10. Once the second pitcher was emptied . . .
Once the second pitcher was emptied, I stood up to go. “Why so early?” Julia wanted to know. “Do you have a date?”
“You bet,” I told her. “A date with about twenty Freshman Comp students. I told them I’d have their last set of papers graded by tomorrow.” I shrugged into my flight jacket and picked up my books. “Besides, I’m starting a new life. Early to bed and early to rise. You know; that shit.”
She studied me skeptically as she prepared a comment, then edited it. “What are you doing for Thanksgiving?” she asked finally.
“I don’t know,” I said, grinning. “Are you asking me out?”
“No!” She quickly lowered her eyes, studying her drink as she turned it round and round. Finally, without looking up, she said, “No, but I know of a party you might go to. Everyone’s invited, I think.”
“Are you going?” I asked. “What kind of party is it?”
“It’s mostly people from the Theater Department. I can’t go because I have to be in Omaha.”
“If it’s the Theater Department,” I said, “the men will all be fairies and the women snakes. Thanks, but no thanks.”
“It won’t just be Theater Department,” she said, finally gathering enough courage to look up at me. “The Nebraskans for Peace folks will be there, too. You might like it. There’ll be lots of dope.”
“Oh, in that case,” I said, laughing. “Say goodnight to L. D. for me. Going up to Omaha for the weekend?”
“Always do,” Julia said glumly.
“Then I guess I’ll probably see you next week.”
After the brisk walk home, my apartment felt like a steam bath. I closed some vents—I had no thermostat of my own; my heat came from vents in the ducts that led upstairs—took off my clothes, and ran some water in the tub. While the bathtub was filling, I rolled myself a modest joint and placed it on a chair beside the tub along with a box of matches. I’d have made it a big one, but I’d decided during the walk home to drive out once more and see whether Grace was waiting tables at Lederer’s.
A half-hour later, shaved, cologned, deodorized, and freshly clothed, I went out to the street to start my cold truck; once it rumbled to life, I trotted back inside to give my plum-thicket hair a final brush and put on my coat. Looking in the mirror, I tried imagining myself with a beard, but all I could see looking back at me was a tall, thin, oversized Scottish terrier. Instead of my usual flight jacket, I put on my Air Force overcoat, a well-made wool garment whose main defect was its telltale color. Anyway it was newly drycleaned. I thought I looked fine and prosperous in my fresh clothes, like somebody going out on a job interview.
The bare limbs of the sycamores glistened white as bones in the moonlight; Cassiopea overhead was beginning her decline to the west. The marijuana had left me woolly but alert, hungry for a midnight breakfast. I gunned the motor of the old hot-rod truck at the green lights, braked hard for the reds—in other words, I drove like the rest of the bozos out late on West O Street. The blue Falcon was there in the lot, back beside the dumpster, and Grace was at the counter grinning when I came in. “Hi!” she said. “I wondered if you’d be out tonight.” Her hair was up and her eyes were mascara’d, and the funny earrings jigged below her ears. Her goofiest smile, though, she saved for the other customers. I felt pleased to have that secret knowledge of her, that she was a faker, smart like me.
“I wondered, too,” I said, returning her honest grin. “If this is where I am, then I guess I’m here.”
“See that booth ‘way back in the corner?” She gestured with her coffeepot. “Sit back there. I usually work the counter, but I’ll come and take your order. Then if it’s not too busy I’ll see if the other girls will let me take a break.”
I pushed my way through clinging webs of cigarette smoke, past men wearing quilted vests or slick rayon jackets with place-names embroidered in fluorescent thread: “Rocky Mountain Grain Company, Longmont, Colorado” or “Stan’s Super Service, Highway 66, Albuquerque.” Some wore western hats, some wore caps with gold braid stitched on the bills. My dope-fiend smile beamed inappropriately in the bluish air; they glowered like a clan of Serbs. I chose a seat facing the rear wall, with night and the blue-lit parking lot on my right, and thought for a moment of my father, still grinding the gears (though he didn’t have much time for truck stops) and pounding his skinny butt up and down those highways. He’d be expecting me home for Thanksgiving, maybe. I felt sad because I didn’t want to go.
Grace came over to take my order; I asked for French toast and a side of sausage, orange juice and coffee. “Eat slowly,” she said when she brought the plates. She bent down, cupping her hand as if to whisper, but instead she stuck her tongue in my ear. “I’ve switched breaks with Sheila. I’ll be off in fifteen minutes.”
After the hairs on my neck settled back down, I picked up the syrup and began dribbling it over the toast. It made fascinating patterns, the thick golden-brown liquid oozing down the golden-yellow toast in glassy lava-like waves. The toast had been laid out accordion-style, like a cordillera, and was thickly dusted with powdered sugar. I carefully drowned each slope until the syrup pooled in the plate, catching imaginary skiers in avalanches, burying whole Andean villages alive. Finally the meaty smell of the hot sausage caught my attention, and I put down the syrup squeezer and picked up my silverware.
Once I started eating, I couldn’t slow down; everything was gone in an instant, and I had nothing left to do but draw pictures in the syrup with my fork. I drew a tree, then watched the lines fill up and disappear. I drew a cat, a car, an old-fashioned radio, abstract patterns of waves. “Hey!” a voice said. I looked up to find Grace watching me. “What are you doing?”
“Art class.” I smiled up at her. “My fourth-grade teacher told me I couldn’t draw, and she was right, but I still have to try it once in a while.”
“Well, scoot over,” she said. “I haven’t got all night.”
I put down the fork and hitched myself closer to the cold plate-glass window. Grace bounced in beside me, and before the cushion had stopped vibrating she was groping my crotch, pinching my penis through my jeans. “Woof!” I cried, glancing back over my shoulder at the lounging truckers. I lowered my voice to a husky whisper. “Man, you don’t waste any time!”
“I do not,” she said, smiling archly. “So, tell me how you’ve been.” Under the table, she was already unbuttoning my fly. I hitched myself up—my left arm rested along the top of the booth above her shoulders—and rearranged my wool coat to cover her hand. “What’s the matter?” she laughed. “Cat got your tongue?”
“Somebody might come over,” I said uneasily. I glanced toward the counter, smiling like a bank robber waiting in the cashier’s line with his paper sack.
“They won’t. They know better. Act normal; drink some coffee, that’s what most people do around here.”
I gasped as she found an opening and her hand plunged into my pants. “God! I’ll spill it!”
“No you won’t.” She grinned, biting the tip of her tongue. “Concentrate. You can walk and chew gum at the same time, can’t you?”
Shakily, I picked up my cup and took a sip as she brushed the wool coat aside and popped my dick into the open air. Now her eyes held mine, her grin frozen as she focused on her work. “Shouldn’t I (Yikes! Jesus Christ!) be reciprocating?” I glanced down. “I mean, I really (Ow!) do (Help!) appreciate this—”
“Later,” she said. “Maybe this afternoon. Did you have other plans?”
“No,” I said. She’d taken a tight grip on my cock and was rubbing around and around my glans with the ball of her thumb; already I had produced some preliminary moisture. “I’m done with classes at noon. Then I usually eat lunch and start drinking around two.”
“How about if I meet you at your house? Any complications?”
“None,” I said. “I live alone.” I tried another sip of coffee; my cup rattled when I put it down. She let go my penis and started burrowing for my balls, and when she found them she grabbed hold like they were the pair she’d been looking for all her life.
“Thought you might be lonely,” she said, tightening her grip. “Do you want to see me?”
“Yes,” I said hoarsely. “We can discuss Plato.”
“That way I can get some sleep and take a shower,” she said. “What do you think?” She quit my gonads and gave me a poke in the ribs, then picked up a table knife in her left hand and a pat of butter in her right.
“I think we’ve got a date,” I said. “I think you’re a wild woman and crazy as a flea. Now what are you doing?”
“What does it look like?” Carefully and deliberately, she began buttering her right hand, palm first, then all four fingers.
“Oh, my God—!” I blinked in disbelief. “If you knew how much I needed this, you wouldn’t be doing it.”
“I might,” she said, putting down the knife. “I’m that kind of girl.” Then her messy hand descended below the table again, and I almost died.
After Grace finished spray-painting the underside of the table with my sperm—I shot such a geyser, it’s a wonder it didn’t lift right off the floor—we had a little small talk while she rubbed me with my own slickness and I shuddered between syllables. Then I wrote my address on a napkin while she wiped her hand on my pants, and made my way unsteadily out to the chilly parking lot, glad I’d worn a coat to cover the stains. I drove home in a state of wonder; you couldn’t enter a bar in Bangkok without having your penis grabbed, but it surely wasn’t the action you’d expect in a truck stop outside Lincoln. It made me feel nostalgic for the war.
So little time had passed that I could’ve gone back to Casey’s; Julia was probably still sitting there, nursing a second gin-and-tonic and wondering about men. I didn’t consider it for long. I was too sleepy, and besides, I had butter on my pants. I turned right on 9th Street and left on K, then missed my turn at 12th and had to drive around the block. Back home inside my overwarm, snug but dismal hole in the ground, I saw with a freshened eye the litter of papers, the dirty clothes, the week’s debris in the sink. A pan of cold oatmeal sat drying on the stove, and half an eggshell lay on the floor where I’d thrown it at the garbage sack and missed. I picked up the eggshell and put it in the trash, carried the oatmeal to the bathroom and flushed it, and went to bed.
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