“Yes, I do. But if he didn’t, couldn’t, I’d still go. And this is more something me and him can handle.”
“You’re sure?”
“No. But it sounds good.”
Brett turned her glass of ice tea around and around in her hand, said, “I can’t let you go by yourself. You go, with or without Leonard, I go too.”
“What about your job?” I asked.
“What about yours?”
“I can leave it. It’s not like I wasn’t looking for a job when I found that one.”
“I can get off too.”
“You’re sure?”
“I’m sure. It might make my supervisor’s butt hole suck wind, but I’ve got some more vacation time coming. I need to get off, I can.”
“All right,” I said. “But you got to consider some things. These guys, they probably knew Tillie, all right. They may have worked for this Big Jim, but we don’t know they’re telling the exact truth.”
“I guess I have some doubts, them driving all the way down here for five hundred dollars.”
“Actually, I buy that,” I said. “Scum like that, they’ll do anything for a buck. They’ve probably robbed and looted every damn thing they could on their way down here. They figured since they were en route to Mexico, they might as well stop by and pick up five hundred bucks from you. We don’t even know for sure Tillie wants you to come get her, or that she told them to ask for five hundred dollars. They may just know you’re her mother, and nothing else. This could all be some story they made up. A grain of truth here and there, like a couple of whole corn kernels that have passed through the bowels on their way to becoming shit.”
“That’s metaphorical talk for you think they could be lying a lot. Right?”
“Right.”
Somehow we drifted toward the bedroom, and it was very cool in there, and the sheets were soft and sweet-smelling and Brett was warm and even sweeter, and I kissed her lips, then her breasts, pausing to roll my tongue around and over her hard nipples. I ran my tongue down the length of her long legs, and kissed where she had shaved herself, then I kissed everything else there was to kiss, rolled her on her stomach, moved her legs apart, and entered her.
Brett had the CD going, playing The Best of Percy Sledge—which means anything he ever sang. The song was “When a Man Loves a Woman,” and the way he sang made time stop. We made love for a long time, and eventually I had no idea which song was playing, and finally, when we finished, both of us satiated, I was somehow startled to realize we lay hugging each other in silence.
After a while, Brett said, “Now, that was some fuck.”
“Yeah,” I said, “and next time, I’m going to put my whole thing in.”
“Yeah, right,” Brett said. “What I meant to say, was that was some fuck, considering what you have to work with, and I don’t mean me, pardner.”
“Oh ho.”
“Ho ho.”
“Ho, ho, ho.”
“Oh, ho, ho, ho.”
We lay there for a while, kissing. Brett said, “You know, what we been talking about. About you and me.”
“Me moving in?”
“Yeah. I still want that. But right now, I don’t know we should. I don’t know how things are—”
“I understand.”
“—and Tillie, we go get her, well, I may need to keep her here, and with you and me trying to work things out together right now, I don’t know.”
“I understand.”
“Well, don’t understand too goddamn quick, mister. I want to do it, but maybe right now isn’t good. It could put a strain on all of us that we don’t need at the moment.”
“It’ll be all right.”
“I love you, Hap.”
“And I love you.”
“It’s okay we wait?”
“Sure.”
“Want to stroke the bald beaver again?”
“Will it bite?”
“Absolutely.”
We made love again. Less passionate this time, but satisfying nonetheless, then we lay with pillows propped behind our heads and Brett got the remote off the nightstand and turned the television on.
We lay there and watched some stupid talk show with a pig that was supposed to play a harmonica. The pig seemed bored. His owner held the harmonica, and the pig, a red neckerchief tied around its throat, tried to be cooperative and made a halfhearted attempt to blow into it. He could make a noise, but I wouldn’t call it music. The pig’s owner claimed it was taps.
Frankly, unless the sonofabitch can hit more than one note, I’m not that impressed with harmonica-playing pigs. In fact, way I feel these days, I don’t know one could actually play taps, or even “The Star Spangled Banner,” would excite me much.
We lay there holding each other, watching this pig, and finally some other program even more bland, then nothing. We fell asleep in each other’s arms, the TV going, and when we awoke in the late afternoon a famous talk show host was trying to help some whitebread woman in a five-hundred-dollar dress sell a book she’d written on the power of love; about how all we had to do to make things right was just believe in love and it would fill the air.
Pollution fills the air, honey, you believe in it or not. Love takes more work than that. And unlike pollution, sometimes love goes away.
6
When I got back to Leonard’s place my car windshield was caked with bugs. I used the hose and an old rag to clean it, but it wasn’t a much better job than I had done on Brett’s car at the filling station. Just call me Greasy Bill.
After I had been struggling for a while, Leonard came out of the house with a squeegee and gave it to me. I assumed he had been watching me through the window and had become frustrated. I used the squeegee and the hose and finally got the windshield clean. All the while I was doing this, I was glancing at Leonard out of the corner of my eye. I could see he was in a foul mood. He had that pouty mouth with the wrinkled forehead he gets when he’s ready to jump your ass. Not the look where his eyes are on fire and you know someone is going to get mauled or maybe die, but the one tells you he’s pissed and ready to let you know.
I tried some polite conversation about the bugs and the weather. Pointed at a couple of interesting birds I saw on fence posts, but Leonard wasn’t having any of that. I tried a clever slide into talking about Brett and her daughter, but he wasn’t having any of that either.
He said, “Before we talk any outside shit, we’re gonna talk some inside shit. I mean mine and your shit. Come on.”
I followed him into the house. He said, “Sit down right there and wait a minute.”
I sat on the couch. He left the room. A moment later he returned. He was carrying a roll of toilet paper and a toilet paper roller. “I’m gonna show you a little trick, here, Hap. You see, when you use the last piece of shit paper on your nasty ass, you take the roller post, that’s this thing here, long and hard, unlike your dick, I’m sure. And you take this long and hard thing, the dick we’ll call it, so it’ll be something you can understand, and we take this dick, and we put it in the hole in the toilet paper tube.
“And in keeping with your mental faculties, we will call this hole in the toilet paper tube the pussy. So you take the dick, put it in the pussy, then, finished, you realize that the dick is sticking in the pussy and out the asshole, which is what we’ll call the other side of the tube. You take each end of the dick, ’cause somehow it got broken off, okay, and you take each end of the dick and slip it into the little notches that hold it on to the wall in the bathroom. This way, you got a new roll of crap paper on a stick. That simple enough for you, Hap?”
“Good grief, Leonard. Don’t have a cow.”
“Yeah. Well there ain’t nothing like taking a big ole greasy crap and having to duck-walk over to the cabinet to get another roll while you got a goddamn hunk of turd hanging out of your ass. You ought to try it some time.”