American Boy - Larry Watson [29]
I had a moment of panic, but she pulled a church key out of her pocket, and opened each of the bottles in turn. Then, after a long pull at her beer, Louisa said, “Lester ... You know why he wanted to live here? In the woods, I mean.”
“Because it was cheap?” replied Johnny.
“Lester thought he’d be able to hunt for our food. ‘These woods are full of game,’ he’d say. No shit. Raccoons ate our garbage, and every morning I’d see deer outside our bedroom window. But they were safe from Lester. The only gun he had was that little .22. Not that he could hit a goddamn thing.” She laughed and patted her stomach. “I mean, obviously. The sonofabitch damn near missed me at point-blank range.”
“Yeah, I’ve been meaning to ask,” Johnny said. “What does it feel like to get shot?” Sometimes his naïveté brought him effortlessly to just the right question.
Louisa leaned away from Johnny, as if she needed a little distance to see who was asking her such a question. “It hurt like hell. But you didn’t need me to tell you that, did you?”
“Like being burned?”
“Just trust me: you don’t want to get shot.”
“Do you miss him? Lester?”
“Hell, no. You don’t miss someone who tried to kill you, for Chrissake.”
Johnny’s questions emboldened me to ask, “Why’d he try to shoot you?”
“Not try. He did shoot me. I showed you the goddamn scar. Because he thought I should have fixed him a Thanksgiving dinner that was more substantial than a bowl of soup. You bring something more than soup home, I told him, and I’ll fix it. Like pointing a gun at me was going to make a Thanksgiving feast magically appear on the table. Lester Huston ... Good riddance, I say. Hey, turn that up.” She pointed to the radio. “Telstar,” a charttopping instrumental by the Tornados, was playing. I was sick of the song, but I did as she said.
“Now, is that supposed to be a real satellite signal in the song?” Louisa asked. “I thought I heard that somewhere.”
“It’s guitars,” I said.
She twisted herself around again, but this time it was merely to make herself more comfortable. She lifted her legs, extended them across Johnny’s lap, and rested her back against me. Then she reached over, turned up the radio, and settled back to listen to the song. When it was over, Louisa asked, “Do you ever park here with your girls? I know this is a big make-out spot. Lester used to complain that we couldn’t get back out to the road some nights because love cars were blocking the road. That’s what he called them. Love cars.”
“I have,” I said. “A few times.”
Johnny leaned forward. “Yeah? With Debbie?”
“Ooh, Debbie—she sounds cute. Does she look like Debbie Reynolds?”
“She has brown hair. That’s about as far as it goes.”
“And why aren’t you with her tonight? Because you had to work on your science project?”
“We broke up.”
“I bet I know why. She wouldn’t get in the backseat with you.”
“Because I fixed her soup for Thanksgiving.”
“Oooo ... That’s very good. Nasty, but good. Now give us the juicy details about what the two of you did in your love car.”
I regretted having brought up the subject, and I wasn’t going to make matters worse by going into detail about what Debbie McCarren and I did or didn’t do when we parked on the edge of Frenchman’s Forest. Nor would I tell them that the last time we were here, on a windy autumn night when sleet struck the car like the clicking of impatient fingernails, we didn’t spend hours with our tongues in each other’s mouths and my hand inside her unbuttoned blouse. Instead, I just sat behind the wheel with my hands to myself while Debbie went through the reasons we could no longer be a couple. “You push too hard,” was a phrase I heard more than once that night, referring primarily to my sexual advances. “Why can’t you let things be the way they are?” she asked. “Why do you always want more, more, more?” I didn’t have a good answer because I couldn’t really understand the question. Who didn’t want more?
Louisa pushed herself back against me. “Come on. Did you even get past first base with her?”
“A gentleman doesn’t talk about such