They laugh, nodding.
"I love you," I say to them.
The second one, with the ready bagel, says, "You say that."
"I say that."
The first woman looks at me, looks away. It seems to me that people are ready to hear things never heard before so long as they are not frightened for their physical safety or worried that listening may cost them money. This is an untestable hypothesis, and I don't know that I want to test it now that I have formed the hypothesis so neatly. But I believe I gave it a fair test for a few days, and proved it sufficiently well for a failed scientist. People are hungry for new utterance. Does the reaction series of life include new utterance in its function?
Can Mary be said to have shown me this by assuming roles and living them? Was Bonaparte receiving and sending wavelengths so novel no one in his right mind could pick up on them?
In the cafeteria of the bus station I saw my driver again, dressed for the road, looking invisible and harmless, in his blue regulation suit. He poured a saucerful of coffee back into his cup, the saucer shaking at a frequency so high and an amplitude so low that anyone unconscious of wave theory would not have seen it shake. His whole attitude suggested a man holding his breath. I joined him.
"Back to Florida?" I asked him.
"Shoot. A run north. Little-town run. From Decatur over to Jackson."
"From where?"
"Decatur."
"I know someone there."
I got up to get us more coffee and to check behind the counter for Rod Serling: crackerjack nuke-whiz Tom lived in Decatur, Alabama. The plottable slope of fate defining my errant life was running straight to Tom.
"I know someone there I'd like to see."
"Well, come on. I'll take you there." He said this as if he meant in his own car, at his own expense, and he sort of did. He told me to meet him in seventeen minutes three blocks down the street and he'd pick me up.
"Sync up," he said, exposing his wristwatch in a flourish of his uniformed arm. We matched our watches like spies. All of this was to save me a six-dollar ticket.
"I fucked some turkeys there when I was a kid," he said.
"You what?"
"Fucked turkeys."
"Fucked turkeys?"
"Yeah. I was staying with my cousin and he asked if I wanted to fuck something, so I said sure, and he showed me these turkeys he said his father didn't want, and we fucked them."
"What do you mean, didn't want?"
"Well, it kills 'em, you know."
"Kills 'em."
"Kills hell out of 'em, actually." He grinned a not altogether ashamed grin.
"Only my uncle did want them. Beat the hell out of us."
In our remaining time he gave me a short course in bestiality. Cows one does barefoot, holding the Achilles tendon with the big toe. Sheep with their hind legs in your Wellies.
"Dogs?"
"Never fucked a dog."
This seemed an oversight to me.
"Did fuck some bass once."
I looked at him. Was he on to the theory of new utterance himself? Was he just doing some Sweetlips pygmy on me? I thought maybe he was not. He was too somber at some level to be kidding.
"Bass," I said. "How in hell do you fuck bass?"
"In the-he pointed down his throat-"the little muscle thing there." He meant the fluted, sphincter-like throat, and it had an aptness so thorough I did not doubt him. I was talking to a sad, alcoholic bus driver who had fucked bass as a kid. I was talking to a natural in the world of folk who can celebrate their liabilities, carry their failures.
"I've got a friend up in Decatur who hunts armadillos for radiation exposure," I said. "Maybe you can-"
"Radiation's a sore point with me, bud."
On the way to Decatur he told me of his wife's travail, a not atypical one, I presume. Her life had been prolonged by radiation, he supposed, but watching her suffer, he did not see the point of it. She was hairless, incontinent, and, as he put it, hot. At night he held her hand. He did not mind being on the road now. He applied, in fact, for long, errant tours of duty taking him anywhere but home.
He drove me to Tom's very door, where I debarked in a great hydraulic hiss onto a neatly trimmed yard in a new suburb. Tom came out grinning like an idiot, appreciating the joke of my being delivered, a lone passenger, by so large a vehicle, to his otherwise undistinguished residence. The driver and I shook hands. He declined to come in. He eased the giant machine around the corner and slowly out of sight.
The drop-in is not all it was once in the South, and my timing in coming to see Tom was not good. Tom and his wife, Elaine, were expecting guests for the weekend-the twin girls of Elaine's sister. At first I thought that crowding alone was to be the principal hitch, but things got complex.
When the girls arrived, Elaine fawned over them in a demonstrative way I suspect was calculated to show Tom something, and I came to think the something was that they needed girls, or children, just like these. Tom entertained them with nervous cartoonisms, affecting a kind of Dr. Seuss character. Elaine acted happily dazed, serving as a kind of buffer between Tom and the somber girls, who, as if in opposition, were mature and smiled only when obligated.
After dinner the girls were put to bed and we sat talking. Tom got a brilliant light in his eyes and said to me, "Do you know what Elaine does?"
"I do not," I reported.
Elaine gravely started to peel her blouse over her head. I wondered if I had badly misjudged them. Beneath her blouse was a T-shirt proclaiming Slingshot champ of 1249 Bowick.
Tom leaped from the table, returning with a cardboard box, in the bottom of which was a carpet sample. It was one of our targets before we got the tents and the rats. Elaine was flexing the surgical tubing of a slingshot, inspecting for fissures. "Tom had this made at the shop at work. Aircraft aluminum? I had my first look at a nuclear-reactor slingshot.
For an hour we shot into the box Tom's array of suburban grapeshot; marbles, slugs, rocks, fishing weights, ball bearings, a wild thing that looked like a lead pecan cluster.
"This should be in the Olympics," Tom said.
"Are there any rats?" I asked.
"Rats?" Tom asked, as if he had forgotten our previous time with the slingshot. "No. No rats. None in town." There was a momentary drop in Tom's goofy mirth, a kind of amnesiac stare I was not familiar with. "Tom," Elaine said.
It was not clear what had happened, what Elaine meant, what Tom had provoked. Tom put the box containing all the grapeshot away. Elaine showed me a guest room, appointed in all details, towels to alarm clock, and retired. I got the entirely unsupportable impression that she was wondering what Tom had ever seen in me and felt, so accused, that I couldn't blame her.
Tom and I stayed up in the kitchen. I had given no explanation for my arrival and had expected to have to. Tom was usually downright nosy about school and how well or badly folk were doing. Flunked out was a phrase he liked to repeat until it was ludicrous. Telling him I quit Friedeman would ordinarily produce his largest ear-to-ear, incredulous smile. But he was not curious. We sat and listened to Elaine closing doors.
Tom looked down the hall. I thought of our once having wadded up my tent out on the fire escape and firing the slingshot down the long reach of the apartment hall past the Orphan's and Veteran's doors, prepared to tell anyone who challenged us we were humoring the Veteran with a dead fucking nigger cannon. I thought Tom was just possibly calculating for a long-hall setup. He remained still.
"Tom, no rats?"
"Paul White tapirs?" The old glee. Paul White was our landlord. "Are tapirs really rodents? How could they be? I'd like to see the teeth." This was the old Tom.