Psychology and Other Stories (8 page)

“Damn nasty old day to be stranded on the side of the road,” he said, scowling at the dark patches of cloud hanging over the highway, which five minutes earlier he had been praising to the cashier at the filling station. He had been trying to get her to cash a cheque, but she'd insisted on calling the owner.

“What, you mean to tell me
you
don't own this place? A capable woman like you?”

She smacked her lips in distaste, though not at his flattery. “Wouldn't care to neither. Loses money hand over fist.”

“Hand
under
fist,” he quipped, and she pressed a thumb into the cheek opposite the telephone receiver to hide a smile.

They stood on opposite sides of the counter looking out the unwashed window at the sky. Mr. Custard sighed contentedly, giving the easy impression that he was not in any hurry.

“Those clouds look ugly,” he said, “but, you know, they keep some of the heat off.”

“He don't always answer on the first ring,” she explained, rolling her eyes to indicate that this was a kind of understatement.

“You know what you need?” He slapped his hand on the counter. “A place like this?”

“What's that?”

“You need a ‘Going Out of Business' sign.”

She thumbed her cheek, rolled her eyes, and shook her head.

“I got a bunch of them in the car. Cheap.”

“You sell ‘Going Out of Business' signs?” She pulled the phone away to devote both ears to hearing what she was hearing.

He had not sold her any signs, but he could have. There came a point in every conversation when he knew he could sell someone something, borrow money off them, or pass a cheque on them. Technically, the signs were samples and he wasn't supposed to be selling them at all; it was the
idea
he was selling to the man up in
Carbon. But he could have sold her five signs, if he'd cared to. Same with the pump boy outside, who was still standing there gawping at Francine's old beater, which Mr. Custard had led him to believe once belonged to Bonnie and Clyde. After that, he could have sold him anything, the car or just about anything else. It wasn't a matter of pulling the wool over a person's eyes, but lifting the veil from them. Mr. Custard ushered people across the border of their everyday experience into a wider world, a larger-than-life world where heroes and villains still existed and marvelous things still happened—and might happen to
them.
For Mr. Custard, the joy of selling was in getting them to cross over; once that was accomplished, he often didn't bother to carry the deal to a conclusion. He hunted for sport, not for food. All the pleasure was in getting them on the hook.

He did not sell any signs or wait around for her to cash the cheque but left it with her, saying he would pick up the cash on his way back through in a day or two. In the meantime, as a “surety,” he said, he took one packet of gum.

He popped a piece in his mouth now, without for a moment taking his eyes off the highway. He held the packet out to the skinny girl, who made a buzzing chirp of refusal, so he reached back over the seat until he felt a stick slide out of the wrapper. In lieu of thanks he received another grunt, but slightly longer and with a note of apology in it. He decided that the girl in front, the skinny one, thought she was the leader, but the one in back, the chubby one with eczema who was always cleaning her glasses, followed her lead only when it suited her. From the first second he'd seen them across the road he'd recognized that his job would be to get the skinny one alone—that is, to get rid of the chubby one. Practically speaking this would mean winning the skinny one over to his side while alienating the chubby one, a feat which would itself entail setting the girls against each other.

He had not even begun to imagine how all this might be accomplished, but this suited him down to the ground. He did not like planning ahead. He believed that he was at his best when forced to act spontaneously, without forethought or, indeed, thought. Besides, knowing what to do next was almost like already having done it. He had a weak mind's eye, and consequently no taste for fantasy: visualizing a future event was the surest way for him to lose all interest in it. He had cultivated the habit of thinking only of the obstacle or challenge directly before him, never of its probable consequence or outcome.

He'd figure something out. It was only a shame that so far the chubby one had shown herself more disposed to be friendly. Well, he had his work cut out for him. Dr. Yard shook his head wonderingly.

“What all're your ladies' names?” he asked, not too cheerfully. “I'm Custard.”

Again, the skinny one hesitated, and the chubby one waited to take her cue.

“Melissa,” said the skinny one at last.

“Connie,” said the other.

“But folks call her ‘Slim.'”

“They call
her
‘Missy.'”

“Well, folks call
me
Custard,” said Mr. Custard diplomatically. “Sometimes Mr. Custard, sometimes Corporal Field Sergeant Custard. Sometimes Dr. Custard.”

He chewed his gum energetically, snapping his mouth open after every bite, and waited for this information to settle—not all the way, just a little.

“Sometimes Damn You Custard,” he chuckled, then made his face grim again when this got no response from the girls. “And how
old're all you ladies?” he said, and immediately wished he hadn't asked.

“Nineteen,” said the one called Missy, with a slight quaver, as though she were guessing someone's weight.

“Twenty,” said the one called Slim, with a note of gloating.

He admired her pluck but could not encourage it. Addressing the skinny one, he said, “That's a fine age. Why, that's not only the age you can legally drink at, but the age you can legally marry at.”

At this absurd notion, the girl made a noise that bore some resemblance to laughter.

Mr. Custard was gratified, but he was not born yesterday. He did not believe for a second that they were nineteen and twenty. He was pleased however that they had taken the trouble to lie. If they had come clean he would have had no choice but to not believe them. If they were as young as he thought they probably were—closer to half than to two-thirds his age—it might lead to trouble if he ever managed to get the skinny one alone like he hoped to. If they had told him the truth he would have had to claim that they'd acted older, or that he'd forgotten.

One of Mr. Custard's favorite pastimes was concocting defenses and alibis in advance. He rarely got to use them, however, which was unfortunate. The elaborate justifications that he constructed for his various acts were, in his own estimation, often as brilliant as the acts themselves. In his mind he laid out these excuses, with all the patience and skill of a bricklayer, before Dr. Yard, who in his imagination was always gradually, grudgingly won over.

Encouraged, Mr. Custard asked both of them, with a playful leer in his voice, “Are all you ladies
married
?”

They giggled in hiccups, like two sponges getting the bubbles squeezed out of them.

“Are all you ladies
drunk
?” cried Mr. Custard.

That did it. They split their sides. They giggled till they wheezed.

He wouldn't have to be so careful anymore, wouldn't have to scowl so much. They were on his side.

When they'd calmed down, the one perversely called Slim asked, “You reading all these here books?”

Mr. Custard smiled humbly and said, “I'm writing one.”

The skinny one made a sound that might have indicated surprise or curiosity had she held it longer. As if translating this into English, the chubby one leaned forward and asked, “What's it about?”

“Psychology,” he said.

He was no longer sure why he had taken the books; perhaps it had tickled him to imagine himself as a scholar, the sort of maverick genius who
would
steal books. In fact, he didn't care for reading, and hadn't glanced at so much as a newspaper since leaving high school. He sometimes boasted about this to Francine, who liked to proclaim that the magazines she fanned in front of her face were “bettering.” He would then cite his own superior cleverness and long-time aliteracy as disproof, but the point was usually lost on her.

With most people he found it more useful to present himself as learned and widely read. After a few days in the hospital he had even borrowed a book from the floor nurse and let himself be seen with it in various contemplative poses about the ward and inner grounds. One day, shut up indoors due to rain and with Dr. Yard away for the afternoon, he had been driven by boredom to actually open the book and look inside it. He got as far as the first few words of Chapter One—“The Duke and the Duchess were …” —when across the activity room Harold, one of the resident
schizos, began throwing a fit, pulling antennas out of his head and stomping on radio waves. Mr. Custard carefully closed the book on his forefinger and sauntered over to watch the orderlies subdue Harold. He liked to stand nearby, looking cheerful and reasonable and sane, whenever one of the inmates went off their nut. Sometimes he even offered the orderlies a helping hand. When Harold had been injected and dragged back to his room, Mr. Custard returned to his easy chair and to the book. But he found that his eyes would not focus on the text. His brain simply rejected it. He realized he did not care the slightest goddamn bit about some goddamn worthless duke and duchess. What the hell did they have to do with
him
? It came to him then quite vividly, in a clarifying surge of rage, that reading was a sustained act of voluntary madness. To read was to remove yourself from life, to absent yourself from reality, and was there a better definition of insanity? That night he burned the book, a page at a time, in one of his ward-mates' bedpans, with matches he'd acquired from Mitkin, one of several sympathetic orderlies who realized that Mr. Custard did not belong there.

The skinny one called Missy cleared her throat and after a pause asked as casually as she could, “So you're a doctor?”

In his mind, Dr. Yard crossed his arms, shook his head, and grumbled,
Saner than all of us put together.

“You girls waiting on someone?”

Slim turned around, startled. The truck had crept over to them from the gas pumps, crunching gravel all the way, but so many vehicles had already passed by in either direction that they had become almost invisible to her, like the groundhogs scurrying around the high school baseball field.

In the truck were two boys, eighteen or twenty. The one closest
to them, leaning out the passenger-side window, had shaggy brown hair and a sweet, knowing smile. Instinctively Slim took off her glasses and pretended to polish them, but before she could say how do you do, Missy, sitting with her back against one post of the giant GAS sign, growled up at them, “Not for you we ain't.”

“Well, excuse us for sucking air.”

Slim gave them a parting look that was grim but not unfriendly. As the truck lurched forward, its wheels churning up dust, she thought she heard the driver shout something shocking: two words, one an adjective and one a noun. She was stunned; then she replaced her glasses and murmured, just loud enough for Missy to hear if she chose to, “Adolescents.”

Missy paid her no mind, and Slim wandered down the gravel shoulder to scratch her arm in privacy. She permitted herself seven seconds, with fingernails but through the sleeve, which seemed a minor enough lapse given the circumstances.

The adjective had been “fat.” She was not yet ready to contemplate the noun.

Missy was not talking to her, but that suited Slim just fine. As far as she was concerned, Missy's silence was proof of a guilty conscience. She knew she'd caused them to miss the bus.

But Slim was damned if she was going to stoop to such adolescent behavior herself. She walked back, placed one hand on her hip and the other above her eyes (though the sun was in the other direction and almost behind the mountains now) and looked down the highway in the direction the truck had gone.

“Hell, I wonder if we shouldn't've
taken
that ride.”

Missy issued a dismissive syllable through her nose. Missy preferred, whenever possible, to express her point of view non-verbally: she had found that sighs, grunts, and gasps were more difficult to refute than even the most eloquent arguments.

“Nothing we can do about it now,” said Slim, and offered a few of her gramma's proverbs on the impossibility of undoing that which was already done and the inevitable improvement of a bad situation. She was afraid that if she did not make light of their predicament she would cry.