Footprints in the Butter Read Online Free PDF

menacing bellow. “Ponder this, my friends. What would happen if you stripped the Lone Ranger’s mask from his face? I think you’d find a wrinkled, toothless, senile man.”
    “Are you crazy?” The ex-cheerleader stepped forward. “The Lone Ranger wears an itty-bitty mask. It just covers his eyes. You can see his nose, mouth and chin.” She ran her fingertips across her own nose, mouth and chin, as if trying to ascertain their ageless reality. “And he has all his hair,” she added desperately, “which you can see when he’s not wearing a cowboy hat.”
    “His hair’s a rug, his false teeth bleached, polished, shiny with petroleum jelly.” Wylie grinned. “I think the Lone Ranger puts on a rubber mask. Pull away the rubber and you’ll discover a monster.”
    “Ick!”
    “Boo!”
    “Shut up!”
    “Get off the stage, Jamestone!”
    “Did you honestly believe you could hide those saggy chins and boobs?” he continued. “Alice plans to crown a Reunion Dance Queen. Any volunteers? C’mon, who wants to be queen? How about you, Junior? You’ve aged well, except for that bald forehead, humongous butt, and bony chicken chest. We could choose Dwight. He’s handicapped, sorry, physically challenged, and if we chose Dwight, we’d all feel so frickin’ good inside.”
    Wylie gestured toward the cheerleader. “Gimme an S, gimme an H, gimme an I, gimme a T. What do you got? Look at her, folks, trying to put the letters together. It spells hits, you airhead! Speaking of hits, what male vocalist won the Grammy in 1966?”
    Most of us just stood there, speechless, but one Jeopardy! addict shouted, “Who is Glen Campbell?”
    “No, you asshole. That was sixty-eight. Anybody else? C’mon, Ingrid, you’re the expert.”
    I knew the answer. Sinatra. But I shrugged my padded shoulders.
    “Frank Sinatra,” said Wylie. “It was a very good year. Wasn’t it, Beaumont?”
    Okay, I hadn’t fooled him. I never could fool him.
    “Seriously, folks,” Wylie said seriously, “we tsk-tsk over the homeless, then spend billions on plastic surgeons and products that promise eternal youth.”
    Wylie continued his harangue, only we couldn’t hear him because Alice had yanked the microphone’s cord from its socket. Angry tears streamed down her face and you could practically see the steam vaporizing from her ears.
    Reunionites buzzed like a swarm of angry hornets while the ex-cheerleader screamed, “Who the hell do you think you are anyway? Why don’t you eat shit and die!”
    Fondling his crotch a la Michael Jackson, Wylie jumped down from the platform. I grabbed his arm and led him toward an empty bleacher section. “Damn,” I said. “What brought that on?”
    “Your Peter Pan remark.”
    “I only meant—”
    “They say a dying person’s life unfolds before his eyes. Once we had ideals, Beaumont. Once we stopped a war!”
    Surprisingly, despite everything, I wanted to hug him, nurture him, and I wondered why he and Patty didn’t have any kids. An heir would have helped Wylie regain his lost youth.
    I was bothered, to put it mildly, so I responded with the first thing that popped into my head. “Are you dying, Wylie?”
    “We all die by bits and pieces, Beaumont. How do you make a statue of an elephant?”
    “By bits and pieces?”
    “Wrong. Try again. How do you make a statue of an elephant?”
    “I don’t know. I give up. How?”
    But Wylie was running toward Patty. Draped across her arms were two coats—one a fur-lined tweed, the other a full-length mink. Patty, who thought PETA stood for Pelts of Ermine, Tigerskin and Aurumvorak, appraised the basketball hoop’s backboard, her head held high, and I felt like cheering her regal stoicism.
    Following Patty and Wylie’s abrupt exit, I searched for Alice. She was standing near a white Styrofoam cooler, empty except for melting ice cubes.
    Alice’s hair had once been dishwater blonde. Then she watched celebs talk about how they were worth it. Alice