“Got tea.”
I followed my nose into the kitchen. She’d put last night’s soup on a back burner overnight, and the smell made me ravenous. It wasn’t even eleven, though. Popped a beer and sat down at the kitchen table with a magazine and a 100-calorie bag of pretzels.
The bag had sixteen pretzels in it. A penny’s worth of food and a dime’s worth of plastic for half a dollar. But the principle was valid; if I had a regular box of pretzels I’d keep at them till I could see the bottom. Leave a few so I technically wouldn’t have eaten the whole box.
Hunter would swallow the box whole. Cardboard, plastic, good roughage.
How often does he eat, anyhow? Big predators like lions kill a big animal, gorge themselves, and sleep. Maybe he should do something like that. But what do big ocean predators do? I think sharks have to keep moving. Do killer whales and porpoises sleep after they eat, floating in the waves? I’d look it up when Kit got off the machine.
My own computer was being random, files disappearing and reappearing. So it was resting until the VA check came. The guy at the Apple Store said I’d need a rebuilt hard drive, which would suck up about a third of the check. But the uncertainty was driving me batfuck. So I was a madman writing about a lunatic on a mentally deficient machine. There’s a recipe for a best seller.
So what’s the appetite of a hugely fat person really like? Myrna the Mountain must’ve been well over three hundred pounds, fattest girl at GHS, but nobody ever saw her eat anything but salad. She said she had “fat genes,” which generated obvious jokes.
Maybe when she wasn’t eating lettuce she went after hikers on deserted trails.
Kit came in and opened the refrigerator. “How come you put the bike carrier on?”
“Had some time to kill.” And it would save me 4.2 miles, biking from my place to here and back. It would make a difference, 48 miles instead of 52. Don’t want to overdo it. “How often do you think a four-hundred-pound person would eat?”
She brought out a soda water and a pie pan with one wedge left. Key lime with whipped cream topping, graham cracker crust.
She laughed. “You should see your face—you, too, could be a four-hundred-pound guy! Split it with you?”
“I’ll pass.” Try not to drool.
“Maybe he’d eat all the time. If he ate like three huge meals a day, it would put stress on his digestive system. Didn’t we used to be foragers?”
“Speak for yourself.”
“You know what I mean, humans… roots and berries, nibble all the time?
“Yeah, but we’re set up to be omnivores,” I said. “If you kill a large animal, you can’t just eat a nibble at a time. It would spoil.”
“Wild animals don’t mind a little rot. Remember that grizzly bear.” We’d taken a helicopter ride over Yellowstone, and saw a bear that the pilot said had been eating on the same moose for weeks. He said that if we were on the ground, the smell would knock us over. She took a bite. “Yum… rotten moose pie. Maybe key lime.”
“I guess this guy doesn’t live on human flesh. He’d have to be killing people left and right.”
“Well, I don’t know,” she said, stacking lunch meat and cheese. “He weighs four hundred pounds and looks like a creature from outer space. Maybe he doesn’t just walk into a Hy-Vee and buy a side of beef. Maybe he does have to eat people.”
“Or farm animals,” I said. “That wouldn’t draw as much attention.”
“You ought to have him break into a zoo and eat a camel. Half a camel.”
“Speaking of—”
“No. And I won’t buy any more.” Saturday night she’d come home with half a pack of Camels, and we shared it in an orgy of resolution-breaking. I could still feel the narcotic rush.
“You can’t be virtuous all the time.”
“So look up something really dirty in your Kama Sutra. Something that doesn’t cause cancer.” She held up the mayonnaise jar. “And doesn’t use condiments.” We’d used mayonnaise once, and she complained it made her smell like a sandwich. So people will know where you hid the salami, I said, and she did have to laugh.
She didn’t like to talk about sex, but was willing to do anything. Better than the opposite, I knew from experience. Lynette of recent memory. A modern kind of celibacy, I guess; talking dirty and being squeaky clean. All talk and no action, my father would have said.
I wondered where he and his girlfriend were now. It’s not fair for old people to have so much fun. Or, be honest, it’s creepy to think of your own dad fucking a girl not much older than you. Fucking anybody.
“Earth to Jack.” She set the sandwich in front of me. “You’re daydreaming again. About your novel?”
“No, nothing.” I drove the image from my mind. “The bike carrier, we might need it. Like if one of the bikes breaks down, one of us could pedal back to pick up the car, then come collect it.”
“Oh, right. Good.” She took one bite and got up to punch the little boom box by the fridge. “New Flash Point CD.”
We shared a lot of musical likes and dislikes, but I didn’t get her passion for Flash Point. Retro wannabes, what a combination. I nodded and concentrated on my sandwich.
“Maybe he’d like them rotten,” she said. “The corpses. Like the French, they hang ducks and geese.”
“What did they do?”
“Who do?”
“What did the ducks do, the French want to hang them?”
“You’re kidding.”
“No, I’m not. Who would hang a fucking duck?”
She laughed. “They like hang them in a shed. Let them rot to improve their flavor.”
What an image. “Tell me you just made that up.”
“I swear to God and Gastronomique. Go Google it.”
“Oh, I believe you. What do they do with fish? Fuck them blind?”
“Not raw.”
“’Course not. The bones.” I put some more mustard on my sandwich. “Maybe he would, you know? He’s got the big freezer, but maybe he’d stack them around for a while at room temperature first. The trailer’d smell like a dead moose, but he’d like it that way.”
She nodded, munching. “That would make a good penultimate scene. Antepenultimate. The FBI men are closing in on Hunter’s trailer, and they go, ‘What’s that godawful smell?’”
“He’d remember it from the war,” I said, and had to stop and swallow twice.
“You all right?”
I coughed and swallowed again. “Yeah. Nothing.”
“You remember it. Don’t you?”
“Sure. But it’s not like a big thing.” The first time, it wasn’t. They’d been dead so long they’d dried out, and we didn’t smell it till we were right on them. But the next was a woman and two babies, bloated up and burst, and as soon as we smelled them we heard the flies, and followed the sound, and if it hadn’t been for the X-rays, the demo squad, we might have snagged a trip wire in the sand and gotten claymored all over the fucking desert.
“Jack, you’re pale.” She touched the back of my hand and I jerked it away in reflex.
I rubbed my face with both hands. “Fucking shit.”
“Tell me.”
“No, really. I’m all right.” I took a bite and tried to smile and chew at the same time.
“If you don’t talk to me about it, who are you going to talk to?” I shrugged, or cringed. “You stopped going to the VA shrink.”
“She just gave me pills.”
“And you didn’t like the pills, I understand. I didn’t like what they did to you. But you do have to talk to someone.”
“Okay. I will.”
“Promise?”
“Yeah. I’ll open up. Let it all out.”
Into the book.
Twenty-six miles turned out to be more in practice than it had seemed in theory. The idea of Iowa being flat was also a theoretical premise not borne out by fact. At the nineteen-mile mark there was a forlorn-looking motel, the Tidy Inn, and we turned into it after a two-word discussion.