Pamela Forktine had not heard him, apparently, and he heard no noise in the kitchen, so he tiptoed in there and looked, and there was no beer. He went back in the bathroom and closed the door and looked at himself in the mirror. His hair was dirty and it had the kind of control to it that suggested someone had jerked large chunks of it out. Except it was so greasy how could anyone get a grip on it? Wayne did this himself — grabbed a chunk of hair — and felt it slipping in his hand well before it hurt to pull it. He thought about a shower. That might constitute a moving-in gesture — he did not want that. And he did not want this Rafe character, convict or cartoon-watcher cereal-eater, to find him in the shower the first time they met.
He looked at himself again. His face was, as all faces are to their owners, inscrutable. It was “normal” up to a point. It had high, glossy, rather boyish cheeks and a freckled nose, not too veined, and the always slightly burned forehead was plain. Then the trouble started. That wild skyline of hair and, when he smiled, something that gave Wayne the willies, like mold on cheese gave him the willies, because you never knew, once you got away from outright yellow cheese into cheese that was white, or nearly white, it could be bluish or greenish, and soft, you never knew how soft until you touched it — once you got away from yellow cheese you did not know if the mold was mold or part of the cheese itself. That was the feeling he had, looking at his teeth in Pamela Forktine’s mirror, on a Saturday morning. He looked around the bathroom: it was good old tile, black and white, and she had knickknack shelves everywhere and all the towels and face towels neatly hung, and the toilet was covered in carpet that matched the rug on the floor. He smiled at himself quickly and got the blue-cheese willies and got in the shower anyway.
He soaped up very, very well and took two or three kinds of shampoo from a rack of them, whether they said Conditioner or not, or Oily or Dry or Normal, and washed everything hard and got a boner. All right. He was back. The killer was back.
Wayne has set out an aluminum-framed plastic-webbed chaise lounge in the large gravel beside Lake Travis. He gets in the lounge, has him a Coors in one hand and a cigarette in the other, takes a drag and a drink, says, “Ahhhhh…The only thing I need now is for some broad to give me a knobber.” He grins seedily, seedily the only way you can grin if your teeth appear to have small black-and-green flies on them. “A blonde,” he adds.
Another drag on the cigarette and a long pull on the Coors. It does not pay to drink a beer slowly in this heat.
Wayne is pleased with himself. A knobber indeed. Why should Wayne not get a knobber? Why should he? The first question is the one Wayne would entertain if he were to entertain one of them. He won’t. He will entertain only the positive if slight prospect of reclining in the sun beside his rod and reel baited for catfish, drinking a cold beer, not working on a roof, smoking a cigarette, and having a woman, preferably blond, give him a knobber, as he puts it.
Why should he? is the question that only others entertain at this juncture. If he indeed induced a woman to oblige his need, and should a fish manifest, you can see him leaping out of the chair, and out of her mouth, to tend his rod. Should his fiberglass rod, propped on a forked stick driven into the lake gravel, but twitch, Wayne would be there. Missing the fish, as he would, despite his three-time hook-set philosophy, which he is willing to articulate and demonstrate even while losing fish, Wayne would resume his position on the lounge with a fresh beer and say, addressing the blonde still on her knees in the gravel, “Missed him. Okay.”
Thus the question: Can Wayne expect a knobber from a beautiful blonde in the rightful world? And the world’s answer is no.
But Wayne has an advantage over the rightful world. Wayne is certain that he is himself. It is a weak, quivering self, afraid of nearly everything on earth, but Wayne knows it.
Wayne rebaits. Takes one pretty-good-looking chicken heart off his hook and tosses it to the gravel, where ants will find it in about ten minutes, though there is not an ant on the beach, and puts a better-looking chicken heart on, a fresh purple-red cone with a band of yellow fat on it, and casts it out, far like he can, as he puts it in his Mexican English. To cast out as far like he can is farther than he should, because the fish, if there are any, are in closer. But Wayne is the kind to speak perennially of “the channel,” of the necessity of casting into this channel, which is never marked — you have to know—but is always, wherever you fish, far out there, at precisely the distance Wayne can cast if he casts far like he can.
Floyd, Wayne’s brother, still lives with his and Wayne’s mother. Floyd is a large, soft fellow who somehow is not regarded as fat, or quite grown, which is why, probably, at thirty-seven, people do not kill him. He is found in the wee hours wearing plaid sports coats too large even for him, the pockets loaded with science-fiction paperbacks, verbally assaulting police officers. He is arrested, to be bailed out by his mother. He returns home, red-eyed, with his science-fiction books stacked neatly on his folded coat on his high knees during the front-seat ride home in his mother’s car. She is not mad at him, or really worried. He’s Floyd and he’s home.
Wayne is putting his car in a ditch, putting Antabuse under his tongue, putting his kids in a motel to hide them from his wife, putting dollar bills in a jukebox at eleven in the morning, putting a chaise lounge beside a lake to call for an imaginary broad to give him a knobber. Wayne has thrown away everything except a folding plastic-and-aluminum chair, an Igloo Playmate cooler, and his cigarettes.
Floyd has thrown away nothing — not his childhood room, his toys in it, or his mother.
Mr. Stark, father and husband, threw them all away, one presumes.
Floyd is Mrs. Stark’s boy.
Wayne is on his own.
Wayne inherited the throwing-away. Wayne even threw away the United States Navy. Once, an Ingersoll-Rand compressor, admittedly someone else’s, but still.
Floyd? Asleep. Mrs. Stark is watching a late-morning soap. These people are afraid of nothing.
Floyd is talking, on a roof: “It was thirteen inches long and nine inches around—”
“On the soft?” Wayne asks.
“On the soft,” Floyd says, with a giggle. “I think.”
Wayne pulls out his tape measure and starts measuring roof jacks. As these things happen, the fourth or fifth jack — a lead jacket for open ventilation pipes protruding through roofs — is exactly thirteen inches high and nine inches around.
“If that son of a bitch has a dick that big,” Wayne says, “you tell that son of a bitch I’ll suck it.”
Floyd giggles some more. “I don’t know where he is.”
“I thought he was your friend,” Wayne says.
“My friend’s friend.”
“I don’t care who the son of a bitch is. I’ll suck it.” Wayne measures another jack.
Wayne is serious in the one way Wayne can be serious: trivial outrage. He is being lied to, albeit thirdhand, about a ludicrous matter, but insofar as Wayne has a member that he cannot tell anyone is thirteen inches long by nine inches around—on the soft—he is outraged. The gentleman of mythic dimension has breached a protocol of manners, even for roofers, and Wayne will see him in a duel, if he can. Wayne proposes not to duel evenly, member-to-member; Wayne proposes false submission: he will contest this liar on his knees. The true beauty of this is that if the man did appear, up the ladder and over the horizon of the roof edge, carrying with him this great, leaden soil pipe between his legs, Wayne would not suck it. Wayne would turn profoundly red, giggling now himself — Floyd would stop giggling, at this point embarrassed and a little outraged to have delivered the goods, only to have his brother welsh — and begin complimenting the bearer of the cannon.