by Hob Broun
Tildy nodded; she knew about the slowness. “He doesn’t try and keep you home?”
“No point in that. Besides, Donnie weighs close to three hundred pounds. How many times is a guy like that going to get lucky? Once, and I’m it…. But what about you? What do you get into on the weekends?”
“Not a lot. Drive to Tampa and eat out.”
“I know you’re bluffing, a fox like you. Think about it some more and I’ll be back with drinks.”
Not much to think about—that was the problem. Tildy was embarrassed at her own dullness. Playing catch with Karl on a typical off-work day, hitting a few fungos just to watch the ball sail; sometimes going off on a treasure expedition, but unable to share Karl’s rudimentary excitement at digging up a high school ring near a roadside picnic table or a few black Mercury dimes at a demolition site. If she weren’t so perverted, could make the quick, animating choice instead of turning from it, she’d still be in New York and shacked up with Looie. No one to blame, sweets, but yourself.
DaVita showed up with two drinks, two men, and an unsettling gleam in her eye. They all four shoved in around a table for two and it was instant kneesies.
“Tildy, I’d like for you to meet Leroy and Bob. Leroy runs the security for Sears and Bob manages … What is it, Bob, sporting goods?”
“Affirmative. That’s my area, rods and balls.” Beefy Bob chortled through his mustache and his elbow pressed into Tildy’s left breast.
Leroy, squinting over the rim of his Bloody Mary said, “How about it for sports? Do you do tennis? Horseback riding?” Leroy was tall and pop-eyed, his hair cut in early Beatles fashion, sort of a Merseybeat Ichabod Crane. His arm went around DaVita and squeezed. “Now DaVita, she loves to go four or five miles on a stallion, right?”
“Don’t let these boys startle you,” DaVita cautioned. “That’s just what they’re after.”
“Not at all, not at all.” Bob sadly puffed his lips at the extent to which they’d been misconstrued. “I mean would we be making the money we make and looking how we do if we weren’t a couple of straight arrows?”
“I’d like another,” Tildy said.
DaVita emptied her glass. “Me too,” she said with her mouth full of ice cubes.
“Okay, this is my round,” Leroy volunteered. “Let’s get the party going.”
While he was off seeing to refills Bob stuttered his chair to a strategic angle and dropped his hand in Tildy’s lap. She tossed it back. With the sudden downshift of a telethon emcee going from toilet joke to fund appeal, Bob came on all chumpy and sincere.
“Hey, I’m really sorry. Don’t get ticked off, okay? I’m not always this crude but sometimes I get so nervous, you know, nervous around women that I act like a dumb high school kid.”
“No whispering, Bobby.” DaVita waggled a finger at him. “This is a party. You gotta be loud.”
Tildy smiled at her, but it was hard to tell if she and DaVita were allies or not.
Then Leroy was back and it was time for a toast to Mother’s beaten biscuits, dancing by moonlight, and, for all present, the peace and contentment of a sow on her belly in a bog. They all touched glasses and drank. Leroy, who seemed deeply moved by his own words, had to be cajoled into sitting back down. DaVita tickled under his chin and told him he had poetry in his soul.
“Don’t worry about it,” Bob said. “He got that off a record jacket.”
“Bullshit.” Leroy sent a fine spray of tomato juice across the table.
“Lighten up now, both of you. This is a party.” DaVita made them all touch glasses again.
Trying to ignore everything but what was in her glass, Tildy was struck by the sudden inspiration that separately or together DaVita had already fucked these clowns about a dozen times. This better not be a setup, she thought.
Bob, meanwhile, had returned with a vengeance to his original tack. Tildy jumped when he pinched her thigh, drinks sloshed all over the table and now it was Bob’s turn to buy a round. Leroy went off to empty his bladder, leaving the girls alone to discuss developments.
“What’s cooking here?” Tildy wanted to know.
“Bob’s pestering you? So you’ll sit next to Leroy when they get back. He’s much easier to handle.”
“Then you know these two from before?”
“Oh hell, yes. We’re like long-term buddies, drank ourselves unconscious in here many a time. Couple of sad guys, really. Snakebit. Mrs. Leroy, she lost her arm last summer. Driving down the road with her arm out the window, truck went by with a two-by-four sticking out and tore it right off at the shoulder.” DaVita mimed the impact, the expression of horror and revulsion, seeing your arm all mashed on the highway like somebody’s dead cat. “And Bobby’s so cranked up most of the time it’s pathetic, like a disaster just waiting to happen. But they’re totally harmless, believe me.”
Tildy needed subtitles, something to translate all this bar palaver into words of one syllable. “You and I were going to have a quick beer,” she said lamely. Was she being encouraged to come across with a charity fuck for one of these “sad guys”?
DaVita reached for Tildy’s hand with sisterly reassurance and her grip was soft, insinuating. “Oooh, your fingers are like icicles. You need to relax a little. I don’t think that job of yours is worth it if it makes you so uptight.”
“You’ve got advice for everyone, don’t you?”
“Know what I do? I’ve got these special breathing exercises. There’s a rhythm you have to master, but after that it’s easy. You get those lungs working smooth and steady and soon all your bullshit problems just float away. I’ll show you sometime.”
Bob arrived with a tray of highballs and an angry waitress at his heels. She windmilled her arms and screamed that he had no right taking her customers away like she wasn’t fit to carry drinks ten feet across a room, and he’d better give the tray back before she had him bounced the hell out. Bob was serving all the while with deep, smirking bows, throwing little scalloped napkins down to catch the frost-drip from the glasses. When he was through he flipped the tray at her like a pie plate and tried clumsily to jam a five-dollar bill into her modest cleavage. The girl took the money, but she was crying.
Tildy slid back as Bob melted into his chair. “What was that for? Do you get a jolt out of wiping your feet on people?” She was hot and cool at the same time.
“So don’t get all in a sweat over nothing. She got a nice fat tip out of it.” To DaVita, with a snide, shimmying delivery, “This is the stripper you told us about? So what’s with the goody-goody bit?”
Tildy turned flame-thrower eyes on DaVita and saw in her face sheepishness but no apology. “You’ve got it all wrong. There’s been a misunderstanding. I was a stripper, true, but in my uncle’s antique shop in New Orleans, the French Quarter. I stripped the paint off furniture.”
DaVita’s bracelets jangled in the bubble of uneasy silence. The evening, the party, had quietly slipped its bonds and was beyond capture, free to roam as it liked. Leroy loomed up with the orange caftan lady on his arm and offered to take the whole crew out for bar-b-que at some nigger spot back in the woods. There were no takers. Bob slurped from every available glass and looked ready to hit someone. Asking plaintively why, with the world so overpopulated, folks had to go on being lonely, the caftan lady wept inconsolably. DaVita chewed her split ends and asked if anyone would like to buy her a pack of cigarettes. There were no takers.
Even Leroy could pick up these vibes. “Hey, what happened, guys? Did I miss the boat or something?”
“Totally,” Tildy said.
“Well, fuck you, people.” And Leroy led his sobbing comrade away to a quiet venue near the restrooms where they could get to know each other better.
“Just the three of us now,” Bob said. “Ain’t that cozy.” He changed moods like paper hats.
Tildy slowly twisted to face him, lips flirtatiously slack, dampened by a sliding tongue. “As cozy as you want to make it.” Fingers darting inside his ra
yon shirt to tug at coiled chest hairs.
Bob flinched. “Don’t burn your fingers, baby.”
“You’d really like to get into my pants, wouldn’t you?”
“I surely would. Whatta you think?”
“I think one asshole in these pants is enough.”
She stood, tipping the ashtray onto Bob’s blossoming erection and, without so much as a glance in DaVita’s direction, headed for the exit.
It was a beautiful night. A beautiful night for a secret thought or a hanging. She heard DaVita’s jewelry sounds behind her.
“You’re mad, you’re mad.” DaVita moved as though there were a hot griddle under her feet. “I should never have mentioned to those tired rejects about your being a stripper. I know that.”
“Why are you following me?”
“I feel bad.”
“Yeah, don’t we all.” With a flat hand Tildy swept water beads off the car and onto DaVita’s chest.
“Hey, come on. So you got naked on stage. So what.”
“So,” pointing inside, “so you don’t tempt a hungry man with a steak.”
“You think I was pimping you? Well, honey, that just ain’t fair. It wasn’t that way at all. Those guys are drinkers, not doers, I’m here to tell you. I thought we’d have a little fun with ’em, tease ’em along, get a few free belts, but that’s it. Shit, I’m hurt you could think anything else.”
“Who invited them over? Not me.”
DaVita tugged at her wilting hair in frustration. “How could I know it’s going to turn into an ugly scene.”
DaVita was eager to please. Tildy softened a bit, regaining a sense of—was it proportion? “You shouldn’t have waited until now to tell me the score.”
“You’re right, of course you’re right. A little bit late, that’s chronic with me. So I still owe you, don’t I?”
“Never mind.”
“But I want to make it up to you.” DaVita was pleading; she looked pale and wasted in the rain. “We’ll go out Saturday and I’ll show you my secret beach. No one ever goes there so we’ll have it all to ourselves. Some days it’s good for body surfing and you can pick up nice shells if you want, they’re all over. I make necklaces and sell them.” Touching her throat, “I don’t have one on to show you but …”
Tildy opened the car door and threw in her bag. “Let’s just call it a draw and forget it.”
“No. I really like you, Tildy. I mean, I don’t even know who you are, but it’s one of those gut things.” DaVita shivered. Her vehemence was mysterious but compelling. “It would be good for me right now to have a girlfriend.”
“Agreed.” Tildy slid behind the wheel, turned the key. “A little sun, a little sand. I’ll meet you in front of the store at around eleven.”
“Cool, cool. And I’ll bring my kids along, I want you to meet them. They’re real sweet. I wouldn’t lie and say I’m happy to have ’em around all the time, but they’re my kids and I love ’em. Okay? So you drive careful now and don’t worry about me. I can hitch my way home, done it hundreds of times.”
Tildy activated the wipers, waved quickly, backed out.
“Don’t worry about me,” DaVita murmured into the headlights. “I’ll just put out my thumb and get soaked.”
The children were shy and pretty with hair of seaweed black. Robbie was five, Gina was three, and they held tightly to one another’s hands, moved cautiously onto the back seat with their dripping popsicles.
“Don’t you go making a mess back there,” DaVita said gently.
“Yes ma’am.” Robbie’s lips were tinted wild cherry. Kneeling, one hand braced on his sister’s head, he pushed in the chrome knobs to lock both doors.
DaVita pushed a ragged straw bag between them. “You have to both be watching this for me ’cause our sandwiches and everything are in here. That’ll be your job, okay?”
“Yes ma’am.”
But Robbie pushed the bag into one corner, Gina clambered over the transmission hump, and they sat close, clasping sticky hands.
Tildy was not in the best frame of mind for a weekend drive. It was hot and growing hotter and DaVita unbuttoned her shirt; a lacy scar curved out from under her bikini top. She snooped restlessly through debris in the glove compartment.
“Can’t you go any faster? We’re liable to miss the prime tanning period.”
“It’s an old car.”
But Tildy put a hair’s extra pressure on the accelerator. A delivery van zoomed past, honking. She checked the odometer, then the rearview mirror; 12.7 miles and still not a word out of those kids.
They reached the coast and turned south past fruit stands and reptile museums and pastel stucco bunkers offering live crabs by the bag. Tildy rolled her window down to catch some of that salt breeze, but all she could smell was diesel smoke. Jammed up behind a laboring trailer truck, they passed slowly by a tongue-shaped inlet where men were wading waist-deep and scooping great weed balls into olive-drab buckets on shore. A guard sat nearby on a camp chair, shotgun across his knees. His bald head was red and peeling.
“Water hyacinth,” DaVita explained. “It fucks up boat propellers so they rip it out, chop it up, spray it with molasses and use it for cattle feed.”
“I’m impressed. Where’d you pick all that up?”
“Those are boys from the farm. Little bit ago you coulda seen Donnie out there pulling twice as much as anyone else.”
Robbie broke his vow of silence: “My dad’s so big he could pull a train.”
DaVita howled with laughter, reached over to squeeze a little baby fat leg. “But he couldn’t be the caboose, could he?”
“No ma’am.”
Past a line of palms, through a couple of S curves, and DaVita said, “Take a right, your next available right.”
They rumbled down a sandy trail descending gently toward water that was dirty green with shreds of white over the surface where the wind kicked it up. With a long sweep of sky behind it, the silvery beach was right out of an airline magazine. The only problem was the barbed wire they would have to climb to reach it; and the big red NO TRESSPASSING signs every ten feet. To the left, where the shore swelled out round and fat like the toe of a sadist’s boot, was a power generating station. If anything was coming out of the monstrous stacks it was colorless.
“Park right here and you’ll be invisible from the road.”
“‘Violators subject to fine and imprisonment’?”
“It’s all right. I’ve been here lots of times and it’s always deserted. We won’t have to bother about suits.”
DaVita padded the top strands of wire with folded towels, boosted Tildy up, then lifted the children over to her. With a vault and a spin she cleared the wire herself, landing gracefully with arms spread as in the finish of a tap routine. They picked a spot below small dunes tufted with sawgrass and laid a blanket down. Robbie took the plastic pail, Gina the matching shovel, and they wandered off along the hot sand.
“They’re independent,” DaVita said. “I like that. You been married a few years, how come you don’t have any kids?”
“It never came up really, we were both away so much. Now? Who needs one more thing to fail at. I don’t have so much confidence in myself as a mother.”
“That didn’t stop me. Fuck it, I know I don’t do all the things I should, but they’re tough and they’ll get by—or not—regardless of what I do.”
DaVita peeled off her clothes, then her bikini, and stood hipshot, humming softly, challenging Tildy to look.
“You think I got a good body?”
The scar was a tilted capital C under one tiny breast and her sloping crotch was shaved. She pinched her thighs, slapped at them, thrust herself forward with palms on her ass.
“Too much bone, you know. You can count every rib I’ve got.”
Staring at this scrawny, breakable woman, Tildy did not know what she felt, but it was sitting heavily in the pit of her stomach.
“For a man my tits are too small but I li
ke them just the way they are, and like I tell Donnie, anything over a mouthful is wasted. I think you maybe got a little more up here. Come on, let’s see. Let’s see who’s bigger.”
Tildy looked down at the chipped pink polish on DaVita’s toenails, then over at the surf sliding in, frothing, bouncing up in little wedge-shaped waves. Whatever the spirit was, wherever it was leading, she’d get with it. Was this what DaVita meant by toughness? With stunning speed, she got naked.
“Zowie.” DaVita whistled through her teeth. “You got gorgeous lines. Yeah, everything tapers just right. But when you get right down to it I’d say we were about even. My breasts are firmer, see, the way you hang just makes them look bigger. I bottle-fed my kids from day one ’cause I didn’t want that droop.”
“I’m a thirty-two B. How about you?”
“I take an A cup myself, but I still say we’re even.”
This seemed to satisfy DaVita and she lay back on the blanket brushing hair out of her face, a fine web of sweat along her collarbone.
“Can you see the kids? Are they okay?”
“I guess so.”
Tildy stretched out on her stomach. Hot as it was, there were goose bumps all up and down her legs. She shifted from side to side, digging herself a hollow in the sand. The itch of the blanket was not unpleasant. After a while she felt her flesh soften, her muscles relax. The sun was directly overhead and the still air seemed to hum with its clean yellow fire.
“I love the heat.” DaVita sat up and began to anoint herself with olive oil from a glass jar. “Mmm, that’s good,” massaging her breasts, scissoring her fingers on shiny, tumid nipples. “I hope I’m not making you uptight. When I’m close to the ocean like this with the sun on me I feel like the first woman on earth.”
Tildy ducked her head and said nothing.
“Don’t you want some of this? You’ll get an evil burn without it. I’ve never seen skin so white.”