What about wildcats?
No wildcats live around here. I’ve seen foxes, though.
Foxes aren’t that big.
They spread out their sleeping bags inside the tent and opened the flap a bit so they could see the fire.
This is my favorite place, Wayne said, when they zipped into the bags.
The tent?
No. The meadow. I’ve been thinking about it. I want to have a house here someday.
A house?
Yeah.
What kind of house?
I don’t know. Like mine, I guess, but out here. I could come out onto the porch at night, and it would be just like this. But you wouldn’t have to pitch a tent. You know what? We could both have it. We’d each get half of the house to do whatever we want in. We wouldn’t have to go home before it gets dark, because we’d already be there.
Larry smiled but said, That’s dumb. We’ll both be married by then. You won’t want me in your house all the time.
That’s not true.
You won’t get married?
No — I mean, yeah, I will. Sure. But you can always come over.
It’s not like that, Larry said, laughing.
How do you know?
Because it isn’t. Jesus Christ, Wayne. Sometimes I wonder what planet you live on.
You always make my ideas sound dumb.
So don’t have dumb ideas.
It isn’t a dumb idea to have my friends in my house.
Larry sighed and said, No, it isn’t. But marriage is different. You get married, and then the girl you marry is your best friend. That’s what being in love is.
My dad has best friends.
Mine too. But who does your dad spend more time with — them or your mom?
Wayne thought for a minute. Oh.
They looked out the tent flap at the fire.
Wayne said, You’ll come over when you can, though, right?
Sure, Larry said. You bet.
They lay on their stomachs, and Wayne talked about the house he wanted to build. It would have a tower. It would have a secret hallway built into the walls. It would have a pool table in the basement, better than the one at Vic’s Pizza King in town. It would have a garage big enough for three cars.
Four, Larry said. We’ll each have two. A sports car and a truck.
Four, Wayne said. A four-car garage. And a pinball machine. I’ll have one in the living room, rigged so you don’t have to put money in it.
After a while, Wayne heard Larry’s breathing soften. He looked out the tent flap at the orange coals of the fire. He was sleepy, but he didn’t want to sleep, not yet. He thought about his house and watched the fire fade.
He wished for the house to be here in the meadow now. Larry could have half, Wayne the other. He imagined empty rooms, then rooms full of toys. But that wasn’t the way it would be. They’d be grownups. He imagined a long mirror in the bedroom and tried to see himself in it: older, as a man. He’d have rifles, not BB guns. He tried to imagine the rooms full of the things a man would have and a boy wouldn’t: bookshelves, closets full of suits and ties.
Then he saw a woman at the kitchen table, wearing a blue dress. Her face kept changing — he couldn’t quite see it. But he knew she was pretty. He saw himself open the kitchen door, swinging a briefcase that he put down at his feet. He held out his arms, and the woman stood to welcome him, making a happy girlish sound, and held out her arms too. Then she was close. He smelled her perfume, and she said — in a woman’s voice, warm and honeyed — Wayne, and he felt a leaping excitement, like he’d just been scared — but better, much better — and he laughed and squeezed her and said into her soft neck and hair, his voice deep: I’m home.
Patrick Michael Finn
Where Beautiful Ladies Dance for You
From Ploughshares
By the time he’d turned twenty, Ray Dwyer looked like a movie gangster’s bodyguard, and was either feared or adored by everyone who knew him. He drove trucks on a local route for Tamco, one of the many quarries in South Joliet, and when he wasn’t working, Ray Dwyer liked to dress up in nice shirts and slacks from Baskin’s on Roosevelt Avenue and take pretty girls to elegant dinners and shows. There was never a shortage of pretty girls who wanted to accompany Ray Dwyer, for not only was he naturally muscular with green eyes and handsome black hair he combed slick with Royal Crown hairdress, but he was always a perfect gentleman who didn’t force or even expect anything beyond a kiss at the end of the date, no matter how much he’d spent on the evening.
And even though this angered the other men who knew Ray Dwyer, an impossible act to follow when it came to pretty girls (most guys tried to hike a girl’s skirt after bowling, burgers, and maybe a beer or two at Stone City or Andy and Sophie’s), who among them had the balls to say anything to him? Everyone knew about the quarry strikes a few years back, when Ray Dwyer, five months out of high school and unarmed, beat the living Christ out of three cops who’d tried to pull him away from the quarry gate he was blocking with the rest of the truckers and heavy machinists. Three cops. With his bare hands. Ten more patrolmen had to eventually bring him down, and Ray Dwyer had a smooth, deep scar from one of their billy clubs hidden under his handsome black hair to prove it, which he never did, since Ray Dwyer was never one to boast about his own strength, no matter how hammered he was.
And everyone also knew Ray Dwyer’s secret when it came to his ease and virtue with the pretty girls: Ray Dwyer was raised in a home where pretty girls outnumbered him four to one. His father, James Dwyer, a quarry machinist who’d loved Camel cigarettes and corned beef hash, died of a heart attack when Ray was still a boy, which left Ray Dwyer the little man of the house surrounded by his mother and three younger sisters: Mary, Katie, and Maureen. Like most men Ray’s age, he still lived at home, and would continue to do so until he fell in love with the right pretty girl whom he would marry and have a family with.
The Dwyer girls were seventeen, eighteen, and nineteen years old, and whenever a fellow wanted to take one of them out, he’d usually be intimidated enough to ask her big brother, Ray, for permission beforehand, something Ray Dwyer found incredibly dumb and unmanly.
“Aw, come off it,” Ray would tell the fellow between swigs of Old Style at the Stone City tavern. “You don’t need my okay, but thanks,” Ray would say, then offer a friendly squeeze of the fellow’s trembling, relieved shoulder.
Hell, it was only natural that the guys wanted to take Ray’s sisters out, and he had no problem with it, as long as the guys behaved themselves. And the guys sure as shit did behave when it came to the Dwyer girls; any guy who even thought of getting fast with one of them would have been out of his goddamn gourd.
So Ray Dwyer didn’t think twice when John Lucas, a hillbilly from Georgia or some damn place who’d just started driving for the GAF quarry, took Katie Dwyer to the movies on a Saturday night without asking for Ray’s approval. As a matter of fact, Ray Dwyer was so happy with his own plans for the night that his sister’s date with John Lucas never once crossed his mind. Ray was so happy because he was on his own date with Samantha Baskin, an absolutely beautiful girl with black hair and perfect skin she somehow kept tan even in the middle of winter, whose father owned the very clothing store where Ray had purchased the crisp white shirt and charcoal slacks he wore that night. First they had dinner at a small French restaurant downtown (Ray wasn’t much for that frog food, but Samantha was crazy about it, and if Samantha had wanted Ray to eat dog chow, he would have gladly asked for seconds — thirds, even), and then Ray took Samantha to a Jerry Lewis movie she wanted to see. Ray’s first choice would have been a Western, but he laughed at all the scenes Samantha laughed at even though he found the movie pretty silly, because Ray was deeply in love with Samantha Baskin, and as far as he was concerned, Samantha Baskin was the only girl on Earth he wanted to marry. But there was a problem: Samantha Baskin was Jewish, and Ray Dwyer wasn’t, and though Ray never once even hinted to Samantha that he wanted to marry her (how the hell could he say that?), she’d told him how bent her parents were on making sure she married someone who was Jewish, too. Ray didn’t care what church Samantha went to, and he knew the problem was Samantha’s parents, and not Samantha. Hell, Samantha only went to her church two or three times a year, anyway. But Ray wasn’t thinking about the problem too much that night, since Samantha was sitting right next to him and holding his hand and having a good time — a hell of a good time.