“Let’s not bite the hand that feeds us,” said Gordon.
“For Gordie to remain where he is, what a terrible waste, when he has the stuff to amount to something.”
“What about happiness?” said Gordon.
“But as long as he keeps working hard and exercises patience, he’ll make the grade.”
Beef wondered why she kept talking about him rather than to him.
“In about ten years,” said Gordon. “That’s how long I figure it will take me, if I’m lucky.”
“He’ll be an old man of thirty-four,” said Ginny. “Most men thirty-four have kids in school.”
“Most men thirty-four should never have got married in the first place. They threw away all their options, all their hopes, all their real chances, and for what?”’
“For what every man wants, I think.”
“What?” asked Ginny.
“You know.”
“I’d love to know. I’ve been used, abused, and confused by a variety of men without ever learning what they want. I don’t think they know themselves.”
“They want to be the heads of their own families.”
“I can understand that,” said Beef.
“You’re the head of this family,” said Ginny, at last speaking directly to her son. “Who pays the bills, who makes all the important decisions?”
“Yes, yes,” said Gordon. “Look, I really have to finish this.”
“God, what he makes me sound like,” said Ginny, perhaps to Mrs. Lister.
Beef had inconspicuously moved behind Gordon, who now caught him looking over his shoulder. “Get away from me!” he snapped.
“Hey, Ginny,” said Beef, “I think I’d better shove off.”
“Stick around for coffee and dessert,” she said.
“Well, sounds good, but to tell you the truth I get the feeling Gordie don’t like me.”
“Nonsense. Gordie, you like Bomba the Jungle Boy, don’t you?”
“No.”
“See,” said Beef, “that was the feeling I got. I’d better shove off.”
“It’s me he doesn’t like,” said Ginny. “A recent development.”
“Go, if you want to,” said Gordon to Beef. “If you stay, just stop snooping.”
“It’s not like I was copying or anything, I was only curious.”
Beef sat on the other side of the room, opposite to Gordon, watching him write. Whenever Gordon looked up at him, Beef averted his eyes and pretended to be deep in the examination of some other detail of the apartment or his own fingers or knees.
After the ladies had cleaned up the kitchen and dining table, Ginny called out, “Front and center, front and center!”
The Scrabble board was set up on the table. Mrs. Lister sat and fingered the tiles with shaking hands, turning them around and around, seemingly unable to find the business side of them.
“I’ll just sort of sit and watch, if you don’t mind,” said Beef. “Wouldn’t mind nibblin’ on another Hostess Twinkie.”
He loved the game but was a notoriously absurd speller.
“Nonsense,” said Ginny. “Of course you’ll play.”
Reluctantly, Beef took a place at the table, knowing that soon someone would imply or state outright that he was of inferior intelligence, a judgment he always thought was based on faulty criteria.
“Gordie?”
Beef knew immediately that Gordon actually wanted to join them. Given the least chance to do something more social, even if it’s Scrabble, a certain type of student will ditch his studies for the time being, after the usual perfunctory protestations.
“I don’t know how you expect me to ‘amount to something’ if you never give me the chance to get my work done.”
“All work and no play, et cetera, et cetera...”
Unlike most Scrabble players, they had agreed to accept foreign words, archaic words, proper nouns, slang abbreviations, any word that was in the dictionary.
“We used to have an egg timer,” said Mrs. Lister, “to tell us how long we could take at our turns, but Ginny threw it up against the wall and smashed it.”
“Now you can have as much time as you need, within reason,” said Ginny Wynn.
“Who says what’s within reason?” asked Beef Buddusky.
“I do,” said Ginny. No one questioned her right to do so.
Gordon won the first match by arranging the word chigoe, which Mrs. Wynn challenged. Gordon took the battered Webster’s New Collegiate Dictionary that was at his elbow and looked up the word.
“Just as I thought, the deadly tropical chigoe, a hell of a flea.”
“I don’t mind losing if someone happens to be better than me,” said Ginny, “but when someone uses chigoe and through dumb blind luck it happens to be a word, why, then I become a sore loser.”
“Good winner, though, aren’t you?” said Gordon as they overturned the tiles, mixed them up, and drew seven each for the next game. He seemed to take a great deal of pleasure in the victory over his mother.
“Most people are good losers because they’re used to it,” said Ginny. “I’m not that way.”
“It’s only a game,” said Beef. “All that counts is you have fun playin’ it.”
“That shows how much you have to learn, Bomba,” she said.
“And I’m sure you mean to teach him,” said Gordon.
“You haven’t done so badly by my advice.”
“Just once, though, I’d like to do something, to have something all my own.”
“I would never object to anything you did to better yourself.”
“Some things are not meant to advance you. Some things are just natural.”
“In the toilet are things natural.”
“Crissake, Mother, crissake.”
During this exchange, Beef laid alot on the board, a mistake he had made all through grammar school, high school, college, and forever. Gordon noticed it and said, “I don’t believe it.” He gave the tiles back to Beef and informed him he had just lost his turn.
“We’re absolutely broke,” Ginny said to Beef and Mrs. Lister. “I don’t think we have five dollars in the bank. And he wants a girlfriend.”
Gordon shifted uncomfortably. “I get paid Friday. We’ve always spent every cent we made. If I made ten thousand a month I’m sure we’d spend it to the last penny.”
“Lots of folks are like that,” offered Beef.
“Is that right?” said Gordon sarcastically.
“I just wish we had a good buffer instead of always being down to the lousy dime,” said Ginny. “Wait till my ship comes in from Reader’s Digest. What bothers me is they give you three choices and I can’t make up my mind. At first I thought the hundred a month for life was just the ticket. Every month of your life, there it would be, above and beyond your other income, to do with as you please. But then I found out you can take two thousand a month for a year. What a year that would be, Gordie! Mexico City, Hawaii, Europe, can’t you see it! But then the year would be over and we’d be back where we started. There’s another choice, though. A twenty-four thousand lump sum. I’m not so sure that if we took the twenty-four grand we couldn’t put a good down payment on a cattle ranch and finesse it to a heck of a lot more than a paltry hundred a month.”
“Well, let’s go out and buy the ranch now,” said Gordon. “Why wait?”
“Gordon,” she said plaintively.
“I insist on thrift this time. I don’t want to go a penny higher than two hundred thousand dollars.”
“You won’t ever let me forget it, will you?”
Gordon said nothing for a moment. “I’m sorry, Mom. We’ve both said enough.”
She reached across the table and touched his hand.
They concentrated on the game, Beef usually gnawing at his cuticles and missing his turn for taking too long or trying to do impossible things like coff. Mrs. Lister hobbled along and kept alive with rat and the and plurals.
Gordon played knee. Ginny laug
hed.
“That’s really the way they spell it, Ginny,” said Beef.
“I know it is, silly. I was laughing at something I remembered. When Gordie was just a baby, about three years old, he scraped his knee...”
“Oh, Mother!” pleaded Gordon.
She waved away his objection and continued telling her story. “He came crying to me and I put some Mercurochrome on it. What I did was draw a funny face on his knee with the Mercurochrome so that when he bent his knee the face would move.”
“Mother, I’m sure they don’t need to hear baby stories.”
“That’s real cute,” said Beef.
“So then he wanted me to do the other knee, but I told him that I wouldn’t do it because he hadn’t scraped that knee. Well, the little bugger went right out and deliberately fell on his good knee so I would have to draw a funny face on that one too.”
“The little devil,” said Beef, and he and Ginny laughed together.
“Fine,” said Gordon, “now can we get on with the game?”
“Should I tell them what happened when I painted the second funny face?” said Ginny coyly to Gordon.
“Oh, Mother, please...”
“His little peanut stood straight up!” she cried.
“Crissake, I was three years old,” said Gordon.
“It starts early,” said Beef. “Ends too early too, is my guess.”
Ginny roared and slapped his shoulder. Beef felt so satisfied to be as entertaining as he obviously was, he tried for a topper. “Guess it’s fair to say you made his peanut brittle.”
Ginny laughed until she coughed. Mrs. Lister, oblivious, pleaded with her seven tiles to reveal their secret. Gordon was not amused.
“Honey,” he said at last to Ginny, “I’d like to know, if you can tell me truthfully, the answer to a question.”
“Shoot.”
“Why do you enjoy embarrassing me?”
“Am I embarrassing you?” she asked, injured.
“You know damned well.”
“Because I happen to have wonderful memories of your early years?”
“Instead of picking away at each other like this, why don’t we face the real problem head on and come to a workable compromise?”
The suggestion was innovative. Ginny preferred her own methods.
“I haven’t a notion what you’re talking about.”
“You’ve been harassing Maria on the telephone, in the middle of the night.”
“Well, I may have called her once or twice. It’s a free country.”
“Why don’t you leave her alone, Ginny Mom, she hasn’t done anything to you.”
“It’s what she’s doing to you I can’t stand.”
“I hear she’s a beautiful girl,” said Beef.
“In a cheap kind of way,” said Ginny.
“You can’t deny she’s pretty,” said Mrs. Lister, out of her reverie.
“I’d like to see her sometime,” said Beef. “She’s all I heard about since I come to town here.”
“She wears falsies,” said Ginny.
“No, she doesn’t,” said Gordon with some authority.
“She runs around with niggers and smokes marijuana with them.”
“Now, Ginny Mom, that’s a lie and you know it.”
“What if I prove it to you?”
“Can you?” asked Mrs. Lister.
“You could prove conclusively that...that Eisenhower was a cook in the Japanese Navy. I know you could, but that doesn’t make it true. You’re always proving things that aren’t true. You’re a genius at it, and if it makes you happy, why, then go right ahead, just don’t expect me to believe you.”
“Why would I expect you to believe anything I say? You never have.”
“I have, that’s been my problem.”
“Like all men you prefer to believe what comes out of the mouth on a pretty face. It was a trait of your father’s I prayed would pass you by. I was in labor pains and he had his middle finger up some...”
“Honey, let’s can all that. Not with...” Gordon gestured to Beef and Mrs. Lister.
“I didn’t hear a thing,” said Beef.
“I was enjoying a game of Scrabble. If you didn’t want to discuss it, you shouldn’t have brought it up.”
“I want to discuss it. I want to discuss it in a reasonable way.”
“Okay, here I go,” said Ginny. “I will be reasonable. You want to fool around with this beaner? Go ahead, that’s what she’s there for, but I will fight to the final bell your marrying her.”
“You do expect me to get married someday, don’t you, Mom?”
“Not as a cop, I don’t. Policemen should never get married, don’t you ever watch TV?”
“Practically every guy on the force is married.”
“If every guy on the force cut his throat tomorrow, would you have to cut yours too?”
“You don’t even give yourself a chance to let it work out. You won’t meet her. You don’t even know the girl, and you carry on like this.”
“I know more than you think. What about her parents?”
“They’re dead.”
“Oh, an orphan,” said Beef.
“I happen to know that,” said Ginny.
“How?”
“Never mind how, I do. What I would like to know is how they died.”
“I can enlighten you. They got old, they got sick, they died.”
“It all sounds very mysterious to me. A woman comes into town. She has no people here, no one knows her, and she starts asking a lot of questions, prying into people’s personal affairs...”
“That’s her job, Mom.”
“Did you know she was married once before, to one of her own kind?”
That was known to him. What amazed him was that his mother knew it too.
“Mother, how in the world did you find that out?”
“I have my ways. You can do so much better than used goods.”
“Who’d she marry?” asked Beef.
“She was married when she was eighteen,” said Gordon. “It didn’t work out. They were both too young.”
“Well, why did she marry so young?” asked Ginny.
“You can ask that?”
“Things were different then. I bet she had to get married.”
“No, she didn’t but what if she did? Those things happen, don’t they? Can you hold something like that against anyone, in this day and age?”
“I most certainly can, when such a woman means to ensnare my son. “Where’s her child?”
“She has no child.”
“I’ll tell you where it is. With her mother, who never died, but was deported to Mexico, where she deals in dope.”
“I can see as usual I’m getting nowhere,” said Gordon sadly. He rearranged his tiles.
“I can be as reasonable as anyone else,” Ginny declared to no one in particular.
“Is that true, about her mother?” asked Beef.
Gordon put his elbow on the table and pointed his finger into Beef’s face. “You are not to talk about her, you understand?”
“Take it easy, I don’t even know her.”
“And you never will.”
“Okay, okay. But is it?”
“No, you big dummy! Now, play, dammit.”
The conversation then centered around the game in progress. By the time they were down to their last set of tiles, Ginny had an edge of three points over Gordon and was well ahead of the others. The board seemed to have no possibilities for a play, with the one strong exception of the lower left corner, where a triple word score was possible if Gordon could come up with a four-letter word that had n as its second letter. He pondered it as long as she would allow him and when she insisted he play or pass he discovered snot and triumphantly played the word.
“There it is,” he said. “Double letter, two, three, four, five. Triple word makes it fifteen. Tough luck, gal.”
“Not so fast,” said Ginny.
“snot: mucous
membrane.”
“It’s pretty slangy.”
“Woi Yesus,” said Beef, “I’ll buy snot any day of the week. No arg’in’ there.”
“I bet it’s not in the dictionary,” said Ginny.
“Every six-year-old knows snot,” said Gordon.
“It’s got to be in the dictionary.”
“Well, are you challenging or not?”
“I challenge,” she said, and looked for the word in the dictionary, the others leaning toward her to see for themselves, watching her forefinger glide below the space where the word should have been. “Sorry, lover, you lose,” she said.
“I be damned,” said Beef, amazed that he knew something the dictionary did not.
“Let me look again,” said Gordon.
“Read it and weep,” she said, handing him the dictionary.
He searched for the word, but could not find it. He calmly put down the dictionary and said, “Maria was not pregnant.”
“Well, maybe she was and maybe she wasn’t.”
“But she is now.”
The coffee cup she was extending to Mrs. Lister fell out of her hand.
“Why did you call the ambulance!” she screamed at her son. “You want me dead, why didn’t you let me die in peace?”
“I resent that, Ginny Mom,” said Gordon.
“Ginny Mom, it ain’t the end of the world,” said Beef. “It happened to me, so I know.”
“It’s just the thing she feared most,” Mrs. Lister whispered to Beef.
Like a member of the family, Beef said, “Well, if you want my advice...” and like a member of the family he was cut off by Ginny Wynn.
“You’ll never marry that scheming little bitch!”
“Mother, I am above the age of consent.”
“Oh, stick that shit up your nose!” She picked up the board covered with tiles and carried it to the kitchen sink, where she slid the tiles into the garbage disposal and flipped the switch. Tiles burst upward like so many bubbles in a glass of champagne. Beef could not keep from laughing.
Gordon rushed to the sink and turned off the disposal. “I just hope you didn’t break it,” he said, rolling up his sleeve. He dug into the disposal and began removing handfuls of broken tiles. “You know the landlord will make us pay for it.”
The Accomplice: The Stairway Press Edition Page 5
