everything. The flesh of his lower belly can count the stitch-marks in Amy's appendectomy scar. So that he has a boner is probably about as obvious to her as that he smells bad. He might as well have one of those long fluorescent orange bicycle flags lashed to the shaft of his phallus and sticking up out of his pants.
She steps back, looks down at it, then very deliberately looks him in the eye and says, 'How do you feel?' which being as it is the obligatory question of females, is hard to read-deadpan/ironic or just sweetly naive?
'I miss you,' he says, 'and I apologize if my limbic system has misinterpreted your gesture of emotional support.'
She takes this levelly, shrugs, and says, 'No need to apologize. It's all a part of
Randy resists the impulse to check his watch, which would be pointless because it has been confiscated anyway. She has undoubtedly set some kind of world speed record here, in the male/female conversation category, for working the subject around to Randy's own failure to be emotionally available. To do it in this setting displays a certain chutzpah that he cannot help but admire.
'You've talked to Attorney Alejandro,' she says.
'Yeah. I assume he's imparted to me whatever he was supposed to impart.'
'I don't have much more for you,' she says. Which on a pure tactical level means a lot. If the wreck had been found by the Dentist's minions, or their salvage work had been somehow interrupted, she'd say something. For her to say nothing means that they are probably hauling gold out of that submarine at this very moment.
So. She's busy working on the gold salvage operation, to which her contributions are no doubt vital. She has absolutely no specific information to impart to him about anything. So why has she made the long, alternately dull and dangerous trek to Manila? In order to do what exactly? It is one of these fiendish mind-reading exercises. She has her arms crossed over her bosom and is eyeing him coolly.
He suddenly gets the feeling that she's got him right where she wants him. Maybe she's the one who planted the heroin in his bag. It's a power thing, that's all.
A big slab of memory floats up to the surface of Randy's mind, like a floe calved off the polar icecap. He and Amy and the Shaftoe boys were in California, right after the earthquake, going through all the old crap in the basement looking for a few key boxes of papers. Randy heard Amy squealing with laughter and found her sitting in the corner on top of some old book boxes, reading a paperback novel by flashlight. She had uncovered a huge cache of paperback romance novels, none of which Randy had ever seen before. Bodice-rippers of the most incredibly cheesy sort. Randy assumed they'd been left behind by the house's previous owners until he flipped through a couple of them, checking the copyright dates: all from the years when he and Charlene were living together. Charlene must have been reading them at a rate of about one a week.
'Ooh baby,' Amy said, and read him a passage about a rugged but sensitive but tough but loving but horny but smart hero having his way with a protesting but willing but struggling but yielding tempestuous female. 'God!' She frisbeed the book into a puddle on the basement floor.
'I always got the sense she had furtive reading habits.'
'Well, now you know what she wanted,' Amy said. 'Did you give her what she wanted, Randy?'
And Randy has been thinking about that ever since. And when he got over his surprise that Charlene was a bodice-ripper addict, he decided it wasn't necessarily a bad thing, though in her circle, reading books like that would be tantamount to wearing a tall pointy hat in the streets of Salem Village, Mass. circa 1692. She and Randy had tried, awfully hard, to have an egalitarian relationship. They had spent money on relationship counseling trying to keep the egalitarian relationship alive. But she had become more and more angry, without ever giving him a reason, and he had become more and more confused. Eventually he stopped being confused and just got irritated, and tired of her. After Amy discovered those books in the basement, Randy slowly put a whole new and different story together in his head: that Charlene's limbic system was simply hooked up in such a way that she liked dominant men. Again, not in a whips and chains sense, just in the sense that in most relationships someone's got to be active and someone's got to be passive, and there's no particular logic to that, but there's nothing bad about it either. In the end, the passive partner can have just as much power, and just as much freedom.
Randy has this very strong feeling that Amy doesn't read bodice-ripper novels. She goes the other way. She can't tolerate surrendering to any one. Which makes it hard for her to function in polite society; she could not have been happy sitting at home during her senior year of high school, waiting for a boy to invite her to the prom. This feature of her personality is extremely prone to misinterpretation, so she bailed out. She would rather be lonely, and true to herself, and in control, in an out-of-the-way part of the world, with her music-by-intelligent-female-singer- songwriters to keep her company, than misinterpreted and hassled in America.
'I love you,' he says. Amy looks away and heaves a big sigh like,
Now she's back to looking at him expectantly.
'And the reason I've been slow to, uh, to actually show it, or do anything about it, is first of all because I wasn't sure whether or not you were a lesbian.'
Amy scoffs and rolls her eyes.
'. . . and later just because of my own reticence. Which is unfortunately part of me too, just like this part.' He glances down just for
She's shaking her head at him in amazement.
'The fact that the scientific investigator works fifty percent of his time by nonrational means is quite insufficiently recognized,' Randy says.
Amy sits down on his side of the table, jacknifes, spins around neatly on her ass, and comes to light on the other side. 'I'll think about what you said,' she says. 'Hang in there, sport.'
'Smooth sailing, Amy.'
Amy gives him a little smile over her shoulder, then walks straight to the exit, turning around once in the doorway to make sure he's still looking at her.
He is. Which, he feels quite confident, is the right answer.
Chapter 85 GLAMOR
A couple of squads of Nipponese Air Force soldiers, armed with rifles and Nambus, pursue Bobby Shaftoe and his crew of Huks towards the Manila Bay seawall. If it comes to the point where they must stand and slug it out, they can probably kill a lot of Nips before they are overwhelmed. But they are here to find and assist the Altamiras, not to die heroically, and so they retreat through the neighborhood of Ermita. One of MacArthur's circling Piper Cubs catches sight of one of those Nip squads as it is clambering over the ruins of a collapsed building, and calls in a strike-artillery rounds spiral in from the north like long passes in a football game. Shaftoe and the Huks try to time the incoming rounds, guessing at how many tubes are firing on them, trying to run from one place of concealment to the next when they think there's going to be a few seconds' pause in the shrapnel. Maybe half of the Nips are killed or wounded by this barrage, but they are fighting at such close quarters that two of Shaftoe's Huks are hit as well. Shaftoe is trying to drag one of them out of danger when he looks down and sees that he is stomping across a mess of shattered white crockery that is marked with the name of a hotel-the same hotel where he slow-danced with Glory on the night that the war started.
The wounded Huks are still capable of moving and so the retreat continues. Shaftoe's calming down a bit, thinking about the situation with more clarity. The Huks find a good defensive position and stall the attackers for a few minutes while he gets his bearings, works out a plan. Fifteen minutes later, the Huks abandon their position and fall back in panic, or appear to. About half of the Nipponese squad rushes forward in pursuit and finds that they
