nervously from a distance. ‘I’ve been giving them a history lesson why we win wars and nobody can get near us technologywise. Isn’t that so, girls?’
‘Yes, Uncle Wally,’ said the quads in unison. Eva looked at them suspiciously. She knew that unison. It was a portent.
That night while Uncle Wally was watching baseball and having his fifth bourbon on the rocks, and Eva and Auntie Joan were talking family back in England, Samantha found an old portable tape recorder in Wally’s romper room. It was a reel-to-reel one with an automatic cut-out when the tape came to the end and it had a four-hour reel on it. By the time Wally and his wife staggered up to the bedroom it was running under the doublewide. And Wally wanted a hump.
‘Aw, come on, honey pie,’ he said. ‘We aren’t getting any younger and–’
‘Speak for yourself,’ said Auntie Joan. She wasn’t in a good mood. Eva had told her that Maude, who was Auntie Joan’s sister, had decided to become a lesbian and was living with a gay who’d had a sex-change operation. That wasn’t the sort of family news she wanted. Wally humping her wasn’t what she wanted either. Could be something to be said for becoming a lesbian.
‘I am speaking for myself,’ Wally said. ‘Only person I can speak for. You don’t have a goddam prostate or if you do I haven’t heard that Dr Hellster I go to in Atlanta speak about it. He tells me I got to keep it up or else.’
‘Keep it up? You haven’t got it to keep up. Leastways I haven’t noticed it lately. You sure you haven’t left it in the bathroom along with your hairpiece? Like trying to get some action out of a sea slug.’
‘Yeah,’ said Wally, evidently ignoring the comparison with difficulty. ‘And I’m not likely to get it up if you don’t give me some foreplay.’
‘Foreplay? You think a woman’s got to do the foreplay? You’ve got the wrong woman if you think that. You’re the one supposed to do the foreplay. Like with the tongue and all.’
‘Sweet fuck!’ said Uncle Wally. ‘At your age you want me playing the old mouth-organ? Like whale blowing in reverse? Shit. This is no time to be making cracks like that.’
‘Well, it isn’t the time to be asking me to go down on you either.’
‘I wasn’t talking about going down. Last time you did that must have been around the time of the Watergate hearings.’
‘Tasted like it too,’ said Auntie Joan. After more argument she agreed to lie back and pretend Wally was Arnold Schwarzenegger on barbiturates, something that slowed him up.
‘Only thing slowing me up is finding the thing,’ said Wally. ‘Like going down Oak Creek Canyon on a wet night and no flashlight. You sure you still got a pussy? That surgeon didn’t do a total when you had that hysterectomy?’
In the end he found what he had been looking for. Or thought he had. Auntie Joan put him right.
‘Asshole!’ she shrieked. ‘Jesus, are you insane trying to brown-ass me? Oh no, you don’t, Wally Immelmann. I’m fucked if you’re going to sodomise me. You want to do that with someone, find yourself a guy who likes it that way. I sure as shit don’t.’
‘Sodomise? I wasn’t trying to sodomise you,’ said Wally, genuinely outraged. ‘We been married all these years, thirty years, thirty goddam years, I ever tried to sodomise you?’
‘Yes,’ said Auntie Joan bitterly. ‘Yes, you have and don’t I know it. Dr Cohen says it’s–’
‘Dr Cohen? You been telling Dr Cohen I’ve been sodomising you? I’m not hearing this. I can’t be!’ Wally yelled. ‘Telling Dr Cohen…Jesus.’
