“You step on it.”
“I see that. Any beer?”
“No.”
Wayne looked at his bayonet: it was the narrow kind, very heavy, with the most prodigious blood groove he had ever seen on a knife of any kind. It was not imaginable to him that a bayonet like this one could kill someone better, or more efficiently or quickly, or let you get it out of the victim easier, or whatever the hell a blood groove actually did or was supposed to do. Blood groove. It sounded like a joke, or something to tell a recruit and laugh at him if he believed it. It was probably a way to save steel.
Felicia stepped off the Exerstep and back up, and stepped back off and back on, and looked at her hips some more. Wayne pressed his crotch to her leg, at about her knee.
“Hey, ugly.”
“Don’t say that to me, Wayne.”
“Okay. How about a knobber?”
“Not now. Later.”
“Sounds like a weenie.”
Wayne struck an elaborate, stylized martial-arts pose and said, “I’m a burnin, burnin hunk of love,” and threw the bayonet at the back of the front door, which it struck not with the blade but with the short, heavy, fat machined handle, making a deep, dull contusion in the door and falling to the floor with a thick twang. Two boys ran into the room at the sound and saw immediately the bayonet and the fresh wound in the door and Wayne and said, in unison and looking at Felicia to gauge her approval, “Cool!” Felicia was expressionless, so the boys leaped on the bayonet and fought over it until Wayne took it from them and put it through his belt pirate-style.
“Git.”
The boys did.
“There is some beer, I think, Wayne,” Felicia said.
“Who brought it?”
“Nobody.”
“Nobody, shit.”
“Nobody, Wayne.”
“I didn’t leave it.”
“Wayne, you left.”
“Okay. Okay. Don’t give me the fifth amendment or third-degree burns or—” He stopped speaking, overcome by the sight of Felicia’s pale thigh going into the Exerstep-pink nylon so loosely a hand could easily glide up there, meeting no restriction.
“Our Lady of Prompt Succor!” he declared, brandishing the bayonet and trying to kiss her.
“Don’t. I’m sweaty.”
“Okay.”
Felicia went to shower and Wayne went to the kitchen, where he parted items in the refrigerator with the bayonet until he found the beer. These he would have stabbed to extract if it wouldn’t have wasted a beer. He felt good, suddenly very good. He almost took a beer into the back yard and punctured it with the bayonet to test out the blood groove, but did not. Yet. “Goddamn beer groove,” he said aloud, holding a beer in one hand and the bayonet in the other. He regarded the bayonet and its groove a moment, put it on top of the refrigerator, and walked back into the living room holding his crotch, with certain fingers extended and certain folded as he’d seen black rappers do. The fingering was the same as the Texas Longhorn Hook ’em Horns sign.
What do they call it — fragrant dereliction?
What?
Romans. Somebody. Napoleons.
Be quiet.
I’m about to pop.
Don’t.
I could come back, do this to you all the time.
No, you couldn’t!
Come back, do it sometimes.
Not come back. Sometimes, maybe.
Whatever. Changkaichek!
Oh, Wayne.
Hey. That mudpuppy’ll be back hard in ten minutes.
I don’t have ten minutes.
What?
Work.
Sounds like a personal problem.
Actually, it is, Wayne. I have to have two jobs now.
Oh.
And…
And what?
Don’t be here when I get back, if you want sometimes.
Sheeyit.
That’s right.
Wayne left without showering, wondering where Felicia’s second job was, where she…how she took care of four kids. It was a vague, troubling haze of guilt that felt like a huge ball of tangled monofilament filling the back seat of the car. A ball of monofilament that size could not be dealt with with less than a flamethrower. It would ensnare birds, it would hook something, it would trip you, you’d see a piece of good tackle in it and never cut your way in, it would foul your next cast, it would williefy your entire life. If his life was a happy, larky fishing trip, he had a ball of monofilament half the size of the boat beside him. And it didn’t have anything to do with him anymore. Felicia had had it. She wouldn’t let him untangle it. Which he didn’t want to, couldn’t do anyway. How did marriage and kids look like such a hot idea before you had it and like such a clusterfuck after you got it? It was like praying for rain and getting struck by lightning.
“I feel like going to Italy,” Wayne said aloud in the Impala. He pictured wearing rather pointy, thin-soled shoes and yelling at people without having to fight them and drinking things he’d never heard of (and liking them) and mountains, maybe, and fountains and marble and beautiful women who would talk to you whether you understood them or not and whether they understood you or not, a problem that sign language would solve anyway, and what it would be like sleeping with dark world-famous-loving women who did not wear pink shorts the same pink as a miniature geezer walker, stepping on it about once an hour. He was ready for a beer. He was not ready for the want ads, but it looked like time.
Wayne drove down to a bar called Taco Flats run by an agreeable Mexican who would pretend he understood your bad Spanish. Blocking the lot to Taco Flats were cars lined up to do window banking at the bank next door. Wayne wished one of them would just rob the bank and dismiss the line of traffic. He wondered why he didn’t rob the bank. He had the bayonet, against the day Felicia cut him off and changed the locks and denied him his things, or moved in the night with them all, or whatever a woman going up and down on a geezer walker might come up with. He could rob the bank with his bad Spanish and a bayonet. “Cabrónes! Tú probablamente anticipare un hombre with pistole. Es un blood groove!” Blood groove shouted by a white-looking Mexican bandito would scare anyone in a bank in suburban San Antonio. The line of cars opened for him and he drove into the Taco Flats lot. It was lunatic to rob a bank without a gun. He had over a hundred dollars left from not going to California, anyway.
The agreeable Mexican who ran Taco Flats, Harry, gave Wayne, whom he had once overlooked passed out at a corner booth and locked in Taco Flats for the night, a wink and said, “Qué pasa!”
“Stone!” Wayne said. “Mongo firo bira, per favor.” He meant to say frió beer — cold, a word he knew — but never got it right. This was the sort of error Harry allowed by never correcting. He would in fact corroborate and advance these idiocies people came up with.
“Aquí, a fiery beer, my friend John Wayne.”
“Wayne,” Wayne said.
“Sí. John Wayne, if you go to sleep and something today, let please a bandanna on the table for indication of surrender.”
This was the height of Wayne and Harry’s communion: a manly, head-on reference to Wayne’s humiliating overnight stay and Harry’s jovial acceptance of it.
“Chingasa!” Wayne said, squinting with mirth and a mouthful of extremely cold fiery beer.
Harry would move on to other customers, forgetting Wayne except to ponder how someone as unlike John Wayne got to be called John Wayne. Wayne had no idea how he came to be called, by Harry, John Wayne, but it was in the fabric of not correcting anyone or anything to let it go. Besides, he had tried and it didn’t work. He drank like John Wayne, Wayne thought, if John Wayne drank. Did John Wayne drink? Did Dean Martin say, “Circle the wagons, the Injuns are comin’”? Were dress designers gay? These models you saw, runway, were so goddamned good-looking. He tried to picture Calvin Klein or Perry Ellis in the Navy. He couldn’t. He could see male models in Klein underwear in the Navy but not Calvin Klein himself. He did not have the balls to rob a bank. Bayonet, Biretta, shit, Uzi. Kalashnikov. He wouldn’t rob a bank with a bazooka. He wouldn’t hold up Fort Knox with an atom bomb. He couldn’t do shit.