If that was so, Archer concluded, the only way to turn her off was to regain her affections. So he set about to re-woo her. He launched an all-out campaign toward that goal.
He called Shirley. She hung up on him. He wrote her. She returned the letters unanswered. He rang her doorbell. She slammed the door in his face. He rang again. She sent her husband to answer it. The husband was a nine-foot-tall, ten-ton piledriver with atomic energy by Con Ed and HOSTILE stamped on his forehead. Archer fled.
But he didn’t give up. He simply took the precaution of checking up to find out when her husband left on his next out-of-town business trip. Such trips had always been frequent, so Archer didn’t have long to wait. When he was sure Mr. Simpell was safely out-of-state, Archer resumed his campaign.
Right about then, Rufus Blisternape was “walking the dog” with his yo-yo. Mrs. Rufus Blisternape, Cora Sue, was cursing him out for wasting his time with the yo-yo when he could have been out chopping cotton and earning maybe three dollars for the day which, coincidentally, was the price of that sexy cotton sundress she’d set her heart on in the Sears catalogue. Rufus kept “walking the dog,” giggled silently and lewdly to himself at the way her tits bounced when she was het up, but ignored her nagging.
The Fickle Finger jabs, and having jabbed, reams on . . . to the supermarket where she was handing out leaflets demanding the Attorney General Mitchell be impeached because he was “soft on Communist peaceniks.” The confrontation was far from satisfactory from Archer’s standpoint. But he supposed it was a beginning.
“Relationship . . . rapport . . . flesh-fitting-flesh . . . not going to let you destroy what we have . . . can’t throw it away . . . made for each other . . . ” Etcetera, etcetera . . . Archer said all the things a lover says when he’s trying to keep a good thing going with his turned-off inamorata.
“Anarchist bombs . . . chaos . . . Commie plot . . . decadent radical sapping of sexual energies . . . Marxist impotency . . . effete Eastern establishment . . . ” Etcetera, etcetera . . . Shirley was into her thing
“Politics . . . Intellectualism . . . Meaningless . . . body chemistry! . . . when we touch each other . . . ” Archer grabbed for a sweatened breast and a tweed-covered buttock. "
“RAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAPE!” Shirley bellowed.
A cop in a nearby bookie parlor dropped his daily payoff and jumped toward the sound. Two police cars, sirens screaming, raced toward the scene from opposite ends of the street and collided. A firehouse a few blocks away spewed forth men and trucks. Helicopters spun toward the supermarket like gyroscopes in the pull of some irresistible gravitational force. The early warning system at the Air Force base sounded Red Alert. Local civil defense officials scurried for their fallout-shelter cellars. The local boy scout bugle corps sounded out the call to battle stations. The ASPCA gassed thirty-seven kittens and then burned its records. The Navy’s nuclear subs headed for a preselected spot under the polar icecaps. Three IBM computers self-destructed. Bell Telephone suspended all but official, top priority service. Abbie Hoffman called up Bobby Seale, shook his fist, and said “Right on!”
“RAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAPE!…” The echo lasted a long time.
Archer dropped the breast and released the buttock. Archer turned and walked away from Shirley. If she was going to be like that . . . Obviously the time was not yet propitious. But he didn’t give up as he departed the scene. If at first you don’t succeed . . .
One day passed. Mr. Simpell was winging southward to make his second business call. Cora Sue Blisternape was brooding over her bad luck at having married a man who’d been a celebrity (Rufus had won the statewide yo-yo contest—“WHITES ONLY”—-three years back and his picture had been on the second page of the local weekly newspaper.) but who was now a has-been, a has-been who didn’t go out to earn the money to buy her the pretty things she’d thought she'd have when she married a celebrity, a has-been who was even more interested in playing with his yo-yo than in licking her honeypot the way he used to be so eager to do before they were married. Cora Sue sure liked having her honeypot licked! She got itchy as a ’skeeter bayou just thinking about it! Well, if Rufus would rather swing his string, then she guessed she’d just have to find some other stud with a sweet-tooth tongue! Rufus Blisternape just went on practicing figure-eights with his yo-yo.
And the Fickle Finger soared tookus-wards . . .
Archer popped up in the back seat of Shirley’s car as she pulled away from the DAR meeting. “Even though that wasn’t a very nice thing to do, screaming like that, I just want you to know I still love you," he told her.
“Get out of my car!” She hit the brake so hard he was thrown into the front seat.
There was a tangle of arms and legs. “Peace,” Archer murmured.
“Jeepers!” Shirley’s resistance wavered as Archer’s head wedged high under her skirt.
“It’s bigger than both of us!” Archer’s voice was muffled.
“Golly gee!” Shirley started to quiver. “Keep talking!”
“I gadt. I dod odd oddy gadt dawg, I gadt ebed breadg!”
“Holy cow!” Shirley panted. “What did you say?”
“I said I’m suffocating!” Archer’s head came up gulping air.
“Degenerate Communist eunuch!” Shirley immediately regained her antagonism. “You're not even a man! Gloryosky! This is the second time! Get out of my car and leave me alone!” She opened the door, braced her foot against Archer’s groin and propelled him from the car. “I’m a respectable married woman!” she called back indignantly as she drove away and left him sprawled and writhing in the gutter.
“Right wing bitch!” Archer moaned . . .
Another day passed. Mr. Simpell had rented a car and was making a series of local stops in the heartland of Dixie. Cora Sue Blisternape, drenched in perfume, was miniskirting her way from one roadhouse to the next, looking for some non-yo-yo action. Rufus Blisternape was perfecting a new yo-yo routine which he called “The Spiro Spiral," or “Lynch ‘N’ Order.”
The Fickle Finger was probing flesh . . .
Archer was in the branches of the tree outside the second-story window of Shirley’s bedroom. When the light in the room went on, he stretched precariously across the space between the branches and the building and tapped on the pane. Shirley opened the window and peered out.
“Repulsive!” she identified Archer. “Get out of my tree, or I’ll call the police!”
“If you do, I’ll tell the whole world what we’ve meant to each other.”
“Blackmailing Pinko goop!”
“Including your husband!”
“What about your wife? Peoople in glass houses . . . ”
“I don’t care about her. It’s you I’m mad about. I’m not going to let you destroy what we have because of some silly political disagreement!”
“Dialectics!” Shirley sneered.
“If you’d just let me take you in my arms, Pm sure everything would be all right,” Archer pleaded.
“If you were a man, I might!” Shirley unwrapped a lollipop and stuck it in her mouth arrogantly.
“Give me another chance.”
Shirley removed the lollipop and licked it, thinking. Slowly her face softened. “Oh, golly;” she said finally. “All right. I’ll give you another chance.”
Archer stared at her, surprised by her sudden change of attitude. “You mean I can come in?” he asked hesitantly.
“Holy Cow! What are you waiting for?” Shirley took a particularly suggestive lick of the lollipop.
Archer crawled out as far as he could on the branch, which dipped precariously under his weight. He reached out with both arms until he had a grip on the inside edge of the windowsill with both hands. Then he unlocked his legs from the tree branch and started to swing his body over.