What’s this we jive? She hadn’t used we about anyone other than me and her in a long time. I took a shot at sounding nonchalant. “Who’s we?”
“Ft. Worth and his friend Hank Elkrunner drove me over to Dubois this afternoon. Hank’s part Indian, Blackfoot or Black-feet, something about feet. He knows all this neat stuff about the forest. We found a badger track.”
“You went into the forest? There’s snow, and cold.”
“They had snowshoes. It was a hoot, Sam. I tried something new.”
“What did you try new?”
“Don’t look at me like that, honey bunny. I told you— snowshoeing. It was wholesome.” She kicked off her shoes and padded barefoot into the kitchen, then came back with a glass of water, which was really weird. The only time Lydia ever touched water was to wash down pills.
This time she drained the whole glass. “I thought I would never do anything new again the rest of my life, but now I did. How about that?”
“How about that.”
She came over and gave me a little motherly hug. “Don’t be such a grump, Sam. We’re in this place. Hell hole or not, we might as well admit it and see what there is to see.” I’d been giving her that rap for a month now, but you’d think Lydia was the first person in history to realize it’s more satisfying to live where you are than where you aren’t.
“Did you hear about President Kennedy?” I asked.
She broke the hug and went over to pat Les on the side of the head. “Isn’t it a shame.” Lydia stared off into space and I thought she was dwelling on the pitifulness of a national tragedy. Wrong again. “Did you know coyotes and badgers sometimes run together so they can eat whatever the other one kills?”
“Ft. Worth told you all this nature stuff?”
“Hank. He’s interesting. His great-grandfather was one of only four Cheyennes killed at Little Big Horn. That’s in Montana. Custer bought it there.”
“I know about Custer.”
“Hank says he had it coming.”
“This guy sounds like a mountain of folklore.”
“You know that bucking bronco and cowboy on everyone’s license plate?”
“The ones you think are so stupid?”
“They have names, Steamboat and Stub Farlow. Steamboat is the horse.”
This was too much strangeness all in one day. “Do any of these little items relate to us?”
She snuffed out the cigarette before it was half smoked.
“Sammy, information can be interesting even if it doesn’t affect me personally.”
“That’s not how I was raised.”
I headed for the kitchen to boil mac and cheese water, but something bothered me about the setup. “Did those guys come over here and say ‘Let’s go for a ride’?”
Lydia smiled at me. “I met them at the White Deck. Ft. Worth has a hairy fingertip.”
“You went to the White Deck alone?”
“You don’t expect me to stay in this living room forever, do you?”
“I thought you expected to.”
“Honey bunny, there’s a difference between time out and death. Ask Les, he’s the one told me to get my head off the wall.”
I looked up at Les, wondering if Lydia meant that symbolically or literally. A lot of weird things can happen on a pint of Gilbey’s.
She flipped on the TV. A fuzzy image came on of two people showing the mechanics of a rifle. Lydia went on. “That Dotty’s had a fascinating life. She has a little son she hasn’t seen in two years and a husband in Asia, or somewhere, in the army.”
“You talk to Dot?”
“We have a lot in common.”
You think you’re on top of the deal, then suddenly you find yourself actually over to the side with the view blocked.
I was more disoriented than ever.
6
Maurey and I discovered a mutual love of reading books. It was like being in Bolivia or someplace foreign and running into the only other person in a thousand miles who speaks English—instant old-home week.
We raved at each other. “Have you read Have Spacesuit, Will Travel?”
“God, it was great. Have you read Stranger in a Strange Land?”
Sunday, Maurey and I discussed the sex stuff in Diary of Anne Frank while Petey played fort with the couch cushions. Neither one of us knew exactly what sleeping together meant, we were only sure it meant more than being asleep at the same time in the same place.
“It’s a metaphor,” Maurey said.
“A metaphor for what?”
They were showing the procession as John Kennedy’s body was moved from the White House to the Capitol. It was real sad and dignified. White horses pulled the casket up the street followed by a black horse with empty boots stuck backward through the stirrups.
“Jeeze, what a horse,” Maurey said. “Wouldn’t you love to ride him?”
“Who wouldn’t?” The horse looked like a man-killer to me.
Petey dragged a bunch of dolls and a beat-to-death bear into his fort and pretended they were customers at a drive-up liquor store. Being from North Carolina, I had no idea what that meant until Maurey explained.
“You sure have led a sheltered life,” she said.
“I went to New York City once. I didn’t see any drive-up liquor stores there.”
The literary sex stuff confused us both. Growing up around Lydia, I’d learned the patter early—the hooker laid the John with a Bo Peep fantasy on a half and half—but I didn’t know what went where when the hooker did all this.
Maurey couldn’t even follow it that far. “Bo Peep is about doing it?”
I faked sophistication. “Of course.”
Maurey had read ]ane Eyre and D. H. Lawrence’s The Virgin and the Gypsy. The virgin gets wet and cold in a flood and the gypsy saves her by doing something peculiar.
I told her about the whores in Catch-22.
She told me a Hemingway story where an African guide has a double cot and somebody’s wife sneaks out for a couple of hours, then the next day she blows her husband’s head off.
I told her about The Catcher in the Rye, which I read because a teacher told me not to.
We finally found common ground with Tortilla Flat, in which Danny drags every woman in the Flat into a gully, drinks three gallons of wine, and dies.
“But what happened in the gully?” Maurey asked.
I shrugged. “Seems like a lot of book people die afterward.”
Maurey pointed to the TV. “Here’s the killer.”
“Who are all those other people?”
Boom. Oswald bought the big one. Right there, live, in front of me and everyone else, one person murdered another one.
“Holy cow,” Maurey said.
Annabel brought in a huge bowl of popcorn and stood in the middle of the family room, staring blankly at the Dallas police wrestling Jack Ruby to the concrete floor. She turned to us. “Who’s ready for a snack?”
Petey twisted the bear’s head until it tore off its body.
That night I had my first wet dream. It was king-hell peculiar. Lydia and I were in this department store to buy me some new Wranglers. She held a pair of 26-28s up to my waist and said, “Looks right if they don’t shrink much. Maybe you better try them on.”
I went into the changing booth and Annabel Pierce was sitting on this three-legged stool, naked with Kleenex boxes on both feet. She said, “You didn’t eat the popcorn.”
I couldn’t take off my jeans to try on the new ones with her watching, so I just waited there, holding the pants in front of me, embarrassed because Annabel was old and naked.