Book Seven: A Piece of Steel
53. When I got back into Lincoln. . . .
When I got back into Lincoln after the Christmas holiday, the first person I talked to was Julia. Five hours on the road had made me thirsty, so I drove straight to Casey’s. It was a Thursday afternoon. I found her alone in a booth, nursing a club soda, staring longingly at the slice of lime on the rim of the glass. She winced when she saw me; I walked over and asked if I could sit down. “Sure,” she said dully. “Here, take this, will you?” She pulled the lime off the rim and handed it to me.
“What am I supposed to do with it?”
“Get it out of my sight,” she said. “It’s food.”
I slid in across from her. “Polish sausage is food,” I said, chewing the sour pulp away from the rind. “This is decoration. What’s wrong with food?”
“It’s made me what I am,” she said bitterly. “A blob. A cow. A sexless bag of flesh.”
“I wouldn’t call you sexless,” I said, glancing at her chest. “This lime is making me hungry. Would you mind if I ordered a cheeseburger?”
“I’d mind,” she said. “I’d mind so much, I’d probably have to move.”
I studied her pale face. She seemed to have aged; her cheeks had lost their fullness and color, and her eyes looked sunken. “What the hell,” I said. “Julia, when did you quit eating?”
“None of your business,” she said. Her gaze followed the lime rind as I tossed it into the ash tray. “I’m not eating again until I lose fifty pounds,” she said.
“Fifty pounds! That’s not realistic,” I said. I lowered my voice. “Julia, your tits will fall off.”
“Hmp!” I’d almost gotten a laugh out of her. “At twenty-five apiece, that’d be fifty pounds right there.”
I gazed with exaggerated longing. “If they do fall off,” I said, “can I have them?”
“Jonas!” She looked at me strangely. “What would you do with a pair of oversized boobs? Dress up like a woman?”
I licked my lips and darted my eyes around like Marion Saunders watching for snipers. “Just give them to me,” I said, twitching my upper lip. “I’ll be real careful, I promise. Pleeeze?”
“Jonas!” She put her hand over her mouth. “Stop it!”
“Pu-leeeeze?” I leaned forward, twitching earnestly.
“Stop!” I blinked pervertedly. “Stop.” She held up her other hand. “You’re making me— I’m afraid I’ll throw up.”
“Hey, we wouldn’t want that,” I said, resuming my normal voice and expression. I caught L. D.’s eye across the room and signaled for a draft; when I looked back across the table at Julia, tears were trickling down her cheeks and dripping from her jeweled hands. “Hey,” I said again.
“Jonas,” she said, “I’m so sorry about what happened.”
“Listen, it was no big deal,” I said gently. “In fact, it wasn’t even the first time I’d been bounced off a wall by cops.”
“Bounced off a wall? The police did this to you?”
“Didn’t Sarah tell you? Yeah, they patted me down in the hospital. Hurt my arm, too; in fact, it’s felt funny ever since.” I drew my shoulders up, and, sure enough, an itchy little twinge ran down my right elbow.
She glanced at my arms. “You must think I’m— Very neurotic,” Julia said.
“I think you’re terrific. Man, can you sing! I don’t think I’ve ever met a woman with a voice like yours.”
“Voice?”
“You sang the lyrics in Leonard’s class. Blew the windows out and saved my report. Remember?”
“Oh, that.” She lowered her hands from her face and pushed back a little. “That was weird. Did you ever find your tape?”
“No,” I said. “You’d think they’d return it, wouldn’t you? It can’t be any good to them now.”
“What are you going to do to them?” Julia pulled a wad of napkins from the dispenser and began drying her face.
“I don’t know,” I said. “Shemansky I can simply flush down the toilet. McKinley? I might put him in a cardboard box and mail him home to his mother. Surely that would be adequate, don’t you think?”
“I don’t know,” Julia said. “I’m not a vengeful person.”
“I’ll have to ask Sarah about that,” I said.
“How was your vacation in the wilderness?” she asked after a pause. “How’s life in the hinterlands?”
“Boring,” I said. “The old man got me to take a load to Iowa. I fell and hurt my arm again, same one the cops loosened up for me. Then I did a little work on my paper. How was yours?”
“Lousy,” she said. “Christmas is a pisser for us Jews.”
L. D. Langdon came over with my beer. “Took you long enough,” I said to her. “Bring this woman a burger or something, will you?”
“She won’t eat,” L. D. said. “She wants to kill herself in the most painful way possible, by dieting.”
“Bring her a glass of tomato juice, anyway,” I said. “If she doesn’t drink it, I’ll make myself a red beer.”
“She’ll throw it in your face,” L. D. said.
“We’ll see.” I glanced at Julia. “If she does die, I get her tits,” I said. “We made a deal.”
“Like hell you do,” L. D. said. “I get ‘em.”
“You’d fall on your face,” I objected.
“I’m always getting tipped over anyway,” L. D. said. “Usually backwards, since God rounded my heels. Maybe they’d give me a better sense of balance.”
“I doubt that,” I said. “You’d be top-heavy.”
“That’s enough,” Julia said. “You two shut up about my tits, OK?”
“Our lips are sealed,” L. D. said. “Do you want that tomato juice, or not?”
“All right, bring it,” Julia said. “Life goes on, eh?”
“Or else it doesn’t,” I said. “I’ve seen it both ways.”
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