“Well, fuck,” Bob said. “Guess we could use a change of scenery. We can take the camper to Shit Town and get some gas there.”
“Hey,” Grace said. “I’m not asking—”
“Hush,” Bob said. “I might come to my senses.”
2
Up in Jungle Home I tried to sleep, but no dice. I got out of bed and slipped on my blanket and left Bob and Crier sleeping and went out on the deck where a warm breeze was blowing.
I went on down and walked over to the camper and touched it. It was cool to my touch and I got a mild sexual charge out of it, which made me feel pretty damn silly. I thought about what Grace had said about fucking the ocean in case there was a shark in there that had swallowed a girl, and suddenly it made a lot of sense.
I went around to the end of the camper. The tailgate was down. My mouth filled with saliva. I knew then that I was going to at least look inside.
I looked.
She wasn’t there. There was just a basket of fruit. I guess my sexual charge had come from that or a horny spare tire.
Then I heard splashing. I think I had heard it before, but now it registered.
I walked around on the other side of the camper and looked out at the lake.
The moon was high and bright and it made the lake slick as a mirror. Not too far out in it, halfway submerged, was Grace. She was slapping her arms on the surface of the water. Playing.
I went down there, and when I was fifty feet from the water, I stopped and looked at her sleek, marble-white back sticking out of the water like a flooded Grecian statue.
She looked over her shoulder and smiled.
“Out for a walk, Jack?”
“Sort of.”
“Excited about tomorrow?”
“I guess.”
“You saved my life today.”
“That’s all right.”
“Of course it is. I got hot in the camper. Funny, Timothy’s down at the other end of the lake and here I am playing in the water at this end. I never made love to him, you know.”
“Did you want to?”
“I think I saw him as a brother.”
“You telling me this for a reason?”
“I don’t know.”
She turned and started to shore. She came out of the water like Venus being born. The moon hit the sheen of water on her breasts and made them bright as moons themselves. The little pink stripes on her skin looked like birthday ribbons.
“You’re going to go blind,” she said.
“I don’t make you go naked.”
“I didn’t make you come down here.”
I put my hands in front of me and clasped them together.
She came to me and kissed me lightly on the lips. Her breath smelled of fruit. She took hold of my arms, lifted them over her head and around her neck, said, “You’ll have to pull out, you know. I don’t have any birth control. And don’t make more of this than it is.”
I pulled her to me and kissed her. Our tongues made war.
She looked down. “Goodness, Jack. There’s something in your blanket.”
“You’ve already seen it. You weren’t much impressed.”
She took hold of the edges of the blanket and pulled it over my head, knocking my arms off of her. She threw the blanket down on the grass and took hold of me.
“My,” she said, “how the little fella’s grown.”
3
After we made love on my blanket, we stumbled giggling to the camper and smeared fruit on one another and licked it off. Between licking and giggling, we made love again. Every time we moved apart our bodies made a sound like two sheets of flypaper being pulled apart.
When we finished we went down to the lake and rinsed off again and tried to make love again, but neither of us was up to it. We went back to the camper and fell asleep in each other’s arms.
I dreamed good for a time. Kind of dreams a man dreams when he’s holding a woman in his arms. But the dreams didn’t last. I thought about my aliens and I thought about Grace’s story about Popalong Cassidy and the Producer and the Great Director. I thought about all that movie junk on down the highway. I tried to make everything add up but nothing would.
It all went away and folded into a cloud the color and texture of Grace’s pubic hair.
Next morning Bob woke me by pulling on my foot. I got my head out from between Grace’s legs and looked up.
“That’s disgusting, you know,” Bob said.
I picked up Grace’s shirt from the floorboard and draped it over her. I got my clothes and sat out on the tailgate and put them on.
“Well, I hope we enjoyed ourselves,” Bob said.
“We did.”
Bob went away and I woke Grace up and she got dressed and we helped Crier and Bob load some fruit and bamboo water containers in the camper. Then we were off.
After a few days we came to Shit Town. The post Grace had told us about was gone, and now there was an official sign made of crude lumber. On it was: SHIT TOWN, POPULATION: WHO GIVES A FUCK.
Civic pride.
Shit Town wasn’t much. Some shacks made of sticks and crooked lumber mostly. It looked like a place the Big Bad Wolf would blow down.
Out next to the road was a line of cars, and people were living in those too. Some of the cars were fixed up with huts connected to them. Snazzy stuff.
We parked on the opposite side of the highway, locked up and walked over to Main Street, which was a dirt track, and went down it.
A few people ogled us, and we ogled them back.
No one offered us the Key to the City.
In spite of Shit Town not looking like much, I suppose by present standards it’s pretty prosperous. There were a lot of people moving about and there was an aura of industry in the air.
Down at the end of the street was a well house. Most likely it had been built over an open spring, as I figured that was what had attracted folks to this spot in the first place, as the lake had attracted us to Jungle Home.
Beyond this I could see a lot of stumps leading to the jungle. In a short time, with only their hands and crude tools, these people had cut a lot of trees.
I figured eventually this kind of industry would lead to Shit Town having burger joints that served dinosaur and rabbit burgers, and eventually the place might move up the evolutionary line to having a kind of thrift store where you could get shower curtains, house shoes, bird feeders and Bermuda shorts.
A lot of women were pregnant, and though I’m not good at guessing things like that, they looked pretty close to domino date to me. Of course, time here is too hard to judge.
There were little huts along the street and some of them had plank counters out front with things to trade on them. There was one that had flat-in-the-middle green bread with flies on it, and behind the counter was this woman leaning on a hut post with her dress hiked up and her butt free to the air. There was a guy with his pants down against her, and he was putting it to her. If the woman liked it, it didn’t show, and the fella looked like a man called to duty.
It didn’t take long, and when they finished she let down her dress and took the loaf of bread and went away. The man pulled up his pants and looked at us.
“Ya’ll want bread?”
“I don’t think so,” Bob said.
“We went on down the street and came to another stand, and on its counter was a turtle shell turned upside down, and there was a wooden pestle in it. All around the shells were piles of fruit.
A guy with a belly that looked like a bag of rocks under his shirt got off a stump when he saw us coming and came over and smiled at us. All this teeth had gone south except one dead center of his bottom gum. The rest of him didn’t look too good either.
“Want me to make you a fruit drink?” he said. “Mashed right here while you wait.”
“Nope,” Crier said.
Next to the fruit juice place was a hut with a sign out front painted in black mud that read: Library.
“They’re kidding,” Bob sai
d.
I went over and pulled the curtain of reeds aside and looked in. There was just enough room for one person in there, and that one person had to sit on a rotting stump because the roof was low. There was one crude shelf of books, and under the shelf was a little sign that said: PLEASE RETURN BOOKS.
I went inside and looked at what they had to offer. There was a Bible covered in red plastic with a zipper on it. I unzipped it and looked inside. Saw that everything Jesus had said was printed in red so you could tell it from ol’ So-and-So.
Alongside it was a collection of Rod McKuen’s poetry and a copy of Jonathan Livingston Seagull with “This book belongs to David Webb and is his inspiration” written inside.
There were two copies of the Watchtower, one concentrating on the dilemmas of dating in the modern world, the other on the deterioration of the family unit.
There was also a pamphlet for raising chinchillas for fun and profit (neither the fun or profit being to the advantage of the chinchillas); a postcard with a gerbil’s picture on the front and a note on the back that said they could be seen at some petting zoo; a photo-novel of Superman 3; and a souvenir hand fan from Graceland with a picture of the erstwhile King of Rock’n’Roll on one side (prebloat) and the words to “You Ain’t Nothing But A Hound Dog” on the other. There were also a couple of poems that didn’t rhyme written on some dirty popcorn bags with eyeliner pencil.
I took the Elvis fan and fanned myself, then put it back and went outside. The others had wandered down the street, not having felt the pull of the arts.
The guy with the one tooth said, “Find anything?”
“I fanned myself a little.”
“It’s checked out right now, but there’s a pretty good Max Brand novel we got, ‘cept the last couple of pages are torn out. Some fella wrote an ending for it, though. He wrote on the inside back cover, ‘He rode off into the West and everything was okay.’ Seems a good enough ending to most anything, don’t it?”
“Does at that. I take it you’re also the librarian?”
“Yeah, but people want fruit juices more than they want books. Only thing is they don’t always have something good to trade. Tell you, I’ve had all the dry pussy I want. It’s making the head of my dick raw. In the long run I get the bad end of the trade. I’d really rather have some kind of meat, fish, maybe some roots that are good to boil.”
“Commerce can be a bitch,” I said.
4
When I caught up with the others, they were standing beside the street looking out between a couple of shacks made of mud and sticks, staring at a man hanging from the limb of a big oak tree. He was spinning around, kicking his feet and working his elbows as if in a square dance. The elbows were all he could work of his arms, since his hands were tied behind his back.
On a bench near the oak sat two men and a woman. They looked like benched baseball players waiting for their turn at an inning.
“Suicide tree I told you about,” Grace said. “Come on.”
“I don’t want to see that,” I said.
“Me neither,” Bob said.
“I’ll pass too,” Crier said.
“Do what you want,” Grace said to me, “but they’re going to hang themselves anyway and you fellas need pants.”
“Pants?” I said.
“You think those folks are gonna need them later?”
“I got pants,” Crier said. “They’re ragged, but they’re pants. I’ll just hang out.”
Grace led Bob and me over to the tree. I looked up at the guy. His face was purple as a plum and his neck was swollen out in such a way it was starting to spread over the rope. His tongue was flopping against his chin and he was biting through it. His eyes were crossed and the lid of one was drooped halfway down and the other eye looked like a table tennis ball being pushed out of the hole from behind.
We went over to the bench. The woman was sitting on the end near us and the men were sitting next to each other. She looked at us. The hair on one side of her head had been burned off, and the hair on the other side wasn’t anything to be proud of. It was dirty-brown and kinky as wire. I’ve seen Brillo pads with more class. She had on a filthy T-shirt and her nipples were punching through it. The jeans she had on were thin enough to shit through. Her face wasn’t any kind of special. It was covered with pimples and red welts. She was barefoot.
The two guys weren’t fashion models either. They had beards full of dirt, bugs and fruit seeds. Their dark coloring wasn’t the result of the sun’s rays. You could have packed lunches on the pores of their skin.
I hated to think what I looked like.
“Bench is full,” the woman said. “Come back tomorrow. Three’s about it for a day. Them’s the rules.”
“We’re not here to hang ourselves,” Grace said.
“If you’re going to watch,” she said, “stay back out of the way. This bastard won’t never choke. I bet he’s been up there an hour.”
“He looks about gone to me,” I said.
The man beside her, the skinnier of the two, said, “Who can tell how long he’s been up there. Time isn’t worth a duck fart here. But you should have seen him just a little while ago. He looked worse than this. I think he’s gotten him a second wind.”
“Maybe he’s changed his mind,” I said.
At that the hanging man began to kick his legs vigorously. “No, don’t think so,” the woman said.
“Look at him,” I said.
“You can’t pay that any mind. It doesn’t mean a thing. He wanted to go worse than the rest of us. He bit Clarence there to get first in line.”
Clarence was the skinny fella. He held up a sticklike arm and pushed his short sleeve back. There was a crescent of teeth wounds.
“He called me some things I’ve never heard,” said Clarence, “then he pushed me on the ground and bit me. I told him to go ahead. Hell, I wasn’t even next in line. Fran was. But look who he bit. That’s the way it’s always been for me. I tied his hands for him and boosted him into the rope. More than he deserved, I’ll tell you. Which reminds me, you folks around when Gene here goes, maybe you could tie his hands for him. It works better that way, otherwise you claw at the rope, no matter how bad you want to go.”
“I’ll make do,” Gene said. He got up and went over to the hanging man and jumped on him and swung back and forth like a kid on a tire swing. The hanging man’s neck lengthened.
“We probably won’t be around long enough to help Gene,” Grace said, “but we wanted to try and talk you out of your pants, just you fellas. Jack and Bob here don’t have anything but these dresses.”
“Noticed that,” Clarence said, “and I’ll tell you boys, you haven’t got the legs for it.”
From the hanging man came a sound like a semi tire blowing out at high speed.
“Goddamn,” Clarence said, “there’s the signal.”
“Yeah,” Fran said. “It’s nature’s way of saying ‘Sayonara, motherfucker.’”
“It’s nature’s way of filling your pants with shit, is what it is,” Clarence said. “Get off of him, Gene. Let’s get him down and get Fran up there. Come on, get off of him, goddamnit.”
“About those pants,” Grace said.
“Guess you want them before I hang myself,” Clarence said.
“Well,” Grace said, “you know how it is, nature’s sayonara and all.”
Clarence nodded and undressed. He didn’t have on any underwear. He tossed the clothes at me. “Take all of it. Shoes too, if they fit. Hell, if they don’t fit.”
I gathered up the clothes and held them. They smelled a little ripe.
“Hey Gene,” Clarence said. “Want to help the other fella out?”
Gene had finally got off the dead man, and he came over to the bench and sat down. He took off his clothes, except for some soiled, green boxer shorts, and gave them to Bob.
“Go on, enjoy them,” Clarence said. “You want to thank us later, well, we’ll be hanging around.”
Clare
nce loved that. He laughed like a drunk hyena.
He was tying Fran’s hands for her when we went away.
5
We collected Crier and went out to the camper. He and Grace sat up front and talked, and Bob and I tried the clothes on. I ended up with some pants too tight in the waist, but I zipped them up high as they would go and left them unsnapped and used the belt I had made for my blanket outfit and ran it through the pants loops for extra support. The shirt fit fine and I wore it with the tails hanging out. The socks were thin but not holey. The shoes were an inch too long and they made me look a little like Bozo the Clown.
Bob’s pants fit him in the waist, but were too short. They were what my dad used to call high-water pants. The shirt he had was too narrow across the shoulders, and he got a knife out of the toolbox and slit it halfway down the back. He slit the sides of the shoes too because they were too narrow.
Grace and Crier laughed at our outfits, but just a little. I guess thinking about where the clothes came from took some of the humor out of it.
Crier and Bob stayed with the camper, and Grace and I took Bob’s gas can and went around begging for gas. The people who were living in cars that had huts attached to them were the quickest to give up their gas; they had made a stand and they were staying. Some wouldn’t even talk to us, and one guy told us he’d pour his goddamn gas on the ground and piss on it before he gave it to us. We took this as a no.
By the end of the day we had a full tank of gas, and we went into Shit Town one last time to see if we could talk someone into giving us enough to fill our can. It never hurt to have extra.
We got off Main Street and went down a little side street lined with huts and cars and we came on this tall, hatchet-faced fella wearing a sweat-stained cowboy hat. He was as unusual in that he was clean-shaven.
He had the hood up on an old red-and-white Plymouth convertible, and he had a wrench and he was fiddling with something under there. He didn’t look like someone that wanted to get rid of his gas, but we asked anyway.