I wonder if the man thought it was his inane jokes that kept us in hysterics, or if he realized it was his scabrous vocabulary tickling us to our boyish cores. Could, indeed, we have made the distinction? Eric cussed out more potholes, more drivers, and speculated at length on the sexual habits of the waitress at the diner who’d served him breakfast that morning. (“Shit on a fuckin’ shingle, that’s what she gave me, I swear. Goddamn, it’s a fuckin’ miracle I’m still fuckin’ alive!”) His invective involved her with toothless octogenarians and several large barnyard animals, at a specificity quite beyond our nine-year-old minds to follow: “I’m sittin’ at the goddamn counter, being fuckin’ polite and thinkin’ ’bout my face full of pussy…” evoked a picture of Eric on a counter stool with a kitten trying to climb down from his head — while his speculations on whether the waitress was or wasn’t the sort who’d “give a fuckin’ donkey head with rusted-out braces an’ rotten teeth till the hairy bastard hee-hawed for mercy…” sailed by in an image worthy of Un Chien andalou, but devoid of information for Robert or me — though enough big monster-mule and little wormy pig dicks got sucked off, cut off, and rammed down this or that cocksucker’s throat, Lord knows, to make up for it. We couldn’t stop laughing anyway, as it all swirled around us in phallic confusion, a surreally mis-imagined haze.
Nor was it entirely monologue. Eric asked us more questions about life in the fuckin’ city, professing to each answer we gave his own smilingly indulgent terror of that fuckin’ place:
“When I was in that goddamn Navy they wanted to put me on a fuckin’ plane. I told them right the hell out, there was no fuckin’ way they was gonna get me up in one of them fuckin’ things! Well, I feel the same way about fuckin’ subways. I want the wheels on the fuckin’ road. Not twenty feet under it, or half a mile above it. On it. An’ that’s fuckin’ it!”
When the truck crunched onto the gravel beside the dairy, a guy in a blue uniform with white piping across the pockets and down the sides came out and, as Eric opened the cab door, called:
“Well how the hell are you?”
For a moment, as Eric climbed out, I thought we were entering some unimaginable world where all males talked like this. (“Got some kids with ya’,” the uniformed guy observed. “Yeah, I remember Robert, from last time.” And, to both of us, as we dropped down: “Hi, there.”) But the occasional hell, dang, damn, and goddamn we heard from the rest of the dairy workers as the morning rolled on were no more than ordinary, civilized slips, that vanished against the profane transgressions of Eric’s dithyrambic scatology.
Standing in the sun, I looked down at the gray stones graveling away before the building, thankful for my shoes as only a city child can be.
Grinning, Eric motioned to me. “Get over here, ya’ little shit-ass bastard.” Beside me, he bent and put one hand on my shoulder. “You stay the hell back, now, while me and a couple of these other cocksuckers unload them shit-ass milk cans down onto that fuckin’ chain-linked conveyer, right there — see?” He pointed with the other. “They carry the shit — ” clinking and wobbling, half a dozen, already on it, moved by the red brick wall — “till they go right through that fuckin’ archway, over there — you see it, now?” He smelled of earth and machine oil. “So you stay the fuck outta the way.” Then he dropped his hand, stood up, and went around to the truck back. “God-damn, get that big ol’ shit-ass fucker!” he’d shout, standing in the truck bed, leaning a can out to one of the men below — till finally one of the loaders objected:
“Come on, now! You better quit talkin’ like that, Garbage Mouth. You got kids around here! And they ain’t even yours. Maybe they haven’t been brought up to hear that kind of thing!”
From the truck, Eric grinned over at us: “Sorry, there.” He went back for another can. “Whyn’t you two go look around. We don’t want your goddamned little ears to wither up and fall off from the fuckin’ heat, listenin’ to our shit.”
“Your shit!” the other loader said sullenly, standing below. “Come on, now!”
So Robert and I went off to explore inside the building.
Robert had been here before and explained to me how everything had to be kept real clean — then let me wander off to see something on my own that didn’t much interest him. I strolled past tall aluminum equipment, slanted with salmon sun through high levered-out windows, to amble over the red, tessellated flooring slurred with milky spills — wondering what it would be like to walk through the white puddles barefoot. I probably looked like any ordinary kid, loafing around, gazing at the pasteurizing tanks, the homogenizing tubs, the cooling vats, the angled pipes and arching hoses that ran between gauges like clusters of clocks. I was still in a kind of profane trance, separated from the overtly sexual, at least in me, by a barrier no more substantial than a misty breath breathed out on a chill April dawn.
Once, in an empty corner (other than a few loaders and a foreman or two, all outside now, the workers didn’t come in till eight-thirty: so the dairy proper was deserted), I stopped by bare brick. Asbestos-covered pipes ran up to the high roof. Then I felt down inside my pants. What, before, I’d suspected, now I confirmed: back in the truck, about when Eric had scorched the Texas plains, I’d wet my underpants with that mysterious discharge that came more and more frequently these days — and which sometimes I could even make happen by various pleasurable frictions.
Immune in his youth to genital joy, could Robert have undergone a less sloppy, if similar, reaction?
Eric did not have an iota of the child molester in him. (I’ve known a number of Erics since: all heart and mouth.) He would have been outraged by any such idea. In a sense, the man who kept his cussedness under control with respectable women and men probably gives a better picture of him than his verbal excesses of the road. But if he had been so inclined, the sad and simple truth (at least I thought so then) is that I would have been the happiest, most willing, most gratefully molested child one might have asked for.
There was simply no sexual act, whether or not I’d tried it already with the guys after swimming, I wouldn’t have happily performed with him.
Soon I was in the truck again, between Eric and Robert.
The ride home was equally glorious, obscene, and innocent. Back at the farm we got down from the cab, said hello to Robert’s mother, who came down the kitchen steps drying her hands on a dish towel, while Eric swung the empty milk cans from the truck bed. We called our thoroughly inadequate goodbyes to the amazing man whose cussing caused such marvels.
He called back: “Bye, Robert. So long, little guy.” (I realized he’d lost my name on our trip.) “We had fun, didn’t we?” Then he slammed the cab door after himself. “Hope you come up and we do it again. They were real good, ma’am. Both of ’em, real good. Bye, now, ma’am. Weren’t no trouble at all!” Then he pulled his head back inside the window and the truck rolled off.