Butch Karp: Absolute Rage Part 27

"Well, you're gonna get your wish, little lady. I don't think there's a better collection of hand-cut screws and carriage bolts anywhere in West Virginia."

"Be still my heart!"

"Yeah, but really it's nice, in a tacky way. Sincere. Dad used to take us there all the time, and that's where they always held the Labor Day picnic, the great event of Dad's . . . um . . . calendar . . . no, what's that church word?"

"Liturgical year."

"Right, that. My mom would always roll her eyes at me when he wasn't looking. Anytime she could, she'd grab us up and zoom into D.C. for a day of tromping through art museums, and we'd go to a concert in that room at the National Gallery with the fountain, and zoom home again to cook supper."

"Did you like it?"

"We liked the Natural History and the Air and s.p.a.ce all right, not the art so much. Lizzie liked the art." He was silent for a long interval. She watched his face. He is transparent as the air, she thought. You can see what his heart is feeling. Without thinking she moved closer to him and put her hand around his neck. He jumped and shuddered.

"Wow. s.h.i.+t, I was about to bust out crying there for a minute. What a drag."

"It's not a drag," she said. "It's grief. You're supposed to feel that way."

"You're not going to tell me they're all having fun in heaven and I shouldn't worry?"

"Of course not! 'Blessed are they who mourn, for they shall be comforted.' Even Jesus wept."

That was interesting, she thought, he can pull down a screen over his face, but it takes an effort. He doesn't want to hear any of that stuff. She regretted her outburst.

More silence and then he switched the radio on, found a country station. "You don't mind? It's the onlyiest kand of music we get here in beeootiful southwestern West Virginia."

She smiled and shook her head. They drove, they listened. Dolly sang about the coat of many colors my mother made for me. He took her hand. This is not happening, she thought. I am not out on a date with a gorgeous boy who likes me. She rolled the words date and boy around in her mind like a baby playing with something s.h.i.+ny and new. To test whether it was really happening, she reviewed the modal suffixes of Korean in her head. I want to go: ka-go s.h.i.+psumnida; I must go: kaya huminida; I ought to go: kaya haeya hadda . . .

"What are you thinking?"

She started and turned toward him. He was smiling. "You were someplace else. What were you thinking?"

She felt herself blus.h.i.+ng. "I was reviewing the modal verb modifiers of Korean."

"Really. Are you having a test in Korean tomorrow?"

"No, it's a habit, like picking cuticles."

"Uh-huh. You realize you are an extremely peculiar person. I kind of resent that."

"You do?"

"Yes. I used to be the most peculiar person in Robbens County, and now you b.u.t.t in. I'll have to think of something really weird."

And more of this kind of silly, delightful talk, until they pulled into the parking lot at First Forge. It was full of families and smelled of fried things and burnt sugars and the stink of burning coal from the actual forge. They watched a fat, red-faced man in a wig make a shovel blade. They walked giggling through the dim room and got glared at by the guardian. They ate fried chicken. Then they took a ride on the Tunnel of Love.

"Gosh, this is a first for me," said Lucy as their little craft, pink and spattered with hearts and crudely figured cupids, was yanked through the heart-shaped entryway.

"Oh, you're just saying that to make me feel good."

"No, really. I didn't think they had them anymore. I figured the s.e.xual revolution had put them all out of business."

"They had a s.e.xual revolution? No one told me."

"I bet you've been on Tunnels of Love with lots of girls."

"Oh, yeah, hundreds. Miles and miles in the dark with 'Moon River' playing on cracked speakers. There's no detail of tunnel of loving I haven't plumbed . . ."

After saying this, he kissed her neck, her ear, drawing her to him, mouth on her mouth. His hand slipped around her shoulder, wiggled under her arm, fingers slid under the stretchy fabric of her suit and settled on her nipple. Time became stretchy, too, as the love pod moved for hours up a minor tributary of the Orinoco.

Suddenly she pulled away. "Whoa! My gos.h.!.+"

"What?"

"Whew! Nothing, I was being overcome by l.u.s.t."

"What's wrong with that?"

"I just didn't expect it, is all. My experience in these things is fairly limited. Approaching zero, as a matter of fact."

"Now must be the time, then."

"No, I don't think so. If we keep this up, I'll want to drag you into the bushes for purposes of fornication."

"That sounds like a good plan," he breathed into her ear. The hand snaked again.

"No, it's not," she whispered against his cheek. What an absolutely remarkable smell he had.

"And why?"

In a whisper, too: "Because it's a sin ."

"You're joking."

"I am not."

He pulled an arm's distance away from her and looked at her. His eyes had adjusted to the dimness and he could make out her face, its expression woeful, vulnerable, mouth slightly open, the thin lips fatter than they had been with all the kissing, her eyes almost reflectant, like an animal's.

"I don't understand."

"You'll laugh if I tell you."

"I won't, honest."

"It's connected. My gift. I mean the languages. I have to abjure s.e.x until I'm married, I mean if I ever get married. Otherwise, it'll be taken away from me."

"You mean . . . like that thing with the girl and the unicorn?"

"Yes, pretty nearly."

"Lucy, that's insane. You have a . . . a rare genetic variation, that's all. Like people who can extract ten-digit primes in their heads or tell you the day of any date, or become chess grand masters. You can't lose it because you think you're violating some medieval rule."

"Yes, that's what Morrie Shadkin says."

"Does he want to get you into bed, too?"

"No, although he does want to marry me. I pointed out to him that he's already married and has two kids. He says, 'Lucy, that's such a technicality!' He hates to let me out of his sight. He'd go nuts if he knew I was in dangerous, uncivilized West VA."

"She drags me into the Tunnel of Love to boast about her other boyfriends."

"Oh, Morrie's not a boyfriend. He's the neuroscientist who's trying to figure out how my brain works. Anyway, about your rare genetic variation-the experts of the whole world have looked into my head, CAT scans, fMRI, PET scans, and, yeah, there are small variations, but not explanatory variations. Physically, I'm the same as anyone else, but I can do stuff that no one else can do, except another freak, a fifteen-year-old boy in Russia. So forgive me if I regard it as a gift of the Holy Spirit. Look, what if you knew that if you did something, it would mean that after you couldn't tell a quark from a lipton?"

"Lepton."

"Lepton. How would you feel?"

"I'm prepared to risk that."

"Well, I'm not. And besides, it's wrong. Do you love me?"

"Love you? Christ, I just met you."

"Yes, but you're willing to use me to slake your l.u.s.t. So say I want to slake my l.u.s.t, too, and so we slake them, and slake them, and then we get bored with it after a while, or find someone who's more attractive or more interesting, and the whole thing starts over again with someone else."

"All right, fine!" he snapped.

After some silence, she said, "You're pouting now."

He was inclined to pout. He was h.o.r.n.y as the devil and he was attracted to her without really understanding why. He had never been attracted to such a girl before this, and it irked him a little. He was a modern kid and had enjoyed plenty of s.e.x from an early age. While it was true that he tended to go for girls who wanted a different sort of boy, he had never had much trouble scoring. His high school had, of course, been full of girls who were born-again and self-consciously Christian, and he had mocked them along with the rest of the bright crowd he had hung out with. This one, however, was not like any of them. He found now, somewhat to his surprise, that he did not want to pout, did not want to push her away, wanted . . . something, he didn't quite know what. Without thinking about it, he flung his arm around her again and gave her a squeeze. "Oh, well, so we'll be pure. I can't believe this. This is like 1903."

She relaxed against him. "Or 1403. Look, we're emerging." There was brightness ahead around a curve, and then a heart-shaped slice of the real world, glowing and making them squint their eyes.

"Where's Lucy?" asked Karp.

Marlene blinked awake and looked around. "Isn't she in the pool?" She sat up and saw that Lucy was not. The twins were there, playing with a ball and a net set up at the side of the pool. "I must have dozed off. The sun got to me." She sat up, rubbed her face, looked around. "Mm, I don't know. She was with the Heeney boy. They're probably off in the bushes somewhere, playing doctor."

"Yeah, psychiatrist, maybe. I just wanted to tell you I'm going out with Hendricks."

"Anything going on?"

"We had another sighting. They bought a case of beer at a grocery in Selden. That's north of here at the junction of 712 and 11. They look like they're getting ready to liquor up and come to town. Wade is gathering the forces. Also, Hawes called. Bledsoe sprung Emmett on a hundred grand bail. He's coming here, but it looks like it might be over by the end of the day, if Wade does his job."

"You want to be in on the kill, do you?"

"Yeah, I do. I deserve it." He sat on the edge of the lounger. "Speaking of which, are you going to tell me how you psyched Ernie Poole up from Death of a Salesman to Clarence Darrow?"

"Oh, that. You know, womanly wiles, tee-hee."

"Really."

"I went to his office, where he was trying to climb into a bottle, but had only got a leg in so far, and I told him I knew he had got Amos Jonson to drag me into that shack with his story, and then I expatiated on how you were going to cream Emmett Heeney in court. And he cursed out Hawes for a corrupt f.u.c.k, and you and me for fools. He was pretty eloquent, and I said Hawes wouldn't be a factor, you'd be running the case, and you were ten times the lawyer he was, even when he was cold sober, and I walked out."

"That was it?"

"Yes. It came down to a p.e.n.i.s-measuring contest between you and him, as I find most litigation does in the end. He's nuts about me, the poor sap, and I manipulated him shamelessly. It's going to break his heart not to be able to beat you up in court."

"He couldn't beat me up in court on his best day and my worst," said Karp, winking John Waynesque.

"Right. I rest my case."

"Now that we've done the cultural riches of the greater McCullensburg area," Dan said, "how about looking into the lowlife?"

They were walking with their arms around one another by the side of a little lake, on a kind of sandy promenade. There was a bathing beach full of shouting children, and the smell of barbecue fires, broiling meat, and charcoal starter fluid. Lucy had never done this with a boy before, but thought she could get to like it. Small town, girl and boy, summer, a lakeside carnival, the hallucination of innocence. She understood that it was hallucinatory, America having given up innocence along with unleaded gas, but she was enjoying it nonetheless. And the badinage.

"There's lowlife in McCullensburg?" she said, miming wonderment. "I'm shocked! Shocked!"

"Yep. There's a roadhouse on Route 11 just outside of Selden. They got a pool table and a jukebox with all country favorites. A couple of pinball machines, too."

"You can see my eyes are sparkling, I guess. Did you also hope to get me drunk, so as to make me more pliable?"

"Be honest? Yeah, it had crossed my mind. There's a motel right behind the roadhouse." He hugged her more closely. "Come on. We're young. It's summer. Look at these people." She looked. They seemed to fall into two general cla.s.ses: parental couples jiggling with fat, mostly lard-pale except for the blue-collar sunburns on the men-face, neck, and lower arms-and rail-thin teens in gaggles and couples, poking and pawing one another. He meant the adults.

"Soon we'll be fat and ugly, too, with mortgages and bratty kids. You want to look back and think you never once did anything just because you had the urge? Seize the day, Lucy!"

To his surprise, she giggled. "Seize the day? My G.o.d, you're such a pagan! You should be wearing a helmet with horns on it and a greasy beard. Look, let me explain something. If you believe that you're basically an animal, and you're only going to live a certain little bit of time, and for most of it you're going to be in decline, then 'seize the day' is the right take on life. On the other hand, if you believe that your real destiny is entirely outside of time, and that you were made to be with G.o.d forever, then the right take is 'sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof.' In other words, forget the c.r.a.p from the past and what you're plotting for the future, such as, in your case, getting into my pants. Live for eternity, which means, among other things, behaving in a certain way."

"What I can't believe is we're having this conversation. You are honestly, really, not going to have any s.e.x at all until you're married?"

"Uh-huh." She gave him another of those light-filled grins. In the bright sun her tan eyes seemed disks of flas.h.i.+ng gold. "At which point, I expect to be completely insatiable. They'll have to pry me off it with a sharp tool. And who can tell, you may be the lucky man."

At these words he felt a thrill go through him, l.u.s.t mixed with terror.

She added, "But meanwhile I would love a beer in your low dive."

"You would?"

"Uh-huh. I trust you, and also I have a big, ferocious dog with me. And I can outrun you."

With that, she spun around and took off, racing along the edge of the lake, with the black dog at her heels. Dan stood there for a moment, slightly stunned, watching her run, those long legs graceful as birds' wings. She was like something out of a fairy tale, the kind of girl who might, in some shady wood, turn into a deer or summon a unicorn to her lap. Heart thumping, he began to run after her.

The roadhouse was a low, windowless, concrete structure, painted tan, plopped like a discarded brick on a gravel lot. Lucy put Magog under the Land Cruiser with a pan of water and a handful of dog biscuits and followed Dan through the olde-saloon-style swinging doors. Inside it was surprisingly cool, smelling dankly of old beer, the air stirred by ceiling fans, the light dim and colored by several beer signs over the bar and a large TV with the volume off showing a stock-car race. Pinball noises and the click of pool b.a.l.l.s came from an adjoining room. In the saloon proper half a dozen country boys and a fat woman in a halter top were engaged in serious drinking. They looked up briefly when Dan and Lucy entered and then went back to their drinks. Dan sat Lucy at one of the eight tables and brought a pair of Coors longnecks from the tired-looking blond woman at the bar.

"So," he said after a long swallow, "do you feel your virtue giving way yet?"

"It's pretty depraved. We don't have anything this bad in New York."

"Just wait. You might get to hear some uncouth language in a while. Someone might even hurl a s.e.xual innuendo."

"Well, let's hope it doesn't happen. I don't want to have to change my underpants again."