A PUDDLE OF SEX BOOKS by Ed Allen
How it starts is that a man is driving in the desert and a woman passes him in a car and she is naked. Then there is something about how she pulls in for gas and somebody else sees her, maybe an old man. Or maybe by then she’s curled up in the back seat of somebody else’s car. The sight of her bare breasts revives some long-buried stirrings in the old gas station attendant, or words to that effect.
In the book it was spring in the desert. In real life everything was so damp that you could scratch the dirt with your fingernail and your finger would go in up to the second knuckle. George read, page by water-logged page, surrounded by mud and water in the half-dimness of trees out in back of his house, sitting on the friendly rock he and his friends had named “Roger.” Whatever details were missing from the story – sex organs, penetration, bodily fluids – he wouldn’t have noticed. These were just books, and he didn’t even know why he had them. At fourteen, or whatever age, in the spring, in the middle of the wet dirt, he wouldn’t have known the difference between soft core and hard core. He would not have remembered whether the story was told by the first guy driving, or by somebody else watching; it was only later that he began to notice that, except for the letters column in Penthouse, you don’t see much pornography narrated in the first person.
Somehow the man and the woman get together in the desert at the gas station and they drive around and perform the sex act over and over again without penises or vaginas, just breasts all over the place, bursting out from her skimpy underwear and the two naked, or partially-naked, bodies clutching and climbing over each other, non-penetratively, which is the only way a kid can do it with his sister’s Barbie and Ken dolls.
He had found at least a dozen of these books, all soaked from where he came upon them, in a pool of water at the edge of the woods somewhere. He stuffed them into the imitation leather saddlebag of his three-speed Rudge. Where they came from he never figured out. Maybe somebody felt guilty. Maybe somebody’s mother found them, or somebody needed to throw them away and didn’t want the garbage collectors to see them.
George read the first of the books out in the woods, in a clear patch out in the half dark, where sometimes when it was wet enough they used to find strings of frog’s eggs. The whole book was so wet he had to tear the pages off as he went, and throw them on the ground, soft as leaves.
The man and the woman had the sex act again and again, driving around, on a cliff, in the bushes. Then what? Then somebody got killed. They had some kind of a bad fight, with only a few soaked pages left to be torn off and the rest in a pile beside the rock. The ground was so soft in those days that you didn’t have to bury anything; you could just kick it underneath the duff of leaves, and the top layer would fold over like rubber and let your foot in. The only thing George remembers from the end of the book is that they have such a bad fight that the man punches her in the breast, and then somebody else dies, male or female he didn’t know, and the car goes over the cliff, with somebody in it screaming, and that was the end, a pile of wet pages to be jammed into the ground, the same soaked smell as the leaves and the water.
For years afterward, the scene where the man punches her in the breast made him wince, because it always made him remember the time he was playing softball with his sister Karen, in the field down the long driveway from their house, just the two of them. She bounced a bad underhand pitch in front of him, which he shouldn’t have reached down and swung at, but he golfed it on the bounce straight at her and hit her in the breast.
She must have been old enough for it to be a real breast. He couldn’t get her to stop crying. She was still crying as they rode their bicycles back up the driveway, both of them standing up on the pedals, the bikes tilting beneath them from side to side, Karen still crying and George still saying “I’m sorry, I’m sorry.”
It was terrible for that man to punch her breast like that at the end of a book where people are supposed to be nice to each other so men can masturbate. Anybody knows that a punch was made for a cowboy’s face and nothing else. Once in a family crisis George punched the dog in the face – and that was terrible too. It made a sound almost like the sound on television. His father never said anything about it, but George could feel it for years.
It’s not fair that George’s sister had to cry and cry and at the same time still have to heft her Royce Gazelle up the hill, and it’s not fair that some fictional nice girl with big breasts, an explosive sexual appetite, and no functioning genitals, should have to go over a cliff like that, if that’s who it was in the car, when there were so many places remaining out there in the little excited narrative universe where she could have performed the sex act, and maybe awakened buried stirrings in some other old men watching through a crack in a tin storage shed.
And maybe it’s not fair that the guy who wrote it was such a sad old drudge for a penny a word that he didn’t know any better. By now he’s probably as dead as the rats sniffing around a drainpipe in an old Nazi propaganda movie he saw years later. Or if the guy who wrote this is not dead, maybe he’s stupid, reads nothing, listens to talk radio in traffic, loud, has never even heard of the famous novel where that woman gets down under the covers and does something so cruel (though justified in context) to her abusive boyfriend or husband, that male graduate students who were talked, or forced, into reading it are vague about the other chapters, but they still wince when they think about that scene.
Once, on television, with subtitles, a Japanese girl said, “The ground is warm under my feet.” This was years later, when George was trying to learn Japanese, and for the first time he understood something about those days when he rode around with the books soaking in his saddlebag. What makes it hard to think about those days is that it’s just as interesting when nothing happens as when something happens. There is a corner in one of the subdivisions where there is no traffic, and kids have been riding bicycles around in a circle for so long that the kids riding now weren’t even born when George and his friends were there. They always go counterclockwise. It is in the nature of the Northern Hemisphere that you will never see them ride clockwise. His father took the bike in to have the chain tightened and George forgot about the books, and the bicycle mechanic found them.
“Too hot to handle,” was the mechanic’s joke. The whole cloth side of the imitation leather was rotten, so the whole pouch had to come off, and everything got thrown away. A lean look now to the bicycle, with the seat high and nothing under it. The road was warm under his tires. They were a good family. They teased him a little about the books, but nobody made a big deal about it.
It was true about the ground. You could scratch your finger into it and feel the warmth from inside. You finger would come up brown as fertilizer, but clean, with no grains under your fingernail.
Things went back into the ground, or else they came out of it and got their heads cut off. Mrs. Burns, who lived across the street from the end of the long driveway, had hired a man with a tractor to mow the field across from the entrance to George’s driveway.
The sickle bar of the mower had cut through a nest of rabbits. Karen came running, crying, around to the back of the house where George was digging with a stainless steel spoon against the side of the poured concrete foundation. Their friend Oliver Stanton from next door was running behind her.
“It’s murder!” they were both shouting. Oliver deserves to be credited as the one who originally invented the game of “booties.” George was the oldest one, so they came to him, which was nice, but there was nothing he could do. It was just some old man with a tractor, and the jiggling squeak of the sickle bar. As they ran across the laid-down rows of the mowed field, which George would later learn in poetry class should rightly be called a swale, they could see the cut rabbits from a long way off, a mild red, almost orange under the green.
“Booties” is a game in which you tear a section of paper towel into four squares and with a rubber band attach a square over each of the cat’s feet, and watch the cat trudge or dance. Everybody said it was cruel. Perhaps George was the only person who knew that if you loved your cat you could be mean without being cruel.
Another woman from two houses down called the police and said they were living with their chickens. Every night the fire siren went off and sometimes George thought it was the end of the world, but then when it wasn’t it somehow didn’t register, and two nights later he would think the same thing. One night he dreamed it was the end of the world and his father and Khrushchev were lying on the roof, laughing.
Oliver and George and Karen and Oliver’s two brothers went for ice cream, under the yellow lights, on the nights they could get Oliver’s father to drive them down there, to a town at the edge of a trailer park, where the main highway ran so close to the swamp that every streetlight was a blizzard of bugs. It must have been longer ago than he thought; the first time he ever saw an electric guitar was in the doorway of the Gulf station, two fat boys on stools playing minor chords, and the moisture from the swamp blowing in across the Gulftane pumps, which would have been a great poem, a whole world there in the dark.
They went out behind the house into their father’s garden and ate raspberries. For the raspberries to have been that good and that prolific, it must have rained all the time but George can’t remember it. Karen had the “Old King Cole” dream. A big fat man was spanking her with a board with a nail in it, and she was laughing. Daffy Duck was strapped into the electric chair, laughing in that whoo-whoo way, until the current slammed his face shut.
It must have been April Fools’ Day. They put worms in the refrigerator. Up the road, where the bad kids lived, a dog was sick and then some kid shot him with a twenty-two. He went stiff, convulsed. Somewhere on the same road, Oliver Stanton was playing with some of the other bad kids, who were burning twenty-two bullets in a fire. One of them went off crooked and the slug skinned the side of Oliver’s head. In trouble. The heaviness of those words, like the heaviness of dirt locked under the ground, under the rubbery duff of leaves. The kids from up the road walked with him, pleading with him not to tell. There was something sad about that pleading. These were the bad kids, but now they were almost crying. Oliver Stanton was a real gentleman. He told his mother he fell on a rock, even though she was a registered nurse and must have known he was lying.
Every few months Karen would show up in the kitchen, silent at first, with her face collapsed, meaning the cat had been run over. Over and over again she loved them, and she never once allowed George to play booties, though he did once when she wasn’t home. She must have known that the cats were going to get run over, but she kept crying when it happened.
He doesn’t even know if the next thing happened at all, but it might have. If he hit the ball into her breast, and if he punched the dog in the face, and if he played “booties,” maybe he did this too. The cat disappeared, just before she had kittens. A week later he found the cat dead, twenty yards downhill from the road, lying on her back, her belly soft and fat as a Buddha, bloated, spread, expansive, almost flat, liquid inside. She had already started to sink back into the wet ground.
George doesn’t remember whether he made it a joke and led Karen down the hill for a surprise, or told her in good faith, or planned it as a joke and thought better of it halfway up the driveway or halfway back down. What is remarkable is that she wasn’t angry. She just stood there in the tall grass looking down at the rot, and her face collapsed. Again, afterward, they rode together up the hill, the Rudge and the Gazelle, straining against their pedals, the sound of her crying absorbed by the thick green in every direction but both of them sitting straight up on their hard seats, riding uphill past the little cement block house that Vernon Short and his wife were renting from George and Karen’s parents, who had been recommended to them through the church as somebody who wouldn’t discriminate against them for being a racially mixed couple – unless this was at a time when they hadn’t moved in yet or had already left.
It was a long driveway and she cried all the way up, pedaling. She carefully set the kickstand before she ran into the house to cry some more. Strange how the sound of that crying went through the house, room to room and year to year, from the time the chair caught on fire to all the times over breakfast with her face collapsed. If she had ever stopped crying, that house would have been dead. She cried when war broke out in Africa. She cried for four hours when she couldn’t see Darby O’Gill and the Little People.
They went to see Old Yeller, and it was weird, because at the end of the movie, when Old Yeller was dead, all the kids were crying, and then instead of turning up the house lights they had scheduled a cartoon to be played after the movie. It was the cartoon where Donald Duck and Huey, Dewey, and Louie are sledding, and every time the nephews build a snowman, Donald Duck smashes through it with his sled, and laughs that cruel, choking, convulsive laugh. Then he aims the sled at another snowman, a squat, bulky-shaped construction – but this one his nephews have built around a boulder. The sled splinters, and the metal runners get wrapped around Donald’s beak, while his nephews are falling all over each other and slapping themselves and laughing in that same constricted way. The weirdest thing was that all the kids in the theater were laughing for a few minutes, but when the cartoon was over they were all crying again.
Sometimes the whole family went to the movies together, and coming home, George sat in the back looking out the window at the dark buildings and wondering what it would take for him to be a real person in a real world of bright colors, and to open a door and have something to say to every face inside. They called up the theater one morning to find out what time The Blob was playing, but they couldn’t get through. The old building was on fire. They didn’t know it at the time, but they were making a phone call into the fire. It didn’t sound like anything, only a call not going through. Like so many buildings in that town, the theater had been struck by ominously precise lightning an hour before dawn.
They went to Florida, in the spring. As they drove south it got warmer and warmer, and as they came back north it was still getting warmer. And then a week after they got back home, unless this was a different year, their grandmother came up for a visit, with her chauffeur.
It gets blurry. Green is a hard color to focus on. Something about the sex act. It was in the spring and everything was green and George was walking up and down the driveway, shuffling his feet in the fine blue gravel. Karen took her bike down the hill to baby-sit for Vernon’s kids, but Vernon opened the door and yelled out into the yard.
“Don’t you play with that person!” he shouted at his two little boys. “You know she’s not your friend.”
The twins ran into the house. Vernon had found out somehow that the family had stayed in what could only have been a segregated motel, this during the weekend of the Selma to Montgomery March. Then the next week their grandmother came up with a colored chauffeur.
Vernon got in his little blue M.G. and peeled out of the bare dirt next to his house, and into the driveway, spraying tiny chips of that fine bluestone that stayed in the driveway year after year without ever having to be replenished. But after ripping out of the parking spot so fast, he didn’t go any faster, because the transmission was broken. He could only go up to second gear. Slowly, he roared out to the main road and slowly drove away.
George hadn’t heard what Vernon said, so he waved to him, as he pedaled up the driveway the other way, home from riding around and around in a circle counterclockwise and thinking about the world out there, the life it has, in dark rooms, in shredded paper jammed under the flexible ground, a world where you can have spring fever without being in love, something alive all night, like the radio, even with the lights out, in the magazines at the stationery store, the world of big breasts, a kind of music around him ringing with a note so strong it would come down in his memory many years later like a sound and a taste and a color combining in the back of his throat into something that every time he thought about it he felt as if he had never thought about it before.
Karen was crying, a long sound, a big sound, at the end of the driveway, a sound to pull the family in around her, the way they always did when the cats were dead, but George was the only one there. He didn’t put his arms around her or anything. He was just there with his bicycle, the two of them standing outside the little cement block house that Vernon and his wife were fixing up in lieu of paying rent.
Something almost liturgical about that crying, as if it could cancel everything, could bring the dead back from the grave, like Pepsi in China. They rode together up the hill, their bicycles heeling back and forth with each stroke of the pedals. Or maybe they walked. Maybe they left their bicycles there, or maybe they didn’t have them. It would have been the same crying. He was wondering if he should go into the house first and tell their mother that Vernon found out about the segregated motel and the colored chauffer, or if he should stay behind and let her go in first, crying, and then come in behind her, with a sympathetic expression on his face and, for once, nothing to apologize about.
Ed Allen’s stories have appeared in The New Yorker, GQ, Story, and Best American Short Stories.