“I don’t know.”
“Shit, man, think of her like the business manager you never had. Remember you always said the business side of art makes you want to puke? Well, Misty’s a pro, knows computers, says she’s a real, for sure, people person. Which you ain’t, right?”
“Right.”
“So let her manage the crap you hate — the crap you suck at — and see if your income gets better. Come on, man.”
“Can’t argue with that,” Yoder mumbled, seeing a few dollar signs gathering in his future. He did, indeed, hate hauling the chimes around to all the fru-fru and chi-chi and cutesy-cute little galleries and shops in the Foley — Gulf Shores — Orange Beach area, making fake-nice with all the managers and artsy-arts folks. Even though his pieces were popular, unique, and sold quite well, he thought some of those “fancy ladies and gay boys,” as he called them, the ones running the shops, might be overpricing and skimming their own special kind of slick off the top of his profits.
It was his mind-set, to be wary. The older he got, the less he trusted folks, even old friends. He had just about stripped away anyone who ever mattered to him, stripped away with suspicion, always, of ulterior motives. His two children were long estranged, radio silent for over a decade, and the ex-wives did not even bother to try anymore. Gary was all he had. And Gary, like him, had alienated his own set of friends and family, not with paranoia but with his scattershot approach to living, his sheer and utter unreliability.
Gary and Misty had skyped throughout May, June, and into July’s haze, becoming more and more familiar, gestating the plans that would culminate in their reunion, in mere weeks, the revival of a long-ago hot second of a romance — all while the Deepwater Horizon vomited its ominous cloud of crude into the cesspit of the Gulf of Mexico, in ever-mounting numbers of gallons per day. It seemed like CNN had a picture of it on TV 24-7, the live, real-time movie of the slow murder of the gulf. And the numbers, the volume of the disaster, forever ticked upward.
“It’s an awful thing,” Gary told Misty’s image on the computer screen, “a terrible thing — not just the folks killed but no telling what all else is gonna die. They say it’ll kill the coral, even. Hell, I didn’t know coral was alive to begin with.”
“Well, that’s what a lot of the free money is for, to help with that, so I’m going to get there as quick as I can — no later than July’s end. Can’t wait to see you in the real flesh, sweetie,” she cooed.
Gary allowed that she had held up pretty well. She laid claim to the age of fifty-four but looked light of it, with long hair streaked blond, animated green eyes, and the distinctive laugh he remembered from all those years ago, “kind of a hoarse, horsey laugh,” he always called it. And the once — braless teenybopper showed him her relatively new fake boobs. “I was dating a plastic surgeon in San Francisco for a while,” she said, spreading her top open, unhooking her bra from the front, spilling them on out, right in his face, giving him the kinds of sexual itches he had not scratched in years. “The doc gave me these, plus an eye job, and a slight nose job — just got rid of that little bump. You remember that little bump on my nose?”
He did not. He was preoccupied with the not-little boobs.
“What do you think, daddy? Nice, huh? It’s a D-cup size.”
Gary was done for.
They spent more and more hours skyping, which soon became elaborate cyber-sexcapades full of dirty talk and all manner of autoeroticism the likes of which Gary had never imagined himself doing. “She sure does know about some variety,” he confided to Yoder one humid evening. “But hell,” and he took a long pull from the bottle, “why jerk off to a nudie mag when you can see everything right there, just a-writhin’ along with you?”
“Can’t argue with that,” Yoder exhaled his cheap cigarette. “Just seems kind of weird to me, having romantic doings like that.”
“You’re being old-fashioned, man. This is how it’s done these days — everything’s on the Internet line.”
“Can’t argue,” Yoder said again.
Elite Septic Systems sent a “technician” to Turkey Branch the day after Gary headed out for Blountstown, to his new, big-boobed love, and the cleanup job, armed with booze and Viagra.
“This one’s a doozey, one of the worst I ever seen. Gonna need new field lines too,” Ronny, the self-proclaimed turd wrestler, insisted. “This thing is a dinosaur, that’s all there is to it. We got to put in all new. Run you a few thousand dollars.”
“Nothing here to work with at all?” Yoder responded.
“Zero. Zip. You’re lucky you ain’t had the EPA and the Corps of Engineers and any government regulator you can think of out here. The money you’ll save in fines could install a boatload of septic systems.”
Yoder seethed and silently vowed to garnish Gary’s British Petroleum wages or government money or whatever. And he didn’t have to wait long. After only three weeks on the job, sans Turkey Branch commute, not a trailer but a pop-up camper on the back of a Toyota pickup following Gary’s own truck came rolling up to his property, which one Misty Smith hit with the force of Hurricane Katrina.
“I’m moving in with Gary,” she squealed. “My man. My destiny.”
Gary blushed. “If it’s no never mind to you, that is,” nodding at Yoder.
“Of course he doesn’t mind!” Misty was possessed of grand movements, physically — large swoops of arms, long strides of legs, and she had a booming voice to match, a voice she exercised with the looseness of one who was possessed of few boundaries. “The only way I can get the work done is to set up office space. Not going to happen in a camper, that’s for sure. And Yoder, I promise, I guarantee you, that I’ll get you noticed, get the bucks rolling in. As your agent, I’ll negotiate for higher prices, and as your advertiser and website administrator I’ll handle it all. My sweetie here explained your dilemma in detail. And it’s so typical of artist types. You just need to be left alone to do the art. You deserve to be known, and I’m making your fame my mission in life, along with loving up this guy,” nudging Gary, who blushed again, with her elbow. “Oh! Where’s my camera? Look on the front passenger seat, honey, and grab it for me.” But she strode her long legs past Gary, arms flailing a pricey digital camera out of her vehicle and commenced striding, bounding all over the property snapping pictures of individual wind chimes, studying them, making a show of her professional eye. It wore Yoder out already, her energy, but, he told himself, she obviously was a worker bee, and it was, after all, for him.
“What happened to the cleanup job?”
“Aw, man, it was bullshit — walking up and down the beach scooping up tar balls, wearing these dinky, cheap-ass rubber gloves and neon vests. All Misty had to do was hand out water all the livelong day; said she was definitely overqualified for that.”
“Can’t disagree.”
“But after I got hit with that fog a few times, I was thinking I had enough.”
“Fog?”
“Yeah, man, that shit they been spraying all out over the water from planes. To bust up the oil.”
“Dispersant? I saw something about that on the news, I think. Breaks up the oil and sinks it to the bottom of the gulf.” Yoder tapped out a cigarette and lit it. “You say you got hit with it?”
“Lots of folks got hit with it — anybody on the beach — ’cause the damn planes would be maybe a hundred, two hundred yards out, and that gulf wind blowed it all up on the beach, in the air, smelling like a bitch, burning our eyes and all. Nasty stuff. It ate clean through them cheap-ass gloves they gave us. And them stupid lawn-mowin’ masks ain’t no kinda protection.”