by Harvey Click
Hempy gave his thick brown beard a fierce tug and said, “All people talk, but very few say anything worth hearing. That’s her room there. Go on in, and I’ll give you two lovebirds some privacy. Since you’ve already knocked her up you can’t do much more damage now.”
Jason tapped on the door and opened it. Holly sat on her unmade bed in the tiny room.
“My God, you look awful,” she said. “Where’d you get those silly clothes?”
“They’re for work. I got me a job.”
Holly smirked and said, “Where? In a circus?”
“I’m a doorman at a very ritzy nightclub,” he said. “Probably gonna be a waiter pretty soon, and the tips are damn good there.”
“So don’t you have to be twenty-one to work someplace like that?”
“Your dad made me a fake ID a while back so I could buy whiskey for my pa when he come down sick.”
Holly sighed. “I should have guessed. Unfortunately fake IDs aren’t the only illegal things daddy makes.”
“So how you been?” he asked.
“Pregnant and miserable. I’ve got to get out of here, Jason. Daddy is driving me insane.”
“So I guess Cosmo musta dumped you, huh?”
Holly sighed. “Jason, why do you have to be so difficult? Can’t you see I’ve been crying? I’ve been crying all day long. And for your information, Cosmo didn’t dump me. We mutually agreed to go our separate ways for the good of my baby. After much thought and discussion we decided you should help me raise our child because you’re the natural father.”
“But you said I’m too damn dumb to be a good father.”
She sighed again. “Jason, I said nothing of the sort. I was trying to explain the issue of nature versus nurture to you. It’s a very complicated subject, and after I studied it more deeply I realized I was wrong in some details. In fact you’ll be a very good father. And besides that, I love you.”
“You sure ‘bout that? You useta say you loved me, but yesterday you didn’t give two hoots if I lived or died.”
“Yes, I’m sure.” She smiled and patted the mattress beside her. “I never stopped loving you, Jason, I was only trying to think scientifically about the good of our child. As I just told you, I was wrong in my thinking—sociology is a very complex subject, you know. Don’t you want to sit down?”
Jason sat down two feet away from her and clasped his hands in his lap. Suddenly there was cursing in the next room. “Tax and spend and tax and spend and tax and spend!” Hempy yelled. “Goddamn that peanut farmer and the jackasses who voted for him!”
“Nice little place you got here,” Jason said, staring at a “Save the Whales” poster tacked to her wall so he wouldn’t have to look at her.
“It’s horrible here,” she said. “I have to get out. Do you have a place where I can stay?”
“Uh, well, I just have me a little tiny room, more like a flophouse really. I’ll have to find us a better place.”
“Can you do it today? I can give you a little money for rent.”
“Uh, well, I gotta go get this suit cleaned and get into work by 6:00.”
“Then come and get me first thing tomorrow morning, and we’ll look for a place together. It’s urgent, Jason. It’s not safe for me to be here. Daddy is making LSD and selling it to anyone who looks halfway interested, and the police could come through that door any minute.”
“Well, okay, sure. Tomorrow we can go have a look ‘round I guess.”
Holly lifted her loose white blouse and said, “Do you want to see what your baby feels like?”
He laid his hand on her swollen belly and said, “Gee.” He gently felt around to see if he could feel a baby in there, but there seemed to be nothing but the same sort of fat that stretched the denim of her jeans at the hips and thighs.
“My breasts are starting to swell too,” she said.
She unbuttoned her blouse and unhooked her bra, and her breasts fell out. They were plumper and saggier than Jason remembered, and her flat brown nipples looked as big as jar lids.
“Gee,” he said.
She took his hand and placed it on her left breast. It felt fat and heavy, nothing like Rue’s small, uplifted breasts with those hard pink nipples.
Suddenly Holly was crying and kissing him and pulling him down on top of her.
“Oh, Jason, I’m so sorry I ran away from you,” she said. “It was terrible being without you. I was so confused, I did it all for your sake, I was afraid I’d ruin your life with the baby, I was afraid you didn’t really love me but would feel obligated to marry me, and I couldn’t bear to think of doing that to you. And then you came all this way just to find me, and so now I know how much you love me, and I know how much I want to be with you and how much I want to raise our beautiful child with you.”
Suddenly the bedroom door burst open and Hempy came charging in, waving a newspaper like a flag. “I knew it all along,” he roared. “They’re going to stick their jackboots right down the throats of the independents and give it all to the Seven Sisters! Throttle the producers and steal what you want, that’s their motto!”
Then he noticed his daughter half naked on the bed and said, “Excuse me, I didn’t know you were occupied.” He left and slammed the door behind him.
Holly continued as if nothing had happened. “I should never have doubted you, Jason. The way you came looking for me, just like some prince in a storybook, tells me everything I need to know about you. I know you’ll be a wonderful father and a wonderful husband.”
She had already unbuttoned his shirt and now she unzipped his trousers.
“I don’t think we better do nothing with your pa out there,” he said.
“Don’t worry about Daddy.”
“Well, I dunno ‘bout this,” he said as she eased his trousers off.
“Do you remember the time we did it in that tree house?” she said. “I think that was the night of conception.”
“I dunno ‘bout that, I’m pretty sure I was wearing a rubber that time.”
“Daddy was in the house drunk and carrying on,” she said. “We could see him through the window. I remember it was a clear night, because I could see stars through the branches. There were dogs howling down the road, do you remember? They sounded like wolves, and I imagined we were in a huge forest all alone, and you were a knight who had rescued me from some horrible ogre. You were such a great lover that night, it’s no wonder you gave me a baby.”
She had taken off her jeans and blouse and underwear while she spoke, and now she took off the rest of his clothes and pulled him down on top of her.
“Maybe we’ll hurt the baby doing this,” he said.
“No we won’t. I can see there’s a lot I need to teach you about babies.”
The moment he entered her, she shut her eyes and lay there with a tolerant expression frozen on her face as if she were bravely putting up with the unpleasant probing of a doctor. Her body felt so big—soft and womanly but too damn big. In the other room, Hempy began to rave about that damn fool Jimmy Carter and his gang of socialist comrades in Congress.
As soon as they were finished, Jason got up and began pulling on his suit. “Sorry but I gotta be going,” he said. “I got responsibilities, I gotta get this suit cleaned and get to my job. You know where they’s any second-hand clothes stores ‘round here?”
“There’s one but it’s not very close. Go east to Indianola and then go north.”
Hempy tapped on the bedroom door and said, “What’s there to eat around here, Holly?”
“What’s there always to eat?” she answered.
Jason noticed she was crying again and he said, “What’s wrong?”
“You’re in such a big hurry to get out of here. You came here looking for me, but I think now it’s all hit you and you’re not so sure.”
“It ain’t nothing like that, Holly. I got me some responsibilities, but I’ll be back here tomorrow morning. We’ll find us a real nice place, you’ll see.”
He heard
Hempy slamming cupboard doors in the kitchen, and he desperately wanted to be gone, but Holly kept crying, her big bare breasts heaving with grief or a pretty good imitation of it. He knew he didn’t dare leave her like that, so he reached in his hip pocket and handed her his bandana.
But as she took it and began to wipe her face he realized with horror it wasn’t a bandana after all. In fact he had handed her Rue’s green panties.
“What the hell is this!” she shouted.
He snatched the panties away from her and stuffed them back in his pocket. “I don’t know,” he said. “It’s nothing, nothing at all. Some damn joker must a slipped ‘em in my pocket I guess.”
She’d stopped crying, and now she glared at him like an irate schoolteacher.
“You’d better think about some things, Jason, and you’d better think about them fast,” she said. “You damn well better not be whoring around now that you got me pregnant. This is your baby too, and it’s your responsibility as much as mine. I expect to see you here tomorrow morning bright and early, and if you’re not here I promise you’ll regret it for the rest of your life. I’ll find someone who will love me and raise your baby, and you’ll never see me again or your baby either, but I’ll make sure you send me money for the next eighteen years, and lots of it too, so think about that the next time you’re playing with some other woman’s underwear.”
“I’ll be here,” he said.
As Jason was leaving, Hempy came storming out of the kitchen. “There’s nothing in there but macaroni and cheese,” he yelled. “How the hell can anybody afford decent food with this fucking inflation?”
***
At the second-hand store Jason found a pair of dressy black shoes for three dollars. They were a tad tight, but they’d have to do. He found a pair of faded jeans with not much wear left in the knees and a blue flannel shirt missing one button and then looked longingly at a red plaid wool jacket. It was chilly today and the jacket looked warm and snazzy, but the tag said five dollars and he decided he couldn’t spare that much.
After paying for the clothes he changed in the dressing room, transferring the little vial of love potion to his jeans pocket, and then asked the old lady at the counter where he could find a dry cleaner. The nearest one was quite a few blocks farther north, and his legs felt as hungover as his head while he trudged in that direction.
He tried to imagine himself married to Holly, but his brain refused to cooperate. He kept thinking instead of Kyra, that sweet smile, that smooth buckwheat-honey skin, those mysterious eyes, but every once in a while an image of Rue’s breasts interrupted his thoughts.
“Can I get this stuff in an hour?” he asked the lady at the dry cleaning counter.
“You can have it in two hours, but that will cost you extra,” she said.
“Your sign says one-hour cleaners.”
“You can have it in two hours, but that will cost you extra,” she said.
At the last moment he realized Rue’s panties were still in the pocket of his raspberry trousers, and the dry cleaning lady clucked her tongue as he transferred them to his jeans pocket.
He trudged down a little side street in the direction of High Street with no idea what to do next. He was hungry, so probably McDonalds should be his destination, unless maybe he could find a Burger King.
Up ahead he saw an old lady with a shopping cart full of junk. She was wearing a man’s long gray overcoat over a tattered brown dress and beneath its hem were thick brown stockings rolled halfway down her skinny calves. She was searching through a garbage can, and as he drew closer she found a pair of tennis shoes, examined them carefully, and threw them into her shopping cart.
Then she began to sing. Her voice was crackly and decrepit but beautiful in a strange way, and Jason stopped to listen.
A tisk a task a basketful
of purty colored ghosts.
I’ll take them to the marketplace
where little Emmy goes.
The men will ask how much fer that,
but it’s more than they can pay.
I’ll prance right past them to the place
where my sweet Emmy plays.
Her laugh is all the price I want,
but little Emmy’s gone.
I’ll take my secrets home with me
and burn them in the lawn.
Just look at how this busyness
has brittled up my skin!
My hands is cold and tremble like
these leaves do in the wind.
Oh damn and hell, these smoky smells,
they bring such memories.
Alas, alas, poor Emmy’s gone,
and no one’s left but me!
Jason was transfixed. He forgot about Holly, Kyra, Rue, and even his hangover. He was remembering how his old Aunt Ida used to sing at family reunions when he was a child, the way her ancient voice had sounded like hilly streams and mysterious woods and whispering leaves. He was thinking if he had his old acoustic guitar right now he could play it better than he had ever played it before.
The old woman noticed him staring at her and pulled a frayed wool blanket out of her cart. “Gone to be cold tonight, maybe yeh’ll need this,” she said.
“No thanks.”
“It only cost a quarter,” she said. “Anybody can afford twenty-five cents.”
“I don’t need no blanket. I got me a warm place to sleep.”
“Yeh never know fer sure,” she said.
In the yard beside them a little boy playing with a stuffed toy fell down and started crying. He kept trying to get up but was having trouble because his arms were too short and had no hands. The old woman helped him up and handed him his toy, which he clutched tightly in his short arms.
She found an old baseball cap in her cart and placed it on his head. He chuckled with glee and she chuckled back, the ancient and the young having a good laugh together while Jason watched miserably on.
She pushed her cart quickly down the sidewalk, and Jason followed her.
“I see poor li’l tykes like that ever where I go,” she said. “It’s somethin’ they puts in the water nowadays, makes the young’uns all queer and sickly. This world’s an evil hole gone so far from God he can’t hardly even see it no more, and it’s the li’l tykes that suffer. Yeh got any chillen, boy?”
“Not yet.”
“Yeh shoulda seen my sweet li’l Emmy, purty as a button she was back in them days long gone. The sky was nicer in them days, all blue and fresh with bright yeller birds singin’ that you don’t see no more. Them yeller birds is all gone now and the world’s gone straight to hell.”
She shoved her cart into an alley, and before she was out or earshot Jason heard her say, “I wouldn’t give yeh twenty-five cents fer this whole damn world.”
He reached High Street and headed south toward campus, but before he got very far he heard a car honking and turned to look. It was Madison Hatter’s old blue Hudson idling noisily at the curb.
Chapter Twelve
The passenger window rolled down and Hatter said, “Need a lift, kid?”
Jason stepped over to the window and said, “You been following me I reckon.”
“Of course not. Why would you say such a thing?”
“I seen you staring at me on the Oval yesterday, and then I seen your car parked over by Rue’s house.”
“Who’s Rue?”
“So what are you, some kinda cop or something?”
Hatter chuckled and coughed. “Hell’s bells, kid, do I look like a cop? It’s kismet, that’s all.”
“What’s that?”
“Fate. Look at it this way. I’m staying at a hotel right across the street from campus, and I suspect you’re staying somewhere thereabouts yourself. So consider the odds—it’s highly probable we’d bump into each other once in a while, since we’re staying right here in the same area, while it’s highly improbable that we’d bump into each other on a highway in the middle of nowhere. So you see, the only improbable meetin
g was when I picked you up hitchhiking.”
“Maybe so, but I still think you been following me.”
“You’ve got a hungry look about you, kid. You looking for a free lunch?”
“I could do with some grub.”
“Get in and I’ll buy you some.”
Jason got in, and the car lurched onto the street with a sick whine. Hatter parked a few blocks later, and they stepped into a corner restaurant called the Blue Danube. The large room was crammed with tables, booths, diners, and drunks. A bar stretched almost the length of one wall with a long mirror behind it.
Hatter hung his overcoat on a hook outside a booth, hung his fedora above it, and sat down. He was wearing what looked like the same brown suit, but today he had on a black string tie with a turquoise clasp. He knocked a Chesterfield halfway from its pack and offered it to Jason.
“Nope, I give up smoking,” Jason said.
Hatter lit one and said, “Where the hell’s the damn waitress? Doesn’t she want a tip?”
In fact she was standing right beside him. She handed them menus, and Hatter said, “Bring me an Augustiner.”
“They don’t make it no more,” the waitress said. “They shut down the brewery maybe four, five years ago.”
“I’ll be damned. This town’s going straight to hell. Well then, bring me a Hudepohl. You want something to drink, kid?”
“Just some coffee.”
The waitress scratched in her pad and left.
“Well, Jason, what about this girl who’s plump but not too? You find her yet?”
“Yep.”
“You don’t sound especially happy about it.”
“She’s knocked up.”
Hatter chuckled and coughed. “Tell me about it, kid,” he said. “Get it off your chest.”
“It’s sorta private stuff.”
“Look, kid, you can see for yourself there’s some kind of kismet going on here. Fate keeps throwing us together, so we may as well carry on a bit of friendly conversation, don’t you think? You look like you want somebody to talk to, and I don’t have any pressing engagements at the moment. Besides, I’m buying you a free lunch, so the least you can do is tell me your story.”
