by phuc
Still, I was hoping for him. I was beginning to tire of fish and fruit, fine as it had once seemed.
Isn't that the way of humans? They're never happy. One day I'm living off sardines and jerky with no water, and the next thing you know, I'm complaining about having fresh water, fish and fruit. Before long, I'd probably want a sauna in Jungle Home and someone to cater my meals.
Anyway, Crier and Bob went off on safari, and I was home filling some water containers we had made out of thick cylinders of hollowed-out bamboo.
I finished the job, stripped off my blanket, and went out and sat on the deck and dangled my feet over the edge.
I had no more than gotten comfortable, when I heard a car out on the highway, the engine straining and knocking as if it were about to explode.
I found me a good spot between the limbs and leaves, zeroed in on the highway, and saw a battered green Galaxy. It was coughing gouts of black smoke from under its hood and pooting a matching concoction from its tailpipe.
The driver hit down on the horn for some reason, and the horn hung.
This wasn't the Galaxy's day.
It slowed, turned off the highway onto the grassland, started weaving and picking up speed again.
I could see a figure in the front seat, fighting the wheel as if it were some rare breed of poisonous hoop snake. Then the driver lost it or quit, because the Galaxy veered to the left toward the lake.
The closer it got to the lake, the more speed it lost. It got down to a crawl. But it still made the water and dipped its nose in. Hot black smoke hissed up in a cloud, and the Galaxy began to slide languidly into the water.
And I was moving.
I had minded my own business so long, I was somewhat surprised when my Good Samaritan urges came back to me like a return bout of malaria fever. I went down the ladder two steps at a time and started running across the grassland toward the lake.
Owing to the gradual slope of the shore, the Galaxy had still not eased all the way in. The back right window was open, and I climbed through that.
The backseat was little more than springs and foam rubber. On the floorboard was something that looked like burnt sticks and brush. Another look and I knew it was human.
Its skin was burned the color of neglected bacon. There was no hair, features or genitals.
One of its arms was lifted, fingers extended and frozen in a pose that made the hand look like a miniature weed rake.
Water began to trickle in the back window. Already the front seat was filled. The thing on the floor didn't look alive, so I was about to go over the seat for the driver when the garden rake took hold of my ankle.
I jerked and flesh came off of the ruined hand and ran down my ankle like dirty Jell-O. I looked at the thing and it opened its mouth, made a croaking noise that sounded like "Kill me."
The water would take care of that. I couldn't. I went over the seat and into the water and found the driver, fearing he or she would be like the burned creature on the floorboard.
I got the driver's head out of the water, saw it was a woman. I started pulling her into the backseat by the chin. The rising water helped me.
The car was going under now, and I had time to get one deep breath before the whole kit and caboodle sank to the bottom of the lake.
The mud was stirred up down there" and it was like being in creamed coffee. Somehow I got out the open window and tugged the woman after me, tried to kick to the surface.
The woman was deadweight and I couldn't get us up. We sank to the bottom. Since we were near the edge of the lake, it wasn't too deep, so I buried my toes in the sand and flexed my knees and shot us to the surface.
I managed her on shore, rolled her on her stomach, got hold of her arms and worked them some, pausing to push in the middle of her back. She puked.
I turned her over, cleared her mouth with my fingers and started mouth-to-mouth. It was a stinky job and tasted of vomit, but after a short time she coughed hard once and started breathing regularly.
She blinked at me. "Timothy?"
"He the burned guy?"
She nodded.
"He's still down there."
"Best," she said, and tried to get up on her elbows. She looked at that part of my body I least wanted her to look at.
"Small," she said.
"It's cold, for Christsakes."
But she wasn't listening. She had fallen back and was out of it.
5
Considering the way she had insulted my anatomy, I wasn't in any rush to pick her up and carry her to Jungle Home, but I finally gave it a try. She was a pretty hefty gal.
I put her down, went back to Jungle Home, found the keys to the camper and drove over there and got her, loaded her into the back, letting her head bump the tailgate only a couple of times.
When I got her stretched out, I moved her hair out of her face and took my first good look at her. She wasn't bad-looking. Somewhere between eighteen and twenty-one. Guessing ages is not one of my better attributes.
Under the wet clothes her breasts looked nice and so did the width of her hips and the shape of her thighs. I thought about getting her wet clothes off to make her more comfortable, but I feared an ulterior motive.
I left her there in a puddle and went back to Jungle Home, stopping on the way to look at myself in the truck's wing mirror. My hair was wet and twisted and my scraggly little beard looked like a smear of grease. If I was going to have whiskers, why couldn’t I have a full set like Bob and Crier.
I did the best I could combing my hair with my fingers, then went on up to Jungle Home and put on my blanket and tied it around my waist with a belt I had made of vines. Then I lay down on my sleeping bag and found that all that exertion had worn me out. I went right to sleep.
Next thing I knew, Bob and Crier were back. They had a vine basket of fruit, but no game.
"The great hunters return," I said.
"He saw a bunny," Bob said, "and couldn't shoot it. He got all dewy-eyed."
"It had a little pink nose," Crier said. "After all that's happened, I just couldn't kill something."
"Think those fish you catch live happily ever after in our bowel movements?"
"They aren't cute like bunnies," Crier said.
"Boys," I said, "there's a girl down in the camper."
"Don't joke me," Bob said. "I see a fork in a tree and I get hard."
"I'm not joking," I said, and told them the story.
We brought the basket of fruit with us, and when we got around to the back of the camper and looked inside, it was empty. There was a pool of water where she had been and her clothes and tennis shoes were laid out on the tailgate.
"Melted, I figure," Bob said.
"I'm right here."
We turned. She was about ten feet away, wearing only faded blue bikini panties. Her blond hair was dry now and somehow she had combed it out. It fell to her wide shoulders and tumbled over them and, much to our happiness, stopped just before covering her breasts, which were firm and full with areolae the size of half-dollars and the color of warm beef gravy. The nipples were thick and firm, like the tips of pointing fingers. She had a narrow waist and her ribs showed from having lost too much weight. There were faint, pink bands here and there on her body, as if she had been lashed with something.
She had her hands on her hips and was looking right at us. If she was embarrassed, I couldn't tell it.
"Christ," she said. "Haven't you boys seen titties before?"
"There's titties," Bob said, "then there's titties."
"This is my first time, ma'am," Crier said. "I've heard of them, of course."
"Fuck with me, any kind of way," she said, "and I'll break your legs off and shove them up your assholes."
"Me first," Crier said.
But the way she looked at us then made us step aside. She came over and got her clothes and started putting them on.
"You boys enjoying the show?"
"Very much, yes," Bob said.
S
he finished dressing, sat on the tailgate, and looked at us. I guarantee we weren't as pleasant to look at as she was.
She said, "Had a cousin told me about a boyfriend she'd had. Said he was so horny he'd go to the ocean and fuck the water in case there might be a shark out there that had swallowed a girl. Know what she meant now. You could at least close your mouths."
"We're not so bad," Crier said. "We brought you some fruit."
She eyed the fruit we had left on the tailgate and said, "It isn't full of dick holes, is it?"
"Oh, come on," I said, "we're not that bad. All things considered, we're doing okay. We're not trying to rape you, are we? Look here. I'm Jack, this is Bob, and this is Crier."
Her face changed a little then, and there was something behind that pretty skin and those green-gray eyes that wasn't so pretty. But whatever it was went away as quickly as it had arrived.
She took a plumlike fruit from the basket and bit out of it. The juice leaped from it in gold beads and flecked her lips and cheeks and she began to chew. After a moment, she spat out the seed, and went deeper into the fruit like a lion biting the innards out of an antelope's belly. When she finished that one, she ate another.
Somehow, watching her eat was as good as a peep-show. None of us said a word.
When she was finished, she said, "Now you've had a look at my tits and watched me eat. I hope you're happy. Had you showed five minutes earlier, you could have gone off in the bushes with me and watched me pee."
"You could have called us," Bob said.
"Nice dresses," she said, nodding at Bob and me.
"Let's not talk fashion," I said. "Tell us about yourself. Before the drive-in and up to now."
"Why would you want to know?"
"Entertainment," I said. "It's not like we have a pressing social calendar. We know more than we want to know about each other. Give us something new to think about."
"All right," she said. "Sit down and get comfy, because this is going to take a while."
SECOND REEL
(Grace Talks About Frat House Fires,
Raw Liver, and a Nine Iron to the Noggin)
1
My name is Grace, and I come from a little burg called Nacogdoches. It's supposed to be the oldest town in Texas. We got a sign that says so, but it doesn't look that old—the town, I mean, not the sign.
The place is still kind of neat, but it's going to hell fast, and when I look at photographs Mom and Dad have of it twenty-five years ago, it really chaps my highly attractive ass.
It's one of those towns where the fine old houses and the massive trees have been torn or cut down so progress can slither in. You know progress. Burger King, McDonald's, and all manner of plastic eateries where the wrappers for the burgers and the lettuce inside them taste pretty much alike, and it's my opinion the wrappers have a more natural tint than the lettuce and are probably more nutritious.
These days the old houses are gone and you can stand in the parking lot of McDonald's on North Street and toss a dried Big Mac underhanded and bounce it off the front glass of Wendy's on the other side of the street. Or you can go over to University Drive and toss a pepperoni pizza., no anchovies, out of the driveway of Mazzio's Pizza and wing an innocent bystander on the table-laden deck of Arby's.
I went to high school and college in good ol' Nac. The college is called Stephen F. Austin University, and it's named after one of the guys that helped con Texas from Mexico.
I was majoring in anthropology/archaeology, but what I really wanted to be was a karate instructor, since my dad, who was a black belt in kenpo, had been teaching me ever since I was five. If it matters, I'm first degree brown belt now.
But like Dad, I couldn't see any real future in martial arts. Or to be more precise, I think I let Mom convince me there wasn't any future in it. She talked Dad into being a manager of an optical store and she wanted something like that for me, or as she always put it,
"Kicking people is all right, but you can't make a decent living at it. You got to have something to fall back on."
Well, I had been hearing this speech since I was old enough to know which was the business end of a tampon, so when I saw this National Geographic special on archaeology on television, I thought it might be just what I was looking for.
There were these folks with tans about the color of fresh walnut stains applied to burnt mahogany, wearing khaki shorts and pith helmets, and they were swarming all over these ruins. Fire ants couldn't have been any busier.
They were doing a lot of pointing and writing in notebooks and looking intelligent. There were close-ups of pottery shards from pots that had been made before Jesus was old enough to suck Mary's tit, and there were skull fragments and pieces of bones from the guys and gals that had made the pots.
The show ended with a close-up of this woman with sweat running from under her pith helmet and onto her face and mixing with the sand there, and she was looking out over these little fragments of walls, looking soulful as a Baptist preacher, contemplating the past and all the great civilizations that had arisen there and folded back in on themselves like a card table.
It was inspiring.
Thinking back on it now, she may have been looking out over that sand waiting for somebody to pick her up in an air-conditioned truck and drive her over to a Mideast Hilton.
But the desire to dig holes in the ground and hold the bony remains of ancient pottery makers in my hands had come over me like the Holy Ghost. I couldn't think of anything else. I checked out archaeology books and read them cover to cover and started envisioning ancient civilizations marching ghostlike through Nacogdoches, throwing down pots and bowls and breaking them so I could find them a zillion years later.
What I didn't get from those books, or refused to get, was how goddamn hard archaeology is. And it's dirty work. Those people on National Geographic weren't just deeply tanned, they were downright filthy.
At the end of a day, having sifted through enough sand to fill Galveston Beach, the sun burning through my clothes like an X ray, it was hard for me to take a whole lot of pride in a few broken pieces of pottery that some prehistoric dude had marked on with a pine needle.
Looking back on it, it was pretty wonderful stuff, I guess, but I don't like working in the heat and getting so dirty you have to use a putty knife to get it off your elbows. And I didn't even have a pith helmet. Just a cap that said Nacogdoches Dragons on it, and they weren't winning many ball games.
If someone from National Geographic had showed up right then, I'd have stuffed a year's run of magazines down their throat and kicked them until they shit a single bound volume.
It's not that I'm a weak sister. I'm not. Karate gave me patience as well as determination.
But it's mostly clean work. A little sweat and dirty feet is all. And I did my workouts in our air-conditioned garage or the college gym. If you have to use martial arts on the street, it doesn't take but a few moments to open up a can of whup ass, then you can find some air-conditioned building to cool off in when it's over.
Even indoor archaeology is hard.
On one dig I found some pottery pieces, and I was assigned to try and reconstruct them.
That's like giving a blind, crippled monkey a hammer, a bag of nails, and a pile of lumber and telling him to build an A-frame. I'm the gal who still has an unfinished fifty-piece puzzle of a white cat in my closet at home, and I got that puzzle for my tenth birthday.
I'd go to the lab every night and try to do that pottery, and I'll tell you, after fifteen minutes of that I was dangerous. I wanted to kill something and drink a couple of bottles of Nervine.
Bottom line is, I quit. And that was the turning point. Had I stayed in archaeology, I'd probably have been home studying, or up at the lab, destroying my nerves with that pottery instead of meeting up with Timothy and Sue Ellen and tooling on over to the Orbit Drive-in that weird Friday night.
2
So, on the night after I'd given up archaeology and my chance to
have something to fall back on, I was out riding around in my old Chevy Nova trying to figure out what I was going to do with the rest of my life, and I'll tell you, what I was coming up with was not pretty.
I thought about all those stories I'd heard about college dropouts and how they spent their lives working behind the counter at K mart or pulling the train for the football team during off season. I could envision myself standing on the corner of North and Main with a cigarette jutting out of my mouth, one side of my lip pulled up in a permanent snarl, and me thinking how I can get a few dollars so I can go over to the 7 Eleven and buy me a bottle of Thunderbird wine. Nothing would be too low for me to do: prostitution, theft, drug-running, murder, working as a used-car salesman. In time I would be shunned by winos and Baptists alike.
On the other hand, I was also thinking about whoever had inherited my prehistoric pottery shards, and I felt a wicked elation that while I was out tooling around, someone was hunched over those shards with their eyes twitching, their hands shaking, wishing I had quietly pushed those fragments down a gopher hole.
Anyway, I was riding around, taking back streets mostly, thinking, and I came up on this fire.
There were cars pulled over to the curb and people were standing on the sidewalk and out front of their houses, watching a frat house burn down.
I pulled across from the house, behind the string of parked cars, got out and leaned on the Nova and watched.
The fire department was there and the firemen were jerking hoses, yelling and hopping on the lawn like grasshoppers. Every now and then one of them would erupt from the doorway of the burning structure like the end result of the Heimlich maneuver, land in the yard on his hands and knees, and crawl about feebly, coughing smoke like a little dragon.
I had never seen a fire like that before, and it didn't take Smokey the Bear to tell me it was some kind of serious. A blazing paper hat would have been easier to save.
While I was watching the frat joint burn up—hating that it was an old house of the sort the city council loved to see go so an aluminum building the shape of a box could take its place, or some concrete could be laid down for a car lot—a tan van came down the street and stopped at the curb and three guys fell out of it yelling. Frats, I figured. Most likely they had gone for a six-pack, or to work their version of heavy machinery, a Trojan dispenser, and had come back to find they had forgot to turn the fire off from under the chili, and now their pad was on its way to becoming air pollution.