Drowned Sprat and Other Stories Read Online Free PDF Page B

least my husband’s got a lot in common with those bugs. He don’t know what’s real either.’ Her husband had just left her then — this was years and years ago, at least two, when I was nine — and all Candy would say about that was two things:
    1) Jed had the brains of a bug and
    2) his new girl was fake, like the flowers: fake tits, fake hair, fake teeth.
    Candy only has fake fingernails and phony eyelashes, which are silvery blue and so heavy her eyes are always half closed.
    The point of all this is to show you the setting, kind of, so you can see where it happened, the night I got my tuckie. It was a Tuesday and Dad and me, the minute we parked, saw the car. Itwas a new shiny green Ford, one we’d never seen there before. Winter was coming on, so it wasn’t the time for tourists, people coming up from Chicago to swim in the lake or go fishing for trout. There’s good fishing in Zion, particularly round the power station where the water used for cooling the turbines comes out warm. They’d all cluster round there and pull out giant fish — Dad says he wouldn’t eat ’em if you paid him a million. Anyways, it was too darn cold for that now, and I knew it was cold — that’s why I had Pink Panther with me. He’s taller’n I am and he’s good for a blanket or a pillow in the pickup if Dad stays thirsty for longer. Dad thinks I’m getting too old for Pinkie, but he lets me cart him still. This particular night I took him in the bar. He’s useful in there — I’m stunted for my age, ’cording to Candy, and if I put him on the bar-stool, then sit on top of him, it’s comfy and high. It was Candy’s idea for me to do that, years and years ago.
    We went in, Dad, the Panther and me, and there was Candy behind the bar, peering through the silvery-blue strings of her eyelashes, red fingernails clinking on the beer-taps. The lights were on, glowing on the wood paneling around the windows. The wall behind where Candy stands is glass shelves of different kinds of drinks, all colors — red, blue, green, brown, black and clear — with a mirror behind them. One time Candy’d tucked her skirt into her panties and it was all hooked up at the back and ’cause I could see her fanny reflected in the mirror, flickering through clear spirits, the gin and vodka and Bacardi, I could tell her. She was so grateful ’cause I just leaned across and whispered — I didn’t say it right out loud so’s all the men could hear. She gave me a Coke, which I’d earned. Most often she and me’re the only females ’cause the women round here drink alone at home, while the men drink together. Know which I’d prefer — makes me wish I’d been born a man, though there’s plenty of reasons tobe wishin’ for that, that’s for sure.
    This night Candy and me had company. There was another woman. She was sitting in one of the booths at the side, the ones Candy had done out in red leatherette after Jed left her. I could tell the woman wasn’t from around here. For a start off, she had a braid, brown and gray and mousy, down her back. And she had a man with her — her husband, it turned out — and he matched her exactly. Not that he had a braid, but his hair was the exact same color, though bushy and curly. They had the exact same blue eyes, sticky-out like the strangest of the trout they pull up round the plant. They were just sitting there, him and her, face to face, staring at their beers, and she was pointed our way, so I got a good look at her. If she’d had necklaces and earrings I might’ve thought she was a hippy from California or Canada or such — we get them sometimes — but she had nothing like that, just a rollneck sweater in a bad shade of brown, like an old hamburger pattie, and no make-up — not a scratch. Nails weren’t done either; they were as plain as little shells on her stumpy fingers, turning her beer glass round and round. Women round here wouldn’t never go out with plain nails — it’d be