I also thought I could pick out a few University people. Wynning is just a stone’s toss from Iowa City and the University of Iowa, and apartments and houses in a university town are hard (and expensive) to come by, so not surprisingly a certain number of bearded, pipe-smoking men in poorly fitting somber sportshirts walked arm in arm with lean-faced, short-haired liberated women wearing studiously unattractive slacks and sweaters.
One person, though, particularly caught my eye. This person was female, as you may have guessed. This person was wearing a red, white and blue sparkle swim suit.
Well, not exactly a swim suit, but that’s as close as I can come to describing it properly. You see, she was the band majorette I mentioned before, briefly, and she was really something. She had blond hair and dark blue eyes. She had a very nice figure. She looked familiar to me, but then all pretty girls look somewhat familiar; I mean, the conventional sort of attributes that make girls pretty makes for a lot of them looking alike. If you follow me.
I followed her, with my eyes, as she practiced with her baton, out in the street; she had the good sense not to bother with the entertainment on the bandshell stage (right now a middle-aged heavy-set lady was imitating Groucho Marx) and was prancing out there, probably playing the exhibitionist more than practicing her baton work (which was as flawless as it was intricate) and had drawn a crowd of guys, who were watching, with round-eyed adoration.
The more I watched her, the more familiar she looked. Wishful thinking you might say, but I really felt I had seen her somewhere before, though what any acquaintance of mine would be doing in Wynning was beyond me, too, so I kept studying her, forcing myself to focus on her face, to try to dredge up the memory of where it was I’d seen her before.
And then it came to me.
It was the girl I had bumped into when I was streaking through the DeKalb Holiday Inn. The girl in the bikini. There was no mistaking that young, pretty face. That blond hair. Those dark blue eyes. Or the rest of her, either.
And here I was staring at her! What if she noticed me, and, Lord! What if she recognized me, too?
As the thought passed through my mind that I had to turn away, before our eyes met, our eyes met. She dropped her baton.
She smiled.
She recognized me.
Chapter 28
She rushed over, a blur of blond hair and flashing thighs and patriotic glitter, and said, “Well, hello!”
“Er,” I said.
“What are you doing here?”
She giggled and scooted in next to me on the bench. “I almost didn’t recognize you with your clothes on.”
That elicited a startled look from the middle-aged couple on the other side of me, but my pretty majorette didn’t seem to notice, or anyway care, and she bubbled on, “I’m so glad to see you! And surprised!”
A fat man in front of us turned and held a finger to pudgy lips and shushed us. There was a talent show going on, after all. A man was on stage doing tricks with a yo-yo.
“We better get out of here if we want to talk,” she said. “Tell you what. I’ll let you buy me a lemonade.”
And before I could answer, she was standing up, and two of the nicest boobies (as Wheat would say) ever to be decorated in red, white and blue sparkles were looking right at me. She took my hand, pulled me to my feet and led me away.
Normally, I wouldn’t mind at all being led away by a girl as beautiful as this, a girl who had that golden-haired wholesome look used in television commercials to make the American male think of sex and buy milk.
But I was in no mood for sex or milk or lemonade, either. I was, remember, in the middle of the worst situation of my life, and this vision of blond Midwestern liveliness was walking in at a most inopportune moment. I don’t mean to be a complainer, but I think you’d have to agree that Fate just hadn’t been on my side through this whole thing, and this was a hell of a time to throw me a crumb, even a beautiful, shapely crumb like this.
Anyway, pretty soon we were standing in front of the Tacomobile and she was saying, “You still haven’t told me what you’re doing in Wynning.”
I opened my mouth, but my mind couldn’t seem to find anything to fill the opening.
“I know!” she said, suddenly brightening. “You came to see me, didn’t you!”
“Right,” I agreed. “Right. To see you.”
“How did you know where to look for me? How did you find me?”
“Uh,” I said.
“You’re a sly one,” she said, nudging me in the ribs, winking. “Going to keep me guessing, huh?”
“If I, uh, told you how I found you,” I heard myself saying, “that’d take, uh, some of the fun out of it. Some of the mystery.”
A nice-looking brown-haired girl in one of the hideous marching band uniforms was ahead of us in line at the Tacomobile window. She heard us talking and turned and looked with envy and even scorn at her fellow band member wearing the skimpy, sparkly majorette outfit, and said, “Who’s the new boyfriend, Sue Ann? Find a replacement for Bo Bo so soon?”
Sue Ann put her hands on her very attractive hips and smiled at her catty friend in genial defiance. “His name is Fred Kitchen,” she said. “And he came all the way from Sycamore, Illinois, to see me, didn’t you, Fred? Fred? Are you all right, Fred?”
I was Fred, all right. The TILT light in my head was going on, but I was Fred. I conjured up a smile as weak as my knees. “I’m fine,” someone said. Me, apparently.
The brown-haired girl said, “Hi, Fred. I’m Julie.” She extended a hand.
I looked at it. After a while I remembered about shaking hands, yes, that’s a native American custom, shaking hands. I shook her hand. I shook period.
Sue Ann said, “Fred, are you sure you’re all right? You look kind of sick.”
“Uh, Sue Ann,” I said. “Could we go someplace private and talk?”
The brown-haired girl, Julie, said, “Well!” huffily, like Jack Benny, and turned quickly away. I guess I hurt her feelings or offended her or something, although I hadn’t meant to be rude; my mind was not organized enough at the moment for me to do anything so controlled as to be purposely rude to someone.
But Sue Ann didn’t seem to mind my accidental rudeness, and even smiled at me for it. Even in my shell-shocked state, it was coming through that the two girls didn’t like each other much.
So I bought lemonades at the Tacomobile window and Sue Ann led me behind the concession wagons up onto the step-up sidewalk, where we sat on the slight porch of one of the storefronts.
Sue Ann slurped at her lemonade. Through a straw. She had on some sort of pale, frosty lipstick that made her lips glisten like the sparkles on her skimpy suit.
So she knew me. I remembered vaguely telling here my name was Fred, when I bumped into her, streaking; but I didn’t remember telling her Fred Kitchen. Or had I?
Finally she looked up from her lemonade and said, “Are you always so quiet, Fred?”
“No. I’m just a little... surprised.”
“Surprised? Why? I’m the one who’s surprised, having you come look me up like this!”
“Well, I’m surprised you remembered my name, is all.”
“Silly! You were in all the papers! Don’t you think I was interested, having bumped into you like I did? I almost felt famous myself! I saved all the clippings.”
“No kidding?”
“Sure! That’s a really funny picture, you know, of you and your friend streaking through those wedding guests. But maybe it doesn’t seem so funny to you. I mean, going to jail and all.”