“What’s so funny?” my mother asked.
“Nothing.”
“You’d better …”
“I’d better what?”
“Stop that.”
“Stop what?”
“Stop … everything.”
At this, despite myself, I laughed again. It was not a prudent move, but it could not be helped. Before I could repair the damage, sure enough, she hung up. I looked, as one will, at the mouthpiece of the phone and held it in the air regarding it long enough for the manager to understand I’d been hung up on.
He shrugged. “Your girl?”
“Yeah.”
“I don’t like Saturdays worth a damn. Everybody don’t like Monday, but I do. Saturday is a bunch of hooey.”
I poured us some more tequila, had him get us some salt, and we drank a few little shots, looking out at traffic and not saying much. I could not figure out, drink in and drink out, watching him at all furtive angle and even watching him bite limes, if he had teeth or not.
In the little office, with its pine paneling and bad carpet and out-of-date calendars on the wall, the business pone idle, all the cars going by, I thought to think the moment one of contentment, a kind of contentment likely not to be enjoyed forever. That is an odd emotion, drinking with a geezer and with a Judy Love Doll out the back door of your room, but it is an emotion that is true.
“You know what else is not all it’s cracked up to be?” I asked the manager.
“What?”
“Fishing.”
“That shit,” he said, “is for the birds.”
We both laughed, fine fast friends if there ever were fine fast friends in this world. I think I saw a tooth.
“Fishing on a Saturday about the worst idea in the world,” he said.
15
THE WAY WE HAD worked it, fishing any day was, to my mind, the worst idea in the world. We didn’t spot a school of fish and lower lines or nets, we spotted a good price on a case of thirty-weight and pulled into AutoZone and debated whether we needed fan belts and oil or just oil. I got thoroughly impatient with the enterprise, though we were making money. Not a lot, but enough to be surprised when we looked at the checkbook.
We pulled into a wholesaler’s one day and saw some Vietnamese standing about the lot in positions of consternation, itself a sign that something wasn’t right. You saw Vietnamese working or you did not see them. If they were talking, moreover standing around and talking, there was an obstacle in their path. I didn’t want any part of it.
“This looks like Vietnam,” I said to Jim, driving. “Westmoreland’s inside, weighing three hundred pounds, tahkin like iss, refusing to sell them something or buy something from them, playing with his hairy gut through the side ports of his overalls, wondering why in hail we din’t bomb them into the Stone Age, why? Theron, I ast you, why?” I was, as I say, impatient with the entire affair.
“What you know about Vietnam wouldn’t form a good dingleberry in your BVDs,” Jim said, as expected. I was in for the harangue: HE HAD BEEN. I had not.
“Let me see if I can get it right, Jim. We know who went, but we don’t know who came back. Is that it? Do I have it right?”
“Fuck you.”
“Fine with me.”
This was fishing on asphalt. I got out of the van to go in to find Haystacks Calhoun Westmoreland and buy something, but as I neared the Vietnamese I heard them speaking English first and switch to French, and that did it. That did it. I went up to the van window and said to Jim, “They doing French, mon cher, to elude me. When I let them know I speak it, they’ll switch to something else.”
“Gook. Gook’s hard.” He laughed.
I waved agreeably at the Vietnamese and said across the lot, “Laisse le bon temps roulé,” which confused them, understandably, but they knew it meant to be French, and when I went back by them, sure enough, they were speaking something that sounded like Hungarian.
I went in and found the proprietor. I took one look at him and left. He was in overalls, and white Red Ball boots, slopping around — ahhch, I’d had it.
“Take me to the suite,” I told Jim. “I quit.”
“Bullshit.”
“No. I’m not talking to one more Klansman in rubber boots, ever. Won’t do it.”
“I’ll do it.”
“You do it.”
I got to the Cactus Motel and walked a good long hot walk down to the liquor store and got a generous stock of stuff I felt appropriate to celebrating the end of my post-college dalliance. On the way back I threw away a beer can in an oil drum and saw on top of the trash in the can a large, colorful, lifelike dildo. It had a tube running from it to a squeeze bulb of the sort you see on certain pneumatic toys. I stood there regarding it agreeably for a long time, amazed by its veins and knurls and hues, and thought to myself that if I were an artist, I was having an epiphany. I’ve had an epiphany, I said to myself walking back to the Cactus, kicking smashed beer cans and marveling at the proximity of the dildo to the Judy Love Doll out the back door. So close, so far. If wedded, what beautiful music they might make. I was a man of uncertain future afraid to pick up an abandoned dildo and give it to an abandoned deflated woman. I think I saw a small snake in the grass of the road shoulder, and if I did, it looked considerably less real, or less probable, or more outlandish than did the dildo in the garbage. Everybody in the world, granting a certain statistical exception, knows what he’s doing, except me, was my next thought. This was at once of course ludicrously untrue and vigorously sound, and I liked it. It gave comfort, especially if I could eliminate the statistical exceptions and have it really be true. If the plastic woman through her scarlet O-ring mouth were calling siren-fashion the lost dildo to her, it made no less sense than did my life. I had once been rational, as a child. That time looked as far away and as probable as Jules Verne’s Lost Island.
16
AND SO I QUIT TEXAS, where I had gone, I confess, for imprudent reasons. The Doctor had had me read, of course, all Faulkner, and if you take nothing else from him, which is prudent, you may remember that he designates Texas as where you go and change your name when your schemes don’t work out. These are the kind of schemes which when they do work out everybody says you’re smart and you remain in Mississippi or Virginia or South Carolina or even Oglethorpian Georgia — honorable (the Wawer, the Wawer) next to Texas, a place too low for the Snopeses! I had had to see it for myself, albeit in an homogenized latter-day state, its dastardly modern equivalent to horse thieves represented by million-dollar attorneys so removed from horses they nickname themselves Racehorse. Lyndon Johnson was conceivably the model prototypical outlaw by the time I got to old change-your-name Texas. I suppose at the other end of the spectrum it was the Klansmen in rubber boots who schemed for a while to have commercial fishing all to themselves, whose scheme was not working out precisely because the scheme — and was this not Mr. Johnson’s scheme finally? — to bomb Vietnam into the Stone Age had not worked out. In a way Texas was a great epicenter of the not-working-out, and I should have loved it, but I did not.
Their pride in pride is oppressive, cheerless, unlaughable. Something in you wants to film it, but something else wants a robot to run the camera for you while you … change your name and go somewhere else.