“Hi,” he said. “Who’s you?”
“Tina Howard, Bart. Don’t you remember the class trip?” She waggled a long, spade-shaped fingernail under his nose. “
“
“Except I’m Tina Howard Wallace now,” the woman in the black dress said. “My husband’s around here… somewhere…” She looked around vaguely, spilled some more of her drink, and swallowed the rest before it could get away from her. “Isn’t it AWFUL, I seem to have lost him.”
She looked at him warmly, speculatively, and Bart could barely believe that this woman had given him his first touch of female flesh-the sophomore class trip at Grover Cleveland High School, a hundred and nine years ago. Rubbing her breast through her white cotton sailor blouse beside…
“Cotter’s Stream,” he said aloud.
She blushed and giggled. “You remember, all right.”
His eyes dropped in a perfect, involuntary reflex to the front of her dress and she shrieked with laughter. He grinned that helpless grin again. “I guess time goes by faster than we-”
“Bart!” Wally Hamner yelled over the general patty babble. “Hey buddy, really glad you could make it!”
He cut across the room to them with the also-to-be-patented Walter Hamner Party Zigzag, a thin man, now mostly bald, wearing an impeccable 1962- vintage pinstriped shirt and horn-rimmed glasses. He shook Walter’s outstretched hand, and Walter’s grip was as hard as he remembered.
“I see you met Tina Wallace,” Walter said.
“Hell, we go way back when,” he said, and smiled uncomfortably at Tina.
“Don’t you tell my husband that, you naughty boy,” Tina giggled.” ’scuse, please. I’ll see you later, Bart?”
“Sure,” he said.
She disappeared around a clump of people gathered by a table loaded with chips and dips and went on into the living room. He nodded after her and said, “How do you pick them, Walter? That girl was my first feel. It’s like 'This Is Your Life.'”
Walter shrugged modestly. “All a part of the Pleasure Push, Barton my boy.” He nodded at the paper bag tucked under his arm. “What’s in that plain brown wrapper?”
“Southern Comfort. You’ve got ginger ale, don’t you?”
“Sure,” Walter said, but grimaced. “Are you really going to drink that down-by-de-Swanee-Ribber stuff? I always thought you were a scotch man.”
“I was always a private Comfort-and-ginger-ale man. I’ve come out of the closet.”
Walter grinned. “Mary’s around here someplace. She’s kinda been keeping an eye out for you. Get yourself a drink and we’ll go find her.”
“Good enough.”
He made his way across the kitchen, saying hi to people he knew vaguely and who looked as if they didn’t know him at all, and replying hi, how are you to people he didn’t remember who hailed him first. Cigarette smoke rolled majestically through the kitchen. Conversation faded quickly in and out, like stations on latenight AM radio, all of it bright and meaningless.
A long Formica-topped table had been set up in front of the stove and the sink, and it was already crowded with opened liquor bottles and glasses in varying sizes and degrees of fullness. Ashtrays already overflowed with filtertips. Three ice buckets filled with cubes had been crowded into the sink. Over the stove was a large poster which showed Richard Nixon wearing a pair of earphones. The earphone cord disappeared up into the rectum of a donkey standing on the edge of the picture. The caption said:
To the left, a man in bell-bottomed baggies and a drink in each hand (a water glass filled with what looked to be whiskey and a large stein filled with beer) was entertaining a mixed group with a joke. “This guy comes into this bar, and here’s this monkey sitting on the stool next to him. So the guy orders a beer and when the bartender brings it, the guy says, ‘Who owns this monkey? Cute little bugger.’ And the bartender says, ‘Oh, that’s the piano player’s monkey.’ So the guy swings around…”
He made himself a drink and looked around for Walt, but he had gone to the door to greet some more guests-a young couple. The man was wearing a huge driving cap, goggles, and an old-time automobile duster. Written on the front of the duster were the words
KEEP ON TRUCKIN”
Several people were laughing uproariously, and Walter was howling. Whatever the joke was, it seemed to go back a long time.
“… and the guy walks over to the piano player and says, ‘Do you know your monkey just pissed in my beer?’ And the piano player says, ‘No, but hum a few bars and I’ll fake it.’” Calculated burst of laughter. The man in the bell-bottomed baggies sipped his whiskey and then cooled it with a gulp of beer.
He took his drink and strolled into the darkened living room, slipping behind the turned back of Tina Howard Wallace before she could see him and snag him into a long game of Where Are They Now. She looked, he thought, like the kind of person who could cite you chapter and verse from the lives of classmates who had turners out badly-divorce, nervous disorders, and criminal violations would be her stock in trade-and would have made unpersons out of those who had had success.
Someone had put on the inevitable album of 50’s rock and roll, and maybe fifteen couples were jitterbugging hilariously and badly. He saw Mary dancing with a tall, slim man that he knew but could not place. Jack? John? Jason? He shook his head. It wouldn’t come. Mary was wearing a party dress he had never seen before. It buttoned up one side, and she had left enough buttons undone to provide a sexy slit to a little above one nyloned knee. He waited for some strong feeling-jealousy or loss, even habitual craving-but none came. He sipped his drink.
She turned her head and saw him. He raised a noncommittal finger in salute:
“I’m so glad you could come, Bart,” she said, raising her voice to be heard over the laughter and conversation and stereo. “Do you remember Dick Jackson?”
Bart stuck out his hand and the slim man shook it. “You and your wife lived on our street five… no, seven years ago. Is that right?”
Jackson nodded. “We’re out in Willowood now.”
“Good enough. Are you still working for Piels?”
“No, I’ve got my own business now. Two trucks. Tri-State Haulers. Say, if that laundry of yours ever needs day-hauling… chemicals or any of that stuff…”
“I don’t work for the laundry anymore,” he said, and saw Mary wince slightly, as if someone had knuckled an old bruise.
“No? What are you doing now?”
“Self-employed,” he said and grinned. “Were you in on that independent trucker’s strike?”
Jackson’s face, already dark with alcohol, darkened more. “You’re goddam right. And I personally untracked a guy that couldn’t see falling into line. Do you know what those miserable Ohio bastards are charging for diesel? 31.9! That takes my profit margin from twelve percent and cuts it right down to nine. And all my truck maintenance has got to come out of that nine. Not to mention the frigging double-nickle speed-limit-”
As he went on about the perils of independent trucking in a country that had suddenly developed a severe case of the energy bends, Bart listened and nodded in the right places and sipped his drink. Mary excused herself and went into the kitchen to get a glass of punch. The man in the automobile duster was doing an exaggerated Charleston to an old Everly Brothers number, and people were laughing and applauding.
Jackson’s wife, a busty, muscular-looking girl with carroty red hair, came over and was introduced. She was quite near the stagger point. Her eyes looked like the Tilt signs on a pinball machine. She shook hands with him, smiled glassily, and then said to Dick Jackson: “Hon, I think I’m going to whoopsie. Where’s the bathroom?”
Jackson led her away. He skirted the dance floor and sat down in one of the chairs along the side. He finished his drink. Mary was slow coming back. Someone had collared her into a conversation, he supposed.
He reached into an inside pocket and brought out a pack of cigarettes and lit one. He only smoked at parties now. That was quite a victory over a few years ago, when he had been part of the three-packs a-day cancer brigade.
He was halfway through the cigarette and still watching the kitchen door for Mary when he happened to glance down at his fingers and saw how interesting they were. It was interesting how the first and second fingers of his right hand knew just how to hold the cigarette, as if they had been smoking all their lives.
The thought was so funny he had to smile.
It seemed that he had been examining his fingers for quite a while when he noticed his mouth tasted different. Not bad, just different. The spit in it seemed to have thickened. And his legs… his legs felt a little jittery, as if they would like to tap along with the music, as if tapping along with the music would relieve them, make them feel cool and just like legs again-
He felt a little frightened at the way that thought, which had begun so ordinarily, had gone corkscrewing off in a wholly new direction like a man lost in a big house and climbing a tall crrrrystal staircase-
There it was again, and it was probably the pill he had taken, Olivia’s pill, yes. And wasn’t that an interesting way to say crystal? Crrrrrystal, gave it a crusty, bangled sound, like a stripper’s costume.
He smiled craftily and looked at his cigarette, which seemed amazingly white, amazingly round, amazingly symbolic of all America’s padding and wealth. Only in America were cigarettes so good-tasting. He had a puff. Wonderful. He thought of all the cigarettes in America pouring off the production lines in Winston-Salem, a plethora of cigarettes, an
