Like Warm Sun on Nekkid Bottoms - Charles Austen [62]
She looked at her more intently. “My word, she is, isn’t she? She’s pretending to…”
“So, you…uh,” I asked Helena, darting artlessly away from the subject and narrowly avoiding an aneurysm, “you want me to take the Duesy, and…”
“Get it repaired,” said Helena absently, looking over my shoulder at the imaginary sex show. “He said he can do it while you wait. The repairman. Fix the car, I mean. Goodness. She seems rather optimistic, doesn’t she?”
“I think I’d give her the benefit of the doubt—Gene Tenace led the league with a hundred, and ten bases on balls—I don’t think getting the Duesy repaired would be a problem. You want to take my car, then?”
“Oh, no. That’s all right. Pjuter will be here in a minute to pick me up. He’s probably obeying the speed limits, so he fell a little behind. Heavens, those men appear to be rather lengthy. Do you suppose she actually knows men like that, or is it all just her imagination?”
I flashed on Woodruff mounted atop Ms. Waboombas and immediately regretted it. “Joe Rudi, 65 extra base hits…”
“After our…uh…thing…is finished,” Helena continued, not taking her eyes from Ms. Waboombas, “we can meet you at the chapel later this evening.”
“What chapel?” Ms. Waboombas asked, still pretending to be madly humped and bumped.
“This place my, eh…Reggie Jackson, 20 intentional walks—my, eh, fiancée wants to see,” I said, not looking straight at her. “Just a quick side trip. Would you mind?”
“Sure,” she said, apparently missing the proper grammatical response and momentarily confusing me. “I’m okay with it.” She hadn’t missed a beat in her pretend hand-jobs to the imaginary friends of her enthusiastic, nonexistent lover.
“If we go in this car,” she said, “you can take all night as far as I’m concerned.” She glanced up at me meaningfully. “All night.” She winked. Apparently one of the penises she was servicing might have been mine.
“In 1974 Catfish Hunter led the League with a 2.49 E.R.A.”
By the time Mindie returned, Ms. Waboombas had finished, complete with mock orgasm (I supposed it was ‘mock’ anyway), and was recovering in the back seat of the Duesenberg, apparently quite satisfied with the car’s performance. Mindie trotted up happily toward me with one shoe still missing, carrying an armload of framed and sealed comics, and comic art, all of which had once been decorating my various walls.
“Here,” she said cheerily, handing me the priceless collection. “You can sell these at your comics convention.” Then she turned to the others and called out in shrill excitement. “I sit next to Wendy!”
“I can what?” I asked, trying not to drop my near mint copy of Superman number one, lost in the fog that seemed to have perpetually surrounded me since yesterday afternoon.
She stopped and looked at me as if I was something a cat had coughed up on her Manolo Blahniks.
“You can sell those,” she said, her cheeriness almost completely dissipated. “And the others I piled on the floor in there. I don’t want them around after I move in, so you may as well take the opportunity.”
“Why don’t you want them around?”
She looked down momentarily at them as if they were something I had coughed up. “That can’t be a serious question.”
“These are valuable… ”
“To retards.”
“This one alone,” I tried again, ignoring her.
“And perverts.”
“This one alo…what? Perverts?”
“Yes, perverts. All the people in those things are running around naked.”
“Naked?” I asked, barely able to hear her last word.
“Naked,” she repeated, clearly not wanting to even say the thing out loud.
“They’re not naked. They’re wearing super suits.”
“Please. You can see every detail. Even spandex doesn’t show off that much.”
“It’s not spandex. Superheroes don’t wear spandex, they wear a thin layer of unstable molecules… ”
“They’re not wearing anything! They’re naked! Naked, and colored blue, and red, and the girls all have enormous boobs, and bodies that are TOTALLY