Bad Chili

12

When we got back to Leonard’s house we drank some coffee and chatted a bit, but it wasn’t a lively sort of chat.

After a while, I took a hint, told Leonard I was going home, and I’d call him the next day. He almost helped me to the door. He stood on the porch as I was getting in my pickup.

“Hap,” he said, “ain’t no one I’d rather have around than you. But sometimes I don’t want no one around.”

“I understand.”

“This is one of those times.”

“No problem.”

I drove home, wheeled by Leonard’s old house, the one down the road from me, gave it a longing once-over. It was boarded up and graying, and the old television antenna shooting up the side of the house, spreading out on top of the roof, had been ravaged by wind. It looked like some kind of giant alien hand gone to rot, leaving only bones. Paint flaked like psoriasis off the porch and the front door. The grass was tall and nodding in the wind.

I wished Leonard would move away from his uncle’s house and come home. The place wasn’t much, but I liked him down the road from me. We had had some good times out here, and maybe we’d never have them again. Life was starting to get in the way.

I was pretty wired when I got home, so I tried a shower, but that didn’t help. I sat around for a while, trying to read, trying to watch television, trying to listen to music. None of this did me any good.

The day wore on. I got to thinking about Brett. I looked at my watch. It was late afternoon, but she wouldn’t have to go to work until late. I dialed her number. She answered on the third ring.

“Honey, I was beginning to think I was going to have to part my hair on the other side,” she said.

“Come again?”

“I thought I was losing my touch.”

“Do you practice it much?”

“Actually, I don’t. And I’m not normally such a floozy, but I haven’t met anyone that’s interested me in ages.”

“That’s flattering. What interested you in me?”

“I just love that little bald spot.”

“I don’t think you mean that.”

“You know, you’re right. I don’t.” Brett laughed. The laugh was as nice as her smile. “I don’t know. Not really. There’s just something about you. You remind me of a big puppy dog. I think that’s it.”

“Woof, woof,” I said.

“How about taking me to dinner? I haven’t eaten yet, and I’ve got to go to work before long. I’ve had one of those days where all I’ve had to eat is coffee.”

“Well, I’ve had one of those days too. Maybe we can cheer each other up.”

“Forty-five minutes,” she said.

We went to an expensive place called the West Coast. The place looks better than the food tastes, though the food isn’t bad. The West Coast is on a hill and has a large advertising sign out front that lists the specials of the week, most of the specials being some kind of seafood or steak.

The restaurant itself is made of great slabs of lumber and vast expanses of glass. It has well-manicured bushes and lots of parking places. For some reason, people dress up when they go there.

I dressed up a little myself. Dark slacks, dark blue sport jacket with a light blue shirt. I wiped off my shoes with a wash rag until they almost looked as if they had been polished. I had a tie in my coat pocket that I decided not to wear. It was a nice tie. Maybe later I could get it out and show it to Brett, just to give her some idea of what I might have looked like had I worn it.

When I picked up Brett, I wished I had on the tie. She looked nice. She had on a white blouse with a blue design on it, a blue skirt, dark blue shoes, and dark hose. Her makeup was spare and her hair was as lustrous as a goddess’s. The blouse revealed the tops of her breasts and she smelled so good I thought I might have to pull over to the side of the road and cry for a while.

“I hope I look all right,” she said. “I started to just shit in the face of all feminists tonight and wear an all-purpose deluxe tight-as-sin polyester screw-me-to-death outfit and no panties. I wear that, when I walk it looks like my thangamajig is shellin’ a walnut.”

All I could respond with was, “I’m sure that would have been very nice too.”

“Well, this will have to do. I didn’t want you to spring a leak on our first date.”

“It’s fine,” I said. “Looks great.”

“I hope so,” she said. “Actually, it’s kind of painful. I got on one of those bras hikes your titties up. They aren’t as formfitting as the goddamn box says they are. I feel like I got a truck jack under each one of ’em.”

We made romantic small talk like that on the way over, and once inside and seated at our table, a guy dressed in a white dinner jacket stood up at an organ and played and sang in a manner so awful I thought for a moment he was a comedian. When I realized he wasn’t, I said, “I’m sorry. I could have taken you to Burger King and we could have listened to Fats Domino on the jukebox. This clown wasn’t here last time I came.”

“That must have been Christmas Eve 1984, because I been here a lot and he’s been here since I’ve been coming, and he’s never been able to carry a note in a sealed Tupperware container. He can do a damn good ‘Pop Goes the Weasel,’ though, and come Christmas he has a medley that ends with ‘Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer’ that’ll break your goddamn heart.”

I smiled at her. “You are definitely different, Brett.”

“Not really,” she said. “I just put up a bold front. I’m really a chicken shit. This dating business is confusing to me. I don’t know if I want a real relationship anymore or a quick fuck. What about you?”

“I’d really hate to choose.”

“I’ll tell you a secret too. I don’t come on to every man like I did you.”

“You keep telling me that.”

“Do I?”

“Yep.”

“Well, I really do like you. If you had money I’d like you even more.”

“I like you too, but I don’t have money.”

“I didn’t think you did. You don’t look like you got more than a couple dimes to rub together.”

“Don’t worry. I can pay for the meal.”

She smiled again. Damn, I liked that smile.

“I don’t mind you don’t have money,” she said, and she reached out and placed her hand on top of mine. “I just said it would be convenient you had it. As for you liking me too, that’s good, but men like women right off if they look a certain way. And there’s some men, they go long enough and it’s late enough and they’re drunk enough, and some of them don’t even need the drink… Well, they’d fuck a three-hundred-pound cross-eyed sow in a John Deere cap.”

“You got to be proud of those old boys,” I said. “To think appearance doesn’t matter. That’s very modern, don’t you think?”

“What I think is I may not be a Playboy model, but I been around enough to know I look better than a tie rack. Figure that won’t last much longer at my age, so I better use it while I got it.”

“I may let my biology bark now and then,” I said, “but I make my final judgments with my heart, not my eyes. And just for the record, on the visual part, you’re a long way off from having ties hung on you. But that’s not the long and the short of it for me. How you look, I mean. I grew up in the sixties. I’m for equal rights and I’m for women. I even think of myself as a supporter of feminism as long as it doesn’t come across as stupid and strident as extreme machoism… Is that a word?”

“Who cares? I get your drift.”

“All right. Whatever, strident on either side wears me out. Like I said, my biology barks now and then, but when it comes down to it, I like to think I’m not the sort of guy can be pulled around by the ying-yang. I like to believe I’m made of sterner stuff than that.”

“I grew up in the sixties too,” Brett said, “but I hope there’s at least a drop of male chauvinist pig in you, or I’ve spent too much time brushin’ my hair. They still use that term, don’t they? ‘Male chauvinist pig’?”

“I’m not sure,” I said.

“Men and women, biology and the goddamn federal budget,” Brett said. “All a mess, isn’t it?”

I agreed it was.

Brett said, “If you’re a woman and you like sex, you’re a whore. If you don’t like it, then you’re frigid. If you use what charms you have to get sex, then the feminists hate you, and if you don’t want to marry every goddamn hard dick gives you a poke, then the men think you’re a ball breaker, or you’re back to number one again. You’re a whore.”

“It is confusing,” I said.

“And you know what?” Brett said. “I think you could be pulled around by your dick a little bit, I wanted to pull it.”

“You’re right,” I said. “I take all that bullshit back. Start pulling.”

A well-dressed waiter came by then. A good-looking college kid about nineteen. He was very polite and acted as if he couldn’t wait to give us menus, take our order, and be our food slave for the next hour or so. I caught him peeking at Brett’s titties, but I thought it might be ruder to ask him to stop than to ignore him. Besides, I couldn’t actually blame him. It’s easy to talk a line of shit about how looks don’t matter, and they shouldn’t, and as you mature they don’t matter as much, but the eyeball is connected to the crotch in men, and that is the sad way of the world, and no matter how many volumes are written on political correctness, the one-eyed snake that lives between the legs of men will not read and strives only for satisfaction.

The waiter took our drink order and went away. While I studied the menu, I found myself feeling guilty. I was having fun, about to eat a good meal, sitting there with a good-looking date, and Leonard was sitting at home with a can of tuna fish, a handful of bad TV stations, and no vanilla cookies.

Well, he could always go down to Burger King.

When the waiter came back with our drinks we ordered a dozen oysters, steaks, and salads. The oysters came and Brett ate hers with lots of lemon and sauce, and I ate mine with just the lemon. The salad came and it was a good salad, or as good as salads get in Texas. A Texan’s idea of a salad is a few bananas and strawberries inside a mold of lime Jell-O.

The baked potatoes had all the fixings. Cheese, sour cream, butter, bacon bits. The steaks weren’t bad either, both of them cooked medium rare. I drank a nonalcoholic beer, and Brett had another mixed drink. And if I could remember the roster of all the songs that talentless sonofabitch in the dinner jacket sang, I’d go to my grave a happy man.

As we ate we blocked out the singer’s frantic organ playing and tired voice and talked about ourselves. My side of the story was pretty easy to tell. It was mostly about bad jobs, growing up, this and that, but I left out the part about being an ex-con because I was a draft resister; that would come later when we knew each other better.

Brett told me she had been raised in Gilmer, Texas, had been a cheerleader and later a majorette, and that she’d once had a fantasy she might like to fuck the football team. But the fantasy wore off before she got the opportunity, and in the long run, after knowing a few of them, she decided the knob on the end of her baton was about as stimulating. Real lady talk.

“When I was eighteen,” she said, “even without the football team, I was a walkin’ sperm bank. A psychologist will tell you it’s because there was something wrong with me, and who am I to argue. They’ll tell you my parents beat me or fucked me or doodled with my asshole while I slept, or a next-door neighbor liked to pay me nickels and ice cream to have me strip naked and sit on his coffee table while he beat off to violent Bugs Bunny cartoons. And I’m sure it happens, but I had a good home life and was well loved and was popular in school, went to church, got baptized, and even attended charm school.”

“I take it you didn’t get a diploma from charm school.”

The great smile again. “Actually, I did, smart ass. But as I was sayin’, ain’t none of that bullshit applies to me. I do have a sneakin’ suspicion what my problem was and is, however.”

“What?” I asked.

“I got on the pill when I was sixteen because I think I just simply and dearly loved to fuck. I still do. Though I’ve got morals now.”

“You don’t do it on the first date.”

“That’s it. That’s the moral. And I make the man wear a rubber. But I suppose that’s nothing to do with morals. You could call that disease control. Has to be, because I hate those goddamn rubbers.”

“So do men. Go on, tell me more.”

Brett told me she had a twenty-seven-year old son named Jimmy who lived in Austin and was into Taoist philosophy and the martial art of aikido. Jimmy believed the source of his energy came up from the center of the earth and moved through his colon and all around inside of him. He had lots of internal energy. What the Japanese call ki power. Three people couldn’t lift Jimmy off the ground because of his ki. He could hold his arm out and you could swing on it. For all this internal energy, however, he lacked common sense and didn’t have a bank account. He wrote to Brett at least twice a month for money, and last time she heard he was in love with a former cocaine addict turned Christian Scientist who was healing an unexplained open wound on her leg – more of a running sore, actually – with prayer. Jimmy said he was certain in time his girlfriend could cure it right up. For the time being, however, she had also consented to the use of gauze, peroxide, and adhesive tape, though this was not common knowledge she shared with her church.

Brett had a young daughter named Tillie, who lived in Denver. She said the last letter she got from Till, as Brett called her, was encouraging. Till said her pimp didn’t beat her as much these days and most of her old injuries had gone away, though she did sport a small white scar over her right eye, and on cold days she walked with a limp. She had bought a new spitz puppy she named Milo, but her pimp didn’t like it and shot it and she was kind of happy about that now because she didn’t really need a dog in a small apartment where she had to entertain men.

The apartment, Brett told me, was a room over an all-night garage, and most of her customers were brought there by taxi after reading her name off a Fina station’s shit-house wall. The pimp lived uptown in a condo. Brett finished by saying, “Guess I can’t be too hard on Tillie, she’s just doin’ for money what I used to do for free, though admittedly I didn’t advertise in the Fina station toilet.”

“I always felt bad about not having kids,” I said. “But I’m feeling better now.”

“I must admit, I’ve come to understand why certain animals eat their young,” Brett said. “But I wouldn’t have missed them growin’ up. I love them. The problem was their father was an asshole and I was too young to raise babies. It’s our fault they both turned out to be worthless pieces of shit. I had the first one when I was sixteen. The second one when I was eighteen. I did the best I could but I was a kid myself. Earl didn’t do a goddamn thing except suck the end of a bottle and hump truck-stop waitresses. After we were married for a while, Earl decided he liked to toss me over the TV set on Friday nights, bounce me around the bedroom, punch me, then butt-fuck me as a little treat when his arms got tired. This went on longer than I like to admit. I kept thinking I could change him.”

“I’m sorry to hear it.”

“That’s all right,” Brett said. “Nineteen eighty-five I finally got tired of it. I hit him in the head with a shovel while he was digging for fishing worms in the backyard. I seen him out in the yard digging, and just the night before he’d given me one of them beatings I was tellin’ you about, and he put a beer bottle up my ass and poured the beer into me, and I was not in a cheery mood about it. Anyway, I seen him out there, so I made my plans. I hit him in the head with that shovel and I’d brought some lighter fluid and kitchen matches with me, and after I hit him I set him on fire. You might call it premeditated. You may have seen something about it back then. It made all the papers and TV. I burned the back of my hand a little when I was doing it, but Earl got the worst of it. He’s in some kind of home now in Houston, a ward of the state, and he can’t do things for himself and has trouble with simple math problems. Stuff like, if you have two apples and you eat one, how many are left?”

“Jesus, Brett. Did you do some time?”

“Judge let me off. There was plenty of evidence Earl had it coming. I dressed nice that day, best hot pants I had – you remember hot pants, don’t you? Well, I wore pink hot pants and a tight top, and as the judge was a known lecher, he let me off on a kind of self-defense thing. Earl’s relatives tried to sue me, came back on me for every kind of thing there was for about six months, but after a while they got to feelin’ good about Earl being gone too. He was always borrowin’ money from ’em and he was known to conk the sisters now and then, and I figure he’d been fuckin’ the youngest one, ’cause she had a kinda twitch to her eye and didn’t like men much. Earl’s mama thought Earl was a lot like her husband, Earl’s daddy, who used to beat her. Her husband, Earl Senior, died of a heart attack one morning in a moment of fury over runny breakfast eggs. So, his family kinda got to respect me a little, ’cause down deep they didn’t like that sonofabitch Earl Junior neither. I’m not sayin’ they exactly thanked me for settin’ Earl’s head on fire and bangin’ his brain around, but they began to feel fortunate he didn’t have anything upstairs left to use for devious means. Instead, he was tryin’ not to mess himself too often and learn not to lick his fingers when he got single square breakthrough. That’s kind of his lifetime career now. Keepin’ shit off his fingers.”

“Always an important point,” I said.

“His family sent me a Christmas card for a few years after I moved away,” Brett said. “All this happened over in Gilmer, and I can’t say I’ve missed the place much or looked back, though I do miss the Yamboree now and then. You know, the big sweet tater celebration they have over there every year?”

“I’ve been to it.”

“What kills me is the main float they make. It’s always this big yam, or sweet tater, but it looks like this big brown turd. I rode on it back when I was in high school. I was the Yamboree Queen one year. I remember I drank some Boone’s Farm apple wine and rode on that turd down Main Street waving at people, got so goddamn tickled I nearly fell off. People thought I was just hysterically happy that I was that year’s turd queen. That’s back when I first was datin’ Earl. He wasn’t so bad then, and I’ve got some good memories, but the best one is the last one, when Earl was running across the yard with his head on fire, just before the neighbor tripped him and put out the blaze with a water hose.”

“Did he beat the flames out with the hose, or did he have the water on?”

Brett laughed. “He had the water on. When I think about that day I get a kind of warm feelin’ inside. Not as warm as Earl’s head got. But warm.”

“I don’t suppose any of your other relationships have ended in tragedy?”

“Don’t worry. Earl’s the only one I ever set on fire, and I haven’t taken up a shovel since, unless it was to plant flowers. It was just one of them things. Enough was enough. I burned up his car too. I was so goddamn angry after he got his head fire put out, I pulled his car into the drive, poured gasoline on it, and set it ablaze. I did that ’cause he treated that car better than me.”

“You certainly had a big day that day.”

“You betcha,” Brett said. “And you know what? I got a friend goin’ through that shit right now. You met Ella, didn’t you?”

“She’s a nurse too?”

“That’s the one,” she said. “She told me she talked to you. Her husband beats her regular, and she won’t leave. I’ve tried to get her to leave, but she won’t, and she ain’t for settin’ his head on fire.”

“Actually, that’s for the best, Brett.”

“I reckon, but she ought to do somethin’.”

“I wish her luck,” I said.

“Luck ain’t gonna have a goddamn thing to do with it,” Brett said.

After dinner I drove Brett back to her place and she made coffee, then dressed for work. While she dressed I sat on the sofa and drank my coffee and looked around the living room. It was neat and simple. She had a row of books, mostly nursing text books and a few bestsellers. A few knickknacks. No shovels or lighter fluid. There were photographs of her two kids. They were probably in their teens in the photos. Handsome kids. The girl looked as if she were going to grow up to resemble her mother. Probably did by now. Except for the scar and the limp. The boy was nice-looking. Probably wowed a lot of women in the aikido class during his discussions of Taoism. I wondered what he could do with a left jab to the nose, a swift kick to the gonads.

Brett came out wearing her nurse duds. “I’m sorry I had to deflate my titties,” she said, “but duty calls.”

“That’s all right. Would you like me to run you to work?”

“No. I got to come home sometime, and I don’t want to be dependent on you. I had a good time, really. I hope you did, even if you didn’t get any nookie.”

“Listen, Brett. You don’t need to keep that up. I like sex. Really. But I like you too. I want to know you better. I’d prefer not to spend a lot of time with you around shovels and lighter fluid, but I do want to know you better. You don’t have to come on so strong.”

“I guess you’re right. But I got to tell you, sweetie, when you been fending for yourself long as I have, you use ever’ tool you got in your toolbox. I guess I bring out the monkey wrench sometimes when a pair of pliers would do.”

“It’s all right,” I said. “I’ll see you again if you’ll let me.”

“You bet. And soon.”

“One thing,” I said. “You got any photos of you riding that turd in the Yamboree?”

“Somewhere. Next time we get together I’ll let you see ’em. I even got one of me when I was a baby on a fake bearskin rug I’ll show you.”

“Great. Good night, then.”

“Wait,” she said. “Come here.”

I went to her and she started to kiss me. I said, “I’m on the tail end of a cold.”

“I’ve had colds before,” she said. We kissed. It was very nice. I kissed her again.

“I got to go,” she said.

We went out and she locked the house and we kissed again and I walked her out to her car. She drove away in her Ford and I got in my truck and left her place tasting the lingering sweetness of her on my lips and tongue.