Eric knew it hurt his left hip and winced for him. “I wanna find out what you’re gonna ask me.”
“Well, if you’re ready, Hanna says we can use her back office. That’s where my recorder is…” and they were walking off.
Then the kid in the net shirt returned with Eric’s plate. Eric took it and said, “Thank you.”
The kid didn’t say anything but looked very serious. Eric was about to start eating, when he realized the youngster was still staring at him.
Eric paused with his fork up and frowned inquiringly.
The kid blurted. “My name is Cum Stain. But I don’t think you would call me that, would you? You’re probably too old, huh?”
Eric shrugged. “Why not? My partner’s name is Shit — ” he nodded off in the direction Shit had vanished — “and people been callin’ him that since he was younger than you.”
“They have? Oh, wow!”
“Sure have, Cum Stain.” Eric grinned.
The kid grinned back, then turned, and dashed away.
Even with the black plastic fork, the ham cut just as tender. It was good, too. So were the greens. He ate some more, but gas in his belly suddenly wanted to get out but wouldn’t. It made him sit the plate down beside Shit’s, wondering if there was any club soda.
Molly walked up, in her open orange jacket and orange slacks, gold flocking on both. “Hey, I came over to make sure somebody had taken care of you. But I see you got a plate — oh, you didn’t get no sweet potatoes.” (But he shook his head, and she went on.) “It’s so nice of you fellows to agree to talk to Ann.” She had rings in her dark, dark nipples. Her orange lipstick practically leapt from her dark, dark face. It was interesting that both men and women again were turning to make up, a resurgence from the thirties.
“Oh,” Eric said, “this ain’t nothin’. We’re at that age where we’ll talk any of you young folks ear off, if you wanna waste time listenin’. The only thing I’m worried about is Shit’s stories is gonna scandalize her. Shit never did learn how to tone a tale down a little so he could tell it in a way that wouldn’t make a civilized person arch an eyebrow.”
Hanna laughed. Gold and orange fabric shook as did her tit rings. “Well, I don’t think Ann — ”
— Eric felt a mental hitch, realizing for the tenth time in three days that Ann was the university woman Ann Lee, not the potter Anne Frazier —
“—really wants her stories all that civilized. This is for her American Anthropology class, and she told me she needs ’em as raw as she can get ’em. Her topic, you see, is the role of sexuality in gay community development.”
“Well, yeah,” Eric said. “I un’erstand that. But there’s raw and there’s plain crude. Shit starts talkin’ about sex, and he may just ‘role’ her out your front door on the run. We’re both more than a little crude. Only sometimes I can control it. Most of the time, though, Shit don’t even make the effort.”
“Mr. Jeffers, I’ve known both you and Mr. Haskell for a long time — thirteen years, fifteen even.” Molly laughed again. “You’re my oldest friends in the Settlement. The fact is you are true social treasures, the both of you.”
It surprised him when she said it: Eric thought of Molly as among his newest. But then, fifteen years was probably a third of the young painter’s life.
“Nobody minds a little crudity, Mr. Jeffers — at least not here in the Settlement. Most of the women around this place consider themselves pretty worldly and sophisticated, but if we didn’t have the two of you and the outrageous things that come out of both your mouths, we wouldn’t have anything to lift our eyebrows about or to whisper with each other over or just to make us…laugh ourselves silly! I mean, that story Mr. Haskell told at Anne’s, two summers ago, about the two of you in a three way with that midget, when his catheter worked loose, and started spurtin’ all over everyone, has still got be one of the funniest things I ever heard!”
“Oh, yeah.” Eric raised his chin. Shit had told that one back at Anne’s summer solstice dinner and kept half her back yard in stitches twenty whole minutes. “I remember that one. That was pretty funny — and messy. But you know, we’re all still friends.” Though, as he said it, he realized they weren’t: Big Man had died, at his dad’s house on the mainland, maybe fifteen, twenty years ago — or more like thirty. (What he’d meant was that they’d stayed friends, despite the incident. But that’s not what he’d said.) Mr. Markum was dead. For half a dozen years there, they’d gone to Christmas dinner at Big Man’s in Pinewood (despite the tree and the cards, Big Man always managed to call it something else), arriving early in the day to help out, then clean up afterward, but that was…twenty-five, thirty-five years ago!
Molly was saying, “Ann said she wanted to spend about an hour and a half with Shit, then she’d be ready for you. If you don’t mind sittin’ here, she’ll get to you. You want me to bring you some key lime pie?”
“I ain’t even ate this ham and greens yet. And I ain’t much for desserts. Naw, you don’t have to worry about me.” Eric shifted around in the chair’s cushions, thought about taking up the plate of food again, but let it stay. “What I’m gonna do is sit here and take a little nap. While I’m waitin’, I mean — ’cause it’s after eight o’clock. And after eight o’clock, that’s what I usually to do.”
“Well, you go ahead. I’ll come get you as soon as she’s finished with Mr. Haskell.” Straightening up, Hanna chuckled again. “I swear — I was walking back from the commons the other evening, and I was thinkin’ about that story, the way Mr. Haskell told it that night at Anne’s. I started laughing out loud, right there on the path, under the trees. I couldn’t stop myself. Two years after hearin’ it — and I’m still laughing myself silly over the image of you lookin’ all surprised and him rollin’ onto his bag with that stuff just…” In the course of searching for a word, not finding it, and shaking her head, she laughed again, turned, and started away between guests.
Draperies behind the Christmas lights — whatever they called them, Christmas lights was what they were — were flowered and printed with leaves. Among their pattern, he could make out something like a face, which looked like…yes, that was his beard, and that was where his upper teeth should have been. Jay stood there, behind the colored stars, grinning. Behind him was Mike, with his denim shirt open wide over his dark, gleaming chest, because it was summer — Jay’s shirt was open too, because it was winter and along the coast winter was so mild.
Like summers, sometimes…
It was funny, too — both had tails, winding, coiling, looping and unrolling, writhing behind them on the sand, pushing aside leaves, splashing down in the water, whipping up dry dirt, as they walked ahead of him over the beach. Mike’s serpentine appendage was covered with what looked like coal chips — black scales, Eric realized — glistening under an aluminum sky. The scales on Jay’s were hemp hued. Eric could see the bases pushing aside the frayed rip in the seat of both their work pants, allowing him to glimpse where the plated flesh joined Jay’s blond-haired buttocks or his dad’s, dark as gunmetal.
As the two men walked ahead, the tails overlapped and wrapped one another, so that along the writhing lengths he couldn’t keep them distinct. It was like one great tail between them that, with its loopings and unloopings, as gulls flew above, ran from one of them and coiled around and around to join the other.
“Now, how’re we gonna do it,” Mike explained, stopping and turning and taking Eric’s book from under his arm, “is that I’m gonna weld this one cover over here…weld it to the people.” The volume was four-feet high — as tall, Eric thought, as one of Anne’s pots. “And your friend over there — ” he nodded toward Jay, who, in his big old work shoes, stood in the scurf of foam — “is gonna weld the other cover there to the sea, you see?”