Pig-Out Inn (6 page)

“Next time knock,” he shot back.

“Knock? We practically beat your door down,” Stephanie reminded him.

“I wasn't ready for any company then. Later I might be. Depends.”

“Oh, brother,” I sighed, trying to hold Tag's smelly mess away from me so I wouldn't stink all day.

Stephanie said, “We've just got to get that child something to wear.”

“Terrific, Stephanie. Got any ideas?”

“Johnny's old jeans?”

“In case you haven't noticed, Johnny weighs about four hundred pounds more than Tag, and even my dad's stuff would swim on him.” I stepped back, like an artist admiring a model. “You're pretty slim, Steph. You haven't got a whole lot of shape,” I added. “Have you got some old jeans we could make into cutoffs for Tag?”

“
Oh
no—I'm not sacrificing a perfectly good pair of jeans!” she protested. But it's no use trying to change my mind once it's set on something.

Half an hour later, with Tag's smelly heap soaking in Biz, we brought a decent pair of cutoffs down to Red Cottage 4 and knocked.

“Who is it?” came this sort of rasp from inside.

“Who do you think it is?”

Tag opened the door a crack, then backed up behind it so we could get in. I swear, the change in the room was amazing. He'd stripped the bed and tossed the dirty sheets into a corner, and the clean ones were tucked in as tight as a baby crib. All his “business papers” were stacked neatly on the desk, and we could see places on the floor where the mop water was drying in deformed shapes.

“Boy, you've been busy,” I said. “Even wrapped in that stupid towel.”

“Check the bathroom,” he told us proudly. Sure enough, he'd Ajaxed the sink and tub to a glistening white, despite the cracks and rusted places, and the mirror over the sink, which he must have climbed on the toilet to reach, was sparkling and barely even smudgy. Except for a few hairs along the baseboard, the floor was spotless.

“Why, Tag, you're a regular houseboy,” Stephanie cried.

“Am not!”

“Oh, shut up. That was a compliment, dope.” I tossed him the jeans. “Here, get dressed.”

He turned them this way and that. “Is this all?”

“It's hot out. You don't need a shirt or socks.”

“He means the you-know-whats, Dov.”

“Yeah, what am I s'posed to put on under these?”

“Nothing, macho man,” I teased. “Oh well, these cutoffs are pretty soft and harmless, and we'll have your clothes disinfected in about a week, so don't worry.”

He tightened the towel around his middle.

“Suit yourself,” I shrugged. “If you ever get dressed, come on into the cafe for the Sunday Special. On Sundays we always feed our cottage customers for free. Especially if they're not wearing underwear.”

SEVEN

Stephanie had a major decision to make: Was she going to stay at the Pig-Out for the summer to write her fiction novel, or was she going back to Wichita for Wayne Firestone's All Star game?

“This is a tough one, Dov. I—am—torn. I'd really like to stay and see how things turn out with Tag, and I wanted to finish my fiction novel, which I'm going to start tomorrow, but sometimes we have to make sacrifices for love.”

By this time I'd heard so much about Wayne Firestone that I was beginning to believe he looked like one of those hulking gargoyles outside the Spinner Public Library, and I was sure he had as much personality as a head of iceberg lettuce.

“Look at it this way, Steph. Have you even gotten one letter, one single word from Wayne the whole time you've been here?”

“Well, no,” Stephanie admitted. “But I promised him before I left that if he made the All Star team I'd be there for the game, and Judy wrote that he made it.”

“I guess if he invited you …”

“Uh, well, he didn't exactly invite me. I sort of volunteered.”

“Yeah, but if you're going with him …”

“We're not exactly going together. It's more like we're really good friends.”

“Okay, so if you're so close …”

“Well, it's not exactly that we're terribly close—yet.”

“Stephanie Fisher, what exactly is it between you and the great first baseman, Wayne Firestone?”

“You mean actually? Specifically?”

“I mean on the nose.”

“The exact, particular, actual, specific nature of our relationship is that I'm wildly crazy about Wayne Firestone, and he's wildly crazy about baseball.”

“He doesn't even like girls?”

“Baseball, and Emily Ryan,” Stephanie said miserably.

“Oh, Steph.” I put my arms around her, feeling genuinely sorry for her. But deep inside my heart was pounding joyfully because Stephanie hadn't really gotten any further than I had in the boyfriend department.

“Emily Ryan is four foot eleven,” Stephanie said, “and she has red hair that she wears in a wedge that bounces.”

“Oh no, the worst—bouncy hair,” I cried, yanking on the brown straw that hung to my shoulders.

“She's what my mother calls ‘perky,'” Stephanie confessed. “Perky, bouncy, they go hand in hand. And her hair's not the only thing that bounces. It makes me positively nauseous.”

I handed her a carry-out sack. “Here, have a barf bag.”

She grabbed one of the cheap, bristly napkins we kept in the holders—I mean, these napkins could scrape off the top layer of flesh—and she wiped the tears off her face. Blush and dripping mascara went with the tears. “On the other hand, if I'm not there for the All Star game, Emily could really get a strangle-hold, and Wayne will be lost forever.” This was enough to soak two more napkins. I pulled out a stack as thick as a Viva sponge.

“Wayne Firestone sinks into the bog,” I pronounced it as if I were reading an
Eagle and Beacon
headline. “Starting first baseman's head visible only for seconds before he is sucked into the gurgling mud. Implicated in the drowning is fifteen-year-old Emily Ryan, described by classmates as perky. Wayne Firestone is survived by Stephanie Fisher, waitress at the world famous Pig-Out Inn of Spinner, Kansas.”

Stephanie giggled and sort of brightened a bit, with her face all streaked in about three different shades. “This is really dumb, isn't it?”

“Yeah, really dumb.”

“But I'm part of a long tradition. Cleopatra and Juliet and all.”

“They're dead. I'm not sure, were they ever really people?”

“Oh yes. I went to Shakespeare-in-the-Park last summer and saw at least one of them, I forget which. Anyway, if they weren't real, they should have been.”

As far as I was concerned the whole issue of Stephanie's leaving was decided right then and there, but I guess she wasn't sure until the next Saturday, when something happened to convince her.

The Army came for its usual weekly siege. There were only eighteen of them this time wanting cheeseburgers and fries and shakes on the double. But one of them was destined to be the new Wayne Firestone.

Oh, I'd come far since the first invasion. I could carry plates of cheeseburgers all the way up my arm, four at a time, and I could do milkshakes without needing to be hosed down afterwards. Stephanie was no help at all, though. She latched on to the youngest guy in the group and delivered one-on-one waitress service. He got his order first, of course, and then she surrounded his burger plate with a whole detail of regular mustard, hot mustard, ketchup, barbecue sauce, and steak sauce. I came by to grab a couple of the bottles for the other customers and recognized this guy, mostly because he seemed so young and so unmilitary, sitting on a stool two away from the nearest soldier. “You're the guy who left the retainer a few weeks ago, aren't you?” I asked. It was funny to see the kid blush almost purple. “I've got it under here somewhere. I stuck it in a cottage cheese container.” I groped around under the counter.

“Oh, it's okay. I don't need it anymore. The orthodontist says I'm good as done.” He pulled his lips back and showed us his new, improved bite, like a cocker spaniel's. Stephanie was awed. I thought, here's a guy she could really sink her teeth into.

I flew around the cafe, taking care of all the customers and making snide remarks at Stephanie. “If it's not too much trouble, cut the apple pie, will you?” and “Never hire a waitress from the city if you expect the coffeepot to stay filled.” She paid no attention because she was zeroing in on the guy, who turned out to be a buck private in basic training named Eddie Perini. I overheard scraps of their conversation as I dashed around attending to the guys who were already on seconds and thirds.

“How come you're in the Army?” I heard her ask, and I leaned over to catch the answer.

Eddie turned his pockets inside out. “No money for college,” he said. “Uncle Sam will pull me through.”

About six cheeseburgers later I heard, “Do you play baseball, Eddie?”

“Do I play baseball!” I glanced over and saw him eating his milkshake with a fork. Stephanie must have put in about nine scoops of ice cream.

The last thing I caught was Eddie asking her if she'd lived in Spinner long, and her replying that she's just moved there, and him saying he hoped she'd be staying a long time, and her saying, well, she was still in high school, so it looked like she had a few years to go, and him saying, well, he'd be finishing up his radio training in a couple of weeks, and he didn't know where he'd be shipped, and her saying she was thinking of moving back to Wichita at the end of the summer anyway.

Boy, I had a lot to learn about male-female give-and-take. From the juke box, Elvis pleaded Eddie's case: “Love me tender, love me true.”

Then Tag came in, wearing Stephanie's cutoffs and his alligator shirt. He climbed onto the stool next to Eddie's.

“I might join the Army,” he said.

A guy down at the end of the counter said, “Don't say it too loud. They'll sign you up.”

“Maybe the Air Force is better,” said Tag.

“Anything's better,” one of the soldiers said with a laugh. Only Eddie seemed to be taking Tag seriously.

“What do you want with the Army?” he asked.

Tag shrugged. “Travel.”

“So far I've been to Kansas,” Eddie said, “which is where I started from.”

“A place to lay your head at night,” Tag said.

“Just don't sign up too early,” Eddie warned him. “You want your hair cut short like this?” He pulled Tag's hand up to feel the stubble at the back of his head. “You want to take a shower every day? You want to mop floors and make your bed at five-thirty every morning?”

Tag looked confused. “Is that all there is to it?”

“Naw, that's just the good stuff,” one of the soldiers laughed.

“Well, I haven't made up my mind yet.”

“You got time,” said Eddie, offering Tag some of his fries.

“Hey, listen, guys,” Tag said, “any of you need a shoe shine? I've got my kit outside. Drop by after lunch. That's one thing you won't have to do back at the base. Just bring me all your shoes. I work cheap, and I don't just use spit, either.”

“He uses real polish, man!” one guy said, taking off his shoes. “Here, do mine!”

Tag shook his head. “Sorry, I'm on my lunch hour.”

Tag adopted a dog—unless he traded somebody's grandmother for it. I was afraid to ask. The scruffy-looking mongrel slept in the shade next to Tag's roadside stand/shoe shine parlor and ate candy bars with Tag. I don't know where he slept at night, but I have an idea.

“What's your friend's name?” I asked, heading to Yellow Cabin 6 after the lunch rush one day.

“Fenway,” he said.

“What kind of a ridiculous name is Fenway?”

“He's named after my favorite ballpark, over there in Boston, Massachusetts.”

“Have you ever been to Boston?” I asked.

“Me and Cee Dubyah are going there for a baseball game. Maybe next summer.”

“Tag, when do you figure Cee Dubyah's coming back?”

“It won't be long,” he said.

“It's already been long.”

“So? You don't have a father, what do you know?”

“I do too have a a father. He's coming home Friday. You'll meet him. By the way, I was wondering, where's your mother?”

“I'm not supposed to answer that,” Tag said softly.

“How come you're not living with her?”

“You're the nosiest girl I ever met,” said Tag, waving to a trucker who was pulling in for a late-afternoon breather. Fenway raised his lazy head for a second to bark absently at the driver, then settled back into his coil at Tag's feet.

“You going to be out here long?” I asked.

“Until the sun goes down. By then everybody's in for the night.”

“Oh. Well, see you later.” Now was my opportunity. Stephanie was taking a nap and Tag was peddling, so I grabbed the keys from the hook in the kitchen and stole over to Tag's cottage. I'd made a couple of attempts to find Cee Dubyah's note, but Tag had done one thorough job of hiding it—or maybe he carried it with him all the time.

Tag's cottage was looking pretty good; he'd probably have done all right in an Army barracks. I rummaged through the papers and comic books on Tag's desk; even found odd dollars between the pages of a
Sports Illustrated
, and about seventy-five dollars more scattered around in his drawers, which were mostly empty. No sign of the note. It was deadly hot in the room. I thought I'd do Tag a favor and turn on the air conditioning so he could come back to a cool cabin when he was through work. Flipping open the control box of the window unit, I found it—Cee Dubyah's note folded into a tiny square.

Dear Tag, my boy,

I got to do this, so we can be together someday. You and me are like two peas in a pod, and she's got no business keeping us apart.