[3]
Saturdays there are special events at the mall. It could be a ho-ho banjo band in red vests and sleeve garters. Or a begonia club. Or a cat show. There might be Cub Scouts all over the place. Everyone seems to put in the extra effort on a Saturday. Their jaws ache from smiling.
[4]
Courtney and Jenelle together in a bath. Pubic hair is ugly, but they’re afraid to shave. Many products for the hair, each based on a wholesome foodstuff. Plastic bottles bobbing.
J: I wish my toes were long and thin like yours.
[4A]
Courtney and Jenelle in a stall shower, embracing in soap foam. Why they’re late all the time. Mist.
[4B]
Courtney and Jenelle washing clothes by the Orinoco. (Black-and-white, dubbed.)
C: Why can’t I get my skirts as bright as yours?
J: You’re not beating them hard enough.
Rising smoke in the distance, music of chain saws.
[5]
She had enough imagination to feel molten plastic when she took the albums from the carton. These were red mostly, with lettering in white. There was a song about land reform, another about mascara. She thought of wearing leather next to the skin.
“Where would I find language instruction tapes?” She shelved the travel guides in overstock, felt once more this alien regret at not being able to type. Letters to show the way. Orange signs in her sightline: Romance Cooking Health & Fitness. She thought about her eyes in someone else’s face on posters all over town.
“Do you have How to Avoid Probate?”
[6]
Jenelle’s mother lives by herself in Cherry Hill in a house that’s almost paid for. Dad is trying to make a cleaning service go in south Alabama; he calls often, seems not to be doing well. She has brown hair, type O blood, allergies to shellfish and aluminum foil.
Courtney’s mother is Japanese, a war bride. Her father died last summer of asbestosis. Her brother is in his third year of biochemistry at Drexel. She is right-handed, underweight, wears glasses to correct a mild astigmatism.
[7]
They could be married to men like sleds on rails: top ten percent of the class, membership in a rowing club, an ability to anticipate currency fluctuations. They could be plain in Quaker bonnets, humming as they card wool, shaded sweetly by belief.
[7A]
Rod turned back to her in his belted leather coat of a too-shiny material that was not leather. His wide dark eyes glistened with forgiveness. Courtney inhaled the coat’s laboratory musk as he gathered her up in his arms.
[7B]
Jenelle heard the whispers in passing, her gray skirts brushing the cobbles, the black book cradled in her hand. She had broken the silence in fear, but her quiet simple words had then seemed to lift all eyes in the meetinghouse.
[8]
Was it a party? Jenelle is lying in bed, cold cucumber slices balanced on her face. She has unplugged the stereo, forbidden music. Wondering if he really will phone tonight, Courtney wishes for an interesting birthmark. Someone downstairs is raking leaves. Jenelle has an enema and feels better.
J: Why don’t we have towels that match? With our initials intertwined in a contrasting color?
C: I don’t know.
[o]
Strollers were unconsciously arranged around the fountain; the mothers could not wake their children. Earring Emporium had not had a customer all day. An NCR repairman set down his tool kit and wandered aimlessly. The sound track was muddy for Cinema III’s matinee. A man with no family bought a badminton set and charged it. An aquarium burst spontaneously at Petsateria; there was a brief waterfall over jagged glass, and then little flips on the carpet….
Courtney took the taped package out from behind the stockroom fire extinguisher. Her mouth was dry. The package felt funny. Too heavy? Too light? She was late for the rendezvous….
Jenelle put the mustard on her pretzel left-to-right, signing everything was go. Slowly, as if browsing, they moved toward the Westgate exit, past Jeans World, Muffy’s, the Cookie Castle. They were being followed. The two men wore state trooper glasses and trim black chin beards, but weren’t as young as they thought. Were they DEA? Libyans? No hesitation. Jenelle took the silver gun from under her rabbit jacket and gave each one two in the face. JFK time, brains on a pink dress….
Courtney and Jenelle hydroplaning in a white Camaro, spinning across three lanes of expressway, coming out of it and going harder on. The windshield a gray boil. Hiss of the police-band radio. Swerving headlights. The needle edging past 100….
“Don’t you read?” Courtney said.
“No, I’ve finished school.”
“Read and you’d know nothing ever happens to us. Just these little vignettes we’re not even aware of.”
“You mean it?”
“Anyway they do.”
“Okay.”
Jenelle threw the package out the window, bit off the tip of the silver barrel. The gun was made of wax and contained a thin lime syrup.
[—1]
Courtney and Jenelle in a cemetery with hoagies. From this elevation it is possible to see a white church, the empty river. New shoots of grass are just starting. The air is soft, receptive to the least aroma trace. Starlings forage between grave aisles, behind bronze-doored crypts. Oil trickles over Courtney’s lip. Jenelle catches it on her finger.
C: I wish we were in our eighties and could look back.
J: Me too.
[oo]
What then do we want words for?
The tab on a file.
To say this was in Pennsylvania, during the second term of Reagan.
BLOOD ASPENS
THE OUTLAW CAMP WAS on the middle fork of the Flathead between Horseshoe Peak and the Divide. Ponies nodded over their hay in the corral and jaybirds called from out of the big pines. Inside the loghouse, Buzz (Dan Duryea) was feeding the stove from a basket of cobs to heat a kettle of red beans and jerky. The wall behind him was hung with snakeskins and calendar art. He couldn’t remember the name of the song he was humming and by now he’d stopped trying. He spat on the stove and it hissed.
Wiley (Andy Devine) came in from the dooryard and went to rummage in his medicine box. They called him “El Paciente” because he never stopped whining about his ailments. Lumbago today and bursitis tomorrow or palsy or milk leg or grippe. He brought over his packets of herbs and put a pan of water on the stove to make tea.
Wiley said: “Smells good.”
Buzz snorted. “Jerky and beans. Like always.”
Wiley said: “Put in plenty of chili pods. It cleans out your system.”
Buzz said: “I like mine to stay dirty.”
Out by the hayrick, Midnight (Marlon Brando) was planting geranium slips in a rusted-through pump trough. One night he’d lost three fingers blowing a safe, but he was still deft anytime he worked with his hands. His long lank black hair fell down the back of his buckskin shirt. His boots glistened with mink oil. Midnight had an Oglala wife somewhere and two boys, but it’d been years since he left.
Jackdaws were squawking in the dusk. Hard rain began to fall as Costain (Rod Taylor) came down off the ridge in his linen duster, four cutthroat trout in his bag. A wide Stetson brim darkened features that were already nut brown and fixed in their usual blank expression. They called him “High Wide and Handsome.” He opened the loghouse door and saw the stable hand naked on the end bunk. He had Wiley’s cock in his mouth and Midnight was greasing his butt with lard.
Buzz said: “Juanito got drunk on liniment again and he’s ready for love.”
Costain’s granddaddy had ridden with Quantrill’s raiders. Costain lit a cigarillo and …