mean nothing.”
“The Chinese food syndrome.”
“One is apt to overeat Chinese food. Therefore, an hour later one has hunger pangs. But one doesn’t really need more food.”
“So how do you know when you’re really hungry?”
“You know. Your energy levels begin to drop. Then you should eat real food, not sugar, to maintain your energy. You should know about how much of what kind of food you need to produce the energy you need every day, and eat that much.”
“And forget about the feeling of hunger.”
“Something like that. I don’t know what I’m talking about. I’ve been thinking about this, driving along, thinking about you. Maybe there are psychological reasons you are the way you are, as there are with everybody. I know you’re not crazy. But a lot of the problem may be in your head. A misperception of what you’re feeling. It’s what that professor said about thermostats.”
“Foodstats.”
“Something like that. We think about food differently. Like people who drink more than usual and then get up in the morning and respond to the hangover by having more to drink. It doesn’t make sense. One doesn’t need more to drink just because the liver or whatever is ready to process more.”
“Hunger pangs are a food hangover,” Crystal said. “Now I’ve heard all.”
“You asked. I’m no better than you. I just think about food differently.”
“Maybe because you’ve been really hungry.”
“Maybe.”
“I wonder if I’ve ever been really hungry in my life.”
“Probably not.”
“I just feel hungry all the time.”
“It’s not hunger.”
“Maybe you should write a diet book, Fletch.”
“You think I could sell it?”
“Nothing sells better than diet books. Diet books and cookbooks.”
“I don’t know anything about it.”
“That’s never stopped other people from writing diet books.”
“I’ve just been thinking about it. About you. For you, maybe.”
His pocket communicator buzzed. He picked it up off the pavement beside his chair. “Hello?”
“Fletch, Mister Mortimer called here again.”
Fletch said to Crystal, “It’s Carrie, calling from the farm.”
“Your lover,” Crystal said. “Give her my best. No, come to think of it, she already has my best.”
Carrie said, “He sounds real mean, Fletch.”
“Mister Mortimer is real mean,” Fletch agreed.
“He’s warning you off his place loud and clear. How close are you to his boxer training camp, or whatever it is, now?”
“Pretty close. Another three hours, maybe. We should be there by nine or so in the morning.”
“Fletch, he doesn’t want you.”
“Sure he does. Everybody likes me. I’ve told you that.”
“He hates you!”
“He just forgets.”
“He insists you ruined his life.”
“How could I have done that? I just got him to put all his friends in jail, that’s all. Why should he be upset about that?”
“Then he had to run for his life, he tells me. From the boxing world to cow heaven, he says. From New York City to Wyoming, which he hates or doesn’t understand, or both. He’s lonely, angry, bitter—”
“And mean. I know all that.”
“Fletch, this is the seventh or eighth time he’s called here, warning you off. You should hear him talk!”
“I have.”
“I think you’d better take him seriously.”
“I do.”
“It’s a crazy idea, anyway, taking an overweight lady to a boxers’ training camp.”
“I’ve had crazier ideas,” Fletch said, “that have worked out.”
“Fletch, he’s said he’s borrowed three shotguns from neighbors. That if you drive onto his place he and his two boys—”
“Haja and Ricky.”
“He says they’re as mean as bare wires snappin’ in a rainstorm.”
“They’re as tame as garden hoses.”
“—will blast your head off.”
“Boxers don’t know how to aim beyond arm’s length.”
“Please, Fletch. He’s serious, I swanee down the back.”
“If he calls again …” Fletch hesitated.
“What?”
“… tell him we’ll be there about nine in the morning. Leave a lamp burnin’ in the window, darlin’. I’ll be home, either with my head on my shoulders, or carried under an arm, but I’ll be there.”
After he clicked off, Crystal said, “How much does Carrie weigh?”
“One hundred and twenty three pounds.”
“You don’t know how much I weigh, do you?”
“No.”
“That’s good.”
12
“Who—?”
Jack’s head snapped off the pillow. In his dark bedroom he had been asleep on his stomach. His right leg was over someone else’s legs. Those legs were muscular, and smooth. His right arm was over someone else’s stomach. He withdrew his arm and propped up his shoulders by his elbows. He thought he had been dreaming. He had begun to move. He was primed. He slid his leg off the legs of the other person’s. Holding himself up on one elbow, gently he felt the other person’s breasts.
A naked girl had gotten into his bed with him.
He breathed hard. He listened to the low hum of the window air conditioner.
It had been weeks since a girl had been in bed with him.
After biking in the dark back from Vindemia Village he had played his guitar softly half an hour, thinking about his conversation with his father, about the previous weeks, setting The Tribe story up with the authorities, his five weeks in the maximum security prison in Kentucky, his time in the encampment in Alabama, his working day and night in Virginia, how confining Vindemia was.
He had been thinking about sex, how long it had been since he had loved anyone, anyone had loved him. Thinking about girls he had loved and who had loved him. Thinking about the when and where and how of some of the times he had made love. Wondering how in this life with people moving great distances continuously boys and girls, men and women got together, gobbled each other up, sometimes their minds and spirits as well as their bodies, given to each other, taken from each other, really loved and sometimes learned from each other, and then been separated by circumstances, families, schools, schedules, jobs, mobility, distances, no reasons romantic or usually even emotional. Perhaps because of practicalities, society’s new lessons, through its courts, the centeredness on self in mental health practice, Jack’s generation had been taught above all else that long-range relationships did not, would not work; one must not hope or even think of such.
So there were many of whom he thought, many missed, each once a swelling on his heart now a scar.
