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 |  | GATOR SPRINGS GAZETTE a literary journal of the fictional persuasion | |
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| | GATOR SPRINGS GAZETTE a literary journal of the fictional persuasion | |
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| PROMISES TO KEEP(page six) |
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RILEY’S SHOES Bob Arter 1. THE RHYTHM OF HER LIFE She awoke in a dither on the day he was due, did Marylou Lite, blinked hard against the day he’d arrive.. She pajamaed out of bed, got confused in the hall, tottered east toward the kitchen in a nicotine fit, fled west to the bath, had to pee, wanted coffee, where’d she leave her cigarettes?—found the Marlboros waiting in the oven where she’d left them, nice and warm on the breadstone, lit a stick to help her think. Then she stretched and grinned at the bluesky day, knew her man was on his way, said he’d never be late, said his wealth grew great, said he’d never love another, made Marylou laugh at his silllyman talk, told him, Just show up, Riley, don’t let me down and I’ll see you when you get here… She was pretty and she knew it, wore raspberry lips and raggy-assed jeans. She was cute, she would suit, she was round where it counted, little stealth-tech body flying underneath the radar of the boys in her brain. Riley liked to tell her she was built for comfort, and she loved to hear him say it, lifted long brown locks so he’d say it in her ear, so he’d whisper it again, kiss her neck at the shoulder, make her shake. She was shaking at the moment, shaking flour in a bowl, shaking shame out the window, hot tears stinging eyes when the hot tears came, late at night, after lunch, every time she kissed a baby, every time she lost the grip that she held by a hair, just a moment from despair, like it lurked in her closet, like it lived in her spine, like it followed her to town, to the sea, to Madrid, like she never got away. Like she couldn’t. So she hustled up some biscuits, saw a cow about some butter, made the goddamned absolutely worst pot of coffee since the bean got invented, found her boysenberry Smuckers in the pocket of her peacoat in the closet where she’d hung it, looking down on the chance Riley’s shoes would be there looking up. Breakfast all done and sustained for a few, Marylou poured more of her hideous brew, gave Vision a bone so he’d leave her alone while she kicked it along. She leaped and landed in the trunk where she kept her brief trousseau, featured all the better fabrics, had your silks and had your satins, there were crinoline and calabash, zee Zoloft and zee Zig Zags and zere zey were!—her denim overalls, patches on her patch pockets, soft as the sun. She shuddered in the shower, soaping limbs loins latter-day outsized breasts, singing raunchy godless sailor songs the sailors didn’t know, singing serenades to Riley while her left head hammered out a menu for the man. He was not a fan of fancy, but he’d want home cooking after all the months in Arabia—good-tasting food, strong drink with his baby, and a big springy bed. Well, I can do that, she thought. She didn’t know when he’d get there, but he would. She didn’t know how long he’d stay, just as long as she could keep him, then she’d let him fly away. Part of him was hers and she loved him hard as diamonds, but (she sang in the shower) he was only just a man after all. Shopping, she decided, could wait for a bit, there was bread to be baked, and the linen to be changed, and the house to be aired and she lusted for some music and a diddle and a drink and she did. 2. BEDUOIN SILVER Corrigan Riley chugged through Yemen’s desert air, pistons hammering him home, soared high and wide over Wadi Dhahr, the Fertile Valley where the Imam Yahya once dwelt in his forbidding rock palace Yahya’s pears and pomegranates were now a memory: as far as Riley’s eyes perceived, the Yemeni crop was unrelieved Catha edulis—call it qat; they do. And qat was Riley’s business, or had been, for lo these many months. Bestride his battered buggered band-aid Cessna Skyhawk, he ferried qat from thousand-meter highland fields to the street markets of Sana’a, where locals haggled over price and quality, highnosed as French wine snobs or quietly desperate for a chew. They bought qat in hues from bruise to iceberg lettuce, leaves from limbs high as heaven or down in the dirt and it was a clear-eyed Yemini indeed who could put off till three his everyday amble to the corner pub or parlor, so to say, join his favorite gang of leaf-heads, getting high. Four-fifths of the people spent two-thirds of their money and nine-tenths of their time cramming green wads into tennis-ball cheeks, all to transit silkily from sandcrop daylight harries to boundless fields of clarity, of charity, to first-hand knowledge and the Way—a way for Riley to pad his pockets, line his purse and parse the pure longhand intent of Marylou, his heebie-jeebie hottie in the States. Qat, he mused dreamily, a peek at noonday starlight on the snow and no snow in recorded history—he cruised past the upper altitudes and south to Sana’a—just that modest much dissociation from space and time, a tidy bit of Arab juju and a dollar for Mrs. Riley’s little boy Corrigan. My, oh, my. He breakfasted on bread an hour later, a round dark loaf of khudz tawwa and local coffee, black as blood and bitterer. Out of sight he sweetened it with demon rum and Riley knew full well he was the only demon in North Yemen’s whacked-out qat-leavened State of Islam, the only Yankee Satan in its skies. Like his rum, he was contraband, illicit and prohibited as untaxed Camels. It’s a dirty job, thought Riley, but he’d done far dirtier and wasn’t troubled overmuch. Besides, he’d leave within the hour, take a Boeing into Brooklyn, catch a flick and catnap, pat a stewie’s ass and pass the hours slipping time zones back to Marylou, well north way west in sweet New England. Chased by the sun, he’d land five hours after he left, as the wristwatch flies. Young Corrigan had taught himself to play bassoon, blew Sequenzia XII better than Pascal Gallois, but his dad decreed a military sojourn. At seventeen he found himself in Warrant Officer Flight Training and a year later he crept aloft in the army’s U6 Beaver to reconnoiter Communists and taxi brigadiers here and there, often there. When career officers discovered they could win an air medal for every firefight they observed, Riley’s mileage increased radically, as did the junk on the old men’s chests. When soldiers fell, they seemed so far away. The Army discharged him hard for misplacing a Lieutenant Colonel and Riley undertook a civilian flying life, his bassoon little more than a conversation piece that he lugged around the globe in his career as a bush pilot deluxe, I’ll fly anything anywhere. He was early into guns and drugs, but was collected by customs agents with a Glad Bag of ephedrine at a New England airstrip, did seven months of a three-year hurt and spent his parole dusting crops and spelling out Marry Me, Glenda in the sky and drinking as heavily as he could manage. His P. O. sent him to A. A. to get a little nicer and there he met Marylou, looking for Jesus and a way to heal her heart. She found him and he her and they lived well enough together till he left. Not just like that, but he needed money and he needed motion. Riley was a big man, a spacious fellow ill-suited to a parlor and a tea service. He wanted room and the sky was filled with just that, big wide space to accommodate his wingspan. Other towns at first, bigger farms, then Pennsylvania and the oil trail from there to Texas to Alaska, a bush pilot in a legendary land of them, movie men who delivered the antivenin through a raging blizzard when Ididerod’s own dogs lay stiff in their traces—though his cargo was more often huntsmen after caribou, or sulfa drugs and liquor for a huntsman with a bullet in his foot. Finally, he parked his bassoon in a corner of Marylou’s poorhouse parlor, kissed away his regrets and some of hers and headed overseas. He came back to her on minor Christian holidays and all the major Islamic ones, and the days that honored the martyrs of this revolution or that, days his unturbaned red hair marked him as an outsider or worse, and just such a day approached. So Riley ventured into a bazaar, the Suq al-Milh, Sana’a’s ancient Salt Market, inhaling fish and oranges, onion sizzle of humanity, the subtle hubbub of Islamic grace. In truth it was a cardboard camptown toss of hovels, gaily flagged and brightly twittering and very little more. A woman floated past him, brushed him, draped like all her sisters in black: headdress, veil and cloudlike gown, sharshaf, a sudden flash of blue blue eyes, her garb affording Riley just a glimpse of dusky ankle—he was choked by this restraint, and full lubricious. A boy in a doorway sold AK-47s, grenades, a Russian rocket-propelled grenade. “How much for the RPG?” Riley inquired idly. “Cum floos? ” “Twenty-eight,” the boy said. “It will kill many American airplanes, inshallah.” Riley heard the word constantly: if Allah wills it. Towering over early Arab shoppers, Riley sought a gift to give his babydoll; he always brought her something. He never gave her jewelry, only jewels—saying, Take these, keep these, trust in gems before you trust in any man, myself included, darling. You can’t sell a man, now can you? Her answer was unvarying: she’d throw her arms around him and plead, Stay with me! He wasn’t sure she was paying attention. Riley paused at a wood-and-awning stall where an old man, a Jew, was tooling chains of silver coins and red coral beads. He knew their name: Bedouin silver. “How much?” he asked, but the old man shook his head. “Is there one you like? One you want? If not, who cares how much? Find one, and leave numbers until later.” Riley fingered the silver, lingered over chains. “This real silver?” “Close enough. They are made from Mother Theresa dollars. Eighty-five percent pure. You have an Arab woman?” “Not exactly.” He was tempted to buy her a sharshaf, dress her in black. Then he pictured her behind a veil and laughed his laugh. “Not exactly,” he repeated. In Islam, a man could divorce very nearly on a whim, and they bought these chains for their still-wed wives, divorce insurance, pre-planned alimony. Women wore their wealth around their necks, chains to lighten the sterner chains of one-way marriage. “Never mind,” said the artisan, and raised the links he’d wrought. “Buy this one. Whoever she is, she’ll not soon starve when you leave her.” Riley scowled. And bought it. 3. BOSTON BROWN BREAD Marylou danced in a kitchen of love, wearing one of Riley’s workshirts, had it on backwards with the sleeves rolled up and her socks rolled down, Lord she danced to the zither in her brown-bread head, badly sang of love and sadness, lullaby for no one at all: My man’s so mean he means the world She made her bread in a coffee can, the way her mama did for the man she oughtn’t have kept at home with her child—the way she’d done when straight and sober, twice a year at least. And Marylou sang: Oh man alive, no man alive She disappeared, did Marylou, amidst a cloud of powder. She mixed rye flour with whole wheat, mixed both with corn, brown sugar sweet and moist, forgot the baking soda—add it now, who’ll be the wiser?—currants then, and black molasses, salt and buttergrease the pan and grease her brief and troubled life with choking sobs, with snot and guttural moans, with tears forever. Life shifted to a minor mode and presently she sang again, in misery she sang: With him a child I would conceive She paused and remembered her mama, her mama’s man, the child, the midnight death. And whispered the final line: Now I’ll not bear him none. 4. OLD MOTHER RILEY United Six or Seven seared and soared over dowager clouds and the vast blue continent rippling miles below. With nothing much to do after polishing off the Yardbird Alfredo, Riley was working on his fourteenth martini and watching an industrious little fellow sweating over his crossword when the in-flight movie spun into being. Much to his satisfaction, he noted that it was from the Old Mother Riley series of the Thirties and Forties and he hadn’t seen it yet. He recognized nobody above the title: Old Mother Riley Does Littlegirl Lite. Action movie, he thought with pleasure and hiked up his knees and turned up the sound and sipped and watched and ordered another. “. . . and I’m a goddamned drunk!” a fellow roars, and Riley recognized himself; no one in Hollywood had feet that big. For some reason, his confession meets with a round of applause from the unwashed and downtrodden in the folding chairs, suggesting that his drunkenness is commendable, even heroic. Onscreen, he grins a little nervously and sits down. Marylou is the only woman there and in Riley’s view the only one necessary. He’s not seen her once and thinks her a vision and decides on the spot to give her a dog. She blushes and gulps and haws and hems her little frock and clears her little throat and blurts out, “Me too!” and blushes steam and puts her ass in the chair. The dozen or so ragged men, and millions more worldwide, roar their collective approval and congratulate themselves on having seen her, this cold dry night in the unforgiving belly of God. A twelve-step dissolve puts Riley and the teary-eyed lass in a coffee shop, where he buys solace for her in a prune Danish, for she dearly loves to stuff her face. While polishing it off and gazing at a raspberry tart like a wolf at a bunny, she sings him her long sad song. The gist of it all, Riley learns while buying out the bakery section, is that perhaps a decade earlier, when she was fourteen or thereabouts, the bad-news snake her mama kept took note of her brashly budding breasts, took both note and a fancy. And came upon her in a wood that dripped with summer berries, blue and black and huckle, and he plucked her up and snatched her down and picked her clean and left her feeling dirty. She feared to tell her mama and seldom found the woman clear-eyed anyway, her veins pocked and flooded with the poppysap her man sold to the yokels. But he poked her steady, diligent, and so she took the poking and said nothing—for who would listen? Weeks passed, a month, more, and soon her belly swelled and she learned why and found a cause for gladness: a baby, and her own. This pissed him off of course, to see his semen rudely used without his say-so and he took to beating her, for mama didn’t notice any more, when he hammered her around or when he didn’t. The thumping got him nothing but a wilder child, for Marylou had set her head on this: he could stick his stupid dingus in her if he must, but if she had to take a fucking she would by God have a baby of her own. When he shouted out “Abortion,” she was gone. She was packed to go and the poking was done, hollered “See ya!” at her mama, stole the man’s narcotics wad and bought herself a ticket on a Greyhound bus that landed her near Hoppingwell, there to roost and grow her child. “Or so I thought,” she tells him, sniffling, wolfing pie. Rapt and sore affected in the sky, Riley hollered for a drink, a bag of peanuts and a hanky. And watched himself, onscreen, ten years her senior and three his junior, buying one last jelly donut, feeling squirmy-close to Want some candy, little girl? but never mind. Her lips a little sticky, Marylou had told the rest. It wasn’t nice. Quick dissolves: the girl more pregnant. The girl unlearned in childbearing, ignorant as to how. The girl working ninety-hour weeks waiting tables, washing pots and washing pans. The girl despised by decent Christians. The girl learning how to smoke, then drink, her belly filled with ignorance and little more. Spontaneous abortion, and a bonus from her mama’s man, chlamydia. Struck dumb, she stayed at home and bled and hurt and moaned and finally saw a doctor. No more babies. The girl sobbing, jelly on her chin. Riley hands his napkin across and she dries her nose and dries her eyes and licks her lips and wounds. And bawls some more. “Alcoholics Anonymous,” Riley says before the credits, “claims there’s such a thing as a dry drunk. That’s me, and I’m tired of it. Let’s go and get ourselves a drink, my darling.” 5. A WHOLE LOT OF SHIT Marylou Lite snatched the bread from the oven, grabbed her green ladies Schwinn and set about pedaling her round little sweet little ass downtown. Didn’t go there much outside of work, seems the folks didn’t cotton to a big-eyed bawd who showed up knocked up no man around, and where was the baby? but she clenched her teeth and she set her jaw and she went. She knew a man named Jones and a granny named Smith. Old Jones was a fishmonger, cases of crabs but she only wanted scallops, big fat ones at that, feeling happy in their shells, it was all about the skillet, so she picked out a dozen and a few for herself. “He’s big as you, but twice,” she explained to Bigbelly Jones, who scowled and wrapped and wanted cash. He was Deacon Jones at the Fourlegged Church, knew what he knew and all about Jesus, saw Marylou and his Lord whispered, whore! in his ear, hollered harlot! in his head and Jones knew enough. The man never met a mortal sin he didn’t love, nor was it lost on his loins that the girl had a pretty nice pair, had a sweetpea ass; old Jones saw sin anywhere it appeared, sprang up, took root in its mandrake manner, Mister Bigbelly Jones was there to rip it out. Just as soon as he counted up her dollars and her cents, and examined her ass and put a palm on her body, it was Out of here, now! Old Granny Smith sold fruit from the tree, sold berries from the bushes in the fenced-in forested wrapped-up chain-link back of her tattletale house. Marylou had always pined for a peek through the gate at the woods behind the wall, a return to the Garden, but it wasn’t going to happen. Granny Smith wore a face like canful of Mace and she never would approve of a girl gone bad, gone glad on occasion, told her Dad, Our Father, did the prune-headed bat, Who art up there, like she’d know about heaven. So she bagged her secret berries and she pocketed the money, grabbed the keys and she headed for the gate to her padlocked plot, just to guard it from the girl, now you could never tell when some little slut might peek through the bars. There was more that day, there was spinach from the greengrocer’s, all the olive oil in the olive oil store, where they kept the extra-virgin where the girl couldn’t get it, singing Psalm Ninety-One, a thousand died on my left, tenthousand on my right, but the Lord is going to smack down the fool fucks with me, yea yea. Marylou gave it up, got a bottle and a sneer from the only bar in town, got a whole lot of shit everyplace she put her money on the counter, everywhere she smiled hello, took as much as she could take and gave it up. And rode home feeling bad. 6. WELL MET At the Hailfellow Airport, after a hop from Kennedy, welcomed to America by the newsmen blaring out the charred body found by the cab driver in South Ozone Park and the woman in the room with the telephone cord around her neck, Riley rented the last Plymouth ever made, tossed his duffel in the trunk, and mumbled on out into Hotppingwell’s staid traffic—downright pious, he thought, after Araby. He’d been months in Arabia and drove around to restore his Stateside bearings—not a palm tree worth its butter in New England, he mused—and to find a genius to reset his digital watch. Just as Riley reckoned, he found one at the Big Knock Tavern, tending bar. “You’re back,” said Henry Conway just as sourly as he could manage. “You delight in the obvious, Connie. Bottle of Black Jack, maybe a glass.” “Here to see the woman again?” Connie fiddled with the watch, staring bleakly at the Arabian Peninsula. “Here to buy a drink. You still do that?” Connie reached back for a bottle, under the bar for a glass. Riley peeled the seal and poured, tossed it back and poured a shorter one. “She was in here for a bottle herself,” Connie muttered past his mascara mustache. “Ain’t like it’s an uncommon occurrence, Riley, her boozing it up. You ask anybody.” “Give me another bottle.” “You ask the Widow Harbinger, she sees that girlfriend of yours every day, going on to work waiting tables at the Kattle Kall, wearing her skimpy little nothings and bearing beef and booze for the well-heeled gents down from Boston. Reckon they tip her fine, I do, and the Widow, she reckons they do too. What do you s’pose she does to earn them tips, eh, Riley?” “I said, give me another bottle.” “You want another? You’ve got the one, and your little lush picked up some Bacardi. One five one. It ain’t going to be no big chore to get that one liquored up.” “No,” Riley said. “I’m going to hit you with it.” Connie looked up with his best Mr. Rat grin. “Just making conversation, Riley.” But Riley had thrown money on the counter and had almost reached the door. “What about your watch?” Connie called after him. “Put it someplace dark,” Riley said. “I’ll be back to yank it out.” He slammed the door and the local japes hooted their derision. 7. STOP THE MUSIC He got out of the car and got his bag and bottle. A light illuminated the dyed burlap that served as Marylou’s curtains. Vision came bounding out of nowhere at all and, as Riley took a knee and roughed him up, puzzled. Then he knew why. No music could be heard from the house. He climbed three wooden steps, noting that the nails were working loose again, and listened at the door. He heard only a soft sound, and after a moment he knew it better than he wanted to. Just a push at the door and Riley went in and dropped his duffel in her patchwork parlor. Same old shit, he thought. Park bench sofa, orange crate coffee table. A gigantic orange grinned at him from the label. Posters on the wall: Stephen King, Loretta Lynn, and Einstein. In the corner, his bassoon. The kitchen was a battleground where many gallant Pillsbury doughboys had fallen. Pie crusts had been rolled out and balled up again, re-rolled and cut into curious strips. Berries of varying genus bounded about on the countertop and floor, and spinach leaves waited patiently for their olive oil in a frying pan on top of the refrigerator, whose door stood open and in whose light a clan of scallops basked, saved from a sear. Riley stepped gingerly through the little room, leaving tracks in the flour that covered the floor. He found her in the bedroom, sobbing, choking, the ugly sounds muffled by the pillow her face was planted in. He sat down on the bed and waited. Then pulled off his flying shoes, big high-top rough-outs that fared well in the desert, in the land that had become more home to him than this one. He placed them side by side under her bed, toes snooping out. Her cigarettes were handy and he lit one, choking on its menthol fire. He thought things over. He wearied of thinking. He got up and padded back out to pour a pair of drinks. He returned and sat and drank them both and went for more and this time brought the bottle. Still belly-down, Marylou had angled ninety degrees and was peering over the edge of the bed, looking down at Riley’s shoes. He sat down beside her and patted her ass in an absent-minded way, saying, “I’m having a drink, my darling. Sit up and have one with me, now, won’t you?” She sat. Her hair was a hurricane fright that covered her face and she was not inclined to tame it. She pounded her overalled thighs, raising clouds of all-purpose flour, but the bounce had gone out of her and the dance had disappeared. She groped blindly for the glass and he gave it to her. It disappeared into the brown tangle and when she reached for a cigarette, Riley stopped her. “You’re a fire hazard,” he said, and undertook to part her hair, discover again her face. It was red and scrunched and featured swollen, pouchy eyes. Riley opened one experimentally and found it to be as blue as he recalled, the white shot through with red. He felt like saluting. “Take me away,” Marylou said. He was lighting her cigarette. “I was hoping to spend the night.” She embraced him, squeezed him fiercely. “You know what I mean,” she said to his chest. “Off to Arabia with us? Is that it, dear? Do you know how women are treated in Yemen? Or Djibouti? Or every damned place I work?” She leaned back and stared up at him. “Do you know how they’re treated here?” Riley paused and considered. He eased his extended bulk onto the bed and wiggled his toes in threadbare cotton socks. He thought about the chain in his bag. “Maybe,” he suggested, sipping Connie’s excellent bourbon and cursing the man and every man in Connie’s beggared acquaintance, “this is a fight better fought in the morning, over roasted eggs and wretched coffee. I’ve traveled far this day, my girl. Be a darling and pull off my clothes and give us a kiss. Won’t you?” She put her cigarette down carefully in an inverted pickle jar lid and turned to him, cheer wending its weary way through all those low-down blues. “Mercy,” she murmured. “What a job your mama must have had birthing you.” Then she unbuttoned his faded denim shirt, thinking, another apron for me, and this one with a Harley logo on the front. Happy again, happy as she could manage, she buried her face in his coppery coils of chest hair and slipped her hand into his pants and purred. Later, in the night, she put on his shirt and crept into the kitchen to clean things up and salvage what she could.
8. RILEY’S SHOES Corrigan Riley ambled through the marketplace, rum humming in his head, eyeing bread and trinkets, wondering when the new fuel pump would arrive. He’d made his day’s delivery, engine gasping, the greenest tender qat a turbaned head could want, and found himself at pleasantly loose ends on paycheck Friday. He’d soon enough return to his recent acquisition, a room in a two-sheet hotel, and his mind still danced to gaudy song at the notion of a working stove, a reasonable toilet. He passed the Jewish silversmith and stopped briefly to admire the latest pieces from the Hadramout, old ethnic silver with its dull unpolished gleam, raised grapes bunching in the metal. “Find what you like,” the old man muttered, “and we’ll come to an agreement.” But Riley had already found what he liked. The woman floated past him, brushed him, draped like all her sisters in black: headdress, veil and cloudlike gown, sharshaf, a sudden flash of blue blue eyes, her garb affording Riley just a glimpse of ankle—he was choked by her restraint, and full lubricious... The old man scowled as Riley drifted off in her wake, dumbstruck, done for. From the ankle he extrapolated the entire cloaked body: a diminutive woman but great of heart and whopping of breast, all sweet smile, sweet ass, sweet loving murmur in his bed. He’d met her in frank and drunken misery, had been taken in, befriended, loved for himself, had wandered far and nearly lost her, nearly left her, nearly let her drown in America. When they reached their two-sheet suite, she turned to finally face him. “Did you buy bread, ya-Sheikh?” He put a paper bag on the table, and a bundle of lime-green leaves. This kitchen was actually larger than the one she’d had in Hoppingwell, but of course it saw extra duty as sitting room, office, den and kennel. Bed and bath, he thought gratefully, were separate entities. This had not been the case in the one-sheet enterprise he’d previously occupied, and she’d put her small foot firmly down at this indignity. He worked a little longer now, and they lived a little better. She disrobed carefully, folding her dark clothing and hanging it over a chairback, smiling at him in bra and panties and silver chain. “There’s coffee,” she said. “I’ll learn to make better, inshallah.” He gazed at her. “I paid the boy to take Vision into the desert for a run,” she said. “We’re alone.” Riley located his wits. “Into the bedroom, woman.” She walked past him and he turned, an automaton, to follow, fatuously enjoying the view. Standing by the bed, she adhered to established ritual, removing the chain and hanging it with the others on the bedpost. “I remove my fear and my refuge, ya-Sheikh,” she recited solemnly, “and I am your mate in bed. I will stay as long as you choose to keep me, or as I choose to stay. Then I will take my belongings and leave. Do you hear me?” “Woman, I hear you,” he said, fierce joy in his heart. Marylou Lite did a grin and a shimmy, like she jumped in bed, like she gave him a look, said, “Come on, Riley, get out of those clothes and I’ll give you something good, don’t you make me say it twice, here’s a warning.” As he sat on the bed, she said, “Buy us a house.” “We have a room in a two-sheet hotel!” “This is our home now, Corrigan. We ought to have a house like all of our people. And we have a dog.” She kissed him. “And when I take my silver and leave you, you’ll need a house of your own.” He laughed his laugh. Then he nodded. “I’ll have a look,” he said, and put his shoes under the bed side by side, toes snooping out. And lay his body down, saying, “I’ve worked hard this day. Help me out of these clothes, Marylou, there’s a darling.” She leaped at him, did Marylou Lite. © Bob Arter 2004 Bob Arter writes mad fiction and verse in Southern California, where he is often forced to resort to evasive maneuvers to find respite from his countless female fans. back to THE GSG VAULT |