They poured their own sweet tea from the nozzles of big zinc urns and sat down at a table and waited for their tacos. Harris balanced the little car seat in a chair. He had to turn the chair sideways to balance the baby in its car seat properly.
Burns said to Harris, in reference to the curious cashier, “I should have told her the baby has two daddies. That would have been funny.”
The tacos came and the men began to eat the tacos.
The baby put its foot in its mouth.
“Look at that,” said Burns. “Your baby thinks its foot is a taco.”
“Her foot,” said Harris.
“What?” said Burns. Then Burns said to the baby, “Well, well, well. Do you think your foot is a taco? I’m going to call you Taco Foot.”
Burns said to Harris, “From now on I’m going to call your baby Taco Foot. You should put a little soft taco shell on your baby’s foot. Old Taco Foot. You should dress up your baby like a taco for Halloween. That would make a good costume. You should decorate old Taco Foot with lettuce and tomato. Isn’t that right, Taco Foot?”
“I’m getting sick of you,” said Harris.
“When you’ve wasted your life, part of you is like, ‘Gosh, that’s terrible.’ And part of you is like, ‘Oh well. I guess I should have thought of this sooner,’” said Burns.
“You probably haven’t wasted your life,” said Harris.
“You had a baby,” said Burns. “That’s supposed to be a pretty good setup by all accounts.”
“It’s not bad,” said Harris.
“Let me be frank,” said Burns. “I asked you to lunch today because I’m in love with your wife.”
“When did this happen?” said Harris. “I ought to take this bottle of hot sauce and pour it in your eyes.”
Was Harris joking? It was hard to tell.
Burns wasn’t joking.
“Don’t get me wrong,” said Burns. “I’m not going to tell her. I’m never going to tell her. I’m going to walk around with a broken heart.”
“Congratulations,” said Harris.
“Once she was nursing old Taco Foot at a party and I didn’t even realize it. I was just standing there talking to her. And then Taco Foot’s head slid off, didn’t it, Taco Foot? I saw everything. Marcie looked all red and ruddy, like she had been out in the sun.”
“Marcie’s tits are not red,” said Harris.
“Healthful,” said Burns. “They had a healthful look to them. Don’t use such crude language in reference to your incredible wife.”
“I’m going to kill you,” said Harris.
“Well, I’ll see you later,” said Burns. He wiped his mouth on a napkin. “Sorry to spring this on you. Now I feel awkward.”
Burns was sitting at a red light when the minivan attacked him. Harris was bumping Burns’s little car from behind, trying to push him into oncoming traffic. Burns looked in the rearview mirror and saw Harris’s mad face but not Taco Foot, who was probably strapped safely into place.
Burns answered his phone.
“You twat,” said Harris’s voice. “This is what you get.”
“We can’t be punished for our thoughts,” said Burns.
“Oh yes we can,” said Harris.
Tornado
WHEN JAMES DROVE HIS CAR INTO THE TORNADO, HE THOUGHT OF the huge window with French shutters by their bed. In the morning, when they undid the shutters, there stood the biggest camellia bush they’d ever seen growing out of control, it almost filled the whole window, squashed up against the glass like an eager beast. The haunted camellia bush. The witch’s fingers. They said a lot of silly things back then. Whenever they’d get a big storm or a strong wind the camellia would make a clawing noise at night against the window — a horrible, squeaky clawing sound, which, as he drove helplessly into the tornado, he remembered in perfect detail.
He remembered asking her whether they had a can of that Italian wedding soup he liked. She said, “Look in the cabinet.” He said, “I’m too tired to look in the cabinet.” One time she said, “I don’t want to talk about the things that haunt me.” And he was like, “Good. Jesus! Let’s don’t.” Looking back on it, maybe she had wanted to talk about the things that haunted her.
Detective
“HOW MUCH DO YOU CHARGE?” GRANGER SAID.
“For what?” she said.
“To follow a guy.”
“What kind of guy?”
“A guy like Cowboy Bob.”
“What’s the angle?”
“I just want to know everything he does, everything he says.”
“Oh, is that all?”
“See, I stopped doing things at some point. I don’t do things. In writing, the preference is for characters who do things. I want to turn Cowboy Bob into a character. As a character, Cowboy Bob will appeal to a certain demographic. In particular, I trust, the distaff side, who form a much more active readership than their male counterparts, according to respected surveys.”
“You want me to follow somebody around so you can make pages out of him. That the gist?”
“Sure. You provide the raw material of a life, I fashion it into art. In addition to your fee, I’ll thank you in the acknowledgments section.”
“What about Cowboy Bob? You plan on thanking him? In your little acknowledgments section?”
“That doesn’t seem wise. This would be strictly between us. You and me. A professional arrangement. I assume you have some sort of confidentiality clause in your contract?”
“I’m no rat, if that’s what you’re asking.”
“By the way, my last acknowledgements section wasn’t ‘little.’ It was over thirty pages long. I’m thorough, and I think you’ll find I’m grateful in a perceptive and extremely flattering way.”
“So you’re going to basically take this guy’s life without his permission and crap all over it.”
“Oh, he’d never know. Not in a million years. See, by the time it hits the page…see, what we writers do is…well, I don’t know. I don’t have any idea.”
“You spin straw into gold.”
“That’s it.”
“Some poor schmuck should feel lucky to be immortalized by you.”
“Well, he wouldn’t know, but sure. The great part is, it works equally well if his glamorous bad-boy persona is all a sham and he spends his free time reading The Bridges of Madison County out loud to his comatose grandmother. I want to get that straight right up front. You don’t have to worry if the material doesn’t seem exciting enough to you. That’s where the power of fiction comes in.”
“I spent some of my childhood near Portland, Oregon. My grandmother made pickles in the washing machine.”
“Uh-huh.”
“So is that yours now? That part of my life?”
“It’s already filed away up here.”
“I want to be my granny. That’s my goal.”
“You want to make pickles in the washing machine?”
“I don’t have a washing machine.”
“You could do it at the laundromat.”
“You know, I’ve always wanted to dye clothes at the laundromat. But I don’t have the balls.”
“I find that hard to believe.”
“How do I know you’re not a weirdo?” she asked.
Granger didn’t answer. He was a weirdo!
Dazzling Ladies of Science Fiction
THEY GOT DOWN TO THE BUSINESS OF DICE. PUFFER AND BRICK TOOK most of Laurel’s money. They tried to be nice and let her win some back, but she didn’t want their charity.
Hurt couldn’t focus on the game, which was called ace-four twenty-four and played with a worn leather cup. He had watched the men playing it at the bar on multiple occasions, but it remained obscure to him. His mind went away. He thought about writing on the bar napkin but recalled the look that Brick had given him over that habit in the past. And rightfully so. There was something trashy about trying to capture other people on a napkin, or on any kind of paper. Sometimes he was experimenting, writing little stories that would fit on a napkin. But most of the time he was a jackal, stealing people’s biz. “Very fly,” Laurel had said about something, and it seemed sweetly antiquated. He had to jot it down.