Psychology and Other Stories (11 page)

“He said he was a salesman,” she murmured, poking at a chicken wing. It was red, pimply, and slimy, and she could imagine it being torn off a real chicken.

“He said he was writing a book,” said Slim. “But the books he had—” She shook her head. “
A Dictionary of English Surnames
, that was one.”

“That T-shirt,” said Missy. “My uncle Lewis had one. A blue one, but the same coconuts and trees on it and things.”

Slim nodded. “That dog,” she said.

Missy pursed her lips in agreement. “Nobody calls their dog ‘Good Dog.'”

Slim held up a french fry, peered at it skeptically, then laid it back among the others.

“We can't pay for this,” said Missy suddenly, as it occurred to her.

“We got no money,” Slim agreed.

“Shitfire,” said Missy.

“Holy coyote,” said Slim.

“Eat the rich and shit the poor,” they drawled in unison.

The girls' eyes met briefly, then glanced away.

With both hands, Missy lifted Mr. Custard's untouched glass of beer to her lips. It tasted sour and grainy—not at all what she had expected. She masked her surprise with a grimace of satisfaction.

“Helps me think,” she confided, sliding the glass back to its original position.

Slim nodded and pulled the glass to herself. She sniffed it a little before sipping, Missy thought, but otherwise betrayed no lack of familiarity with the beverage.

They drank the beer surreptitiously, watching out for the waitress and returning the glass to the same spot after each swallow. Missy felt that, in some small way, justice was being done: if they had eaten the food
they
had ordered, it would be stealing; but drinking Mr. Custard's beer was making
him
the thief, which was just what he deserved.

A family of three came in, turning their bewildered heads in every direction as if trying to figure out where the food was. The waitress led them to a table.

“When she takes that order,” Missy whispered.

“She'll have her back to us,” Slim finished.

The waitress hung back, looking their way occasionally. Then the man with his family beckoned.

“Now,” Missy mouthed.

The door chimed incriminatingly, but no one shouted at them to stop; and then they were outside and running, first from nervousness and fear, then for pleasure. Missy felt that all the blood in her body had gone to her head and was churning around in her brain like water in a washing machine. Behind her, Slim let out a whoop that echoed down the silent street.

The sky had gone from blue to purple and black. The town was even smaller and dingier than Delyle. On one side of the road was a line of dusty shops, all dark and closed; on the other was a sparse copse of pines. A car turned onto the road, its headlights stretching the girls' shadows out from their feet, and they slowed to a brisk, skipping walk as it passed. Missy felt like laughing, but she funneled the impulse down into her limbs, swinging her arms and kicking her feet as she walked.

Soon the cold of the night had pinched off even this lingering energy. She put on her coat and hugged herself, trying to hold on to the warm glow from the beer and the triumph of their escape. She had begun to recognize, as an abstract proposition, that they were stranded here, in the middle of nowhere, with the cold of night settling in, without a ride or any money or any hope of finding a place to sleep, when Slim drew up short and grabbed her arm.

“That's his car.”

It was parked, roughly speaking, in front of another diner. The girls approached without hesitation, as if it were their own. Indeed, Missy felt an impulse to throw open the door and crawl inside and wait for Mr. Custard as if nothing had happened. At first sight of the car, she had felt simple relief; but as this hardly seemed adequate in the circumstances, she clenched her teeth and tried to feel angry.

“We should cut his tires,” she said experimentally.

“We should … steal his dog,” said Slim, scratching at her eczema.

The dog, still in back, lifted its head as their shadows passed over the windows.

Grinning and shivering, they stared at the diner, which gave off a provokingly warm and soft light.

Missy articulated a new grunt, one comprised of promise, threat, and resolve.

“C'mon,” she said.

They strode side by side across the parking lot; but when they reached the entrance, Missy held the door for Slim, who was left no choice but to go first.

The wind picked up and across the road the pines shuffled restlessly. In the car, the dog cracked its lips in a squeaking yawn, then fussily laid its head back on the seat.

When Slim awoke, she was alone in the car—even the dog was gone. Through the windows she could see nothing but vertical bars of blackness against granular swaths of grey. Trees and snow. She was shivering and had the feeling that she had been doing so for some time.

She remembered falling asleep. Anyway, she remembered the warmth of the car, the headlights scrubbing the highway clean before them, and the reassuring flow of speech from Mr. Custard beside her. As long as he went on talking she could keep an eye on him, as it were, even with her eyes closed. He'd been telling them about his first fight, the first moment he realized that he had a rare gift for knocking people down. It had not been a violent story. He had spoken almost lovingly of his opponent, a big, dull-witted boy three years older than him. The way Mr. Custard told it, the fight had been nothing but a dance followed by a sleep.

Where was she? She quickly corrected the pronoun in her mind (she would not yet face the fact that she was alone):
Where are we
?
She did not remember turning off the highway, though she thought she recalled the gramophone-like crackle of gravel beneath the car's wheels. She remembered, she thought, waking briefly, and asking him where they were going. “To get gas,” hadn't he said? She'd fallen back asleep.

A thought, or the prospect of one, blinked on in her mind, like the status light on the radio at home that came on when it had warmed up and was ready to be played. She ignored it, scratching her arm instead.

The inside of her head felt hot and sticky, like a feverish mouth. She could not peel apart individual ideas. The seeping cold, the black bars of pines, Missy's absence, and the matter of how she—
they
— had come to be here, all had to be taken together, in one unmanageable clot.

She remembered walking towards Rosie's Roadhouse with Missy, feeling quite sure of themselves. Then Missy held the door for her, and Slim hesitated, realizing that her friend did not, after all, know what they were going to do, what they were going to say.

He was at the counter with his back to the door, talking to two waitresses.

“‘War hero'?” he said, shaking his head with slow, measured scorn. “No, I don't think I care for the term. After all, what's a hero? How's it defined, that's what I want to know—and who's defining it? A person of exceptional powers or extraordinary abilities? Exceptional compared to what? Extraordinary compared to who? Once you realize most folks are monkeys or crazy you realize it don't take much to be a hero and won't thank no son of a bitch for calling you one. Shitfire. And never mind what's a hero—what's a
war
?”

Slim sat down two stools to his right, leaving a space for Missy. But Missy did not take it, sitting instead on Slim's right. That, then,
was how it was going to be: Missy was going to just go on holding the door for Slim.

Well, to hell with that.

“Howdy,” she said. Her voice was calm, but she realized she was scratching her arm. She took off her glasses and began to wipe them with a napkin.

“Get you girls something?” asked one of the waitresses, leaning against the refrigerator like she was keeping it upright.

“Why, these here ladies are my nieces!” cried Mr. Custard, slapping the counter with unfeigned joy. “Ladies, these here are Lorna and Lola, friends of a friend of mine and therefore friends of mine and friends of my friends.”

“How
do
you know Irene anyhow?” asked the other waitress, slumped over the counter and peering sideways at Mr. Custard as if he were some clever, skittish animal in the zoo.

“I come in here all the time,” he said.

“Then how come I never seen you,” she demanded, charmed by his furtiveness.

Mr. Custard turned to Slim. His gaze went into her and she felt for a moment, till she tore her eyes away, that she had never seen anyone so happy to see her in all her life. He was not in the least alarmed or embarrassed by their arrival.

“You ladies want something to eat?” he asked. “They got the best damn burger in town here. In fact, I'll have one of them fellas myself. But hold the mushrooms.”

The waitress leaning against the fridge said, “Our burgers don't ordinarily come
with
mushrooms.”

“They're extra,” said the other.

“Then I'll have mine
with
mushrooms. Make it
double
mushrooms.” He turned to Slim and cupped a hand to his mouth in a mock whisper. “That way they got to make it fresh.”

“We make everything fresh!” cried the one slumped over the counter, pleasantly scandalized.

“I'll have the same,” said Slim, blushing in anticipation of their laughter, “… but hold the burger.”

They didn't laugh, so she kept her face straight and pretended it hadn't been a joke.

“Something for you, honey?”

Missy grunted, then grunted again, annoyed that the first grunt had not carried her meaning. “The same,” she clarified.

“Same as him or same as your friend?”

“As him,” she said, with a grunt of impatience.

Slim emitted a grunt of her own. They had come in here allied against him, but now it seemed that Missy had abandoned both their alliance and their grievance. For a moment she keenly hated both of them, Missy and Mr. Custard. She wanted to crush something, but had nothing to crush but her own feelings, her own desire to crush something. She lashed out by lashing inwards, and did the last thing she wanted to do, which was stay put and smile, and said the last thing that would normally have entered her head: “And I'll have one of
those
,” she said, pointing her finger like a gun at Mr. Custard's half-finished beer. “Same as him.”

“You old enough for that, sugar?”

“Eat the rich and shit the poor,” said Mr. Custard with placid indignation, “these ladies are my
nieces.
They're nineteen and twenty years old. Old enough to drink, old enough to get married, by God.”

“What about you, angel?”

Missy glumly shook her head, and Slim felt a flush of triumph.

They ate and drank and Mr. Custard, through an ever-present mouthful of half-chewed burger, regaled them with tales of his childhood. It took all of Slim's attention and ingenuity to correlate what he was saying now with what he had told them in the car. Now he
had only five siblings—but she reasoned that earlier he had been counting himself. Now his family lived on a milk farm—but she supposed they must have milk farms in Hawaii too. Again the most salient figure of his youth was his mother, but it was not easy to reconcile the woman as he described her now with the one who had called him “selfish.” Now he said that she had been dissatisfied with all her children except for the youngest—namely, Mr. Custard himself. He never came right out and said that he had been her favorite, but he was conspicuously absent from the litany of disappointments she had suffered at the hands of her offspring. One had died in the war; one had died in childbirth; one had married the wrong kind of man; one had dropped out of high school and run away from home; one had been arrested on charges of “unmotivated assault”; one had ended up in the booby hatch. There were more sins than there were children—but Slim figured that some of his siblings may have committed more than one.

That he might be lying occurred to her only fleetingly and abstractly. He showed none of the hesitation or embarrassment of a liar, and the details he furnished were too richly embellished to be the product of anyone's mere imagination. She supposed that some facts had possibly become garbled or confused with the passage of time and through numerous retellings, but she did not seriously doubt that the stories he told had a firm foundation in his own personal experience. Where else could they have come from?