“Your protagonist. What’s his name again? Harold.” Nathalie, pale of face and eye, twisted white-blond dreads around her finger. “He’s a sex offender?” She gave the Medusa ’do a rest and pulled an apple from a bowl of fruit. Apparently Gary had taken one look around Missoula after his arrival and gone as crunchy-granola as the rest of his part of town. Everybody else — except Benson — had brought something to drink. Lots of microbrews, along with PBR and more Hamm’s. Irony abounded.
“And all he does is drive around delivering newspapers?” Crunch. The waif’s little white teeth opened a wound in the apple. “Why doesn’t he try to molest the guy riding with him? I mean, if he’s a sex offender, he’s got to offend, right? That would ratchet up the tension.”
“Because he didn’t try anything.” Benson grabbed at the air as though to recall the words. Too late.
“Underfictionalized!” the group chorused. Even though that was the most fictional part of his submission. Gary looked at him with eyes full of pity. Benson imagined putting a thumb to each of those eyes. Pressing hard.
Gary handed him the fruit bowl. “Grape?”
Benson’s new neighbors would have cussed him twelve ways to Sunday if he’d shown up with a fruit bowl.
“Hey, boy, get on over here. You look like you need a beer, and we’ve got beer. And snacks.” It was ten in the morning, but for Miss Mary, the yardarm constituted Mount Sentinel, the hill on the college side of town with its whitewashed concrete M — for the University of Montana — where the sun now sat comfortably ensconced.
Miss Mary lived in the trailer next door. Only a single-wide, but someone had affixed a porch, its boards gone so gray and warped that the woman spent most of her days sitting on the sturdy cinder-block steps. There she held court, sparkle-dusted pink Crocs on her feet, pink bandanna on her bald head, a cigarette in one hand, beer in the other. Given that she apparently spent most of her Social Security check on beer, Miss Mary frequently had company. Usually it was Velma, she of the cosseted irises, a divorcée in her forties whose life of child-rearing had left her ill-equipped to counter the husband who’d sprung for the sort of lawyer who guaranteed he kept the house. Even though Velma, with no job and none of the skills that commanded pay for a woman her age, had ended up in this shithole of a trailer park, she retained enough suburban sensibilities to know that when someone else supplied the beer, it was only right to offer up some eats. A green plastic bowl of sour-cream-and-onion-soup dip sat on the step between Velma and Miss Mary, along with a party-size bag of ruffled and ridgy Lay’s, not the limp, inadequately salted supermarket variety that sometimes made an entire meal for Benson.
“Here.” Miss Mary extended the smoke, its ends loosely twisted, with an illegal smile.
“Damn, girls.” Benson sucked deep. Possibilities caromed around his brain. Fuck Harlan/Harold. Miss Mary and Velma — now here were some worthy protagonists.
“Hey. Hey.” Velma snapped her fingers in front of her face. “Shit’s good, but not that good. Where’d you go?” She liked the sound so much that she kept snapping, arching her back and swaying to the beat, so that Benson couldn’t help but notice that Velma had herself a fine pair of titties. Tick-tock, he thought, before he wrenched his eyes away from the motion.
“Writing. I’m writing in my head.”
Snap, snap. Both hands raised high. “Respect.”
He could talk about his writing with the girls. Unlike the group that gathered at Gary’s, they took it seriously. He passed the joint to Velma.
“How’s the book coming? What’s the latest?”
Early on he’d intimated that he was writing a book, a fabrication that required endless embroidery. “George is working Benjamin’s last nerve.”
Velma picked a fleck of bud from her tongue and flicked it away. Her lipstick was harlot scarlet, matching the polish on her fingernails and toes. He’d have to tone her down for his story, Benson thought.
“I hate that George. He’s a privileged little shit and a bully. Reminds me of my ex. Is Benjamin gonna kill him?” She looked at her watch. Velma favored peasant blouses over short stretchy skirts with nary a hint of a panty line and, when sitting outdoors, religiously recrossed her thighs every ten minutes to keep her tan even, magnetizing Benson’s gaze with each shift change. He took cloudy days as a personal affront.
A little broad in the beam, Velma, and nearly twice his age. Still, Benson couldn’t deny he’d thought about it, in convoluted musings that involved those sun-coppered legs scissored around his skinny white frame, Nathalie’s whispery drawl in his ear. He bit into a chip laden with dip and savored the smooth and salty crunch. Not like that weak-ass fruit bowl at Gary’s, all waxed skin and no flavor.
“No,” he said. “Killing him is too obvious.”
“Ahhhbvious,” Nathalie sighed her opinion of the revisions to Benson’s sex-offender story, glancing at Gary for confirmation.
Benson had written a new section where the man’s hand had clamped around his — his protagonist’s — dick, fingers corpse-cold even through his jeans, freezing him into momentary immobility.
“I thought she’d like it,” he told Gary later.
“Me too. Because if there’s one thing that girl likes, it’s dick.” Gary made an O of his mouth. Pumped his fist in front of it. “Last week,” he said, “after everybody else went home.” Seeing the look on Benson’s face, he added, “Sorry, man. I didn’t know. Can’t say I blame you. She’s a few steps up from that trailer-trash hottie, am I right? Go for it.”
“No way,” said Benson. Way, he thought, and went home and wrote a new story for Nathalie. Which she dismembered the following Sunday with all the finesse of a child yanking the head off a Barbie doll.
“These women. You did everything but have them slinging hash in a diner. Aren’t we over Raymond Carver yet?” She cast a sidelong glance toward Gary as she pulled apart paragraph after paragraph.
Benson imagined the doll’s limbs flying: arms first, then legs, nothing left but a torso with Velma-worthy boobs and a sexless crotch.
“I know it’s cliché” — clichéd, damnit, Benson thought — “but why don’t you try writing what you know? Dig deep.” Nathalie pounded at her skinny chest with her fragile white fist, stopping just short of actual contact. “Get past these caricatures and write something real. This verges on genre.” At genre, a collective shudder ran through the room. “What’s next — ending with, In the distance, a dog barked?”
“Nathalie’s got a point.” Gary, that fucking hypocrite. As if he hadn’t hightailed back to his side of town, irony foaming in his wake, after the real of Benson’s trailer, of Velma. “You might want to think about taking a couple weeks off from the group, find your focus.”
Nobody laughed until the door closed behind Benson. Maybe they’d forgotten about the open windows. Or maybe that was the point.