“Air freshener,” the life insurance salesman says.
“Fish air freshener?”
“Well, no. It’s—”
“Here’s some Eau de Paris — NOIR.”
“That’s expensive.”
“Oh!”
“Windows! Stop that shit, Borger,” Pampa says.
“What is all this crap?” Borger asks.
“Yeah. Are we in the presence of a complex here?”
“No, I just like to keep my car spotless. I live in this car — work in this car fifteen-sixteen hours a day.”
“Well, it doesn’t have to smell like a whorehouse.”
“Well — you know how sometimes a car just gets an odor in it that … doesn’t go away?”
“No,” Pampa says.
“No,” Borger says.
“You know, kind of under things?”
“No.”
“No. God. Did he fart?”
“Heysoos. I get the picture. Spot of ORANGE GROVE up here, Borger.”
A stop is made for urination all around. Mr. Irony, whose clay-caked face resembles a terra-cotta mask, declines to unwinch and pees from the Superman position.
“Look, Mom, no hands,” he says.
Rooster says to me, “That is one trazy white man.”
The oiler heads for the ditch in a mincing wobble and appears to start to wilt when Rooster suspends him by the back of the shirt. “And he still dead, Taint,” Rooster whispers to him, shoving him back toward the truck. “Pitiful. Pitt-ee-full.”
“Load my bomb bays, kind sirs,” Mr. Irony calls.
Responding as to a regular call for workaday lubrication, the oiler pulls himself to with a big sniff and hurries to Mr. Irony with two more cold beers, which Mr. Irony instructs him to slip into the pockets of his jacket.
“You will surmount your troubles, son,” Mr. Irony says to him. “Your wife’s father died and he will remain dead, as Mr. Rooster has so sagely informed you. The world means you no harm. Be brave, be brave, and be strong.” Mr. Irony makes a gesture in the air that suggests a blessing and that throws him out of the Superman orientation, and we fire up and are off in a scratch of rock and rubber and clay, Mr. Irony in a spinning circle-within-a-circle boomerang motion.
“Well, thing is, see, she’s a young girl — big girl, you girls would like her, being as you’re from Texas and all, fine state, did my time out there yessiree on rigs outside Odessa, nice folk, hospitality-wise — she’s young, Debbie, and absolutely in love w’me, see — she’s never been that before so she’s, like, skeptical.”
“We trust you encourage her in that skepticism,” Borger says.
“Hey, what’s that supposed to mean?”
“There they are,” Pampa says.
In the parking lot of a boarded-up convenience store in the center of Dillon, S.C., is the log truck, and drinking beer are the blue-Rebel-capped driver, the crumbling oiler laughing with his head thrown back, Rooster, the student of low-affect living edged with self-deprecating irony, and, suspended yet from the boom, orange as a kapok life jacket head-to-toe, Mr. Irony himself.
“Is that your not-husband?” Pampa asks Borger.
“Goose by any other name,” Borger says.
“Hey. What’s the deal? That’s a dude?” the insurance salesman asks.
“That’s a dude, mister.”
“Hey. All right. He looks like I could sell him some life insurance, you think? What you think? Worth a try or not or what!”
The life insurance salesman gets out of the smoked-glass Blazer and shakes down his pants legs over his Italian ankle boots and walks in a confident stride for Mr. Irony. Before he reaches him, Borger rushes to the orange horizontal figure with the hurried pumping vigor of a sailor’s wife greeting her sailor after six months at sea, and she kisses the unbooted end of it fully upon its clay-caked crusty terra-cotta lips and says, “Oh, honey, you smell good!” and the life insurance salesman turns on his heel and retreats, his face a configuration of pure confusion.
Swatting handfuls of the thick, nearly leavened clay dust from himself in a three-quarter beat, Mr. Irony said, to the beat, in time, “Dark, dark candy; light, light pain; green, green fruit; trying, trying times.”
“Is that a quote?” the driver asked.
“Yeah, I’ve heard that somewhere,” the insurance salesman said. “Maybe Shakespeare.”
“Do I detect shower stalls across the boulevard?” Across the street was a coin-operated car wash, to which Mr. Irony made a straight path, removing his boots as he went. He held the long water gun by its barrel, aiming it down at the top of his head, and with the insertion of a quarter engaged the works, disappearing into a vaporous high-pressure cone of suds and steam.
The rest of us stood about somewhat ill at ease. The oiler shortly had the presence of mind to offer Pampa and Borger a beer, and we adjusted into as comfortable a group as we could standing around a log truck drinking beer in a shut-down convenience-store parking lot watching Mr. Irony shower in a car wash. I personally felt negligible, and had for some time, and thought to remove myself from the affair, at least as a dramatis persona, it being arguable whether I was contributing much toward my narrative end of the stick; further arguable whether I would ever be able to demonstrate in telling fashion that I had in fact picked up self-deprecating ironic ways from Mr. Irony, whose student I allegedly was, and who (Mr. Irony) was, having finished his shower, walking sopping wet into Bill’s Dollar Store next to the car wash. I could serve the tale best, I thought, and finally not without considerable self-deprecation and irony, by removing myself from it, and decided thereupon to do so, and hereby pronounce myself expunged from this affair as teller — Pampa I intend to continue to have relations with, but that coupling is a private matter and is not to be hereafter mentioned. In point of fact, I had felt for two hundred butt-pounding rough miles that the oiler was the proper student of Mr. Irony, a figure of such unironic beginnings that something like true biblical salvation and conversion, if not a bona fide saintly transformation, was available to him if Mr. Irony attempted to bless him with the vision which would let him stop seeing as important his dead father-in-law and his life as minister of lubricant. Mr. Irony emerged from Bill’s Dollar Store bearing gifts for the crew and for the Available Traveling Women and none for me — confirming me in my resolve to defect. A fair fare-thee-well to you all.
The presentation of gifts began with a stir — Mr. Irony presented Pampa and Borger with panty hose—“Apologies, ladies: not designer pants”—and persuaded them to don them in the cab of the log truck. When the women emerged, glossy-legged and matted, the crew and the insurance salesman all adopted a deliberately calmed-down demeanor like that of men in a bar before the storm of a bar fight.
Mr. Irony presented the driver with a case of Skoal, a particolored welder’s cap made of dungaree cloth, and a Buck knife, which, as the driver reached for it, Mr. Irony threw into the adjacent wooded lot. “The knife is guaranteed for life, even against loss, sir.” The driver donned his new cap, backwards, took a big pinch of Skoal, pocketed the fresh tin of snuff on his butt, looked sidelong at the panty-hosed women, and walked jauntily and juicy-lipped into the woods.
“A good man,” Mr. Irony remarked. He pulled from a carton a model 44 Husqvarna chain saw, started it, cut the air after the fashion of a Shriner with a big sequined sword, and motioned to the oiler to come relieve him of the saw.