Slide - Kyle Beachy [37]
“Wiry little gookers slapping singles and running like hell. Playing for hours on the beach with a bat made out of driftwood.”
Stuart stepped in front of me and went to the kitchen for his Tupperware, then joined Edsel at the table. I watched our scrappy leadoff hitter lace a double into the right-field corner and get thrown out at third.
“Tiny men push around carts stacked with mountains of insects. Old Buddhist men with wrinkled faces shiny with sweat. You look down an alleyway and you see rows of the carts all lined up. Some carts got wheels, others just sit there. At night the lights shine on the carts and the bugs look like donuts if you don't know any better. And I'll tell you something about these wrinkled little brown men, they love to see a white man struggle with a grasshopper. They smile and stare into your eyes and wait for you to retch. Happy bastards.”
“Did you retch?” I asked.
“Shit no I ain't retch.”
Joint hanging from one corner of his mouth, Stuart caught my eye and twisted the other into something sly and knowing. Behold the ogre, and bask. Edsel's accent was that of a cross-legged whittler sitting somewhere up near Twain's Hannibal, so thoroughly aligned with the beard that even if it was affected there was no point objecting.
“The women got their own carts. They mix whatever the boatmen caught that morning with simple noodles. Talking about old women who look like they never had teeth to begin with. They smile and chatter away in their bird language, then nod and ask for a dollar fifty Daughters charge ten times that in the massage parlor around the corner. And another thing—the Thai don't use chopsticks. I don't know who's behind that myth, but fact is those bastards love a fork.”
A buzzing encircled my head, a high-pitched wail like a tiny lobster dropped into a thimble of boiling water. I watched a mosquito land on and dig himself into my forearm. Couldn't believe his drive and desire to dig into my skin. Her. Stuart stood up to answer his cell phone. A finger onto the skeeter left an oval of my blood on my skin, dead skeeter on my finger.
I watched Stuart's mouth, I saw laughter and facial expressions, I saw him lean against the counter; then he hung up.
“I do believe tonight's the night,” he said. “So far she has refused to sleep with me, a refusal I greet with thorough respect. We have made it to genital fondling, naked tumbling on the bed, but no sex. I admire her for this. I think I even admire her parents for this. Ed, she insists on meeting you. Insists. Poot, she says you're fine.”
With its added length of beard, Edsel's nod was a force. Such affirmation.
“What does that mean, I'm fine? Fine how?”
“She says she already knows whatever it is she needs to know about you.”
“That's absurd. This is the girl with the breasts?”
“The beautiful breasts, yes.” Stuart closed the Tupperware and took it away. “Perfect breasts are among her long list of total or near perfections. You two met the other day.”
“We didn't share a single syllable,” I said. “You never introduced us.”
Edsel stopped shuffling. “You always like this?”
“Sometimes you imagine things, Poot. But doesn't matter because she says she gets it. You're fine. Now I need to prepare myself for what's to come. You two enjoy your dinner.”
Then Stuart was gone, back into the bedroom, and I was left at the table with the ogre with the playing cards, and on TV the Cards losing and defeat silently mounting, the central air churning, and somewhere in Europe Audrey was laughing and laughing and moving and bald and