The whole encounter left her feeling weak and it was a real task to drag herself to the store and get groceries for Peewee’s dinner. She did it, and made spaghetti, but her mind was on the afternoon. Peewee arrived, shiningly clean in Levi’s, every hair slicked down, terribly awed even to be coming into the garage apartment of such a big house.
Jim was delighted to see him, and Patsy let them do all the talking. She listened only with the shallow part of her mind—the deeper part was arguing fiercely with Lee Duffin. It was almost midnight—and Jim had gone to take Peewee home—before her mind began to leave the afternoon. She sat at her dressing table combing her hair for a long time. While she was combing it she remembered Hank, and the moment on the corner when she had thought he was going to kiss her. It was a better thing to think about than the argument with Lee. Lee was a sad, disappointed woman. The things she said had not really been important. The moment on the corner was a little frightening, but it had been important.
When Jim came back she was in bed reading Frazer, and instead of looking restless and irritable, as she had all evening, she looked subdued and glowing. Jim sat down and kissed her, and she allowed him a light kiss before she moved her head. “Stop, please,” she said. “I’m reading. I can’t be interrupted until the end of the chapter.
“Fourteen pages,” she added, checking.
“You ought to see the dump Peewee lives in,” Jim said. “He’ll be lucky if he stays alive in that neighborhood.”
“I wish I had been nicer. I wasn’t myself this evening.”
Jim went to the closet and dragged out the box his rodeo pictures were in. He sat down and went through it, pulling out a file here and a file there. Patsy let Frazer fall onto her bosom. “I doubt he’s ever known a nice girl,” she said, thinking of Peewee and the life of squalor he must lead. She could not imagine Peewee having any girl, and it made her sad. Her nice bed, nice apartment, nice husband made her feel cozy suddenly. She felt she had been wrong to be contemptuous of Lee Duffin for being afraid to leave a nice house with a beautiful blue rug.
“These are pretty good,” Jim said. “I might have got the book published if I’d kept on with it.”
“You can blame that on me,” Patsy said. “I couldn’t take any more cowboys.”
“Maybe I’ll go take some more next summer and leave you here to bring up Junior.”
“Wait till you see Junior. You might not want to leave us.”
“Bill said I should write my thesis next summer.”
“When did you start calling him Bill?”
“He keeps insisting.”
“I had a chat with her this afternoon,” she said. “You’ll never guess what they have planned for us.”
“Well, we’re supposed to go to dinner with them some night next week.”
“No,” Patsy said. “What they really have in mind is her seducing you and him seducing me, in that order. Not that they have all that much interest in us, of course. It’s just that their sex life withers and they need a gay young couple for fertilizer once in a while.”
“Are you crazy?” he asked, looking around.
“No,” Patsy said. “She told me that in so many words this afternoon.”
“Oh, well, don’t pay much attention to it,” Jim said. “She’s nice but she’s not very stable. Bill told me she’s had two nervous breakdowns. He’s had a lot of trouble with her.”
“That’s lovely,” Patsy said. She sat up, very annoyed. “Now he’s telling you his marital troubles. Next you’ll be telling him yours. His wife tells me hers and probably expects me to tell her mine. Pretty soon we’ll know all about one another, and the cozy little switch can take place. Me-him, you-her, just like she said.”
Jim shut the picture file and yawned. He didn’t take any of it seriously. “Don’t get carried away with your own rhetoric,” he said. “Lee’s obviously a little neurotic, that’s all. We don’t have any marital problems to tell them about, anyway. They’d get bored with us.”
“Like fun they would. Maybe after a few months of swapsy-wapsy they’d get bored with us. It’s very condescending of you to call someone you scarcely know neurotic. I think that’s very sloppy.”
“What would you call her?” He sat down on the bed and kicked off his loafers, a habit he knew annoyed her and yet couldn’t break. He remembered that it annoyed her just as one of his shoes narrowly missed a vase full of ferns.
“There you go again,” she said.
“Sorry.” His good humor was undisturbed.
“Miserable is what I’d call Lee Duffin. Miserable and neglected, just like I’ll probably be at her age.”
Jim chuckled infuriatingly, all masculine poise. He was in no mood to take female irrationality very seriously.
“Don’t chuckle like that,” she said. “I’ll hit you.”
“He says she’s very demanding,” he said. His head disappeared for a moment as he took off his pullover.
“Sure. She probably has to demand like hell to get one drop of affection out of him.”
“You’ve got a block where he’s concerned.”
“I sure have.” She got out of bed and stamped angrily off to the bathroom. Her belly was large enough to eclipse the toilet bowl. When she came back Jim was straining his eyes to read a footnote in the back of Robinson’s Chaucer. The light was completely wrong and he had not bothered to change it.
“For god’s sake,” she said, exasperated. “How did you ever expect to be a photographer if you don’t have any sense of where the light is?”
He looked up, a little abstracted, then put the book down and reached for her. “Don’t grab,” she said, but he did anyway and after a short tussle got her turned on her back. “We don’t have any marital problems, do we?” he asked.
“I don’t like to wrestle when I’m pregnant,” she said, staring up at him. She was friendly but grim in her determination not to yield points unnecessarily.
“We don’t, do we?” he insisted.
“We will if you insist on attaching yourself to that guy’s fetlocks,” she said. “I don’t like him.”
“Okay,” he said. “But do me a favor and go to this one dinner. I promised, and one dinner is no more than your wifely duty.”
He tried to kiss her but she squirmed and looked cheerfully at the ceiling. “Okay, one dinner,” she said. “Never let it be said that I’m slacking my wifely duties.”
“I sort of wish he’d quit pestering me about the massage parlors,” Jim said.
“What?” she asked, relaxing.
“The massage parlors. You know, the ones that are really whorehouses—there was a story about them in the paper. You go in for a massage and get a girl. Bill’s always pestering me to take him to one. He thinks it’s a novel way to work a whorehouse.”
“He’s a monster,” Patsy said. “He’s married, and he goes to whorehouses?”
Jim sighed. “Where have you been?” he asked. “Millions of men who are married go to whorehouses, apparently. It’s not like he was the only roving husband in the world.”
“After twenty-one years, he treats her that way? I never heard of anything so awful.”
“That’s a long time to be married,” he said quietly.
“So what? Momma and Daddy have been married over thirty years and Daddy doesn’t go off to massage parlors.”
“No, he just drinks and wastes money and lets his youngest daughter screw herself up in California.”
“How do you know she’s screwed up? Besides, that’s evading the question. How many years before you become eligible for that kind of relief?”
“Oh, nag, nag, nag,” he said. “If you didn’t talk so much you wouldn’t get ideas like that.”
“Don’t evade the question.” She watched him closely.
“I don’t know,” Jim said. “It seems to me I’ve been eternally faithful to you already and probably I’ll go on through several more eternities. Just don’t yap at me about it. How do I know what we’ll
be doing in twenty years. The one thing I’m sure of is that you’ll still be yapping.”
“If you were a man of principle, you’d know now,” Patsy said. But she lost heart for the argument, light as it was. Lee Duffin came back to mind, crouched on her living-room floor weeping and raising and lowering her torso hopelessly. When she tried to imagine the scenes that lay behind that weeping her mind was blank. The thought of Bill Duffin simply made her feel cold. She drew Jim close to her and held his hand long after he was asleep.
The next day’s mail brought a letter on the stationery of the William Duffins:
Dear Mrs. Carpenter,
I’m very sorry indeed for my performance today. It was entirely my fault. I’m so ashamed of it that it’s all I can do to write you this note. My only excuse is that I’m in trouble. It would be painful for us to meet right now, of course, but I hope you’ll forgive me and not find it necessary to shun me entirely. I shan’t ever be that way again.
Lee Duffin
Patsy wrote, in all, seven replies, some long, some short. One she put in an envelope—she even stamped it. Then she carried it past mailboxes for days and one evening threw it away.
11
THE SPAGHETTI, the mushrooms, the candlelight, Patsy, the nice well-lit apartment hung with strange pictures and posters of movie stars—all of it was a little too much for Peewee. When Jim let him out at his place of residence, a decaying motel on Telephone Road, he was so agitated that he scarcely knew what to do with himself. Walking across the muddy driveway, he stumbled over the tricycle of the cross-eyed tot who lived in the cabin next to his. It was an old tricycle, one wheel tireless, no handleguards, but Donna, the tot, wheeled it across the shaly drive with great expertise. Her mother was a fat slut named Doreen. She worked in a drive-in on Griggs Road, screwed a succession of Cajuns, and sometimes, on bad nights, used Donna for a punching bag.
Peewee’s quarters did not particularly depress him, though there were times when he could have wished for less mud. When he got home he felt restless, too keyed up for sleep. He had nothing to read but a few issues of Rodeo Sports News, and he had those memorized. He did have a couple of cheap dirty books, one called Passion Flayed and the other called Her Talented Tongue, but he was in no mood for dirty books. He got his black cowboy hat out of the closet and set out for his favorite drinking establishment, a place called the Gulf-Air Lounge.
No one could remember whether the Gulf-Air had originally been a cafe and turned into a bar, or had originally been a bar with ambitions to be a cafe, or what. It remained an uneasy mixture, largely bar but with a small grill where hamburgers could be cooked and chili heated. The clientele consisted almost entirely of the wretched of Southeast Houston—a motley collection of aging bar bums of both sexes, with an admixture of young vagrants, day workers, Cajun cowboys, truckers, and Gulf Coast roustabouts, most of whom came in to horse around with the shuffleboard or the miniature pool table.
Peewee took most of his dinners at the Gulf-Air, it being the place closest to his motel. Also, he had just turned twenty-one, and the people at the Gulf-Air knew it and weren’t always making him show his ID. He had got to know most of the people who frequented the bar at night, and he usually spent his evenings there sipping beer and eating Fritos and watching whatever was on the old blurry TV. He didn’t like beer, preferring Coke or Dr. Pepper, but all of his acquaintances regarded beer as the manly beverage and he felt obliged to drink it. He found that if he ate a package of Fritos per bottle it wasn’t so bad, and having to walk to the john to piss every twenty minutes or so was a comfortable, manly thing to do. All the people in the Gulf-Air called him Squirt, whether because he was short or because he pissed so much he didn’t know.
“Hey, Squirt, you’re late tonight,” the barmaid said when he climbed up on the barstool. Peewee began to chew a toothpick. The barmaid was a thin redhead from Lufkin—Nancy by name. Her three kids were growing up in Lufkin with her mother; she didn’t think cities were good for kids. She herself had never quite managed to get divorced from her husband, who worked off shore, and she was well known to a couple of truckers who laid up in the area. She was too faded to be mean, and Peewee sometimes aspired to her in his fantasies. The only encouragement he ever got was that Nancy would sometimes lean across the bar and put her hand on his wrist while she told him her troubles. The owner of the bar was a fat shaky drunkard named Big Woody, who sat at one of the tables with his shirt unbuttoned, drinking malt liquor and playing Moon with two other oldsters, an unemployed liquor-store clerk named Roscoe and a tire salesman from the Lawndale area whose name was Skeets. The bar’s two female habitueés sat in a booth nearby smoking and sipping beer and trying to goad one of the old men into making a pass at them. They were both part-time waitresses who lived off the money they scrounged from their multiple ex-husbands. One was named June, the other Gloria. The only other patron of the bar was a young man named Terrible Tommy. He drove a truck for a sterile-water company and wore a cowboy hat when he was off work. He was playing a solitary game of pool when Peewee walked in.
“Pearl or Bud?” Nancy asked.
“Pearl,” Peewee said touchily. He suddenly felt infinitely superior to the milieu he was in and sipped his beer a little haughtily.
The old man at the Moon game regarded Peewee as canaille and never let him forget it. Roscoe, the ex-clerk, was particularly foulmouthed and loved to tease Peewee about his job at the zoo.
“Well, we was wrong,” he said, turning a domino down. “We figured the lions ate you, sonny. Figured you’d be a nice smelly pile of lion shit by this time tomorrow.”
“Shut your goddamn foul mouth, Roscoe,” June said. “Peewee’s a nice boy. A lot more of a gentleman than some people I know.”
“Horse turds,” Roscoe said. “You wouldn’t know a gentleman if one was to piss in your ear.”
“Where you been all night, sugar?” Nancy asked.
“Having dinner,” Peewee said, using the phrase for the first time in his life. “I was almost over to River Oaks tonight.”
“Doing what?” Roscoe asked, winking at Big Woody. “Stealin’ hubcaps or fucking poodles?”
Peewee remained impassive. “Visiting some friends,” he said proudly. “They go to Rice. One of them’s going to be a Ph.D. That takes a lot of studying.”
“I guess that would leave me out of contention,” Skeets, the tire salesman, said. He had a dry voice and when he held two dominoes up to look at them the dominoes chattered like teeth his hands shook so.
“The only thing I was ever interested in studying was pussies,” he said. “They don’t give no diplomas for that.”
“Naw, you learn about them in the school of hard knocks,” Roscoe said. “I’ve knocked against many a hard one too.”
“You old turds,” Gloria said. “You don’t deserve no women, the way you talk.”
“Oh, goddamn, what am I going to do?” Nancy said, turning white. “Here comes Lee Harvey. That’s his Chevy driving up.”
“What’s the matter with that?” Big Woody asked. “I thought he was your sweet thang these days.”
“We busted up,” Nancy said. “He’s been off in Seattle. Richard’s been staying at my place while he was gone.”
“So what the shit?”
“Lee Harvey never agreed we busted up.”
Everyone looked worried. Everyone was worried. Peewee regretted not staying home. The one thing he didn’t like about life on Telephone Road was that everyone there went armed. He was used to the concept of Fist City, which meant fist fights, but he had not adjusted to the gun crowd.
“Everybody just act natural,” Nancy said. Terrible Tommy was sighting studiously down his cue at the eight ball.
In a moment Lee Harvey slouched in, a stocky middle-sized guy with a greasy forelock dangling over his forehead and his cuffs turned up two rolls on his hairy wrists. He walked around behind the bar and dispensed with preliminaries.
“Where’s that goddamn Richard?” he
asked. “Gonna kill that son of a bitch’s ass.”
“Why, honey?” Nancy whimpered.
“Gonna stomp his guts out,” Lee Harvey went on. “Where is he?”
“I don’t know. What are you picking on me for? I don’t keep up with Richard, if you want to know the truth.”
“Oh?” Lee Harvey affected surprise and glanced around as if to share the joke with everyone. He wasted the glance, for the bar was paralyzed. The Moon players might have been sculpted, and Terrible Tommy, a crick in his back, was still taking aim at the eight ball.
“Then what was them goddamn rubbers doing there by the bed?” Lee Harvey roared suddenly. “Fine thing to find, coming in off the road.”
Nancy had been squeezing out a rag to wipe the bar with. She started to retreat but before she could Lee Harvey slapped her with one meaty hand and knocked her on her behind. She scrambled up, back-pedaling, but he grabbed her by the collar of her cheap uniform. It tore, one of her slip straps broke, and she fell again and sat on the floor behind the bar sobbing and holding her torn dress together pitifully, the strap of her slip still dangling.
At that Lee Harvey seemed to lose interest in her; he walked out from behind the bar and studied the position of the balls on the pool table.
“What’s the matter, your goddamn back broken?” he asked. “Hell, you got a straight in.”
Terrible Tommy flinched and shot so hard that the cue ball hopped off the table, hit the cement floor with a crack, rolled between Roscoe’s legs, and came to rest against the jukebox. Lee Harvey snorted and leaned over the bar to glare at Nancy. “You better get your cheatin’ ass on home when you get off,” he said. “I’m going to look for Richard.”
Without another word he left the bar and roared off. Nancy got to her feet and hurried to the ladies’ room, sniffling and wiping her eyes. The bar relaxed again.
“Well, a two-timing woman don’t deserve no better,” Roscoe said pontifically. June and Gloria glared at him.
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