husband is an honorable gentleman.”
“I’m sorry, Mrs. Saunders.”
Katrina suddenly stood up. “Don’t be sorry. Skip has a scandal coming. That pinhead’s been dipping his wick ever since I married him.”
I glanced over at Gilia. She stood uncommitted as a fence post.
“I don’t see any call for scandal,” I said.
Katrina laughed. “I can’t wait to see how Mr. Wheeler-Dealer handles this. First, he’ll offer you money to change the story.” She grabbed my arm. “Don’t take it.”
“I don’t need money.”
“Then he’ll threaten you with hired violence. Skip’s too wimpy to touch you himself.”
Mimi’s voice was up near hysteria. “Cameron does not dip his wick.”
“Oh, he does too,” Katrina said.
“And Cameron does not deserve scandal. You. Leave my house this instant.”
I stood up from the ottoman, but Katrina didn’t release my arm. “I’m sorry to have upset you,” I said.
Katrina’s fingernails dug into my skin. “Don’t make him go. I want all the sick, ugly details of how your Cameron and my Skippy soiled this poor boy’s mother.”
At the word
“I better go,” I said.
Gilia looked from her mother to me.
I said, “Nice to have met you.”
Her lips parted, but she didn’t speak.
“You ain’t my kid, you’re too scrawny.”
Babe Carnisek was big—big as Billy’s coffin case. Even leaned back in a recliner with his hands curled in his lap he appeared in the upper-six-foot range and near three hundred pounds. He hadn’t gone to fat, either. A well- dinged free-weight set and lift bench filled the gap where the breakfast nook should have been.
“But you did have relations with my mother,” I said.
“I humped her, if that’s what you mean. I was number two behind that bastard Skip, before she got wore out.”
Babe’s wife, Didi, came in from the kitchen, carrying three ice teas on an A&W Root Beer tray. “Who got wore out, honey?”
“His ma. A bunch of us screwed this junior high chick and Pee Wee here says we got her pregnant. Says I might be his dad.” Babe was paying more attention to the Washington-Detroit game on TV than to his wife or me. Washington was up 21-8—not so close a game as should have pulled him away from the possibility of a son.
Didi offered from the tray. “He’s too shrimpy, Babe.” She put a finger on her chin and studied me like a Food Lion steak. “You couldn’t be his father; unless your mama was a midget. Is your mama a midget?”
“No, ma’am. She’s about the same height as you.”
“I wish you was his boy. Babe always wanted a son, but we can’t have any, on account of the steroids.”
“Look at that pussy block,” Babe said. “I can block better’n that, without my knees.”
Didi sat down across from me on the vinyl-covered couch. “Babe had a scholarship to Virginia Tech, until he ruint both knees playing softball.”
The tea had enough sugar to send a horse into diabetic shock. “If you aren’t my father, which one do you think is?”
The Detroit quarterback fumbled the snap. “God almighty,” Babe said, “I hate quarterbacks. Every ratty little one should be horsewhipped.” He looked over at me. “Skip Prescott or the nigger, I imagine. Other than them we’re all linemen.”
“Billy Gaines was an end.”
“Tight end. And high school teams didn’t pass much in the fifties. Guilford County ran a T formation with Billy blocking the left side.”
“Was he any good?”
Babe snorted. “Billy’s blind as a bat. Mostly he stood in people’s way.”
“So you think it’s Skip or Jake.”
“I was you I’d hope for the nigger. I’d rather have a nigger daddy than Skip Prescott any day.”
“You don’t like Mr. Prescott?”
Babe went back to the game, but Didi clucked a couple times and gave the explanation. “Skip hired Babe the first summer out of high school, then said he’d fire him if he didn’t play on the Dixieland Sporting Goods softball team.”
“And Babe blew his knees,” I said.
I looked at Babe, who was pretending to watch the game. But I could tell he was thinking about what might have been.
Didi sipped her tea. She was pretty in a Kmart kind of way. I’ll bet she’d never been gone down on in her life. “Then Skip told Babe if he took these blue pills he’d grow strong and be able to play football again.”
“Steroids,” I said. “I didn’t know steroids existed back then.”
“We didn’t know what they were,” Didi said. She gestured at the game. “Now all those players on TV take steroids and not a one of them will ever have children. Babe says if he sees Skip again, he’ll break his neck.”
“I know where Skip lives.”
I think Babe wanted to change the subject, because when he spoke it was louder than before. “Your mama was a pistol, boy. I have to admit, that girl was a pistol.”
Seemed a weird thing to say about a girl you raped and urinated on. “She runs a feminist press in Wyoming,” I said.
He frowned. “Lesbo?”
“I don’t think so, she has a boyfriend.”
“Lesbos scare me. They was one in Woolworth’s the other day buying shotgun shells. Said she was going to shoot her husband.”
“You didn’t tell me that,” Didi said.
“How did you know she was Lesbian if she had a husband?” I asked.
“Short hair and a fuzzy mustache.”
Didi protested. “Italian girls have mustaches and none of them are Lesbo.”
“Wasn’t no Italian. I can tell Italian women.”
Subject closed. We sat drinking tea and watching the game while the Redskins scored two more touchdowns. Babe didn’t seem to have any more to say about fatherhood. Partway through the third quarter he had Didi fetch his hand squeezer exercise coils so he could watch TV and build up his wrists simultaneously.
“So, you’re sure you aren’t my father?” I said.
He shrugged without looking away from the game. The Lions were finally mounting a drive. “Hell, anything’s possible. Maybe you’re just a runt.”
“I think I’ll be leaving now,” I said.
Babe ignored me. Didi took my glass. “Come back any time,” she said. “We always have plenty of tea. Babe won’t drink beer. Too many former athletes drink beer and let themselves go.”
Babe sat in his recliner, flexing his wrists. Lord knows what he did for a living. What does a person whose life is his body do when the body lets him down?
“Good-bye, Mr. Carnisek,” I said.
His eyes brightened, as if he’d received an idea. “Tell you what, come Father’s Day, you can send me a card.”
“I’ll do that.”
“I always wanted a card on Father’s Day.”
