Waiting for the Ladies

My wife come home crying from the dumpsters, said there was some pervert over there jerked down his pants and showed her his schlong. I asked her how long this particular pecker was, I was drinking beer, not taking it half seriously, and she said it sort of resembled a half-grown snail, or slug, she said, a little hairy. It was so disgusting, she said, and gave off this little shiver, doing her shoulders the way she does.

Well, a sudden unreasonable anger suddenly came over me, and I slammed my beer down. I’d already slammed several down. I said by God I’d go take care of the son of bitch, I said, If it ain’t safe for women and kids to walk the roads, what’ll you think’ll happen when lawlessness takes over, and crime sets in, and the sick and the sexually deviated can sling their penises out in front of what might be some little kid the next time? She was just too tore up to talk about it any more. Had to go lay down and hold one forearm over her eyes. That sort of made me mad. This unknown guy getting his own personal tiny rocks off had messed up my own sexual gratification, and besides that by God it just wasn’t right. Here I was a working man, or had been, and come to find out it ain’t even safe to lay over here in your own bed and let your wife take the garbage out.

I didn’t figure I’d need no gun or anything, but I did take my beer. I figured since he’s already dropped his drawers he’d done hit the bushes, and I thought I could ride around some and listen to country music songs about drinking and cheating and losing love and finding it, since it looked like I wasn’t going to be pumping any red-hot baby batter into my own favorite womb any time soon.

Riding over there I thought about the injustice of how a few people could fuck up everything. I’d heard about these people sucking toes and stuff. I didn’t want it around me. I even devised a plan. I left out a few details early on there but my wife had gone on to say that she’d seen this guy sitting there in his pickup before, when she’d been going down the road to some other place, just sitting there, not dumping any garbage or anything. Waiting on his next victim, I supposed, some innocent person he could terrorize. I said well I’d just start keeping my shotgun in my truck and ride over that way about every day and the next time I saw that pickup (she said it was a blue Ford) I’d just stop and haul it out and peck up his paint job a little bit until he decided to get his ass back to wherever he come from in the first place.

I got over there and of course there was nothing there. Just a bunch of trash and garbage on the ground right in front of the dumpsters, and treetops people had dropped off, and wet magazines on the ground, and a little thin sad puppy scared of me somebody’d dropped off, so hungry he couldn’t decide whether to stay or run. A son of a bitch who’ll drop his pants in front of some woman he’s not familiar with is the same kind of son of a bitch’ll drop off a puppy like that, thinking somebody’ll give him a good home. Good home my ass. Some of these Vietnamese around here’ll eat him.

I didn’t know how far this perversion thing had spread, how much word of it had got around. I didn’t want to sit there in my pickup thinking people driving by had already heard of the pervert and might think I was him. I tried to call up that puppy. I got down on my heels and clicked and whistled and snapped my fingers and talked nice to him, but all he’d do was roll over with his legs up in the air and his tail between his legs, peeing on himself in little spurts. Somebody had ruined him, beat him, stomped him, him roughly the age of an eighteen-month-old human baby in dog years. I knew some Humaner would come by and capture him and take him to the pound. I should have gone on and killed him. How would the gas be any better than a knock in the head to him? That might’ve been Napoleon Bonaparte reincarnated running around there, sniffing coffee grounds.

I took off down the road there and rode around a while. What would have to be wrong with a guy to make him flang his thang out in front of women? It had to be some kind of guy who couldn’t get any pussy, was too messed up in some way to get some from anybody, even for money, wanted some bad, and had developed this overpowering urge to gratificate himself, ergo, like the mirror is to the image, himself twinned in their eyes, what he imagined to be his big penis, his brutal, killing penis, bigheaded and swinging like a nine-pound hammer, suspended out there for all womanhood to draw back and gasp from, which, in his opinion, was what was happening.

I felt sort of bad for the guy. I didn’t know if I needed to go talk to Daddy about it or not. I figured the guy was hollow-eyed, sat in a dark room with his mother watching tv all day long, eating popcorn, and waited for late evening before he started stalking his lusts. I was beginning to get a pretty good mental picture of him already. He was about fifty, with wattley skin around his neck, shaky hands, maybe a dirty cap pulled down low over his eyes and white stubbly whiskers on his jaws, weak chin, bad shoes, one of those belts about ten inches too long for him with the excess hanging loose. Yeah, he was starting to form up in my mind. He was a wimpy sumbitch from back yonder. His had not been an easy life, and he might not have all his mental faculties. He might stand in line at the welfare office every Wednesday, holding his mother’s hand, and she might have cared for him like this since he was a baby. She might’ve had bad love, or love run off, or he might’ve been in the womb too long. They had some little awful house way back up in the woods around London Hill or somewhere, with tin cans out in the yard and mud on the porch, and bleak was a word they didn’t understand, since that was the world as they knew it. She didn’t know why he took off like that in the evenings sometimes, and she’d never recognized that he might have secret needs he was too scared to tell anybody about, or maybe she didn’t even think about stuff like that.

I made one long slow circle around through Potlockney and DeLay and came back up through the Crocker Woods, cut through to Paris and back through the Webb Graveyard Road, but I didn’t see a blue Ford pickup parked anywhere. I knew he was back home by then, sitting on the floor in a dark room right in front of the television, his eyes blank, his hand cramming popcorn in his mouth, the lights of the Bill Cosby Show flickering across his face, his mother asleep on the couch behind him, unaware of the twisted needs in him, a mindless, drooling idiot, someone without enough sense to turn the television off, chewing, thinking about where to try it tomorrow, and my wife, a motherfucker you could crush.

 

Later on that night I wound up at Daddy’s, s usual, when I went over there, him laying up there all by himself waiting for me, patient, never looking when you walked in like he was even expecting company. We never argued any. I always told him something or asked him something and he gave me some advice and I took it. It wasn’t any different this time.

He turned his old flat gray eyes over to me real slow, his eyes as gray as his gray flattop, smoking one Camel after another on that old Army cot twenty years after the doctors told him lung cancer had killed him, a glass of whiskey nearby, Humphrey Bogart on the tv. The Caine Mutiny. One of his favorites. Laying there in his long underwear without a shave in a week, indomitable, old boxer, warrior, lover, father.

I told him somebody’d showed his dick to my wife.

He wanted to know how big a dick it was.

I told him she said it was just a small one. He paused. We watched Humphrey measure out some sand with a spoon. I felt almost out of control.

Then he looked back around to me, swung his old flat gray eyes up there on my face and said, Son, a little dick’s sort of like a Volkswagen. It’s all right around the house but you don’t want to get out on the road with it. I didn’t know what to say. He told me to bring him some whiskey sometime. I left soon after.

 

I’d quit my job after sixteen years and drawn that state requirement money out, way over ten thousand dollars. Back in those days I thought that money would last forever. I was just laying around the house drinking beer, poking Dorothea soon as she walked in the door. I did the same thing the guy at the dumpsters did, only behind closed doors. I had a woman who looked good, who liked to wear a garter belt and black stockings and keep the light on.

But that insult to her wore on me. I’d get in the truck to ride around and I’d get to thinking about it. I’d get to thinking about the humiliation she felt when that guy did that. I even called the sheriff’s department one day and reported it, and talked to a deputy about it. They knew who it was, and I like to fell over. They knew his name. They told me his name. I said Well if this sick son of a bitch is running around out here jerking his pants down in front of people why in the hell don’t y’all do something about it? They said he was harmless, that he’d already been arrested six times for doing it, twice in front of Kroger’s uptown when ladies tried to load up their groceries. I said You think a son of a bitch like that is harmless? They said Believe me, he’s harmless. They said Believe me, there’s a lot worse than that going on that you don’t know nothing about. They said, If you did know what all was going on, you wouldn’t sleep at night.

That made me uneasy and I decided to get in my truck and ride around some more. That money was stacked up inside that bank account drawing six-and-a-half percent interest. I had beer and cigarettes unlimited. Dorothea had gotten that promotion and her boss liked her, took her out to lunch so she wouldn’t have to spend her own money. She had a real future in head of her.

I put my gun in the truck. Squirrel season was open, and that meant rabbit, too, and once in a while after dark you’d see the green eyes standing out in the cut fields that meant deer. Hamburger meat was $1.89 a pound. Double-ought buckshot was thirty-three cents. Some nights I was Have Truck, Will Kill, Palladin with a scattergun.

Those nights back then out on those country roads with that sweet music playing and that beer cold between my legs and an endless supply of cigarettes and the knowledge that Dorothea was waiting back at home with her warm moist pussy hairs curling around her cleft sometimes made me prolong the sheer pleasure of getting back to it, just riding around thinking about how good it was going to be when I got back. And then there was a little son of a bitch who didn’t have any, who’d never know what it was like or the heat that was in it, like a glove that fit you like a fist but better, warmer, wetter, no wonder he wanted some so bad it drove him to have one-way sex with strangers. Dorothea hadn’t said, but since she’d commented on the size of it, I figured his meat was down when he did it, not up. I wondered what he’d have done if some woman had walked over and grabbed him by the balls.

I puzzled over it and puzzled over it and drove for nights on end looking for that blue pickup, but if there was one in the country I didn’t see it. I took back roads and side roads and pig trails that buzzards couldn’t hardly fly over when it rained, and I decided he’d done decided to take his goobergrabbing on down the road somewhere else. By then I wasn’t even mad and just wanted to talk to him, tell him calmly that he couldn’t run around doing stuff like that. I was sure by then that he’d been raised without a father and I could imagine what their lives were like, him and his mother, eating their powdered eggs, and I couldn’t imagine how we could spend 1.5 billion dollars on a probe to look at Jupiter and yet couldn’t feed and clothe the people in our own country. I wanted a kinder, gentler world like everybody else, but I knew we couldn’t get it blasting it all off in space, or not providing for people like him. Who was to say that if he got cleaned up with some fresh duds, a little education, some new Reeboks, he couldn’t get a blowjob in Atlanta? Hell. Why not educate? Defumigate? Have changes we could instigate? Why couldn’t everybody, the whole country, participate?

Then I saw his truck.

It was backed up between some bushes on the side of the road. A cold feeling washed over me, made me lose all compassion. I said here this son of a bitch is sitting by the side of the road waiting for some innocent woman like my wife to come along and have car trouble and instead of helping her change her tire he’s going to run out in the road flonging his dong, whipping his mule, and it gave me a bad case of the creeps. I said I’m fixing to tell this son of a bitch a thing or two. I thought of Boo Radley, how sweet he turned out to be. But I knew this wasn’t nothing like that. I went on up to the end of the road and I turned around and came back. My shotgun was loaded. I pulled it over next to me. It was warm, the stock smooth, like Shane said a tool only as good or as bad as the man who uses it, and I wondered if I could kill that man for what he’d done to my wife.

He’d already pulled out, and you can tell when somebody wants you to pass. They’ll slow down, maybe because they’re drinking beer and don’t want to turn one up in front of you because they don’t know if you’re the law or not, since all they can see is your headlights. They’ll poke along and poke along, waiting for you to pass, slowing down to a crawl in the straightaways, and it’s maddening if it’s happening to you, if you’re riding around wondering why your wife’s boss keeps driving by the house and waving out the window, almost as if he’s looking to see who’s home, if you’re riding around wondering if you’re riding around a little too much.

I got right on his bumper and rode that busted set of taillights and watched that stiff neck and that cap pulled down low over his eyes, that head turning every five seconds to the rearview mirror for eight or nine miles, him crawling, me crawling along behind him, letting him know that somebody was onto his game and following him all the way home. I went all the way down through Yocona bottom behind him, where it’s straight for three miles, nothing coming, him speeding up a little, me speeding up too, getting another beer out of the cooler and thinking You son of a bitch. Pull your dick out in front of her now. Swing that dick like a billy club now. You sick perverted piece of shit.

I kept drinking and following him and he started weaving and I did, too, and we almost ran off the road a few times, but I stayed right on his ass until he got down to Twin Bridges and tried to outrun me, stayed right with him or pulled up beside him and then eased off thinking he might have a wreck. I didn’t want to kill him. I just wanted to talk to him. I kept telling myself that. I kept drinking. Everybody wanted pussy and pussy was good. I knew that because the worst I’d ever had was wonderful. I laid there right on his ass and when he turned around in George Fenway’s driveway I turned right around with him and followed him almost all the way to Bobo.

I let him get a little ahead of me. I knew where he lived. Deputy sheriff had told me, and his name was on the mailbox. I knew he was trying to run, hide, I knew by then that he knew he was caught somehow, I knew there had to be a whole lot of fear going through his mind, who was after him, what’d they want, all that kind of stuff. He just hadn’t thought about any of that when he flicked his Bic, when he goosed his moose, when he opened it up to where the sun don’t shine.

When I got to where he lived, the truck was behind the house and there wasn’t a light on. I coasted by twice with the headlights off. Then I killed it by the side of the road and listened for a while. It was quiet. Some light wires were humming. That was it. Dorothea and her boss had taken some awful long lunches. I got out with the shotgun and a beer and closed the door. The law wasn’t there, and I was the law. Vigilante Justice. Patrick Swayze and somebody else. Dirty Dancing. But he never flashed his trash.

The yard was mud, the house was almost dark. I could just see that one little light inside that was Johnny Carson saying goodnight. I knew he might have a gun, and might be scared enough to use it. In my state I thought I could holler self-defense in his front yard.

I hope I didn’t ruin their lives.

The door was open, and the knob turned under my hand. The barrel of the gun was slanted down from under my arm, and I tracked their mud on their floor. He didn’t have his cap on, and his hair wasn’t like what I imagined. It was gray, but neatly combed, and his mother was sobbing silently into a pillow in her mouth on the couch.

He said one thing, quietly: “Are you fixing to kill us?”

Their eyes got me.

I sat down, asked first if I could, and started telling both of them what my life then was like.