Shrugging into it, he went back to the john.
He stayed in there long enough to jerk off silently, eat it all, check to see that none had dropped. (Where might he start a medallion…? Probably not in here. Did Shit and Dynamite have one, perhaps?) Then he went back out.
He’d already noticed most of the trailer part of the house was plastic, pink or orange, soiled with time’s gray. Basically the built-on porch and the built-on living room were wood and wicker — looking new and artificial, surfaces sunk below an eighth-of-an-inch of polyurethane.
Stepping into the kitchen he asked, “What time is it?”
“Ten to seven,” Barb said. “You don’t have to get up this early — ”
“That’s all right,” he said. “If I’m gonna start on the garbage run on Wednesday, I gotta get up a lot earlier.”
“The sea air down here does make you sleep.” She moved from the counter, where a large yellow box stood with a picture of a heart-shaped bowl filled with cereal. “Clem Englert gave me some Honey Nut Cheerios from the Lighthouse. Those used to be your favorite…”
“I don’t eat the sweet ones no more.” Eric looked around. “But…well, since you got ’em, it’s okay.”
“Oh…” she said.
She was actually worried, Eric saw. “Really. It’s fine.” The trailer kitchen brought it back: when last he’d visited Barbara in Florida, he’d gotten really upset about some food he didn’t like — which, if only because today he couldn’t remember even what it had been, seemed silly.
That brought back something else he hadn’t thought about since before they’d left the upstairs kitchen at Mr. Condotti’s, yesterday morning. Eric went into his pocket — he’d put his lube in a box under his bed — and came out with his wallet. Sitting on a chair at the kitchen table, he unfolded it and fingered through. (He was glad the condom had gone off with Dynamite and Shit — one less thing not to have to worry about Barbara finding and his having to explain.) “I should’ve given you this last night. Dad told me to make sure you got it — it’s his check for this month’s money.” Among green bills, he found the blue rectangle with HSBC across the front. Pulling it free, he held it out.
Barb stepped forward to take it. “Oh, honey — you could’ve lost that!”
Eric looked at her strangely. “No, I couldn’t,” he said — remembering when, in Turpens Notions, he’d thought his wallet gone. “It was in my wallet.”
Barb took it, looked at it, sat down across from him. Then she looked up. “You know, you really have grown up so much. I’ve got to get used to you all over again.” She smiled at the check. “Maybe Mike has, too.”
Eric laughed. “You gonna let me drive you to work?”
“Sure — but you can’t have the car all day. Sometimes things come up and — ”
“That’s okay,” he said. “I was going to walk around anyway and explore.”
When, in the gravel lot by the Lighthouse, they got out of Barb’s Honda, with seven-twenty sun coming in across the waves instead of going out across them, the whole street seemed different from yesterday. By the yellow rail, Barbara walked up the cinder blocks, stopped to finger over her keys, found one, and pushed it in the lock.
Behind them, someone called, “Hey, there, li’l feller. Mornin’, Mrs. Jeffers. Now this’s gotta be Eric who you been talkin’ about for the last three weeks.”
With the door open an inch, Barbara — she was wearing pink jeans and white sandals (flats in her straw bag) — stopped and looked back.
A step below, so did Eric.
In the rough black denims he’d worn yesterday, open over his brown belly, with his broad rough feet, bare on the grass running between the narrow pavement and the street and his smiling blasted face, Mex walked a step ahead of bearded Jay, who towered behind him in a blue work shirt, his sleeves rolled up from colorful forearms. Under hay-hued fur, Eric saw an anchor he hadn’t noticed yesterday — perhaps an older image, around which oranges, violets, and greens clustered and spiraled (probably it had been on the arm away from Eric when they were messing with Mex) — the denim buttoned up to three button holes below his beard, at the bottom of a pie slice wedge of chest hair. “How long you been here, son? A couple of days now? Or did you get in this mornin’? Yeah, your mama been going on and on about you for days. Probably I’d’ve recognized you anywhere…”
Was that, Eric wondered, Jay’s coded way of saying that, at the truck stop yesterday, he had? (Maybe he’d already known Mike was black, and spotted him in the car through Turpens’ glass doors…) Yet MacAmon’s reticence said relax and be easy. So Eric relaxed.
“Good morning, Mr. MacAmon,” Barbara said. “Yes, this is Eric. His dad brought him down from the city yesterday afternoon. I’ve talked to him on the phone, but it’s been more than a year since we’ve seen each other. Hasn’t it, honey?”
Eric smiled at them.
“Mornin’, youngster. What’s a matter? Cat gotcha tongue?” Jay gave him his grin without incisors. “Hey — don’t you say good mornin’ to folks?”
“G’mornin’, sir!” Eric really was pleased to see them.
“Now, that’s better — good to meet you.” Jay reached out and shook Eric’s hand, which momentarily vanished in Jay’s, rough, hot, hirsute, and hard. “This here’s my partner, Mex.”
Eric shook again. He thought: I came in this guy’s mouth yesterday, while Jay was pissin’ all over my dick…Yes, though this meeting was all charade, it was easier. Mex smiled at him warmly.
“He’s grown up so,” Barbara said, “I don’t quite know what to do with him yet.” She laughed. “Eric’s already got himself a job with Mr. Haskell.”
“Dynamite?” Standing two steps up, Eric was as tall as MacAmon. “You sound like a busy young man. And responsible, too. Dynamite’s a good feller — I don’t think you could have yourself a better bossman. We used to work together, so I know.”
“Well, that’s nice to hear.” Turning back, Barbara finished pushing the door open and went in. Mex and MacAmon followed behind Eric into the empty café.
“See — ” MacAmon grinned at Eric — “your mom’ll tell you: Mex and me almost always stop by and have a cup of coffee in the mornin’ when she opens up the Lighthouse. We’re pretty much always her first customers.”
Beside Eric, Mex raised his fist and, in the sun and shadow around the curtains on the booth windows, made a rapid sequence of signs.
“Really — ” Barbara walked to the counter’s end and stepped behind to the urn, took a dinner plate sized paper filter, held it up in one hand, looked at it, put it down, and took two bags of coffee from the shelf with the other, tore them open, and poured both into the scalloped paper basket — “he’s got so grown up. He’s going to be tired of hearing me say it, pretty soon.” She turned a spigot above the urn. Like a river in a cavern, water falling into metal rang through the room.
“Come on, let’s sit down and have some coffee,” Jay said, which may or may not have been translation of something Mex had just signed.
Swallowing, Eric thought: These guys have done something, been somewhere, seen something — and because Mex can’t speak, the energy he carries with him is three times as intense as that of any ordinary person. Is that sexiness?
Or is that just to me…?
Eric followed, about to sit with them, but Jay leaned to the side and gripped a corner of one of the square tables and pulled it closer. “Come on — you sit there, Eric.” Turning to Mex, Jay’s great hand said something in silent signs.
Mex laughed — as silently — and signed something back.
“That’s so you can see what we’re sayin’.”