He and Zelda’s grins circled their heads at the line from Mooshie’s song Baking Babies.
“You ain’t gonna add to the family like this. I want some kissing. I want some loving.” Mooshie hopped on a table as if levitated. “I said kissing, bitches.”
The two girls shyly kissed.
“I said kissing, not wiping away lipstick.”
The girls opened their mouths and the crowd whooped.
“That’s right. You. You and you and all of you. I want to see some tongue.”
Around the bar, couples kissed. Mooshie stared expectantly at Puppy and Zelda, who kissed lightly and broke away, embarrassed.
“You too, White Grampas.” Mooshie singled out Mickey and Ty, running away to hide in the back amid good-natured laughter. “You ain’t never too old for a new kind of loving. Ever, darlings.”
The piano cued her back into the song.
“There’s no excuse to be sad,
If you gotta heart, then baby baby baby.”
She pouted, hips rocking back and forth, milking the beat.
“Give it a launching pad,
And let that goddamn lovin’ in.”
The bar roared. Zelda and Puppy brushed away tears.
Mooshie played two long sets. In between there was a lot of alcohol. When Puppy woke up on the kitchen floor the next morning, Zelda was crawling out the door holding her shoes and dry heaving. Ty and Mick were sprawled on opposite ends of the couch, legs crisscrossed. Puppy shook them awake and stumbled into the shower as they fell back asleep, snoring. Soap, water, shampoo, nothing helped once his mind remembered and sent his body into mild hysteria.
Seven thirty AM. He pitched in ninety minutes.
He staggered past his bedroom, drawn back by Mooshie’s empty bed. Worry about pitching hungover or worry about where you lost Mooshie. Good choices. Mick and Ty stumbled into the bathroom making all sorts of unnatural body sounds.
“Where’s Mooshie?”
Mick squatted on the toilet, yawning; Ty carefully shaved.
“Who?” Mantle asked.
Lopez stood in the doorway, the black dress a little looser, as if it’d been peeled off a few times without regard for zippers. Hand on her right hip, she shook her head at the two old naked men. “That is some awfully ugly white shit.”
Ty threw a towel. “Feast.”
Mooshie gagged and strolled into the kitchen, Puppy trailing.
“Where’ve you been?”
“What?” she glared.
“It’s seven-forty.” He pointed at the clock, yelling into the bathroom. “We gotta game, hurry up. I was worried.”
“Don’t be. I make friends.” Mooshie shook the empty Edison’s Crackers box. “We’re out already? Least we got coffee.” She kept twisting the stove knobs. “You forget to pay the gas?”
Chimes tingled throughout the apartment.
It took Puppy a few moments to recognize the cue. Oh no. Not today.
The vidnews wobbled slightly from the effort of the first Grandma Story since 2085. Puppy and Annette had just finished sex for the second time that morning when Grandma’s kind, warming expression had circled the room. Annette had burrowed under the bed in case Grandma figured out she’d faked an orgasm.
On that day, Grandma had told the Story of food, its nutrients and the effect of radiation from the Allah attacks, reminding everyone just how much worse it would’ve been if America had retaliated with nuclear weapons. Instead, she could tell the Story of new farms opening in the Middle West, wheat and corn crops flourishing. Not just nature, not just the regeneration of the soil, but the advances in food engineering.
The days of the SC and AG foods had begun, a quiet mocking of a hungry, grateful nation who, watching while sitting stuck in trains and buses with engines shut down, one long red light for traffic stretching just west of the Las Vegas radiation belt, had probably skipped over Grandma’s vow that someday America would once again feed the world. Their bellies were the priority.
Now another Story would freeze the nation. Mooshie wasn’t the only one who couldn’t cook breakfast. Ovens and stoves went cold. All mass transit stopped. No cars could move. All meetings in businesses halted. Elevators stalled. Factories, cash registers, stacking canned goods on the shelf, morning exercise, showers, flushing toilets, anything that anyone could possibly do to distract them from watching was forbidden. Even breeding was against the law; no fiery orgasms when Grandma settled in next to vidnews host Etsy Valdez on the daily morning show Wake Up My Darlings.
Even after the trees died and the sun’s rays weakened through the war-scarred atmosphere, Grandma still refused to move her My Darlings talks inside. Stubborness or hopefulness were two sides of a confident mind. Massive planting in the 70s and into the 80s, along with the diffusion of the tainted clouds, brought back some green; the scientists insisted that was all to be expected, considering.
In this reality she permitted, hunks of dead trees comprised America’s forests. So came the HGs: birds, animals, bright trees flourished. The foods they mocked as So-Called and AlleGedly fed her children. Rain was on schedule and every so often real downpours drenched an area. Snow was coming back to the mountains. Those indomitable fish survived; she thought the likes of Saul Ribe and Pops Tai were supernatural, summoning versions of salmon and tuna from the oceans.
Slowly the world would return and then the HGs would disappear along with Disappointment Villages. No more entrance exams from DV children saddled by the failures of a generation which had committed the worst failure of all: fear.
Once the fake, and Grandma shuddered at that word but it was true and truth couldn’t be denied even by the single-minded, but once the fake and the false were gone, they had to deal with reality again. No magic other than their minds and their courage. They’d survived their own stupidity and that’s what the war was, as most if not all wars were, anger unleashed until pride took over, permitting no turning back.
Except there was nothing behind the pride except bravado. The men and women maimed and killed so a flag could be waved sickened her. A flag representing what? What was the vision except causing death in the name of an idea?
“If you
