McMurtry, Larry - Novel 05 (34 page)

 
          
 
Mr. Cawdrey was looking at my hat. A faint
flicker of expression crossed his face.

 
          
 
"I was sent to a dude ranch once,"
he said, as if surprised at having been invaded by a memory. "I was
fourteen. It was in
Wyoming
. I had never been in
Wyoming
before."

 
          
 
He paused. "Come to think of it, I've
never been since."

 
          
 
"Did you enjoy yourself?" I asked.

 
          
 
"No," he said, a little sadly.
"The cowboys laughed at me because I wore pajamas. Then they stole my
pajamas. They also put a skunk in my bed. It didn't stink, but it was a
skunk."

 
          
 
Then he stopped talking as abruptly as he had
begun. The memory of his embarrassments at the dude ranch apparently faded
somewhat. Then he looked at his watch and it faded completely.

 
          
 
"My goodness," he said. "I've
dawdled. Are you quite sure you don't want the weapons?"

 
          
 
"I'm quite sure," I said, feeling
slightly nauseous, either from my one bite of Styrofoam hamburger or from the
thought of 2,000 cannons.

 
          
 
"It's odd that you came," Mr.
Cawdrey said.
"Though of course you did have an
appointment."

 
          
 
A second later he was gone.

 
          
 
Escaping from the Department of Transportation
cafeteria into the bright fall sunshine was such a relief that it made me feel
dizzy. It was a joy to discover that the world was still there. I felt a
tremendous urge to be with people who were as different as possible from the
thousands of numbed souls still waiting in line in the depths of that vast
building.

 
          
 
Accordingly, I headed straight for the Little
Bomber's Lounge, where I was immediately rewarded by the sight of Lolly and
Janie Lee, sitting in their favorite booth giggling like mad. This time they
were drinking pina coladas. Their girlish laughter seemed to be something of an
irritant to a couple of sullen-looking customers who probably just wanted to
sit in a bar and nurse a beer and be quietly depressed.

 
          
 
They waved me over the minute they saw me.

 
          
 
"I knew he'd come back," Lolly said,
when I squeezed in beside them.

 
          
 
"Yeah, he can't resist us," Janie
Lee said.

 
          
 
"Well, so what, I can't resist them
yellah boots," Lolly said. "Have a pina colada. We're
celebrating."

 
          
 
"Don't tell me you finished secretarial
school already," I said.

 
          
 
"Naw, we quit," Janie Lee said.
"I couldn't stand that shorthand."

 
          
 
"I bet Boog's disappointed. He had high
hopes for you girls."

 
          
 
"Yeah, he was," Lolly said. She was
wearing a red peekaboo blouse over a pink peekaboo bra.

 
          
 
"We made it up to him, though,"
Janie Lee said. "We kept him in the Jacuzzi all afternoon and didn't
charge him a dime."

 
          
 
"He was all wrinkledy when he got
out," Lolly remembered.

 
          
 
"Am I too late for the Double Bubble
Brunch?" I asked.

 
          
 
"Aw yeah, you missed it," Lolly
said. "That's okay, though. We can just give you the Soap Opera special.
It ain't supposed to start till one, but Penny ain't here today."

 
          
 
"Who's Penny?"

 
          
 
"The manager.
Shoot, she
don't
care. We got some special going 'bout
every hour of the day."

 
          
 
"We even got a Midnight Special,"
Janie Lee said.
" 'vailable
till
3 a.m.
on Friday and Saturday nights."

 
          
 
Ten minutes later i was in
a
large
, warm whirlpool bath drinking pink
California
champagne with two fat naked girls. A big
color TV sat across the room, providing the soap opera part of the Soap Opera
special. As the World Turns was on, Janie Lee's favorite soap, as it happened.
She watched it intently, her elbows on the side of the big tub and her pinkish
body floating more or less on the surface. From time to time she set her
plastic champagne glass on her stomach.

 
          
 
Lolly evinced little interest in As the World
Turns. Beside the deep whirlpool was a heap of green snorkeling gear.

 
          
 
"What's the snorkeling stuff for?" I
asked. Lolly was trying to get some water out of her ear.

 
          
 
"Aw, that's for Congressmen," she
said.
"Representatives mostly.
Sometimes two or
three of them get in here and want to watch what's going on from under
water."

 
          
 
"Shoot, that ain't the worse of it,"
Janie Lee said, looking our way, during a commercial break.

 
          
 
"What's the worse of it?"

 
          
 
"When they put that stuff on an' expect
us to suck 'em off while they're sitting on the bottom," she said. "I
never did like to swim underwater."

 
          
 
"First time I tried it I swallert so much
water I like to drowned," Lolly said. "I don't know who thought up
this snorkeling business, anyway. It
don't
mix with
fucking very good."

 
          
 
A minute later she got out of the tub and
pattered wetly over to the icebox where they kept the champagne.

 
          
 
"Oh Janie Lee, you drunk all the
pink," she said.

 
          
 
Janie Lee didn't hear her. The soap had
started again and whatever was happening struck her as deeply wrong-headed.

 
          
 
"Now that ain't gonna work," she
said. "That's just gonna make trouble all around."

 
          
 
Lolly came back with some white champagne and
hopped back in the bath.

 
          
 
"Janie Lee, you
don't
never
help if there's a soap opera on," she said, a little testily.
"I end up doin' just about every bit of the work."

 
          
 
With that she began to blow in my ear. Janie
Lee looked briefly guilty and worked her way around the pool to us, with the
result that I was soon floating between two sizable girls both of whom were
slick as seals. The scene was too companionable, if not ridiculous, to provoke
anything resembling passion, and anyway Janie Lee couldn't really get her mind
off the soap opera.

 
          
 
"You wanta get on the floatie?"
Lolly asked.

 
          
 
The floatie was a huge rubber air mattress. It
lay over by the snorkeling gear.

 
          
 
Without waiting for an answer Lolly drug the
big mattress into the pool.

 
          
 
"You won't hold us both up?" Janie
Lee said.

 
          
 
"Janie Lee, you don't never wanta try
nothing," Lolly said. With the floatie in the pool there was not much room
for the three of us. It covered at least three quarters of the surface of the
tub.

 
          
 
"Now I can't see," Janie Lee
complained. "This is the Soap Opera special. What's so special about it if
we can't even see the soap opera?"

 
          
 
Lolly ignored this complaint. She managed to
get on the air mattress by the simple expedient of straddling it and then
flopping backwards.

 
          
 
"Come on up here, Janie Lee," she
said. "It'll hold us up."

 
          
 
Though not as enthusiastic as Lolly, Janie Lee
finally complied. With my help she managed to get on the floatie, too. The two
of them lay there looking as innocent as babes but a lot larger, while As the
World Turns, unnoticed now, filled the big color screen, occasionally sending
an orange or green shadow over their bodies.

 
          
 
Both girls had fat thighs with dimples in
them, smallish breasts, and fat white shoulders. Somehow as they lay there with
their legs squeezed together and their wet blond hair stuck to their necks they
reminded me of Beverly and Belinda Arber. They had the aspect of two slightly
mischievous little girls.

 
          
 
"You could pour some champagne on us, I
guess," Janie Lee said. "That's real popular, seems like."

 
          
 
"I don't think so," I said.
"I'd rather drink the champagne."

 
          
 
"See, he's normal, like us," Lolly
said.

 
          
 
"You girls are too friendly," I
said, apropos of my own lack of raging passion.

 
          
 
"Yeah, we are," Lolly agreed.
"It's our only trouble. My husband's
always tellin'
me that."

 
          
 
"Your husband?"

 
          
 
"Yeah, Bobby," she said. "He's
best friends with Janie Lee's husband."

 
          
 
"I wisht you hadn't reminded me,"
Janie Lee said. "We
don't never
get to see them.
They stay on the road a lot."

 
          
 
"What do they do on the road?"

 
          
 
"We wisht we knew," Lolly said.
"I guess they mostly chase girls, unless they're smuggling dope. They stay
in

 
          
 
Florida
just about all the time.
Shoot,
me
and
Janie Lee's got to have a life, too. That why we work at the Double Bubble, rd
rather
suck
off Congressmen than sit around the
house."

 
          
 
"What do your husbands think about all
this?" I asked.

 
          
 
Both girls looked solemn for a moment—neither
of their faces
were
meant for solemnity and it had the
effect of making them look younger than they were.

 
          
 
"I don't know," Lolly admitted.
"We ain't asked them."

 
          
 
"Shoot, why ask them?" Janie Lee
said. "They don't ask us if they can go to
Florida
. They just get in the car and take
off."

 
          
 
"Yeah, and they don't call, neither,
unless the car breaks down and they need money."

 
          
 
"We
don't never
know when to expect them," Lolly added somewhat forlornly.

 
          
 
"Do you reckon they've got
mistresses?" she asked. "A lot of men around here have
mistresses."

 
          
 
"Yeah, I wish I could be one," Janie
Lee said. "I'm getting tired of staying in a tub half the time. I get
water up my nose nearly every day."

 
          
 
"We had a double wedding," Lolly
said, somewhat more cheerfully. "But no double honeymoon. Shoot, that wouldn't
have worked.
Me
and Bobby went to
Ocean
City
and Eddie and Janie Lee went to
Norfolk
."

 
          
 
"Reason it wouldn't have worked is
because they're always trying to get us to swap," Janie Lee said. "Or
worst than that. Four in a bed is what they really want. Pretty soon they'd get
us so mixed up we couldn't remember who we was married to. It'd be just like a
soap opera."

 
          
 
"If they've got mistresses I bet they do
it four in a bed," Lolly reflected.

 
          
 
"Shoot, I'm not going through that,"
Janie Lee said. "I'd rather not do it at all."