American Outlaw - Jesse James [12]
“You’re sick.”
“Were you born without a penis?” Bobby said seriously. “It’s okay if you were. I swear I won’t tell anyone.”
“Dude, come on.”
“Man, that is tough. But I promise, I’ll never tell a soul.” He kept up his serious face for about five seconds, then fell over laughing.
“You’re an idiot.”
Bobby cackled. No one could crack up Bobby like Bobby himself. “Now look, man, cheer the fuck up. That’s an order.”
“I am cheered up,” I grumbled. “You’ve made a big difference.”
“Finally,” Bobby sighed. “Jesus. Can we go steal shit, now?”
I wasn’t going to tell him the truth, of course: that in part, Joanna freaked me out because I had come across a stash of naked pictures of her when I was twelve.
I was all alone in the garage after school one day, picking through the thousand or so magazines that my dad had collected across the years at flea markets and swap meets. He’d bought up stacks and stacks of old McCall’s and Life magazines and Saturday Evening Posts and National Geographics on the cheap; some were valuable collector’s items, others were just discolored garbage that he hadn’t gotten around to throwing out. From time to time, I leafed through them idly, just for something to do.
I was methodically making my way through a stack of Posts when I came upon a small box with a canvas cover on it. Just for the hell of it, I decided to open it. When I did, I found a black-and-white photograph of Joanna wearing a thin, lacy teddy. She was contorted in an awkward position that showed off most of her skinny little body.
“What the hell . . . ?” I muttered.
I peeled the picture back, revealing another. There was a whole avalanche of them. In some, my stepmother’s lips were puckered up dreamily. In others, she offered up a teasing pose. With equal parts dread and curiosity, I slowly examined each photo in the stack. A blank expression often played upon Joanna’s face, as if she was receiving direction she didn’t quite understand. In most, a freckled hand was atop her bare hip, awkwardly.
Joanna was small and pasty, with blunted breasts and an epic bush. This was the woman behind my nightly meat loaf. I felt confused, and somehow tricked. You don’t want to see your stepmom naked. At least, I didn’t.
I shoved the photos back underneath the stack of McCall’s and left the garage, face burning.
——
Joanna left awhile after that. It had nothing to do with my discovery.
“Dad?” I asked.
“Huh?”
“Where’s your wife?” About a week had passed with no trace of my stepmom. We had eaten dinner alone together for several nights running, mostly in silence.
He took a long, slow look at me. “Joanna doesn’t live here anymore.”
“Uh . . . where does she live?”
“Don’t know,” my dad admitted. After a second, he laughed shortly. “Try asking the guy she ran away with.”
I didn’t quite get it, but later I concocted a theory that Joanna and my dad had been “swingers.” It was the right era, and that would explain the racy pics. My dad was always a real ladies’ man, with a silver-tongued kind of charm. Maybe the photographs were meant to be sent off to swingers’ magazines, so on weekends they could ride out to Bakersfield or San Bernardino, taking part in wacky wife-swaps and oiled-up orgies. Of course, I had no evidence of this, but hey—I was in high school and I had a vivid imagination.
He’d posed her like a plastic love doll, but never in his wildest dreams could my father have predicted that his obedient and sedate wife of four years would suddenly spring to life, bouncing off over the Fresno horizon with another guy. Who the hell understood women, anyway? And so, just a few years after she’d entered my life, Joanna was gone.
So began a brief, cautiously happy era. It was just me and my dad at home together, like a couple of bachelors. I would cook or he would. I’d watch TV and he wouldn’t care what it was. I was staying up late and he didn’t seem to mind. Dishes got done haphazardly. But peace reigned in the James household.
“Jess!”
“Yeah, Dad?”
“Need you to work tomorrow for