We turned. She was about ten feet away, wearing only faded blue bikini panties. Her blonde hair was dry now and somehow she had combed it out. It fell to her wide shoulders and tumbled over them and, much to our happiness, stopped just before covering her breasts, which were firm and full with areola the size of half-dollars and the color of warm beef gravy. The nipples were thick and firm, like the tips of pointing fingers. She had a narrow waist and her ribs showed from having lost too much weight. There were faint, pink bands here and there on her body, as if she had been lashed with something. She had her hands on her hips and was looking right at us. If she was embarrassed, I couldn’t tell it.
“Christ,” she said. “Haven’t you boys seen titties before?”
“There’s titties,” Bob said, “then there’s titties.”
“This is my first time, ma’am,” Crier said. “I’ve heard of them, of course.”
“Fuck with me, any kind of way,” she said, “and I’ll break your legs off and shove them up your assholes.”
“Me first,” Crier said.
But the way she looked at us then made us step aside. She came over and got her clothes and started putting them on.
“You boys enjoying the show?”
“Very much, yes,” Bob said.
She finished dressing, sat on the tailgate, and looked at us. I guarantee we weren’t as pleasant to look at as she was.
She said, “Had a cousin told me about a boyfriend she’d had. Said he was so horny he’d go to the ocean and fuck the water in case there might be a shark out there that had swallowed a girl. Know what she meant now. You could at least close your mouths.”
“We’re not so bad,” Crier said. “We brought you some fruit.”
She eyed the fruit we had left on the tailgate and said, “It isn’t full of dick holes, is it?”
“Oh, come on,” I said, “we’re not that bad. All things considered, we’re doing okay. We’re not trying to rape you, are we? Look here. I’m Jack, this is Bob, and this is Crier.”
Her face changed a little then and there was something behind that pretty skin and those green-gray eyes that wasn’t so pretty. But whatever it was went away as quickly as it had arrived.
She took a plum-like fruit from the basket and bit out of it. The juice leaped from it in gold beads and flecked her lips and cheeks and she began to chew. After a moment, she spat out the seed, and went deeper into the fruit like a lion biting the innards out of an antelope’s belly. When she finished that one, she ate another.
Somehow, watching her eat was as good as a peepshow. None of us said a word.
When she was finished, she said, “Now you’ve had a look at my tits and watched me eat. I hope you’re happy. Had you showed five minutes earlier, you could have gone off in the bushes with me and watched me pee.”
“You could have called us,” Bob said.
“Nice dresses,” she said, nodding at Bob and me.
“Let’s not talk fashion,” I said. “Tell us about yourself. Before the drive-in and up to now.”
“Why would you want to know?”
“Entertainment,” I said. “It’s not like we have a pressing social calendar. We know more than we want to know about each other. Give us something new to think about.”
“All right,” she said. “Sit down and get comfy, because this is going to take a while.”
SECOND REEL
1
My name is Grace, and I come from a little burg called Nacogdoches. It’s supposed to be the oldest town in Texas. We got a sign that says so, but it doesn’t look that old-the town, I mean, not the sign.
The place is still kind of neat, but it’s going to hell fast, and when I look at photographs Mom and Dad have of it twenty-five years ago, it really chaps my highly attractive ass.
It’s one of those towns where the fine old houses and the massive trees have been torn or cut down so progress can slither in. You know progress. Burger King, McDonald’s, and all manner of plastic eateries where the wrappers for the burgers and the lettuce inside them taste pretty much alike, and it’s my opinion the wrappers have a more natural tint than the lettuce and are probably more nutritious.
These days the old houses are gone and you can stand in the parking lot of McDonald’s on fourth Street and toss a dried Big Mac underhanded and bounce it off the front glass of Wendy’s on the other side of the street. Or you can go over to University Drive and toss a pepperoni pizza, no anchovies, out of the driveway of Mazzio’s Pizza and wing an innocent bystander on the tableladen deck of Arby’s.
I went to high school and college in good ol’ Nac. The college is called Stephen F. Austin University, and it’s named after one of the guys that helped con Texas from Mexico.
I was majoring in anthropology/archaeology, but what I really wanted to be was a karate instructor, since my dad, who was a black belt in kenpo, had been teaching me ever since I was five. If it matters, I’m first degree brown belt now.
But like Dad, I couldn’t see any real future in martial arts. Or to be more precise, I think I let Mom convince me there wasn’t any future in it. She talked Dad into being a manager of an optical store and she wanted something like that for me, or as she always put it, “Kicking people is all right, but you can’t make a decent living at it. You got to have something to fall back on.”
Well, I had been hearing this speech since I was old enough to know which was the business end of a tampon, so when I saw this National Geographic special on archaeology on television, I thought it might be just what I was looking for.
There were these folks with tans about the color of fresh walnut stains applied to burnt mahogany, wearing khaki shorts and pith helmets, and they were swarming over these ruins. Fire ants couldn’t have been any busier.
They were doing a lot of pointing and writing in notebooks and looking intelligent. There were close-ups of pottery shards from pots that had been made before Jesus was old enough to suck Mary’s tit, and there were skull fragments and pieces of bones from the guys and gals that had made the pots.
The show ended with a close-up of this woman with sweat running from under her pith helmet and onto her face and mixing with the sand there, out over these little fragments of walls, looking soulful as a Baptist preacher, contemplating the past and all the great civilizations that had arisen there and folded back in on themselves like a card table.
It was inspiring.
Thinking back on it now, she may have been looking out over that sand waiting for somebody to pick her up in an air-conditioned truck and drive her over to a Mideast Hilton.
But the desire to dig holes in the ground and hold the bony remains of ancient pottery makers in my hands had come over me like the Holy Ghost. I couldn’t think of anything else. I checked out archaeology books and read them cover to cover and started envisioning ancient civilizations marching ghostlike through Nacogdoches, throwing down pots and bowls and breaking them so I could find them a zillion years later.
What I didn’t get from those books, or refused to get, was how goddamn hard archaeology is. And it’s dirty work. Those people on National Geographic weren’t just deeply tanned, they were downright filthy.
At the end of a day, having sifted through enough sand to fill Galveston Beach, the sun burning through my clothes like an X-ray, it was hard for me to take a whole lot of pride in a few broken pieces of pottery that some prehistoric dude had marked on with a pine needle.
