She looked up at me and said, “I chap easy.”
I leaned back against the closed door. “My baby is having sex.”
“Good for her.”
“I shall never have an erection again. The penis is a blind and cruel animal without conscience or mercy.”
“You talk like there’s one big schlong out there that ravages little girls.”
“There is. All schlongs are one schlong and the one schlong is soiling Shannon.”
Katrina stared at my boxers. “You really can’t get a stiffie?”
“I’m limp with outrage.”
She threw back the sheets, revealing her tight little body. “You’ve still got a tongue.”
17
For a few days life reached a pattern of some sort. Breakfast pancakes with Gilia, oral perversions with Katrina, miles and miles on the Exercycle 6000. At night I telephoned Mike Newberry to fill him in on the day’s activities: dry cleaners, the Magic Cart office, a drive over to Winston-Salem to see if Rainbow News and Novels still stocked Jump Shot to Glory, egg sandwich for supper. Mike accused me of holding out the juicy stuff, but there wasn’t any juicy stuff, outside of Katrina’s taco, so I made some up.
A novelist can’t stand to tell a boring story. I invented a Chinese brothel in Siler City where I wiled away the afternoon. I told him I lost ten thousand dollars betting on cockfights.
Tuesday noon I had a remarkably close call at Katrina’s health club. Turned out to be the same health club where Gilia swam. I ended up hiding in the women’s shower, then escaping down a laundry chute and out a fire exit. After that I insisted Katrina meet me at the Ramada Inn. She took out a room with a weekly rate.
At breakfast Wednesday, Gilia was indignant about the invasion of Grenada.
“Seven thousand crack marines against two hundred Cuban construction workers,” she said, “and Reagan’s behaving like we whipped the Kaiser.”
“Are Grenadians black?”
Gilia’s hair was in a ponytail, which excited me for some reason. She looked clean and wholesome, like untracked snow. I guess no boy can resist putting tracks in untracked snow.
“Spanish, I think,” she said, “but maybe black. Jamaicans are black and Grenada is somewhere near Jamaica.”
“My garbage disposal predicted a war against black people.”
“That’s interesting.”
“Actually, my housekeeper, Gus, predicted the war against black people, but she heard it from the garbage disposal.”
“Seven thousand marines against construction workers could hardly be called a war.”
I went on to explain Gus, which is no easy trick. She’s six feet two inches tall, and twenty-five years ago she played basketball for North Carolina A & T, back when girls’ teams had six on the floor instead of five the way they do now. Gus reads the New York Times every day and dabbles in the stock exchange, but she believes there’s a sign that migrates around the body, putting hexes on various organs. She won’t eat cranberries or tuna and she once punched out a UPS driver who called her Aunt Jemima. She’s saving her money for a personal home computer.
“We had a black maid but Mama accused her of wasting toilet paper. Now she won’t hire anyone but Quakers,” Gilia said.
“I saw a black woman at Skip’s. She wouldn’t speak to me even though I asked politely if anyone was home.”
Gilia slid the check to her side of the table. “That’s Phadron. Skip hires illegal aliens who don’t speak English. Ryan says Skip threatens them with deportation if they don’t sleep with him and Katrina can’t do anything to stop it.”
“Sounds like a sad situation.” I made a grab for the check but she snatched it away. A traditional Southern woman would have protested delicately, but still let me win.
She said, “I suspect Katrina does her share to balance Skippy’s sins. She’s been awfully chipper the last few days.”
“Chipper?”
“Mama suspects the tennis pro.”
That afternoon a thin man in an extremely cheap suit showed up on my doorstep. I’ll wear a sports jacket now and then, but I stopped wearing suits after Lydia told me the neck tie is a phallic symbol. I’m not ashamed of having a phallus, but I sure as heck don’t brag about it.
The man called me Mr. Callahan.
“My name is Sam. I don’t like being called mister; it’s too male.”
“Here, Sam.” He handed me some official papers.
“This is a legal document,” I said.
“You think fast,” the thin man said.
The papers were from Wanda by way of a lawyer and signed by a judge.
“What’s your name?” I asked.
“Vernon Scharp.”
“Do you enjoy process serving?”
He looked at me to see if I was condescending or interested.
He must have decided I was interested. “I could tell you stories that would straighten your hair,” he said.
“I imagine you run into a lot of shoot-the-messenger mentality.”
“Shoot, knife, and beat with a baseball bat.”
“I’m asking because I own a golf cart manufacturing company, and I’m certain we could find a job for you at the plant.” I gave him the address and told him to speak to Gaylene. “Work for us and you won’t have to wear that suit.”
“What’s wrong with my suit?”
The papers said I was not to dispose of any assets; piddly amounts were okay, but big ticket items were out of the question. I read the papers carefully, then filed them in a jack-o’-lantern.
Thursday, I did lunch with Billy Gaines. We met at Tijuana Fats where he asked if I had any plans for the future and was I seeing anybody—Dad kind of stuff. I was touched that at least he tried. He even wrote my birth date and shirt size in his pocket calendar.
I didn’t tell him about the two death threats I’d received in the mail. They were written in purple ink on the title pages of L’Idiot de la Famille by Jean-Paul Sartre and Cancer Ward by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. If I had Clark for a son, I would probably take my supposititious heir to lunch myself.
Supposititious is my new word of the month. Say it slowly—supposititious. It means a person you’ve never seen before who shows up out of nowhere, claiming to be your child. Imagine: a special word for people in my situation. Supposititious comes from the same word as suppository. Don’t ask me why.
Bastard is another special word for people in my situation. Fatherless. Born of an unwed mother.
The disgrace of being a bastard never bothered me much, growing up. For a long time, I didn’t know it meant anything specific. Bastard was simply another insult, like squirrel or douche bag, that children yelled at each other. Dothan Talbot was the one who taunted me with bastard most. He was the one who explained in detail exactly what the term meant and exactly why I was one. I didn’t care. I had impregnated Dothan Talbot’s girlfriend and everyone knew calling me names was nothing but lame sour grapes.
The single practical skill Lydia taught me as a boy was not to give a hoot what anyone thought of us. That’s a rare attribute in junior high, but with the town character for a mother and a daughter by the eighth grade, I’d have been in big trouble without it.
I telephoned Lydia to see how the poison chew toy saga came out.
“Wire me five thousand dollars,” she said. “I need it today, tomorrow may be too late.”