“She’s not stupid.” It slips out before I could stop it.
“Yeah, she is, but I can never resist …”
“Not stupid!” Miss Lick looks at me with her mouth poised for a word, her clever eyes calm on me, waiting. I feel everything slipping away from me, all the care and planning, and volunteer misery. “I don’t know! Don’t mind me. I feel sorry for her.”
Miss Lick always melts at “feeling sorry.” “Hey, don’t I know? Don’t I just know precisely?”
“I mean,” I dig my fingertips into my knees for control, “she’s already in school. Where’s the percentage?”
“The men like that tail. I could subtract that distraction for her as a start. That’s what I had in mind.”
I take a taxi back to my alien apartment, crawl under the bed with two blankets, and huddle there on the orange carpet.
• • •
“So the nutso wants to sell me a nine-millimeter full-auto with a clip as long as an elephant’s dong and he won’t let up. He’s revving his tonsils and I’m standing there staring at him, thinking what he’d look like with that clip rammed up his …”
Miss Lick is lolling on the fir-needle sponge beneath the trees. She stretches out on her belly, arms stuck out in front of her, hands clasped warmly around what looks like a small gun, just the tip of the barrel showing beyond her puffy knuckles. The thing blaps like a knife in the eye when she squeezes. A dark blotch appears on the sheet of typing paper tacked to the tree fifty feet away. She milks off four shots and then pushes up to her knees and breaks the pistol open, its barrel lifting at the root like a shotgun as she nips the casings out with a sturdy fingernail.
“Hot!” she winces. “Want to look?”
By the time I reach the shredded target paper, she’s reloaded and caught up with me, the ground snapping and hissing under her weight. She flicks the paper scraps away and fingers the yellow splinters that look as though somebody small and very rough had busted out of the old fir. “Nice tight pattern.” She looks at me for praise.
I nod, though it’s too high up for me to see inside the teacup-sized crater. I don’t tell her for fear she’ll lift me up to look.
“So I walked out,” she continues the tale. “If the silly sucker had just sold me what I wanted he could have made his money and saved his breath.”
She sticks the gun into the holster under her left arm. I hear a small snap as she buckles the gun nest closed.
“Ready for work?” she claps and grins and reaches for the heavy machete leaning at the foot of the tree.
She gives me thick gloves and I follow her all afternoon as she chops at the saplings and brush and blackberry vines that clog the back acres of “the homestead” as she calls it.
The big brick house with its turrets and diamond-paned windows sits close to the road, surrounded by civilized green and leased to the regional director of a major computer manufacturer. “He always invites me to his sociable dos on the terrace,” says Miss Lick, “and his wife tries to maroon me in the library with one of the firm’s middle-aged bachelors or get me drunk and show me pictures of starving babies to make me blubber before she tells me how much the firm contributes to famine relief. She’s inventive, I have to admit. And he’s subtle.”
The wooded acreage isn’t included in the lease. “I get my firewood here,” she explains. She just likes it out here. She wears boots and a wide tweed bag of a skirt with her hooded sweatshirt to wallop around in the woods. She calls it “tending the park” or “minding the homestead.”
She cuts brush and I drag it out and throw it on a heap that rises and spreads in the small clearing.
She’s rambling on about guns. “I used to carry my old man’s.45 but the bastard was built for a hip holster. Barrel was too long to be discreet in a lady’s suit. The poor broad that makes my clothes got old suddenly every time I walked through her door. So I got this little bitch of a COP. Stands for Compact Off-duty Police. Fires a.357 Magnum round. Has a rotary hammer like the old Sharps and Brownies. Guy, when I bought it, tried to sell me a little automatic. Told me a lady needed more than four shots. I says to him, Well, if I shoot some sonofabitch I’m not gonna miss, ya know. And he shuts up like a bank on Sunday. I think it’s a cute gun. I like those four big barrels looking down on anybody who’d give me a hard time. Little gun, big bite. Always liked a.45 though. Cut my teeth on them because my dad always had them. He taught me to shoot.”
She talks and swings the heavy blade, tearing the cuttings away with her gloved left hand and pushing them behind her to where I plod.
Thomas R. Lick seems to have been the only man in her life. Her tongue is modeled on his. Without ever having known him or heard him speak, I know she mimics him. She moves like him. She looks like him. Her politics and prejudices and pride are almost certainly his. And I look like Arty.
I am thinking about Arty and throwing an armload of spider-and-scratch onto the heap when she hollers, “Hey! Shit-for-brains!” in her jollying-the-help tone. “Boss is gone! Break time!” She comes red-faced from the dark of the trees. I sit down, suddenly nauseated.
“Hey! Don’t faint.” She is patting me clumsily, smoothing my hump, pressing my head down so my wig slides to my glasses. I start giggling helplessly and bat at her to get free. “I’m all right.”
“You were pink and sweaty and then boom, your face was …”
Laughing, I flop back on the heap so I can look up at her. “I had a brother who used to call me shit-for-brains.”
She grabs at the ancient wheelbarrow that lugs the tools and drags it toward me. “Brother? That’s something. Is he dead? You never mention family. Kind of figured you for an orphan. Born of joy and mirth, like. Something like that.”
She’s reaching under my arms to lift me like a child. I hate having her lift me. She does it too easily. She folds me up tidily in the wheelbarrow and I lean back, trying not to be angry. Her chin stretches like the prow of a Buick as she shakes her head. “Hang on for the ride!” and she runs, trundling me and the barrow, the branches whipping the sky above her and her pink and blinking face grinning like the hilarious moon, all the way to her car.
“If I could think of a way to seal her asshole, I’d do it. And maybe stitch her mouth shut and feed her with a tube going in under her chin.” Miss Lick is half-joking in the elevator. Her hands are shoved flat into the pockets of her suit jacket and she rocks back on the thick heels of her crocodile shoes and rolls a chuckle at the mirror-bronze ceiling of the rising cubicle. “You’ll see what I mean. This little broad hasn’t a hair left, bald as you are. A double mastectomy. And she’s still got that sex thing. If I let her walk from her room to the can, three men would climb out of the light sockets on the way and find holes in her to cram their dicks into.”
The elevator stops and the door sighs open. Miss Lick lowers her voice and mutters down at me, “I’ve been thinking testosterone. You’ll see what I mean.” A silvery grandma-nurse passes us in the hall, nodding her little grey bun and her perky white cap and twinkling, “Good afternoon, Miss Lick!” with only a slight hesitation in her smile for me.
We are visiting Miss Lick’s latest, a nineteen-year-old gymnast with a bent for engineering and a yen to get into the space program. Miss Lick likes the idea of producing an astronaut but is hampered in her efforts by the requirements of the work. “She’s got to be physically functional all the way. It’s a nuisance.”
Jessica H. is in Miss Lick’s favorite nursing home, recuperating from the relatively minor surgery that closed her vagina and removed her clitoris. The girl has pushed her sheets off and is languidly stroking her firm, golden belly with one finger. The bandages look like a diaper. Her chest is blank and nippleless but the scars are almost invisible.