Executioner's Song, The - Norman Mailer [82]
Barrett had been through everything with Nicole. Seen a lot of dudes come and go, studs, jocks, freaks, animals, characters you could almost call cripples, but they always had something. If they weren't good looking, strong, well hung, then they had something you could relate to, some good trick. Barrett knew Nicole was a beautiful person and really independent, and if you had the misery to be stuck in love with her like Barrett, then you had to live with who she would come up with next. Had to be there when she was ready to quit the guy.
Barrett wasn't built for heavy encounters. That was part of his understanding of himself. Yet the bravest, heaviest things he'd done in his life happened because of Nicole. For example: helping her move out of Joe Bob's house was scary. All those hours with a borrowed truck outside-why, Joe Bob could have come back from work to check on her. Barrett had a gun that day, but Joe Bob was heavy enough to walk through a gun.
Yes, all those hours moving her furniture (which was Barrett's furniture when they had lived together) was some of the tightest time Barrett ever put in, but he got her away, every last lamp shade, and Sunny and Jeremy up in the front seat with them, yes, saved Nicole's buns one more time, and she even went back to living with him when he found the house in Spanish Fork.
He had been working then. Concrete pumping. Had been looking for an occupation to get him out of dealing. Thought concrete pumping might be it, but found it a hard attitude to keep loyal to. Straight people only had to take one look at him and his flowing hippie threads, suede buckskin-style jacket with fringe, long hair, mustache, and they would categorize him right at the bottom. It was hard to drive somebody else's truck, and get paid a couple of bucks while making the other fellow a couple of hundred bucks. It always got Barrett down. Dealing, you were your own businessman least.
Still, he had been trying to make a straight living and prove a point to Nicole. Driving from Spanish Fork and working at pumping in American Fork, he was thereby damn well from one end of Utah County to the other, close to 60 miles a day. Commuting in morning traffic was as straight as you could get. That was the point he wished to make. But Nicole and him
started hassling about all the things in the past. Her sexual relations with other men bothered him. Couldn't get them out of his head.
Right from the beginning in Spanish Fork their sex life wasn't like it used to be. Not that feeling of love anymore. Times he'd say to her, "You don't even want me." He might just as well have had an open hole in him. To be without Nicole was living in the pits. She didn't realize how he felt-if she could just now and again feel his pain. She didn't know how beautiful it could be with her, if she was in the mood to have it beautiful. Nobody could give you a feeling you were wanted, like Nicole could give it. Like she was the seducer, and it was heavenly places when you got that goodness from her. When she cut it off, Barrett knew the pits.
So even with the house in Spanish Fork-$75 a month-he couldn't help it, he split. Went up to Wyoming for a few weeks, and did what he always did on a split, which is, try to enjoy his free, make the most of life without daily hassles. But he couldn't get on the good side of his free where you could feel kind of dapper. Instead he carried Nicole around like a load. So, first opportunity, he hit her up with a surprise visit from Wyoming,