“Some creepo was tailing me,” he was saying, “for like a hundred miles.”
“Why?”
Her husband snorted. “To rob my lily-white ass, that’s why.”
“This was a black guy?” Desie asked.
“Or a Cuban. I couldn’t see which,” Stoat said, “but I tell you what, sweets, I was ready for the sonofabitch. Senor Glock was in my lap, locked and loaded.”
“On the turnpike. Palmer?”
“He would have been one stone-dead mother.”
“Just like your rhino,” Desie said. “By the way, are you getting her stuffed like the others?”
“Mounted,” Stoat corrected. “And just the head.”
“Lovely. We can hang it over the bed.”
“Speaking of which, guess what they’re doing with rhinoceros horns.”
“Who’s they?” Desie asked.
“Asians and such.”
Desie knew, but she let Palmer tell the story. He concluded with Durgess’s fanciful rumor of two-day erections.
“Can you imagine!” Stoat hooted.
Desie shook her head. “Who’d even want one of those?”
“Maybe you might, someday.” He winked.
Desie glanced around for the waiter. Where was dinner? How could it take so long to boil pasta?
Stoat poured himself another glass of wine. “Rhino horns, Holy Christ on a ten-speed. What next, huh?”
“That’s why poachers are killing them off,” his wife said.
“Yeah?”
“That’s why they’re almost extinct. God, Palmer, where have you been?”
“Working for a living. So you can sit home, paint your toenails and learn all about endangered species on the Discovery Channel.”
Desie said, “Try the New York Times.”
“Well, pardon me.” Stoat sniffed sarcastically. “I read the newspaper today, oh boy.”
This was one of her husband’s most annoying habits, dropping the lyrics of old rock songs into everyday conversation. Palmer thought it clever, and perhaps it wouldn’t have bothered Desie so much if occasionally he got the words right, but he never did. Though Desie was much younger, she was familiar with the work of Dylan and the Beatles and the Stones, and so on. In college she had worked two summers at a Sam Goody outlet.
To change the subject, she said: “So what did Dick Artemus want?”
“A new bridge.” Stoat took a sideways bite from a sourdough roll. “No big deal.”
“A bridge to what?”
“Some nowhere bird island over on the Gulf. How about passing the butter?”
Desie said, “Why would the governor want a bridge to nowhere?”
Her husband chuckled, spraying crumbs. “Why does the governor want anything? It’s not for me to question, darling. I just take the calls and work my magic.”
“A day in the life,” said Desie.
“You got it.”
Once, as a condition of a probation, Twilly Spree had been ordered to attend a course on “anger management.” The class was made up of men and women who had been arrested for outbursts of violence, mostly in domestic situations. There were husbands who’d clobbered their wives, wives who’d clobbered their husbands, and even one grandmother who had clobbered her sixty-two-year-old son for blaspheming during Thanksgiving supper. Others of Twilly’s classmates had been in bar fights, gambling frays and bleacher brawls at Miami Dolphins games. Three had shot guns at strangers during traffic altercations and, of those, two had been wounded by return fire. Then there was Twilly.
The instructor of the anger-management course presented himself as a trained psychotherapist. Dr. Boston was his name. On the first day he asked everyone in class to compose a short essay titled “What Makes Me Really, Really Mad.” While the students wrote, Dr. Boston went through the stack of manila file folders that had been sent to him by the court. After reading the file of Twilly Spree, Dr. Boston set it aside on a corner of the desk. “Mr. Spree,” he said in a level tone. “We’re going to take turns sharing our stories. Would you mind going first?”
Twilly stood up and said: “I’m not done with my assignment.”
“You may finish it later.”
“It’s a question of focus, sir. I’m in the middle of a sentence.”
Dr. Boston paused. Inadvertently he flicked his eyes to Twilly’s folder. “All right, let’s compromise. You go ahead and finish the sentence, and then you can address the class.”
Twilly sat down and ended the passage with the words ankle-deep in the blood of fools! After a moment’s thought, he changed it to ankle-deep in the evanescing blood of fools!