Leave It to Me - Bharati Mukherjee [52]
I didn’t exist. I might as well have never existed. That snake-thing had been a Dickinson wanna-be’s fantasy.
Ham pushed open the door to the lavatory, guided Jess in, then kicked the door to shut it behind them. The door didn’t swing back all the way. I could have closed it; I should have walked away. I didn’t have to watch my mother and my lover make love in the cramped loo of a houseboat in Marin. I saw her legs straight out, a flash of Ham’s blue Jockeys. Mother Steals Daughter’s Boyfriend belongs on The Jenny Jones Show.
I stayed rooted; I stared; I envied.
This has to be serenity.
Jess and Ham inhabited space where all actions were guiltless, all feelings natural.
And when I couldn’t stand watching my lover and my mother go at it any longer, I fuzz-busted all the way from Sausalito to Beulah Street, stole a parking space from a tourist’s Beamer, rushed to Loco Larry’s apartment.
“What freaked you out, doll?” His bulked-up torso blocked the I MY ARSENAL sign on the opened door. He had a beer in his hand. Empties lined up along the sides of the futon. Drunk enough to hope his luck had changed. “A beer? Grass? Nookie?”
“I’m not a couch potato. The evening deserves better.”
He took it as we’ll-fuck-later. “No problema, señorita.” He grinned. “No fucking problema. We’ll get in the Larry-mobile and drive around a bit.” He checked the pockets of his fatigues for the keys to his truck.
The keys had to be in the left pocket of the windbreaker hanging from a peg just inside the front door—I could make out a lumpy sag that looked car-keys size—but hanging with Larry meant accommodating the macho locked inside the loco.
“If you’re in the mood, let’s go do some serious gardening.” He clicked his crepe-soled heels and let me in. “Let’s fucking garden till we drop.”
I hadn’t figured Larry as a green thumb. There were no potted plants on his windowsills, not even marijuana under artificial lighting in his closet.
He stripped off the fatigues he had on, down to his plaid boxer shorts, no explanations, then pulled on fatigues exactly like the ones he’d just taken off. “Help yourself to a beer,” he ordered. He opened the apartment door, and swaggered off to the bathroom in the hall. I followed, because he didn’t say no. The top shelf of the bathroom cabinet held the greasepaint he was looking for. I watched him daub on battle-ready black.
“Great gardener look,” I joked.
We ambled back to his apartment. One of the Somali kids stuck his head in the open door. “Scoot!” Larry barked, but he tossed the kid a half-used-up roll of Certs. When we were finally ready for the road, he had on a camouflage helmet and jackboots. Any guy who’d poop-scooped shredded buddy-flesh in paddy fields on the other side of the moon was entitled. Larry looked wired; I felt it.
“The bulbs for planting are in the truck.” He grinned. “When apocalypse hits, we dig up what we sowed. That’s the plan.”
Whatever the plan, I didn’t get it. “Sweets, put yourself in Robinson Crusoe’s shoes.”
“Crusoe lost his shoes when his ship went down.”
Larry tried again, a good sport. “What’s the one must-have item on a desert island?”
“A sun-powered TV?”
He thumped my arm, buddy fashion. “An arsenal in weatherproof storage underground.” He pulled a dolly out of a cluttered corner of the kitchen alcove, and started to pile up crates, canisters, cache tubes. “Yours truly’s partial to AK-47S and Colt AR15HBARS.”
Forget The Victory Garden; tune out Martha Stewart Living. Larry’s gardening was for survivalists who relied on more than organic flowers and vegetables for their postapocalypse days.
I was Larry’s buddy; I took a shot at wheeling the loaded dolly closer to the apartment