“Are you kidding? You don’t know? That was Merwin Fester?”
“Who’s he?”
“What a dumb fuck you are. He’s the toughest guy in the county.”
“Is that right? Gosh, Feller told me it was someone named Mountain.”
“Pulaski? No way. Fester would kick his butt.”
“Is that a fact? I’d heard this Mountain guy was pretty tough.”
“Shit. He’s no fighter. He’s just big.”
A prodigious fart boomed from Mountain’s stall. Purdy looked his way.
“But Pulaski could probably kick Buford’s ass ….” Blondie began.
“Listen, I’m not sure Mountain could take me,” Purdy said, growing cockier.
“Oh come on…”
“You think I’m some pushover?” he challenged.
“Pulaski would whip you so fast it would make your head spin.”
“Yeah? I’d like to see him try.”
The stall door crashed open and Mountain emerged, boiling with anger. The color drained from Purdy’s face.
“You set me up,” he accused Blondie.
Blondie smiled at him.
“Boy, you got a big mouth,” Mountain said to Purdy.
“Hey, look, Mountain, that asshole set me up.”
“All that shit seemed to come out of your mouth on its own,” Mountain said to him.
“I was just kidding. You know, just shooting my mouth off. That’s not very smart, is it?” His voice had shriveled to a nun’s whisper.
“You got that right.”
“But it’s no reason for you to get pissed off, is it?”
Beads of sweat formed around Purdy’s forehead, a garland of fear.
“I’m not pissed off anymore,” Mountain said.
“Good.”
Mountain’s fist flew out from his side and popped Purdy squarely on the nose. Purdy fell to the floor like a trap door had opened beneath him. Blood began to spurt from his nose and, to Blondie’s amazement, he began to cry like a baby.
“I thought you weren’t pissed,” Purdy sniveled.
“I’m not. I just figure life’s about living and learning. My guess is that if I hadn’t popped you one, you wouldn’t have learned a goddamn thing.”
“I’m gonna get you for this,” Purdy threatened Blondie between spasms of tears.
“You didn’t learn anything, did you?” Mountain said. “I oughtta pop you again.”
Purdy cringed and hunkered in the corner.
“I don’t know this guy well … ” Pulaski said to Purdy, tilting his head toward Blondie.
“Blondie,” he volunteered.
” … but you and this Buford pussy better leave him alone. If you don’t, I’m going to take you on like a meat grinder. Understand?”
“Yeah,” Purdy moaned.
“Okay my friend,” Mountain said to Blondie, “let’s leave this turd where he belongs. In the latrine.”
Blondie felt exhilarated walking back to the poolroom stride by stride with Mountain. He’d redeemed himself. So what if he hadn’t been the one to strike Purdy. He’d set it up. That was good enough. The guys would approve.
Blondie was right. It was the liveliest night ever out at the quarry. The constant snap of church keys biting into cold and willing beer cans punctuated their animated conversation.
“T-tell us h-how P-Purdy cried,” Shakes said.
“Just like a baby,” Blondie said. Then he imitated him. They loved it.
“Was Mountain pissed?” Brick asked.
“Like a bull whose nuts have been dipped in Ben-Gay.”
Grouper acclaimed it as their first real victory against the “insidious forces of billiedom.”
Their conversation moved on to the subject at hand: beer. When Brick said he preferred draft beer to bottled, Dispatch said: “Speaking of draft, I had to go register for the draft last week.”
“What, you’re eighteen now?” Feller asked him.
“Let’s not talk about the draft,” Brick said. “It’s depressing.”
“What difference does it make?” Dispatch said. “There’s no war going on.”
“Yes, there is,” Grouper voice rumbled through the car.
“Where?” Several of them challenged him.
“In Vietnam.”
“Where the hell is that?” Brick said.
“Next to Cambodia and Laos.”
“I’ve never heard of those places,” Brick said.
“Why do I bother trying to educate you Philistines?” Grouper asked. “Don’t any of you ever read the paper.”
Blondie stayed out of the fray. He knew Miss Darlington worried about Vietnam, just like the Grouper, but he didn’t agree. He had too much faith in President Kennedy. He would never send American boys over to some no-name place halfway around the world.
“It can’t be much of a war if I’ve never heard of it,” Brick argued.
“Well, I’m sure as hell not going into the army,” Dispatch said.
“I hope I never get drafted,” Grouper said.
“Who’d draft you?” Brick said. “You’re so far out of shape you couldn’t pass the physical.”
“Y-yeah, and y-you’ve g-got flat f-feet,” Shakes added.
“I’m not in that bad shape,” Grouper answered.
“If the shoe fits, sit on it,” Brick said. “The only thing you’re in shape to do is drink beer.”
“Better than anyone else,” Grouper boasted.
“Bullshit!” Brick retorted. “I could drink you under the table.”
“I’d like to see that.”
The gauntlet had been thrown.
For the next two hours, Blondie, Feller, Dispatch, and Shakes watched while Brick and Grouper matched each other beer for beer. Empty after empty was placed on the P-mobile’s dash. At one point, Blondie counted eighteen.
Dispatch had to return to the Suds Cellar twice for replenishments.
Brick’s speech began to slur as the gang gabbed about everything from Mrs. Buckley’s rump to who was screwing whom. Grouper, on the other hand, continued to speak clearly in his basso profundo, although Blondie noted he remained silent during their sexual speculations. Yet he was the only one with a girl. Blondie wondered if he and Meryl were doing it. He didn’t figure Grouper was the kind who would tell — and he was glad for that.
Suddenly Brick’s head slumped against the window.
“Are you okay, Brick?” Feller asked.
“H-he’s p-passed out,” Shakes said.
“Looks like you won,” Blondie said to Grouper.
Grouper didn’t answer.
“I said it looks like you won.”
Grouper still didn’t answer.
“Turn on the lights,” Blondie said to Dispatch.
The Grouper was staring straight ahead with a glazed look. His face had turned green.
“Grouper? Grouper!” Feller screamed at him.
Blondie shook Grouper. His huge head lolled to one side and his eyelids fell shut.
“Jesus, he doesn’t look good,” Dispatch said.
Blondie grabbed Grouper’s wrist and felt for a pulse.
“I can’t feel any pulse,” he said with alarm.
“How can you tell with all that blubber?” Dispatch asked.
“See if he’s breathing,” Feller said.
“I can’t tell,” he said, alarmed.
“What’s up?” Brick asked, emerging from his stupor.
“Something’s wrong with the Grouper. He’s not breathing.”
“He’s dead. I drank that sucker under the table.”
At the word “dead,” Blondie’s heart stood still. What if Grouper were dead?
Blondie raised one of Grouper’s eyelids. His pupil was barely visible. When Blondie let go of the lid, Grouper’s eye stayed open. Only white showed.
“He’s fucking dead!” Brick repeated gleefully.
<
br /> “It isn’t funny, Brick,” Feller said to him.
Blondie heard the worried tone in Feller’s voice.
“We better get him to a hospital,” Feller said. “And quick.”
The P-mobile shot out of the quarry, spewing rocks and bring angry shouts from interrupted lovers.
Halfway to the main road, the Grouper sat up and said, “Who won?”
They stared at Grouper in disbelief and then all heads turned to Brick who’d passed out again in the front seat.
“You, I guess,” Feller said.
“Not much of a contest, was it?” the Grouper said.
That night became known thereafter as The Night the Grouper Died and Came Back to Life.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
Girls got wet! Why hadn’t anyone ever told him? When they’d been subjected to two days of sex education in ninth grade health class, the teacher had shown them all kinds of diagrams and anatomical drawings with all the detail and sex appeal of blueprints. Never once did she mention the incredible fact that girls got wet. Now, for the first time ever, Blondie’d put his hands in a girl’s underpants, then given away his lack of experience by asking if she’d had “an accident.” What a gaffe.
“It’s all right,” Flossie told him. “I think it’s sweet when guys haven’t played around too much.”
Sweet? Wimpy — that’s what it was.
What a gaffe. But how was he supposed to know? For the first time ever, he’d put his hands in a girl’s underpants and he’d asked her if she’d had an “accident”!
He and Flossie were in the back seat of the P-mobile, parked by the rock quarry. Feller’d rented the P-mobile from Dispatch for five bucks, explaining that they needed something “roomy.” Feller was in the front seat with Delores, but he and she had disappeared below the seat back several minutes before.
Blondie’s right hand remained secure in Flossie’s panties. He found it immeasurably exciting, though he wasn’t sure if it was the act so much as the thought of it — forbidden fruit of the first magnitude. Just as exciting was the incredible and unexpected development that Flossie was fondling Nessie. Blondie didn’t know girls did things like that.
Happy as Blondie was with the present state of affairs, he kept thinking he should move along. After all, the object of the evening was to get laid. With his free hand, Blondie felt along his pants leg until he felt the outline of the foil package Feller had given him. Feller’d advised him to put the contents on his member “at the appropriate moment.” But now that the moment had arrived, Blondie decided he didn’t want to fool with the damned thing. It would detract from his mood.
“Do you think we should go a little further,” Blondie whispered.
“What do you have in mind?”
“Well, you know what guys like.”
“You want me to go down on you?”
What had she said? The very thought of Flossie putting her mouth around Nessie made Blondie feel weak. But for some reason he’d never understood, getting a blow job didn’t count as much with other guys as getting laid — and, of course, it still left one a virgin.
“Thanks for the offer, but that wasn’t quite I meant,” Blondie said.
“You want to make love?”
“That’s it.”
“Okay. How do you want to do it?”
Holy shit! Why was she bringing up all these options? How many ways were there? She didn’t seem to understand. He wasn’t after the exotic or gymnastic. He just wanted to get the job done.
“The usual way,” he answered.
“For a car you mean? Okay, you sit there and I’ll sit on top of you.”
That wasn’t what he’d meant either. But he decided he’d be better off letting her take the lead. She seemed to know what she was doing. When she put Nessie up inside her, Blondie moaned. It felt so good he thought he was going to go off right then.
Flossie began to sway her hips.
“Don’t do that,” Blondie told her.
“Don’t you like it?”
“Yeah. But I don’t want to come right away.”
“Okay.”
He looked at her face, trying to see her expression. Was she as excited as he was? It was too dark to tell.
From the front, Blondie heard a sudden inhalation and Feller’s voice murmuring “Oh God, Oh God …. ” Jesus, Feller had gone off. Blondie felt pressured to finish before Feller and Delores sat back up. He’d feel dumb if they were watching. He told Flossie to go ahead and “move.”
She rotated her hips a couple times and raised and lowered her bottom on his lap and that was it. For a mind-stopping instant, his brain shut down and all he could feel was a pleasurable warm stream pass through his body: Muggerood’s Theorem.
“Finally, finally, finally,” Blondie said to himself when his brain switched back on.
As soon as she got off him, Flossie stuffed some Kleenex into her panties and pulled them up. She was efficient. Blondie liked that. He was even more surprised to find he kinda liked her. Because she was a friend of Delores’s, he’d expected Flossie to be marginal-looking and wear too much makeup, but she wasn’t and didn’t. In fact, she had long blond hair and a cute face. As a bonus, her legs were outstanding. Best of all, she thought he was smart and witty. How could he not like someone that perceptive?
On the way home, when they were nearing Flossie’s house, she nestled up to him and whispered, “I liked it with you.”
Her words, and the shy way she spoke them, affected him.
“I’m glad,” Blondie said.
After they dropped her off, Delores spent most of the time on the way to her house fussing about her permanent. Blondie wondered how anyone could talk about a hairdo after getting laid. Girls were something else. For him, getting laid had been monumental. It was the first time in his life when, for even the smallest time, he’d forgotten who or where he was.
Once Delores was out of the car, Feller asked, “Well? What’d you think?”
“Worth the price of emission,” Blondie said.
Feller laughed.
“Virgins no more!” he shouted
Blondie couldn’t wait to tell the Grouper about his big score, though he told himself to be cool about it. After all, Grouper’d had a girl for a couple months and he didn’t want to let on that he’d been a virgin before. So what he told Grouper when he had a chance to be alone with him was “Feller and I had a pretty hot night last Saturday.”
Grouper raised his eyebrows but didn’t say anything.
“Don’t you want to know who it was?”
“Okay, who was it?” Grouper asked, as if drawing his voice from some hidden cavern in his body.
“Flossie Wilder. Do you know her?”
“I’ve heard Meryl talk about her. Isn’t she a tenth-grader?”
Now why did he bring that up? He was missing the point. Blondie couldn’t just grab him by the shirt and say, “Don’t you understand? This is major. I got laid!” Anyway, Grouper seemed out of sorts.
“Is something bugging you?” Blondie asked him.
“Meryl and I have split the sheets,” he mumbled. “We’re just not a good match.”
“I never thought she was worthy of you,” Blondie offered in consolation.
Grouper gave him a sharp look.
“What do you know about worthy?”
What had he said? It wasn’t like Grouper to get peevish.
“Meryl’s okay,” Grouper said. “She’s just not what I want — or need.”
Blondie was impressed by the pains Grouper was taking to avoid saying anything negative about Meryl. It was more-or-less expected for guys to badmouth girls when the romance was over — and absolutely required if ending it had been the girl’s idea.
Although he and Feller hadn’t made any plans to follow up what Feller called, borrowing on baseball jargon, the Night of the Twin Killing, it wasn’t long before Feller asked him if he wanted to “do
uble-date” again. Blondie was game. Sex was terrific.
“Do you think they’ll want to do it again?” Blondie asked him.
“I know they do.”
When Blondie told his mom he had another date, she asked him if he had a girlfriend.
“Not a girlfriend.”
He didn’t think of Flossie that way.
“Don’t you like her?”
“I just met her. I hardly know her.”
Upon reflection, Blondie thought it a strange thing to say about the only girl he’d ever been “intimate” with.
“Are we going to be seeing each other regularly?” Flossie asked when they got together with Feller and Delores the following Friday night.
“Probably.”
“Don’t you think you better use a … well, you know.”
“I should,” Blondie conceded.
But, when the time came, he passed again. Whipping on a condom was easy to contemplate in advance, but when Nessie began tugging at his corduroys, Blondie couldn’t interrupt the natural progression of events — Muggerood’s Theorem again.
Afterwards, Flossie put her lips to his ear and whispered, “You could get me pregnant, you know?”
“If I did, I’d marry you,” Blondie said.
“What?”
She seemed startled.
“If I got you pregnant, I’d marry you,” he repeated.
“You’d marry me?”
“If I got you pregnant.”
“No one’s ever said anything that nice to me before.”
“Well, I mean it. A guy has to be responsible for his actions.”
Later, Blondie told Feller what he’d said.
“What? Are you cuckoo? It would wreck your life to marry a girl like Flossie. She isn’t going anywhere.”
“She’s nice.”
“As nice as Tammy?”
“Well, no. But how do I know I can get her?”
“You won’t if you’re a defeatist.” Feller paused. “I think it would be best if we kept our little foursome quiet for a while,” he added.
“Why?”
“It’s not going to do your reputation any good to be going around with Flossie. And it sure isn’t going to help mine going around with Delores Clitoris.”
“I don’t have a reputation,” Blondie said.
“Maybe not. But you don’t want to get a negative one.”
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