up, but his desire to know her kept pounding jealously at her interior space. She felt more and more invaded. He felt her slipping away. <br /><br />There was no escaping it. Time and complication bore down on Rodney's love. He suffered from his peripheral position in Marie's life, her dominant one in his. She spoke several times of him finding another lover, saying that he deserved more than she could give him. <br /><br />"You need someone who can give you more time," she told him impatiently, "don't you see that?" <br /><br />So-there were the dreaded words at last-words that had been lying in wait for him since the day he'd met her. Now, suddenly, they were real. He was beginning to see what was and was not possible. His love for her would become a burden that she could not carry. She wasn't going to last. She wasn't going to be his. <br /><br /><font size=2>"What will we be when we are no longer lovers?" he wrote. </font> <br /><br />He looked at the words on the page and felt an aching dullness in his chest. He had always wanted to think that they would be best friends, but the vivid speed and terrible wrath of his imagination would not allow it. His mind raced forward, played out all the permutations. His analysis spoiled the present, and his anticipation consumed their relationship faster than time could wear it away. He was stained by need and resentment. He had lost the grace that love had given him. What at first he had not been able to conceptualize with his friend Marie was now what he could not live without: sex and possession. He still called it love, but in fact he had begun to hate her. She could leave him, but he couldn't leave her. <br /><br />Marie couldn't bear it that his love had become so suffocating. She told him so more than once, but without effect. They were walking near her home one day when she finally said, "I want us to stop seeing one another for a while, Rodney. I want to call a truce to this tension and resentment." <br /><br />"I don't think that I can do it," he answered. <br /><br />"We've got to do it," she insisted. "Please, darling, don't you see how close we are to-to an explosive end? Can't we back off before our friendship dies completely? Isn't it worth it?" <br /><br />A decade later, in a faded blue notebook, Rodney tried again to answer her question: <br /><br /><font size=2>"Certainly it was worth it," he wrote, "but such wisdom is only of use to wise men. Life would have no meaning without her, I thought-and that was all I thought about." </font><br /><br />Rodney sat down on the curb and said nothing. His heart was beating far too fast. He wished his brain could work as fast. At length he spoke. <br /><br />"I know what you want. You want me to go away and find someone else, and then it might be safe for us to be friends. If I could do it, I would, but my knowledge of you obscures every attractive woman that I meet. I don't know what they're saying and they don't know what I mean." <br /><br />"Don't be ridiculous!" Marie said in exasperation. <br /><br />"I can't help it. I can't see anyone else, I wish I could. You're not just the woman that I love, you're the only woman I see who deserves my love." He flinched, then added, "God, what egotism." <br /><br /> "What egocentrism, that's what you mean! And what a terrible case of self-depreciation as well! If you have learned anything good from loving me, the notion that I'm the only woman in the world isn't one of those things. Damn it, why can't you see that the only point in all of this is that You are attractive, that You can win love, that You deserve it! That's the goddamned moral lesson you're always looking for. I'm not the first one to love you and it's silly for you to think that I will be the last-for God's sake, how can you keep thinking that?!" <br /><br />"I know you're right," he said without conviction. <br /><br />After a fashion, he still had her, but he had already lost his faith. She understood his tone and it made her furious. For a moment, something made the corners of her constricted mouth twitch nervously-to Rodney it looked like grudging compassion. <br /><br />"She still loves me," he thought, "and that gives me a chance. But she isn't sure that she likes me any more-and that's the risk I take." <br /><br />No matter how low he'd fallen, he was still possessed of an implacable cunning. He could move her, he felt, if only he could find the right button to push. Marie gave him a long hard look, her eyes narrowed in concentration. Suddenly a curtain of grim determination descended over her face. <br /><br />"Look," she said, "we're just not going to see one another for a while, and that's that. You've got to stop thinking that you can't live without me, you've got to stop trying to win me back. You're driving me crazy. You don't leave me any sense of space!" <br /><br />She stepped away from the curb, then turned back to him and gently, tiredly asked, " What sense can it make, what good can it do, if we just stay together and fight. Why can't we be friends?" She walked away, slowly at first, then briskly. Perhaps she thought she'd done some good. <br /><br />Rodney showed up at her door again far too soon. Elliot seemed to understand what was transpiring. Unobtrusively he went to bed, though perhaps he didn't sleep. It was late and Marie wanted Rodney to go, but he used every trick he knew to delay her. He played on her sympathy, her guilt, her dignity, her vanity. He played on her love and exhausted it. He argued vehemently, but his logic was twisted and she refuted it. He played for time, but it wouldn't play. The time for his last despair had come. <br /><br />"I'm afraid," he said at last. <br /><br />"You're just trying to manipulate me like you do with everyone else!" she screamed. <br /><br />"You're killing me," he pled. <br /><br />"I don't care! I'm going to bed and I don't care what you do. You can leave, you can stay, you can go to hell!"<br /><br />Marie left the room in a rush. Rodney just stood there. Ten minutes later she came back in her dressing gown, folded her arms carefully and leaned back heavily against the doorframe. She seemed to be addressing herself to some sentient spot on the floor when she sighed and said, "If you're really afraid tonight, you can sleep on the sofa. But please don't be here in the morning-and don't come back again like this. It's over. There's some champagne in the refrigerator if you want a drink to help you sleep." <br /><br />Panic filled him and he closed his eyes. He heard her robe brush softly against the wall, the swift diminishing sound of her footsteps in the hall. <br /><br />"Goddamn you!" he spat at the empty doorway, but the words came out in a stifled whisper. No one could have heard those words that strangled him so. <br /><br />Soon the house was dark except the room in which he stood. He tried to leave, but got no further than the porch. He sat rigidly on the swing and stared for a while into the darkness. He went back inside, found the unopened bottle of champagne and drank it quickly, almost all at once. In the living room, he leaned drunkenly against the cool marble mantle of the fireplace and stared into the mirror. <br /><br />"That's a very stoic face," he said to himself, "or else there's nothing in it." He turned out the light. <br /><br />Sitting on the arm of the sofa, he thought about trying to sleep, but his heart would not stop pounding. Between alcohol and terror, Rodney's memories of that night remain blurred but vivid, like hectic images from a dream. He writes,<br /><br /><font size=2>"I remember only a wine bottle flung in the darkened room at a mirror full of moonlight; a frantic dash from the house, the screen door unhinged behind me; a hurried circling walk through empty streets at midnight." </font> <br /><br />Gradually his crazy concentric path led further and further from the house where Marie lived. By early morning he was home again. <br /><br />Had the bottle broken the glass or not? He never knew. He had flung and run in the same wild instant. More than that, he had screamed. He could not have heard that irreparable sound over the sound of himself breaking. <br /><br />Love was dead, murdered with such finality that he couldn't dream of turning back. He hated her now, he thought, as ardently as he had ever loved her. He needed to think of her as an ordinary woman that anyone might desire, anyone might forget. He tried to dismiss her as a cold-hearted bitch who'd betrayed him. Such bitter accusations wouldn't quite ring true, but he could not stop himself. His love had become as loathsome as some suspended anonymous specimen in a clouded jar that he couldn't throw away. <br /><br />For a long while, it was hard for Rodney to go to work, and when Marie quit her job at Bio-Search he thought that things might get easier. He was wrong. He saw her several times on the street and she wouldn't even look at him. In the hardness of her face he saw the force and flaw of his own unbridled will. He had all but compelled her to hate him, and now he saw the horror of it. If he had quarreled with God and lost, he could hardly have felt more desolate or more at fault. Marie was sick to death of him. He was sick of himself. He prayed that they would never meet again. <br /><br />Many months passed, but Rodney continued to nurse his despondency as if it were something of value. He avoided his friends. He slept too much and nearly lost his job. He tried to forget, but remembered instead. One day he went out and bought a copy of the record with the song that Marie had played for him, "Apre un Reve" by Gabriel Faure. There was a translated lyric sheet with the record that he hadn't seen with the other record. He turned on the lamp by his desk and slowly read out loud the first two lines: <br /><br /><font size=2>"In a dream graced by your image, <br />I dreamed of happiness, passionate mirage..." </font><br /><br />That was all it took. Perhaps because he often took both art and life far too seriously-sometimes he couldn't tell where one ended and the other began-that translation had a curiously cathartic effect on him, and he broke into hysterical laughter. <br /><br />"Dear God," he sighed, "I still admire her!" <br /><br />He read the song through several times and when he was through, he copied the last lines into the blue notebook, printing carefully in large letters: <br /><br /><font size=2>"Alas! Alas! Sad awakening from dreams! <br />O night, I beg of you, give me back your illusions. <br />Come back, come back in radiance, <br />Come back, o mysterious night!" </font><br /><br />For a while he sat over the diary, looking grim. But then he bent and wrote beneath the lyrics, more swiftly now, <br /><br /><font size=2>"No. It was an illusion that I could have her, but she was real." </font><br /><br />There was moisture in his eyes, but not from sorrow. This was mere exhaustion. Time had wearied him of the brunt of his despair, yet Marie's vivid image had survived. And though somewhere Marie herself was alive, he was still shut off from her, as certainly as if by death. In the notebook he wrote: <br /><br /><font size=2>"Though death is expected, we are never prepared." </font><br /><br />Now, as in the aftermath of his father's death two years earlier, he saw that he had been clinging piteously to his guilt and remorse, yet all the while devoured by an intense, a consuming need to let go, just let go! Marie's death was as real and as implacable to him as his father's-he could not apologize, he could not be forgiven, he could never say Goodbye. She was out of reach, and he had gone too far. Now each time he felt his longing for her, he laughed softly and muttered, "What a goddamn fool I am!" But no longer a fool in love, he felt, just an ordinary one. <br /><br />That should be the end of this story about Rodney and Marie, though there seems to be no end to Rodney's story of Marie. At the bottom of an old box of books he found this year that old blue spiral notebook and was amazed to see how little was actually recorded there. More than a decade later, he began to write in it again. This brings us up to date (at last) at a very late point in the story. Tonight he has written: <br /><br /><font size=2>" "Dear Diary: This afternoon when Ralph phoned, I was very glad indeed. I had lost track of him for a long time, and now it turns out that he's with some new firm in Galveston, not so far away. I told him about the notes I'd been writing lately about Marie and asked if he remembered her. He said he remembered that she had 'an attractive smile, a handsome face, a manner that was more shy than anything your descriptions would suggest.' While I thought that over, I heard that old familiar snort at the other end of the line as he added, 'Listen, Cathcart, I hope I'm not bursting any balloons?' </font><br /><br />But, no, how could he? Outsiders never see what people in love see in one another. They just have to take our word for it. <br /><br /><font size=2>"Only a few close friends knew about that affair at the time, and to none of them did I confide everything. I see now that there were things I did not want to know about it myself, things I still don't want to know. And yet it seems so compelling, like something that happened to someone else, a story from a long time ago of wild poetic obsession-an obsession played out to a hard prosaic end." </font><br /><br />He speaks of her as one might speak of some important work of art, something which has had an immeasurable effect. In the absence of any evidence or mementos-for there were no love letters, no gifts that survived, not even a photograph of Marie-remembrance alone preserves the image of that mysterious night: the fullness of their hearts at love's beginning, a fullness greater than its loss. <br /><br /><font size=2>"I never wanted anything so much," Rodney writes, "nor had so little expectation of getting it. It saved my life and it ruined me. It taught me what was possible, and it set my standards for love painfully, impractically, exquisitely high. The grace and the wonder and the gratification of the discovery that she loved me can't be measured, or compared, or lessened. Whatever happened, it was worth it. <br /><br /> "That night I tried to say Goodbye to her and she fell into my arms instead-that was, and perhaps always will be, the best night of my life." </font><br /><br />rcs.<br /><br /><font size=2><I>21st draft:03/03/03<br />©1988 Ronald C. Southern</font></I> </p> </span>Ron Southernhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08604305014713612990noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6900460.post-1098069112879363302004-10-17T20:09:00.000-07:002007-02-10T14:38:26.006-08:00Felice Orwell"Oh, God, let's quit fooling around," Dogger Gatsby panted. <br /><br />"Hmm?" she murmured. <br /><br />"Let's get naked and make love." <br /><br />"Mmm! I'm in favor of that!" Felice Orwell said in a throaty voice. She grinned shyly and shook her clean dirty-blonde hair. "Let's do it!" <span id="fullpost"><br /><br />Dogger Gatsby grinned at her helplessly for the hundredth time that night. He felt like he had grin-itis. He loved to hear her talk. He'd never liked a West-Texas accent very much, but that accent of hers was so pleasing, it almost sounded musical to him. They'd been wrestling slowly, tenderly with one another for ten minutes or so now. It was the first time they'd ever really touched one another, and they were having a great time, although they were getting very agitated. They were sprawled across her unmade bed, so they were in the right place for it. His feet were still on the floor, which made him feel a little like some censorship-bound screen-lover from a forties movie. The rest of his body, however, was half on top of the slim girl, and he had one hand under and all the way up her skirt. Which was a little more representative of a young man of the early seventies trying to get in his girlfriend's pants. <br /><br />"Mmm," she sighed again as they hurriedly undressed one another. "Don't stop kissing!" <br /><br />Dogger kissed her, happy to be of service. He loved that soft sound of gratification she made in her throaty West-Texas voice. He had always disliked strong accents, but hers had utterly charmed him-was, as you will see, about to charm the pants off of him. Everything was happening quickly, everything was going well. He couldn't have been happier or more surprised. <br /><br />Felice Orwell had been his neighbor for two or three months now, living in the apartment above him with her sister, Melody, who was one year younger. The sisters were both students at the nearby University of Texas. It was the Christmas season, and he'd been very busy with business, so that he'd barely spoken to either of the sisters, except in passing. Until tonight, of course. He came home late that Saturday afternoon from selling on the Drag, excited about how well sales had gone. He'd been selling leather goods in the crafts market across the street from the UT main campus for years now, and Christmas-time was the only time of year he made really good money. He'd made eight hundred bucks that day and could hardly believe it. He felt rich and very much in need of a celebration. After bathing and changing into some new clothes he'd bought on the way home, he'd felt refreshed, definitely ready for <u>something</u>. He just didn't know what. <br /><br />"I need to <u>spend</u> some of this money!" he thought. He sat by the phone and speculated about whom he might call. "You got to share," he thought glibly. He was in a better mood than he'd been in ages. <br /><br />Suddenly there was a knock at the door; it was Felice, the tall slim blonde from upstairs, and she was dressed to the teeth. He couldn't remember ever seeing her in anything but corduroy pants and old shirts, and he was certain he'd never seen her hair fixed like this. She must have been conscious of it, too, as she was grinning awkwardly and looking a little jittery. Dogger thought she looked handsome and flushed and wonderfully alive. He almost wanted to lick his lips. <br /><br />"Hey, boy!" Felice said, a little too loudly. <br /><br />"Hey, girl," he answered her softly, smiling at her nervous exuberance. <br /><br />"Ha! I do sound idiotic, don't I?" she said disarmingly. "Uh, hey, look, I was just wonderin' if you had plans tonight? I don't have any plans myself, but I sure want to <u>do</u> somethin'! I've been studyin' my butt off all week for these finals and I'm just about to <u>bust</u>!" <br /><br />Dogger laughed softly. Her directness was charming, but it was more than that. He'd thought about her several times these past few weeks. It was odd how much he liked listening to her voice. He couldn't remember when he'd been more pleased to see anyone. <br /><br />"Uh, I'm not butting in on you, am I?" she asked. "Are you getting ready to go somewhere or something?" <br /><br />She had spoken more softly, he noticed. Also she was suddenly pronouncing all the letters at the ends of her words. He wondered if that meant she was getting less nervous or more. More, perhaps, for she began to glance repeatedly at the empty hallway behind her as if afraid she was blocking someone's path. <br /><br />"No, absolutely not," he smiled. "Come in." Felice took a single step across his threshold, still grinning, still looking flustered and flushed. <br /><br />"Well, you wanna go out with me?" Felice said. She'd blurted it out hastily, apparently still trying to be dead honest, to spell out her intentions. Dogger smiled. He didn't understand how they'd come about, but he'd already figured out her intentions and was pleased with them. <br /><br />"Sure, I do," Dogger said. "This is great. It's exactly what I was trying to figure out. I had a great day on the Drag and I absolutely need to celebrate." <br /><br />"Oh, that's good," she smiled. She began to look a little less likely to turn and run back upstairs. "Yeah, I see now; you're kinda all dressed up too, huh?" <br /><br />"All dressed up with no place to go!" he declared with a self-conscious grin. <br /><br />"I've heard that phrase somewhere before," she beamed at him, glancing down self-consciously at her shiny dress." <br /><br />"That's very pretty," he told her. "It looks good on you. Is it new?" <br /><br />"Oh, thank you!" she said, clearly relishing the compliment. "It's not new, though." <br /><br />"Still pretty," he said. "What color is that? Some kind of pink?" <br /><br />"Pale rose," she said, glancing briefly at her reflection in the mirror above his artificial fireplace. Felice took a few small, almost prancing steps into the room and let him shut the door behind her. They looked at each other appreciatively and smiled. <br /><br />That was how it'd begun, just a few hours ago. He'd never expected to be so intrigued with her. He'd certainly never expected her to share the intrigue. But that was how all his new affairs began; it never failed to surprise him when a woman liked him. They started by going to Castle Creek, a small nightclub in downtown Austin. A large woman folk-singer with a strong husky voice and straight brown hair that hung to her waist was playing that weekend. They agreed she looked a little like Cass Elliot, except that she wasn't nearly as big. <br /><br />"She's still a pretty full-figured woman, though, isn't she?" Dogger teased Felice, leaning close to her in the dim light and half-shouting to be heard over the amplified music. <br /><br />"Sure is," Felice hollered back. He barely heard her and looked at her questioningly. "She's one of those women that makes me feel like a refugee from a concentration camp!" she half-shouted. Just then the music ended and Felice looked chagrinned, wondering if everyone in the room had heard her. <br /><br />"You're just deliciously slim and paranoid, like a lot of women," he told her. "On the other hand, she'd probably worry you make her look like a cow," Dogger laughed. <br /><br />"She's fat <u>and paranoid</u>, huh?" Felice grinned. <br /><br />"Right." <br /><br />"You sound like you know all there is to know about fat women and skinny women," Felice pretended to pout. <br /><br />"No, not exactly. There's no explaining the opposite poles of women's vanity, though, I know that." <br /><br />"Lucky for you men that you aren't bothered with such things, huh?" Felice laughed. <br /><br />Dogger looked slightly abashed and patted his large stomach and shrugged. "Yeah, we're lucky that way." <br /><br />"A man of wonderful intelligence!" Felice kidded him. <br /><br />Dogger sipped his drink nervously. Maybe it was just the alcohol, but he began to worry if she understood that <u>he</u> was just kidding. <br /><br />"In the meanwhile, buddy," she added, putting her hand firmly on his leg, "you gonna get me drunk or what?" He sighed with relief. <br /><br />They spent a lot of money on drinks that night. Still, it didn't seem to be the liquor that made them drunk. They left Castle Creek and drove around the hills on the outskirts of Austin for an hour or more, talking and laughing and looking at things together. The longer they looked around, the better things looked. About midnight, he took her home. Since she lived upstairs from him, it felt very strange. He was "home" too. Parking his car in back, as usual, he took her arm and they walked slowly toward two doors at the back of the building. The door to his kitchen was to their right, the door that led up the back stairs to her apartment was to their left. They stopped to kiss between the doors, then hesitated. <br /><br /> "Well, maybe I ought to go on to bed," she yawned, stroking his nose lightly with her finger. <br /><br />"Oh!" he whispered. He looked confused. Felice giggled at his expression and kissed him briefly on the lips. He pulled her back toward him and kissed her twice more. "Nice kiss," he sighed. <br /><br />"I think so, too," she laughed softly. Without another word, she turned toward the door on her left and was gone. Dogger unlocked his door and stepped into his kitchen, still hearing her feet tripping lightly up the stairs overhead. He winced as he flipped the wall switch and was blinded by the overhead light. <br /><br />"What just happened?" he asked himself irritably. "What am I doing <u>here</u>? What, what?!" <br /><br />He was in love and in lust, totally aroused and wide awake. And totally confused. <br />Ten minutes later he was tapping at her back door. She'd removed her dress and was wearing a bright blue dressing gown over her long white slip. <br /><br />"You forget somethin'?" she grinned. <br /><br />"I feel like I did," he said, feeling foolish. <br /><br />What if she thought he was a jerk? Maybe she'd really <u>wanted</u> him to leave her alone. Maybe she'd had her fun, her drinks, her little kiss, and that was the end of it? Maybe he hadn't been nearly as charming as he'd thought or as she'd hoped. Damn, why was it always so hard for him to tell what women wanted?! Although he didn't particularly feel drunk any more, he leaned tipsily against the door frame as if he was, beamed at her, and sighed. <br /><br />"You wanna come in?" she asked him. <br /><br />"You wanna let me?" <br /><br />"I asked you first," she laughed. <br /><br />"I want to come in," he said. <br /><br />"Yeah, well, I want you to," she said. "So how come you're just standing there?" <br /><br />"Inertia, I guess," he said. "Or else so happy, I just can't move." <br /><br />"Unlikely story," she said, shaking her head and reaching for his hand. <br /><br />Her long slim fingers felt cool as they caressed, then intertwined and locked with his fingers. She pulled him inside. He began to feel vaguely like a dancer from one of those romantic old movies, for, without taking her eyes off of him, she had given the door a shove with her free hand, simultaneously swinging him away from her in a wide arc, then bringing him back toward her as she herself turned. He sucked in his breath, feeling light on his feet for once, moving toward her in a slow smooth curve, at the end of which he found himself in her embrace, his lips pressed firmly, thrillingly, against hers. <br /><br />"You're a smooth operator, aren't you?" he sighed a few moments later. <br /><br />"No, I'm not!" She looked embarrassed for a moment, then shrugged and grinned. <br /><br />"Very smooth," he said, kissing her on the cheek. <br /><br />"Well, it's nice of you to say so, but I'm sure I don't know what you mean!" she chuckled. "I suppose you hadn't thought about this, either, huh?" she added. <br /><br />"Not in detail," he sighed. "Just repeatedly." He grinned as she nuzzled her forehead against his chest and wrapped both arms around his waist. <br /><br />"Mmm, you're big," she said softly. <br /><br />"You're thin," he answered as he lovingly carressed her back and sides. <br /><br />"Yeah," she purred. She took his hand and led him quickly to her bedroom. <br /><br />"Watch out for the doggie papers," she said. "I've got a new puppy." <br /><br />"Oh, okay," he said, skirting the dirtied newspapers. "Where is the dog?" <br /><br />"Sleeping like a log in the living room," Felice said. Without looking back, she gave her bedroom door a hard push and it swung closed. She sat down on the edge of the bed and Dogger sat down beside her. She looked slightly embarrassed as she nuzzled her cheek against his, then pushed her hand between the buttons of his shirt and slyly began to caress his chest. <br /><br />"Falling in love's such fun, isn't it?" he whispered, lifting her face and kissing the side of her nose. <br /><br />"It makes life New again," Felice murmured. "Like music you haven't heard in ages," she sighed, beginning to nod her head rhythmically. <br /><br />She closed her eyes. She wanted more of those kisses. She made a noise—a deep-throated "mmm" that he began to think of with some amusement as her "signature" sound. Then she leaned back sensuously on the bed. Dogger shifted slightly to accommodate her as she lifted her legs onto the bed, then leaned down and fervently kissed her, pressing his upper torso firmly against hers. Thus they'd reached the point mentioned earlier where he'd decided to try to get in her pants and she'd decided to let him. <br /><br />"Don't stop kissing!" she gasped as they began to remove one another's clothing. <br /><br />Dogger was eager to please. Nonetheless he was having an awkward time of it as they tried to kiss and undress each other at the same time. At last, they were nude and he tumbled into bed beside her. Before long they were both panting. <br /><br />"Oh, Gawd!" Felice shivered. <br /><br />"What is it?" <br /><br />"Let's do it, dammit!" Felice giggled. <br /><br />"Don't be so anxious," he told her. <br /><br />Starting at his neck, she moved her hand downward, dragging her fingers across his chest until it went over the edge of his belly and disappeared from sight. "Oh! Mmm... I see you're not far behind me!" <br /><br />"You better hope not, anyway!" he smirked. "'Cause I'm certainly ready to try it!" <br /><br />"You sure?" she asked, holding his face gently between her small hands. "We don't really have to hurry. I was just...teasing you...you know?" <br /><br />"Honey, don't worry; I've never been more ready! I'm thrilled, I'm engorged, I'm very nearly salivating and masticating!" <br /><br />"Oh, good! In that case, I wasn't teasing at all!" she declared with a grin that seemed to stretch from ear to ear. She rolled over, settling herself flat on her back, and reached up for him. <br /><br />"Boy, you're pushy. You sure you don't wanna get on top?" he teased her, holding back from her. <br /><br />"Good grief!" she giggled. "We'll do it that way later! Just get on me!" <br /><br />Just as he settled down on top of her, he heard a scampering and scuffling on the floor. <br /><br />"Oh, fuckin' hell!" Felice sighed. "The puppy woke up, and I left the door open!" <br /><br />"I could get up and close it," Dogger said. <br /><br />"You won't, though!" she chortled, wrapping her arms and legs around him tightly. "You stay right where you are!" <br /><br />"Mmm," he sighed. He wiggled himself around very carefully on top of her, making no forward movements whatsoever yet. The puppy continued to scamper around the room, intermittently sniffing at the edge of the bed. It wasn't quite tall enough to reach them or even to see over the edge of the bed. <br /><br />"Mmm, that's good, Dogger," she sighed. <br /><br />"I thought so, too," he said. He had his hands flat beside her, supporting most of his weight with his arms. Then he leaned down and licked her ears as he slowly began to move himself inside of her. As his body slid slightly downward, his toes stuck off of the bed and he felt something lick them. <br /><br />"Felice, your dog is licking my toes," he said tensely. <br /><br />"Ignore it!" she gasped. "Keep doing what you're doing!" <br /><br />The dog jumped up on the bed and sniffed noisily at Dogger's bottom. <br /><br />"If that mutt licks my butt while I'm doing this," he muttered in her ear, "I'll..." <br /><br />"You'll what?!" she said, huffing and puffing, beginning to move herself passionately against him, hoping she could ignore the whole thing. <br /><br />"At the very least, I'll get the hysterical giggles," he said, snickering slightly even as he said it. "Or I might get so aroused that I bang you to smithereens. Accidentally screw you to death, you know?" <br /><br />Felice opened her eyes wide and smirked uncertainly. Her cheeks filled with air, then her lips vibrated as she expelled a blast of air, creating a clamorous noise that subsided into a hysterical fit of laughter. Her body quaking violently beneath him, he gasped as she pulled him against her, squeezing him so hard that he could barely breathe. Dogger had a sudden vision of suffocating on top of her in his aroused state; losing control, he began to laugh helplessly too. <br /><br />"Oh, G-G-Gawd!" she gasped loudly, trying to talk through her laughter and to be heard over his. "I want you to make love to me so bad right now and y-y-you're just making me laugh! Don't do that! You will kill me!" <br /><br />Dogger's breath was coming in gasps as she loosened her hold on him and he began trying to catch his breath, stifle his own laughter, and regain his sense of direction all at once. He was still very aroused. Beneath him, Felice had stopped laughing and he looked at her face. She didn't look like she'd giggled herself out of the mood yet, either. <br /><br />"Just keep doing what you're doing!" she panted sharply. "The dog won't bother us. You can't kill me; this feels too good!" <br /><br />"You sure?" he grinned. <br /><br />"I won't die, I promise!" she snickered, losing control of herself all over again. He watched her with a bemused look as she began to furiously slap the sheets with the flats of her hands, tears pouring down her cheeks. <br /><br />"I thought it was only dogs that got locked into positions like this," Dogger said drolly. <br /><br />"Oh, Gawd-in-heaven, shut up!" she shrieked. <br /><br />His remark didn't help Felice at all. It was just too comical. She beat the sheets even harder. The puppy ran forward to investigate her noises, made the supreme effort to jump up onto the bed, and then licked repeatedly at their faces. Felice thought the dog's activity the most hilarious thing yet and gave a bronx cheer right in the puppy's face. The little dog blinked his eyes and sneezed once, then licked his face repeatedly. <br /><br />"Do you feel as much like a pervert as I do?" he asked her. <br /><br />"I think I do now!" Felice cackled, giving the dog a gentle but firm push, brushing it off the bed. "Stay down, you little twerp!" she said. "Stay <u>down</u>!" <br /><br />"You're not speaking to me, are you?" he asked her, trying to keep a straight face. "There's quite enough danger of that as it is!" <br /><br />Felice threw her head back and roared. Dogger thought she was pretty funny herself, the uninhibited way she laughed. And pretty, too. It wasn't every woman, he felt, who could look so appealing under such circumstances. Felice looked as good to Dogger when she looked ridiculous as she did when she didn't, and his desire for her, like his erection, hadn't flagged one iota. <br /><br />"Jesus, if I laugh any more, I'll die, I swear I'll die!" she sighed. She wrapped her arms around him and squeezed tightly, suffocating him again. <br /><br />"F-f-falling in love is fun, is-is-isn't it?" he stuttered, unable to hold back his laughter. <br /><br />"This fucking's not so bad, either!" she howled tearfully. <br /><br />They held onto each other tightly and kept quiet for a long while after that. Why the dog didn't come back, they never knew, but eventually Felice spoke up in that straightforward West Texas voice of hers. <br /><br />"Listen, Dogger, we gotta get serious, don't you think? We got to screw." <br /><br />"I'm ready," he told her, though he couldn't for the life of him have explained how. She began to kiss him again, this time wearing a very serious expression and mostly keeping her eyes closed. They finished making love without further interruption and Felice didn't die. Or, if she did, she lived to enjoy it. So did Dogger. Before they made love again, however, he searched the room carefully, closed the door and shoved a chair against the doorknob. <br /><br /><br />THE END<br /><br /><I><font size=3>4th draft: 02/10/07<br />©1990 Ronald C. Southern</I></font> </span>Ron Southernhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08604305014713612990noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6900460.post-1095136438927164492004-09-13T21:20:00.000-07:002007-02-09T22:10:53.875-08:00Fire With Fire"Honey, if somebody wrote a story about us, what would they write, d'you think?" <br /><br /> "That's a funny question!" she smiled gently. <br /> <br /> "I know, I know," he sighed. "Things have been funny lately, Darla. Don't you think?" <br /><br /> "I guess they have," she answered. "Are you feeling bad again, Roger?" <span id="fullpost"> <br /><br /> "No, no. I'm all right." <br /><br /> "Well, then we're all right, aren't we?" Darla asked. She was trying to sound bright and cheerful; in fact she sounded desperate and miserable. <br /><br />She couldn't stand it that Roger had been so depressed. He'd been like this, off and on, since the baby was born. <br /><br /> "Well, listen, I'll see you later. I'm going down to the creek to shoot some cans and bottles." <br /><br /> "But first you have to drink 'em, huh?" she grinned, still trying to be cheerful. Actually she wasn't all that happy about how much beer he'd been drinking. <br /><br /> "Hey," he grinned, "somebody's got to empty 'em! That's part of the fun." <br /><br /> "Well, don't have too much fun, buckeroo," she teased him. Every so often they liked to be silly. <br /><br /> "I ain't no buckeroo, little toodle-oo," he answered in that peculiar teasing language they'd developed while they were dating. His voice sounded dull, though; his heart wasn't in it. <br /><br /> "You gonna be long?" she asked. <br /><br /> "Maybe. I might go see Jenkins after I shoot the bottles." <br /><br /> "Oh? Well, okay, have a good time," she told him as he opened the screen door and walked across the front porch. <br /><br /> "You too, toodles!" he called back over his shoulder. <br /><br /> "Oh, don't be mushy!" she grinned. He was outside now and opening the car door. She pushed the screen door open and caught a glimpse of his face. He looked haggard, kind of ashen, she thought. Impulsively she shouted, "Hurry back, Roger!" at him, but he'd already closed the car door and started the engine. "Oh, hell," she sighed, "I guess he didn't hear me." <br /><br /> "What does he want to go see Jimmy for?" she wondered. <br /><br /> And what about all this target-practice he'd been doing the past few weeks? She supposed it helped him get something out of his system, that he needed the time alone. Both of them had always been loners, and everyone who knew them soon knew it. They were friendly, even helpful, to their neighbors, but never really anyone's friend. They were polite to everyone, but never overly encouraging. It was said that they were the same at the places where they worked; efficient, well-liked, friendly, and yet—nobody's friend. They had always been like that, they admitted; they preferred to spend their time alone or with each another. Their Pineville neighbors had kidded them at first about not having children yet, but soon learned to let it be. No one forgot later how the couple had freely admitted—almost as if they were bragging—that they didn't want children, that it would just be an invasion of their privacy. <br /><br /> "It's a wonder two hermits like us got together at all, isn't it?" he whispered to her one night in bed. <br /><br /> "It's a wonder," she'd answered happily. That had been in the good old days, of course, when their solitude hadn't bothered them. They hadn't needed anybody then. <br /><br /> "He's been carrying it too far lately," Darla thought. "We both have, I guess. And all because I..." <br /><br /> Her mind closed down when she reached that point. She didn't like to think about all the trouble they'd had this past two years. It'd all started, she guessed, when they found out that she had that brain tumor. For months, both of them had been scared to death that she would die. It hadn't been any picnic. In the hospital, every procedure had been painful or embarrassing or both. She'd always hated hospitals, and now she hated them even more. But she'd survived it somehow, as well as the other thing, and now maybe they could begin to—suddenly she heard a noise. <br /><br /> "What was that?" she muttered, jumping up. It was a sharp, distant sound. She couldn't quite tell where it came from, but she thought it might have come from the bedroom. Quietly, quickly, she entered the bedroom and looked into the crib. Her little girl, Justine, looked as if she was sleeping soundly. <br /><br /> "Little brat," Darla thought affectionately. "She's got a talent for making noises in her sleep!" <br /><br /> She felt better, standing over the crib and watching. She always did. As she had so many times this past 7 months, she felt that if she could just stand still long enough and concentrate on her small beautiful daughter, she wouldn't feel so worried about Roger and herself. In a way, it always worked; the little girl was magical to her. Still, Justine was part of the problem, too. Roger never talked about it anymore, and most of the time he was marvelously sweet to Justine, but Darla knew he'd never stopped wondering whether the child was really his or not. <br /><br /> "I gave him reason enough, I guess," she sighed. <br /><br /> For her part, she was convinced that the child was Roger's, it couldn't be anyone else's. Jimmy Jenkins, the young man she'd had the affair with, couldn't possibly have produced such a wonderful child. Her face flushed, thinking about Jimmy; she didn't want to think about him. "But I wouldn't ever have fooled with Jimmy, if Roger hadn't—!" <br /><br /> She didn't want to think about that, either. She looked back toward the front of the A-frame house. Not counting the bathroom, they only had two rooms: a bedroom at the side and a single large room in front for everything else. If they needed to get away from each other, there was the enclosed front porch for her and a wooden work shed out back where Roger kept his tools and sporting goods. She wished now that Roger had only gone out back to fiddle with his fishing gear or the rolls of fencing he was always bringing home from work. One of these days, he'd actually put the fence up, she guessed. Right now, though, she didn't care if he ever did; she just wanted to be able to run to him and tell him—what? She wasn't sure. She just wanted to speak to him. She was curious about his wanting to go see Jimmy, but she knew they couldn't talk about Jimmy. Not that Roger would get angry; he didn't get angry any more. He would simply have shaken his head and walked away. She hated that, and hated it even more when she thought of it as being her own fault. There'd been a time when they'd been happy together. <br /><br /> "It used to be the world and us," she thought. "Now it seems like there's nobody here but me and Justine..." <br /><br /> It was funny about Jimmy, though. No matter how angry he got at her, Roger still seemed to get along so well with the young man. He liked Jimmy as well as he liked anyone, even now. <br /><br /> "Oh, Roger," she muttered dejectedly, "why did you have to leave?" <br /><br /> It was at a Christmas party last year that Roger had met her. That damn "girl", as Darla termed her. The "other woman", as local society liked to call them. Of course, Connie Rae Callie wasn't a girl at all. She was only 5 or 6 years younger than Roger and herself, Darla guessed—about 30 or so. Connie was a history teacher at the local high school, and the granddaughter of old Sylvester Callie, one of the few loggers in Pineville County to get rich and stay rich. The old man was still the chairman of the Pineville School Board, as he had been for twenty years. At the high school where she taught, Connie almost always wore the same kinds of outfits; staid black or gray business suits with heavy skirts over a white or beige blouse. Not even an occasional scarf to add a splash of color, just a small black string tie sometimes. Darla had laughed bitterly later, thinking how some of the local women had always worried that Connie might be a lesbian because of her severe clothing. <br /><br /> "Well, the slut sure wasn't a lesbian!" Darla thought, walking restlessly through the house and out onto the front porch. Calling her a slut wasn't fair, and Darla knew it. <br /><br /> "She was a very respectable young woman, I guess," Darla sighed, walking back into the front room where she stood and brushed absent-mindedly at the nap of the corduroy sofa. "Was, anyway, before she decided she couldn't leave my husband alone!" <br /><br /> "That's still not right," Darla spoke aloud. <br /><br /> Connie Rae was just the kind of intelligent, pretty woman that Roger liked. Oddly—and even Darla knew it—the young woman didn't look that different from Darla; her hair-style was different, but a stranger might have mistaken them for sisters. It had only added to Darla's bitterness, once she knew the truth about Connie. <br /><br /> "I shouldn't have let Roger go to that party alone," she told herself furiously, even after all this time. "Oh, hell, why do I keep thinking about that, anyway?" <br /><br /> Yet somehow it was easier to think about that than the other. Her "revenge". She didn't like to think about that at all. As much as she hated to think of how her husband and that woman had looked when she found them naked together, even that was easier to remember than Jimmy. <br /><br /> "Poor Jimmy," she thought, then shook her head. "I just shouldn't think about him, I shouldn't!" <br /><br /> Still, she couldn't help it sometimes. Jimmy Jenkins was a nice boy who lived down the street; she had always thought of him that way, even though he was a grown man. He wasn't retarded, it wasn't anything like that. He just wasn't what she'd always thought she liked in a man. He was quieter than anyone she'd ever known. He would talk, of course, but he didn't go on and on like so many men did. He was good-natured nearly all the time, and never seemed to quarrel with anyone—which Darla found remarkable. It wasn't that she and Roger fought very much, or that Roger was particularly bad-tempered—it was just that Jimmy excelled in his lack of masculine vices. He would have made anyone seem quarrelsome. It made him very easy for Darla to take, and they became good friends. <br /><br /> Though she admired Jimmy's virtue, she knew what he was like. Part of his boyish quietness was his shyness, and that charmed her. But another part was simply that he had nothing to say. He didn't think much. He wasn't as intelligent as Roger, she knew that. But that was a relief sometimes, and besides, he didn't need to be, because she always had Roger. Jimmy was an agreeable neighbor, and he'd been a godsend sometimes. When she'd had to stay at home so long after the operation, for instance, Jimmy had been very nice about checking up on her while Roger was at work. It had barely entered her mind that he might be a man on the prowl for his neighbor's wife—particularly since she felt so ugly with her head shaved and sliced and bandaged! Indeed, there had been no sign at all that he was up to anything. He'd been a great help to her while she recuperated, just a friendly young man who found her pleasant, ran errands for her, and broke the terrible boredom. <br /><br /> None of it had mattered very much until one day, months later, when she came home unexpectedly and thought that she heard voices in her bedroom. Though she didn't quite believe it, the thought crossed her mind that it might be thieves. Walking warily, she moved a step or two into the dimly lit bedroom, but immediately stopped. She sucked in her breath and stepped back against the wall. She stood there frozen, staring at the bed; it wasn't burglars. It was her husband Roger, stark naked and squirming around on top of Connie Rae Callie. Both were moaning, whispering, giggling, oblivious. Neither of them were aware of her. Not yet. Darla shook her head, blinking back tears; she wanted to see everything, no matter what. <br /><br /> Connie Rae was still dressed, though just barely. She was incredibly disheveled and wrinkled, and her honey-blonde hair was a mess. The jacket of her stern brown business suit was flung wide open, and her stylish blouse and brassiere were pushed up into an uncomfortable-looking wad of cloth above her breasts. Roger's hands were frantically shoving her heavy skirt up high around her waist, and Connie was pawing passionately at his naked back. It seemed to Darla an awful lot of overwrought movements and noise, but then she'd never watched anyone having sex before. She hadn't imagined it as quite like this! In the dim light she could barely keep track of whose pink flesh was slapping or sliding against whose. The noises it made were audible enough, though, she didn't exactly want to see it too clearly. She glanced away. On a crooked lamp-shade halfway across the room hung a crumpled piece of pale turquoise cloth. <br /><br /> "Oh, Goddammit, her panties!" Darla thought with a shiver. "And they don't even go with what she's wearing!" <br /><br /> The phrase "what she's wearing", when Connie was hardly wearing what she was wearing, struck Darla as ludicrous. She was afraid she was going to laugh out loud, and she tried to concentrate very hard on the figures on the bed and what to do about them. She wondered if she just sneak away. "It'd sure be easier," she thought. She sighed, then sucked in her breath and held it. Had they heard her?! <br /><br /> "Goddamn it, I'm acting as if I was guilty of something," she thought. <br /><br /> Judging by the signs of disarray in the room and sense of haste on the bed, she concluded that their decision to couple had been a sudden one. With a sinking heart, Darla wondered if perhaps she'd caught them doing it for the first time. She began to fret that she might have prevented the affair entirely if she'd only been a few minutes earlier. <br /><br /> "What if they're really in love?" she worried. "Maybe I could have stopped the whole thing if—." <br /><br /> What difference did that make now, though? She could hear the intimate noises they were making; it was a done deal, she realized. They were going at it like animals. She forced herself to look and saw that her husband was indeed no longer just squirming; his muscular pink buttocks were rising and falling rapidly, rhythmically, between Connie's legs while Connie Rae made every kind of noise imaginable with her mouth, throat, and respiratory system. That son of a bitch Roger was screwing the shameless girl's brains out now! The lovers pressed themselves together over and over again, kissing each other so ardently, so wetly, that Darla felt she was going to be sick. The sounds of their lovemaking were ordinary sounds, of course, but in the otherwise quiet room and under the circumstances, everything was amplified. The sounds swamped her senses, swarming around in her head like a cloud of angry bees. <br /><br /> "God, they're noisy!" she thought disgustedly. <br /><br /> At the same time, though, she imagined herself to be perfectly indifferent. <br /><br /> "This must be what watching a porno film is like," she thought. <br /><br /> Yet, because of Connie's resemblance to herself, she had an unnerving sense of watching herself in it! She backed up against the dresser and put her hand on top of it to steady herself. Her hand encountered a thick unopened newspaper, still rolled tightly. Darla's hand closed over it and hefted it experimentally. All at once, her eyes full of tears, she rushed forward. <br /><br /> "Youbastard, youbastard, youbastard!" she screamed. <br /><br /> Wielding the newspaper forcefully, she smacked her husband's behind as hard as she could, pounding him noisily again and again and again. When Roger, in total confusion, jerked aside hastily and rolled off the bed to dodge the blows, Darla landed a few of them on Connie's chest and abdomen. Darla's eyes opened wide and her face turned redder than ever as she got her first good look at Connie Rae's nakedness. <br /><br /> "Oh, Jesus! Her breasts are bigger than mine!" Darla thought. Though she would never have expected it of herself, she lifted the newspaper again and began to hit the other woman twice as hard, this time targeting her breasts. Connie Rae screamed and, much to Darla's amusement, so did her husband. <br /><br /> "Jesus save us!" Connie Rae shrieked. <br /><br /> "Jesus Christ, stop it!" Roger bellowed, stumbling forward and snatching the newspaper out of her hand. <br /><br /> Darla stopped and grinned slightly. Even as angry as she was, she felt their reactions were sort of funny. What did they think this was, an attack of the banshees from hell? She hoped so, she fervently hoped so! <br /><br /> "You fuckin' whore, nobody's going to save you!" Darla snapped grimly, snatching the newspaper back from Roger and lazily throwing it at Connie's crotch. Connie flinched as it struck her knee, then reached down and grabbed it, clutching it tightly as if to keep Darla from coming after her with it again. <br /><br /> Oddly, the moment she'd hollered at the girl, Darla felt calm again. She barely knew what she meant by such a statement. She didn't particularly mean to do anything, really, but she was perfectly willing to give the bitch the fright of her life. <br /><br /> "God damn it, Darla, you scared us to death!" Roger muttered, clutching the sheet in front of him. <br /><br /> Darla, going in and out of her anger faster than she'd ever imagined possible, became instantly incensed. It didn't matter what he'd said. She doubled her fist and swung at him with all her might. It wasn't the most practiced punch in the world, but she'd swung her arm so far back and it was coming with such force that Roger could see he wouldn't be able to dodge it or just step back. He did the only thing he could think of—he fell to the floor with a thump and rolled away from her. She missed him, but now he was lying on the floor with a bruised butt. <br /><br /> "Goddamn it, will you please calm down, Darla?" <br /><br /> Darla, who had turned back to stare malevolently at Connie Rae, turned toward the sound of her husband's voice, meaning to give him an equally unpleasant look. Instead, she laughed. Roger, muttering and cursing, was lying of the floor with the sheet twisted around him. He looked like a revivified mummy. He was watching his wife so carefully that he was barely able to untangle himself and get up. Finally he rose, jumping awkwardly several times like a contestant in a sack race as he tried desperately to keep his distance from his wife and keep the sheet in front of him at the same time that he was extricating himself from it. <br /><br /> "What are you so embarrassed about?" Darla sneered. "She's seen it. I've certainly seen it!" <br /><br /> "Yeah, well," Roger said uncertainly, finally standing on both feet. He didn't know what to say to her. In all his schemes of passion, he hadn't even thought about this! Afraid to look her in the eye, he found himself turning and staring at Connie Rae, who was still sprawled awkwardly on the bed, her mouth agape. One arm covered her breasts and the other was holding the newspaper, now spread out, firmly snuggled against her crotch. <br /><br />"Wuh-wuh-wuh!" she muttered noisily. Her eyes were rolling around and she looked very strange. Roger swallowed uncomfortably, wondering if she'd gone insane. She sounded like an idiot. <br /><br /> "Listen to her," Darla said pensively. "Did you give her that good an orgasm, that she's lying there still having it?" <br /><br /> "Oh, for crying out loud, Darla, don't be so cruel," Roger sighed. <br /><br /> "I'm not cruel. The remark may be crude, but it's not cruel. If she's having an orgasm that lasted that good, don't you think we ought to admire her for it? Or should we admire you?" <br /><br /> "Oh, for God's sake!" Roger moaned, shaking his head. <br /><br /> "Don't talk to me about God!" Darla snapped at him. "You don't even believe in God, and I sure don't want to start hearing about it now!" <br /><br /> "All right, all right," he said, waving his hand at her as if to dismiss the whole issue. <br /><br /> "I certainly admire her," Darla sneered. She wasn't about to stop if it annoyed him this much. "I envy her, in fact. How come you never gave me a wonderful orgasm like that?" <br /><br /> "Hush, please, Darla!" <br /><br /> "I—i—it's not what you say!" Connie gasped, her face red as a beet. She looked awful, but at least she'd found her voice. "I, uh, I was just, uh, hyper-ventilating! That's all! You frightened me to death!" <br /><br /> "I screwed up your orgasm, too, I think," Darla smirked. She walked over to the bed and pushed at Connie's shoulder roughly. "Didn't I?!" <br /><br /> "Yes, yes!" Connie panted, still gasping for breath. "You don't have to be—uncivilized about it!" <br /><br /> "Jesus, listen who's talking!" Darla snapped. "You voracious little whore, you screwed my husband and now you expect me to be civilized? That's good, that's really good!" <br /><br /> "Leave her alone, Darla. It's bad enough." <br /><br /> "I'm glad to hear you think so, anyway," Darla said flatly. <br /><br /> "I'm sorry, Darla, I'm really sorry." <br /><br /> "Sorry you were caught, you mean. I know that." <br /><br /> Their argument went on like that for some time. Eventually, Connie Rae got her senses back as well as her breath and remembered to pull her clothes back around her. While the other two argued, she buttoned up hastily and flung her skirt down over her legs without getting out of the bed. For some reason she felt it was safer there than anywhere else in the room. Once she was covered up, she lit a cigarette and wondered why Darla looked like she was angrier than ever at her. Darla turned toward Roger and stared daggers at him. Roger glanced up at her and wrinkled his eyebrows. <br /><br /> "What? What, goddammit, what?" <br /><br /> "You see?" <br /><br /> "See what, for Christ's sake?" <br /><br /> "She's smoking in my house! You never let anybody do that before! I thought you couldn't stand smoke any better than I can!" <br /><br /> "Well, I may not like it," he told her irritably, "but anybody can stand it better than you can." <br /><br /> "Well, thanks a lot!" she snapped. "I sure am glad to know that!" <br /><br /> "Jesus Christ, I'll put the damn cigarette out," Connie Rae exclaimed. "I didn't mean to start anything." <br /><br /> "Oh, no, of course you didn't," Darla sneered. "That's why you let my husband get between your legs, you didn't want anything to start!" <br /><br /> "Oh, good grief, you people aren't ever going to talk about anything!" Connie said, getting up off the bed. "I'm getting the hell out of here, this isn't going anywhere!" <br /><br /> "Nice of you to think of it," Darla muttered. <br /><br /> Connie Rae grabbed her shoes, stockings, and belt, and hurriedly shoved them into her purse. The purse was small however and the items ended up more out of it than in it. Connie didn't care. She swung the long purse strap over her head and around her neck while she grabbed her overcoat off a chair. The sleeves of her jacket rode up as she jammed her arms forcefully into the overcoat, but she didn't stop to fix it. <br /><br /> "Goddammit, I'm going!" she announced, slamming her small white hat on top of her head. <br /><br /> Roger and Darla both turned toward her and stared at her as if she was an apparition. Her hair, on which she'd used so much hair-spray earlier in the day, had gotten twisted in every direction while she was on the bed and had stayed that way. With her skirt askew, her blouse and jacket buttoned to the wrong buttons, and the jacket material bunched up under her overcoat, she looked like Popeye the sailor man disguised as a bag lady. Roger smiled and Darla laughed out loud. <br /><br /> "Christ, you look like a banshee!" Darla giggled. <br /><br /> You do look like—I don't know what!" Roger grinned. <br /><br /> "Jesus Christ, Roger!" the girl cried. She looked like she was going to stamp her foot at him. "Whose side are you on?!" <br /><br /> Roger wiped the smile off his face and went toward her. Putting his hand around her shoulder, he guided her steadily toward the door. <br /><br /> "I don't know whose side I'm on, dear," he told her. "Except that I'm on my own side, of course. The rest remains to be seen. But you'd better go now." <br /><br /> "But, Roger-!" <br /><br /> As he opened the door he leaned down and whispered, "Please don't pout, darling; as you can see, I've got to fight with my wife now." <br /><br /> Roger, still holding the door open, even though Connie Rae was gone, glanced over his shoulder and said, "I'm sorry, Darla, I really am." <br /><br /> "Oh, yes, I know you are," his wife replied coldly. <br /><br /> Roger sighed and closed the door. <br /><br /> They hadn't gotten any sleep at all that night, and not much sleep the next night. They both called in sick at work and stayed home to talk. For the most part, they simply fought. They called a truce and went back to work. <br /><br /> The next week Roger went hunting, and while he was gone Jimmy Jenkins came by for a visit. He didn't have a chance. If he'd been biding his time all along, waiting patiently for this chance to poke his neighbor's beautiful wife, then he was a happy man indeed that day. He barely had to do anything, of course; he didn't have to be charming or romantic or athletic. All the real work of the seduction had been done before he got there to do it. It had only needed his presence. Jimmy was ecstatic; he'd never had better, and he knew it. What's more, it'd been a long time since he'd had any at all, which had given him a wonderful enthusiasm, as well as a very blind eye. When he left later that afternoon, he was as proud as a peacock and head over heels in love with Darla. Darla hadn't anticipated that. <br /><br /> "Well, I fucked him, all right," she thought guiltily. "Fucked him up, too, probably." <br /><br /> She felt good because now she had something with which to hurt Roger; she would have her revenge. But she also felt bad, because she knew she was going to hurt Jimmy. If one didn't make her a monster, then the other one would. She'd lost whatever moral superiority she'd started with, and she knew it. But she had to fight fire with fire. <br /><br /> It hadn't taken long for Roger to find out. But when he did, it didn't seem to matter any more. The next time Roger mentioned Connie Rae, that was it. Ashamed and proud at the same time, Darla had thrown Jimmy in his face. Roger's face turned red and he did something he'd never done, not with Darla, not with anyone. He hit her. Darla fell back against the sofa and slumped down onto the floor. She looked up, expecting him to say something, yell or something, but he just kept staring at her with his face incredibly red, his expression twisted into an awful scowl. <br /><br /> "I was leaving anyway," he said in a choked voice. <br /><br /> Was he, she wondered? Roger packed his bags and left immediately. Darla heard later that he'd quit his job at the mill and that Connie Rae Callie had quit hers the next day. One of Connie's cousins told Darla she'd heard they'd gone to Austin. Somebody at the beauty parlor whispered that her husband, who also worked at the mill had heard they'd gone to Colorado Springs. <br /><br /> "Rumors are such wonderful things," Darla had sighed. She wondered how much else about her life, accurate or otherwise, was being bandied about behind her back. <br /><br /> She'd gone on with her life, though. She'd had to. It wasn't that long before she realized that she was pregnant. It hadn't even started to show yet though when Roger showed up again. He'd been in Montana, he said, with her, just nodding his head, not saying Connie's name. In fact, he never said her name in front of Darla again. They hadn't gotten along, he said. And he'd missed her, and he wanted to come home. Darla thought briefly of being "strong", but decided instead to be herself. She wanted him; she wanted things to be like they used to be. Roger came back, then the baby came. Justine had seemed to pull them together at first, but it didn't last. Roger, who had always been reclusive, now seemed more so than ever. <br /><br /> Darla heard the baby waking up, went into the bedroom, and picked her up. She came back into the living room and sat down, talking to Justine in a low sweet continuous murmur. "Daddy'll be home soon!" she said, and the child cooed. "Yes, he will, sweetie!" Then the telephone rang. <br /><br /> "Hello," Darla said, still distracted by the child. <br /><br /> "Uh, is this Miz Conway?" <br /><br /> "Yes, it is. Who is this?" <br /><br /> "This is Jackson Hardegree, Sheriff of Pineville County, Miz Conway. I'm afraid I may have some bad news for you." <br /><br /> Darla closed her eyes and waited. She didn't want to ask, "What?" She didn't want to know. But she knew. <br /><br /> "Uh, Miz Conway, you still there?" <br /><br /> "Yes." <br /><br /> "We have a man who's shot himself down here at Crookman's Creek. His identification says his name's Roger Conway. Is that your husband, ma'am?" "No, no," Darla whimpered. "It can't be." <br /><br /> "What's that?" the sheriff asked. "I'm sorry, Miz Conway, maybe our connection isn't so good. Are you sayin' you think this is somebody else?" <br /><br /> "Nooo," Darla whispered slowly, drawing the word out. No, she wasn't saying that at all. <br /><br /> "Now, I've sent a man for you already, Miz Conway," the sheriff's rough voice was saying gently. "He'll be there before you get off the line with me. I guess—well, I think you better just come down here." <br /><br /> "Nooo," Darla repeated. She put the telephone down and picked up the baby. She heard the sound of fast-approaching automobiles outside in the driveway. <br /><br /> "You there?" asked a distant voice on the phone. "You still there?" <br /><br /> Someone was knocking on the door, though somehow it was barely audible above the other noise. There were voices, distant voices. Darla couldn't make them out. She couldn't make herself move. She saw a man in uniform step sideways and glance in at her through the window. Another face appeared beside his; it was Jimmy Jenkins. His mouth was moving; he was saying something, but she couldn't tell what. There was an awful, awful roar in her ears and she wondered what it was. As the door was forced open and two men came in, her vision blurred and she realized suddenly what the noise was. She and the baby were crying. <br /><br /><br />THE END<br /><br /><I><small>Current draft: 03/02/03<br />©1988 Ronald C. Southern</I></small> </span>Ron Southernhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08604305014713612990noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6900460.post-1090978026571707472004-07-27T18:15:00.000-07:002007-02-08T18:22:53.661-08:00Red Harry"Aw, hell, Red, we known each other too long for that," Ellie Martonak said in a reluctant, sweet, but very certain tone of voice. <br /><br />Harry Redcliff was in his early fifties, Ellie was in her forties. They were sitting at a small shaky table in the semi-darkness of the Lost Anchor Tavern on the outskirts of Port Arthur. It was a small dark bar that all the major highways had turned away from as if in disgust, leaving it in the middle of nowhere. It was a cozy, dirty little place where anything might happen, but usually didn't. <span id="fullpost"><br /><br />Nor did the couple sitting slumped toward each other now in the dim light, balancing their elbows precariously on the table, as if waiting to see who'd go off-balance first, have any reason to be surprised about things like that-things that didn't happen. They grinned at one another with a sort of friendly chagrin; they weren't all that romantic, and both of them knew it. If there'd been any doubt about it at all, Ellie had just reminded him of it. She was looking at him now in that disconcertingly friendly way of hers and it made Red feel funny. It was hard to understand. Even when she was telling him "No," she was nice about it. Considerate. But he still felt awfully uncomfortable. <br /><br />"Hell, now I kind of feel like a creep," he shrugged. She shook her head and shrugged back as if to say, "No need for that." <br /><br />Harry put his cigar back in his mouth and sighed, then nodded. He could read "body language" as well as the next guy, he guessed. He'd always been able to get along in the world, as long as everybody else wanted to. He knew how to fight-you learn that quick enough on board ship-but he'd always hated it. He preferred to accept things as they were, more or less. So he was ready to take her word for things. But then Ellie screwed him up all over again by reaching out and touching him. While he stared at her, wondering what was up, she lightly patted his round beer belly a couple of times, then briefly placed her hand on his and gave him a shake. <br /><br />"C'mon now," she said pleasantly. <br /><br />She was shaking, very slightly, the kinky blonde hair that Red always found so pretty and always wondered why. His face flushed now and his hands felt warm and sticky. He felt funny all over, all over again. He pulled his hand away from her and made a big show of relighting his cigar. <br /><br />"Oh, lord, God!" he thought. "Women have got such strange ideas about how to soothe a man!" <br /><br />Ellie's actions so far were having an effect quite opposite to her intentions. It'd been like that with women all his life. There was no way around it that he knew of, no way of getting them to do it any differently. He sighed and shook his head. "Ah, well, gotta be strong," he thought, "unless you want to live without friends." He made himself sit up straight in his chair. He sucked in his stomach.<br /><br />"Hell, I'll get over it," he grinned at her. "Gimme a minute or two." <br /><br />"I just couldn't think of you like that," she explained. "I'd always keep rememberin' all the good times you and me and my Ed had together 'fore he died, and it'd depress me, you know? Hell, I'm sorry, Red, okay?" <br /><br />She sounded sincere enough. Indeed, he knew she was. <br /><br />"Oh, yeah, sure, that's okay," Red nodded, fidgeting with his thick red mustache. "I can understand that, all right. I just thought, you know, we been pretty good drinkin' buddies, and friends and all for so long now, and we always get along so well, uh... I just-well, you know. But, anyway, yeah, it's sure all right." <br /><br />It was all right, too, pretty much. He didn't think he was really in love with her, not like you're supposed to be. He was only getting sentimental and lustful over her because they'd gotten so damn drunk tonight. <br /><br />"Still," he thought, "she's awful nice, and not bad-lookin', neither. Even if she is past forty now. 'Course, so am I-way past." <br /><br />"Lemme order us another couple of beers," Ellie said, a little more heartily than before. <br /><br />"That'd be good!" he said spiritedly. <br /><br />She was trying to cheer him up, he figured. Trying to make light of the pass he'd made at her. Of course, all he'd done was kiss her. "That's too personal a kiss!" she'd said sharply, and pushed him away from her. <br /><br />He guessed it was all right, but he wished that he hadn't done anything at all. They'd known each other too long, they were supposed to be buddies. He couldn't imagine what the hell he'd been thinking when he kissed her that way. He was getting older, that was for sure, maybe even a little desperate. He'd been married once to about the only woman he'd ever met who'd put up with him, but she'd died of a heart attack five years ago. It had been totally unexpected. <br /><br />"Like poor ole Ed," he thought. "Can't get more unexpected than that!" <br /><br />Ellie's husband, Ed, had been a friend of Red's since they first met in the Merchant Marines 15 years ago. Three years ago Ed had died when the ship he was on ran into a Greek ship. The other ship had drifted away with fairly minor damage, but Ed's ship had begun exploding on impact. First a small one, and then <b>BOOM BOOM BOOM!</b>, one goddamned explosion after another, had shaken the ship, and no one had escaped alive. Officials had never admitted just what Ed's ship had been carrying, but a rumor had gone around that they'd been carrying some secret cargo for the Navy. It was all very hush-hush. It was bad enough that Ed was dead, but it turned out to be even more complicated. Somehow, though Ellie had been too distraught to understand it, none of the ship's records had been filed anywhere when the ship blew up. Since nothing except huge scraps of metal had ever been salvaged from the wreckage, the ship's papers were utterly lost. This meant that the records of who had been on board were somewhat faulty. Thus Ellie, like the wives of several other men whose bodies or body parts had never floated to the surface, was in the process of waiting seven years for the settlement money. The insurance company said there was just no proof that their husbands were dead. Some of the wives had tried to get the local TV stations interested in the affair, but nothing had ever come of it. <br /><br />In the meanwhile, Ellie did pretty well raising her two kids. She'd gotten a job running after parts and doing paperwork at Heartfield's Garage where her husband had worked one summer when she'd gotten so mad and threatened to leave him if he went back to sea. She went out drinking pretty often, though, like tonight with Red, or sometimes with the mechanics from Heartfield's. Sometimes she'd get way too drunk and a little too morbid. She was doing it more and more lately. <br /><br />"I just know damn well he's dead," Ellie said suddenly, apropos of nothing, tearfully shaking her head. <br /><br />It was an hour later in the same bar. The guys from Heartfield's Garage had come in and joined them. Red had been relieved to see them, for they were always loud and talkative and he felt he could count on them to dispel the tension between him and Ellie. In fact, they had, until Ellie spoke up like that. <br /><br />The others glanced up at her curiously. They'd been talking about something else entirely, but they knew what she meant. She'd said it often enough in the past. <br /><br />"How's that?" Don, the black mechanic, asked her in a kindly, slightly blurred, voice. He was a new guy and had never known her husband Ed, but he was sympathetic, anyway. He was a nice guy in general, and at the moment was just as drunk as she was. <br /><br />"Wouldn't nothin' keep that mean bastard from rollin' home dead drunk and wakin' me up at two in the morning for a poke if he was still alive!" she snapped. "Nothing!" <br /><br />Don nodded at her knowingly and tried not to grin. Red and the others smiled. Yeah, that was Ed, all right. Soon, however, the men had forgotten about her outburst and gone back to their conversation. <br /><br />"Yeah, I seen another one of them stories on TV the other night!" Robert exclaimed. "Just <b>POOF!</b> and then burn right up!" <br /><br />"I've heard about these spontaneous combustion people before," Jason, the quiet one, laughed. "What's the deal on it, though?" <br /><br />"They just bust into flames!" Don said in his soft blurred voice, shaking his head. Red frowned slightly, wondering why these guys could always sound so awed by such silly subjects. They were all at least ten years younger than he was, but he didn't feel like that quite explained it. <br /><br />"One guy'd had it happen to him the same way over and over again," the head mechanic Mike Patterson drawled. "Three or four times, anyway. It was his hand; it'd just bust into fuckin' flame! They showed it on television one time. Baby, it was weird, you know?" The others nodded and murmured. They were impressed, they believed it. "It'd just burnt that motherfucker's hand up, boy!" Mike added with a chortle. "Hell, it just looked awful!" <br /><br />For some reason, everybody laughed. Red grinned, too, but was still perplexed by their attitude. They said it was awful, but sounded as if they thought it was wonderful. <br /><br />"Airline crashes, hurricanes, and earthquakes," Red whispered to Ellie. "Other people's tragedies make great entertainment." Ellie shrugged. She figured she knew what he meant. <br /><br />"Yeah, and I read this other story about a baby that'd burned up in its crib overnight," Robert said, shaking his head and still speaking with that curious tone of reserve. "Man, there wasn't nothin' there but ashes the next morning!" <br /><br />"Sounds more like gypsies to me," Red laughed. "You know, snatch the baby, leave a handful of ashes. Fool the fools." <br /><br />"No, no," Robert insisted, "this was real! They proved it. You hear about it all the time!" <br /><br />"That's right," Don said firmly, "it's been on TV, in magazines, everything!" Red shook his head and grinned. <br /><br />"Old Red Harry over there doesn't buy this shit," Jason laughed quietly. Red was surprised to hear Jason speak again so soon. The young man was always pretty quiet, but he was dependable, and everybody liked him. <br /><br />"Hell," Mike grinned, "ole Harry doesn't buy much shit at all, if you get right down to it. He's an intellectual, he don't believe in nothin'!" <br /><br />"Well, maybe it's aliens or somethin'," Red chuckled, standing up and stretching. "Anyways," he announced, "I'm going to the bar for some peanuts, boys. I'm sure you can get along without me believing this weird shit for that long, at least. But one of these days you boys gonna have to figure out what you talk such goddamn nonsense for." <br /><br />Robert looked puzzled and the other mechanics nodded at Red as if to say, "Yeah, sure." When he'd been gone a minute Mike looked around the table appraisingly, then said, "Ole Red's pretty strange, isn't he?" <br /><br />"He sure is, to me," Robert agreed. <br /><br />"Aw, Red's a good man," Don said. "Ain't no need to call him strange!" <br /><br />"He sure can be bad-tempered sometimes, though," Robert said, shaking his head. "It's his damn red hair showin', is all," Mike smirked. <br /><br />"No, it's not; it's his bad disposition," Ellie said suddenly, sounding pissed off. "Goddammit, you lay off of Red, okay? All you dumb bastards are strange, if you ask me." <br /><br />"Aw, hell, we was just talkin'," Mike said soothingly. "We didn't mean nothin' by it." <br /><br />"It's better to just not talk about all that stuff," Ellie said. "That's what I think." <br /><br />"Damn, those boys are weird!" Red thought as he stood at the bar waiting for the bartender to notice him. Spontaneous combustion, hell! Of course, it was always possible that all that stuff was true. In which case, he reasoned drunkenly, maybe the devil was alive and well and dancing a jig right here at the Lost Anchor Tavern! He turned around and looked around the room carefully, expectantly, looking first at his friends, then at the dance floor where a few couples were dancing. Red was thinking that if anybody did burst into flame like that, he'd sure like to see it. But he wasn't going to believe stuff like that just because somebody started talking about it. Red tried to get the bartender's attention again, but the man was busy with other customers. He turned around and watched the dancers again. <br /><br />"They look so comfortable with one another when they dance," he thought. "As if each one owns the other one and nobody minds it." He wondered if it was real. <br /><br />"I'm so tired of all this Goddamn waiting," he muttered to himself, glancing at the bartender. "Dog tired." <br /><br />Just then, Ellie came over and dropped down exhaustedly at a nearby table. She lit a cigarette and looked depressed. <br /><br />"To hell with the peanuts," Red shrugged and sat down beside her. <br /><br />"Those bastards just talk, that's all," Ellie mumbled. Red looked at her blankly. "I can't hardly fucking stand it, you know?" Ellie said insistently. <br /><br />"What're you talking about, anyway?" Red asked her. <br /><br />"I don't know. I think I'll just go throw myself in the fuckin' river, that's all," Ellie said in a miserable tone of voice. <br /><br />"Christ, you've threatened to do that plenty of times before and you're still here," Red told her irritably. "It's getting to be mighty old hat, you know?" <br /><br />"Well, to hell with you, too!" Ellie snapped at him in a fervent voice. <br /><br />Red and Ellie spoke in low, increasingly argumentative voices while the mechanics at the other table were talking more and more loudly about the fire situation. Red was vaguely aware of Robert saying something about gasoline tanks. <br /><br />"You just can't get one empty enough or dry enough to really be safe. You weld around it and, hell, one day <b>BOOM!</b>, it's got you! I've seen it happen, boy!" <br /><br />Red forgot about them and began to get mad. He realized just how sick and tired he was of Ellie's whining and threats. He was vaguely aware that they were both drunker than they ought to be, but he didn't care, she'd complained one damn time too many. <br /><br />"Well, hell, why don't you just go on and do it then?" Red asked her in a disgusted tone of voice. He'd had it with all this crap. <br /><br />"Well, goddammit, I will!" she declared, jumping to her feet. "Don't think I won't!" She leaned against the table and swayed slightly as Red jumped up, too. <br /><br />"Well, that's just fine with me! Hell, I'll even drive you there!" <br /><br />"Well, just come on then!" she snapped. She sounded like a woman whose integrity had been questioned one time too many. She grabbed Red's coat sleeve and half-dragged, half-led him out of the bar. <br /><br />Outside they got in his car, a beat-up old Volkswagen bug. Red drove-none too well-until they got to a small dark bridge suspended a few dozen feet over the river. There were light poles all along the bridge, but most of them were out. "Probably shot out," Red thought, for some reason annoyed with the darkness. "Nothing but a bunch of fuckin' cowboys around here when the sun goes down!" Toward the center of the bridge he slowed down, not really intending to stop, but just to show her he was ready to stop. He figured that any minute now she'd back down. She'd laugh or cry or something and then they'd go on. Before he even came to a full stop, however, she'd opened the car door. He glanced over and saw her drunkenly, casually, taking a step out of the car. <br /><br />"Hey! Hey, wait!" he hollered. <br /><br />It was too late. She was already out of the car. He didn't know whether to stomp on the brakes on not. He decided he'd better let the car roll a little bit clear of her. By the time he'd stopped, taken the car out of gear, and jumped out to look for her, she was on her feet again, though looking pretty battered. She was in the middle of the lane, directly under one of the few telephone poles with a light still on it, kicking off her shoes one at a time and watching them carefully as they flew upwards toward the light. The shoes turned end over end in a graceful arc, then plummeted down onto the road. As the last one struck the pavement, she suddenly began tearing at her blouse, all the while swaying and weaving across the highway, constantly moving away from him. It was clear to him, though it wasn't clear why, that she was headed toward the rail on the opposite side of the bridge. Why didn't she jump off of the near side if she was going to jump, for God's sake? As he stared at her, wondering what the hell to do, Red realized that something was moving beside him. His car, its engine still running, had begun to roll forward. <br /><br />"Oh, hell!" he yelled, and ran to catch up with it. The car door was still open and he slid in on his knees, leaned forward, and jerked the emergency brake. He turned the ignition off, grabbed the keys, and threw them on the floorboard angrily. "I can't believe this!" he roared as he turned sideways again and slid out of the car. He stood up too quickly though and hit his head on the door-frame with a resonant thud. He saw stars for a moment. <br /><br />"Oh, God!" he moaned, grabbing his head and holding it. If there was anything in the world he hated, it was stumping his toe or bumping his head! Suddenly he became distantly aware of Ellie's voice again. <br /><br />"Don't think I won't do it, 'cause I fuckin' well will!" she was screaming, still thoroughly engrossed in her own drama. Red groaned. It didn't matter if his head hurt or not; he still had a suicidal woman on his hands! <br /><br />"Goddamn, shit, hell!" Red screamed at her incoherently. <br /><br />He'd meant to tell her something sensible, something intelligent and kind and reassuring, but his head hurt so bad, that those were the only words he could get out of his mouth. He hadn't thought she was serious from the beginning and he wasn't absolutely certain that she was serious now, but she was thoroughly scaring the crap out of him. What was he going do if this crazy woman really did jump off the bridge and drown? By now Ellie had one arm out of her blouse and was tearing furiously at her brazierre with one hand and the buttons of her skirt with the other. She was crying loudly and her tears were streaking her makeup. He'd never seen her look uglier. <br /><br />"Crazy idiot," Red thought as he raced toward her, "she keeps tryin' to do two things at once!" If he didn't get a move on, though, she might finally succeed in one of them, and he sure didn't want to explain all this to anybody! He could hear it all now: "Uh, yeah, officer, I brought her down her so she could jump, and then she jumped. I helped her all I could." He'd be in the slammer in a minute flat. <br />"Stop it, Ellie, stop, stop!" he yelled frantically, running as hard as he could, harder than he'd run in years. <br /><br />"The hell I will! I'm goin'!" she hollered. "I've had it, once and for all!" <br /><br />Just as she got the top button on her skirt loosened and her brazierre half unsnapped, he finally reached her and grabbed her in a tight bear hug. By then, she was pretty near the rail. Despite how scared he was, he knew he wasn't a bit more sober than he'd been back in the bar. He wasn't sure if he could actually handle this or not. <br /><br />"God, she's a hellcat!" he thought. <br /><br />He was having a terrible time hanging onto her. She was madder than he'd ever seen her, fighting, kicking, and clawing at him with all her might. He remembered picking up a cat when he was a little boy and not putting it down quickly enough. He'd paid for that mistake. Ellie's attack seemed worse than the cat's somehow. By now, he knew enough to put a cat down, but he couldn't make himself turn loose of Ellie even though she seemed determined to scratch his face off. <br /><br />"Shitfire!" he thought. "How you supposed to go and decide to just let a woman drown herself, anyway?!" He needed a straighter mind and more time than he had this night to decide that little problem. His brain felt like it was about to burst and his heart was pounding. If she didn't calm down soon, he might just let go of her and let her jump! <br /><br />A car came down the road at a high rate of speed. Red Harry, perhaps thinking that help was at hand, accidentally loosened his grip on Ellie and she jerked out of his grasp and ran toward the rail. Inexplicably Red jumped out in front of the oncoming car as if to wave them down, but they were too close. The driver jammed on the brakes and skidded to a halt, but not before it'd struck Red a glancing blow and flung him aside like a rag doll. Ellie, standing on the rail, half-dressed and ready to jump, looked back and screamed Harry's name. She covered her face with both hands for a second, then looked with horror at the stopped car. <br /><br />The mechanics from Heartfield's jumped out of it, all hollering and asking questions at once. Jason and Mike reached them first and pulled Ellie away from the rail while Robert and Don ran to Red Harry and dragged him out of the road, leaning his back against one of the nearby telephone poles. <br /><br />"Is he alive? Is he alive?" Ellie cried. <br /><br />"Yeah, he's alive!" Jason said. He didn't sound very sympathetic. <br /><br />Red, looking up at his friends, was dazed, confused. All of them except Jason and Ellie looked so angry! They looked like they wanted to beat him senseless! <br /><br />"What the fuck's goin' on, Harry?" Mike hollered at him. <br /><br />"She-she was gonna jump in the river!" Red gasped, sinking to his knees. "I was... I was just trying to stop her." Even as dizzy as he was just then, it seemed to him that his explanation sounded fishy. That must be why they looked so angry. <br /><br />"Is that right, Ellie?" Jason asked. Ellie nodded her head and started to cry. <br /><br />"Oh. Jesus, Red, we're sorry. We thought you was-up to something! Are you all right? Are you hurt?" <br /><br />"I don't know," Red said, frowning slightly. "My leg might be broke." <br /><br />"Oh, God damn it, I can't believe this!" Mike said, shaking his head. He felt terrible; he was the one who'd been driving. Red suddenly grabbed his shoulder and grimaced. <br /><br />"Christ, what's the matter, Red?!" Mike asked. "Your face looks awful! Are you dizzy?" <br /><br />"I think I'm havin' a heart attack, boys," Red said. He sounded calm as he slid sideways off of the telephone pole and all the way to the ground. "I never felt so awful in my life." <br /><br />"Oh, no!" Ellie screamed at the top of her lungs. "Oh, God, I've killed him!" She tried to pull away from Jason, but he restrained her forcefully. He had no way of knowing if she meant to run to Red's side or simply finish her jump in the river. <br /><br />"Oh, Great Christ, what've we done?" Mike said, his face turning white. He hadn't liked Ellie's remark at all; he didn't want to hear anybody talking about having <u>killed</u> Red! <br /><br />Jason pushed Ellie toward Mike and said roughly, "Here, hold her!", then ran over to the fallen man. Robert and Don helped lift the older man up while Jason took off his jacket and put it under Red's head. Ellie sounded like she was choking as she desperately tried to stop weeping. <br /><br />"Christ, Mike, take Ellie and get back to the car! Use the CB to get the police. Have 'em send an ambulance, quick!" Mike took off running like a scared rabbit, dragging Ellie behind him. Behind him, Ellie looked just as frightened. <br /><br />"Well, this'll make 'em a good story," Red Harry thought idly as he felt a cold numbness move down through his body. <br /><br />"God, we're sorry, Harry!" Jason said quietly, leaning over him. <br /><br />"Me, too," Red whispered, for some reason staring straight at Robert just before he closed his eyes. "It's not as good as, as..." <br /><br />His voice trailed off and the rest of his words were inaudible to Robert. He stepped back a little from Red. Jason leaned closer to him. Robert, afraid of getting any closer, thought that Red seemed to be making a terrific effort to speak. <br /><br />A few seconds later Jason stood up and sighed. <br /><br />"W-what is it?" Robert asked. <br /><br />"He's dead. Jesus, he's dead." <br /><br />"Goddammit!" Robert said, nervously running his hands through his hair, then hurriedly lighting a cigarette. "Jesus in hell!" Jason looked at him curiously then and frowned, almost as if he was looking at a bug. Robert got more nervous than ever. He turned away and walked quickly back toward the car, muttering "Somebody's got to tell Mike, I guess." <br /><br />Later, all of them waiting together for the ambulance or the police or somebody to show up, they'd mostly calmed down. Even Ellie, though she'd never stopped crying, was quieter. Suddenly Robert cleared his throat and spoke. <br /><br />"Listen, Jason, I been wonderin'. What was it Red Harry said at the end?" <br /><br />"What, you mean he said something?" Mike asked, looking uncomfortable. <br /><br />"Yeah," Jason sighed. "Something..." <br /><br />"Well, what was it?" Mike asked nervously. "I'd kind of like to know. I mean, I know it probably don't matter, but still... Lord, I don't think anything's ever gonna make me feel any better for a long time. Red was a good man." <br /><br />"He sure was," Don said. <br /><br />"What the hell do you keep saying that for?" Robert asked him irritably. "You didn't even know him, least not as much as the rest of us. We known him for years." <br /><br />"Well, that's true, I guess," Don nodded. "I guess it's just I'd say the same thing about any of you, you know. I'd hope somebody's say it about me, too. If I was dead, of course." Robert frowned, wondering if Don was getting on his nerves on purpose or by accident. He shook his head and walked away from the group a little. <br /><br />"Well, sonofabitch," he muttered under his breath. "What the fuck you supposed to say about a dead man, anyway?" <br /><br />"What was it he said, Jason?" Don asked. <br /><br />"I don't know what he said, that's what's weird. Or I didn't understand it. It sounded like he was saying some kind of damn thing about 'spontaneous combustion', of all things! Now does that make any sense to you?" <br /><br />"Not much!" Ellie sobbed, starting to lose control again. "But I tell you one thing; I'm never going back to that goddamn bar again! Never, do you hear me, never!" <br /><br />"Shit, me, neither!" Robert growled. <br /><br />"I ain't never even gonna drink again, I don't think," Mike said weakly. <br /><br />"I hear the ambulance comin' now," Robert said, turning toward Don. <br /><br />"Yeah," Don yawned, rubbing his eyes with both hands, wondering what time of the morning it was. He was tired, desperately tired, but trying not to show it. <br /><br />"Yeah, I hear it, too. I think maybe Ellie needs it more than Red Harry does, though," Don said. <br /><br />"I think maybe I do, too," Mike said. <br /><br />His voice sounded shaky, and when he sat down on the ground suddenly, the others ran over to him to see what was wrong. He looked up at them stupidly, his head wobbling slightly as he sat there in a semi-faint. Nervously, weakly, the others began to laugh. They didn't know what else to do. <br /><br /><center>THE END</center><br /><br /><i><small>6th draft: 07/23/03 <br />©1990 Ronald C. Southern </i></small> </span>Ron Southernhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08604305014713612990noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6900460.post-1087692478162853182004-06-19T17:45:00.000-07:002007-02-08T18:47:48.048-08:00Shooting A Dead PossumEvelyn Victor was in the kitchen with a bad case of nerves. It was midnight and her husband Adam Victor was in the back yard, chasing a possum with an old police flashlight and a brand-new rifle. That stupid Irish setter was out there too, barking loudly and driving her crazy. <br /><br /> For more than a week now, she'd been taking medicine for a head cold, but not taking the medicine for her head. She was afraid of taking too many drugs at once, but now that she felt a little better, she wondered if she shouldn't start taking the anti-depressants again. Every so often she could hear Adam outside, cursing as he stumbled in the dark. She hoped that it was only tree-roots and not the children's toys. <span id="fullpost"><br /><br /> "He gets so mad," she thought and lightly sucked her thumb. Somehow it was always her fault when the kids did something wrong. Evelyn glanced at the clock and sighed. <br /><br /> "Midnight is always my worst time," she told herself. <br /><br /> When the rest of the world had gone to sleep, she'd wake up so completely that she didn't know what to do. She was used to it, as she was used to so many things, but it looked as if tonight might be worse than usual. Her husband didn't stay up this late very often and the possum in the back yard was making him mad as hell, she was sure of it. <br /><br /> Evelyn started searching through the kitchen cabinets to see what was there. She'd decided to forget about Adam, the dog, and the possum. Maybe they'd all just go away. She reached into the cupboard and pulled out something that Adam had bought, some sort of expensive quick-fixer dish from Rice-a-Roni. Adam was always buying things like this for the new microwave, spending money to save time-he never listened when she insisted that they had more time than money. Evelyn's eyes skimmed quickly across the back of the box: in small black print it said, "CREAMY PARMESAN, HERBS, BASIL, LONG GRAIN RICE". <br /><br /> "Hmmm, sounds good," she admitted to herself. <br /><br /> "TRY IT WITH CHILDREN," the package said. <br /><br /> "No," she said, smiling to herself and looking up at the ceiling, "I don't think my children would like being served with long grain rice, thank you." <br /><br /> She shook her head and read it again. What it said was: <br /><br /> "TRY IT WITH CHICKEN, BEEF, OR PORK." <br /><br /> "Oh, well-that's a relief," she snickered. She decided she'd rather have eggs and sausages, anyway. Evelyn usually ate whenever she felt like it. She was extremely slim and never had to worry about eating too much. <br /><br /> "You're too skinny!" Adam complained, but she always shrugged. There wasn't anything she could do about it. Some of the people she'd met at the hospital told her that their medications made them gain weight, but it never happened to her. <br /><br /> "Powerful metabolism," she snickered to herself again, removing the sausages from the skillet. She then scrambled her eggs in the greasy pan, a habit that disgusted her husband and two sons. <br /><br /> "I don't fix your eggs this way," she told them mildly, "so don't bother me about mine. You don't have to eat it." <br /><br /> She sat down at the table and took a few fast bites. Outside she could hear the dog still barking and Adam saying something angrily to the dog. "That witless, worthless dog," Evelyn thought. It made her nervous. She went to the window and peered out, but couldn't see much. Only a patch of weedy ground which the dog kept semi-bare and dusty with his constant digging and fidgeting. Grass didn't have a chance in her yard, though the nutgrass did all right. <br /><br /> "I wish Adam would come in," she muttered. She sat back down and glanced at the Bible on the table; just before he went outside Adam had gotten it out, as he often did, to prove or disprove some damn thing, but she hadn't really been listening. She pulled it toward her now and it flopped open to where Adam had marked it in the book of Matthew.<p id=narrowmar><br />"And, behold, there was a great earthquake: for the angel of the Lord descended from heaven, and came and rolled back the stone from the door, and sat upon it.</p><br /><p id=narrowmar>His countenance was like lightning, and his raiment white as snow. And for fear of him the keepers did shake, and became as dead men."</p><br />"Horsefeathers," she said, pushing the Bible aside. His preoccupation with resurrection was morbid stuff, she felt. She slouched forward and stared idly, poking at the sausages with her fork, rolling them around on her plate as if inspecting them for some purpose other than eating. When she was a little girl, Evelyn's Aunt Heather used to tell her that her posture made her look like she was pouting. <br /><br /> "You shouldn't sit like that! You'll never get a husband that way, you know!" <br /><br /> But that was years ago. Now she was grown up and her Aunt Heather was dead, unable to tell her how much worse it looked on a woman of 26. <br /><br /> "I just hope I won't have to get involved with any of Adam's silliness tonight," she thought. What's more, she hoped that the possum would get away. For a moment she closed her eyes and clasped her hands in front of her as if saying a blessing over the food. Perhaps she was praying for the possum. <br /><br /> "Why can't he just leave it alone?" she asked herself aloud. "So what if it makes the dog bark? You can't kill everything that makes the dog bark!" <br /><br /> Suddenly, savagely, Evelyn speared a sausage, thrust it in her mouth, and laughed. She was picturing Adam stomping around out there as if he was some sort of intrepid woodsman. <br /><br /> "Drugstore cowboy is more like it," she thought. She looked pensive for a moment, then grew melancholy. "Glorified Wal-Mart shit-kicker," she sighed. She knew he'd never been hunting very much and suspected that if he'd ever killed anything, it was probably something like this-something foolish and demented in the dark. <br /><br /> "I just hope he doesn't shoot up the neighborhood," she thought. "We don't exactly live in the middle of nowhere. There's people all around us. The kids are asleep too, and God Knows they were hard enough to put down tonight." Just as she'd decided to think about something else, Adam came storming into the house and went past her in a rush, his eyes full of fury. <br /><br /> "What is it?" she asked, suddenly frightened. <br /><br /> "That goddamn animal!" Adam answered hoarsely over his shoulder and kept on going. From the hallway that led back into the bedrooms she heard him repeat, "That goddamn animal!" <br /><br /> Evelyn got up from the table quickly and followed him. She couldn't imagine what had happened. Had the possum bit off his finger? Had it killed the dog? She couldn't be sure, she didn't know much about possums or anything else around here, for that matter. She'd never understood why Adam had moved them to Vidor in the first place. To her, Vidor was a partly pleasant, partly awful place, half-in and half-out of the wilderness. She couldn't get used to that patch of deep woods immediately behind their house and felt as if the house itself would always remain strange to her. Part of the reason she felt that way was because Adam had bought the house without even asking her. He didn't even seem to realize how insulting that was. It was a new house that someone had built and then hadn't been able to afford to move into. She hadn't yet understood how they were going to afford it either, and it made her nervous. It made her nervous too that every pickup truck going past their house had a rack full of guns in it, but it just made Adam go out and buy a gun. <br /><br /> "It don't hurt to fit in," he'd told her. <br /><br /> Evelyn caught up with Adam as he turned the corner at the bathroom and went into the children's room. Their oldest son, Jasper, was six; the youngest, little Jimmie, was two and a half. <br /><br /> "Get up!" Adam whispered insistently as he knelt over Jasper. "Get up and come help daddy!" <br /><br /> "Oh, Christ!" Evelyn thought. "What a twisted son of a bitch!" <br /><br /> Adam liked to believe he had control of things, though where he'd gotten that idea, Evelyn could only guess. <br /><br /> "He seldom has control of anything!" she thought resentfully. "With the possible exception of me!" Evelyn had argued with him about his attitudes so many times now that his revenge-or his defense-had been to stop asking her for any goddamn help at all. It was all he could do at times to ask her to pass the salt. <br /><br /> "He's such a fussbudget," she thought. "He acts as if I'm the first person in the world to ever argue with him, but his sister Ruth has always fought with him. Of course, he can't hardly stand her!" Evelyn was extremely fond of Ruth. <br /><br /> Once, drinking tea at Evelyn's kitchen table, Ruth said, "He likes to make himself the head of the household in a fashion that he just won't admit is old-fashioned! He's too much like Daddy, I guess." Ruth paused, looking solemnly thoughtful for a moment, then laughed-a loud, clear, sudden laugh-and added, "And Daddy's a terrible old jerk! Lord knows I love him, but that's all there is to it!" Evelyn put her hand over her mouth and smiled. Sometimes she liked Ruth better than anyone else in the world. <br /><br /> "Hey, get up," Adam said, still shaking the child. Jasper woke up and whined that he was sleepy. Evelyn could hear the dog barking in the back yard. <br /><br /> "Oh, for God's sake, Adam, leave him alone and come on out of here. I'll help you." <br /><br /> Adam looked at her as if he'd only just noticed her. "I need someone to hold the flashlight," he said. He said it as if it was something that the boy could do, but that might be beyond her. <br /><br /> "Well, I can do that," she told him and walked toward the door. "Come on out and let the children sleep!" <br /><br /> Adam followed her, looking as if he were a bit dazed by the lights in the house. He'd been outside in the dark for a long time. <br /><br /> "All right," he said, "but hurry up." <br /><br /> Evelyn ran to her bedroom and pulled a pair of jeans on under her nightgown, then threw one of Adam's shirts on over everything. As she rushed to the kitchen and then out the back door, she realized that she should have just taken the nightgown off and gotten dressed. <br /><br /> "I probably look ridiculous," she told herself. "Well, no one will see me anyway at this time of the morning." Then she giggled, realizing that if that was true, she could just as well have gone out in her nightgown. <br /><br /> Her laughter was momentary however, for as she stepped into the darkness Adam suddenly appeared in front of her, said, "Here!" and thrust the flashlight toward her. She grabbed at it, but missed, and it struck her hard in the chest. <br /><br /> "Jesus," she grumbled, "my tits may be small, but you don't have to try to flatten 'em!" <br /><br /> "Huh?" Adam said distractedly. <br /><br /> "Nothing," Evelyn answered blandly. She knew better than to say such things out loud; sometimes she just did it anyway. "Hell, he's not listening, anyway," she thought. Of course, she couldn't be sure of it. He could be so mean sometimes. <br /><br /> Adam went on toward where the dog was barking, to all appearances having already forgotten that she'd spoken. When he did bother to listen, it upset him for her to talk like that. He thought it was all right for him, though. "They're the same damn words he uses in bed," she thought, "with his stupid face all red and his hands all over me!" <br /><br /> If she talked that way, though, he became sullen and tyrannical. She thought it was funny in a way, a sort of helpless way, and she wondered about it. It was as if the words had power over him in a way she never had. It made so little sense, she felt, in a man who liked to believe that he was always in control. In his view she had no power at all. Why then was he so squeamish when she used "those words"-words she'd learned, he said angrily, "from your trashy family and your goddamn trashy friends!" <br /><br /><br /> He was awfully hard to live with. He didn't seem to know how to pull any punches. She loved him anyway, of course, though she couldn't explain why. Nobody'd paid her much attention until he did, that was part of it. And her family was sort of trashy, she thought. None of them seemed to know how to do anything, and she didn't either. Even if she didn't love him and if she had the guts to leave him, what could she do? She had no job skills. Maybe she could learn one, given time, but what would happen to her babies in the meanwhile? She'd never once threatened to leave Adam, but he always assumed she was on the verge of it. When they argued too long, he'd hit her in the face with it, smack out of the blue, threatening her with her own worst nightmare. <br /><br /> "You'd better watch out," he'd say. "If you try to get away from me, you'll have to leave your children too, you selfish bitch!" He knew just how to knock the breath out of her. <br /><br /> "What-what do you mean?" she'd gasp. <br /><br /> "I mean that nobody's going to award custody to you. You don't have a job. You can't even balance a checkbook. It's not your name on the credit cards! You were in the mental hospital just last year. They don't give custody or credit to mental patients, you know!" <br /><br /> No, she wanted to say, she didn't know! But that was part of the problem-she didn't know and didn't say. "It's crazy shit like this," she thought, "that starts all our worst arguments." Until he brought it up, their arguments were just regular fights, something that could be lived through, something you could get over. When Adam brought the children up, the stakes became more than she could play for. She tried to fight, but in the end she froze, she folded, she failed. Evelyn had never had many friends, but most of those she had insisted that she had to change things somehow. <br /><br /> "I really think you'd better get your name on the credit rating, dear," one of the ladies at church warned her. <br /><br /> Amy, a young mother she talked to sometimes while Adam and Jasper played miniature golf had whispered, "Get some kind of training so you can get a job. The only reason he can be so mean is because he knows that you're helpless." <br /><br /> Cathy, a patient she'd met at the hospital last year, had been exuberant about lawyers. "Get his balls in a vise and squeeze!" she'd said in a confidential tone. "That's what lawyers are for!" <br /><br /> Evelyn had thought that Cathy's talk was funny, but she hadn't been sure whether to show it or not. She was never sure how "natural" she was supposed to be with someone who was "crazy", even though she was crazy too. And surely this was too serious, anyway. Adam's sister Ruth had dropped by the hospital that day and Evelyn had tried to tell her about it. <br /><br /> "I don't know, but when you've decided you're crazy," Evelyn whispered, "it's hard to tell when you're acting crazy. I mean, almost everybody's a little bit crazy, so how do you know when you really are?" <br /><br /> "Maybe when they put you in here," Ruth answered gently, forcing a smile. She lit a cigarette and fidgeted, trying not to stare at the other patients in the day-room. She loved Evelyn, but she still couldn't get comfortable in these goddamn hospitals. All these people were so strange, including the doctors and staff! <br /><br /> "That's right," Evelyn said thoughtfully. "Only it was me that put me in here, not them, you know." <br /><br /> Evelyn felt she had no power or freedom except what Adam could be talked into letting her have. She wondered sometimes why he allowed her to go on seeing the shrink. In her worst moods she thought it was probably because he thought she really was crazy. He gave no signs though that he felt she could get any better and he didn't try to make her feel any better, yet he never actually discouraged her from going to the psychiatrist. <br /><br /> "Quit daydreaming," Adam shouted, "and hold the damn flashlight still! There, over in the corner!" <br /><br /> Evelyn moved the flashlight slowly. She didn't really want to see. She wasn't exactly afraid of the possum, she didn't know enough about them. But now that they'd found it, she figured Adam would feel compelled to kill it, and that frightened her. <br /><br /> "Hold the damn light still, Ev," Adam rumbled. <br /><br /> "Urrrr, don't call me that!" Evelyn said, grumbling to herself like a dog. She'd never liked pet names, but at the moment she was only trying to distract herself from what was about to happen. She wanted to close her eyes, but blinked a lot instead. In the glimpse she caught of the possum, it seemed like it was blinking too. It seemed like a long time to her before the rifle went off. Suddenly she jumped. <br /><br /><b>BAM! </b><br /><br /> "Jesus! God!" she cried. The words jumped out of her throat. <br /><br /> "Goddamn it, hold the light still!" Adam snapped. "I can't see if I hit the damn thing or not." <br /><br /> He snatched the flashlight out of her hand and ran toward the corner of the fence. Evelyn felt dizzy, stepped back toward the fence, and let herself slump, thinking that the fence was close behind her. She was wrong, however, and felt herself keep going back, back, back. Her swoon ended in a hard thump in the dust of her one struggling flowerbed, two feet short of the fence. <br /><br /> "Damn," she said as she hastily rose and brushed herself off, "sometimes it wouldn't hurt to have a fatter ass!" <br /><br /> "I got it, I got it!" Adam hollered. <br /><br /> Evelyn felt depressed as she made her way across their new sparse lawn. Adam was standing now over a dark lump of something. Westmoreland, the big Irish setter, was yowling and running around the spot with frenzied energy. Adam was smiling like an idiot. Evelyn thought it was disgusting. <br /><br /> "Yuck," she said. <br /><br /> "What did you say, girl?" Adam said, giving her a hard look. <br /><br /> "I just said 'yuck'-you know, like the little kids say." <br /><br /> "Oh." Adam turned back to look at his big success. <br /><br /> "Jesus shit," Evelyn said, though very much under her breath. Sometimes Adam made her afraid to even breathe. She still didn't look at the dead possum, but stared instead at Westmoreland, idly thinking that while they were shooting things they ought to take care of the dog too. <br /><br /> "It-it's not dead," Adam said in a quiet voice. <br /><br /> "It looks dead to me," Evelyn said, forcing herself to look at it for the first time. Actually it didn't look like anything to her. It didn't look dead and it didn't look like it used to be alive either. <br /><br /> "I tell you it's not dead!" <br /><br /> Adam's egotism over killing the beast had begun to shrink before the notion that he might have to kill it again. The Irish setter continued racing around the possum in wild figure eights, yapping loudly and bumping against Adam's leg. <br /><br /> "That goddamn animal!" Adam exploded. Evelyn wasn't sure which animal he meant. Whatever he meant, Adam kicked the dog with all his might and the dog retreated to the other side of the yard in a trail of yelps. <br /><br /> Evelyn felt sorry for the dog at the same time that she hated it. She'd never cared for it. All the Irish setters she'd ever encountered had been somebody's house-pet, big bony balls of stringy flesh with too much energy and nowhere to expend it. She was vaguely aware that the breed was supposed to be used for hunting, and wondered if breeding them for sport had bred all the intelligence out of them. Certainly Westmoreland seemed stupid and incredibly high-strung to her, always knocking over furniture, running like sixty through barbed-wire fences, or bowling little Jimmie over and making him cry. <br /><br /> Adam shifted the rifle in his hand. Evelyn began to feel faint. She could not believe how long this was taking. Her heart sank and her pulse beat faster. Her nerves were completely shot. Just then her oldest son Jasper appeared at the screen door. <br /><br /><br /> "Mommy, Mommy, what's that noise?!" he yelled. <br /><br /> "You woke up the children!" Evelyn said petulantly. "Hurry up and get this over with, Adam!" <br /><br /> Adam's head snapped around. His eyes were furious again, he looked like he wanted to spit at her. Her heart sank, if possible, even lower. <br /><br />"This dumb mean bastard," she thought sullenly, gritting her teeth. <br /><br /> She turned in exasperation toward the screen door and yelled as softly as she could, "Dammit, Jasper, go back to bed! Everything is all right, just go back to bed, please!" Jasper opened the door and started coming toward her. She rushed toward the child, swept him up in her arms, and kissed him. "Come on now, sweetheart," she said, "I'm taking you back to bed." <br /><br /> "But what was that noise, Mommy?" <br /><br /> "It was just a big truck passing by, honey," she told him as she laid him back down on his bed, "and if it passes this way again, I want you to stay in bed, okay?" <br /><br /> "Okay," the boy said, yawning in the middle of the word. By the time she'd checked to make sure Jimmie was all right, Jasper was asleep again. <br /><br /> "Thank God for little favors," Evelyn whispered. <br /><br /> She didn't want to go back outside, but she knew she had to. She hoped that Adam would have dealt with things while she was gone, but when she got there she saw he hadn't done a damn thing. He was breathing heavily, staring at the possum and looking confused. Evelyn thought suddenly of some film she'd seen once, with John Wayne or somebody. <br /><br /> "Why don't you just knock it in the head with the butt of your gun?" she asked. <br /><br /> "This is a brand-new rifle," Adam said stubbornly. Apparently that explained everything, though it didn't mean anything to Evelyn. <br /><br /> In the dark, she squinted at the rifle's stock; she couldn't see it very well but she'd looked at it when Adam had bought it. It seemed foolishly ornamental to her. She wondered if the engraver meant to obscure or celebrate its true purpose with all those artistic flourishes. <br /><br /> "Then hit it with that long flashlight," she offered. <br /><br /> "No way," he said. "My uncle Martin gave me that. You know, the one who used to be with the highway patrol in Shreveport? He's retired now. It's high-grade aircraft aluminum, you know, really the best-." <br /><br /> "I don't care about that! What are we going to do?" <br /><br /> Adam gave her that hard look again. She wondered if his hatred was for her or for the possum that was or wasn't dead or for that son-of-a-bitch uncle who wasn't here to help them. Maybe he didn't know himself who his hatred was for. What difference did it make, anyway? This late at night, it didn't matter much to anyone, certainly not to her. If this went on much longer, she was going to shoot the damn possum herself. She'd rather shoot the dog than the possum-at least she had something against Westmoreland-but she knew that she probably wouldn't shoot anything. Still, she couldn't help thinking that probably it wouldn't hurt to shoot the possum, as long as she was sure it was really dead. <br /><br /> "Jesus, this is getting confusing," she thought. "If I have to be the one to shoot the possum, then I might as well shoot Adam too!" Evelyn was beginning to miss her medication. <br /><br /> "Hold the light," Adam said. <br /><br /> Yeah, sure, shithead, Evelyn thought. She wished she'd said it. She shone the light on the little creature, but didn't care to look right at it. She didn't want to be looking at it if it's brains and gore were going to be splattered all over the place. Adam seemed to be trying to find just the right stance. He hefted the rifle as if somehow it's weight or balance might have changed since he fired it a few minutes ago. <br /><br /> Evelyn felt nervous, but still she stubbornly wondered how a man could lose his nerve over shooting a dead possum? How could he want to do this so badly and yet not want to get it over with? <br /><br /> <b> BAM! BAM! BAM! </b>went the rifle. <br /><br /> "Ha!" went Adam. <br /><br /> "Rowf, rowf, rowf!" went the dog, as it rushed at full speed out of the darkness, bounced against Evelyn, and snapped noisily at the dead possum. <br /><br /> "Murdering Jesus!" screamed Evelyn, jumping back. Fortunately, Adam wasn't listening. In unthinking reflex, even as she was falling, she kicked the dog and hollered, "GET AWAY!" <br /><br /> "Ha!" Adam said again. <br /><br /> "What's the matter with him?" Evelyn wondered irritably and considered kicking that son of a bitch too. As she got up and stepped away, the dog made another scrambling kamikaze dash toward the corpse. <br /><br /> "A wonderfully brave dog!" Evelyn thought. It was snuffling at the dead possum, looking for its own proof of life or death.<br /><br /> "I hate Irish setters," Evelyn told herself, "I just hate them!" She thought about kicking Westmoreland again, but felt too guilty about kicking him the first time. <br /><br /> "Well, at least it's over now," Evelyn thought and sighed. Her relief gave her the courage to finally look at the dead possum, but there wasn't much to see. She'd expected it to look blown to bits, but the small still lump in the sparse grass looked pretty much as it had before to her. Maybe it was because the flashlight batteries had grown weak and she just couldn't see well enough. <br /><br /> "We've got to bury this thing, you know," Adam said, absent-mindedly patting Westmoreland on the head. For a moment she thought he meant the dog, and just for a moment it sounded like a good idea. Then she realized what he meant. <br /><br /> "You mean right now?" <br /><br /> "If we don't, the dog will get at it." <br /><br /> "Couldn't we just drag it in the garage and bury it in the morning?" she pled. <br /><br /> "It would stink." <br /><br /> "Oh." All her ideas were worthless. <br /><br /> "Go get some plastic garbage sacks," Adam said, "and some fresh batteries for the flashlight. And lock that damned Westmoreland up in the garage! He's driving me crazy." <br /><br /> "Pretty late to think of that," Evelyn mumbled as she led the dog away. <br /><br /> When she got back, Adam was digging a hole near the possum, but he wasn't making much progress-the ground was full of tree roots. Perhaps in daylight things would have been easier, but in the dark the earth seemed nearly impenetrable. Adam stopped digging for a few moments, slipped a bag over the possum, then held up the bag while Evelyn slipped a second bag over that. He put two twist-ties over the end of the bag, then went back to digging. <br /><br /> Evelyn shuddered, picked up the flashlight and held it for him. Jabbing again and again at the tree roots, Adam sweated profusely, which only reminded her how hot she was with all those clothes on. She longed to strip some of them off right there, but couldn't figure out how to do it while still holding the light. Besides, Adam was such a stickler for propriety; she didn't dare draw his attention to her odd costume. His insensibility was like a booby-trap; she never knew when she might step in it. <br /><br /> "Hold the light steady, willya," Adam said. <br /><br /> "Mmmm," she answered as if in agreement, but was actually thinking about bopping him on the head with the long flashlight. It was heavy enough, she thought. Maybe she could just dump him in the hole with the possum and-but no, she could see how much trouble it'd be to bury anything out here. Anyway, what would she do without him? She wasn't even sure if she was the beneficiary of his insurance policy. He might have left it to his parents; you can't trust a man who threatens to take your kids away from you. <br /><br /> "There's too much air in that bag," Adam told her. "You're going to have to squeeze it out if it's ever going to fit in this hole." <br /><br /> Squeeze the bag? Who, me? <br /><br /> "I can't do that," she said. <br /><br /> "Sure, you can," he said matter-of-factly. She hated it when he took that tone. It meant there was no arguing with him. It meant he had his head straight up his ass and it wasn't coming out again until he got his own way. <br /><br /> She loosened the top of the bag and began to squeeze it slowly. The first soft whoosh of air that came out carried an odor of death-or so she imagined-that nauseated her. As the bag got smaller and smaller, she decided that the smell was more familiar, more like that of the dog after it had been out rolling and tumbling in the woods behind the house. She felt the softness of the still body in the bag and dreaded to think what part of it she was touching. Somehow the little package looked smaller now that the animal had looked when it lay in the open. <br /><br /> "Do things get smaller when they die?" she wondered. She'd seen a rat last year in the garage of the house they used to live in and set a trap for it. When the trap caught it she'd been amazed at how much smaller it looked than when it had run past her. When she was still a little girl, her Aunt Heather had died and someone had made her look at the body in the coffin and Evelyn had thought her aunt looked deflated. For a long while after that she'd thought of being dead as having the air let out of you. <br /><br /> Adam stopped digging, tiredly and delicately pushed the deflated bag into the hole with his foot, and said, "Perfect fit!" Evelyn turned away in disgust and walked toward the house. Behind her the soft heavy earth was noisily being flung on the sack. <br /><br /> In the kitchen, the bright light seemed to stab her eyes; she turned on the small light over the stove and turned off the overhead lights. She looked at the plate she'd left unfinished earlier and thought about putting it in the microwave, but the gooey eggs somehow reminded her of the brain-matter that didn't splatter and she lost her appetite. She decided to take a shower instead. <br /><br /> "Now I know what eternity feels like," she thought as she headed for the bedroom, stripping off her jeans and shirt as she went. She stood in front of a small fan near the bed, gasping and letting the air cool her for a while before taking her shower. "God damn," she said tiredly. She paused in the act of lifting her nightgown over her head to let the fan blow on her chest. <br /><br /> She was standing there like that when her husband rushed in with another grievous look of agitation on his face. His mouth was open as if about to blurt out something important, but when he saw her he froze in the doorway. Evelyn froze too, the front of her nightgown bunched together between her breasts and neck. She felt exposed. <br /><br /> "This is crazy," she thought. <br /><br /> Adam's wide eyes had a clear view of her, but little clarity in his look. For a moment the two of them looked like a still photo from some implacable, inexplicable porno film. Adam's expression softened and his mouth opened wider and wider. Evelyn dropped the folds of her gown and gave him an impatient, quizzical look. <br /><br /> "He'd better not be thinking about sex," she thought. <br /><br /> He thought of it so seldom these days that she'd fallen out of the habit entirely. Maybe it was because she'd been "crazy" those months in the hospital and he'd become afraid of her and she hadn't ever bothered to straighten him out. She didn't care, it had been too big a relief to her. <br /><br /> "What is it?" she asked. <br /><br /> Adam was moving his mouth, yet saying nothing. Ordinarily he would have had some clear and extreme response to the sight of his wife's nakedness-either excitement or rancor-for he always had a neurotic interpretation of his wife's body, never an ordinary one. <br /><br /> "What is it?" Evelyn repeated. <br /><br /> "Uh-there's another possum out there," he said, his face turning red. He turned on his heels and immediately disappeared. <br /><br /> "Mysterious goddamn bastard, isn't he?" Evelyn muttered as she mulled over this new piece of information. Then, "Ha," she said, without emphasis, and started to smile very strangely. She sighed and went out after him, padding heavily, smiling more and more as she went. "This is too unreal," she thought. She wasn't sure if she could take it seriously any more. <br /><br /> Adam was in the side yard near the fence that separated them from their neighbors, Joe Bob and Aline Kisnet. He was slowly stalking something along the length of the fence. She came up close to him and spoke loudly. <br /><br /> "Hi!" <br /><br /> Adam jumped. <br /><br /> "Jesus, don't do that!" he said in a hoarse voice. "Here, take the flashlight," he added. <br /><br /> Evelyn giggled and took the flashlight. Something rustled behind the viburnum bushes and Adam stiffened, taking aim at what he couldn't see. <br /><br /> "Wait a minute!" Evelyn said sharply, "You'll end up shooting into the Kisnets' house!" <br /><br /> Adam remained stiff. "Well, what do you propose?" he said coldly. <br /><br /> In the dim moonlight Evelyn could detect the sheen of perspiration glistening on his forehead. A large drop of sweat hung from the tip of his nose. <br /><br /> "He looks ridiculous," she thought. And yet it was exactly that look which made her realize that she had to take him seriously. <br /><br /> "Let me go around to the other side of the fence and see what's there, okay?" she said placatingly. She took a couple of steps, then turned and looked back. "But don't you dare shoot that gun while I'm over there!" Adam grunted. She assumed he was agreeing not to shoot her. <br /><br /> There was a place in the front yard where she could squeeze between two fence boards and get into the Kisnets' yard. As soon as she got through the boards, she tripped on a tree root and bumped loudly against the side of the house, right next to the Kisnets' bedroom window. <br /><br /> "Who's there?" a woman's voice asked querulously. <br /><br /> "It's just me, Aline-Evelyn from next door. I think there's a possum on the fence back there and I want to chase it away before my husband starts shooting at it again." <br /><br /> "Is that what I heard a little while ago? I thought I heard something." <br /><br /> "Yes ma'am. Is it all right if I go in your back yard?" <br /><br /> "Go ahead, dear," Mrs. Kisnet said sleepily, "but try to be quiet." <br /><br /> In the neighbors' back yard, everything became simple. She didn't need the flashlight to see the possum huddling on the fence near the viburnums. Perhaps, Evelyn thought, it was the other's mate. She felt sorry for it coming to such an unlucky place. She found a broom leaning against the Kisnets' utility building and poked the possum with it. At first the creature sank his teeth into the straw and pulled, but that only lasted a couple of seconds. Either because there was nothing to really bite or because Evelyn over-balanced it by turning loose of the broom, the possum turned, ran the length of the fence, then jumped down and disappeared into the dark woods behind the house. <br /><br /> When Evelyn got back to her own yard, Adam was still standing there, stiff and poised. The same or a similar drop of sweat dangled from his nose. <br /><br /> "He really does look stupid," she thought, then decided, "No, he looks like a demented squid." She didn't know what a squid looked like, but it sounded like what she meant. She was sure she wouldn't like a squid any better than she liked Adam right now. Ruth had been right-Adam was a jerk and that's all there was to it. <br /><br /> "What time is it anyway?" he asked. <br /><br /> "About two-thirty, I guess," she answered and started walking toward the house. As Adam followed along behind her, he stepped in the hole they'd buried the possum in and fell headlong across the lawn. There was a heavy thump, then silence. She turned around, wondering why he didn't start cussing about it like he did about everything else. Going closer, she saw that he was on his back now, making weird stifled sounds and incomprehensible gestures. The fall had knocked the breath out of him, that was all. In the darkness, Evelyn smiled broadly. She turned around and shone the light on the hole. It was empty now. No sign of the possum at all, only the torn, flattened bags lying on the ground. <br /><br /> "What is this?" she thought, shaking her head and scratching her hair vigorously with both hands. Was it some kind of weird goddamn possum epiphany or was she simply going nuts? <br /><br /> "Thank God, anyways!" she exclaimed, wiping her forehead. <br /><br /> She'd decided that she didn't care any more, she just didn't care. But why was she feeling like this, then, her heart pounding like sixty? She closed her eyes a moment and took a long deep breath, then headed toward the house. She moved quickly past the man sprawled as if dead in the sparse brown grass of their new lawn. She hated that dead lawn and she hated Adam and she thought there must be something she could do about it. Once inside the kitchen, she leaned back hard against the door and locked it. <br /><br /> "Oh, hell, it isn't over yet, though," she grinned wildly, then wondered what else there was to eat. Maybe she'd try that rice with Parmesan. There was a grumbling in her stomach and a terrible noise in her head. Maybe she'd just go to sleep.<br /><br /><b><center>THE END</center></b><br /><br /><I><small><br />4th draft: 06/18/04<br />©1988 Ronald C. Southern </I></small> </span>Ron Southernhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08604305014713612990noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6900460.post-1086230353451039842004-06-02T19:33:00.000-07:002007-02-08T18:49:26.543-08:00Joe Dan's Religion"I think you're protected sometimes by the things you don't know," Eddie said. <br /><br />"What in the world you mean by that?" Joe Dan Darden asked, brushing wildly at his face.<br /><br />When Joe Dan got nervous or irritable, he had a habit of squinting and brushing at his bushy black eyebrows as if gnats had attacked him. Taken in congress with the rest of his appearance--short, stocky but muscular, close-cropped hair--he was an uneasy and far too serious semblance of one of the Three Stooges. Handsome Curly puffed up by steroids. Stoopid Curly hopped up on Jesus. <span id="fullpost"><br /><br />"I mean, like not havin' car insurance," Eddie said. "If you're drivin' 'round all day and you're not even thinking about it--you know, like you've totally forgot about insurance, whether you have any or not, and you're just thinking about ordinary stuff. Just takin' an ordinary attitude, ordinary precautions--then you're safer than if you remembered how you didn't have any, 'cause it'd make you nervous and you'd probably have a wreck."<br /><br />"What'd make you nervous?" Joe Dan asked impatiently. The explanation had been too long and he'd lost track. <br /><br />"Thinking about the responsibility, of course," Eddie grinned.<br /><br />"Well, I sure don't see how an irresponsible guy like you'd ever be worrying about stuff like that," Joe Dan declared. "You ain't never worried about nothin' else you was supposed to!" <br /><br />"Well, I used to worry," Eddie grinned. He paused and started to pull a small heavy item out from under his jacket, something wrapped tightly in a piece of old split leather. <br /><br />"Durn," Joe Dan thought, "he's gonna show it to me again!" <br /><br />"I show you my new gun yet?" Eddie asked, then shook his head and yawned. "Oh, yeah, yeah! Sure, I did."<br /><br />"Yes, yes! And I told you you shouldna never brought it to work, too! Keep it out of sight, will you?" <br /><br />"Yeah, sure. Uh, anyway, what I was talkin' about, I used to worry, you know, before I figured everything out." <br /><br />"And just what did you figure out?" Joe Dan asked impatiently. <br /><br />"That nothin' makes any fuckin' difference."<br /><br />"This is absolutely not true!" Joe Dan yelled, his face red as a beet. "That is not true, boy, and you just better refigure that stuff!" <br /><br />"What fuckin' difference does it make, then?" Eddie teased, deliberately placing his emphasis on what he knew Joe Dan would only refer to as the "F-word". He liked to upset Joe Dan. It was so easy. "I guess now you gonna tell me it makes some kinda difference to God, huh?"<br /><br />"It certainly does, it certainly does!" Joe Dan spluttered, almost choking in his effort to get the words out as quickly as possible. His loose bridge did a little flip flap inside his mouth and he clapped his mouth shut fast to hold it in place. He breathed hard, thinking how his dentist's appointment wasn't for another two weeks.<br /><br />"Jesus, don't spit on me, Joe Dan," Eddie snickered, pretending to wipe something off his face.<br /><br />"I didn't!" Joe Dan said through clinched teeth.<br /><br />"Don't get so excited. Anyways, lunch is over; I gotta get back to my crew. That ole nigger Hargraves gets seriously pissed off if I'm even half a minute late getting them started." He picked up his gun, tucked it under his arm, and started walking.<br /><br />"Don't just walk away from me on this!" Joe Dan bellowed after him, his face contorted with frustration. "This stuff is important! This is your soul we're talking about!" <br /><br />"That's what you're talkin' about," Eddie hollered back with a grin. "That's what you're always talkin' about! But just talkin' 'bout it don't mean a damn to me!"<br /><br />Joe Dan wanted to rush after him and keep arguing, but decided he'd better not. Meanwhile, though Joe Dan was unaware of it, the superintendent, Dick Hargraves, was headed toward him in a hurry.<br /><br />"Goddamn that boy, he's just bound for hell!" Joe Dan muttered. Every day he got more worried about Eddie. "I got to do somethin' to save him!"<br /><br />"Are you a foreman or not, Joe Dan?" Hargraves hollered gruffly, still walking toward him.<br /><br />Joe Dan didn't answer. A moment later the superintendent stopped in front of him, embarrassed by the trance Joe Dan was in. He always hated it when one of his employees was so plainly strange. He never knew how to handle it. He looked down and cleared his throat, pretending to clean something off his shoes by scraping it against a piece of angle iron. When he looked up again Joe Dan still wasn't snapping out of it.<br /><br />"Damn Christian nit-wit!" Hargraves thought. "I go to church too, but I don't haul it to work with me like a sack of potatoes!" He reached over and gave Joe Dan a mild shove on the arm.<br /><br />"Huh?" Joe Dan shook his head and looked around. <br /><br />"Joe Dan Darden, you go on now, your crew's waitin'! Goddammit, they're all waiting for you!" he hollered, pointing toward a group of men on the far side of the yard. "C'mon, you wool-gathering about Jesus again or what?"<br /><br />"Sorry," Joe Dan blushed.<br /><br />He put his head down and headed for his crew. He was forty years old and sometimes still felt like a kid. He hated it when Hargraves got on his case like that. When he got his crew in the field, he handed them the shovels and stood over them, hounding them to dig faster while he did nothing but occasionally spit. After a while, he felt better about everything.<br /><br /><br />THE END<br /><br />©2003 Ronald C. Southern </span>Ron Southernhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08604305014713612990noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6900460.post-1084499961333591532004-05-13T18:57:00.000-07:002007-02-08T18:57:25.934-08:00Abbie Hoffman Died (1989)"Abbie Hoffman died last week, did you see that?" Dogger asked.<br /><br /> "Yeah, I did. Sorta sad, I guess." Sallye snickered slightly and passed him the joint. So softly that he almost couldn't hear her, Sallye began to sing:<br /><br /> <blockquote> "Oh, he used to be a Yippie, <br /> and now he's dead, dippy, daid, <br /> dippy, dead, yippie, daaaid!" </blockquote> <span id="fullpost"><br /> "Hey-sus! Are you making fun of a poor dead hippie?" he grinned at her.<br /><br /> "No more so than he made of anyone else. He wasn't exactly Tame, you know. Irreverence was his Game, wasn't it?" <br /><br /> "Is that what it was? Well, I'd wondered."<br /><br /> Dogger took a deep drag off the joint and held his breath a while, finally remembering to pass it back to her.<br /><br /> "Don't Bogart that joint, dopey," she said, taking it from him.<br /><br /> "You're too late," he grinned. <br /><br /> "Delayed reflexes," she muttered. <br /><br /> "Remember when we used to be hippies?" he asked her. <br /><br /> "Just barely," Sallye replied. "Guess I lost too many brain cells along the way!" She sucked in her breath and held it for a long while, apparently not minding if she lost a few more. "You know, I haven't smoked any pot in a couple of years," she said as she began to breathe again. "It's kinda strange." <br /><br /> He nodded at her, finally releasing his hold on his breath. "Gonna get blotto if I'm not careful," he told her. <br /><br /> "Why?" <br /><br /> "It's the first pot I've smoked in almost a decade," he said. He wasn't really sure he was feeling it yet. He figured it would sneak up on him yet, though. <br /><br /> "That day won't come around again soon, I don't guess," he said aloud. <br /><br /> "What days?" <br /><br /> "Hippie days." <br /><br /> "Hippie daze?" Sallye asked. She squinted at him for a moment before his meaning fell into place. She made a sort of giggling noise: "Phtt! No, I suppose not." <br /><br /> "It's kind of disgusting, really," he said. Sallye nodded knowingly, then looked confused. <br /><br /> "What is, though?" she asked, passing the joint back to him. "That we used to be hippies?" <br /><br /> "No, not that. That it won't come around again." <br /><br /> "Well, it might; you never can tell. Besides, it isn't all gone, you know," she giggled, pointing to the number they'd been smoking. <br /><br /> He looked down at the joint thoughtfully, puckered his lips, and said, "Hmmm. Okay, yeah. Still-most of the rednecks I meet these days smoke dope, and it doesn't do 'em a lick of good." <br /><br /> "Cosmic cowboys for real, at last, huh? Good grief!" <br /><br /> She giggled and shook her head. She seemed to think that one or both of them was pretty funny. Dogger grinned at her as if he understood perfectly, and even though he didn't, he sort of did. There was something between them, there always had been. <br /><br /> "You've got me thinking now," Sallye said a few minutes later. <br /><br /> "Thinking what?"<br /><br /> "That we're still hipsters of that same generation, you know, no matter what. We always will be, we're stuck. You don't escape the past just because it's past." <br /><br /> "What?" he asked in a tone of mock panic. <br /><br /> "What do you mean, what?" she frowned.<br /><br />"You mean, the only thing we can escape is the future?" <br /><br /> She looked at him with an amused squint, but otherwise ignored his question. "I figure we can't really be that much different from the generations that went before us. Every generation that's come along has thought itself smarter and more liberal and-."<br /><br /> "And all that jazz?" he giggled, remembering Phil's line a couple of nights before.<br /><br /> "Yeah. Every generation thinks itself better than the preceding generation. Everybody's parents are dull, including the members of our generation who are now parents." <br /><br /> "Fortunately, not you and me," he interjected. <br /><br /> "What do you mean?" she asked.<br /><br /> "We're not parents; ergo, not dull yet," he smirked. <br /><br /> "Oh. Well, more or less. You forget I had that baby years ago and put it up for adoption. You know me, lapsed catholic."<br /><br /> Yes, he knew her. Her liberalism didn't save her from her abhorrence of abortions any more than the contraceptives saved her from getting knocked up. <br /><br /> "If that child's alive, she's about 18 now, I guess, and I wonder sometimes-well, I wonder what she must think of me. And I wonder what she'd think about me if we met, too, but that's almost too much to think about. I'm kind of afraid of that. She might just think I was a terrific fool, and I don't guess she'd be that far wrong. I feel as evil when I think of that grown child thinking about me as I would have felt if I'd have had the abortion-isn't that strange?" <br /><br /> "I guess so," Dogger said. He hadn't expected her to talk about this. He felt utterly out of his depth, especially since he was stoned. "Oh, God, I remember this!" he thought. "Being on dope was always such a wonderful excuse for putting life off, for not thinking about things!" <br /><br /> "But, back to the subject," she said. "I think we've all become the same. Perhaps we've always been the same. Okay, we were "hippies"-but so what? Those other generations just called themselves different things, or else were lucky enough that no one managed to glue a name to them at all." <br /><br /> "What is this," he laughed, "some sort of middle-aged One?Worldism you've caught like a disease or that you've adopted like a stray cat? Or is just the power of positive thinking? I'm not at all sure what you mean, but it sounds like pretty universal stuff. Who knows, maybe it's even true." <br /><br /> "It's true whether we think so or not," she said. <br /><br /> "Or maybe true if we wonder about it enough?" he grinned. "If you'll tell me who the 'we' is, then maybe I'll know what you mean," he told her. "I've completely lost track of what you're saying. I haven't smoked dope in a long time, you know. I'm befuddled, dazed, and bemused, I think."<br /><br /> "Oh, you're always 'befuddled!" she said, hitting him on the knee with a folded section of newspaper she'd been holding. "I can't remember the last time you admitted to being 'clear'! Anyway, I mean the 'we' who started out together." <br /><br /> "You mean muh, muh, muh ge-ge-generation, huh?" <br /><br /> "Who?" she frowned, glancing up at him like she thought he was crazy. <br /><br /> "Precisely." <br /><br /> "Oh, Christ," she said, smacking herself lightly on the forehead with her newspaper. "Yeah, The Who. Webster's definition: antique musicians, circa the dear departed sixties Drug Cul?chur." <br /><br /> "Yeah, but they're not dead yet." <br /><br /> "Some are," she said softly. <br /><br /> "Not all." <br /><br /> "Well, that's neither here nor there," she said with a shrug. "McCartney is alive too, but half the Beatles are dead." <br /><br /> "Yeah. What are we arguing about, by the way?" he said, lighting a cigarette. They'd only that minute finished the joint. He had a terrible smoking habit. <br /><br /> "I don't know. I wish you wouldn't do that." <br /><br /> "What? Smoke? Does it bother you?" <br /><br /> "Not exactly; it makes me want one. You know it hasn't been that long since I quit. Somehow it's always seemed to me that drugs and cigarettes go together." <br /><br /> "I've heard people say that about cigarettes and beer," he laughed. "But I hadn't heard this before. Do you want me to put it out?" <br /><br /> "No, that's okay. Just see if you can smoke fewer of them. If they really bothered me, I guess nowadays I'd have the societal upper hand and could be just as goddamn snotty as I wanted to be about it. Smokers are like dinosaurs these days. Hippies, too, for that matter." <br /><br /> "Dinosaurs didn't know they were doomed, though. And they didn't have to spend the last years of their lives being pissed off all the time because people kept coming around hollering, "You big dumb bastard, you're gonna die if you don't stop being a dinosaur!" <br /><br /> "Well," she laughed, "since it's just that you make me want one, too, I'll try to be stoic, Mr. Dinosaur! I need to learn to cope with this sometime, anyway." <br /><br /> "I guess it's not easy, is it?" <br /><br /> "Not for somebody that's nervous," she sighed. <br /><br /> "What do you have to be so nervous about, anyway, for God's sake?" he teased her. He was blowing smoke rings now, and starting to feel incredibly relaxed. "You're doing all right. You're a big deal real estate agent now. You just bought a nice house, even if it is an old one. You're as stable as anyone I know." <br /><br /> "And as unstable, too! And I'm just a 'little deal' real estate agent, thank you very much! Anyway, I'm nervous about making money. I'm nervous about paying for the damn house. I'm nervous if the cats aren't here when I get home!" <br /><br /> "What?!" he laughed explosively, nearly choking on the cigarette smoke. <br /><br /> "Well, hell!" she grinned. "I guess I just mean that I'm nervous about whatever it is that I'm doing at the time, okay?!" she laughed. <br /><br /> "Yeah, sure," he said, wiping tears from his eyes and grinning. "I believe you! It's just that you're the only one I know who's so provokingly honest that you'll say so. I feel that way too a lot of the time. You and I do have things in common, don't we?" he teased. <br /><br /> "Yup! Always did," she said sheepishly. "Hipsters of the same generation, coming from 'there', sittin' here-as Joni Mitchell used to sing-going 'no place special'." <br /><br /> "Is that really true?" he asked. She'd touched a nerve in him. She frequently did, of course. <br /><br /> "That Joni Mitchell sang a song about it?"<br /><br /> "No, fool. That we are-that way." <br /><br /> "Well, I think it is," she answered. <br /><br /> "She doesn't sound like she doubts it much," he thought. He wanted to sigh. He thought he did hear her sigh. They sat together quietly, looking serious and tired. <br /><br /> "It's the dope," Sallye said suddenly a long while later, lifting her head and grinning at him. "It'll do that sometimes."<br /><br /> "Do what?" he asked. <br /><br /> "Make you think too much, dopey. And leave you sitting around with the listless blues." <br /><br /> "Oh. Yeah. I knew that." <br /><br /><br /><br />THE END<br /><br /><br /><I>4th draft: 05/13/03<br />©1989 Ronald C. Southern</I> </span>Ron Southernhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08604305014713612990noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6900460.post-1083792154070820842004-05-05T14:21:00.000-07:002007-02-08T18:52:55.230-08:00Coon's Age“Hey, Sylvester,” Harold Jenkins hollered, glancing into the drugstore as he passed.<br /> <br /> Old man Callie looked around, frowning slightly. He put on his glasses and stared hard through the screen door. Hardly anyone these days called him by his first name like that. He was used to being addressed as either “Mr.”, in deference to his age or, by men close enough to his age to be that familiar, as “Sly”, which was not in fact considered his name any more, but tribute to his long political history in the county. <br /><br /> “Yeah, sure, Harold!” Sylvester Callie yelled back after a moment. “How ya doin', boy? Hey, come on back here! Hell, I ain't seen you in a coon's age. Come on in a minute.” <span id="fullpost"><br /><br /> “I been around,” Jenkins drawled, opening the screen door slowly. <br /><br /> He paused to scrape his boots on the welcome mat, nodding vaguely at the small group of men sitting at the tables near the soda fountain. The men nodded back just as ambiguously. Jenkins wasn't anybody's best friend, but he wasn't a stranger, either; most of the men in the drugstore had known one another for half their lives. Mr. Callie, being older than everyone except Jenkins, had known some of them all their lives. “I know 'em like the back of my hand!” had been his political catchphrase for years. <br /><br /> “Listen, Sylvester, I heared they was a rumor 'bout that Connie Rae of yours bein' messed up with ole Roger 'fore he killed himself. They anything to it?” <br /><br /> Everybody except Sylvester looked up with interest. All of them except Jenkins and Sylvester looked uncomfortable. Nobody but that old fart Jenkins would have had the nerve to bring up his granddaughter to Mr. Callie's face. Since the question had been asked, though, they listened.<br /><br /> “Good lord, Harold,” the old man said casually, taking his cigar out of his mouth, “just 'cause we grew up together don't give you the right to say any goddamn thing that occurs to you, you know?” <br /><br /> “Well, Sylvester, you know you don't learn nothin' if you don't ask,” Jenkins said stubbornly, drawling almost as slowly as Sly had done. He took off his hat and ran his hand through his gray hair for a moment, then put his hat back on. <br /><br /> “Shit, look at the old bastard's hand tremble,” Ed Maldy, the young druggist, thought, hiding his grin behind his milkshake. “Guess he finally remembered who he was talkin' to!” <br /><br /> “No harm meant,” Jenkins said, surprising Ed by looking Callie straight in the eye. “You don't wanna talk, don't talk; it's your bizness. I thought you liked to talk.” <br /><br /> “I ain't above talkin', Harold,” Callie said amiably, glancing around the room casually now, checking the other men's expressions. They were, as expected, watching him carefully. Sylvester smiled and went on. <br /><br /> “I got this old by out-talking a whole lot of men that's quiet in their graves now, poor bastards. You know, I'll be 78 next November and I don't recall as how I've ever been shy about talkin'! But you know that. I don't know much 'bout all this with Connie Rae, now. I have thought about it some, though, I reckon.” <br /><br /> “Yeah?” Jenkins nodded. <br /><br /> “Oh, yeah. I figure it like this about ole Roger. There ain't no way o' telling what women are apt to like or admire in a man—hell, some of 'em have even loved me! And not so long ago that I can't remember it, neither. 'Course, I got a memory like a elephant!” <br /><br /> Several of the men laughed appreciatively at the old man's joke. They generally figured it was best to stay on his good side. They weren't wrong, either; now as always, just as they imagined, without even looking at them Sylvester Callie was uncannily aware of who smiled and who didn't. <br /><br /> “Oh, hell, Sylvester,” Jenkins grinned, “you and me used to chase the girls together once upon a time and we caught some, too, I reckon. But that was a long time ago. What's your damn point now?” <br /><br /> “Yeah, well, that kinda thing just sticks in your mind, I reckon. Women! Yeah, buddy. But that Connie Rae now,” he continued, “she don't confide much in me, she never did. I suspect as how she's a pretty hot tomato under all them thick dark winter clothes she's always wearin', an' if she met a man she liked, who knows what would happen. All hell might break loose. She might burn 'im up! Ole Roger was pretty likeable, we all knew that. Maybe all hell finally did break loose, huh? But whether she burnt him up or he burnt to the ground all by hisself ain't nothin' for a grandpa to speculate about, now, is it?” <br /><br /> “I reckon it ain't,” Jenkins said, looking at him hard. “Not usually, nohow. You still ain't said nothin', you know.” <br /><br /> “Well, I guess I know that,” the old man nodded, speaking smoothly. “I ain't finished yet, you see.” <br /><br /> Everyone waited while the old man paused to light his cigar, almost holding their breath. The old man had a sense of timing; he made them wait just a little bit longer than breath could be held before he spoke again. <br /><br /> “In short, you dipshit idiot,” he grinned, “I ain't got no way at all of knowing who or if she dallied—excuse my euphemism, boys! I don't know if it was seven kinds of fun for her or what. I don't know if the boy was a rootin' tootin' dead-eyed shooter or a pansy hidin' back there behind all these women's lifted skirts. Him being dead an' all, I guess it don't matter. I kinda wonder, though, if this whole damn thing wasn't some kinda perfidious revenge cooked up by ole Roger's wife, but I don't know. No, sir, no, I don't know nothin' 'bout that. If it was revenge, though, she musta put some damn hard work in on it 'cause the poor bastard sure is dead! Went down to the creek myself that day and took a quick look before they moved him. Never seen anybody'd who'd killed himself so efficiently!” <br /><br /> “Yeah. That's what I heard,” Jenkins muttered. <br /><br /> “Yeah,” Sylvester nodded. “Sure enough a ugly business. Well, no matter. I just wish it hadn't happened, whatever the hell it was! It didn't do the community no good.” <br /><br /> “You right about that, Mr. Callie,” Ed Maldy said. The other men nodded their heads in agreement. Jenkins snorted rudely and walked toward the door. <br /><br /> “I ain't never had the pleasure of talkin' a whole roomful of men to death like you have, Sylvester, but I reckon I been listening to you buzz like this for half a century, and it ain't killed me yet. You can call it gossip if you want to, but I know what I know. An' all that dern talk of yours ain't gonna make it otherwise!” <br /><br /> “I agree a hunnerd per cent, Harold!” Sylvester Callie grinned as Jenkins opened the door and paused to look back. “Come on back anytime you need to get your facts straight! I'll be glad to help you out!” <br /><br /> The other men slapped the tables and laughed like schoolboys. Jenkins slammed the door behind him, but not before he heard Callie say, “Hey, Ed, lemme have one of them cherry Cokes, if you'll be so kind.” <br /><hr color=blue><br />EPILOGUE<br /><br /> At Callie's funeral the next year, some were surprised to see old Jenkins turn up. Some said he came for spite, to show he'd outlived Sylvester. <br /><br /> “He was a crooked bastard,” Jenkins explained to someone, “but he was our crooked bastard, so I showed up for his funeral. Is that against the law now?” <br /><br /> Nobody allowed as it was, and Mr. Jenkins walked home alone. It wasn't evident in his stride, but he was feeling a lot feebler than he'd felt in a long time. <br /><br /> “Damn it,” he muttered to himself, “just 'cause another ole man's dead don't mean I got to feel so beat up!” <br /><br /><br />THE END<br /><br /><br /><I>4th draft: 03/04/03<br />©1990 Ronald C. Southern</I> </span>Ron Southernhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08604305014713612990noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6900460.post-1083792037531377302004-05-05T14:19:00.000-07:002007-02-08T18:53:56.301-08:00Adam's DroolEvelyn's husband had developed the disturbing habit of drooling in his sleep. He didn't talk about it and his wife didn't like it. His wet pillow in the mornings thoroughly revolted her. <br /><br />"Surely that's unsanitary," she shuddered. It gave her the creeps! She changed the sheets every day now, something she'd always been too lazy to do before. "Surely, surely," she thought miserably as she hurriedly threw the soiled sheets in the washing machine, "surely he knows he's doing that!" <span id="fullpost"><br /><br />Either he didn't notice, or else he pretended not to. Yet how could he not know it? She was afraid to ask, and, anyway, it would be a horrible thing to have to talk about. Especially to Adam. Yet every time she handled the sheets, she got sicker and madder about it. Every night she lived in terror that he'd roll over against her and she'd wake up with drool all over her! She knew men didn't like being bothered with such things; she was supposed to take care of it. Clean the babyshit, sop up the drool! Well, she did try to keep busy taking care of the children, to distract herself with honest household tasks, but it wouldn't always work. It was becoming clearer and clearer to her that her relationship with her husband was worsening. Dealing with this slobbering problem of his was too much akin to cleaning up after one of the children, and that was wrong, she felt. Her husband shouldn't be one of her children! But she didn't know what to do about it. She wasn't sure she wanted to do anything about it, for she knew his temper. He liked to threaten her when things got bad, and she knew she didn't know what she'd do without him. <br /><br />"Starve, probably," she thought miserably. "The children, too, I guess. And then they'd blame that on me and take them away from me. I couldn't stand that!" <br /><br />They were on a sort of equal footing now, she thought. He didn't like talking about her being crazy and she had a horror of this new thing that was wrong with him. Yet being equal didn't make her any more comfortable than before. She had liked the sense of somebody having the upper hand in their marriage, even though it hadn't been her; it had made her feel secure, even when she'd been the most crazy. <br /><br />"Now what do I do?" she worried. "This can't go on." <br /><br />But it did go on. </span>Ron Southernhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08604305014713612990noreply@blogger.com