“ Let’s just worry about Greenlawn for now.”
Louis went and sat beside her.
He liked Macy. Everyone in the neighborhood liked Macy. Maybe part of it was Jillian, her mother, white trash if he’d ever seen white trash, but mostly it was just because Macy was, well, likeable. She wasn’t a stuck-up, eye- rolling, empty-headed, self-absorbed princess like a lot of girls her age. She was a good kid. She was smart and sincere, mature and very funny when you caught her off guard or she relaxed around you.
Louis just looked at her, smiling.
If he had a girl of his own, he’d want her to be Macy. She was small and thin, blatantly sexual around the mouth and eyes, almost hungry-looking. Although her curves were definitely making themselves known, she had not really blossomed completely yet, but judging from Jillian who pretty much had everything in the right place, when that happened Macy would be fighting off the boys with a sharp stick. Her eyes were huge and liquid brown, shimmering. They lit up her face. Why the boys weren’t after her now, Louis did not know. Maybe you had to be older to appreciate a calm, understated beauty like Macy had or to revel in her almost sensual schoolgirl charm… things she probably didn’t even know she possessed.
He found that he was staring at her and she was watching him do so, a slight blush blooming in her cheeks.
Oh Christ, he thought, did she know what I was thinking?
She turned away and he wondered what had gotten him on that train of thought.
Louis and Michelle had only lived on upper Rush Street for the past four years, but they knew all the local gossip. Macy’s father had died when she was very young and Jillian had just crashed and burned, becoming a drunk that played it pretty free and easy with men of any age, if you could believe all that was said. One thing that was true, though, was that Jillian had never recovered from her husband’s death and had retreated to her eighteenth year where she still was, an adult woman with a child who acted like a wild college girl out sowing her oats for the first time. It was too bad. Macy probably needed her mom to be a mom, but that just wasn’t going to happen. Around the neighborhood they said that Macy had raised herself. That she took care of the house and just about everything else, including her mother.
Louis did not doubt that part of it.
Every summer, Michelle and he threw a neighborhood bash. There was beer and pop, hamburgers and hot dogs. Just a social event where all the neighbors and their kids could spend some time together, get to know each other better. And Jillian always came, of course. Sometimes she just got drunk and sometimes she got really loaded and fell flat on her face. Sometimes she picked fights with the other women, but mostly she just pursued their husbands in ways that were practically indescribable. That first summer when Louis and Michelle had spread the word, Dick Starling, a heavy equipment operator that worked for Indian Central Railroad and lived across the street, had taken Louis aside and over a few beers, laid it all out for him.
“ This is a pretty good neighborhood, but we got a few odd ducks here,” Starling said. “I think everyone will show for your party. Old man Onsala won’t. He’s a crazy old Finnlander. You can always tell the Finnlanders by the pile of firewood in their front yards. They like to hang gutted deer in the front yard come season. Onsala don’t like anyone, barely speaks anything but Finnish. Les Maub and his wife’ll come, but not if you invite the Soderbergs. Bonnie Maub and Leslie Soderberg have been fighting about something since 1963 and they still won’t talk to each other. They won’t show. On the other hand, Jillian Merchant will show and that’s not necessarily a good thing. But if there’s booze, she’ll be there. Oh yes, Lou, count on that. She’s not bad looking, you know? Long legs and nice set of jugs on her. You’ll get a look at her and you’ll be thinking what every man in this neighborhood has already thought: that you wouldn’t mind getting into that shit, having a little fun. But you won’t, buddy, you won’t dare because she’s nuts.”
That was Louis’ first introduction to Jillian Merchant.
The party that year came and Jillian came with it. She was actually quite attractive, like Dick Starling said, but her eyes were wild and hungry-looking. The more liquor she poured into herself, the hungrier those eyes became until she was scoping out the men at the party like a dog sizing up red meat, wondering which cut to take a bite out of first. She was wearing a black leather miniskirt which put her long, slender legs on fine display right up to the thigh. She completed the look with a tight tube top that barely contained her cleavage. She kept drinking and making the rounds and anytime she found a lone man, she hopped right on his lap and gave him a free bump and grind, whether his wife was present or not. Louis had managed to keep his distance as she moved around, flirting and running up to the men like a horny feline. But, finally, she cornered him. Right there by the keg of beer she was all over him, asking him to give her a private tour of his bedroom.
Louis couldn’t believe it.
With Michelle there, too.
Jillian was just out of control and liked it that way, apparently. Later, playing cards with the boys at the picnic table, Jillian had zeroed in on him again. She kept hanging around and sticking her tits in his face while the other guys chuckled about it. Louis kept her away from him, but he did not realize the level of her determination until she went right up to Michelle and asked, “You mind if I give your husband a lap dance?”
Michelle claimed later she thought it was a joke, even though she should have known better by that point. “Um…no…yes…no, I don’t care,” Michelle had said.
The stage was set. Jillian jumped right on Louis’ lap, facing him yet, her tits pressed into his chest and her crotch right up against his own, her miniskirt practically pushed up to her hips. She went right at it, moving her ass and legs with almost professional zeal, grinding into him and making him first turn red, then start to sweat. He could feel the heat of what was between her legs just fine. He put a stop to it then and there, figuring he better before something embarrassing popped up in his pants. He pulled Jillian off of him, but she came right back, wrapping her arms around him and one of her long legs, trapping him, encircling him. Finally, all the boys laughing at him, he picked Jillian up to carry her back to her own seat and that was a mistake. For as he threw her over his shoulder, drunk himself, he saw the looks on everyone’s faces. What happened was, with Jillian over his shoulder, everyone saw that she had no underwear on. Her skirt had really hiked up to her hips and there was her fine, round ass on display along with her business.
The women were either laughing or angry; the men laughing, too, or just staring with delight at all Jillian had to offer which was considerable. Most of them had not seen such an offering since their high school days…at least not in such wonderful proportions. Dick Starling, being the smartass he was, snapped a shot of that embarrassing moment with his digital camera: Louis standing there looking surprised, Jillian over his shoulder, one tit popped out of her tube top, legs kicking, ass and privates on full display. He liked to bring that picture out and show it to Louis whenever he came over.
And, of course, Michelle never let him live it down.
But that was, essentially, Louis’ first taste of Macy’s mother and each summer since she put on a similar show at the backyard parties. The sad thing was that Jillian carried on like that right in front of her daughter, had absolutely no qualms about it. Louis was not a parent, but even he knew there were things you did in front of children and those you did not.
Macy sat there with him beside her for five or ten minutes before she spoke again. “But it’s all funny, isn’t it? Funny/scary? I mean, I can see a couple people losing it on the same day…but like this? Aren’t the odds against dozens of people going whacko on the same day, the same afternoon? Or thousands across the country?”
“ Yeah, I guess they would be.”
“ Insanity-if that’s what this is, Mr. Shears-isn’t catchy. It’s not a disease, a germ, a microbe, whatever. It does not pass from person to person.”
Well, he couldn’t argue with any of that.
It made him think of all those end-of-the-world movies he’d caught on the late show. There was always, ultimately, something to blame. An atomic bomb or a mutant germ or chemical warfare…something that made people change into monsters or crazies. There was always something. He could rule out radiation, he supposed, but the jury was still out on the biological or chemical agents. But if it was something like that, something in the soil or water or air, why hadn’t he been infected? That dying kid surely had it, whatever it was, and Louis had been in pretty goddamn close proximity with him.
Shouldn’t he have been contaminated?
But what if it’s nothing that simple, nothing that quantifiable, Louis. Not a germ or a chemical. Then that would make it even worse, wouldn’t it? The idea that what’s happening here and everywhere will keep happening
