Wyatt watched, silent, as the other men chided one another, finished beers, checked their reflections in the windows of their vehicles and patted flyaway hairs into place. Vain as women.
“All right, fellas,” Sam said, clapping his hands at the group as though they were a pack of rowdy dogs. “Let’s get in there.”
The bouncer at the door was checking IDs. Wyatt, at the back of the group, watched as Sam pulled his wallet smoothly from his back pants pocket, flipping the ID sleeve over with the conviction of a clergyman, and the guy barely glanced at it before giving Sam a nod and stamping his hand. Wyatt wondered if the fake had just been that good or if Sam had just been that good. Probably the latter. When Wyatt’s turn came, the bouncer wanted to see nothing from him except his five dollars.
He smelled Nancy’s before he could see it well enough to move forward. Cigarette smoke hung thickly in the doorway, and a set of multicolored lights behind the band flashed red and blue against the fog, turning it into something that seemed almost solid in the otherwise dim room. Behind the smoke he could sense the heavy, sticky edge of old frying grease; beneath that, the tang of body odor. It was almost hot despite the building’s size and the time of year, and as Wyatt pressed ahead through the crowd, following the white glow of Daniel Stone’s polo shirt, he could see an oily sheen on most of the bodies around him. He tripped a little and found himself almost kissing-distance to the face of a woman about his own age. The too-pale powder on her upper lip bubbled with hot sweat, reminding Wyatt unpleasantly of the sight of flour and sausage fat in his cast-iron skillet on the mornings when he took the time to make a little milk gravy.
“Excuse me,” he said, backing up, but she seemed not to notice.
The men from work had gathered against the corner of the bar, each trying to claim the nearest bartender’s attention, and so Wyatt looked around for an empty table, a place to sit and observe. At first there was nothing. The stools at the bar were all occupied, the tables laden with empty glasses and beer bottles and shoulder-to-shoulder with people, but then the band’s leader announced a slow song, told the men to “grab the nearest looker,” and some of the tables cleared out then. Wyatt seated himself at one immediately.
He’d been there for only a moment, peering through the bad lighting at the shift and spin of the dance floor, when he heard a soft “Oh” to his side, and he turned in time to see a woman backing away, a foamy pint of beer in each hand.
Wyatt jumped up immediately. “Did I take your table?”
She shook her head like a child would, making her hair, which was glossy blond and clipped unflatteringly in a bob that hit her cheekbones, whip back and forth. Some of the fine strands stuck to the sweat on her nose, and she tried awkwardly to push them to the side, lifting her right hand, beer and all, and backhanding them free. “I guess I just got confused,” she said. “I mean, I must have. Someone was supposed to be waiting for me.”
“Think you just got turned around in here? Easy to do in this light.”
“I thought . . .” She trailed off. “Oh,” she repeated then, tone of voice flatter than before, and Wyatt followed her gaze down to the edge of the dance floor, where a man and a woman were standing together, not even pretending to affect a twist or a sway. The man had the woman by her belt loops and was pulling her backward and forward, bumping her hips in a playful way against his. The woman, holding a cigarette next to her head as though she could lean a little to the right and puff through her ear, was laughing. As Wyatt and his new companion watched, the man reached out, grabbed the woman’s bottom with both hands, and kissed her sloppily. As a final flourish on this bit of grotesquery, he pulled the woman’s cigarette to his mouth, inhaled, and breathed a dirty cloud of smoke into her face, making her laugh again.
Wyatt didn’t know what to say.
“That,” the woman with the beers told him, “is my date.” She set the beers on Wyatt’s table with a thud—not a slam so much as a drop, as though her arms could no longer support the weight of them—and wiped the beer that had sloshed across her hands on the hips of her blue jeans.
“You should sit,” Wyatt said, pulling out the chair next to his. She nodded absently, still watching the couple, and pushed the second beer to the space in front of Wyatt.
“Please take that,” she said, and Wyatt nodded. So they both sat, and they both sipped, Wyatt dutifully, the woman forlornly, holding her glass steady with both hands and leaning down to slurp over the rim, again with a quality so childlike that Wyatt felt almost sick with pity for her. She might have been forty or forty-five, and she was, he supposed, categorically fat—big enough, at any rate, to do her shopping at the plus-size end of the clothes aisle, though not so big that her face seemed anything but full and, perhaps because of the fullness, youthful. It was a pleasant face, smooth and unblemished, her features proportioned much more elegantly than the rest of her: the attractive, normal face and slender neck sitting atop slumped, dimpled shoulders, heavy breasts, a swell of stomach that pushed past the breasts. She had on a sleeveless red top in a light, feminine material; the contours of her nipples and belly button were visible, and Wyatt could even, without trying, make out the lace pattern on her bra. He cleared his throat and sipped again, wondering if she could see his red cheeks. But her gaze was fixed on the sight of her date and his dance partner, and her fingers, strangely slender, tightened around her pint glass.
“Do you know who she is?” Wyatt asked.
The dimpled shoulders lifted and dropped. “I barely know who he is. But they seem awfully familiar with each other.” She looked back at Wyatt and smiled crookedly, her lips pressed together. “This was our first time out. We found each other in the Peddler.”
“The Peddler?”
“You know, The Olde-Tyme Peddler,” she said in a stagy whisper, as though afraid of being overheard. “The personals section. I put an ad in there on a lark.”
Wyatt felt a surge of admiration for her. He’d contemplated the personals a few times over the years but never had the courage to place an ad or respond to one.
“I didn’t lie,” she said. “I put it all out there. I said what I looked like and what I weighed. I’ve been down that road before. I got set up on a blind date once by a work buddy of mine, and the guy barely made it through the appetizer before bugging out. He told me he’d forgotten a doctor’s appointment.”
“I’m sorry,” Wyatt said.
She waved irritably. “I’ve got thick skin. But this time seemed different. He knew what he was getting into. I thought he might be pleasantly surprised, if anything.”
Wyatt wondered what he’d have done if this was the woman on the other end of a blind setup or a personals ad. Beggars couldn’t be choosers, his mother would have told him, but the recollection made him feel small and unkind. This woman was sort of a pleasant surprise. Her lips were a pretty bow shape, and her voice was husky and confident, a strange but interesting contrast to the physical girlishness. He liked the way she gestured as she talked: she had this way of throwing her hand open, as though she were tossing rice at a wedding.
“And what about him? Look at him. He’s no prize,” she said. Wyatt looked. The man was tall and almost frightfully skinny except for a small mound of beer belly, which seemed alien yoked to the rest of him. His dark hair flowed like a grease stain around his neck and shoulders. “Me, I’m a nurse. I probably make twice as much a year as he does. I own my house.” She downed a third of her beer in a swallow.
Wyatt matched her. “Sounds like you win,” he said. “The guy’s just a fool.”
“But here I was, ready to buy him beers and dance the night away.” She sighed. “What does that make me?”
The song the band had been playing ended with a two-note flourish on the lead’s electric guitar, and the slow-dancers started making their way back to the upper deck. The woman’s date was leading his new girl directly toward their table, holding her by the elbow as though this were a goddamn supper club and he a cert
ified gentleman, and Wyatt wondered, suddenly furious, if the guy even remembered the date he’d arrived with.
“Let’s dance this one,” he said, grabbing those oddly slender fingers and pulling the woman up to a stand before she could argue. They took the long way down to the floor, avoiding the approaching couple, and it wasn’t until they were standing on the slick hardwood, facing but not yet touching, that Wyatt felt struck by the absurdity of what he’d gotten them into. The song was fast-paced rockabilly, the bodies around them kicking and twirling, and the woman—he didn’t even know her name yet—had an inch on him. She tucked the flaps of that too-short bob behind her ears, held her right hand up and to the side expectantly, and so Wyatt closed the gap between them, grasping her open hand with his sweaty left one and putting his arm around her waist, nervous at the sensation of heat and softness so poorly shielded by the barrier of that thin wisp of shirt. They started rocking slowly side to side, ignoring the steady thump of bass that urged them to lift their feet and really move, and the woman didn’t lean her head down to Wyatt’s shoulder—she would have been too tall to pull that off gracefully—or make eye contact with him. She smelled like vanilla and the metallic edge of strong deodorant, and Wyatt wondered if she, like him, had gone on too long in loneliness, too long in disappointment, to let a night like this one get to her. Perhaps that was the saddest thing: not that the disaster date had hurt her irrevocably or that Wyatt’s pitiful act of compassion had redeemed the night somehow, but that neither would ultimately matter, the cruelty or the kindness. If she was like Wyatt, she’d accept the cruelty as the way of the world, the kindness as an anomaly.
And what of her kindness to him? Wyatt realized, holding her, that he hadn’t touched a woman in a year or more, hadn’t shared a touch this intimate in—good Lord—too long. He remembered the handshakes, the hugs, the kisses, rare as diamonds, that a regular person would have forgotten, wouldn’t have taken strong note of in the first place. When his Aunt Sheila died three years ago, her daughter, his cousin, had clung to him so long and so desperately, clutching him, dampening his neck with her tears, that he’d found himself aroused—and she had known, had wrenched herself suddenly from his arms, and the look on her face had been worse than disgust. It had been more like horror.
He pushed the memory away now.
“What’s your name, mister?” the woman in his arms said. The mister was intoned with humor.
“Wyatt.”
“Wyatt,” she echoed, her beery breath tickling his mustache. “I’ve always liked that name. Makes you sound like a cowboy.”
He laughed. “I’m no cowboy.”
“Sure you are.” Her arms had relaxed in his, and so had the sway between them. Wyatt had a natural sense of rhythm, though never having an occasion to use it had made him forget.
“What about you?” he said.
“What about me?”
Wyatt, feeling a surge of confidence, dipped her a little. “What do you think? Your name.”
“Sarah,” she said, and there was another surprise. He’d expected Joyce or Wanda or Tammy, one of those country names, trendy in the fifties and sixties, that had nothing to do with the Bible. The kind of name you saw on the badge of your checkout girl at Wal-Mart or the woman frying your fish at Captain D’s. He’d grown up with Peggys who weren’t Margarets and Bobbys who weren’t Roberts, diminutives that had forgotten the original. Sarah was a good name, a classic.
“Sarah,” he echoed, testing the word’s texture on his tongue. “Sarah, it’s been awful nice meeting you.”
“Likewise,” she said.
And now her head did drop down to his shoulder, not as awkward a negotiation as Wyatt had expected. He pulled their extended hands in so that he was cradling her elbow rather than using it to lead her anywhere. The music galloped along ahead of them. Wyatt could feel Sarah’s heartbeat through her thick pillow of breasts, though maybe it was his own heart reflecting back at him.
“Tubs!” someone called, and Wyatt winced, afraid to look up, to acknowledge the speaker. He’d forgotten Sam and the rest of those guys for a moment—he’d forgotten himself—and he knew from the way Sarah flinched that she’d assumed the call was directed at her, that she was the kind of woman who accepted ownership of every insult.
“Tubby Powell, you dog!” Sam was beside him, dancing with a woman who could have been his sister: blond, smirking, blue eyed. Just as skinny as Sam but augmented up top with a set of fake breasts, which she displayed like the trophies they were on the shelf of a corseted lingerie-style blouse. “Aren’t you going to introduce me to your lady friend? Swear to God, Tubs, I knew you’d move in faster than any of the rest of us. Told Gene you’d be a regular poon hound, and look at you.”
The girl with Sam blinked her eyelashes, which were furred with too many layers of mascara, and tweezed the fabric of Sarah’s shirt between her thumb and forefinger. “Isn’t this pretty,” she said, giggling. “You’ll have to tell me where you got it.”
Sarah stopped dancing and put a hand on her hip. “Wal-Mart,” she said. “They don’t carry my size at Strippers-R-Us.”
“You got that right, you fat bitch,” the girl said. She let go of Sam and crossed her arms. “I was trying to be nice.”
“Like hell you were,” Sarah said, and Wyatt waited nervously for Sam to hit the roof. He’d seen Sam throw tantrums twice before at work: once when the shift manager chewed his ass for failing to make quota, once when his buddies, not seeming to realize that Sam could dish it out a whole lot better than he could take it, teased him too hard about a new pair of prissy cowboy boots he’d worn. These tantrums were fascinating and frightening to behold, because Sam could somehow behave like a child—the screaming, the crimson face, even the stomping—and instead of losing the respect of his friends, even his boss, he somehow solidified it. It was as though these men, these grown men, were afraid of a person who was strong enough in his convictions to be a brat about them.
Sam didn’t scream, though. He laughed. He threw his blond head back so far that his Adam’s apple bobbed, howling, and he finished with a weird little double stomp and hand clap, calling, “Whew!” as though the hilarity were just too much for him. “Gonna have a catfight on our hands. And, Missy-girl, I’d back the hell off if I were you. I don’t think you got a chance against Roseanne Barr over here.”
“I don’t think either one of you would,” Sarah said, and Wyatt could only stand there, silent, wishing that she wouldn’t seem so damned bent on making it worse. You just didn’t fight the Sams of the world, didn’t she know that?
Sam stopped laughing then and grabbed Wyatt’s arm above the elbow, leaning into his ear. “I don’t want to mess this up for you, but you better shut her fat yap up.” He backed away, lifting his hands, surrender-style, and smiling. “We’re gonna go do our own thing now, miss. And do my boy a favor, won’t you, and suck his cock tonight? I think it’s been a while.” The girl, his date, was smiling again, and she leaped on his back, hooking her bony arms around his neck. Sam reached back and patted her bottom. “Happy trails,” he said. He carried the girl back to the bar, stumbling a little on the steps up to the deck level. The girl was kicking her platform heel into his thigh playfully.
“He’s real drunk,” Wyatt said apologetically. He couldn’t bring himself to look Sarah in the eye. He was embarrassed, but not just of Sam’s behavior. He was embarrassed that Sam had caught them cozying up together. He tried to imagine the picture they’d made, their big bellies pressed up to one another, Sarah’s head on his shoulder when she could have been the one leading him, their slow sashay when everyone else was spinning and boogying around them. They had been laughable. Fat, sad, lonely. A joke.
“You were right,” Sarah said. “You’re no cowboy.”
Wyatt flushed with shame. “I’ve got to work with that man. He’s my ride home.”
“You might have had another ride home if you’d give a damn.” She took a shaky breath, and Wyatt glanced fur
tively at her face. Her eyes were damp. She had bright spots of red on each cheek, like Raggedy Ann, and Wyatt again thought of her girlishness, how oddly that fit with the big body and the coarse voice, and he wished that he were a good enough man to appreciate her. She would have come home with me, he thought, stunned. He might have touched those heavy breasts, put his lips on the pink bow of her mouth.
“I’m so sorry,” he told her, and she did that little throwing gesture at him.
“Oh, heavens. I’m being silly. Haven’t even known you an hour and I’m ready to get all tore up about it.” She patted his shoulder. “Thanks for the dance, cowboy. I’ll see you around.”
She started toward the door, moving her bulk carefully between dancers. Wyatt didn’t know her last name, where she lived, whether or not she was truly okay. Had it all happened in the space of a bad song? It occurred to him, watching her go, that he would regret not following her. But he wouldn’t know until the next day just how much.
A hand grasped the place where his neck curved into the shoulder and squeezed. Gene’s.
“Nice work,” he said. “It takes a real hero to push a woman like that away.”
“Just shut up,” Wyatt said, snapping before he could stop himself. “We just danced. She had to get home.”
Gene laughed. “It’s almost midnight. Coach is about to turn into a pumpkin.” There was a silence, and Wyatt could almost hear the gears in Gene’s brain turning. “Big old pumpkin pie.”
He’d let her go for this. For them. He was a fool.
“Let me buy you a whiskey, Tubs,” Gene said. “Least I can do.”
The Next Time You See Me Page 7