“I love it when you gaze at me like that,” Chuckette said.
“Oh.”
“Sam, you can be so charming when you try.”
Stebbins didn’t show up for sixth-period PE. A few slows slid around the gym floor in their socks, heaving a basketball at the backboard, calling each other “douche bag.” Douche bag was the in insult of the winter, but I doubt if a one of them knew what a douche bag was. I only knew because I took a drink out of Lydia’s once and she yelled at me.
The rest of us slouched in the bleachers playing dot-to-dot pencil games and finger football. Dothan Talbot passed around three black-and-white postcards of naked women. I wasn’t impressed. I’d seen both Maurey and Lydia naked and these women were dogs compared to mine. Their breasts hung like baseballs in the toe of a sweat sock and their bellies pooched. The one straddling a bicycle had hickies from her navel to her fuzz.
“Be like sticking your prick in a milking machine with that slut,” Dothan said. “Wouldn’t stop till you gave two quarts.”
I bet he got that from his dad. Rodney Cannelioski went bug-eyed holding the picture of the woman on the bicycle in both hands. A trance situation.
“How’d you like to pork that, Roddy?” Dothan asked.
Rodney flushed out. “Degrading. This is an abomination against the sacredness of Eve.”
Everyone started chanting, “Abomination, abomination,” and pushing at Rodney.
Dothan stood up. “Let’s take his pants off and see if he’s stiff.”
A couple of guys jumped on Rodney, he screamed, and I left.
Howard Stebbins sat at his desk in homeroom, his eyes scrunched up in concentration over a paperback. From the door, I watched as he licked a finger and turned the page. The tendency was to feel sorry for him—the sports hero who had lost his glory at nineteen. Now, ten years later, he’s stuck in a meaningless town with a plain wife and three foreheadless rats for children. Small-town adultery is nothing more than boredom and timing. In his position, I’d have probably screwed Annabel. What else was there to do in winter?
But the situation called for toughness. Look at the jerk through Lydia’s eyes. If I walked in with a heart full of pity he’d have me comparing birth-control methods and talking baseball. Never talk baseball with someone you’re supposed to hate.
“This,” I said to myself, “is the man who once said I was too slow to be a nigger.”
He shut the book—Zane Grey, Wanderer of the Wasteland— and looked up.
“They’re depantsing Rodney in the gym,” I said.
Stebbins blinked twice and it came to me that he was at a higher emotional peak over this event than I was.
“New rules,” I said.
His eyes were sheeplike, so I stared at that king-hell cleft running up his chin.
“First, no more forcing me out for sports I don’t want. I deserve an A in English and you are to give it to me.”
He blinked again. The abortion had made him speechless.
“No more licks on Dothan Talbot for not cutting his hair.”
“I thought you and Dothan are enemies. He’s Maurey’s boyfriend.”
“The licks are making him a hero.”
“I hadn’t realized that.”
“You hadn’t realized a lot. Number three, no more Saturday bridge club. It upsets my friend Maurey.”
Stebbins went back to blinking and looking resigned. I’d expected some sort of resistance, maybe a counterthreat. This was too much like cutting off Otis’s leg.
“Anything else?” he asked.
“We’re done with Ivanhoe. He’s a bad influence. Starting tomorrow you read the class Tortilla Flat by John Steinbeck.”
“I don’t know where I can lay my hands on a copy,” he said.
“I’ll find one.” I pointed to Wanderer of the Wasteland. “In the meantime, try that. Teddy’ll love it.”
Stebbins turned the book over twice in his hands. “She went through with it. After you took Maurey away, I tried to stop her. I offered to leave my family.”
He looked as if he might cry, which was the last thing I could deal with at the moment. Living with Lydia makes you susceptible to vulnerability. I’d reached enough-is-enough. “They’ll push Rodney out in the snow with no pants,” I said.
Stebbins raised his head. “Maybe I should save him.”
“Maybe you should.”
20
Maurey showed me how to make a tent out of the blankets so you can read by flashlight and eat graham crackers without your mother finding out.
“But Lydia doesn’t care if we leave the light on and read and eat all night,” I said.
“This is how I’ve always done it. There are certain things you should sneak around to do, even if no one cares.”
“Like reading?”
We sat cross-legged, facing each other, with the books and graham cracker box between us. Maurey’s book was The Black Stallion’s Filly. She’d been on a horse-fiction kick ever since the botched abortion. I was working on Tike and Tiny in the Tetons by Frances Farnsworth, Being and Nothingness by Jean-Paul Sartre, and the back of the graham cracker box.
Hank loaned me Being and Nothingness. He said it would help me understand life and Lydia.
“Do you understand Lydia?” I asked.
“I’m better with life.”
I spent twenty minutes on the table of contents—“Chapter Three, Knowledge as a Type of Relationship Between the For-Itself and the In-Itself”—and decided I was still a kid after all.
“You’re getting crumbs in the sheets,” Maurey said.
“I thought we were supposed to get crumbs in the sheets. If we didn’t want to crumb the sheets, we’d be in the living room, on the couch.”
“You’re losing your sense of play, Sam.”
“What play?” Maurey was wearing the white nightie and the flashlight light made her new breasts and the undersides of her cheekbones glow while the rest of her stayed shaded.
I wanted to talk more than read. “Is your real name Maureen? Hank said Maurey is short for Maureen.”
“Merle.”
I flipped the light beam up at her face. “Merle?”
“Short for Merle Oberon. She was a movie star in the thirties or forties or sometime when Dad used to see movies all the time. He thought she was the perfect woman.”
“Was she?”
“I’ve seen photographs; she had a face like Charlotte Morris.”
I had trouble with the picture. “You’re named after a beautiful woman who looked like Chuckette?”
“Chuckette’s pretty.”
“If you like a dinner plate with eyes.”
Maurey dug in the box for another cracker. “Our TM Ranch is named for a cowboy star named Tom Mix. Dad’s his second cousin’s son or something like that. He saw Tom Mix once in San Francisco.”
This was considerably more interesting than Being and Nothingness. “What was Buddy doing in San Francisco?”
“Art school at Stanford.” Maurey reached over and with the thumb and forefinger of her left hand, she opened my pajama fly.
I ignored her, but, boy, did I have hopes. “Buddy’s a cowboy. He couldn’t be in art school.”
“Cowboys aren’t stupid, Sam. They just like being alone and outdoors.” Maurey held the graham cracker in her right hand and made a fist, then she let the crumbs sift through her fingers into my pubic area. She said, “Now there’s a sense of play.”
“I’ll show you play.” I dived on her and she shrieked. We rolled around, all tied up in each other and the blankets while I stuffed crackers down her nightgown and she crumbled into my hair. I got her a good one, right up the nose. Amid the giggling and mock screams, we rolled off the bed and crashed to the floor where I came out on top. She looked at me with crumbs in her eyelashes and smiled.