All My Friends Are Going to Be Strangers: A Novel (25 page)

I left. In my mirror I saw them looking uneasily at the house, kicking their engines. I turned right and then right again and idled at a stop sign for a minute or two. When I got back to where I could see up Godwin’s street I saw my ruse had worked. Both motorcycles were gone.

EL CHEVY
and I slipped smoothly out of Austin, I had become a Driver, apparently. The wheel felt good in my hands. I liked the way the road slipped under me, liked to see signs, to pass cars, to ease into little towns. Once I got moving my feelings seemed to come back. When I stopped, feeling seemed to leave me. I wasn’t sure I wanted to go to Houston, where I would undoubtedly have to stop and cope with things.

Three hundred miles to the north was Idiot Ridge, where Granny Deck had lived and died. It was just a little bluff, with lots of mesquite trees and rattlesnakes, but in a way it was the place most truly mine. The ridge was the northern boundary of a valley called the Sorrows, which my mean old grandfather had homesteaded with his first wife. The Comanches came one day, while Grandpa was gone, and shot six arrows into the first wife. After that Grandpa lived alone in the Sorrows, drinking whiskey and trapping skunks. One day an ex-soldier came drifting through, with a sixteen-year-old girl he had tricked into coming west with him. Grandpa was womanless and took a fancy to the girl. He and the soldier got drunk and he offered the soldier half his
winter’s skunk hides for her. The soldier took the skunk hides and left the next day.

The girl was Granny Deck. Somehow she hung on and survived. She never married Grandpa, but she bore him eight kids. She lived out her life on the ridge. The story of her bartering was one of the best things I had ever written.

I had meant to use it as a prologue to my second novel. Oddly enough, Old Man Goodnight had helped chase down the Indians that killed Grandpa’s first wife. Then he had gone on to blaze his cattle trails.

I didn’t turn north. I would have liked to
be
on the ridge for a little while, but I didn’t want to drive there. Neither did I want to write about it. I didn’t want to tell the world about the sadness of Granny, as she sat in a flapping tent in the 1880s, listening to Grandpa count out skunk hides. I didn’t want to tell it about the sadness of the Indians, as they sat watching the buffalo grunt out its last grunts. I would have liked to sit on Idiot Ridge for a while and watch the April moon float over the Sorrows, but I was too tired to turn. I kept driving, and El Chevy found his way home to Houston.

She had not reformed. She smelled as spunky as ever. I drifted over to Rice. Nobody was walking, and I didn’t have a library key. Didn’t matter. I was awfully tired. El Chevy and I needed rest. I drove to my apartment and parked at the familiar curb. I got all my blankets and pillows and Jill’s green rug. The grass would be very wet in such a mist. I slunk through the darkness, carrying stuff. Jenny’s tree was still there. I put several blankets on the ground. I put me on the blankets. I put more blankets on me, which was stupid. It was hot. I made a sort of nest and rested in it. I put the pillows against the tree.

Parts of my body must have slept, but most of my mind didn’t. I was too tired. Too many things pressed at me.
I dreamed of Sally. I struggled to know what might happen, but I couldn’t. I struggled to sleep. I struggled in sleep.

Jenny found me in my nest. I noticed her standing on her back porch. The sun was well up. She was wearing her same bathrobe. Red. She seemed to take the sight of me in stride. She didn’t panic. She didn’t scream. She looked in her milk box, to see what the milkman had left her. He hadn’t left her anything, apparently. Maybe
he
had seen me and panicked and screamed. I imagined myself as looking horrible. I hadn’t shaved for a few days. I felt boneless. I didn’t want to move. After a while Jenny came walking across the wet grass toward me. She was smiling. I tried to smile back.

“You’re full of surprises, aren’t you?” she said. “Why didn’t you tell me goodbye?”

“When I left it was the middle of the night,” I said.

“Sure it was,” Jenny said, sitting down in the grass. Her bathrobe was going to get wet again. For some reason she seemed glad to see me. She had a very pleased expression on her face.

“God, you’re even sloppier than you used to be,” she said. “How’s that slut you married?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “She’s here somewhere, about to have a baby.”

“Who got her pregnant?”

“Me.”

“What a sucker you are,” she said. “You must have changed your mind about me, huh? Otherwise you wouldn’t be under my tree.”

“That’s right,” I said. “I’ve given up on monogamy.”

“You hungry?” she said. “I could make you some breakfast. You don’t look healthy.”

My stomach felt like it didn’t want food in it. “You don’t play hard to get,” I said. “How come?”

“I’m so good at being hard to get that nobody gets me,” she said simply. “Let’s go get in bed before we lose our nerve. I don’t want to talk about it.”

She had the right idea. If we had talked any longer we would have lost our nerve. We went right up to her bed, leaving my nest under her tree. She had a huge bed with a purple bedspread. We undressed as quickly as we could and got under the covers, scarcely giving each other a glance. Jenny was shivering. I felt embarrassed. Neither of us could think of a thing to say. We were much too shy to play with each other. After about two kisses we tried to make love. It very nearly didn’t work. It was like neither of us had ever done it before. We were terribly awkward. The covers felt like they weighed tons. I was almost too weak to cope with such covers and Jenny’s body too. Jenny kept her eyes shut. Fortunately I didn’t give up, or become impotent. Technically the basics worked. Things got smoother. It wasn’t the summit of anything, but after a while we had actually made love. Jenny opened her eyes. Doing it hadn’t been any fun, really, but having done it made us both feel immensely better. Somehow we had triumphed over shyness and separateness. We could never be quite as separate again—at least that was how I felt. I couldn’t understand why Jenny was so inexperienced. It was like she had never been touched. But she was Jenny Salomea, the man-eater. I asked her about it.

“You’re supposed to be very tough,” I said.

“I am tough,” she said. “That’s why I never sleep with anybody. I’m so tough men are afraid to try me. It just makes me worse. If I can scare them I don’t want to do it with them anyway. You were my only hope. I cried myself blind when you left. You’re too foolish to be scared of me. You were the only one around foolish enough to try and care about me.”

Since we had done it I thought we might be comfortable enough to look at each other. I kicked the covers back, but Jenny wasn’t that comfortable. She shut her eyes. I covered us up again. She didn’t look tough at all.

“I’ve been shy all my life,” she said.

I had almost forgotten how much I liked to be in bed with women. I wasn’t shy. I felt happy and kind of horny. We kissed for a long time. Jenny hadn’t been kissed much and was sort of delicate about it. We twisted around and got more and more comfortable. The bedroom window was open and we could smell the nice hot Houston morning. I could see the squirrels in the tree. Finding out how inexperienced Jenny was made me admire her terribly. It must have taken great nerve, that time she came to see me. She didn’t even know how to kiss. I was determined she should get some happiness. I was feeling very refreshed. I wanted to make love for several hours. I couldn’t think of anything nicer than whiling away the morning getting Jenny more comfortable with sex. The fact that I wanted to make love again really took her by surprise.

“Are you sure?” she said. “Sammy usually waits eight or nine months.”

I had gotten completely unembarrassed and was a lot smoother about things. Jenny enjoyed herself a little. She was a long way from knowing how to really enjoy herself, but she wasn’t hopeless. She just hadn’t had any practice. I was slow and easy. Once in a while I looked out at the squirrels, while I was being slow and easy.

Suddenly an incredible thing happened. Something made me look around just in time to see it. Jenny had her eyes shut and sensed nothing, but I sensed that another person was there. I looked over my shoulder and there was Sammy Salomea. Unfortunately I was just in the process of letting myself come. I couldn’t stop. Sammy was a short man. He
wore a neat blue suit and his red tie had a large knot. I only saw him with part of me. Most of me was with Jenny. Sammy had a large bucket in his hands. I think it was a laundry bucket. It was so large he had to struggle along with it. He wasn’t a big man. I supposed he must be carrying a vat of acid or something, to destroy the bodies with. Before I really had time to get scared I got doused. It was too bad Jenny wasn’t coming too. It would have been an unbeatable sexual experience. The contents of the bucket were warm soapy water. Half water, half soap suds. Sammy made a perfect heave. In an instant we were both absolutely drenched. I wouldn’t have thought he could get so much warm soapy water in a bathtub, much less a bucket. I was nonplussed. It was considerate of him to warm the water, I must say. Cold soapy water would have been awful. As it was I was able to enjoy the last second or two of my orgasm. There was no reason not to. No man who would think to warm the water could be going to kill us. Besides, I couldn’t help enjoying it. A flood of warm soapy water is kind of nice. Only the circumstances were bizarre.

It was a great shock to Jenny, of course. Propriety required that I pull out but I didn’t. I had just come and I couldn’t see what good pulling out would do, anyway. We were certainly caught. I think for an instant Jenny thought I had burst. I hadn’t. I was snugly buried in her, and I stayed that way. She looked at me through the water and the soapsuds, deeply puzzled. Then she noticed Sammy. Immediately they began a domestic scene.

“Oh, Sammy, you horse’s ass,” she said. “Why did you do that? Look at my bedspread. Do you know what that bedspread costs to clean?”

“Listen, Jenny,” Sammy said, “what you two are doing is not very hygienic. I saw you the first time you did it. If you had showered, that would have been that. But you
didn’t even remember to shower!” He was very indignant.

“Oh, shut up!” Jenny said, wiping soapsuds out of her eyes.

“Honestly,” Sammy said. “He has several days’ growth of beard. Why didn’t you insist that he shave? Where are your principles?”

“I was getting fucked, Sammy,” Jenny said. “Why are you standing there talking about principles? This is private.”

“I’ve done what I can for you,” Sammy said. “I have to rush. I see you forgot to buy dental floss again.”

He picked up the empty bucket and left. Jenny and I, soaked and soapy, lay exactly as we were, recovering from whatever it was we had been through.

“Poor guy,” Jenny said. “He’s flipped out several times, and I can’t find him a nut house he likes. It’s put a lot of new pressure on me.”

Being soapy was kind of sexy, but it didn’t do us any good. My penis went into retreat. We got towels and went out on Jenny’s sundeck to dry off. I was in a new life again. Jenny had really lovely legs. I remembered them from our badminton games.

“Where are you going to live?” she asked.

“I don’t know.”

“Live here if you want to,” she said. “We have lots of rooms. Sammy won’t mind, as long as you keep clean. You’ll have to shave, is all.”

Her face seemed young—her body too. She was just unused. She had nicely rounded shoulders.

“You have to help me get to be normal,” she said, smiling at me.

“Okay,” I said. “Maybe I’ll just get a room somewhere close. It would be bad for your reputation if I lived here.”

“Okay,” she said. She fed me a good breakfast. We sat on her woodblock and necked and ate and necked. Then we went out in her yard and I gathered up my nest.

“Seeing you under that tree this morning was the happiest moment of my life,” she said.

I almost wished she hadn’t said it. It was probably true. My responsibilities were getting constantly more complex. I told Jenny again that I had to go. She let me go, but her eyes were shining and her face was very alive. She skipped back to her house.

I got in El Chevy, feeling odd. I didn’t know what life was coming to. Suddenly I felt I had to call Emma. I called her from the nearest drugstore.

“I knew you were back,” she said, when she heard my voice. “When you coming by?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “How are you?”

“Why don’t you know?” Emma said. “What’s wrong with you? I’m dying to see you.”

“I may not be the same,” I said. “I may have changed forever.”

“That’s just bullshit,” Emma said. “You quit saying that. How could you ever change?”

“I’ve had a lot of problems,” I said.

“You shouldn’t have married her,” she said. “It could have ruined your whole life. Why don’t you come by? Flap’s gone fishing with his dad. They won’t be back until Sunday.”

“I might come by before my party. I have to find out where Sally is, first.”

“Why don’t you want to come and see me?” Emma said. Her tone was odd.

“I do,” I said.

“No you don’t. If you wanted to you would have come already. I’ve been expecting you for days.”

I sighed. There was no use trying to fool her. All I knew about it myself was that I was saving her for emergencies.

“I don’t know why I don’t want to,” I said. “It isn’t because I don’t want to.”

It seemed to reassure her. “I know you want to,” she said. “Why don’t you then?”

“I have to be in order first,” I said. “I can’t even explain. Do you want to come to my party with me?”

“No,” she said.

“Why not?” I was surprised.

“Flap would get jealous.”

It had never occurred to me that Flap could get jealous of me.

“Come on,” I said. “You don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Yes I do,” she said, in a small voice. “I can’t come with you. That’s all.”

It made me feel even odder. I suddenly wanted to see Emma. Maybe she was in trouble. She didn’t sound so bouncy.