By the time Gretchen won the hydrant-painting competition, her husband Cornell, though the father of her six children, including triplets born just three months before the contest, much to Grandpa’s great delight (thus the beaming smile on the fireplug’s cartoon face), was little more than a peripheral nuisance to the family, which centered now around the thickly bespectacled lady from the north with the anguished grimace and the withered leg. Lumby loved her, Oxford did, as did all her babies of course (and there were more to come), and so did even, from a distance, her brother-in-law Harvie, grateful that his lonely sister had found true companionship at last, and so, with brotherly gratitude, loving the beloved. And Corny, who spent his mind-bombed days behind pin-ball machines and pornographic magazines, loved her, too, as best he could in his woeful way, having less than all his marbles, as was often said — a strange boy stranger yet as man: his thinning hair uncombed, his eyes unfocused, the hairs of his blond moustache hanging down over his pink mouth like a kind of wispy curtain, nothing but nonsense heard from behind it. With cause, of course, were his marbles lost and scattered, as all who knew his Paris story knew, but that boy was born to strangeness, not all there from the get-go, and in more marbly ways than one, as his sister Lumby would say, speaking euphemistically, she unable to figure out, given his little problem, just how the little sperm machine got the job done, so to speak. Though get it done he clearly did, his bride’s fecundity, even at this early stage in her parturient career, already notorious in the town and soon to become a local legend.
One who was not surprised by the frequent ripening of the crippled drugstore lady’s womb was Pauline, who had seen Corny’s little problem, as his sister called it, from a different perspective. Though she and Corny had been in high school at the same time, just a class or two apart, Pauline had always thought of him as light-years younger, not only because she felt so much older than almost all the boys she knew, but because Corny was such a backward little shrimp, hanging out mostly with gradeschool children right up into her senior year in high school, which was when she began noticing him staring at her from across the room with that confused wall-eyed look of puppydog desire she had seen drift across the faces of successive generations of boys like the special effects in werewolf movies. She had known by all her five senses his two brothers before him, Harvie, the one they called Hard Yard, being off only by an inch or two, and Yale, who was so sweet, and she supposed, by the looks he was giving her, she would eventually know their little brother in like manner as well. This came to pass, though not without a great deal of hesitation on Corny’s part, a lot of time-wasting teasing and pretended hostility and disinterest and silly snickering in the corridors, before he finally turned up at the trailer park on his bicycle one twilit summer evening with two of his little friends, asking if she would like to go riding with them. Luckily, her Daddy Duwayne was not around, he would have eaten them alive. She asked them how much money they had and what they wanted. The idea of needing money had apparently not occurred to them: nothing but small change among the three of them. But what they wanted was small change, too: they merely wanted (after a long list of false wants was got through, starting with the supposed fun of a bike ride) to see. So she took them around behind the trailer and dropped her jeans and underpants, raised her tee shirt. Their frozen, pop-eyed, red-faced, grimacing expressions were so comicbook-like they made her laugh. “You can touch if you want,” she said, feeling generous. Corny held back but the others poked about gingerly like little kids trying to guess the contents of wrapped Christmas presents, and eventually Corny, timidly, joined in. Even body hair seemed strange to them, though one said squeakily he had seen his mother’s and it was just like that, as though this were some kind of brag. She chased them off finally with threats of her violent daddy’s imminent return, but they were back almost every week after that, with more money now and with more boldness in their explorations. They made her bend over and touch her toes, squat, lie down and spread her legs, roll over, get up on her knees and elbows, lie on her side with one knee in the air, press up on her shoulders with her knees by her ears, as they squeezed and patted and palpated and dipped their fingers in wherever they could. Then one evening, just for fun, she told them it was their turn, they had to take their clothes off now and show her. They went rigid with fear, and when she reached for one of their belt buckles, they ran off, leaving her giggling in her own puddle of cast-off clothes and feeling about a hundred years old. But then, later, Corny came back alone and, though he had seemingly lost his power to speak, he indicated by his undone belt buckle that she was to undress him and so she did, remarking to herself, as she took what she found down there into that cavity which had made her locally famous and by which she logged what simple memory she kept of that half of the town’s population, how much more interesting it was, even for an incurious person such as herself, to know mankind in all its variety than to surrender, like John’s wife, say, to the experience of one alone, no matter how beautiful.
Pauline’s loving embrace of the world’s variety was not unlike that, if not of his wife, of John himself, though whereas Pauline was fundamentally interested in men’s zingers, as she often called them — a childish corruption of Daddy Duwayne’s “old sinner,” which, because it perversely pleased him, stuck — John was fundamentally uninterested in any zinger but his own, and in that only with respect to where, variously, he might safely and pleasurably put it. To be fair, it could be said that John did therefore share Pauline’s fundamental preference for a variety of sexual partners, but John’s love of the world’s novelty did not end there, nor was it even fundamentally sexual unless all human activities might be reduced to displacements for sexual ones, as some believed — Alf, for example, or Dutch, or Lorraine in her more bookish highbrow moments, more and more infrequent as the years rolled on. Moreover, even in the matter of sexual partners, there was a catholicity in Pauline’s taste which John, obeying some unstated aesthetic, did not espouse, to his discredit perhaps from a democratic point of view; but then, the democratic point of view was never one that appealed to John very much, though he paid lip service to it and found it profitable. John felt at one with the universe and the universe was not democratic, it was an uninhibited exhibition of colliding forces, of which a bruising game of football was only the barest echo, but an echo at least, which was why he loved it, and the less refereeing the better, a good fuck likewise. Democracy was a sad little human defense mechanism for the inherently powerless against the powerful, a pipe dream and a failure for the most part, instigated by fear and perpetuated by pissants like his cousin Maynard. Or that butch buttinski Marge. It sought to diffuse, curb, and redistribute power, but it did not, as John knew full well and to his daily increase, succeed. It was a joke. Like that variation on the old “put out or get out” line about the guy (old Stu always liked to hear John tell this one) in the beat-up Ford pickup who stops for a girl walking down a lonely country road crying, she explaining through her tears how she’d been taken out into the woods by a guy in a Lincoln Continental (it was a Cadillac when John had first heard it) who had presented her with that cruel and infamous choice, which of course to her was no choice at all. The guy in the truck tells her to hop in, he’ll take her to town, and they go bouncing and jolting and rattling down the road until finally the girl asks to be let out. “Right now, mister, I mean it!” she yells above the clatter. “I’d rather be raped any day in a Lincoln, than get jerked off in a goddamn Ford!”