“What I want to know,” the black guy said to Wayne, “is what would happen if Deion Sanders say to Mickey Mantle, Run it out, you piece of shit homeboy!”
From his distance, Harry announced, “Mickey Mantle had bad knees, he never run shit.”
“I know that,” the black guy said. “That ain’t my point.”
“I get you point,” Harry said. “All shit break loose is what happen.”
The black guy raised his hand and Harry high-fived it. Wayne looked on.
Wayne said, “I don’t understand Jesse Jackson or Mickey Mantle or Deion Sanders.”
“I believe that,” the black guy said, and looked to Harry for another high five, but Harry declined. Wayne bought the round and Harry served the beers and neatened everything up. Wayne didn’t know why he wanted to talk to the black guy in the first place, except he was sure the guy was a roofer and Wayne would be needing a job, but he didn’t need a job this soon, so he didn’t know why he started talking to the black guy, roofer or not, but now he had a buzz and didn’t mind talking to him.
“Hey!” he suddenly said. “You mean this thing where Carlton Fisk says to Deion Sanders, Run it out, you piece of shit or something?”
The black guy and Harry exchanged glances.
“Einstein,” the black guy said.
“Git it, git it, git it, guitar Sam!” Wayne shouted. “I get it now.”
“Get my man a beer,” the black guy said. “That is one trazee white man.”
“That is John Wayne,” Harry said.
“Wayne, Stone,” Wayne said to the black guy.
“Robert Williams,” the black guy said to Wayne. “Don’t call me Bob.” Wayne and Robert Williams shook hands clumsily, Wayne attempting a black shake and Robert Williams a white shake. The fumbling resulted in Wayne chuckling and a white shake.
“So they hiring where you are?” Wayne asked.
“What day is this?”
“Friday.”
“Monday will be Monday, right?”
“Stoweno.”
“It’s roofing, right?”
“Water runs downhill and wet things don’t stick together.”
“They hiring.”
Wayne had a pair of the most bleached-out blue eyes Robert Williams had ever seen. It was hard to maintain, drunk or not, that those eyes could be connected to the devil. In fact, when Robert Williams shook Wayne’s hand, thinking it an act of racial duplicity, he was surprised to receive from Wayne a current of no malice whatsoever. Wayne was a new kind of blue-eyed devil: one who could not say nigger with sufficient heat or conviction to be anything but comical or innocently self-referential. What Robert Williams felt, despite himself, when he shook the fumbling, dirty hand of this Cloroxed pinkish devil was a small surge of pity.
On Monday morning at Ponderosa Roofing and Sheet Metal Robert Williams spoke highly of Wayne’s credentials as a roofer and Wayne was hired.
After securing his position at Ponderosa Roofing and Sheet Metal, which also manufactured, it turned out, serious roofing equipment, for which Wayne thought he could be a sales representative, particularly for the gas-powered gravel scarifier, as it was properly called, or power spudder, as it was known by those who used it, Wayne went on a date. There was a woman in the office named Pamela Forktine and Wayne could not resist asking her every morning for plastic spoons for the coffee-stirring operations, which were prodigious operations at Ponderosa or any other roofing company at six in the morning among troops as hungover and blear—their brogans flared open at the untied ankles and sticking to the floor, their flannel shirts not altogether tucked in, their hair wet-combed—as the troops at Ponderosa or any roofing company.
Wayne said, “Spoons, Ms. Forktine. Ms. Forktine, spoons.” Pamela Forktine was older than Wayne. She had put up with the advances of every description of loser testosterone hardcase it was conceivable to put up with, until Wayne. Wayne was to her mind so far gone on rancid testosterone he was sweet. That her fifteen or so years on him did not seem to bother him—a direct result, as she saw it, of the hormonal dementia these boys suffered—made her certain he was sweet.
The fifteen or so years she had on him did not bother Wayne, until they went out and Pamela Forktine took the bull by the horns and said, while they were going counter-clockwise in their cowboy boots and she was looking for Wayne’s chest hair between the pearl snaps of his shirt with her finger, “You want to do the bone dance?”
“Do what?” Wayne said, stopping their counterclockwise drift among the stream and creating eddies of resentment on the floor around them. “I mean, sure,” he said, and they got going again.
“It’s what kids say,” Pamela Forktine said. “Bone in, bone out.”
Wayne sort of bent over at the waist, blowing his nose at this. He turned a red far deeper than the yoke on his shirt. He had a piece of ass, it was a lock, but this kind of talk embarrassed him to a dangerous point. If Pamela Forktine wanted to do the bone dance, then Pamela Forktine had best not say anymore about it.
They went to her house. There she scared Wayne by looking in another room and announcing, “It’s okay. He’s out.”
“Who?”
“Rafe.”
“Rafe?”
“Oh. Raphael.”
“Who’s Raphael?”
“My son.”
“How old is he?”
“Nineteen.” Pamela Forktine had led Wayne into the living room and was making them a drink in the kitchen. Wayne pondered getting beat up by a nineteen-year-old kid named Raphael. His original concern had been that Pamela Forktine was married and that he might be shot by a Mr. Forktine. That was, now, preferable to this other. Raphael Forktine was either going to be a homosexual of some sort or some kind of terminator. Rafe Forktine sounded like death row.
When he looked back on it, picturing Pamela Forktine’s death-row-candidate son beating the ever-living shit out of him might have been the high point in the travail of his and Pamela Forktine’s eminent time together. But Rafe Forktine did not burst in and rescue Wayne from what was about to happen. No one did, including God.
Before God and everybody else, Pamela Forktine walked in the room with two drinks and her blouse open, no bra. This required of Wayne a careful, very casual double take. Her breasts were not altogether visible because they seemed to point down and away from each other, like a cartoon hound dog’s eyes. It was the end of subtlety on Pamela Forktine’s part. “Where’s that bone, Wayne?”
Wayne turned red and made a splitting noise.
“In here?” Pamela Forktine made one stroking pass, one unzipping pass, and scared Wayne with an immediate and vigorous program of what he would later term gobbling. It included a gobbling noise. Wayne would have laughed but was too frightened. The gobbling worked, though, and Pamela Forktine got up very cuddly in his neck, her knees facing him on the sofa, and said, “Oh, sweetie. I hope I’m okay.”
“You’re okay, sure you’re okay—”
“No, I mean. Well. I’ve been…”
This scared Wayne again. “You’ve been…what?”
“Dry.”
“What?”
“I’ve been, well, dry.”
There they were in a brightly lit living room waiting for a nineteen-year-old son to avenge his mother, who said things like bone in bone out, gobbled you, was dry. Wayne was about to lose it. Why did pussy have to be this way? Why could it not be like in a magazine? Like in a book? Like at least in a story, something that went smooth and worked.
But Pamela Forktine was not giving up. She gobbled, she got Wayne into the bedroom, she got on Wayne, and Wayne had a passing fancy that her hair felt like hemp rope and her skin like party balloons three days after the party. But this felt good, this harsh rope and loose satin, and made its opposite number, fine hair and young tight flesh, seem like tomatoes and eggplants, and Wayne began if not gobbling back at least nibbling this satiny crinkly Pamela Forktine, and Pamela Forktine, when that didn’t tickle too much, seem
ed to like it and kept saying “Oh, sweetie” and was not dry. It worked. Wayne gasped up on her like a shipwrecked man on his found island. “Oh, sweetie, sweetie, sweetie,” Pamela Forktine said, patting his head in rhythm.
This was a very sad and silly business, Wayne thought, this woman calling him this for not doing any more than not losing his desire and spooing in her in five minutes, but she was calling him this sweetie nonsense without any joke, she was serious, and that made Wayne feel, despite himself, good. She could by God call him whatever she wanted to. What had she ever done to him? She had fucked him, that’s what, and that was what he’d asked for. He was going to be man enough to take what he got if he was man enough to ask for it.
And he was asking for it, man or not. Man. God, or whoever, put you here, and you have to ask for it. He puts water here and it has to run downhill. You get up there in fucking 120-degree heat and have to stop its running. You fix the fucking leak.
“I sprung a leak in you, Pamela Forktine,” Wayne said.
“You sure did.”
“Was it too soon?”
“No, sweetie. It was just fine.”
Just fine, Wayne knew, meant too soon. So what? Was that his fault? No, it was not. Water runs downhill. It has to.
It was not a new beginning, but it was, Wayne thought, new enough. He was half asleep and inadvertently said, aloud, “New enough,” and Pamela Forktine said, “Hmm? Did you say nude enough?”
“Sounds like a wiener,” Wayne said.
They nestled and snuggled together. Pamela Forktine said, “Do you like cereal? Rafe likes cereal. You can stay. There’s enough.”
“There’s nude enough?”
“Nude enough.”
It was their first joke together. Wayne said, “I had a twin brother no one knows about. Sparky. Sparky died and Wayne lived.”
“I’m sorry, sweetie. How old was he?”
“Sparky was three. Minutes.”
“Mmmm.”
“Nude enough.”
“I’m nude enough, Wayne.”
“What? More?”
“Sounds like a wiener, sweetie.”
Wayne liked women who said what they wanted. Up to a point. This was the point. This was precisely the point. He liked Pamela Forktine.
Wayne took, as he puts it, a dump. This came out of him loose and burning. It made him step more highly than usual for a few minutes afterward and wish for some kind of soothing salve. “Is there any beer?” he asked Pamela Forktine. This was probably a mistake, at nine in the morning with a new woman with a teenage son possibly already in the kitchen eating cereal. Next he would be watching cartoons. Wayne gave this some thought. Maybe this was not the place to be.
Pamela Forktine had not heard him, apparently, and he heard no noise in the kitchen, so he tiptoed in there and looked, and there was no beer. He went back in the bathroom and closed the door and looked at himself in the mirror. His hair was dirty and it had the kind of control to it that suggested someone had jerked large chunks of it out. Except it was so greasy how could anyone get a grip on it? Wayne did this himself—grabbed a chunk of hair—and felt it slipping in his hand well before it hurt to pull it. He thought about a shower. That might constitute a moving-in gesture—he did not want that. And he did not want this Rafe character, convict or cartoon-watcher cereal-eater, to find him in the shower the first time they met.
He looked at himself again. His face was, as all faces are to their owners, inscrutable. It was “normal” up to a point. It had high, glossy, rather boyish cheeks and a freckled nose, not too veined, and the always slightly burned forehead was plain. Then the trouble started. That wild skyline of hair and, when he smiled, something that gave Wayne the willies, like mold on cheese gave him the willies, because you never knew, once you got away from outright yellow cheese into cheese that was white, or nearly white, it could be bluish or greenish, and soft, you never knew how soft until you touched it—once you got away from yellow cheese you did not know if the mold was mold or part of the cheese itself. That was the feeling he had, looking at his teeth in Pamela Forktine’s mirror, on a Saturday morning. He looked around the bathroom: it was good old tile, black and white, and she had knickknack shelves everywhere and all the towels and face towels neatly hung, and the toilet was covered in carpet that matched the rug on the floor. He smiled at himself quickly and got the blue-cheese willies and got in the shower anyway.
He soaped up very, very well and took two or three kinds of shampoo from a rack of them, whether they said Conditioner or not, or Oily or Dry or Normal, and washed everything hard and got a boner. All right. He was back. The killer was back.
Wayne has set out an aluminum-framed plastic-webbed chaise lounge in the large gravel beside Lake Travis. He gets in the lounge, has him a Coors in one hand and a cigarette in the other, takes a drag and a drink, says, “Ahhhhh…The only thing I need now is for some broad to give me a knobber.” He grins seedily, seedily the only way you can grin if your teeth appear to have small black-and-green flies on them. “A blonde,” he adds.
Another drag on the cigarette and a long pull on the Coors. It does not pay to drink a beer slowly in this heat.
Wayne is pleased with himself. A knobber indeed. Why should Wayne not get a knobber? Why should he? The first question is the one Wayne would entertain if he were to entertain one of them. He won’t. He will entertain only the positive if slight prospect of reclining in the sun beside his rod and reel baited for catfish, drinking a cold beer, not working on a roof, smoking a cigarette, and having a woman, preferably blond, give him a knobber, as he puts it.
Why should he? is the question that only others entertain at this juncture. If he indeed induced a woman to oblige his need, and should a fish manifest, you can see him leaping out of the chair, and out of her mouth, to tend his rod. Should his fiberglass rod, propped on a forked stick driven into the lake gravel, but twitch, Wayne would be there. Missing the fish, as he would, despite his three-time hook-set philosophy, which he is willing to articulate and demonstrate even while losing fish, Wayne would resume his position on the lounge with a fresh beer and say, addressing the blonde still on her knees in the gravel, “Missed him. Okay.”
Thus the question: Can Wayne expect a knobber from a beautiful blonde in the rightful world? And the world’s answer is no.
But Wayne has an advantage over the rightful world. Wayne is certain that he is himself. It is a weak, quivering self, afraid of nearly everything on earth, but Wayne knows it.
Wayne rebaits. Takes one pretty-good-looking chicken heart off his hook and tosses it to the gravel, where ants will find it in about ten minutes, though there is not an ant on the beach, and puts a better-looking chicken heart on, a fresh purple-red cone with a band of yellow fat on it, and casts it out, far like he can, as he puts it in his Mexican English. To cast out as far like he can is farther than he should, because the fish, if there are any, are in closer. But Wayne is the kind to speak perennially of “the channel,” of the necessity of casting into this channel, which is never marked—you have to know—but is always, wherever you fish, far out there, at precisely the distance Wayne can cast if he casts far like he can.
Floyd, Wayne’s brother, still lives with his and Wayne’s mother. Floyd is a large, soft fellow who somehow is not regarded as fat, or quite grown, which is why, probably, at thirty-seven, people do not kill him. He is found in the wee hours wearing plaid sports coats too large even for him, the pockets loaded with science-fiction paperbacks, verbally assaulting police officers. He is arrested, to be bailed out by his mother. He returns home, red-eyed, with his science-fiction books stacked neatly on his folded coat on his high knees during the front-seat ride home in his mother’s car. She is not mad at him, or really worried. He’s Floyd and he’s home.
Wayne is putting his car in a ditch, putting Antabuse under his tongue, putting his kids in a motel to hide them from his wife, putting dollar bills in a jukebox at eleven in the morning, putting a chaise lounge
beside a lake to call for an imaginary broad to give him a knobber. Wayne has thrown away everything except a folding plastic-and-aluminum chair, an Igloo Playmate cooler, and his cigarettes.
Floyd has thrown away nothing—not his childhood room, his toys in it, or his mother.
Mr. Stark, father and husband, threw them all away, one presumes.
Floyd is Mrs. Stark’s boy.
Wayne is on his own.
Wayne inherited the throwing-away. Wayne even threw away the United States Navy. Once, an Ingersoll-Rand compressor, admittedly someone else’s, but still.
Floyd? Asleep. Mrs. Stark is watching a late-morning soap. These people are afraid of nothing.
Floyd is talking, on a roof: “It was thirteen inches long and nine inches around—”
“On the soft?” Wayne asks.
“On the soft,” Floyd says, with a giggle. “I think.”
Wayne pulls out his tape measure and starts measuring roof jacks. As these things happen, the fourth or fifth jack—a lead jacket for open ventilation pipes protruding through roofs—is exactly thirteen inches high and nine inches around.
“If that son of a bitch has a dick that big,” Wayne says, “you tell that son of a bitch I’ll suck it.”
Floyd giggles some more. “I don’t know where he is.”
“I thought he was your friend,” Wayne says.
“My friend’s friend.”
“I don’t care who the son of a bitch is. I’ll suck it.” Wayne measures another jack.
Wayne is serious in the one way Wayne can be serious: trivial outrage. He is being lied to, albeit thirdhand, about a ludicrous matter, but insofar as Wayne has a member that he cannot tell anyone is thirteen inches long by nine inches around—on the soft—he is outraged. The gentleman of mythic dimension has breached a protocol of manners, even for roofers, and Wayne will see him in a duel, if he can. Wayne proposes not to duel evenly, member-to-member; Wayne proposes false submission: he will contest this liar on his knees. The true beauty of this is that if the man did appear, up the ladder and over the horizon of the roof edge, carrying with him this great, leaden soil pipe between his legs, Wayne would not suck it. Wayne would turn profoundly red, giggling now himself—Floyd would stop giggling, at this point embarrassed and a little outraged to have delivered the goods, only to have his brother welsh—and begin complimenting the bearer of the cannon.
Aliens of Affection Page 5