The little man smiled and looked just over their heads at the distant horizon. “Well, you’re the only one I know here and …”
Joe Lon came over and laid his big square hand on the back of the little man’s neck and offered him the whiskey bottle. “Why don’t you have a drink and git out of the way? You fucking up the workout.”
“I’m sorry. I didn’t know …”
“It’s all right,” said Willard. “Now you know.” He turned a short hard glance toward Joe Lon and then back to the little man. “Say, you ain’t a salesman are you? A traveling salesman? You look like you might be one to me.”
Joe Lon closed his hand on the neck he was holding. Closed in hard. “What?” he said. “You cain’t be a fucking salesman. It ain’t allowed.”
They were both leaning in on him now, one on each side. The workout, the sweat, the whiskey, and the sight of Susan Gender’s red underwear had made them feel good. They were playing. But the little man didn’t know that. They looked as though they were set to go crazy mean.
“What you saying?” the little man cried, sucking desperately at the spit spinning between his lips. He stared wildly at Duffy Deeter. “Tell’m who I am. Tell’m I’m Enrique Gomez.” He glanced up at Willard, who regarded him with a kind of objective, passionless malevolency. “My friends call me Poncy. Poncy!”
Willard Miller looked at Joe Lon. “What kind of name is Eniquer Gomez?”
Joe Lon said: “It ain’t our kind of people, is it?”
Duffy Deeter was smiling. Up in the door, Susan Gender was smiling. Willard and Joe Lon each had one of Poncy’s arms. They were even smiling now, but to Poncy their smiles looked terrible.
Poncy said: “My friends call me Poncy. Honest to God they really do call me Poncy.”
Duffy Deeter said: “He told us that on the road, last night.”
“That’s what he told us,” said Susan Gender. “We met’tn at the Magnolia Truck and Rest Stop coming into town and that’s what he told us.”
Joe Lon seemed to grow hot, to burn all along his veins. He looked at Willard with genuine puzzlement. “I’m damned if I know what to do about this.”
Duffy Deeter sat down on the bench, smiling, gazing with great fondness upon the bulging mound of Susan Gender’s blender, as he called it in moments when he felt good. Listening to these country boys playing with the old man pleased him. It amused.
They kept Poncy lifted on his toes while he frantically explained that he was born in Cuba, brought to Tampa at the age of five, and educated at the University of Florida. Here he started an addled singing of the University of Florida’s Alma Mater, with Susan Gender screaming in the background that he fucking-A-well had the words right. That was it. He stopped singing and was rapidly talking about his life’s work in bananas when Hard Candy Sweet appeared between two tents across the road.
She came straight to them and. said, “What you two assholes doing to this little sapsucker?”
“We was gone kill him,” said Willard, smiling. “But I think we’ll just leave him alone and let him bore his goddam self to death.”
They let him down on his heels. Joe Lon straightened Poncy’s shirt, smoothed his collar. Then he raised Poncy’s chin with the end of his little finger and looked directly into Poncy’s eyes. “But you ain’t no traveling salesman, are you?”
“No. No sir! Retired. I’m re …”
“You didn’t retire from being no salesman neither, did you?”
That was precisely what Poncy’s specialty had been. And he had risen to Director of Sales for all of bananas before he was through.
But he saw that was not the right answer. “Engineering,” said Poncy. “I was an engineer.”
Joe Lon gave him a thin whiskey smile. “Got a uncle that was a railroad man.”
Willard had introduced Hard Candy to Susan Gender and it turned out Susan had been an undergraduate head majorette herself back at Auburn University in Alabama and they went down and lined up hip to hip on the grass at the end of the trailer working on a little routine.
“Now after the first kickout, you spin and do a split,” said Hard Candy Sweet. Her little eyes shined. “Can you still split?”
“Lord yes, honey,” said Susan Gender. “I’m still just limber as a dishrag.”
Willard was on his back on the bench pumping two hundred and fifty pounds. Poncy was whispering, “Are they crazy, or what?”
Duffy didn’t answer right away; he only looked at Poncy. Finally he said: “You better get over there out of the way.” Joe Lon and Willard slid a ten-pound plate on each end of the Olympic bar.
“You set,” said Joe Lon.
Poncy walked over and did not so much sit as collapse onto a little grassy bank of dirt.
The girls came high-kicking by and Susan Gender sang: “We’re going inside.” She stopped in the door and called: “You want anything, Duffy?”
Duffy, who was in the middle of a press, did not answer, but Joe Lon Mackey, beginning to buzz from the whiskey, feeling better than ever in the old familiar demand of muscle and sweat, said: “Got any bourbon whiskey up there in that trailer?”
Susan Gender gave a little kick and laid the full weight of her smile and single red eye upon him. “Duffy Deeter wouldn’t go anywhere without it.”
“You might just bring us out a bottle,” Joe Lon said.
“If you got any of them cold beers in there,” said Willard Miller, “bring a few. Damned if that straight corn ain’t beginning to burn my breakfast.”
“Pussy,” said Joe Lon.
“You better hope so,” Willard said. “Slip on that other ten.”
They were doing only three repetitions on the bench now, and they were no longer adding weight casually but slamming it on with little grunts of challenge and pleasure.
When they went through the door of the Winnebago, Hard Candy looked up and said: “Hey, those are great trophies.”
There were trophies mounted along three walls, bracketed and gleaming on specially constructed shelves.
“You oughta see them two guys’ football trophies out there. Knock you eyes out. They’re stars, you know.”
“Duff said he wouldn’t ever have anything to do with a team sport. He always said somebody else could just have the team sports.”
Although Hard Candy knew there were trophies for other sports — didn’t Willard have a shelf full from track? — nobody she knew thought a trophy was a real trophy unless it was from football.
“What are all them from?” said Hard Candy.
“Karate mostly. Some from handball. Duff was the state singles champion in handball for four years. That right there is something the ABA, you know, the American Bar Association, gave him for coming in fifteenth in the Boston Marathon.”
Hard Candy could only blink at the trophies. A lawyer that played handball? Willard was apt to kill him and eat him.
Susan Gender smiled at her. “I know what you’re thinking. That’s what I thought at first. But don’t be fooled, that little bastard out there is dangerous.”
Poncy came bursting through the door, his face ash-gray under his Cuban color. “They said I better get the whiskey and beer,” he said rapidly. “They said I better.”
“Jesus,” said Susan, “I forgot.”
She got the bottle out of a cabinet and the six-pack of tallboys out of the refrigerator. Poncy rushed outside with it in his arms.
“That old man ought to git away from them boys,” said Hard Candy, “him being like he is and all. One of’m git drunk enough and git to feeling mean, and I don’t know.”
They had gradually moved to a window while they talked and they stood now watching the three of them take turns pressing off their backs. Duffy was on the bench and Willard and Joe Lon were on either side, leaning forward yelling at him as he strained to finish the press, yelling in short, abrupt phrases. Veins stood in their necks and their heads jerked as if they might have been barking. Poncy sat on the little bank of dirt, alternately clapping his hands the way the boys were doing and looking afraid. Dust rose around the bench and clung to their sweating bodies. They didn’t seem to see it.