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“I’m not going to give up, Linda.”

“I hope you don’t.”

“Tomorrow night we’ve got a date.”

“I’d like that.”

“And I don’t want any notes left on my door.”

“There won’t be any.”

“And I don’t want any we-now-interrupt-th-program-messages on Tv to tell me the date’s off, either. When I’m watching professional wrestling, I don’t want some announcer cutting into the match.”

She laughed softly. “None of those, either.”

“And I’ll expect you to wear that perfume you were wearing last night.”

“I promise. I don’t have any other kind of perfume, anyway.”

“And one other thing.”

“What’s that, Sam?”

I kissed her on the mouth. I started to pull back but she held me there, slender fingers against the back of my neck.

“What I was going to say,” I said finally, “was that I care about you. All of a sudden last night it just happened.”

The gray gaze got impish, amused. “As I recall, you fall in love pretty easily.”

“I’m not sure I’m falling in love. I don’t know what it is. Except every time I think of you I feel a whole lot better than I have in quite awhile. And I get this really urgent need to see you.”

She was just about to say something when the front door opened and her mom stuck her head out. I was back in eighth grade again, tense about moms, and hoping I didn’t say anything stupid or unforgivable.

“Oh, hi, Sam, haven’t seen you in a long time,” said her mom, who looked very much like her daughter. “I didn’t realize you were still here.

Would you like to stay for supper?”

“Afraid I can’t, Mrs. Dennehy. I just stopped by to say hi to Linda.”

She smiled. “Well, say hi to your folks.

I always see them at mass but that’s about all these days.”

“I’ll be right in, Mom.”

“Nice to see you again, Sam.”

“Nice to see you, too, Mrs. Dennehy.”

Linda walked me to the edge of the porch. “I wish it were tomorrow night.”

“I could pick you up later tonight.”

She took my hand and kissed me on the cheek.

“No, let me live in that “glow of expectation” they’re always talking about in those romance novels I read.”

“It’s a deal, then. We’ll both glow for the next twenty-four hours and I’ll see you right here tomorrow night.”

This time she kissed me on the mouth. Not for long. “I’d have kissed you longer but Mrs.

Sullivan is peeking out her curtain from across the street.”

“Want to put on a real show for her?”

She took my shoulders, turned me forward like a wooden soldier, and then set me marching off to my ragtop.

I honked at her as I pulled away. She waved good-bye with a girly hand. Don’t you love it when they wave good-bye with a girly hand?

Nine

Kenny Chesmore’s got one of those tiny silver house trailers that the military used in army camps during the war. After the fighting stopped, you could get them cheap. A lot of people did, especially Gi’s who went to college on the Gi Bill.

Kenny’s trailer was set up in the shade of a giant oak with branches of mythic proportion.

Easy to imagine Arthur’s knights sleeping beneath its mothering wings on a stormy night preceding the battle next day.

Or in a more modern context, a pornographer cranking out twenty pages of pure art a day.

Ladies and gentlemen, meet Kenny

Chesmore. The typewriter you hear is his, a sweet little Olympia portable of a model they don’t make anymore. I’ve offered him $150 for it. He won’t take it.

Out front there’s a big, lazy golden collie that butterflies like to pick on and who steadfastly refuses to go outside when the thermometer strikes below thirty. His name is Herbert.

As the door opened you could see for yourself the kind of image Kenny chooses to project for himself-beatnik. Bohemian. Outsider. The short dark hair combed forward. The goatee. The ragged gray T-shirt. The wrinkled chinos. The dirty white tennies. I’m not sure where this “beatnik” uniform came from-I’ve never seen any of the holy trinity,

Kerouac-Ginsberg-Corso, wearing anything like it.

But all you have to do is go to a city and you’ll seen dozens if not hundreds of such getups. Kenny also has a bumper sticker on his door-Khruschev is a Commie. Kenny likes what they call sick jokes.

When he’s not writing, he’s usually in a political demonstration of some kind in Chicago, which is four hours away. I’d accompanied him to the one for Caryl Chessman and the one for civil rights but some of the others bothered me enough to stay away from. Any group that is willing to forgive Joseph Stalin for all his atrocities is not a group I want to be part of.

The inside of Kenny’s trailer is, as you might imagine, a garbage dump of dirty clothes, pizza wrappers, books of every size and description, stacks of records running to some really good stuff such as Sara Vaughan and Gerry Mulligan, and a huge Admiral console Tv. Kenny likes his politicians to be twenty-four inches. He thinks it makes it easier for them to hear when he screams at them about what lying capitalist devils they are. He’s right, of course-I like capitalism but it sure has produced more than its share of devils-it’s just that he’s awfully damned noisy about it.

The windows were open so the trailer smells weren’t too bad. He gets some fresh breeze off the wide creek that runs in back of his place. He also gets some interesting animals, especially the raccoons and the possums that manage to break into his trailer whenever he’s gone. One day I pulled up to find him out. But there were three raccoons staring out at me from his living room window.

He has a small table on which he both writes and eats. You can tell when he’s about to eat because just before he puts his Tv dinner into the tiny oven, he shoves his typewriter to the far edge of the table. Dinner, as they say, is served.

On the wall, high and just to the right of the table, are six or seven of his latest paperback covers thumbtacked to the wall. He makes three hundred dollars a book and usually does one a month. The covers are usually photographs of buxom women wearing as little as the law will allow. They all say “For mature readers only” somewhere near the title. The only place you can buy them in Black River Falls is down at the Union cigar store along the river.

You tell the guy what your favorite brand of literature is and he always winks at you and says, “Okay, you like them there zippy books, do ya?” He always says “zippy.” He’s some kind of immigrant, just nobody has ever figured out what kind. Then he stoops low, lifts up a cardboard box, and gives you time alone to look through the various titles.

The covers Kenny had on his wall now all seemed to share a certain theme.

Tryst for Triples

Three-way Thrust

Thrills for Three

He handed me a Pepsi-Kenny drinks booze even less than I do-z I said, “What happened to lesbians?”

“They’re sorta out right now. M@enage @a trois is in.”

“Ah,” I said.

“The French publishers started it.”

“Ah, the French.”

“Hell, in Denmark they’re doing bestiality with bondage.”

“Ah, the Dens.”

“I wish the missionary position would come back.

It’s a lot easier to write. I get a headache thinking up all this stuff. I’ve never done a three-way, have you?”

“Several times.”

I’ve always wanted to use the word “agape.”

And that’s just how Kenny looked. Agape. “You have?”

“We went all night.”

“No shit?”

“No shit. We would’ve gone longer except the one sheep got tired out.”

“You asshole.”

“I’m from Black River Falls, Kenny.

People from Black River Falls don’t have three-ways.”

“I’ll bet they do. They just don’t talk about it.” He frowned at his typewriter as if it were deeply disappointing to even gaze upon. “I gotta come up with some pages here. I’ve got four three-way scenes to write and the rules are each one has to be at least fifteen hundred words. That’s a lot of three-wayin’.”