“Okay, I could’ve accepted that. He was crazier than a hoot owl. But it was the jury that got to me — they were on his side. If the judge had let them acquit, they’d have acquitted. It was like to them my dad was a fair target, and Lewis Olson was this folk hero for standing up to the federal government — which is how a lot of people in Montana think. My dad wasn’t my dad: he was Washington, D.C., a federal agent, and Olson was Robin Hood.
“They gave him four years, and he was out in two. I broke down when I heard the sentence. My dad was the kindest man. He loved the ranchers, loved the land, and it was just unimaginable to me how much those strangers hated him.”
“I think, if it had been my dad,” Minna said, “I’d’ve wanted to see him go to the electric chair.”
“Or just locked up for life. But it gets worse. I went to see him in the jail — I had this stupid idea it might bring ‘closure.’ I was even going to write a piece about it, you know, a daughter reconciles herself with her father’s killer: I was like, ‘This is my therapy, and The New Yorker will pay ten grand for it.’
“He’d gotten religion in the penitentiary. He had this mad seraphic smile and sort of vacant eyes, like he was some kind of goddamn saint. He tried to make me go down on my knees with him, in the fucking visitors’ room, and say the Jesus Prayer with him: ‘Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner.’ I mean, not just once, but over and over and over. He’d murdered my dad, and here he was, telling me to confess my sins to him. That’s when I would’ve happily pulled the switch on the electric chair.”
“Funny how really bad people — the most horrible people — always think they’re good people at heart. And they do, too. I’ve seen that.”
“He told me that if I came over to Jesus, I’d meet my dad in heaven. Like it was going to be him and me and my dad, sitting around some celestial campfire, reminiscing about old times on the prairie.”
“You’ve told Alida all this?”
“No. She knows her granddad was murdered, but not about the Jesus stuff. She doesn’t know Lewis Olson keeps on writing to me — just to warn me that if I don’t repent I’ll never see my dad again. Then he brings me up to date with his stupid news, like he and I are family. Blue envelopes and block capitals. The sight of a blue envelope in the mail makes me want to vomit. I have a Google Alert on his name, hoping to see his death notice in the Billings Gazette or whatever. But you’d be amazed how many Lewis Olsons there are. Mostly I get the latest dope on some New Zealand glass artist.”
Again, the island was too small for the conversation; again, Sunlight Beach Road came too quickly into view. But even though — or, rather, because — Lucy had done all the talking, she’d found out one thing crucial to the GQ piece: why Augie married Minna.
ON SUNDAY AFTERNOON in the Dew Drop Inn on Aurora, Charles O was waiting for his girl to come out of the bathroom.
She was good and old, this one — as old as Lucy Bengstrom, maybe even older. “Hi, I’m Estelle,” she’d said when she stepped into his pickup. It was a made-up name. Last week’s girl had called herself Dolores.
“I’m Don,” Charles O had said.
“Hi, Don,” she’d said, hitching her skirt up to show her thigh. He saw her appraising the leather upholstery, the premium stereo, the power seats, the AC.
She sure took her time in the bathroom: lot of water running and the toilet flushing. Still fully clothed, he sat on the edge of the waterbed, lightly bouncing, waiting for his date.
At last she came out, in her underwear — red bra, red panties, black stockings and a lot of hooks and elastic to hold them up. She turned around, cocked her fat ass up at him, big meaty buttocks bulging out from the lacy stuff that barely filled her crack, looked over her shoulder, and said, “How you like me, Don?”
“Lookin’ good, Estelle.”
“I like Asian men. They keep themselves clean, not like Americans. I’m big on personal hygiene. I mean, what with all the DSTs nowadays, you gotta be clean, right?” She perched herself on his knees, arm around his neck, then reached for his pants. “Hey, your little elvis, he’s got wood.”
She unzipped him, easing his pants down to his knees. He liked the motherliness of her as she swabbed his dick and balls with a Wet One.
“What a big elvis he’s getting to be.”
Charles O knew the drill. He handed her the condom that he’d taken from its wrapper when she was in the bathroom. Gently, skillfully, she unrolled the latex sheath down his dick, as if she was hanging wallpaper. Then she put her lips to the teat of the condom, teasing him.
“Does little elvis want to come in my mouth?”
This was what the old ones were good at. They liked to play around, to pretend. Charles O liked that.
“Is he going to be a good little elvis today, then?”
It was like his entire being had gone into his dick now: he was his dick. “Yeah,” he grunted. “Yeah.”
She had him all in her mouth now, licking, sucking, squeezing, as if she had a whole bunch of baby chipmunks working overtime inside there.
As she labored on him, he thought of Lucy Bengstrom. Lucy, Lucy, Lucy, Lucy, Lucy, Lucy!
“Oh, you’re a quick one, aren’t you, honey? Was that nice? I like a quick man.”
He went to the bathroom to rid himself of the Trojan and wash up. When he came back, Estelle said, “I only go hoing for my little daughter. Sharon’s ten. You’d like her. She’s doing great at school.”
“Where she at now?”
“I got an aunt looks after her on weekends. In Shoreline. That’s a nice neighborhood. You know Shoreline?”
She was chatty, this one. He shrugged. “Yeah, I been all around there.”
“I gotta go to the little girls’ room,” she said. “You wait there. Turn on the TV. We could watch TV together.”
Impatient to settle up with her and get back on the road, he paced the room, wondering why she trusted him to stay. Then he saw her watching him through the just-open bathroom door — her eyes on his every move as she pulled up her skirt and tucked her shirt into it. She had him covered.
When she came out, she was smiling. He hadn’t noticed her bad teeth before. She said, “I got an idea, Don. I’m really hungry. I thought, you and me, we could go out to lunch someplace, somewhere fancy, like with a cocktail lounge, you know? Like we were on a date date. Then after, maybe I could do your little elvis again — wouldn’t cost you no more, ’cept for the lunch, and you could give me like a gratuity?”
He was sufficiently tempted to check the time on his watch. “Nah. Too much business I got to see to.” He handed her three twenties, as agreed.
They parted company at the door, Charles O to his truck, Estelle to the street. She was almost at the corner of the motel when she turned around and called, “Don?”
“Yeah?”
“And fuck you too, honey.”
He was laughing as he switched on the ignition. What a ho — drive two stoplights down Aurora and she’d be gone forever from his mind. Yet the good blow job had only further imprinted the beckoning thought of Lucy Bengstrom. He didn’t want hos no more, he wanted her. Lucy! Just thinking her name made his dick begin to twitch again.
He turned on the stereo.
“Next, when you attain deep understanding about the three circles of your Hedgehog Concept and begin to push in a direction consistent with that understanding, you hit breakthrough momentum and accelerate with key accelerators…”