Here’s a problem I could deal with. There are so few, I like to jump on them when I can. “Look, Hank, call Sheriff Potter, tell him I’ll donate a color TV to the women’s cell.”
“Lydia will claim you cheated.”
“For God’s sake, don’t tell her.”
I telephoned Dyn-o-Mite Novelty Co. and ordered a custom bumper sticker that read
“It’s the least you can do after everything I gave up to support your vapid dreams the last fourteen months,” she said.
“What did you give up?”
Wanda tossed me a look of intense pity and sped off into the Carolina humidity.
I drove the Dart up Wendover Avenue through a high school parking lot to an open-ended football stadium where boys in full uniforms and helmets were running steps. Football practice is what I do whenever I’m worked up over life. I sit at the top of the bleachers and imagine the players raping Lydia. I choose five typical teenage boys and picture them on top of her, behind her, in her mouth. I picture them urinating on her nude body.
The coach stood at the bottom, wearing gym shorts and a cast on his left arm, shouting epithets of failure at the players. I got the idea they’d lost a game the night before and had been sentenced to a Saturday afternoon of running up and down the stadium stairs. The coach called the boys “girls,” meaning it as an insult.
A fat kid dripping sweat missed a step going up and fell, barking the holy hell out of his shin. He rolled on his back in intense pain, then sat on a wooden bleacher seat and looked glumly down at his bleeding leg.
The coach threw a wall-eyed hissy fit. Charged up the steps and got right in the kid’s face guard and screamed at the top of his lungs.
“You stupid homosexual pussy!” the coach screamed. “You pitiful excuse for whale shit!”
The kid didn’t react. Just sat there looking at his leg. If I’d been the fat kid I would have pushed the coach backward down the stairs and broken his other arm.
The coach slapped him. “Look at me when I talk!”
“Hey,” I said. I was sitting twenty feet or so away, atop the bleachers. “That’s no way to treat a human.”
The coach stared up at me. “This is none of your business.”
“Touch the kid again and I’ll make it my business.”
Now the kid was staring like I was a Martian.
The coach’s face wrinkled up. “Are you in administration?”
“I’m in humanity and you’re impolite. You’re an ape.”
The fat kid made it upright. “Don’t call my dad an ape.”
“Your dad?”
“He yells because I deserve it.”
My eyes passed between the two. There was a nasal resemblance. “You’re his father?” I asked.
The coach beamed with pride. “I don’t show no favoritism.”
A funeral procession blocked the intersection at Battleground Avenue, so I turned off my engine and waited. The cars were all big, new, and American, except for a couple of Mercedes being driven by women. I have a religious belief that dead people can read nearby minds for four days after they die, which means I’m careful at funerals. If this dead person was reading my mind as the hearse drove by, he or she, or by now it, I suppose, overheard some pretty confusing thought processes.
I was parked next to a Christian bookstore with a Kinko’s copy shop on one side and a Baskin-Robbins ice- cream parlor on the other. Two pregnant teenagers sat on a bench in front of Baskin-Robbins, eating goop out of banana split boats. We’re talking third trimester here—beached whales.
I turned right into the Baskin-Robbins parking lot but missed the drive and jumped the curb and knocked off my muffler, which caused the girls to burst into spontaneous giggles and the Dart to roar like a sick lawn mower.
As I retrieved the bent muffler, one of the girls said, “We oughtta call the Mothers Against Drunk Driving hot line.”
The other one stopped her spoon in midair to check me for signs of drunkenness. “We’re not mothers yet.”
“I’m still against drunk driving. Have been for over four months.”
They were both short and gave the impression they had been chubby well before pregnancy. They had silver hair with black roots and dimples at the elbows that winked as they spooned triple sundaes. The only difference was complexion—the girl against drunk driving was pink and the other one came off as a dull bamboo color.
“I’m not drunk,” I said.
This made the girls laugh, and I liked them immediately. For being so large, they seemed in remarkably good moods.
“If you’re not drunk, you got no excuse,” the pink one said.
I walked over to the guardrail Baskin-Robbins had put up to keep people from driving through their plate- glass window. “I don’t have any excuse.”
“What if I’d been standing on that curb,” the pale one said. “You’d have hit me and I might have gone into premature labor.”
“Shoot, Lynette, I don’t know about you, but I’d be happy as a peach to go into premature labor.”
“I’m tired of being pregnant.”
I sat on the rail with the muffler in my lap. “Can I ask you a question?”
The girls spooned ice cream and considered how to deal with me. Lynette was eating hot fudge on three various forms of chocolate while Babs had separate toppings—butterscotch, caramel, and something red—on what appeared to be strawberry, butter pecan, and creme de menthe. I immediately critiqued their personalities based on ice-cream choices and decided I’d rather be involved in Babs’s problems over Lynette’s, but they were both interesting.
“I’ll give you each fifty dollars to help me with an ethical dilemma.”
“Cash or check?” Babs asked.
“Check, but it’s good. Here, look at this.”
I talked while they studied my check guarantee card, then me. “You see, there’s this decision I have to make where I must choose right over wrong and not doing anything is a decision unto itself. I’m usually real firm about right and wrong, but this time I can’t figure out which is which. I’m lost.”
“Are you selling insurance?” Babs asked.
“Good Lord, no.”
Lynette said, “Insurance agents always start off with that innocent question stuff and before you know it they’re in your kitchen.”
“Insurance agents don’t pay fifty dollars for an answer,” I said.
That gave them cause to think. An ambulance blew by on Battleground going the opposite direction the funeral procession had taken.
“Just don’t tell Rory,” Babs said. I had no idea what that meant, but it seemed like agreement.
I folded both hands on the muffler and tried to figure a way to word the problem. “Let’s pretend the fathers of your babies did something awful. They’re both no good sons of bitches.”
Lynette could relate. “That don’t take no pretending. B. B. Swain is the evilest snake in Broward County.”
“Great. Now pretend he doesn’t know you’re pregnant.”
