Though he seemed not to notice, Stu was aware all along of Rex’s hatred, thought of it as a sick streak in the boy, a transmission failure of a sort, knew also Rex was stealing him blind, but somehow, in spite of all this, Rex’s malice, his paranoia, horniness, thievery, Stu felt some kind of kinship with the lad, and generally let him do what he wanted. Even lent a helping hand, often as not, though it made him feel a little like his block was cracked. Sometimes, just to let Rex know he wasn’t completely stupid, Stu would try to catch him in some mischief or other. He’d leave a tenspot on a counter or a workbench, say, then demand to know what had happened to it when it disappeared. The kid would scowl at him, act like he was dealing with a crazy man, and Stu would have to reverse gears, back down, no longer sure whether he’d put the ten bucks there or only intended to. Same with the other stuff that went missing: Maybe it wasn’t there in the first place, or vanished years ago. Couldn’t say. Goddamn memory. Strangest maybe was the way he kept throwing that black-hearted whelp and his little darlin’ together. He knew Daphne had the hots for the young scamp, the way she dressed and teased and showed her backseat every chance she got. Broke old Stu’s heart to see them carrying on, but weirdly it gave him a charge, too, as though by giving Daph the keys to the inner office and leaving the lot on some invented errand or other, or letting Rex give her a ride to the Getaway, he were getting a stalled car moving again. Maybe, somehow, he was reliving his cheatin’ days through the tacky little hotrod, whom he hated and feared, yet felt close as a father to. Stu had this ambivalent relationship with about everybody in town. He thought John was a great guy, for example, top of the line, but he didn’t really like him. He did like John’s wife, liked her a lot, hell, he’d do anything in the world for that girl, yet at the same time he felt he couldn’t care less about her. For the most part, this relationship was mutuaclass="underline" everybody in town loved old Stu, their hearts went out to him, yet they all considered him a worthless old drunk who might as well be dead. He was everybody’s friend, but nobody knew him.
Maybe Stu’s ambivalent attitude toward Rex’s malice had something to do with his notion that as far as life expectancy went, bad luck was good, good bad, a notion Alf heard him trying to explain in the country club bar one night (an unusual night, as it turned out) to Trevor, the insurance salesman, meaning to put him straight, he drawled, about what was wrong with his damfool actuarial tables, meaningless as a used-car price tag. There were others standing around, too, or perched on barstools, most of them having long since stopped listening to the garrulous old lush, though he still had the polite attention of John’s wife beside him, always patient with the foolishness of others. Stu had just sold a Cougar and an Explorer XLT that day and so his rear axle was really dragging tonight, he said, since he thought of car sales as additions on the way to his own funeraclass="underline" each man was given to sell so many cars in his life, and then: pfft! “Get ready to tow me to the junkyard, ole buddy,” he growled, clutching his chest and rolling his eyes as though it were one of his punchlines, “I feel another sale comin’ on!” And Trevor wheewheed in that silly sniggering way he had, covering his mouthful of bad teeth with his ring-studded left hand. Daphne, relatively sober and out of her usual baggy sweatsuit with the dirty seat and into a pink party dress for a change, told Stu to shut up, he was depressing everybody, and Stu sobered up for a second and gave her a look Alf hadn’t seen on his face since before Winnie died. Then he grinned his gap-toothed country-boy grin and, wrapping his drinking arm around John’s wife, asked her if she’d heard the one about the old boy here in town who’d died a few years back of diarrhea but his widow insisted they write “gonorrhea” as the cause on his inspection sticker. “Well, ole Doc here he wouldn’t have none of that, y’know, bein’ the—hee ha! — lawr-abidin’ sort and knowin’ the difference between them two ‘rhears’ and maybe even how to spell the little suckers, on accounta him havin’ a college diploma and all, and he reminds her that ain’t exactly the—haw haw! — gospel truth. ‘Aw, hellfire, I know it,’ she—whoof! wharr! — says, ‘but I’d—hoo! — I’d rather folks—yarff! hee! harr! — folks remembered the old clunker as a—heef! — as a—whoo! — ”’ And, wheezing and snorting helplessly, he dropped his drink down John’s wife’s bosom and fell off his stool. Alf helped Daphne drag Stu out to his car and pour him in, and as he propped him up in the front seat, pushed the lock button on the door, and (Stu was muttering something incomprehensible about a fucked-up transmission) closed it, he thought: It’s silly to keep people like Stu alive. Alf felt ashamed for his own part in it. The old fellow, drooling, slid back against the door and batted his freckled head on the window. Stu’s wife Daphne, staring out at the little red pennant flapping over the eighteenth hole, now floodlit, said: “It’s a goddamn mess,” and Alf thought so, too. When he went back into the bar, vaguely uneasy about letting Daphne drive Stu home, he found John’s wife holding her silk blouse in her fingertips, away from her breasts, flapping it about as though to shake the gin out. There were a lot of jokes, or what passed for jokes, about the tonic virtues of gin, the new improved flavor of mother’s milk, and so on, and when they asked Alf his medical opinion, he sniffed and said that they smelled like martinis, okay, but he’d never seen them served in cups that big before. Trevor giggled like a moron at that one, and his wife Marge said: “Well, the party’s getting a little rough!” Marge’s cups wouldn’t hold a martini’s olive.
How much, his little darlin’ Daphne wondered, driving foggily home that night, did Stu know about her and Rex? Plenty, probably. Hard to say, though, if it mattered. Maybe it even gave the old coot a peculiar pleasure to star in one of his own jokes. Made him a kind of living legend. “There was this old farmer, doncha know, who took him a young bride, a hot-wired little sports job who just couldn’t get enough juicin’ and left the old yokel too pooped out from so much time down in the Red River Valley to get his chores done out in the back acres. Ffoo! Fuckin’ spread goin’ to hell in a hangbasket and him, too, see. So directly he went and took on this young hired hand …” Did old Stu take notice when she stood over the horny boy while the kid was down in the pit, offering him the view she’d seen him gobbling up from the other women who came out there to get their oil changed and their motors tuned? Was he watching when she squatted down, knees spread, while sexy Rexy was on his back under a car, to kid around with him about needing a valve job or getting her own underbody greased? And if he did, if he was, did he care? Daphne had slipped into the somewhat boozy habit over the recent years of wearing a floppy fat-hiding sweatsuit wherever she went, gave her the illusion of being an athlete by day and it cushioned her and served for peejays when she fell over at night. Now, though, she was back into skirts again, not the old ones, of course, which no longer fit, had to buy a whole new closetful of the damned things, new underpants, too, with ribbons and peekaboo crotches and cute little messages the randy mechanic could read. Which he did, at first by long eye-filling gazes, hand on his connecting rod, later by braille, as you might say, which led her to crack back, when he alluded, somewhat cynically, to the mystery of her being attracted to a guy like him: “Mystery? Hell, honey, I’m an open book!” As the boy laughed his snarling laugh and nibbled at her clit, Daphne lit up and, blowing smoke at the motel room mirrors, thought about the long stupid shaggy-dog joke she and Stu had been playing out for so many years. Some of it right here in these rooms when warhorse Winnie was still around, though it really went back much farther than that, back to her best friend’s wedding reception and her mythical handful of strawberries and cream, old Stu’s “day of destiny,” as he called it, half her goddamned life. Maybe it was time for the punchline. “Fuck me, sweetie pie,” she whispered, stubbing out the smoke and squinting appraisingly at the tense mirrored buttocks of the creature hunched over her like a powerful predator gnawing at a carcass. “Fuck me hard!”