Executioner's Song, The - Norman Mailer [73]
"You're not fat," Nicole said.
"You, Sissy," said April, "were skinny!" She confirmed this with a most definite nod of her head to Gary, and then added, "Sissy was most of my childhood." She said this in a strong voice as though that were the last matter ever to argue about. "Me, Mike, and Sissy would go for walks with Rikki down by the gulch. We picked snails out of mossy logs."
She was remembering the moss and how it was slimy from everything that oozed out of the snarls-that was how she felt. You could rub slime between your fingers and never feel a thing but slipperiness. Like you were the center of slipperiness. Making love. "I miss Hampton," she said. She didn't want to talk about him. She was getting to the point where she wanted to be deaf and blind. Sometimes her thoughts came out so strong, April could hear them twenty seconds before they went into her head. Especially before a real strong thought. "I've gone cold turkey," she said. "I've said farewell to the idea of love."
Gary's records were mostly Johnny Cash. Full of the love and sorrow of men at how cruel and sweet and full of grit life feels. It wasn't her trip. The men could love the men. Still, she went on a trip with Gary and was very much in his music, and Johnny Cash, wherever he was now, would be able to feel his song stirring in her. Like she had a magic spoon to stir his soup. People could get down without playing an instrument. It was in the way they put the record on.
"I was crazy about Hampton," April said. "He had so much green in his eyes you knew right away he was going to tell a story."
"He always bored me," said Nicole.
"Good in bed," said April. She sighed. She was thinking of the day last week when Sissy had come over and said to Hampton, "You need a haircut." "You want to do it?" he had asked, and Sissy said, "Sure." She had done his hair all right. Like she owned his head. Each time Nicole's scissors cut a lock of his hair, April could feel Hampton's love for herself ending. She could hear it in the sound the hair made when it was cut. Goodbye. Now she could feel Gary hearing the same sound and hating Hampton. "Oh, I loved Hampton," April said to make it right. "He was very spacey."
Nicole snorted. "You loved him 'cause he was spacey?"
April felt truly fierce. "That was 'cause I could live in his spaces."
Next day, the Bicentennial Fourth of July, they went to a carnival and April ran into a couple of boys she knew. Next thing, she was gone. Gary and Nicole turned around and she was gone. No great matter. April was that way.
They got home just in time to pick up the telephone. It was Nicole's father. Charley Baker told Nicole he was up the road at her grandfather's, and Steinie was having a big birthday party for Verna. Would she come?
It made Nicole mad. That big a family party and they couldn't get around to inviting her until it started. She could hear the noise over the phone. "Well," she said, "I'd like to come, but don't get mad when you see my boyfriend."
Nicole would find out that the Fourth of July party being given by Nicole's grandfather, Thomas Sterling Baker (nicknamed Stein), for his wife, Verna, had been planned in December, back before Christmas, by all of his six sons and two daughters, all coming from different places to celebrate their mother's birthday on the centennial. Glade Christiansen and his wife, Bonny, came in from Lyman, Wyoming, where Glade was a mine foreman. Danny Joanne Baker, also from Lyman and the mines, were there. Shelly Baker. Wendell Baker drove in from Mount View, Wyoming. Charley Baker, with his brand-new young woman, Wendy, came over from Toelle, Utah, where Charley now worked at the Army depot, and Kenny, Vicki, and Robbie Baker, from Los Angeles, came in. Boyd, Sterling