“I make these.” She cupped a tiny blue sequined pump in her hand.
“You have a girl friend? I’ll give it to you. Here.”
She pushed the little shoe across the table. It skittered over the edge, fell into his lap, and Beverly retrieved it quickly, for he saw that her hand was following. He set the blue slipper between them without addressing her implicit question on his status-girl friend, married, or just looking around. He was intent on bringing up the subject of Henry junior.
“Remember that time. he started. Then he didn’t know what he was going to say. What did come out surprised him.
“You and me and Henry were playing cards before you got married and the boys were sleeping?”
He could have kicked himself for having blurted that out. Even after all these years he couldn’t touch on the memory without running a hand across his face or whistling tunelessly to drive it from his mind. It didn’t seem to have bothered her all these years though. She picked up the story smoothly and went on.
“Oh, you men,” she laughed chidingly. Her face was so little like Beverly’s flour sacking doll he wondered how he had stood imagining her that way all these years. Her mouth was small, mobile, like a puckering flower, and her teeth were unusually tiny and white. He remembered having the urge to lick their smoothness once. But now she was talking.
“I suppose you thought you could take advantage of a poor young woman. I don’t know who it was, you or Henry, that suggested after several too many beers that we change our penny ante poker game to strip. Well I still have to laugh. I had you men right down to your boxer shorts in no time flat, and I was sitting there, warm and cozy as you please. I was still in my dress with my shoes on my feet.”
“You had them beads on, clip earrings, bangle bracelets, silk stockings,” Beverly pouted.
“Garters and other numerous foundation garments. Of course I did. I am a woman of detachable parts. You should know by now. You simply weren’t playing in your league with strip poker.”
She had the grace to put a hand to her lips as they un curved hiding the little gap-toothed smile he’d doted over at the time of that game.
“Want to know something I never told before?” she said. “It was after I won your shorts with my pair of deuces and Henry’s with my eights, and you were naked, that I decided which one to marry.
Beverly was shocked at this statement, bold even for Lulu. His wind felt knocked out of him for a moment, because her words called up the old times so clearly, the way he felt when she decided to marry his brother. He’d buried the feelings eventually in the knowledge that she wasn’t right for him, man of the world that he was becoming. He congratulated himself for years after i A W7 F_ mom… ……… on getting free of her slack, ambition less but mindlessly powerful female clutches. Right now his reasoning had ripped wide open, however, and jealousy kicked him in the stomach.
Lulu cooed. Her voice was like a wind chime rattling. Cheap, sweet, maddening. “Some men react in that situation and some don’t,” she told him. “It was reaction I looked for, if you know what I mean.”
Beverly was silent.
Lulu winked at him with her bold gleaming blackberry eyes.
She had smooth tight skin, wrinkled only where she laughed, always fragrantly powdered. At the time her hair was still dark and thickly curled. lAter-she would burn it off when her house caught fire, and it would never grow back. Because her face was soft and yet alert, vigilant as some small cat’s, plump and tame but with a wildness in its breast, Beverly had always felt exposed, preyed on, undressed around her, even before the game in which she’d stripped him naked and now, as he found, appraised him in his shame.
You got your reaction when you needed it, he wanted to say.
Yet, even in his mounting exasperation, he did not lose control and stoop to discussing what had happened after Henry’s wake, when they both went outside to get some air. He tolled his sleeves down and fished a soft pack of Marlboros from her side of the table. She watched his hand as he struck the match, and her eyes narrowed. They were so black the iris sometimes showed within like blue flames. He thought her heartless, suddenly, and wondered if she even remembered the two of them in the shed after Henry’s wake. But there was no good way he could think of to ask without getting back down to her level.
Henry junior came to the window, hungry, and Lulu made a sandwich for him with baloney and hot-dog relish. The boy was seven years old, sturdy, with Lulu’s delicate skin and the almost Asian-looking eyes of all the Lamartines. Beverly watched the ZA
AM
boy with electrified attention. He couldn’t really say if anything about the child reminded him of himself, unless it was the gaze.
Beverly had tried to train his gaze like a hawk to use in barroom stare-downs during his tour of duty. It came in handy, as well, when he made a sale, although civilian life had long ago taken the edge off his intensity, as it had his muscles, his hero’s stubborn, sagging flesh that, he could still muster in a crisis. There was a crisis now.
The boy seemed to have acquired the stare down technique naturally.
Beverly was the first to look away.
“Uncle Bev,” Henry Junior said. “I always heard about the bird on your arm. Could you make it fly?”
So Beverly rolled up shirts sleeve once more and forced his blood up.
He flexed powerfully, over and over, until the boy was bored, satisfied, and fled back to his brothers. Beverly let his arm down carefully. It was numb. The sound of the. 22 reports came thick and fast for a while, then all the boys paused to reload and set the jugs in a line against the fence and argue over whose shot went where.
“They’re teaching him to shoot,” explained Lulu. “We had two bucks brought down last fall. And pheasants? Those boys will always put meat on my table.”
She rambled on about them all, and Bev listened with relief, gathering his strength to pull the conversation back his way again.
One of the oldest boys was going down to Haskell Junior College, while another, Gerry, was testing the limits of the mission school system, at twelve. Lulu pointed Gerry out among the others. Bev could see Lulu most clearly in this boy. He laughed at everything, or seemed barely to be keeping amusement in. His eyes were black, sly, snapping with sparks. He led the rest in play without a hint of effort, just like Lulu, whose gestures worked as subtle magnets. He was a big boy, a born leader, light on his feet and powerful. His mind seemed quick.
It would not surprise Bev — WN to hear, after many years passed on, that this Gerry grew up to be both a natural criminal and a hero whose face appeared on the six-o’clock news.
Lulu managed to make the younger boys obey perfectly, Bev noticed, while the older ones adored her to the point that they did not tolerate anything less from anyone else. As her voice swirled on, Bev thought of some Tarzan book he had read. In that book there was a queen protected by bloodthirsty warriors who smoothly dispatched all of her enemies, Lulu’s boys had grown into a kind of pack. They always bung together.
When a shot went true, their gangling legs, encased alike in faded denim, shifted as if a ripple went through them collectively.
They moved in dance steps too intricate for the non initiated eye to Unitate or understand. Clearly they were of one soul. Handsome, rangy, wildly various, they were bound in total loyalty, not by oath but by the simple, unquestioning belongingness of part of one organism.